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The critics' consensus on "The Rise of Skywalker," the final installment of "Star Wars," is... not great. According to Rotten Tomatoes, before the movie opened, it stood at 57 percent fresh. But reviews haven't always been so harsh. At The New York Times, at least, the critics have positively endorsed some entries in the franchise, beginning with the first one in 1977, which Vincent Canby, senior critic at the time, described as "the most elaborate, most expensive, most beautiful movie serial ever made." Here's a look, in order of release date, at how The Times has reviewed the saga, episode by episode: For the movie that started it all (technically Episode IV), Canby identified many of the writer director George Lucas's influences, including "Quo Vadis?," "Buck Rogers," "Ivanhoe," "Superman," "The Wizard of Oz," "The Gospel According to St. Matthew," the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. "The way definitely not to approach 'Star Wars,'" Canby cautioned, "is to expect a film of cosmic implications or to footnote it with so many references that one anticipates it as if it were a literary duty. It's fun and funny." Though he got in a dig at the plot "the story of 'Star Wars' could be written on the head of a pin and still leave room for the Bible" Canby complimented Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford (as Luke, Leia and Han Solo), noting that "everyone treats his material with the proper combination of solemnity and good humor that avoids condescension," and called C 3PO and R2 D2 "the year's best new comedy team." Read the full review. Presciently describing this first sequel (Episode V) as part of "a projected series that may last longer than the civilization that produced it," Canby spent a portion of his review on the sensation caused by the original "Star Wars" not in a good way: "There is more nonsense being written, spoken and rumored about movies today than about any of the other so called popular arts except rock music. The Force is with us, indeed, and a lot of it is hot air," he wrote, before going on to damn "The Empire Strikes Back" with faint praise by comparing it to the first "Star Wars": "It's not as fresh and funny and surprising and witty, but it is nice and inoffensive and, in a way that no one associated with it need be ashamed of." Or maybe they should be? He panned the director (Irvin Kershner) and the cast, in Fisher's case, with a sexist comment. Read the full review. The final entry (Episode VI) in this trilogy is also "by far the dimmest adventure of the lot" with "tiresome" fight scenes and a "virtually nonexistent" narrative, Canby wrote. "All of the members of the old 'Star Wars' gang are back doing what they've done before, but this time with a certain evident boredom." He did find a few moments directed by Richard Marquand that "evoke legitimate smiles" including the Ewoks whizzing around a forest, but they were the exceptions, not the rule. Read the full review. A new trilogy called for a new reviewer, and Janet Maslin was drafted to weigh in on "Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace," which she deemed a Critic's Pick. The release (with Lucas back as director) had been preceded by product tie ins that reportedly promised to make the movie profitable even if no one bought a ticket, but Maslin declared that "stripped of hype and breathless expectations, Mr. Lucas's first installment offers a happy surprise: it's up to snuff. It sustains the gee whiz spirit of the series and offers a swashbuckling extragalactic getaway." Her praise was tempered: The cast, including Natalie Portman as Queen Amidala, and Ewan McGregor as a young Obi Wan Kenobi is "often sandbagged by the physical demands of their roles"; the "bland conception" of Anakin Skywalker (played by Jake Lloyd) is a problem; and the film could do without the "noxious Jar Jar Binks" or the villains who sounded "embarrassingly like dated stereotypes from the sinister Orient." Read the full review. Our current co chief critic, A.O. Scott, took on "Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones" and described it as "many things a two hour and 12 minute action figure commercial, a demo reel heralding the latest advances in digital filmmaking, a chance for gifted actors to be handsomely paid for delivering the worst line readings of their careers." But if you couldn't guess already, it's not, he wrote, much of a movie, "if by movie you mean a work of visual storytelling about the dramatic actions of a group of interesting characters." Lucas, directing again, "seems to have lost his boyish glee" and he's overseen "some of the most embarrassing romantic avowals in recent screen history" (involving Portman and Hayden Christensen, now playing Anakin Skywalker). The special effects "demonstrate impressive polish and visual integrity," but, Scott added: "So what?" Read the full review. After being disappointed by the first two entries in this trilogy, Scott was in for a surprise with "Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith." It turns out to be "by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That's right (and my inner 11 year old shudders as I type this): it's better than 'Star Wars.'" There were still problems with the acting and writing (Portman has little range and Christensen plays Anakin's "descent into evil as a series of petulant bad moods"), but never mind those. "The sheer beauty, energy and visual coherence of 'Revenge of the Sith' is nothing short of breathtaking," and as the flawed Anakin devolves into a terrifying villain, "it is a measure of the film's accomplishment that this process is genuinely upsetting." What's more, "the rise of the Empire and the perdition of Anakin Skywalker are not the end of the story, and the inverted chronology turns out to be the most profound thing about the 'Star Wars' epic." Read the full review. For the start of this trilogy, our co chief critic Manohla Dargis got straight to the point: "The big news about 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' is spoiler alert that it's good!" Though Episode VII has the "usual toy store ready gizmos and critters," there are also "appealingly imperfect men and women" played by the "charismatic, talented trio" of Oscar Isaac, John Boyega and Daisy Ridley as Poe, Finn and Rey. What's more, the images of "Boyega and Ridley holding a lightsaber are among the most utopian moments in a Hollywood movie this year." Thankfully, the director J.J. Abrams, a fan of the Lucas movies, "doesn't pile on the mayhem, and, for the most part, the pace remains fast without being overly frantic." It could well be that the student has surpassed the master: Abrams "hasn't made a film only for true believers; he has made a film for everyone (well, almost)." Read the full review. Dargis was so enthralled with Episode VIII that she made it a Critic's Pick: "It has visual wit and a human touch, no small achievement for a seemingly indestructible machine that revved up 40 years ago." The writer director Rian Johnson tries to put "his fingerprints on a franchise that deliberately resists individual authorship" and he "largely succeeds" with a tangled story "mitigated by Mr. Johnson's quick pace and the appealing performers." Poe, Finn and Rey remain a "dream team"; Adam Driver as Kylo Ren "delivers a startlingly raw performance"; and added characters like Kelly Marie Tran's Rose re establish the franchise's diversity bona fides "a vision of the future you can recognize." But mostly it's the director's touch that makes this episode work: Johnson "brings lightness to his banter, visual flair (not simply bleeding edge special effects) to the design, and narrative savvy to Rey and Kylo Ren's relationship." Read the full review. For Episode IX, A.O. Scott returned to the reviewer's chair, and Abrams took back the directing reins. As you probably know by now, it's not a positive notice. The new film reaffirms the franchise's "commitment to dynastic bloodlines and messianic mumbo jumbo," while Ridley and Driver, as Rey and Kylo Ren, "are downright valiant in their pursuit of tragic dignity in increasingly preposterous circumstances." Even worse, "the struggle of good against evil feels less like a cosmic battle than a longstanding sports rivalry." Abrams, "perhaps the most consistent B student in modern popular culture" has made the "Star Wars" galaxy "a more diverse and also a less idiosyncratic place." In the end, the final episode "isn't a great 'Star Wars' movie, but that may be because there is no such thing." Read the full review. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
To hear more audio stories from publishers, like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Reporting on the White House's herky jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror. According to Sherman, when New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being alarmist. "I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity," Kushner reportedly said. "I'm doing my own projections, and I've gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn't need all the ventilators." (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's top expert on infectious diseases, has said he trusts Cuomo's estimate.) Even now, it's hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House's daily coronavirus briefing: "People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections." Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father in law. Most of his other endeavors his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians have been failures. The journalist Andrea Bernstein looked closely at Kushner's business record for her recent book "American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power," speaking to people on all sides of his real estate deals as well as those who worked with him at The New York Observer, the weekly newspaper he bought in 2006. Kushner, Bernstein told me, "really sees himself as a disrupter." Again and again, she said, people who'd dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he "believed he could do it better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn't know what he was talking about." It's hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid 1.8 billion a record, at the time for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once great New York Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites. His forays into the Israeli Palestinian conflict for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books have left the dream of a two state solution on life support. Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel Policy Forum described Kushner's plan for the Palestinian economy as "the Monty Python version of Israeli Palestinian peace." Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life or death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we've come to expect from him. "Mr. Kushner's early involvement with dealing with the virus was in advising the president that the media's coverage exaggerated the threat," reported The Times. It was apparently at Kushner's urging that Trump announced, falsely, that Google was about to launch a website that would link Americans with coronavirus testing. (As The Atlantic reported, a health insurance company co founded by Kushner's brother which Kushner once owned a stake in tried to build such a site, before the project was "suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.") The president was reportedly furious over the website debacle, but Kushner's authority hasn't been curbed. Politico reported that Kushner, "alongside a kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants, has taken charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government," including the production and distribution of medical supplies and the expansion of testing. Kushner has embedded his own people in the Federal Emergency Management Agency; a senior official described them to The Times as "a 'frat party' that descended from a U.F.O. and invaded the federal government." Disaster response requires discipline and adherence to a clear chain of command, not the move fast and break things approach of start up culture. Even if Kushner "were the most competent person in the world, which he clearly isn't, introducing these kind of competing power centers into a crisis response structure is a guaranteed problem," Jeremy Konyndyk, a former U.S.A.I.D. official who helped manage the response to the Ebola crisis during Barack Obama's administration, told me. "So you could have Trump and Kushner and Pence and the governors all be the smartest people in the room, but if there are multiple competing power centers trying to drive this response, it's still going to be chaos." Competing power centers are a motif of this administration, and its approach to the pandemic is no exception. As The Washington Post reported, Kushner's team added "another layer of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House's disjointed response to the crisis." Nor does his operation appear to be internally coherent. "Projects are so decentralized that one team often has little idea what others are doing outside of that they all report up to Kushner," reported Politico. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
TOKYO Mika Tanabe, a new investor in the Japanese stock market, has been on a stomach turning roller coaster ride. Since March, her shares in Softmax, an electronic medical records company, have slumped 30 percent, surged 120 percent, lost half their value, then climbed 20 percent again. She watched in bewilderment as Softmax shares plummeted as much as 25 percent in just one day. Her friends had warned her, Ms. Tanabe said, that playing with stocks was playing with fire. "They said investing is so risky, so dangerous. It's what many people think," said Ms. Tanabe, who is 26. She listens to them and then rationalizes it. "I tell myself that stocks are going to rise in the long run." The wild ride in Japanese equities this year has been driven by the hopes and fears accompanying the bold economic policies of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The country's economy, after decades of doldrums, appears to be re energized. Mr. Abe's success in the Japanese parliamentary elections last Sunday affirmed the policies, even if the statistics are not always encouraging. It has reinvigorated an interest in investing, some brokers here said, that brings flashbacks of Japan's spectacular bubble era of the late 1980s. After a giddy 80 percent ascent over six months, the Nikkei 225 stock index turned sharply southward in mid May and all the horrors of Japan's historic bubble burst seemed to return. In a matter of days, stock market commentators went from hailing the "rally of the century" to cautioning that stock markets were a dangerous money sink in which no casual investor could hope to thrive. "Market terror! Amateur investors, get out now!" screamed a headline on the cover of the popular weekly magazine Shukan Gendai after a particularly bad run last month. The volatility continued on Friday as the Nikkei stock index fell almost 3 percent after news that Japanese consumer prices rose in June to their highest annual pace in nearly five years. The question market watchers are asking remains: Can Japan's retail investors get over a deeply entrenched suspicion of the stock market made worse by recent volatility? "Japanese still think of the stock market as a place where people, blinded by greed, manipulate prices based on some sort of voodoo magic," said Ryoji Musha, president of Musha Research, a private financial research firm based in Tokyo, and former chief investment adviser at Deutsche Securities in Japan. The continued wariness casts a cloud on the long term strength of Japanese stocks, even as individual investors are crucial to sustaining a recovery, experts say. Fear of stock markets also limits the broader effect of the wealth generated so far by Mr. Abe's economic policies, because too few ordinary Japanese stand to benefit directly from stock market gains. And it undermines efforts by Mr. Abe to shift the trillions of yen sitting in low yielding savings accounts in Japan toward more productive investments. "Any long term market recovery hinges on the support of individual investors," said Masayuki Doshida, senior market analyst at Rakuten Securities, an online retail brokerage firm. He said that some individual investors had bought stocks on margin, or borrowed money from brokers to pay for their stock purchase. But once those stocks fell past a certain value, many investors were forced to sell their shares, worsening the market fall. "But I'm optimistic. I'm waiting for investors to regain their nerve and jump back in," Mr. Doshida said. The Japanese remain some of the most cautious investors in the industrialized world. Stocks and mutual funds together made up just 11 percent of financial assets held by individuals in Japan at the end of last year. That is less than half the levels seen in 1990 near the bubble's peak, and far below the current 45 percent in the United States and 22 percent in the euro zone, according to figures from the Bank of Japan. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Japanese households instead hold 55 percent of their financial assets as cash and savings, despite near zero interest rates. At the peak of the bubble, Japanese savers stashed only 40 percent of their assets there. The comparable rate is about 15 percent in the United States and 36 percent in Europe. In the bubble years, novice investors followed Japanese corporations in taking up zaiteku, a Japanized abbreviation of investment technology, or the art of speculative investment in stocks, bonds and real estate. Neighborhood stockbrokers popped up across Japan. The 1987 listing of Nippon Telegraph and Technology, the former state run telecommunications company, drew such investor enthusiasm that its share price almost tripled in the first two months of trading, briefly making it the world's most valuable company by market capitalization. Legends were born. Nui Onoue, a bar hostess in Osaka, earned a reputation for getting stock tips through divine guidance and became one of Japan's most active individual investors, controlling billions of yen in investments. Self made billionaires like Kazuo Kengaku earned notoriety as "shite" (pronounced she tay) or market movers who reaped hefty profits by driving stock prices up and down. Then things starting going awry. By 1992, N.T.T. shares had lost four fifths of their value, wiping out investors across Japan. Ms. Onoue was arrested in a 2.5 billion fraud scandal. Mr. Kengaku ran into trouble with his gangster associates, and his body was discovered encased in concrete in a forest in Kyoto. "The excesses of the bubble era gave stocks a dirty image," said Sumio Mochizuki, who runs Icas, a nonprofit company that is trying to popularize investment clubs in Japan. "Even if you're just getting together to trade shares, some people suspect you're up to no good, or that you're a criminal group," he said. But as markets surged in 2013, "semiprofessional" day traders and Japan's wealthy seized the market upside and made some serious money, according to an analysis by Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank. The fervor later spread as mom and pop investors who had watched nervously from the sidelines raced to the market. Suddenly, a proliferation of investment guidebooks hit bookstores: "Get rich with Abenomics," one advertised on its cover. "It's true: You can make money off stocks!" gushed another. Soon, brokerage firms said they were inundated with applications for new accounts and attendance at investment seminars ballooned. In late May, Daiwa Securities, one of Japan's biggest investment banks, said it would increase its sales force by about 50 percent to handle the renewed interest in stocks. "It's incredible. For a while, I didn't know anything but a bull market," said Mirei Tsugawa, 33, a novice investor who works at Narita Airport in Tokyo. "I didn't tell my parents what I was doing, though, because they'd be worried." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
That song got stuck inside my head. Before a recent screening of "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part," a promotion for the film was playing on a loop with a snippet from its "Catchy Song." As the chorus repeated over and over that "this song's gonna get stuck inside your head," I found that very thing happening on a level so maddening I had to put my headphones in and play something else, anything else, to drown it out. "Catchy Song" has an airy sheen thanks to production by the D.J. Dillon Francis and vocals from T Pain and That Girl Lay Lay. In a phone interview, Lajoie talked about the difficulty of following up the first "Lego Movie" hit song, "Everything Is Awesome," what it takes to make an earworm and why he doesn't feel bad for parents who have to listen to it over and over again. How did you end up writing "Catchy Song?" I'd wanted to do this kind of thing for a long time. But the opportunity to write music for an animated movie is few and far between, and it usually goes to Broadway people. I didn't know whether I'd be good at all. But I wanted to at least try. The filmmakers liked my stuff enough to let me take a crack at it. What was your objective with it? At first we were going more in the direction of a song that is supposed to drive you insane, something that sort of feels creepy and brainwashy. And so I thought about it for a while and then, one day I was showering and I start screaming, "This song's gonna get stuck inside yo! This song's gonna get stuck inside yo!" So I wrote an annoying version of that. But eventually the movie's story changed and it needed to be a somewhat enjoyable song. Was it daunting to think about how to follow up "Everything Is Awesome"? Yes, there's no way to make a more annoyingly catchy song than "Everything Is Awesome." So we thought, let's look at the audience and acknowledge that we know this in an impossible task, and let's lean into the meta ness and take it one step further. We wouldn't necessarily have to write a catchier song, we would just say that the song is super catchy. Did you try additional ideas before settling on this? Yes, we had a song called "All Is Amazing." We actually recorded a version of it but never used it. It was almost the exact same thing as "Everything Is Awesome" except every lyric was tweaked just a tad and every melody tweaked just a tad. In the end, we found that it was funny in the room, but after putting it all together it wasn't that funny. And then there was this other idea where the song would be called, "It's Hard to Follow Up a Hit Song." So you can see the territory we were playing around in. What music were you listening to when thinking about this? I listened to a lot of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande. Also a lot of K pop. There's something very specifically bubblegum there with just a teaspoon of creepy. The producer Max Martin's theories on writing a catchy song are very eloquent. They boil down to this: find a catchy melody, keep the same amount of syllables every verse and every chorus, hit the melody at the same rhythm every time, and hammer it into the audience's brain by repeating it over and over. I definitely took that advice. Did it take a while to get what you wanted? We'd produced so many different versions of this song and were struggling to find the right sound. I knew Dillon Francis through a friend, so we sat down with him and he took our descriptions of what we were looking for. When we heard his demo, everyone just breathed a sigh of relief. And on top of that, throw in T Pain on that chorus, who was incredible. I had written maybe 20 different verses for that song. Then we found That Girl Lay Lay. She came in and freestyled her verses. We sat there in shock and I just threw out all the verses I worked on for a year. So this song would not be what it is without them. Do you have a technique for getting rid of an earworm? Just go listen to any Beatles song. They're the perfect example of a band doing what pop music is supposed to do but doing it in a great way that is sustainable. Do you feel bad for parents whose kids may want to hear this on repeat? I would feel bad if I wasn't the person who has heard and heard and heard this song for a year. There's no way anyone's ever going to listen to this song more than me. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Obama's willingness to be honest about the West's imperial past led conservative critics to accuse him of conducting an "apology tour," a meretricious dodge. They ignored the other half of his message, which gave it an elegant balance: "Islam has to recognize the contributions that the West has made to articulate certain principles that are universal." All presidents do stupid stuff overseas; the world beyond our ocean borders is too complicated to be fully known. Obama made mistakes of optimism. He assumed the old, autocratic order in the Middle East was about to change; he underestimated the power of tribalism, which provided identity amid amorphous globalism. Rhodes encouraged these delusions along with the White House advisers Samantha Power and Susan Rice, who professed a somewhat tortured liberal militarism, a faith in humanitarian intervention. The story of how Rhodes progressed from this idealism to a more nuanced vision of "the world as it is" is at the heart of this book. "I was part of a cohort of younger staffers ... who shared a distaste for the corrupt way in which the Middle East was ruled," Rhodes writes. Obama sided with the idealists early on, especially when protesters filled Cairo's Tahrir Square in the first flush of the Arab Spring. "If it were up to him," Rhodes reports Obama saying, "he'd prefer that the 'Google guy' run Egypt, referring to Wael Ghonim ... who was helping to lead the protest movement." Rhodes writes that Obama "didn't mean it literally. ... But his senior staff was in a different place." Indeed, Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were all counseling caution: Don't be so quick to oust the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. There was no guarantee that democracy would ensue and, in fact, democracy led to an electoral victory by the Muslim Brotherhood, which led to a military coup. The same mistake was made in Libya. The dictator Muammar Qaddafi threatened to massacre his opponents in Benghazi. Susan Rice compared the situation to Rwanda, where Bill Clinton was said to have "allowed" a genocide. Samantha Power passed Rhodes a note stating "this was going to be the first mass atrocity that took place on our watch." Rhodes agreed. "We'd have to consider," he advised in his new role as a deputy national security adviser, "what we would say if we choose not to do something." A good point, especially with the Europeans and the Arab League (very briefly) urging action. But military intervention and the eventual removal of Qaddafi led to chaos. The impulse to prevent a massacre was noble, but it was speculative; the chaos was real. And the more general disorder in the region led to revolts and atrocities in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. There were, Rhodes slowly realized, events in the world beyond America's influence. By the time Bashar Assad dropped poison gas on his populace, both Obama and Rhodes were having second thoughts. Obama had established the use of chemical weapons as a "red line" and then chose not to respond militarily when Assad crossed it. Rhodes's description of these deliberations and most of the other real time crises is particularly illuminating, given Donald Trump's subsequent missile strikes. Obama calculated that any military action that would have an actual impact on Assad's behavior might lead to a wider war. He may well have been right, but he seemed weak at the time. Trump, by contrast, seemed strong, but the effect of his strikes appears to have been negligible. In a remarkable moment, in the midst of the deliberations over what to do about Syria, Obama completes his transition to realism by telling Rhodes: "Maybe we would never have done Rwanda. ... You can't stop people from killing each other like that." This is the reality of "The World as It Is." Sometimes there are no good choices. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Stephen Jackson has been a consistent presence at protests and news conferences in Minneapolis since George Floyd's death last month. Stephen Jackson Was Known in the N.B.A. as an Agitator. Now He's Leading a Movement. Just a few months after being jettisoned by the Indiana Pacers and joining the Golden State Warriors in 2007, Stephen Jackson helped his new team upset the 67 win Dallas Mavericks in the opening round of the N.B.A. playoffs. By the beginning of the following season, Jackson had picked up a new nickname to paste over the old troublemaker label that led Indiana to trade him. Don Nelson, the Warriors' coach at the time, christened him Captain Jack. "He was our leader," Baron Davis, the point guard widely recognized as the best player on that team, said this week of Jackson. Controversy found Jackson often during his 14 N.B.A. seasons, but teammates as decorated as Davis and the retired San Antonio Spurs star Tim Duncan have raved for years about his leadership, loyalty and protective instincts. "People have been telling me, 'Jack, you're suiting up for your biggest game ever,' " Jackson said in a telephone interview. "When I get texts like that, it moves me and excites me." Jackson had just awakened from a nap on his couch with his 6 year old daughter, Skylar, when he first watched the ghastly video of Floyd's neck being pinned against the concrete under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, for nearly nine minutes. Chauvin has been charged with second degree murder, and three other officers who did not intervene have been charged with aiding and abetting. It did not immediately register that the man on the ground gasping for his life was his pal from the Cuney Homes public housing complex in Houston's Third Ward, until Jackson turned off the video and was besieged by text messages from concerned friends. The screams that followed, Jackson later told the "Today" show, scared his daughter. Since then, sleep has been scarce for Jackson, who flew to Minnesota determined to tell Floyd's story and bring more attention to his fate. Jackson wasn't there long before he had become an unforeseen spokesman for the family and for the larger Black Lives Matter movement that has surged throughout the world. After days' worth of public appearances, Instagram posts and television interviews to continue the campaign including a passionate May 29 speech during a news conference at Minneapolis City Hall Jackson was in Houston on Tuesday for Floyd's funeral, at the Fountain of Praise church, where he sat near Floyd's 6 year old daughter, Gianna. On Thursday, Jackson was back in Minneapolis for a march on the local district attorney's office with a specific goal."I've got to stay until we get convictions," Jackson said, referring to Chauvin and the three other officers charged in Floyd's death. Jackson, 42, was introduced to Floyd through a mutual friend in the mid 1990s, before he was selected by the Phoenix Suns with the 42nd overall pick in the 1997 draft. The two bonded immediately over their facial resemblance they habitually referred to each other as "twin" and became close enough that Jackson brought Floyd as a guest to Washington in 2001 for the N.B.A.'s All Star Weekend, where Jackson played in the Rookie Challenge as a member of the Nets. Jackson bounced around before landing with the Nets, playing in professional leagues in Australia, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, as well as in the Continental Basketball Association. Through it all, trips to see Floyd in Houston were a staple for Jackson, who furnished him with clothes in later years after Floyd moved to Minneapolis to try to restart his life after multiple arrests and incarcerations. "Every time I watch that video, I see myself down there because we look so much alike," Jackson said. "It easily could have been me down there: Just let me get pulled over by an officer who's having a bad day and don't like the fact that I'm in a nice car." Jackson said he and Floyd were "going down the same road" in their youth, spending time "in the same neighborhoods, in the same cars, doing the same things." "But I had more opportunity," Jackson said. "The reason we need to change how people look at us and put some money into these minority areas is because there's no opportunity there." He added: "If I can stand up for a change in the world and everybody coming together and standing together and making history with protests and knocking some doors down to get social justice and change some of these laws if the president ain't going to do it, hey, I'll stand up and do it." Jackson helped Duncan and the Spurs win the second of their five championships in 2003, but he hasn't been in the national spotlight like this since November 2004, when he followed his Indiana Pacers teammate Ron Artest (later known as Metta World Peace) into the stands late in a game at Detroit for a brawl with spectators. Jackson, who received a 30 game suspension for his involvement, has long maintained that he knew it was wrong to cross the line into the crowd but that he did not see it as an option to leave World Peace, who was suspended for the rest of the season, to fend for himself. "That's what I was taught," Jackson said. "Stand up for your brother and worry about the consequences later." A subsequent arrest outside an Indianapolis strip club in October 2006, when he fired a gun into the air in what he described as an act of self defense, led to a charge of criminal recklessness and a seven game suspension from the league and spurred the fed up Pacers to trade him to Golden State. He ultimately became known as much for technical fouls and bursts of volatility as for his clutch shotmaking and his stirring run with the Warriors in the second half of the 2006 7 season. Yet Jackson had more fans than detractors throughout his N.B.A. career, which helps explain why few in league circles have been surprised by Jackson's new calling as a crusader for social justice. "Some people still connect him with the brawl against the Pistons, which will always happen," said Matt Barnes, a former N.B.A. player who this season started a podcast with Jackson on Showtime called "All the Smoke." "But I'm glad that he's able to really show the world who he is. It wasn't something that he asked for. It was a situation that was pretty much put on his plate, and I think the leadership he's demonstrated and the movement he helped create is going to be the beginning of a change not only for the United States, but hopefully the world.'' "For 400 years,'' Barnes added, "we've been silently marching and protesting and taking a knee, and that's fallen upon deaf ears. I think for the first time the world hears us, and Jack has been at the forefront of that movement." Jackson, as a result, has received messages and calls of encouragement from an array of N.B.A. luminaries, including LeBron James, Chris Paul and Commissioner Adam Silver. Some of the most uplifting support, Jackson said, came from Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr, his former Spurs teammate, and Minnesota Timberwolves Coach Ryan Saunders. "To have two white coaches reach out," Jackson said of Kerr and Saunders, "that meant the world to me." Yet no conversation has stayed with Jackson as much as the one he had with Hardel Sherrell's mother on his first day in Minneapolis last month. Sherrell died in the Beltrami County jail in Minnesota in 2018 despite complaining of his deteriorating health. Sherrell's mother, Del Shea Perry, has maintained that her son's symptoms were ignored for days before his death. "She was outside crying by herself as we were walking to our protest," Jackson said. "Every time I speak now I try to bring a light to her son's death, because her son doesn't have a Stephen Jackson as a friend. I'm embracing being a voice for the voiceless." It was Nelson, the winningest coach in N.B.A. regular season history, who officially made Jackson a team captain for the first time at the start of his eighth N.B.A. season in 2007 8. To Davis, the two time All Star guard, Captain Jack is a natural. "Stephen Jackson has always been outspoken and leads with his heart," Davis said. "I think the Stephen Jackson that you're seeing now shows the progress that one can make and not only know how to lead with his heart but also with his mind." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The thing that James Comey will probably like best about "The Comey Rule," if one believes its characterization of him, is that his name is in the title. But he is not exactly the hero. He is not even, really, the star. Comey (Jeff Daniels), the former F.B.I. director, gets more screen time than anyone else in Showtime's two night, three and a half hour special. But the real lead is Donald Trump (Brendan Gleeson), in the same sense that, regardless of its minutes on camera, the true lead of "Jaws" is the shark. Given how much it rehashes recent events, albeit with a fine cast, I'm not sure what interest "The Comey Rule" will have beyond people whose copies of the Mueller Report are already well thumbed. (There's more to be learned from "Agents of Chaos," the chilling Alex Gibney documentary, which premiered on HBO this week, about Russia's 2016 election influence campaign and its American enablers.) But if you stick to the end, there is at least a lesson and a warning, if not the one that Comey either the screen version here or the real life one who's become a media figure intended. In his book "A Higher Loyalty," he appears to see his decisions, which very possibly swung the 2016 election and failed to keep the president from interfering in investigations, as noble if tragic acts of principle. As translated by the director and screenwriter Billy Ray, this is instead a slo mo horror story, in which the worst lack all inhibition while the best are full of fatuous integrity. The first half, which starts Sunday, is basically a prelude. It walks us through the role of the F.B.I. in 2015 and 2016 when it investigated Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server with Comey making unusual public statements that damaged her campaign while also looking, much more quietly, into increasingly disturbing signs that Russian intelligence was out to help Trump. The first two hours blitz through the timeline and establish key players. So many familiar faces captioned with headline names pop up Jonathan Banks as James Clapper! Holly Hunter as Sally Yates! that it plays like a long, stone cold sober episode of "Drunk History." Daniels is inspired casting. Physically, he resembles the real Comey somewhat in stature (the ex director still has a few inches on him). But having played figures of high minded duty in "The Newsroom" and "The Looming Tower," he captures his character's starched righteousness wholly. This time, however, there's an ironic spin on the character. Comey's actual rectitude is complicated by his fixation on the appearance of rectitude, his homey decency by smugness. His precedent breaking decisions to speak out on Clinton's email practices were driven by worry over how he and the bureau would look later if in his view, when she became president. (He writes in "A Higher Loyalty" that he assumed she'd win.) His guess proves wrong, but the day after the election he assures his devastated wife, Patrice (Jennifer Ehle), "We're going to be OK." True enough for him. He lost his job but wrote a best seller. With that self justifying memoir as a source, Ray makes the sharp choice to make Rod Rosenstein (Scoot McNairy), the deputy attorney general who wrote the memo recommending Comey's 2017 firing, the quasi narrator. Rosenstein bitterly introduces Comey as a self righteous "showboat" (though, we discover, Rosenstein has his own blind spots and failings). This is not, however, a production out to win over MAGA viewers. (At one point, it dramatizes one of the more eye popping accusations of the Steele dossier.) The first night, we see Donald Trump only as shot from behind, a leering hulk parting the curtain at a Miss Universe pageant and pawing at a contestant's bikini strap. He's like the barely glimpsed monster in the first act of a creature feature, a rough beast slouching toward Pennsylvania Avenue. It's on Night 2, when President Elect Trump emerges as a character, that the show really begins. In part, it's simply that his crew of artless amateurs, relatives and B list pols make for better TV. Not every portrayal works Joe Lo Truglio as Jeff Sessions? but it gives the proceedings a "Burn After Reading" flair. More important, Gleeson has a thorough idea of his character. His Trump is not the orange haired clown prince of "S.N.L." and late night talk shows. He's a crass, heavy breathing mobster (Comey's comparison, and Gleeson makes the likeness vivid) driven by spite and vanity. A heavy handed musical score portends menace whenever he turns up. He, too, is concerned with appearances, but in a more literal way than Comey. His version of "good morning" is "I saw you on TV"; he and his staffers keep referencing his "eye for interior design." His brassy presence in the halls of power is as much an aesthetic statement as a political one, which Ray underlines by showing a White House staffer serving him an Egg McMuffin on a gleaming silver platter. All the while, it gradually settles on Comey that his new boss may not be an entirely scrupulous man. Their White House dinner the "honest loyalty" scene, for Comey buffs takes only a few minutes, but you could imagine it as an entire movie, "Frost/Nixon" style. It's like an uncomfortable date with a persistent suitor. Trump, cleaning out his ice cream dish, pushes and prods on the Russia investigation, pressing his advances. A pained Comey guards and parries, finding ways to say things that resemble what the president wants to hear. Comey survives that battle but loses the war. "The Comey Rule" is not out to damn him. It strains itself to sympathize with his falling into one impossible position after another, and it suggests that public life might be better if everyone in it were like James Comey. But it also shows how catastrophically inadequate he was to a world in which not everyone is like James Comey. He becomes a stand in for an entire class of Trump era elites who believe that respect for norms will save them. (The president "can't fire me," Comey tells an associate. "It'd look horrible.") As for Donald Trump, he's not precisely the villain, in the show's view. As "The Comey Rule" depicts him, he's a creature, an appetite. He is what he is. He doesn't know how to be otherwise. Comey, on the other hand, is, if not a villain, then a tragic, hubristic dupe, precisely because he believes he knows better, and because he should. "The Comey Rule" is not good drama; it's clunky, self serious and melodramatic. But it makes an unsparing point amid our own election season. It says that anyone, like its subject, who complacently assumed in 2015 and 2016 that everyone would be fine, who thought that propriety and rules could constrain forces that care about neither, who worried more about appearances than consequences, was a fool. Then it leaves you to sit with the question: What does that make anyone who still believes that today? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Jan Morris, the acclaimed British journalist, travel writer and historian who wrote about history's sweep and the details of place with equal eloquence and chronicled her life as a transgender woman, died on Friday in Wales. She was 94. Her son Twm Morys said in an email that she died in a hospital near the village of Llanystumdwy, where she lived. He did not give the cause. As James Morris she was a military officer in one of Britain's most renowned cavalry regiments and then a daring journalist who climbed three quarters of the way up Mount Everest for an exclusive series of dispatches from the first conquest of that mountain, the world's highest. She continued a brilliant writing career with reports on wars and revolutions from a score of countries, and with much admired books like "Pax Britannica," the first of a three volume history of the British Empire. Ms. Morris also married and had five children. But she became increasingly despondent over the issue of gender identity. At age 46, she underwent transition surgery, explaining the reasoning in a well received 1974 memoir, "Conundrum," which was written two years after the operation under a new byline, Jan Morris. "I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl," the book began, a riveting narrative of being transgender, which was misunderstood at the time and rarely discussed. "I thought of public success itself, I suppose, as part of maleness, and I deliberately turned my back on it, as I set my face against manhood," she wrote. In all, Ms. Morris wrote some four dozen books. Among the best known early titles were "The Hashemite Kings" (1959) and "Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress" (1973). In a 1957 review of "Islam Inflamed: A Middle East Picture," Phoebe Lou Adams of The Atlantic wrote that Ms. Morris's "descriptions of cities and countrysides are equally vivid" and that her writing conveyed "the emotional tone of a place as sharply as its shape and color." "Venice" (1960) won Britain's prestigious Heinemann Award for Literature. In The New York Times Book Review, the Italian author Carlo Beuf called the book "one of the most satisfactory and delightful works on the City of the Lagoons to appear in recent years." In 1968, The Times Literary Supplement in London hailed "Pax Britannica" as "a tour de force, offering a vast amount of information and description, with a style full of sensuality." And in The New York Times Book Review, the British biographer Philip Magnus called it "a successful portrayal of what the Empire looked and felt like in a variety of places at the end of the 19th Century how it ticked, who pulled the strings, and the practical ends and ideals it served." Another two dozen books came after Ms. Morris's transition. Besides "Conundrum," they included "Destinations" (1980), a collection of travel essays; "Last Letters From Hav" (1985), a deadpan exploration of an imaginary city that was a finalist for the Booker Prize; and "Fisher's Face, or, Getting to Know the Admiral" (1995), a biography of the British naval reformer John Arbuthnot Fisher. Ms. Morris excelled as a travel writer, drawing literary portraits of places like Manhattan, Hong Kong, her beloved Wales (she was a dedicated Welsh nationalist), Oxford in England and Trieste in Italy. Ms. Morris continued writing into her later years, including the essayistic "In My Mind's Eye: A Thought Diary," published in 2018. A final work, "Allegorizings," is to be published posthumously. She told The Guardian in 2015 that it would go to press "the minute I kick the bucket," saying the book is "loosely governed by my growing conviction that almost nothing in life is only what it seems. It contains nothing revelatory at all." Ms. Morris was born on Oct. 2, 1926, in Clevedon, a town in Somerset, England. Her father, Walter, was gassed during World War I and died when Ms. Morris was 12. Her mother, Enid Payne, was a concert pianist. Ms. Morris enlisted in the elite Ninth Queen's Royal Lancers in 1944 and served in Italy during World War II as an intelligence officer. After two more years of military service in Palestine, then a British protectorate, she was discharged as an army lieutenant and enrolled at Oxford University, receiving a bachelor's degree in English literature in 1951. Ms. Morris joined The Times of London that same year, becoming a roving correspondent in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. But it was her coverage of the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 that established a reputation as one of the shining journalists of a generation. The Times secured the exclusive rights to cover the Everest expedition, which was led by Col. John Hunt (Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand explorer, and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa guide from Nepal, were the climbers who reached the summit), and picked Ms. Morris 5 foot 9 and a sinewy 140 pounds to join the team. Filing dispatches by using guides as relays between the expedition's overnight camps and the city of Kathmandu in Nepal, she wrote of deep snow dragging at the explorers' feet, sweat trickling down their backs, their faces burning from cold, ice and wind. But Ms. Morris stopped short of the summit, allowing the expedition leaders to claim the limelight. "I think for sheer exuberance the best day of my life was my last on Everest," she wrote in "Conundrum." "The mountain had been climbed, and I had already begun my race down the glacier toward Katmandu, leaving the expedition to pack its gear behind me." She continued: "I heard from the radio that my news had reached London providentially on the eve of Queen Elizabeth's coronation. I felt as though I had been crowned myself." For a Britain that was fast losing its empire, the conquest of Everest was greeted with nationalistic euphoria. As a correspondent with The Times and later with The Guardian, Ms. Morris wrote about wars, famines and earthquakes and reported on the trial in Israel of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal who was convicted and executed for his leading role in the extermination of millions of Jews. She also covered the trial in Moscow of Francis Gary Powers, the United States spy plane pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union. She traveled to Havana to interview Che Guevara, the revolutionary leader, who was described in "Conundrum" as "sharp as a cat," and to Moscow again to meet with the British intelligence defector Guy Burgess, who was "swollen with drink and self reproach." It was in the early 1960s that Ms. Morris met with a prominent New York endocrinologist, Dr. Harry Benjamin, an early researcher on transgender people. He advised her on a slow process of transition that began with heavy doses of female hormones some 12,000 pills from 1964 to 1972, according to the writer's own calculations. Ms. Morris wrote, "I was about to change my form and apparency my status, too, perhaps my place among my peers, my attitudes no doubt, the reactions I would evoke, my reputation, my manner of life, my prospects, my emotions, possibly my abilities." From the very beginning of her marriage, Ms. Morris had confided her feelings about her gender identity to her wife, Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter. "I told her that though each year my every instinct seemed to become more feminine and my entombment within the male physique more terrible to me, still the mechanism of my body was complete and functional, and for what it is worth was hers," Ms. Morris wrote. They would have three sons and two daughters, one of whom died in infancy. In addition to her son Twm, a Welsh poet and musician, she is survived by Ms. Tuckniss; two other sons, Mark and Henry; a daughter, Suki; and nine grandchildren. "Conundrum" describes Ms. Morris's relationship with Ms. Tuckniss, even before the surgery, as an "open marriage, in which the partners were explicitly free to lead their own separate lives, choose their own friends if they wish, have their own lovers perhaps, restrained only by an agreement of superior affection and common concern." Ms. Tuckniss and later their children, with some discomfort, supported Ms. Morris's initial hormone treatments. She finally decided on an operation to complete her transition in 1972, choosing a clinic in Casablanca, Morocco. Ms. Morris asserted that every aspect of existence changed with her transition. The more she was treated as a woman, the more she behaved in her own estimation as a woman. "If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming," she wrote. "If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself." She added, "I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged them." She complained that her transition had distracted from her writing accomplishments. "I do object to it being dragged in, for example, when I write a book about the British Empire," she said on "CBS Sunday Morning" in 2000. Nonetheless, she repeated on the program her prediction that the headlines on her obituaries would read: "Sex change author dies." By her early 90s, Ms. Morris said the matter seemed remote. "I've never believed it to be quite as important as everyone made it out to be," she told The Times in 2019. "I believe in the soul and the spirit more than the body." Although she divorced her wife just before her operation, the two remained close, often traveling and living together, even after Ms. Tuckniss began struggling with dementia. In their house, Ms. Morris kept a gravestone that bore the inscription both in Welsh and English that was meant to be their future epitaph: "Here are two friends, Jan and Elizabeth, at the end of one life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Lucy was a small one. She weighed about as much as the average 2nd grader and stood about three and a half feet tall. But that lady (or pre lady, because Australopithecus afarensis like her weren't quite human) was strong. Her famous skeleton, a 3.18 million year old fossil also known as AL 288 1, tells us so. But to build arm bones as strong as hers, she, and possibly other members of her species, probably spent a lot of time in trees, suggests a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. Lucy, discovered almost half a century ago, was the most complete skeleton of the earliest hominid ever found at the time. She changed our understanding of human evolution. There's little doubt Lucy walked on two feet like a modern human, or that she climbed trees to sleep, avoid predators or gather food. Some scientists including some involved in this study even think she died after a fall from one. But just how much time she spent in trees has been a subject of contention because interpretations of her ancient skeletal clues are hard to prove. For the latest study, researchers looked at the ways bones can grow stronger or weaker with everyday use. And by examining the internal structure of Lucy's upper right arm and leg bones and comparing them with the bones of around 100 chimpanzees and 1,000 modern humans, they concluded that climbing trees wasn't just some trivial task. Lucy did it enough that the ratio of strength between her arms and legs is slightly more chimpish than human. To make inferences about how Lucy's bones were used in day to day life, the researchers analyzed 3 D digital models of bones built from scans of the fossil. Bones, like drinking straws, are hollow, and if you were to slice them horizontally you'd have a set of bone bangles. The width of each one of those bangles at particular parts of the bone indicate its strength. This width is called cortical thickness. For example, a professional tennis player's racket arm bone has a larger cortical thickness than that of the other arm. "She's tiny, but for her size, she's coming in very strong," said John Kappelman, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin who conceived of the study. Because there isn't much evidence for tool use, which could have made her bones stronger, the researchers concluded she must have been climbing. "They would have had to spend a considerable amount of time in the trees for this to happen, and I think the overwhelming anatomical evidence is that they were terrestrial in their preferred locomotion," he said, suggesting that activities like food gathering and digging up roots could have contributed to the thickness of their bones. The study brings new evidence to a long debate about whether Lucy's skeleton reflects life in trees as well on the ground, or just unused adaptations leftover from ancestors. Long arms, curved fingers and toes and shoulder blades that pointed more toward the head than side of the body are indications she was a climber. But her big toe which looks more like yours and mine than a chimpanzee's is strong evidence, said Dr. Johanson, that she was mainly a walker. Debates aside, one thing is clear about Lucy: "You don't develop that kind of arm strength unless you exercise your arms a lot," said Dr. Ruff. "She wasn't just doing a couple of pull ups a week." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
On Monday, Kylie Jenner sold 51 percent of her cosmetics and skin care brand to Coty for 600 million, a price tag that values the enterprise at 1.2 billion. Whether we agree that she is self made or not and you can argue that in many ways she is mom made you can't dispute where she is now, or the effect the success her business, and that of her extended family, has had on the way we shop, and even think about shopping. Which suggests that this move may have repercussions for us all. Someday we may study them in school, but for now, it's even more interesting to engage in the Kardashian Jenner equivalent of fantasy football. Let's play. Vanessa Friedman This is actually a big deal for two reasons: It not only makes Kylie, by some estimates, the first Kardashian Jenner billionaire, it also makes her, I believe, the first Kardashian Jenner to officially become part of the old school fashion beauty establishment. Milestones! And yet part of what I have loved about watching this family build its empire(s) is the outside the system nature of the whole thing. At the beginning, the system kind of turned up its collective nose at them. They, of course, have been laughing their way to the bank ever since, But I wonder if this Coty Kylie deal is going to undermine that appeal. Is it the final K J triumph, or the beginning of the end? What do you think? Jessica Testa Oh, it's just the beginning not of the end, of the next stage. The Kardashian Jenner family or more accurately, Kris has worked hard to position Kylie as the Entrepreneur of the bunch (maybe to Kim's chagrin). I think selling to Coty only strengthens that image. In July, we learned that Kylie Cosmetics sales were declining, and that the brand wasn't attracting loyal customers. Now is the perfect time for Kylie to hand off the business to a well respected international conglomerate and do something else with her time. (Rise and Shine, the baby brand?) That's the K J M.O.: Start a business, then start another one. But does this sale make Kylie part of the system now? That's a trickier question. The Kardashian Jenners have created their own establishment, and it's become so large and unwieldy that I'm not sure it'll ever fully fit into the confines of the traditional establishment. At this point, do they really need it to? VF I would say absolutely not. In fact, they derive part of their power from having created a system of their own. But maybe at a certain point what they need is the infrastructure. Kylie famously makes so much profit from her lip kits, and so on, because of her tiny staff and low overhead. But after a while you probably need more people to handle volume, and Coty can give her that. Do you really think the sale means she's getting out while the getting's good? Both sides have paid lip service (no pun intended) to the idea that Kylie will remain as involved as ever. And I can't imagine her followers continuing to buy literally into the whole idea if she doesn't keep up the posting volumes. Which brings up the question of what effect going larger will have on them, the superfans, the ones that lined up for hours before the Kylie Cosmetics pop up drops. Is it going to grow their numbers, or actually turn some of them off? After all, part of Kylie's appeal is that she is cooler than Max Factor and CoverGirl. And that's great news for Kylie, a celebrity! She can cash out and focus on expanding her personal Kylie brand beyond beauty and skin care. This should excite Kylie superfans, especially if they're indeed more loyal to the woman than to her lip kits. (One market research firm found that from roughly 2016 to 2019, more than half of all her customers made just one purchase.) The question for me is whether Coty will double down on Kylie's coolness, or apply its more time tested sales models to bring in a new type of customer shoppers who don't really care about her. (Imagine!) Will we start seeing lip kits in the CVS beauty aisle? And what about the rest of the Kardashian Jenner businesses? Do you think this sale speaks to the future of Khloe's Good American jeans, or KKW Beauty or Fragrance, or Skims (the shapewear line formerly/controversially known as Kimono)? Or, uh, Arthur George? VF In other words, is this a new model for their empire? Will Warnaco buy Skims? Or what about PVH, which owns Calvin Klein underwear, a brand that once famously featured the whole Kardashian Jenner clan in an ad campaign? I can easily imagine that scenario, just as I imagine Estee Lauder is watching what happens with one eye on Coty and one eye on KKW. For a while, the big trend in beauty was celebrity fragrances, and there was an arms race among the big groups to sign as many famous names as they could. Maybe these direct to followers beauty brands will be next not just Kim's, but also Lady Gaga's Haus Laboratories. In this possible future, Kylie becomes the sharp end of the spear in which the Kardashian Jenner brands and their ilk begin to infiltrate any number of big groups, liberating the family to move on to new ventures, like Kim's dream law firm. Just think of the twist if, in a few years (and after passing the bar), KKW sells her beauty brand to Lauder or L'Oreal for another half billion, and then uses the windfall to set up a pro bono venture dedicated to wrongful convictions. What an idea that would be. But it also makes me wonder if this is an acknowledgment that the influencer model only takes you so far, and then you really do need the backing of a classic bricks and mortar operation, just as so many digital brands like Warby Parker and Moda Operandi have opened physical locations. If the future of influencing (terrible word) is really in the micro selling game as opposed to the big brand game, so that the actual big brand is always the personal brand, as opposed to any specific product. In which case, entrepreneurs like Kylie and co. just keep creating and offloading, creating and offloading, since what they are really selling is themselves. Or is that reading too much into what is just a standard acquisition? JT Let's look at the great Jaclyn Cosmetics disaster of 2019. In May, the makeup artist and YouTube personality Jaclyn Hill introduced a line of 20 nude lipsticks. By June, she was offering refunds after customers complained that the product was subpar (uneven textures) and unsanitary (allegations of mold). Introducing a beauty brand is hard! Especially as a solo influencer. Backing from a bricks and mortar operation could undeniably make it easier, even if it removes some autonomy and makes you seem a little less cool. But first that operation has to come calling. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In "The Bird Revelation," the first comedy special to focus on the MeToo movement, Dave Chappelle, sitting on a stool at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in November, pauses to give advice to some comedians in the back. "You have a responsibility to speak recklessly," he says. In that special and a second one, "Equanimity," both released on Sunday by Netflix, he makes a show of hesitating before wading into controversial territory. It's an old tactic of his, building suspense by suggesting he is about to say something taboo. But it's worth asking: Just how reckless is Dave Chappelle being these days? "Equanimity" is a defensive, occasionally hilarious hour, shot in his hometown Washington, D.C., and covering the material that he developed in his monthlong stint at Radio City Music Hall last summer. The real headline is "The Bird Revelation," which addresses accusations against Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K. and Harvey Weinstein with the conspiratorial tone of someone who wants to tell you what everyone (including Mr. Chappelle) is afraid to say. Judging by Mr. Chappelle's stand up output, however, there are few subjects he is more drawn to than the sexual misbehavior of famous men. He has joked about R. Kelly, Ray Rice, Michael Jackson, Nate Parker and Bill Cosby. Mr. Chappelle's approach varies, but generally speaking, he denounces the actions and minimizes or mitigates them. ("How old is 15, really?" he asks in reference to Mr. Kelly's alleged misconduct.) These bits often have the feel of someone digging a hole to prove he can escape, but in this new special, for the first time, they also seem like tired shtick. Taking long pauses, sounding confessional without being so, Mr. Chappelle performs introspection while resorting to the same old tricks. They appear more clearly here than in the past because the set is so raw and unpolished. Mr. Chappelle didn't have months to refine his material, smooth his transitions, build the act. "The Bird Revelation" is one of four specials he released in 2017, and in another of those, "The Age of Spin," he brings up a rumor that Bill Cosby paid for the microphone that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. used in his "I Have a Dream" speech. It was Mr. Chappelle's way of expressing how hard it is to give up the comic as one of his heroes. In "Bird," he again leans on the gravitas of King to pivot from the pain caused by sexual misconduct. Mr. Chappelle criticizes the "brittle spirit" of the female comic who said Louis C.K. masturbating in front of her hurt her career, before imagining what would happen if Louis C.K. masturbated in front of the civil rights leader, prompting him to give up his movement. When suggesting a handsome man wouldn't be accused of assault and rape, he says that if Brad Pitt did what Mr. Weinstein did, the response would be different. ("Girl would have been like: I got the part.") But Mr. Chappelle is just rehashing a Chris Rock bit on sexual harassment from the 1990s ("If Clarence Thomas looked like Denzel Washington ..."). It's a joke that has not aged well, and this new version does not do Mr. Chappelle any favors. Mr. Chappelle opens this special by noting that sometimes the funniest thing to say is mean, and he's right. Comedy, to quote Steve Martin, is not pretty. But when Mr. Chappelle says some of the sexual assault victims speaking out are now experiencing "buyer's remorse," a particularly cruel turn of phrase, this is surely not the funniest thing he can think of. And it is expressed with as little empathy as possible. Mr. Chappelle who has always been far more savvy and engaged on race than on gender (his TV series "Chappelle's Show" flashed a leering teenage sensibility) is not aiming merely for transgression. He embraces this new movement, calls himself a feminist and offers sober political analysis, with a passionate argument for focusing on structural issues. "You got all the bad guys scared, and that's good," he says. "But the minute they're not scared anymore, it will get worse than it was before. Fear does not make lasting peace." This is not a joke. Nor is it reckless. It's expressing a moderate's caution and hope for reconciliation in the face of a revolutionary social movement. It's the same impulse that led Mr. Chappelle, hosting "Saturday Night Live" just after the presidential election, to urge us to give Donald J. Trump a chance. (He has since apologized.) In his current incarnation, Mr. Chappelle often carries himself less like a mischievous outlaw than a comedy statesman. (At the close of Netflix's "Def Comedy Jam 25," Mr. Chappelle, who as a young comic criticized how the show set expectations for black artists, delivered a reverential coda about its historical importance.) Much of his 2017 comedy had a professorial tone, weaving long pocket histories into his act. But in this paradigm shifting moment, when victims are speaking out and revealing secrets long buried, Mr. Chappelle is ignoring the historical context, the systemic barriers preventing women from speaking up about abuse or succeeding in comedy. It's perhaps why an audience member off screen balks at one joke, to which he responds: "I know you're right, baby. I was right once. Remember that?" For many young viewers, some of whom know him mainly for his much criticized recent jokes about transgender people, the answer is no. They don't remember "Chappelle's Show," which premiered 15 years ago, or that he quit the series abruptly. At the time, his reasons for leaving were slightly unclear but, because of an interview he gave, were widely seen as involving his discomfort with white viewers' response to his racial humor rooted in stereotypes. The departure helped cement his reputation as a comic with a social conscience, willing to pass up tens of millions of dollars because of a principle. In 2017, Mr. Chappelle made tens of millions of dollars from his specials, but one wonders how much he cares about why people are laughing at his new jokes. In an abrupt pivot, he ends this unusually topical special by asking audience members if they want to know the real reason he left "Chappelle's Show," a mystery that lost its urgency years ago and suggests a comic nostalgic for old glories. In a funny bit of self awareness, Mr. Chappelle says he never wanted to be a hero but, rather like Paul Revere, to be known for a single heroic act. "Paul Revere's ride was only one night, then 40 years of him being like: Remember that time when everyone was asleep and I was up, and the British was coming?" Mr. Chappelle says, pausing. "Boy, good thing I was awake." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The Parkland survivors emerged at just the right time for Cullen. He wrote the book "Columbine," a deeply researched and thorough account of the 1999 massacre at a Colorado school that ushered in the era of school shootings. Years of covering shootings, being called as an expert talking head on shootings, writing and thinking about shootings have left Cullen with a diagnosis of "vicarious traumatization," he writes, and twice in the last seven years he's found himself sobbing and immobilized for days. Although he doesn't say it explicitly, following the Parkland kids seems like a form of therapy for Cullen himself, and, he hopes, the nation. "There were no vacant stares from the Parkland survivors," he writes. "This generation had grown up on lockdown drills and this time, they were ready." With "Parkland," Cullen aims for a straightforward inspirational story of a group of kids "healing each other as they fought." They knew one another from drama club, and instinctively understood how to position themselves on a national stage. At a candlelight vigil, one of them introduced herself to the Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who connected her to a state senator, who helped the kids figure out how to get floor time at the statehouse. Another came up with NeverAgain while he was on the toilet in his pajamas. The hashtag went viral and landed him on "Anderson Cooper 360" and NPR. Basically every time Emma Gonzalez opened her mouth, she went viral. And within a couple of weeks they had ambitions of planning a rally as big as the Women's March. How or why these particular kids came to be so rapidly effective is not exactly clear from the book. Cullen partly chalks it up to generational wisdom. They understood news cycles and Twitter, viral videos and memes, and they set out to make themselves as relevant as possible. They understood they would be perceived as privileged white kids who live in gated communities, so they made alliances with groups that focus on urban school violence and shared the stage with them. They understood that no politician wants to be seen dismissing a kid who just saw his or her friends shot, so they staged as many showdowns as possible. In retrospect it seems extraordinary that all the pieces came together so effortlessly, yet even after reading the book I'm not exactly sure why this group of kids, at this particular moment. In "Columbine," Cullen punctured the lazy media narrative that the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were goth vigilantes, crusaders against bullies and mean girls. They were, he concluded, a psychopath and a depressive, and should be viewed through the lens of mental illness, and not school cliques and revenge a point he's repeated about many school shooters since. And partly thanks to Cullen, the rules of covering shootings have shifted. It's become something of a taboo to spend too much energy on the psyche of the shooters, and definitely a taboo to glamorize their motives in any way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
It's an old story that New York's first fancy apartment building opened in 1884, in a neighborhood so far northwest that the many gabled chateau was called the Dakota. But did you know that its developer, Edward Clark, had already given the name Wyoming to a building on West 55th Street? As might be expected of a coffee table book about upper class vertical living, "Life at the Top: New York's Most Exceptional Apartment Buildings" (Vendome Press) is rich in such details. The book's authors, Kirk Henckels and Anne Walker, approach the subject from two different wings. Mr. Henckels is the vice chairman of Stribling Associates, a New York real estate company. Ms. Walker is an architectural historian and author. Their honor roll of 15 towers includes the impossibly glamorous 998 Fifth Avenue (1912), a McKim, Mead White building developed by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's maternal grandfather; 720, 740 and 778 Park Avenue (1928 to 1931), designed by the Deco era starchitect Rosario Candela; and Emery Roth's Upper West Side Beresford (1930), which was at first lived in largely by affluent Jewish tenants who had been denied access to the palaces across Central Park. Also featured are more recent totems of New York wealth, like Richard Meier's ultramodern 173 and 176 Perry Street buildings (2002); Robert A.M. Stern's 15 Central Park West, a limestone clad crib for extreme capitalists (2008); and Rafael Vinoly's cloud piercing 432 Park Avenue (2014). Anne Walker Actually the Dakota's residents weren't the most elite New Yorkers; they were more professionals. But then 998 Fifth Avenue came along. It was a perfect storm: There was a building frenzy across the board, and there was advertising of all these different architects of that period. Kirk Henckels Here you have the super wealthy; they have a city house with a staff of 20 and another house with a staff of 40 because their wife made them build one in Newport. And income tax is creeping round. The economies of apartment buildings looked good. The problem was just getting that first person to sign on. Senator Elihu Root was highly respected and a member of Mrs. Astor's 400. He moved into 998 as the first tenant because he got a deal. Value drives real estate in New York, even for the super wealthy. The floor plans you publish look like townhouses were pancaked and spread over vast apartment floors. Mr. Henckels When the Dakota was built, architects didn't really know what to do with apartment buildings. It took a long time for that floor plan to evolve as it did. The difference in style from the Dakota in 1884 to 998 Fifth in 1912 was huge. The Dakota has long, very narrow hallways. You could almost call it, in quotes, "mostly hall." The foyers were not big, the bathrooms were small and sparsely located. Things really changed. Ms. Walker And 998 is a lot more lavish than some of the later apartment buildings in the '20s and '30s because it was really trying to replicate those public rooms from the townhouses. By the time you get to the Beresford, buildings still had huge apartments but were less elaborate in terms of interior design and carvings and ceiling heights. The book describes the hard times some of these buildings fell on after the Depression, but the postwar years were prosperous. Weren't any great apartment buildings constructed in the 1950s and 1960s? Mr. Henckels None. Zero. Not one built for this moneyed set between the '30s and the turn of the 21st century. The early condominiums were for foreign investors and were really mostly one and two bedroom apartments. It wasn't until 1998 that 515 Park Avenue became the first condo building targeting Upper East Side families. Part of this transition in the 21st century comes from the spreading of money around New York. Back in the 1980s, luxury was defined by Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue and Central Park West. But now the young people want to be downtown. And many of them are self made. They haven't necessarily grown up with the traditional trappings of wealth. You see this throughout all the decorative arts the death of brown furniture, for instance. It doesn't fit the contemporary modality. What was the most surprising thing you uncovered in your research? Ms. Walker For myself, it was the history of 778 Park Avenue. The address was originally 780 and then construction stopped for a year because it went bankrupt. It's such a celebrated building; we don't think of it in those terms. Mr. Henckels What I thought shocking was that the initial buildings were rentals. It was not just a jump from a mansion to an apartment building, but also a jump to not owning your own home. These were rentals because the prior co ops had failed in the late 1800s. The cooperative structure did not have a great history at that point. Will anything like the Dakota ever be built again? Ms. Walker I think 15 Central Park West is probably the closest you're going to get. One thing we loved about the Dakota apartment in our book was it could have existed more or less in the 1880s, except for the kitchen. Mr. Henckels Making the Dakota apartments really serviceable today without ruining their integrity takes some creativity. Some renovations are more successful than others. You have no closets, but there are a lot of fireplaces and enormous windows and great woodwork. How many historic apartments have maintained their original layouts? Does anyone ever keep those warrens of servants' quarters? Mr. Henckels Most of the Candela buildings and others won't permit major renovations, thank God. They will generally allow you to gut the staff areas and the kitchen and service areas. It doesn't mean you can't make the place contemporary or maybe take down a wall between the living room and dining room, but you can't destroy the integrity of the apartment. The cooperative system has fortunately served a landmarking function for these architecturally spectacular buildings. If you were to do a sequel, what other buildings might you show? Ms. Walker I would include 770 Park by Candela, which is one of my favorites. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
If it wasn't for a blowup with one of her three children, Kirsten Wazalis might never have called a friend to come over and commiserate one July evening in 2012. And if the friend hadn't suggested that the two go out and listen to music, she might have never met Glenn Leader. Ms. Wazalis, 50, shook off her gloom at Stevenson's Place, a bar with a jukebox, up the street from her Philadelphia apartment. There, the two friends listened to Lionel Richie, Hall Oates and other pop artists. "I have such good taste in music that people actually pay me to play the jukebox," she said jokingly. By the time the bartender, Mr. Leader, offered to buy her a drink, her bad day was looking much brighter. Ms. Wazalis has had her share of challenging days since then. But never again has she had to recruit someone to help her through them. "Glenn's been with me every step of the way, taking care of me and treating my kids like they're his own," she said. She had been prepared to fight this battle alone. After her 2007 divorce, she said, "I had all but given up on relationships." Her priority instead was her two daughters, Sara and Jaimie Wazalis, and her son, Matthew Ford. The night Mr. Leader walked her home, after they met for the first time, she wouldn't invite him in. "We were having a great time, but I didn't want to bring a man into the house with the kids there," she said. Sara and Jaimie were in their teens, Mr. Ford in his early 20s. "So we just sat on the steps outside for a long time talking." Ms. Wazalis and Mr. Leader, 46, are native Philadelphians. Ms. Wazalis grew up in the Feltonville neighborhood with her parents, Albert Ford Sr., and MaryJane Ford, both deceased, and four siblings. Mr. Leader grew up in Mayfair with his parents, Pat Dougherty and Glenn Leader, and a sister, Kelly Passio. Mr. Leader Sr., died in 2015. The younger Mr. Leader never left the Mayfair neighborhood. His 2012 shift behind the bar at Stevenson's, also in Mayfair, had been a good will gesture to the managers there and a way to earn a few extra bucks. "Sometimes you just know," he said. With Ms. Wazalis, "it was both her looks and her personality. She's a warm, loving person." Ms. Wazalis sees herself differently. "I talk a lot, I'm loud, and sometimes I'm not the easiest person to handle," she said. But after Mr. Leader called her a few times and started lingering around her front steps, she worried less about those qualities. By the end of the summer of 2012, they had put two milestones behind them. First, Ms. Wazalis told him about her diagnosis. "And he kept coming back anyway," she said. Second, Ms. Wazalis's children invited him into their apartment. "Glenn would bring them breakfast sandwiches from the corner store. As soon as he started bringing those sandwiches, they loved him." His Christmas gift scored him still more points. "He gave them cards with 20 bucks inside, and you would have thought it was a million," she said. "They were like, 'Take it back! It's too nice.' It was really sweet." In 2014, Mr. Leader moved in. He had by then become accustomed to Ms. Wazalis's frequent doctor's appointments 25 a month, on average and what she called her spells of being "laid up." Working full time in insurance billing left her tired most days, but Mr. Leader's presence was a balm. "He was so kind, and so good to my kids," she said. By the end of 2017, he had helped her through surgeries for endometrial and thyroid cancer, plus a hysterectomy and a double mastectomy. She told Mr. Leader she was never going to take her shirt off in front of him again. But when he convinced her to show him her scars, said a teary Ms. Wazalis, "He said, 'You're more beautiful than you were before.'" Convincing her she deserved his round the clock care was another matter. "It felt like love, but it also made me feel like a burden," she said. In addition to the care at her bedside, Mr. Leader had to become her family's financial caretaker. After her 2012 craniotomy, she willed herself back to work 19 days later. "I had kids to feed," she said. But battling breast, thyroid and endometrial cancers in the space of a few years took a toll on her resilience. In 2016, she quit working and applied for Social Security disability. "It was a no brainer that she should have been eligible, but it took nearly two years," Mr. Leader said. "It was frustrating. She couldn't work. We did what we had to do." A few months after she started receiving disability in 2018, she made a clerical error while filling out forms for Medicare. "I have a brain tumor," she said. "Every once in a while, I make a mistake like that." She started a letter writing campaign to try to fix the error, but that led to a bureaucratic hall of mirrors. By the summer of 2019, she was uninsured. Her family and longtime friends like Nancy Potalivo, owner of the Mayfair hair salon the Creative Zone, worried constantly. "Every time I know she's feeling bad and she can't go to the doctor, it's like, I can't believe this is happening," Ms. Potalivo said. "She's supposed to be getting all these screenings. She's supposed to be being watched nonstop." Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. "He had been saying, 'I want to be able to buy you a really nice ring,'" Ms. Wazalis said. She told him a ring didn't matter. "I said, 'I wouldn't care if you tied a Stroehmann bread bag tie around my finger.'" Mr. Leader found one in the kitchen and wound it around her ring finger. "He said, 'Will you marry me?' And I said, 'Oh, absolutely I will.'" Ms. Wazalis still has the bag tie. Their initial plan was to be married in the spring of 2018, but Ms. Wazalis's mother died of pancreatic cancer that year on April 30, Ms. Wazalis's birthday. When they rescheduled for October 2019, life got in the way again. Ms. Wazalis was already a grandmother Naela Mae Ford, Mr. Ford's daughter, is 6. But in October, Jaimie had just given birth to a son, Nolan Jeffrey Wazalis, now nine months old, and Sara was pregnant with her daughter, Malia Jane Paynter, now seven months. A wedding seemed like too much all at once, especially when a longtime friend Mike Darden announced he was getting married in October. Their next choice was April 18, 2020, less than two weeks before Ms. Wazalis's 50th birthday. Ms. Wazalis chose a dress from David's Bridal; they booked the ballroom at a Philadelphia American Legion for a party of 150. Then the coronavirus hit. "We had already sent out the invitations," Ms. Wazalis said. "My dress is still locked up at David's Bridal." They didn't have their marriage license. But Philadelphia was issuing emergency licenses, and Ms. Wazalis's plea for one was accepted. On April 24, Ms. Wazalis and Mr. Leader were married in front of the Mayfair brownstone they moved into in 2018 by Mr. Darden, who was ordained through the Universal Life Church for the occasion. Ms. Wazalis borrowed a short sleeve, cream colored wedding dress Ms. Potalivo had worn years earlier. Mr. Leader wore black pants and a black tie. Cars full of guests, including Mr. Leader's mother and several friends in Philadelphia Flyers National Hockey League jerseys, pulled up outside and jockeyed for places to idle in viewing distance of their exchange of vows. "When Glenn and I used to sit on the front steps, we would talk about our childhoods, and we realized that on Saturdays we would both go to the same roller skating rink," she said. "You had to pay a dollar or something to get in." Ms. Wazalis is six feet tall. In skates, she is 6 foot 3. "So none of the boys would ask me to couple skate," she said. Mr. Leader had planned to make up for that on their wedding night. "I thought we could skate off into the sunset to Air Supply." Instead, they slow danced in their kitchen to Mr. Richie's "My Love." "Have you ever heard the lyrics to that song?" she asked. "It's like they were written for us." Where The couple's brownstone in Philadelphia Rolling Along Mr. Leader took Ms. Wazalis couple skating around their Philadelphia neighborhood on her 50th birthday, April 30, even though he had not laced up roller skates since he was in his early teens. Something Old and New Stein's, a neighborhood florist, offered to make Ms. Wazalis a bouquet of red roses for the wedding; she tucked the Stroehmann bread bag tie that had served as an engagement ring in the bouquet. Looking Ahead Ms. Wazalis has already made a playlist for a larger reception they are planning for August. The couple will be introduced as "Hooked On a Feeling" by Blue Swede is played. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
SIRUSERI, India A massive futuristic office complex is rising from a patch of spare, arid land here near the southern Indian city of Chennai. Six butterfly shaped buildings dock like spacecraft to two long metal latticed terminals. About 12,000 people already work at the campus, being built by India's largest technology company, Tata Consultancy Services. It eventually will have space for 24,000 of Tata's nearly 180,000 employees. Meanwhile Infosys, one of Tata's biggest competitors, has added a corporate campus for 15,000 employees with buildings that resemble the Parthenon, the Coliseum and the Louvre's glass pyramid. Infosys plans to build an additional 10 million square feet of custom office space by mid 2012, at various sites, adding 25,000 workers to its current 122,000. It is all part of a construction spree by India's outsourcing companies, which are growing at a breakneck pace after the lull caused by the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. But the building boom is about more than making room for more workers. The outsourcing giants, which include Wipro and others, hope that architectural sizzle can help them compete for the nation's top software programmers, while also burnishing their reputations with overseas clients and prospective customers. In this nation where world class high tech companies co exist with urban slums and rural poverty, employers like Tata, Infosys and Wipro have set out to create avant garde, environmentally smart corporate sanctuaries. And even if some architects and critics complain about the wisdom and taste of the efforts, the executives behind the building boom say their ambitious projects put a modern face on Indian business. T. V. Mohandas Pai, a director at Infosys, which has 15 campuses around India, said his company's eclectic mix of designs from all over the world reflected this nation's inclusive sensibility. "One singular thing is monotonous," he said. "In India, we are a colorful people." Like China a decade earlier, India appears to be at that phase of economic development where buildings are meant to help advertise the nation's arrival on the world stage. But unlike China, where the government and state owned corporations took the lead, private companies in India have headed the charge not the government, which struggles to execute even basic construction projects. And within India's business world, technology companies have been more adventurous than others, perhaps because of their outsize financial success and their need to hire tens of thousands of workers to write software for foreign clients. State and federal governments are aiding the effort by offering these companies generous tax incentives and choice pieces of real estate to build big campuses. Competition for employees is intense, because while India produces about 500,000 engineers every year, most colleges provide such poor education that the industry says that just a quarter of graduates are employable. But among those most qualified typically graduates of elite places like the Indian Institutes of Technology and Birla Institute of Technology and Science as many as 18 percent leave for other jobs every year. The outsourcing companies see lavish, environmentally friendly campuses as a way to help attract and retain the best and brightest workers. With their manicured lawns, power generators and lakes, the campuses are a noticeable improvement on most engineering colleges, which suffer from India's standard infrastructure deficiencies blackouts, water shortages and poor maintenance. "I prefer a big campus," said Aditya Mathur, a software engineer, 23, who joined Wipro a year ago, and now works at a four year old office in Gurgaon, south of New Delhi, as a software tester. "The facilities are better in a big campus." Tata Consultancy Services or T.C.S., as the company is known is spending 200 million on its Siruseri campus and has hired the Uruguayan born Canadian architect Carlos A. Ott, who designed the opera house on the Place de la Bastille in Paris. The company is also building big campuses in Ahemdabad, Pune, Calcutta and Hyderabad. But some critics say that too many of the industry's new complexes are intended to make a big splash without much thought of how they will function and fit into the local surroundings. "It is a haphazard reaching for something that will quickly make a statement about the place being world class," said Himanshu Burte, an architecture critic who writes frequently for Indian newspapers. But Rahul Mehrotra, a prominent architect who has designed an office building for Hewlett Packard in Bangalore, the city at the heart of India's technology industry, argued that rather than being outre, too many Indian tech campuses had a hackneyed feel, evoking the sprawling suburban campuses of Silicon Valley or American companies like Google and Apple. "The architecture in these cases symbolizes the fact that these are places of outsourcing, not cutting edge research," said Mr. Mehrotra, who lives in Mumbai and Boston. Mr. Pai of Infosys said he was unconcerned about such criticism. He said the people who mattered to the company employees and customers raved about its buildings, particularly those that resembled landmarks like the Coliseum at its new campus in the city of Mysore. "They like the fact that it's so diverse," he said. Infosys probably set the standard for ambitious corporate campuses in India more than a decade ago. Many other companies grew helter skelter wherever they could find space. But Infosys started building large complexes, beginning with its first campus on the southern edge of Bangalore, its home city, in 1995, just a few years after India started to open its economy to the rest of the world. That first campus, which, after many expansions, can now accommodate 24,000 people, was considered cutting edge for creating an ordered oasis of lawns and lakes in the midst of the urban chaos that envelops most commercial areas in India. The complex also established the company's quirky style with a glass pyramid for an auditorium and a building that resembles a washing machine and helped set a benchmark for big campuses in the technology industry. Mr. Pai, who determined the overall layout of the campuses with the company's chairman, N. R. Narayana Murthy, said Infosys was determined to make every new campus "better than our last campus." Their rules include the tenet that no two buildings should look alike. Another audacious goal is that every campus should become a "carbon sink" in the next five years. In other words, trees, lakes and other natural features should absorb more carbon than is generated by the campus. Some other firms, like Wipro, tend to be more understated, opting for standard looking office buildings. But even these companies have trademark causes. Wipro prides itself on minimizing the use of power and, especially, water. It recycles water and creates lakes to harvest the rain. At one of its campuses in Bangalore, a training center appears to float on one of these reservoirs. T.C.S., based in Mumbai, has long had significant operations in and around Chennai, the city formerly known as Madras, which is on the Bay of Bengal. But N. Chandrasekaran, chief executive of T.C.S., said the company previously had too many buildings arbitrarily sprinkled around that region. The new Siruseri campus, 18 miles south of Chennai, is meant to help consolidate some of those outposts and give employees a sense of place and pride of ownership. "We had multiple buildings and we felt that we should have a campus where employees will feel empowerment, will feel good about working," he said "and at the same time we have a place to host clients." For at least some employees, the plan seems to be succeeding. Deenathajalan Sugumar, who works in production support, recently moved to the new T.C.S. campus in Siruseri from a smaller building in Chennai. He gushed about the campus, even though he now commutes by a company bus for more than an hour every day, more than double his previous travel time. "It's my home," Mr. Sugumar, 24, said. "It's my company." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Heroes Model Management, a modeling agency, formerly at 110 Greene Street, has signed a seven year lease for 3,450 square feet on the second floor of this 1860 five story building in the SoHo Cast Iron District. This three story industrial building, built around 1931, features three large residential lofts on the top floor with exposed brick and 14 foot high ceilings. The second level has three commercial lofts, also with 14 foot ceilings. The 5,500 square foot ground level is a shared retail commercial space with two 2,000 square foot lofts and a 1,500 square foot common area including a waterfall. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
He shouted down a question from CNN, calling the network "fake news." He knocked NBC News for "such dishonest reporting." He falsely accused the London tabloid The Sun of cherry picking quotes from an interview and complained about a photograph in The New York Times that, he said, made it look like he had a "double chin." President Trump was in Britain on diplomatic business. But on Friday, he often appeared focused on a topic that comes more naturally to the showman president: the news media. Nonstop denigration of journalists has become an indelible part of the Trump presidency, so routine that it threatens to recede into the background noise of this chaotic administration, a low hum lost in the racket. But in taking his act on the road, Mr. Trump gave a fresh audience a front row seat to his treatment of the press. The spectacle of a president bashing his nation's news organizations on foreign soil in scenes broadcast live around the world was a reminder of how Mr. Trump's conduct with journalists can still shock. "It's music to the ears of dictators and authoritarian leaders," said Rob Mahoney, the deputy executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. "Leaders have latched on to the term 'fake news' to undermine independent journalism and even jail reporters. Every time President Trump uses that term to dismiss critical coverage or avoid a reporter's question, it sends a terrible message." The viral moment of the president's day came when Jim Acosta, the CNN correspondent who is a preferred punching bag of Trump supporters, tried to ask a question during a news conference with the British prime minister, Theresa May, at the Chequers estate in Buckinghamshire. "CNN is fake news," the president declared. "I don't take questions from CNN." He then pointed at the raised hand of John Roberts, the White House correspondent for Fox News, saying, "Let's go to a real network." "We're a real network, too, sir," Mr. Acosta protested, visibly perturbed. Mr. Trump ignored him, and Mr. Roberts moved ahead with his question. The exchange prompted some intramural squabbling among news outlets another sign of Mr. Trump's skill in not only insulting the news media, but in dividing it as well. Fox News, meanwhile, posted a video of the "CNN is fake news" exchange on its official Twitter account, which was retweeted by the network's top rated personality, Sean Hannity. Mr. Roberts, himself a former CNN reporter, issued a statement saying that "there are some fine journalists" at CNN, adding, "To issue a blanket condemnation of the network as 'fake news' is also unfair." Mr. Acosta's name went unmentioned in the statement, prompting a CNN executive, Matt Dornic, to ding Mr. Roberts for a "glaring" omission. "Next time try and show some class," Mr. Dornic wrote on Twitter. 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. Mr. Trump's assertion that he does not take questions from CNN is false: a day earlier, he had answered a question from Jeremy Diamond, a CNN reporter, and he responds to CNN journalists during White House appearances. Even Mr. Acosta, on Friday, eventually got in a question. "Will you tell Putin to stay out of U.S. elections?" the correspondent asked in a booming voice as Mr. Trump was walking away from the lectern. The president paused, turned back, and called out: "Yes." Not all of the news conference was so fraught. When the president called on Jeff Mason, a White House correspondent for Reuters, he complimented the reporter on his headwear. "I like your hat," Mr. Trump said. "You look good without it, too," the president added, before praising Mr. Mason's "good solid head of hair" as other reporters laughed. There were more smiles when Mr. Roberts reached over to lift the hat off his head revealing Mr. Mason's mostly bald pate. Mr. Trump also used his appearance to do some damage control concerning an interview he had given to The Sun, the London tabloid. Speaking with the paper's political editor, Mr. Trump had robustly criticized Ms. May and her plans to withdraw Britain from the European Union, threatening to undermine Mr. Trump's meeting with his British counterpart. The Sun is considered friendly ground for Mr. Trump because of its owner, Rupert Murdoch, the magnate who also oversees Fox News. But the president called the paper's front page story based on an interview that had been recorded "fake news," apparently because he thought it left out his complimentary remarks about Ms. May. In fact, those remarks did appear, and The Sun issued a cheeky, damage control statement of its own, saying it stood by its reporting. Oddly, though, the tabloid's statement seemed to let Mr. Trump off the hook: "To say the president used 'fake news' with any serious intent is, well ... 'fake news.'" No matter. Mr. Trump went about the rest of his itinerary, greeting Queen Elizabeth II before leaving for Scotland, where he planned to visit the Trump Turnberry golf resort. Before takeoff, Mr. Trump spared some time for a journalist whose work he has said he admires: Piers Morgan, the British television presenter and the president's former co star from "The Celebrity Apprentice." Mr. Morgan, who once hosted a prime time show on CNN, was granted a 30 minute interview with the president on Air Force One, to be broadcast on the British network ITV. Later, Mr. Morgan posted a photograph on his Twitter account of himself inside the presidential plane's cabin, beside a seated and grinning Mr. Trump. "I've been on a few fancy planes in my time," Mr. Morgan wrote, "but nothing quite like this one." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
SAN FRANCISCO Twitter's defining attribute has long been its brevity: 140 characters in a post and no more. That is now set to change. Twitter said on Tuesday that it would test extending the text limit of a post on its service to 280 characters. (In effect, that would double the length of the first two sentences of this paragraph; those sentences, for the record, add up to 140 characters.) Twitter said the goal was to eliminate what it viewed as constraints that kept people from tweeting more frequently. One significant barrier, according to Twitter's internal research, has been the stringent limit on character count. "When people don't have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people tweeting," Twitter said in a blog post. The idea of extending the length of Twitter posts has been contentious internally, batted around among product groups that are trying to find ways to persuade people to use the service more frequently. At 328 million users, Twitter has been criticized for its inability to attract more people. Investors have grown nervous, as that slowing of user growth has affected the company's revenue. Last year, Twitter tried extending its character count by allowing people to post photos and GIFs without counting them against the overall character limit. It also toyed with longer posts exceeding 140 characters, until criticism from users prompted Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, to proclaim that the limit was here to stay. Twitter is now preparing for a backlash from those who might take issue with a 280 character tweet. "We understand since many of you have been tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters," the company said. "But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint." The negative reaction was swift, however. Some on Twitter proclaimed it a "terrible idea." Still, Twitter pointed to people who post primarily in Japanese, Chinese and Korean, languages with alphabets that allow the expression of more thoughts in fewer characters. Those users tend to bump up against the character limits less often, which Twitter said leads to more frequent messages. As a result, Twitter said, if rules around characters are loosened, English speaking users who tend to use more characters in tweets will also hit character limits less frequently. That may, in turn, lead English speaking users to post more regularly. The test will begin in small groups around the world. The company has not said whether it will roll the change out to all users in the future. Twitter said the people who will get to test the 280 character tweets will be randomly selected. Whether that may include prominent Twitter users like President Trump is unclear. Mr. Trump has often used Twitter to announce policy decisions, which has sometimes led to heat on the service. This week, there was a renewed call to bar Mr. Trump from using Twitter after Kim Jong un, the leader of North Korea, said recent inflammatory tweets from Mr. Trump should be considered "a declaration of war." On Monday, Twitter issued a statement from its policy team saying that it took a number of factors into account when dealing with violations of the company's user agreement, including the "newsworthiness" of the tweet. In the end, "Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter," the company said of the 280 character tweet test. "That is something we will never change." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Don't look for God within the cloisters of "In the Green," Grace McLean's oddball musical portrait of the sainted medieval nun, theologist and composer Hildegard von Bingen. Though Hildegard (1098 1179) was celebrated for having a direct line to the almighty, via holy visions, the Judeo Christian deity is invoked but briefly in this LCT3 production, and then only as an interjection (as in "oh, God, I'm suffocating"). As for Jesus, he's not even name checked, except in Latin at the very beginning. On the other hand, it wouldn't be surprising, however anachronistic, to hear the psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung mentioned with holy reverence. Ms. McLean, you see, has trained her gaze not toward the heavens but inward, into the darkest realms of the psyche, where the shadow self is hidden. Digging, literal and otherwise, is the central activity in "In the Green," which opened on Thursday night at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center. Its implicit message: You can't see the light until you've figured out what's underground. This strained presentation of Hildegard as a singing sufferer of post traumatic stress disorder is one of several wildly inventive musicals to have arrived in New York recently. The past couple of months have seen the Off Broadway openings of Dave Malloy's "Octet," an a cappella songfest about internet addiction, and Michael R. Jackson's "A Strange Loop," which takes place inside the head of a queer, black man writing a musical about a queer, black man. But for audacity and opacity it's hard to top "In the Green," which is directed by the gifted Lee Sunday Evans and features Ms. McLean as Hildegard's mentor, the Benedictine abbess and anchoress, Jutta von Sponheim. Those unfamiliar with Hildegard's astonishing C.V. she is regarded as the creator of both the first morality play and a founder of scientific natural history may still leave "In the Green" wondering why she's such a big deal. The uninitiated should definitely not expect a solid introduction to the extraordinary musical achievements for which Hildegard is best known today, which include the liturgical song cycle "Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum." Ms. McLean and her highly sophisticated musical collaborators experiment quite ingeniously with the Hildegardian elements of style, reworking them into fragmented, jazzlike fugues. Still, unless you're already acquainted with the masterworks of Hildegard, you're unlikely to appreciate Ms. McLean's splintering riffs on the original. The entire production is steeped in a mixture of archness and earnestness that prohibits emotional engagement and easy listening. The production begins with a musical quotation, sung in Latin, from Hildegard's "O virga ac diadema." Enter the child Hildegard (a faceless puppet, designed by Amanda Villalobos), who is being consigned by her family to a life as an oblate in a monastic cell with Jutta. "Inside the cell, she'll be technically dead, but super comfortable," Hildegard's mother is told by the monk in charge. Such breezy contemporary speech would appear to be the lingua franca here. The door of the cylindrical centerpiece of Kristen Robinson's set which brings to mind an Art Deco bank vault opens to reveal a sparsely furnished room with a single, high window and a floor of dirt. Jutta instructs Hildegard to dig, and keep digging, which the obliging child does, as the years pass, while Jutta sings of self denial as the road to freedom. Hildegard is at this point a divided self. She is thus portrayed by not one but three young actresses Rachael Duddy, Ashley Perez Flanagan and Hannah Whitney who operate puppets representing Hildegard's mouth, eyes and hands. It is typical of the show's bizarrely jaunty tone that Jutta acknowledges this state of being by saying, in rhyme, "I can see that you're broken apart/But in here, you can have a brand new start." When Hildegard has her first period, Jutta explains the curse of original sin: "Eve had a hunger she couldn't contain./ She was punished for wanting to gain./So her want became her stain." The best way of dealing with Eve's burden, it would seem, is to stop eating and pretty much deny the life of the senses altogether. But in digging around that floor, Hildegard is inspired to uncover a repressed episode from her early childhood, while also summoning her mentor's Shadow (Mia Pak), an embodiment of a painful past, which Jutta had hoped to keep buried forever. But Hildegard is determined to combine her fractured identity into a whole, and "integration" (a song title here) becomes her watchword. Ms. McLean a piquant performer in the musicals "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812" and "Alice by Heart" would appear to be trying to demythologize Hildegard from a sociological, feminist perspective. The script implicitly correlates religious asceticism with the abuse and commodification of women in the Dark Ages. It's an intriguing approach, but you have to squint really hard to figure out what Ms. McLean is doing. And the abrupt postscript of a conclusion, which refers to the adult Hildegard's rejection of a religious sect known as the Cathari, will make no sense whatsoever to most theatergoers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A Fifth Avenue Co op Tops the List of Sales in May The priciest co op sale so far this year occurred on the Upper East Side, as several more big closings took place throughout New York in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. Many of the deals that closed in May were in contract before the coronavirus pandemic struck in New York, or came together quickly before the lockdown and avoided the disruptions in the real estate industry brought on by sheltering in place rules. The full floor apartment, at 4 East 66th Street (a.k.a. 845 Fifth Avenue) was bought by the financier and philanthropist J. Christopher Flowers and his wife, Anne W. Flowers, for 43 million, marking the city's most expensive sale in the month of May. (The record price for a co op was set in 2015, with the 77.5 million sale of a duplex at nearby 834 Fifth.) At the ultra pricey 220 Central Park South, two sponsor units were acquired by a single anonymous buyer for a total of 28.6 million, though both sales had been in contract long before the pandemic surfaced. There were a few luxury townhouse purchases as well, including a newly constructed manse in the Lenox Hill neighborhood and an Upper West Side brownstone bought by the "Hamilton" choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler and his wife, Elly Blankenbuehler, a physician assistant. Also last month, Alexandre de Betak, a fashion show and events producer, sold his co op loft in SoHo to Dick Costolo, the former chief executive of Twitter, and his wife, Lorin Costolo. The financier J. Christopher Flowers and his wife, Anne W. Flowers, bought a co op taking up the entire eighth floor at 4 East 66th Street. The Flowerses' co op, on the eighth floor, was purchased from a trust set up for Ezra K. Zilkha, an Iraqi born financier and investor who died last fall. It was an off market deal, so few details about the residence are available. Most of the units in the limestone building on Fifth Avenue and 66th Street are around 7,500 square feet and occupy full floors. They have high ceilings, grand galleries and direct Central Park views. Mr. Flowers, a former partner at Goldman Sachs who runs his own private equity firm, has been an active player in Manhattan's high end market. In 2006, he paid 53 million for the Harkness mansion on East 75th Street, which at the time was a residential townhouse record. (He ended up selling the building five years later to the art dealer Larry Gagosian for 36.5 million.) The couple's new apartment house, designed by James E.R. Carpenter and built in 1920, has been home to a number of notable people, among them Paul G. Allen, a founder of Microsoft, and the socialite Veronica Hearst. The recent closings at 220 Central Park South included a half floor apartment on the 58th floor that sold for nearly 26.8 million and a studio on the 19th for 1.8 million. The buyer of both was listed as 220 CPS Unit 53B L.L.C. The larger unit has 3,322 square feet, with three bedrooms, three and a half baths and a 28 square foot balcony, while the studio has 472 square feet, according to the most recent offering plan. Nearly all the apartments in the 70 story limestone tower, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, are now spoken for. This includes the four adjacent units, on the 50th through 53rd floors, acquired by the hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin in early 2019 for a record 240 million. The mansion at 118 East 76th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues, was sold for 25 million by the Chetrit Group, a privately held real estate development firm. It had been under contract since late December. The buyer's identity was shielded by the limited liability company ZMMSG. The home is one of three townhouses created from six brownstones that the Chetrit Group acquired in 2007 from Lenox Hill Hospital for 26 million. The facades were preserved, while the interiors were gutted and rebuilt. (One of the houses, No. 110, sold for almost 40.3 million in 2018, reportedly to the industrialist and philanthropist David Koch.) The sprawling building that sold last month is five stories high and 32 feet wide, and covers more than 13,000 square feet. It contains eight bedrooms, 10 full baths and three half baths, according to the listing with Douglas Elliman Real Estate. The master suite encompasses the third floor and has three bathrooms, two large dressing rooms and a sitting room. 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. The home offers contemporary finishes and myriad amenities including a screening room, a wet bar and wine cellar in the basement, and a rear garden off the massive formal dining room. The top level has a 36 foot indoor lap pool, glass enclosed gym, sauna and a landscaped limestone terrace. And to get to all of them: an elevator and a grand spiral staircase. The Blankenbuehlers bought a five story, 5,141 square foot brownstone at 121 West 85th Street near Columbus Avenue that is also is packed with amenities. The basement contains a wine cellar, recreation room and gym, and there is plenty of outdoor space, including private terraces on the third and fourth floors, a multilevel deck off the parlor floor and a rear garden with paver stones and mature trees. The closing price for the fully renovated house, in contract since late February, was 7.1 million, slightly above its nearly 7 million asking price. The seller was listed as Martin Guillermo Marron, the head of investment and private banking in Latin America for J.P. Morgan. Mr. Blankenbuehler, a choreographer and stage director, has won three Tony Awards for his work on the Broadway shows "In the Heights," "Bandstand" and "Hamilton." The meticulously revamped, 4,000 square foot space retains the bones of a downtown industrial loft, with high ceilings, immense windows and exposed brick, pipes, beams and columns. Mr. de Betak added a few whimsical flourishes during his two plus years of renovations, among them a swing near the kitchen, a tatami room with sake dispensers, and a hidden party room with a stripper pole. Mr. Costolo, the new owner, served as chief executive of Twitter from 2010 to 2015. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
A Toronto jury on Thursday concluded a coroner's inquest into the death of a drum technician who died after the roof of a stage collapsed on him before a Radiohead concert in 2012. The technician, Scott Johnson, had been hired for the band's tour for its album "The King of Limbs." An hour before a sold out show in Toronto in June 2012, a rooflike structure came crashing down on crew members, killing Johnson and injuring three other workers who were setting up equipment. The jury proposed 28 nonbinding recommendations to help prevent similar incidents, including the creation of a permanent working group that would establish and update standards and best practices for the live performance industry. Several other recommendations highlighted the need to improve oversight of safety rules for the construction of temporary stages in Ontario. Radiohead responded to the jury's conclusion with a statement, saying that the inquest's verdict of accidental death "feels frustratingly insufficient given that the stage collapse was shown to be preventable." The group added: "The jury have made sound and practical recommendations to prevent such an accident happening again and to ensure the future safety of show crews and audiences. It's up to all of us now to make sure that these recommendations are implemented." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Alone on the Range, Seniors Often Lack Access to Health Care Beverly Kolacny, 82, at her home on the Clark Fork River in Wyoming. Janie Osborne for The New York Times What's it like to grow old in rural America? Millie Goolsby is a retired nurse, so when she experienced chest pain five years ago, she recognized the signs of a potential heart attack. But her family didn't call 911. The drive from her home to the hospital in Klamath Falls, Ore., requires at least half an hour. "It takes a while for an ambulance to get here, and then you hope the ambulance can find you" on an unpaved country road, said Mrs. Goolsby, who is 83. Instead, her son in law drove her to the emergency room. (After three days in the hospital, she went home and resumed her two mile a day walks with her dog.) Richard Howard, a 70 year old cattle rancher who lives 17 miles from Chiloquin, Ore. (population: about 700), is considering how to reshingle part of his roof this spring. Professionals charge too much, he said. A friend who used to help with maintenance moved away. His wife's son is handy, but lives in Idaho and can visit only occasionally. Young people tend to leave rural Oregon, Mr. Howard said, because "there's not the employment opportunities out here in the sticks." Through his 95th summer, Bill Kolacny was tending the tomato patch on the 400 acre Wyoming ranch where he and his wife, Beverly, had lived for 25 years. When he began to weaken from heart failure in December, all he wanted was to die in their log home on the Clarks Fork River. But the nearest hospice organization, in Red Lodge, Mont., isn't licensed to care for patients in Wyoming. And the closest Wyoming hospice said it couldn't afford to send staff members 60 miles to the Kolacny ranch. So Bart Kolacny and his two sisters, who all live at least an hour away, took turns caring for their father at home with the help of their family physician, Dr. Bill George, also certified in palliative care. The family managed until Bill Kolacny died last month at 95, but "it wasn't easy," Bart Kolacny said. When it comes to attention and medical resources, "we're kind of underrepresented," said Dr. George, who practices at Beartooth Billings Clinic in Red Lodge. "People sometimes feel forgotten." Aren't country folks supposed to be hardier and healthier, with all that fresh air and exercise, than their urban counterparts? "When you actually do the research, it's pretty much a myth," said Leah Goeres, a postdoctoral fellow at Oregon State University who led a research team comparing rural and urban dwellers' health. The rural American population is older: About 15 percent of residents are 65 or older, compared with 12 percent in urban areas, largely because many people have left in search of education and jobs. "When young people leave, they take their fertility with them," said E. Helen Berry, past president of the Rural Sociological Society, which promotes the study of rural life, and co editor of an essential 2013 book, "Rural Aging in 21st Century America." The remaining population gets older still. Rural areas vary, of course. Some picturesque locales get infusions of capital and energy when younger retirees move in. In general, though, "people in rural areas tend to have lower incomes throughout people's lifetimes," Dr. Berry said, and thus lower retirement incomes, with greater reliance on Social Security. Among those over 65, poverty rates run higher outside of metropolitan counties, the Department of Agriculture reports. Because income level correlates with health, it isn't surprising that Dr. Goeres found significant differences when her team analyzed five years of health data from people over 85: two groups in metropolitan Portland, Ore., and one in the rural Klamath Basin. The rural cohort had more chronic illnesses to start with, including higher rates of diabetes, stroke, cognitive impairment, heart arrhythmia and heart failure. "The diseases got worse at a faster rate" in rural seniors, who also took more prescription drugs, Dr. Goeres said. They survived 3.5 years on average from the time the study began in 2000, compared with 7.1 years for urban dwellers. Though the study looked at only one state, other studies have also found poorer health and higher mortality in rural areas. Yet because they struggle to attract and keep health professionals, it's harder for older residents there to get health care. Louise Mohardt, 78, still working as a geriatric care manager in Lancaster, Va., needs to see an ophthalmologist for her glaucoma. "We had one here in town, but he retired," she said. So a friend drives her 85 miles to Fredericksburg, Va. In Lancaster, "we don't have everything we need," Mrs. Mohardt said. "We had a terrible time getting a psychiatrist." There's no local neurologist, pulmonologist or kidney specialist, either, and the nearest dialysis center is a 30 to 60 minute drive. Few rural counties can offer much in the way of public transportation, so residents have to travel these distances to supermarkets as well as clinics by car. Nina Glasgow, a social gerontologist and co editor of "Rural Aging in 21st Century America," recalls conducting a focus group in upstate New York. "One woman said, 'If I can't drive anymore, I'll just kill myself,'" Dr. Glasgow said. "I hope she didn't mean it." Many seniors, wisely or not, fight to keep driving, but rural residents have fewer alternatives. In most of the United States, families help with driving, shopping and activities of daily living as their relatives age. When adult children leave their rural homes, a key component of elder care goes missing. "There's a question of whether people have to go into nursing homes prematurely" because they lack family caregivers, Dr. Glasgow said. In their absence, neighbors and churches can play compensatory roles. Her research in rural areas has shown that older adults actually prefer to accept services from their churches rather than from government programs. Satellite clinics and telemedicine can help bridge some of the health care gaps. For digitally adept older adults, the Internet already allows easier shopping, entertainment and social interaction. Dr. Glasgow, among others, has called for better transportation options and for more senior housing, so that rural communities can bring services to clusters of people who need them. The solution often suggested and generally rejected, however, is moving away. Sometimes that reflects the cold reality that would be sellers can't find buyers for homes in remote areas, but often it simply demonstrates the attachment older people have to their rural lives. Since Bill Kolacny died, his children have taken turns spending the night with their mother, Beverly, 82. She has hypertension and uses a walker, so she no longer uses her second floor, and she has relinquished her flock of chickens. But she intends to stay put. "I've seen so many old ranchers and farmers get to a point where they couldn't do it anymore, so they'd move to town and within a month, they'd be gone," Bart Kolacny said. "Staying on their place gives them that will to keep going." So he's not arguing with his mother. "If she wants to stay out there," he said, "I'll do everything I can to keep her there." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Well, that was a downer. Not President Trump's recent blame the press conference; the Marc Jacobs show. Maybe we should have expected it. This designer's singular skill, after all, is discerning which way the wind is blowing and capturing that moment in cloth. On Thursday, Mr. Jacobs brought New York Fashion Week to a close with a disconcertingly depressing if very well merchandised ode to the documentary "Hip Hop Evolution" and a moment in time when everything changed. In the cavernous 67th Street Armory, empty but for two long lines of folding chairs set up to form a corridor cum runway, Mr. Jacobs turned off the sound: The show was absent both music and the clicks of cellphones. Guests had been asked not to take pictures, because the chief executive, Sebastian Suhl, said before it all began, "Marc wants everyone to experience the show" with their own eyes, as opposed to through the eye of the camera. Mostly, everyone complied. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LONDON "Hamilton" and the new "Harry Potter" play are the hottest theatrical shows of the moment, with "Hamilton" outgrossing everything else on Broadway, and Harry, Hermione and Ron drawing hordes of muggles to London's West End. But success has a side effect: Both shows have fallen prey to high tech scalpers who harvest large quantities of seats and resell them at exorbitant markups. "Hamilton" has been hit particularly hard: When it first opened on Broadway, nearly 80 percent of seats were purchased by automated ticket bots, and for Lin Manuel Miranda's final performance, resellers were seeking an average of 10,900 a seat. Now, as "Hamilton" prepares to open in London this fall and "Harry Potter" plans to open on Broadway next year, the producers of both shows are aggressively trying to contain scalping, a long festering problem for the entertainment industry that has been exacerbated by technology. The producers of "Hamilton" are trying an unusual approach for theater paperless ticketing while the producers of "Harry Potter" are refusing to accept resold tickets. And in the United States and Britain, policy makers are tackling the issue anew, concerned about the effect of industrialized scalping on consumers and artists. Mr. Mackintosh is on the front lines of the latest battle against resellers. In addition to being a producer, he is an owner of major theaters in the West End, including Victoria Palace, where "Hamilton" will begin performances in November. For the tickets that just went on sale and the first block immediately sold out the show is trying paperless ticketing, which has long been used for concerts, to the consternation of ticket brokers. Picture this: Instead of receiving a traditional ticket from the box office or a facsimile printed at home, you just get an email confirming your purchase. Then, on the day of the show, you have to bring the same credit card you used for the purchase as well as the email confirmation and a photo ID and run the credit card through a scanner to get in. The theory is that requiring the same credit card for purchase and entrance should complicate efforts by would be resellers. "Going to the theater is expensive enough as it is with the money that you need to charge to put these big shows on, so it's absolutely ridiculous for it to be inflated by third parties," Mr. Mackintosh said. "We have no silver bullet, but we are trying to do everything we can within the law, and it has made a massive difference," said Sonia Friedman, a lead producer of the "Harry Potter" play. Ms. Friedman and her co producer, Colin Callender, said they would be consulting with New York producers and officials about what steps they might take to limit resales when their show opens next year on Broadway, where it is also expected to be a blockbuster. The secondary ticketing market is a big business that has long been a significant factor for major concerts and sports events. Live Nation Entertainment, the company that owns Ticketmaster, has estimated it at 8 billion a year. And the business is increasingly global, making any one country's laws difficult to enforce. StubHub, a large ticket reselling company, said it supported legislation to combat "bot misuse" but also argued that producers shared blame for high ticket prices. "There continues to be a lack of transparency in the primary market about how many tickets are available for public sale," the company said. "This is despite the fact that the industry and regulators continue to put pressure on the secondary industry, rather than attempting to tackle these problems at the source." Theater producers said they objected to reselling on two grounds: It limits access, by making it harder for people who are not wealthy to afford popular shows, and it deprives theater artists, presenters and investors of profits that should be theirs but instead go to ticket brokers. At a recent performance of "Harry Potter" in London, ticket holders expressed considerable wariness about resellers. "I was looking in at all the touting sites, all the reselling sites, and the same type of ticket I got was going for like 600 pounds a ticket it was ridiculous," said Lauren Putland, 26, of Portsmouth, England. But Ms. Putland acknowledged that she had once used a reseller to obtain tickets to a Britney Spears concert. "I was literally obsessed with her I would have done anything to go to her Circus tour so I paid over the odds for that," she said. The issue affects other shows beyond "Hamilton" and "Harry Potter," for which demand seriously outstrips supply. New York Theater Workshop, an Off Broadway nonprofit that has just 200 seats and is perhaps best known as the birthplace of "Rent," has emerged as a test case because it has recently had two shows with strong crossover appeal: "Lazarus," featuring songs by David Bowie, who died while the production was running, and "Othello," starring Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo. In Britain, where pop musicians have been far more vocal about scalping concerns, an advocacy group, the FanFair Alliance, was founded last year by a group of artists and powerful managers (Mumford Sons, Ed Sheeran and more). Adele has become a high visibility example of how artists are trying to control scalping. Using Songkick, a boutique ticketing company, she has sold hundreds of thousands of seats directly to fans, which Songkick says has drastically reduced their availability on the secondary market. But while she was able to sell two thirds of the tickets to her four coming Wembley Stadium shows, industry practices limited Songkick's allotment in the United States to 8 percent of the ticket inventory. Songkick is suing Ticketmaster in federal court in the United States over those restrictions, which it says are anticompetitive. In London, Parliament is considering antibot legislation after the release last year of a critical investigation of the market, written by Michael Waterson, an economics professor at the University of Warwick. The House of Commons held hearings in November, expressing concern about close relationships between the sellers and resellers. (In an article for The Telegraph, Damian Collins, a Conservative member of Parliament, wrote, "The ticketing industry in the United Kingdom has become a national scandal.") Another government agency, the Competition and Markets Authority, has opened its own investigation. "Quite a lot is happening at last," said Sharon Hodgson, a Labour member of Parliament who has been pushing for years for legislation to restrain resellers. "The secondary market is a bit nervous, and they should be." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
To make ballet contemporary again, modern music and modern sensibilities are needed. And lo! Thursday night at New York City Ballet brought two world premieres, entirely unalike, each to new music, each distinctly reflecting the world we inhabit today: "The Shimmering Asphalt," choreographed by Pontus Lidberg to a commissioned score by David Lang, and "The Times Are Racing," by Justin Peck (the company's resident choreographer since 2014) to recorded music by Dan Deacon. Warm ovations greeted both. Deservedly. Both are distinct, skilled, arresting. Yet they're hard to grasp on a single viewing: more immediately striking as authoritative exercises in style than as absorbing worlds to inhabit. Each is sophisticated; there's plenty of detail and structural complexity here to reward later visits. But are they as accomplished in substance as they are in manner? It's good that they remain in repertory into February and then return in May. Mr. Peck's "The Times Are Racing" (24 minutes long) an excitingly "now" piece in the way it catches the mood of 21st century urban protest and the evening's biggest hit with the audience is danced in sneakers; its dancers are otherwise dressed (by Humberto Leon) in a motley assortment of urban wear shorts, jeans, raincoats, T shirts as well as a leotard or two. The dance style, with a strong emphasis on currents of motion through the upper body, informal posture and gesture, as well as sequences of tap, makes this work a young relation to such dances as Jerome Robbins's "N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz" and a number of early pieces by Twyla Tharp ("Deuce Coupe" and "Ocean's Motion," for example). The music taped, electronic, hard hitting, insistently pulsating is "USA I IV," from Mr. Deacon's album "America." To my ear, this is tiresome, but so is the Tchaikovsky "Allegro Brillante" used in the 1956 Balanchine ballet of that name; what matters is that Balanchine's choreography makes his score insidious whereas, on first acquaintance, Mr. Peck's doesn't. Mr. Peck's taste in, and response to, contemporary music seem the weakest aspect of his generally formidable talent. "The Times" features one lead male female couple (Amar Ramasar and Tiler Peck); two other lead dancers (Robert Fairchild and Mr. Peck himself); a quartet of one man (Sean Suozzi) with three women (Brittany Pollack, Gretchen Smith, Savannah Lowery); as well as a corps of six woman and six men. There's no hierarchy. Even corps dancers are given individual moments, and the stars are part of a communal climate. The mood of modern protest is evident in groupings (imagery of human microphones, for example), in percussive attack and in hurtling energy. Brisk tap duets for Mr. Fairchild and Mr. Peck make a terrific impact. Images of wild, untrammeled force from the corps are memorable. The quartet for Mr. Suozzi and his three companions is slow: a welcome change of tempo as well as a vivid statement of equality. I found, however, the duets for Ms. Peck and Mr. Ramasar bland. The intensity of every dancer as always with Mr. Peck's creations for City Ballet is a thrill. They certainly believe in "The Times Are Racing." As yet, I'm not sure I do. By contrast, Mr. Lidberg's "The Shimmering Asphalt," 22 minutes long, is an investigation of contemporary ballet classicism, with pointwork and turned out body language. Its five part score music (titled "Shade") is for violin, cello and piano. The mood is consistently poetic and atmospheric: a 21st century nocturne in which tensions change. Mr. Lang's music is a five part essay in what can be called classical post minimalism, beautiful in changing sonorities and suggestions of fragmented melody. Mark Stanley's lighting sets the dance against a night sky in which stars dimly twinkle; he also lights much of the dance from above, which, despite the suggestion of strong moonlight, distances us from the dancers and makes them hard to identify. Rachel Quarmby Spadaccini's costumes are in a selection of blues and grays, with men, bare chested, in short kilts. You can feel "Asphalt" making experiments as it proceeds. A quintet for Sara Mearns with four men is succeeded by another for Taylor Stanley with four women: issues about gender are examined throughout, with same sex and other sex partnering fluently interleaved. Women sometimes steer or support men. Ballet tradition is another theme: George Balanchine's "Serenade" is specifically evoked. There are nine principal roles. Rebecca Krohn, Ms. Peck, Chase Finlay and Russell Janzen also register strongly, while Sterling Hyltin, Lauren Lovette, and Gonzalo Garcia each have opportunities. There are six supporting dancers (three men, three women); and, as with Mr. Peck's premiere, every soloist is often shown as part of an inclusive ensemble. Another question this ballet asks is "How does a ballerina fit in to the group?" Often, here, she stands apart. I enjoy this choreography moment by moment; yet it's nebulous, running through the mind like water through the fingers. Mr. Peck's "Scherzo Fantastique," new last July in City Ballet's season in Saratoga, had its New York City premiere on Sunday, as part of an all Stravinsky premiere. As before, the bright, Fauve colors of costumes (Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung) and sets (Jules de Balincourt) burst happily on the eyes. As yet, Mr. Peck's choreography and its performances haven't settled on the Koch stage; but this Mr. Peck's first creation to Stravinsky is already buzzy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
MARRAKESH, Morocco "If you come to Marrakesh, you don't come to see contemporary art," Othman Lazraq, president of the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden told journalists before the opening of his independent museum. "You come to see camels and dancing ladies." Mr. Lazraq, 29, son of the multimillionaire Moroccan real estate developer and art collector Alami Lazraq, might have had his tongue firmly in cheek, yet his remark summed up popular perceptions of Marrakesh. Now the city, once the capital of medieval African empires, hopes to become a destination for art. The Lazraqs' museum, the first nonprofit museum of its kind in North Africa, formally opened on Feb. 24, one day after the inaugural 1 54 Contemporary African Art Fair started at the La Mamounia Palace Hotel. The openings filled the gap created by the cancellation of the seventh Marrakesh Biennale after its founder, Vanessa Branson, withdrew her support. "We thought it was important to show contemporary African art in the African continent," said Touria El Glaoui, the founding director of the 1 54 fair. The fair, which was founded in London in 2013 and branched out to New York in 2015, now spans three continents. "But we wanted to find a spot where visitors can come to Africa and be O.K. with it," said Ms. El Glaoui, alluding to the relative stability of the Morocco, whose monarch, King Mohammed VI, has his own museum of modern and contemporary art in Rabat. "We also need African collectors to collect their own art," Ms. El Glaoui added. There are few more comfortable spots than La Mamounia (Winston Churchill was a frequent guest). The exclusivity of the venue, as well as its iron gates manned by security guards, certainly made many European and American visitors feel at ease. A significant proportion own properties in Marrakesh, which has been a magnet for cultured wealth ever since Yves Saint Laurent made a home in the city. "I prefer boutique fairs," said Primo Marella, director of the Primo Marella Gallery in Milan and Lugano, one of just 17 exhibitors at 1 54. "They attract fewer collectors, but they are more specific." The Marrakesh fair attracted 4,000 visitors from Thursday through Sunday, according to the organizers, less than a third of the attendance at last year's London fair. But many were collectors with plenty of money to spend ensuring sales. By the end of Friday, Mr. Marella said he had sold three textile wall hangings by the Mali based artist Abdoulaye Konate made specially for the fair. P riced as high as 25,000 euros each, or around 30,000, they went to collectors based in France, Morocco and Portugal. Mr. Konate's enigmatic, politically charged hangings, inspired by local textile traditions, first came to prominence in the much exhibited Contemporary African Art Collection formed by the Italian businessman Jean Pigozzi. That collection, which still guides many buyers' incursions into contemporary African art, was formed in 1989 under the guidance of Andre Magnin, a French curator and dealer. Mr. Magnin's Paris gallery, Magnin A, was doing brisk business at the fair, selling 10 works by Friday afternoon for prices ranging from EUR2,500 to EUR22,000, by artists such J.P. Mika from Congo and Amadou Sanogo from Mali. The latter's wry 2017 canvas, "Untitled," showing a headless figure holding a paddle, sold for EUR16,000. "Most of my collection is sub Saharan," he said. "It was an opportunity to be educated, but also to look at the potential to buy." Mr. Akintokun said that he was negotiating to purchase two North African works for his collection, but he declined to name the artists. Mr. Akintokum might have been looking, for example, at photographs by the Moroccan artist Walid Layadi Marfouk, 22, who is based in New York. The London gallery Tiwani sold one of his photographs of his aunt in his great grandfather's ancestral mansion in Marrakesh for 5,000. Others were included in a survey show of works by 40 photographers, "Africa Is No Island," at the contemporary art museum. Over 9,700 square feet of exhibition space over two floors, the museum presents the most comprehensive overview of how North African artists are responding to our times by showcasing works from the 2,000 piece collection of Alami and Othman Lazraq. Many of the artists are from Morocco. For several, plastic garbage has become the medium and the message of the moment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
MUNICH It seems safe to say that right now, there is more live theater being performed in Germany than anywhere else on earth. After a spate of hastily devised productions that used coronavirus driven social distancing and hygiene restrictions to achieve heightened levels of intimacy and immersion, ensemble theaters here are back to presenting regular repertoire, albeit at extremely limited capacity. Audiences have gotten used to wearing masks while moving around and to forgoing intermissions and refreshments. These regulations will most likely remain in place for the foreseeable future. In the closing weeks of this truncated German theatrical season, a number of playhouses hosted productions that treat antiheroines with unusual sympathy and understanding. Seen together, they form a panorama of tyrants, femmes fatales and child killers. "I hate to disappoint you, but I'm not going to get naked," the Swiss actress Liliane Amuat announces at the start of Bastian Kraft's deconstruction of Frank Wedekind's "Lulu" plays. "Of course, you're free to imagine me naked," she continues wryly, "Just as I am free to imagine you naked. I've been doing that all along, by the way." In this elaborate chamber production for Munich's Residenztheater, a spirited trio of actresses portray Wedekind's complex heroine, a dramatic figure who has never been equaled in her uneasy mixture of debauchery and innocence. Joining Amuat onstage for most of the evening are Juliane Kohler and Charlotte Schwab. They all don tuxedos with tails to bring Lulu's lurid tale to life in a composite performance that includes philosophical addresses to the audience and precisely timed interactions with multimedia elements. Among these are prerecorded videos featuring the actresses as the various men in Lulu's life and shadow plays where the live performances surreally blend with silhouettes and offstage voices. While interrogating Lulu's status as a crucible of male desire, Kraft also insists on her autonomy. Wedekind's Lulu meets her end as one of Jack the Ripper's victims. In his production, Kraft liberates her from this fate by not showing us her murder. "Of course, you're free to imagine my death, the same way I'm free to imagine yours," Schwab defiantly announces at the end of the evening. In Burkhard C. Kosminski's production, just three chairs and a lectern represent the conference room where three widows of deposed totalitarian leaders meet for a joint press briefing. Mrs. Imelda, Mrs. Margot and Mrs. Leila share their first names with the much reviled spouses of the Philippines' Ferdinand E. Marcos, East Germany's Erich Honecker and Tunisia's Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. (When Walser's play was first performed, all three of the protagonists were still alive; Margot Honecker died in exile in Chile in 2016). The title, taken from a quote attributed to Col. Muammar el Qaddafi, the former Libyan dictator, signals Walser's intention to give a humorous gloss to a "banality of evil" theme. While waiting for the news conference to begin, the women reflect on their lives, offer justifications for the roles they played in repressive regimes, and brag about their encounters with Stalin, Mao and Castro. Much of the play's focus is on Margot (Christiane Rossbach), unrepentant after decades of exile. She is a true ideologue and comes across as both fiercer and more bitter than the paranoid Leila (played by Paula Skorupa as something of a ditsy brat) and the boastful Imelda (Anke Schubert, withering and imperious). While her counterparts discuss which actresses should play them in a film, Margot declares that she is "unrepresentable." She mocks democracy's version of freedom. "Is the world really any better off after the 'end of history'?" she queries. Asked about her political crimes, she flatly responds: "We had enemies. I have nothing to apologize for." Facilitating much of this dialogue is Margot's German interpreter, Gottfried (a nervous and stealthy Sven Prietz), who initially tries to maintain the peace. He starts by mistranslating some of the more combative and insulting comments and ends up manipulating these master manipulators. The play goes off the rails during a screwball climax involving the mortal remains of one of the dictators. By this point, however, Walser has provided vivid characterizations of these infamous women as well as a provocative discussion of both the ideological underpinnings and banal everyday considerations of running a dictatorship. If "I Love Apples" refuses to paint its protagonists as arch villainesses, it doesn't exonerate them either. The protagonist of Euripides' "Medea" is likely the best known tragic female character in all of literature, and her crime still makes the blood run cold. Markus Bothe's new staging for the Schauspiel Leipzig is one of only a handful of productions that have premiered post lockdown. It looks amazing, but doesn't succeed in conveying the emotional or psychological weight of a play that actors and audiences have grappled with for 2,500 years. More than any individual performance, the set itself is the star of the evening. The set designer Kathrin Frosch's shimmering, water filled stage and Jorn Langkabel's focused lighting provide the bulk of the psychological characterization. For much of the performance, Medea's two sons play with a toy ship, passing it back and forth across the shallow water that covers the entire stage and ripples whenever actors wade in it. When the pool is still, it becomes a dark mirror in which the actors are reflected. An oblong house, enclosed in glass, rotating in the middle of the shallow pool symbolizes the land that Medea has been banished from. It was frustrating to find such bold stagecraft ill matched by the acting. Anne Cathrin Buhtz's Medea was enraged to a fault, and she often gave her character's fury and bile too much emphasis. In aiming for steely rage and proud anger, she delivered an erratic performance in a quivering, broken voice. Denis Petkovic's Jason was most convincing in his early scenes with his matter of fact arrogance and callousness. The quiet anguish of his final scene, in which he learns of his children's murder, was curiously dispassionate and fell flat. I found myself wondering whether the production's shortcomings might have had to do with a hurried development schedule that didn't leave Bothe and his cast sufficient time to explore the characters. When a production of "Medea" succeeds, it disturbs us with special force because we come to understand how a mother could be driven to murder her children. Examining such evil might just be too terrible for many to contemplate. But trying to make sense of the shocking and the reprehensible isn't the same as endorsing it. Nor does putting a human face on monstrous figures, real or imaginary, let them off the hook. Euripides could have told you that thousands of years ago. I Am Like You, I Love Apples. Directed by Burkhard C. Kosminski. Schauspiel Stuttgart. Through Oct. 17. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
As if to tighten a nightmarish vise on our minds, Ligeti's quartet returns at regular intervals during this show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In other ways, though, the production, written by Eve Wolf, the Ensemble founder, and directed by Donald T. Sanders, is straightforward. Unfairly accused of spying, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus (Max von Essen, "An American in Paris") was dismissed from the military and shipped off to Devil's Island. Meanwhile, his wife, Lucie (Meghan Picerno), and brother, Mathieu (Mark Evans), tirelessly fought to clear his name. They battled not just the Army, which considered the Jewish captain a convenient scapegoat, but a virulently anti Semitic press David Bengali's projections include chilling period caricatures and slogans like "France for the French" (still heard at National Front rallies). The case split families and political parties, and stirred up the press. "What a poignant drama, and what superb characters!" the novelist Emile Zola (Peter Scolari, who played Hannah's father on "Girls") enthused before penning the pro Dreyfus editorial "J'accuse...!," the opening salvo of the modern engaged intellectual. Zola's passion provides welcome fire to a show that otherwise hews to a calm, even keeled tone, exemplified by Mr. von Essen's sober performance. Much of the emotion comes from the music, which both illustrates and comments on the story, but is not necessarily from the Dreyfus era a conceptual gambit that can be just as distracting as illuminating. Baroque pieces by Jean Philippe Rameau predate the affair by centuries, and are used in a head scratching ballet of military officers; Jehan Alain's pulsating "Litanies," performed with verve by the organist Parker Ramsay, are from the 1930s, decades after Dreyfus was rehabilitated. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Identifying the next great ballet choreographer isn't exactly like recognizing the Messiah, yet for the ballet obsessed there are similarities. Since the deaths of George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton and Jerome Robbins at the end of last century, the sense of loss has remained so strong that critics and audiences have been both desperate to find successors and reflexively skeptical about candidates. Thus it was a big deal in January 2013 when Alastair Macaulay declared in The New York Times that Justin Peck was "the third important choreographer to have emerged in classical ballet this century." Mr. Peck was still a corps dancer at New York City Ballet. (He is now a soloist.) At 25, he was more than decade younger than the other two choreographers on Mr. Macaulay's list: Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky, both acclaimed internationally. And Mr. Macaulay had seen only three works by Mr. Peck; two of them had debuted only months before. Was this hasty judgment? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
I was not excited to review a book about Instagram. Sure, I'm glued to the app; right now those pictures of dogs and babies and my friends' home cooking are my main source of quiet pleasure in these miserable times. But it didn't feel like the moment for a list of reasons as so many books in this genre are of why this app was bad for me, and for the world. Written by the San Francisco based Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier, "No Filter" has a deceptively simple goal: "to bring you the definitive inside story of Instagram," a photo sharing app one billion of us use every single month. But in fact and happily this is a book about Silicon Valley. It is a record of a single app moving through the place. And in making that record, in hewing closely to Instagram and its founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, while giving new texture to the Valley's major players, like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, Frier tells the story of how that place works. Like many tech founders, Systrom hailed from a frat at Stanford, but he always saw himself as more artistic than the other ambitious engineers. Instead of dropping out of school to accept Zuckerberg's offer, in 2005, to join his start up called TheFacebook.com, Systrom studied abroad in Florence. He'd always liked nice things (espresso done just right, fine clothes, old bourbon), but his photography professor made him give up his fancy camera for a simpler device, one that only shot blurry images in square frames. The experience taught him to embrace imperfection; that "just because something is more technically complex doesn't mean it's better." Interning at the podcasting company Odeo, a 22 year old Systrom sat next to a 29 year old engineer, Jack Dorsey. Improbably, this N.Y.U. dropout "with an anarchist tattoo and a nose ring" befriended him. Odeo eventually gave rise to Twitter, an idea he'd dismissed ("They're crazy, Systrom thought. Nobody is going to use this thing") just as he had Facebook. Frier at first blames Systrom's conservative temperament for his pretty bad judgment, but eventually concludes nobody else knew any better than he did. "Silicon Valley looked like it was run by geniuses," she writes, but "from the inside, it was clear that everyone was vulnerable, just like he was, just figuring it out as they went along." After a stint writing marketing copy at Google (which he found so deeply boring he used the office espresso machines to make latte art), in 2009 he built Burbn, an app for people to find their friends and go out. After V.C. investors pushed Systrom to find a co founder, he and Krieger a former Stanford classmate and a more skilled engineer soon turned their focus solely to photo sharing, a feature Burbn lacked. Most cellphone cameras were pretty crummy, so they would provide filters to make the pictures prettier. In 2010, that app became Instagram. The book manages to be cleareyed and objective about the founders and their many flaws, without sensationalizing or oversimplifying a hard balance to strike in tech coverage right now. Their backdrops are hilarious: Basically all of the corporate drama in the book happens around fire pits, at themed bars or twee espresso spots, in hot tubs and at Lake Tahoe. But mostly fire pits. If there is a villain in this tale, it is Zuckerberg. After Systrom sells Instagram to Facebook in 2012 for an (at the time) astonishing 1 billion, Zuckerberg comes off as controlling and cruel, maniacally focused on growth at the expense of all else. Systrom stayed on as Instagram's chief executive, but Frier outlines the ways in which their new owners began to undermine the founders, highlighting the clash in corporate cultures. Instagram has no reshare button by design ("all your posts were yours. That was what the founders wanted"); Zuckerberg wanted constant viral growth. But with this growth came the new worry that Instagram's success would "cannibalize" Facebook's, so Zuckerberg began to downplay Systrom's brand alongside Facebook's news feed. More upsetting, when Systrom tried to build protections against abusive comments, the ex Facebook engineers on his team, reluctant to weed out opportunities for higher engagement, proposed controls that would be prohibitively hard to find and use. "Thanks but no thanks" was Systrom's response. These portions of the book read as a kind of sequel to the movie "The Social Network," an update on the sort of man that young protagonist grew up to be. Frier had a lot of access to the insider Valley gossip, like who got invited to Zuckerberg's parties (and that he served Systrom the boney mystery meat of an animal he had personally killed). She also had access to the Instagram founder himself, from whose perspective this book often seems to be told. The axes to grind are his axes. Every once in a while, in the heat of a dramatic moment, there are reminders of just how silly the stakes are. In an "emergency meeting," Systrom announced that Instagram would be launching a new feature called "stories," basically copying Snapchat. "He explained that every user would get to add videos, which would disappear within 24 hours, to their personal reel," Frier writes. An executive later recalled: "It was like being in the room when John F. Kennedy announces you're going to the moon." This book is not about going to the moon, but we're not going there anyway, or anywhere else; we're on our couches, or in our beds, scrolling through Instagram. Now that that company and the pleasure it brings us are so deeply entrenched in the ever growing behemoth that is Facebook, we need a book like this to explain what it is I'm tapping on all day. I spend hours staring at the screen, and now I have a better sense of who's staring back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"The government is very powerful," a corrupt registrar (Ajay Chourey) tells Aasiya (Shilpi Marwaha) when she arrives for the umpteenth time to beg for a death certificate for her long missing husband. To illustrate his point, the registrar will happily issue the certificate; all Aasiya has to do is sell him her land or lend him her body. Power, and its absence, shape the conflict hardened heart of "Widow of Silence," a serenely beautiful tragedy about women and war. Set in modern Kashmir a territory that India and Pakistan have been wrangling over for more than seven decades this third feature from Praveen Morchhale records Aasiya's desperate quest for freedom and agency. Seven years earlier, her husband disappeared a probable victim of Indian security forces and Aasiya is now a "half widow," unable to claim the title to her husband's land or remarry with a clear conscience. (A solid suitor is waiting, not so patiently, in the wings.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Shocked by Your Tax Refund? Next Year Could Be Worse Unless You Act Now Conor Barnes, an accountant in New York, decided to stop telling her clients to "have a nice day" at the end of their meetings. Often she delivered news that had, in fact, ruined their day: They owed the government money, sometimes a painfully large amount. The overhaul of the tax code the first in three decades caused much confusion this tax season, which was only worsened by the monthlong government shutdown. Many taxpayers were upset when they found out that they owed money to the federal government, even if their tax burden was lower. And if taxpayers don't adjust their paycheck withholdings, next year could bring an even bigger shock. "If they don't go out and make a change now, they will have even less withheld in 2019, so their situation will just get worse," said Nathan Rigney, lead tax research analyst at H R Block's Tax Institute. How did it happen? New guidance from the Internal Revenue Service prompted employers to adjust workers' paychecks last March in an attempt to match up what they would owe under the new tax plan. And in some cases if taxpayers didn't update the relevant withholding forms they ended up owing money, even if their total tax liability dropped. Most Americans got a tax cut, a study says. Most of them don't buy it. "Clients intellectually understand it when you explain it to them," Ms. Barnes said, "but it is emotionally challenging." The updated tables were in effect for about nine months last year. But this year, they'll be in effect for all 12, meaning the problem will be magnified if taxpayers don't take action and soon. Withholdings are updated by filling out I.R.S. form W 4 and giving it to your human resources department, or whoever handles payroll. It's an eye glazing task, which may be why nearly 80 percent of filers, according to H R Block, failed to update last year. "Most people were taking a wait and see approach, as no one is dying to increase withholdings," said Debra Taylor, an accountant and financial adviser in Franklin Lakes, N.J. "It was difficult to generalize how the new law would affect taxpayers as everyone's situation was truly different." If a family was able to take the child tax credit or new qualified business income deduction, they might not have ended up owing anything, even if they could no longer deduct their state and local income taxes, Ms. Taylor said. But if they did not receive benefits from some of the newer tax breaks, "then they could be losing all the way around. Hence the high level of frustration and surprise among folks." Early this tax season, I.R.S. statistics showed that the average taxpayer refund was down nearly 17 percent. Things have evened out since then: As of April 5, the average refund was 2,833, down 1.1 percent from last year. But that's not the whole story: A million fewer taxpayers had received refunds. Averages also gloss over what was happening in individual households across the country. In New Jersey, for example, H R Block found that, on average, its clients owed about 30 percent less in taxes than in 2017. But their refunds declined by about 6 percent, according to an analysis among customers who filed through the end of March. Over all, H R Block said that its average taxpayer's total liability dropped by 1,200, while refunds were up 43. Instead of substantially bigger refunds, those taxpayers received about 50 more in their biweekly paychecks starting in March 2018, for a total of 1,156 which they may not have even noticed. Whether or not you owed for 2018, now is the time to update your withholdings. The I.R.S. suggests performing a "paycheck checkup" annually to avoid surprises. Big life events like getting married or having a child are other reasons to go through this exercise again. Using the I.R.S.'s withholding calculator makes it easier to fill out the W 4. TurboTax and H R Block offer similar tools. The calculator helps taxpayers estimate their 2019 income tax and compare that amount with their current withholding. That will show them whether they should have more or less money withheld from their paychecks. The amount withheld is determined by the number of so called allowances. The fewer allowances you claim, the more is set aside from each check. You can increase your withholdings further by specifying an additional flat dollar amount to be set aside each pay period. To use the I.R.S. calculator, you will need a copy of your 2018 return, along with your most recent pay stub (and your spouse's, if applicable). The calculator can determine how much you need to withhold to end up with the right amount set aside at the end of the year. But it's already April. If you need to withhold more, the longer you wait, the fewer pay periods there will be to absorb the changes. Make sure you keep all of that information handy you will probably have to do this again, and sooner than you would like. The reason? The I.R.S. is updating the W 4 form. The W 4 has to be overhauled because it was built around personal and dependent exemptions, which the new tax law eliminated. The tax and payroll industry was critical of the initial proposal released last June. They said it was far too complicated for workers and their employers, and it also asked workers to provide sensitive information about outside income, among other things that they might not want to share with an employer. A new draft is expected at the end of May. After soliciting comments and making more tweaks, the final version should be available by the end of the year, in time for the 2020 tax year. It hasn't been an easy task. "Do you want the form to be absolutely accurate or do you want it to be simple and easy to complete?" said Alice Jacobsohn, senior manager of government relations for the American Payroll Association, a group for industry professionals. When the new form is available, you should probably run through the withholding exercise again. Your employer might ask you to fill out the revised form anyway. But as you work out how much you want withheld, keep one thing in mind: As good as it feels to get a fat refund, what you're really doing is giving the government an interest free loan. So instead of withholding too much, you might direct that extra bit of money into an interest bearing account, and pay yourself instead. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Profiling four members of an underdog high school wrestling team in Huntsville, Alabama, "Wrestle" constructs an empathetic portrait of a mat that's anything but level. Filmed in 2015 16 during its third season, the team is already defeating more experienced and better financed opponents. Yet, as the countdown to the State Championship begins, we see how deprivation can hobble the most promising talent. Parents are incarcerated or otherwise invisible, and the school, with one of the highest concentrations of poor students in the state, has been listed as failing for years. Resources for athletics are virtually nonexistent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The coronavirus won't be loosening its grip on the United States any time soon, leading infectious disease experts said on Sunday. They are also uncertain how the viral spread will be affected by the patchwork of states reopening businesses and by large events like protests and President Trump's upcoming campaign rallies. "This virus is not going to rest" until it infects about 60 percent to 70 percent of the population, Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said on "Fox News Sunday." Experts have estimated that without a vaccine, about 70 percent of the population will need to be infected and develop immunity in order to stop the virus's spread, a concept called herd immunity. The number of confirmed American cases now exceeds 2 million, less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Johns Hopkins Covid 19 Dashboard and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Joseph Fair, a virologist and epidemiologist who recently recovered from a serious bout of Covid 19, echoed that view on NBC's "Meet the Press." "Once it gets so ingrained in the population, there's not a point where we can come back from that other than having a vaccine in place," said Dr. Fair, who is a medical contributor to NBC News. Dr. Osterholm said that recent data show the rate of new cases has been level in eight states, increasing in 22 states and decreasing in the rest. The increase is not simply because of more widely available testing, the experts said, noting that an especially worrisome development is a rise in hospitalizations in several states. "At this point, hospitals are at risk of getting overwhelmed and that is basically signaling to me that those states are already behind," said Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, medical director of the special pathogens unit at Boston University School of Medicine, who also appeared on the NBC News program on Sunday. The C.D.C. recently projected that by July 4, coronavirus deaths in the United States will likely jump from the current level of about 115,000 to somewhere between 124,000 and 140,000. Dr. Bhadelia said the rise in cases in some states, especially in the South and West, suggested that "we opened too early in those states. We didn't have the ability to basically trace down those chains of transmission and stop them once people started mingling again." But Dr. Osterholm said the reasons are still unclear. "Do we think reopening is going to increase cases? Sure should. But we have examples of states where it hasn't happened," he said, adding, "We don't really know what is actually making the virus move like it is right now in some states and not others." He said that so far there have not been widespread indications that protests over police killings of African Americans and racial injustice have led to a spike in cases. He pointed out that because the virus has an incubation period of up to two weeks, any such effect will become clearer in the coming days. He and other experts have noted that the BlackLivesMatter protests are taking place outdoors and that many participants are wearing masks, steps expected to limit the spread of the virus. "On the other hand, yelling, screaming, being exposed to tear gas or smoke, which causes coughing, being put into a holding cell overnight in jail if you're arrested all are reasons why you would expect to see more cases," Dr. Osterholm said. The risk of viral spread at a rally like the one President Trump has planned for next weekend in Oklahoma is much higher, the experts said, because the rally will be indoors in a large arena and there will no requirement that attendees wear masks. "It's a perfect storm setup: the idea of tons of people, where one sick person can have an impact of generating secondary cases on this immense level, where it's indoors, where there's no ventilation," Dr. Bhadelia said. "I would move it to the outdoors, I would reduce the number of people, I would introduce social distancing, and I would require everybody to wear a mask." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
It wasn't the first time we'd eaten pizza with friends in a food court. But doing it while wearing a custom made sequined gown and suit? At the Grammys? Definitely a first. We were at Madison Square Garden, husband and wife nominees for the cast album of our Broadway musical "Come From Away" a story about strangers landing somewhere they never expected to be. Which was pretty much us that night. Together with our co nominees and guests (our director and choreographer), we passed metal detectors, bomb sniffing dogs and a giant golden gramophone to the entrance to the Garden, where a million photographers begged us to stand still. On our right a small bleacher of extras were there to cheer for whoever hit the carpet. Though they had no idea who we were, they were remarkably convincing. It's not that long ago that we worked as extras on films shot in our home, Toronto; it's not that long ago that we were between day jobs and hoping we could afford decent clothes. Now Irene was in a beaded Este Chlo, designed by Henry Picado, with spectacular Gurhan earrings on loan for the night and generally making us nervous. David was wearing a Shinesty red and plaid suit a shout out to Canada and a fashion declaration that we were there to have fun. Somehow, we kind of matched. There are actually two Grammys ceremonies: the televised one in the evening with the pop stars and pyro, and an afternoon event in an adjacent smaller theater for the presentation of awards in 75 other categories, from best spoken word to best liner notes to best Latin jazz to ... best music theater album! The 75 awards go fast they are on a schedule. One moment we're realizing that we forgot to write a speech, and the next moment it doesn't matter, as we cheered for our neighbor on 45th Street, "Dear Evan Hansen." Then we went to get food. But the Grammys take security very seriously. We'd been warned sternly that nominees and guests weren't allowed to leave, or we wouldn't be readmitted. Until 5:15 we couldn't even leave our theater's lobby, where there was nothing to eat or drink, except water. By 5 p.m. the crowd was going squirrelly, packed by the doors. Finally we were released and ushered up to the sixth floor concession stands in the big arena. That's where we found ourselves, scrounging for dinner in a "Come From Away" cluster for the next three hours. There were no chairs and only a few food vendors, serving sushi, hot dogs and pizza. The bar had the longest line, and we all took turns getting cocktails. We kept our eye out for celebrities, but suspected they were somewhere with chairs. Nearby, a woman tripped on her sequins and/or stilettos and/or the slippery floor and landed with an audible thud. Irene reminded herself to walk very, very carefully, and maybe cool it on the cocktails. For the first time in the six years of working on "Come From Away," we were all together with nowhere to go, no rewrites to make, no scenes to restage. Somewhat like the airline passengers described in our show, who were diverted to Newfoundland after 9/11, we couldn't leave. So we did what they did. Enjoyed each other's company. Made each other laugh. We are practically family these people have been with us through five productions and on Sunday we're celebrating our first anniversary on Broadway and the opening night of our second production in Toronto. Later this year, we're starting a tour, and a film is in the works. Anybody who has made an album or a musical knows that it can break up the best of friends or, y'know, a married writing team. So the fact that we still actually love each other? That's worth celebrating. When it was time for the concert, we sneaked drinks past the ushers and took our seats way up in the 100s, far away from the stars but still with a great view. Confession time: We are not up to date on the latest pop music. Maybe it's because we have a 4 year old. Maybe it's because we are theater nerds. Maybe we just work a lot. But that didn't stop it from being a crazy awesome concert. Kendrick Lamar's opening was amazing theater. Pyro. Smoke. Dave Chappelle. While it was happening, in another direction we could see Lady Gaga being led out to her piano. Throughout the night, we watched artists and techs setting up a show bigger than anything on Broadway. Massive props (theater pun!) to everyone backstage pulling off this magic. We were thrilled to see our fellow Canadian Alessia Cara get a win, and it was incredible to see all the white roses and to cheer for Janelle Monae's and Kesha's TimesUp messages. But you could actually feel the lack of female representation among the winners. Normally we'd be thrilled to find something in common with our theatrical world, but in 2018, the lack of equity unfortunately seems to be across the board. We were out of vodka and water when Bruno Mars gave his final acceptance speech, about the tourist aimed variety show he worked on in Hawaii before he became a pop star. "I remember seeing it first hand," he says. "People dancing that had never met each other. From two sides of the globe, dancing with each other, toasting with each other. Celebrating together." I don't think we could have better described our album. That's what got us here tonight. We didn't meet any celebrities at the after parties at the Marriott Marquis, though we did pass Neil deGrasse Tyson. A bartender on the third party floor told us that if we see Usher we should send him her way. She asked us if we were famous. We told her we wrote the musical playing across the street and she smiled politely. Then she reminded us to send Usher her way. By 2:30 a.m., we were at the after after party, exhausted and having worn our shoes for waaaay too long. Some of our friends were still with us. We realized that the best part of the night wasn't the pyro or the people watching it was eating pizza in a food court all together, enjoying the craziness. As Bruno Mars said at the end of his speech, "Hopefully I can feel that again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Here, as in her previous fiction, Ms. Shields writes with an almost painfully attuned ear for the nuances of language and the way they attach to feelings and probe the most delicate layers of human consciousness. Her words ring like stones in a brook, chilled and perfected; the syntax rushes like water, tumbling with the slight forward tilt that makes for narrative. The reader is caught in whirlpools and eddies, swirled, then launched farther downstream. The diaries leap from decade to decade, tracing the stages of Daisy's life: her first, tragic marriage to a boy from Bloomington, her second marriage to her old guardian, Barker, and the birth of her children. The fact that her life fits the familiar contours is, somehow, refreshing; Daisy is Everywoman, and her crises are the normal ones. There is little in the way of conventional plot here, but its absence does nothing to diminish the narrative compulsion of this novel. has explored the mysteries of life with abandon, taking unusual risks along the way. "The Stone Diaries" reminds us again why literature matters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
MUD (2013) on Amazon, Google Play, Hulu, iTunes and Vudu. In small town Arkansas, two boys, Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), explore an island on the Mississippi River and make two discoveries: a boat wedged in a tree and a sun kissed runaway who's been living in it. That man, Mud (Matthew McConaughey), comes to rely on the boys as they supply him with food. He in turn supplies them with colorful stories in this coming of age drama from the director Jeff Nichols. In his review for The Times, A. O. Scott wrote: "Mr. Nichols's screenplay is perhaps a little too heavily plotted, especially toward the end, when everything comes together neatly and noisily, but he more than compensates with graceful rhythm, an unfussy eye for natural beauty and a sure sense of character and place." BEN HUR (1959) 8 p.m. on TCM. Watch one of Hollywood's biggest films on the small screen when TCM shows this epic, which turns 60 this year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
At a literacy center in Brooklyn where I volunteered a couple of years ago, I was often surprised by which books would catch a child's eye. It was not always the ones with bold jackets or zany titles, as I somehow expected. Often it would be a quiet story a bit old fashioned, even. One favorite was Barbara Cooney's 1982 "Miss Rumphius," about a girl who grows up wanting to fulfill her grandfather's request that she do something "to make the world more beautiful." After many travels she finally returns home and plants a lot of blue and purple lupines in the fields around her house. The end. I loved to watch how intently a young reader would turn the pages and puzzle out this modest and satisfying conclusion. I enjoyed the story, too and while it was partly inspired by a real life figure, I wanted it to be all true. Publishers of today's picture books must be on my wavelength. Perhaps nudged by the Common Core crusade, which called in part for high quality nonfiction for children, they are producing a bonanza of beautifully illustrated and closely researched nonfiction books about unsung heroes as well as heroes we can't read enough about. Best of all, if you like true stories, they include superbly detailed endnotes and suggestions for further reading. It's anyone's guess which of these new books a child might reach for but it might surprise you. Children who love words should warm to Alexandria Giardino's ODE TO AN ONION: Pablo Neruda and His Muse (Cameron Kids, 32 pp., 17.95; ages 4 to 8), which imagines a small episode in the life of a great poet. The spare prose echoes Neruda's own celebrations in verse of simple things, like the onion: "luminous vessel ... bright as a planet," vanquishing "the hunger / of the laborer along the hard road." We first see Pablo at his desk, "writing a long, sad poem," until he realizes he's about to be late for lunch with his friend Mathilde. In Felicita Sala's vivacious and beautifully detailed drawings, done in colored pencil, Mathilde's smile and Pablo's glum expression give a tender humor to this real life relationship, as they gather vegetables from her garden to cook. The full text of his poem "Ode to the Onion" appears in the original Spanish at the end, and in an excellent translation by Giardino. SO TALL WITHIN: Sojourner Truth's Long Walk Toward Freedom (Roaring Brook, 32 pp., 18.99; ages 5 to 9), written by Gary D. Schmidt and illustrated by Daniel Minter, is a stirring introduction to an extraordinary life. Born into slavery on a Dutch farm in New York State, Sojourner Truth chose her own name after she won her freedom and began a walk that, over her long life, extended to thousands of miles as she journeyed from camp meetings to abolition halls "to tell the truth about Slavery." She never learned to read or write, yet successfully sued a white slaveholder in court for the return of her son (who had been illegally sold), addressed the first Women's Rights Conventions, and insisted on riding in whites only streetcars in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War. "I felt so tall within I felt as if the power of a nation was with me!" The plain spoken and eloquent quotations in this book come directly from her 1878 memoir, "Narrative of Sojourner Truth." Daniel Minter's paintings, in saturated tones of midnight blues and leaf browns and golds, bring it powerfully to life. Did you know that Japan bombed Oregon during World War II? I didn't either. Sometimes the most inconsequential episodes in larger stories can turn out to be the most moving, and so it is with THIRTY MINUTES OVER OREGON: A Japanese Pilot's World War II Story (Clarion, 32 pp., 17.99; ages 6 to 9), by Marc Tyler Nobleman, illustrated by Melissa Iwai. After Pearl Harbor, apparently, the Japanese military believed a successful attack on the United States mainland would be effective propaganda, so in 1942 a bombing raid was planned to start a fire in the Oregon woods that would "rage into nearby towns and cities." Iwai's fine renderings of the unsuspecting townspeople of Brookings, Ore., are matched by her depictions of the bomber, which was launched from a Japanese submarine deck by slingshot. Fortunately, the plan failed, but the story goes someplace completely unexpected when, years later, the boosterish citizens of Brookings track down the pilot, Nobuo Fujita, to invite him to a Memorial Day ceremony. He is welcomed warmly and even teased about his poor fire setting skills and friendships made that day continue to grow for another generation and beyond, until his story becomes a thought provoking meditation on the power of forgiveness, of others and oneself. The "girls who code" movement should probably get some extra credit for the trend in fine books about women who made history in science and math. NOTHING STOPPED SOPHIE: The Story of Unshakable Mathematician Sophie Germain (Little, Brown, 32 pp., 17.99; ages 4 to 8), written by Cheryl Bardoe and illustrated by Barbara McClintock, tells the story of a young woman who made her mark in the lofty academies of Paris after the French Revolution. With trouble in the streets, Sophie was often forced to stay inside for her safety, and she fell in love with the study of mathematics. She would even sneak out of bed to work on problems while everyone was asleep. Her parents' response? To take away her candles! Yet she didn't give up, and in 1816, after years of work, she won a grand prize from the Royal Academy of Sciences for solving an "impossible" problem: how to predict patterns of vibration, a real life challenge to designers of buildings and bridges. Barbara McClintock's illustrations in markers, gouache and collage show Sophie moving through life in a bright swirl of numbers, floating like thought balloons all around her. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
For 50 years, Paul Theroux's addictive novels and brutally honest travel narratives have inspired readers to leave home, travel slow and with a purpose beyond sightseeing. His versatility and boundless curiosity shine in "Figures in a Landscape," a new collection of essays (to be published on May 8), and in his latest autobiographical novel, "Mother Land" (which will be published in paperback on May 1), where Mr. Theroux takes readers to his beloved Cape Cod and deep inside the Machiavellian world of a large, dysfunctional family run by a scheming matriarch. It's a deeply revealing and wickedly funny gem that may be the best book ever written about the interpersonal dynamics of a big family. Following are edited excerpts from a conversation with him. Why did you choose to set this novel on Cape Cod? The Cape is the scene of my childhood happiness. As a traveler, you look for conflicted or misunderstood or little known places good places to write about. But the place that makes you happy as a child is one you return to the blue remembered hills, the happy highways of the Housman poem. If you have the opportunity, you go back there to recapture that sense of serenity you had in your childhood. My childhood was late 40s, early 50s a period when Cape Cod was small and simple. The cottage we rented didn't have a refrigerator; there was an ice man who delivered blocks of ice for the chest. I remember the sunshine, the beaches, the smell of the salt marshes. I grew up in Medford Massachusetts , but my parents moved to the Cape, and I always wanted to come back here. And so, as soon as I had some money, around 1975, when I was living in London, I bought a house on the Cape and I've spent every summer here since then. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, pioneering transgender activists who were at the vanguard of the gay rights movement, will be immortalized in a monument that may be placed down the street from the Stonewall Inn, the city said on Wednesday. Ms. Johnson and Ms. Rivera were both drag performers and vibrant characters in Greenwich Village street life who worked on behalf of homeless L.G.B.T.Q. youth and those affected by H.I.V./AIDS. They are also believed to have been key figures in the June 1969 Stonewall Uprising who fought police as they raided the gay bar on Christopher Street. The planned monument will be publicly announced on Thursday in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, which was a seminal moment for gay rights. It is also part of the city's effort to fix a glaring gender gap in public art. Statues of L.G.B.T.Q. individuals are virtually nonexistent among the city's monuments, and the city says the dedication to Johnson and Rivera will be one of the world's first for transgender people. The monument is proposed for Ruth Wittenberg Triangle, a short walk from Stonewall. In 1992, the city unveiled a set of statues in Christopher Park, across the street from Stonewall , by the artist George Segal to commemorate the uprising. The four figures, two standing men and two sitting women, are painted white and do not appear to depict particular people. Critics have said the sculpture excludes transgender women and women of color. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Habits are hard to break. That's one reason people are still asking "How's it going?" during a world upending pandemic. A similarly reflexive "Fine" often follows, which is why it was so jarring when, during a recent interview, the pianist Lang Lang responded with a wince and shouted: "It's horrible!" This is a difficult time for everyone in classical music, as in person performances have all but come to a halt worldwide. Mr. Lang, one of the industry's biggest stars and moneymakers, is relatively safe from financial devastation. But being sidelined by forces beyond his control is painfully familiar to him. He injured his left arm in 2017, and the recovery put him out of commission for more than a year. "I've had a break already," Mr. Lang, 38, said over Zoom from his home in Shanghai. "This time, I'm so ready, but I cannot play a concert. That's much more frustrating." He made it three stops into the tour, all in Germany, before the rest was canceled. But before leaving, he made a studio recording of the "Goldbergs" in Berlin and a live one at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach worked. Both versions will be on the coming release. That wasn't always the plan, Mr. Lang said, but he pushed to include the live performance after listening to it and finding that he appreciated its spontaneity and "floating" nature. Still, he added, he prefers the studio recording, which he believes shows more depth. Few works elicit more varied interpretations than the "Goldbergs." Performers bring personal touches to repertory staples like concertos by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, but on balance those works have a consistent running time and a generally agreed upon sound. But Bach's set of 30 variations, surrounded by two iterations of an Aria of music box simplicity, is written with such austerity that it's something of a blank canvas. There is no rule book for ornamentation; virtually absent tempo markings mean it can last less than an hour or, in the case of Mr. Lang's reading, more than 90 minutes. It can be heard on harpsichords or modern pianos, or even transcribed for other instruments. Despite being an audience favorite, Mr. Lang has long left critics scratching their heads over his undeniable skill and his questionable taste, his expressiveness and his pop star mannerisms. And he will yet again divide listeners with his "Goldbergs." Baroque specialists in particular may bristle at his occasionally counterintuitive voicing, with unconventional emphasis on particular notes and phrases, and his rubato rhythmic manipulation that sometimes pushes the meter toward unrecognizability. The slow 25th variation, which typically lasts six or seven minutes, is here stretched beyond 10; Mr. Lang's studio version of the closing Aria is nearly six and a half minutes long, while most pianists stay shy of four. But regardless what people think about Mr. Lang's interpretation, they cannot write it off as unconsidered. It's deeply felt and two decades in the making. Like all piano students, Mr. Lang played a lot of Bach as a child, from the easy minuets to the encyclopedic "Well Tempered Clavier." He used fast sections of the "Goldbergs" for exercises, but didn't perform the work in its entirety until, after coming to stardom as a substitute at the Ravinia Festival near Chicago in 1999, he recounted it from memory in the middle of the night for some fellow musicians. Mr. Lang said he didn't want to publicly share his "Goldbergs" until the moment felt right. In his mid 20s, he played the work for the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt during an informal audition for the Salzburg Festival. He recalled Harnoncourt saying, "You play Bach with no imagination," urging him to play with fewer reservations and more lyrical melodic lines. "He started singing the theme of Variation 3, and I was like, wow, can Bach be played this Romantic?" Mr. Lang said. "I was quite overwhelmed by his emotions." Mr. Lang has since sought advice from other artists, including the German pianist and harpsichordist Andreas Staier, who taught him the importance of approaching the "Goldbergs" with scholarly rigor. Learning the piece, Mr. Lang said, has improved his understanding of composition, and of music itself. "It takes you to another level of thinking," he said. With his copy of the score in hand, Mr. Lang discussed what he has learned about the "Goldbergs," and how he arrived at his interpretation. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. Your career was made with Romantic concertos, but lately you've worked backward in time, now to the Baroque. Does this style come naturally to you? It does, but I've played it much less than the Romantic or Classical repertoire. And Bach is another planet. When I met Andreas Staier , he told me this piece needs to have a real knowledge behind the strategy. You cannot think about this as a 10 minute or a 30 minute piece or concerto. You have to hold your cards in your hands and not throw your cards at the same time. He said I had to learn each variation with a kind of calm temperament, and not get overheated on Variation 1. What has guided your interpretation? This is an entire piece, but at the same time it's separate pieces. In that way, each of the variations has to have a calculated way of playing. You cannot play everything the same way. I feel like you're most personal in the rubato and ornamentation. Those can be difficult to balance, and Baroque rules can be very particular. How did you find what works for you? With rubato, it's the theory of the roots of the tree and the leaves going up. In this case, the left hand is not always the roots in Bach's music. In the Aria it is, but in other variations, maybe it's the middle voice. But you always need to find where the roots are, and those need to be steady. Then the melodic line can be a little different. I realized doing some of my studio recording, sometimes I gave a lot of rubato and had to come back, because then it can fall apart very easily. You can hear that you're losing the pulse. You play as little ornamentation as possible the first time through. Each section of the "Goldbergs" is divided into two parts that are both repeated. Then on the repeat you can do ornamentation to give it a little bit of improvisational style. If it sounds like everything is planned, the ornamentation loses its real meaning. Sometimes, you can even add a few chords here and there to make it a little more colorful. In the French overture, Variation 16, I try to make it more like an organ piece, so I add a little more lower voice. But we have to be careful to not have strange ornamentation that sounds like Messiaen or something. Some of my ornamentation was corrected by Baroque musicians. Let's talk about some specific sections. The Aria is a perfect example of how the "Goldbergs" can be played any number of ways. I intended to play slightly slower than other musicians, especially in the studio. It gives me a quietness, slightly more space. But obviously it needs to be legato. If I can really connect each note, then I can play slower because it gives me a grounded feeling. And Variation 7, the gigue, is a place where you seem to really loosen up. For the repeat, I played the chords, the sixth and the third, under the main voice. This is what I learned from the Baroque way of playing. They often add lower sixth and lower third to make it like a bell sound. It's more notes, but actually a lighter feel. This is the character of the piece. It needs to bubble. For an open ended section like this, do you consult with older recordings or artists? Especially on this one, I got a huge inspiration from Glenn Gould. He is someone who is not afraid to play fast passages really fast. I think that's why people like his "Goldberg" Variations. It has such an inspired character. He gave me the confidence that some parts can be very exciting; you can just let it go. What does the return of the Aria at the end mean for you? Variation 30 is the most important connection for me. It's a combination of three popular songs, German folk songs. I copied the lyrics, and the third is about home. This created a great transition to the Aria. And without this variation I think the Aria would be so much harder to play, after those fireworks: After the Adagio, Variation 25, you have four variations that are fast and virtuosic. It's just impossible to get back to the Aria. But when you have this family reunion song in the 30th, you suddenly realize that you are getting older. The truth is, we don't need to think too much to play the Aria this second time. It's already different, automatically, no matter what you do. After certain things, you're changed. You don't need to say it; you just are. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
It sure does get exhausting working for the global corporate media conspiracy. The hours are horrible (my kingdom for a weekend off). You never know what the puppet masters are going to order up next. (I wish that guy from Mexico, What's His Face Slim, would get off my back.) And there's no extra combat pay when, at this point, there clearly should be. I probably shouldn't joke (and yes, Twitter, that's what I'm doing). The anger being directed at the news media has become dangerous enough that some news organizations are providing security for staff members covering Trump rallies. "Someone's going to get hurt" has become a common refrain in American newsrooms. On Thursday, Jim Acosta of CNN held up a sign left in the press section of Donald J. Trump's rally in West Palm Beach that featured a swastika next to the word "Media." Later, in Cincinnati, the crowd met reporters with sustained boos, curses and chants of, "Tell the truth, tell the truth." It was as tense as anyone had seen it since the candidacy of George Wallace, and yet it was almost understandable given what Mr. Trump had been telling them: The news media was trying to "poison the minds" of voters with "lies, lies, lies." All of it, he said, is part of a "conspiracy against you, the American people" that also includes "global financial interests." The idea that the press is part of some grand conspiracy against the people, presented in such incendiary terms, goes well beyond the longstanding Republican complaints about liberal bias. You'd more expect to hear it from Lenin or the pages of the anti Semitic publication American Free Press than from the standard bearer of the Republican Party. But it is resonating with a large portion of the American electorate. There are many reasons, some of which should cause the news media to make good on its promises to examine its own disconnect from the cross section of Americans whose support for Mr. Trump it never saw coming. We can debate whether the "corporate" news media is as left leaning as critics claim. The answer, as I see it, is more than they'll admit to themselves and less than conservatives claim. But there is little question that it is out of step with Mr. Trump's die hards on the issues upon which Mr. Trump won them over, especially immigration and trade. And this tracks across the ideological divide in the mainstream media. For all their many differences, the right leaning editorial board of The Wall Street Journal and the left leaning editorial boards of The New York Times and The Washington Post share the beliefs that global free trade is generally beneficial and that the United States needs to create ways to legalize the undocumented immigrant work force. The newsrooms of The Times, The Journal and The Post operate independently from their editorial pages. But their coverage certainly does not start from the premise that an immigration overhaul would unduly reward the original sin of illegal border crossing or that free trade deals threaten our national sovereignty. Then there are big attitudinal differences that come from the fact that the biggest American newsrooms are in major cities. "One of the reasons the national media initially missed the rise of Trump was because so much of it is based on the coasts," said Joanne Lipman, editor in chief of the USA Today Network, which Gannett formed in December, in part, to combine the sensibilities of the 110 newspapers it owns throughout red state and blue state America. There also tends to be a shared sense of noble mission across the news media that can preclude journalists from questioning their own potential biases. 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. "The people who run American journalism, and who staff the newsrooms, think of themselves as sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and, culturally speaking, on the right side of history," Rod Dreher, a senior editor at The American Conservative, told me. "They don't know what they don't know and they don't care to know it." It's a pretty sweeping generalization. But a considerable percentage of the country believes it. An even larger percentage of Mr. Trump's voters do. No matter what happens on Nov. 8, the notion isn't going away. American newsrooms will be making a big mistake and missing a huge continuing story if they fail to adjust their coverage to better illuminate the concerns of Mr. Trump's supporters well beyond Election Day. Doing so might begin to build up trust in the news media, which the Gallup Organization reported as hitting a new low in September. But there is something else that will help: a far more assertive defense from the news media, of what it does well and honestly, and against the sustained attempts to impugn its motives through the many false and misleading political style attacks that too often are mixed in with the valid criticism. Just look at this past week, starting with the trove of Clinton campaign emails released by WikiLeaks possibly aided by Russian sponsored hackers, according to United States intelligence officials. Mr. Trump seized upon them as proof of media bias favoring Hillary Clinton. Citing their provenance purloined from the personal account of Mrs. Clinton's adviser John Podesta campaign officials have refused to verify them publicly. But they have not disputed emails that lay bare the back channel communication between reporters and political operatives. An email chain that purported to show the Democratic Party official Donna Brazile sharing with the Clinton campaign a question from a coming primary season town hall was particularly disturbing. (CNN has denied sharing any questions with Ms. Brazile, who denied having access to them.) But most of the emails show reporters, including some at The Times, trying to: Get permission to use quotations from an off the record interview; run details in a coming story past political aides to make sure they are correct (called fact checking), or alert Mr. Podesta that his name was to come up in a critical article (the opposite of which is to ambush). That's standard interplay between reporters and political aides. It isn't always pretty. Reporters can make mistakes, become overly chummy with sources and fall into traps that give the campaigns too much power over their reporting. Much as they should resist it, that happens on a bipartisan basis. It is not evidence that the news media, including The New York Times, is working in tandem with "globalists" and Mrs. Clinton's campaign to deliver her the presidency. In the case of The Times, Mr. Trump has made its largest individual shareholder, Carlos Slim, of Mexico, part of the conspiracy. The Times's publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. whose family controls the company's voting shares said in a statement that Mr. Slim "has never sought to influence what we report." The Times's executive editor, Dean Baquet, recently told me that he had never even met Mr. Slim. Mr. Trump apparently had no problems doing media business with Mr. Slim "a good guy," he had called him on David Letterman's show before the election. It was just 2015 when a production company Mr. Slim controls, Ora TV, announced it was canceling a television project it said it had in the works with Mr. Trump, citing his comments about Mexicans. Previously, I had mostly noticed suggestions of a Slim Times conspiracy on sites like Breitbart and alt right Twitter accounts. In giving those allegations prominence, the standard bearer of the Republican Party is adding a sinister, false twist to his press criticism that arguably puts the reporters covering his rallies in danger. In effect, he is painting them as traitors. Now, who's poisoning the minds of the electorate? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Where You Can See the Stars of 'Hamilton' Now None Disney Plus, via Associated Press When a hip hop musical chronicling the life of a Treasury secretary made its way uptown to Broadway in 2015, a fair number of the faces onstage were still relatively unknown. Many know the story of what would come next: "Hamilton" became an instant hit, sweeping up praise and accolades and drawing an army of devoted fans. There were the 11 Tonys, not to mention the Grammy, the Pulitzer Prize and the Kennedy Center Honor. Critics heralded the show as transformative, emblematic of a new age in American musical theater. And the original cast? The mix of Broadway veterans and newcomers was elevated to a status of celebrity that theater performers rarely reach. The show that will long be considered their most memorable performance is now immortalized onscreen, filmed over three days in the summer of 2016 and now showing on Disney . Here's what the original cast members have been working on since their time in the show. His character in the show: Alexander Hamilton. His career since then: Whenever it feels like you've got too much on your plate, like you can't possibly do it all, we invite you to look at Miranda's workload since he left the show. The musical's creator and original Hamilton was already well known in the theater world as the composer and lyricist for the Tony winning "In the Heights" (2008), his first Broadway show. And after the success of "Hamilton," he has kept busy: He wrote songs for "Moana" in 2016 and starred in "Mary Poppins Returns" last year. On the small screen, he appeared in the series "His Dark Materials" on HBO as well as "Fosse/Verdon" on FX, which he also helped executive produce. He returned to Broadway late last year with "Freestyle Love Supreme," the improvised hip hop musical sketch show he helped create. Coming up, he has a role in and served as a producer on the film adaptation of "In the Heights," and he's working on two new songwriting projects for Disney: an animated musical set in Colombia and a live action remake of "The Little Mermaid," for which he is writing new lyrics with the original composer, Alan Menken. He is also slated to direct a film adaptation of the Jonathan Larson musical "Tick, Tick ... Boom!" for Netflix. His character in the show: Aaron Burr. Odom won the Tony Award for best actor in a musical for his turn as Hamilton's perilously ambitious rival. His career since then: He has released two albums and has had roles in such films as the 2017 mystery "Murder on the Orient Express" and the 2019 biopic "Harriet." Odom is also set to star in several films, including Regina King's "One Night in Miami" (he's playing Sam Cooke), John Ridley's "Needle in a Timestack" and the "Sopranos" prequel, "The Many Saints of Newark." Her character in the show: Angelica Schuyler. Goldsberry was a familiar face on Broadway she had already appeared in "Rent," "The Lion King" and the original cast of "The Color Purple" before her performance as the eldest Schuyler sister earned her the Tony for best featured actress in a musical. Her career since then: She has turned her focus to film and TV, appearing in the 2019 Trey Edward Shults drama "Waves" and playing the title character, alongside Oprah Winfrey, in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" (2017) the HBO film adaptation of the 2010 best selling book. She has been starring in the Netflix sci fi series "Altered Carbon" since 2018. Her character in the show: Eliza Hamilton, Alexander's wife. Her career since then: Soo's most recent stage role was Off Broadway, in "Tumacho" a supernatural Western comedy that ran for less than a month before the pandemic shuttered live performances. Her other shows post "Hamilton" have had somewhat longer runs, including "Amelie" on Broadway, where Soo played the title role in the musical based on the 2001 French film, and "The Parisian Woman," where she appeared alongside Uma Thurman. Onscreen, Soo will next be seen in "The Broken Hearts Gallery," a romantic comedy slated to premiere in theaters next month. She's also voicing the moon goddess Chang'e in the Netflix animated musical "Over the Moon" later this year. His characters in the show: Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. His dual role led to a Tony win for featured actor in a musical. His career since then: He went on to star in the 2018 film "Blindspotting," which he also co wrote. But he has spent much of the past several years in television, most recently starring in TNT's "Snowpiercer," the dystopian thriller series adapted from Bong Joon Ho's 2013 film. He also appeared on "black ish," "Central Park," "The Get Down" and "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." Diggs was part of the rotating cast of "Freestyle Love Supreme" on Broadway with fellow "Hamilton" castmates Miranda and Christopher Jackson, and a documentary about that show is scheduled to premiere on Hulu on July 17. Up next are two Disney projects: He's providing a voice in the Pixar tale "Soul" and playing Sebastian in the live action "The Little Mermaid." His characters in the show: John Laurens, a fellow revolutionary, and Hamilton's son Philip. His career since then: Ramos's biggest role will come in another Lin Manuel Miranda project as leading man Usnavi in the film adaptation of "In the Heights," due next summer. He has also starred in Spike Lee's Netflix reboot "She's Gotta Have It" and on the big screen appeared in "A Star Is Born" (2018) and the recent "Trolls World Tour." Ramos will also have a role in the film "Honest Thief" later this year, alongside Liam Neeson and fellow "Hamilton" veteran Jasmine Cephas Jones, who happens to be his fiancee. The actress opposite Peter Dinklage in a production of "Cyrano." Jeenah Moon for The New York Times Her characters in the show: Peggy Schuyler, the youngest Schuyler sister, and Maria Reynolds, Hamilton's mistress. Her career since then: She moved Off Broadway in 2019, starring in the musical "Cyrano" alongside Peter Dinklage. She also appeared in HBO's "Mrs. Fletcher" and "Girls" and continues to work with other cast members from "Hamilton": She was in "Blindspotting" with Diggs, and will be in "Honest Thief" with Ramos and "One Night in Miami" with Odom. His character in the show: King George III. His career since then: Groff's most recent onstage role was a full 180 from the pompous caped monarch he played several years ago. In the "Little Shop of Horrors" revival that opened Off Broadway in 2019, the royal dramatics were replaced with a steep drop in confidence as Seymour, the nerdy flower shop worker charged with handling a man eating plant. Last year, Groff also reprised his role as Kristoff in "Frozen 2" (with his own campy '80s ballad to sing this time around) and has starred in Netflix's significantly less cheery series "Mindhunter." His character in the show: George Washington. His career since then: Jackson was a Broadway veteran (his credits include Miranda's "In the Heights") when he joined "Hamilton." After he left the show, he was a rotating guest on the Broadway show "Freestyle Love Supreme" through closing night earlier this year. He appeared in "When They See Us" on Netflix and sang the father of "Moana" in 2016. He also stars in "Bull" on CBS, which he began filming while still in "Hamilton." His characters in the show: Hercules Mulligan, another revolutionary, and James Madison. His career since then: Onaodowan took over for Josh Groban in "Natasha, Pierre The Great Comet of 1812" on Broadway. On the small screen, he has appeared on "The Get Down," "Girls" and "BoJack Horseman." But his main role has been playing the firefighter Dean Miller through three seasons of the "Grey's Anatomy" spinoff "Station 19." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
One of my most vivid memories of Arthur Mitchell, who died last week, is of dancing with him in Moscow in 1962. George Balanchine, New York City Ballet's founding choreographer, had left the Soviet Union in the 1920s. And now he was returning for the first time to present his company of American dancers. Tensions were high between our countries. We were deep in the Cold War, just a week before the Cuban Missile Crisis. On opening night, the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, was in the audience, and so were top party members. Arthur and I were dancing in Balanchine's "Agon," with music by Igor Stravinsky, the last ballet on the program. Balanchine was nervous. The cast was nervous. But not Arthur. (Arthur was never nervous.) In the wings before our pas de deux, he could see I was jumping out of my skin. He said, "This is just a small town, Allegra." What he said was so ludicrous that it calmed me down. The reason for everybody's nerves? "Agon," created in 1957, had changed the course of choreography. It has form, but not conventional form, and strange innovations that had come out of Balanchine's different way of hearing music and creating movement. Stravinsky's music is rhythmically complex and difficult even for the dancers to count. (A conductor was sent ahead to rehearse the orchestra.) And "Agon" is a non narrative ballet, costumed only in leotards and tights not classical tutus and princely tunics. It was unlike anything that the Russian audience, so passionate about ballet, had seen before. The most unusual part of "Agon" is the pas de deux, originally choreographed for Arthur and Diana Adams, a black man and a white woman; the man doesn't just support the woman, he dances with her they're in concert. This racial mix was startling and different for American audiences at the time. And now we wondered how the Russian audience would react. Arthur told me we should wait in the wings for two counts before our entrance. He wanted the audience members to see an empty stage, so they could breathe, and perhaps wonder what would happen next. I don't remember him ever saying this to me before, in the many times we'd performed this pas de deux. But Arthur had an uncanny sense of stagecraft, more heightened in this crucial time and place. We made our entrance and waited for the signal from the conductor. Then we tore across the stage in a long diagonal of dynamic lunges and turns, before settling into an odd design of calmness. Different hand patterns. My leg hooked around his shoulder. A series of "arrivings" somewhere, then unexpected momentary resolutions. Painterly patterns woven into the choreography. His white T shirt and my black leotard. Dark skin tones and light skin tones. After that came a moment when Arthur held my hand and led me around in a semicircle, before the next surprise in Balanchine's choreography. Arthur had told me earlier what Mr. B had told him as he choreographed the piece: This move was like a trainer leading an elegant racehorse to its stall. He didn't need to tell me this, but he chose to, because he wanted the pas de deux to be all it could be. He was a generous partner, and that gave me confidence. Not all partners were like that. Our "Agon" pas de deux was sensual. Sculptural shapes would evolve in unpredictable ways, ending with a surprising beauty. It was like a puzzle (but not exactly). Arthur placed my pointed foot on the floor and indicated that my other my leg should go up and then he was on the floor, supporting me with only his extended arm and hand: Was he leading me, or I leading him? We arrived together at the next configuration. After our duet, the audience went wild. At the stage door when we walked out, people said our names screamed our names (MEE chell! Kent!) and later they would have flowers for us. Arthur became one of their favorite performers. At that moment, Arthur Mitchell was the only black principal dancer in the company he was there not because of his race but because of his excellence. Balanchine was a visionary. When he first saw Arthur in 1955 and invited him into the company, he saw not an African American dancer, but a dancer who could thrill an audience. Balanchine wanted dancers who could project something beyond technique. Your eyes were drawn to Arthur onstage. You had to watch him. Even if you knew the choreography, you didn't know what was going to happen. Arthur was a star. I sometimes danced with Arthur in Balanchine's "Ivesiana" (1954), with music by Charles Ives, in the section called "In the Inn." After a romp full of jazzy Balanchine inventions, the two dancers shake hands, then part, leaving the stage in different directions. That at first seems casual, but the music has a subtle change. It becomes wistful. We somehow know and feel that these two will never see each other again. When I heard the news of Arthur's death, I thought back to "In the Inn." Arthur was an amazing person. And I had the great honor of dancing with him. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. The 2004 baseball season was a turning point for the Mets. It was the final year of Art Howe's forgettable reign as manager and the last season that the storied lefties John Franco and Al Leiter pitched for their boyhood team. But new beginnings also emerged that year: David Wright made his debut in July, and then in October the Mets owner Fred Wilpon brought back Omar Minaya to be general manager. All of those men, minus Howe, gathered at the Mets' minor league complex on Monday to watch the team's current top pitchers Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard throw in an intrasquad game. Wright and Minaya sat in the tower above the field while Franco and Leiter peered through a fence, all reunited to help new general manager Brodie Van Wagenen build a championship contender. Wilpon, who is entering his 40th season as an owner of the Mets, loves having his former players back in the fold. He wants them to help re establish a winning tradition in Flushing. Wilpon vividly recalled how Franco, Leiter and Wright had contributed to successful Mets teams, and he believes they can help foster that same culture, now, as advisers in the front office. In fact, that was precisely the topic of discussion within that group on Monday: How to turn a collection of individual baseball players into one winning squad? None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "They probably weren't the most talented team," Wright said of the 1999 and 2000 Mets teams that reached the National League Championship Series and the World Series, "just as we weren't the most talented team in 2015. But what we had was everybody pulling that rope in the same direction, guys that got to know one another on a personal level. It was important to go out and play well for one another." Wright said that when he joined the Mets in 2004, Franco and Leiter helped him make the transition into the nuanced and sometimes complex world of a major league clubhouse, imparting lessons that went far beyond playing ball. Wright said he hoped to do the same with an array of younger players and minor leaguers, especially those at his old position of third base, over the next few days. "I'm here to talk about the baseball mind set," Wright said. "The last thing they need is another coach. I can talk about off the field type stuff, anything. I want to be available." He also said how "weird" it was to be in Port St. Lucie for the first time as something other than a player. On Monday, Wright said he fretted over what to wear now that playing games was not part of his routine. He chose a golf shirt and slacks, and looked very much like an executive. The front office roles seem like a natural development for all three, who exerted a particularly strong influence in the clubhouse as players especially Franco. Wright was a quieter leader, but as he grew older he knew what was expected of him. During spring training in 2015, the year the Mets went to the World Series, Wright confronted Syndergaard, then a rookie, for eating lunch in the clubhouse during a game, instead of being in the dugout to support his teammates. Wright also had the humility to later apologize to Syndergaard for challenging him in front of reporters that day. Syndergaard, when asked what he remembered from Wright's days as a clubhouse leader, said he did not recall his emotions from that time. But he noted that with all of Wright's accomplishments, including earning more than 160 million, Wright did not need to continue punching a clock. "The tenure and career that he has had, he could just kick back and relax and call it being an adviser," Syndergaard said, and added, "If I were him, that's what I would do." But the 36 year old Wright, who was forced to retire after missing virtually all of the last two seasons with back and neck injuries, still yearns to be involved, even if he will do some from California, where he lives with his wife and daughters. From his base there, he can scout high school and professional players and provide Van Wagenen with insight about current major leaguers he played with and against, all while gaining insight into the role of an executive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The 50,000 officials, delegates, journalists, protesters and gawkers expected to head to Cleveland during the Republican National Convention will encounter extra tight security around the Quicken Loans Arena, known locally as the Q, where the main event takes place from July 18 through July 21. But beyond the secured perimeters and protest zones, visitors to Cleveland will find a city basking in a new energy thanks, LeBron! and alive with restaurants, cultural events and night life. Here's a guide to spots that mostly fit these convention friendly criteria: in or near downtown; open to the public during the convention; easily accessible by foot, cab or public transportation; good for small groups; involves eating and drinking; and has something for (almost) everyone. Yes, people who differ in politics, temperament and tastes will convene in Cleveland's walkable, compact downtown. But here are a few excuses to check your politics at the door. Begin the morning at the chic coffee shop Pour (530 Euclid Avenue), where you can settle in with a cold brew at an oversized wooden table. Pair it with one of the Cleveland Bagel Company's crispy chewy rings, or head down the street to Bloom Bakery (200 Public Square) for croissants and muffins. Cleveland's coffee geeks also flock to two local roasters with their own shops. Rising Star has a small cafe (412 Superior Avenue) inside the historic Arcade, a stately Victorian era building with a soaring glass atrium. Phoenix Coffee has an outpost downtown (1700 East Ninth Street), but it's worth heading to its location in the Ohio City neighborhood (3000 Bridge Avenue), just minutes outside downtown, so that you can get a pastry from Metro Croissant to go with your espresso. If your group can't agree on how to jump start, head to Hingetown, a micro community in Ohio City. Morning spots include a larger Rising Star location (1455 West 29th Street); Cleveland Tea Revival (1434 West 29th Street), with a huge menu of organic teas; and Beet Jar (1432 West 29th Street), a cafe that serves fresh juices and nut milks. New to Ohio City is Passengers Cafe (2090 West 25th Street) in the lobby of the Cleveland Hostel, where a rooftop patio features a sweeping view of the city. No matter how you vote, you have to eat. And no matter how you eat, Cleveland's thriving food scene has something to offer. Many of the city's top restaurants, including Michael Symon's Lola and Jonathon Sawyer's Greenhouse Tavern, have been long booked. You'll have better luck sampling the city's flavors at smaller venues with open doors. Got a busy agenda? Downtown's best bets for quick bites include ramen at Mr. Sawyer's Noodlecat (234 Euclid Avenue); hearty sandwiches at Cleveland Pickle (850 Euclid Avenue); or meat and veggie bowls at Rebol, the sleek new al fresco restaurant in Public Square, a central plaza transformed into the city's newest urban park after a just completed 50 million renovation. Got time to spare? Options abound in Ohio City: Gonzo pancakes (candied jalapeno, tiramisu) at Jack Flaps (3900 Lorain Avenue). Brunch at the modern bistro Flying Fig (2523 Market Avenue). Beef brisket taquitos (gluten free!) at the Mexican inspired Momocho (1835 Fulton Road). Sandwiches and salads at the design forward Plum Cafe Kitchen (4133 Lorain Avenue). Ice cream in seasonal, classic and vegan flavors at Mitchell's (1867 West 25th Street) or Mason's Creamery (4401 Bridge Avenue). Sure, there's the Rock Roll Hall of Fame, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Playhouse Square and other large cultural organizations that get all the buzz. But there are some ways to have fun like locals if you have daytime downtime. If political differences could be played out as easily as a board game, the world might be a better place. In Ohio City, 5 gets you access to a library of almost 1,000 old school games, including Trump: The Game, at the Table Top board game cafe (1810 West 25th Street). Good for groups of friends, the lively space lets you pair your game of Pictionary or Can't Stop the Turtles with sandwiches and cocktails. If Cleveland has a signature game, it's bowling. (Sorry, LeBron.) The downtown Corner Alley, on trendy East Fourth Street, is booked. But cab it to the Uptown neighborhood and you'll find Corner Alley's two story building (11409 Euclid Avenue) with 17 lanes for play. Across the street is the Museum of Contemporary Art (11400 Euclid Avenue), where the big summer show is devoted to the work of Mark Mothersbaugh, the co founder of the New Wave band Devo. (The museum is offering two for one admissions during the convention week.) Cap the afternoon with pan Asian street food at Ninja City (11311 Euclid Avenue). If you really need to get away from downtown, it's about a 15 minute drive to the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood, where an afternoon can include dings and pings at the pinball emporium Superelectric (6500 Detroit Avenue); an indie film at the renovated vaudeville era Capitol Theater (1390 West 65th Street); craft beer and poutine (classic and vegetarian) at Banter (7320 Detroit Avenue) and ice cream (with a separate vegan menu) at Sweet Moses (6800 Detroit Avenue). "Beach" may not be the first thing you think of when you consider Cleveland, but that's what awaits you at Edgewater Park on the shores of Lake Erie. Minutes away from downtown, the beach offers swimming and sun (fingers crossed), recreation (volleyball, fishing) and picnic spots with some of the best views of the city. A brand new eight foot high, 16 foot long sign that spells "Cleveland" in a hip looking script has become a go to site for selfies. More than 400 bars in the greater Cleveland area have been approved to stay open until 4 a.m. during the convention, two hours after the usual closing time. Many are in the city's newest entertainment district on the East Bank of the Flats, an industrial area undergoing a major reimagining. One place to decompress is Punch Bowl Social (1086 West 11th Street), an adult playground that offers karaoke, shuffleboard, vintage arcade games and many other diversions, along with food and local beers. Cleveland's craft beer scene has exploded in recent years. No matter what your taste, Ohio City is also a great neighborhood for adventurous drinkers. Bar hop to Platform Beer Company, Market Garden Brewery, Nano Brew, Bier Markt and the Great Lakes Brewing Company to sample what Cleveland's beer geeks are up to. There may be no better equalizer than a gay bar, where politics get pushed aside for a killer smile. There is no designated gay neighborhood in Cleveland, so it's best to cab or Uber your way around to various neighborhoods. Check out Twist for flirting, Vibe for chilling, Bounce for dancing and drag queens, Aura for go go boys, the Leather Stallion for bears and the Hawk for old school cruising. Straight allies are welcome, too. Don't have time to sleep? Two downtown Starbucks locations, at 1400 Euclid Avenue in Playhouse Square and 1374 West Sixth in the Warehouse District, are staying open 24 hours during the convention. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
An unlikely hodgepodge of names gets dropped in the course of Red Bull Theater's Short New Play Festival: Virginia Woolf, Rachel Dolezal, Troilus, Cressida, Cervantes, Trump. But the name that gets dropped hardest dropped in the sense that it all but disappears is that of the production's touchstone, Noel Coward. The eight 10 minute sketches that make up the 10th edition of the festival, which premiered via livestream on Monday evening and will remain available online through Friday, were meant to respond to Coward's 1930 play "Private Lives," a comedy of manners polished so bright you can see yourself in it. Beneath the silver plate, its antic story of a divorced couple who reunite while honeymooning with new spouses is more melancholy than you may recall. Humans, it suggests, are cursed to be least compatible with those they are most drawn to. Perhaps that's true of theaters, too. Though "leadership support provided by the Noel Coward Foundation" may have helped to paper the problem over, Coward is not an intuitive match for Red Bull, which has generally devoted itself to the sanguinary dramas and elevated verse of the Jacobean period. At any rate, the festival's offerings, which include commissioned works by two marquee names Theresa Rebeck and Jeremy O. Harris do not in general suggest much compatibility with Coward. And only a few of the other offerings, selected in a contest from more than 500 entries, make any meaningful allusion to the plot and themes (and comic punch) that power "Private Lives." Harris's play, "Fear and Misery of the Master Race (of the Brecht)," has only the tenuous connection of a pun to tie it to Coward. (It is partly inspired by a Brecht play whose alternative title is "The Private Life of the Master Race.") Otherwise it is recognizably and entirely Harris, a field guide to the many species of racism, seen through the distorting lenses of satire. Choosing four events from 2015 as his springboard the death of Sandra Bland, the rampage of Dylann Roof, the blackpropriation of Dolezal and the candidacy of Trump Harris forefronts the other half of the Black Lives Matter story: the one that happens in white people's homes when they think history can't hear them. As the Dolezal figure, a white woman streaming a tutorial to Black women on how to "love your hair right," Louisa Jacobson brilliantly embodies the toxic endpoint of microaggression. I suppose you could argue that anything set behind closed doors, or in isolation from the world, counts as a response to "Private Lives." But two of the contest winners go further, borrowing Coward's format or at least the famous adjacent balconies on which his Elyot and Amanda rediscover each other to tell their stories. Leah Maddrie makes it plain in her title: "Love Adjacent, or Balcony Plays." But her Elyot and Amanda are a Black couple named Troy (Peter Francis James) and Cressie (Woodard), more formally known as Troilus and Cressida. Their new (white) spouses, in the original Sibyl and Victor, are likewise grafted onto Shakespearean characters; to say which ones would be to spoil the surprise. A happy ending and the unexpected overlay of rhymed pentameter couplets makes this the easiest of the eight to absorb. Probably the tightest is "Old Beggar Women," by Avery Deutsch. This one, too, takes place on adjoining balconies, but in a nursing home instead of a Deauville hotel. There, by amazing playwriting coincidence or perhaps not Sibyl, in her 70s, encounters Amanda, in her 80s. Deliciously, neither can remember Elyot's name, though both were married to him; along with men, the male gaze has disappeared from the story. If not very credible, the plot at least is engaging and unexpected, and as a sequel to Coward succeeds more than its contrivances might suggest. Part of that, again, is Woodard, who handily swaps personalities and styles in five of the eight plays. Here she plays Sibyl to the Amanda of Kathleen Chalfant, likewise dependably precise and piquant. That the evening's women (who also include Jacobson, Ali Ahn and the terrific Lilli Cooper) are generally more compelling than the men (James, Frankie J. Alvarez, Edmund Donovan and William Jackson Harper) may be the natural result of plays that are less interested in the Elyots of this world than the Sibyls and Amandas. (Two of the festival's directors, Vivienne Benesch and Melisa Annis, are women and the third, Em Weinstein, identifies as nonbinary.) That dynamic continues in the remaining plays, two of which, without sampling Coward, at least nod to him in passing. Both "Plague Year" by Matthew Park and "In the Attic" by Jessica Moss pick up his battle of the sexes theme, with women winning the battle decisively. In Park's play, a resourceful woman in plague time England (Cooper) must save herself, and her baby girl, from both a domineering husband (Donovan) and a thoughtless lover (Alvarez). Moss takes the theme of novel romantic arrangements even further, mashing "Private Lives" with "Rebecca" and "Jane Eyre" (and its stepdaughter, "Wide Sargasso Sea") into a deliciously silly Pythonesque squib. The virtues of the remaining two plays are not Cowardy ones. Though "Evermore Unrest," by Mallory Jane Weiss, unpacks a relationship between a woman (Ahn) and her ex (Alvarez) through fragments of letters, texts and scrawls on foggy mirrors, its main concern is not romantic, but ecological. Likewise, Ben Beckley's "Outside Time Without Extension" gives us the measure of two lovers (Ahn and Harper) but is more of a formal experiment, allotting one minute of its length to each 10 years of their lives. And yet perhaps Beckley's play the evening's opener is more like "Private Lives" than I at first supposed. Its side by side Zoom panes do, after all, simulate the effect of adjacent balconies. And when Ahn and Harper later move into a single frame (apparently, they are quarantining together) the shock of intimacy that made Coward so modern is deftly recreated. How long since we've seen a stage kiss? Short New Play Festival 2020: Private Lives Available on the Red Bull Theater website and YouTube through July 24 at 7 p.m. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
FIFTY years ago this month, General Motors cast off the overchromed tailfinned excesses of its postwar auto designs and shocked the Paris auto salon by slipping into a clean, crisply tailored new suit. The 1963 Buick Riviera made its world debut, winning rave reviews even from Europeans who had been scornful of Detroit's irrational exuberance in the 1950s. The legendary coachbuilder Sergio Pininfarina said the new Riviera was "one of the most beautiful American cars ever built," adding that it "marked a very impressive return to simplicity of American car design." Sir William Lyons, the founder of Jaguar and a respected designer, called it "a very wonderful job." Raymond Loewy said the Riviera was the best looking American car except for his own Studebaker Avanti, introduced at the same show. Ed Welburn, vice president for global design at General Motors, knows that first generation Riviera from the inside out: after spending part of his childhood in the back seat of his father's '65 model, he grew up to help design later generations of the car. A "personal luxury" coupe created to clip the wings of Ford's hot selling Thunderbird, the Riviera was a watershed G.M. design. "It combined a luxury car with a sports car," Mr. Welburn said. More than that, it signaled a major shift in style for a company that had set automotive fashion trends for decades under Harley Earl. In 1958, William Mitchell succeeded Earl, eager to leave his stamp on the auto giant. The Riviera was the first fully realized statement of Mitchell's style. After the voluptuous forms, baroque grilles and fighter jet tail ends of the Earl era, Mitchell went for a taut, crisp look he called it "English tailoring," but it came to be known as the Sheer Look. Sheet metal was sharply stamped and body planes were bold, largely unencumbered by chrome. "I put the crease in the trousers," Mitchell was fond of saying. By 1959, G.M. designers were grasping for a response to the Thunderbird, which for the previous year had grown from a sporty two seater into a four seat personal luxury car. Mitchell envisioned the T bird fighter as a junior Cadillac a revival of LaSalle, which had been a Cadillac sub brand in the 1930s. In many interviews later in his career, Mitchell recalled turning to Ned Nickles, who had been head of the Buick studio before moving to the advanced design department. Nickles is said to have casually drawn up his first ideas for the car at home. One sketch that survives shows a convertible, longer and lower than the final car, but with the projecting front fenders, W shape front end and forward leaning face that would eventually reach production. Nickles's design paid homage to the upright grille of the 1938 LaSalle and the projecting fender lamps of some of Mitchell's own sketches from the 1930s. Soon after he saw the sketch, Mitchell went to London. He recalled that he came back with an order for Nickles: "Make it look like a Ferrari combined with a Rolls Royce." Top management enthusiastically received the design, by then called the XP 715 special coupe. But which G.M. division would get it? Mitchell's idea to market the car as a new LaSalle was rejected; Cadillac sales were already strong. Nor did it seem a good fit for Chevrolet. G.M. management ordered the other car divisions Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile to compete for the right to sell the car. Mitchell loved seeing the engineers and managers following the lead of the designers, for once. Buick made its case using artwork by Melbourne Brindle, who had painted Rolls Royces and Packards for impressionistic advertisements, and it got the car. The Riviera name was one the division had previously used for sporty hardtops, and it gave the coupe a suitably European tone. The egg crate grille said Ferrari, as did the long hood, short deck proportions. The elegant roof showed the Rolls influence. But the car's character derived from its forward leaning face, which evoked the shark nose 1930s models designed by Amos Northup for Graham and Willys. The Riviera's frameless side windows without the metal trim previously found on hardtop models started a trend. "The interior was years ahead of its time," Mr. Welburn said. The center console swept up between bucket seats, and the two spoke steering wheel was both sporty and elegant. In the same model year, G.M. introduced the Corvette Sting Ray. The two cars sealed Mitchell's reputation as one of the world's top designers, and they set G.M. and eventually all of Detroit on a course that would play out for the next 15 years and produce some of the enduring classics of American automobile design. In a 1985 interview, Mitchell recalled being overjoyed when the Riviera and Sting Ray both received management's blessing for production. "Those were my two pets," he said, adding, "I could have got drunk for a week." The Riviera's design was refined for 1965, receiving the hidden headlights that Nickles had originally envisioned. "The rear was cleaned up by moving the taillamps to the bumper," Mr. Welburn noted; the decorative side scoops were removed. The second generation Riviera looked heavier and less elegant; the boat tail version of 1971 73 suffered from a change in its underlying platform and ended up grossly malproportioned. The final eighth generation Riviera was designed by Bill Porter with more rounded Jaguaresque lines. Buick has been silent about future use of the name, although a Riviera concept car developed in China made its debut in 2007. After a recent interview, Mr. Welburn spoke with his father about the '65 Riviera the family once owned, and quickly reported back. Ed Welburn Sr., who is 94, "usually drove Chevrolets and station wagons," his son said. "He said he bought the Riviera because it was great looking car, a great driving car, and had a great interior. It had plenty of room for all four of us, and a big trunk." When he turned 16, the future head of G.M. design moved to the driver's seat himself. "It was one of the first cars I drove," he recalled. "It had so much energy. It was a real driver's car with a great exhaust note. I got two tickets in it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
HERE WE GO AGAIN At a recent open house at 33 Rosedale Avenue in White Plains, several lookers were already in contract on other houses. They were back on the hunt for a house, because their appraisals had come in low enough to cast a pall on their deals. IN White Plains recently, 16 couples attended an open house at a wood frame colonial with four bedrooms and two and a half baths listed for 799,000. What was surprising, said Gary Leogrande, the lead broker for the Leogrande Team at Keller Williams NY Realty, was not the number of people interested in the house he had already noted an increase in real estate activity this spring but rather that several of those attending the open house were already in contract to buy other houses. "At first I couldn't imagine what was going on," recalled Mr. Leogrande, the president of the Empire Access Multiple Listing Service. "Why were they here at this open house if they had signed a contract on another?" When he inquired, the buyers explained that at the last minute, as they had approached the finish line, approved mortgages in hand, the appraisals on the houses they had hoped to buy came in lower than expected. When that happens, the signed contract is no longer binding. According to Mr. Leogrande and other brokers, this situation has been occurring more frequently as the market tries to rebound but is still unstable. Possible compromise solutions in such cases: the seller can come down in price to reduce the amount of the mortgage; the potential buyer can increase the down payment; or the two parties can meet somewhere in between. But in some cases, frustrated buyers choose to wash their hands of the deal altogether, and like those at the open house, they explore other options. "We're at a point in the market where prices are finally trending upward," said Michael Marciano, a broker with Keller Williams NY, "but banks are still wary of another surge, and they don't want to be left holding the bag again." Mark Logue, the president of Thoroughbred Mortgage, an affiliate of Wells Fargo and Houlihan Lawrence, said that in the aftermath of the real estate market crash, appraisers felt pressure from skittish lenders to value homes conservatively. Another factor complicating appraisers' lives these days is that stricter state and federal laws require them to base their comparisons on at least six recent similar sales, which after a slow sales period is sometimes hard to do, Mr. Logue said. The appraisers might also be strangers to the neighborhood where they are working which is not always conducive to making accurate appraisals. Federal and state code of conduct laws passed in the last several years require the bank to choose an appraiser through an intermediary company rather than directly. The goal is to avoid conflicts of interest by preventing lenders, borrowers and brokers from exerting pressure on appraisers. But, said Ted Holmes, Prudential Douglas Elliman's director of operations for Westchester, the law sometimes results in the hiring of appraisers from out of the area, who have no knowledge of a local market and do not factor in critical variables. That can prove problematic in a county like Westchester, where there are many municipalities with overlapping school districts and ZIP codes. For example, a home with a Scarsdale address might actually be in the low performing Yonkers school district. Or conversely, a modest house may be in a sought after school district, which assessors unfamiliar with an area may not factor into their reports. The laws governing appraisals, taken together with the persistent uncertainty in the housing market, have added perils to the process of getting a house from listing to closing, said Sally Slater, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman in Bedford. Ms. Slater cited a recent 815,000 listing in Bedford for a ranch with three bedrooms and two and a half baths on two acres with an in ground pool. Buyer and seller signed a contract for 785,000 and were set to close in 30 days. It was at that point, she recalled, that the appraisal came in at only 700,000. "My first response was, 'Something is clearly wrong here!' " Ms. Slater said. "Let's try another bank. Let's get another mortgage." They did, and when the second appraisal came in at 785,000, the sale moved forward. The broker described the clients as first time buyers, already worried about making such a large investment. The last minute snag, she said, almost scuttled the deal. (As did other buyers and sellers caught in similar predicaments, the buyers requested that their names not be used.) In another case, Ms. Slater said, an appraiser from the Midwest was sent to place a value on 105 acres of undeveloped land in Bedford for sale at 1.8 million. He appraised the property at 600,000. Ms. Slater sought an independent appraisal from someone familiar with local property values, who valued the land at its asking price. In such cases, buyers are sometimes willing to make up the difference, even if it is substantial. Take for example a century old three bedroom center hall colonial on five acres that Mr. Logue cited in Yorktown. The listing was for 975,000, and the buyer and seller signed a contract for 899,000, only to have the appraisal come in at 815,000. In this case, there were not enough comparable properties in the area to request another appraisal, Mr. Logue said, explaining that the two parties are renegotiating. "These buyers are not backing out," he said. "They're convinced that the view of the countryside from the top of their hill and the charm of the antique house are worth more than whatever some appraiser says." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
ROME Sometimes the most extraordinary finds occur by sheer luck. At least that was the case of a fourth century B.C. chamber tomb that came to light five weeks ago during the construction of an aqueduct in a Rome suburb, when an earthmover accidentally opened a hole in the side of the chamber. "Had the machine dug just four inches to the left, we would have never found the tomb," Francesco Prosperetti, Rome's special superintendent with archaeological oversight, told reporters on Friday. The tomb contained the remains of four occupants three men and a woman and funerary wares. Archaeologists are calling it "the Tomb of the Athlete" because of the presence of two bronze strigils, the instrument used by ancient Greek and Roman athletes to scrape sweat from the skin after a workout. Actually, the male skeletons in the tomb belonged to older men (all three were over 35 very old in those days). "To say there was an athlete is a bit of stretch, but it works journalistically," joked Fabio Turchetta, the on site archaeologist who followed the aqueduct works. All major construction that intrudes on Italy's underbelly requires the presence of an archaeologist. Mr. Turchetta said he'd been on the job for about a year but that very little had turned up until this tomb. It was worth the wait, he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
My Aunt Doris recently passed away, exactly two weeks before her birthday. She would have been 107. I have been involved in health care for my entire professional life, as a hospital executive, consultant and professor of health care management. But the time spent with my aunt at the end of her life taught me more about living and dying than all my experience had prepared me for. Doris lived in the same Manhattan apartment for seven decades. For years, she had stubbornly resisted moving into a relative's home or assisted living community. When she was 103, she had a fall that landed her in the hospital, after which she agreed, reluctantly, to hire a live in aide. The aide was caring and capable, but over the next two years, Doris became exceedingly feeble and bedridden, her mind confused. Her breathing grew labored and her voice was practically inaudible when she told my wife, Amy, and me that she didn't want to die with a "stranger," whom we took to mean the aide. When Amy said, "Doris, we would love for you to come live with us," Doris, uncharacteristically, began to cry. With a look of gratitude, she whispered, "You would take me in?" Doris seemed moments away from death, and we wanted to honor her wish to be with family. It felt simple, naively so in retrospect, uncomplicated by the implications of an open ended period of caregiving. Her doctor felt that time was of the essence. With the help of a local home hospice agency, we readied our guest room and arranged for Doris to be transported to our New Jersey home. As the ambulette crew delicately shifted a fragile Doris from her bed onto a stretcher, she appeared more a collection of bones than a person. Would she even survive this trip? She was nearly unresponsive, her eyes vacant. I held her frail hand, hoping she wasn't frightened. At our house, she lay nearly motionless in the hospital bed provided by the hospice agency. We began the vigil we were certain would not last long. We hung some family photos that we had taken from Doris's apartment on the wall next to her bed and sat at her bedside, describing each one. A photo from the 1940s showed Doris in a dark high buttoned dress with pronounced shoulder pads, a look she called "handsome." In another, from the 1960s, she was on a palm tree lined beach in California, posing happily with a few cousins. There was little sign that our story telling was penetrating, but we persevered, hoping to spark familiar memories, like the Third Avenue Hudson Place waffle fries she loved and the 1940s maritime decor that caught her eye. Doris stirred a bit over the next few days, her eyes becoming a little more focused. Then something of a miracle happened: Doris began a slow but steady journey back to her old self. Over the next few weeks, her cognition was almost fully restored. She began to feed herself and, with help, use the commode instead of the diapers she hated. As winter gave way to spring, Doris sat in her wheelchair on our backyard deck. Her vision was weak, but she could make out the trees and see birds fluttering about. We had lengthy talks about her life. She was most animated when talking about her childhood. The eldest of four, Doris was born in Poland where she and her mother my grandmother remained while her father came to the United States in search of work and opportunity. They joined him in the United States when Doris was 7. Doris entered the work world right out of high school. She was industrious and ambitious, eventually becoming an executive in a finance company. She never married, pouring herself into her work. When she retired at 91, she looked for volunteer work, becoming a docent at the New York Public Library. Doris and I had formed a friendship years ago, when I became a young adult. Later, our children also developed close relationships with her, admiring her strength of character and feminist perspective that was shaped in the 1940s when she joined her company's exclusively male executive ranks. She inspired us all, recounting how she walked everywhere in New York City: to her job, her volunteer work, the opera at the Met. Now, living with us, Doris was determined to regain her strength and walk independently again. She returned to the exercise regimen she had been doing for years, mostly leg lifts, stretches and self massages. Soon, Doris was able to raise herself out of her wheelchair and walk with the aid of a walker. She had a disciplined routine, counting her steps and charting her progress. Then she would sit back in her wheelchair and gaze at the trees in the backyard. She giggled when the dog licked her ice cream cone and her face. She delighted in the reawakening of her senses, asking to smell the newly blossoming lilacs. Doris's intellectual curiosity blossomed as well. We sat on the deck and talked every day. When the weather turned cold, our conversations moved indoors. She kept up with politics and her investments. A small circle of relatives who had visited her in New York came to visit her in New Jersey. At one point she looked at Amy and me and said, "I never knew life could be so beautiful." After 17 months with us, Doris's cognition again began to fade. I would initiate a discussion about my father her brother with whom she always had a special bond. He had passed away 15 years earlier. She stared at me blankly, conceding she did not know who I was talking about. I then remembered an anecdote she had once told me and I shared it with her: When my father was a newborn, Doris rocked him in her arms while their mother was busy with household chores. "Oh, George, of course, my baby brother," she said with a pleased grin, recalling a memory that was almost a hundred years old. It often took a while to find the right trigger, the portal into a memory clouded by age and confusion. But once there, her mental wherewithal returned in full form. It remains a great challenge for caretakers, helping our elderly loved ones experience life that, no matter the constraints and limitations, no matter the place they live, is purposeful and enriching. We have a richer vocabulary for talking with our aging relatives about their health than about their dreams. And yet, what I discovered is that Doris thrived when she could make choices about how to spend her time, maintain control over her life story, and feel that those around her respected whatever autonomy she was capable of exercising. In "Being Mortal," Dr. Atul Gawande reminds us that meaningfulness is central to what we yearn for, and this doesn't stop just because we get old. I came to appreciate that meaningfulness involved dignifying Doris's desires, feelings, memories and even aspirations. In the journal The Gerontologist, Melanie Mallers and colleagues summarize research indicating that "lack of choice and self determination can lead to poor physical fitness, decreased social support, and depression." The will to go on can weaken when one feels stripped of empowerment in decisions made about one's own life. Among the more valuable lessons I learned is that actualization is feasible for a person of even significantly advanced age. A story Doris repeatedly told me in her last few months opened my eyes to this point. It was about a vacation Doris and her mother took in the 1950s. The motel housekeeper entered their room and appeared ill. My grandmother asked why she hadn't stayed home. She replied that she needed the money. After insisting that the housekeeper lie down in her bed, my grandmother cleaned all the rooms assigned to the housekeeper. This story was important to Doris because she revered her mother's altruistic nature. But it also gnawed at her, fostering lingering self doubt. Doris saw herself as incapable of exercising kindness in the manner of her mother. Although she was generous with time, advice and financial support, she could be brusque. She lacked confidence in the softer ways we reach others, through touch and expressions of warmth. As much as the story helped Doris celebrate her mother's memory, it was a troubling reminder that she might have fallen short. So we talked about generosity, about what giving looks like. It comes in many forms, hers just as valued as any other. In the end, she became gracious in ways I never thought possible. She talked about family as being something to cherish, to nurture. She initiated hugs rather than stiffening through them. Her final words, as she passed from life to death, a transition of merciful seamlessness, were "thank you." Amy and I thought that Doris would be living with us for a very short time, and we had invited her to stay with us thinking we could lend comfort to her in her final moments. But it transformed into something none of us anticipated, bringing new meaning to her life, even at 106. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Nestled in the Rocky Mountains of south central Idaho lies Ketchum, an outdoors obsessed city and home to America's first destination ski resort, Sun Valley. At 9,150 feet, Bald Mountain, called Baldy, presides over Ketchum with 12 lifts, 105 trails, a sophisticated snow making operation and impeccably groomed runs. While new hotels (Limelight Hotel on the south end, Hotel Ketchum on the north) bookend Main Street, the half mile stretch still exudes plenty of the old time charm from Ketchum's mining and sheep ranching heyday with cabin style shops and historic brick buildings. Professional big mountain skier and native Alexis "Lexi" du Pont describes Ketchum as "classy Western." She says the area offers a great deal of history and a European influence from Sun Valley resort, which opened in the 1930s, "but at the same time it's Wild West Idaho." Here are five of her favorite places. In December, Ms. du Pont's childhood friends Jane and Jesse Sheue opened their first restaurant, dishing out New American food in a building resembling a small red barn. The cozy restaurant is centered around a big colonial style hearth and features housemade pastas and meats like pheasant and elk, grilled on apple wood. "It's cool to see a local chef who was born and raised here" at the helm of a restaurant with such high quality dishes, Ms. du Pont said. With 24 taps and 30 wines by the glass, guests can pair drinks with food and stay a while to enjoy what Ms. du Pont calls "cool vibes" and a rotating art collection, courtesy of a local gallery, Lipton Fine Arts, that includes original works by Alexander Calder, Keith Haring and Marc Chagall. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Mark Hartman for The New York Times | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I've been coming around to the view that Bernie Sanders could really win the Democratic nomination and the presidency, and the numbers show it. A poll released last week by The Des Moines Register and CNN gives him the lead in Iowa, and he's in strong contention for New Hampshire. His fund raising is just extraordinary: more than 34 million last quarter, raised mostly in very small donations. Do you see him winning the nomination? And how does "President Sanders" sound to you? Gail Collins: Definitely better than "President Trump." He's not my favorite Democrat, but what I'm looking for now is anybody who can win and get us out of this nightmare. If you told me Sanders is a guy you'd vote for, I would certainly be impressed. Come on give me your appraisal. Bret: O.K. Here goes: I could never vote for Sanders. Joe Biden? Sure. Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar? Gladly. Mike Bloomberg? Enthusiastically. They are all middle of the road Democrats who would restore honor to the White House and sanity to the country, and maybe even teach Republicans a valuable lesson in the perils of embracing a demagogue. But while I would never cast a ballot for Donald Trump, there's no chance I'd vote for either Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Gail: I understand that Sanders and Warren have economic principles that you most definitely do not share. But they're reasonable human beings who could represent the presidency to the nation and the world without causing us to hang our heads in shame. Bret: I might say that about President Warren. Not President Find the Silver Lining in Fidel Castro Sanders. Gail: Once upon a time, Sanders actually had a good record of getting bipartisan support for his legislation. And it's not as if he'd be able to walk into the White House and impose democratic socialism. Remember that Obama, who ran on the idea of national health care, could barely get a much smaller, flawed version through a Congress he theoretically controlled. Bret: Trump also has been able to get only a fraction of his agenda through Congress. The wall with Mexico is largely unbuilt. We still take in hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year, including from majority Muslim countries (though the numbers are declining). Our sanctions on Russia are still in place, and we haven't abandoned NATO. But I still wish Trump had never been elected in the first place. 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." Bret: Let's assume President Sanders got just one third of his agenda through Congress. What would that mean? Dramatic cuts in defense spending that would leave us and our allies even more vulnerable to Russian or Chinese aggression. One or two huge new government spending programs that would weigh on fiscal balance sheets for generations. Punitive tax increases on billionaires, who have the means and the savvy to move their assets offshore, and major tax hikes on people who aren't anywhere near as rich, and who can't avoid taxes. Declining incentives for investment; ever growing incentives for political corruption as a way of gaining favors from the state. On the plus side, however, we'd be seeing much more of Larry David on "Saturday Night Live." Gail: Or ... it would mean a turnaround on the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy, which have made the gap between the richest one percent and the bottom 99 even more appalling. Cutting the defense budget doesn't mean making the country weaker. It's stuffed with pork expensive and unnecessary projects that please only the egos in the Pentagon and politicians pushing for new spending in their districts. Personally I'd rather go with Sanders or Warren and put the money in schools. Bret: The one bright spot of the Trump years is an economy that has defied doomsayers and surpassed expectations with historically low unemployment and excellent stock market returns. Those aren't small things, most of all to people who live at the margins or outside of the labor market, including people nearing retirement and looking expectantly at their portfolios. Gail: Some of us believe he's just coasting off the Obama recovery. And people who worry about deficits must notice that ours is exploding from the lost revenue caused by his tax cuts. But go on. Bret: If Trump just wired his mouth shut and bandaged his fingers for the next 10 months to keep him from saying or tweeting something awful, he could just ride the economic numbers to victory. But, of course, he won't. He'll be himself. Gail: Kinda digging the image of that wired mouth. ... Bret: For the longest time I thought that the best way of beating him would be a candidate who projected sanity and balance: a "return to normalcy," to cite a president of 99 years ago. Now, however, I'm starting to think that Sanders may be the only Democrat in the field who can beat Trump. He's the only one who has a clear ideological vision, who presents the sharpest possible contrast to Trump and who has the same sort of cultlike following that can turn a political campaign into a mass movement. What do you think? Gail: If Joe Biden holds up, I think he can do fine. Presumably paired with someone young and healthy like Amy Klobuchar or Cory Booker. Bret: "Young and healthy" will definitely be a vital consideration in Biden's choice of a running mate. Gail: And at some point today we've got to argue about Elizabeth Warren. Bret: It's what we live for. Sorry, go on. Gail: But first ... I'm confused. We've been talking forever about how Trump is worse than anything. And now you say Sanders is the only one who can beat Trump. But you wouldn't vote for Sanders? So basically you're throwing your chips into four more years. But that doesn't apply to every prospective Democratic nominee. And Sanders is just a bridge too far. Gail: Even though you think he's the only one who can beat Trump? Bret: Fair point. Let me walk that back a step. What I really mean to say is that Sanders has the strongest chance of beating Trump, much in the way that Trump may well have had the strongest chance of beating Hillary Clinton four years ago. But no, I'd be wrong to say he's the only one who can win. Of the other candidates, Klobuchar would be Trump's strongest opponent. She has a winning combination of an aw shucks sensibility and a first class brain. And Trump would have a hard time attacking her, at least not in ways that wouldn't expose him to a devastating retort. Gail: Suspect a whole lot of Democrats could concoct that devastating retort. Biden would be very strong at drawing black voters, but I have to admit, Sanders might be more powerful when it comes to getting a great turnout of young people. Bret: An interesting fact about this primary season: There doesn't seem to be much of a correlation between a candidate's identity and his support. Buttigieg is young, but younger voters seem turned off by him. Neither Kamala Harris nor Cory Booker was able to elicit African American support the way Biden has. Sanders would be the oldest man ever elected president, but he draws much of his support from millennials. And, from what I've seen of the polls, Warren seems to have all but lost a small edge with women voters. I guess this only means that people vote according to interest and inspiration at least as much as they vote according to identity. What do you think? Gail: Did you see the CNN story about Sanders telling Warren over dinner that a woman couldn't win? He vehemently denies it and, of course, I absolutely do not agree. But it is interesting that we haven't had all that much talk about gender even about women voters. You know, for years I believed women would not vote for a candidate who yelled because he reminded them of their worst boyfriends. I'm kinda wondering as the campaign chugs along whether some women are going to pay serious attention to Sanders for the first time and think, "Calm down, please." Obviously my theory doesn't always work look who's in the White House. Still, if I'm right this time it might suggest a plus in the primaries for people like Biden and Klobuchar. And Mayor Pete. Are you still a Mayor Pete fan? Bret: Absolutely. His left toenail knows more about the world than both hemispheres of Trump's brain. But if I had to choose between the former mayor of South Bend and Klobuchar, I'd choose her. Experience counts for a lot in life and in politics. She has it far more than he does. Sanders doesn't strike me as a screamer. He's just ... intense. A lot like my own late great uncle, who was also a socialist from Brooklyn named Bernie. Lovely, loving man, full of heart and good intentions. Wouldn't vote for him, either. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
"For Forest," an installation of 299 trees in the Worthersee stadium in Klagenfurt, Austria. The curator Klaus Littmann expected complaints when he installed 299 trees some up to 50 feet tall in a soccer stadium in Austria . In a telephone interview, Mr. Littmann said he wanted people who saw the forest to think about humanity's impact on the environment in places like the Amazon. One day, he added, seeing trees could be a rare spectacle, like going to a soccer match or looking at animals in a zoo. "But I didn't think this would happen," Mr. Littman said about what came next. "People are using it for political warfare." Mr. Littmann's project, "For Forest," opened in Klagenfurt, a small city in the southern state of Carinthia, on Sept. 8, as Austria was gearing up for national elections, scheduled for this Sunday. Now, the forest in a stadium has become the surprising focus for a political flap in an area that was once a stronghold of the far right Freedom Party. Opponents say "For Forest" wastes taxpayers' money. ( Mr. Littmann said it has been privately financed, but the regional government said state funded institutions had spent part of their budgets on related events.) It's also been attacked for using foreign trees, instead of local ones from Carinthia, and for preventing a local soccer team using the stadium for important matches. Mr. Littmann said he had been sworn at in public meetings, and was once pushed in the street and told to go home to Switzerland, where he lives. But the main public opposition to the project has come from the larger Freedom Party, which has a strong base in Carinthia, and whose former leader Jorg Haider was once the state's governor. Mr. Haider, who died in a car accident in 2008, was a flamboyant and media savvy leader who brought anti immigrant and anti European Union views into the mainstream in Austria. The stakes are high for the Freedom Party in Sunday's election. Support in Carinthia, its former bastion, has slumped; in regional elections in 2018, it secured less than a quarter of the vote. Austria's last coalition government was brought down in May after a video emerged showing Heinz Christian Strache, the party's current leader and the country's vice chancellor at the time, promising government contracts in exchange for financial support from a woman he thought was a wealthy Russian. Peter Kaiser, Carinthia's current governor and a member of the center left Social Democratic Party, said in a telephone interview that he did not think the attacks on the project had been successful. "Day by day, we've seen between 3,000 and 7,000 spectators," at the stadium, he said. The protesters, he added, were "just attacking it and hoping people who have an opposition to the climate situation, have an opposition to green policy, have an opposition to art, vote for them." Gernot Darmann, the Freedom Party's chairman in Carinthia, denied the party opposed the installation because of its environmental message. In fact, he said in an email, "The project leaves a devastating ecological footprint," because the trees were imported. "Such a project would have more meaning in large industrial cities with bad air, and in countries where the forest is being over exploited or destroyed," he said. More than 60 percent of land in Carinthia is covered by woods, according to Austria's Federal Office for Forests . Mr. Littmann said transporting the trees had released up to 55 tonnes of carbon dioxide . That is roughly equivalent to the emissions a passenger would create by taking 25 return flights from New York to Vienna. The idea for the project went back about 30 years, Mr. Littmann said, to when he saw a drawing by Max Peintner, an Austrian artist, called "The Unending Attraction of Nature." It shows a dense forest in the middle of a sports stadium, with spectators gawping at it from bleachers. "I was completely fascinated by the image," Mr. Littmann said. The curator tried to turn the drawing into reality first in Switzerland, France and Germany, he said, but none of the soccer teams he approached would let their stadiums be used. He succeeded in Klagenfurt because the soccer team there was "so bad" at the time that it could not fill the stadium's 30,000 seats, he added, so local authorities were happy to let him use it. The furor around "For Forest" is likely to die away as soon as the election is held, Mr. Littmann said. But views on its success as an artwork will likely linger longer. Almuth Spiegler, the art critic for the Austrian daily Die Presse, said in a telephone interview that she loved Peintner's original drawing: The trees in it had a threatening air to them, she said, and reminded her of a wild animal, caged. But, she said, the installation did not have the same impact. "It's quite a banal metaphor for climate change ," she said, though she added that she kept thinking about it for hours after she saw it, and that it made her look afresh at other trees. Mr. Darmann of the Freedom Party said he did not think the debate would have much impact on the election. He had not actually visited "For Forest," he said, and would not let his son visit either. Instead, he had an alternative idea for an outing, he added: "In the near future I will take my son for a walk in a beautiful broad leafed forest in Carinthia." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Uzo Aduba studied classical voice at Boston University before moving to New York to pursue theater. She was on the verge of quitting acting when she learned she had landed the part of the zany, troubled Suzanne Warren, also known as Crazy Eyes, a role for which she won two Emmys. Although Suzanne doesn't sing often enough, Aduba has showed off her pipes several times, singing opera on "The View," performing a duet with Taylor Swift and playing Glinda the Good Witch in "The Wiz Live!" on NBC. Next, she'll be playing a trailblazer: Shirley Chisholm, the first African American Congresswoman, in the coming FX limited series "Mrs. America." The androgynous Australian model, singer and V.J. Ruby Rose broke through in the United States as Stella Carlin, Piper's devious love interest in Season 3, and quickly became a face of gender fluid awareness. Her "Orange" stint was brief, but her star has been on the rise since, with roles in several blockbuster action films including a sharpshooter in "XXX: Return of Xander Cage," a sultry assassin in "John Wick: Chapter 2" and why not? a marine scientist in the monster shark opus "The Meg." Next up, Rose will star as Kate Kane, better known as Batwoman, TV's first openly lesbian superhero, in a series that will debut on CW in October. Dascha Polanco, a nursing student when she tried out for "Orange," came to her audition straight from an overnight hospital shift, still in scrubs. She continued her studies and held down an administrative job at a Bronx hospital throughout the shooting of Season 1. Since playing the increasingly hardened Dayanara Diaz, Polanco has worked with David O. Russell (who cast her as Jennifer Lawrence's B.F.F. in "Joy") and Ryan Murphy (who cast her as a no nonsense detective in "The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story"). She also joined Natasha Lyonne in "Russian Doll," playing a disaffected love interest, and is next set to appear in Lin Manuel Miranda's film adaptation of his Broadway musical "In the Heights." Much like Nicky Nichols, her plucky "Orange" character, this onetime "American Pie" star fell into a heroin addiction and had to claw her way back out. Natasha Lyonne's struggles with dependence and with other health issues (including Hepatitis C, a collapsed lung and a heart infection) nearly derailed her career, but "Orange" saved it and led her to an Emmy nomination. She also mines elements of her past trauma as Nadia Vulvokov in the critically lauded Netflix series "Russian Doll," a show she co created, produced, directed and wrote. Lyonne recently signed a first look television deal with Amazon Studios. Danielle Brooks was fresh out of Juilliard when she was cast as Tasha Jefferson, known as Taystee, the brash best friend of Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley). Since being cast in "Orange," she has added more TV work to her resume, stealing scenes in guest spots from Jemima Kirke on "Girls" and from Aziz Ansari on "Master of None." Brooks has also found success in the theater world: She made her Broadway debut in the 2015 revival of "The Color Purple," earning a Tony nomination for her powerful portrayal of Sofia, and earlier this year she played Beatrice in the Shakespeare in the Park production of "Much Ado About Nothing." Samira Wiley, who had already met Brooks while they were both studying at Juilliard, hung onto her bartending job through the filming of Season 1 of "Orange," scared that she might be written off. (This had happened to her before, after appearing in the first two episodes of "Unforgettable.") Instead, she played the good natured Poussey Washington for four seasons until her character's shocking death. She then moved from one women's prison to another, joining the Republic of Gilead in "The Handmaid's Tale" (along with the fellow "Orange" alum Madeline Brewer). Wiley's portrayal on that series of the valiant refugee Moira won her an Emmy, and she has stayed busy recently as Karen's love interest on "Will Grace." Up next: "BIOS," a sci fi feature with Tom Hanks. Asia Kate Dillon, who identifies as gender nonbinary, played Lucifer in an off off Broadway production of "The Mysteries" before joining "Orange" in Season 4 as the calm and collected white supremacist Brandy Epps. (Dillon's real life neck tattoo, which reads "Einfuhlung," translates as "empathy.") Dillon then turned up playing Taylor Mason on "Billions," the first major gender nonbinary character on American television. That role and a role as the Adjudicator in "John Wick: Chapter 3" have made Dillon a sort of nonbinary emissary to the wider culture . Diane Guerrero almost quit acting just before landing her "Orange" gig, portraying the sociable inmate Maritza Ramos. The following year, she landed the part of the outgoing best friend Lina on "Jane the Virgin." More recently, she starred as Crazy Jane, a superhero with multiple personalities, on the DC Universe show "Doom Patrol." Guerrero advocates for immigration reform, and her memoir, "In the Country We Love: My Family Divided," is reportedly being developed for television. Matt McGorry is a former bodybuilder, personal trainer and all around buff guy. He had bit parts in a couple of New York based shows ("Gossip Girl," "Person of Interest") before landing the role of Officer John Bennett, the "nice guard" who impregnated Dayanara. While still on "Orange" he left after Season 3 McGorry joined the cast of "How to Get Away With Murder" as the awkward Asher Millstone. Along the way, he has become a household name for his (polarizing) outspoken feminism and his outrageous stripper dance moves. A onetime fixture in New York's downtown club scene (singing operatic versions of heavy metal songs), Laverne Cox cautiously declined to leave her job at the drag show cabaret Lucky Cheng's while the first season of "Orange" was in production. But within a year of playing the prison hairdresser Sophia Burset, Cox had become Hollywood's most famous openly transgender actress the first to get an Emmy nomination, to be on the cover of Time magazine, to have a wax figure installed at Madame Tussauds. Since then, Cox has donned a corset to play Dr. Frank N Furter in a TV version of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and hosted the reality show "Glam Masters." She was also a regular on the short lived CBS legal drama "Doubt." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
THE steady flow of reminders to keep tires at the automaker's suggested inflation levels even President Obama chimed in demonstrates just how far the demands of auto maintenance have diminished. With spark plugs that seem to last forever and oil change intervals stretching to 10,000 miles and more, many owners continue to slack off when it comes to looking after tire pressures. But the day when drivers never have to pump air into their tires may be coming. Goodyear has developed a self inflating tire technology intended to keep commercial truck tires at the proper pressure, saving fuel and reducing tread wear. The system, which Goodyear calls Air Maintenance Technology, automatically keeps tires inflated without the need for electronic controls or external pumps. The key is a clever pumping device essentially a flexible tube nestled inside the tire that operates in much the same way a person's muscles push food through the digestive tract in continuous pulses. As the tire rotates, high pressure caused by the vehicle's load compressing the tire repeatedly deforms the embedded tube, generating a pumping action. If the pressure inside the tire falls below the required level, a regulator lets outside air into the pumping tube, where it is pressurized and sent through a valve into the interior cavity of the tire. And all of this happens automatically, without any action by the driver. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Some disasters, like hurricanes and earthquakes, can bring people together, but if history is any judge, pandemics generally drive them apart. These are crises in which social distancing is a virtue. Dread overwhelms the normal bonds of human affection. In "The Decameron," Giovanni Boccaccio writes about what happened during the plague that hit Florence in 1348: "Tedious were it to recount how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbors was scarce found any that shewed fellow feeling for another, how kinfolk held aloof, and never met ... nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate." In his book on the 1665 London epidemic, "A Journal of the Plague Year," Daniel Defoe reports, "This was a time when every one's private safety lay so near them they had no room to pity the distresses of others. ... The danger of immediate death to ourselves, took away all bonds of love, all concern for one another." Fear drives people in these moments, but so does shame, caused by the brutal things that have to be done to slow the spread of the disease. In all pandemics people are forced to make the decisions that doctors in Italy are now forced to make withholding care from some of those who are suffering and leaving them to their fate. In 17th century Venice, health workers searched the city, identified plague victims and shipped them off to isolated "hospitals," where two thirds of them died. In many cities over the centuries, municipal authorities locked whole families in their homes, sealed the premises and blocked any delivery of provisions or medical care. Frank Snowden, the Yale historian who wrote "Epidemics and Society," argues that pandemics hold up a mirror to society and force us to ask basic questions: What is possible imminent death trying to tell us? Where is God in all this? What's our responsibility to one another? Pandemics induce a feeling of enervating fatalism. People realize how little they control their lives. Anton Chekhov was a victim during a TB epidemic that traveled across Russia in the late 19th century. Snowden points out that the plays he wrote during his recovery are about people who feel trapped, waiting for events outside their control, unable to act, unable to decide. Pandemics also hit the poor hardest and inflame class divisions. Cholera struck Naples in 1884, especially the Lower City, where the poor lived. Rumors swept the neighborhood that city officials were deliberately spreading the disease. When highhanded public health workers poured into Lower City, the locals revolted, throwing furniture at them, hurling them down stairs. The city thought the disease was passed on by people eating unripe or overripe fruit. The peasants responded by bringing baskets of fruit to City Hall and gorging on it in public a way to hold up a defiant middle finger against the elites who were so useless in the face of the disease. The Spanish flu pandemic that battered America in 1918 produced similar reactions. John M. Barry, author of "The Great Influenza," reports that as conditions worsened, health workers in city after city pleaded for volunteers to care for the sick. Few stepped forward. In Philadelphia, the head of emergency aid pleaded for help in taking care of sick children. Nobody answered. The organization's director turned scornful: "Hundreds of women ... had delightful dreams of themselves in the roles of angels of mercy. ... Nothing seems to rouse them now. ... There are families in which every member is ill, in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food. The death rate is so high, and they still hold back." This explains one of the puzzling features of the 1918 pandemic. When it was over, people didn't talk about it. There were very few books or plays written about it. Roughly 675,000 Americans lost their lives to the flu, compared with 53,000 in battle in World War I, and yet it left almost no conscious cultural mark. Perhaps it's because people didn't like who they had become. It was a shameful memory and therefore suppressed. In her 1976 dissertation, "A Cruel Wind," Dorothy Ann Pettit argues that the 1918 flu pandemic contributed to a kind of spiritual torpor afterward. People emerged from it physically and spiritually fatigued. The flu, Pettit writes, had a sobering and disillusioning effect on the national spirit. There is one exception to this sad litany: health care workers. In every pandemic there are doctors and nurses who respond with unbelievable heroism and compassion. That's happening today. Mike Baker recently had a report in The Times about the EvergreenHealth hospital in Kirkland, Wash., where the staff showing the kind of effective compassion that has been evident in all pandemics down the centuries. "We have not had issues with staff not wanting to come in," an Evergreen executive said. "We've had staff calling and say, 'If you need me, I'm available." Maybe this time we'll learn from their example. It also wouldn't be a bad idea to take steps to fight the moral disease that accompanies the physical one. 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 |
A new study provides the best evidence yet that wearing a back brace will slow the progression of the most common form of scoliosis in adolescents, helping them avoid painful spine surgery. Physicians have recommended bracing for more than 50 years, but until now, studies of its effectiveness had produced mixed results. The United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended against scoliosis screening in schools partly on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence that bracing and other conservative treatments relieved back pain or improved quality of life in these children. The new randomized study, published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, should end the longstanding debate, several experts said, and may spur the task force to reconsider its position. The trial is "very convincing," said Dr. B. Stephens Richards, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Texas Scottish Rite Hospital in Dallas. "It scientifically proves that brace treatment works for adolescents with scoliosis who are at risk of curve worsening to the point of needing surgery." Adolescent girls are more likely than boys to have idiopathic scoliosis, or curvature of the spine from no known cause. Rigid bracing is worn to restore spine alignment by external force. It is a demanding treatment at a vulnerable time of life. "When you have a teenager who is anxious about wearing a brace to school or what their friends will think, it gave us a bit of heartache to try to convince them if we weren't certain ourselves," said Dr. Paul D. Sponseller, the director of orthopedic surgery at Johns Hopkins Children's Center, who was not involved in the study. "In light of this new evidence, we can say we really do have a basis for putting them through bracing." In the study, researchers analyzed data on 242 patients at 25 sites across the United States and Canada. The children were all aged 10 to 15 and still growing, and they all had a spinal curvature of 20 to 40 degrees. Of those patients, 116 were randomly assigned to observation or bracing for at least 18 hours daily. Because too few families agreed to randomization, the researchers added a group of 126 adolescents who chose for themselves between bracing and observation. Bracing was deemed a failure if spinal curvature progressed to 50 degrees or more, a point at which surgery is often suggested. It was deemed a success if the child achieved skeletal maturity without this degree of curve progression. The trial was stopped early because of the apparent efficacy of bracing. In the analysis that included both groups, the rate of treatment success was 72 percent among children with bracing, compared with 48 percent among those under observation. The benefit increased the longer bracing was worn. More than 90 percent of the children who were successfully treated wore their braces more than 13 hours a day. Dr. Richards, the immediate past president of the Scoliosis Research Society, said the study's strengths were the inclusion criteria, limited to adolescents most at risk for spinal curve progression, and the use of a high tech, temperature sensitive device in the braces to measure compliance objectively. "There were a lot of doctors like me who treat scoliosis as the primary focus of their practice who had doubts about whether bracing was effective," said Dr. Stuart L. Weinstein, the lead author of the study and a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Iowa. "Now the jury is in." Bracing has been the standard of care since the 1940s. It took so long to perform a rigorous trial of its effectiveness not only because it was "a gargantuan task," said Joe O'Brien, the president of the National Scoliosis Foundation, but also because parents did not want to "just sit there and wait and watch." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
By the end of this century, the landscape around Mount Everest may drastically change. As the planet continues to warm, the Everest region of Nepal could lose most of its glaciers, according to a study published in the journal The Cryosphere. "We did not expect to see glaciers reduced at such a large scale," said Joseph Shea, a glacier hydrologist at the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development in Nepal and lead author of the new report. "The numbers are quite frightening." Dr. Shea and his colleagues found that moderate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions could result in a 70 percent loss of glaciers around Mount Everest, while a business as usual scenario in which emissions remain at the same levels could result in a 99 percent loss. To arrive at these findings, Dr. Shea and his colleagues used a computer model for glacier melt, accumulation and redistribution. They customized the model with data on temperature and precipitation, measurements from the field and remote sensing observations collected over 50 years from the Dudh Koshi basin, which includes Mount Everest and several of the world's other highest peaks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
ROME An Italian court ruled on Wednesday that Leonardo's famous "Vitruvian Man" drawing would be allowed to leave Italy for the much ballyhooed Leonardo exhibition that opens at the Louvre in Paris on Oct. 24. The drawing, a study of the proportions of the human body that dates to around 1490, will be shown at the Louvre for eight weeks until Dec. 14. The Leonardo exhibition, which commemorates the 500th anniversary of the artist's death in France, will continue through Feb. 24. The court's ruling was the latest twist in a drawn out and at times bitter drama that played out over the loan of several Leonardo works from Italian museums to the Louvre. At one point, an Italian deputy minister accused France of trying to culturally appropriate the Italian artist; others raised concerns about the fragility of the works, and about cultural diplomacy trumping scientific merit in deciding the loans. The heritage conservation group Italia Nostra had tried to block the loan, arguing that "Vitruvian Man" was too delicate to leave Italy. The loan, the group argued, violated an Italian law that forbids the loan of any works that form the principal collection of a museum, gallery, archive or library, or any work "susceptible to damage during transportation, or in unfavorable environmental conditions." In a statement last week, Italia Nostra pointed out that "Vitruvian Man" was one of 16 officially designated works that formed the "principal collection" of the Accademia Galleries in Venice, where the work has been part of the collection since 1822. The curators of the drawing at the Venice museum declined to be interviewed, but in an interview last year, the director of the Accademia Galleries at the time, Paola Marini, said that the curators had not been in favor of the loan. "Vitruvian Man" is rarely lent and is not permanently displayed. On its website, the Accademia Galleries notes that the drawing must be protected from direct light and constantly monitored. Earlier this year, however, the drawing was on show in Venice as part of a Leonardo exhibition. Before that, it was last exhibited in 2013. On Wednesday, an administrative court in Italy's northern Veneto region wrote that while the drawing was part of the Accademia's principal collection, other works on that list had been lent in the past. It also noted that technical reports by two of Italy's most important restoration institutes said that the drawing could travel, as long as it would be shown for a limited number of days and under specific lighting conditions. The drawing was one of several works by Leonardo lent to the Louvre as part of an exchange agreement signed on Sept. 24 by the culture ministers of Italy and France. In its ruling, the Veneto tribunal noted that in return for the loan of "Vitruvian Man" and other works, the Louvre next year will send to Rome two paintings by Raphael, along with several drawings, for an exhibition commemorating the 500th anniversary of Raphael's death. Italia Nostra was not pleased, saying in a statement, "Today is not a good day for protection in Italy." The group pledged to fight on, and said that raising the issue of how works of art are lent out was a victory on its own. While the ruling closed one chapter, another opened on Tuesday with a brewing kerfuffle over two other works that have already left Italy for the Louvre's blockbuster show. Tomaso Montanari, an art historian and member of the scientific committee of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, raised concerns about the loan of two works in the Uffizi collection to the Louvre: "Study of a Landscape" from 1473, believed to be Leonardo's earliest known work, and a study for "The Adoration of the Magi," dated around 1481. Both drawings are on the Uffizi's list of "immovable works," so the loan to the Louvre was both "against the law and against good sense," Mr. Montanari said in a telephone interview. "If something is immovable, you don't send it to France. " Both drawings were also part of the Sept. 24 exchange agreement signed by the two culture ministers, which Mr. Montanari cited as evidence that Italy's patrimony was no longer the purview of scientists and technicians, "but in the hands of politicians," as it had been during the time of Mussolini. "That's the real issue, scientific knowledge should have priority over politics," he said. But Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi, said that like all of the drawings in the collection, the two would be shown only once every five years, and that care was taken with travel arrangements and the conditions under which they were displayed. "From a conservation point of view, it made no difference if they are exhibited in Florence, Rome, Venice or Paris," he said. And Franco Conte, the lawyer for a consumer's rights group that opposed the Italia Nostra petition during Wednesday's hearing, said the ruling "recognized the fact that art is something that should be shared." Otherwise, he added, "It's like the gold in Fort Knox: beautiful, but no one can see it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times "This is so weird," Jake Shears said one afternoon in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. He was standing on South First Street, in a leather jacket and a backpack, staring up at the building where he lived in 1999, when he was new to New York and not yet the frontman of the glam rock band Scissor Sisters. He wasn't Jake Shears then, either, but Jason Sellards, a skinny 20 year old who had moved from Seattle to try to make it, though he wasn't sure at what. While studying fiction writing at the New School, he saw a flier for an apartment in a former cake factory. "The whole floor was just a raw space with some drywall put up," he said. The rent was 700 a month (condos there now sell for 1.2 million). The entrance looked like a crime scene (there's now a state of the art intercom, which Mr. Shears scrolled through with fascination), and when it rained, it rained into his bedroom (presumably no longer a problem). But the French guy who showed him the room was too handsome to resist, and "when you're 20 years old," Mr. Shears said, "you don't know any better." His shifting set of roommates included a heroin addict whose bedroom looked like an opium den. In the fall of 2001, Mr. Shears decamped to the East Village, where he was working as a go go dancer, after returning from a backpacking trip in Europe to discover that one of his roommates had been subletting his bedroom to a couple from Brussels. Ten days after Sept. 11, he and his friend Scott Hoffman performed for the first time as Scissor Sisters (slang for a lesbian sex move), with Mr. Shears singing along to a synth track in a kimono. If this combination of details makes you wistful a freewheeling Williamsburg, weird roommates in unsanctioned living spaces, post 9/11 avant garde escapism chances are that you danced to a Scissor Sisters song, or even saw Mr. Shears perform one in a thong. Then, five years ago, he all but disappeared. Exhausted and artistically stymied, he put the group on indefinite hiatus and moved to Los Angeles with his longtime boyfriend, Chris Moukarbel. "I had a really hard time out there," Mr. Shears said. "Without the band, without Scott as my songwriting partner, I was just unmoored. I was really lost for a couple years." The relationship ended in 2015, and Mr. Shears fled to New Orleans, where he now keeps an apartment in the Marigny district. (He splits his time between there and Los Feliz in Los Angeles.) "It was a very dark time in my life," he said. But he loved New Orleans, and he started making new friends and new music. At the suggestion of an editor at Simon Schuster, Rakesh Satyal, he began writing down the story of his bedazzled life. Now Mr. Shears, 39, is back in the limelight. Through April 1 he is starring on Broadway in "Kinky Boots." He recently toured the South, gearing up for his first solo album. And his memoir, "Boys Keep Swinging," comes out Feb. 20, chronicling not just the ups and downs of rock stardom but a saucy slice of downtown New York in the aughts. Consider this scene: 2001 at the Roxy, a gay club in Chelsea. The night of his college graduation, he writes, he met "a man with silver hair wearing a black T shirt" named Anderson, who hosted a TV game show called "The Mole." They kissed near the dance floor and went back to Anderson's place for a night of "laughing and making out," before waking up the next day and seeing "Moulin Rouge." Not long after, they met up in Rome for a two day tryst. Yes, this mysterious fellow was Anderson Cooper. They dated for a few months, lost touch and have since reconnected. "We're still really close friends," Mr. Shears said. "He used to sing, and I remember telling him that he really needed to buckle down and look for a job," Mr. Cooper added. "Thankfully, he did not listen to me." Mr. Shears had long craved the spotlight, ever since his mother enrolled them in a tap class together when he was in fourth grade. Growing up in suburban Arizona and a harbor town in Washington State, he obsessed over David Bowie and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and watched the Playboy channel for its "upscale trash aesthetic," he says in the book. Adolescence, he writes, turned him into a "girlie freak." "When I was coming out, I was dressing very aggressively," he said. "Lots of consignment shop skirts and fishnets. I would buy bondage belts from my tweaker friends who needed money for drugs." Even while he went goth and sneaked out to Phoenix gay bars, he got baptized in a Christian youth group and was closeted to his family. In 1995, his parents sent him to a prep school in Seattle, where he started calling in to Dan Savage's radio advice show, "Savage Love Live." "He was just really funny and sweet and vulnerable and a little at sea at 16," Mr. Savage said. They met face to face at a queer youth dance in Seattle. Mr. Savage had advised him to come out to his parents, and it hadn't gone well. Feeling responsible, Mr. Savage got his mother to call Mr. Shears's mother. ("My mom is very good at guilt," Mr. Savage said.) Mr. Savage and Terry Miller, then his boyfriend and now his husband, became Mr. Shears's gay mentors, inviting him over to play video games and attending his high school production of "Guys and Dolls." One day, Mr. Savage picked up Mr. Shears after school and took him to an AIDS funeral, to show him the risks of unprotected sex. "He kind of took me on as a project," Mr. Shears said. In Seattle, Mr. Shears used a fake ID to get into a drag bar called 20th Century Foxes, where he would lip sync James Bond songs, before moving to New York City in 1999. There, he soaked in the counterculture, including the cabaret duo Kiki and Herb and electroclash stars like Fischerspooner and Chicks on Speed. He got a job go go dancing at IC Guys, a closet size gay bar in the East Village, and interned at Paper magazine, interviewing artists he longed to emulate. "He was an exhibitionist," said Mickey Boardman, an editor there. "At Paper, it's like being in a room of exclamation points. Everyone's fighting for attention, whether they admit it or not." He and Mr. Hoffman made their first appearance as Scissor Sisters at a show at the Slipper Room on the Lower East Side, where the M.C. was the bawdy entertainer Ana Matronic. On a whim, Jason Sellards renamed himself Jake Shears, a play on "scissors" (his friends still call him Jason), and Mr. Hoffman went by BabyDaddy. Soon after, they invited Ms. Matronic to join the band. They got a gig at Luxx, a breeding ground for the electroclash scene in Williamsburg, which they advertised with fliers reading, "You Gotta Pump Your Body, if You Wanna Be a Hottie," from their song "Electrobix." He and Mr. Moukarbel, a filmmaker, were living in a TriBeCa loft, where they threw rowdy house parties attended by friends including Calvin Klein, Sandra Bernhard and Rufus Wainwright. "There would be too many people, and they would run out of ice early on," Mr. Cooper said. "The music was fun, but it was always too loud and the police would be called. I always stayed five minutes and then felt way too old and not cool enough to be there." Mr. Moukarbel's work was pulling him westward (he directed documentaries about Banksy and Lady Gaga), so they gave up their New York life and bought a Streamline Moderne style house in Los Feliz for 1.92 million. "I had nothing going on. Just partying a lot," Mr. Shears said. (He celebrated his 35th birthday with a disco foam party in the backyard.) "That first year in L.A., I was just lost. Wanting to work, because I'm happiest when I'm working, but without the band I didn't know what to do." The end of his 11 year relationship with Mr. Moukarbel was "brutal." Even now, he said, "I think I'm over stuff, and I'll wake up from nightmares." (Mr. Moukarbel, for his part, said, "Jason and I basically grew into adulthood together and I still think of him as family. He's always inspired me and I'm incredibly proud of his recent work.") As Mr. Shears's personal life was falling apart, the director Moises Kaufman cast him in the play "Bent" at the Mark Taper Forum. "That was a real catalyst for me and made me examine my life and really ask myself how I was going to make myself happy again," Mr. Shears said. "I learned that it's really important to be creative for the right reasons. And if you're not, it'll come back and bite you." Still, it wasn't until he got back to writing music, and writing his life story, that Mr. Shears returned to his swinging self. In addition to the new album, he is working on a musical with Elton John, following up his 2011 stage adaptation of "Tales of the City." In June, he ended his solo tour with a concert in New Orleans, the same weekend he was celebrity grand marshal of the city's gay pride parade. "All my friends were down, my mom, everybody," he said. "Everyone got to be in the parade. It was one of the best times I've had in my whole life. This sounds so stupid, but it felt like a wedding, even though I wasn't marrying anybody. It was just this amazing celebration I got to have with everyone. It felt like I had found myself again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Sean Baker, a filmmaker whose fame has hitherto resonated mostly underground, broke the surface in 2015. "Tangerine," his microbudget Los Angeles picaresque tale about two transgender women of color working an unbecoming strip of Santa Monica Boulevard near Highland Avenue, found its way onto year end best of lists and has been steadily collecting awards and nominations. Next month, it competes in the best feature, director, female lead and supporting female categories at the Independent Spirit Awards. How to follow that? With a fashion film. Mr. Baker's latest film is "Snowbird," an 11 minute short that was shot, like "Tangerine," on iPhones. And, again like "Tangerine," it has a mixed cast of professional and nonprofessional actors. It is a dreamy, surreal parable set in Slab City, Calif., a desert campsite that looks like something between a trailer park and a Martian utopia. It also happens to have been commissioned by Kenzo, the LVMH owned fashion label. "I don't see myself as a short film director, and I'm not a commercial director," Mr. Baker, 44, said by phone from Los Angeles. "But there was something about fashion films: Because there would be a narrative and because I would be able to experiment, it was so appealing. This was the first time I was actually excited by a project I was being commissioned for." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY PRESENTS THE LITTLE MERMAID LIVE! 8 p.m. on ABC. In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the release of this classic animated film, Disney has tapped an all star cast for a live stage performance of the beloved underwater musical. Auli'i Cravalho, who voiced another Disney princess as the lead in "Moana," appears as Ariel, while Queen Latifah will be her tentacled nemesis, Ursula. Prince Eric, the royal for whom Ariel gives up her voice, will be played by the Broadway actor Graham Phillips, while the Jamaican musician Shaggy will portray Sebastian, the singing lobster. John Stamos rounds out the cast as Chef Louis. The production will mix live action and animation, switching between the original film and live musical numbers from the movie and the Broadway musical. RUNNING WILD WITH BEAR GRYLLS 10 p.m. on National Geographic. On the season premiere of this show that takes Hollywood celebrities off the grid, Bear Grylls teams up with the "Captain Marvel" star Brie Larson to test her survival skills in the wild. Larson and Grylls wind up on the shores of a remote island in the Gulf of Panama, where they spend 48 hours trekking through swamplands frequented by crocodiles. Later in the season, Cara Delevingne and the host will hike the mountains of Sardinia and Armie Hammer will join Grylls for a scuba diving adventure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"Testing, can you hear me?" playing piano "I don't want nobody." The simple thing about Aretha Franklin is she was a great singer, a singer who could do anything. "The moment I wake up ..." She could do rhythm and blues, she could do jazz, she could do opera. She could do country, probably. They started calling her the Queen of Soul in the '60s, when she was barely in her 20s, and nobody argued. People heard Aretha, and they were inspired. And it was an inspiration that she channeled from gospel, into soul music, into music that spoke to people's daily lives. There were songs like "Think," which is a warning shot across a relationship. It's one of the few songs she wrote, and it's one of her strongest messages. She had 100 songs in the Billboard R and B charts and 17 pop hit singles, but what was more important was the way she freed other singers, the way she showed other singers this is how a voice can fly. You can hear Aretha Franklin in Whitney Houston. You can hear Aretha Franklin in Chaka Khan. You can hear Aretha Franklin in men, too, Luther Vandross. I mean, you can hear Aretha Franklin across R and B and across American music. She wasn't always in the charts. There were long stretches of the late '70s, the late '80s, when she couldn't get a hit. I think the people who were giving her material often let her down. "What do you do if you forget a lyric?" "I keep stepping." laughter "You keep moving fast?" You see here at the end of her career singing an Adele song ... and you think, what if Aretha had better songwriters all the way through her career? She would have even more than those 100 R and B singles. "Respect" was first recorded by Otis Redding, and for Otis Redding, it was, "Come on, when I get home, baby, you know, be nice to me, I worked." When Aretha gets it as a woman and turns it around "R E S P E C T." it's about much more than that. It's about respect for her as a woman, it's about respect for her as a person. It's about respect for her as a breadwinner in this song. But it's also about sexual respect and physical respect it's everything. "Anywhere I've gone in the world, people love that song" "They do" "Did you have any idea when you recorded 'Respect' that it was going to be what it was?" "No, I really did not. I did not have any idea that the civil rights movement would adopt that as its mantra." "My country, 'tis of thee ..." Her father had been involved in the civil rights struggle. She was close to Martin Luther King. She was involved back in the '60s. To see America's first African American president be inaugurated, this was a culmination of something, and you had to have Aretha Franklin there. applause "All right, thank you. Good evening, how's everybody tonight? Feel good? Looking out on the morning rain ..." Aretha Franklin was the Queen of Soul, gospel music applied to secular topics. And that meant putting all of the airborne improvisation of gospel into songs about fighting with your guy, and bringing that spirit, channeling that ecstatic spirit into really down to Earth situations." "Gospel goes with me wherever I go. Gospel is a constant with me." "Amazing Grace" is a gospel standard. Everybody who sings gospel music knows "Amazing Grace." It's a beautiful song. And when you hear Aretha Franklin sing that song, it's just transcendent. "Amazing grace, how sweet ..." There was always that feeling that she was channeling some higher power into whatever she was singing. "... the sound." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
DROGHEDA, Ireland Brian and Rosie Condra grew up poor. But as prosperity washed over Ireland in the first decade of the 21st century, they managed to buy a modest house, start saving for their children's future and, for once, do more than simply make ends meet. "We were on the up and up," Mr. Condra said. The Condras are among hundreds of thousands of Irish who, over the last few years, finally started to catch up with and even surpass many of their European neighbors. But now, after a stunning plunge fueled by a disastrous banking collapse, the economy has fallen back to where it was in 2005, before a housing bubble stoked a growth frenzy. "The last several years of growth in Ireland have effectively been wiped out," said Constantin Gurdgiev, an economist and lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin. For many people in Ireland, it is as if the boom never happened. And some of those who floated up during the good times now see themselves slipping even further behind. "It's like we drew the lottery ticket made in hell," said Mr. Condra, who says he gets by with only two pairs of shoes, one for work, so that he can afford to meet the needs of his growing children. "Suddenly we see that the Europe we've bought into isn't a golden utopia." Benefiting from years of low interest rates that followed the creation of the euro zone in 1999, Ireland enjoyed one of the biggest growth spurts of any country in Europe, and spent lavishly as its wealth increased. The economy expanded an average of 7 percent in the decade leading up to 2007 before plunging into a deep recession. Per person, inflation adjusted economic activity has fallen approximately 18 percent from the peak, when the average gross domestic product per person was a shade over 43,000 euros ( 62,000). Now it is less than 35,000 euros ( 50, 767). As the country tries to recover from the bust, many of its people are paying a tremendous cost for the folly of the country's banks and to bring its government finances back in order. As part of Ireland's effort to pay down its immense debts and bail out the banks, the Condras' salaries from their state jobs as hospital workers have been cut 20 percent in two years. Higher taxes and further spending cuts are on the horizon. Moreover, the European Central Bank, for the first time in three years, is raising interest rates, which will increase borrowing costs on existing home loans. That frightens the Condras even more. With unemployment at 14.7 percent, thousands of young Irish people continue to leave the country to find work. Those who have good, secure jobs here are thankful, but even they worry about the future and are rationing spending. Household savings surged to 11 billion euros in 2009 from 3.5 billion euros in 2008, and net disposable income fell. There are glimpses of renewal. Exports from multinational companies like Intel, Pfizer and smaller manufacturers are surging as wages become more competitive and help to lower production costs, giving hope for future growth. Signs of a real estate recovery have even emerged, with buyers flocking to recent auctions to snap up distressed properties. Patsy Carney's generic pharmaceuticals export business, EirGen Pharma, has been thriving. He has hung on to the 40 employees at his plant in Waterford and hopes to hire 60 more people. Nevertheless, he recognizes what the collapse has meant for the Irish as a whole. "You see it all around you, all the people out of work, and there's nothing turning up," he said. "It's frightening." Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. In Ireland, treatments at suicide prevention centers increased by a third last year, with sudden financial troubles cited most often as the cause of despair. "It's the psychological impact of austerity that bites the hardest and lasts the longest," Mr. Condra said. The biggest fear is that growth and jobs are not going to return as quickly as promised. Instead of investing in its future, Ireland is committed to spending at least 46 billion euros to bail out its banks, and must pay a substantial interest rate, about 5.7 percent, on an 85 billion euro European rescue package. And fears linger that Ireland could default on its debts. Angry voters swept out the government in March, making Ireland the first euro club member to punish its leaders for their handling of the economy. But the new prime minister, Enda Kenny, has little choice but to follow the austerity blueprint, which the International Monetary Fund now acknowledges is delaying recovery. The fund cut its 2011 growth forecast to 0.5 percent, down from an already meager 0.9 percent, as a program to save an additional 15 billion euros over four years kicks in. For the Condras, it seems like only yesterday that everyone in Ireland was living better than ever even people who had been near the bottom. Two years ago, Mr. Condra's take home pay as a hospital porter in Dublin was 1,200 euros ( 1,718) a month. He and his wife were able to begin saving for their children's schooling, and secured their first loan ever to buy a small brick row house. Their fortunes suddenly changed, though, when Ireland's banks went bust. Unlike Iceland, which did not save its debt ridden banks, the Irish government decided taxpayers would pay the full bill, which adds up to more than 10,000 euros per person. Mr. Condra's pay was gradually whittled down. He now earns 240 euros ( 344) less a month, and his wife's income fell after she cut her work hours to stay home and reduce their child care expenses. The couple has stopped setting aside money for higher education so they can meet the mortgage payments. They no longer pay their electricity bill on time and have begun scrimping on items they took for granted, like butter. Birthday parties for their children have been stopped; a vacation trip is out of the question. Carless, Mr. Condra spends an hour on the bus each way to and from his job in Dublin; when he sees a politician in a shiny black sedan through the window, he fights back his anger. He has not bought a pair of jeans in a year, and Mrs. Condra has taken the pragmatic step of wearing her flat wedding shoes around the house. Nearly everyone they know is underwater on their mortgage; one neighbor expects a foreclosure in two weeks. And last month, eight homes in their otherwise quiet working class neighborhood were burgled. Mrs. Condra agrees that Ireland has to make good on its debts. "But they're debts from the banks that we didn't even know we had," she said. "And the people least able to afford it are paying for everything." Forty five minutes away by car, in a comfortable middle class suburb of Dublin, Killian and Teresa O'Connell are thankful to be in a more stable position. Mr. O'Connell, an information technology project manager at a Dublin stockbroker, was spared when his employer laid off 20 percent of the staff. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
While former Vice President Joe Biden spent nearly a year nailing down the Democratic presidential nomination, the Trump campaign devoted the better part of the past four years vacuuming up as much data as possible to better target and influence American voters. The Trump campaign is using its head start to break fund raising records, test political messages and blanket swing states with thousands of digital ads. The Biden campaign is still hiring digital talent and making critical decisions about strategy. For the second presidential cycle in a row, the Democrats are starting far behind in online presence. President Trump's campaign has used its vast data mining operation to build pockets of influence throughout the internet connected through hypertargeted landing pages and subdomains ensuring that important constituencies, such as women and veterans, are funneled to groups where they are encouraged to organize. Not only does this keep supporters engaged, but it also can create viral loops that trap a loyal online base within an echo chamber of right wing talking points and pro Trump propaganda. Just jump into any one of the 90 plus Facebook groups in the Trump ecosystem and you can see this dynamic at work. Mr. Trump's operation is formidable, but that does not mean that it's invincible. While the Trump campaign's tactics will make it easier to engage individuals it has spent years cultivating online, the top down approach is inefficient for reaching new audiences. This may be the Biden campaign's biggest opportunity. Covid 19 and the resulting societal disruption has primed millions of Americans not only to receive political information, but also to participate in the political process themselves. All Democrats have to do is meet supporters (and potential supporters) where they are online and make it easy for them to get involved. On Andrew Yang's campaign, that took the form of embracing a new style of politics for a new generation of voters exclusive behind the scenes content, regular contests, direct lines of communication with both the candidate and the campaign, and a decentralized structure that empowered the Yang Gang to innovate on their own. Similarly, the Buttigieg campaign shared its design tool kit, allowing thousands of supporters to create their own content, such as parade banners and pamphlets, that tremendously increased its reach and capacity. Both of our campaigns embraced a multiplatform strategy that put our candidates in front of audiences normally ignored by the political classes. The goal was not to be everywhere, but to be in the right places with the right message. Whether that meant Mr. Yang appearing on an Instagram Live stream of "The Daily Show" or Mr. Buttigieg appearing on the Snapchat show "Good Luck America," expanding beyond our existing online bases was one of our top priorities. But no candidate can be everywhere. It's why the Buttigieg campaign created a first of its kind Digital Captains program where users were supplied with resources and direction from the campaign and then encouraged to use that material to create their own content and organize and raise money among friends and contacts. By the end of the campaign, being a member of TeamPete or YangGang was about more than supporting one candidate; it was a signal of a different type of politics and a different type of political engagement. The Biden campaign appears to be building a large number of Facebook groups, but unlike the Trump campaign's groups, the Biden groups appear to be driven by the campaign and segmented by state, not by cause, interest or affinity. Facebook groups are a space where people congregate to exchange information and ideas. Geography shouldn't matter; shared passions do. To engage audiences outside their core fan base, Mr. Biden's campaign needs to show him as a kind, caring and compassionate leader, and compare that with President Trump's cruelty and coarseness. It should use the many digital platforms available to it to make this contrast crystal clear. The Biden campaign's current digital footprint seems too static and packaged. The copy that accompanies social posts is often too long, sounding more like a stump speech or ad than an engaging call to action. Audiences want to get to know the candidate, flaws and all. Social media content should be conversational and break down the walls between audiences and candidates. The Biden campaign should focus less on controlling the message and more on giving audiences a platform to share their stories and feelings about the candidate. Like Team Biden, we've experienced the struggles of gearing up a digital campaign from nothing and we know how challenging it can be to have to do a lot with a little. But it's not about money, staff size or high priced consulting firms. It's about empowering audiences to be a part of the story. Vice President Biden is not going to beat Donald Trump by duplicating the top down structures and the huge data mining operation that the Trump team built over the past four years. Instead, it's time to harness the power of the people and build something new. Patricia Nelson was the creative and social media director for Yang2020. Stefan Smith was the online engagement director for the Buttigieg campaign. Erick M. Sanchez ( erickmsanchez) was Andrew Yang's traveling press secretary. 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 |
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. The classic car auctions here last week were remarkable for not being especially remarkable: No bubbles burst, and neither did the market make another vertical leap. While no single sale overwhelmed the collector car community something that has happened often in previous years there was a respectable gain in total sales, a record of about 250 million, an improvement of some 10 percent compared with 2013. The top sale, at 8.8 million including the buyer's premium, was a 1958 Ferrari 250 GT California Spider. Factors contributing to the increase included more than 100 additional cars being offered (some 2,800 in all this year) and a market continuing its recovery from the recession. Average sale prices from the six auctions were up about 7 percent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
WASHINGTON No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent. Seventeen months before the next election, it is increasingly clear that President Obama must defy that trend to keep his job. Roughly 9 percent of Americans who want to go to work cannot find an employer. Companies are firing fewer people, but hiring remains anemic. And the vast majority of economic forecasters, including the president's own advisers, predict only modest progress by November 2012. The latest job numbers, due Friday, are expected to provide new cause for concern. Other indicators suggest the pace of growth is flagging. Weak manufacturing data, a gloomy reading on jobs in advance of Friday's report and a drop in auto sales led the markets to their worst close since August, and those declines carried over into Asia Thursday. But the grim reality of widespread unemployment is drawing little response from Washington. The Federal Reserve says it is all but tapped out. There is even less reason to expect Congressional action. Both Democrats and Republicans see clear steps to create jobs, but they are trying to walk in opposite directions and are making little progress. Republicans have set the terms of debate by pressing for large cuts in federal spending, which they say will encourage private investment. Democrats have found themselves battling to minimize and postpone such cuts, which they fear will cause new job losses. House Republicans told the president that they would not support new spending to spur growth during a meeting at the White House on Wednesday. "The discussion really focused on the philosophical difference on whether Washington should continue to pump money into the economy or should we provide an incentive for entrepreneurs and small businesses to grow," said Eric Cantor, the majority leader. "The president talked about a need for us to continue to quote unquote invest from Washington's standpoint, and for a lot of us that's code for more Washington spending, something that we can't afford right now." The White House, its possibilities constrained by the gridlock, has offered no new grand plans. After agreeing to extend the Bush era tax cuts and reducing the payroll tax last December, the administration has focused on smaller ideas, like streamlining corporate taxation and increasing American exports to Asia and Latin America. "It's a very tough predicament," said Jared Bernstein, who until April was economic policy adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. "Is there any political appetite for something that would resemble another large Keynesian stimulus? Obviously no. You can say that's what we should do and you'd probably be right, but that's pretty academic." More than 13.7 million Americans were unable to find work in April; most had been seeking jobs for months. Millions more have stopped trying. Their inability to earn money is a personal catastrophe; studies show that the chance of finding new work slips away with time. It is also a strain on their families, charities and public support programs. The Federal Reserve, the nation's central bank, has the means and the mandate to reduce unemployment by pumping money into the economy. As financial markets nearly collapsed in 2008, the Fed unleashed a series of unprecedented programs, first to arrest the crisis and then to promote recovery, investing more than 2 trillion. The final installment, a 600 billion bond buying program, ends in June. Now, however, the leaders of the central bank say they are reluctant to do more. The Fed's chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said in April that more money might not increase growth, but there was a growing risk that it would accelerate inflation. Congress charged the Fed in 1978 with minimizing unemployment and inflation. Those goals, however, are often in conflict, and the Fed has made clear that inflation is its priority. Fed officials argue in part that maintaining slow, steady inflation forms a basis for enduring economic expansion. Eric S. Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said in a recent interview that the Fed had reached the limits of responsible policy. "We've done things that are quite unusual. We're using tools that we have less experience with," Mr. Rosengren said. "Most of the criticism has been that we're being too accommodative. That is a concern that we have to put some weight on." Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group, said that the Fed was being too cautious about inflation and too callous about joblessness. "We have a massive unemployment problem in this country right now. It is festering. It's not good for our economy. It's not good for our society. And we have the tools to fix it," she said. "We certainly need to be concerned about what happens down the road, but shouldn't we first be concerned about getting the U.S. economy back on track?" Seven presidents have stood for re election since Mr. Roosevelt. In three instances the unemployment rate stood above 6 percent on Election Day. Two presidents lost: Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush. But Ronald Reagan won, despite 7.2 percent unemployment in November 1984, because the rate was falling and voters decided he was fixing the problem. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
A. We had a great year. We completed the acquisition of the Sheraton Galleria in Atlanta; we're renovating that. We negotiated the franchise agreement for the Hilton on Marco Island. That will be the launching of the complete redesign of all the public spaces. We just redid the guest rooms. It was the first hotel franchise expiration that I encountered. I got to do two in one year. Our retail is probably around 90 percent occupied. We had a great Christmas for retail traffic was up and the retailers are very happy. And office has really picked up. Q. Is the surge in online shopping affecting business? A. The retailers are really responding by making the shopping experience more important. A lot of our properties have a pedestrian environment. People are excited to be able to live, work, shop, eat and walk around with their families. It's a more customer focused destination. Q. So is this affecting the way you approach new projects? A. We have been very focused on looking at these lifestyle type centers; we think they're undervalued by the market. We think that there is a shopper appeal to them that is more resilient. We look very hard at demographics and market dynamics, because there are things that you're not going to buy online you can't get a haircut; you can't dry clean your clothes online. Q. What other projects do you have in the pipeline? A. We're actually looking to develop another hotel in the Midwest. We are also renovating all of our residential rental units in New York City, both in Parkchester and in our own portfolio. Q. How much of your portfolio is in the New York area? A. For the residential, about 90 percent, and of the retail, probably about 30 percent. None of the hotels are in the New York area; we have them in the Midwest and the Southeast. Q. What kind of year will 2014 be? A. This year there are going to be some great opportunities in the retail sector in terms of purchasing. There are a bunch of markets that have been overlooked, and institutional capital is now looking a little bit off the coast. They realize there's tremendous value across the country, and we've been talking to a lot of institutional partners about some of those. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. THE OTHER JAPANESE NEW WAVE: RADICAL FILMS FROM 1958 61 at Japan Society (April 5 27). Nagisa Oshima's "Cruel Story of Youth," which had its premiere in 1960, may or may not be the definitive depiction of the alienation felt by Japan's postwar generation, but as this retrospective with rarities, top to bottom illustrates, that film was hardly alone. Highlighting directors who are less known internationally, Japan Society will present works from several of Oshima's contemporaries at the Shochiku studio and elsewhere in the Japanese film industry of the era, beginning with the director Kiju Yoshida, whose "Good for Nothing" (on Friday) centers on a nihilistic young man and the secretary who shows sympathy for him. "The End of Love" (on Saturday), directed by the film critic Eizo Yamagiwa, had been presumed lost but will now screen for what is said to be the first time in the United States. 212 715 1258, japansociety.org WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD at the Museum of Modern Art (April 8 20). There's a lot going on conceptually in MoMA's latest series, designed as a companion piece to the vintage posters on display outside the museum's theaters. The title comes from a 1932 George Cukor film (showing on April 13), which was a forerunner of "A Star Is Born." The guiding intellectual spirit is the critic Parker Tyler, who asked in 1944 whether Hollywood would "remain monstrous and pernicious" or make movies that worked "toward an end beyond what any other art has accomplished in a mass sense." The selections zero in on how movies have shaped perceptions of sexual politics. More than half the films come from the 1930s, but in terms of when they were released, the lineup begins with the silent era star Louise Brooks ("Diary of a Lost Girl," on Tuesday) and ends with Divine ("Female Trouble," on Thursday and April 20). 212 708 9400, moma.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters I landed in Delhi on a work trip in mid March and just over a week later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced what was soon recognized as the world's strictest lockdown. He warned Indians to imagine "a sacrosanct line" around their homes, not to be breached for work or travel of any kind, not even a walk outdoors. Evoking the 18 day war described in the Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic, Mr. Modi said it would take 21 days to win the war on the coronavirus. Two months later, I am still cooped up in my house off Delhi's Ring Road, by far the longest stretch I have spent in India since I first left for work in New York nearly two decades ago. My immediate concern was that in its usual way, India was copying measures that rich countries take to protect public safety and welfare but that low income countries cannot afford. I was in touch with officials in other major emerging countries and none advocated total lockdowns because without the resources to support new armies of the unemployed, closing the economy would only lead to more hunger and death. Within days, millions of displaced migrant workers were coursing out of major Indian cities thousands trudging right past my front door. Most were young men, released from construction jobs and evicted by nervous landlords. They planned to live on the kindness of strangers, which is not necessarily a losing bet in India, and to keep walking home to villages hundreds of miles away. I had to question how many would make it, walking side by side, at unsafe social distances. "It doesn't matter," one young man told me. "The government says that this is a serious disease, so what else can we do but go home?" Delhi's liberal elite has long criticized Mr. Modi for his autocratic style and Hindu centric agenda, but they rallied behind his lockdown immediately. Though India had seen relatively few deaths from the virus, the media had broadcast many images of people dying alone in Italy, Spain and the United States, and fear was spreading faster than the virus. Early on, the Modi administration made beds available for Covid 19 patients only in government hospitals infamous hellholes the privileged avoid at all cost. A friend was only half joking when he told me, "Even if the virus isn't going to kill you, getting sent to a government hospital will." After three weeks the government began replacing lockdown 1.0 with slightly looser versions, but instead of relaxing, many upper class Indians were still confining themselves more strictly than the rules require and learning to love it. They posted odes to recipe sharing, Netflix, Zoom cocktail parties, the clear view of the sky and moon as the smog lifted over an idle nation. They gasped over images of leopards venturing into shuttered cities like Chandigarh, 150 miles from Delhi. Ah, nature! When I look out my living room window, I see dorms for the community staff and wonder how sublime this life can be for them. Does social distancing have any meaning for laborers packed six to a 200 square foot room? This crisis has been liberating for Indian bureaucrats and the police, self important in normal times, "essential" now. WhatsApp is full of videos of the police beating people caught on the streets without a satisfactory excuse or forcing them to perform squats while holding their ears a punishment common in government schools. The commentary on these clips is often more humorous than horrified, including one mash up that went viral with cricket style commentary. By mid April, many rich countries had started to debate reopening their economies, and protests were breaking out against lockdowns in several major U.S. states. In India, there was little public debate, much less protest. The hardest hit, the poor and unemployed, seem to accept their misery as fate, no doubt unaware of evidence showing that the more stringent the lockdown, the more severe the economic damage. Some estimates suggest that India's economy could contract by nearly 6 percent this year, making this the worst downturn in the country's post independence history. All this and the Covid 19 death toll in India is around 4,700, fewer than the number who die, mostly in rural areas, each week from tuberculosis or diarrhea. Still, the urban elite has all the political influence, and most have remained steadfast supporters of the tough lockdown. "If the government lifts restrictions, millions of illiterate Indians will pour into the streets and superspread the disease," a friend said. But what of estimates showing that each week the lockdown is pushing tens of millions of Indians below the poverty line? The standard answer is: "The government should take care of them. Just look how much the United States is spending on displaced workers." Never mind that India has about one twentieth the average income of the United States and, with its dysfunctional bureaucracy, is particularly ill equipped to manage the sudden displacement of so many workers. Constrained by high public debt and a large deficit, India's government has increased spending by less than 2 percent of gross domestic product since the lockdowns began compared with about 12 percent in the United States. This lack of resources greatly complicates the challenge of helping the jobless in India, a far flung group that is so hard to track that the government doesn't regularly report the unemployment rate. But a credible Mumbai think tank estimates that it has tripled under the lockdown to 24 percent well above the U.S. rate. And the United States has no group as large or underserved as the Indian migrant workers, who number around 140 million and for the most part do not qualify for India's limited unemployment benefits. For a while, the Indian media had stopped covering the flight of the itinerant laborers, sticking instead to positively patriotic takes on the war effort. But then 16 sleeping migrants were run over by a train on tracks they assumed, fatally, would be empty until the pandemic ends. Now they are back in the news. Many of those laborers are testing positive when they get home, driving up India's case count even as lockdown fatigue forces the authorities to ease up. It is past midnight on Ring Road as I sit down to write. Outside, angry shouting erupts. I go out. It is the migrants, moving in small groups, one fending off an attack by thieves from the nearby slums. They had set out on rumors about an imminent lockdown 4.0, assuming the worst. I hope they make it home safe. But learning to love life under lockdown? That kind of love is too expensive for them. Ruchir Sharma is the chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, the author of, most recently, "The Ten Rules of Successful Nations" and a contributing Opinion writer. This essay reflects his opinions alone. 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 |
Jeff Daniels as the former F.B.I. director James Comey in "The Comey Rule." Holly Hunter portrays Sally Yates, who was the acting U.S. attorney general. Before Nov. 3, Watch This and This and This Jeff Daniels agreed to play James Comey in Showtime's "The Comey Rule" on the promise that the four hour mini series would be released ahead of the election. The documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney worked at a breakneck pace to complete his feature length film "Totally Under Control," an indictment of the Trump administration's handling of the coronavirus, so it could debut before Nov. 3. And Aaron Sorkin began courting streaming companies at the end of May when it became clear that the global pandemic would impede Paramount Pictures' ability to release his film about protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in theaters this year. For Mr. Sorkin, the decision to forgo a traditional theatrical release "The Trial of the Chicago 7" is available on Netflix starting Friday was all about being part of the conversation when the conversation was happening. "There is going to be exhaustion a year from now," he said in a recent interview. "Now is when you want to release it." Hollywood rarely shies away from politics. This election cycle, however, a plethora of movies, documentaries and TV mini series are hitting the marketplace with immediate relevance. That stands in contrast to the usual industry practice of waiting for events to pass into history before depicting them onscreen. Think Oliver Stone's "JFK" or Spike Lee's "Malcolm X." "I can't think of any writer director who ever had the opportunity I had, to write about the collapse of a building while it was still collapsing," said Billy Ray, who began working on "The Comey Rule" in 2018 when Mr. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, released his memoir, "A Higher Loyalty." The mini series, which features Brendan Gleeson as President Trump, generated mostly positive reviews, and the first episode was seen by 2.5 million people across various platforms and the second by 2.1 million. Whether these projects can influence the election is another matter. And with less than three weeks until Election Day, the window to reach undecided voters is quickly closing anyway. "The percentage of voters who are swayable in the states that matter are 2 to 5 percent," said Tanya Somanader, the chief content officer for Crooked Media, left leaning political content company, and a strategist in the Obama administration. "And that number is collapsing by the day because people are voting early." That won't stop Hollywood from trying. Last month, Amazon Studios released the documentary "All In: The Fight for Democracy," which both tracks Stacey Abrams's run for governor in Georgia in 2018 and its contested result and examines the history of voter suppression in the United States. The film was accompanied by a 22 city bus tour and an extensive voter registration drive. "We are hoping to inspire people to fight for what is theirs," said Liz Garbus, who directed the film with Lisa Cortes. "That means voting." On Wednesday, HBO will debut "537 Votes," a documentary about the disputed 2000 presidential election. The director Adam McKay ("Vice") is the executive producer. On the same day, the magazine The Atlantic will unveil its first documentary, "White Noise," about the rise of far right nationalism. Next Friday, Amazon will start streaming "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm," a sequel to the 2006 satire starring Sacha Baron Cohen as the clueless Kazakh journalist Borat. While the plot has not been revealed, the film's trailer shows Mr. Cohen's alter ego crashing the Conservative Political Action Conference while Vice President Mike Pence is speaking. (Mr. Cohen also plays Mr. Hoffman in "Chicago 7.") Showtime will air Alexandra Pelosi's "American Selfie: One Nation Shoots Itself," an examination of the country's hyperpartisan landscape over the past 12 months, next Friday, too. "Us Kids," a documentary centered on the teenagers turned activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the March for Our Lives movement, will become available via Alamo Drafthouse Virtual Cinema on Oct. 30. Mr. Gibney began his "Totally Under Control" project in May after the coronavirus ripped through New York, killing one of his friends and putting another one on a ventilator. He and his co directors, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, trace the administration's delayed response, its failure to secure proper protective equipment and the subsequent politicization of science regarding the pandemic. A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. The win by Glenn Youngkin, who campaigned heavily in the governor's race on education and who evaded the shadow of Donald Trump, could serve as a blueprint for Republicans in the midterms. A rightward shift emerges. Mr. Youngkin outperformed Mr. Trump's 2020 results across Virginia, while a surprisingly strong showing in the New Jersey governor's race by the G.O.P. candidate unsettled Democrats. Democratic panic is rising. Less than a year after taking power in Washington, the party faces a grim immediate future as it struggles to energize voters and continues to lose messaging wars to Republicans. A new direction in N.Y.C. Eric Adams will be the second Black mayor in the city's history. The win for the former police captain sets in motion a more center left Democratic leadership. Mixed results for Democrats in cities. Voters in Minneapolis rejected an amendment to replace the Police Department while progressives scored a victory in Boston's mayoral race. The documentary features, among others, Dr. Rick Bright, the whistle blower from the Department of Health and Human Services; Kathleen Sebelius, the department's secretary under President Barack Obama; and Max Kennedy Jr., a grandson of Robert F. Kennedy who sent an anonymous complaint in April to Congress detailing the "dangerous incompetence" of the Trump coronavirus task force, for which he was a volunteer. "I hope it makes a huge difference," Mr. Gibney said of his film, which became available on demand on Tuesday and will stream on Hulu next week. "It's a crime film, and the crimes we discovered were fraud and negligence," he added. "If you are looking at it from the perspective of 'Did this administration do all it could to protect American citizens?' that's an important piece of information to have when you are going to the voting booth." Hollywood's liberal leanings have long been known, and that hasn't changed this year. Last month on Instagram, Dwayne Johnson announced his support for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee. Mr. Johnson was soon followed by Taylor Swift. Last week, a group of naked actors including Sarah Silverman, Mark Ruffalo and Tiffany Haddish demonstrated in a viral video the proper way to send in a mail in ballot. That's not stopping Mr. Sorkin, who argues that actors have as much of a right to their political opinion as dentists do. The day before "The Trial of Chicago 7" became available on Netflix, HBO Max aired the "The West Wing Special," a restaging of an "ode to voting" episode of the NBC show Mr. Sorkin created in 1999, to promote voting via Michelle Obama's When We All Vote initiative. With "The West Wing" often categorized as a "liberal fantasy," Mr. Sorkin is bracing for a withering response from conservatives. He even wrote his defense into the introductory remarks that the actor Bradley Whitford read at the start of the special: "We understand that most people don't appreciate the benefit of unsolicited advice from actors, and if HBO Max was going to point a camera at the 10 smartest people in America, we would gladly clear the stage for them," Mr. Whitford said. "But the camera is pointed at us, and we think that the risk of appearing obnoxious is too small a reason not to do something if we can get even one person to the polls." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A 6,000 square foot block through retail space is available in this six and a half story TriBeCa loft condominium, where the singer songwriter Taylor Swift owns the penthouse apartment. The space has 77 feet of frontage along Franklin Street and 33 feet along Leonard Street, and the block has a stop on the No. 1 subway line. Previously an office with an open floor plan, the space also offers a usable 2,500 square foot lower level, four bathrooms, two kitchen pantries and five conference rooms. A private elevator may be constructed in an old shaft between the levels. The building was originally the Sugarloaf Warehouse, built around 1882 by the architect George W. DaCunha. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
TO BUILD A BETTER WORLD Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth By Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice As secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice hung up in her office portraits of George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson, the predecessors who, more than anyone else, built the institutions that governed the international community after World War II. Rice and the president she served, George W. Bush, believed that with the invasion of Iraq, and the aggressive promotion of democracy across the Middle East, they could extend to the Arab world the liberal, democratic order that had sustained peace and prosperity in the West. They turned out to be dreadfully wrong, and neither the United States nor the Middle East has recovered from their reckless experiments. Like Henry Kissinger, Rice is a scholar as well as a diplomat, and thus has additional means to influence the public and shape her own standing. A quarter of a century ago, she and Philip Zelikow, both of whom served as midlevel officials in President George H. W. Bush's National Security Council, described the virtuoso statecraft that brought the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion in "Germany Unified and Europe Transformed" a kind of bookend to the world ordering labors of Marshall and Acheson. In "To Build a Better World" they return to the subject, but with a new sense of urgency, for, as they write, the world seems to be "drifting toward another great systemic crisis." They would have us regard the end of the Cold War as a parable for our own beleaguered times. Rice and Zelikow make a convincing case that the collapse of the Soviet Union constituted one of history's rare "catalytic episodes," when the existing order is convulsed by immense forces that statesmen can shape for good or ill. Had reckless leaders made self aggrandizing choices, the collapse of a great power could have led to chaos and war. This did not happen, in Rice and Zelikow's telling, because the chief actors of the drama the elder President Bush, the German chancellor Helmut Kohl and the Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev were rational, worldly, pragmatic heads of state. They shared a vision of a common Europe, even if Gorbachev imagined a Communist Soviet Union flourishing alongside the capitalist West. They believed in, and used, the chief institutions of the postwar world, whether NATO or the United Nations. They understood the political limits under which each operated. When he met Gorbachev in late 1989, Bush said: "I have conducted myself in ways not to complicate your life. That's why I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall." Gorbachev, under great pressure from traditionalists to keep the Soviet sphere intact, responded that "he had noticed that and appreciated it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Woods's neck issue may indeed be minor, but for many years when he struggled to play through myriad infirmities, Woods often withdrew from a tournament with a similarly short statement about a seemingly insignificant injury. In the end, he missed dozens of events, and his absences from competition lasted months because of multiple, serious knee operations and four back surgeries. On Monday, Woods did offer one encouraging sentence: "I hope to be ready for The Players." The Players Championship, which is the PGA Tour's flagship event and is often called a fifth major golf championship, runs from March 14 to 17. Woods's optimism about playing in the tournament will help calm worries about his golf fitness for now. But should he miss that tournament, a fair amount of panic will probably ensue about his ability to continue a startling comeback that was one of the most uplifting stories in sports last year. The Masters begins in five weeks, on April 11. Six months ago, Woods completed an unforeseen return to golf's upper echelon and ended a five year winless drought, with a victory at the season ending Tour Championship. It was the 18th tournament that Woods played in 2018 his first full schedule of events since 2015. He did not miss a tournament he was scheduled to appear at last year. This year, Woods has already played three times. Eight days ago, he finished tied for 10th at the Mexico Championship. At that event, Woods did not mention any neck discomfort, and he did not say Monday how the injury occurred. In his two other events this year, Woods tied for 20th at the Farmer Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in late January, and he shared 15th place at the Genesis Open at Riviera in mid February. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Glytone Enhance Brightening Complex, 70 at dermstore.com, a combination of glycolic and azelaic acids, gently lightens hyperpigmentation by breaking up pigment proteins. What's nice is that it can be applied all over, unlike the often prescribed skin lightener hydroquinone, a spot treatment. That makes this cream ideal for larger areas like the hands and decolletage (it's mild enough for the thin skin there, too). Expect to see results in three months a lengthy commitment, yes, but in the meantime you'll get the radiance boosting benefits of exfoliation. But don't forget the sunscreen: Glycolic acid increases sun sensitivity. When Seagull Haircutters, known for its edgy yet versatile cuts and rainbow dye color, outgrew its four chair storefront on West 10th Street, the owners the hairstylist Shaun SureThing and Johanna Fateman were intent on maintaining a sense of community in their new, larger space. The midcentury decor is accessible and playful. Clients sip coffee and chat at a communal table while they wait. The ambience is cool without being exclusionary. "We're like an old school salon in that stylists collaborate on ideas and people actually talk to each other," Mr. SureThing said. Cuts start at 100, and color ranges from 175 to 300. In May the salon will add acupuncture and laser skin and hair removal treatments. Seagull Haircutters, 224 West Fourth Street, second floor, 212 989 1807. The makeup artist Fiona Stiles, who has worked her magic on the Hollywood likes of Gabrielle Union and Jennifer Garner, has created a color collection for Ulta Beauty. "I wanted my products to be exciting but not intimidating to people who aren't savvy with makeup," Ms. Stiles said. Among the highlights is a set of contouring powders, 28, that go on sheer. "Every contouring powder or cream I'd seen was quite heavy, which can end up streaky," she said. "This is a lot harder to mess up." The Light Illusion Prism Palette highlighters, 28, are subtle, not glittery, which is built in protection against overdoing it. And even the darkest eye shadows have little fallout, so your cheeks won't end up with an inadvertent dusting of smokiness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Though she began writing at age 7, Grace F. Edwards waited until she was 55 to publish her first novel. That book, "In the Shadow of the Peacock," was a lush portrayal of Harlem during World War II, a girl's coming of age story set against the race riots of the time. It was a placeholder for the six detective stories she would later write, mysteries set in Harlem starring a female cop turned sociologist and accidental sleuth named Mali Anderson, always with a backbeat of jazz. The first of these, "If I Should Die," was published in 1997, when Ms. Edwards was 64. She was 87 when she died on Feb. 25 at Downstate Hospital in Brooklyn, her death receiving little notice at the time. Her daughter, Perri Edwards, who confirmed the death, said she had had dementia for three years. In the late 1960s, Ms. Edwards and a friend ran an Afrocentric dress shop selling dashikis and stylish caftans of their own designs and those of others near West 140th Street and Seventh Avenue (now called Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard). They called the store Neferti, for the African queen (intentionally misspelling the name because another business had taken the correctly rendered one, Nefertiti). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
It would seem almost impossible for a late night comedy show that employs 17 cast members (along with many other artists, technicians and staff members) to produce new episodes in this era of sheltering in place. But this weekend, "Saturday Night Live" is going to give it a shot. On Thursday, NBC said that "S.N.L.", its long running sketch variety series, will broadcast an episode on Saturday that will include new content created outside of its traditional home at Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center. NBC said in a statement that this original material would be "produced remotely as 'S.N.L.' practices social distancing." Although no guest host or musical performers were mentioned, the statement added that this new episode would include the recurring "Weekend Update" segment along with "other original content from 'S.N.L.' cast members." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
I might have completely written off "Ma," the ambitious, but not fully realized psychological thriller as a "Get Out" copycat had I not read an interview in which Octavia Spencer said that playing an increasingly unhinged woman, in the starring role, represented a new era in her career. She would no longer play caretakers, nursemaids, stewards of other people's emotional journeys. "At this point in my life, I will be heard," she said. What, exactly did she want us to hear? The film was marketed as a potentially hilarious revenge fantasy about an older black woman who's simply had enough. Enough of being mistreated and overlooked, run down and run over, and who snaps on a group of unruly white kids. The film unspools quite differently, largely in part because it doesn't know what it wants to be: A study of PTSD, a "Falling Down" reboot, pure camp or torture porn? It manages to be a little of all, none very successfully. The filmmakers seem more invested in positioning the movie to be eaten up, regurgitated and upcycled on Twitter than in making a point about its protagonist, a lonely woman named Sue Ann (nicknamed Ma) who lives in a predominantly white town in Ohio, working at a dead end job and at war with herself and the trauma of her past. The director Tate Taylor narrates a sequence from his film starring Octavia Spencer. "Hey this is Tate Taylor, director of Ma." "Not today. Not today. Come on, sweetie." "This is the scene where most teenagers will remember that moment where they tried to get an adult to buy them alcohol. We see here that Octavia's in some kind of scrubs with a three legged dog, which is a little bit of foreshadowing a maimed beast. And this is when Maggie meets Sue Ann for the first time sheer chance." "You want to spend the night in jail? Does that sound fun to you?" "But just by chance, she sees the writing on this van the kids are driving Hawkins Security. And we later figure out, throughout the course of the movie, the name Hawkins awoke something in Sue Ann, something that's been asleep for a very, very long time. And she puts it together. And there's a hint that maybe this kid could possibly be a link to her past, so she's intrigued." "I wouldn't be able to live with myself if you got into an accident." "Oh, well, I'm driving and I don't drink. We were just gonna go to the rock pile for a little bit, I promise." "I know where that is. Shoot. We used to hang out there all the time when I was a kid." "So she decides that, O.K., I'm gonna buy alcohol for these kids and just keep seeing what's happening. If this is what I think it is, I want in." "Hell. Hold this dog." "Yes!" "So it's like a monster that's been asleep, and this is the moment that it's woken up. And in many ways, I like to think if Carrie in the movie "Carrie" had not burned everybody alive, and she had somehow repressed her trauma and gone on to live, what would have happened if, later in life, that trauma resurfaced?" "O.K. They didn't have whatever Fireball is so, I got Aftershock. The man said it's the same thing This never happened, O.K.?" "Thanks again for " "I really wanted to pump up the nostalgia, the innocence, those crazy summers when kids had nothing to do. It just feels innocent. And as a director, and knowing how loved Octavia is as an actor, I wanted it to be fun. I wanted the audience to feel like they were those kids, and they were pulling wool over her eyes, and they were getting away with something." "Hey!" "Oh my god!" "Your change. I'm not some thug." "It's the genre. I wanted to have fun with it, and a wink and a nod to the movies of the past that we all love." The director Tate Taylor narrates a sequence from his film starring Octavia Spencer. There is a long history in popular culture of characters unraveling with gusto: Sissy Spacek in "Carrie" ; John Wick, to some degree; Daenerys's razing the entirety of Kings Landing, just because she could. The inner monologue of Nora, the narrator of Claire Messud's novel "The Woman Upstairs," fumes with anger at her own unrealized dreams, giving herself permission to lash out in unforgivable ways. In my favorite Elena Ferrante novel "The Days of Abandonment," a woman named Olga descends into madness after her husband leaves her for another woman. When Olga sees them together in the street, she lashes out, verbally and physically. Olga tries to seduce her neighbor and accidentally kills her dog. Authors like Nell Zink, Ottessa Moshfegh and Paula Bomer also love to write women who take pleasure in being pathological disasters. Consuming narratives of unbridled messiness and fury delight me (I'm a Scorpio). Although of course I know that these behaviors are not normative or acceptable, it's darkly fun to indulge in the fantasy of them, of giving into the base human impulses that exist beyond societal expectations. It's reassuring to know that having a limit is human, and to see how skilled directors and writers embody what happens when we go over it. Rage is a regular part of my life, and since I rarely get to fully express it, I enjoy seeing it explode onscreen. It's as cathartic as any means of processing anger, grief, fear, sadness. Have we ever seen a black protagonist snap as hard as Ma? Each of the characters described above are white. We've certainly seen Elektra Abundance, Cookie Lyon and Olivia Pope char their enemies with a single glance, but murder? Black women onscreen are rarely anything but the impeccably dressed and infallible "superheroes" that the noted black feminist writer Michelle Wallace presciently understood, even back in the 1970s. They are resilient; they rely on humor and "sass" to endure life's hardships. Anger may be present, but we rarely see it depicted as more than cutting remarks, or a tired bitterness. I kept waiting for Red, the tethered doppelganger played by Lupita Nyong'o in Jordan's Peele's "Us" to have a justifiably explosive meltdown from decades of deceit and pent up repression, but she never did. Her exterior remained calm, calculating, collected. Messy, sexual, traumatized, abusive black women like the one Spencer plays are not easily digested. A friend recently told me that her girlfriend's family was so disturbed by the film that they refused to discuss it after, or relay any details whatsoever. There's a scene in "Ma" where Spencer sits in a nail salon, thumbing through her social feeds to kill time. She sees a video of Haley, one of the local kids she's befriended, telling everyone to ignore Ma. That she's lame. A loser. Ma screeches at her smartphone, irritating the older white woman next to her, who then becomes the target of Ma's rage. Ma scrambles into her car and drives around until she sees a former high school classmate and actually runs her over. Later, we find out that this classmate had a particularly devious hand in Ma's trauma, but in that moment, we're just bearing witness to what it might feel like to follow a spiral to its darkest end. And seeing a black women enact it is unbelievably satisfying and unheard of, onscreen. "Ma" was originally written for a white character who has a mental break. Tate Taylor, Spencer's longtime friend and collaborator (they also worked together on "The Help") wanted to adapt it for her. When he told her that "you actually do all the killing," she said she replied, "O.K., I'm interested." What if the witch from Hansel and Gretel had been black? Freddy Krueger? Hannibal Lecter? In "Ma," we get a Katamari blend of all three, skewered through the lens of a woman who is sick and tired of people assuming she's, well, the help. Spencer is a creative who seems to be brimming with unfulfilled desires and potential. She spent the better part of two decades playing the types of black characters that white audiences find endearing and reminiscent of "better" times and that tend to make black audiences squirm. But what we do know is that Spencer is not afraid to play around with complex themes of black isolation, motherhood, white entitlement, pain physical and metaphysical and humor. I laughed more the second time that I watched "Ma." In a recent interview with Vulture, Lee Daniels said that when he watches his 2009 drama "Precious," he laughs. "It's so painful that you have to laugh," he said. "Because if you sit with it, you'll be in a mental institution." Spencer's deftness with such unformed ideas is still a marvel to watch. Ma works at a veterinarian clinic, and the scenes of her at work make for the film's funniest, like when she's trying to wrangle a goat into a trailer and half kicks and curses at it. Or when she starts to harass the teenagers using their own weapon of choice: social media. These lighter moments don't offset the truly disturbing parts of the film including the abuse of her daughter. During the final act, Ma paints the lone black teenager's face with white paint and sings to him, "Sorry, there's only room for one of us." I kept thinking about that character, Darrell, in the aftermath, when all the teenagers are crying and comforting themselves. Darrell stood to the side, alone, head hung in contemplation. No one hugged him, or wiped his face, or unwound the dog collar still around his neck. What happens to him and his pain? There's a clip on YouTube of Minny, Spencer's Oscar winning role in "The Help." The clip was recorded stealthily and illegally while the film was still playing in theaters, but the important part is you can hear the reaction of the audience as Minny exacts revenge on her white employers. Fed up with their mistreatment of her, she tells them there's human excrement in the pie they are currently eating. You can barely hear the dialogue over the claps and cackles as Minny wields power in the only way someone in her position could back then. Spencer's history in Hollywood is uncomfortable. What does it mean that even her departure from those genres also makes us uncomfortable? Maybe the discomfort is the story we should be paying attention to. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A batty composer, a fusty French chateau, missing children and that old faithful, the Antichrist add up to a whole lot of silliness in "The Sonata," a leaden Gothic ghost story whose high gloss imagery fails to disguise its low energy plot. Bedazzled or otherwise, cliches are still cliches, and this debut feature from Andrew Desmond is strewn with them. When Richard Marlowe (Rutger Hauer), a reclusive composer who disappeared mysteriously decades earlier, dies suddenly, his disgruntled daughter, Rose (Freya Tingley) an ambitious violin prodigy inherits his forbidding French estate. Included in the bequest is the usual creepy housekeeper (introduced in familiar jump scare fashion), a book on Satanism, and villagers who eye her with the shifty hostility of their counterparts in many a previous horror movie. ("An American Werewolf in London" springs to mind, but feel free to choose your own example.) Poking around Marlowe's gloomy mansion, Rose and her long suffering manager, Charles (Simon Abkarian), unearth the sheet music for Marlowe's final composition: a violin sonata marked with strange annotations in scarlet ink. The same symbols appear in various locations on the property, where shadowy figures hover out of focus and a derelict chapel houses Marlowe's nastiest secrets. At times, the film as in its arrestingly fiery opening seems to be straining to express ideas beyond the rote, only to be thwarted by a director who doesn't know how to develop them or when to pick up the pace. Some scenes are positively funereal responding to a suspicious noise, Rose takes what feels like a five minute stroll from bathtub to hallway while others are only fuzzily incorporated into the story. (Charles's drinking, for instance, seems narratively redundant, unless it's to promote the regressive notion that those who struggle with addiction are more likely to be seduced by evil.) As the story crawls forward, Alexis Maingaud's sometimes lovely, sometimes booming score climaxes every time there's a sniff of the supernatural, whipping itself toward the finale. Melodramatic camera movements keep telling us where to look, and isolated sections of Rose's body her padding feet, her widening eyes fill the screen. Elevating even the most humdrum effects, the Latvian cinematographer Janis Eglitis gives the movie's wraithlike figures a spooky glamour that suggests, were we to spend more time with them, they'd be livelier company than the movie's stars. (This is one of Hauer's last roles (he died last year), and we barely see him.) Required to play little more than bratty or baffled, Tingley (best known for television series like "Hemlock Grove" and "Once Upon a Time") is most convincing when sawing on her violin. Her final close up might be the film's most hackneyed moment of all, proving that not only does the Devil have all the best tunes, he also has all the best shades of lipstick. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Is there anything easier to sell than a pedicure to a sweaty New Yorker? Plop down, let someone soak and exfoliate and massage and moisturize your feet, and all that is asked of you is to stare into space, read that week's tabloid or, in my case, gently stalk your high school crush's wife on Instagram. It's a respite, a meditation, a way for me to incorporate some color into my wardrobe. It's even relaxing to experience secondhand. Chanel used to have a manicure tutorial video on its site that was so soothing I had it bookmarked on my computer to use during cases of severe nerves. Much has rightly been made about the conditions of workers in nail salons, particularly after a 2015 investigation published in this paper. In the years since, many nail care enthusiasts have started to pick salons for not just the quality of their work, but also for their values: nontoxic polishes, ethical labor conditions, medical training. They tend to come with a higher price tag, too. I've paid 40 for room service breakfast, but when I saw that Shen Beauty, a beauty store and salon in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was offering 85 pedicures, I came down with a case of sticker shock, then booked an appointment. It was a pop up for Dr. Krista Archer, a podiatric surgeon whose office is on the Upper East Side. Dr. Archer is the only podiatrist I've ever met, but I feel confident saying she's the hippest in the city, if not the planet. The day of my appointment, she wore tiny diamonds snaking up the multiple piercings in her ears and casually mentioned being a superfan of Pearl Jam. If names are destiny, Dr. Archer heeded the call: Her line of natural foot products are simply called Arch. What she offers is a medical pedicure, performed by nail technicians she trains and supervises who use sterilized and single use instruments. In practice, the pedicure doesn't seem all that different from the typical upscale one: There's cleaning the feet, filing the nails, grooming the cuticles and nail beds, moisturizing and massaging and polishing. What you're really paying for, besides guaranteed sterility, is a kind of Type A pedicure in its thorough and exacting approach. There was a glycolic peel, followed by a soak with pink Himalayan sea salts and Dr. Archer's own Sole Savour Scrub that has fine bits of pumice in it and a slightly herbaceous scent. After my heels and cuticles were polished and pushed back, there was a cream, a balm and an antifungal tea tree nail oil. I ended the pedicure with a rose beige in LeChat's B 52, but it was almost an afterthought given that my feet had probably last been that soft at birth. It was an indulgence but one that I felt good about. I swore I'd never let anyone else touch my feet again. It was a memorable pedicure, the best I've ever had, but no matter how much you spend, nails grow and polish chips. Two weeks later, my feet were returning to their usual hooflike appearance, and I don't have the kind of bank balance that could justify pedicures that cost nearly three figures. So I made an appointment at the NoMad location of Sundays, a new nail studio that has its own in house line of nontoxic, vegan, cruelty free polishes. Sundays is a step up from the usual neighborhood salon, but with comparable prices. The vibe is Instagram chic, with cowhide chairs, pillows with a Memphis style print, and the leafy plants that are so ubiquitous in businesses catering to a certain millennial, city dwelling, female clientele. It's also casually luxurious, with pedicures starting at 45. I had to stop myself from showing too much visible excitement when I was given a whole bottle of green juice from Pressed Juicery and puffed rice snacks. There are no magazines to be found; instead, a single copy of "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up" by Marie Kondo sat on a side table as an invitation to get one's life in order. Self improvement is big at Sundays. It offers a guided meditation you can listen to on headphones while technicians in blush pink cardigans work on your nails. And they certainly know what they're doing. Your feet are thoroughly attended to: There's a soak with sea salt, a lot of attention to sloughing off rough spots and repairing cuticles with sterile tools, and a massage with a homemade cream. French language songs played faintly in the background, and I listened to a woman in a Chanel jacket tell her companion that "orange is the one color that looks good on everyone." I didn't test out her questionable theory, instead opting for No. 14 polish, a raspberry shade from the house line. I then put my pedicure to the test, going on a beach trip and walking through tide pools. My polish didn't budge. But when it does, I can afford to keep going back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Results of small studies have trickled out in the last few weeks that signaled more problems with using the malaria drugs to treat coronavirus patients. The latest report, on Friday in the journal Nature Medicine, describes abnormal heart rhythms in 84 patients treated with the drugs. Several medical societies, including the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Thoracic Society and the American College of Cardiology, have warned of the risks of using malaria drugs with azithromycin to treat patients with Covid 19 outside of a clinical trial or without close monitoring. "The F.D.A. is aware of reports of serious heart rhythm problems in patients with Covid 19 treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, often in combination with azithromycin" and other drugs that can disrupt heart rhythm, the statement said. It also noted that many people were getting outpatient prescriptions for the drugs in the hopes of preventing the infection or treating it themselves. The warning is based on reports from multiple sources that described adverse events, including several types of abnormal heart rhythm, "and in some cases death," the F.D.A. said. The message is the second warning about the drugs this week from a federal health agency. On Tuesday, guidelines from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases cautioned that patients receiving hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine should be monitored for adverse effects, particularly an abnormality in heart rhythm called prolonged QTc interval. And at a White House briefing that day, the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Stephen Hahn, emphasized that the agency wanted data from randomized clinical trials before considering the drugs as a valid treatment. Rick Bright, who led the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the agency seeding money to companies working on vaccines, said on Wednesday that he was removed from his post after he pressed for rigorous vetting of hydroxychloroquine, and that the administration had put "politics and cronyism ahead of science." There is no proven treatment for the coronavirus, and there is no proof that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine can help coronavirus patients. Those two drugs are approved to treat malaria and the autoimmune diseases lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. But earlier reports from France and China suggesting a benefit led to interest in the drugs, even though the reports lacked the scientific controls needed to determine whether the drugs actually worked. The French study was later discredited. Scientists have urged that the drugs be tested in controlled clinical trials to find out definitively whether they can fight the coronavirus or quell overreactions by the immune system that can become life threatening. Those studies are underway in the United States and around the world. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the president's coronavirus task force, has not endorsed the drugs, but has consistently said that scientific evidence is essential to find out whether they work. "I have been very clear of the importance of doing randomized controlled trials to definitively prove whether something is both safe and effective," he said in an interview. A report on Friday, from doctors in New York, adds to concerns about combining hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. In 84 hospitalized patients receiving the drugs, electrocardiograms found a rhythm disruption called a prolonged QTc interval a few days after the treatment began. In nine cases the disorder was severe, reaching levels known to increase the risk of sudden death. None of the patients died from heart problems, however. Patients given the combination should be carefully monitored, especially if they have other chronic conditions and if they are also receiving other drugs known to affect heart rhythm, the doctors, from NYU Langone Health, said in a letter to the journal Nature Medicine. Many of the 84 patients had other health problems, including 65 percent with high blood pressure and 20 percent with diabetes. Their ages ranged from 18 to 88, with an average of 63, and 74 percent were male. Many hospitals are reporting that the disease appears more serious in men than in women. The doctors suggested that the underlying illnesses and the severity of the coronavirus infection may have made the patients especially vulnerable to the cardiac effects of the combined drugs. Their study was peer reviewed but did not include a comparison group of patients who did not receive the drugs, to see if their heart rhythm changed as the disease progressed. Another study, analyzing the records of 368 Veterans Affairs patients, posted on Tuesday but not yet peer reviewed, found that hydroxychloroquine, with or without azithromycin, did not help patients avoid the need for ventilators. And hydroxychloroquine alone was associated with an increased risk of death. But the study was not a controlled trial, was not peer reviewed and patients who received the drugs were sicker to begin with. The authors wrote, "These findings highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
LONDON Vanessa Kirby has never given birth, but after shooting her first lead movie role in "Pieces of a Woman," she kind of feels like she has. "Whenever I see a pregnant woman now, or someone's telling me that they've just given birth, I smile," she said in a recent video chat. "I feel with them." The two full days she spent shooting a searing scene for the film could explain this psychic confusion, as could the thorough way Kirby, 32, immersed herself in the role. In "Pieces of a Woman," which debuts Jan. 7 on Netflix after a limited theatrical release in December, Kirby plays Martha, a pregnant woman whose home birth goes horribly wrong. So she got down to research. Watching many onscreen depictions of birth left Kirby no closer to understanding the experience, she said, since they were so censored and sanitized. "Then I was even more scared, because I realized that I had a responsibility to show birth as it is, not as it's even edited in documentaries," Kirby said. She talked to women who had given birth and women who'd had miscarriages, as well as midwives and obstetrician gynecologists at a London hospital. While she was there, a woman arrived having contractions, and agreed to let Kirby observe the birth. The experience of watching that six hour labor "changed me so profoundly," Kirby said. "Every second of what was happening to her, I just absorbed." Over two days, that long take was shot six times. In a phone interview, the director, Kornel Mundruczo, who also works in theater and opera, said that preparing it was like getting a stunt scene ready: "Lots of planning, but you don't know what's actually going to happen." In the end, each take was different, Kirby said: Martha and Sean's conversations shifted, the way Martha's body reacted to the contractions was distinctive each time. "It was, I think, probably the best career experience I've ever had," Kirby said of those two days of shooting. Inspired by the labor she'd observed, she tried to think as little as possible, she said, and not judge what her body was doing in the scene. After a decade of work, "Pieces of a Woman" is Kirby's first time leading a feature film, and it is a bold and memorable role that shows her flexing her acting muscles. Mundruczo said he needed an actor at Kirby's exact career point: "Where all of the skills are already there, but the fear is not," he said. "When you are very established, you are more and more careful." "Every time I walked into that space, I suddenly felt not judged at all, I just felt accepted," Kirby said. "You didn't have to be anything, or do anything right." After graduating from college, where she studied English literature, Kirby was accepted to the prestigious London Academy of Music Dramatic Art in 2009. A few months before term began, though, she was offered three stage roles by David Thacker, a former director in residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who was then the artistic director of the Octagon Theater in Bolton, a town in northern England. Come to Bolton, he told her, and you will learn more from these roles which included Helena in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Ann Deever in "All My Sons" than you will in three years of drama school. Kirby agreed, and now describes that season as her training. "I learned everything there," she said. Working with Thacker taught her to trust herself, to find her own way as an actor, rather than waiting for other people to tell her what to do, she said. Kirby has been working steadily ever since, with lead roles in the West End, as well as high profile supporting roles in films and British TV costume dramas. She starred as Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of "The Crown," a performance that earned her a BAFTA award. Her Margaret fizzes with restless energy, an ideal foil for Claire Foy's restrained Queen Elizabeth. Even as these supporting roles brought her critical praise and awards, Kirby wasn't in a hurry to find her first onscreen lead role, she said. She's played many complex characters onstage: women like Rosalind, the fiercely intelligent heroine of Shakespeare's "As You Like It." She was holding out for an onscreen lead in whom she could feel some of Rosalind's "magic," she said, which made performing "like flying when you step onstage." "I could never find those roles at all onscreen," she said. So she waited, using her smaller parts as opportunities to observe and learn, asking Anthony Hopkins about his craft when they worked together on the British TV drama "The Dresser," and watching how generous Rachel McAdams was onset for the film "About Time," she said. It's fitting, given Kirby's theatrical background, that "Pieces of a Woman" started life as a play, written by Kata Weber, Mundruczo's partner, who drew on the couple's own experience of losing a child. The play "Pieces of a Woman," which is set in Poland, consists of only two scenes: the birth, and an explosive dinner with Martha's family that occurs about halfway through the film adaptation. Its 2018 premiere, directed by Mundruczo at the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw, was a hit, and the production is still in the company's repertoire. Around the time Mundruczo turned 40, five years ago, he started wanting a bigger audience for his work, he said, so he switched from working in German, Hungarian and Polish; "Pieces of a Woman" is his first English language film. In adapting the play for the big screen, Mundruczo set it in Boston, he said, because he felt the city's Irish Catholic culture mirrored Poland's conservative social landscape. The loss of a pregnancy is rarely featured in onscreen entertainment. Mundruczo said he hopes watching Martha's experiences will encourage "people to be brave enough to have their own answer for any loss," he said. In recent months, the model Chrissy Teigen and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (writing in The New York Times), have shared stories of their experiences with pregnancy loss. Kirby said that, while researching for the role before filming, she found that women who had experienced one were "actually really relieved to talk about it," and appreciated that someone wanted to understand. "Pieces of a Woman" was shot over just 29 days last winter, but Kirby said it took months for her to shake off the experience of playing Martha. "I knew my job was to feel it, to feel what she felt," she said. Carrying that degree of empathy was "really difficult and disturbing," she said, but added that the privilege of spending time inside another's experience is what she loves about her work. Kirby's next project will see her co starring as Tallie, one of two farmers' wives who fall in love in the United States in the 19th century in "The World to Come," a meditative drama from the Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold slated for theatrical release next month. And after that? Kirby said she was reading scripts, on the hunt for the next role that will scare her. She's looking for an "untold story about women," she said, that will feel as urgent to tell as Martha and Tallie's did. "What's that expression?" she said. "Feel the fear, and do it anyway." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Still reeling, Harper moved to Philadelphia to work at a hospital where she was eventually passed over for a promotion by an apologetic (white, male, liberal) department chair who said: "I just can't ever seem to get a Black person or a woman promoted here. That's why they always leave!" From there, Harper went to an emergency room in North Philadelphia (which had a volume of more than 95,000 patients a year) and then across town to yet another facility, where she had fewer bureaucratic obligations and more time for her true calling: seeing patients. Harper tells her story through the lives of people she encounters on stretchers and gurneys patients who are scared, vulnerable, confused and sometimes impatient to the point of rage. Each chapter introduces us to a different case, although Harper never boils people down to their afflictions. We learn names and meet families. There's a newborn who isn't breathing; a repeat visitor whose chart includes a violent behavior alert; a veteran who opens up about what she's survived; an older man who receives a grim diagnosis with grace and humor. Harper looks each one in the eye. She listens. In this summer of protest and pain, perhaps most telling is Harper's encounter with a handcuffed Black man brought into the emergency room by four white police officers ("like rolling in military tanks to secure a small town demonstration"). He refuses an examination; after a brief conversation in which it seems as if they are the only two people in the crowded triage area, she agrees (against the wishes of the officers and a colleague) to discharge him. She writes about the incident "so we always remember that beneath the most superficial layer of our skin, we are all the same. In that sameness is our common entitlement to respect, our human entitlement to love." "The Beauty in Breaking" is a journey of a thousand judgment calls, including some lighter moments. Each one leads the author to a deeper understanding of herself and the reader to a clearer view of the inequities in our country. (An emergency room is a great equalizer, but only to an extent.) Just as Harper would never show up to examine a patient without her stethoscope, the reader should not open this book without a pen in hand. There are so many powerful beats you'll want to underline. Read an excerpt from "The Beauty in Breaking." None True or false: "We ignore the inconvenient problem because it doesn't have a rapidly accessible answer." How does this apply to the world outside an emergency room? None We've all seen the signs that say "Thank You Health Care Heroes." How does Harper's memoir change how you think of those words? "When Breath Becomes Air," by Paul Kalanithi. In this gutting, philosophical memoir, a 37 year old neurosurgeon chronicled what it is like to have terminal cancer. Not only did he read his own CT scans, he stared unflinchingly at his own life and shared his findings with unimaginable courage. "Know My Name," by Chanel Miller. At first glance, this memoir by a sexual assault survivor may not appear to have much in common with "The Beauty in Breaking." But the cover of Chanel Miller's book was inspired by the Japanese art of kintsukuroi, where broken pottery is repaired by filling the cracks with gold, silver or platinum. Harper writes about this concept when she describes her own survival. As she puts it, "In life, too, even greater brilliance can be found after the mending." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"Crown Vic" begins in the midst of a kinetic shootout, the camera zipping back and forth as a pair of masked robbers careen away from the L.A.P.D. in a car. But the writer director Joel Souza soon dissipates the adrenaline rush of this opening into a verbose, hackneyed thriller about a night in the lives of a veteran patrol officer and his trainee. Souza's feature plays like an amalgam of the tropes of numerous TV and movie police procedurals. The gruff and jaded older cop, Ray Mandel (Thomas Jane, overdoing the tortured macho routine), is haunted by the recent death of his longtime partner. The idealistic rookie, Nick Holland (Luke Kleintank), is eager to emerge from the shadow of his father a legend in the force and be a good family man. "Crown Vic" devotes much screen time to their banter, packing in more cliches per minute of dialogue than you'd think possible. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Speculation about the Obamas' books and how much they would sell for have been circulating in the industry in recent weeks, as executives at the top publishing houses met separately with the former president and first lady. Some publishing executives who followed the bidding process said that the opening offers for Mr. Obama's book alone were in the 18 million to 20 million range. The publisher plans to donate one million books in the Obama family's name to First Book, a nonprofit organization that provides books to disadvantaged children, and it will continue to provide digital copies to Open eBooks, which grew out of the 2016 White House digital education initiative. The Obamas also plan to donate part of their advances to charity, including the Obama Foundation. "We are absolutely thrilled to continue our publishing partnership with President and Mrs. Obama," Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, said in a statement. "With their words and their leadership, they changed the world, and every day, with the books we publish at Penguin Random House, we strive to do the same. Now, we are very much looking forward to working together with President and Mrs. Obama to make each of their books global publishing events of unprecedented scope and significance." The Obamas' advance is likely to exceed even the stratospheric figures that other recent presidents and first ladies have received. Former president Bill Clinton sold his memoir "My Life" for more than 10 million, and Hillary Clinton reportedly received an 8 million advance from Simon Schuster for her memoir "Living History." George W. Bush's memoir "Decision Points," became a hit, selling about two million copies and earning him an estimated 10 million. (Mr. Barnett, a Washington based lawyer, has handled many of these lucrative deals and represents some of the capital's most powerful players, including the Clintons; Mr. Bush and his wife, Laura Bush; Speaker Paul D. Ryan and former Vice President Dick Cheney.) It is unusual, however, for a former president and first lady to make a collective deal for their memoirs, and some publishing industry insiders said that early on the process, it appeared that the books were going to be auctioned separately. (It is possible, and perhaps likely, that the books will be published by different imprints in the Penguin Random House conglomerate, which could also help the company absorb the cost of a large advance, by sharing it between imprints.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Yekaterina Kondaurova, the elegant, flame haired principal of the Mariinsky Ballet, appeared in "Swan Lake" during her first year with the St. Petersburg company in 2001. "I was in the last row of the corps of swans," she recalled in an email interview. "At the time I thought it was the most frightening thing there could be in life. My arms and legs were shaking so much. It was even hard to stand on my two feet." Six years later, Ms. Kondaurova was front and center, making her debut in the demanding dual role of Odette Odile. On Jan. 21, she reprises the part in conjunction with the Mariinsky Theater's season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. What makes a work of art as timeless as "Swan Lake"? In the ballet, the princess Odette is turned into a swan by the sorcerer Rothbart; love will set her free, and she thinks that she's found it in Prince Siegfried, who pledges himself to her. But at a ball, Siegfried is tricked by Odile, Rothbart's seductive daughter, and promises to marry her. Suddenly, Odette is back where she started. Even when the sets are shoddy or the story line clumsily modernized, "Swan Lake" remains a sensational journey in which a Swan Queen tries to find her way back to life as she knew it. No matter if the ending is happy, tragic or somewhere in between, Odette's battle to reclaim her identity is undeniably moving. Yet perhaps the true power of "Swan Lake" comes in its synthesis of music and dance. Tchaikovsky's score, both melancholy and stirring, is where a ballerina finds Odette's soul and Odile's fire. That journey is both personal for the dancer and, for audiences, an enthralling chance to see how each dancer explores the nuances of each role. Is she more of a bird or a woman? How does she use her arms, her back, her eyes? How does the music course through her body? "I've been dancing 'Swan Lake' for about seven years, and I think my Odette has changed more," Ms. Kondaurova said. "You get that depth, that sadness, so that it doesn't look superficial, so that she's not just a pathetic girl or a swan that's displaying serpent like arms. Odile was always this energy charged girl who could bewitch any man, yet at the same time she's not a serious vamp, she's just a girl full of the joys of life." In conjunction with the Mariinsky Ballet's Brooklyn season, which opens Thursday, four ballerinas a breathtaking array of sophistication and youthful dew answered questions about Odette Odile through email. Along with Ms. Kondaurova, performing the lead are the glittering Viktoria Tereshkina, the refined veteran Ulyana Lopatkina and the first soloist Oxana Skorik. If you imagine that ballerinas, especially those in Russia, have no generosity, think again: For Ms. Tereshkina, Ms. Lopatkina is the ideal Odette: "I'll admit that no one, anywhere in the world dances the White Swan better than she does." Ms. Lopatkina, the Mariinsky's reigning ballerina, made her Odette Odile debut in 1994 and dances the role this Jan. 16. "It is the plasticity of the swan's wings, in my opinion, that makes this image of the swan maiden legendary in the history of ballet," she said. "And, of course, the two contrasting images with the same face that is a particular feature of this work. How do you depict the difference between the natures of the two heroines and the difference in their souls?" Like it or not, the popularity of "Swan Lake," first performed at the Mariinsky Theater in 1895, has only grown with the 2010 release of the film "Black Swan," which introduced the ballet to new audiences. The Mariinsky's production of "Swan Lake" is one of the finest, even with its cheerful ending in which Siegfried, Odette's beloved, tears off Rothbart's wing and removes his power. For many, a tragic ending carries more pathos, more weight, yet Ms. Skorik, who dances Jan. 22, likes it the way it is. "A happy end in the American style," she said. "I prefer it when love conquers evil. I've seen a version where she dies, but it's sad. There's so much sadness in life, sometimes you need to see a fairy tale." Before Ms. Kondaurova performed other renditions of the ballet, the Mariinsky's ending made sense. "But when I danced in other versions, I began to think the tragic finale was closer to me," she said. "Because this is not a Disney fairy tale where everything works out well. Someone has to be punished for these deceived emotions." For Ms. Kondaurova, Odette is a girl, not a bird; her most important quality is her sadness. "After all, this is not her first day as an enchanted girl, and she is probably in despair at the thought of ever finding some way out of this existence," she said. "She understands that she herself can't escape these confines. When she meets the prince, I believe she sees a glimmer of hope. We don't know if he is the first such to have approached her, but that hope springs up, even though at the start of the act she is hesitant to trust him. I think that in the character there is always a hint of tragedy and anxiety, even when everything is O.K." In life, Ms. Tereshkina, who first performed the dual role during her second year at the theater and will again this Thursday and Jan. 23, sees herself more as an Odette while not so sad yet finds it both easier and more pleasing to dance as Odile. "Her colors are stronger," she said. As Odile, Ms. Tereshkina experiences "a true victory, both in the music and in the choreography that's when you hear this storm of applause." She recalled one performance when, after her last turn, a black cat ran across the stage. "No one could explain its presence," she said, "It just appeared and instantly vanished." Odile's 32 fouette turns are famous, epitomizing virtuosity and triumph, but as Odette, the accent is placed more on the arms and the back. Ms. Skorik aims for a soft, floating quality. "I always demand little pas de bourrees and a catlike transition, liquidity," she said. "I think the swan flies precisely like that slowly. I want to achieve gentle transitions, without sharp movements, so that everything has the proper plasticity." Some nights, she said, her Odette is better, and on others, it's Odile. That's a riveting part of "Swan Lake": when a dancer surprises even herself. "Each time," Ms. Tereshkina said, "it depends only on you, and it always happens differently, like in life. The stage can be very fickle." Certainly there's a special thrill when it comes to embracing a new Odette Odile, but watching an experienced dancer can be more fulfilling, especially as she accumulates more color, more depth not simply as a ballerina, but as a woman. "Over the years," Ms. Lopatkina said, "I have come to see this ballet not so much as a legend, not as a fairy tale, but much more as a real life story and as a reflection of our own lives. Love of which everyone dreams, the trial of temptation, the wrong choice, repentance, forgiveness and the victory of all forgiving love all of this has a place in today's world. Here, too, in real life, we really need hope! Hope for a happy end." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Harrison Coll and Sterling Hyltin as the title characters in Peter Martins's "Romeo Juliet" at New York City Ballet. Mr. Coll made his debut in the role on Tuesday. The issues arising from the departure of Peter Martins as ballet master in chief of New York City Ballet keep multiplying. What value do Mr. Martins's own ballets have? For decades his choreography has been an easy punching bag. There were always worse dance makers, but he was singularly prestigious (thanks to his job at City Ballet) while his ballets were seldom interesting. If most of his one acts fell out of repertory, they would not be missed. In an era when the ballet audience needs lures, however, he has given City Ballet three full length productions that have drawn the throng. In the case of his "Sleeping Beauty" and "Swan Lake," he drew on the work of previous masters. But "Romeo Juliet," which returned to repertory on Tuesday, is all Martins. (That " " comes from the 1996 Baz Luhrmann movie.) There are worse versions of "Romeo," but few so perfunctory or thin. Originally choreographed in 2007, Mr. Martins's featured an immediately notorious moment Lord Capulet audibly slapped his daughter Juliet that has now been excised. Instead of the slap, Lord Capulet now merely swipes the air in anger. Amid his several showily blustering gestures, this one is scarcely noticeable. What remains, however, is the gruesome way Romeo kills Tybalt. What on earth impelled Mr. Martins to make Romeo suddenly wrap Tybalt's head in his cloak and stab him repeatedly in the back? Any "Romeo" abounds in fights and deaths, but this incident remains among the most gratuitously unpleasant. It also robs Romeo of audience sympathy. Mr. Martins's choreography allows Prokofiev's illustrious score to do much of his work for him. Although most of his dances here look like unfinished sketches as is true of most of the ballets Mr. Martins made after taking over City Ballet the narrative action they represent is almost always the action Prokofiev's music has in mind. I don't find this to be one of the great ballet scores; in terms of rhythm and melody, Prokofiev composed much better dance music in "Cinderella." But for an audience, "Romeo" is like the best movie accompaniment ever written. If only Mr. Martins had a better notion of how to direct this movielike ballet! Mark Stanley's lighting is too dim for us ever to feel we're getting a close up of the leading characters' faces. (You keep peering at them through the gloom.) Per Kirkeby's designs are a weird assortment of colors, styles and periods: Juliet's dresses are absurdly short amid the approximately Renaissance context; the movable gray central decor looks a mix of primitivist Minoan and late medieval; and the costumes' geometric figures and color combinations are a clumsy bend of modernism and postmodernism. There are several passages in which the stage action makes little rhythmic response to the music's overwhelming pulse most obviously in the Capulets' outrage over the death of Tybalt. The best sustained dances are for peripheral characters and don't advance the plot. The production's sole true hit is a number for five boys (students from School of American Ballet) who turn up out of nowhere. Juliet's five girlfriends, arriving on the morning of her wedding to Paris, have a dance that has more charm and musical phrasing than anything she gets herself. When this production was new, Mr. Martins cast four pairs of junior dancers all beneath principal level, and most in the corps and announced that he wanted their youthfulness to make the story "for real." It paid off in terms of those young dancers' careers. (The first cast Romeo was Robert Fairchild, now a Broadway name.) Yet almost 11 years later, Sterling Hyltin, Tiler Peck and Erica Pereira are still cast as Juliet, and Daniel Ulbricht remains the first cast Mercutio. Tuesday night's performance was my first return to the production since its first year: Ms. Hyltin and Mr. Ulbricht were no less real than before. Harrison Coll, a corps dancer who made his debut as Romeo on Tuesday, is endearingly impulsive and coltish. It's to his credit that he can't making the brutal killing of Tybalt ring true. That savagery is uncharacteristic of this Romeo anyway; it's just another of the production's gimmicks. There are five casts of lovers this year. Three of the Romeos Zachary Catazaro, Chase Finlay, Taylor Stanley are principals, as is a fourth Juliet, Lauren Lovette. Although Mr. Martins never again took such risks in casting his "Romeo" with juvenile dancers after 2007, he often took them in the company's central repertory of ballets by George Balanchine. This was one of the Balanchine lessons he learned best. Supporting characters Lady Capulet (Maria Kowroski), Paris (Russell Janzen), the Duke of Verona (Silas Farley), Friar Laurence (Aaron Sanz) have mime gestures that register with more force than when the production was new. As with so many Martins ballets, you think, "This could be good when he gets around to finishing it." Andrew Litton, who is conducting 10 of the 11 performances, shapes the score marvelously, even though moments of brass and woodwind playing on Tuesday let him down. From individual portamenti to overall sections, he really sets a stamp on the music in a way we seldom hear in ballet. In several other works, Mr. Litton isn't always quite right with tempo or as a propulsive accompanist to dancers, but here his contribution powerfully enriches a patchy show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Over Labor Day weekend, a steady stream of hopefuls arrived at Eckhaus Latta's basement studio in Chinatown for the chance to take an audition strut down a makeshift runway. New York Fashion Week was days away, and Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, the designers of Eckhaus Latta, and their casting director, Rachel Chandler, were surveying the talent (male, female and nonconforming) hoping to appear in their fashion show on Sept. 10. Eckhaus Latta is an anomaly among the trendy sportswear labels that otherwise populate New York Fashion Week. Mr. Eckhaus and Ms. Latta, both 28, founded it in 2011, straight out of the Rhode Island School of Design, where neither had studied fashion (he, sculpture; she, textiles). And it maintains an air of art school (there is much talk of various "creative practices" and their "process oriented" praxis). Their designs have been exhibited at the hipper museums of the coasts at MoMA PS1, in New York, and the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles and their shows often have the flavor of an old school "happening." (Their last show was held at PS1, at 9:30 p.m., on a weekday night mid fashion week, in a snowstorm. Hundreds turned up anyway.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
From left, "Study for the Madonna With the Fruit Bowl" (c. 1478 1480), "La Belle Ferronniere" (1493 4)," and "The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" (c. 1503). PARIS No institution in the world owns more Leonardo da Vincis than the Louvre. There are five paintings in its collections including, most famously, the Mona Lisa, which the Renaissance artist had with him, along with two other masterpieces, when he died in France in 1519. To mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death, the Louvre is staging a retrospective featuring some 160 works. The blockbuster show, which opens on Thursday and runs through Feb. 24, is one of the most ambitious surveys ever of the artist's work. On display are eight paintings by Leonardo (plus the Mona Lisa, which remains in her usual, mobbed gallery upstairs but can be seen with the same exhibition ticket). The exhibition also contains 22 drawings from the Louvre's own collection, and paintings and drawings from institutions such as the Vatican Museums, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Royal Collection and the National Gallery in Britain, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Objects drawn from private collections include the "Codex Leicester," a set of scientific writings owned by Bill Gates. Securing the Leonardo loans has been a complicated and sometimes rancorous process. Late last year, the governments of France and Italy fell out over the Renaissance master. Italy's under secretary for culture at the time, Lucia Borgonzoni, questioned plans to lend multiple works during the anniversary year, and accused France of treating Italy like a cultural "supermarket." The two sides resumed talks shortly afterward, and a list of Leonardos traveling from Italy was announced last month. One star on the list nearly didn't make it to the Louvre: Leonardo's famous "Vitruvian Man" drawing of a spread eagled male figure was briefly held back when the heritage conservation group Italia Nostra tried to block its loan in a last minute court action, on the grounds that it was too fragile to travel. The court threw out the case last week, allowing the drawing to be shown for 8 weeks. The Louvre is still hoping for another work it has asked for: "Salvator Mundi," attributed to Leonardo, which sold for 450.3 million at Christie's in November 2017. That sale made it the world's most expensive artwork sold at auction, but it has not been seen since. The painting's anonymous buyer is a close ally of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and may have acted on his behalf. (The Louvre would not discuss this or any other loan negotiation.) How they would even attribute "Salvator Mundi" remains in question. One of the exhibition's two curators, Vincent Delieuvin, said in an interview here early this month that the painting was either 100 percent by Leonardo, partly by Leonardo (with the rest by one of his students), or wholly by the student of Leonardo. The Louvre will only determine its attribution when the institution receives the painting, he added. "It's a damaged painting," said Louis Frank,the exhibition's other curator. "Much of it is missing, and it has been restored." "Salvator Mundi" is "a fragment," Mr. Frank added, "and the questions are centered around that fragment." The works on show at the Louvre will be grouped in four sections that reveal Leonardo's artistic progression through his own drawings and paintings, but also through copies of his works by others, which offer useful snapshots of his artistic career. The mission is to "give a different image of Leonardo," said Mr. Delieuvin, challenging the perception that he was someone "who lived a somewhat dispersed life, dabbling in mathematics, geometry, anatomy, and every now and again, painting." "His life was spent striving for the most perfect form of painting," he added. Here are eight highlights from the retrospective that plot Leonardo's trajectory as an artist and show the breadth and range of his talents, explained by the curators. This exquisite study, produced by Leonardo when he was a young man and owned by the Louvre, is one of 11 studies that open the exhibition. It is displayed in the same room as a bronze sculpture that Leonardo knew well, and that is thought to have inspired this work: "Christ and Saint Thomas" by Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo's master at the time. The sculpture is on loan from the Church and Museum of Orsanmichele in Florence. The aim is to demonstrate that Leonardo's relationship with sculpture is "the first brick in the construction of his artistic universe," Mr. Frank said. It was at this moment, the curators said, that Leonardo transitioned from sculpture to painting, and made painting his lifelong vocation. This is the only known portrait of a male figure by Leonardo, and comes to Paris from the collections of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, which are the property of the Vatican state. Because the figure holds a musical score, he has long been believed to be a musician. Yet Mr. Delieuvin said recent scientific imagery showed that the hand holding the score was not included initially, so the musical reference could be a pointer to the passage of time, and the fleeting nature of existence. The painting is "completely meditative: It's a picture of introspection," he explained. "The figure is lost in thought." This painting, on loan from the Vatican Museums, is an unfinished depiction of the Roman Catholic saint, draped in a sheet and kneeling in a desert as a lion growls at his feet. Once owned by the artist Angelica Kauffmann, it is, to the Louvre curators, the perfect illustration of one of their key themes: that Leonardo allowed himself the freedom to leave works unfinished. "Most of Leonardo's paintings are incomplete," said Mr. Delieuvin. "This is not an artist who's interested in producing frescoes by the kilometer, of painting never ending madonnas and portraits. He wants to take his time, and to paint perfect works." This Renaissance beauty is Leonardo's best known female subject after the Mona Lisa. And unlike that painting, she travels: The Louvre lent her to the National Gallery in London for its 2011 Leonardo da Vinci exhibition, and, more recently, she was on display for the inauguration of the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum. With his painting of this woman, who was either the wife or the mistress of Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, Leonardo "revolutionizes the genre of portraiture," said Mr. Delieuvin. Rather than depict the subject in profile, as was customary in Milan at the time, he made her turn and look almost directly at the viewer. "It's the personality, the inner feelings, and the soul that are revealed through the movement of the figure, and this extraordinary gaze," he added. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Fed Board members have substantial, but not absolute, power at the central bank. Of the 12 votes on the rate setting Federal Open Market Committee, the board has seven. The other five voters come from the Fed's 12 regional banks. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has a permanent say, but the others rotate in and out of voting seats. The Washington based board members also have a say on bank regulatory matters. Mr. Trump's two new picks are vastly different. Mr. Waller has spent his career in academia and within the Fed system, researching everything from Fed structure to its communication. Ms. Shelton was most recently the United States executive director at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and she previously advised Mr. Trump during his presidential campaign and served on his transition team. She has also been an outside commentator who has regularly critiqued the Fed's actions. In the aftermath of the 2007 to 2009 recession, she criticized the Fed for keeping interest rates too low. More recently, she has voiced support for much lower rates, in line with Mr. Trump's view. Mr. Trump has pushed the Fed to slash rates and routinely blasts the central bank and his handpicked chair, Jerome H. Powell, for holding back economic growth. Mr. Trump has expressed jealousy over the European Central Bank's negative interest rates. Officials and most economists say negative rates would be a bad idea in the United States, given its different economic and market structure and stronger economy. Just this week, he indicated that he wished he had picked Kevin Warsh, another one time contender, as the Fed chair instead of Mr. Powell. The president can nominate Fed officials and jawbone them, but he has little power over the central bank. Officials are free to pursue their goals of maximum employment and stable inflation as they choose, but must explain themselves to Congress. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Lyme disease is transmitted to humans through the bite of infected ticks. The tick above, in its larval stage, is no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. We've all heard the advice about avoiding Lyme disease. If you walk through wooded or grassy areas where it's prevalent, you should use insect repellent. Cover exposed skin. Check yourself thoroughly once you return home, and take a shower. If you see a tick, pluck it off your skin with tweezers. Look out for a bull's eye shaped rash and flulike symptoms in the summer. About 30,000 cases of Lyme disease are reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention each year, making it the most commonly reported vector borne illness in the United States. That number has tripled over the last 20 years. And experts estimate that the actual number of cases not just those that happen to be reported to the agency is more like 300,000 per year. If Lyme has become so common, why isn't there a vaccine for it? Well, here's something you may not know: There used to be one, but it was taken off the market more than 15 years ago. And there's only one new vaccine candidate in the pipeline. "Clearly, the problem is getting worse," said Dr. Paul Mead, a top scientist at the C.D.C. "For years, we have been advocating that people use repellents, do tick checks, spray their yards. That remains good to do, but it's not enough." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Here are the basics Lyme disease was first recognized in the mid 1970s, after a cluster of adults and children in Lyme, Conn., started experiencing symptoms of arthritis. Additional symptoms may include fever, headache, fatigue and rash. The disease is mainly found in Northeastern and North central states and Northern California, though a recent report found it had spread to all 50 states. It's also found in parts of Canada, Europe and northern Asia. Lyme disease is usually handled with a short course of antibiotics. But without treatment, infections can spread to the heart and nervous system and cause serious problems. Additionally, some patients experience symptoms even after taking antibiotics, what the C.D.C. refers to as "post treatment Lyme disease syndrome." "Chronic Lyme" is also a term you may have heard. It is sometimes used to describe persistent symptoms of infection, even in people who have not received a diagnosis of Lyme. The C.D.C. and many other experts don't support the use of the term because of that confusion. But the company took it off the market less than four years later, citing low sales, amid lawsuits from patients who said the vaccine caused severe arthritis and other symptoms. Some claimed that the vaccine had provoked an autoimmune reaction. Studies never showed a direct link between LYMErix and any chronic side effect or serious complication. But patients' claims about it, and resulting media coverage, were sufficient to make doctors and patients wary. Dr. Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist at the Mayo Clinic, has written that public concern, induced by anti vaccine groups and class action lawsuits, resulted in LYMErix being withdrawn from the market. "There's a big difference between what's claimed and what's proven," he said. The high cost of the vaccine and confusion over who should get it and how many doses were needed didn't help its prospects. Additionally, a vaccine was never intended to replace "personal protective measures" like tick checks. After all, ticks can carry a number of diseases besides Lyme. Dr. Stanley A. Plotkin, an emeritus professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the loss of the vaccine was a "public health fiasco." He and other researchers said that in the years since, public opposition prevented drug companies from investing in another vaccine that could fail on the market. "It's a situation that has never existed before," he said. "You have a vaccine that works, you know it works, you know the disease is prevalent, but there's no vaccine on the market, except for dogs." Dr. Mead of the C.D.C. said that the issues with LYMErix were complicated, but that subsequent studies did not bear out the safety concerns that were raised at the time. In addition, Lyme disease was a lot less common 20 years ago, so the need wasn't as great. Some experts thought Lyme could be controlled if people were vigilant about checking themselves. But the rise in cases shows that's insufficient. "We need more options on the table," he said. "Which is why we certainly strongly support the development of a safe and effective vaccine." A European company called Valneva says that it is making progress on VLA15, a vaccine that would protect against six strains of Lyme, including the one most prevalent in the United States. Valneva's chief executive, Thomas Lingelbach, said that the developers at his company had taken the concerns surrounding LYMErix into consideration, and that out of an abundance of caution, they had engineered the new vaccine so that it would not create an autoimmune reaction. "It is a very different vaccine than LYMErix," he said. The vaccine is being tested now, and the company hopes to seek licensing in about five years. Meanwhile, Dr. Erol Fikrig, the chief of infectious diseases at Yale Medical School and one of the developers of LYMErix, is trying to target the tick itself. He's in the early stages of research on a vaccine that could prevent ticks from transmitting Lyme and other diseases. "I believe it's promising," he said. "But time will tell." Dr. Phillip J. Baker, the executive director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation, a nonprofit group run by volunteers, predicted that opposition from Lyme groups that are suspicious of the medical establishment would hinder any vaccine's prospects. "There's a lot of misinformation out there about Lyme," he said. "We're making some progress, but we've got a long way to go." Patricia V. Smith, the president of another advocacy group, the Lyme Disease Association, is among those who are skeptical about the new vaccine. "I would like to see safe and effective vaccines developed," she said. "But those are the key words." Ms. Smith added that Valneva hadn't been proactive enough about reaching out to patients' groups to share its findings. The company said in response that it planned to increase outreach efforts as the vaccine got closer to hitting the market. "It is part of our ongoing mission to become more proactively engaged with advocacy groups," Valneva said. "We encourage patients and advocacy groups to reach out to us, and we will be working to do the same to establish a dialogue with the patient community." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The title of Craig Morgan Teicher's new book, "We Begin in Gladness," comes from a poem by William Wordsworth: "We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness." These lines have come to embody a cliche about poets' downward emotional trajectories over the course of their careers, as if, writes Teicher, himself an accomplished poet, "writing poems and looking too long at the trials of the human mind and heart in a troubled world beckon poets to their undoing." He acknowledges the great poets of the last century who "met terrible ends" at the mercy of deteriorating mental health (among them Sylvia Plath, Randall Jarrell and John Berryman), but insists, quoting the critic Joan Acocella, that "it is a species of sentimentality to think that the end of something tells the truth about it." Teicher proposes a well reasoned alternative: to read poets not so much by their experiences but by the evolution of their words "by their journeys, by how their art grew and changed over the course of their writing lives." In this thoughtful book, he does just that, contemplating a range of poets, from Plath (whose work he wants to rescue from the retrospective weight of her suicide) to francine j. harris (whose experimental verse, often about racism and her life in Detroit, frequently avoids conventions of grammar and punctuation and can have an improvised feel). Early on, Teicher declares that to truly understand poets' work, we need to "become them, or, more impossibly, to have been them." He has to settle for less intimate modes of comprehension, including, for instance, the concept of "apprenticeship," which provides a useful lens for considering questions of influence and transformation. Teicher frames the experimental poet Brenda Hillman's forays into Gnostic philosophy an ancient mystical tradition within Christianity as the impetus for a poetic breakthrough that allowed her to become "the metaphysical poet she was striving to be, and also to think deeply about the relationship between the realms of imagination and of experience." And he excavates the collision of influences in W. S. Merwin's work, which range from ancient Chinese poetry to Pre Raphaelite painting and culminate in the masterly late poems of "The Shadow of Sirius," a meditation on the nature of time. "Merwin locates himself in an ongoing stream of losses," Teicher observes, taking "a wide view of time, the kind of wide view one would need a lifetime to take." Teicher perceptively identifies the philosophical undercurrents in much of 20th and 21st century poetry and highlights important patterns of poetic influence. Yet he tends to neglect another key part of any poet's development: the awakening of his or her political sensibility. He overlooks, for example, the fact that for poets like Plath and Louise Gluck and Susan Wheeler, inhabiting and substantively revising a predominantly masculine creative tradition was itself a political act. For francine j. harris, politics are inextricable from her work's philosophical concerns. Since the publication of her first book, "allegiance," harris has been praised for her attention to (and criticism of) the aesthetics of violation. In her poem "katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet," she writes in the voice of a young woman addressing an acquaintance a fellow poet who has been found dead: "i didn't like you. this is the first i remembered your name." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Opened in late June, the Lodge at the Presidio has the unusual perk of having a San Francisco address in the heart of a 1,500 acre national park the Presidio, an iconic former army post, now home to miles of forested hiking and biking trails, plus museums, restaurants, and even a bowling alley. The sister property to the smaller Inn at the Presidio, which opened in 2012, this is the closest lodging in the city to the Golden Gate Bridge, where, on a recent visit, foghorn blasts sounded from a seemingly invisible source socked away in white, misty drifts (a.k.a. Karl the Fog, in local parlance). The hotel is situated in a restored 1897 brick Colonial Revival barracks building that housed successive waves of soldiers throughout much of the 20th century. A long front porch lined with teak rocking chairs faces the Presidio's Main Post, a vast, grassy field that hosts frequent events and is an ideal place for picnics, Frisbee games, and afternoon naps. Inside, the three story building opens up to a bright, light filled lobby with classy navy blue wall accents, oversized historic photographs and an art display that includes Ohlone stones discovered during excavation, and beautiful hardwood floors that are inlaid with a darker "ghost pattern" to show the original floor plan of the military company offices and artillery storage rooms. The Presidio is a place where coyotes still roam. This past spring, a litter of pups was born; at the time of our visit, the young coyotes were traveling through the park with their parents (to protect the pups, a section of the Bay Area Ridge Trail, which runs through the Presidio, was temporarily closed to dogs). Twenty four miles of trails wind out the front door, through fragrant stands of eucalyptus and pine. Also within walking distance is the Golden Gate Bridge, where some of the best people watching can be found on the ascent up the rust hued span "the United Nations of tourists," observed my husband, affectionately, as one man, overstuffed rolling suitcase in hand, asked us to take his picture. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Ryan Seacrest Could Face as Many Questions as He Asks at the Oscars Though he'll be the one holding the microphone, Ryan Seacrest may face as many questions as the celebrities he interviews on Sunday at the Academy Awards red carpet. Mr. Seacrest, an E! host, was accused of sexual harassment by his former personal stylist, Suzie Hardy, who worked with him from 2007 to 2013. Her lawyer said Mr. Seacrest had asked her inappropriate sexual questions, slapped her buttocks, given her a bear hug while wearing only his underwear, "forced himself on top" of her and grabbed her crotch. He has denied the allegations, writing in a Feb. 5 essay for The Hollywood Reporter that he had been falsely accused. NBCUniversal, the parent company of E!, said it opted to keep him as host of its red carpet coverage after an investigation by an independent counsel, which it did not name. "Ultimately, my name was cleared," Mr. Seacrest said in a statement. "I eagerly participated in the investigation in order to demonstrate my innocence because I know my truth, and I believe in due process." The Harvey Weinstein scandal has made the subject of sexual harassment and misconduct unavoidable on Hollywood's biggest nights, with red carpet interviews becoming a primary vehicle for actors to signal solidarity with victims. The allegations against Mr. Seacrest raise the question of whether actors could turn questions around on him, or avoid interviews altogether. Tarana Burke, the creator of the MeToo movement, told Variety in an article posted on Sunday that the network should not have sent Mr. Seacrest. She said actresses should not be put in a position that requires them to agree to or avoid an interview with him. "We shouldn't have to make those choices of, 'Do we or don't we?'" she told Variety. Speaking of the allegations against Mr. Seacrest, Ms. Burke added, "This is not about his guilt or innocence." She said "it's about there being an accusation that's alive," and that until the network reckons with it, "it's really on E! News and shouldn't be on us." Jennifer Lawrence, speaking to Howard Stern, was noncommital but left open the possibility of skipping an interview with Mr. Seacrest. "There are already outlets that I'm just like, 'Nah,'" she said. "So it wouldn't be that big of a deal." At the Golden Globes in January, most of the actors wore black as part of the Time's Up movement to support women. At the event's red carpet, Debra Messing and Eva Longoria used their E! interviews to chastise the network over pay equity. Catt Sadler, a former E! host, left the network in November, saying that a male colleague, Jason Kennedy, was paid twice as much. On Thursday, an E! producer, Aileen Gram Moreno, filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming she was unfairly terminated for allowing Ms. Longoria's interview to air. Jimmy Kimmel, the Oscars host, told Variety that MeToo would be "part of the show." There had some been some confusion after he told ABC News in an interview broadcast on Thursday: "This show is not about reliving people's sexual assaults it's an awards show for people who have been dreaming about maybe winning an Oscar for their whole lives. And the last thing I want to do is ruin that for someone who is, you know, nominated for, you know, best leading actress or best supporting or best director or cinematographer or whatever, by making it unpleasant." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Raising the minimum wage could lower the suicide rate, according to a study published last week, delivering labor advocates a tantalizing new finding about the broader impacts of wage changes even as some experts said other factors could explain the decrease. More than 47,000 Americans died by suicide in 2017, and with other so called deaths of despair drug overdoses and alcoholism it has grown into a slow motion public health crisis. The phenomenon is difficult to study, and researchers have struggled to find effective prevention strategies. The new study examined suicide rates from 1990 through 2015 across all 50 states and Washington, and measured how they changed as the minimum wage increased. The researchers focused on adults between 18 and 64 years old with a high school education or less a group more likely than others to be affected by changes in the minimum wage. When controlling for changes in a state's economy and welfare policies, the researchers estimated that a 1 increase in the minimum wage corresponded with a 3.5 percent decrease in the suicide rate for those with a high school education or less. Without some of the controls, the decrease in the suicide rate was 6 percent. The effect was most pronounced during times of high unemployment. "The real world is a living natural experiment," said John Kaufman, a doctoral student in epidemiology at Emory University and the lead author of the study, which was published on Jan. 7 in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. "Yes, there are possible alternative explanations to what we saw, but these aren't crude associations, these aren't mere correlations," he said. "We designed the study to account for multiple types of alternative explanations." The study echoed other findings about the nonfinancial effects of minimum wage increases. They have been linked to less chronic disease in adults, lower premature mortality and fewer cases of child maltreatment, said Yannet Lathrop, a researcher and policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit organization based in New York that supports workers' rights. Two 2019 studies also associated raising the minimum wage with lower suicide rates. Mr. Kaufman's research drew national attention in recent days, coming as suicide rates continue to climb and a movement to raise minimum wages sweeps across the country. Democrats in the House pushed through a bill in July that would more than double the federal minimum wage, raising it to 15, and dozens of states and cities have enacted similar wage increases. "Raising the minimum wage by 1 could've prevented thousands of suicides a year," Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a leading progressive candidate in the presidential race, said in a tweet about the study. "We will end the 40 year assault on the working class and the suffering it has caused for our people." Some politicians raised questions about the study's findings. A spokesman for Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, who leads a congressional committee that has examined suicides, told The Washington Post last week that the office had a different interpretation. "Our reading," said the spokesman, Conn Carroll, was that the paper showed that a higher "state minimum wage over the federal minimum wage is correlated with less suicide." "By this logic, if we raised the federal minimum wage while keeping state minimum wages constant, suicide would go up!" he said. "Or, we could really reduce suicide by eliminating the federal minimum wage entirely thus creating a huge gap between state minimum wages and the federal one. These seem nonsensical." Mr. Kaufman said that he did not expect the study to draw so much attention, and that it was part of a series examining changes in economic policy unemployment programs and tax credits, for example and how they affect people's health. "My approach is, when there's a disagreement, there's room to learn," he said. "But only if people recognize that maybe they don't know everything." Aparna Mathur, a resident scholar in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said the study's findings made sense. But she said she was concerned about not knowing what specifically drove decreases in the suicide rate. "Are we adequately controlling for everything else?" she said. "Do we know that when people have high minimum wages they tend to go to the doctor more? They seek more help for depression?" She said policymakers focusing on suicides may be ignoring potential costs of raising minimum wages, such as a reduction in hours worked. Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor at Columbia University who studies the impact of socioeconomic factors on suicide rates, said he did not find the results of Mr. Kaufman's study persuasive. He said looking at large groups of people, instead of homing in on specific individuals, allows for other factors to affect the suicide rates even if the study tried to control for some of them. "It introduces room for spurious associations or associations that are hidden in their overall finding," Dr. Olfson said. He said that when taking into account the margin of error, the change the researchers found in the suicide rate was too small to make solid conclusions. "You make sound public policy decisions in part based on strong empirical evidence at least that's the hope," he said. "Studies that don't meet some basic standard, really, I think don't think have much of a role in the discourse." But Dr. Margot Kushel, the director of the Center for Vulnerable Populations at the University of California, San Francisco, said there would most likely be no other way to study the impact of minimum wage on suicide. Dr. Kushel, who is also a professor of medicine, said the study was "well done," noting that it was not the first to link minimum wage increases to decreases in suicide. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Bill Shine, a former co president of Fox News and top lieutenant to the network's founder, Roger Ailes, has spoken with White House officials about taking a position on President Trump's communications team, according to several people briefed on the discussions. Mr. Shine has no political experience outside of producing cable news, and he was forced out of Fox News in May after his name surfaced in lawsuits that accused him of abetting Mr. Ailes's harassing behavior toward women. (Mr. Shine has denied all wrongdoing, as did Mr. Ailes, who died in May.) But Mr. Shine has an influential ally in the Fox News host Sean Hannity, an informal adviser to Mr. Trump and one of his most loyal on air supporters who dined with Mr. Shine, the president and the first lady at the White House last week. Mr. Shine's job prospects are unclear now that Mr. Trump has fired his communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, who also attended last week's dinner and worked with Mr. Shine during his tenure as a host on Fox News and the Fox Business Network. Mr. Shine's association with Mr. Scaramucci may hinder his chances with some factions in the West Wing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
PREVIEW Before the auction began, Richard Hein inspected one of 80 vehicles offered to military collectors. AUBURN, Ind. Don Coffman broke the news to his wife by telling her he had bought a German convertible. Technically, it was not a lie: the vehicle was German, and it did have a folding top, but it was not the sporty ride she probably had in mind. Instead, it was a 1941 Volkswagen Kubelwagen Type 82, the first acquisition in a collection of war materiel begun 10 years ago by Mr. Coffman, a refrigeration service technician from Marengo, Ill. A predecessor of sorts to the rustic Volkswagen Thing sold briefly in the United States in the 1970s, the Type 82 served as Nazi Germany's version of the military jeep. Today, such war machines have become highly collectible. "I bought it for 16,000," said Mr. Coffman, 40, as he scouted for potential purchases here at a Dec. 8 auction of World War II era vehicles from the collection of the National Military History Center. "If I went to sell it today, it would be about 60,000." The draw of military machines cuts across a surprisingly wide spectrum of auto enthusiasts. "I'm geared differently," explained Mr. Coffman, who owns German vehicles, equipment, weapons and other Axis memorabilia that he uses for battle re enactments. "If it's not camouflaged, I don't want it." More than 350 spectators and registered bidders from 19 countries turned out in person, on the telephone and by the Internet for the no reserve auction conducted at the museum by Auctions America. In addition to 82 World War II era vehicles still in their museum displays and many fitted with guns that had been made inoperable the auction also included 100 lots of uniforms, mess kits, tools and other items. Just before the sale started, auctioneers reminded bidders that they would need to pass a background check and possibly obtain special permits from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives before they would be allowed to remove some of the items. Spirited bidding erupted. Richard D. Waistell, an engineer from Berkshire, England, came looking for good examples of British vehicles to add to his collection, which includes a 1919 steam traction engine, a 1957 Land Rover ambulance and a 1954 Bedford fire engine. "It's a good way of investing money because these vehicles always go up in value," said Mr. Waistell, 69. "But it's not done for the money, it's done for the enjoyment." After carefully inspecting several lots, Mr. Waistell made winning bids on six lots: a 1940 Ariel W/NG motorcycle, 1944 GMC CCKW air compressor truck, 1944 Standard utility car, 1940 Loyd full track carrier, 1940 Morris truck and 1942 Velocette MAF motorcycle. "The idea is, my sons and I will restore them, get them up and running again and exhibit them in rallies in the U.K.," Mr. Waistell said. The sale offered enthusiasts vehicles ranging in price from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, Mr. Waistell picked up the Ariel motorcycle for 7,130, including a 15 percent buyer's premium, while another bidder bought a rare Daimler Benz DB10 12 ton halftrack prime mover for 230,000. The sale included trucks and tracked machinery bearing such marques as Citroen, Diamond T, Fiat, Hotchkiss, Humber, Indian, Opel, Steyr and Zundapp. Previewing the auction lots, Frank Depoutot, 55, a mechanic in St. Louis, paused to marvel at a 1942 Harley Davidson 42XA, a motorcycle that was reverse engineered from German BMWs. It was built with a horizontally opposed 2 cylinder engine rather than Harley's typical V twin. "I've never touched one," he said. "I'd love to get my grubby little mechanic hands on it." Harley made only about 1,000 examples of the bike, which was available only to the military. This one sold for 46,000. "The difficult ones to find are the German and the French even in Europe," he said. Finding parts for such machines can be equally challenging, hobbyists said. Randy and Shane Harnish, a father and son team from Bluffton, Ind., restore vintage Army jeeps and fabricate replica guns for vintage military vehicles. They spent a good deal of time inspecting a 1944 White M16 halftrack to gauge its completeness. Still equipped with two of its original four .50 caliber M2 Browning machine guns mounted on an M45 Maxson turret, the Meat Chopper, as the antiaircraft truck was commonly called, sold for 109,250; the price handily exceeded the pre auction estimate. Similarly, a GMC DUKW, an amphibious machine equipped with both 6 wheel drive and a propeller, soared past its estimate, selling for 111,550. "My biggest mistake 15 years ago was not buying everything I could get my hands on," said Randy Harnish, 64. "A nice restored World War II Jeep 15 years ago was 7,000, and today that same one would bring 20,000." Some collectors said they use their vehicles for educational purposes to help veterans open up. "We're into historical preservation," said Fred N. Ropkey, a charter member of the Military Vehicle Preservation Association who owns a tank museum in Crawfordsville, Ind. Veterans, he explained, "need to have an outlet for the emotions that they were not able to release for so long." Though Axis equipment, flags and other items are important artifacts of World War II history, displaying swastikas and similar symbols can be touchy. "We just can't put them up," said Mr. Ropkey, 83, speaking of some German flags in his collection. "The ones that we will put up are signed by the crews that captured them. Then, it becomes a thing of pride." Officials with the Auburn museum, which opened in 2003, said they planned to apply the event's proceeds toward a 2.9 million debt left from the construction of a museum building that never opened. "The other building was foreclosed, and it left us with a very large mortgage," said Tamara Hantz, the operations manager of the military museum. "That is what inspired the auction." The military museum's collection was originally bought by Dean Kruse in Messancy, Belgium, in 1999 and brought to Auburn. Mr. Kruse, the former classic car auctioneer whose annual Labor Day sale was once billed as the largest collector car auction in the world, established a foundation, donating the collection and building a 200,000 square foot building to display it and other vintage vehicles. While Mr. Kruse continues as a member of the foundation's board of directors, he no longer operates an auction business. In 2010, the Indiana Auctioneer Commission stripped him of his auction license after complaints that he had not paid consignors for sales; at the time, Mr. Kruse countered that buyers had not paid him. He subsequently sold his 235 acre Auburn auction park, located near the military museum, to RM Auctions, based in Canada. RM used the new location to establish its United States subsidiary, Auctions America. This sale, which raised 2.9 million, will help make room for new exhibits for the museum. Plans include eventually expanding the facility to cover other American wars, Ms. Hantz said. "We literally have storage rooms with thousands and thousands of pieces of memorabilia and artifacts," she said, adding that more vehicles, including a Korean War personnel carrier, were waiting in the wings. "Unfortunately I can't go get it because I have nowhere to put it." Still, the thought of letting go of so many vehicles was not easy, Ms. Hantz said. The museum gave winning bidders the option to keep vehicles here on loan or to donate them back to the facility. According to Ms. Hantz, the museum would continue to display at least 31 pieces in its collection. "It's kind of a bittersweet day today," Ms. Hantz said at the auction. "I think the reality will hit when they start leaving out the back door." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
I was 22 in 1993 when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn to officially begin the peace process that many hoped would create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. I've been arguing for a two state solution first in late night bull sessions, then in articles and speeches ever since. I believed in Israel as a Jewish state because I grew up in a family that had hopscotched from continent to continent as diaspora Jewish communities crumbled. I saw Israel's impact on my grandfather and father, who were never as happy or secure as when enveloped in a society of Jews. And I knew that Israel was a source of comfort and pride to millions of other Jews, some of whose families had experienced traumas greater than my own. One day in early adulthood, I walked through Jerusalem, reading street names that catalog Jewish history, and felt that comfort and pride myself. I knew Israel was wrong to deny Palestinians in the West Bank citizenship, due process, free movement and the right to vote in the country in which they lived. But the dream of a two state solution that would give Palestinians a country of their own let me hope that I could remain a liberal and a supporter of Jewish statehood at the same time. Events have now extinguished that hope. About 640,000 Jewish settlers now live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the Israeli and American governments have divested Palestinian statehood of any real meaning. The Trump administration's peace plan envisions an archipelago of Palestinian towns, scattered across as little as 70 percent of the West Bank, under Israeli control. Even the leaders of Israel's supposedly center left parties don't support a viable, sovereign Palestinian state. The West Bank hosts Israel's newest medical school. If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fulfills his pledge to impose Israeli sovereignty in parts of the West Bank, he will just formalize a decades old reality: In practice, Israel annexed the West Bank long ago. Israel has all but made its decision: one country that includes millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights. Now liberal Zionists must make our decision, too. It's time to abandon the traditional two state solution and embrace the goal of equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. It's time to imagine a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state. Equality could come in the form of one state that includes Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, as writers such as Yousef Munayyer and Edward Said have proposed; or it could be a confederation that allows free movement between two deeply integrated countries. (I discuss these options at greater length in an essay in Jewish Currents). The process of achieving equality would be long and difficult, and would most likely meet resistance from both Palestinian and Jewish hard liners. But it's not fanciful. The goal of equality is now more realistic than the goal of separation. The reason is that changing the status quo requires a vision powerful enough to create a mass movement. A fragmented Palestinian state under Israeli control does not offer that vision. Equality can. Increasingly, one equal state is not only the preference of young Palestinians. It is the preference of young Americans, too. Critics will say binational states don't work. But Israel is already a binational state. Two peoples, roughly equal in number, live under the ultimate control of one government. (Even in Gaza, Palestinians can't import milk, export tomatoes or travel abroad without Israel's permission.) And the political science literature is clear: Divided societies are most stable and most peaceful when governments represent all their people. That's the lesson of Northern Ireland. When Protestants and the British government excluded Catholics, the Irish Republican Army killed an estimated 1,750 people between 1969 and 1994. When Catholics became equal political partners, the violence largely stopped. It's the lesson of South Africa, where Nelson Mandela endorsed armed struggle until Blacks won the right to vote. That lesson applies to Israel Palestine, too. Yes, there are Palestinians who have committed acts of terrorism. But so have the members of many oppressed groups. History shows that when people gain their freedom, violence declines. In the words of Michael Melchior, an Orthodox rabbi and former Israeli cabinet member who has spent more than a decade forging relationships with leaders of Hamas, "I have yet to meet with somebody who is not willing to make peace." Rabbi Melchior recently told me that he still supports a two state solution, but his point transcends any particular political arrangement: It is that Palestinians will live peacefully alongside Jews when they are granted basic rights. What makes that hard for many Jews to grasp is the memory of the Holocaust. As the Israeli scholar Yehuda Elkana, a Holocaust survivor, wrote in 1988, what "motivates much of Israeli society in its relations with the Palestinians is not personal frustration, but rather a profound existential 'Angst' fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust." This Holocaust lens leads many Jews to assume that anything short of Jewish statehood would mean Jewish suicide. But before the Holocaust, many leading Zionists did not believe that. "The aspiration for a nation state was not central in the Zionist movement before the 1940s," writes the Hebrew University historian Dmitry Shumsky in his book, "Beyond the Nation State." A Jewish state has become the dominant form of Zionism. But it is not the essence of Zionism. The essence of Zionism is a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society that can provide refuge and rejuvenation for Jews across the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
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