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Numberless biographies, of course, have been written about people who also told their own stories; all that's needed is perspective. And sections of this book do provide striking glimpses into a remarkable life. Weschler resurrects the interviews he did in the early '80s with Sacks's friends and colleagues, and with Sacks himself, who illuminates his insistence not merely on the humanity of patients who suffered everything from extreme Tourette's to severe amnesia, but also on something spiritual within them. "William James," Sacks tells Weschler about the philosopher known as the father of American psychology, "referred incessantly to 'the soul' in his conversation but banished the word from his physiology. ... I want to give souls their innings." A nurse and nun at one of the old age homes where Sacks did rounds puts it more prosaically: "Everyone who reads his notes sees the patients differently, newly. ... Most consultants' notes are cut and dried, aimed at the problem with no sense of the person. ... With him, the whole person becomes visible." Compellingly, Weschler intertwines Sacks's searching empathy with his sheer strangeness. A colleague on the ward where Sacks met the "Awakenings" patients calls him "deeply eccentric" and describes him as "huge, a full beard, black leather jacket covering T shirts riddled with holes, huge shoes, his trousers looking like they were going to slide off his body." A friend from Sacks's days as a medical resident remembers him as a "big, free ranging animal" who one day "drank some blood ... chasing it with milk. There was something about his need to cross taboos. Back in those days, in the early '60s, he was heavily into drugs, downing whole handfuls of them, especially speed and LSD." And, always interlaced, there is Sacks's own irresistible voice, a concoction of humor and half concealed torment. "I loved Eryops: clumsy amphibians out of water who took on grace and ease once back in it," he says to Weschler, as they walk through a natural history museum Sacks visited often in his youth. "I used to have erotic fantasies of all sorts here, and by no means all human (hippos in the mud!)." By the time Weschler writes of Sacks's death, I found myself tearing up at the loss of this inspired creature. Yet I read "And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?" with an unshakable sense of missed opportunity. The feeling that the great majority of Weschler's material has been rendered before and with more artistic grace by Sacks himself, in his autobiographies and accounts of treating his patients, could have been mitigated had Weschler chosen to examine topics that Sacks barely touches. As a writer, Weschler should have been intrigued by exactly how Sacks's books were composed. He would turn in mammoth drafts and wind up publishing spare, elegant narratives; there seems to have been an editorial process along the lines of Gordon Lish's sculpting of Raymond Carver's stories. Weschler doesn't linger on literary process. Nor does he focus on what must have been a crucial force in Sacks's concern for the neurologically afflicted: an older brother's schizophrenia. Sacks writes only briefly about his need "to get away from my tragic, hopeless, mismanaged brother"; Weschler might have made this sibling and Sacks's flight from him central to his own explorations. In his prologue, Weschler sets a high standard for himself when he writes that in his relationship with Sacks he was "a sort of Boswell to his Johnson." There's little to be gained by invoking a biography that some rank as the best ever written in English, particularly when this book lacks what Boswell had in his every spirited sentence: a distinctive voice. Weschler calls his book "a biographical memoir," suggesting a special hybrid, an exciting convergence, an interplay of revelations about Sacks and the author. To fulfill this promise, Weschler would have needed to gaze inward, possibly to expose the kind of raw longing that runs throughout much of Sacks's writing, nowhere more memorably than in "Awakenings," when Sacks gives his frozen patients the drug L dopa and they erupt into hunger, groping nurses and grunting over their food and desperate for love. Instead, Weschler keeps himself forever in check, quoting at length, deferentially, doggedly, from interview after interview, and relegating himself to an almost forgettable role. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"I've made it my business to know what I'm doing," said Leslie Baltes, the president of Carter, Milchman Frank, an industrial supplier. "My male contemporaries in sales don't feel the obligation to know as much because they're not going to be tested as much."Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times "I've made it my business to know what I'm doing," said Leslie Baltes, the president of Carter, Milchman Frank, an industrial supplier. "My male contemporaries in sales don't feel the obligation to know as much because they're not going to be tested as much." It is no longer exactly groundbreaking for women to work on construction sites, to develop or design retail and commercial spaces, or to fill those spaces with tenants. Women, for example, occupy 43 percent of commercial real estate positions industrywide, according to data from CREW Network, a networking organization for women in commercial real estate. And more women than ever now fill senior vice president, managing director and partner slots in commercial real estate businesses. Still, women who work in male dominated sectors of the industry sometimes discover that a hard hat is a hard hat to wear. They tell of being locked out of deals, of being condescended to, of having to prove their skills and then prove them again. "None of us are looking for a handout. We're just looking for a level playing field," said MaryAnne Gilmartin, the chief executive of the development company L L MAG, which she co founded in early 2018 after 23 years at Forest City New York, the last five as chief executive. "Where I feel concerned," she added, "is that the metoo backlash will mean that women won't get opportunities because the men doing the hiring don't want to open themselves up to confusion or claims about their behavior." But Ms. Gilmartin said she also sees cause for optimism: "As women become more common in the real estate workplace and move up the ladder, we're in a position to influence who makes up the team." She is also hopeful because "there's pressure on the all male lineup to diversify," she said. "This is an industry that changes because it has to, not because it wants to. The failure to address the women issue will cost them money and opportunities, so companies will do what they have to do." Here are a few women who endured workplace slights because they were in places dominated by men, but who thrived nonetheless and now run their own corners of the real estate world. Leslie Baltes began climbing the shelves of the industrial supply company Carter, Milchman Frank when she was a child. Ms. Baltes is now 46 and the president of the Long Island City based company and she's still climbing the shelves. But while her grandfather Herman Milchman was one of the founders of the company, and her mother and father took over the business in the 1980s, Ms. Baltes chose a different path accounting. Half a dozen years ago, when her parents wanted to retire and pass the baton to her, Ms. Baltes's response was quick and to the point: No way. "I don't know how they got me," she said. She now supervises a staff of 40, and almost half of them women. "I'm all about girl power," Ms. Baltes said. Not everyone got the memo. When she started at the company and would order her drivers to get going with deliveries, "they looked at me like I had two heads," Ms. Baltes said. "I had to be tough." Then there was a lunch with, among others, the general contracting team for a large developer. Ms. Baltes had been asked to prepare a quote for some equipment and was told "the guys wanted to meet me," she said. A casual lunch was set up, and over burgers, Ms. Baltes got a grilling. "Were you a manicurist or a hairdresser before you got this gig?" the men asked. "And who did you have to sleep with to get it?" "I said, 'You guys are idiots. A manicurist? Look how bad my nails are. Look how bad my roots are,'" she recalled. "I made a joke. I said that my grandfather slept with my grandmother." But sometimes being a woman is a bit of an advantage. "When my competitors and I are talking about our products, and there are 12 men and one me, and when I make my follow up phone call, potential customers will remember me," Ms. Baltes said. "And that's important." Elizabeth Roberts is the founder of a 20 person architecture firm in Brooklyn that bears her name. And although she has done some cultural and commercial projects, her concentration is on residential work. "I made a decision early on that I wanted that to be my focus," said Ms. Roberts, 50, whose clients include the fashion designer Ulla Johnson and many in the entertainment industry, among them Maggie Gyllenhaal and her husband, Peter Sarsgaard. "I prefer working with families and helping them create a home." Ms. Roberts said she experienced no gender bias whatsoever when, early in her career, she worked at the architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle. And she said she has experienced it only rarely as the head of her own firm, whose staff, for the record, is 50 percent female. "I tend to focus on the positive side," she said. "I tend to think that being a woman helps me in my job, because there's a lot of balancing that needs to be done hourly and daily, and a need to keep your cool under pressure, and I think a lot of those things come with being a woman." But, she added, "I wonder if I try to pretend that gender bias isn't an issue." Here, she is thinking of the surprised look she gets from contractors when they learn that not only is she the architect of record on a project but that she is also the boss of the team the contractor has been working with for the past year. She is thinking also about the difficult conversations she must sometimes have with clients about why the fearsomely expensive renovation has suddenly become even more expensive, and why the 18 month project is sliding past year two. "These clients are understandably stressed," Ms. Roberts said. "But when I feel I'm being put in my place or talked down to or spoken to in a particular way, I often wonder: 'If I were a 75 year old man, would you be lecturing me about how things should have gone?' I do think about that often." Ms. Zeigler quickly learned some things that weren't in the books she read so diligently: Real estate is a relationship business, and people (that is to say, men) tend to form those relationships with people who are just like them (that is to say, other men). They develop those relationships on golf courses and in cigar bars, negotiating on the back nine and firming up the deal over a Cohiba. "It can be a challenge when deals are happening in places where females are not invited," Ms. Zeigler said. It can also be a challenge even when females have every reason to be there. "I've experienced things like walking into a meeting that I've called and I've been asked by a man to get coffee," Ms. Zeigler said. "I've responded, 'I like mine with a little bit of cream and sugar, and I'm Robin Zeigler.'" She can't make those annoyances vanish, she said, but she controls what she can: "I do make sure people know what I bring to the table and try to make my voice heard. When you're the only woman in a room full of men, that can sometimes be difficult." Keeping quiet at the conference table, she has learned, is often not the way to go. "If you have enough experience having a thought and not sharing the thought, and then having someone offer the thought that was your thought, you get the courage to share that thought when the thought occurs to you," she said. "It's not an issue for me anymore." "Thanks to my dad, who thought it was important for a girl to be independent, early on I had a taste of what it felt like to have self esteem and to accomplish a goal," said Ms. Kavovit, who has built on that childhood success, and then some. Soon after college graduation, she started her first business, Stand Ins, a home improvement company in Westchester County. After three years, Ms. Kavovit shuttered Stand Ins, established a new company, Anchor, and moved her base of operations to New York City to take on corporate and retail construction projects. These included the construction of iVillage headquarters and Carnegie Hall Towers, and the build out of Coty headquarters. In 2015, Ms. Kavovit, who is now in her late 40s, started Evergreen Construction, now a 30 million a year business with 22 employees (six of whom are women) and a focus on interior construction for corporate and retail projects. Evergreen's client list includes companies like Bandier, Exhale Spa and the ceramics studio BKLYN CLAY. Despite such accomplishments, "I get challenged every day by men," said Ms. Kavovit, who will likely face a fresh set of challenges as a supporting cast member on the new season of "The Real Housewives of New York City." She recalled walking a potential client through a job site last year and stopping to ask her field supervisor a question. The field supervisor had a question of his own for the boss: "Do you know how to read a blueprint?" Yes, Ms. Kavovit knew how to read a blueprint, how to sign a paycheck and, come to think of it, how to fire a benighted employee. She proved it by sacking that supervisor posthaste. "It's almost like there are some men who don't want us to be on the job site," she said. "Thank God there are companies and clients that do want me there." But because of a real estate blunder involving a storage facility and crippling rent, those stores went out of business. "I had chosen the locations for my stores and had negotiated all my leases," said Ms. Podell, who is now in her 70s. "And a friend and mentor who worked in the furniture business told me, 'If you can do it for yourself, you can do it for others.'" Well, sure she could, but first someone had to give her the chance. "Coming up was harder than it needed to be," said Ms. Podell, who has been in the business for more than 25 years. "The problem was that everyone teamed up. It was a boys' club, and it's not that different today. I had no one to talk to and no one to mentor me. I had to learn on my own." In particular, she remembers looking at a building with a school on the ground floor. "I thought, 'Wow, that's prime real estate. Maybe we can ask the school if it wants to move.' How naive to get involved with the Department of Education." Because Ms. Podell failed to appreciate the complexity and futility of such an undertaking, she spent days and weeks calling people. "I wasted all that time on something I couldn't realistically realize," she said. "And for a broker, all you have is time." Back then, the only real advantage to being a woman in the business was that there were very few women brokers, "and landlords would remember me," she said. "The retailers had no problem with my being a woman. I had been a retailer; I understood the great risk they were taking, and they knew I was interested in doing the right thing for them." It was 1975, and Leslie Winkler was working on her doctorate in American history. She and her husband, a dentist, were out one night with another dentist and the dentist's wife, who ran her family's real estate business and who announced during dinner that she needed a managing agent. Ms. Winkler, disenchanted with academia, was intrigued. A managing agent what's a managing agent? A managing agent, she was told, was someone who visited people's beautiful apartments. That sounded good to Ms. Winkler; she said she could start on Monday. She quickly learned that being a managing agent was not only about visiting beautiful apartments. It was about leaks, broken boilers, tenants who were hot and tenants who were cold, and tenants whose stoves and refrigerators were on the blink. "But it was such a problem solving job and such a learning experience," said Ms. Winkler, now 71 and the president of Halstead Management, with 200 residential properties under her supervision. "You'd go up on the roofs of these buildings and see the landscape of New York City and think, 'This is really good.'" If Ms. Winkler was one of the few women in the property management business back then, it was fine with her. "I wasn't intimidated at all," she said. "I wanted to learn and put myself right out there." It's true that when she went to a meeting with a male colleague, most of the questions were directed to that colleague. "Even if you did have the answers, there was no presumption that you knew anything or were good at your job, but that was how it was. That was the business," said Ms. Winkler, who is very much of the "if you don't want ants in your food, don't go on picnics" school of thought. "Either you accepted it and proved you were better than your male colleagues, or you got upset." At least in part because of her own experiences, she has made a point of bringing women into the business and mentoring them, she said: "I hope I'm a role model to show them you can reach the top of your profession." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Thirty five years ago, Holly Bowers Ruben moved from California to New York, following an actor boyfriend to Brooklyn. The relationship didn't last, but Ms. Ruben never moved back, although her mother, Marie Louise Bowers, stayed out west. That arrangement worked mostly. "I did talk to my mom on a daily basis. That's kind of the relationship we had, even when she was in California," Ms. Ruben said. But last year Ms. Bowers, 87, started having trouble getting around, and Ms. Ruben felt that helping her mother from across the country was at best a difficult prospect. In January, Ms. Ruben moved her mother to Sunrise at Mill Basin, in Brooklyn. "Just in case she fell, I know that there's something here, versus 'how am I going to help her when she's in Walnut Creek, Calif., and I'm in Brooklyn?' Peace of mind that has been a huge gift," Ms. Ruben said. And coincidentally, soon after Ms. Bowers moved east, Ms. Ruben had to undergo a battery of tests for what turned out to be a noncancerous brain mass, and she was comforted by having her mother nearby. Ms. Ruben and her mother are an example of a phenomenon that is driving an increase in the construction of senior housing across the United States. More assisted living, independent living and continuing care retirement communities are being built not necessarily in the warmer climates where seniors have traditionally retired, like Florida and Arizona, but wherever economies are robust and booming, in places like New York, Denver, Chicago and Atlanta. It is not uncommon for today's seniors to live well into their 80s, 90s, even past 100. And when they can no longer be entirely independent, many are moving to be near their adult children for help in the last stage of their lives. The need for more of this kind of housing is also driven by the need to combat what many see as a growing problem of isolation among people in this older generation. Of Americans age 65 and older, 28 percent 11 million people live alone, according to the United States Census Bureau. And the National Council on Aging estimates that eight million adults over the age of 50 are affected by isolation, which can harm both mental and physical health, said Lisa Marsh Ryerson, president of the AARP Foundation, which introduced Connect2Affect in 2016 to help raise awareness and offer solutions to senior isolation. Ms. Ryerson said that the health effects of prolonged isolation have been found to be the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to a study in Perspectives on Psychological Science. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America also found that social isolation and loneliness are associated with higher risk of mortality in adults 52 and older. Senior living communities, where people of similar ages and abilities live together, can help combat that isolation, as can moving closer to adult children, who can then more easily help take care of their parent's needs. That is what drove Linda Gramatky Smith and Kendall Smith to move to the Cedar Crest Retirement Community in Pompton Plains, N.J. They had raised their children in Northern New Jersey, but once they became empty nesters, they moved to Westport, Conn., where Ms. Smith had grown up and still owned her childhood home. But when their daughter, who lives in New Jersey, was widowed five years ago, they found that driving back and forth to help her with her three children was not ideal. In an uncannily prescient move, Mr. Smith, now 85, had put down a refundable deposit at Cedar Crest more than a decade ago, just in case they ever wanted to move there. Living in one of these communities, of course, is not cheap. The Smiths paid an entrance fee of about 500,000, and their monthly rent is 4,500, which is not unusual, according to the AARP. The organization estimates that entrance fees typically range from 100,000 to 1 million, and monthly rents can be anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000. For the Smiths, however, it was worth it. Ms. Smith, 75, was resistant at first about giving up their home, but did a "total 180," she said, soon after moving in, not just because they were closer to their daughter and grandchildren, but because it had improved their quality of life. She has returned to painting watercolors and is on the resident advisory council, and her husband sings in the chorale. "So many people told us come earlier than waiting and it's true," she said. "You just have a little more energy" to take advantage of what such a community offers. There seems to be plenty of money behind the construction of these centers, in part because the recession did not have the same effect on senior housing that it did on the rest of the housing market. "We were kind of a niche," said David Freshwater, chairman of Watermark Retirement Communities, which appealed to the kinds of "people who invested in things like student housing and self storage." Watermark, which is based in Tucson, has 52 locations and is currently building or renovating an additional 10 senior housing centers, including one in a former Jehovah's Witnesses dorm in Brooklyn Heights. "During the recession, because it performed so well, a lot of the bigger more institutional investors took notice and said, 'Let's invest some capital into the market,'" Mr. Freshwater said. Investors don't expect senior housing to react to the future whims of the housing market either, although occupancy rates dipped slightly, to 88.3 percent, in the first quarter of this year, from 89.2 percent in the first quarter of 2016. The commercial real estate brokerage firm Marcus Millichap also forecasts that the demand for senior housing is strengthening, in part because older homeowners who may have been reluctant to sell their homes when the housing market was weak are now more willing to sell their homes and move. "Home prices are up. A lot of people didn't want to sell during the recession, so they stayed in their homes a lot longer than they may have wanted to. But now that home prices are higher again, they can sell them," said John Chang, first vice president of research services for Marcus Millichap. "They have equity built up that they can use for their next stage of life." The new tax law, which doubled the standard deduction for most taxpayers, but reduced the amount of mortgage interest that homeowners can deduct, may add another incentive for older homeowners to sell. "The tax advantages of owning a home are maybe going away for some people," Mr. Chang said. "And at the same time, the values are elevated. So seniors who had been aging in place now have more incentive to make a lifestyle change." Erickson Living, based in Catonsville, Md., has 20 senior properties, including Cedar Crest, and is developing seven more, said Adam E. Kane, the organization's senior vice president of real estate acquisition and corporate affairs. The company looks to two types of areas when deciding where to build new facilities, he said. The first is "infill markets" places that are already densely populated, like Northern New Jersey for seniors who either want to stay in the area where they have lived or move closer to adult children. The second is what Mr. Kane calls "growth corridor markets," where the company sees population moving even if "there's really not a plethora of aging demographics in the local area, but it's a growth market where you have a lot of adult children moving to and living there." In 2008, for example, the company opened Ashby Ponds in Loudoun County, Va. When construction started, "it was not considered a densely populated area, but it attracted mostly younger families seeking to get newer homes and larger homes," Mr. Kane said. The facility was successful in attracting seniors from the inner Washington suburbs, he said, "either because they have family there or are looking for newer product and more value." Erickson is currently going through the zoning process to build a similar facility in Fairfax, Va., for the same reason. No matter what the economy does, Ms. Mace said, senior housing is going to be needed in the future, especially as the baby boomer generation ages. According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of the American population 65 and older will increase by 6 percent up to 75.5 million people by 2030. Ms. Mace predicted that the kinds of facilities that currently exist will continue to be in demand. But there may be other kinds of housing as well, including cogenerational and even "Golden Girls" type setups, where single older adults can choose to live together. "We've seen the values of living in senior housing: socialization, hospitality, better nutrition, better exercise," Ms. Mace said. And when it is the baby boomers' turn, she added, they will already be familiar with the model and ready to move in. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Welcome to "The Month in Live Jazz," a column highlighting five standout performances from the past month on stages across New York City. It's always been convenient to frame the trumpeter Dave Douglas as an anti traditionalist, but he's more of a roving archaeologist, exhuming and examining various strands of musical history without declaring any singular allegiance. On Saturday at the Appel Room, he led an intergenerational sextet in an investigation of Dizzy Gillespie's legacy. The set included both deconstructions of Gillespie's repertoire and Douglas originals inspired by his famed trumpet forebear. In "Manteca," Gillespie's seminal Latin jazz composition, Ambrose Akinmusire, playing second trumpet, made the strongest statement. His brief solo was a saber stream of bluesy invocation, loud and wide awake. (Douglas's arrangements didn't allow for many long form solos, a revision to the bebop idiom that emphasized both the arrangement and the ensemble's spontaneous interplay.) As the tune simmered toward senescence, Mr. Akinmusire, 35, used circular breathing to hold a long tone while the guitarist Bill Frisell responded with gentle, sustained notes in the upper register. The drummer Joey Baron scraped tones off the surfaces of his cymbals, and Mr. Akinmusire started making blustery smacks into his mouthpiece. Then he pulled it out and clacked it around in the bell of the horn. The audience was laughing some, but it was bewildered too. The tenor saxophonist David Murray's new album, "Blues for Memo," is centered on the emphatic poetry of Saul Williams. It works as a sharp inoculation against establishment wisdom, delivered in the guise of a blues battered jazz recording. Mr. Murray, 63, an outre jazz eminence who recently moved back to New York after years of living in Europe, is no stranger to literary collaborations, or to bending the rules of straight ahead jazz to suit his idiosyncrasies. His thick tone with a tremulous vibrato and a constant urge to scrape its way higher into the atmosphere sounds like the synthesis of a broad jazz tradition, and also like no other musician. Mr. Murray played a week at Birdland recently, joined by his quartet but not Mr. Williams. Even without the poetry, the group made its points clear. Mr. Murray rendered Billy Strayhorn's ballad "Chelsea Bridge" without any undue sentimentality, checking his tremolo just a bit. And on original tunes from the album, the drummer Nasheet Waits played in his brawny, aerated style, matching Mr. Murray's warped pronouncements and rough urgency. Sometimes the eye of a storm can draw upon the chaos around it, taking on its energy and consolidating it for use. Something like that is going on in Elder Ones, the quartet led by the vocalist and harmonium player Amirtha Kidambi. She creates drones on the harmonium an old, air powered keyboard and coaxes her bandmates into ripping them apart. Then her voice funnels that energy out in a scorching beam. In its best moments, it's like a mix of a Cuban sonero's citrusy cry and a riot grrrl yowl. At Roulette, Ms. Kidambi performed a book of new material with Elder Ones featuring Matt Nelson on soprano saxophone, Nick Dunston on bass and Max Jaffe on drums which released a strong CD, "Holy Science," in 2016. The band abided by a turbulent pact, Mr. Nelson painting in vertical streaks as the rhythm section pried at its own foundations. Ms. Kidambi also performed a solo set, accompanying her voice with belled bangles on her ankles (the ghungroo, a traditional Indian accouterment) and, for the latter half of each piece, the harmonium. The songs, comprising a new suite she's calling "Yajna" (or "ritual of fire"), all centered on direct phrases: "They step on those beneath in the name of progress," or, in one inspired by the life and death of Erica Garner, "The system breaks her heart." Without the tousled kinetics of the band, Ms. Kidambi worked hard to create a full context. To a degree, the specificity and the fury felt healthy, and important. We need more of this. But the lyrics were intentionally unambiguous, leaving little room for imagination. And in the way she hurtled them straight and hard at the audience, you couldn't help feeling as if you were receiving something impervious and final. It was hard to tap into a sense of catharsis, or find your way into the sound. As she develops these pieces, Ms. Kidambi may work to ensure that her solo music feels more like a caldron of activity and possibility frightening listeners and beckoning them at the same time like her music with Elder Ones often does. Ms. Kidambi continues her residency at Roulette on June 17, performing in a vocal quintet and a duo with the saxophonist Lea Bertucci. In the main gallery at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in an exhibition titled "Solid Light Works," the artist Anthony McCall has four vertical light sculptures on display. In an almost pitch black room, the pearly drapes of light descend from a high ceiling in irregular, conical shapes, making stark outlines on the black carpet. Each immaterial sculpture has a distinct allure and form, but as you walk under and through them, their effects become related. Your eyes adjust and readjust; your body enters into the light; your movement throughout the space connects the four pieces. A similar logic took hold on Feb. 2 as you listened to the music in the second of four performances titled "Four Simultaneous Soloists." In the gallery, the pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, the drummer Eli Keszler, the cellist Tomeka Reid and the trumpeter Nate Wooley each sat beside one of the four vertical light sculptures, improvising freely as attendees circled slowly around them or sat beneath the fallen lights. Couples found it hard not to embrace or lay down together in an unselfconscious tangle. The "soloists" played quietly, matching the darkness around them, and they could only catch snatches and inklings of what the others were playing. Ms. Alcorn and Mr. Keszler were at opposite ends of the long gallery; whatever information they received from each other came almost completely through Ms. Reid and Mr. Wooley. Thinking it through, you might have been drawn to wander. Why sit and hear Ms. Alcorn's simple, slowly exhaled harmonies when across the room Mr. Wooley was playing fabulous long tones, blowing into what looked like a sheet of metal and making a music of blistery reconstitution? But ultimately, your body won out. It wanted you to find an arbitrary vantage and sit still, allowing the shape of the room and the vague drift of sound to determine what you heard. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Deirdre Wall, an actress in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was eight months pregnant when she was married on a New Hampshire mountaintop on June 25. While planning for the wedding, even amid a whirlwind engagement and impending motherhood, she found the task of dress shopping the most worrisome. "There is a real hole in the market for cool maternity bridal dresses," said Ms. Wall, 36. "I looked really hard throughout New York and couldn't find a place to try one on that would also let me return." After perusing Etsy and Anthropologie, Ms. Wall ordered two gowns from Tiffany Rose, a British based designer of bridal and special occasion maternity dresses. One gown featured a lace bodice with cap sleeves, while the other had a classic sweetheart silhouette. The best part was that Ms. Wall could try them at home and send one back. "Both dresses are beautiful yet stretchy, and I felt like I could gain 30 pounds next month if I wanted to," she said. "I'm relieved that I have options." Wedding dress shopping is a rite of passage for any bride. But throw in the physical demands of pregnancy a rapidly expanding middle, growing bra size and disappearing waistline and the process becomes all the more complex: How will it look a few months, and pounds, down the road? The same goes for pregnant wedding guests and bridesmaids who want to look and feel great while on their feet all night. Though traditional maternity labels have long offered their share of empire waist gowns with endless ruching and layers of stretch jersey, for a growing number of stylish women, these dresses feel matronly and passe. Whether trekking to a remote field or a hotel ballroom, today's expectant brides and pregnant wedding guests want fashion forward alternatives that offer the security of comfort and fit throughout pregnancy and even after baby. "The modern pregnant woman doesn't want to wear maternity only for a short period of time, but wants clothes that are adaptable," said Sarah Rutson, vice president for global buying at Net a Porter. "Of course it depends how pregnant you're going to be and which stage you're in, but many pregnant women who shop our site expect to wear these pieces afterward." Ms. Rutson cited voluminous cocktail and black tie dresses by designer brands like Chloe, Isabel Marant, Lanvin and Tibi. With their forgiving silhouettes and looser cuts, certain styles could fit some pregnant wedding guests. Last November Net a Porter began selling its first maternity minded label, Hatch, which offers ready to wear that women can dress in before, during and after pregnancy. "I wear Hatch all the time, and my pregnancy days are long gone," Ms. Rutson said. "The style and design is there, and if you're eight months along, it's not too tight." Ariane Goldman founded Hatch in 2011 after wearing a strapless dress she designed for a wedding while pregnant with her first daughter. "I got stopped constantly by people saying how beautiful and comfortable I looked, but also how formal and appropriate," said Ms. Goldman, who also founded twobirds, a bridesmaid dress label. "I thought, wow, this is the feeling I want women to feel: that they can go out on a beautiful evening and be comfortable and chic and not be omitted from fashion." Lindsey Evans chose the Fete gown by Hatch, a black sateen maxi style with a crisscross top, for a June 10 wedding in France. She was just over 30 weeks pregnant. "The fabric felt really expensive, and it didn't look like a bag hanging over me," said Ms. Evans, the director of merchandising at the jewelry firm David Yurman. "I also appreciated the flexibility, that no matter what my size would be, it would still fit." Ms. Evans plans to wear the gown to a friend's wedding in Mexico at the end of the year, long after her baby arrives. Seulki Chung shopped Hatch for a wedding she attended over the Memorial Day weekend at the TriBeCa restaurant Locanda Verde. After trying on a few dresses in the maternity section of Nordstrom, she felt matronly and uncomfortable. Hatch's off shoulder Audrey style features an easy A line silhouette that Ms. Chung expected she would wear during the warm months after her baby was born May 31. "What drew me to Hatch is the idea that I can wear the pieces after my pregnancy," said Ms. Chung, who runs Real Food Kitchen, a food company. LoveShackFancy is another label offering dress styles for pregnant bridesmaids and wedding guests. Rebecca Hessel Cohen started it in 2013 when she was unable to find bridesmaids dresses she liked for her own wedding. She designed a single dress for her maids that featured a halter top and empire waist. "When I designed the first dress, I didn't know anyone pregnant at the time," Ms. Hessel Cohen said. "Now our dresses do really well with pregnant bridesmaids. Personally, I wore our dresses a few times when pregnant and to a wedding three weeks after my second daughter was born. After you have a baby, your waist is nonexistent. You still look pregnant, and these pieces are forgiving." But for many women, an easy go to remains a classic maternity style. Liz Corder was a bridesmaid at a Florida seaside wedding on June 18 when she was 25 weeks pregnant. Like Ms. Wall, she opted for a Tiffany Rose gown with cap sleeves, with a long skirt and sweetheart neckline. "Something about the jersey underneath makes it so comfortable," said Ms. Corder, a development manager for the Community Foundation of Tampa Bay in Tampa, Fla. "A lot of people think of maternity dresses as unflattering and tentlike. I feel really pretty in this style." When the bridal designer Monique Lhuillier created the actress Ginnifer Goodwin's tulle and lace wedding dress in 2014, Ms. Goodwin was well into her third trimester. Ms. Lhuillier suggests to all pregnant clients that they show off their neckline and shoulders, which are flattering regions regardless of a baby bump. She also encourages them to enjoy their silhouettes. "I tell my pregnant brides, 'Let's not hide the pregnancy, because it's such a beautiful thing,'" Ms. Lhuillier said. "The best thing to do is embrace the belly. I love showing it off." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
You can find him on YouTube talking to David Letterman or Johnny Carson a celebrity novelist. Although at a certain point Jerzy Kosinski became more than that, or something different: one of those hard to place figures, not quite funny but not exactly the butt of the joke either. A professional oddball. Letterman doesn't quite know what to do with him and treats Kosinski like the weird foreign uncle a well brought up young man should be nice to. But Kosinski played other roles too: Holocaust survivor, con man, sex fiend, Hollywood actor, seer, a guy on the make. Jerome Charyn's new novel covers much of the usual life story, though not in the usual order. Born Jewish, Kosinski grew up in Poland and survived World War II, when he was said to have been taken in by local Roman Catholics. There are stories that he served as an altar boy in church. Some of these experiences made their way into his breakthrough novel, "The Painted Bird" about a Polish boy who escapes the Nazis by wandering from village to village, where he is, as Charyn puts it, "beaten many times, left to drown in an ice hole, hung from the rafters of a barn." The book was banned in Poland but made its author famous in America, and what followed was a peculiar kind of American success story: lecture gigs at Yale and Princeton, marriage to a wealthy widow, a divorce and another marriage, affairs, more novels, the inevitable backlash, a cameo in Warren Beatty's "Reds." Then, abruptly, suicide, at the age of 57. Kosinski is a slippery figure to write about, since the facts have gotten mixed up in his fictions. Accusations of plagiarism and dishonesty and his and others' defenses against both have further muddied the waters. But all this confusion is really grist to Charyn's mill. He's not trying to tell the story straight. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A cruise ship that was turned away from Jamaica and the Cayman Islands on Tuesday received permission to dock in Mexico on Wednesday. The MSC Meraviglia from MSC Cruises, was turned away from Jamaica and the Cayman Islands after a crew member tested positive for the flu on Tuesday. The ship, with more than 4,500 passengers and 1,600 crew members, is scheduled to arrive in Cozumel Wednesday evening. "MSC Cruises is pleased to confirm that it has just received formal and final authorization from the local health authorities in the State of Quintana Roo, Mexico to get to Cozumel," a spokeswoman for MSC said on Wednesday. It seemed that the ship was falling into a pattern set by Holland America's MS Westerdam, which earlier this month was turned away from five countries because authorities feared that people onboard had Covid 19. After the Westerdam docked in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, one passenger tested positive for the illness. The C.D.C. later said that the woman's diagnosis was a false positive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The New York Times on Sunday reported on deals between Facebook and device makers that allowed the manufacturers broad access to Facebook user data over the last decade. As the debate about Facebook's privacy practices unfolds, here is what we know about the company's partnerships with makers of phones, game consoles and other hardware: Why would Facebook allow device makers private access to user data? Facebook officials said the company began forming device partnerships in 2007. The social network wanted to ensure that its services were available to Facebook users not only on desktop computers, but also anywhere else people used the internet: mobile phones, smart TVs, game consoles and other devices. At the time, many phones could not run full fledged Facebook apps. So Facebook allowed manufacturers to integrate elements of the social network "like" buttons, photo sharing, friends lists into their devices. Are we just talking about the Facebook app on my phone? No. Facebook has said that device partners use the private data access for both the Facebook app and other apps and integrations that it considers part of the "Facebook experience." That varies depending on the device company. Some devices have apps that show Facebook messages in a social "hub" along with other messages. Others integrate Facebook status updates and friend information into the device's own news feed. In some cases, the device pulls Facebook data into its own address books. What does this have to do with Cambridge Analytica? In 2014, the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica sought to build psychological profiles of American voters by exploiting Facebook data, such as the kinds of content people "liked" on Facebook. Only a few hundred thousand people gave Cambridge's contractor access to their Facebook information, many of them through a third party quiz app. But under Facebook's policies at the time, the app could retrieve data on all of the Facebook friends of those people as many as 87 million in all, according to the social network. In what Facebook says was misuse of the data, the contractor sold it to Cambridge to build voter profiling technology. The company went on to work for Donald J. Trump's presidential campaign. Facebook has said in recent months that a Cambridge like abuse could not have happened after 2015, when it imposed restrictions so users could choose which of their data their Facebook friends could share with third parties. But The Times's reporting shows that Facebook continued to allow that kind of access to dozens of the world's biggest tech and hardware companies and only began shutting down the data sharing partnerships after the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted in March. So can I stop my information from going to device makers? Unless you keep close track of which devices all of your Facebook friends are using at any given time, you won't know which manufacturers have access to your data. You could adjust your settings to bar all outside apps from retrieving your data, but some device makers, including BlackBerry, can override even that restriction. Short of deleting your account, the only way you can be sure your data is not shared with device makers is to set all of your sharing settings to private which would also prevent your friends from seeing the information. Does this mean device makers are amassing giant stockpiles of Facebook data? Facebook has said that some of the device partners store Facebook users' and their friends' data on their own servers. But Facebook has also said that regardless of where the information is stored, its partners are bound by strict contracts regarding the use of the data. But that doesn't mean the data is necessarily safe. One of the lessons of the Cambridge Analytica scandal is just how hard it is to control what happens to user data once it has left Facebook's system. Facebook also said that it periodically audits partners' use of the data. Some partners store Facebook data on their own servers, while others have said that the data is sent directly to each device. But Facebook, as well as some device partners contacted by The Times, acknowledged that there are several ways Facebook information could leave those devices, including when a device backs up its own data to cloud services or syncs with third party apps. A third party app is any app that is not made by the device maker itself: Think games, messaging or banking apps. Every time a newly downloaded game or other app requests access to your address book, information in the address book can be shared. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Why pay top dollar for a luxury vacation when it's possible to have it for less? A high end trip without a premium price tag is possible anywhere in the world, but your approach needs to be tailored to your destination. Here, locals in five famously expensive cities London, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore and Sydney share luxury for less tips. TIME IT RIGHT London has some particularly busy periods with sky high hotel rates, according to Paula Fitzherbert, a lifelong Londoner and the head of communications for the five star hotels Claridge's, Connaught and Berkeley. They include June, during the Chelsea Flower Show, Ascot and Wimbledon, and the fashion weeks in February and September. These times asides, rates are least expensive on Sunday nights when occupancy is at its lowest. "A stay could be half the price, compared with another day of the week and you're likely to get free amenities," Ms. Fitzherbert said. The properties she represents try to offer Sunday night guests extras such as a bottle of Champagne, breakfast and a room upgrade. James Manning, the global projects editor for Time Out London, encourages visiting either at the end of August or anytime in November. Flights and hotels are less expensive, and several noteworthy and free events take place. One of the largest street festivals in Europe, Notting Hill Carnival, is in August. DINE AND DRINK SMARTLY Skip white tablecloth dining. Mr. Manning said that some of London's casual and affordable restaurants, such as the Taiwanese spot Xu, outperform many expensive Michelin recognized joints in atmosphere and flavor. To indulge in decadent cuisine for a bargain, head to a food hall in a luxury department store like Harrods or Selfridges, Ms. Fitzherbert said (she does, too). "You can buy small portions of rare cheeses and handmade chocolates, and the stores often give out free samples on weekends," she said. She also suggested taking advantage of the widely available and attractively priced pre and post theater menus at otherwise expensive restaurants like The Ivy and Savoy Grill and enjoying an evening drink at an upscale bar like the Connaught Bar for less than 20 an order usually comes with olives, nuts and other snacks. STAY AT AN UNDER THE RADAR HIGH END HOTEL For luxury at a less stratospheric price point than the city's palace designated hotels, stay at a lower key but still luxurious property. Examples include the San Regis, hidden on a quiet street in the 8th arrondissement's so called Golden Triangle or the Jacques Garcia designed Hotel Bourg Tibourg, in the Marais. Research these lesser known gems online the site Paris Boutique Hotels lists several, as does Time Out Paris. PALACE HOTEL ACCESS WITHOUT THE PRICE TAG With standard doubles often starting at 1,000 or more per night, Paris's palace hotels are price prohibitive for most people. But Elsa Bacry, a lifelong Parisian and the director of European partnerships for the luxury travel network Virtuoso, said locals get a taste of them by frequenting their casual bistros and brasseries such as 114 Faubourg, at Le Bristol. "They're not a deal, but you're not spending a fortune either," she said. Parisians also like to have drinks at the hotels' bars such as the rooftop L'Oiseau Blanc at The Peninsula Paris or Bar Josephine at the Lutetia. Hannah Meltzer, a Paris based journalist, said that spa treatments are another option; Ms. Bacry recommended the caviar facial at the lavish day spa at the Four Seaons Paris. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF FREE SIGHTS AND GROUP TOURS Paris has plenty of museums with free entry including the fine arts museum Petit Palais and Musee de la vie Romantique, or museum of romantic life. Admission to many others, including The Pompidou, is free on the first Sunday of the month while the Louvre offers free admission on the first Saturday evening of every month. Some monuments also offer inexpensive small group tours, such as the 90 minute, 10 euro tour at Versailles of Louis XIV and XV's private apartments. SHOP SALES AND THE OUTLETS To buy designer goods at a discount, Ms. Bacry suggested checking out My Little Paris, a site that lists private sales. Also, designer stores have sales in July and January, and La Vallee Village, an outdoor designer outlet shopping mall about a 45 minute train ride from central Paris, is full of deals. BOOK LESSER KNOWN HOTELS OR RENT AN APARTMENT Debbie Kessler, who runs the San Francisco office of Protravel International and sells high end trips to the city, said that travelers could save by staying away from well known international brands and choosing a luxury boutique property instead. "They are far more reasonably priced than their big name competitors," she said. Viceroy Hotels Resorts, for example, has four design forward boutique properties in town. Booking an upscale hotel in Southern Marin County, about a 20 minute drive from San Francisco, is another money saving option her clients use, taking Uber to get back into town. Ms. Rodriguez encourages visitors to rent a home through Airbnb or another rental site you can stay in a historic Victorian home or sleek high rise apartment for the fraction of the cost of a hotel. DON'T SPEND ON HIGH END MEALS Japantown is home to affordable sushi, ramen and shabu shabu places, while the Mission neighborhood has authentic and favorably priced Mexican. To sample the city's famous crabs without blowing your food budget, buy them from one of the crab stands on Fisherman's Wharf, and have them steamed and cracked. Ms. Rodriguez is a regular at a stand called Nick's Lighthouse and enjoys the crabs, along with sourdough bread and wine with her family at Aquatic Park Cove, a park near the wharf with views of the bay and Alcatraz. Also, oyster specials abound: Woodhouse Fish Co., with two locations, for example, has 1 oyster specials on Tuesdays, and Plouf sells 1 oysters on weekdays at its bar from 6:30 p.m. until closing. Travelers keen on an upscale dining experience should know that some of the fanciest restaurants offer lower priced menus in their bars. The three Michelin starred Quince, for example, offers a five course 180 menu in its bar area. While hardly inexpensive, that is less than the 295 eight to ten course tasting menu in the main dining room. SIGHTSEE WITH A TIGHT FIST Both Sigmund Stern Recreation Grove and Golden Gate Park have noteworthy free concerts, performances and events all year. Ms. Rodriguez said that Free Tours by Foot has free high quality walking tours, including one in Chinatown. Also, the touristy Bay Cruise isn't worth it. Instead, take an inexpensive ride on the commuter ferry from the well known Ferry Building. (Ms. Kessler likes the ride to Sausalito.) There's a bar on board so riders can savor a glass of wine while taking in the views. WATCH FOR DEALS AT LUXURY HOTELS Singapore has no low or high season and sees consistent tourist traffic throughout the year, according to Howard Oh, the concierge manager at Mandarin Oriental, Singapore, who is also Singaporean. So instead of having off season rates, the city's upscale hotels have promotions throughout the year. Mr. Oh recommended comparing rates offered by three luxury hotels you are keen on staying at and seeing which has the most attractive offers. "The deals vary, but you might find a discounted rate for a weekend stay with breakfast and other inclusions or a third night free with two paid nights," he said. DINE LIKE A LOCAL The food writer Annette Tan said that eating out in the city is generally expensive but that some neighborhoods are home to excellent and affordable restaurants. Keong Saik Road, in Chinatown, is lined with several, many of which aren't Chinese. Cure, for one, serves modern European food with Singaporean accents. Another option is Gemmill Lane, a hidden alley off Amoy Street full of buzzy restaurants such as the French Japanese Le Binchotan. Singaporeans also enjoy decadent high teas at the city's five star hotels. Ms. Tan recommended Regent Singapore, where a weekday high tea costs around 33 per adult and includes sandwiches, pastries, scones and cheeses, and the 37 tea at The Clifford Pier, overlooking Marina Bay, at the Fullerton Bay Hotel. SKIP PRIVATE GUIDES Hiring a private guide costs about 45 an hour, Mr. Oh said, but a small group tour can be equally high quality and costs around 6 per person, per hour. "The guides leading these tours are very knowledgeable, and you see the same sights you would on a private excursion," Mr. Oh said. Companies offering such tours include RMG Tours and Tour East. Monster Day Tours also offers free walking tours. BOOK THE RIGHT ACCOMMODATIONS Carly Rea, the founder of Splendour Tailored Tours, advises staying at a five star boutique hotel in a residential neighborhood, where nightly rates can be half of what they are in the touristy Central Business District. Ms. Rea recommended Spicers Potts Point, in Potts Point, an area full of homegrown boutiques, cafes and restaurants, and Paramount House Hotel, in Surry Hills. Josh Blake, the assistant chief concierge at Four Seasons Hotel Sydney and a longtime Sydney sider, as locals are called, said that travelers who want to stay in the heart of town should be aware that several of the luxury hotels in the CBD, including Shangri La and InterContinental, have club lounges. You pay a fee on top of your room rate, the lounge at the Four Seasons, for example, costs 96 for two people per day. But you get a concierge, a lavish breakfast buffet and a premium open bar with appetizers in the evenings. For longer stays, consider a home rental through Contemporary Hotels or Luxico. "You can find a fantastic two bedroom apartment for a week for the same price as a standard hotel room in the CBD," Ms. Rea said. EAT LIKE A LOCAL Ms. Rea said that the tastiest and most affordable food in town is to be found at neighborhood spots. Bistro Rex, in Potts Point, a vibrant place showcasing seasonal dishes, is an example. She also recommended a meal at one of the city's many inexpensive and delicious Asian influenced restaurants where diners can bring their own alcohol. The Darlinghurst and Newtown neighborhoods are full of these. On Bondi Beach, a table at a casual seaside cafe is a less expensive and more authentic way to go than a pricey restaurant, said Mr. Blake. He suggested Speedos Cafe, a local favorite that serves health focused dishes using seasonal and organic produce. Picnics are a longtime tradition for Sydney siders, and it's one that travelers should partake in, too. BE A SAVVY SIGHTSEER Climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge is a mainstay tourist activity, but it costs more than 120 and takes hours. Walking across the bridge is another option. "It's free, the path is uncrowded and you get the same views," Mr. Blake said. Also, skip a pricey private boat rental and enjoy Sydney's skyline from a public ferry or water taxi. A ferry ride, depending on the route, is less than 10, while a 30 minute scenic ride in a taxi around the harbor costs about 70. Mr. Blake recommended the ferry from Circular Quay to Manly, a lively suburb with a scenic beach and a thriving surf community. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
COMPUTER GENERATED investment advice has gotten a lot of attention in the last few years. And for good reason. Many web based services have given investors with smaller portfolios access to advice that they wouldn't otherwise get. And because these services charge lower fees no need to pay human advisers, after all that can increase returns on investments that track indexes. But what has not been clear is what benefit, if any, these so called robo advisers, which help investors with asset allocation and charge a relatively modest fee for the service, bring to high net worth investors. Suffice it to say there is little consensus. And that is probably fair: There are pluses and minuses among the three dominant ways to use technology in personal investing. Here's a look at the three: Two of the biggest robo advisers are Betterment and Wealthfront. They both started by courting people who wanted to invest but did not have enough money to meet the minimums of traditional advisers. They charged a fraction of typical advisory fees. In the case of Betterment, the fee is 0.15 percent for accounts larger than 100,000, and it is 0.25 percent at Wealthfront, compared with 1 percent or more for traditional advisers. Instead of a supermarket of investing options, both offered a strategy that relied on investment products tied to an index. Neither has abandoned its base of young, tech adept investors, but both are looking upmarket with offerings that appeal more to people who are already wealthy, not those trying to amass wealth. Wealthfront has offerings that normally only sophisticated clients get. It also offers automated tax loss harvesting in which a security like an exchange traded fund that has lost money is sold to get the tax benefit of the loss and is then replaced with a similar security. By looking at the securities every day and not just at the end of the year Wealthfront said it could double the benefits from tax loss harvesting. Another service helps people diversify a single, large concentration of stock on the days when the company allows insiders to sell. "None of our services require any people," said Andy Rachleff, executive chairman of Wealthfront. With traditional advisers, the fee goes down as the assets go up. But at Wealthfront, he said, "Instead of lowering your fee with more money, we keep the fee constant and give you more value." Betterment offers a similar suite of services, including tax loss harvesting. Jon Stein, its founder and chief executive, said it also had features to help with retirement calculations, including one that determines how much people will get from all sources of retirement income and another that determines how much they can spend in retirement without running out of money. Can platforms that have attracted investors with 5,000 work for people with 5 million or more? Or are they better suited for younger investors who are overlooked by larger firms? There is little consensus on who is best served by robo advisers. According to a report by the consultant McKinsey Company that was released this month, 42 million households worldwide worth a total of 13.5 trillion could benefit from what it calls virtual advice. The report said people with 100,000 to 1 million would benefit the most from advisers using digital tools. But it expressed skepticism over whether online advisers could attract a broader, more affluent audience. Yet Steven D. Lockshin, principal of AdvicePeriod, which has 500 million under management, said he had moved 20 percent of his clients' assets to a new offering from Betterment, called Betterment Institutional. It's a platform that allows advisers to manage their clients' investments through Betterment's technology and then work with clients on more personal issues. Jon Stein is the founder and chief executive of Betterment, an online automated investment adviser. Tina Fineberg for The New York Times "It's saving time and not worrying about what's in the platform," he said. "We have a heavy emphasis on tax and estate planning. Those are huge impact items, and we have more time to focus on that." Mr. Stein said Betterment now had a program that offers telephone consultations with certified financial planners for wealthier prospective clients who have questions about what assets to transfer. "This is the classic innovation paradigm you start mass and you build more and more functionality over time," Mr. Stein said. "We've got you covered if what you want is a diversified portfolio of global assets. We're making more and more tools available to make it easier for the affluent customer to come to us." Betterment's offering is a move toward a hybrid model that many consultants and advisory firms think will appeal to more affluent consumers. It has the benefit of using technology to take over the selection of low cost investments. And that frees up the adviser to spend more time on conversations with clients. "The real problem is chaos," said Bill Harris, chief executive of Personal Capital, a web based provider of investing and budgeting software that offers personal advice by videoconference. "We put it all together so you can see what you own." The client, he added, "just worries about high level stuff." Mr. Harris made clear that much of what his software does, investors could figure out on their own, such as what they own and in what percentages across various accounts and mutual funds. "But you would never do it," he said. "We make it push button easy." Some skeptics of the robo adviser boom argue that it is nothing new. Mark Hebner, president of Index Fund Advisors, which manages 2.7 billion, said he had been running client portfolios online since 1999 and had met only half of his clients in person. He said his system, which relies on indexing, freed up time to talk to his clients. And that conversation, he said, focused on "the idea that investment selection should be limited to a portfolio of index funds and the only real issue for investors is how much risk would be appropriate for them." After writing a report on the different ways of using technology, Tyler Cloherty, a senior manager at the consulting firm Casey, Quirk Associates, said there were probably limits to how many wealthy clients robo advisers could attract. Instead, he said he saw a move toward advisers who use technology to give clients the type of advice they wanted. "If I'm the investor, I don't need my adviser to be that portfolio manager who is pulling all the strings," he said. "What I'm looking for is, are they executing on this strategy?" And that is where other, less ballyhooed technology offerings come in. David Lyon, who runs a registered investment advisory firm in Chicago that is focused on 27 clients with tens of millions of dollars each, is also the chief executive of Oranj, a web platform that allows clients and advisers to interact more efficiently. It is now licensed to over 300 firms. More than account aggregation or reporting, the software allows advisers to see when clients make changes in their assumptions, like retirement age, and then contact the client sooner than an annual meeting. "There's probably something that happened that made him or her change a goal," Mr. Lyon said. "People's lives are fluid. This provides a more collaborative way to work together." In a twist on this, GuardVest lets clients invite other advisers to look at their portfolios and compare that advice with what their current advisers are giving them. "The GuardVest user will be far better informed when they discuss their portfolio with their current adviser or when they use GuardVest to evaluate a new adviser under consideration before investing capital," said Audie Apple, the service's founder. What all these tools do for affluent investors is allow them to have a complete picture of their wealth, and maybe even save on some fees. But it may give wealthy investors something more as well their money does what they want it to do. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The Trump administration plans to adopt a decades old testing strategy that will vastly increase the number of coronavirus tests performed in the United States and permit widespread tracking of the virus as it surges across the country. The method, called pooled testing, signals a paradigm shift. Instead of carefully rationing tests to only those with symptoms, pooled testing would enable frequent surveillance of asymptomatic people. Mass identification of coronavirus infections could hasten the reopening of schools, offices and factories. "We're in intensive discussions about how we're going to do it," Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country's leading infectious disease expert, said in an interview. "We hope to get this off the ground as soon as possible." In a call with reporters on Wednesday, Adm. Brett Giroir, deputy secretary of health and human services, said he expected the program to be up and running by the end of the summer. "My assessment is that the data is very strong," he said. By the time students return to universities, "pooling will be very mature." Given the many advantages, experts said, health officials should have embraced pooled testing much sooner. The United States military has used the technique at its bases worldwide, and has done so since it first tested men for syphilis in the 1940s. Health officials in China, Germany, Israel and Thailand have all deployed pooled testing for the coronavirus. In Nebraska, a state scientist found a loophole that allowed him to circumvent federal prohibitions on the method. In Memphis, Dr. Manoj Jain, an infectious disease expert familiar with low cost methods in India, has forged an ambitious plan to use the strategy. "I'm just wondering why the federal government does not mandate now that this be done to preserve the testing capacity," said Dr. Jain, of Emory University. "We really haven't learned from our counterparts in Europe and Asia." Here's how the technique works: A university, for example, takes samples from every one of its thousands of students by nasal swab, or perhaps saliva. Setting aside part of each individual's sample, the lab combines the rest into a batch holding five to 10 samples each. The pooled sample is tested for coronavirus infection. Barring an unexpected outbreak, just 1 percent or 2 percent of the students are likely to be infected, so the overwhelming majority of pools are likely to test negative. But if a pool yields a positive result, the lab would retest the reserved parts of each individual sample that went into the pool, pinpointing the infected student. The strategy could be employed for as little as 3 per person per day, according an estimate from economists at the University of California, Berkeley. By testing large numbers of people at a fraction of the cost, time and necessary ingredients, pooled surveillance could be widely adopted by workplaces, religious organizations, and schools and universities seeking to reopen. The method works best in such settings, where the number infected is likely to be low, rather than in high risk workplaces like meatpacking plants. In the absence of federal guidance, some health officials have forged ahead on their own. In mid March, as the number of infections in Nebraska climbed, the state was running out of supplies needed for coronavirus tests. The state lab had for years screened pooled samples of donated blood for pathogens and from pregnant women for sexually transmitted diseases. Peter Iwen, the lab's director, estimated that pooling coronavirus samples could conserve supplies and increase testing capacity by at least 70 percent. He tried to persuade officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to allow its assay to be used for pooled testing. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. "They told me it's an interesting concept, that's as far as it went," he said. Dr. Iwen also appealed to the Food and Drug Administration. Officials said the agency could not comment on pending applications for emergency use authorizations. But Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska had declared a state of emergency on March 13, which meant that certain federal and state rules could be superseded. With permission from the governor, Dr. Iwen moved to put pooled testing in place. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Looking for ideas to contain a coming surge in coronavirus infections, Mayor Jim Strickland of Memphis called Dr. Jain, who recalled a World Health Organization mission to India in November where he had seen pooled testing for tuberculosis. Dr. Jain, like Dr. Iwen, found that in the federal government, "there was no one really encouraging this to be done." But he proceeded with the mayor's blessing. Hundreds of Memphis firefighters, police officers and city workers volunteered to swab their own noses. The lab tested the samples in batches of three, five, seven or 10, and determined that pooling seemed to work best with batches of seven. The data were submitted to the F.D.A.; the agency has responded positively, but has not yet authorized the pooled method, Dr. Jain said. Pooled surveillance has its limitations. The savings in time and expense thin out when the number of infected people rises above 10 per 100. Because so many pools then are likely to yield positive results, laboratories wind up testing huge numbers of individual samples. Nebraska, for example, suspended its program about a month ago when meatpacking plants in the state exploded with coronavirus infections and the rate of positive samples arriving at the lab spiked above 10 percent. The technique also loses accuracy beyond that range. Dr. Jain said that weakness was not a pressing concern, because pooled testing's main goal is to identify people who have a high viral load and could transmit the virus, not simply to find every infected person. "This is not a diagnostic test, but a screening test," he said. "The bar can be much lower for a screening test." The F.D.A. has released guidelines for developers to adapt their tests to pooled samples. The agency is also asking manufacturers to permit labs to use the tests without being explicitly authorized by the F.D.A. to do so. "If the F.D.A. is able to do this, I think it would be a big deal for the U.S.," Dr. Iwen said. Federal law forbids any lab without the right credentials from conducting diagnostic tests and revealing the results to patients. But on June 19, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees lab testing, said it did not consider pooled surveillance to be diagnostic meaning any private or academic lab can screen and reveal the grouped results from a pool to the set of patients who contributed samples. But if a batch tests positive, the retesting of each patient's sample would be considered a diagnosis and need to come from a certified lab tacking on a delay of several days for the verdict noted Kelly Wroblewski, chief of infectious diseases at the Association of Public Health Laboratories. "That's where I think we probably start to disagree with pooling as a strategy," Ms. Wroblewski said. The F.D.A. and C.M.S. have always required screening tests to be done at a certified lab, so the change in policy needs further discussion, she said. She added that pooling was also unlikely to be useful at most state labs, which now tend to see samples from at least 15 infected people for every 100, well above the recommended cutoff of 10 percent. "I don't think it's going to solve all our problems," she said. Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the C.D.C., warned that any testing strategy was unlikely to succeed without isolation of those tested until results are available, and reasonable options for isolating away from the home for anyone who is found to be infected. Faced with rising cases in multiple states, he said, the administration is consulting with statisticians to estimate the ideal proportions for a pool in a particular location. In the meantime, more states have come around to the idea. Dr. Iwen said that in the past three weeks, about a dozen state lab directors had contacted him to ask about Nebraska's experience. Even in states like Arizona, where the percentage of positive tests may exceed 20 percent, pooled testing could be used in settings such as schools where the prevalence is likely to be much lower, he said especially as the shortage of testing supplies continues to be a problem. "We're being asked to expand surveillance testing to large populations of people, and there quite frankly is not enough reagents to be able to do that," he said, referring to chemicals used in diagnostic tests. "It's becoming a national discussion now." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Credit...NASA If No One Owns the Moon, Can Anyone Make Money Up There? CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. From Launch Complex 17 here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, many of NASA's robotic planetary missions blasted off. Soon, the two massive towers that once cradled Delta 2 rockets will be torn down. A new tenant Moon Express, a tiny company with far out ambitions is moving in. Next year, the company, with just 30 employees, aims to be the first private entity to put a small robotic lander on the moon and perhaps win 20 million in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. It is investing at least 1.85 million to renovate decades old buildings here. The company is transforming a parking lot into a miniature moonscape, and will also set up an engineering laboratory, a mission operations room and a test stand for spacecraft engine firings. Moon Express would not need all of these facilities if its only goal were to win the Lunar X Prize. Its second spacecraft aims to land in 2019 near the moon's south pole. A third, larger spacecraft in 2020 is to gather samples and then bring them back to Earth, the first haul of moon rocks since a Soviet robotic probe's return in 1976. But these plans almost came to a halt a couple of years ago not because of technological challenges or financial shortfalls, but because of an international agreement known as the Outer Space Treaty, which is marking its 50th anniversary this year. Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, boldly proclaims that his company will begin sending colonists to Mars in a decade. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is using part of his fortune to finance his rocket company Blue Origin, and predicts millions of people will be living and working in space. As these companies go where no businesses have gone before, they raise questions only fuzzily addressed by the Outer Space Treaty: What are private companies allowed to do in space? Can a company mine the moon or an asteroid and then sell what it has pulled out? How are countries to regulate these businesses? Internationally, countries have been discussing how to answer these questions. In the United States, Congress has begun tackling regulatory issues. Some warn that if the United States does not set up business friendly policies, then the start ups could move elsewhere including such seemingly unlikely places as Luxembourg. The Outer Space Treaty officially it is the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space declares that "the moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all states parties to the treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes." "We had a mission planned, we had investors invested, but didn't have a way forward at the end of 2015," Dr. Richards testified during a Senate committee hearing in May. "There wasn't anybody that didn't want to say yes. There was just no mechanism to do so." The Federal Aviation Administration licenses rocket launches and re entry of commercial spacecraft from orbit in order to ensure the safety of people on the ground. The Federal Communications Commission regulates communications satellites, and the Department of Commerce regulates commercial remote sensing satellites. But the United States does not as yet have a process for authorizing or supervising novel endeavors like a private company landing on the moon. Moon Express spent about a year working with the F.A.A., the State Department and other agencies to jerry rig what Dr. Richards called a "temporary patch," using the F.A.A.'s existing authority to review rocket payloads in order to gain the approval Moon Express was seeking. But if Congress and the president do not come up with a better solution, Moon Express, SpaceX, Blue Origin and the rest of the emerging industry could run into more bureaucratic walls, and companies might start looking for other places to set up shop. "Each company is moving forward with some assumption of risk but a presumption of the U.S. government coming through with frameworks that allow that to happen," Dr. Richards said in October during a visit at his company's Florida headquarters. Another space upstart is Planetary Resources, a small company located in an unremarkable office park outside Seattle. Its early investors included Larry Page, co founder of Google, and Charles Simonyi, a former chief software architect at Microsoft. The company is also taking advantage of an investment from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Planetary Resources's goal is to mine the solar system's asteroids. Luxembourg, a nation smaller than Rhode Island with a long history in mining, has bet 200 million euros more than 225 million on this industry that does not exist. That includes 28 million invested in Planetary Resources. In return, Luxembourg owns a 10 percent share of the company, said Etienne Schneider, the country's deputy prime minister. A Goldman Sachs report about innovative space businesses that came out in the spring seemed to agree. "Space mining could be more realistic than perceived," the report said. "While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower." At the Manhattan presentation, Mr. Schneider readily acknowledged that the notion of asteroid mining sounds like science fiction and that he often gets quizzical questions about why Luxembourg is spending money chasing this. Mr. Schneider recalled that during a visit to Silicon Valley in 2012, he met S. Pete Worden, then the director of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., who suggested that Luxembourg look into asteroid mining. "At the time, I listened to him and wondered what this guy might have smoked," Mr. Schneider said. But more discussions and research convinced Mr. Schneider this was a promising possibility. As a business, Planetary Resources is betting that by the time it extracts water from an asteroid, there will be a customer like NASA interested in buying water, hydrogen and oxygen. Eventually, the company aims to extract platinum, currently worth more than 900 an ounce, and other precious metals. To make these pursuits easier, Luxembourg passed a space law that took effect this summer. Planetary Resources has set up its European office there. Moves like this one are in part motivating policymakers in the United States to devote more attention to American laws that currently govern commercial space activities. Ambiguities in the Outer Space Treaty currently create uncertainty over whether anyone can profit from such business ventures. Article II in particular states, "Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means." Once the price of transportation comes down, more business opportunities will open up, Dr. Richards said. The moon, peppered with the impacts of asteroids over the eons, should also possess dollops of platinum and other precious metals. Helium 3, embedded in the lunar crust by the solar wind, could be fuel for future fusion power plants. Moon Express's family of spacecraft could be a boon to scientists, sending low cost probes not just to the moon but to other planets. Its second spacecraft is to carry a shoebox size experimental telescope for the International Lunar Observatory Association. Some locations near the lunar south pole, offering a continuous view of the universe, could be ideal for an astronomical observatory. Patches of eternal sunshine on the moon could be limited, valuable resources that nations and companies will someday squabble over. Dr. Richards compared this moment he sees coming to the 19th century California Gold Rush, when gold diggers jousted over the most lucrative places to sift ore. But he was confident that the new competitors would reach compromises. "I don't think there's going to be bad players per se, but there could be arguments over areas of operation overlap," he said. "But those are problems for the future, and that'll be a great problem to have." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Ms. Goerke sang splendidly, with silvery top notes and earthy colorings lower in her range . Still, she seemed to be feeling her way into the role at least the 80 minute chunk that is Act II, most of which is devoted to an impassioned love duet. When Isolde, in a wild eyed moment, tells her nurse that the goddess of love commands her to plunge into the realm of night, Ms. Goerke's singing had sheen but lacked blaze. There was something affecting, though, about this slight feeling of tentativeness in her performance. Here was a great singer making herself vulnerable and inviting an audience to share as she took up one of opera's great challenges. In music that's often conducted with thick, rich sound, Mr. Noseda drew lucid, fleet and textured playing from the orchestra during urgent stretches of the score. The opening of this second of three acts when a nervous Isolde is waiting for Tristan to arrive as horn calls from a nighttime hunting party are heard in the distance was wonderfully restless and lithe. As the act progressed, Mr. Noseda was good at revealing the shape of long arcs in the score, as the music swelled and crested and subsided. At times, for all the bracing vigor and transparency, I wanted more traditional Wagnerian weightiness and depth. Mr. Noseda was at his best as the music settled into the murmuring, blissful "O sink hernieder" love music, which had hints of almost Italianate lyricism in this performance. Ms. Goerke and the tenor Stephen Gould exchanged long spun, melting phrases while the orchestra shimmered; subtle syncopations in the warm strings came across like nervous breathing. Mr. Gould was not testing any waters: He has long been a leading Tristan. At times his voice sounded a little patchy and rough. But he mostly sang with remarkable freshness and clarion tone, especially during Tristan's bursts of unhinged ardor, and brought touching poignancy to moments when he was transfixed by Isolde's rapturous love. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
What happened to the dinosaurs when an asteroid about six miles wide struck Earth some 66 million years ago in what is today Mexico is well known: It wiped them out. But the exact fate of our planet's diverse ocean dwellers at the time shelly ammonites, giant mosasaurs and other sea creatures has not been as well understood. New research now makes the case that the same incident that helped bring an end to the reign of the dinosaurs also acidified the planet's oceans, disrupted the food chain that sustained life underwater and resulted in a mass extinction. The study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, aims to shore up the hypothesis that the Chicxulub event's destruction of marine life the result of sulfur rich rocks depositing acid rain into the oceans was just as severe as the fire and fury it brought to land. "It's flash acidification, and it transformed ecosystems for millions of years," said Noah Planavsky, a biogeochemist at Yale and one of the study's authors. "We were shocked that we actually found this." The impact of the Chicxulub asteroid so named for the crater it carved out around the Gulf of Mexico sent columns of rock into Earth's atmosphere, incinerated the planet's forests and drove tsunamis far across the oceans. But the connection between the crash and the marine extinction has been less solid. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
It was November 2002, little more than a year after planes had been flown into the World Trade Center and anthrax mailings had killed five Americans. New York City was still on edge, in a state of high alert for suspected terrorists. Suddenly all eyes were on a middle aged married couple from Santa Fe, N.M., on a brief vacation to New York, who had the remarkably ill luck to come down with the city's first case of bubonic plague in more than a century. Television news trucks surrounded Beth Israel Medical Center North, where they had dragged themselves after being stricken in their hotel room with rampaging fevers, headaches, extreme exhaustion and mysterious balloonlike swellings. It took just over a day for public health officials to dispel fears about bioterrorism; there had been no unusual rise in the number of very high fevers that could have suggested an attack. It turned out that the couple, Lucinda Marker and John Tull, had been bitten by fleas infected with Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. Their home state, New Mexico, accounts for more than half of the average seven cases of plague in the country every year. (In 2012, just one case was reported in the state.) "It was an absolute fluke," Ms. Marker, now 57, said during a recent visit to New York. "Just rotten luck." Like most people who contract the disease and are quickly treated with antibiotics, she recovered in a few days. But 10 years later, her husband is still badly scarred. In the days after they were bitten, Mr. Tull, a burly, athletic lawyer a former prosecutor who volunteered with search and rescue teams developed septicemic plague, as the infection spread throughout his body. His temperature rose to 104.4, his blood pressure plummeted to 78/50. His kidneys were failing, and so much clotted blood collected in his hands and feet that they turned black. Mr. Tull was put into a medically induced coma. When he was brought out of it, nearly three months later, he found out that both his legs had been amputated below the knee to drain the deadly infection. The surgery that saved his life radically changed it, but did not dampen his resilient spirit. Even before he was released from the hospital to begin a long rehabilitation, he vowed he would once again be hiking on the rustic trails above his home. Today Mr. Tull, 63, drives his own car, sometimes takes over the controls of a private plane, and goes on an annual trout fishing trip to Colorado with friends. But he has not been able to hike that trail. "That is one of the things I miss most," Mr. Tull, now retired and receiving a disability pension, said in a telephone interview from his home. "Every single hour of every single day, the plague affects our lives, but about the only time I really get angry these days is when, because of my physical condition, there is something I want to do but can't." He has appeared in several television documentaries, speaking to medical researchers around the world and dealing with a posse of journalists as his very private ordeal has been played out in public. "Basically Lucinda and I surrendered our privacy to the press and the people who make documentaries," Mr. Tull said. "But you know what? That didn't bother us a bit. Lucinda had been an actress and I had been a trial lawyer. We were used to it." Ms. Marker, who has started to write about their ordeal, says that after 10 years she is coming to terms with it emotionally and psychologically. Yet many aspects of their case still puzzle medical experts. In particular, no one knows why she was so easily cured while he nearly died. Bubonic plague is transmitted by fleas that feed off pack rats, ground squirrels and prairie dogs in the mountains of New Mexico and several other states. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the disease probably came to the United States around 1900, in Asian rats that escaped from ships in the port of San Francisco. Initially, plague was restricted to cities. The worst outbreak came in 1907, after the San Francisco earthquake. Vermin control programs prevented further outbreaks, but fleas hitched onto other animals in the wild. Dr. Paul Ettestad, public health veterinarian for the New Mexico Department of Health, said prairie dogs became an "amplification host," carrying the disease to their burrows and spreading it throughout their territory. Today, the easternmost limit of the plague roughly corresponds to the 100th meridian, which passes through central Texas. Known as the plague line, is it also the extent of the prairie dog population. When doctors from New York called Dr. Ettestad in 2002 asking about bubonic plague, he thought it was some kind of joke. The height of plague season is summer, not November, and there had not been a single instance of human plague that year in New Mexico. "Imagine my skepticism when the New York doctor said there were two people with plague at the same time," Dr. Ettestad said. An investigator on his team heard the names of Ms. Marker and Mr. Tull and remembered that an infected pack rat had been found on their property that July. Samples of Mr. Tull's blood were sent to the New York City Public Health Laboratory, which had received training for diagnosis of plague after Sept. 11. Within hours, plague was confirmed. Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, then commissioner of New York City's Department of Health and now director of the C.D.C., said in an interview that the city's emergency room surveillance system enabled officials to rule out bioterrorism. "That showed us the importance of having information systems that could not only show trends but also show when trends were not there," Dr. Frieden said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Some architects prefer their creations devoid of people it photographs better that way but Lina Bo Bardi built for life. The Italian born Brazilian architect (1914 92) took a functionalist, anti utopian approach to building that privileged social encounters and unexpected discoveries, and she is responsible for three of the greatest buildings in Sao Paulo: the city's main art museum, known as MASP, where paintings hang on free standing glass easels; her own cantilevered house, the Casa de Vidro; and the huge SESC Pompeia, a convivial community center that is her crowning work. If you can't get down to Brazil (and, alert, starting next month Americans no longer need a visa!) you can just head uptown, where Bo Bardi's furniture has been installed in a swoon inducing exhibition, "Studio d'Arte Palma," at Gladstone's uptown branch, in a townhouse designed by her fellow modernist Edward Durell Stone. From 1948 to '51, she and her fellow Italian immigrant Giancarlo Palanti (1906 77) created new Brazilian interior furnishings informed by vernacular styles and made from local woods, often darker and more lustrous than the ones the European avant garde favored. A stackable folding chair she designed for MASP is fashioned from burled jacaranda and has its original leather seat, while Palanti's armchairs, made of the same wood, have been reupholstered in soft mohair velvet. Here too are a covetable desk Bo Bardi made of caviuna wood, and a low slung armchair Palanti crafted from darker cabreuva, both of which are supported by bold N shaped legs. Even the gallery's receptionist is seated at a dining table by Bo Bardi and Palanti, topped with a slab of the warm, dense paulista wood called pau marfim. Later, working on her own, Bo Bardi made starker and chunkier furniture for her own buildings, often inspired by the vernacular architecture of her beloved northern Brazil. They include chairs for a church in the form of a simple box, with three planes beveled into the top to form a seat, as well as the adroit stools of SESC Pompeia, each made from four orthogonal planes of economical pine. If you are new to Bo Bardi, these should impel you to delve into the full career of one of the last century's most magnanimous architects. If you're already a Lina lover you may go weak in the knees but luckily there's plenty of seating. JASON FARAGO This exhibition envisions a future somewhere from 2040 to 2060, unfolding over five dimly lit funhouse rooms (without the fun). Tables and display cases hold melting blocks of ice that cause water to rise around dollhouse size legislative buildings molded in mud gathered from the Potomac River. Water from the melting ice collects in buckets beneath the tables and cases and will be refrozen and put back in the sculptures throughout the show. Elsewhere are sculptures of buildings created in wax, also melting. (They will be recast and reinstalled.) In the final room, giant vitrines with eerie orange and purple light contain round vessels encasing miniature scenes of work or leisure: tiny computers, office equipment and beach chairs. It's like staring into a flooded version of our already memorialized future. The gallery release written by Mr. Kline serves as a stern policy brief as speculative fiction. We're living in a "soft dystopia" now, he writes, but when/if the Antarctic ice sheet becomes unmoored and the world's major cities are flooded, this will become a "hard dystopia" as people scramble for resources around the globe. In the same way specially fabricated doors embedded with sodden looking fragments of national flags divide the exhibition, we are on a historical "threshold" between present and future, prediction and reality. Mr. Kline's show offers a metaphorical conceptual forecast , after which you can join young protesters in the streets. MARTHA SCHWENDENER To make the artworks for which she's best known, the Swiss artist Heidi Bucher (1926 93) would cover a shirt, a window, a even an entire room with an adhesive and strips of fabric. Once they were in place, she'd apply a mixture of latex and mother of pearl pigment by hand to the fabric, which would take on the form of the original material as it dried. Ms. Bucher would then peel it off with great effort and care, as one might a Band Aid. She used this process on everything from her studio cellar to an 18th century prison and called the castings nine of which are on view in the exhibition "The Site of Memory," at Lehmann Maupin "skinnings." The final artworks do resemble skins, as if the objects and architecture they represent had shed them like snakes. Detached from their bodies, the skins take on colors browns, pinks and purples that recall bruises and rust, while some have a white sheen that might suggest mold. Up close, the fascinating surfaces of pieces like "Untitled (Door to the Herrenzimmer)" (1978) morph into abstract paintings. Step back and their ghostly shapes return to view. The physicality of Ms. Bucher's works gives them an abiding power. They are impressions and memories captured through contact, rather than more immaterial means like photography. Notably, Swiss women gained the federal right to vote in 1971, around when the artist was cultivating her casting process. She seems to have been seeking the cycle of new growth that molting implies. By relegating her surroundings to traces of their past selves, Ms. Bucher was willing a new world into existence. JILLIAN STEINHAUER | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Whenever people talk about the icons of 20th century men's wear, there is a roster of names you can always rely on hearing. There is Cary Grant. There is Fred Astaire. There are Marlon Brando, James Dean, Robert Redford, Paul Newman and, at a slightly later date, the musicians Miles Davis, David Bowie and Bryan Ferry. Yet there is one influential figure who hardly ever gets his proper due for the abiding influence he has exerted on men's fashion. That is Steve Urkel, the prototypical fictional nerd portrayed on the sitcom "Family Matters" by the actor Jaleel White. There are plenty of reasons Urkel should have lodged in the collective consciousness of an earlier era, not the least of these his catchphrases "Whoa, Mama!" and "I've fallen and I can't get up!" Yet it is the sartorially distinctive Urkel that concerns us here, he of the goggle eyed glasses, the crisply ironed denim flood pants, the red suspenders and the grandpa cardigans. Knowingly or not, designers have been mining the Urkel style vocabulary for years he is the geek that keeps on giving Todd Snyder being just the latest. There were shrunken sweaters paired with oversize denim trousers in the light blue dad wash that are catnip to millennial guys and a vague source of shame to the olds from the '80s who wore them the first time around. There was a show opening belted bathrobe coat in houndstooth checked wool, followed by a parade of wide wale corduroy car coats paired with rib hugging shirts adorned with floral patterns that screamed thrift shop dollar rack. In true Urkel fashion, these were worn over shrunken striped turtlenecks. There were, of course, the usual hoodies, because Mr. Snyder made his name as a designer who came early to the wedding of sartorial styling to street wear (and also because he was doing Champion collaborations back when Demna Gvasalia was a still a gleam in his daddy's eye). There were leather shirt jackets with contrast sleeves and breast pockets so ostentatiously nerdy that you wondered why the show's stylist left out a plastic pocket protector. Much of it was in a palette mustards, burgundy, the smutty pink that skaters made it cool for guys to wear again so off kilter only someone with Mr. Snyder's chops would even venture near it. That is the signature skill of this Iowa reared designer who, while he seldom strays out of his mainstream lane, manages to introduce just enough innovation each season to ensure his survival in a landscape littered with the wreckage of competitors' defunct careers. "I like taking something old and frumpy and making it new and young," Mr. Snyder said. In the absence of shock and awe, that will do. Willy Chavarria, conversely, is a designer determined to startle and move, to import not only elements of his personal narrative (he identifies himself as a Chicano from California's agricultural San Joaquin Valley, where his family worked as harvesters) into his work, but also his current emotional state. For his debut several seasons back, Mr. Chavarria installed a selection of street cast models some trans, all minorities in prison cage settings as a symbol of "brown power," his way of expressing opposition to the racially exclusionary rhetoric of the Trump presidential campaign. His last show was held in a leather bar in Midtown Manhattan that is one of the surviving relics of New York gay culture from a time before AIDS. "It is all about reflecting how we feel as a community of people," Mr. Chavarria said backstage after his Monday evening show, referring to the little appreciated fact that no inherent contradiction exists between caring deeply about the fit of a biker jacket and about immigration policy. "The first show was angry and resistant," he said. "The second show, at the Eagle, was romantic, loving and sexual. This is a sad show because we're in a sad time." Yet despite the tears painted or glued onto the models' tattooed faces, the show felt less sad then somber, expressive of both an emotional charge largely absent from contemporary fashion and of the technical skills Mr. Chavarria honed during design stints at Ralph Lauren and American Eagle Outfitters before going out on his own. Proportion play, asymmetry and contrast are signature tools of this designer, and here he paired supersize hooded denim trench coats with billowing denims; placed shrunken canvas work wear jackets atop rib hugging leather vests; and presented armoring (yet luxurious and lightweight) lab coats reminiscent of early Yohji Yamamoto in a lineup that also played up the fragility of the body beneath the clothes. Shoeless or shirtless is how Mr. Chavarria sent out some of his models, and also in the case of Roe Taylor, a 3 month old whose father, John, tenderly carried her onto the runway to close out the show clad in the scrap of unstitched cloth that is the first thing most people on the planet will ever wear. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
You would not have called her camera shy. In more than half century in the public eye, Betsy Bloomingdale courted photographers, drawing them into her orbit with a come this way cocktail of glamour and fizzy good cheer. When she died last week, Mrs. Bloomingdale was 93. The social doyenne, philanthropist, fashion plate and widow of the department store heir and Diners Club developer Alfred S. Bloomingdale would be remembered as the last of a tribe, adept at elevating the social civilities entertaining, dressing and the rituals of seeing and being seen into something of an art. "In everything she did, she had a light touch," said Bob Colacello, her longtime friend and a Vanity Fair contributor. The effervescence that defined her, often masking a formidable perfectionism, helped place her on intimate footing with royalty, corporate titans, show business luminaries and politicians. Her devoutly chronicled, decades long friendship with Nancy Reagan won her the sobriquet First Friend. "She had this kind of joie de vivre that made her seem at times very Pollyannaish," Mr. Colacello said. At the same time, she was elegant, he added, "like a cross between Babe Paley and Lucille Ball." Mrs. Bloomingdale, born Betty Lee Newling in Los Angeles to Australian emigre parents, may have relished the comparison. True, she made a near fetish of documenting the manners and mores of the European elite. She meticulously jotted in her diary the menus, table settings, seating arrangements and furnishings of the Rothschilds, Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, Sao Schlumberger and their patrician like. Yet, as admirers point out, she rarely took herself too seriously. "She was correct, but at the same time, she had a sense of coziness and spontaneity," said her friend Alex Hitz, a Los Angeles chef and society fixture. Her sense of fun was reflected "in the most elegant little hors d'oeuvres, peanut butter and bacon, that were served at every dinner," he said, and, more visibly, in the clothes she wore. Early treks, at her husband's suggestion, to the Parisian couture houses instilled in her an appreciation for Valentino, Balmain and the minimalist fashions of Marc Bohan for Dior. "We both loved Marc Bohan," remembered her friend Lynn Wyatt, the Houston society figure. "We lived at opposite ends of the United States, but we would always call each other and tell each other what we bought, so we wouldn't wear the same dress at the same event." Mrs. Bloomingdale cultivated a taste as well for the Americans James Galanos, Oscar de la Renta and Adolfo, whose little boucle luncheon suits and lustrous evening looks among them the brocade vest and gleaming silver pantaloons she wore as a hostess in the late '60s became a signature. She documented a wardrobe that was built on audacious color, especially red, as duteously as she did her menus, keeping detailed notes on when each gown had been worn, with which earrings, bags and even hosiery. Yet she was neither rigid nor predictable, eschewing a codified style in favor of a look that veered from the sleek understatement of a mock turtleneck cashmere caftan, or the slender one shoulder gowns she favored in the '70s, to the more showy effusions of the Reagan era, as in the lavishly feathered cape she wore atop a filmy gown to a Metropolitan Museum of Art costume exhibition in 1985. Mrs. Bloomingdale's fondness for frills was still in evidence a year ago, when she wore a scarlet evening dress with outsize belled sleeves, girlishly bowed at the shoulders, to Vanity Fair's Oscars party. She was devoted to finery, entertaining and dressing with theatrical flair. "Giving a party or hosting a dinner is in many ways like a performance," she wrote in 1994 in "Entertaining With Betsy Bloomingdale: A Collection of Culinary Tips and Treasures From the World's Best Hosts and Hostesses." "You are the producer, director, stage manager and finally the actor," turned out, accordingly, she might have added, in a costume befitting a star. Yet she was never pretentious. "She was happy with the duchess or the flower girl," Mr. Hitz said. "She was not a snob." Nor did she balk at bending convention to her tastes and whims. Mr. Hitz remembered giving a party, the invitation calling for tieless shirts and jeans. "Well, Betsy was a game girl," he recalled. "If somebody said bluejeans, she was going to wear the best damn bluejeans in the house, with shoes as high as the Empire State Building." From the start of the Bloomingdale Reagan friendship in the 1950s, through Ronald Reagan's term as California governor and his years in the White House, Mrs. Bloomingdale shared her sedulously cultivated fashion sense with the first lady. "Nancy didn't travel as extensively as she may have liked, certainly not as extensively as Betsy," Mr. Colacello recalled. "I think Nancy looked to her as a kind of style mentor." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LEPENSKI VIR, Serbia The faces are haunting. About 8,000 years ago, over a period of perhaps 200 years, artists that lived in this settlement on the banks of the Danube carved about 100 sandstone boulders with faces and abstract designs. The faces are simple, with wide round eyes, a stylized nose and down turned open mouths. They do not look happy. I imagine these stone heads posing an existential question something like the one my son startled us with when we told him that he had to go to play group even if he didn't want to. He was 3, and as the loss of freedom struck him, he wailed: "How did this happen to me?" Archaeologists say the heads seem to be a mixture of human and fish features, accounting for their strangeness. Some designs look like fish skeletons. The gorges and pools in this part of the Danube were long a home to sturgeon and other large fish that sustained human life. Perhaps a fishing people imagined their souls migrating into fish after death. And many of these sculptures were kept in strange trapezoidal dwellings, with hard limestone floors. In some cases the dead lay buried under the homes. So the sculptures might have represented ancestors. I take this as consistent with my interpretation. You die and suddenly you're a sturgeon: What's your first question? Lepenski Vir Vir means whirlpool in Serbian was first inhabited more than 12,000 years ago and off and on over thousands of years. Archaeologists excavated it from 1965 70, when most of the site was flooded during the building of the first of two dams on the Danube. But I first came upon the museum and reconstruction of the site in Serbia only a few months ago as a tourist. I was stunned by the sculptures and the mystery of the site's past. It sits across the river from a mountain cliff on the Romanian side of the river, and its trapezoidal homes echo the shape of the cliff. There are other sites of similar age, a few of them with boulder sculptures, on either side of the Danube in this area, now known as the Iron Gates. But only Lepenski Vir has boulders with faces. I called Dusan Boric, an archaeologist who has studied the site extensively, to find out more. Dr. Boric, a fellow at Columbia University's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, said Lepenski Vir is more important than ever for research. Studies of ancient DNA that trace patterns of human migration into Europe, chemical analyses of bones and pottery, and continuing archaeological studies of burial practices place the site at the very moment when farmers from the Near East began to migrate into Southeastern Europe and met the hunters and gatherers who lived there at the time. Researchers still debate the precise dating of different settlements at Lepenski Vir and nearby sites, but agree on the essential fact that the sites capture a record of the meeting and mixing of two cultures and peoples. It took a few thousand years for agriculture to spread to all of Europe. Permanent settlements were created, and the population itself changed with this migration and others that followed. This transition from a hunting and gathering culture to a farming culture marks the change from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic for archaeologists. Lepenski Vir offers a snapshot of that process at its very beginning. David Reich, an expert in ancient human DNA and human migration at Harvard, has drawn DNA from bones at Lepenski Vir. "It is a mother lode of material," Dr. Reich said. In a recent paper, he and other scientists reported new findings about the "genomic history of southeastern Europe." As part of that study they drew DNA from four individuals at Lepenski Vir. Two were identifiable as Near Eastern farmers. And studies of the chemistry of their bones show that they had not grown up at Lepenski Vir, but were migrants from elsewhere. Another had a mixed hunter gatherer/farmer heritage and had eaten a diet of fish. Another had hunter gatherer heritage. The dating of the skeletons showed a range. The one with mixed heritage was from 6070 B.C .E., or about 8,000 years ago. The farmers were dated as 6200 5600 B.C.E. And the hunter gatherer probably earlier than the others. The DNA of this ancient population of hunter gatherers contributes only a small fraction of European ancestry today, Dr. Reich said. Europeans now represent a mixture of genetic contributions from waves of migrants. The site, he said, is a key landmark in the "lost landscape of human variation." In some other areas, archaeologists and ancient DNA experts have not always seen eye to eye, but here, Dr. Boric said, the new techniques have been a great boon. With ancient DNA analysis, he said, "What we are getting is an incredibly powerful tool for understanding what went on in the past." Another indication of the merging of two cultures is a change in burial practices. Throughout Europe, the Mesolithic foragers laid a body down stretched out. The migrant farmers from the Near East brought another way of treating death, setting the body in a crouched or fetal position. Both practices are found at Lepenski Vir. And when the burial practices are combined with DNA profiles, the picture is richer still. Some of the dead of Near Eastern heritage are buried in the way of the foragers. And others of foraging heritage are buried in the way of the farmers. The farmers also brought their animals. There are bones from at least one dog, which may someday help illuminate the muddled picture of dog domestication, which now seems to have occurred separately in Asia and Europe. And then there are the pigs. Laurent Frantz of Queen Mary University of London, Greger Larson of the University of Oxford and many other researchers just this month published an exhaustive study of the introduction of Near Eastern pigs, originally domesticated in Anatolia, into Europe. They looked at ancient and modern DNA of wild and domestic pigs, including specimens from the Iron Gates sites. As to the faces, fishing was important on the Danube before farmers came and continued long afterward. Pottery that was used for cooking grains elsewhere in Europe was used for preparation of fish at Lepenski Vir. And the strange faces appear nowhere else. There are about 100 such sculptures at Lepenski Vir. In neighboring settlements, also of fishing people, also where farmers came and met and married foragers, there are some sculptures with designs like those found on the Lepenski Vir stone heads, but none of the nearby sculptures have faces. The farmers did not bring them with them. The hunter gatherers did not make them before the farmers came. They did not spread to the rest of Europe. I have on my desk now replicas of two of the heads that I picked up when I visited the museum at Lepenski Vir. I look at them and I feel a muddled kinship to the artists, the departed souls, the sturgeon. I too would like to know the answer to what I believe is their question. How did this happen to me? But I tell them what I told my son. I have absolutely no idea. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
She's only just arrived, but Annie Murphy is about to get kicked out of the Plaza Hotel. The situation would be a fitting one for the character she plays on "Schitt's Creek": Alexis Rose, a fallen socialite whose family loses everything in a Bernie Madoff esque Ponzi scheme. For Alexis, being ushered out of a New York City landmark would be yet another entry in a long line of humiliating losses, including getting dumped by her Greek shipping magnate boyfriend, saying goodbye to her wild life on the international party scene and moving from an affluent neighborhood in an unspecified city to the small town of Schitt's Creek. And, O.K., the cause for the hotel banishing Ms. Murphy a rogue photo shoot staged in the lobby is admittedly very Alexis too. It probably doesn't help that, out of character, Ms. Murphy could still pass for a rich hellion of Instagram, with her waterfall of caramel colored hair and precision winged eyeliner. One of the Plaza's chief occupations these days is likely trying prevent glossy maned women just like her from creating influencer content inside its storied walls. "It would be hilarious if we got kicked out," Ms. Murphy remarked. She remained un Alexis ly pleasant and patient through the negotiations with management until they were finally assuaged. (The Plaza eventually consented to a photo shoot as long as it was limited to one dead end hallway and there was no flash photography. Otherwise, she was welcome to use the exterior of the building, where any old pleb with a selfie stick can pose.) Then it was on to the Champagne Bar, which is less intimidating and exclusive than it sounds, but just as expensive. Ms. Murphy's eyes widened as she read the menu, which includes a champagne and caviar special that costs 895. She instead settled on a glass of more reasonable rose. Ms. Murphy's unfussiness can be explained in two ways, the first and cheapest being that she's Canadian, and imbued with the kind manners for which her nation is so often parodied. The second is that fame and success remain relatively new to her. "Schitt's Creek" just entered its fifth season, but only in 2018, when it began streaming on Netflix, did the show see a surge in its popularity stateside. (The program airs on the CBC in Canada and Pop TV in the U.S.) Alexis Rose is the biggest role Ms. Murphy has ever played, and before she was cast, she was close to quitting acting entirely. "About two years into living in Toronto, my apartment burned to the ground," Ms. Murphy said. "My husband and I ended up living in his grandparents' attic for a year and a half." Sign up here to receive Wait , a weekly newsletter in which Caity Weaver investigates a question in the news and pop culture. Soon thereafter, she went to Los Angeles and gave what she described as the worst screen test of all time. "It was literally the worst thing I've ever done in my life," she said. "So I finally got through this train wreck of an audition. There was 15 seconds of silence, and all they said was, 'Woooow, O.K.'" After what she called an "ugly cry," Ms. Murphy determined it was time to find another, less brutal profession. (Also: She wanted to leave L.A.) Two days later, she got the audition for "Schitt's Creek," which films in Toronto. Her co star Dan Levy who is also the show's creator knew right away that she would make the perfect foil and sister to his character, David Rose. Their tough love is introduced in the pilot episode, when the siblings argue over who has to sleep closer to the door in the motel room they now have to share. "You know what, David? YOU get murdered first, for once," Alexis snaps. Ms. Murphy is the kind of physical comedian who disappears entirely into her character, holding her arms like someone accustomed to balancing an expensive purse in the crook of her elbow. Her hands, limp at the wrists, move constantly, forming a posture Ms. Murphy described as "a T rex playing the piano at an old timey saloon." As Alexis, she creates a persona that is so fully embodied that you almost miss how good she is at it. She was effusive with praise for him, as well as her other "Schitt's Creek" castmates, including Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy (Dan's father and "Schitt's Creek" co creator). Ms. Murphy admitted that the silk dress she was wearing was borrowed from her friend and castmate Emily Hampshire, who plays the owner of the rundown motel to which the Rose family decamps after losing their fortune, and that she was terrified of sweating through it. "All of the women of 'Schitt's Creek' are on a natural deodorant kick right now," she said. Ms. Murphy said that the show has made her more aware of fashion. "Catherine and I do hours and hours of fittings," she said. "Sometimes we have to resort to the internet because we come out of the room with two arms out of the neck hole, completely trapped in whatever article of clothing it is. Some of the clothing is so complicated and expensive. I'm constantly walking on eggshells because I'm wearing a 10k outfit." As for whether or not she's actually damaged anything, she said: "There have been a few close calls. I've ruined many pairs of shoes, especially during the first season because Alexis was doing outdoor community service" a result of driving her car into a Prada store "and I had to tromp around on gravel roads in Jimmy Choos. Dan would be like, 'Ughhh," but he's the one who wrote it!" Ms. Murphy finished her second glass of wine and decided it was time to quit the grand opulence of the Plaza for a more relaxed scene: her friend's apartment in Brooklyn, where she planned to watch the season premiere and get tarot readings with some of her castmates. More than anything, she said, she was excited to show Ms. Hampshire that she hadn't ruined her dress. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
America needs new tools for the timely measurement and monitoring of technology, jobs and skills to cope with the advance of artificial intelligence and automation, an expert panel composed mainly of economists and computer scientists said in a new report. The panel's recommendations include the development of an A.I. index, analogous to the Consumer Price Index, to track the pace and spread of artificial intelligence technology. That technical assessment, they said, could then be combined with detailed data on skills and tasks involved in various occupations to guide education and job training programs. A public private collaboration, they added, is necessary to create such tools because information from many sources will be the essential ingredient. Those information sources range from traditional government statistics to the vast pools of new data from online services like LinkedIn and Udacity that can be tapped to gain insights on skills, job openings and the effectiveness of training programs. "We're flying blind into this dramatic set of economic changes," Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, said in an interview. Mr. Brynjolfsson was a co chairman of the 13 member panel that drafted the 184 page report, which was published on Thursday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a nonprofit organization whose studies are intended as objective analysis to inform public policy. He and the panel's other co chairman, Tom Mitchell, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, also wrote a separate commentary in the journal Nature that was published on Thursday, explaining the problem. Both the report and commentary were spurred by the advances in A.I. in recent years, including document reading software and self driving cars, which promise to make inroads into work done by humans. That prospect has created angst for many American workers about the difficulties of adapting to technological change and the failure of institutions to help them. Yet technologists and academics still differ sharply on how fast the next wave of automation will proceed and how many occupations will be affected. That prompted the panelists to suggest the new data monitoring tools and the pulling together of government and online data sources to sort through the consequences. That style of data driven decision making is a hallmark of internet companies like Amazon and Google, and it has been increasingly embraced across corporate America. "There's no reason government can't do that," Mr. Brynjolfsson said. In recent years, the federal government has made considerable progress in integrating its surveys of businesses and households with other data it collects, including information on foreign trade, payrolls and unemployment, said John Haltiwanger, a professor at the University of Maryland and former chief economist of the Census Bureau. "But our surveys are not really designed to track technology or its impact," said Professor Haltiwanger, who was a member of the expert panel. "The best shot at that is the private sector data." A broad national initiative, perhaps with the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis setting rules for private sector data sharing and privacy protections, might not be possible, Mr. Brynjolfsson conceded. But he and Mr. Mitchell wrote in Nature, "Perfection here is not a prerequisite for utility anything is better than flying blind." One program that embodies the panel's recommendations is Skillful, a collaboration of the Markle Foundation, LinkedIn, Arizona State University and edX, a nonprofit provider of online courses. The partners are working with employers, educators and local governments in Colorado and the Phoenix metropolitan area to link jobs, skills and training more tightly. Past times of economic turmoil have led to new kinds of economic data collection and analysis. At the outset of the Depression in 1929, for example, there was no measure of national economic activity or reliable information on unemployment. In June 1930, based on scattered reports of improvement, President Herbert Hoover prematurely declared, "The Depression is over." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
At first the scene is quiet: Janet Leigh steps into a shower at the Bates Motel, finding relief under the warm water. Then the translucent curtain reveals an approaching figure, who whisks it open with one hand while brandishing a knife in the other. The slashing shrieks that follow are some of the most famous musical notes in film: synonymous with horror and still frightening enough to make any veteran thrill seeker tense up. At David Geffen Hall in Manhattan, those high notes Bernard Herrmann's murder theme for Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" will be struck from the violin section of the New York Philharmonic, which is presenting the movie on Friday and Saturday with a live soundtrack, as part of its popular Art of the Score series. Also on offer, on Wednesday and Thursday, is Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," whose restrained soundtrack by John Williams contains another famous theme: the five notes used to communicate with alien visitors. Both scores were underappreciated when new. Herrmann's "Psycho" music received no Academy Award recognition in 196 1. And while Mr. Williams was nominated for "Close Encounters" in 1978, he ended up losing to himself, for "Star Wars." Yet the music of both "Psycho" and "Close Encounters" has become the stuff of legend, essential to the histories of horror and sci fi. Here's what to listen for in the two soundtracks. 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' That Mr. Williams wrote his score for "Star Wars" in the same year as "Close Encounters" speaks to his versatility. One is a grand space opera, with catchy Wagnerian leitmotifs and blaring immensity; the other is atonal and elusive, full of amorphous sound that rarely coalesces into melody. (Mr. Williams, ever adaptable, later wrote playfully enchanting music for "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," which the Philharmonic will perform in December.) If you listen closely, there are signs that "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters" share a composer: an affinity for Ligeti comes through in both, as does a mastery of cosmic Romanticism. But their differences are clear from the first measure. Where "Star Wars" begins with fanfare and a brassy overture, Mr. Spielberg's movie doesn't open with any sort of memorable theme. The John Williams of rhythmic complexity, brass melodies and militaristic percussion comes through in subsequent scenes, but only in passing; the score is otherwise understated, as mysteriously slippery as the film's U.F.O. sightings. And in that mystery is a lot of terror. "Barry's Kidnapping," one of the soundtrack's many atonal passages, escalates like a Shepard tone and horrifies with piercing strings reminiscent of Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima," from 1960. Steven C. Smith, in his biography "A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann," repeats a quip from the composer that Hitchcock completed only 60 percent of any film. "I have to finish it for him," Herrmann said. That's not too outrageous; in the films they collaborated on between 1955 and 1964, from "The Trouble With Harry" to "Marnie," Herrmann's soundtracks were vital in setting tone and offering insight into psychology. Nearly 30 seconds in, Herrmann introduces a tuneful melody that, even in its singing ease, feels unstable over the accompaniment, a symptom of the horror hiding behind the amiability of Norman Bates. Here, as in the rest of the score, Herrmann writes for only a string orchestra. He was working on a budget the film's daring came at a price, with Hitchcock using his own money to finance it though Herrmann writes for the small ensemble's full range of sound: harmonics, percussive effects, the use of mutes and a telling difference between vibrato and unadorned, airy sustained notes. In cues like "The Stairs," Herrmann escalates anxiety through simple yet clashing rising scales that begin with the lowest instruments and build with the upper voices for a disturbing cluster. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
DALLAS The objects themselves machined steel barrels, lathed brass casings, cast lead slugs are functional and practical, designed for maximum efficiency, be it in shooting targets, animals or human beings. They are more than that though. The guns and weapons parts on display at the N.R.A. convention in Dallas last weekend represent ingrained ideals of this country's identity, a nation forged an hardened by wars. Firearms were not the most common accessory among the 75,000 odd attendees. That honor went to Old Glory. The flag was emblazoned on T shirts and caps, incorporated into outfits, printed on backpacks and purses, pinned through lapels, tattooed in skin, and painted on walls, signs and guns. There were planned protests outside the convention center that garnered hundreds of R.S.V.P.s on Facebook, but in a state where guns are welcomed virtually anywhere, from churches to colleges, the numbers didn't meet expectations. In the midday sun on Saturday, a handful of protesters demanding stricter regulation were countered by hundreds of open carry activists, some with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. They carried a banner, 25 feet high, proclaiming their right to bear arms. "It bothers me that people say no one's trying to take away the Second Amendment rights. On the contrary, they are trying," said John Swicegood, who was wearing an AR 15 and sunglasses wrapped around the back of his head, to Gretchen Goetz. "I see it on Facebook, I hear it on the news. I'm a Democrat, but I support the Second Amendment." Ms. Goetz, 57, who was protesting assault rifles, responded from her perch on her bicycle seat. "Basically, I think you can buy a politician who will make the law," she said, grasping at the handlebars. "We have got to find a way to bridge this gap. There is a division in our country that I've never seen like this in my life. I've never even been an activist until I was 56!" "Me too!" said Mr. Swicegood. He laughed. "I didn't become one until I turned 55," which is to say, this year. Inside the exhibition hall, thousands of vendors were selling firearms and accessories. The hum of the crowd was broken rhythmically by the throaty sound of guns being charged and the sharp click of firing pins. Teenagers joked with one another, holding sniper rifles taller than they stood. Families gathered for group photos by a helicopter with machine guns mounted on its doors. "We're looking around at stuff and having fun," said Shoaib, 8, who is from Dallas by way of Pakistan. "As soon as we found out the N.R.A. was having their meeting here, we got an N.R.A. family membership and planned to come," said Shoaib's father, Muhammad Janjua, 38. "Today, we woke up, had a good breakfast and went out for our father son day." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The watch industry has been laboring to get millennials in the habit of checking their wrists, not their cellphones, for the time. The challenge is even greater for the makers of fine mechanical timepieces, which can cost 5,000 or more. No wonder then that Nomos Glashutte made waves at the recent Baselworld watch fair with its new Club Campus line, a budget priced collection of design forward "serious" watches aimed at first time buyers celebrating special occasions like college graduation or a first job. "Starting an independent life isn't always easy, but we think that a good watch can help as a reliable accompaniment for whatever life brings next: whether that is a trip around the world, further studies or a job interview," said Uwe Ahrendt, the chief executive of Nomos. "As a father of two young adults myself," he added, "I am particularly enthusiastic about these new customers, for whom there has been nothing on the market until now." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
MARFA, Texas When Landrie Moore was looking for a venue for her destination wedding, she knew she wanted a space that really reflected life in this small, remote desert town. Her guests would be coming from as far as Ecuador and England, and Ms. Moore, 35, who works for a boutique hotel firm, hoped to provide a memorable and authentic experience for those travelers. When you visit a new place, she said in a phone interview, "you want to feel like a local." Which is why she decided to get married mere feet from the office of The Big Bend Sentinel, the region's oldest newspaper (where I worked as a reporter in 2014 and 2015). Ms. Moore's wedding, in June, was the first of five held last year in the Sentinel, a cafe and cocktail bar in the newspaper's newly renovated office building. The space is perhaps the most visible sign that The Big Bend Sentinel is under new ownership: Maisie Crow and Max Kabat, who moved to Marfa from New York City in 2016, took over last year from Robert and Rosario Halpern, the paper's publishers of 25 years. "Buy a newspaper?" Mr. Kabat, 37, recalled thinking when the Halperns first approached him and Ms. Crow about a potential sale. "What are we, idiots?" Their background is in consulting and documentary filmmaking. (The New York Times is a producer of a forthcoming film by Ms. Crow.) Since 2004, nearly 20 percent of local papers in the United States have folded or merged, according to a 2018 study by the Hussman School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina. In many cases, publishers have been replaced by a narrow network of large investment groups that have acquired hundreds of failing newspapers. But Marfa is no ordinary town, and its newsweekly has been a pillar of the community for nearly a century long before Marfa became cool. The Big Bend Sentinel's pages are pasted up with major issues of the day (the death of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice, on a nearby luxury ranch, for example, and the possibility of a border wall just 60 miles away) alongside valedictorian announcements, photo spreads of homecoming events and advance coverage of the town's many festivals. Before Mr. Kabat and Ms. Crow (who is originally from Corpus Christi, Tex.) took over, the paper ran solely on ad sales and subscriptions. "It was able to sustain itself on a shoestring, but we wanted to expand the potential," Ms. Crow, 38, said. They hoped to bring locals closer, physically, to the institution covering their hometown. She recognized that there was a familiar Marfa aesthetic that tourists had come to want and expect "a nomadic austerity mixed with the warmth of the desert," in her words and married that with Scandinavian influences, including concrete floors and Hans Wegner chairs, while preserving the original adobe brick and plaster walled facade. All the furniture had to be movable and multifunctional, Ms. Jenschke said, "because they didn't really know how it was going to be used." It could be a co working space, Mr. Kabat and Ms. Crow thought initially, then decided a subscription model would go against their goal of inclusivity. Instead, they landed on a cafe/bar where locals could work and tourists could recharge. They would rent the kitchen space to local cooks to serve food throughout the day. And though they wouldn't make money off the food itself, they could turn a profit on drinks. Eventually, there would be requests to rent the space for private events. Next door, the Big Bend Sentinel's staff squeezed into a dimly lit room just a fraction of the Sentinel's size. Now and then, the two full time reporters dropped into the cafe to refill their mugs. A relic of the old office remains: a neon sign spelling out "newspaper." In the evenings, when the light is turned on, the office glows red from within. Sometimes the reporters work out of the Sentinel, which functions as a kind of public square. "It's a great way to keep my finger on the pulse and get new leads and find stories," said Abbie Perrault, 27, the managing editor. Still, the couple sees the Sentinel as a natural extension of the paper. During editorial meetings, the staff discusses greenlighting private events. When a political candidate asked to rent the space to host a meet and greet, they declined, concerned it might violate the ethics of the newspaper. Since Ms. Crow and Mr. Kabat took over, they have expanded the newspaper's digital platform, which has seen a 7 percent increase in traffic, Mr. Kabat said, and broadened its photographic coverage. At the newspaper's sister publication, The International, which the couple also owns and which serves the largely Spanish speaking neighboring border town of Presidio, every article is now translated into Spanish. They added a crossword puzzle and Sudoku to both papers, too. The newspapers still sell ads, which account for the majority of revenue. But with additional income from private events and day to day drink sales, the publishers have been able to keep yearly subscription costs steady: 50 for area residents and 60 for anyone outside. "If people come in and buy a coffee and buy something from our shop, rent the space, buy a cocktail, whatever it is, their dollar isn't just going to that," Ms. Crow said. "Their dollar is going to support something larger." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
A weapons possession charge against Quinnen Williams, a defensive lineman for the Jets, stemming from the discovery of an unloaded gun in his baggage at La Guardia Airport has been dropped, his lawyer said on Monday. "This case was nothing more than a technical issue with the storing of the firearm, which is why the government gave Mr. Williams nothing more than a ticket," the lawyer, Alex Spiro, said. A representative from the Queens district attorney's office said Williams pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in satisfaction of all charges, paid a fine of 250 and forfeited the firearm. Williams, 22, was charged in March with a felony count of possession of a weapon after trying to board a flight at the airport. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Q. When the chicks have just hatched, how do chicken farmers tell future hens from future roosters? A. Sexing hatchlings is important for the egg industry. Roosters do not lay eggs, obviously, and they are not needed in order for hens to lay eggs. But it is surprisingly difficult to tell hatchling males from females; there are no external genitalia, and the internal equipment is only subtly different. Though some breeds may show early differences in feather color, often it can take weeks for obvious signs of gender like combs, wattles and behavioral traits to emerge. An alternative to waiting was developed in the 1930s by two Japanese researchers, Kiyoshi Masui and Juro Hashimoto. It is called venting or vent sexing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: A police investigation into the crash that killed Paul Walker, a star in the "Fast and Furious" film franchise, found that speed, not mechanical failure, was to blame for the deaths of Mr. Walker and his friend, Roger Rodas. The police say Mr. Rodas was driving about 90 miles per hour when he lost control of the 2005 Porsche Carrera GT in which the two were traveling, slamming into a light pole on a road with a 45 m.p.h. posted speed limit. (The New York Daily News) Honda and Toyota have plans to release zero emission hydrogen fuel cell vehicles for the 2015 model year, according to a report by Nikkei, a Japanese publication. Initially, each automaker will build about 1,000 of the cars per year, with prices starting at around 97,000. (Reuters) Since Mary Barra took over as chief executive of General Motors in January, the automaker's stock has dropped about 14 percent. Ms. Barra's tenure as G.M.'s chief has been plagued with trouble, as the company has recalled nearly two million vehicles for a variety of long ignored problems. Next week, Ms. Barra is scheduled to testify before Congress regarding the recalls. (Bloomberg) In the void left by Ford's Crown Victoria sedan, which is no longer in production, the Ford Explorer has emerged as the most popular vehicle among police departments in the United States. Ford also sells its Taurus sedan to police departments, and other popular models are the Dodge Charger and Chevrolet Caprice. But more than half of the new police cruisers bought by law enforcement agencies are Explorers. (USA Today) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Nobody knows how many people read the December 1964 issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, but apparently only one, , was so appalled by one of its articles, about a syphilis experiment using uneducated black men in Tuskegee, Ala., that he wrote the study's author to protest. "I couldn't believe what I had read," Dr. Schatz, who died on April 1, wrote in an email in 2013 to Civil Beat, an online newsletter in Hawaii, where he had moved to teach. "But the message was unmistakable." "These researchers had deliberately withheld treatment for this group of poor, uneducated, black sharecroppers," he added, "in order to document what eventually might happen to them. I became incensed. How could physicians, who were trained first and foremost to do no harm, deliberately withhold curative treatment so they could understand the natural history of syphilis?" In 1964, Dr. Schatz was just four years out of medical school and working as a cardiologist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. No one ever responded to Dr. Schatz's letter, written in 1965, but its discovery in 1972 helped frame a national debate over patients' rights that generated new standards for research involving human subjects. Dr. Schatz (pronounced SHOTZ) died of metastatic melanoma at his home in Honolulu, his wife, Barbara, said. He was 83. The Tuskegee clinical study had been conducted by the United States Public Health Service since 1932 to reach underserved black rural populations. But it was not widely known outside the scientific community. In 1972, on the basis of information from Peter Buxtun, a health service interviewer turned whistle blower, the study was revealed by The Washington Star. Dr. Schatz's letter was found by The Wall Street Journal in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Of the 600 men enrolled in the study, about two thirds had already contracted syphilis. All were told that they had "bad blood," but none were given penicillin, even after it became a proven treatment for the disease in the 1940s. Dr. John C. Cutler of the Public Health Service during its syphilis experiment in Tuskegee, Ala., which went on for 40 years. The study raised questions not only about denial of treatment but also about racial discrimination and morality in the aftermath of medical experiments by the Nazis during World War II. Dr. Schatz sent his letter, comprising three sentences, to the study's senior author, Dr. Donald H. Rockwell. He wrote: "I am utterly astounded by the fact that physicians allow patients with potentially fatal disease to remain untreated when effective therapy is available. I assume you feel that the information which is extracted from observation of this untreated group is worth their sacrifice. If this is the case, then I suggest the United States Public Health Service and those physicians associated with it in this study need to re evaluate their moral judgments in this regard." The letter was passed to a co author, Dr. Anne R. Yobs of the Centers for Disease Control, who wrote in a memo to her bosses: "This is the first letter of this type we have received. I do not plan to answer this letter." In 2009, the Mayo Clinic recognized Dr. Schatz with a Distinguished Alumni Award. A nominating letter praised his courage because "criticizing an investigation which was overseen by some of the leading figures in the American Public Health Service was an action that was, to say the very least, potentially harmful to his career." Irwin Jacob Schatz was born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, on Oct. 16, 1931, the son of Jacob Schatz and the former Reva Rechtman. His parents ran a kosher style restaurant in Winnipeg. He earned undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Manitoba and a fellowship from the Mayo Clinic. Besides his wife, the former Barbara Jane Binder, his survivors include his sons, Jacob, Edward, Stephen and Brian, who is a United States senator from Hawaii; nine grandchildren; and a sister, Bea Berger. Dr. Schatz joined the faculty of the University of Hawaii in 1975 and was the chairman of medicine and a professor at the John A. Burns School of Medicine there. In 2013, Brian Schatz told the Pomona College magazine in California that his father was reluctant to play the hero for criticizing the Tuskegee study. "His style is that you just do the right thing and move on, then you do the right thing again and just move on," Senator Schatz said. Dr. Schatz explained that he had written the letter as a young doctor "not knowing what else to do," and that when he received no response he did not pursue his complaint any further. With hindsight, however, he hinted that perhaps he should have persisted. "I suspect it would not have made a difference, because they really didn't think they were doing anything wrong," Professor Susan M. Reverby of Wellesley College, the author of "Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy," said in an interview. However, she added, "in looking at my interview notes, he said, 'I wish I had followed it through.' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
On a recent Wednesday night, Odell Beckham Jr. and his phalanx of security guards and cronies poured through a back entrance at the House of Morgan, an imposing financial district landmark that was once the headquarters of J.P. Morgan and is now an event space. Today's business was selling shoes, and the New York Giants star receiver was there to promote a new Nike collection from Virgil Abloh, the designer of Off White. It was a mellow kickoff for an athlete known for careening between exuberant and operatic. At 24 and entering his fourth season with the Giants, he is a three time Pro Bowler, an explosive wide receiver known for making jaw dropping airborne snags and a charismatic celebrity who was spotted at Paris Fashion Week parties in March with Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner and Travis Scott. In May, Mr. Beckham signed a 25 million, five year deal with Nike. But Mr. Beckham's reticence may also have been self preservation, given that a reporter was present. A gregarious bon vivant, he has occasionally been mired in skirmishes of his own creation. In January, he took fire for a lackluster playoff performance in a 38 to 13 loss after spending an off day in Miami on a boat with teammates and the singer Trey Songz. Over the summer, Mr. Beckham's leadership was questioned when he skipped an organized team practice. And, several Sundays ago, after making one of two touchdown catches against the Eagles, Mr. Beckham drew an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for crouching on all fours and pretending to urinate like a dog. Soon he was seated in the back of black Mercedes Benz Sprinter, a touring van that resembles a fattened orca. The vehicle lurched northward, toward another event, this one at the Nike store in SoHo. Vybz Kartel's "Fever" pulsed over the speakers. Mr. Beckham believes he has been targeted by the media, and that even innocuous situations involving him have become tabloid fodder. He once wore cleats depicting the logos of media outlets including ESPN, The New York Post and TMZ with the word "Shhhhh!!!" scrawled atop them. "There's no real privacy anymore," he said. "That's the only thing that gets annoying. What if I want to go to the grocery store and get some candy, get some Hot Cheetos? You don't wish your life is any different, it's just what your life is. I don't take anything personal anymore." He paused, then said, "I try not to. I can't say I don't." Mr. Beckham's cockscomb of blond hair and thick dark beard were accented by a hammock of glittering chains, a Supreme T shirt showing the rapper Nas and jeans with "Sinners" written on the knees. His mosaic of tattoos included portraits of Tupac Shakur, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mike Tyson (shown chomping on Evander Holyfield's ear). "It's not like I'd bite someone's ear off to win," he said, then reconsidered."But I really would. 'Oh, I'm about to lose this fight?'" He bared his teeth and made gnawing noises. He plans on adding a tattoo of Allen Iverson stepping over Tyronn Lue. Once at Nike SoHo, Mr. Beckham was ushered through a back entrance, into an elevator and up to an impromptu greenroom. Photographers snapped away as he personalized a Giants jersey on an e tablet with the assistance of Eric Elms, a Brooklyn based artist. "I should have made this small for my mama," Mr. Beckham said of a digital mock up that read "Savage" on the back. Soon Mr. Beckham was chaperoned downstairs to speak on a panel in front of a billboard showing his likeness and the phrase "G'ed Up," a reference to the Giants. The audience was a packed half moon congregation of schoolchildren, all dressed in blue Giants shirts. Before long, Lawrence Taylor, the New York linebacker who was sentenced to probation for sexual misconduct, trotted out in Tommy Hilfiger sweatpants and sliders with exposed toes. "I don't know how you played with the earring," said Mr. Beckham of Mr. Taylor's chunky signature jewelry. "That was like 40 pounds of gold and diamonds." Jay Z's "Bam" rang out, and soon Mr. Beckham headed back to the Sprinter. He planned on spending a quiet night in New Jersey, where he lives with four Presa Canario dogs (Mowgli, Blackjack, Khan and Ares). It was brought to his attention that, compared to the other athletes at the event, he was a veritable choirboy. He chuckled. "L.T. and Mike Vick with me in the room," Mr. Beckham said. "I might be able to chill." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Don Quixote, viewing the world through the lens of his fantasies, mistakes a windmill for a giant and has visions of what isn't actually there. But during the vision scene of "Don Quixote," which Gelsey Kirkland Ballet presented at the Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University on Thursday, the ranks of classically trained dancers that crowded onto the stage were real. Mounting a full length 19th century story ballet with a cast of 100 might have seemed a quixotic goal for a troupe only two years old, but this one already has a "Nutcracker" and a "Sleeping Beauty" under its belt. "Don Quixote" is less a leap than a sensible next step. This three act production, based on Alexander Gorsky's version of Marius Petipa's choreography, staged by Ms. Kirkland with a large team of experts, is packed. Toreadors, Gypsies, dryads, kids pretending to be puppets, reams of classical dance and a standard story of two lovers outwitting the girl's father all in under three hours. On Thursday, because of a "technical difficulty," the show ended more than three hours after it began. That interruption between the second and third acts could take some of the blame for a dearth of momentum, but the performance had been a little staid and by the numbers all along. Anastasia Barsukova was a pert Kitri who compensated for a low jump with a lot of finesse; after a rocky start, she gained in force and fire. As her lover, Basilio, Johnny Almeida played to the audience with some Latin flair. His pirouettes, remarkably controlled, seemed to corkscrew upward. Anderson Souza brought cape whipping speed to the matador, Espada, and Sabina Alvarez matched him with attitude as the Street Dancer. Nagi Wakisaka was a strong and taut Queen of the Dryads. Alina Gavrilov and Natalia Sheptalova were pretty and crisp Flower Girls. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
People with high blood levels of cortisol , the "stress hormone," may have poorer memory and thinking skills than those with lower levels. Cortisol is produced by the adrenal glands and is involved in regulating blood sugar levels, reducing inflammation, controlling salt and water balance and other body functions. Researchers gave tests for memory, abstract reasoning, visual perception and attention to 2,231 people, average age 49 and free of dementia. They recorded blood levels of cortisol and did M.R.I. examinations to assess brain volume. The study, in Neurology, controlled for age, sex, education, body mass index, blood pressure and many other variables, and found that compared with people with average levels of cortisol, those with the highest levels had lower scores on the cognitive tests. In women, but not in men, higher cortisol was also associated with reduced brain volume. There was no association of the lowest cortisol levels with either cognitive test scores or brain size. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Harry Macklowe, 80, the New York developer who built 432 Park, at right, the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, takes in the view from the sales office for a new venture, the condominium 200 East 59th Street. Harry Macklowe, the real estate titan with a career as mercurial as it is long, is riding the wave of successful sales at 432 Park Avenue said to be the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere and forging ahead with new projects. Sales began this month for a residential condominium in Midtown and he plans to convert One Wall Street, an Art Deco office building, to residential. "Real estate is a nice thing," he said. Then, after a brief pause for comic effect, he added: "You can do it until you croak." At 80, Mr. Macklowe has had many professional near deaths over the course of his career, which covers almost six decades and has been marked by dizzying highs and stomach churning lows. Yet each time, he has pulled off a resurrection. At his latest comeback, 432 Park Avenue, which Macklowe Properties developed with CIM Group, a penthouse sold in September for 87.66 million. The tower proved that Mr. Macklowe continues to be a formidable player in the real estate arena. His latest project, a condo at 200 East 59th Street, is far more modest, a reflection of the cooling luxury market. The 35 story tower, with 67 apartments, will rise opposite Bloomingdale's department store. Prices begin at about 2.1 million for a one bedroom and 4.075 million for a two bedroom. From Mr. Macklowe's vantage point, he has never stumbled, not even in 2008 when he was forced to relinquish seven properties to lenders and to sell four others, including his crown jewel, the General Motors building on Fifth Avenue at 59th Street. Exhibiting the same unabashed confidence exuded by another New York developer who just took office in Washington, Mr. Macklowe reasoned: "I've never had a bad deal," he said. "I've only had good deals that, because of timing, haven't worked out." As for the future, Mr. Macklowe is confident, if not exuberant, about President Donald J. Trump, whom he sees as good for business and commerce. "The cabinet he's put together is, for the first time, full of outstanding people, all sophisticated business people, and you've not had that before in our lifetime," he said. Rex W. Tillerson, the president's choice for secretary of state, strikes Mr. Macklowe as particularly adept. "I think it'll be good for the world," he said, adding that he is excited to personally know about half of Mr. Trump's cabinet picks. He dealt directly with Mr. Trump in 2003 when he bought the G.M. building, which had been owned by Mr. Trump and Conseco, for 1.4 billion. Mr. Macklowe described Mr. Trump as honorable in his business dealings. Real estate "is not an industry full of camaraderie and good will," said Vicky Ward, the author of "The Liar's Ball" (Wiley, 2014), a book about Mr. Macklowe and the G.M. building. Developers "are set up to dislike each other, yet occasionally they do come together to partner." The two do not share the same taste in design. After Mr. Macklowe bought the G.M. building, he renovated the lobby and common areas to give them a more understated look. And although Macklowe Properties was the sole owner, he did not splash his name across the facade, as Mr. Trump had done in four foot tall gold letters. While Mr. Macklowe's professional life enjoys a moment of calm, his personal one is in the midst of upheaval. Last spring, he filed for divorce from Linda Macklowe, his wife of 57 years, leaving her, according to the gossip columns, for another woman. And in November, he filed a lawsuit against his son, William Macklowe, over issues relating to their separate real estate businesses. After their relationship soured in the wake of the 2008 upheaval, the son started his own venture, William Macklowe Company. Harry Macklowe declined to comment on personal matters. However, in an industry dominated by family dynasties, the potential disintegration of Mr. Macklowe's family sets him apart, putting his legacy in question. But Mr. Macklowe, the son of a garment industry executive who broke into the real estate business as a commercial broker, is more concerned about the here and now than the hereafter. "Once you're no longer here, you're no longer here," he said. "So the degree of satisfaction is now." The sales gallery for 200 East 59th Street is in the Macklowe Properties offices in the G.M. building, now owned by Boston Properties, Zhang Xin and the Safra family. Laid out like a retrospective of his long career, the gallery walls are flanked with eight foot tall photographs of his developments. Models of his projects fill the space. Mr. Macklowe bent over one model, plucking a stray sliver of plastic from a miniature ledge and placing it on the plastic lid of his paper coffee cup. Stopping in front of an oversize photograph of Metropolitan Tower, the black glass residential 1987 high rise on West 57th Street, he lamented the lack of recognition it received. "I never got the compliments for it," he said. "I thought it was outstanding." Three years after the tower opened, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, writing for The New York Times, begrudgingly gave it a nod, describing it as "an alien object," but adding, "It is a lot less destructive to the cityscape than it looked as if it was going to be. The slender wedge of black glass has a certain elegance, like minimalist sculpture. This is not the finest piece of glass detailing around, but it is far from the crudest." Mr. Macklowe easily slips into long monologues about the minute details of his buildings, describing the type of hedges he selected for entryways and the angles at which they should be trimmed he avoids ivy because it dies in the winter. He speaks in passionate terms about columns, setbacks and Siberian mink, the variety of marble used in the bathrooms at 200 East 59th Street. He appreciates sleek, modernist lines. The architect Mies van der Rohe is his idol; the Barcelona Pavilion, his Mecca. "I believe in classic design," he said. The kitchens at 200 East 59th Street are minimalist, with white glass cabinets and slab countertops of white Calacatta marble. "There are two colors, do you know what they are?" he asks me. No, the answer is not gold and more gold. It's black and white, obviously. For many New Yorkers, Mr. Macklowe will be remembered as the developer whose company bulldozed several S.R.O. hotels in Midtown in the middle of the night in 1985, just hours before a city moratorium on the practice went into effect. In their place, he built Hotel Macklowe on West 44th Street, only to return it to lenders during a financial upset in the early 1990s. It is now called Millennium Broadway Hotel. But in 432 Park Avenue, Mr. Macklowe sees the chance to rewrite his legacy, and enjoy some of the accolades he craves. "When you do something that people compliment, it is wonderful, that's the aphrodisiac that nobody else can enjoy," he said. Designed by Rafael Vinoly, the 1,396 foot tower rises above the Empire State Building, reshaping the city's skyline, something he said he did not intentionally set out to do. Yet, "nobody else saw what I saw," he said of the opportunity to develop the parcel that once housed the Drake Hotel. And so, with 432 Park, Mr. Goldberger finally gave a full throttled endorsement. "Vinoly's 432 Park, on the outside, is as sophisticated as One57 is glitzy," Mr. Goldberger wrote in Vanity Fair in 2014. "Its facade is a flat, minimalist grid of smoothly finished concrete. As one looks at the building it's hard not to think of Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect who is famous for making concrete feel more sensual and luxurious than marble." Michael Kimmelman, The Times's architecture critic, described the building's exterior as "a grid of concrete and glass, like an extruded Sol LeWitt, or a distended Josef Hoffmann vase (or a middle finger stuck up at the city, depending on your perspective)." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
What's Ann Margret Doing at 75? Still Playing the Girl Next Door BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. In the new Zach Braff directed heist comedy "Going in Style," out April 7, the performer Ann Margret stars as Annie, a supermarket employee who flirts, overtly, with a grumpy old man of a customer played by Alan Arkin. They eventually end up in bed. More on that later. Off the screen, it turns out Ann Margret is actually not all that familiar with grocery stores. "I went once and I asked the lady next to me, 'Which one is spinach?'" the 75 year old actress said, before breaking out into laughter. Still, she was not joking. When the movie a remake of a 1979 George Burns vehicle about three elderly gentlemen who rob a bank was filmed in 2015 in Brooklyn, "Alan and I were doing a scene with vegetables," Ann Margret continued. "'What's that?' I asked him. It was purple and it was perfect." "You don't know what that is?" Mr. Arkin said to her. "Usually I just see eggplant all mashed up," Ann Margret said in an attempt to explain away her confusion. "Alan Arkin is a good cook. He couldn't fathom the fact that I didn't know what the purple thing was. I'm the only one of all my friends that doesn't cook. But I don't cook and I don't care." Working in that grocery store, at least for a film role, suited her though. "I got to wear a cute outfit," she said. It was a chilly Southern California afternoon, and Ann Margret was seeking another cute outfit. This one would be for the "Going in Style" premiere, which takes place late in the month, in New York. So she paid a visit to the marbled atelier of Mark Zunino, a tanned, muscled designer she has worked with since he took over the business of his mentor, the late Nolan Miller, who also regularly dressed her. "Isn't this so glamorous?" Ann Margret asked, as she walked in, wearing a yellow printed shirt and scarf that belonged to her mother. There were pictures of many of Mr. Zunino's clients on the wall, including Beyonce, Joan Collins, Elizabeth Taylor and, of course, Ann Margret. A fit mannequin was scrawled with Ann Margret's name and that of Selena Gomez. Apparently, their hips are the same size. "Really?" Ann Margret asked, underlining the aw shucks, "Who me?" persona that has trailed her since the 1960s. "She's beautiful," she said of Ms. Gomez. "I've seen her on television." Typically, she will alert Mr. Zunino to her event calendar. "This time we gave them a week," said Alan Margulies, the actress's manager, who accompanied her to the fitting, along with his assistant, a hairstylist and a makeup artist. "They know what I don't like," Ann Margret chimed in, then paused for effect. "What don't I like?" "I know everyone likes her to be sexy, but she likes to be modest," said Rene Horsch, Mr. Zunino's equally tanned and muscled publicity director and in house stylist. "She'd wear a turtleneck if she could." Mr. Zunino's team presented the actress with two looks one black, one cotton candy colored. Before trying either on, Ann Margret already knew which one was for her: a dress with a removable sleeveless vest, one that she described as "Bye Bye Birdie" pink. Playing the all American teenager Kim MacAfee in the canonical 1963 movie musical set the then wide eyed 21 year old Swede on the path to superstardom. She likes to stick with what she knows works. "It's very 'We've got a lot of living to do,'" she said, referring to a big number in the film, as she comically gnawed at the pink crystals lining the dress's sleeves. Despite having more than 50 films and innumerable episodes of television, from "The Flintstones" to "Army Wives," under her dancer's belt, Ann Margret said that she liked to keep it demure and was still quite shy. At premieres, "I'm uncomfortable," she explained, as she slipped into the outfit, borrowing a pair of heels and getting a hair and makeup touch up for a photographer. "How Ann Margret is that?" she asked no one in particular as she gave herself a once over in a mirror. She has also played the sex kitten time and again, a role she reprises as a septuagenarian in "Going in Style." But it makes her blush to describe her love scenes with Mr. Arkin, who this weekend turns 83. "I'm an only child; my father did not see 'Carnal Knowledge,'" she said of the 1971 film, with Jack Nicholson, that earned her an Academy Award nomination. "He was very proud that people had said that I was talented as an actress, but he knew what it involved." As Mr. Horsch pinned the outfit, she coyly asked to change topics. On this year's Oscars: "I felt so sorry for Warren and Faye," she said. As for "La La Land," "it was adorable." On the new Ryan Murphy show "Feud," about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford: "Studios are still doing that. Pitting people against you." (Ann Margret's first film role was as Ms. Davis's daughter in "Pocketful of Miracles.") Though there were a few "Ray Donovan" episodes in 2014, and movies like 2006's "The Breakup" and 2009's "Old Dogs," Ann Margret's main role these days remains nursing her husband, Roger Smith, who has Parkinson's disease. "If we make it to May 8, we will have been married 50 years," she said. He was not well enough to join her for much of the film's New York shoot, and his attendance at the premiere was up in the air. "I'm a loner anyway," she said. But still, Ann Margret admitted, she would like to keep working, the thought of which changed her outlook on discussing that sex scene with Mr. Arkin after all. "It's different. It's age appropriate. I think it's wonderful," she said, wistfully. "There's no cutoff age. It doesn't end when you hit 40. It doesn't end when you hit 50. Just because you're older doesn't mean that we've stopped wanting to be with someone. It doesn't mean that you're dead." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
It was a Kellan Lutz season. The "Twilight" hunk popped up seemingly everywhere during New York Fashion Week: Men's a style Zelig. There he was at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, seated at a cafe table in a Chelsea restaurant that served as the setting for a Joseph Abboud show. Lightly bearded, strawberry blond hair artfully tousled, the actor was wearing one of the sand colored linen suits around which Mr. Abboud built his spring 2017 collection. The suit was well proportioned, double breasted and had been tweaked by the seasoned stylist Bill Mullen with rolled back sleeves and a goofy ribbon pinned to the lapel. Though Mr. Lutz is 31, the suit seemed to age him, underlining one of the problems with the designs Mr. Abboud has produced since returning to his label. Youthfulness is privileged in most every aspect of culture. The tendency is to dress like a younger version of oneself. Apparently he has many. Barely a half hour later, there was Mr. Lutz at Skylight Clarkson Sq studios, fashion week headquarters, dressed in Tim Coppens separates that hugged his bendable action figure torso, crowding into a rope line alongside other guests at Mr. Coppens's show. When a reporter noted the quick transformation, Mr. Lutz was just as quick with a reply. "I changed in the car on the way," he said. "I'm not shy." This may be the place to note how little gender play was on view during the week. True, some designers, like Joshua Cooper and Laurence Chandler of Rochambeau, introduced such nutty feminine elements as the granny turban worn by the skateboarder Eli Reed to a show inspired, they said, by the Rolling Stones in Marrakesh and other "creatives in exile." And the California born tyro Rio Uribe at Gypsy Sport, explored non binary dressing, showing flimsy peignoirs over dress length button downs printed with club kid floral patterns or pairing a body hugging sports jersey with a tiered lace skirt like something a drag queen might wear to make her first communion. If the Gypsy Sport show was a mite cartoony (Mr. Uribe may have confined his styling gimmicks either to the whited out irises of Storm in "X Men" or the Moms Mabley wigs; he chose both), it at least alluded to social transformations occurring beyond the runway. By contrast, most designers reacted to the currently modish gender flux by clinging to traditional masculine archetypes. You would expect that, of course, from Parke Ronen, whose designers Ronen Jehezkel and Parke Lutter recently teamed up with David Hart to add tidy varsity squad jackets and blazers in boater stripes to an offering of the skimpy swimwear that earned their label its sobriquet as the gay Victoria's Secret. "So many men, so little time," Mr. Jehezkel said backstage as he smoothed bronzer onto the model Trevor Signorino's six pack in advance of the most heavily attended show all week. And it is doubtless true that the mobs crowding into the Platform 1 space would have been deliriously happy had the designers chosen to loop the whole nine minute show all over again. Although with his own famous eight pack, Mr. Lutz could easily have slipped into the lineup at Parke Ronen, it was one presentation he skipped. His presence during a week with only the barest celebrity quotient was part of a strategy devised by the branding expert Chiun kai Shih to pass Mr. Lutz in front of the eyes of designers and position him as something more than mere beefcake. Most memorable of his previous fashion forays was a stint as a poster boy for Calvin Klein underwear. He is aiming now to add to the billion online images of him shirtless one or two in which he is fully clothed. Thus he was all suited up in Todd Snyder at that designer's show, one that is as close as New York Fashion Week: Men's gets to a marquee event. Now in its third season, the men's wear week continues to suffer from an absence of designers with global presence. Of the designers showing here, is the most famous and deepest pocketed. Yet he confines himself to static tableau presentations that, while demonstrating how many changes this clever designer can ring on his signature preppy garb (a tracksuit in the fire engine red that is already a big street wear trend stood out, as did some short sleeved floral separates that fell somewhere between leisure suits and pajamas), hardly provide what one British editor called "an aha moment." Both Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein continue to show in Europe, with no plans to return home any time soon. It falls then to designers like John Varvatos and Mr. Snyder to make what passed for big fashion pronouncements in a solid though largely uninspiring season. For his part, Mr. Snyder did so by using design to underscore his longstanding relationship with Champion, the classic American athletic wear label. "We've been doing Champion for five years, so we figured we should come out swinging a bit more" at the competition, Mr. Snyder said, making reference to designers like the Russian Gosha Rubchinskiy and the Georgian Demna Gvasalia of Vetements (and Balenciaga), each of whom has recently capitalized richly on Champion, by aping its look or through collaboration. It was just hours after that show, with its references to easy living in the South of France, that reports appeared with news of the attack on crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, which left 84 dead and injured many more. Guests for Mr. Varvatos's show Mr. Lutz was there, of course drank vodka gimlets from coupes and milled around a subterranean bar at the Roxy Hotel, which by sheer coincidence had been set up to resemble a cafe in Provence. Notes for the show suggested that Mr. Varvatos was aiming for was a "fresh kind of elegance," which may emerge if the "artisanal character of Provence was cast evenly over a sprawling metropolis." The show, as it turned out, was among the best in some time from this lauded designer fencing and deconstructed motorcycle jackets in silk, wool or linen; buffed suede jackets artfully distressed; asymmetric dusters and a hobo bag. Yet a sense of easy French esprit seemed more than ever a fantasy in light of the tragic events of the day. "All I can focus on right now," said Ken Downing, the fashion director of Neiman Marcus, "is my friends in France." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Amazon's headquarters in Seattle, where seven City Council seats are in play this election. The company has contributed more than 1.4 million to a local political action committee. Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Greetings from Seattle, where we have seven straight days of rain in the forecast. I'm Karen Weise, the tech correspondent here. Let's start with our local giant, Amazon: Amazon may have taken some hits in the Democratic debate on Tuesday, but in its hometown, it has come out swinging. Seattle is fast approaching one of the most contentious local elections in recent memory, and Amazon this week dropped an additional 1 million into the fray. Amazon's new contributions, made to the political action committee run by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, bring its total to more than 1.4 million this year, a staggering sum for a city election, let alone from a company that was M.I.A. in local politics for years. Four years ago, Amazon gave just 25,000 to the PAC. Seven of the nine seats on the City Council are up for grabs in November, presenting an opportunity to virtually remake the booming city's leadership at a pivotal time for addressing the stresses of growth, affordability and homelessness. In a poll released on Wednesday, two thirds of likely voters said they were looking for change. In addition to the political contributions, Amazon has hosted a candidates' forum and has been encouraging employees to vote like never before. It has also invited local journalists to at least two off the record happy hours, one leading up to the primary election and the other this month. These are all signs that Amazon has been rethinking its lackadaisical approach to its hometown after the downsides became particularly clear last year, when it got into a bruising fight. The Council was considering a per employee "head tax" on large companies to pay for homeless services and affordable housing, and as the vote drew near, Amazon turned to its old playbook, threatening to halt some of its development plans in the city. After the Council unanimously passed the tax, which would have raised about 50 million, Amazon funded a campaign that succeeded in pushing the Council to repeal it. Amazon may have won, but the fight left a sour taste for residents and inside Amazon's headquarters. "Amazon has held civic affairs at arm's length for so long," said Margaret O'Mara, a professor at the University of Washington who studies the history of tech companies and the government. "The head tax seemed to have activated them." In a statement, an Amazon spokesman, Aaron Toso, said: "We believe it is critical that our hometown has a City Council that is focused on pragmatic solutions to our shared challenges in transportation, homelessness, climate change and public safety." For Amazon, the biggest prize in the current election would be unseating Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative party who represents the Capitol Hill area and its surrounding neighborhoods, where many Amazon employees live. Her election was a driving force behind the city's adoption of a 15 minimum wage five years ago, and she has been a relentless critic of the company, leading protests in front of its headquarters. "For the business community, she has been such an irritance," Ms. O'Mara said. "She pushed the conversation to the left further than before, opening up space for other officials" to bring up more progressive ideas, like the head tax. The chamber's PAC, fueled with Amazon's cash, has spent almost twice as much on direct mail and canvassing in Ms. Sawant's district as in any other race, campaign finance data shows. And that doesn't include more than 16,000 that Amazon employees largely executives contributed to her opponent, Egan Orion. Jeff Wilke and Andy Jassy, who respectively run Amazon's retail and cloud computing services, each maxed out the 500 that an individual can give, as did other Amazon leaders, including Jay Carney, who oversees lobbying and communications. Local unions have put "hundreds of thousands of dollars" into the election, largely to candidates the chamber opposes, The Seattle Times reported in its coverage of Amazon's contributions. Ms. Sawant's campaign has tried to turn Amazon's opposition into an asset. "EMERGENCY! Amazon just dropped a 1 million bomb on Seattle elections we can't let Jeff Bezos buy City Hall!" her campaign declared on Twitter, in a post that including a link for donations. None Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has been hosting off the record dinners at his home with conservative pundits and media figures, including Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro, Politico reported. Mr. Zuckerburg responded by saying he has dinner with "lots of people" about "lots of issues." On Thursday, he also delivered a wide ranging address defending his company to students at Georgetown University. None Amazon is selling cheap products with free shipping at prices lower than what it must pay to ship the items to customers. Jason Del Rey at Recode explained how Amazon might be gaining advantages over other retailers and then pushing the costs back on brands. None WeWork! Where to even begin? The collapse of WeLive? The Sophie's Choice of a bailout? The hazardous phone booths? The mystic bond offering? None You may think you're a great photographer, but it's increasingly likely that your phone just has really great artificial intelligence, Brian X. Chen wrote. None Twitch, which started as a site to live stream gaming, is morphing into a "repository for political speech and terrorist propaganda," Drew Harwell and Jay Greene reported in The Washington Post. None "Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington." Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel of ProPublica uncovered the lobbying, revolving door and "dark pattern" designs that TurboTax successfully wielded for two decades to prevent Americans from filing their taxes for free. None In our new Visionaries series, Ellen Rosen profiled Andrew Kassoy and the other two co founders of B Lab, who are encouraging businesses to focus on more than just profits. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Mr. London retired from the C.I.A. in 2018. His last assignment was chief of counterterrorism for South and Southwest Asia. The appointment in February of Richard Grenell, a political operative and Donald Trump loyalist, as acting director of national intelligence after the renomination of former Congressman John Ratcliffe to permanently fill the position once he is confirmed, has many current and former intelligence professionals deeply concerned. I am among them, if only because we cannot trust the judgments of a president who so often overrides the wisdom of professional intelligence analysts, prosecutors and medical authorities, even during a calamity. Last week, for example, on the same day that the office of the director of national intelligence (D.N.I. for short) released a public statement affirming the scientific community's consensus that "the Covid 19 virus was not man made or genetically modified," The New York Times reported that the Trump administration was pressing intelligence officials to look for evidence to prove otherwise perhaps that it originated in a Chinese laboratory. Not coincidentally, acting director Grenell, a prolific Twitter user, failed to sign his own intelligence community's official position. I take solace in my confidence that Mr. Trump will learn, even after the Senate confirms Mr. Ratcliffe and the president replaces still more professionals with less capable political loyalists, that gagging the intelligence community will be far more difficult than hushing the Justice Department or overriding the wisdom of our medical institutions. That's not to say that Mr. Grenell and Mr. Ratcliffe can't already do damage and that more politically focused Trump allies among the nation's inspectors general are harmless. Recent reporting in The Washington Post and The New York Times has challenged the president's false messaging about what the intelligence community was telling him as early as December. The C.I.A.'s scientists, doctors and analysts undoubtedly provided sophisticated models of how the pandemic would most likely spread from China and how much damage Beijing was adding by suppressing information about it. So what happened? Mr. Trump dismissed the information, presumably afraid it would hurt the economy and his re election. Instead, Mr. Grenell's misleading comments about the agencies' actual positions have undermined the community's credibility with Americans, and risk miscalculations among foreign adversaries and allies. In short, the job of the director of national intelligence, or D.N.I., is to help the president process and understand what intelligence professionals have concluded, however bad the news. Sharing those conclusions with the public would let it understand and support the president's policies, knowing that the information was gathered by professionals whose assessments are collaborative, integrated and honest. But the coronavirus crisis suggests that Mr. Grenell has failed at all three. Fortunately he has also failed at breaking the intelligence community's determination to do its job. Try as he might, neither he nor the president can prevent a vast majority of these nonpolitical patriots from doing their jobs. What limits the damage can be better understood by contrasting the D.N.I. with the head of the Justice Department. Unlike Attorney General William Barr, neither Mr. Grenell nor Mr. Ratcliffe shares his work force's background or training. They are, at best, novices at intelligence and lack the degree of control over their 17 agencies that Mr. Barr enjoys over the Justice Department. The attorney general can initiate and end investigations, direct U.S. attorneys against prosecuting or compel them to seek leniency toward Mr. Trump's political allies. He can approve or deny deals, hire and fire, and control his subordinates' career advancement and their department's budget. The director of national intelligence has no such powers over individual intelligence agencies, nor their operations. The D.N.I. is hardly the nation's top spy. His or her fief is restricted to analytical and advisory centers, and the centers Mr. Grenell can purge are restricted to his central office. Indeed, Mr. Grenell's responsibilities focus on integrating and coordinating information found by individual agencies, with little control across the entire community. Of course, the director of national intelligence could better expend his energies in shielding the work force from intimidation and pressure. Dan Coats, who preceded Mr. Grenell, did that artfully, providing a buffer against Mr. Trump's outbursts and calumnies after the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment briefing, his alignment with Vladimir Putin's election meddling despite what his own intelligence experts were telling him, and his approaches to North Korea, China and Iran. My concern is whether the D.N.I. will be allowed to challenge the independence of the individual agencies. Will he decide who serves abroad as the community's representative, a post normally reserved for the C.I.A. chief of station? Will he demand a greater say over clandestine operations and the identities of our sources? And will he jeopardize them and our collectors of secrets for political gain? The D.N.I. can restrict dissemination of intelligence that might embarrass or damage the president and his allies, and declassify strikes at his adversaries. Doing so could affect what is collected; that, in turn, would undermine the whole community's ability to warn homeland agencies about threats like the current pandemic. Still, the D.N.I.'s most effective leverage can be his or her relationship with the president and the ambition of the 17 intelligence agencies' individual leaders. Whether agency heads like Gina Haspel of the C.I.A. are prepared to push back to protect the country, their mission and their work force depends on the professional costs they are willing to assume, as well as their personal backbone. Director Haspel's track record is not encouraging. Her compromises to President Trump tell us that even if he is re elected, her ambition is unlikely to be enough to allow her to keep her position or move to another cushy job. Mr. Trump's dismissal of the intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson was another reflection of his mercurial nature about national security decisions. But the inspector general has limited influence over how 17 intelligence agencies do business. Indeed, the incumbent's statutory independence enables a climate in which those who have witnessed wrongdoing or have grievances can come forward without fear of retaliation from their superiors. The reality is that C.I.A. managers do not take decisions on contentious issues without legal guidance from its own capable and apolitical lawyers. Even investigations by the inspector general result in findings and recommendations, with Congress controlling oversight and the purse. At most, committees can punish the C.I.A. for noncompliance with the legislators, but only if they embrace the inspection's conclusions. Intelligence professionals are a dedicated and willful lot. Usually, they keep their heads down, away from the political fray, regardless of who occupies the White House, and focus on their jobs. We rarely have a clue as to what party our colleagues support; that matters as little as it matters to a Marine sharing a fighting hole in the heat of combat. Mission and country come first. The real collectors of secrets protect their sources as mother bears protect their cubs, and analysts are like religious zealots safeguarding the integrity of their beliefs. Intelligence professionals operate with significant responsibility and under intense pressure. Far too many who reach the top succumb to the temptations of political compromise and power. But a vast majority are largely immune to political pressure, or sufficiently proud and arrogant to withstand it. The C.I.A., for example, has only three political appointees the director, the deputy director and the chief operating officer. The rest are career intelligence officers. The president's current feckless, politicized use of the intelligence community could not have come at a worse time and will no doubt get worse as he grows more desperate and fearful of the coronavirus's impact on his own fortunes. But President Trump, Mr. Grenell and Mr. Ratcliffe (should he be confirmed) will often be overwhelmed and outmaneuvered by the intelligence community's independence and skill. As the president continues to learn the hard way, the community is not his personal secretariat. It provides intelligence 24/7 to a wide variety of officials across every federal agency and operates under congressional oversight. Preserving the intelligence community's mission and integrity will not come without casualties or damage, both for the work force and the country, but suppressing it will not be the cake walk the president imagines. Inscribed at the C.I.A.'s entrance, and embraced as its gospel, is written: "And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free." Douglas London was a senior operations officer in the C.I.A. Clandestine Service for over 34 years, assigned to the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Central Eurasia, several times as a chief of station. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
In This Novel, the Fate of an Indian Slum Is in the Hands of Its Women 's novel, "A People's History of Heaven," follows the lives of five girls and close friends as they fight to save their slum on the outskirts of Bangalore from demolition. The slum is called Swarga, Sanskrit for heaven. Heaven, we are told, "is nothing if not a series of crises. Men lurching home after midnight, collars and shirtsleeves blotted with blood. Women rushing to the police station to post bail for a son wrongfully incarcerated, a husband rightfully restrained. Children stumbling out of tin roofed huts where their mother has died giving birth, cradling babies swaddled in torn up saris, blinking their newly orphaned eyes." It starts a little heavy handed, as city officials are "demolishing Heaven" with bulldozers. But as the book progresses, the metaphors calm down and Subramanian finds her footing, the language taking on a musicality that is in sharp contrast to the bleak setting. A nameless narrating chorus weaves in and out of the stories of not just the girls but the mothers and women who came before them. At times this "we" detracts from the specificities of the central characters, but it works, because this is a story of a generation, a class, a community, a gender, a world. In Heaven, the girls' fates are as tightly intertwined as their braids. Parts of this novel read like independent vignettes, almost poetry. This is a "history" as much of a place and a time as of a people. A plot about underprivileged girls in India runs the risk of sounding morally self important or, worse, voyeuristic, particularly when written in English. These plots are almost always told from the safe haven of privilege, and carry the burdens of having to be earnest yet careful, and to demonstrate a sympathy that too often blurs into pity. At first it feels as though we've read this tale before: one in which girls are hated from the minute they're conceived, women are valued only for their wombs, men are drunk and philandering, sadness piled on top of depression sitting atop cruelty. But then Subramanian surprises us. Moments of genuine joy (though I wish a character didn't actually have to be named Joy) burst through. The women are not there for our pity; they are there to be listened to, even when they speak softly. The story moves from all that is done to the girls to all that the girls do. One is transgender, one navigates her blindness, one discovers a family secret, another an unexpected sexuality, one might just be a future Banksy. The men and their cruelties fade into the peripheries. How simple, how refreshing. A few elements are glossed over too lightly, as if perhaps Subramanian is afraid of the current or future sociopolitical climate in India. Despite the group's interreligiosity (including a converted Christian and a Muslim among the Hindu majority, which varies in devoutness), Subramanian avoids exploring the real life ascendancy of the Hindu right in any detail. The Hindu boys taking on the saffron colored clothes and slogans of the nationalist extremists seem to play no role, let alone cause any tension, in the lives of this mixed community. One can hope that is how things will play out in the India outside this novel: Maybe the flexing of religion as power will remain an adolescent attempt at finding a sense of belonging, and will no longer actually tear the country or the world apart. Maybe what Subramanian is trying to give us is a sense of optimism. Because by the end, the book gives us more hope than gloom. The girls find things they're looking for, be it a home or love or something less concrete. And, most important, they hold on to one another. Despite its uplifting enough ending, though, "A People's History of Heaven" feels scattered, new characters being introduced here and there to help tie up loose threads. It is as if the author herself were unsure how to give these girls a sense of resolution after setting them up with lives so full of sadness and misfortune. Or as if she'd been planning to write a collection of poetry, but decided to write a novel instead. But like her, we too want these characters to find happy endings, so we'll take it. This is a strong debut by Subramanian. In the future, she might trust her readers a bit more, and allow herself the freedom to reveal a world of her creation in which not everything needs to represent something else. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. President Trump's infrastructure meeting with Democratic congressional leaders on Wednesday ended angrily after three minutes, with the president later singling out Speaker Nancy Pelosi for accusing him of a cover up. The late night hosts piled on both Trump and Pelosi. "Pelosi can't be surprised. It's like talking trash about your friend, then showing up to the group brunch, like, 'Hey, girl.'" JIMMY FALLON "That's like responding to someone's birthday evite by writing, 'I resent the day you were born,' and then still clicking 'Will attend.'" SETH MEYERS Immediately after the abbreviated meeting, Trump held an unscheduled news conference in the White House Rose Garden, where he said he had no interest in working with Democrats until they stopped investigating him. "Now this confused me a lot, because is he saying that up until this point he was working with the Democrats? The last two years were his version of things going well?" JAMES CORDEN "So Trump has a clear stance on infrastructure. Imitating Trump 'It's my way, or no highways.'" STEPHEN COLBERT The Other White Guys Running in 2020 While Trump continued to dominate the news, some of the other 2020 presidential candidates also came up on late night Wednesday. "I saw that Beto O'Rourke has fallen from third place to eighth. Now Beto is asking experts how to get back up to third. Meanwhile, Bill de Blasio is asking Beto how to get up to eighth." JIMMY FALLON "Joe Biden raised over 2 million in just two days while he was in Florida. Amazing. In Florida, he raised 2 million, probably due to his speech entitled, 'Hey, I Am Your Age.'" CONAN O'BRIEN "Why even bother doing a Fox town hall? As Democrats, there are easier ways for you to get lots of Fox News airtime. You can talk about climate change or wear pajamas or if all those options fail, just be Hillary Clinton." SAMANTHA BEE, on Pete Buttigieg's decision to appear on the network "Presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke held a town hall on CNN last night where he revealed that he worked as a live in nanny after college. Said his wife, 'No, you're a dad.'" SETH MEYERS "Trump walked out the door, straight to the Rose Garden for a nationally televised hissy fit, complete with a podium adorned with a preprinted sign that said, 'No collusion, no obstruction.' Blocked the seal. Very presidential, I gotta say, very presidential. It reminds me of the time that Jefferson addressed the Continental Congress behind a sign that said, 'Sally Hemings: just a friend.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Can you stop calling Don Jr. a young man? He's 41. When a woman turns 41 you're ready to drive her to the edge of the woods and leave her there: 'O.K., goodbye, enjoy the two or three years you have left.'" SETH MEYERS, on Trump's referring to his son as a "good young man" who has "gone through hell" "Donald Trump is right, he is. He is right. Hearing about your 72 year old father having sex with a porn star does sound like hell, doesn't it?" JAMES CORDEN Lena Waithe filled in as guest host for Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday night and received a rousing pep talk from her friend and fellow "Boomerang" producer, Halle Berry. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Before trying a boardroom coup, it is wise to line up enough support in advance to win. Luis del Rivero, the ousted chairman of the Spanish construction company Sacyr Vallehermoso, learned that the hard way this week. After failing in his months long crusade to shake up the management and strategy of Repsol YPF, the largest oil company in Spain, he became the victim of his own boardroom coup on Thursday. The board of Sacyr voted to remove Mr. del Rivero and replace him with the company's chief executive and his longtime partner, Manuel Manrique. The move throws into doubt the future of a pact that Sacyr, which owns 20 percent of Repsol's stock, had signed with another large Repsol shareholder, Pemex, the Mexican state oil monopoly, to agitate for changes at Repsol. Under the pact struck in August, the two companies agreed to vote together on the Repsol board, where Sacyr held three seats and Pemex held one. Pemex, which held about 4.8 percent of Repsol's shares at that time, also began increasing its stake and now owns about 9.5 percent. Before he was fired, Mr. del Rivero had been under increasing pressure as he struggled to refinance the 4.9 billion euros ( 6.8 billion) loan that Sacyr had taken on to buy the Repsol stake in 2006. That loan is due Dec. 21, and his removal makes it more likely that Sacyr will sell some of its Repsol stake, worth nearly 5.3 billion euros ( 7.3 billion) at current prices, to pay back the loan. The debt had pushed Mr. del Rivero into a public feud with Repsol's chairman and chief executive, Antonio Brufau Niubo, as he pushed Repsol to raise its dividend payments and separate the positions of chairman and chief executive. The Repsol board instead backed Mr. Brufau's strategy, which has been to invest more in oil exploration. And in late September, Repsol counterattacked. It changed its bylaws in an attempt to strip Pemex and Sacyr of their seats on Repsol's board on the grounds of conflict of interest. Repsol also mounted a legal challenge to the pact struck by Sacyr and Pemex, arguing that it breached takeover rules. Sacyr and Pemex had hoped to gain more seats on the board without making a takeover bid for Repsol, which would have been compulsory if their combined share had reached more than 30 percent. Shares of Repsol rose in the initial days of the battle, but fell back as the standoff dragged on. That put more pressure on debt burdened Sacyr to find another approach, or a new leader. "The reality is that del Rivero has been pushed out by other powerful shareholders from the Abello and Carceller families, who had been his backers in Sacyr but got fed up with his mismanagement and shenanigans," said Luis Arenzana, a partner of Shelter Island Capital Management in Madrid, an asset management company that owns shares in Repsol. Mr. del Rivero was part of a generation of construction engineers who rode Spanish property development to become among the country's most powerful entrepreneurs with ambitions stretching far beyond the sector and Spain's borders. Initial jobless claims drop to their lowest point since 1969. The U.S. effort to cut energy costs may not have the intended effect. Catch up: Elizabeth Holmes points fingers at others and says she was a believer. Together with Mr. Manrique and two others, he founded Sacyr in 1986 and then leapfrogged some rivals by buying Vallehermoso, a property subsidiary of Banco Santander. But some of Mr. del Rivero's subsequent bids failed, notably an attempt in 2004 to gain control over the banking group BBVA, with the blessing of the incoming Socialist government, and a takeover bid for a French rival, Eiffage. Pemex's role in the Repsol fight was always puzzling, and the outcome is an embarrassment for its chief executive, Juan Jose Suarez Coppel. A Pemex spokesman said Friday that its pact with Sacyr remained in effect, but analysts said that the partnership was likely to dissolve with Mr. del Rivero's ouster. Pemex had long been a passive investor in Repsol, but after it struck the pact with Sacyr, it spent 1.6 billion to nearly double its stake. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
SAN FRANCISCO Dozens of databases of people's faces are being compiled without their knowledge by companies and researchers, with many of the images then being shared around the world, in what has become a vast ecosystem fueling the spread of facial recognition technology. The databases are pulled together with images from social networks, photo websites, dating services like OkCupid and cameras placed in restaurants and on college quads. While there is no precise count of the data sets, privacy activists have pinpointed repositories that were built by Microsoft, Stanford University and others, with one holding over 10 million images while another had more than two million. The face compilations are being driven by the race to create leading edge facial recognition systems. This technology learns how to identify people by analyzing as many digital pictures as possible using "neural networks," which are complex mathematical systems that require vast amounts of data to build pattern recognition. Tech giants like Facebook and Google have most likely amassed the largest face data sets, which they do not distribute, according to research papers. But other companies and universities have widely shared their image troves with researchers, governments and private enterprises in Australia, China, India, Singapore and Switzerland for training artificial intelligence, according to academics, activists and public papers. Questions about the data sets are rising because the technologies that they have enabled are now being used in potentially invasive ways. Documents released last Sunday revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials employed facial recognition technology to scan motorists' photos to identify undocumented immigrants. The F.B.I. also spent more than a decade using such systems to compare driver's license and visa photos against the faces of suspected criminals, according to a Government Accountability Office report last month. On Wednesday, a congressional hearing tackled the government's use of the technology. There is no oversight of the data sets. Activists and others said they were angered by the possibility that people's likenesses had been used to build ethically questionable technology and that the images could be misused. At least one face database created in the United States was shared with a company in China that has been linked to ethnic profiling of the country's minority Uighur Muslims. Over the past several weeks, some companies and universities, including Microsoft and Stanford, removed their face data sets from the internet because of privacy concerns. But given that the images were already so well distributed, they are most likely still being used in the United States and elsewhere, researchers and activists said. "The more ubiquitous facial recognition becomes, the more exposed we all are to being part of the process," she said. If you're online and, well, you are chances are someone is using your information. We'll tell you what you can do about it. Sign up for our limited run newsletter. One database, which dates to 2014, was put together by researchers at Stanford. It was called Brainwash, after a San Francisco cafe of the same name, where the researchers tapped into a camera. Over three days, the camera took more than 10,000 images, which went into the database, the researchers wrote in a 2015 paper. The paper did not address whether cafe patrons knew their images were being taken and used for research. (The cafe has closed.) The Stanford researchers then shared Brainwash. According to research papers, it was used in China by academics associated with the National University of Defense Technology and Megvii, an artificial intelligence company that The New York Times previously reported has provided surveillance technology for monitoring Uighurs. The Brainwash data set was removed from its original website last month after Adam Harvey, an activist in Germany who tracks the use of these repositories through a website called MegaPixels, drew attention to it. Links between Brainwash and papers describing work to build A.I. systems at the National University of Defense Technology in China have also been deleted, according to documentation from Mr. Harvey. Stanford researchers who oversaw Brainwash did not respond to requests for comment. "As part of the research process, Stanford routinely makes research documentation and supporting materials available publicly," a university official said. "Once research materials are made public, the university does not track their use nor did university officials." Duke University researchers also started a database in 2014 using eight cameras on campus to collect images, according to a 2016 paper published as part of the European Conference on Computer Vision. The cameras were denoted with signs, said Carlo Tomasi, the Duke computer science professor who helped create the database. The signs gave a number or email for people to opt out. The Duke researchers ultimately gathered more than two million video frames with images of over 2,700 people, according to the paper. They also posted the data set, named Duke MTMC, online. It was later cited in myriad documents describing work to train A.I. in the United States, in China, in Japan, in Britain and elsewhere. MS Celeb was ostensibly a database of celebrities, whose images are considered fair game because they are public figures. But MS Celeb also brought in photos of privacy and security activists, academics and others, such as Shoshana Zuboff, the author of the book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," according to documentation from Mr. Harvey of the MegaPixels project. MS Celeb was distributed internationally, before being removed this spring after Mr. Harvey and others flagged it. Kim Zetter, a cybersecurity journalist in San Francisco who has written for Wired and The Intercept, was one of the people who unknowingly became part of the Microsoft data set. "We're all just fodder for the development of these surveillance systems," she said. "The idea that this would be shared with foreign governments and military is just egregious." Matt Zeiler, founder and chief executive of Clarifai, the A.I. start up, said his company had built a face database with images from OkCupid, a dating site. He said Clarifai had access to OkCupid's photos because some of the dating site's founders invested in his company. He added that he had signed a deal with a large social media company he declined to disclose which to use its images in training face recognition models. The social network's terms of service allow for this kind of sharing, he said. "There has to be some level of trust with tech companies like Clarifai to put powerful technology to good use, and get comfortable with that," he said. An OkCupid spokeswoman said Clarifai contacted the company in 2014 "about collaborating to determine if they could build unbiased A.I. and facial recognition technology" and that the dating site "did not enter into any commercial agreement then and have no relationship with them now." She did not address whether Clarifai had gained access to OkCupid's photos without its consent. Clarifai used the images from OkCupid to build a service that could identify the age, sex and race of detected faces, Mr. Zeiler said. The start up also began working on a tool to collect images from a website called Insecam short for "insecure camera" which taps into surveillance cameras in city centers and private spaces without authorization. Clarifai's project was shut down last year after some employees protested and before any images were gathered, he said. Mr. Zeiler said Clarifai would sell its facial recognition technology to foreign governments, military operations and police departments provided the circumstances were right. It did not make sense to place blanket restrictions on the sale of technology to entire countries, he added. Ms. O'Sullivan, the former Clarifai technologist, has joined a civil rights and privacy group called the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. She is now part of a team of researchers building a tool that will let people check whether their image is part of the openly shared face databases. "You are part of what made the system what it is," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In his remarkable new documentary, the veteran filmmaker Nicolas Brown interviews prominent ecologists who study biodiversity specifically, how one species can affect an entire ecosystem. Even if the film, "The Serengeti Rules," were merely presenting credible research clearly, it would still be providing invaluable insight into the natural world at a time when as many as one million species face the threat of extinction. But Brown's ambitions extend beyond summarizing data. Instead, his spectacular sequences in the tide pools of the Pacific Northwest, in Amazon rain forests and in Tanzania's Serengeti region, among other places reproduce the circumstances of original studies, providing visual demonstrations of what makes environments thrive, falter or rebound. In one such sequence, Brown observes Aleutian kelp forests, recreating a study by the ecologist Jim Estes. As Estes recounts his observations of sea otters in their uninterrupted habitat, the camera dives beneath choppy waves to discover sea urchins purpling the rocks and iridescent fish flitting in schools around the up climbing kelp. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
SENSO (1954) Stream on Mubi. In Luchino Visconti's early film, shot in Technicolor, the unequal love affair between Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli), a married Italian countess, and Franz Mahler (Farley Granger), an officer in the occupying Austrian army, plays out against the backdrop of Italy's ongoing struggle for unification in the 19th century. Livia's love for Franz flourishes despite his evident ulterior motives and his political allegiance to her country's opponent. It's only when he violently rejects her after she makes a particularly risky sacrifice that Livia decides to turn on him. But even then, after it has destroyed them both, her passion for him remains undimmed. ARROW 9 p.m. on the CW. The superhero show's eighth and final season has been largely dedicated to laying the groundwork for "Crisis on Infinite Earths," a five part crossover series that will also include the cast and characters of "Supergirl," "Legends of Tomorrow" and the CW network's other DC comic book series. Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell), the vigilante Green Arrow, has been tested throughout to prepare him for his role in staving off an apocalyptic crisis. Over the course of the season, Oliver has learned to accept that he must sacrifice himself to save the people he has spent years protecting. In the midseason finale (the series will wrap in 2020 after the "Crisis" mini series is concluded), Oliver finds himself on Lian Yu, the island that transformed him from a spoiled, immature playboy to a disciplined warrior. As he approaches the end, he's also coming full circle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The documentary "Rising Phoenix" opens with triumphant imagery: stone statues of Paralympians in a dim room, illuminated by beams of light. In voice over, a competitor compares his fellow athletes to Marvel's Avengers; like the characters, they excelled in the face of adversity. This image, of Paralympians as reborn superheroes, is central to the film's facile portrait of the Paralympic Games. Its tribute could double as a commercial for the event or, in blander moments, an ad for activewear. The documentary (streaming on Netflix) makes its case by spotlighting a series of Paralympic athletes. As subjects, they are figures of valor, sharing their experiences with disability and the challenges they overcame in their sport. The directors, Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui ("McQueen"), illustrate the event's scope by assembling competitors from around the world. The subjects' backgrounds differ, but the accounts echo. Many were bullied or othered because of their disabilities, and used athletic prowess as a vector for power. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
SAN FRANCISCO Amazon sold a lot of things to a lot of people in the last three months of 2019, as speedy shipping shortened the time between "I want it" and "It's here." That was expected. What no one anticipated was that profits would also shoot up. On Thursday, Amazon said it had earned 6.47 a share in the quarter, up from 6.04 a year earlier. Analysts had forecast 4.04 a share, and some would not have been surprised if it had been less. Amazon went wide last year with one day shipping for members of its Prime service, and "fast" is usually synonymous with "expensive." Not this time. Amazon said more customers joined Prime in the fourth quarter than ever before, pushing worldwide membership to 150 million households. That total was also more than analysts expected. It was 100 million less than two years ago. Sales came in at 87.4 billion, up 21 percent from a year earlier and above what Wall Street predicted. The possibility that "fast" is so valued by convenience loving shoppers that they will bind themselves even more tightly to Amazon made investors giddy. Amazon shares soared more than 10 percent in after hours trading. That added 100 billion to the company's valuation, at least for the night, pushing it above 1 trillion again. "The surprise on the bottom line comes down to two things," said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst with eMarketer. "First, it looks like the fixed costs in building out their last mile infrastructure are beginning to normalize earlier than expected." Second, "with Amazon broadening their offerings, there is more pressure on sellers to buy ads in order to gain exposure," Mr. Lipsman said. "That is driving ad business momentum, which is increasingly dropping to the bottom line." Amazon ads for Amazon products delivered in Amazon trucks to Amazon households, where Amazon cameras alert residents that their new toys have already arrived. This is the Amazon flywheel, and the earnings report said it was working well. "What we saw was essentially very strong holiday performance, from the middle of November on," Brian Olsavsky, the chief financial officer, said in a conference call on Thursday. The more Amazon sells, the more efficiencies of scale it can find. So, he promised, Amazon will get bigger. "We will have to scale our fulfillment center network further," Mr. Olsavsky said. Amazon has about 500 shipping facilities in the United States and 600 elsewhere in the world, according to MWPVL International. If the last decade was all about Amazon's ascendancy in retail, the next several years will bring more of a pitched battle. "This will be the decade of the algorithmic retailer," said Hilding Anderson, head of retail strategy at the consulting firm Publicis Sapient. "Companies like Walmart and Target will use all the data they have acquired to compete more effectively with Amazon." AWS, the high margin cloud computing division that has been a big source of Amazon's profits in recent years, also increased its revenue in the quarter, by 34 percent to 9.95 billion. Amazon has a wide lead in renting computer space to other companies, although Microsoft, which reported this week that its cloud revenues had risen 62 percent in the quarter, is striving to catch up. The fourth quarter of 2019 was the first big test of Amazon's one day shipping, which began last spring. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
An Amazon warehouse in Baltimore. Since the pandemic began, the company has faced tough competition from Target, Walmart and others. As millions more Americans turned to online shopping during the pandemic, Amazon struggled to keep up with the demand, and its rivals pounced. Target's online sales shot up 141 percent last quarter, while Walmart's rose 74 percent. Etsy's were up almost 80 percent in April. Now Amazon is saying enough is enough. The company is shipping many more items in a day or two and is again running promotions. It has removed limits on the types of products allowed in its warehouses. And while it has delayed its annual Prime Day, Amazon is preparing for an earlier "Summer Sale" to let brands sell excess inventory, according to an audio recording of an internal meeting discussing the promotion. The changes position Amazon to recapture its customers who had fled elsewhere when the outbreak took hold. And the moves signal that Amazon's leaders feel confident that the business, and in particular its shipping network, is no longer in crisis mode in response to the pandemic. "They eliminated their own competitive advantage they had built over 20 years," said John Ghiorso, who runs Orca Pacific, an agency that helps brands run their Amazon business. "Now they are getting it back pretty quickly." Amazon remains by far the country's biggest online retailer. But the coronavirus put the tech giant in a new spot: on its heels. The surge of orders overwhelmed its operations, forcing the company to dampen demand and slow shipping on many items from a few days to almost a month. Jeff Bezos, its chief executive, has retaken day to day control of operations during the crisis. While Amazon's sales did boom, its competitors' grew even more. Before Covid 19, orders to Amazon accounted for about 42 percent of online spending in the United States. By mid April, that had fallen to 34 percent, according to data from Rakuten Intelligence, an analytics firm. The biggest problem facing Amazon has been its fulfillment network, the 500 or so warehouses across the country that let Amazon house, pack and ship products to customers' doors in two days or less. The efficiency of its network and the speedy and reliable delivery it provided is what separated Amazon from its competitors. As the virus spread and Amazon's response at times lagged, many workers stayed home, reducing how much product Amazon could handle. The company also struggled to keep popular panic buying items, like toilet paper, in stock. Though it took longer than many employees wanted, Amazon put in place new safety measures in its warehouses. On May 1, it stopped allowing unlimited unpaid time off, bringing many nervous employees back to work. It also hired and trained 175,000 new employees. Before, trucks could wait days for someone to unload them; the extra hands let Amazon quickly replenish its warehouses. Kate Scarpa, an Amazon spokeswoman, said, "We know customers want their deliveries as quickly as possible, and we are working hard to return all products to faster delivery speeds while helping keep our employees safe." Native, a brand of natural deodorants that Procter Gamble bought in 2017, got caught in the roller coaster. Native had been selling about 1 million a month on Amazon, before customer orders surged online as panic buying set in, said Vineet Kumar, who became the brand's chief executive just before the pandemic. When Amazon put a priority on essential and other high demand products, it told customers that Native's products would take about a month to arrive. The brand's sales on Amazon quickly fell, but they rose elsewhere online, including on its own site, where traffic jumped 70 percent from a year earlier. By focusing on critical items, Amazon "made the right call," Mr. Kumar said, but the period was "so volatile." Now, Amazon ships Native products quickly, and Native can introduce new products, which was hard to do when Amazon imposed caps on sending products to the warehouses. "Things have stabilized," Mr. Kumar said. "We are back on track." Amazon is also unwinding the steps it took to throttle customer demand. For more than a month, Amazon hid its Today's Deals page, a heavily trafficked page that usually received prominent promotion on its website and app. It also limited the products sold on the page to things that could be downloaded, like software, instead of shipped. About a week ago, the Deals page got its homesite placement back, and the variety of products widened. "It was under the radar, then all of a sudden promotions were back," said Fahim Naim, whose company, eShopportunity, helps Native manage its Amazon business. Recent flash deals promoted Hunter rain boots, Black and Decker tools, and an off brand pleather legging available for next day delivery. Amazon is also regaining its grip on companies selling products on the site. In early April, the company stopped banning brands from selling on the site if they had numerous late or canceled orders. "We made this decision after hearing from many of you about supply chain and fulfillment difficulties you were having," Amazon later explained to sellers. But last week, the company told brands that on June 1 it would "restart tracking and enforcing selling accounts with high cancellation rate, late shipment rate or order defect rate per our established order performance standards." Mr. Heller spotted another sign that Amazon's confidence had returned. A co worker noticed that Amazon was promising overnight delivery by 8 a.m. for a case of snack size popcorn a very fast turnaround. "To test that now," Mr. Heller said, "seems so gutsy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
How to Develop an Appetite for Insects It's derived from Greek and Latin: "entomon," meaning "insect," and "phagus," as in "feeding on." Some think it's the future of food. In 2013, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released a report declaring the need to swap traditional protein sources for insects to support a sustainable future. The report helped drive an explosion of efforts all dedicated to making mealworms your next meal. Presenters at a 2018 conference in Georgia, Eating Insects Athens, published papers this month in a special issue of the Annals of the Entomological Society of America. The volume showed how people who study insects scientifically are now spending more time thinking about eating them. When Christopher Columbus returned from the Americas, he and members of his expedition used the insect eating of the native inhabitants as an example of savagery, and as justification for dehumanizing people he would later enslave, said Julie Lesnik, an anthropologist at Wayne State University and author of "Edible Insects and Human Evolution." While it wasn't the only factor, the colonial era deepened the stigmatization of entomophagy in mainland Europe, and in turn among European settlers in the Americas. Further distaste grew as insects threatened profitable agricultural monocultures supported by slavery and industrialization. It wasn't always that way. Aristotle loved cicadas. Pliny the Elder preferred beetle larvae. They weren't that different from insect eaters among other cultures on other continents. Those who experienced colonialism may lead the way Evidence of insects in written reports, fossilized feces and mummies found in caves across North America, and corroboration from nearly every other continent, suggest humans have valued insects as food for millenniums. Today, billions of people still consume more than 2,100 insect species worldwide. Even in the United States, Kutzadika'a people, or "fly eaters," cherish salty pupae from Mono Lake in California. Some shoppers may be following suit, purchasing popular cricket flour and protein bars from manufacturers like Chapul in specialty shops and on Amazon. That company is named after an Aztec word for cricket, and pitches itself to customers as aiming to reduce water usage by livestock in the American West and connecting with native cultures' food knowledge. Many of us were programmed early in life to fear insects, and developing an appetite for them won't be easy. "It's O.K. if you think it's gross. It's totally fine," said Dr. Lesnik. "You didn't ask to be programmed this way." But entomophagy advocates think reprogramming can transform people's attitudes toward insects. For instance, kale, sushi, lobster and even olive oil or tomatoes were once scorned and unfamiliar in some cultures. But change can come about. With education and by acknowledging negative feelings toward eating insects, adults can try to resist passing them to their children. "It will really benefit them if they don't think bugs are gross," she added. "Because it's our kids' generation that's going to have to be able to solve those problems." Still, insects aren't yet beef or chicken In the United States, black soldier flies, good at converting waste products to protein, have long been used as feed for poultry and farmed fish. To better understand how to produce more of them, researchers have just characterized their reproductive systems from the tracts' shapes to the sperm tails' lengths. They have also discovered that larvae raised in relatively low densities are more likely to survive, grow heavier at each life stage and develop more quickly. That kind of research could be a model for eventually mass producing other insects for human consumption, like mealworms or crickets, which we're a long way off from growing in ways that could feed the masses. While years of agricultural research have guided industry regulations aiming to make beef, poultry and pork healthier and safer, and less wasteful of what they eat, similar research and rules for most insects are a long way off. When insects are and are not filthy Even if consumers become more comfortable with the idea of eating insects, they won't stay that way without specific regulations meant to ensure quality and safety. That's a goal supported by industry groups like the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture, recently formed, in part, to work with regulators as more bugs are introduced into our diets. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Ada Vox, a drag queen who had auditioned for "American Idol" previously as Adam Sanders, is one of the promising hopefuls on the debut season of the rebooted show on ABC. Lionel Richie wears the supplest leathers. They dangle decorously, as if slowly dripping off after being molded to his body for decades. They are cloak and armor and also marker of experience. So is his mustache, trimmed to triangular perfection. And even when he's not performing, he's onstage: When he offers critiques on the new season of "American Idol," he often stands and gestures, as if playing to an audience of one. On "Idol" which began on ABC last month following a two year hiatus after 15 seasons on Fox Mr. Richie is the godfather, the light of authority around which the show orients itself. Some of the contestants call him "Uncle Lionel." And when he wants to get the attention of his fellow judges, Katy Perry and Luke Bryan, he faces and addresses them as he might a class of unruly third graders: "Children." In all its prior iterations, the only father figure "Idol" genuinely had was Simon Cowell, a bad dad if ever there were one. But at the time of his and the show's arrival in 2002, he carried with him a new idea: that through the magic of television, a total unknown could be transformed into a multiplatinum superstar. The decade and a half since then has occasionally borne that out but more often showed it to be a facade, or a pretense television ratings are not the same as record sales (or in the current climate, streaming totals). And the drama that drives "Idol" and its many copy cats, "The Voice" primary among them, is its own end. But the new season of "Idol," which has just moved from the winnowing phase to the live vote phase, shows the resilience of talent in the face of a program that benefits from it, but might not benefit it. This reboot accesses many of the same charms of the original (especially in its early years). More than "The Voice," it relies on young, unpolished singers with little professional experience. Time and again, the performances have been sterling. Mara Justine, who recently turned 16, has a striking howl of a voice and a penchant for onstage hypertheatrics that she's just learning to bring under control. Her duet last week with Rachel Platten, on "Fight Song," was almost chilling. Seeing singers like these grow into their power was always central to the "Idol" narrative. The same is true for some older contestants, like Marcio Donaldson, a tender soul singer who in early appearances seemed as if he might shatter, and Ada Vox, a drag queen with a gargantuan voice who auditioned in earlier seasons as Adam Sanders. (The celebration of Ms. Vox; Ms. Perry's casual use of queer slang; and the showcasing of the same sex marriage of Jurnee, one of the finalists, are far leaps for a show that always emphasized heteronormativity, and whose most famous gay contestants, Clay Aiken and Adam Lambert, didn't come out until after their time on the show.) In later seasons of "Idol," and subsequently on "The Voice," these contestant arcs were replaced by judge dramatics. "The Voice" especially showed that pop stars, if they took the judging chair, would not just be the arbiters of a competition but also stars of their own weekly sitcom. The new "Idol" acknowledges this shift without crumbling under it. Ms. Perry is a talented physical comedian and a ham willing to wail over her purported contestant crushes, though as a judge, she's especially tough on the young female performers. Mr. Bryan is especially tough on the English language; as a judge, he's Randy Jackson reincarnate. Mr. Richie is the shepherd of this uncertain flock. He is the most firm with criticism, and also the most generous with praise. In the early rounds especially, particularly when the auditioners were young black men, he slipped into a paternal role, offering firm encouragement and stories from the Commodores' glory (and not so glory) days. When telling two young fathers that they'd made it through to the Top 24, he congratulated them for "standing up to your responsibilities." The show's host is still Ryan Seacrest, slightly muted in the wake of sexual harassment allegations that resurfaced earlier this year, which he has denied. During some of the recent rounds, he sported glasses and a fine coat of stubble on his face, distancing tools (though both were gone for Sunday's live show). Now that the season is at its halfway point, the cracks in the show's alleged star making process are becoming clear. Thriving in a series of singing competition performances is a stand alone skill that has little to do with music industry viability (See: most winners of "Idol" and every winner of "The Voice"). Take Michael J. Woodard, a guileless young singer bursting with energy and equally comfortable with show tunes and dramatic dance music. When Bobby Bones, the country radio D.J. and a guest mentor, tried to shove him into a genre box, he chose "alternative R B," which isn't nearly the half of it. And as the season progresses, even the most idiosyncratic singers get good at "Idol" style performances. They mistake sobriety for maturity, and tend toward the mean, losing the quirks that made them stand out in the auditions. This was particularly grueling during the duets round, a new innovation this season in which contestants perform with professional singers who could still benefit from the broad scale exposure "Idol" offers Colbie Caillat, Bishop Briggs, someone named Banners, and also Luis Fonsi, more famous than all of the others combined and quadrupled (in Spanish). For those sturdy in their identity, like the Southern rocker Cade Foehner, this was manageable, but others on less steady ground faded into anonymity. That round spelled doom for some of the competition's best pure singers, like Alyssa Raghu, whose initial audition with Ariana Grande and Nathan Sykes's "Almost Is Never Enough" was disarmingly mature, and Shannon O'Hara, whose version of Patty Griffin's "Up to the Mountain" in the Hollywood Week solo rounds had glorious heft. (Somehow, the dynamic Thaddeus Johnson had already been eliminated by this point, following a sterling gospel version of Ms. Perry's "Rise.") Perhaps those early exits merely prove the show's lie that talent is at its center, and there is an abundance of it this year. But again, it is talent suited to a television screen. In addition to the duets, the other significant change to the show from the original is how the herd is culled. In the past, finalists were generally sent packing one at a time in a slow drip that could be dull before it was thrilling. But "Idol" has thickened the middle and rushed the end. This week, in the first public vote of the season, the 14 finalists will be whittled to 10, and in just four weeks the new "Idol" winner will be crowned. In the old system, a contestant like Gabby Barrett, a nuclear warhead singer aimed directly at country radio, might have had the leg up. The shortened format might favor someone less expected someone who isn't inclined to use the show as a step toward a mainstream music career (though the winner gets a guaranteed contract with Hollywood Records, a pop leaning label) but rather as a distraction on the way to a quieter kind of fame. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times "Where you going?" a man asks the woman leaving his bed one morning possibly expecting her to say, "to the bathroom." Instead she says, "Barcelona." Or, rather, she sings it, because the joke as well as the character insight she's a stewardess are part of a song that became its own three act mini drama in the 1970 musical "Company." Act One: Bobby, the man, tries to get April, the stewardess, to come back to bed but fails. Act Two: As April puts on her uniform, Bobby rhapsodizes about her being a very special girl "and not because you're bright." (He quickly corrects himself: "not just because you're bright.") Then, on a ringing high note, he calls her June. Act Three: When she accedes to his relentless importuning, he is instantly horrified. "Oh, God," he sings, having achieved the companionship he never wanted. Blackout. What just happened? In the three minutes, 93 bars and 181 words that make up the song "Barcelona" one of 15 or so in "Company" and more than 750 in the catalog of Stephen Sondheim theatergoers get a complete narrative, within the larger one of the show, that deepens our understanding of Bobby, bachelorhood and the push pull of otherness. The director (in the original production, Harold Prince) gets something too: a rich scene to stage; the actors, a palpable conflict to play and the subtext to inform it. And all this is done in classical A B A form, to a sweetly lazy tune befitting the morning after setting, with apt but gentle rhymes ("going"/"Boeing") and punch lines that are not just punches. They help you sympathize a little more with Bobby, even if you like him a little less. To say that he has been revered as a brilliant trickster lyricist for at least 60 years, and for 50 as a composer of singular breadth and passion, minimizes his achievement. Not that I don't share in those judgments; I'm as thrilled by his work today as I was when first introduced to it by the original cast recording of "Company," which I transcribed word by word from my parents' cassette tape because I didn't know how else to absorb it fully. But listening again to the 15 major stage works for which he has served as both composer and lyricist, I find myself thinking not of Sondheim the word man or of Sondheim the music man but of Sondheim the dramatist. Having long taken for granted that he is the greatest composer lyricist the United States has produced, we can perhaps now notice that he is also an artist to place in the line of America's foundational 20th century playwrights. In years to come, critics will have trouble understanding how our time put him in one basket but put Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, August Wilson and Edward Albee in another. Well, they'll understand this part of it: Musical theater is a much more collaborative field than nonmusical theater; Sondheim never wrote the books for his own projects, rarely even initiating them. (Exceptions: "Sweeney Todd," "Passion," "Road Show.") But one of the things that the people who did write those books must have learned to accept, and in some cases treasure, is the way he cannibalized their work until not much was left of it but the bones. Sometimes he even ate the bones; "Barcelona" is the entire scene, no dialogue needed. So while the stories of all 15 shows were collaborations, by the time they got musicalized, the drama was mostly Sondheim's. That's especially obvious in the great works built on middling books. In "Company" and "Merrily We Roll Along" (both by George Furth) and "Follies" (by James Goldman), the spoken parts are almost always where the action isn't; you sit through them to get to the songs. The proof is everywhere. When directors looking for challenges (or engaging in rescue fantasies) overhaul the Sondheim oeuvre, it's not his contribution they try to reinvent. Take the new version of "Company" opening on Broadway this month, in which the director Marianne Elliott (with Sondheim's encouragement he's the least precious auteur ever) keeps the score pretty much as it is but flips the prototypical toxic bachelor Bobby to a biological clock watching woman named Bobbie. Or "Merrily," that great white whale of musical theater aspiration, with a hundred Ahabs bent on landing its jaw dropping score and unworkable book, even if it means building a new whale in the process. It's a matter of taste, but I would include in the best book category "Sweeney" and "A Little Night Music" (by Hugh Wheeler) and "Passion" and "Sunday in the Park With George" (by James Lapine). In these musicals and a few others, the raw material allowed Sondheim to create sequences in which neither music nor lyrics prevail but their interplay produces the heat of lived emotion. How does it happen? How does he get so often to the place where real drama happens, when even the greatest of his predecessors could get there only occasionally? Part of it is technique, both verbal and musical. It's easier to talk about the verbal kind because Sondheim's lyrics represent such a quantum improvement over the vagueness and inanity of almost everything that came before. As befits a man who for a time wrote British style cryptics, his words serve many purposes: delight, emphasis and subversion among them. His use of rhyme is only the most obvious aspect of this. Whether quiet (like that "going"/"Boeing" matchup from "Company") or showy ("personable"/"coercin' a bull," from the same show), the pairings almost without exception scan perfectly and, beyond that, highlight meaningful connections between sounds instead of an over clever Lorenz Hart like coupling that amounts to a shotgun wedding. That line is set to a musical phrase that coils in on itself for the first clause and leaps in joy for the second. If no one has ever exploited the thousand colors and astonishing coincidences of English to greater effect than Sondheim, that's in part because no truly great lyricist, save possibly Cole Porter and Frank Loesser, has been his own composer. But even more than for those showmen, Sondheim twins and twines the two elements like DNA. Sometimes that means letting the music support the words, intensifying them, as in the song "Color and Light" from "Sunday in the Park." While the pointillist painter Seurat dabs dots of pigment on his canvas, the lyric ("Red red red red/red red orange") underlines the action and is, in turn, underlined by the music's bristly staccato. Other times the music sends a coded secondary message, contradicting the lyric. Take "In Buddy's Eyes," from "Follies," in which the accompaniment turns reedy and sour whenever the despondent wife, who sings what she thinks is a tribute to her husband, starts lying about her "ducky" life. (Jonathan Tunick has orchestrated many of Sondheim's great works, with the daring and inerrancy of a sherpa.) And sometimes, most thrillingly, Sondheim will double team the drama, pitting both music and lyrics against the story. In the song "Pretty Women" from "Sweeney," as the voluptuous tune and ethereal lyrics ("dancing" and "glancing" rhyme with "how they make a man sing") pulse toward what feels like erotic release, the vengeful barber is stropping the blade that will soon kiss his customer's neck. The gasp is in the gap between what we hear and what we know. Conflict like that is the essence of drama, which is why musicals too often seem thin when they try to approach the density of plays. Their emotional states are usually monaural, offering only one channel of perception at a time. The cowboy is happy, so he sings "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'." The couple are either in love and say so, or in love but pretending not to be. The music may be delicious, the lyrics clever, but the situation is flat and generally inert; the songs are the release from the story instead of being the story itself. Such passages barely touch down to refuel. In their breadth and daring, they are akin to opera, except that the words are not a sequence of singable vowels but real thoughts that ripple with specificity. Expressing through conflict all manner of insight, they are thus less closely aligned with the grandeur of Puccini and Verdi than with Miller's moral acuity, Williams's poetry of human failure, Wilson's outsider fury and Albee's raised eyebrow, zinger filled existentialism. Through the shapes of melody they paint the lines of character. They do more than sing: They tell stories that move. That's what we otherwise call drama, and to those who have asked despairingly over the last six decades where drama is going, I would point to the violent "Epiphany" of "Sweeney" leading immediately into the funny awfullest number in musical theater, "A Little Priest." Or to the song "Someone in a Tree" from "Pacific Overtures," in which the idea of history is cut down to size: "It's the fragment, not the day." Or to the end of the first act of "Sunday in the Park," when a great artist triumphantly finishes his masterpiece. Or I might just answer: "Barcelona." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
How to Pull Off Rainbow Hair and Still Look Like an Adult When that '80s signature, rainbow colored hair made a comeback, it was wilder than ever. Layers of crazy pink transitioning to purple, blue and green now pepper Instagram feeds and pop up in everyday life and not just at the Mermaid Parade. But what about rainbow hair lite? Something prettier, more wearable, designed for the woman who secretly adored the whimsy of that Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino but can't rationalize a mermaid hued mane at her 9 to 5? The colorist Rachel Bodt of the Cutler salon suggests a "beautiful, lush and sophisticated" alternative: seashell hair, as in the gentle iridescence of a shell's interior. "This hair is for someone who wants color that's interesting, but the really funky colors won't work," Ms. Bodt said. Here's how she did it. A double process can look good on all skin colors, from dark to fair. "It's like red hair that way," Ms. Bodt said. "You just have to find the right tone." Her rule of thumb: Match the blond tone to your skin's undertones. Golden undertones look best with creamy shades; cool skin tones look good when paired with platinum white hair. "The paler the hair, the better it absorbs these colors," Ms. Bodt said. "It's like painting a white wall versus painting a pale yellow wall." Ideally, a big bleach job is better left to professionals. Very curly hair tends to be dryer and more delicate because of its spiral structure. It might not be able to handle a complete bleach job. "You should have your colorist do a test patch," Ms. Bodt said. "If the hair loses its elasticity or breaks, you won't be able to bleach it." Women with textured hair or those who simply don't want to do a double process can highlight some pieces, or curls, a light blond. Ms. Bodt used Redken Shades EQ, a demi permanent gloss "meaning it has both ammonia and dye so it deposits the color inside the hair shaft," she said. It's not as durable as regular permanent color, lasting a few weeks at best. "The colors are also dusty, which helps the overall look be more muted," she said. "And since I'm using real hair color, not Manic Panic, which is just pigment, the colors are more natural rather than cartoonish." Ms. Bodt painted rose onto the roots and pulled the color through to the ends of pieces scattered throughout the hair. "The key to this look is leaving a lot of the blond visible," she said. "That way the pastels don't hide or distract from the beautiful blond. It's a complement." After rinsing the rose gloss, Ms. Bodt added diulted rose and violet glosses all over. The effect of this step is more transparent, leaving a light tint to the hair. This "ties everything together, so it's not just pink roots and then suddenly blond hair," she said. She finished the look by painting on ribbons of violet throughout. "If you really want to go for it, you can do a semi permanent rose or violet all over the hair," Ms. Bodt said. "If your hair is highlighted, the dusty pastel shade will pick up more the palest blond hair, but your whole head will have a beautiful dusty pastel cast." In very curly hair, the roots aren't always visible. So Ms. Bodt takes a more customized approach. "You have to look at how the curls fall around the face and paint those that are most flattering perhaps around the cheekbones or at the ends of some curls," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
You can call it a Triassic titan. Or a pre Jurassic juggernaut. Just don't call it a dinosaur. Despite its appearance, this burly behemoth was a completely different prehistoric beast: a dicynodont. Early relatives to present day mammals, dicynodonts dominated Earth more than 200 million years ago, living first before, and then alongside, dinosaurs. Unlike dinosaurs, these herbivorous animals had short necks and large skulls. They were stocky like rhinos, toothless and had tusks and turtle like beaks. Many ranged in sizes from pigs to hippos, though some were small enough to burrow into the ground. Now, scientists have uncovered a new species of dicynodont that towered over the rest, comparable in size to an elephant. The newly discovered species, known as Lisowicia bojani, was 8.5 feet tall and about 15 feet long, and weighed 9 tons. It is both the largest and youngest dicynodont found so far and its discovery provides further evidence that these proto mammals survived into the late Triassic Period, past the point when many scientists had previously thought they went extinct. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The coronavirus pandemic is still raging in this country. In fact, in more than 20 states, the number of cases is rising. More than 120,000 Americans have died from the virus. This country has a quarter of all the cases in the world even though it makes up only 4 percent of the world population. Things are so bad here that the European Union, which has lowered its rates, is considering banning U.S. citizens when it reopens its borders. This situation is abysmal, and it would not have been so bad if President Trump had not intentionally neglected his duty to protect American citizens. From the beginning, Trump has used every opportunity to downplay the virus, claiming in February, "Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away." Well, we're now in June, summer. It's not just warm, it's hot. And the cases in the hottest states those in the South and Southwest are surging. Trump has consistently been resistant to testing, falsely claiming that an increase in testing is somehow linked to an increase in cases. But in fact, the more you test, the more you are able to control the virus by identifying, isolating and treating the infected, thereby reducing the spread of the virus. Testing is how you reduce your cases. It is also how you save lives. But Trump believes that to reveal the true extent of the virus's presence in this country would make him look bad. So more people get sick and more people die. He said in May: "When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases. They don't want to write that. It's common sense. We test much more." What Trump is truly saying here is, let people get sick without proper surveillance. He is saying, let them suffer out of sight. He is saying, some will die, but so what. He is saying vulnerable Americans are collateral damage in his image making and re election bid. At his rally in Tulsa, Trump took a step deeper into the darkness, saying: "When you do testing to that extent you're going to find more people, you're going to find cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test and they test. We got tests for people who don't know what's going on." If there actually was a slowdown, it allowed the virus to spread and more people to get sick and die. Trump stood in the White House briefing room and suggested that injecting disinfectant into the body could possibly cure the virus, known officially as SARS CoV 2. After this insane and dangerous remark, states saw a spike in poison control calls. A survey for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that a third of Americans were "engaged in non recommended high risk practices with the intent of preventing SARS CoV 2 transmission, including using bleach on food products, applying household cleaning and disinfectant products to skin and inhaling or ingesting cleaners and disinfectants." Trump pushed the use of hydroxychloroquine, without sufficient scientific backing, to prevent transmission of the virus or to treat infection, even saying that he took a course of it himself. The Food and Drug Administration approved an emergency use of the drug for Covid 19. The federal government began to stockpile it. States requested doses from the federal stockpile. Then, researchers found that Covid 19 patients were more likely to die if they took the drug, not less likely. During the height of the crisis, some states experienced a shortage of ventilators to treat gravely ill patients. Trump claimed that the Obama administration had left no ventilators in the national stockpile, that there were "empty cupboards." In truth, his own administration confirmed a few days ago that 16,660 ventilators were available for use when Trump took office and in March, and outrageously the Trump administration had distributed only 10,760 of them as of Tuesday. States were scrambling for ventilators to keep people alive, and the Trump administration held some back. This all says nothing of Trump's lag in using the Defense Production Act to more quickly get supplies to cities and states. Trump then pressured states to reopen economically even before those states met the administration's own guidelines for reopening. Now, many of the states that quickly reopened, no doubt in part to please the president, are the same ones in which cases are rising and more people than necessary are dying. Trump has even mocked the wearing of masks, which experts say is a proven way to reduce virus transmission. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
An associate producer at CBS's signature newsmagazine program "60 Minutes" claimed she was sidelined after making a formal complaint about her boss, according to a lawsuit filed against the network Tuesday. The producer, Cassandra Vinograd, said that Michael Gavshon, a veteran producer, sent her an inappropriate photo of himself and another man urinating on a pile of smoldering coal. The lawsuit also accused Mr. Gavshon of drinking excessively at work. Ms. Vinograd, who joined the London office of "60 Minutes" in June after working at NBC News, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press, is still a producer on the show. In the lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court, she claimed that she had been stripped of assignments after complaining about Mr. Gavshon, who worked with her in the London office. She is seeking a jury trial to determine damages. The lawsuit is the latest example of women making accusations against men in positions of power at CBS. The network has made efforts in recent months to repair its public image, with mixed results. A little more than a year ago, the former CBS Corporation chief executive Leslie Moonves was ousted after more than a dozen women made allegations of sexual misconduct against him. At the network's news division, the anchor Charlie Rose was fired in 2017 after he was accused of sexual misconduct, and the longtime "60 Minutes" executive producer Jeff Fager was dismissed last year after sending a threatening text message to a CBS journalist who had asked him for comment while reporting on allegations of inappropriate behavior against him. Since those firings, CBS has instituted new policies and procedures for dealing with sexual harassment complaints. Two writers recently quit the Patricia Heaton sitcom "Carol's Second Act" after they claimed they were made to feel uncomfortable in the workplace after reporting that Ms. Heaton's husband, David Hunt, an executive producer on the show, touched one of them inappropriately. (Mr. Hunt said he had no recollection of touching anyone inappropriately and disputed his accuser's account.) In her lawsuit, Ms. Vinograd, 35, claimed that Mr. Gavshon, a "60 Minutes" veteran who has won multiple Emmy Awards, texted the inappropriate photo in September, after they had been on assignment in Hungary. (Mr. Gavshon's texts to Ms. Vinograd, including the photo, are included in the legal complaint.) In the photograph, which appears to have been taken decades ago, Mr. Gavshon and another man appear to be urinating on a wheelbarrow filled with coal while two other men look on. The lawsuit said that Ms. Vinograd thought "it was creepy and gross to receive a picture of her boss's penis and urine stream." According to the suit, Mr. Gavshon apologized to Ms. Vinograd with a second text message that said, "So so sorry." In a third text, he added that he had sent her the photo by mistake, having intended to text it to his sister. Days later, Ms. Vinograd sent an email to CBS executives, including Susan Zirinsky, the head of CBS News, and the network's human resources division, saying that she wanted to make a complaint about "highly inappropriate, unprofessional and upsetting events," but wanted their assurance that she would not be retaliated against for doing so. In a phone conversation later that day with two people from human resources, she went into detail, according to the suit. 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. She was told the network would investigate the matter, and that if she was uncomfortable working with Mr. Gavshon, she should be the one to stay home and avoid the office, the lawsuit said. After completing an investigation, CBS said it had not corroborated Ms. Vinograd's claims about Mr. Gavshon's drinking. It also concluded that he had texted the photo by mistake, describing it as an isolated incident with "no malicious intent." After the investigation, Ms. Vinograd claimed that she was excluded from emails, calls and meetings, and that stories she had been involved with were taken away from her. As a result, according to the suit, co workers have avoided her "as if she committed wrongdoing." In a statement, CBS News said it was "reviewing the complaint filed by Ms. Vinograd and plans to vigorously defend against this lawsuit." The statement added, "CBS thoroughly and immediately investigated the matter in accordance with its policies. Subsequently, Ms. Vinograd asked to no longer work with Mr. Gavshon and CBS has made every reasonable effort to honor this request. CBS News vehemently denies there was any retaliation." Mr. Gavshon, in a statement, described the episode, saying he was reminiscing with his sister about a recently deceased childhood friend (who was in the picture) when he sent the text. "I immediately deleted the picture and apologized profusely," he said. "I was mortified. The following day I went in early and reported the incident. I cooperated with an investigation by the company and was told not to come into work during the course of the investigation. I continue to regret this mistake and sincerely apologize for it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
If Kushner was moved by Gorkov's thoughtful gifts, he did not let on to either Congress or to the Mueller investigators. But Bernstein sees the symbolism. The bag of dirt, she writes, was "reminiscent of the bags of dirt that Rae Kushner" Kushner's grandmother "and her family had dug from the earth and hidden in the walls of Novogrudok ghetto so the Nazis wouldn't know they had dug a tunnel to safety." Dramatic enough on its own. But Bernstein sees deeper meaning that she wants us to know is lost on her subjects, the Kushners and the Trumps. "Had it not been for those bags of dirt," she writes, "Rae would never have made it out of the ghetto, to the forest, to the refugee camp, or to New York, where she had four children, including one named after her brother who had died during the escape. And whose own son, Jared Corey Kushner, was now one of the most powerful people in a new and uncertain world slinking again toward darkness." This book was one of our most anticipated titles of January. See the full list. This passage shows Bernstein at her narrative best: reportorial, pointed and unsparing, while reinforcing her theme that the Trumps and the Kushners are ruthless, cold, power hungry and endlessly ambitious. Her narrative traces the origin of the myths about the two families, how these callous, opportunistic dynasties were finally joined at the hip through the 2009 marriage of Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Trump's older daughter and most favored child, at Trump's Bedminster, N.J., golf club, and what the present generations were willing to do to relatives, friends and foes anyone, really to slake their seemingly unquenchable thirsts. But it is also true that Bernstein has picked a most difficult topic to probe for new insights. So much has been written already about the Trumps and the Kushners and not just in the four plus years since Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower spewing vitriol and hate that to add new material to that grotesque canon is an exceptionally challenging task for any reporter, even one as diligent as Bernstein. While "American Oligarchs" is a rich and highly readable compendium, one does not finish it and think, "I've just been bedazzled and infuriated anew." Rather, the experience of consuming this book is more along the lines of reading an encyclopedia of many of the hateful things we already know, or think we know, about these two families. As Bernstein shares in her "Note on Sources," she did not have access to Trump or his family. She did not interview the Kushners, although Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner's father, answered some of her questions through his attorney; Jared Kushner, through the White House, provided some factual information but did not answer her questions. She obviously didn't have Anonymous's access to the White House, or even Michael Wolff's. Fear was yet another obstacle to overcome. Most of the more than 200 people she did interview many of them with firsthand knowledge of events, and on good terms with the Trumps and the Kushners declined to be identified in any way. Make no mistake, Bernstein is an intrepid reporter, best known for her work at WNYC, the New York City public radio station, and in particular for her relentless digging about Bridgegate, that notorious only in New Jersey story that probably cost Chris Christie, the former governor, the chance of making a serious run for the Republican nomination that Trump won instead. Of course, as Bernstein also shares, Christie was the United States attorney in New Jersey who famously prosecuted Kushner's father for evading taxes, witness tampering, making illegal campaign contributions and hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother in law as part of a family feud. When Charles Kushner pleaded guilty, in 2004, he served 14 months in a federal prison. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
As the leather goods and apparel company Coach celebrates its 75th anniversary this year with an ad campaign focused on its heritage, a battle has been going on in the United States Patent and Trademark Office for the rights to the name of perhaps its best known designer, Bonnie Cashin. For anyone under 40, Cashin's name doesn't exactly resonate, though some fashion scholars go so far as to credit her with inventing American sportswear. The designer, who died in 2000 (Cashin maintained that she was born in 1915, though the census for 1910 puts her birth year at "abt 1908"), left a legacy of hard working ponchos and wizardly "carriables," a.k.a. handbags. This opposition has come partly from Coach, whose original parent company, Gail Leather Products, hired Cashin in 1962 as Coach's first designer. Coach has since grown into a behemoth with net sales of 954 million in the last reported quarter, but it was not Cashin's only client. She also designed for Hermes, Ballantyne and Aquascutum, among dozens of other firms, as well as under her own label. Ms. Lake, 43, a jewelry designer based in Minnetonka, Minn., says she notices Cashin's impact, unattributed, everywhere. "Everyone from Miu Miu to Rachel Zoe has something in their collections that is specifically Bonnie," she said in a recent interview. Isaac Mizrahi, who has explicit affinities with Cashin, acknowledged that "oh my God, yes, she influenced me profoundly." Cashin also won the praise of her contemporaries, including those with alien aesthetic sympathies. "You are the most original and creative talent we have," Norman Norell, who dressed ladies who lunch, said in a telegram to her in 1965. She is often cited not just for creating the concept of layering, but for coining the term, as well as for her pioneering use of leather, mohair and hardware. The brass turnlocks that kept the top of her 1940s convertible down became the innocent detail that has sold a zillion handbags for Coach. The clasp at the end of a dog leash found its way not only onto baguettes and feedbags, but also to the waistband of a fuzzy ankle grazing blanket skirt, Cashin's answer to the hostess's need for mobility. D rings below the clasps could be attached, hitching the skirt so madame could pass the canapes. The matter of rights to her name has been complicated by the trustees of the Bonnie Cashin Foundation, which has joined Coach as the opposition in the trademark office filings. Ms. Lake was creative director of the foundation until 2012. She said the end of her term was triggered by a change in trustees, to Lucia Kellar and David Blum. "Bonnie Cashin: Chic Is Where You Find It", by Stephanie Lake. L. Donald Prutzman, the lawyer for Ms. Kellar and Mr. Blum, and Victor Luis, chief executive of Coach, declined to comment. Fashion generates disciples, but rarely ones as devoted as Ms. Lake. She can tell you the value of Cashin's first contract with Coach ( 2,500 for two collections) and the color of the Nelson Marshmallow sofa in her studio (yellow). Were Ms. Lake to prevail, she said Isabel Toledo would be among the first designers she would call to reinvigorate the Cashin brand, observing that she shares the founder's "fascination with transforming geometric, even architectural forms into kinetic art." Ms. Lake is also weighing re editions, in the manner of Cashin's fellow modernists Ray and Charles Eames. But it is worth noting that a little reverence goes a long way when exhuming a fashion idol. Successful revivals usually have an element of blasphemy, as with Chanel, universally held up as a house that did it right. Mr. Mizrahi had no trouble envisioning himself as Cashin's successor, saying that "the name has bearing only if pushed to an edge that matters." Unaware of Ms. Lake's dispute, he said it would be "supersmart for Coach to launch a Cashin module, but not just things she did. It could be Coach's 'black label,'" he said, employing the term for a high end collection within a brand. Ms. Lake tends to romanticize Cashin's years with Coach as a love fest with the company's owners, Lillian and Miles Cahn. Cashin "designed some very expensive bags," Mr. Cahn told The New Yorker, "and they didn't really sell." Reed Krakoff, who stepped down as Coach's designer in 2013 after 17 years, said that "from Day 1 we looked at Cashin's work. Many times we reissued her bags, knitwear, outerwear and recreated product from her history." In 2011, Coach appears to have sought to formalize its claim to the Cashin name by licensing it from the foundation, and Bonnie inflected merchandise filled the shelves. But according to Ms. Lake's lawyer, Kyle Peterson, the license was never the foundation's to issue, as it did not hold the trademark. This may explain why Stuart Vevers, who replaced Mr. Krakoff, has thus far left Cashin out of the marketing hoopla and product introductions attached to Coach's current anniversary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The company not only publishes plays and musicals, but also licenses them, which means it grants permission for amateur and professional performances in exchange for a fee. "The reason that this completely makes sense is given the competitive outlook of the industry, especially with Concord having acquired some of the major players I just knew that competition was going to be a lot more fierce, and we were going to run into some headwinds," said Nate Collins, the president of Samuel French and a great grandson of one of the company's early 20th century presidents. "We have been family owned and operated since 1830, and the outlook of the industry required that we have backing from an institution with more resources." The Samuel French imprint will continue to exist, and Mr. Collins will become its general manager; the company will move from near Gramercy Park to the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, where Concord has been consolidating its theater operations. Mr. Collins said he expected most of the company's employees to retain their jobs. He said the merger would benefit playwrights, because it would allow for more technological innovation and stronger relationships with producers. Concord is now not only publishing and licensing theatrical scripts, but is also releasing cast albums (including "Come From Away" and this year's revival of "Carousel") and investing in theatrical productions (including the musical "Jagged Little Pill," featuring the songs of Alanis Morissette, which is poised to transfer to Broadway as soon as the producers can find an available theater of suitable size). "Over the course of the last couple of years these iconic, mostly family held companies, who have carefully curated their shows and the writers they represent, have combined into something that has the scale to service those titles with the best current business practices," said Sean Patrick Flahaven, who has been chief executive of The Musical Company and will now run Concord Theatricals. "Concord is very much interested in signing more shows and more writers and investing in shows, and has the financial ability to do that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Angie is Italian American and single; Seth is a divorced Orthodox Jew. She lives in apartment 4C; he is down the hall in 4J. She's a curator at a Chelsea gallery; he runs a knish shop on the Lower East Side. She finds inspiration at the Metropolitan Museum; he translates an obscure Yiddish writer for fun. You've guessed it: We are in a romantic comedy, "The Sabbath Girl," and its protagonists are fated to be mated, as Cole Porter put it back in 1957 (some things never change). But while it is refreshing to see the young writer Cary Gitter unabashedly dive into a genre as rare onstage as it is popular onscreen, his play, at 59E59 Theaters, can't escape the cliches and clunky setups that burden rom com as much as they fuel it. Angie (Lauren Annunziata) and Seth (Jeremy Rishe) meet cute, obviously when he asks her to turn on his air conditioner: It's Friday night and as an observant Jew, he can't do it himself. Soon enough, Angie becomes Seth's bemused "Shabbos goy." It will take a bit longer, however, for them to realize they are each other's person. Angie is sidetracked by Blake (Ty Molbak), a hunky artist she's trying to lure to her gallery, undeterred by the fact that he's the kind of guy who prefaces a declaration with "Here's what I see in your soul." As for Seth, he must overcome the objections of his sister, Rachel (Lauren Singerman), who is appalled that he's even thinking of dating outside their faith. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In January, the choreographer Heather Kravas presented her aggressively stringent solo "dead, disappears," in which she walked on her toes with her head covered by a garbage bag, urinated in a bucket and beat a pillow, duct taped to a chair, with a pole. For her new "play, thing," she extends her passion for repetitive movement and simple props with more dancers six in total who execute three independent, converging duets. It has a twin theme. The pillow is back, but this time there are two. In "dead, disappears," Ms. Kravas embodied agitation with a cheerleader's precision as she performed tasks relentlessly and obsessively in an intimate, clinical studio setting. There are more tasks in "play, thing," which opened on Wednesday at the Chocolate Factory, but the atmosphere is cooler and the setting more dramatic, thanks to Madeline Best's lighting, which has a soothing effect, even when the cast threatens to repeat the dutiful dance. Mercifully, it only goes part of the way. Ms. Kravas's exploration of domestic drudgery here, the dancers' laborious tasks feel like housework is, at times, a chore. For this piece, which hints at the possibility of pain in play and how a woman can be seen as an object, or a thing, Ms. Kravas pairs with Rebecca Brooks (both wearing tights and gray button down shirts), while Anna Azrieli moves alongside Natalie Green (in black sweatpants and green leotards) and Heather Olson dances with Omagbitse Omagbemi (in crisp black dresses). Their uniforms are important; they help to keep the duets separate, no matter how close the dancers get to one another as they traverse the long, narrow space. With their methodical movements twirling pillows around their bodies, rolling on rugs or assembling and wrecking wooden platforms the stage becomes a well oiled machine. Set to Eliane Radigue's "Transamorem Transmortem," a hypnotic electronic score, the production hints at the anxiety behind the dancers' neurotic loops of movement as they collapse onto mattresses, drag their fingertips across the carpets or drop pillows onto the floor that land with a surprising smash. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
MIAMI "That's where the classrooms were," said Katrina Wilson Davis, pointing at the deserted building that housed the school where she was once principal. She climbed the chipped stairs that children used to race down at recess in their cherry red school uniforms and walked past a street sign that still warns drivers of a 15 mile an hour speed limit on school days. Those days are over. Now trash and fronds from the palm trees that students planted litter the grounds, and cafeteria tables are folded away in a dark doorway. Jeb Bush's charter school is a ruin baking in the Miami sun. Co founded in 1996 by Mr. Bush with what he called in an email a "powerful sense of pride and joy," Liberty City Charter School was the first school of its kind in Florida and a pioneer in a booming industry and national movement. It became an image softening vehicle for Mr. Bush's political comeback, though the school's road was anything but smooth. It served a poor, often overlooked black population, and struggled with landlord problems and deepening deficits without the resources and infrastructure of a public school system to rely on. And by the time it closed, in 2008, the school did not have Jeb Bush to count on, either. "He was a private citizen then," said Ms. Wilson Davis, an admirer of Mr. Bush's. "He was trying to make money then. He was no longer in office." But with Mr. Bush all but certain to be running for office again, this time for the White House, the school he once championed is again useful. As he tries to sell himself to the conservative Republicans wary of his support for the testing standards they consider emblematic of government overreach, he can speak with authority on charter schools, funded largely by taxpayers but run by private companies, as a free market antidote to liberal teachers' unions and low performance. And his firsthand experience in the education of underprivileged urban grade schoolers lends him credibility in a party that has suddenly seized upon the gap between the rich and poor as politically promising terrain. In his first speech as a likely presidential candidate in Detroit last month, Mr. Bush credited Liberty City Charter School with helping "change education in Florida" But Mr. Bush's uplifting story of achievement and reform avoided mentioning the school by name or its unhappy ending. For all his early and vital involvement during his 1998 campaign for governor, and for all the help he offered from afar in the governor's office, Mr. Bush's commitment to his school project was not as enduring as some students and teachers might have hoped. Critics of charter schools note that Liberty City, named after the impoverished African American neighborhood from which many of its students hailed, also set an unfortunate precedent for the short life span of schools whose survival is dependent on their financial as well as academic success. And while Ms. Wilson Davis does not blame Mr. Bush for the school's demise, members of her former faculty and student body wonder whether it ultimately did more for him than he did for it. What everyone agrees is that Mr. Bush moved on. His involvement began after his narrow loss in the 1994 governor's race, which he ran as a tough on crime and solid on social issues conservative who clumsily asserted that he would do "probably nothing" for blacks if elected. With defeat still fresh, he called T. Willard Fair, a president of the Urban League of Greater Miami, with a question: Would he accept leftover campaign funds for his organization? "Are you on your way?" Mr. Fair answered. The president's son and the African American activist ended up talking for an hour and a half, with Mr. Bush introducing and selling his new friend on the idea of charter schools. For the next couple of years, the two crisscrossed the state, making their case. Mr. Fair, who displays pictures of the Bush family and Liberty City Charter School students on his office walls, said he had no interest in whether Mr. Bush was sincere in his commitment to educating black children. "If I can use Jeb Bush's aspirations to be governor of the state of Florida to do that, so be it," said Mr. Fair, whom Mr. Bush later appointed to the State Board of Education. The board approved a three year contract. One of its members, Frederica S. Wilson, now a member of the House of Representatives, had grilled Mr. Bush about his plans for the school, and apparently made an impression. "He asked the superintendent if I could be the principal of the school," said Ms. Wilson, who declined the job. Mr. Bush asked if she could recommend someone with "the same personality" as her. She suggested Ms. Wilson Davis (no relation to Ms. Wilson), but she advised the young social studies teacher not to take the job because she lacked any managerial experience. Ms. Wilson Davis took it anyway. The school wanted "an inexperienced person," Mr. Fair said, who would not be beholden to teachers unions. Next, Mr. Bush, using his connections, set about raising money to help fund the school's first year budget of about 312,000, a combination of private and public funding. And they needed students. Mr. Fair called the mothers of the affordable housing units developed by the Urban League, and asked for help. In the days before school started, Mr. Bush arrived in corduroys and boat shoes to paint the school chairs primary colors. On Aug. 26, 1996, the first day of school, he stood with a teary eyed Mr. Fair on the school steps as 60 children marched down the street. Mr. Bush became a frequent presence at the school. Before each visit, Staci Schulster, a second grade teacher, prepped the children by telling them that Mr. Bush was "famous." The students would rush Mr. Bush and knock him off his tiny chair, "and all you'd see was his legs hanging out" said Ms. Wilson Davis. He came dressed up as Santa Claus, took students to Parrot Jungle and brought his mother, Barbara Bush, to read to the kids. But he also declined invitations for the school choir to sing at outside events. "I'm protective of the school," Mr. Bush said in December 1997. "The school is separate from my campaign." Some former teachers and students found such an assertion risible. Ajani Booth was one of the children who was chosen to stand behind him as Mr. Bush gave a speech. There was a campaign atmosphere to his visits, he recalled, and "we all had to dress up and look spiffy" for the cameras when he came by. But some members of the school were happy to play a role in his political career. When Mr. Bush formally started another run for governor in 1998, his campaign paid for Cheri Perry, a board member at the school, to travel to Tallahassee, where photographers captured her delivering the paperwork. During the campaign, Mr. Bush wrote in an email, "the school provided a firsthand look at the policy and real life challenges in improving education." That fall, the public school system gave Liberty City a "Best in Class" rating among poor black schools. And in November, Florida's voters elected Mr. Bush governor. Exit polls showed he doubled his share of the black vote. In the ensuing years, Mr. Bush "faded a little a bit," rarely visiting the school, said Aubrey Davis, a former student and Ms. Wilson Davis's son. Mr. Bush's office said in response to questions that it would have been inappropriate for Mr. Bush to help the school as governor. But behind the scenes, Mr. Bush's now partially public emails show that he kept tabs on Liberty City, congratulating Ms. Wilson Davis on math bowl victories and improved standardized test scores, even receiving debriefings from an adviser who tutored at the school. Mr. Bush rolled to re election in 2002, and his first post victory appearance was at the school, which by then was having problems with its landlord. In April 2004, Ms. Wilson Davis requested a meeting with Mr. Bush to discuss "acquiring this property right across the street from our current school!!!!!" she wrote in one of the now public emails, calling it "a deal that we simply cannot afford to miss." But when the school went ahead with the purchase, Mr. Bush was not involved in the decision, his office said. That November, when Ms. Wilson Davis briefed him on roof damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, he wrote back: "Trina, have you applied for FEMA assistance? What do they say?" He was referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Liberty City earned an A grade for the 2005 06 year, a high mark in what was, over the years, an inconsistent report card as the school wrestled with Mr. Bush's standardized tests and took over the management of other failing charter schools. But that October, Ms. Wilson Davis wrote to him frantically that the school had missed a deadline for FEMA funding the repair of hurricane related damages. "I am in a position where I need some intervention and direction from YOU!" she wrote in an email. Mr. Bush wrote back that he would work on the issue and directed his office to look into the FEMA funding. Ms. Wilson Davis said that Mr. Bush had helped as governor, but that the roof was only one dispute with the landlord for a school that had become a financial catastrophe. There had been what Ms. Wilson Davis called a "barrage" of complaints from the landlord to the authorities, who cited the school for fire code violations, shoddy work by unlicensed contractors and unsafe conditions. A judge awarded damages and legal fees to the landlord. "I am not aware of what this is about," Mr. Bush told The Miami Herald in 2008, when the financial issues became public. He added that he knew that the school carried an A rating, "which warmed my heart." School board documents show the school had a C rating for its last two years. As for the school's financial and landlord problems, "I did tell him," Ms. Wilson Davis said. She said Mr. Bush had looked into the issue, called back and said the school had a big hole of debt that would be hard to fill. "How do we survive this?" she remembers asking him. Mr. Bush's answer, in an email response this month to questions from The New York Times, was that "I asked some friends to get involved on the board and help the school." But he declined to expand on what efforts he had made. Whatever they were, they were insufficient. On March 13, 2008, the Miami schools superintendent, Rudy Crew, notified Mr. Fair, Ms. Wilson Davis and Ms. Perry, who had hand delivered the paperwork for Mr. Bush's 1998 candidacy, that the school board had voted to "immediately terminate the contract." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Ms. Nixon, an actor and advocate, was a candidate for the 2018 Democratic nomination for New York governor. My TV show is a very safe place to work. My son's school well, it might check air circulation with a yardstick and toilet paper. Update: New York City announced another delay for public school reopenings on Thursday. This summer, I participated in two back to back phone calls about resuming some semblance of normal life in New York City which for me means resuming work on a television show and sending my 9 year old son, Max, back to school. The differences in these phone calls could not have been starker, and they taught me a great deal about in whom and what we invest in the era of Covid 19. On the call related to my show, I heard about the many tours the industrial hygienist had taken of the set and about the renovation of some of our work spaces to be coronavirus safe. Out of an abundance of caution, even some spaces that looked fairly healthy had been eliminated. I also heard about how the crew and production staff would be divided into strict pods; they would be tested before they started work and then tested one to three times a week. Actors, who need to remove their masks, would be tested every day. Anyone coming to New York from out of state would need to quarantine for two weeks before being allowed on set. Air purifiers have been purchased, filtration systems have been upgraded, and an entire department has been created solely to deal with safety protocols and testing. And Covid 19 upgraded vans and shuttles, along with extra parking lots, were available to ensure that everyone had safe transportation to work. The second call was a meeting of the parents association at my son's public school. I heard that teachers and administrators could choose to be tested for the coronavirus before the school year began and that people entering the school could decide whether they wanted their temperature taken. I heard about classroom pods limited to nine students, a restriction made irrelevant by the number of people moving freely from pod to pod teachers, school staff members and even parents who are now being recruited as substitute teachers by overwhelmed school administrators. I heard about the several hundred school nurses who still needed to be hired in the system. I heard that building inspections would begin just a few weeks before school was set to open, even though out of the 1,700 buildings to be examined, a thousand already have documented ventilation problems. And I could only shake my head as I later saw that the system for testing these ventilation systems involves using a yardstick with a piece of toilet paper attached to it by paper clip to gauge airflow. Needless to say, the care and investment given to restarting television and film production in New York looks nothing like the uncertain, chaotic, shamefully underfunded and profoundly unsafe approach to reopening the public schools, which serve 1.1 million children, nearly three quarters of them deeply underprivileged. This pandemic has laid bare our society's inequities, and nowhere more than in our public schools. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, lauded as a hero for his handling of the state's pandemic response, has overseen a supposedly temporary 20 percent reduction of its payments to school districts since this summer. In New York City, the decrease would amount to a 2.3 billion loss for the schools over the next year. The city schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, said that the cuts, if made permanent, would mean "game over" for in person learning, and would lead to programming cuts and 9,000 layoffs in the Department of Education. Yet the governor has resisted raising taxes on the state's 118 billionaires (up from 112 last year), who have seen their collective wealth increase by 77 billion during the pandemic, a figure that dwarfs the state's projected budget gap of 14.5 billion this year. Even before the pandemic, New York State was second in the country when it comes to inequities in education funding with rich districts getting 10,000 more per student on average than poor districts. (The state's failure to equitably and fully fund New York's low income school districts motivated me to run for governor in 2018.) The city has compounded the continuing disinvestment in our public schools. In June, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council pushed through nearly 1 billion in cuts and savings to the education budget. Coupled with the state reductions, the schools are now facing a staggering cut of 3.3 billion. The mayor has been hamstrung by the governor and his own political miscalculations and leadership failures. As experts warned of a pandemic earlier this year, the mayor, echoing Mr. Cuomo's confidence that the virus could be contained, resisted calls to close the schools. By early May, at least 74 Department of Education employees had died in connection with Covid 19. (Researchers at Columbia found that had the city shut down even a week earlier than March 16, the date when schools were finally closed, some 18,500 Covid 19 deaths citywide could have been avoided.) Over the summer, as schools in Los Angeles and Chicago decided to go fully remote this fall, giving them crucial weeks to prepare for remote learning and make accommodations for the neediest students, our mayor at first stubbornly refused the pleas of parents and teachers and pushed for reopening in person without delay. The mayor, whom I endorsed in 2013, has insisted correctly that schools are vital for the city's most vulnerable families. His desire to reopen on time, however, has not been backed up with adequate safety measures. It is noteworthy that a survey last month by the Education Trust New York found that Black, Latino and low income families many of whom have already been disproportionately hit by the virus were significantly more wary of reopening schools this fall. Only when threatened with a strike by teachers (who were largely demanding many basic safety measures) did the mayor finally agree to delay opening, albeit by less than two weeks. As a result, all city public school students are now without schooling, remote or in person, for most of this month. Instead of asking our wealthiest citizens to pay more during a time of crisis, New York is imposing austerity on public schools even though fewer dollars mean fewer safety measures, more cases and more deaths. If city and state leaders cared half as much about our children as they do about television actors, we'd be raising revenue and giving our schools the funding needed to reopen safely. The attention being devoted to keeping the city's movie sets safe shows that it's possible. Don't our students and teachers deserve the same level of care and investment? Cynthia Nixon is an actor and advocate. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, our TV critic Margaret Lyons offers hyper specific viewing recommendations in our Watching newsletter. Read her latest picks below, and sign up for the Watching newsletter here. This Weekend I Have ... a half hour, and I miss the silly parts of 'Barry' 'Hitmen' When to watch: Now, on Peacock Premium. You might know Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc from their time hosting "The Great British Baking Show," but in this breezy comedy they play endearing assassins. While "Hitmen" doesn't have the dark intensity or moral complexity of "Barry," it does share its affection for clash of context comedy, in which characters indulge in pop culture banter or a game of charades while carrying out horrible crimes. There's a fun zip here, and if you watch a lot of British television, you will recognize every supporting player. The first episode is free on regular Peacock, but the subsequent five are available only with a subscription to Peacock Premium. ... 90 minutes, and try the gray stuff (it's delicious) Howard Ashman and Paige O'Hara at a recording session for "Beauty and the Beast." This new documentary biography of the playwright and lyricist Howard Ashman traces his life from his childhood in Baltimore through his death from AIDS in 1991. Ashman is best known for writing the book and lyrics for the musical adaptation of "Little Shop of Horrors" and for writing the lyrics for "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," and parts of "Aladdin," but this film pays ample attention to his student work and earlier pieces, too. The archival material here is wonderful, especially the initial character designs for Ursula in "The Little Mermaid" and the footage of Ashman coaching Paige O'Hara, the voice of Belle, on the exact intonation for a lyric that eventually taught a generation of children the word "provincial." ... many hours, and empty stadiums bum me out Jackie Joyner Kersee competed in the long jump at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Bud Greenspan's Olympic films When to watch: Now, on the Olympic YouTube channel, HBO Max and the Criterion Channel. Sunday would have been the closing ceremony for the Tokyo games had the coronavirus not ruined everything, so if you're missing the spectacle and catharsis of it all, try one of the many Olympic films directed by Bud Greenspan, 10 of which are currently available to stream. I'm partial to "Calgary '88: 16 Days of Glory" and "Atlanta's Olympic Glory," which includes a segment about the track star Jackie Joyner Kersee and her final Olympic Games. Or, for a fuller understanding of what athletes endure, listen to the podcast "Heavy Medals," which chronicles some of the abusive coaching practices in women's gymnastics. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Thomas Lux, a poet who used spare, direct language to express the absurdities and sorrows of human life, and whose 1994 collection, "Split Horizon," won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, one of the most lucrative prizes in American poetry, died on Feb. 5 at his home in Atlanta. He was 70. The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Jennifer Holley Lux. Mr. Lux showed a rare gift for blending comedy and disturbing surrealist images in his early collections "Memory's Handgrenade" (1972), "The Glassblower's Breath" (1976) and "Sunday: Poems" (1979). A character in the poem "Five Men I Knew" dreams he is reading "Duino Elegies" by Rilke "aloud, / in German, at a racetrack in Florida," when suddenly "the flamingos are drained of their color / and collapse." His early manner, according to the reference work Contemporary Poets, was "tormented and tortured, full of complex and disjointed images reflecting an insane and inhospitable world." With time, Mr. Lux gravitated toward a taut, precise realism, finding his subject matter in seemingly mundane events to which he applied an often comic twist, reflected in titles like "Attila the Hun Meets Pope Leo I" and "Like Tiny Baby Jesus, in Velour Pants, Sliding Down Your Throat (a Belgian Euphemism)." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Some say the experience is akin to that of a nascent start up, and an ideal way to test drive the experience. Zach Latta and Benjamin Zweig, both 17, high fiving over the completion of a task. At 16, Zach started HackEdu, a nonprofit that works with high school students to start programming clubs. At least 26 coders at TreeHacks this year were attending high school. These younger participants are often spinning off their projects into start ups and moneymaking apps. Dan Isaza, a Stanford junior majoring in mathematical and computational science, also happens to be a co founder of NeoReach, a platform that enables marketers to launch and track advertising programs. Collegiate hackathons have emerged as important places for networking, job recruiting, entrepreneurial pitching and learning. Fostering an education first ethos, they encourage students to tinker with new software and hardware. There is an expert in nearly anything at hackathons, and students teach one another. Collegiate hackathons are increasingly popular. Last year, there were approximately 40. This year, at least 150 are expected to be scheduled. For TreeHacks, 672 participated, with more than 250 from about 60 universities. Some came from as far away as Taiwan and the United Kingdom. At collegiate hackathons, students program mobile apps, websites or hardware, including aerial drones and virtual reality headsets. This semester they converged on Stanford's alumni center for TreeHacks, a 36 hour competition (named for the band's fir shaped mascot). Among prizes: a seat on a zero gravity airplane and, of course, glory. At collegiate hackathons, students program mobile apps, websites or hardware, including aerial drones and virtual reality headsets. This semester they converged on Stanford's alumni center for TreeHacks, a 36 hour competition (named for the band's fir shaped mascot). Among prizes: a seat on a zero gravity airplane and, of course, glory. Shariq Hashme squints at his laptop screen as he scrolls through hundreds of lines of computer code. "I can't even make sense of it right now," he says with a grimace. The long string of numbers, symbols and letters would usually be intelligible to Mr. Hashme, a 21 year old computer science major at the University of Maryland, College Park, but at this moment, he's having trouble even keeping his eyes open. In the last 27 hours, he has slept just two. It's 2:37 a.m. on a Sunday, and he is toiling alongside 671 young software engineers who are camped out in and around a 6,000 square foot ballroom in Stanford's alumni center. The space resembles an oversize dorm room during final exams: Temporary workstations are cluttered with computers, electronics cables, half eaten doughnuts and empty cans of Red Bull. As hundreds of students type feverishly at their laptops, dozens more are passed out in sleeping bags. Meanwhile, an overhead sound system blasts bass heavy songs think Kanye West. "What's really cool about this atmosphere is that it's pretty easy to say 'Screw it' when it comes to schoolwork," says Vikram Rajagopalan, a sophomore from the University of Michigan. "Pulling out a textbook is very frowned upon." None of these sleep deprived students is cramming for midterms or racing to finish a class assignment. They're participating in TreeHacks, a 36 hour contest to program mobile apps, websites or hardware, including aerial drones and virtual reality headsets. The goal of a hackathon, a portmanteau of marathon and hacking, isn't to obtain confidential data the way hackers infiltrated Sony Pictures last year. Instead, teams attempt to build a new piece of tech, either of their choosing or with code provided by one of the sponsors. At the end, the judges walk from table to table as the programmers show off their projects, just like a school science fair. During the opening ceremony for TreeHacks (named for the fir shaped mascot), a DirecTV representative grabbed a microphone and announced: "We want you to build the future of television!" On the same stage, two reps from Microsoft encouraged students to build projects using its motion sensing Kinect and shot T shirts into the crowd using a cannon controlled by the device. Mr. Hashme's team spent the weekend programming four Kinects with an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset to create an immersive 3 D videoconferencing system. Hackathons have become commonplace among professional developers, especially in booming tech centers like San Francisco and New York, and have emerged as prime places for networking, job recruiting, entrepreneurial pitching and, in many cases, winning cash. (One sponsored by the tech company Salesforce famously offered a 1 million prize to the most innovative project.) Now weekend hackathons organized by and for students are surging in size, scale and frequency. "A few years ago, hackathons weren't really that popular it was sort of a subculture," says Kathryn Siegel, a junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "There's been an enormous explosion." Last year there were some 40 intercollegiate hackathons. This year more than 150 are expected, according to Jon Gottfried, a founder of Major League Hacking. The company, often called the N.C.A.A. of college hackathons, provides guidelines and resources for student organizers and ranks colleges based on their students' overall performance during fall and spring. Last fall, the top school was the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. The longest running collegiate hackathon, founded at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, has since ballooned to accommodate 1,200 students each semester. Demand, though, is far outpacing growth. At TreeHacks, 2,500 applied for 500 spots. (Capacity was later expanded to 672, which required setting up a heated outdoor tent.) More than 250 participants traveled to Palo Alto, Calif., from some 60 universities, including five Ivy League schools, top tier engineering programs like Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and Georgia Tech, and universities as far away as the United Kingdom and Taiwan. "It's a big party," says Mr. Rajagopalan, who directs the University of Michigan hackathon. "At MHacks, we had therapy dogs come just so people could pet puppies." Social activities offer only a brief reprieve from the stress. Aside from having to debug their computer code at the last minute, Mr. Hashme's teammates struggled for hours with basic carpentry. They needed to construct a four foot tall frame for holding the Kinect cameras. They took an Uber car to Home Depot to buy two by fours and supplies but, curiously, the software engineers did not return with a hammer and nails. They tried joining the boards with Elmer's wood glue, which failed to dry, so in a last ditch effort they frantically wrapped electrical tape all around their rickety wooden frame. They didn't win. Top honors went to programmers from Purdue and the University of Waterloo who developed a robotic arm controlled by motion sensor. The engineers won a free trip on a zero gravity airplane (one ticket: about 5,000) as well as travel expenses and admission to hackathons in Taiwan and South Korea. Other prizes: a 50 inch flat screen television, airfare to Hawaii and a trip to Paris. Hackathon goers maintain that what motivates them is not the awards. Mr. Hashme, who directs the University of Maryland's Bitcamp, has participated in more than 40 hackathons since 2013. He says he attends because they force him to learn new tech skills. "Sitting in your dorm alone and trying to work on something, you wind up doing things you regret later, like watching a movie or browsing the Internet," he says. At hackathons he enjoys meeting like minded students from across the country "It's a room full of doers." Fostering an education first ethos, collegiate hackathons encourage students to tinker with new software and hardware and challenge themselves, and students teach one another. "There's an expert on nearly anything there," says Dave Fontenot, a former director of MHacks. "If you ask who the best JavaScript person is, pretty soon you're meeting a GitHub celebrity." (GitHub, a user generated online repository for sharing computer code, is like a Wikipedia for software.) At TreeHacks, a team of Apple engineers was on hand to mentor students at all hours of the night. Many attendees say they acquire practical skills that college courses fail to teach, and gain technical proficiency at a much faster pace. "Hackathons are like gyms," Mr. Fontenot says. "If you never go to the gym, you're never going to get big." These days, it pays to develop big muscles. In one iconic scene in the Oscar winning film "The Social Network," Mark Zuckerberg hosts a hackathon among five students in his Harvard dorm room. The winner earns an internship at his start up, Facebook. Collegiate hackathons have replicated that scene on a far grander scale. Identifying talented coders who can dream big and thrive under pressure is particularly valuable to Silicon Valley. Since hackathons showcase some of the best, brightest and most motivated upstart programmers, the events have become a focal point for recruiting. Some say hackathons are as fruitful as job fairs. "We want to find the next Mark Zuckerberg and the next Jack Dorsey," says Andy Chen, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, the venture capital firm that invested in Uber, Google, Snapchat and Twitter, which Mr. Dorsey helped found. The firm sends representatives to at least 20 collegiate competitions each year. Shariq Hashme, a senior at the University of Maryland, paused from his task: the creation of an immersive 3 D videoconferencing system. Peter DaSilva for The New York Times "I strongly believe that the best talent are at these opt in courses called hackathons," Mr. Chen says, adding that they are essential for any student pursuing a career in tech. "If you're not at a hackathon, you're at a disadvantage. What you learn in class isn't necessarily as applicable to the work force." Seeing which students can thrive in a chaotic environment akin to nascent start ups is a boon to recruiters. Likewise, students say hackathons are an ideal way to test drive the experience of working at a start up before committing to a job. But finding talent is only part of the appeal for venture capitalists. Brian Pokorny, a partner at SV Angel, which invested in Foursquare, Zappos and Airbnb, says the events help them spot emerging tech developments. Specifically, he points to the recent rise in the number of virtual reality projects from just a few years ago, when more students were building social media apps in the vein of Instagram or WhatsApp. "The students," Mr. Pokorny says, "are almost like crystal balls for the future." At last January's HackTech, hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles, and the California Institute of Technology, a 17 year old named Ash Bhat proudly announced via Twitter that his hackathon project would top Snapchat, the messaging app. Snapchat had just released a new API, the back end protocols and code that allow developers to build other software applications. Mr. Bhat realized he could "break the Captcha." ". snapchat is outdated, we're going to show that it's flawed and are going to release a competitor. all in 36 hours," tweeted Mr. Bhat at 2:53 a.m. He and three others proceeded to code a workaround for sending messages to all of Snapchat's 4.6 million users (this is not a feature Snapchat permits). Less than 12 hours later, to Mr. Bhat's amazement, Snapchat's chief executive, Evan Spiegel, 24, was standing in front of him at the hackathon, which was held in Santa Monica, not far from Snapchat's offices in Venice. Mr. Spiegel asked to see the hack and Mr. Bhat obliged. "It was a little tense," Mr. Bhat confesses now. "We thought they were going to take legal action." (They didn't.) The day after the impromptu meeting, Mr. Bhat had dinner with the three founders of Tinder, the popular dating app. They gave him their recruiting spiel, he says. "A lot of my friends are dropping out just to pursue their own ideas, and recruiting friends to drop out to pursue those ideas," says Evadora de Zhengia, a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a director of Cal Hacks. "I can name off the top of my head at least 10 dropouts. There's a lot more incentive to take a break from school for a semester and see where it takes them." The Thiel Fellowship 100,000 awarded by the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel to students who forgo college to pursue their own start ups frequently sends reps to hackathons to pass out pamphlets and buttons with the Thiel logo. "We're not there to snipe people out of school," says Danielle Strachmann, program director of the fellowship, adding that she lets students lead the discussion. "We're willing to have these hard conversations with them about what they're looking to do and what we can do to help them. Having a degree used to be your ticket to a job, but now maybe it's just going to a hackathon." Some participants are not even enrolled in college. At least 26 coders at TreeHacks attend high school. Last year at HackTech, 20 percent of the programmers were high school students. These younger participants are not just crashing collegiate hackathons; some are spinning off their projects into start ups and moneymaking apps. "The hackathon is sort of the beginning," says Veeral Patel, 17, who helped build a best selling iPhone app called Workflow at MHacks last year. Workflow won the 5,000 prize at the time, three of its four engineers were still in high school, including Mr. Patel. Three months later, two of Workflow's developers Ari Weinstein, then an M.I.T. freshman, and Conrad Kramer, then a high school senior admitted to M.I.T. were both accepted into the Thiel Fellowship, which allowed them to continue developing their team's project. "I'm kind of bummed 'cause I couldn't work on it as much as I wanted because of homework and college applications," says Mr. Patel, who has been admitted to Stanford, which gives students the option to defer. Some universities cater to the kinds of students who participate in hackathons, either by allowing a gap year or providing opportunities for less structured learning and coding. "Students need this kind of space all the time, not just at hackathons," says Stacey Sickels Locke, senior director of development at the University of Maryland, which is building a lab for engineering students to experiment with virtual reality hardware and software. The initiative is a result of a 31 million donation by Brendan Iribe, chief executive of Oculus VR, the virtual reality start up acquired by Facebook last year for 2 billion. Mr. Iribe, who dropped out of Maryland during his freshman year, decided to make his donation, the largest in the university's history, after attending its hackathon. He was depressed by the computer science facilities but impressed by the Bitcamp energy. Mr. Iribe has said he believes students should finish college, not follow in his footsteps. Whatever path they choose, one thing is certain: Hackathons are instilling in young engineers a sense of life after school, and the feeling that they can accomplish anything. "You start realizing that a lot of the companies we see, we can build. I mean, what's different from you and Mark Zuckerberg?" Mr. Bhat posits. "It's just coming up with the idea and building it." And to do that, all students really need is the time and space to just go do it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Credit...Michelle Mishina Kunz for The New York Times The coronavirus has created a surge in demand for telemedicine of all types including for a quietly expanding program for terminating pregnancies. Ashley Dale was grateful she could end her pregnancy at home. As her 3 year old daughter played nearby, she spoke by video from her living room in Hawaii with Dr. Bliss Kaneshiro, an obstetrician gynecologist, who was a 200 mile plane ride away in Honolulu. The doctor explained that two medicines that would be mailed to Ms. Dale would halt her pregnancy and cause a miscarriage. "Does it sound like what you want to do in terms of terminating the pregnancy?" Dr. Kaneshiro asked gently. Ms. Dale, who said she would love to have another baby, had wrestled with the decision, but circumstances involving an estranged boyfriend had made the choice clear: "It does," she replied. Abortion through telemedicine is a quietly growing phenomenon, driven in part by restrictions from conservative states and the Trump administration that have limited access and increased the distance many women must travel to abortion clinics. Now, the coronavirus pandemic is catapulting demand for telemedicine abortion to a new level, with much of the nation under strict stay at home advisories and as several states, including Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas, have sought to suspend access to surgical abortions during the crisis. The telemedicine program that Ms. Dale participated in has been allowed to operate as a research study for several years under a special arrangement with the Food and Drug Administration. It allows women seeking abortions to have video consultations with certified doctors and then receive abortion pills by mail to take on their own. Over the past year, the program, called TelAbortion, has expanded from serving five states to serving 13, adding two of those Illinois and Maryland as the coronavirus crisis exploded. Not including those new states, about twice as many women had abortions through the program in March and April as in January and February. To accommodate women during the pandemic, TelAbortion is "working to expand to new states as fast as possible," said Dr. Elizabeth Raymond, senior medical associate at Gynuity Health Projects, which runs the program. It is also hearing from more women in neighboring states seeking to cross state lines so TelAbortion can serve them. As of April 22, TelAbortion had mailed a total of 841 packages containing abortion pills and confirmed 611 completed abortions, Dr. Raymond said. Another 216 participants were either still in the follow up process or have not been in contact to confirm their results. The program's growth is significant enough that Republican senators recently introduced a bill to ban telemedicine abortion. The F.D.A., which has allowed TelAbortion to continue operating during the Trump administration, declined to answer questions from The New York Times about the program. Abortion through medication, first approved by the F.D.A. in 2000, is increasingly becoming women's preferred method. Recent research estimated that about 60 percent of abortion patients early enough in pregnancy to be eligible 10 weeks pregnant or less chose medication abortion over suction or surgery. But the F.D.A. requires that the first drug in the two medication regimen, mifepristone, be dispensed in clinics or hospitals by specially certified doctors or other medical providers. The F.D.A. rules, however, do not specify that providers must see patients in person, so some clinics have begun allowing women to come in for video consultations with certified doctors based elsewhere. TelAbortion goes further, offering telemedicine consultations to women at home (or anywhere), mailing them pills and following up after women take them. In interviews, seven women who terminated pregnancies through TelAbortion described the conflicting emotions and intricate logistics that can accompany a decision to have an abortion, and their reasons for choosing to do it through telemedicine. Ms. Dale, a single mother, was about to start a job at a storage center when she became pregnant last year. She would have had to fly to Honolulu, incurring expenses for travel and child care. But many TelAbortion patients live near clinics. Shiloh Kirby, 24, of Denver, who said she had become pregnant after being raped at a party, chose TelAbortion for convenience and privacy. She conducted her video consultation while sitting in her car in the parking lot of the hardware store where she worked. Dawn, 30, a divorced mother of two who asked to be identified only by her first name, was terrified that the debilitating postpartum depression she experienced after her children's births would return if she continued her pregnancy. And she worried protesters at her local Planned Parenthood in Salem, Ore., might recognize her. "I just don't want to deal with that ridicule," she said. Based on state laws governing telemedicine and abortion, Dr. Raymond estimated TelAbortion might be legal in slightly over half of the states, including some conservative ones. It now serves Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington. The doctors (and nurses or midwives in some states) who do TelAbortion's video consultations must be licensed in states where medication is mailed, but do not have to practice there. Likewise, patients do not have to live in the states that TelAbortion serves; they just have to be in one of them during the videoconference and provide an address there that of a friend, relative, even a motel or post office to which pills can be shipped. "We have had patients who cross state lines in order to receive TelAbortions," Dr. Raymond said. More are expected to do so during the pandemic. This month, a woman from Texas drove 10 hours in snowy weather to New Mexico, where she stayed in a motel for her videoconference and to receive the pills. The organization that provides TelAbortion services in Georgia, carafem, has expanded recently to Maryland and Illinois, and it is running digital ads that are expected to reach women in some nearby states like Missouri and Ohio, which have more abortion restrictions, said Melissa Grant, carafem's chief operations officer. In May, shortly after Georgia's governor signed one of the country's strictest abortion laws (which is now being challenged in court), Lee, 37, who lives near Atlanta, discovered she was seven weeks pregnant. Lee, who asked to be identified only by a shortened version of her first name, said the pregnancy had shocked her because she took birth control pills regularly. She decided to terminate the pregnancy because she had recently cut ties with her boyfriend after he was arrested on drug charges, she said. She kept her decision from her family members, who she said were strongly against abortion. And she feared protesters would castigate her if she visited an abortion clinic. "No one goes through life saying, 'I'm going to grow up and get an abortion,'" Lee said. "So you're already struggling with that and then to have someone tell you that you're going to hell or that you're killing babies, it's horrible." She found carafem, and videoconferenced in her office at lunchtime with a doctor in another state. During such consultations, doctors explain that most women do not experience discomfort from mifepristone, which blocks a hormone necessary for pregnancy to develop. Cramping and bleeding, resembling a heavy period, occur after the expulsion of fetal tissue caused by the second drug, misoprostol, which is taken up to 48 hours later. After several hours, bleeding dwindles but might continue for two weeks. In rare cases, women can develop fevers, infections or extensive bleeding requiring medical attention. Lee received a package marked only with her name and address; it contained the pills, tea bags, peppermints, maxipads, prescription ibuprofen and nausea medication. "Just everything you could need," she said. "It was so comforting." TelAbortion reports that of the 611 completed abortions documented through April 22, most were accomplished with only the pills and without complications. In 26 cases, aspiration was performed to finish the termination. Dr. Raymond said 46 women went to emergency rooms or urgent care centers with issues that appear just as likely to have occurred if the women had followed the common practice of visiting abortion clinics for consultations, taking the first medication there and the second at home. Two women went before receiving the pills and two before taking them, either because of morning sickness or because they thought they were miscarrying. Fifteen ended up needing no medical treatment. Some were given medicine for pain or nausea. Eleven women decided not to have abortions and did not take the pills they were sent. Another woman continued her pregnancy after the medication failed, as did another after vomiting the mifepristone. Sixteen women have undergone two telabortions, Dr. Raymond said. Of the women The Times interviewed, only Dawn, who said she has anxiety, called the 24 hour TelAbortion line for emotional support. "It was after I took the pills," Dawn said. "I felt like my body, my hormones essentially crashed. And because I suffer from mental health issues, just everything was just kind of out of whack and I started really panicking bad. I called the nurse and she just sat on the phone with me." TelAbortion typically charges 200 to 375 for consultations and pills. Women must also pay for an ultrasound and lab tests, obtained from any provider. During the coronavirus pandemic, TelAbortion may waive its requirement for an ultrasound to gauge the gestational age of the pregnancy if women are unable to visit a doctor to obtain one, Dr. Raymond said. In some states, some or all of the costs are covered by private insurance or Medicaid. For women facing financial hardship, like Ms. Kirby in Denver, the program taps abortion grant networks. Some patients said the teleconsultations helped them navigate the complex feelings that abortion can evoke. Leigh, a 28 year old construction inspector in Denver, who asked to be identified only by her middle name, said she considered herself "totally pro life." But, she said, she also has depression, which became so severe after she had a baby two years ago that she sometimes felt suicidal. Doctors, she said, "didn't trust me alone with my baby." Last March, after discovering she was pregnant and consulting her fiance, she called Planned Parenthood. "I said, 'I don't want to be this person, but I need to abort this pregnancy,'" Leigh said. She chose the TelAbortion option. After taking the first medication, she attended a previously scheduled photo shoot for engagement pictures with her fiance, then took the second medication that evening. Conducting her follow up call from a field on a job site, Leigh told the doctor, Kristina Tocce, medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, that she felt compelled to abort "no matter how much I hate myself." Ms. Dale's consultation and lab tests were covered by Hawaii public assistance. The pills, which cost her 135, arrived by certified mail. She placed them on a table near two pregnancy ultrasound photos. "OK, this is happening," Ms. Dale said she told herself. "I'm doing this." Her reasons partly involved disagreements with her estranged boyfriend, the father of Sophia, now 4. Their strained relationship made Ms. Dale believe she would have to raise their second child alone. "I've got a beautiful daughter and I'd really love to have another one," she said. "But it's just not feasible for my sanity, and I feel like I'd basically be guaranteeing us to live in poverty." On the back of an ultrasound picture, she wrote: "Never forget why you had to make the hard decision to let this baby go." She swallowed the pill. She had Sophia stay at her mother's house and took the other tablets, which she said felt like chalk in her mouth. To distract from seven hours of cramping and heavy bleeding, she watched back to back "Matrix" movies. "It's not like it was easy," she reflected later, "but at the same time it's pretty clearly the right choice." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
An Atlanta man was arrested on Friday morning in the fatal shooting of the actor Thomas Jefferson Byrd, the authorities said. The man, Antonio Demetrice Rhynes, 30, was arrested on a charge of felony murder in the death of Mr. Byrd, 70, earlier this month, Officer Anthony W. Grant, a spokesman with the Atlanta Police Department said in a statement. The police said they followed evidence and tips from the public to identify Mr. Rhynes as a suspect and issued a warrant for his arrest on Wednesday. The police said he was arrested without incident at an apartment complex and shared a drone video of the arrest. It was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer. He was taken to the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, according to jail records. About 1:45 a.m. on Oct. 3, police officers responded to a call of a person who had been wounded. When they arrived, they said they found a man, who was later identified as Mr. Byrd, dead with multiple gun shot wounds to the back. It was not clear what led to the shooting or whether the gunman and the victim knew each other. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Opioid Lawsuits Are Headed to Trial. Here's Why the Stakes Are Getting Uglier. Uncontested: The devastation from prescription opioids has been deadly and inordinately expensive. Contested: Who should foot the bill? Just over a year ago, opioid lawsuits against makers and distributors of the painkillers were proliferating so rapidly that a judicial panel bundled all the federal cases under the stewardship of a single judge. On a January morning, Judge Dan Aaron Polster of the Northern District of Ohio made his opening remarks to lawyers for nearly 200 municipal governments gathered in his Cleveland courtroom. He wanted the national opioid crisis resolved with a meaningful settlement within a year, proclaiming, "We don't need briefs and we don't need trials." Far from being settled, the litigation has ballooned to 1,548 federal court cases, brought on behalf of cities and counties, 77 tribes, hospitals, union benefit funds, infants with neonatal abstinence syndrome and others in total, millions of people. With a potential payday amounting to tens of billions of dollars, it has become one of the most complicated and gargantuan legal battles in American history. With settlement talks sputtering, the judge has signed off on a parallel track involving, yes, briefs, focused on, yes, trial. He will preside over three consolidated Ohio lawsuits in what is known as a "bellwether," or test case. The array of defendants include Purdue Pharma, Mallinckrodt PLC, CVS RX Services Inc. and Cardinal Health, Inc. That jury's verdict could determine whether the parties will then negotiate in earnest or keep fighting. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The trial date has already been postponed twice. It is now scheduled for Oct. 21. "I knew this would be complex and challenging," Judge Polster said in an interview, "but it turned out to be far more so than I envisioned." To help sort through the complexity, here are some important developments and what they mean: Manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies are supposed to track and report prescription opioids to the Drug Enforcement Administration and raise alarms when orders seem suspicious. After considerable legal skirmishing, the D.E.A. complied with orders from Judge Polster and turned over more than 400 million lines of data. It's a detailed history, from 2006 through 2014, showing how many opioids were made by each manufacturer, trucked by each distributor and sold in pharmacies across the country. The plaintiffs have long said that the companies deliberately looked the other way at the improbable quantities. But the lawyers did not have the hard numbers in hand to bolster their claims. For the time being, the judge will not release the data to the public. But a passage from a congressional report gives a sense of the granular information in the data: during 10 months in 2007, one distributor, McKesson, shipped three million prescription opioids to a single pharmacy in a West Virginia town with 400 residents. The data has turned out to be a modest help to some of the defendant companies, too: because the D.E.A. reports show that certain medications were not sold in large quantities in some communities, companies that make and distribute them have been dropped from a few cases. In the Cuyahoga County, Ohio lawsuit, for example, the Kroger Company, which owns grocery stores that include pharmacies, was dropped because they turned out not to have a location in the area. Going to trial is a win for plaintiffs In a 39 page decision last month, Judge Polster shot down the drug industry's efforts to dismiss the Ohio trial. Instead, h e gave the lawyers the go ahead to test just about every legal theory the plaintiffs raised. They include: that the companies conspired; committed fraud; were negligent; violated public nuisance laws this last being a relatively recent, novel way for communities to redress health crises. Of course, legal theory is one thing. Next comes the hard part: the plaintiffs will actually have to prove those allegations to a jury. Typically, patients who sue for medical malpractice or product liability must turn over their own medical records as proof. They forfeit conventional privacy rights. Here, the overwhelming majority of plaintiffs are government entities, not individuals. They are seeking to be reimbursed for the accumulated costs of drug addiction and its collateral damage. The defendants want them to produce precise evidence showing how those costs are calculated, including the chain of events for example, from a drug's development, to its delivery, to a pharmacy filled prescription to, eventually, bills from hospitals and others. That means the drug industry is asking for patients' records and for every prescription the plaintiffs deemed medically "suspicious." The plaintiffs are pushing back, saying that the depleted municipal budgets for health, social services and law enforcement paint a more telling picture. But they are giving ground. The plaintiffs have now turned over millions of coded insurance claims connected to opioids. The fight has moved to the scope and quantity of patients' medical records. Meanwhile, the plaintiffs pursue their own paper chase At the same time, plaintiffs are seeking the internal documents from the pharmaceutical industry pertaining to development, marketing and sales strategies. They are also looking for documents showing what efforts the companies made to prevent their drugs from being illegally diverted. Years ago, some companies settled cases with promises to take such steps. The plaintiffs want to know whether they actually did so. Defense lawyers say they have already handed over roughly 67 million documents. Drugstores could be held responsible for black market fentanyl A knee surgery patient goes home with opioids. His teenage son finds the pills in the bathroom medicine cabinet and starts down a jagged road that ends in heroin addiction. Should the companies that made, distributed and sold the prescription painkillers be liable? What if the son sold them to a friend who turned to street drugs and overdosed? Are the drug companies responsible then? Multiply these examples by many years and generations of analogous scenarios. Now tabulate the accumulating drain on civic budgets for emergency responders; hospitals; incarceration; drug courts; rehab; mental health services; child welfare. Whether the companies should have foreseen the growth of an illicit second market including pills, heroin and fentanyl is among the knotty questions being addressed. Right now, Judge Polster, who is only ruling on the Ohio bellwether cases, says yes. But to make matters even more twisty: if more bellwethers go to trial, the answers to these and numerous other questions may differ, depending on the jurisdiction. Why drug companies could have an upper hand Lawyers on both sides agree: This litigation presents a slew of novel legal issues. If the bellwether ends in a victory for plaintiffs, appeals courts, increasingly filled with conservative judges, would be unlikely to uphold all of Judge Polster's rulings on these untested legal questions, much less a whopping, emotional jury award. Complexity favors the defense. And in settlement negotiations, the long game is the defense's best friend: they can afford to drag this out. Typically, the longer it slogs on, the more the final tab gets driven down. But don't count out the plaintiffs According to Andrew S. Pollis, a litigation expert who teaches at Case Western Reserve Law School in Ohio, the plaintiffs have advantages, too. "Judge Polster's unusual level of commitment to settlement" is potent, he said. The judge is still pushing for a relatively swift resolution, replete with directed funds to help remedy the crisis and establish prevention measures. The judge's biggest stick that could drive defendants to the bargaining table is the bellwether trial, with its looming date. A trial could not only unleash far more money than a settlement would, but the companies' documents currently under seal would become glaringly public, telling a more complete story of the relationship of the defendants to the crisis. And, to that point, Mr. Pollis added: Don't discount the leveraging power of public perception and pressure, which does bear down on the defense "especially since the plaintiffs are, in effect, all of us." The defendants want a global settlement a comprehensive agreement that will indemnify them against further lawsuits. The multidistrict litigation, with all the federal cases, is positioned for that goal. But to achieve it, Judge Polster needs cooperation from state courts. There are about 332 other cases that have been filed in state courts. Coordinating data sharing between the state and federal cases is a feat unto itself. Indeed with Purdue documents from the federal litigation, Massachusetts has moved ahead with its own case; over Purdue's objections, the Massachusetts judge has made public far more than Judge Polster has. So there's an ongoing baroque court dance between Judge Polster and the states. He cannot be perceived as a big footer. The state judges must be seen as independent. And yet Judge Polster needs cooperation from the states to achieve that global settlement. In a recent interview, Judge Polster repeatedly emphasized, "I don't control the state court judges or the attorneys general but I very much appreciate their participation. They are indispensable." Eyes will be on the first trial in another state, scheduled to start before Judge Polster's: The State of Oklahoma v. Purdue Pharma, currently set for May 28. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner of the W.N.B.A., said the proposed contract with the players' union is a "big bet on women." The W.N.B.A. and its players' union have signaled a radical shift in how female athletes are to be compensated with a tentative contract agreement that would sharply increase salaries and provide generous maternal benefits in a move Commissioner Cathy Engelbert called "a big bet on women." The implications of the agreement stretch far beyond basketball at a time when women around the world are demanding increased pay and benefits, on their own merit and as a challenge to historically unequal pay that leaves them earning less than men for similar work. The pushback has been most visible in soccer, where the United States women's national team has sued its governing body, and star players like Megan Rapinoe have spoken out. But the fight also is going on in tennis, hockey, track and field and other sports. The proposed W.N.B.A. contract, which still must be approved by the league's board of governors and the union's membership, would enable top players to earn more than 500,000, about triple last season's ceiling and far more than had ever seemed possible since the league's first season in 1997. But amid a broader cultural reckoning over disparities in how society regards women and men, the league's 12 teams have attracted increased attention, and its players have felt more empowered to push for better pay and benefits. "What we have here is a multidimensional pay structure as well as benefit structure," Engelbert said in a phone interview. "We've really gone all out here. We're making a big bet on this league, a big bet on women, and that in professional sports, that the W.N.B.A. can lead the way." Low salaries and limited or nonexistent maternity benefits have been two of the most discussed issues in the debate over compensation for female athletes. Under this deal, the maximum W.N.B.A. salary would increase almost 83 percent, to 215,000 from 117,500. And while some people think that the players, in pushing for better pay, have been asking to earn the same multimillion dollar salaries as their counterparts in the N.B.A., the union's leaders have insisted that what they want is a comparable share of their league's revenue, which this agreement would allow. The N.B.A., which created the W.N.B.A. in 1996 and shares ownership with the women's teams, splits its revenue about 50 50 with the men's players. In the W.N.B.A., the players are estimated to receive just 20 to 30 percent of league revenue. By 2021, if the league reaches certain revenue markers in broadcast agreements, marketing partnerships and licensing deals, the W.N.B.A. and its players could be splitting revenue equally. The contract would last for eight years, through 2027. This agreement also would provide maternity leave with full salary, a dedicated space in arenas for nursing mothers and a 5,000 child care stipend. Veteran players also would be able to seek reimbursement for up to 60,000 in costs directly related to adoption, surrogacy, egg freezing and fertility treatment. "We have several mothers in the league, and we had players that talked to us about what they realized they needed while they were playing," Nneka Ogwumike, the W.N.B.A. players' union president, said in a phone interview on Monday. In exchange for these and other benefits is a new requirement that will be gradually phased in: Players must be in W.N.B.A. training camps from the start. No more reporting late, or even after the season begins, to finish commitments to clubs overseas, with exceptions built in only for national team play and players in their first three seasons. Players, from superstars to rookies, have long supplemented their league pay by competing for clubs overseas during the off season. "We had to be incredibly innovative with this," Ogwumike said. "And to be honest, with what the league wanted, we understood that it would take some novel change to get the league where we want it to go. We wanted to ensure that it is still allowing players the opportunity to get the salaries that we are used to getting in both markets while also phasing in a system that will hold the league as a certain priority." The year round play of some players has had its consequences. Last year, Seattle Storm forward Breanna Stewart ruptured her right Achilles' tendon while playing overseas and missed the entire 2019 season while she was the reigning Most Valuable Player Award winner. That and other examples of players returning fatigued or injured have prompted the league and union to find ways to encourage players to stay stateside more. The league has agreed to add 1.6 million annually in what are being called league marketing agreements, up to 250,000 for any one player, Engelbert said. For a top player, this new deal could mean a single season salary of 215,000, another 250,000 in a league marketing agreement, plus bonus incentives for things like All Star appearances and awards that could push her total compensation above 500,000. The W.N.B.A. also will team with other leagues the N.B.A. and its developmental league and college basketball to promote its own players for potential coaching openings. And Engelbert said players coaching in the N.B.A. could be paid market rate, even if the men's team was affiliated with a W.N.B.A. team. This became an issue last season when Mystics guard Kristi Toliver, because of pay restrictions in the expiring collective bargaining agreement, could earn just 10,000 as an assistant coach for the Washington Wizards. That is no longer an issue, Engelbert said. The W.N.B.A. season itself also will change in some dramatic ways, if the deal is approved. A 34 game campaign in 2019 will become a 36 game slate next season. And the games themselves will be different, thanks to another innovation: the Commissioner's Cup. Certain games on the 2020 schedule will be designated as Cup games, with separate standings for this in season competition. The top team in each conference with the best record in Cup games will play for the Commissioner's Cup title. Starting in 2021, the prize money for in season tournaments will be a minimum of 750,000. The players' experience, too, will be improved in ways that reflect both their day to day priorities and lifestyle choices. The league's teams, which provide housing, will now guarantee two bedroom apartments for players with children. Travel, long a source of frustration among players, will now include individual instead of shared hotel rooms for every player. But players will still have to fly on commercial, not charter, planes to games, though they will receive economy plus flight accommodations. Player movement, too, will become easier, echoing an N.B.A. trend to give players more opportunities to change teams or sign new deals. In the last W.N.B.A. agreement, players could not reach unrestricted free agency until they had played six full seasons. That number would become five. The leagues will, over the next several years, reduce how many times a team can designate someone as a core player and thus prevent them, even as an unrestricted free agent, from leaving the team. The sum of new investment, accounting for league and team specific initiatives, is nearly 1 million per team per season. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Why, after 33 years of living in a Park Avenue high rise, has New York developer Larry A. Silverstein decided to leave Midtown for Lower Manhattan? "It was full of old fogeys," Mr. Silverstein, 87, said recently about his longtime home. He was sitting in his corner office on the 38th floor of 7 World Trade Center, beneath a wall mounted skateboard emblazoned with an image of the downtown skyline a housewarming gift from his employees. Behind him, three humidifiers crowded his desk, misting at full blast. "I felt it was a wonderful opportunity to come down to an area we had just finished, with a population that is all young," said Mr. Silverstein, who has been instrumental in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center complex. Last month, he and his wife, Klara, moved into an 80th floor penthouse at 30 Park Place, an 82 story limestone tower completed by Silverstein Properties in 2016. Their roughly 6,200 square foot, four bedroom apartment comes with a terrace overlooking his office not to mention most of Manhattan, New Jersey and parts beyond. He bought the full floor unit for 32.6 million. "If you look far enough," he said, "you can see the curvature of the Earth." Mr. Silverstein isn't the typical empty nester looking for a change of pace. As the chairman of Silverstein Properties, his move downtown into a building just minutes from the World Trade Center site is an endorsement of an area that remains a work in progress. With the opening this week of 3 World Trade Center, his firm's third completed office tower at the site, he sees another chance to raise the profile of Lower Manhattan. The area south of Chambers Street that includes Battery Park City and the financial district has undergone major changes since 2001, roughly tripling its population to 61,000, according to Jessica Lappin, the president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, a business improvement organization. The median age of residents there is 32, she said, about five years younger than the median age in Manhattan. For Mr. Silverstein, who signed a 3.2 billion, 99 year lease for the World Trade Center just six weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it has been a difficult road. After construction began on 3 World Trade in 2010, for instance, it was delayed repeatedly by financing issues. It is now 40 percent leased, with GroupM, an advertising media company, signed on as the anchor tenant. Silverstein's final tower, 2 World Trade, was stalled in 2016 after the publisher News Corp. backed out of lease negotiations. Its construction site, recently disguised with lively street art, is a reminder of the long haul ahead. After years of disputed insurance claims and more than a decade of political wrangling over subsidies and financing with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the 16 acre site, about 7 million of the proposed 10 million square feet of commercial space has been rebuilt. Meanwhile, in the nearly 17 years since the attacks, other pockets of the city also have redeveloped, adding competition for both the residential and commercial markets of Lower Manhattan. In the first quarter of this year, 818,391 square feet of commercial space was leased downtown, the least of the city's major office markets, said Richard Persichetti with Cushman Wakefield, a commercial brokerage. The average commercial rent was 59 a square foot, about 23 percent cheaper than Midtown. The quarter finished almost 40 percent below its average over the last 10 years, he said, and "could point to signs of concern." In May, though, leasing looked stronger, he said. Lower Manhattan "has a residual perception as a back office location," said M. Myers Mermel, chief executive of TenantWise, a real estate advisory firm, adding that office space downtown leases for around 25 a square foot less than comparable space at Hudson Yards in Midtown, despite having more transportation options. Many prospective tenants still view Midtown as the premier area for office headquarters, he said, while others may have reservations about relocating so close to the site of the attacks. Companies are also eyeing the newly rezoned Midtown East, where a slate of new projects is expected, he said. The residential market in Lower Manhattan is also changing. "It's a market in transition, from 9 to 5 to 24/7," said Jonathan J. Miller, a New York real estate appraiser, referring to pockets of the area that can still feel isolated on nights and weekends. In the first quarter, the median sales price in the area fell to 1,105,000, a 31 percent drop from the same period in 2017 the steepest decline of any submarket in the borough, according to a Douglas Elliman report. The decline reflects, in part, a large number of new luxury condo sales that closed last year, pulling this quarter's numbers down. But that doesn't account for the entire drop off, said Mr. Miller, who prepared the data. "I think it's a reset, just like in the greater market," he said, referring to the softening of prices at the top of the market. There are other challenges. Frances Katzen, an agent with Douglas Elliman, said quirks to buying in parts of the area have scared away some clients. In Battery Park City, the land is owned by a public authority that charges developers a payment in lieu of taxes, which can inflate monthly carrying costs. For instance, condos in Battery Park City listed for an average of 1,523 a square foot, practically the same as in Murray Hill, according to Gabby Warshawer with CityRealty, a real estate data website. But the average combined cost of common charges and taxes in Battery Park City was 3,466 a month, about 1,000 more than the Midtown neighborhood. But new condo developments, like Mr. Silverstein's 30 Park Place, are in a different class. Located on the cusp of the more affluent downtown neighborhood of TriBeCa, the 157 unit project has just 18 unsold units left (sales began in 2014), with an average price of around 7.2 million, said Rob Vecsler, president of Residential Development at Silverstein. "It's been a relatively strong sales pace, given the overall market," Mr. Vecsler said, acknowledging that the ultraluxury market has been softer. To help entice buyers, the developer agreed to pay a total of 20.5 million toward residents' common charges over five years, lowering the fees from 2.20 a square foot to 84 cents a square foot, Mr. Vecsler said. With that perk set to expire in 2022, some owners are concerned that their monthly carrying costs will increase significantly, said Jonathan Helfer, a partner at Katz Matz, who represented a buyer in the building. But Mr. Silverstein isn't worried. The tower's allure is in the Four Seasons amenities, he said, and carrying costs will not be out of step for the neighborhood, which has several new luxury towers. It was a characteristic response from a developer who has faced setbacks at nearly every stage of the World Trade Center redevelopment. After a recent tour of their 80th floor apartment, Mr. and Mrs. Silverstein stood on a private terrace overlooking the site's mammoth towers. Helicopters whirred above and below. "In the beginning, people thought we were crazy," Mrs. Silverstein said about their move, calling it "a complete departure" from their longtime Midtown home and its views of Central Park. But it has brought them closer to their daughter, Lisa Silverstein, an executive vice president at Silverstein Properties, who lives in the tower with her family. It has also meant a much shorter commute for Mr. Silverstein, who is spry at 87, but not bold enough to ride his new skateboard to work. Plus, it takes time to change people's minds, Mr. Silverstein added, wryly. "It's only been 17 years." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In the context of the Cold War and with post colonial independence movements spreading across Africa and Asia American leaders took seriously the devastating effect racism had on international opinion. Henry Cabot Lodge, the ambassador to the United Nations at the time, told Eisenhower that he could "see clearly the harm that the riots in Little Rock are doing to our foreign relations" and that "we lost several votes" because of it. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles thought it was "ruining our foreign policy" and would have a more serious impact on relations in Asia and Africa than the Soviet Union experienced from its brutal crackdown on Hungary a year earlier. As mob violence escalated, Eisenhower stepped in. He ordered 1,000 armed paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. They surrounded the school and escorted the black students into the building. In a televised address to the country, Eisenhower said he had done this to protect the rule of law, and also because "it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world." The address was lauded in much of the foreign press and later used in Cold War propaganda to show that the American form of government protected individual rights. Eisenhower's deployment of troops in an American city in opposition to a governor may have appeared authoritarian, but it was an effort to enforce a court order protecting individual rights, which a governor had defied. Arkansas schools were shuttered the next year. When they reopened, the state's approach to segregation was more subtle, provoking attention from neither the federal courts nor the world's press. Ultimately, Eisenhower's drastic action may have been more effective at protecting the nation's image than desegregating the schools. Civil rights protest in the United States kept international attention on American racism during the Kennedy administration. Police violence against peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 is now remembered for its role in prompting the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the brutality also generated a crisis in American international relations, as leaders of newly independent African nations debated whether they should break with the United States. Although efforts to quell violent opposition to civil rights were important, the most effective response to international criticism was ultimately concrete change, like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. This week, an audience around the world watched the shocking display of American troops at the Lincoln Memorial and in American cities for the purpose of squelching democratic rights, rather than protecting them. While Eisenhower proclaimed "thus will be restored the image of America and of all its parts as one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all," Mr. Trump's explanation was stark: "I am your president of law and order." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
A comparison of horned larks from the early 20th century in the collection at the Field Museum in Chicago. The specimens on the left were collected inside the manufacturing belt in Illinois. The specimens on the right were collected along the West Coast, away from industrial areas. Tucked away in the drawers of natural history museums across America's Rust Belt, thousands of dead birds carry dirty secrets from America's polluted past. The specimens that were put away around the start of the 20th century are far grimier than the ones from more recent decades. And now, climate scientists and historians can thank museum curators for not having tidied them up before storing them. When two graduate students at the University of Chicago measured black carbon clinging to the chests and bellies of more than 1,300 birds in collections at museums in America's Rust Belt, they found that the dirt on their plumage contained a record of America's coal use over time. Between 1880 and 2015, the filth on their feathers undulated with social changes and environmental policy. The dirtiest birds flew through the skies just before 1910, at the height of industrialization. But during the Great Depression and after the middle of the 20th century, birds soared with brighter feathers as people burned less coal and home heating transitioned to natural gas. "We can estimate how much smoke was actually in the atmosphere," said Shane DuBay, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at The Field Museum and the University of Chicago and co author of the study. "It might have been worse than the best estimates have predicted." As early as the 1930s, scientists noted the darker feathers of birds collected in the early 20th century. Some wondered if they were an adaptation to pollution like the peppered moths of Britain's Industrial Age. But Mr. DuBay and Carl Fuldner, a graduate student in art history at the University of Chicago and a co author, used a special microscope to look closely at the feathers. They were just dirty dusted in the same tiny particles of black carbon that were there a hundred years ago. They quantified the sootiness by taking pictures of the chests of sparrows, woodpeckers, larks and towhees and measuring how well they reflected light. Black carbon isn't very reflective which is why it's been a problem in the environment. It absorbs sunlight and generates heat, leading to alterations in cloud cover and precipitation or acceleration of the melting of snow and ice. The team found that dirty feathers corresponded to historical reports and other atmospheric measurements and they were more localized in time and space. They hope that scientists and policy makers can use the data to inform climate models and environmental policy. And the birds, once dead and void of context in museum drawers, now play a part in environmental history. Mr. DuBay and Mr. Fuldner have more questions: Did soot affect the health of birds and other wildlife, as it has in humans? Did the dirt alter their reproductive strategies? And could birds in other industrialized nations of the past and present like England or China, also reveal hidden measures of air pollution? "These collections are hidden treasures, and who knows what other questions we'll be able to ask by getting into these museums and exploring," Mr. DuBay said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Alabama and U.S.C. playing at AT T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, in 2016. The teams have a deal again to play in September at the home of the Dallas Cowboys, but college football games with no fans at neutral sites might not make sense during the coronavirus pandemic. When Alabama and Southern California agreed to kick off the season on Sept. 5 in Arlington, Texas, the one certain winner seemed to be the host the Dallas Cowboys' owner, Jerry Jones, whose Labor Day weekend game has become a college football staple. Alabama would earn a flat fee of 6 million, according to an agreement the university signed, and U.S.C. was likely to bank a similar amount. But if the teams drew anywhere near the 81,359 fans they did four years ago, it would be a bonanza for Jones, who would reap upward of 16 million in ticket sales alone, according to estimates from a seating price chart that lists rates for the public, starting at 100 for nosebleed seats. Then toss in parking where some of the stadium's 12,000 spots go for 75 and up at Cowboys games along with concessions, game merchandise, a 22 percent cut of each team's merchandise, sponsorships, suites and event revenues, and it's the start to an industrious Saturday afternoon. The outlook significantly changed once the coronavirus struck. Now, as it increasingly appears that the college football season will be played with restrictions if it is played at all college administrators and event promoters are busy wondering how games like Alabama U.S.C. pencil out if crowds are prohibited or limited. There are close to 30 games that are scheduled for the regular season for neutral sites, in neither team's home stadium. Some are seasonal rituals, like when Texas and Oklahoma play at the Cotton Bowl or Southern and Grambling play at the Superdome on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Other games come without millions in payouts or prime time TV slots, like when Central Michigan and Western Michigan move their 93 year old rivalry to Detroit's Ford Field. Several of these games largely cash in on the popularity of college football, particularly in the South. The same day that Alabama and U.S.C. are on the calendar, Baylor and Mississippi play at the Houston Texans' stadium, and West Virginia and Florida State are scheduled at the Atlanta Falcons' stadium, which is slated to host three college football games in a seven day span (Auburn vs. North Carolina and Virginia vs. Georgia are the others). Even if there are no limits on fans attending, there is a strong likelihood that many fans would be reluctant to travel, prompting organizers to confront the reality of games playing out in largely empty stadiums. "Fans are important because they provide revenue," said Gary Stokan, the chief executive of the Peach Bowl, which puts on the games in Atlanta. As for whether it makes sense to host games without fans packing the stands, as well as nearby restaurants and hotels, Stokan said: "We're a long way before that can be decided. Certainly we're dealing in hypotheticals. We want to deal with the reality of situations." No university is likely to be as affected by playing games at third party sites as Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish are scheduled to open their season against Navy in Dublin on Aug. 29. They are also scheduled to play Wisconsin at the Green Bay Packers' Lambeau Field on Oct. 3, and have games against Wake Forest and Georgia Tech in N.F.L. stadiums. Jack Swarbrick, the Notre Dame athletic director, said the university was in regular contact with authorities in Ireland and the United States to understand travel policies and their implications for fans and the team. If travel is hindered in either direction or people are required to quarantine after the game, Swarbrick said: "That's a pretty untenable situation. You've got to play the next week." Notre Dame's game with Wisconsin is less complicated because the universities agreed to jointly rent Lambeau Field and share nontelevision revenue. If one team was renting the stadium and offering the other team a payout as Rice is doing by paying Louisiana State 3.5 million to play at the Texans' stadium on Sept. 19 the game would more likely need a move because the hosting team would be absorbing the bulk of the losses. "Something that was a straight share of revenue would present less of a challenge in this dynamic than something that was a straight rental agreement," Swarbrick said. The decisions on whether Notre Dame plays Wake Forest in Charlotte, N.C., on Sept. 26 or Georgia Tech in Atlanta on Nov. 14 will be largely left to those schools. Neutral site games have a long history in college football. Coaches like them because they can showcase their team in a new recruiting ground. Fans like them as opportunities to travel. Sponsors like them because they can advertise to captive audiences. And players like the chance to play in N.F.L. stadiums and sometimes on hallowed grounds. "It's not only an athletic experience, but an educational experience," said the Mid Eastern Athletic Conference commissioner, Dennis Thomas, who as an Alcorn State center played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Soldier Field in the early 1970s. Historically black colleges are scheduled to play in nine neutral site games, including Howard and Central State at the Pro Football Hall of Fame stadium in Canton, Ohio. That state has had some of the most aggressive measures early in the pandemic, which could leave Ohio in better position by September. It could also follow a more conservative path toward reopening. "Everyone is in a holding pattern right now because if the state of Ohio or the state of Florida or Tennessee determines that you can have games but with no fans, the participating institutions and the third party will have some decisions to make," Thomas said. While seeing how the pandemic develops, athletic directors are studying contingencies, paying attention to the political winds and saying little other than acknowledging the uncertainty. U.S.C.'s athletic director, Mike Bohn, warned fans in a tweet that there would be "much disinformation" about the game against Alabama. He declined an interview request through a spokesman. Alabama's athletic director, Greg Byrne, did not respond to a message left on his cellphone. Joe Trahan, the Cowboys' spokesman for events, said he would defer to the universities and did not respond to questions about the event. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
MANCHESTER, England "Tree of Codes," a new work by Wayne McGregor, Olafur Eliasson and Jamie xx, inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer's book of the same name, is the Manchester International Festival's first major dance commission. This work uses dancers from Mr. McGregor's company and the Paris Opera Ballet, an unusual combination that, along with its illustrious collaborators, helped build excitement. At the premiere here on Friday night, audience members screamed and cheered as they gave "Tree of Codes" a standing ovation. You could see why. The piece has breathtaking lighting and visual effects by Mr. Eliasson, the Icelandic Danish artist who built waterfalls around New York City and had museumgoers basking under his fake sun at the Tate in London. The steely, layered, swelling electronic score is by Jamie xx, a member of the xx, the much lauded London band. And then there was Mr. McGregor's choreography, fabulously performed and packed with hyperkinetic intricacy and urgency. But "Tree of Codes" is all wow and no substance. One amazing lighting effect or scenery change succeeds another; dancers pour on and off the stage in a never ending procession of limb lashing, body rippling, how do they do that awesomeness; the music sends forth insistent rhythms and wordless vocals. But nothing means anything, no emotional resonance accrues and almost no dance passages stand out. (Solos for the Paris Opera Ballet dancers Jeremie Belingard and Julien Meyzindi are the exceptions.) It doesn't matter that it's impossible to tell what any of this has to do with Mr. Safran Foer's book, in which he cut words out of Bruno Schulz's "The Street of Crocodiles" to create a new narrative (and a book that was itself a kind of artwork): Inspiration can be a long way from a final product. But it's disappointing that Mr. McGregor, who just created the moving and skillful "Woolf Works" based on three novels by Virginia Woolf for the Royal Ballet, where he is the resident choreographer, doesn't extend himself in new physical and conceptual directions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
I've always needed an ensemble family drama in my life. Starting with "Thirtysomething" years ago, then "Once and Again," then "Parenthood" and now "This Is Us." "Succession" sort of doesn't count because it's more of a comedy. Do you have other suggestions along these lines? Mark You seek "Queen Sugar," a lyrical family drama about three adult siblings who reconnect when their father dies. I typically recommend it to people who love "Six Feet Under" it does not lack for grief narratives or poetic pauses but if you like sibling conflict, family secrets, growing pains, teenagers getting into scrapes where not all the adults agree on the best course of action, and characters who each remember childhood a little differently for good reasons but in ways that deeply affect their adult perspectives, this is your jam. It is also extremely steamy in its first few seasons, so ... bonus. (The first three seasons are on Hulu.) I'm going to guess you've watched "Brothers Sisters," the 2006 series starring Sally Field, Matthew Rhys and Calista Flockhart, among others. It is very talky, and often annoying, but in that way that is also true of "Parenthood" all of you, be quiet and get therapy! But then there's no show, so, we endure. (That's also on Hulu.) If you're down for subtitles, try "Bonusfamiljen" ("Bonus Family" on Netflix), a Swedish ensemble drama about blended families. It's relatively laid back nothing so insane happens, but it's well observed and specific, and thus rewarding. If you want something foreign but still in English, try "Tangle," from Australia (on Amazon Prime). It's a little soapier, and faster, than some of your faves, but it scratches that same itch. We all think your husband is a jerk, but no one will ever say anything! That's my kind of conflict. Finally, there is one show that is the exact overlap of "Thirtysomething" and "Parenthood" that might have escaped your notice over the years, but it is "My So Called Life." Even if teen shows are not typically your bag, I encourage you to try this. (It's free on ABC's website.) And if teen shows are your bag, then run don't walk to "The Fosters," as earnest as a family drama can be without sliding into cheese town. (That's on Netflix.) Both "My So Called Life" and "The Fosters" include substantial plots about the parents and their issues, too, so it's not teen only stories not unlike "Once and Again." I feel like the only person around who hasn't seen "Game of Thrones." But when I look at the description of what it is about, I really have no interest. Is it so incredibly awesome that I will love it even though I am not inspired to watch it at all? Linda Nope! If you are not interested in fantasy epics, swords, battles, self serious soaps or palace intrigue, you can go ahead and free yourself of the idea that you need to watch "Game of Thrones." I loved "The Wire" and "Justified" and have been floundering ever since. Any recommendations? Judy Judy, come back to us! Watch one of my favorite cop shows of all time, "Southland." While it's not quite as season by season as "The Wire," it does have different areas of focus, and some significant characters are only around for a short time. I am happy for everyone who is newly into Regina King, but some of us have been on the Regina King wagon for a long time. (You can watch it on Hulu.) "Justified" is a little easier to match. Start with "Terriers," a short lived FX gem about a washed up ex cop working as a private investigator. (Right now it's only available to purchase, but it comes and goes from streaming platforms.) It's not quite as bleak as "Justified" can sometimes get, but don't let its sunny setting fool you: "Terriers" knows plenty about dark sides. Then try "Claws," set in a nail salon in Manatee County, Fla., that is also home to some career criminals. (The first two seasons are on Hulu.) It shares the jaunty decrepitude "Justified" also loved, a passion for seediness and a comfort with severe violence. If you want something a little easier but just as substantive, "Jack Irish" isn't quite as severe but has the character depth and plotting that "Justified" also had, and it's a lower commitment: There are only 12 total episodes. (And they're on Acorn.) I'm guessing you've seen the usual suspects in this genre, so I'm going to suggest shows I feel like most folks have not tried for whatever reason. How about "Harlots" (on Hulu)? It's set in a brothel in London in the late 1700s, and while lots of period pieces seem hyper miserable, "Harlots" is actually a lot fun. It's serious about its characters, it's just an easy to enjoy show versus, oh, "Peaky Blinders" or "The Knick" or something. "Underground" was canceled too soon, but its two seasons blend a historical drama about the Underground Railroad with some modern flourishes, including a pop score. (Both seasons are on Hulu.) Finally, "A French Village" is set during World War II, but far from the front lines. It's a careful character piece, superbly realized and often unexpected. Even if you've seen a lot of shows set during this era, "A French Village" is different and probably better. (It's on Hulu.) Send in your questions to watching nytimes.com. Questions are edited for length and clarity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The Auschwitz Memorial called on Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, to stop selling books by the Nazi demagogue Julius Streicher. Days later, the memorial criticized a new Amazon Prime series. Should one be allowed to sell Nazi propaganda online? And is it OK to take creative license with Holocaust atrocities? Amazon, the world's biggest digital retailer, has been confronted with both of these questions in recent days, highlighting the company's uniquely powerful role in shaping millions of people's views of history and culture. The Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial and Museum criticized Amazon Prime on Sunday for "Hunters," a new television series that shows a fictional human chess game at a concentration camp. On Friday, the memorial joined other Holocaust educators in calling on Amazon to stop selling "The Poisonous Mushroom," an illustrated children's book by Julius Streicher, the founder of the Nazi era anti Semitic newspaper Der Sturmer. By Monday, the book was no longer being sold on the site. The Amazon Prime series "Hunters" stars Al Pacino and tells the story of Nazi hunters in New York City in 1977. Amazon said it was inspired by true events. But those seeking to educate the public about the Holocaust said the show took dangerous artistic license with a scene in which concentration camp prisoners are used as human chess pieces, and are killed one by one as they are removed from the board. "Auschwitz was full of horrible pain suffering documented in the accounts of survivors," the Auschwitz Memorial said on Twitter. "Inventing a fake game of human chess for huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness caricature. It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy." David Weil, the creator and executive producer of "Hunters," said in a statement released by Amazon Studios that his grandmother was a survivor of Auschwitz and that he had vowed to ensure the promise of "never again" after visiting the concentration camp. He said the show was not a documentary. 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. "In creating this series," he said, "it was most important for me to consider what I believe to be the ultimate question and challenge of telling a story about the Holocaust: How do I do so without borrowing from a real person's specific life or experience?" Mr. Weil said that he avoided using the tattoo numbers of actual prisoners in the show and that the responsibility to honor Holocaust victims constantly weighed on him during the project. He said the human chess scene was important "to most powerfully counteract the revisionist narrative that whitewashes Nazi perpetration, by showcasing the most extreme and representationally truthful sadism and violence that the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews and other victims." Mr. Weil said he created a fictional event because he did not want to depict "specific, real acts of trauma." Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization named after a concentration camp survivor who spent his life documenting the atrocities of the Holocaust and hunting Nazis to bring them to justice, said the show did not need to rely on dramatization. "Why invent something?" Rabbi Hier said. "Just tell what occurred." The criticism of the scene followed calls from several Holocaust awareness groups for Amazon to stop selling "The Poisonous Mushroom," an illustrated children's book by Streicher, published in 1938. On Friday, the Holocaust Educational Trust, which trains students and teachers across Britain, posted a letter on Twitter calling on Amazon U.K. to remove it from its listings. The book's text, which likens Jews to the devil, was "designed to brainwash an entire generation of children that Jews were inherently evil," Karen Pollock, the trust's chief executive, wrote in an email. The book was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials, during which Streicher was convicted of directing and participating in crimes against humanity. The front cover alone draws on longstanding and offensive anti Semitic tropes, Ms. Pollock wrote in the letter. Throughout his life, Streicher was committed to advocating the annihilation of Jews. Among his final words before he was executed in 1946 were "Heil Hitler." "As a bookseller, we are mindful of book censorship throughout history, and we do not take this lightly," an Amazon representative said in a statement to The New York Times on Friday. "We believe that providing access to written speech is important, including books that some may find objectionable, though we take concerns from the Holocaust Educational Trust seriously and are listening to its feedback." On Monday, the URL for the book's listing page on Amazon's site redirected to an image of a dog with a "page not found" message. Amazon URLs for other books by Streicher also redirected to the same error page. This is not the first time that Amazon had removed a listing in response to a controversy. In December, it stopped selling holiday ornaments and a bottle opener displaying images of Auschwitz after the memorial called the products "disturbing and disrespectful" on social media. In July, L.G.B.T.Q. activists persuaded Amazon to stop selling "A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality," written by a vocal proponent of the discredited practice of using "conversion therapy" to turn gay people straight. Some third party booksellers that sell titles on Amazon told The Times earlier this year that they would welcome more clarity about why some texts have been prohibited and others have not. They also urged the company to publish a list of prohibited books. Booksellers who stock Amazon's virtual shelves said the retailer had no policies they could discern and often seemed to be simply reacting to bad publicity, a move that could raise free speech concerns. Amazon controls about two thirds of the U.S. book market, including new, used and digital titles. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Raul Esparza in an Encores! Off Center production of "Road Show," a Stephen Sondheim musical with a book by John Weidman that has gone through several iterations since 1997. There are a lot of fingerprints on "Road Show," even beyond the ones that grub up everyday musicals. Naturally, there are those of its authors, Stephen Sondheim (songs) and John Weidman (book). But there are also those of every director who has had his hands on it from its first reading in 1997, when it was called "Wise Guys," through various incarnations and titles, including "Gold" and "Bounce," as it expanded and contracted, shifted focus and shuffled its songs. Nor have those directors been exactly unhandsy: Sam Mendes, Hal Prince and John Doyle are no wallflowers. To the story of the Mizner brothers, flailing and failing their way through early 20th century America, they brought completely different attitudes and aesthetics, as well as actors as varied as Nathan Lane, Victor Garber, Richard Kind and Michael Cerveris. You would hardly think one show could accommodate so many contrasting visions and talents. It couldn't, and as such the other hand smearing our view of "Road Show" is history' s . Fans of Mr. Sondheim who as a songwriter but also as a dramatist has done more to reshape the musical than any other artist fear that this may be the end of the line. Unless his much announced adaptation of two Luis Bunuel films re emerges from its seemingly endless doldrums, "Road Show" is the last new artistic statement we're likely to have from the master. And what we can see of it in the torpid semi staged production that opened at City Center on Wednesday basically a revival of the version seen at the Public Theater in 2008 seems only intermittently like his work . The genius glints through, of course; still in evidence everywhere is the way he packs insights about human nature into tight coils of words that spring open like penknives. When Mama Mizner (Mary Beth Peil) sings that her son Wilson (Raul Esparza) is a joy despite his fecklessness "If he had the slightest sense of shame, it would be a shame" you suddenly see brightly into a depth of human nature. That she sings this to her other son, Addison (Brandon Uranowitz), who is more dependable and dull, only twists the knife. But such moments, however they may glint , emerge from a story that has become something of a palimpsest and thus something of a blur. It cannot have been easy for Will Davis, the director and choreographer of this Encores! Off Center offering the third and last of the season to find a way into material that is already so overwrought. For a while, as the tale takes Wilson and Addison from their parents' California home to the Alaska gold rush, this works well. Pruning extraneous sensory data focuses our attention on the weirdly close, quasi incestuous but also furious Cain and Abel like rivalry of these two outsized avatars of the American dream. We can savor every turn of phrase, both musical and lyrical, as it twists down into character. But when other strands of the show's DNA start to express themselves, Mr. Davis breaks faith with the concept. The radio show cannot accommodate the sense of spectacle built into passages like the one in which Addison travels the world "to find my road" and winds up in a travelogue of disaster. As Mr. Davis begins to give us visuals to support the narrative picture postcards, awkward props his frame breaks and all the overbusy contents of the story leak out. There's no putting it back together, either. Though there are charming moments throughout, especially when Addison finally finds nonfraternal love in the form of the rich dilettante Hollis Bessemer (Jin Ha), the exigencies of staging the picaresque tale overwhelm our interest in it. It doesn't help that the men's adventures are structured as three or four part shaggy dog stories: Addison dabbles as a fight promoter, then a playwright, then a racetrack fixer, all in one song. Basically you are tired of him, and the bit, after the first example, despite the bottomless wit of Mr. Sondheim's patented wordplay. What ultimately undermines "Road Show" is that sense of diminishing rather than increasing returns. In recent versions, and especially in this one, we don't much care about either brother; though both sing beautifully, Mr. Esparza is seedy bad news from the start and Mr. Uranowitz a mopey mess. Nothing about their characters improves with age, which may be the point. Fine, but this is a musical, not a treatise. Ideas about what people stand for (and what they are willing to stand) are important underpinnings of many great works, including Mr. Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd," which doesn't lack for darkness. But in "Road Show," the portrait of America as a contest between inept dreamers and expert scammers is the whole story, relentlessly repeated. (Papa Mizner, played by Chuck Cooper, has little else to do but deliver soul of a nation soliloquies.) The plot and the characterizations have been bent around the theory, instead of the other way around. That may be why the characters we most look forward to are the ones who bear less freight as symbols: Mama and Hollis. Ms. Peil's rendition of the song about Wilson ("Isn't He Something!") and Mr. Ha's two numbers, delivered in a bright, clarion tenor, are highlights. Alas, the story finds mother and lover no less disposable than the brothers do. Mr. Sondheim is not only one of the theater's great artists, he is one of its great collaborators. That can feel like a contradiction in terms, particularly when a work like "Road Show," tirelessly revised in search of its true self, seems to be heading every way but his. What a shame that so much beautiful material was dropped like excess baggage along the way! And yet, if he had the slightest sense of shame, it would be a shame. Even here, even now, isn't he something! Tickets Through July 27 at New York City Center, Manhattan; 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes . | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
On the outskirts of Berlin, Michael Barillere Scholz is testing a driverless vehicle that is neither sleek nor futuristic. The machine is boxy and painted white. Its top speed barely reaches 20 miles per hour. The self driving vehicle is a shuttle with room for 12 passengers. Mr. Barillere Scholz, who leads the driverless research team at Deutsche Bahn, Germany's largest train and bus operator, and his team have been testing the vehicle around a local office park. Later this year, the partly state owned public transit company will also begin separate trials of a similar autonomous bus on public roads in southern Germany, connecting a local train station with stops along a predetermined route. "We want to show that autonomous cars don't have to be limited to luxury consumer vehicles, they also have a role in public transport," Mr. Barillere Scholz said. "The market in Germany for this type of vehicle is huge." The coming age of driverless cars has typically centered on Silicon Valley highfliers like Tesla, Uber and Google, which have showcased their autonomous driving technology in luxury sedans and sport utility vehicles costing 100,000 or more. But across Europe, fledgling driverless projects like those by Deutsche Bahn are instead focused on utilitarian self driving vehicles for mass transit that barely exceed walking pace. Forgoing the latest automotive trends of aerodynamics and style, European transportation groups and city planners are instead aiming to connect these unglamorous driverless vehicles to existing public transportation networks of subways and buses. The goal is to eventually offer on demand driverless services to those who cannot afford the latest expensive offerings from Tesla and others. "When it comes to public transportation, we're really close on making this technology work," said Harri Santamala, who coordinates several projects involving autonomous public transport in Finland and directs a "smart mobility" program at Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. While cities in the United States including Ann Arbor, Mich., and Las Vegas have tested some of these mass transit driverless vehicles, Europe is a particular hotbed of this activity. That is because of the region's densely packed urban areas and decades old and widely used public transit systems, which often include subways, trains and buses. In total, more than 20 pilot or existing public transport programs have taken place in Europe involving autonomous vehicles, according to a review by The New York Times. Most of these projects have received government funding, tapping into local research institutions and tech start ups that are not household names. For those who dream of owning a sleek driverless vehicle of the future, this generation of autonomous public shuttles often half the length of a traditional bus with capacity for less than a dozen people will not set hearts racing. Though they include much of the high tech sensors and gadgetry required for autonomous driving, the vehicles are designed for functionality rather than speed and style. "With our first vehicle, the goal was just to get in on the road as quickly as possible," said Christophe Sapet, chief executive of Navya, a French start up that designs autonomous shuttle buses that have carried almost 150,000 passengers across Europe, Asia and the United States. He added that Navya's next vehicle will look "more like a robo taxi." Unlike the driverless trials from Uber and Alphabet's Waymo, which aim to bring autonomous vehicles to personal transport, a focus on self driving public transit is a significantly easier challenge. That is because these autonomous vehicles are often limited to operating in the "last mile," to existing public transit, or smaller distances on often well traveled routes. That reduces the complexity required to make the machines navigate across an entire city. In London, city planners conducted a three week trial in April involving a self driving electric shuttle moving slowly around a well defined three mile route on mostly private roads. Nick Reed, the project's coordinator, said that by offering people autonomous connections to the British capital's existing transportation network, his team was helping the city to meet public demand without having to invest millions, if not billions, in traditional subways or buses. "London is a megacity, we want people to use the public transportation that is already there," said Mr. Reed, academy director at TRL, a transit consultant firm in charge of the two year trial in London. "If we can connect people through autonomous vehicles, it's a big plus." Not all of the autonomous vehicles being tested for public transport in Europe are glamour free. In December, Carlo Ratti, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stood on the banks of a picturesque canal in Amsterdam to test his team's latest contraption: a driverless boat. The machine painted bright orange and measuring less than two feet in length darted swiftly between parked boats and a flock of ducks. Called the Roboat, the initial prototype was remote controlled. Later versions are set to incorporate sensors and other technology to make the boat fully autonomous. The machines will eventually reach up to 16 feet in length. Mr. Ratti's goal is to bring a fleet of these driverless boats to the Dutch city by the end of the decade, where they will be used to ferry people and goods around Amsterdam's miles of canals. If everything goes to plan, the researcher also hopes the autonomous boats will be able to automatically dock with each other, creating on demand bridges and walkways whenever necessary. "There are rivers and waterfronts in most cities, so the applications are quite wide," said Mr. Ratti, whose team is split between Amsterdam and Boston, where they use a university swimming pool to try out their latest version of the Roboat. "Not many people have looked at self driving boats." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Across the country, biohackers hobbyists, amateur geneticists, students and enthusiasts are practicing gene editing, concerning some bioterrorism experts.Credit...Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times As D.I.Y. Gene Editing Gains Popularity, 'Someone Is Going to Get Hurt' Across the country, biohackers hobbyists, amateur geneticists, students and enthusiasts are practicing gene editing, concerning some bioterrorism experts. WASHINGTON As a teenager, Keoni Gandall already was operating a cutting edge research laboratory in his bedroom in Huntington Beach, Calif. While his friends were buying video games, he acquired more than a dozen pieces of equipment a transilluminator, a centrifuge, two thermocyclers in pursuit of a hobby that once was the province of white coated Ph.D.'s in institutional labs. "I just wanted to clone DNA using my automated lab robot and feasibly make full genomes at home," he said. Mr. Gandall was far from alone. In the past few years, so called biohackers across the country have taken gene editing into their own hands. As the equipment becomes cheaper and the expertise in gene editing techniques, mostly Crispr Cas9, more widely shared, citizen scientists are attempting to re engineer DNA in surprising ways. Until now, the work has amounted to little more than D.I.Y. misfires. A year ago, a biohacker famously injected himself at a conference with modified DNA that he hoped would make him more muscular. (It did not.) In a recent interview, Mr. Gandall, now 18 and a research fellow at Stanford, said he only wants to ensure open access to gene editing technology, believing future biotech discoveries may come from the least expected minds. But he is quick to acknowledge that the do it yourself genetics revolution one day may go catastrophically wrong. "Even I would tell you, the level of DNA synthesis regulation, it simply isn't good enough," Mr. Gandall said. "These regulations aren't going to work when everything is decentralized when everybody has a DNA synthesizer on their smartphone." To some experts, the experiment nullified a decades long debate over whether to destroy the world's two remaining smallpox remnants at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and at a research center in Russia since it proved that scientists who want to experiment with the virus can now create it themselves. The study's publication in the journal PLOS One included an in depth description of the methods used and most alarming to Gregory D. Koblentz, the director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University a series of new tips and tricks for bypassing roadblocks. "Sure, we've known this could be possible," Dr. Koblentz said. "We also knew North Korea could someday build a thermonuclear weapon, but we're still horrified when they actually do it." Experts urged the journal to cancel publication of the article, one calling it "unwise, unjustified, and dangerous." Even before publication, a report from a World Health Organization meeting noted that the endeavor "did not require exceptional biochemical knowledge or skills, significant funds or significant time." But the study's lead researcher, David Evans, a virologist at the University of Alberta, said he had alerted several Canadian government authorities to his poxvirus venture, and none had raised an objection. Many experts agree that it would be very difficult for amateur biologists of any stripe to design a killer virus on their own. But as more hackers trade computer code for the genetic kind, and as their skills become increasingly sophisticated, health security experts fear that the potential for abuse may be growing. "To unleash something deadly, that could really happen any day now today," said Dr. George Church, a researcher at Harvard and a leading synthetic biologist. "The pragmatic people would just engineer drug resistant anthrax or highly transmissible influenza. Some recipes are online." "If they're willing to inject themselves with hormones to make their muscles bigger, you can imagine they'd be willing to test more powerful things," he added. "Anyone who does synthetic biology should be under surveillance, and anyone who does it without a license should be suspect." Authorities in the United States have been hesitant to undertake actions that could squelch innovation or impinge on intellectual property. The laws that cover biotechnology have not been significantly updated in decades, forcing regulators to rely on outdated frameworks to govern new technologies. Most of them report not having heard so much as a greeting from the F.B.I. At many, the consequence for breaking safety guidelines is simply the loss of membership leaving the perpetrator to experiment in isolation, but still among thousands of enthusiasts huddled online in Facebook groups, email listservs and Reddit pages. Many find their inspiration in Josiah Zayner, a NASA scientist turned celebrity biohacker who straps a GoPro camera to his forehead and streams experiments on himself from his garage. He's the man who tried to make his muscles bigger. "This is just normal Scotch packing tape," Mr. Zayner, chief executive of a biohacking start up called The Odin, told his YouTube audience one summer night, muttering expletives as he stripped the top layer of skin from his forearm. "This is Day 1 of my experiment to genetically engineer myself." Tools like these may be threatening in the wrong hands, but they also helped Mr. Gandall start a promising career. At age 11, he picked up a virology textbook at a church book fair. Before he was old enough for a driver's permit, he was urging his mother to shuttle him to a research job at the University of California, Irvine. He began dressing exclusively in red polo shirts to avoid the distraction of choosing outfits. He doodled through high school correcting biology teachers and was kicked out of a local science fair for what was deemed reckless home brew genetic engineering. Mr. Gandall barely earned a high school diploma, he said, and was rebuffed by almost every college he applied to but later gained a bioengineering position at Stanford University. "Pretty ironic, after they rejected me as a student," he said. He moved to East Palo Alto with 14 red polo shirts into a house with three nonbiologists, who don't much notice that DNA is cloned in the corner of his bedroom. His mission at Stanford is to build a body of genetic material for public use. To his fellow biohackers, it's a noble endeavor. "There are really only two things that could wipe 30 million people off of the planet: a nuclear weapon, or a biological one," said Lawrence O. Gostin, an adviser on pandemic influenza preparedness to the World Health Organization. "Somehow, the U.S. government fears and prepares for the former, but not remotely for the latter. It baffles me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
GUANABACOA, Cuba There was nothing Caridad Limonta would not do for her dear mother, even if it meant fulfilling her strange wish to be buried with two pairs of socks. Cancer took Ms. Limonta's mother, Zenaida, in 2002, while they lived together in this ancient town across the harbor from Old Havana. Following the custom of many Cuban families, Ms. Limonta washed the body and sprinkled it with talcum powder and perfume. Holding back tears, she dressed her mother and covered her with a white sheet. Then Ms. Limonta, at age 46, carried out her mother's odd request, pulling two polyester socks onto her feet and another pair over her hands. A few years later, when her mother's remains were exhumed and the bones interred in a small vault so that the tomb could be reused, Ms. Limonta saw the sense in her precautions. The tiny bones of her hands and feet were neatly contained inside the pairs of socks, like marbles in two sacks. Until her mother died, Ms. Limonta had managed to avoid this unpleasant Cuban reality. But her mother's illness and death also forced her to confront an unsettling truth that profoundly reshaped her relationship with the Cuban revolution and led her to a deeper understanding of what it really means to be Cuban. It is an understanding that American voters and politicians might benefit from recognizing, in this election year when relations with Cuba, along with the votes of Cuban Americans, are on the table. As Ms. Limonta came to realize, being a Cuban means having deep respect for, and first loyalty toward, her fellow Cubans and the heritage, customs and needs of their island society that they share, no matter who holds power there. But it had taken Ms. Limonta decades to even approach that realization. The first inkling came when her mother, a retired nurse, had been fussed over by some of Cuba's best doctors inside Havana's finest hospitals. Ms. Limonta needed to know: Had she benefited from Cuba's acclaimed medical prowess because every Cuban does? Or had her mother been pampered because Ms. Limonta herself was a ranking member of the Communist Party and vice minister of light industry for all of Cuba? Until then, Ms. Limonta's faith in the revolution had been absolute. Born just three weeks after Fidel Castro started his uprising by beaching an old American yacht called Granma in a mangrove swamp on Cuba's southern shore in 1956, she had fully embraced his promise to wipe out inequality and create a new Cuba. Growing up in the tiny sugar mill town of Tacajo in eastern Cuba, she'd believed with all her heart that regardless of her gender, or the poverty into which she'd been born, or the deep mahogany sheen of her skin, she was equal to every other Cuban. When she boarded a trans Atlantic ocean liner in 1976, she gazed at the thousands of other Cuban students going with her to study at Soviet universities and felt equality had already been achieved. "The ship was full of young people," she recalls. "Chinese, white, mulatto, black, all of us equal, with practically the same clothes, the same suitcases." Returning to Havana in 1981, she applied her economics degree to positions in Cuba's textile industry, overlooking the advantages she was receiving and the shortcomings of the revolution that she, unlike many other Cubans, had embraced. On the darkest day of the revolution in August 1994, when angry mobs shouted "Freedom" and "Down with Fidel" the largest mass protest against the Castro government she was enjoying a buffet at a Varadero beach resort, a deserved reward for a job well done. She eventually rose to vice minister and held powerful positions within the party. But she couldn't understand why tens of thousands of Cubans had risked their lives trying to reach Florida in flimsy rafts. As the revolution aged, contradictions grew harder to ignore. As her job took her around the country, she saw that the hospitals most Cubans went to were shabby reflections of the one where her mother was treated. Other Cubans waited months, sometimes years, for a wheelchair. They couldn't count on oxygen being available. Vital equipment broke down. Medicines ran out. Doctors and nurses expected to be bribed. The stark differences weighed on Ms. Limonta, weakening her revolutionary spirit as well as her heart. She was just 48 when she was rushed to the mediocre hospital to which she, as a resident of Guanabacoa, was assigned. But once doctors found out who she was, they insisted on transferring her to Cuba's top cardiology center. She got the pacemaker she needed, but the speedy treatment only deepened her doubts. Bound by a strict sense of social justice, she finally forced herself to see the truth. She and her mother had been pampered in their time of need not because they were equal to other Cubans. Not because they were socialists. Not because they loved Fidel. But because they were more important. The surgery caused a nearly mortal infection in her heart. Emergency open heart surgery left her scarred and uncertain about her life. She decided to quit her job, hand in her party membership, give back her state car and even renounce the Santeria religion she had been practicing. Standing before a mirror one day, she cried. The scars on her body made her look like she had been torn apart and sewn back together, which was how she felt about her life. She had turned her back on everything she once believed in and had no idea how to go on. She was not like her friend Lili, who led the neighborhood Committee for the Defense of the Revolution and whose faith in Communism was unshakable. Like many other Cubans whose support for the revolution lagged, Ms. Limonta had few options. She could dissent openly and invite harassment or persecution. She could throw herself into a raft and hope the sea breezes blew her to Florida. Or she could keep her thoughts to herself and focus on surviving. Even with the subsidized rice and beans every Cuban receives, her 12 monthly pension guaranteed only misery. She needed to remake her life and found inspiration in the old treadle sewing machine that her mother had given her for graduation. Using discarded hotel sheets, she sewed crib sets for newborns that she covertly sold for a few dollars apiece. In 2011, when Raul Castro cautiously allowed Cubans to start their own small businesses, Ms. Limonta became one of Cuba's first legal capitalists. Eventually, with help from a church sponsored business incubator, she created her own company, rented space for a workshop, hired seamstresses and started turning out clothing of her own design. When President Barack Obama visited Havana in 2016 to see for himself how Cuba was responding to the opening he had set in motion, Ms. Limonta was among the Cuban entrepreneurs who met with him. But the good times didn't last. The Trump administration undid much of the Obama opening, tightening the screws on Cuba and promising a quick end to the Castro regime. As American tourists stayed away, Cuba made life more difficult for fledgling capitalists like Ms. Limonta and her son Oscar, who had his own design business. Despite the increasing hardships, she hoped that the arrival in 2018 of a Cuban president who was not named Castro, and of a new constitution a year later, would persuade him to stay in Cuba. It didn't. Late in 2018 he joined the tidal wave of young people fleeing Cuba. So did two cousins and their mother, Ms. Limonta's twin sister, Esperanza. Ms. Limonta's heart keeps her in Cuba, where she receives free medical care, though not at elite hospitals. Now she brings gifts to see a doctor, as other Cubans do. She squeezes into rattling jalopies to get to work, as everybody else does. She finally feels equal to all the others who are fed up with endless assurances that the future will be better. Fed up with promises of plenty, but shortages of everything. Just surviving, day to day, week to week, saps their strength. Toughened by decades of deprivation, they have found ways to adapt to hardship, but have lost the will to demand change. And that is something both Washington and Havana need to understand. When Joe Biden promises to pick up where the Obama administration left off with Cuba, he must make it clear to Florida's hard liners that Mr. Trump's aggressive positions hurt small people like Ms. Limonta and Oscar, but not big men like the Castros and the new president, Miguel Diaz Canel. To expect that if only things get bad enough, Cubans will rise up, when they are struggling just to stand, is not just unrealistic. It is cruel. Likewise, the old men who run Cuba cannot deny that they've lost even individuals like Ms. Limonta who once embraced the revolution. Cubans are not in the streets protesting, but they have no loyalty toward the men who took Fidel Castro's place or the political system they keep propping up. Their allegiance is to Cuba and the conception of it that is harbored in their hearts. It hurts her deeply to say it, but Ms. Limonta now accepts what she never thought she would: For her, "the revolution is lost." She no longer considers herself a partidista, aligned with the Communist Party. But she very much remains a patriota, a patriot who loves her bruised and disfigured homeland and its people far more than any ideology or any ideologue. Her damaged heart may need help to keep her alive, but she insists that nothing could ever empty it of the affection she feels for her Cuba and the hope she still holds for its future. Anthony DePalma is a former foreign correspondent for The Times and the author of the forthcoming book "The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times," from which this article was adapted. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
LOS ANGELES On Tuesday, voters in Los Angeles will go to the polls for a mayoral primary. But much of the attention will also be on the three races for the school board, a battle that involves the mayor, the teachers' union and a host of advocates from across the country including New York City's billionaire mayor who have poured millions of dollars into the races. The outcome of the political fight for the school board seats will have a profound impact on the direction of the nation's second largest school district. But the clash has also become a sort of test case for those who want to overhaul public education, weakening the power of the teachers' union, pushing for more charter schools and changing the way teachers are hired and fired. After years of pressing to take power away from local school boards, some advocates have directed their money and attention directly to school boards in the hope that they will support their causes, as unions have done in the past. Last month, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City donated 1 million to a coalition formed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles to help elect candidates who will support the current superintendent and the policy changes he has promoted. Students First, a national advocacy organization created by Michelle A. Rhee, the former schools chancellor in Washington, donated 250,000 to the same cause. So far, the total spending from outside groups, including the teachers' union, has reached 4.4 million as of Friday, according to the city's ethics commission. And Mr. Villaraigosa has said he expects to raise even more in the final days for his group, the Coalition for School Reform. In 2006, Mr. Villaraigosa tried to gain control of the city schools as Mr. Bloomberg and many other big city mayors were doing across the country. But after his efforts failed, he moved to back school board candidates who he said would support his vision for drastic changes in the city's schools. And this election, just months before he will end his final term in office, could determine the fate of his legacy. The mayor sees the election as a referendum on the future of education changes in the city. If the three candidates he is backing lose, he said, it would mean "losing reform in Los Angeles as we know it." The superintendent, John E. Deasy, has generally been a less divisive figure than some of his counterparts in other large urban districts, like Joel I. Klein, the former chancellor of New York City schools, and Ms. Rhee when she ran the Washington school district. But the current campaign has turned particularly nasty, and many here say they believe that Mr. Deasy could lose his job if the mayor's slate of school board candidates loses. "We would lose part of the heart and soul of the education reform movement," Mr. Villaraigosa said. "The reason I've raised as much money across the country as I have is because people get that." Warren Fletcher, the president of the teachers' union, United Teachers Los Angeles, declined to comment when asked whether the board should remove Mr. Deasy as superintendent. In one race, the union is backing all three opponents to the school board president, Monica Garcia, who is seen as Mr. Deasy's strongest backer. The union has spent nearly 450,000 to help elect its candidates, but Mr. Fletcher bristles at the involvement of Mr. Bloomberg, Ms. Rhee and others from outside Los Angeles and their attempt to influence the results. "We don't elect a superintendent, but school board races are a way to take the temperature of whether people like the direction schools are going in," Mr. Fletcher said. "This is a race for Los Angeles, not the school board race of America. It would be really tragic if the voices are drowned out by folks who have no sense of what is going on here to begin with." Mr. Bloomberg donated about 100,000 to political education causes last year, according to his aides, with most of it going to state legislative races and independent political groups. Los Angeles is one of only a handful of school board races he has gotten involved in, said Howard Wolfson, a New York deputy mayor and counselor to Mr. Bloomberg, who added that Mr. Bloomberg had responded to a direct appeal from Mr. Villaraigosa. "If you care about education, this is a place to make a difference," Mr. Wolfson said. "For years, the expenditures in these races were one sided from the unions, now they are not happy there is a counterbalance to their efforts, but they are going to have to get used to it." "It will be interesting to see what kind of impact we can have by investing heavily in this race," Ms. Rhee said. "It could determine whether or not we should move in this direction." Two of the board races are likely to go to a runoff to determine who will get a spot on the seven person board. But the third race, with only two candidates, the incumbent Steve Zimmer, a Teach for America alumnus, and Kate Anderson, a lawyer and former Congressional staff member, is expected to be decided Tuesday, making it the most watched and most expensive contest. Mr. Zimmer portrays himself as a middle of the road deal maker, sometimes siding with the teachers' union and other times backing Mr. Deasy. He has often been the swing vote on issues that have divided the board. That he is being challenged so vociferously, he said, is a sign of "the need for orthodoxy in the reform community." "People aren't very interested in reform or middle ground and instead there's a tremendous interest in continuing this warfare," he said. Mr. Zimmer, who had the support of the mayor in his first campaign and is now backed by the teachers' union, has come under particular attack for a proposal he made last year to put a hold on creating new charter schools. "What people refer to as poison pills, I describe as holding people together." Mr. Zimmer has said repeatedly that he will support Mr. Deasy staying in office, but that he will continue to challenge some of his proposals, particularly on charter schools. Ms. Anderson, for her part, says that changes in Los Angeles schools need to come more quickly, particularly in the ways teachers are laid off or fired. Like most public systems, layoffs in Los Angeles are based on seniority, which Ms. Anderson calls "absurd." "L.A. should be leading the nation, but instead we have been failing our kids for a long, long time," she said. "Now we are on the precipice of real reform, but we need to support the superintendent to really be able to do so." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
As the daughter of a Norwegian woman and a Norwegian American man, I cannot remember when I discovered Munch because he was always there. Nearly every art book on the shelves in my childhood house was devoted to the work of one man: Edvard Munch. Rivaled only by Ibsen, and perhaps Hamsun, Munch exists in Norwegian culture as a sign of greatness, and it may be helpful for readers in English to understand this reality as a point of departure. "'Munch,'" Knausgaard writes, "is a static entity, so great and autocratic that it is barely in contact with anything but itself." He also notes rightly that "The Scream" has been lost to viewers. He doesn't say that the canvas is so famous that people around the world may recognize it without knowing Munch painted it, but that is the truth. As with the "Mona Lisa," whatever it may have meant to those who first saw it, the canvas has been buried under layer upon layer of cultural excrement. In "So Much Longing in So Little Space" (translated by Ingvild Burkey), Knausgaard's ambition is to whittle away at the legend to arrive at insights about the genesis of the art itself, and not only Munch's art, but all art. The painter's life appears in fragments. The reader is told about Munch's early losses the death of his mother when he was 5, and of his beloved sister Sophie when he was 13, the early diagnosis of his sister Laura's mental illness, the subsequent deaths of his father and brother but not much about the painter's own mental collapse in 1908. The influence of Norwegian artists on Munch is included, but there is little about his life in France and Germany and its profound significance on his development. The urgency of Knausgaard's project lies elsewhere. To my mind, Knausgaard is best when he is narrating his own pleasures and doubts as a museum curator and in his conversations with others on his subject. His exchanges with Munch aficionados appear in the book as personal accounts or actual transcripts of what was said. The German artist Anselm Kiefer is tight lipped and critical. The Munch scholar Stian Grogaard is learned and precise. His mordant language acts as a foil to Knausgaard's more searching, languid prose. Grogaard's scholarly certitudes about Munch are countered by the Norwegian artist Vanessa Baird, who declares a painting Grogaard praised highly "embarrassing" and demolishes one art piety after another with an invigorating demotic sharpness. Knausgaard's response to the varying opinions of those he encounters is at once measured, insightful and tinged with comedy. He has walked into the land of the experts and visual artists and is afraid of looking like an "idiot" when the exhibition is mounted. His analysis of his own feelings is bracing: "The spineless fear which a couple of critical voices produced within me, can perhaps serve as an indicator of the power of social mechanisms, how they force everything into the channel of consensus, and what it must cost not just to oppose them, but to work within them ... as an artist, what forces are present even before one picks up the brush." The "channel of consensus" forged by invisible social mechanisms, what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus gestures, perceptions and thoughts so deeply embodied in us they come to seem natural is formidable. And it is after this thought that Knausgaard moves into a poetic meditation on how art belongs to ordinary life, with potato peelings in the sink and cats running across a lawn and children shouting at one another "somewhere in the house," which culminates in an eruption: "And the breakdown which 'The Scream' represents," he writes, "is just terrible, terrible." I am convinced that the writing of this passage and the associative movements of memory made it possible for Knausgaard to see "The Scream" in its naked form as terror. The writer enacts on the page exactly what he hopes to convey. Art can sometimes break through the blinding conventions that dictate our perceptions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Sara Mearns, wearing rehearsal clothes she wouldn't normally wear a purple chiffon Grecian dress turned to Lori Belilove to ask a question she wouldn't normally ask as a principal at New York City Ballet. Her brow narrowed in concentration: "We decided I would come on like the wind?" Ms. Belilove, an Isadora Duncan specialist rehearsing Ms. Mearns in "Narcissus," set to Chopin, nodded in encouragement. "The wind blows you up, and it turns you to the left and brings you around," she said. "Now, I'm open to interpretation. You need to feel nature. It is water, it is the wind blowing, it is a storm it is something that catches you. And then you settle to be your glorious, narcissist self." It's true that a solo by Duncan, the modern dance pioneer, is far removed from Ms. Mearns's ballet universe. There are the tricky coordinations, the technique of moving "eye first," as Ms. Belilove put it meaning that you look in the direction in which you're headed, and then the body reacts and the bare feet. Brisk running waltzes, Ms. Mearns has found, make her dizzy. But what sent Ms. Mearns into a whirl of doubt after Ms. Belilove invited her to dance the solo with her group, the Isadora Duncan Dance Company, was Duncan's disparaging view of ballet. "She even said that ballet's not worthy of the soul," Ms. Mearns said. "I became so conflicted artistically. I was like, I'm the wrong person to be doing this! Why is a ballet dancer doing this?" Thinking about what ballet means to her, Ms. Mearns became emotional. "Ballet doesn't constrict me," she said. "Even though there are rules and set codes and a strive for perfection, I find release within that set of rules." She emailed Mikhail Baryshnikov, one of the people who recommended her to Ms. Belilove. She said that he convinced her, citing her attack, response and emotional accessibility, which, he said, were what Duncan wanted in dance. Ms. Mearns, clearly overwhelmed by his words, said, "So that already changed my way of thinking." Mr. Baryshnikov also stressed that she would be interpreting, not recreating, something that is essential to keeping dance alive. On Monday night, Ms. Mearns will try to do just that when Ms. Belilove's group performs at the Joyce Theater in celebration of the 140th anniversary of Duncan's birth. After a recent run through, Ms. Belilove looked pleased. "I will say you dance it," she said. "You do dance it. That's good." Ms. Mearns, who went in knowing little about Duncan's history but has now read extensively about her and watched videos of her dances, isn't afraid of expression as a ballet dancer and though it might sound odd actual dancing. Some dancers perform so correctly that their performances can become tentative and measured, but Ms. Mearns holds nothing back. The solo, which Ms. Belilove said dated to 1900, is an abstraction of the Narcissus and Echo myth in which Echo, a wood spirit, falls in love with Narcissus and is rejected. Narcissus then falls in love with his reflection in a pool of water and drowns. With a younger dancer, Ms. Belilove said she might just stress a sweet narcissus feeling an innocent rendition of self love. "I knew Sara could take more, intellectually and artistically," she said. "She immediately wanted to know what it's about, to find ways to get her hooks into it. I said, 'You're so full of yourself, and you see your reflection you're really very androgynous.' Sara's got a lot of androgynous power, and I'm having fun cultivating that out of her." It usually takes around two years of training to create a Duncan dancer. But Ms. Mearns has been able to grasp its essence with only a few rehearsals because, Ms. Belilove explained, "She already has a sense of carrying a dance." That doesn't mean that it hasn't been a challenge. "I'm so held," Ms. Mearns said, describing the upright way she carries her body as a dancer. "Lori took me to her studio and gave me a Duncan class. She had me sit on the floor, and I did all these port de bras" meaning the carriage of the arms "from side to side, where you're picking up soil and inviting the light in. Then we did a barre. How you move the body with the leg it's so stylized and hard. I was drained. I had to forget everything that I knew about training and let it go." She actually doesn't see the solo as being about narcissism. "I just don't feel it," she said. "The music is so playful, and I feel like I'm searching for things I'm reaching and then I come to the front of the stage. I'm feeling out the space, I'm seeing how far I can go in the space." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
After his possessions are stolen from a van, The Man files a report with the police chief, John (Michael Shannon), who is in a relationship with Celia and harbors certain racist and reactionary tendencies. These lead him to Celia's cousins (Bobby Soto and Alvaro Martinez), who did in fact steal his belongings. But the items, unfortunately for them, include some bloody clothes. Posing as a preacher evidently rubs off on the protagonist, who finds that he is capable of captivating his flock and even performing a baptism. He hints that Celia's cousins ought to be let off the hook. "Forgiveness only works in a world where people learn their lessons," John says in response. "But they don't. Not here, anyway." Chewing on a line like that, Shannon is the only the actor who seems to recognize that this material is more suited to a potboiler than a limp, contrived spiritual parable. Rated R. Murder and guilt. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNOW, Google Play, and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Q. What are they? A. Many times we've heard many of the artistic directors at these premiere ballet companies say, "Well, we can't find them." And this is our response to that and to move the conversation along. This is really a call to action for the ballerinas of color to show themselves; for the artistic directors, it's a challenge for them to do what they say they want to do. We obviously identified a need, and this is a way to fulfill that need, plus the response that we've heard from the dancers is that this is fabulous. Rather than having to travel around the country to each company's audition, it happens in one place. Even some of the artistic directors are like, this is actually a good thing. Q. Apart from age and point experience, what are the other requirements? A. There are no other rules or regulations. We really wanted to keep it open, and to be honest with you, we say it's for women of color, but we've had inquiries from women who are not of color, and we're not going to discriminate. If you want to be there in the room, that's fine. A. Where in the world would you ever have the chance to have Houston Ballet Academy, Dance Theater of Harlem, Ballet Memphis and Washington Ballet all in the room at the same time? We think it's monumental. We want to continue to do it. Part of the Sunday audition is to have a conversation with the artistic directors about continuing this and seeing how we can strengthen what we're doing in alignment with what they're trying to do as well. We want to be a conduit, a pipeline to really bridge our two communities together and to work to diversify the landscape of the ballet world, because we want it to really reflect what our country looks like. Q. What will the audition entail? A. The first half of it is going to be led by the African American ballet dancer Delores Brown, and we are just ecstatic to have her. It will be the technique the barre work, the floor work and the center. Robert Garland from Dance Theater of Harlem will be doing the second half with repertory. Q. What has the response been? A. More great idea than anything. But some folks were very wary about it, and they didn't want us to set up this big audition and have no one show up. Of course, that's a fear that we all have stepping out there for the first time, but the fact that we're at the number of dancers that we are at just said to us that we are really fulfilling a need and that's a good thing. We've got dancers coming from Wisconsin, and we're like, yes, the black ballerina is alive. It's just really giving her the opportunity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
An updated version of a widely cited study that found many students in charter schools were not performing as well as those in neighborhood public schools now shows that in a few states, charter schools are improving in some areas. The study, to be released Tuesday by Stanford University researchers at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, examined the standardized test results of students enrolled in charter schools in 25 states, the District of Columbia and New York City. The charter school results were compared with those of students with the same demographics and academic profiles in public schools that the charter students would have otherwise attended. The original study, conducted four years ago, showed that only 17 percent of charter schools managed to raise student math test scores above those of local public schools. The new report said that 29 percent of charter schools performed better in math than local public schools. And while the 2009 study showed 37 percent of charter schools were actually providing a worse education than local public schools, that figure declined to 31 percent in the new report. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
In 2010, Andrew Warren, working in London for an American bank, was given a chance to transfer to Salt Lake City. He took it. There, at work, he met his wife to be, Ellada Arakelova. Ms. Arakelova, known as Lada, grew up in the former Soviet Union. As a teenager, she had immigrated with her family to Salt Lake City, where her parents had second cousins. The couple came to New York in two stages: She arrived first, landing a job (and a studio on the Upper East Side), and he followed a year later. Now in their 30s, they both work in finance. They married two years ago. At that time, they were renting a sunny but small one bedroom in a Chelsea high rise with a great view. They faced Avenue of the Americas, which "was like a highway for ambulances," Ms. Arakelova said. "We both came from thousands of miles away to be in New York, so we wanted to be in the middle of the action, rather than living on the outskirts or in the suburbs," Mr. Warren said. They aimed to keep the price under 1 million. A Midtown listing led them to Richard Rojas, a salesman at Compass real estate. That apartment required a gut renovation. "It's unlikely for first time home buyers to go for a property like that," Mr. Rojas said. But "I knew they were determined. They were really serious about getting their first home." The couple visited an attractive floor through in a five unit, five story walk up building on far West 85th Street. The asking price was 899,000, with a monthly maintenance charge of 1,050. The place was two flights up, and they knew that visiting parents and grandparents would struggle with that, and so would they, if they one day had a stroller to carry. But they liked the apartment so much, they felt the sacrifice was worth making. The couple offered 925,000, but when the place was bid up to 990,000 by several other parties, they didn't pursue it, because of the stairs. They headed to the East Side. "I was kind of giddy to come back, because this was my starting point in New York," Ms. Arakelova said. A handsome two bedroom with a dining room, on the top floor of a brick elevator building on East 91st Street in Carnegie Hill, was 985,000. Maintenance was nearly 1,800 a month. It included a full second bathroom, a luxury. Their offer of 995,000 was accepted. But they were upset to find the sellers had scheduled an open house. The couple had not received a contract, Mr. Rojas said; they didn't have a leg to stand on. "That would not happen in England if you had a gentleman's agreement," Mr. Warren said. In the end, the apartment sold for the asking price, which was less than they had offered. "That was so frustrating," Ms. Arakelova said. "It was like a blow." Mr. Rojas said he was told the other party had stronger finances. They felt they couldn't compete for a two bedroom without raising their price. So Mr. Warren sold his half of a house he owned in England. Their budget rose to something over 1 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Abdel Latif, an intellectual who is sympathetic to the cause of Syria's rebels, makes this request to his son Bolbol, who is caring for him in Damascus at the time of his death. Transporting Abdel Latif is no small feat. Although under normal circumstances his hometown, Anabiya, is only a few hours' drive, it now involves crossing from regime held into rebel held territory, and will take several days. The physical obstacles to the journey corrupt officials, trigger happy soldiers, indiscriminate airstrikes will prove only half the challenge. The other half will be reckoning with the family's past. That reckoning includes Hussein, the elder son, who was Abdel Latif's favorite until they became estranged years before: "He had no desire to repeat his father's small town life of teaching and respectability. He said he hated the world of weaklings; he wanted to live among the powerful." Hussein didn't make it far "among the powerful," winding up as a minibus driver and an errand boy for local toughs while his brother, Bolbol, "was no good as a replacement: His weakness and anxiety had never exactly endeared him to Abdel Latif." Fatima, their sister, is the last of this triumvirate enlisted to transport Abdel Latif to his final resting place. Like her brothers', her life is defined by its disappointments. Fatima is trapped in a loveless marriage and servitude to the men in her family, despite being the smartest of the siblings. "The traces of her lost pride were still visible on her face. Everyone who loses their pride becomes a miser of a sort; their self importance increases, their eyes die out, and their resentments accumulate." As the three siblings journey from Damascus to Anabiya, we witness a terrain blighted by violence, but it's also a terrain blighted by an accumulation of resentments, the millions of indignities suffered by a society forced to live under the scourge of authoritarianism and, now, civil war. At every checkpoint, every rest stop, every halt in traffic, there is another reminder of all that Abdel Latif's family has endured. His sister Layla's death was particularly violent. On her wedding night, when her father married her off to a man she didn't love, she climbed onto the roof of the family home and, in sight of the wedding party, doused herself in kerosene and lit a match. (Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor whose death was the catalytic event marking the beginning of the Arab Spring and, subsequently, the Syrian civil war, also ended his life in an act of politically inspired self immolation.) "The past is never dead," Faulkner famously wrote. "It's not even past." This seems an apposite companion to a passage that comes late in "Death Is Hard Work": "The shame and the silence they had lived through for years were exacting a price, and everyone would pay it, executioners and victims alike." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
WASHINGTON During his 2016 bid, Donald Trump would sometimes pause from bashing elites and the media to speak with awe about a phone call he had with a Very Important Journalist. Trump puffed up with pride as he told the story to bemused rallygoers, who only moments before had been jeering at the press. It was, to say the least, a mixed message from the phony populist. During an interview in June 2016 at Trump Tower, Trump bragged to me about the call with the journalist, who turned out to be Tom Friedman. Lately, Trump has been boasting about Tom's praise for the White House's Israel United Arab Emirates peace plan. Like Stella Dallas standing in the rain outside the gates of the mansion where her daughter is getting married, Donald Trump has always had his nose pressed up against the window of the elites. "For a man who has risen to the highest office on the planet, President Trump radiates insecurity," former Ambassador Kim Darroch wrote to his colleagues in London, in a leaked cable. Steve Bannon once told me that Trump was much more concerned about CNN's coverage than Fox's. Trump was not seeking affirmation from the nighttime slate of Fox knuckleheads; they were in the bag. Unserious though he may be, Trump covets praise from serious people. And serious Sean Hannity is not. Fresh off his win in 2016, he was eager to come talk to The New York Times. I've never seen Trump happier than in that hour with the "failing" New York Times. (He even got to upbraid me in front of my boss.) As we wrapped up, he told the assembled editors, reporters and Times brass: "It's a great honor. I will say, The Times is, it's a great, great American jewel. A world jewel. And I hope we can all get along." That same eager tone was echoed in the audio of Bob Woodward's tapes with Trump, as the president warmly spoke the name "Bob" again and again, yearning for acceptance from the very establishment that he had denounced to win the Oval Office. Even though Woodward keeps writing books about Trump with titles that sound like Hitchcock horror flicks first "Fear" and now "Rage" Trump somehow thought he could win over the pillar of the Washington establishment. "I brought something that I've never shown to anybody," the president told the writer in December 2019. "I'm going to show it to you. I'll get you something that's sort of cool." He had an aide bring photos of him with Kim Jong un, including some capturing the moment when the two leaders stepped over the line between North and South Korea. "Pretty cool," Trump gushed. "You know? Pretty cool. Right?" He added, "I mean, they're cool pictures when you you know, when you talk about iconic pictures, how about that?" In a later interview, he gave Woodward a poster size picture of himself and Kim, saying: "I don't even know why I'm giving it to you. That's my only one." He trumpeted about Kim: "He never smiled before. I'm the only one he smiles with." Trump also bragged to the man who helped break the Watergate story, which sparked an impeachment inquiry, that he handled impeachment with more aplomb than his predecessors. "Nixon was in a corner with his thumb in his mouth," Trump said. "Bill Clinton took it very, very hard. I don't." Woodward once told me that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. But at least with Nixon, Woodward had to follow the money to expose the venality. With Donald Trump, he simply had to turn on a recorder. Trump is his own whistle blower. As The Times's Nick Confessore put it on MSNBC: "Trump is the first candidate for president to launch an October surprise against himself. It's as if Nixon sent the Nixon tapes to Woodward in an envelope by FedEx." Trump fiends for legitimacy even as he undercuts any chance of being seen as legitimate. He is fact based and cogent on the Woodward tape talking in early February about how the coronavirus is airborne and deadly and dangerous for young people. But he vitiated that by publicly downplaying the vital information for his own political advantage. For more than a week, instead of focusing on his peace deals and his nomination for the "Noble Prize," as a Trump campaign ad spelled it, everyone has been focused on a story that contends he called Americans who died in war "suckers" and "losers." Trump desperately wants approval even as he seems relentlessly driven to prove he's not worthy of it. He may be ludicrously un self aware, but even he sensed that his tango with Woodward would end badly. It was fun for a while, bro ing out in the Oval with his fellow septuagenarian big shot, batting around the finer points of white privilege. But it could not last. "You're probably going to screw me," the president told the writer. "You know, because that's the way it goes." Even so, the unreflective Narcissus will never drag himself away from his reflecting pool. You know, because that's the way it goes. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Instead, a story about class, desire, obsession and the unreliability of stories turns into a series of encounters between people who interact without quite enough of the atmospheric touches or sinister implications that would keep things interesting. First there is James's character whose name is never uttered and her snobby, nasty employer (Ann Dowd). Our heroine works as a "lady's companion," sneeringly referred to as "staff" by an obnoxious maitre d' and mercilessly mocked by the lady and her friends. Nonetheless, the young woman catches Maxim's eye, amuses him with her mousy naivete and in due course becomes Mrs. de Winter. The second of those, she soon finds out. Arriving at Manderley, Maxim's ancestral pile, the new bride discovers that the place is something of a shrine to her predecessor, whose name was Rebecca. She had dark hair, and the kind of charisma that the blond, mousy second Mrs. de Winter can't hope to match. Rebecca's monogram and signature are everywhere, and she is held up as a paragon of beauty, bravery and high spirits. Especially by the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas), who terrifies her new boss and is the only interesting person in the movie, with the possible exception of the invisible title character. The movie fails to live up to either of them, or to Thomas's seething, dignified performance. Du Maurier's plot is a fine piece of gothic machinery, full of suspense and foreboding and subtextual kink. None of that seems to work in Wheatley's hands. Instead of fusing melodrama, mystery and upstairs downstairs tensions, the movie gestures toward meanings it lacks the wit to explore. There is nothing seductive, unnerving or even especially interesting to occupy your mind while you're looking at the clothes. I suppose an attempt has been made to rework some of the narrative's themes to bring it into line with contemporary sensibilities. Or something. To call this "Rebecca" an update would be misleading. It's just a mistake. Rebecca Rated PG 13. Hitchcock was much naughtier. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
That the phrase "the fall," in the context of espionage fiction, usually refers to the crumbling of the Berlin Wall doesn't entirely rinse it of its theological connotations. The Cold War has long been a backdrop against which to explore human frailties; that's one of the reasons so many spy novels are backward looking. But, like any careful spook, the best of such novels look both ways at once. In what we have to assume is the twilight of his career, John le Carre opted to interrogate his own past in the recent "A Legacy of Spies," but took the opportunity to examine the present at the same time. If neither era showed human nature at its best, it was hard not to discern between the lines a certain amount of nostalgia for the world before the fall. Dan Fesperman's latest novel, "Safe Houses," similarly opts for a dual perspective. It begins in 1979, in a Berlin rife with shady bars and attic windows, but that's something of a red herring: Though peopled by spies of every shade, it's not a Cold War thriller as such. Instead, its narrative flashes back and forth between the backstabbing streets of a divided city, where the enemies might easily be on your own team, and a murder investigation set in the present; a murder with roots in long ago events that is not the simple domestic tragedy it appears to be. This novel stumbles at the outset, it should be said: One fortuitously overheard conversation in a safe house is a fair device to trigger a thriller; two is stretching credulity. But that bump in the road having been negotiated, what follows is a smooth ride, a novel belying its historical origins with a MeToo slant. In 1979, the C.I.A. officer Helen Abell discovers that a handler in the Berlin station has a history of sexual assault, and puts first her career and then her life at risk to expose wrongdoing the Company seems all too happy to accommodate. Thirty five years later, in Maryland, Anna Shoat's parents are murdered by her brother, a young man with learning difficulties. Anna wonders if there's more to the crime. As she investigates, she is aided by Henry Mattick, a refugee from Washington politics. Many of his ground rules overlap with those of the world of espionage for example, that information is shared and friendship offered "not out of any sense of love or loyalty. ... You're just hoping to use me." As their probing reaches back to the 1970s and beyond, skeletons drop rattling from the cupboards. The narrative choreography demanded by Fesperman's split timelines is expertly handled, and the dilemma faced by Helen, in particular whether to be a good employee or a good citizen illustrates the kind of weight that the spy novel, in the right hands, is capable of bearing. 's "Red, White, Blue" is an altogether different kettle of spooks, less an unfolding story than a series of set pieces, using rehearsing might be a better word some of the tropes of the spy thriller. There's nothing new about this: Many a self consciously literary novelist has dipped a toe in the genre in order to examine themes of identity, betrayal, duplicity and so on. Few, though, have skated quite so lightly over the surface of the world they're borrowing. While much of the pleasure of Fesperman's novel derives from its detail, and the acute handling of tradecraft like the escape and evasion kit Helen prepares Carpenter dabs instead on a larger, fuzzier canvas. An unnamed C.I.A. case officer delivers a series of bulletins about his career, and the spy trade in general, to Anna, a young woman whose late father also worked for the C.I.A. He has, it seems, something of moment to impart to her. Alternating with these sections are glimpses of Anna's own life: her memories of her father, her girlhood, her marriage, her gradual comprehension of who her father was and what he did. What the threads have in common is a kind of dreamlike, affectless prose that effectively nulls characterization Anna's husband, we're asked to believe, is a mover and shaker in the music business, but nothing about his behavior adds credibility to this bare resume. And the individual sections are, if anything, overcrafted, each straining for its own little epiphany. A ship's nautical compass, appearing in an opening paragraph, will inevitably have mutated into "a moral compass" by the section's closing line. Meanwhile, our nameless agent delivers a series of unanchored observations, supposedly laying bare operational truths. "Timing plus empathy equals a successful recruitment ... timing plus empathy can even, occasionally, avert an attack." This sounds worth exploring, but remains an abstract profundity. Narrative scaffolding, indeed, is conspicuous by its absence throughout, and while we're told at one point that "the order in which we receive facts matters," this isn't borne out by the text, many of whose sections could be rearranged without fracturing the story. And yet, it weaves a spell. Though mannered and elliptical throughout, it's more readable than those qualities usually herald, and in the end there's something hypnotic about its stately, confessional prose. I'd hesitate to classify it as a spy novel, because it pretty clearly doesn't want to get grubby. No: It's a novel in which some of the characters are identified as spies. But in its contemplation of different kinds of lost innocence, it's also pondering the fall. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Every journalist of color has a story. My first job as an on air reporter was at KRON in San Francisco from 1993 to 1996. I saw my new colleagues having a lively conversation and wanted to jump in. I discovered that they were talking about the "affirmative action hire," who turned out to be me. That's how they saw me it didn't matter that I'd been a researcher and producer at NBC News or that I had gone to Harvard. At that same job, the managers half joked that they had taken their lives into their own hands when their morning commute was rerouted through Oakland. I was the bureau chief for the East Bay, which includes Oakland, and they would be signing off on my reports hours later. So, as other journalists of color in these recent weeks have spoken up about their lack of representation and influence in newsrooms, and how that warps coverage, I know exactly what they're talking about: how treatment leads to unfair coverage. What's most disturbing, though, is how much their stories, in 2020, sound like mine from several decades ago. After my time at KRON, I moved on to NBC News in New York and worked my share of nights and weekends, as is standard for young reporters. It wasn't lost on me that people of color were usually the ones who got stuck there, at the bottom on the ladder. I didn't, fortunately, eventually becoming an anchor, and then in 2003, I became an anchor at CNN. This was a great opportunity to work with journalists at a network known for its saturation coverage of news events. When I began reporting the "Black in America" documentary series in 2008, followed by the "Latino in America" series, the production team had so few producers of color that they had to draft them from the news gathering unit. The first team meeting about "Latino in America" ended with approximately 15 people debating whether Puerto Ricans on the island should count as part of the Latino community in the States. This was at the same news outlet where staff members had complained for years, to no avail, about Lou Dobbs's racist, and frequently inaccurate, reporting on immigration. When "Latino in America" debuted, Latino activists picketed our screenings because of him. When the "Black in America" series aired, I was attacked by racist trolls. In both cases, the leaders of CNN stayed on the sidelines. I left CNN more than seven years ago. But I watch its coverage, and that of other news networks the panel driven journalism that sometimes gives voice to liars and white supremacists; the excuse of "balance" to embolden and normalize bigots and bigotry by posing them as the "other side." When I criticize CNN (as I do frequently on social media), the company attacks me as "more of a liberal activist than a journalist," a common dig against journalists of color who criticize newsroom management. I have never been alone in speaking up, but these days something seismic is finally happening. Journalists of color are sidestepping management and going straight to the public: Absent a hashtag but buoyed by this public awakening over Black Lives Matter, we have collectively inaugurated our own MeToo movement. Grievances have been laid bare in all corners of the media: The New York Times, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Bon Appetit, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer. We are risking jobs and status and a metaphorical stoning by bigots on social media to call out an industry that reports on racism and segregation while shamefully allowing it to fester within. To be clear, this is not just about how reporters of color are treated when they talk about race in the newsroom. The thin ranks of people of color in American newsrooms have often meant us and them reporting, where everyone from architecture critics to real estate writers, from entertainment reporters to sports anchors, talk about the world as if the people listening or reading their work are exclusively white. There are simply not enough of us in the newsroom to object effectively not in TV, print or online, certainly not in management. So our only option is to mimic the protester's strategy: Talk directly to the public and just talk loud. According to the News Leaders Association in 2019, 21 percent of newspaper employees and 31 percent of online only news employees belonged to so called minority groups that includes African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans. I say "so called" because people of color are not minorities in many parts of this country. Blacks, Latinos and Asians are about 37 percent of the American population and much more in big cities where big news organizations exist. According to the report, from 2004 to 2019, only 38 percent of newsrooms gained racial diversity, while 15 percent became less diverse. Moreover, just 18.8 percent of newsroom managers at print, digital and online only publications are people of color. It's so bad that The Village Voice recently republished a 1995 two part series called "The Unbearable Whiteness of Publishing," by James Ledbetter, without an update, because nothing has changed. There is better news in television newsrooms, where, a study found, people of color made up 25.9 percent of staff in 2019. The study noted, however, that "in the last 29 years, the population of people of color in the U.S. has risen 12.8 points" while "in TV news it is up just 8.1." I run an independent production company now, so I have less to lose when I speak up. I can even speak for those who can't: This is a moment, propelled by the outrage over brutal policing and so many other flagrant inequities, when Black and brown reporters won't await your awakening. We are letting viewers, listeners and readers know that the absence of reporting on communities of color is why it took shocking videos of police killings to awaken them to police brutality. We are telling the public about the editor who wore brownface and the puffy article about the first lady that fails to mention she is a birther and the pained euphemisms that replace calling the president a racist when he acts out. We refuse to be benched or tainted as activists or deemed incapable of objectivity, while white reporters are hailed for their "perspective" on stories. It's been 52 years since the Kerner Commission declared: "The press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men's eyes and a white perspective. That is no longer good enough." You don't get another 52 years. Time's up on hiring and promoting and giving us voice. We can't stand it anymore. I'm optimistic that the public will agree. ( soledadobrien) is the host of "Matter of Fact With " and chief executive of Productions. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts Via RadioPublic Via Stitcher Weeks or months into worldwide stay at home orders, the Modern Love team wanted to know how people who live alone were faring in isolation. What were they doing to keep themselves occupied? What did they most long for? What did they feel liberated to live without? More than 2,000 people shared their experiences. On this week's Modern Love podcast, you can listen to some of the stories from "Alone," recorded by the people who wrote them. Thanks to the people who contributed to this week's episode. They include Phyllis Coletta, Amy Dempsey, Shelby Condray, Chia Ti Chiu, C.J. Jones, Claire Manship, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Derek Shevel, Simone Samuels, Desiree Ontiveros and Bette Ferber. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Chronic drug shortages that threaten patient care are caused by rock bottom prices for older generic medicines and a health care marketplace that doesn't run on the rules of supply and demand, among other factors, according to a federal report published on Tuesday. The report, the work of a task force led by the Food and Drug Administration and comprising representatives from various federal agencies, recommended that buyers like hospitals consider paying higher prices for older generic drugs. Paying more would encourage drug companies to prioritize drugs like vincristine, a critical cancer medicine for children that now sells for just 8 a vial. To the consternation of cancer specialists, supplies of the drug recently have been scarce. Cancer drugs are not the only medications in short supply. At any given time in the United States, there are shortages of well over 100 drugs, including many used for anesthesia, palliative care and septic shock, as well as vaccines and medical supplies like sterile water. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Carmella Salinas at the Family Learning Center in Espanola, N.M., where she has taught early childhood education for 14 years. She earns 12.89 an hour and her week is capped at 32 hours. Carmella Salinas has worked steadily for 14 years as an early childhood education teacher, taking care of 4 and 5 year olds at the nonprofit Family Learning Center in the hardscrabble community of Espanola, just north of Santa Fe, N.M. Even so, she rarely earns enough to cover all her bills, and has more than once received a disconnection letter from the water, gas or electric company. A few months ago, she arrived home with her 10 year old son, Aaron, to find the electricity shut off. "But Mom," she recalled Aaron saying, "don't they know it's your birthday?" While the scramble to find affordable child care has drawn a lot of attention, prompting President Obama to label it "a must have" economic priority, the struggles of the workers mostly women who provide that care have not. Yet the fortunes of both are inextricably intertwined. "You can't separate the quality of children's experiences from the knowledge, skills and well being of early educators," said Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. About two million caregivers look after 12 million children from newborns to 5 year olds, and they are among the lowest paid workers in the country, sometimes earning little more than minimum wage, said Ms. Whitebook, who is an author of a state by state comparison of the early child care work force that was released last week. Caregivers also get few benefits and scattershot training, and they are subject to a tangle of requirements and regulations that can vary from one program to the next. Scientists established decades ago that the crucial first years of life, in the words of a 2015 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report, "provide a foundation on which later learning and lifelong progress is constructed." Blue states and red, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and children's advocates have moved toward supporting universal prekindergarten. But as the academy researchers concluded, "Adults who are underinformed, under prepared, or subject to chronic stress themselves may contribute to children's experiences of adversity and stress and undermine their development and learning." Ms. Salinas, 43, knows such stress too well. After 14 years, she earns 12.89 an hour, but her work week is capped at 32 hours. If she worked more than that, the nonprofit center would have to provide her with benefits, which it cannot afford. In past years, enough parents managed to pay tuition during the summer, but not this time. As a result, she is without a job until state funding for prekindergarten starts to flow again in September. For a while, Ms. Salinas got a second job to supplement her paycheck, but the extra money meant she no longer qualified for food stamps and Medicaid. Without public assistance, she was unable to afford the two inhalers one was 200, the other was 75 that she needed for her chronic asthma. "I was hospitalized last year from complications from asthma," she said. "I was rationing the medication. I am supposed to have four puffs, but I would think, 'Can I get by with one?'" Nor could she afford enough groceries. When her food stamps came through a couple of weeks ago, she stocked the refrigerator. Unaccustomed to seeing such a crowd of yogurt, carrots, strawberries, lunch meat, milk and orange juice, her son asked, "Mom, are we rich now?" "No, baby," Ms. Salinas recalled saying with a laugh. "We're really, really poor." Ms. Salinas said she could not manage at all if she had not inherited her mother's house a few years ago. But staying on top of the bills is still tough. When her 1999 Dodge Durango broke down last year, it took her four months to save enough to get it fixed. New Mexico, like some other states, provides limited stipends to help teachers earn the credentials they lack. But the money, Ms. Salinas said, is only enough to cover one class each semester. She has been taking weekend or evening classes since 2005 to get a bachelor's degree. After eight years of similar part time schooling, Mona Zamora, now 33, earned her diploma while working at a child care center in Las Cruces. At a job fair, she learned about an opening for a kindergarten teacher in Mesa, Ariz., where she is now moving with her two children. Her salary will be 38,000 a year almost a third more than she earned in New Mexico plus health insurance and a retirement program. 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. "Once I graduated and got my degree, the job that I was working at for over eight years wasn't able to compete with the pay and benefits," Ms. Zamora said. Public schools, even in poor states, generally pay better than nonprofit and private child care centers. At the same time, elementary school teachers tend to earn twice as much as prekindergarten teachers, and caretakers of toddlers and infants are further down on the income scale, according to the Berkeley report. Ms. Whitebook at Berkeley acknowledged that while many mothers did not have a bachelor's degree, handling a roomful of children required different skills from caring for one's own. "The work of caring for and educating the youngest children is as complex and requires as much knowledge as working with kids 5 to 8," she said. She commended states for focusing on improved training and qualifications, but said it was not enough. Child care workers need professional support in the classroom, she said, and "we need to raise the floor so people are making a living wage." But using standards for teachers at public school as a benchmark troubles Katharine Stevens, an education policy researcher at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "It's a model that has largely failed disadvantaged kids," Ms. Stevens said, noting that early childhood education offers a particularly potent opportunity to help level the playing field for poor children, who can lag as much as two years behind by the time they start kindergarten. "This is a crucial area and we need people who are good at it," she said. "But a college degree may not be necessary to be a very good caretaker of infants and toddlers." Child care workers deserve more than poverty wages, Ms. Stevens said, adding: "Leaping to a just add water and stir solution is going to backfire. We don't know what credentials or what training leads to child care workers and teachers being effective with very young children." And raising wages would also make child care more expensive putting it further out of reach for low and moderate income families, and stretching already tight state budgets. The Berkeley researchers counter that the push to expand child care has come at the expense of the poorly paid women who do the work. "A major goal of early childhood services has been to relieve poverty among children, yet many of these same efforts continue to generate poverty in the predominantly female, ethnically and racially diverse early childhood education work force," the report states. Despite all of her own financial hardships, Ms. Salinas in Espanola said there was no other job she would rather have. "I realized that this was my calling in life," she said, making the discovery after finding a part time job at a day care center when her two older daughters were living at home. Even so, Ms. Salinas and her colleagues have families of their own to support. On a trip to lobby for education funding at the state Capitol in Santa Fe, she remembered meeting with a senator who told her, "You don't get into this for the money; you're paid in love." "Really?" she replied. "When my landlord comes, can I just give him a hug?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The tone of Renee Taylor's solo show "My Life on a Diet" is set early on: "My name is Renee, and I am a food tramp," she says by way of introduction. "That is someone who eats around." There are many, many such lines in "My Life on a Diet," which is based on her 1986 memoir of the same title and is a veritable depository of old fashioned zingers. The show is nominally about food, but when has discussing food ever been just about that? You may get a clue from the very first words, a recording of Ms. Taylor singing parts of "The Frim Fram Sauce": "Don't want pork chops and bacon / That won't awaken / My appetite inside." Just a hint that there may be something spicy going on at the Theater at St. Clement's. And fortunately for audience members unmoved by the idea of an hour and a half dedicated solely to dieting, there is. Ms. Taylor mixes reminiscences about her childhood and beginnings as an actress and writer with a lighthearted look at her self image and quest for love. There is a happy ending, too: a 53 year romantic and artistic partnership with Joseph Bologna. This show, which they wrote together and which he directed (he died last year), is the final installment in a fruitful collaboration that fully took off when they wrote the 1968 Broadway comedy "Lovers and Other Strangers." Mr. Bologna figuratively enters only toward the end of the evening, though. Before that, there are encounters with such stars as Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, and tales of professional struggles. Ms. Taylor is especially funny when recounting her tiny parts in B movies and gigs on television talk shows a trajectory defined early on when, after portraying Juliet in drama school, she was told by the dean that her "weight sabotaged the play." The show's central part is a fascinating evocation of a woman with a weak body image and a strong sense of humor trying to make it in the late 1950s and early '60s. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Around midnight on June 30, 1998, Juan Echevarria, a 23 year old principal in a drug crew, ran into a crack dealer on a Harlem street corner. What ensued, he later told the police, was an argument over money. In those days, Mr. Echevarria would case New York City in a bulletproof vest, often armed with a handgun and sometimes cocaine and cash, overseeing dealers who sold on the streets and in the lobbies of Harlem and Brooklyn apartment buildings. On this night, Mr. Echevarria was cruising for trouble. Hours before, he'd found out his girlfriend had dumped him. He'd just been across the river at Rikers Island on a drug possession conviction. He was feeling hopeless and angry. Pumped with alcohol and mounting rage, he slipped a small revolver out from under his waistband. As the argument heated up, he fired at the dealer, who staggered to his death. Looking back, he can't quite explain what happened. "It went bad real fast," he recalled. Mr. Echevarria pleaded guilty to manslaughter and spent 14 years in prison. Today, at 41, he is desperate to remake himself. Now a sleep deprived college student, he lugs a textbook filled backpack around the Midtown Manhattan campus of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York, pulling all nighters, struggling with five page papers and keeping close tabs on his 3.47 grade point average. Part of the Prison to College Pipeline, a re entry program that helps incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men in New York City pursue college degrees, Mr. Echevarria dreams of one day graduating. But his challenges have been numerous. He grappled with remedial algebra, required of matriculating CUNY students who can't pass the basic math competency exam. He had to take it four times. Five years in, he is just a sophomore, still 84 credits away from a bachelor's degree, and has accrued 18,000 in student loans. Money has been a constant source of anxiety. Sometimes he had to rely on friends and family to feed him, and he worried about where he would lay his head at night. He has stayed in seven apartments since his release, in 2012. A day job as a case manager helping mentally ill prisoners re enter society has relieved some of the financial pressure, but it has taken its toll emotionally. Exhausted, he tosses and turns on the couch in his mother's public housing unit in East Harlem, where he stays when not at his new girlfriend's apartment, and he wonders: "Why am I doing this?" On other evenings, Mr. Echevarria sits in class scribbling copious notes and raising his hand frequently to answer questions, confident he has made the right choice. For a recent anthropology class, he arrived early and positioned himself in the center of the room. Raymond Ruggiero, an adjunct professor, offered up an energetic lecture on the rise and fall of democracy in Latin America, touching on the spread of the Enlightenment, the power structure of banana republics, and the Guatemalan peace activist Rigoberta Menchu. Pausing on the escapades of the Venezuelan leader Simon Bolivar, Dr. Ruggiero grew animated. "Bolivar's whole idea was about equality, was about freedom, freedom of the mind," he told the class. Mr. Echevarria, one of Dr. Ruggiero's favorites, nodded enthusiastically. Later, when the discussion led to how nation states began to regulate themselves once Spanish rulers had left, Dr. Ruggiero asked, "What did they learn about governance?" "Juan, excellent work!" Dr. Ruggiero had scrawled at the bottom of the paper. That put him in good spirits. Much is at stake. With his degree, Mr. Echevarria hopes one day to become a director at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, the nonprofit organization where he works. It's one of the rare places that appreciates an applicant's time behind bars. He plans to major in culture and deviance studies, an academic field heavy on ethnographic perspectives and popular with undergraduates interested in social work, law or the social sciences. Mr. Echevarria's employer has promised a promotion and a big raise if he gets his degree. With the extra income, he would like to settle into a two bedroom apartment in the Inwood section of Manhattan, removed from the crime infested neighborhood where he grew up and the drug dealers who remind him of his former life. Without a degree, he worries, opportunities will "disappear." "You want to do this, but it adds a lot of stress," he said. "I've had my ups and downs because of school." According to the Department of Justice, there were 1.5 million Americans in state and federal prisons in 2014; 636,000 were released. But the number who are likely to stay out fewer than a quarter by the five year marker is dispiriting. With widespread consensus that the system is failing both offenders and their victims, state and federal governments are reinvesting in rehabilitative programs. Access to college is one of the most popular. From California to New York, states have announced plans to increase funding. New York is committing 7.5 million to offer classes to 1,000 inmates over the next five years. The White House has been particularly engaged in the second chance movement. In May, President Obama urged colleges to eliminate a question on applications about would be students' criminal history. The question has been found to have a chill effect on applicants with felony convictions. He has also sought ways around a law that bars prisoners from accessing Pell grants. Advocates estimate that there were at least 350 college degree programs for prisoners and the recently released in the early 1980s. But as crime rates skyrocketed and the national mood toward violent offenders turned unforgiving, many of the programs shuttered. Both Democrats and Republicans questioned the spending of higher education dollars on lawbreakers while law abiding young people struggled with the relatively small sums that federal financial aid offered them. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, prevents anyone in a state or federal prison from accessing Pell grants. Inmates also can't take out low interest federal student loans. Last year, President Obama announced an experimental educational program (exempted from regulatory requirements) known as the Second Chance Pell Pilot Program. It is expected to award grants to 12,000 inmates, many of whom began classes this fall; 67 colleges and universities have been chosen to participate, and more than a quarter of them are starting new programs. Higher education behind bars is not free. Some colleges charge inmates regular tuition, or scale it to their prison wages. Others, including John Jay and Bard College, offer them full scholarships. The Bard Prison Initiative plans to expand its well regarded program, which offers credit bearing classes to nearly 300 prisoners. The Prison to College Pipeline at John Jay, one of the nation's premier criminal justice colleges, currently sends professors to teach for credit classes at Otisville, a medium security men's prison in Orange County, N.Y. It hopes that with the Pell program, it can add 120 new in prison students, give inmates the opportunity to get an associate degree while still incarcerated and start a program at the Queensboro Correctional Facility in Long Island City. Baz Dreisinger, a popular English professor and spirited voice in the prison reform movement, founded the Prison to College Pipeline in 2011. The program is administered by the Prisoner Reentry Institute, an arm of John Jay dedicated to finding best practices for re entering inmates. The Pipeline, for male inmates five years or less before their release date, is noteworthy for providing its students with a community both on the inside and on the outside. On release, students are encouraged to transfer to a city campus. So far, 10 have. Once out, the men are offered a host of services by the institute's College Initiative program. The small, tight knit staff, made up of mostly young prison advocates, advises them through workshops, office visits and anxious phone calls on financial aid matters, what classes to take, ways to perfect term papers, and how to deal with ornery professors and manage girlfriends, parents and children while trying to hold down jobs. "Our people have a whole lot more to lose if they don't graduate and a whole lot more to gain by graduating," said Vivian Nixon, executive director of the College and Community Fellowship, a nonprofit that funnels dozens of former female prisoners onto college campuses in and around New York City every year. "It's a natural time of transition and reinvention." Ruth Delaney, a senior program associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, which oversees its own prison to college initiative in New Jersey, Michigan and North Carolina, says that when it comes to factors proven to prevent recidivism, clocking time with other students "checks all the boxes." College surrounds people with peers who are motivated and focused. It leaves them little time to fall back into old patterns and helps them build their resumes. And because campuses are ripe with resources mental health services, financial counselors, food pantries recently released prisoners who arrive on them are near the kind of assistance they desperately need. Indeed, a 2013 RAND Corporation study found that involvement in a prisoner education program reduced a person's odds of returning to prison by 43 percent. Edward J. Latessa, director of the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati, has spent years studying programs that work in reducing recidivism. He says most successful programs aren't lofty and philosophical, and they don't involve a lot of talk therapy, yoga or tough love scare tactics. The best programs, he says, are pragmatic. "You have to do something about people's difficulties, rather than just talking about them," he said. "You don't just tell them what they need to do, you show them and then you let them do it." But getting through college is no easy feat. Five years in and only one of the 57 students in the College to Prison Pipeline (29 are still in prison) has graduated with an associate degree. No one has obtained a bachelor's degree. And two who have been released have gone back to jail. To survive in prison, Mr. Echevarria put on the tough, protective veneer that prisoners sometimes refer to as "the mask." He learned how to size up a cafeteria to determine who was a threat and how to make a knife out of a toothbrush and shards of metal to protect himself from gang attacks. He landed in solitary on various occasions once for talking back to a guard, another time for smoking marijuana. He moved around a lot, from Rikers Island to the Sing Sing Correctional Facility to the Clinton Correctional Facility a sign, in the prison world, that he was challenging to maintain. A few years into his sentence, though, while stationed in a maximum security prison in Ulster County, he made friends with a longtime inmate who was teaching AIDS awareness classes. He signed on, read pharmacology and immunology textbooks, and eventually became an instructor himself. AIDS was still a significant killer, and men flocked to his classes. While teaching, Mr. Echevarria started thinking about his future. He thought about changing. "I knew I was going to get out. What would I do?" When he learned about the Prison to College Pipeline, he applied immediately. He had a high school equivalency diploma, but had lasted only a few semesters at a community college. Now, though, the idea of pursuing a degree appealed to him. He wrote a three page essay and sat for the entrance exam. He was transferred to the Otisville prison in 2011 to begin taking classes, some with Dr. Dreisinger. A year later, Mr. Echevarria got the news. It was time for his release his "homecoming." Out of class, he worked to avoid old friends and "business acquaintances" so he wouldn't "end up with plans that were not initially mine," and he started going to church. He was befriending professors and bonding with administrators at the Prisoner Reentry Institute. But if things looked good on the outside, he was emotionally raw on the inside. "I was a wreck," he recalled. "Things were a roller coaster." He struggled to make emotional connections. He and his teenage daughter (now a single mother of a toddler and an infant) texted and saw each other on occasion, but she was not that interested in bonding with him. The relationship he had developed with a woman while in prison, involving long letters about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, had not translated to the real world, so he moved in with his mother, living blocks from the shooting that had led to his arrest. It was a situational quagmire putting him in contact with all the people recidivism research suggests he should avoid. It was also placing him too close for comfort to old family memories. Mr. Echevarria, whose father left when he was a tween, harbored resentment about his childhood. His mother had worked. He was often supervised by older siblings, and felt abandoned. He recalls being kicked out into the streets for days, as a teenager, after coming home high. His mother recalls warning him about drugs and drug dealing and being worried that she herself might get kicked out of the apartment building if he was involved with illegal substances. Mr. Echevarria moved in with a girlfriend, but that didn't work out either. Some weeks he had only a few dollars to live on. He worried that if he lost his Metro card, he would be in "crisis mode," he said. Once, seeing a young man ruffling through garbage, he thought: I am steps away from that. He was beginning to feel "the temptation to go back to the old life," and the quick and easy cash. It was fleeting. But there. At semester's end, Mr. Echevarria had earned two B's, but he failed algebra. The graphs baffled him. He had trouble remembering what formulas went with what problems. It was a blow to his self esteem. But it was the rage he felt when things went wrong, lingering from his days behind bars and during his childhood, that seemed to be his most pressing problem. Mr. Echevarria took a deep breath. "I really needed that," he recalled. Heady and philosophical, Mr. Echevarria remains interested in the thinking patterns the self loathing and propensity for violence that landed him in prison. As a result, many of the classes he takes delve deeply into the nature of violence, juvenile delinquency and prison life. They are as much a study of himself as a study of others. What does he most want to learn? How to master his emotions. "I still have a lot to work on," he told me. "But I'm getting there." At ease in a dress shirt and a pair of leather lace ups, Mr. Echevarria hobnobbed with professors, administrators and Manhattan artists at the program's annual dinner at John Jay last spring. Dr. Dreisinger praised a group of John Jay students who had traveled to Otisville regularly to take classes alongside prisoners, a feature of the program that participants, both in jail and out, praise. Prisoners say it builds their confidence and creates bonds with students they can call on, once out. Traditional college students, particularly ones interested in criminal justice careers, say it offers them a bird's eye view into the life of the kind of people they may soon serve. Dr. Dreisinger acknowledged an inmate who had been released but ended up back inside. She told the diners that the young man was with them in spirit, writing beautiful papers and taking an independent study course with her. "He's engaged and still very much present in the program," she said, sidestepping the heartbreaking reality of the situation. She also paid tribute to Devon Simmons, who landed in jail 16 years ago, convicted of assault and weapon and drug offenses. He was scheduled to graduate a few weeks later with an associate degree, the first to do so. A photo of him in graduation gear was flashed on an oversize screen in the center of the room. This fall, at 35, he is at John Jay pursuing his bachelor's. "Devon is just opening the door because we have so many other graduations that are going to be coming up in years to come," she said. As for Mr. Echevarria, he said he was proud of how his last few semesters had gone. He had finally passed remedial math. He had earned an A in Dr. Ruggiero's class and a B in a criminal justice course taught by a former parole officer. Dr. Dreisinger even needles him about seeking a Ph.D. But he continues to oscillate between big academic dreams and the realities of his life. He talks about opening up a community center, or doing something that doesn't require a degree at all. Then he latches onto the Ph.D. idea. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Home sales stabilized in August after a deep tumble in July, a development that, in the context of a severely troubled housing market, counts as good news. Sales of existing homes rose 7.6 percent last month from July's miserable levels but were still the second weakest since 1997, the National Association of Realtors said. Sales were down 19 percent from August 2009. The results matched analysts' expectations, which were modest. "It's not much to write home about," Michael D. Larson of Weiss Research said. On a seasonally adjusted annualized basis, August sales were 4.13 million, up from 3.84 million in July. In a typical year before the boom, more than five million existing homes were sold. Few analysts anticipated the carnage in July, when sales fell 27 percent from June. A tax credit that propped up the market last winter but expired in the spring took most of the blame. Even the lowest interest rates in 50 years, prompted by the government's large scale buying of mortgage backed securities, could not make much headway. The rate for a 30 year fixed mortgage slid as low as 4.32 percent this month. Between the low rates and the 30 percent decline in prices from the peak, monthly mortgage payments are about half what they were at the peak of the boom. Then no one wanted to wait to buy; now potential buyers have infinite patience. Sales over the next few months are likely to remain subdued. Weekly applications for new mortgages show little growth but little decline either. "There is still some demand out there," Jennifer H. Lee of BMO Capital Markets said in a research note, "just not a heck of a lot." Housing is on its own these days. The government is unlikely to add to its panoply of foreclosure relief plans, and interest rates do not appear likely to fall further. A rebound will depend on a pickup in employment and the formation of new households, both of which keep receding into the future. Slumping sales will undermine prices as sellers compete to find buyers. Some indexes are already starting to fall again. The Federal Housing Finance Agency reported this week that its home price index dropped 0.5 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in July from June. The index is down 3.3 percent over the last year. Moody's Analytics lowered its expectation for prices last week, saying they will drop 8 percent more. Previously, Moody's forecast a 5 percent drop. It also postponed the date for the market bottom from the first quarter of 2011 to the third quarter. The supply of homes on the market, whether from banks or households, will weigh heavily on prices. While inventories declined slightly in August, they are still at an elevated level. It takes about a year to sell a house, the Realtors' group said. That is more than double the time in a healthy economy. If the number of foreclosures on the market continues to rise, inventories will swell considerably. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
NOT long ago there was just one cable channel, Speed, devoted to cars; the few television shows for enthusiasts included MTV's "Pimp My Ride," since canceled. These days, the offerings are more plentiful and comprehensive. The popular British series "Top Gear" will begin its 18th season in April on BBC America. The show features three charismatic hosts who test cars (mostly of the fast or outrageous variety) and engage in adventures and odd challenges. In an episode last season, the show pitted a Mini racecar against an Olympic gold medalist skeleton racer down a mountain in Norway. The History channel carries an American version of the show, which was recently extended by eight episodes that will start being shown on Tuesday. And viewers looking for more crazy auto antics will find them in a new show starring Richard Hammond, one of the co stars of "Top Gear," in which he travels the United States in search of the most dangerous vehicles he can get his hands on. The motoring shows elsewhere tend to be less comedic. Many of them are on the Speed channel, which balances its motor sports coverage (with an emphasis on Nascar) with a schedule of restoration and customizing shows for gearheads. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
People who buy shoes for comfort are cops. There is really no other explanation. A sparkling, sublime footwear choice is the most expedient way to demonstrate taste. It achieves more per square inch than any shirt could. Whatever you may have to trade in exchange for a shoe with real personality is almost certainly worth it. I promise, and I have the sore ankles to prove it. The last couple of days, my right outer calf has been throbbing. I am certain this is because of my footwear choices. But though life has crossed me untold times in recent years, I have not yet given up on chasing this particular kind of beauty. Catch me hobbling and styling all the way to retirement in Boca. Determined to prove the viability of this opinion, I skeptically embarked upon a reasonable footwear doubleheader: Allbirds and Birkenstock, which recently opened a few blocks away from each other on Spring Street. I went on the day of a dreary rainstorm. Deliberately, I wore my least comfortable rain boots and thin, supportless socks. By the time I hit Spring Street, my feet needed succor. First came Allbirds, the preferred footwear of Silicon Valley (at least, last year). They are made from merino wool or eucalyptus tree pulp, are machine washable and are studiously unstylish. It is footwear for people who poke around in the code on the websites they visit, and who would prefer not to think too hard about their footwear choices. Because I don't live in or near Silicon Valley, I first heard about Allbirds in the Lefsetz Letter, an email sent by a 60 something music biz hanger on turned poor man's pundit. It is not where one goes to learn about anything au courant. I sighed deeply, then entered, through doors with handles that were large stubby feet that appeared to be made of compressed wood. Allbirds makes just a few categories of shoes: runners (a clumped silhouette that looks like it was dreamed up in a bootlegging operation), loungers (inoffensive slip ons), tree toppers (a Chuck Taylor manque) and skippers (which are, like, the worst Keds). On foot, the runner ( 95) made my foot look pouty, as if it were dipping into the floor. It was an unforgivable silhouette. Most of the store clerks wore the tree toppers stuffy, but versatile. And the sole, made of sugar cane, was by far the most comforting. (The clerk advised me it was carbon negative, too.) The loungers ( 95) were slightly better, like a slightly steroidal karate slipper. It reminded me of the time a decade ago when I noticed punk dudes on Warped Tour wearing Toms slip ons (a far worse shoe, and that's saying something). Unlike the runner, it was slightly futurist, pointed as if in fast forward motion. Still, I could see the wool which is breathable and designed to allow water to pass through giving each time my foot moved. It felt as if I was going barefoot, but without confidence. When it comes to open toe shoes, I adhere to the gospel of Cam'ron, who once barked at Jay Z on a song: "How's the king of New York rocking sandals with jeans? Open toe sandals with chancletas with jeans on." This is, I admit, an unevolved position. History gives us our blind spots, and experience allows us to keep them. And yet here I was, at the Birkenstock store, trying on a pair of Milanos, the ur Birkenstock model with two cross straps and one across the back, the stuff of folkies and novelists lounging on the weekend. This was the first Birkenstock I ever encountered, as a college freshman hanging out with the kid who would become one of my roommates and closest friends. As he played me some Freestyle Fellowship, he wore a pair with chubby wool socks. I was appalled. I've relented slightly since then. I remember telling a girlfriend in the early 2000s that the Gizeh thong sandals for women were due for reappraisal. I've seen plenty of handsome men wearing the two strap Arizonas ( 100). These humble German shoes, with the cork insole that molds to your foot, have persevered. And in so doing, thrived. Anyhow, the Milanos had a sturdy dignity, as if I might wear them to debate metaphysics while chopping wood. I liked them, despite myself. (One tip: If shoppers have to buckle their own shoes to try on, some footstools would help.) I also admired the Arizonas made of foam rubber ( 40), made in loud colors for the beaches I'll never set foot on. The cramped second floor balcony holds the designer collaborations: 10 Corso Como, Rick Owens, Colette, 032c. They're out of the way, not spotlighted; almost any other company would place these premium items front and center. I was especially impressed with the 032c polyurethane clogs ( 200), a slightly tweaked version of the shoe that's popular with chefs. It was like the child of a Dansko and a Timberland. I could almost imagine wearing them out of the store. But I had a secret. On an earlier visit, I'd tried on the Rick Owens pair I'd been coveting online Arizonas in gray calf hair with extended straps ( 420). They're wild and special, and go with nothing. During holiday sale time, I went online and bought them on Farfetch for around half off. No witnesses. Catch me if you can. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
What's the most surprising thing you learned while writing it? Definitely that Abraham Lincoln wrote a best selling book. Even big Lincoln biographies have missed this story. It started in 1858, when Lincoln had just lost his famous Senate race against Stephen Douglas. You'd think he would be feeling frustrated, feeling down. Instead he just got to work. He tried to find the most accurate transcripts of the debates he had had with Douglas on the trail. His contemporaries were thinking: Why do you care about this? Everyone has moved on. But he understood that in those debates, he had given his fullest and most eloquent answers about slavery and why it shouldn't expand. He finally got the best transcripts, put them together really carefully and used them as the source text for the published book, which became a huge best seller. One store in Chicago put together a stack of copies that was seven feet tall, and by the end of the day the books were gone. I think the fact that Lincoln saw that this book could be successful says a lot about how ambitious he was, and about him as a book lover. It came out in 1860, just early enough to help him in the Republican primary, and during the general election is when the book became a national sensation. It sold 50,000 copies, which was a big number, but if you adjust it and it's a rough adjustment it's the equivalent of half a million copies today. People would ask him what he thought about this issue, and he would send them to the book. He used it to stand in for himself and his ideas. In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write? There's a lot more material for book lovers than I expected. This was a big reason it took me 10 years. I had to go deep into the list of publishers, bookstores, presses. To go back to the Lincoln example: One of the reasons his book sold so many copies was because there were steam powered trains that could bring the book across the country. And there were steam powered printing presses, which made the book more affordable. Those technological shifts helped explain why the book was important. Obama is another example. "Dreams From My Father" was difficult to write. He lost his book deal at one point. He was totally stumped at another point, and had to rewrite it. He reread Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior," and it helped him. It was a book a lot of people were talking about in the 1980s, when memoirs were having a big moment, in M.F.A. programs and book reviews. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
With donated drugs and services provided by major pharmacy chains, 200,000 uninsured Americans will gain access to H.I.V. preventive medicines at no cost, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday. The announcement, by Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, essentially explained how the government plans to distribute the drugs for pre exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, that were promised in May by the drugmaker Gilead Sciences. PrEP describes a strategy of preventing infection with H.I.V. by taking a single pill a day, either Truvada or Descovy. Both are made by Gilead. The strategy is 99 percent effective at preventing infection, studies have shown, and is a mainstay of the administration's campaign to end the H.I.V. epidemic. Some American cities with high H.I.V. rates, such as San Francisco, already have programs that pay the costs of PrEP for the uninsured. Gilead itself offers the drug at no cost to those who cannot afford it, or picks up insurance co pays for patients who qualify. But the new program called Ready, Set, PrEP marks the first time the federal government is supplying PrEP to patients not enrolled in Medicaid, the Veterans Health Administration or any other federal health program. Under the new program, any patient who lacks health insurance, has had a recent negative H.I.V. test and has a prescription for PrEP presumably obtained from a doctor can call 855 447 8410 or sign onto a new government website, getyourprep.com, to apply for free H.I.V. prevention drugs. They can also apply in person, Mr. Azar said, through a participating health care provider, such as a community clinic. Until March 30, the government will pay Gilead 200 per bottle each bottle of Truvada contains 30 pills to cover the cost of moving donated drugs from factories through the supply chain to patients, Mr. Azar said. About 1.2 million Americans could benefit from PrEP because they are at high risk of getting H.I.V. from unprotected sex or needle sharing, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only an estimated 270,000 people are now taking the drugs. Truvada and Descovy are now mired in billion dollar patent lawsuits pitting H.H.S. against Gilead. The federal government and the company both claim ownership of patents covering the use of the drugs to prevent H.I.V. infection. But Mr. Azar said the new program was "not related" to the lawsuits. "That matter will be resolved in the court system," he said. Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, leader of a team at Massachusetts General Hospital that has analyzed the costs of the H.I.V. plans of the Obama and Trump administrations, said she was "having a hard time understanding why the government is paying 200 a month per bottle to dispense these drugs." Truvada does not need refrigeration or special handling, and it is distributed free in France and Norway. The drug costs patients only 96 a year in Australia, 384 in Germany and 720 in Ireland. The company has promised to donate enough of the drugs to cover as many as 200,000 people for 11 years in the United States. Mr. Azar described the 200 per bottle payments as a stopgap measure that will enable rolling out the drugs as soon as possible. The amount is what Gilead claimed it pays the pharmacy supply chai n to distribute its drugs, he said. After March 30, Mr. Azar said, with a combination of donated pharmacy costs and competitive bidding for distribution contracts, "I think we'll be able to do better." Gilead makes no money from the distribution arrangement, said Ryan McKeel, a company spokesman. It will reimburse vendors but not charge the government for the time of any Gilead employees involved. Any tax deductions the company takes for its donation, he added, will be based on the cost of making the pills, not on their market value or distribution costs. James Krellenstein, a founder of the advocacy group Prep4All Collaboration, said the government's plan "is poised to repeat the errors of Gilead's own medication assistance program." While uninsured patients may get free drugs under the program, he said, they get no help paying for the medical exam and laboratory tests needed to get and keep renewing the prescription, which can cost up to 1,000 a year. Instead of focusing on paying Gilead up to 6 million for high pharmaceutical supply chain costs, the government could pay for lab tests for 6,000 patients, Mr. Krellenstein said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
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