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The razor had a familiar thrum. Only this time, I wasn't the one doing the shaving. I was watching as my sister's remaining hair fell away. She was putting on a brave face, joking with the hairdresser. Her defiant look said: "Leukemia's not going to get me." But in her eyes, I also saw terror. I wanted to rescue her, but there was nothing I could do. Eighteen months younger than me, Victoria had always been there, someone I took for granted. When we played as children, she tried to keep up, to convince me she was cool and worthy of attention. We had weathered much together: a move to London, our parents' divorce, a health crisis of my own. She always had my back. But with college, marriages, moves across the country, kids of our own, we grew apart. She became an actress; I became a neurosurgeon. Was our relationship still relevant? Victoria had pushed many visitors away, but invited me to fly out from North Carolina to spend a week at her bedside at City of Hope, the cancer hospital outside Los Angeles where she was being treated. As I entered her hospital room for the first time, I was afraid I would disappoint her. I was in a strange city, in an unknown place, asking for directions and permission to enter restricted areas. I had to scrub my hands, glove and gown to enter her room, a ritual I perform many times in the course of a busy workday but one that felt foreign and awkward in this new context. But Victoria and I grinned at each other through our masks, and her eyes twinkled with the pleasure of a long anticipated reunion. The years of distance vanished. She gave me courage, which was strange, because I thought I was there to give her courage. While we spoke about the medical facts of her illness during that glorious first week, mostly we chatted, sharing memories of our childhood, played Yahtzee and Scrabble, watched movies contending for Oscars and laughed. I stayed each day by her bedside, leaving only to eat and take walks around the hospital's gardens while she rested, then spent the afternoon and evenings with her as well. I came back for another week after her bone marrow transplant to be with her while she recovered, fighting through fevers, chills, vomiting and diarrhea, seemingly endless tests and intravenous treatments. She was fearless as she prepared for the transplant, enduring full body radiation and powerful chemotherapy given to kill off her marrow in preparation for an infusion of stem cells (from her son, Nick, who became her donor). Each day they weighed her and, despite eating nothing at all, she was gaining, rather than losing, weight. She was furious: She had hoped at least she would be thinner after all she was going through. I felt my sister's frustration and anguish as we waited hours for doctors and consultants to come by and answer our questions. Stripped of my physician status, I was aware of the consuming and unrelenting fear that patients carry with them and cannot shake. I was no longer the doctor dropping in on rounds, calling the shots. While Victoria wouldn't discuss her mortality with anyone (that was off the table), she resolved herself to conquer whatever the medical team asked of her. Each day she walked further, sat in a chair longer, tried to eat when she could keep things down. The housekeepers stopped by to talk with Victoria every morning. She knew their names, and the names of their children. Jose spoke of his son's difficulties with school. Victoria listened and made suggestions. She knew the nurses' names and concerns as well; how long their commutes were, how they tried to balance the personal and professional demands in their lives. Over time, Victoria became increasingly grateful for the kindness and compassion of others, whether it came from her husband, Pat, who stayed with her each day (my visits provided necessary respite for him); or from her sons, Nick and Will, whose faces beamed at her from large poster size photos they had placed in her room; or from the friends who looked after her family, feeding them every day for the eight plus months of her continuous hospitalization. Sitting with Victoria allowed me to reconnect with a part of myself I had been suppressing for years. Her courage rubbed off on me. Blood test results set the expectations for each new day. A higher white blood count would allow Victoria the freedom to step from her room into the hallway to take a few steps around her unit, albeit with a thick filtration mask covering her mouth and nose. If her counts were low, she would sit confined to her room, often for days on end, gazing longingly through a sealed window at people six stories below walking the garden paths and at the trees swaying in the breeze. I went to City of Hope to support my sister, and what I found there was gratitude: appreciation for others; reveling in small pleasures we usually take for granted, like a hot shower, sunlight, a walk outdoors. Victoria's gift was a tangible lesson, something I have been able to carry with me. Now I approach patients differently than I did before her illness. Recently, I met Meghan White, a 34 year old woman with breast cancer that had metastasized to her brain. I was initially hesitant and fearful as I entered the examining room to see her one afternoon after a long day in clinic. She was going to need me to surgically place a reservoir into her brain to deliver chemotherapy. My colleagues and I also planned to perform focused radiation treatments to two tumors in her brain that were growing quickly. Meghan sat bald and proudly beautiful in my examining room, her mother there to support her. Previously, I would have thought nothing of her shaved head, but now I understood Meghan had a story to tell. As they were with Victoria, the odds were long against her. Meghan was a fourth grade teacher and wanted to put off her surgery until her students completed their year end assessments late the following week. I agreed that it was a milestone she shouldn't miss and said we could work around her schedule. I held her hand. Her mother, eyes brimming with tears, asked me to take care of her baby. I assured her I would. As I left the room, Meghan thanked me and said this was the first doctor's appointment she had had in a long time where she didn't cry. I never used to cry when speaking with patients. I would gird myself, push forward, distract myself with new and pressing problems to fix; I focused on technical, rather than human, matters. Now, I told Meghan that I would cry for us both. My sister was present in that room, in the patient sitting before me and in the way I was newly able to comfort and reassure her. With Victoria, as with Meghan, my immediate reaction to her diagnosis had been fear and a desire to run (or at least to hide from the depths of my feelings while still being physically present). But in witnessing Victoria's fearlessness, and later her gratitude, I found courage. My sister showed me how to become a better brother and, at the same time, a better doctor. Joseph Stern is a neurosurgeon in Greensboro, N.C., who has written a memoir about the loss of his sister. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Aparna Ramaswamy is a founder, director and standout member of Ragamala Dance Company, a Minneapolis troupe specializing in contemporary interpretations of Bharatanatyam, the classical dance form of southern India. Watching this ensemble, the eye often goes straight to Ms. Ramaswamy's impeccable technique and incandescent beauty. Even when surrounded by others, she could be the only dancer onstage. In "They Rose at Dawn," she shares those gifts as a soloist, though she's not alone. This four part suite, which had its world premiere at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday, pairs Ms. Ramaswamy with a live Carnatic music ensemble, whose five members on flute, violin, mridangam (two sided hand drum), nattuvangam (cymbals) and vocals fill the space with music as lusciously as she does with movement, in such a way that the two seem inseparable, entirely symbiotic. (The original score is by Prema Ramamurthy, and the choreography primarily by Ms. Ramaswamy.) "They Rose at Dawn," Ms. Ramaswamy's Joyce debut, is in some ways a radical programming choice for the theater, a departure from its often highly produced fare: just the essentials, no bells or whistles, except for the actual bells on Ms. Ramaswamy's ankles, a traditional accessory that turns floor slapping footwork into jingling percussion. She performs against a black backdrop for the full 75 minutes and wears a single costume of red and gold silk. The musicians, facing her, sit on one side of the stage, leaving the other open for her entrances and exits. The only superfluous element is an expository voice over that swoops in between sections and tells us what to see. Why not let the dancing speak for itself? Ms. Ramaswamy has a specific if sweeping theme in mind: women as "carriers of ritual and culture" and "the primordial source of all creation," according to the program notes. She enters with a handful of flower petals and deposits them reverently at the front of the stage. At different points, she could be a warrior, mother or goddess, a yearning lover or protective leader. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
It takes a lot for C Span to get mad. But an unusual move by the South Carolina Democratic Party to bar the network from putting on a live broadcast of its annual convention which is doubling as a major showcase for 21 presidential candidates has left executives at the strait laced public affairs network fuming. CNN and Fox News aren't thrilled about it, either. The source of the friction is a deal struck between the state party and MSNBC, the liberal leaning cable network, granting the channel exclusive rights to show the candidates' speeches live on Saturday. Under the party's rules, which were abruptly announced this week, rival television networks will have to wait three hours after the event concludes before broadcasting their footage. News organizations always scrap for exclusive interviews with prominent politicians. But the South Carolina convention, virtually a required stop for presidential hopefuls, is typically open to all journalistic comers. The decision to restrict coverage set off broader concerns that the state party was picking and choosing the news organization allowed to cover what is a crucial event in an early voting state. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Dr. Raj Panjabi, 36, is a co founder and the chief executive of Last Mile Health, a charity that brings medical care to some of the most remote corners of Liberia. Earlier this year, he was awarded both the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship an honor worth 1.25 million and the 1 million TED Prize. Dr. Panjabi, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, plans to use the money to finance the training of community health workers in Liberia and other developing countries. We spoke for three hours at his offices in Boston. An edited and condensed version of our conversation follows. Q. Why do you call the organization Last Mile Health? A. Because there are a billion people around the world who live in communities so distant from health care services that they might die of diseases that no one needs to die from. These people live in small isolated settlements where no doctor or nurse visits. They exist beyond "the last mile" of the organized health care system. In Liberia, I've been to districts where people walked for two days to get to a clinic. To solve this, we're partnering with the Liberian government to create a model where lay people from these rural villages are hired to serve as community health workers. We train them in about 30 lifesaving practices. We then give them backpacks with medical supplies and smartphones connected to nurses based at clinics. The professionals on the phone supervise and coach. An obvious question: Why is this important to do? The first reason is moral: Why should anyone die from diseases that others don't? There are economic and security reasons, too. It turns out that blind spots in rural health care can become hot spots of disease. The Ebola epidemic of 2013 14 started in an isolated region of Guinea. Patient Zero was a boy named Emile. The disease spread quickly and was not detected because the early victims were so out of the range of the health care system. Within three months, it had jumped borders and moved into cities. We lost 11,000 of our people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. You say "we" are you African? I was born in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. I'm not a citizen. My parents are from India. When I was 9, the civil war broke out. Charles Taylor's rebel army marched on Monrovia. Some foreign embassies organized evacuation flights. My mother told me to pack one bag. At the airport, foreign nationals were separated from Liberians and allowed to board outgoing flights. Liberians were not. My family and I were stuffed into the cargo section of this old military airplane. The hatch was left open, and I could see other Liberians, including soldiers, trying to escape. Leaving those people on the tarmac was something I never forgot. Where did your family go? First to Sierra Leone. Ultimately, we ended up in High Point, N.C., where a family took us in. My sister and I grew up like ordinary American teenagers. I went to the University of North Carolina. The plan was for me to go to medical school and practice in High Point. Then came Sept. 11. It brought back memories of Liberia and got me thinking about the roots of extremism. I also read Paul Farmer's book, "Pathologies of Power," which made me realize that medicine could be a way to bridge inequality, one cause of extremism. Soon I was rethinking my future. I wanted to go back to West Africa and to find a way to serve those I'd left behind. How did you make that happen? I began by researching programs that had brought health care to the rural poor. While in medical school, I went to Alaska, where the Community Health Aide Program had brought access to the most remote areas. They had done it by training local people to become providers. Then in 2005, I took my fiancee, Amisha Raja later my wife to see where I'd grown up. In the wake of the civil war, there were 51 doctors in the entire country. We volunteered to work at a rural clinic. The first patient I saw, a newborn, died of pneumonia in my arms. I'd never seen anything like that before. The mother had lived too far from the clinic to get prenatal care. When we returned to the United States, I wrote a proposal to start a clinic modeled on what I'd observed in Alaska. Amisha and I raised the funds for Last Mile Health at our wedding. Instead of a gift registry, we asked people to donate cash. We got 6,000, enough to hire and train 30 community health workers. As of today, we have over 500 working directly for us. Was there any resistance to your doing this? Not from the government. The minister of health was positive. Liberia was now headed by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first elected woman president, and she was open to new ideas. With other partners, Last Mile Health is now supporting the government by helping to train 2,000 of its own health workers. However, the general rhetoric among local professionals was that it was not possible to provide health care in the rural areas so why try? What these critics didn't recognize was how new technologies had changed things. Smartphones can connect lay workers to supervising nurses at clinics who can coach them on what they're seeing. There are apps now that help diagnose disease at least in uncomplicated cases. For instance, a village child shows shortness of breath. There's a smart watch that helps count the number of times he breathes. If it's over 50 per minute, it might mean pneumonia. The community health worker has antibiotics in her backpack. A life that might have been lost is possibly saved. What else is in that Last Mile backpack? A digital thermometer to check for fever, blood pressure cuffs to screen pregnant women, zinc for dehydration, testing kits for malaria. Now, that's something new. We have a test kit that costs a dollar and that you can take anywhere and use without electricity. Within 15 minutes, it can tell you if the patient has malaria. Before this, it could only be done by a trained person at a hospital. Do you think of yourself as Liberian? Well, that place gave me so much: a sense of purpose and meaning. But I am an American citizen. I often think that some of what I've learned in Liberia about increasing medical access applies to the United States. We have lots of places where community health workers would help. Look at how much pain there is in those rural American regions where there aren't doctors. In North Carolina, people are dying of things they don't need to die from. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? Someone made me try to read my car's manual after five years of ownership. I won't name names except to say: It was my boyfriend, Aaron. I shy away from the mechanical and don't read any manuals. Or contracts. Or fine print. When I'm going to read at length I want it to be for work or pleasure, not for practicality. But he thought I should know the basics. He sees it as an ethical flaw that I don't change tires. Probably others agree. I learned I'm intractable and have the attention span of a 6 year old faced with a differential equation. I was reminded that in a disaster scenario, an every person for herself kind of challenge or even one involving minor electronic failure, I would be lost. That much like pediatric periodontists and professional closet organizers, writers like me, however uneconomic we may seem, can exist with a degree of tranquillity or efficiency only in economies like this one, of extreme specialization. Hothouse flowers. What moves you most in a work of literature? Grief and longing. From an austere place, not one that 's squishy with emotion. I like a backdrop of coldness, or at least neutrality. And I like fiction that doesn't affirm, reinforce a reader's fixed ideas or comfort him but casts the familiar in a strange light. Humor should always be present or ambient, even if sly or slight. I want to sense the presence of an author who can laugh at herself, who's aware of her own design and also her fallibility. One who doesn't think he's above self mockery. Also I love ecstatic moments, but they have to be delicate, with the right balance of restraint and indulgence. Hard to earn as a writer and to find as a reader. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? I read literary fiction most, but also some charismatic and political nonfiction and cultural history. I loved "Cadillac Desert," by Marc Reisner, for instance, and Barthes's "A Lover's Discourse." I've loved the rare great memoir: say, "Darkness Visible," by William Styron, or "Autobiography of a Face," by Lucy Grealy. Children's literature and poetry. Science fiction and fantasy, if the idiom isn't lame. Ideally the fantasy shouldn't feature fake Gaelic sounding names, breastplates or women with long flowing hair, but even there my resolve has been known to fail. Maybe I can blame my late father, who raised me on a diet of the stuff. Out of a similar aversion to long flowing hair, the romance fiction door is firmly closed to me. I did read Harlequin novels as a preteen, though, and formed the perfect mental image of a repressed, withholding, cruel yet devilishly handsome man. I do not seek out such men. Or the books that celebrate them. I also don't tend to read books about middle aged self realization involving people who travel to exotic and impoverished countries to seek spiritual enlightenment after divorce, later to fall in love with a better guy and drink sauvignon blanc back at their renovated country farmhouses outside Darien, Conn. Or ones where Tom Hanks uncovers ancient religious conspiracies via outrageously infantile forms of symbol interpretation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
FLORENCE, Italy At Gucci, people like to call Alessandro Michele the renaissance man. Since his ascent to the role of creative director just over two years ago, the soft spoken Roman has been hailed as a design visionary, responsible for a dazzling turnaround in fortunes at the Italian luxury house. It felt fitting, then, that Mr. Michele chose Florence at sunset as the backdrop for his 2018 cruise collection. And not just because Gucci was founded in Florence in 1921 as a leather goods company. Beginning in the 14th century, this city was the place where art was first seen as a way to show intellect and imagination beyond a purpose as decoration or religious tribute. At the center of it all was the Palazzo Pitti, home to the Medici family, a dynasty of bankers, popes and royalty who were patrons to the greatest artists and thinkers of the Renaissance period, including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. And home, on Monday, to the Gucci resort show. Mr. Michele chose to make that Medici palace his own, paving its cloistered staircases with deep magenta carpets and serving fizzing pink cocktails and prosecco amid palm fronds and silk parasols on its roof terrace before models took to the runway. (It is probably not a coincidence that Gucci announced less than two months ago that it was underwriting an extensive restoration project in the Boboli Gardens, which surround the Palazzo Pitti.) "I have always felt connected to the Renaissance, because it transformed everything," Mr. Michele said backstage, surrounded by an army of well wishers. His heavy beard and long dark hair were topped by a baseball cap; nestled under gold aviators that dangled amid scores of gold necklaces was a T shirt with the slogan "Guccify Yourself" in pink. "Pink is very powerful. It makes you feel sweet and sexy, also if you are a man," he offered by way of explanation. Initial ideas for what might shape this collection, Mr. Michele said, had focused on the might and power of ancient Greece and Rome. But the Acropolis was not available (and Chanel, whose Greek themed resort show took place a few weeks ago, already did that). So he opted for what he considered the next best thing. "The only era to compare to those epochs, I think, was the Renaissance," Mr. Michele said. "It was the other big step. And Florence was at the center of that change like California is now. It heaved with beauty, creativity, energy and a power to shape the future, all fueled by money." The same could be said of the Gucci resort scene. Hundreds of guests, including the actresses Kirsten Dunst, Saoirse Ronan and Dakota Johnson, and the singer Elton John many of whom had earlier been treated to an after hours private tour of the Uffizi Gallery, just across the river perched in the Palatine portrait galleries on rainbow hued canvas stools inscribed with words from a poem by Lorenzo de' Medici to watch the show go by. It included billowing gowns for a modern princess in striped Pepto Bismol pink and violet, caped, buttoned and decorated by bejeweled gold bows that were also wound in the models' hair. Diaphanous gold and black chiffon dresses, bound with winding ribbons, pleated and worn with metallic cithara garlands. And pearls unthinkably rare during the Renaissance but plentiful for Florentines with money and influence, Mr. Michele said were scattered everywhere: on jackets, on necklaces and even fashioned as a balaclava. This being an Alessandro Michele show, however, it didn't stop there. Cruise collections, which are notionally intended to be transseasonal wardrobes for jet set shoppers who flit between climates, tend to err on the lighter side. Not here. In 90 degree Tuscan heat, boys and girls drifted past in high ruffled necklines and heavy duty felt military coats covered in rich brocade, kitschy brown double G emblazoned PVC and fur striped jackets and oversize white shearling leather bombers with fringing on the arms. An eccentric, sequined menagerie of snakes, tigers, butterflies, dragons and bees ran riot down sleeves, up chests and across shoulder blades, while the sound of harps hung heavy in the air. Afterward, guests traveled to a cocktail party in a private garden on the outskirts of the city, complete with a concert from the American singer Beth Ditto. "I am always connected with the Renaissance, so I feel very comfortable here," Mr. Michele said. "It is also the right moment for the brand, which started here, and where what I am doing is closer to heart of Florence than other moments in its history. It is not about the past. I wanted to paint a new kind of renaissance. The Gucci renaissance: injected with rock 'n' roll." That desire makes him, presumably, its new crown prince. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
American history is littered with ugly examples of politicians using national crises to erode civil liberties. This time is no different. President Trump and Attorney General William Barr have been threatening to bring a particularly authoritarian brand of executive power to the streets of American cities. And although civil unrest in many American cities now appears to be diminishing, Mr. Trump has given notice that he may yet take matters into his own hands. On Thursday morning, he tweeted: "LAW ORDER!" The day before, Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican of Arkansas and close ally of the president, called for troops to be dispatched in an Op Ed in The Times: "One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers." The president has threatened to unilaterally invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to send federal troops into some cities, a move that even his current and past defense secretaries have said is unwarranted. And Mr. Barr has warned that he may turn to the Anti Riot Act of 1968 to federally prosecute protesters, though the law is so broad that it arguably would criminalize the actions of thousands of people who went into the streets peacefully in the past two weeks. What's alarming, indeed, frightening, about the president's and attorney general's threat to make use of these laws is plain: They convey to Mr. Trump nearly limitless power to use the military and Justice Department to police heated matters of public concern. The Insurrection Act, passed when the United States was a young federation of states, has certainly been used before, but not in the way the Trump administration now proposes. The law generally allows for states to seek help from the federal government. The last time it was used was in 1992 when the governor of California, Pete Wilson, asked that National Guard troops be federalized to assist in quelling the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. President George H.W. Bush sent several thousand troops and riot trained federal law officers. A 1956 addition to the law gave the president power to act unilaterally when normally protected actions, like assembly and demonstration, have spilled over into rebellion, insurrection or violence in a way that makes it "impracticable to enforce the law." The president is then empowered to order the military to step in. At best, that's a highly subjective determination, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper said this week that he did not support using the Insurrection Act to deal with the current unrest. Ordering active duty troops to police American cities, Mr. Esper said, should be a "last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations" and said that for now, it was not warranted. And his predecessor in that job, James Mattis, a retired Marine general, warned on Wednesday: "Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict a false conflict between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part." But if this week's use of chemical gas and force on peaceful demonstrators to clear the way for President Trump to have his photo taken holding a Bible in front of St. John's Church in Washington portends anything, it is that we should be worried how, and where, the president will draw that line. The Anti Riot Act, the other law that Mr. Barr has threatened to use, is perhaps less blunt but more insidious. It was cynically appended to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, a measure designed in part to improve the economic circumstances of black urban communities, after a wave of riots in those same communities. It was proposed on the Senate floor by the avowed segregationist Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, just days after the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, issued a report on the causes of the 1967 riots, warning: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white separate and unequal." Senator Thurmond and others criticized the report for blaming everyone but the rioters. Instead of addressing poverty and institutional racism, which the commission had identified as the underlying causes of the riots, this new version of the Anti Riot Act aimed to stop riots before they started. The law targeted "outside agitators" who were teaching, preaching and urging nonviolent civil disobedience. It was no secret that it was aimed at the "communists" of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and potentially even the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself. In a 1968 letter to The New York Review of Books, a group including Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock and Norman Mailer argued that "the effect of this 'anti riot' act is to subvert the First Amendment guarantee of free assembly by equating organized political protest with organized violence." "Potentially," they continued, "this law is the foundation for a police state in America." They were correct then, and they are correct now. The Anti Riot Act is vast and sweeps within its reach significant amounts of protected First Amendment speech and assembly. The history of prosecutions under the law include the Chicago Eight protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (whose convictions were all overturned on appeal) and antiwar protesters at the Republican National Convention in 1972 (all acquitted at trial). John Lennon was under investigation (never charged) for possible violations of the Anti Riot Act because of his association with a group known as the Election Year Strategy Information Center. The law was also used to try to force members of the Black Panther Party and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to testify before federal grand juries. It has re emerged in recent years, though under a constitutional shadow. The most recent revival of the law, in 2018, involved federal prosecutions of the Rise Above Movement, a self identified white nationalist group, after a confrontation with civil rights demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. In California, a federal judge found the law in its entirety "unconstitutionally overbroad in violation of the First Amendment." The case is on appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But law was upheld by a federal judge in Virginia. The defendants pleaded guilty while preserving the right to argue the constitutionality before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, where we were appointed to represent one of the defendants. The appeals court is likely to rule soon on whether all or part of the law survives constitutional muster. As Federal District Judge Cormac J. Carney explained in his opinion striking down the law, the statute defines a "riot" to include any group where there is even a threat of violence, and the law criminalizes acts taken long before any crowd gathers. That could even include renting a car or posting about a rally on Facebook. This cuts multiple ways. If you have tweeted support for the protesters in Minneapolis or Richmond or Atlanta, you have most likely violated the Anti Riot Act. If you tweeted support for the armed protesters urging Michigan's governor to reopen the state during the Covid 19 lockdown, you most likely violated the Anti Riot Act. You're unlikely to be prosecuted, but that doesn't mean you couldn't be or that your computer couldn't be searched for evidence of your associations or what else you have done online. Together these laws create a nearly limitless federal authority to police matters of public concern. As General Mattis put it: "We must reject any thinking of our cities as a 'battlespace' that our uniformed military is called upon to 'dominate.'" States are abundantly equipped to respond to violence and looting when it breaks out. And if they need help, they can call in the National Guard or rely on long established portions of the Insurrection Act to request federal assistance. The current unrest started with abuse of law enforcement authority. We must be on guard for an expansion of that authority now, as we know from history that over criminalization and racism travel together. Lisa Lorish is an assistant federal public defender in the Western District of Virginia, where Juval Scott is the federal public defender. 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 |
The movie is pretty direct, though, about the damage she can do in turn. Laura, played by Evan Rachel Wood with her usual commendable concentration and attention to detail, works for a home cleaning company run by her father (Denis O'Hare). In one of the houses she looks after there's a delicate 16 year old girl, Eva (Julia Sarah Stone), who's locked in a battle with her mother. The two form a tentative friendship over music and weed, and soon Laura has Eva at her home, and very much wants her to stay to the extent that she forces the issue, to say the least, first through wheedling, then through locked doors. After Laura convinces the police that she had nothing to do with Eva's disappearance, the film becomes a character study of one lost soul trying to engulf another. Laura's behavior once Eva settles in is discomfiting. She acts as both a gentle lover and an egocentric, vengeful parent figure. In a number of scenes, the characters are framed in doorways and hallways, the camera maintaining a distance that I suppose it wishes the viewer to take as discreet. I saw the strategy as more to do with withholding, and I think it backfires. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Verne Edquist in an undated photo. He at first refused to tune Glenn Gould's piano because it was in such bad shape, but he eventually became Gould's personal tuner. As a piano tuner, Verne Edquist spent his career tweaking the infinitely complicated mechanical actions under the lids of pianos in Toronto, pricking hammers with needles to give the sound different characteristics and adjusting tiny parts with names most pianists do not know wippens, agraffes, knuckles and backchecks. He prepared the pianos for well known musicians, among them Gina Bachauer, Victor Borge, Duke Ellington, Arthur Rubinstein, Andras Schiff, Rudolf Serkin and Liberace. But he was chiefly known as the personal tuner for the famously eccentric virtuoso Glenn Gould, whose pianos Mr. Edquist nurtured from the 1960s to the early '80s, making exacting adjustments that shaped the sounds heard on Gould's recordings. Mr. Edquist died on Aug. 27 in Toronto at 89. His son Carl said the cause was kidney failure. Tuning pianos is a subtle art, but there was nothing subtle about how Mr. Edquist became Gould's tuner. The first time they encountered each other, he flatly refused to work on Gould's piano. It was a Chickering, an 1895 grand whose featherweight action set the standard for pianos in Gould's mind. Leonard Bernstein said, after stopping in to see Gould when the New York Philharmonic toured Canada in the 1960s, that it sounded "rather like a fortepiano, or as much like a harpsichord as possible." But the piano did not adjust well when Gould moved it from his family's cottage on Lake Simcoe, about 55 miles from Toronto, to his apartment in the city. Gould called the piano department at the T. Eaton Company Limited, a department store that was Steinway's dealer in Canada at the time. As a favor to Gould, who was famous for his exuberant 1955 recording of Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, Eaton sent Mr. Edquist right over. Mr. Edquist had been on Eaton's staff of tuners for only a year. The piano "was a disaster," he recalled in a 2014 oral history interview. Its problems went beyond being badly out of tune. "All Gould wanted," Katie Hafner, the author of "A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano" (2008), wrote in a tribute to Mr. Edquist, "was for the tuner to do what had been done hundreds of times before: get the piano into playable condition, if only for the time being. But Verne refused, telling Gould that the tuning pins were so loose, they needed to be replaced. Verne's stubborn insistence on doing things his way endeared him to Gould." Some months later, the Chickering was hauled into Eaton's and larger pins were installed, just as Mr. Edquist had advised. Gould later enlisted Mr. Edquist to be his private tuner and ready Gould's preferred Steinway for recording sessions. That battered piano referred to as CD 318, its number in Steinway's fleet of concert pianos had been sidelined at Eaton's until Gould tried it. Gould "was delighted to discover that Edquist was as impressed by it as he was," Ms. Hafner wrote. Mr. Edquist's work ultimately made CD 318 feel more like the Chickering. Mr. Edquist became an essential part of the small team at Gould's late night recording sessions in the Eaton auditorium, touching up CD 318 while Gould was in the control room listening to playbacks of the piece that he had just recorded. The schedule energized Gould but exhausted Mr. Edquist, who said he did push ups to stay awake until Gould told him to stop. "Verne was clearly very well aware of his unique skills and his ability to achieve what many other technicians could not to hear at the earliest possible moment when an instrument was drifting, when it was no longer creating that harmonic aura," said Brian Levine, the executive director of the Glenn Gould Foundation. "He'd be there like Johnny on the spot." Still, Gould could be stingy with praise. "Verne took it like a trooper," Mr. Levine said in a phone interview. "He understood the star attraction was not him." Charles Verne Edquist was born on Jan. 10, 1931, in Fairy Glen, Saskatchewan, a farming community about 310 miles from the United States border. His father, Carl Ferdinand, known as Charley, was a Swedish immigrant who was deported back to Sweden when Verne was a small boy. His mother, Thea (Staaf) Edquist, worked as a housekeeper. Mr. Edquist was born with congenital cataracts; an operation improved his sight but still left it impaired. He was sent to the Ontario School for the Blind in Brantford, where, bedridden with scarlet fever as a 13 year old, he was intrigued by a sound that drifted through the infirmary windows the sound of a piano being tuned. He signed up for tuning classes when he was well again. He moved to Toronto when he graduated and found a job in a piano factory, tuning freshly strung instruments. He also began attending a Lutheran church, where he met and married another parishioner, Lillian Lilholt. She died on Sept. 20. Besides their son Carl, they are survived by a daughter, Marilyn Trenbeth; two other sons, Eric and Graham; nine grandchildren; and six great grandchildren. CD 318's days as Gould's preferred piano were numbered after it was dropped on its way back from a recording session in Cleveland in 1971. In time, Gould began playing Yamahas, which had their own tuners, and so stopped calling Mr. Edquist, who was not fond of the brand and whose ears were sharp enough to recognize its particular sound, even over the phone. "One day, I was talking to Verne on the phone," Ms. Hafner said, "and he hears my daughter in the background, playing, and he says, 'Katie, why do you have a Yamaha?' Which I did, because I loved it. I couldn't hear the difference between a Yamaha and a Steinway, but Verne could." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
On Tuesday afternoon, The New York Times announced that it had hired Quinn Norton, a journalist and an essayist known for her work at Wired magazine, as the editorial board's lead opinion writer on technology. On Tuesday evening, Ms. Norton said in a Twitter post that she would no longer be joining The Times. Between the two statements, a social media storm had erupted, with Ms. Norton at the center of it, because of her use of slurs on Twitter and her friendship with Andrew Auernheimer, who gained infamy as an internet troll going by the name "weev." Mr. Auernheimer now works for The Daily Stormer, a neo Nazi website. The Twitter campaign against Ms. Norton focused on a tweet from October in which she said that "weev is a terrible person, an old friend of mine." It also turned up years old tweets by Ms. Norton in which she used slurs against gay people and another in which she retweeted a racial slur. James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The Times, said in a statement on Tuesday night: "Despite our review of Quinn Norton's work and our conversations with her previous employers, this was new information to us. Based on it, we've decided to go our separate ways." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Federal Reserve officials decided in late January to pause their steady campaign to raise interest rates as the global economic outlook became less certain and financial markets failed to appreciate the Fed's willingness to shift if the economy weakened, according to the minutes of that meeting released on Wednesday. Fed officials concluded that a pause posed "few risks" for a strong economy in which prices continued to increase at a subdued rate, the minutes show. The Fed did not see any immediate threats to America's economic expansion, but officials indicated they were worried enough about potential risks including slowing growth in China and Europe, trade tensions, a volatile stock market and a prolonged government shutdown to postpone rate increases. Whether the Fed will raise rates at all in 2019 remains unclear. The minutes show a divergence among Fed officials, with "several" saying they believed it would be appropriate to raise rates again later this year "if the economy evolved as they expected." Others were less eager to resume the increases, particularly if inflation remained below the Fed's 2 percent target. James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, suggested to reporters this month that the Fed had gone too far with rate increases last year. Other officials have said in recent days they expect rate increases to resume, a view the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland president, Loretta J. Mester, expressed in a speech this week. Markets found little new information in the minutes. The S P 500, which had been negative earlier in the day, rose slightly. Treasury bond yields barely budged. The January meeting was a departure by the Fed from what had been a slow and steady march toward higher rates and less stimulative monetary policy amid a strengthening economy. After five consecutive quarters of raising rates, Fed officials left them unchanged in January, as expected. But they surprised markets in the policy statement released after the meeting, which dropped previous language that said "some further gradual increases" in interest rates would be warranted in the months to come. That shift appears to have been, in part, a corrective note to financial markets, which officials believed had turned volatile in December on the belief that Fed officials were not sufficiently worried about economic uncertainty at home and abroad or willing to adopt more stimulative policy measures if those uncertainties turned into economic drags. The Fed's communication after its December meeting, when officials raised rates by a quarter of a percentage point, "were reportedly perceived by market participants as not fully appreciating the tightening of financial conditions and the associated downside risks to the U.S. economic outlook that had emerged since the fall," the minutes said. Officials worried in particular that investors did not have a clear picture of how the Fed planned to deal with the slimming of the bond portfolio it amassed in the wake of the financial crisis. In addition to lowering interest rates to near zero, the Fed tried to goose the economy by purchasing large quantities of mortgage bonds and Treasury securities, as a way to encourage investors to buy riskier assets, like stocks. The Fed has slowly been winnowing that 4 trillion portfolio by allowing up to 50 billion in bonds to mature each month, but officials appeared to agree in January that the balance sheet runoff should end this year. Officials agreed that "it would be desirable to announce before too long a plan to stop reducing the Federal Reserve's asset holdings later this year" and said the announcement "would provide more certainty about the process for completing the normalization of the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet." The minutes also highlighted just how hard it is for the Fed, which does not traffic in plain language, to always effectively communicate its plans. At the January meeting, Fed officials noted that investors were perceiving the central bank to be "insufficiently flexible" in both its rate increase campaign and its balance sheet runoff. Fed officials tried to change those perceptions after both the December and January meetings. The Fed chairman, Jerome H. Powell, said in a news conference on Jan. 30 that officials had concluded that recent economic developments including slowing global growth, turmoil in financial markets and uncertainty over trade negotiations had pushed the central bank to "a patient, wait and see approach regarding future policy changes." Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." "We are now facing a somewhat contradictory picture of generally strong U.S. macroeconomic performance, alongside growing evidence of crosscurrents," Mr. Powell said. "At such times, common sense risk management suggests patiently awaiting greater clarity." Curt Long, the chief economist at the National Association of Federally Insured Credit Unions, said the minutes revealing the shift to a more "patient" stance were "certainly a nod to jittery markets." Greg McBride, the chief financial analyst for Bankrate.com, was more blunt: "It's evident the Fed was rattled by the markets and caved," he wrote on Wednesday. The minutes show Fed officials saw little downside to the shift. They show officials "pointed to a variety of considerations that supported a patient approach to monetary policy," including the need for additional economic data, which would help policymakers better gauge business and consumer sentiment. The Fed also believed that being patient would allow more time to determine the effect of President Trump's trade war with China and other countries and the economic damage from the prolonged government shutdown, which had not been resolved at the time of the January meeting. "Information arriving in coming months could also shed light on the effects of the recent partial federal government shutdown on the U.S. economy and on the results of the budget negotiations occurring in the wake of the shutdown, including the possible implications for the path of fiscal policy," the minutes said. The pause had its desired effect with investors, as markets celebrated that news with a rally that has since continued. Other critics of the Fed's interest rate campaign also appear to have been pleased. Mr. Trump who has repeatedly criticized the Fed for raising interest rates dined with Mr. Powell soon after the meeting. Many liberal economists also cheered the move to slow rate increases, saying it would help workers by continuing to buoy the labor market and potentially raise wages. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
At 12, He Had a Viral Science Video. At 14, He Fears He Was Too Rude. Marco Zozaya loves science. His bedroom wall is covered in photos of scientists. When he grows up, he wants to be a science communicator like Neil deGrasse Tyson. And for a moment at age 12, when he recorded a video about vaccines on an iPad in his backyard in northeast Mexico, it seemed like he was off to a good start. "Every single bit of evidence there is in the observable universe that vaccines do cause autism is inside of this folder," he says in the nearly two year old video. Then, in mock shock, he starts pulling out blank pieces of paper. "It's nothing." "I look back on it and see that I was actually quite rude," Mr. Zozaya, now 14, said during a video call. "But everyone went crazy for it." Science communication is the art of making science accessible, and thanks to the internet, science is more accessible than ever. More research and original data is being posted publicly online, and a new generation of science ambassadors in the tradition of Mythbusters or Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan has found a large audience on social media. But they face a conundrum: the platforms that help get their message out sometimes favor a style that inflames as much as it informs. Science enthusiasts have built enormous audiences online not only because they appeal to human curiosity, but also because they have a flair for entertainment. Michael Stevens, whose YouTube channel Vsauce often explores psychology, has described how he packages his videos to reach the biggest audience and has bragged that he could even make paint drying interesting. Derek Muller is known for using man on the street interviews on his popular YouTube channel Veritasium to expose misconceptions about science. And Elise Andrew, who commands an audience of 25 million through her Facebook page, "IFLScience," often shares science themed memes. A lot of the science stuff that goes viral ends up being "information light and punchline heavy," said Yvette d'Entremont, who runs SciBabe, a popular Facebook page. Ms. d'Entremont specializes in debunking myths around homeopathy, pet wellness, G.M.O.s and other trends. Her arguments are dense with citations, but she also dispenses a fair amount of snark, as in an essay for The Outline titled "The Unbearable Wrongness of Gwyneth Paltrow" about the Goop wellness guru. "There are a lot of really wonderful science communicators on YouTube that find a way to break down science concepts; they do these long form videos," she said. But she says the videos that really go viral are, "short punchy ones that seem to be taking a swing at things that we hate, or that we're trying to combat in sci comm or in the skeptic universe." Some of this trend may result from algorithms that promote certain types of content over others, often to maximize the time users spend on a site. "The algorithm is trying to make people react, trying to make people engage," said Guillaume Chaslot, a former YouTube engineer who now advocates for greater accountability for tech platforms. "When you have these very combative videos, it's very efficient at getting people to watch." His site, AlgoTransparency, shows how videos asserting that the Earth is flat and that vaccines are harmful were among those most recommended by YouTube's algorithm in February. Another was "Bill Nye Destroys Noah's Ark," in which the famed scientist dismantles arguments from creationist Ken Ham. Facebook has said it will make changes to its algorithms to favor "time well spent" over just time spent. (The company declined to comment.) A statement from YouTube pointed to its announced changes intended to combat misinformation. It wasn't just for the views, although he admits that aspect was gratifying. As a devotee of empiricism, Mr. Zozaya felt compelled to push back against the discredited autism vaccines link. He also empathized with the autism community. "Think about it from their perspective," he said. "There's people who are like, 'I would rather have my child die of X deadly disease and be contagious and put everyone else in danger than have my child get this condition that you were born with.'" As it happens, he later found out he is on the autism spectrum himself. Mr. Zozaya realized he wasn't convincing anyone by picking fights, nor was he doing much to further human understanding. But when he shifted toward more informational videos like an analysis of the role snakes play in the environment his viewership plummeted. "I was really disappointed," he said. "I thought I had a following mostly made up of people who loved science, because that is what I originally wanted to build on. I wish honestly that people were as much into science as they are into shutting people down." There is a real concern in the science communication community about how best to handle the tide of pseudoscience. Emily Gorcenski is a data scientist and activist who has studied how fake science spreads on the internet. In her view, snark or cheeky videos are not the problem: If people are really committed to a piece of pseudoscience, a video from someone like Mr. Zozaya will not convince them otherwise, no matter how respectful. Rather, she's more concerned with how much science is locked up behind university doors or in paid journals. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
In the Indian Ocean, Fragments of a Continent Where They Should Not Be If you've heard anything about a newly discovered "lost continent" beneath the Indian Ocean, don't worry too much: Your spots as the continental magnificent seven are secure. It's true that geologists have found something strange under the island of Mauritius, the former British colony east of Madagascar with a population of 1.3 million. They're calling it "Mauritia." But it's not a continent like you all are. As Lewis D. Ashwal, the researcher who made the discovery, put it: "It's a continent in the geological sense, not in the geographical one." Mauritia is not something people can see, visit or live on, because it's buried beneath millions of years' worth of volcanic material. Dr. Ashwal, who is a geologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa, published the study Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. But he said it might be better to refer to Mauritia as a continental fragment or microcontinent rather than as a "lost continent." So what is Mauritia anyway, and where did it come from? Remember about 200 million years ago when you were going through one of your "supercontinent" phases? Africa, South America, Antarctica and Australia had joined together with India and Madagascar to form Gondwana. When that rock band broke up and you all drifted your separate ways, you left a piece behind. You probably didn't notice because it was small. Then about seven million years ago it was blanketed in lava when a volcano in the ocean erupted, creating the island of Mauritius. At least that's what Dr. Ashwal thinks happened. He based his hypothesis on tiny sparkly minerals called zircon that he found on Mauritius. Zircon contains radioactive material that allows geologists to easily date it back billions of years. The island of Mauritius is thought to be only about nine million years old, and the oceanic crust it was thought to be resting on could not possibly be more than about 200 million years old. But when Dr. Ashwal dated the zircon crystals he found on Mauritius, he discovered they were around three billion years old, much older than any oceanic crust and much, much older than Mauritius. "The results we got were spectacularly surprising, unexpected ones," he said. The only way zircon crystals that old could have ended up on the Mauritius Island, he said, is if there were fragments of a continent beneath the island. "We found continental crust in the middle of oceanic crust where it shouldn't be," he said. Dr. Ashwal thinks a volcanic eruption from the Earth's mantle lifted zircon flakes from Mauritia's continental crust and ejected them onto the surface of the Mauritius Island. He said the findings showed that continental breakups, like the one that split Gondwana, are more complicated than previously thought because they can leave big pieces and little pieces all over the planet. But you already knew that continental breakups are complicated. After all, in your billions of years on Earth you've gone through plenty. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
LONDON The Olivier award for best director will be renamed the Sir Peter Hall Award, after mention of the director's contribution to British theater was omitted from this year's ceremony, its organizers said. Mr. Hall, who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and was the artistic director of the National Theater, died in September at age 86. Like the Oscars In Memoriam segment, which has also been criticized for its omissions over the years, the Oliviers ceremony includes a video montage of figures from British theater who passed away during the year. In that section of Sunday's ceremony, many theater insiders were surprised when Mr. Hall was not mentioned. The actor Christopher Biggins tweeted that the omission was "disgraceful". Matthew Bourne, the artistic director of the British dance company New Adventures said he was "flabbergasted." The Society of London Theater, the body that organizes the Olivier Awards, issued a statement on Twitter on Monday apologizing for the error, adding, "We were honoured to have dimmed the lights for him across London's West End theatres when he passed away." That remark was not well received, including by Ms. Hall, who replied, "Thank you, but please don't imply that a previous tribute compensates for this mistake." In response, the organizers issued another statement on Tuesday announcing the best director award would be renamed in Mr. Hall's honor. The statement said that the society "has taken the decision to rename the Olivier Award for Best Director the 'Sir Peter Hall Award for Best Director' from next year's ceremony and in perpetuity thereafter." In an email, Ms. Hall said, "Sunday night's omission was shocking and painful to witness." She added that she was pleased that the Oliviers' organizers "have responded to the family's protest and public outrage by issuing a full apology, renaming the director's award in my father's honor." The society added that it would also be reviewing the process by which people are included in the In Memoriam segment for future ceremonies. In 2014, the Tony Awards faced criticism after deciding not to air its In Memoriam segment during the live broadcast of the ceremony and posting it online instead. The segment has since been reinstated. This year, the Olivier Award for best director went to Sam Mendes, for "The Ferryman." He had been up against Thomas Kail, whose production of "Hamilton" opened in London in December and scooped seven trophies at the ceremony. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
JANE BIRKIN at Carnegie Hall (Feb. 1, 8 p.m.). and Serge Gainsbourg had one of the great romances of the 20th century, expressed through two decades' worth of sly, decadent French love songs from the succes de scandale of "Je T'Aime...Moi Non Plus" in 1969 through "Amours des Feintes," released less than a year before Mr. Gainsbourg's death in 1991. In recent years, Ms. Birkin has crisscrossed the world performing new orchestral arrangements of her late ex lover's music. "It's a wonderful feeling, but equally sad, because the most beautiful songs were written when I left him," she told The New York Times in November. At this Carnegie Hall show, she will be backed by the Wordless Music Orchestra, with a special guest appearance from Rufus Wainwright, one of Mr. Gainsbourg's greatest stylistic heirs. It's sure to be a night of bittersweet beauty and high wit. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org JEN CLOHER at Rough Trade NYC (Jan. 30, 9 p.m.). The Australian songwriter Jen Cloher's self titled album was one of 2017's finest rock releases, full of hard won insights on matters personal ("Strong Woman") and political ("Analysis Paralyisis"). The last time Ms. Cloher toured the United States, this past autumn, it was as an opening act for her partner, Courtney Barnett. This month, she's back for a headlining run that hits Brooklyn on Tuesday night, fronting an exceptionally tight band whose members include Ms. Barnett on guitar. 888 929 7849, roughtrade.com/us FLEETWOOD MAC at Radio City Music Hall (Jan. 26, 7:30 p.m.) and ELTON JOHN at the Theater at Madison Square Garden (Jan. 30, 8 p.m.). The Grammy Awards are in New York this weekend, for the first time since 2003 which means that several platinum dusted tributes organized by the Recording Academy are in town this week, too. The hottest ticket is a Radio City Music Hall gala for the five members of Fleetwood Mac, who are being collectively recognized as "Person of the Year" by the Grammy run charity MusiCares; they will share the stage with Lorde, Harry Styles, Haim and other A list fans. The second hottest: "Elton John: I'm Still Standing A Grammy Salute," featuring performances by Kesha, Sam Smith, Miley Cyrus and Sir Elton himself at the relatively cozy Theater at Madison Square Garden. These shows aren't cheap, but they will surely be memorable. 800 745 3000, msg.com FRUIT FLOWERS at Rough Trade NYC (Jan. 28, 7:30 p.m.). This Brooklyn psych rock group was named one of 2016's hardest working local acts by one website after playing upward of 30 shows in the city that year. It recently earned the same honor for 2017. Even if such metrics do little to convince you of a band's artistic merit, though, Fruit Flowers are worth a listen: Their recent EP "Drug Tax" is full of dark little hooks that are easy to hum along with and harder to forget. 888 929 7849, roughtrade.com/us | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Farhad: How's it going, Mike? Remember how a few weeks ago people were all like, Hey, I can't wait for 2016 to be over, 2016 is the worst? Well, this week the president elect compared the intelligence services to Nazi Germany, then had a shouting match with a CNN reporter at a live news conference. Meanwhile, the phrase "golden showers" began trending on Twitter. (That was fine with me, as I go nuts for very nice bathroom fixtures.) Mike: Uh, I do not think that means what you think it means. But yes, happy new year. Farhad: Don't try to trick me. O.K., let's talk about the tech industry. Facebook announced that it would be starting a "journalism project," a way to establish deeper partnerships with media companies (including possibly The New York Times). There's been a lot of hand wringing lately about Facebook's role in the news business, especially after the presidential election. The company's algorithms and policies, critics say, have helped foster the rise of misinformation and polarization, not to mention siphoning ad dollars away from news companies. Mike: Which, speaking as an employee of a news company, is something I think is a bad thing. But hey, I guess we just have to think of better ad products or value propositions to customers as times change. (Click below to subscribe!) Farhad: Now Facebook says it wants to help. Among other things, it plans to work with news companies to develop new kinds of products, like new article formats. It is also trying to develop ways to improve users' "news literacy," though how that will happen isn't quite clear. To me the announcement sounded a bit vague, but there seemed to be a real earnestness to it. Facebook seems to slowly be coming around to recognizing people's concerns about its role in the news. Or am I being too kind? Mike: I will cautiously half agree with you. Facebook is in a real bind here. They clearly understand, at least now, how influential they are in the distribution of mass media. And from indications I've been getting from people inside the company who aren't in public relations, there is at least some genuine concern that they need to balance their power with a series of checks. That said, try getting anyone at Facebook to say "yes, we're a media company." It won't happen, partly because they really don't believe it media company is far more boring than tech and innovation hub and partially because it comes with many more strings and responsibilities. Also, who knows what that could mean in terms of regulation or governmental interference. So anyway, this is kind of a half measure, which I guess I can get on board with until someone figures out a better way. Farhad: Speaking of Facebook, Peter Thiel a Facebook director sat down for a revealing and strange interview with our colleague Maureen Dowd. Thiel, the venture capitalist who was Donald Trump's only big name backer in Silicon Valley, told Dowd that people in tech were far too apocalyptic about Trump's presidency. Thiel said a lot of troll ish things he was obviously trying to get a rise out of people when he said that Trump's "Access Hollywood" comments bothered people in the tech industry only because "people there just don't have that much sex." Mike: He's like a living, breathing Twitter egg. You two might get along! Farhad: But what was really surprising about the interview was Thiel's lack of imagination about how the world could change in big ways under Trump. Thiel is famously bold he invests in crazy ideas, he favors huge social, political and economic change. He is Disruption Man. And yet when asked about what might happen to gay rights or abortion rights under Trump's Supreme Court, or whether Trump's Twitter musings could spark global conflicts, Thiel only kind of shrugged, saying big things won't happen because they just won't, O.K.? It reminded me of the famous Onion point counterpoint: "This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti Americanism vs. No It Won't." Mike: My suspicion is that he's keeping his cards close to his chest on making pronouncements on any sweeping social change. Thiel clearly made the right move backing Trump when all others in the Valley did not, and now he has the president's ear. That's invaluable. My point is, he doesn't really believe in that shrug. He just wants to keep quiet on contentious issues and not upset the president. All the while, he'll work on his actual agenda in private. Remember his secrecy around funding the Gawker lawsuits for years? He's calculating; he's strategic. He is very, very smart. Farhad: Just like us! Or me, at least. Finally, Amazon put out a statement promising to create 100,000 new full time jobs in the United States over the next year and a half. The company did not mention Trump, but the statement seemed as if it was part of a pattern of corporations sending out good news to the incoming president. A half dozen companies, including Ford and SoftBank, have promised to hire more American workers. As with the others, though, it's not quite clear if Amazon's promises are a deviation from its plans, or if it's just pre announcing growth that was already baked in. Mike: Is it cynical for me to say "the latter"? Seems like a pretty obvious way to curry favor with the new boss while just doing what you were already planning to do. Farhad: Well, analysts also believe it's the latter Trump or no Trump, Amazon is growing really quickly, so it most likely had plans to hire all these people anyway. But Trump has had Amazon in his sights for a while; during the campaign he frequently threatened the company with antitrust action, often in response to critical coverage from The Washington Post, which Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, owns. In that light, Amazon's job announcement is a savvy defense: Come after us and you'll come after all these new jobs. Do you think it's going to work? Mike: Honestly, I'm not sure, but if experience tells us anything about Trump's actions, it is this: Compliment the guy or win him over, and he'll be your new best friend. Cross him, and prepare for a gnarly tweetstorm. He's about as mercurial as a thermometer, so there's no real road map for predicting his actions outside of seeing who has wooed him most recently. Farhad: Agreed. O.K., great to chat. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take a luxurious soak under my new golden showerhead. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
COUNTRY MUSIC: LIVE AT THE RYMAN (2019) 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Next week Ken Burns will unveil his newest documentary series: "Country Music," an eight part, 16 hour chronicle of the genre's evolution that honors artists like the Carter Family and Dolly Parton. Gear up for that sonic journey with this concert special. Hosted by Burns and filmed in Nashville, Tenn., the event features appearances by several country artists, including Dierks Bentley, Rosanne Cash and Rhiannon Giddens. VALERIE HARPER TRIBUTE 5 p.m. on MeTV. The Emmy Award winning sitcom star Valerie Harper died last month at 80. She found her breakthrough role in the 1970s as Rhoda, Mary's Bronx born neighbor in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." That spawned the popular spinoff series "Rhoda," which ran for five seasons. Harper went on to star in several television movies and make appearances in a variety of shows, including "Sex and the City" and "The Simpsons." This three hour tribute features select episodes from "Rhoda" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," including one in which Rhoda enters a beauty contest but struggles with self doubt. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
That singular focus on cosmetics is questioned not only by Natsu but also by Makiko's daughter, Midoriko, who is herself going through puberty, its series of bodily changes leaving her both mute and enraged. Natsu starts to see her sister differently, as an object of pity. "It actually made me sad," she says. "It was the same feeling you get at a train station, or in a hospital, or on the street, when you stop at a safe distance away from someone who can't seem to help but talk and talk, whether or not anyone is there to listen." Cut to the second part of the novel, and it's Natsu who's in the grips of her own obsession. Single and desperate to have a child, she enters the labyrinthine bureaucracy of sperm donation. The process thrusts her into psychological isolation from her loved ones (she hesitates to discuss her desire for motherhood with family or acquaintances, lest they react to her the way she did to Makiko's surgery) and from society at large (she's a single woman exploring sperm donation in a culture where that is far from the norm). "Breasts and Eggs" was originally published in Japan as a novella in 2008, before Kawakami expanded it for this current edition. Book 1, which takes place over a handful of days as Makiko and her daughter visit Natsu, has the feel of a stand alone work. This effect is partially temporal and partially tonal: Here, Natsu possesses some level of certainty, at least about Makiko's mania and what it says about female identity. In Book 2 Natsu is far more uncertain, as she turns to her own desires and struggles with whether or not to honor them. It's here that the novel releases the narrative tightness of its first half and becomes increasingly discursive: "If I tried to delve below the surface, my thoughts dispersed," she thinks, pouring herself a glass of whiskey as she reads about infertility. "All the books and blogs catered to couples. What about the rest of us, who were alone and planned to stay that way? Who has the right to have a child? Does not having a partner or not wanting to have sex nullify this right?" Kawakami's prose is supple and casual, unbothered with the kinds of sentences routinely described as "luminous." But into these stretches of plain speech she regularly drops phrases that made me giddy with pleasure. Natsu's fridge is stocked so sparely and haphazardly it "looked like a lost and found for condiments." Meanwhile, outside, "spring came and went, like someone opening the door to an empty room only to slam it shut again." Osaka haunts the novel, in Natsu's memories of its landscape and cuisine, but above all in Kawakami's use of its regional dialect, Osaka ben. I grew up hearing my father speak in dialect whenever he was with a fellow Osakan. In those moments, I heard the incredible elasticity of the Japanese language maybe of all language the way its rhythms can suddenly realign, its tones shift. The politesse that I tended to associate with traditional Japanese disappeared into a language that was raucous and full of swagger. Throughout the skillful translation by Sam Bett and David Boyd, we get indications of this code switching, and at one point Natsu's novelist friend Rika riffs on the relationship between a narrative and its idiom: "The real thing, the real Osaka dialect, isn't even about communicating," she says. "It's a contest. Somehow, you're both in the audience and on the stage. ... Language is always art, but in order to achieve its highest form, the language itself intonation, grammar, speed, everything had to mutate over time." "Breasts and Eggs" is about this kind of mutation, this irrepressibility. What exactly is so wrong about Makiko wanting breast implants? For Natsu, it's the shamelessness of her sister's fixation that's so alienating. But that shamelessness is also what gives Makiko's desire and eventually Natsu's as well its dignity. Its brazenness, its unruliness, its full expression. That's radical and not just in Japan. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
For Samsung, a tech company that stakes its reputation on shipping flashy new smartphones with eye catching features, it was a nightmare come true. One of its latest phones, the Galaxy Fold, generated lots of attention this year for an exciting new feature: It could be folded and unfolded like a book to decrease or increase the screen size. The nearly 2,000 cost was also eye catching. The device made its way into the hands of a small number of gadget reviewers this week, just ahead of its public release. And then things went awry. First, one reviewer said one side of the device's screen had died on Day 1. The next day, another critic said his device had become unusable. Then another reviewer reported different problems with the screen. With that, the Galaxy Fold's reputation was sunk, and Samsung was left scrambling before the device could even reach consumers. "They're constantly throwing new ideas against the wall, and this one broke upon impact," said Kyle Wiens, chief executive of iFixit, a company that offers instructions for people to repair their devices. Samsung Electronics said on Thursday that it would investigate possible problems with its new foldable phones. A spokesman said the scheduled release date remained April 26 in the United States. There was also no further information about how many of the samples provided to reviewers had been described as damaged or malfunctioning. "We will thoroughly inspect these units in person to determine the cause of the matter," the company said in a statement. The company added that the main display has a top layer designed to protect the screen from scratches. Removing it, or adding adhesives to the main display, can damage the screen, the company said. Some reviewers had reported removing the top layer of the display, causing damage to the screen, Samsung noted. "We will ensure this information is clearly delivered to our customers," the company said. The South Korean company, the world's largest handset maker, unveiled a prototype of the Galaxy Fold at a conference for software developers last year. It shared further details about the device in February. When folded, the viewable screen measures 4.6 inches. When unfolded, the device has a 7.3 inch display, about the size of a tablet screen. The New York Times reported on the Samsung media event in February. Samsung lived a similar nightmare not long ago. In 2016, the company discontinued its Galaxy Note 7, a smartphone that was more complex to produce than previous models, after reports that several of the devices had exploded. Samsung had received at least 92 reports of overheating Note 7 batteries in the United States, with 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage. The company concluded that the device had been shipped with faulty batteries. Samsung declined to provide an early review unit of the foldable phone to The New York Times after multiple requests. In a review published on Wednesday in The Verge, the site's executive editor, Dieter Bohn, said that after "normal use," he had detected a bulge in the hinge area of the screen on the phone he was provided. "Whatever happened, it certainly wasn't because I have treated this phone badly," Mr. Bohn wrote. "I've done normal phone stuff, like opening and closing the hinge and putting it in my pocket." He said an object might have become lodged in the device through a tiny gap. "Or maybe it was pieces from the hinge itself breaking loose and working their way up into the screen. I don't know," he wrote. "I just know that the screen is broken, and there was no obvious proximate cause for the bulge that broke it." Mr. Bohn added, "We've seen worries about scratches on expensive phones and debris breaking the keyboard on expensive MacBooks, but a piece of debris distorting the screen on a 1,980 phone after one day of use feels like it's on an entirely different level." Mark Gurman, who reports on technology for Bloomberg, wrote that the device he had reviewed had a "very small tear" at the top part of the hinge. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
During the early months of the Covid 19 pandemic in the United States, Americans were bombarded with contradictory information. Don't wear masks! Actually, no, scratch that wear them all the time! Stay in the house! Go outside! Get tested! Don't get tested! Confused, afraid and desperate to survive, we turned to one of our favorite pastimes: public shaming. Angry people posted pictures on social media of maskless crowds frolicking in parks without any social distancing. Politicians responded quickly, blaming the spread of the virus on summer holiday revelers, and local authorities shut down beaches across the nation. The message was clear. If you don't obey the ever changing guidelines, your neighbors will shame you on Instagram, and your government will punish you with park closings, fines, or worse. And yet, despite all the threats and castigation, some Americans pushed back. Groups organized protests against social distancing mandates. President Trump confused things by egging these protesters on and at times even shaming those who did wear masks. For those who are increasingly frustrated Why won't anyone follow the rules? there is one difficult truth we have to also face. Shame doesn't work. Researchers Heidi Tworek, Ian Beacock and Eseohe Ojo co authored a recent report on how nine countries and two provinces managed their coronavirus communications. What they found is that problems and outbreaks worsened when local authorities used shame tactics to enforce health guidelines. As part of their report, the researchers offer a tale of two Canadian provinces: Ontario and British Columbia. Leaders in Ontario set up rigid rules for social distancing and mandatory mask wearing, emphasizing that violators would be fined. Almost immediately, anti mask protests broke out in major cities. Ontario Premier Doug Ford responded by publicly chastising the protesters, calling them selfish and reminding them that they would be punished. As protests continued, various public officials weighed in, trying to offer new rules that would ease tensions. Ultimately the messages about social gatherings became so confusing that epidemiologists believe it contributed to to a spike in cases. Even people who wanted to comply with guidelines couldn't figure them out. The province of British Columbia approached the pandemic very differently. Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry was the main voice of the government, and politicians largely ceded their platforms to her when it came to pandemic guidelines. Dr. Henry focused on flexible guidelines that have changed little: limit gatherings to fewer than 50 people, and keep those gatherings shorter and mostly outdoors. Masks were recommended, but not mandatory. She allowed individuals and businesses to make their own decisions about how to comply. Though the province imposed stricter fines in August to deal with a surge of cases among young people, Dr. Henry's guidelines have remained the same. Her strategy emphasized compassion, trust and empathy and it worked. There were only a few small protests in the province, and British Columbia has recorded a mere 250 deaths to date in a population of 5.1 million. One lesson here is that empathy works as well as shame in the short term, and works far better over the long term at least, if your goal is a stable democracy with citizens who trust one another. By now we know there are a lot of ways to flatten the curve, ranging from the extreme lockdowns we saw in China, to activating the highly effective Health Emergency Operation Center in Senegal, to contract tracing and testing in New Zealand. The question we face now is how to cope with this and future pandemics over the long term, while still maintaining a democratic society. We need more than just autonomy and empathy. We need clear communication that comes from a single source. The U.S. has experience doing just that, during another health crisis: the H.I.V. epidemic. Early efforts to stop H.I.V. in the U.S. were scattershot, but in the early 21st century we developed a comprehensive national strategy, with messages about the virus coming from a central source. H.I.V. is no longer a death sentence to the extent that it once was, and local health authorities offer clear guidelines on how to avoid spreading it sometimes, they offer free safer sex supplies to people who are at risk. This type of pragmatic intervention is exactly what we need with the coronavirus; ideally it would be led by the C.D.C. or a coalition of health care agencies. We could also stand to borrow another strategy from the H.I.V. epidemic: widespread acknowledgement that people have social and sexual needs that can't be denied. In the 1980s and 90s, many leaders tried to push an abstinence only solution to the AIDS crisis. But this created backlash. People don't like rigid restrictions, and they kept having sex anyway. Once health care educators changed their strategy, promoting safer sex guidelines, with everything from bus stop P.S.A.s to clever videos, many Americans adopted the new practices willingly. It turns out that trusting Americans to have safer sex is more effective than shaming them into celibacy. Perhaps what we need during the Covid 19 pandemic is a set of "safer socializing" guidelines that give us practical options for the times when we yearn to touch a friend's arm for comfort or to rub shoulders with strangers at a restaurant. The human need to socialize isn't exactly like our urge to have sex, but it's analogous. If we're going to survive this pandemic, and the next one, we need to stop shaming one another for our natural desires. Instead, we need to work together to make sure everyone has the protection they need, and understands how and when to use it. 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. Annalee Newitz ( annaleen), a science journalist and contributing opinion writer, is the author of the forthcoming "Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
THE RENTER Haoran Yang's new top floor apartment on the Upper East Side came with a bonus: furniture available from the departing renter, including her couch. Finding a Place (and a Decent Kitchen) to Call Her Own During and after graduate school at Pace University, Haoran Yang lived in Chelsea with roommates. Then, three years ago, she found a new roommate situation on Craigslist and moved into a one bedroom condominium in Midtown East near Sutton Place. For 1,600 a month, she occupied the bedroom. The condominium's owner, a retired woman who traveled often, took a curtained off corner of the living room. "We've become like a family," said Ms. Yang, who came to New York from China to study finance. "I am a twentysomething and she is older than my mom, and she treated me like a daughter." Late last summer, Ms. Yang landed a new job in her field, financial services, and decided it was time for her own place. A friend referred her to Sangmi Park, a licensed salesperson at Keller Williams TriBeCa. She knew she needed help with the hunt it would save her time, she said, and give her access to more options. For her monthly budget, 2,000 to 2,200, she assumed she would find a studio in a doorman building, similar to the condo building. But Ms. Park told her that if she wanted more space and didn't mind giving up amenities like an elevator or laundry room she could instead get a one bedroom in a no frills building on the Upper East Side. "That's perfect, because I don't mind a walk up," Ms. Yang said. "I have a lot of stuff, and I feel more comfortable if I have a separate room." One evening last fall, Ms. Park took her to see two relatively spacious top floor one bedrooms in the East 70s, each for 2,150. One faced Third Avenue. "I could hear the traffic come and go," Ms. Yang said. "Even at 6 or 7 p.m., the avenue is very busy." And the kitchen was a collection of appliances against a wall. The apartment felt outdated but not as outdated as the second unit they saw, which faced away from the avenue. The next day was tightly scheduled. A one bedroom for 2,000, also in the East 70s, was nicely renovated. But while the pictures made it look spacious, the bedroom was tiny and the hallway narrow. Ms. Yang and Ms. Park moved on to the East 80s, where the saw a building with two one bedrooms available, on the top floor and the ground floor; the rents were 2,150 and 2,300, respectively. Ms. Yang fell for the sunny top floor apartment, with its open kitchen. But the listing agent, en route, informed them by text that it had been rented earlier that morning. The ground floor unit wasn't ideal. "The layout was like a train, long and skinny," Ms. Yang said. Plus, it faced the trash cans. Most of all, it was situated just beyond the building's entrance, with its double doors. "I've never lived in that kind of building," Ms. Yang said. "The door slams so hard. I didn't want to live on the ground floor in an apartment close to the door." In her previous doorman buildings, the door was always open and attended. But she was encouraged. The apartments she had seen were generally livable. Still, even if a place was otherwise fine, there was often one dealbreaker: a noisy street, a dingy bathroom, a tiny bedroom. Nearby, another top floor apartment was available for 2,100. Up they climbed. This one was still occupied. It had two windows looking out onto the street, a separate eat in kitchen and a quiet bedroom facing the back. And Ms. Yang was excited to learn that the outgoing tenant was eager to sell some furniture. "Usually, a 2,100 apartment doesn't look this finished," Ms. Park said. "We took action right away." Ms. Yang left a deposit on the spot. Two more places were still on the schedule, but one was on busy East 72nd Street and the other, on Second Avenue near her old neighborhood, was dimly lit. "It was obvious what was the best out of all of them," Ms. Park said. "The space was right, the location was right, and the furniture really helped." Ms. Yang paid a broker's fee of 15 percent of a year's rent, or almost 3,800, and arrived last winter. For 550, she bought from the departing tenant the sofa just a year old and originally from Ikea as well as a large wardrobe against a living room wall. "Most people want a no fee apartment, but she was willing to see all the options to find the best one for her, because she is planning to live there for a long time," Ms. Park said. Ms. Yang ordered some additional furniture and "a lot of cooking utilities, because I cook almost every day," she said. Her only disappointment is the uneven floor, which slopes so much her kitchen table tilts. "When you walk, you can feel the floor is not even," she said. "When I am eating dinner, I feel my food is falling." Everything else, however, is to her liking. "I am very happy for this small place," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Andy Muschietti on the set of "It Chapter Two." As the director of a two part film version of one of Stephen King's longest books, he has given some thought as to what makes a successful adaptation. It started right away. As soon as Stephen King published his first novel, "Carrie," in 1974, Hollywood came knocking. And it has never left his doorstep, not really. Every decade since, the movies and the TV shows kept coming. Some of them were great; some were fine; some were not either. We are once again in a boom period for King adaptations. In addition to "Pet Sematary" in April, Netflix's "In the Tall Grass" and the coming second season of Hulu's "Castle Rock," the fall's two biggest horror films are "It Chapter Two" and "Doctor Sleep." The former has already scored the second biggest horror movie opening weekend ever, and the latter well, the latter is only a sequel to one of the most obsessed over scary movies of all time. Based on King's sequel to "The Shining," which picks up with Danny Torrance as a grown man decades after his father went mad at the Overlook Hotel, "Doctor Sleep" will try to please aficionados of Stanley Kubrick's beloved original as well as fans of the novel. In recent years, King has become vocal on Twitter with support for adaptations of his work, but he has never abandoned his disdain for the Kubrick film. In separate interviews, Muschietti and Flanagan spoke about what they've learned adapting King for the screen. Here are edited excerpts. Lesson No. 1: Don't skimp on the characters FLANAGAN So many of his stories demand a suspens ion of disbelief that's pretty huge. He's written about laundry machines coming to life and killing people. It can be really hilarious were it not for the attention he pays to his characters. One thing that tends to go wrong is that people who adapt King's work prioritize the genre elements over the characterization. Understandably, they think, "I'm making a horror movie, I should focus on the scares" at the expense of character. I think what King does better than almost any of his contemporaries is approach his characters in a very warm, very empathetic manner, and the horror, when it works, is growing out of those characters and is there to test them. MUSCHIETTI King has such passion for digging into psychology. In "Pet Sematary," after the young boy Gage gets hit by a truck, there's a whole chapter that speaks about Gage growing up and becoming successful and all the girls are crazy about him and he goes to college, except none of that was true because Gage was actually dead. That blew my mind. You're reading this and you're like, "Why!" He understands human psychology so well; that sort of thinking is part of the grief and the inability to cope with that child's death. FLANAGAN My approach has always been: Identify the overarching tone, and then from there you can wander into things that are lighter, that are a little more absurd, that can be warmer, colder, even brutal in moments. Andy did that really well with "It." There are other movies like 2003's "Dreamcatcher" which, despite the incredible collection of talent directed by Lawrence Kasdan, co written by William Goldman and co starring Morgan Freeman and Damian Lewis , made many missteps. They are playing all the notes from the book, but they're playing them all over the keyboard. And movies just don't have that freedom to go as far as the books do. On the page, King can play the whole orchestra, but he also has hundreds of pages to do it. MUSCHIETTI I think I learned storytelling from King and from watching films that were adapted from his work. I learned that it is possible to mishmash a lot of different flavors and tones. Now, how you reach a balance of good taste and subtlety, that's just something you learn on your own. It's a matter of calibration. Lesson No. 3: Appreciate the work MUSCHIETTI What makes the movies good is when there's an element of love. Look at Frank Darabont and "The Shawshank Redemption." That movie was made by a guy who loves the material. The first movies were executed by very good filmmakers. "Carrie" was Brian De Palma; "Christine" was John Carpenter; "The Shining" was Kubrick. The most memorable adaptations were carried out by filmmakers who had a voice and a strong vision. But then his books exploded, and suddenly everyone wanted to get their hands on his properties. "We bought this book. Let's make a quick Stephen King movie." FLANAGAN In the very beginning, with his adaptations, there was a sense of "we're plucking these off the best seller list, so clearly the movie will be successful." But when you grow up reading him and watching adaptations going well and going south, you get protective. There is a profound difference to how people of my generation will approach it than those were who making them in the '80s. Lesson No. 4: But don't be too loyal MUSCHIETTI The whole idea of adapting a story into a film is about translating it into a different language, and that language has its own exclamation points and question marks. When you adapt a book into a movie, the book is not always tense in the way you need it to be. So you need to come up with new things, and you have to discard things that are not useful for cinematic escalation. The scene in "Chapter Two" where Pennywise bashes his head against the fun house wall, for example, was not in the book, but there wasn't a scene that gave you that kind of anxiety at that point in the story. The structure of the book is fascinating. But you think you're catching a rhythm, and then it's interrupted by Mike Hanlon's interludes. Or it goes back to 1958, and you get this really experiential section that goes into each character and their minds. If you adapted the book with that same structure, it wouldn't be a very interesting cinematic experience. FLANAGAN My whole pitch for the movie hinged on the Overlook Hotel, which burns down at the end of the novel but is still standing at the end of the film. In "Doctor Sleep" , King makes it so clear out of the gate that he's ignoring the Kubrick film. And while I'm such a Stephen King fan, as someone who had experienced the Kubrick film at a young age and had been influenced by it in a really profound way, it was really difficult to reconcile this schizophrenic experience. All of the visual language I associate with the characters and with the Overlook Hotel was Kubrick's language, but all of the characterizations and story lines were King's. "The Shining" might not be a very good adaptation of the book, but you can't argue that it isn't a masterpiece of cinema and that it's defined how an entire generation views horror. My argument to King was that if we're going to be revisiting the world of Dan Torrance and of the Overlook, we're kind of obliged to do so in the language that the world knows. And like it or not, that language was Kubrick's. His initial reaction was no, he did not want to go back into the world of Kubrick. But the more I was able to explain to him how I was going to do it he said, "O.K., under those circumstances, go for it." Had he not endorsed that, I wouldn't have done the movie. There was no upside for me to be part of yet another adaptation set within the world of the Overlook Hotel that was going to upset Steve. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
MONTPELLIER, France The director is widely considered king in French theater, and is often a bigger name than anyone onstage. At the Printemps des Comediens, however, it's the actors who are in the headline: The name of this festival, first held here in 1987, translates as "Actors' Spring." This year's opening weekend brought uneven productions uniquely crafted for and occasionally by their performers. The festival's artistic director, Jean Varela, is a veteran actor, and his programming this year felt in keeping with the event's collegial atmosphere. Most performances take place at the Domaine d'O, a large park surrounding an 18th century castle on the outskirts of Montpellier, about 100 miles west of Marseille in southern France. In addition to three permanent theaters, temporary performance spaces are set up in the gardens, and artists and audiences can mingle between shows around large picnic tables under the pine trees. No production seemed more at home in this setting than Jean Bellorini's "Un Instant" ("An Instant"), performed in the park's Roman style amphitheater. It was inspired by Marcel Proust, but Mr. Bellorini, the director, wisely makes no attempt to follow the sprawling narrative of "In Search of Lost Time," which is notoriously difficult to adapt. Instead, he offers a quietly affecting meditation on memory and family. "Un Instant" features just two actors, Helene Patarot and Camille de La Guillonniere, and they played an integral part in shaping the production. They wrote the script with Mr. Bellorini, and Ms. Patarot's life story is woven into it. Born in French Indochina , in what is now Vietnam , she migrated to France with her family as a child; when her mother became unwell, she was placed with a foster family in the countryside, and for a time lost all connection to her Vietnamese heritage. Ms. Patarot, 65, is a grandmotherly figure alongside the younger Mr. de La Guillonniere. Early on, he tenderly takes her hand to help her down a stair, and nudges her to remember details of her own story. "Un Instant" then segues into excerpts from Proust, with Mr. de La Guillonniere as the narrator of "In Search of Lost Time." The text meanders in true Proustian fashion. Like the proverbial madeleine, a scent or a gesture recurs and opens up vertiginous worlds that seemed forgotten. Unbuttoning a boot triggers, for Ms. Patarot as in the novel, the image of a lost grandmother. Still, memory remains selective , as Mr. Bellorini's stage design suggests: In it, a ladder leads to an attic reminiscent of a childhood refuge described in "In Search of Lost Time," but there is no house around it, only mountains of chairs. While Mr. de La Guillonniere brings Proust's words to life with clarity and sensitivity, Ms. Patarot somehow embodies the current of bittersweet longing underneath them. Emotions glide across her face slowly, like clouds. It's a shame Mr. Bellorini has opted to layer predictable music over a handful of scenes, including Arvo Part's vastly overused "Spiegel im Spiegel"; his cast needs no help. Frank Castorf 's directorial hand has never been light. His has been an imposing presence over the years, but his fearless company of actors played a major role in his success at the helm of Berlin's Volksbuhne theater. Since his departure in 2017, however, he has found himself working with new players. His "Don Juan" was created for Munich's Residenztheater, whose ensemble can't quite paper over some of the production's weaknesses. This four hour production is a freewheeling version of Moliere's 1665 play. As is his custom, Mr. Castorf has "augmented" the play with additional material, by the French writer Georges Bataille and the German playwright Heiner Muller among others. Don Juan's amorality opens the door to transgression and nudity onstage, and the female actors are, at times, aggressively sexualized. Still, the hero in this version, played by two performers, Franz Patzold and Aurel Manthei, is more nihilistic than a standard womanizer. Mr. Patzold and Mr. Manthei carry much of the production, whether they're blowing rings of smoke in aristocratic dress or racing around the stage naked. Nora Buzalka, as Charlotte, a peasant very willing to be seduced, also stands out alongside her dimwitted fiance, played by Marcel Heuperman. The rotating sets, which feature a small wooden stage and a pen for three goats, are beautifully detailed, but after the interval Mr. Castorf appears to have been running on empty and brings little resolution to the hodgepodge of ideas in the text. A series of solo performances brought a sense of focus back to the festival. "Le Marteau et la Faucille" was initially created as an interlude in "Joueurs, Mao II, Les Noms," Julien Gosselin's 10 hour stage adaptation of three novels by Don DeLillo, which had its premiere last year. Now presented as a stand alone work, "Le Marteau" is an adaptation of a short story by Mr. DeLillo, "Hammer and Sickle," about a hedge fund manager jailed for financial crimes. Bathed in red light, the indefatigable Joseph Drouet delivered it breathlessly into a camera while his performance was simultaneously projected on a screen behind him. The young Julie Delille, another solo performer and one of just a handful of female directors in the lineup, delivered a work of remarkable visual precision with her adaptation of "Je suis la bete" ("I Am the Beast"), a novel by Anne Sibran. Ms. Delille herself plays the heroine, a 2 year old girl abandoned by her parents. The show starts in pitch darkness, as if to mimic the closet in which she is trapped. The girl is rescued by a cat and grows up among animals in the forest. Much of the story could easily look silly (how to stage a dangerous encounter with badgers?), but Ms. Delille has created spare tableaux that suggest the girl's evolving physicality, from a prowling beast to a rescued orphan. Her instincts promise much for the future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In its closing minutes, this week's episode of "The Affair" shows us a vision of Montauk, N.Y., a few decades from now. It's nothing short of post apocalyptic. Gutted buildings, flooded parking lots, shattered streets in which nothing moves but salt water fish brought in by the tide. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? The old joke is a fitting one: Earlier in the episode, Helen Solloway yawns her way through her son Trevor's student production of "Fun Home," right after a visit to the set of the movie based on her ex husband's quasi autobiographical novel "Descent." Helen spends much of her point of view segment trying to figure out what to make of the film's star, Sasha Mann, whose intellectual and artistic interest in her opinions may or may not have romantic undertones. Even the emotional climax of her segment is a performance of sorts: She finally presses play on the video her former partner Dr. Vik Ullah recorded for her before his death. "Be a little selfish," he advises her after correctly guessing she would respond to his passing by hiding her feelings. "I want you to spend the rest of your life enjoying yourself." Minutes later, the shot of Montauk, ravaged by climate change, stares us in the face. So much for future enjoyment. The contrast between Helen's serio comic misadventures in showbiz and the life led decades later by Joanie, the daughter of Cole and Alison Lockhart, feels deliberately drawn. "The Affair" has always had ambition even when it was a relatively tight drama about relationships (with the occasional murder mystery thrown in). The series's showrunner, Sarah Treem, and the episode's writers , Katie Robbins and Jacquen Castellanos , are asking us to weigh Helen's concerns which, to be fair to Helen, are earth shattering personal matters with the nearly literal earth shattering crisis facing the planet. But the future material threatens to drown out the present, at least where Helen is concerned. What image will stick with you from this episode: the sight gag of Helen and Sasha hanging like bats from his aerial yoga harnesses, or a Long Island tourist mecca turned into a ghost town? Will you remember an exhausted Helen melodramatically Googling "Can Narcolepsy Kill You," or Joanie referring to her boss's unborn child as a "carbon bomb"? Even the jokes within Joanie's relatively brief segment seem frivolous by comparison. Sure, I laughed while she begged her talking toilet to flush down the mouthful of pills she'd just regurgitated, which it refused to do because it didn't recognize it as a waste product it could incorporate into the house's biome. That is, I laughed, until I realized it was no laughing matter. "The Affair" is to be commended for taking this storytelling risk, and risk taking has been its strong suit from the start. But going full science fiction futurist with Joanie is going to weigh heavily on the rest of the characters' story lines, and it remains to be seen whether they can pull that weight. Some of those story lines, to be fair, tackle weighty subjects all their own. Joining the elite fraternity of significant others outside the core foursome to have had point of view segments was Janelle, Noah's girlfriend. Like him, she works at a charter school, but as the principal, not a teacher. And like him, she has an absolutely god awful time at Vik's funeral. Seen from her perspective, the ceremony is an onslaught of racial microaggressions. Some of these are more symbolic than literal, as when she and Noah arrive to discover everyone else is wearing all white. Others are the unthinking racism of people who believe they're better than all that: Helen asking her to liaise with the valet, who is also black; Helen's father Bruce mistaking her for a waitress; Helen and Noah's daughter Whitney telling her that dating a woman of color might be "one of the coolest things" her father has ever done. Who doesn't love to be judged based on how cool their existence makes another person look, am I right? Matters get more severe, career threateningly so, when Janelle receives long awaited word of her fate at the charter school. The board has decided to make her "co principal" with Joel, a condescending upstart with only a few years of experience compared to her decades. In congratulating her (though, really, congratulating himself), he raises a fist in a faux Black Power salute. It makes her quickly deleted email to the head of the board in which she tells him in less than gentle terms what he can do with his decision look reasonable. Uncertain of what to do, Janelle turns to her ex husband, Carl, of all people. (Their relationship has been depicted as testy at best.) He looks over her contract and tells her it's on the level, though its stipulations stink. But he refuses to tell her not to sign it, which he argues is what she really wanted from him. Always the more militant of the two, Carl says he is tired of being the uncompromising one, a sort of racial political carbon offset for her reform within the system approach. But eventually, he does advise Janelle to turn the job down so that she can aim higher and run for the board. That way, she can bring her values and vision to the school system from above, not from inside. This being "The Affair," their heart to heart leads inevitably to a kiss, though the segment cuts to black before we see just how far she takes things with this man who is emphatically not her boyfriend. "Out of sight, out of mind" has long been how relationships rise and fall on this show. With the sight of ruined Montauk on my mind, I wonder whether those relationships will weather the show's boldest moves yet. None Pity Janelle not just for her job situation, but for the insane hurdles Noah makes her leap by introducing her to (deep breath) his four children, his ex wife's parents, and his ex wife's dead partner's parents at that dead partner's funeral. Do they give out medals of honor for reaching that relationship level? None Helen has a lot of insight into, well, Helen. She advises Sasha, who's directing the "Descent" film as well as starring in it, to make her character "more of a bitch" in order to elicit audience sympathy for the Noah figure. None At long last we hear her unvarnished opinion of Noah's book, too. She dislikes it not "because it's about male ego," as Sasha guesses, but "because it's not very good." None After vomiting from a combination of bad tea, wine, exhaustion, grief and getting bonked in the head with a basketball, Helen delivers a beautifully facetious account of how she never quite grasped that Vik's death would truly take him away from her forever: "I get it, he made his point, he died. Now when's he coming back?" None "I find I feel healthier with less," Sasha explains about the sparse furnishings and decorations ... in his absolutely massive beachfront home. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The ad opens with amateur footage of an older, white haired woman, smiling and chatting with the toddler snuggled in her lap. In a voice over, a younger woman reminisces about how her grandmother's home had always been "the safe place." Then came the coronavirus. "It was difficult to comprehend how quickly everything kind of spiraled downwards," says the woman, Jessica, from Greenfield, Wis., now shown on camera. Almost as soon as the family realized that her grandmother, Susana Martinez, was sick with Covid 19, she was gone. "The president made a huge mistake in downplaying this virus," says Jessica, lamenting his lack of leadership and his unwillingness to take responsibility and devote appropriate resources to address the crisis. "It felt like our elderly have not been a priority for this administration that they don't matter," she says. "And I feel like my grandmother didn't matter." Ouch. This 60 second TV spot was rolled out last week by Joe Biden's presidential campaign "to highlight the pandemic's impact on older Americans and their families," per the announcement. Part of a 14.5 million media buy for the final week of July, the ad was scheduled to receive prominent play on "shows on daytime television that have high viewership among older Americans." In the Latino rich states of Florida and Arizona, a Spanish language version also ran. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." The campaign released shorter digital ads as well, stressing to seniors that Mr. Biden cares about their health, independence and "dignity." One six second Facebook ad featuring a dancing grandma cites Mr. Biden's efforts to reduce prescription drug costs, while another touts his support for lowering the eligibility age for Medicare to 60. The videos include much arm squeezing, hugging and multiple shots of Mr. Biden listening intently to voters of a mature vintage, presumably all recorded prepandemic. With fewer than 100 days until the election, the battle for America's most reliable voting block is heating up. Beset by crises, President Trump is at risk of losing older voters, perhaps badly. Team Biden is eager to present these voters with a more comforting alternative. Older Americans vote. In large numbers. Consistently. Regardless of whether the specific contenders make their hearts go pitter patter. Seniors are a political force who candidates neglect or, worse, alienate at their peril. In recent decades, older voters have tilted conservative. "No Democrat has won or broken even with seniors in two decades, since Al Gore in 2000 devoted much of his general election campaign to warning that Republicans would cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare," The Times recently noted. This was certainly the case in 2016, when Mr. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 13 percentage points among voters 65 and up, according to data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Along with his xenophobic scaremongering and culture war revanchism, the Donald Trump of 2016 explicitly promised older voters that he would protect Social Security and Medicare. He assured them that he had their backs. Four years on, many seniors aren't feeling all that reassured and are wondering if maybe the president has turned his back on them. A growing pile of polls show this crucial cohort slipping from his grasp. A June survey by The Times and Siena College found Mr. Biden running basically even with Mr. Trump nationally among voters 65 and older. That same month, surveys by The Times and Siena of voters in six key battleground states Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania showed Mr. Biden with a six point advantage among seniors. Last month, NBC News noted that an average of current polls showed the 65 and older crowd favoring Mr. Biden by 15 points. This shift in affection is being driven by many factors, from Mr. Trump's crassness to his heavy handed response to the protests against racial injustice. But there's no question that his epic mishandling of the coronavirus has cost him with seniors, who face an elevated risk of dying from Covid 19. In the midst of all the turmoil, Mr. Biden's team believes that he has what it takes to win over older voters. While Mr. Trump throws Twitter tantrums and wallows in self pity, Mr. Biden is painting himself as the candidate of steadiness and reassurance. He speaks the language of loss and grief with an authenticity born of too much personal experience. He oozes empathy. This may not impress fiery young voters all that much. But older Americans seem increasingly open to Mr. Biden's low key charms and ability to feel their pain. "The last time I saw my grandmother, we weren't going to be allowed in the hospital," Jessica recounts toward the end of the new Biden ad. Voice cracking, she says the family gathered via video to say a prayer and say goodbye. "But the fact that she was alone it just breaks my heart." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Since its founding in 1975, Soho Rep has sheltered the theatrically unruly and risky and weird. "We think people might really hate this one and then we're very excited about it," Cynthia Flowers, the company's executive director, said. Here's a quick look at some of the most form twisting, boundary breaking and acclaimed works the theater has produced. ALEXIS SOLOSKI One of the first plays that pushed Soho Rep beyond dramatic classics, this eccentric Len Jenkin drama had a story, impossible to parse, which somehow involved occultists, oculists and a stolen diamond. In his review in The New York Times, Mel Gussow called it "a series of B movie plots encased in Chinese boxes." It prompted the designer John Arnone to fill the theater's original Mercer Street space with outsized projections, flashing lights and a carnival shooting gallery. Soho Rep has had a long relationship with Mac Wellman, a playwright with a boldly unconventional approach to language and story structure. In this jubilantly nonsensical solo show, which ran in repertory with Mr. Wellman's "Three Americanisms," the actor Stephen Mellor took audiences on to borrow the play's subtitle "a spiritual history of America through the medium of bad language": "Why Russia? Why Brooklyn? Why lard?" One of the standout shows from Daniel Aukin's tenure as artistic director, this teasingly bittersweet Melissa James Gibson play reopened the Walker Street space after the Sept. 11 attacks. Ms. Gibson, who went on to become a "House of Cards" showrunner, turned her rapid fire language on three neighbors in the midst of articulate quarter life crises. Bruce Weber called the play, which featured a knockout triplex design from Louisa Thompson, "a verbally dexterous and neurotically wise comedy." A year after Sarah Benson took over as artistic director, she staged Sarah Kane's harrowing drama, a play that out Becketts Beckett in its vision of devastation. Marin Ireland, Reed Birney and Louis Cancelmi starred in this "astounding drama," which Ben Brantley described as "a work of moral outrage." Ms. Thompson transformed the theater into a space of intimate devastation, cutting a hole in the floor to accommodate a scene with a severed head. Branden Jacobs Jenkins's brainy and anguished rewrite of a classic melodrama played with ideas of race, representation and the peculiar work of playwriting itself. Reviewing Ms. Benson's "exhilarating, booby trapped production," brilliantly designed by Mimi Lien, Ben Brantley wrote that it "invites us to laugh loudly and easily at how naive the old stereotypes now seem, until suddenly nothing seems funny at all." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Skyline Tower, the 778 foot luxury condo building in Long Island City that looms over western Queens, was built to break records. It is the tallest building in the borough; the most ambitious, with sales projected to exceed 1 billion; and in February the developers claimed that it was the fastest selling, with contracts signed on a quarter of its 802 units, a massive supply for a single building. It represents the pinnacle of construction near Newtown Creek, a grimy tributary of the East River that connects the neighborhoods of Long Island City and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, two of the busiest real estate markets outside of Manhattan. Together, they have over 10,300 apartments in the works, almost 3,000 more than the mega development Hudson Yards, according to Nancy Packes Data Services, a real estate consultancy and database provider. But even before the coronavirus gripped New York in March, the condo market there and across the city was softening. And as the sales and rental markets cautiously reopen, many of the surefire bets that fueled the last cycle of development are being thrown into question. Will buyers still pay top dollar for proximity to Manhattan offices they rarely use? Can developers sell tiny units in big buildings, many without outdoor space, now that building amenities are closed? With so many options on the market, what will a shrinking pool of qualified buyers and renters choose? There may be no better proving ground for which projects will succeed or fail in a post Covid world than what is being built in these once largely industrial neighborhoods off Newtown Creek. The quarantine in March knocked marketing and construction timelines off track, imperiling some builders' plans and forcing others to rethink their projects on the fly. Some builders are changing apartment floor plans to make way for home offices and decontamination rooms, and rethinking amenities that no longer make sense in close quarters. To spur sales, new discounts and promotions, like rent to own programs more commonly seen after the 2008 recession, are now cropping up. And after a monthslong reprieve from endless construction, the pause has also given new life to community concerns about what should be built, and for whom, considering not only the new economic reality, but also climate change concerns around the vulnerable coastline. "In 2016 to '17, they were humming," said Kael Goodman, the chief executive of Marketproof, a real estate data and analytics company, about the prevalence of pricey new apartments to hit the Brooklyn and Queens markets. But, as in Manhattan, a number of factors, including changing tax incentives and the retreat of foreign buyers, have slowed sales just as many new projects have been coming online. In Long Island City, out of 1,945 condo units completed since 2018, nearly 60 percent remain unsold, he said. "If you're a shoemaker, and 60 percent of your shoes haven't sold, you've either made the wrong shoes, or you've made too many," he said. The problem is not necessarily too much building there is huge demand for affordable housing in the city. It's a matter of what was built, agents said. "There is simply no demand for two bedroom apartments that are 950 square feet and go for 1.5 million," said Patrick W. Smith, an agent with Corcoran who specializes in Long Island City, referring to the recent trend toward apartments with less square footage but higher end finishes. The average size of a two bedroom apartment in Manhattan is 1,344 square feet, according to Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers Consultants. Mr. Smith considers himself lucky that his upcoming projects are still in the planning stages, which means the developers still have time to change their layouts to react to the coronavirus. At one upcoming project, the ubiquitous open floor plan has been modified to create an old fashioned foyer a decontamination area of sorts before entering the living room. At another, some kitchens will shrink to make way for offices, now that so many people are working from home. "The ultimate question is: 'At what point does the job market recover?'" said Nancy Packes, the principal of Nancy Packes Data Services, a real estate consultancy and database provider. If not for the pandemic, the new condos in Long Island City would have sold in due time, she said, while a number of slow selling condos could potentially be listed as rentals, since the apartments there are generally smaller and less expensive than the ones in Manhattan. Despite unemployment numbers soaring, the buyers and renters targeted in these new developments tend to have more job security, she said. Market observers are looking for answers at the 802 unit Skyline Tower, which has more than four times as many condos as the next largest building in the neighborhood. Since the quarantine began in March, there have been just six new contracts signed, for a total of about 30 percent of units sold, said Eric Benaim, the chief executive of Modern Spaces, which is leading sales at the project. But he says there is pent up demand, much of it from local buyers, who have been waiting for a chance to see the sales gallery in person. Prices at the tower range from about 680,000 for studios as small as 450 square feet to 4 million for a high floor three bedroom; the penthouse prices have not been revealed. More than half of the units are two bedrooms or larger. Occupancy was going to begin around October, but may now be pushed to January. Stella Liu, the head of sales and marketing for Risland U.S. Holdings, one of the Skyline developers, said the prices were warranted because of the unmatched views of Manhattan, subway access, and amenities, including a 75 foot indoor pool. But use of the shared amenities will depend on state guidance for at least the next several months, if not longer. The lasting impact of Covid 19 is not lost on buyers. Gary Hirshfield, a 58 year old ophthalmologist who works in Queens, moved with his wife, Stacey Kruger, also an ophthalmologist, into a three bedroom penthouse at Galerie, a nearby condo project, at the end of 2019. Now he is having second thoughts. "Today, if I could get my money out, I'd consider it," Mr. Hirshfield said. For the cost of his 1,690 square foot apartment, he said he could have bought a 5,000 square foot house with some land in the suburbs. But Long Island City appealed to him because of the restaurant scene, its proximity to Manhattan, and the high end fitness center in the building (now closed to residents). He still believes in the value of the project, but doesn't know when he'll feel safe enough to use the gym again. Some buildings are already sweetening the pot to entice new buyers. At the Neighborly, where prices range from 585,000 for a roughly 440 square foot studio to 2 million for a three bedroom penthouse, the developer, New Empire Corp., is offering to pay residents' taxes and common charges for the first full year, almost 10,000 for a one bedroom. Another project, Corte, offered a number of "rent to own" plans, in which a renter would pay toward ownership a tactic more commonly seen during the last recession. It's possible that bulk sales, the discounting of a large offering of units to investors, could be in the offing for some developers, but so far there have not been signs of distress in the market, said Mr. Goodman, the chief executive of Marketproof. And there may soon come another wave of development to the area. Four developers are proposing a project, called YourLIC, on a 28 acre site that includes what would have been the Amazon headquarters, as well as adjacent properties. The development could be as large as 12 million square feet, half of which could be residential, a spokeswoman said. One potential exit strategy for developers is to convert a number of units into rentals, but they may face stiff competition in that market as well. At the site of the former 5Pointz graffiti murals, the developer, Jerry Wolkoff, has nearly completed two rental towers with more than 1,100 apartments, most of which are market rate, ranging in price from about 2,500 to over 6,000 a month, not including prime penthouses. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. Mr. Wolkoff could start leasing now, he said, but might wait several months before giving the go ahead. "Nobody is going to go in, looking at apartments with masks on," he said. "It was a bit of an unproven leasing market, but it was very strong," said Kevin Davenport, a vice president with Brookfield. One current Blue Slip tenant is Lia Araujo, 39, a television producer and writer. She had lived in Greenpoint for a few years in a classic railroad apartment, but decided to look for safer quarters when she and her neighbors began having trouble with an erratic neighbor. She settled into a one bedroom apartment, with a monthly rent of 3,200. She has since become fond of not just the co working spaces and modern amenities and open space, but also the neighbors and staff. "Having seen the other luxury buildings along the waterfront, Blue Slip somehow manages a personal vibe that I didn't find anywhere else," she said. About a quarter of the 5,500 units planned throughout Greenpoint Landing, which includes three low rise buildings developed by Park Tower and L M Development Partners, will be reserved for residents who make between 30 to 130 percent of the area median income, which is 102,400 for a family of three. Rents for studios in those units start at 393, and are in high demand: There have been three vacancies the entire year in the affordable units, and each unit was filled within a month, according to the developers. The next luxury tower, 2 Blue Slip, had just begun leasing its 421 units, 30 percent of which will be affordable, in February when the pandemic struck. About 20 deals were signed, but leasing essentially shut down in March, despite virtual tours. The least expensive market rate studio is asking almost 3,100 a month, and a larger two bedroom is seeking nearly 6,000 a month. It's unclear how well the units will be received in this new climate, but early data suggests hurdles ahead. Nearly a quarter of New York City rentals were discounted in May, up from 15 percent in the same period last year. And the discounting was most pronounced in buildings with more than 50 units, where the median discount was 9.3 percent below the original asking price, according to Nancy Wu, an economist with the real estate listings site StreetEasy. She calls that discount the "social distancing premium," because the data suggests renter wariness with more crowded buildings. Mr. Davenport, one of the developers, was hopeful that Manhattan residents would show interest in the Greenpoint offering, but said it will take a few months to "figure out where the demand is in the market." The condo market in Greenpoint, though less crowded than Long Island City, may also face headwinds. The property at 44 Box Street, a former parking lot leased by a plumbing company, was sold in 2014 for 1.875 million, then again in 2018 for 4.15 million. Plans were filed for a six story condo with about 15 units that would cater to tech forward millennials, said Jay Batra, founder and chief executive of Batra Group Real Estate, who does a lot of work in the neighborhood. But phone and email messages left with the developer, M Development, were not returned. Mr. Batra has also had no luck connecting with the developer, and says that the status of the project appears to be unclear. The wave of mostly luxury development in Greenpoint has rankled some longtime community activists who say that the landscape has drifted far from the city's original rezoning plans, which they believe could have included more moderate income housing and resiliency measures in flood prone areas. Ronald Shiffman, professor emeritus at the Pratt Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, says there should be a moratorium on all waterfront development until there's a comprehensive plan for addressing the city's industrial land in the context of climate change. "We're rezoning all of this area out of existence and we don't know what the manufacturing needs will be in the future," he said, citing the shortage of face masks and testing equipment during the pandemic. Jane Pool, a longtime community activist in Greenpoint, said that "it appears that our rezoning was all about building towers, and infrastructure has been an afterthought." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
What gives the work of Merce Cunningham its thrill? Why does watching it feel, at times, as if you're standing at the edge of a precipice? There was space to ponder these questions on Friday at the 92nd Street Y, at the opening of the 25th Harkness Dance Festival, one of many events this year honoring the 100th anniversary of Cunningham's birth. While the rest of the monthlong festival highlights his descendants artists who danced for him and went on to make their own work Friday's "Feast of Cunningham" sampled his vast repertory, bringing together seasoned Cunningham dancers with newcomers to his oeuvre. The thrill factor, of course, has to do with who's dancing. And on this program, it spiked when Melissa Toogood a member of the Cunningham company's final generation shared the stage with the American Ballet Theater soloist Calvin Royal III. There were also valiant performances from New York Theater Ballet, in "Septet" (1953) and "Cross Currents" (1964), as well as students from the New World School of the Arts in Miami, who danced a MinEvent (or collage of Cunningham excerpts) staged by Ms. Toogood. But it was Ms. Toogood and Mr. Royal, in a couple of too fleeting duets, who most embodied a sense of transcending the impossible. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Who knows what to call marijuana these days? Born of the need for secrecy, slang has long dominated pot culture. But as entrepreneurs seek to capitalize on new laws legalizing recreational and medical marijuana, they too are grappling with what to call it. Heading to the dispensary to buy a few nugs or dabs? Marketers seeking to exploit the 10 billion market would prefer that you just called it cannabis. Shirley Halperin, an author of 2007's "Pot Culture: The A Z Guide to Stoner Language and Life," has seen the shift in recent years. Not long ago, she met with an executive to talk about his company's products. "He physically winced when I said the word 'pot,'" she recalled. "Businesses don't want to call it 'weed.'" Cannabis, she said, "sounds like it has purpose in the world." Reefer madness or pot paradise? Read about the surprising legacy of the place where legal weed began. Like anything, the history of pot, weed or whatever you want to call it is complicated. During the Jazz Age, when singers wrote odes to the plant, it was called dope, reefer and tea. It was a drug of choice for the hippie counterculture 30 years later, often referred to as grass. Willie Nelson sang a song about pot. "I still call it weed," said Tommy Chong, half of the Cheech Chong comedy duo that defined stoner culture in the 1970s and '80s. "Yeah, I think it's the easiest. You can tell what age people are by the words they use." At Cannes Lions in June, a conference in France for marketers, a panel of experts debated the language and perception of cannabis in today's culture. "There is a generational divide when it comes to language," Ms. Halperin said. "What was O.K., say, 10 years ago is out now." Words that sounded cool in the '60s and '70s (remember wacky tobacky?) are woefully old fashioned now. That's especially true given that recreational marijuana is legal in 11 states and the District of Columbia. Medical marijuana has even broader appeal. "Words we think of today as leftovers from the 1960s are really leftover from the 1930s," he said. But it is important to look even further back, he added. Terms like cannabis and ganja go back centuries, and have long been used to describe the plant and its medicinal properties. Indeed, the word "marijuana" was introduced to the English language as recently as 1874 and was derived from Spanish, Mr. Sokolowski said. And it was the Spaniards who brought cannabis to Mexico's land, which they hoped to cultivate for industrial use hemp. They had a number of spellings for the word, including "mariguana" and "marihuana." But unlike the word "cannabis," it picked up a negative meaning. In 2013, NPR wrote a thorough explanation of the word in which people said it had racist and anti immigrant implications. In the piece, NPR cited news articles from the early 20th century suggesting that marijuana or marihuana was responsible for inciting violence among Mexicans who smoked it. It was sometimes called "loco weed." (Loco means "crazy" in Spanish.) That imagery was part of an anti cannabis movement and helped to prompt a crackdown on illegal cannabis use, which culminated in the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. "Suddenly the drug has a whole new identity," NPR wrote. Mr. Chong, who has argued in favor of legal cannabis, agreed. "It became evil," he said. Long before Snoop Dogg became a de facto ambassador for the cannabis industry, Mr. Chong, now 81, and his comedy partner, Cheech Marin, poked fun at stoner culture in their movies, playing affable smokers on the run from the police. "I was known as the pothead guy," Mr. Chong said. In 1978's "Up in Smoke," they drive a van from Mexico to Los Angeles that is made of resin from cannabis plants. In 1981's "Nice Dreams," they sell marijuana out of an ice cream truck. In the 1930s, Mr. Chong said, jazz musicians and their fans spoke in code about cannabis because it had been demonized. That's when words like dope, grass, pot, weed, tea and reefer became popular. In 1932, Cab Calloway and his orchestra recorded "Reefer Man." The next year, the jazz musician Benny Goodman and his orchestra recorded the song "Texas Tea Party." "People used to stand outside of clubs and sell tiny joints for 1," Mr. Chong said. "It was just enough to give you a buzz." Reefer, though, acquired a particularly sinister connotation with the 1936 release of "Reefer Madness," a propaganda film meant to warn teenagers of the plant's ill effects. "Marijuana! The burning weed with its roots in hell!" exclaimed the trailer. The movie caused a wave of fear and public debate. "They did it to demean, knock people down, to vilify them," Mr. Chong said. Around that time, President Richard M. Nixon sought to further criminalize marijuana and called for a war on drugs. In response, marijuana advocates began to market the plant as cannabis or under its scientific name, cannabis sativa, Ms. Halperin said. The goal was to take away the stigma. But attitudes were changing, and pot culture was becoming mainstream. "We were proud to be stoners," said Ms. Halperin, who previously worked for High Times magazine. Movies featuring smokers became cult classics or box office hits, including 1982's "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and, in the 1990s, "Dazed and Confused" and "The Big Lebowski," which stars Jeff Bridges as an aging hippie called The Dude. In 2008's "Pineapple Express," with Seth Rogen and James Franco, marijuana was central to the plot. Ms. Halperin said the names will continue to multiply as new products flood the market. Doobies, muggles and Mary Jane are out. "Dabs, vape, those are new terms," she said. "I hear 'pre roll' used a lot in conversation." A pre roll is exactly what it sounds like: a pre rolled joint. One thing is certain, though, she said. "No one wants to say the word stoner anymore." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
If Joseph Goebbels strived to create a Nazi cinema that matched Hollywood's, then what of the results? "Hitler's Hollywood," an essay film that uses clips to explore the aesthetics, attitudes and messages of German cinema from 1933 to 1945, has some answers and begins by acknowledging the perilousness of the terrain. "We barely know these films, but there is no reason to look away," says the narrator, the character actor Udo Kier. The movie recommends a look "that focuses on the details and disregards the surface message without losing sight of it." The study of this period of filmmaking is hardly new, and the director, Rudiger Suchsland, quotes influential theorists like Siegfried Kracauer, Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag. ("From Caligari to Hitler," Mr. Kracauer's landmark analysis of Weimar era cinema as a reflection of national attitudes, served as a basis for a previous documentary by Mr. Suchsland.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Johni Cerny in 2019. As the chief genealogist for the PBS series "Finding Your Roots," she helped some 200 famous people trace their ancestry. Johni Cerny, the chief genealogist for the PBS series "Finding Your Roots," who helped some 200 famous people among them Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Senator Bernie Sanders and Speaker Nancy Pelosi trace their ancestry, died on Wednesday in Lehi, Utah, near Salt Lake City. She was 76. Deborah Christensen, Ms. Cerny's partner of 23 years, said the cause was coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure. "Johni Cerny was the proverbial dean of American genealogical research," Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor who is a host and executive producer of "Finding Your Roots," said in a statement. In an email message on Thursday, he described her work as "transforming raw data into narratives and metaphors about diversity and our common humanity." Ms. Cerny's passion for the field began in childhood, for intensely personal reasons. Jonnette Elaine Cerny was born on Aug. 27, 1943, in Kansas City, Mo. Her mother was Vivian Elaine (West) Cerny, and the man she was told was her father was John Steve Cerny, a soldier in World War II who later worked in the heating and air conditioning business. She was the oldest of five children. The family later moved to Southern California. She enrolled at the University of Missouri but transferred to Brigham Young University in Utah, where she received a bachelor's degree in social work and genealogical research in 1969. She was always fascinated by family trees. Her maternal grandmother, Bertha Smith West, had been adopted and always wanted to learn the identity of her biological parents. Johni was 19 when she began that research, but it was not until long after her grandmother's death in 1972 that she was able to use DNA essentially a 21st century genealogical tool to find their names. Meanwhile, Ms. Cerny had long suspected that John Cerny was not her biological father. It was not until 2018, however, that with the help of DNA she was able to identify the man who was: Charles Owen Williams. According to Nick Sheedy, a researcher at Lineages, Ms. Cerny's family history and genealogical research company, he and Ms. Cerny signed up with "every database out there" and the process took about nine months. Mr. Williams had died in 1960, but Ms. Cerny soon met a whole new circle of relatives on her father's side. Ms. Cerny did not go into genealogical research immediately after college. From 1972 to 1979 she served in the Army, reaching the rank of captain. She returned to Utah because of its research resources, particularly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints' Family History Library. She founded Lineages in 1983, before most computerized databases and long before 99 mail order DNA reports. As a social media tribute to her observed, she spent a lot of time "looking through microfilm and toting bags of quarters for the copy machines." Ms. Cerny was an editor and author of "The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy" (1984) and "The Library: A Guide to the LDS Family History Library" (1986). A favorite research subject of hers was Germanna, the Virginia settlement of Germans who in 1718 were tricked into indentured servitude. She and Gary J. Zimmerman published several "Before Germanna" books, including histories of the Baumgartner, Dieter, Moyer and Willheit families. She began working on PBS projects with Professor Gates in 2006 as a researcher on "African American Lives," which Virginia Heffernan, in a review in The New York Times, called "the most exciting and stirring documentary on any subject to appear on television in a long time." Ms. Cerny also worked on "Faces of America" (2010) and "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" (2013). From 2012 through 2019, she was the chief researcher for "Finding Your Roots." Her subjects on that series also included Stephen Colbert, Larry David, Queen Latifah, Representative John Lewis, Meryl Streep and Tina Turner. Ms. Cerny was never one to pinpoint a favorite project, associates said, but in a 2019 interview she mentioned an episode with the comedian Sarah Silverman. "Her comment just took the words right out of my mouth," Ms. Cerny said. "She was looking at a photograph of family members she had never seen before. And she just said, 'I wish I could crawl into this picture and know what's going on in there.'" In addition to Dr. Christensen, a psychologist, Ms. Cerny is survived by a brother, Jack Cerny, and three sisters, Antoinette Greenstone, Nanette Muirhead and Stevette Shinkle. She helped raise Dr. Christensen's sons, Tim, Matthew and Jake, and her daughters, Anna Ward and Rachel Stowe. There are 11 grandchildren. There was little doubt that Ms. Cerny loved her career. In a 2019 video, she admitted to a workday that began around 7:30 a.m. and ended at about 6:30 p.m. and to a habit of waking up in the middle of the night with an idea and going straight to her computer. Her work, she said, was "very addictive." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
We can't live without our cellphones and they can't live without battery power. So how best to keep them charged? Nick Guy, senior staff writer for The Wirecutter, The New York Times's site that evaluates products, plugged the devices into chargers and came up with some answers. When I type "wall charger" in Amazon, I get 32,819 results. Help me sort it out. The huge number of options out there can seem overwhelming. But it's not so bad once you know what to look for. Our top pick for a wall charger is Anker's PowerPort 4. It has four USB ports, each of which can provide up to 2.4 amps per port. Most devices you own can't draw more amperage than that, so this charger will charge most devices at top speed, including larger phones and tablets. The exceptions are newer devices compatible with USB C PD and Qualcomm Quick Charge, but those technologies aren't quite ubiquitous yet. I lug my charger around. Could I carry it in my pocket? Would it weigh down a purse or bag? The PowerPort 4 would fit in a bag, but it might be just a hair big for a pocket. We like iClever's Dual USB Travel Wall Charger as a more portable option. It has only two ports, but it's about an inch and a half square by just over an inch thick, so it's pretty compact. I recently read that public charging stations can be dangerous to use because they could suck down data. Is that a concern? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
LONDON You would think that after years of press calls and premieres, luncheons and prize ceremonies, the whole red carpet shebang would get easier for most movie stars. You would think particularly for nominees in the running for major awards that being photographed and judged and assessed would eventually become par for the course. You would think that for someone like Olivia Colman, nominated for best actress for her role as Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos's "The Favourite" (and already a winner in that category at both the Baftas and the Golden Globes), choosing what to wear would long have been a pleasurable exercise. You would be wrong. "I have never felt confident having to do any photographs or red carpet," Ms. Colman, 45, said this month by email. "Being someone else is easy; being me is torture during those events." She was in London, where she is filming the latest installment of Netflix's "The Crown" (she plays Queen Elizabeth II in middle age). She and Ms. Colman were first introduced by Phoebe Waller Bridge, the writer and actress behind television series like "Fleabag" and "Killing Eve," while Ms. Colman was preparing for junkets for "Murder on the Orient Express" at the end of 2017. They quickly struck up a rapport. "Olivia is a strong woman, a working mother and an independent thinker. She also has a real woman's body. These have always been major considerations when we are thinking about how she should dress," said Ms. Fellowes, who also said that personal style in the public sphere was ever more important for actors in the aftermath of the TimesUp and MeToo movements. But initial calls to big name luxury brands for ready to wear outfits in the early stages of their partnership "did not get what I felt to be a satisfying response," Ms. Fellowes said as she sat at her kitchen table in London, immaculate in polished black leather and oversize cat's eye spectacles. "Throughout my entire career, I have been frustrated by the fact that fashion, both editorial and on the red carpet, largely exists in a bubble," she said. "These size zero bodies, the fairy queen gowns: They don't look or feel real, nor do they have anything to do with the lives of real women. Of course, a woman wants to feel good in the hot glare of the spotlight. But plenty can be done via a game of proportions and smart tailoring, styling tricks and knowing how to pose. "Fashion should enhance and empower women; it shouldn't shrink them." In the beginning, Ms. Fellowes contacted Deborah Milner, the former head of the Alexander McQueen couture studio, to make a series of bespoke looks that would make Ms. Colman feel comfortable, while also delivering the requisite impact (see the black wraparound gown with bejeweled shoulders that the actress wore to the "Murder on the Orient Express" global premiere). But as their relationship progressed and Ms. Colman's star rose in Hollywood amid awards fever (she has long had celebrity status in Britain), the fashion industry did something of an about face. Suddenly, the balance of power had shifted, and the two women found themselves able to pick and choose. So they raised the stakes. They decided that if Ms. Colman was going to endorse a brand by wearing it on the red carpet, it should have associations that mattered to her. It should ideally be, for example, family owned; make efforts toward sustainability; and maybe involve another working mother (Ms. Colman has three children). Hence the structural ivory and black Emilia Wickstead gown worn by Ms. Colman when she won the best actress Bafta this month, and the caped black Stella McCartney dress (made with recycled bamboo) that Ms. Colman wore to scoop up the Golden Globe in the same category in January. "Mary really listens when I say when I don't like something and takes the time to commission pieces that flatter me or make me feel strong," Ms. Colman said. The two women then drew pictures of dream dresses in the car on the way to the Palm Springs International Film Festival. Ms. Fellowes had brought along a file of Prada dresses, fabrics and embroidery from years gone by. Ms. Colman said she knew she wanted simple, with a big bow on the back. The Prada atelier set about making their shared vision a reality. "The Prada team are so bloody lovely, it's like getting ready for your wedding," Ms. Colman said. "And Mary knows what I want to hide and what I hate about myself." Thus was born the long, sleeveless A line turtleneck gown in emerald green silk radzimir plus a smoky gray silk organza cape with puffed sculpted sleeves that Ms. Colman wore on Sunday. Designed to be draped around the shoulders, it was gathered into a giant bow at the back that cascaded into an embroidered train covered in Swarovski crystal flowers. A team of eight in the Prada atelier worked on it for a total of 120 hours in the run up to the Oscars; the embroidery alone took a dozen artisans more than 300 hours. "Clothes, ultimately, are at the service of who wears them and what they want to portray of themselves, so to be part of this special moment for Olivia is very exciting," said Miuccia Prada, the brand's lead designer. Many years ago early in Ms. Colman's career, during her bachelorette party in Paris she and her friends stumbled into a Prada boutique. At the time, she remembered, she declared: "One day, when I have finally made it, I will wear a Prada dress." By any measure, that day has come. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Dr. Heather Ashton in an undated photo. She researched hundreds of patients' experiences with benzodiazepines and put her findings in a manual that would become a guide for doctors and patients. When researchers began tinkering with a class of tranquilizer drugs called benzodiazepines in the 1950s, they felt they had uncovered a solution to modern anxiety and insomnia. Benzodiazepines worked quickly and effectively to quell racing heartbeats and dismiss spinning thoughts. The dozen or so different types including Xanax, Valium, Ativan and Klonopin became the most frequently prescribed drugs around the world, even as concerns arose about their potential side effects and addictive properties. "Patients themselves, and not the medical profession, were the first to realize that long term use of benzodiazepines can cause problems," wrote Dr. Heather Ashton, a British psychopharmacologist. She said that patients who had been on the medications for months or years would come to her with fears that the drugs were making them more ill. Some continued to have symptoms of depression or anxiety. Others had developed muscle weakness, memory lapses, or heart or digestive issues. Dr. Ashton would dedicate much of her career to listening to hundreds of patients' experiences and rigorously collecting data. The result of her work, in 1999, was "Benzodiazepines: How They Work And How To Withdraw." Now known simply as "The Ashton Manual," it has become a cornerstone for those looking to quit the drugs safely. Addiction researchers worldwide still cite it in studies on benzodiazepines. And patient support groups have translated and distributed it in about a dozen languages. Dr. Ashton died on Sept. 15, 2019, at her home in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. She was 90. Her death, which had not been widely reported, was confirmed by her son John. "Benzodiazepines: How They Work and How to Withdraw," better known as "The Ashton Manual," has become a cornerstone for those looking to quit anxiety drugs safely. "Heather was a remarkable person," Nicol Ferrier, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Newcastle University who worked closely with Dr. Ashton, said in an interview. "She was very upset by this problem of benzodiazepine dependence that was essentially caused by doctors overprescribing the medications, and she took it upon herself to help patients struggling to withdraw from them." From 1982 to 1994, Dr. Ashton ran a benzodiazepine withdrawal clinic at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, tailoring her tapering schedules for each patient. She acknowledged that benzodiazepines could be useful in the short term, but said that they should not be taken for longer than two to four weeks. Long term use, she found, often led to physical dependence. The brain adapted to the sedative effect of the drugs to the point where patients would pop a calming pill just to treat the symptoms of withdrawal since the previous dose. Patients who tried to quit cold turkey faced extreme restlessness, irritability, insomnia, muscle tension, racing heartbeats and other debilitating symptoms. Dr. Ashton concluded that people needed to slowly reduce the dose of their medication, sometimes over the course of six months or more. She explained this strategy in her manual, using examples from patients she had treated herself. "Her work both honored her patients and turned out to be more helpful than any randomized, controlled trial," said Dr. Anna Lembke, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, where she leads the school's Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Dr. Ashton's work was also timely. Scientists were starting to realize that patients who became dependent on benzodiazepines often misused opioids as well. One study found that the overdose death rate among patients taking both benzodiazepines and opioids was 10 times higher than among those who only took opioids. But unlike opioid prescriptions, which started declining after 2012, benzodiazepine prescriptions continued to rise. Doctors still had limited awareness of benzodiazepines' addictive potential and some patients could continue on the same steady dose for years without exhibiting any symptoms or obvious changes in behavior. "If patients take them only as prescribed by their doctor, then they don't meet criteria for addiction, because addiction involves behaviors that correspond to compulsive drug seeking," Dr. Lembke said. "But really, if you look at what's happening in the brain, it's probably not that different." In 2013, the British National Formulary, which advises doctors on prescribing practices, updated its guidelines to recommend benzodiazepines for short term use only and to suggest a withdrawal schedule based on Dr. Ashton's manual. In 2018, it revised its recommendations again to suggest an even slower withdrawal, based on evidence that Dr. Ashton and other researchers had collected. The United States followed suit, with the Food and Drug Administration requiring that all benzodiazepines carry a so called black box warning about the drugs' side effects, and that doctors check their state's prescription drug monitoring program to see whether a patient had been given any federally controlled and addictive medications in the past 12 months. "Basically, we now recommend using the same kind of interventions that are used to address the opioid crisis to address the benzodiazepine overprescribing crisis," Dr. Lembke said. "Dr. Ashton was the vanguard of that change." Chrystal Heather Champion was born on July 11, 1929, in Dehradun, India, to Harry Champion, a forester, and Chrystal (Parsons) Champion. Her parents sent her to boarding school in England when she was 6, but in 1939, during World War II, she and her older brother, Jim, were among millions of children evacuated from Britain to live with relatives and foster families overseas. The two ended up in the care of John and Obi Marshall in West Chester, Pa. They became a second family, and Heather remained in close touch with the Marshalls for the rest of her life. She returned to England in 1945 and went on to study medicine at the University of Oxford. After graduating, she married John Ashton and moved to London, where he worked as an economist for the Ministry of Agriculture. They moved to Newcastle in 1964, when John was appointed a professor of agricultural economics at Newcastle University. Dr. Ashton was hired by the university's department of pharmacological sciences, where she developed her expertise in psychoactive drugs. In addition to benzodiazepines, she conducted several studies on the effects of nicotine and cannabis in the brain, and was among the earliest researchers to use electroencephalography to understand changes in neural activity. She took great pains to avoid any conflict of interest that might undermine people's trust in her work or profession. She scrupulously declined support of any kind from the pharmaceutical industry. Even after she retired, Dr. Ashton continued publishing original research, seeing patients and teaching medical students. She also remained active on the executive committee of the North East Council on Addiction and would answer requests for advice on benzodiazepine dependence that poured in from around the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
BRIGHTON, England Anna Burns sounded almost giddy one recent Monday as we sat in a restaurant here in Brighton, on England's southern coast. The week before she had won the Man Booker Prize for "Milkman," her third novel, about an unnamed 18 year old coerced into a relationship at the height of Northern Ireland's Troubles. The win wasn't the only reason for her excitement. "I can feel I'm on the cusp of something," she said. Burns suffers from "lower back and nerve pain," she said, the result of a botched operation. "Nerves pain," she suddenly added, correcting herself. "There's plenty of nerves involved." Thanks to the Booker, which includes a 64,000 prize, she may get treatment in Germany without having to worry about the cost. "If it's successful, I'll be able to write again," she said. "I haven't written in four and a half years." The last writing she did was finishing "Milkman," a process that dragged out for months because of the pain. She had tried standing desks, she said. And various chairs. "But it's not just the physical pain. It's the whole emotional stress that goes with it." "Can we just move off the health?" she added with an awkward laugh. She then got out of the chair and leaned against a pillar to make herself more comfortable. "Don't worry, I do this a lot," she said. Burns is one of the more surprising recent winners of the Booker, one of literature's biggest awards. "Milkman" was this year's outsider, up against Richard Powers' ecological epic "The Overstory" and Esi Edugyan's heralded slavery era "Washington Black," among others. It was also labeled an "experimental novel" because its characters are nameless and its paragraphs sometimes run for several pages. Her victory provoked think pieces about the "bold choice." "I don't understand," said Burns, when asked why it had picked up such an awkward label. "Is it the whole nameless thing? Is it really difficult? The book just didn't want names." (The tag does not seem to have put many off buying it. Faber, her British publisher, has sold over 350,000 copies so far. The book will be published by Graywolf Press in the United States on Dec. 4.) But even with the fuss around it, Burns's victory touched many with her honesty about what the prize meant to her financially ("I will pay my debts," she told the BBC the morning after her win). In the acknowledgments section of "Milkman," she thanks her local food bank, which she has relied on to get by; Homelink, a charity that gave her a low interest loan to pay her rent; and Britain's "Housing and Council Tax Benefit system." "Milkman" tells the story of "Middle Sister," who stands out in her neighborhood for her habit of reading while walking ("Are you saying it's okay for him to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read 'Jane Eyre' in public?'" she asks at one point). The "Milkman" of the title is an apparent paramilitary, who stalks Middle Sister, insinuates he'll murder her "Maybe Boyfriend" and talks himself into her life. The book is told from Middle Sister's perspective, most of which are the thoughts rushing through her head as events force themselves upon her. The book is filled with an oppressive air, giving a distinct impression of what parts of Belfast were like in the '70s but also a surprising amount of humor. Kwame Anthony Appiah, the chairman of this year's Booker judges, said its focus on men abusing power and what happens when rumors spiral out of control gives it wide resonance. But "Milkman" also stood out thanks to Burns's unique voice. "There are moments when I had to read it out loud, just for the pleasure of it, the way it sounds," he said. He read it in a bad Ulster accent. Burns Denies That She Is 'Middle Sister' Burns denies "Middle Sister" is her "All we share is the reading while walking," she said but it is easy for a reader to jump to conclusions based on Burns' life story. Burns, 56, grew up in a working class family in Ardoyne, a mainly Roman Catholic district of Belfast. She lived with her aunt across the road from her parents and six siblings. "I'd go over to the house so I had all that rowdiness, which was important, then I'd go back to my aunt's for the quietness," she said. The Troubles started when she was 6, and that forms the backdrop for her novels. (A writer and former senior member of the Sinn Fein political party dismissed her debut novel, "No Bones," as a "misanthropic portrayal of the nationalist people" of Ardoyne). "There was an awful lot of violence, shocking amount of violence, apart from the Troubles," Burns said when asked about her childhood. "Just adults fighting in the street with each other over anything, and children fighting and dogs biting anybody. And then of course they'd be bloodstains all over the place." She remembers petrol bombs being stacked at the entrances to certain areas and riots on her way to and from school. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
When last we checked on the platypus, it was confounding our expectations of mammals with its webbed feet, duck like bill and laying of eggs. More than that, it was producing venom. Now it turns out that even its drab seeming coat has been hiding a secret when you turn on the blacklights, it starts to glow. As noted last month in the journal Mammalia, shining an ultraviolet light on a platypus makes the animal's fur fluoresce with a greenish blue tint. They're one of the few mammals known to exhibit this trait. And we're still in the dark about why they do it if there is a reason at all. For most humans, ultraviolet light exists outside of the visible spectrum. But certain pigments can absorb it, drain off some of its energy, and re emit what remains as a color that people can see. Many man made things contain such pigments, including white T shirts, Froot Loops and petroleum jelly. A lot of living things do, too. Scorpions, lichens and puffin beaks all pop under UV light. Blue light, which is a notch away from ultraviolet, makes the undersea world look like an indoor mini golf course, and causes dozens of types of amphibians to glow green. Mammals, though, seem to have generally gotten the short end of this paintbrush: So far, not many have been found to have coats or skin that fluoresce. But there are exceptions, all among nocturnal creatures. In the 1980s, for example, a few researchers uncovered a rainbow of opossums. Then one night a few years ago, Jonathan Martin, an associate professor of forestry at Northland College in Ashland, Wis., was exploring the woods behind his house with a UV flashlight when he saw that a flying squirrel at his bird feeder appeared bright pink. Dr. Martin and a few colleagues went to the Field Museum in Chicago to confirm that finding in some preserved specimens. It turns out all three North American flying squirrel species give off a bubble gum glow under UV light. After checking with the museum's staff, the team went down to the basement, found the platypus cabinet, and flipped on their special lights. "And sure enough," Dr. Olson said. They were eventually able to examine three platypuses: a male and a female at the Field Museum, and another male from the University of Nebraska State Museum. All gave off the same cool glow. So did a road killed platypus, discovered by a blacklight wielding mycologist in northeast Australia this summer. Despite the sad circumstances of the finding, "we were elated to know that it was verified in a wild specimen," Dr. Olson said. So why would a platypus fluoresce? Other instances of life form Lite Brite serve a clear purpose. Bioluminescence, for example, helps ocean creatures lure prey and find each other in the depths. And hummingbirds get information from the ultraviolet hues that some flowers reflect. Fluorescence, though, is a bit more opaque. Because it's a natural property of certain materials, "just finding fluorescence doesn't mean it has any particular purpose," said Sonke Johnsen, a sensory biologist at Duke University who was not involved with the study. Instead, he said, that glow could be incidental "just something that's there because it's there." It's unknown whether platypuses can perceive either UV rays or fluorescence, especially in natural light. One theory is that by absorbing and transforming UV light rather than reflecting it, platypuses can better hide from UV sensitive predators. But this is just a hypothesis, Dr. Olson said: "Our main goal is to document this trait," in hopes that future research might shed more light. For now, his group plans to strategically investigate other nocturnal mammals, to see if they can add to their list. They may have opened a few more museum cabinets already. "Stay tuned," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The California Fur Ban and What It Means for You So California has become the first state to ban fur. This sounds draconian. What does that actually mean? It is true that on Friday the state's governor, Gavin Newsom, signed AB44 into law, which bans sales of new clothing and accessories (handbags, shoes, pompoms, key chains, you know) made of fur. But that does not mean that California is saying sayonara to all fur. For the purpose of the law, fur is defined as "animal skin or part thereof with hair, fleece or fur fibers attached thereto." For the purposes of shoppers, that means mink, sable, chinchilla, lynx, fox, rabbit, beaver, coyote and other luxury furs. Exceptions have been made for cowhide, deerskin, sheepskin and goatskin. Which means that shearling is totally fine. Exceptions have also been made for religious observances (shtreimels, the fur hats often worn by Hasidic Jews, can continue to be sold) and other traditional or cultural purposes. Fur that is already in circulation can remain in circulation. So your grandmother's astrakhan stole is safe. So is any aviator jacket . But how will anyone know if the fur you are wearing is old or new? The law is really about the selling of fur, not the wearing of fur. After all, it is perfectly legal for any California resident to travel to, say, Las Vegas, buy a big fur coat and show it off back home. Some fur partisans are nonetheless concerned that because it is hard to tell what is new fur and what is old fur, they will be ostracized or otherwise seen as having done something illegal if they appear in public in a fur garment. That is a legitimate worry. What happens if a retailer cheats? If retailers break the law, they risk incurring civil penalties, including a fine of up to 500 for a first offense and 1,000 for multiple offenses. I've been hearing about various fur bans for a while. This isn't the first one, is it? California is the first state to ban fur, but it is following the lead of a number of its own municipalities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Berkeley. A variety of countries have banned fur farming, including Serbia, Luxembourg, Belgium, Norway, Germany and the Czech Republic. And similar bills banning fur sales have been introduced in New York City and Hawaii, though they have yet to become law. Really? New York City could be next? A bill was proposed in New York last March by the City Council speaker Corey Johnson, but since then conversation has gone pretty quiet. It is fair to say, though, that the momentum is with the movement. Not really. Over the last year numerous brands have jumped on the no fur bandwagon, including Stella McCartney, Gucci, Versace, Coach, Chanel, Prada, Burberry, Michael Kors, Giorgio Armani and Tom Ford. H M, which is not exactly a haven of mink coats, has said it will no longer use mohair. One of the few holdouts is Fendi, which began life as a fur house, still has five outlets in California that sell fur and even has "haute fourrure" fashion shows once a year during couture. (Fendi did not respond to requests for comment on the ban.) Still, all of this just say no to fur is not quite the sacrifice it sounds, since for many brands fur makes up a very small percentage of sales (at Coach, for example, fur accounted for less than 1 percent of its business). In California, it was an especially tiny percentage. This is true for department stores, too. Saks does not even have a dedicated fur salon in its California stores. On the other hand, fur is still popular in Miami. Cameron Silver of the vintage store Decades said in an email that while there was "a waning interest" in fur in California, "preloved fur pieces" tend to be the first to sell at trunk shows across the country. "I was just in Chattanooga, and on a 99 degree day two 1980s era fur jackets sold within minutes," he said. So geography does play a role. Why is all this happening now? The anti fur movement has been growing for a while, but between the general conversation about the climate crisis, a raft of books like "Eating Animals," by Jonathan Safran Foer, and the sense that fur feels very last century, and contrary to millennial value systems, consumer sentiment has begun to swing against it. And whither consumers, so, too, those that sell to them. It makes sense, so what are the arguments against it? They range from fur being a meaningful part of national industry generating 1.5 billion at retail in the United States, according to the Fur Information Council of America, and accounting for more than 32,000 full time jobs to the fact that many of the fake alternatives are made from petroleum and other plastic based synthetics and are generally regarded as entirely disposable, which means they end up in landfill, which means fake fur is probably worse for the environment than real fur, which is almost never thrown away. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
On Tuesday night in Brooklyn, Rihanna made her bid for global underwear domination. It took place in the Barclays Center, against a gigantic set that was part stairway to heaven, part Roman Colosseum, part "Chicago" (the Bob Fosse version) and part "Laugh In," with a reflecting pool in the middle. It involved famous singers , famous models in little lace nothings and stiletto heels. There was a lot of writhing, twerking and in your face sexting choreography. Legs were thrust up and out. Groins were grabbed. Breasts and butts were weaponized. There were bodies of many shapes and many heights and sizes and colors, wearing an assortment of thongs, bras, boy briefs, bodysuits, baby dolls and camisoles, also in many colors and sometimes draped in rhinestone chains. Some abs looked as if they could crack walnuts. Others like a feather mattress. Halsey sang and wore a teeny black robe. Laverne Cox and Normani gyrated in undies. Migos, ASAP Ferg, Big Sean and DJ Khaled seemed to be modeling their own clothes. Rihanna herself appeared on a pedestal in the opening number in a black sheer bodysuit, bra, strategically draped micro skirt and lots of attitude. At the end, she reappeared in a long gown to accept the adoring applause of her populace (sorry, audience). This was the Savage x Fenty show. The whole thing was filmed for Amazon Prime, and all the attendees' phones were put in little locked neoprene pouches so they couldn't take pictures and ruin the surprise. Cameramen skipped around the stage and ran through the water like renegade Pac Men to record it for posterity (or at least streaming): the moment when Savage x Fenty (not to be confused with Fenty, the fashion line Rihanna has with LVMH) finally crushed the flailing Victoria's Secret beneath its high stomping, all inclusive, woman driven feet. Which it pretty much did. But it is really so different? Or are we simply trading one kind of sexploitation for another? The surprise of the event wasn't how disruptive and mind altering it was. The surprise was how familiar. Rihanna has just sampled the VS playbook and set it to her own tune updated the music, the action, the platform, and the message and stadium sized it. But don't be fooled: The ingredients are the same. She even had many of the same models who once walked with great excitement for VS, including Gigi and Bella Hadid, Joan Smalls, and Cara Delevingne. They have just switched allegiances, and instead of fluffing their hair with a big smile, they are now rubbing their hands all over their bodies with a pout. Instead of wearing wings, they are wearing Cleopatra armbands. They know which way the wind is blowing. Last year, in its drive to justify its show, VS included videos with the models in which they talked about how "empowered" and "strong" strutting around in their fashion undies made them feel; how it gave them ownership over their bodies. It made people giggle. Rihanna is selling the same idea, albeit more convincingly and to the benefit not of a faceless corporation dominated by older white men, but to a young woman who made her own success. The "who profits?" thing matters, especially because her sell doesn't discriminate based on size. And maybe that's a big enough leap forward. But her show is still as much about the male gaze as the female. The difference is that whereas the VS women always seemed to serve that gaze at its most banal common denominators (sometimes literally, in naughty maid costumes), Rihanna's women own it, manipulate it and crush it between their thighs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
New Convertibles Invite Drivers to Come Out and Play CONVERTIBLE makers and fans might be forgiven for humming a few bars of "Here Comes the Sun." Sports car sales went as cold as the economy during the recession. But with Americans shopping for shiny toys again, carmakers are tempting them with perhaps the most frivolous plaything of all: the sun soaked, optimism streaked convertible. The Chevrolet Corvette Stingray and Ford Mustang, those American stalwarts, have new convertible versions, including the Corvette's 650 horsepower Z06 edition, among the most powerful droptops in history. An all new Chevy Camaro convertible joins them next year. Jaguar's rakish F Type, in convertible or coupe form, is the British carmaker's first two seat sports car in 40 years. The Alfa Romeo 4C Spider, with its Ferrariesque curves, is the debutante in Alfa's ambitious plan to reintroduce its Italian cars to American society. Mercedes Benz is readying an al fresco version of its AMG GT sports car, and BMW's 4 Series is off to a strong sales start. A redesigned Mini Cooper convertible arrives in 2016. Perhaps no convertible is whetting appetites like the Mazda MX 5 Miata, whose fourth generation model reaches showrooms in July. Introduced as a 1990 model, the original, 14,069 Miata kicked off a golden age of convertibles, capturing the spirit of classic British and Italian roadsters the Lotus Elan, Triumphs, MGs and Alfas only with vastly superior Japanese quality. The Miata found nearly 36,000 buyers in 1990, still its best sales year ever. Its revolutionary success spawned a wave of mostly pricier imitators from BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Audi, Pontiac and others. But between the recession and the growing indifference to hair mussing transport, Miata sales slowed to a trickle, along with those of other droptops: From a peak of nearly 420,000 cars in 2001, Americans bought fewer than 150,000 convertibles on average during recession years. "Die hards stayed with the segment, but the casual convertible buyer moved away, especially as S.U.V.s gained in popularity," said Jeff Schuster, senior vice president for forecasting at LMC Automotive. Count Mark Booth among the die hards. Mr. Booth, co founder of the San Diego Miata Club, plunked down a deposit for a 2016 Miata on May 5, the day Mazda began taking orders for the initial 1,000 "Launch Edition" Miatas. "I haven't had new car fever like this since I was 20 years old," said Mr. Booth, 58, a retired supermarket produce manager who expects his Mazda to arrive in July. The new version, whose 25,735 base price nearly matches the original's in inflation adjusted dollars, is faster and more aggressive than its cute and cheerful predecessors. Mr. Booth, whose new Miata will eventually replace his 2001 version once he finds a deserving home for a car that has taken him and his wife on epic trips including traveling the old Route 66 expects the new one to deliver its signature euphoric handling. "Driving one is like putting on a roller skate," he said. "And you don't even need to break the speed limit to have fun. Just being out there on that two lane blacktop with the top down is fabulous." Convertible makers hope that kind of enthusiasm is contagious. "When the industry slumped, performance cars suffered," said Monte Doran, communications manager for Corvette and Camaro at G.M. "These are emotional purchases, not rational purchases, and convertibles perhaps even more so." Emotion seems in vogue again: Sales of the acclaimed Corvette doubled in a year, from barely 17,000 cars in 2013 to nearly 35,000 last year. Droptops account for one in five Corvette sales, a number that Chevy expects to rise thanks to the Z06 version. "This is an amazing time for performance cars across the industry," Mr. Doran said, adding that the Corvette's arrival "was incredibly well timed." Mr. Schuster said that convertibles had also been hampered by a shortage of practical four seat models. Once popular family convertibles, including the Chrysler Sebring and PT Cruiser, are defunct. Buick will look to rectify that with its first convertible in 25 years: The shapely Cascada, based on a Poland built Opel from G.M.'s European division, will be exported here beginning next year. Owners, makers and analysts are cautiously optimistic that convertibles will carve out a respectable niche even if sales never reach their previous boomer fueled heights. LMC Automotive projects annual sales will inch up to 171,000 by 2018, still only one of every 100 cars sold in America. Even in California, whose car culture touchstones range from hot rodding to the Beach Boys and whose endless summer seems expressly made for convertibles the passion for fun cars isn't as ingrained as it used to be, Mr. Booth said. Younger generations find digital diversions or are more enamored with electric cars. "I think you find younger people seeing the car as a way to get from point A to point B," Mr. Booth said. "It's a generalization, but cars have fallen from the popularity they had as a form of entertainment." Rod McLaughlin, vehicle line manager for the Miata, said that Americans were first exposed to sporty European convertibles by returning veterans of World War II. "Now, there's maybe a whole generation of Gen Xers and millennials who've never driven a roadster and have no frame of reference," Mr. McLaughlin said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
President Trump said he would no longer be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch before a Yankees game on Aug. 15 days after he said he would be doing so, causing a political ruckus. Trump wrote on Twitter on Sunday afternoon that he would not be in New York that day, when the Yankees will play the Boston Red Sox, because of his "strong focus" on the coronavirus pandemic, "including scheduled meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much else." He added, "We will make it later in the season!" During an event at the White House on Thursday that featured Mariano Rivera, the former star closer for the Yankees, Trump announced he had been asked to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. Trump said he had been invited by the Yankees' president, Randy Levine, who used to work for Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, during Giuliani's tenure as New York City mayor. Trump is a longtime Yankees fan and was close friends with the Yankees' former owner, George Steinbrenner, who died in 2010. Trump's announcement drew criticism from local New York political figures, including Mayor Bill de Blasio. He wrote on Twitter on Saturday, "After CONDEMNING racism, the next step isn't inviting it to your pitcher's mound. To the players that knelt for the BLM movement, we applaud you. To the execs that have aligned with hatred, you are on the wrong side of history and morality." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Before the Industrial Revolution in the United States, Canada and Europe, you might have ended up married to a fourth cousin. People didn't travel far to find a spouse, and the closer you were to home, the more likely it was you'd marry within your family. Then, in the late 19th century, something changed, and people stopped marrying their cousins. It has been conventional wisdom that Europeans and North Americans married more outside their families as geographic dispersal ramped up between 1825 and 1875, with the advent of mass railroad travel. But over the same period, the genetic relatedness of many couples actually increased. It wasn't until after 1875 that partners started to become less and less related. This 50 year lag might indicate that shifts in social norms played a bigger role than geographic mobility in getting people to wed outside their bloodline. It's also just one example of the insights that can be gleaned from the world's largest, scientifically vetted family tree, presented in a study published on Thursday in Science. Compiling and validating 86 million public profiles from Geni.com, a genealogy driven social media site, the authors generated 5 million family trees. The largest tree consisted of 13 million people, spanned an average of 11 generations and included both Sewall Wright, a founder of human population genetics, and the actor Kevin Bacon (the two are separated by 24 degrees, in case you were wondering). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Broadway shows often fold their tents at the end of the year, fearing the winter blues at the box office. But this year a few shows of note are holding on, at least for a week or two. You've got a few more days to catch Stephen Karam's gorgeous "The Humans," last season's Tony winner for best play (ending on Jan. 15), and even fewer to jump on the exhilarating emotional roller coaster that is the sublime revival of the musical "Falsettos" (ending on Sunday). Looking further ahead, here are other notable shows and events I'd put at the top of my theater to see list. The first of the majestic 20th century cycle of plays written by the great August Wilson, this drama set in the 1970s (and written in 1979) was, until now, the only piece of the cycle not to be produced on Broadway. A classic Wilson ensemble drama, about a group of gypsy cab drivers in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the new Manhattan Theater Club production is directed by Ruben Santiago Hudson, who has both appeared in and directed Wilson's plays notably the superb recent revival of "The Piano Lesson" from the Signature Theater. (In previews for a Jan. 19 opening at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.) Normally I frown on theater as a rarefied form of stargazing. But with a star as luminous as Cate Blanchett, I will grant an exception. And, of course, Ms. Blanchett, who graces this new adaptation of "Platonov," an early Chekhov play, is not merely a movie star burnishing her reputation with a Broadway debut. During the past decade she has made regular, acclaimed appearances on the New York stage, in productions imported from the Sydney Theater Company (as is this one). An unwieldy drama about the familiar Chekhovian concerns lives full of regret, stomachs bloated with vodka the play has been moved from Russia in the 19th century to Russia in the late 20th century for this version by Andrew Upton, Ms. Blanchett's husband. The esteemed Australian actor Richard Roxburgh is Platonov. (In previews for a Sunday opening at the Barrymore Theater.) I have been saving this lovable classic as a cure for the post holiday blues. The small but enterprising Irish Rep first produced this delicious musical whimsy, with a glorious, multihued score by Burton Lane and E. Y. Harburg, a dozen years ago, with Melissa Errico as the ingenue, Sharon (she who wonders "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?"). The seemingly ageless Ms. Errico, I am delighted to report, is unfurling her silvery soprano once again in this revival, directed by the company's artistic director, Charlotte Moore. (Through Jan. 29 at the Irish Repertory Theater.) Read the review This is not a single show (as downtown theatergoers will, of course, know) but a whole feast of international theater, presented by the Public Theater at its home base and elsewhere. Along with P.S. 122's Coil and other festivals, it has come to make January a dizzying smorgasbord of experimental theater. Highlights this year include a new production from one of my favorite companies, the imaginative 600 Highwaymen, presenting "The Fever," which is said to be "performed in complete collaboration with the audience." Bring your tap shoes or at least a willingness to blast your way through the fourth wall on a regular basis. (Various locations, Wednesday 15.) Martin McDonagh's tar black comedy drama was the first of his trilogy of plays set in the impoverished Irish village of the title. It returns in a 20th anniversary production from the Druid Theater, the company that first made a splash internationally with a pungent production that ultimately moved to Broadway. Once again the company's longtime chief, Garry Hynes, directs. And Marie Mullen, who won a Tony Award as the embittered daughter of a manipulative terror of a mother, with the aptly monstrous name Mag, now takes on that formidable role. (Begins performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Jan. 11.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Glued to TV for Now, but When Programming Thins and Bills Mount ... It happened around the world, and now it's happening in the United States: The more people stay home to avoid the coronavirus pandemic, the more they find themselves glued to their screens. In South Korea, as cases spiked, television viewership shot up 17 percent, according to Nielsen. Last month in Italy, the size of the TV audience increased 6.5 percent, with a 12 percent rise in hard hit Lombardy. The same trend has arrived in the United States. In the Seattle area, total television use increased 22 percent on March 11 from the week before, according to Nielsen. In New York that day, as more people started working from home, use went up 8 percent. (Total use, as defined by Nielsen, includes live television, on demand viewing, streaming and gaming.) But for media companies, the benefit of having a bigger than usual audience may be short lived as the outbreak threatens to undercut the very structure of their business. With businesses scaling back workers and analysts warning of a recession as global economies slow, a significant number of viewers may decide in the coming months to break away from cable or cut back on streaming subscriptions. The gain in audience size "will be replaced pretty quickly by the necessity of reducing monthly bills, when people will have to deal with the financial impacts of a recession," said Craig Moffett, a co founder of the research firm MoffettNathanson. "Cord cutting will accelerate with a vengeance." The Walt Disney Company, ViacomCBS and other media giants face a pivotal moment as the delicate ecosystem that protects their business live content tied to high cost subscriptions erodes even faster. It started last week with the sudden disappearance of a dependable asset: sports programming. Live sports coverage generates billions of advertising dollars and fuels television subscriptions a combination that delivers fat profits. Now the industry is facing the postponement and cancellation of almost every major sporting event, including the Masters golf tournament, a CBS staple, as well as the remainder of the National Basketball Association season and postseason, which are consistent draws for the AT T owned Turner channels and Disney's ESPN and ABC networks. The sports coverage has become critical at a time when the audience appetite for dramas and sitcoms has shrunk. Advertisers spend more than 2 billion on live games and tournaments during this part of the year, according to Kantar Media. And with LeBron James benched indefinitely, ESPN is expected to lose 481 million in N.B.A. related advertising; for Turner, the loss will be about 210 million, according to MoffettNathanson. NBCUniversal executives have been eagle eyed on the Tokyo Olympics ever since President Trump called last week for a possible postponement. More than 1.25 billion in advertising commitments are on the line for the network and its parent company, Comcast. The overall TV industry calendar has also been upended, thanks to the scrapping of the upfronts, the annual schmooze fest of advertisers, television executives and prime time stars. Instead of locking in ad deals over canapes and cocktails after splashy presentations at Radio City Music Hall, Carnegie Hall and other New York venues, the usual attendees at this springtime gathering will have to find another way to broker the roughly 20 billion in marketing agreements for the 2020 21 season. "We'll miss Carnegie Hall and our agency dinners this year," Jo Ann Ross, the head of advertising sales at CBS, said in a statement, adding, "We won't miss a beat." 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. Brian Wieser, the head of analysis and research at the media buying giant GroupM, wondered about the possible long term effects of the pandemic on the industry. "Will lack of advertising demand in the spring make it so pent up that when the upfronts are being negotiated, advertising will come back rapidly, or does it go away forever?" he asked. "Right now odds don't look great, but nobody really knows." At a time when millions of isolated people are likely to tune in, the media industrial complex is grinding to a halt and it is unclear when it will start back up again. Warner Bros. has halted production on more than 70 television series. Netflix has suspended production on all scripted series and films in the United States and Canada for at least two weeks. Most late night talk shows, a major profit center for broadcasters, have announced that they will go dark through at least March 30. (On Monday, Stephen Colbert broke the silence with surprise segments filmed from his bathtub.) "Saturday Night Live" announced on Monday that it was halting production indefinitely, with six episodes to go in the current season. Other programs shot before live audiences will not be affected. The current season's remaining episodes of NBC's "Ellen's Game of Games" and Fox's "The Masked Singer" are already in the can, as are the next six weeks of NBC's "The Voice." But a question mark hangs over the final episodes of "The Voice" episodes that, in previous years, have been shot live before a studio audience. The suspensions call into doubt the industry's push into live and event based content, a strategy designed to create programming that's not easily replicated on the web. "It looked like a good bet until two weeks ago," Mr. Moffett said. "Now these companies look like they're in the wrong place at the wrong time." Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and Disney Plus are likely to see a "surge" in viewership, now that traditional television has lost some of its "most valuable content," said Matthew Ball, a media executive and former head of strategy at Amazon Studios. Disney took advantage of the newly homebound by releasing its animated hit "Frozen 2" on Disney Plus three months earlier than planned. In a break from Hollywood's standard practice, Universal announced on Monday that it would make its films available for rental via streaming the same day as their theatrical releases. Soon to launch platforms could attract more viewers than expected during the nightmarish pandemic situation. Peacock, NBCUniversal's streaming service, has an April 15 start date. AT T's HBO Max is set for a May debut. Quibi, the short form content service from Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, is scheduled for an April 6 launch. "This might not last, but it gives them all a much better and lower cost shot at proving their value to audiences," Mr. Ball said. The streaming players may find themselves in a price war. "Cost will become that much more urgent," Mr. Moffett said. "There are going to be very large parts of the population out of work." It took place at the network's new headquarters in Manhattan's Hudson Yards complex. The room was so packed that some advertisers had to be seated in an overflow area. In front of the crowd after the anchor Anderson Cooper quipped that he had "shaken, like, 50 hands today" the CNN president Jeff Zucker asked the network's chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, if it was "OK for these folks to go to a room of about 250 people." "No," Mr. Gupta answered half seriously, to laughs from the crowd. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Even before coronavirus prompted a stay at home order for New York City, Dana Shakarchy, 33, decided to flee her apartment on the Upper West Side for her childhood home in Great Neck. "Being in the city, in an apartment, it feels like the risk is larger," said Ms. Shakarchy, who works for the Jewish Federations of North America. "You are in elevators and touching things. It feels not as good as being in a house." She's now sleeping in the full size bed she had as a teenager. On the walls are posters of boy bands including 'NSync. Next to her is her lifetime collection of stuffed animals. She's taken work calls from the couch in the den to spare her colleagues the visuals. "Although I just found out you can put a background up on Zoom," she said. "So theoretically I could have done it with my stuffed animals, and they wouldn't have even known." It's been an adjustment to not have as much space and alone time, but she's trying to cherish it. "I baked challah with my mom. She joined me for exercise," she said. "It feels really meaningful, and I don't want to take that for granted." Across the United States, millennials and Gen Z professionals are escaping dense cities by moving back into their parents' homes. Some feel safer outside of crowded settings or want to be close to their parents to help care for them if they fall ill. Others who have young children are turning to grandma and grandpa for help with child care. For many it feels like time has reversed or this is a special moment for them to connect with extended families. "I looked through one of my old diaries the other day," said Ms. Shakarchy. "That was very strange." Ace Heddleson, 24 and unemployed, was already sad that his parents were planning on moving out of his childhood home in Carlisle, Pa. this summer. So when the virus hit, he decided to use the opportunity to leave the house he shares with roommates in Pittsburgh to be with his parents. "We thought it would be a good time to do social isolation and help them pack the house up and get it ready," he said. He's acutely aware that this will be his last days sleeping in his childhood bedroom. "It's been redecorated to be a guest room, but there are trophies on top of the dresser and the books I read growing up on the bookshelf by my desk," he said. "It's kind of like a bit of closure to be here before they move." While he knows he has his own life in Pittsburgh, it also feels a little like a trip back in time. "I definitely feel like I am a teenager again in some way, where I feel like my every move is tracked a little bit," he said. "I definitely think about the fact that they probably could hear my conversations if they wanted to." Those with young children don't seem to care about any restrictions they now face in their parents' home. They are just grateful for the extra help. Carly Zimmerman, 32, who works for BBYO, a Jewish youth movement, was on a vacation visiting her parents in Bonita Springs, Fla., when coronavirus escalated. She decided it would be safer for her and her 3 year old daughter Nora to stay. Her husband, Michael Zimmerman, is still in Philadelphia, where they live, looking after the dogs. Ms. Zimmerman has been doing her work from a small guest bedroom in the house. "We put a plastic folding table and a chair up," she said. "I ordered a white board, but it hasn't come in yet." While she's in back to back meetings, her parents watch her daughter, sometimes for eight hours a day. They read books from the virtual library, tackle art projects, walk around outside looking at nature. Ms. Zimmerman doesn't know how she would survive this time without them. "I just feel so lucky to be with my parents, whom I have a great relationship with," she said. "I have fantastic child care." Jonathan Wasserstrum, 37, the chief executive and a co founder of SquareFoot, which helps companies find office space, is currently living at his father in law's house in Mamaroneck. With his pregnant wife due in two months, they felt it would be better to be settled somewhere with more space and with extra sets of hands. "We set up a nursery here in case we are here for a while," he said. "We took over an office, where we are going to set up a crib. We won't get a new dresser, but there are already shelves where we can put baskets up." (The only furniture item they want but won't have is the glider they left in their Greenwich Village apartment. "It's going to be a hassle to move," he said.) For Mr. Wasserstrum, living with extended family doesn't seem so weird when he thinks about historical precedent. "Not in the past 20 years, but if you go back centuries, everybody lived right next to each other," he said. "It's a reversion to the norm instead of something brand new." 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 |
Manchester City, the English Premier League champion, will find out before the end of July whether it has successfully appealed its two year ban from European soccer's elite Champions League. The club, which has angrily denied breaking cost control rules and vowed to fight any punishment, presented its defense during a three day hearing conducted by the Court of Arbitration for Sport that concluded on Wednesday. Lawyers representing UEFA, European soccer's governing body, which imposed the ban, defended their decision. Manchester City, backed by the billionaire brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi, was punished in February after a lengthy investigation by UEFA concluded the club had committed "serious breaches" of so called financial fair play rules, regulations designed to prevent clubs from spending beyond their means. City reacted to the decision, which would deny the club as much as 200 million in Champions League payouts as well as the chance to claim the title it covets the most, by charging that the disciplinary process had been prejudicial. It vowed to present "irrefutable evidence" to CAS that would clear the team. The uncertainty surrounding the case, and City's punishment, has cast doubt over the future of a sporting project that turned City from an also ran into a serial winner and one of global soccer's most powerful institutions. Such is the sensitivity around the case, though, that little was made public before the hearing this week, including the identity of the three member panel that heard the appeal, as is customary. The arbitration panel heard the case over video link because of travel restrictions imposed to restrict the spread of the coronavirus. In a statement, it said a verdict would most likely be announced by "the first half of July." "At the end of the hearing, both parties expressed their satisfaction with respect to the conduct of the procedure," the court said in an emailed statement. At the heart of the case against City is a claim that it disguised millions of dollars of direct investment by its owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, as sponsorship income, with one document published by the German news weekly Der Spiegel appearing to show that the team's main sponsor, the Abu Dhabi based Etihad Airways, paid only a fraction of an 85 million sponsorship agreement. City has denounced the use of "out of context materials purportedly hacked or stolen," and it continues to contend that the leaks are part of an "organized and clear attempt to damage the club's reputation." The repercussions of the verdict will be significant; Manchester City earns about 100 million a season for participating, and its exclusion and the loss of those payments could make it more difficult to retain staff members and players or acquire new ones. But the case could also have consequences for parties beyond Manchester City. Clubs in the Premier League, which will return to action next Wednesday after a shutdown because of the coronavirus, are competing for places in next season's Champions League; if City is banned, the fifth best team will take its place in the competition. For UEFA, the stakes are just as high. A Manchester City victory at CAS would raise serious questions about the future of the financial fair play regulations, which were introduced in 2009 as a bid to stem a culture of ballooning losses in European club soccer. The fate of a separate investigation by the Premier League, which has its own spending rules, could also be determined by the result of City's appeal. City has been aggressively fighting the allegations of overspending since damaging leaks of internal emails first emerged in news media reports in 2018. The club has long claimed that it has acted properly at all times. In November, it attempted to short circuit the case before a verdict could be rendered, but CAS rejected that effort on technical grounds. Two of the three judges involved in that decision are on the current three arbitrator panel. The case has poisoned Manchester City's relationship with UEFA. Interactions between club officials and UEFA's investigators are said to have been testy, a point made clear in the statement announcing the ban: It said the club had "failed to cooperate in the investigation." The bitterness extends to many of the team's supporters. Manchester City Fans routinely jeer the Champions League anthem on match days, and others have taken to social media decrying what they perceive as unfair treatment of their team by UEFA, which they accuse of siding with more established elite clubs. The club has espoused similar sentiments. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Q. Is there any way to both charge the phone and listen to music at the same time on these new models that don't have the traditional headphone jack? A. Apple retired the 3.5 millimeter jack in 2016 with the iPhone 7, and Google omitted the port on its Pixel 2 phones last year leaving owners of those models a single Lightning or USB C connection to use for earbuds and the battery charger. Other phones will likely follow suit if they haven't already, and a few popular workarounds have emerged for people who like to listen to audio while the phone's battery is charging. For those who prefer the fidelity of wired headphones (and the fact you don't have to charge those up as well), a port adapter may be your best option, and you can find different products online. Although it has mixed reviews, Belkin's Lightning Audio Charge RockStar adapter is one option for the iPhone, and can be found for 40 or less. For Google Pixel 2 owners in a similar situation, Moshi's USB C Digital Adapter With Charging dongle is about 45. If you do not want to keep track of a port adapter, using a wireless charging mat is another approach. These mats, like those that use the Qi technology, allow you to place the phone on its surface to power up the battery. This leaves the single connection port free for headphones. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
When Richard Swan and Josh Rosenthal, founders of the creative beverage service the Grand Bevy, first saw Snoop Dogg post an image on Instagram of his face on a cocktail, they knew they had created something great. "We saw people losing their minds over it," Mr. Swan said of the post. That photo was of their SipMi live activation, an invention where guests at a wedding or other event can snap an image in a photo booth and have it printed, on flavorless edible paper with edible inks, on top of their cocktail. The result is an interactive and memorable moment for guests. And it's representative of how couples are elevating the cocktail at their marriage celebrations. Signature cocktails are nothing new at weddings, but gone are the days of brides and grooms picking their favorite classic tipples. Now, couples are opting for entire custom bar programs, which tells their love story through unique mixed drinks, molecular gastronomy, craft beers, mocktails and even new inventions, like the SipMi activations. "Fifteen years ago, if there was a cocktail served at an event, it was a mojito or a spicy margarita," said Talmadge Lowe, the founder of Pharmacie, a specialty bar and cocktail company, also in Los Angeles. "That was the extent of the creativity. Now, cocktails are a must. They have grown from the familiar and classic to the custom and creative." Mr. Lowe started Pharmacie a decade ago after repeatedly crafting drinks for friends' dinner parties and realizing a demand for high end mixology at private events. He now creates custom beverages for 90 percent of the events he does. The essence of the demand, he says, is that a specialty beverage elevates the experience. A drink is sensual and ignites responses from sight and smell to taste. It is often remembered long after the event. Couples use cocktails as a vehicle to deliver a message about their relationship, incorporating, say, a margarita inspired drink to denote their first date a local taco restaurant or an ingredient discovered by the couple on a memorable trip. For one Los Angeles couple, Mr. Lowe suggested employing their mutual adoration of music and the groom's career as a musician as inspiration for their cocktails. The bride, Melanie Ayer, recalled that many of their best memories were on the road as now husband Kelcey Ayer toured. Since he proposed the day after a Radiohead concert in New York, the couple and Mr. Lowe fashioned a dark Bourbon cocktail with Dubonnet Rouge, Benedictine, and Angostura Bitters to evoke the experience. "It reminded us of the moody, romantic vibes of that entire weekend," Ms. Ayer said of the drink, which they dubbed "Everything in Its Right Place" after the rock band's song. One of Mr. Lowe's other couples requested bourbon for the groom; and for the bride, yuzu, a citrus fruit often found in Asian cuisine. The bride, Jackie Noh Davis, says she wanted it featured in a drink but didn't have the basis of anything classic to work from. "We could have ended up with something too on the nose, like a yuzu sake drink," she said. Instead, Mr. Lowe concocted a bourbon based cocktail titled "Eastern Star." It blended together the brown spirit, yellow chartreuse, honey, cardamom bitters and, of course, yuzu, with a star anise garnish. "It felt like meeting in the middle, and very special to have a new drink created for us," Ms. Davis said of her celebration last October. "Our guests were effusive about their praise of the drinks." Alcohol has long fueled dance parties and wedding shenanigans, but the experience of sipping an elegant drink gives guests an opportunity to converse with one another and bond while enjoying the beverage, much like a cocktail party. It's another form of entertainment. Bobby Brown, a founder of Craft Cartel Cocktail Catering in Boynton Beach, Fla., explained that couples know more about cocktails than before, thanks to the mainstream cocktail craze, and use that knowledge to put playful spins on their wedding beverages. "People don't want cool, craft drinks anymore," Mr. Brown said. "They want engagement." For Mr. Brown, this has led to alcohol infused adult ice pops as welcome drinks and slushy drinks like a frozen Aperol spritz. At receptions, his team offers a wheel that guests can spin to determine which custom cocktail to order. He has cheekily named drinks, such as the Dale Lama, for a yerba mate infused, Kashmiri chili cocktail for an Indian wedding with South American touches. He has even matched the hue of a mocktail to a National Football League player's team color. "The bar is often the focal point of any celebration," he added. "A proper drink can galvanize that." When Melanie Smith and Matt Minzes got married in New Orleans in March, the bar became just such a focal point. Along with the Grand Bevy and their planning team at Sapphire Events, the couple erected a smoked cocktail station for their wedding, where guests could see in action how their cocktails were infused. "The bar program, much like the food or the band, is a touchpoint that every guest will interact with and notice," Jack Kane, of Sapphire Events, said. In addition to stations, Mr. Swan also experiments with molecular gastronomy to upgrade classic recipes. Most popular are his spherification cocktails, whereas the alcohol and mixers are held together in a jellylike sphere, often topped with a garnish such as gold leaf. When a guest eats the cocktail, the bulbous edible bursts on the palate. "People can enjoy familiar flavors in a completely new way," he said. The team has paired molecular cocktails with plated dinners and has even used them as "cocktail courses" in between plates of food. The cost of signature cocktails can vary widely. Mr. Rosenthal of Grand Bevy said it can range from 3,800 to 90,000 depending on the services, guest counts, products and vendors are included as well as where the event is held. For Craft Cartel Cocktail Catering, Mr. Brown said they require a minimum of 1,800, and approximately 45 per person is the "sweet spot" for a custom cocktail program. At Pharmacie, Mr. Lowe noted that they take in multiple variables when determining the price, but said the cost averages 50 per person for craft cocktails. If it's a full scale beverage program including wine, beer and nonalcoholic drinks, it will be more. The entire trend has trickled down to nonalcoholic mocktails, too. Mr. Lowe said he has seen an increase in requests for custom spiritless drinks, while Mr. Brown has worked with both custom mocktails and low alcohol by volume cocktails. These are cocktails based on a liqueur rather than a high proof liquor. Couples favoring beer or wine only should not despair either. All three companies find personalized ways to showcase couples' love of local beers, home brews, wines, and ciders by hosting on site tastings at stations and beverage pairings for coursed dinners. It's all reflective, they say, of the growing importance couples are placing on beverages as a way to personalize their days and even carving out specific budgets. "We both love food and drink, so we couldn't image slacking in that department when throwing the biggest party of our lives," Ms. Davis said of collaborating on custom beverages with Pharmacie. "We tried to make every component very personal to us. The drinks were no exception." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Credit...Deanne Fitzmaurice for The New York Times They are app makers, they are podcasters, and they are also H 1B visa holders possibly putting them at risk from the president's immigration policies. At dawn in California's Bay Area, the river of commuters begins to flow. It is filled with the people who help make our smartphones, our favorite games, the apps we download. But many have also come to make something else, perhaps a new life in America. These are just a few of the 85,000 people who come to work at American companies from as far away as India and China on H 1B visas, which are granted to highly skilled workers from overseas. Many, like Kaushik Gopal, land jobs at technology firms that have struggled to find enough American citizens with advanced math and science skills to fill their cubicles. Often, they hope to call the United States home. President Trump's plans to change the rules that govern work visas and immigration have thrown the lives of many visa holders into limbo. "I'm always on guard because there is a chance that suddenly I'll get the news that I'm no longer welcome," said Mr. Gopal, 32, who first came to the United States in 2012. Like many of Silicon Valley's workers who are here as part of the H 1B visa program, which is aimed at highly skilled workers, Mr. Gopal was born in India, attended university in the United States and got a job at a tech company. He said the Bay Area attracts the smartest engineers from all over the world because it is known as "a magnet for technical skill." But visas are always on his mind, along with the possibility that he may have to return to India. "Our ability to stay in the U.S., with good standing, depends on the visa process," he said. "Working hard is just one factor. If the financial markets are hit and your job lays people off, H 1B visa holders have a limited time to find another job and get into good standing before we have to leave the country. If the market is down and jobs numbers are low, there will be more H 1Bs in the market looking for jobs." Mr. Jaladi isn't the only one who has found himself in immigration limbo at Gusto. Shub Jain, a 26 year old software engineer there, graduated from the University of California, San Diego, in 2014, worked at Microsoft and last fall moved to San Francisco for a job at the H.R. start up. He has been working on an extended student visa and has lost out on the H 1B visa lottery three times. This is the last year he will be eligible to apply. "If it doesn't work out," he said, "I'll leave the country." Mr. Jain's life is like that of many 20 something professionals. He loves cars and driving around California, as well as exploring new restaurants with friends. But the feeling of welcome he has always experienced in the United States has shifted as politicians have changed their views on immigration. "My conversations with friends have changed," he said. "I used to look at the news every morning, but now I don't because I don't want it to impact my work. I look at night. You don't know what you'll read." Like many tech employees, Mr. Jain took a gamble on a smaller start up. But his decision came with extra risk. At Microsoft, he could deal with visa issues by relocating to one of the company's many global offices. He does not have that option at Gusto. Mr. Jain talks about his anxieties with teammates like Nicholas Gervasi, 32, a Canadian who is working at Gusto on an H 1B visa. Thanks to provisions under the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mr. Gervasi has had an easier time living and working in the United States than his colleagues from India, and he expects his green card application to be approved soon. Because of his uncertain situation, Mr. Jain's best friend from college recently visited for a month to play video games, go on drives and spend as much time together as they could. Some critics of the H 1B visa program say there are more than enough Americans with technology degrees to fill all the technical jobs in the United States. Others say that Silicon Valley companies do not cast a wide enough net for American job candidates. But tech executives have long said that there are not enough Americans with the advanced math and science skills necessary to succeed at their companies. Mr. Gervasi said that companies "should be empowered to hire the best people." Joshua Reeves, the chief executive and founder of Gusto, agreed, noting that 8 percent of his work force is on a visa or green card. Gusto's hiring policy has never taken a candidate's citizenship into account, and Mr. Reeves said the company was "committed to sticking to that mind set." That commitment could be tested over the next few years, given that the White House is continuously looking for ways to curb immigration as it seeks to enact America first policies. "It's almost like living under this maybe not fear but a worry about what's next and what will happen," Mr. Jain said. "This feeling of being unwelcome in the country. I hadn't really felt that before." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Add another item to the list of once common features including ashtrays, spare tires and turn the key ignition switches disappearing from new cars: fog lamps. Several makers of luxury vehicles have quietly omitted the front fog lights from many of their latest models, including Audi, Cadillac, Lincoln, Mercedes Benz and the new Genesis line from Hyundai. The trend is unlikely to stop there, as changes to high end models inevitably filter down to mainstream cars and trucks. Those companies say their latest high tech headlights make separate fog lamps unnecessary. There is scant independent research to verify such claims; the public interest groups that test headlights, including Consumers Union and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, do not conduct tests of fog lights and do not take a position on their effectiveness. Nor do the federal safety regulators that issue standards for high and low beam headlights. In a statement, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said, "Fog lamps are considered supplemental equipment, which means there are no applicable federal requirements for these lamps other than they must not impair the effectiveness of the required lighting equipment." Though fog is an isolated and somewhat regional and seasonal road hazard, it is particularly challenging for drivers. A 2014 report by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, looking at federal crash data on fatal crashes from 1990 to 2012 and police reported crashes from 1990 to 2008, found that fog was a factor in nearly 20 percent of deadly multicar pileups involving 10 or more vehicles. Fog is especially prevalent in some regions, including much of the Southeast, northern New England, the Pacific Northwest and the Central Valley of California, and it forms most often in winter. Deadly multicar crashes generally occur when cars and trucks traveling at interstate speed drive into what is essentially a low lying cloud and quickly lose visibility. Drivers may not see the slowed cars ahead until it is too late, with one vehicle crashing into the next, including huge tractor trailers. Eleven people died in a pileup in January 2012 near Gainesville, Fla., a crash that was linked to a combination of smoke and fog. In November 2007, a chain reaction crash of 108 vehicles in fog near Fresno, Calif., resulted in two deaths, as did a 60 car pileup in Wyoming in April 2015. On Jan. 31, nearly 50 cars piled up in fog related crashes near Hanford, Calif. Lighting and safety experts caution that stand alone front fog lights, which are usually set into the bumper close to the road, may be inadequate to prevent such horrific highway speed crashes. But they can help drivers see road markings in fog at low speeds, perhaps keeping the car from hitting a tree or running into a ditch. High beam headlights, designed to send light into the distance, are especially ineffective at penetrating the fog, as they reflect off the moisture in the air. But even low beams throw enough light into the fog curtain that the effect can be blinding rather than illuminating. Fog lamps are intended to provide an adjunct to the low beams. Because fog hovers close to the ground, the lamps are designed to shine down, illuminating the road beneath the fog. The top of the beam is cut off sharply so the light does not shine into the fog and reflect off it. Jennifer Stockburger, the director of operations at the auto test center of Consumer Reports, said that although her magazine routinely tests headlights as part of its auto evaluations, it does not concern itself with fog lamps, which are "just meant for that low light in front of the bumper." She added: "They do work because they cut under the fog. But they are so short in range that you've got to be going darn slow to make any use of that." Of greater concern, she said, is the effectiveness of low beams, adding, "That is how most people are driving most of the time." Even before automakers began offering high tech headlights, many vehicles on American roads did not have front fog lamps. Though common on cars from European manufacturers and on luxury models from American and Japanese companies, they tended to be options on mainstream models, sometimes included on premium trim lines or in extra cost feature packages. Aside from the fog lights in the front, which can help the driver to navigate, rear fog lamps which look like an extra bright taillamp on just one side make cars more visible in bad weather to following drivers. Rear fog lamps are required in Europe but not in the United States, though most European manufacturers include them on cars sold in the United States. And drivers sometimes leave the rear units on even when the skies are clear, just as they do with the front units, which other motorists can find distracting. While some companies are phasing out discrete fog lights at the front of the car, others are keeping them. Except for a few specialized models, BMW continues to offer front fog lights on models sold in the United States, according to a company spokesman, Hector Arellano Belloc. And Mark Gillies, a spokesman for Volkswagen of America, said: "No, we are not phasing them out at all. They can be quite useful." Others say the latest headlight technology makes separate fog lights redundant. Michael Larsen, the technical fellow for exterior lighting at General Motors, said the high tech headlamps on the Cadillac CT6 luxury sedan produce "such an abundance of light" that they not only meet the company's criteria for factors such as distance, glare and uniform illumination, but also "fill in the foreground of the beam pattern to basically do what fog lights do, creating generous amounts of foreground light." "So if there is fog or rain or whatever, you are able to see those road markings," Mr. Larsen said. Indeed, he added, if fog lamps were fitted to a car like the CT6, "you wouldn't be able to see that anything changed in the beam pattern, because the fog lights basically cover the same areas." Some manufacturers like Mercedes Benz have used the space once occupied by fog lights for cornering lamps or daytime running lights. Audi has used the niches to install radar units for driver assistance technology like adaptive cruise control. Ms. Stockburger of Consumer Reports said that new technologies held out the promise of overcoming fog. She noted that infrared night vision systems, already offered on some models from companies including Audi, BMW, Cadillac and Mercedes, essentially "see" through fog, snow or darkness by sensing the heat of objects and displaying their images on a screen. Existing technology like radar and lidar, as well as automatic emergency braking systems that stop your car before it hits something, have the potential "to see what your eyes just can't," Ms. Stockburger said. "Maybe the car will come to a stop and you won't know why," she said. And with further development of vehicle to vehicle communication systems, "your car will then tell the car behind you to stop." Not only will fog lights be unnecessary, she added, but "maybe there won't be headlights at all." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
After two and a half decades, the acclaimed band ventures into a different sound on its ninth album, "The Center Won't Hold" and moves onward without its longtime drummer. WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. When Sleater Kinney arrived in a Los Angeles studio last fall with the slim demo of a track for its upcoming album, the group's new producer, Annie Clark (better known as St. Vincent) had an ear for how to amplify it. What if, she said to the group the singer guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker, and the drummer Janet Weiss you took Brownstein's guitar riff and made it the lead? Oh, and also, changed the key. And the lyrics. In the rough sketch, a few lines nodded at the inception of Sleater Kinney, the Pacific Northwest trio that reframed feminist punk for a generation. "Annie was like, 'Oh, we should expand that so that it actually is the story of the band,'" Tucker r ecalled . "Like, 'I think that's cool, and I think the world would want to hear it.'" Brownstein added, "She thought about the audience, she thought about the listener in a way that I think we don't always." And they are: Sleater Kinney, with a new, yet to be named drummer, will go on tour as scheduled this fall. Some dates overlap with a freshly announced mini tour by Quasi, Weiss's other long running band. "It's been a surprising and sad turn of events," Tucker said, in an interview alongside Brownstein. They had touched down briefly at a hotel restaurant in West Hollywood, Calif., from Portland, Ore., their longtime musical home, and were still bristling tearful but determined from Weiss's departure weeks after it became public. "I'm glad that there's this record that has her immense drumming on it," Brownstein said. "But now Corin and I have to kind of clean up the mess of someone leaving after we announced a tour." "We have a job to do," she continued, "and we're going to do it well, because I feel really lucky to get to do this like, luckier than I've ever been." Her eyes welled up. "I just realize that there's nothing that feels like this band. I don't know why you wouldn't want to do it." Weiss, 53, declined to comment for this article. In the statement announcing her choice, she said, "The band is heading in a new direction and it is time for me to move on. I will never forget the heights we reached or the magnificent times Corin, Carrie and I shared. We were a force of nature." Brownstein said that, in a band get together after she'd made her decision, Weiss said she hoped they'd remain friends. "Of course," Brownstein replied. "She's like my family member." (Weiss also worked as a location manager on "Portlandia," Brownstein's comedy series, for several seasons, including the final one in 2018.) "They were the classic things that Sleater Kinney has always done so well, which is great guitar parts and big firework, lightning in a bottle kind of songs," Clark said, "but then there was this other side that I also felt in the demos kind of an extra vulnerability from both of them." It came through in their vocals and subject matter, which both writers called unusually personal, taking on depression, suicidal thoughts and MeToo. "Broken," the wrenching piano ballad that closes the album, invokes Christine Blasey Ford. Clark, Brownstein said, directed them to "not circumvent the emotion, but actually really delve into it." Production wise, "I remember I was using the word 'corrosive' a lot," Clark said, when she joined the group interview. All three were arrayed in variations on black, white and a pop of red, in escalating levels of glam. "Nice suit," Brownstein, low key in a printed button up, said admiringly of Clark's slick, sexy boss black and white pinstripe, set off by red heart shaped sunglasses and a Gucci handbag. They wanted the album to sound "really gross," Tucker, in contrasting lacy white, said, as her collaborators mmm hmmmed in affirmation. "Like, disgusting, dirty, gross, dusty." She went to a Depeche Mode show and got absorbed by synths; Clark and Brownstein saw Nine Inch Nails, and heard industrial. The three or so weeks they spent in the studio with Clark were, to hear Brownstein and Tucker tell it, transformative. Choruses and bridges were revised; major keys were introduced; Tucker, whose raging vocals have helped define the group's sound, sometimes sings two octaves higher than normal. "She pushed us further," Tucker said, just as they were ready for someone to challenge their instincts. (The trio similarly left its comfort zone making its sprawling 2005 album "The Woods;" after its bruising tour, they went on hiatus for nearly a decade.) This time, the band pushed back, too. On the poppy "Love," Clark questioned a Brownstein lyric: "There's nothing more frightening and nothin' more obscene/than a well worn body demanding to be seen." It's essentially the album's defining statement. Clark and Brownstein exchanged a look when I mentioned the line. Clark: "I didn't object to the sentiment, I think it's right on. I thought that Carrie was being too self effacing. I was like, well worn body? What?" Brownstein: "Yeah, check out this body! It's crazy! I mean, my body is perfect, but for you other people out there, with worn bodies, this is for you." She laughed she was clearly joking, but also, that really is her bare butt on the cover for the single "Hurry on Home." At the table, Clark was still trying to explain her objection to the lyric as the other women laughed. "I was picturing, like battle wounds, and botched " she made some flailing hand gestures, which cracked everyone up further. "That's the only reason I was checking in with you, to make sure that you knew that you were beautiful." As collaborators, Brownstein and Clark who previously dated are deeply intertwined, with other projects in the works, both said. "There's no reference that either of us could throw out that the other person didn't get," Clark said. "It's fully just dialed in, and we make each other laugh." The dynamic, when all three were together, was a rapid, sharp and frequently hilarious riff on subjects ranging from the media they'd absorbed (which, yes, sometimes felt like a "Portlandia" sketch) to politics ("President Marianne Williamson. I'm trying to get used to it now," Brownstein kidded) to gender parity in the studio. "We had to have one man in there," Tucker said of their recording engineer, Cian Riordan. "It's required by California law." Clark also seemed careful not to overstep the bounds of Sleater Kinney's partnership. Early in our conversation, she realized that, as primarily a solo artist, she'd hardly fielded interview questions as one among collaborators . "Was that O.K.?" she mock whispered, looking to Brownstein, after an answer. "That was great," Brownstein assured, then couldn't resist a rimshot: "No." It's a sentiment that echoes more bleakly after Weiss's exit. Britt Daniel, the Spoon frontman, has known Sleater Kinney since he befriended Weiss after her first tour with the band in the late '90s. "Even at that time, they felt legendary to me," he said. "Like they were coming out of nowhere with this sound that was totally unique and really aggressive. I hadn't seen anything like that before, I hadn't heard anything like that before." (Spoon's song "Metal School," he said, "was my interpretation of a Carrie riff.") Weiss, who helped sequence the last two Spoon albums and who masterminded Sleater Kinney's set lists is "good at having a concept of the overall big picture," said Daniel, who has dealt with lineup changes in his own long running band. "It just hurts, when it can't stay together." Coming out of the D.I.Y. riot grrrl scene that birthed Bikini Kill and other defiantly feminist acts in the '90s, Sleater Kinney was primed to buck the system, and defy the misogyny of the music industry. It's something they discussed while conceiving "The Center Won't Hold." "This band is always a place for us to go when we feel vulnerable and fragile and angry," Brownstein said. "It houses emotions that aren't necessarily sanctioned in our day to day life, that people don't make room for because we can't. You wouldn't function if you allowed the ambient anxiety of the current era to permeate every cell." The lyric about the well worn body was also asking, "How much can any of us withstand right now?" she added later. "All the characters, all the narrators all of us in this album are seeking a means of resistance and withstanding pain. But I didn't want to express that in a way that was like a screaming match. I wanted to give people something that buoyed them, that reached a chorus where they could sing together, and sing along with us." After "No Cities," Brownstein made a pilot for Hulu based on her 2015 memoir, "Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl," reliving her origins as a '90s bred artist. It didn't get picked up and that was the impetus she needed to dive fully back into music again. "The way I want to interact with songwriting is in the present," she said. If anything, her vision for the band has grown: "The Center Won't Hold" is the first Sleater Kinney album to credit creative directors, including Brownstein's friend Humberto Leon of the fashion line Opening Ceremony. She wanted to give the group a visual identity, to take ownership of their accomplishments, she said. "I just want people to be able to carry this around with them, not just on their headphones, but to feel like, when you see Black Flag on something." (Despite her best efforts, Sleater Kinney has yet to pick a signature font.) But the idea that they might be known for their willingness to adventure, experiment and persevere "those kind of ambitions, I'm interested in," Brownstein said. Denying oneself change "isn't a way to live, or to make things, ever," she said. "I'd rather take risks. This is the mid period of this band; it's going to be expansive, and it's not going to feel like it did before, because I'm not in the same place. No one in the band is. And there's just a point where you have to say: Either come with us, or don't." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
For many actors, a life of constant travel is part of the job, but for the actor Neil Patrick Harris, 43, who lives in New York City, frequent work related trips generally aren't the norm. "Given that I have two young children, I try to travel as little as possible for work," he said, referring to his 6 year old twins, Gideon Scott and Harper Grace, with his husband, David Burtka. Last year, however, Mr. Harris made an exception to his stay close to home rule when he spent five months in Vancouver, British Columbia, to film "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," a Netflix drama series that made its debut this month and is based on the eponymous children's book series; Mr. Harris plays the lead role of the villainous Count Olaf and is also a producer of the show. (This is the first in a series of Q A's related to our 52 Places to Go in 2017 list. Canada took the No. 1 spot.) Below are edited excerpts from an interview with Mr. Harris: Q. How did you enjoy your time in Vancouver? A. It's a fantastic city. When I was there on my own, I took advantage of how health conscious it is and spent lots of time outdoors. I biked in Stanley Park and also hiked the different trails in the area including the Stawamus Chief, where you can climb three different peaks. When the kids came, I discovered how family friendly Vancouver is. We were outside a lot, and also went to the Vancouver Aquarium and to the science center. Also, since the city is on the coast, there is great seafood, and I ate amazing sushi and oysters. Did you have a chance to travel around Canada's West Coast while in the area? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
ABT STUDIO COMPANY AND THE ROYAL BALLET SCHOOL at N.Y.U. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (Feb. 10 11, 7 p.m.; family friendly performance on Feb. 11, 2 p.m.). This pairing features the American Ballet Theater Studio Company, under the direction of Kate Lydon, performing alongside graduates of the Royal Ballet School in a shared program of classical choreography. The Studio Company will offer Dana Genshaft's "Chromatic Fantasy," Ethan Stiefel's "See the Youth Advance" and a new work by Marcelo Gomes; the Royal Ballet School will unveil excerpts from Frederick Ashton's "Birthday Offering," the pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan's "Concerto" and Helgi Tomasson's "Concerto Grosso." The highlight is a premiere by Liam Scarlett, the Royal Ballet's artist in residence, which will be performed by both groups after spending a week together in classes and rehearsals. It's a balletic tale of two cities. 212 998 4941, nyuskirball.org MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY at the Joyce Theater (Feb. 14 26). With classic works by Martha Graham and pieces by four contemporary choreographers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Annie B Parson, Pontus Lidberg and Nacho Duato the Graham company hosts a two week season with the theme "Sacred/Profane." The runs includes premieres by Mr. Cherkaoui, who takes on Sufi mysticism, and Ms. Parson, who is inspired by Graham's "Punch and the Judy," a comic work from 1941. Promisingly, there is text by the witty Will Eno. But the real attraction comes in the Graham masterworks, especially "Primitive Mysteries" (1931), an all female dance divided into three sections that explores the virgin myths of the American Southwest. There are also sections from the haunting "Dark Meadow" (1946) and Act II from "Clytemnestra" (1958), as well as some lighter fare, including the always lovely "Diversion of Angels" (1948) and the comic work "Maple Leaf Rag" (1990). 212 242 0800, joyce.org NEW CHAMBER BALLET at the Barbara and David Zalaznick Studio (Feb. 10 11, 8 p.m.). The composer turned choreographer Miro Magloire presents his intimate company in dances featuring live music, including the premiere of "Sunrise," set to a solo piano piece by Ryan Brown called "Ceramics." The program is rounded out by "Dark Forest," from 2016 with music by Michel Galante; "Gravity," from 2015 and choreographed in tribute to the Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha; "Fast Forward," to Beethoven; and "Anna's Last Day," featuring "Duo for Violin and Piano" by Rebecca Saunders. In it, Mr. Magloire delves into drama, as his title character grapples with guilt over the death of her sister. 212 868 4444, newchamberballet.com NEW YORK CITY BALLET at David H. Koch Theater (through Feb. 26). The company presents two weeks of "The Sleeping Beauty," a ballet that coincided with George Balanchine's first appearance onstage, as Cupid. He never choreographed his own full length version, but in 1981, for the Tchaikovsky Festival, he created "The Garland Dance." Featuring students from the City Ballet affiliated School of American Ballet, it's enchanting. In this complete production, from 1991, Peter Martins includes "The Garland Dance" in Act I and adds his own touches; it's brisk, with an array of Auroras to keep it snappy, including the principals Ashley Bouder, Megan Fairchild, Tiler Peck, Sterling Hyltin and, in a debut on Thursday, Lauren Lovette. 212 496 0600, nycballet.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
New York Galleries : What to See Right Now None The Estate of Konrad Lueg and Greene Naftali Some of the most visionary art dealers started as artists. One was Konrad Fischer (1939 96), whose gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany, represented figures like Carl Andre, Charlotte Posenenske, Sol LeWitt and Bruce Nauman, and instituted the idea of artists making work on site what would later be called "site specific" art. Before becoming a dealer in 1967, however, Mr. Fischer went by Konrad Lueg (Lueg was his mother's maiden name) and made the paintings and sculptures now on view at Greene Naftali. Like other Pop artists of his generation, Mr. Lueg focused on mass media, popular culture and consumerism. (Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke were his classmates at art school, and he and Mr. Richter performed a famous "Capitalist Realism" happening in a Dusseldorf department store in 1963, partly a critique of the emerging commercial art world.) Mr. Lueg painted politicians, athletes and industrial patterns and materials, using a wallpaper roller or featuring plastics, as in the inflated, sculptural "Cubes" (1967). There are also Pop curiosities, in the vein of Andy Warhol. To "finish" an "Untitled" 1968 work here, you stand before a bright light that temporarily imprints your shadow onto a canvas slathered with phosphorous pigment. These are interesting gestures, if not brilliant artworks. (Mr. Fischer himself deemed his earlier work as an artist "a failure." ) Mr. Lueg clearly found his calling and purpose in being Mr. Fischer, the art dealer. Rebecca Morgan's "You Can Have It All" (2019). Art featuring nature tends to fall into familiar categories: for instance, landscapes or romantic depictions of working class people. Part of what makes Rebecca Morgan's work so fresh, especially in her new show, "Town and Country," is that she eschews timeworn symbolism for the messy realities and conflicting mythologies of rural life. "Realities" might sound like a stretch if you've beheld Ms. Morgan's cartoonish, outrageous style. In her paintings, prints and sculptures which seem like an unholy mix of Peter Saul, R. Crumb and Lisa Yuskavage body parts bubble and bulge; the most salient feature of the man in "Boring Cunnilingus" (2019) is his pimple covered buttocks. Yet Ms. Morgan, who grew up in a small Pennsylvania town, includes herself among the characters who grope, slug and lounge in the woods. It keeps her honest. Her work in this, her fourth solo exhibition at Asya Geisberg, looks sharper than ever as it coalesces around a pair of themes: gender roles and sexism. My favorite piece, "You Can Have It All" (2019), shows a young mother huffing as she carries her baby, flowers, a dish of pasta and the weight of her own breasts. The scene is a perfect, precarious balance of bright colors and big forms. In both cases woman and painting upsetting a single element would push the whole thing over the edge. Leonhard Hurzlmeier's "Candle in the Wind," from 2019. There's a cheerful self deprecation to the bright colors and sharp edges of Leonhard Hurzlmeier's paintings. (Though his exhibition "Told Tales," at the Rachel Uffner Gallery, includes some charming sculptures and an illuminating little group show of work by other artists, curated by Christian Ganzenberg, it's Mr. Hurzlmeier's own paintings that are the main event.) They make you think of the Bauhaus, that idealistic interwar German art school but we know what happened to the idealists of the 1930s. But there's also an inherent irony in pictures that seem so easy to read just because we're all so well practiced at reading them. "Candle in the Wind," portraying a thick white column in a wooden bowl, is an immediately recognizable image. But it's also full of little winks and nudges. Mr. Hurzlmeier uses nearly the same teardrop shape for the candle's tilting flame as for its bulbous drips of wax. The purple background looks like empty space, and the yellow beneath like a flat tabletop, though they're both just rectangles. The white eyelid shape at the candle's tip is such a conventional marker of roundness and depth that you barely notice that no depth is actually created. But similar conventions govern the way we see everything. Where Mr. Hurzlmeier's entrancing trickery becomes transcendent is in the painting "Elephant in the Room." A pale, eyeless beast in near silhouette, it's weirdly difficult to focus on, making it a thrilling attempt at the impossible goal of showing the world as it is. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
What began as a brush fire over the weekend for the fashion designers behind the Dolce Gabbana label spread quickly across the Internet. Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce have found themselves at the center of a viral social media campaign after the pair criticized in vitro fertilization and nontraditional families in an interview with the Italian magazine Panorama. "I am not convinced by those I call children of chemicals, synthetic children," Mr. Dolce told the magazine. "Rented uterus, semen chosen from a catalog." "The family is not a fad," Mr. Gabbana added. "In it there is a supernatural sense of belonging." The comments caught the attention of the singer and songwriter Elton John, who took to Instagram over the weekend to urge a boycott of the high end label, a perennial favorite of celebrities and socialites. "How dare you refer to my beautiful children as 'synthetic,' " Mr. John wrote. "Shame on you for wagging your judgmental little fingers at I.V.F." He added: "Your archaic thinking is out of step with the times, just like your fashions. I shall never wear Dolce and Gabbana ever again. BoycottDolceGabbana." Mr. John has two sons through I.V.F. with his husband, David Furnish. The hashtag quickly became a rallying cry on social media. Among others, Victoria Beckham, Courtney Love, the singer Ricky Martin, and the former tennis star Martina Navratilova condemned the fashion label on Twitter. Celebrities and civilians alike threatened to burn their Dolce Gabbana apparel. Users posted pictures of their children conceived through artificial insemination. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Some great performances come with elaborate costumes or prosthetic noses attached. Some involve crackerjack timing or floods of tears. But the great performance Kerry Washington is giving in "American Son," which opened on Sunday at the Booth Theater on Broadway, features no such decoration. The only thing Ms. Washington has to do as Kendra Ellis Connor is bulldoze her way through 85 minutes of mounting agony as a mother whose son may be in desperate trouble. Let's add "black" to that sentence, because it changes everything: "as a black mother whose son may be in desperate trouble." "American Son," by Christopher Demos Brown, is part of a wave of new plays that consider the vulnerability of young black men in their dealings with the police. But unlike "Pass Over," "Until the Flood," "Kill Move Paradise" and "Scraps," the style here is neither surreal nor poetic; it's ticktock realism, deployed in real time. And the focus is not on the young men or the police but on the parents caught in between. Offering a reverse angle on the standard procedural, "American Son" takes place entirely in the waiting room of a South Florida police station, where in the middle of a stormy night Kendra and her estranged husband, Scott, await news of their missing 18 year old son, Jamal. Scott (Steven Pasquale) is an F.B.I. agent. Is that why he is so much more effective at dislodging information from Officer Paul Larkin, the policeman on duty? Or is it because of his lack of apparent hostility? Or because both men are white? In any case, Scott quickly learns things that Kendra, who sees racism wherever she looks, cannot. The thing is, Kendra is right. The play's schematic setup allows Mr. Demos Brown to demonstrate how the tendrils of prejudice creep everywhere, even into the cracks of a marriage. Scott, though he loves Kendra, simply isn't very troubled when the clueless Larkin (Jeremy Jordan) describes her with phrases like "the natives are restless" or says that she goes "from zero to ghetto in, like, nothing flat." No matter that Kendra is a professor of psychology who corrects her husband's "white trash" diction. In the mind of the officer, she is still the mother of a thug. Would he have asked a white woman, as he asks Kendra, whether her son, despite acing A.P. physics at an elite private school, has gold teeth? What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter In jeans and tennis shoes, with her hair pulled back to highlight her weary, worried face, Ms. Washington trails no glamour from her seven seasons as the political fixer Olivia Pope on "Scandal." Nor does she have any of Olivia's finesse and power. All she has is a torrent of words, barely containing her rage at everything: at her son for slapping a provocative bumper sticker on his car, at her husband for leaving them, at the police for stonewalling her and at history itself. For even as she speaks through Kendra's specific experience in lines like "Everything's coming apart," Ms. Washington evokes a larger and longer disaster. No matter how you build your life to avoid it, her performance suggests, the day will come when your black son is in danger. Perhaps all of your decoys, all of your success, will make that day come more surely. This is a despairing message in a despairing play, and it renders the actual plot almost secondary. Indeed, after the first few minutes we don't learn much more about what's happened to Jamal until the final curtain. In between, the dispensing of calibrated micro doses of information can seem manipulative; much of it could as easily be revealed earlier. But Mr. Demos Brown, who is white, is interested in the procedural details only as a tensioning device. His real aim, evidently, is to shift the narrative about police and young black men from individual cases to universal feelings. It would be hard for any parent not to be harrowed by the terror both Kendra and Scott express, in their own ways, about the disappearance of their child. The play's title clearly expresses that generalizing intention. This puts enormous pressure on the production to keep the personal material in focus, lest the whole thing tip into polemics. Though I could quibble with some of the staging, which sometimes seems to get stuck behind furniture, this is the director Kenny Leon's best work to date: incisive and breakneck. If the police station set by Derek McLane is a bit grand in scale, it fills the Booth nicely and emphasizes Kendra's powerlessness. And for the first time I can recall, a thunderstorm recreated onstage actually seems like a thunderstorm instead of a comment. The cast manages a similar feat of naturalism: These are big but nuanced performances. Mr. Pasquale, for once ideally cast, fully inhabits Scott's contraption of a personality, easygoing for about an inch and chaotic underneath. (Listen, if you can, for his devastating last lines.) Mr. Jordan, naturally ingratiating onstage, smartly uses that ingratiation to suggest a character who has never had to dig any deeper. And as a police lieutenant who arrives near the end, Eugene Lee makes a powerful figure of a plot device. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
China demanded on Wednesday that four American news organizations provide the government with information about their staffs, finances and real estate holdings inside the country, in what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said was retaliation for the Trump administration's recent actions against Chinese news outlets in the United States. The Chinese government stopped short, however, of announcing the expulsions of journalists at any of the four American organizations: The Associated Press, CBS News, National Public Radio and United Press International. The action is the latest in a series of tit for tat clashes over the treatment of journalists, part of an intensifying rivalry between the two powers. In March, China required five other American media organizations to submit information about their operations. It also expelled almost all of the American journalists working for three of them: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Pep Guardiola never liked the term "tiki taka," but it came to define his Barcelona teams. Enjoying this newsletter? Tell a friend to sign up at nytimes.com/rory and then you'll have something new to talk about every Friday. The story of how the term "tiki taka" entered soccer's lexicon, how it came to define a style, might, perhaps, be apocryphal, but that does not matter. Sometimes, whether a story is true and whether a story reveals a truth are separate things. The story, as you may know, goes like this. Javier Clemente was coach of Athletic Bilbao in the 1980s. Clemente was a brusque figure, and he wanted his teams to play a physical, direct, effective sort of soccer. It worked: In 1984, Athletic won both the Spanish title and the Spanish cup. Its main rival that year was a Barcelona team coached by Cesar Luis Menotti, an Argentine who was, in many ways, Clemente's polar opposite. Menotti believed soccer was a form of art. He wanted his teams not only to win, but to take the crowd's breath away with the beauty and synchronicity of their movements. Partly, that is because we look for two things in a soccer match: not just a certain standard of ability, but a certain level of meaning. A tense, tight, hardscrabble game between two cautious teams can be more compelling than a seven goal thriller, if the stakes or the standards are higher. (The perfect game ends without a goal, as the Italian coach Annibale Frossi once said.) Likewise, watching perfection can be curiously cold. Manchester City, over the last three years, has often reached a pitch of brilliance that has overwhelmed almost every opponent. But and again, this is purely personal it has, at times, felt like watching a perfectly tuned machine. The United States strolling to last summer's Women's World Cup title engendered the same response: Jill Ellis's team was a more than deserving champion, vastly superior to every other team at the tournament. By every measure, it was what we would call an attacking team. It played on the front foot. It was impressive and efficient and clinical. It was impossible not to admire the engineering. But that is not the same as stirring the soul. The other part, of course, is that what appeals to each of us is different, rooted in subjective metrics even we, deep down, probably do not fully understand, based on the cultures we grew up in, the expectations we were raised with. A friend of mine always draws a parallel with weather presenters: They are always so gloomy about the prospect of rain, as if they are delivering bad news. Some people, we should probably not forget, quite like the rain. This is significant in the context of elite, modern soccer. Few managers, now, present themselves as ideologically flexible. Rarely do they go into a club and tell prospective employers they will see what sort of players they have, and implement an approach that suits them. Far more often, they claim to stand for something, to be the emissaries of some particular, superior philosophy. None of that is necessarily bad. Having a defined idea of what a team is also makes it far easier to sign players. Often, it enables coaches to get the best out of their squad, because the principles of what they are trying to do are baked into their minds. It makes periods of struggle simpler to overcome. But it should not be forgotten that beauty is not universally acknowledged. It is dangerous to pursue style above all else, because not everyone reacts to it in the same way. After a while, the appeal even of Guardiola's Barcelona, and particularly the Spanish national team, started to pall. Where once it had felt fresh and flowing, now it felt repetitive, stale, death by a thousand cuts. Tiki taka, all of a sudden, drifted back closer to Clemente's original meaning; what was once an aspiration became an insult again. Some people, after all, like the rain. That brings the number of countries to halt the season permanently to four; not quite a trend, yet, but certainly an emerging pattern. It may, though, not be that simple. First, there is the issue of what to do with the curtailed season: The Dutch cannot name a champion, but the Belgians, Scots and French think they will. In the Netherlands and Scotland, there is a lingering threat of legal action from teams unhappy with the outcome. In France, the government may yet have to bail out clubs facing a financial catastrophe. Everywhere else, the message remains in line with UEFA: The leagues and their teams want to play on. Germany is planning to be back in May. Spain does not see why, if factories and fishing boats are open, training facilities should not be. Even slow moving England, where the process has been especially messy, is starting to give teams advice. Beneath all of that, though, are hundreds of other questions. So in the spirit of trying to help, I thought I would try to answer some of yours. From Peter Stokes: "Can anyone explain why Premier League clubs are unable to finance what is a relatively short interruption to their businesses?" Because soccer is a finely balanced cash flow business, I suppose: The money comes in, and the money goes out straight away, in the form of player salaries and transfer payments. The clubs have enough money to sustain the losses for a while, but more than a couple of months would be a challenge. This has, I think, shown us how delicate soccer's financial ecosystem is. That is something that will need to change. Christopher Orr: "Have the various authorities considered simply declaring an extension to the season and all its related contracts for as long as it requires to complete the season?" In essence, yes. FIFA has guided clubs that the June 30 date on players' contracts, say, should really be read as "the point the season ends," rather than a specific date. That issue strikes me as being relatively simple: Players and clubs will, for the most part, extend temporarily, if that is what is required to get the game back. Other obligations are more complicated. Part of the reason that France, Belgium and Scotland canceled their seasons was because they have new broadcast deals that kick in starting with next season. Stephen Nicola: "I am wondering why the cancellation of next season has not been considered as an option that would ensure the current season is finished?" It is a nice idea in theory, but the problem there is entirely financial. If it comes down to losing some of this year's revenue a quarter, say or all of next year's, there really is no choice to make. What does not seem to be under consideration is that next year's dates could be much more flexible than is currently being suggested. Of all the many and varied myths that permeate English soccer, the one that has always grated the most is the idea that Newcastle is the country's great one club city. It is easy to see why the idea has taken hold: the fervor of the club's fans; the reverence for the players; the site of the stadium, a cathedral, high on a hill, keeping watchful guard over its flock. But none of that makes the myth any more true. That's because Leeds a couple of hours to the south has the exact same number of soccer clubs, followed with no less passion, but is substantially larger. The difference, the reason the Newcastle myth holds, is that Leeds is a one club city, but not a one sport one. It is cricket country, and it is Good Rugby territory, too. Those of you and there were plenty who wrote in to recommend "Take Us Home: Leeds United," the Amazon Prime documentary series about the club's push for promotion back to the Premier League, will doubtless have noticed this. Add it to your list of things to watch during lockdown. There have been many more suggestions, too, if you're looking for a fix, ones that a more competent list compiler would have gotten the first time around. Mark Sullivan directs you to the "All or Nothing" series about the Brazilian national team. "So much drama and hugs and praying," he wrote, checking the three boxes that should be required of any television show. Thomas Patterson and Laurel Patrick both mentioned "Next Goal Wins," detailing the story of the American Samoa soccer team; John Lowndes recommends "The Class of '92," covering the Manchester United generation of Nicky Butt, Phil Neville and a couple of others; Matthew Magill believes "Antoine Griezmann: The Making of a Legend" is better than its title suggests. I'll endeavor to watch them all, between episodes of "The Last Dance." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Why do some people infected with the coronavirus suffer only mild symptoms, while others become deathly ill? Geneticists have been scouring our DNA for clues. Now, a study by European scientists is the first to document a strong statistical link between genetic variations and Covid 19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Variations at two spots in the human genome are associated with an increased risk of respiratory failure in patients with Covid 19, the researchers found. One of these spots includes the gene that determines blood types. Having Type A blood was linked to a 50 percent increase in the likelihood that a patient would need to get oxygen or to go on a ventilator, according to the new study. The study was equally striking for the genes that failed to turn up. The coronavirus attaches to a protein called ACE2 on the surface of human cells in order to enter them, for example. But genetic variants in ACE2 did not appear to make a difference in the risk of severe Covid 19. The findings suggest that relatively unexplored factors may be playing a large role in who develops life threatening Covid 19. "There are new kids on the block now," said Andre Franke, a molecular geneticist at the University of Kiel in Germany and a co author of the new study, which is currently going through peer review. Scientists have already determined that factors like age and underlying disease put people at extra risk of developing a severe case of Covid 19. But geneticists are hoping that a DNA test might help identify patients who will need aggressive treatment. Figuring out the reason that certain genes may raise the odds of severe disease could also lead to new targets for drug designers. As the pandemic gained momentum in February, Dr. Franke and his colleagues set up a collaboration with doctors in Spain and Italy who were struggling with a rising wave of Covid 19. The doctors took blood samples from 1,610 patients who needed an oxygen supply or had to go on a ventilator. Dr. Franke and his colleagues extracted DNA from the samples and scanned it using a rapid technique called genotyping. The researchers did not sequence all three billion genetic letters in the genome of each patient. Instead, they looked at nine million letters. Then the researchers carried out the same genetic survey on 2,205 blood donors with no evidence of Covid 19. The scientists were looking for spots in the genome, called loci, where an unusually high number of the severely ill patients shared the same variants, compared with those who were not ill. Two loci turned up. In one of these sites is the gene that determines our blood type. That gene directs production of a protein that places molecules on the surface of blood cells. It's not the first time Type A blood has turned up as a possible risk. Chinese scientists who examined patient blood types also found that those with Type A were more likely to develop a serious case of Covid 19. No one knows why. While Dr. Franke was comforted by the support from the Chinese study, he could only speculate how blood types might affect the disease. "That is haunting me, quite honestly," he said. He also noted that the locus where the blood type gene is situated also contains a stretch of DNA that acts as an on off switch for a gene producing a protein that triggers strong immune responses. The coronavirus triggers an overreaction of the immune system in some people, leading to massive inflammation and lung damage the so called cytokine storm. It is theoretically possible that genetic variations influence that response. A second locus, on Chromosome 3, shows an even stronger link to Covid 19, Dr. Franke and his colleagues found. But that spot is home to six genes, and it is not yet possible to say which of them influences the course of Covid 19. One of those gene candidates encodes a protein known to interact with ACE2, the cellular receptor needed by the coronavirus to enter host cells. But another gene nearby encodes a potent immune signaling molecule. It is possible that this immune gene also triggers an overreaction that leads to respiratory failure. Dr. Franke and his colleagues are part of an international effort called the Covid 19 Host Genetics Initiative. A thousand researchers in 46 countries are collecting DNA samples from people with the disease. They are now beginning to post data on the initiative's website. Andrea Ganna, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Helsinki, said that initiative's collected data were beginning to point to a single spot on Chromosome 3 as a potentially important player. It's not common for genetic variants to emerge out of studies of so few people, said Jonathan Sebat, a geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the new study. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
THE JUNGLE BOOK (1942) Stream on Amazon or Criterion Channel; rent on iTunes. Rudyard Kipling's classic collection of fables has spawned a growing Disney franchise of animated and live action adaptations. This movie isn't one of them. An independent feature by the Korda brothers, the adventure centers on the young hero Mowgli (Sabu), a boy who was raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. After he is captured by villagers and reunited with his mother, he tries to give life among human beings a try. That doesn't go too well: Mowgli discovers the greed and violence that comes with civilization, and ultimately decides that he can't live between both worlds. The film was nominated for four Oscars, including best cinematography and music. PIRATE RADIO (2009) Stream on Amazon; rent on Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. This rowdy comedy from Richard Curtis ("Love Actually") revisits the mid 1960s, when, believe it or not, the British government all but banned rock music from the airwaves. Defying that censorship, a group of pirate D.J.s (led by Bill Nighy and Philip Seymour Hoffman) set up a radio station on an old tanker and broadcast their favorite hits to millions of listeners from the sea. In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Stuffed with playful character actors and carpeted with wall to wall tunes, the film makes for easy viewing and easier listening." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The government of Switzerland kicked off a debate this week when it ordered that lobsters and other crustaceans no longer be dropped alive into boiling water. Boiling them causes pain, the government said, and should be replaced by a more rapid method of death such as stunning. Still, even the scientist who conducted the foundational research for the government's decision said he's not 100 percent sure that lobsters can feel pain. But he's concerned enough that he's only cooked a live lobster once and doesn't plan to do it again. "There's no absolute proof, but you keep running experiments and almost everything I looked at came out consistent with the idea of pain in these animals," said Robert Elwood, professor emeritus of animal behavior at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. "There should be a more humane approach with lobsters." Dr. Elwood's position and the Swiss government's is outside the scientific mainstream, said Joseph Ayers, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern University in Boston. "I think the idea of producing such a law is just a bunch of people anthropomorphizing lobsters," Dr. Ayers said, adding that there were other possible explanations for Dr. Elwood's findings. "I find it really quite remarkable that people attribute to these animals humanlike responses when they simply don't have the hardware for it." Lobsters lack the brain anatomy needed to feel pain, said Dr. Ayers, who builds robots modeled on lobster and sea lamprey neurobiology. Lobsters and other crustaceans are often swallowed whole by predators, he added, so they never needed to evolve the ability to detect pain from say, warming water or an electric shock. Michael Tlusty, a lobster biologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston, takes a middle ground. He agrees that lobsters lack the brain anatomy that we associate with pain sensation. But crustacean brains are so different from ours, he said, that no one can really say for certain what they are feeling. For instance, when a lobster's claw is being attacked, it will jettison its own arm to escape. "When a human does that, we make a movie about it," Dr. Tlusty said, referring to the 2010 survival drama "127 Hours." Lobsters continue to twitch after they've had their limbs ripped off, he noted, but it's unclear whether that's in response to unpleasant sensations or a programmed reflex like your leg kicking when a doctor taps your knee in a particular place. Dr. Elwood got the idea for researching lobster pain about a dozen years ago at his local pub. Celebrity chef Rick Stein, known for his seafood dishes, was having a pint, and Dr. Elwood introduced himself. The chef stumped him by asking if lobsters felt pain when cooked. In several studies since, Dr. Elwood has shown that crustaceans guard wounded limbs and avoid areas where they've been shocked even leaving their shells behind if necessary. When he traveled to Singapore, he said he watched as street sellers kept grabbing live crabs as they scuttled off a barbecue grill, keen to get away. He's now convinced that those responses are the crustacean equivalent of pain. As David Foster Wallace observed in his famous article "Consider the Lobster," lobsters remain the only animals we still kill in our own kitchens. We have to face the ethics of that decision, he noted, while we more easily ignore such feelings about other animals in our diet. Boiling might take as long as a minute to kill a lobster, long enough for it to suffer, Dr. Elwood said. A skilled chef who slices right into a lobster's head should be able to kill the animal faster, he said. "That should be a reasonable way of doing it." He also mentioned a commercial device called a Crustastun that zaps the animal with electricity, promising to kill it instantly. The Swiss government cited electrocution as a preferred method of killing, though the Crustastun, which reportedly costs 3,400, is meant to be used by processors or large restaurants. Dr. Ayers dismissed the method, saying he's seen animals moving for minutes after being stunned. He said he loves lobsters as much as anyone he's devoted his career to studying them, and his son is a lobster fisherman but he said he doesn't see a more humane way of killing lobsters than dunking them headfirst into a pot of boiling water. Dr. Tlusty has an alternative strategy: He puts lobsters on ice to slow their nervous system before they meet the pot. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Developers used the 2010s to reshape the New York skyline with soaring condo towers many of which will struggle to sell units well into the next decade. But what began as a period of exuberance for investors ended with a dwindling pool of high end buyers willing to pay record prices. Apartments are still selling, especially in the resale market, but often at marked down prices. "We think of this decade as this boom of new product never seen before, but that's a distant memory," said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers Consultants. "The second half was a reckoning with reality." It was also a decade of tremendous change and gentrification for the boroughs beyond Manhattan, where rezoning and the pursuit of cheaper land near public transit spurred new building, much of it too expensive for local residents. At the same time, a dire need for affordable housing continues in the city, where about 79,000 people live in shelters or on the streets. To better understand what awaits in 2020, we explored some of the biggest changes of the last decade in the sales, rental and new development markets. Which neighborhoods received the most new development, experienced the highest rent increases, the highest sales price increases? The building boom made Brooklyn ascendant, with Queens not far behind, and some major residential mixed use projects are now also underway in the South Bronx. There are already signs of the market and neighborhoods pushing back against the glut of new development and subsequent gentrification. In Manhattan, where the surplus of new luxury condos could take more than six years to sell, there is already a shift toward smaller, relatively less expensive units. Sweeping rent reforms in 2019 could also shape what gets built, and for whom, in the years to come. The Rise and Fall of Ultra Luxury Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015, or 3,695 of 7,727 apartments, remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both closed sales and contracts by Nancy Packes Data Services, a real estate consultancy and database provider. The report looked at buildings with about 30 or more units. That is a staggering estimate and a humbling reversal from the start of the decade. Investors, many of them from overseas, in search of higher returns after the 2008 recession looked to hard assets like real estate, and bet big on residential projects. Because credit remained tight for most New Yorkers, the most lucrative demographic was the affluent all cash buyer, and thousands of new units larger apartments, with better finishes and more amenities were built to suit the demand. Luxury real estate is a sentiment driven market, said Nancy Packes, the principal of Nancy Packes Data Services. "Someone who has 30 million has four to five homes they don't need to buy," she said. The ambitious pricing created a divide between buyers who intended to live in their apartments and investors seeking a certain return. In 2011, the average sale price of a new condo was 1.15 million, just a 9 percent premium over resales. By 2019, the average price of a new condo was 3.77 million, a 118 percent premium over resales, Ms. Packes said. That disconnect has led to a glut of unsold luxury condos. Including shadow inventory the units held off the market until conditions improve there were 7,050 new condo units available for sale in Manhattan in January, according to a Halstead Development Marketing report. That is the equivalent of more than six years of inventory at the current pace of sales, when a balanced market typically sells out in two to three years. "You never had this kind of supply in these price ranges," said Gary Barnett, the president and founder of Extell Development, which has built some of the priciest condos of the decade. "The 5 million to 10 million market is hammered there's way too much of it," he said, leading most developers to pump the brakes on new residential plans, until the current supply is sold. The competition has meant deep concessions to buyers, including developers' offers to cover closing costs, several years of common charges and other sweeteners. At One Manhattan Square, Extell's massive 815 unit condo tower in Two Bridges, where prices range from 1.2 million for a one bedroom to 12.1 million for a penthouse, several units are being offered with "rent to own" plans an unusual option that underscores the volume of supply. Only about a quarter of the units had been sold in October, according to a StreetEasy analysis, though marketing began in 2015. A spokeswoman said, however, that there are "hundreds of more units" that are in contract. In the pipeline of new residential projects, there could be a renewed focus on full time residents, with a mix of smaller, comparatively affordable units. At Essex Crossing, a six acre mixed use project on the Lower East Side expected to be completed in 2024, the nine building complex will incorporate retail, community space, and a total of 1,079 new apartments, more than half of which will be reserved for low and middle income tenants. Seven of the nine buildings are open or under construction. Led by a consortium of developers called Delancey Street Associates, the project began in 2013, but only after decades of false starts under different city administrations and input from local residents, who pushed for more affordable units and other considerations. To be sure, the project is supported in large part by luxury apartments. One of the nine buildings within the complex, 242 Broome Street, a 55 unit condo designed by SHoP Architects, had prices that ranged from 1.275 million for a one bedroom to over 7 million for a three bedroom penthouse certainly expensive, but far from the prices sought for more extravagant spreads earlier in the decade. All but three units there have sold, a spokesman said. Closer to Downtown Brooklyn, Pacific Park, formerly known as Atlantic Yards and anchored by the Barclays Center stadium, attracted major residential development nearby. A number of new mixed use residential towers begun in the 2010s will soon dwarf the 512 foot clock tower at One Hanson Place, which was the borough's tallest building for decades. Nearby, when it is completed in late 2021, the 1,066 foot skyscraper at 9 DeKalb Avenue, next to Junior's cheesecake, will be the borough's first supertall skyscraper, and new recordholder. "Brooklyn became a brand unto its own," said Brendan Aguayo, a managing director of Halstead Development Marketing, who oversees several luxury rental and condo projects in the borough. The seeds were sown in the mid 2000s, when parts of the mostly industrial waterfront were rezoned to allow for denser building, and developers sought out less expensive land near mass transit. Tax abatements given to certain developments encouraged more building, and residents priced out of more central neighborhoods fanned outward. "It's taken a number of years for all these dynamics to converge," he said. Critics argue that much of the new development, even when a portion of units are reserved for low and middle income renters, have made housing unaffordable for longtime residents, the majority of whom are black and Hispanic. Many neighborhood groups in Bushwick, where the median rent was 1,592 in 2018, up 27 percent since 2010, are unhappy with the current rezoning plan proposed by the city, which Ms. Fennell said dismissed years of community feedback on affordability requirements and other considerations designed to reduce displacement. The question of what gets built, and for whom, is at the center of a number of ongoing zoning disputes in the city. In December, a New York State judge sided with opponents of a rezoning plan for Inwood in Upper Manhattan, the borough's most affordable rental market, in part because the review process did not adequately consider the racial impact of the proposed changes. A changing tide in the state legislature, with Democrats taking control of state government in 2019, could also be a boon for the roughly 2.4 million residents of rent regulated apartments in New York. In June, a raft of new rent laws passed, including stronger eviction protections for tenants and rules that make it harder for landlords to sharply raise the rent. There are still several large development sites along the Anable Basin, near the proposed Amazon campus, that could yield thousands of additional market rate and affordable units. And the Sunnyside Yard, a 180 acre potential development site in western Queens that has been eyed for decades, could soon move forward, though community fears of gentrification and displacement have intensified in recent years. The change is not limited to the neighborhoods closest to Manhattan. In downtown Flushing, the last stop on the 7 subway line, rows of glassy condo towers have redefined the largely Chinese and Korean immigrant enclave. Since 2009, developers have built 3,075 new condo units in Flushing, second only to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in terms of condo construction citywide, according to Nancy Packes Data Services. "I remember a decade ago when people were embarrassed about living in Flushing," said Helen Lee, an executive vice president with F T Group, one of the developers of Tangram, a 1.2 million square foot, mixed use complex named after the Chinese puzzle. The complex will have two condo towers with 324 apartments, a hotel and amenities that include a teahouse inspired pavilion, an indoor pool, outdoor tennis court, and a porte cochere. The first condo tower began closings in 2019, and upcoming retail space anticipated in late 2020 will include a new movie theater, food hall and beer garden in a crowded section of Flushing long known for mom and pop restaurants and stores. "This town is upgrading," said Allen Chiu, 74, a semiretired attorney who bought a one bedroom apartment with his son in the south tower for close to 900,000. The median sale price in Flushing was 650,000 in 2019, up from 350,000 in 2009, a nearly 86 percent jump, according to StreetEasy. Mr. Chiu, who grew up in Taiwan but has lived for decades on Long Island, said he bought the apartment in large part because of the nearby conveniences: dozens of nearby banks, doctors, and markets that cater to Chinese speakers, as well as a large South Asian community. He said he recognizes the absurdity of condo prices approaching 1 million in this part of Queens, but that the quality of design French oak floors, Italian cabinetry, rooms oriented to balance feng shui exceeds what was built even a few years ago. The second tower at Tangram, which will have larger, more lavish apartments, will be even more ambitious. "A three bed there costs more than 3 million," he said. "It's crazy, but what can you do? There are still people buying." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In the early hours of Friday morning, Lin Manuel Miranda, the creator of "Hamilton," released "One Last Time (44 Remix)," a gospel reworking of a song from the hit musical. Halfway through, Barack Obama the 44 in question appears, to deliver part of George Washington's farewell address over some gentle guitar and piano. Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder. "Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors," he starts, lines that are likely to appeal to both Obama's fans and his detractors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Trade negotiators from Canada, Mexico and the United States resume discussions on Friday over the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The first round of the talks, which opened in Washington last month, got off to a tense start with the Trump administration admonishing its neighbors and declaring that Nafta had "fundamentally failed." As the second round gets underway in Mexico City, the three countries said in a statement that they were committed to an "ambitious outcome." What is being negotiated? Nafta, which came into force in 1994, created what is now the world's biggest free trade bloc. But the pact has been the focus of criticism in recent years. Opponents in the United States President Trump chief among them argue that it has allowed Mexico to benefit at the expense of its neighbor to the north. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Households entered the coronavirus shutdown in precarious economic positions that have only worsened as workers are furloughed by the millions, and the challenges are especially acute for the poorest Americans, according to a Federal Reserve survey released Thursday. Many Americans went into the nationwide lockdown with limited savings, despite gains from a record long economic expansion. At the end of 2019, three in 10 adults said they could not cover three months' worth of expenses with savings or borrowing in the case of a job loss, "indicating that they were not prepared for the current financial challenges," the Fed report said. One in five people who were working in February reported losing a job or being furloughed in March or the beginning of April, the data showed, and that pain was highly concentrated among low earners. Fully 39 percent of former workers living in a household earning 40,000 or less lost work, compared with 13 percent in those making more than 100,000, a Fed official said. The U.S. economy began slowing in March as state and local governments instituted stay at home orders to tame the coronavirus' rapid spread. That has most likely caused the steepest growth decline in the United States' postwar history. Consumer spending has plummeted as stores and restaurants closed, and mass layoffs have become a feature of everyday life. Nearly three million people filed for unemployment benefits last week, pushing the two month tally over 36 million. Lawmakers have responded with 2 trillion in relief spending, expanding unemployment insurance and forgivable loans to small business. But most families would not have gotten relief checks by the time the Fed survey was fielded in early April. Policymakers and economic experts increasingly worry that it will prove insufficient to stem the damage, as the timeline for reopening and the path back for consumer spending remain uncertain. The Fed's report included both a large annual survey fielded in October and a roughly 1,000 person supplement conducted April 3 to April 6, and it showed just how intense and disparate the economic fallout has been so far. While about 53 percent of those with jobs worked from home at the end of March, that was a highly educated group. More than 60 percent of workers with at least a bachelor's degree worked completely from home, versus 20 percent of those with a high school degree or less. Among those who had lost hours or jobs amid the pandemic, 48 percent were "finding it difficult to get by" or "just getting by," according to the survey. Just 64 percent of those who had taken an employment hit felt that they would be able to pay their bills in April, compared with 85 percent of those without a work disruption. Those challenges came as a large swath of Americans took pay cuts. About 23 percent of all adults, and 70 percent of those who had lost their jobs or their hours reduced, said their income was lower in March than in February. That coronavirus lockdowns have hit disadvantaged communities hard comes as no surprise to Paul Ash, executive director of the San Francisco Marin Food Bank. Mr. Ash said his food pantry network, which typically serves 32,000 households weekly, had seen traffic increase by about 26,000 since the crisis began. 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. At one location, "the line stretched, when the pantry opened, around 10 city blocks," he said. "People have to have a motivation to wait in a line like that." While food bank pantry visits also increased during the Great Recession, that wave of demand came slowly this one hit suddenly, and has not abated even after the government response kicked in. "People were feeling the same angst as those with more money were feeling," he suggested, so while the well to do went the Safeway to fill their pantries, those of lesser means went to the food bank. While Mr. Ash's organization doesn't ask for recipient information, his sense from volunteering at one of the food pickups is that many of those seeking assistance are newly in need. "A good number of them, they don't know what the procedures are there's a group that just hasn't asked for food help in the past," he said. He and his colleagues are beginning to plan for elevated demand over the next six to 12 months, he said. There are signs that coronavirus' economic damage could take longer to fade than many were hoping. About nine in 10 workers who had lost jobs in the Fed's survey anticipated that they would return to work for the same employer or said they had already returned to work, but the vast majority of those people do not have a specific date yet. About 5 percent had already returned to work, and 8 percent did not expect to go back to the same employer. "There is a sense, a growing sense I think, that the recovery will come more slowly than we would like," the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, said on Wednesday, after warning that the U.S. economy may require more fiscal policy help to make it through the crisis. "Additional fiscal support could be costly, but worth it if it helps avoid long term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery," he said in his speech. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Times Square will be emptier than usual for New Year's Eve this year, but TV networks are doing their best to fill the gaps with extra live performances and creative thinking. What becomes of Times Square when you take away hundreds of thousands of cheering, shivering New Year's Eve revelers? It may no longer be the "biggest, most exciting New Year's Eve party on Earth." But it may still be the night's biggest TV production set. For this year's pandemic New Year's Eve, many television traditions will be scrapped, including the scenes of raucous celebrations across the world and impromptu interviews with exuberant party goers at bars and clubs, eager to say hello to their mothers and grandmothers back home. Instead, networks are doubling down on the segments that they can safely pull off. They've increased the number of performers and interview guests, decreased the number of crew members and brainstormed creative and socially distant locations to send their reporters to. (Instead of reporting from a crowd of partyers, for example, one CNN correspondent will report from a crowd of puppies, which are not known to spread the coronavirus.) So while the type of people who enjoy cramming themselves into crowds of strangers to watch the ball drop may be disappointed this year, the type that prefers to curl up and celebrate from their sofas will find their tradition largely intact. "In some respects it's going to feel very similar to previous years," said Meredith McGinn, an executive producer of NBC's New Year's Eve program, which is hosted by Carson Daly. "You will see the same confetti fly at midnight; you will see the ball drop." But, like most things in 2020, there were some necessary adjustments. "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve" on ABC will send Ryan Seacrest roaming around a much emptier Times Square with a camera crew in tow wearing a mask except when standing in designated areas. And CNN's hosts, Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen, will reunite in Times Square for an evening of interviews and cheeky ad libbing. (The hosts are close friends who have been in each other's social "bubbles" during the pandemic.) "We had to reinvent Times Square," said Jeff Straus, the president of Countdown Entertainment, which co produces the event with Times Square Alliance. He described the set up as a theater in the round, with two stages at the center. Three huge screens will provide close ups of what's happening onstage for the small number of guests. Emergency medical workers, frontline workers and essential workers were invited to bring their families to sit in specially designated areas in Times Square and watch the array of performances. In total, somewhere between 100 and 160 guests are expected to be present for the 11 scheduled musical acts, including a seven minute show by Jennifer Lopez leading up to the final countdown. Those guests will be the subjects of the on camera interviews, rather than the partyers among dense crowds of people, some of whom wait in Times Square for a dozen or more hours to ensure good spots. To pull off the broadcast, networks must follow state guidelines on pandemic television production, as well as protocols set by the various unions representing the crews and performers. They've devised plans for testing production staffers for Covid 19 before New Year's Eve and for feeding production staffers without letting them get too close to one another. (NBC rented additional space in Times Square to make sure crew members could eat and maintain proper distance.) On Thursday, network employees will work from separate locations when possible. The director of "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve," Glenn Weiss, is overseeing the broadcast from his office on 46th Street instead of in the "Good Morning America" studio at Broadway and 44th Street. And NBC cameras are stationed on the third floor of the Renaissance New York Times Square Hotel, where the network had to remove some of the hotel's windows so that bird's eye views of the event would not be hindered by glare. All of the acts at Times Square will be live, including performances by Lopez, Gloria Gaynor, Billy Porter, Cyndi Lauper and Pitbull. Many other performances will occur on stages outside of New York including those by Brandy, Megan Thee Stallion and Miley Cyrus, all from Los Angeles, for ABC. On PBS, a New Year's Eve program, called "United in Song," was filmed in November at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and in September at George Washington's Virginia estate in Mount Vernon, where about 120 audience members watched from a distance and masked violinists were separated from unmasked brass players with plexiglass. NBC is showing a new Blake Shelton music video. Spectrum News NY1 will roll a highlight reel of its reporter Dean Meminger's flashy New Year's Eve suits over the years. And networks are getting creative in other ways to fill the holes formerly filled by crowd shots and partyers. CNN will have one correspondent getting a tattoo, another skiing down an Oregon slope wearing a GoPro and an appearance from Carole Baskin of "Tiger King" fame. With the pandemic driving people away from bars and restaurants and toward their living rooms, executives say it's possible that there will be more viewers than ever before. ABC, which tends to have the highest viewership on the holiday, peaked last year at about 21 million viewers, according to news reports. "I can never predict what the Nielsen gods will bring," said Mark Bracco, an executive producer on ABC's program, "but we're hopeful that most Americans will be home on their couches." In a year in which more than 338,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, viewers may notice a tonal shift compared with the goofy and sometimes tipsy coverage of years past. The Champagne popping and 2021 eyeglasses will be interspersed with appreciations of health care workers and emergency medical workers, as well as reflections on the lives lost and the economic hardship. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
While studying for his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Columbia University six or seven years ago, Marshall Cox regulated his room's temperature in winter the way most New Yorkers with steam radiators do. He opened a window. But then his twin brother, Jeremy, moved to New York to dance in "Come Fly Away" on Broadway. His brother complained "incessantly," Mr. Cox said, that "it was boiling, or freezing, many times both over the course of a night." It drove Marshall Cox to invent the Cozy, a radiator cover that can contain the warmth in an overheated room and shift it to an underheated room. The Cozy, which Mr. Cox has described as a "glorified oven mitt" and which is being sold on a limited basis, went on to win a 220,000 M.I.T. Clean Energy Prize in 2012. The Cozy's victory is understandable. It addresses a problem that has afflicted New Yorkers since the early 1900s, when oversize radiators were necessitated by a Board of Health directive requiring open windows on even the iciest winter days. This was back when "fresh air" was considered the universal cure all. Today's apartment and condominium dwellers needn't suffer, though. Thanks to modern technology, energy saving programs, and a handful of tradesmen versed in century old plumbing techniques, there are a variety of fixes to tame runaway radiators. Much of New York City's overheating problem can be attributed to the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, said Dan Holohan, a historian of heating and the author of 18 books on the subject. "I first spotted this in my engineering books from the 1920s," he said. "The authors would mention the 'Fresh Air Movement' and caution that both boilers and radiators now had to be much larger because of the need to keep windows open by command of the Board of Health." Fresh air was specifically thought to ward off airborne illnesses like the flu. Although the Spanish Flu abated in 1920, the engineering standards dictating oversize radiators remained. Now, when the master plumber John Cataneo answers his phone, "I could write the script for nearly every caller," he said. " 'I'm boiling, I can't sleep at night, and the building isn't helpful.' " In theory, steam heating is simple, efficient and easy to maintain. A boiler heats water to about 212 degrees. It becomes pressurized steam and races through a circuit of pipes. Some of the steam enters the radiators connected to the circuit. The steam transfers heat to the radiator's metal, which then warms the air of the room. This transfer causes the steam to cool, and it turns back into water, called condensate. The condensate returns to the boiler to repeat the cycle. But a properly working steam heat system is a delicate balancing act. Numerous radiators are connected to a single source of steam. It is tricky getting the right amount of steam into each radiator when each may require a different quantity. Reducing steam in one room may send too much to a different room. "It's really simple," Mr. Holohan said, "but in practice, it's real easy to screw up." Years of piecemeal repairs often lead to the banging, clanging and uneven heat so common in prewar buildings. In the more common one pipe system, the heat is moderated by a vent, which looks like a miniature torpedo sticking off the end of the radiator and lets air out, to make room for steam to come in. One potential fix is a vent that allows some control over how hot a radiator gets. "On a one pipe system, an adjustable vent could be a very inexpensive answer; it's a 25 part," said Hunter Botto, past president of the New York State Association of Plumbing Heating Cooling Contractors. The cost of labor drives the price up, though. Expect to pay 250 to 750 for parts and installation of adjustable vents on each radiator, according to Paul Shay, a master plumber and heating consultant. The problem with valves and adjustable vents is that they are easily misused. "People use the extremes," Mr. Cataneo said. When people get chilly, they turn the valves all the way on until the room is too hot, then they turn them all the way off. Because of the mass of the radiator, he said, "there's still a half hour of heat left in that thing." When the room eventually gets too cold, the process repeats. "It is best to set them and give them several hours to react to the adjustment," Mr. Cataneo said. "These devices can provide a great deal of comfort they just need time to work." These problems can be reduced by using a properly installed Thermostatic Radiator Valve, known in the trade as a TRV. These valves are fitted with a thermostat that turns the valve on or off automatically as room temperature dictates. The disadvantage is that TRVs are frequently installed improperly, plumbers said, and are less durable than the simpler manually adjustable valves. There are also common steam heat problems that a TRV can't fix. Steam systems mix metal pipes, water and air a recipe for rust that can cripple valves and vents. If rust doesn't get them, house painters are infamous for wrecking them with a coat of paint. Engineers estimated savings from improvements to the heating plant which included insulating the pipes and boiler as well as adding TRVs throughout the 126 units at more than 36,000 a year. The state authority provided 63,000 for those and other upgrades, which helped defray the costs. And there is a payoff in comfort. "Having the TRVs where we can adjust our radiators, it's really great," said Jane Maisel, a co op board member and teacher. Over the years, Ms. Maisel and some of her neighbors had removed radiators to deal with their overheated apartments. "Now some people, like me, will probably have to put some back in," she said. As for Mr. Cox, he has a Brooklyn based company, Radiator Labs, making and selling his Cozy radiator covers, which have been installed and studied in two buildings in Upper Manhattan. The Cozy works as an insulator, trapping the heat in a radiator, so it doesn't escape into a hot room. When a room cools, a fan on the Cozy circulates air so the radiator can heat the room. In the buildings tested so far, the Cozy has reduced heating costs by 24 percent to 33 percent, according to Radiator Labs. For now, Cozies are available only for installations in entire buildings, in which case they cost about 500 for each radiator. Each one has to be custom fitted for snugness by a trained technician, which makes them expensive to manufacture for an individual apartment. Mr. Cox is working to develop an adjustable model that could be mass produced to work on radiators of different sizes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Democratic senators on Thursday questioned whether Amazon retaliated against whistle blowers when it fired four employees who raised concerns about the spread of coronavirus in the company's warehouses. In a letter sent to Amazon, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a frequent critic of the e commerce giant, and eight other senators asked Amazon to provide more information about its policies for firing employees. "In order to understand how the termination of employees that raised concerns about health and safety conditions did not constitute retaliation for whistle blowing, we are requesting information about Amazon's policies regarding grounds for employee discipline and termination," the letter said. The letter was also signed by Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, as well as Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand, Edward J. Markey, Richard Blumenthal, Kamala Harris and Tammy Baldwin. It asked Amazon if it tracked unionization efforts in its warehouses and whether it tracked employees who participated in protests or spoke to the news media. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A new flag hangs above Mercer Street, announcing a new shop: Nili Lotan. To which many may ask: Who? The Israeli designer doesn't stage fashion shows. She doesn't shoot ad campaigns or pay for them to run in magazines, and she doesn't spend a lot of time kissing up to the people who run them, who decide which clothes to feature and which to forget. Her clothes aren't flashy or splashy: They are neutral, well considered, the sort of thing those magazines like to euphemize as "elevated basics," as if there were anything basic about making something women want to wear every day. After 14 years in business, she is successful enough to keep her two other stores (in TriBeCa and in East Hampton, N.Y.) and sell briskly at department stores, but mostly in her own quiet way. "In our crowd, in the fashion circles we work in, so few people know about her," her friend, the photographer Inez van Lamsweerde, said. "They're blown away by the sense of fashion, but also the fact that you could actually live your life in it." "When I would say to other friends of mine, not in fashion, 'I found this incredible designer,' everyone says, 'Oh, yeah, I've been buying her pants for the last 10 years,'" Ms. van Lamsweerde said. "I missed that." But in the past year or two, something happened. Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner supermodels, super friends and Instagram juggernauts for whose endorsements brands pay handsomely discovered Ms. Lotan's clothes. As the celebrities wore her slouchy sweaters or her silk camisole dresses, their fans clamored after Ms. Lotan, and swelled her numbers on Instagram. "I started to look at who is following me more in depth," Ms. Lotan said. A majority are women between ages 24 and 34. "It could be as a result of Kendall and Gigi," she said. "It's possible that they brought all this younger crowd." This younger crowd is not necessarily the one Ms. Lotan has in mind when designing, and it is not necessarily one that can afford her designer level prices. So, taken with the digital experience (not to mention the migration of a significant part of her business from in store to online), Ms. Lotan hit on the idea for her new temporary Mercer Street shop: a brick and mortar extension of her e commerce platform, with new pieces priced lower than her usual for the young new fans who otherwise swarm her sample sales, hoping for deals. In her new space, Ms. Lotan seeks to emulate the speed and ease of online shopping. Orders will be taken on iPads, without cash being exchanged, and purchases can be carried out, shipped or delivered the same day in the New York metropolitan area. Each month, a new theme will take over the store: To begin, a feather motif inspired by Emily Dickinson's poem known as "Hope Is the Thing With Feathers," which also gave rise to a photo shoot by Ms. van Lamsweerde and her husband, Vinoodh Matadin, the results of which line the walls. "The past year I've been walking around feeling constant concern," Ms. Lotan said. "The only thing I could do to feel better was think about the word 'hope.'" But that's this month. Next month comes camouflage. And the next, riffing on her communities, TriBeCa and Tel Aviv. Ms. Lotan lives and works in TriBeCa with her husband, the Israeli singer songwriter David Broza, a superstar in their native country who is sometimes called "Israel's Bruce Springsteen." (Ms. Hadid, for the record, is half Palestinian; Mr. Broza has been a vocal activist in song for Israeli Palestinian peace; and Ms. Lotan is involved with the organization Women Wage Peace, and will host a benefit for it in the store.) The shop will stay open through August, when it will become a kind of traveling caravan, opening its doors wherever Ms. Lotan finds an outlet. Toronto has already been booked. She hopes Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv are to come. For the younger fans looking for the lower priced items, starting at 98 for a T shirt, they will be available (and in limited quantities) only at these pop ups, and, for those who cannot get to one, online. In honor of Ms. Hadid, Ms. Lotan has renamed an Aran sweater that the model wore in her honor, and at the opening, a rack of the silk cami dresses she favors hangs in a new rainbow array. But, Ms. Lotan added, the two have still never met. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
As a teenager growing up in Miami, Rahysa Vargas was always more concerned with serving her community than looking for a boyfriend. She was born in Bogota, Colombia, and, eager to fulfill the dreams of her parents to improve their lives in the United States, was interested in local politics and government. She even became the vice president of her high school class. During Christmas holiday seasons, Ms. Vargas would accompany her father, an entrepreneur, to a homeless shelter in Homestead, Fla., where they would distribute toys to children. In September 2006, she was introduced to Christopher Cheng, a fellow University of Miami undergraduate, by mutual friends at a football game against Florida State. She was not intrigued. His face was painted the Miami school colors of orange and green that got streaked in the rain. "We briefly spoke, but since I don't drink, he found me boring," Ms. Vargas said. "His attention was on my friend who did drink." "I didn't think Rahysa was my type," said Mr. Cheng, 33, who was born in Plantation and raised in South Florida. "I never had a college girlfriend. I was a free spirit who liked the chase. I wasn't mentally mature enough to engage Rahysa." Three months later, they reconnected at Tavern in the Grove, a local bar where Ms. Vargas, dressed in a silk dress and heels, was waiting for a friend. Mr. Cheng asked if she wanted a cocktail. "She looked classy but said no to drink offers and was short with me," said Mr. Cheng, who graduated in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in public relations and sociology and has worked in television broadcasting and hospital marketing. "I was drunk and challenged, so I apologized for my rude behavior and asked if she was too upper class for me to make her dinner sometime." Since she loved food and found him attractive without paint on his face, Ms. Vargas agreed. After more than a week of conversation leading up to their Dec. 15 date, she discovered that he was also "smart, cultured and funny." They dined at the Cheesecake Factory because Mr. Cheng had moved in with his mother for winter break. While waiting 90 minutes for a table, they talked about politics, religion, sociology and family. "We made fun of each other, laughed and couldn't stop speaking," she said. Later that night, Ms. Vargas suggested they see "The Pursuit of Happyness," starring Will Smith, because she felt the struggles of the actor's character were similar to those of her father when he moved the family to the United States when she was an infant. "I liked Rahysa's brain, personality, ambition and drive," Mr. Cheng said. "She was a firecracker who let me be candid without imposing judgment." Eager to see how she would fit in with his family and friends, Mr. Cheng asked Ms. Vargas to help celebrate his birthday the following night. "I normally chased down the wrong kind of girls, but nothing worked because they wanted bad boys, and I was too nice," he said. "But this felt different. " They started dating four or five nights a week, enjoying Mr. Cheng's cooking, dining in restaurants and reading together. "I thought he was genuine," said Ms. Vargas, who later showed her loyalty during another Miami Florida State football game when Mr. Cheng was beaten by opposition fans in the stands. "They ganged up on Chris and smashed his face in," said Mr. Cheng's mother, Helene Woodward. "Little selfless Rahysa jumped on top of him to save his life." Frank Guzman, a friend and groomsman, remembered how "Rahysa dragged his bloody, limp body into the aisle until the police arrived, and he was taken to the hospital." His injuries included a broken nose, a laceration from lip to chin and contusions on his body and skull. Mr. Cheng liked to show his affection by giving Ms. Vargas gifts, or regaling her with an appropriate song. He also nurtured her with food and medicine when she was sick. But he didn't plan birthdays, anniversaries or Valentine's Day. "I always write a letter on birthdays," she said, "and holidays are important so this became an issue." Ms. Vargas also got jealous when Mr. Cheng, then a busy associate producer at WSVN TV in Miami, hung out with a close buddy. She preferred that he spend quality time with her by going to dinner and talking. She also liked having him accompany her to places like the grocery store. Mr. Cheng wanted alone time to chill and play his guitar. "I have a big social personality and need to be away from people to recharge because I get anxious and depressed," Mr. Cheng said. "Rahysa is an adventurer and always wanted to go places." During one Christmas season when she asked him to help distribute toys at a homeless shelter, he declined, thinking her social interests were honorable but not as important as his television work. "I was super selfish, and everything was about me," he said. "They are both strong personalities, leaders, opinionated and outspoken," said her brother, Steven Vargas. Her mother, Constanza Gomez, agreed: "They are highly dramatic with similar personalities. Each can be sitting in a different room thinking about the same things." Still, while dating others, they kept in touch by sharing the grief of his uncle's death, divorcing parents, illness and other mercurial moments. In 2013, when Mr. Cheng returned to Miami for a job in marketing after a year in news at a Texas television station, they repeatedly ran into each other. He said he was battling depression and anxiety, and wasn't fulfilled by his career. "Even though I wanted to marry Rahysa and have a family," Mr. Cheng said, "she would soon be practicing law and knew I was a storm coming back and couldn't promise her a stable life." The next two years involved soul searching for Mr. Cheng. He sought professional help in hopes of finding stability so he could have one more shot with the love of his life. "She was my moral compass, a together person who liked me more than I liked myself," he said. "She made me a better human being." On March 3, the couple married under the cupola of the huge dome at the Beaux Arts designed City Hall in San Francisco, the city they visited shortly after reuniting. Before 88 guests, Chris Lopez, a mutual friend who founded Vous, their nondenominational Christian church in Miami, led a religious ceremony as David Gomes, a Universal Life minister, officiated. The couple wrote their own vows about how much they have overcome in 12 years, with Mr. Cheng declaring, "I can't believe we are finally, finally here. I know! It's my fault, my bad." Ms. Vargas thanked Mr. Cheng for "accepting that I'm the worst cook in the universe and for taking over the cooking in our house." About an hour later, with dynamic dance music in the background, the newly married couple made a grand entrance to the reception, which was also held at City Hall. As they approached the bottom of the staircase, Mr. Cheng, poking fun at his own flair for drama, fell and acted as if he had hurt his leg. He was given a chair to sit in, and was handed a microphone and acoustic guitar. He then serenaded his surprised bride with "Perfect" by Ed Sheeran. Ms. Vargas beamed, wept and sang along. At the end, she wiped the groom's tears before joining him for their first dance to "Just the Way You Are" by Billy Joel. "Chris and Rahysa walk the same path," said the best man, Jonathan Shupert. "They hold hands when they disagree and are a shining example of how you can be an imperfect couple yet still love and grow." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Where Are the Mavericks? Why Men's Fashion Week Needs Pepping Up How about one of these days some fashion maverick makes a radically ironic move sends out, say, a Lawrence Welk collection shown on models sporting toupees? Welk, for the benefit of ... well, practically anyone not in assisted living ... was the son of dirt poor North Dakotan German immigrant farmers who earned enduring fame on a television variety show that ran unendingly in the 20th century. One longtime sponsor of the show was Geritol, a dietary supplement advertised as a remedy for "iron poor tired blood." Is it premature to suggest the sophomore season of New York Fashion Week: Men's could use a dose? Based on the first several days of shows and presentations, there is no question things need some pepping up. Expectations were understandably high for the reinstatement of New York on a roster of international men's wear shows; and given the place holder quality of the recent European shows, the field seemed wide open for some brash innovator to make a mark. To be sure, there have been some creditable efforts, particularly from obscure indies like, say, Mike Rubin the designer for the novice Krammer Stoudt label, which came out of nowhere for Monday's New York Men's Day with a witty collection mashing up inspirations that ranged from the German neo expressionist artist and dandy Markus Lupertz to Mr. Rubin's surfer boyhood in Orange County, Calif. The results were a hybridized, distinctly So Cal take on "athleisure" wear, things like a gray cotton jersey suit whose jacket had no lapels and whose trousers resembled footie pajamas, though without the feet. "You could put that on when you get out of the water after surfing and wear it to lunch," Mr. Rubin said. Somebody book a table at the Ivy. Style tropes from Northwest skate rat culture were a point of departure for Derek Buse and Jo Sadler of the Los Angeles based CWST, whose determinedly raggedy collection of "hobo chic" sportswear had the so wrong it's right look one associates with the best Japanese men's wear design. In Mr. Sadler's and Mr. Buse's hands, clothes in imported Italian and Japanese textiles were outsize, dissonant (pinstripes over camouflage), layered and so offhand they seemed ill fitting. A pair of wool high water trousers in a broad check, for instance, looked like what a clown might wear if he were sentenced to life in a penitentiary. A raddled knee length wool parka looked as though its wearer had gotten drenched in a Seattle downpour and then tumbled dry. These observations are intended as compliments. The young designer David Hart based his latest collection of blanket plaid jackets and trousers, soft sweaterlike blazers, suede jeans jackets and natty two button suits on a style he linked to John Coltrane or any of the other jazzmen Francis Wolff photographed in the '50s for Blue Note Records, images immortalized by Reid Miles's brilliant cover designs for that label. Impressively resolved as the collection was (especially for a comer who started his label in 2013), it seemed perhaps unnecessarily safe, given it was meant as homage to true creative radicals. The closest any designer came to that notional Lawrence Welk collection was probably Lucio Castro's delightfully wacko assortment of mock turtlenecks, culottes, checkered shirts and chevron quilted puffer jackets in colors that ranged from moss and tobacco to sickroom pink and acid green. The basis for the collection was a group of photographs the designer came upon last year of caravan hippies camping at Stonehenge in the '70s. And you cannot but admire the spirit of someone who claims to find inspiration in the dusty, dirty, stained and ill fitting rags once worn by a group of pagan druggies roaming the English countryside. "It's two flannels, a navy cavalier twill jacket, white shirting from Italy, six looks total: That's it," the Duckie Brown designer Steven Cox said backstage before his show on Tuesday. True to his word, Mr. Cox gave a presentation that was fashion haiku. It takes a certain kind of brass to gather the most influential people in the industry into a loft and present them with a collection comprising just six looks. Yet so subtly had Mr. Cox and his partner Daniel Silver manipulated scale, made minute alterations in the formula that is a man's suit (a puffer parka, stuffing removed, was worn under a jacket as a shirt) that their collection came off as an airtight argument for short form fashion and self editing. If not for the cold dread that settled over attendees at Joseph Abboud's purgatorial show on Monday, there might have been something comical about the contrast between it and the pared down Duckie Brown one that followed. Making a welcome return to the brand he founded in 1987 and left in 2005 having lost the right to his name Mr. Abboud presented a collection of tailored suits so gratuitously detailed (buttons marched up the sleeve of one velvet jacket from cuff almost to shoulder) and seemingly overwrought that even the efforts of the gifted stylist Bill Mullen couldn't salvage the situation. There is only so much a person can do with a pheasant feather brooch. The past can be a treacherous place in fashion, one of whose primary functions is to conjure an intensified present. It is one thing to make references to your own collection of priceless oldies, as does John Varvatos a serious collector of vinyl. Just make sure the needle doesn't get stuck. The high school debate team question Mr. Varvatos posed with the title of his show was "Rock Is Dead?" Like most moot rhetorical devices, you can argue that one any way you like. For argument's sake, though, let's say that holding a show in a designer shop that formerly housed the fabled rock dive CBGB, and serving invited guests s'mores as they wander through rooms decked out like a suburban house of horrors past models in cheetah print sweaters and shearling coats does not inspire confidence in the vitality of the genre. More compelling than the clothes, though, was the presentation, which took place at the ground floor of Milk Studios in the meatpacking district. The space itself had been bisected by curtains into dual zones. One was for the press and retailers. The other included a window walled backstage area left visible to the street. Starting in the early morning hours, Public School followers tipped off on social media had lined up on behind barricades to secure good viewing spots. Thus when the time came for the show to begin, models like Robert Sipos, Adonis Bosso and Fernando Cabral strode straight out onto West 14th Street along an improvised sidewalk runway. Inverting the customary hierarchies of fashion, the designers kept the fashion insiders waiting while the kids on the street and the 150,000 others on Public School's Instagram feed saw everything first. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
SHIBATA MACHI, Japan When the ground shook violently on the afternoon of March 11, the ceiling collapsed in part of the huge Ricoh copier factory here, exposing the vents and wires above. The ceiling is still not fixed. But employees are back at their posts, working under temporary lighting and wearing hard hats to protect themselves in case debris falls. The factory may be a case study for the can do recovery of Japan's manufacturing industry. Only seven weeks after the huge earthquake in northeastern Japan collapsed the ceiling, toppled a huge water tank and upended assembly line equipment, the Ricoh factory here is nearly back to full production. And so, for the most part, is all of Ricoh, a nearly 25 billion company that makes copiers and other office equipment. "The influence of this disaster is not as large as the world thinks," Shiro Kondo, Ricoh's president, said in an interview at the company headquarters in Tokyo. At varying speeds, Ricoh's story is being played out all over the quake affected parts of Japan. The pattern suggests that whatever the long term effect of the natural and nuclear disasters on this country, manufacturing the most important cog in Japan's export oriented economy might largely rebound within a few months. Without doubt, things are not back to normal yet. And some sectors, particularly automobile manufacturing, are suffering more than others. Still, almost every day companies are reporting progress on some of the hundreds of factories knocked out of commission by the quake or ensuing tsunami. The government estimates that 7 percent of Japanese factories were in the region heavily affected by the earthquake. A survey of 70 damaged factories released last week by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry found that nearly two thirds of them had recovered while most of the rest in the survey group expected to do so by summer. Shin Etsu Chemical, a leading producer of silicon wafers used to make computer chips, said last week that it expected to return to pre earthquake production levels by July. Sony has resumed operations at nine of its 10 halted factories, with the 10th expected to come online in phases from May to July. Masatomo Onishi of Kansai University, who studied the recovery after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, said that when a disaster strikes, Japanese companies tend to cooperate with one another and workers rally to the cause. That seems to be the case at the Ricoh factory here. Even many of the Ricoh workers who lost family members to the tsunami came to work. Some whose homes were destroyed or flooded slept on blankets on the floor of a factory conference room. With gasoline scarce, many rode bicycles. And with bathrooms not working because of blocked sewer lines, employees improvised with plastic bags. Still, the disaster exposed vulnerabilities that simply restoring any one factory's assembly line cannot fully resolve. The biggest susceptibility for Ricoh and many other companies has proven to be parts shortages. Although Japanese manufacturers have spread their factories around the world Ricoh makes 70 percent of its products outside of Japan many of those overseas plants often still depend on parts made in Japan. For example, Tohoku Ricoh, as this plant is known, is the company's only factory making a particular motor used in copiers. When the factory here went down, a giant Ricoh plant in Shenzhen, China which supplies most of the Ricoh copiers sold in the United States had to stop production for a full week. (Mr. Kondo said he did not think Ricoh's sales in the United States would be affected much.) Ricoh is also dependent on parts from various suppliers in Japan, some of which suffered their own damage from the earthquake. That is forcing Ricoh to live off its inventory of certain computer chips and connectors. If production of those parts does not resume in the next couple of months, Ricoh might have to slow or halt production. The emergency plan at Ricoh's headquarters was designed to cope with a big earthquake in Tokyo, not one in northeastern Japan. "We had a manual of what to do in such cases, but things did not go as written," said Toshihiro Kenmoku, a leader of the recovery task force at headquarters. When the earthquake occurred, powder started coming out of the walls and ceilings of the office of Hiroshi Tsuruga, the president of Tohoku Ricoh. "I felt like I would be crushed with the building and die," Mr. Tsuruga recalled. Neither Mr. Tsuruga nor any of the other 1,270 Tohoku Ricoh employees were killed at the factory, which is about a 20 minute drive from the coast. But one employee, sleeping at home to prepare for the night shift, was swept away by the tsunami. A Ricoh sales and service employee was also killed by the wave while calling on a customer near the coast. Some 26 family members of factory workers perished or are missing, 42 homes were partly or completely destroyed and another 37 flooded. The day after the quake, 70 factory employees gathered in the gym to plan the recovery, posting the plans on the walls. A similar scene was taking place at headquarters in Tokyo, where a conference room was converted into a war room for a recovery task force. The table soon became covered by phones, documents and packages of instant noodles. One of the first tasks was to send 10,000 bottles of water, as well as food, blankets and other supplies, to Ricoh's stricken factories using the company's own trucks. Besides Tohoku Ricoh, three other Ricoh factories making a variety of products and one research center were damaged. But Tohoku Ricoh which accounts for about 60 million in annual revenue, or one fortieth of Ricoh's total posed the biggest challenge. The priority was to restore production of ink and the motors made only at the Tohoku plant. Finally, by April 6, all the production lines were back in operation, with the exception of toner manufacturing. (Toner is used for machines that can print, copy and scan, while ink is used for some copiers.) Then, On April 7, an aftershock of magnitude 7.1 jolted the region. Electricity and water were knocked out again and many repairs undone. "Production went back to zero again," said Hiroyuki Murakami, a general manager. It took until April 15 to restore motor production. Mr. Kondo, Ricoh's president, said it would probably take half a year for the company to be fully back to normal. He declined to say how much the lost production and the lower economic activity expected in Japan this year would hurt the company's sales and profits. "We have many problems, so it's very difficult to think about the results of this year," he said. His main concern was that a drop in industrial and consumer spending would mean less photocopying. Japan accounts for about 45 percent of Ricoh's sales. On April 12, Masahiro Nakanomyo, an analyst at Barclays Capital, cut his estimate of operating profit for the fiscal year ending next March to 85 billion yen, or 1.05 billion, from 93 billion yen, or 1.14 billion. Last week Ricoh reported sales for the year that ended March 31 of 1.94 trillion yen, or 23.9 billion. That was about 3.9 percent below the forecast the company made on Feb. 2. Operating profits were 60.2 billion yen, or 740 million, 29 2 percent below the forecast. The company attributed part of the shortfall to the earthquake. Ricoh predicted that operating profits for the year that ends next March would be 70.0 billion yen, or about 860 million. Based on that revised forecast, Mr. Nakanomyo at Barclays further reduced his estimate of operating profit for the year, to 63 billion yen. At Ricoh headquarters, the war room has reverted to a conference room. But a new challenge looms. Because of the power plants disabled by the earthquake and tsunami, big companies like Ricoh will have to cut their use of electricity by up to 25 percent in the summer, which could also disrupt production. Another task force has gone into action. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Days after public criticism from Poland's prime minister, Netflix said that it will modify some of the maps shown in the new documentary series, "The Devil Next Door," to clarify that concentration camps shown within the boundaries of modern day Poland were built and operated by Nazi Germany. A Netflix spokeswoman said on Thursday that the company will not alter the maps themselves, but will add text saying that the camps were run by the Nazi regime, which invaded the country in 1939 and occupied it until 1945. She was careful to say that the move was a response to complaints from subscribers rather than from the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, who sent a letter to Netflix's chief executive earlier this week saying the maps should be modified because they falsely suggested that Poland operated the camps. The true crime series, released last week, focuses on the case of John Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker from the Cleveland area who was put on trial in Israel in the 1980s after he was accused of being a notoriously cruel guard at the Nazi run concentration camps. Some of the maps in the five episode series showed modern day Polish boundaries, labeled "Poland," with geographical markers for death camps such as Sobibor and Treblinka, sites where Demjanjuk is said to have worked. The Netflix spokeswoman said that five maps showing modern day Polish boundaries would be altered to include further context. The maps were taken from United States and Israeli television coverage of Demjanjuk's trial in the 1980s, when he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to be hanged. The Israeli Supreme Court later overturned the decision. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Maybe you've heard about MedMen, the design forward marijuana dispensary chain that Page Six described as "the Barneys of weed." And then there's the Plug, a premium dispensary in downtown Los Angeles that LA Weekly called "the Barneys of weed." Well, there's a new Barneys of weed, and this one has a familiar name: Barneys . In a move to court chillaxed influencers (and their Instagram feeds), the luxury department store chain is taking an unlikely, or perhaps inevitable, detour into cannabis, with its own head shop called the High End. This store within a store is scheduled to open at the Barneys store in Beverly Hills in March, with other locations in California to follow. The company may also open the head shop in other states, including New York if recreational cannabis becomes legal there. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
After the tropical thunder rolls across south Java comes the rain, and each drop has a character. Some sweep across the bamboo roof in high pitched volleys, and some plop into the puddles one by one, luminous, like silver. Others hit the dried banana leaves with a solid, resonant thunk. In early Java, they heard music in these sounds and rhythms. They refined it over the centuries into a complex, ethereal form of auditory theater that needs as many as 10 instruments at once, so expansive in tones and harmonies that it cannot fit into any Western style of notation. By now you hear gamelan all over this ancient capital, from the airport public address system to the marbled palace of the local sultan. All of Java's courtly arts, including shadow puppetry and classical dance, first flourished here. They made this small city the heartland of traditional Javanese culture, protected during colonization, wartime, occupation, revolution and years of authoritarian rule. And now, as Indonesia's voters turn away from the past and reach out for an uncertain but promising future, Yogyakarta has emerged as one of the world's most vibrant centers of artistic innovation and risk taking. Little known in the West but familiar throughout Southeast Asia, the city known simply as Yogja (pronounce the 'Y' as 'J') has been a royal center of art and power since the eighth century, even after Dutch colonials made Jakarta the capital. With several major universities, it has always attracted an artsy, intellectual crowd. As an ancient city and the last remaining sultanate in the country, it has long nurtured the presentations that, for Javanese, give symbolic form to everything from official ritual to the routines of daily life. Performance throbs from this city's heart. On the expansive grounds of the Sultan's Palace at the center of the old city, dance troupes and gamelan ensembles perform every day at 10 a.m. on a grand covered pavilion, the kraton. To signal religions at peace, it is lavishly decorated with symbols of the three traditions that inform life here, Hinduism, Buddhism and, the majority, Islam. In its shadow, children play with stick puppets representing Sita and Rama, iconic lovers of Hindu myth, as the call to prayer issues from a half dozen loudspeakers, each one slightly mistimed to the others to create an atonal, ambient drone. Over the last several years, a new generation of artists has sprung from these rich but formalized traditions. All over the city, choreographers, musicians, filmmakers, puppeteers and rappers are bursting the boundaries of these styles and their conventions. There's a gallery scene with painters, sculptors and cartoonists whose works have made contemporary art from Indonesia the sensation of events like the last Art Basel in Hong Kong. The good news: There's always something happening on the cutting edge of culture. An art gallery will host a visiting performance artist; a new dance troupe will be re enacting an ancient myth as interpreted, perhaps, at the Edinburgh Fringe. Only a few events require tickets, and reservations are nearly unheard of. You just show up. The bad news or perhaps it's an exciting opportunity is that little of this is announced or scheduled in a way that fits into a world of prearranged vacations or advance purchase airfares. Web based information is sketchy. You could always call. But this is a place where, as Ry Cooder famously said of Havana, "when the phone rings, it's like a dog barking no one pays attention." Official sources such as the city's tourism group and most hotels know mainly about static attractions like the museums and temples. Word of mouth, through new acquaintances and friends, is how you come to see its hidden life. So you show up at the right places, find the right people (this town has coffee and pastry shops like Boston has Irish bars) and leave plenty of messages. You spot the few other travelers at recitals and galleries and become comrades at a glance, comparing hand scrawled notes as they did a hundred years ago. You get invitations to gamelan evenings, or hear of a gallery opening as if it were a rave, show up and meet an artist who last week was lionized in Paris. Or maybe you just get a cryptic text message telling you to be at a crossroads outside of town. That is the only hint something special may be going on up a dusty farm road, past pens of chickens, goats and a few munching water buffalo. But at its end, a large postindustrial studio is throbbing with activity. Dancers, stagehands, musicians carrying heavy brass gongs, computer technicians with clipboards; all in a swirl and, at its center, the intent, black clad choreographer Martinus Miroto. Mr. Miroto was born and raised in this city, where dance class is required in high school. Since then he has toured the world and won praise with acclaimed choreographers such as Pina Bausch and Peter Sellars. His own dancing draws on the rich vocabulary of classical Javanese movement, pulling together its rapid, angular, formal phrases into fluid, emphatic statements of personal experience rather than collective myth. Rather than remaining in Berlin or Los Angeles where he studied, he started the Miroto Dance Company, building an arts campus around this high roofed studio, clad in aged coconut trunks. A performance here may start on a traditional stage or outdoors, on a terrace that lets dancers overflow across the nearby stream, wandering among torches and foliage, or splashing in a pool fed by a waterfall. For the traditional dance he grew up with, one of Java's most vivid full scale productions is showcased just a few miles north of town. The Ramayana Ballet, a spectacular staging of the South Asian epic, takes place every night of the year with firelight, extravagant costumes, a full gamelan orchestra and grandeur in the shadow of the nearby ninth century Prambanan, the largest Hindu temple in Indonesia. (The region's other World Heritage Site, the ninth century monument at Borobudur, is the largest Buddhist temple in the world and worth a day trip.) Rather than waiting for that random text message, a good place to start any search may be a special clutch of stages, verandas, studios and classrooms up a red dirt jungle lane. Founded by a leading local painter and choreographer as a retreat for artistic meditation and experiment, the Padepokan Seni Bagong Kussudiardja has become Yogja's all purpose center for rehearsals, jam sessions and impromptu performances. Almost all of this is open to visitors, but little of it is scheduled. Such a roiling performance scene needs a wrangler, and Yogya has Jeannie Park. As the center's director she keeps track of dance troupes, musical ensembles and theater companies, telling you who's doing a pop up performance that night and who's conducting open rehearsals, helpful when so little information is available in English. Starting this month, the center begins a monthly series with collaborations between the artists in residence. For the more traditional arts, drop by the Yogyakarta Cultural Office, the Dinas Kebudayaan, in the university district. A staffer, Ibu (Aunt) Dwi, as she is called, is a font of advice and news on all of the classical forms. She has the timetable of performances at the palace, and knows about informal gamelan gatherings throughout the city. She can describe the different styles of puppetry, from the familiar shadow style of the wayang kulit or klitik, or the more bumptious wayang golek. And she makes sure to warn you that the wayang on the Sosona Hinggil pavilion to the south of the kraton is an all night affair with a cast of hundreds of leather puppets so bring a pillow. One puppet act in Yogja, however, is far from traditional. The Papermoon Puppet Theater has become a staple of the global arts festival circuit, with enigmatic modernist puppets that tell stories from myth to the birth of modern Indonesia. In one production, a simple tale of long lost love plays out against a backdrop of the mass killings that took up to a million lives in 1965 and 1966 such a traumatic subject that it is seldom discussed, not even in textbooks. Words are few for these puppets with moon shaped faces who, like mimes, express everything in evocative, poignant gestures. Between tours scattered throughout the year, you can visit the puppets and the people who use and make them, like the founder Maria Tri Sulistyani, at their new studio and performance space, a gracious compound near the Chinese cemetery south of the city center. At a just ended residency at the University of New Hampshire, Papermoon developed an epic scale production on the Indonesian genocide that's unlikely to appear in the country, but is preparing a new series based on traditional myths that bear on modern life. The theatrical spirit runs so strong in Yogyakarta that it has energized the figurative arts as well. Local painters such as Agung Kurniawan, the duo known as Indieguerillas, and the puppet maker and cartoonist Eko Nugroho offer an emphatic, whimsical yet brutal approach that can deliver scabrous commentary on politics and pop culture. As contemporary art of Southeast Asia attracts more attention all over the world, these locals have become global stars, with prices soon to follow. "As a center of creativity, this place exerts a magnetic field," according to the influential Berlin based Matthias Arndt, who has opened galleries in that city and Singapore. Much of the energy springs from communal art spaces such as the Cemeti Art House, which welcome visitors to share morning tea. Updated information on the hottest openings comes from the curator Alia Swastika, based at the Ark Galerie, who also recommends the Art Jog festival, an artist run event in June that has become a flamboyant center of this scene. With the national dance institute based here, there are events almost every weekend, ranging from formal productions to pop up events. Just this year, the weekly dance performance at the kraton features a rotating series of the area's top troupes. Don't be deterred by the scruffy entrance to the kraton off the bustling shopping district of Malioboro Street; once you are inside, it gets much nicer, with uniformed guides. In a search like this, it's hard not to run into street posters on rap events. Based largely on East Coast styles with a bit of Atlanta steampunk thrown in, crews perform often near the university district and, as in the United States, can take on a political edge. Shaggydog, for example, convened a fund raiser for displaced people in the Gaza Strip. The Yogyakarta based Yogja Hip Hop Foundation has taken recent stardom to a level of media consciousness reminiscent of American groups, with a new full length film, CDs, T shirts and online videos of rapping on an M.T.A. bus straight out of Bushwick, Brooklyn, accompanied by an omnipresent gamelan track that softens anything that sounds defiant. The group welcomes visitors to their headquarters in an out of the way, bunkerlike concrete building. But Western style celebrity doesn't seem to be anyone's goal. That's clear from a recent event at the Dusun Jogya Village Inn, a homegrown resort that feels as if it's deep in the jungle though it's just a few minutes out of the city. Billed as an opening for 11 woman artists introduced by the provocative 80 year old abstract realist Kartika Affandi, it had a documentary film, a hip hop troupe with two rappers, a lightweight gamelan ensemble, an immersive performance art work and a dance performance with stark modern choreography, but in traditional Javanese costume. "In Indonesia we have a concept for this, an event where anyone joins in, and everyone here is at home," says the proprietor Amron Paul Yuwono, a theater director and actor, who recently returned from political exile in the United States. "We call it the village, the kampung, but it really means the community." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
On Tuesday, Mr. Wallace and his team, Richard Petty Motorsports, revealed a new black paint scheme for his No. 43 Chevrolet, with the slogan " blacklivesmatter" over the rear wheels. On the hood, a black fist and a white fist clasp in a grip above the slogan "Compassion, Love, Understanding." The paint scheme will make its debut on Wednesday at the NASCAR Cup Series race at the Martinsville Speedway in Virginia. "It's true, black lives do matter," Mr. Wallace said in a video posted on the team's Twitter account. "It's not that we're saying no other lives matter. We're trying to say that black lives matter, too. If we put 'T O O' on the end, I think a lot more people would understand it. We want to be treated equally and not judged off our skin color." Mr. Wallace's call for the Confederate battle flag to be banned at NASCAR events was among the latest pushes to have the flag removed from prominent display. State officials have faced growing pressure to take down Confederate statues and other monuments that many consider symbols of racism. On Friday, the Marine Corps issued a statement that gave detailed instructions for how to remove and ban public displays of the Confederate battle flag at Marine installations. In a more modest move, the Army has said it would consider renaming bases named for military leaders of the Confederacy. NASCAR and the Confederate battle flag were once seen as entwined. The flag has been ubiquitous at places like Darlington Raceway in Florence, S.C., where the annual Southern 500 is held and where fans often showcased the emblem on baseball caps, coolers and T shirts. But as NASCAR has tried to broaden its fan base and expand to other parts of the country, leaders and drivers have pushed for more diversity in the sport and tried to show solidarity with people of color. NASCAR representatives did not immediately respond to calls and emails seeking comment. On Sunday, at a race at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, NASCAR's president, Steve Phelps, delivered a message over the loudspeaker in which he urged fans and NASCAR drivers to recognize the pain black people and other people of color "have suffered in our country." "Our country is in pain and people are justifiably angry, demanding to be heard," he said, as drivers and crew members lowered their heads, some of them wiping away tears or holding T shirts that said "Black Lives Matter." "It has taken far too long for us to hear their demands for change. Our sport must do better. Our country must do better." Mr. Wallace, who competed in Sunday's race and wore a shirt that read "I Can't Breathe/Black Lives Matter," praised NASCAR leaders for those actions. His comments about the flag on Monday followed a question from Mr. Lemon about what drivers and the organization should do now. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Theriault's, an auction house in Maryland, sold a 19th century French doll created by Antoine Edmund Rochard for a record 333,500 last month. The buyer: Carolyn Barry, a doll collector who, with her husband, Richard, provided the funds to create Old Dominion University's new Barry Art Museum, which is set to open in October. She has given 81 dolls to the museum, and in January she had set out with a purpose: to add the Rochard doll. Pale, delicate and elegantly dressed, the 30 inch tall Rochard doll is unlike any of its porcelain contemporaries, said Theriault's president, Stuart Holbrook. Working with a doll manufacturer of the era, Rochard, a crafter prized for his dolls' rarity, designed the lips to be parted (unusual for that time). Peering through the mouth, one sees a kaleidoscope effect. The doll's breastplate has a necklace of 28 Stanhope gems, all but two still intact. Twenty four of these contain microphotographs some only a millimeter wide showing images of Paris and surrounding France and Europe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Michael Neuwirth, a spokesman for Dannon, said in an email that Chobani's ads were misleading and deceptive. "Like many reduced calorie foods, Light Fit Greek nonfat yogurt contains sucralose, an F.D.A. approved ingredient that has been safely and widely used as a sweetener in foods for more than 15 years," Mr. Neuwirth said. Potassium sorbate is a common preservative. But Chobani's ad campaign contends that it "is used to kill bugs." Another Chobani commercial shows a young woman in a classic convertible reading the label on a tub of Yoplait Greek 100 and then tossing it out of the car. Mike Siemienas, a spokesman for General Mills, which owns Yoplait, says that potassium sorbate is a salt used in small amounts in yogurt to prevent the growth of mold and yeast. "The statements made by Chobani in their latest attempt to sell more yogurt are entirely misleading, and we don't think consumers appreciate that kind of approach," Mr. Siemienas said in an email. Consumers have become much more aware of the ingredients in their food over the last few years, sending food and restaurant companies scrambling to reformulate products. PepsiCo removed brominated vegetable oil from Gatorade after a teenager in Mississippi complained and pointed out that the ingredient added to some citrus drinks to keep the fruit flavoring evenly distributed was banned from use in foods in many other countries. Coca Cola later followed suit. And the Campbell Soup Company is retooling its soups to get rid of ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and artificial colors. "This campaign is fundamentally about choice the choice between natural ingredients versus artificial ingredients," Peter McGuinness, chief marketing and brand officer at Chobani, said in a statement. "We're empowering consumers with facts and information to help them make more informed decisions when they're buying food for themselves and their families." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to three scientists William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza for their work on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability. The Nobel Assembly announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Monday. Their work established the genetic mechanisms that allow cells to respond to changes in oxygen levels. The findings have implications for treating a variety of diseases, including cancer, anemia, heart attacks and strokes. The investigators uncovered detailed genetic responses to changing oxygen levels that allow cells in the bodies of humans and other animals sense and respond to fluctuations, increasing and decreasing how much oxygen they receive. Why is the work important? The discoveries reveal the cellular mechanisms that control such things as adaptation to high altitudes and how cancer cells manage to hijack oxygen. Randall Johnson, a member of the Nobel Assembly, described the work as a "textbook discovery" and said it would be something students would start learning at the most basic levels of biology education. "This is a basic aspect of how a cell works, and I think from that standpoint alone it's a very exciting thing," Mr. Johnson said. The research also has implications for treating various diseases in which oxygen is in short supply including anemia, heart attacks and strokes as well as for treatment of cancers that are fed by and seek out oxygen. "Like any scientist, I like solving puzzles," he said in an interview this morning. But he had an unprepossessing start. When he was a pre med student hoping to become a physician researcher, a professor wrote, "Mr. Kaelin appears to be a bright young man whose future lies outside of the laboratory." Eventually he became intrigued by a rare, genetic cancer, von Hippel Lindau disease, that is characterized by a profusion of extra blood vessels and overproduction of erythropoietin, or EPO, a hormone that stimulates production of the red blood cells that carry oxygen. The cancer "was really fascinating," Dr. Kaelin said. It had unusual features, like causing the body to make a substance, vegF, that stimulates the formation of blood vessels. And the cancer can cause the body to make too many red blood cells by increasing the production of EPO. He had a hunch about what was going awry: "I thought it had something to do with oxygen sensing." As it turned out, he was right. "It is one of the great stories of biomedical science," Dr. Daley said. "Bill is the consummate physician scientist. He took a clinical problem and through incredibly rigorous science figured it out." Dr. Kaelin said he knew, of course, that today the Nobel Prize would be awarded. But his chances were "so astronomically small" that he stuck with this usual routine and did not stay up last night. He had a dream, though, that he had not gotten the 5 a.m. call from Sweden. He woke up and looked at the time; in fact, it was just 1:30 a.m. He went back to sleep, and when it really was 5 a.m., his phone rang. Gregg L. Semenza, professor of genetic medicine at Johns Hopkins, said his life was changed by a high school teacher, Rose Nelson, who taught biology at Sleepy Hollow High School in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. "She was unbelievable," Dr. Semenza recalled in an interview. "She transmitted the wonder and joy of science and scientific discovery. She set me on a course to science." In college, at Harvard, he thought he would get a Ph.D. and do research in genetics. But then a family he was close to had a child with Down syndrome. "That shifted me from being interested in genetics as kind of a scientific discipline to thinking about the impacts of genetics on people," he said. After attending medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Semenza set out to understand what cancer cells are searching for when they spread into surrounding tissues, and then into blood vessels that carry them around the body. His guess was that cancer cells are searching for oxygen. Dr. Semenza turned his attention to the gene the guides production of EPO. Once it is activated, the body makes more oxygen carrying red blood cells. But how is that switch turned on when the body is deprived of oxygen? As a geneticist, he was trained to study rare genetic diseases. But his work on cellular responses to oxygen led him to study such common diseases as heart disease and cancer. At first, he divided his attention between the two conditions. More recently, Dr. Semenza said, he has focused on cancer, looking for ways to use what he has learned to find new ways to attack tumors. Dr. Semenza was asleep when the call from Sweden came this morning, and did not get to his phone in time to answer it. The phone rang again a few minutes later. "I heard this very distinguished gentleman tell me I was going to receive the Nobel Prize," he said. "I was shocked, of course. And I was kind of in a daze. I've been in a daze ever since." But he added, "It's been wonderful." Peter J. Ratcliffe, the third Nobelist, is the director of clinical research at the Francis Crick Institute in London and director of the Target Discovery Institute at Oxford. He became a medical researcher almost by chance. "I was a tolerable schoolboy chemist and intent on a career in industrial chemistry," he said in a speech in 2016. "The ethereal but formidable headmaster appeared one morning in the chemistry classroom. 'Peter,' he said with unnerving serenity, 'I think you should study medicine'. And without further thought, my university application forms were changed." He became a kidney specialist, fascinated by the way the organs regulate production of EPO in response to the amount of oxygen available. Some colleagues, he said, felt this was not very important. But he persisted, intrigued by the scientific puzzle. "We set about the problem of EPO regulation, which might have been seen, and some did see, as a niche area," he said in a telephone interview posted by the Nobel Committee on Twitter. "But I believed it was tractable, it could be solved by someone. The impact of that became evident later." The research is an illustration of the value of basic research, he added: "We make knowledge, That's what I do as a publicly funded scientist. It is good knowledge. It is true. It is correct." But, he added, "We set out on a journey without a clear understanding of the value of that knowledge." When the call from Sweden came, Dr. Ratcliffe was writing a grant proposal. Today he will continue working on it. "I'm happy about it," he said of the Nobel Prize. But also was not enthusiastic about being thrust into the public eye. "I'll do my duty, I hope," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation announced on Wednesday that they had started a global fund to help low and middle income countries fight legal challenges to their smoking laws by the tobacco industry. The fund is modest, at least so far, with a total of 4 million from the two charities. But Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies and the financial data and news company Bloomberg LP, said in a conference call with reporters that the investment was more like an initial marker, and that it was expected to grow as more donors joined the effort. "The fact that there is a fund dedicated to taking on the tobacco companies in court sends a message that they are not going to get a free ride," Mr. Bloomberg said. "If they say that's not a lot of money yes, well, take a look at who's behind it." He added, "We just picked 4 million just to say, 'O.K., here, let's start it.'" The fund was set up to counter what health experts say has been a strategy by tobacco companies to block smoking laws in poorer countries through legal means. In a number of cases, companies have challenged laws in development or after passage, warning governments that they violate an expanding number of trade and investment treaties that the countries are party to, and raising the prospect of long, expensive legal battles. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
On a warm, rainy, summer day, I crunched up a gravel path at the Moses H. Cone Memorial Park in Blowing Rock, N.C. It was my third day of running uphill in the rain. On the way up, I tried to chat with Chrissy Stuckey, a 36 year old dancer from Toronto, but I was running out of breath. She was training for a marathon, and I was not. I prayed we'd soon reach the top of the hill so I would stop huffing, embarrassing myself in front of the 30 or so other runners out on the trail that day. I'm not on a high school track team, or a college runner. I'm not even that fast a runner for someone my age. I'm 36, and last August I went to camp. To run. Running camps for grown ups aren't exactly new, but they have become more popular, according to Randy Accetta, director of coaching education at the Road Runners Club of America and the mentor in residence at the University of Arizona's McGuire Entrepreneurship Program. "We're seeing a national push toward experiential consumption," said Mr. Accetta, who also directed running camps at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center in Craftsbury Common, Vt., from 1996 to 2008. Since the end of the last recession, he's seen a growing number of people especially women, who have driven the explosive growth in running since 2008 willing to put more money into what they love by signing up for running camps. "They want to do their passion, and they want to master it, and they want to do it in a cool setting with cool people," he said. The Craftsbury Outdoor Center started its adult running camps in the mid 1970s, and the current running camp director, Carole Hakstian, said they can't keep up with demand. They now offer nine camps with 20 to 25 runners a session and she says there could be more if the camps didn't share the outdoor center with sculling and cycling retreats. Craftsbury offers four day and seven day sessions, which cost 694 and 1,135, including room and board. Participants run twice a day and have classroom sessions on injury prevention, nutrition and exercise psychology, along with yoga sessions. Ms. Hakstian said that campers range from those training for 5Ks and 10Ks to ultramarathoners. The youngest camper last summer was 23; the oldest was 84. "At every one of these camps, the majority of people say that they're at camp because they're looking for something to motivate them," Ms. Hakstian said. Rob Krar, a professional ultrarunner, and his wife, Christina Bauer, put on the first Rob Krar Ultrarunning Retreat in Flagstaff, Ariz., in 2015, drawing 14 runners. This year they've held two already with two more on the schedule, with up to 20 spots. They get everyone from beginner ultrarunners this is a world in which a beginner is someone who's just run a 50K to experienced 100 mile race runners. Ms. Bauer said that at a minimum, they expect runners to be able to run nine to 15 miles a day. Retreats are five or seven days and cost 1,550 to 2,150, including food and lodging at a hotel. Runners work out in the morning, followed by a picnic lunch and education sessions in the afternoon. Most runs are done in and around Flagstaff, but each camp also does one workout in Sedona, and weeklong camps include a run at the Grand Canyon, providing sightseeing opportunities. "To me, I am fostering an environment where people can forge connections with each other and learn more about running but also about themselves," said Ms. Bauer, who has a background in experiential education. The camp I was attending, ZAP Fitness, held its first camp at a facility built for that purpose in Lenoir, N.C., in 2002, and it now holds five all comer camps a year; it also hosts high school and college camps and rents out the facility for others to host. Four day camps cost 750, and six day camps cost 1,050. Zika Rea, a former professional runner and second place finisher in the 2005 United States Marathon Championships, co founded the ZAP Fitness Foundation in 2001 with her husband, Andy Palmer (ZAP stands for Zika Andy Palmer). The two met at a camp Mr. Palmer had put on in Maine. "He was trying to find a way to run adult running camps and work with recreational runners and runners at all levels and give back to the sport of distance running and help with the development of American runners," Ms. Rea said. After Mr. Palmer died in 2002, Ms. Rea continued the running camps, which fund, in part, the ZAP Fitness Team, a professional distance running group (additional funding comes from private donations and Reebok). I met a lot of return campers that week, like Ms. Stuckey, the dancer who kept me going on that hill. The 2016 camp was her third. "It gets me looking at training in a different way," she said. "I think it's cool to work with coaches at this level and really nice to be able to observe the athletes because I want to keep getting better." Most camp attendees that week had heard about ZAP Fitness through their local running clubs or from friends who convinced them to go. Carrie Williams, a 44 year old marketer from Atlanta, heard about ZAP from a co worker who "told me how amazing his experience was last year and got me so excited that I had to go," she said. "It's really hard as an adult to meet new people who have the same kinds of passions you have." ZAP's camp didn't physically resemble the Girl Scout camps of my youth we slept in a place that had walls and showers and flushing toilets, after all but the sense of camaraderie was similar. I went into camp without a fall marathon on my schedule and soon after signed up for two. Within the setting of 30 other runners who took a week of their regular lives to go running, this seemed perfectly normal. For the first time, Mr. Accetta of the Road Runners Club will be a camper, rather than a coach, when he and his wife attend a Wilder Retreat, a four day camp that focuses on running and writing in Bend, Ore., in August. His wife paid for the retreat as a gift. He's looking forward to seeing things from a different point of view, and loves the idea of getting away and "being able to focus and channel three of my passions: running, writing and my wife." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Three prominent universities were sued on Tuesday, accused of allowing their employees to be charged excessive fees on their retirement savings. The universities the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and Yale each have retirement plans holding more than 3 billion in assets and are being individually sued by a number of their employees in cases seeking class action status. The lawyer representing the three groups of plaintiffs, Jerome J. Schlichter, is a pioneer in retirement plan litigation. Over the last decade, he has filed more than 20 lawsuits on behalf of workers in 401(k) retirement plans and has been widely credited with lowering plan fees across corporate America. With the suits filed in federal courts on Tuesday, the focus has turned to a lesser known corner of the retirement savings market, 403(b) plans, which are named for a section of the tax code. The accounts are similar to 401(k) plans, but are offered by public schools and nonprofit institutions like universities and hospitals. The complaints allege that the universities, as the plan sponsors, failed to monitor excessive fees paid to administer the plans and did not replace more expensive, poor performing investments with cheaper ones. Had the plans eliminated their long lists of investment options and used their bargaining power to cut costs, the complaints argue, participants could have collectively saved tens of millions of dollars. "It is important for retirees and employees of universities to have the same rights and ability to build their retirement assets as employees of for profit companies," said Mr. Schlichter, a founding partner of Schlichter Bogard Denton in St. Louis. "They shouldn't be penalized." In a statement, New York University said that it took the welfare of its faculty and employees seriously, including a dignified retirement. "The retirement plans offered to them are chosen and administered carefully and prudently. We will litigate this case vigorously and expect to prevail," said John Beckman, a university spokesman. A spokeswoman for M.I.T. said it did not comment on pending litigation, while Yale said it was "cautious and careful" in administering its plans and would defend itself vigorously. More attention is being paid to investment costs shouldered by American workers, who are less likely today to have pension plans. With the strong support of the Obama administration, the Labor Department introduced new rules in April to strengthen investor protections, requiring a broader group of financial professionals to act in customers' best interest when handling their retirement money. The aim is to reduce conflicts of interest and the fees consumers pay. Even modest reductions in costs can have a significant effect on retirees' savings. An oft cited example from the Labor Department: Paying one percentage point more in fees over a 35 year career say 1.5 percent instead of 0.5 percent could leave a worker with 28 percent less at retirement. An account with 25,000 and no further contributions for those 35 years would rise to only 163,000 instead of 227,000, at an annual rate of 7 percent. Mr. Schlichter said the three universities' plans were targeted because more people were asking questions about their retirement accounts and "these involve clear breaches of the law." The complaint against N.Y.U. which involves two 403(b) plans covering faculty, research administration and the medical school centers largely on costs. The complaint said that participants were offered too many investment choices (there were more than 100 options for faculty), and that many of them were too expensive. The suit, filed in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, singles out several investments, including the TIAA Traditional Annuity, which it said has severe restrictions and penalties for withdrawal, as well as variable annuities that have several layers of fees and have historically underperformed. A spokesman for TIAA said it offered high quality plans and low cost investments that provide lifetime income. The suit also argues that even the cheapest funds offered could have been provided for less, given the enormous size and bargaining power of the faculty and medical school plans, which together held 4.2 billion in assets for more than 24,000 participants at the end of 2014. The complaint alleges that the university did not use its negotiating powers to select a single low cost record keeper for administrative tasks such as sending statements to employees. It said it also overpaid for these services for many years. The issues concerning Yale's 403(b) retirement plan which held nearly 3.6 billion in assets in the spring of 2014 follow a similar pattern: multiple record keepers with excessive fees, costing participants millions of dollars over the last six years; too many investments of the same style; and the use of higher cost funds instead of identical but lower priced ones. That case was filed in Federal District Court in Connecticut. Yale eventually consolidated to one provider, TIAA, in April 2015, and swapped in some lower cost investments, but the suit claims that the changes did not go far enough to fully protect the interests of its employees. Mr. Schlichter said participants were still burdened with sorting through more than 100 options, many of which were too expensive. The complaints lodged against M.I.T.'s retirement plan (unusually, it is a 401(k) like those used by corporations) are similar but with a twist. The suit alleges that the university, because of its longstanding relationship with nearby Fidelity, did not conduct a thorough search for a plan provider, which might have provided better service for less. The retirement plan offered more than 340 investment options including 180 Fidelity funds until July 2015, when M.I.T. reduced the lineup to 37 options but still retained Fidelity as the record keeper. The complaint said that Fidelity had donated "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to M.I.T., while Abigail Johnson, Fidelity's chief executive, has served as a member of M.I.T.'s board of trustees, giving her influence over the institution's decision making. Had the plan reduced its options to those on the menu it adopted last year, "participants would have saved over 8 million in fees in 2014 alone, and many millions more since 2010," according to the complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Massachusetts. M.I.T. recognized that the plan structure was inefficient, the filing said, since that was part of the reason it said it made the changes. But even after the overhaul, the suit alleges, investment costs could be further reduced. Fidelity, which noted that it was not a defendant in the case, declined to comment. Mr. Schlichter's firm has settled about half of his 20 cases over the last 10 years. His first case involving a 403(b) was against Novant Health, a nonprofit hospital system, which settled last year for 32 million. In a landmark case he argued last year before the Supreme Court, the justices, in a unanimous decision, agreed that plan sponsors had a "continuing duty to monitor investments and remove imprudent ones." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Credit...Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. The world has caught up to Gregory Crewdson. In his large scale photographs, which are produced with a movie crew in bravura Hollywood style, the people stare off into space, cloaked in solipsistic misery. The lighting is so portentous and the isolation and hopelessness so exaggerated that these scenes have always reminded me of Technicolor film stills from a 1950s melodrama a kitschy imitation of life. Until now. In the current locked down world, which is hollowed out by economic collapse and fragmented by fear of contagion, Mr. Crewdson's overwrought images seem like faithful representations of our frazzled psychological state. "It's weird how all my pictures have taken on a new meaning," he said. In a masked interview last month in his Great Barrington studio, adjacent to the deconsecrated 1890 Methodist church where he lives, he and Juliane Hiam, his studio manager and romantic partner, hung his prints, which are more than seven feet wide and four feet high, one by one on the wall. It was the first studio visit since the pandemic lockdown in March, and Mr. Crewdson, 57, a stocky, affable man, looked relaxed in a T shirt and shorts. His central decision when he stages a photograph is selecting the site. "I spend a lot of time driving around, finding locations that can accommodate a picture," Mr. Crewdson said, explaining the elaborate scouting procedure for his constructed images. "Returning to these locations, a story will come into my head." He then describes the concept to Ms. Hiam, who writes a scenario that will provide a template for the shoot. "There's no motivation, no plot," he said. "I love the idea of creating a moment that has no before and after. I do everything I can to make it as powerful as possible." The collection's name alludes to a term for a cluster of the nocturnal flying insects, which gather around an illumination source, eventually obscuring it. The hard bitten figures in his photographs are similarly attracted metaphorically to a promise of grace, literally to radiance in a quest that ends in self defeat. Driving home that trope, Mr. Crewdson brought street lamps into many scenes, fitting them with special lights that cast an eerie glow. The region has been hit hard by the opioid epidemic. "On a daily basis we would see O.D.'s," Mr. Crewdson said. He and Ms. Hiam recruited local people to appear in the pictures, and for some, a dejected air and a vacant stare did not require acting. Embellishing his landscapes, he painted billboards and altered the street signs. He towed in dilapidated cars and installed an old telephone booth. "We age everything," he said. "It should all look slightly broken. We work closely with the town. I asked them not to pave any streets, cut any grass. It's all in the effort of making a world that is beautiful and unsettling. I want it to feel both timeless and of the moment." Everything appears to be outmoded, even the overhead electric wires. He shot "An Eclipse of Moths," and previous sequences of Berkshires based photographs, during the summer, when the twilight is prolonged. Conveniently, he is off from his teaching duties at Yale, where he is the director of graduate studies in photography. "There is a New England quality in the majesty of some of the trees," said his friend Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture. "A sturdiness and scale and greenness to some of those trees is in high contrast to the buildings and the cars and the other parts of the landscape that don't have that staying power." The section of Pittsfield where he staged his pictures is near a General Electric transformer plant that poisoned the environment with PCBs but also employed most of the town. Ms. Hiam, who was born in Pittsfield, said, "My parents worked for GE. Everyone I knew had parents who came here for GE." Pittsfield was devastated in 1987 by the closing of the factory, which now looms over the landscape like a ruined castle in a European village. But Mr. Crewdson, who as a boy summered in a cabin in the nearby town of Becket with his Brooklyn based family, sees the surroundings from a different vantage point. "He definitely feels the area is enchanting," Ms. Hiam said. "It's the feeling a vacationer would have the detached and enchanted view. When he takes me around to show his locations, I'm often not seeing what he is seeing yet." As Mr. Crewdson shot the pictures two years ago, overseeing a large crew of technicians and actors, he was afflicted by mysterious maladies. "I'm not even sure it was conscious in terms of the content of the work, but one of the central themes for me is brokenness," he said. "I was having a series of serious physical ailments that made going through life, let alone the production, a real chore." He was short of breath, constantly fatigued, liable to fall asleep at odd times. "There's always an unconscious connection between my life and my work," he said. "All my work really does start with a psychological state of looking inward and projecting outward a tension between something very intimate and something very removed. I was also just coming out of a difficult divorce and had moved out of New York, trying to continue my relationship with my children by constant commuting. At the core, I felt my body had betrayed me." He delayed seeing a doctor until he was in postproduction, and then learned that he was suffering from severe sleep apnea, waking as frequently as 50 times an hour during the night. Since then, he has recovered. He follows a strict daily regimen: abstaining from alcohol, eating the same two meals (heavy on salmon), swimming in a lake for an hour and a half. Mr. Crewdson's chosen genre, the constructed photograph, is nearly as old as photography itself, but for a long time it fell out of favor. As early as the 1850s in Victorian England, Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar G. Rejlander engineered tableaus with actors and stage sets and even, in a handmade precursor of digital manipulation, montaged multiple negatives to create photographic facsimiles of history paintings or domestic dramas. But the sentimentality of their images and the subordination of the camera to the aesthetics of the easel damned those photographers in the eyes of their modernist descendants. Over a century later, starting in the late '70s, Jeff Wall, who was deeply schooled in art history and influenced by Conceptual art, brought the constructed photograph back into critical favor with his large color transparency light boxes. Concurrently, but from more of a pop culture vantage point (referring to Hitchcock, for instance, rather than Delacroix and Manet), Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills" demonstrated the capability of the constructed photograph to express an artist's personal obsessions and (in her case) feminist concerns. Since then, Mr. Crewdson has been one of many artists, including Philip Lorca diCorcia, Stan Douglas and Alex Prager, who explore various approaches to the practice. "They have been developing different models of production in a way that is unmistakably cinematic," Roxana Marcoci, senior curator of photography at MoMA, said in a phone interview. "They are as attentive to the furniture and the location as to the faces and bodies of the people they are portraying. You have the aesthetic of the film still." Mr. Crewdson is a filmmaker manque. "Almost from day one, I was interested in the intersection between movies and a still image," he said. "I love movies maybe above all forms of art the dreamlike quality of going to a movie and watching the light on the screen and being intoxicated by how that world seems separate from our world. But I think in single images, always. I'm dyslexic and have trouble with linear storytelling." Early in his career, in the mid 90s, Mr. Crewdson created and photographed dioramas of out of scale insects and animals in natural settings that evoked the uncanny hothouse atmosphere of David Lynch's movie "Blue Velvet." As he advanced, he employed actors and film crews to fabricate scenes with a similar emotional payoff on a grander scale. During production, fog machines cloud the air and water trucks wet the streets. Lights beam down from 80 foot high cranes. Unusually for a photographer, he employs a camera operator to press the shutter and a director of photography to arrange the lighting. (Recently, he replaced his 8 by 10 large format film camera with a Phase One digital camera, which, he says, has "100 or 200 times the definition.") "I'm not comfortable holding the camera even," he said. "I'm interested in what I see in front of me." The pictures in "An Eclipse of Moths" traffic less heavily in otherworldly encounters than in previous sequences, including "Cathedral of the Pines" (2016) and "Beneath the Roses" (2005). Still, they feature such off kilter human activities as a young woman bathing in a concrete burial vault, another young woman standing on a broken down fair ride called "the Cobra" and holding an erotic face off with a shirtless youth in a discarded shipping container, boys on bicycles close to the abandoned GE plant who are watching a fire burn in the back of a truck, and a shirtless old man with a shopping cart full of junk outside a building marked "Redemption Center." The even lighting enhances the dreamlike quality. Everything is in focus, nothing is blurry. In postproduction, he creates seamless composites from various takes, so that the reflections in the rain puddles are as sharp as mirror images and the houses in the distance are as defined as the foreground buildings. The son of a psychiatrist who treated patients in the family's Park Slope house, Mr. Crewdson likes to describe how as a boy he would lie on the floorboards of the living room, hoping to hear what was being said below. "I was trying to listen to something that was hidden or forbidden in the domestic space," he explained. He never could make out the conversation. Like the people in his photographs, these mysterious strangers tantalized his curiosity but kept their secrets just beyond his grasp. So the fascination never faded. "I've always been drawn to photography because of its inability to tell the full story," he said. "It remains unresolved." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Close the Schools and Bars and Stay Home, but Keep the Horses Racing None While most sports has come to a standstill, horse racing and gambling on it has largely continued in the United States and beyond. The Kentucky Derby, long known for its spot on the sporting calendar on the first Saturday in May, is making a big shift to September. But even the coronavirus pandemic has not stopped horses from racing and gamblers from betting on it across the United States. While the virus has transformed the sporting landscape, leaving fans with virtually nothing to watch or bet on, horse racing has remained an option particularly for gamblers isolated at home. On Wednesday, for example, you could watch and bet on horse races taking place at tracks in Australia, Louisiana and Texas, as well as harness racing in Sweden, Canada and Ohio. On Friday, several major thoroughbred tracks, such as and Santa Anita Park in California, plan to be open for competition and wagering, running full slates with four to 10 horses per race. Fans will be prohibited from the tracks, as they were last weekend. NBC Sports in need of live broadcasting content announced Wednesday that it would simulcast "Trackside Live," the signature program of the horse racing network TVG that jumps around to live races around the sport on Saturday and Sunday. Despite its many, many problems including an alarming number of horses who suffer fatal injuries and a federal doping investigation that has so far yielded 28 indictments horse racing remains a multibillion dollar industry and racetrack operators intend to keep their doors open, if possible. Even as schools and restaurants close and large gatherings are restricted, the races have held on, with the blessing of regulators. Brad Maione, a spokesman for the New York State Gaming Commission, said before the worker tested positive that the commission had approved the continued racing at Aqueduct as long as no fans are allowed to attend. New York's thoroughbred tracks saw 2.1 billion in wagers in 2019. They contributed 15.4 million in tax revenue. In California, where races generate more than 16 million in annual tax revenues, racing had also been approved for this weekend, said Mike Marten, a spokesman for the California Horse Racing Board. "All wagering is remote from patrons at home using account wagering platforms," Marten said. While social distancing has become regular practice in so many parts of American life, many fans have stuck with one of the few live sports still happening, even remotely. More than 17.5 million was bet on races at Aqueduct from Friday through Sunday, according to the association. TVG, which broadcasts races from more than 150 tracks across the world, saw a 75 percent increase in wagering on its betting platform on Saturday and Sunday, compared with the same two days in 2019. The FanDuel Racing app was downloaded more over the weekend than it had been in the previous three months, reaching the No. 6 most downloaded on Apple's list of free sports apps, according to TVG. The app was designed for first time horse racing bettors in anticipation of the Triple Crown races. "We didn't think it would take off under these circumstances," said Kip Levin, the chief executive officer of TVG. "As you can tell, people were looking for a distraction." The network also told its anchors and commentators to simplify their explanations and insights to make them understandable for novice bettors. Its simulcast arrangement with NBC Sports could nearly double its reach: TVG is in 45 million homes while the NBC Sports Network is in 83 million homes. So far, TVG has a significant number of tracks still running to broadcast. "But that may be changing by the hour," Levin said. At a time when nearly 600 people live in facilities on the backside of Belmont Park to take care of feeding, grooming and walking horses, New York racing officials said they were simply following the recommendations of state and federal health authorities to not have fans at the track. The horses must be cared for whether there is racing or not. Churchill Downs, the home of the Kentucky Derby, postponed America's most famous race until Sept. 5. The Preakness and Belmont Stakes the other two thirds of the Triple Crown have yet to decide if they will follow the Derby into the autumn. "All options are on the table, including running the Belmont on June 6," said Pat McKenna, a spokesman for the New York Racing Association. The prospect of holding the Derby before a crowd of more than 150,000 prompted Churchill Downs to delay the race for the first time since World War II. "Its energy and its magic really comes from everybody being there to enjoy it," Bill Carstanjen, the chief executive of Churchill Downs Inc., said during a conference call. "We will roll with the punches but we feel very good that Sept. 5 is the right date." NBC Sports, which holds the broadcast rights to the Triple Crown, is in talks to hold the three race series within a window of five weeks in the fall. If that happens, the Preakness would most likely be held Sept. 19 and the Belmont on Oct. 10. Maryland Jockey Club officials acknowledged that they were talking to NBC Sports about a deal to move the Preakness. "It had to be done," Carstanjen said of the Derby postponement. "We own it and will make it a really special day. We are also excited that NBC is in talks to move the Preakness and Belmont Stakes to September and early October, respectively. We hope the parties can reach a final agreement." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
For years a full block parking lot that occupied a staggering three acres in Dumbo sat undisturbed, while the waterfront warehouse district around it became a white hot neighborhood. Bounded by Front, York, Bridge and Jay Streets, the lot was owned by the Jehovah's Witnesses, which once had extensive real estate holdings in Brooklyn. Now it's the site of the neighborhood's latest amenity packed large scale luxury development. Front York, at 85 Jay Street. When the religious group was selling off its properties and moving its headquarters upstate a few years ago, a development team including CIM Group, LIVWRK Holdings and Kushner Companies bought the lot with plans for a mixed use project that "would complement the industrial character of Dumbo," said Jason Schreiber, a principal at CIM. (Kushner last year sold its minority stake and bowed out of the partnership.) Morris Adjmi Architects, which is known for its sympathetic repurposing of old factories, has designed the building and its interiors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Welcome to the Well newsletter. Every Wednesday, we email readers with news about health, fitness and nutrition and advice about living well. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. Every day brings a new question, a new worry, a new fear about the coronavirus pandemic. Its essential to pay attention to public health advice to practice social distancing and to stay home to limit contact and reduce the spread of infection. And it's also essential to take care of yourself, particularly when it comes to stress. For me, my regular meditation and mindfulness practices do not seem sufficient for these times, so I have added something new to my routine a hand washing and gratitude exercise. Every time I wash my hands, I focus on my feelings of gratitude. I start with the doctors, nurses, ambulance and hospital workers on the front lines of the pandemic. I think about the countless numbers of hourly workers who are restocking grocery store shelves, working at pharmacies and staffing checkout counters. These people are coming face to face with hundreds of people each day, putting themselves at risk so the rest of us have food and necessities. I think about sanitation workers collecting our trash. I think about the young man who provides maintenance and cleaning to my building, while grandparents care for his 9 year old and 1 year old children. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
When the first lady, Melania Trump, on an unannounced humanitarian visit to a children's shelter in Texas, strode onto her airplane in an olive green Zara army jacket with those words scrawled in faux white graffiti on the back, it sent the watching world into what might be called, with some understatement, a meltdown. "Insensitive," "heartless" and "unthinking" were some of the words hurled through the digisphere about the choice. "It's a jacket," her communications director, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement to reporters. "There was no hidden message." She's right, of course. It wasn't hidden. It was literally written on the first lady's back. The question is: Who was the intended audience? She knows everyone is going to be watching. Remember back in August 2017 when she walked across the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews in sky high Manolo stilettos during the Texas flood crisis? At that time, the shoes seemed to symbolize her enormous remove from the trauma, and she became the target of great opprobrium for the choice. She is well aware that nothing a first lady wears is "just" an anything, especially nothing she wears to a public event in which she remains silent, but knows she will be photographed as her experience with the high heels to Texas would have taught her (and taught her advisers). To accept the idea she just threw the Zara jacket on in practically the same situation because hey, it was close at hand and she was maybe a little bit cool (or something like that) is simply unbelievable. Especially because this time around Mrs. Trump chose to wear something from the mass market brand Zara Zara! instead of her usual Dolce Gabbana or Ralph Lauren. This is a first lady, after all, who decided to wear a 1,380 Balmain plaid shirt during a White House gardening initiative. She is not a high/low dresser in public or has never been since the election. She's been all high seemingly all the time. So how else to interpret the Zara jacket, a style in line with the signature self protective aesthetic she has developed since entering the White House, except as an indication Mrs. Trump was thinking about what people might read into the clothes she chose to wear to visit children left with, effectively, nothing? The jacket, after all, which is reportedly sold out and is not from the current season, retailed for 39. It may be the least expensive garment the first lady has worn while representing the administration. And then there's the fact that Mrs. Trump has never been one to shy away from coding pointed, not necessarily, popular communications into her wardrobe. She did, after all, wear a white trouser suit the uniform of the Hillary Clinton led opposition to her husband's first State of the Union address. All of which suggests there is very little chance she did not know what she was doing with that "I really don't care" coat. (Zara declined to comment.) So who was the target of that not so hidden message? That the first lady had shed the jacket by the time she disembarked in Texas may indicate it was not, in fact, the families at the heart of the immigration issue. Besides, there are numerous alternative possibilities, when you start to think about it. Or maybe the "I really don't care" part was intended for critics of her husband's policy. Maybe it was intended to tell everyone that she was not part of forming said policy, or not responsible for conveying everyone's outrage about said policy. Maybe it was intended for her husband himself. (The "free Melania" folks will like this idea.) Or maybe, just maybe, it was a message for those of us who like to read messages into her clothes. One that said, "I'm going to wear whatever I want and I don't care what you think about it." After all, she wore the jacket again deplaning later at Andrews wore it unapologetically knowing all the hoo ha it had caused, the confusion and umbrage, the distraction from what she said was her core message of compassion. Wore it as if to give direct proof to the words on her back. That would be kind of meta. Mrs. Trump often seems to be using her clothes as a sort of private diary, yet one that is parsed by millions who don't have the rest of the text. Between intention and analysis an enormous gulf can exist. It's a risky approach to her role. And as interesting as the idea might be, this time it may have backfired. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
LEAP OF FAITH Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy By Michael J. Mazarr The operative word in the title of "Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy" is the last one: tragedy. Drawing on extensive interviews with unnamed "senior officials" as well as recently declassified documents, Michael J. Mazarr attributes the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 to good intentions gone awry. Here is an example of "America's worthy global ambitions" that went "terribly wrong." Yet the evidence Mazarr himself assembles refutes that conclusion. Chalking up the debacle of Iraq to "the messianic tradition in American foreign policy," as he does, simply won't wash. It's akin to writing off a vehicular homicide because the driver happens to be a known alcoholic. The Iraq war was not a tragedy. It was more like a crime, compounded by the stupefying incompetence of those who embarked upon a patently illegal preventive war out of a sense of panic induced by the events of 9/11. An impulse to lash out overwhelmed any inclination to deliberate, with decisions made in a "hothouse atmosphere of fear and vulnerability." Those to whom President George W. Bush turned for advice had become essentially unhinged. Iraq presented an inviting opportunity to vent their wrath. The handful of officials who shaped policy after 9/11, writes Mazarr, a political scientist currently with RAND, were "not evil or pernicious human beings." Instead, Mazarr credits them with acting in response to a "moralistic sense of doing the right thing." Viewed from that perspective, "the Iraq war decision was grounded in sacred values," even if the evil and pernicious consequences of that decision continue to mount. So Mazarr bats away what he calls "erroneous mythologies" attributing the war to a neoconservative conspiracy or describing it as a plot to protect Israel or seize Arab oil. He finds these explanations unworthy. The invasion of Iraq, he insists, stemmed from "America's essential sense of itself" as "fundamentally messianic or missionary in character." 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. As an account of the war's origins, "Leap of Faith" offers few genuine revelations. It clarifies, confirms and fills in details. So, Mazarr tells us, within 24 hours of 9/11, even before Bush had unveiled the phrase "global war on terrorism," a decision to overthrow Saddam "had been essentially sealed in cognitive amber." All that remained was to work out the details while conjuring up a moral rationale that would conceal the absence of a strategic one. The dearth of hard evidence connecting Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda or confirming the existence of an Iraqi program for developing weapons of mass destruction was beside the point. The administration declared Saddam a threat; nothing more was required. Mazarr affirms that an actual decision for war was never really made but merely assumed. "There was no single meeting," he writes, "no formal options paper, no significant debate about the consequences." None were required. Recently, critics have lambasted President Trump for making decisions to pull out troops from Afghanistan and Syria without properly consulting the national security establishment. There's been no process, the charge goes. During the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, in contrast, there was process galore, an endless stream of studies, briefings and planning sessions. It's just that none of it mattered. Bush and his chief lieutenants were dead set on a course of action and nothing was going to prevent them from plunging ahead. Process was a charade. Mazarr describes the result as "policy implementation on autopilot," with doubters and dissenters frozen out or simply ignored. At echelons below the top level, he writes, "loyalty enforcing groupthink" abounded. Military officers given to asking annoying questions "were particularly muzzled." With the exception of a single four star general who went off script by suggesting publicly that occupying Iraq might pose a stiff challenge, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff learned to keep their mouths shut. Making matters worse was the dysfunction that prevailed at the top level. President Bush, Mazarr says, "believed in belief itself," a tendency that obviated the need to challenge assumptions or solicit second opinions. Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, created his own foreign policy shop, which pursued its own agenda. Secretary of State Colin Powell lagged two steps behind his colleagues, never quite grasping that he had been marginalized. "To demonstrate his superiority, to dominate, to overawe," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld blustered, accrued authority and protected his turf. Yet when it came to making tough decisions, he ducked and deferred. Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, another important figure, was "moved more by grand ideas than by the bothersome trivia of execution." Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, was herself given to what some of her associates called "magical thinking," and never gained the respect of Cheney or Rumsfeld. All in all, according to Mazarr, a "truly astonishing degree of wishful thinking" permeated the upper echelons of government. It was like the court of Czar Nicholas II in 1917. So while United States military commanders focused on the problem of getting to Baghdad, the question of what was to happen next became an orphan, ignored and unwanted. Rumsfeld in particular nursed the fantasy that the United States could "be liberator and hegemon at the same time" freeing Iraqis from oppression, and then quickly converting Iraq itself into a compliant ally that would do Washington's bidding, all with minimal muss and fuss. As a result, the disorder triggered by Saddam's overthrow and the combined civil war and insurgency that ensued caught the war's architects completely by surprise. For the next several years, American soldiers and Iraqi civilians were to pay a heavy price for what can only be described as malpractice on a Trumpian scale. To explain all of this in terms of a misplaced messianic impulse the self described indispensable nation having a bad run of luck may play well in Washington, where serious introspection is rarely welcome. Yet, ultimately, such an explanation amounts to little more than a dodge. After all, altruism rarely if ever provides an adequate explanation for the actions of a great power. Exempting the United States from that proposition, as Mazarr does, entails its own spectacular leap of faith. The United States invaded Iraq not in response to a "vigorous missionary impulse," but to avoid reckoning with this fact: Decades of wrongheaded policies in the Middle East had culminated on 9/11 in a cataclysmic episode of blowback. National security policies conceived from the 1940s through the 1990s, reinforced after the Cold War by false assumptions of military supremacy, had produced the inverse of security. In the formulation of those policies, America's missionary obligations had figured as the faintest afterthought, if at all. Sadly, Mazarr's well intentioned book is likely to provide yet another excuse to postpone reckoning with that failure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Roxanne Shante was D.J. ing at a party in 2016 when she noticed two women in the crowd waving their hands in the air. "I thought, I must be doing a hell of a job hosting," Ms. Shante said. As it turns out, the women had been looking for her: They wanted to produce a movie based on Ms. Shante's life as a little known hip hop pioneer. "I was like, O.K. these must be some really strong drinks," Ms. Shante said. You can't blame Ms. Shante for her skepticism. As dramatized in "Roxanne, Roxanne" a biopic having its premiere in theaters and on Netflix on Friday she endured crushing betrayals after that first blast of success. In 1984, prompted by UTFO's "Roxanne, Roxanne," about a woman who had spurned that rap trio's romantic entreaties, Ms. Shante, then 14 and living in the Queensbridge projects in Long Island City, changed her first name from Lolita to Roxanne and released an answer record with lyrics like "If he worked for me, you know he would be fired" and "He ain't really cute, and he ain't great/He don't even know how to operate." The record, "Roxanne's Revenge," became a huge hit for Ms. Shante and led to dozens of singles by other artists supposedly telling the real story of Roxanne. "In the pre internet days, that was a meme," said Alan Light, former editor in chief of Vibe and a contributor to The New York Times. "It took on a crazy momentum." As the film depicts, however, Ms. Shante was mistreated by managers and other men in the music industry and proved unable to release an album for five years, dealing her a severe career blow. But she emerged from these experiences stronger and wiser. "Everyone goes through heartache, and it's O.K. to cry and break down, but you've just got to get yourself together," Ms. Shante, now 48, said over breakfast in Newark, where she runs a nonprofit organization for troubled teenagers called Mind Over Matter. "I went through it, and I'm O.K." Now, thanks to "Roxanne, Roxanne," Ms. Shante may finally be recognized as the groundbreaking figure she is. "She was really the first solo female rapper," Mr. Light said. "She showed it could be done and illustrated possibilities that had never been there before. That's a lasting legacy." Mahershala Ali, the "Moonlight" Oscar winner who co stars as Ms. Shante's abusive, much older manager and boyfriend, agreed that her contribution to hip hop couldn't be overstated. "I don't know if people are really aware of what doors she opened for women in rap from Foxy Brown and Lil' Kim to Nicki Minaj and Cardi B," he said. "I was singing her records in the bathroom mirror with my braces, bangs, ponytail and red lipstick," Ms. Long added. "You never know how things that shaped your life as a girl will come back and reshape your life." The biopic, written and directed by Michael Larnell, was well received when it played Sundance last year. Variety called it "a vivid and unusually honest drama about the pain and bravado that were the fuel of hip hop," and The Hollywood Reporter singled out Chante Adams, in her screen debut as the rapper, saying she had "terrific range and an incandescent screen presence." Ms. Adams had just graduated from Carnegie Mellon University when she landed the role, and she went on to win a special jury prize for breakthrough dramatic performance at Sundance. The similarity of their names made it seem like destiny. "We always say it's a Chante/Shante thing," Ms. Adams said. "It felt meant to be." Ms. Shante added: "I think Chante was born for the part. Her parents made her for me." As an executive producer of the film, Ms. Shante was frequently on the set giving Ms. Adams advice on how to recreate her life realistically. During one scene in which Roxanne shoplifts clothes, "I was like, 'That's not how you steal!'" Ms. Shante recalled with a laugh. "'You can't look down. You just have to fold and drop. They would have caught you every time!'" The story of a woman who suffers at the hands of men and fights back with the power of her words may resonate deeply in the MeToo era. "I was very strong willed and strong minded," Ms. Shante said. "But that situation has been around since the beginning of time, and there's a lot that still needs to be done." Mr. Ali sees his character as a cautionary example for men. "We have to be more conscious of how we support, protect and take care of women and not in a patronizing way," he said. Nina Yang Bongiovi and Mimi Valdes, the women at the party in 2016, are among the producers of "Roxanne, Roxanne." The film arrives amid signs of a cultural shift that has allowed more stories about women of color to be told across a wide range of genres: comedy ("Girls Trip"), fantasy ("A Wrinkle in Time"), superhero movies ("Black Panther," with its female soldiers). "We are thirsty to see ourselves as the central characters in big movies," Ms. Long said. "Black people have always been capable of starring in blockbuster movies. Hollywood just caught up." For Ms. Shante, seeing her life transformed into a movie feels like a bittersweet, long overdue victory. "The Roxanne Shante story is not an easy one, but I've always been willing to share my life the more you give, the more you get," she said, adding that this time, "I was actually able to sit back and say, 'Wow, something good came out of all of this.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
But let's return to that "Boheme" for a minute. On the surface, the evening seemed like a demotion for the soprano Angel Blue, who sang at the Met last year as Mimi and was back this week in the much smaller role of Musetta. Don't be mistaken, though: Her brief appearances onstage are what have stuck with me the most in the days since. She was as enthralling as ever, and utterly in command of both her powerful instrument and the stage itself. Listen above to an excerpt from the Cafe Momus scene in Act II, recorded on Tuesday. Around 5:50 in this clip, she lets out a note so powerful it echoes in the hall, then she takes a sharp turn to three bubbly, soft notes that end the phrase. It's one of those moments opera fans live for. This week was also the second of Jaap can Zweden's tenure at the New York Philharmonic. The orchestra paired Bruckner's Eighth Symphony with the premiere of Conrad Tao's "Everything Must Go," which Anthony Tommasini described as teeming and mercurial. It may have been difficult to keep up with all this in a week when the news was both relentless and distressing. In dark moments, we as a nation have often turned to the placating power of Yo Yo Ma's Bach, as described in this profile of him written by Zachary Woolfe from Leipzig, Germany. Zack gets to the heart of why, while following Mr. Ma on his journey to save the world through Bach's music. (Ever peripatetic, Zack is en route to France for the opening of the Paris Opera season; stay tuned for his dispatch next week.) May we offer Mr. Ma's latest album as a way to end your week on a high note? JOSHUA BARONE It's not often that you get a chance to hear an ambitious new orchestral work twice. But after attending the premiere of Ashley Fure's "Filament" last week on the New York Philharmonic's gala program, I returned five days later to hear it again. This absorbing work for orchestra, a trio of bassoon, trumpet and bass soloists, and a 15 member chorus of "moving voices" came across again like an immersive, yet kinetic and atmospheric sound environment. I heard even more details and strange intricacies the second time. And Ms. Fure had sent me a note to emphasize one point: Though elements of the piece, especially the sounds of the choristers who sing and whisper through radial megaphones while scattered around the hall, sound almost improvised, actually every detail had been learned and practiced during a long period of rehearsal. ANTHONY TOMMASINI Is Magnus Lindberg becoming a late career Romantic? "Tempus Fugit" a swooning orchestral piece, newly recorded by Hannu Lintu and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra can at first seem a world away from the density and unpredictability of Mr. Lindberg's early orchestral triumphs, such as "Kraft." Yet there is some connection between the works. The Finnish composer says he is still using software to create and organize harmonic zones. But he is also interested in using the "power of functional harmony" in a contemporary context, noting: "A chord should not be an isolated object but should be aurally related to what has come before and what follows." The slow fourth movement of "Tempus Fugit" puts the goal into practice, in its first minute. After some gentle handoffs of thematic material, Mr. Lindberg builds out the orchestral complexity. He fashions some surprising textures presumably thanks to all the data he's stored away on computers though the compositional mood remains coolly seductive throughout. SETH COLTER WALLS During the New York Philharmonic's season opening gala program last week, the 27 year old virtuoso pianist Daniil Trifonov was the soloist in a scintillating and dreamy performance of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G. But the next night, for the first subscription program of the season, Mr. Trifonov played Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto instead. I heard him in the piece when I returned for the final performance on Tuesday. We have come to know Mr. Trifonov best for his dazzlingly brilliant yet poetic accounts of Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and other Romantic repertory. Who matches him in works like Liszt's aptly titled "Transcendental Etudes?" Last season at Zankel Hall he admirable stretched himself playing a daunting program of thorny 20th century works. He has not played that much Beethoven as yet, so the "Emperor" showed another aspect of his artistry. His playing was exuberant and youthful, with crystalline sound and fleet passagework. If he was a little too ruminative for comfort during the reflective slow movement (Jaap van Zweden indulged Mr. Trifonov in this), he drew me in with the tender lyricism of his playing. And the finale was like a spirited Promethean dance. ANTHONY TOMMASINI The infant Solera Quartet got its name from a Spanish winemaking process that involves blending different vintages to produce something fresh. To most, the metaphor should be obvious: This is a group that sees in musical mixology an opportunity for both new insight and full bodied provocation. With the release of their debut album, "Every Moment Present," on Tuesday, the foursome brings this mission to the theme of artistic obsession, shrewdly connecting three works that might otherwise appear to share little in common. Janacek's second string quartet, "Intimate Letters," is a peek at the composer's real life infatuation with a much younger woman, and features movements that oscillate between desperate hysteria and the delicate sounds of pleading. Serving up a different picture of longing, Mendelssohn's sixth string quartet in F minor, "Requiem for Fanny," was penned in response to the death of the composer's sister. While the juxtaposition may feel a bit esoteric at times, the results are often intoxicating. Opening the album is a terrific new take on Caroline Shaw's "Entr'acte," which offers a mini object lesson on the consuming power of influence. Directly inspired by Haydn's late Quartet in F (Op. 77, No. 2), Shaw's composition takes its predecessor's experiments with shifting form and pushes those forms even further often to obsessive extremes. The quartet's playing on the recording is sensitive and finely articulated throughout and the sound bright and vivid. Those interested in hearing them live are in luck, however: Solera is slated to present "Entr'acte" at the group's Carnegie Hall debut on Oct. 23. JOEL ROZEN | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Amanda Peet's first ball smacked right into the net. So did the second. The third? That one whammed right into the groin of the Sanjin Kunovac, her tennis coach. "I'm so sorry," she said with a shriek. "We haven't had our children yet," he said, trying to straighten up. It was a recent Thursday afternoon and Mr. Kunovac was giving Ms. Peet tennis lessons at the Manhattan Plaza Racquet Club on West 43rd Street. He had arrived with his fiancee, Kat Sorokko, another tennis coach. (A few days earlier, he had proposed, spelling out I 3 U in red and yellow tennis balls. He showed the video.) Ms. Peet is known as an actress (she appears in the new Amazon series "The Romanoffs"), but she is also a playwright. She met the tennis couple when she was researching "Our Very Own Carlin McCullough," a play about a tennis prodigy that had its premiere at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles this summer. They served as technical consultants and professional hand holders. "I need two coaches," she said. "That's how bad I am." "First thing we're going to do is 20 laps around the court," Mr. Kunovac said. Ms. Peet, a 46 year old mother of three, replied with an obscenity. The Racquet Club's tennis bubble was puffily futuristic and starkly lit, with thwacks and grunts coming from the other courts. Ms. Peet has a tennis grunt, too; it sounds like the scream of a woman who has stepped on her cat. She warmed up with some halfhearted stretches while Ms. Sorokko rewrapped her racket in gleaming white tape. Then Mr. Kunovac started her on some groundstrokes. "I'm really excited to torture you," he said. That's when the groin shot happened. Once he'd recovered, they went back to forehand groundstrokes. Ms. Peet struggled with footing. "The second the forehand comes, I'm like, it's over," she said. She has decided that a weak forehand, which she has, and a strong backhand, which she also has, "is the sign of a true neurotic." She is a competitive person (she showed a scar on her forehand, a reminder of a scene in "Brockmire" in which she'd insisted she could catch a full beer can), but when it comes to tennis, she knows she can't compete. "It's really horrible to love something and suck at it so much," Ms. Peet said, as she went to fill a paper cup with water. When she had emptied it, she repurposed the cup as a dunce cap. Next, she practiced volleys. Her arms were like spaghetti, sometimes overcooked, sometimes a lot more al dente. Still, her net game was solid and the ball smacked from racket to racket more than a dozen times before a passing shot ended the volley. The father of those kids is David Benioff, a showrunner of "Game of Thrones." Mr. Kunovac and Ms. Sorokko are fans. As a thank you for their help with the play, she got them small roles in the show's final season, shot somewhere near Belfast, in Northern Ireland. "It was hard to go to the bathroom," Ms. Sorokko said. And no, Ms. Peet can't spill any finale details except to say that she has a lot of anxiety about keeping it a secret. As she stripped down to a T shirt, Mr. Kunovac and Ms. Sorokko rallied with each other. Ms. Sorokko hit a couple of trick shots through her legs. Ms. Peet hit the water cooler. She mentioned that she is also collaborating on a film script with the Duplass brothers, with whom she worked on the HBO show "Togetherness." She has been working through draft after draft. But she still thinks that "writing is easier than tennis," she said. "And that's saying a lot." It was time to practice her serve. "Oh God," she said. "It's a little hard because I'm shortsighted. I know that sounds like an excuse." It did sound like an excuse. She bounced the ball a few times. "This part looks good," she said, "the preamble." Then she tossed the ball high in the air and whacked it way past the baseline. She finished off the lesson rallying with Ms. Sorokko, at one point nearly clipping her in the head. "Apparently, you like to take people out," Mr. Kunovac said. "It's the 'Game of Thrones' in you." The session ended. Ms. Peet collapsed on the sidelines. "If you lived in the city, I'd be in much better shape," she said. "If you were a real student, you'd pick up balls," Mr. Kunovac said. "I'm so Hollywood," Ms. Peet said. But she hauled herself up, ponytail swinging, and went to gather them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
With Chase Elliott winning the season finale on Sunday at Phoenix Raceway and becoming the champion of the Cup Series, NASCAR allowed itself a moment of congratulations for completing its most challenging year. "What a remarkable way to end it," said Steve Phelps, NASCAR's president. If Elliott, NASCAR's Most Popular Driver in 2019, were to win that award again, he would become the first driver to win it and a championship in the same year since his father, the Hall of Famer Bill Elliott, in 1988. "Awesome, awesome, awesome!" screamed Elliott, the 24 year old son of Awesome Bill from Dawsonville, as he took the checkered flag. He finished three seconds ahead of Brad Keselowski, who was followed closely by Joey Logano, Denny Hamlin and Jimmie Johnson, the retiring seven time series champion. "What we have accomplished during this global pandemic is, I think, nothing short of remarkable," Phelps said. "We ran all 36 of our races. I believe we are the only professional sport that can claim it ran its full schedule in 2020. "It's just unprecedented in the history of our country, in the history of sports, and certainly in the history of our sport. I would suggest this is the single most difficult year that we've faced as a sport." When the Cup Series was shut down in early March three events into its season, no one knew when, or if, it would return. To come back, the series had to reinvent itself. On May 17, NASCAR racing returned in an unusual format a single day event in Darlington, S.C., with no fans in the stands. "A bunch of midweek races, three doubleheaders, no practice and qualifying," Phelps said. "Things that were kind of significant in bedrock that we do, right? You come to the racetrack, you're here for three days, you practice, you qualify, you race, right?" That structure went out the window, as NASCAR tried to regain its footing. The goal was to run a full schedule of races, but no one knew if the new plan could be sustained, or if the sport might face another shutdown. In addition to racing without fans in the stands until a small number were allowed back over the final races crews were limited. Instead of multiple days of preparation at the track, teams showed up on the morning of the event and raced without any practice or qualifying. They raced at new venues, under unfamiliar conditions: At one track they raced in the rain for the first time. Phelps said the sport started the 2020 season with great optimism that recent economic difficulties, dwindling attendance and disappointing television ratings were behind them. "We were a sport that was coming back," Phelps said. But then came the shutdown. How would NASCAR regain that momentum? "If you think about where we are as a sport today, I believe we're stronger as a sport today than we were pre Covid," Phelps said. "I believe that." NASCAR banned the display of Confederate flags at its facilities. It banished one of its top drivers, Kyle Larson, after he used a racial slur during an online gaming event. It stood in unity with Darrell Wallace Jr., the only Black driver in the top series, after someone apparently left a noose in his garage stall at an Alabama event. "What we do from a social justice standpoint moving forward really to me is about human decency," Phelps said. "We want to make sure that people want to come to our facilities. We want to make sure they want to participate in this sport on television, radio, digitally and socially. We want them to feel part of this community." Although President Trump had attended the season opening Daytona 500, NASCAR later broke with the president in its approach to the coronavirus, requiring strict protections for everyone who set foot on the property at a NASCAR event. Masks were always mandatory. As a result, only two of the many coronavirus tests given to NASCAR drivers the rest of the season came back positive for Johnson and Austin Dillon and those may have been false positives, since subsequent tests came back negative. Now, Phelps believes NASCAR has the momentum to carry itself through a three month off season, until its 2021 schedule kicks off at Daytona International Speedway in early February. It includes 28 one day shows and eight with practice and qualifying. It is possible, Phelps said, that the sport may not be in a position to revert to some of its traditions, like welcoming a full contingent of fans, until 2022. "What does that look like in '22, as we unveil a new car? Probably a lot more practice and qualifying. How much, and what does it look like? Really, it will be determined when we get a little closer to that particular season." But how much of the pre pandemic NASCAR atmosphere will come through at the 2021 Daytona season opener? "Do I believe we're going to have fans in the stands? I do," Phelps said. "What percentage of fans in the stands? I'm not sure." When will it be safe enough for fans to return to the garage areas, fan midways, infields and grandstands? The answers to those questions are dependent on the coronavirus itself, and the success or failure of efforts to control it. Phelps said he welcomed any effort to improve the health, safety and security of everyone involved. "The great news is that the racing, again, arguably is as good as it's ever been," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
HELENA, Montana Ponderosa pine and pinyon forests in the American West will die at an increasing rate as the world grows warmer, becoming less and less resilient when they are weakened by higher temperatures, according to new projections. Although these forests now withstand short droughts, warming temperatures increasingly stress the forests, which means they will no longer survive the shorter droughts they once endured. And future droughts will be hotter as the planet warms. "We're saying that if the climate warms a little more, things don't get a little different, they get very different," said Henry Adams, a plant biologist at Oklahoma State University and lead author of a new paper, published in Environmental Research Letters in a special edition of the journal titled "Focus on Tree Mortality in a Warming World." "You get an acceleration in the rate of mortality." "Long droughts are what it takes to kill trees," Dr. Adams said. "As you crank up the heat though, the time it takes to kill trees is less and less." This study is significant because rather than looking at the effects of a single temperature increase, it examines the effects of multiple increases that provide a more realistic forecast. "The confidence we've developed about our forests being at great risk is really high now," said David D. Breshears, a professor of natural resources at the University of Arizona and a co author on the paper. "Warming makes droughts more lethal." Dr. Breshears said that the research shows that warming temperatures and drought alone could cause 9 or 10 additional forest die offs per century during this century by killing seedlings. "It's not sustainable if you knock out a forest every ten or twelve years," Dr. Breshears said. "We are at a big risk of losing lots and lots of forest." The researchers also say that they believe the results of this study apply to many other types of forests around the world. In recent years, Western forests in North America especially have been hard hit by die offs. California's most recent drought, from 2012 to this year, killed more than 100 million trees. In Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico, more than 350 million pinyon pines over 4,600 square miles died in one year, from 2002 to 2003, showing how a changing climate can rapidly wipe out broad swaths of forest. A recent study found that the sequoias, the largest trees in the world by volume and thousands of years old, are no longer as resilient as was once thought. As droughts occur, other species of trees growing nearby suck up stored water in the ground and render the sequoias susceptible to dying. There is increasing talk of irrigating the giants. Because of the complexity of these systems, many scientists think forest mortality has been underestimated. Even this study only looks at mortality caused by temperature and not the added death toll from pathogens, wildfires or pests, which are expected to expand as temperatures warm. In fact, an unparalleled forest die off caused by bark beetles has already taken place in the Rocky Mountains, where below zero bug killing temperatures, once common, have become rarer. During the 2000s, more than 150,000 square miles of lodgepole and ponderosa pine forest in the United States and Canadian Rockies died in just a few years from a surge in beetle infestations, which experts said was unprecedented. Europe too is seeing an increase in drought in its forests. Switzerland, for example, expects to lose its iconic spruce forests because of hotter and drier weather. Trees that are weakened by drought can no longer muster enough sap to protect themselves from beetle attacks. Adding to drought problems is air pollution such as ozone, which weakens trees. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
More than 100 scientists and clinicians have questioned the authenticity of a massive hospital database that was the basis for an influential study published last week that concluded that treating people who have Covid 19 with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine did not help and might have increased the risk of abnormal heart rhythms and death. In an open letter to The Lancet's editor, Richard Horton, and the paper's authors, the scientists asked the journal to provide details about the provenance of the data and called for the study to be independently validated by the World Health Organization or another institution. A spokeswoman for Dr. Mandeep R. Mehra, the Harvard professor who was the paper's lead author, said on Friday that the study's authors had asked for an independent academic review and audit of their work. Use of the malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to prevent and treat Covid 19 has been a focus of intense public attention. President Trump has promoted the promise of hydroxychloroquine, despite the absence of gold standard evidence from randomized clinical trials to prove its effectiveness, and recently said he was taking it himself in hopes of preventing coronavirus infection. The scientists' challenges to The Lancet paper come at a time of increasing debate about the risks of the rush to publish new medical findings about Covid 19. The paper, published May 22, included data on tens of thousands of patients hospitalized through April 14, meaning that the authors analyzed the trove of data, wrote the paper and went through the journal's peer review of its findings in just over five weeks, much faster than usual. The experts who wrote The Lancet also criticized the study's methodology and the authors' refusal to identify any of the hospitals that contributed patient data, or to name the countries where they were located. The company that owns the database is Surgisphere, based in Chicago. "Data from Africa indicate that nearly 25 percent of all Covid 19 cases and 40 percent of all deaths in the continent occurred in Surgisphere associated hospitals which had sophisticated electronic patient data recording," the scientists wrote. "Both the numbers of cases and deaths, and the detailed data collection, seem unlikely." Another of the critics' concerns was that the data about Covid 19 cases in Australia was incompatible with government reports and included "more in hospital deaths than had occurred in the entire country during the study period." A spokeswoman for The Lancet, Emily Head, said in an email that the journal had received numerous inquiries about the paper and had referred the questions to the authors. "We will provide further updates as necessary," she said. "The Lancet encourages scientific debate and will publish responses to the study, along with a response from the authors, in the journal in due course." On Saturday, the journal made two corrections to the study but said, "There have been no changes to the findings of the paper." Dr. Sapan S. Desai, the owner and founder of Surgisphere and one of the paper's authors, vigorously defended the findings and the authenticity and validity of the company's database. He said official counts of coronavirus cases and deaths often lagged behind actual cases, which might explain some discrepancies. The paper's authors said they had analyzed data gathered from 671 hospitals on six continents that shared granular medical information about nearly 15,000 patients who had received the drugs and 81,000 who had not, while shielding their identities. "What the world has to understand is that this is registry based data," Dr. Desai said. "We have no control over the source of the information. All we can do is report the data that is given to us." Another group of researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health also raised questions about the Surgisphere database, both with the authors and editors of The Lancet. Scientists who wrote and signed the letter criticizing the study included clinicians, researchers, statisticians and ethicists from academic medical centers, including Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University and Duke University. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. One of the signatories, Dr. Adrian Hernandez, who heads the Duke Clinical Research Institute, said the paper contained many troubling anomalies, "but the biggest thing that raised a red flag was that here was such a large database across more than 600 hospitals, and no one had really known about its existence. That was quite remarkable." Like several other signatories of the letter, Dr. Hernandez is involved in a clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine to see if it can protect health care workers from infection. Allen Cheng, a professor of infectious diseases at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who also signed the letter, said in an email that the individual hospitals included in the database should be identified. "Ideally, the database should be made public, but if that isn't possible, it should at least be independently reviewed and an audit performed," he said. Surgisphere's data was also the basis of a study of coronavirus patients published in The New England Journal of Medicine this month by some of the same authors, including Dr. Desai and Harvard's Dr. Mehra, as well as for two versions of an article on the use of an antimicrobial drug to treat Covid 19 that were not published in an established medical journal. Jennifer Zeis, a spokeswoman for The New England Journal of Medicine, said by email that the journal was aware of the questions that had been raised and was looking into them. Dr. Mehra issued a statement Friday, saying that the paper's authors "leveraged the data available through Surgisphere to provide observational guidance to inform the care of hospitalized Covid 19 patients" because the results of randomized clinical trials would not be available for some time. Other observational studies had previously reported possible harms associated with the malaria drugs, and the Food and Drug Administration had issued a safety warning about their use. After the Lancet paper was published, the World Health Organization and other organizations suspended clinical trials of the drugs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
MOUNTAIN DALE, N.Y. When Butch Resnick was growing up in this small working class hamlet in the town of Fallsburg, he never imagined that decades later, he would be standing in the town's former grocery store, eying a five foot tall painting of a naked Buddha. But times had changed. Micheline Gingras, the curator of the Grocery Store, a new gallery, said she wanted to put the Buddha in the window. Mr. Resnick frowned, thinking of the Hasidic synagogue just up the road. "It's a little too risque for Mountain Dale," he said. Ms. Gingras seemed unconcerned. At 70, she had happily left her Brooklyn apartment for a small piece of the Catskills. "I enjoyed the excitement about giving this little village a rebirth," she said. "I could bring everything to people who don't even know it exists." Mr. Resnick, 50, a self described "country boy" who has the hulk of a club bouncer but favors bright white sneakers and dad jeans, felt the same way. Six years ago, he bought 31 buildings in Mountain Dale nearly all of them vacant hoping to revive the town. He knew this required courting a new breed of visitors: weekenders, artists and escapees from New York City's high rents. But as a high school dropout who made his money manufacturing grocery store equipment, he didn't know how to find them. Then a friend introduced him to DVEight, a regional magazine named for eight towns in the Delaware Valley that describes its audience as "a stylish and sophisticated readership interested in exploring modern rural life." These were precisely the people Mr. Resnick wanted. And so he hired the magazine's editor in chief, Nhi Mundy, 39, to be Mountain Dale's "town curator." Ms. Mundy's role is to turn Main Street into a living version of the magazine. "If a museum does it, why can't I do it?" Mr. Resnick said. The people behind these ventures frequently install their friends and acquaintances in storefronts, while attempting to preserve (or exploit, depending whom you ask) local history. The practice is rarely free of conflict, even when developers have the best intentions. "Everybody in this country says Main Street America is dead. It's a bad investment," Mr. Resnick said. "I'm trying to recapture what I had as a kid. Everything was alive, every store was open." From the 1920s through the 1960s, Mountain Dale and the other Fallsburg hamlets thrived on the back of some 300 borscht belt hotels. When the resorts shuttered, so did many main street businesses. Mr. Resnick sorely missed the bakery, dairy and ice cream shop of his youth: Even the grocery store owner the kids called Crazy Becky, because she threw cans at people from the window. "When Butch first approached me, I said, 'I'm not taking part in this town that doesn't exist,'" Ms. Mundy said. But walking through Mountain Dale for the first time, she had the same feeling she had experienced in two other "kind of dead" towns where she eventually opened her restaurants. "I felt that energy, that promise that this town would work," she said. At least as it's rendered in DVEight which has a circulation of 5,000 and ads from business like Kasuri (an avant garde clothing store) and Tentrr (a glamping start up) Ms. Mundy's aesthetic isn't easily defined. "The people we feature farmers, fashion designers, Marina Abramovic for one issue it's all over the place, which is what upstate is about," she said. "There's a lot of poverty up here, but a lot of people with enormous wealth. I want Mountain Dale to reflect that too: both highbrow and lowbrow." And yet marketing the romance of rural living to city folk can seem like an affront to locals who are dealing with serious socioeconomic decline. Monson, a town in one of Maine's poorest counties, was gutted a decade ago when the local furniture factory closed. Then a nonprofit called the Libra Foundation purchased 28 properties in town, hoping to create an artists' retreat and, eventually, encourage painters and poets to settle there permanently. Daniel Swain, Monson's town manager, says the formerly dilapidated downtown now "looks wonderful" and that a few young families have even moved in. But he thinks that many locals probably care less about an abstract nod to history than the fact that milk at one grocery store suddenly doubled in price after a 1.5 million renovation. "A lot of people say, 'You just gentrified an entire town,'" said Mr. Butler, who was previously the town manager. "I disagree. If anything, we saved a small rural town on the decline." Without an influx of new residents, he said, the town's aging population might die away. Similar changes are happening in Wardensville, W.Va., population 250, about two hours from Washington, D.C. Over the last five years, Paul Yandura and his partner Donald Hitchcock purchased a handful of buildings there with the aim of branding Wardensville as "the smallest main street in America" to tourists. "It's about the nostalgia, the country, being out in fresh air," Mr. Yandura said. Many longtime residents still prefer to patronize Wardensville restaurants that either predate Mr. Yandura and Mr. Hitchcock's activity or that locals have since opened. Arguably, some of these like Marina's Pizza or Cinderella's Attic dress shop wouldn't have opened had the men not begun to market the town as a tourist destination. But these new establishments aren't turning chicken feeders into flower planters or reclaiming old barn wood. Their spaces are simple, their prices affordable. Mr. Yandura said he gets it: "We're creating a sense of place, but a sense of place is a tourist activity." Walmart's foray into place creation is more of a head scratcher . The company recently announced plans to build "reimagined centers" that is, faux towns adjacent to eight stores. These will include "a carefully curated mix" of food, shopping, wellness, entertainment and green space, as well as day care, pet care and bike shares. It seems that the corporation many blamed for mortally wounding Main Street before Amazon delivered the death blow is now attempting reparations, though Ms. Mundy is pessimistic about the project's prospects. "The cool factor isn't there," she said. On a recent Saturday afternoon in Mountain Dale, a smattering of shoppers wandered around the vintage store, perusing the racks of dresses and Angora hats, which Ambika Conroy, the proprietor, had crocheted from the fur of her own rabbits. Outside, Susan Jacobs Carr, a retiree who grew up in Mountain Dale and returned somewhat reluctantly after her husband's death, said she welcomed the changes. "We used to have to drive seven miles for half a gallon of milk and a newspaper in the winter," Ms. Jacobs Carr said. "That's no longer the case. It makes me happy that I can go out for dinner in my own town." In Wardensville, Mr. Yandura and Mr. Hitchcock were initially the subject of a homophobic online bullying campaign and their pride flag was stolen from their house. "We made lots of mistakes in the beginning by relying on our personal values and cultural references, and by believing these were somehow universal," Mr. Yandura said. When two friends, Jon Bier and Brent Underwood, purchased the ghost town of Cerro Gordo, Calif., hoping to revive it for 21st century tourists, they received pushback from the nearby community of Lone Pine. "I have gold teeth and tattoos," Mr. Bier said. "It's 'who the bleep are these guys? They're going to ruin everything.'" He added that when city people come into a small town, it's imperative to "win hearts and minds helping the community thrive instead of taking from them." Mr. Yandura and Mr. Hitchcock, who live in Wardensville full time, are intimately involved with the farm and bake shop, which is run as a nonprofit. Fifty high school students work there, learning organic farming techniques, business management and customer service. Previously, economic opportunities for young people were limited. But in Wardensville, as in Mountain Dale, progress remains slow, especially during weekdays and in the colder months. Mr. Resnick is allowing his shopkeepers to operate either rent free or for a nominal fee, since there aren't enough shoppers to keep the doors open. During the week, Mountain Dale, like Cerro Gordo, is a veritable ghost town. But on the Saturday afternoon of Mr. Resnick's recent visit, Ba Me was bustling and the stores were open. Ms. Conroy, the rabbit breeder, emerged from her shop to get a cup of coffee at an outdoor pop up stand around the corner. One of the animals, a giant ball of fluff, was cradled in her arms, and suddenly a small crowd of onlookers surrounded her. "Look, we have people walking down the street," Mr. Resnick said, proudly. "Before, there was nobody." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
MONTCLAIR, N.J. "Healing Wars," the latest production by Liz Lerman, begins backstage. Audience members, en route to their seats, file through a maze of meticulously reconstructed scenes from the Civil War. Along with a costumed performer or two, each tableau vivant comes with wall text imparting an interesting fact: the number of women who disguised themselves as men to fight, the number of letters that the American Red Cross founder Clara Barton received and wrote. At the end of the line, there's a real and much more recent veteran, the former Navy Gunner's Mate Paul Hurley, calmly discussing his missing lower leg and his prosthesis. It's a representative introduction to the show, which opened on Thursday at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University, and its frustrating mix of past and present, real and fake, heavy handed and understated. The subject matter could hardly be more potent: the traumatic effects of war on soldiers and on those charged with healing them. At times, the episodic production honors that material and affectingly brings it to life. Elsewhere, facts fall inert, with some of the randomness of war, and the show takes on the clumsy awkwardness of "historical re enactments" in TV documentaries. Ms. Lerman makes many poor choices. A section disapproving of Hollywood representations comes off as smugly self congratulatory. In a segment screening a viral 2010 video of soldiers in Afghanistan dancing to Lady Gaga, the show's dancers block the soldiers' images. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
From left: Anthony Martinez Briggs, Avery Hannon, Lindsay Smiling and Brandon Pierce in the Wilma Theater production of "Kill Move Paradise." Violence against black people is nothing new not in real life and not in the theater. Especially in the last few years, playwrights have been telling the stories, sounding the alarm and predicting our current upheaval. Newer works, too, created under the stress of grief, have been trying to put George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and too many others in a larger context. The problem is that just when we need to see these works most, so many have disappeared into the darkness of shut theaters. Luckily, some are streamable; here's a sampling of just a few. They investigate from many angles and in many styles what it really means to say Black Lives Matter. JESSE GREEN Moses and Kitch are young black men living endangered lives in a city much like Chicago. But in Antoinette Nwandu's devastating play, they are also avatars of decades even centuries of abuse. In adapting Danya Taymor's Steppenwolf Theater production to the screen, Spike Lee captures the action not only onstage but also in the audience, doubling the drama of pain and recognition. JESSE GREEN "Pass Over" is available on Amazon Prime In Geraldine Inoa's reverberant drama, the enormity of the crime at its center can't be accommodated by a single style of theater. The play begins as a slice of life street scene, which portrays the ineradicable impact of the police shooting of a college bound football player on his survivors. The script then splits open into a fantastical, cosmic game show, in which nobody is a winner. Stevie Walker Webb's compelling, genre straddling production comes from Los Angeles's Matrix Theater Company. BEN BRANTLEY "Scraps" is available on YouTube. "What if I told you: It's going to be all right?" Jomama Jones asks. "But what if I told you: Not yet?" So begins the patter in an evening of song and story that sees the world's troubles in one bespangled diva's heart. The campy but powerful creation of Daniel Alexander Jones, "Black Light," recorded live at Joe's Pub on March 17, 2018, makes unrest deeply personal and deeply complicated, too. JESSE GREEN "Black Light" is available on YouTube Kara Young in the monologue "Twan's Sister" by Monique A. Robinson. This series of short plays, each written and produced over the course of a single day, has since March offered playwrights and actors in isolation a great platform for experimentation. Some of the monologues seem to have predicted our current national unrest, including "L.A. Yoga ," a typically scabrous take on white microaggression by Stephen Adly Guirgis, performed by Andre Royo. A number of others, like Shawn Randall's " Uprising2020," featuring Stephanie Berry, are direct calls to action. Still others, including "Twan's Sister Or On the eve of Super Woman's Retirement" by Monique A. Robinson, touch on the problem of racism in the theater itself, with a twist and a terrific performance by Kara Young. JESSE GREEN Four young black men have arrived in a haunted corner of eternity, and they are trying to figure out how they died. When the answers come, they never stop echoing and they never start making sense. James Ijames's beautiful, elegiac play ponders the unjustified killings of black youth by police officers through an unblinking, everlasting gaze. This archival recording of the 2018 production at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia is directed by Blanka Zizka. BEN BRANTLEY When Claudia Rankine's award winning hybrid poetry collection "Citizen: An American Lyric" came out in 2014, it immediately became one of the defining literary works of our time, combining probing academic essays with sobering personal accounts of daily microaggressions. Though some of the book's elements are inevitably lost in its translation to the stage (or, in this case, Zoom screen), the Fountain Theater's painfully pertinent live reading of "Citizen," adapted by Stephen Sachs and directed by Shirley Jo Finney, brings multi vocal urgency to the text. Round robin line readings and choral declarations emphasize Rankine's central question what it means to be a citizen, whether black or nonblack in our society right now. MAYA PHILLIPS "Citizen: An American Lyric" is available on YouTube. Dominique Morisseau's gripping, deeply empathic play is an anatomy of a grievously understandable fear that of a black American mother for her adolescent son. Nya, a rigidly self possessed schoolteacher, is unraveled by feelings that her restless, rebellious teenager is destined to die young. Lileana Blain Cruz directs this impeccably mounted Lincoln Center Theater production from 2017, with a shattering performance from Karen Pittman as Nya. BEN BRANTLEY 'Fires in the Mirror,' 'Twilight: Los Angeles' and 'Notes From the Field' In investigating the culture and sociology of American racial divisions, no theater artist has surpassed Anna Deavere Smith for complexity, insight and empathy. This sui generis combination of actress, artist, playwright and journalist has created two masterworks shaped from interviews with witnesses, pundits and participants in the era defining riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991 ("Fires in the Mirror") and in Los Angeles in 1992 ("Twilight: Los Angeles"). They're available for streaming, as is her later, excellent "Notes From the Field," about the notorious school to prison "pipeline" that entraps many African American students. For further context, check out the conversation with Smith at the 92nd Street Y. BEN BRANTLEY | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
As NASA's Juno spacecraft closes in for its Monday arrival at Jupiter, many other eyes are also staring at the solar system's largest planet. Data from about 25 observatories including some of the largest on Earth, like the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and in orbit around Earth, like the Hubble Space Telescope will aid scientists in interpreting the data that Juno is expected to gather as it swoops close to the cloud tops of Jupiter over the next 20 months. It has taken Juno nearly five years to reach this point in its journey. "In just a few days, we're about to arrive at Jupiter, and it's hard to believe," Scott Bolton, the mission's principal investigator, said at a NASA news conference on Thursday. Around last Friday, Juno crossed from interplanetary space into the magnetic bubble surrounding Jupiter that deflects the stream of particles from the sun known as the solar wind. "Inside that magnetosphere is Jupiter's domain that's filled with its particles," Dr. Bolton said. "It has blocked out the sun's particles." "Just the sound of it can tell you it's nontrivial to go into Jupiter," Dr. Bolton said, as NASA released the recording of it. A couple of days ago, the propulsion system was pressurized in preparation for the firing of the spacecraft's engine, which will take 35 minutes on Monday. On Thursday, the last set of instructions before the arrival was sent to Juno. "Then it'll be hands off from the team," said Edward Hirst, the mission manager. "The spacecraft is on its own, and it's designed to take care of itself." When in orbit, Juno's instruments will be able to peer deep into Jupiter, but only for a narrow swath. The faraway observations by telescopes will "fill in the blanks to get the big picture story," Leigh Fletcher, of the University of Leicester in England, said in an interview. "We'll have the best observational data set of Jupiter that we've ever had." This week, Dr. Fletcher and his colleagues released infrared photographs of Jupiter seemingly on fire. "You can see the internal glow of Jupiter coming out," Dr. Fletcher said. "Those clouds are colder and are absorbing in the infrared." Once Juno begins orbiting Jupiter, each time that the spacecraft zips in close, the team will take similar photographs using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile "to place the Juno close up observations in their broader spatial context." For example, Dr. Fletcher said he wanted to piece together Juno's measurements of ammonia and water key constituents of Jupiter's clouds with the weather patterns seen in the Very Large Telescope pictures. With Juno providing the first good look at Jupiter's poles, Dr. Fletcher is curious as to whether huge hurricane like storms rage, similar to what has been observed in Saturn's polar regions. The auroras glowing patterns powered by charged particles slamming into the atmosphere might also affect the weather. To gain more data on the auroras, the Hubble Space Telescope has been staring at Jupiter for 45 minutes every day for the past month. At Earth, auroras light up when solar wind particles slam into molecules of air near the polar regions. At Jupiter, the charged particles come mostly from a different source: the volcanos of Io. Jupiter's powerful magnetic fields then accelerate the particles into the planet's atmosphere. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Kiran Nagarkar, an Indian writer whose celebrated novels and plays addressed subjects like 16th century Rajasthani royalty, the life of the working poor in Mumbai and religious fundamentalism, died on Sept. 5 in a hospital in Mumbai. He was 77 . His longtime partner, Tulsi Vatsal , said the cause was a cerebral hemorrhage. In both English and his native language, Marathi, Mr. Nagarkar's wordplay and the colorful characters he created left an indelible impression. His writing was bawdy, irreverent and joyous, but it also held up a mirror to uncomfortable truths . Mumbai, his birthplace, was often the backdrop for his plots, and he was known for capturing that sprawling metropolis's never say die spirit. His experimental novel "Saat Sakkam Trechalis" ("Seven Times Six Is Forty Three") , from 1974 his only book in Marathi is considered a landmark in that language, spoken by more than 80 million people in India. It follows the stream of consciousness of a young author waiting to be recognized for his work. In " Ravan and Eddie" (1995), his breakout English novel, he took readers into the chawls, Mumbai's squalid tenements, where his main characters live. That book and two more, "The Extras" (2012) and "Rest in Peace" (2015), form a trilogy that follows two boys Ravan, who is Hindu, and Eddie, who is Roman Catholic from childhood to their life in Bollywood. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Grandparents are natural subjects for picture books, given their all star status in the lives of the primary audience, not to mention research showing an increase in multigenerational households in the United States. Yet so many of the excellent new grandparent centric picture books surging into bookstores and libraries come from creators who grew up in other cultures. This may be because Americans are still catching up to Europeans and to children when it comes to realizing that older bodies can still be vital and attractive. And we can only hope the reverence and tenderness toward elderly people found in Asian cultures takes root here, too, becoming as American as sushi and dumplings and K pop. The simple fact is that grandparents fascinate young children. I still remember the excitement of being allowed to explore the treasure chest that was my own grandmother's pocketbook, or the silky wonderland of her nightgown drawer. The utterly delightful ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GRANNIES (Gecko, 32 pp., 16.59; ages 4 to 8), a French import written and illustrated by Eric Veille and translated by Daniel Hahn, plays this interest in the minutiae of seniors' lives to humorous perfection, with buoyant, colorful comics style illustrations of groovy, goggle eyed grandmas. Each page wittily catalogs a subject of interest: "Nicknames" ("Every granny has a nickname") features a Bubbe, a Nonna, a Gran and so on. "Grannies' Moods" reminds us that grandmas feel sad, too, and offers suggestions for helping: "Tell her a secret," "draw her a chicken" or "peel her an orange." With refreshing French frankness, the "Age" page shows grannies who are 69 and 58, "and some are even 87," with this octogenarian winking and waving, her gray curls sporting a sassy red flower to match the pattern on her trousers. Several pages are as wise as they are entertaining. The "Time" page says, "Grannies are the only people who always have time." We see three older ladies around a table with a civilized looking meal in progress (a wineglass, a bowl of soup, an oyster shell). One has a sleeping baby nestled cozily against her chest, which may cause an involuntary "aww" to escape some readers. This is one of those picture books that make wonderful use of the way children read illustrations while adults read words aloud. After a blunt introduction "My grandparents are really old. They have wrinkly faces, a little bit of hair and funny teeth" a young narrator proceeds to tell the "truth" she hears, while the illustrations demonstrate the opposite. 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. As we read "Grandparents are slow," a child on a scooter careens downhill, trailed by Grandma on roller skates and Grandpa on a skateboard (everyone wears helmets, a sure sign this is an American book). One daring spread claims grandparents "don't care for romance," while we gaze upon the pair in an ardent full on smooch, with Grandpa's hands cradling his wife's head. Oh breaks down each activity into small pieces, the way perceptive caregivers do with the youngest children. For example: "When he gets to the restaurant, he sits down and orders." This bit takes up an entire page and on the next one, we learn what he orders: dumplings, his favorite. But the real thrill comes when the little girl enters the scene, dropped off at Papa's house for her Thursday time. He's brought some dumplings home for her. Then he pulls out art supplies and they make a butterfly kite, which we see them flying in a blissful, wordless ending. The simple storytelling is enchanting, and Oh's vivid collages add a stage set feeling to her tale. In FINDING GRANDMA'S MEMORIES (Knopf, 32 pp., 17.99; ages 3 to 7), Jiyeon Pak, another native of South Korea, also tells a warm tale of life with a grandparent. It starts: "Ever since I was really little, I loved having tea with my Grandma." We see Grandma's collection of teacups, and her sweet black and white cat licking his chops on the fringe of the tea party. But "as I got bigger," the girl says, "teatime started to change. Once, Grandma got my name confused." Pak's characters are facing the challenge of memory loss. She shows the girl's parents telling her that Grandma is "losing her memory"; mindful of the literal mindedness of kids, they explain what this actually means: "She could forget things, even things she used to know well." A stunning and original debut by a Chinese creator, Jin Xiaojing, takes on the complex feelings many of us have about a grandparent we never got to meet. The narrator of I MISS MY GRANDPA (Little, Brown, 40 pp., 18.99; ages 4 to 7) tells us her grandpa "died before I was born, but still I have always felt that he's here with me." She asks her family about him, and learns that he had a nose like one of her uncles', and that when he told stories, he took on many voices, from a lion's to a cloud's. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
She was threatened repeatedly. Poisoned, twice. Detained by Russian security forces, tortured and told she would be executed. None of this was enough to stop Anna Politkovskaya from reporting on the second Chechen War. In books and articles for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, she described, with ruthless objectivity and an acute sense of moral complexity, the clash between the Russian government and the Chechen rebels that opposed it. She investigated allegations of abuse on all sides, pursuing the truth relentlessly, often on behalf of the Chechen civilians most victimized by the war, until she was shot and killed in Moscow in October 2006 at the age of 48. Five men were convicted of her murder in 2014, but critics say the case remains unsolved until whoever ordered the assassination is held accountable. The journalist's life and work is the subject of Stefano Massini's play "Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya," which opens Sept. 23 in a Play Company production directed by Lee Sunday Evans. "Intractable Woman," which is now in previews, will be the first of his works to be produced in the United States, followed by another Massini play with resonance even closer to home. "The Lehman Trilogy," a London hit about the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers financial firm, comes to the Park Avenue Armory in March. (Two other plays about journalism are landing on Broadway, too: an adaptation of the film "Network" and "Ink," about the early career of Rupert Murdoch.) In an email correspondence, Mr. Massini talked about his artistic interest in historical figures and why he is hopes to visit New York. Edited excerpts follow. How soon after Politkovskaya's murder did you begin working on this play? I remember very well: I began writing immediately. And do you know why? Because I was struck by the fact that by killing Anna, someone thought they were solving a big problem. It was simple: Is there a journalist who tells uncomfortable truths? Good: We kill her. So who will ever realize it? Who will ever remember her, once she is buried? She will end up forgotten. This is why I decided to write. Rather than a naturalistic play, you have three actresses, who all play Anna at times, address the audience directly. Why this form for this story? I have always written in this form. My plays are strange, I recognize it. Something halfway between the epic, the screenplay, the ancient tragedy. Do you remember the anatomical table? Here it is: the theater is the biopsy of reality. At least it is for me. "The Lehman Trilogy" is also a three actor play. Is this just a coincidence? Warning: this is not so. It is much more complicated. Both plays are not written for three actors, but can be recited by one, two, 20 actors. I do not specify it. "The Lehman Trilogy" has been staged in Italy by Luca Ronconi with 11 actors. Sam Mendes made it in London with three actors; it's his choice. Same for this play: I saw a version in France with 23 actors! I leave the directors total freedom. Almost all of "Intractable Woman" is told in Politkovskaya's voice. How much of the text is taken from her work and how much is your own invention? What about real life figures interests you as a playwright? Every day I read the newspapers. I read them deeply. Because that's where my works are born. The theater has always been born there. I wrote theatrical pieces on the economy, on wars, on precariousness in the world of jobs. One of my monologues tells the true story of an old immigrant who walked 5,000 kilometers from the Iraqi desert to the ice of Sweden. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
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