text stringlengths 1 39.7k | label int64 0 0 | original_task stringclasses 8 values | original_label stringclasses 35 values |
|---|---|---|---|
Q. I've been backing up my computer to two different external hard drives one made by Seagate and the other by Western Digital. The backup drives are now six years old. I know hard drives fail after a while, so when should I replace these drives with new ones? A. The life span of hard disk drives, both internal and external, can be difficult to predict. The mechanical state of the drive's motor, the number of hours the drive has been in use and its environmental conditions are just a few factors that could alter its condition. Manufacturer warranties on the hardware often two or three years for consumer focused products are no guarantee of the drive's life expectancy, either. While it may not be possible to predict exactly when an external drive will fail, closely monitoring the device for grinding noises or other erratic behavior (like unusual slowness) can offer clues to its health. Many manufacturers, including Seagate and Western Digital, offer utility and diagnostic programs in the support areas of their sites. You can use these programs to periodically test the health and file systems of your drives. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Netflix is hoping that it will define Internet TV in Swahili, Spanish, Vietnamese, Filipino and dozens more languages within just two years. The company, which already has a presence in 50 countries, announced on Tuesday that it would accelerate its global expansion to operate in 200 countries by the end of 2016. Netflix said that it planned to replicate its subscription based, advertising free model for its streaming service and that its business would remain profitable while pursuing such breakneck expansion. Netflix's international streaming business now loses money, but the company predicted that it would generate global profit by 2017. "Once we complete the expansion, we're going to have a very unique and compelling proposition to producers, which is we can get your content seen and loved around the world," Mr. Hastings said in an interview. "In Kenya, in Argentina, in Vietnam, in the Philippines, just everywhere in the world that we can." Netflix said it was still exploring its options for China and called its plans "modest." The company said it hoped to operate a small service there, focused on its original and globally licensed material. Despite the global ambitions, the quarterly results the company reported on Tuesday underscored the challenges it faces at home. The company said it had exceeded its forecast for total paid streaming subscribers. That number increased to 54.5 million in the quarter that ended Dec. 31, 2014, up 31.5 percent from the same period in 2013. Revenue rose 35.7 percent, to 1.3 billion, compared with the year earlier period. Some analysts have started to raise questions about Netflix's long term prospects, concerned about how much more the company can grow in the United States, where it is profitable, as well as the rising costs tied to paying for content and international expansion. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. In the United States, Netflix had 39 million streaming members in the fourth quarter, a net addition of 1.9 million. In the year earlier period, it added 2.3 million members. For the coming quarter, Netflix predicted that growth would slow further. Mr. Hastings called the decline a "natural progression in our large U.S. market as we grow." He said the company was still on course to reach up to 90 million members in the United States eventually. Netflix previously attributed the growth slowdown to a price increase, but it now says the decline would have occurred regardless of the change. "If you step back and say, 'Internet TV video is going to be in every home in America in 10 years,' the clear answer is yes," Mr. Hastings said during an investor call. Full year profit for 2015 is expected be less than that of 2014 because of the company's global expansion plans. Netflix is pouring resources into original productions. The company said it would release 320 hours of original programming this year, about three times its offerings in 2014. That includes about 65 new and returning series, movies and other content. Netflix said it planned to raise at least a billion dollars of additional long term debt to finance the material. On the roster for the coming months are new seasons for the company's popular "House of Cards" political drama and its "Orange Is the New Black" prison comedy. New series include the comedy "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" from Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, and "Grace and Frankie," starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as a pair of "frenemies." The company also recently announced that it was renewing its "Marco Polo" series for a second season. The series cost about 90 million for the first season's 10 episodes, according to industry executives. While critics called the series a disappointment, Netflix said that the epic drama was a hit on the service and pointed to positive online reviews from viewers. After racing ahead as one of the first streaming services, Netflix now faces a new era of intense competition both for viewers and for content. That includes a planned streaming service this year from HBO. Amazon also has increased its offerings. The company became the first streaming service to win a best series award in the television category at the Golden Globe awards last week, for "Transparent." In the days after, Amazon announced that it would produce and acquire films for theatrical release and early distribution on its service, and it announced a deal with the filmmaker Woody Allen to write and direct his first television series. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
These new works from Tomi Ungerer, Sophie Blackall and Christian Robinson are realistic and without being sappy filled with hope. Tomi Ungerer, who died in 2019, was a wonderfully idiosyncratic, uncompromising artist whose books never condescended to young readers with platitudes or secondhand morality. His books, in fact, rarely seemed intended for kids at all. "If all these books still thrive," Ungerer wrote about his oeuvre, it is because "they broke all the rules applied to children's books peopled with cushy teddy bears in an illusory world where everyone is nice, happy and stupid." Ungerer and Maurice Sendak were friends and contemporaries who shared an editor in Ursula Nordstrom, their bold champion at Harper Row. They also shared a frustration with the limits of what Sendak called Kiddiebookland "that awful place that we've been squeezed into because we're children's book illustrators or children's book writers. Yes, we are! But isn't our work meant for everybody? How infuriating and insulting when a serious work is considered only a trifle for the nursery!" The protagonist is Vasco, a man in a suit and a cap, his face always in shadow, as he navigates a city and a world falling apart. It begins like this: "Birds, butterflies and rats were gone. Grass and leaves had withered. Flowers had turned into memories. Streets and buildings were deserted. Everyone had gone to the moon." Vasco is lost and alone in a disintegrating, Hopperesque city. Luckily, his shadow knows where to go, and saves him "just in time" is the refrain from explosions and falling buildings (again, not Kiddiebookland). Soon Vasco meets a sluglike creature called Nothing, who asks Vasco to deliver a letter to Nothing's wife, who has vanished. Vasco takes on the challenge, surviving a tsunami and a shipwreck before washing up on a grim beach. Above the shore stands a hospital containing only two souls: Nothing's gravely injured wife and her newborn child, Poco. 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. Nothing's wife is not long for this world (still not Kiddiebookland). She dies, leaving Vasco to care for Poco. Together Vasco and tiny Poco pass through surreal landscapes full of lonely menace frozen seas, dying forests, hungry tanks, empty trains, magma, deserts before the story has a happy (though not stupid) ending. The book is dedicated to Ungerer's brother, Bernard, who, Ungerer writes, "became my guiding shadow after our father died." That Ungerer, an Alsatian, lived through the German occupation of France seems pertinent, too. In a world now facing environmental catastrophe and a resurgence of fascist sympathies in Europe and the Americas, "Nonstop" could not be more timely. Ungerer has created an all ages classic, a fitting capstone on a fearless career and just in time. At 34, Christian Robinson is still at the beginning of his career, but he has already established himself as one of the world's pre eminent picture book artists, with a spare paint and collage style that achieves a kind of witty, lyrical sublimity on every page. There are few awards Robinson has not won as an illustrator working with writers such as Matt de la Pena, Mac Barnett and Adam Rex but his last two books are solo efforts, and the results are extraordinary. Last year he published "Another," in which a girl and her cat discover a portal to another dimension. There, an upside down version of her and her cat exist. The book, probably the most concise examination of the multiverse ever conceived, manages a balance of levity and metaphysics that is uncanny. It can't be improved upon. In lesser hands, his new book, YOU MATTER (Atheneum, 40 pp., 17.99; ages 4 to 8), might be a well meaning but undelightful pamphlet on self worth. It is about self worth, in a way, but it's also about the history of life on Earth from the first ocean dwelling microbes to four legged creatures leaving the sea for land, all the way up to an astronaut looking down on our blue marble from space. Oh, and in 107 words, it somehow covers loneliness, death and rebirth, too. Like Ungerer's "Nonstop," Robinson's "You Matter" isn't meant simply to please or instruct children. His goal is nothing less than encompassing the world through an art form that relies on economy of language and image. Mastery of this art form is very, very tough, and its best practitioners somehow manage to delight kids and adults at the same time both audiences appreciating the chaos of existence brought temporarily to order. Robinson's books, like anything perfect, have that rare quality of the inevitable. They had to be. They always were. Sophie Blackall's IF YOU COME TO EARTH (Chronicle, 80 pp., 18.99; ages 5 to 8) shares the vast scope of "You Matter," though its text is more explicit in its grand objective. Her narrator is Quinn, a red hatted young child based on a real person in Blackall's life. The real life Quinn has lived in Nigeria, Indonesia and Nepal, but Blackall met him in her native Australia and saw the globe trotting young person as a worthy guide. "Dear Visitor from Outer Space," Quinn begins, "if you come to Earth, here's what you need to know." From there, Blackall delivers on the promise. The book seems to contain everything the world's every river, flower, person, cruise ship and bottlecap. It covers sight, sound, sickness, conflict and inequality. It is overwhelming. Like Robinson (and Sendak), Blackall was known first as an illustrator, and has more recently begun creating the text for her books. "Hello Lighthouse," from 2018, related the story of a lighthouse keeper facing obsolescence, and won a Caldecott. "If You Come to Earth" is more ambitious by a factor of 10. It's far and away the best work she's done. Blackall tackles every page with a different composition, an ambitious visual conceit. There are grids, spirals, close up two shots (twins identical but for a mole) and dizzying diagonals (all the world's means of transportation in one hectic spread). No detail escapes Blackall's attention, though; close reading is richly rewarded. There are cameos everywhere: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ella Fitzgerald, Mariah Carey, Garry Kasparov, a Richard Scarry supercar and the red suited boy from Ezra Jack Keats's "The Snowy Day." Though its scope is expansive, "If You Come to Earth" feels, in the end, intimate. A number of characters, young and old, recur throughout, giving us the sense of reading a multigenerational family saga only this is the human family in toto, with seemingly no culture or incarnation unrepresented. The people in Blackall's world seem content to coexist on a crowded planet, happy to share a park or a train or a feast. "Many of my first children's books," Ungerer said, "were aimed at rehabilitating disreputable animals." He meant snakes, rats and vultures, but the same might be said for humans. In Ungerer's last work, and in the work of his successors Robinson and Blackall, people, despite all the trouble we make, can be redeemed. Even if it's only within the span of a picture book. Dave Eggers is the author of several picture books, including "Her Right Foot." His latest is "The Lights Types of Ships at Night." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'TRUE WEST' at the American Airlines Theater (previews start on Dec. 27; opens on Jan. 24). Propose a toast. Better yet, lots of toast. Sam Shepard's darkly funny tale of sibling rivalry returns with Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano as California brothers in arms and at throats. James Macdonald directs and Marylouise Burke makes a late in the play appearance as Mom. 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'VARTN AF GODOT' at the 14th Street Y (previews start on Dec. 24; opens on Jan. 6). The bowler hats are back as the New Yiddish Rep ("God of Vengeance," "Rhinoceros") revives Samuel Beckett's comedy in Yiddish. Rafael Goldwaser, David Mandelbaum, Gera Sandler, Richard Saudek, Noam Sandler and Myron Tregubov, under Ronit Muszkatblit's direction, perform the usual tale of tramps, with more gutturals. 646 395 4310, newyiddishrep.org 'ALL IS CALM: THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE OF 1914' at the Sheen Center (closes on Dec. 30). Do you hear what I hear? Theater Latte Da's documentary musical, about the Christmas carols that emanated from World War I trenches, is finishing its song. The depiction of the war itself is somewhat sanitized, but the 10 men are in excellent voice, and when they come together, the sensation is tremendous and the musical chill effect engulfing. 866 811 4111, sheencenter.org 'GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY' at the Public Theater (closes on Dec. 23). Don't think twice. This musical by Conor McPherson, which uses the songs of Bob Dylan, will play its final harmonica solo. The setting, Depression era Minnesota, is grim and so is most of the story, but when these characters sing, Ben Brantley wrote, "they seem to conjure light and warmth out of the cold, cold night that surrounds them." 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'MOTHER OF THE MAID' at the Public Theater (closes on Dec. 23). Though a mother's work is never done, Jane Anderson's "robustly sentimental" play about the woman who raised Joan of Arc will soon be. Ben Brantley described Glenn Close's starring performance as "a triumphant blend of sharp sense and passionate sensibility, of an old pro's expertise and a newcomer's enthusiasm." 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'USUAL GIRLS' at the Black Box Theater and the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater (closes on Dec. 23). Ming Peiffer's play about the treacherous road to womanhood has reached its end. Directed by Tyne Rafaeli, it stars Midori Francis as a Korean American girl coming of age in a booby trapped world. Laura Collins Hughes wrote that this funny, gloomy drama "connects the dots between pleasure, pain and shame." 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
ECSTASY AND TERROR From the Greeks to "Game of Thrones" By Daniel Mendelsohn I get the feeling, or perhaps the impression, that Daniel Mendelsohn would already disapprove of any review that opens with the words "feeling" or "impression." "Ecstasy and Terror," his third collection of essays, examines subjects across the millenniums, from Sappho and Euripides to C. P. Cavafy, John Williams, Karl Ove Knausgaard and "Game of Thrones." The final piece is "A Critic's Manifesto," from 2012, a Mendelsohn origin story of sorts, about the venerated critics he read in his youth. Their own "long and searching" essays were mini disquisitions, so that when the teenage Mendelsohn hijacked the family copy of The New Yorker, he could learn from them about opera, poetry, dance and film, as well as the way this critical knowledge "could derive from passion, not a diploma." He worshiped critics whose immense expertise stemmed "above all from their great love for the subject": All hail Kael. "Even when you disagreed with them," Mendelsohn writes, "their judgments had authority, because they were grounded in something more concrete, more available, than 'feelings' or 'impressions.'" Mendelsohn, now in his late 50s, grew up "in the waning days of 'old' literary culture" and still practices an expansive pedagogic mode of reviewing. (Most of the essays here were previously published in The New York Review of Books or by The New Yorker.) The manifesto that closes "Ecstasy and Terror" is a helpful guide to his technique. Most reviews should be a mix of positive and negative assessment, he states; they should not "devolve into flaccid cheerleading." They should keep a sense of humor. Honor the subject. Edify readers. The unspoken lesson might be to sprinkle in illuminating analogies from antiquity as often as possible, for Zeus' sake. Mendelsohn is either one of the great critics of our time or an unregistered cultural lobbyist sent from Mount Olympus. "Most of the 20 essays collected here," he assures us, "are not about the classics per se although inevitably, and I hope interestingly, some of them betray the influence of my classical background." With Mendelsohn, that background is always near. His ambitious project is not to resuscitate the classics but to remind us, as he put it in an earlier collection, that no such "mausoleum of culture" exists. Our breath is theirs from "the high Aeschylean sheen" of "The Lord of the Rings" to George R. R. Martin's "tart Thucydidean appreciation for the way in which political corruption can breed narrative corruption." A "Greek DNA," he argues, was present in our response to the Boston Marathon bombings and J.F.K.'s assassination. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SAN JOSE, Calif. Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education: giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time. Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit bearing classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job. Meanwhile, shrinking state budgets have taken a heavy toll at public institutions, reducing the number of seats available in classes students must take to graduate. In California alone, higher education cuts have left hundreds of thousands of college students without access to classes they need. To address both problems and keep students on track to graduation, universities are beginning to experiment with adding the new "massive open online courses," created to deliver elite college instruction to anyone with an Internet connection, to their offerings. While the courses, known as MOOCs, have enrolled millions of students around the world, most who enroll never start a single assignment, and very few complete the courses. So to reach students who are not ready for college level work, or struggling with introductory courses, universities are beginning to add extra supports to the online materials, in hopes of improving success rates. Here at San Jose State, for example, two pilot programs weave material from the online classes into the instructional mix and allow students to earn credit for them. "We're in Silicon Valley, we breathe that entrepreneurial air, so it makes sense that we are the first university to try this," said Mohammad Qayoumi, the university's president. "In academia, people are scared to fail, but we know that innovation always comes with the possibility of failure. And if it doesn't work the first time, we'll figure out what went wrong and do better." In one pilot program, the university is working with Udacity, a company co founded by a Stanford professor, to see whether round the clock online mentors, hired and trained by the company, can help more students make their way through three fully online basic math courses. The tiny for credit pilot courses, open to both San Jose State students and local high school and community college students, began in January, so it is too early to draw any conclusions. But early signs are promising, so this summer, Udacity and San Jose State are expanding those classes to 1,000 students, and adding new courses in psychology and computer programming, with tuition of only 150 a course. San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX, a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would be engineers. Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Junn hoped that blending M.I.T.'s online materials with live classroom sessions might help more students succeed. Dr. Agarwal, the president of edX, agreed enthusiastically, and without any formal agreement or exchange of money, he arranged for San Jose State to offer the blended class last fall. The results were striking: 91 percent of those in the blended section passed, compared with 59 percent in the traditional class. "We're engineers, and we check our results, but if this semester is similar, we will not have the traditional version next year," said Khosrow Ghadiri, who teaches the blended class. "It would be educational malpractice." It is hard to say, though, how much the improved results come from the edX online materials, and how much from the shift to classroom sessions focusing on small group projects, rather than lectures. Finding better ways to move students through the start of college is crucial, said Josh Jarrett, a higher education officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in the past year has given grants to develop massive open online courses for basic and remedial courses. "For us, 2012 was all about trying to tilt some of the MOOC attention toward the more novice learner, the low income and first generation students," he said. "And 2013 is about blending MOOCs into college courses where there is additional support, and students can get credit. While some low income young adults can benefit from what I call the free range MOOCs, the research suggests that most are going to need more scaffolding, more support." Online courses are undeniably chipping at the traditional boundaries of higher education. Until now, most of the millions of students who register for them could not earn credit for their work. But that is changing, and not just at San Jose State. The three leading providers, Udacity, EdX and Coursera, are all offering proctored exams, and in some cases, certification for transfer credit through the American Council on Education. Last month, in a controversial proposal, the president pro tem of the California Senate announced the introduction of legislation allowing students in the state's public colleges and universities who cannot get a seat in oversubscribed lower level classes to earn credit for faculty approved online versions, including those from private vendors like edX and Udacity. And on Wednesday, San Jose State announced that next fall, it will pay a licensing fee to offer three to five more blended edX courses, probably including Harvard's "Ancient Greek Heroes" and Berkeley's"Artificial Intelligence." And over the summer, it will train 11 other California State campuses to use the blended M.I.T. circuits course. Dr. Qayoumi favors the blended model for upper level courses, but fully online courses like Udacity's for lower level classes, which could be expanded to serve many more students at low cost. Traditional teaching will be disappearing in five to seven years, he predicts, as more professors come to realize that lectures are not the best route to student engagement, and cash strapped universities continue to seek cheaper instruction. "There may still be face to face classes, but they would not be in lecture halls," he said. "And they will have not only course material developed by the instructor, but MOOC materials and labs, and content from public broadcasting or corporate sources. But just as faculty currently decide what textbook to use, they will still have the autonomy to choose what materials to include." While San Jose State professors decided what material should be covered in the three Udacity math courses, it was Udacity employees who determined the course look and flow and, in most cases, appeared on camera. "We gave them lecture notes and a textbook, and they 'Udacified' things, and wrote the script, which we edited," said Susan McClory, San Jose State's developmental math coordinator. "We made sure they used our way of finding a common denominator." The online mentors work in shifts at Udacity's offices in nearby Mountain View, Calif., waiting at their laptops for the "bing" that signals a question, and answering immediately. "We get to hear the 'aha' moments, and these all caps messages 'THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU,' " said Rachel Meltzer, a former clinical research manager at Stanford and mentor who is starting medical school next fall. The mentors answer about 30 questions a day, like how to type the infinity symbol or add unlike fractions or, occasionally, whether Ms. Meltzer is interested in a date. The questions appear in a chat box on screen, but tutoring can move to a whiteboard, or even a live conversation. When many students share confusion, mentors provide feedback to the instructors. The San Jose State professors were surprised at the speed with which the project came together. "The first word was in November, and it started in January," said Ronald Rogers, one of the statistics professors. "Academics usually form a committee for months before anything happens." "Our ego always runs ahead of us, making us think we can do it better than anyone else in the world," Dr. Ghadiri said. "But why should we invent the wheel 10,000 times? This is M.I.T., No. 1 school in the nation why would we not want to use their material?" There are, he said, two ways of thinking about what the MOOC revolution portends: "One is me, me, me me comes first. The other is, we are not in this business for ourselves, we are here to educate students." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Dave Burd, a.k.a. Lil Dicky, has taken his talents and "almost foolish level of confidence" to television with "Dave." Dave Burd was brushing his teeth when he started crying. It was 2013, and after working by himself on his music for 18 months not even sharing songs with friends or family the aspiring rapper finally was ready to post his first video, for a song called "Ex Boyfriend," on YouTube. "I had been so focused on the task at hand that I hadn't stepped back to reflect until I was there looking in the mirror," Burd said of that day. "I knew how hard I had worked. I felt real satisfaction having given it my all." He was also surprisingly certain about what he'd achieve. "I've always been very self believing and felt I was destined for stardom," he said, with his trademark bluntness about what he calls "my almost foolish level of confidence." Burd hoped "Ex Boyfriend," which like most of his songs, has its share of sexual references but leans more heavily on self deprecating wit, would launch his career by garnering perhaps 100,000 views within a year. He was wrong: the video was watched more than 1 million times in just 24 hours. Dave Burd, ad agency employee, had become Lil Dicky, rap's hottest newcomer. "That was the best day of my life, because it showed I am who I thought I was," said Burd, who turns 32 later this month. That dramatic bathroom scene is not part of "Dave," the new comedy about Burd's transformation, premiering Wednesday on FXX, that is otherwise chockablock with moments taken from Burd's actual rap life. "Dave has a bucket of shameful, embarrassing, amazing stories," said the show's co creator Jeff Schaffer, who was also a creator of "The League" and an executive producer on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "Seinfeld." This gave him instant credibility with Burd, who idolizes Larry David. Burd had been publicly stating for years that he wanted to create his own TV show. He was eventually introduced to Schaffer, who after several conversations was sold on Burd's commitment and convinced there was enough material for a series. Schaffer said several networks were interested in "Dave," but he had a strong relationship with FX Networks and the programming executive Nick Grad, who happened to be a big Lil Dicky fan. (FXX is the network's comedy focused channel.) The series is also executive produced by the comedian Kevin Hart and the "Superbad" director Greg Mottola, who credits Burd with having "more to say than his nom de plume would imply." (Mottola decided to direct several episodes himself because of "the questions of race and gender that the show grapples with," he said.) The pilot begins just after Lil Dicky has gone viral, and is trying to convert instant fame into a career. (Well, technically it opens with Dave detailing to a doctor all the things wrong with his genitalia.) Later, he's so eager to work with the rap star YG he withdraws his bar mitzvah money to pay for the privilege a symbol of how different Dave's path is from most rappers'. Dave also meets GaTa, who is also on the hip hop scene's fringes and later becomes Lil Dicky's hype man. GaTa is, in fact, Lil Dicky's real life hype man and, like Burd, has no previous acting experience. The remaining co stars are experienced actors, including Taylor Misiak as Dave's girlfriend Ally and Andrew Santino as Mike, Dave's roommate and eventually his manager. Throughout the episodes, many scenes are improvised to heighten the naturalism as Lil Dicky tries to transform himself from a viral gimmick into a respected rapper. "The arc of the first season is, how do you go from having people view your video to being viewed as an actual rap artist?" Schaffer said. Burd, with typical modesty, said his rookie TV effort has exceeded his own high expectations, especially considering he has "not made a show before, never acted before and everything I've written has had to rhyme. I feel I'm destined to be amazing at this craft." "I'll be brutally disappointed if it isn't one of the most explosive comedies on television," he said. Burd's statements often seem over the top, but in conversation, he has none of his alter ego's braggadocious manner. He speaks in a low key, thoughtful tone, whether he's praising FX executives for their helpful notes, or telling you why he is, definitively, obviously, a genius and the greatest at whatever he does. It's as if Muhammad Ali brought in Eli Manning to recite his prefight poetry. "Dave" shares Burd's real back story: a Jewish kid from the Philadelphia suburbs who got good grades and worked in advertising after college. "David always dreamed big," his mother, Jeanne Burd, wrote in an email. "He was not afraid to say what was on his mind and he was always fearless and confident." While Burd's family thought he had found the perfect outlet working in advertising, he had bigger dreams: He wanted to be a rapper, a comedian with his own TV show or an NBA player. ("That's not ruled out yet," he deadpanned about the third option. "I definitely train twice a week so we'll see I'm a never say never type of guy.") Burd's ad agency job proved inspirational in a pragmatic way. "Making music videos had seemed so unachievable but I saw all these things getting produced on a day in day out basis, and learned how technologically feasible creating high end art was," he said. Burd started producing his first mixtape in 2011. His parents tried to dissuade him from releasing the risque "Ex Boyfriend" video, but his grandiose predictions came shockingly true: Each song and video was more successful than the last, and a Kickstarter campaign to fund new production outpaced the goal. Something like legitimacy came in 2015, when he released his first official album, "Professional Rapper." It featured appearances by Snoop Dogg and Fetty Wap, topped both the comedy charts and the rap charts and reached No. 7 on the Billboard Top 200. The title track, featuring Snoop Dogg, now has more than 95 million Spotify listens and 173 million YouTube views. The single "Freaky Friday," his 2018 collaboration with the R B singer Chris Brown, drew more than 465 million listens and 583 million views. "I always took him seriously," GaTa said. "Because he's a white rapper you knew it was not going to happen overnight, but it happened fast because he has a vision and he's driven and he's that talented." Unsurprisingly, Burd agreed with that assessment. "In my heart I feel I'm one of the best rappers alive," he said. Burd's rise hasn't been without its hiccups. His perfectionism, "hyper neuroticism and worry" slow production he has yet to finish a second album. (He says the relentless pace of making a TV show causes "extreme anxiety, but in a way, being forced to make decisions is good.") More significantly, he has waded mouth first into plenty of controversy. "White Dude" offers some sharp lines like: "Everybody naturally assumes I'm a great person/I get a fair shot at the life I deserve/I mean I could underachieve my way into any college in the country." But the song and video also featured more troublesome moments that seemed to obliviously revel in white privilege: "Happy that my name ain't stupid/Dave coulda been Daquan with a few kids." Burd was defensive in interviews, most infamously one that appeared in 2014 on Noisey, the Vice music blog. He claimed he had "everything to lose" in his middle class white life by becoming a rapper, and that it wasn't his fault if his mostly white dude fans don't understand "brilliant satire." "Freaky Friday" drew even more flak: Lil Dicky and Brown switch bodies, so Lil Dicky, suddenly African American, uses the N word with abandon, while Brown makes light of his history of domestic abuse. GaTa believes Burd "meant no harm," he said, so he counseled his friend, "you're coming from a pure place, so don't hold back." But Drew Millard, who wrote that Noisey article, said in an interview that someone with a marketing background should understand the implications of these videos. "But he knows what is working in the marketplace and does not care," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Credit...Taylor Jewell/Invision LOS ANGELES Jeffrey Katzenberg hasn't left his Beverly Hills home in nearly 50 days. Deprived of a frenetic schedule that, before the coronavirus pandemic, typically meant three breakfast meetings, three lunch meetings and a working dinner, the veteran executive has filled his days with what he calls "Zoom a roo" videoconferences as he tries to rejigger Quibi, the streaming app he started with Meg Whitman a little more than a month ago. Downloads have been anemic, despite a lineup that includes producers and stars like Jennifer Lopez, LeBron James, Idris Elba, Steven Spielberg and Chrissy Teigen. The service, which offers entertainment and news programs in five to 10 minute chunks, was designed to be watched on the go by people who are too busy to sit down and stream TV shows or movies. It came out when millions of people were not going anywhere because of stay at home orders across the country. "I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus," Mr. Katzenberg said in a video interview. "Everything. But we own it." Quibi fell out of the list of the 50 most downloaded free iPhone apps in the United States a week after it went live on April 6. It is now ranked No. 125, behind the game app Knock'em All and the language learning app Duolingo, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower. Even with a free 90 day trial, the app has been installed by only 2.9 million customers, according to Sensor Tower. Quibi says the figure is more like 3.5 million. Of those who have installed the app, the company says 1.3 million are active users. Mr. Katzenberg expressed disappointment with those numbers. "Is it the avalanche of people that we wanted and were going for out of launch?" he said. "The answer is no. It's not up to what we wanted. It's not close to what we wanted." "If we knew on March 1, which is when we had to make the call, what we know today, you would say that is not a good idea," he said. "The answer is, it's regrettable. But we are making enough gold out of hay here that I don't regret it." Mr. Katzenberg, 69, and Ms. Whitman, 63, the former Hewlett Packard chief, raised nearly 1.8 billion from Hollywood studios and the Chinese e commerce giant Alibaba for Quibi. They pitched it as an app designed to match how people consumed media now on their phones during slow moments, while they commuted or waited in line. Conditions were much different on the day it came out. "My hope, my belief was that there would still be many in between moments while sheltering in place," Mr. Katzenberg said. "There are still those moments, but it's not the same. It's out of sync." Many people who downloaded Quibi had a simple question: Why can't I watch it on TV? In response, Mr. Katzenberg and Ms. Whitman have backpedaled on their original commitment to a smartphone only app. This week, Quibi subscribers who have iPhones will be able to watch movies in chapters like "Most Dangerous Game" and shows like "Chrissy's Court" on TV screens. (Android users will have to wait a few more weeks.) Also coming soon, Mr. Katzenberg said: Quibi will be less walled off from the internet, and users will be able to share its content on social media platforms. 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. "There are a whole bunch of things we have now seen in the product that we thought we got mostly right," he said, "but now that there are hundreds of people on there using it, you go, 'Uh oh, we didn't see that.'" Quibi placed a large bet on news programming for a lineup of shows from NBC, BBC, Telemundo and ESPN that it filed under the name Daily Essentials. Interest in those segments has been minimal. "The Daily Essentials are not that essential," Mr. Katzenberg quipped. There have been other bumps in the last month. A tech company, Eko, accuses Quibi of misappropriating trade secrets and infringing on the patent for the technology that allows viewers to shift seamlessly between horizontal and vertical viewing. The activist hedge fund Elliott Management has committed to funding a lawsuit filed by Eko. A recent report found that Quibi had given away its customers' email addresses without their knowledge. "As soon as we heard about it, we fixed it," Mr. Katzenberg said. Several executives, including Janice Min, left Quibi during its beta phase, and the company parted with another key team member in recent weeks: Megan Imbres, the top marketing executive, who declined to comment. A newly installed interim marketing executive for Quibi, Ann Daly, once the president of DreamWorks Animation, has worked with Mr. Katzenberg since 1997. He said the change had come about because of a "difference of opinion about what the strategy would be going forward." Until recently, Quibi promoted its service as a whole, rather than marketing any particular show. That strategy has started to change. On a recent installment of "The Last Dance," the ESPN documentary series on the 1997 98 Chicago Bulls, Quibi ran a commercial for "Blackballed," a docu series about the National Basketball Association's banning of the Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. On the season finale of "Saturday Night Live" this past weekend, it advertised its reboot of the Comedy Central show "Reno 911!" Despite the difficult start, Mr. Katzenberg said he saw reasons for optimism. Eighty percent of Quibi's viewers complete the episode they are watching, Mr. Katzenberg said. And once daily life returns to normal, he believes, people will go back to using their phones in ways that prompted him and his investors to bet on Quibi. When asked if the success of TikTok gave him pause, considering that it is also a platform built on short form video, albeit of the user generated variety, Mr. Katzenberg seemed momentarily steamed. "That's like comparing apples to submarines," he said. "I don't know what people are expecting from us. What did Netflix look like 30 days after it launched? To tell me about a company that has a billion users and is doing great in the past six weeks, I'm happy for them, but what the hell does it have to do with me?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The Most Electrifying Speech (and Reaction) All hail Queen Oprah. Her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award brought the house down and then some, not just as the most rousing speech of the night (among many calls to arms) but also as the instantly iconic address of the Time's Up and MeToo movements. Few if any people blend the personal and political as well as Ms. Winfrey, and she wove together stories of her childhood, watching Sidney Poitier win an Oscar in 1964 while her mother, "bone tired from cleaning other people's houses," watched. She traced her own career rise, and praised journalists for unearthing stories of corruption and abuse. "What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have," Ms. Winfrey said, as she settled into a preacher's rousing cadence. She recounted the story of Recy Taylor, a black woman who was raped in 1944 and whose white assailants were never charged. "For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men," Ms. Winfrey said. She paused, just for a moment. "But their time is up." The audience broke into applause. "Their time is up!" The audience rose to its feet. "Their time is up!" But that wasn't the end of the speech. Ms. Winfrey closed by proclaiming that "a new day is on the horizon," and envisioning "a time when nobody ever has to say, 'Me too,' again." She delivered those lines over rapturous cheers and applause. Imagine if every awards ceremony had a speech like this. Margaret Lyons Even before the Globes began, an acting challenge of sorts was on display: watching Ryan Seacrest and Giuliana Rancic do their part for WhyWeWearBlack and try to pivot from clothes to crises during their "E! Live from the Red Carpet" show. Ms. Rancic and Mr. Seacrest had pledged to not ask their guests who they were wearing, but rather why they were wearing black. It sounded like a promising approach, though it was undermined, somewhat, by the continued presence of the E! Glambot, a gadget that creates a wholly unnecessary slo mo 360 degree view of outfits, and that could really have done with a new name, if the network had actually been thinking things through. The piercing replacement questions Mr. Seacrest and Ms. Rancic came up also didn't really advance the cause. Samples: "What were your New Year's resolutions?" (Mr. Seacrest to Neil Patrick Harris.) "What are some strange secret talents you have?" (Ms. Rancic to the cast of "Stranger Things.") And while the hosts dutifully tried to discuss the issues, they didn't seem to really know what to do with the answers from the boldface names. Especially when stars like Debra Messing and Eva Longoria both called out E! itself, siding with Catt Sadler, who quit her E! hosting job a few weeks ago because, she said, her male co star was being paid nearly double her salary. Neither Ms. Rancic nor Mr. Seacrest wanted to go near that one. Vanessa Friedman Women had plenty to say about harassment and their struggle for gender equality, but men were mostly silent. Seth Meyers was a notable exception, acknowledging that a white man may not have been the ideal host for the moment but filling his monologue with enough self deprecation and righteous barbs to ease any concerns. Otherwise, men almost entirely clammed up on the subject, with the loudest statements they made coming in the form of fashionable pins. For those watching at home, it was easy to think: Yet again, the women carry the burden. Daniel Victor Sterling K. Brown, a star of "This Is Us," gives wonderful acceptance speeches, and if his recent winning streak is any indication, we have more to look forward to. "Throughout the majority of my career I've benefited from colorblind casting," said Mr. Brown, the first African American to win a Golden Globe for best actor in a TV drama. Then, addressing the creator of his show, he said, "Dan Fogelman, you wrote a role for a black man. That could only be played by a black man. And so what I appreciate so much about this thing is that I am being seen for who I am and being appreciated for who I am. And that makes it that much more difficult to dismiss me, or dismiss anybody who looks like me." Margaret Lyons A best actor win stemming from one of the worst American movies? At the Golden Globes, anything is possible. James Franco picked up best actor in a musical or comedy for his performance in "The Disaster Artist," playing Tommy Wiseau, the director of the very bad, very cult film "The Room." But it was Mr. Wiseau who stole the show (or at least tried to). Mr. Franco invited the director to the stage with him. Mr. Wiseau went in for a hug, then went straight for the mic, but he was quickly pushed aside by the actor. It may be as much of the awards spotlight as Mr. Wiseau is likely to see. Mekado Murphy | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Hikers along the narrow paths of the Bisse de Saviese. Credit...Lauryn Ishak for The New York Times Just outside the train station in the Swiss town of Sion, a yellow signpost points hikers in two main directions with no fewer than 16 routes to choose from. As you cross the medieval downtown, keeping the Valere Basilica and the Tourbillon Castle on the right, aim for the Valaisanne Brewery. If you can resist the brewery's new tap room and its outdoor tables, be sure to duck as you scramble up a staircase and through the tunnel of holly and its busy bees and onto the Bisse de Clavau and 500 years of history. Now you can relax. The babbling flow of water soothes the soul and the Valais sun warms the body. The Bisse de Clavau was built in 1453 to irrigate the terraced vineyards in the region, which is the driest and hottest in all of Switzerland. A bisse (rhymes with peace ) is a narrow (two to six foot wide) canal that brings water from high altitude rivers across mountains to irrigate pastures and vineyards. From the 11th to the early 20th century, about 300 bisses (stretching about 1,200 miles in all) were dug by hand, primarily in the Valais Canton, which is bisected by the Rhone River Valley. Centuries ago workers dug up the channels, flinging the mud and debris next to the canals, thus forming a berm that was used as an elevated walkway. To this day, 80 percent of all pastures and vineyards in Valais are irrigated with water from the bisses, while the paths that run alongside them are excellent for walking or trail running. The Bisse de Clavau arcs across the vineyards for about five miles. Sometimes the bisse is a simple channel, or a metal aqueduct when crossing undulating terrain. Sometimes it disappears into pipes underground or flows into tunnels in the rock. Then the scenery changes. The rock wall gets taller and the path gets narrower. The Lienne Gorge is up ahead. After a brief tunnel (lighted, thankfully), the bisse goes underground, leaving hikers with the choice of two other bisses that are far more spectacular: the Grand Bisse de Lens or the Bisse de Sillonin. (Or the town of St. Leonard is a 15 minute walk, with train service back to Sion.) Many bisses are still managed by a consortage, a group neither public nor private that is in charge of all aspects of the bisse (repairs, cleaning, enforcing water rights, etc.). A bisse in the upper Valais, in the German speaking part of the canton, inspired a theory on the shared management of scarce resources developed by Elinor Ostrom, the only woman to have won the Nobel Prize for Economics. The consortages have settled disputes and distributed a scarce resource for more than 500 years. In his book on the bisses, the most definitive of its kind in English, Guy Bratt wrote: "some of the bisses in Valais are undoubtedly most remarkable examples of tenacity, courage and sheer bloody minded determination in human achievement." Perhaps no other bisse exemplifies this centuries old sacrifice better than the Bisse de Saviese, also known as the Bisse du Torrent Neuf. And Patrick Varone is its savior. "People thought I was crazy. No one followed me," he says of his pioneering plan to restore the bisse in the 1990s. But when he pitched the idea to the local authorities, and 200 people filled the room, his vision started to take shape. The result is a stunning overhaul completed in 2009. It is by far the most thrilling bisse or the most blood curdling, depending on your fear of heights. It features four, slightly bouncy, suspension bridges, the longest 443 feet and the highest 262 feet. Between 80,000 and 100,000 visitors make the trip every year, "but about 10 percent turn around when they see the first bridge," Mr. Varone continued with a hint of a smile. Tourism wasn't his intention. "I wanted to pay tribute to our ancestors who fought hard to build and maintain the bisse. The mentality was different back then. People today don't have that kind of courage." Finding the money required ingenuity as well. The authorities footed one third of the bill, while commemorative plaques, corporate sponsors and bisse membership fees filled in the rest of the 5.4 million Swiss francs (or 5.5 million). Starting from the Sainte Marguerite Chappelle where, from 1430 to 1935, workers would stop to pray en route to the Branlires precipice, visitors are immediately struck by the vertical landscape. The water for most of the next several miles was transported in chenaux, planks of larch wood forming a three sided channel that was held up by two boutzets, or beams of larch wood. A 20 centimeter, or nearly eight inch, hole was chiseled into the flaky rock, the beam was placed into the hole, wedges inserted until the beam was tight and the chenal was then laid inside. Every spring, 200 men, women and children from the town of Saviese would work for one month to repair and clean the bisse to get it ready for when the fields started to dry out. Lives were lost repairing the bisse, and in 1935 the Prabe tunnel was blasted through the mountain to facilitate the water's passage. When the Bisse de Saviese was restored, Mr. Varone decided to bypass the most treacherous sections. "I didn't want to have to repair the bisse every year. We can no longer justify putting people's lives on the line," he said. Visitors if they dare take their eyes off their feet can see the old path of the bisse; sometimes it is covered deep with scree in avalanche prone sections. Mountain goats occasionally send rocks tumbling down the steep embankment, hurtling past the bisse and the wooden overhang protecting hikers. The bisse continues all the way to a 16th century sawmill that has been painstakingly restored into operation: "You can't find parts for that on eBay, " Mr. Varone said. The last section, available by reservation only, is a must see. Leon Courtine, who worked on the bisse in the 1920s and '30s, inaugurated the renovation in 2009, proclaiming: "Tant que l'eau coulera, l'homme vivra" "For as long as water flows, man will live." As they've known for centuries in the Valais, the opposite is true as well. The tourism potential of the bisses has gone largely untapped. Eric and Martine Danian have been coming to Nendaz, a ski resort on the left bank of the Rhone, for the past 30 years to walk the area's half dozen bisses: "If I can't make it one year, I miss it," Ms. Danian said. "On the bisses you can really disconnect. It's never too hot because they're in the shade. The flowing water is really peaceful and provides quietude. You feel light on your feet." The area's Bisse du Mileu (3.2 miles long) to the Bisse Vieux (3.7 miles long) loop is wonderful for families, offering shade as well as views of the Rhone Valley and the Bernese Alps. Between the two, the Cafe des Bisses offers cuisine that is a big step up from typical mountain food, including a savory lamb burger. Hiking is the most popular sport in Switzerland with 44.3 percent of the population having spent an average of 20 days on the trail in 2014. One lesson foreigners quickly learn is to take the times indicated in the hiking brochures and on the trail signs seriously. The average age of Swiss hikers may be 49, but they can move. Back on the right bank of the Rhone, a decision needs to be made upon reaching the end of the Bisse de Clavau. After a 15 minute scramble up a steep hiking trail, the Grand Bisse de Lens offers intrepid walkers another example of a successful rehabilitation effort. The Grand Bisse de Lens underwent major renovations in 2010 to improve safety and bring water back to a cliff hanging section made irrelevant by a tunnel built in 1983. It has a storied and well documented past dating back to about 1448. After the cliffs, it becomes a highly pleasant walk, complete with a covered picnic table, from which you can observe the "marteau avertisseur," a water wheel turning a hammer that strikes a plank. The steady banging was like an alarm, letting the caretaker of the bisse know from a substantial distance away that the water flow was neither too fast nor too slow and that the bisse wasn't clogged somewhere upstream. The trail meanders back to public transportation in Chermignon d'En Bas or Diogne. The other option, which skips the steep uphill, is the Bisse de Sillonin a bisse with rougher edges. A rope bolted to the rock wall is all that separates walkers from plummeting or sliding hundreds of feet into the gorge. The path is rocky but safe. Small children should be put in backpacks, or otherwise secured, at this point. The views of the other side of the gorge, and the Bisse de Clavau, are impressive. The bisse was first mentioned in 1367. Recently, however, the water has been channeled underground before re emerging at the end of the cliff section. Weary hikers are rewarded several miles later at the Chateau de Vaas (circa the 12th century), which is one of the oldest houses still standing in Switzerland. The paintings on the facade date back to 1576. Inside, the Maison de Cornalin is an ode to a local grape varietal that produces a medium bodied red wine. The crispy flutes au fromage, cornalin red wine and Valaisan chiffonade (thin sliced cold cuts) couldn't come at a better time. After these refreshments, there is a nearby bus stop or an easy 30 minute walk through the vineyards that take you to the valley floor, and for better or worse civilization. If you go From the Sion train station, the 'bus postal' can take you closer to the start of many bisses. The bisse association offers an excellent online guide in English to the bisse paths. A list of bisses and useful information is updated by the Musee des Bisses. The tourism offices in the ski resorts of Nendaz and Anzere, as well as Sion, have bisse related information in English. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
DOROTHY DAY Dissenting Voice of the American Century By John Loughery and Blythe Randolph In March 2000, 20 years after her death, the Vatican began a stringent examination of Dorothy Day's life to prove that she had demonstrated the "heroic virtue" that qualifies a Catholic for sainthood; this process is ongoing. More recently, in September 2015, Pope Francis cited Day alongside Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton as an American who exemplified principles that were desperately needed in our inequitable world. Day was a tireless advocate for the poor and homeless, but what exactly is a saint and was she one? Even though her middle class Republican family had no interest in faith and her father shared a widely held disdain for Catholicism, Dorothy was attracted to religion from an early age. When she was 12, her parents allowed her to be baptized in the Episcopal Church, which she attended for a year before giving it up to focus on politics. She went on to lead a thoroughly bohemian life in Greenwich Village and embarked on a career in left wing journalism. In 1917, at the age of 20, she was arrested during a suffragist rally outside the White House and experienced for the first but not last time the terror and brutality of an American jail, with its filthy cells, exposed toilets, violent guards and, in this instance, the physiological and psychological nightmare of forced feedings. John Loughery and Blythe Randolph, who are seasoned biographers, claim that they will never again have such a "challenging and complex" subject as Day, implying that this in part justifies their biography, "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" the first full length portrait, according to the book jacket, to appear in 40 years. But it may also be true that Day's life highlights tensions that are currently of concern to both Catholics and Americans. The authors render their subject in precise and meticulous detail, generating a vivid account of her political and religious development. They also include perceptive portraits of her colleagues, lovers and friends, who in these early days included Mike Gold, a prominent American communist, and the playwright Eugene O'Neill. They chronicle her continued preoccupation with religion, which initially was fed by the great Russian writers: Gorky, who vividly depicted the tragedy of poverty; Chekhov, who emphasized the importance of empathy; and Dostoyevsky, who memorably described Aloysha Karamazov as a seeker of the "deep flame of inner ecstasy" that Day herself would pursue throughout her life. She also felt increasingly drawn to Catholic churches, where she was deeply moved by the cadences of medieval hymns as she stumblingly learned to pray the rosary. When, later, she read William James's "The Varieties of Religious Experience," she realized that during these quiet moments she had experienced the intuitive awareness that James called "prayerful consciousness." Loughery and Randolph write that she was also galvanized by James's skeptical view of the Western ideal of progress, which, he argued, merely prioritized social conflict and commercial success. Increasingly, Day asked herself: Why are we here? What is life without transcendence? These questions became more urgent after a suicide attempt in the early 1920s, following a traumatic abortion, and again, later, when she gave birth to a child out of wedlock. Determined that her daughter, Tamar, would not flounder as she had, Day had her baptized a Catholic, and followed her into the church in December 1927. She experienced what the authors call a "second conversion" during a series of retreats in the early 1940s led by Father John Hugo, which served to wed her socialist views to her new faith. Hugo insisted that Christianity involved a commitment to love, sacrifice and pacifism that secular society could no longer fathom. Day now hungered for action demonstrations, marches and newspaper articles were no longer enough. In 1932 she had found a partner and soul mate in the brilliant French autodidact Peter Maurin, who believed that she could reform the Catholic Church much as St. Catherine of Siena had done in the 14th century. The following spring they founded The Catholic Worker an implicit goad to the Communist Party's Daily Worker which argued that the cardinal sins of the United States were poverty, discrimination and exploitation, since the much vaunted American dream was clearly not available to everybody. The paper would eventually acquire 100,000 readers. Less than two years later, Day and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement, establishing a group of residences across the country to provide food and shelter to the homeless. These homeless people were served by young volunteers who shared their guests' poverty a modern version of the hospitality that Benedictine monasteries had provided in Europe before the Reformation. Day and Maurin also tried, less successfully, to create self sustaining farming communities, with the goal of furthering Maurin's dream of a "green revolution" long before environmental issues became a public concern. Throughout her life, Day remained an impassioned and radical critic of United States policy. She spoke against the draft in Congress shortly after the beginning of World War II, and in her lectures and articles, she condemned the use of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She later insisted that the Catholic President John F. Kennedy was as much to blame for the Cuban missile crisis as Nikita Khrushchev. When the Cold War was at its height, she vociferously asserted that the Soviets differed from the Gospels only in the methods they used to achieve equality. Yet, paradoxically, Day the political radical was a rigidly conservative Catholic, accepting without demur church rulings on episcopal authority, papal infallibility, abortion, birth control, masturbation and premarital sex that encroached on personal liberty. She embraced doctrines and practices that Protestants had deplored since the Reformation: transubstantiation, the cult of Mary and the saints, the rosary, relics, confession and indulgences. For Loughery and Randolph, this stance exemplifies Day's wholehearted approach to life; Day, they suggest, quoting a line from "The Mill on the Floss," a novel she admired, was "never satisfied with a little of anything" and wanted to experience the entire Catholic package, warts and all. But while reading their respectful account, I began to wonder if Day's religious conservatism might also, perhaps unconsciously, have been politically subversive. Dorothy's religiously inspired politics flagrantly challenged the Enlightenment ideals of the American Constitution. The British philosopher John Locke, for example, had declared that mixing politics and religion was a grievous, dangerous and existential error, and Thomas Jefferson too had famously called for a "wall of separation" between personal faith and public policy. In fact, however, religious faith had always inspired political and social action. Not only did Jesus and the prophets of Israel vehemently denounce those who prayed devoutly while neglecting the poor and oppressed, but Muhammad, Confucius, Mencius, Mahavira, the Buddha and Gandhi all insisted that personal piety was fruitless unless one worked tirelessly to relieve human suffering. In the Hebrew Bible, the word for "holiness" (qadosh) literally means "set apart, other"; and the cultivation of sanctity has often been an "othering" a deliberate and dramatic inversion of a social or spiritual norm. Passionately denouncing the inequity of his time, Francis of Assisi abjured his wealth and joined the beggars. Accused of flouting male authority by demanding that bishops and priests reform, Catherine of Siena starved herself, becoming frighteningly and androgynously "other." Ever since the Pilgrim fathers fled the "popery" of Europe, America's national religion has been Protestant, and Catholicism was long felt to be incompatible with enlightened liberty. In her wholehearted embrace of the Catholic faith, was Day also attempting an "othering," tacitly and subversively suggesting that there were different ways of being a loyal citizen and devout Christian that the radicalism of a St. Francis, indeed, of Jesus himself, spoke imperatively to the American dilemma? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Twenty three miles south of Anchorage on the Seward Highway, the first glimpse of Froth Forage's turquoise roof comes two mountainside highway curves ahead of the restaurant's gravel parking. Though the weathered wood building looks like the barbecue shack it was in a past life, it is now home to a 22 seat restaurant headed up by a chef who wants to prove that a restaurant in south central Alaska can thrive using local ingredients or, at least, other small local purveyors, instead of goods delivered from, as Alaskans call it, Outside. The chef, Zachary Reid, who opened Froth Forage in May, is making the case by serving up inventive comfort food that often pops with color and flavor. Even the tasty burger, made of venison and buffalo, is pretty, thanks to red onions pickled to a magenta hue. Mr. Reid is developing the winter menu featuring heartier dishes anchored with root vegetables and pickled produce but some of the standouts from the summer menu will live on. That burger, for one. Also staying, a decadent starter of poutine that might even make a Canadian get weepy: house made fries thin cut and dressed in garlic, Parmesan and truffle oil topped with house made Cheddar cheese curds, and a rich gravy made from reindeer and house cured bacon. Mr. Reid and his wife Michelle McIntyre she runs the front of the house met in high school in Hawaii, the only other state in Alaska's time zone (the Aleutian Islands share a time zone with Hawaii). His cooking resume includes high end resorts on Oahu and, later, in Vermont. The couple's first restaurant, Brown's Market Bistro in Groton, Vt., brought Mr. Reid a 2012 Chef of the Year award from the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, but the couple, who have two children, wanted to live closer to Ms. McIntyre's family in Alaska. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
By Page 418 of Tony Robbins's new book "Money: Master the Game," which promises on the cover that its seven steps to financial freedom will be "simple," I was sort of ready to put it down. But then, he hits readers with this promise: "Turn the page, and let me show you the five types of annuities that could change your life." And then, on 428, the zinger: "Upside without the downside." Those are magic words to investors, but they also cause skeptical people to watch their wallets. Moreover, the product that he is most excited about is something called the fixed indexed annuity, the subject of numerous alerts and bulletins from a variety of concerned regulators. Finra, the independent securities regulator, noted that the products were "anything but easy to understand." To top it off, Mr. Robbins now has a stake in a company that makes money through the distribution of annuities and intends to help invent a new one, which he discloses in the book. In the two months since his book came out and rocketed to the top of the New York Times business best seller list, Mr. Robbins, a renowned self help author, has been adamant that its specific financial strategies and tools are not his own opinion; he interviewed plenty of experts to get theirs. But once you start trying to make money off a specific product, logic would dictate that you think it's worthwhile (or at least lucrative). So what exactly is going on here? Let's begin with the fact that there is nothing wrong with annuities per se. At their simplest, money is turned over in the present to be distributed later, often in a stream of monthly checks. Social Security works that way. The Obama administration has long hoped to make it easier for people to turn the money from their own retirement accounts over upon retirement in exchange for a pensionlike annuity payment. But fixed indexed annuities are something else entirely. There are untold varieties, but the basic premise is this: First, hand some money to an insurance company through an annuity salesman. In return, get a guarantee that you'll get your principal back, at minimum, at the end of the term. Then, you get credit on top of your principal when the market rises without losing money when it falls. How is this possible? It gets complicated fast, but the insurance companies begin by putting much of your money aside for safekeeping. Then, they buy options that will be profitable if the market goes up. If the market doesn't go up, the insurance company eats the cost of the options when they expire. Given these costs and machinations, the insurance company has a variety of creative ways to limit how much of the stock market's gain it will actually credit to you if you own one of these annuities. In his book, Mr. Robbins describes fixed indexed annuities as an "elevator that can only go up." The Securities and Exchange Commission, however, says the opposite quite bluntly: "You can lose money buying an indexed annuity." The quickest way is by trying to pull your money out early. The insurance companies generally lock people into contracts, and if you need the money before the term is up, you pay what is known as a surrender charge. Some people could pay tax penalties under certain circumstances too. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Prudent consumers who encounter all of this for the first time might want to seek out an expert who has no financial stake in their choice; annuity salesmen make large upfront commissions on fixed indexed annuities. So I asked Glenn S. Daily what he thought of the products, since he picks apart a variety of insurance products and makes recommendations for anyone who wants to pay him an hourly fee to do so. His feeling? "I have not ever found any that I am willing to recommend," he said. Why not? His process is to imagine how he might defend himself if he were sued, even though he's never been sued. He would need to prove that he'd considered appropriate alternatives (say, buying and selling options on one's own) and compared them with the product being offered. But building those models is extraordinarily complicated. He pointed me to a paper that a math professor and her colleagues recently published. In it, the writers noted that researchers who had worked in the area couldn't even agree on how best to build a model, and the fact that the products have only existed for two decades or so means that there isn't much historical data to go on. I figured a full time annuity salesman might have a sunnier view. When I called Stan Haithcock, he answered with his usual greeting: "Stan the Annuity Man!" And his opinion of fixed indexed annuities? "If they are not regulated soon, they are going to go down in history as one of the most overhyped products in the history of financial services," he said. He expects a class action to emerge soon over another common aspect of the products, something called a guaranteed lifetime income rider. I hoped that Mr. Robbins and his partners might offer some clarification, so I did what he suggested in his book and went to their website, lifetimeincome.com, to try to enter some of my own numbers and compare a few annuities. The site's calculator didn't work for me, so I called the phone number on the site. When I reached a representative, he told me that the calculator actually only bases its output on a single product. "It's a generic product, to be honest," he said. "I don't even know what the product is." Hey, no problem, I told him. What I was really curious about was an enticing new fixed indexed annuity that Mr. Robbins, in his book, said that he and his partners had pushed insurance companies to begin creating. It would let people buy in at younger ages than most current fixed indexed annuities, invest a little at a time and still get guaranteed lifetime income and growth linked to the stock market. The representative didn't know anything about that product but offered to connect me with Vince Virga in Bayonne, N.J., who could hook me up with something he referred to as a laddered annuity strategy using multiple annuities from different companies. "You may have heard him on the radio," he said of Mr. Virga. I had not. None of that was part of Mr. Robbins's book, and when I told him about my experience in a phone conversation this week, he agreed that annuity ladders were not what he had in mind for the world. Indeed, the annuity he promised in the book does not exist yet because the first insurer withdrew right after the book went to press. He and his partners are working with another insurer now and expect the new product to emerge in the third quarter of this year. By diving into the financial services industry headfirst, Mr. Robbins has drawn plenty of criticism for potential self dealing, but he said that taking a stake in an existing company was the best way to advance a new solution for consumers. Mr. Robbins is clear both in the book and in person that fixed indexed annuities are only one part of an overall asset allocation strategy. He said he believed that people should invest in index mutual funds, which is more than defensible. But he also said he felt strongly that the purpose of investing was not to produce assets but income, say for retirement. And to him, an annuity with some kind of guaranteed payout will ultimately appeal more to millennials spooked by the stock market gyrations of the last decade than a standard 401(k) or similar plan. We shall see. Meanwhile, the word that people in technology circles use for coming soon offerings like Mr. Robbins's best of everything annuity is "vaporware." I hope it will one day emerge from the ether and do all it promises to do. But I don't know if I would bet on it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Just over there, on a banquette beneath an oil painting depicting the racehorses Man o' War and Citation in bookend profile, Rihanna and Naomi Campbell sit huddled like sleek and improbably beautiful fillies after a sudden storm. Not far away, the Departures editor, Richard D. Story, candlelight burnishing his mahogany tan, is deep in what anyone who knows him can guess is drollery with Lee Radziwill, sole survivor of Truman Capote's storied social swans and still resembling a Tanagra figurine. Away in a niche and glowing in light cast by a dozen subtle sources, the heiress and D. J. Hannah Bronfman is caught up in lively conversation with David Rockefeller, chatting as amiably as if a seven decade difference in their ages did not exist. Tucked behind a corner table, the Creative Artists Agency honcho Bryan Lourd is tearing into a Gruyere popover, sharing deep agent thoughts with the superhero hunk Chris Hemsworth, although please don't mention this to Page Six. Back to the room and facing a beveled mirror, Mr. Hemsworth is practicing his incognito, which is what one does when the prize view at a prime view table happens to be you. The name of this delightful pleasure ground is, of course, the Polo Bar, Ralph Lauren's brand new restaurant in Midtown. The bilevel space opened eight weeks ago during the bitter days of winter for invitation only previews and to a universally warm reception; almost immediately thereafter it became the kind of hot place where even knowing the secret email is no guarantee of booking a table any time soon or even a seat at the bar. This enraged the blogosphere, of course, and with good reason. Right now, virtually no reservations are available before the second week of April (except, as a caller was informed on Wednesday, for "a party of two at 6 p.m., the last week of March"). As Grub Street pointed out, that is a "lot of advance planning for a place that serves cheeseburgers and brownie sundaes." Yet apex feeders aren't fussed about pretty gatekeepers shooing tourists away from the Polo Bar's portals, standing guard with reservation lists studded with famous names and iPads bearing photo cues for identifying the kind of people too busy being powerful to bother cultivating face recognition. Big leaguers don't need to wear a Michael Bloomberg mask to gain entry, because in all likelihood they are the former mayor of New York. If the city's elite were drawn at first to the Polo Bar for its novelty in a dining dead zone (and for the reassuring sense that they would be among others of their ilk), they have returned to a place that is already giving Michael's or the Modern or the Monkey Bar competition as the cozy in crowd clubhouse for an unexpected reason: They like the food. "Where else can you go that's buzzy and cozy that has great comfort food and is truly chic?" Lynn Nesbit asked one evening. Frenetic as ever, Ms. Nesbit flitted among tables where the author Renata Adler was sitting elegant snowy braid looking just as it did in the famous Avedon photo and Vera Wang was with a group of female pals taking selfies and in a corner booth Mr. Lauren sat surveying the scene he'd created, magisterial as the Grand Poobah in his black jeans and turtleneck and with an enormous silver concha belt slung around his hips. As befits a literary power agent, Ms. Nesbit had already scoped out a table for future power lunches with authors, never mind that the restaurant doesn't plan to serve midday meals for at least another month. "It's the '21' Club meets the Carlyle," said Aerin Lauder, the Estee Lauder heiress and eponymous founder of a lifestyle luxury brand. "The second you walk in, you're greeted at this beautiful bar, with the silver buckets of wine and waiters looking perfect and bowls of fried olives," she added. And it is true that as a theatrical stage set, the Polo Bar would be hard to improve upon. On a recent evening, its mile long banquette of aged and channeled leather was packed, as Ms. Lauder pointed out, with an unusually "cross generational" array of New Yorkers. The theatrical legerdemain deployed at the Polo Bar by Mr. Lauren's design team was necessary to distract diners from what is clearly its most glaring deficit. "It was only later that I realized there were no windows," Barbara Walters said of a recent dinner eaten in what, as she pointed out, is in fact a basement. True, this subterranean space once housed the service kitchens for a storied restaurant of an earlier era, La Cote Basque. But at that place, best remembered for having provided a title for a Capote short story that turned into his social and professional tombstone, the actual dining rooms were at street level, curtained windows filtering strong ambient light. "If a broker would have shown me that space, with the bar upstairs and the restaurant downstairs, I would have walked out in 12 seconds," Mr. Flay said. "I don't think I'm that good." Yet Mr. Lauren is, and when he decided to create what, in an interview, he called, "the restaurant I wanted to go to," he was unambiguous about the requisites. The lighting had to be pretty enough to flatter diners not necessarily in the first blush of youth. "Brooke Astor would have loved it," said Ms. Adler of a scheme deploying virtually every trick known to interior design. It had to feel cozy and homey, even if few homes not inhabited by people named Whitney or Mellon have ever been homey in quite the Ralph Lauren way. The Laurens Ralph; his wife, Ricky; their children, Andrew, David and Dylan "Eat as a family, vacation as a family, eat and breathe New York, and are part of the community," Mr. Samuelsson added. At the very least, they epitomize that always evolving community of New York strivers who revel in having made it to the inside, past the immigration officials, all the barriers to success, the velvet ropes and officious pretties with iPads, the very people who keep the civic envy machine humming along. "Listen, people always want to go where they can't get in," Ms. Walters said. "Who can figure out what makes a place the place where everyone wants to go? If you figure it out, call me. We'll go to lunch." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The upshot of all of this the charges of fraud, the refusal to acknowledge the president's defeat is a party prepared to do even more than it already has to restrict voting. "This election has shown we need major reforms to our election systems, including voter ID laws across the nation, to protect against fraud and rebuild the American people's trust in fair outcomes," Senator Rick Scott of Florida said in a statement touting a federal bill that would introduce a strict ID requirement in addition to making it more difficult to get a mail in ballot. Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas has similarly called for new ID requirements and a crackdown on mail in voting. And Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky told his Twitter followers to "look at the evidence" of fraud "and decide for yourself" while he shared a conspiratorial blog post on "anomalies in vote counts." The results of the election clearly show that Republicans can compete in high turnout conditions as much as they can when there are fewer people voting. But they have persuaded themselves that voters are the obstacle and that a smaller electorate is their best path back to power. Or, as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said just after the election, "If Republicans don't challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again." The obvious question is why are they doing all this. The president's decision to spread conspiracies about the election is part of the answer, yes, but the commitment to anti majoritarian politics runs deeper than just fealty to Trump. One way to understand the dynamic at work in the reflexive Republican retrenchment against voting rights is to think of it as a habit, not in the conventional sense, but as defined by the philosopher and social theorist John Dewey. In his 1922 book "Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology," Dewey defined "habit" as "special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts." This use of "habit" he explained, may seem twisted somewhat from its customary use when employed as we have been using it. But we need a word to express that kind of human activity which is influenced by prior activity and in that sense acquired; which contains within itself a certain ordering or systematization of minor elements of action; which is projective, dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation; and which is operative in some subdued subordinate form even when not obviously dominating activity. A Deweyan "habit" isn't simply an action that repeats itself. It is, instead, an "active disposition" that shapes one's response to one's environment. We don't deliberate about many or even most of our actions, we simply react. And the exact nature of those reactions are habits, acquired through our interactions with others, shaped by the conditions set by "prior customs," part of the embedded context of our lives. Here's Dewey again: If an individual were alone in the world, he would form his habits (assuming the impossible, namely, that he would be able to form them) in a moral vacuum. They would belong to him alone, or to him only in reference to physical forces. Responsibility and virtue would be his alone. But since habits involve the support of environing conditions, a society or some specific group of fellow men, is always accessory before and after the fact. Some activity proceeds from a man; then it sets up reactions in the surroundings. Others approve, disapprove, protest, encourage, share and resist. In 2008, record turnout among young people, Black Americans and other underrepresented groups put Barack Obama in the White House. In the wake of that victory, Republicans introduced a host of new voting restrictions. "Following the Tea Party's triumph in the 2010 elections," wrote Ari Berman in his chronicle of the post 1960s fight for voting rights, "Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America," "half the states in the country, nearly all of them under Republican control from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania passed laws making it harder to vote." These measures strict photo identification rules, limits on early voting and mass purges of voting rolls targeted the groups that got Obama across the finish line. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
LONDON A Huawei executive defended the company's security practices in the face of tough questioning from members of the British Parliament on Monday, as the Chinese technology giant seeks to contain an American led effort to ban it around the world. John Suffolk, Huawei's global cybersecurity and privacy officer, appeared at a hearing in the House of Commons about the safety of Britain's telecommunications infrastructure. British leaders are facing pressure from the Trump administration to follow America's lead in banning Huawei, the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment. The United States has argued that Huawei is beholden to the Chinese government, poses a grave national security threat and should not be allowed to help build the high speed, next generation networks known as 5G that will debut in the coming years. At the hearing, Mr. Suffolk said Huawei was independent and would never undermine the safety of its equipment to satisfy demands from Beijing. "There are no laws in China that obligate us to work with the Chinese government," he said during questioning. "There is no requirement." Britain is weighing whether to allow Huawei to play a role in its new 5G networks. The company's equipment is already being used in the country, but American authorities have raised new questions about the gear and the risks it poses to national security. The United States has threatened to restrict the intelligence it shares with countries that allow Huawei in its 5G networks. Huawei has become a central piece of the trade dispute between the United States and China. After the American government recently blacklisted Huawei and threatened the company's access to American technology, Beijing has moved to retaliate against American companies. Over the past week, Chinese authorities summoned major international tech companies to warn that they could face consequences if they cooperated with the Trump administration's ban on sales of key American technology to Chinese companies. "In this country at the moment there is a big debate: Should we be following what the Americans are trying to argue we should do, excluding Huawei, or should we include them and manage the risk?" Norman Lamb, the chairman of the Science and Technology Committee, said during the hearing on Monday. John Suffolk, Huawei's global cybersecurity and privacy officer, said the company would never undermine the safety of its equipment to satisfy demands from Beijing. British authorities have for years subjected Huawei products and code to review at a security facility about 80 miles outside London. While British intelligence officials have said the risk of Huawei can be mitigated, a government report issued in March highlighted "significant" security problems with the company's equipment. The report didn't link any of the flaws to the Chinese government. Mr. Suffolk said Huawei was committed to transparency and to fixing the problems highlighted by the March report. One challenge has been introducing product updates that don't compromise the reliability of its network in other nations using older equipment, he said. "We stand naked in front of the world," he said. "It may not be a pretty sight all of the time, but we would prefer to do that." Representatives from Britain's largest wireless networks said any security threats from Huawei could be alleviated. "Our view is the risk can be managed," Scott Petty, the chief technology officer at Vodafone, said at the hearing. He said the company used Huawei only in less critical parts of its network. British lawmakers asked Mr. Suffolk if China could inject backdoor access into Huawei's network without the company's knowledge. Mr. Suffolk, without directly answering, noted that the United States had used those tactics to intercept global communications. "That's what governments do," he said. The hearing became tense when members of Parliament asked Mr. Suffolk if Huawei made moral considerations before selling equipment to oppressive governments with a history of human rights abuse. Mr. Lamb noted an Australian research report that said Huawei provided equipment that Chinese authorities use to monitor the Uighurs, a Muslim minority in China's northwestern region. "I don't think it's for us to make such judgments," Mr. Suffolk said. "The question is whether it's legal in the country where we operate." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
BEIJING A prominent arts center in Beijing has canceled a Chinese American artist's exhibition of works with strong social and historical themes, planned for December, after the local authorities declined to issue the necessary import permits. The cancellation comes amid a growing clampdown on civil society across the country and rising tensions between China and the United States. China's censorship review process is notoriously opaque and there was no official reason given for withholding the permits. In a letter to lenders of the works announcing the cancellation, Philip Tinari, director of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, said that after months of back and forth with the local cultural authorities, the gallery was suddenly informed this month that the approvals would not be coming. "Topics that were once relatively open for discussion are now increasingly scrutinized," Mr. Tinari wrote in the letter, which was seen by The New York Times. "An exhibition that might have been greenlighted a few years ago such as this one must now be canceled." The show, featuring the artist Hung Liu, was scheduled to open on Dec. 6. Ms. Liu, who was born in the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun in 1948 and moved to the United States in 1984, is known for fusing her early artistic training in socialist realism with Western influences to create paintings based on historical photographs. Ms. Liu with one of her works. The Chinese American artist is known for paintings based on historical photographs. Her work can be overtly political, like a series of pencil sketches titled "Where Is Mao?" But the 30 plus paintings that had been proposed for the Beijing show focused more on questions of culture, gender, history and memory . In an interview, Ms. Liu said that the local authorities had initially raised concerns about nine works, including a 1993 self portrait based on a photograph of the artist as a young, rifle toting woman at the end of the Cultural Revolution, the decade long period of political tumult that rocked China under Mao Zedong, and a 1988 painting, "Abacus," or "Seven Up Eight Down" in Chinese a common phrase that is often used to describe the state of feeling agitated. Another work in question was a 2011 painting of 12 schoolgirls in uniforms wearing gas masks, which Ms. Liu said was originally based on a historical photograph of an air raid drill during World War II. "The message is antiwar so I thought it was O.K., but when I talked with my Chinese artist friends about it, they just said one word: Hong Kong," Ms. Liu said. In recent months, images of gas masks particularly as worn by students have become widely associated with the antigovernment protests that have convulsed Hong Kong since June and angered the authorities in Beijing, who see the demonstrations as a direct challenge to their rule in the semiautonomous territory. Ms. Liu said that after the authorities voiced objections, she reluctantly agreed to withdraw the nine works in question from the show. What remained was still a "pretty strong show," she said, including a large scale installation of 250,000 fortune cookies piled atop train tracks a reference to the nuggets of gold that lured a wave of Chinese immigrants to America in the 19th century, many of whom later went on to build the country's first Transcontinental Railroad. The final show would also have included some of Ms. Liu's more recent works, based on the Depression era photographs of Dorothea Lange as well as some works that had been exhibited in China before, like a painting of a Chinese mother and daughter pulling a barge upstream. But in a sign of the fast shrinking space for expression in China, the authorities decided in the end to effectively kill the show altogether by refusing to issue the approvals required to import the remaining works. "I was so sad and disappointed," Ms. Liu said. "Of course my work has political dimensions, but my focus is really the human faces, the human struggle, the epic journey." "I sincerely feel like all I'm doing is enshrining the anonymous working class who never had a voice," added Ms. Liu, who will be the subject of a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in 2021. The show's cancellation, which was first reported by The Art Newspaper, is a setback for the UCCA, which is coming off the huge success of a major exhibition of works by Pablo Picasso and its recent announcement of plans to open an outpost in Shanghai. It is also the latest indication of how China's turn toward a more hard nosed authoritarianism under the leadership of Xi Jinping has crept into all corners of society. While censorship has been a source of frustration in China's cultural sectors for years, most knew generally where the so called red lines were and how to avoid them. But many now say the red line of censorship has been moving, a point that was illustrated most vividly over the summer when the opening of a big budget Chinese patriotic movie of the sort typically beloved by the authorities was abruptly canceled. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
A statue at the Cementiri de Montjuic in Barcelona. "I still love the place, no matter how creepy it is," the Barcelona born novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafon said of one of his favorite spots. The author Carlos Ruiz Zafon offers a travel guide to his hometown with a darker spin on some familiar spots. In Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Barcelona, the well trodden capital of Spain's Catalonia region, there is still much to discover beneath the surface. "Treasures beneath the noise" are how the best selling novelist, whose books present a vivid portrait of his native Barcelona, describes frequent haunts in his hometown. The 54 year old author behind the series, The Cemetery of Forgotten Books (the most recent, The Labyrinth of Spirits, was published in 2018), divides his time between Barcelona and Los Angeles, where he is now based. His favorite places may sound familiar, but they take on an entirely different meaning when viewed through his fantastical lens. Here, five of Mr. Ruiz Zafon's recommendations. Mr. Ruiz Zafon likes the contrasts he sees when walking from the Cathedral of Barcelona to the harbor, Port Vell, via Carrer dels Banys Nous. The pedestrian friendly route begins narrow and dark along an ancient Roman wall, cutting through the heart of the Gothic Quarter, then ends in the bright openness at the harbor. "You cross many centuries of the city, so many layers of its history." Gaudi's massive, incomplete cathedral is a block away from where Mr. Ruiz Zafon grew up, and where his father still lives. "When I was a kid, it was a ruin! I knew it inside out. I would climb the towers and get into the tunnels, and down into workshops where they kept the religious statues." Now, Mr. Ruiz Zafon is still drawn to the cathedral. "It's very interesting to see how it's changed from being a neglected place that people made fun of 'This is monstrous, this is garish!' to becoming the most visited attraction in the city." In the cemetery's older section, you'll find ornate mausoleums and palaces built by 19th century tycoons who insisted on displaying their wealth, even in death. "There's something about the combination of excess and death that I find fascinating," Mr. Ruiz Zafon said. "You'll see these extravagant, morbid buildings with vengeful angels from Hell! It's like the real world disappears." He advised visitors not to get caught there after sundown when the gates are locked. He can speak from experience as a teenager, he attempted to drive a broken down motorcycle through the cemetery, getting terribly lost and nearly locked in. "It was a perfect horror movie setting!" he said. "But I still love the place, no matter how creepy it is." Mr. Ruiz Zafon likes taking the funicular to the top of Tibidabo mountain. Once there, he might appreciate the stunning view of Barcelona with a drink at La Venta, a century old restaurant. Further up the mountain is Gran Hotel La Florida, which has been restored to five star splendor, and the Parc d'Atraccions Tibidabo, a refurbished amusement park that, to Mr. Ruiz Zafon's chagrin, has lost some character in the modernization. Still, he's drawn by the mountain's history, and even by its name. "In Latin, tibidabo means 'I'll give you,' which are the words the Devil uses to tempt Jesus. I always thought it was very appropriate Barcelona has this very dark soul. It makes sense that the devil would get up on this mountain trying to tempt us with all of these worldly pleasures." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
I've stayed in some unusual digs on my travels but this was something new. I walked through the colorfully hand painted door to music emanating from a boombox and the soft thud of bodies hitting gymnastics mats. There were about a dozen kids learning how to tumble, and I could see a trapeze, a Cyr wheel and aerial silks. This place was a circus literally. These were my hosts: the members of an Ethiopian circus troupe good natured and helpful, and eager to educate me about their country who rent out a spare room to travelers. It was just one of the pleasures of exploring Addis Ababa, the capital of the oldest independent country in Africa (though it was occupied by the Italians, Ethiopia was never formally colonized). The capital, where both Orthodox Christianity and Islam are practiced, is an extraordinary, fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking city. Dire poverty is still a harsh reality for many in the country despite a booming economy. And while the city can certainly be navigated inexpensively, you will also find fascinating cultural landmarks, wonderful food and an almost unparalleled coffee culture. Some preplanning is required before heading to Ethiopia starting with a visa. Americans can apply for one upon arrival at Addis Ababa's Bole International Airport. Those who do, however, run the risk of having to line up with other travelers. I applied for the visa online, a convenience that was rolled out just this summer. I paid the 50 fee electronically (plus an extra 2 service fee) and was approved in less than a day. I recommend printing out the receipt and holding onto the paperwork through your departure from the country it expedited my exit when passport control couldn't locate my visa in the computer. Come with an open mind and be prepared for a couple of extra bumps in the road. The first things I typically look for upon landing are an A.T.M. and a local SIM card. It took me a bit to find a working A.T.M., but getting a SIM card at the airport was a no go. There were guys in the lobby hawking SIM cards at overly expensive rates 20 for only 300 MB of 3G data. No thanks. Taxis at the airport were also overpriced, but by simply walking a couple of minutes out to the main road, I found a blue and white taxi (slightly more rustic cars, commonly found on the streets of the city) and paid just 200 birr (about 13) to go to the Piazza area, in the heart of the city. The learning curve in Ethiopia was proving to be steep and I'd just arrived in the country. Luckily, it was Fekat Circus to the rescue. I connected with them through Airbnb, and though there were no traveler reviews when I visited (which would ordinarily disqualify a place from getting my business), I found their website engaging and decided I'd roll the dice. The price was right: Less than 12 per night. (I also spent one night at the relatively luxurious Capital Hotel and Spa for 84 per night good if you want a splurge.) My circus stay was problem free. The representatives of Fekat I met were incredibly helpful throughout my visit, particularly Eyob Teshome, a Cyr wheel expert and all around good guy who served as an informal guide for a portion of my stay. He helped acquaint me with the neighborhood, find a local SIM card, answered questions and showed me a few different sights. He is also, like several Ethiopians I met, incredibly proud of his country. "We are special," he began, before correcting himself: "We believe we are special," he said, smiling and looking downward. Mr. Teshome, a devout Christian (most Ethiopians are Christian, either Ethiopian Orthodox or Protestant), talked a bit about Ethiopia and its role in the Bible, and how many Ethiopians view the country one of the world's oldest Christian nations as the promised land. "And did you know," asked a smiling Mr. Teshome, as we walked past street hawkers selling mangos and young men offering to clean your sneakers for a few birr, "that we have our own calendar? And that we even have our own time?" Ethiopia works on a 13 month calendar, with 12 30 day months and a 13th intercalary month (a leap month, basically) of five or six days. And instead of working on standard international time, which would put it in the same zone as Moscow, it works on a 12 hour clock determined roughly by sunrise and sunset. What we would call 7 a.m. is simply called "1 o'clock" in Ethiopian time be careful when making appointments. After showing me my room modest, but comfortable, with a bunk bed and shared bathroom down the hallway Mr. Teshome asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to do. I said I was up for pretty much anything. "O.K.," he said. "We'll go to Merkato." We hopped on the Chinese built metro rail at Menilik II Square (right near the beautiful St. George's Cathedral, where Haile Selassie was crowned emperor in 1930), and rode two stops west to Gojam Berenda (2 birr, less than 10 cents). We exited the station to a completely different world. I've been to markets all over the world but I wasn't prepared for this. By some accounts, Merkato is the largest open air market in Africa: It encompasses an entire neighborhood several square miles of barely controlled chaos. Vendors hawk nearly everything you could possibly imagine. Produce, textiles, car parts, baked goods and massive sacks of colorful incense line the dirt roads packed with honking cars and busy traders trying to avoid getting hit. Things are roughly divided into sections: All the cookware on one street, towering stacks of colorful plastic containers on another. Against the side of a building under a plastic tarp, I saw a man welding old mechanical gears into weight lifting sets. "Watch your pockets," Mr. Teshome warned me as we wound our way through the crush of people at the Merkato, passing rows of shoes, colorful T shirts, bags of spices, slaughtered animals. We stopped to snack on chornake, a dense, doughnut like fried pastry (2 birr), then each bought a mefakia (also 2 birr), a short stick of wood many Ethiopians use as a natural toothbrush. We continued wandering the market, cleaning our teeth. (Many things in the city cost just a few birr keep some small change handy.) Mr. Teshome warned me about pickpockets in the market, but over all, I didn't find safety to be a problem in the city. I used common sense by limiting the amount of walking I did after dark and not mindlessly gazing at my phone while strolling down the street. You may occasionally be gawked and called after my general sense was that it came from a place of friendliness and curiosity. But there's also a serious hustle to many of the locals, primarily young men, who are eager to make a birr or two by cleaning your shoes, selling you knickknacks or escorting you to a destination. I'd generally advise against following strangers anywhere or accepting offers to "show you around." Decline firmly, but not rudely. After picking up a local SIM card (with 4G capability) from the Ethio Telecom shop near Minilik Square (bring your passport, a hundred birr or so to top up your phone, and plenty of patience the wait can be considerable), I was beginning to feel the effect of all my recent travel. It was time for a cup of coffee lucky for me, Addis Ababa is full of modest streetside coffee stands selling amazing java. No surprise there coffee is believed to have originated on the Ethiopian highlands. The best cup of my trip was at Tomoca Coffee, a small storefront on Wawel Street in the Piazza area near where I bunked at the circus (there are a few locations). The cozy, homey shop was packed, and flooded with the warm, earthy scent of ground coffee. I picked up a cup for 14 birr and a frosted doughnut for 15 birr. The doughnut was mediocre, but that was beside the point: The coffee, a dense, bittersweet shot of only three or four ounces, was some of the best I've had. You can buy whole bean coffee, too; I picked up a couple of 500 gram bags to bring home (138 birr). Food and drink are practically a religion in Ethiopia, and there's no shortage of places to get tasty, family style meals. Expect thick stews of vegetables and meat eaten together with injera, a sour, spongy fermented bread made from teff, a native grass. At KG Corner, a neighborhood restaurant that's been operating since 1960, I tried the fasting ferefer (the Ethiopian Orthodox Church prescribes a number of fasting days during which adherents may not eat animal products) for 43 birr and the shiro tegabino, a pea stew (also 43 birr). The ferefer was essentially a spicy vegetable stew that tasted heavily of the deep, earthy berbere spice that Ethiopia is famous for. Other highlights of my stay included the Holy Trinity Cathedral, also known as the Haile Selassie church (the former emperor is buried on the premises with his wife). Admission to the church and small museum on the property is a relatively expensive 150 birr. For theater buffs, the Ethiopian National Theater, originally constructed during the Italian occupation, is worth visiting for a look at its massive lobby and gilded interior. I even took in a show, "Finger of God" (40 birr). While I don't speak Amharic, I found the performance engaging. The National Museum of Ethiopia is just a 15 minute walk from the Holy Trinity Cathedral and, for just a 10 birr admission fee, it is a must see. The highlight, naturally, is Lucy the Australopithecine hominid that made an enormous splash when her partial skeleton was discovered in eastern Ethiopia in 1974 by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray. When she was discovered, the 3.2 million year old Lucy excited the anthropological world because of her well preserved remains as well as the fact that she walked upright shedding possible light on the "missing link" of how humans may have evolved. Seeing the bone fragments up close and in person is fascinating even for casual fans of history and paleontology. While the fossil long predates Ethiopia, of course, it serves as a reminder of how much rich history the country has and what fascinating discoveries await the curious traveler. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Gaspar Noe was crestfallen when hardly anyone walked out of his new movie, "Climax."Credit...Julien Mignot for The New York Times Gaspar Noe has had to make his peace with the reaction to his newest film, "Climax." Then again, it's the first of his movies with a happy part. Gaspar Noe was crestfallen when hardly anyone walked out of his new movie, "Climax." Gaspar Noe makes the kind of movies that can end a relationship. Let's say you invite a special someone over to Netflix and chill with the aid of Noe's breakthrough film, "Irreversible." It caused a stir at Cannes in 2002 and wildly exaggerated rumors spread that quelle horreur! 250 people walked out. Others fainted. Once they came to, though, lots of them called it virtuosic, daring and original. So you and your date settle in for something nice and transgressive ... and within minutes you are watching a man getting his face bashed in all the way in with a fire extinguisher and then, a few scenes later, a woman getting raped for 10 agonizing unedited minutes and by the time the credits roll, voila, you're single again. Or let's say you and a friend and a bag of shrooms decide to check out Noe's trippy exploration of the afterlife, "Enter the Void" (2010), set in Tokyo, filmed from the vantage point of a young drug dealing American before, during and after he's shot to death in a bar. For 150 minutes you see through his eyes as he floats like a ghost through the city's sex clubs and drug dens. Sounds like a trip! And it is! But after the second or third hallucination sequence, and especially after the aborted fetus scene, you and your friend are no longer friends. It's hard to imagine getting anyone to come with you to see "Love," Noe's next film. There's nothing scarring about it, but it does feature lots of actual penetrative sex, including one shot of an ejaculating penis filmed from the perspective of the woman's vagina. This seems like a good time to mention that Noe filmed it in 3 D. Which brings us to "Climax," Noe's new film. By this point, critics greet a new Gaspar Noe movie with a mixture of anticipation and dread, and afterward it can be hard to tell if they loved it or hated it. Usually both. His films have been called "absolutely moronic" and "sneeringly superior and nihilistic." Noe loves the hate, and so it was seen as some kind of prank when he scheduled "Climax's" premiere at Cannes last spring for 8:30 on a Saturday morning, bright and early, and refused to provide any kind of synopsis. This time, though, it was Noe who was in for the surprise. "Climax" was a dance hall musical of sorts: "'Fame' directed by the Marquis de Sade," as the Variety critic later described it. It was short and simple. First there's an exhilarating dance rehearsal in an abandoned boarding school, featuring music by Daft Punk and Aphex Twin, then a slow dive into an LSD spiked sangria, party gone wrong nightmare an allegorical vision of beauty and harmony, followed by total social collapse. Nearly everyone in the audience that morning loved it. Hardly anyone walked out. Noe was crestfallen. Now, though, with the benefit of time and reflection, Noe has learned to see the bright side of people enjoying his films and even recommending them to people he likes. In this respect, "Climax" is a first for him. "This is the only movie of mine that I can give them," he said recently via Skype from his Paris apartment. He is 55, bald with a thick mustache and a perma scowl that he uses to sucker punch you with really good black humor. "The other ones had almost no happy parts." "Climax" begins with the happy part. A troupe of street dancers, nonprofessional actors mostly, aside from "Kingsman's" Sofia Boutella, a dancer herself, gather to rehearse a new routine. The scene is a classic movie musical showstopper, but what makes this one so singular is that customary Noe dread, the certainly that something awful this way comes. And then it comes. A mystery person spikes the sangria, and Noe begins lighting fuses all over the room. A man hits on Boutella's character a bit too aggressively, and we start to get nervous. A woman urinates directly onto the dance floor, and we start to get alarmed. The son of one dancer, maybe 8 years old, wanders near the punch bowl, and we start to panic. "One reaction that I didn't expect many friends who are big party monsters came out of the movie totally depressed," Noe recalled. "They said, 'I have to go back home. You just reminded me of the worst moments of my life, all my blackouts and fights.'" He grinned, as though this maybe delighted him, then he shrugged. "It's just a movie." Like David Lynch's "Eraserhead," one of Noe's own favorites, "it's written in the language of nightmares, but then you come out, you're all clean." "Climax" began as a documentary about street dancers Noe loves dancing and he asked the Los Angeles choreographer Nina McNeely to help him cast it and choreograph the dance sequence. He also asked her to star, but she declined. "There was no script," he explained. "Also, she had seen 'Irreversible.'" Then, just as they were about to start filming, a blizzard hit Paris, and Noe was struck by a mental image of a woman crawling through a field of snow, screaming, panicked, filmed from above, until she collapses. In a blink, Noe's documentary became A GASPAR NOE FILM. But it's his most mature film, though it's maybe mature in the same way that serial killers get more effective at carving up their victims. "I just tried to portray reality," he said. "My friends tell me there's nothing artificial threesomes are not so uncommon. Probably less now than in the '70s or '80s. There is an animal instinct force in humans that creates passion. When you love sometimes you cross a border." Noe's gaze is unapologetically male, and so is he, and he sees no use pretending that this isn't a garden variety straight male fantasy. Enjoying a Gaspar Noe film requires acknowledging that he's probably right. Which brings us to the other big reason Noe's films are so often despised: His protagonists are often despicable. It's only fair to point out that Noe detests them, too, despite the fact that most of them, like Boutella's thwarted pursuer in "Climax," are based on him, or at least the most odious version of him. In Noe's movies, men destroy everything. "They're pretentious, and they always end up losing." He is drawn to these men, he explained, "because I think there are more losers in this world than winners." To hear Noe tell it, he was put on this earth to provoke. Born in Buenos Aires, the son of a celebrated Argentine painter, Luis Felipe Noe, known as Yayo, he lived on Bleecker Street in SoHo until he was 5 and has fond memories of peeing from his balcony onto passers by below. His family returned to Argentina, then fled to Paris in 1976 to escape the coup. As a teenager Noe discovered Kubrick and Scorsese. His hero was Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro's deranged antihero from "Taxi Driver." "Especially the second part," he said, then cackled madly. He studied filmmaking at Louis Lumiere College, showed a horse being slaughtered in his first movie a 40 minute short called "Carne," about an incestuous butcher and his mute daughter then fell in love with his producer, now wife, Lucile Hadzihalilovic. (They do not have children.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
MADRID At first the soldiers of the Red Army found almost nothing when they reached the camp in the southwest of occupied Poland that January. The retreating Nazis had blown up its crematories, dismantled its gas chambers; the prisoners had been marched west, in the freezing cold. Only later, as the Soviets liberated Auschwitz 75 years ago Monday, did they discover the last, straggling survivors, too ill or young to leave the inferno where at least 1.1 million people were murdered, 90 percent of them Jews. Immediately after the war, writers and philosophers maintained that the death camps defied representation; no art could ever do justice to their horrors, and even the concept of poetry after Auschwitz, in Theodor W. Adorno's notorious phrase, had become "barbaric." Yet survivors themselves, as early as Primo Levi's 1947 memoir, "If This Is a Man," have forced themselves to make sense of the horrors they endured in art and as Auschwitz recedes into historical distance and the last survivors disappear, there are voices even the greatest skeptic of representation cannot afford to tune out. One is the self taught Austrian artist Ceija Stojka (1933 2013), a member of the Roma minority (sometimes derogatorily called "Gypsies"), who turned the ordeals of the camps into an art of immense power. At 10, she was deported to Auschwitz, the first of three camps she would outlast. She slept on the pathway to the gas chambers, and hid among heaps of corpses; she survived by eating tree sap. She made more than 1,000 such paintings and drawings between 1990 and her death in 2013, and I saw more than 100 of them recently at the Museo Reina Sofia, in Madrid. I had seen a few of her paintings in isolation at an art fair in New York last year (the first time her work had been shown in the United States) but I was not prepared for the full intensity of her art of barracks and cattle cars, ravens and sunflowers, sadistic kapos and emaciated prisoners. Not only a testimony to an occluded genocide, Stojka's art also stood up for the possibility even the necessity for human creativity to represent, and take ownership of, the darkest chapters of history. Stojka (her name is pronounced CHAY ya STOY ka) was one of six children born into a family of nomadic horse traders. The family spoke both Romani and German. After the Nazis annexed Austria, they gave up their itinerant life and settled in Vienna. A prologue to the Reina Sofia exhibition includes some of the "light paintings" Stojka made of her childhood. We see women in kerchiefs and long dresses as the sun sets beside their caravans. Sunflowers blossom like fireworks. Willows pullulate with blotchy foliage that recalls her fellow Austrian Gustav Klimt. In 1941, her father was deported to Dachau; he would later be murdered at what was euphemistically called a "euthanasia center." The next year, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree that "all Gypsy mixed bloods" were to be deported to Auschwitz, and treated "on the same level as Jews." (That decree contradicts the falsehood, widely espoused after World War II, that the Roma were "antisocial" and not specifically targeted for extermination. The Roma genocide was not raised at the Nuremberg trials; West Germany recognized the persecution as a racist act only in 1982.) Stojka would paint the cattle car in which she was deported: a rickety thing, its rear window barred, charging into a sky burning white, pink and orange. She arrived at Auschwitz in March 1943, and was assigned to filthy barracks reserved for Roma prisoners. The girl's arm was tattooed, with the number Z 6399. The Z stood for Zigeuner, "Gypsy." She painted that too, in one of her sparest and most modern pictures: a red hand and forearm lost in a sea of black, interrupted by a shaft of white suggesting an absent god. In old age Stojka would treat her tattoo almost as an insignia; a photomural at the Reina Sofia shows her smiling for a portrait, cigarette between her fingers, her decades old number proudly visible. Her paintings of Auschwitz, where she was interned for a little more than a year, burn with a rage and shame not dulled by three quarters of a century. Prisoners, presumably fellow Roma to judge from their kerchiefs, peer from their barracks as the kapos wield their bullwhips, while wraithlike captives walk single file past a cart full of corpses. Nude women, arms thrust to the sky, march at gunpoint into the lethal showers. The sky rots into an otherworldly purple interrupted by the white smoke of the crematorium. Birds recur as gashed Vs, barbed wire as rows of Xs. And bodies: faceless, reduced in places to a few strokes of black. Many of these paintings are done on cardboard; she sometimes used her fingers to score the paint, which gets Van Gogh thick in places, fluid and emulsified in others. They have a detachment and unsentimentality that recalls the fiction of Imre Kertesz, the Nobel winning novelist and fellow Auschwitz survivor. Though Stojka used painting to give form to trauma, these works do not express private grief so much as they bear public witness. One painting, which gives the Reina Sofia show its title, states its testimonial character as bluntly as possible: "This Has Happened." For compared to the Holocaust of European Jewry, the Roma extermination has been less studied and less commemorated. What in Hebrew is called the Shoah ("calamity") is, in the Romani language, known as the Porajmos: the "devouring." No authoritative death toll has ever been established; estimates range from 250,000 to 500,000 people, or up to half the Roma population of Europe. Their persecution went on after World War II, and still does. In 2018 Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy's far right League party, proposed a census of the Roma population as part of a "mass cleansing." In 1944, Stojka and her family were transferred to Ravensbruck only weeks before all the remaining Roma prisoners of Auschwitz were gassed on a single night. She was moved again, to Bergen Belsen, at the start of 1945. In Stojka's paintings of this final camp, the coldblooded order of Auschwitz has given way to chaotic, even apocalyptic desolation. Fires rage before acres of black earth, and skeletons lie tangled in darkness; a single prisoner, stranded in the snow, looks goggle eyed at a pair of blackbirds on a barbed wire fence. The British liberated Bergen Belsen that April. Ceija and her mother walked across Germany and Czechoslovakia to Vienna. She resumed an itinerant life at first, then spent decades as a carpet seller and only in 1988, encouraged by the documentary filmmaker Karin Berger, did she begin to speak of what she survived and to teach herself how to paint. Her writing and art made her a public figure in Austria, as well as an advocate for Roma across Europe. This will be the last major anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with a significant number of survivors. And the further we get from Auschwitz, the easier it is to reduce its horrors to kitsch or light entertainment. (Consider the self satisfied, Nazis are people too "Jojo Rabbit," garlanded with a best picture Oscar nomination.) There is so much bad art out there, in our libraries and streaming services, that you can ask yourself whether Adorno was right all along: better to just stay silent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
SAN FRANCISCO Waymo, the autonomous vehicle business that operates under Google's parent company, dropped several patent claims against Uber on Friday, scaling back some of its major allegations in a bitter lawsuit over driverless technology. In a federal court filing, Waymo said it was dropping three of its four claims over Uber violating its patents related to light detection and ranging sensor technology, or lidar. Lidar is a vital component in driverless car technology, helping the vehicle detect its surroundings to navigate roads. The case, an acrimonious battle between Waymo and Uber, spotlights the arms race surrounding autonomous vehicle talent and technology. It is especially significant for Google now Waymo which spent years working on driverless car technology before other tech companies took an interest. But as Waymo searches for a way to make money from self driving cars, many of its best engineers have left for potential competitors, carrying valuable knowledge of its technology with them. The case with Uber, the ride hailing company, began when Waymo filed suit in February, claiming Uber was using intellectual property stolen by one of Google's former project leaders in its driverless vehicles. That set off months of wrangling, eventually leading Uber to fire the former Google project leader, Anthony Levandowski. The case is scheduled for trial in October, with the thrust of it centered on Uber misappropriating Waymo's trade secrets. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A half century ago, when researchers said cancers were caused by exposure to toxins in the environment, Dr. Henry T. Lynch begged to differ. Many cancers, he said, were hereditary. To prove his point he traveled to gatherings of families that he suspected had histories of hereditary cancer. He arranged to meet family members and asked: Who in the family had cancer? What kind of cancer? Could he get medical records, and blood samples, which he could freeze and store? He hand drew family trees, with squares for men and circles for women, marking who got cancer and what kind. He was soon insisting to a doubting world that he had found compelling evidence of genetic links. In time, the medical world accepted his claims, and his work the family trees, the blood samples eventually contributed to the discovery, by others, of a gene that when mutated can lead to colon cancer and an array of other cancers. He also contributed work that led to the discovery of gene mutations that greatly increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Dr. Lynch died on June 2 at Bergan Mercy Hospital, the main teaching hospital for Creighton University in Omaha, where he had spent most of his career. He was 91. His son, Dr. Patrick M. Lynch, a gastrointestinal endoscopist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said the cause was congestive heart failure. Dr. Henry Lynch, a 6 foot 5 former professional boxer whose physical presence belied his gentle nature, was an old fashioned researcher who never changed his ways. Investigators like to talk about translational research, going from bench to bedside making discoveries in the lab and using them to treat patients. Dr. Lynch went in the opposite direction, from bedside to bench, said Dr. Funmi Olopade, director of the center of clinical cancer genetics at the University of Chicago. In Dr. Lynch's case, though, others took over the bench part. For years, epidemiologists dismissed Dr. Lynch's data as anecdotal, said Dr. Steven Narod, who runs the family cancer unit at Women's College Hospital in Toronto. Skeptics argued that the cancers Dr. Lynch saw could have occurred by chance. They included common cancers, like those of colon, breast and thyroid, which can occur in almost any family. But some medical professionals, including Dr. Narod, were convinced even without the statistical analyses. "In 1987, I looked at those family trees and said, 'I'm in,' " he said. Dr. Olopade met Dr. Lynch in Omaha in 1992, when she wanted to search for breast cancer genes. Dr. Lynch offered his data. "That day stood out in my memory," she said. "He gave me every questionnaire, every consent." Dr. Judy Garber, chief of the division of cancer genetics and prevention at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said Dr. Lynch had helped her, too. "He was among the most decent people in academics," she said. Cancer researchers now estimate that 5 to 10 percent of cancers are inherited. Hereditary cancer syndromes, like the ones Dr. Lynch investigated, include gene mutations that predispose some to more common cancers. One form of hereditary cancer is often called Lynch syndrome (it is also known as hereditary non polyposis colorectal cancer, or HNPCC) because Dr. Lynch first identified families in which it occurs. People with Lynch syndrome have a higher risk of certain types of cancer. Dr. Lynch liked to tell the story of how he got interested in cancer genetics: When he was a medical resident, he saw a patient who was dying of colon cancer. The man began telling Dr. Lynch about all the other people in his family who had had cancer. Intrigued, Dr. Lynch applied for a research grant from the National Institutes of Health, hoping to show that colon cancer could be hereditary. He was turned down. Undaunted, he persisted, collecting pedigrees, drawing family trees and eventually getting research grants. He mostly counseled cancer patients, advising them rather than directly caring for them, his son said. Henry Thompson Lynch was born on Jan. 4, 1928, in Lawrence, Mass., to Henry and Eleanor Lynch. He grew up poor on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father, a salesman, lost his job in the Depression, and his mother was a secretary. With the onset of World War II, Henry enlisted in the Navy at age 15, using the name of a relative a few years older. He was shipped to the South Pacific as a gunner and sustained permanent hearing loss from the guns' blasts. When he returned from the war he earned a high school equivalency degree and became a boxer, competing under the name Hammerin' Hank. After a few of years of boxing professionally, he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. After graduating in 1951, he received a master's degree in clinical psychology from the University of Denver the next year. At the time, his son said, Dr. Lynch wanted to find the genetic roots of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. Then he decided to become a medical doctor. He later explained to his son that he had concluded that physicians had an assured income and more career options than scientists with Ph.D.s. He earned his medical degree at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1960, after completing all the coursework toward a Ph.D. in human genetics at Austin. Hired by Creighton in 1967, he stayed there because, his son said, as a serious Roman Catholic he liked being at a Jesuit institution. Dr. Lynch founded the Hereditary Cancer Center at the university in 1984. In addition to his son, Dr. Lynch is survived by his daughters, Kathy Pinder and Ann Kelly; two brothers, Warren and Donald; 10 grandchildren; and nine great grandchildren. His wife, Jane (Smith) Lynch, died in 2012. Dr. Lynch was buried in a cemetery across the street from the Creighton hospital, in view of a sign on the building that says "The Henry Lynch Cancer Center." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. His last dispatch was from Hampi, India, a stunningly beautiful and less visited historic site. There were still two hours until sunset and I was already about to have my fifth meal of the day. The low, thick clouds that hung over the city of Danang had been pouring buckets of rain on and off since morning, washing my plans for a day trip into the countryside down the gutter for the third consecutive day. Holding a limp umbrella that broke after the first of many storms, I dashed between the awnings that cover the city's sidewalks. Bold, bright letters decorated with the diacritics that denote tones in the Vietnamese language advertised the dishes on sale. Soaked through, I ducked into a restaurant for no other reason than that it was crowded. Out front, just out of range of the rain, a woman loaded bowls with gleaming white noodles and a clear, steaming broth. I sat at a communal table with my serving of bun cha ca, a noodle soup with dense fish cakes. Around me was the kind of constant buzz I crave, as though the city was an organism and I was looking at it under a microscope. Families laughed; couples took photos of their food and each other. The man sitting next to me, also alone, pushed a plate of freshly chopped chilies my way and motioned to my bowl. I finished a 1 can of beer and ordered another. I considered asking for a second bowl of the bun cha ca, but restrained myself. There was more to eat. I had but one afternoon on one of the city's giant stretches of white sand, Non Nuoc, or China Beach as it was dubbed by American G.I.s. My beach plans were derailed by the rainy season and a pair of typhoons that hit elsewhere in the country while I was there. For a week, the sky mostly remained a dull gray. The ubiquitous motorcyclists wore colorful ponchos as they drove down the city's wide avenues, sending sprays of water onto pedestrians like me. But the weather turned out to be an opportunity. The great thing about restaurants? They have roofs. Though Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi deservedly get accolades when it comes to street food, Danang is no slouch. Walking down the alleyway that led to my apartment, I couldn't go five paces without running into something to eat or drink. There were the national classics, of course, and Danang's geographic location means it gets a bit of everything. Pho spots make sure to include a hint to their provenance in their name restaurants with "north" or "Hanoi" in their title specialize in a pared down variety where the broth is the main focus; the southern ones, with references to Ho Chi Minh City in their names, offer something slightly sweeter and in your face. I had a banh mi every day, the crispy baguettes holding a slew of different meats and fresh herbs, living proof that sometimes the colonized can take the tools of the colonizer and make them better. On average, each meal cost around 50,000 Vietnamese dong or 2. Filling the spaces between restaurants were cafes. At any time of day, crowds spilled onto the streets, crouching on kid size plastic stools, smoking cigarettes and sipping turbocharged Vietnamese coffee sweetened with condensed milk, another legacy of history: coffee from the French, condensed milk because of the lack of fresh milk at the time. Danang also has its own signature dishes, which beckoned me most enthusiastically. The pride and joy of the city is mi quang rice noodles sitting in a lukewarm turmeric tinged bone broth and topped with roast pork, chicken or bright red shrimp the size of quarters. I returned to My Quang Ba Mua twice once in the morning and once again in the late afternoon to learn of the different varieties. The morning soup was thicker the sustenance you need to face the day and the afternoon's less intense variety felt more like a snack. Or at least I treated it as such. Danang's main specialty is seafood. A seemingly never ending chain of restaurants on the eastern side of the city, just across the Han River, serves octopus, crab, clams, squid, prawns and fish cooked in delicate sauces of garlic, tamarind, chiles and lemongrass. All meals come with a smorgasbord of optional additions. Vietnam is a land of condiments, but I found myself repeatedly drawn to the most simple: a tiny bowl of salt, pepper, cut up chiles and squeeze it yourself lime juice. None Download Grab before you touch down in Vietnam. Affordable and safe, the ride hailing service is everywhere in Vietnam's cities and I never had to wait more than three minutes for a pickup. Opt for a Grab motorcycle ride for even cheaper fares and way more excitement. None While staying at one of the five star beach resorts is a splurge worthy treat, I'd recommend spending time in the city proper. There are a lot of uninteresting, middling hotels in Danang City, so instead go for a "homestay," the term used for private apartments and homes that are put up for rent. I stayed at May Home, a basic but comfortable apartment down a narrow alley run by helpful, English speaking hosts that made me feel like I was living in the city. None For an overview of Danang's incredible food scene from banh mi to egg coffee book an outing with Danang Food Tour. My guide was knowledgeable and funny, but most importantly the food was excellent and had me plotting where I would return for seconds. Sixteen years ago, Tran Tuan opened a food stall serving recipes he learned from his mother, regional classics that over time Mr. Tuan started riffing on. Today, Mr. Tuan is in charge of a growing empire, with four branches of his restaurant, Am Thuc Tran, in Danang and plans for an expansion into other Vietnamese cities. The main draw? A cut of pork he pioneered, wherein each paper thin slice comes with two layers of shiny, white fat. Loaded up into a rice paper roll along with a forest of fresh herbs, it tastes like springtime. "Call me tomorrow I'll take care of you," Mr. Tuan told me after each of our meetings. On my penultimate night, I did, and I ended up at a birthday party he was throwing for a group of his staff members. Over three hours, a frat party's worth of beer was consumed as we dug into plates of barbecued short ribs and tiny tortellini shaped frog organs (I will never know which ones exactly some things are better left to mystery). In a rare moment of seriousness amid singalongs and a drinking game that involved counting in Vietnamese (guess who lost?), Mr. Tuan told me what made the food in Danang so special. "It's about good ingredients and what's fresh," he said. "People in Danang won't eat a dish unless it is the most fresh it could be." When I asked people if Danang has changed over the years, the universal reaction was a wide eyed, "you have no idea" type look. I was told that in the 1960s, only one bridge spanned the Han River, connecting one side of Danang with the other. Today, there are six, including one in the shape of a golden dragon that spits real fire and mist every Saturday and Sunday night. In the early 2000s, Danang's economy was growing far faster than the national average, at more than 11 percent a year, and even during the global recession its economic growth numbers still hovered in the double digits. A coordinated effort on the part of the communist government to turn the city into a regional hub they were largely starting from scratch has created a clean, organized city where the avenues are wide, the traffic moves and the air is breathable. After dark, the bars and bridges light up with Vegas like abandon, turning the city from seaside haven to cyberpunk fantasy. As someone who spent his formative years in and loves Southeast Asia, "livable" is not the first word I typically use to describe many of the region's cities. Danang feels like an exception. While lacking some of the excitement of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, Danang makes up for it with mountains, rivers and the ocean, all a short trip away from the city center. The towering Marble Mountains and mist covered Hai Van Pass are both popular day trips for tourists, but because of rain I had to forego both. Still, when the sun broke through for a single afternoon I knew I had to take advantage of it, and so I rented a motorbike. This was no easy feat for me. I've been afraid of motorized two wheelers since getting hit by a motorcycle in Jakarta at the age of 13, leaving me with a fractured neck and skull. But travel has always pushed me beyond what I thought were my limits. Once you understand the rules to survival on two wheels in Vietnam, everything becomes easier and even fun. Traffic flows with its own logic, a sea of motorbikes turning a road of two lanes into approximately 14. The key is going with the flow, and the biggest rule of all: don't make any sudden movements. After just a few panicky minutes, I found myself grinning uncontrollably as I zipped through the city and toward its outskirts. The resorts lining the beachfront eventually thinned out and gave way to a very different scene, one that hinted at what came before. On the beach, men and women talked in the lilting tones of spoken Vietnamese while repairing circular coracles, the basket like boats that have been used here for centuries. Just offshore, yellow starred Vietnamese flags fluttered off the bows of bright blue wooden ships, the detritus of life spent at sea strewn about the decks. As I entered the mountainous Son Tra peninsula, the road snaked upward. Signs cautioned against attempting the climb with automatic scooters, but I saw others making their way up and so kept on. Soon I was going 30 minute stretches without passing any other tourists. I stopped at viewpoints along the way to look at the aquamarine sea stretching toward Danang's rapidly growing skyline. I got hopelessly, blissfully lost. Occasionally one of the famously shy macaques of the peninsula would peek its head out from the surrounding thick canopy before getting spooked by the groan of my straining engine and vanishing into the brush. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Women's dispatches from enemy territory hold a distinct fascination: The basic structures of misogyny are constitutional, and there is a pleasure, for many female readers at least, in seeing everyday structural unfairness reflected back in fiction. But I suspect most of us stay for the quirks of the world building the expose of a niche or rarefied culture. And as no book is born in a vacuum, ours is a climate in which these women's voices speaking from foreign, masculine terrain seem not just louder, but full of echoes. With this context in mind, I approached two new novels, both set in Silicon Valley and written by women, with a mixture of trepidation and titillation. Anyone writing about an industry that has been so heavily traversed in literature and entertainment and the media does bear a certain responsibility to add to the conversation in a meaningful way. I wonder now whether a reiteration of the same aesthetics so well known to us through television and film can still cut it, or if today's standards require women to say something ... more. Or it is enough that there are women in the room at all; is that the more we actually need? These two novels have nothing in common beyond those superficial trappings of life in that once rural valley south of San Francisco. There are lots of helicopters, private planes and first class tickets, over the top parties benefiting the charity of the moment. Both books foreground female protagonists who work with, or for, the boy genius college dropout turned philosopher king. Guru trained (of course), he's soft spoken, but volatile. Elisabeth Cohen brings us "The Glitch," an ambitious and entertaining novel that centers on Shelley Stone, the chief executive of a fictional company, Conch (imagine your iPhone in the shape of a tiny shell that nestles behind your ear, whispering helpful and vital information to you all day). Seemingly based on female executives in the mold of Sheryl Sandberg, the protagonist is one of those women who routinely advise us that we, too, can "have it all." Their optimism is underwritten by their supernatural ability to wake up at 3:30 a.m., an hour that Shelley describes as "my me time. I'm on the treadmill it's so relaxing. I love having the chance to just browse the papers local, international while pounding out a couple of leisurely seven minute miles and ... doing a little spreadsheet crunching, mapping out next quarter's acquisitions. Sometimes I read classic literature." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Credit...via SCAD SAVANNAH, Ga. Frederick Douglass passed through this elegant Southern city only once, for the briefest of visits a half hour whistle stop on his rail journey to a speaking engagement in Jacksonville, Fla. It was April 1889, just the second foray into the Deep South for the great orator, five decades after his escape from Maryland as a fugitive slave. Douglass was now a major political figure, with an elegant hilltop home in Washington, D.C. Across the South, Jim Crow laws and racial terror were demolishing the gains of Reconstruction. In Savannah, Douglass greeted the cheering crowd and reviewed a company of black troops at the railway depot, and then he was gone. "Within a stone's throw of one of the largest cotton trading centers," writes the historian David W. Blight, "and in a city with thousands of black freedmen struggling to survive and live meaningful lives amid hostile white supremacy festering around each of its beautiful squares, the locals had only glimpsed their mysterious hero." Today, however, Savannah is a pilgrimage site for Douglass researchers. The reason is a remarkable archive of letters, manuscripts, and other documents, by Douglass and by members of his family, in the possession of Walter O. Evans, a retired surgeon here and a major collector of African American art and letters. The trove sheds light on the later parts of Douglass's life, and on his family, which he rarely mentioned in his speeches and writings. It has prompted a fresh wave of Douglass studies not least Mr. Blight's book, "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom," which won a 2019 Pulitzer Prize, and which is dedicated in part to the collector and his wife. This fall, the city has become a destination for cultural tourists on the Douglass trail. The SCAD Museum of Art is hosting three concurrent and contemporary exhibitions that open up fresh interpretations of his impact. They show how primary sources can feed not only new scholarship, but also the imagination of artists and curators concerned with issues of the present day. The centerpiece exhibition, "Frederick Douglass: Embers of Freedom," on view through Jan. 5, is a Douglass themed dialogue between the archive and visual art. It features 48 modern and contemporary works from Charles White and James van der Zee to commissions by emerging artists together with highlights from the Evans collection, presented in vitrines and on digital browsers. Running concurrently is "The Golden March," a series of screenprinted fabric installations on Douglass's life, by the French artist Raphael Barontini. It is possible to fill a show with photographs of Douglass, who cannily managed his image and is considered the most photographed person in 19th century America. He was also a theorist who connected the possibilities of photography with political representation and social progress for all people. "Men of all conditions may see themselves as others see them," he commented about the spread of the medium. Elsewhere, he wrote: "Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture makers and this ability is the secret of their power and achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction." The exhibitions here take liberties with Douglass, gently. Mr. Barontini screenprints him into collage like tapestries; Mr. Fearon, remarkably well cast, lends him emotions and affect in Mr. The premise is that Douglass can trigger vital new art that reaches far beyond the familiar young firebrand and lion in winter photographic poses. "Douglass believed that art was a terrain that was about emotional and imaginative, as well as intellectual and social, transformation," said Celeste Marie Bernier, a professor and Douglass specialist at the University of Edinburgh, who coedited a book on portraits of Douglass and who assisted in curating the group exhibition. "He saw art as the quintessential liberation, outside of social campaigning and political argument." The new research on Douglass stems from something close to accident. Mr. Evans, then a surgeon in Detroit, purchased from a dealer in the mid 1980s two large lots of Douglass materials. Two decades later, retired in his hometown of Savannah, Mr. Evans showed the discovery to Mr. Blight, who was in town for a talk. It included manuscripts in Douglass's hand of some of his later essays and speeches, but also correspondence with his children. There are years' worth of letters from one son, Lewis Henry Douglass, to his fiancee (and later wife) Helen Amelia Loguen, including early ones from places where Lewis's unit was stationed in the Civil War. Another son, Charles Remond Douglass, was a kind of family historian, attesting in particular to the role the whole family played in Douglass's endeavors. The trove is an antidote to hero worship, Ms. Bernier explained. "It enables us to tell stories that aren't just the mythic, epic, solitary Douglass. You see that the struggle of the family was struggle for social justice that was collaborative and Mr. Evans said that the collection was "dormant" for many years, until he let scholars rummage in it. He knew the material was precious, but never sifted through it in detail, consumed by what he called the addiction to finding the next treasure. "I had barely looked at it until David Blight came around," he said. The home of Mr. Evans and his wife, Linda, on a gracious cobblestoned block in Savannah, is full of African American fine art and bespoke leather and linen cases of archival materials with labels such as "Malcolm X," "Marcus Garvey," or "Zora Neale Hurston." Opening one on his dining table, Mr. Evans produced a letter to the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, signed by Napoleon Bonaparte. The provenance of his Douglass collection is unclear. Mr. Evans said his dealer had acquired them from another dealer, beyond which the trail ran cold. That they were even available and affordable, he said, attested to the lack of interest of major institutions in the 1980s in African American letters a situation that has changed. "They weren't biting then," he said. "But boy, are they biting now." The SCAD exhibition "Frederick Douglass: Embers of Freedom" is the last time Mr. Evans intends to show materials from this archive in his lifetime, because of their fragility. (They are being digitized.) Humberto Moro, one of the museum's curators, said they offered an opportunity to connect archives and contemporary art. Mr. Julien's film features actors in beautiful period costumes, shot at the Douglass home in Washington, D.C., in Scotland and at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, alluding to the formative visits a young Douglass, still a fugitive from slavery, spent in Britain in the 1840s. Along with Douglass, seen giving speeches but also alone, ruminative, in a forest and along a windy shore, the work foregrounds the women in his life: Anna, as ever in the home, and the white British women who supported his work. "It was important to highlight the gendered relations in Douglass's life," Mr. Julien said. Douglass ardently supported women's rights. He attended the Seneca Falls convention, a meeting that launched the women's suffrage movement but also had disagreements with Susan B. Anthony. "These quarrels almost get replayed between, say, Obama and Clinton, feminism and African American political rights," Mr. Julien said. "These echoes of gender and race reverberate in American culture." Barack and Michelle Obama's production company is planning a film adaptation of Mr. Blight's biography, suggesting more attention to Douglass ahead. "The Douglass moment is kind of an unending moment in the fight for justice," Ms. Bernier said, noting that even late in life, in a reactionary time, Douglass never despaired. "In this dark hour, I think he has a lot to tell us about how to continue that fight." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
And so to Milan, where a jam packed week of shows begin Wednesday afternoon with a new collection from Alessandro Michele for Gucci, the onetime accessories designer hailed as the man with the Midas touch for his role in a turnaround of fortunes for the Italian luxury powerhouse owned by Kering. The fashion elite has applauded his romantic, eclectic styles as have customers, judging by the latest sales figures so all eyes will be on Mr. Michele come 2:30 p.m. to see what he delivers this time. After the blockbuster curtain raiser comes Fay at 3:30 p.m., then, an hour later, a parade of floaty femininity from Alberta Ferretti. At 6:30 p.m., Fausto Puglisi, the flamboyant Italian with an unabashed love for kitschy Americana, will show his label's latest offerings (he also is creative director of Ungaro, but that show isn't until March 4 in Paris). Afterward, there should just be time to get to the Palazzo Morando for the Next Talents cocktail reception for new designers, hosted by Franca Sozzani, editor of Vogue Italia, and Federico Marchetti, chief executive of the Yoox Net a Porter Group. Then, rounding off the day is Roberto Cavalli, in a new 8:30 p.m. time slot. Peter Dundas will show his second collection for the house, just days after it announced it would be opening its first store in Iran. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Unemployment payments that looked like a lifeline may now, for many, become their ruin. Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that covers gig workers, part time hires, seasonal workers and others who do not qualify for traditional unemployment benefits, has kept millions afloat. The program, established by Congress in March as part of the CARES Act, has provided over 70 billion in relief. But in carrying out the hastily conceived program, states have overpaid hundreds of thousands of workers often because of administrative errors. Now states are asking for that money back. The notices come out of the blue, with instructions to repay thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Those being billed, already living on the edge, are told that their benefits will be reduced to compensate for the errors or that the state may even put a lien on their home, come after future wages or withhold tax refunds. Many who collected payments are still out of a job, and may have little prospect of getting one. Most had no idea that they were being overpaid. "When somebody gets a bill like this, it completely terrifies them," said Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit workers' rights group. Sometimes the letters themselves are in error citing overpayments when benefits were correctly paid but either way, she said, the stress "is going to cost people's lives." The hastily conceived Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program has presented other troubles, including widespread fraud schemes and challenges with processing. As a result, states only recently had enough resources to start sending out overpayment notices. In the meantime, people have been collecting and spending sometimes thousands of dollars in what they understood to be legitimate benefits. Olive Stewart, a 56 year old immigrant from Jamaica, worked part time as a sous chef at a cafeteria at a Jewish school in Philadelphia, earning 16 an hour for roughly 25 hours a week. But when the pandemic hit and schools shut down, she was laid off. Ms. Stewart applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and began receiving 234 a week. It was not quite enough to cover the 650 in rent, 200 electric bill and 200 internet bill for the house she shares with her 12 year old daughter, her retired mother and her sister, who has a disability that prevents her from working. To make ends meet, Ms. Stewart started dipping into her savings. Then, on Oct. 6, she got a notice saying that Pennsylvania's unemployment insurance vendor, Geographic Solutions, had overpaid her by accident. The overpayment included funds from Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and from a 600 federal supplement to unemployment insurance. In total, she was told, she would have to pay back nearly 8,000. "The state should be paying attention to what they are sending out," Ms. Stewart said. "It was their mistake, and I've already spent all the money on food and rent. How am I going to pay it back?" Geographic Solutions made duplicate payments for 30,000 Pennsylvania claims because of a system problem, a 280 million mistake, the State Department of Labor and Industry said. (The company says the problem arose from a one day error that was immediately reported.) Overpayments can also occur if an applicant makes a mistake on a form, as ProPublica reported, or if a state determines that a recipient should not have been eligible. As of Sept. 30, about 27 percent of those approved for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance in Ohio had been overpaid, about 162,000 claims. In mid November, the figure in Colorado was about 29,000; in Texas, it was over 41,000. Many states waive overpayments on regular unemployment insurance when no fraud is involved, or when paying the money back would cause someone significant hardship. But the federal rules for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance prohibit forgiveness. Even if the state is at fault, the recipient is on the hook. 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. States often start collecting the overpayment automatically, by withholding a portion from 30 to 100 percent of future unemployment benefit payments. Many overpayments arose because state unemployment systems are designed to calculate benefits using W 2 forms, employer records, pay stubs and other documents associated with traditional jobs. But because gig workers and part timers had different sorts of documentation, states had to adapt quickly to a new method of processing and approving claims. Mistakes in the rollout were inevitable, said Behnaz Mansouri, a senior attorney for the Unemployment Law Project, a nonprofit legal aid organization in Seattle. "For a new system to have such a punitive response when the system itself fails seems overly harsh and draconian," Ms. Mansouri said. Gina Jones, 29, was furloughed in March from her part time job at a breakfast bar at a Quality Inn in Spokane, Wash., and began receiving 750 a week from the pandemic program, which allowed her to pay for rent, food and necessities for her two daughters, ages 1 and 5. She was called back to work in July, and now works about 28 hours a week at 13.50 an hour. Then, in mid November, she checked her unemployment portal online and saw a message that she had been overpaid by nearly 12,500. She fears that the state will start garnishing her wages to collect the debt. "I already used that money to support my family," Ms. Jones said. "It's all gone, and I can't afford to pay it back." Asking people to pay back unemployment funds can undermine the unemployment system's goal of stabilizing the economy, said Philip Spesshardt, branch manager for benefits services at the Colorado Division of Unemployment Insurance. If a person's unemployment checks are reduced each week because of an overpayment, the recipient will have less cash to pay bills and patronize local businesses. "Ultimately that has a cascading effect on many of those small businesses, causing them to close permanently and further adding to the unemployment rate," Mr. Spesshardt said. While overpayments under the federal program cannot be waived, applicants can appeal demands for reimbursement after the notice is issued. But the time allowed for appeal can be as little as seven days. After that, the process can be slow, confusing and cumbersome. Colorado has taken steps to address the hardships of reimbursement. In October, after the state noted the large number of overpayments, it determined that the application form was confusing because it did not specify whether the person filing was supposed to provide gross or net income. It decided to "write off" cases where the recipients had submitted earnings and tax documentation that would have allowed the correct benefit to be calculated. Asked how the policy squared with the federal prohibition against forgiveness, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment cited "the administrative burden that it would create for us to collect on these overpayments given competing priorities." House Democrats have called for renewed pandemic relief to include a provision allowing states to waive overpayments when workers cannot repay them without severe hardship. The provision would apply to previous and future cases. A separate House bill, with bipartisan sponsorship, provides for forgiveness if the overpayment was not the recipient's fault and "such repayment would be contrary to equity and good conscience." But the possibility of a remedy is not much consolation to those wondering how they will pay rent and put food on the table in the meantime. William and Diana Villafana, 55 and 34, who before the pandemic ran a car rental business in Henderson, Nev., were told in late October that between them, they had been overpaid by more than 7,000. To cover that debt, the state is taking all of Mr. Villafana's benefits, and giving Ms. Villafana 73 a week. They are using credit cards for their 2,000 monthly rent, as well as utilities, food and other necessities. "I don't think they understand that unemployment benefits are for survival," Mr. Villafana said. "Or if they do understand it, they don't care." Mr. Villafana worries about how he will continue to provide for their son and daughter, ages 6 and 7. When his daughter recently asked for a paintbrush set and an easel, he didn't know what to tell her. "It's kind of hard to explain to them, 'Look, you can't do this' or 'I can't buy you that,'" he said. "I have no idea what we're going to do about Christmas." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Here are the lectures, tours and films. Architects lead walking tours of prominent buildings throughout New York City every day in October. Sites include venerable places like the Merchant's House Museum (Oct. 12) and recent additions like the new Statue of Liberty Museum (Oct. 23). The New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects has partnered with the Classic Harbor Line to offer daily architectural sightseeing tours around and beyond Manhattan. Passengers can select from six different trips, including an industrial waterway tour of Freshkills Park and a nighttime viewing of the lights of the city. Times vary. Most tours leave from Chelsea Piers (Pier 62 at Hudson River Park); 2019.archtober.org (or: aiany.org/architecture/tours/boat tours/) New York City architecture practices will open their doors on Wednesdays for behind the scenes presentations and workshops. Participants include Diller Scofidio Renfro, the architects behind the High Line and the Shed at Hudson Yards (Oct. 23); and Thomas Phifer and Partners, which recently completed an extension of the Glenstone museum in Potomac, Md. (Oct. 30). The Museum of Modern Art's senior curator of architecture and design discusses her recent exhibition at the 22nd Milan Triennial, which explored art and design in an age of environmental crisis. The Urban Design program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation hosts the oceans expert Jon Bowermaster, the writer Nellie Hermann, and Ayesha Williams, deputy director of the nonprofit Laundromat Project, for a conversation with the urban planner Cassim Shepard on narrative strategies in design. Since establishing his Fayetteville, Ark., practice in 2000, Marlon Blackwell has maneuvered between traditional vernacular and contemporary form. He joins Billie Tsien, of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, for an evening of dialogue and refreshments. Thomas Christopher and Ngoc Minh Ngo, the author and photographer, respectively, of a new book from Timber Press, "Nature into Art: The Gardens of Wave Hill," will discuss the Bronx's 28 acre Wave Hill public gardens with the estate's founding director of horticulture, Marco Polo Stufano, and the current senior director of horticulture, Louis Bauer. The British artist and researcher will discuss her work in synthetic biology and critical design. David Benjamin, founding principal of the Living, a New York City design studio at the intersection of biology, sustainability and computation, will offer a response. The Architectural League and Cooper Union's school of architecture will present a lecture by Carme Pigem, a founder of the Pritzker Prize winning Spanish firm RCR Arquitectes, on the group's latest projects. 7 p.m. 8:30 p.m. at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East Seventh Street; archleague.org/events Shohei Shigematsu and Atelier Bow Wow on the Past and Future of Tokyo Architecture To kick off the opening of its exhibition "Made in Tokyo: Architecture and Living," Japan Society is hosting a conversation between the show's curators and designers, the Tokyo based architects Atelier Bow Wow, and Shohei Shigematsu, a partner in the architectural firm OMA. In honor of the National Design Awards program, which turns 20 this year, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum is offering seven days of free admission and educational programming. Highlights include a design career fair (Oct. 15, 4:30 7 p.m.), an educator open house (Oct. 15, 5 7 p.m.) and the National Design Awards gala (Oct. 17, 6 10 p.m.). The week wraps with Design Fest, a day of activities and workshops, on Saturday., Oct. 19. Through Oct. 19 at the Cooper Hewitt, 2 East 91st Street; cooperhewitt.org Toshihiro Oki, formerly of the Pritzker Prize winning architectural studio SANAA, walks visitors through the structural details and vision for Grace Farms, a cultural and community center in New Canaan, Conn., designed by the firm. The five day event features 25 documentaries. "The New Bauhaus," a film about the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy Nagy makes its U.S. premiere on opening night. "PUSH" describes the worldwide decline of public housing, and "A Poetics of Living" is about a young architect's Chilean home. The festival closes on Oct. 20 with "City Dreamers," which highlights the work of four pioneering female architects: Phyllis Lambert, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel Cornelia Hahn Oberlander and Denise Scott Brown. The program for the National Association of Minority Architects conference includes a lecture by Zena Howard, a managing director at the architectural firm Perkins Will, a student design competition, a cocktail event, educational seminars, and a 5K run/walk. Through Oct. 20. Locations vary; most events take place at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge, 333 Adams Street,Brooklyn; nycoba.org/nomaconference In its centennial year, the Bauhaus is still a force in architecture and design. Rosanne Somerson, the president of Rhode Island School of Design, sits down with the design eminence Murray Moss to discuss the movement's ongoing influence. 5:30 p.m. 8 p.m. at the Glass House Visitor Center, 199 Elm Street, New Canaan, Conn.; glasshouse.org Tours, talks and performances will be conducted at municipal, historical and residential sites that are normally closed to the public. Through Oct. 20 at various locations; ohny.org/weekend A History of New York in 27 Buildings Timed to the release of his new book, A History of New York in 27 Buildings: The 400 Year Untold Story of an American Metropolis (Bloomsbury Publishing), Sam Roberts, a New York Times reporter and former urban affairs correspondent, discusses evocative buildings throughout the city. 6:30 p.m. 8:30 p.m. at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue; mcny.org The MacArthur winning founder of the landscape studio SCAPE speaks about environmental design in the age of climate change. Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation presents Henry Cobb, of Pei Cobb Freed and Partners. The architect Laurie Hawkinson joins for a response. A lecture by the founder and principal of Selldorf Architects, who is at work on the expansion of the Frick Collection. 6 p.m. 8 p.m. at New York School of Interior Design, 170 East 70th Street; nysid.edu/events | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University has selected its latest class of fellows in residence, who, during the 2017 18 academic year, will create new dances, write books and, in one case, reconceive "The Nutcracker." Among the 19 fellows is the choreographer Annie B Parson, a founder of Big Dance Theater, who will create a suite of dances inspired by the idea of "erasing the master" in Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing" (1953). Ms. Parson, according to a statement about her project, plans to "at first slavishly" attend to music in the second movement of Stravinsky's Concerto for Two Pianos, then depart from it "while leaving faded marks of Stravinsky's rhythms and musical structures in the dance material." The designers Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, who have made costumes for choreographers like Justin Peck and for companies including New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, plan to work on the project "A New Way In: Reconceiving Ballet Through Design." They will stage "The Nutcracker" from the perspective of designers as opposed to the more conventional approach of following a choreographer's vision. Other projects include "Balanchine's Twenties: Early Solos and Duets," a book by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer about their decades long work reconstructing lost ballets by George Balanchine, and "Cunningham's Events," a study of the choreographer Merce Cunningham's staging of dance in museums and other nontraditional venues, by the art historian Claire Bishop. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Like anything else, travel tastes can change as one gets older . The comedian and Cincinnati native Gary Owen used to get pumped up about exploring a city's night life. Now, breakfast is the highlight of his days on the road. "It's almost like I get excited to get up in the morning, like you would if you were going to a club when you were 21," Mr. Owen said. "When you get older, it's about the coffee shop." Here are edited travel tips from Mr. Owen, who will be headlining the season premiere of HBO's stand up series "All Def Comedy," on Dec. 1 at 10 p.m. I got this breakfast spot that I really like called Snooze. And when I first started it was only in Denver and now it's expanded there's a few in Phoenix and there's a few in San Diego. I don't know what it is, they just got the best breakfasts. It's one of those spots that's only open from, like, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. When you go to any city, look up what the city is known for. So Cincinnati is known for its chili and goetta, which is a breakfast meat, I've only seen it in Cincinnati it's pork, and there's oats in it. I know it doesn't sound good, but it's a German dish, and it's so good. In Cincinnati they'll put it on omelets. It's a great side meat with eggs. Instead of bacon or sausage, get goetta. Cincinnati's done a good job of bringing downtown back, especially by the river. I always recommend: go downtown, soak up the city. Like, if you stay in a hotel downtown, there's so many good places to walk. We have a lot of "hole in the wall" gems great places to eat . I try to charm the hotel front desk people, because they'll pretty much give you whatever you want. If you're extra nice, they might waive a room service fee. If you go to a hotel where they have those little pantries, and if you start a nice little conversation with the guy working the late shift, they don't even blink when you grab that Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and that bottle of water. It always amazes me when a flight gets delayed or canceled and people get mad at the person that announced it. They're not flying the plane! They didn't make the storm! But if you go up there and you're real nice, and they see that it doesn't bother you, they really work extra hard for you. But if you go up there cursing, saying "I got to be there!" and "how dare you!," it gets you nowhere. Just start a conversation and ask about them. Just flip the tables on them. They will type so fast and try to get you where you are going. This is what I really don't get about airline food and this is a first class problem, I'll admit. But you always got to pick a seat in the middle. You don't want to sit in row 1 or row 5, because they run out of the food you might want. There's always two dinner options or two breakfast options. And it's always so uneven. It's like, "We have an omelet with cheese and bacon or a bowl of Cheerios." And it kills me because, say there are 16 first class seats, they do eight and eight on the meals. So if you're in row 1 or row 5, you don't know which way they're going to start. That's why I always try to sit in row 2 or row 3, where I'm right in the middle. Because if they run out, I don't want them coming up to me saying: "Cheerios?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
BORIS at Le Poisson Rouge (Aug. 24, 7 p.m.). These prolific Japanese experimentalists have spent the past 26 years moving among the worlds of metal, noise, shoegaze, punk and all other varieties of distortion filled, theatrical, catharsis inducing music. Although the Melvins have been Boris's most important influence, they have turned their source material into something completely their own. "Noise is Japanese blues," the band members told The Quietus in 2014, when they were promoting an album called "Noise"; they've released five more studio projects since, culling from their slow, sludgy roots while pushing toward a new sound. 212 505 3474, lpr.com CARL CRAIG at Elsewhere (Aug. 24, 10 p.m.). While so much of dance music today is associated with European artists and audiences, techno and house are homegrown innovations. For nearly 30 years, Mr. Craig has been one of the foremost practitioners of Detroit techno, making music that sets the tone for dance floors everywhere. In between trips to Ibiza, he'll make a stop in Brooklyn, where he'll share some of the still fresh sounding grooves that helped Detroit remain among the most influential music cities in the world. Mr. Craig is known for collaborating with jazz and classical musicians, influences that have percolated back into his own work even when he's performing solo as he will be on Friday night. elsewherebrooklyn.com CUPCAKKE at Le Poisson Rouge (Aug. 25, 8 p.m.). Following in the vein of fearlessly lewd female M.C.s Salt N Pepa, Foxy Brown, Lil' Kim and Gangsta Boo, among others this Chicago based rapper, born Elizabeth Harris, raps deftly about explicit topics (e.g., a current single, "Hot Pockets," is not about the microwaveable snack), earning her both viral fame and credit as a force for empowering both women and people in the L.G.B.T.Q. community. Even though it's 2018 and Cupcakke certainly makes the most of the attending shock value of her songs, there's still something thrillingly subversive about a woman unwilling to act demure. 212 505 3474, lpr.com DARK D.I.Y. FEST 2018 at Color Scenes (Aug. 25, 11 a.m.). Afropunk Fest, the sold out festival taking over Brooklyn's Commodore Barry Park this weekend, began as a D.I.Y. event, and now it features some of music's biggest names. To fill the void for people of color who make music that could be described as independent, underground, experimental and/or extreme, the D.I.Y. performance space Color Scenes is hosting its own first ever festival, featuring bluesy rock from the Chicago based band Blacker Face, experimental electronic music with East Indian influences from Tavishi, R B from Yaya Bey and more. colorscenesbk.com DRAKE AND MIGOS at Madison Square Garden (Aug. 24 25 and 27 28, 7 p.m.) and Barclays Center (Aug. 30 Sept. 1, 7 p.m.). Not content to simply rule the charts and the airwaves, the Canadian hip hop powerhouse Drake will also spend a week as the de facto ruler of New York (or at least two of its largest arenas) with the Aubrey the Three Migos tour. And even though the Atlanta based rap trio Migos are billed as co headliners, Drake, with a decade's worth of songs, will take up a majority of the stage time at each concert, too: For the tour's early shows, he has played 39 of his own songs (while making time for gossip fueling commentary in between). 800 745 3000, msg.com 800 745 3000, barclayscenter.com FISHBONE at Brooklyn Bowl (Aug. 24, 7:30 p.m.). According to the Roots drummer and music scholar Questlove, this pioneering ska, funk and rock band is "the greatest band that the world ignored." Despite their influence on bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and No Doubt, they have long been relegated to cult classic status. Now, for the first time in almost two decades, the original lineup (except for guitarist Kendall Jones) is back and their politically charged, deeply funky music has rarely felt more timely. 718 963 3369, brooklynbowl.com GLADYS KNIGHT AND THE O'JAYS at Ford Amphitheater at Coney Island Boardwalk (Aug. 24, 8 p.m.) and the Rooftop at Pier 17 (Aug. 25, 7 p.m.). Come to this gathering of soul and R B legends equipped with a serviceable two step: You won't be able to remain seated when Ms. Knight performs her hit "Midnight Train to Georgia" or when the O'Jays play their most famous single, "Love Train." Both acts are well into their golden years, and between Grammys, timeless songs and Rock Roll Hall of Fame inductions, they have reached just about all the musical milestones one could hope for and yet they keep on touring, choreography and all. fordamphitheaterconeyisland.com 800 745 3000, pier17ny.com NATALIE WEINER CHARLES ALTURA at the Jazz Gallery (Aug. 24 25, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Mr. Altura is a virtuoso guitarist who seems unfazed in almost any context. He came up on the Los Angeles scene in the mid 2000s, playing blazing fusion alongside Thundercat, and now he's a central part of projects led by Terence Blanchard, Chick Corea and Ambrose Akinmusire all jazz luminaries. This weekend Mr. Altura presents a new work of his own, commissioned by the Jazz Gallery, titled "Portraits of Resonance." His top flight band will include Adam O'Farrill on trumpet, Aaron Parks on piano, Joe Martin on bass and Kendrick Scott on drums. 646 494 3625, jazzgallery.nyc BILL FRISELL AND IKUE MORI at National Sawdust (Aug. 29, 7 p.m.). Here are two indomitable icons of New York's downtown music scene, who in duet seem likely to create something both intimate and abstract. Mr. Frisell's guitar playing is warm and bubbling and recursive, a beloved treasure on the musical fringe. Ms. Mori's style on drums and electronics is a bit harder to define. She began her career as a no wave drummer but now works more often with computers, creating something between percussion and texture. In her work, even the sounds of tinkling bells carry unexpected weight. This concert is part of the Stone Commissioning Series at National Sawdust. 646 779 8455, nationalsawdust.org AARON GOLDBERG AND MATT PENMAN at Mezzrow (Aug. 24 25, 8 and 9:30 p.m.). Mr. Goldberg, a pianist, plays straight ahead jazz with tight command; his notes almost always seem to be shot with a glint of light. He aims for the sublime almost constantly, and usually gets most of the way there. "At the Edge of the World," a remarkable trio album due in the fall, is a particularly successful effort. Partly that's thanks to the help of Mr. Penman, a surefire bassist who appears this weekend in a duo with Mr. Goldberg. 646 476 4346, mezzrow.com CHARLIE PARKER JAZZ FESTIVAL at Marcus Garvey Park and Tompkins Square Park (through Aug. 26). One of the city's best annual community gatherings, this festival is also a reminder of how broad and vibrant New York's jazz scene remains. This year's installment includes the esteemed trumpeter Charles Tolliver in a celebration of the 50th anniversary of his debut album, "Paper Man"; the newly reconfigured Bad Plus; a trio of up and coming powerhouses (the trumpeter Adam O'Farrill, the alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and the vibraphonist Joel Ross); and Amina Claudine Myers, a spellbinding pianist and vocalist who was an early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. On Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, the festival is in Harlem at Marcus Garvey Park. It culminates on Sunday afternoon downtown, according to custom, at Tompkins Square Park. cityparksfoundation.org/charlieparker WILLIAM PARKER'S IN ORDER TO SURVIVE at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (Aug. 28 29, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Mr. Parker, an eminent avant garde bassist, has convened bands for over two decades under the title In Order to Survive. His collaborations vary widely, but the music he tends to make under this moniker is quintessentially Parker: rangy, big toned free jazz with a mix of sly melodicism and slipping off the cliff unease. At Dizzy's, Mr. Parker is joined by the trombonist Steve Swell, the saxophonists James Brandon Lewis and Rob Brown, the pianist Cooper Moore and the drummer Hamid Drake. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys G. CALVIN WESTON at the Stone (Aug. 28 31, 8:30 p.m.). In the mid 1970s, at age 17, Mr. Weston hit the road with Ornette Coleman's Prime Time, a leading jazz funk fusion outfit. His career as a drummer flowed easily from there: Working with James Blood Ulmer, Vernon Reid and others, he became known for his balance of throbbing groove, white knuckle power and thick blues coloring. At his four day Stone residency, he will lead a different small group each night: trios on Tuesday and Thursday, and duos on the other nights (with Billy Martin on Wednesday and John Medeski on Friday, both members of Medeski, Martin and Wood). thestonenyc.com GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
I have been to several presidential nominating conventions. My first was Bill Clinton's in Madison Square Garden in 1992. The convening itself the drawing together of the party's faithful, the die hards, the sizzle of their excitement created the spectacle and the specialness. For that reason, it was hard to conceive of a virtual convention, dictated by social distancing as a deadly virus still rages. Indeed, as the Democratic National Convention opened Monday night, I feared that, despite all their efforts, the convention would fail to succeed. There was a particular charge and effectiveness of seeing people in situ, surrounded by their books, in their kitchens, on their lawn, in some place that is meaningful to them or the people they represent. The lack of a live audience also stripped away a bit of the performative nature of speeches and presentations; no pausing for applause, no way to know for certain if a line was landing. You simply had to deliver your speech. But yet another benefit was that because there was no roar of the crowd, everyone could be clearly heard; because there was no crowd, cameras stayed fixed on the speaker instead of panning to the audience. Some of the features of this convention should actually be preserved and repeated, even after we can meet again in large gatherings. But the Democrats' message and their inclusiveness, not the format, have been the real stars of the convention. They have served to remind America of the beauty of its diversity and to encourage the continued quest for universal equality. This has not by any means been without hiccups. As Julian Castro, former Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of housing and urban development, told NPR: "You know, last week I saw the schedule. And out of the 35 prime time speakers, only three of them were Latino. There were no Native Americans, no Muslim Americans. And I said that that was I didn't think that completely reflected this beautiful, diverse coalition, this big tent that Democrats have put together over these last few years. However, over the weekend, they did make some good announcements of additional speakers, including Latinas and Latinos and Native American and Muslim American speakers. So that's a positive. And more important than, you know, the words is the actions." Furthermore, some progressives have not been satisfied with their wing of the party's level of representation at the convention, and many were not happy when Joe Biden said on the opening night of the convention that "most cops are good, but the fact is, the bad ones need to be identified and prosecuted." Police defenders often offer up the "bad apples" theory on police misconduct, which implicitly suggests that our current system of policing is fine and functioning, and simply in need of a weeding. Many progressives take the opposite view: That the system of the police itself is corrupt, defiled, misdirected and bloated and must be dealt with as such. Still, all in all, the Democrats' effort is succeeding and is a welcome note of positivity ahead of what surely will be a Republican convention filled with fear mongering and divisiveness. As CNN and others reported Wednesday, Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the St. Louis homeowners who pointed guns at protesters, are scheduled to speak at the convention. It is already clear that the selection of Kamala Harris as Biden's running mate and the blistering indictment of President Trump delivered by Michelle Obama have gotten under his skin. That has commanded the headlines, these two Black women pointing out his flaws and calling him a failure. This is something Trump can't abide. He will want a grander spectacle with even more fight. He will want to divert attention from that which Democrats have continued to highlight: We are in a pandemic in which more than 170,000 Americans have died, mainly because of Trump's own colossal mismanagement of this country's response, and thousands more are expected to die. This is an unprecedented public health disaster, much of it because of Trump's own actions and inaction. The fact that the Republicans seem to be willing to ignore this will not be recorded favorably by history. For me, the Democratic convention so far has been a welcome reprieve from a cascade of lies, disinformation, bullying, blaming and bragging. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
An abandoned storefront in downtown Elyria, Ohio. For some American workers, the wounds of the recession have never fully healed and there is mounting evidence that the scars may never fade. The American economy has created nearly 16 million new jobs in the eight years since the end of the Great Recession. The unemployment rate, which hit 10 percent in 2009, has fallen below 5 percent. And wages, at long last, are rising. Yet for some workers, the wounds of the recession have not fully healed. The key issue facing policy makers now is whether the scars will prove enduring. In August, 78.4 percent of Americans in their prime working years typically defined as ages 25 to 54 had jobs, down 1.3 percentage points from when the recession began. That small sounding change masks a vast human toll: the disappearance of more than 1.5 million workers from the economy. Research has found that many fell into drug addiction and poverty. Recent evidence suggests that the recession's impact is still echoing through the work force. In a newly published working paper, Danny Yagan, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, used anonymous tax records to trace more than a million individual workers through the recession and its aftermath. He found that in the places that had been hit the hardest, the effects have lingered thousands of workers who lost their jobs struggled to find work and ultimately stopped looking. Many, according to Mr. Yagan's data, still haven't found it. "The signals say the recession is over, but employment's not back to normal," Mr. Yagan said. "Recession effects aren't supposed to last this long." Indeed, traditional economic theory has held that the damage from recessions is usually short lived. For most of the 20th century, the nation bounced back quickly from downturns, with displaced workers quickly finding new jobs. Some economists even hailed recessions for their "cleansing" effects, purging unproductive companies in much the same way that forest fires burn up dead wood and release seeds that provide new growth. More recently, however, that pattern seems to have changed. The United States recovered slowly from the relatively mild recession that followed the bursting of the dot com bubble, and the current recovery has been anemic by many measures. Economic growth has averaged just 2.2 percent per year since the recession ended, half the rate that followed the recession of the early 1980s. Some places have done even worse: A recent report from the Economic Innovation Group, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, identified large parts of the country, including cities like Cleveland and Memphis, that have experienced essentially no recovery at all. "We seem to have had a series of shocks and recessions where things haven't quite come back," said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist. For Mr. Yagan and many liberal economists, the solution to the problem is more and faster economic growth: If a weak economy is the disease, then a strong economy is the cure. That would argue for continued stimulus efforts such as low interest rates or perhaps increased spending on infrastructure. They point to the late 1990s as a period when low unemployment and strong demand for workers raised wages and attracted more people to the labor market. But others are skeptical that a recovery, however strong, could draw back workers who have drifted so far from the labor market. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Another Harvard economist, the former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, said Mr. Yagan's research and other evidence made it "difficult to escape the conclusion" that recessions now do permanent or at least "quasi permanent" damage to the economy. That is, the recession may have been what pushed people out of the labor force, but recovery alone may not be enough to bring them back. "There are a bunch of people who were knocked out by the recession who aren't coming back even in the places where unemployment has fallen," Mr. Summers said, although he said he believed there is room for further improvement in the labor market. It is not clear what has been preventing workers from returning to work as the economy has improved. Recent research from the Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger has linked the decline in employment among men, in particular, to opioid abuse, a problem unlikely to go away simply because more jobs become available. Mr. Krueger found that nearly half of the working age men who are not in the labor force take pain medication daily; many employers have recently complained that they are having trouble finding workers who can pass a drug test. Other factors that could be keeping people out of the job market are also being examined. In a widely discussed paper earlier this year, for example, economists at the University of Chicago and other schools argued that some young men are opting out of the labor force to play video games. (Other economists are skeptical.) Some research has pointed a finger at the federal disability system: Nearly two million more Americans are receiving federal disability payments than when the recession began in 2007, an increase that some economists argue is a reflection of the benefits' use as an alternative to work. Some research, however, has concluded that the increase in disability claimants is due mostly to an aging population and is, in any case, a small piece of the overall decline in employment. Deeper changes in the structure of the American economy could also be playing a part. A variety of evidence, including declining rates of entrepreneurship and falling job turnover, suggests the nation's economy has become less dynamic and flexible since 2000, which could have made it harder for workers and companies alike to adapt following the shock of a recession. And the recession may have accelerated trends that were already underway: Research from Lisa B. Kahn, a Yale economist, and a co author has found that companies had, in effect, taken advantage of the recession to replace workers with machines. That was particularly damaging for men without a college degree a group that was already struggling before the recession and that has been especially slow to recover from it. "We were on a kind of trend where that group of people was going to find it harder and harder to find productive outlets in the labor market, and the recession kind of accelerated that," Ms. Kahn said. Had the change happened more gradually, Ms. Kahn added, workers might have had a chance to adapt and learn new skills; instead, the recession left millions of them jobless in an environment where there was little demand for their labor. Work like that of Ms. Kahn and Mr. Krueger suggests that what begins as a cyclical recession driven problem can harden into a permanent structural issue. That could carry a lesson for policy makers: If the United States no longer recovers as quickly from recessions as it once did, and if those slow recoveries can leave permanent scars on workers, then it is all the more important to kick start the economy before too much damage is done. Ben S. Bernanke, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned during the recession and the recovery that workers who stayed unemployed too long might drift too far away from the labor market to return. Mr. Yagan's research suggests that efforts by the Fed, Congress and the Obama administration to prevent that had not gone far enough. Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. who is now with the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said Mr. Yagan's research could be read as an indictment of economic policy after the recession. If Congress and the administration had been willing to act more aggressively, they might have avoided some of the long lasting damage that has been done. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
A Swiss government panel proposed rules on Monday that would require the nation's two big banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, to hold more capital in reserve than their international competitors. The rules, which require approval by the Swiss Parliament, address concerns by the Swiss National Bank and others that a severe crisis at either bank could prove more than the nation of 7.8 million people could bear. The combined balance sheets of the two banks are five times the size of the Swiss economy. "Given their size, it cannot be ruled out that the big Swiss banks are potentially" too big to be rescued, the Commission of Experts said in a report. The commission, which was appointed by the Swiss Federal Council, included representatives of the central bank as well as industry and the two big banks. Credit Suisse and UBS said in statements that they would be able to meet the requirements, which by the end of 2018 would require them to maintain low risk reserves equal to 10 percent of their total assets. That is a higher reserve requirement than was proposed for global banks last month by the Basel Committee on Bank Supervision. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
WASHINGTON I've been riveted all week by the spectacle of the most famous blond phenom on the planet, a child isolated and miserable living inside a national landmark, lashing out and spiraling into self destructive acts. But eventually I had to turn off the new season of "The Crown," focusing on Princess Diana, and drag my attention back to Donald Trump, who is trashing this place before checking out like he's Axl Rose at a Four Seasons. Diana and Donald shared a few things in common: their toxic tango with the press, their psychic connection with their fan base, their willingness to blow up norms. They were both "unpredictable meteors," as Tony Blair once described Di. They both savored sitting in their rooms glued to their own coverage on TV, dialing up their chosen reporters to control the narrative. They were both unhappy at the top, fretting about being undercut. Diana almost upended the monarchy and Donald is doing his worst to upend democracy. That's where the similarities end. In terms of empathy, hugging the afflicted, the radiant Diana and the radioactive Donald are opposites. And while watching her fractured fairy tale breaks your heart, watching his fractious exit makes your head hurt. The young princess feared she was going mad amid barking corgis; the 74 year old president wallows in his barking madness. On Friday afternoon, Trump continued embarrassing himself and the nation when he finally emerged, after sulking in his tent for days, and asserted that he had won the election. He blamed Big Pharma, Big Tech and the media for his woes. He sent out a fund raising message praising the news conference with his lawyers, a dripping Rudy Giuliani and a rabid Sidney Powell, laying out the absurd phantom global conspiracy that is thwarting Trump's re election. Then Trump met with Michigan G.O.P. officials, brazenly trying to subvert democracy and claw back a swing state, or even just to feed his ego by delegitimizing the election in the eyes of his base. But the Michigan lawmakers came out of the White House and said they would "follow the normal process" that has Joe Biden ahead even as the governor of Georgia certified the results there for Biden. It would be merely pathetic to watch Trump toss nails on the road behind him if it weren't so dangerous. Biden needs all the air in his tires and a full tank of gas when he pulls that Corvette into the White House driveway in two months, because this country is shot to hell and running on empty. Trump is sabotaging the transition as the pandemic rages, engaging in midnight maneuvers like ending several emergency lending programs that could buoy the economy and attempting to ravage Alaska's wildlife refuge. Republicans remain as mute and frightened of Trump as ever. Mitch McConnell could stop this nonsense with one sentence: "We're moving on and recognizing Joe Biden as president elect." But he refuses to, letting the damage to the country unspool to protect his own standing with the base and to hold onto those two Senate seats in Georgia that make him majority leader. It's outrageous that Congress left town for the holidays this weekend without passing Covid relief. But Republicans, who are already all about setting themselves up for the next election, prefer to put Biden in a bind and later trash him for big spending. Never mind that they're leaving millions of Americans in the lurch. After watching unfeeling Republicans, it's not really an escape to turn on "The Crown" and watch that unfeeling bunch Margaret Thatcher and the royals. Peter Morgan, the writer of "The Queen" and creator of "The Crown," spent a large chunk of his career refurbishing the queen's reputation after the disastrous period following Diana's death, when Blair had to beg Queen Elizabeth to show more emotion. But in this fourth season of "The Crown," Morgan presents a more brittle queen, as the bulimic Diana is crying out for help and the Boss blows her off, feeling Charles and Diana are spoiled, immature and letting the side down. Diana, perfectly played by Emma Corrin, describes the palace as "a cold frozen tundra, an icy dark, loveless cave with no light, no hope, anywhere, not even the faintest crack." Morgan's portrayal of Charles is rough, as well. The Prince of Wales is too in love with Camilla, too jealous of Diana, and too wounded from his upbringing to give his marriage a real chance. When I covered the visit of Charles and Diana to Washington in 1985, the couple seemed happy. But problems were brewing. An insecure future king was sure to be jealous of a wife who sluiced all the attention away simply by tucking down her chin and flashing a look from under her eyelashes. And it was clear that Diana, who was called "Duch" as a girl because she always acted like a duchess, was learning how to channel her electric star power. The gala at the Reagan White House Duch meets Dutch was a showcase for Diana, shimmering in blue velvet and a pearl choker, not Charles. Nancy Reagan had gathered a pantheon of leading men for the princess Mikhail Baryshnikov, Clint Eastwood, Tom Selleck and, as a dancing partner when the Marine Band played "Night Fever," John Travolta. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
It's that time of year when productions of "The Nutcracker" abound, each a little different from the others. The one that had its New York debut on Sunday at the United Palace of Cultural Arts in Washington Heights began, as so many do, with an M.C. exhorting a crowd of thousands to scream "Paaar taaay!" All right, so this "Nutcracker" "The Hip Hop Nutcracker" is more different than most. The combination of the setting, an ornate former movie palace, and an opening set of old school hip hop classics performed by Kurtis Blow goofy, ebullient and still able to bust a move at 55 would have been delightful any time of year. This, however, was a "Nutcracker," which Mr. Blow characterized empathetically as "an oldie but goodie." What the title meant in this case was mainly the Tchaikovsky score, played as a recording but with sporadic live interpolations by DJ Boo at the turntables and the electric violinist Filip Pogady in hip hop hoedown style. The story is new. As conceived by the affable impresario Mike Fitelson (who spoke of writing it at his in laws' kitchen table with a bottle of Scotch), it is set in the present and, presumably not to exclude anyone, on New Year's Eve rather than Christmas. We meet Mom and Dad (Myriam Gadri and Robert Taylor Jr.), who comically bicker. Their daughter (I think) is Maria Clara (Ann Sylvia Clark), who is attacked by a gang with mouse ears and rescued by Myron the Nutcracker (Sammy Soto), who sells nuts out of a grocery cart. There is a Drosselmeyer (Taeko Koji), a magician with a cape, a plume of black and hot pink hair and a gift for telekinesis. But the Land of Sweets is, oddly, a club in 1985. There, in a mix of "A Christmas Carol" and "Back to the Future," Maria Clara and Myron witness the courtship of Mom and Dad. Returning to the present, we watch the older couple roll on the floor and shove each other to Tchaikovsky's Sugar Plum pas de deux music. Then the younger couple teaches them how to get their love back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Girl Scouts want you to know there's more to them than cookies. The list of accomplished Girl Scout alumnae is long including the pop star Taylor Swift and the tennis greats Serena and Venus Williams. Michelle Obama, the organization's honorary president, enhanced its visibility when she hosted a scout campout last year on the South Lawn of the White House. But the venerable organization, about to celebrate its 105th anniversary, is being buffeted by slipping membership numbers, especially among middle school girls, who can lose interest because of sports, homework and social media. With parents often busy, traditional volunteers also are scarcer. Other girls have left scouting because they wanted more focus on traditional outdoor activities and less on sales of Thin Mints and Samoas. To counter any perception that scouting is out of date, the Girl Scouts are introducing a new marketing campaign that highlights their GIRL initiative it stands for go getters, innovators, risk takers and leaders to better define what it has to offer, according to Sylvia Acevedo, the interim chief executive of Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., the group's national body. "We are trying to galvanize our conversation with girls and let them know we are the premier leadership organization for them," she said. Six years ago, the organization revamped its image for the first time in decades. Old fashioned badges became less important than experiences, particularly annual cookie sales, which were heralded as teaching money management and other business skills. The cookie program is too vital to Girl Scout finances it brings in some 800 million in annual sales to be abandoned, but, with a continuing slide in members, planning began more than a year ago to clarify and broaden the organization's appeal. The new approach includes a peppy contemporary Girl Scout anthem, a public service announcement highlighting the kinds of roles that girls might take on, a digital fund raising effort targeting small donors and a national gathering to expose more people to the organization. Ms. Acevedo said that the Girl Scouts would also partner with some community based organizations. The first such partnership is expected to be announced early next year, and it is seen as crucial because of low membership among growing minority populations. Currently the Girl Scouts have 1.8 million members, a drop from 2.1 million three years ago. About two thirds of scouts are white, according to Girl Scout figures. In an attempt to broaden the organization's appeal, the Girl Scouts will host a gathering in Columbus, Ohio, in October that will be open to Girl Scouts and to nonmembers. The event, called GIRL 2017, will give girls opportunities to learn about subjects like therapy animals and hear from entrepreneurs about their experiences building businesses. The new approach can entail some risk. "It can be a big mistake to dilute a brand," said Americus Reed, professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. "Some are attracted because the DNA in a brand like Girl Scouts comes from gender stereotype roles, but others find that a turnoff because they want something more progressive, like coding, for their daughters," said Mr. Reed, who studies how people identify with, and become loyal to, brands or products. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. As part of their new marketing campaign, the Girl Scouts issued an "I'm Prepared ... to Lead Like a Girl Scout" public service announcement that is airing nationwide. The 30 second spot, in which girls none of whom are in scouting uniforms try a variety of activities including playing the guitar and skateboarding, is also on the Girl Scout YouTube channel, its website and its social media accounts. The spot is set to "Watch Me Shine," a song written for the Girl Scouts by Liz Rose, a Grammy winner, and Emily Shackleton, who sings lead. The anthem, which will be used at official Girl Scout events, is also available on iTunes, Google Play and Amazon music, with part of the proceeds going to the Girl Scouts organization. The point is to appeal to girls in middle school, the age at which scouting can sometimes lose its appeal. "When you are 13 or 14, you may not know about the opportunities you can have in scouting and the chance to see older girls be leaders," Sarah Greichen, 17, of Centennial, Colo., said. "Girl Scouts has really transformed me," added Ms. Greichen, who started scouts as a 7 year old Brownie. "I didn't know how to make a phone call to an adult, how to write a business letter or how to speak publicly," she said, "but I learned when I created my organization, called Score a Friend; I had to talk to parents, teachers, administrators and school district heads." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
ALL STAR FLIP 9:30 on HGTV. When you think of Miami you think of DJ Khaled, Cuban sandwiches, "Scarface," Gloria Estefan and of course, Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union. The basketball player and actress practically embody the city's sunshine and glamour; they returned to Wade County after Mr. Wade was traded back to the Miami Heat in February. (Ms. Union responded ecstatically to the move on Twitter.) In this new special, the couple leave their mark on the city by entering the real estate business: They buy, overhaul and flip a house, with proceeds of the sale going to charity. THE GREEN MILE (1999) 7 p.m. on AMC. This Stephen King adaptation was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture. It stars Tom Hanks, who was in the midst of a remarkable three year stretch that also included "Saving Private Ryan," "Cast Away" and "Toy Story 2." He plays Paul Edgecomb, a death row corrections officer during the Depression, as supernatural events begin to wreak havoc in the prison. Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The New York Times that Mr. Hanks "is so unaffectedly good that it has become redundant to say so." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
FLORHAM PARK, N.J. A day after the Jets fired Coach Todd Bowles following the team's season ending 38 3 loss to the New England Patriots, team chairman and chief executive Christopher Johnson said the franchise will move quickly in finding a replacement. Seven other N.F.L. teams have joined the Jets with vacancies at the top coaching spot, adding to the urgency felt by an organization that has not reached the playoffs since 2010. Speaking to reporters from the team's practice facility on Monday, Johnson said he will work with General Manager Mike Maccagnan and Brian Heimerdinger, the team's vice president of player personnel, without any external influence from consultants or search firms, unlike the last coaching search. Owner Woody Johnson, currently the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, might get a phone call or two with updates, but the ultimate decision will be made by Christopher, who is Woody's younger brother. Perhaps the most critical figure in the selection, however, will be the rookie quarterback Sam Darnold. It is clear that the organization feels it has the foundational player to build around coaching staff included. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. "The person doesn't have to be an offense or defense minded head coach," Maccagnan said. "But we definitely want to make sure they have a plan in place to try to develop our young quarterback in Sam Darnold." Maccagnan went as far as to say that, while the 21 year old quarterback will not have a say in who the team decides upon, they plan to ask candidates to spend time with Darnold, which could give the team a sense of their chemistry. It sounded, well, a bit like an arranged date. But for Maccagnan, there are two clear examples of teams that engineered fantastic turnarounds based, in large part, around finding a coach that could get the most out of a young quarterback. The Los Angeles Rams and the Chicago Bears are both headed to the playoffs this year, but at one time both teams struggled with a rookie quarterback, proceeded to hire a new coach with that quarterback in mind, and saw their prospects skyrocket. Asked what qualities he would look for in a new coach, Johnson began his response by mentioning that experience working with a quarterback would jump out to him. "Somebody who has created a great quarterback would be a big plus," he said. Darnold, despite missing three games with a foot strain, tied for second in the league with 15 interceptions. But his final three games after returning from the injury were some of his best of the season. "I thought in the beginning of the year, I took a while to get comfortable," Darnold said. "Then once I got comfortable in the offense, I felt very confident when I was out there. Just going to keep growing and keep trying to make those strides and watch the tape, see how I can get better and move forward from there." The organizational structure will not change, with the new coach reporting directly to Johnson, rather than to Maccagnan, who has two years remaining on his contract. "The buck stops with me," Johnson said. "I think I let the fans down here, and I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure we get to and win a Super Bowl." After a third straight season with at least 11 losses the first time the franchise had accomplished that since 1977 talk of championships rings somewhat hollow. But the Jets have more than 100 million in salary cap space this off season and Johnson said the plan is to be aggressive in spending it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
After more than four decades of making films, Woody Allen is coming to television streaming television. Amazon announced on Tuesday that it had signed Mr. Allen to write and direct his first television series. The company said it had ordered a full season of half hour shows, as yet untitled, which will make their debut on the service next year. It provided few other details. "I don't know how I got into this," Mr. Allen, 79, said in a statement. "I have no ideas, and I'm not sure where to begin." The series, like other Amazon original TV productions, will be available exclusively on the company's Prime Instant Video service in the United States, Britain and Germany. The service costs 99 for an annual membership and includes free two day shipping of certain Amazon products, and is a way for the company to tie its entertainment offerings to its huge retail operation. Recruiting Mr. Allen signals Amazon's goal to continue to push the envelope as it expands its creative ambitions. Just this Sunday, Amazon's original series "Transparent," a dark comedy about a family in which the father comes out as transgender, won a Golden Globe for best television comedy. (It was the first time a streaming service had won a best series in the TV category at the Globes.) The deal with Mr. Allen also raises the stakes in the heated competition among digital companies and traditional networks. Amazon, Netflix and Hulu are pouring resources into creating original streaming series. HBO, the premium pay channel, also has joined the fray, saying it would offer a stand alone streaming service this year. Roy Price, vice president for Amazon Studios, said that the company was thrilled to work with Mr. Allen, whom he described in a statement as having created some of the best movies ever. He said that the project came together after a couple of meetings with Mr. Allen in New York. "I had always thought Woody Allen's characters and comedy would translate beautifully to TV, particularly now with more serialized story lines and openness to nuanced characterization," Mr. Price said in an email. In his statement, Mr. Allen said, "My guess is that Roy Price will regret this." Some Hollywood executives said that Mr. Allen was not known to be widely pitching a series. He did not pitch one to Netflix or Hulu, said people with knowledge of the situation. Mr. Allen is a polarizing figure, and the association could carry risks for Amazon. He came under heavy scrutiny in February when his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, wrote an open letter accusing him of sexually molesting her as a child. Mr. Allen has denied the abuse claims, first raised in the 1990s during a custody battle with Dylan's mother, Mia Farrow. He was never charged with criminal wrongdoing. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Though Dylan Farrow, in her letter, challenged actors to examine their willingness to work with Mr. Allen, he has remained a fixture in the film industry. Over his career he has turned out movies at a rate of about one a year, and his next work untitled and starring Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix as lovers will probably be released this summer. In contrast, several other media groups dropped projects with Bill Cosby after a wave of accusations by women who said that he drugged and raped them decades ago. NBC and Netflix canceled Cosby projects and TV Land stopped reruns of "The Cosby Show." Mr. Cosby has denied the accusations. "Amazon has a formula; they know what sells," said Brian Wieser, a media analyst with Pivotal Research. "Presumably they are making a calculation in terms of not offending some of their customers while concurrently appealing to others." The news also represents a substantial shift in Amazon's strategy. When the company created its studio group about five years ago, it tried a tech driven online submission process rather than recruiting well known directors, writers and actors. TV pilots were posted online and the company decided whether to go forward with projects based on viewer feedback. Mr. Allen's project is Amazon's first straight to series deal, meaning that it has ordered a full series and the project will not go through its pilot process. Rich Greenfield, a media analyst with BTIG Research, said that as streaming services like Amazon, Netflix and Hulu invest more in talent, traditional television networks will come under increased pressure. "Once you've watched 'Orange Is the New Black' and 'Transparent' and binged through 10 episodes," he said, "it is increasingly hard to go back and watch television with 20 minutes of painful commercials and multiple weeks in between episodes because of show interruptions." Amazon is escalating its ambitions in the face of a proliferation of original content for online streaming. Netflix recently announced that it was renewing its "Marco Polo" series for a second season and is releasing other projects this year, including the comedy "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" from Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. Hulu, too, has announced multiple projects, including the much anticipated "11/22/63" from J. J. Abrams, based on Stephen King's best selling novel of the same name about a time traveler who tries to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Facebook has banned advertising from The Epoch Times, the Falun Gong related publication and conservative news outlet, as the social network struggles to implement a consistent political advertising policy. Facebook issued the ban on Friday after NBC News published a report this week that said The Epoch Times had obscured its connection to recent Facebook ads promoting President Trump and conspiracy content. The Epoch Times, started in 2000 by a group of Chinese Americans affiliated with the religious group Falun Gong, has in recent years ridden the wave of conservative, pro Trump social media popularity to build a large social media following. On its website, it advances conspiracy content such as anti vaccination theories, while its YouTube channels promote the pro Trump fringe movement QAnon and other topics. The Epoch Times's official Facebook accounts were banned by the social network in July. But according to the NBC report, it then ran new Facebook ads without disclosing that they were associated with the outlet. The ads ran under page names such as "Honest Paper" and "Pure American Journalism" and purchased by MarketFuel Subscription Services and Perpetual Market, which are decoy names for The Epoch Times, according to NBC News. "Over the past year we removed accounts associated with The Epoch Times for violating our ad policies," Tom Channick, a Facebook representative, said in a statement. "We acted on additional accounts today, and they are no longer able to advertise with us." Stephen Gregory, publisher of The Epoch Times, said in a statement that Facebook did not earlier respond to requests for clarification on why its ads were taken down, so it began "publishing its advertising on a number of other, new Facebook pages." He added that "these ads were overtly Epoch Times advertisements for our subscription." Facebook's move illustrates how difficult it can be for it to catch political ads from groups that it has already restricted on its site. The social network has been under fire for spreading disinformation and being used by Russians and its Internet Research Agency and others to manipulate public opinion. To clamp down on such activity, Facebook introduced political advertising transparency rules in 2018 that require political advertisers to divulge the name of organizations responsible for the ads. But The Epoch Times was apparently able to sidestep those rules before being caught. The tactic mirrors that used by Russia's Internet Research Agency to launder disinformation across social movements by creating impostor pages, according to Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center. "The weaponizing of advertising is crucial for growing the audiences for this disinformation," she said. Ms. Donovan added that researchers and journalists have essentially turned into "glorified content moderators," searching for ad content that violates Facebook's rules. The Epoch Times spent around 2 million on Facebook ads, NBC News said, many of them pro Trump. Facebook declined to comment on the publication's amount of spending on its platform. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
PARIS Xavier Niel is not what you would expect in a billionaire. Mr. Niel, the French Internet entrepreneur, is a slightly disheveled 45 year old fond of jeans and open collared shirts. He is a high school graduate from a working class Paris suburb who rails bluntly against the country's established classes and a business elite culled from a handful of grande ecoles elite educational institutions. But over the past two decades, Mr. Niel has amassed a net worth estimated by Forbes in March at 6.6 billion, emerging as France's most influential technology entrepreneur, an opportunistic, controversial visionary whose low cost Internet service provider and mobile network have made the Internet affordable for millions of French consumers. To many struggling in France's stagnant economy, Mr. Niel is a hero. But to a French business establishment grappling with the competitive disruptions of the Internet not to mention the same stagnant economy he is an unwelcome threat, a destroyer of profit margins. "He represents the Internet world and the Internet economy, something that is not really appreciated in France," said Cedric Manara, a law professor at Edhec, a business school in Paris. "He is not one of them. He represents what scares them the big battlefield between the old and new economy." Mr. Niel says his goal is no less than to instill a Web based entrepreneurial culture in France. "If people like us don't start to change things in France, nothing is ever going to change," Mr. Niel said. "Today France is the fifth largest economy in the world. But if we don't change things, we will be the 25th biggest in just 10 years." The role of new economy evangelist did not come naturally to Mr. Niel, who grew up as an introvert in a middle class home southeast of Paris, not far from where the Marne and Seine rivers meet. His father worked as a patent consultant for a French pharmaceutical maker. His mother was a bookkeeper. Mr. Niel said he was coaxed out of his shell by his younger sister, Veronique. When he was 13, his father bought him his first computer, a Sinclair ZX81, which had no monitor and 1 kilobyte of memory. The gift would change his life. "It was the only thing in the world where I could ask it to do something, and it would do it," he said. In 1993, when he was 25, Mr. Niel created France's first Internet service provider, WorldNet, which he sold seven years later, just before the dotcom bubble burst, for more than 50 million. In 2002, his second Internet service business, Free, sold the world's first triple play package of phone, television and Internet. The Freebox service cost just EUR29.99 a month, or about 40 at current exchange rates, about a third less than the going rate. The triple play would not arrive in the United States until three years later. Free has since added a Blu ray disc player, a digital recorder and unlimited domestic mobile calls to the Freebox package, but it still has not raised the basic price. The company is France's second largest Internet service provider, behind Orange, owned by the former telephone monopoly, France Telecom. But the ISP business was only a warm up. In January 2012, he created Free Mobile, which became France's fourth cellphone network operator. In another break with convention, Free sold a no strings attached SIM card service with unlimited calls, text and Internet for EUR19.99 a month, less than half what the other three Orange, SFR and Bouyges Telecom had been charging. This came after the three bigger operators had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the European Commission to block Free's mobile license. Since its inception, Free Mobile is estimated to have cost the top three operators millions in profit, as all created new, lower cost plans to compete. That does not bother Mr. Niel too much. In December, the French competition regulator, Autorite de la concurrence, fined Orange and SFR, which together have about three quarters of France's mobile users, EUR183 million for abusing their size by offering free on network calls to their own customers since 2005. The operators are appealing the ruling. But for Mr. Niel, who spoke during a wide ranging interview on the top floor of his headquarters in central Paris, the case was another example of the cartel like relationship among industry leaders that pervades the French economy and in which profit trumps the needs of consumers. Free Mobile signed up 5.2 million customers during its first year of business, grabbing almost 8 percent of the French mobile market. Sales reached EUR844 million but the business generated a EUR46.1 million loss in 2012 before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The new enterprise increased annual revenue at Mr. Niel's holding company, Iliad, by 49 percent to EUR3.2 billion last year. Iliad had a market capitalization Friday of EUR10 billion. "Our goal is to bring Internet to everyone in France," he said, speaking in a heavily accented English. In 2004, he was arrested on charges of aggravated procuring the French equivalent of pimping in connection with his part ownership of a chain of French peep shows. One of the businesses, in Strasbourg, was found to be a front for prostitution. Mr. Niel, as a shareholder in the business, was taken in by the police. 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. The procuring charges were dropped, but Mr. Niel was convicted of concealing the misuse of corporate funds in connection with EUR200,000 in income from the peep shows. He received a two year sentence that was suspended, but not before he spent four weeks in La Sante Prison in central Paris and paid a EUR250,000 fine. "I have done a lot of stupid things in my life," Mr. Niel said, adding that he had subsequently sold his interests in the peep shows. "This was the stupidest." Jean Louis Missika, the deputy mayor of Paris and a longtime friend of Mr. Niel who served on Iliad's board from 2005 to 2008, said the experience the police had led Mr. Niel away in front of his children had changed him profoundly. "It made him more careful about what he was doing, but it also made him want to get involved positively to change French society," said Mr. Missika, who is in charge of innovation, research and universities for the city. "Before, he was only interested in computers and the Internet. Now he is interested in giving something back." For 10 years, Mr. Niel has been investing tens of millions of euros in technology startups. Each week, his venture capital company, Kima Ventures, invests in two more. Some of the money goes to French companies like Deezer, the streaming music service, but much has also gone to U.S. start ups, like Square, a maker of free credit card readers for the iPhone, iPad and Android devices that is based in San Francisco. Last month, Mr. Niel announced plans to open a tuition free Web developer academy for 1,000 students. He has received 10,000 applications from students, each of whom spent four hours filling out a test of computer logic posted on the Web. Tellingly, the test did not ask applicants for their academic credentials. Mr. Niel said he was looking for people like himself qualified, but unprivileged and lacking the right connections to give them a leg up. "We are not just trying to change business," he said. "We are trying to change the mentality in France." Despite Free's fast start, success is far from guaranteed. In July, Free will lose a financial advantage over its competitors a preferential interconnection charge that it levies on rivals when they connect callers to customers on Free's third generation mobile network. When it awarded Free a mobile license, the French government let Free charge 2.4 cents for the service, three times what competitors could charge Free. In July, Free must begin charging what its rivals charge. Another test for Free Mobile will come at the end of 2017, when France Telecom, which owns the nation's largest landline grid, an essential low cost transmission link for all mobile operators, will no longer be bound to connect Free's calls across France. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
I think there are mechanical truths that you can see to those arguments. But it's also true that this is all really complicated, and that this was sold as a very simple relationship. Cut the taxes, investment will increase. And just the fact that we're not seeing that happen right away flies in the face of the arguments that were used to sell the bill. I think that's really important here, is that, yes, it may be true that investment over time is slightly more competitive in America because of a reduction in marginal business tax rates. But that was not what President Trump stood up at rallies and talked about. He talked about growing the American economy by 3, 4, 5, 6 percent a year because of all this flood of investment coming back to the United States. And we just don't see it. I think it's important to hold politicians and their supporters accountable for the promises they make, particularly when those promises have real world implications. The economy is not performing as well as we were promised it would when the tax cuts were passed. It's not growing as fast. It doesn't have as much investment. And if you believe the arguments that were made to sell this, that's hurting workers. Because slower growth is keeping their incomes from rising as fast as they should be. So real people are suffering from not having that additional growth that they were promised they would have and now don't. A then there's this one last thing, which is this all comes at a cost. It's not free to just give money back to corporations by cutting their tax bills. Despite what the proponents said, which was that the law would pay for itself the additional growth what we're actually seeing is a massive, hundreds of billions of dollars a year effect to grow the federal budget deficit. And last year, that deficit came very close to topping 1 trillion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The arc of fashion week is long, to paraphrase an old paraphrase, but it bends toward novelty. How could it not? The fashion industry is built on a relentless cycle of renewal, the (largely false) premise that to stay stylish, a fashion forward man must shop. Even that phrase, with its precise vector: Ahead! Twice a year at least, the professionals who stock the stores and make the magazines meet in Paris to see what is coming next. The newest (the next est) tend to absorb the most attention. The talk of Paris this week has been Virgil Abloh's first show for Louis Vuitton, followed by Kim Jones's, for Dior. Rihanna and Kanye West parachuted in to see Mr. Abloh's; Lenny Kravitz and Victoria Beckham, Mr. Jones's. In the hours and days that followed, the designers swanned around like conquering heroes. Mr. Abloh got a standing ovation at the Hotel Costes; Mr. Jones was toasted with Champagne and caviar by Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. (After party at Lenny's, the rumor ran.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist, is among the elite of American scientists, with a tenured position at the University of California, Berkeley, and generous funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for his research on fruit flies. But late last month, dismayed over the Trump administration's apparent disdain for evidence on climate change and other issues, Dr. Eisen registered the Twitter handle SenatorPhD and declared his intention to run in the 2018 election for a seat in the United States Senate from California. His campaign slogan: "Liberty, Equality, Reality." "I'm not sure I'm the best vehicle for this," said Dr. Eisen, whose professional attire consists of shorts and T shirts bearing mottos supporting open access to scientific literature, a cause he has championed. "But if we want to defend the role of science in policy making, scientists need to run for office." Since Mr. Trump's election, many other scientists have expressed concern about rumors and public statements on the new administration's views on science, climate change and the role of federal offices like the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Trump has called climate change a hoax (although more recently said he would have an "open mind" about it) and appointed some officials to his transition team who dispute mainstream climate science. But there is much that is still unclear about his administration's attitudes toward science. The president has yet to appoint a science adviser and has not responded to open letters calling on him to do so from science policy groups including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (whose president, Rush D. Holt, is a physicist and former congressman). Few scientists have gone as far as Dr. Eisen, but other researchers are now undergoing a political awakening, contemplating what their role should be for at least the next few years. "There are many conversations going on right now," said Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard who spoke at one of the first scientist led anti Trump protests, a rally in San Francisco during the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December. "Many scientists do feel that the time for sitting on the sidelines is past." A political action committee that seeks to get more scientists and engineers to run for elective office, 314 Action, has seen a surge of interest in its programs, with more than 2,000 people registering at its website. The group is planning a training program for scientist candidates, whether they want to run for local or state offices or Congress. But an activist role is not an easy fit for many scientists. "I have plenty of colleagues who say, 'Leave me alone in my lab,'" said Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Environment at the University of Arizona. Still, he has seen more scientists take at least the first steps toward mobilization. "Right now it's mostly talking about what to do," he said. "We're scientists we tend to plan very carefully what we do and then we try to do it well. But certainly there's an elevated sense that this is very real." That sense has motivated hundreds of student and faculty volunteers at nearly a dozen universities to participate in "data rescue" events over the last two months, the most recent of which was held this weekend at New York University. After a brief training session, participants spent six hours archiving environmental data from government websites, including those of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department. An anonymous donor has provided storage on Amazon servers, and the information can be searched from a website at the University of Pennsylvania called Data Refuge. Though the Federal Records Act theoretically protects government data from deletion, scientists who rely on it say would rather be safe than sorry. "For a problem like climate change, you can't understand it if you don't have data," said Jerome Whitington, an environmental anthropologist and member of the loose knit group Environmental Data Governance Initiative, which sponsored the N.Y.U. event. Much of the concern among scientists has been centered on the E.P.A., which was a favorite target of Mr. Trump during the campaign. Comments by members of his transition team have led to speculation that the new administration would gut the agency's science staff. Although he said he was speaking only for himself, Myron Ebell, who headed the E.P.A. transition but left on Jan. 19, said in a recent interview that science within the agency had become too politicized. "I'm a great believer in science," Mr. Ebell said, "but I'm not a great believer in politicized science." Many scientists would argue that it is climate deniers and others who are politicized. The question of whether scientists should take sides politically is an old one, with the widespread and long held view among many researchers that they should be quiet and let their data speak for itself. Some scientists have objected to plans for the Washington march, arguing that the event will feed the view among many conservatives that scientists have a political agenda. But the idea that they should be above the fray has been slowly unraveling as researchers realize that their own aloofness may largely be to blame for public disregard for the evidence on issues like climate change or vaccine safety. And in the era of Trump, some say it could finally come completely apart. Youth is leading the way in rejecting the old view, Mr. Rosenberg said. "Early career scientists, younger scientists that's not an answer for them," he said. Chanda Prescod Weinstein, a cosmologist and particle physicist at the University of Washington, is one of those younger researchers. She has long been politically active she comes from a family of organizers and attended her first demonstration when she was 2 months old but for her the talk and actions of the Trump administration have led to a new level of concern. Dr. Prescod Weinstein said she was especially incensed by what she and others viewed as efforts by some science organizations to reach out to the Trump administration. Immediately after the election, she took to social media to criticize a news release from the American Physical Society that urged President Trump to strengthen scientific leadership and quoted his campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again." "What history has taught us is that collaboration doesn't work for science," Dr. Prescod Weinstein said. "When we work with extremist, racist, Islamophobic or nationalist governments, it doesn't work for science." The news release was quickly withdrawn and the society apologized for any "offense it might have caused." Michael Lubell, a physics professor who was director of public affairs for the society but who was terminated without explanation, said that "initially people were very worried that if anybody criticized Donald Trump there would be retribution." "People are now getting to the point where they are understanding that this is a guy in the White House who doesn't have a firm grasp on science policy at all," Dr. Lubell said. "Now they are mobilizing. But there's absolutely no strategy." Dr. Eisen, the Berkeley biologist, would seem to have slim chances of winning a race for the Senate, since it is sure to be joined by several prominent Democrats if Dianne Feinstein, the longtime incumbent, decides not to run. But Jacquelyn Gill, a paleo ecologist at the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute, has been actively recruited to eventually make a bid for a congressional seat by 314 Action, ever since she was quoted in the journal Nature urging her fellow scientists to "do more than write letters." Staff members at 314 Action (which takes its name from the number pi) liked her attitude, and she happens to live in a swing district. Like many academic scientists, Dr. Gill employs several graduate students in her laboratory and has received grant funds for research that is still in progress. But the idea of public service, at what she considers an urgent time for climate science, is tugging at her. "I came into this career wanting to do science that's in the public good," she said. "And maybe now that means something different than it did before." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Tariq Trotter, 44, a founder of the music collective the Roots (and the house band for "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon"), could be hip hop's Dostoyevsky. Like the Russian novelist, Mr. Trotter (also known as Black Thought) has refined literary fire from the soulful furnace of pain and suffering. However, there is more to Black Thought than just music. His performance as Reggie Love, the philosophical Vietnam veteran turned pimp in "The Deuce," is the latest example of his impressive acting skills. He has also collaborated with the Clear Weather Brand on limited edition sneakers (sold exclusively at Barneys New York), and with Moscot for the Grunya for Tariq Trotter line of sunglasses. In a recent interview at a restaurant in Union Square, Black Thought talked about his challenging childhood, the visual arts that have inspired his career, and the royal nature of wearing a beard. Q: On a recent episode of "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," the comedic actor Marlon Wayans tugged at your beard and said, "I'm so jealous of this. I want to rob your face." What did you think of that? Philadelphia, specifically among black men, was way ahead of the curve in terms of the popularity of wearing a beard. Rocking a beard in Philly is like wearing a chin crown. To what do you attribute the popularity? I know that there is a large percentage of African American men in Philadelphia who are followers of the Islamic faith. Do you think that is a factor? I do. I was raised as a Muslim. I think the beard, and specifically long facial hair, is indicative of a sense of wisdom, strength and royalty, and not just in Islamic. In most of the religious books, when men of faith or kings are described, they are usually described wearing long facial hair. The beard is a reflection of both wisdom and royalty. I also think the barbers from Philly are the best when it comes to the beard game. I made the mistake of going to a barber who was not from Philly, and let's just say, I would never do that again. Do you have a specific barber from Philly that is your go to guy? I actually have three barbers from Philly that I use. Shout out to Faheem Alexander and the Hands of Precision shop in South Philly, Darien Hilliard in the East Falls section of Philly and Shaun "Shizz 215" Porter, a Philly barber based in Los Angeles. Those guys are true craftsmen. Your freestyle at Harvard University in 2016 was searing and soaring epos. When I heard the line "What my father was into/sent him to his early grave/then Mom started chasing that base like Willie Mays" it felt very personal. Was it autobiographical? It was absolutely autobiographical. I had a tumultuous childhood. My dad, Thomas Trotter, was murdered before I was a year old. From what my family members and those who knew him have told me, he was a good man, very kind to my mother and very chivalrous. Opening doors for women, very respectful. But he was also feared. My dad grew up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia and was associated with Mosque No. 12, which was also the birthplace of Black Brothers Inc., a.k.a., the Philadelphia Black Mafia. Years later, I discovered that my dad's body was found near an alley in Germantown. Ironically, that same alley was not far from the location of "Night Catches Us," a film I shot in 2010 with Kerry Washington and Anthony Mackie, and directed by Tanya Hamilton. What are some of the earliest memories of your childhood? I grew up in Mount Airy, a middle class enclave in the Northwestern area of Philadelphia. The most profound memory I have from my childhood, is burning down my house at 6 years old. It was an accident. I have always been drawn to the visual arts, even as a child. I used to play with green plastic army men, and I would use a lighter to melt parts of their body, to make it seem like they were wounded as they fought each other. I had done this many times, with no problem. However, on this particular occasion, the lighter got too hot, and it burned my hand. I flung the lighter away from me, and it ignited the curtains. My brother Keith, who was 14 years old, and my mom's boyfriend were downstairs, and they smelled smoke. They called the Fire Department, and my mom's boyfriend took me with him to pick up my mom from her doctor's appointment. My brother waited for the Fire Department. When we got back, the fire had been extinguished, but my brother had accused a few of the firemen of pocketing some jewelry and smashing some framed family pictures on the floor. My brother also said some of the firemen had destroyed some furniture that had no fire damage at all. One of the firemen got in my brother's face and threatened him, and another swung on my brother. My brother fought back, and he was arrested. That day was a turning point not just for me, not just for my family because of the fire, but that was the day my brother was arrested for the first time. He has been in and out of jail ever since. Were the challenging circumstances of your childhood a catalyst in terms of your attraction to hip hop? I think so. The culture of hip hop not just the rapping but the graffiti, the dancing, the attitude was an escape for me. Because I was a visual artist, it was the graffiti component that pulled me in. I became a tagger. I bombed walls all over the city with the name "DT" or "Double T," which are my initials, Tariq Trotter. When I was 12, I was arrested for tagging a basketball court in a South Philadelphia park known as the Lot. I was sentenced in juvenile court to what was known as scrub time, in the Philadelphia Anti Graffiti network. I was supervised by a lady named Jane Golden, who now runs the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, of which I have been a longstanding board member. Talk about full circle. Do you think that your talent for tagging city walls helped you get accepted to the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts? Absolutely, because it was connected to my passion as a visual artist. I wanted to be a painter or an illustrator. This is the same school where you met Amir "Questlove" Thompson? Yes. It was there that we formed the group Square Roots, that later became the Roots. Quest was a fascinating guy to me when I first met him. He has always been a brilliant musician. How would you describe your high school years? Were they as tumultuous as your childhood? Money was not a problem, but for a while I was selling crack. I didn't have to, but everybody I knew at that time was either caught up selling crack or smoking it. Had it not been for one of my uncles shipping me off to Detroit to live with family members, I would have become a statistic. After a few months, I returned to Philly. I was determined to turn my life and be successful. But not long after I returned home, my mom, Cassandra Trotter, had gone missing for a week. She had gotten addicted to crack cocaine, so it wasn't odd for her to go AWOL for a day. I would usually see my mother once a month, which was around the time my dad's Social Security and Navy benefits came in. However, when my mom went missing for a whole week, me, my grandmother and our family, we knew something was wrong. Our family checked with the hospitals, the jails and then the morgue. An unidentified black woman matching my mother's description had been admitted to the morgue. Dental records confirmed it was my mother. She had been stabbed to death. I am so sorry. God rest her soul. Did the cops ever catch the person who murdered your mother? Yeah. It was a 22 year old dude who lived a few blocks away from my mom in Southwest Philadelphia. He was arrested and was supposed to have gotten the death penalty, but then through some clerical error, there was almost a mistrial and he had to be tried again. I sat through two trials. I was 16. He was found guilty again in the second trial, and he is serving a life sentence. How did all of this affect you and your art? I felt rage. The kind of rage you see from the families at the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer or the trial of any serial killer. I know that kind of rage. For a minute I was like: "My mom was murdered, and I don't care about anything or anyone anymore. I'm going on a killing spree." But at that same moment, something turned me around to want to survive. Resilience spoke to me as opposed to nihilism. I said to myself: 'I'm going to win, and I'm going to be a success. My mom would want me to achieve greatness in life.' That tragic experience became a positive motivation for me. This interview has been condensed and edited. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
For the first time in its long history, The Financial Times will be led by a woman. On Tuesday, the daily known for its robust coverage of international markets, its distinctive salmon hued paper and its impenetrable digital paywall announced that Roula Khalaf will be its top editor, starting in January. Ms. Khalaf, a 24 year veteran of the newspaper, which has its headquarters in London, will succeed Lionel Barber, a Financial Times journalist since the 1980s and its editor since 2005. Mr. Barber, 64, said in an interview Tuesday that he had consulted with the newspaper's owners about a transition for more than a year. "You mustn't see this as some kind of 'woke' gesture it's got nothing to do with that," he said. "She is one of our most outstanding journalists. She's been deputy editor for four years, she's been tested in all sorts of areas, and that's why she's the next editor." The newspaper, which was founded in 1888 and has a paid circulation of one million, including digital and print subscribers, declined to make Ms. Khalaf available for an interview. In a statement on Tuesday, she said, "It's a great honor to be appointed editor of The FT, the greatest news organization in the world." Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, and educated in the United States at Syracuse University and Columbia University, Ms. Khalaf has served as the publication's Middle East editor, foreign editor and deputy editor. Before joining The Financial Times, she wrote for Forbes magazine, where she made waves with a feature article on Jordan Belfort, the shady stockbroker who became known as the wolf in Martin Scorsese's 2013 film, "The Wolf of Wall Street." A character based on Ms. Khalaf appears in the movie. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
'SIAH ARMAJANI: FOLLOW THIS LINE' at the Met Breuer (through June 2). Born in Iran, Armajani has been living in the United States since 1960. This retrospective ranges from work he did as a teenage activist in Tehran to models of the many public sculptures he has produced across America over the past five decades. It introduces us to a sharp social thinker, a wry (and increasingly melancholic) metaphysician, a plain style visual poet and, above all, an artist ethicist. "Bridge Over Tree," Armajani's wonderful large scale sculpture presented by Public Art Fund at Brooklyn Bridge Park (on the Empire Fulton Ferry Lawn through Sept. 29) to coincide with the Met show, is well timed for our present era of sundering moral confusion and offers ways forward from it. (Holland Cotter) 212 731 1675, metmuseum.org 'ARTISTS RESPOND: AMERICAN ART AND THE VIETNAM WAR, 1965 1975' (through Aug. 18) and 'TIFFANY CHUNG: VIETNAM, PAST IS PROLOGUE' (through Sept. 2) at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. Everything in "Artists Respond," a big, inspiriting blast of an historical survey, dates from a time when the United States was losing its soul, and its artists some, anyway were trying to save theirs by denouncing a racist war. Figures well known for their politically hard hitting work Judith Bernstein, Leon Golub, Hans Haacke, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero are here in strength. But so are others, like Dan Flavin and Donald Judd and Barnett Newman, seldom associated with visual activism. Concurrent with the survey is a smaller, fine tuned show by a contemporary Vietnamese born artist, Tiffany Chung; it views the war through the eyes of people on the receiving end of aggression. (Cotter) 202 663 7970, americanart.si.edu 'JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT' at the Brant Foundation (through May 15). The opening of the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in the East Village, with an exhibition of nearly 70 works by Basquiat created from 1980 to 1987, serves as a fitting temporary shrine for this Brooklyn born painter, who became a global sensation in the early '80s and died at 27 of a heroin overdose. Basquiat sprayed poetic, enigmatic graffiti on walls in downtown Manhattan before moving to canvas, dated Madonna before she was famous and made paintings with Andy Warhol. Part of a group of Neo Expressionist painters who were largely rejected by critics, he was embraced by an influential audience and a surging art market and ended up creating a brand of African American history painting that still resonates today. Tickets to the exhibition have sold out, but you can add your name to the wait list at the foundation's website. (Martha Schwendener) 212 777 2977, brantfoundation.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image (ongoing). The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Jason Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'FRIDA KAHLO: APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEIVING' at the Brooklyn Museum (through May 12). This is not exactly an exhibition of Kahlo's art it contains just 11 paintings, from compelling self portraits to ghastly New Age kitsch but an evocation of an artistic life through her elegant Oaxacan blouses and skirts, not to mention the corsets and spinal braces she wore after a crippling traffic accident. Do her outfits have the weight of art, or are they just so much biographical flimflam? Your answer may vary depending on your degree of Fridamania, but the woven shawls and color saturated long skirts here, as well as gripping photographs of the artist by Carl Van Vechten, Imogen Cunningham, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and other great shutterbugs, suggest Kahlo's real accomplishment was a Duchampian extension of her art far beyond the easel, into her home, her fashion and her public relationships. (Farago) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'LINCOLN KIRSTEIN'S MODERN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through June 15). With George Balanchine, the indefatigable Kirstein (1907 96) founded the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. But he was also an impassioned writer, collector, curator and devotee of photography who had much to do with MoMA in its early years. The museum commemorates his complex career with art, letters and ballet ephemera, drawn from its vast holdings. (Roberta Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through May 5). The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'JOAN MIRO: BIRTH OF THE WORLD' at the Museum of Modern Art (through June 15). Drawn mostly from MoMA's unrivaled Miro collection, this fabulous exhibition is best when tracing the artist's brilliant early twists on Modernism and their swift ascent to "The Birth of the World," a 1927 masterpiece that presaged the drips and stains of radical painting two decades hence. Unappreciated in its time, it was barely exhibited until 1968. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'MONUMENTAL JOURNEY: THE DAGUERREOTYPES OF GIRAULT DE PRANGEY' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through May 12). This exhibition is a buffed jewel. In 1842, just a couple of years after Louis Daguerre unveiled the world's first practical camera, Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey, a French aristocrat with a yen for experimental technology, set off on a three year road trip, lugging a 100 pound kit as he took the world's first photographs of Athens, Cairo, Constantinople and Jerusalem. More than 100 of Girault de Prangey's precise daguerreotypes glisten here under pin lights, and his systematic photos of Islamic architecture, in particular, express how the new technology of photography could flit between art and science, and would soon become a tool of colonial rule. Girault de Prangey's daguerreotypes were little seen before 2003, when his descendants put them on the market; their discovery was a landmark in the history of early photography, and this show is too. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'BETYE SAAR: KEEPIN' IT CLEAN' at the New York Historical Society (through May 27). Saar has been making important and influential work for nearly 60 years. Yet no big New York museum has given her a full retrospective, or even a significant one person show, since a 1975 solo at the Whitney Museum of American Art. As this exhibition demonstrates, the institutional oversight is baffling, as her primary themes racial justice and feminism (her 1972 breakthrough piece, "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima," merges the two by transforming the racist stereotype of the smiling black mammy into an armed freedom fighter) are exactly attuned to the present. (Cotter) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.org 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum (ongoing). After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'TOLKIEN: MAKER OF MIDDLE EARTH' at the Morgan Library Museum (through May 12). J. R. R. Tolkien did more than write books like "The Hobbit" and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy; he invented an alternate reality, complete with its own geography, languages, religion and an era spanning history. This exhibition of his artwork, letters, drafts and other material reminds visitors that the stories Tolkien wrote, however impressive, represent only a fraction of his efforts, and it highlights his unparalleled ability to create an immersive experience using only words and pictures. After a visit you, too, may find yourself believing in Middle earth and the hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs and wizards that live there. (Peter Libbey) 212 685 0008, themorgan.org 'T. REX: THE ULTIMATE PREDATOR' at the American Museum of Natural History (through Aug. 9, 2020). Everyone's favorite 18,000 pound prehistoric killer gets the star treatment in this eye opening exhibition, which presents the latest scientific research on T. rex and also introduces many other tyrannosaurs, some discovered only this century in China and Mongolia. T. rex evolved mainly during the Cretaceous Period to have keen eyes, spindly arms and massive conical teeth, which could bear down on prey with the force of a U Haul truck; the dinosaur could even swallow whole bones, as affirmed here by a kid friendly display of fossilized excrement. The show mixes 66 million year old teeth with the latest 3 D prints of dino bones, and also presents new models of T. rex as a baby, a juvenile and a full grown annihilator. Turns out this most savage beast was covered with believe it! a soft coat of beige or white feathers. (Farago) 212 769 5100, amnh.org 'NARI WARD: WE THE PEOPLE' at the New Museum (through May 26). The persistent and liberating message in Ward's sculpture and room size installations is that art can be made from virtually anything. In this midcareer retrospective, anything means old carpets, plastic bags, bottles, zippers, bed springs, keys and furniture. Although the exhibition includes a number of large installations, Ward is best as a creator of curious and discrete sculptures, ones that remind us that our world is filled with potentially magical objects. We enter museums expecting to be transformed, but if we shift our perspective and look around us, we'll see that everyday life is really just art waiting to happen. (Schwendener) 212 219 1222, newmuseum.org 'THE WORLD BETWEEN EMPIRES: ART AND IDENTITY IN THE ANCIENT MIDDLE EAST' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through June 23). The Met excels at epic scale archaeological exhibitions, and this is a prime example. It brings together work made between 100 B.C. and A.D. 250 in what we now know as Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. In the ancient world, all were in the sphere of two competing superpowers Rome to the west and Parthia to the east and though imperial influence was strong, it was far from all determining. Each of the subject territories selectively grafted it onto local traditions to create distinctive new grass roots cultural blends. Equally important, the show addresses the fate of art from the past in a politically fraught present. (Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'HILMA AF KLINT: PAINTINGS FOR THE FUTURE' at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through April 23). This rapturous exhibition upends Modernism's holiest genesis tale that the male trinity of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian invented abstract painting starting in 1913. It demonstrates that a female Swedish artist got there first (1906 7), in great style and a radically bold scale with paintings that feel startlingly contemporary. The mother of all revisionist shows regarding Modernism. (Smith) 212 423 3500, guggenheim.org THE ORCHID SHOW: SINGAPORE at the New York Botanical Garden (through April 28). This 17th annual orchid extravaganza features the natural species and hybridized sensations of Southeast Asia upward of 70 percent of the display in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. Thousands of them, in hundreds of varieties and every conceivable and inconceivable shape, size and color. The partners on this show are Singapore Botanic Gardens, whose National Orchid Garden has the largest collection in the world, and Singapore's Gardens by the Bay, a green themed entertainment attraction where the wedding party finale in "Crazy Rich Asians" was filmed. There are two major attractions: a pair of supertrees 18 foot tall steel armatures in the trunklike, canopied shape of actual trees and a promenade of arches, dripping with orchids, that leads to the conservatory's main dome. The colors move through a spectrum from yellow Oncidium 'Goldiana,' or the "dancing lady" orchid to pink to darker, hotter shades. It is like walking under a rainbow. (William L. Hamilton) 718 817 8700, nybg.org 'R.H. QUAYTMAN: X, CHAPTER 34' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through April 23). At the summit of the Guggenheim's spiraling rotunda, this show appears as if the exhibition of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, on the floors below, had suddenly exploded into 28 fragments. Quaytman made this series of works in 2018 in response to af Klint's oeuvre from the last century, and Quaytman is the perfect artist to answer af Klint: Af Klint worked in series, and Quaytman works in what she calls "chapters." Where af Klint took orders from spirits she claimed to have contacted through seances, Quaytman, for this project, has adopted af Klint as her higher power, working in a more secular, channeled collaborative vein. And where af Klint offers a bright, dynamic symphony, Quaytman responds with a spare, restrained and slightly dissonant tone poem. (Schwendener) 212 423 3575, guggenheim.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Adele Uddo is a model whose job is to stay mostly out of the picture. On a cover shoot for Town Country, for example, Hugh Jackman perched on apple crates while Ms. Uddo stood beneath him, arm raised, so the only part of her in the frame was her hand cupping his face, her slender fingers tousling his hair. David Yurman bracelets were taped to her forearm so they'd hang artfully (and not catch Mr. Jackman's beard). "I actually used to be embarrassed about admitting I was a hand model, like I should be contributing more to society than nice nail beds," said Ms. Uddo, who, like many women in front of the camera, declined to reveal her age. "But I figure we're all doing our part." Ms. Uddo is one of the most successful parts models in the world, able to command as much as 6,000 for a day's work, she said. She's usually hired for her hands, which have grasped a Chanel No. 5 perfume bottle, held a Christian Louboutin shoe, revealed a Dior Rouge lipstick and have been stand ins for those of Penelope Cruz and Katy Perry. But Ms. Uddo is also the rare parts model with more than one in demand feature. Her abs, chest, feet and lips have also appeared in Vogue magazine pages and on billboards. "Adele's isn't the Everywoman hand," said Jennifer Adjali, the global director of education for Essie nail polish, whose campaigns often feature Ms. Uddo. "It's that high end luxury hand. She can sell diamonds." Ms. Uddo is sometimes rejected for jobs that call for more of a "mom hand" say, to wipe up tomato sauce. "If I have shorter nails and more of a nude, natural polish, I usually can pass," she said. Ms. Uddo dropped out of college to become a model of the more traditional variety when a telephone psychic suggested it. (If that sounds like unorthodox career coaching ... well, Ms. Uddo grew up on a California commune and also employs a psychic for her dog and cat.) But at 5 foot 6, she was too short for most jobs. Then one day her agent asked if she had nice hands and sent her on a call for OPI nail polish. She got the job. The work can be tedious. She can't text or read because often two manicurists work on her simultaneously. The process is repeated for up to 15 nail looks in a day. "Luckily I'm a double Libra, so I can space out pretty easily," said Ms. Uddo, who divides her time between the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan and Malibu, Calif., where her husband of eight years lives. Some hand models baby their hands, wearing armorlike gloves and keeping their arms raised to avoid bloating. (For George Costanza on "Seinfeld," oven mitts did the trick.) But Ms. Uddo considers herself a "rebel hand model," even hiking, a favorite pastime. She does admit to moving slowly and deliberately so as not to break a nail, avoiding cooking and limiting caffeine so her hands don't shake on tight close ups. She moisturizes with an all natural lotion she makes herself and met a reporter for tea wearing fingerless gloves, which she kept on indoors. Ms. Uddo said she wonders how long she can keep up a bicoastal existence (most jobs for "fashion hands" are in New York) and is working at bringing her lotion to market. She's practicing her pitch ("It's an all in one lotion!"), which includes putting an empowering spin on her work. "We women can be hard on ourselves, but every woman should be able to find some part of her that she most likes," Ms. Uddo said. "That's kind of all you need in this business." Adele Uddo never fully dries her hands because it's better to moisturize something she does about 10 times a day when the skin is still damp. She uses a concoction of coconut and vitamin E oils with shea and jojoba butters that she whips up in her kitchen. When she's not using her homemade product, she likes Weleda (her mother had her use it as a child) and a lotion called Luxe by Ladybug Jane (a vegan line). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Let it never be said that N.F.L. prospects do not support each other. As Michael Turk, a 21 year old punter out of Arizona State, approached the bench press at the N.F.L. draft scouting combine in Indianapolis on Thursday, he was cheered on by a crowd of prospects undoubtedly baffled by the sight of the only punter participating in the test. The crowd's encouragement, and the enthusiasm of Turk's spotter, Chad Englehart, helped power the special teams hopeful to 25 repetitions of 225 pounds a record for a punter since the N.F.L. began keeping official combine statistics in 2003. In a video of the performance, Turk hesitates after 21 reps, but with the crowd roaring, and Englehart, a strength and conditioning coach for the Washington Redskins shouting for him to continue, Turk powered his way to four more. The enthusiasm as Turk lifted, and the reaction online afterward, somewhat overshadowed Henry Ruggs III, a wide receiver out of Alabama who recorded a 4.27 second 40 yard dash on Thursday tied for the fourth fastest time since 2006. To say Turk set a bench press record for a punter, however, would understate the feat, because punters rarely participate in the weight lifting portion of the combine. For better context, consider some of the players who completed fewer reps of the same weight in recent years: None Bradley Chubb, a 270 pound defensive end who was selected fifth overall in 2018, recorded 24 reps. None T.J. Watt, a 252 pound linebacker who was first team All Pro in 2019, recorded 21 reps in 2017. None Derrick Henry, Tennessee's wrecking ball of a running back, did 22 reps in 2016. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
As Harvey moved on and patches of blue sky finally appeared over Houston on Thursday, hundreds of car dealerships began reopening across the rain soaked region and at least a few were doing a brisk business. By noon on Thursday, AutoNation Ford in Katy, Tex., had sold 30 new vehicles, mostly pickup trucks to contractors and other tradesmen who were scrambling to get to work repairing the devastation caused by the torrential rains and flooding. "We have stores where the phone is ringing off the hook," said Michael J. Jackson, chief executive of AutoNation, the country's largest auto retailer, which owns 17 showrooms in the Houston area. South of Houston, in Alvin, the Ron Carter group of four dealerships had customers coming in shortly after the doors opened at 7 a.m. "There are some people looking to buy," said Cary T. Wilson, the owner of the franchises. "But you're also going to have a long list of service work for people whose cars have water damage and need to get back on the road." Harvey destroyed or damaging tens of thousands homes across hundreds of square miles in the Houston area and ruined a vast number of vehicles in a region that relies heavily on them. As many as 500,000 vehicles already on the road or still on dealer lots will need to be replaced, according to an estimate by Cox Automotive, a research firm. That estimate, if confirmed, would be more than are typically sold in all of Texas in a year and exceed the combined losses from Hurricane Sandy (250,000) and Hurricane Katrina (200,000). At McRee Ford in Dickinson, Tex., the entire stock of 500 new and used cars and trucks was damaged by water, according to a notice posted on the franchise's website. "The inventory displayed here on our website and other sites on the web are no longer available for sale," the notice said. In a message on Facebook, the dealership's owners said they were "beyond grateful" for the messages of concern they had received. "We have been in the facility today trying to get a grasp of the damage, and to be honest it's a bit overwhelming," the message said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
How do you keep a TV serial going past its fourth season? You reinvent, or you repeat. You find a new story, or you bring back old reliable villains who seemed to have been written off. The Donald J. Trump re election kickoff rally Tuesday, at the Amway Center in Orlando, Fla., was an attempt to recreate the media dominating phenomenon of four years ago. Like many an ongoing series later in its run, it was a bigger budget operation, the production more lavish, the set physically larger. But, filled with callbacks, fan favorites and references to moments from its first season, it was more rerun than re imagination. Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign announcement, four years ago, was full of imagery to remind people of his long celebrity career. He was backed by the pink marble of Trump Tower, the site of so many of his '80s photo shoots; he glided down its escalator in an image familiar from "The Apprentice." Mr. Trump's 2020 election announcement, on the other hand, was staged to remind people of the 2016 campaign: his rally tour, all those packed, howling arenas that showcased him in repeated news images as the raging, preening ringmaster in a circus of furious, fervent, sometimes violent energy. The result was a speech that was simultaneously filled with grievance his own and his audience's and oddly retrospective. For every boast about job creation or judge appointments, there were more old scores to resettle. The president seemed to enjoy reminiscing about the 2016 campaign more than readying the 2020 campaign. "Do you remember this?" he asked the crowd. "They called us deplorables." There was a lot of do you remember ing on Tuesday. Remember when they said we'd lose and we won? Remember "Build That Wall"? Remember "Crooked Hillary"? The crowd did remember, and proved it, loudly. "Lock her up!" "CNN sucks!" All the hit singles of yesteryear. They had the albums, and they knew the lyrics. It was like old times. But not just like. Notably where cable news producers would in 2016 show Mr. Trump's empty podium as he prepared to speak only Fox among the three major news channels carried his hour and a half speech from beginning to end. CNN aired the first five minutes, roughly, before cutting away during a tirade targeting the assembled press pool, another 2016 chestnut. And then there was the matter of the protagonist's catchphrase. (Not "You're fired!" though Mr. Trump also briefly reprised that, to cheers.) The president spent a bizarre, reality show like meta digression polling the audience on his new campaign slogan, "Keep America Great," whose graphics in the arena clashed visually and semantically with the "Make America Great Again" caps in the crowd. The rally took place in Schrodinger's America, which was simultaneously Great and not Great. Mr. Trump asked his supporters to "let me hear by your cheers what you like": the new branding or the old. There was sadly no applause o meter, but the candidate declared his new slogan the winner. The campaign faces questions familiar to most meteoric TV phenomena. How do you please the original fans while replenishing them? How do you roll out new material and top yourself? How do you keep the momentum without burning people out? It might be concerning, then, that the ratings for Mr. Trump's ABC interview Sunday were anemic, compared with his eyeball grabbing TV dominance in the 2016 campaign and early in his presidency. Am I connecting Nielsen ratings with political power? No. But I am saying that, if I were Donald Trump, I totally would. (Even at his own rally, he referenced "the Academy Awards, before it went political and their ratings went down the tubes.") Mr. Trump is caught between an audience that in Florida, by the roaring thousands rewards him passionately for playing the hits, and another that is voting (at least with its remotes) as if it's seen this story before. In his nostalgic kickoff, Mr. Trump went with his old fandom. After all his talk of rebranding, he closed his speech with "Make America Great Again." Of course, Mr. Trump's first campaign as he also reminded his audience was underestimated. And it's a long time until November 2020, plenty of time for more audience polling and slogan testing. ("2 America 2 Great"?) But this time, President Trump chose the reliable, gratifying love of the audience in front of him, which was more than glad to Make America 2016 Again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A bite size sampling of concours, cruise nights, auctions, club races and other upwellings of car culture happening across America this weekend. The theme for this year's event is "Addicted to Winning" and celebrates champions from across various motorports genres. The festival features a race that will include many Formula One teams and drivers, as well as the hillclimb event, concours and Bonhams classic car auction. An 85 foot tall arch over Goodwood House unveiled Thursday was commissioned by Mercedes as the festival's central feature. More info. The John R. Elliott Hero Campaign 300 Nationwide series race and the Quaker State 400 Sprint Cup race will be held at Kentucky Speedway this weekend. According to a report from NBC Sports, the 1.5 mile oval hasn't been repaved in a decade, so expect plenty of action as Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth and other top Sprint Cup drivers compete on the track's worn in grooves. More info. This event marks the official reopening of the Thompson Speedway in Connecticut. Sponsored by the Vintage Racer Group and the Vintage Sports Car Club of America, the festival will feature nearly 30 antique sports cars, including several Triumph Spitfires, Austin Healey Sprites and MG Midgets. More info. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
LONDON The journalist who resigned as the BBC's China editor to protest the broadcaster's gender pay gap said on Monday that she was offered a raise before quitting, but one that still did not bring her to the level of her male peers. The sudden resignation by Carrie Gracie, the BBC's top journalist in China, was met with a wave of support from her peers in the British media. It comes with international attention focused on the wider issue of gender disparity, from entrenched differences in compensation to the harassment and, in some cases, assault of women in the workplace. It has also fueled renewed criticism of Britain's publicly funded broadcaster, which last summer published the salaries of its top stars. The data revealed a startling gap in pay between its most senior male and female journalists. In the aftermath of the release of the figures, the BBC's most senior female journalists demanded the organization take action to close that divide. On Monday, Ms. Gracie indicated that any changes so far had not gone far enough. In an interview on BBC radio, she said she had filed an official complaint after the pay data showed that two of her male peers were paid far more than she was. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
For all the fanfare surrounding the new structure of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, things weren't too different on Tuesday at the inaugural performance of Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance. The biggest change was the live music, played by the terrific Orchestra of St. Luke's under Donald York's baton, a major upgrade from the troupe's usual taped accompaniment. But whereas other programs this season will feature, for the first time in the company's 61 year history, outside artists the Limon Dance Company in Doris Humphrey's "Passacaglia," Shen Wei Dance Arts in Mr. Shen's "Rite of Spring" opening night at the David H. Koch Theater was devoted to Mr. Taylor. At 84, he has created 142 dances, four of which made up Tuesday's program. Every seat in the house was 7.50, a season opening special signaling that American Modern Dance is for everybody even if, according to the possessive construction of the company's title, it belongs to Mr. Taylor. (Perhaps it's not surprising that he's having trouble acquiring works from the likes of Twyla Tharp and the Martha Graham Dance Company. Who wants to be owned?) I often find myself resisting Mr. Taylor's dances so proper, so unfunny and then relaxing into them, won over by their musicality and by dancers who appear to be completely in their element. This happened in "Arden Court" (1981), a sprightly suite for six men and three women, performed to William Boyce symphonies. Against Gene Moore's backdrop of a feathery pink rose, courtships and friendships blossom. A suitor tries giddily to entice his aloof love interest; one pal challenges another to a fleet footed race against the music. The men are the focus here, and Francisco Graciano, spinning around Parisa Khobdeh, cut a startlingly sharp image. You couldn't miss him. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
As night settles, a fisherman of silver cyprinid readies a lantern to be cast into the waters of Lake Victoria, in Kenya. The fish, locally known as omena, are attracted to the lights in the night.Credit... As night settles, a fisherman of silver cyprinid readies a lantern to be cast into the waters of Lake Victoria, in Kenya. The fish, locally known as omena, are attracted to the lights in the night. As the sun sets over the waters of Lake Victoria, the soft sound of the lapping waves is drowned out by the hum of motors. Squinting, I can see them on the horizon, the tiny boats splitting the oranges and blues of the twilight sky. At first only one or two appear, but soon the few become many, a fleet spreading out over the water, appearing to chase the horizon. The vast expanse of the lake, the largest in Africa, appears to swallow the boats as darkness descends. But I know their destination and goal: the fishing grounds and the silver cyprinid known as omena in Luo, the local language in this part of Kenya that stir in the night under the wind whipped waters. On Mfangano, a Kenyan island in Lake Victoria where many of the fishermen live, the collection of lanterns on the water is known as the City. Hundreds of lights shimmer and meld into a sparkling succession of glowing orbs. The casual observer would see a town, or a highway in the distance. And it's not until you're among them, propelled by a fishing boat, that the true nature, and purpose, of these lanterns is revealed. I'm riding with two local fishermen, brothers named Mike and Robinson Okeyo. They've been targeting omena for five years, but the practice of fishing by lantern extends as long as anyone on the island can remember. In the past, most have used paraffin lanterns, but many are now switching to the use of portable (and rechargeable) lights powered by small solar panels. I first heard of the tradition of fishing by lantern while working as a consultant for nongovernmental organizations in Kisumu, Kenya. While Kisumu is also on the shore of Lake Victoria, it takes a three hour drive and a ferry ride to reach Mfangano Island. To me, the long trip in a cramped matatu a common form of local transport where 12 people often pack into a nine person van was worth it. The idea of fishermen casting lamps into the water as the sky turns from orange to blue was too much to resist. But the reality of the situation on the lake is far less peaceful than my imagination conjured. Robinson Okeyo estimates that there are now more than 400 boats fishing for omena every night. While in the past many fishermen lived and worked on Mfangano Island, more and more are coming from the surrounding towns on the shore of the lake. The draw of the omena is obvious. Despite the high numbers of fishermen, it's still a much easier fish to catch when compared to Nile perch or tilapia, which have been chronically overfished despite restrictions on the size of fishing nets. "It's the only reliable fish, because it's so easy to catch," Mike Okeyo tells me. And to emphasize the point he adds, "Tilapia and Nile perch take too much sweat to catch." The ease of catching omena might be relative, though, as the fishermen have to spend the entire night on small boats, with crews of up to five people. The nights are long, and clothes get wet despite the homemade waterproof jackets the fishermen wear. No catch is guaranteed. Competition has increased so much that at times violence has erupted on the lake which, in a worst case scenario, has resulted in drownings. In other cases, Kenyan fishermen have found trouble with Ugandan authorities, as the border between Uganda and Kenya lies less than a mile off the tip of the westernmost point on Mfangano Island. The penalty for crossing the unmarked border on the water can be huge, levied as fines or the confiscation of equipment. But, at the end of each night, crews of omena fishermen haul in their lanterns and head to shore, where the price of omena is higher than it has been in the past. Fishermen typically sell to two types of customers: locals who dry the fish and sell to consumers, or companies that use the fish in the creation of animal feed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
DUNEDIN, New Zealand Only a keen eyed observer can spot the rare yellow eyed penguin in the impenetrable forest hills that hug New Zealand's South Island beaches. Native to this region, the birds mostly lurk under a canopy of thick shrubs, trees and branches, dashing for hiding places as soon as a human approaches. Incredibly shy, the yellow eyed penguin is truly odd. Measuring about 65 centimeters, or just over two feet tall, with striking yellow eyes and a yellow band across its head, it is the rarest species of penguin, nesting in the forest and returning to it. It is also severely endangered. Despite various measures deployed in recent years to protect this penguin's flocks, the outlook remains bleak. On average, only 18 of 100 penguin chicks survive their first year at sea. A decade ago, the population was estimated at 6,000. Today conservationists reckon that only 2,000 yellow eyed penguins are alive. The yellow eyed penguin first got into trouble when large parts of its natural habitat were destroyed in the previous century. Farmers bulldozed and torched the forests where the penguin lived to make way for cattle and sheep. The Te Rere Reserve was founded in 1989, when Mr. Sutherland succeeded in persuading farmers not to destroy the forest on the southern tip of the South Island. Eventually, reforestation efforts allowed about 120 yellow eyed penguins to nest in the scrub. In February 1995, however, a fire started by a neighboring farm spread to Te Rere, burning half the population. Mr. Sutherland regularly checks box traps set in the forest to catch ferrets, stoats and rats that prey on the young, flightless birds, refilling the traps with fresh eggs for bait. The penguins also fall victim to cats and dogs. Over the summer here, some of the roads to the beaches were closed to the public, to protect the penguins. There are signs warning that "persons causing distress to penguins will be prosecuted," and the general public can watch the penguins only from special observation huts as they waddle off to sea at dawn, then disappear again into the forest at the end of a day's foraging. During the 100 day nesting season ending in February, Yolanda van Heezik, a marine biologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and Jim Watts, a ranger with the Department of Conservation, monitored the condition of seven penguin nests on a beach on the Otago Peninsula. "Breeding pairs always make their nests out of sight of other penguins," Dr. van Heezik said. Mr. Watts visits the baby chicks about 30 times, weighing them regularly even though the task can be hazardous. "They can use their flippers like a machine rifle and have a nasty bite," Mr. Watts said. He often hand feeds underweight chicks a salmon smoothie. Severely malnourished penguins are carted off in a plastic crate to Penguin Place, a special rehabilitation center. Young penguins often succumb to heat stress, as was the case in December when temperatures reached 95 degrees. And in recent years, many chicks have suffered from avian diphtheria, which causes ulcers in their mouths that make it difficult to eat and breathe. While the yellow eyed penguin may be well protected on land now, they spend most of their days at sea, where they are on their own. Last year veterinarians had to suture about 50 yellow eyed penguins that were wounded in barracuda or shark attacks. "Fish populations are low, so penguins are being attacked as they compete for the same food," said David McFarlane, field manager of the Yellow eyed Penguin Trust, a nonprofit conservation group. For years, conservationists have been calling for a restriction on fishing to help protect the penguins. But Mr. Sutherland, a member of the South East Marine Protection Forum, a government appointed group that recommends marine protection sites to the government, complained that "the political lobby of the fishing industry is much stronger than us." On the other side of the debate is Nelson Cross, who represents recreational fishermen on the forum, and opposes further restrictions on fishing. While Mr. Cross acknowledged that there were "unfortunately occasional instances where a penguin has been caught in a commercial trawl," he added that there was "no evidence that recreational fishing impacts in any way on the penguins." The scientists, not the fishermen, he argued, were the real offenders. "Penguins suffer from human interference," Mr. Cross said. "Humans ignore the fact that penguins are wild animals and not a domestic variety accustomed to constant harassment and handling in the name of research." Conservationists also hope that the growing ecotourism industry will persuade New Zealand's government to take measures to preserve the country's penguin population, because the penguins help draw tourists. Shops sell little brown bags of "penguin poo" candies, and the penguin's picture adorns dustbin liners marketed in Dunedin as well as the country's five dollar bill. "Ecotourism is big business," Mr. McFarlane said. "Penguins are bringing in good income in this region. It is only reasonable to allocate more funds for the protection of the yellow eyed penguin at this dramatic point in their lives." For now, private organizations play a vital role. The Te Rere Reserve managed by Mr. Sutherland is owned by Forest Bird, the largest privately owned conservation organization in New Zealand. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The posters reflect how different the films are except for their titles. Despite what your brain may tell you, "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" is not the same movie as "Sometimes Always Never." The former (in theaters March 13) is a neo realistic drama that examines the hurdles a 17 year old Pennsylvania girl faces to get an abortion in New York City. The latter (in theaters April 17) is a whimsical British dramedy starring a Scrabble obsessed Bill Nighy on a hunt for his estranged son. Both are small, indie films. Both have spring release dates. And both are eager to find a distinct audience, despite sharing overlapping titles of the same rearranged words. Yet neither considered changing the title to avoid confusion. Why not? The director and writer Eliza Hittman originally called "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" simply "A" when she began working on the script in 2012. "'A' as in abortion movie, as in 'The Scarlet Letter,'" she said. "I didn't think it was a title that would resonate with audiences ultimately, and I knew I was searching for something more dynamic." "There is something about the repetition of it that really struck me, the rhythm and repetition," she said. "And obviously, the intimacy of the conversation. I knew in the narrative that we were building to an intimate revelation." "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won a special jury award, and Hittman said there was never any pushback on her title choice along the way. "Obviously, when I was thinking about using it as the title, I did an IMDb search to see if there were any films that shared the same title and nothing came up," she said, referring to the internet movie database site. She recalled that executives from Focus Features, which is distributing her film, mentioned "Sometimes Always Never" in an early meeting "but I don't think anyone felt it would create confusion. It seemed like their film had been made a while ago, so I was a little surprised" to see that it was being released around the same time. Across the Atlantic, "Sometimes Always Never" quietly debuted at the 2018 London Film Festival and in several international markets. Its title likewise changed from inception to release. It was originally called "Triple Word Score," like the Frank Cottrell Boyce book it is based on. But legal discussions with Hasbro over the rights to the Scrabble phrase made that a less than ideal choice. And while shooting in 2017, the director Carl Hunter felt instantly moved when Nighy spoke the line, "Sometimes, always, never," to his on screen grandson as he taught him the buttoning rule for a three button suit (top: sometimes, middle: always, bottom: never). "The title was in the script all the time. We just didn't spot it," Hunter said. "Sometimes you read words and they're great, but then when those words are in the mouth of an artist, all of a sudden they occupy a very different world." When he heard Nighy deliver the line, "a shiver went down my spine," he said, adding, "I thought, 'That should be the title. It's philosophical. It's poignant. And it's poetic.'" Hunter's background as an art director also led him to visualize the phrase on a potential poster. "I look at words very carefully from the point of view of typography," he said. "To me, I can see those three words, and they occupy a wonderful space." Not everyone was on board. "We had lots of long, hard discussions over whether to change the title," the producer Roy Boulter said. "There was concern from the marketing department that it wasn't an easy name to hang onto 'Triple Word Score' is much easier to remember than 'Sometimes Always Never.' But then you'd get people going into the cinema thinking they're going to get a Scrabble drama, and that's not what it's really about. It just came to the point that it would cause us a lot less hassle with Hasbro." While "Sometimes Always Never" was originally slated for an October 2019 U.S. release, the American distributor, Blue Fox Entertainment, pushed it to March and eventually April to try to find a noncompetitive window. "We are a small English indie and so we've got to give ourselves a big chance," Boulter said. "You only get one go at release." Jessica Tabin, a vice president at the Creative Impact marketing agency, said the two movies' convoluted titles were detrimental both on their own and in light of their now month apart release dates. "Honestly, it's not like anybody wins, and I'm surprised no one made the change," said Tabin, whose agency has worked on promotional campaigns for "Parasite," "The Report" and other films. "I really feel like a short concise title always helps. Obviously, not every movie is 'Lincoln' or 'Goodfellas,' so sometimes you have to do a little bit of explaining in your title. But that's what taglines are for." Tabin also noted that it's not just about what title works when spoken or seen on a poster, but also what makes the most sense when marketing to moviegoers who increasingly find out about films on their phones. "A really lengthy title isn't going to play very well on your really small screen if you're looking through film titles, or for search purposes when you're looking for movie tickets," she said. "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" and "Sometimes Always Never" aren't the only 2020 releases with titles that have wound up playing outsize roles in marketing and reception. In February, after the Margot Robbie comic book movie "Birds of Prey" fell 12 million short of expectations on its domestic opening weekend, Warner Bros. announced a "display change" for the title at theaters and ticketing sites, where it's now "Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey." While the film was technically always titled "Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)," Tabin noted that "nobody remembers the parenthetical portions of titles" and many probably didn't connect the dots that "Birds of Prey" was "the Harley Quinn film." Meanwhile, the title of Autumn de Wilde's adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma" was styled with a period, much to the chagrin of grammar conscious copy editors. "There's a period at the end of 'Emma' because it's a period film," de Wilde told Radio Times in Britain. (The New York Times opted against using the punctuation for clarity's sake.) "A lot of times misplaced punctuation or all lowercase or all caps might stop you in a good way because you're not used to seeing it," Tabin said. "It's there for a reason, and it's causing you to potentially want to look into it further. And maybe with 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always,' the thought process is it's so confusing that it catches your eye." Ultimately, it's difficult to gauge how much of a role a movie's title plays in its box office success or failure, and perhaps the parallel appellations of "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" and "Sometimes Always Never" will even work in their favor. "Whether it worries me or not, I'm not quite sure," the "Sometimes Always Never" director Hunter said. "In a strange way, because of Eliza's film having a similar title, the phone has been ringing and people want to talk. So maybe, actually, it's a very good thing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
From the earliest days of Hollywood, women directors have been staggeringly outnumbered by men. While that still holds true, in 2019 there was a notable shift. According to new research, more than 10 percent of the directors on last year's top films were women, which was more than twice as many as in 2018 and the highest number in over a decade. The top grossing films featuring female directors in 2019 included "Captain Marvel," "Frozen II," "Hustlers," "Abominable," "Little," "Little Women," and "Queen Slim." The study, by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, found that of 113 directors attached to the year's top 100 films, 12 were women, compared with just five in 2018. Examining the 1,300 top films from 2007 through to 2019, the Annenberg researchers found that on average just 4.8 percent of directors were women, yet that spiked to 10.6 percent in 2019. Last year's historic high extended beyond box office hits: 15 percent of the directors of all films released by major companies last year were women, another record. "This is the first time we have seen a shift in hiring practices for female film directors in 13 years," said Stacy Smith, who heads the initiative. However a rival study, also released Thursday, painted a less rosy picture. In the latest Celluloid Ceiling report, Martha Lauzen, head of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, looked at, among other things, a larger group of 2019 films, the top 500, and found that women in key behind the scenes jobs were outnumbered four to one by men. That figure remained unchanged from 2018. Lauzen also found that 14 percent of women worked as directors on those films, down from 15 percent the previous year. And nearly a third of those films had one woman or none working as directors, writers, editors, cinematographers and executive producers; conversely, 1 percent of those films had hired one man or none in similar positions. "It's odd to talk about reaching historic highs when women remain so far from parity," Lauzen said in a statement. Still, narrowing her focus to last year's top 100 films, Lauzen did find that more women held 20 percent of those key jobs, up from 16 percent the year before. As with Annenberg, Lauzen also found that a record number of women directed the top 100 films in 2019, however likely due to differing methodology, she arrived at another result: Her research indicated that women comprised 12 percent of directors on those films, up from 4 percent the year before. She cautioned that it was premature to herald 2019 as a turning point, saying any trend would not be discernible until figures from 2020 and 2021 were revealed. Male domination of the industry endures despite evidence showing that audiences respond equally to films irrespective of a director's gender. Analyzing scores from the aggregator site Metacritic, the researchers at Annenberg found that critical reception for male and female directed films was virtually identical; but that films directed by women of color were more critically lauded than any other group. Even so, of the 1,300 films they examined between 2007 and 2019, less than 1 percent had a woman of color in the director's chair. Meanwhile, a Fandango poll of fans revealed that the most anticipated films of 2020 star and are directed by women. They include Patty Jenkins's "Wonder Woman 1984," "Black Widow," which stars Scarlett Johansson with Cate Shortland directing, and "Birds of Prey," starring Margot Robbie and directed by Cathy Yan. The Annenberg study found that among studios, Universal Pictures had the best track record last year for hiring female filmmakers: just over a quarter of its directors in 2019 were women. Paramount had the fewest zero and indeed has not hired a women to direct any of its films in the last five years. The paucity of women who have received directing nominations for major awards over the last year is in keeping with a stubbornly entrenched trend. The Annenberg researchers found that of the 273 directing nominations doled out at four major awards shows over the past 13 years, just 14 nominations, or 5.1 percent, went to women. All 14 nominations went to four women: Ava DuVernay, Angelina Jolie, Greta Gerwig and Kathryn Bigelow, who is the only woman to ever win an Oscar for directing (for "The Hurt Locker"). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Bodies Keep Shrinking on This Island, and Scientists Aren't Sure Why In 2003, researchers digging in a mountain cave on the Indonesian island of Flores discovered astonishing fossils of a tiny, humanlike individual with a small, chimp sized brain. They called the species Homo floresiensis. These relatives of modern humans stood just over three feet tall. Several villages in the area, scientists noted, are inhabited by people whose average height is 4 feet 9 inches. Was this the result of interbreeding long ago between taller modern humans and shorter Homo floresiensis? Fifteen years after the bones' discovery, a study of the DNA of living people on Flores has delivered a verdict. "It's rare in science that you set about to answer a question and you get something of a definitive answer and it's the end," said Richard E. Green, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a co author of the study, published on Thursday in Science. "The answer is a clear enough 'no' that I'm done with it." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. But as often happens in science, the answer to one question raises new ones. The study shows that at least twice in ancient history, humans and their relatives (known as hominins) arrived on Flores and then grew shorter. And not just humans: Other research has shown that elephants also arrived on Flores twice, and both times the species evolved into dwarves. So what mysterious power does this island have to shrink the body? When the fossils of Homo floresiensis first came to light, many researchers hoped they might still hold fragments of DNA. They were encouraged by the initial dating of the fossils an estimated age of perhaps just 13,000 years. DNA analysis might have settled the debate over how Homo floresiensis fits into the hominin family tree. Some researchers argued that the bones simply belonged to a modern human with a growth disorder. Others argued that they belonged to a much more distant branch of the human tree, evolving from a taller hominin species called Homo erectus. In 2007 Herawati Sudoyo, a geneticist at the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Indonesia, brought samples of Homo floresiensis fossils to Dr. Green, then at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. Hard as he and his colleagues tried, they failed to get any definitive DNA from the fossils. "We could never really make sense of it," said Dr. Green. Years later, Dr. Green and his colleagues made two important discoveries. They found that humans and Neanderthals interbred; about 1 percent of the DNA of living non Africans comes from those vanished hominins. And researchers discovered a separate branch of hominins, known as the Denisovans. Denisovans and humans also interbred, with the result that living people in East Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific still carry some Denisovan DNA. At a 2012 scientific conference, Dr. Green and Dr. Sudoyo got to talking about Homo floresiensis and realized they might not have to look for its DNA in fossils. What if the ancestors of the people around the cave had interbred with the extinct hominins, inheriting genes for a pygmy body type? In 2013, they organized a trip to Flores to visit a village called Rampasasa near the cave. With the consent of village elders, Dr. Sudoyo and Gludhug A. Purnomo, a research assistant, took saliva samples from 32 villagers. As the researchers extracted DNA from the samples and analyzed it, other scientists were taking a new look at the Homo floresiensis fossils. They realized that the initial estimate of their age was wrong. Instead, the fossils are at least 60,000 years old. That finding drastically narrowed the window during which modern humans might have shared Flores and interbred with Homo floresiensis. Enlisted by Dr. Sudoyo, Dr. Serena Tucci, now a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, and her colleagues compared the DNA of the Rampasasa villagers to that of other living people around the world. The researchers found that a very small percentage of the villagers' DNA came from Neanderthals or Denisovans. A tiny portion could not be matched to humans, Neanderthals or Denisovans. But these enigmatic pieces weren't dramatically different from human DNA, as you'd expect if they had come from Homo floresiensis. Dr. Tucci concluded that the Rampasasa villagers have no Homo floresiensis ancestry. "I wasn't disappointed," she said, "because they are extremely interesting for other reasons." Rampasasa villagers aren't short because they descend partly from Homo floresiensis. Instead, their ancestors were tall er humans. But at some point after they came to Flores, they became very short as did Homo floresiensis before them. And they're not the only mammals to have shrunk. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Some scientists studying the relationship between contact sports and memory or mood problems later in life argue that cumulative exposure to hits that cause a snap of the head not an athlete's number of concussions is the most important risk factor. That possibility is particularly worrisome in football, in which frequent "subconcussive" blows are unavoidable. On Thursday, researchers based at Boston University reported the most rigorous evidence to date that overall exposure to contact in former high school and college football players could predict their likelihood of experiencing problems like depression, apathy or memory loss years later. The finding, appearing in The Journal of Neurotrauma, is not conclusive, the authors wrote. Such mental problems can stem from a variety of factors in any long life. Yet the paper represents researchers' first attempt to precisely calculate cumulative lifetime exposure to contact in living players, experts said. Previous estimates had relied in part on former players' memories of concussions, or number of years played. The new paper uses more objective measures, including data from helmet accelerometer studies, and provides a glimpse of where the debate over the risk of contact sports may next play out, the experts said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In a blasted out shelter nestled up against a garbage pile, a grubby girl in a newsboy cap leads two younger children through their lessons: phrases in English to beg what they need from foreign visitors and a succession of piteous poses, each more subservient than the last. A poetic stage direction in Phillip Howze's play "Frontieres Sans Frontieres," a brightly colored comic fantasia on cultural imperialism, describes these moppets as "tiny revolting looking angels." Living by their wits in some vague developing country, they pick pockets and panhandle to survive. "Hello, you do have apple?" Win (Emma Ramos), the children's 14 year old leader, asks Thom (Sathya Sridharan), a promising mark. Then she hits him up for cash. A teacher, he strikes a bargain: He will help her improve her English if she will promise not to ask him for money anymore. As embodied by the magnetic Ms. Ramos, Win is a sharp and resourceful waif, and it is hard to tell who is getting played in her deal with Thom. But when she contorts the muscles of her face, making the sounds he wants her to make, our laughter comes with a twinge. She is straining to reshape herself. Is that such a good idea? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Needless to say, small children won't be reading this review. It is aimed squarely at the grown ups who buy picture books, borrow them, give them as gifts and read them aloud to children. Of all these transactions buying, borrowing, giving and reading aloud the one that really counts is the last. Reading a book to a small child can create a connection of exquisite intimacy, with the book itself as a vital point of contact. The quality of such a book is inextricably linked to the quality of that interaction. Such thoughts are stirred by these four new picture books featuring a loving relationship between a child and a grandparent. Leafing through each of these books, one tends to step outside the story and imagine it being read by grandparent to child. The fact that the two parties in this imagined scenario are in the earliest and latest chapters of their lives lends each book more than the usual measure of emotion. I REALLY WANT TO SEE YOU, GRANDMA (Chronicle, 40 pp., 18.99; ages 3 to 6), written and illustrated by Taro Gomi, was first published in Japan in 1979. Here it is, almost 40 years later, with its spare text translated into English. It hasn't aged a bit. The book tells the simple story of an old woman and her granddaughter, who set off at the same time to visit each other across a broad valley. Using several modes of transportation, they twice miss each other en route but finally meet halfway for a happy picnic under a tree. The author Minh Le and the illustrator Dan Santat have teamed up for DRAWN TOGETHER (Hyperion, 32 pp., 17.99; ages 4 to 8), another book whose pictures give an extra measure of help telling the story. This time a young Thai American boy is dropped off to visit his grandfather. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. The two sit in awkward silence, separated by their gaping age difference and by an impenetrable language barrier (the old man's dialogue is even scribbled in Thai). Not even a Southeast Asian action video engages the interest of the hapless lad. But when he idly plucks art supplies from his backpack, he and his granddad discover a shared enthusiasm for drawing action figures. At this point Santat's staid, prosaic images explode into garish, kinetic life as the two create a comic book epic featuring a ferocious dragon and two embattled heroes modeled on themselves. The heavily symbolic epic, it must be said, makes little sense to this particular grandfather, but it is charged with visual drama. The story ends with the old man and his grandson in each other's arms, brought together by wordless affection and the power of their shared imagination. This touching lesson in empathy and family love may resonate more with a grown up reader than a child (no child ever spoke the sentence "my grandfather surprised me by revealing a world beyond words"). Still, the book's heart is firmly in the right place, and Santat's illustrations of both the real life and fantasy worlds of the two main characters are beautifully rendered. Another book also bears the weight of a grown up message, but this one carries it a bit more gracefully. This is OCEAN MEETS SKY (Simon Schuster, 48 pp., 17.99; ages 4 to 8), by the Fan Brothers. Sharing the roles of both author and illustrator, these two brothers have taken on the daunting challenge of introducing children to the grave fact of death. The central character in the book is a boy named Finn who lives in a house by the sea. With the gentle device of a verb tense, the authors reveal that Finn's fisherman grandfather has recently died (he "would have been 90 years old today"). The impact of his absence is suggested by an empty chair in a darkened office. The room is cluttered with the old man's books, tools and bric a brac, objects that fill Finn's mind with fragmented memories of him. "To honor him," Finn builds a boat on the beach, using found objects and detritus. Exhausted from his labors, he naps inside his rickety craft and, in a fantastical dream that recalls such books as "Where the Wild Things Are," he sails it out to sea. From this point on, the book's lovely, muted illustrations depict a world of melancholy magic. We see a giant golden fish, islands made of books and seashells, a "sea of moon jellies dancing." Everywhere there are little reminders of Finn's grandfather, all of them traceable to the objects in that ghostly office. A kind of spirit guide finally appears in the shape of an enormous blue whale, leading Finn through a misty universe of floating and flying memories. Finn's mother awakens him near the end of the book. As he stands alone on the beach and takes one last look at moon and sky, he appears to contemplate for the very first time the mysteries of life and death. Of these four fine books, the real gem is TINY, PERFECT THINGS (Compendium, 32 pp., 16.95; ages 3 to 7), written by M. H. Clark and illustrated by Madeline Kloepper, whose first name triggers associations with Ludwig Bemelmans, who may well be her stylistic muse. There's really no story here at all. On the first page we see an old man and his rambunctious granddaughter strolling the sunny sidewalks and leafy yards of a small town. The text begins with a disarmingly simple statement: "Today we keep our eyes open for tiny, perfect things." Each ensuing sentence has the same deadpan straightforwardness, peppered with a few fun, fractured rhymes. Grandpa and grandchild chronicle everything they find: leaf, snail, apple, crow, spider's web, bottle cap. The verdant flora in Kloepper's illustrations teems with hidden insects, birds and neighborhood pets. All of them reappear in a crowded two page panoply toward the end of the book, setting the stage for a delightful game between old reader and young listener: "How many perfect things can you find?" As night falls, grandfather and grandchild return to the warm, welcoming interior of a clapboard house. Here we meet the girl's parents. Mom, who is white, hugs her daughter; Dad, who is brown skinned, serves up supper; Grandpa settles into a comfy chair. The scene sends off several signals that might seem too distinctly politically correct (besides tweaking gender stereotypes the family is racially mixed), but it does so with such unforced sweetness that its familiar sentiments simply warm the heart. You can almost hear the sighs of contentment from a doting grandparent and happy child. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Rob Corddry is a comedian, former "Daily Show" correspondent and the creator of "Childrens Hospital," a subversive parody of medical television shows. He's now starring in "Ballers," an HBO comedy about N.F.L. players and their entourages. Based in Los Angeles, Mr. Corddry travels by air for work, but with his family he often prefers to go by car. "My wife and I love road trips and the kids are old enough that they're into it as much as we are; they're 8 and 10. Our plan was, once they grew out of the 'annoying on an airplane or in a car' age, we started starving them of any sort of video entertainment at home . So then when we give them iPads in the car, they're just gone." But getting the children to look up from the screens and out the window is a struggle. "We'll do the requisite family games, spying things with our little eyes. Sometimes my wife and I will sing, but my kids have reached the age where they're starting to roll their eyes. This summer, though, when we did a little New England road trip, we were heavy into the 'Hamilton' soundtrack. I would take the Aaron Burr part and my 8 year old would take the Hamilton part, so that was really fun." One regular journey is a family trip to Telluride, Colo., for Presidents' Day weekend. "I do a very small comedy festival there, but it's just an excuse to see some snow once a year," Mr. Corddry said. " My kids take ski lessons every time we go, but my wife and I, over the years, our ski time has dwindled. Now that I'm 46, I have a knowledge of my own mortality. I'm just afraid of it now; the fun does not outweigh the fear." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Finding new ways to teach the digital generation, bringing down the cost of a college education and ensuring that more students graduate are among the biggest challenges facing institutions of higher learning today and meeting those challenges has never been more crucial than it is now. That was the clear consensus among some of the nation's top educational leaders who gathered at a two day conference sponsored by The New York Times on Monday and Tuesday. The Higher Ed Leaders Forum was among a series of conferences organized by The Times throughout the year. It convened some of the nation's top educators to discuss the future of higher education. Technology, for good and bad, is now firmly entwined in all grades, while lectures are becoming a thing of the past, educators on a panel on "The Digital Future of Education" acknowledged. Students' attention wanders "in a frighteningly short time six to 10 minutes," said James E. Ryan, dean of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard. And "they think, 'If you can do it online, why do it in person?' It's a different premise than we have." That means a major "rethinking of how we spend time in the classroom," he said. "We need to engage them in something that would be difficult to do online," such as working together in person to solve problems or complete projects. One example, Mr. Ryan suggested, was to throw a question out to the class, have students respond, and then put them in groups to try to persuade one another that they are right. "It's amazing how many people care if a hole in the middle of metal expands or contracts when heated," he said. John Palfrey, head of the Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., an elite residential secondary school, said his school had successfully teamed up with the Khan Academy, a major participant in online K 12 education, to teach high level calculus. But he warned that online learning had its limitations it is highly useful in math and science, less so in history and English. "For many fields, technology doesn't have an application," he said. "In others, it has enormous importance and it would be malpractice not to use it." One of the major challenges is overcoming digital inequality, Mr. Palfrey said. The problem is not so much the devices themselves most students these days have access to computers and smartphones but the level of sophistication in using these devices to conduct research. One way to address that, he said, is to incorporate the issue into existing class curriculums, such as by examining how a Wikipedia page is created and how it differs from, say, an article in Nature or Smithsonian magazine. And teachers need to be brought up to speed on the use of technology as well, Mr. Ryan said. "Schools need to do a better job teaching teachers." Joni Finney of the University of Pennsylvania said the nation's next president "has to be serious about college affordability." Brian Ach/Getty Images for The New York Times Inequality dominated much of the discussion about the direction of higher education. "Completion is a huge national challenge," said John B. King Jr., the secretary of education. His statement was confirmed by the many hands that were raised by administrators and educators in the audience when asked how many students at their institutions take longer than two or four years to obtain a degree. Secretary King pointed out that many students take out loans and end up in debt without ever getting a degree. One way to encourage students to finish in two or four years is to offer incentives to take 15 or more credits a semester, because taking fewer means they cannot finish in four years, he said, pointing to the University of Hawaii's successful initiative "15 to Finish." Also helpful for students will be the reinstatement of summer Pell grants, federal financial aid for low income students, which President Obama ended four years ago as a wat to reduce the federal budget deficit. Legislation to reinstate those grants, so students can afford to take summer classes, is wending its way through Congress. But Pell grants, which now are a maximum of 5,815 annually, are just too low, said Harold Levy, executive director of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which offers scholarships, counseling and support services to outstanding low income students from eighth grade through graduate school. "We need to double or triple them," Mr. Levy said. "When they started in 1976, they covered most of tuition. Now they cover barely a third." Guests attending the first day of the two day Higher Ed Leaders Forum, sponsored by The New York Times. Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for The New York Times It's also time to rethink programs that benefit poor students that end in 12th grade, such as free and reduced price lunches, he said. "It's silly. These kids still need to eat," he said. Few appeared eager to discuss the ideas of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, except to disparage the now defunct Trump University. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, touched on the competing higher education proposals of Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, saying she believes that the country will end up with a hybrid of Mrs. Clinton's proposal that students be able to graduate from universities without debt from loans, and Mr. Sanders's proposal that all public colleges and universities should be tuition free. "The next president has to be serious about college affordability," said Joni Finney, director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She said that too many higher education institutions used their money to offer merit aid rather than needs based aid and that "the federal government needs to develop a public compact" by stepping in and offering substantial money for such aid, with an expectation that states will match it. The government offered such matching funds until they were phased out by the Obama administration, but even when the program existed, the amounts offered were so paltry, Professor Finney said, that states had no real incentive to match them. A psychological shift as well as a financial shift is needed, Ms. Weingarten said. "We now believe college is as vital as high school," she said, yet still accept that it is increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible to many Americans. Although these concerns have been whirling around higher education for years, the attention during the presidential campaign to skyrocketing student debt indicates that the public is becoming increasingly aware and concerned about the problem. "I think this is an inflection moment," Mr. Levy said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Jennifer and Scott Bartone were married in October after a seven year courtship. But they did not have a serious conversation about money until this week. And boy, did Ms. Bartone, a 32 year old legal recruiter, and Mr. Bartone, a 43 year old bartender, have a lot to talk about. I was in their living room, in North Bergen, N.J., to witness it all as part of a "fiscal health day" exercise, where I promised to spend several hours helping readers organize their financial life. The goal of our meeting was to try to reconcile their different money philosophies before they opened a joint bank account to handle their household expenses. They needed to figure out a way to track Mr. Bartone's earnings, most of them in cash, which they were not entirely sure of. She also wanted a better way to track their spending (and overspending). And both of them had accumulated significant credit card debt, which had to be tackled before they could begin to think about saving for a house. "Financially, we are opposites," said Mr. Bartone, who has a sleeve of colorful tattoos that climb from each wrist to his elbows. "Total, total, total opposites." Both of them were honest about their financial behavior: Mr. Bartone acknowledged that he was the spender. Ms. Bartone described herself as determined and goal oriented, and said she had saved significant sums in the past. But they now owe more than 30,000 on credit cards, a topic that Ms. Bartone said she had avoided broaching. So they had not had the tough talk about how best to stanch the bleeding and work on a joint plan to get out of debt. "I have been really cautious about not stepping on his pride," she added. But they volunteered to put it all on the table for their personal fiscal health day, the brainchild of my colleague Ron Lieber, which involves setting aside a full day to fine tune finances and make headway on the money related tasks that never seem to get done. I asked readers on the Bucks blog to submit their pleas, with the promise that I would meet with the candidate with the most compelling story. Nearly 100 readers responded, many of them needing something more like an overhaul than a financial tuneup. There were tales of paralyzing student loan and credit card debts and crushing medical bills, as well as pleas from single people and young families hoping to do better than live paycheck to paycheck. Some lost their jobs in the recession, and had gotten new, lower paying work and were trying to figure out how to live on less. I chose the Bartones in part because their financial issues are all too common. Ms. Bartone, who has curly brown hair and a contagious smile, wanted to make sure she and her husband were on the same financial page and to set priorities on their financial to do list. She also felt it would help to have a neutral third party to walk them through the process given that they are financial opposites. She calls herself neurotic and keeps spreadsheets. He puts his cash tips in a kitchen drawer. Here is what we managed to get done in one afternoon: MONEY TALK The biggest accomplishment, by far, was having the newlyweds sit down at their dining room table to actually talk about their financial life, their differing outlooks and how their views were influenced by their upbringings. This was a huge step. My suggestion, unromantic as it may sound, was to make the money talk a weekly ritual, at least until they learned more about their income and spending patterns and made progress on paying down their debts. CREDIT CARD DEBT The couple have lived together for several years, yet each still did not know exactly how much debt the other had. So Ms. Bartone created two lists of each of their credit cards, along with the outstanding balances and interest rates. She has already started to pay down the cards with the highest rates first, and she said she would help her husband set up his own plan of attack. But she had a good question: since the interest rates on Mr. Bartone's cards were more than twice as high as hers, should she focus on paying down his debt first? I told her she could not enable his behavior, particularly if he did not start to control his spending. But I also contacted an expert after I left Kristin Harad, of VitaVie Financial Planning, who had seen this situation many times before. "Creating healthy habits as a unit is paramount," she said, since they are building a future together. So yes, they should focus on paying down Mr. Bartone's debt first. But that also means Mr. Bartone needs to remove the plastic from his wallet (and frankly, the financial planner said, so does Ms. Bartone). They should use only cash and debit cards and stow the rest of the cards away. (We will talk about how they managed to accumulate their debt below.) CREDIT SCORES The couple said they did not know each other's credit scores, though the topic had come up from time to time. "She's always asking me mine," Mr. Bartone said. We decided it was a good idea to check their scores, even though it would cost them 40. After I left, the couple purchased their scores through MyFico.com, which costs 19.95 a score. Though several factors determine your FICO score, outstanding credit card debt can pull it down. Even with their debts, however, their scores weren't too bad: Mr. Bartone's was 697 and Ms. Bartone's was a respectable 732 (on a scale of 300 to 850). Ms. Bartone already pulls a free credit report from each of the three major credit agencies each year at annualcreditreport.com to be sure there are no mistakes, since she has found errors in the past. She promised to help Mr. Bartone do the same. TRACKING SPENDING Their two bedroom apartment on the first floor of a brick home is furnished practically, with bare hardwood floors and oversize beige sofas. Pictures of their "children" three cats named Bouncer, Chloe and Stormy hang on one wall, with engagement photos on another. There is not much obvious physical evidence of overspending, with the exception of the 55 inch 3 D television, which replaced a 37 inch screen that was in perfect working order. "That was a couple of years' battle," Mr. Bartone said. "He took tax refund money to buy the TV," she added, hinting that she had just given in after the television dropped to a price she found acceptable. (They received a tax refund of about 5,000: 1,500 went to pay bills and the new television, while the remaining 3,500 went into savings.) Like many people in credit card debt, Mr. Bartone does not know exactly how he got there, so we tried to do some quick forensic accounting. He said he surprised his wife with a photo booth and a magician at their wedding, and they extended their honeymoon in Playa Mujeres, Mexico, all of which probably added about 5,000 to his overall bill. Another 860 remained on a J. C. Penney card. And last year, Ms. Bartone said, he bought boxing equipment and a tension weight lifting machine to outfit the gym he had created in their garage. Then there were weeks when the bar was slow, so he pulled out the card to pay for household expenses. As for Ms. Bartone, she said her income as a legal recruiter, which is largely paid on a commission basis, fell precipitously in 2008 and 2009, mostly because she had many financial services clients and none were hiring. So she raided most of her 401(k) savings, or about 35,000, as well as another savings account. Still, she accumulated credit card debt. (She has already paid down about two thirds of her student debt. She has about 8,000 remaining.) I suggested the couple begin using a service like Mint.com, which allows users to connect all their financial accounts, and compiles and categorizes all of the transactions in one place. The big drawback is that they will have to use their debit cards for payments to be automatically transcribed; cash transactions must be entered manually, though that can be done through an app on their phones. Ms. Bartone immediately signed them up. TRACKING INCOME They both have variable incomes. Mr. Bartone has good days and bad ones behind the bar. Ms. Bartone works largely on commission, though her firm pays her a "draw," which is a small steady paycheck that is more of a loan that is deducted from her commissions. So budgeting is hard, but a big part of their problem is that they do not really know how much they collectively have to work with. Mint.com allows users to add cash income, and it will track any deposits either of them makes. But if adding Mr. Bartone's cash income manually was too much of a hurdle, I suggested he write it all down on an index card he could keep in his cash drawer. When he does make those deposits, Ms. Bartone, a natural bookkeeper, will be able to keep better tabs on how much he is bringing in through the online money program. JOINT ACCOUNTS The couple has individual accounts at three brick and mortar banks. Keeping an account at one of them was important because Mr. Bartone needed a place to physically deposit his tips without too much trouble. So I suggested staying with the bank with the lowest fees (or finding a new one entirely), and then opening another joint account at an online bank with a higher interest rate, or a bank like Ally or Capital One (formerly ING Direct) that allows customers to label different savings subaccounts. That way, they can also start building an emergency account, even before accelerating repayment of their debts. That will help them build a cushion should their income drop or an unanticipated expense occur. Their goal should be to accumulate at least three months of expenses, Ms. Harad, the financial planner, said, and work their way up to six months. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
As Americans celebrate the rollout of a coronavirus vaccine, many of the doctors and nurses first in line for inoculation say a victory lap is premature. They fear that the optimism stirred by the vaccine will overshadow a crisis that has drawn scant public attention in recent months: the alarming shortage of personal protective equipment, or P.P.E., that has led frontline medical workers to ration their use of the disposable gloves, gowns and N95 respirator masks that reduce the spread of infection. At St. Mary's Medical Center in Duluth, Minn., health care workers who treat Covid 19 patients are required to reuse their tightfitting respirator masks up to six times before throwing them away. Although soiled N95s are sterilized each day with ultraviolet light, Chris Rubesch, 32, a cardiac nurse, says the masks invariably sag after two or three shifts, leaving gaps that can allow the virus to seep through. "Our days are filled with fear and doubt," Mr. Rubesch said. "It's like driving a car without seatbelts." Many of the shortages are the result of skyrocketing global demand, but supply chain experts and health care providers say the Trump administration's largely hands off approach to the production and distribution of protective gear over the past nine months has worsened the problem. That has left states and hospitals to compete for limited supplies. Price gouging has become the norm, and scores of desperate institutions have been duped into buying counterfeit products. President Trump has made only sparing use of the Defense Production Act, a Korean War era law that allows federal agencies to coordinate the distribution of scarce goods and force companies to prioritize government orders. The D.P.A. can also provide grants to companies that need help ramping up production. "It's been an absolute free for all, and the federal government has failed to provide any meaningful leadership," said Scott LaRue, the president of ArchCare, a nonprofit operator of nursing homes in New York State. Although the vaccine will help protect health care workers from falling seriously ill with Covid 19, it is unclear how long that protection will last and whether vaccinated people will still be able to transmit the virus to others including patients of all stripes who seek their care. At Community First Medical Center in Chicago, Kathy Haff, a registered nurse, said employees there are often given N95 masks that don't fit their faces. She blamed the shortage of appropriate gear for the coronavirus deaths of three nurses at her hospital this past spring and summer. "Things are going to get worse before they get better, especially if we don't have enough P.P.E.," Ms. Haff said. "This is not a time for complacency from the federal government," said Stanley M. Bergman, the chief executive of the medical gear distributor Henry Schein. The community clinics, cancer care centers and family care practitioners his company serves, he said, are still hampered by an inability to obtain masks and gloves. "We need bold action," he said. Hospital purchasing agents say they are facing an unparalleled shortage of single use nitrile gloves one of the most important items for reducing the spread of infectious pathogens with prices soaring to 300 a case from 30 before the pandemic. Get Us PPE, a volunteer organization that connects health care facilities to available protective gear, says requests for help have more than tripled in the first half of December compared with the same period last month. Nearly 90 percent of the frontline workers the group surveyed across the country say they are repeatedly reusing masks designed for single use. The pandemic has exposed flaws in freewheeling distribution system that enables hoarding by wealthy hospital chains and a global supply network overly reliant on overseas manufacturers. This was evident in the early months of the pandemic, when transcontinental flights that ferry Asian made medical gear to the United States were largely frozen. And the crisis grew worse as China turned off the export spigot and commandeered its mask factories for domestic use. For nearly two decades, Mike Bowen has heard politicians make promises to address the nation's supply chain problems only to be disappointed. As the owner of Prestige Ameritech, an N95 mask manufacturer in Texas, Mr. Bowen has been warning federal officials about the country's reliance on overseas factories, which make more than 90 percent of the world's medical face masks. In early January, when the coronavirus first emerged in China, he wrote to the Department of Health and Human Services offering to ramp up production. The offer, he said, fell on deaf ears. His letter became public in April after Dr. Rick Bright, then the director of H.H.S.'s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, included it in a whistle blower complaint. Dr. Bright had filed the 89 page complaint with the Office of Special Counsel, not long after he was outsted from his job by the White House amid a dispute over an unproven coronavirus treatment pushed by President Trump. Alarmed by the federal government's lack of response but determined to pitch in, Mr. Bowen invested millions of dollars to build more machines and he hired 200 additional workers, allowing Prestige Ameritech to increase production to six million masks a month, up from 75,000 in March. "I did it all without a penny of government help," said Mr. Bowen, whose company is one of the country's largest domestic mask producers. By next spring, he said, his factory will be producing 10 million masks a month. Still, Mr. Bowen worries he will be saddled with unsold product. "A few months ago my phone was literally ringing all the time and I was getting thousands of emails per day," he said. "Right now my phone just isn't ringing that much." The problem, Mr. Bowen said, is that the hospitals that were once so eager to purchase his N95 masks have begun buying cheaper products from China, which have become more widely available in the months since Beijing brought its pandemic under control. Luis Arguello Jr., the vice president of DemeTech, a surgical suture manufacturer in Florida that jumped into the mask business in the spring, says he has also seen a similar slump as state officials seeking to replenish their stockpiles buy foreign made goods with federal money. "We have product and we have capacity, but they're not really buying it," said Mr. Arguello, whose company is now making 100 million masks a month. He is concerned that hospitals swayed by the comparatively low cost of Chinese masks might end up buying inferior products. Public health experts say solving this crisis will be a heavy lift for Mr. Biden, but they have been encouraged by his words, and by the experts he has appointed to his Covid 19 advisory board. One of the appointees, Dr. Bright, the federal scientist ousted from his job, has been discussing the problem with domestic manufacturers, supply chain experts and state officials. Dr. Bright is troubled by what he has heard, he said, including reports of millions of test kits gathering dust in a warehouse because of a collection swab shortage and nursing homes unable to use rapid result test machines provided by the federal government because they arrived without instructions. "There is not a lot of coordination out there right now, and lots of community confusion and chaos," he said. The incoming administration, he said, is exploring ways to take over the distribution of testing supplies and medical gear. They are also seeking to create financial incentives and "buy American" policies to boost the handful of domestic companies that make P.P.E., he said. Mr. Biden would not hesitate to embrace the Defense Production Act, Dr. Bright said, though he did not provide details on how it would be employed. Industry executives say the only way to guarantee the United States has a reliable supply of high quality masks and other medical gear is to recognize the sector as essential for national security, similar to the Pentagon's approach for ensuring companies that make fighter jet components and military uniforms remain viable even in peacetime. That could mean providing loans and subsidies to domestic companies, mandating that state and national stockpiles acquire American made medical products, and perhaps requiring hospital chains to source some of their supplies from homegrown manufacturers. "Masks are not a big spend," Mr. Bowen said. "The whole damn market is less than 150 million." Dan DeLay, who oversees procurement at CommonSpirit Health, the nation's second largest nonprofit hospital chain, said the pandemic had opened his eyes to the importance of domestic supplies. But, he said, it can be challenging to convince hospital executives to buy American made protective gear, which can cost 40 percent more than goods manufactured overseas. "If we're serious about domestic manufacturing, we're going to have to make a serious investment that is sustained over the long haul in case something like this happens again," he said. For now, the legions of exhausted health care workers are focused on getting through the current crisis. Mary Turner, president of the Minnesota Nurses Association, said the monthslong shortages had left many members feeling unappreciated and angry. Ms. Turner, who is also an I.C.U. nurse at North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale, Minn., recalled the days before the pandemic, when nurses were given an N95 mask for each patient. These days, she frequently hears from nurses forced to use the masks up to 10 times, "or until they fall off their faces," she said. Despite her optimism that a Biden administration will be different, she is weary of political leaders who lionize medical workers as frontline warriors but do little to help keep them safe, she said. "The total disregard for our safety has been unconscionable," she said. "They call us heroes but we're not being treated like soldiers at war because if we were, the federal government would make sure we have everything we need." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Emmanuelle Charpentier one of three scientists credited with starting the gene editing revolution willingly turned her life over to science. For 25 years, she was a scientific nomad, working at nine institutions in five countries, scrambling for research funds, paid so little she barely scraped by. Now, at 47, with her gene editing discovery, her life has changed. The process involves a bacterial system, Crispr/cas9, that can be used to add or delete genes in any type of cell. The discovery has sparked a scientific revolution with a seemingly endless list of applications. Dr. Charpentier would like to see it used, for instance, to remove the mutated gene in blood cells of people with sickle cell disease and to replace it with a normal gene, curing the disease. Other uses include making insect pests unable to reproduce and plants that naturally resist disease. We spoke while Dr. Charpentier was in New York to receive an honorary degree from New York University. This is an edited and condensed version of our conversation. You say you always loved science. But why such an itinerant life? It was the career I chose to have. What was important to me was to tackle different fields and see different institutions, different environments, learn different techniques, see different approaches. And in Europe, it is not easy to have a permanent position, especially when you are a foreigner in that country. I chose that science would be the main focus of my life. It is a little bit like entering a monastery. This is really the thing that drives you. You tend to be focused and obsessional you need to be a bit obsessed. Tell me about your big Crispr discoveries. What was it like for you in the moments when your students told you that crucial experiments worked? There were two moments. First, there was an experiment that was very critical. It showed that Crispr/cas9 consisted of a protein and two RNA molecules. There are different Crispr systems, and I understood right away that the system I was working on was definitely the minimal system and that it would be very attractive to harness. I was in Umea in Sweden, and my students were in Vienna. That evening, one wrote me an email. I was alone in my office, but at some point, I walked out and there was a colleague of mine there. I said, "I have very good news and I am very happy." Then I went back and spent a lot of time writing an email to my students with the series of experiments that had to be done next. The second moment was even more exciting. We did an experiment that showed Crispr/cas9 was cleaving DNA. This was really, really critical. It was the same story. My student wrote me an email. I called him right away. This time, it was again in the evening and I was in my office, but there were other people in the lab. I ran out and told the others in the lab. Then I sat down and wrote down what to do next. Is it difficult being a woman in science? It's harder for those women with a family. I am under the impression that many female scientists, four or five years after their Ph.D., give up. They have difficulty projecting that they will have a family life when they will be on the road, moving from lab to lab, for the next 10 to 15 years. I also felt that to enter the game as a woman in science, you always feel some colleagues are commenting. Let's say it is like no one will forgive you the fact that you may not fail, but you may have a phase that is a little bit down. You feel that as a woman, you have to really make sure you are on the money. Do you still do experiments? What does your work consist of? I am not doing experiments but I am running a lab, so I am very close to the projects. I also travel once or twice a week, in Germany or abroad. Right now, my work is a lot of replying to email requests, and there are a lot of documents I need to take care of a lot of paperwork. I also write articles and reviews. Tell me about the biotech companies you co founded, Crispr Therapeutics and ERS Genomics. Why two companies? I had the hope I could use Crispr for human genetic disorders. Crispr Therapeutics is working first on cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease, and certain types of eye disease. These are more amenable because they involve gene in blood cells and cells of the eye, which are more accessible for targeting. The other is ERS Genomics, which is a company that is a licensing platform to allow other companies to go ahead and have access to the intellectual property. What is your life like now? I like to start early but I also work late. I am rarely in bed before midnight. Right now, I have a very bad tendency to wake up in the middle of the night and work. Sometimes, I then go to sleep again for an hour. I don't have time to have a social life or even a cultural life. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. Before Salvador, his previous stop was Aberdeen, Scotland, where street art enlivened the walls. For the first time in six months, I would have to rely on memory alone: No cameras allowed. In my packed section of male spectators (women were at the other end of the room), there wouldn't have been enough space to lift my camera to my face even if I'd been allowed. The pattering of long cylindrical atabaque drums, a sound like rainfall with occasional syncopated claps of thunder, bounced off the room's white walls. Over a floor strewn with leaves, women dressed in billowing white dresses danced in circles while answering every sung call from the lead drummer. Occasionally, a dancer would fall into a trance, body shaking, head rolled back until another woman would approach her, rub her back and whisper words that would bring her back to this plane. Over the course of the night, I watched as practitioners of Candomble, a religion originating with the enslaved Africans brought to Brazil hundreds of years ago, paid their respects to Oxossi, one of the pantheon of orixas that form a link between this world and that of the divine. For four and a half hours, the music barely stopped. The drums and singing were still going as I walked away from the house and down an alleyway in Salvador's neighborhood of Federacao. The event was a rare opportunity for outsiders like me to witness the rites of Candomble, a faith, which like its sister religion in Cuba, Santeria, has a long history of secrecy and resistance, having survived generations of Catholic colonialists. These public ceremonies are held at the Terreiro do Gantois every month, but they are not marketed to tourists. A friend of a friend told me where to go and when. It was telling that the spectators were largely Brazilian and it was indicative of how overwhelming Salvador can appear, but how, once you find your way in, the rewards can be intoxicating. Salvador, the capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia, is home to more than 2.5 million people and is one of the largest black majority cities outside of Africa. Its streets, a result of very little city planning, loop and wind between neighborhoods spread into two main sections, the Cidade Baixa (or "low city"), which hugs the coastline, and the Cidade Alta (or "high city"), where the Portuguese set up Brazil's first capital in 1549. The city is the picture of faded colonial grandeur: colorful facades appear desaturated by time and sunshine, and tangled telephone wires run over sloping cobblestone streets. Even with the threat of occasional winter downpours, the city's beaches are packed, where vendors sell sticks of cheese that they roast over coals and sprinkle generously with oregano. For a handful of reais, someone will set you up with chairs and an umbrella and bring you cold beer and grilled seafood until you tell them to stop. But the city isn't without its problems. Brazil is consistently rated among the most unequal countries in the world, and that wealth disparity can lead some to desperation. Danger, in the form of petty theft and muggings, seemed to be on many people's minds and it was often tough to tell which warnings warranted my attention and which were clouded by paranoia, classism or racism. In Pelourinho, the historical center that is wrapping up a multi year face lift an effort that helped land it on the 52 Places to Go 2019 list police patrolled the tourist friendly stretch packed with caipirinha stands and souvenir shops. But I was repeatedly told not to venture even a few streets over. As a result, I felt the need to be more alert and cautious than I have been in other stops on this trip. I was aided, however, by a network of friends of friends who provided much needed advice on where to go (and where not to go) and by the fact that, for the first time this year, I wasn't traveling alone. My partner Maggie had flown to Salvador to meet me. Still, I felt a semblance of guilt as we took Uber after Uber, heeding advice, for example, not to walk to a restaurant 15 minutes away. I like to assume the best in people and doing just that has led to some of the most memorable travel experiences of this trip. I'm not naive: I've been in my fair share of scary situations, including many in the United States. But finding myself in a place where I felt I had to put up walls was difficult for me to adjust to quickly, and, for the first couple of days, the city felt impenetrable. When we decided to follow the music Salvador opened up. Rhythm and melody are everywhere, and I mean everywhere. In Pelourinho, bloco afros, or percussion crews that often double as community service organizations, rehearsed samba reggae rhythms in the streets. Tuesday night brought out a particularly joyous crowd for the weekly show put on by Olodum, the bloco made famous through collaborations with the likes of Michael Jackson. Roadside shops blared forro, a propulsive musical style, through overworked speakers in attempts to drown each other out. The perpetual party was even more energized than usual because the city was playing host to the Copa America, the South American soccer tournament, and the Dia de Sao Joao (Day of St. John), which passes in other parts of Brazil with barely a blink but is a major event in the northeast of the country, was approaching At the Teatro Castro Alves, the Bahia Symphony Orchestra went full Casual Friday, decked out in plaid and jeans, and churned out forro classics in celebration of Sao Joao. By the encore, everyone had left their seats and Maggie and I found ourselves twirling with strangers. I met Gabi Guedes at the Candomble ceremony we attended and he offered at least one perspective as to why music plays such a prominent role in daily life. Mr. Guedes had been described to me by the owner of Cana Brava, a small but mighty record store in Pelourinho, as having "the hands of God." A lifelong percussionist who started playing drums at age five because, in his words, he "heard the music in the wind," Mr. Guedes has had a long and successful career as a touring percussionist with practically every world famous Brazilian artist, along with international acts like Jimmy Cliff. He plays a major role in the local Candomble community and sees it as integral to all the music that pervades the city. None Stands selling beiju, a kind of crepe made from tapioca, are everywhere in Salvador and it is baffling to me that the streets of New York and Los Angeles aren't filled with hip food trucks hawking the stuff. A thin layer of tapioca is covered in a choice of fillings, savory and sweet, and folded in half like a taco. Try one filled with carne de sol, a salted and sun cured beef, for starters. Addiction guaranteed. None Salvador's beaches are world famous for a reason, but you don't get the full picture unless you visit more than one. Start with the easily accessible Praia do Porto da Barra, which faces the Bay of All Saints and is one of the best spots in the city to take in the sunset, and, just around the bend, the Praia do Farol da Barra. At both, you'll find a mix of more well to do locals and tourists. For something completely different head out to Itapua on a Sunday to see a beach packed to the brim with extended families enjoying a day off. None Everyone has an opinion on where to get the best moqueca, the signature palm oil based stew famous in Salvador. The best I had was at Casa de Tereza, a spot tucked away in a corner of Rio Vermelho. It's a modernized version of the dish to be sure, but it undeniably hits the spot. In so many parts of the world, culture rooted in black communities has at one point or another faced attempts at whitewashing: Just look at all the buttoned up white jazz ensembles that emerged across the United States in the early 20th century. It was refreshing to see so much of the Afro Brazilian culture in Salvador still intimately connected to the city's black community, despite (or perhaps because of) generations of collective trauma. In the historical center, where a slave auction once stood, today a group of black capoeira acrobats and musicians set up every day and put on a show. The food of the city, like moqueca, feels like it was lifted straight from West Africa because it was. One afternoon, before Maggie had arrived and still dazed from a redeye flight, I sat on a plastic stool on the side of the road and ordered acaraje, black eyed peas deep fried into a mash and stuffed with tiny shrimp, cashews and palm oil. Speaking in a purposefully clumsy Spanish I hoped would pass as Portuguese, I asked the woman the story of the dish. She looked at me confused and with a heavy "no duh" tone replied simply, "Africa." As powerful and integral as Salvador's African heritage is, it's almost contradictory that outsiders like me still mostly discover it through the eyes of the white people it fascinated. Until that night in the Terreiro do Gantois, everything directly related to Candomble that I encountered had been through a white lens. There were the stunning photographs by Pierre Verger, the French photographer for whom Bahia and its culture became an obsession, on display at the museum of photograph y, Espaco Pierre Verger. The novelist Jorge Amado's home has been turned into a museum and a hut tucked away in the house's garden tells the story of Mr. Amado's own respect for and fascination with the religion. The highlight of the Afro Brazilian Museum at the Federal University of Bahia is the room filled with floor to ceiling panels depicting the different orixas carved by the Argentinean born artist known as Carybe. To witness any of that culture firsthand is an immense privilege. In all its complexity, Salvador is a hard place to make connections and revel in serendipity. But the times that it does happen can rewire your brain. One night, Maggie and I headed to Rio Vermelho, the hip neighborhood of bars and restaurants on the southern edge of the peninsula. The idea was to grab a drink and a snack and get an early night. On a patio, a samba band blared. People danced as if they had the lifelong training of a professional troupe and we found ourselves in the fray. The hours passed and the band kept going. Knowing Maggie is generally early to bed, I suggested that maybe it was time to head back to the hotel. "Let's just stay a little longer," she replied. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Are You Man Enough for a Peel? To prepare for important meetings, Robert Tomson, the owner of a women's activewear company, has a secret weapon: an at home two step facial peel. "It's a perfect little pick me up," said Mr. Tomson, who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. "It takes care of ingrown hairs and gives me the instant feel of getting a facial." Mr. Tomson, who is in his 40s, first tried a peel from his wife's stash after he noticed the results on her. Now he jokingly compares himself with the Mel Gibson character in "What Women Want," the ad man awash in beauty products intended for women. Men are unlikely to request peels (they just complain about their skin), but dermatologists, facialists and skin care companies say they are selling more to men every year to treat a variety of problems. "Men feel comfortable with peels because they work fast and there are no injections, so they don't feel like they're having work done," said Francesca Fusco, a dermatologist in Manhattan, who uses them to treat brown spots (the top complaint), fine lines, wrinkles, ingrown hairs and large pores (especially on the nose) and to address skin texture. For men, there is the welcome side effect of a closer shave, she said, and skin care professionals like that the peel has become a gateway drug to other cosmetic procedures. "Men come in for that, and then maybe the next year they're asking about skin tightening," Dr. Fusco said. Men tend to stick to gentler peels, like those with glycolic acid (as opposed to, say, fraxal laser peels) because they'd rather not walk around pink and flaking. Jim Massaro, a strength and conditioning coach in Nyack, N.Y., first went to a dermatologist because he was worried about the brown spots on his face and hands. (He sheepishly admits to rarely wearing a hat.) Now, about once a season, he has a peel (usually glycolic acid or trichloracetic acid, a relative of vinegar), which he says has reduced the spots about 90 percent. Joanna Vargas, a facialist in Manhattan, has seen a steady increase in male clients, and she said she gives them peels because they're a quick way to see results and, most especially, because they make removing blemishes less painful. "Women think it's O.K. to suffer a bit for beauty, but men are a little more sensitive to extractions," she said. She avoids anything that smells like a woman's product and opts for higher concentrations of fruit acid (men's skin is thicker) mixed with paprika. "They like the heat of the paprika," Ms. Vargas said. "It's invigorating." At a three month old pop up peel bar at Butterfly Studio Salon in the Flatiron district, customers can get the dermatologist Neal Schultz's signature glycolic acid peel without trekking uptown to his office. Men make up about 20 percent of the clientele for the peel, Dr. Schultz's most popular office procedure, and the number has been rising. They tend to come for the roughly five minute, 39 treatment after work, usually at the prodding of a significant other. "It's quick and painless, so why not?" said Jaime Maser, a spokeswoman. Because men are less likely to browse for products, skin care brands rely on seduction via in store demonstrations, samples and a bit of psychology. The men's skin care company Jack Black introduced a peel in 2011, handing out foil packet samplers. They called it the DIY Power Peel. "Guys are kind of into Home Depot and Lowe's and doing it themselves," said Curran Dandurand, a founder and the company's chief executive. "We wanted that strong, powerful association." The Philosophy cosmetics company engages men, often as they wait for wives or girlfriends to finish shopping, by suggesting they try the Reveal Imaging Machines, which use ultraviolet technology to show skin damage. Some 50 cameras connected to laptops rotate among the company's five "peel bars," and the smaller "peel stations," at many of its 200 counters. "Most men lean into the machine feeling pretty confident," said Angelina Bellanti, Philosophy's retail sales manager in Chandler, Ariz., the brand's birthplace and its only stand alone store. "This is usually a wake up call." To make unisex peel products appeal to men, Philosophy skips the inspirational text it deploys on concoctions like its Hope in a Jar moisturizer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
For purposes of clarity and in keeping with this publication's style guidelines, I'm going to refer to Radha, the main character in "The Forty Year Old Version," by her first name. The Radha Blank who wrote and directed it, and who plays Radha, will get the more formal last name treatment. You could argue that it's a distinction without much of a difference, since this movie, premiering Friday on Netflix, is obviously poignantly, hilariously, disarmingly autobiographical. But Blank is equally concerned with what it means and how it feels to be an artist, which is to say a maker of metaphorical masks and literal alter egos. Radha, like her creator, is a playwright, and as such is well aware that authenticity can be both an imperative and a trap in particular for an artist of color working in a milieu (downtown, nonprofit theater) dominated by white assumptions and sensitivities. Radha seeks an alternative outlet in hip hop, adopting the moniker RadhaMUSPrime as she spits raw, funny, intricate rhymes about the realities of being a Black woman facing middle age in 21st century New York City. The stage name references the Transformers, but when she picks up the mic Radha is less transformed than revealed. She upholds a venerable rap tradition that sees keeping it real and self reinvention as the same thing. But I'm getting ahead of the story. And there is quite a lot of story here. The word that best captures "The Forty Year Old Version" might be "also." It's a romantic comedy and also a backstage farce; a classroom drama and also a grief memoir; a portrait of the artist as a no longer young woman and also a love letter to her hectic hometown. Blank enacts, on a large (and also an intimate) scale, the "yes, and" ethos of improv, expanding what might have been a modest chronicle of personal malaise and professional uncertainty into something almost epic in scope. It's a catalog of burdens and also a heroic act of unburdening. Radha, a decade after being named a promising under 30 talent, finds herself stalled. She pays the rent on her Harlem apartment with a teaching gig, managing a room full of rowdy, moody young adults (and lusting after one of them) as they fumble toward self expression. Her long suffering agent and childhood friend, Archie (Peter Kim), tries to tend the flame of Radha's career, but she doesn't always make it easy for him. Her emotional life is its own kind of mess. She ducks calls from her brother, who wants her help in sorting through their late mother's things, and finds herself perpetually short on patience, stamina and time. As a character, Radha is that rare comic creation who is both a genuinely funny person her offhand riffs and muttered asides pop like tiny firecrackers of wit and the butt of the universe's jokes. As a performer, Blank finds a perfect balance of dignity and ridiculousness, of insecurity and strut. As a writer, she possesses an enviable ear for the profane, polyphonic music of New York speech in its various idioms. At least as impressive, given that this is her first feature, is her filmmaker's eye, which captures the tumult of ordinary city life with graceful kineticism and composes it in elegant black and white images. (The director of photography is Eric Branco.) Those monochrome frames are likely to remind many viewers of other New York movies, notably Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It" and Woody Allen's "Manhattan," which feels like an especially deliberate point of reference. Radha's self conscious, self critical relationship to her own experience her prickly, charming blend of vanity, defensiveness and emotional need place her firmly in the Allen genealogy, even though she doesn't have the sense of narcissistic entitlement that generally makes his characters tick. What she has instead is an awareness by turns resigned, resentful and resilient of the cultural politics that affect her life and work. A production of her new play is quickly tangled up in white liberal bad faith, as the producer (Reed Birney) and director (Welker White) twist the story of a Harlem shopkeeper into a self serving parable of gentrification. This strand of the movie's plot includes its most painful and pointed satire, as Radha and Archie, a Korean American gay man, try to succeed without selling out, chafing against and assessing the strategic value of their status as outsiders. This is a matter of representation, and also of the demand for representativeness, for (in this case) Black stories with clear symbolic import, told in a way that will superficially challenge and ultimately flatter the sensibilities of a white audience. "The Forty Year Old Version" dramatizes this conundrum and also contends with it. Radha's choice between inauthenticity and invisibility, between becoming a symbol and being herself is mirrored in Blank's film. For Radha, hip hop offers a way to refuse the choice. "The Forty Year Old Version" wrings some fish out of water comic mileage from the incongruity of her presence on the underground rap scene. Some of that comes from her own prejudices about the genre and the young men who are its avatars and devotees. Her ears are repeatedly harassed by a radio hit with suggestive lyrics (composed by Blank) about poundcake. When she shows up to record with an inscrutable beat maker known as D (Oswin Benjamin), she at first sees a stereotype rather than a fellow artist. Later, he turns out to be something of a soul mate, a taciturn yin to her voluble yang. More than 20 years ago, Yasiin Bey, then recording as Mos Def, warned that "Hip hop will simply amaze you/craze you, pay you/do whatever you say do/but Black, it can't save you." "The Forty Year Old Version" doesn't suggest otherwise, but it does insist on the power of aesthetics, and it revels in the pleasure and struggle of creative work. This comes through in the rambunctiousness of Radha's students, in her belated appreciation of her mother's paintings, in shots of street murals and sonic scraps of freestyle rhyming in pretty much every frame of a film that, like its heroine, is grumpy, tender, wistful, funny and combative. Also beautiful. The Forty Year Old Version Rated R. Not the radio friendly version. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. Watch on Netflix. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Re "The Cult of Selfishness Is Killing America," by Paul Krugman (column, July 28): While I agree with the headline, I think the article missed the mark. This is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. It is failure of the broader society. Masks have become political theater, no different from the knocking over of statues or the destruction of private property. Neither the left nor the right is justified in its respective behaviors. We as Americans have a fundamental right to disagree. We do not have the right to trample on others' property, health, thought process or social well being. It is a failure of the society at large to peacefully and respectfully disagree. This is not a partisan issue. All of us own this, and it needs to be fixed. Paul Krugman has been warning us for years about right wing hypocrisy and the essentially anti democratic ways of modern day Republicans, and his take on a "cult of selfishness" is once again correct and urgent. Today's G.O.P. values applied to the virus response can actually be measured in tens of thousands of needless American deaths and, as Mr. Krugman has so often stated, the steady destruction of an America built for the common good. Sadly, the voting criterion for the average Republican and for the professional Republican in Congress is now too often: "What's in it for me?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
SHANGHAI Last July, China's biggest state run television broadcaster accused a luxury retailer named DaVinci Furniture of passing off low quality goods from a factory in southern China as premium imports from Italy and other foreign lands. Now, DaVinci has pointed the cameras and microphones back at the broadcaster, according to a report in current issue of the weekly magazine Caixin. The magazine is regarded as one of the most authoritative business publications in mainland China. DaVinci says that it has video and audio evidence that the big state broadcaster, China Central Television, known as CCTV, distorted and even fabricated evidence against DaVinci, and that people close to the television program might have tried to extort money from the company. The CCTV broadcast in July, on the program "Weekly Quality Report," became a public relations fiasco for DaVinci, which was founded in Singapore and had established itself in China as a leading retailer of European brands like Versace and Fendi Casa. It was also a coup for CCTV, which demonstrated that the official propaganda arm of the Communist Party could also engage in muckraking journalism using hidden cameras. But according to Caixin, Doris Phua, DaVinci's chief executive, said that after the initial television allegations against DaVinci last July, she agreed to wire about 150,000 to the Hong Kong bank account of a middleman whom she said she understood to be acting on behalf of the CCTV journalist involved in the investigative program. Ms. Phua said the payment had been intended to stop the state broadcaster from continuing to accuse DaVinci, Caixin reported. She also said that the middleman once asked her to pay the CCTV journalist directly, according to Caixin. DaVinci said it had reported the incidents to the Chinese police, CCTV executives and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, which regulates the industry. In audiotapes released on the Web site of Caixin, the person DaVinci contends is the middleman is heard discussing a payment with Ms. Phua by telephone, saying: "Originally, I told you to give it to him directly; you were not willing to do so, so it is an understood thing, right? You did it through me, then it's nothing to do with him. No one would admit this problem." Raymond Wong, executive director of DaVinci, said Tuesday that Ms. Phua had met repeatedly with the middleman and the CCTV journalist, Li Wenxue, after the initial report in July, and that she had been pressured into wiring the 150,000 under threat of more harm to the company. "They were telling us they had much more evidence, and will continue to publish and let our company collapse," Mr. Wong said. "They have the power to tell the public things, even if they are not true, and so we thought we should pay the money first." He said the company believed that the journalist, Mr. Li, was probably acting for his own gain. Shortly after the Caixin article appeared online and in print Monday, Mr. Li issued a statement calling DaVinci's allegations "slander." A spokesman for CCTV, which is based in Beijing, did not return telephone calls requesting comment Tuesday. The man identified as the middleman also could not be reached for comment. DaVinci is still feeling the effects of the broadcast and has reported a sharp decline in sales in China. The company has also faced sanctions from regulators and customs officials in Shanghai, who have accused it of falsely labeling items and selling poor quality products. The Caixin article, though, has at least temporarily shifted the public focus to the question of whether the news division of China's biggest state broadcaster might itself have been at fault. Although mainland Chinese media outlets are obliged to comply with the nation's strict censorship controls, there have been widespread reports over the years about news outlets engaging in extortion by promising to scrap negative articles in exchange for large cash payments. Many news outlets are also widely believed to accept payments in exchange for favorable coverage. In some cases, journalists in China or people pretending to be journalists have tried to extort money from coal mine bosses in exchange for not publicizing explosions at illegal mines, according to media reports and mining bosses. The payments are apparently made to cover up the cases, because the government often acts swiftly against operators of such mines. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
For the music world, outdoor festivals are a big business that is only getting bigger. And the world's largest concert conglomerate is getting a bigger piece of it. On Tuesday, Live Nation Entertainment announced that it had taken a controlling stake in the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, an annual four day event that draws some 80,000 fans to rural Tennessee to hear jam bands, dance D.J.s and marquee pop stars. The deal is the latest in a wave of consolidation in the concert business, as corporate players like Live Nation, AEG Live and SFX Entertainment have all moved aggressively to swoop up major outdoor events, leaving a shrinking number of independent operators. Last year, Live Nation paid an estimated 125 million for a 51 percent stake in C3 Presents, the company behind Lollapalooza in Chicago and Austin City Limits in Texas; in 2013, Live Nation bought a controlling stake in Insomniac, the promoter behind the dance music festival Electric Daisy Carnival, for an unspecified sum. Altogether, Live Nation controls more than 60 festivals around the world. "We continue to expand the industry's most unparalleled and scalable festival platform, all while driving strong revenue and growth for Live Nation on a global basis," Michael Rapino, Live Nation's chief executive, said in a statement. "Bonnaroo is another crown jewel in this festival channel strategy." Neither the price of the transaction, nor the size of Live Nation's stake in Bonnaroo, was disclosed. Once a marginal part of the music scene in North America, festivals now play an increasingly central role in the business. The biggest events, like Coachella and Electric Daisy Carnival, have built powerful identities, luring huge crowds as well as sponsorship dollars. And for the promoters who not only sell tickets but also control a range of other sales, like food and V.I.P. packages that can include amenities such as special viewing areas and luxury tents, they can be highly profitable. "Festivals are the one area of the business where there is consistent growth," said Steve Martin, a longtime talent agent now with the APA agency in New York. "Profit margins on a good festival are vastly better than a regular night at Jones Beach." Bonnaroo, held on more than 700 acres of farmland about 60 miles south of Nashville, started in 2002 and has become one of the country's premier festivals, with a hug your neighbors culture and an immersive environment that includes its own post office and newspaper. This year's event, to be held June 11 14, will feature Billy Joel, Mumford Sons, Kendrick Lamar, My Morning Jacket, Alabama Shakes and Deadmau5. 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. In 2012, the last year Bonnaroo's results were reported to Pollstar, an industry trade publication, the festival had nearly 19 million in ticket sales over four days. By comparison, Coachella had 47 million over six days that year, and in 2014 reached 78.3 million. In a joint announcement by Live Nation and Bonnaroo's founding promoters, Superfly and AC Entertainment, the deal was described as a partnership that gives the founders a certain amount of autonomy. Among the other investors in Bonnaroo are Coran Capshaw, a powerful artist manager behind acts like the Dave Matthews Band. "Through this partnership with Live Nation, we're even more empowered to enhance the festival while preserving the integrity of the event that we've thoughtfully built over the past 14 years," Rick Farman, a co founder of Superfly, said in a statement. For most big festival operators, rapid expansion has been critical to build a network for booking talent and making sponsorship deals. Much of that expansion has happened overseas, as promoters like C3 and Ultra, an independent dance festival company, have looked to South America, Australia and Europe. So far the Bonnaroo promoters have a mixed record when it comes to expansion. Vegoose, presented by Superfly and AC Entertainment in Las Vegas, ran only from 2005 to 2007. But for Outside Lands, an annual event in San Francisco, Superfly has teamed with Another Planet, a California promoter, and others. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Depending on who you are, looking at the BMW i3 electric car will make you either love it or hate it. Its peculiar proportions and appearance, as with other odd shape cars, seem to be polarizing. Something about it recalls the basic look of a Honda Element, but it is uniquely BMW and its fuel economy is much more impressive. But whether you love or hate its looks, it's difficult not to enjoy driving the i3. A tall, boxy, snub nose body; tall, narrow tires; and a short wheelbase do not seem to be good ingredients for an ultimate driving machine, but all that custom electric only vehicle engineering seems to have paid off in the final product. First off, it's a good idea to point out how other than it is all electric the i3 is different from most cars on the road. Unlike the majority of the vehicles in the urban and suburban commuters' fleet, the i3 features body on frame construction. An aluminum frame carries the electric motor, batteries and suspension components, and a bubblelike carbon fiber body shell bolts on top. The result is a car that is light and small, but has a lot of interior room and a low center of gravity. "It's a city car, so it needs to be agile, easier to park," he said in an interview. "The interior space is supposed to be a relaxing place where you can stretch out." So aside from building the car with a cavernous interior, BMW outfitted it with materials Mr. Walter said were meant to soothe: seats clad in fine leather, sustainably harvested bamboo across the dashboard and recycled bottles on the door panels. The owner of an i3 will have reminders that the car is or is supposed to be, at any rate less taxing to the environment than the 20 mile per gallon S.U.V. he or she has been driving for the last 10 years. But that soothing feeling can disappear simply by mashing the accelerator pedal to the floor. On a test drive from downtown Los Angeles to the Griffith Observatory in the low mountains to the north, the i3 proved an agile performer, with quick acceleration and lightning fast steering. At 80 miles per hour on the freeway a speed the i3 reached and maintained smoothly and without struggle the car held its tack firmly, slicing easily into the next lane with a slight flick of the steering wheel. Mr. Walter said the steering was meant to be quick so that motorists driving in a city's tight quarters could get into and out of tight spots easily. Accordingly, the i3's turning circle feels tiny. It is one of those cars that can make U turns on the most impossibly narrow roads. On the narrow, twisty road up to the observatory, the steering system came in handy for flinging the car around turns, while its low center of gravity kept all four wheels planted on the road. The car was able to do that despite its tall, relatively skinny tires, made that way to reduce rolling resistance. One of the more interesting features on the i3 is its single pedal driving, which will throw off many drivers (this one included) at first. As with many electric and hybrid cars, the i3 uses electricity generation to slow the car during deceleration. The resistance from power generation slows the car when the driver lets off the accelerator pedal, so there is no coasting. It's not uncommon for a beginner to stop 30 feet short of a traffic light, but once you get used to the way it works, using one pedal to slow the car comes in handy, particularly on roads with tight curves. There are still a brake pedal and conventional brakes, but you do not have to use them nearly as often as in a typical car. According to BMW, the i3 will shoot from 0 to 60 miles per hour in about 7 seconds (an impressive feat considering that the 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS 454, one of the more formidable entries of the muscle car era, posted a 0 to 60 time of 6.1 seconds). Mr. Walter said it would go from 0 to 35 in 3.5 to 4 seconds, or "the acceleration you need to go from one traffic light to the next one." BMW says that the i3's electric motor produces 170 horsepower and 184 pound feet of torque, and that the car's battery will charge fully in about three hours. Its range is 80 to 100 miles, depending on driving style, and an optional gasoline powered range extender a 650 cubic centimeter 2 cylinder BMW motorcycle engine that includes a two gallon gasoline tank mounted in the front of the car adds another 100 miles or so to that, Mr. Walter said. The small engine is tucked next to the electric motor at the rear of the car. In short, the i3 seems like a perfectly capable car to use in most urban and suburban areas, particularly those that already have charging infrastructure. With the range extender, even trips into the hinterland will probably go down without incident, and the car's huge display screens and easy to use navigation system will help make sure a driver does not get too lost while looking for a place to plug in when the battery is low. The only thing it seems to need to make it a more fun, practical city car is a front bench seat option, so a driver can slide, '50s movie style, across the front seat and out the passenger side door when parallel parked on a busy street. The i3 is expected to show up in North American dealerships sometime next year, for a starting price of 41,350. That price does not factor in the destination charge, and it also leaves out E.V. tax credits, which vary from state to state. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
MIAMI Dale Girard was wearing long underwear covered in what he said looked like "ectoplasmic slime from 'Ghostbusters'" but was actually freezing cold fire gel. Costumed as "The Executioner," he was in a holding area underneath a massive metal stage as it was being rolled onto the field at what was then known as Joe Robbie Stadium. There was one thing on his mind, he recalled this week: "I'm about to be set on fire, and I'm three feet from Patti LaBelle." Welcome to the 1995 Super Bowl halftime show. This Sunday, about 100 million people in the United States will watch as the pop stars Jennifer Lopez and Shakira perform during halftime of the Super Bowl. They were recruited in part by Jay Z and his company, Roc Nation, which signed a deal with the N.F.L. last year to become the league's "live music entertainment strategist." For the N.F.L., far more important than the quality of the show is the absence of controversy. Last year several artists, including Rihanna, reportedly declined to perform during the Super Bowl halftime out of concern for Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who has not played in the N.F.L. since the 2016 season, when he knelt during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality. Once the league landed its performers, Maroon 5 and Travis Scott, it opted to cancel the traditional news conference ahead of the show, pre empting questions about the decision. Super Bowl halftime shows have not always been delicate issues. And they have not always been just concerts. They used to have speaking roles and narrative arcs, more akin to theater. They used to be campy. They used to make no sense. That changed along with the N.F.L. itself, as the league's airtime ballooned in value and made the Super Bowl show one of the most coveted gigs in entertainment. The marching bands of early shows gave way to Up With People an educational organization and eventually to theatrical spectacles and concerts from megastars. Perhaps the most bizarre halftime show in Super Bowl history happened 25 years ago, here in South Florida, the fifth and last time the San Francisco 49ers won the Lombardi Trophy. Over a frenetic 11 minutes, the odd show played out. A costumed temple worker brought the N.F.L.'s Lombardi Trophy to the king, and LaBelle, dressed as a temple goddess, belted out the opening lines to "Release Yourself." But alas, this gang's ambitions of stealing the trophy would be foiled by Indiana Jones and his sidekick, Marion Ravenwood, who both sky dived onto the field. 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. They battled the temple guards including Girard's "Executioner," who was set on fire with a torch were threatened with snakes, and ultimately made their way into Club Disney, where Tony Bennett, the jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and the Miami Sound Machine performed. After Marion and Indiana recaptured the trophy, they held it aloft as LaBelle, Bennett and the supporting cast of dozens for some reason broke into a rendition of "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" an Elton John song from the movie "The Lion King." A quarter century later, it makes even less sense. The show was the brainchild of a Disney marketing executive. One month after the Super Bowl, Disneyland would open a ride called The Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye. And as part of an estimated 20 million marketing budget for a ride that required years of construction and reorienting Disneyland, why not put it front and center on television's biggest stage? A few months before the Super Bowl, a stuntman named Bryan Friday was performing at the Six Flags amusement park in Dallas. He heard there were auditions for a new Indiana Jones stunt show at Disney World in Orlando so he piled into a car with four friends for the long drive to Florida. The audition went well, he said in an interview last week, but he was told that he was too tall for the permanent role of Indiana Jones at the park. But did he want to come back the next day, when Disney was holding auditions for a Super Bowl show? And that is how Friday came to perform as an iconic movie character in front of tens of millions of people. Not that he was paid handsomely. "I want to say it was 3,000, and that was for three weeks," he said. "But you figure, 1995? It was definitely worth doing." He also didn't get to watch the Super Bowl. The cast members thought they might get to see the second half, but they were shepherded onto buses and driven out of the stadium. "They took us to Don Shula's restaurant," Friday said, referring to the longtime Miami Dolphins coach, "and we ate and drank there and had a really nice party at their expense." There was an unexpected perk, however. "I met Patti, and she was actually kind of flirty with me," Friday said. "I probably was, if he was cute," LaBelle said in a telephone interview. Though the television viewers probably didn't notice, there were a handful of minor problems with the show. In a full dress rehearsal the day before, the flares worn by sky divers singed the field. The N.F.L. forbade the performers to wear them during the actual halftime, so that part of the broadcast came from video shot during the rehearsal. The metal stage also had numerous holes, to make it lighter and improve traction, which LaBelle says wreaked havoc on her high heeled strutting. And, of course, the snakes. Indiana Jones is famously afraid of snakes, so what would an Indiana Jones show be without them? Two purple turbaned snake charmers performed in the show with 12 foot reptiles Storm and Slither. There was only one problem. "They scared the absolute bejeebers out of Patti," said Ron Magill, the longtime communications director of the Miami Dade Zoological Park and Gardens who is a South Florida celebrity. Magill was one of the snake charmers. "It was Patti LaBelle and Tony Bennett, and Patti just screeched, 'Oh no, child. Oh no, child.'" "I am petrified of snakes," LaBelle said, remembering her response: "You all gotta do something different right now. You gotta move those snakes." In many ways, the halftime show has become simpler. "It was like a Broadway play back in the day," LaBelle said. "Today you go out there, you have your three or four song set, you do it and you go home." But the current versions are far more lavish than the shows at the first 20 or so Super Bowls. Michael Eisner, Disney's chief executive from 1984 to 2005, pegged the evolution to the spectacular opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. "John Williams created what is now the music that introduces everything in the Olympics," he said. "That was really a monumental moment." As the 1995 show and several subsequent Super Bowl halftimes have proven, those moments are not easily manufactured, no matter how many snakes are involved. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Light and tight, "On Turpentine Lane" is constructed with an almost scary mastery. Not a single thread dangles, not a single character is left without a place in Faith's world. The story folds out and back in as neatly as an origami flower, and Faith recounts it all with a raised eyebrow and plenty of cheek. "I tried to be circumspect," she says of a nouveau riche broker of customized Chagall copies. "I might have let slip some of the adjectives I meant to stifle, such as 'domineering,' 'insensitive' and 'hypersexual,' but I was careful to balance those with compliments about her decor." Even Faith's macabre discoveries don't flatten the fizz; instead, they become some of the book's most delicious elements. Similarly, Lipman seems to have the most fun writing ridiculous characters, which may be why the novel's worst people are so enjoyable. Stuart's semiliterate hippie musings are pure perfection, as are Faith's various nemeses in love, life and homeownership, who pop up with welcome regularity. The novel's few difficulties are in some ways the flip side of its pleasures. True, every character finds a home when the music stops, but for one or two of the less developed characters that neatness can feel contrived. For me, the larger question involves one of Faith's most significant relationships, which provides the central plotline. This romance never seems anything but likely, yet the prospect also never feels as tantalizing as it should. In some ways, this easy progression is refreshingly adult, a neat bourbon swapped for the usual rom com grenadine. Things fall into place, and we're never truly meant to fear that they won't. And yet, while Faith's growing contentment provides a calm base for the chaos playing out around her, I found myself wishing for a little more tension. It would have helped if the object of Faith's affection had received the kind of physicality and vividness Lipman lavishes so wonderfully on her more difficult characters. Of course, maybe Faith as the eye of the hurricane is exactly as intended. Her romance may not pulse with nervous sexual possibility, but then again, that tension usually comes from wondering who can be known, who can be trusted, and Lipman takes another tack here. The reader knows right away who's trustworthy in "the murder site" Faith calls home, and so does Faith. The novel's pleasurable uncertainties and there are many come from everything that whirls around that stable center. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Neil Armstrong: First Man on the Moon, and Its First Great Geologist Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Sign up for the weekly Science Times email. At the start of a talk at the Lunar and Planetary Science conference in Houston in March, Harrison Schmitt, one of the two astronauts who walked on the moon during Apollo 17, the last lunar mission, put up a picture of Neil Armstrong. "Let's pay tribute to this man," said Dr. Schmitt, the only professionally trained scientist among the Apollo astronauts. A ballroom packed with scientists erupted in exuberant applause. "Neil turned out to be the best field geologist on the moon," he added. "Until Apollo 17, of course. In 20 minutes or so, he collected a fantastic suite of samples." Before Apollo 11, even simple questions about the moon confounded scientists. For instance, how old was it, anyway? Once they started examining the 50 pounds of rocks and soil brought back by Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the answer quickly became clear: very, very old. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Dr. Schmitt said that had the Apollo program stopped then, with no additional landings, including his own, those first lunar samples would have been enough to forever reshape knowledge of the solar system. Armstrong collected two types of rocks: basalts, which are hardened pieces of lava, and breccias, which are fragments of older rocks fused together. The landing site was within a flat lava plain, which was chosen because it appeared to be a safe place to touch down, not because it looked scientifically intriguing. Nonetheless, the basalts rewrote solar system history. The relative amounts of certain long lived radioactive elements within the rocks gave a range of ancient ages, unchanged since they cooled and solidified out of lava between 3.6 billion and 3.9 billion years ago. That is far older than almost all of the rocks on Earth, which have been churned, compressed, melted and resolidified over the eons. In fact, the moon rocks were nearly as old as the Earth a nd the solar system, which formed 4.5 billion years ago. " Right there, we knew the moon was going to be, at least in part, the record for the early history of the Earth ," Dr. Schmitt said. "That was not clearly understood before Apollo 11. But it is clearly understood afterwards and now. " Another major discovery lay within soil that Armstrong had picked up and dropped into the collection box, because it was not yet packed full . The soil contained bits of a rock known as anorthosite. Just as ice floats on water, anorthosite, made of the mineral plagioclase, floats on magma. Within half a year after Apollo 11, two teams of scientists, one at the University of Chicago, the other at Harvard, independently used the presence of anorthosite to come up with what was then a radical notion: The moon, the scientists proposed, had at one point melted into a global ocean of magma. Buoyant anorthosite would then have risen to the surface while heavier materials, like iron, would have sunk to the core. Speculation of a lunar magma ocean, in turn, led to the hypothesis that the moon formed out of the debris from a collision between Earth and a Mars size body. "The concept, the phrase magma ocean, didn't exist until Apollo 11," Dr. Schmitt said in an interview. "That's the way science moves." Armstrong's soil also contained hydrogen, helium, nitrogen and carbon, much of which had been deposited by the solar wind, the stream of high speed particles continually flying outward from the sun. A light version of helium, helium 3, is of particular future interest as fuel for fusion reactors, which could generate bountiful, nearly clean energy by combining atoms. "It told us there were going to be tremendous amounts of potential resources for use in space, and possibly even on Earth," Dr. Schmitt said. Another far reaching scientific legacy of the moon rocks gathered by the Apollo astronauts is how scientists used them to calibrate a technique of using craters to determine the ages of places in the solar system. The concept is simple. Over time, impacts of asteroids, big and small, pocked the surface of the moon and elsewhere. But a layer of ice or lava can erase the craters and reset the clock. Thus, a heavily cratered surface is older than a smooth one. But while planetary scientists could see which places were older and which were younger, they did not know exactly how old any of them were. With the dating of the rocks taken from Apollo 11's landing site, scientists then knew the age of that patch of the lunar surface. Rocks from the other five Apollo landings set the ages of those corresponding regions, which then correlated with the different numbers of craters in each place. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Hall, a professor of classics at King's College London and the author of "Introducing the Ancient Greeks," is not the first contemporary theorist to claim that philosophy particularly ancient Greek philosophy can change, and even save, a life. Twenty five years ago the French classicist Pierre Hadot argued that the Greeks never intended the love of wisdom to end up as the most arcane of intellectual disciplines. Instead, according to Hadot, "philosophy appears as a remedy for human worries, anguish and misery." In the last decade, the ancient Stoicism articulated by the Roman ruler Marcus Aurelius in the second century has re emerged as self help for the smart set a way of regulating our passions, doing our duties and resigning ourselves to the things we cannot change. The Stoics are wildly popular among readers (predominantly men) who want to train their stiff upper lips. Silicon Valley moguls, N.F.L. stars and Olympians flock to "Stoicon," an annual conference of modern day Stoics who spend a week attempting to "think like a Roman emperor." There are probably worse ways to spend one's time, but according to Hall's Aristotle there are also far better ways to approach life. In the end, according to Hall, Stoicism "is a rather pessimistic and grim affair. ... It recommends the resigned acceptance of misfortune rather than active, practical engagement with the fascinating fine grained business of everyday living and problem solving." In short, an Aristotelian life is not solely about bearing the inevitable, but about identifying the particular talents or natural proclivities that each of us has, and then pursuing a path, consistently and deliberately, over the course of a life. This will make one deeply happy. In Hall's assessment, "Stoicism does not encourage the same joie de vivre as Aristotle's ethics." As one who is perhaps not overly predisposed to dwell on the joys of life, I was skeptical. Cold showers have their virtues: They prepare an adult for the unavoidable tortures and small indignities of the day. But Hall's treatment of Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" reveals that true virtue, the inner core of human happiness, is a matter of living in accord with "the ancient Greek proverb inscribed on the Delphic Temple, 'nothing in excess.'" According to Aristotle, the first Western theorist to develop a moral system tethered to this principle, "character traits and emotions are almost all acceptable indeed necessary to a healthy psyche provided that they are present in the right amounts. He calls the right amount the 'middle' or 'mean' amount, the meson." Hall suggests that her adult reader aim for this Golden Mean by first asking a number of diagnostic questions: What sort of moral being am I right now? Am I prone to envy or revenge, rage or lust, overblown confidence or secretive cowardice? Do I find acute pleasure in precisely the things that stand in the way of my long term happiness? If you are unable or unwilling to answer these thorny questions, Hall writes, "you might as well stop reading here." Hall excels when she is at her most frank. For Aristotle, there is latitude when it comes to which endeavors merit our pursuit, but authenticity and self knowledge are nonnegotiable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Tajrish Square in Tehran. Cybersecurity experts say they worry that the American departure from the nuclear deal with Iran could increase Iranian hackers' attacks on United States targets. Inside the Pentagon's cyberwarfare unit, analysts have been closely monitoring internet traffic out of Iran. Six thousand miles away, Israel's elite cyber intelligence Unit 8200 has been running war games in anticipation of Iranian strikes on Israeli computer networks. Government and private sector cybersecurity experts in the United States and Israel worry that President Trump's decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal this week will lead to a surge in retaliatory cyberattacks from Iran. Within 24 hours of Mr. Trump announcing on Tuesday that the United States would leave the deal, researchers at CrowdStrike, the security firm, warned customers that they had seen a "notable" shift in Iranian cyberactivity. Iranian hackers were sending emails containing malware to diplomats who work in the foreign affairs offices of United States allies and employees at telecommunications companies, trying to infiltrate their computer systems. And security researchers discovered that Iranian hackers, most likely in an intelligence gathering effort, have been quietly examining internet addresses that belong to United States military installations in Europe over the last two months. Those researchers would not publicly discuss the activity because they were still in the process of warning the targets. Iranian hackers have in recent years demonstrated that they have an increasingly sophisticated arsenal of digital weapons. But since the nuclear deal was signed three years ago, Iran's Middle Eastern neighbors have usually been those hackers' targets. Now cybersecurity experts believe that list could quickly expand to include businesses and infrastructure in the United States. Those concerns grew more urgent on Thursday after Israeli fighter jets fired on Iranian military targets in Syria, in response to what Israel said was a rocket attack launched by Iranian forces. "Until today, Iran was constrained," said James A. Lewis, a former government official and cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "They weren't going to do anything to justify breaking the deal. With the deal's collapse, they will inevitably ask, 'What do we have to lose?'" Mr. Lewis's warnings were echoed by nearly a dozen current and former American and Israeli intelligence officials and private security contractors contacted by The New York Times this week. Over the years, state backed Iranian hackers have showed both the proclivity and skill to pull off destructive cyberattacks. After the United States tightened economic sanctions against Tehran in 2012, state supported Iranian hackers retaliated by disabling the websites of nearly every major American bank with what is known as a denial of service attack. The attacks prevented hundreds of thousands of customers from accessing their bank accounts. Those assaults, on about 46 American banks, detailed in a 2016 federal indictment, were directly attributed to Iranian hackers. Iranian hackers were also behind a digital assault on the Las Vegas Sands Corporation in 2014 that brought casino operations to a halt, wiped Sands data and replaced its websites with a photograph of Sheldon G. Adelson, the Sands' majority owner, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, according to the indictment. Security researchers believe the attacks were retaliation for public comments Mr. Adelson made in a 2013 speech, when he said that the United States should strike Iran with nuclear weapons to force Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. But after the nuclear deal with Iran was signed, Iran's destructive attacks on American targets cooled off. Instead, its hackers resorted to traditional cyberespionage and intellectual property theft, according to another indictment of Iranian hackers filed in March, and reserved their louder, more disruptive attacks for targets in the Middle East. With the nuclear deal at risk, American and Israeli officials now worry Iran's hackers could retaliate with cyberattacks of a more vicious kind. The Israeli war game sessions have included what could happen if the United States and Russia were drawn into cyberwarfare between Israel and Iran, according to a person familiar with the sessions but who was not allowed to speak about them publicly. The United States already has a blueprint for what it might expect in Saudi Arabia, where there is growing evidence that Iranian hackers may have been responsible for a string of attacks on several Saudi petrochemical plants over the past 16 months. The attacks crashed computers and wiped data off machines at the National Industrialization Company, one of the few privately owned Saudi petrochemical companies, and Sadara Chemical Company, a joint venture of Saudi Aramco and Dow Chemical. The hackers used malware nearly identical to the bugs used in a similar 2012 Iranian assault on Aramco that replaced data on Aramco computers with an image of a burning American flag. Private security researchers and American officials suspect that Iranian hackers also played a role in a more serious attack at another, yet to be identified Saudi petrochemical plant in August that compromised the facility's operational safety controls. Analysts believe it was the first step in an attack designed to sabotage the firm's operations and trigger a chemical explosion. The tools used were so sophisticated that some forensic analysts and American officials suspect Russia may have provided assistance. The August 2017 assault in Saudi Arabia marked a dangerous escalation that put officials and critical infrastructure operators in the United States on high alert. The industrial safety controls that hackers were able to compromise in Saudi Arabia are used in tens of thousands of other installations, including nuclear plants, oil and gas pipelines and water treatment facilities across the United States. American officials fear that the Saudi Arabia attack, which was ultimately thwarted by an error in the attackers' computer code, was a training drill for a future attack on infrastructure or an energy company in the United States. In 2013, Iranian hackers infiltrated computers that controlled the Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye Brook, N.Y. They managed to gain access to computers that control the dam's water levels and flow gates, according to the 2016 indictment. But any attempt to manipulate the dam's locks and gates would have failed because the dam was under repair and offline. American officials believed the true target of the cyberassault was the Arthur R. Bowman Dam, a much larger dam on the Crooked River in Oregon. The dam hack was one of about a dozen security incidents at American critical infrastructure providers, including some power grid operators, that officials in the United States attributed to Iranian hackers. The 2016 indictments named individual Iranian hackers, but there have not been any arrests. Officials believe there is little deterrent to stop them from trying again, especially with the United States leaving the nuclear deal and American businesses, including those in the financial services and the energy sectors, likely to bear the brunt of any attacks. "Given the history of Iranian cyberactivity in response to geopolitical issues, the American energy sector has every reason to expect some type of response from Iran," Mr. Olsen said. General Alexander, who now serves as chief executive of IronNet, also warned that although the United States has some of the most sophisticated offensive cyber capabilities in the world, the country is at a tremendous disadvantage when it comes to playing defense. "We're probably one of the most automated technology countries in the world," he said. "We are an innovation nation and our technology is at the forefront of that innovation. We could have a very good offense, but so do they. And unfortunately, we have more to lose." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The television industry is focusing a great deal of attention on millennials these days. Billions of dollars are in play, along with the reputations of industry executives who view this vast, diverse generation generally defined as those born between 1977 and 1995 as the hot consumers of choice in a bewilderingly changing business. It is as if the companies are throwing a bunch of money at the millennial wall, hoping some of it sticks. Verizon Communications and Hearst have teamed up to produce two new multiplatform online video channels, one aimed at "millennials from the heartland," whoever those are. Conde Nast Entertainment has come up with a demographic called the "cultured millennial," whose members apparently prefer artisanal beer to kegs. Unveiling its new streaming service, HBONow, HBO said it would be a heat seeking "millennial missile." But what, as Freud might have asked if he lived in America in 2016, do millennials want? Does anyone really know? Is it fair to lump together a group of people ages 21 to 39? I was curious. I decided to conduct my own nonscientific study of millennials and their attitudes toward television. It is not hard to find a millennial; there are 79.8 million in the United States. At the Brooklyn Roasting Company's branch in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, for instance, I found one right there at the counter, arguing with the barista about what "refill" means. He was not free to talk, but Rob Szypko, 25, who was looking up stuff on his laptop, had a moment. He took off his headphones. "I struggle with the term millennial," he said. "Maybe this is a very millennial thing to say, but I don't feel I'm of the same mind as everyone else just because I happened to be born in the same 15 year life span." He had a point. Older people tend to lump millennials together as basically a huge, mysterious group of entitled young people on their phones all the time. They're fun to mock, just as the baby boomers and Generation X were mocked back in the day. "I think there's something wrong with this generation," says Jack Donaghy, the "30 Rock" character played by Alec Baldwin, when a millennial job applicant announces that he has to leave for his "ironic kickball league" and that he is "not interested in this position unless I'm going to be constantly praised." Unlike that person, or, say, the constantly plugged in, constantly high, constantly hapless millennial protagonists of "Broad City," Mr. Szypko (pronounced ZIP co) already has a respectable job he works in city government. But he does not own a television set. He mostly watches shows on Netflix and Hulu. He won't commit to a series unless he is sure it's going to be good. He does not like to be told what he likes. "One of the things people chafe at is the sense that other people are curating things for them," he said, speaking of his age group. "If Netflix says, 'Hey, Rob, we think you might like this title,' and it's too on the nose, it removes part of the fun of discovering an experience for yourself. If I don't have to scroll past the second line of my Netflix page to find what I want, something is wrong." Leaving Mr. Szypko to his devices, I set out for Williamsburg, another millennial heavy section of Brooklyn. I found two Austin McAllister and Ryley Pogensky, both 26 on a street corner, trying to attract the attention of their friend Danielle, who was crossing the street 20 feet away with her headphones on. She did not respond, even when all three of us shouted, so they sent her a text message to alert her to our location. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. "People have a far reaching idea of who millennials are, but I don't know what that word means," Ms. McAllister, a singer, said. Mr. Pogensky, who identified himself as an editor at a "millennial media company," was dismissive of TV programs attempting to portray his generation. ("Girls," for instance.) "They try far too hard that notion of the over millenniated hipster," he said. "They use, like, slang that no one uses, that your dad would use," he said. "She's using that sarcastically, rather than in reality," Mr. Pogensky said. They have televisions, but they do not have cable. ("No one has cable," said Danielle, 34, who had finally arrived on the corner and who did not give her last name.) They have had a variety of jobs (Danielle: nurse, maid, sex worker.) Their tastes are almost aggressively idiosyncratic. Ms. McAllister, for instance, said she had watched virtually every episode of "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit," because of her love for Mariska Hargitay. Mr. Pogensky said he watched the film "Mean Girls" "like once a week." "I'll binge watch 'House of Cards,' and then I'll watch 'Daria,'" he said, referring to the classic turn of the millennium animated series about an acerbic high school student. The three of them left for brunch it was 3 p.m. but it got me thinking about the great challenge for media companies: How do you appeal to people with such splintered, diffuse tastes, who crave novelty and individual experiences and who do not want to be part of a herd? "They're the most diverse generation of adults in U.S. history, so that's a big issue for the entertainment industry," said Jason Dorsey, whose job as chief strategy officer and millennials researcher at the Center of Generational Kinetics in Austin, Tex., sounds as if it could have its own ironic television show. "How do we program for such a diverse generation that doesn't carry checkbooks, a lot of whom don't carry cash, most of whom are delaying marriage and kids and have a high expectation of diversity and more college debt?" Indeed. "Nothing gets all of them, but there are themes that do seem to matter," said Tom Ascheim, president of Freeform, as the recently renamed ABC Family is now called. While Freeform's target audience is mostly millennials, the channel is specifically geared to an age group people from 18 to 34 rather than a generation, on the grounds that what a generation wants changes as that generation becomes older. "What unites our shows is that they center around young people in an adult world that revolves around them and that they have the power to shape," Mr. Ascheim said. That sounds right: Millennials do want to shape their world. "How long is this going to take?" said Stephane Rochefort, 33, who works in sales and was walking along the street when I asked him about his viewing habits. He had to go. "I don't watch any TV, but I sometimes watch sports on the Internet," he said, over his shoulder. Three millennials in the finance industry whom I met in Lower Manhattan were just as difficult to pin down. Morgan Kiss, 23, said her favorite show was "Chopped," because she is learning how to cook. Her roommate likes a program about real estate developers flipping houses. Natalie Urban, 22, likes "Game of Thrones." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The pin tailed whydah is a spectacular little bird. It's also a parasite. And if you live near Los Angeles or some other parts of the United States, it could soon become a regular visitor to your backyard, says Mark Hauber, an evolutionary ecologist at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In a study published Wednesday in The Condor: Ornithological Applications, Dr. Hauber and his colleagues used computer modeling to predict where you might spot them next. Their models suggest that potential sites for invasion include California's Orange County, southern Texas, southern Florida, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and many of the Hawaiian Islands. If the birds are introduced in great numbers to these areas, they could have a damaging effect on the birds you know and love. During the mating season, a male pin tailed whydah grows a plume of black feathers twice as long as his body. To impress a potential partner, he hovers in front her like a helicopter, flapping his wings and dangling his long tail feathers like luxurious locks of hair. He sings. After mating, the male leaves to breed more, and the female lays eggs in another bird's nest. The pin tailed whydah is one out of only about 100 parasites of the 10,000 bird species in the world. In its native range in sub Saharan and South Africa, it uses more than 20 other birds as foster mothers to care for its offspring. "These birds don't look like a virus or bacteria, but they have the same impact," Dr. Hauber said. Brood parasites compete with their hosts. And the host birds must work harder to support themselves, their own young and the offspring they are tricked into fostering. Over time, it takes a toll on the hosts. Another brood parasite, the brown headed cowbird, does the same thing to about 200 hosts. Some people think that its parasitism, along with habitat loss, contributed to the decline of the endangered Kirtland's Warbler in the Midwest, and other rare species. The cowbird expanded its territory naturally, but people introduced the whydah. Over the last century, it has made its way to North America and islands of the Caribbean via the pet trade. The whydah has now successfully colonized Puerto Rico and is starting to make a home in California, and Dr. Hauber is worried. Hosts that evolved with the whydah on the African continent some of which can be found here, too have learned to recognize foster babies by the spots inside their mouths, what's known as gape pattern recognition, and they feed them less than their own babies. But the whydah has also proven itself capable of switching hosts when its tricks don't work. "It's basically like a virus jumping from a pig to a human or a bat to some domestic animal," he said. The virus would spread, potentially wreaking havoc on local ecosystems. After arriving in Puerto Rico in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, they learned to fool Orange cheeked Waxbills. And in California, scaly breasted munias have been found feeding young whydahs. Dr. Hauber is worried they could target native birds that never learned to identify whydah babies by their spots. "They'll try breeding and mating and sneaking their eggs into another bird's nest, and at some point they might succeed," he said. People buy pin tailed whydahs as pets. But males and females paired together make poor feathered companions. When not breeding the male loses his elaborate tail feathers. And when his displays are not well received, he will pick on the female. Bored or frustrated pet owners or shopkeepers who can't sell their expensive pets may release them into the wild, Dr. Hauber said. Or they may escape while being transported. If enough birds are released, if the climate is right, and, more important, if a proper host is around, the whydah can persist. But the whydah is not a good flyer, does not migrate and may not be good at crossing bodies of water. Therefore, Dr. Hauber thinks any invasion will remain somewhat localized. "A bird released in San Francisco is not going to fly to L.A.," he said. If you spot a whydah in your backyard, don't try to capture or harm it, Dr. Hauber said. He recommends contacting the Fish and Wildlife Service or local Audubon Society who are better equipped to respond to this potential threat. And if you have a whydah you're trying to get rid of, "Releasing them into the backyard is probably not the best way to do it," Dr. Hauber said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Credit...Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times NASHVILLE In more than four decades of making music, Lucinda Williams has learned to roll with sizable disruptions. Seated in front of a laptop for an early April video interview in a conspicuously empty room, she quickly dispensed with her latest two challenges: a March tornado that left its mark on her roof, and the self quarantine that's kept her and her husband and manager, Tom Overby, inside the sparsely furnished house they moved into shortly before the storm. "Now when we get food delivered from Uber Eats, I have to send a message to the driver and say, 'It's kind of hard to see because we lost our front porch light,'" she said nonchalantly. Williams's specific variety of renown, on the other hand, is intact. At 67, she's long been held up as an archetype in a lineage of rocking, literary Americana songwriters. The roots scene reveres its elders, but rather than settle into life as a dignified link to the past, she prefers to remain a bit more restless, letting age and experience toughen rather than temper how she expresses herself. Written and recorded before she could know what crises this year would hold, Williams's 14th studio album, "Good Souls Better Angels," due Friday, contains her most apocalyptic visions to date. It's the work of an idealist horrified by the monstrous power that bullies wield in the world, and its impact is heightened by its delivery system: The album is dominated by fuzztone electric guitars, propulsive blues progressions and direct lyrics delivered in Joan Jett sneers and Patti Smith chants. "You can't rule me," she announces plainly on the opening track. Williams explained that she was sold on "the garage rock sound, you know bass, guitar, drums." She added, "It just sounded good without other things." Early on, Williams made moves that performers often reserve for reflective periods later in their careers. On her acoustic 1979 debut, "Ramblin'," recorded in her mid 20s, she faithfully rendered the hillbilly, Delta blues and gospel standards she'd absorbed in her youth. Her subsequent albums were sprinkled with vignettes that conveyed melancholy attachment to the people and places of her past. Her efforts culminated in the 1998 breakthrough, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," an immaculately vivid album made through a strenuous process of trial and error involving numerous studios, producers and players. The LP was canonized as a contemporary roots classic, even as press coverage made its creator out to be intractable. "I feel like if she was a man, it would have been portrayed so differently," said Katie Crutchfield, who records as Waxahatchee. "She's like a role model to me. Hearing that story, it gives me this confidence that if I'm ever in that situation where I'm making a record and it doesn't feel right, then I can switch gears and not worry about all the outside pressures." Williams had artistic inclinations that she hadn't yet cultivated. She'd always been able to summon force see her 1988 track "Changed the Locks," in which she sang, in searing fashion, about willing her surroundings to transform themselves to conceal her from an ex. But the ferocity she began to artfully summon in her 50s and 60s felt edgier than the scrappiness typically associated with country rock. Overby pointed out in a separate conversation that, at a 2016 show, Thurston Moore strapped on his guitar and joined Williams for a performance of her sprawling, raw track "Unsuffer Me." Williams and Overby produced Jesse Malin's shaggy roots rock album "Sunset Kids," which was released last year. And when Cary Ann Hearst, half of the duo Shovels Rope and herself one of the grittier singers on the Americana circuit, opened a string of European dates for Williams, she took in the headlining set each night. "I've never seen a grown ass woman rock that hard," she said. "Particularly a woman performer who is not 20." The politics that Williams leans into on her new album didn't evolve overnight. She was thrown out of her New Orleans high school for distributing Students for a Democratic Society anti racism leaflets and refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance to protest the Vietnam War. Her father, the poet Miller Williams, then teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans, enlisted an A.C.L.U. lawyer on his daughter's behalf, but she couldn't resist leaving class for what proved to be the final time for a demonstration in front of the school. "It became very black and white, like you're either for it or against it," she said. "The kids who weren't down joining it were spitting on the protesters from the windows of the classrooms. I was like, 'I can't not go down there!'" Back then, Williams would sometimes sing Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" at antiwar marches. Much later, after the United States led invasion of Iraq following 9/11, she added the song to her set lists, because she hadn't yet written a protest anthem of her own. "I always found it really challenging to write those kinds of songs without sounding too 'Kumbaya' ish," she said. By the early 2010s, folky, empathetic originals in a '60s folk rock vein, like "Soldier's Song" and "West Memphis," were making their way onto her albums. "People not getting what they deserve, you know, a roof over their heads and medical care, that's been an issue here forever," she said. "There's always been something to rebel against and be concerned about." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
LONDON A teenager who is accused of throwing a 6 year old boy off a balcony at the Tate Modern museum in London appeared in court on Tuesday on a charge of attempted murder. In a five minute hearing, a magistrate confirmed the teenager's identity and heard a short statement from prosecutors before referring the case to a higher court, where the accused is scheduled to appear on Thursday. The teenager, who is 17, cannot be identified because of British laws that restrict reporting in cases involving people younger than 18. Sian Morgan, a prosecutor, told the court on Tuesday that the 6 year old boy was with his parents on the museum's 10th floor viewing platform when he was picked up "in one swift movement" and thrown over the side. He fell around 100 feet, and landed on the fifth floor roof of the museum, she said. Ms. Morgan said the boy had suffered "very serious injuries," including fractures to the spine, legs and arms, and "a deep bleed to the brain." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
AUGUSTA, Ga. It was almost a given that Bryson DeChambeau would do something memorable at this year's Masters tournament. It did not figure to be a booming tee shot so high in the Georgia sky that it landed clear out of sight. Just as amazing: That swing, and the resulting penalty for a lost ball, could cause DeChambeau, the pretournament favorite, to miss the cut and be sent home from the 2020 Masters on Saturday. The missing tee shot on Friday triggered a three hole meltdown of sorts for DeChambeau as he batted his ball around the course and dropped precipitously down the leaderboard. It has been that kind of Masters so far for DeChambeau, who arrived at the Augusta National Golf Club awash in a wave of publicity for his prodigiously long drives. But in his first two rounds, keeping his shots straight has been a major issue. Consider an exchange Friday evening between a reporter and Jon Rahm, one of DeChambeau's playing partners the past two days: Reporter: "Were you involved in the search for Bryson's ball?" More on that later. The far fetched drama for DeChambeau began on the third hole. At that point, DeChambeau, who on Friday finished one over par for the tournament with six holes left to play in a truncated second round, was enjoying something of a tournament revival. After a bumpy start early Thursday, he had rallied to get to two under par, which left him lurking behind the quartet now leading the event: Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Abraham Ancer and Cameron Smith, who were all at nine under after finishing their second rounds. The 350 yard, par 4 third hole was supposed to be easy prey. On Friday, DeChambeau smashed a shot that landed about 20 yards short of its green and just left of the fairway in some high rough. The ball disappeared in the grass. On multiple, slow motion televisions replays, the white orb appeared to have descended roughly 330 yards from the tee and vanished as it contacted the grass. In golf, that is known as a plugged ball and it is often visible only if someone is standing directly over it and staring straight down, but since the 2020 Masters is being conducted without spectators, there were no fans surrounding the hole to guide DeChambeau to the proper location. Delayed to November because of the coronavirus pandemic, the tournament is being played on grounds that have some spots with grass standing several inches high and that on Friday remained soaked by small puddles from a rainstorm the day before. DeChambeau tramped the grass in the general vicinity of where his ball seemed to have landed. Rahm and their fellow playing partner, Louis Oosthuizen, joined him, as did their caddies and tournament officials. At one point, an assemblage of 14 men were stomping the grass in search of DeChambeau's Bridgestone golf ball. Based on television replays, it appeared they were looking about 10 yards to the left of where they should have been searching. A rules official began timing the episode because after three minutes any ball that cannot be found is considered lost, which draws a one stroke penalty and requires the player to go back and replay his shot from the spot from where he hit it. That is counted as the player's third stroke on the hole, which is enough to make any golfer feel sick. An increasingly distressed DeChambeau plaintively asked the rules official Ken Tackett as the clock was ticking down: "So you're saying if we can't find it it's a lost ball?" Time was up, and the ball was officially lost. DeChambeau climbed into a golf cart and hit another ball from the third tee. It struck almost the same spot as the previous ball, except it bounced and remained visible. But when DeChambeau returned to the scene, it was obvious the entire incident had shaken him. He sent a short chip, his fourth shot on the hole, flying 20 yards over the green. His pitch from there skipped another 15 feet past the hole. Two putts later, DeChambeau had a confounding, disheartening triple bogey. "I know it affected him a little bit, because he didn't play his best golf after that," Rahm said. Rahm was being empathetic, and diplomatic. Looking frazzled, DeChambeau hooked his drive on the fourth hole, then mis hit an iron from the rough "Oh, I popped it up," he yelped after the swing. He started playing considerably faster and hardly sized up some shots before hitting them, as if he had an Uber car waiting to remove him from the scene. It was an unconscious reaction any everyday duffer would have recognized the kind of thing golfers do when their minds are overcome by a mix of exasperation and embarrassment. Consecutive bogeys ensued on the fourth and fifth holes. Now DeChambeau, who declined to come to the clubhouse interview area late Friday, was four over par for his round. Rahm, who was also part of the search party that on Thursday had helped DeChambeau find a ball he blasted into the azalea bushes behind the 13th green, understood what his playing partner was going through. "It's unfortunate that the rules of golf don't let you kind of figure out it's somewhere there and keep playing because he had to re tee," Rahm said. "I mean, when you have Bryson hitting it as hard as he hits it and it's kind of hooking with not much spin into a soft area, we were all confident it was pretty buried and it was going to be hard to find." To his credit, DeChambeau did mount a comeback. He birdied three of the next nine holes after his debacle on the third, but missed a four foot eagle putt on the eighth hole after a superb drive and a precise approach shot. He is not out of the tournament yet, although finding a way to contend will take a spectacular rally on his final six holes to finish the second round on Saturday. Still, all in all, it was not the way DeChambeau wanted to make his mark on golf's most meaningful event. There was one last indignity to cap DeChambeau's day: Rahm said the missing golf ball had been found in the high grass near the third green minutes after the search for it was abandoned. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Q. I'm deleting Yahoo and my Flickr account. In regards to Flickr, I still have most of the original images on my computer, but need to retrieve a handful of photos I can't find on my hard drive. Can I download the Flickr copies in the original resolution, or will they be in a lower image quality? A. You can download a copy of each photo at the original resolution in which it was uploaded. Log into your Flickr account and click on a photo in your collection to view it. In the lower right corner of the viewer window, click the Download arrow icon. In the window that pops up, choose Original to grab the image in its highest resolution. Flickr creates several resolutions of uploaded images for sharing purposes. These include small squares and thumbnail previews, as well as medium and large sizes for friends and family who might want to download copies of the pictures but do not need the bigger original resolution files. You can see the range of sizes available for a picture when you click the Download arrow and choose View All Sizes from the menu. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A. I was starting to build out our first grow and it was incredibly expensive. I thought, "This can't be the best way." We were growing indoors because marijuana had been illegal, so that's how it had been done. I started thinking about greenhouses and had an epiphany. I felt like Michelangelo when he saw David in the marble and just had to let him out. Are you planning beyond Colorado? I'm raising 100 million for a national weedery development fund to build our first five. We are looking at Nevada and Massachusetts and then California and Washington. I'm sure after we build ours someone else will build one too, so we're working on them very actively. Why do you want people to visit? People are so curious. When they visit our indoor grows they say, "Wow, I had no idea the plant was so beautiful," or "It smells so good in here." I can spend all day talking about marijuana. But it would mean more if you have 30 seconds of a personal experience where you see it, you smell it. Can this help people overcome preconceptions about marijuana? I have a lot of reasons to want to demystify marijuana. It's good business, but there are social justice reasons. We incarcerate more people in the United States than any country in the history of the world; we've turned it into a for profit industry where people of color are doing time for drugs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It should come as little surprise that the gig economy, that great upheaver of the service industry, has come for horticulture too. Still, it's sort of funny to hear someone say it out loud. "Freelance mossing is a real job," Michelle Inciarrano told me inside her plant studio, Twig, where she and her co owner Katy Maslow hire many such mossers from Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Washington to supply good product. The varieties they source are soft and springy and come in vibrant shades of green that can't be found at most home improvement stores. High quality moss, they say, can be the difference between a sad desk terrarium (we've all seen 'em) and a lush, lively little world. Twig occupies an unassuming space in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, on a block with a restaurant supply store, an auto body shop and a Russian bathhouse. Inside, the shelves are lined with assembled terrariums, potted plants and empty glass orbs waiting to become miniature ecosystems. No one really needs to be taught how to make a terrarium. Technically, all it requires is some rocks, dirt, moss and a container, preferably one made of glass. But the women behind Twig avid crafters whose first business venture involved "subversive greeting cards" elevate the hobby to a meditative art. Each Twig workshop offers a brief crash course in the life of the humble moss. You'll learn that these organisms come in more than 12,500 varieties, and that none of them have roots. Unlike (most) humans, moss thrives atop its own decaying matter and is largely self sustaining. It prefers a warm, humid environment, which a covered terrarium can maintain with a spritz of water every now and then. Plant care doesn't get much more hands off. But the assembly of a terrarium is an intimate exercise in plant cultivation and aesthetics. On a recent Sunday afternoon, tables at Twig were set with brown paper bags and bowls containing our tools: glass jars with loose lids, giant tweezers, polished river rocks, peat moss soil, sphagnum, sand and crushed sea glass. It turns out that moss demands an entrance all its own. We prepared our jars, filling them about a fifth of the way with rocks, then packed a handful of hay into a dense layer atop them. Over that we sprinkled a cupful of potting soil. Then it was time for three types of moss (mood, sheet and palm) to be carried out of the fridge as if on a palanquin and for the real landscaping to begin. In her memoir "Life in the Garden," Penelope Lively distinguishes the "real garden writer" from the "garden commentator." The writer, she said, is unafraid of dirtying her hands in service of beauty. I grabbed a fistful of moss and ran my fingers over its furry surface, felt the cool of its soil in the center of my palm. Making a terrarium isn't as involved as, say, mulching a rose bush, but it satisfies the gardener's urge to cultivate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"Is this seat taken?" I heard a student ask another student, who was holding a seat in the front row of a class I was about to teach. "Yep that one's taken!" He laughingly gestured to his lap. "Want to sit here instead?" he asked softly. She paused and looked at him silently for a split second before walking away and taking a seat at the back of the class. Not wanting to start the first day of the course on a negative note, I said nothing. I should have. Many microaggressions are gaffes where the perpetrator is making a misguided attempt at humor. I vividly recall the time I was in training many years ago, and I told my supervising physician about my pregnancy. He responded good naturedly: "Pregnant? How did you even find the time? We must not be working you hard enough!" I remember mustering a feeble smile, not quite knowing how to respond to his misplaced humor. A few years ago, I started the Stanford Project Respect initiative to study health care communication and foster mutually respectful interactions between health professionals and their patients. Through this project, my colleagues and I recently conducted research in four medical schools across the country, the results of which were just published in the journal Academic Medicine. Using professional actors, we reenacted 34 real life microaggression scenarios paired with comparable "nontoxic" versions of these situations, to serve as controls. The 68 videos were shown in random order to medical faculty members from the four universities, who were asked to rate each scenario on the frequency of occurrence in real life. We identified six types of workplace microaggressions reported by women: encountering sexism, sexually inappropriate comments, pregnancy and child care bias, having their abilities underestimated; being relegated to mundane tasks, and feeling excluded and marginalized. Women uniformly reported that workplace microaggressions were quite common and identified 21 of the scenarios as frequent. We were surprised to find that the men working in the same venues seemed to be blind to microaggressions, calling them uncommon. As a part of Project Respect, we are collecting real stories from health care personnel across the nation. A successful surgeon recounted her experiences being interviewed by a "manel" a panel of men "I was asked how I will be able to effectively communicate in the operating room as a woman and how I plan to navigate that challenge." Another woman asked her boss about being appointed to a new position and he responded "Well, I'm just deciding, you know, if I'd like to give you an engagement ring or not. You have to convince me." A physician from a minority background seemed resigned to her fate: "We are the 'pink ghetto' getting less pay, less resources." In one appalling incident, a lecturer chose a female student to be the podium model for his ultrasound skills demonstration class and referred to a specific angle of the instrument probe as a "money shot." Identifying microaggressions and calling out the aggressor in the moment can be quite daunting as these moments are fleeting, the comments unwitting and outwardly innocuous. But upon closer inspection, we see that microaggressions are rooted in our unconscious biases that are fed by the gender and racial tensions that seethe under the surface and bubble up when we least expect them. It's important to note that both and men and women can be microaggressors and that men are not exempt from being the recipients of microaggressions. I have witnessed such events in the workplace, especially in fields where men are the minority, like gynecology and obstetrics. What can we do to change the culture? The first step toward solving any problem is diagnosing it. If you are the perpetrator and you catch yourself in the act, apologize immediately and sincerely for your misstep. If you are the recipient, speak up respectfully and promptly in the moment: "Can you please explain what you mean by that comment?" or "That statement is bothersome I am sure you did not intend it to be that way I just want you to know how it looked from my point of view." Bystanders can play a powerful role in mitigating microaggressions by becoming active "upstanders" and speaking up in the moment to support the recipients and to defuse the situation. During a large gynecology seminar, a professor known for his pointed questions asked a female student "Can you tell me how much estrogen you have inside you when you are ovulating?" While the mortified student sat in stunned silence, a male classmate stepped in deftly. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
It was misty early in the evening on Saturday, and the lawn of Nelson A. Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City was damp as 100 volunteers danced en masse for 11 seconds. This extremely brief burst of activity was the finale of Twyla Tharp's 1970 work "The One Hundreds." The duration of the preceding part of the piece could be measured in minutes: about 20. That was less time than I spent waiting for a subway train on my way home afterward. But "The One Hundreds" was well worth the trip. First, the numbers. The work, performed without music, is built from 100 movement sequences, each 11 seconds long. These 100 phrases are first executed, one after the other, by two dancers (Ramona Kelly and Daniel Baker on Saturday) in loose unison. Then five dancers, starting at the same moment, each perform 20 of the phrases, thereby giving us all 100 in one fifth the time. Finally, each phrase is represented by one volunteer, who learned it earlier in the day, so we see all 100 in one 11 second flash. This corporeal math has some interest. The discreteness of each sequence, formally delineated by the first two dancers, is already blurred during the five dancer phase. The work's end, even if you know how it is ordered, looks like chaos. Ms. Tharp has spoken about this as a process of deterioration, and also as democracy. Yet, especially in this performance, presented as part of the River to River Festival as Ms. Tharp celebrates her 50th year as a choreographer, what matters more is the content. The movement borrows from rock 'n' roll dances of the '50s and '60s, tap dancing, cheerleading, baseball, tennis, boxing, basketball and golf, just as it helps itself to snatches of everyday behavior and various kinds of ballet, quoting wittily. It's as if Ms. Tharp were cruising the supermarket of American dance, grabbing items from every aisle and filling up her cart. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Diontae Johnson began the Steelers' comeback against the Colts with a diving catch for a 39 yard touchdown. Ben Roethlisberger added two more scoring passes in the fourth quarter to help Pittsburgh secure a 28 24 win. None There is some fight left in the Steelers. Pittsburgh came into the day on a three game losing streak, and appeared to be headed toward a fourth consecutive loss when it fell behind the Indianapolis Colts, 24 7, in the third quarter. From that point, the game belonged entirely to the Steelers. Ben Roethlisberger started the comeback in the third quarter by throwing a deep 39 yard touchdown pass to Diontae Johnson. He then added a 5 yard touchdown to Eric Ebron and a 25 yarder to JuJu Smith Schuster in the fourth, as Pittsburgh's defense shut down Indianapolis. The Colts' final four drives resulted in two punts, an interception and a turnover on downs. Pittsburgh, which clinched the A.F.C. North title with Sunday's win, is currently a half game ahead of Buffalo for the No. 2 seed in the A.F.C. playoffs. Indianapolis, which fell to 10 5, has been one of the N.F.L.'s better teams this season but is currently not in line for a playoff spot because the Baltimore Ravens and the Cleveland Browns own tiebreakers over the Colts. None The Chiefs love to play with fire. A win was hardly necessary for Kansas City, as the Chiefs were virtually assured of the No. 1 seed in the A.F.C. playoffs even if they lost their final two games. But watching Kansas City barely hang on for a 17 14 win at home over the Atlanta Falcons reinforced the idea that Patrick Mahomes's team tends to play down to its competition. A sloppy effort against Atlanta had the Chiefs losing, 14 10, with just over two minutes remaining, and would have headed to overtime if not for an unlikely miss from Atlanta's Younghoe Koo, as the Pro Bowl kicker's attempt at a game tying 39 yard field goal sailed wide right. Regardless of how close they cut it, the Chiefs improved to 14 1 and clinched the A.F.C.'s only first round bye. Perhaps by the divisional round of the playoffs, the Chiefs will decide that it is important to try for the entire game. None The Ravens control their playoff destiny. Baltimore dropped to 6 5 with a loss to Pittsburgh on Dec. 2 the team's fourth defeat in five games and seemed like a long shot to make the playoffs. A soft schedule, and a return to form by quarterback Lamar Jackson, has righted the ship and thanks to a 27 13 victory over the Giants, the Ravens can now secure the team's third straight trip to the playoffs simply by beating the Cincinnati Bengals next week. Baltimore's four game win streak has included only one victory over a team with a winning record, but an average of 37 points a game is impressive no matter the opponent. The Ravens, who thrive when chewing up huge chunks of yardage on the ground, have averaged 233.3 yards rushing a game in the four game win streak after having been held to fewer than 200 in nine of their first 11 games. Chiefs 17, Falcons 14 It was a quiet day by Kansas City's lofty standards, and the team's running game looked far less effective without the injured Clyde Edwards Helaire, but the Chiefs did have the silver lining of Travis Kelce reaching 1,416 yards receiving for the season, breaking the single season record for a tight end set by George Kittle in 2018. Kelce has one more game to add to his total, provided Kansas City doesn't rest him in next week's irrelevant game against the Los Angeles Chargers. Packers 40, Titans 14 Green's Bay's comfort in the snow was evident as the Packers made quick work of Tennessee. Aaron Rodgers had the same number of touchdowns (four) as he had incompletions, A.J. Dillon and Aaron Jones rushed for a combined 218 yards and Davante Adams scored three times. Steelers 28, Colts 24 At halftime, Indianapolis was romping to an easy win. The second half was another story, as the Steelers stopped trying to dink and dunk themselves to victory and had their aggressiveness pay off in spades, with the team earning its first A.F.C. North title in three seasons. Seahawks 20, Rams 9 It was hardly an explosive effort, but Seattle clinched the N.F.C. West title, kept alive a small chance at a first round bye, and continued to show dramatic improvement on the defensive side of the ball. Despite its loss, Los Angeles controls its own fate next week. A win would give the Rams a wild card spot in the playoffs. Ravens 27, Giants 13 The Giants' third straight loss was largely a result of Baltimore's offense overwhelming them, but the Ravens' defense had a fine day as well, making Daniel Jones's life miserable with six sacks and 11 quarterback hits. Jets 23, Browns 16 It took a total team effort for Cleveland to lose, with Baker Mayfield completing just 28 of his 53 passes, the Browns' celebrated running game averaging just 2.5 yards a carry and the team's defense making the Jets' Sam Darnold look downright competent. A win would have clinched a playoff spot for Cleveland, but the Browns will now go into Week 17 fighting with Miami, Baltimore and Indianapolis for the three wild card spots in the A.F.C. Bears 41, Jaguars 17 It is not like Jacksonville had any motivation to win quite the opposite but watching Chicago put up 28 consecutive points to start the second half couldn't have been very fun. Chicago's win, combined with Arizona's loss on Saturday, has the Bears in line for the N.F.C.'s final wild card spot. That sets up an entertaining Week 17 in which Chicago closes its season with a home game against the top seeded Green Bay Packers, and the Cardinals have a tough matchup on the road against the Los Angeles Rams. Bengals 37, Texans 31 Brandon Allen threw for 371 yards and two touchdowns and Samaje Perine ran for 95 yards and two scores, powering Cincinnati to its first road win since Sept. 30, 2018. Houston dropped to 4 11, having absolutely wasted a season of quarterback Deshaun Watson's prime. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Over the last 15 years, as cruise ship hordes and souvenir schlock have overrun the village of Oia on Santorini's northern tip, Atlantis Books has become an oasis of authenticity. On a Greek Island, a Bookstore With Some Mythology of Its Own SANTORINI, Greece On a wall above rare first editions, old maps of this volcanic island and a stained linen lampshade, a painted timeline traces the evolution of Atlantis Books from a wine drenched notion in 2002 into one of Europe's most enchanting bookstores. A terrace overlooks the Aegean Sea. Bookshelves swing back to reveal hidden, lofted beds where the shop's workers can sleep. But the writer in residence program was also a Greek myth. "The idea was not to come here to write the great American novel, it was to sling books," Craig Walzer, the store's owner, said. "You are here for the bookshop first." Over the last 15 years, as cruise ship hordes and souvenir schlock have overrun the village of Oia on Santorini's northern tip, Atlantis Books has become an unlikely oasis of authenticity and cultural sanity. Yellowed pages and shelves fashioned from driftwood give off a musty smell. The soundtrack on a recent visit shifted from Beck to the BBC's commentary of the Wimbledon men's final. Customers sidestepped the shop dog, Billie Holiday, to peruse just so offerings ("Plato: Cool as a Cucumber") from the store's own press of classics. "Have you read 'Rilke in Paris'?" Sarah Nasar, a veteran of Shakespeare and Company, asked one customer as Mr. Walzer steered a skeptical boy away from "The Little Gray Donkey" to a children's version of the "Iliad." "Boys being boys," Mr. Walzer described the plot of Homer's epic. Bibliophiles around them leafed through a lovingly curated collection of fiction, poetry, essays and rarities. A first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," minus one of the rare book world's most sought after dust jackets, was on sale for 6,000 euros beneath a label reading "I must have you," a nod to the novel's opening epigraph. Behind the register sat a 1935 edition of James Joyce's "Ulysses," illustrated by Matisse, and an exceedingly rare first edition of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol." It was listed at 17,500 euros. Expensive rare books sell well here, Mr. Walzer explained, partly because the island has become a popular destination for "people who have way too much money," but also because honeymooners and other visitors often want to take home something more meaningful and less common than a diamond bracelet, say. Books offer tourists "something tangible and not digital," he added; they're not just another posed photo in front of the sunset. Right on cue a customer interrupted to ask whether pictures were allowed in the store: "It's so cool." Almost despite itself, the shop has become a tourist attraction. That is especially strange for Mr. Walzer, who for years called the cozy place home. He alternated beds. One is hidden behind shelves now displaying copies of Homer's "Odyssey" and the Harry Potter series in ancient Greek. The other one ("the master bedroom," Mr. Walzer called it) sits above the German section. That spot is now occupied by one of the store's employees, Katie Berry, a 22 year old graduate in English from Harvard ("Surprise," she deadpanned) who was spending her third summer sleeping amid the stacks. The shop is run by him, a 38 year old Memphis native who keeps barbecue sauce in the back fridge and who affectionately uses the words "chief" and "dude," not by a twee old British man whom many tourists ask to meet. Atlantis is not the oldest and smallest bookstore in Europe. "Harry Potter" was not set here. Ernest Hemingway did not write here. And yet, the story of Atlantis is not without its mythic elements. It has a muse inspired (O.K., booze inspired) origin. Mr. Walzer and a friend came up with the idea during a visit to the island during a break from Oxford in 2002. It has a great journey: a van ride with fellow founders from Britain to Santorini, during which Mr. Walzer read John Steinbeck's "East of Eden," the tattered copy of which is kept in the back like a talisman near a signed, plastic wrapped galley of "Infinite Jest," by David Foster Wallace. It has no shortage of twists and turns. An original location below the ramparts of a 13th century castle built by Venetians closed, and the founders were forced to rebuild the shop in a ruined captain's house. Love interests came and went. ("Love Stories, for Suckers" reads the label in the store's romance section.) One of Mr. Walzer's drinking buddies, the author Jeremy Mercer, injected a dose of deus ex machina in 2005, when The Guardian asked him for his favorite bookstores and he topped his list with Atlantis. "We had no business being on that list," Mr. Walzer said. "Now I think we do." And Mr. Walzer himself stands in as the tortured hero. He left the island in 2005, enrolled and dropped out of Harvard's Kennedy School and its law school, then "went underground essentially" in New Orleans. He found his way, and returned to Santorini and his bookshop for good in 2011. Survival led to success, but as the shop flourished the real estate fates descended. In 2015, landlords threatened eviction unless Mr. Walzer came up with a million euros to counter an apparent offer on the building. But since international coverage at the time raised the alarm that Atlantis could be lost again, Mr. Walzer hasn't heard back from the dreaded landlords. He said he is still operating without a lease. "One day the bell will toll," he said. "But not today, because it's Sunday afternoon." And it was a lovely one. As he sat on the store's terrace, with the shimmering Aegean filling the Caldera on one side and tourists flowing like lava down Oia's narrow sunset boulevard on the other, Mr. Walzer rolled a cigarette. He looked with contentment at the sea and the people scanning a blue shelf of used books. "The challenge used to be selling books. Now it's finding the books to sell," he said. "We figured it out." Moments later, his phone buzzed. Billie Holiday had vomited by the B's in the fiction section. He excused himself to help clean up. It took a lot, he noted, "to make this mythical place." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
PARIS Theater rarely pauses to mull over its past. What happens when the curtain rises next is the main preoccupation of stage artists and critics. Keeping up with the huge number of productions on offer is usually a Sisyphean task, leaving little room for historical perspective. Yet with theaters currently shut around the world, time has opened up to look back. As luck would have it, the National Audiovisual Institute, which archives all French television and radio programs, began a new streaming platform, Madelen, shortly after a stay at home order was issued here in March. Madelen gives subscribers a chance to watch theatrical productions that were taped for television from the 1950s on. While the platform is clunky to use, with no advanced search options and a limited catalog for now, it offers glimpses of theater's early popularity on the small screen. And a sample of recordings from exactly half a century ago provides a window onto an onstage world that unfolded at a much slower pace than plays today. As a snapshot of theater in France at the time, Madelen's selection is skewed. It leans heavily toward what is known as boulevard theater, a mix of popular comedy, vaudeville and melodrama. Some of the most influential French directors of the 1960s and '70s, from Roger Planchon to Ariane Mnouchkine and Patrice Chereau, as well as the overtly political stage works that echoed the events of 1968, don't get a look in. (Programming decisions played a part, but some artists simply didn't believe in TV as a medium for their work.) Still, it is a welcome opportunity to re evaluate what has long been considered a lesser genre. Theater history tends to erase boulevard productions in favor of more innovative and radical forms, yet most of the televised plays on Madelen averaged 15 million to 20 million viewers in 1970. They were shown on a popular program, "At the Theater Tonight" ("Au Theatre Ce Soir"), that introduced the Paris theater scene to the rest of the French population. Under the guise of entertainment, they also spun well crafted stories out of the era's social mores. What do they have in common? An obsession with death, crime and extramarital affairs, for starters. The stakes of domestic entanglements, all staged with conventional, realistic sets and costumes, are certainly heightened: Even the comedies are rife with casual death threats. Andre Roussin's "The Husband, the Wife and Death" ("Le Mari, la Femme et la Mort"), for instance, features a woman looking to hasten her husband's death so she can inherit a secret fortune. In Jean Guitton's "I Loved Too Much" ("Je L'Aimais Trop"), which takes place in a florist's store, an unfaithful lover is shot not once but twice. At one point, the store's oldest employee sighs, "No one believes in love, everyone uses it, and here is the result: a game of massacre." Cheating is portrayed as both a cardinal sin and a commonplace occurrence, for men and women alike. Robert Lamoureux's "Here Comes the Brunette" ("La Brune Que Voila") alternately lionizes and punishes its hero, Germain, played by Lamoureux, for having four lovers at once. When the husband of one woman threatens to kill him if he doesn't leave his wife alone, yet declines to give his name, Germain is forced to break up with all four women just in case: a comeuppance that leads him back to monogamy. These 1970 productions reinforce how deeply social context shapes our storytelling expectations. "The Old Fogies Are Doing Fine" ("Les Croulants Se Portent Bien"), a 1959 comedy by Roger Ferdinand, initially sets up a generational clash when a divorced father in his late 40s introduces his 20 year old fiancee to his adult children, who are the same age. To get back at him, they decide to find older partners, too: The daughter (played by a future star, Nathalie Baye) seduces her father's best friend, while the son goes out with a 40 year old widow. I naively expected the characters to conclude that the age difference was too great for all involved. Wrong: Ferdinand ends up extolling the virtues of dating a much older partner. Par for the course, sadly, is the casual sexism woven into these productions, all written and directed by men save for a stage adaptation of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None." The age difference between male actors and their younger, more attractive stage partners is often stark. Women are cast as superficial housewives and airheads, easily overwhelmed by their emotions. In "The Husband, the Wife and Death," a man even says to his wife, without a trace of irony: "I might rape you afterward, but it's part of ordinary life." Elsewhere, women are also feared. "What About Hell, Isabelle?" ("Et l'Enfer, Isabelle?"), written by Jacques Deval in 1963, pits an investigative judge against a presumed "black widow," the self assured Isabelle Angelier (the superb Francoise Christophe), whose husbands keep dying shortly after naming her a life insurance beneficiary. This slow burning detective story would probably never make it to the stage today. The static set of the judge's nondescript office and the long exchanges between the main characters would be seen as lacking variety and energy. Audiences have grown used to rapid fire scene changes, and crime stories are told very differently in current movies and TV series. Yet "What About Hell, Isabelle?" shows, by fleshing out the characters' psychology without quite solving its central mystery, that there is value in a more old fashioned approach, too. In 1970, there was relatively little of the frantic movement that often fills the stage nowadays. The technical constraints of filming at the time may have played a part in how these productions come across, but the moments of silence and stillness also allow viewers to process the action differently. Three knocks are even heard every time the curtain is about to rise, an old French stage tradition that has fallen by the wayside, and it is also a joy to hear the clear, occasionally overemphatic diction of this generation of French actors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
WUHAN, China The world's largest human migration the annual crush of Chinese traveling home to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which is this Sunday is going a little faster this time thanks to a new high speed rail line. The Chinese bullet train, which has the world's fastest average speed, connects Guangzhou, the southern coastal manufacturing center, to Wuhan, deep in the interior. In a little more than three hours, it travels 664 miles, comparable to the distance from Boston to southern Virginia. That is less time than Amtrak's fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston just to New York. Even more impressive, the Guangzhou to Wuhan train is just one of 42 high speed lines recently opened or set to open by 2012 in China. By comparison, the United States hopes to build its first high speed rail line by 2014, an 84 mile route linking Tampa and Orlando, Fla. Speaking at that site last month, President Obama warned that the United States was falling behind Asia and Europe in high speed rail construction and other clean energy industries. "Other countries aren't waiting," he said. "They want those jobs. China wants those jobs. Germany wants those jobs. They are going after them hard, making the investments required." Indeed, the web of superfast trains promises to make China even more economically competitive, connecting this vast country roughly the same size as the United States as never before, much as the building of the Interstate highway system increased productivity and reduced costs in America a half century ago. As China upgrades and expands its rail system, it creates the economies of large scale production for another big export industry. "The sheer volume of equipment that they will require, and the technology that will have to be developed, will simply catapult them into a leadership position," said Stephen Gardner, Amtrak's vice president for policy and development. But the high speed trains, which average speeds of up to 215 miles an hour, have their critics here. Heavily subsidized regular trains, which require 11 hours for the trip from Guangzhou to Wuhan, cost 20.50 one way. The bullet train costs 72, or one to three weeks' pay for an assembly line worker. Sun Nanyu, 9, on a new high speed train in China. Its full 664 mile run takes about three hours. Thomas Lee for The New York Times "These prices are unreasonable, just like a lion opening its bloody mouth," said one recent Internet posting, using a Chinese proverb for voracious greed. Yet many workers traveling home for the lunar New Year were understanding of the high price. "Based on the distance, the price is not too high," said a plastic injection molding worker who gave his surname, Li, and was catching the slow train to save money. China's lavish new rail system is a response to a failure of central planning six years ago. After China joined the World Trade Organization in November 2001, exports and manufacturing soared. Electricity generation failed to keep up because the railway ministry had not built enough rail lines or purchased enough locomotives to haul the coal needed to run new power plants. By 2004, the government was turning off the power to some factories up to three days a week to prevent blackouts in residential areas. Officials drafted a plan to move much of the nation's passenger traffic onto high speed routes by 2020, freeing existing tracks for more freight. Then the global financial crisis hit in late 2008. Faced with mass layoffs at export factories, China ordered that the new rail system be completed by 2012 instead of 2020, throwing more than 100 billion in stimulus at the projects. Administrators mobilized armies of laborers 110,000 just for the 820 mile route from Beijing to Shanghai, which will cut travel time there to five hours, from 12, when it opens next year. Zhang Shuguang, the deputy chief engineer of China's railway ministry, said in a speech last September that the government planned 42 lines by 2012, with 5,000 miles of track for passenger trains at 215 miles an hour and 3,000 miles of track for passenger and fast freight trains traveling 155 miles an hour. Top speed on the Tampa to Orlando line is supposed to be 168 miles an hour. Janitors clean a high speed train after its arrival at the Wuhan Railway Station, in Hubei, China. Thomas Lee for The New York Times Though they have yet to retreat from their goals, Chinese officials have hinted in the last several weeks that stimulus spending may slow. Some transportation experts predict that a few of the 42 routes may not be finished until 2013 or 2014 as a result. One worry is whether China is overinvesting in high speed trains that may require operating subsidies like those for maintaining highways: fares on a route from Beijing to Tianjin have been set lower than initially forecast to make sure they stay full. The new trains leave 29 times a day for Wuhan from a gargantuan train station on the outskirts of Guangzhou that opened on Jan. 30. With soaring steel girders, white walls and enormous skylights far overhead, the station, Asia's largest, resembles a major airport. As the Chinese train whizzes across the countryside, tile roofed homes in ancient villages gape windowless, hints of peasant relocations that the government has not publicly quantified. To avoid bulldozing urban neighborhoods, huge rail stations have been erected in industrial districts on the edge of cities. Subways to the stations are still being built in Guangzhou and Wuhan; passengers now take 40 minute bus rides from city centers. The three hour train to Wuhan makes a quicker trip than the nearly two hour flight, once faster train check in times are accounted for. Airlines are losing customers. Bullet trains travel faster than a commercial jet at takeoff. They require extremely flat, straight routes. Amtrak's Acela only briefly reaches its top speed of 150 miles an hour because it runs on old, curvy tracks that it shares with 12,000 ton freight trains. On a recent Wednesday, the 2:50 p.m. bullet train glided smoothly out of Guangzhou's station and within four minutes was traveling more than 200 miles an hour. Practically every seat on the 14 car train was full of migrants heading home for Chinese New Year. A saying is making the rounds in Guangzhou: a resident can board a train in the morning, have lunch at historic Mount Yuelu in Changsha, dinner at the famous Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan and still come home and sleep in her own bed. For Americans, a comparable trip would involve a Boston resident who catches a train to Philadelphia, has lunch near the Liberty Bell, goes to dinner in colonial Williamsburg, Va., and returns home by bedtime. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
In 1972, researchers in North Carolina started following two groups of babies from poor families. In the first group, the children were given full time day care up to age 5 that included most of their daily meals, talking, games and other stimulating activities. The other group, aside from baby formula, got nothing. The scientists were testing whether the special treatment would lead to better cognitive abilities in the long run. Forty two years later, the researchers found something that they had not expected to see: The group that got care was far healthier, with sharply lower rates of high blood pressure and obesity, and higher levels of so called good cholesterol. The study, which was published in the journal Science on Thursday, is part of a growing body of scientific evidence that hardship in early childhood has lifelong health implications. But it goes further than outlining the problem, offering evidence that a particular policy might prevent it. "This tells us that adversity matters and it does affect adult health," said James Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who led the data analysis. "But it also shows us that we can do something about it, that poverty is not just a hopeless condition." The findings come amid a political push by the Obama administration for government funded preschool for 4 year olds. But a growing number of experts, Professor Heckman among them, say they believe that more effective public programs would start far earlier in infancy, for example, because that is when many of the skills needed to take control of one's life and become a successful adult are acquired. The study in Science drew its data from the Carolina Abecedarian Project, in which about 100 infants from low income families in North Carolina were followed from early infancy to their mid 30s. The project is well known in the world of social science because of its design: The infants were randomly assigned to one group or the other, allowing researchers to isolate the effects of the program. Such designs are the gold standard in medical research, but are rarely used in investigations that influence domestic social policy. The researchers had already answered their original question about cognitive development: whether the treated children would, for example, be less likely to fail in school. The answer was yes. Over all, the participants' abilities as infants were about the same, but by age 3 they had diverged. By age 30, those in the group given special care were four times as likely to have graduated from college. "Forty years ago, it was all about cognition," Professor Heckman said. "But it turned out that when you expand these capabilities not only cognitive but social and emotional one of the effects is better health. Nobody thought about that at the time." Frances Campbell, a senior scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who started work on the project in the 1970s, said of the health improvements, "I would not say to you that we were expecting to see much of a difference at all." But that is precisely what researchers found. Men in the treatment group, now mostly in their mid 30s, were less likely to develop hypertension than those in the control group. They also had significantly higher levels of so called good cholesterol, and none had developed metabolic syndrome, the medical term for a group of risk factors that together substantially raise the chances for heart disease, diabetes and stroke. In contrast, a quarter of the men in the control group had the syndrome. "These are real biological markers, blood tests, physical results," Dr. Campbell said. "That's what makes this story so exciting." As for women, those in the treated group were less likely to develop pre hypertension or abdominal obesity, which tends to be a risk factor for heart problems. They also had healthier habits. They were significantly less likely to have started drinking before age 17, and more likely to be physically active and eat nutritious food, than the women in the control group. Some have criticized the Abecedarian study as not persuasive because it is too small and too old, Professor Heckman said. He argued that results were striking even with its small size, and the fact that it was randomized and that the participants have been followed for decades shows the results are real and long lasting. Addressing criticism that the program would be too expensive to apply more broadly, Professor Heckman said the cost of the Abecedarian project was about 16,000 per child per year in 2010 dollars. His research group is now analyzing how that might compare to the costs of medical care for the poorer health outcomes that tend to be typical for low income Americans. "This is tangible, it is real," Professor Heckman said. "It's not just a declaration from someone saying, 'I'm smart and I think this is true.' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Top row left and center, Landon Nordeman for The New York Times; right, Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times; bottom row left and right, Firstview; center, Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
There are books that enter your life before their time; you can acknowledge their beauty and excellence, and yet walk away unchanged. This was how I first read Elizabeth Hardwick's "Sleepless Nights," after it was recommended in David Shields' "Reality Hunger," a thrilling manifesto that tries to make the case that our contemporary world is no longer well represented by realist fiction. While I loved "Sleepless Nights" on that first read it is brilliant, brittle and strange, a book unlike any preconceived notion I had of what a novel could be I moved on from it easily. I've lived two thousand and some odd days since, read hundreds of other books and published three of my own, all in a bright, hot landscape of somewhat realist fiction. The middle of the night has become a lonely stretch of time, especially in the past few years, with vastly increased anxiety over climate change and politics and what lies in wait in my little sons' future. I normally salve insomnia with reading, but few new books have felt so revolutionary or so brave as to be able to rock my tired brain to attention. Only the great ones remain: George Eliot's infinite wisdom in "Middlemarch," Jane Austen's gracious and low stakes sublimity, Dante's "The Inferno," which makes our world above seem downright kind. And strangely, of all the books I have reread to comfort myself, I have turned most often to Hardwick's "Sleepless Nights," not without a little bitter tang of irony because of its title. The book didn't dovetail with my heart on the first reading, but the world has changed around me, and now I find myself hungering for its particularity, the steady voice of Elizabeth Hardwick a balm to my aching, vulnerable mind. Elizabeth Hardwick grew up in Kentucky, a charming young woman with a dagger of a mind. She left for New York City after college and took up with the Partisan Review crowd, becoming best friends with Mary McCarthy and writing for The New York Review of Books from its inception. "Sleepless Nights," her third novel, is unambiguously her chef d'oeuvre; it was published when she was 63, after a career of writing sharp, ingenious pieces of criticism and after her long marriage to (and divorce from, then reunification with) the poet Robert Lowell, whose profound psychological struggles and infidelities and plagiarism of Hardwick's letters in his books must surely have tested her strength. As a result, "Sleepless Nights" feels elemental, an eruption of everything that had been slowly building up over decades. Though there are books that are distant kin to it Renata Adler's "Speedboat," Maggie Nelson's "Bluets" I have read nothing close enough to be called a sibling. This is rare; a feat of originality. "Sleepless Nights" brings the profound gift of plotlessness, as it is organized more like a piece of music than like a traditional novel, with its long slow build of themes and lives; as such, you can open it to any chapter and start to read, just as you can play movements from a symphony out of order without damaging the experience of letting individual movements pour over you. You can put the novel down at 3 a.m. and toddle off to bed, then pick it up in a different place a week later, and be carried away by its voice and description and sheer astonishing linguistic power and flexibility. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Retailers' midnight openings last week brought in customers, most big chains said they were pleased with their Black Friday sales and the November revenue increases at stores open at least a year came in just where analysts had expected, reports showed Thursday. But the important question how retailers' profit margins were affected by their Thanksgiving weekend promotions remained unanswered. And several retailers said that they would discount even more in December. The figures released Thursday showed just the sales performance of stores open at least a year, "so what we aren't seeing is the impact on those retailers' bottom lines, and we all saw how promotional last weekend was," said Megan Donadio, a retail strategist at the consulting firm Kurt Salmon. Adding to concerns, she said, even those deep discounts "were not able to sustain the crowds through the entire weekend even from Friday morning, through the end of the day Friday, the number of people making purchases in the stores declined." Sales at stores open at least a year rose 3.1 percent in November, according to a Thomson Reuters tally. The results included sales through Saturday, so the Sunday after Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday results were not included. But several stores that relied heavily on Black Friday momentum, including Target, Kohl's and J. C. Penney, did worse than analysts had expected. Wal Mart Stores is to blame for that, said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners. Even as Target and Kohl's decided to open at midnight on Thanksgiving, Wal Mart was more extreme, leaving most of its stores open all day Thanksgiving and starting its holiday discounts at 10 that night. Mr. Johnson said that tactic "crushed" the comparable sales of its most direct competitors, according to his estimates, as Wal Mart does not announce monthly sales figures. "Next time around, expect a lot more midnight, if not 10 p.m., Thanksgiving openings," he wrote in an e mail. Target, for instance, said its comparable store sales rose just 1.8 percent, while analysts expected a 2.8 percent increase. Target seemed to be especially challenged in holiday categories. While comparable store sales in food and household essentials rose, apparel and accessories sales were flat for the month. And "hard lines" nonapparel items like electronics and toys declined in the low single digits, with particular weakness in toys, movies, music and books. "November sales were near the low end of our expectations," Gregg W. Steinhafel, chairman and chief executive officer of Target, said in a statement, telling investors to expect a "promotional environment" in December. Kohl's, which also missed forecasts, said that though the company had "improved performance" over Thanksgiving weekend, "a majority of our planned incremental marketing investment is in December," meaning lots of promotions. Its comparable store sales dropped 6.2 percent, while analysts had expected an increase of 2 percent. The company said sales in bread and butter categories like women's clothing, accessories and children's apparel were lower for the month. J. C. Penney said its after Thanksgiving sales were not very strong. Unlike competitors like Kohl's, Macy's and Target, which opened at midnight on Thanksgiving, Penney elected to open early on Friday. "The company's decision to respect Thanksgiving Day for families and open at 4 a.m. on Friday, as we have in prior years, adversely impacted our Black Friday sales," the company said in a statement, and "sales in store remained soft throughout the holiday weekend." Penney's comparable store sales declined 2 percent, a little worse than analysts had expected and sharply worse from November 2010, when they increased 9.2 percent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Look Instagram is a contingent space. Images get deleted, interesting people vanish for months. The most stable feeds are usually ones trying to sell something, and that's just tedious. Then there's the matter of privacy: Sure, a certain artist's posts are public, but who are they really for? What are the terms of our viewership or our eavesdropping? And yet! Instagram is a visual commons, and right now, a lifeline. It documents a shared condition around the world: Culture workers are more or less confined, all travel on hold, projects suspended. In my own anxious scrolling, it is a balm when artists take me into the studio, share from the archive or initiate projects to help us get through. The curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, for instance, is writing daily entries on African LPs from the '70s and '80s, and Cauleen Smith is posting her speculative short films catch them while they're up. I appreciate seeing how organizations like the Bronx Documentary Center so close yet so far, right now, from my Brooklyn garret are contributing to mutual aid in their hard hit communities. What about escape? I'm here for cats the Scottish dude who rescued a kitten in Bosnia on his intended bicycle trip around the world (they're currently stalled in Hungary) is the best IG ever, and the Bodega Cats feed is New York City art in itself. Here are my five current must follow accounts; New York Times critics will be posting their own favorites every week. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.