text stringlengths 1 39.7k | label int64 0 0 | original_task stringclasses 8 values | original_label stringclasses 35 values |
|---|---|---|---|
Comedy depends on people behaving badly. So does tragedy. That's good news for "BLKS," the first play by the poet and performer Aziza Barnes. Aiming to be a raucous comedy of misbehavior and a quiet tragedy of mistreatment, it amazingly succeeds at both. Comedy is the top note in Robert O'Hara's hold onto your seats staging, which opened on Thursday at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space. The main characters are voluble and gaudily unquotable. They make choices that make you wince. They shout first and ask questions later. Call them the Real Roommates of Brooklyn: three young black women, living "where Bed Stuy meets Bushwick" while facing confusions about love and work that are both ordinary and extreme. For quite a stretch of the breakneck 90 minute production, you feel the pure joy of seeing the best of people at their worst. June (Antoinette Crowe Legacy) has just caught her boyfriend cheating on her for the 11th time this year and is probably heading back for a 12th. Imani (Alfie Fuller) spends most of her day memorizing the comedy routines from "Eddie Murphy Raw," believing that reciting them verbatim will make good performance art. Minutes after having sex, Octavia (Paige Gilbert) dumps her maybe girlfriend, Ry (Coral Pena), over the tiniest thing. How tiny? It's a mole on her clitoris. Ry, citing boundaries, refuses to examine it. "You were literally just down there!" Octavia wails. Among the many successful audacities of "BLKS" is the way that bit of comedy sets up both the plot and theme. Octavia's fear that the mole may be cancerous propels all three roommates on a use it while you've got it night of club crawling and sex trawling. But the uncomfortable proximity of terror and pleasure, the mark of mortality in the midst of intimacy, percolates beneath the surface at all times, so that even at its most extreme and obscene "BLKS" is not for prudish ears or eyes it is serious and sad and profoundly human. Which means that everything that happens as the three women "get extremely day drunk" and "extremely night fly" cuts two ways: hilarious in one light, awful in another. "If you want me to be your blk person survival guide slash encyclopedia," Imani snipes, "I got a rate." It's 50 per question. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter The playwright, who identifies as nonbinary but is comfortable with female pronouns, uses the abbreviated spelling "blk" to create a verbal distinction between a people and a color. She credits the Chicago poet Avery R. Young with that coinage, and you can hear in Barnes's use of it, as well as in the incredible precision of the dialogue throughout, a poet's attention to sound and meaning. Yet "BLKS," which had its world premiere at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in 2017, is the opposite of precious. As its bleaker themes begin to emerge, first in flashes and then more pervasively, Barnes never slumps into abstraction. So when we hear, near the beginning, that June has just landed a great job as an accounting consultant at Deloitte, it slips by as mere irony. Surely an accounting consultant would have advised her not to room with two women who cheerfully call themselves "the most fired blacks of 2015." But eventually her status as a successful young black woman starts to throb like a tension headache. When she gets punched by the ethnically ambiguous dude, the police refuse to come. When she reads on her phone that "another one" was killed another unarmed black person, that is the idea takes hold for her and for us that there is no escaping American racism, any more than American men, even if you pull down 100,000 at Deloitte. June, Octavia and Imani bear up as best they can, with gallows humor, abundant weed and fifths of Maker's Mark. Sex, too, is an anesthetic, if a short acting one. Without pressing the issue, "BLKS" describes a world in which black women have only one another to lean on. Even the nice guy that June meets at a club (Chris Myers) turns out to be a stalkery nerd with Krazy Glue in his manbag. But the process of numbing and un numbing themselves, of climbing repeatedly to hope from hopelessness, takes its toll. The cast is exceptionally good at specifying each step of this treadmill so that their performances don't blend into a generalized blob of midrange feeling. Ms. Crowe Legacy (recently seen in "If Pretty Hurts ..."), Ms. Fuller ("Is God Is") and Ms. Gilbert ("School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play") are so delicate with the sadness that it keeps coming as a surprise how merciless they are with the comedy. Mr. O'Hara's direction is key here. Like his own warped tragicomedies, including "Barbecue" and "Bootycandy," "BLKS" benefits from brightness and speed. (Clint Ramos designed the aptly rotating set.) "BLKS" also shares with those plays a delight in discomfiting audience members I mean white ones who may feel they are being prodded to laugh at something they have no right to see. Discomfort is great for comedy, of course; it adds intensity. Less profitably, "BLKS" suffers from a familiar structural turbulence at the end, as if it's too big a vehicle, with too heavy a burden of stories and themes, to land on a short runway. Still, it lands. And you may find it continuing to do so for quite a while in your thoughts, like a pleasant dream that inexplicably turns into a nightmare, even while you're still smiling. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Though the Prohibition inspired speakeasy trend has cooled in recent years, the desire to drink underground hasn't. Take Le Boudoir, a gilded cocktail den that opened this winter under Chez Moi, a casual French bistro. The owners, the husband and wife pair Tarek Debira and Patricia Ageheim, modeled the subterranean chambers after Marie Antoinette's boudoir in Versailles. It drips with gold leaf frames, red velvet couches and other louche touches. The glass tabletops are held by nude nymph statuettes. Odalisque paintings hang on the wall. The space itself is reached through a bookshelf stocked with scarlet spined books. On a quiet corner of Atlantic Avenue and Henry Street, where the sidewalk is well worn with strollers and where gentlemen prefer sweaters. The entrance is along the left wall as you walk into Chez Moi, down a flight of candle lined stairs. There's a small marble bar with a bronze bust of Marie Antoinette, which serves as a tap. The action is in the cuddle friendly booths and divans, as well as in a cavelike room in the back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Harold Mabern in 2012. "He was always adventurous, and he was always swinging, keeping the crowd pleased," the saxophonist George Coleman said. Harold Mabern, a pianist, composer, recording artist and teacher whose richly harmonic, soul inflected style made him a sought after bandmate for some of jazz's premier musicians, died on Sept. 17 in New Jersey. He wa s 83. The cause was a heart attack, his publicist, Maureen McFadden, said. She declined to specify the exact location of his death. Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Mabern (pronounced MAY burn) recorded more than two dozen albums as a bandleader, but he contributed to far more in bands led by luminaries like the trumpet player Lee Morgan, the guitarist Wes Montgomery and the vocalist Betty Carter. His employers leaned on him not only for his lush and muscular playing often rendered in two handed block chords so that harmony, melody and rhythm came all at once but also for his compositions. Tunes like "The Beehive" and "Richie's Dilemma" were built from Mr. Mabern's signature composite of harmonic sophistication, blues feeling and sharply punctuated swing rhythm. "He was just such a complete musician," the saxophonist George Coleman, a lifelong musical collaborator with Mr. Mabern, said in a phone interview. "He was always adventurous, and he was always swinging, keeping the crowd pleased." At well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a gentle hunch, Mr. Mabern put his physical heft into his music playing, as he said in a 2015 interview, "from my shoulders, from my whole body." Reviewing a concert by Mr. Coleman's quartet for The New York Times in 2003, Ben Ratliff observed: "Mr. Mabern carpeted each tune with thick chords, almost never letting up until it was time for a bass or drum solo at which point, instead of trudging through a dull accompaniment, he enacted spare, nicely worked out arrangements to accent the solo." Mr. Mabern came of age in the Memphis music scene of the 1950s, where jazz kept company with other forms of black popular music. In Memphis, he told the French magazine Jazz Hot, the blues "was a way of life." He taught himself to play the piano while in high school, largely at the elbow of two local phenoms, the pianists Phineas Newborn Jr. and Charles Thomas. Six months after taking up the instrument, he was playing professionally alongside Mr. Coleman, in gigs that earned him 1 a night. Many of his friends from those years went on to illustrious careers, and he would work with some of them frequently after he moved to New York City in 1959. For nearly 40 years Mr. Mabern taught at William Paterson University in New Jersey, where his students included the tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander and the drummer Joe Farnsworth. Both have gone on to become successful bandleaders, and both played in Mr. Mabern's ensembles for the rest of his life. "I don't have to rehearse with those guys," Mr. Mabern proudly told London Jazz News in 2014. "I just play and they know what to do." He is survived by two children, Michael and Roxanne Mabern, and a granddaughter. His sister, Nettie, and his wife of nearly 40 years, Beatrice, died before him. Harold Mabern Jr. was born in Memphis on March 20, 1936, to Harold and Elnora Mabern. His father worked for middling wages in a lumberyard, but after discovering that his teenage son could play melodies back from memory, he saved up to buy the family a piano, for 60. After high school Mr. Mabern moved to Chicago to play in a band led by the saxophonist Frank Strozier, another former classmate. He attended classes at the American Conservatory of Music, joined a big band and practiced, he later said, for 12 hours a day. Prepared to make the leap, Mr. Mabern relocated to New York at age 23, arriving with 5,000 tucked into his shoes. Soon after his arrival, he ran into the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who was on his way to becoming one of the country's most popular jazz musicians. "Cannonball knew me from Chicago, saw me and said, 'Hey, Big Hands, you want a gig?'" Mr. Mabern said in an interview for Jazz at Lincoln Center. "I said, 'Sure!'" That night Adderley took him to Birdland, where he introduced Mr. Mabern to a gaggle of other leading jazz musicians. Work soon followed with the likes of Miles Davis and Lionel Hampton. He released his first album, "A Few Miles From Memphis," in 1968, one of four he would record for Prestige Records. Mr. Mabern worked mostly as a side musician in the 1970s and '80s, but a record deal with the Japanese label DIW in 1989 revivified his bandleading career. Over his last three decades, when not teaching, he was often at the helm of his own small groups. He became a regular presence at New York clubs, particularly Smoke. He recorded his last four albums for the club's label, Smoke Sessions. Reflecting on his career, Mr. Mabern described himself unpretentiously as "a blues player with chops," borrowing a phrase from the pianist Gene Harris. "I'm never going to stop being a blues pianist," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Welcome to rural Russia. Have a swig of vodka. We'll be here a while. Mallory Catlett's "This Was the End," produced by Restless NYC and Mabou Mines at the Mabou Mines Theater in Manhattan, is a foxed love letter to Chekhov's 1898 play "Uncle Vanya," which opens with a bunch of characters stranded on a country estate and leaves most of them there, four acts later, a little older, no wiser, conclusively mired. Ms. Catlett's work curious and cryptic, playful and mournful imagines these same characters 30 or 40 years further on, still pursuing the same doomed loves and smashed ambitions. Chekhov wrote in a naturalistic style; Ms. Catlett prefers a supernatural one. A meditation on memory and decay, "This Was the End," which first played a few years ago at the Chocolate Factory in Queens, is less of a play and more of an apparition, a ritual, a haunting in one act. Its first scene is an extended hallucination in which Peter Ksander's set, goosed by Keith Skretch's video, appears to flicker and spasm. Projections of each actor dart across the space, pursued by the live bodies of those same actors, bodies that never quite catch up to the video. Hidden behind a sliding door, the sound artist G Lucas Crane cues these images to a soundscape of prerecorded voices and snatches from the Beatles' "White Album." The live actors speak over and around this soundscape, echoing themselves in eerie syncopation. (The dialogue is a mix of scenes from the play and rehearsal chatter in which the actors recap the action.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Otzi the Iceman was a dapper dresser. About 5,300 years ago, he sported a fur hat made from a brown bear, a sheepskin loincloth, leggings and a coat made of goat hide, shoelaces from wild cows, and a quiver made from deer leather. Researchers from the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Research Academy in Bolzano, Italy, used genetic testing to identify the animals that made up the frozen mummy's fur and leather ensemble. Their findings were published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. Otzi, as he became known, was found face down in a thawing glacier in the Otztal Alps, which border Austria and Italy, nearly 25 years ago. Since then, researchers have learned a lot about his life from studying his caramel colored corpse. The Iceman had an arrow in his shoulder, parasites in his gut, wild goat meat in his stomach and tattoos all over his body. Now his wardrobe is giving scientists information about how the Copper Age man dressed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Champion logo, clockwise from top left: on a Pat Peltier hoodie; on a Bootleg Is Better T shirt; on vintage sweatshirts at Flight Club in New York; on items by Ava Nirui; and on a Vetements hoodie. Late last year, the high fashion radical pranksters of Vetements released what would become one of the brand's signature pieces: a misshapen hoodie with a logo on the chest that played off the traditional Champion script logo, rotating the oversize C 90 degrees to make a V. Ava Nirui, a writer, artist and part of a loose group of bootleg influenced design provocateurs who use corporate identities as raw material, thought the price, around 700, was outrageous. "A brand on the come up doesn't have a right to charge that much money," she said. And so she decided to poke fun at Vetements by seeing its borrowing, and raising it or more to the point, interrogating it. One at a time, she took actual Champion sweatshirts and incorporated the elongated C logo into the names of other designers Rick Owens, Chanel, Gucci, Marc Jacobs by embroidering the names around the C in utilitarian font. She made them for herself, snapping pictures and posting them to her Instagram account with a shrug emoticon as the caption. "A lot of people misconstrue what I'm doing," she said. "I'm not trying to start a fashion brand. I'm trying to make people uncomfortable." Vetements's cheeky appropriation and Ms. Nirui's meta cheeky reappropriation represent two phases of what has become a mini resurgence of interest among tastemakers, from high fashion to streetwear, in the Champion logo, one of the most iconic marks in American apparel. In the hands of these recontextualizers, the logo, whether the stand alone C or the full script rendering, is reborn as something of an ideological and aesthetic blank slate, an axis upon which to turn and a foundation for new ideas. This year, in addition to Ms. Nirui's work, the Canadian label Bootleg Is Better put the full script logo on a T shirt, surrounding it with lyrics from Buju Banton's "Champion," and VFiles sold a T shirt with "Athl'c Dept" on the sleeve, with the single letter Champion logo replacing the C. (VFiles, which plays at the intersection of cool kid subversion and fashion industry legitimacy, declined to be interviewed for this article.) This burst of renewed interest has extended to the brand's history. The sneaker reseller Flight Club in New York currently has a floor to ceiling grid of dozens of 1980s and '90s American made Champion sweatshirts, which have been selling briskly. "The Champion sweatshirt is such a regal piece," said Josh Matthews, the director of merchandising at Flight Club and a longtime collector of the brand. "It's a template," Mr. Matthews added, citing the brand's ubiquity with high school sports teams. "They gave a lot of canvases out." That's what the designer Virgil Abloh saw in Champion when, in 2012, he began working on his first clothing line, Pyrex Vision, which, apart from its flannel pieces, was printed entirely on Champion blanks, often with the logo visible. "That was my go to, because my high school gym uniform was Champion a specific style of tee, shorts and hoodie," he said. "So I sought out those blanks and recreated my uniform, but for no particular sport." Since 2013, Pat Peltier has been using Champion garments for one of a kind pieces sold under the name Bandulu Street Couture, sourcing vintage T shirts and sweatshirts and embroidering paint splatter designs on them, or making veils and chokers out of C logos. "I felt like it was Americana," he said of the logo. "It's like Nike. It's such an icon." Champion logos are generally embroidered, adding texture and inspiration. "Champion is the most branded blank," Mr. Peltier said, making it ideal for clothing artists who want to create work in conversation with the base canvas. "The brand is sturdy," Mr. Abloh said. "That's what makes it appealing to me to add an artistic take on it." In recent years, perhaps inspired by the burgeoning athleisure market, Champion itself has dabbled in high, or at least middle, fashion. It has a continuing collaboration with Todd Snyder, now in its third year. Last year, Champion teamed up with Capsule Show and Urban Outfitters to sell a limited run set of directional pieces, including an oversize sweater with distressed edges made with the British avant gardist Craig Green. And for the last several years, it has been collaborating with Supreme, which uses the logo on hockey jerseys, parkas and sweatshirts. ("Supreme is usually patient zero," Mr. Matthews said, referring to the viral spread of fashion resurrection.) Mr. Peltier, who has sold around 200 of his pieces, said that he had had casual conversations with Champion representatives, but that no formal collaborations were planned. Ms. Nirui said she hadn't heard from Champion; she has only just sold her first 10 pieces, after a flurry of requests. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Ivana Trump, best known as the first spouse of the 2016 Republican candidate for president and the woman who coined the term "The Donald," made her New York Fashion Week spring 2017 debut at Dennis Basso on Tuesday, sitting front row at Moynihan Station on the West Side of Manhattan. Ms. Trump wore a black and white patterned dress and sat next to Nikki Haskell, a West Coast socialite who helped invent the weight loss pill Star Caps and who was profiled recently in Politico in an article called "The Real Trumpettes of Bel Air." When the Trumps divorced in the early '90s, after Mr. Trump's affair with Marla Maples (soon to be Wife No. 2), things were anything but cordial between them. But reporters hoping for a morsel of news that might somehow break the Twittersphere were going to walk away disappointed on this day. "I think the Mexican people and all the immigrants are perfectly fine," she said. "They are good workers and good people, but they have to come here legally, they have to speak at least a little bit of English and pay their taxes." She was also not so inclined to discuss such issues with anyone from The New York Times. "You are not so nice to Donald," Ms. Trump said, adding that she was "not a politician" and was here only because Mr. Basso was a "good friend." Had he designed her dress, too? Security guards announced that the show was about to begin, and party page fixtures like Nicky Hilton Rothschild, Somers Farkas and Elisabeth Kieselstein Cord took their seats. Then, electronic music blared for 15 minutes, while models showed off white fitted cocktail dresses, taupe suede skirts and luscious brown bolero like fur coats. In the audience was Kelly Killoren Bensimon and Luann de Lesseps both of whom have appeared on "The Real Housewives of New York" over the years. Ms. de Lesseps and Ms. Bensimon (who referred to the crowd as "well bred, well fed and well read") headed backstage afterward to kiss the ring of the man who designed the collection. Mr. Basso was dressed in a black blazer, a black and white tie and khaki ish dress pants. And it was quickly clear that he has a formidable ability to show equal love for all the women in attendance, whether young or old, famous or nonfamous. He kissed random grandmothers and squeezed their wrists. He posed for pictures with the young daughters of his more middle aged clients. "It's wonderful," he said, looking out at all his well wishers a moment later. "We have young women in their teens to women of a certain age. I think that's great." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Not everyone can run on a treadmill for more than an hour, and it's unusual to see somebody do it in a blue dress. But the woman running in place from the beginning to the end of Ohad Naharin's "Last Work" isn't the extraordinary part. What happens around her is. "Last Work," which was received with wild cheering after its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday, is urgent and intense and curiously less than satisfying. Those are qualities it shares with many other works Mr. Naharin has made for Batsheva Dance Company, the Israeli troupe that he has transformed in the past few decades into one of the world's greatest. In this work, though, the mechanisms of that intensity are set into relief by the runner. Her pace is as moderate and steady as a ticking clock, whereas Mr. Naharin loves extreme slowness, a resistance to the flow of time that he follows with acceleration and sudden stillness. The runner's action is upright and pedestrian, but Mr. Naharin prefers more radical positions. His dancers waddle like storks, skim the ground squatting, bend deeply in every direction. The runner is alone, apart. Mr. Naharin's dancers are seldom free from one another. There are many solos and duets, but they are brief. In their quick profusion, these individual moments ratify the greater power of the group from which they emerge and into which they are absorbed. Such apparent contradictions are a potent source of fascination. In "Mr. Gaga," the revelatory new documentary about Mr. Naharin, he repeatedly mentions physical pleasure, and yet Gaga, the movement language he created, while plainly springing from physical sensation, rarely seems pleasurable, exactly, for the dancer or the viewer. Mr. Naharin also stresses (accurately) how his movement is delicate, "the opposite of macho," and yet it is implacably assertive. It doesn't seduce so much as assume rapt attention. Its uncommon specificity is severe, ruling out apologies and explanations. Which isn't to say that it avoids meaningful images. To the contrary, "Last Work" abounds in them. The dancers float on their backs like fetuses in the womb. They act like machines. They cover their faces in mesh; they seem to daven in religious looking robes; they ride one another with suggestions of kinky sex. One waves a white flag of surrender, not in capitulation but demandingly. Another cleans a rifle as if masturbating. Another binds everyone else (even the runner) in a web of tape. Is that binding benevolent or sinister? How does it fit together with everything else? Mr. Naharin doesn't want that to be too clear. "I like that I can create drama without giving anything away" is how the testily cryptic Mr. Naharin recently explained the title of "Last Work," which he doesn't intend to be his final opus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
ST. LOUIS The most disturbing moment in Verdi's "Rigoletto" is the great monologue "Pari siamo." Rigoletto, a hunchbacked jester at the court of the Duke of Mantua, is approached at night by a mysterious man who says he's an assassin for hire, should Rigoletto ever need such services. Left alone, Rigoletto grimly reflects that he, who wounds people with verbal barbs, and the assassin, who stabs them with a blade, are not that different. At Opera Theater of St. Louis here recently, this aria came across with stunning immediacy, because Rigoletto (the baritone Roland Wood) sang the words with stinging crispness and brooding power in an English translation: It was once common practice for opera librettos to be translated and performed in the language of the audience. That tradition was already losing sway even before supertitles were introduced and widely embraced. Now, the convenience of titling has made translating librettos for performance seem pointless, even stilted. But it would be a great loss for the practice to disappear. Opera Theater of St. Louis remains one of a handful of companies (the English National Opera in London is another) dedicated to performing English translations. To hear two productions in St. Louis "Rigoletto" and Monteverdi's "The Coronation of Poppea," both originally in Italian in an intimate, 960 seat theater was to experience opera as it was intended to be: engrossing music drama, with an emphasis on the drama. Read our review of a new opera this summer in St. Louis. When "Rigoletto" was performed outside Italy during Verdi's lifetime, he fully expected the libretto to be translated into the language of the listeners. Wagner wrote his own German librettos and considered himself as much a poet dramatist as a composer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
For several weeks, Reanna Bhola and her sixth grade classmates at Intermediate School 126 in Astoria, Queens, spent part of nearly every day focused on test preparation. First it was reading, with sample passages, questions and review sheets mirroring the actual tests. Then came math. They did work sheets full of word problems from previous tests, and as the critical time came three days of state math exams began on Wednesday the students concentrated each day on test content, including double periods twice a week for what felt like "every second" of class, Reanna said. Even over spring break, she said, her teacher asked the class to work on answering questions in under two minutes. "Every day, my teacher told me to at least spend 20 or 30 minutes practicing," she said. On Dec. 30, the day she was announced as New York City's schools chancellor, Carmen Farina denounced an overemphasis on test preparation as the dark underbelly of the previous administration's data driven reforms, telling an approving crowd, "We're going to do all we can to roll that back to focus on the best quality teaching as opposed to test prep." Ms. Farina's salvo against teaching to tests so quickly became a mantra that the State Legislature passed a law severely restricting the practice, adding New York to a short list of states trying to get a handle on the issue. But in interviews across the city this past month, students and teachers said that test prep was as robust as ever. Despite the appearance of a turned tide, teachers said, more than a decade of accountability based reforms have so deeply changed the classroom that it would take a long time for the chancellor's message to have any effect. For one matter, state law now bases teachers' evaluations partly on test scores. For another, scores are still a factor in admissions to competitive middle and high schools. Some also cited the new tougher tests linked to the Common Core learning standards and delays in getting Common Core teaching materials into students' hands. "For me, I'm worried because I want my students to feel successful," Ms. Steel said. "To my students, a lot of them really care how they do." In April, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and state legislators passed a law, intended to take effect by the next school year, setting a 2 percent limit on the amount of classroom time that could be spent on test preparation, or about three and a half days in a school year. Charter schools are not obligated to comply, officials said. With the new law, the governor and legislators stumbled into deeper questions surrounding test preparation: First, what, exactly, is it? (The State Education Department was asked to define the practice.) At M.S. 447, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, for example, some students read newspaper articles, which both kept them up with current events and helped them "build stamina for the English test," Annie Smith, a seventh grader, said. Marc S. Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, said that depended on how well the tests were written. For years, he said, teachers leading Advanced Placement courses, or preparing students for state Regents exams, took pride "in teaching to the test," because the tests were so good they forced students to master all the demanding material and synthesize it, not simply regurgitate it. But Mr. Tucker added, "it is not at all clear" whether the assessments being used in New York and some other states are a good reflection of the Common Core standards, which he supports. "There is far too much test prep if, by test prep, we mean setting aside good and challenging curriculum in order to prepare students for low level tests of basic skills that rely on remembering facts and the rote application of procedures," he said. The nature of test prep varies by school. At I.S. 204 in Long Island City, Queens, some students estimated they had spent more than two thirds of their English classes preparing for the reading test, which was given at the beginning of April. For the math tests, Oliver Greene, a sixth grade student at M.S. 447, said he and his classmates were given mandatory packets to finish over spring break. Stamped "Common Core Learning Standards 2014," the packets were checked by teachers as soon as classes resumed, during a week already dominated by test preparation. Students at Public School/Intermediate School 276, in Lower Manhattan, also brought home packets, several parents said, though school leaders have tried to mitigate any stress by playing down the assignments: The work was not mandatory, and parents were not to pressure their children to finish. Besides New York, Texas restricts the number of days students can spend preparing for state assessments, said Monty Neill, the executive director of FairTest, a nonprofit group that advocates for testing reform. Limits are also in place in California, Florida and Kentucky, said Michelle Exstrom, the education program director for the National Conference of State Legislatures. "Test prep is a big area of concern," Ms. Exstrom said. But Mr. Neill added, "I fear these measures will be window dressing." "No matter what you do," he continued, "the definition of test prep is going to be vague, with lots of loopholes, and as long as there are high stakes attached, the word will still come down: 'Keep those test scores up.' " An Education Department spokeswoman this week did not make Ms. Farina available for comment on test prep in city schools. She has already taken some steps to reduce the importance of test scores, saying that they would no longer be the dominant factor in promotion decisions, and pledging to end the practice of assigning letter grades to schools. Still, even after her repeated suggestions, and sometimes admonitions, against test prep ("It has to end," she said in April), a quarter of elementary and middle school teachers surveyed recently by the New York City's teachers' union, the United Federation of Teachers, said they were spending more than five hours a week on test prep. The union's president, Michael Mulgrew, dismissed the argument that the practice was not necessarily harmful. "Test prep is proven, over and over again, that it does not really lead to real acquired learning that stays with the child," Mr. Mulgrew said. Even so, many students and parents are actually clamoring for it, said Elisabeth Stephens, 36, a fifth grade teacher at P.S. 59 in East Midtown, in part because scores still matter in admissions. "I don't think there will ever be no test prep," Ms. Stephens said. Besides classroom practice, the school offered a test prep club before and after school, beginning on March 3. The sessions included sample questions, as well as "relaxation or refocusing techniques, for kids who might need to stand and stretch, or you know, 'How do you know when your mind is wandering?' " Ms. Stephens said. She added: "We try not to belabor the 'take another one, take another one, take another one.' Because they have three days of it coming up." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Five million years ago, a massive sea monster may have eviscerated sharks and whales using gigantic teeth like this. Murray Orr, an amateur fossil hunter, stumbled on this not so pearly white in February while exploring Beaumaris Bay, a popular site for digging up ancient remains near Melbourne. At first, he had no idea what he was yanking out from the rocks. "For a moment it looked like an artillery shell, and I thought I might blow my arm off," he said in an email. "But then I saw the curving pointed end and knew it was a sperm whale tooth." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Jasper Johns's "Untitled" (2017), acrylic over etching with collage on canvas. It's among the works in his latest exhibition, "Recent Paintings Works on Paper," at Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan. At 88, Jasper Johns is not slowing down. After spending more than six decades cultivating an extensive and influential body of work, he continues to be relentlessly productive and inventive. His art has sometimes been described as somber or melancholic. His latest exhibition, "Recent Paintings Works on Paper," at Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea, depicts moments of inconsolable grief and concludes with a gallery full of portrayals of skeletons, albeit ones wearing dandyish boaters. Yet in its sheer variety and vitality, this exhibition is optimistic, and generous in spirit. It reaffirms Mr. Johns as, foremost, a painter's painter and a working artist rather than an art historical subject. In it he revisits three or four previous series extending, editing or recombining their motifs and introduces two new ones that more than meet the Johnsian standards of mystery, suggestion and painterly allure. One group of the new arrivals consists only of three small, dense 2017 canvases painted in acrylic, their familiar but freshly arranged motifs in marvelous color schemes and featuring a new addition: a 1938 reclining nude by Picasso, upright and reversed. The other newcomer is based on a photograph taken during the Vietnam War, in which, as is his wont, Mr. Johns shuttles toward abstraction and back again, this time over the course of two paintings accompanied by a group of 11 works in ink on paper or plastic. Together in a room of their own, the drawings form the show's quiet center. Mr. Johns's last two solo exhibitions of new paintings in New York drilled straight down into the well of a single and new device or motif, yielding coherent, tersely titled ensembles of paintings, drawings and prints. His great "Catenary" works (1997 2003), unveiled at Matthew Marks in 2005, center on gray blackboard like paintings, each with a fragile piece of white string drooping across its surface. Attached to either side of the canvas, the string forms a catenary, or a curve essential in design anything from roadways to artificial bodies of water as implied by titles like "Bridge" and "Near the Lagoon." In 2014, the "Regrets" series (2012 14) had its debut at the Museum of Modern Art. The title comes from a rubber stamp "Regrets," coupled with Mr. Johns's signature which he devised to decline social invitations. In this series, "Regrets" turns dark, psychological and philosophical. They are among his first to be entirely photo based, being derived from a damaged photograph of the British painter Lucian Freud, seated on a bed in his studio, hunched over, covering his face with his right hand. Mr. Johns took this seemingly anguished pose and amplified, fractured and distorted it by adding various patterns and combining the image with its reverse. This mirroring doubled the photograph's deeply torn corner into a central shape resembling a tombstone. With very little encouragement, the stains and creases just above it emerged as a skull. Rather than drilling straight down, "Recent Paintings Works on Paper" spreads out, like a free form, multidirectional root system. Several paintings are uncharacteristically small for Mr. Johns, which gives the show a marvelous intimacy that calls attention to his different paint handling, and how it changes from series to series. The best "Regrets" paintings may actually be here: four downsized canvases painted in acrylic, made since the Modern show and influenced by the prints from the series. (Their dimensions are the same.) In combinations of gray or white, primaries or secondaries, their quasi Cubist shatterings and flattenings create abstraction as a kind of mounting rubble, but Freud's face shielding hand and arm are always discernible. Opposite the "Regrets" additions, the two untitled paintings that introduce what is likely to become known colloquially as the "Farley Breaks Down" series are isolated, side by side, on a wall. One is somewhat smaller than the other; both display a surfeit of greens a color somewhat scarce in Mr. Johns's repertory. They initially appear abstract, with gentle push pull tensions of plane and brushwork complicated by the imprints of steel mesh in three sizes (extra fine, fine and small). But the phrases stenciled across their top and bottom edges "Farley Breaks Down/After Larry Burrows" indicate an image, of Farley breaking down, made by someone other than Mr. Johns. And so you sense, and then see, a figure, covering his face, slumped at its center and typically doubled because of mirroring. Made in 2018, these paintings are based on a 1965 photograph taken in Vietnam by the Life magazine photographer Larry Burrows (1926 1971). Mr. Johns came across it in 2002, before the "Regrets" series. It shows a grieving American soldier at the end of an unsuccessful mission, collapsed on a trunk, with his face buried in his hands, which rest on the top of a suitcase. The man inhabits these works like a ghost, among the greens, browns and yellows of camouflage and jungle. An upright shell casing to his left is often expanded to form a vertical column, recalling the pieces of wood lathe used in several earlier works, and suggesting the base of a very tall cross with the mirrored Farleys recast as Mary and the Magdalene. In the smaller of the two paintings, a rough shape is visible through a door. It resembles a rock with an X shape made of tape; it could also be the bandaged head of a corpse laid out and waiting for its coffin. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. It should be neither remarkable nor courageous for a country singer to address the plague of gun violence in this country. That mass shootings tore apart a country music festival a year ago and a country music bar just two days ago makes the genre's silence on the matter irresponsible and infuriating. And yet the mute response largely persists, which is why "American Bad Dream," from the new Kane Brown album, "Experiment," is such an outlier. But it is one that country music needs to contend with, both because of what it says and how it says it. In the first verse, Brown talks about the preponderance of school shootings in stark terms: Remember when 9th grade was about getting laid Skipping class trying not to get caught Now you gotta take a test in a bulletproof vest Scared to death that you might get shot That this sentiment is coming from Brown, someone as fluent with country tradition as with the reasons to challenge it, matters a great deal. He's a young star not as beholden to the expectations of genre elders, but with a rich, oozy voice that would have been as resonant two or four or six decades ago. The song moves with a hollow, post Sam Hunt thump, which gives it a contemporary sheen. Which makes it a challenge: Will country music's institutions embrace it, support it, promote it even? Will country radio's mainstream find room for it? Will even a boundary pushing D.J. like Bobby Bones play it? Next week, the whole of the industry will gather in Nashville for the 52nd annual Country Music Association Awards, the industry's most prominent showcase. Real courage would be inviting Brown to perform it on the show. JON CARAMANICA "In Common" is the just released debut album from a quintet featuring five standout young musicians on New York's jazz scene: the tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III, the guitarist Matthew Stevens, the vibraphonist Joel Ross, the bassist Harish Raghavan and the drummer Marcus Gilmore. All have fearsome chops, and the rapport between them here is gummy and warm. At times that serenity becomes self defeating; some tracks will make you wonder if the recording studio's water supply wasn't dosed with CBD. But on "ACE," the steady, cyclical harmonies deliver just the right level of understated grace. Stevens and Ross strike asymmetrical chords on every offbeat, setting Smith up for a coolly drifting solo. RUSSONELLO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Legend has it that the British economist John Maynard Keynes, asked why he had changed his position on a question of economic policy, responded: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has embraced a different approach: ignoring the facts. This week, Mr. Mnuchin repeated the risible fantasy that the Trump administration's 2017 tax cuts will bolster economic growth sufficiently for the government to recoup the revenue it has lost by lowering tax rates. "I'll stick with my projections that the tax deal will pay for itself," he said from Switzerland. The claim that tax cuts don't cost money is a lie that won't die, because proponents of tax cuts have learned that many voters like to hear it. Republicans have steadily insisted for almost four decades that tax cuts are free, even as each new round of tax cuts fails to pay for itself. Mr. Mnuchin and other proponents of the most recent tax cuts were already peddling a delusion when they made the claim in 2017. Two years later, the results are in. The annual federal budget deficit has topped 1 trillion. And it is even more difficult to understand how anyone could make such a claim. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The first time I saw President Trump referred to as "Cadet Bone Spurs" I laughed, the second time I smiled and the third time I cringed. It's an apt slur, but it lumps him together with all the other politicians whose military huzzahs contradict their personal histories and whose insult to our men and women in uniform can be reduced to dodging the draft. Trump's twisted and utterly transactional relationship with America's armed forces is a bigger insult than that. For all his lip service to military service, his actions reveal a crude take on those who perform it. And they have led now to a remarkable and remarkably public reappraisal even repudiation of him by people in the armed services, their leaders and veterans. Some are finally coming around to a cleareyed view of a corrupt president. Others are venting a distaste for Trump that they'd previously downplayed or kept to themselves. Even the most dutiful soldier has a breaking point, and even a culture of deference finds its moment of defiance. Late last week Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued an extraordinary apology for his participation in that awful presidential photo op made possible by the use of tear gas against peaceful protesters. But as Helene Cooper noted in a story in The Times, that's just one example of an intensifying friction between the president and military leaders. Many of them don't share his opposition to renaming bases that honor Confederate officers and disagreed with his push to have armed forces quell demonstrations. "Trump's Actions Rattle the Military World" was the headline on a separate story in The Times by Jennifer Steinhauer. Her conversations with members of the military, their families and veterans made clear that they might not back Trump to the extent that they did in 2016. Then there are the generals and admirals, silent by custom but silent no more. What we've seen and heard from them over the past two weeks is unprecedented in my adult lifetime, a jolting departure from their norm of mutely supporting a sitting president, no matter their differences with him. Trump has been denounced by Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis and reprimanded by Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, both of whom held top jobs in his administration. "I think we need to look harder at who we elect," Kelly said in an interview for the online platform SALT Talks. Trump has been upbraided by Navy Adm. Mike Mullen and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, each of whom served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George W. Bush. "I'm glad I don't have to advise this president," Myers said in a CNN interview. Together these admonishments amount to a metaphoric court martial of the commander in chief. Trump campaigned by arguing that presidents before him had abused the military by deploying troops to places Iraq, Afghanistan where the justification was suspect, the mission ill fated and the end point invisible. He promised to avoid such costly entanglements while nonetheless spending more on military equipment. He wanted lots of it and he wanted it to gleam, just like his casinos. He told members of the armed forces that they'd never known a friend like him in the White House. But what a nasty tongue and temper this friend has. At the start of his candidacy, he grossly mocked John McCain, who had been tortured for years in North Vietnam, by saying that he preferred war heroes who didn't get captured. He praised generals, sure, but only to assert his superiority to them. "I know more about ISIS than the generals do believe me," he said at one point in his candidacy, a cockamamie coda to his earlier boast that "there's nobody bigger or better at the military than I am." He attacked Gold Star families, rage tweeting against the father of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq, and the widow of Army Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in Niger. They had dared to criticize him, and he put his vanity over their grief. There's no reverence in Trump, only convenience and expedience. Nearly two years and a hell of a lot of golf passed between his inauguration and the first time he could rouse himself to visit troops in a foreign combat zone. During an earlier trip abroad in late 2018, he abruptly canceled his participation in an event at an American cemetery and World War I memorial in France when rain meant that he'd have to drive instead of taking a quicker helicopter flight. The following year, again in France, he used the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the D Day invasion in Normandy as the backdrop for an interview in which he called Robert Mueller "a fool" and Nancy Pelosi "a disaster." Everything to Trump is show business, and the graves of warriors are fitting props for a tirade on Fox News. Trump approaches and appraises the military as he does all else: What's in it for me? He needlessly sent troops to our southern border in the fall of 2018 because it advanced a narrative, which he contrived to help the Republican Party in the midterms, that America was being threatened by an invasion of migrants. "My military," he has said, and it's no slip of the tongue. He sees the military as a vessel for his own glorification, to which end he openly yearned for a military parade in Washington, a titanic tribute to all the metal and munitions under his control. "My generals," he has also said, referring to the bevy of them Mattis, his first defense secretary; Kelly, his second chief of staff; Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser; Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, his second with which he stocked his administration. The phrase is the giveaway that, to him, they were trophies, their stars and medals merely ornaments on his ego. And they were meant to defer, lest there be doubt of his own dominance. So he lied not only about firing Mattis, who in fact resigned, but also about having given him the nickname "Mad Dog." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The Selfie No No Hall of Fame may have found its Babe Ruth. Simon Birch, a British multimedia artist based in Hong Kong, has been displaying his latest immersive exhibition at the 14th Factory pop up gallery in Los Angeles. In one room were placed a series of crowns on pedestals of varying heights all very close to one another. They were the very definition of selfie bait. So it was perhaps no surprise that a woman two weeks ago would get a bit too close to the art and, mid selfie, lose her balance, sending pedestals and crowns crashing in a cascading domino effect. Damage estimate: Roughly 200,000, according to Mr. Birch. A video of the incident, uploaded to YouTube on Thursday, has racked up nearly 300,000 views. It is possible this was staged. The video was uploaded by someone who claims to know Mr. Birch and its description ends with a plug: "The rest of The 14th Factory is one of its kind. .... Go visit before it closes end of July (or before a few more pieces break)." But in an email, Mr. Birch said it was a true accident. Still, he said, he would not be putting signs up urging visitors to be careful. "We trust people." Mr. Birch said. "Crowns are fragile things. They are symbols of power. Perhaps it's ironic and meaningful that they fell." Museum selfies have become a thing, and are even encouraged by some museums to draw younger visitors. There are entire blogs dedicated to museum selfies. Museum Hack, which gives quirky, unofficial tours of major museums around the country says on its website, "Museum selfies are an awesome way to engage audiences with your museum and collections." Lisa Krassner, chief member and visitor services officer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said, "Visitors are here to enjoy our collection and exhibitions and the entire experience, and we welcome individuals capturing and sharing that experience through photography as long as it's done in a way that doesn't endanger the art or interfere with the experience of others." Our Los Angeles woman is hardly alone in the annals of the selfie clumsy. At the "Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors" exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, a huge hit featuring immersive mirrors, part of the museum closed for three days after a patron shattered a glowing LED pumpkin in February. In 2015, in Cremona, a city in northern Italy, a sculpture "Statue of the Two Hercules," carved more than 300 years ago was partially shattered thanks to a pair of overindulgent self photographers. In these cases, the selfie takers damaged the art. In other cases, the art has damaged the selfie taker. In 2014, an American student, on a dare, decided to take a photograph from inside a 32 ton sculpture in the shape of a vagina at Tubingen University in Germany. He got stuck. Firefighters got a call to rescue a man "stuck in a stone vulva." In other instances that didn't go well for the art: at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan, also in 2014, a student decided to climb a sculpture from the early 1800s that was a copy of an ancient Greek sculpture, "Drunken Satyr." The statue's left leg fell off. Last year, in Lisbon, a tourist in his mid 20s climbed a train station to take a selfie with a statue of Dom Sebastiao, a 16th century king in Portugal. The statue crashed and shattered and he was arrested and charged with destruction of public property. We could go on, but won't. Advice for selfie seeking museum goers: Keep your distance the likes will come anyway. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
IF you didn't live through Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath, it's hard to fathom the extent of the destruction. Photos and videos go only so far. You simply cannot understand it if you haven't been through it. Unfortunately, plenty of Americans have been through it, in one form or another. And their empathy about the length of the recovery runs deep. "I hope they don't get discouraged, because it does take a long time," said Raye Frerer of Joplin, Mo., where a tornado left a 14 mile scar last year. "Here we are, 18 months later, and we're still not back in our home." Even today, you can stand on what passes for a hill in Joplin's midsection, at 23rd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, look east and look west and see empty space. The trees are still gone. Apartment complexes are gone. The hospital is gone. The high school is gone. That's what happens when an EF 5 tornado touches down, eviscerating everything in its path, as it did here on Sunday, May 22, 2011. Winds reaching 250 miles per hour tore homes and other buildings from their foundations and sent debris flying for miles, and 161 people died. As Joplin's residents make their way through the stages of grief, they are eager to talk about it. They want to share how they survived and how they're preparing for the next one, because they now understand that this kind of disaster can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time. We all know the risks, and we promptly learn to ignore them. After all, you can't function very well if you live in daily fear of disaster. But you can prepare yourself for the possibility, however remote, that something like what happened to the people of Joplin or New Orleans, or Northridge, Calif., or New York City and the surrounding areas last month will happen to you. And one of the easiest steps you can take is to disaster proof your finances. The tornado here caused nearly 3 billion in damage. Some 61,000 insurance claims were filed, with a total payout of more than 2 billion. Of that, 31 percent went to homeowners and 5 percent to people who lost their cars and trucks. But many people did not get as much relief as they had expected. The long road back to financial wellness has been more difficult than it perhaps had to be. And those lessons have stayed with them. Ms. Frerer, 58, was at her mother's home south of Joplin that Sunday afternoon. They were celebrating Mother's Day a week late, and her mother, who is close to 80, looked out the window from a small breakfast nook and said, "That's the blackest cloud I've ever seen!" Ms. Frerer turned to her husband, Fred, and told him she didn't want to get her hair wet, so maybe it was time to head home. Mr. Frerer, 60, is retired, and Ms. Frerer is a teacher. When they got to their house in Joplin, Mr. Frerer stood in the road to check the sky. When he came back in, he grabbed a twin mattress from one of the beds, and the two of them settled onto the floor of their small bathroom with the mattress on their heads. "My chest started getting tight and my ears, all of a sudden they started popping," Ms. Frerer said. "They must have popped hundreds of times. And I thought, 'Lord, what on earth am I going to do?' I thought, 'God, I'm prepared to meet you.' " She had been through tornadoes before, and they usually sounded like freight trains. "This one sounded like World War III," she said. "You could feel it, almost like a cosmic tug of war between good and evil." The house shook, objects pummeled the walls outside the bathroom, and then, as suddenly as it had arrived, the storm ended. They stood up from under the mattress and opened the bathroom door. Ms. Frerer could see that the nearby middle school had been destroyed, and she wondered whether there would be school tomorrow. Then she realized she shouldn't be able to see outside. "I stepped into the hall, and the only part of that house still standing was the bathroom that we were in," she said. Money issues take an obvious back seat to the imminent possibility of death at moments like this. But they surface fairly soon after. The Frerers were more prepared than many people are, and for that they credit Financial Peace University, the biblically tinged educational enterprise of Dave Ramsey, a nationally syndicated talk radio financial adviser. One of the so called baby steps Mr. Ramsey recommends is to set aside 1,000 where it is easily accessible. The Frerers had some of that amount stashed in a small safe in their bedroom closet. The closet wasn't there after the tornado, but the safe was. They kept another portion of the money in an envelope that ended up embedded in a vent. They remembered the cash a couple of days after the storm and were able to retrieve it. Disaster preparedness experts say cash is an important element of any emergency planning, because you don't know if banks will still be standing or if A.T.M.'s will be operational. But a common question is how much you should have on hand. Ted Beck, president of the National Endowment for Financial Education, suggests the same amount as emergency officials recommend for food and water: three days' worth. The Frerers also had homeowners' insurance. Ms. Frerer contacted their insurance company, State Farm, that first night as they took shelter nearby at her brother's house. She got through despite spotty cellphone coverage but had to leave a message when no one picked up. (With so many cell towers down, calls were hard to make. Text messages, she learned, were more likely to go through because they are shorter bursts of data.) She said one lesson she and her husband learned was that people should try to build a close relationship with an insurance agent, so the agent will try to contact them if a disaster happens. Another couple in their neighborhood had such a relationship, and six days after the storm, that couple had keys to a fully stocked temporary apartment. The Frerers spent the first few days staying with friends and family, trying to figure out what kind of financial assistance they would get from insurance and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. By the time they started looking for rental apartments or hotel rooms, there weren't any available. Ms. Frerer said another lesson was to go ahead and book something immediately after a disaster, assuming you can afford to front the money before seeking reimbursement from your insurance company. When the insurance adjuster arrived two days later, she gave the Frerers a check for about 1,000. Several weeks later, another adjuster told them they were about 30,000 short of what they needed to rebuild their home to what it had been. That was in large part because the cost of supplies and materials skyrocketed in the Joplin area after the storm. The couple looked into buying an existing house, but prices for those also went up because of high demand and diminished supply the tornado had destroyed 7,000 homes. "My house was insured for more than the house down the street sold for six to nine months before," Ms. Frerer said, "so I thought, 'Hey, we're good to go.' Well, not necessarily." She said she had begun checking her insurance coverage yearly and making sure she understood every part of her policy. Mr. Beck, the National Endowment for Financial Education president, suggests doing this at the same time you do the annual check of smoke detectors in your home, so it becomes a habit. One bit of bureaucracy the Frerers came up against was the insurance company's demand for a detailed list of the contents of their destroyed home, including what they paid for each item, its current value and its replacement value. "Like, I have 16 T shirts or I have 22 pairs of whatever," Ms. Frerer said. "What kind of toiletries, makeup I kid you not. The detail they wanted was overwhelming." She had a receipt box for major purchases, but not for smaller items. And that box? "It's probably blown across to Illinois by now," she said. Mr. Beck said that without receipts, the best way to prove what you owned was with photos and videos. Every year or two, walk around your house and take a detailed inventory of what you own. Put the videos or photos on a DVD or thumb drive and keep it in a safe deposit box or somewhere else outside your home, or store it online. You can also give copies to family members who do not live in your area. The Frerers are now living in a small rental while they build a new, large house less than a mile from the one that blew apart. The school district bought their old land for rebuilding. Because of the insurance shortfall, they are dipping into their savings and retirement funds. They say their financial recovery was helped by the fact that they had paid off their mortgage and had no debt. But Ms. Frerer's voice still catches when she thinks about how much worse it could have been. "It makes us thankful for things that aren't financial," she said. "I'm not going to dwell or think about what I've lost. We come from pioneer stock, so that's the way we want to live. We're just going to pull up our bootstraps and thank God for what he provides and get on with living." "I mention that as an important detail," Ms. Davison, 39, said. "We moved into the house with a tragedy, and we left the house with a tragedy." Joplin's warning sirens first sounded around 5:10 p.m. Ms. Davison said she didn't hear them. Mr. Davison, 42, texted her, "Don't worry, we're in the basement," which alerted her to the coming storm. About 10 minutes later the sirens sounded again. She looked out the window and didn't see anything, and the radar on local television news showed what seemed like a small storm cell. But as a resident of Tornado Alley, imprudence was not her style. She and Emma, 12, moved to the one room in the house the laundry with an exterior wall and an interior wall between them and the direction the storm was coming from. They dragged in a large cedar chest, and Emma climbed in with a few stuffed animals and her iPod. Ms. Davison sat down next to the chest, placed her hand inside to keep contact with her daughter and hoped for the best. And then, the tornado was upon them. "Trains are nothing compared to this sound," she said. "You hear this ferocious thing just hitting your house, and you start to feel the walls moving. We were praying the Lord's Prayer. It sounds melodramatic now, because we were not injured in any way, but at that time I faced my death, and possibly the death of my child." Emma started crying as rain began to fall on them on the first floor of a three story house. They emerged to find a living room that opened to the sky, and a second story staircase to nowhere. A van outside the house was decimated. In one bit of good news, they found all three of their cats unharmed. Ms. Davison's mother had always told her to get replacement cost insurance, as opposed to what is known as an actual cash value payment. With a cash value policy, the insurance payment is for what your home and its contents were worth before they were destroyed. Replacement cost insurance covers what it would cost to buy all of your belongings new, whenever you need to replace them. Replacement cost coverage is usually 10 to 20 percent more expensive than cash value coverage, but the Davisons chose that option through their insurance carrier, Horace Mann. Their policy included an inflation guard that automatically adjusted to cover increases in rebuilding costs. That saved them from the gap experienced by the Frerers when construction materials became so expensive after the storm. The policy also included 10,000 worth of debris removal and demolition costs, as well as money to pay for a rental property, which they did not use because so many friends and family members opened their homes. Because the Davisons' insurance was so comprehensive, they moved quickly to buy another home. They didn't want to deal with all the decisions involved in building a house from scratch, and they didn't want to stay in their old neighborhood, where all the trees were suddenly gone. Within six weeks, they had a check in hand large enough to pay off their mortgage and to cover the full cost of the new home, which they got at a discount because they were able to pay cash. They also had some money to restock the new home, including with a few major appliances. Ms. Davison said people tended to forget about all the little things they own. "Think about replacing all your spices at 3 or 4 or 5 a bottle," she said. "When you have to start a whole house, you buy everything from scratch all at once." The Davisons were also lucky that both of them were able to keep working. The church where Mr. Davison works sustained damage, but not enough to keep him off the job, and Ms. Davison's school was not in the tornado's path. They said the insurance payout involved a significant amount of paperwork, particularly when it came to buying the house, but it still took them only two months to get into their new home. For that, they praised their insurance company. Ms. Davison said that one important element of preparation was knowing how to get access to medications after a disaster. "If you're going to put together a kit, one thing that would be really good to have is just the names of your prescriptions and how many milligrams you're taking," she said. This was a common problem faced by Joplin residents. Stephanie Brady, vice chairwoman of Joplin's long term recovery committee, noted that many pharmacies, including the local Walmart, were damaged or destroyed, as was a hospital and several other large medical buildings. "That was one of the big expenses that people had," she said. "They've lost their prescriptions and they couldn't get a new one, an actual script, let alone have the money to purchase it again." Ms. Davison said she wished she and her husband had thought to put shoes on as the tornado approached, and that would be a priority next time. They also now have a fire safe box containing important household documents, after losing their college diplomas and marriage license in the storm. But even if they had done all of this before May 22, 2011, they said no plan would have been sufficient for what happened. Carrie Cook, 39, works in the advertising department of the local cable television company. She was supposed to be cleaning her apartment that Sunday evening. An inspection was scheduled the next day, an annual walk through that occurs in rental housing subsidized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as hers is. Instead, she had driven to her mother's house for dinner with her 9 year old son, Zachary. As they arrived, the sirens sounded. She asked her mother if they should leave the area, but dinner was in the oven, so they decided to stay. Minutes later, Ms. Cook's ex husband drove up with their other son, 7 year old Aidan. "He said, 'Everybody get in the car!' And he told my mom, 'You're coming, too,' " Ms. Cook said. "We got in his truck and drove to my dad's house, and as we were going into his storm shelter the fence and everything was falling down, so we were in the middle of it. It was right on us real fast." After the tornado passed, they drove back to her mother's house. A trip that usually took 10 minutes took more than 30 because of downed power lines and other debris on the roads. Her mother's house was still standing, while others around it had been ripped from their foundations, but it was not habitable. Ms. Cook's car, still sitting in the driveway where she had left it, was destroyed. "It looked like a bomb had blown off in it," she said. "The windows were all gone, shot out." She wasn't going to leave her mother there that night, so she suggested they all stay at the apartment complex. Instead, her father and ex husband insisted on going alone to check on it. They made a videotape of that journey, and in viewing it again recently, Ms. Cook choked up. The top floor of the two story complex was sheared away. Their first floor apartment was uninhabitable. "They had brand new beds that my dad and their dad had just built for them," she said of her sons. "They had those for one week. All you could see underneath was drawers of their pajamas." Added Aidan: "There was a Dumpster in our living room." Ms. Cook said the calculation of what this could do to their finances started that night. "When I saw the picture of my apartment and I had already seen my car, all that processing started," she said. "I couldn't sleep. I immediately went into panic mode: 'Where are we going to live?' " For the first few nights they stayed in hotels, courtesy of her mother's employer, and after that in a succession of apartments. The saving grace for Ms. Cook was that she had renter's insurance. A recent survey by the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, showed that less than a third of renters in the United States purchased renter's insurance, despite owning an average of 30,000 worth of household goods. The Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, another industry group, said the cost of insuring that amount of property was about 12 a month, which would also cover 100,000 worth of liability if someone were injured on the premises. "I got my first check within five days," Ms. Cook said. And what led her to buy that insurance? "I didn't get it because I was afraid of a tornado," she said. "I got it because I couldn't control what anybody else did" in the apartment building. Ms. Cook did not work for three weeks after the storm because her sons' day care had no electricity, and she was sorting through what little was left of the apartment. She said she still felt that she had been underinsured and the insurance she did have meant she did not qualify for FEMA assistance, despite repeated appeals for aid. FEMA's Individuals and Households Program provides grants of up to 31,500 for temporary housing and repairs, as well as replacement of some essential household items. But money paid out in the immediate aftermath of a disaster must be repaid once an insurance settlement is received, and any money FEMA provides as a supplement to insurance is only for repairs to an existing home, not for the cost of rebuilding one. Like Ms. Frerer, Ms. Cook found it difficult to complete the required inventory statement. "I had to remember what else I'd lost, such as my grandmother's ring that I'd gotten as a sweet 16," she said. "It was difficult to remember, it was depressing and it was time consuming." She had also opted for full coverage on her car, instead of just liability, even though it was paid off. That meant another insurance check that covered the cost of an equivalent used car. Ms. Brady of Joplin's long term recovery committee said the lack of adequate vehicle coverage was a significant issue for a lot of lower income families that carried only liability insurance. She said that 18,000 vehicles were damaged or destroyed and that public transportation wasn't available for two weeks after the storm. "So a lot of people lost their jobs because they couldn't get to it because they didn't have that transportation, and it just compounded the situation," she said. Like the Frerers, Ms. Cook is a follower of Dave Ramsey, the talk radio financial adviser, and she did have some cash hidden in a piece of furniture in her apartment. That was one piece that was still intact after the storm came through. It wasn't a lot, but at that point every dollar was helpful. She said she was able to get through the first few months in large part because of the kindness of strangers. "People from everywhere donated money," she said. "They'd hand you a Bible and it had 20 in it. They would just come up to you and give you gift cards." Ms. Cook recently moved into one of 65 homes that Habitat for Humanity is building this year in Joplin. She said getting the house was "a work of God." She filled out an application after the storm, and the organization sent someone to interview her family. They fell into the sweet spot for Habitat somewhere between the people who make too little to maintain a house properly and those who make enough to buy one on their own. "We are able to look at this tragedy as one of the best days of our lives," she said. Habitat even built them a storm shelter, so she and the boys have somewhere to escape to when the next tornado comes. In their new house, all around, they hear the din of construction on the other houses that are slowly rising from the ruined streetscape. It nearly drowns out the chimes they've placed on their brand new front porch. But not quite. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The N.B.A. off season this year may be defined just as much by which players teams are able to get as by the ones they are able to keep. The trade market opened last Monday with Chris Paul going to the Phoenix Suns, and now free agency is here, with all eyes on Houston and Milwaukee teams hoping to bring in sufficient talent to satisfy the expectations of their biggest stars. Teams were allowed to begin negotiations with free agents on Friday at 6 p.m. Eastern time, but the new contracts could not be signed until 12:01 p.m. Sunday. We have compiled some of the notable transactions. Follow Marc Stein on Twitter TheSteinLine for more. The Clippers have become an off season nemesis for the Raptors, who lost Leonard to them in free agency a little over a year ago mere weeks after the Raptors finished their run to the 2019 N.B.A. championship. Ibaka was a popular figure in Toronto, on and off the court. As host of his online show "How Hungry Are You?" he invited guests like Leonard and Durant to sample cuisine from the Republic of Congo, his home country. (Ibaka got Durant to sample snake.) On another online show, "Avec Classe," he memorably argued with Raptors forward OG Anunoby about who had a better scarf game. Montrezl Harrell is staying in Los Angeles with the Lakers. The Los Angeles Lakers keep making moves to get younger and more dynamic. The latest seemed to come as a surprise to many, including some players around the league. Montrezl Harrell is joining the Lakers on a two year, 19 million deal, according to Rich Paul, his agent at Klutch Sports. The Hornets are expected to waive the veteran Nicolas Batum to create the needed salary cap space for Hayward and spread the payments they will owe Batum over the next three seasons. Going that route would mean Charlotte is in essence paying in the 39 million range in each of the first three seasons of Hayward's contract. The Knicks and the Indiana Pacers had interest in Hayward but not at that price. The contract is the most significant outlay for Michael Jordan in his tenure as the Hornets' owner, and a gamble for a team that has been making moves in an attempt to become more of a factor in the Eastern Conference. Worth noting, perhaps: Last summer, the Hornets lost Kemba Walker in free agency in a sign and trade with the Celtics. After developing into an All Star with the Utah Jazz, Hayward signed a big money deal with the Celtics in 2017 then sustained a grisly season ending ankle injury in his first game with the team. He made a halting return for the 2018 19 season, averaging 11.5 points game. He was more productive last season he averaged 17.5 points a game while shooting 50 percent from the field but missed a large chunk of the regular season with a fractured hand and sat out most of the playoffs with an ankle injury. The Celtics lost to the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference finals. The N.B.A. has opened an investigation into the Milwaukee Bucks' reported attempt to trade for Bogdan Bogdanovic of the Sacramento Kings, according to a person with knowledge of the probe. The league, as The New York Times first reported Thursday, is looking into whether the reported transaction violated its anti tampering rules, according to the person, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly. The N.B.A. will seek to determine if the Bucks and the Kings, as ESPN first reported early Tuesday, had already reached an agreement on a sign and trade deal that would bring Bogdanovic to the Bucks several days before free agent discussions were allowed to start. The Bucks and the Kings declined to comment. Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, pledged in September 2019 that the league would enforce its anti tampering rules more stringently after numerous free agent deals in June 2019 became public within minutes of the start of free agency, suggesting they had been negotiated in advance. The maximum penalty for a tampering violation was raised to 10 million from 5 million and set at 6 million for teams making unauthorized agreements with players, with Silver adding that penalties could also include voiding contracts, suspending team executives and forfeiting draft picks. On Sunday, Bogdanovic signed a four year, 72 million offer sheet with Atlanta that the Kings will have two days to match, according to two people with knowledge of the offer who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. But that calculus had all changed by Thursday, when tests revealed that Thompson one of the great shooters of his generation and a key player in three championship runs would miss the coming season after tearing his right Achilles' tendon during a workout in Southern California. Thompson, 30, missed all of last season after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in the 2019 N.B.A. finals. Back to back seasons for a player in his prime: Gone. "Watching his journey, watching his growth nobody deserves this," Myers said in a news conference Thursday. "This is a guy that loves basketball. He bleeds basketball." Of course, the cupboard is not entirely bare for the Warriors. Stephen Curry should be back to full strength after missing all but five games last season with a broken left hand. Draymond Green is no slouch. And the Warriors bulked up their post presence by using the second overall pick in the draft on James Wiseman, a center from the University of Memphis. Rajon Rondo says bye to the Lakers and hello to the Hawks. On Saturday, the Clippers were thwarted in an attempt to round out their backcourt when Rajon Rondo, fresh off his championship run with the Lakers, agreed to join the Atlanta Hawks on a two year deal worth 15 million, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who was not authorized to discuss them publicly. In a post on Instagram, Rondo bade farewell to the Lakers, writing that he was "truly grateful" for the opportunity. Despite struggling to stay healthy, he had been a key (and timely) presence for them in the playoffs, scoring 19 points in the Lakers' title clinching win over the Miami Heat in Game 6 of the N.B.A. finals. The Nets hang on to Joe Harris. The Nets are re signing Harris to a four year deal worth 75 million, according to a person briefed on the deal who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. Harris's agency confirmed that he had reached an agreement with the team. After barely playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers in his first two seasons in the league, Harris was recovering from foot surgery in 2016 when the Cavaliers traded him to the Orlando Magic, who promptly waived him. He eventually landed on the Nets, who signed him to the league minimum. He quickly developed into a dependable 3 point shooter, then continued to expand his game. In 2018, he signed a two year deal worth 16 million. On Thursday, the 76ers worked out a trade for Seth Curry after moving toward a deal for Danny Green. The two are veteran guards who figure to help the team space the floor around Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid. There is no doubt that Simmons and Embiid are ascendant stars. But they have not figured out how to put it all together when it matters most, a problem that was especially glaring when the 76ers were swept by the Boston Celtics in the first round of the playoffs a couple of months ago. Seth Curry should help the Sixers space the floor after shooting a career best 45.2 percent from 3 last season in Dallas. Perhaps playing with some teammates who can make 3 pointers will help. Last season, the 76ers ranked just 22nd in the league in 3 point attempts. To that end, Morey made a couple of bold moves. First, he agreed to send Al Horford to the Thunder as a part of a package for Green, according to ESPN. Hobbled by a hip injury last season with the Lakers, Green was largely ineffective in the postseason but when healthy, he is a reliable perimeter threat. Later, Morey sent Josh Richardson and the rights to the No. 36 draft pick, Tyler Bey from the University of Colorado, to the Dallas Mavericks for Curry, who averaged 12.4 points a game last season while shooting a career best 45.2 percent from 3 point range. Curry, whose older brother, Stephen, stars for the Warriors, also happens to be the son in law of 76ers Coach Doc Rivers. Goran Dragic will re sign with the Miami Heat. Dragic told The Associated Press that he had agreed to a two year deal to remain with the Miami Heat after helping lead the team to the N.B.A. finals last season. "Happy to be back," Dragic told The A.P. "That was my plan, to come back, but in this crazy business you never know." Dragic, 34, had a terrific season in Miami, averaging 16.2 points and 5.1 assists a game mostly off the bench. He excelled as a starter in the postseason, averaging 19.1 points a game as the Heat made a deep run in the bubble. But he injured his foot in Game 1 of the N.B.A. finals, and his absence at point guard went a long way toward derailing the Heat's title hopes against the Lakers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Rebecca Luker, the actress and singer who in a lauded three decade career on the New York stage embodied the essence of the Broadway musical ingenue in hit revivals of "Show Boat," "The Sound of Music" and "The Music Man," died on Wednesday in a hospital in Manhattan. She was 59. The death was confirmed by Sarah Fargo, her agent. Ms. Luker announced in February that she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig's disease. Ms. Luker's Broadway career, fueled by her crystal clear operatic soprano, brought her three Tony Award nominations. The first was for "Show Boat" (1994), in which she played Magnolia, the captain's dewy fresh teenage daughter, whose life is ruined by marriage to a riverboat gambler. The second was for "The Music Man" (2000), in which she was Marian, the prim River City librarian who enchants a traveling flimflam man who thinks mistakenly that he's just passing through town. Playing Adriana was fun, Ms. Luker admitted. "For the first time in my life, I got to do a bit," she told The Times in 1998. "Learning to turn to the audience, learning to hold for laughs I ate it up with a spoon." But by the end of that year, she was deep into ingenue territory again, playing Maria, the undisciplined novice nun turned live in governess of seven, in "The Sound of Music." When she earned her third Tony nomination, this one for best featured actress in a musical, it was for playing Winifred Banks, a married Englishwoman with two children and a gifted nanny, in "Mary Poppins" (2006). For all her success in musicals, Ms. Luker did not identify as a show tunes type. "I am so not a musical theater person," she told Playbill in 2003. "I love rock music and jazz. I love the '70s stuff I grew up with." Rebecca Joan Luker was born on April 17, 1961, in Birmingham, Ala., and grew up in Helena, a small town nearby. She was one of four children of Norse Doak Luker Jr., a construction worker, and Martha (Baggett) Luker, the local high school's treasurer. Rebecca sang in her church choir (First Baptist of Alabaster) and was a member of the Thompson High marching band. In high school, she entered a beauty pageant. Singing "Much More," the ballad of girlish dreams and determination from "The Fantasticks," she won a college scholarship as first runner up to Alabama's Junior Miss. That took her to the University of Montevallo, just 14 miles from her parents' home, where she was a music major and received her diploma in 1984. Graduation was a year later than planned because she took a break to work with Michigan Opera Theater, where she met her future New York agent. Just five years after college, she was on the Broadway stage, assuming the lead female role in "The Phantom of the Opera" Christine, the chorus girl who is the object of the phantom's affections. "Phantom" was her Broadway debut; she began as the understudy to the original star, Sarah Brightman; became an alternate; and took over as Christine in 1989. She remained with the show until 1991. Ms. Luker moved on immediately to another Broadway show: She played a ghost, the little orphan girl's dead Aunt Lily, in "The Secret Garden." In his review in The Times, Frank Rich singled out "I Heard Someone Crying," Ms. Luker's haunting trio with Mandy Patinkin and Daisy Egan, for special praise. She grew older gracefully in a number of her later Off Broadway roles. Twenty years after starring in a 1996 revival of "Brigadoon" as Fiona, a Scottish lass so rare she really does come along only once a century, she played a droll Buffalo matron in A.R. Gurney's comic drama "Indian Blood" (2006). In 2011, she was an Italian duchess grieving her son's death in the musical "Death Takes a Holiday," by Maury Yeston, Thomas Meehan and Peter Stone. Ms. Luker also had a thriving cabaret career, appearing at intimate venues like Cafe Carlyle and Feinstein's/54 Below, but she professed a special love for "the live experience in front of an orchestra." The stage was always her first home, but she did finally make her screen acting debut in her late 30s when she appeared in "Cupid and Cate" (2000), a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie in which she played the heroine's perfect and perfectly sensible sister. Between 2010 and 2020, she had guest roles on series including "Boardwalk Empire" and "N.C.I.S. New Orleans" and appeared in three feature films, including "Not Fade Away" (2012), a drama about a teenage rock band. Her final stage role was as a small town minister's narrow minded wife in a 2019 Kennedy Center production of "Footloose." She performed at a concert in honor of the lyricist Sheldon Harnick in March 2020. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
From restricted environments to daily testing to empty stadiums, it has been a year of drastic disruption of sports. But while leagues are eager to return to normalcy, it appears as if the virus will continue to alter their seasons for some time to come. With coronavirus cases surging across the United States, the major North American leagues are putting into place plans for changes to their traditional seasons. The N.B.A. announced this week that it would have a shorter regular season. The N.H.L. is considering a hub system for games and realignment. And the N.F.L. has agreed to expand its playoffs if new outbreaks force it to cut short its regular season. The league has been determined to complete 16 game schedules for every team, even as dozens of players have tested positive and a few teams have had to postpone games because of multiple cases. Those postponements led to a cascade of rescheduled games. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. But this week the league's teams agreed that if the national surge of cases leads to more postponements or cancellations, the league is willing to push games, which are normally fit into a 17 week schedule, into an 18th week. And if that is not enough to schedule every game, the league voted Tuesday to expand the playoffs to 16 teams, from 14. The goal would be to prevent a team from missing the playoffs because it was unable to play its entire schedule, perhaps through no fault of its own. The playoff expansion would only go into effect if "meaningful" games were missed; in other words, games that potentially would affect playoff berths. The league had already expanded the playoffs this season to 14 teams, from 12. The reason for the truncation is that the season will start a month late, on Dec. 22, because of the delay in completing the last one. With training camps set to open in early December, the off season will be especially short for teams like the Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat, whose final game in the league's Florida bubble was Oct. 11. (Eight teams who did not compete in the bubble, on the other hand, have not played since March.) This year's abbreviated off season will include the usual free agency and trading periods, though on an accelerated timetable. The N.B.A. draft a staple of June for years will be held, belatedly, on Nov. 18. Not every team will start from the same point. After the 2019 20 season was halted in March because of the pandemic, the weakest eight teams had their seasons ended after 64 to 67 games. The others returned in July and completed schedules of 71 to 75 games before the playoffs. The league is considering reducing its schedule, realigning its conferences and keeping players in bubbles for a few weeks at a time, Commissioner Gary Bettman said Tuesday. "You'll play for 10 to 12 days," Bettman said. "You'll play a bunch of games without traveling. You'll go back, go home for a week, be with your family." Those games would be at teams' home arenas, he said. He said the short term plan for games in restricted environments was designed to avoid keeping players in quarantined bubbles for the entire season. When the league resumed in August after a four month pause for the pandemic, all games were played in Toronto and Edmonton, Alberta. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
VERONA, Italy Long gone are the days when French soldiers or Italian farmhands were issued their daily ration of a liter of wine. Even the three hour Parisian lunch, accompanied by a few glasses of red, white or sparkling, is threatened by the ravages of globalization. Across much of Europe, wine consumption is flat or sinking. The United States is only slightly more buoyant. To stay in the game, the industry is trying hard to develop new markets, especially in Asia. In China, perhaps the most promising Asian country for European producers, France has been the main beneficiary of growing consumer interest in wine. Now Italy is trying to catch up. This week at the Vinitaly wine fair in Verona, which bills itself as the largest wine gathering in the world, with more than 4,500 producers represented and more than 150,000 visitors expected, the organizers announced a partnership with the Hong Kong International Wine and Spirits Fair, under which they will promote each other's activities. Over all, Italian wine exports rose 13 percent last year, to 4.4 billion euros, or 5.8 billion, according to Vinitaly. But in Asia, Italy has some ground to make up. In the first six months of last year, France exported 5.5 million cases of wine to China, accounting for 48 percent of total imports, according to Chinese customs data. Italy, with fewer than one million cases, claimed a mere 8.3 percent of Chinese imports, putting it in third place, behind Australia. "We need to do more to educate consumers," said Lamberto Vallarino Gancia, president of Federvini, a trade group. "Asian consumers are very brand conscious." Italy's late start in Asia contrasts with its consistent strength in the United States, where it is the biggest foreign producer. In 2010, it supplied 30 percent of total American wine imports by value, according to the Commerce Department, compared with 24 percent provided by France. Cultural ties have helped Italian winemakers in the United States, where French producers are still recovering from anti French sentiment after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which the French government opposed. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. In China, on the other hand, French wines have benefited from a perceived association with luxury and status. Wine from Bordeaux houses like Lafite Rothschild, Mouton Rothschild and Latour have soared in price in recent years, in part because of Chinese demand, wine dealers say. Chinese investors have even bought several historic Bordeaux chateaus. Now there are signs that the Chinese enthusiasm for high end Bordeaux may be waning slightly, with the price of Lafite Rothschild easing from the highs recorded a year or two ago. Is this the opening that the Italians needed? Italy has some noted wines, like Sassicaia from Tuscany and those produced by the house of Gaja in Piedmont, but few of them fetch the four digit prices that are not uncommon for top Bordeaux in great vintages. To try to strengthen the link in consumers' minds between Italian wines and other examples of the finer things in life, the country's wine industry has recruited the Altagamma Foundation, which represents Italian fashion houses and luxury goods producers, as another partner. Santo Versace, brother of the fashion designer Donatella Versace and president of Altagamma, said at a news conference during Vinitaly that members of the group would feature Italian wines at fashion shows and other events around the world. "Fashion, design, jewelry, food, hospitality they all give shape to the way in which Italy is identified abroad, being at the same time the true engine of our economy," Mr. Versace said in prepared remarks. He also said that promoting "synergy" among these industries could be beneficial. To promote the association with fashion, Vinitaly organized an unusual tasting in which more than 100 of the best winemakers in Italy poured their wines to an invitation only crowd including a handful of Asian critics, bloggers and buyers. Coordinated action like this is often lacking in the European wine industry, which celebrates the diversity of its producers, geographical origins and wine styles. Thierry Desseauve, a French wine critic who has promoted French wines in Asia, said European vintners should look beyond old rivalries that have divided wine regions and countries, and work together to promote their products in growing Asian markets. "We think there is not one country in the wine world, but one civilization, mostly a European civilization, and we need to develop this civilization in Asia," he said at Vinitaly, which continues through Wednesday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
What is it? The next step up the McLaren ladder from the 12C, the 650S gets its name from its 650PS metric horsepower rating. It will be available in coupe and convertible versions. Is it real? Yes. The global unveiling of the 650S was last month at the Geneva auto show. What they said: "The 650S adopts the new McLaren design language that we introduced on the P1 car," Jamie Corstophine, McLaren's product chief, said at a quiet event held near the New York auto show. What that translates to, he says, is improved aerodynamic performance, which greater downforce and better cooling than other models. Mr. Corstophine said that the 650S was meant to be a car that can be driven every day. What they didn't say: McLaren politely omitted mention of its rivals, but it's clear that the 650S is aimed at competition with supercars like Ferraris and Porsches. What makes it tick? A 641 horsepower 3.8 liter twin turbo V8 sits on a carbon fiber composite frame. The diminutive engine creates an incredible amount of twisting force 500 pound feet and decent fuel economy. McLaren says the car will get 16 miles per gallon in the city and 22 m.p.g. in the city, which is good enough so that the car dodges the E.P.A. gas guzzler tax in the United States. The suspension features stiff springs and a hydraulically controlled damping system that removes the need for a traditional anti sway bar. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
I never imagined I'd experience the sensation of floating in the sky while on a river, but in Vang Vieng in central Laos, I did. Arching my back on an inner tube while lifting my feet out of the silky Nam Song, the air still and the day quiet, I looked up into a cloudless sky and felt as if I were hovering in midair, completely weightless. Right then I wondered why tubing is so underappreciated in the pantheon of water activities: It's cheap, meditative and arguably more connected to its environment than kayaking or rafting, for the tuber must submit to the will of the current. What's more, tubing is why Vang Vieng emerged on the international tourist map. This small town between the capital, Vientiane, and the Unesco Heritage town of Luang Prabang was little more than a farming settlement two decades ago, set in a valley bordered by striking karst formations. Most houses didn't receive electricity until the late 1990s, and the roads were largely mud tracks. Tubing, according to local lore, took off when Thanongsi Sorangkoun, the founder of the riverside Organic Farm Vang Vieng north of town, gave a volunteer a tube to go down the river (Mr. T., as most people call him, neither denied nor confirmed the story when I asked him). Entrepreneurs saw an opportunity, and by 2001 a small industry had blossomed, with half a dozen operators offering tubes that adventurers could ride down about five miles of river. After the rise came the downfall. "There was one concrete slide we called the Slide of Death for obvious reasons," Mr. Perkins said. A spate of fatalities occurred on the river in 2011 between a dozen and 27 or more, depending on whom you ask mostly young men made foolish and fearless by alcohol, diving head first into a river, or falling off poorly built equipment, hitting their head on rocks never to regain consciousness. Among them were a number of Australians, prompting the Australian news program "60 Minutes" to run a segment in March 2012 morbidly titled "Death in Paradise." The Lao government sensed international pressure and sent the police from Vientiane to Vang Vieng to close all the bars in August 2012. "It changed the development of tourism. Now we get old people here," Joseph Foley, an Irishman who has lived here for 15 years and runs Maylyn Guest House, said. The traditional crowd hasn't entirely disappeared. "Backpackers still come but not as many and they're not as drunk," Mr. Perkins added. "With things like the unregulated zip lines stopped, there are fewer opportunities to be completely absurd," he said. "There were 20 to 30 people drunk on the streets in town every night at 2 a.m.; not anymore. The deaths were tragic but the villagers are glad for the change." The river is quieter these days. Twelve bars have come back, but their hours are restricted; only three can open each day along the 2.5 mile tubing stretch. The slides and swings are closed, though remnants are still visible. Partying backpackers ply the river, but their numbers are a fraction of days past. "We used to rent 500 tubes a day," an employee who didn't want to be named at the sole tubing outfit in Vang Vieng said. "And people would also come just to party. Now we only rent about 150, a bit more in high season." Vang Vieng now attracts visitors who tend to be more professional, affluent, and older, drawn by the area's limestone formations and agricultural tableaus. Even the sort of backpacker seems to be changing; Para Pascoe, a 22 year old from Southern Australia, came "to swim in the Blue Lagoon and for the tubing, not the partying," she said. "I'd heard about problems but just thought it was people being irresponsible." Some businesses, including the tubing operation, are actively promoting change, displaying signs asking tourists to respect Lao people and not be shirtless or in bikinis on streets. Other individuals are more forthright in their message: Outside a multistory riverside hotel and shopping complex under construction when I was there, the red tin fencing bears the spray painted message "Go Home Tourists!" But over all the changes are positive. "For the past two years we have been experiencing the Korean wave," Philippe Selbe, the operations manager at Riverside Boutique Resort at the time of my visit, said one misty morning. The boom was attributed to episodes of the Korean reality show "Youth Over Flowers," which was shot in Vang Vieng and broadcast at the end of 2014. "We've typically had a mix of customers, but now 50 percent of our clients are Korean. And there is no low season." The Riverside Boutique opened in 2012 when the French and Lao owners sensed the town was turning a corner. It is, by some stretch, the plushest hotel in Vang Vieng, with 31 rooms in buildings arranged around an infinity pool, views of hulking rock formations across the river, and a spa that opened last month. (I stayed at the more basic Vinutda Guesthouse around the corner). The town retains an easygoing, transitory vibe, with tourists languidly wandering the streets, and ubiquitous street stalls where white signboards advertise fruit shakes, banana Nutella pancakes, chicken sandwiches, beef bacon burgers and more. Snippets of party town Vang Vieng still surface: Around 6 p.m., when tubers must return their equipment to avoid a fine, backpackers fresh off the river in bikinis and board shorts wobble down the streets in various states of inebriation. At night they pack into the few bars still open in town, the rowdiest of them Sakura, where by 11 p.m. Korean, European, North American and Australian revelers shimmy together on table tops in a scenario that could serve as a poster for the United Nations or Benetton. And when the bars close at midnight, they pile into the one after hours club, dancing until 3 a.m., picking their poison from the Happy Menu that, in addition to alcohol, also includes marijuana, opium and magic mushrooms, all technically illegal in Laos. But the partying seems incidental rather than intrinsic to the town's identity, and at night, with its location on a plain surrounded by peaks, the vast majority of Vang Vieng feels like a dusty hamlet on the edge of the earth. "The party scene is still there," said Lavone Thipsady he is known and refers to himself as Mr. Vone who was born and raised in Vang Vieng and owns VLT Natural Tours, one of the largest travel agencies in town. But, he added, "the local government is much stricter controlling things. Tourists have a specific time to party. The river bars have to close at 6 p.m., and tuk tuks have to bring the people back. "Before, people in bright body paint used to walk around, but that's not sold in stores anymore. Town bars have to stop their music at 11:30 p.m., and drinking is over at midnight. Now people come less for the partying, more for the good weather, the river, to enjoy the outdoors." These days, as prevalent as backpackers are Korean couples in straw sun hats, designer Lycra leggings, golf shirts and Adidas sneakers, tugging shiny silver rolling suitcases behind them; tour groups of middle age Chinese here to see pastoral beauty akin to that of Guilin; and well heeled Europeans touring Laos with a private guide. Whatever is going on in town, it's easy to escape. North of town, the Organic Farm accepts volunteers willing to pay their own room and board so they can tend the plants and livestock. I spoke to a Frenchwoman who would identify herself only as Audrey. She had been there for six months looking after the goats. "I like goats. I like Laos," she told me plainly, though she detested the music from the neighboring Viva Vang Vieng bar, the launching point for river tubing trips. Outside of town, the true beauty of Vang Vieng reveals itself, and many activities allow visitors to enjoy the landscape. I took a half day tour with Green Discovery, one of the town's better known tour operators, to hike and explore caves. Our group of five traveled by Jeep past rice fields full of golden sheaves in the process of being harvested. The guide, Bud, led us over bouncy, narrow wooden suspension bridges and around teak, linseed and gooseberry trees, some populated by termites. We entered caves where people hid during the First Indochina War and where giant stalactite formations resembled pumpkins, owls, octopuses and turtles. The following morning I rose early to bike south of town to Tham Jang cave. The interior of the hillside cave, reached by a steep stairwell, was brightly lit and a little too polished for my liking, but the views of Vang Vieng from sections where it opened up were startling. Near the bottom of the cave stairwell, I slid into a small lagoon and into a skinny water tunnel that I had all to myself moments of gratifying solitude. That afternoon I scrambled up Pha Poak, a jagged limestone peak that rises above the rice paddies west of town, offering views as wondrous as those that morning. The clear, crisp light gave the contours of the landscape the precision and sharpness of an architectural drawing. Of course there is the river, the town's raison d'etre. My first trip down it, at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, took place before the hordes descended on the water, around 1 p.m. I was alone most of the time, drifting past sheer drop offs, walls of sharp limestone shards, old ropes hanging off trees. Two teenage boys at Mr. Lao Best Beer bar beckoned me with "Hello, relax, come, have a drink," and were perplexed when I declined. The only company I had was fleeting: speedy Korean kayakers singing folk songs; at least that's what the lilting melodies sounded like. Those two hours on the river were the most tranquil I've had in years. I returned to the river two days later midafternoon, a time when the partying was supposed to be at full tilt. Apart from the crush of 20 somethings drinking and laughing at one bar (the two others open that day were empty), I barely encountered anyone. The river was deserted and I relived my experience from days earlier, drinking in the sublime scenery that, truth be told, should always have been the reason to visit, and remember, this town. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Among the European countries that Standard Poor's declared less creditworthy on Friday, France stands out among the tarnished. An S. P. downgrade provides no truly new information about the euro zone's debt struggle, now entering its third year. But the move at least symbolically places the crisis squarely on the doorstep of the Continent's second biggest economy after Germany which retains the AAA credit rating of which France can no longer boast. Keeping that top credit rating had long been a badge of honor for France and a political point of pride for President Nicolas Sarkozy, who now enters a difficult re election campaign with a stigma that his opponents quickly moved to exploit. News of the downgrade blared from French airwaves and on Web sites, as the finance minister, Francois Baroin, declared that the event was "not a catastrophe." Members of the opposing Socialist party wasted no time painting a gloomier picture. "He's the president of the degradation of France," Martine Aubry, the party's secretary, said of the French president. Mr. Sarkozy had often boasted of France's gilt edged standing, and the looming prospect of its loss had recently become a prime topic of political discussion, a hot issue on talk shows and fodder for comedians and political cartoonists. But whether the S. P. downgrade will have a marked effect on France's cost of borrowing money is something only the coming months and weeks will tell. Because the demotion had been widely anticipated, French officials have said the impact will be manageable. French debt, and that of most other euro zone governments, was already trading as if a downgrade had happened. Yields on French 10 year government bonds, which rose slightly Friday and stood at 3 percent, have been trading more than a percentage point above Germany's, the European benchmark. Germany's interest rate fell slightly to 1.8 percent Friday. "It isn't the end of the world" for France, said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "There will be a lot of terrible headlines," he said in an interview before the official announcement of an S. P. downgrade, "but it's not going to cause French bonds to decline a lot on a persistent basis." S. P. kept a negative outlook for France, citing its high government debt, and a rigid labor market that has helped keep the unemployment rate high, at around 9 percent. The agency said it could downgrade France yet again this year or next if efforts at budget consolidation strategy and structural reforms faltered. The downgrade will raise the nation's borrowing costs at a time when it is trying to reduce around 1.7 trillion euros of debt. In Paris, for example, a sparkling light show that illuminated the Eiffel Tower for 10 minutes every hour after dark has been cut to 5 minutes. Cities and municipalities will feel a similar pinch. Some have already begun adjusting to tighter financial constraints. France is one of the major financial backers of the European rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, which is meant to prevent the credit contagion that began in Greece from spreading to large countries like Italy and Spain. The price of its rescue fund, whose borrowing costs depend in part on the credit ratings of its contributing nations, will now probably rise because of the downgrades to France and others. Higher costs could make the fund less effective in stemming the euro crisis. Many French leaders have noted that S. P.'s downgrade of the United States' AAA credit rating in August did not stop investors from flocking to Treasury securities. To a large extent, though, the United States has a special safe haven status, as the world's largest economy and as a financial power outside the euro zone, which France does not. At the time S. P. issued the American downgrade last summer, it had warned that France of all the major economies that still held the highest credit grade was the most vulnerable because its finances were being eroded by the European crisis. That warning came as the stocks of two of the country's biggest banks Societe Generale and BNP Paribas were being hammered by investors amid rising concern that they had been weakened by the crisis. The shares of both banks have continued to decline since then. Many French and European officials have accused the ratings agencies of fanning the flames. As Europe's crisis wore on, each time a troubled country whether Spain, Ireland, Portugal or Greece announced a new program to improve its finances, they said, S. P. or Moody's or Fitch crushed confidence by issuing fresh downgrades or warnings shortly thereafter. French officials were livid in November after S. P. erroneously sent out an e mail saying that it had already lowered the rating on France's sovereign debt. The company quickly apologized, but Mr. Baroin, the French finance minister, opened an investigation. Until December, Mr. Sarkozy had warned that a downgrade would bite, especially as he outlined two back to back austerity programs meant to reduce France's budget deficit of nearly 6 percent of gross domestic product as well as pare debt of 87 percent of G.D.P., the highest of any AAA rated European nation. But with his main political rival, the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, turning up the heat in the campaign, Mr. Sarkozy reversed course, telling voters since then that a downgrade would be manageable. That may be: French banks and others in Europe that hold piles of French government bonds are raising tens of billions of euros to meet new regulatory requirements to guard against a worsening of the crisis. And while the credit rating of Europe's current rescue fund may also be cut, European officials have already teed up a replacement, the European Stability Mechanism, which does not depend as much on credit ratings. That is because governments would pump taxpayer money directly into the fund. Nonetheless, France will have to work to restore its financial luster, especially if it is subsequently downgraded by other ratings agencies. French officials say their priority now is to demonstrate that the euro area is solid, while also showing that France is working to improve its own finances. Mr. Sarkozy's austerity programs, including higher taxes on items like some food and beverages that kicked in across France recently, are aimed at whittling the country's budget deficit to 3 percent of G.D.P. by 2015. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The muscles of older men and women who have exercised for decades are indistinguishable in many ways from those of healthy 25 year olds, according to an uplifting new study of a group of active septuagenarians. These men and women also had much higher aerobic capacities than most people their age, the study showed, making them biologically about 30 years younger than their chronological ages, the study's authors concluded. All of us are aging every second, of course, which leads many of us also to be deeply interested in what we can expect from our bodies and health as those seconds and subsequent years and decades mount. Worryingly, statistics and simple observation suggest that many elderly people experience frailty, illness and dependence. But science has not established whether and to what extent such physical decline is inevitable with age or if it is at least partially a byproduct of our modern lifestyles and perhaps amenable to change. There have been hints, though, that physical activity might alter how we age. Recent studies have found that older athletes have healthier muscles, brains, immune systems and hearts than people of the same age who are sedentary. But many of these studies have concentrated on competitive masters athletes, not people who exercise recreationally, and few have included many women. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. So for the new study, which was published in August in the Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., decided to look at a distinctive set of older men and women. "We were very interested in people who had started exercising during the running and exercise booms of the 1970s," says Scott Trappe, the director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State and the new study's senior author. That era, bookended to some extent by the passage of Title IX in 1972 and the publication of "The Complete Book of Running" in 1977, introduced a generation of young men and women to recreational physical activity, Dr. Trappe says. "They took up exercise as a hobby," he says. Some of them then maintained that hobby throughout the next 50 or so years, running, cycling, swimming or otherwise working out often, even if they rarely or never competed, he says. Those were the men and women, most now well into their 70s, he and his colleagues sought to study. Using local advertisements and other recruitment methods, they found 28 of them, including seven women, each of whom had been physically active for the past five decades. They also recruited a second group of age matched older people who had not exercised during adulthood and a third group of active young people in their 20s. They brought everyone into the lab, tested their aerobic capacities and, using tissue samples, measured the number of capillaries and levels of certain enzymes in the muscles. High numbers for each indicate muscular health. The researchers focused on the cardiovascular system and muscles because they are believed inevitably to decline with age and the scientists had expected they would see what Dr. Trappe describes as a "hierarchical pattern" in differences between the groups. The young people, they thought, would possess the most robust muscles and aerobic capacities, with the lifelong exercisers being slightly weaker on both counts and the older non exercisers punier still. But that outcome is not precisely what they found. Instead, the muscles of the older exercisers resembled those of the young people, with as many capillaries and enzymes as theirs, and far more than in the muscles of the sedentary elderly. The active elderly group did have lower aerobic capacities than the young people, but their capacities were about 40 percent higher than those of their inactive peers. In fact, when the researchers compared the active older people's aerobic capacities to those of established data about "normal" capacities at different ages, they calculated that the aged, active group had the cardiovascular health of people 30 years younger than themselves. Together, these findings about muscular and cardiovascular health in active older people suggest that what we now consider to be normal physical deterioration with aging "may not be normal or inevitable," Dr. Trappe says. However, this study was cross sectional, highlighting a single moment in people's lives, and cannot tell us whether their exercise habits directly caused differences in health or if and how genes, income, diet and similar lifestyle factors contributed. It also did not look at muscle mass and other important measures of health or whether you can begin exercising late in life and benefit to the same extent. The researchers plan to explore some of these issues in future studies, Dr. Trappe says. But already the findings from this experiment suggest that exercise could help us "to build a reserve" of good health now that might enable us to slow or evade physical frailty later, Dr. Trappe says. "These people were so vigorous," he says. "I'm in my 50s and they certainly inspire me to stay active." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Marilyn Snell craved time to herself in the summer of 2012 so that she could take stock of the emotional losses enveloping her life in San Francisco. She found that time on the Greek island of Kythira, at a friend's early 19th century home. There, she stayed in a room that was once a bakery, white walled with a curved ceiling and a fireplace that had served as the bakery oven. A close friend and co worker had died of cancer in 2010, after months of her caring for him. She was still struggling with sadness and the lessons he had taught her about death and human connections. Her mother, too, needed care during that time after two open heart surgeries. "I was in a moment where I needed to survive, and figure things out," said Ms. Snell, now 57 and a freelance environmental journalist. Long single, she favored solitude. Yet, alone in that white space and remembering her late friend's belief in the lasting strength of relationships, she concluded, "I needed to think of unfinished beginnings and set miscommunications straight." At the top on that list was Gregory Williams, a man with whom she had had a relationship until he broke it off 24 years earlier. She knew nothing about his life since then other than that he had married. Before departing for Greece, she had attempted to reach out to him through Facebook. His response to her inquiry offered little encouragement. "It was just kind of, 'Thank you,'" she recalled. Her earlier relationship with Mr. Williams, which spanned five years, began in 1984, while they were commuting from Berkeley on Bay Area Rapid Transit to downtown San Francisco. Mr. Williams, a newly minted architect, couldn't help looking her way one night when the two found themselves the sole passengers on a train car rumbling under San Francisco Bay. "I wasn't going to just sit there," recalled Mr. Williams, now also 57, who crossed the car to introduce himself. By the time he disembarked, they had exchanged phone numbers. Lunch followed, and then museum visits, reggae concerts and road trips. They shared a passion for the arts and nature. He was raised in Los Angeles and Cerritos, Calif., where his mother, Julietta, taught in the Cerritos public schools for 33 years, and his father, Amos, a Korean War veteran, retired after 36 years as a mail carrier in Los Angeles. Ms. Snell is from Phoenix, where her father, Richard, had been the chairman of Pinnacle West Capital, which owns Arizona's largest electricity utility, and where her mother, Alice, was, among other things, deputy associate superintendent in the vocational division of the Arizona Department of Education. "He's quiet, and an independent, deeply creative thinker," Ms. Snell said of Gregory Williams, who was later a founder of Mass Architecture Design, a Los Angeles firm with commissions that have included several notable homes and restaurants and the Coffee Milk cafe at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "I love the way he helps me see the world from a different angle." For his part, Mr. Williams said, "We've always had very similar spirits, similar life views, whether they're social, political, family values." "They just really epitomize to me what a loving relationship should be," Mr. Williams's mother said. "They hold hands. It's so warm." With regard to the biracial nature of the relationship, Mrs. Williams said that she and the young couple did not blink, although even today some people outside their families and friends "still blink, they still do," at the notion of interracial marriage. In time, Ms. Snell's journalism career took root when she worked at a Los Angeles based political and cultural journal. "She has got this profound sense of empathy that seems to affect everything she does," said Omar Dajani, a friend. Over time, however, irritants began building. They faced the same challenges that many young couples do, with communication lapses, self centeredness and thoughts that there might be something better out there. The couple say that they also lacked the insight to discuss race and class, particularly at a time when acceptance was harder to come by. "I wanted to be my own person, not having her family's position dictating things," Mr. Williams said of his decision to break off their earlier relationship. He began dating other women a year later, and, after two years lapsed, he called to tell her he was getting married. "It broke my heart," said Ms. Snell, who returned to San Francisco. "He had always been the one for me." Over time, she had a series of relationships, some serious, she said, but "I came to love my solitary life." She threw herself into work as executive editor at the Utne Reader, followed by eight years as senior writer at Sierra, a national magazine published by the Sierra Club. When she sought to contact Mr. Williams on Facebook in 2012, she did not know that during the year before he had separated from his wife of 18 years, with whom he has two sons. Mr. Williams responded more positively to her second Facebook inquiry, telling her, "I've been thinking of you." He soon flew to San Francisco, hopeful but apprehensive. "I was thinking, I will get into her car, and we will have nothing to say, and it would be horrible." But they clicked immediately, and after seeing a play, they went dancing at a bar called the Make Out Room, where, as Ms. Snell put it, the sparks started flying. "He's self confident without being egoistic," Ms. Snell said. "He's his own man." She also found that the responsibility of fatherhood had changed him. It was in a rented cottage in Point Reyes, Calif., that they began working off those 24 years of hurt and separation and quickly came to realize how close they still were, Mr. Williams said. After dinner, they wrapped themselves in blankets and sat side by side on a long side porch, staring out at the dark forest and talking about their past insecurities and poor communication. "I grew up Catholic, and it was kind of like confession," Mr. Williams said. "You don't see the person. You just spill out your soul. I told her, 'Let's see if there's something here.' And the only way we could do this was to see each other exclusively and see if there's something there that's worth rebuilding." Ms. Snell said: "I just felt it was a sacred moment. I realized then, I really want this." The next day, walking on the beach, Mr. Williams asked how she saw herself growing old. The couple plans to build a home in the Williamses' old neighborhood, south of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a version of the shack they designed while in Point Reyes. It will have commercial space on the bottom floor: They want a community where people know each other. "Strangely, we are very different people, and we came apart because of our differences," Ms. Snell said. "But when we came together, we found a way to build things." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Garrison Keillor's cruise was to set sail in March. Loyal fans out thousands of dollars are still scrambling to determine if they will get their money back and if so, how much. No 'Prairie Home Companion' at Sea, and So Far, No Refund, Either When reservations for this year's cruise with Garrison Keillor, the former public radio host, went on sale last May, Mr. Keillor's loyal listeners rushed to claim passage. Cabins sold out in 23 hours. The Veendam, boarding 1,350 passengers, was scheduled to leave for the Caribbean from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on March 18. But a week before the cruise was set to depart, Mr. Keillor, who has corresponded with cruisers throughout the process, emailed the more than 1,200 guests, officially canceling the cruise. "Events are moving rapidly," he wrote. "And in the wrong direction and what was intended to be enjoyable has lost all aspects of pleasure." Two days later, Holland America Line, a brand under Carnival Corporation, the world's largest cruise company, announced a 30 day "Voluntary and Temporary Pause," which would have effectively canceled the cruise. The next day the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a no sail order for cruise ships sailing in U.S. waters. Sailings are now prohibited at least until July 24. In the wake of the pandemic, would be passengers who booked directly through Carnival's nine cruise lines have been able to choose between a refund and rebooking with 125 percent credit, said Roger Frizzell, a company spokesman. But the refund process for those who booked through charters, like Mr. Keillor's Prairie Home Cruises, LLC, is more complicated. The charter, which essentially rented the boat from Holland America, had already spent much of the money the cruisers prepaid. Caught in the tangled relationship between the charter operator and the cruise line, more than two months after the canceled trip, passengers out thousands of dollars are still scrambling to determine if they will get their money back and if so, how much. It has left some fans feeling let down by their cultural idol, Mr. Keillor, who some six weeks after canceling the trip, sent a mass email that jumped from a personal anecdote about sheltering in place to Franz Kafka to plans for his own novel, "in which Lake Woebegonians catch a virus from eating cheese that causes compulsive admission of innermost thoughts and guilty secrets." (He offered advanced copies of the novel "AT COST plus postage," as well as a monetary prize for the winning title suggestion.) But the email complete with a limerick written by Mr. Keillor left a lot of questions unanswered. Mr. Keillor, 77, a radio personality, novelist and comedian, is best known for creating public radio's "A Prairie Home Companion," which he hosted on Saturday nights for some 40 years on Minnesota Public Radio. He has maintained a loyal following outlasting two retirements (the first wound up being a sabbatical) and, in 2017, accusations of sexual misconduct. Mr. Keillor, whose show peaked at 4.1 million listeners, is widely credited with helping shape public radio as we know it. (His final show before his retirement in 2016 included a phone call from then President Barack Obama, who professed to be a fan.) The next year, Mr. Keillor was accused of "unwanted sexual touching," accusations later outlined in a letter published by Jon McTaggart, president of Minnesota Public Radio, in January 2018. Mr. McTaggart said a female colleague working on the show had accused the host of "dozens of sexually inappropriate incidents." Responding to the accusations, Mr. Keillor then told The Times: "If I am guilty of harassment, then every employee who stole a pencil is guilty of embezzlement." Minnesota Public Radio terminated contracts with him and temporarily removed archives of the show from its website. Mr. Keillor and the broadcaster eventually agreed to a settlement. Criminal charges were not filed. Long before the accusations, Mr. Keillor's brand had expanded from the radio airwaves to his own holding company Prairie Grand, LLC, founded in 2002 which includes a production company and now the charter cruise company. On 11 cruises since 2005, what Mr. Keillor calls his "floating small town" had traveled to Scandinavia, the Mediterranean and the Canadian Maritime, among other locations. Without American Public Media, which had chartered the previous cruises and held all financial responsibility, Mr. Keillor was uncertain if they would be able to continue sailing. But after hearing from interested cruisers, his small team worked to restart them. The cruise in March would have been the first since the accusations. Dick Kaufmann, 80, a retired lawyer and businessman from Washington, D.C., and his wife, Barbara, are among Mr. Keillor's dedicated listeners. They had attended every previous cruise and looked forward to sailing again. "The reality for me and my wife was that we could go anywhere or stay moored to dock and not go anywhere and it would have been a warm and interesting experience," Mr. Kaufmann said. Celebrity cruises, whether for fans of Oprah Winfrey, Gwyneth Paltrow or James Taylor, have become a popular part of the cruise business. Such niche cruises often have a patchwork of businesses in the background organizing the trip: charters, booking agents, cruise lines and others. In Mr. Keillor's case, the companies involved were his charter, Prairie Home Cruises, the booking agent, Executive Meetings and Incentives, Inc., and the cruise line Holland America, as well as dozens of performers and speakers. With so many involved, the cruise's cancellation led to confusion and angst among guests who started asking for their money back. Holland America offered the charter company the options of pushing the cruise "into next year" or to take a full refund, said Erik Elvejord, the public relations director for Holland America. But with cruise ships quickly becoming a floating symbol of the pandemic and the industry's future so uncertain, the charter opted for the refund, which Kate Gustafson, the managing director of Prairie Home Cruises, said would amount to almost 1.5 million less than half of what passengers' had originally paid. Mr. Elvejord said the process will take "at least 60 days" from the request "due to the high volume we are processing." The charter company had fronted between 700,000 and 800,000 for airfares, insurance, rentals and other costs, which they cannot afford to return to passengers, she said. Instead, the money from Holland America, along with an additional amount potentially as much as about 1 million not already used for other expenses, will be grouped together and prorated to the cost of passengers' cabins, she said, adding that she could not calculate the total amount passengers could expect to see. Prairie Home Cruises said it has gone beyond its contractual obligations in trying to secure passengers even a partial refund. Eric Nilsson, the lawyer for the company, said its charter agreement's force majeure clause, which considers uncontrollable catastrophic events, "allowed cancellation without penalty or forfeiture of payments made." Further, the terms of agreement in the company's travel insurance specifies that a "governmental declaration of pandemic" releases it of liability a standard clause in such insurance policies. Ms. Wolfson said she finds the whole process "rife with bureaucracies" and told the charter company in an email that: "Waiting until June for an unspecified partial refund seems callous, unprofessional, and unacceptable." She said that while she was disappointed the cruise was canceled and would rebook if offered a refund, "I'd be really disappointed to be thousands of dollars in the hole because we could really use that right now." But that might not be a possibility. In an email to Ms. Wolfson, Ms. Gustafson said that the loss of cruise funds "has hit us in the knees." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Will Eddie Murphy and his natty cohort in "Dolemite Is My Name" bring back the double knit polyester leisure suit? Don't bet on it. But what the movie may spawn, in some quarters at least, is yet another round of 1970s inflected Afro urban chic. There is plenty of hustle in Mr. Murphy's latest film, which arrived in theaters last week and will be on Netflix starting Oct. 2 5. In this upbeat biography of Rudy Ray Moore, the record store clerk turned entertainer and his stage persona Dolemite, the actor slips nimbly into character. His dapper suits, carnival stripe bell bottoms and platform shoes, the winged lapel of his dinner jacket invariably punched with a bright carnation, function as a liberating second skin. His regalia is matched by the riotous costumes his companions flaunt, their high crown Homburgs, fur collared coats and slickly patterned polyester shirts, plumage ripe for the plucking by a novelty parched style establishment. Fashion's pilfering of black urban style hardly comes as news to Ruth Carter, the "Dolemite" costume designer, who won an Academy Award earlier this year for her work on "Black Panther." "In fashion, urban cultures tend to lead the way," Ms. Carter said. "When we pick up something over the top and even gaudy, wear it and bring it down to a more realistic level, it tends to catch on." That it does. Over the years some of those Afro urban influences have filtered onto establishment runways, among them that of Marc Jacobs, who provoked social media furor when he sent white models onto his catwalk crowned in Afros and dreadlocks. More recently, and more notoriously, Alessandro Michele, the Gucci creative director, stirred a tempest when he plucked inspiration from the '70s workshop of Dapper Dan (Daniel R. Day), the much mythologized Harlem tailor, but failed to credit his source. Mr. Michele and Mr. Day eventually collaborated on a fashion line. From Ms. Carter's perspective, fashion's impulse to borrow seems natural, if not downright inevitable. "The '70s in urban America had its own individual look and style," she said. "People wanted a piece of it." Still, in its way, the movie represents a take back, the reclaiming of a sartorial heritage that has leached bit by bit into the cultural mainstream. "There were lot of kooky things you could do in the '70s and now to make yourself kind of a clown," Ms. Carter said. "But this is a film where you look a little deeper into all of the details about this time, and your job is to make people look good." The film's splashy style, its untrammeled exuberance, was embodied in the day by Mr. Moore, a small time comedian bent on coolly defying the odds to become a trash talking recording artist and, ultimately, the star of his own roughly cobbled films. Dolemite, his sedulously designed alter ego, can be thought of as an early influencer, his raunchy, rhyming patter a progenitor of '80s rap, his rakish wardrobe conceived to captivate an avid following. His look had its origins in the smoky, boozy nightclubs where he performed, his costumes both a sendup and a homage to the '70s era blaxploitation genre. The fur collared maxi coats, the pinstripe suits, the boutonnieres worn by the class conscious heroes and villains of "Superfly" and "Shaft" were aspirational, Ms. Carter said. Their wardrobes, which bore the stamp of Savile Row, were modified and showily accessorized for impact. "The pimp takes that suit and blows it out," she said. "His only rule is that there are no rules." The pimp owes a less obvious debt to the 19th century dandy, all style and swagger in his high top hat, tight waistcoat and ruffle front shirt that last a Dolemite signature. Mr. Murphy's flamboyant character may have also taken a page from Robert Beck, better known as Iceberg Slim, the outlaw hero of "Pimp: The Story of My Life," a 1967 fictionalized autobiography and a repository of pimp philosophy and style. Always on the prowl for sporty vines (suits) and fancy trimmings, "I would press five dollar bills into the palms of shine boys," Beck writes. "My shoes would be handmade, would cost three times as much as the banker's shoes." After all, as he reasons in another passage, "few can resist the charms of exclusivity in its myriad forms." Just as colorful an influence: Mr. Moore's travels on the chitlin circuit, performing and selling his self produced albums out of the trunk of his car. "What I loved best about people in that time was that they created a subculture," said Ms. Carter, who is 59. They were unapologetic in taking a stance, in creating the black community of the South. "They went to juke joints and back alley clubs, sat with their legs crossed wearing sequined bright yellow hats, bright pink suits, white shoes we called them marshmallows and white fur hats. They enjoyed their community that was a little rude and crude." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
You could have been enjoying this newsletter hours ago. If you like it, sign up to get it directly, every Friday, at nytimes.com/rory. The feast is almost over. For six weeks, barely an evening has passed without television schedules filled by soccer from one, or more, of the world's major leagues. In England, almost every game was given its own time slot. In Spain, they tried not to miss a day. In Italy, they played late into the sweltering night. This weekend, our appetites for European soccer long since sated, we have the final few morsels: Saturday's F.A. Cup final between Arsenal and Chelsea, and a round of fixtures to conclude the Serie A season. And then, no sooner than the table is cleared, the next course appears: two weeks in which the Champions League and the Europa League will be decided in World Cup style tournaments. In the spring, as soccer plotted its way out of its pandemic shutdown, the fear was that this would prove a watershed, a revolution not just televised, but one available only to subscribers. Networks would not willingly turn back the clock to a world in which some games could not be shown live. Soccer's transformation from attendance event to broadcast content would be complete. At first glance, the change seems counterintuitive. After all, the more games that can be broadcast, the more television rights should be worth to the leagues and their clubs. More significant, with no definitive timeline on when fans might return to stadiums, it raises what is almost an existential question: If a game is played in an empty venue and it is not broadcast, what is its purpose? Soccer is an entertainment business. Why would it happen with nobody to entertain? But on a deeper level, it is entirely fitting, an (unwitting, most likely) acknowledgment of one of the central ingredients that has made soccer, the game, the most popular on the planet, and soccer, the elite competition, one of the most remarkable cultural phenomena in history: scarcity. There is a scene in "The Simpsons," from back before it grew old and bloated, in which the residents of Springfield go to watch a soccer game. After kickoff, the team in green passes the ball to one another aimlessly. The crowd cheers. The team in red just stands there, waiting. The green team keeps passing. The cheers die down. Even the smallest, least significant goals have the power to make "the stadium forget it is made of concrete and break free of earth and fly through the air," as Galeano put it. It is the breaking of a dam: a pent up force, waiting and waiting to be unleashed. Goals mean more, mean everything, because you never know how long you might have to wait for the next. It is here that the passion soccer can engender is rooted. It is from here that soccer draws its power. Among major team sports, that makes soccer unique. In their book "The Numbers Game," Chris Anderson and David Sally found that, in (American) football, there is a score every nine minutes. In rugby, it is every 12 and a half. In hockey, every 22. In soccer, that rockets up to a goal every 69 minutes. Soccer's "genius lies in the way it makes fans and players alike wait for their reward," they wrote. "It is a sport of delayed gratification." It is worth considering, though, that the value of rarity does not only apply on the field. In the United States, Major League Baseball is currently going through what we might term the "Asterisk Debate." It is a conversation that Europe experienced several months ago, though with one central difference. In soccer, the assertion was that a title awarded without completing the season as happened in Belgium, France and Scotland should be accompanied by an asterisk, because it was not won over a full, traditional campaign. (In England, this was later amended to: a title won with all of the games completed but some held behind closed doors should have an asterisk because it was won by Liverpool). Sports Illustrated acknowledged that playing 162 games is "arbitrary," but pointed out that "seasons of that length are, at the very least, large enough samples to separate the good teams from bad." The Houston Chronicle was even more damning: "A 60 game season isn't really baseball," one of its columnists declared. It is a view shared by players, past and present. Christian Yelich of the Milwaukee Brewers believes there "will be an asterisk next to this year, no matter what happens." Mike Stanton, a three time World Series winner with the Yankees, is sure that the "teams that lose, they'll be the ones going, 'Well, it's not for real, they didn't play 162, they didn't have the marathon.'" With the exception of the N.F.L., American major leagues are not sports of scarcity. The baseball season is particularly unwieldy, but basketball and hockey both have regular seasons of 82 games, plus a playoff system that normally includes 16 teams. A cynic might suggest that is because more games means more money in ticket sales, but in reality, it seems like the sort of arrangement where everyone wins: the owners, the players as the pay dispute around baseball's return made clear, the players earn more the more games there are and the fans. Who doesn't want to watch more of their favorite sport? Soccer, of course, runs contrary to that. Most league seasons play somewhere between 30 and 46 games, plus knockout and continental tournaments, and the sport as a whole is confident that a sample that size is large enough to separate good teams from bad. Randomness does have a stronger hand with fewer games, of course, but that is part of the charm: It makes the experience more unpredictable, more compelling. More important, scarcity heightens the meaning of and therefore the emotion at stake in every game. Soccer's slim line calendar infuses every occasion with jeopardy. With every additional game, that effect is diluted. If tonight's defeat can be set right tomorrow, then perhaps it does not matter so much. Soccer is turning away from the model it established to escape the pandemic. The endless television buffet will, slowly but surely, be removed. In doing so, the sport's major leagues will restore to their televised fixtures a sense of occasion, something to be savored and anticipated, something not to be missed. After all, you will have to wait awhile for the next one. Perhaps, though, baseball a sport that has wrestled with declining attendance, aging fans, dwindling attention spans and an ever less certain place in the modern sports landscape could approach this shortened season with an open mind. Perhaps the answer is not tweaking the rules or changing the games, but in making them more rare. Maybe each hit, each out, will seem to matter a little more. Maybe each game will appear more decisive. Maybe the tension will be ratcheted up a notch, and maybe the joy of victory and the despair of defeat will seem heightened. Maybe, just maybe, it might come to seem that less can be more. The night before I met Erling Haaland had been the night of that television interview. You may remember it, from back in the before times. On his first appearance in the Champions League for Borussia Dortmund, Haaland had scored twice against Paris St. Germain. The second had contained enough power to rattle the bones of Signal Iduna Park. As he walked off the field, he was steered toward the waiting banks of television cameras. Everyone, at that time, wanted a piece of Europe's shooting star. His first appointment was with German television. The reporter was polite and assiduous, asking questions in English, simultaneously translating the answers into German for his audience. It became clear that Haaland, pretty quickly, did not want to play ball. He gave brief, matter of fact responses: not rude, not exactly, but seemingly designed to highlight that he did not think much of the questions. The reporter, gamely, persisted. At one point, Haaland rolled his eyes and nodded his head, the universal gesture for "what's with this guy?" The prospect of my sitting and asking him about his relationship with his father, the former Leeds United and Norway midfielder Alfie, suddenly seemed a little more daunting. If Haaland was not in the mood to talk, if he decided not to play ball, then it might be a very long 30 minutes indeed. For both of us. There is a risk in judging a player from what you see in a postgame television interview. There is a limit to what a reporter can ask there is no time for an in depth investigation into anyone's psyche and a limit to what a player can say. They are still caked in sweat. They are often still catching their breath. And much of what they have just done, out on the field, is not immediately explicable to them; it is, instead, a mixture of instinct and instruction internalized so deeply that the two are indistinguishable. Haaland was a reminder of that. He does, I think, have a prickly side: closed questions tend to elicit a closed response. He will not do your work for you. But once he settled down, and stretched those long legs out on the table in front of him, and talked about his father, and what it's like to be the Son Of Someone, the sentences grew longer, more considered. He is surprisingly offbeat. He is a little quirky. A flash interview after a game is no time to show that. But that does not mean it is not there. Many of you, it seems, have been nursing the same sense as me that Karim Benzema has spent his career at Real Madrid not getting quite the credit that he deserves. Rick Burroughs wrote to say that Benzema has "often felt that he was this strange outlier, one that demanded respect from the teams Real played and always made those around him better." Kudos to Edward Baker, too, for probably putting it best: He has always liked Benzema, he wrote, "and one of his great attractions is that Jose Mourinho never did." But Richard Whiddington made an observation than warrants exploration. The fallout from the rumbling incident with Mathieu Valbuena, Benzema's erstwhile France teammate a tabloid affair involving a sex tape and accusations of blackmail served to preclude Benzema from "permanently reaching superstar status: particularly losing his place in the French side. How might it have been if he had been an integral part in Russia?" It is just a personal view, but there was a reason behind the choice not to focus on the Valbuena allegations: Benzema's being overlooked and underappreciated predates the scandal. That it has had an impact on his public image is without question, though, and while the World Cup is no longer where reputations are made, it is frequently where they are reassessed, particularly as the twilight starts to descend. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
If the world's dance companies occupied the shelves of a bar, Nederlands Dans Theater would sit comfortably on the top like a fine liquor smooth, complex, potent. In 2011, Paul Lightfoot became the artistic director after serving as the company's house choreographer, along with his creative (and romantic) partner Sol Leon, since 2002. On this visit, the company presents their works "Stop Motion," where dancers slide through white dust like ghosts on a ski slope, and "Safe as Houses," where they are chased by a massive rotating wall to the sounds of Bach. Also on the program are new creations by the sharp associate choreographers Crystal Pite and Marco Goecke. She sets the action on a long table and clads her dancers in suits and ties, like a corporate thriller; he interprets the acoustic love songs of Jeff Buckley. On Tuesday, Nov. 15, the company will offer a preview as part of the Guggenheim's Works and Process series. (Wednesday through Saturday, New York City Center; nycitycenter.org) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Cooped up at home these last four months, many New Yorkers have found themselves longing for larger apartments. But Kayla Oberlin and her partner Inbar Madar, who moved from a two bedroom in Bushwick to a studio apartment in a Williamsburg high rise late last fall, are not among them. "Honestly I don't miss it," said Ms. Oberlin, 30, of the couple's old two bedroom. "It was a railroad apartment and despite being relatively large, it was pretty dark." "We used the second bedroom as storage and office space," she continued. "It was easy to give up that square footage for more light. This feels really big and open." Even after months of working and doing pretty much everything else from home, "we're not suffocating," said Ms. Madar, 28. They also share the space with their cat and dog. Ms. Oberlin and Ms. Madar started looking for a new apartment last fall, a few months before the lease was up on their Bushwick place, where they'd been for the last few years. "It was a great space but we were living above a bar and a lot of tourists were coming constantly to the area for graffiti tours," said Ms. Oberlin, who had previously lived in a shared apartment in the same building. "We were looking for a slower pace." The Williamsburg waterfront, close to a number of their favorite shops, music venues and cafes like Mogador and Reunion, seemed like an ideal spot to relocate vibrant but not quite so raucous. One of the places they checked out was the new mixed use tower One South First, developed by Two Trees Management Company, which opened last September at the site of the former Domino Sugar Refinery. The couple liked a studio apartment there so much they decided to break their lease. Their landlord agreed to the early departure as long as they found new tenants, which wasn't hard as they'd been paying 1,950 a month. "What we really liked about the apartment was that it's considered a studio but there is a separation between the living room kitchen and the bedroom," said Ms. Madar. It was also one of few units in the building that had both that studio layout and a view of the Williamsburg Bridge and East River. And though the rent was a significant jump from their previous place 3,900 a month they felt comfortable with the increase because of all the building offered. Before the coronavirus shutdown, Ms. Madar reasoned, they'd be able to save money on gym membership. They were also excited about the restaurants that were slated to open in the building's retail spaces: Roberta's Pizza, OddFellows Ice Cream and Other Half Brewing Company. They liked that the custom hair care brand Prose planned to move into the building's office leg, and that there would also be a 2,800 square foot co working space. Ms. Madar, who is a brand manager and Ms. Oberlin, who is in customer relations, met while working at a skin care company; they now work at different luxury hair care companies. They speculated that, maybe if the right opportunity came up, one or both of them might work from their own building in the future. They had no idea, of course, that in just a few months they'd be working from their building whether they liked it or not: Ms. Oberlin from a standing desk in the bedroom area and Ms. Madar in the living room area. (Ms. Madar has also made use of some of the shared lounges in the building.) Or that the opening of the restaurants downstairs would be delayed and the building's gym would be closed until the government allows fitness facilities to reopen. But they've found the space a pleasant place to quarantine, almost surprisingly so. They may be largely confined to two ish rooms, but at least the view is expansive. Occupation: Ms. Oberlin works in customer relations for a hair care company and Ms. Madar is a brand manager for a different hair care company. The kitchen: where they've been spending a lot more time than usual, has more counter and storage space than the one in their last apartment. For Ms. Oberlin's 30th birthday: Ms. Madar managed to hide 30 presents around the apartment, although she did have to ask Ms. Oberlin to sit in the hallway while she set up the birthday hunt. "The view is sort of an extension of the space in here," Ms. Oberlin said. "Sunsets and sunrises are really beautiful. It's nice to wake up with the sun, and our schedules are better because we're not fighting the darkness. It's definitely alleviated our mental space." "You can take a five minute break just looking out the window," said Ms. Madar. They also walk in Domino Park, which is right in front of their building, but only in the mornings, when it's less crowded. The social distancing circles painted on the park's turf help with that, but as Ms. Oberlin pointed out, "The park is pretty strict about where dogs can and cannot be and the AstroTurf is one of the only areas in that park where dogs are allowed, so I personally would not sit on it." They've also found a good alternative to the closed gym: the stairs in their 45 story building. In the future, however, they might consider upgrading to a one bedroom. It's not that they need more square feet, but another wall would be nice. "Right now we have the TV in the bedroom. The living room has only one real wall and it's the couch wall, so we'd be under it if we put it there," said Ms. Oberlin. "We often think, 'If we just had one more angle...' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In 2016, Britain takes the cake celebrating the births of several famous writers, and the death of one illustrious playwright; in the American West, an icon of contemporary bohemia approaches middle age; victory and defeat are commemorated on French battlefields; and the struggle for independence is cause for celebration in Central America. Children the world over know Charlie and his chocolate factory and Jeremy Fisher, but to learn about their creators, families will want to head to Wales and northern England. In the Lake District of Cumbria, Beatrix Potter's 150th birthday will see a new book festival sponsored by the National Trust (March 4 to 6), exclusive tours of her Hill Top home, exhibitions and a new musical, to be presented by the World of Beatrix Potter Attraction (June 27 to Sept. 4). The centennial of Roald Dahl's birth will turn his hometown, Cardiff, in Wales, into a "City of the Unexpected," a number of citywide site specific performances produced by the National Theater Wales and the Wales Millennium Center (Sept. 16 to 17). It is to serve as the centerpiece of a monthlong series of readings, exhibitions and other events. On April 23 and 24, the Globe Theater turns to cinema to celebrate the Bard, projecting 37 original 10 minute films one for each play onto just as many screens set up along the banks of the Thames, between the Westminster and Tower bridges. On Feb. 21, France will honor those lost at one of the bloodiest battles of World War I by unveiling a newly renovated Memorial de Verdun and a brand new museum, which is to host several exhibitions of never before seen artifacts and photographs, along with concerts, talks and other programs. President Francois Hollande is to help kick off commemorations at a special ceremony there on May 29. Other centennial events in France this year will honor battles of the Great War in Somme, Delville Wood, Pozieres and Flers Courcelette. Tour companies are offering excursions through these regions led by military historians, like that of the Great Rail Journey, which is offering a five day tour of the Somme battlefields on what remains of the Western Front's military railway. The United States National Park Service turns 100 on Aug. 25, and while each of its more than 400 sites will be celebrating in its own way, a nationwide initiative, the American Solar Challenge, will span nine parks, seven states and 1,800 miles in eight days, as a parade of solar powered cars race from Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Brecksville, Ohio, to Wind Cave National Park in Hot Springs, S.D. Other centennial programs and park specific events can be found at findyourpark.com. How can it be that the original gathering of free spirits and spontaneous performance, the desert home of ludicrous experimentation and mad fun, Burning Man (Aug. 28 to Sept. 5), is turning 30? Perhaps it's become a bit more formulaic and organized than in its youth, but some middle age practicality is necessary for an event that has grown from 35 people at its inception on Baker Beach in San Francisco to a town of its own in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, drawing 65,000 temporary residents each summer. But not to worry, the festival's 10 major principles, particularly that of "radical self expression," are still alive and kicking. Just 35 years ago, Belize gained full independence from Britain, and since then, tourism has soared. But don't expect to find a Starbucks on what was once known as Mother Nature's best kept secret. The Belize government and the tourism board have managed to keep chain establishments away, while drawing a surplus of independent luxury resorts (see Leonardo DiCaprio's eco resort on Blackadore Caye) and restaurants. Independence celebrations include parades and street festivals throughout September, notably the Jouvert (Sept. 17) in Belize City, an early morning street party that has participants sporting paint, mud and chocolate. Costumed dancers and musicians follow during what is to be an amped up version of its annual Carnival. And on Sept. 21, the festivities culminate in a nationwide party of barbecues, concerts and ceremonies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The novelist Philip Pullman, known for his wildly popular fantasy series "His Dark Materials," will release the first book in a new trilogy in October, he told the BBC on Wednesday. The first volume in the new series, called "The Book of Dust," is to be released in the United States and Britain on Oct. 19. The name of the first volume has not been announced. "At the center of 'The Book of Dust' is the struggle between a despotic and totalitarian organization, which wants to stifle speculation and inquiry, and those who believe thought and speech should be free," Mr. Pullman said in an earlier statement. The new books will focus on Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of "His Dark Materials," who is trying to discover the secrets of "dust," a cosmic force whose powers are a subject of recurring mystery in the first series. The "His Dark Materials" trilogy, released from 1995 to 2000, consists of "The Golden Compass" (published as "Northern Lights" in Britain), "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
East Bay Express Lays Off Most of Editorial Staff in Latest Blow to Alt Weeklies The East Bay Express, an alternative weekly newspaper in the Bay Area that gained national acclaim for its 2016 expose of a police sex scandal in Oakland, Calif., laid off almost its entire editorial staff on Friday, the newspaper's publisher said. The newspaper plans to rely on freelance writers for the foreseeable future, the publisher, Stephen Buel, said in an interview on Saturday. Six employees were laid off, including five in the editorial department. In addition to its coverage of arts and culture, the newspaper was known for local accountability journalism. Three police chiefs were fired within a week when it published its series on the Oakland Police Department, which won a George Polk Award for local reporting. Like weekly newspapers across the country, The Express, which has existed for more than 40 years, had recently been running a deficit as print advertising revenue declined, Robert Gammon, the paper's editor, said. Compounding those financial troubles, Mr. Buel said, was a recent ruling from a state appellate court that said the paper had illegally denied a former employee overtime. The employee was asking for about 750,000, necessitating the layoffs, he said. "The only other alternative that I could really see is shutting down the paper, and no one that I know of is ready to do that," Mr. Gammon said. "We're still committed to covering our community and producing the very best journalism that we can." The layoffs were not unexpected given the court ruling, said Azucena Rasilla, who was the newspaper's associate editor until Friday. "We knew that the paper has been having financial issues for a while now, and we also thought eventually we're probably going to lose our jobs," she said. Ms. Rasilla plans to freelance for now. She said that she was unsure about the future of The Express and that having such a small editorial staff would be "unsustainable." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Stand together with the Apiece Apart designers Laura Cramer and Starr Hout, who are organizing a group of 16 fashion labels owned by women, including Creatures of Comfort, Ace Jig and Sidney Garber, to walk in the Women's March on Saturday and donate a percentage of their week's profits to an organization of their choosing that supports human rights. Ms. Cramer and Ms. Hout will give 20 percent of sales on items like their white cotton dress with intricate self loop details ( 445). At apieceapart.com Cuyana, the women's fashion label whose philosophy is "fewer, better things," will be hosting a panel discussion on building that intentionality into style, beauty and home with the founders of several like minded Brooklyn companies at the William Vale hotel in Williamsburg on Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. After the conversation, you can shop a tight edit that includes a Cuyana classic leather tote ( 175), MCMC eau de parfum made from jasmine and vetiver ( 95 for 40 milliliters) and an Eskayel printed linen cotton pillow ( 139). At 111 North 12th Street, Brooklyn. Celebrate the Year of the Rooster. Brioni will give 15 percent of proceeds from sales of a limited edition silk tie with a red lining ( 230) at its new uptown store to the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund (through Feb. 4). At 688 Madison Avenue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
On a cold night in February five years ago, I ended up at a dinner in Beaver Creek, Colo., with Jeff Shiffrin, father of the otherworldly skier Mikaela Shiffrin. Mikaela, then 19, was there too, and would soon be competing in the world championships, but as often happened at these things, I ended up hanging around with Jeff. As middle aged dads of daughters, we had a lot more in common than I did with Mikaela, who had the Olympic gold medal and the freakish athletic skills, and is decades younger. There is an archetype of the hyperdriven parent behind great athletes and scholars, adults seemingly more obsessed with the glory and trappings of success than their children are. As far as I could tell, Jeff Shiffrin, a highly respected anesthesiologist who died of a head injury on Sunday at 65, was pretty close to the opposite of that, someone who appreciated other qualities his daughter possessed far more than what she could do on snow. That night in Colorado, I told Jeff a story of how at a lunch a few months back, Mikaela, who had come to my New York office with a half dozen others, had been the only one to offer to help me carry the trays of sandwiches and salads. When lunch was over, the gold medalist started clearing everyone's plates and throwing them in the garbage. Again, she was the only one doing this. Jeff chuckled and took a sip of his drink. "Hearing stories like that about Mikaela is so much better than watching her win a gold medal," he said. In announcing the death of her father, Mikaela wrote of her family's heartbreak, referring to him as "our mountains, our ocean, our sunrise, our heart, our soul." Even as Jeff Shiffrin's daughter became the best skier in the world, he still showed up to her races with a camera hanging from his neck, as if there were not 100 other lenses catching the action. Any time a talent like Mikaela bursts onto the scene the immediate question is, "How did this happen?" Mikaela began winning national championships when she was 16 and World Cup races soon after. Early in my conversations with the Shiffrin family, I got some pretty clear clues why. Yes, she had great genes. Jeff skied at Dartmouth, and his wife, Eileen, was a masters level ski racer as well. During Mikaela's childhood, the family lived in Colorado and New Hampshire and prioritized skiing, and Mikaela had attended Burke Mountain Academy, a Vermont prep school built around the sport. Why spend all those hours in a car on a weekend driving to a mountain for a competition so Mikaela could take a few runs and walk away with a blue ribbon when she could spend so much more time practicing or skiing with her family near her home? Getting really good was about maximizing the number of hours she could have her skis on the snow. It's hard enough because a skier has to spend so much time riding up the mountain in a chair lift. Why make it worse by adding all that car time, just for another ribbon and the chance for the parents to pat themselves on the back and show off their wunderkind? It was so simple and obvious race less, ski more, give up the quick hit of glory for something lasting and meaningful and full of quality time. In raising Mikaela, the Shiffrins offered a welcome respite from so many other parents, of great athletes and not so great ones, for whom child rearing becomes an endless series of trips to games and tournaments and competitions. The night Mikaela won her gold medal at the Sochi Olympics, I ran into Jeff at a party at U.S.A. House, the social headquarters for the American team. Neither of us really wanted to be there. We were old, it was late and loud, speakers booming with music for a younger set. The Olympics were nearly over, and we were both pretty exhausted, but we both had an obligation to be there for the same reason. We had to keep an eye on his daughter, then an 18 year old budding celebrity enduring all the pressures and pitfalls that come with that. In fact, we didn't. There wasn't much danger of Mikaela Shiffrin doing anything that was going to make headlines. So when we drifted to a quieter spot to kibbitz, I mentioned that I was impressed with the gold medal but more taken with this thoughtful kid, self conscious beyond her years, able to speak in long paragraphs rather than sound bites, unafraid to admit her fears and very aware of her good fortune. "You have no idea how much that means," he said. "This stuff," he gestured to the seemingly glamorous event unfolding nearby and all the attention being heaped on his not so little superstar, "none of it matters." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Credit...Joyce Kim for The New York Times In "Friday Black," the title story in Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah's strange, dark and sometimes unnervingly funny debut collection, a shopping mall turns into a site of carnage as rabid shoppers stampede through the aisles of a clothing store in pursuit of discounted winter wear. The narrator, an unflappable salesman, calmly tosses fleece jackets into the frenzied crowd as trampled, mangled bodies accumulate. The story is a not so subtle critique of consumerism run amok. But like all effective satire, there's a glint of truth and accumulation of mundane details that make the farcical scenario feel plausible. Like his narrator, Mr. Adjei Brenyah had to contend with ravenous shoppers during the holiday season, back when he worked in a clothing store at the Palisades mall in West Nyack, N.Y. "I've seen somebody step on someone else to get the jeans on a Black Friday," he said, still sounding confounded by the behavior he witnessed. "How did you decide to step on a human being to get a pair of jeans?" Most of the stories take place in prosaic settings shopping malls, theme parks, hospitals, suburban neighborhoods, college campus libraries but Mr. Adjei Brenyah renders prosaic scenarios unfamiliar by adding a surreal, disorienting twist. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. In "The Finkelstein 5," the first story in the collection, Mr. Adjei Brenyah takes this approach to its extreme conclusion. To write about the experience of code switching as a young black man, he gives the protagonist, Emmanuel, the ability to dial his "Blackness" up or down in different situations. He adjusts his Blackness to 1.5 for a phone call with a prospective employer, and raises it to a 10 when he joins a radical protest movement. He's come to expect routine racism like a security guard demanding to see a receipt after he buys clothing in a store. But he's moved to action by a grotesque act of brutality, after a man who decapitated five black children with a chain saw gets acquitted by a jury. By making the murders so vicious and extreme, Mr. Adjei Brenyah manages both to deliver a shock, and to point out our diminished capacity to experience shock at the routine violence against unarmed African Americans. "If I see someone who looks like me getting murdered with impunity, that feels like something I should talk about," he said. "Just how bad does it have to be for us to care?" During a recent interview, a few weeks ahead of the book's release, Mr. Adjei Brenyah, 27, gushed about his favorite writers "Toni Morrison is God," he said, seemingly without intending hyperbole and was stunned by the growing tsunami of praise "Friday Black" has generated. The collection has been compared to works by literary titans like Isaac Babel, Ralph Ellison, Anton Chekhov and Kurt Vonnegut, and has drawn ecstatic blurbs from Mary Karr, Dana Spiotta, Charles Yu and Roxane Gay, who called it "dark and captivating and essential." Mr. Adjei Brenyah grew up in Spring Valley, N.Y., the son of Ghanaian immigrants. As a boy, he devoured science fiction and fantasy and Japanese Manga. Later, as an undergraduate at the University at Albany, SUNY, he made his first attempt at writing for a wider audience. After learning of yet another police shooting of a young African American, he stayed up all night writing a pamphlet denouncing systemic racism, which he printed and scattered around the campus. "I went to bed at 5 a.m. that morning thinking, well, I fixed racism," he said. "I basically just littered all over the campus." He took a writing workshop with the novelist Lynne Tillman, who urged him to read works by George Saunders, James Baldwin and Grace Paley, among others. "In this very ferocious period we're living in, in a period of great binaries, he's able to find another way to talk about these issues we're facing," Ms. Tillman said. Some of his early stories were about working in retail, something he knew a fair bit about from the years he spent working at a clothing store in the Palisades mall and later at the Crossgates Mall outside Albany. In some ways, being a salesman was good preparation for being a writer. He became a keen observer of people's moods and mannerisms. He learned how to intuit both what they wanted and what they could afford, and how to read into the details of how people dressed and where their eyes lingered. "I can upsell, I can downsell," he said. "A lot of it is noticing what people are noticing." One Black Friday weekend, he sold about 17,000 worth of North Face jackets, he said. As a reward, he got a free North Face jacket for his mother, a detail he slipped into the story "How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing," which is narrated by an adept salesman who gets a free PoleFace jacket for his mom after selling almost 18,000 worth of merchandise. There were grim moments at the mall that shaped his fiction too. About a decade ago, when Mr. Adjei Brenyah was working at the mall, someone fell from one of the mall's upper floors and died, in a likely suicide an event that he alludes to in his short story, "In Retail." The hum of shoppers shopping halted briefly, but resumed after the body was taken away. When he got to the graduate writing program at Syracuse University, where he now teaches, Mr. Adjei Brenyah first tried writing realistic stories "because I wanted to be taken seriously" but fantasy started seeping into his work. He read Ishmael Reed's experimental satire "Mumbo Jumbo," and something clicked. "I didn't realize you could be so irreverent in talking about these issues," he said. He saw he could use magical realism, or something like it, to write about the issues that had always preoccupied him race and the depravities of consumer culture and our collective habituation to violence. He enrolled in a writing workshop with Mr. Saunders, a contemporary master of fiction that teeters on the edge of otherworldliness, who became a mentor to him. One of the first stories he submitted to Mr. Saunders was a draft of "The Finkelstein 5." "It was just a mindblower," Mr. Saunders said. "As fantastical as the story is, it's referring to reality. Racism is real, and that's what it feels like from the inside." Another story he showed Mr. Saunders, "Zimmer Land," unfolds in a theme park where patrons pay to act out their racist revenge fantasies on actors impersonating "thugs" and terrorists. Before he finished it, Mr. Adjei Brenyah asked Mr. Saunders if he minded him using a theme park setting, since Mr. Saunders is famous for, among other things, writing fiction set in creepy theme parks. Mr. Saunders gave his hearty approval. "This is a person who's using fiction to ask and answer big, urgent questions," Mr. Saunders said. "That's why the stories feel new, because they're compressed tools for moral exploration." The 12 stories in "Friday Black" veer between pure realism and straight up science fiction, and something in between. The juxtaposition feels casual rather than deliberate, perhaps because Mr. Adjei Brenyah finds distinctions between literary and genre fiction, and between fantasy and reality, meaningless. In one of the more personal stories in the collection, "The Hospital Where," the narrator is tending to his sick father when he is confronted by a god with 12 tongues, a demonic muse of sorts who compels him to write stories. That's what it feels like to him when the urge to write strikes, like an almost supernatural possession, Mr. Adjei Brenyah said. In the story, the deity issues a command to the aspiring writer before she leaves. "Don't be boring," the god admonishes him. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The guy with the alligator in his pants never made it to Instagram and neither did the man with Ziploc bags of vodka taped to his thighs. But the supermarket grade meat slicer someone tried to pack in a carry on did make a social media appearance (and quickly garnered over 4,100 likes). Though it may not always seem so to followers of the Transportation Security Administration's wildly popular (and currently unmanaged ) Instagram feed, standards apply to what it can post. The T.S.A. is, after all, a federal agency, one with a multibillion dollar budget and over 57,000 employees and the daunting task of safeguarding the skies. Screeners at airports are considered "essential" employees and are working without pay in the government shutdown although, according to CNN, "hundreds" are now calling in sick, many for practical reasons (child care, work that pays their bills). And challenges for those workers ramp up this time of year when, over a two week period that starts before Christmas and ends just after New Year's Day, an estimated 41 million harried travelers shed belts and shoes, grudgingly remove both laptops and liquids from their luggage and also, not infrequently, fail to recall that they have tucked a loaded pistol, say, or a pet tarantula or some throwing stars in their carry ons. Maces and crossbows may be the least of it, as it happens. Or so it can seem to followers of tsa, the agency's hugely popular Instagram account. Devotees of a feed that counts close to one million followers have grown accustomed to a certain level of crazy on the part of the traveling public. They are aware that tales of snakes concealed in computer hard drives, scythes in backpacks, bricks of weed festooned in Christmas wrapping, replica rifle umbrellas and sword canes are more than urban legend. People try carrying stuff like that and worse onto airplanes every day. That they know this is largely attributable to the efforts of a former transit security officer who, from modest beginnings as a volunteer blogger for the agency, went on to create the T.S.A.'s official Instagram account over five years ago. It was back in 2013 that Curtis Robert Burns, widely known as "Blogger Bob," first began posting smartphone snaps shot by airport personnel culled from daily reports of contraband seized at 450 airports throughout the country to the internet. Though the prospect of anonymous baddies sneaking bombs onto planes can sometimes seem abstract (if scary), Mr. Burns's goofy way with a caption tended to import a measure of common sense and humanity to a detested ritual of modern travel. He did this while highlighting the T.S.A.'s serious underlying core mission. "When we first started it, the reason was to get at why the T.S.A. did what it did," said Lynn Dean, a former public affairs officer at the agency and who now works for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "The challenge was that every time you met someone at a barbecue and said you were a T.S.A. person, you'd get lambasted: 'Why did they take away my toothpaste? I'm in a wheelchair, why did you have to scan me? I've got a pin in my hip.'" The wryly informative captions Mr. Burns appended to his posts along with the hashtags that, as Jimmy Kimmel once noted, Mr. Burns deployed more liberally than a teenage girl helped put a face to an abstract arm of federal government, a division of the Department of Homeland Security formed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "Bob had this firsthand knowledge of dealing with the good, the bad and the obnoxious aspects of the world coming through the checkpoints," said Mr. Bilello, the T.S.A. spokesman. "He used dad humor to put the mission across." In April 2018, the T.S.A. won its first Webby award, for internet excellence in the categories of Corporate Communications in Social, the aptly titled Weird in Social, as well as a category called People's Voice for Weird. Lofting and giving a good shake to an award that looked remarkably like a truck spring, Mr. Burns pronounced his Webby "carry on approved." And then in October, at the age of 48, Mr. Burns died unexpectedly of a bacterial infection. He left behind a wife, two daughters and a government agency with no clear blueprint for replicating the jaunty social media presence Mr. Burns devised. The agency has not yet posted the listing, but it will appear soon on USAJobs, the official federal government employment website. "It's a very hard government job to post for," said James O. Gregory, a public affairs officer at the T.S.A. "The task is to educate passengers and stop bad people. But you've got to do it in such a way that it's interesting." Humor has proved the best format for that. And Mr. Burns had that to spare, no matter the offending object. In a video of his annual list of the top ten most bizarre things people tried to carry onto planes in 2017, he characterized one jagged gizmo found at Honolulu's international airport as "Satan's pizza cutter." (Another, a "grenade art thing" snagged by an X ray machine in Milwaukee, was so strange, Mr. Burns was left to shake his head in disbelief.) "There's no shortage of stories," said Ms. Dean, invoking the tale of the alligator in a passenger's pants. Its head had been taped beneath one trouser leg; its tail, fastened down the other. The alligator's torso was pressed against the groin. The New York bound passenger might even have made it through the checkpoint at Puerto Rico's international airport had it not been for a sharp eyed T.S.A. officer. "As the passenger was approaching, the officer saw something rise in his trousers," Ms. Dean said. "Maybe they'd tried to give it a little ether and it woke up, but the officer spotted it and said, 'Sir, your pants should not be moving in your midleg.'" That particular tale, first reported in a T.S.A. newsletter, never quite made it to Instagram, mostly for reasons of delicacy. "That's what feels so irreplaceable about Bob," Ms. Dean said. "You are trying to amuse people and inform passengers while humanizing officers working at airports, whom everyone hates and who've probably said, 'Please take all your liquids out of your bags,' about four million times." You are trying, Ms. Dean said, somehow to explain for the benefit of the nearly three million people who shuffled along purgatorial lines at airports daily this season why T.S.A. officers are obliged to screen those in wheelchairs, or why it is necessary to X ray a bride's precious wedding dress, and also why, if you insist on traveling with sex toys in your carry on, you should make sure to remove the batteries first. "It actually happened that someone's vibrator went off in their bag," Ms. Dean said. "And a vibrating suitcase is definitely going to trigger an alarm." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The cliche of the volatile chef riding roughshod over his subordinates receives a thorough airing in "Nose to Tail," a resolute but finally punishing wallow in self destructiveness and obnoxious male behavior. Putting his back into the role of Daniel, the abrasive owner of a high end bistro, Aaron Abrams gives him a swelling desperation that's surprisingly touching. Over the course of a single, devastating day, Daniel will fight to save his reputation from ruin and his restaurant from bankruptcy. Bestubbled, hung over and popping painkillers, he's betting everything on a lavish, seven course meal designed to seduce an old friend and potential investor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Six years ago, Julio Torres, the comedian, former "Saturday Night Live" writer and bilingual surrealist, decided to dye his hair. He called Marcy Ozuna, a hairdresser who works out of a narrow shop on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. "It's time," he told her. "You were so excited," Mr. Torres said. "We did it drastic, so drastic," Ms. Ozuna said. "I was like, that's not my boy." On a sticky Wednesday earlier this month, her "boy," whom she also calls "Julito" and "baby," was back. Mr. Torres had just returned from a trip to Greece with his friends Ana Fabrega and Greta Titelman , who star alongside him in the eerie Spanish language comedy "Los Espookys." The Aegean sun had left his hair a pallid beige. Geometric forms are crucially important to Mr. Torres. In the hourlong HBO special, which premiered on Aug. 10, he sits onstage behind a conveyor belt that brings him various objects a crystal, a cactus, a piece of chocolate. He proceeds to describe each in mundane and hilarious detail . After some small talk, Ms. Ozuna wrapped him a shiny black cape and got to work. They have known each other for 10 years, ever since Mr. Torres, who had moved from El Salvador to attend the New School, admired the haircut on a roommate's friend and found himself at Salon G, in Ms. Ozuna's station, and he loved her right away. That station wasn't always decorated with framed magazine cutouts of Mr. Torres. It is now. "I told my co worker, I want my boy next to me," Ms. Ozuna said, dancing around him in red platform sandals. She has never seen his stand up, arcane routines that emphasize his not from around here perspective. Nor had she seen his bizarrely funny "S.N.L." shorts, like "Papyrus" (starring Ryan Gosling as a man obsessed with the font used in the "Avatar" movie poster) and "Wells for Boys" (a spoof commercial for a toy wishing well for "sensitive boys"). She spent years persuading him to abandon his brown hair and now, every three or four months, they experiment with different shades of blond: ash, metallic, vanilla, champagne. Once, briefly, they went black. On "Los Espookys," his character, Andres , has blue hair; as soon as Mr. Torres returned home from the set in Santiago, Chile, he went to Ms. Ozuna to correct it. "Like Immediately. Like the next day," he said." By the time he left for Greece, she had made him a strawberry blonde. "Red always fades," Ms. Ozuna said, philosophically as she moved to the back of the salon to create his color. She started dyeing hair in the '80s, making colors out of Kool Aid. Now, she mixes hues by hand, infusing a peroxide base with three or four shades, softening it with vitamin E oil and jojoba oil. She returned with the color, presenting the chestnut liquid like an offering. "This is what Julito tells me all the time, 'Marcy you're an artist,'" she said. She applied the dye with a broad brush, then worked it in with her gloved hands ("I like to feel it all the way through," she said) until his hair stood out in spikes, like the crown on the Statue of Liberty. The priest in the next chair leaned over to admire her work. "This color is going to be delicious," Ms. Ozuna added. She let it sit for a few minutes, then took Mr. Torres to the back for a shampoo and rinse, before squeezing his hair dry with a towel. But when she pulled the towel away, something had gone wrong. His hair didn't look like sunset. It didn't look delicious. It look more like eggplant purple. "Should we make it lighter?" he said. She agreed. "When we do color, we play together," she said. "We're playing, changing, working. We have to get what he wants." She mixed the color more quickly this time and poured it into a plastic squeeze bottle, drizzling it onto his hair like a butterscotch sauce on top of a sundae and working it through again. He looked like a firework, as he bent his neck back into the sink. "I killed the violet," she said, as she rinsed his hair. "The violet was in my way." She wrapped him in a new cape, brown with a leopard print. His hoop earring had fallen out during the shampoo, but she found it in the sink's drain. In a hand mirror, he admired his damp hair. "Julito, grab my blower," she said. Back in the front of the salon, Ms. Ozuna applied a clear finishing treatment, blew his hair dry and trimmed it with pink scissors, before taking a razor to the ends and working some pomade through until it gleamed like a fire opal. "Oh it's fantastic," he said. "It's what I wanted." She told him not to shampoo his hair or expose it to chlorine. He told her he planned to spend the coming weekend in the pool at Fire Island. Her face fell. "I'll come back," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
GLASSBORO, N.J. Glassboro's downtown has been dying for decades, with shops struggling to compete with nearby strip malls and students from the local university showing little interest in the run down Main Street. Now, borough officials hope that a 300 million makeover will draw shoppers to the downtown stores and revive its flagging image. Eager to avoid the fate of Camden, its downtrodden neighbor less than 20 miles north, Glassboro enlisted a private developer, Sora Development, to rebuild a 26 acre swath of its town center. The new Rowan Boulevard connects the borough hall with Rowan University, a public college. Construction on the new town center began in 2009 and includes plans for a hotel, retail stores, a public park and rental housing. In addition, the 15 building development adds more than 1,500 beds for student housing, 72,000 square feet of classroom space and a university bookstore. The decade long plan is an effort to erase the line between town and gown, by turning this dormant community of 19,000 into a real college town. "Glassboro was in a downward spiral, and if you don't fix that then it's ultimately going to be bad for everybody," said Joe Getz, a principal with the JGSC Group, a consulting business that provided economic modeling for Glassboro. "You've been to Camden? Camden's what happens when the economics leave." While Glassboro has been flailing, Rowan University has been on overdrive. In 1992, Rowan, then a small teachers college, received a 100 million endowment that allowed it to become a full fledged university. Last year, Rowan opened a medical school in Camden. The university expects its population to double to 25,000 over the next decade. "Let's face it, the town has changed, but the university has changed immensely," said Joseph A. Brigandi Jr., borough administrator of Glassboro. "We support Rowan growing, but only if they grow in a smart way that benefits us both." The redevelopment plan is not without risks for Glassboro. The borough issued 28 million in municipal bonds in 2006 to buy and demolish the existing properties a collection of bungalows that had been mostly private student rental housing. The new street grid was financed with 3.5 million in public grant funding. As part of the deal, the developer will make payments to Glassboro in lieu of taxes for the next 30 years, which could hurt school district financing because the borough isn't obligated to share the revenue. If the development succeeds, Glassboro could be rejuvenated. If it fails, Glassboro could be left with a new main street that snarls traffic and siphons business away from the very downtown shops the project was intended to save. Owning the land may leave Glassboro on the hook for some risk, but it also provides the borough with some control. The university is in a lease to own agreement with Sora Development for the dormitories, bookstore and classrooms. After 30 years, ownership reverts to Rowan. But, because the borough owns the land, it will continue to collect revenue from the tax exempt college by charging rent for the land lease. Sora will retain ownership of the retailing, hotel and market rate housing. "The nonprofit university is paying taxes through a private ownership agreement," said Tim Elliott, a principal at Sora Development, based in Maryland. "That's a big advantage to the borough. That's huge." Already, the agreement has been filling Glassboro's coffers. The borough has recouped about half of the 28 million it spent for the land acquisitions, Mr. Brigandi said. Before the redevelopment, the properties in the 26 acre zone generated about 260,000 a year in tax revenue. Now, the borough receives about 1.2 million a year in payments. When the project is complete, Mr. Brigandi estimates, the town will receive as much as 3 million a year in payments. Rowan Boulevard has had a flurry of construction activity this summer. A 129 room Courtyard by Marriott will open in mid August, along with a 1,200 car parking deck and a 60,000 square foot continuing education building. Already, several retail shops have opened, including a novelty store and restaurants. The centerpiece, a 38,000 square foot Barnes Noble, which opened in 2010, doubles as the student bookstore. Some business owners along the struggling Main and High Streets wonder if the 6,000 students who live on campus or in town during the year will generate enough customer traffic for 60 new retail outlets. "Right now it's a ghost town here. It's summer and all the kids leave," said Adam Szyfman, owner of Ace Screen Printing and Embroidery in Glassboro. "I don't think they have the clientele to support what's going on." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
WHEN I was 30, the ovarian cancer I'd had as a child returned after a 20 year hiatus. The new diagnosis arrived dramatically, when a trip to the emergency room revealed a tumor that was causing internal bleeding. During the week I spent in intensive care, my son, Leo, stopped speaking aloud and talked only in a whisper. He was almost 4. Home from the hospital, I juggled a raft of medical appointments on top of the chaos of normal life. I had a young child, a part time job as a librarian, a growing freelance writing career and a ridiculous number of volunteer commitments. My partner, Matthew, had a day job as an archivist and wrote articles on the side. As usual, my anxiety was all about money. Sometimes I find it easier to fret about money than to worry about big things like cancer. My financial anxiety boiled over when we got a nice, fat tax refund a few months later. Normally, I would have used it to increase our retirement savings, which could always use an extra infusion. We both contributed to our workplace retirement accounts, and I set aside a little of my freelance income when I could. But I worried we weren't saving enough. Like most of our friends, we were trying to juggle bills like mortgage payments and preschool tuition. I tended to use windfalls to play catch up. But this time I hesitated. It seemed crazy to keep saving for retirement when my chances of living that long were so uncertain. My cancer was not as aggressive as most ovarian cancers, and I was healthy again after surgery to remove the tumor. But my oncologist said there was a 70 percent chance the cancer would show up a third time. Another occurrence would mean more medical bills and missed work. Nobody pays freelancers for sick time. Matthew and I lived frugally, sharing a used car and putting in hours at Leo's cooperative preschool to lower our tuition costs. But we had always had two incomes, and I didn't think we could live on one. I did endless calculations in my head at night, unable to sleep. I steeled myself to think of the worst. If I died, my life insurance policy would protect Matthew and Leo. They would be able to keep our three bedroom row house in Philadelphia. Matthew could probably even pay for college, provided Leo went to an in state public school. But what if I was sick for years, unable to work? Our families would help us, but nobody's pockets are bottomless. I knew it made the most sense financially to keep the tax refund in cash. But that just seemed depressing. It felt like I was expecting to get cancer again. I didn't want to live that way. I wanted to believe that the cancer wouldn't come back, and that eventually I would be able to stop working for money. I imagined myself as a healthy 70 year old, gardening and writing novels. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Maybe we shouldn't save this money at all, I thought. Maybe we should use it to do something memorable as a family before my health got any worse. But even that seemed morbid. A certain carpe diem attitude comes along with a cancer diagnosis. You're alive! Take that trip to Patagonia. Buy the designer chicken coop for the backyard. Take your friends out for sushi. Go nuts! I confess, I did a little therapeutic overspending after my cancer returned. I bought a fancy ice cream maker and made plans to take Leo to Hawaii. But there is a frenzied feeling to that kind of self indulgence, a fatalistic, forced happiness that made me feel sad underneath. No, better to save the money, better to comfort myself by controlling one aspect of the future that I could control: my family's financial well being. If I put the money toward retirement, I was taking a gamble. I was betting I'd be alive when I reached retirement age, half a lifetime away. It was an act of wild optimism. And after my new diagnosis, I needed a bit of wild optimism. And really, did it matter? If I got sick again, a few thousand dollars probably wouldn't make the difference between financial solvency and, say, losing our house. And a few thousand dollars, invested when I was 30, wouldn't make the difference between a comfortable retirement and an impecunious one. But the decision wasn't just about the smartest way to use the money. It was a choice between pessimism and optimism. I wanted to be an optimist, even if I would always be a realistic one. Realistic optimism meant facing the fact that the cancer would probably come back, but hoping I could beat it again when it did. It meant staying on top of current bills, but keeping a little money going into our retirement accounts. It meant continuing to pay those life insurance premiums. Five years later, I'm still optimistically saving for retirement. The cancer did come back, twice. I have an amazing array of surgical scars, and chemo has changed the texture of my hair. After many false starts, I'm on a cocktail of drugs that is keeping the cancer at bay. My health has been stable for over a year. The side effects are manageable, and I'm able to work and share parenting responsibilities for Leo, now 9 years old. My oncologist jokes about handing my case off to her successor when she retires. She's only in her 40s. Most days, I don't think this disease will get me. "When are you going to die?" Leo asked me once. Nobody knows when they're going to die, I told him. But I'm not planning on doing it any time soon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Since 2008, after a string of public meltdowns, Spears has lived under a unique conservatorship, sometimes known as a guardianship, a complex legal arrangement typically reserved for the old, ill or infirm. For more than a decade, the pop singer went along quietly with the setup, which controlled her finances, as well as aspects of her day to day life, like her mental health care, and where and how she could travel. Spears, 38, who has not released an album since 2016 and has slowed down substantially since her early 2000s peak, announced an "indefinite work hiatus" in January 2019, at the time citing the health of her father, who had suffered a ruptured colon. But in August, she moved for the first time to make substantial changes to the conservatorship in court "to reflect the major changes in her current lifestyle and her stated wishes," according to her lawyer. She also kept open the possibility that she would seek to get rid of the arrangement altogether. Representatives for Jamie Spears have said that his stewardship of her career protected her from financial ruin, turning her estate into a nearly 60 million business, and likely saved her life. In court filings, Jamie said that his "sole motivation has been his unconditional love for his daughter and a fierce desire to protect her from those trying to take advantage of her." On Wednesday, Jamie Spears's lawyer, Vivian Lee Thoreen, said in court that Ingham's comments about the father daughter relationship were merely hearsay and should not be admissible. Complicating the family and financial drama has been the ongoing presence of an especially vocal, activist wing of fans calling themselves the FreeBritney movement, who have sought to portray the conservatorship as a money hungry means of total control over Spears. For years, the Spears family largely ignored those accusations, but recently, the singer has signaled her appreciation for their support, which many have taken as implicit encouragement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A promising buzz of suspense stirs the opening moments of "The Wrong Man," Ross Golan's solemn new chamber musical, which opened on Wednesday at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space in Manhattan. A lone, ominous whistle; a searchlight raking the darkness; a throng of tense bodied men and women looking furtive such gratifyingly classic notes of noir are sounded before a single word is sung. Then there's the title itself, a blunt summing up of the universal nightmare of being accused unjustly of a crime, a topic that's has recently become an obsessively popular subject for podcasts and streaming fare. "The Wrong Man" is also the name of a 1956 Alfred Hitchcock movie about such a miscarriage of justice, and whenever I try to watch it, I find myself having to look away as poor, decent Henry Fonda is railroaded once again. So I was fully prepared to spend the 90 minutes of Golan's variation on this theme staged by Thomas Kail, no less, the director of the almighty "Hamilton" with my fingernails buried into my palms. It was also encouraging to know that the title character, a love seeking loser in Reno, Nev., would be played by Joshua Henry, a Tony nominee as Billy Bigelow in the 2018 revival of "Carousel" and a performer of searing emotional focus. For better or worse, though, my fists soon unclenched themselves. It's not that "The Wrong Man" strays from the spine tingling elements it establishes at its beginning. On the contrary, it hews to them with an unchanging insistence that ultimately drains them of their power. The show keeps reiterating its central premise, without grounding a dark conceit with the details that would give it gooseflesh and blood existence. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The peculiar matches began early on a Sunday morning. Across the world, genealogists found that they had numerous new relatives on GEDmatch, a website known for its role in helping crack the Golden State Killer case. New relatives are typically cause for celebration among genealogists. But upon close inspection, experienced users noticed that some of the new relatives seemed to be the DNA equivalent of a Twitter bot or a Match.com scammer; the DNA did things that actual people's DNA should not be able to do. Others seemed to be suspected murderers and rapists, uploaded by genealogists working with law enforcement. Users knew that the police sometimes used the site to try to identify DNA found at crime scenes. But users found the new profiles strange because they also knew that profiles made for law enforcement purposes were supposed to be hidden to prevent tipping off or upsetting a suspect's relatives amid an investigation. What really drew attention, however, was the fact that all one million or so users who had opted not to help law enforcement had been forced to opt in. Though the growth of genealogy sites has slowed slightly in recent years, their use by the police has increased. After the authorities in California used GEDmatch in 2018 to identify a suspect in the decades long Golden State Killer case, police departments across the country began to dig through their cold case files in the hopes that this new technique could solve old crimes. And GEDmatch was often their preferred site. Unlike the genealogy services Ancestry and 23andMe, which are marketed to people who are new to using DNA to learn about themselves, GEDmatch caters to more advanced researchers. The site appeals to the police because it allows DNA that has been processed elsewhere to be uploaded. Verogen has a long history of working with law enforcement, and the acquisition of GEDmatch further solidified this collaboration. Scientists and genealogists say the GEDmatch breach which exposed more than a million additional profiles to law enforcement officials offers an important window into what can go wrong when those responsible for storing genetic information fail to take necessary precautions. In an interview, Mr. Williams said that the first breach occurred early on July 19. After shutting down the site, his team "covered up the vulnerability," he said, and brought it back online, but only briefly. "On Monday we took the site down again because it was clear the hackers were trying again," he said. This time the site remained down for nearly a week. "We're taking an abundance of caution because we don't want to end up in the same situation again," Mr. Williams said. Mr. Williams said he had hired an outside security team and contacted the F.B.I. to see if the agency would investigate. The F.B.I. did not respond to a request for comment. All was far from resolved when the site's settings were restored, said Debbie Kennett, a genealogist in England, who wrote about the breach on her blog. We're stuck with our DNA for life, she said. "Once it's out there it's not like an email address you can change," she said in an interview. Because of its interconnected nature, she added, when any one person's genetic information is exposed, the exposed DNA can potentially affect their family members too. In a paper published last year, Michael Edge, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Southern California, and fellow researchers warned several genealogy websites that they were vulnerable to data breaches. "Of course, hacks happen to lots of companies, even entities that take security very seriously," he said. "At the same time, GEDmatch's, and eventually Verogen's, response to our paper didn't inspire much confidence that they were taking it seriously." Other genealogy websites, he added, seemed more open to the researchers' recommendations for improving security. For many, the presence of fake users in GEDmatch was as alarming as the breach itself. Genealogists know that they cannot trust names or emails. They also know that a user can easily upload someone else's genetic profile. But the breach exposed that behind the scenes, hidden by privacy settings, were all kinds of profiles of people who were not even real. The giveaway that the matches were not actual relatives was that their DNA was too good to be true, said Leah Larkin, a biologist who runs DNA Geek, a genealogical research company. People who managed profiles for many clients and relatives repeatedly found that these fake users somehow were displayed as close relatives across the unrelated profiles. Their visible ancestry information reinforced the matches were impossible and suggested the fake profiles had been designed to trick the site's search algorithm for some reason. In Dr. Edge's paper, he warned that it was possible to create fake profiles to identify people with genetic variants associated with Alzheimer's and other diseases. "If something is just a geeky genealogist messing around, there is no concern," Dr. Larkin said. But it becomes a problem, she said, if users are trying to find people who all share a particular genetic mutation or trait, as Dr. Edge cautioned. Such information could be abused by insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies or others, she said. The breach also reinforced something that genealogists have been saying for years: Mixing genealogy and law enforcement is messy, even when you try to draw clear lines. Until two years ago, the primary DNA databases that law enforcement used for investigations were maintained by the F.B.I. and the police. That changed with the Golden State Killer case in 2018. As police departments rushed to reinvestigate cold cases, GEDmatch, which at the time was run by two family history hobbyists as a sort of passion project, tried to serve two audiences: genealogists who simply wanted to trace their family tree and law enforcement officials who wanted to know if a murder or a rapist was hiding in one of its branches. Amid a backlash, GEDmatch changed its policy in May 2019 so that only users who explicitly opted to help law enforcement would show up in police searches. Still, there is little regulation around how the authorities can use GEDmatch and other genealogy databases, so it's largely up to the companies and their users to police themselves. And as the breach demonstrated, users' wishes could be quickly overridden. For some users, the reason for keeping their profiles private is philosophical. Even if helping law enforcement could mean helping catch a killer, they do not want their genetic information used to incriminate their relatives. Others, like Carolynn ni Lochlainn, a genealogist from Huntington, N.Y., keep their profiles private because they worry the data will be improperly used to arrest innocent people. "I work with a lot of Black clients and cousins, and I was most angered by the inexcusable risk at which they were placed," Ms. ni Lochlainn, said. Colleen Fitzpatrick, the founder of Identifinders International, which applies forensic genealogy techniques toward identifying unclaimed remains and suspects in crimes, oversees a team that relies heavily on GEDmatch. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
When federal regulators approved two antibody treatments last month for emergency use in high risk Covid 19 patients, doctors worried there would not be enough to go around. President Trump had taken one of the treatments, made by Regeneron, in October and promoted it as a "cure." Early trial data had shown the treatments could keep people at risk of severe disease out of the hospital if administered soon after infection with the coronavirus. But in a surprising turn of events, the treatments are sitting unused in hospital refrigerators around the country, just when they might do the most to help patients and relieve the burden on overwhelmed hospitals as cases and deaths surge to record levels. Dr. Daniel M. Skovronsky, chief scientific officer of Eli Lilly, which manufactures the other monoclonal antibody treatment, said he had assumed that "we're going to be holding back the mobs that want to get this drug." The federal government has on hand nearly 532,000 doses of the two drugs, and 55 percent of that has been shipped out, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. But early data collected from hospitals by the federal government suggest that they have given only about 20 percent of their supply to patients. Hospitals and clinics, staggered by the needs of the sick and gearing up to help administer the new coronavirus vaccines, have not focused as much attention on these treatments, which have to be infused into patients in a narrow window of time, within 10 days of when they start showing symptoms, but before they're sick enough to be hospitalized. Administrators have struggled to identify people who should get the antibody drugs because of delays in testing and a lack of coordination between testing sites and hospitals. And demand from patients themselves has been weaker than expected. Some have been reluctant to venture out of their homes to get the therapies in hospitals or perceive the treatments aren't available to them but are going to well connected people like Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Ben Carson, the housing secretary in the Trump administration. "There were politicians getting it, and bragging about it, or whatever, and then people thought, well it's not for me it's for those people," Dr. Skovronsky said. Federal and state health officials have had to take the extraordinary step of urging patients to seek out treatments that were once expected to be snatched up. "There may be a therapeutic option that could help keep you out of the hospital," Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, said at a news conference last week. "Please, talk to your health care provider." Tufts Medical Center in Boston received 117 doses of the Eli Lilly and Regeneron treatments, but only 19 patients received them in the two weeks after the hospital started giving them on Dec. 6. "It was just a little bit of everything" that limited uptake, said Dr. Helen Boucher, the hospital's chief of infectious diseases. The treatment's scarcity has been a problem, as some hospitals were reluctant to deplete supplies and some patients, and their doctors, felt the treatments were so unattainable that they did not request them. Like hospitals, state health agencies charged with overseeing use of the antibody treatments were busy dealing with rising infection rates and the rollout of two vaccines. "They really are just very preoccupied with the vaccine right now that is their No. 1 issue," said Dr. Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which represents state health agencies. Some experts are skeptical about the strength of the evidence and that is making some doctors reluctant to embrace them. A National Institutes of Health panel said that there was not enough evidence to recommend for or against their use for patients with mild or moderate Covid 19. An infectious disease society recommended against routine use of Eli Lilly's drug. Some hospital officials said they want to see stronger data before devoting more of their constrained resources to administering the treatments. A C.D.C. study finds stillbirths are higher in pregnant women with Covid. Canada expands its list of vaccines accepted for travel. Michigan recommends that all residents older than the age of 2 wear a face mask indoors. "If we knew this was a cure, we would obviously drop everything and figure out how to get it to as many patients as possible," said Dr. Emily Rubin, a physician at the Mass General Brigham health system in Boston. "It's a little bit more challenging to try to transform how we do things when we're not sure yet whether this works and how well it works." Dr. Rubin, who has been involved in deciding how to allocate the treatments, said that potentially eligible patients are automatically entered in a lottery for the seven infusion appointments available daily. A clinician calls patients who win and others on a waiting list to explain the risks and benefits of the therapy. But many patients decline, and Mass General Brigham has not been able to fill the available slots since it began giving the treatments on Dec. 10. Some patients feel better or have no symptoms by the time they get a call. Others who feel sick don't want to go into a clinic for several hours to get an infusion, or can't because they lack transportation or have caregiving responsibilities at home. Compounding the challenges, the companies that raced to develop the treatments don't know how quickly their products are being used, because they are selling their doses to the federal government, rather than the physician practices and other buyers that typically purchase drugs. Until recently, the federal government did not require hospitals to report how many doses they had given to patients, although it will begin to do so starting Jan. 8. There is also no single hotline or website to help patients locate a provider in their area who is offering the treatments. Dr. Skovronsky said that patients who call Eli Lilly's hotline eventually get the treatments. "But that's not right," he said. "It shouldn't be only for people who are persistent, who know how to call around and have doctors to get it. It should be for everyone." Doctors and hospital executives said factors that have hindered the U.S. response to the coronavirus have also gotten in the way of distributing antibody treatments. Every day in Green Bay, Wisconsin, doctors at Prevea Health, a large physician practice in the state, call high risk patients tested through the state to offer the treatments. But federal testing sites don't share patient information, making it difficult to reach people who could benefit. "We haven't done a very good job nationally, locally, wherever of getting to those high risk populations and saying, 'Hey, if you start feeling sick, we need to know right away,' " said Dr. Ashok Rai, president and chief executive of Prevea Health. Despite the obstacles, Dr. Rai said Prevea has made some headway. Earlier in the pandemic, the intensive care unit of one of its partner hospitals, HSHS St. Vincent, quickly filled when there were outbreaks in long term care facilities. But since the treatments became available, workers have rushed to administer them at two assisted living centers, cutting down on the number of patients hospitalized. "It's palpable in our numbers right now," Dr. Rai said. Another challenge is finding the space and staff members to safely administer the treatments. In Rome, Ga., Floyd Medical Center repurposed several rooms in the ward for hospitalized Covid 19 patients for infusions. And with Floyd stretched thin on staffing, nurses have at times had to work late to give the treatments, said Dr. Daniel Valancius, who directs the hospital's monoclonal antibody program. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
PHILADELPHIA Not every street in America deserves a birthday party, but this city chose to honor its 100 year old Benjamin Franklin Parkway on Thursday with a mesmerizing centennial celebration. Hundreds gathered at sunset to catch a public art performance by the Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang that filled the grand boulevard, originally modeled after the Champs Elysees in Paris, with a fleet of rickshaw style pedicabs festooned with 1,000 handmade paper lanterns. They appeared as flying fireflies, as the bicyclists bobbed and wove in choreographed patterns. "Even if you weren't expecting to enjoy it, it was just so charming and it made you laugh," said Lauren Raske, 31, an event planner who came out to view the event. She said she particularly enjoyed the quirkiness of the Chinese lanterns, which included traditional stars and spheres as well as aliens and U.F.O.s, movie cameras and high heeled shoes, pandas and roosters, even a Yellow Submarine. "It's a nighttime activity and the mystique of the evening makes it a little romantic," said Nicole Dugan, a physical therapist who brought her daughter and a group of friends with her. "Even on this small scale, it was really spectacular." Mr. Cai, who has lived and worked in the United States since the 1990s, is internationally renowned for his highly creative fireworks displays. His pyrotechnic artworks included a series of 29 giant "footprints" in the sky for the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. In 2009, he was commissioned locally, by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to create "Fallen Blossoms," a 60 second series of controlled explosions on the museum's terrace. (The blossom pattern, signifying the passing of time, was a tribute to the museum's late director, Anne D'Harnoncourt.) Mr. Cai works in a variety of mediums, including video and drawings made by lighting gunpowder, balancing the damaging force of the material with its aesthetic possibilities. This week, a solo exhibition of his work opened at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, and he will shortly begin a residency at the Prado Museum in Madrid culminating with an exhibition opening in late October.. "In a way, these lanterns are the fireworks of my childhood that can never be put out," he said, speaking with the assistance of his project manager, Beatrice Grenier, who served as translator. "When I was kid in my hometown, there were a lot of lanterns I could play with and these became extensions of my dreams." Though the Parkway performance was only one night, the project will continue through Oct. 8 with lighted pedicabs ferrying visitors between two city parks, Sister Cities Park and Iroquois Park, on Thursday through Sunday evenings. Participants can show up and take a chance on getting a ride, but all the advance time slots have been reserved. One of the pedicab drivers was Sadigaa Horton, 45, wearing a head scarf and long sleeves, who invited all the families from the day care center she operates. "This is not just from Cai's childhood but from everyone's childhood," she said, beaming after her performance. None of the drivers were professional athletes and at times their movements were slightly less than synchronized, which only added to the whimsy of the event. Penny Balkin Bach, executive director of the city's Association for Public Art, said the group commissioned the work in collaboration with the independent curator Lance Fung, who brought Mr. Cai to its attention in 2014. Given the current political climate, she said, she felt it was fitting to have an artist who was an immigrant to the United States create a work for the city where the Constitution was signed and American democracy was founded. "Especially these days, people need opportunities to come together for joyous reasons," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
If milk comes from a plant, can you still call it milk? Not according to the dairy industry. Facing growing competition from dairy alternatives like almond, soy and coconut milk, the nation's dairy farmers are fighting back, with an assist from Congress. Their goal: to stop companies from calling their plant based products yogurt, milk or cheese. Dairy farmers say the practice misleads consumers into thinking that nondairy milk is nutritionally similar to cow's milk. A bipartisan group of 32 members of Congress is asking the Food and Drug Administration to crack down on companies that call plant based beverages "milk." They say F.D.A. regulations define milk as a "lacteal secretion" obtained by milking "one or more healthy cows." Proposed legislation from Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, and Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, a state known for its cheese, suggests a slightly broader definition. Their bill would require the F.D.A. to target milk, yogurt and cheese products that do not contain milk from "hooved mammals." "The bottom line for us is that milk is defined by the F.D.A., and we're saying to the F.D.A.: Enforce your definition," Mr. Welch said. But critics say consumers know exactly what they are buying when they choose almond or soy milk instead of dairy milk. "There's no cow on any of these containers of almond milk or soy milk," said Michele Simon, executive director of the Plant Based Foods Association, a trade group representing 70 companies. "No one is trying to fool consumers. All they're trying to do is create a better alternative for people who are looking for that option." And what about other nondairy products with dairy names? Will milk of magnesia, cocoa butter, cream of wheat and peanut butter have to change their names as well? In recent years, dairy milk alternatives made from almonds, soy, cashews and coconuts have exploded in popularity. Many people consider them more nutritious than cow's milk. Some people buy them because they have a milk allergy or lactose intolerance. Others choose them for environmental reasons or because they want a vegan diet. And some just like the taste. Cow's milk was once one of America's most iconic beverages. But Americans are drinking less of it. Americans drink 37 percent less milk today than they did in 1970, according to the Department of Agriculture. Dairy milk sales tumbled to 12 billion last year, down 20 percent from 15 billion in 2011. Part of the reason is that people switched to other beverages, such as soft drinks, fruit juices, bottled water and soy and almond milk. Mintel, a market research firm, found that negative health perceptions were driving the decline in sales of cow's milk. Plant based milks, with brand names like Almond Breeze and Silk, are sold in the dairy aisle and still represent a fraction of the beverage market, but they are growing in popularity. According to Nielsen, sales of plant based milks have surged to 1.4 billion from 900 million in 2012. Much of the growth in plant based milk has come from the rising popularity of almond milk. Last year, Starbucks, the world's largest coffee chain, announced that it would begin offering almond milk to lighten its espresso drinks, to meet customer demand. The chain said it was one of the most requested customer suggestions of all time. Experts say sales of almond milk are surging for a number of reasons. The dairy industry has come under fire over concerns about animal welfare and the environmental impact of livestock, which contributes to air and water pollution. Almond production has an environmental impact as well: Most of the world's almonds come from drought stricken California, where farmers have been accused of diverting dwindling groundwater reserves to their almond orchards, and producing just 16 almonds requires an estimated 15.3 gallons of water. But ultimately the environmental impact of producing cow's milk in areas where almonds are grown would be far worse, said David Zetland, an assistant professor of economics at Leiden University College in the Netherlands and the author of "Living With Water Scarcity." Many consumers also consider almond milk a healthier alternative to cow's milk. The dairy industry says that's not true. They point out that milk has nine essential nutrients that are necessary for good health, like calcium, vitamin D, vitamin B12 and potassium. The industry has also created ads claiming that milk has up to eight times as much protein as almond milk and fewer ingredients and additives. Some brands of soy and almond milk do contain large amounts of added sugar. But they also come in unsweetened varieties with zero sugar, and some are fortified with calcium, B12 and other nutrients. There is also debate over the nutritional merits of cow's milk. In 2013, for example, two of the country's top nutrition experts, Walter Willett and David Ludwig, both at Harvard, published an editorial in JAMA Pediatrics arguing that healthy adults who get plenty of vegetables, nuts and protein in their diets may not get any extra benefit from cow's milk. They also raised concerns about exposure to hormones in milk and high levels of added sugar in the chocolate milk served in many schools. As the dairy industry continues to press its case, producers of nondairy milks are fighting back. The Plant Based Foods Association sent letters to the F.D.A. stating that plant based milks were properly labeled with their "common or usual" names. A petition from the Good Food Institute opposing the dairy labeling legislation has garnered more than 41,000 signatures. Marsha Cohen, an expert on food and drug law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, said that the dairy industry faces an uphill battle. She said the government's definitions for milk and other foods known as "standards of identity" are intended primarily to protect consumers from financial harm, such as being duped into buying cheap or imitation foods masquerading as more expensive ones. She noted that the F.D.A. recently allowed the company Hampton Creek to call its vegan mayonnaise substitute "Just Mayo," even though the F.D.A.'s legal definition of mayonnaise states that the condiment must contain eggs. The debate over what can and can't be called milk already has played out in courts, with judges so far siding with the plant based milk industry. In 2013, Judge Samuel Conti of Federal District Court in San Francisco, dismissed a proposed class action lawsuit that claimed that almond, coconut and soy milk were mislabeled because they do not come from cows. Judge Conti said the claim "stretches the bounds of credulity," and that it was "simply implausible that a reasonable consumer would mistake a product like soy milk or almond milk with dairy milk from a cow." He said the lawsuit was reminiscent of an earlier case in which a woman claimed she was misled by Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries cereal because she thought it contained real fruit (that case was thrown out). In another lawsuit in 2015, another Federal District Court judge in California, Vince Chhabria, rejected a similar claim that consumers could be misled into thinking that soy milk and cow's milk were nutritionally equivalent. "A reasonable consumer," he wrote, "would not assume that two distinct products have the same nutritional content; if the consumer cared about the nutritional content, she would consult the label." One place the dairy industry has always found support is in Washington. The industry has spent millions of dollars lobbying the federal government, which strongly encourages Americans to drink plenty of milk. The government's dietary guidelines recommend that Americans consume up to three cups of low fat milk or dairy products each day, saying it contains many essential nutrients such as protein, calcium, vitamin D and potassium. Senator Baldwin of Wisconsin said that one of the reasons she introduced the Dairy Pride Act was that her dairy farmer constituents wrote to her with their concerns. Among those was Janet Clark, a third generation dairy farmer who runs Vision Aire Farms about 80 miles north of Milwaukee. Ms. Clark said that she and her family have struggled as milk prices have slumped and the costs of operating their farm have risen. She says that plant based products are unfairly profiting from the name and reputation of cow's milk. "We set a high standard for the milk we produce," she said. "Milk has already been defined as coming from a dairy animal. We just want that to be enforced in the marketing in supermarkets that what is being called milk comes from a dairy animal." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Virginia is back as a No. 1 seed, and its tournament experience can only get better than last year's, when the Cavaliers became the first No. 1 men's seed to lose to a No. 16. But the selection committee did not do Virginia any favors: A date with fourth seeded Kansas State (25 8) could await in the regionals, and No. 2 seeded Tennessee (29 5) is dangerous and experienced, a team no one wants to play. How tough is the South? Wisconsin, always a tough out in March, is the No. 5 seed; Villanova, the Big East champion and winner of two of the past three national championships, is the sixth seed. The good news for Virginia? It can shut down almost anyone. The Cavaliers have the country's stingiest defense, allowing 55.1 points a game. Let's be clear: You could have taken Virginia's three best players away from it before last year's opening round game versus the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the Cavaliers, the top overall seed, still would have probably been favored over the 16th seeded Retrievers. But it is nonetheless worth pointing out that Virginia's historic loss to U.M.B.C. did, in fact, occur without the A.C.C.'s sixth man of the year, De'Andre Hunter, a redshirt freshman, who reliably offered 20 minutes, 10 points and floor stretching offense off the bench. And so it further would do well to recall that this year, in his second college season, Hunter has blossomed into a stalwart who starts every game and averages 15.1 points, 5 rebounds and 2.1 assists. He is decidedly healthy as Virginia turns its attention to this year's No. 16 matchup, the Gardner Webb Runnin' Bulldogs. "It sucked last year," Hunter said Friday night shortly after Virginia was defeated by Florida State in the A.C.C. tournament semifinals. "But it'll be different this year." He seemed to become more and more O.K. with the still simmering Seminoles loss as he spoke. "I'll definitely be able to play," he added. "Looking forward to it now." What Hunter, who went to high school in Philadelphia and chose Virginia over Maryland and Villanova, offers is size at his position. He is a nominal point guard listed at 6 foot 7 and 225 pounds. Virginia Coach Tony Bennett took care last year not to make excuses for his team's historic defeat. But in the course of discussing that squad and accepting a national coach of the year award he did note what Hunter had added, and what his subtraction subtracted. "We were pretty good this year in playing against smaller teams," Bennett said. "I think that's always been a little bit of a Kryptonite of ours, but this year I think we addressed that and we took a step in the right direction. I think with De'Andre Hunter, we had that flexibility. When he wasn't available for the N.C.A.A. tournament, we were not as effective." That inoculation to big teams could prove relevant in the coming weeks. In the regional semifinals, the Cavaliers could well face fourth seeded Kansas State, whose coach, Bruce Weber, is a defensive mastermind, or fifth seeded Wisconsin, which has size all around. In fact, per KenPom.com, those teams have the fourth and third best defenses in all of college basketball. On the other hand, with Hunter, Virginia is the fifth rated defense, and No. 2 in offense. Which means the Cavaliers should match up well assuming they make it past Gardner Webb, of course. MARC TRACY | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
This article contains spoilers for "Joker." The title character in "Joker" comes of age not in the way you might imagine with a litany of wisecracks but through the silent language of dance. It's in that nonverbal place that Joaquin Phoenix's performance, along with Hildur Gudnadottir's melancholy score, wraps the film in unmanageable sorrow. You can't completely banish your true self when you dance; Arthur Fleck is still somewhere inside of Mr. Phoenix, even after Arthur transforms himself into the Joker. What makes Mr. Phoenix's performance so confusingly poignant and not just a tale of good vs. evil is the way in which he has essentially placed two characters within one dancing body. Just as the Joker takes control with strutting, confident steps his ultra erect posture makes it seem as if he's looking down on the rest of the world dance allows Arthur, brittle with tension, to relax. To melt a little. To float in space. "Joker" has divided critics, but there's one thing they agree on : Mr. Phoenix is a great dancer. They're right. It's not just the way he moves, with uncultivated finesse dreamily, animalistic, like a rock star. Or how, when he stretches his arms out side to side, he evokes the ghosts of Jim Morrison or Brandon Lee in "The Crow." It has more to do with the nuanced way his body can express emotion; you see the mind at work, and because of that the dancing enters another realm. In the film, directed by Todd Phillips with choreography by Michael Arnold, Arthur, who suffers from mental illness and is damaged from abuse and bullying, works as a party clown. An aspiring stand up comedian, he finds comfort in watching a talk show hosted by Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). But Murray turns out to be a bully, too. Dance is Arthur's escape, his life force. The first time he dances isn't in the pivotal scene in a grimy public bathroom, after he's committed his first murders . It's in the apartment he shares with his mother as "Shall We Dance," the 1937 Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers film, plays on the television. The number is "Slap That Bass": "The world is in a mess/with politics and taxes/and people grinding axes/there's no happiness." His arms float overhead to form something like a diamond crown. "I know." He aims his gun and fires at the imaginary him. The bullet hits a wall and in that moment, Arthur is both alarmed and exhilarated: Dance is his path to bravery, something he's never known. As Arthur recedes and the Joker takes over, the choreography becomes more drawn out. In the transformative bathroom scene, panic morphs into an eerie power. Mr. Phoenix softly crosses one foot over the other and twists, curling his arms overhead and around his torso. His shoulders hike up and his elbows jut out dangerously as his body ripples and swells until, in the final moment, his arms extend to either side. This is the Joker's power pose. Sometimes Mr. Phoenix, who lost a great deal of weight for "Joker," has the look of a ballet dancer on a break from rehearsals. Pale and gaunt with wavy hair pasted to the sides of his face, his appearance, at times, has a touch of Rudolf Nureyev or Sergei Polunin two Russians with attitude. His skin stretches tautly over muscles and protruding ribs. But it's not just a cosmetic transformation. Nor is what he does ballet. Mr. Phoenix has the sinewy ability to turn his body particularly his back into a Butoh horror show of odd, freakish angles. But more than Butoh the postwar Japanese form known, in part, for its dark, slow motion movement his dancing embraces vaudeville . That makes sense. Growing up, Mr. Phoenix spent time busking with his brothers and sisters in Los Angeles; vaudeville is in his body's history, too. And while he told The Associated Press that Ray Bolger's "The Old Soft Shoe" was an inspiration for the hubris of the Joker, there's also something of Astaire in his movement , especially in the way he creates lightness and space in his upper body. Yet Mr. Phoenix's dancing also feels fueled by sensation , as if he were delving into Gaga, the movement language created by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. That vocabulary is driven by imagery. I n a Gaga class, participants respond to physical instructions, like moving while imagining that their spine is made of seaweed if you're embarrassed or holding back, it doesn't work. (There are no mirrors in class.) Mr. Phoenix may not be practicing Gaga, but he seems to understand the difference between skin and flesh. It's subtle, but different. Gaga can veer from bizarre to sensuous to tactile, and is about, as Mr. Naharin has said, finding a connection to groove. As the Joker, Mr. Phoenix nails that when dancing down a steep outdoor staircase, kicking his legs on each step in full body revelry. Instead of being kicked, he's the one doing the kicking. It's a dance of empowerment. "Joker," which continually blurs reality, seems less a linear tale than a sequence of dances knitted together with dialogue. In the end, Arthur, though handcuffed, has a song in his head and a spring to his step. As he disappears down a pristine white hallway, he uses what mobility he has his shoulders, which creep up and down to Frank Sinatra's "That's Life." His feet leave bloody tracks behind, like the footprints in an Arthur Murray diagram. Are the names in the film Mr. Phoenix's Arthur and Mr. DeNiro's Murray a coincidence? In any case, the last dance is one of liberation: As long as he can move, he's free. And Mr. Phoenix knows how to move. His dancing is no joke. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
It looks like spring break 2020 will be remembered more for the break than the spring. From Florida to Mexico, spring break festivities pool parties, beach parties, hotel parties, party parties have been canceled in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. To stem the spread of the virus, many locales have closed beaches, enacted curfews and limited access to bars and restaurants, effectively canceling spring break. (But not everyone is listening.) Of course nothing can replace the feeling of a clingy T shirt soaked in cheap beer. There's no bigger thrill than the crisp clap of a massive belly flop made by an actual massive belly. To counter spring break withdrawal, here are five movies that will bring sun and fun (and beefcake and cheesecake) to your screen in these dark times. Ever wondered where spring break as a thing came from? Start with this classic CinemaScope romp about four coeds (Connie Francis, Dolores Hart, Paula Prentiss and Yvette Mimieux) who spend their spring vacation under the Fort Lauderdale sun strategically flirting up a storm with young men on the make (including George Hamilton, Jim Hutton, Frank Gorshin and Rory Harrity). Directed by Henry Levin, the film features frivolities like dancing and making out, but also jazz and, surprisingly, a pensive ending. In his review for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther was gentlemanly and timeless in his description of spring break: "Here are all these youngsters jammed together, on the beach, in beer joints and motels coeds from state universities, fellows from the Ivy League flirting and making passes, with only one thing on their minds. That is xes spelled backwards." Francis, a popular singer at the time, scored a chart topping hit with her version of the title theme song. "It's the reason kids go to college in the first place." That's how the trailer sets up the rowdy shenanigans in this quintessential spring break film, about two friends (David Knell and Perry Lang) who visit Fort Lauderdale for a spring break bacchanal. With only debauchery on the brain, the film checks every spring break box: barely there bikinis, a wet T shirt contest, sex aplenty. The movie is also a time machine back to the randy Golden Age of early '80s teen sex comedies like "Porky's" and "The Last American Virgin" that made pearl clutchers clutch even harder. And talk about pivots: "Spring Break" was directed by Sean S. Cunningham, who in 1980 led lustful teens down a less pleasurable path as the director of the original "Friday the 13th." The horror genre loves to upend a beloved tradition Christmas, birthday parties, birth itself into an opportunity for mayhem and massacre. Spring break is the target in this under the radar oddity that marries the slasher film and the beach party flick, two genres that share a love of "naked girls and stupidity," as one critic put it. The director, Harry Kirkpatrick (possibly a pseudonym for the Italian director Umberto Lenzi), uses pool parties, sweaty machismo and topless young women to set the mood. The outlandish script has something to do with an angry biker gang, fratty spring breakers and a leather clad killer who rides a motorcycle that doubles as an electric chair. Fans of bargain bin '80s horror will find plenty to enjoy: a hair metal soundtrack, girls with feathered bangs, guys in mesh tank tops, studded headbands and a busybody preacher. For a spring break horror movie double feature, add "Piranha 3D" (2010), a gory dark comedy about flesh eating fish who ruin everything. Who says you have to be straight to act a fool at spring break? Directed by Todd Stephens as a follow up to his 2006 film "Another Gay Movie," this is a raunchy, vulgar, candy colored gay sex comedy about four friends (Jonah Blechman, Jake Mosser, Jimmy Clabots and Aaron Michael Davies) who travel to Fort Lauderdale for spring break and enter a contest to see who can sleep with the most men. The reviews were as painful as a sunburn; The Times called it "wretched gaysploitation." But hang on: It's worth it to see RuPaul play Tyrell Tyrelle, the frisky resort manager, a year before "Drag Race" first began its ascent. The film is also a camp flashback to Gay 2008, with performances by the New York City nightlife deities Lady Bunny, Amanda Lepore and Lypsinka; the Kids in the Hall actor Scott Thompson; the celebrity gossip Perez Hilton; and the gay porn performers Brent Corrigan and Colton Ford. This one's for hard core party people who don't mind a spring break of booze, breasts and a body count. Directed with abandon by that auteur of the abject, Harmony Korine, "Spring Breakers" is set during a sleazy spring break in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the annual coming of age tradition becomes a playscape of sexual excess, drugs and indiscriminate violence. Told through the eyes of four young women (Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine) who fall under the spell of a drug dealer (James Franco), this is a spring break that would be unrecognizable to the innocents of "Where the Boys Are." Is the film a social satire about millennial carnality and privilege? Is it a flashy and fleshy heterosexual fantasy that's equal parts "Jerry Springer Show" and "Cops"? Is it a horror movie? Maybe it's all of those just like spring break should be. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Willy Loman has been smashing up his car and gassing himself on the boiler for nearly 70 years. A little man with big dreams and bigger regrets, he has rarely stepped offstage since Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" opened in 1949. Now, Willy is back in his native Brooklyn, courtesy of Theater Mitu at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and he's acting pretty strangely scurrying around in a wrinkly white mask, singing many of his lines, arguing with a refrigerator. Attention must be paid? Sure. Who doesn't like a talking appliance? But this "Death of a Salesman" revival eclipses the classic instead of illuminating it. It's almost always a good time to resurrect Willy. An Everyman making a desperate tally of his small triumphs and greater disappointments, he speaks to those who feel left behind by social progress, caged in the sweet land of liberty. His story ought to resound just now. How many men and women like him punched ballots for Donald J. Trump? But the director Ruben Polendo's unproductive, experimental staging is mostly just talking to itself, sidelining a larger conversation. "Death of a Salesman" has never been a strictly realistic play. It describes the final hours of Willy, a traveling salesman flummoxed by the downward trajectory of his life and his livelihood. An early draft seemed to take place inside Willy's skull, and the final one skids back and forth in time as Willy tries to pinpoint just where and when and how he went wrong. So the tragedy can stray from realism, though not perhaps as much as Mr. Polendo does. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
NEW DELHI The rise of right wing populist leaders in several countries has brought immense attention to the use of executive power, in popular debate and among constitutional scholars across presidential and parliamentary systems. Along with the rise of executive power, there has been a corresponding but less studied phenomenon: the decline in judicial power. The courts were once seen as shields against the tyranny of majority and autocratic drifts within the state, and as the defenders of liberty and enforcers of accountability. Sadly, courts today have become silent bystanders and complicit actors. In Hungary, the autocratic government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has systematically disarmed the judiciary by lowering retirement ages, creating vacancies and appointing favorable people. Mr. Orban initially planned a parallel system of administrative courts that would be controlled by the government. That plan was dropped but a new law was introduced in December, which enables the government to move politically sensitive cases from the more independent wings of the judiciary to the Constitutional Court, whose autonomy was severely compromised by court packing. Earlier, after Mr. Orban's re election in 2018, several Hungarian judges resigned for "personal reasons," though the timing and collective action raised concerns of government pressure. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan similarly took command of the judiciary by filling its benches with supporters. Thousands of judges were removed in 2016 after the failed military coup against the Turkish government. A 2017 referendum cemented Mr. Erdogan's power by giving him nearly complete authority over the Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which manages appointments to the judiciary. The new judicial system has approved the indefinite detention of dissident intellectuals and civil society activists. Kim Lane Scheppele, a scholar of constitutional law at Princeton, has drawn an important contrast between traditional autocrats and contemporary ones. If the autocrat's moves in the 1900s were mass human rights violations and streets afloat with tanks, "the new autocrats come to power not with bullets but with laws." We see this in the co opting of courts by populist regimes. In Turkey, Hagia Sophia's conversion from a museum to a mosque was made possible by a judicial ruling. Poland's Constitutional Tribunal approved changes to the National Council of the Judiciary that appoints judges and regulates their behavior, giving politicians far greater power over courts. The Indian judicial approach of not only approving the government's actions like the courts in Hungary, Poland and Turkey but also being absent, remaining silent while the state acts, raises a genuine puzzle. India's judiciary possesses a rare institutional safeguard: Since the early 1990s, it has exercised formal control over the processes for the appointment of judges. The Indian Supreme Court's rare confrontational decision in recent years was in 2015, when it struck down a federal commission for judicial appointments proposed by the government. For decades, India's higher judiciary has held extraordinary power and been noticeably interventionist, recognizing social welfare rights, passing wide ranging interim orders that assess the work of executive ministries at regular intervals, and even reviewing and striking down constitutional amendments. Yet the self abrogation by the judiciary in India; court packing in Hungary, Poland and Turkey; and the strategy of submerging the courts with so much work that they are not able to scrutinize the government illustrate the demise of judicial power and the courts losing their institutional role in a variety of ways. The lesson has been a sobering one for constitutional scholars. A generation ago, law students, whether in the United States or elsewhere, had interpreted the Warren Supreme Court era, which saw the expansion of civil rights, as the rule rather than the exception. It was hard to think of democratic constitutionalism in the absence of a powerful judiciary. Now it seems just as likely that when freedom is truly at stake, courts are quick to collapse, either from within or without. The legitimacy of courts was never built on popular authorization from the people. It was built on the promise of keeping representation in check and protecting the people from the extremes of politics. The real question for the future is not how courts will act. It is whether their actions will carry legitimacy if and when they do. Madhav Khosla, who teaches law and politics at Ashoka University and Columbia, is. the author of "India's Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy." 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 |
Robin F. Williams's third show of paintings at P.P.O.W in Chelsea is a direct, pictorially savvy hit on the multilayered sexism of modern life. The show's title is a taunt: "Your Good Taste Is Showing." The paintings are extravagantly in your face regarding execution, style, image and social thrust. They take aim at the impossible idealizations of women in both art and advertising, depicting mostly nude and aloof androgynous supermodels, and the occasional feline, with a new kind of cool yet visceral bravura. Dipping into commercial art, Ms. Williams's methods range from stain painting through carefully controlled impasto to grainy, almost stuccolike brushwork, usually with sharp edged precision. This versatility is clearest in "Bottom Feeder," in which a woman lies on her stomach just beneath the surface in (it seems) a shallow creek, facing us, her body greatly foreshortened. What we see of her is softly dappled with pastel paint stained into a raw canvas, except for her bent legs and feet. These break through the surface behind her into the upper half of the painting a sun scene fashioned in thickly worked in textures a la Wayne Thiebaud. The woman's placid face and open mouth are suitably fishlike, but they also evoke Caravaggio's shrieking "Medusa." Ms. William's surfaces are so intriguing that you want to study how everything is painted bodies or parts of them, ersatz woodland greenery, a hoarding of stones. A creek bed of Bob Ross worthy reeds and cattails are figured in "Spa Night," in which two women in exquisitely stain painted tie dye sarongs seem to baptize a third. They look like Georges de La Tour's Madonnas, updated for our monetized present; they are illuminated by what looks like a car's high beams, the light bouncing off the reflective sunglasses, a frequent accessory of her subjects. Light is a big deal to Ms. Williams, with sources intimated but never specified. A post apocalyptic Color Field glow suffuses "Burn," in which a sunburned, vaguely over the hill model sits nude, smoking a cigarette on a tombstone. Her skin is ruined; she's working on her lungs. Needless to say, these painting are timely, but they are also enigmatic, off putting and out there in rewarding ways. Russia shuddered from an imperial state into a Bolshevik republic 100 years ago, and many museums and galleries have spent this centenary year examining the artistic legacy of the two revolutions of 1917. (The Museum of Modern Art unpacked hundreds of paintings, prints and ceramics for its show "A Revolutionary Impulse"; the Art Institute of Chicago just recently opened what it bills as the biggest Soviet exhibition in America in a quarter century.) Soviet Russia was a new world, and it needed new images ones provided by the dozen photographers in this stimulating portal onto the aspirations of young artists caught up in revolution. Boris Ignatovich, one of the most inventive photographers of the era, shot new buildings, monuments and subway signage at sharply acute angles, making Moscow's architecture itself appear as if it were rushing into a higher age. Other photographers used montage to envision a dynamic society and constructed multiple exposure images for circulation in magazines or on propaganda posters. Arkady Shaikhet's "Express" (1939) features a locomotive charging through steam beneath a separately shot sky and became an emblem of Soviet progress. Solomon Telingater's masterly "The Red Army Is Watching" (1931) makes use of disjunctive scales between an army corps in the background and a single saluting soldier laid atop. Aleksandr Rodchenko, best known for his Constructivist paintings and sculptures, is represented here by a photograph of his black clad mother, leaning over a desk as she finally learns to read, and a magnetic portrait of the poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, staring forward with impatience for utopia. We all know what became of the Russian Revolution, and how the avant garde vision of the 1920s and '30s was crushed in the vise of Zhdanovite propaganda. But to believe in the future as these photographers did to have an artistic vocation greater than narcissistic individualism or ceaseless critique appears more enviable than pitiable in a new century of downscaled dreams. Heidi Hahn's paintings remind me of Erik Satie's compositions. It's a funny comparison to make, because his music is famously minimal, and the first thing you notice about the 10 numbered oils in Ms. Hahn's new show, "The Future Is Elsewhere (if It Breaks Your Heart)," at Jack Hanley, is their luxurious brushwork. But like Satie, Ms. Hahn achieves the richness in her work by stripping it down to a few formal elements and then prying those elements apart to reveal the sticky, inexhaustible force that holds them together. Every piece in the show is centered on one or more extended female figures in sinuous cartoon silhouette. "The Future Is Elsewhere (if It Breaks Your Heart) No. 3," a dark vertical tricolor, is complicated conceptually as well as chromatically by its three figures: one standing, one on a chair and one sitting on the floor. Blond and brown hair, a green sweater and roseate noses add subtle dissonance to the background of lavender, cloudy pink and gray, while Ms. Hahn's use of figuration and some cues to depth of field gently undermine the abstract flatness of that background and of the figures themselves. ("No. 7," in which an apartment building's 15 windows act as streaky rectangles of pure color, almost convinced me that there's no such thing as pure abstraction, anyway.) In "No. 9," the artist paints her stand in stretched out on the floor, back and arm curved like a billowing hill, painting herself, Galatea turned Pygmalion. The large scale compositions of demurely exuberant shapes that constitute most of the Austrian painter Bernhard Buhmann's American debut, "Fragments of Statue," look sweet and old fashioned, but a faintly bitter aftertaste of self consciousness puts them squarely in the present day. Rounded corners, together with the occasional gradation and imperfect edge or drip, create a curious suggestion of depth that hovers at the corner of the eye. The pieces look as if they should look flat, but don't quite. On any given canvas, similarly, the colors are so well balanced as to very nearly cancel out to nothing, but Mr. Buhmann always leaves just enough discord to hold viewers' attention. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The calls came in late August. A couple who had moved up to the Berkshires during the pandemic had seen the first two union approved theatrical productions of the summer, and were impressed. Now they had a question: What would it cost to keep those theaters intact for another six months? The couple introduced themselves to the leaders of one theater over Zoom, and to the others under a tent. And now those conversations have borne fruit: a little more than 1 million for each Western Massachusetts theater, enough to preserve their staffs and facilities through the winter. "I was like, 'What?'" recalled Julianne Boyd, the artistic director of one of the theaters, the Barrington Stage Company. "My development director almost passed out." The gifts, to Barrington Stage and the Berkshire Theater Group, have an only in 2020 back story. The couple, Mary Chris and Alan Bassman, sold their New Jersey home in June and relocated to a condo they had purchased two years ago in Pittsfield, Mass., where the theaters are based. Mrs. Bassman, a 62 year old hand therapist, had been furloughed from her job because of the pandemic; Mr. Bassman, 73, is retired. They had long been theater lovers she adores a good issue play, while he loves a big musical (they're planning to name their new dog Marius, after a character in "Les Miserables"). In the summer of 2019, hoping to meet people in the Berkshires, they had volunteered at Barrington Stage, working as ushers and occasionally at the concession stand. This summer, of course, not much was going on; the performing arts, central to life in the Berkshires, had largely shuttered to slow the spread of the virus. But Barrington Stage managed to put on the one man play "Harry Clarke," and Berkshire Theater Group staged the musical "Godspell." The two outdoor productions were the first authorized by the Actors' Equity union during the pandemic, and the Bassmans saw them both, as well as a pair of concerts, one at each theater. "We were really impressed by what it took to do that," Mrs. Bassman said. "And we were very concerned about the survival of the theaters here." As it turns out, Mrs. Bassman's brother, Phill Gross, is a successful money manager with an interest in the arts, an enthusiasm for "Jersey Boys" and a passion for philanthropy. He is hoping to give away his entire salary, under a little known provision of the CARES Act that allows people to use 100 percent of their income for tax deductible charitable contributions this year. So sister called brother to tell him about how impressed she was with the Berkshire theaters, and what she had learned about the theaters' financial situations. The siblings agreed to make the gifts, in memory of their mother, Mary Anne Gross, a regular theatergoer in Milwaukee and an occasional visitor to the Berkshires, who died in December. Each theater has already received a check from the Gross family to cover expenses through the end of the year 732,000 to Barrington Stage and 681,000 to Berkshire Theater Group as well as a pledge for another 350,000 each if matched by other donors, which would cover their expenses for the first three months of next year. "Basically the goal was to get them through the winter," Mrs. Bassman said. "They were both in debt from the work they did this summer, they both have multiple buildings, and they have tapped out their donors. They're still going to have a tough time." Mr. Gross, 60, is the co founder and managing director at Adage Capital Management. He is also helping several other theaters through the pandemic the Umbrella Arts Center, in his hometown, Concord, Mass.; the Grand Center for Arts Culture, in New Ulm, Minn., where another sister is the executive director; and the Garry Marshall Theater, in Burbank, Calif., where the producer is Joseph Leo Bwarie, who played Frankie Valli in the Broadway production of "Jersey Boys" off and on for several years. (Mr. Gross got to know Bwarie while helping "Jersey Boys" raise money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.) "We're going to need this kind of art on the other side of Covid," Mr. Gross said. "The first day I get vaccinated and I can go to a show, I'm going, and I don't want them not to have a show." Although the Gross siblings and their mother had occasionally attended productions at the two theaters over the years, neither Ms. Boyd nor Kate Maguire, the artistic director and chief executive at Berkshire Theater Group, had met them. The administrators have in the past received surprise gifts Ms. Maguire talks of the occasional unexpected bequest, for example, and Ms. Boyd still remembers another usher who gave her a 50,000 check but not of this size. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The historian, biographer and author, most recently, of "The Square and the Tower" owns books by people who have insulted him in print: "I do research before taking vengeance." What books are on your nightstand? I am a few pages from the end of Tom Holland's marvelously readable "Rubicon" and about a quarter of the way through Mary Beard's somewhat more earnest "SPQR." Those were part of my challenge to myself this year to get better educated about the fall of the Roman Republic. I'm still dipping into Maya Jasanoff's beautifully written travels in the footsteps of Conrad, "The Dawn Watch." Newcomers to the nightstand, which were both recommended to me by friends: "China in Ten Words," by Yu Hua and "Lives Other Than My Own," by Emmanuel Carrere. Tell us about the last great book you read. Great in the sense of "up there with the Columbia Core"?I would nominate "2084," by the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal. As a vision of Islamic totalitarianism, it is blood chilling. But it is also a masterly piece of writing. What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? I was rather fascinated to read in Tom Holland's book about Baiae, the Roman resort on the Gulf of Naples which was the Roman equivalent of the Hamptons or Malibu, complete with that combination of sexual libertinism and dietary epicureanism which I associate with certain members of today's American elite. What's the best book on economics? And the best work of economic history? The best book I've read recently on economics was probably Ian Kumekawa's "The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics." Amongst recent economic history books I would have to pick Chris Miller's very insightful "The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR," which shows why the Russians could not achieve in the 1980s what the Chinese did achieve, namely (partial) escape from the pathologies of the planned economy. Of course, economists and economic historians these days are discouraged from writing books. Most of what I consume in these fields comes in the form of working papers and journal articles. What books do you think best captures your own political principles? I suppose it would have to be Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France." I wish I could force feed or perhaps force read it to every progressive who is convinced that her latest untested and hare brained policy initiative will magically eliminate inequality, discrimination, climate change and all the rest, without any unintended consequences for individual liberty. Do you and your wife, the activist and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, share similar taste in books? What books has she recommended to you, and vice versa? Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Very similar, so books frequently cross the bedroom from one nightstand to the other. A good example was Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty," her favorite work of political philosophy, which she urged me to read. I recently gave her Tom Holland's "Dynasty," the sequel to "Rubicon," and of course his "In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire," which I am waiting my turn to read after her. Which books do you think capture the current social and political moment in America? I shared the widespread enthusiasm for J. D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" last year, but the must read book for Trump's election and presidency remains Charles Murray's astonishingly prescient "Coming Apart." I wish the contemptible "students" who disrupted his lecture at Middlebury College earlier this year not one of whom I'll bet had ever read a word of his would read "Coming Apart" and then look in the mirror and realize: "Oh God, I'm a member of that loathsome coastal cognitive elite that is completely out of touch with middle America." Which fiction and nonfiction writers playwrights, critics, journalists, poets inspired you most early in your career? And which writers working today do you most admire? I'd have to begin with A. J. P. Taylor, who was the first historian I ever read and who inspired me to believe a) that historical writing should never be dull, but should bristle with irony and paradox, and b) that historical knowledge is a prerequisite for worthwhile commentary on contemporary matters. Another major influence at the early stage was Norman Stone. But it wasn't just historians who inspired me as I was starting out. As a sixth former (high school senior), I lapped up Tom Stoppard's plays, painted a mural inspired by the poetry of Thom Gunn and read compulsively the reviews of punk bands in the New Musical Express. At Oxford, I came under the influence of The Spectator, then edited by Charles Moore, one of the most gifted English journalists of his generation and now Margaret Thatcher's biographer. But my favorite writer at that time was Flann O'Brien, the great Irish humorist. I have always liked his description of himself as "a spoilt Proust." No one writing in English today is remotely as funny as O'Brien. Only the French can still produce real men of letters. Chapeau, therefore, to Bernard Henri Levy and Michel Houellebecq. Which historians and biographers do you most admire? Amongst those currently writing, Simon Schama stands out as the Dickens of modern historiography: bewilderingly erudite and prolific, passionate in his enthusiasms and armed with the complete contents of the thesaurus. We agree to disagree about politics. I have also hugely admired Anne Applebaum for her trilogy on the Gulag, the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe ("Iron Curtain") and, most recently, the Ukrainian famine ("Red Famine"). Walter Isaacson has established himself as the great American biographer of our time. "Leonardo da Vinci" is his best book, I think. Whereas the earlier books were pure journalism, he is now showing academic scholars how to write accessibly about subtle and even recondite subject matter. I read quite a number of biographies while researching "The Square and the Tower." My favorite was probably Michael Ignatieff's on Isaiah Berlin, which led me into the vast, delightful rabbit warren of Berlin's correspondence. And which novelists do you especially enjoy reading? Everyone has at least one vice. Mine is reading (and re reading) 19th century novels. It's hard to pick just a couple of favorites but I unreservedly adore Wilkie Collins (e.g., "The Moonstone") and Theodor Fontane ("Der Stechlin"). Which genres do you avoid? Historical fiction, especially of recent vintage. The brain simply cannot compartmentalize. I noticed while writing "The Pity of War" that I was subconsciously drawing on Pat Barker's "The Ghost Road" novels as if they were the real thing. Since then I've abstained completely. In any case, I would much rather read an authentic contemporary diary than a work of historical fiction. A good example is the diary of Ivan Maisky, the long serving Soviet ambassador in London. Gabriel Gorodetsky's edition abridged and unabridged is a work for the ages. How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or several simultaneously? Morning or night? I've tried electronic but I can't read on a screen for pleasure. It has to be the paper and ink book, preferably a robust paperback. From an early age, I've liked to have five books on the go at a time that was the maximum number one could borrow from the Ayr Public Library. As for when I read, always at night. In the morning, there are too many distractions. What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? I own books by a number of people who have insulted me in print, but I don't think it is all that surprising that I do research before taking vengeance. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? I read a lot and quite systematically. Once I had identified an author I liked, I read everything by that person the library possessed. I vividly recall devouring the complete works of Arthur Conan Doyle and P. G. Wodehouse in this way. I have tried (and continue to try) as a father to impart my love of reading to my children, so the books I loved as a boy Tolkien's "The Hobbit," for example, or Stevenson's "Treasure Island" are books I have reread multiple times. The greatest works of literature benefit from being read aloud. A wonderful example are the "Just William" stories by Richmal Crompton, which deserve to be much better known in the United States. She was the Dorothy Parker of provincial England. If you could require the American president to read one book, what would it be? And the prime minister? I agree with you that it would be wonderful if both Mr. Trump and Mrs. May read one book. I don't much mind which one it is. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan. I'd call it The Last Burns Supper. Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? The first book I ever abandoned was Captain Marryat's "The Children of the New Forest," which came highly recommended but bored me rigid. I also struggled with "Swallows and Amazons." At the time, I felt quite guilty about these sins of omission. As I grew older, however, I became more cavalier and now treat books with the contempt they mostly deserve. To give an example of a book I found overrated, Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty First Century" was both conceptually unsound and tediously executed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
EXPRESSING your own views is challenging enough. Describing someone else's opinions without talking to them first opens the door to serious trouble. I took that risk in a recent column about the two new Nobel laureates in economics, Christopher A. Sims of Princeton and Thomas J. Sargent of New York University. They received their awards for a lifetime of theoretical and statistical work on the cause and effect relationship between government policies and the economy. These are immensely complicated matters, and neither man is accustomed to boiling down his opinions into bite sized morsels. Professor Sims told me that some conservative commentators had gotten his views quite wrong. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for example, implied that both professors opposed the interventionist economic policies of central banks and governments over the last few years. Professor Sims said he actually approved of many of them with qualifications, of course. An op ed article, also in The Journal that day, called the pair "non Keynesian," a reference to the late British economist John Maynard Keynes. Professor Sims said he was not "non Keynesian" at all. When I talked to Professor Sims earlier this month, he wouldn't speak for his colleague Professor Sargent (and I couldn't reach him). Based on his voluminous published work, I wrote that Professor Sargent didn't seem to belong in the noninterventionist camp to which he had been consigned. But I was going out on a limb. It turns out that in some respects, I didn't go far enough. In telephone conversations last week, Professor Sargent said he felt insulted by people who call him "non Keynesian" or "right wing," terms that, he said, are based on a misunderstanding of his thinking. And he rejected attempts to categorize his views in simple slogans. He doesn't wear his political opinions on his sleeve. "They really don't matter in my research," he said. But because others have applied labels to him, he decided it was worth setting the record straight. He's a Democrat, he said, "a fiscally conservative, socially liberal Democrat," adding, "I think that budget constraints are really central." It's important to consider the "incentive effects" of government policies, he continued. "There are trade offs in efficiency and equality, and they lead to choices that aren't easy," he said. For example, he has studied the effects of incentives on the behavior of the unemployed. With a colleague, Lars Ljungqvist of the Stockholm School of Economics and of New York University, he's found that in some circumstances, increasing unemployment benefits may have the unintended consequence of prolonging unemployment. He's definitely not opposed to unemployment benefits, he said, but believes that they should be designed to help people get back into suitable jobs so that they feel like full participants in the economy. "The problem is, it's not just whether you have unemployment insurance," he said. "It's what the duration is. And when it's very long and very generous, it creates traps that are very hard to get out of." This makes government policy tricky, but it doesn't imply that the government should avoid intervening wisely on behalf of those without jobs, he said. Professor Sargent described himself as a scientist, a "numbers guy" who is "just seeking the truth" as any good researcher does. "If you go to seminars with guys who are actually doing the work and are trying to figure things out, it's not ideological," he said. "Half the people in the room may be Democrats and half may be Republicans. It just doesn't matter." The "non Keynesian" label irks him particularly. "That's just off base," he said. "Keynes was a very good economist. He was brilliant. He had wonderful insights. His work has inspired me many times." Professor Sargent's own writings are sprinkled with pithy quotations from Keynes. In January 1986, the professor wrote a Wall Street Journal article, "An Open Letter to the Brazilian Finance Minister," analyzing that nation's fiscal crisis. In form and substance, it was explicitly modeled on a very similar letter written by Keynes to the French finance minister 60 years earlier. One point of this exercise, he said, "was to get people to actually read Keynes." Still, early in Professor Sargent's career, he was known as one of the founders of the "rational expectations" school, which has sometimes been thought to be un Keynesian. He says it actually "tied down an important loose end in the kinds of theories Keynes was building." Keynes, he said, believed that expectations were all important in determining economic activity, but didn't have the mathematical tools needed to nail down all his concepts. Today, Professor Sargent says that in some ways he actually is a Keynesian, but he qualified that claim, too. "I'm happy to say I am a Harrison Kreps Keynesian," he said, citing work by two scholars at Stanford, J. Michael Harrison and David M. Kreps. They developed a theory of speculative investor behavior and stock bubble formation that subtly modifies rational expectations "in a beautiful way" and "captures Keynes's argument, makes it rigorous, and pushes it further," he said. Fundamentally, he said, "What I really don't like is oversimplification." He tries to think things through, he said, and avoid having "one slogan fighting another." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The purchaser was identified as the limited liability company One57 86. But the 30.2 million mortgage taken out on the property through China Citic Bank International shows the buyer to be Guoqing Chen, a founder along with his brother, Chen Feng, of Hainan Airlines, part of the HNA Group, one of China's largest private airline companies. The mortgage document also lists the Pacific American Corporation, a New York subsidiary of HNA where Mr. Chen serves as a vice chairman and chief executive. Graham Spearman, a senior sales executive with the Extell Marketing Group, said the buyer "likes to be very high above the clouds," and was impressed by the unencumbered views of Central Park, the Hudson and East Rivers and several landmark buildings, as well as the amenities available from the Park Hyatt New York hotel at the base of the building. Mr. Chen was also undoubtedly pleased with the proximity of his new place to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, where he serves on the board of directors. The runner up last week, at 29,500,000, was a penthouse at 250 West Street, an 11 story former warehouse in TriBeCa, opposite Piers 25 and 26 at Hudson River Park, that was converted to condominiums by the Elad Group in 2011. Monthly carrying costs for the four bedroom four and a half bath residence are 20,130, according to Raphael De Niro of Douglas Elliman Real Estate, who represented the sponsor in the sale. In addition to 5,718 square feet of interior space, the unit has a 4,298 square foot wraparound terrace (landscaped and irrigated) with views of the Hudson. The apartment also has its own private entrance and lobby. The private terrace facing north, west and south features a deck and six person Jacuzzi. Mr. De Niro said that the purchaser, whose identity was shielded by the limited liability company 250 West Street, is a "domestic buyer" who paid all cash and planned to use the residence as a pied a terre. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The Pittsburgh based cartoonist Tom Scioli's science fiction and superhero stories have lately come to resemble distorted memories that have taken solid form. His subtle inks preserve the softness of the drawing underneath, and the paper is scumbled as though forgotten for decades in a basement. This thumbworn aesthetic shrouds and amplifies a ferocious, often goofy imagination. With the most poetically evocative style in the superhero genre today, Scioli is a perverse auteur: Handling all aspects of the art and writing, he breathes strange life into licensed properties. For instance, every page of this year's staggering FANTASTIC FOUR: GRAND DESIGN (Marvel, 120 pp., 29.99) collapses about a year's worth of Marvel Universe high jinks into a 25 panel per page fever dream, jammed with bonkers plot twists ("We returned empty handed only to face the most powerful man on earth, a man who could control molecules") and frenetic, lovingly drawn miniatures. So much is at stake that after a few pages, nothing is. What's left is pure eyeball bliss. In 2019's GO BOTS (IDW, 128 pp., 17.99), Scioli turns his essentially subliterate subjects (a line of Transformer like toys) into players in a psychedelic apocalypse, full of mind blowing reveals and impish wit, as when a professor explains that the mutable machines "started out as a parking solution. ... You get to your destination and the car walks along with you." (A Go Bot dutifully demonstrates.) Executed with the same soft colors and tawny pages, Scioli's latest graphic offering, JACK KIRBY: THE EPIC LIFE OF THE KING OF COMICS (Ten Speed Press, 201 pp., 28.99), is a biography of his comics idol. Kirby (1917 94) co created much of the Marvel pantheon, visualizing with palpable force such figures as Spider Man, Thor, Black Panther and the X Men. He was born Jacob Kurtzberg on the Lower East Side, to Jewish immigrants from Galicia, a region soon to be "engulfed in the First World War ... and washed away for all time by the Holocaust." Short and pugnacious, he belongs to the Suffolk Street Gang, perpetually locked in battle with the neighboring Norfolk Street Gang. ("I drew what I knew," he says. "I composed violent ballets.") Though Scioli tells the story in Kirby's voice, he sticks to the historical record, locating resonances big and small. As a kid, Kirby is informed by both the violence all around him and his mother's Old World "vunder meyses," which find their futuristic translation in Hugo Gernsback's science fiction magazine Wonder Stories. His first comics appear in the amateur newspaper of a youth club called the Boys Brotherhood Republic, where he befriends the founder Leon Klinghoffer yes, that Leon Klinghoffer. (Noting how his wheelchaired pal put up a fight with P.L.O. hijackers decades later, Kirby says proudly: "A guy from my block would do that.") After stints helping the animator Max Fleischer and the cartoonist Will Eisner, Kirby teams up with the editor Joe Simon. The two launch assorted characters into the void (e.g., Red Raven, combining "elements of Batman and Superman") before hitting on Captain America for Timely Comics, the precursor to Marvel. The debut cover (March 1941) shows Cap decking Hitler, an instant sensation that also drew ire from the German American Bund. At Timely, he meets an irritating office boy, Stan Lieber, who prances around the office playing a flute and who will become his chief collaborator and lifelong nemesis, under the alias Stan Lee. What seems like a sober, respectful biography turns out to be something more thrilling. Scioli makes the bravura decision to tell Kirby's story in one go, sans chapter breaks; with few exceptions, each page is stolidly structured around six uniformly sized panels. It's the comics equivalent of a Thomas Bernhard novel, giving Kirby's life the form of an incantation or rant: the way he's constantly generating wild new scenarios and characters (the unloved Super Sherlock, the hardy Iron Man), how his old grudges with Stan Lee and the industry in general are never far from his mind. Watch as he chews out the inker Mike Royer for turning one of his heroines into a Cher look alike, then X actos out the offending visage and replaces it with a photocopy of the original penciled version. He ages so gradually that the reader might not register how gray his hair has become until the last page. Kirby fans will know, say, the date when he briefly moved to the rival publisher DC, but actual years seldom appear in "Jack Kirby." This timelessness is an apt tribute to an artist who died over 25 years ago, yet whose midcentury dreams prove more popular than ever. A standout sequence relates Kirby's time in the Army: Arriving in France shortly after D Day, he is plunged into a universe of lethal violence. (When his superiors realize he's the artist who drew Captain America, they send him ahead as a scout to make maps.) Kirby channeled some of his firsthand experience into fictional war stories, three of which appear in the rich if confusingly titled ATLAS AT WAR! (Dead Reckoning/Marvel, 258 pp., 65), a selection of comics from the end of 1951 to June 1960. Atlas was the pupal name used by Timely before it became the Marvel we know today. It published over 500 war comic books, under roughly a dozen titles ("Battlefield," "Battle Action," et al.), for approximately 2,700 stories across the decade. The 50 grim, bullet ridden tales in this collection demonstrate how cartoonists like Kirby, two of his best known inkers (Joe Sinnott and Steve Ditko), the future Mad magazine caricaturist Mort Drucker and other familiar names adapted to the market. Most titles have exclamation points ("Bazooka Battle!" "Rookie!"), a trend reaching its inane peak with "The Man With the Beard!," a simpatico 1959 take on Fidel Castro's rise to power. World War II is well represented, and even the Civil War makes an appearance ("Gettysburg!"), but over half the pieces unfold during the Korean War (a conflict technically still active today). The book provides a newsstand level glimpse into how that "forgotten" war was perceived and publicized at home: distant, draining, but still ennobling. Unlike Harvey Kurtzman's comics (collected in "Corpse on the Imjin!"), though, these make little attempt to get inside the head of a Korean. (Hank Chapman's strident "Atrocity Story" at least notes civilian slaughter at the hands of the Communists.) Ironically, the most satisfying story in the book isn't one by Kirby, but rather a fleet three pager about the futility of war written by none other than Stan Lee. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Chile's taking on the Rapa Nui cause comes as European museums are facing growing pressure to repatriate objects to their countries of origin. President Emmanuel Macron of France, having declared that "African heritage cannot be a prisoner of European museums," has appointed two advisers to plan how to return African objects. The British Museum is no stranger to pressure to return items from its collection Greece has waged a long campaign for the restitution of the so called Elgin marbles. "We believe that there is great value in presenting objects from across the world, alongside the stories of other cultures at the British Museum," a spokeswoman for the museum said in an emailed statement. Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an archaeologist and director of the Easter Island Statue Project, the longest running research project into the statues, said by telephone interview that British sailors were taken to a sacred area of the island in 1868, and found "Hoa Hakananai'a" inside a building, buried up to its torso. They bartered for it, and dragged it to their boat in a procession led by a dancing chief, Ms. Van Tilburg said. "However, this was done within a context where the Rapa Nui people were suffering a great deal of deprivation," she added. Ms. Van Tilburg said that she had excavated two statues on Easter Island with carvings on their backs the only others with such decoration among some 1,000 statues. But "Hoa Hakananai'a's" carvings are unique, she added, as is the type of rock it is carved from. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Born in 1865, Suzanne Valadon was one of the few female Impressionists with the talent and determination to breach sexist boundaries in an arena controlled by male artists and critics. But as 's new biography, "Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon," makes clear, Valadon would have spurned being identified as a feminist, just as she did "the notion of the femme artiste." The daughter of a penniless linen maid, Valadon, whose given name was Marie Clementine, was a gleeful hellion as a child "a devil," she called herself, adding, "I behaved like a boy." According to Hewitt, Valadon was more like a "social deviant." Her restlessness made school stifling and conventional employment impossible. Living in bohemian Montmartre, she found that the only job that satisfied her physical courage and energy was as a circus acrobat. But after a glittering six months, she fell from a trapeze and broke her back. Bedridden for a time, Valadon turned to the one sedentary occupation that could hold her attention: drawing, at which she had always excelled. And so the tragic accident that grounded her became the catalyst for an extraordinary career. Without the affluence of contemporaries like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot (both of whose work she considered inferior to her own), she had no means of studying at an academy, much less with a master. Her medium was pencil stubs. Before Valadon could afford so much as an easel, she would have to serve other artists; she would have to begin by modeling. Valadon found that her stamina was undiminished by the fall. She could sit or stand motionless for hours and had the sang froid to negotiate what Hewitt characterizes as a market "shrouded in a dark cloud of social stigma." Any woman who took money in exchange for being naked and unchaperoned with a man was no better than a prostitute, and models often became paramours. Valadon wasn't looking for a lover at least not one who couldn't further her ambitions. For her, modeling offered what no conservatory could: the opportunity to observe the Impressionist masters at work. Her body might have been motionless, but her eyes followed the brushes in their hands. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. The tally of Valadon's mentors and champions reads like a who's who of Impressionist painters, from Miguel Utrillo, who claimed paternity of her only child (although three others could reasonably contest this), to Renoir, Lautrec, van Gogh even curmudgeonly Degas, who recognized her talent, took her as his pupil, provided her with contacts in the art world and facilitated her inclusion in the 1894 Salon de la Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts exhibition. She was not yet 30 years old. Valadon's flamboyant, unashamed life seems to have held few secrets but it does present a surprise. Cafe society was intolerant of bourgeois responsibilities, but even as she cut a swath through husbands and lovers, her only lifelong attachment was to the mother she supported and her son, Maurice Utrillo, whose care demanded her extraordinary endurance. By age 15, Maurice had devolved from an uncontrollably disturbed child to an advanced alcoholic whose spectacular benders landed him either in jail or in a psychiatric facility. Despite a thirst so intractable that he "greedily guzzled" eau de cologne when he couldn't find anything better, Maurice, who idolized his mother, never failed to summon her sympathy. Hewitt, a biographer with great emotional intelligence, calls their bond "titanic." The painter's devotion to her mother was equally fierce. Indeed, the death of Madeleine Valadon caused what her daughter characterized as "unspeakable pain" and left a gaping, financially problematic hole: Maurice's grandmother was no longer there to supervise him while his mother worked. When a physician friend of the family suggested that a creative occupation might help Maurice direct his energy productively, Valadon took on her son as a student and discovered a talent that would carry him to fame. Unfortunately, exercising it had no salubrious effect. Maurice's alcohol consumption increased in direct proportion to his success. He seesawed between periods of "intense productivity and incoherent drunkenness." By the time she reached 70, Valadon was exhausted and feeling unequal to the task of saving Maurice from himself. What would happen to him if she should die? Who would manage her enfant terrible? When she fell seriously ill and voiced her fears, her friend Lucie Pauwels, patroness of the arts, received them as an epiphany: Pauwels's life's purpose was to become Maurice's "matron, mother and manager." Before Valadon had a chance to rise from her sickbed, Lucie and Maurice were wed, and Valadon's worry turned to jealousy. Never before had any woman insinuated herself between the painter and her son. Never before had Valadon survived as an artist alone Maurice's fecund periods helped sustain them both. Soon her financial straits were dire. Too proud to accept support from her son and daughter in law, Valadon preferred to sit shivering in her kitchen when the boiler broke. As impoverished at the conclusion of her career as she was before it began, Valadon ended her life in front of her easel, where "the matriarch of creative rebellion" suffered a fatal stroke. As succinctly as any writer of epitaphs, Hewitt observes that the "work had grown stronger than its creator." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
HOUSTON Things were looking up for Texas in recent weeks. Oil prices had managed an impressive rebound, more than doubling to just above 40 a barrel. Restaurants and small businesses were opening up in Houston, Dallas and elsewhere. And tens of thousands of people were getting back to work. But a recent surge in coronavirus cases in the state is messing up that neat recovery story. Small businesses that had just reopened are closing again and oil prices have slid below 40 a barrel after weeks of gains. Energy executives say they remain optimistic, but some analysts are worried about the Texas economy, which would be the world's 10th biggest if the state were a country. Since businesses began reopening in early May, after a four week statewide stay at home order by Gov. Greg Abbott that was only loosely enforced in some areas, optimism spread that the coronavirus pandemic was under control. People returned to their dentist offices, gyms and hair salons, and bars began doing brisk business, especially in the oil production hub of West Texas. Many residents of the state, which last backed a Democratic presidential candidate in 1976, considered mask wearing a form of opposition to President Trump. And many business owners were reluctant to force their customers to cover their faces or stay apart. But starting just after Memorial Day, Texas began to report a rise in coronavirus cases, a trend that has accelerated over the last 10 days. The state has recorded 130,000 cases, and nearly 3,000 deaths. Hospitalizations are on the rise. Fears of the disease spread as grocery stores and restaurants reported that employees were getting sick, and Apple this week closed seven stores in Houston again. Other large retail chains like J.C. Penney, Ikea and Nordstrom said on Thursday that they were monitoring the situation but were keeping their Texas stores open. Restaurant reservations on OpenTable have been dropping in recent days. Data from another online platform, the Home Base scheduling app, showed total hours worked by employees at small businesses were rising until Monday, but then stalled as the week progressed, according to analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. On Friday, Governor Abbott ordered all bars to close effective 12 p.m. On Thursday, Governor Abbott issued an executive order suspending elective surgery in four populous counties to ensure that hospitals have the space to care for coronavirus patients. He also paused further business reopenings. William Presta, a barbershop owner in the Houston suburb of Bellaire, closed on March 22 and reopened on May 12. Business was going well until this week when demand suddenly dried up, he said, so he has decided to close the shop next week and take a vacation. "I'm just being conscious and smart and trying to keep out of harm's way," he said. Texans are accustomed to a gyrating economy that has long soared and tanked along with oil and natural gas prices. There have been four steep oil downturns in the last four decades. In the 1980s, for example, a sharp drop in oil prices devastated the state's energy companies and banks. Three out of every four petroleum worker lost their jobs. Over the years the state economy has diversified, with medical centers mushrooming in Houston and Dallas, and Austin becoming a technology hub. But energy remains a critical part of the state's economy. The shale fracking revolution has made Texas the leader of a national energy boom and fueled an expansion of petrochemical plants and natural gas export terminals. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. At the start of the year, Texas oil and gas companies appeared to be doing OK. The U.S. benchmark oil price hovered around 60 a barrel. When the pandemic took hold, and Russia and Saudi Arabia briefly flooded the market with oil, the price dropped to 20 a barrel in March, and then, in a first, briefly dropped to more than 37 below zero. Oil companies shut down wells and stopped new drilling except when companies were legally obligated to employ rigs under contract. More than 26,000 Texas oil workers roughly one in four lost their jobs in April, according to state employment data. That was the largest single month of oil and gas layoffs. But the impacts were far greater, rippling across the state, hurting businesses that serve the energy industry and its workers. Regional banks, many of which have large oil company loan portfolios, are being strained, and investments in pipelines are being delayed. But oil prices recovered faster than most analysts had expected as producers in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Russia and other countries cut back production. And as many states opened up their economies, gasoline demand started climbing. National average prices at the pump for regular gasoline have increased roughly 10 percent, or 20 cents a gallon, over the last month, according to the AAA motor club. Texas added 237,800 jobs in May, a monthly record, as businesses reopened and oil companies slowly began sending workers into the field to revive shale wells. At nearly 40 barrel, oil is now expensive enough for producers to reopen some wells they had shut. "The near term situation in oil markets is undeniably severe, but it is a temporary aberration stemming from an unprecedented health issue," said Ray Perryman, an economic consultant in Waco. But despite his overall optimism, Mr. Perryman remains cautious because of the recent surge in coronavirus infections, which he said should have been avoided. "The spike is higher than necessary due to lack of adherence to safety recommendations and is becoming alarming," he said. "You can't fix the economy if you don't get to a sustainable place on the health crisis." The Texas oil industry is marked by wildcatters who wear optimism on their sleeves whatever the oil price, in part because low oil prices typically stimulate demand, which in turn pushes prices back up. But the current crisis is fundamentally different because the pandemic has kept demand suppressed even at low prices. Demand for jet fuel, for example, is still subdued because airlines are flying far fewer flights than they normally do this time of the year. Energy executives say that at 40 a barrel, the U.S. oil price is not high enough for them to hire more workers and drill more wells. They say the price needs to approach 50 a barrel, but few experts expect that to happen until the pandemic is largely under control or an effective vaccine is widely available. "I'm optimistic to a point," said Scott D. Sheffield, chief executive of Pioneer Natural Resources, a leading Texas oil company. "If the infection numbers don't level back, it's going to be a tough decision for the governor as to whether or not to put back in place 'shelter in place,' which would be an economic disaster for the state." Even if the governor does not issue another stay at home order, many businesses could decide they have no choice but to shut down because they cannot afford to pay employees with few or no customers coming in the door. Some say closing again would be devastating but not doing so could be, too. Mithu and Shammi Malik had been hoping to open Musaafer, a new Indian restaurant in Houston three years in the making, in March. Instead, the married couple had to wait until May 18 because of state and local public health restrictions. Roughly two weeks after they opened, a few of their employees tested positive for the virus, forcing them to shut down again. The couple decided to give it another shot, and reopened on June 12, and are now nervously monitoring the rise in coronavirus cases and wondering if they will be forced to close their doors yet again. "You can't ignore that Covid itself is spreading quickly," Mr. Malik said. "We are very much aware that cases are going up." Sophia June contributed reporting from New York, and Gillian Friedman from Salt Lake City. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
On a routine trip to monitor ocean wildlife near the northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 2016, researchers noticed small patches of red algae they had never seen before growing on the coral reefs. When they returned last summer, the algae had spread exponentially. Mat like layers now cover vast swaths of coral in the Pearl and Hermes Atoll, a remote, uninhabited portion of the protected Hawaiian Islands around 1,200 miles from Honolulu. The prolific alga is a previously undiscovered species, according to a study published Tuesday from researchers at the University of Hawaii. Scientists say it poses a threat to coral and other marine life in the area. "Something like this has never been seen in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands before," said Alison Sherwood, lead researcher of the study. "This is extremely alarming to see an alga like this come in and take over so quickly and have these impacts." Scientists determined the alga, which they named Chondria tumulosa, didn't match any known species, Dr. Sherwood said. Though it behaves like an invasive species, disrupting its new environment, it cannot be labeled one because it hasn't been traced to an outside source. Scientists instead refer to it as a nuisance species. The alga's sudden appearance and rapid spread are cause for concern, Dr. Sherwood said. When the alga grows on coral, it blocks sunlight, essentially smothering the coral and anything else living underneath it, Dr. Sherwood said. It takes up space where other algae or seaweed species that feed herbivores would naturally grow. Randall Kosaki, the deputy superintendent of the monument for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was chief scientist on the cruise that discovered the algal outbreak. It took the team four days by boat to reach the Pearl and Hermes Atoll. "This is an organism that has the potential to completely overrun an entire island or an entire atoll," Dr. Kosaki said. "Whether it will do it or not, time will tell." In marine environments, invasive species spread so easily that once a species gets into an ecosystem, there's virtually nothing to be done, he said. "Prevention is the only tool in our toolbox." To ensure that they did not spread the algae to other islands when they returned to Honolulu, the researchers doused their dive gear in bleach. "God forbid that we bring this back to Oahu or Waikiki, where the consequences would not just be an ecological disaster but an economic disaster, because Hawaii's economy is so heavily based on tourism," Dr. Kosaki said. Researchers observed that local grazers, like surgeon fish, that usually spend days munching on algae weren't seen grazing on the new algae, Dr. Kosaki said. This may indicate it isn't a native alga, because most native algae have natural predators, he added. "At this point we don't know if it's a native species that was just overlooked until it went berserk at this one atoll or an introduction whose natural range may be thousands of miles away," he said. Though there was no record of other invasive seaweeds in the area, there have been bloom forming algae species seasonally in the past, Dr. Sherwood said. But this is the first time scientists haven't been able to track an alga's origins. Scientists observed that large pieces of the alga, around three feet long, could be detached from the coral. These "tumbleweed like pieces" are moved around by ocean currents and then attach and form new mats elsewhere, Dr. Sherwood said. The samples they studied in the lab formed spores, which may also spread the algae further. Peter Mumby, a professor at the University of Queensland and chief scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, said unusual water chemistry or an absence of natural consumers of the alga could be possible causes for the bloom. He was not involved in the study. "In terms of what it means for the reefs there, it might well reduce coral recovery by preventing new corals from getting a decent foothold on the reef," Dr. Mumby said. "It really depends on how permanent this bloom will be." The Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument was created in 2006 and expanded in 2016 under President Barack Obama to cover more than 580,000 square miles. It is home to an estimated 7,000 marine and terrestrial species, a quarter of which are found nowhere else on earth. "This is just our initial window into what's happening," Dr. Sherwood said. "The observations that we made last summer about it overgrowing and killing the coral on which it's growing doesn't bode well for coral." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
With the New York gala circuit on hiatus because of the coronavirus outbreak, here is how some patrons and society figures are spending their time (and money) while self isolated. Interviews have been edited for space. Where are you hunkering down? Malibu, Calif. Have you evolved a daily routine? When things seemed dicey in New York, I sent my children to Malibu. I flew out to be with them 10 days ago. At first it was chaos, but we've set up a little schoolhouse, a room with a whiteboard and iPads, where the girls (they're 4, 9 and 11) can study. Our babysitter, who is living with us, handles the lessons. We're not all cut out to be math teachers (laughs). What's your advice for parents trying to keep up a semblance of order and sanity? It's important to take an hour in the morning to work out, or just think. When you're not used to being with your children 24 7, you're going to need that early morning downtime. What about work? We've set up a mini office in our house. It's tricky, but everyone is on mobile videoconferencing apps so we can have marketing, budget and design discussions. We have to get our samples done. There is no retail now, but your business really can't stop. How do you keep up your charitable giving? I'm working with No Kid Hungry. We've donated 10 percent of our online sales to support working moms and supply meals to the millions of children who would otherwise be relying on schools for their lunch. What tweaks have you made in your socializing? We have Zoom dinner parties. Everyone sits down with their iPad or phone and a glass of wine. We all laugh. Sure, there are glitches. Some of us look kind of blurry onscreen. Who cares? Are you feeling nostalgic for your New York life? I miss passing the deli on my morning walks, with all the colorful flowers out front. It's the little things that you took for granted that you're reminded to appreciate in the future. And I miss dressing up. Sometimes I just stare at my beautiful racks of clothes. Last week I was telling a friend on the phone, "You can't wear plaid pajamas all day." That's become my life rule. Occupation: columnist for the New York Social Diary Favorite Charities: Parrish Art Museum (she is on the board) and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Where are you hunkering down? Southampton, N.Y. Have you adopted any novel forms of socializing? My daughter, Serena; my son, Will, who is in Los Angeles ; and I are on FaceTime. We do a cook off almost nightly. I made beef stroganoff last night and shrimp scampi the night before. We're a little competitive, but we also inspire each other. We're longing for a little scratch and sniff app on our phones. What do you miss the most? I miss just a handful of friends, and especially my monthly dinners with my best friend Chappy Morris at table 12 at the Carlyle a little pocket of civilization in Manhattan. How about the parties? I don't miss the big charity parties. I do think it will be revelatory in the next couple of months to see who will still be supporting these causes, now that their pictures are not being published. What are some pet peeves? There are people who actually brag about the way they're distancing themselves from their housekeepers or trainers, like that's a badge of honor. This kind of crisis puts a magnifying glass on who we really are. How are you keeping your spirits up? I'm fostering an old cat. He's called Bear, because he's big and black like a bear. Serena and I found him on the Animal Rescue Fund van that comes around from time to time. Seeing him propped inside in a corner really was a heart tugger. There are so many older animals that no one is going to adopt. They need a home. Drinking for me is a purely social sport, so I'm having an inadvertent dry spell. But boy, there is a martini on the other side of this. Where he is hunkering down: his farm in northeastern Connecticut. What's your version of "Keep Calm and Carry On"? I wake up when I normally would, shower, pick up my clothes and get dressed. Doing these ordinary things can make a huge difference. I find myself checking in by phone with friends and family and people I've been out of touch with for a while. We take Bird, our little cockapoo, for walks. She normally has a strict routine. This has really turned her world upside down. We've never spent as much time on social media or watching movies and TV films they've released for home viewing, like "Emma" and "Invisible Man." The strangest thing is watching people kiss in these films, or have dinner together. Is there a positive side to this crisis? We're talking about a dire situation. There is no silver lining. But in so many ways we're united. Humanity is more connected as a whole than in any time I can recall. How are you keeping up with work? I have two video chats a day with the design team and product development. I'm planning sketches and pinning them to a pin board. In a lot of ways it's similar to being at the office. But what can't be replaced is the craft and human interaction: draping, looking at fabric and embroidery swatches, working with the patternmakers and seamstresses. These are the heart and soul of any design studio, and some of the things I miss most. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Google suffered a major blow on Tuesday after European antitrust officials fined the search giant a record 2.7 billion for unfairly favoring some of its own services over those of rivals. The penalty, of 2.4 billion euros, highlights the aggressive stance that European officials have taken in regulating many of the world's largest technology companies, going significantly further than their American counterparts. By levying the fine against Google more than double the previous largest penalty in this type of antitrust case Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's antitrust chief, also laid claim to being the Western world's most active regulator of digital services, an industry still dominated by Silicon Valley. "In Europe, companies must compete on the merits regardless if they are European or not," she said on Tuesday. "What Google has done is illegal under E.U. antitrust rules." The apparent focus on Silicon Valley has prompted accusations from some in the United States that the European Union is unfairly targeting American companies. Officials in the bloc vigorously deny those assertions. Still, in recent years, Ms. Vestager has demanded that Apple repay 14.5 billion in back taxes in Ireland, opened an investigation into Amazon's tax practices in Europe and raised concerns about Facebook's gathering and handling of data. The companies deny any wrongdoing. In targeting the activities of these digital giants, experts say, European authorities are laying down a marker for more hands on control of how the digital world operates. And while the 2.7 billion fine announced on Tuesday is tiny compared with Google's 90 billion in annual revenue, it highlights the region's willingness to dole out sizable penalties. Shares of Google fell for a second straight day on the news. The stock declined 2.5 percent on Tuesday, a steeper decline than the broader Nasdaq. Europe's latest efforts to rein in technology companies stem from continuing unease that Silicon Valley has come to dominate how the continent's 500 million citizens interact online. "Europe is setting the agenda," said Nicolas Petit, a professor of competition law and economics at the University of Liege in Belgium. "It's always been like that." In her statement on Tuesday, Ms. Vestager said that Google held a dominant position in online search, requiring the company to take extra measures to ensure that its digital services did not crowd out those of rivals. The antitrust decision related to Google's online shopping service, which the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, said had received preferential treatment compared with those of rivals in specialized search results. Analysts say such so called vertical search products also including those for restaurant and business reviews represent a fast growing percentage of Google's annual revenue. The company does not break out earnings figures for this unit in its financial reports. The search company is facing two separate antitrust charges in Europe related to Android, its popular mobile software, and to some of its advertising products. Google denies the accusations. Google rebuffed the European Union's claims on Tuesday, saying that its services had helped the region's digital economy grow. It has also said that significant online competition remains in Europe, including from companies like Amazon and eBay. "We respectfully disagree with the conclusions announced today," Kent Walker, the company's general counsel, said in a statement. "We will review the commission's decision in detail as we consider an appeal, and we look forward to continuing to make our case." Despite Google's denials, the record fine the previous high, against Intel in 2009, was EUR1.06 billion represents a bloody nose for a company that holds a market share of more than 90 percent in online search in Europe. Several other antitrust complaints related to other specialized search results have been filed in Europe against Google, and Ms. Vestager said Tuesday's announcement could "be used as a framework" in those investigations. That may eventually lead to further fines if European authorities find wrongdoing. The complaints include many from other American technology companies, including Oracle, News Corporation and Yelp, which have been vocal advocates of large fines against Google. Google has 90 days to respond to the European Commission's demands, or face penalties of up to 5 percent of the average daily global revenue of Alphabet, its parent company. European officials said on Tuesday that they would regularly monitor the company's activities to ensure that it was complying with the ruling. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
AS parents, we worry about our children. And if we have more than one, we worry about how they will interact with each other, not just when they're young but when they've grown up. Independence is great; interdependence is what keeps them together when we're gone. Families of great means often try to encourage this interdependence through the creation of a family foundation, a nonprofit organization meant to give away money to charitable organizations. The idea is almost always that the act of giving to others will keep the family together and help them weather inevitable family discord. The plans don't always work out, but when they do, they can offer lessons to families of far less wealth about passing along shared assets to their children be it the family business or just something that one generation hopes subsequent ones will share. One issue that some families have encountered is that the types of philanthropy favored by one generation may not be the ones favored by the next something that could cause strife if not addressed. A recent report, "Next Gen Donors: Respecting Legacy, Revolutionizing Philanthropy," produced by 21/64, a philanthropic consultancy, and the Johnson Center for Philanthropy, looked at how younger generations felt about philanthropy. It found that those who followed the baby boomers wanted to give to charities in ways that produced measurable change. The report also found that they wanted to be more hands on with the groups they give to. "The belief is that Gen X is cynical and Gen Y is entitled," Sharna Goldseker, managing director of 21/64, said. "We found this high capacity subset to be different, to be more involved and interested in stewarding their family philanthropy." Their desires will affect how grants are made by family foundations for decades. But the vast transfer of wealth from older generations will first have an impact on how family foundations function from within. Many are large financial organizations, but they are also a collection of family members with all the issues that any family has. I hoped to learn more about how the generations were managing the transition. BRINGING THEM ABOARD Succession in family foundations, not to mention family run companies, used to happen when the founder died. With people living longer, this is happening less often, and the desire to use foundations to teach children and grandchildren about the family's values is increasing. As with many things with children, it's easier to get them to do something if you're interested in it, too. Ms. Goldseker said the report found that nearly 90 percent of respondents cited their parents as their model for philanthropy. In her case, she said her parents started talking to her when she was quite young about philanthropy in general and, specifically, the Goldseker Foundation, started by her great uncle, who made his money in real estate. But she said she still had to demonstrate interest and competence to get a seat on the board, which she did in her late 20s after paid and unpaid work with various grant making charities and nonprofit organizations. Zac Russell, whose grandfather built Russell Investments, the money management firm and creator of the eponymous stock indexes, said he had wanted to be on the board of the Russell Foundation since he was 11 years old. He worked with the foundation's chief executive and attended various next generation conferences to learn as much as he could. Now 25, he will attend his first board meeting as a member this month. "My interests have never been on the programmatic side but on how we fund those programs, how we invest accordingly, how we help people who are passionate about it," Mr. Russell said. "I didn't play soccer as a kid. I read The New York Times and The Economist to learn about investments." Younger family members are not always so eager to join the foundation. Nor are their parents or grandparents ready to have them. Bruce Bickel, senior vice president for private foundation management services at PNC Wealth Management, said he runs a directors internship program to counsel family members. The program starts with a history of philanthropy and ends with their responsibilities as board members. "The big thing that motivated me was to maintain the integrity of the family relationship," he said. "The best thing a family can do is to use their foundation to help others and to keep together as a family." GIVING ALL A VOICE For the board to function well, every member needs to have a say. This may be somewhat challenging when older board members once changed the diapers or managed the temper tantrums of the younger ones. Lisa Philp, vice president for strategic philanthropy at the Foundation Center, said families handled this issue differently. Some let younger members sit in on meetings but not vote. Others give the younger generation a separate pot of money as a test for board membership. But, she said, the most successful ones are the most open. "The more the next generation actually gets to come on and be part of the decision making, so it's not just make work for them, the better chance you have of getting an integrated flow of ideas," Ms. Philp said. "You want to be mindful of keeping the next generation engaged." Katherine Lorenz, whose grandfather, George Mitchell, has been called "the father of natural gas shale drilling" by Forbes, said she was fortunate to be the right age just as her grandparents expanded their family foundation in 2004 to include their children and any grandchildren who were 25 or older. Ms. Lorenz, now 34, said her family brought in outside advisers to help them formulate the objectives of the foundation, a process she credits with making it easy for the family to make decisions. "Sustainability was an area we could all agree on," she said. "What sustainability means to each one of us is a different question." The other challenging part was who got one of the 12 seats on the board. Her grandparents had 10 children, who filled up the board. But when her grandmother passed away in 2009, her seat became a rotating one for the grandchildren, and Ms. Lorenz's mother and uncle have given up their seats so three of the 23 grandchildren are now on the board. She said the system had worked smoothly so far, though she admitted there were difficult moments when family members sought grants for an organization and they did not get approved. "We give the program director discretion to make what grants will best serve our strategy," she said. "When she comes back and says this is not a good fit for this reason, most of us say this makes sense." Having that outside arbiter is one way to manage hurt feelings. MANAGING CONFLICTS There are often as many issues floating around a board meeting as at the Thanksgiving table. Once the next generation has a voice, they may not understand that their voices are among many. "The families who do it well are the ones who maintain the original mission statement of the original donor," Mr. Bickel said. "Where you run into problems is when the next generation says, 'Oh, goody, I want to do my own thing.' No one's said to them that their role is to maintain the priorities and preferences of the foundation." This is not to say they have to give to the exact same organizations as their predecessors, or that they have to honor those principles as a group. Mr. Bickel said he once parceled out the five giving areas of a family foundation to each of the five siblings because they could not agree on how to make grants together. Mr. Russell, who comes across as wiser than his years, said one of the issues with third generation members was that each nuclear family had different values and concerns from the founders. "We have four families, and each one has a different view on the world," he said. "The question was how do we bring this together and trust it?" He said the foundation's mission statement, which focuses mainly on issues of environmental stewardship, had become a touchstone. "If you don't believe in this, maybe it's not right for you to sit on the board," he said. Of course, a big reason family members might not want to be on the board has to do with simmering family resentments. Ms. Lorenz said one thing she learned from working with other family foundations was that there were always going to be families who were more and less dysfunctional than yours. "Doing philanthropy as a family can be really fulfilling and it can be really hard," she said. "There will be fun and rewarding experiences. Other times, there will be really painful issues playing themselves out around the table." Her advice? "Bringing in outside people can really help." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
One afternoon last fall, I walked along the North Sea coast in search of a ghost. Admittedly, the bucolic spot felt incongruously cheerful for a paranormal encounter. A low sun splayed its rays over the blue water and the majestic red brick walls of the Renaissance castle next to me. Couples with ice cream strolled around the embankment and sea gulls floated above. No phantoms materialized. I was probably several centuries too late. For it was there, along the ramparts of Kronborg Castle, that Hamlet, prince of Denmark, encountered the ghost of his murdered father, setting in motion the revenge story that propels what is perhaps the most famous literary work in the English language. A devotee of "Hamlet," I had taken the 45 minute train ride up the coast from Copenhagen to the town of Elsinore (called Helsingor in Denmark) to immerse myself in the Renaissance era "Elsinore" Castle as Shakespeare called it and stroll among the town's centuries old edifices. But I was also keen to witness Elsinore's recent renaissance. Though the town enjoyed centuries as a prosperous royal outpost (thanks mainly to taxes levied on foreign trade ships passing through the adjacent sound that separates Denmark from Sweden), its fortunes ebbed in the 1980s with the collapse of its shipbuilding industry. The docklands wasted away. The town's income became dependent on Swedish day trippers, who would ferry over to buy cheap booze. From the train station, I threaded my way past churches with green copper spires and gabled, half timbered houses in fanciful colors peach, mustard, sage toward the newest attraction, the M/S Maritime Museum of Denmark. Everywhere, the town flaunted its nautical past. Model ships and sailor hats peeked out from boutique windows. On a wall, a mural depicted a cartoonish vision of the harbor, replete with three masted ships, buccaneers, sailors, fishmongers and spyglass toting explorers. Things took a turn for the strange along the docks, where a giant fish had been assembled from colorful plastic flotsam and jetsam, like watering cans, dish racks, garden tools and children's toys. Nearby, a silvery boy sat on a silvery rock and stared forlornly out to sea. A male counterpart to the famous Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, the highly polished stainless steel statue of Han ("Him" in Danish) was unveiled in 2012 by Elmgreen and Dragset, a contemporary art pair known for their sometimes provocative public art installations around the world. A descending gangplank like walkway brought me into the museum, which traces the seafaring history of the Danes, from the Vikings to the Maersk global shipping empire. Opened in 2013, the subterranean space is built into the U shaped perimeter of a disused dry dock where large ships were once serviced. The design comes courtesy of the Bjarke Ingels Group (a.k.a. BIG), an envelope pushing young Danish architectural firm that has built an impressive international portfolio and racked up abundant awards. The result is an enveloping sensory experience, part nautical fun house and part time capsule. Ambling along uneven floors (which mimic being at sea) I was subsumed in cinematic music, colored lights, projected films and noises of boat horns and sea gulls. Display cases resembling old portholes and stacked chests revealed the accouterments of old time shipboard journeys, from "hardtack" sailor biscuits to sextants and sundials. The interactive exhibits revealed something else: my unfitness for maritime life. In an ersatz old world tattoo parlor, I stenciled the word Mor (Mother) on my forearm with a buzzing pen meant to mimic a needle. The shaky, amateurish result would have left any mother ashamed. In a soaring hall dedicated to contemporary global shipping, equipped with computer terminals and a huge projected map of seaborne transport lanes, my attempts to route a container ship from Australia to Bangladesh resulted in a half million dollar loss for my "company." Exposed as a landlubber, I consoled myself with fish and chips in the atrium like restaurant of the Culture Yard next door. Formerly part of the town shipyard, the industrial building has been fully overhauled and outfitted with a jagged glass facade suggesting transparent origami. Today the building houses auditoriums, exhibition areas, a multimedia library and other spaces to host an annual roster of concerts, theater and cinema. That evening's entertainment was provided by bands participating in the fourth edition of the Knejpe Festival, a two night gala held in Elsinore's numerous nautical themed bars and old world taverns. Valorizing sea shanties and world music Greek blues, Cuban folk, Afrobeat the event pays homage to Elsinore's past as an international port. (Another new event, the multimedia Click Festival, looks instead to the future, exploring "the field between art, science and technology.") "We thought it would be a great way to tell the story of Elsinore as a maritime city," said Mikael Fock, the Knejpe Festival organizer, whom I chanced upon while waiting to enter a subterranean bar called Holger Danske. Throngs of revelers ambled unsteadily through the streets as musicians lugged instruments into various venues. "There are at least 13 traditional bars left in Elsinore," Mr. Fock said. Within Holger Danske, a stony cavern, a gray haired man and woman called Duo Visti worked a banjo and accordion, strumming and squeezing out minor key Danish drinking songs while the boisterous crowds swallowed local Wiibroe lager. Down the street, a band called Klepti Klepti summoned rollicking Balkan Gypsy music that shook the walls of Hald An, a smoky tavern decorated with a faded seascape mural. Next up was My Bubba, three young Scandinavian women one Dane, one Swede, one Icelander in vintage store dresses who merged their voices in high harmony while strumming and drumming jangly ditties. "Hundreds of years ago there were bars everywhere" in Elsinore, said Kirsten Dalsgaard, a self described regular of Kobenhavneren tavern, a cottage like warren of small rooms decorated with beer steins and paintings. In a corner, Bolvaerket (wharf, in Danish), two middle aged guys on guitar and bass, cranked out good time rock. With the Knejpe Festival, she added, "We are trying to relive it." Eventually, all paths lead to the iconic Kronborg Castle, a sober, four sided fortress bedecked with ornate spires and scrolled architectural flourishes, a curious marriage of Lutheran restraint and Renaissance pomp. An actor in period costume led my tour group through the castle rooms as he alternately narrated, re enacted and provided background to "Hamlet." Assuming the role of Horatio, the prince's confidant, he shepherded us along the ramparts, into the cellars and through various stately rooms the royal chambers, the palace chapel, the immense ballroom while bringing the play's celebrated scenes to life. Afterward I chatted with the actor guide, William Jansen, alongside the castle courtyard, where Elsinore holds its most famous festival every August. (This year's edition runs Aug. 1 to 9) A mix of performances, films and concerts, "Shakespeare at Hamlet's Castle" has drawn some of the modern era's most celebrated actors to play the title role. Laurence Olivier, Derek Jacobi, Richard Burton, Kenneth Branagh and Jude Law are among the many greats who have held Yorick's skull on that very spot. Next year, Mr. Jensen said, promises especially abundant rewards for the Shakespeare faithful. As the 400th anniversary of the playwright's death and the 200th year since "Hamlet" was first performed at Kronborg Castle by a group of soldiers the town is gearing up for a particularly extravagant and extensive homage. "It's going to be a grand occasion" Mr. Jansen said. Then he strutted across the cobblestones to welcome another group and delve again into Elsinore's past. IF YOU GO Summer is perhaps the most popular season to visit, though spring and fall are also agreeable. Frequent northbound trains (rejseplanen.dk) from Copenhagen's Central Station make the roughly 45 minute journey to Elsinore. A one way ticket is 108 Danish kroner (about 16 at 6.6 kroner to the dollar). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The pianists Daniil Trifonov, 27, and Leif Ove Andsnes, 48, are at very different places in their careers. But as both have had major presences in New York this season, I've been struck by how similarly these exceptional pianists approached the coveted platforms they were handed. Mr. Trifonov, who had a Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, has always been able to toss off Liszt and Chopin etudes or any blockbuster concerto. But from the start he showed a poetic sensibility and probing musical curiosity. Mr. Andsnes, who was the New York Philharmonic's artist in residence this season, is also the opposite of a flashy virtuoso. He has played the standard repertory splendidly, but also has explored works by Janacek, Scandinavian composers and, most recently, Sibelius. (Yes, Sibelius the visionary symphonist wrote a sizable number of fascinatingly strange piano pieces. Who knew?) Celebrating Chopin, a central element of the Carnegie series, hardly seems daring. But Mr. Trifonov found a way to place this composer's achievements in a fresh context. He began in October with a recital featuring pieces by Tchaikovsky, Mompou, Grieg, Barber and Rachmaninoff that had been written in homage to Chopin. He built, piece by piece, to the final offering, Chopin's own "Funeral March" Sonata, giving an impetuous yet searching performance. Late last month, joined by the musicians of the string chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica, Mr. Trifonov presented the most intriguing programs imaginable. In Chopin's day, every emerging pianist was expected to show himself off in his own concertos. The young composer, under pressure, wrote two of them. Musically, for me, they are two of Chopin's most personal and sublime works. Though there is plenty of dazzling piano writing in the scores, the real challenges come from the subtle intricacies folded into the piano part. His handling of the orchestra is generally considered no better than effective. Mr. Trifonov performed these works with the orchestral music arranged for strings by the composer Yevgeniy Sharlat. The warmth and richness of the strings placed a mellow cast on the orchestra's contribution, turning it almost into chamber music, albeit for a large contingent of players. Mr. Trifonov embraced this chamber style approach. I've never heard the piano parts played with such intimacy and tenderness. Sometimes, I wanted just a little more definition, especially in the left hand accompaniments. I wouldn't have minded some bursts of assertiveness now and then. Still, I was moved, and mightily impressed, that Mr. Trifonov would attempt such a mature and revealing experiment. Chopin wrote only a handful of chamber works, pieces you almost never hear. On the first of the concerto programs, Mr. Trifonov also played Chopin's early Piano Trio with powerful partners: the eminent violinist Gidon Kremer, the founder of the Kremerata, and Giedre Dirvanauskaite, a cellist from the ensemble. On the second evening, Mr. Trifonov performed Chopin's Cello Sonata, a rhapsodic tangle of a piece, with the splendid Gautier Capucon. In both works, Chopin seems to be pouring out his pent up thoughts about chamber music, to the point of overflow. Mr. Trifonov and his colleagues made sense of the music while playing it passionately. Mr. Andsnes's simpler concept for his Philharmonic residency was daring in its own way. On three subscription programs across the season, he performed three inexplicably neglected works for piano and orchestra by composers who otherwise could not be more familiar: Rachmaninoff's Fourth Concerto, the composer's last, most modernist, most structurally radical concerto; Britten's unconventional, tartly Neo Classical four movement concerto; and, late last month, Debussy's elegant, inventive Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra. Sibelius was at the core of Mr. Andsnes's solo recital program on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall. He played several of the works he included on a recent Sibelius album on the Sony label. In the second half he turned to Schubert: two little known, freewheeling Scherzos and the three Piano Pieces (D. 946), curious late works in which, below playful seeming surfaces, troubling musical and emotional currents rustle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
As a proudly renegade voice of the populist right, Breitbart News has long delighted in bedeviling liberals and establishment Republicans alike, emerging in recent years as one of the nation's leading conservative media outlets. But in an ironic twist, Breitbart, a news and opinion website that welcomed the rise of Donald J. Trump as an outsider candidate, is now facing a problem similar to the one roiling the Republican Party it likes to torment: a scathing internal dispute, with Mr. Trump at its center. Several top executives and journalists at the site have resigned in the last week, saying the organization has turned into a shill for the Trump campaign and failed to support Michelle Fields, a Breitbart reporter who accused Mr. Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, of grabbing and shoving her at a Florida rally last week. Ms. Fields reported the episode to the police, and a journalist for The Washington Post, Ben Terris, identified Mr. Lewandowski as the person who grabbed her. The Trump campaign has denied Ms. Fields's account, and Breitbart, after initially requesting an apology, later published an article casting doubt on whether Mr. Lewandowski was involved. In a telephone interview, Ms. Fields, who also resigned on Monday, said that she "felt like my employer was working with the Trump campaign to assassinate my character." "They were more interested in protecting Trump and coordinating with him on a message than they were about finding out the truth," said Ms. Fields, who is 28. Messages left with Breitbart executives on Monday were not answered, and the site's spokesman was among the employees who quit. The uproar entwines the growing concerns about violence at Mr. Trump's rallies protesters have been attacked, and reporters ejected with the squabbling that has erupted among right leaning media organizations over Mr. Trump's improbable political rise. It also offers a glimpse into the growing pains at Breitbart, which began as a cousin of the Drudge Report and has expanded into a broader, if still ideologically driven, news operation with journalists in London, Los Angeles and on the campaign trail. The site's ethos, said Kurt Bardella, the spokesman who resigned, had been that "everyone should unilaterally be held accountable whether it be Donald Trump or someone else." Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Mr. Bardella acknowledged that the site's readership had substantial overlap with Mr. Trump's base of supporters, saying, "Anyone who reads Breitbart is fundamentally generally angry at the Washington establishment." But he said that Ms. Fields was not treated as a team player. Or, as Ben Shapiro, another editor who resigned on Monday, put it, "You don't throw your own campaign reporter under the bus to satisfy the whims of a political campaign." Some staff members at Breitbart disputed that characterization of events, although none agreed to be cited by name. Briefly on Monday, the site published what appeared to be a facetious column that mocked Mr. Shapiro for resigning and compared him to a snake. The column was later taken down, and a Breitbart executive, Joel B. Pollak, apologized. Mr. Trump's rise in the presidential race has paralleled a significant growth in Breitbart's readership: The site's traffic rose 120 percent, to about 14 million unique monthly visitors, from January 2014 to last January, according to data from comScore. Traffic to The Daily Caller, a conservative site more closely associated with the party establishment, dipped 3 percent in the same period. Ms. Fields, in the interview, said she had been happy at her job since starting in November. "People would ask me, 'How do you work at Breitbart, oh my goodness?' " she recalled. "But I enjoyed it. I liked my co workers. I didn't cover Trump. I didn't have to sit there and write all these pro Trump pieces." Ms. Fields said she believed superiors questioned her account in exchange for more access to Mr. Trump. She said she had stopped reading posts about herself on social media, citing threatening messages from Trump supporters, including accusations that she had falsified a photograph of a bruise on her arm. "I'm in a tough spot," Ms. Fields said. "If I go to the police, people say I'm taking advantage, I'm a crybaby." She added, "Anything I do, it seems like it is the wrong decision." Her next move, she says, is uncertain, although she said she would like to continue covering the presidential race. But, she added, "Not the Trump campaign." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Remembering and facing the challenges of the past is a bold, potent choice, but nevertheless, so many people prefer to forget. Taylor Swift has rarely been one to put up blinders, instead making her problems her gasoline, her kindling, her spark. The anguish is the art. But "Me!" her new single, and presumably the first from her forthcoming seventh album is, quite relentlessly, the sound of moving forward, eyes averted. At the beginning of the song's video, a pink and white snake slithers toward the camera; the reptile was part of the symbolic language surrounding the sharp tongued "Reputation," Swift's 2017 album. Swift was the snake painted as such by Kim Kardashian West, in a public feud that reshaped Swift's image from belle of the ball into something darker and more textured. But in the video, the snake explodes and becomes a thousand butterflies: Her conflagrations are in the past, and Swift is renewed. A shame, really. "Reputation" was Swift's most forward looking, contemporary pop aware album. Even if large parts of it were animated by agita, it was well written and well executed (if occasionally awkward) with a persistent hum of tension. "Me!" which is mechanistic fun, but dull at the edges skips all that in favor of a kind of uncritical exuberance that's almost piercingly saccharine. The song's lyrics are in a familiar Swift mode (if on the whole, a little less punchy than usual): "I know that I went psycho on the phone/I never leave well enough alone." It's her singing that alters the calibration. Swift isn't an especially powerful vocalist, but she's long had an unerring sense of how to deliver tsunami grade melody, knowing when to lean in to a buildup. But here, when she gets to the hook, her singing thins out, gets childlike, almost gleeful. The restraint is, at times, agonizing. "Me!" is a duet with Brendon Urie of Panic! at the Disco, a potent vocalist with far lower star wattage who seems to be under singing here so as not to trample the boss. (That Swift chose a duet for her return is also baffling the collaboration is a distraction, not an additive.) And on Thursday night, Swift appeared for a brief interview during the N.F.L. Draft; "Me!" will be the soundtrack of its second round. It is difficult to think of a less apt partnership than Swift, who has recently found her political voice, and the scandal plagued N.F.L. The pandemic has been a time of renewal and reinvention for Taylor Swift. After releasing two quarantine albums, the singer is in the process of releasing the rerecordings of her first six albums. None A Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift's rerecordings: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun. Pandemic Records: In 2020, Ms. Swift released two new albums, "Folklore" and "Evermore." In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music. Fearless: For the release of "Fearless (Taylor's Version)," the first of the rerecordings, Times critics and reporters dissected its sound and purpose. Reshifting the Power: The new 10 minute version of a bitter breakup song from 2012 can be seen as a woman's attempt to fix an unbalanced relationship by weaponizing memories. All of which is surprising, because Swift is as aggressive and effective a chess player as pop has seen in years. These choices suggest that the urgency of the bigger goal to shake free of the last few years of distractions was far more crucial than the minor details of songwriting (by Swift, Urie and Joel Little) and production (by Swift and Little). Rather than opt to wear the patina of surviving a rough stretch, Swift has chosen a to the studs restoration and a fresh coat of paint. It gleams so bright, it just might obscure the fact that anything was ever out of place. Too bad. JON CARAMANICA For some time Bruce Springsteen has been mentioning an album that harks back to the 1970s of Southern California Laurel Canyon pop, a genre exploration that has nothing to do with the 21st century. "Hello Sunshine" is the first sample of that album, "Western Stars." It's a well cushioned, smoothly melodic testimonial to despairing resignation. Springsteen sustains a croon, backed by a pedal steel guitar, a cottony bass line and a string section; there's a meditative instrumental outro. But when he sings "Hello sunshine, won't you stay?" it's a request without much hope; he's been singing about lonely, endless empty roads ahead: "no place to be and miles to go." As plush as the music is, that's his vista. PARELES "Anger Management," the new mini album from Rico Nasty and the producer Kenny beats, is wild, boisterous fun. Rico Nasty is an enthusiastically aggrieved rapper, and on "Cold," the album opener, with its greasy and chaotic production, she's brawl ready. But there's an appealing calm relatively speaking on "Sell Out," about finding peace somewhere on the other side of the storm (or maybe within). "Had a lot of built up anger that I had to let out/Lost a few friends, me and money never fell out," she raps, adding the therapeutic realization, "The expression of anger is a form of rejuvenation." CARAMANICA "So Long" is the first single from a forthcoming country music project by Diplo, who in the last decade has taken his talents to just about anywhere that might have them. Nashville can be a cloistered place, but this alliance isn't as unlikely as it seems. Avicii pioneered the blending of dance music and roots music many years ago, and, for a time in the early 2010s, Nashville had a brief flirtation with EDM, with aftereffects that still linger. Which is to say that this up tempo thumper, with firm singing by Cam, doesn't sound like a rude intrusion, but rather a logical, uncontroversial continuation. CARAMANICA | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Credit...Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times; Styled by Alex Tudela Dane DeHaan has watery, nearly translucent blue eyes somewhere between mysterious and radioactive, "made for cinema," according to the director Derek Cianfrance and a haunted stare that has made him Hollywood's go to avatar of teenage torment. In the few years he has been acting on film, he has played a high school loner turned telekinetic terrorist ("Chronicle"), the troubled son of an absent father (in Mr. Cianfrance's "The Place Beyond the Pines"), and a tortured analysand ("In Treatment"). So when a reporter asked Mr. DeHaan what they might spend an afternoon doing together, the answer came as a surprise. "I always say if I could do anything, I would be a professional golfer," said Mr. DeHaan, whose handicap is a country club respectable 12, on a windy December morning at the driving range at Chelsea Piers in New York. "But I'm not good enough, so I'm an actor." He reared back and drove into a golf ball with a satisfying thwack, and it sailed out toward the Hudson River. Finding one of American film's favorite young interpreters of subcutaneous roil on the links (or the range, barring that) was not what I expected, I told Mr. DeHaan. "No one expects me to golf," he said. "I don't think there are so many moody, brooding people on golf courses. But I always say that golfing and acting are very similar to me. I think they're both singular practices. It's something that no matter how hard I work at, or practice, I will never be as good as I want to be." (There's that roil.) Actually, Mr. DeHaan contests the descriptions, now standard, of him as a tortured artist type (though he did recently play James Dean in "Life," a Dean biopic). He has played happy go lucky (in John Hillcoat's 2012 bootlegging period piece "Lawless") and straight man to a marauding zombie girlfriend ("Life After Beth"). But it is Mr. DeHaan's brittle soulfulness that has booked him four Prada ad campaigns and kept him on lists of soon to break out stars. That break has been primed by independent films like "The Place Beyond the Pines" and the studio system imprimatur of a key role as the Green Goblin in "The Amazing Spiderman 2." In 2017, he is headlining, for the first time in his career, two major films. "A Cure for Wellness," a creepy thriller from Gore Verbinski, the director of "The Ring" and the first three "Pirates of the Caribbean" films, comes out next month, with Mr. DeHaan in nearly every frame. And Luc Besson's "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets," a reportedly 180 million sci fi spectacular the most expensive film ever made in Europe, according to Variety follows in July, with hopes of expanding into a franchise. In that one, Mr. DeHaan is not the surly teenager or the supporting villain: He is, for the first time, the hero, Valerian himself with a supermodel consort, no less: Cara Delevingne. "I feel like Hollywood can really take people, take a hold of them and make them feel pressure that doesn't need to be there," he said. "I don't want Hollywood to influence me, I want to influence Hollywood." He now shuttles there a week or two a year for meetings. (He also admits he takes himself too seriously "almost all the time.") "I think a lot of people put that pressure on themselves," he said, gazing out over the driving range. "I think people feel like this is their moment and they have to capitalize on it, or whatever. I want to do this forever. So I'm more than happy to just kind of let things happen." It helps that he has not been without an acting job since graduating from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in 2008. He had been so eager to act that he finished high school there as well, as part of its high school program. "I never waited tables out of school," he said. "I waited tables summers between college in anticipation of waiting tables." His return to the restaurant never arrived. He followed a well worn path the "Law Order" guest appearance, Off Broadway theater, recurring roles on HBO before crossing over onto the big screen. Luckily, he added, even if doing "The Aliens," a three man play by the Pulitzer winner Annie Baker, which he performed in a 104 seat theater and for which he won an Obie Award, was "one of the best experiences of my career." "Still," he added, "when I was doing Off Broadway plays, I would have been making more money collecting unemployment." Mr. DeHaan looks younger than his 30 years, and his delicate, almost alien handsomeness makes him an unusual fit for a Hollywood megastar. He had to adopt a "bro lifestyle" to bulk up for "Valerian." But he has always found support among directors, including Steven Spielberg, who cast him in a small part in "Lincoln," and Mr. Cianfrance. At the time of his casting in that film, Mr. DeHaan was not well known; Mr. Cianfrance had not seen any of his other films. "There was discussion of other more established actors for that role, and actors that would have secured financing in an easier way in that time," he said. "But across the board, he was undeniable." Mr. DeHaan has an intensity that holds the screen, whether he is uncovering the sinister truth about a Swiss spa in "A Cure for Wellness" ("We want to do what 'Jaws' did to a day at the beach to the health spa," Mr. Verbinski said) or battling aliens as a time traveling special agent in "Valerian." "With Dane, 30 seconds after I sat down at the bar with him, the restaurant, I knew that it was him, for sure," said Mr. Besson, the director of "Valerian." "After one minute, my problem is, if he says no, I'm in trouble. It was already printed in my head." "Valerian" is a different kind of film, and a different kind of acting, for Mr. DeHaan, who is classically trained and speaks reverently of "doing" rather than "acting." (On the inside of his forearm, "i do." is tattooed in tiny letters, as a reminder.) "Valerian" was shot largely in front of a blue screen, for the visual effects to be added in later. And yet, Mr. Besson said, "you can see what he's seeing. He's watching the alien or the spaceship. You have no doubt about it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
It's actually very difficult to attract mosquitoes. It may not feel that way on a warm and sticky summer night. But every time a mosquito sneaks up to an animal thousands of times its size to feed, it is trying to pull off something extremely dangerous, said Matthew DeGennaro, a mosquito geneticist and professor at Florida International University. The right cues a whiff of exhaled carbon dioxide, warmth, a bit of body odor, other mysterious elements of animal smell have to be there, or mosquitoes won't take the risk. To design traps that could lure mosquitoes, scientists would love to know how they are picking up on these cues. In a paper published Thursday in Current Biology, Dr. DeGennaro and colleagues report that they have unraveled part of the mystery: They've identified a receptor in the mosquito's antennae that allows the insects to detect lactic acid, a substance from human sweat that the bugs find very attractive. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The work began years ago when Dr. DeGennaro, then working in the lab of Leslie Vosshall at Rockefeller University, identified another odor receptor mosquitoes used to home in on prey. However, even with that receptor destroyed, mosquitoes could still find humans as long as carbon dioxide was floating around. That suggested that other receptors, presumably ones that detect carbon dioxide, were compensating for the loss. Dr. DeGennaro and his colleagues went in search of these other players, starting with a receptor called Ir8a. Its role was not yet clear. The researchers put mosquitoes that had been engineered to lack Ir8a into chambers where they were exposed to various combinations of carbon dioxide, lactic acid, warm temperatures and the arms of human volunteers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Nissan, these days, makes two kinds of cars. There are the inoffensive high volume machines like Sentra, Altima, Rogue and Pathfinder. And then there are the others, vehicles so keenly focused (and often eccentric) that you'd think they came from an entirely different maker. These include the Leaf, the Murano CrossCabriolet, the Cube, the GT R and today's subject, the Juke Nismo. The Juke looks like the company car for Zog, Lord of the Xterra Galaxy. Which reminds me: put the Xterra in that second group, too. Most crossovers can't risk indulging in a polarizing exterior design. But Nissan already has the Rogue to chase mainstream buyers, so the Juke can afford to get freaky. The Juke Nismo a quicker, more powerful Juke presumes you're already on board with the Juke's styling but would like its performance enhanced by the Nissan Motorsports department, known as Nismo. About that styling: I love it, but you might hate it. In any case, I doubt anyone is ambivalent. When first confronted with the Juke, my 3 year old son remarked, "That car have lots of lights and eyes on it." That's as accurate a description of the Juke front end as you'll get. The face is dominated by bug eye headlamps, and the running lights bulge up above the hood such that they're in the driver's line of sight. At night, the effect is of large bioluminescent slugs lounging atop the front fenders. Admittedly, it's more appealing than I'm making it sound. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Ambrose Akinmusire, 36, may be the most distinctive, elusive and ultimately satisfying trumpeter of his generation. With a prickly, attenuated tone, he plays in little diving gestures, often wrapping his phrases around a crooked peg. When moving up a scale, he sometimes skips across an unexpected interval, as if he's just built you a bust and left off the nose. But what if his trumpet isn't the biggest point? Looking at his career, his horn might matter most as a periscope into his compositions, which tend to be full group affairs, too rich for any one instrument to carry. On "Origami Harvest," his scorching and emphatic new album, the trumpet is often absent altogether. This is Mr. Akinmusire's most absorbing work since "When the Heart Emerges Glistening," from 2011, a contemporary classic by his quintet. "Origami Harvest" stretches six lengthy tracks across a full hour of snarled interplay between the classical strings of the Mivos Quartet; Mr. Akinmusire and his two improvising brethren, Marcus Gilmore on drums and Sam Harris on piano; and the poet and rapper Victor Vazquez, a former member of Das Racist, who goes by Kool A.D. The result is a tangled portrait of anxieties, one that adheres to its own standards of beauty, taking no particular tradition for granted. More than almost any other contemporary improviser, Mr. Akinmusire has invented a way of composing that's unfixed from jazz's stickiest conventions: Musicians trade the melody; solos evade a clear path or just cut out; tempos disintegrate. He's rooted but not referential. So, while "Origami Harvest" is being billed as a kind of classical meets rap album, his source materials were bound to be more complex than that. If anything, he's working from his own deconstructed versions of chamber music and hip hop. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A Fossilized Finger Bone May Be From the Earliest Humans on the Arabian Peninsula Archaeologists on Monday announced the discovery of a fossilized human finger bone in the desert of Saudi Arabia that they said was 85,000 years old. If confirmed, the finding would be the first and earliest Homo sapiens fossil found on the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the oldest specimen of our species to be directly dated outside of Africa and its doorstep, the Levant. Along with recent finds of 80,000 year old human teeth from Asia and 65,000 year old human relics from Australia, the Arabian finger bone provides further evidence that early modern humans spread out of Africa much earlier and farther than previously thought. "It's a discovery that we've been expecting for a while," said Robyn Inglis, an archaeologist at the University of York in England who was not involved in the research. "It's become increasingly clear that humans dispersed far out of Africa and the Levant before 60,000 years ago, a date suggested by genetics." Traditionally, the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa was portrayed as a single exodus from the continent that highlights one stop to the next, like a New York City subway map. But archaeologists and paleoanthropologists have challenged that idea, saying the journey was much more complicated and probably filled with numerous routes, departures and delays. "This discovery of a fossil finger bone for me is like a dream come true because it supports arguments that our teams have been making for more than 10 years," Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and an author on the paper, which was published in Nature Ecology Evolution, said during a media briefing. "This find, together with other finds in the last few years, suggest that modern humans, Homo sapiens, are moving out of Africa multiple times during many windows of opportunity during the last 100,000 years or so," he said. Arabia was at the heart of that dispersal from Africa into Asia. But at the time when this ancient person lived, the Arabian Peninsula was almost alien from what it is today. Instead of being bone dry with endless red sand, it was a lush grassland awash in lakes and rivers and teeming with wildlife like ostriches, gazelles and hippos. For more than a decade, the team had searched the vast desert for clues. They had dug up hundreds of stone tools, collected satellite imagery of thousands of paleolakes and found numerous bones belonging to wild cattle, antelopes and other animals. "But one thing was always missing: ancient human fossils," Dr. Groucutt said. In 2016 their colleague Iyad Zalmout, an archaeologist with the Saudi Geological Survey and author on the paper, was prospecting in a site called Al Wusta in the Nefud Desert in the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula. He spotted something white sticking halfway out from the sediment surface. Dr. Zalmout pulled up a cylindrical bone, barely bigger than an inch, that had a socket at one end and a protrusion at the other. "I said: 'What could this be? It doesn't look like any other mammal that we've seen here before,'" said Dr. Zalmout. He showed the find to a colleague, who suggested it may have belonged to a primate, possibly human. Back at the camp they compared it with images of Neanderthal finger bones, but it was much longer and thinner. They concluded it was most likely the phalanx, or middle finger bone, of a Homo sapiens. Biological anthropologists from the University of Cambridge made a three dimensional model of the bone, which they used in a statistical analysis to determine its origin. The test compared the bone with more than 200 finger bones belonging to humans, extinct hominins like Neanderthals and the 'hobbit,' Homo floresiensis, and nonhuman primates like gorillas and chimpanzees. "These studies very strongly demonstrated that this finger bone belongs to a member of our species, Homo sapiens," Dr. Groucutt said. The team suspects that the bone came from a middle finger, though they aren't sure if it was from the right or left hand. They also ruled out the possibility of extracting ancient DNA from the specimen because the arid environment most likely destroyed any genetic material, they said. To determine how old the bone was, the team sent it to Rainer Grun, a dating specialist at Griffith University in Australia, who had previously helped date a 180,000 year old jawbone from an Israeli cave. Using a laser, he and his colleagues drilled seven microscopic holes into the bone. When the bone was buried, it absorbed uranium, which can be measured and provide a minimum age estimate. The fossil came back as being about 88,000 years old. The team also dated a hippopotamus tooth, stone tools and sediments, which provided similar date ranges of about 85,000 to 90,000 years. Dating sites of ancient human occupation can be controversial because often they rely only on measurements of sediments where human remains were found and not the remains themselves. "But here we've dated both the deposits and the fossil finger bone directly," Dr. Petraglia said. "And so we think we have a very, very strong case to make in terms of the dating of this site." So far, the finger bone from Al Wusta is the oldest Homo sapiens fossil found outside of Africa and the Levant that has been directly dated. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
With a new editor in chief, a new staff and a new look, the February issue of Out magazine represented a fresh start for the groundbreaking queer publication. Two young Hollywood stars, Hari Nef and Tommy Dorfman, made for lovely cover subjects. Splashy ads from Louis Vuitton, Cadillac and Gucci seemed like good omens for a prosperous future. And the magazine's 27 year old editor, Phillip Picardi, a recent arrival from Conde Nast, where he was a protege of Anna Wintour, sounded a note of renewal in his message to Out's readers. "Every page you see here has been put together by a brand new team of editors, photographers, stylists, journalists and designers all of whom are keen on documenting queer stories and being a part of queer history," he wrote in his first editor's letter. But all was not well behind the facade. Executives involved in the influential publication, which started in 1992, have been in a bitter dispute for months. And more than 40 writers, editors and photographers have complained publicly that they did not receive compensation for their work. In addition, Pride Media, the company that oversees Out, has laid off five employees and instituted an across the board pay cut of 8 percent, according to its chief executive, Nathan Coyle. A spokesman for Pride Media which is owned by the boutique hedge fund Oreva Capital said payments had been sent to 89 of the freelancers who had not been compensated in a timely fashion. But many contributors are still awaiting their checks. Austin Dale, a writer in Los Angeles, was instrumental in drawing attention to the unpaid freelancers. He said he was owed 1,775 for movie reviews published in 2018 and did not get paid until recently. "It's not a substantial amount of money," he said. "But it would pay six weeks of my rent." Mr. Dale, 28, started his effort to get paid for his work by sending a number of emails to Mr. Coyle. When those emails went unanswered, he pleaded his case on Twitter. That led to other Out freelancers going public with their complaints. To keep track of those who said they had been stiffed, Mr. Dale also created a Google spreadsheet. The invoices he logged ranged from 150 to almost 14,000 for a total of more than 100,000, he said. His next step was to enlist the help of the National Writers Union, which had recently won an 80,000 settlement after filing a lawsuit against Ebony magazine on behalf of 45 unpaid contributors. Larry Goldbetter, the president of the National Writers Union, said he would go the same route on behalf of the Out contributors, if necessary. "We want the publisher to straighten this out," Mr. Goldbetter said. "They can go from being derelict to being a hero and setting an example. Or we'll go to court. And we're not afraid to go to court." Mr. Coyle, the Pride Media head, published a contrite reply on the same platform. "We share in your outrage and have prioritized the resolution of this issue," he wrote. The executive added, "To our contributors, we apologize," before going on to cite Out's formerly byzantine corporate structure as a reason for the missed payments. For the six years that ended on Sept. 1, the editorial division was run by an outside agency founded by Aaron Hicklin, a former editor in chief of Out. Mr. Hicklin started the agency, Grand Editorial, as a cost cutting measure at a time when the publication was in financial trouble. Under the system, Out staff members became contractors, and Pride Media (and its predecessor company, Here Media) paid a monthly fee to Grand Editorial. From that pool of money, the agency sent checks to contributors. Things changed in 2017, when McCarthy Media, a company run by Evanly Schindler, the founder of the glossy magazine BlackBook, acquired Grand Editorial. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In interviews, Mr. Coyle (of Pride Media) and Mr. Hicklin (formerly of Grand Editorial) blamed Mr. Schindler for the missed payments; Mr. Schindler disputed those claims. Last June, the problem at Out became so pronounced that editors refused to go into the office as a print deadline approached. Photo editors struggled to book photographers, who were owed money for previous jobs. "We couldn't function as a team anymore," said Mr. Hicklin, who was the top editor until June. "People were feeling increasingly bitter and frustrated by the broader situation." In mid August, Mr. Coyle decided to end the partnership with McCarthy Media. To get out of the agreement, he said, Pride Media negotiated to pay 18 percent of its monthly fee of 90,000 for a 90 day period. But then, Mr. Coyle said, he had second thoughts and decided against paying up. "We were like, 'This is crazy! There's over 100,000 of funds of the 800,000 given him this year that didn't go to paying people, and now we're paying him all this money?'" Mr. Coyle said. Mr. Schindler said Pride Media had failed to make several of the scheduled monthly payments to McCarthy Media. He also said that the company had never properly terminated the contract, and that it owed McCarthy Media roughly 300,000. "That's why we are in this situation," Mr. Schindler said. Financial records reviewed by The New York Times show that, from January through August 2018, Pride Media transferred nearly 800,000 to an account held by McCarthy Media. In addition to his complaints about Pride Media, Mr. Schindler said Mr. Hicklin bore some responsibility for the unpaid Out contributors. Mr. Hicklin disputed that claim, saying that he had tried to persuade Mr. Schindler to pay the Out freelancers, without much success. The February issue of Out was the first under its new editor, but a lingering fight simmered behind the scenes. "I would sit with him for sometimes three hours to try and get a series of checks and would maybe walk away with a couple," Mr. Hicklin said. "It was an enraging experience." As Pride Media started the process of taking over the editorial operation from the outside agency, it hired Mr. Picardi as the new top editor, along with new staff members who would replace longtime contractors. In November, Bernard Rook, an executive vice president of Pride Media, tried to assuage the unpaid freelancers: "Despite the fact that we've already paid Grand/McCarthy for this work who were contractually obligated to pay you but did not we are committed to making sure your invoices are remedied," he wrote in an email. That came as welcome news to the contributors awaiting payment. But Pride Media wasn't prepared for the many requests for payment that followed. Soon the company stopped replying to invoices, including those filed by freelancers whose work was published after Sept. 1, when Pride Media had taken on the task of paying them. "I didn't realize the magnitude of the problem," Mr. Coyle said. "We repeatedly asked for McCarthy's ledgers for accounts payable, which they've never done. And so we're kind of in the dark." The continued back and forth has annoyed the writers, photographers and editors who are owed money. They don't care who is to blame. They just want their money. For those who have yet to be paid, it may be a long wait. Pride Media said it had decided against making payments to freelancers who, in the company's view, should have received checks from McCarthy Media. Mr. Schindler has been successfully sued for nonpayment in recent years. In a case filed in 2009, which reached its end last year, the New York State Supreme Court ordered him to pay more than 125,000 to Maurizio Marchiori, the former head of marketing at Diesel, because of a money dispute involving a magazine called Tar. In another case, the court ordered Mr. Schindler to pay 50 percent of the 202,000 he owed two Italian businessmen who had invested in the magazine. Mr. Schindler has been sued for nonpayment in at least two other cases, court records show. The unpaid freelancers have kept up the pressure. "The issue we have now is that there is a repeated pattern of a failure to pay and a failure to communicate with us, which is basic respect," Anne christine d'Adesky, a founding editor of Out, said. Michael Musto, the veteran Village Voice columnist and longtime Out contributor, said: "I feel at times we can be our own worst enemy. Queer people get mistreated by non queers, so when we get second class treatment by ourselves, it really hurts." The corporate clash ruined what should have been a honeymoon period for Mr. Picardi, who made his name at Conde Nast as the top editor at Teen Vogue and the founding editor of the website Them. In an interview, he tried to sound hopeful about the future of the venerable publication he now oversees. "For all of us these past and present regimes we can be aligned in saying it's vitally important that Out exists on newsstands and on a website," Mr. Picardi said. "And that Out stands by queer creators and stands by them being paid for their work. We need to value each other, because there are so many people who don't value us." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE (2019) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. "I don't like reasonable people telling me to be reasonable," Terry Gilliam said in an interview with The Times earlier this year. That attitude yielded the existence of this Cervantes adaptation, a longtime passion project of Gilliam's. The famously troubled road to the film's release stretched out over three decades, and included an attempt to shoot it in 2000, with the French actor Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp playing the leads. (Neither appear in the final film, but that period is covered in "Lost in La Mancha," a 2003 documentary about the movie.) The version that was ultimately released instead stars Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver. "Surely a movie so long in gestation, inspired by a doorstop thick novel that has beguiled and baffled readers for several centuries, would turn out to be either a world class catastrophe or a world historical masterpiece," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times. "With a mixture of relief and regret, I must report that the movie is neither." THE STORY OF G.I. JOE (1945) 10 p.m. on TCM. This movie was considered a pinnacle of realistic war films when it came out in the waning days of World War II. That's largely thanks to the fact that it was based on the writings of the Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle, whose articles reflected the experiences of front line soldiers. The movie was nominated for four Academy Awards, but Pyle didn't know that he was killed before its release, while covering the Battle of Okinawa. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
People who work for SoftBank funded start ups around the world have protested the way the companies treat them. Videos of these protests have spread, depicting scenes of violence and unrest.Credit... People who work for SoftBank funded start ups around the world have protested the way the companies treat them. Videos of these protests have spread, depicting scenes of violence and unrest. For five years, Sunil Solankey, a retired captain in the Indian Army, had run the 20 room Four Sight Hotel in a New Delhi suburb. Business was steady, but he longed to make the establishment a destination for lucrative business travelers. Last year, a ho spitality start up called Oyo told Mr. Solankey that it would turn the Four Sight into a flagship hotel for corporate customers. It guaranteed him monthly payments whether the rooms were booked or not, as long as he rebranded the property with Oyo's name and sold the rooms exclusively through its site. At Oyo's request, Mr. Solankey sank 600,000 rupees, or 8,400, into reupholstering the hotel's furniture and adding new linens. But corporate guests did not materialize, and Oyo stopped making the payments. Now he is on the verge of eviction. Mr. Solankey is one of millions of workers and small business people who worked with start ups financed by the biggest venture capital fund in history, the 100 billion Vision Fund run by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. The fund was part of a flood of money that has washed over the world in the past decade and that has upended people's lives when the start ups broke their promises. Masayoshi Son, SoftBank's chief executive, was hailed as a kingmaker in 2016 when he unveiled the Vision Fund. Using the cash hoard, Mr. Son poured money into fledgling companies across the world, many of which have a business model of hiring contractors who deliver their services. Above all, he urged these start ups to grow as fast as possible. Many of the young companies used SoftBank's cash to dangle incentives and other payments to quickly attract as many workers as they could. But when they failed to make a profit and SoftBank changed its tune on growth, the companies often slashed or reneged on those same incentives. That has now left contractors like Mr. Solankey holding the bag. With little power to fight back, many of them have been financially and personally devastated. "These start ups try to get workers attracted to them and bring them within the fold," said Uma Rani, a researcher at the International Labor Organization who is surveying start up contractors in emerging economies. "When the workers attach to the whole thing and are highly dependent on it, then you slash it. This is something we are systematically seeing." SoftBank's Vision Fund is an emblem of a broader phenomenon known as "overcapitalization" essentially, too much cash. Venture funds inundated start ups with more than 207 billion last year, or almost twice the amount invested globally during the dot com peak in 2000, according to CB Insights, a firm that tracks private companies. Flush with the cash, entrepreneurs operated with scant oversight and little regard for profit. All the while, SoftBank and other investors have valued these start ups at inflated levels, leading to an overheated system filled with unsound businesses. When the companies try to cash out by going public, some have run into hurdles. At two of SoftBank's biggest investments, WeWork and Uber, some of these issues have become public. Uber, the ride hailing service, staged an underwhelming initial public offering in May and posted a 1.2 billion loss last week . WeWork, the office leasing company, recently ousted its chief executive and accepted a rescue plan from SoftBank as its value was cut. Last week , SoftBank reported a 4.6 billion hit from its WeWork investment. " Since the money started pouring out of SoftBank, they have completely distorted the priorities and focus of young ventures around the world," said Len Sherman, a Columbia Business School professor. But none have invested as widely in these companies as SoftBank. The Vision Fund, which is nearly 10 times larger than the next biggest venture fund, has 16 of them in its portfolio. Several are among its largest investments . The model of using contractors, which has defined the last decade of start up investing, has created work opportunities . Bu t among people who are most dependent on these companies, unrest is growing. Protests against SoftBank funded start ups have erupted in New York, Bogota, Mumbai and beyond, with many captured on video and posted to YouTube. Some of the videos, which have been viewed thousands of times, showed chanting workers or destruction of property. All displayed a visible frustration. In China alone, three SoftBank backed companies the logistics firm Manbang, the ride sharing service Didi Chuxing and the food delivery company Ele.me faced 32 strikes last year, according to data gathered for The Times by the China Labour Bulletin. Jeff Housenbold, a managing partner at SoftBank's Vision Fund, said, "This is an important, complex issue that predates the Vision Fund and affects many companies we haven't backed in equal measure." That is of little comfort to contractors like Mr. Solankey. "I am in the pit," he said. That month, Oyo told the hotelier it would bring him high paying corporate travelers if he joined its network and upgraded the property. Under the arrangement, Oyo guaranteed him monthly payments of 700,000 rupees, or around 10,000, for three years, according to a contract viewed by The Times. But within a year, the payments evaporated . Instead of business customers, unmarried couples looking for private rooms turned up. And Oyo discounted the rooms so much online that Mr. Solankey could not offer them to guests at a higher price. "It is suicidal for me," he said while sitting recently in his hotel's empty restaurant. Oyo said Mr. Solankey had misrepresented the health of his business before signing the contract. Oyo was founded in 2013 as a website to organize and standardize India's budget hotels. It coaxes small hotels to become Oyo branded destinations that list exclusively on its site, without its having to own most of the properties. SoftBank, which began investing in Oyo in 2015 and now owns nearly half the start up, has pushed to add more hotels to the company's network . Last month , it helped the site raise 1.5 billion, valuing it at 10 billion and making it India's second most valuable start up. "It's completely a new type of hotel, and they are growing so fast," Mr. Son said of Oyo last year. "The number of rooms and net growth is going to continue at the pace of more than 10,000." Oyo now claims to offer more than 1.2 million rooms, including in China and the United States, where it recently bought the Hooters Casino Hotel in Las Vegas. It has scaled up partly by promising hoteliers monthly payments, made possible by SoftBank's money. The payments, which are an advance on the hotel owner's share of room revenue , were supposed to be paid no matter how many rooms were booked. In exchange, the hotels added free breakfasts and linens in Oyo's signature red and white. They agreed to book all rooms even walk in guests through Oyo and let it control how the rooms were sold on other sites. But those payments led to rising losses in India. And over the last year, SoftBank has pushed Oyo on profitability rather than just growth, said current and former employees of the start up, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation . Several hotel associations said Oyo had now canceled or cut the payments. Some also said Oyo had deeply discounted room rates and increased its commissions and fees. "The situation is so bad, we're looking at it as a scam," said Pradeep Shetty, the honorary joint secretary of the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India, which represents around 3,000 hotels and filed the competition complaint. Ritesh Agarwal, who founded Oyo when he was 19, said in an interview that only a few hotels had been unhappy or tried to leave. He said Oyo had occasionally reduced the guaranteed minimums, but only when hotels had misrepresented their business in contract negotiations. "Asset owners continue to believe that Oyo is the best option in terms of the value proposition we can provide for them," he said. Not Mr. Solankey. He said he was losing 150,000 rupees, or 2,100, a month. While he plans to quit Oyo, he needs the money the company owes him. Oyo has offered to pay just half the debt and then only if he signs a new contract with no guaranteed payments, according to correspondence shared with The Times. Mr. Solankey has taken out loans, but fallen behind on rent and electricity payments. In September , his power was temporarily cut off . This month , his landlord asked him to vacate the property. Mr. Molina reported the theft to Rappi. The company told him to pay back the 35 he had collected from customers and buy a new cellphone himself. Mr. Molina, 21, borrowed money from his mother. "They never support us," he said of Rappi. Like many SoftBank funded start ups, Rappi not only depends on contractors to deliver its services but also offloads its fixed costs and the risks of the work onto them. The company, established in 2016 by three Colombian entrepreneurs, harnesses bike and motorcycle riders to deliver everything from flowers to cash from the A.T.M. In Colombia alone, it has 20,000 couriers. This year, SoftBank gave Rappi 1 billion twice as much as what the company had gotten from all its previous investors combined. In announcing the funding, SoftBank declared that the start up, which it valued at 2.5 billion, would be responsible for "improving the lives of millions in the region." SoftBank's money has helped Rappi expand into nine South American countries. And the company initially offered drivers 3,500 pesos, or around 1, for every delivery enough to earn more than Colombia's minimum wage of around 8 a day. In return, couriers provided their own cellphones, bikes and motorcycles. They had to buy a Rappi delivery bag, which costs around 25 . And they have to shoulder most of the physical risks of delivery. In August, a judge in Argentina ordered Rappi and two other delivery services there to shut down until they provided workers with insurance and safety equipment like helmets. The judge said 25 couriers had been treated in Buenos Aires public hospitals over the previous month. In an email last year, Robert Reffkin, the founder and chief executive of Compass, apologized to his company for its bumpy growth. His New York firm, which received 1 billion from SoftBank, had sprouted to 8,000 real estate agents from 2,100 in a year. Mr. Reffkin said the company had been unprepared to integrate agencies it had bought and had pushed brokers to use technology that wasn't ready. "I've learned that moving too fast," Mr. Reffkin wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Times, "can be just as dangerous as moving too slowly." Compass , which Mr. Reffkin founded in 2012 as a tech enabled real estate firm, has expanded rapidly since SoftBank invested in 2017. Mr. Reffkin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, said in a Wired interview that year that the money would let it compress its three year growth plan into one. "They are making a great growth," Mr. Son said of Compass in 2018. "This company, I believe, is going to be a great unicorn." Compass, which is valued at 6.4 billion, now has 13,000 agents, all contractors, in 238 offices across the United States. It has grown by promising some agents bonuses and 90 percent of the commissions on future deals, in an industry where 70 percent to 80 percent is standard. The breakneck growth has led to cracks. Several top executives have recently left, as have recently arrived brokers. One was Tricia Ponicki, 44, who started at a Compass office in Chicago in February. She said she had been drawn by the generous compensation; the company also promised more resources to aid home sales. But there was so much turnover in Compass's marketing offices that it took three months to produce a brochure for a house. When she requested a For Sale sign, she was told they were back ordered. Her husband made the sign instead. "Right from the beginning, I was constantly being misled and misled," she said. Over six months with Compass, Ms. Ponicki sold one property, earning 4,300. A year earlier, she had netted around 100,000 selling homes at a local agency. In August, the mother of four applied for food stamps. She also returned to her old agency, At Properties, where her sales have picked up, she said. C ompass employees and agents have generated less revenue per person than other online brokerage firms and, sometimes, even traditional ones, a ccording to research by Mike DelPrete, an independent real estate strategist and visiting scholar at the University of Colorado. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In order to live cheaply in Santa Monica, the central characters of "Three's Company" Janet, Jack and Chrissy (from left, Joyce DeWitt, John Ritter and Suzanne Somers) pretended Jack was gay. High jinks ensued. During a yearlong, semi melodramatic existential crisis in my early 20s, I waited tables all day, panicked about the future at night, watched TV (while panicking) and did it all again the next day. One night, I flipped through channels and landed on "Three's Company" to see Jack Tripper (John Ritter), Janet Wood (Joyce DeWitt) and Chrissy Snow (Suzanne Somers) pratfalling around their plant filled 1970s apartment. Suddenly, watching reruns on Nick at Nite became my salvation. Until I could find a better job or solve the riddle of my existence, I had "Three's Company." Years later, in the midst of a different crisis (one that involved being a working mom during a global pandemic), I found myself once again searching for "Three's Company." I needed the disco era sexual innuendos and ridiculous double entendres. I longed to watch Jack somersault over a couch or tumble into a table. This time around, beyond belly laughing at Jack's expressions, I've truly come to appreciate not only the humorous escapism of the show but also, dare I say it, the high art of it. Or maybe high art is too much. No one would ever confuse "Three's Company" with Masterpiece Theater. Still, even the silliest pratfalls require artistry. "Three's Company" aired on ABC from 1977 until 1984, and it was based on the British comedy "Man About the House." In the American version, Jack, an aspiring chef, has to pretend to be gay so that his Puritanical landlord, Mr. Roper (Norman Fell), will allow him to live with two women in a 300 Santa Monica apartment. The presumption was that a straight man living with two women was so scandalous, it was better to live a lie. Viewed one way, it was a progressive reversal in an era when gay men were more likely than they are today to live a lie by staying closeted. But of course Jack wasn't actually gay, so he relied on certain stereotypes to pretend that he was, and there was no shortage of homophobic jokes and remarks. Still, the show seems self aware, and there's a sense that the writers' sympathies were on the right side. The gay panic comes mainly from Mr. Roper (later replaced by Don Knotts as Mr. Furley), an Archie Bunker type bigot who uses slurs like "fairy" and "Tinker Bell" to describe Jack. And Ritter brings so much humanity to the goofy Jack, however he's presenting, that you always get the sense he's winking at the audience (or rolling his eyes) when Mr. Roper flashes his homophobia. We're not meant to side with the landlord. During its seven year run, Ritter and the show won Emmys and Golden Globes, and his delivery and physicality put him up there with the comedy greats. The show is still in syndication, airing in blocs on Logo TV multiple days a week. (Cord cutters can watch it on Pluto TV.) In addition to its ability to obliterate existential angst, here are three reasons I love the show. "Three's Company" packs so many pratfalls, sexual innuendos and misunderstandings into each episode that the effort alone is worthy of a Peabody. Many of the double entendres come from the Ropers, especially the caftan clad Mrs. Roper (Audra Lindley), a sex starved wife who reads books with titles like "The Passionate Contessa" and tries to hypnotize her husband into sex. (It doesn't work). A typical example of Roper banter happens when Mr. Roper is asking about financial investments, and his wife deadpans: "Forget it, Stanley. If you own it, it's sure to go down." Silly, sure, but one reason the quips are so impressive is that there are so many of them. It's not all slapstick and sex jokes, though. In a Season 2 episode called "Roper's Car," Jack, Janet and Chrissy buy Mr. Roper's beat up Chevy for 212.60. When Janet and Chrissy worry about the cost, Jack says, "Do you realize if people waited until they could afford things, it would destroy the entire economy of this country?" The joke still plays. And of course, there are those pratfalls. Watching Ritter flop and roll and fling his body around is like watching a bell bottomed version of Chaplin or Harold Lloyd. Some of the humor is dated, but the physical comedy is timeless. There's a whole lot of ogling, groping and flat out misogyny going on in "Three's Company." There are blonde jokes and cringe worthy moments when Jack's buddy Larry (Richard Kline) leers at women, or worse. It's easy to dismiss the show's sexism as just that, but I think it's also part of the joke. In the opening credits, Mr. Roper is introduced as a peeping Tom, peering out his window with binoculars. These men aren't meant to be lauded. They're meant to be laughed at. Yes, there are plenty of moments in the show that might make a modern viewer gasp, and it's not as if I long for that era. Still, the sexism in "Three's Company" is truly something to marvel at because it's so in your face. Although they're not exactly modern pillars of female empowerment, Janet and Chrissy do hold their own with the creeps. And if Chrissy didn't prance around in her negligee, it wouldn't be "Three's Company." The show is not known for its subtleties. In the fifth season, Somers was replaced by Jenilee Harrison, who played Chrissy's cousin Cindy. Then came the third blonde, Nurse Terri (Priscilla Barnes), to replace Cindy. For me, though, it's always about Jack, Janet and Chrissy. Their loyalty to one another tugs my heartstrings. Jack is constantly punching jerks who insult his best friends, and the episodes usually involve at least one group hug. I like to imagine how their friendship would hold up during a pandemic. Would Jack make souffles all day? Would Chrissy give up on her negligees and start borrowing Janet's more practical knee socks and T shirt gowns? Would Janet become even more obsessed with house plants? In the Season 2 episode "Janet's High School Sweetheart," Chrissy loans Janet her "almost Halston dress" (a J.C. Penney dress with a Halston label sewn in) for a date. The date turns out to be a lech, and Jack and Chrissy swoop in to help their buddy. A group hug ensues. Their friendship anchors the show, and it's comforting knowing that Jack Tripper will always step up, knock over a lamp and punch out a creep for his friends. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
DORTMUND, Germany Borussia Dortmund's players hung back a little, idling halfway between the center circle and the goal. With Paris St. Germain jerseys slung over their shoulders, the spoils of battle, they clapped each other on the back, they exchanged high fives, they ruffled each others' hair. Most of all, though, they waited for him to have his moment. A few yards ahead, Erling Haaland stood in front of the Yellow Wall, the soaring South stand of Signal Iduna Park. Just after Christmas, he had finally decided to join Borussia Dortmund picking the club from a long, slavering queue of would be suitors, ranging from Manchester United to RB Leipzig in part because of the prospect of playing in front of what is, arguably, the most iconic terrace in European soccer. The support of the Yellow Wall forms a considerable part of Dortmund's sales pitch. Haaland had, by all accounts, long hoped to experience it. Now here he was, 51 days later, basking in its adulation. He applauded it, a little. He raised his arms above his head in celebration. He offered a thumbs up. Mostly, he just stared. In return, the thousands of fans in front of him, the bricks of the Yellow Wall, showered him with love. In deference to what he had just done, his teammates waited. They let him take the acclaim. Only when Axel Witsel could wait no longer, when he just had to start dancing, did they start to join Haaland. Until then, it was all about him. He has that ability: the capacity to make everyone else a bystander. Haaland's start to life at Dortmund has, frankly, been a little unrealistic. So too, for that matter, has been his first season in the Champions League. There is clearly a glitch in the system somewhere, a fault in the algorithm. This is, after all, the most exclusive tournament in world soccer. It is the highest level of the game. It is an aspiration, a dream, the ultimate test. Players spend years hoping to have a chance to play in the competition; many of the finest of their generation will end their careers without ever having made quite the impression on it that they might had hoped. Haaland still only 19, still a touch raw, still learning is making it all look suspiciously easy. He scored a hat trick in his first game in the Champions League, back in September, back when he was still playing for Red Bull Salzburg. He scored in his next four games in the competition, too; only Liverpool, in his sixth Champions League match, stopped his run. Then he moved to Dortmund. He was a substitute in his first game for his new club. He came on in the 56th minute. Twenty three minutes later, he had scored a hat trick. He scored two more in his next game. The following week, he scored twice in his first start. He currently has eight goals in five appearances in the Bundesliga. The last 16 of the Champions League was supposed to be a step up, of course, a challenge of another magnitude. P.S.G. is, after all, one of the most expensive teams ever built. It is a team rated perhaps a little self servingly as the favorite to win the tournament by Jurgen Klopp, the manager of the reigning champion, Liverpool. Asking a teenager to carry the fight to a defense of Thiago Silva, Marquinhos and Presnel Kimpembe felt like a bold call from Lucien Favre, Dortmund's coach. Those who know Haaland, though, those who have tracked his career from its beginnings in Norway, say that he possesses a rare calm, a sort of beatific single mindedness. He is fazed by little, or nothing. He betrays not a flicker of nervousness. He is not the sort to worry that he does not belong. Strikers considerably more experienced than him might, perhaps, have grown a little frustrated Tuesday in a first half that was a little more cagey than most expected. Dortmund has won countless admirers in recent years for its sense of adventure, its risk taking, its dynamism. It has long had a fatal flaw, though: a tendency toward self immolation, an ability to scupper itself at any given moment. It is a trait shared by P.S.G., at least in the Champions League. The French champion's attack is fearsome so good that it could afford to leave Edinson Cavani and Mauro Icardi on the bench at Dortmund but it is not quite good enough to mask what is more a psychological vulnerability than anything else: invariably, P.S.G. seems to melt in the white heat of the competition it has been built to win. This was, then, supposed to be one of those wild games that occur ever more frequently in this tournament, all breakneck counterattacking and slapstick defending. That was what everyone wanted to see nine goals here, split the difference, head back to Paris in three weeks to do it all again with two notable exceptions: Favre and Thomas Tuchel, P.S.G.'s coach. For more than an hour, the stalemate held: P.S.G. had the possession, Dortmund tried to strike on the break. Haaland, starved of opportunities, stuck to his job: he chased and harried; he took up his pressing positions; he sniffed around for chances. He did not lose heart. He did not lose focus. His moment was coming. Or rather, his moments. The first strike, to open the scoring, was pure predator: that rare ability that strikers have to somehow turn up at the right place and the right time, stretching out a leg, lifting the ball over Keylor Navas. But it was the second, after Neymar had tied the score, that shook the Yellow Wall. Darting on to a pass from Giovanni Reyna, the 17 year old American thrown on as a substitute, taking a touch, and then sending a left footed shot screeching past Navas. That was Haaland's 10th goal in seven Champions League games this season. It was his 11th in his time at Dortmund. Raw data, though, is an unsatisfactory metric to communicate what made it so special: it was the power of the shot, how early he took it, the certainty with which he did so. Haaland has only just arrived in Dortmund, in the Champions League but he already knows he belongs. His teammates sensed it, too. This, now, is his moment. There is nothing else to do but let him enjoy it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Federal health regulators approved a drug overdose treatment device on Thursday that experts say will provide a powerful lifesaving tool in the midst of a surging epidemic of prescription drug abuse. Similar to an EpiPen used to stop allergic reactions to bee stings, the easy to use injector small enough to tuck into a pocket or a medicine cabinet can be used by the relatives or friends of people who have overdosed. The hand held device, called Evzio, delivers a single dose of naloxone, a medication that reverses the effects of an overdose, and will be used on those who have stopped breathing or lost consciousness from an opioid drug overdose. Naloxone is the standard treatment in such circumstances, but until now, has been available mostly in hospitals and other medical settings, when it is often used too late to save the patient. The decision to quickly approve the new treatment, which is expected to be available this summer, comes as deaths from opioids continue to mount, including an increase in those from heroin, which contributed to the death of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in February. Federal health officials, facing criticism for failing to slow the rising death toll, are under pressure to act, experts say. "This is a big deal, and I hope gets wide attention," said Dr. Carl R. Sullivan III, director of the addictions program at West Virginia University. "It's pretty simple: Having these things in the hands of people around drug addicts just makes sense because you're going to prevent unnecessary mortality." The scourge of drug abuse has battered states across the country, with deaths from overdoses now outstripping those from traffic crashes. Prescription drugs alone now account for more than half of all drug overdose deaths, and one major category of them, opioids, or painkillers, take the lives of more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined. Deaths from opioids have quadrupled in 10 years to more than 16,500 in 2010, according to federal data. Once turned on, the new instruments will give verbal instruction about how to deliver the medication, similar to automated defibrillators that hang in public buildings. Food and Drug Administration officials said they speedily approved the device in just 15 weeks because it is critical to prevent deaths. Experts applauded the F.D.A.'s decision, saying it could lead to the broad dissemination of the drug, which has rarely been available to the families and friends of drug abusers, who are often the first to find them when they have overdosed. Dr. Nathaniel Katz, assistant professor of anesthesia at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, whose company, Analgesic Solutions, develops treatments for pain, said the approval would "catalyze the adoption of this treatment." "We have 17,000 fatal opioid overdoses every year," he said. "You can potentially prevent a chunk of them with this technique." Deaths have climbed despite efforts by states and the federal government. In January 2013, an expert panel convened by the F.D.A. recommended tightening prescription practices. In September, the F.D.A. changed labeling requirements to indicate that the opioids only be used in patients with no other treatment options for their pain. The agency's critics said it was drawing attention to its approval of the new device the conference call for reporters included Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary because it was defensive about its record on opioids. The F.D.A. has been under pressure since last fall when it approved Zohydro, a new hydrocodone drug, a prescription opioid, against the advice of an expert panel. The drug differs from other painkillers in that it is a pure form of hydrocodone, without acetaminophen, in an extended release form, and the agency contended that it would help patients who needed longer term treatment for pain and wanted to avoid the risks of liver problems from acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. But health officials who deal with abuse of opioids strongly objected to the approval, saying the drug was an unnecessary addition to the long list of pain drugs on the market. In December, attorneys general from 28 states wrote the agency's commissioner, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, asking her to reconsider the approval. Massachusetts announced a ban on the drug last week, and last month, Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, submitted a bill to require the F.D.A. to reverse its decision. Dr. Katz of Tufts University said the federal government could be doing more to combat the drug epidemic, for example requiring doctors who prescribe highly addictive opioids to get training in how to do it properly. Such training is now voluntary, though Dr. Hamburg said on a conference call on Thursday that she believed it should be mandatory. Dr. Katz said of the agency's approval of Evzio, "They're plucking the low lying fruit, but the hard things haven't been done." But Dr. Hamburg defended the agency's record. "Tackling the opioid epidemic is a high priority for the F.D.A.," she said, adding that the device is "an extremely important innovation that will save lives." Some states have already taken steps to make naloxone more broadly available, though mostly through a patchwork of pilot programs. In Massachusetts and Maryland, police departments have a standing order from health departments to allow emergency medical workers to use naloxone. In New Jersey and Ohio, there are laws allowing people who may witness an overdose to administer naloxone. But Dr. Eric Edwards, chief medical officer of Kaleo, the pharmaceutical company that produces Evzio, said naloxone treatment used outside hospitals today involved injectable formulations with glass vials, syringes and, in about half the cases, attachments requiring assembly to create a nasal spray. The new device is the shape of a credit card, the thickness of a cellphone, and has a contractible needle the user never even sees. The company said they had not yet finalized the price. Some voiced concerns that the device might create new problems. "I'm worried that there will be a false sense of security" among drug users, said James Rathmell, chief of the division of pain medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. "Like, 'O.K., I've got a naloxone pen, we can party all we want, no one is going to die.' " Dr. Sullivan, of West Virginia, disagreed. "This is going to help way more than it is going to hurt," he said. David Hufferd, 31, a former addict in Portsmouth, Ohio, whose wife died of an overdose of OxyContin in 2010, said he would buy one of the devices to have on hand in case one of his friends or family members who still actively abuse drugs needed help. "You never know who is going to show up at your doorstep," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The gym's income plunged 90 percent in the three months leading up to its reopening in mid June, with instructors offering "home nastic" programs over Zoom to try to salvage some of that business, said the facility's founder and owner, Kelly Bingel. Paycheck Protection Program funds kept staff members on payroll throughout the closure and helped pay for two months' rent at the gym's two facilities, helping the company get started in June once Virginia allowed facilities to reopen. Here's a look at who some of the other recipients were: A 350,000 loan allowed the National Skeet Shooting Association to continue to pay the 34 members of its national staff office throughout the pandemic and made it possible for members to work from home effectively. Skeet shooting, which has about 40,000 participants worldwide, is competitive and requires travel, according to Michael Hampton, the nonprofit's executive director. Losing 30 percent to 45 percent of participation in tournaments across the country, plus the cancellation of some events that normally draw more than 700 participants, was bruising for the association. But the losses did bring in some new shooters. "An interesting and positive thing that this has done is gathered more participation from people in communities," Mr. Hampton said. "They are going out because it's a recreation that they can still do, and more people are going to those local events." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
One reason is a lack of boundaries. They think the rules don't apply to them. And you know what? They are right, the rules don't. They get all this exclusive access to everything, because people are courting them for their money. The rules don't apply even if the billionaire wants them to apply, and that makes it challenging to have boundaries. Professionals with very strict codes of conduct will loosen their own boundaries to work with these individuals and not get fired by them. It becomes hard for a billionaire to get objective feedback from others because of their status. We've been fired by more than one ultrawealthy person because they didn't hear from us what they wanted to hear, and they have five or six other experts around them that will say what they want to hear. What is the biggest misconception people have about billionaires? We think the very wealthy are nefarious and greedy, and that money corrupts them. We don't have to look too far to find well known wealthy people doing some terrible things with their money. But I find that generally, they want to do something constructive with their money, and are looking for ways to help and contribute. In general, billionaires, like everyone else, want to be loved, find purpose and feel safe. And those core values and needs drive all of us, not just the 1 percent of the 1 percent. When billionaires come to you, what are they concerned about? The ultra high net worth clients of ours, including billionaires, tend to want to be more responsible with their money. Many are worried about the next generation and are wanting to take steps to set them up for success. They don't want their children to be psychologically messed up around money, and that usually means being financially dependent or financially irresponsible. Financial dependence, whether it is with multigenerational welfare families or multigenerational trust fund families, is quite debilitating. In our research, we have found that financial dependence is associated with a lack of passion, creativity and drive, and is also associated with feelings of resentment towards whomever controls the purse strings. Money is a powerful reinforcer of behavior, and when it is given freely and is not attached to desired behaviors, it can reinforce a lack of initiative or drive. For the ultrawealthy, it is a lot easier to pass down money to children than it is to pass down values. The latter requires careful consideration. If the wealthy individual is a first generation earner, much of their success has come from long work hours and sacrificing time with their family. Many are trying to make up for their lack of availability as their children were growing up and can see the damage that has done. Some financially enabled their children quite accidentally, as they were only trying to give their children a better childhood than they themselves had. Some are prone to use money as instruments of control or give money to others out of a sense of guilt. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
"Give it up, Mr. President for your sake and the nation's." In a blunt editorial, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, a tabloid that promoted Donald J. Trump long before he went into politics, told the president to end his attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. The Monday front page showed a downcast president and the all caps headline "Stop the Insanity." The publication's website also featured the editorial, written by The Post's editorial board, at the top of the home page. "Mr. President, it's time to end this dark charade," began the editorial. It blasted Mr. Trump's suggestion that the House and Senate try to disrupt the tallying of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6. It also ridiculed Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for the Trump campaign who pushed conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States. And it said a suggestion by Michael T. Flynn, the former lieutenant general who served as Mr. Trump's first national security adviser, to impose martial law was "tantamount to treason." "You have tweeted that, as long as Republicans have 'courage,' they can overturn the results and give you four more years in office," the Post editorial said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Is there any device in your home more confounding, ever changing and indecipherable than the modems and routers that take the internet in and out of your home? Luckily, we have Nathan Edwards, The Wirecutter's lead editor for networking, who spends his days and nights overseeing the testing and recommendation of new technology to buy and the technology to wait just a bit longer for. I keep seeing ads for mesh networks popping up on my computer. Is this something that we all need to be considering for our homes? Probably not. But home mesh networking kits like Eero or Netgear's Orbi are going to appeal to people who aren't happy with the speed or range of their Wi Fi system, don't like that their router is complicated to set up and use, or want something that's not ugly. It sounds like I want it. Is it better than any router? For some people. Home mesh systems work like your normal Wi Fi router, but come with several satellite units that pick up the Wi Fi signal before it becomes too weak and rebroadcast it farther. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
When the coronavirus pandemic started, the first thing I did was panic. I didn't want to bum anyone out, but it didn't take me long to leap to a certain conclusion: With theaters and studios shutting down, the dance world would be devastated. What would come out of the ashes? For a while I thought that the answer had to do with digital dance and how it might develop into something exciting. (That could still happen! It has its moments! People are trying!) But soon I started to obsess about the radical dance movement of the 1930s. Back then, protests and social justice were part of the fabric of modern dance as it met the moment of the Great Depression and the rise of authoritarianism. "The Dance Is a Weapon." That was the title of the first recital of the New Dance Group, a socially minded collective formed in 1932. For me, that period of dance haunts the time we're living in the pandemic, the election, the uprisings against racial injustice like a good, progressive ghost. It reminds us that dance is about what's happening in the world as much as it's about the poetry of bodies on a stage. This art form that I love is undernourished and undervalued, full of inequity among forms and an uneven balance of power among funders, presenters, choreographers and always last, though hopefully not for long dancers. In New York, it's no big mystery why the dancers who have been able to perform and work together in bubbles outside of the city predominantly come from ballet. Compared with other forms, ballet the rich uncle on the dance family tree is where much of the money and institutional power reside. While ballet is certainly worthy, dance is bigger than any one form. (And with theaters closed and no opening day in sight, ballet is struggling, too.) It might seem that freelance artists working in more experimental circles don't carry as much weight as those whose dance home is Lincoln Center, where American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet perform. But they tend to be the ones imagining new ways to explore the body and the intricacies of movement. These freelance artists don't belong to unions; they don't have health insurance. No institutions have their back. They are dangling in the wind, in part, because of the kind of dance they champion. It's bad out there, and it's going to get worse. With most performances halted, the part of dance that happens behind the scenes is increasingly difficult, if not impossible. It's a social art form ideas don't just incubate in studios. They come from conversations after class, or bumping into someone on the street, or in bars or at restaurants. And there's something about watching a dance with others that completes the work; I've been lucky to see a few performances in outdoor settings, but after the initial euphoria of watching live dance with an audience much of it seemed generic, business as usual. Yes, dancers need to move, but how? Under what circumstances can they carry urgency and weight? At the same time, there is some urgency and friction developing around a dancer's place in the world, around funding, around agency and around the structural racism of institutions. And alongside the rise of the movements for equality, like Black Lives Matter, it feels like this is a new era of the dance artist as activist someone who links the injustices raging in the world with issues in dance. At the start of the pandemic when performances and commissions were canceled, two choreographers, Emily Johnson and Miguel Gutierrez, spoke out. "In NONE of the cancellation emails does anyone mention a partial payment of the fee or acknowledge the commitment and the economic implication of losing the income," Mr. Gutierrez wrote in an Instagram post. "These are challenging times for everyone, but I want to remind all the presenters, universities, summer dance festivals, etc. (I'm speaking for many here) ... THIS IS MY FULL TIME JOB." Earlier this summer, a group initiated "Creating New Futures: Working Guidelines for Ethics Equity in Presenting Dance Performance," an in progress, collectively written document. Now in its first phase and at nearly 200 pages, the document is inspiring and rambling, insistent and hopeful. In it are galvanizing words by novelist and activist Arundhati Roy, who in April wrote in The Financial Times, "Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew." How can the culture of dance and performance be imagined anew? The group is searching for more transparency in funding as well as a more democratic distribution of what money there is. At the moment, that feels tenuous: Most institutions seem to be on the edge of an abyss, too. But this is the time to dream big and, from their insider perspectives, to come up with a plan and to acknowledge the truth about dance's ecosystem. Activism emerges in other ways, too: One obvious but important thing is to just keep dance alive. In early October, Dance Rising Collective, a new organization of artists and administrators, held Dancing Rising: N.Y.C., a two night event in which dancers performed at outdoor locations across the city. The same weekend, in solidarity with Dance Rising, Wide Awakes Dance Corps joined a citywide procession to offer "Soul Train of a Nation," at Washington Square Park at the invitation of Lift Every Vote. The idea was to encourage voting and "collective joy and resistance!," as its organizer the choreographer Leslie Cuyjet wrote in an Instagram post. At the New Dance Group, the aim was "developing and creating group and mass dances expressive of the working class and its revolutionary upsurge." The improvisatory practice of mass dance with its simple and direct movement was geared to untrained performers. A radical wave in the '60s and '70s starting with Judson Dance Theater, the experimental collective that ushered in postmodern dance came at another time of social unrest: the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War. Those practitioners, too, welcomed the untrained, unmannered body, even though they were extremely trained. How will today's dances reflect our times? Until performances begin again, it's hard to say, but the digital world may offer some clues. At least for me, when something transcends the screen, it seems to have originated from a deep, internal place where there are no mirrors in a studio: It's made of equal parts corporeal control and grit or the all consuming fortitude that comes from holding nothing back. That's not to imply it needs to be aggressively physical, only true. One thing dance can do is to turn what seems ordinary into art. Dance is experiential. The coronavirus has reminded me that body based art the kind that doesn't have to express meaning through words is a way in which to see the world more clearly. That's why even some digital programming can feel immediate. Jodi Melnick and Malcolm Low's "Malcolm and Jodi in 12 parts" for the Works Process series at the Guggenheim Museum runs at just over five minutes, but this mesmerizing display of two people one large, the other small moving in tandem and in support of each other as their bodies ripple alongside the natural world is incandescent, encapsulating the fragility and the alienation of the moment. Recently I was sucked into the much longer Metropolitan Museum of Art collaboration between the visual artist Lee Mingwei and the choreographer Bill T. Jones. In the seemingly simple act of sweeping rice with a broom over several hours, the cast, representing different parts of the dance and performance world a drag artist, a ballet dancer, a voguer, a street performer was able to clearly demonstrate the power that artists have when they come together. Mr. Jones's casting shows us what the dance world could look like. It also illustrates the power of the group, which feels relevant when reading the growing number of voices behind "Creating New Futures" and its quest, in Ms. Roy's words, to forge "a gateway between one world and the next." What do organizations like Dance Rising Collective and Wide Awakes Dance Corps have in common? Bodies joining forces. Who knows when dance will come back? It will probably be one of the last art forms to return fully. Dance, the most neglected member of the performing arts, always seems to come in last. (This drives me crazy.) And who knows, maybe the damage caused by the pandemic rents are falling at least, though not nearly enough will create possibilities for the next dance movement. It's at times of unrest that change finally becomes impossible to ignore. And all of it takes me back to the '30s, when class struggle and modern dance were intertwined. In "Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928 1942," Ellen Graff writes, "The movement, artistic and social, was about power and where power started was in the dancers' own bodies." There are many questions in the air, but the idea of the collective body has weight we've seen how bodies can affect change. Yet a big one still remains: Can dance, or any art form really, be truly be equal? Dance is not a democratic art. But it can be better. And as tenuous as life is, this moment, this movement feels powerful. It's been a dark few months, and more are yet to come, but dance is stepping back into the spotlight. And it feels bright, potent and strong like a weapon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
YouTube suspended One America News Network, one of the right wing channels aggressively pushing false claims about widespread election fraud, for violating its policies on misinformation. But the misinformation that got OAN in trouble on Tuesday had nothing to do with the election. YouTube removed a video that violated its policies against content claiming that there is a guaranteed cure for Covid 19. YouTube said it issued a strike against the channel as part of its three strike policy. That meant OAN is not permitted to upload new videos or livestream on the platform for one week. The move came on the same day that a group of Democratic senators urged YouTube to reverse its policy of allowing videos containing election outcome misinformation and pushed the company to adopt more aggressive steps to curb the spread of false content and manipulated media ahead of crucial runoff elections for Georgia's two Senate seats in January. In the weeks after the election, OAN has published articles challenging the integrity of the vote and pushing President Trump's false claims that he won the election. YouTube has said OAN is not an authoritative news source and stripped advertising from a few of its videos for undermining confidence in elections with "demonstrably false" information. However, the videos remained available on the platform, helping OAN to gain share among right wing channels. In addition to the one week suspension, YouTube said it kicked OAN out of a program that allows partner channels to generate advertising revenue from videos for repeated violations of its COVID 19 misinformation policy and other infractions. One America News's YouTube channel will remain up during the suspension. In a statement on Wednesday, One America News said the video featured the opinions of "frontline doctors," which the network believed were important to hear even if they differed from the views of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. OAN said the video was still available on its website. "Although OAN will abide by YouTube's requirements for any video made available on YouTube, OAN will not let YouTube's arbitrary rules infringe upon its First Amendment editorial rights to inform the public," the network said. YouTube, which is owned by Google, has come under criticism for allowing videos spreading false claims of widespread election fraud under a policy that permits videos that comment on the outcome of an election. "Like other companies, we allow discussions of this election's results and the process of counting votes, and are continuing to closely monitor new developments," Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokeswoman, said in a statement. "Our teams are working around the clock to quickly remove content that violates our policies and ensure that we are connecting people with authoritative information about elections." YouTube said it had surfaced videos from what it deemed to be authoritative news sources in search results and recommendations, while affixing a label to videos discussing election results. That label states that The Associated Press has called the election for Joseph R. Biden Jr. with a link to a results page on Google. In a letter sent Tuesday to Susan Wojcicki, YouTube's chief executive, four Democratic senators Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Gary Peters of Michigan and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said they had "deep concern with the proliferation of misinformation" on the platform. The letter pointed to how one YouTube video with the baseless claim of voter fraud in Michigan had five million views. "These videos seek to undermine our democracy and cast doubt on the legitimacy of President elect Biden's incoming administration," the senators wrote. "Moreover, because the current president has not committed to a peaceful transition of power, misinformation and manipulated media content on your platform may fuel civil unrest." The senators also expressed concern about the runoff elections for the two Georgia Senate seats, because those races will garner "significant national interest." In a series of questions to Ms. Wojcicki, the senators asked if YouTube would commit to removing false or misleading information about the 2020 election and the Georgia races. They asked the company to respond by Dec. 8. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
'SIAH ARMAJANI: FOLLOW THIS LINE' at the Met Breuer (through June 2). Born in Iran, Armajani has been living in the United States since 1960. This retrospective ranges from work he did as a teenage activist in Tehran to models of the many public sculptures he has produced across America over the past five decades. It introduces us to a sharp social thinker, a wry (and increasingly melancholic) metaphysician, a plain style visual poet and, above all, an artist ethicist. "Bridge Over Tree," Armajani's wonderful large scale sculpture presented by Public Art Fund at Brooklyn Bridge Park (on the Empire Fulton Ferry Lawn through Sept. 29) to coincide with the Met show, is well timed for our present era of sundering moral confusion and offers ways forward from it. (Holland Cotter) 212 731 1675, metmuseum.org 'ARTISTS RESPOND: AMERICAN ART AND THE VIETNAM WAR, 1965 1975' (through Aug. 18) and 'TIFFANY CHUNG: VIETNAM, PAST IS PROLOGUE' (through Sept. 2) at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. Everything in "Artists Respond," a big, inspiriting blast of an historical survey, dates from a time when the United States was losing its soul, and its artists some, anyway were trying to save theirs by denouncing a racist war. Figures well known for their politically hard hitting work Judith Bernstein, Leon Golub, Hans Haacke, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero are here in strength. But so are others, like Dan Flavin and Donald Judd and Barnett Newman, seldom associated with visual activism. Concurrent with the survey is a smaller, fine tuned show by a contemporary Vietnamese born artist, Tiffany Chung; it views the war through the eyes of people on the receiving end of aggression. (Cotter) 202 663 7970, americanart.si.edu 'MATTHEW BARNEY: REDOUBT' at Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven (through June 16). The wildly innovative sculptor and filmmaker, Yale class of 1989, heads back to the halls of ivy to present his first major project since the six hour excremental eruption of "River of Fundament" and shows Barney in a lighter, nimbler mode than he has displayed in years. The new film "Redoubt," shot in his home state of Idaho, riffs on the myth of Diana and Actaeon; the goddess, here, is an NRA approved sharpshooter, while the doomed voyeur is the artist himself, making plein air etchings of Diana and her attendants. Related copper etchings appear in the exhibition, and Barney has electroplated them over varying times, encrusting them with weird metal nodules. "Redoubt" lacks the operatic grandeur some of Barney's fanboys prefer. But it's the most emancipated work of his career, and it should make a star of Eleanor Bauer, the dancer and choreographer whom he has entrusted with the film's most beautiful movement sequences. The film runs about two hours and screens on Saturday afternoons and on select weekdays; check the website for times. (Jason Farago) 203 432 0600, artgallery.yale.edu 'GAME OF THRONES' MUSEUM TOUR at the Rubin Museum (May 3, 7 p.m.; May 15, 6 p.m.). One of the main pillars of George R. R. Martin's fantasy series is power. It is also this year's theme at the Rubin. So as the HBO television series that Martin's books inspired comes to a conclusion, the museum is conducting a tour on Friday and May 15 through its current "Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism" exhibition, linking a handful of its centerpieces with "Thrones" plot lines and characters from the parallels between the depiction of rebirth in "Wheel of Life" and the resurrection of Beric Dondarrion, Lady Stoneheart and Jon Snow to the copper statue of the Hindu goddess Durga slaying a demon and its similarities with female warriors such as Brienne of Tarth, Arya Stark and Lyanna Mormont. The two tours are free with museum admission; each will start promptly at the base of the spiral staircase on the first floor. (Danielle Dowling) 212 620 5000, rubinmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image (ongoing). The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'LINCOLN KIRSTEIN'S MODERN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through June 15). With George Balanchine, the indefatigable Kirstein (1907 96) founded the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. But he was also an impassioned writer, collector, curator and devotee of photography who had much to do with MoMA in its early years. The museum commemorates his complex career with art, letters and ballet ephemera, drawn from its vast holdings. (Roberta Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'ALICJA KWADE: PARAPIVOT' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 27). This shrewd and scientifically inclined artist, born in Poland and based in Berlin, has delivered the best edition in five years of the Met's hit or (often ) miss rooftop sculpture commission. Two tall armatures of interlocking steel rectangles, the taller of them rising more than 18 feet, support heavy orbs of different colored marble; some of the balls perch precariously on the steel frames, while others, head scratchingly, are squinched between them. Walk around these astral abstractions and the frames seem to become quotation marks for the transformed skyline of Midtown; the marbles might be planets, each just as precarious as the one from which they've been quarried. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'JOAN MIRO: BIRTH OF THE WORLD' at the Museum of Modern Art (through June 15). Drawn mostly from MoMA's unrivaled Miro collection, this fabulous exhibition is best when tracing the artist's brilliant early twists on Modernism and their swift ascent to "The Birth of the World," a 1927 masterpiece that presaged the drips and stains of radical painting two decades hence. Unappreciated in its time, it was barely exhibited until 1968. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'RADICALISM IN THE WILDERNESS: JAPANESE ARTISTS IN THE GLOBAL 1960S' at Japan Society (through June 9). This sturdy addition to our story of the global 1960s, organized by the respected art historian Reiko Tomii, introduces American audiences to three bold positions in Japanese art by one solo figure and two collectives who all worked far from the lights of Tokyo. Yutaka Matsuzawa, a Conceptualist with a Buddhist streak working in a forest near Nagano, made posters and mail art that aimed to imagine a world of total nothingness. The group GUN, in agrarian Niigata, produced breathtaking land art by filling pesticide sprayers with pigment and spewing color across fresh snow. And the Play, a collective in the Kansai region, sailed together on barges or built tree houses on hillsides to rediscover freedoms beyond social boundaries. The lesson: It's not just the opposition of East and West that needs rethinking, but that of the metropolis and the sticks. (Farago) 212 715 1258, japansociety.org 'BETYE SAAR: KEEPIN' IT CLEAN' at the New York Historical Society (through May 27). Saar has been making important and influential work for nearly 60 years. Yet no big New York museum has given her a full retrospective, or even a significant one person show, since a 1975 solo at the Whitney Museum of American Art. As this exhibition demonstrates, the institutional oversight is baffling, as her primary themes racial justice and feminism (her 1972 breakthrough piece, "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima," merges the two by transforming the racist stereotype of the smiling black mammy into an armed freedom fighter) are exactly attuned to the present. (Cotter) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.org 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum (ongoing). After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'TOLKIEN: MAKER OF MIDDLE EARTH' at the Morgan Library Museum (through May 12). J. R. R. Tolkien did more than write books like "The Hobbit" and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy; he invented an alternate reality, complete with its own geography, languages, religion and an era spanning history. This exhibition of his artwork, letters, drafts and other material reminds visitors that the stories Tolkien wrote, however impressive, represent only a fraction of his efforts, and it highlights his unparalleled ability to create an immersive experience using only words and pictures. After a visit you, too, may find yourself believing in Middle earth and the hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs and wizards that live there. (Peter Libbey) 212 685 0008, themorgan.org 'T. REX: THE ULTIMATE PREDATOR' at the American Museum of Natural History (through Aug. 9, 2020). Everyone's favorite 18,000 pound prehistoric killer gets the star treatment in this eye opening exhibition, which presents the latest scientific research on T. rex and also introduces many other tyrannosaurs, some discovered only this century in China and Mongolia. T. rex evolved mainly during the Cretaceous Period to have keen eyes, spindly arms and massive conical teeth, which could bear down on prey with the force of a U Haul truck; the dinosaur could even swallow whole bones, as affirmed here by a kid friendly display of fossilized excrement. The show mixes 66 million year old teeth with the latest 3 D prints of dino bones, and also presents new models of T. rex as a baby, a juvenile and a full grown annihilator. Turns out this most savage beast was covered with believe it! a soft coat of beige or white feathers. (Farago) 212 769 5100, amnh.org 'NARI WARD: WE THE PEOPLE' at the New Museum (through May 26). The persistent and liberating message in Ward's sculpture and room size installations is that art can be made from virtually anything. In this midcareer retrospective, anything means old carpets, plastic bags, bottles, zippers, bed springs, keys and furniture. Although the exhibition includes a number of large installations, Ward is best as a creator of curious and discrete sculptures, ones that remind us that our world is filled with potentially magical objects. We enter museums expecting to be transformed, but if we shift our perspective and look around us, we'll see that everyday life is really just art waiting to happen. (Martha Schwendener) 212 219 1222, newmuseum.org 'THE WORLD BETWEEN EMPIRES: ART AND IDENTITY IN THE ANCIENT MIDDLE EAST' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through June 23). The Met excels at epic scale archaeological exhibitions, and this is a prime example. It brings together work made between 100 B.C. and A.D. 250 in what we now know as Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. In the ancient world, all were in the sphere of two competing superpowers Rome to the west and Parthia to the east and though imperial influence was strong, it was far from all determining. Each of the subject territories selectively grafted it onto local traditions to create distinctive new grass roots cultural blends. Equally important, the show addresses the fate of art from the past in a politically fraught present. (Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT' at the Brant Foundation (through May 15). The opening of the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in the East Village, with an exhibition of nearly 70 works by Basquiat created from 1980 to 1987, serves as a fitting temporary shrine for this Brooklyn born painter, who became a global sensation in the early '80s and died at 27 of a heroin overdose. Basquiat sprayed poetic, enigmatic graffiti on walls in downtown Manhattan before moving to canvas, dated Madonna before she was famous and made paintings with Andy Warhol. Part of a group of Neo Expressionist painters who were largely rejected by critics, he was embraced by an influential audience and a surging art market and ended up creating a brand of African American history painting that still resonates today. Tickets to the exhibition have sold out, but you can add your name to the wait list at the foundation's website. (Schwendener) 212 777 2977, brantfoundation.org 'FRIDA KAHLO: APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEIVING' at the Brooklyn Museum (through May 12). This is not exactly an exhibition of Kahlo's art it contains just 11 paintings, from compelling self portraits to ghastly New Age kitsch but an evocation of an artistic life through her elegant Oaxacan blouses and skirts, not to mention the corsets and spinal braces she wore after a crippling traffic accident. Do her outfits have the weight of art, or are they just so much biographical flimflam? Your answer may vary depending on your degree of Fridamania, but the woven shawls and color saturated long skirts here, as well as gripping photographs of the artist by Carl Van Vechten, Imogen Cunningham, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and other great shutterbugs, suggest Kahlo's real accomplishment was a Duchampian extension of her art far beyond the easel, into her home, her fashion and her public relationships. (Farago) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through May 5). The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'MONUMENTAL JOURNEY: THE DAGUERREOTYPES OF GIRAULT DE PRANGEY' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through May 12). This exhibition is a buffed jewel. In 1842, just a couple of years after Louis Daguerre unveiled the world's first practical camera, Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey, a French aristocrat with a yen for experimental technology, set off on a three year road trip, lugging a 100 pound kit as he took the world's first photographs of Athens, Cairo, Constantinople and Jerusalem. More than 100 of Girault de Prangey's precise daguerreotypes glisten here under pin lights, and his systematic photos of Islamic architecture, in particular, express how the new technology of photography could flit between art and science, and would soon become a tool of colonial rule. Girault de Prangey's daguerreotypes were little seen before 2003, when his descendants put them on the market; their discovery was a landmark in the history of early photography, and this show is too. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
How much longer can the powers that run college sports turn a blind eye to player safety and the health of our communities? How much longer can they keep football and basketball slogging toward golden ticket paydays, coronavirus be damned? How long before all admit that collegiate athletes are now pawns in a high stakes game with life and death consequences? Football and basketball players that represent their prominent universities have long been amateurs in name only. The way such colleges trot them out to provide entertainment amid the pandemic's most deadly surge proves that these competitors are, in fact, workers. They deserve pay. Consider the findings from my colleagues' recent investigation at The New York Times, the most comprehensive look at the number of coronavirus infections in college sports. It found that at least 6,629 players and staff members in athletic departments from major universities have tested positive. Almost all of the infections happened after mid August, when football teams began returning to campuses across the country to prepare for this blighted season. (One can reliably assume the majority of cases come from players, who greatly outnumber coaches, trainers and other support staff.) What a time to hide the truth. There are now more than 294,000 Americans who have died from the virus. That's roughly equal to the population of St. Louis, Mo. According to experts, the current tolls of nearly 3,000 deaths a day will continue for weeks, if not months. But college sports will not pause. Too many Americans need it like a drug. The virus has forced hundreds of games to be canceled. This weekend, it laid waste to several of the biggest football rivalries. No Ohio State versus Michigan. No Indiana against Purdue. Washington could not field enough players to go against Oregon in a critical Pac 12 game on the West Coast. Recall that when the conference decided to put on a season this fall, it did so after assuring skeptics a new form of daily testing would be a magic bullet. It "should keep the athletes safe," argued one of the league's prominent doctors. That has not been the case. Not even close. Still, dozens of other games will be played this weekend many in front of fans, which makes no sense during a pandemic. Football, of course, is hardly alone. College basketball could have been proud of its moral stance in March. The N.C.A.A. pulled the plug on its showcase national championship tournaments last season because the virus was beginning to take hold in the United States. That took guts. Now, with the virus ripping across the nation in ways never seen before, basketball is back. That is plain stupid. The show must go on. It does not matter that two athletes from big time programs were just told they have dangerous heart inflammation, a condition experts have said can be related to Covid 19 a reminder of long term health dangers that are still little understood. It does not matter that games are often contested on campuses where classes are virtual and students who can't hit a jump shot or make a tackle are staying home for safety. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Nor does it matter that every infected player, even the many who feel no symptoms, can unwittingly spread the disease to someone who ends up in the hospital. Think of the No. 1 ranked Stanford women's basketball team. The virus recently forced officials in Santa Clara County, Calif., to halt all contact sports. That meant the Cardinal could not play their home games in Palo Alto. So where did they move to compete through most of December? Las Vegas, even though its local rate of cases is much higher than the rate in Stanford's hometown. Some say college sports cannot slow down because these are young athletes with big dreams. Dreams can wait especially when a vaccine may be close and a semblance of normalcy seems possible by summer. But moving forward isn't really about dreams. It's about dollars. It's about a high and mighty industry that cannot resist the 500 million that gets divided up mostly among the big conferences after the football bowl season and the national title game. It's about the more than 850 million injected into university coffers after the Final Four ends. Moving forward also highlights the sham that is university level amateurism. The University of Pittsburgh basketball coach, Jeff Capel, spoke to this early in the week. He noted that the risk and sacrifice required by the players have peeled back the curtain on college sports. "I don't think anyone can say anymore that these young men are amateurs," Capel told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. "That's out the window. They're not. They absolutely aren't." Few within Capel's world are willing to say it so clearly. This is an industry that pays multimillion dollar contracts to its coaches, most of whom are white. Yet it barely protects the health of its athletes an unpaid, predominantly Black work force that is barred from unionizing or seeking labor protections. Spare the argument that all is fine because the players young, feeling invincible, still learning about the world said they wanted their seasons to go on. If they say they want to hop in a Ferrari and blaze at 120 miles per hour down the freeway, should that be OK? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
LOS ANGELES In a loft studio in Venice Beach here, Tom Binns is rebuilding. Most of the world knows him as a jeweler, and a small subset of the world the fashion world spent many years celebrating him as one of its favorites. He was showered with awards, sought as a collaborator (early on, he worked with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, and many more after) and had his creations worn by the first lady. But most of the fashion world doesn't call anymore. "Not being in fashion for the last couple of years, not being in the picture, you become the forgotten man, I suppose," said Mr. Binns, chatty and peppery if slightly subdued, in an Irish brogue that a decade in Los Angeles has done little to mellow. "The business I had closed down. I was left high and dry. I'm trying to reconstruct my career." Mr. Binns has been making jewelry for 40 years, as he tells it, long before the business that bore his name was founded or the art school he attended taught him the proper way to do it. But he first came to success with a eureka moment: that there is enough jewelry about already, and that he didn't need to make more. He haunted flea markets to buy up stalls' worth of old jewelry, junk and treasure alike, and remade it into assemblages that were more Dada than decorous. "I'll never forget the first time I walked into his showroom," Ikram Goldman, the Chicago boutique owner, said. "I was dumbfounded, my mouth was open, I couldn't even speak." It was 17 years ago, and Ms. Goldman was preparing to open her store, long before she counted Chicago's stylish women Michelle Obama among them as clients. She bought Mr. Binns's jewelry and has stocked it ever since. The jewels found an eager audience, but the pieces Mr. Binns made by hand were costly and laborious to produce. Moreover, his ragtag, magpie exuberance had been easy to knock off as he had risen to prominence. Then, in 2007, he entered a partnership to create a more commercial friendly collection than his handmade pieces. "I might as well cash in on it rather than everybody else," he thought. Though the commercial collection was exclusively costume jewelry, Mr. Binns celebrated the fakeness of his pieces rather than try to pass off rhinestones and paste as gems, playing up wild colors and oversize volume. "What Tom did, and at exactly the right time, is come in and be irreverent about jewelry," said Stellene Volandes, the editor of Town Country magazine and author of the recent book "Jeweler." "Everyone was in on the joke. There was a joy to what he did." Ms. Volandes traced his influence to the brightly colored costume jewelry that still abounds today. Ms. Goldman went further. "Tom Binns single handedly changed the way women viewed jewelry," she said. "When he came on the scene, he made women feel that it's O.K. to wear a really big piece of jewelry every day. No one was doing that." But after years and a store on Perry Street in New York, Mr. Binns's company foundered, choked by competition, his lack of interest in commercializing his designs and his own admitted thorniness. ("Artists should be rebellious," he said, "but, alas, rebellion isn't what it used to be.") Lawyers were called, and Mr. Binns spent two years in litigation to get his name back. "I paid off the ransom," he said. He still has an archive of thousands of old pieces and has been selling them privately to make ends meet "barely," he added. Jewelry doesn't interest him as much these days as art, in any case. It is often seen as "less than," wearable art rather than art, a little sibling to fashion, a mere "accessory." He fumed about the press coverage that attended the president and Michelle Obama's state visit to Britain in 2011, where, at a dinner at the American ambassador's residence, she wore a Binns necklace of tangled chains. The coverage fawned over her dresses. "My piece of jewelry is more important than this dress," he said. "It was the queen standing there with all her crown jewels and Michelle Obama with this necklace that was literally tied together." The sculptures Mr. Binns had on display at his live/work space here looked like larger cousins of the jewelry, assembled bric a brac and funny, often punny, little objets. (A metal handle affixed to a cross shaped glass box: "Handel's Messiah.") Ephemera, even trash, found on bike rides around Los Angeles glows under his gaze, and comes home for renovation and reassessment. "This was an object I found," Mr. Binns said of a smashed can of paint that he had repainted. "This is a tabletop from Ikea that was in somebody's garden that's been affected by the elements," he added. "I'm looking at this and saying, this is a piece of art. It's fantastic." He has not yet exhibited the works, but he hopes to. And he has continued to make a few jewelry pieces for longtime supporters, including Ms. Goldman, and recently sent a few others off to Colette in Paris. "I think for Tom, he is such a sensitive soul that he doesn't know how to create a fake feeling," said Ms. Goldman, who still has a clientele for his pieces (as well as an extensive archive of his work, which she refuses to sell). "It's got to be really deep or nothing or at all. That's his struggle, I think, in this moment." Mr. Binns said he found jewelry limiting as a medium and wasn't keen to return to it full time. "Do you think I have to?" he asked. "I might need to if I run out of money. But I don't want to go into that trap." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
One Last Party for the Agent and Bon Vivant Ed Victor The memorial at the Upper East Side apartment of Tina Brown and Harold Evans for the literary agent Ed Victor felt like a cocktail party. And that was fitting, given that the man receiving tribute had distinguished himself as a bon vivant on both sides of the Atlantic. This Bronx born son of Russian Jewish immigrants rose to Commander of the Order of the British Empire before his death in June at age 77. The list of authors he represented included John Banville, Candice Bergen, Ms. Brown, David Cameron, Eric Clapton, Mr. Evans, Frederick Forsyth, Jack Higgins, Erica Jong, Nigella Lawson, Iris Murdoch, Edna O'Brien, Keith Richards and Pete Townshend. His range "high to low, to lowest," said one of the guests, Jonathan Burnham, the publisher of HarperCollins was such that perhaps the biggest sighting at the party, held on Wednesday evening, was not a recent National Book Award winner but Mel Brooks. "He did the few books I've written," Mr. Brooks said, standing by a wall in his white dinner jacket as the actor Alan Alda ambled by. Mr. Victor was a fierce advocate, Mr. Brooks said, even when negotiating for things that the filmmaker and comedian wasn't sure he deserved. "I'd say to him: 'Don't blow it. Don't lose it,'" he said. "And he'd say, 'I'm not going to lose it, but we can't back down.'" Most agents these days are "pretty corporate," said Ms. Jong, who was standing nearby. Not Mr. Victor, whom the author turned to in the late '80s. He never asked her to write an outline, as other agents had, she said, and the two sometimes did business while lounging in a hot tub. Much like the Hollywood legends Swifty Lazar and Sue Mengers, who were as colorful as their clients, Mr. Victor was almost as well known for his persona, with the lustrous beard and jaunty scarf, as his star studded roster. As someone who attended high school in Bayside, Queens, before going on to study literature at Cambridge University, he made his own myth a reality. Mr. Brooks noted the double breasted suits and the deep knowledge of wine. "He even knew Rioja, that Spanish wine. R I O J A," Mr. Brooks said. At 7:15, guests moved to a garden area, where Mr. Evans serenaded Mr. Victor's blend of "style and substance" and recounted the way his friend would arrive at the couple's summer home in his black Bentley. Ms. Brown attended to Mr. Victor the world class gossip, a "one man transom" whom she first got to know at a book festival in the '80s. He was running around in a T shirt emblazoned with the words "My lawyer can beat your lawyer," she recalled. When a publisher did something irritating recently, Ms. Brown recalled Mr. Victor saying: "You want me to deal with this? Good. I am now Anna Karenina and I am going to throw myself under that train for you." Ms. Jong remembered him as someone who had no off switch. "Although he lived in London, you could reach him any time day or night," Ms. Jong said. "If you called and said: 'I owe the I.R.S. half a million dollars. I need a book deal,' which was the situation I was in at one point, he'd say, 'I got it.'" The publisher Julie Grau had another story: "I was in London and had an appointment to meet him, and I walked into his beautiful office in Bloomsbury. He looked up stricken and he said he had just found out his mother had died. I said, 'I'll see you another time, I'm so sorry.' He said: 'Don't leave. Let's have lunch.' And we went to a restaurant and had the most heartfelt, beautiful, memorable time together." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
LOS ANGELES The editorial director of The Hollywood Reporter has left his job after a dispute with his bosses over coverage of the entertainment industry. In a move that caught the staff by surprise, the trade publication announced on Monday morning that Matthew Belloni was departing. A former Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, Mr. Belloni had led the trade outlet's website, weekly print magazine, television arm and events business for nearly four years. Three people with knowledge of Mr. Belloni's exit said he left because of disagreements with Valence Media, the owner of The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, the music trade publication. Valence Media's two chief executives, Modi Wiczyk and Asif Satchu, as well as another executive, Deanna Brown, tried to influence The Hollywood Reporter's coverage several times, and Mr. Belloni pushed back, according to the people with knowledge of the split. "Today's announcement is the result of a series of conversations I've had for a few months with Modi about the direction at THR," Mr. Belloni said in an email to the staff. "Some may want to read into that, but I'll just say that well meaning, diligent, ambitious people can disagree about fundamental priorities and strategies." Mr. Wiczyk and Mr. Satchu are the founders of Media Rights Capital, a film and TV studio known as MRC whose properties include the 2019 film "Knives Out" and the Netflix drama "Ozark." They started overseeing The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 as part of a reorganization of Valence Media, which also owns Dick Clark Productions. Since Mr. Wiczyk and Mr. Satchu took charge, the people said, Valence Media has put pressure on Mr. Belloni to report favorably on people and projects with ties to MRC. That pressure started to increase last year, the people added, when Valence Media installed Ms. Brown as president of the Billboard Hollywood Reporter Media Group. Valence Media executives asked Mr. Belloni if they could give him a "sensitivity list" filled with names of people and companies in business with Mr. Wiczyk and Mr. Satchu, two people with knowledge of the matter said. If The Hollywood Reporter was planning to cover them, Mr. Belloni was supposed to alert his bosses, the people said. Mr. Belloni, who declined to comment for this article, refused to act on the list and also pushed back against efforts to kill certain articles. Tensions mounted last month during conference calls held by Valence Media to explain its priorities to the editorial staff. The sessions were led by Kelly McBride, a senior vice president at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism center, whom Valence Media hired as an ethics consultant 18 months ago. During the calls, staff members cited examples of what they considered Valence Media's interference. In one instance, the company had asked Mr. Belloni to kill a profile of Louise Linton, the wife of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, according to two call participants. Mr. Belloni declined. 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. Another source of contention was a published list of the decade's best and worst movies. Ms. Brown told Mr. Belloni the piece was "off strategy" and later killed a planned television segment based on it, the two people said. Also deemed "off strategy" was a piece on Jennifer Lopez's re upping with Guess after the clothing company's co founder Paul Marciano had resigned after sexual harassment complaints. Ms. Lopez was described as having many "touch points" to MRC, the two people said. Hollywood Reporter staff members also expressed concern that a Valence Media executive was looking in Slack channels for details on planned stories. Emily Spence, the executive vice president of communications at Valence Media, said in an interview that she was the one who had gone into newsroom Slack channels before realizing it was "an infringement." "I removed myself from the rooms and I have asked I.T. to make these channels only available to editorial employees," Ms. Spence said. Ms. McBride, the ethics consultant, compared The Hollywood Reporter to ESPN, where she served as ombudsman from 2011 to 2013. Owned by the Walt Disney Company, ESPN reports on the National Football League and National Basketball Association while also earning revenue from its game broadcasts. Similarly, The Hollywood Reporter covers the studios it depends on as advertisers, and its parent company creates films and shows. "The owners are learning to understand editorial independence, and they really embrace it," said Ms. McBride, who will continue to advise The Hollywood Reporter while taking a job as the next public editor of National Public Radio. "They have taken my advice at every turn." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
What Facebook's C.E.O. is doing to confront the coronavirus and what he's afraid of. This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays. To understand the world, you need to understand Mark Zuckerberg. I'm serious. That's because Zuckerberg rules absolute over Facebook, a product that helps shape what billions of people believe, and how governments interact with their citizens. My colleague Mike Isaac talked to me about how Zuckerberg is more in control of his company than ever before for better or worse and why Facebook's chief executive is afraid of it all coming unglued. "Facebook is never boring," Mike told me. "That's why I've been writing about it for 10 years." Shira: Why is Zuckerberg increasingly involved in all aspects of the company? Mike: He and the company were scarred by many crises, including propaganda running amok around the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Zuckerberg doesn't ever want to be in that position again. His response to losing control before is to exert even more control now. Would Facebook be better off with more second guessing of Zuckerberg? I do believe he seeks a lot of input about the decisions he makes. He listens intently when you make a statement, then sits there and absorbs it without giving away how he feels. It can be disconcerting. Zuckerberg might say he is leaning into a role he's had for a long time, and he has to trust his instincts. But the best leaders also have built in checks to their power. I'm not sure what those are now. Why has Zuckerberg been so public during this pandemic like interviewing the infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci live on Facebook? Being a highly visible leader is part of the job, and I think he's realized that. Curing disease is also a goal of his personal philanthropy. And Zuckerberg is setting an example for how he believes Facebook can help good information go viral. He's working employees hard sometimes seven days a week, according to folks I talk to because he believes this is a moment to show that Facebook can do more good in the world than harm. Does Facebook do more good than harm? I think about this a lot. Is there a way to tally the good Facebook does, measure it against the bad, and decide which side wins? That's impossible. The question for a lot of people is or at least something I wonder if the nature of the product enables serious harm, including death, should it exist? If you asked Mark, I'm pretty sure he would say yes. But should it be up to the person who created Facebook? Play armchair shrink: What is Zuckerberg afraid of? Dominance is fleeting, especially in tech. I think this is what keeps Mark up at night. He's worried about people losing interest in Facebook, and about competitors outside the United States gaining on him. Those are valid concerns. But it's hard for most people to see his point when three billion people use one of the company's apps, and Facebook keeps making more money. He's afraid of being usurped, but it doesn't look like that'll happen soon. Get this newsletter in your inbox every weekday; please sign up here. How to watch on your biggest screen An On Tech reader wrote in to say he is sometimes confused about how to get videos on his computer or smartphone to play on his living room television set. Me too! Brian X. Chen, a personal technology columnist for The Times, is here to help us: There are so many accessories and apps you can use to stream video from a phone or a computer to a TV. The choices can feel overwhelming. Do you buy a Chromecast or a Fire TV? A smart TV? Find a cable to plug in your computer ... somehow? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Dear Simon Branson: Today is going to be a good day, and here's why. But a person could be forgiven for momentarily confusing "Superhero," the new musical about a withdrawn teenager and his anxious mother, with "Dear Evan Hansen," the hit musical about a withdrawn teenager and his anxious mother. It's not just that the boys' names scan so similarly. Or that both shows are about fatherless families: Evan's the result of divorce; Simon's the result of an accident. The opening songs ("Anybody Have a Map?" in "Dear Evan Hansen" and "What's Happening to My Boy?" in "Superhero") have nearly identical emotional setups, including nearly identical phrases about mothers finding their way back to their sons. More fundamentally, both "Superhero" and "Dear Evan Hansen" show how damaged people try to use stories, whether fictional or outright false, to rebuild themselves after trauma and how they may create new traumas in the process. The problem is built into the low stakes, high whimsy concept. The 15 year old Simon (Kyle McArthur) is not a spectacular social media liar like Evan; he is merely an aficionado and amateur author of comic books, hooked on their tales of rescue. They allow him to imagine characters, like the Amazing Sea Mariner, who "can heal the world's suffering and pain" if only in his sketchbook. In the real world, he feels isolated at a new school and smothered at home by his worried mother, Charlotte (Kate Baldwin). He'd like a girlfriend but is too shy even to defend his dynamic schoolmate Vee (Salena Qureshi) when an ex tries to bully her. These are not exactly shattering or shatteringly original problems. Despite Mr. McArthur's angsty singing, Simon basically comes off as a nice boy with a big imagination and, for a high school sophomore, few objections to setting the table. It's Charlotte who isn't coping well. (Piling on the pathos, Mr. Logan tells us she is named for the title character of "Charlotte's Web.") An assistant professor of English, she has worked only intermittently in the two years since her husband's death, holing up instead in a new apartment after moving from the family's more comfortable home. It is evidently meant as some kind of irony that she is a specialist in the Romantic poet John Clare but cannot imagine resuming a romantic life of her own. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter. I will not spoil how "Superhero" manages to tie both Simon's and Charlotte's stories together with that of the man in apartment 4B. He is Jim (Bryce Pinkham), a shy bus driver with a big secret and dreamy blue eyes. Let's just say that accepting his role in the proceedings requires an almost literal willing suspension of disbelief. I was unwilling. Not even as allegory could the fantastical adventure that swallows the second act sustain my interest; its concerns are sketchy, as thin as comic book stock. Despite spending so much energy hammering the unlikely plot into place, Mr. Logan, author of the Tony Award winning "Red" and the screenplay for Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd," has not created characters who connect his overworked variations on superhero conventions convincingly to real behavior. Nor, to my surprise, do Mr. Kitt's songs enrich the storytelling the way they did in "Next to Normal" and "If/Then." The music does at times prove effective in setting scenes; the first sounds we hear are a heroic horn call delightfully referencing John Williams's theme for "Superman," albeit with just one horn. But if the orchestrations, by Mr. Kitt and Michael Starobin, are atypically wan, Mr. Kitt's lyrics are even wanner. Perhaps that's because "Superhero" is the first of his musicals for which he has also written the words. They seem as withdrawn as Simon, not wanting to call attention to themselves with anything but the mushiest phrases and most reticent rhymes a timidity that lets the ear write them off as unimportant. That Ms. Baldwin nevertheless makes a great deal and a great meal of them is a sign of her tremendous stage intelligence. A should have been musical star who recently graduated to second bananahood (she was a luscious Irene Molloy in "Hello, Dolly!"), she seems to create a full color story for each pale lyric, then spin it out on ribbons of unimpeachable sound. Even outside the songs, her characterization is the most convincing thing in the show, and her purely nonallegorical scenes with Mr. Pinkham, also in fine voice, are the most satisfying beyond their washes of purpleness. But it does not grant much to "Superhero" to say that its leads manage to rise above it. Or to say that Mr. Moore (also the director of "Avenue Q" and "The Cher Show") keeps it moving swiftly on Beowulf Boritt's set, which encloses the action in a receding series of six tilted comic book frames that force your perspective but feel nearly empty. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"The question here is whether TripAdvisor was unfairly or deceptively misleading consumers about what they post or the content of the reviews," said a former high ranking F.T.C. official who asked not to be identified because he was no longer authorized to speak for the agency. "If the F.T.C. actually launches an investigation it will be fact intensive, and if a violation is found, the agency can require more accurate disclosures and impose fines." TripAdvisor had not been notified of any investigation by the F.T.C. as of Monday, according to Brian Hoyt, a TripAdvisor spokesman . In her letter, Ms. Baldwin also complained that the State Department was "not providing sufficient information regarding the health and safety of U.S. citizens in Mexico on its Country Specific Information page or on its Travel Warning page." Because of this, she wrote, people rely more on travel review sites like TripAdvisor for their information. One of her constituents, Jamie Valeri, of Appleton, Wis., tried unsuccessfully to post a review on TripAdvisor in 2015 alleging that she was sexually assaulted at the Iberostar Paraiso Maya after she and her husband were drugged. Her experience came five years after Kristie Love, of Dallas, tried to post her description of being raped at the same resort, only to have TripAdvisor repeatedly remove it. Their accounts, and others from people who complained that TripAdvisor removed their reviews, were reported in early November by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel . In the aftermath of the reports, TripAdvisor announced it would place a warning on some businesses for possible health, safety or discrimination issues. Since the first three properties received the cautionary icon on Nov. 8, one other resort has been added, the Iberostar Paraiso Del Mar in Playa Del Carmen, Mr. Hoyt said. That is the resort where 20 year old Abbey Connor of Pewaukee, Wis., drowned after drinking tequila shots. Her brother, who was found unconscious in the pool, survived. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Detente between President Trump and Silicon Valley is proving hard to maintain. Here's a brief history. During the presidential election last year, the tech industry made it clear that it would prefer just about anyone other than Mr. Trump to become the next president of the United States. Sure, there were outliers, most notably the venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Mr. Trump won the election. Not long after, a collection of the tech industry's most powerful executives along with Mr. Thiel and Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, a company that Mr. Thiel helped found made the pilgrimage to Trump Tower to meet with the president elect. Internet memes mocked the gloomy looks on the faces of many of the executives, but the meeting nonetheless hinted that they were willing to hear Mr. Trump out on his agenda. After taking office in January, Mr. Trump attempted to bar for 90 days people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. The ban, blocked in federal court, would have barred all refugees for 120 days, and Syrian refugees indefinitely. Tech companies, heavily populated by and in some cases run by first generation immigrants, were among the fiercest corporate critics of the proposed ban. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
"Men were coming in and buying pieces that were part of our women's collection," she said, "as well as ordering pieces from our bespoke shop, where customers are pretty much split 50 50 between the sexes, so we thought we might as well do it in a more organized way." And, she said, the move to designing for men from designing for women did not require a great leap of either imagination or resources. "We didn't need masses of differentiation," she said. "Men's hands are bigger, so we had to change the size of some handles and proportions, and women tend to wear more cross body bags, but that's about it." Still, her men's line will not be joining the roster for the next London Fashion Week Men's, due in January. Like Ms. McCartney, who will show her men's wear with her women's pre spring in November, Ms. Hindmarch (who is one of the few accessory designers to show on the catwalk schedule) is hedging her bets: She will show her men's line with her women's line during the London women's ready to wear season in September. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
President Trump is taking one of the most concrete steps of his presidency on Thursday to address the employment prospects of workers left behind by the current economic expansion. In doing so, he also joins a long running and occasionally contentious debate over whether those workers have the skills they need to land desirable jobs. Mr. Trump's action comes in the form of an executive order expanding federally funded apprenticeship programs. The order would create a category of programs that industry groups and other third parties could develop and then submit for Labor Department approval, rather than working within existing department guidelines. "Apprenticeships place students into great jobs without the crippling debt of traditional four year college degrees," Mr. Trump said. "Instead apprentices earn while they learn." Mr. Trump would redirect over 100 million of federal job training money to pay for the new apprenticeships, supplementing 90 million in funding for the existing program. Corporate groups hailed the idea of expanding apprenticeship programs and making them more flexible, arguing that apprenticeships are a reliable path to good paying jobs in sectors like retail and hospitality for those who could no longer support themselves in production sectors like manufacturing. "We applaud the Department of Labor and the administration for being willing to look at how to craft this in a way that brings apprenticeships to a new range of audiences," said Rob Gifford, executive vice president of the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation, which oversees the industry group's apprenticeship programs. Mr. Gifford gave credit to the Obama administration for making industries like his eligible for apprenticeship funding. The restaurant industry group won a contract worth up to about 9.75 million under the Obama era program to create apprenticeships that would run from six months to two years and help candidates for management positions acquire skills in such areas as accounting and sanitation practices. But Mr. Gifford said that streamlining regulations could make apprenticeship programs even more effective. The administration's interest in apprenticeships stands in contrast to the cutbacks for other forms of job training in its budget proposal, involving far larger sums. The Association of Community College Trustees said that while it welcomed Thursday's move, it remained worried about "the severe cuts proposed to federal work force and education programs." Underlying the relatively modest size and scope of Mr. Trump's proposal is a much bigger idea about why workers who have lost good paying jobs that do not require a college degree are struggling to find work at comparable wages. In the eyes of the president and many corporate leaders, the crux of the problem is skills the proposition that employers are eager to fill millions of good paying jobs that workers lack the skills to perform. "The U.S. faces a serious skills gap," Labor Secretary R. Alexander Acosta said during a call with reporters last week, pointing to six million vacant jobs the most since the department starting keeping track in the early 2000s. The vacancies were especially abundant in manufacturing, information technology and health care, he said. If the unemployed could acquire the necessary skills through apprenticeships or course work, the thinking goes, companies could quickly fill these jobs, providing workers with economic security and stimulating the economy. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Despite the belief of some, however, there is little evidence that the economy is suffering from an unusually large skills gap. While economic indicators do show a historically high number of job vacancies, as Mr. Acosta pointed out, research economists tend to believe that the skills gap accounts for, at most, a limited portion of this development. Many experts believe it plays almost no role at all. One way to see this is to hypothetically assign unemployed workers to jobs or industries regardless of their qualifications, essentially assuming away the skills gap. The difference between the hypothetical unemployment rate that results from this exercise and the actual unemployment rate would show the extent to which the skills gap is driving unemployment. But when you do this, according to Aysegul Sahin, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the size of the skills gap today is unremarkable. "The level of mismatch at the occupation level is pretty much where it was before the Great Recession," she said. Ms. Sahin points to two other factors causing employers to take longer to fill jobs: the aging of the work force and a long term decline in the proportion of start ups in the economy. Older businesses tend to grow more slowly and typically take longer to fill vacancies as a result. They often devote more resources to the process and have more bureaucracy overseeing it, such as a human resources department. Steven J. Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago, helped create an index showing that the average time it takes to fill a job is the longest since January 2001. He believes that a skills gap could be part of the explanation, but he also sees several other factors. For example, he said, employers have better technology and data to screen candidates for drug problems, criminal records or credit problems, prolonging the hiring process. Proponents of the skills gap hypothesis typically contend that the loss of many jobs in manufacturing, for example, is offset by the creation of jobs at comparable pay that the same workers could perform with somewhat more training. "Demand is growing for middle skill workers machinists, technicians, health care practitioners and a broad range of other roles," Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said in a Politico op ed in 2014. But extensive economic research on the subject suggests essentially the opposite trend: The proportion of middle skill jobs in the economy has declined since the 1980s, while relative job growth has been concentrated at either the low end of the spectrum, like retail, or the high end, like software development, a related phenomenon economists refer to as job market "polarization." The former class of jobs tends to be undesirable for many former factory workers. The latter tends to be out of reach even with additional training. Consider health care, one of the sectors both Mr. Acosta, the labor secretary, and Mr. Dimon alluded to as a promising source of middle skill jobs for retrained workers. Of the six million vacancies Mr. Acosta cited in the overall labor market, one million were in the health care sector as of April, the latest month for which data is available. But the industry hired only about a half million workers that month the largest absolute gap of any sector between vacancies and hires. Some of these jobs are in fact good paying middle skill jobs, like diagnostic medical sonographers. The same is true in areas like retail and hospitality, where workers can earn a reasonable living by getting on the management track. Apprenticeships, which have been shown to lead to higher paying jobs, may well help more workers land these jobs. But about 70 percent of the health care jobs that the Labor Department predicts will exist in 2024 and classifies among the fastest growing occupations in the economy paid a median wage of less than 26,000 in 2016 primarily home health care aides and personal care aides. By contrast, many of the high paying jobs, like nurse practitioners and nurse midwives, require college or post college degrees. So the potential for skills building to fill many of the economy's job vacancies is limited. "I don't want to say the skill mismatch problem is irrelevant it certainly isn't if you think about a 45 year old who loses a job in a traditional industry and needs to find a new job," said Gordon Hanson, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied job market polarization. "But we do have abundant evidence that there are just fewer of those middle skilled jobs available." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
LAST year, at 66, Jenny F. Scott was not an obvious triathlete. A retired special education teacher, she had suffered a stress fracture running decades ago and took up serious bicycling only when she was 64 years old. But Ms. Scott, of West Columbia, S.C., and a friend decided to "bite the bullet last year, with no expectation other than we wanted to live through it," she said of the swim bike run training needed to participate in the triathlon held locally each July. "I didn't win any prizes," she said of last year's race, adding, "I'm not about speed, just about finishing." She signed up for training again this year, and like growing numbers of people in their 50s and 60s and some older she has found a new challenge in triathlons and other sports that test discipline and endurance. Some opt to train for competitive swimming, or the senior tennis or golf circuits. "There's a dramatic shift taking place because more older people are adopting the attitude that I can not that I'm unable because I'm older," said Colin Milner, an expert on aging, who urges physical activity to stave off disabilities that often trouble seniors. "Too many people spend much of their last decade of life with restricted daily movements like not being able to get up from a chair or walk short distances," said Mr. Milner, the founder and chief executive of the International Council on Active Aging, an association that promotes wellness for aging adults. For those who are not accustomed to intense physical activity, experts in aging urge getting professional advice during the training process. Middle age and older people should build endurance with activities like walking, jogging, swimming, biking and even raking leaves to increase heart rate and breathing efficiency. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recommendation for 2.5 hours of weekly exercise and some strength training, he said, has helped make older people more aware of the need for exercise and helped to encourage taking up competitive sports. Such rising interest is driving participation in contests like the annual National Senior Games, informally known as the Senior Olympics. An estimated 12,000 such athletes are expected to take part in the games this July up from about 2,500 when they were started in 1987. The sports, which are as diverse as horseshoes and the tennis like game called pickle ball, will be held in the Minneapolis area, according to the National Senior Games Association, the nonprofit operating body. Senior athletes first compete at the state level to qualify. Contestants will also battle in the National Senior Games' triathlon, which is one of more than 4,000 local and regional race events held annually around the country. In the last decade, the interest has driven up the number of older adults joining USA Triathlon, the sport's governing body, by about 230 percent, to 27,069 members from 8,278 in 2005. To compete, basic fitness and minimum equipment work just fine. But more intense competitors need to have the wherewithal to travel to different cities for qualifying races or to take part in distant bicycle or running meets, and to afford specialized gear. While such equipment is typically less expensive than taking an overseas trip, certain gear can still be costly, especially because the triathlon requires being outfitted for three sports. Aside from the essentials like a swimsuit, bicycle, helmet and running shoes, triathlon competitors also may want cycling gloves, biking shorts and shoes and triathlon shorts and tops. The triathlon bicycle, however, often dwarfs the other items in expense. According to a 2009 USA Triathlon survey, its members spent an average of 2,274 for a bicycle. In addition, members annually pay 564 in race fees, and they spend 524 on bike equipment and 370 on training, running and athletic footwear, according to survey data. In pricey sports like golf, lessons and clinics can climb into the five figures, especially for those who try to qualify for the elite seniors circuit. But there is no reason multisport pursuits like triathlons cannot be much cheaper, especially if athletes stick close to home for their training and racing, said Kris Swarthout, who coaches USA Triathlon's Team USA. The team will participate in the world championships, where competition is in five year age divisions, in Chicago in September. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' "The older competitors have less of an eye for the new gizmos and fancy equipment that younger people tend to buy," he said. "The older generation wants to put a lot of earnest effort into a training regimen and doesn't care if a bike is 15 years old." Ms. Scott did not have fancy equipment last year when she joined the triathlon training offered by Still Hopes Episcopal Retirement Community in West Columbia. The community's fitness center trains interested residents and those in the surrounding area who are 55 and older. The program, which had eight participants when it began four years ago, has grown to 20 this year, said Denise Heimlich, the center's wellness director. They are coached three times a week, for 22.50 a session, by Stefanie Cain, a USA Triathlon certified coach who is the center's fitness program coordinator. Most participants are in their 60s, with the oldest 68 years old, said Ms. Cain, who trains them for the shortest distance, a sprint triathlon, which includes a half mile (750 meters) swim, 12 mile (20 kilometers) bike ride and 3.1 mile (5 kilometers) run. (The standard race includes a 0.9 mile swim, a 25 mile bike ride and a 6.2 mile run, and there are also longer distances.) Some senior athletes like Catherine S. Wilson, of McLean, Va., a community college career counselor, take up triathlon training on their own. "When you're going to be 50, you realize you'd better get on it," said Ms. Wilson, 61, who had been a biker, swimmer and runner before she decided to investigate triathlons. After an online search, she found the local DC Triathlon Club , a 50 a year membership group (with a 150 training fee), to guide her through the training and preparatory races. "I was by far the oldest, but they were very supportive," said Ms. Wilson, who completed her first triathlon 11 years ago. After her initial training, she joined various local bike clubs and went to triathlon training camps in Florida and Pennsylvania. Two years ago, she wanted to improve her skills, so she hired a USA Triathlon certified coach, Julie Billingsley, 56, of Chevy Chase, Md. Ms. Billingsley, who is also a triathlete, created an individual plan and practice schedule to fine tune Ms. Wilson's training. "You get a lot of little aches and pains, and Julie is there to tell you to stop or to back off or to go to the doctor," said Ms. Wilson, who squeezes in three hours of swimming, three hours of running and five hours of biking into a week when she is training. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Selling and moving to a rental cut his monthly housing expenses by about half. The market was sizzling six years ago when William Tracy bought a 1,300 square foot one bedroom loft in the Grand Madison, a 1906 building near Madison Square Park. He paid a bit more than 1.5 million, with condominium charges and taxes in the low 2,000s. This spring, with prices rising again, Mr. Tracy decided to sell. "I was aware the prices in the building were going up, because I had Streeteasy on my computer," he said, "and it told me every day about any apartment in my building." He listed his condo for 1.895 million and received an offer at the first open house. The condo sold for 1.85 million so quickly that Mr. Tracy had barely thought about where he would live. "I don't want to buy ever again, frankly," said Mr. Tracy, who is 65 and lived in the San Francisco area for 30 years before moving to New York almost a decade ago with his partner, who died of a heart attack a year later. He contacted his friend Ari M. J. Silverstein of Bond New York to help him hunt for a two bedroom in a doorman rental building for no more than 5,000 a month. "My carrying costs at the old place were 10,000 a month and I wanted to cut that," Mr. Tracy said. A friend suggested he try a different neighborhood. He works from home as a graphic designer, "so I am not tied to a painful commute," he said. He knew that when it came to apartment size, price and location, "I couldn't have all three." Mr. Silverstein suggested he check out the financial district, but it seemed remote. Then he mentioned the high rises of Midtown West. "You get a lot of bang for your buck out there," Mr. Silverstein said. "He had a lifetime worth of belongings." At River Place on far West 42nd Street near 12th Avenue and the Hudson, Mr. Tracy saw a corner two bedroom with 1,100 square feet and views of New Jersey. His condo, on a low floor, had received little sunlight. "Every day in the year you had to turn on every light in the house because it felt dark," he said. "It was like living in a terrarium." So this apartment "went to the top of my list right away," he said. The rent was 4,490 a month. Wanting to see other options, he visited the 53 story Biltmore on West 47th Street. For 4,195 a month, a one bedroom with a home office was available on the floor below the penthouse. A high floor apartment "totally was interesting to me," he said, "and the views were spectacular." This apartment was relatively small. The home office could accommodate a convertible sofa, but not when it was unfurled into a bed. Mr. Tracy didn't care. "I was so enthusiastic about it, I decided I would get rid of all my stuff," he said. Friends reminded him that he liked his stuff. Farther north, he liked the location of One Columbus Place, near Time Warner Center and the Upper West Side, where a two bedroom was for rent for 4,100 a month. But the interior seemed ordinary, and didn't compare with what he had already seen. Mr. Tracy was curious about Murray Hill, not far from his old neighborhood. "There is not a lot of doorman rental stock in the area," Mr. Silverstein said, "and what is available is quite expensive." Buildings there seemed comparatively old and "kind of shabby," Mr. Tracy said. At a pretty prewar building on Madison Avenue near 30th Street, a two bedroom that had been converted to a three bedroom by a wall in the living room cost 4,895 a month. The views were of brick walls. "Once the sun hits the horizon, the light changes every minute," he said. "It is totally fun to look out the windows. I am glad I made the decision to come out here." He is finding more of a neighborhood and less inconvenience than he expected from a location so far west. A Sunac Fancy Food market opened just recently. He still heads back to his old neighborhood for meals and haircuts. He likes its merchants, whom he has known for years, "so I want to keep going there until I get too lazy," he said. Transportation from so far west is a bit inconvenient. The closest subway is at Eighth Avenue, and the blocks are long. But his building runs a shuttle across 42nd Street during rush hours, and taxicabs are always available. "I figure, with the amount of money I am saving," he said, "I can take a few taxis." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.