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Corpus Christi, Tex. You've most likely caught wind of the controversy surrounding Jeanine Cummins's newly published novel "American Dirt." In it, Lydia Quixano Perez, a Mexican bookseller, finds herself fleeing to the United States with her son Luca, pursued by an obsessed drug cartel boss. The telenovela plot is a pastiche of stereotypes and melodramatic tropes of the sort one might expect from an author who did not grow up within Mexican culture, from a massacre at a quinceanera to the inexplicable choice of a relatively wealthy woman to leap onto La Bestia, a gang controlled train rather than just take a plane to Canada. Despite the multiple cultural inaccuracies and Spanish dialogue of Google Translate quality sprinkled throughout, the manuscript was acquired by Flatiron Books for seven figures in a nine way bidding war. Hailed as a modern day "The Grapes of Wrath" by the writer Don Winslow, it was heavily promoted for a year, poised to be the book on the immigrant crisis. But "American Dirt" has now been largely rejected by the very Mexicans and Mexican Americans it was meant to foreground, the "faceless brown mass" Ms. Cummins who has a Puerto Rican grandmother and identifies as white sought to humanize. That "brown mass" includes the people in my Mexican American community here in South Texas. The white saviorism is tough for me to swallow, and not just because I'm a Chicano writer critical of "American Dirt." My hometown library was chosen in late 2019 to be part of a pilot partnership between Oprah's Book Club, the American Library Association and local library book groups. The libraries would receive several boxes of books to use with patrons in their book club, as well as other discussion and promotional materials. Last week I was in touch with Kate Horan, the director of the McAllen Public Library here, via phone and email. She told me she felt "excited and honored" by the news, "proud that our library on the border with Mexico was recognized and selected to be part of a new initiative." No one at the library knew which book had been selected: Ms. Winfrey keeps titles a tightly guarded secret. But Ms. Horan was told that it would be "the most talked about book of the year." Instructions were given: Upon arrival of the shipment, the library should film an "unboxing" video and submit it to Ms. Winfrey. The boxes arrived on Jan. 17. Upon opening them, Ms. Horan said, her "heart sank," and she immediately recoiled at this "deliberate assumption that libraries on the border, who were selected to receive the books, would be automatic endorsers, given the subject matter." She sent the unboxing video off, and after two agonizing days consulting with her predominantly Latinx staff and others, she decided to send the books back, and politely declined to participate in the pilot program. What Ms. Horan did is a rare thing to see from a person in power within the literary world a world where it's much more likely that the gatekeepers and institutional systems in place will fashion books out of fraught manuscripts simply because they are practically guaranteed to stir up buzz. Much of the problem lies with the publishing industry. For each of the biggest companies including Macmillan and Simon Schuster a book is anointed each season or year as The One. The limelight is thrown upon it. The bulk of the promotional budget is funneled toward it. Reporters are marshaled to support it. The book is pushed hard with established chains and indie booksellers. They make it a success. Ostensibly, this effort offsets the weaker sales of other titles. One or two big hits, such as Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" or Michelle Obama's memoir "Becoming," can subsidize a publishing house's less trendy offerings. But look too hard at this model, and its flaws become clear. It costs a fortune to make a book a best seller. (Again, Ms. Cummins received a seven figure deal for "American Dirt.") And there are other allied mechanisms applying pressure to the market, such as endorsements by celebrities, tastemakers and influencers. Early "American Dirt" blurbs from prominent writers, several of them Latinas (Sandra Cisneros, Erika Sanchez), have recently been underscored by book selfies from prominent Latina movie stars (Yalitza Aparicio, Salma Hayek, Gina Rodriguez). Perhaps the most significant imprimatur a new release can get is selection by Oprah's Book Club. Established in 1996, the initiative selects up to five books each year based on criteria known only to Ms. Winfrey. The list is mostly books by white and African American authors, ranging from obscure literary fiction to pulpy popular thrillers. Uncomfortably, not one of the 82 books selected so far was written by a Mexican or Mexican American. Only four are by Latinx or Latin American authors. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Oprah's Book Club has proved to be the greatest outside influence on sales in the market. As you might imagine, there's a downside to her ability to ensure a best seller: The economist Craig L. Garthwaite has found that for at least 12 weeks after the club's announcement, sales of other adult books decline. In turning down the offer with Oprah's Book Club, Ms. Horan was willing to put her reputation and job on the line. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this act. Ms. Horan runs what is believed to be one of the largest single story libraries in the country. She holds leadership positions in multiple organizations. She's a powerful figure in literacy on the state and national level. And she was a collaborator, standing with us. The underrepresented. The less powerful. The A.L.A. knew from the beginning what title had been selected. That's why they suggested the McAllen Public Library as the best venue for promoting this atrocious piece of cultural appropriation. Pantalla, we say in Mexican Spanish. A smoke screen. Just like the book selfies. A mechanism for ensuring the greatest profit and least amount of criticism. The clumsy, ill conceived rollout of "American Dirt" illustrates how broken the system is, how myopic it is to hype one book at the expense of others and how unethical it is to allow a gatekeeper like Oprah's Book Club to wield such power. Imagine a publishing industry that dispensed with hit making, that used the millions of dollars poured into "American Dirt" to invest more into promoting a greater number and panoply of authors. Even Ms. Cummins recognizes the unfairness of the system: "That's not a problem that I can fix, nor is it a problem that I'm responsible for," she recently told NPR. The A.L.A. likely would have preferred that Ms. Horan quietly decline rather than make a public statement. Ms. Cummins and Flatiron Books probably would have preferred that Latinx writers and critics like Myriam Gurba and I just kept our mouths shut and let this book go unchecked. To her credit, Ms. Winfrey has publicly acknowledged the critiques from Latinx people. In an Instagram video on Sunday, she said that the book warrants a "deeper, more substantive discussion" and announced plans for a special set to stream on Apple TV Plus in March. Perhaps, if it weren't for all of the promotional hype, it would have been easy to dismiss as a poorly executed work not worth paying attention to. But the industry as it exists forced us to pay attention to it. And we Mexican Americans and collaborators alike refuse to be silent. We'll never meekly submit our stories, our pain, our dignity to the ever grinding wheels of the hit making machine. David Bowles ( DavidOBowles) is a writer and translator in Donna, Tex. 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 |
Shakuntala Devi (1929 2013) was best known as "the human computer" for her ability to perform lengthy calculations in her head, swiftly. One example of this, described in her New York Times obituary, took place in 1977, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where she extracted the 23rd root of a 201 digit number in 50 seconds. It took a Univac computer 62 seconds to do the same. Now, her life story has inspired the Hindi language film "Shakuntala Devi," streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Starring the veteran Bollywood actress Vidya Balan as Devi, the film is directed by Anu Menon and tells the story of Devi's life from the perspective of her daughter, Anupama Banerji. Played by Sanya Malhotra, Banerji was involved in the making of the film. Here are five facts about Devi you may not know. In 1980, she correctly multiplied two 13 digit numbers in just 28 seconds at Imperial College London. The feat, also included in her obituary, earned her a place in the 1982 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. It was even more remarkable because it included the time it took Devi to recite the 26 digit solution. (The numbers, selected at random by a computer, were 7,686,369,774,870 and 2,465,099,745,779. The answer was 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730.) In one famous interview on the BBC in 1950 (recreated in the biopic), her answer to a mathematical question was deemed incorrect, before the host later acknowledged that in fact, the computer's answer was wrong and Devi was right. 2. She was an ally of L.G.B.T.Q. people. In 1960, Devi married Paritosh Banerji. They divorced years later, and the 2001 documentary "For Straights Only" claimed the marriage fell apart because Banerji was gay. Devi said in the documentary that she set out to learn more about the challenges faced by L.G.B.T.Q. individuals to promote wider acceptance. In 1977, she wrote "The World of Homosexuals," which featured her research findings, including interviews with same sex couples in India and abroad. "It is not the individual whose sexual relations depart from the social custom who is immoral but those are immoral who would penalize him for being different," she wrote in the book. 3. She applied her mathematical strength to a pursuit of astrology. Perhaps because of her fascination with numbers, Devi tried her hand at astrology, which is highly revered in Indian culture. "Personal Astrologer of Presidents, Prime Ministers, Royalty, Movie Stars and Top Business Tycoons of the world is now available for Astrological Consultations" a newspaper ad claimed at the time. She similarly toured the world, according to a Times article, seeing up to 60 clients a day. They would give her a date of birth, time of birth and birthplace, and she would answer three questions about their lives. She also wrote a book called "Astrology for You." When Devi stopped touring the world doing shows featuring her arithmetic prowess, she wrote several books on math and her techniques, including "Puzzles to Puzzle You," "Super Memory: It Can Be Yours" and "Mathability: Awaken the Math Genius in Your Child." But decades prior, in 1976, Devi also wrote a crime thriller called "Perfect Murder." Written entirely in the first person, the story explores what happens when a lawyer, motivated by greed, decides to kill his wife to escape the marriage. 5. She once tried to forge a path into politics. In 1980, Devi ran for Parliament, the Lok Sabha, as an independent candidate from two different localities Mumbai and Medak (in the present day state of Telangana). In Medak, her main opponent was the former prime minister, Indira Gandhi, whom Devi had openly criticized. Her fame, however, didn't translate into votes, and she finished ninth, while Gandhi went on to win and became prime minister once again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Traditionally, the Fashion Awards ceremony is one of the glitziest events on the annual industry calendar. The British answer to the Met Gala, it is celebrated during the first week of December at the Royal Albert Hall in London with several thousand guests and a vast red carpet on which celebrities promenade under a wintry night sky. Not this year. Like so many other large scale events around the world, it has been transformed by the coronavirus pandemic. "It has been the most extraordinary 12 months," said Caroline Rush, the chief executive of the British Fashion Council, which administers the awards. "It would have been inappropriate to pretend that it was business as usual." Like the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards, which were canceled in June, the lavish red carpet is gone. But unlike the CFDA awards, which were reduced to a brief digital announcement of big winners in September, the Fashion Awards have also done away with traditional prizes, including best women's wear designer and brand of the year. In their place: a new digital format, with a short film that had its premiere on Dec. 3 on the website fashionawards.com. The film, a slickly edited mash up of talking heads, striking photographs and video footage of high fashion and global news moments, spotlights the work of 20 honorees in just four categories: Community, Creativity, People and Environment. And it is less about celebrating runway trends, silhouettes and blockbuster sales than about acknowledging creative responses to the health crisis and the impetus to change. According to Ms. Rush, the council and its members wanted to clear a path toward a new way to recognize and reward industry talent and the way fashion's influence can extend far beyond the catwalk. That is, she said, "why in this year's lineup you'll see some smaller names standing shoulder to shoulder with some massive ones." Thus, in the Community category, Chanel was honored for its 1 million pound (roughly 1.3 million) donation by its British arm to British charities responding to the pandemic, its PPE manufacturing and its racial justice fund and company climate strategy. But so was Michael Halpern, an American designer based in London who is known for his sparkly evening wear. Mr. Halpern's London Fashion Week video featured eight key female workers a nurse, cleaner and train operator, among them joyfully modeling his latest collection in a moving tribute to the power of collective action. And so was the collective known as the Emergency Designer Network. The group of rising British stars Holly Fulton, Phoebe English, Bethany Williams and Cozette McCreery spearheaded the manufacture of 50,000 surgical gowns and 10,000 sets of scrubs for health workers, establishing a network of experts that range from seamstresses to logistics specialists, with production continuing today. "I am so proud of this award and the work of the whole EDN community," Ms. Fulton said, noting that the four designers had never met one another before creating the collective. "Rallying together as we did reminded me about things in this industry that I had forgotten, about how much more than just clothes it can be. It helped so many people find purpose at a very dark time. And it shows that we can do stuff other than just design, and that as fashion designers our skill sets are actually very versatile." Creativity in the face of the pandemic was also recognized, with Jonathan Anderson being lauded for his show in a box concept, which redefined the runway experience by transforming it into a toylike game that could be created on a kitchen table. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons were honored for the debut of their joint collection. And Grace Wales Bonner was heralded for her work challenging the roles of race and Black culture in fashion. "To see social power and soft power rewarded this year brings a new degree of consciousness to the industry awards system that is really impressive," said Samuel Ross, the founder of the A Cold Wall label. Alongside Edward Enninful, the editor of British Vogue, the designers Aurora James and Priya Ahluwalia, and Lindsay Peoples Wagner and Sandrine Charles of the Black in Fashion Council, Mr. Ross was one of the honorees in the People category, which focused largely on responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. Last summer, Mr. Ross created the Black Lives Matter Financial Aid Scheme, pledging 10,000 pounds (about 13,350) to the organizations and people on the frontline supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. He also awarded grants of 25,000 pounds (about 33,390) to Black owned businesses across a diverse field beyond fashion, including technology and industrial design. "Tearing down the old processes, bringing visibility to those pioneering new paths and offering new opportunities that is a huge change for this business but it is the right step forward," Mr. Ross said. "It is what I've been doing with my work, but also what the BFC is trying to do with these new awards. This year has been brutal for so many. But this is a celebration that feels correct, and modern and inspiring." Also celebrated in the awards video are the 2020 New Wave Creatives. Featuring young artists, activists, casting agents, florists, makeup artists, set designers, stylists and writers, many of whom are interviewed for the montage, the list is meant to be a source for those in the industry looking to recruit from a diverse pool of talent. Whether the revamped template is here to stay remains to be seen, given that the lavish black tie format is traditionally a valuable way to generate much needed funding. Ms. Rush, who said that conversations about next year's awards were already underway, pointed out that without the hefty table sponsorship and donations of previous years, there would have been no emergency support available from the BFC Foundation Fashion Fund for the Covid Crisis, which began offering grants to designers earlier this year. "What we will take forward is the opportunity to champion those who are at the forefront of positive change as well as creativity and commerce in fashion," Ms. Rush said. "As we go into the new decade, we are mindful of that becoming more important than ever." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Artificial intelligence can help doctors do a better job of finding breast cancer on mammograms, researchers from Google and medical centers in the United States and Britain are reporting in the journal Nature. The new system for reading mammograms, which are X rays of the breast, is still being studied and is not yet available for widespread use. It is just one of Google's ventures into medicine. Computers can be trained to recognize patterns and interpret images, and the company has already created algorithms to help detect lung cancers on CT scans, diagnose eye disease in people with diabetes and find cancer on microscope slides. "This paper will help move things along quite a bit," said Dr. Constance Lehman, director of breast imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the study. "There are challenges to their methods. But having Google at this level is a very good thing." Tested on images where the diagnosis was already known, the new system performed better than radiologists. On scans from the United States, the system produced a 9.4 percent reduction in false negatives, in which a mammogram is mistakenly read as normal and a cancer is missed. It also provided a lowering of 5.7 percent in false positives, where the scan is incorrectly judged abnormal but there is no cancer. On mammograms performed in Britain, the system also beat the radiologists, reducing false negatives by 2.7 percent and false positives by 1.2 percent. Google paid for the study, and worked with researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago and two British medical centers, Cancer Research Imperial Centre and Royal Surrey County Hospital. Last year, 268,600 new cases of invasive breast cancer and 41,760 deaths were expected among women in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society. Globally, there are about 2 million new cases a year, and more than half a million deaths. About 33 million screening mammograms are performed each year in the United States. The test misses about 20 percent of breast cancers, according to the American Cancer Society, and false positives are common, resulting in women being called back for more tests, sometimes even biopsies. Doctors have long wanted to make mammography more accurate. "There are many radiologists who are reading mammograms who make mistakes, some well outside the acceptable margins of normal human error," Dr. Lehman said. To apply artificial intelligence to the task, the authors of the Nature report used mammograms from about 76,000 women in Britain and 15,000 in the United States, whose diagnoses were already known, to train computers to recognize cancer. Then, they tested the computers on images from about 25,000 other women in Britain, and 3,000 in the United States, and compared the system's performance with that of the radiologists who had originally read the X rays. The mammograms had been taken in the past, so the women's outcomes were known, and the researchers could tell whether the initial diagnoses were correct. "We took mammograms that already happened, showed them to radiologists and asked, 'Cancer or no?' and then showed them to A.I., and asked, 'Cancer, or no?'" said Dr. Mozziyar Etemadi, an author of the study from Northwestern University. This was the test that found A.I. more accurate than the radiologists. Unlike humans, computers do not get tired, bored or distracted toward the end of a long day of reading mammograms, Dr. Etemadi said. In another test, the researchers pitted A.I. against six radiologists in the United States, presenting 500 mammograms to be interpreted. Over all, A.I. again outperformed the humans. But in some instances, A.I. missed a cancer that all six radiologists found and vice versa. "There's no denying that in some cases our A.I. tool totally gets it wrong and they totally get it right," Dr. Etemadi said. "Purely from that perspective it opens up an entirely new area of inquiry and study. Why is it that they missed it? Why is it that we missed it?" Dr. Lehman, who is also developing A.I. for mammograms, said the Nature report was strong, but she had some concerns about the methods, noting that the patients studied might not be a true reflection of the general population. A higher proportion had cancer, and the racial makeup was not specified. She also said that "reader" analyses involving a small number of radiologists this study used six were not always reliable. The next step in the research is to have radiologists try using the tool as part of their routine practice in reading mammograms. New techniques that pass their initial tests with flying colors do not always perform as well out in the real world. "We have to see what happens when radiologists have it, see if they do better," Dr. Etemadi said. Dr. Lehman said: "We have to be very careful. We want to make sure this is helping patients." She said an earlier technology, computer aided detection, or CAD, provided a cautionary tale. Approved in 1998 by the Food and Drug Administration to help radiologists read mammograms, it came into widespread use. Some hospital administrators pressured radiologists to use it whether they liked it or not because patients could be charged extra for it, increasing profits, Dr. Lehman said. Later, several studies, including one that Dr. Lehman was part of, found that CAD did not improve the doctors' accuracy and even made them worse. "We can learn from the mistakes with CAD and do it better," Dr. Lehman said, adding that A.I. has become far more powerful, and keeps improving as more data is fed in. "Using computers to enhance human performance is long overdue." She and Dr. Etemadi said that a potentially good use of A.I. would be to sort mammograms and flag those most in need of the radiologist's attention. The system may also be able to identify those that are clearly negative, so they could be read quickly and patients could promptly be given a clean bill of health. Although developers of A.I. often say it is intended to help radiologists, not replace them, Dr. Lehman predicted that eventually, computers alone will read at least some mammograms, without help from humans. "We're onto something," she said. "These systems are picking up things a human might not see, and we're right at the beginning of it." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. 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The sculptural works and multimedia installations of the Brooklyn based artist who took the name American Artist explore the ways that structural bias permeates the development and use of technology. "My Blue Window," on view at the Queens Museum through Feb. 16 , focuses on predictive policing technology and the Blue and Black Lives Matter movements . Artist, 30, who uses gender neutral pronouns, talked about some of their personal choices, the whiteness of digital interfaces and making art that centers on the victims of anti black violence. The following interview has been edited and condensed. You've said that changing your legal name to American Artist was an act of both declaration and erasure. What was your thinking behind the decision? When I had the idea to change my name, I realized that if I asked anyone what they thought, they would tell me not to do it. So I just did it. What do you think they would have said? I think they would have just thought, as a person, this is a crazy thing to do. After I changed my name, that's when I was like, "Oh my God, I don't know if this is a good idea. I won't be able to be a normal person in society." But it's worked out O.K. I wasn't thinking of it as an endorsement of an American identity. It was more, for one thing, questioning what an American artist is. Who is considered the mainstream American artist? I think, in America, it's a white male abstract painter. That's becoming less common, but that's sort of how American art came to fore white males in the peak moment of American art gaining prominence, painting big abstract paintings. How did technology become part of your practice? I've always thought about how growing up alongside the development of the internet has influenced my life and my artwork. Earlier on, I began with critiquing the internet as a socializing space. That branched out into looking at the larger structures of the internet and new technologies who is behind that and how it came to be the way it is. Can you talk about some of those structures and how they influenced your art? For example, with "Black Gooey Universe" the title of an essay by Artist and their first solo gallery exhibition , I was thinking about this early computer interface beginning with this black screen. Then Apple released the Apple Lisa. The background was white, and that became the precedent for the interfaces that we have nowadays. When you're making a new file or doing a web search, it always begins with a white screen. And so thinking about how that could function as representative of the values of this group of white men that made this computer. One of the sculptural works in the "Black Gooey Universe" exhibition is of an early model computer with a keyboard that has tar oozing out of it. Tell me about that. I thought about what might technology look like if I thought about it from my own vantage point as a black person. What are some values that are sort of antithetical to those of the white interface? I was thinking about slowness or brokenness or stickiness, and these qualities that you don't think about when you think about an iPhone, for example. What do you want to say in your upcoming show? I'm thinking about the promise of technologies being a solution, especially with predictive policing. It's presented as this optimal way to police people, and yet it can't be proven that it even works. It's software that's continuing to incarcerate people that shouldn't be responsible for the effects of the software. From what I can see, the police are using this algorithm as a way to say, we're not biased we're just following what the computer told us to do. But the data that goes into that system is based on past data that they've created. So it's also inherently biased. It's also a matter of, "How is it ethical to rely on this thing that you don't fully understand to imprison people that you also have no direct relationship with?" Images and videos of police brutality and violence against black people are frequently in the headlines and going viral. How do they inform your work? I try and take a step away from the spectacle of it, because I feel like it's not something that we aren't already familiar with. So with some of my works, something that I've tried to do is just step back. I don't know if you saw this piece I did called "Sandy Speaks." It was about what happened to Sandra Bland in 2015. But seeing how her image was so widely used, and the conspiracy theories that arose around her mug shot, I wanted to not use her image at all and just focus on what she was saying. What is it about the color blue that made you want to explore it in "My Blue Window"? I've used blue in a lot of my work, and it's taken different meanings at different times. Earlier on, that was the color that I used in reference to digital displays, as representative of the moment before an image appears. But then realizing how overdetermined it is as a color, especially politically, I started to think about how the police are weaponizing that color by identifying as blue and by presenting blueness as if it's a racial identity, thinking of the Blue Lives Matter movement. As a viewer in the exhibition, you're in the position of the police officer, watching dashcam footage. It has this voyeuristic aspect to it. The title "My Blue Window" is alluding to the mental space of the police officer, identifying with this notion of blueness. How does that make you feel? It doesn't make me feel good. What do you hope for people to take away when they see your show? I want them to be curious. And to develop their own sense of criticality so that it's not a matter of me presenting an argument but setting up the tools for you to ask your own questions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Dr. Donald R. Hopkins reflects on how the prejudice he experienced growing up in the American South helped him communicate with the rural villages most affected by Guinea worm disease. CHICAGO In his home office, Dr. Donald R. Hopkins has statues of the Hindu smallpox goddess and the Yoruba smallpox god. And, floating coiled up in a glass jar, something that looks like a yardlong strand of capellini but is actually one of the last Guinea worms on earth. Smallpox is gone, and Dr. Hopkins played an important role in its death. Guinea worm disease formally known as dracunculiasis, or "affliction with little dragons" is down to fewer than 600 cases worldwide, from 3.5 million in 1986, when Dr. Hopkins began leading the drive to eradicate it. He took up the cause when he was at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and now runs it as the vice president for health programs at the Carter Center, the group founded by former President Jimmy Carter to advance human rights and fight disease. It has not been swift; several target dates for eradication have come and gone. Nonetheless, "I'm increasingly confident that it's less and less likely that the disease will outlive me," said Dr. Hopkins, who is 71. Nearly all the remaining cases are in South Sudan, which is newly independent and largely at peace. A few are in northern Mali, which is too dangerous for eradicators to work in right now but is becoming safer since French troops ousted Islamist rebels. Ethiopia and Chad, the other two countries with cases, are not at war. Choosing a life's work that requires visiting remote villages around the world seems counterintuitive for someone who, by his own admission, is terrified of snakes, rats, bats, airplanes, heights and food poisoning. Ernesto Ruiz Tiben, Dr. Hopkins's deputy and perhaps the only person who would still consider playing a practical joke on him, recalled sidling up behind his boss in a field of knee high grass in Pakistan as he looked warily around for snakes. Told that story, Dr. William H. Foege a former C.D.C. director and himself a legend of the war on smallpox laughed aloud and said he remembered someone bringing a harmless garter snake to the C.D.C. offices to tease Dr. Hopkins with, and trying to say it was a gift from Dr. Foege. That Dr. Hopkins keeps going back to villages teeming with snakes "proves how important a professional challenge is to Don," Dr. Foege said. "He's one of the most tenacious people you'll ever find." Dr. Hopkins attributes that tenacity to his Bahamian parents and to Coconut Grove, the neighborhood in Miami where he grew up; it was founded by islanders who sailed over in the 1880s looking for jobs in the new resorts springing up. He was one of 10 children of Joseph Hopkins, a carpenter, and Iva Louise Major Hopkins, a seamstress who made her children say their multiplication tables beside her sewing machine and recited the inspirational poem "Don't Quit" to them. "I had tons of cousins, aunts and uncles within a three block radius," Dr. Hopkins said. "It was definitely 'It takes a village to raise a child.' We didn't rebel or get in trouble. It just wasn't allowed. We were very serious about our studies, because of the high expectations." He knew he wanted to be a doctor; he won a local science fair prize for a life size clay model of the digestive system. Just 15 when he won a scholarship to Morehouse, the prestigious black men's college in Atlanta, he had to quit his paper route to go. While at Morehouse, he won a travel scholarship and spent a year in Vienna, where he lived with a local family and came to love classical music while listening to operas for 12 cents in standing room. He saw only one other black person the whole year, he said. Adults were kind, he recalled, "but one little girl skipping along in the park took one look at me and screamed her head off." Back in Atlanta, race relations were harsher. One incident "burned in my memory," he said, was being with classmates on a bus in a white neighborhood, and the driver flagging down a police officer to order them to the back. (The officer refused, he said, saying, "You know the law I can't.") He still remembers the moment he picked tropical medicine. On a winter break trip to Egypt, he saw flies swarming on children's faces, and later learned they transmitted trachoma, an eyelid infection that cause blindness. In 1967, Dr. Foege asked him to lead the smallpox effort in Sierra Leone, which then had the world's highest case rate, and test a new strategy: Instead of trying to vaccinate the whole country, teams would race to new outbreaks, vaccinating around each in widening circles until it died out. The strategy worked so well, Dr. Hopkins said, that Sierra Leone was smallpox free in less than two years. It took a decade more to eradicate the disease globally, but that was "a big morale boost." After a stint fighting smallpox in India, he returned home, taught tropical medicine at Harvard and rose through the C.D.C. ranks, ultimately retiring as acting director in 1987. At the time, leading public health experts had a lofty dream: getting clean water to everyone on earth. Dr. Hopkins suggested a more modest goal: Guinea worm, a plague of the rural poor, could be eliminated by simply filtering existing water. The worms have been torturing humans since before history began. A calcified one has been found in an Egyptian mummy. People become infected when they drink from ponds containing tiny freshwater crustaceans, known as copepods, that themselves have swallowed microscopic worm larvae. The larvae escape being digested by either the crustacean or the human, and grow inside the body to about a yard long. They then migrate to the skin usually in a foot, but sometimes a hand, a breast or even an eye socket. Then they exude a burning acid to create a blister, which they burst through. As soon as the victim dips the inflamed area in cooling water, the worm (described by Dr. Hopkins as "a giant uterus") squirts out millions of larvae, starting the cycle anew. Eradication relies not on a vaccine, but on simple filtering technologies and huge networks of local health workers. Those workers do many tasks. They find cases, treat ponds with a copepod killing pesticide and teach families how to filter their drinking water. Workers also help victims inch the worms out, keep the wounds sterile and assure they do not reinfect local water. Dr. Hopkins excels at building those networks, finding local leaders to run them, and keeping health ministers focused even as the years pass. Mr. Carter backs him up, using his prestige as a former president, telephoning African presidents to urge them to keep the pressure on or even flying to Africa to tour villages where the worm persists. In 1995 he negotiated a four month truce in the Sudanese civil war that became known as the Guinea worm cease fire. Now, with cases dropping steadily, Dr. Hopkins is optimistic. When programs are well run, he said, progress can be rapid; Ghana went from 501 cases to none in 18 months. In a telephone interview, Mr. Carter was full of praise for Dr. Hopkins, saying, "We could not have gotten here without him," and adding, "I have a promise from Don that he won't retire until the last worm is gone." Dr. Hopkins had an answer: "If I even wanted to retire, exactly what would I say to President Carter? He's 17 years older than me, and still going. He's a tough man." His list of awards is long, and offbeat. He won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1995 and is now on the MacArthur board. He was knighted by Mali. He was presented with a tassel covered horse by a Niger chief (he stayed on just long enough for a photo and then quietly regifted it to the local Guinea worm team). In his office, he has two award plaques with pump handles on them a reference to John Snow, the father of epidemiology, who traced a London cholera outbreak to one contaminated pump and halted it by removing the handle. And he has nearly 30 pictures or carvings of woodpeckers, birds he has liked since he saw them in his grandmother's oak tree; when his Carter Center subordinates do particularly good work, he inks the reports they have written with a rubber woodpecker stamp. Asked if he ever became discouraged as the fight dragged on, Dr. Hopkins recounted a conversation he had about 25 years ago, shortly after arriving in India to fight smallpox: "I met a guy who said, 'You guys can come here with your West African experience, but I'm Indian and I know my country and we're never going to get rid of smallpox here.' " "But we did," he added. "So I'm sort of immunized against skepticism." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Since so few books are published in December, the best seller lists don't change much this time of year. John Grisham's "The Reckoning" remains atop the fiction list, and 's "Becoming" still holds the No. 1 nonfiction spot. But it is something of a surprise to see Obama's memoir, which has been translated into 23 languages, selling so well the world over. In Finland, for example, the former first lady's book has been at No. 1 on the bookseller Akateeminen Kirjakauppa's nonfiction list for weeks, followed closely by "Paranoid Optimist," a memoir from the Nokia chairman Risto Siilasmaa (clearly that title works better in Finnish than it does translated into English). Next door in Sweden at Svensk Bokhandel, "Becoming" is at No. 2, edged out by Hans Rosling's "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think," which was one of Barack Obama's favorite books last year. Sweden is a Scandinavian outlier, though; "Becoming" is No. 1 in both Norway and Denmark. It tops the lists in other European countries, too, including Germany, Portugal and England. In this essay, Isabel Wilkerson brings all her narrative firepower to 's "Becoming." "Becoming" is No. 3 on Ireland's combined list, where it follows "Normal People," a novel by the hugely popular Irish writer Sally Rooney, and "At All Costs," a memoir from the hurling manager and player Davy Fitzgerald. It is No. 4 in both France and Spain; in Italy, where most of the books on the combined top 10 list are by Italian authors (Elena Ferrante commands the four top spots), "Becoming" is No. 9. It's No. 14 in Poland and No. 20 in the Czech Republic, and it seems to be selling briskly at bookstores in Albania. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
THIS could be the beginning of Subaru Manifest Destiny, as the maker of hardy all wheel drive cars tries to move beyond its heartland in the great, icy north to places where frost is seen mainly in the freezer. That would be a huge change, because Subarus have had some geographic limitations. With four drive wheels and a practical nature, they have been a logical choice in snowy, mountainous regions. In such places, where drivers put a premium on bad weather propulsion, the cars' negatives scant rear legroom and middling fuel economy were more easily tolerated than in much of the rest of the country. But the redesigned 2010 Legacy sedan and Outback wagon all Legacys are now sedans and all Outbacks are wagons have significantly more rear legroom, much better fuel economy and upgrades in safety and civility. They are not just for Yankee blizzards anymore. The Legacy and Outback share mechanical underpinnings but are aimed at different customers. The Legacy's competitors include the Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Chevrolet Malibu and Ford Fusion. The Outback's probable rivals include the Chevy Equinox, Honda CR V, Toyota RAV4 and Ford Escape. To face such varied opponents, the cars' styling is different. For years, the hood scoop was one defining element of Subaru style, but not any more. The Legacy gets a chic, assertive design; the Outback has a burly S.U.V. look. In length, the Legacy and Outback are little changed. But clever packaging has carved out almost four additional inches of rear legroom. Four 6 foot adults will now fit handily in either car. It is also easier to get into the back seat. Subaru says the openings for the Legacy's rear passenger doors are 15 inches wider than last year, and the Outback's increased by 12 inches. "We've gone from basically the back end of the segment to right in the heart of the segment in terms of interior space," said David Sullivan, the product line manager for the two cars. The important safety features, from side impact air bags to electronic stability control, are standard. The 2010 Legacy and Outback are rated "top safety picks" by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, based on front , rear and side impact crash tests and the roof's ability to withstand a rollover. Over two weeks I had the chance to drive a midlevel Legacy and Outback, each with the base 4 cylinder engine. The Legacy had the 6 speed manual and the Outback the "Lineartronic" automatic, a continuously variable transmission without fixed gears. Mr. Sullivan said Subaru wanted a suspension that struck a balance between a smooth ride and responsive handling. After a few miles on rough, nasty surfaces in the White Mountains, the ride was so comfortable I figured Subaru missed that balance. It was hard to see how, on a twisty road, the cars could not be clumsy. I was wrong. The Legacy works well at speed on the most demanding roads. It's not a hard edged sport sedan, but good. The steering is admirably predictable, but could use more feel. By lifting off the gas pedal in a brisk turn, a driver can make the tail move a bit to the outside, aiming the nose deeper into the turn. Such a tendency is not pronounced enough to be alarming and enthusiasts will enjoy it. With 8.7 inches of ground clearance, the Outback rides almost three inches higher than the Legacy, giving it an advantage in light off road use or deep snow. In normal driving, the Outback is competent and pleasant. Pushed hard, it feels slower to react than the Legacy, but it is never clumsy. The 1,000 Lineartronic automatic is an intriguing alternative. Because it is not limited to six gears, the engine always responds quickly and allows particularly low engine speeds for cruising. This free range automatic provides better fuel economy than the manual. With Lineartronic, the 4 cylinder Legacy is rated at 23 m.p.g. city and 31 m.p.g. highway that's 4 m.p.g. better for both city and highway than the manual transmission and competitive with front wheel drive rivals. The ratings are much improved over those 2009 models' with 4 speed automatics. In addition to costing less at the pump, the new Subarus need not be budget busters at the dealership. The least expensive Legacy, the 2.5i, is 20,690. That's about 8,150 less than a Ford Fusion with all wheel drive, although the Fusion has many more luxury features. For those for whom adequate acceleration is simply not enough, the most powerful and expensive Legacy is the 2.5 GT Limited at 30,690. It has a turbocharged 2.5 liter 4 cylinder (265 horsepower) and a 6 speed manual. The least expensive 6 cylinder (a 256 horsepower 3.6 liter) is 25,690. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
This summer, Daniel Ek, one of the founders of Spotify, drew jeers for suggesting in an interview that artists should now continually pump out content, and that in the "future landscape" of streaming, "you can't record music once every three to four years and think that's going to be enough." But the latest Billboard chart offers an illustration of why Ek may have had a point at least when it comes to genres that perform strongly on streaming, like hip hop and pop. This week the Louisiana rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again has landed his third No. 1 album in less than a year with "Top," which had the equivalent of 126,000 sales in the United States, including 156 million streams, according to Nielsen Music. Since he emerged about five years ago as a teenage rapper with a YouTube account and a Walmart bought microphone, YoungBoy has been a one man content factory, churning out mixtapes, videos and collaborations in rapid succession. By 2019, he had become one of the most popular musicians on YouTube. Last October, shortly before his 20th birthday, YoungBoy whose real name is Kentrell Gaulden released the mixtape "AI YoungBoy 2," which went to No. 1; so did another, "38 Baby 2," in May. For years, artists in genres like hip hop and K pop have aggressively adopted the content deluge strategy, and found rewards on the charts. As Billboard notes, BTS, the superstar K pop boy band, had three No. 1 albums during a 10 month stretch in 2018 and 2019, and the rapper Future sent three titles including one joint release with Drake to the top over six months in 2015 and 2016. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
As a small kid growing up in the 1980s, I truly believed that Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey circus was the greatest show on earth. Nothing compared in scale or spectacle. I was hypnotized by the flamboyance of the lion tamer Gunther Gebel Williams and terrified for the soaring acrobats tempting death. Everything seemed huge and sparkly and full of danger. By the next decade, Cirque du Soleil, the arty alternative circus that grew into a new kind of juggernaut, made that "greatest show" claim sound a little ridiculous. But when I returned to Ringling Brothers, on Thursday at Barclays Center, I watched a daredevil horsewoman, a real life Indiana Jones, duck between the legs of her ride, moving from one side to the other at full gallop, and I was jolted back to the wonder of my childhood. This show was Barnum's final stop in New York after nearly 150 years of performing, part of the startling end for a storied showbiz institution, for decades a symbol of American ambition. (Its final performance is on May 21.) Long before television and radio invaded homes, the circus was the national entertainment industry, complete with vast marketing campaigns and global talent scouts. Imagine the response to seeing Disney or McDonald's go out of business, and you get a sense of what someone from a century ago would think about Ringling Brothers' closing shop. The company has faded over the decades, its grandeur eclipsed and its animal acts seeming fusty, but make no mistake: Something irreplaceable will be lost when Ringling closes up its tent for good a tradition of inspiring awe that connected parent to child, generation to generation. Ringling didn't invent the circus, whose modern origins date to around the founding of this country, but it supersized it, increasing the blockbuster visuals and the travel. P. T. Barnum and his partners led the first circus to transport its entire show (including animals) on newly built transcontinental railroads and coined the phrase "greatest show on earth." After joining with a competitor in 1881 to become Barnum Bailey, they toured Europe, gaining steam before merging with another competitor, Ringling Brothers, in 1907. What resulted was a cultural behemoth. At Madison Square Garden, its production of "Cleopatra," showcasing a cast of 1,500, made Elizabeth Taylor's movie look modest. By the middle of the century, John Ringling North, the circus's impresario for three decades, promised to modernize the show, signing up Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine to make a ballet of elephants. Brooks Atkinson, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, poked fun at the gimmick, before locating the peculiar appeal of the circus. "Nothing save the circus can overpower you with such a tremendous mass of entertainment," he wrote in 1942. "It is the genius of the circus to give too much of everything." The movies of course did the same, and if one were to pinpoint the moment when the torch was passed, it might be when Steven Spielberg's father took him to his first film, Cecil B. DeMille's portrait of circus life, "The Greatest Show on Earth." A new showman was born. "Out of This World," the current show by Ringling (led by its creative director, Amy Tinkham), is a reminder that nothing on a screen can replicate the wonder and urgency of the live circus. Keeping up with the times, this uneven production has some video and some projections, backing up some nonsense story about an evil intergalactic queen, a magic telescope and a journey through space, but these forgettable elements are secondary, mere interruptions to the real matter at hand: the acts. The highlights include motorcyclists (the Torres Family) zipping around inside a small metal globe, veering inches away from one another, and an incredibly daring group of acrobats performing feats standing on top of horses racing in circles at up to 25 miles per hour. Every couple minutes, a flood of ice skaters or animals pours across the stage, setting up the next death defying number. There are some tepid efforts as well, like men on unicycles playing basketball, a few too many flubs like an acrobat falling into the net or a botched juggle. And any time the ringmaster (Johnathan Lee Iverson) sings a pop song, the show evokes a community theater production of "Starlight Express." As is the case with most contemporary circuses, the comedy lacks any real wit or spontaneity, resorting to lame references to "Jaws" and the song "Ice Ice Baby." What really distinguishes Ringling Brothers are the animal acts. They have long been the bread and butter of this circus one of its most classic posters promises "the world's most terrifying living creature." And in this show, they were out in force: llamas, hopping dogs, a donkey, lions and tigers, a kangaroo and a lumbering pig. This menagerie has inspired furious protests, including activists outside this show holding photos of tigers that read: "Whipped for your entertainment." For those who want their circuses cage free, Cirque du Soleil shows that you can offer crowd pleasing spectacle without lions and tigers and pigs. In response to the criticism, Ringling stopped using elephants last year, sidelining perhaps their most famous stars. (The word "jumbo" derives from the African elephant P. T. Barnum brought to America and showcased in his circus.) Perhaps it's for the best. The world moves on, even when a link to the past is broken. When I took my young daughter to see Ringling a few years ago, just as my parents had done with me, it was the elephant that captivated her the most. On the way out, I bought a doll of one for her, with the red sign promoting "Greatest Show on Earth" over its trunk. That stuffed toy sat near her bed for years, long after she had lost interest in dolls. When I threw it out to make room for less childish things, I didn't expect how furious she would get with me. She says she still misses it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
We writers enjoy bemoaning that there are no more surprises in the automotive world, but the last 12 months was full of them, from an exhaust note that caused constant double takes to a Rolls with unexpected avian appeal. And then, of course, there was the hovercraft. LOUDEST EXHAUST The Jaguar F Type V8 S has the most outrageously boisterous factory exhaust system on any car at any price. One night, I mounted a GoPro camera to the rear bumper and went out to ascertain whether fireballs shoot out of the tailpipe. (They don't.) One day, while leaving an airport parking garage I consciously took it easy, for fear that a trip to the redline would echo off the walls in such a way that fellow travelers might mistake it for small arms fire. The prototype wasn't fully functional, but could maneuver around on a pond enough that you got the idea. I recently asked the company's co founder and chief executive, Michael Mercier, how the progress is coming, and he said improvements had been made to the thrust and hover systems to allow better performance on land. A second prototype is to be ready in February, and the company hopes to start production in June. After that, who knows? Villains and superspies alike could soon be undertaking their amphibious travels in newfound style. CAR MOST LIKELY TO ATTRACT FANCY CHICKENS I had a real life Beverly Hillbillies moment at a friend's farm, where an inquisitive chicken tried to climb into the back seat of the new Rolls Royce Ghost Extended Wheelbase. I let her get as far as the doorsill, where she took a good look around before I shooed her away. The chicken did not cross the Rolls. It seemed as if every time I parked the Vanquish Volante I ended up in a conversation involving either the price (about 300,000) or the horsepower (565). A grand total of zero people thought that this carbon fiber body V12 roadster had anything to do with a Fusion. Anyway, there's more to an Aston than the grille: This is a car that compels you to linger in your garage just to look at it. BEST CAR THAT YOU BUILD YOURSELF To build a Factory Five 818S, you need three things: the 9,990 kit from Factory Five, a 2002 7 Subaru Impreza or WRX, and a bit of handiness with a wrench. Given some time and tools, you dismantle the Subaru and use its guts to create the 818, an elemental 1,800 pound two seater with a midengine rear wheel drive configuration. The result sounds like a Subaru and performs like a gutsier Lotus Elise. And, depending on what you spend on the Subaru donor car, the entire project could cost around 15,000 (though 20,000 might be more realistic). I attended the open house event where Factory Five unveiled the car, and a mob of customers validated the appeal of the concept. I've since driven the car, and it's as entertaining as you'd expect of a vehicle with 265 horsepower and half the weight of a Camaro. (There's also the 818R track oriented version, for those who desire additional speed.) Dynamic virtues aside, I imagine that there's a healthy level of satisfaction when someone asks who built your car and you can reply, "I did." CAR THAT MAKES YOU GLAD YOU'RE NOT 6 FOOT 4 One day while I was testing the new Corvette, I emerged from the gym to find a Camaro ZL1 convertible parked alongside the gray Stingray. The ZL1's owner, a doctor named Mark, soon arrived and we talked about the relative merits of two of General Motors' quickest products. It transpired that Mark wanted a Corvette but, at 6 foot 4, couldn't fit in the 2013 model, so he bought the Camaro instead. I handed him the keys and invited him to see if the 2014 Vette is any more capacious, but sure enough his knees were against the dashboard no matter which way he adjusted the seat. I'm 6 feet tall, and it never occurred to me that certain cars would be off limits if I were several inches taller, but subsequent conversations with my more vertically gifted friends revealed that they find plenty of cars inhospitable. (The Honda Accord, for instance, simply needs longer seat tracks.) As for Mark, it's unfortunate that he is denied the pleasures of the new Stingray, but a 6 speed ZL1 convertible with a manual gearbox is not a bad consolation prize. CAR THAT MADE ME WISH I HAD A WEATHER MACHINE I think it's inevitable that the upper echelon of supercars will soon embrace all wheel drive across the board. My three days with the McLaren 12C Spider underscored the dilemma posed by high horsepower and wet roads with 616 horsepower, full throttle on anything less than dry pavement invites incredible wheelspin, even at highway speeds. I found one stretch of road that dried out during a pause in the deluge, and the 12C momentarily displayed its true talents. Oh, golly. But the rest of the time, I'd say that 40 percent of McLaren's finest horsepower remained in the stable. CAR OF THE YEAR They say you shouldn't meet your heroes, but anyone who grew up in the '80s could never refuse a drive in the quintessential hero car of the era, the Lamborghini Countach. My friend David had the uncommon good sense to buy one, a 1988 Countach 5000s Quattrovalvole, and the ill judgment to let me drive it. The Countach has a reputation as an unmanageable beast, a legendary sex object that's not a very good car. I am delighted to report that, contrary to its mythology, the Countach is wonderful to drive. Yes, I had to remove my shoes to cram my feet into the narrow pedal box, but that was the only concession to outrageous Italian ergonomics. By modern supercar standards, the Countach isn't extravagantly powerful, but it is small, light and unexpectedly delicate, its unassisted steering providing unfiltered road feel that would be the envy of any new Porsche on the road. The shifter is direct and slick (even if the clutch is a bit heavy), and the V12 pulls hard but smoothly, its high r.p.m. torque curve in no danger of overwhelming the comically wide 345 section rear tires. It didn't mind going slow, either. There was no overheating or stuttering or stereotypical 1980s Lambo antics. And when I did get snared in a bit of traffic, I noticed that everyone was staring at the Countach. And this was in Los Angeles, where a chromed Fisker Karma doesn't warrant a second glance unless Justin Bieber is behind the wheel. On paper in terms of power, 0 to 60 times and even outright cost a Countach now looks almost reasonable. But in person, it's still the definition of excess. The legend lives. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
For night life veterans, departed haunts like Plant Bar, APT and Guernica were influential incubators where avant garde D.J.s set the tempo. On a recent weekend, it hosted a raucous party for the youthful agitators Trash Talk and Rat King, who had performed earlier at Webster Hall. Le1f, a rapper who was playing tracks from Drake and ASAP Ferg, was approached by a reverent guest. "My soul is yours tonight," said the man, offering pressed palms toward the D.J. booth. "Turn up." Embedded beneath a Japanese restaurant on a ragged strip of Avenue A, Elvis Guesthouse offers a cosmetic face lift of the space that contained Arrow Bar (it closed in January). With decor and color schemes inspired by the mythological conceit of Elvis Presley opening a bar in Katmandu during the 1970s, it mostly looks like your hippie aunt's basement, sans patchouli. The smallish low ceilinged rectangle has seating cordoned off by shower curtains, a paper flower festooned selfie nook and apricot walls painted with hieroglyphs that resemble paramecia. Demographics shift with the D.J., but remain under the indie music umbrella (leather jackets and stonewashed denim are de rigueur). On a Sunday in late March, Cameron Avery of Tame Impala played an acoustic set in front of a tiny congregation that included Dev Hynes, the model Camille Rowe, fashion bloggers and Argentine tourists. "We've had all kinds of folks," said Zachary Mexico, an owner. "Perverts, amateur philosophers, artists, musicians, models who know who Arcade Fire is." Because of the location, weekends collect some runoff from the roiling East Village frat crawl. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
If you've ever pined for the day when Volkswagen will return to its roots and build a car that's stranger looking and more efficient than most other cars, that time may have come. The XL1, VW's superstreamlined plug in diesel electric hybrid, is like nothing out there. But it may be a glimpse into the future of personal mobility. Volkswagen says that, going by European standards, the XL1 will get 261 miles a gallon. That may not match up with the American method of calculating fuel economy, but no other manufacturer is making a claim close to that. It will travel 31 miles on its 27 horsepower electric motor, and when combined with its 48 horsepower 0.8 liter 2 cylinder diesel engine, will go more than 310 miles on its 2.6 gallon fuel tank, according to Volkswagen. "The fuel economy number of 261 miles per gallon is actually translated from the New European Driving Cycle number of 0.9 liters of fuel used per 100 kilometers of driving," Mark Gillies, a spokesman for Volkswagen, wrote in an email. "The cycle assumes that the battery is recharged every 100 kilometers. If you take the battery electric vehicle part out of the equation, then the number is 1.7 liters per 100 kilometers, which is about 140 m.p.g." Still pretty good. And to attain that number, Volkswagen had to focus on details. Like the gasoline engine assisted version of the BMW i3, the XL1 is carbon fiber bodied and mostly electric. The similarities end there. Looking something like an airplane sans wings, a tail and a propeller, the XL1 is focused entirely on efficiency. Exterior mirrors were eliminated in favor of rear facing side cameras to reduce drag. Folding manual cranks wind the windows up and down, because electric window motors are heavy. The navigation system, rather than being integrated into an in dash infotainment stack with a huge screen, is simply a small, lightweight Garmin unit that clips into a swivel neck hard mounted to the dash. There is only one cupholder. The car does not have power steering. The wheels are clad with pizza cutter tires. The side windows are polycarbonate instead of glass. There is no soundproofing. Some of those features are compromises in terms of the way modern vehicles are typically assembled. But they have paid off in terms of what the XL1 can do. Being mirrorless and fuselage shaped gives the car a 0.19 drag coefficient. The carbon fiber reinforced polymer that makes up the frame and body some of its charcoal gray crosshatching visible at the door sills and under the rear motor engine cover as well as the use of aluminum and magnesium parts and attention to the weights of every piece of the car, lends to the XL1's imponderous weight of 1,753 pounds. Driving the XL1, you get the impression that if many more were on the road, and people became accustomed to driving such small conveyances, it would feel pretty normal. The nonpower steering is predictably heavy at lower speeds, but still easy to use. The 7 speed dual clutch automatic shifts smoothly enough to be unnoticeable. Like the original Volkswagen Beetle, the XL1 is rear engined and rear wheel drive. Other than climbing into the car's low cockpit through its scissor doors, which a Lamborghini owner would execute unfazed, the only thing to get used to are the camera rearview mirrors. Two small screens resembling those of iPhones stare back at the driver from just below the bottom of the windows, offering a realistic, wide angle view of the street behind on either side of the car. After years of peering though tiny rectangles made from glass, these seemed fantastic. When you become accustomed to their brightness and their location, they work well. The XL1 is lightweight, long relative to its width and low, with taut yet easy handling what anyone would expect from a modern Volkswagen. Acceleration is not scorching VW says the car will go from zero to 62 miles an hour in 12.7 seconds. Mashing on the accelerator pedal away from a light, the car elicited a hollow whine from its electric motor. Then with a light shudder, the diesel engine clattered to life, its primordial sounding din audible because of the weight saving lack of sound deadening material in the car. Although not quick off the line, the XL1 has an electronically limited top speed of 99 miles an hour, and Volkswagen says that the car's light weight and wind cheating body enable it to cruise at 62 m.p.h. on just 8.3 horsepower. The XL1 has unique, albeit pleasant looks and a narrow, but nice looking interior. It might seem a strange notion that Americans might drive a car that looked like a wingless airplane, but it's a moot point anyway, as none of the 250 XL1s Volkswagen plans to make will be sold in the United States. (They do not meet federal motor vehicle standards.) The next few years will be the time to see how they do in Europe, and whether it is worth scaling up production to bring down the cost. Because no matter how good the fuel economy, not many people would be willing to pay the 145,000 price for the XL1. As fuel prices rise and emissions regulations tighten, more cars of this sort, where every detail is honed to peak efficiency, are a possibility. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
It might seem all too obvious. Two young black men sit on a sofa watching the awful news of recent events police shootings, the Orlando massacre before venturing outside, where they are ignored, shunned and eventually shot. But in the lushly hypnotic video "Color of Reality," a quick tale told through movement and visual art, these men are dancers and their message is not just about social justice. It's also about their art. Just as dance needs to be taken more seriously, the merging of dance and film needs an upgrade. "It doesn't have to just be setting up a tripod and dancing to the hottest new song that just came out to try to go viral," said Jon Boogz, who directed and conceived the video. It's about having something to say. "Color of Reality" features Boogz and Lil Buck, the jookin dancer (the two share the choreography credit), along with an important third presence: the art of Alexa Meade. Her specialty is painting bodies, rendering three dimensional people into something resembling two dimensional beings. Here, she places her painted men in a living room awash with colorful brush strokes. Think of it as a van Gogh that is, if one of his paintings were brought to life as a performative protest. So far, the video has more than 72,000 views on YouTube. And in Los Angeles, it has a more public presence: Throughout this month, its trailer is shown at the top of each hour on a StandardVision screen at the JW Marriott at 901 West Olympic Boulevard. For Boogz and Buck, both 28, it's not just a one off. They have formed Movement Art Is, a nonprofit organization in which dance will be used to inspire positive change and empower dancers to stretch themselves artistically. There will be, in other words, more videos. What follows are edited excerpts from a recent discussion about their characters in the video, the power of dance and what it's like to perform while covered in paint. (It's tighter than a unitard.) How did the story come to you? JON BOOGZ The whole TV thing came about when I was looking at Alexa's Instagram. She had a picture up of a guy watching TV, and I noticed every time I turned on my TV, I was seeing news clips from police shootings and then, ding! This light bulb went off: Buck and I can be sitting there watching TV and these clips of all these things that are happening. I made sure I had sound bites from the massacre that happened in Orlando. It's not just about police brutality. What was it like to dance with the paint? LIL BUCK The way the paint dries, it feels like you're going to crack it if you break character like if you smile when you're not supposed to. It's like putting on a mask. It helped us get more into the world. BOOGZ When we went outside, some of our paint started to crack a little bit. It was good because as we slowly broke out into the real world, that beautiful, comforting space that we were so used to the painting world slowly started dissolving because we were getting a dose of reality: the real human experience. What happens when you leave your painted world? BOOGZ I thought about how there are a lot of people who are naive about some of the problems going on in our society unless it affects them directly. When we see it on TV, it's a shock because we've been living in our own bubble, in our own beautiful fantasy world. We need to unite as one to help stop these senseless acts of violence, and that's really what the whole story is about. LIL BUCK This is about the neglect of the arts, too. The fact that we go out into this other world we're trying to keep art alive. We're in people's faces trying to get them to really see or to be inspired by us. But people walk right past us or they're on their phones when we're right there in their faces. They don't appreciate us. And therefore they don't appreciate art. Where does dance fit in? BOOGZ We don't believe dance is just entertainment. Buck and I believe dance is a tool to educate, a tool to empower. Our goal is not just to touch on socially conscious topics but to empower movement artists and dancers to say: "We're artists too. We want to be considered on that level of a Picasso or a Basquiat." And I'm not coming from an ego perspective; it's more of a perspective of artistic equality. LIL BUCK And things used to be like that. Fred Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers and Earl Snakehips Tucker it was a certain level of artistry, and their dancing was superior, and we don't really have that anymore. Dancing has dropped to where it's just background for an artist instead of dancers being at the forefront of their own artistry. We want to shift the mind set of dancers. Why did you want to end the video with death? BOOGZ I wanted to create a sense of reality. As much as you think these problems don't affect you, no one is safe from the injustices that are happening in the world. I didn't want to sugarcoat it. But the way we present it is beautiful. These are really tough issues to talk about, but when you use movement people receive it better. It provokes dialogue. Art is for everybody. It's universal. It doesn't matter what religion you are, what color you are. Art is art. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
A couple of years ago, the smart money was on wind. In 2012, 13 gigawatts worth of wind powered electricity generation capacity was installed in the United States, enough to meet the needs of roughly three million homes. That was some 40 percent of all the capacity added to the nation's power grid that year, up from seven gigawatts added in 2011 and just over five in 2010. But then a federal subsidy ended. Only one gigawatt worth of wind power capacity was installed in 2013. In the first half of 2014, additions totaled 0.835 gigawatts. Facing a Congress controlled by Republicans with little interest in renewable energy, wind power's future suddenly appears much more uncertain. "Wind is competitive in more and more markets," said Letha Tawney at the World Resources Institute. "But any time there is uncertainty about the production tax credit, it all stops." Wobbles on the road to a low carbon future are hardly unique to the United States. In its latest Energy Technology Perspectives report, the International Energy Agency noted that the deployment of photovoltaic solar and wind powered electricity was meeting goals established to help prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average in the preindustrial era, the limit agreed to by the world's leaders to avoid truly disruptive climatic upheaval. In the same report, however, the organization noted that other technologies bioenergy, geothermal and offshore wind were lagging. And it pointed out that worldwide investment in renewable power was slowing, falling to 211 billion in 2013, 22 percent less than in 2011. These wobbles underscore both the good news and the bad news about the world's halting progress toward reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are capturing heat in the atmosphere and changing the world's climate. The good news is that humanity is developing promising technologies that could put civilization on a low carbon path that might prevent climate disruption. These technologies allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to pass new rules aimed at achieving a 30 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from American power plants by 2030, compared with 2005. They allowed President Obama last week to promise that the United States would curb total greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025 a big step that, White House officials say, can be achieved without further action from Congress. And they allowed China to commit to start cutting emissions after 2030. The bad news is that civilization is mostly not yet on such a low carbon path. While promising technologies to get there have been developed, it is unclear whether nations will muster the political will and mobilize the needed investments to deploy them. New energy technologies have become decidedly more competitive. The United States' Energy Information Administration projects that the levelized cost of onshore wind energy coming on stream in 2019 a measure that includes everything from capital costs to operational outlays could be as little as 71 per megawatt hour measured in 2012 dollars, even without subsidies. This is 16 less than the lower cost projection four years ago for wind energy coming online in 2015. Similarly, projections for the levelized cost of energy from photovoltaic solar cells have tumbled by more than 40 percent, much faster than the cost projections of energy from coal or natural gas. Challenges remain to relying on intermittent energy sources like the sun or the wind for power. Still, experts believe that hitching solar and wind plants to gas fired generators, and using new load management technologies to align demand for power with the variable supply, offer a promising path for aggressively reducing the amount of carbon the power industry pumps into the atmosphere, which accounts for nearly 40 percent of the nation's total carbon dioxide emissions. 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. And new Energy Information Administration projections to 2040 show prices for renewables falling even lower. By then, electricity from photovoltaic solar plants could be generated for as little as 86.50 per megawatt hour, without subsidies. In some areas wind based plants could produce it for as little as 63.40. Nuclear energy is also becoming more competitive. Without any subsidies, new generation nuclear power coming on stream in 2040 could cost as little as 80 per megawatt hour, all costs considered. This is only marginally more expensive than electricity produced with coal or natural gas, even without the added cost of capturing the carbon dioxide. And there are much more optimistic cost assessments out there than the Energy Information Administration's. But for all the optimism generated by cheaper renewable fuels, they do not, on their own, put the world on the low carbon path necessary to keep climate change in check. Progress is faltering on several fronts. The precipitous fall in the prices of photovoltaic cells from 2008 to 2012 pretty much stopped in 2013, after rapid consolidation of the industry. The International Energy Agency now projects that installed global nuclear capacity in 2025 will fall 5 percent, to 24 percent below what will be needed to stay on the safe side of climate change. And carbon capture technologies, which will be essential if the world is to keep consuming any form of fossil fuel, remain hampered by high costs, meager investment and scant political commitment. "The unrelenting rise in coal use without deployment of carbon capture and storage is fundamentally incompatible with climate change objectives," noted the International Energy Agency in its Technology Perspectives report. Despite the falling costs of renewable energy in the United States, the Energy Information Administration's baseline assumptions project that in 2040 only 16.5 percent of electricity generation will come from renewable energy sources, up from some 13 percent today. More than two thirds will come from coal and gas. Without some carbon capture and storage technology, drastic climate change is almost certainly unavoidable. What is necessary to get us on a safer path? White House officials trust that the administration has the tools, including fuel economy and appliance efficiency standards, the Environmental Protection Agency's new limits on power plant emissions and regulations to limit other greenhouse gases. Yet the Energy Information Administration's projections suggest how hard the task will be. Though they were developed before the Environmental Protection Agency issued its new rules, they included hypothetical outlines that could mimic some of its effects. In one, coal power plants were decommissioned more quickly; in another, subsidies to renewable energy were kept until 2040. In another, the price of renewables fell faster than expected. None of them did much to move the carbon dial. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
This story is part of The Big Ideas, a special section of The Times's philosophy series, The Stone, in which more than a dozen artists, writers and thinkers answer the question, "Why does art matter?" By late March, Covid 19 had already unleashed havoc across the globe; the internet was flooded with terrifying images and videos. Yet somehow, things in Japan remained unbelievably normal. On March 21, when the Japanese government still thought the nation would be hosting the Olympics this summer, large crowds of people many wearing face masks, but some not headed outside to enjoy each other's company under the cherry blossoms that filled the landscape. After seeing photos from that day, some of which had captured significant international attention, an American friend of mine emailed me asking, "Is this real?" All I could say was, "I know, I can't believe it either, but it's absolutely real." Things have changed dramatically since then. And yet I can't free my mind from the idyllic images of all those people underneath the cherry blossoms, gazing up at the trees as if they had succumbed to mass hypnosis. Looking back, I'm stupefied with terror, but there's something else mixed in there, in trace amounts. Something close to rapture, piped in from behind the scenes; the essential ingredient of both dystopias and utopias. In Japan, where patriarchy and the pressure to conform function almost like religion, what does it mean to face a crisis? How do they rob us of our desire and anger, and how is it that our imagination and creative forces are depleted? When we are at that point, what kinds of resistance and artwork can flourish? My thoughts, premonitions, hopes and doubts concerning all of this led to the creation of this story. All of us were at the wedding. And by all of us, I mean all of us. Like when you say, "Hey! How are you? All of us are doing fine." That all of us. It was the sort of clear day that burns off every misery. The entire venue was buried in flowers, the tables covered with catered delights. In the garden and in the buildings, heaps of roses bloomed like thunderheads at the height of summer. I started sweating at the thought of the heat. It was far too warm for a May afternoon. The groom was a well known painter and something of a household name; the bride was a tanka poet at the outset of her career. In fact, everybody on the guest list was an artist of some kind. Myself included. The groom was 75, the bride 21. When I was a little younger, we would have had all kinds of thoughts and opinions about the age gap, how it highlighted the exploitation of women, how it grossed us out. But these days, nobody is inclined to say anything. And not just about this kind of thing. The stuff we used to get worked up about, the moments we would fixate on and tell ourselves we couldn't overlook, don't happen anymore. In the spring of 2020, isn't it enough to be alive? Nobody wants to ponder the hard questions. Maybe we weren't cut out for it. We did our best to one up the people outside our sphere, but in the end it got us nowhere. Why get upset when you can just smile? That's where all of us were at. And the truth is, we were raised that way: It's great to speak your mind, but there are more important things in life. Being a little apathetic all the time is more attractive than being totally checked out some of the time. How did we ever forget the most important thing? It only worked if all of us showed up all of us, like I said before. Which is why I was so stunned when the girl seated next to me suddenly voiced her disgust. "Doesn't anyone get tired of this trash?" She sounded like the girls I used to know, plus she looked like she was actually still a girl, too young to talk like that. The girl didn't respond. She continued with her knitting, working the needles swiftly as she glared at the cold chicken on her plate. She must be a fiber artist. Makes sense. The plan for the day was that all of us artists would share our work with the rest of the party. No plate fee, no presents. This was what the couple asked for in their invitations, for us to show our love and celebrate their union with our art. Trends these days. "Someday I'm gonna leave this trashy place and find a world that isn't trash." She had a voice like dark blue ink. Eyes sharp as a knife passing through tofu. The ball of yarn spun in her lap. It started to rain. Catching the light, everything sparkled. The wedding, and the afternoon that all of us had spent together, fell into a gentle, golden slumber. "I mean, I get what you're saying," I said cautiously. The girl offered no reply. Her needles maintained a steady rhythm. The tips knitted the yarn around and over and around. Poking the tip of one needle through the knit, she caught the yarn and passed it through the newest loop. I watched her working. I figured she might ask me what I did for work, but I guess she wasn't interested. She gave the knitting her undivided attention, and it showed. Whatever it was, the thing was enormous. The completed portion draped over her legs, practically touching the grass. Was it something you wrapped around your body? Something you spread out underneath yourself? As I observed the motion of her hands, adding the yarn to the knitting in quick intervals, I felt my spirits flag. To make the feeling go away, I thought of asking her what exactly she was making. But I got the sense I wouldn't understand, so I decided not to bother. "Hey," I said to her, pointing to the people gathered by the stage up front. "How about putting that down for now? Get up there and say something. Talk like a normal person." The girl stared at me. Really stared, for so long I almost felt like I had become the cold chicken on her plate. She shook her head and sighed, then snorted, not having any of it. The temperature started to rise. The mass of roses grew and grew. Nature closed in. Someone was laughing. I could hear music. Sleepiness and solace filled our bodies. I was having a hard time keeping my eyes open. I had to ask myself, was I really at a wedding? Not a funeral? It was becoming hard to tell. What, exactly, was the difference between the two? Obviously, it was whether the star of the event was dead or not. Standing beside the groom, smiling to show her perfect teeth, the bride looked alive, but how could any of us say for sure? Maybe I could ask the knitting girl. Struggling to keep my heavy eyelids open, I turned to her. But she was gone. Though it really didn't matter. Just as it made little difference whether my eyes were open or closed, or whether I was here sitting in my chair or a piece of chicken on a plate. None of it mattered, not anymore. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Dr. Marshall H. Klaus, whose research in the early 1970s into emotional bonding between parents and their newborns prompted improvements in how hospital maternity wards care for mothers and their infants, died on Aug. 15 in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 90. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Laura Abada. Dr. Klaus, a neonatologist, and his colleague at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Dr. John H. Kennell, a pediatrician, concluded in their book "Maternal Infant Bonding" (1976) that contact between a mother and child in the first hours or even days of a baby's life heightens the mother's attachment to her child indefinitely. Those bonds, they wrote, develop in a primeval "dance" that includes eye contact, facial expressions and the rhythmic sound of speech. Such intimacy, they found, increases the likelihood of breast feeding, enhances the child's development and even reduces the potential for child abuse and neglect. Their findings prompted many hospitals to allow and even encourage parents to have more contact with normal and premature babies immediately after they are born, rather than isolating infants in nurseries and incubators, and to focus more on the mother's care and comfort. Hospitals began to give new mothers more private time with their infants, allow fathers into the delivery room and let young children visit their baby siblings in the hospital. "We are bringing back an essential ingredient of birth," Dr. Klaus told The New York Times in 1993. "This is humanizing maternal care." Dr. Klaus and his wife, Phyllis Klaus, were among the founders of DONA International, an organization that certifies helpers who provide emotional and physical support for mothers before, during and immediately after childbirth. The initials stand for Doulas of North America; the word doula is derived from the Greek word for servant woman. Dr. Klaus, his wife and Dr. Kennell, who died in 2013, said that the presence of a doula shortens labor, reduces the demand for pain relievers, decreases the number of Cesarean births and promotes an early and enduring attachment between mother and child. Dr. Klaus and Dr. Kennell advanced their bonding theory in 1972 in The New England Journal of Medicine after exploring the behavior of goats. They noticed that when mother and baby goats were separated immediately after birth, the mother would butt away its offspring and never successfully reunite with it. But their theory proved controversial. Some adoptive parents complained that the bonding theory diminished them, and some feminists said it placed blame on the mother if her relationship with the child became troubled later. Marshall Klaus at his home in Berkeley, Calif., in 2007. Others questioned the implications of describing the immediate bonding period as "critical." Dr. Klaus later said that describing the first hours after birth that way had been a mistake. "It's a 'sensitive' period," he said, amending the language, in an oral history interview for the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2000. "Critical means if it doesn't occur, all is lost." Moreover, he said, the use of the word "suggested that bonding was like an epoxy glue rather than a slow acting sticky substance." "Rather," he said, "I'd say there is a suggestion that for some mothers additional contact in the first hours and days of life may be helpful, and in some it may have a profound effect on how they care for the baby, especially poor mothers with few social supports." Marshall Henry Klaus was born on June 6, 1927, in Lakewood, Ohio, near Cleveland, to Dr. Max Henry Klaus and the former Caroline Epstein, a teacher. He was 6 when his father died of sepsis after passing a kidney stone and in his teens when his mother died of breast cancer. He graduated from Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) and its School of Medicine. While he was in medical school he developed polio, which left him with a frail right arm. He would have liked to be an internist or an obstetrician, he said later, but specialized in pediatric pulmonology and neonatal development in part because of his disability. "I picked newborns because I could thump the chest," he said. "I have a good hand. I can suture with this hand, but I can't deliver babies easily. But I can take care of little babies, and that's why I went into pediatrics." His first marriage, to the former Lois Krieger, ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Laura, he is survived by his second wife, the former Phyllis Stoller; four other children from his first marriage, Susan, David, Alisa and Sarah Klaus; Phyllis Klaus's children from an earlier marriage, John and Geoffrey Stoller; a brother, Carl Klaus; and five grandchildren. Among the books he wrote with Ms. Klaus were "The Amazing Newborn: Discovering and Enjoying Your Baby's Natural Abilities" (1985) and "Mothering the Mother: How a Doula Can Help You Have a Shorter, Easier, and Healthier Birth" (1993). Dr. Klaus, with Maureen Hack, also made the film "The Amazing Newborn" (1987), which demonstrates a newborn baby's responsiveness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
"Is she real? Is she alive? Does she need help? Call 911. Is she breathing? Is she a sculpture? Is this art?" The dancer Hristoula Harakas says she gets these comments all the time. They've become a kind of background noise to her role in Maria Hassabi's "Plastic," a live installation at the Museum of Modern Art through March 20. Walking around the museum, you can't miss "Plastic" and its slow progression through some of the building's most exposed spaces: the Marron Atrium, the main lobby staircase, and the stairs between the fourth and fifth floor galleries. At times you may need to step over what seems like a fallen body. And while plenty of people walk right by the dancers regarding their shifting, sculptural poses with a hurried glance at most the constellation of interactions between performers and the public has become a kind of artwork in itself. On a recent afternoon in the lounge like atrium, one visitor lay down next to Ms. Harakas, posing for a photo. Another visitor, reclining on a nearby sofa, carried on a lengthy phone conversation, as if there were nothing to see. Others, camped out on ottomans and peering down from balconies, seemed unable to look away. "It was really important for me, while making the work, to keep thinking of the three dimensionality," said Ms. Hassabi, who is one of 17 dancers, in a phone interview, "to know there would be people everywhere around us, that people were going to ignore us, and that somewhere in there, somebody would stay and pay attention to us." Ms. Hassabi, who has choreographed for theaters, outdoor spaces and the risers of a Venice gymnasium, created "Plastic" at the invitation of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where it opened last year. It also had a short run at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Transitional spaces, like entrances and exits, caught her interest and aligned with her continuing exploration of stillness. The heavy traffic flow of the Modern, especially, inspired "a desire to slow its rhythm down, even momentarily," she said in an email. In contexts where living, breathing art is not the norm, the attention paid to performers is not always positive. Ms. Harakas has been approached gently by visitors someone touching her hand "just to see if I was alive" but also more aggressively: "At the Stedelijk, I had an old lady poke me with a cane in a mean kind of way," she said. At the Modern, the busiest of the three institutions, the work has taken on a new dimension: the involvement of security guards, who direct traffic on the stairs and intervene in potentially injurious situations. Striking the right balance of performer well being and audience freedom has proved challenging. "Some guards are very sensitive and so attentive," Ms. Hassabi said. "They are able to set the limits with the public in a very smooth way." With others, she noted, the experience is "less enjoyable." The dancers look out for themselves, too, though that can be difficult when, say, lying upside down or face down on the stairs. Ms. Hassabi has asked at least one viewer to step away from her: "He said: 'Why? But you're art!' And I said: 'Exactly. You cannot be as close as you are to the art.'" Asked if she worried about her safety, the dancer Molly Lieber said no: "Plastic" leaves no room for distractions. "If you don't do it with your whole body and your whole presence, you can't really do it," she said. One of the greatest breaches of audience etiquette, Ms. Hassabi said, comes from photographers with long lens cameras, who appear to be doing professional work. As the dancer David Thomson put it, "You run into situations where someone has a camera, and you realize they're actually shooting a whole portfolio with you, and that's when it gets a little unnerving." "Plastic" is Mr. Thomson's fourth project as a performer at the Modern since 2010, when he took part in Marina Abramovic's retrospective, "The Artist Is Present." That show, featuring nude performers, raised critical questions about touching the art when the art is human and other issues specific to live performance. "I think they've grown immensely in how they deal with performers," Mr. Thomson said. "They have much more knowledgeable staff, who have done performance exhibitions, who understand the questions and the needs of the artists a lot more." Thomas J. Lax, a curator in the department of media and performance art and the chief organizer of "Plastic," said coordinating performance had become a more museum wide effort. Ms. Hassabi's installation, in particular, he said, calls for an institutional willingness to adapt. "Even though we had dozens of meetings with our colleagues across the institution for over a year leading up to the exhibition, on Day 1 we regrouped and thought through all of the basic parameters we had set up," he said. "Because the work didn't exist until that first person walked up the stairs and saw Maria lying there." In the first week of "Plastic," Mr. Thomson performed a two hour solo on one of the atrium sofas, using the time to connect with people around him or to try to connect. "Some people can't deal with eye contact; they don't want that kind of attention," he said. "But others really invite it, and when they do, I share that. Because part of my agency is to really engage someone, so that I'm not just an inanimate object, but I'm actually a real person, and I'm looking at you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The first tenant for one of Frank Woodworth's underground bunkers wasn't a human, it was a seed. "A couple of hippies called me up and asked me to build them a vault for their heirloom seeds," he said. A reserved man with Downeast stoicism, Mr. Woodworth is the owner of Northeast Bunkers, a company in Pittsfield, Maine, that specializes in the design and construction of underground bunkers. It was 18 years ago that Mr. Woodworth outfitted that first steel vault while working as a general contractor, and he has since changed direction, pivoting his business model to focus solely on designing, installing and updating underground shelters. He stresses that these are not "luxury bunkers" for the top 1 percent, and only a small part of the calls are coming from Doomsday preppers or Cold War era holdovers. Rather, about two thirds of his business comes from consumers who pay approximately 25,000 for an underground livable dwelling. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Woodworth said he has been unable to keep up with the demand. Buyers of these kinds of underground dwellings say that they simply want to protect their families from an increasingly turbulent world. For many, the decision to build a bunker was made before the coronavirus pandemic surfaced, but they say that they now feel prepared for the next local or global crisis. Aaron, who spoke on the condition that his full name not be used to protect his privacy, said he bought a bunker three years ago to keep his family in the Washington D.C. area safe in a variety of situations. "If something happens, I can put the family in there, or if I'm gone, my wife can lock the family in there," he said. "Not just the coronavirus, or civil unrest. Even in environmental things" like earthquakes and tornadoes "my family is protected." Aaron, who has three teenagers and is in his mid 40s, said he is currently using his 1,100 square foot bunker as an office. "Parts of the bunker are off limits to all my children, like any of the security rooms, the weapons room, the food and storage room, the pantry," he said. Other amenities include a food and storage room, as well as an aboveground "safe room" which is used "if you need to quickly get away from something immediately. Basically, a panic room." He bought his bunker from a company called Hardened Structures based in Virginia Beach, Va., one of the many bunker builders across the country. Some buyers go through a bunker broker to find a shelter that fits their needs. Jonathan Rawles is the owner and manager of Survival Realty Brokerage Services, a national company based in Idaho that works with agents and brokers specializing in remote, off grid bunker type property. "There is continual demand for people that are looking to find more of a sustainable future for themselves, for their families," Mr. Rawles said. "A lot of real estate markets only focus on housing in the urban areas, suburban areas, exurbs, and there is very much a missed opportunity for people who are looking to live off grid, wanting to live remote, or actually looking to secure a property, whether that's a bunker or a more secure and sustainable home." Mr. Rawles pairs his clients with bunker building companies in the U.S. and says his company has a wide range of clients. "This market and desire for security cuts across all levels of society social, political, racial, religious," he said. "People are looking for the opportunity to secure the family's future, to have a more sustainable future, and part of that may be having a bunker." Mr. Woodworth at Northeast Bunkers, said that recent inquiries have come from across the United States, and worldwide. The furthest installation he's ever done? The Caribbean. "That one went by truck then by barge then by truck." The basic model at Northeast Bunkers is a cylindrical steel vessel eight feet in diameter, in 13 or 20 foot lengths, welded from quarter inch plate steel and equipped with an entrance hatch on top. Standard features include rust resistant exterior paint, cedar plank flooring, zero VOC (volatile organic compounds) interior finishes, two vent ports, floor hatches for storage, and an emergency exit hatch. Optional features include power connections (your choice of 12 volt or 120 volt), potable water system, septic system, bathroom, kitchen, bunks, and a blast door. "All depending on what you order, and all materials are made in America," Mr. Woodworth said. "We try to get people as safe as possible within a reasonable budget." The company's bunkers range from 25,000 to 35,000. In the 1950s and 60s, the threat of nuclear war and Cold War tensions sparked demand in home fallout shelters, with endorsements from both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, a proliferation of pamphlets (and coupons) for such structures scattered across America, as well as a vote in 1961 in Congress for 169 million with a big push to mark, locate and stock fallout shelters in existing public and private buildings. "But you do not need to go into a bunker to save yourself from the coronavirus," Mr. Hubbard said. "No one has bought a shelter from me to hide during the pandemic, but many people have bought it because of the pandemic. They feel that this is the beginning of something a lot bigger, and they feel it in their gut." Another bunker owner, Roberta, who lives in New Mexico and who also asked that her full name not be used to protect her privacy, bought her off grid bunker from Atlas Shelters four years ago. "I believe everyone deserves a better chance of survival, not just me." She calls her underground shelter her "woman cave," and it's equipped with a kitchen, entertainment center, toilet, shower, mud room and a place to sleep. Roberta, 59, married, and retired with grown children, wants to be able to provide a safe haven for her family at a moment's notice. She gets into her shelter by entering what looks like a rickety shed hidden in plain sight on a sandy, deserted plot of land that she owns. Inside the shed, she opens a hatch on the floor, and steps down a steep set of stairs to a steel submarine door. Inside, just past the bunker's mud room is the living room, where a sign reads, "My husband needed more space, so I locked him outside." Aaron, the bunker buyer who lives in the Washington D.C. area, found Hardened Structures on Google, and said the company had a good reputation online. When the family was installing an in ground pool, he decided to have Hardened Structures put in a bunker at the same time. "So no one knew what we were building," he said. "I'm not a prepper. My parents were ranchers who do old school canning, deer hunting, that kind of thing. So I took little things from them." With new business booming, bunker installers are also keeping busy with their previous clients. Recently, Mr. Woodworth, of Northeast Bunkers returned from an installation job on Chebeague Island, in Casco Bay, Maine, and said he was so busy that clients were being wait listed. Bunker upgrades have also become much more popular among Mr. Woodworth's clients, and people who were putting in just six months' worth of food are now putting in two years' worth. "I'm just a businessman who deals with paranoid people," he said, "and it seems like the parameters of paranoia are changing every day." Mira Ptacin is the author of "The In Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Of course, there's never a shortage of re enactments when it comes to the Civil War, and the Civil War Trust has planned several in the months leading up to and through the 150th anniversary of Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender to the Union Army in April. Numerous other festivities center on the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park in Virginia, which is helping to organize narrations of historical events, cavalry demonstrations, a formal ball and a period chorale concert (April 8 to 19). The 150th anniversary of the assassination of President Lincoln will be observed with round the clock dramatic retellings of the event at Ford's Theater in Washington (April 14 to 15); and in Springfield, Ill., there will be a re creation of Lincoln's funeral train to Oakridge Cemetery, helped in part by descendants of his original pallbearers (May 1 to 3). If you like the sounds of the Avett Brothers or Bob Dylan or revel in the weathered voices of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger or Huddie William Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, you owe the late Alan Lomax a thank you. And what better time than during the centennial year of his birth? An ethnomusicologist and folklorist, Lomax, with the help of his father, John Avery Lomax, traveled from swamp to mountain in the early 1930s, gathering the most diverse collection of folk music recordings ever documented. (They are available at the Library of Congress, which in 2000 named Lomax an actual "living legend.") Anyone who plans to attend an even borderline Americana fest this year is sure to hear him praised in tributes from SXSW in Austin to the Brooklyn Folk Festival. For a more concentrated experience, Purdue Convocations, the performing arts arm of Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind., is to host "Fieldwork: An Alan Lomax Centennial Residency," two days of music workshops, symposiums and discussions, culminating in the Lomax Project's performance of a few of the sea shanties, a cappella, weaver work songs, fiddle tunes and ring shouts Lomax so carefully recorded (March 27 to 28). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The sprawling free photography festival known as Photoville returns to Brooklyn Bridge Park on Sept. 13 with a pop up village of repurposed shipping containers. This year's festival programming will address issues like immigration and climate change and include a conversation with President Obama's White House photographer. Photoville will run through Sept. 24 and feature work by more than 500 visual artists, talks, outdoor projection shows and workshops. Now in its sixth year, the festival has expanded: in its physical footprint, in its number of artists and in including a second weekend. The festival is organized by the Brooklyn based nonprofit United Photo Industries with a number of partners. Exhibitions include "Stories of Survivors," a project by the photographer Malin Fezehai in conjunction with the United Nations Development Program that documents survivors of violent extremist attacks in five African countries, and "Redefining Gender" by Lynn Johnson, which explores gender identity through science and culture. A number of the exhibitions have a modern political bent. But Laura Roumanos, one of the organizers, said she was also excited about an exhibition that looks at the past. In a vintage Shasta camper R.V., "Lost Rolls America" will display old, forgotten rolls of film mailed from across the country to the photojournalist Ron Haviv. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Leilah Babirye's sculptural figures and heads succeed where many fail: They build convincingly on universally revered traditions from the past in this case the sculptural styles of West Africa. Ms. Babirye carves wood, which she then burns and waxes to achieve a luminous matte surface that gentles down her sometimes brusque forms. Or she translates this vocabulary into clay, using celadon green glazes and round Buddha faces reminiscent of Chinese art. The work in "Kuchu Clans of Buganda," her second solo show at this gallery is astutely multicultural, deeply felt and even autobiographical. ("Kuchu" is a secret code for "queer" in Ugandan gay and transgender circles; Buganda is a kingdom in Uganda from which her family is descended.) Her New York debut here two years ago was small and a bit tentative, filling one of the gallery's small office spaces. This one fills all three and seems assured to the point of triumphal, which it has every right to be. Ms. Babirye has lived her version of the American dream. Born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1985, she sought asylum in the United States in 2015, after realizing that, being queer, her education, livelihood and well being were threatened by the country's virulent homophobic laws. In New York, she experienced bouts of homelessness, but kept working including in a friend's backyard in Brooklyn primarily with scavenged materials. As an artist, she is equally at ease with the monumental and the hand held, with found and manipulated materials. Ms. Babirye's wood pieces especially are supplemented with assemblage elements, including scraps of copper and aluminum, nails and steel bands, as well as bicycle chains and padlocks that reflect her early employment here as a bike messenger. So do the braided inner tubes that resemble leather and form headdresses or mock hair. She titles her works using their clan names, which are usually based on those of plants or animals, including lungfish, antelope and mushroom. Time spent in this show is richly rewarded. For Luigi Ghirri, an Italian photographer of memory and melancholy, a picture wasn't something you took; it was something you fashioned. His plaintive images of interiors, billboards, blank walls and empty squares imbue everyday sights with a metaphysical charge, and display a modesty that belies their careful construction tightly cropped, printed at small scale and usually shot with Kodachrome color film, faded and softened like a half remembered dream. More than two dozen of his photographs, cerebral and bewitching at once, appear in a new show, "The Idea of Building," at Matthew Marks, curated by the painter Matt Connors and on view both in the gallery and in a robust digital representation. Ghirri was born in 1943 and died before his 50th birthday; he lived and worked in Emilia Romagna, in Italy's prosperous industrial center. There he found a landscape in which a rich Italian history crashed into commercial, personal or just banal modern life. An empty nightclub, a frayed record sleeve, the red hood of a car in the Ferrari factory: These unprepossessing objects and settings become, through Ghirri's rigorous framing, fragments that seem to hang between reality and artifice. The photographs' muffled coloring whites gone sallow, reds and blues tempered, grays turned beige may seem now a shortcut to nostalgia (especially to a younger generation weaned on Instagram one touch filters), but the truth is that Ghirri's art seems wrenched out of time entirely. In one heart stopping picture, Ghirri places a worn bowler hat atop a scratched, pitted portrait of some forgotten woman of the 19th century; the doffed hat is a compliment to the past, and an act of leave taking from the present. During the lockdown, I read a novel by another nostalgist from Emilia Romagna: "The Garden of the Finzi Continis," Giorgio Bassani's aching reminiscence of the last years of a Jewish family in Ferrara. "Objects also die, my friend," says Bassani's young heroine an embrace of beauty and transience affirmed by every one of Ghirri's photos. "And if they must also die, then that's it, better to let them go. It shows far more style, above all." After serving in Austria's army during World War I, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spent some time as an elementary schoolteacher. Finding no spelling book suitable for his rural Austrian students, he decided to compile one himself. This fall, the artist Paul Chan, whose varied art career has included animation and inflatable tube man sculptures, published the first ever English language edition of what Wittgenstein called the "Dictionary for Elementary Schools" through his own Badlands Unlimited Press. Some of these thoughts depend like jokes or like words on a delicate interplay between multiple possible meanings. To illustrate "versaumen (to fail to do something)," Mr. Chan draws a tourist at Auschwitz taking a picture of the death camp's entrance sign, "Arbeit macht frei," or "Work sets you free." The sign certainly failed to deliver. But the Shoah also failed to murder every Jew in Europe, and the tourist must not be getting what she's looking at, either, if her response is to pull out her smartphone. Other drawings take in this year of pandemic and protest with a panoramic sweep. Monuments topple, horses cry and, in "Spekulieren (to speculate)," happy ghosts rise from dead bodies to a heaven which, like the future, we can only imagine but which also exists, in a way, in the drawing right in front of us. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The hotel front desk directed my driver to a computer dealer. We drove out of the hotel district, and cruised through neighborhoods crammed with shops for baskets, teak furniture and kites. When we passed some beautifully manicured rice fields, I really thought I had made a poor decision, since we were in rural Indonesia. We finally got to the computer store, and a woman there directed us to the computer repair part of the establishment, which was in a shed packed with pool tables. It looked to me like the most out of control high tech service center anywhere in the world. It was like a computer graveyard, with parts strewn all over the place. To say I was a little concerned is an understatement. No one seemed to speak English, but an older man finally pointed to a teenage boy who apparently could help me. The young man quickly said my computer wasn't booting up, which didn't give me much confidence, since I already knew that. But I asked him if he thought he could fix it. He smiled and took my laptop. Instead of using that magic electronic tester that I saw computer repair people use at my shop back home, this young man began tapping on my computer's plastic shell with his fingers. It reminded me of how I used to check the backs of my older patients for pneumonia. He then put his ear down on the computer's surface, which made my blood pressure rise even more. I could not figure out what this young man was doing since he was doing absolutely nothing high tech. It was really more like he was performing a deep Balinese massage on my computer. I nearly lost my mind when he started to take it apart. Screws were all over the place, and he was jiggling wires and jamming connections together. I thought everything on my computer was lost. But then he put the cover back, flipped the switch, and everything was fixed. Best of all, nothing was lost. I would have paid him anything, but he only asked for 20,000 rupiah, which was at the time about 3.18 in American dollars. I gave him much more. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
These Cholesterol Reducers May Save Lives. So Why Aren't Heart Patients Getting Them? Heart disease runs in Mackenzie Ames's family. Her grandfather had a fatal heart attack at age 30 while dancing with her grandmother at the Elks Lodge in Bath, N.Y. Her mother had a quadruple bypass when she was 42. When Ms. Ames was just 9 years old, her LDL cholesterol level (the bad kind) was 400 mg/dL, about four times higher than it should have been. Diet and exercise did not help. Ms. Ames tried every cholesterol lowering drug available, but nothing could get her LDL below 100 mg/dL. Her problem is a genetic condition, heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (F.H.), that leads to high cholesterol levels and heart attacks at a young age. It affects 1.3 million Americans. In theory, there is a solution a new class of drugs, called PCSK9 inhibitors, that slash cholesterol levels, reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes and save the lives of people like Ms. Ames, who lives in Raleigh, N.C. According to the Food and Drug Administration, patients with F.H. are eligible for the new drugs. But she can't get them. Two insurers have turned her down. "I have followed every rule, and I still can't get access," Ms. Ames said. "My doctor can't get a straight answer." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Like many similar patients, she has gotten caught in the crossfire of a marketplace battle between insurers, providers of prescription drugs and the makers of these drugs. Drug companies gave the PCSK9 inhibitors exorbitant price tags the list figure was as high as 14,600 per year, although payers generally negotiate much lower prices. But insurers balked at the costs and questioned the effectiveness of the new drugs. Access is beginning to ease now, with some unusual new agreements between the manufacturers, insurers and pharmacy benefit managers who act as intermediaries. Still, these drugs offer a cautionary tale, even as pharmaceutical manufacturers bring to market costly new treatments for common diseases like migraine, nonalcoholic liver disease and severe dermatitis. Unlike expensive drugs for cancers or rare inherited diseases, the PCSK9 inhibitors were aimed at large numbers of people as many as 10 million Americans, a number that includes not just people with F.H. but also people with heart disease and stubbornly high cholesterol levels. For the most part, few of those patients were able to get the medications. In one study, 80 percent of patients who tried to get the powerful cholesterol lowering drugs were met with initial rejections by insurers; only 50 percent eventually received approval after appealing. The drugs arrived just after what was called "the hepatitis C debacle" by Jalpa A. Doshi, a health economist at the University of Pennsylvania the introduction of medications that cured the liver disease but cost 84,000 or more for a course of treatment. Stunned by those costs, insurers and other payers "were scanning the horizon to see what else was coming on the market," she said. The PCSK9 inhibitors, they learned, could cost the nation anywhere from 21 billion to 113 billion a year. And unlike hepatitis C medications, the new cholesterol lowering drugs would be taken for a lifetime. "The science behind these drugs is astonishing, but the price is also astonishing," said Dr. Steven Miller, chief medical officer at Express Scripts, the largest pharmacy benefit manager in the United States. (It is being acquired by Cigna, the health insurer.) Until recently, there were no studies showing the drugs did anything except lower cholesterol levels, Dr. Miller added. Payers resisted in part because the manufacturers needed to show that PCSK9 inhibitors also prevented heart attacks and strokes and saved lives. And given the expense, doctors needed to show that patients really needed these powerful drugs and not cheaper alternatives. "Statins cost around 250 a year," Dr. Miller said. Dr. Michael Sherman, chief medical officer at Harvard Pilgrim, which provides health insurance plans, echoed those concerns. "People get very angry when their deductibles go up, or when their premium or cost share goes up," Dr. Sherman said. But the price of expensive drugs "is coming out of somewhere." The companies that make the drugs, Amgen and Regeneron, note the list price of drugs is always higher than the price insurers agree to pay. Regeneron, the first to market (in collaboration with Sanofi), set its list price to allow for substantial discounting when its competitor, Amgen, got its drug approved, a spokeswoman said. As for Amgen, whose drug was the second PCSK9 inhibitor to be approved, the drug's price "was set to be competitive within a complex health care system," said Tony Hooper, Amgen's executive vice president. Both companies say they deplore the subsequent lack of access to their drugs. Insurers insisted doctors fill out pre authorization forms describing why their patients needed the drugs, Dr. Doshi said. The practice is not unusual for expensive treatments but in the case of PCSK9 drugs, the forms tended to be byzantine, inordinately long and complicated. Skittish insurers have denied patients without clear reason, or asked for additional data that were unavailable, said Dr. Leslie Cho, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic. Some insurers, for example, "require inordinate testing or documentation," she said. "They might want to know every statin you ever tried, or force you to try statins that make no sense, like trying simvastatin when you have already tried three other statins." Insurers had asked for documentation of cholesterol levels when the patient was not taking statins. But many had been taking statins for years and had changed doctors several times in the interim. That kind of documentation could be impossible to find. After a doctor applied for a patient to get the drugs, it could take weeks for insurers to issue a denial, and then the doctor had to resubmit the form to appeal. Some insurers approved a PCSK9 inhibitor for a patient but then cut off the supply after three months, asking for another pre authorization request. Doctors often say they have neither the time nor the perseverance to try to get the drugs for their patients. Insurers would rather not cover such expensive patients, said Ron Howrigon, a former executive at Kaiser Permanente and other health insurers. Patients who need PCSK9 inhibitors are already at high risk for heart attacks and strokes, he noted, and their care can be expensive. If one insurer puts up enough barriers, patients may switch to another and even change jobs to get a drug that they believe might be lifesaving, added Mr. Howrigon, who now heads Fulcrum Strategies, a company that advises doctors on running their practices. For patients and their doctors, all this marketplace maneuvering is maddening and frustrating. But there are signs that some of the barriers are beginning to fall. Regeneron and Sanofi cut the price to Express Scripts. In return, Express Scripts made Praluent the only PCSK9 inhibitor it will provide to patients whose prescriptions it fills. Express Scripts also said it would greatly simplify its pre authorization forms for the drug. Harvard Pilgrim struck a different deal. Amgen is reducing its price to Harvard Pilgrim and will refund the cost of its drug, Repatha, for any patient taking it who goes on to have a heart attack or stroke. In return, Harvard Pilgrim also simplified its pre authorization forms. Amgen has 20 more deals nearing completion like the one Regeneron and Sanofi made with Express Scripts, and officials claim that access for patients with commercial insurance has improved by 33 percent. Still, many patients and doctors are struggling to lay hands on the drugs. At the Cleveland Clinic, "we had to hire a couple of people to navigate all the paperwork," said Dr. Cho. They succeed only with extensive documentation of every lab test, every drug, the patient has had. Even in the best circumstances, Dr. Cho said, "it takes four to six weeks to get an approval." "The problem is that there are certain insurance companies and certain groups that require inordinate testing or documentation," she added. And while her group has had some success with appeals, "once you get denied, it is very hard." Then there are those patients who finally got the drugs only to see them snatched away. Rodney Scheidel, a 58 year old Medicaid beneficiary in New Orleans, has diabetes, severe heart disease and an LDL level of 160 mg/dL. With his condition, the figure should be closer to 70 mg/dL. He cannot tolerate statins, said Dr. Keith Ferdinand, a cardiologist at Tulane Medical Center. "He meets all the criteria" for a PCSK9 inhibitor, Dr. Ferdinand added. He managed to get a PCSK9 inhibitor for Mr. Scheidel. After three months, Medicaid cut him off and asked Dr. Ferdinand to reapply for the drug and to document Mr. Scheidel's LDL level to show the drug was working. "That is crazy," Dr. Ferdinand said. "There is no medical guideline that I know of that says if you had an effective therapy you would stop it and show again that it works." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In one of Bob Chapek's first big moves since taking over as chief executive, the Walt Disney Company announced a realignment of its business divisions on Monday that placed the focus squarely on Disney and its other streaming services as the future of the company's creative efforts. The reorganization essentially creates three divisions that will focus on content, and another that will handle how it is distributed. "Given the incredible success of Disney and our plans to accelerate our direct to consumer business, we are strategically positioning our company to more effectively support our growth strategy and increase shareholder value," Mr. Chapek, who succeeded Robert A. Iger as chief executive in February, said in a statement. "Managing content creation distinct from distribution will allow us to be more effective and nimble in making the content consumers want most, delivered in the way they prefer to consume it." He added that the move would allow content executives to focus primarily on creating new films and television series while the global distribution team will determine where it is seen, whether in theaters, on traditional cable or broadcast channels, or on one of the company's streaming platforms, including Disney , Hulu, ESPN or the soon to be launched Star, an international service. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Three years ago, Maria Konnikova, a writer for The New Yorker, came up with a brilliant stunt for a book about luck. A novice at cards, she would learn poker from one of the game's best players, Erik Seidel, to see if she could improve her odds of winning through study and skill. She gave herself a year to play, but something surprising happened: She started winning so much money that she put the book on hold. After winning over 300,000, she was finally ready to publish "The Biggest Bluff" this year, on June 23. Normally, that would be smack in the middle of the annual World Series of Poker, or W.S.O.P., at the Rio All Suite Hotel Casino, where more than 100,000 players brave the sweltering Las Vegas heat each summer to compete for millions in prizes across dozens of card tournaments. Not this year, during the coronavirus pandemic. In person poker is not a great game for this era of public health protocols, with players crouched over the same table, breathing on one another and using communal cards and chips. In March, some retirees in Florida who had a regular, friendly game were all infected with the virus, and three of them died. Like the N.B.A., the N.H.L. and the N.C.A.A., the World Series of Poker, which is owned by the casino giant Caesars Entertainment, had to postpone its in person event; unlike the others, it was able to move the tournament online, even as its Rio casino remains closed while some of its other Las Vegas properties have reopened. But the complicated legality of internet gambling in the United States and around the world, along with inevitable tech issues, meant the transition has not been entirely smooth. For the first part of the series, players needed to get to one of two U.S. states, and then, if they wanted to compete for the big money, they had to get out of the country entirely forcing them to decide whether their potential winnings were worth the risk of traveling abroad. The series kicked off in July using the W.S.O.P.'s software. More than 40,000 people participated, and they had to provide identification and proof of address, and they had to be, as determined by the geolocation settings on their devices, in New Jersey and Nevada. "A drivable option from either coast," according to Ty Stewart, the W.S.O.P.'s executive director. Those are states where Caesars holds licenses to operate online gambling. Konnikova had not left her Brooklyn apartment since early March. Her book had come out as scheduled, and sold well. Publicizing it on the poker circuit didn't work out, but reflecting on what she could control helped. "We don't know when there will be a vaccine," she said. "We don't know so much about the virus. What I can do is choose what information to pay attention to. You have to pay attention to the right things in poker or you will lose." At the beginning of July, she and her husband drove about 90 minutes from their home in New York, where online poker was illegal, to a small Airbnb on the New Jersey shore, where it was lawful. Konnikova spent the days swimming and promoting her book, and then at 6 each evening set up her laptop on a patio overlooking the water to participate in the day's tournament. She played there until a dying battery or the mosquitoes forced her inside the studio apartment, where she would sit in the dark at the kitchen table until the early morning hours while her husband slept. Another New Yorker set up an even more temporary residency in New Jersey: On a Sunday evening in July, Ryan Depaulo, who lives in Manhattan, rented a car and drove across the Hudson River to a Whole Foods parking lot in Closter, N.J. He parked and played through the night on a laptop using the shopping plaza's Wi Fi connection, which booted him every hour, forcing him to play on his phone intermittently. Late into the night, a police car pulled up next to him. "I told them I was playing in the World Series of Poker and didn't think I'd be here this long," Depaulo said. "They told me to win." He did. Depaulo came in first place out of 1,624 entries in the no limit Texas Hold 'em tournament around 6:30 a.m. that Monday, taking home nearly 160,000 after buying in for 500. He spooked a masked person entering the Whole Foods when he screamed from his car: "I'm a legend. I'm a god." In a YouTube video, he proudly displayed the cup and bottle into which he had urinated as he had no access to a bathroom through the night. Konnikova cashed in two tournaments, but she also had to deal with bad luck in the form of technical glitches. During two tournaments, the W.S.O.P.'s software, which is provided by 888Poker, froze up for her. She could see her cards memorably, in one instance, an ace and a king which is one of the best starting hands in Texas Hold 'em but she couldn't make any bets. She watched helplessly as her digital stack dwindled as hands went by and minimum bets were withdrawn. It wasn't just her. Daniel Negreanu, a professional player from Canada who is one of poker's highest earners, with over 42 million over his lifetime, was so incensed by the glitchy software that he picked up his laptop and pretended to punch it, while littering his Twitch stream with expletives. (Negreanu, who is also GGPoker's spokesman, was later suspended from Twitch for threatening an online commenter with violence.) "I have a temper," Negreanu said. "It was my raw emotion. I know I act like an idiot." The World Series of Poker has dozens of different tournaments, but most people are familiar only with the two week long "Main Event," a spectacle broadcast live on ESPN in recent years. Players pay 10,000 each to compete for millions of dollars and a championship gold bracelet. In 2003, an amateur player a Tennessee accountant with the fitting name Chris Moneymaker won the tournament and 2.5 million, inspiring other novices to try their hands at the game, ushering in a poker boom that dramatically increased the number of people playing, both in card rooms and online. But that online boom was cut short in 2011, on a day deemed "Black Friday" throughout the poker community, when U.S. prosecutors shut down the three biggest online poker sites and seized their assets, including the bankrolls of thousands of players. The sites had wagered that poker, a game of skill and not just chance, was allowable despite federal laws against online gambling. Prosecutors disagreed. As a result of the shutdown, most international online poker sites stopped letting people from the United States use their sites. So, in August, when the world series moved from WSOP.com to a site called GGPoker, players who remained in the United States were out of luck, particularly because the most lucrative events were scheduled for then, including the "Main Event," which, for a mere 5,000 entry fee, offered a chance at a 3.9 million first place prize. (The in person version of the tournament last year had more than double the prize pool and a top prize of 10 million, and the entry fee was 10,000.) "Given travel restrictions to and from the U.S.A., it would have been impossible to achieve international participation, even online through WSOP.com, without a licensed third party to serve these customers in their home market," the W.S.O.P.'s Stewart said. It would also have been a far smaller event had it remained in the United States. GGPoker, which launched in 2017, is based in Canada and Ireland with gambling licenses in the United Kingdom, Malta and Curacao. It paid W.S.O.P. a licensing fee to host the tournament. As of mid August, over 170,000 people have played in the international events. Konnikova is not one of them because she refused to get on a plane for fear of the coronavirus. "I wanted to drive to Canada," Konnikova said. "If the border had been open, we would have gone." Canada, along with many other countries, wasn't admitting Americans because of the U.S.'s surging number of coronavirus cases. Some parts of Mexico were letting Americans in but only by plane, not by car. Many of the game's most well known players, such as Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, Maria Ho, and poker vlogger Brad Owen, got on planes bound for Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Negreanu, who is a Canadian citizen, could have gone to Canada, but he and his wife preferred to be on a beach so they chartered a private plane from Las Vegas to Cabo, because it seemed like the safest and nicest option in Mexico. "We looked at the Covid numbers and Cabo was by far the least affected," he said. Negreanu condemned the law, rather than the players trying to break it. "The U.S. law is dumb. It's stupid," he said. "I don't care what couch you play from." "The demand is huge. Poker is a game of skill," said Faraz Jaka, a professional player who flew from San Jose, Calif., to Cabo last month. "When we see more legalization, we won't have to run around the whole world to sit in front of a computer." The prohibition on online poker, intended to protect people from the societal ills of gambling, doesn't mix well with a pandemic, resulting in travel that is risky not only for the players but for the destinations to which they are traveling. "I don't think it's ideal. I don't think people should be traveling right now unless they really, really need to," Konnikova said. "A lot of poker players will say, 'I need to; this is what I do.' If they can't play live, they have to go where they can." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
This is a luxury car. It looks the part with handsome sheetmetal. The interior is stuffed with wood, leather, and technology. And, you knew this was coming, the K900 is a Kia, so the starting price of around 60 grand get's people's attention. I'm Tom Voelk with Driven for The New York Times. The brand best known for hipster hamsters wants to reach some top dogs. In it's home market of Korea, Kia uses different names for it's sedans (ON CAMERA) In their home market of Korea, Kia uses different names for their sedans. Most of them would work quite well in the U.S. Forte is the K3, Optima the K5, Cadenza, the K7. This is the K9. I did say most of them. No matter what it's called, buyers demanding pedigree will pass because of this badge. The big K will appeal to value buyers who want pampering, not a status symbol. There will be a V6 version for 10 grand less. This one is motivated by a smooth 5.0 liter V8 that makes 420 horsepower on premium fuel. There's bit of growl (SOUND UP) The eight speed transmission gets a BMW like controller, sorry to say. Power goes to the back wheels. K900 can hustle (SOUND UP) it sprints from standstill to 60 in 5.5 seconds (ON CAMERA) There is a sport mode that remaps the transmission and throttle response but not the firmness of the dampers. K900 is built for comfort. If you want sport, you could probably pick up a pretty nice Miata with the money you've saved. There's not much feedback from the heated steering wheel. Think Lincoln Continental, not BMW 7 Series. A stout structure, hushed interior, and radar assisted cruise control improve road trips. Kia does a commendable job inside. K900 looks expensive and modern, materials feel rich. The expected premium touches are here heat and ventilation for the supple leather seats, navigation, a great view of the sky, and precise delivery from the Lexicon audio system. Unfortunately, like many luxury cars, the interface requires some practice. (ON CAMERA) K900 does have some great tech but if you want the real cutting edge stuff like auto breaking for pedestrians or cyclists, you have to go with the premium brands. The only option available is a 6,000 VIP Package. It includes this helpful bird's eye view camera system, a better seat for the driver, head up display and power assisted doors. That's a lot of kit. Kia doesn't have the rich depth and dealer experience found with Audi, Lexus, and Mercedes. (ON CAMERA) Luxury sedans often have a raised seating position here and a bulge in the ceiling. Not exactly sure why they do that. The outboard positions of the K900 are much, much more comfortable. There are more features back here than most cars have in total. Many of the goodies such as reclining heated and vented seating are part of the VIP Package. Those in back can control the front passenger's position. Just wait until the kids find out about that. (ON CAMERA) Buying in bulk is another way to save money. This might be a bit excessive. The seats do not split or fold. There is no spare. This large car has the trunk of a midsized sedan. No matter how I reconfigure, K900 maxes out at 6 bundles. LeBron James has signed on as a "luxury ambassador" to help move more of these upscale sedans. But this is not a volume car, Kia easily sells 100 Souls for every K900 delivered. It's about changing the perception of the brand. K900 is a car that can impress the neighbors, especially if they're accountants. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A Blackfoot River Outfitters guide, Ryan Steen, fly fishes near Missoula, Mont., on the Big Blackfoot River, known as the setting for Norman Maclean's book, "A River Runs Through It." "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing." That's how Norman Maclean began "A River Runs Through It," his revered 1976 autobiographical novella about his life in Missoula, Mont., as the son of a Presbyterian minister and devout angler in the years before World War II. On a Sunday morning in June, on the Big Blackfoot River, it was not hard to see how the Macleans came by their faith. Although the family's home stream runs just outside of Missoula, a town of some 71,000, it remains remarkably unspoiled, tucked away from the surrounding hallmarks of civilization like a secret world. For most of its 75 mile length, from its source along the Continental Divide to its confluence with the Clark Fork River just east of town, the Big Blackfoot is lined with Ponderosa pine forest. No traffic choked roads run along it. No bars or restaurants abut it. You'll find none of the gaudy riverfront mansions that have given rise to the term "two by four by 10" in towns throughout the modern American West. (That's two people, four weeks a year, and 10,000 square feet.) There are bigger rivers and rivers that hold larger fish, but few offer anglers a more appealing mix of boulder dotted rapids, shallow rocky bottomed flats, and swirling deep green pools, and almost none are prettier. On this day, at the County Line boat put in, Montana's Big Sky was living up to its name; sunlight glinted off the river, and the only sound to speak of was the emerald tinted water burbling along. My guide for the day was John Herzer, a 25 year Missoula resident and the owner, with his wife, Terri, of Blackfoot River Outfitters, one of the area's top fly fishing operations. He slid our inflatable raft into the water, handed me the rod he'd rigged with one of his favorite flies, a Noble Chernobyl grasshopper pattern, and we launched. After I released my catch, Mr. Herzer and I paused for a moment to appreciate our good fortune. In less than five minutes, we had landed a fish of almost startling beauty in a setting no less lovely. I am not a religious person, but I'll be damned if I didn't feel something holy. Catholics have the Vatican, Muslims have Mecca. But to the fly fishing faithful, there is no more sacred destination than the Big Blackfoot River. Once known mainly to local fishermen only, the Blackfoot gained widespread attention in 1992, when Robert Redford's film adaptation of Maclean's book, starring a young Brad Pitt, touched off a craze for the sport and made a trip to the river an essential pilgrimage for veteran and neophyte anglers from around the world. I was among the inspired. As a boy in upstate New York, I had fished with spinning tackle on local ponds and lakes, but when I saw the movie, fly fishing struck me as something richer and more complex than conventional fishing, as much an art form as a sport. It had an ineffable appeal, too, something existential, Emersonian. Reading Maclean's book only sunk the hook deeper. It wasn't just the fishing. If there is a smarter, more affecting meditation on the themes of fathers and sons, brothers, the pleasures of the natural world, love, loss and the haunting power of water, I have yet to come across it. As it has for many others, "A River Runs Through It" became for me a kind of central text, equal parts fishing primer, literary masterwork and spiritual guide. I went on to become an editor, writer and avid reader, and it remains one of my most beloved books. I also took up fly fishing with an almost obsessive passion, wetting a line everywhere from Wyoming and Idaho to the Bahamas and Belize. And yet, almost 25 years later, I had not traveled to the Big Blackfoot. It was time to see what had caused all the fuss. "A River Runs Through It" centers on Maclean's relationship with his younger brother, Paul. Norman is the archetypal older sibling, married, hard working and responsible. Paul is the golden child, handsome, athletic and charming, but with a weakness for whiskey and high stakes poker games. Paul is also a superior, almost superhuman, fisherman. Much of the book plumbs Norman's love for Paul (and envy of him) as an angler and otherwise. But the story is also a tragedy involving Paul's untimely death he was fatally beaten over unpaid gambling debts and the regret Norman feels that he could not help save him. The book is told in hindsight, when Maclean is a much older man, a point of view that lends everything a deep nostalgic ache. Maclean structured the work around four fishing scenes, three of which are set on the Big Blackfoot. Over two days, Mr. Herzer and I fished all three of those spots: the canyon above Clearwater Bridge, a beach downstream from that, and the mouth of Belmont Creek. "The canyon above the old Clearwater Bridge is where the Blackfoot roars loudest," Maclean wrote. It is here that he first limns the almost heavenly beauty of fly fishing and Paul's nearly godlike gift for it. Watching Paul cast "a four and a half ounce magic totem pole," the water droplets left in the wake of his line "made momentary loops of gossamer," Maclean wrote. "The canyon was glorified by rhythms and colors." I had a rapturous experience in the canyon myself. The old bridge has an early 20th century feel to it that seems to bring one back to Maclean's time, and the surrounding water and wilderness are idyllic. After a period of neglect during the '70s and '80s, the Big Blackfoot has been thoughtfully managed by a consortium of public and private interests. It isn't what it was when Maclean fished it (there were more fish then, and the area was less populated and more remote), and probably never will be again, but at a time when many rivers have been badly degraded, it is relatively pristine, nowhere more so than in the canyon. It is a heartening, even inspiring, success story. Just above the bridge, Mr. Herzer suggested I fish a fly called a Sparkle Minnow (generally speaking, anglers try to pick flies that match what the fish are eating on that particular piece of water at that particular time). Within minutes, I landed a stout 18 inch brown trout with signature black and red markings. In the book, Maclean makes a point of noting that his father was unusual among Presbyterian ministers in his use of the word "beautiful." It's partly a crack about Presbyterian ministers but also a detail that gives the word special weight. That morning, we went on to land about a dozen fish altogether. Every one of them was, by any definition, beautiful. Around 1 o'clock, Mr. Herzer and I anchored on a shady bank under a high canyon wall where he laid out a spread of Italian roast beef sandwiches and potato chips and a pile of fresh, local cherries gathered from a friend's backyard. Our only company was a bald eagle tracing circles above us. You can't talk about "A River Runs Through It" without talking about the sunburn scene, one of the most indelible moments in the book, and certainly the funniest. Maclean's brother in law, Neal, a dandy (and worse, a bait fisherman) visits Missoula from Los Angeles. But instead of fishing with Norman and Paul, as intended, he mostly gets drunk and enlists the services of a local prostitute known as Old Rawhide. On one outing, Norman and Paul wind up ditching Neal and Old Rawhide, only to come upon them later, passed out on a sand bar, unclothed and sunburned, their naked posteriors facing skyward. The alpha fish of the Big Blackfoot, bull trout are brawny, aggressive and almost prehistoric looking. They seem to connect you, as fishing often does, to something primal. It was also the first bull trout I'd ever caught. To an angler, landing a new species is a special thrill, like traveling to an exotic new country or tasting a delicious new food. Today, the "nude beach" is a pretty, laid back hangout where families and others swim and take in the sun. Clothing optional types sometimes still avail themselves of the spot, and Mr. Herzer, a friendly and highly knowledgeable guide with a touch of a prankster's streak, has been known to tell anglers to fish the opposite bank as they approach the area, only to spin his boat at just the right moment. The ensuing sight, he told me, "is usually not what they expect to see." As we drifted past, we waved and smiled at the handful of people lounging on shore and splashing in the river. The scene called to mind "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte," if Seurat replaced the urban sophistication of Paris with Montana's laid back charm. That night, back in Missoula, I had a Montanan pizza (Italian sausage, pepperoni, bacon and Canadian bacon) and a Yard Sale Amber Ale at the Tamarack Brewing Company, a local craft brewery. On their ill fated outing, Neal and Old Rawhide stole eight bottles of beer Norman and Paul had stashed in the river to keep cold while they fished. "It was either Kessler beer made in Helena or Highlander beer made in Missoula," Maclean wrote. "What a wonderful world it was once when all the beer was not made in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or St. Louis." Local breweries have since made a serious comeback, of course, and Missoula has several good ones. The Yard Sale may not have been a Kessler or Highlander, but it was fresh and delicious, and, with apologies to the Macleans, I'm guessing better. After dinner I walked along the Clark Fork River and across a bridge to Maclean's boyhood home, a modest Craftsman with a wide front porch and white picket fence. I have been accused of being as unsentimental as a Presbyterian minister myself, and I am here to report that I did not mist up (mostly). Neither did I ring the doorbell or take a picture. I didn't do anything, really. What happened was I found myself pantomiming a casting stroke. It was entirely involuntary, but I think of it now as a tribute to Maclean. The book's climactic scene takes place near the Big Blackfoot's confluence with Belmont Creek. At Paul's suggestion, he and Norman spend the night at their parents' home so the two brothers and their father, who is retired now, can wake up and fish together the next day. The bite is on, and Norman is filled with joy. "So on this wonderful afternoon when all things came together it took me one cast, one fish ... to attain perfection. I did not miss another." Soon, Paul is hauling them in, too, and his artistry is such that Norman and their father stop to watch him. On the hunt for his 20th and final fish, Paul hooks a big rainbow trout, fights it brilliantly, and lands it. " 'That's his limit,' I said to my father," Maclean wrote. Then, "This was the last fish we were ever to see Paul catch." The book's final two paragraphs are a lyrical, almost mystical reflection that many anglers know by heart: "Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. Just above the mouth of Belmont Creek, I hooked a rainbow of my own whose eponymous colors flashed in the sunlight. Shortly before I had left for Montana, the Orlando mass shooting had taken place. The day before my departure, Britain had voted to leave the European Union, threatening the global economy. A family member had recently received a serious medical diagnosis. But at that moment on the Big Blackfoot River, all that existed were the sun and the water and a fish on the other end of my line. "One great thing about fly fishing," Maclean wrote, "is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing." It pains the cynic in me to say so, but my trip was more magical than haunting. The river was as pretty and well preserved as I could have dreamed for it to be. I caught fish, memorable ones, in the most storied spots from the book. I communed with one of my literary and fishing heroes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Some 66 million years ago, mammals caught their lucky break. An asteroid crashed into what is now Chicxulub, Mexico, and set off a catastrophic chain of events that led to the annihilation of the non avian dinosaurs. That day began their furry ascension to the top of a brave new world, the one from which our species would one day emerge . But little is known about the time period directly after the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction, or K Pg event, because the fossil record is lacking. Now, a team of paleontologists has uncovered a trove of thousands of fossils in Colorado that provides an in depth look at the first million years following the K Pg mass extinction event. The finding provides insight into the interactions between animals, plants and climate that occurred in the earliest days of the age of mammals, and that allowed them to grow from the size of large rodents into diverse wildlife we might begin to recognize today. "We provide the most vivid picture of recovery of an ecosystem on land after any mass extinction," said Tyler Lyson, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. His team's paper was published on Thursday in Science. Dr. Lyson has hunted fossils since he was 10. Although he has found many dinosaurs, uncovering fossils of species that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the dinosaur extinction had proven rather elusive in his field of study. "You can only find so many triceratops skeletons and partial T. rex skeletons and things like that until you want a larger challenge," said Dr. Lyson. "Finding fossils just after the K Pg extinction is a huge, huge challenge." In spring 2016 he and some colleagues explored a fossil site near Colorado Springs called Corral Bluffs. He knew that years earlier, Sharon Milito, an amateur fossil hunter, had found a mammal skull that was confirmed to be from the K Pg boundary there. He set out looking for mammal bones sticking out of the ground. But his search proved fruitless. As he wandered around the bluff, he thought back to his time as a graduate student working in South Africa. There, he had learned to spot certain rocks called concretions that held fossils captive, like pearls in oysters. He shifted his focus from bones to rocks. "I found this ugly white looking rock that looked like it had a little mammal jaw coming out of it," Dr. Lyson said. He cracked it open and found inside part of a fossilized crocodile. "That was the moment when the light bulb went off. If there's one concretion with fossils inside, there's got to be more ." He and his colleagues returned to Corral Bluffs that September and searched for more of the ugly rocks. "When I cracked open the very first concretion I found a mammal skull," Dr. Lyson said. It was the most complete mammal from the K Pg interval that he had ever seen. Within an hour they found four or five more. So far, they have uncovered more than 1,000 vertebrate fossils and 16 different mammal species. "With this discovery, we're starting to see the entire skull of many of these mammals that we previously only knew from teeth," said Stephen Chester, a mammalian paleontologist at Brooklyn College and an author on the paper. The skulls tell a story of mammalian resilience. Whereas rat size mammals survived the extinction event, raccoon size ones perished. About 100,000 years after the K Pg event, mammals bounced back, with raccoon size mammals reappearing. Some 300,000 years after the asteroid struck, more mammals appeared, such as Loxolophus and the small pig size Carsioptychus appeared. Within 700,000 years, the capybara size Taeniolabis and the wolf size Eoconodons began to thrive. The team also collected more than 6,000 fossilized leaves and analyzed more than 37,000 pollen grains. Together the items describe the re emergence of plant life, which may have been a crucial factor in the evolution of mammals. First came the ferns. With their feather like leaves, they proliferated across the wasteland for many hundreds of years to a couple thousand years , paving the way for forests to rebound. Next, the palms paraded in, dominating the green scene for hundreds of thousands of years. Then around 300,000 years after the catastrophe, a diverse array of walnuts appeared . That coincided with the jump in diversity and body size of herbivorous mammals, which suggests they were an important food source. "We call that world the 'Pecan Pie World,'" said Ian Miller a paleobotanist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He added that this epoch also coincided with a warming period in the fossil record, which could indicate that a shifting climate played a role in the development of plants and animals following the extinction event. One of their most important botanical finds a fossil bean pod was made one summer by a high school student while the team was working with NOVA for a documentary that will be broadcast Wed., Oct. 30 on PBS. "There she is holding the world's earliest fossil legume," Dr. Miller said. "She just had this ear to ear smile, totally beaming." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Chronic pain may be linked to an increasing risk for dementia. Researchers interviewed 10,065 people over 62 in 1998 and 2000, asking whether they suffered "persistent pain," defined as being often troubled with moderate or severe pain. Then they tracked their health through 2012. After adjusting for many variables, they found that compared with those who reported no pain problems, people who reported persistent pain in both 1998 and 2000 had a 9 percent more rapid decline in memory performance. Moreover, the probability of dementia increased 7.7 percent faster in those with persistent pain compared with those without. The study, in JAMA Internal Medicine, does not prove cause and effect. But chronic pain may divert attention from other mental activity, leading to poor memory, and some studies have found that allaying pain with opioids can lead to cognitive improvements. Still, the lead author, Dr. Elizabeth L. Whitlock, an anesthesiologist at the University of California at San Francisco, acknowledged that treatment with opioids is problematic, and that so far, there is no satisfactory solution to safely controlling chronic pain. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
AURORA, Colo. William Harris tapped his retirement savings to open A Town Pizza, a Neapolitan pizzeria, in this Denver suburb three years ago. He borrowed 200,000 to open a second location this year and now employs 60 people. On a good Friday, his shops sell 1,200 pies. In such stories, the Federal Reserve finds evidence that its seven year campaign to reboot the American economy is succeeding. So on Wednesday, the Fed, which has held short term interest rates near zero since December 2008, will most likely announce that it will start nudging rates upward, slowly ending what has amounted to a once in a lifetime sale on money. Mr. Harris, for one, is not ready. "It's scary when you hear that the government is planning to slow things down," the wiry 39 year old said as he folded menus. "We live on people's extra money. That's the money they spend on pizza. And it still feels very fragile." Monetary policy is conducted in a language of bloodless abstraction, and most Americans pay little, if any, attention. But the Fed is about to make a big bet, and the decisions it makes in Washington have large consequences, here in Colorado and across the nation. The Fed's move is coming in the face of worries about the health of the stock market and falling commodities prices. Still, by itself, the increase probably will not matter much. The Fed is expected to set short term rates in a range from 0.25 to 0.5 percent, a small jump from the current range of zero to 0.25 percent. It is what follows that will make the difference. Denver seems ready for higher rates. The area's economy has enjoyed one of the nation's strongest rebounds from the recession. The local unemployment rate fell to 3.1 percent in October. There are new skyscrapers downtown and new subdivisions in every direction. The former oil town is now at the center of one of the nation's largest booms of technology start ups. Yet the local mood is fragile. Housing prices have climbed 24 percent above the precrisis peak, but whereas that once would have encouraged economic optimism, now people fret that home prices are due for a fall. Optimists say that the economic expansion is just gaining steam and that modestly higher rates will probably not slow the region's growth. Pessimists see evidence of fragility in the same facts. Josh Downey, president of the Denver Area Labor Federation, says the resurgence of development has created construction jobs for a new generation of workers. They need cars to reach their jobs, and jobs to pay for their cars. "If those buildings stop going up in Denver, they're going to be out of a job and a car," he said. Mark McKissick, director of fixed income research at Denver Investments, says he is waiting to see how quickly the Fed raises rates before he adjusts the firm's investment holdings. The economy, he says, does not seem strong enough to handle higher rates, and he expects the Fed to reach the same conclusion. Otherwise, he worries it could push the economy back into recession. "The Fed threw a bunch of money into the financial system, but it hasn't stimulated growth or inflation the way it might have in earlier periods," he said. Builders, for example, will start construction on about 9,000 single family homes in the Denver metropolitan area this year, according to Metrostudy, a real estate research firm. That is up 14 percent from last year but less than half the 20,000 home starts in the Denver area at the peak of the bubble in 2005. Some workers will be getting raises. Bakery and deli clerks at King Soopers, a grocery chain, will earn a minimum wage of 10.50, an increase of as much as 2 an hour, under the terms of a new contract negotiated by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. The previous four year deal held wages steady. Others, however, are still waiting for prosperity to affect them. Ethel Ayo's landlord raised her rent this year by 400 a month, to 1,126. Ms. Ayo has a part time job as a home care worker and her son, a college student, works at Enterprise Rent a Car. Together they can barely afford the rent and then only because the landlord does not require full payment at the beginning of the month. "And you didn't hear me talk about food," Ms. Ayo said. "After I work two or three days, I buy 50 of food and make it last two or three weeks." Mr. Harris, the restaurateur, says Denver's growth feels nothing like the boom he lived through in Southern California a decade ago. He is struggling to repay his start up costs, particularly during the holidays, when people eat less pizza. The Fed will most likely raise rates before his risks have paid off. If it has overestimated the recovery and moves too fast, people will have less money to spend, and Mr. Harris said he could lose his restaurants and his retirement savings. On South Broadway, a commercial strip south of downtown lined with dilapidated auto dealerships and freshly painted marijuana shops, those worries seem far away. Khalid Sarway, sales manager at Famous Motors, says he is selling about 25 used cars a month, and he does not think higher rates will bother his customers. "The people, they don't care about the rate," said Mr. Sarway, who added that he was making more money now than in the best years before the recession. "They just want a vehicle. They just want to be able to get back and forth between their jobs and school, or whatever their lifestyle is." North of downtown, Denver's tech entrepreneurs also see little immediate danger from higher rates. Steve Adams, the 62 year old chief executive of Leo Technologies, runs a start up, his sixth, in a former produce warehouse that has been renamed Industry, where the nearest thing to manual labor occurs when people play table tennis in the atrium. Like many of his peers, Mr. Adams thinks low rates have made it easier for young companies to raise money from investors seeking higher returns. Denver is also a technology frontier town, reliant on coastal capital, so it may be more vulnerable if the availability of funding begins to recede. But Mr. Adams said he expected the money to keep flowing even as rates on safer investments like corporate bonds start to rise. "The people I'm pitching want to get in early and make a big multiple," he said. Some in the real estate business similarly insist that the local market will probably remain hot. Greg Geller, the owner of Vision Real Estate, says builders are struggling to keep pace with population growth because it takes years to find land, obtain permits and train replacements for workers laid off during the recession. Others are less sanguine. Mitchell Goldman, the owner of Apex Homes, said customers rushed to buy houses in recent years because they worried prices would climb. Now people are holding back, wondering if prices will fall. "I've been getting asked the question a lot, 'Should we wait?'" he said. Mr. Goldman said he expected that higher rates would also push some buyers out of the market. The math, after all, is inexorable. If mortgage rates increase by one percentage point, the monthly cost of a 300,000 mortgage increases by 177. He added that he was looking for land to build a home for his own family. They have moved several times in recent years, but with higher interest rates on the horizon, he wants to build "a more permanent forever home." "I'm a little more anxious," Mr. Goldman said. "Interest rates are never going to be what they were when I was growing up, but every little bit makes a difference." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
For the Liberty, a tumultuous decade that put the franchise's future in doubt has given rise to a team that is new in almost every way imaginable. A new owner: Joe Tsai, not James L. Dolan. A new home: Barclays Center, after a long run at Madison Square Garden and a two year exile to the Westchester County Center in the northern suburbs of New York, far from the fan base. And after the W.N.B.A. draft on Friday night, probably a new franchise star: Oregon's Sabrina Ionescu, not Tina Charles, the veteran All Star the team traded to the Washington Mystics this week. Even the logo is refreshed, with more black coloring to better align with the N.B.A.'s Nets, which Tsai also owns. There's only one problem: Nobody knows when, or if, this season will begin. "For us, it's an opportunity, a bit of a reset," General Manager Jonathan Kolb said. "And we're excited to see where this goes in 2020." Then he sighed, citing the uncertainty of "where and when and how." For Kolb, Walt Hopkins (who is also new, as head coach) and the entire Liberty front office, the off season has gone according to plan. The team is expected to use its No. 1 over all pick in Friday night's draft on Ionescu, by far the standout star in women's college basketball. In free agency, the Liberty added point guard Layshia Clarendon, an All Star and U.S.A. Basketball veteran who can both mentor and play alongside Ionescu. They will join a core that, even without Charles, has significant young talent and will have the chance to shoulder more of the offensive load. The team's 2018 first round pick, Kia Nurse, was an All Star in 2019, and the team's 2019 first round pick, Asia Durr, is a talented two way prospect who was out injured for much of her rookie season. Expect an expanded role, too, for 6 foot 9 Han Xu, the team's 2019 second round pick, an intriguing stretch five who does not turn 21 until October. Even the team's veterans are young: The returning starting center, Amanda Zahui B., is 26, small forward Rebecca Allen is 27 and shooting guard Marine Johannes turned 25 in January. The Liberty have three first round picks in this year's draft, and five in the top 20 selections. "We're really aware of the age, and that's something that we very much discussed," Kolb said, adding: "This is going to be something where myself, our coach, our staff and our players are going to grow together towards what ultimately we hope will be something really special down the line. Getting players in our system is going to be major because they can hone their skills to fit exactly the way we want to play basketball." The way they intend to play, as Hopkins made clear at his introductory news conference in January, more closely resembles the modern offenses of the most successful teams today. The Mystics and the Seattle Storm, the past two champions, have been among the league leaders in 3 pointers attempted and made, and Hopkins believes in scoring primarily at the rim or beyond the arc. That's where Ionescu could come in. Last year's point guards, Brittany Boyd and Tanisha Wright, finished first and second in the league in turnover percentage, and by a wide margin. Ionescu, meanwhile, averaged just 2.8 turnovers per game in her four seasons at Oregon and led N.C.A.A. Division I with 9.1 assists per game. That'll mean more open 3s when Ionescu finds her teammates, and fewer live ball turnovers leading to easy baskets for the other team. But there's an element well beyond Ionescu's on court fit that makes her the no brainer pick for the team as well, and that is her star power. The Liberty have drifted in and out of the spotlight over the past decade, and this was never clearer than in the past two years. They were playing in White Plains, N.Y., north of New York City, amid a pair of losing seasons after three straight Eastern Conference regular season titles and playoff appearances from 2015 to 2017. But Ionescu, with a forceful off court presence to match her relentless on court game, commands attention in a way few W.N.B.A. prospects have. Combine that profile with a cultural moment of increased focus on women's sports, and the Liberty have an opportunity to hitch the franchise's wagon to an authentic change agent. "I think, to me, she's a perfect fit for New York," said Rebecca Lobo, an ESPN analyst and former Liberty star. "The New York fan base is just a little bit different. Even 20 plus years ago when I was there, you could be walking through Central Park and people would start talking to you about basketball." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
On the very last day of March a month that would prove very important to Mitchell Messinger and Deb Kaplan Jacoby the couple danced their first dance as newlyweds. The song they chose was "I Lava You," from Disney's 2014 animated film "Lava," a short played before theater screenings of "Inside Out." The song tells the story of a patient kind of fairy tale, about a lonely volcano who sits isolated in the middle of the Pacific for thousands of years. Despite his desolation, he remains hopeful that one day he will find his love. What he can't know is that another lonely volcano has been living just below him under the sea, listening to his song all these years. Days after she and Mr. Messinger shared their first date, Ms. Kaplan Jacoby took her son, Josh, to see "Inside Out." And there in the theater, tears streaming down her face at the sight of two volcanoes defying odds and geology to be together, Ms. Kaplan Jacoby recognized a version of her own love story. Mr. Messinger and Ms. Levine had been married for almost 17 years when, in May of 2014, she died, at 42, of breast cancer. Their daughter, Jillian, was just 10 at the time. Suddenly a single father and grieving widower, Mr. Messinger found himself in the midst of the kind of tragedy people whisper about while knocking wood or tossing salt, in the hopes that this kind of loss will somehow swerve around them. Slowly however, Mr. Messinger began to heal. After about a year, he decided it was time to give dating a try. But now with apps and social media to navigate, Mr. Messinger found the dating world completely transformed from the one he had first known. "I felt like, O.K., I'm not a millennial. I have a child." Mr. Messinger said. "I just knew I wanted something more organic. I asked some close friends to start scanning their Rolodexes, which I don't even think people use anymore." Before he knew it, every friend, cousin, and mom at the elementary school his daughter attended was scanning their real or virtual Rolodexes. By 2015, Ms. Kaplan Jacoby had also decided to give dating a second shot. She had left her marriage in 2010, and was officially divorced from her husband in 2012. Her daughter, Sarah, was 8, and her son Josh, almost 5. The separation had been difficult, and Ms. Kaplan Jacoby waited years before she was ready to date again. But when she was ready, she was ready. "I went on a lot of dates," she said laughing, but nothing sparked. "I was ready to swear off dating all together. And then Sharon called to ask if I would be interested in a blind date with a widower." Sharon Rosenthal and Ms. Kaplan Jacoby met in the 1990s as co workers who quickly became close friends. Ms. Rosenthal knew Ms. Kaplan Jacoby well, but she was hesitant to get involved in any kind of setup. "It made me nervous," she said. "You don't want to accept the responsibility if it doesn't work out. I was just cautious." But when Ira Sherak, a close friend of Mr. Messinger, told Ms. Rosenthal that he had an idea about two friends whom he thought might really hit it off, she paid attention. Mr. Sherak, after all, had introduced Ms. Rosenthal to her own husband. In fact, Mr. Sherak has quite the track record as a professional yenta. They couldn't know it yet, but this would be his fourth setup to result in marriage. Mr. Sherak had been close friends with the Messingers for years. He'd known Mr. Messinger's first wife well, and he wanted to see his friend happy again. "The stories I'd heard about Deb through Sharon reminded me so much of Michelle," Mr. Sherak said. "They were both sharp and funny. And they shared the same core values. All of these little things just added up." Apparently that age old adage applies to couples and matchmakers alike: When you know, you know. Ms. Kaplan Jacoby and Mr. Messinger had their first date March 25, 2015. This is a date Ms. Kaplan Jacoby can confirm with certainty because she diligently kept a journal entry of each one of the dates she and Mr. Messinger shared. Their first date was sushi. Later, they hiked, saw movies, and took small weekend trips away. Both avid Broadway fans (their honeymoon is a Broadway themed cruise to Alaska, hosted by Sirius XM's Seth Rudetsky), they attended shows at the Pantages theater in Los Angeles. One afternoon, Mr. Messinger took Ms. Kaplan Jacoby to a French restaurant. As she gamely admired the Parisian decor, she asked him if he knew how to say anything in French. "J'adore Deb," he told her. She asked him what it meant, smiled, but said nothing in return. It wasn't until several hours later that it dawned on her: he'd just told her he loved her for the first time. Finally, 77 entries later, Ms. Kaplan Jacoby decided it was time to stop journaling. She had found her future. It was also around this time that she and Mr. Messinger decided they were ready to introduce their children to each other. Jillian, Sarah and Josh are close in age. Jillian and Sarah, now 15 and 14, even share a birthday. But so much of the close friendship they would eventually develop can be attributed to their grandparents. Mr. Messinger remains close with his first in laws, Stu and Helene Levine, as does Ms. Kaplan Jacoby with hers, Marc and Marci Jacoby. All four sets of grandparents attended the wedding. Ms. Kaplan Jacoby's father in law even joined them for dinner the night the children met, facilitating new friendships and putting everyone at ease. If it was possible for these complicated relationships to blend together so effortlessly, perhaps they, the children, could as well. On March 3 2018, Mr. Messinger asked Ms. Kaplan Jacoby to marry him. It was, by every definition of modern romance, a perfect proposal: at the Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village, in a Japanese style pagoda that was reminiscent of their first date. After she said yes, they went to the bar to celebrate and were shocked to find Chris Harrison, the longtime host of ABC's reality show "The Bachelor," there to congratulate them. Mr. Harrison is a longtime friend of Mr. Messinger, and he just happened to be there that night. But for the millions of Americans who watch "The Bachelor," having the crowned head of professional engagements present seemed like some kind of cosmic Hollywood blessing. By November 2018, the two families had been living together in Mr. Messinger's house in Bell Canyon, Calif., for several months when disaster would strike. The Woolsey Fire, which ravaged Los Angeles and Ventura counties, tore through their neighborhood. Of the 10 houses on their street, only three would remain standing. Fortunately, the Messinger Kaplan Jacoby home was spared. Still, the house was badly damaged, and the family evacuated. (They still have not been given the all clear to return to their home.) On Sunday, March 31, almost exactly a year to the day after their engagement, and four years after their first date, Ms. Kaplan Jacoby and Mr. Messinger wed before 80 friends and family members in a morning ceremony at the Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills. It was one of those beautiful Los Angeles mornings that no one, not even the jaded Californians accustomed to this kind of weather, can resist commenting on. Mr. Messinger and a handful of family members and close friends gathered in a small room where he and Ms. Kaplan Jacoby would sign the ketubah, the Jewish marriage license, before the ceremony. With an endearing case of wedding morning jitters, Mr. Messinger happily hopped around playing the host, introducing those who didn't already know each other. In his element as this natural hype man, it wasn't difficult to imagine Otto the Orange in action. The air was soft and smelled of jasmine as Ms. Kaplan Jacoby, wearing a fitted lace gown by DB Studio, strode into the lush courtyard where Mr. Messinger was waiting, with his back to her. Smiling, she playfully tapped him on the shoulder. Overwhelmed by the bittersweetness of the day, Mr. Messinger was in tears before he turned around. "All good?" she gently checked in with him. "All good," he reassured her. "How lucky am I to have a second chance at love?" Mr. Messinger asked his bride, friends and family. To which the rabbi quipped, "There's not a dry eye in the house, Mitch." After the ceremony, friends and family filed into a sunlit room for a sumptuous brunch. "Just enjoy it," said 11 year old Josh, his feet dangling from a high backed chair. "It's a one time opportunity. Nobody lives forever. You have to make it count." And just like that, the eggs Benedict had been consumed, the cake had been cut, and the couple had been toasted with champagne. Through tears, friends of the bride and groom repeated the same sentiment again and again: Despite everything, they have found love again. Maybe it wasn't thousands of years in the making, but they had found each other. And it was time for them to dance. As they swayed in each others arms, Ms. Kaplan Jacoby softly sang along to the lyrics of the song they had chosen together. To finally meet above the sea All together now their lava grew and grew No longer are they all alone. She knew every word by heart. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"The Climb" is a movie about a friendship that stands the test of time through some pretty gnarly events. Oh how strangely can life imitate art. I first spoke to the film's co writers and stars, best friends Michael Angelo Covino (who also directed) and Kyle Marvin, in person back in March at a Manhattan hotel. "The Climb" was slated to be released later that month, but the coronavirus scuttled those plans. While the movie, which takes place over several years, is more about friends who weather disasters frequently of their own making, it is interesting to watch now and wonder how the characters would have dealt with the additional obstacle of a pandemic. After playing the Cannes, Toronto, Telluride and Sundance festivals before the pandemic, and enduring an eight month postponement because of it, "The Climb," has opened in theaters. I spoke with the two again this month, via Zoom, about what it took for these buddies, both 35, to make a movie together and how their friendship and work has fared of late. They were on the call in the same room together, so that may give a hint. How did you first get into the business? MICHAEL ANGELO COVINO I graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles, then tried to find work in the film industry for a long time and struggled with that. I started making my own shorts, but eventually stumbled my way into the advertising industry, producing and directing commercials. And that's how I met this guy. KYLE MARVIN I grew up outside Portland, Ore., and have always been interested in the arts. I got married, had kids and, luckily at the time, got into advertising. And then I quickly burned out on the glory of advertising, but made commercials and eventually started making films with Mike. What were you making together at first? MARVIN When we were making commercials and had access to a camera, we would say, "OK, we've got six hours and a setup. Let's shoot a sketch." How did you transition into films? COVINO We produced a few movies in the years leading up to making our own. With our commercial company, we would put aside money. That leftover money we would put into making movies with other filmmakers. It really got us familiar with how to make a feature film on a smaller budget. We produced a movie called "Hunter Gatherer" and one called "Kicks," "Keep in Touch" and "Babysitter." They played at film festivals like South by Southwest and Tribeca. That gave us more contacts in the film industry, meeting distributors and people who finance films. And it helped us understand the lay of the land more. Your movie begins with the revelation that one character has been sleeping with the other's fiancee. What's the biggest challenge the two of you have faced in real life over your 10 years of friendship? MARVIN Poverty. We had to ask each other, "Are you committed to this crazy thing called independent cinema, which is not an easy thing to sustain your life?" COVINO For me, it was easier because it's like, I can live off peanut butter, but Kyle has kids. COVINO The impetus for that in the script was that I had a friend and an ex girlfriend who ended up together. We had long since broken up, but it stuck with me as this thing that I was upset about but didn't have any right to be. And I had to process that. The betrayal in the film is the kind of thing that many friendships wouldn't survive. How did you get to that extreme place in the story? MARVIN I think we were really fascinated by adult friendships and the pressures that come to bear on those, particularly those that we formed at a young age and are associated with our identity in a foundational way. So we wanted to say, how far do those get tested? And I think in many ways they get tested all the time. Your characters cycle together in the movie and, in March, you had been doing a press tour where you biked in each of the cities you were in, correct? MARVIN Yes, it was surreal, we'd ride bikes and we'd get to a new city and the Covid measures would have incrementally increased everywhere we went. COVINO And it was like more hand sanitizer in every newsroom we went into. And you've been in regular contact since the pandemic began? COVINO Yeah, I got Covid early on and had antibodies. I felt more comfortable so I started going to L.A. to see Kyle and we would write out there. And then if I had to be here in New York, he would come out for a large chunk of time to write together. We would also write remotely. But when we're trying to crack a story or come up with the meat of how we're going to write a script, I think it's really helpful for us to be in person because you can just talk it through. MARVIN There's an alchemy to human interaction. I think that's hard to replicate with a screen to screen sort of thing. And you're in New York together working on something now? COVINO We're writing a couple of films right now. We just finished one and now we're finishing another. And then we have two shows. We wrote one pilot, and now we've got to write the next one. And then we're never writing again for the next three years. Laughs Has the pandemic impacted the kinds of scripts you're writing? MARVIN The things we're always interested in are a little more universal, so we have less desire to, say, write a dystopian movie. In that way, we're more like, even if you're wearing masks at Christmas dinner, it's still going to be really awkward because that uncle, you know what I mean? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The plot didn't make sense. The characters contradicted themselves again. And the pacing was all over the place. But man, the "Discovery" season finale "Will You Take My Hand?" was satisfying. It was one of the rare episodes of the show in which great care is given to individual characters and their story lines. We see Mary Chieffo's L'Rell given some meaty material as she tries to unite the Klingon houses under her leadership. Tyler and Burnham have a torturous goodbye. We even see Tilly retaining some of the confidence she attained from her Mirror Universe stint as a diabolical leader. There was also, thanks to Akiva Goldsman, who directed the episode, a very impressive exploration of a new world we haven't seen yet: the Orion dominated area on Kronos. "Discovery," as a show, hasn't cared as much about exploration as most Trek voyages. Given its superb visuals, watching the buddy cop group of Tyler, Evil Georgiou, Tilly and Tyler navigate unfamiliar territory was a ride worth being on. But more than anything, the last minute of the episode was the best moment in all of "Discovery," and totally welcome fan service. We get our first peek of the Enterprise that we have known and loved for decades (Captain Pike was in charge, but still). Hats off to Goldsman for putting together, essentially, a perfect scene. We think the episode is over and that the Discovery is riding off into the sunset. But then a traditional Trek trope: a distress call, followed by a screen saying, "NCC 17," which is the moment we realize what is coming. And then there is the Enterprise a remastered 2018 version that looks absolutely stunning. The episode was still problematic mostly because the "Discovery" writers had to conclude story lines that were already sticky to begin with. The entire Klingon Federation war comes to an end because L'Rell is given control of a bomb planted in the heart of Kronos by Evil Georgiou. She uses that control to unify the Klingon houses and end hostilities. But why? All L'Rell has wanted was to eliminate the Federation at all costs. Why would she be willing to end the war because she is given control of her entire race? And why would other Klingons unite around her, especially when she calls for ending the war that they had been winning (and presumably still are winning)? The season also ends with many unanswered questions, including an overarching one that never quite got an answer: At some point, we know something significant happens with Sarek and Burnham's relationship. This is why for decades, through multiple Trek franchises, we have never heard Sarek, Spock's father, mention Burnham. We don't get the answer. We also don't get an explanation for why Sarek's exchange with Burnham in last week's episode felt more like a goodbye. A guest appearance by the always funny Clint Howard as a devious Orion man added levity to a show mostly devoid of it. Howard has appeared in Trek before, as Uproxx's Alan Sepinwall reminded me. But it was great to see a recognizable, green face. The moment all of the Discovery crew started literally standing up on the bridge against Admiral Cornwell's greenlighting of genocide was so unnecessarily cheesy. Why did the crew start standing? There was no reason for it! Also, Cornwell was there via hologram. She wasn't even in the room! O.K., I'm being nitpicky. This isn't though: How did the crew, outside of the ones who knew, not realize Evil Georgiou was posing as the Georgiou they all loved? Evil Georgiou was being rude, abrasive and impulsive to the crew similar to how someone from the Terran Empire would act. And no one noticed or said anything. Also, Cornwell greenlighting a genocide, given her speeches decrying Lorca's irrationality throughout the season, didn't wash with me. 2. Why not go to Tyler first? We observe a scene in which Evil Georgiou spends a few minutes pummeling L'Rell to get information out of her. This fails and then Burnham has an idea: Why not ask the Federation officer turned Klingon spy turned Federation officer? And that's how they find what they need. Why didn't they think of that first? Or do both? As the war is wrapped up, we seem to have totally forgotten that a key member of the crew, Dr. Culber, was shockingly murdered and that the crew's captain, Lorca, was an impostor this whole time. Not even a remembrance! Out of sight, out of mind. Some thoughts as we come to the end of the "Discovery" maiden voyage: 1. As critical as I've been of the plot (which had canyon sized holes) and the lack of consistent character development, it's important to remember that pretty much every Trek series struggled to find its footing early on. If weekly recaps existed when "The Next Generation" was on, they would have been brutal. Remember how the Ferengi were introduced in "The Battle"? We don't know what "Discovery" will look like once it has reached its cruising altitude. But it has promise. The cast is there and the visuals are top notch. "Enterprise" never found its footing. "Deep Space Nine" did. If I had to make a prediction, I'd put "Discovery" somewhere between those two. 2. I hope next season we get to learn more about the Discovery crew members, assuming that's where most of the action takes place. We didn't get to know Tilly, Saru and the others well. "Trek" has typically been about the ensemble more than one individual character. "Discovery" has so far mostly orbited around Burnham It is her love life we see develop. It is a war she instigated that we see. It is her mutiny that weighs on the crew. I'm looking forward to seeing plots that aren't Burnham centric. 3. It's worth repeating: The team behind "Discovery" deserves a lot of credit for taking ambitious risks with this iteration of Trek. It is the darkest, most cynical expression of Gene Roddenberry's vision, and it has its own unique identity. The writers went out of their way to make this show different and not lean on traditional Trek tropes. More often than not, it didn't work. But the effort was there, which is what makes me hopeful for next season. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
With "Gemini Man," about an assassin and his much younger clone, the actor was forced to confront his career choices and his director's view of his career choices. SAN FRANCISCO In "Gemini Man," Will Smith plays Henry Brogan , a supernaturally gifted assassin, as well as his clone, Junior, who besides looking exactly like a young Will Smith, circa "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air," is out to murder him. Before filming began, the director Ang Lee curated a collection of clips from the early years of Smith's three decades long filmography, including scenes from "Six Degrees of Separation" and "Men in Black," and reviewed them with the actor, like a football coach running game tape. "Ang basically went, 'This is fantastic, but this one, don't ever do that again,'" Smith said. "'What you did there? I don't want to see that in my movie.'" Playing a young Will Smith at 51 , the actor said, is a lot tougher than playing an older Will Smith at, say, 16. "You can't fake innocence," he said. "You can't unknow things. When Will Ferrell plays a younger character, he knows how to get around his life experiences and understanding, he knows how to put this nothingness behind his eyes. But that's a very difficult thing to do." Lee chimed in, "It's not like, O.K., act less good." Smith and Lee were in a suite at the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco, talking about how the two came together to make "Gemini Man." Opening Oct. 11 , the film is a technological marvel: 4K resolution, shot in 3 D , with the much higher frame rate (120 frames per second, versus the usual 24) Lee employed in his 2016 war picture, "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk," to mixed reviews. (Some critics found the hyper realistic effect uncinematic.) Smith insisted that Junior was not a "de aged" version of himself, but a "100 percent fully digital character" that any actor could "drive." Albeit perhaps not as well as him? "Well, we hope not," he laughs. The two kept the tone light, even when the conversation turned to serious topics, like Lee's initial experiences as an Asian director in Hollywood ("I figured, hell, if I can direct Emma Thompson with my broken English, I can do anything") and OscarsSoWhite. In person, Smith explodes into a room; Ang Lee, well, doesn't. But after directing actors from Heath Ledger ("Brokeback Mountain") to Chow Yun fat ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), Lee knows what he wants out of a film and his cast and crew, and Smith clearly defers to him. "My father was in the military," Smith said, "and one thing he would always say to me was 'If two people are in charge, everybody dies.' Then he would say, 'So am I in charge, or are you?' For me, there's a certain amount of surrender that you have to give if you really want to be a successful actor." In addition to compelling Smith to review scenes of his younger self, the film also made him consider his life from the perspective of Henry, an amiable working stiff who just wants to retire after a career of good and faithful murders. Not that Smith is looking to retire, but after years as king of the summer movie (his films have grossed more than 8 billion worldwide), the actor has made peace with the fact that he's no longer the guaranteed hitmaker he once was. This summer's "Aladdin," in which he played the genie, was a billion dollar smash and "Suicide Squad" in 2016 scored well, but "Concussion," the year before, couldn't break 50 million. "We all get that opportunity, in our 40s or 50s, where you can either make the change, or you doom yourself to a lifetime steeped in your mistakes," he said. "I've definitely felt that over the last five or six years, trying to make that transition from that youthful desire of 'I want to be the biggest movie star in the world,' to doing something that has a little bit more value beyond my ego." Even if he is feeling his years, in person, the "old" Will Smith doesn't look all that different from Junior. "I knew there was going to be a photo shoot, so I sauced it up a little bit," he admitted. But the sorts of stunts he used to do without blinking in "Bad Boys" and "Independence Day" now give him pause. "Definitely on this movie, I was so happy that Junior was C.G.I.," he said. "My back and knees don't feel like the young Will Smith, I'll tell you that much." Lately, many of Smith's decisions have come with an eye toward his family. When asked about his boycott of the 2016 Academy Awards amid the OscarsSoWhite backlash, he said, "Well, my wife took the stand first. And as a good husband, I supported her decision, which turned out to be correct, and the Oscars responded well and aggressively over the next couple of years." And his decision to play Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena, in the forthcoming biopic "King Richard"? "I have a 19 year old daughter who is trying to make her way in the world, so I feel like my life has totally prepared me for this role," he said. The project represents the first time the actor has worked with a black director (Reinaldo Marcus Green) and, counting this film with Lee, the second time in two years he's worked with a director of color . He said he was drawn to the story because of the tennis coach's unshakable confidence. While he may not have raised his own kids with the level of confidence that Williams did "he never doubted that he was creating the No. 1 and No. 2 tennis players of all time," Smith said he takes pride in the effort he and Jada have put in. "There was a lot of work that went into orchestrating their childhood," he said. Talk turned to another sports related biopic , the 2001 "Ali," which Smith said was one of his favorite films, as well as "the most difficult performance I've ever given." There was the obvious physical requirement of learning not just how to box, but how to box like Ali, all while playing one of the most recognizable humans who ever lived (a task not so different from what the special effects folks on "Gemini Man" had to contend with in creating a young Will Smith). Smith connected to Ali's swagger, although perhaps not for the reasons one might expect. "I felt like I could relate to when Ali would say, 'I am the greatest,' that he was saying it because he really felt like he wasn't. That you have to keep saying it to yourself because you're trying to prove it to yourself." As for Lee, he has a soft spot for "Six Degrees of Separation," the 1993 adaptation of the play that Smith, then 25, starred in alongside Stockard Channing, Donald Sutherland and Ian McKellen. Though Smith was criticized for avoiding a kiss his gay character delivers in the stage version, Lee took a wider view. "He didn't have that persona yet, of Will Smith being Will Smith, carrying big movies," Lee said. "But there's something quite precious about how he is in that movie. It's a dramatic piece, with many great actors around him, and he shines." After their interview, the two rushed across the street to the Moscone Center to make a midday appearance at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. There, among the tech bros and assorted dreamers, Smith and Lee chatted up their movie, with Lee extolling the virtues of his vision of cinema while simultaneously asking for patience with it. ("Give us some time," he said, "we'll get there.") Smith served as the sole judge when four wannabe tech titans were given 40 seconds each to explain why their start up idea was the best. Smith was in his element, joking with the nervous contenders and charming attendees at the standing room only event, most of whom flooded out of the hall once Lee and Smith left. After "Gemini Man," Smith will play a suave supersleuth (who turns into a pigeon) in the animated "Spies in Disguise," due in December, then reunite with Martin Lawrence in "Bad Boys for Life" and star as the New York City crime boss Nicky Barnes in the biopic "The Council." But despite having about a half dozen films in various stages of production, he insisted that he'd been trying to take it easy, or at least easier. "Definitely, at this point in my life and career, I'm trying to do less," he said. "I'm trying to cultivate a taste for stillness." "It's not going well," he admitted. "Not by any stretch of the imagination." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Is it too on the nose to point out that Arthur Ashe Stadium, where Kevin Spacey has unaccountably decided to perform his one man show about the great lawyer Clarence Darrow, sits on a site in Flushing, Queens, that was once a waste dump for the rest of the city's coal ash and street sweepings? There is, at any rate, something trashy and depleted about the production of "Clarence Darrow" that opened on Thursday for a two night run at the tennis stadium. The play itself, by David W. Rintels, must already have seemed recycled when it debuted on Broadway in 1974, starring Henry Fonda. Now it defies all of Mr. Spacey's serious gifts and hambone tricks to bring it to engaging life. A wretchedly folksy recital of greatest hits, it does not waste effort on depth or continuity. Darrow (1857 1938) is presented near the end of his life, not so much reflecting on it as bullet pointing. His defenses of the Haymarket anarchists, the Pullman strikers, Eugene V. Debs, John T. Scopes, and Leopold and Loeb march by in a haphazard parade, with little attempt at analysis. Take the case of Ossian Sweet, a black physician who in 1925 dared to buy a home in a white Detroit neighborhood. Expecting a violent reaction, he and his family brought a group of friends to protect them on the day they moved in. When a white mob soon besieged the house, shots fired from within injured one person and killed another. Dr. Sweet and his wife, along with nine of their associates, were arrested, imprisoned and charged with first degree murder. Darrow's tale of his mighty vindication of the Sweets and their co defendants culminates with a heroic Greek athlete pose and the declaration "This time we won!" Then he hustles on to another anecdote. But what may have been the end of the story for Darrow wasn't for Dr. Sweet and his family. His wife, said to have contracted tuberculosis while incarcerated, died of it two years later, as did his brother. Dr. Sweet eventually killed himself. The stories of other clients are similarly abandoned after the verdict; perhaps the playwright felt that such details and follow ups would interfere with his portrayal of a great liberal hero and white knight. Certainly, no time is lost on anything that might detract from, or even complicate, our worship of Darrow's halo. His sour first marriage is miraculously erased with the introduction of a second wife, whose beauty and redheadedness are adduced to justify all. His belief in, and practice of, "free love" are mentioned glancingly, with a wink. Intriguing as such asterisks seemed, I had little energy to spare while watching the play to wish for a fuller picture. I was just trying to stay interested in an event that, even from good seats, felt as if it were happening a mile away. What folly to have staged it in a 23,000 seat stadium, with four Jumbotrons relaying the action to the mostly empty upper decks. Still, more than 4,000 people attended on Thursday night more than twice the capacity of the largest Broadway theater, if smaller than that of Radio City Music Hall, where Mr. Spacey hosted the Tony Awards ceremony on Sunday. But the size of the space is not this production's main problem. Nor is the difficulty of engagement with it the result of the roar of airplanes en route to, and from, the nearby La Guardia Airport. That these flyovers make portions of the play inaudible every few minutes, even though the stadium's retractable roof is in place, is mostly a mercy. The problem is that the production, based on a more conventional one that Mr. Spacey performed at the Old Vic in London in 2014 and 2015, is itself uncompelling. Staged now, as then, by Thea Sharrock, it seems underrehearsed, with so many longueurs and peculiar music cues that I found myself writing several times in my notes: "Inherit the What?" It was not even clear, at the end of both acts, that those ends had definitively arrived. But several tortured seconds of silence did. At the same time, Ms. Sharrock's staging is also bizarrely busy. With no actual drama to project, she has instead given Mr. Spacey a series of menial actions to perform over and over as he narrates the story: holding up photographs, sifting through files, carrying boxes, rearranging chairs, taking his jacket and vest on and off, all for no reason. Though Mr. Spacey gamely obeys these directives and applies his usual polish to them, all of it backfires. Rather than making Darrow seem more relatable or genuine, his wonderfully smooth voice and physical grace render the character more of a fake, as well as an egotist and a braggart. This might make for a fascinating, subversive take on Darrow if carried out fully: a warped mirror image of Mr. Spacey's conniving Frank Underwood on "House of Cards." It doesn't make for a coherent interpretation, though. But one of the young people I took with me felt that the awkward artificiality of the evening actually served its underlying message. That message, he said, was one of inclusion, and, like Darrow's law practice, was not aimed at the usual communities of people who can afford world famous attorneys or Broadway tickets. Free seats were given to 350 students from 11 schools participating in Mr. Spacey's youth arts foundation, and 600 others took advantage of a discount offer. Still, not everything worthy is stageworthy, and soliciting applause for championing underdogs, as this "Clarence Darrow" relentlessly and without nuance does, can also undermine the gesture. The result, even in an arena that is supposedly more democratic than a Broadway theater, feels less like an American hero's tale than like a good old Soviet embalming. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The borough of Bantam has long been viewed as a traditionally blue collar area among the rolling hills of picturesque Litchfield County in northwest Connecticut. Lately, though, Bantam has evolved into a compelling destination of its own; a place that offers everything any true gourmand needs, from artisanal yogurt and tasty bread to handcrafted charcuterie. Recently, its foodie stature has grown with the popularity of A Mano, an always packed coffee shop that is the latest venture from two Manolo Blahnik executives who, in the mid 90s, revived an old dairy farm in Litchfield, then began turning industrial buildings in Bantam into ambitious food spots. The joke now is that Bantam is such a lively culinary destination that some longtime residents refer to the classy town of Litchfield as "East Bantam." This three year old spot in a two story, colonial inspired house is kind of an upscale New England gastro pub. The chef and owner Samantha Tilley serves up something for everyone here, from burgers and Asian spiced wings to dishes that appeal to a more international palate, such as Peruvian inspired salmon tiradito and falafel fritters. Save room for dessert which is often a decadent treat like a banana and white chocolate bread pudding. New Yorkers Niles Golovin and Susie Uruburu moved to Litchfield County in the mid 90s, and soon after opened the area's first artisanal bakery in an old house next to the Bantam River. Regulars come for the Pain de Campagne and loaves made of spelt and ancient grains. They also bake a delicious "dirt bomb," the sugary, cinnamon dusted hybrid of a muffin and doughnut hole. When this distillery opened in 2014, it gave a buzz to the entire county with its small batch artisanal spirits. Local brothers David, Peter and Jack Baker, who in their previous career distributed Crystal Rock water, produce award winning tipples, including a smooth b ourbon whiskey , vodka and gin. They host free tours and daily tastings from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Their newest offering is a maple barrel finished bourbon. This popular coffee shop is owned by George Malkemus and Anthony Yurgaitis, the president and vice president of Manolo Blahnik USA, who have several foodie ventures on Bantam Road. The destinations began with the decade old Arethusa Dairy, both a production facility for the company's dairy products and a popular ice cream shop that also sells Arethusa cheeses and milk. Next came Arethusa al Tavolo, a well received restaurant serving Mediterranean style dishes. A Mano, now two years old, features an impressive range of freshly baked goods, from seasonal doughnuts to Paris worthy croissants and financiers . Devotees of this family owned market drive from miles away to pick up their provisions at this upscale grocery with a popular deli counter and sushi chef. Shoppers can find sourdough bread from the popular bakery Bread Alone, a new refrigerated beer room that offers a wide variety of craft beers, as well as charcuterie and smoked meats cured and prepared by the on site chef Jesse Cole. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
GAME OF THRONES 10 p.m. on HBO. Eight years of wine, murder and murder come to a close Sunday night as "Game of Thrones" airs its final episode. Whether you've been following the series since Day 1 or binge watched to catch up (or will instead spend your Sunday night reading, working, talking with loved ones or watching MULAN (1998), airing at 9:50 p.m. on Freeform), Sunday night's episode represents the end of an era for HBO and millions of viewers. But for the story at large, it's not quite the end: the book series that inspired the show, George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire," still isn't over. That might make some bittersweet viewing parties a bit less bitter or more bitter, given many fans' penchant for stewing over the delay. GET OUT (2017) 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on FX. As far as "Game of Thrones" finale counterprogramming goes, a network can't do much better than "Get Out," Jordan Peele's breakout scary movie that helped redefine the horror genre in 2017. Many viewers will need no reintroduction to Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), the photographer who goes on a trip to the home of the parents of his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), and finds himself in what Manohla Dargis, in her review for The New York Times, called "a white nightmare." She called the film "an exhilaratingly smart and scary freakout." TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962) 8 p.m. on TCM. You don't need to be watching Aaron Sorkin's updated Broadway adaptation to find Harper Lee's story of law and race in small town Alabama resonant. This classic movie adaptation, released just a couple years after Lee's novel, stars Gregory Peck as the white Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch, who agrees to defend a black defendant in a sexual assault case during the Great Depression. SUNDAY TODAY WITH WILLIE GEIST 8 a.m. on NBC. While anyone who has watched David Letterman's Netflix show has gotten used to both the beard and seeing Letterman outside the context of his longtime late night television desk and backdrop, the setting for this interview with Willie Geist is still a bit surprising: After a brief attempt at fishing, the pair sit on two Adirondack chairs next to a river to talk about Letterman's life since 2015, when he wrapped up his 33 year career in late night. LUNATICS Stream on Netflix. Chris Lilley, whom The Times once referred to as "the most famous Australian comedian since Barry Humphries," rose to fame in the mid 2000s with "Summer Heights High" and "We Can Be Heroes," two absurd mock reality TV series in which Lilley played multiple characters of great variety. He does that again in this new series; he plays a fashion designer, a real estate agent and more. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Clockwise from center: Nicole Fara Silver for The New York Times; Nina Westervelt for The New York Times; Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images; Elijah Ndoumbe Clockwise from center: Nicole Fara Silver for The New York Times; Nina Westervelt for The New York Times; Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images; Elijah Ndoumbe Credit... Clockwise from center: Nicole Fara Silver for The New York Times; Nina Westervelt for The New York Times; Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images; Elijah Ndoumbe The Covid 19 pandemic halted live performance, the lifeblood of the genre, but a run of powerful albums and standout debuts provided respite, and hope. Quarantine is especially challenging when it comes to making jazz, which usually means getting together in a little room and cutting loose. But while few albums were recorded during the pandemic so far (none on this list), a nonstop run of impressive jazz releases have been arriving throughout it. This year was uncommonly full of good debuts, providing some relief amid the eerie silence and a bit of hope for when it finally breaks. On his debut, the 23 year old alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins announces himself with a suite of 10 compositions that move with such grace, there's no time to feel overwhelmed by the surfeit of ideas packed into each one. Produced by Jason Moran, "Omega" features Mr. Wilkins's working quartet of Micah Thomas on piano, Daryl Johns on bass and Kweku Sumbry on drums, gliding and diving with a telepathic synergy through tunes that he composed with the nation's racial ills in mind, and that thrive thanks to a buoyant, up to date sense of swing. By referring to the music she makes under the name Jyoti as jazz, the vocalist, producer and multi instrumentalist Georgia Anne Muldrow is opening back up the conversation about what it means to be an improvising musician in the Black American tradition. She revels in the acoustic, bluesy sounds of jazz, while pulling from the toolbox of hip hop production, suturing together her own live instrumentals with endless overdubs of her voice. The result sounds like a message arriving from a past we haven't met yet. From this young, Cape Town based drummer and bold political thinker, an album that seems to have almost everything you could ask for lovely songcraft; farseeing poetry, spoken and sometimes sung; patient, evocative improvising; generations of history coursing through it like a bloodstream but leaves enough open space to suggest he is not overplaying his hand. Another debut that augurs more brilliance ahead. For the latest recording from this loosely configured group of Chicago avant garde all stars, the cornetist Rob Mazurek wrote detailed music with a focus on pairs (two cellos, two flutes, two drums), then let the energy of joyful convocation take over. After the recording was made, he cut and spliced and added electronic sounds, ending up with an intoxicating android of an album. 6. Nduduzo Makhathini, 'Modes of Communication: Letters From the Underworlds' In a moment when spiritual jazz has become a dangerously buzzy concept, trust a musician who has truly devoted his life to divination practices. On his Blue Note Records debut, the South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini and his band are doing serious work, drawing on his history in the Zulu tradition of ubungoma, or divine healing. You can hear him mining the soil for information, creating melodies with a centripetal pull, building rhythms that leave a listener no option but to pick up on the momentum. The music world was stricken this fall by the news that Keith Jarrett had suffered a pair of strokes, and is unlikely to play the piano in public again. This solo piano album was recorded in late 2016, just months before what would be his possible final performance; from the title on down, the overtones of his most famous album, "The Koln Concert" (1975), are obvious, though he has moved away from the lengthy, unbroken improvisations of that era and plays here with a more untroubled sense of clarity especially on the two songs that close the LP. A well regarded member of the improvising avant garde, the pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn makes iconoclastic, ambientish music on an instrument that's usually not heard on the stylistic fringe. It's fitting that when she finally put together a combo of her own, it didn't look like anyone else's. "Pedernal" features Ms. Alcorn accompanied by Mark Feldman's violin, Mary Halvorson's guitar, Michael Formanek's bass and Ryan Sawyer's drums; across five original compositions, melody is liable to be traded between the stringed instruments, or to disappear completely into texture. The music and ideas of Sun Ra have become talismanic among younger generations in the years since he died: Look to several albums on this list, like Ms. Muldrow's, Mr. Mazurek's and Mr. Gamedze's. But his musical messages are in especially good hands with his own ensemble, now directed by the 96 year old saxophonist Marshall Allen. The Arkestra was a vessel built primarily for survival Ra insisted that space would be a more hospitable home for Black people than Earth, if only the music could get him there and more than 25 years after his death it continues to thrive. On "Swirling," the first Arkestra album of newly recorded material in two decades, the band's loose, sweeping power reanimates classic material from his repertoire, plus a couple of never before recorded items. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
It's a strange, seductive story. A young man becomes king. The king becomes a bit overconfident, deciding to test his power against a charismatic stranger's worshipers. This stranger it turns out he's the god of wine and dance responds by ensorcelling members of the royal family. Eventually, the king loses his head: to his own mother, a follower of the new cult. The composer Hans Werner Henze (1926 2012) was approached with this streamlined adaptation of Euripides's "The Bacchae" in 1963, and eventually created "The Bassarids," which is getting a rare revival at the Salzburg Festival in Austria through Aug. 26. When he first gave the subject serious thought, the 37 year old Henze was already well known; his Fifth Symphony had just had its premiere with the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein. He had been writing operas for more than a decade, starting with his first full length work for the stage, "Boulevard Solitude," a jagged (and sometimes jazzy) take on the "Manon Lescaut" story. Instead, he began work on a comic opera, "The Young Lord." He also conducted; he later suggested that the experience of leading works by Schubert and Brahms seasoned him for the challenges of Auden and Kallman's text. A year later, he felt he'd put in enough preparation, and began writing. If the story of "The Bassarids" wasn't a surprise, Henze's music was. It had dodecaphonic (or atonal) elements but was not rigidly conceived in that language, the one preferred by Pierre Boulez and other titans of the post World War II avant garde. Nor was the sound a pure throwback that would delight Romantics weary of modernism. Instead, the score managed a rare balance of experimental and traditional effects. In his autobiography, "Bohemian Fifths," Henze described himself as a Mahlerian, while also approvingly quoting a critic who called the opera "Strauss turned sour." This synthesis was not unanimously hailed at the opera's premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 1966. Writing for The New York Times in 1974, Peter Heyworth recalled seeing the then chair of London's Royal Opera House leaping from his seat "like a scalded cat" at the curtain. But it was exactly what Auden, in particular, had wanted. "I am convinced that Hans has written a masterpiece," he wrote in a letter quoted in the complete edition of his librettos with Kallman. The work soon found champions most prominent among them Christoph von Dohnanyi, who not only conducted the premiere, but also campaigned for the work in the United States, presenting it in Cleveland and New York. Its return to Salzburg this month, in a staging by Krzysztof Warlikowski, is conducted by another of its supporters, Kent Nagano. In a phone interview between rehearsals, Mr. Nagano described "The Bassarids" as an opera that works "at the highest state of refinement." "It is based upon layered tonalities," he said. "Sometimes you feel it's a forerunner of what today we might call spectral music." Mr. Nagano said that when he led the opera in the 1980s, he felt Henze's language to be progressive. But "now, from the perspective of 2018," he added, "we see many of the dramatic gestures that Henze makes in 'new music' or even in popular music. The way that various elements of tonality will collide with each other and, at the end, produce a resonance, upon which it makes room for a very lyric quality." Markus Hinterhauser, a pianist and the artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, described the orthodoxy of the mid 20th century. "There was Stockhausen, there was Nono, there was Boulez," he said. "There was a very defined monopole about what contemporary music grammar could be. And Henze was apart from that." Mr. Hinterhauser said he admires the work's political dimensions: "It's the incredible conflict between the ecstasy the passion and the reason. Who triumphs over this question?" "Yeah, of course," he replied. "This is the victory of the ecstasy. But you can also interpret it so that it's the victory of the total hedonistic world. And now it becomes very political, the whole thing. Looking at our very specific situation, our lives. Where is it going, this world?" Mr. Hinterhauser declined to be pinned down about these contemporary resonances, especially before rehearsals for the new staging were complete. But Mr. Nagano offered one way of placing the Euripidean conflict in our time, noting that, "as we confront the new and rapid evolution of the technical world that we live in," questions of what is rational and what is irrational have become "regular and dominant social topics." Auden, for his part, was wary of tidy summations of the work, or overtly allegorical analyses of it. Responding to Henze's request for an essay that could be included in the program, Auden wrote, "I am very much against trying to state a myth in abstract logical terms, which rob it of all its resonance, e.g., if one starts talking about recent history, one will have fools saying that Dionysus is Hitler." And the opera itself changes its already ambiguous meaning depending on the version you encounter. At the Salzburg premiere in 1966, there was an Intermezzo that included some attractive music at the king's expense. (Auden and Kallman have their Queen Agave editorialize about her son: "My dear, I thought he'd never end. 'I am Pentheus, King of Thebes. Obey me. Answer.' He may be King. He'll never make a dancer.") The creative team also created a myth within a myth dream scene, "The Judgment of Calliope." The jesting instrumental writing in this nearly 20 minute section adds a new dimension to the opera's presentation of the Dionysian cult, which is otherwise characterized with terrifying, destructive timbres. Auden and Kallman wrote that, with the Intermezzo, they were seeking not only to provide some respite from the "sober air of religious disaster," but also to suggest that the visions of the truth seeking King Pentheus pave the way for his falling under Dionysus's spell. Without these scenes, the king can seem a thinner character: the uncompromising enemy of a god, rather than someone also at war with elements of human nature. But the team had second thoughts about these scenes. Auden and Kallman thought that Henze overscored this part of the opera. And Henze cut the Intermezzo, including "The Judgment of Calliope," in later editions. These passages, as well as a spoken prologue used at the opera's North American premiere, will be included in Salzburg this year. "What is being performed here is very much inspired by the original score, the original theatrical intentions of the libretto," Mr. Nagano said. "The purpose is really to demonstrate what a natural composer Henze was, writing for the theater." This attempt is particularly noteworthy given that the opera has never been ideally served on recordings. A CD set of the Salzburg premiere is still available, though that production was sung in a German translation an unfortunate choice, given the crispness of Auden and Kallman's English, as well as Henze's talent in setting it. A subsequent recording of the opera does use the English text, but does not include the cut scenes and is out of print. It's a problem common to Henze's formidable dramatic catalog. Earlier this year, at Dutch National Opera's Opera Forward Festival in Amsterdam, I was dazzled by his oratorio "The Raft of the Medusa" in its grandly orchestrated 1990 revision; the only in print recording of the work is a comparatively skeletal 1960s version on Deutsche Grammophon. Henze's prior collaboration with Auden and Kallman, "Elegy for Young Lovers," was also recorded on Deutsche Grammophon, but not in a complete edition (and, again, in German). "I have all these recordings at home, and it's quite hard to listen to them," Mr. Hinterhauser said. "The interpretation now is on another level. The orchestra plays on another level; the singers are very familiar with this kind of language, this kind of drama." He agreed that "there should be some initiative" to preserve more of Henze's operatic catalog. So how about a DVD or CD of this season's "Bassarids"? "We are working on it," he said. "It's quite complicated to find a producer for that. It might be a DVD; it might be a recording. But there will be something. I think we can be a little bit optimistic." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Near midnight on Tuesday at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola, three women tap danced as the floor beneath them shifted. The dancing surface was three small wooden platforms. These were laid contiguously, but the force of footwork kept spreading them apart. The more challenging variable, though, was musical. For this was a tribute to the great and iconoclastic jazz singer Betty Carter, whose original songs and far from standard arrangements of standards rarely sat long in any groove or speed. The tribute, which continues through Saturday, was organized by one of the dancers, Michela Marino Lerman. In recent years, Ms. Lerman has shown admirable tenacity in getting herself booked into jazz clubs, a natural home for her art that bookers too rarely recognize as such. Since 2009, she has run a weekly tap jam session at Smalls jazz club in the West Village. In March, she presented a weeklong tribute to Horace Silver at Dizzy's; last month, she was back here as part of the Generations in Jazz Festival. The repeated invitations are a good sign. This week, she is joined by a nimble jazz trio (Takeshi Ohbayashi on piano, Alex Claffy on bass and Kyle Poole on drums), the captivating vocalist Charanee Wade and the sister hoofers Alexandria Bradley (also known as Brinae Ali) and Frances Bradley. The dancers open and close the show with some pithy unison choreography but otherwise trade off improvising with one another and the band. Though unfocused in parts, the opening night set caught the right spirit, denying any conflict, as Carter did, between adventurous jazz and a rollicking party. The Bradley sisters sassed it up, spicing their adept and powerful tapping with lots of vernacular sauce. Of the two, Frances is the more ladylike, a little stiff up top with a melting smile. Alexandria is wilder, almost punk in attitude, and she handled the tricky changes of "Sounds (Movin' On)" as she did the sliding boards: with haphazard boldness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The merger between Sprint and T Mobile was proposed to better position the companies to compete against rivals like AT T and Verizon. Critics have argued that the deal could harm competition and cause prices to go up. Executives at T Mobile and Sprint have pitched the merger of their companies as a way for the country to greatly expand its 5G network, a priority for President Trump, who has argued that the widespread adoption of the technology is crucial to national security. The 26 billion deal seemed to be moving forward in recent weeks, when the head of the Federal Communications Commission gave it his blessing. But on Tuesday, the plan hit a roadblock when a group of state attorneys general sued to block it. The 10 officials who filed suit, all of them Democrats, said on Tuesday that if the merger went through, the prices consumers paid for phone plans would rise as the number of major wireless carriers dropped to three from four. T Mobile, the nation's third largest wireless company, and Sprint, the No. 4 carrier, have insisted they must get bigger to serve their customers better. A merger would reshape the telecommunications industry in the United States and create a formidable rival to the industry leaders, AT T and Verizon, with each of the three serving roughly a third of the market. The lawsuit, led by Letitia James of New York and Xavier Becerra of California and joined by eight other attorneys general, was filed in federal court in Manhattan. Ms. James said its aim was "to stop the merger in its tracks." Even if it does not foil the merger, the lawsuit could delay the deal significantly. When T Mobile and Sprint announced in April last year that they had agreed to terms, they expressed the hope that they would be able to close the deal by July 2019. Now the courts, rather than federal regulators, are in charge of the timetable. T Mobile and Sprint have said that, together, they would be able to invest more deeply and quickly in fifth generation cellular networks, or 5G, bringing high speed internet access to rural areas neglected by cable services. The attorneys general argued in their complaint that the merger would cost Sprint and T Mobile subscribers at least 4.5 billion annually. Lower income and minority communities would be hit especially hard, Ms. James said in a statement, calling the deal "exactly the sort of consumer harming, job killing megamerger our antitrust laws were designed to prevent." The companies have powerful allies in the Trump administration. In signaling his approval of the deal last month, Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said it would advance "critical objectives" such as "closing the digital divide in rural America and advancing United States leadership in 5G." The agency's five commissioners, three of them Republican, are expected to vote on the proposed merger soon. The Justice Department is expected to issue a decision in the coming weeks, but its approval of the deal is not a sure thing. Makan Delrahim, the head of the agency's antitrust division, has pushed the companies to sell parts of their businesses to maintain competition in the industry, according to two people familiar with his thinking. At a conference in Israel on Tuesday, Mr. Delrahim did not directly address T Mobile and Sprint, but said that "where there are credible concerns that a transaction or business practice is anticompetitive, timely and effective antitrust enforcement is imperative." Mr. Becerra, of California, said that he and his fellow attorneys general intended to seek a preliminary injunction, so that even if the Justice Department gave Sprint and T Mobile the go ahead to operate as a single entity, the companies would first have to resolve the lawsuit. 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. Scott Hemphill, a professor who teaches antitrust law at New York University, described the lawsuit as a potentially significant impediment to the deal. "If the judge decides to grant an injunction before the transaction is consummated, that would bring things to a halt," he said. That view was shared by Blair Levin, a policy adviser at New Street Research, a research firm focused on the telecommunications and technology industries. "At this moment," Mr. Levin said, "no one should have a high level of confidence in the deal moving forward." Stock prices for T Mobile and Sprint slumped on Tuesday. Neither company responded to a request for comment. The F.C.C. and the Justice Department declined to comment on the lawsuit. Mr. Trump regards 5G advancement as a key political prize, arguing that China's lead in establishing the high speed mobile networks poses a threat to national security. The technology will be a crucial component in the development of robotics, driverless vehicles and other emerging industries. "American companies must step up their efforts, or get left behind," Mr. Trump said on Twitter this year. T Mobile, led by John Legere, an executive with roughly 6.3 million Twitter followers who favors a wardrobe heavy on the bright magenta color the company uses in its advertisements, has been a top player in an aggressive lobbying effort in Washington. In an effort to appease concerns over competition, Mr. Legere and his Sprint counterpart, the company's executive chairman, Marcelo Claure, have offered to scale back their market share by selling Boost Mobile, a Sprint owned prepaid wireless brand popular with lower income customers. Democratic lawmakers have noted that executives pushing for the deal have stayed at Trump hotels repeatedly since the proposed merger was announced. In January, Mr. Legere stayed two nights at a 2,246 suite at the Trump International Hotel in the capital. At a news conference on Tuesday, Ms. James, the New York attorney general, said her office had been conducting an investigation into the proposed merger for roughly a year. She and the other attorneys general "have a renewed focus on mergers and competitiveness not only in the tech industry, but in other industries as well," she said. A combined T Mobile and Sprint would put 30,000 jobs at risk, said Dennis Trainor, the vice president of the local chapter of the Communications Workers of America union. Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Virginia and Wisconsin joined California and New York in filing the lawsuit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The average person will move 11.7 times in his or her lifetime, census data shows. Of these homes, many will be fondly remembered, but once the tape is sealed on the last moving box, rarely do people continue to regularly visit their old stamping grounds. That is, unless the last place they lived was Brooklyn. These days, it has become common for Brooklyn expats to make the journey back over bridge and through tunnel. They turn up at their favorite specialty grocery stores on the weekends, stroll the promenade with their families just as they did when they were locals and sidle up to bars where the staff still knows their poison and their children's names. For many young parents who make the leap to suburbia for the usual reasons more space, better schools and a more manageable lifestyle Brooklyn is still very much a part of their identity. Particularly for those who are hesitant to fully embrace the minivan culture, visiting an old haunt isn't just a trip down memory lane it's also what they're doing on Saturday. And for some, their suburban experiment eventually leads them back to their beloved borough, because they find that they really can't leave Brooklyn. "I've lived in cities all my life Chennai, India, San Francisco but Brooklyn was the hardest to leave. I loved our neighborhood," said Shilpa Srinivasan, a 36 year old artist. She and her husband, Shyam Nagarajan, 38, a global sales leader for IBM, and their 3 year old daughter, Janani Shyam, recently moved to Ridgewood, N.J. Still, months after departing Brooklyn, she and several other mothers who were friends from the old neighborhood convened for a raucous joint birthday party celebration for her daughter and another child at the Park Slope Armory Y.M.C.A. In Brooklyn, "I made so many good friends that my former self would have scarcely believed it," Ms. Srinivasan said. "An amazing diversity of people with whom I probably would not have fostered such an authentic connection anywhere else." After five years in two different rental apartments in Windsor Terrace and Park Slope, the latter a two bedroom railroad style apartment for which they paid 2,300 a month, it was time to go because "the lack of space was driving my husband nuts," Ms. Srinivasan said. In November, the couple paid 685,000 for a home of their own in New Jersey. Between 2006 and 2013, more people left Brooklyn than moved there about 618,000 versus 437,000 according to an analysis of census and other data by Susan Weber Stoger, a researcher in the sociology department at Queens College. Of those who left, 18.1 percent moved out of the city but within the New York metropolitan area, while 17.6 percent went farther afield in the tristate area. It is not known how many of those who left later moved back to Brooklyn. But for some, frequent visits are not enough to scratch the Brooklyn itch felt when a new hometown offers little in the way of cultural diversity, public transportation or even good eats. In 2012, Mike Julianelle, 38, a content marketing manager, moved his family to Raleigh, N.C., when his wife, Heather Millen, a 37 year old theater marketing director, got a job there. Less than two years later, the couple and their son, Lucian Julianelle, now 4, were living in Brooklyn again. To facilitate their move back north, Mr. Julianelle, who also writes an "antiparenting" daddy blog called Dad and Buried, found a job in New York, and Ms. Millen arranged to keep her new position by working remotely from Brooklyn. "I'm glad we tried suburbia, because now we know it isn't for us," Mr. Julianelle said. "In Brooklyn, we would spend entire weekends wandering the neighborhood with no real plan, stopping at parks and playgrounds, at bars and restaurants and shops, and time would fly. In Raleigh, you needed a destination, a schedule and a tank of gas." The family of three gave up a 1,500 two bedroom, two bath rental in Raleigh with amenities unheard of in Brooklyn, including a huge walk in closet and double sinks in the bathroom. "That apartment would be out of our price range if it were here in Brooklyn," Mr. Julianelle said. They now pay double in rent for about half the space in Windsor Terrace and are happy with the trade off. Ms. Millen said she wasn't sure about having a child until she saw how people did it in Brooklyn. For the couple, that meant not having to give up some of the cultural and gastronomic pleasures they enjoy. "In Raleigh, there are either the chain restaurants, or fancy restaurants where you don't bring kids. I want to be able to get good food, but also take my son," Mr. Julianelle said. "Here there are places like Talde you can walk by at 5:30, 6 o'clock and kids are in there eating," said Ms. Millen, referring to the Asian style restaurant run by Dale Talde, a chef who was one of the more memorable contestants on the Bravo show "Top Chef." "We are likely back in Brooklyn for good," Mr. Julianelle said. "We may not have a yard, but we have Prospect Park!" Davida Hogan, 39, an interior decorator who grew up in Park Slope and whose parents still live there, put down roots in Summit, N.J., in 2012 with her husband, Bret Hogan, 40, a senior marketing manager at Ethicon, and their two children. Trips back to Brooklyn are a monthly, if not more frequent, occurrence. Finding ingredients for recipes out of "Jerusalem: A Cookbook" is a challenge in the suburbs, she said. "It's not like I can run over to Sahadi's or D'Vine Taste," she said, referring to her favorite shops, where she stocks up on spices such as sumac and za'atar. "In New Jersey, I find myself going to 8,000 different stores to replicate the experience of going to Sahadi's." Besides visiting family, the Hogans go back to Brooklyn for the greenmarket at Grand Army Plaza and other favorite events. "We always make it to the Chile Pepper Festival at Brooklyn Botanic Garden," she said. "We're still holding onto our pediatric dentist as an excuse to come back to Brooklyn." Before life in New Jersey, the couple did a gut renovation on a home in Park Slope South, which they purchased in 2008 for just under 1 million. But Mr. Hogan's job made for a difficult commute. "My husband works in health care and it's all out in New Jersey," Ms. Hogan said. "He was leaving at 6 a.m. to beat the traffic. He was supposed to be able to get home early, but that never happened. We were spending 1,000 a month in tolls and we never saw him." The decision to leave Brooklyn wasn't easy, but the thought of not having to maneuver through the New York City public school system for Oliver, 9, and Ava, 5, sealed the deal. Dave Sanders for The New York Times Ms. Hogan has yet to come to terms with the fact that while there are plenty of day to day life advantages in Summit "I love that the kids can play outside without me worrying and they have a ton of friends on our block. I love that they go to school with the kids that live in our neighborhood, something they would have missed out on in Brooklyn" there is also a sense of loss. "It kind of kills me that they won't have that inherent knowledge of the city like I do," Ms. Hogan said. "For instance, they won't know without looking at a subway map how to get from Brooklyn to TriBeCa. I don't know why that makes me sad. I guess it just feels like street cred or something." Quality of life, not home prices, seems to be the main motivator for families that depart Brooklyn for the suburbs. Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, an appraisal firm, said the first quarter median sales price for a one to three family home in Brooklyn was 747,000. Compare that with data provided by Jeffrey G. Otteau, president of the Otteau Group, an information provider on real estate trends, which showed median prices in Summit, N.J., at 797,500 and in Ridgewood, N.J., at 700,000, and it's clear that the decision is not necessarily a financial one. For some families, it takes a clean break from Brooklyn to help them realize there's no place like the home they already had. This was the case for Jihan Kim, a 46 year old art director who finally capitulated and left Brooklyn, his home of 20 years, after his wife, Hannah Farnham, a 44 year old design director, made a repeated and compelling case for Brookline, Mass. A New Englander from Connecticut, Ms. Farnham was ready to escape the stresses of city life and was particularly drawn to the idea of raising a family in the suburbs. A job offer in the Boston area, which Mr. Kim jokes that his wife secured before informing him, made the decision to leave Brooklyn easier. "I had to acknowledge that I love her more than New York City," Mr. Kim said. The couple's daughter, Ruby Kim, now 13, was initially against the move. "She was 7 years old at the time, and her wails were as sorrowful as I'd ever heard," he said. The family committed fully to the move, selling their co op in Park Slope and trying their best not to look back. "Psychologically, we cut the cord," Mr. Kim said. In 2000, they paid 269,000 for the two bedroom co op on President Street. When they sold in 2010, they made a sizable profit, garnering 639,000 for the apartment. The money went toward a 1,200 square foot "beautiful Victorian with a backyard" in Brookline for 619,000. "We even did renovations," Mr. Kim said. "It was two bedrooms, but Ruby's room was humongous." Although he found Brookline to be culturally up to speed, even referring to it as a "Brooklyn surrogate," Mr. Kim also found himself constantly comparing his old neighborhood to the new one. "Nothing measured up," he said. "Nothing was ever cool enough." It took a springtime family visit back to Brooklyn less than two years after they had left for Ms. Farnham to realize that in leaving Brooklyn, they had abandoned their true home. "I underestimated how attached we were to the neighborhood," she said. "Ruby was born here." "Before we moved away, the scale and speed of New York City seemed too large and fast for normal life," Mr. Kim said. "We realized it was the right size for us, that it was really home." Having made the decision to go back to Brooklyn, the couple found it difficult to recreate the life they were living before the move. When asked, their daughter said she preferred to be back in Park Slope, but that was now impossible. "We couldn't buy back in," Mr. Kim said. After losing out on several places, they finally bought their current 700 square foot two bedroom Windsor Terrace apartment for 691,259. "We paid too much," Mr. Kim said. "We really pushed to our limit." "But now every time we go outside it's like ah!" Ms. Farnham said. "We still walk the blocks here in wonder," Mr. Kim said, "pointing out the brownstones we wished we lived in or the nice plantings out in front. Both Hannah and I missed the architecture throughout the neighborhood." For Ruby, who was known as the "New York girl" among her new Massachusetts friends, it was the everyday wonders of the city that she missed for example, the subway. "This may sound strange, but I missed the noise," she said. "Brookline is much quieter, less busy. Brooklyn is all hustle and bustle. I realized that I like that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
SAN FRANCISCO Uber expects to be worth as much as 91 billion when it starts selling shares next month, making its initial public offering one of the largest in the history of the technology industry. With its amended prospectus, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, the ride hailing company is kicking off the last stage of its journey to list on the public stock markets. The offering is expected to mint a new generation of Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires. Uber set a price range of 44 to 50 a share, putting its valuation at 80 billion to 91 billion, accounting for stock options and restricted stock. That number could change depending on investor appetite for the shares over the next two weeks. At that valuation, Uber would dwarf its rival Lyft, which went public last month at a valuation of more than 24 billion but it would place the company behind Facebook, which went public in 2012 with a market capitalization of 104 billion, and the Chinese e commerce site Alibaba, which was valued at 168 billion in its 2014 offering. Uber said that it planned to sell 180 million shares in the offering, which could raise up to 9 billion. The company was last appraised at 76 billion in a private fund raising in August. Its offering price will not be firmed up until the day before it lists its shares. Uber's offering is a milestone for "unicorns," young companies that were privately valued at 1 billion or more. Many of these businesses grew quickly, riding a wave of technology like smartphones, but few have demonstrated they can make money. Uber is deeply unprofitable, as is Lyft. Such losses have caused jitters on Wall Street: Lyft's shares now trade below their offering price, for instance. That may have prompted Uber to take a more conservative approach to the stock market. Read more: Who'll get rich when the "unicorns" go public? The filing on Friday confirms that Uber is not expected to make a profit anytime soon. The company said that it lost up to 1.1 billion in the first three months of this year. In the same period a year earlier, Uber had a 3.7 billion profit, which reflected one time gains, including asset sales. Using a nonstandard accounting measure that strips out those one off items as well as costs like stock based compensation, the company lost as much as 954 million in the quarter, compared with a 280 million loss in the year ago period. Revenue rose as much as 20 percent in the quarter from a year earlier, to 3.1 billion. Get the Bits newsletter for the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry. Uber also announced it had received a new 500 million investment from PayPal, the payments company. That new round of capital will be made at Uber's I.P.O. price. The disclosure of the offering's price range kicks off Uber's roadshow, a two week whirlwind of meetings around the country during which its executives will pitch the company's shares to potential investors. Uber's chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, and others will face questions about the company's lack of profit, its potential for growth and how it has reformed its workplace culture after a series of scandals in 2017. How the company plans to make money is likely to be the biggest concern. Ride hailing is an inherently expensive business, because companies spend heavily on subsidies to attract riders and drivers. Uber is also investing beyond its core ride hailing business, adding food delivery and freight shipments as well as short term rentals of electric bikes and scooters. At the same time, its revenue growth is slowing, and it faces fierce competition from other ride hailing companies. Although its ride hailing business is slowing, Uber is seeing growth in its Uber Eats food delivery unit. It has also formed partnerships with several big foreign rivals and acquired its primary competitor in the Middle East, Careem. And it has secured additional investment for its costly autonomous vehicle unit from SoftBank and Toyota. Uber has emphasized several financial alternatives to profit to convey to investors that it can make money. One is "core platform contribution margin," which reflects profit margins from each ride or food delivery, while stripping out the money Uber spends on marketing and other expenses. Uber said its contribution margin fell in the first quarter, to as much as negative 7 percent, amid tough competition in ride hailing and investment in food delivery. In a video for the I.P.O., Mr. Khosrowshahi said Uber would eventually make money by growing quickly and becoming the dominant player in the markets where it operates. "Our strategy is to build the largest network in each market," he said, adding that Uber believes it has a market share of more than 65 percent in the United States and Canada. The company's brand and safety record would lead to "a significant margin advantage over time," he said. Uber also said it would set aside up to 3 percent of the shares in its offering and make them available for its drivers to purchase at the I.P.O. price. The company's relationship with drivers is fraught because they are independent contractors and lack benefits and are paid depending on Uber's pricing of rides. Drivers in eight cities plan to go on strike for 12 hours around Uber's I.P.O. to call attention to their low wages. "While investors are doing their due diligence of researching the risk of investing in a company like Uber, they need to be clear about the risk that the dissatisfaction of drivers could cause to the bottom line," said Rebecca Stack Martinez, an Uber driver who plans to join the strike in San Francisco. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The author Carlos Ruiz Zafon in 2008. "I became a writer, a teller of tales," he once said, "because otherwise I would have died, or worse." MADRID Carlos Ruiz Zafon, whose mystery novel "The Shadow of the Wind" became one of the best selling Spanish books of all time, died on Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 55. His death was announced by his Spanish publishing house, Planeta. His literary agent, Antonia Kerrigan, said the cause was colon cancer, which he had been battling for two years. Published in 2001, "The Shadow of the Wind" was translated into dozens of languages and has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. It was the second most successful Spanish novel after Miguel de Cervantes's masterpiece "Don Quixote," according to Planeta. A visit to a book warehouse in Los Angeles, where he moved in the 1990s, inspired Mr. Ruiz Zafon to write "The Shadow of the Wind," but he set the action in his birthplace, Barcelona. Written as a story within a story, the novel crisscrosses the tumultuous decades before, during and after the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. It starts in 1945, when a boy named Daniel Sempere is taken by his father to a mysterious place known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where Daniel selects a book called "The Shadow of the Wind." Fascinated by its obscure author, Julian Carax, Daniel enlists the help of friends to investigate the writer's past, which also brings up the disturbing story of a character who has been burning all the copies of the book he can find. Reviewing "The Shadow of the Wind" for The New York Times in 2004, when it was first published in English (translated by Lucia Graves), Richard Eder wrote that even though it was generally "lowdown and lazy" to compare writers, Mr. Ruiz Zafon's work could have been publicized as "Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Umberto Eco meets Jorge Luis Borges for a sprawling magic show, exasperatingly tricky and mostly wonderful." Other critics praised Mr. Ruiz Zafon for seeking to transpose the pace and the colorful characters of great 19th century novels, notably Dickens's, into a 20th century context and writing style. The novelist Stephen King wrote: "If someone thought that the genuine Gothic novel had died in the 19th century, this book will change their mind. This is a novel full of splendor and hidden trapdoors in which even the subplots have subplots." Carlos Ruiz Zafon was born on Sept. 25, 1964, in Barcelona. His father worked for an insurance company, and his mother was a homemaker. He attended a Jesuit school and then studied information technology. After working in advertising, he decided to pursue his passion for literature full time. His debut novel, "The Prince of Mist," published in 1993, was written for a teenage audience and won him the first of many literary awards. In an essay on his website, Mr. Ruiz Zafon explained: "I have written for young readers, for the movies, for so called adults; but mostly for people who like to read and to plunge into a good story. I do not write for myself, but for other people. Real people. For you." He concluded, "I became a writer, a teller of tales, because otherwise I would have died, or worse." "The Shadow of the Wind" was the first work in a four part project he called "The Cemetery of Forgotten Books," which he completed in 2016 with the publication of "The Labyrinth of Spirits." Ms. Kerrigan, his agent, said his long fight against cancer cut short his plans to write more novels, as well as film scripts. When he sent her the manuscript of "The Shadow of the Wind," Ms. Kerrigan recalled in a phone interview, "Carlos had been very successful with his young adult books, and he had no real need to switch to an adult novel. But authors sometimes want to enlarge their vision of the world, and he clearly felt the time had come for him to do just that." "The Shadow of the Wind" was not an immediate hit, Ms. Kerrigan said, and this led to some tensions with his publisher, which wanted to reprint it quickly in paperback to help jump start sales. But about six months after its release, she said, after some good reviews, "Christmas came and it finally took off." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"A lot of strange creatures live in the cold depths beneath the Antarctic ice, but none stranger than the giant sea spiders. Sea spiders are often tiny, but Antarctic species grow to dinner plate size. Even stranger are their internal organs. Their genitals and parts of their guts are found in their legs. And because their heart is too weak to pump hemolymph, the equivalent of blood, around the body, it's the movement of the guts that do most of the work. There are many questions about these creatures, but one big one is how they get oxygen into their bodies. Fish have gills, so do crabs and lobsters. Water flows over them and the gills absorb oxygen. Worms, in the sea and on land, absorb oxygen through their skin. But the sea spider has no gills or lungs, and its skin is an exoskeleton, a bit thick for absorbing oxygen. What it does have are hundreds of pores. They use this respiration chamber to calculate how much oxygen the sea spiders were taking in. They found that the countless pores in the spiders' thick skin acted, in effect, like breathing holes. The pores offer an easy way for oxygen molecules in the seawater to be absorbed by the body. To collect sea spiders for research, scientists had to dive beneath the Antarctic ice. Since the water was so cold, diving requires serious preparation, but the result is worth it." "I was pretty petrified about the cold and the ice ceiling before I started diving there, but it's kind of spoiled me for anywhere else." "Why devote all this effort to sea spiders? Well, they're kind of irresistible. Everything they do is weird. And our planet's poles, north and south, are warming faster than any other places on Earth. Learning how these creatures live in these extreme conditions may help us understand how they will cope with climate change to come." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
El Espace is a column dedicated to news and culture relevant to Latinx communities. Expect politics, arts, analysis, personal essays and more. ?Lo mejor? It'll be in Spanish and English, so you can forward it to your tia, your primo Lalo or anyone else (read: everyone). The summer before I turned 11, my Abuela Estela finally got rid of the rusty, rainbow colored swing set in her backyard. It was the last season I got to spend my afternoons eating overripe figs from the tree in her courtyard on those columpios, baking under the sun and scratching my mosquito bites. A scene in Diana Peralta's directorial debut, "De Lo Mio," which follows two sisters who travel to the Dominican Republic after their grandmother's death, evoked a similar nostalgia in me one that many children of the diaspora learn to carry in their chests. In an early scene, one of the sisters, Carolina, sits on her abuela's porch, drinking a cup of coffee. The camera slowly pans from Carolina to the sky, as she gazes at the lush framboyan trees that tower over her. I cried when I watched this scene, thinking of the fig tree and swing set in my own abuela's backyard. "De Lo Mio" is one of the 83 films from 10 countries that will screen at the New York Latino Film Festival, which was founded in 1999 and has since functioned as a pipeline for creators, as well as a space for dialogue on Latinx representation in film. The Nuyorican filmmaker Calixto Chinchilla founded the festival at 21, after directing his first short. He wanted to create a space where Latinx filmmakers could exhibit their work, share knowledge and "get the suits to see what we were doing," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The first reports on Thursday's Supreme Court decisions dealing with the subpoenas for President Trump's financial records sounded like bad news for the president in his effort to keep them hidden. But don't be fooled. There were actually two winners, and you wouldn't know that from the headlines: the president and Chief Justice John Roberts. First, Mr. Trump won, because we almost certainly won't get to see his financial records anytime soon. The decision in the case arising out of the New York State grand jury investigation held that he does not have absolute immunity, but the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts to consider challenges to the subpoenas at issue. Those proceedings will take some time to play out, and even records that are eventually turned over to the grand jury will be subject to secrecy rules. In the case dealing with the congressional subpoenas, Mr. Roberts threw out the lower courts' decisions and told them to start over, this time with significantly greater deference to Mr. Trump. So it is highly unlikely that the subpoenaed records will become public before the November election. And that is what Mr. Trump most cares about. Mr. Roberts, too, comes out a big winner. He gets to posture as nonpartisan after all, he refused to grant Mr. Trump absolute immunity from subpoenas. He gets to insist that not even the president is above the law. And he even got the entire Democratic wing of the court to provide cover by joining his opinion on the congressional subpoenas. Sure, the delays defeat the entire purpose of the subpoenas, but the judges will piously intone, as they have in the past, that they don't think about things like the electoral calendar. The decisions also subtly empower the institution the judiciary of which Mr. Roberts sees himself as the reputational guardian. It's hard to read the two opinions together without getting the distinct sense that he sees the grand jury subpoenas as purer, more righteous, than the congressional ones. The congressional subpoenas, Mr. Roberts suggests, may lack any "valid legislative purpose," which might allow the legislature to "'exert an imperious control' over the executive branch and aggrandize itself at the president's expense, just as the framers feared." The implicit message is that only the courts can be trusted. If Mr. Trump and the chief justice are the winners, then who lost? First and foremost, the people did we have now lost any realistic chance of knowing about Mr. Trump's financial dealings before deciding whether or not to re elect him to the presidency. And relatedly, Congress lost. Congressional oversight has many purposes, but a central one is to communicate with the public, to make arguments about why certain policies are good or bad and why certain leaders should or should not be trusted. The court has dealt this public facing role of Congress a serious blow. Is there anything that Congress can do in the future to make its oversight more effective? There are some things, but first the institution must learn the key lesson of the court's decisions: Don't rely on the judges. Instead, Congress needs to rely on tools under its own control. Perhaps most important, Congress controls the federal purse strings. One way it can use the power of the purse to compel information is by insisting on an information for money trade: If the White House is refusing to turn over testimony or documents, either chamber of Congress can insist on a rider in the next round of appropriations bills forbidding the expenditure of any federal funds for, say, the operation of the White House Counsel's Office. Sure, the other chamber might try to strip this rider, or the president might threaten a veto of the entire bill containing the rider. But if the chamber seeking the information held firm, ultimately the other institutions would be faced with the choice of either no appropriations bill at all (thus defunding a vast swath of the government) or an appropriations bill with the rider. Would the chamber stand firm? That would depend on how this fight played out with the public. But in the context of an unpopular president seeking to thwart all congressional oversight, and in the context of a congressional chamber making a targeted use of the power of the purse (going after the White House Counsel's Office and not, say, the Department of Veterans Affairs), it would stand a good shot at winning the public fight. But there's another way, perhaps even less fraught, that Congress can use its power of the purse to enforce information demands if it does some planning. When creating programs in the first place, it can write in requirements that the administration cooperate with congressional oversight in specific ways (as it did, for instance, with the programs created by the CARES Act to respond to the economic disruption caused by the coronavirus). The president might insist that those requirements are unconstitutional (as Mr. Trump did with the CARES Act). But going forward, as Senator Richard Blumenthal and others have proposed, Congress can write in what lawyers call "non severability clauses": essentially, provisions saying that the oversight requirements and the funding itself cannot be separated. If the White House (or the courts) wants to take the position that the oversight is unconstitutional, it'll have to sacrifice the underlying funds to do so. The power of the purse is not Congress's only tool. Under certain extreme circumstances, it can use its own sergeants to arrest those who defy its subpoenas. And depending on the outcome of the November election, Congress may also have the opportunity to pass legislation that would strengthen the role of inspectors general and others who might aid it in its oversight role. But today's wins for President Trump and Chief Justice Roberts should make one thing very clear: Whatever mechanisms Congress does choose to buttress its crucial oversight role, it certainly cannot count on the courts to help out. Josh Chafetz ( joshchafetz), a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, is the author, most recently, of "Congress's Constitution." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Four years ago, when former book editor Daniel Mallory purchased his 550 square foot Chelsea apartment, its main draw was the book storage: floor to ceiling shelving, which covers a wall of his living room, plus numerous nooks above doorways and under the flat screen TV that shares space among the shelves. Recently, after receiving 32 hardback copies of his debut novel, "The Woman in the Window," published under the pseudonym A. J. Finn, Mr. Mallory had to decide which of his collection would be relegated to storage. In the end, the Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Henry James novels got the heave ho. "They're dead," he said of his early literary idols. "They're not going to complain." Last week, "The Woman in the Window," a psychological thriller that pays homage to Hitchcock classics, debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best seller list. It is a happy if unsurprising endnote to the book's publishing saga, which began in the fall of 2016, when word got out that the debut thriller at the center of an eight house bidding war was written by an anonymous book editor. Probably because of the gender neutral pseudonym and the book's winning, wine slugging unreliable narrator, Anna Fox, guesses about the author's identity skewed female. The competition for North American rights ended with a 2 million, two book winning offer from Mr. Mallory's own publishing house, William Morrow, plus deals with a record breaking 37 international publishers and a film deal with Fox 2000. "As a publishing industry veteran, I could appreciate, even at this very early stage, how unusual this sort of attention was," Mr. Mallory said. Even William Morrow's acquiring editor, Jennifer Brehl, didn't know the author's identity when she received the manuscript. Having read most of the book in one sitting, it was only when Ms. Brehl pitched it to William Morrow publisher Liate Stehlik, that she learned it had been written by their own colleague, Mr. Mallory, then the vice president and executive editor of William Morrow. Despite Ms. Brehl's friendship with Mr. Mallory, she was shocked. "I had no idea that he was writing a book," she said. Had Mr. Mallory not prudently scheduled a weeklong trip to Palm Springs, which began the day his agent sent the manuscript to publishers, Ms. Brehl imagines she may have walked the book into his office to ask for his thoughts on it. Mr. Mallory had always planned to submit the manuscript under a pseudonym, which is a mash up of his cousin's name, Alice Jane, plus the name of another family member's French bulldog. 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. "I felt it would be disconcerting for my authors to wander into a bookshop and see their editor's name writ large across a hardback," he said. While editors moonlighting as authors isn't the norm, Mr. Mallory's crossover is not entirely unique. The novelist David Ebershoff had been working as an editor at Random House two years when his first book, "The Danish Girl," was published in 2000. Former children's book editor Tui Sutherland has published numerous books under her own name as well as multiple pseudonyms, including Tamara Summers, Heather Williams and Rob Kidd. Other recent author/editors of note include former Simon Schuster editor Greer Hendricks ("The Wife Between Us," coauthored with Sarah Pekkanen), Scribner editor in chief Colin Harrison ("You Belong to Me"), former Riverhead assistant editor Danya Kukafka ("Girl in Snow"), Random House senior editor Anna Pitoniak ("The Futures") and Henry Holt senior editor Caroline Zancan ("Local Girls"). But none generated buzz on par with "The Woman in the Window" which, following its sale, collected blurbs from such authors as Gillian Flynn, who called it "a noir for the new millennium," and Stephen King, who deemed it "one of those rare books that really is unputdownable." What impressed Mr. King most was the seamless integration of classic films such as "Vertigo," "Rear Window" and "Gaslight." Mr. Mallory, who is 38, has had a near lifelong fascination with psychological thrillers that began when his parents dropped him off at an art house cinema for the afternoon. The film playing was Dutch director and producer George Sluizer's "The Vanishing," which Stanley Kubrick once called "the most horrifying film I've ever seen." Mr. Mallory said he was terrified, but "I was unable to prize my eyes from the screen." The dueling emotions "interested and sort of disturbed me even at that age." As a teenager, he discovered Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," which proved a gateway drug to the rest of Hitchcock's oeuvre, along with film noir and suspense novels like Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley series. He majored in literature at Duke University, and went on to pursue a master's and doctorate at Oxford. There, he wrote about transgressive sexuality in the works of Highsmith, Graham Greene and Henry James, whose novel "The Turn of the Screw," with its own unreliable narrator, Mr. Mallory considers the original psychological thriller. For several years, Mr. Mallory lived in London and worked at the commercial publishing imprint Sphere, of Little, Brown UK, before returning to New York to spearhead a crime and thriller digital first initiative at William Morrow. While he had long considered writing fiction, it was only when he clocked the popularity of "Gone Girl" and "Girl on the Train," two commercially successful descendants of the classic genre he'd long loved, that he realized the market was ripe for the kind of story he might want to tell. But while his publisher's eye for a successful trend may have primed him for the idea, the novel's premise was deeply personal. The idea came to Mr. Mallory one night as he sat on his couch watching an old favorite, Hitchcock's "Rear Window." Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a lamp switch on in the apartment across the street. "It occurred to me, 'Oh, how funny, in 1954 Jimmy Stewart is spying on his neighbor, and in 2015, I'm doing the same thing,' " he said. "Voyeurism dies hard." At the time, after struggling for a decade and a half with severe depression, Mr. Mallory had recently been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder, and was in his third week of almost total isolation as he transitioned from one medication to another. "I thought, too, as I was watching the woman across the street, about how, despite living in one of the most populous cities in the world, I felt quite lonely," he said. Over the next two days, Mr. Mallory wrote a 7,500 word outline for a novel about a former child therapist who, trapped in her Harlem townhouse by her crippling agoraphobia, becomes obsessed with the family that moves into the building opposite her own. Once finished, Mr. Mallory sent the outline to his friend Jennifer Joel, a partner and literary agent at ICM, who encouraged him to pursue the project. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Sweden's Robin Soderling, who was ranked 25th in 2009, stuns No. 1 Rafael Nadal at that year's French Open, where he had been undefeated. At the same tournament three years later, the 111th ranked Virginie Razzano of France beats Serena Williams in the first round. At this year's Australian Open, the 117th ranked Denis Istomin of Uzbekistan defeats Novak Djokovic. Besides rocking the tennis world with their upset victories, all of these long shot winners had another thing in common: each wore sponsored patches from the French cosmetics company Guinot on their outfits, as have hundreds of other winners and (mostly) losers in high profile matches. Guinot has developed an approach to maximize exposure at the world's marquee tennis events by making spur of the moment endorsement deals with lower ranked players who are scheduled to face the biggest stars. Though other companies occasionally enter similar short term deals the high end grocer Dean DeLuca has tried it at the United States Open this year Guinot is the most prominent practitioner in tennis. Its current program, handled by the agency IMG, began in 2008. After the order of play is made for the next day, IMG contacts the agents of players who are scheduled on the tournament's biggest courts. With players who are not contractually restricted from wearing additional patches, negotiations begin. Roughly eight to 10 deals are struck at each Grand Slam event. "All the agents know who to contact when they have a player who might have a patch available and it's on a show court," said Sam Duvall, an agent and president of Topnotch Management. Guinot and IMG declined to comment for this article. Players are offered a few thousand dollars per patch, which are pre made and bear the corporate logo. The amount increases based on the player's ranking and round of the tournament, stopping around 10,000. Three players have won Grand Slam titles wearing Guinot patches: Svetlana Kuznetsova, the 2004 U.S. Open and 2009 French Open champion; Samantha Stosur, who won the 2011 U.S. Open; and the 2013 Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli. Rules for the size and placement of corporate logos on tennis outfits are strict, especially at Grand Slam events. Only two patches are allowed, neither of which can exceed six square inches. When a Guinot sponsored player has room for just one logo, they wear the Guinot brand patch. When they have room for two, a patch for Guinot's brand Mary Cohr is added. Players iron or sew them on themselves, or take their outfits to the on site tournament tailor to have them applied. The system is foolproof almost. At the 2015 Australian Open, Tim Smyczek, ranked 112th, received a deal to wear the patches when he played Nadal, and dropped off eight shirts to be sewn by the tournament tailor. Only five of his shirts got the patches, however. The match then proved surprisingly competitive, with Smyczek forcing Nadal deep into a fifth set. By the time he reached the critical final moments of the match, Smyczek had sweat through all of his shirts with Guinot patch, and finished the match wearing a shirt without one. "I wonder if you go back and look at the winning percentage wearing those patches, it's got to be the all time least winning patch on a sleeve, for sure," Smyczek said. "But yeah, I remember just thinking I might not win this match, but here's a nice little bonus I could go home with." Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Over the first six days of this year's U.S. Open, six players Radu Albot, Timea Babos, Viktoria Kuzmova, Dusan Lajovic, Feliciano Lopez and Elise Mertens wore Guinot patches. All lost. The seventh proved lucky on Sunday, with Anastasija Sevastova beating Maria Sharapova to reach the quarterfinals. Other brands target top players with more lucrative long term contracts meant to showcase their brands. Porsche sponsors last year's U.S. Open champion Angelique Kerber, and she wears their logo on her tops. Viktoria Wohlrapp, a spokeswoman for Porsche Tennis, said Porsche found that the majority of the deal's value came from matches Kerber played at Grand Slam events. Ms. Wohlrapp said she admired Guinot's approach. "In general, it's a great idea to get good exposure without a too long commitment, marketing wise," Ms. Wohlrapp said. "Patches are sometimes risks: you pay for something, and you don't get the return on it, because the player is not playing that well, so it doesn't get the exposure you would like to." Ms. Wohlrapp said Guinot's strategy would not be appropriate for Porsche, however. "For Porsche, our main goal was never to have brand exposure, but to emphasize the partnership between the brand and the athlete," she said. "That's what our main goal is; we wouldn't put patches on every athlete just to get the exposure." Some clothing companies also prohibit their athletes from wearing other companies' logos. Nike forbids its sponsored athletes, with the exception of some from China, from wearing other logos on their clothing. A handful of top tennis players have similar deals with other apparel companies. When Caroline Wozniacki last renegotiated her deal to wear Adidas' Stella McCartney line, she was paid a premium for agreeing to keep her outfit free of patches, called a "clean" contract. "I think it's much better looking," Wozniacki said of her patch free outfits. "But at the same time, it also has to make financial sense, so it's kind of a give and take. But if you can make it clean and make it work financially, I think that's the best of both worlds." A few players have resisted the offers for other reasons. Kuznetsova, who won two Grand Slam titles wearing the patches, says she now sees herself "as a brand" and would accept only longer term offers. "All the respect for whoever wears them, it's good money and stuff," she said. The retired player Mardy Fish said he had always rejected one match offers. "Whenever I endorse a company, I want to know who it is, what's behind it, who they are," Fish said. "I wanted it to look good, to be on my shirt, to be part of the company, a member of the team, so to speak. I'm sure I'm a rare case, because it is easy money." Fish's hesitation does seem to be rare. Sam Querrey, for example, wore a Guinot patch in his Wimbledon quarterfinal win this year over the top seeded Andy Murray, but replaced it in the semifinals with a patch from Wheels Up, a private aviation company that compensates him with money and the use of its jets. "You literally just go with who pays you the most; I don't care what's on there," Querrey said. "I just put it on and get paid, that's all I care about. I don't even know what Guinot and Mary Cohr are." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Even though he gouges out eyeballs eight times a week, Russell Harvard seems like a really nice guy. When I tell the actor that I have a cold, as we sit in a corner of the Lambs Club in the theater district, he insists on pouring me a glass of the jasmine, elderflower and violet kombucha he is drinking. "That's my favorite," said Mr. Harvard, who is deaf. He can speak with what he has called "a deaf accent" and, with a hearing aid, the sound in his right ear can get "pretty crisp." But for this interview, he mostly relied on an American Sign Language interpreter, his friend Steven Nugent. The tall, brawny Mr. Harvard, 38, is playing the Duke of Cornwall, the sadistic husband of Lear's rotten daughter, Regan, in the buzzy (if mostly Tony snubbed) Broadway production of "King Lear," with Glenda Jackson as Lear. I had always thought of "King Lear" in terms of metaphors about sight. Lear and his ally, the Earl of Gloucester, are both blind when it comes to deciding which of their children to trust. An obtuse Lear orders his loyal daughter, Cordelia, out of his sight. "See better, Lear," his friend, the Earl of Kent, warns him. Cornwall stabs Gloucester's eyes with the imprecation, "Out, vile jelly!" But now, thanks to Mr. Harvard, who translates Shakespearean language into sign language for his role, I also think about the play in terms of metaphors about deafness. Like Donald Trump and so many other leaders and moguls bombarded with the white noise of flattery, Lear cannot hear the truth. His ears are attuned only to sycophants, a ruinous trait. "The word 'nothing' is the most important word of the play, and absence is an important theme,'' said Sam Gold, who directed "King Lear." "Speechlessness. Literal and metaphorical blindness. The silence and lack of spoken language in my production is an exploration of that thematic nothingness." "Russell is a very beautiful and poetic signer," Mr. Gold said. "Sign language is the perfect language for translating Shakespeare because it's filled with imagery and metaphor. Shakespeare's language, unlike contemporary English, is dense with images and invented words, much like A.S.L." As Cornwall, Mr. Harvard wears a kilt. "I'm keeping the kilt for a burlesque show," he joked. He and Aisling O'Sullivan, the Irish actress and Nicole Kidman look alike who plays Regan, have conjured elaborate back stories about their characters, and sign them as the play begins. The relationship between Cornwall and Regan is passionate. "I noticed that Russell smelled very good, and I asked him what scent he was wearing," Ms. O'Sullivan said. "He told me it was Zum Mist, frankincense and myrrh. The following day he presented me with a bottle of Zum Mist, which I now wear, too. The couple that smells together, stays together." Pedro Pascal, who was the sexy Oberyn, Prince of Dorne in "Game of Thrones" and now plays the sexy villainous Edmund, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, in "King Lear," said that Mr. Harvard's kindness as a person and generosity as an actor shine through his bad guys in "Fargo" and "Lear" and "ends up creating a much more original villain, more human and accessible and ultimately more terrifying because you can see yourself in it." Ms. Jackson told me that "Russell can be ferocious on the stage, but invariably charming and utterly delightful off." Dauntingly, his first movie audition was with Mr. Anderson. After two readings in New York, he was asked to fly to Los Angeles to try out with Mr. Day Lewis at the Chateau Marmont. He felt confident, but after he signed his scene, Mr. Thomas said, "Do a little less." So Mr. Harvard reined in his facial expressions, emotions and gestures, and still the director said, "Do it less." "So I signed as quietly as I could," Mr. Harvard said. He recalled walking outside and Mr. Thomas running after him, frantically grabbing a cigarette and saying, "You got it! You got it!" "I gave him my thumbs up," Mr. Harvard said. "Then I went back into my hotel room and I started jumping up and down on my bed. I was like, 'Yay, I got it!'" He remembered Mr. Day Lewis as very reserved, locked in his rapacious character. "He had tattoos all over his arms," Mr. Harvard said. "I never thought he would. He has sons and their handprints as children are on his arm. So that was kind of cute. I really like what he does. He's very, very Method. It's really beautiful. Because I was chatting with whoever the hell would listen." His next film was an indie, "The Hammer," about a deaf college wrestler named Matt Hamill; he inherited the part after another actor stepped aside to accommodate the deaf community's wish to see a deaf actor in the role. Mr. Harvard said that he knows that it's "a fine line," noting: "I was talking to a friend of mine who was debating whether her straight friend, who was playing a lesbian role, should not have that. And I said, 'Fine, then you can't play a straight person.' And it caught her off guard a little bit." Still, he said, he thinks that it's important for deaf people to play deaf roles, because "obviously deaf people can't play hearing roles. And I mean, we have so many deaf actors out there. Why are we not taking advantage of that?" He credited Julianne Moore for doing well in a deaf role in Todd Haynes's 2017 "Wonderstruck," but would have preferred to see a deaf actress get the job. "I've met with people from CBS and NBC and they've asked me, 'What would you like to see?' And I say, 'I challenge you to have an all deaf cast on a TV show.' Because for example, 'Animal Planet,' they have a TV show mainly about meerkats." And why can there be a show about meerkats but not deaf people? "Are the writers afraid of writing deaf characters? Are we too complex?" Mr. Harvard invoked a D.C. Comics character called Man Bat, a scientist who develops a serum to cure deafness and who tangles with Batman sometimes. "It's a tad offensive," he said. "Because being deaf is sacred. It's pride, it's culture. We have our community. We have our language. We have our mores." (He said that what he was doing a bit with me, signing and speaking at the same time known as SimCom, for simultaneous communication is "strongly discouraged" in the community "because you're not able to do both languages perfectly at the same time.") Mr. Harvard continued, "I was thinking that it would be really cool to have a deaf character play Man Bat's part. Maybe it doesn't happen in New York. Maybe it happens in Texas, because they have the famous bat bridge, the Congress Avenue Bridge where the bats fly out." He pondered whether he could get Noah Hawley, who created the TV shows "Legion" and "Fargo," to help him write it. Mr. Hawley, who lives in Austin near the Texas School for the Deaf, was inspired by seeing his neighbors communicating in "a secret language" to write a popular deaf hit man character named Mr. Wrench for "Fargo." Mr. Harvard played the role with a fringed suede jacket that shimmied when he signed and a hidden buzzer inside a jacket pocket that signaled him when the director was yelling "cut." Mr. Hawley liked the actor so much that he brought him back for another season. "There are a lot of actors who work very hard and do complicated things," he said. "But at the end of the day, it's really about what the camera tells you when you're looking at their face." He said that Mr. Harvard has "an empathetic quality" that tugs at your heart, even when he's doing bad things. In 2015, he was on Broadway for the first time in a revival of "Spring Awakening," put on by Deaf West Theater and also starring Marlee Matlin, who became a "sweet" mentor. His drinking amped up "into hyperdrive," he said. "The cast members are drinking, you know? So I would have a drink. But then after the show every night, I would go hit up a bar. I would meet a bunch of fans. 'Let me get you a shot! Let me hug you. Let me love you.' It helps you to feel excited. And then the next day, I wouldn't feel good. And I do not miss the hangovers." That year, he went to Madonna's Rebel Heart Tour at Madison Square Garden, "which is the best place that you can go and use your deaf card and get access to the very front." He went heavy on the Patron. "I woke up and people were leaving the arena," he said. He hit bottom in Austin after a night of drinking in April 2018. "I kneeled down, and I did a very primal scream," he said. He said that his mom, who is also deaf, couldn't hear his scream but his dog freaked out and ran out of the room. "It was so worth it, so I could reflect. Knowing I squirmed like a worm. It was the saddest thing I could see." He called his agent, who told him to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. But it took him 48 hours to get an interpreter to go with him to his first meeting. He says he has been sober for a year. "I have a lot more clarity," he said. "I never thought that I was an addict. Because my brother is, and I never thought that I was like him. But I really was. I would say I was an alcoholic. And probably a little bit of drugs, too." He said that he took care of his brother, who is even more profoundly deaf, and then took a break, moving to Alaska to teach preschool deaf and hard of hearing kids. "For a really long time, I've been looking, searching, looking, looking, looking for love in all the wrong places and experiencing heartbreak," he said, "and I finally have become sober and I just feel like I don't have the need to look. And it feels great. And I feel like I've found myself for the very first time and I'm just relishing it. I would rather have something happen organically." He's not on Tinder or Grindr. "My dating is if I see someone at the gym or Facebook or Instagram," he said. "Those are my dating apps." It's time for Mr. Harvard to go. He's got some eyes to gouge out. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
More than two dozen racehorse trainers, veterinarians and drug distributors were charged in a wide ranging scheme to secretly dope horses and cheat the betting public, according to federal indictments unsealed on Monday in Manhattan. Among the 27 people charged was Jason Servis, the trainer of Maximum Security, one of the best racehorses in the world and one who benefited from a doping regimen, according to one of the indictments. Servis covertly administered performance enhancing drugs "to virtually all of the racehorses under his control," the indictment charged, adding that from 2018 to February 2020 he entered horses in more than 1,000 races. In May, Maximum Security crossed the finish line first at the Kentucky Derby, only to be disqualified for almost knocking over a rival horse and slowing the momentum of others. Country House, a 65 1 shot, was named the winner. Maximum Security went on to win four of his next five races including the 10 million first place check last month in the world's richest race: the Saudi Cup at the King Abdulaziz racecourse in Riyadh. The scheme, as described in four separate indictments against a total of 27 people, was to manufacture and distribute adulterated and misbranded drugs and to secretly administer them to racehorses under their control. The participants sought to improve race performance and obtain prize money from thoroughbred and harness racing tracks throughout the United States, including in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Ohio and Kentucky, as well as the United Arab Emirates, one indictment said, "all to the detriment and risk of the health and well being of the racehorses." To avoid detection of their scheme, the indictment said, the defendants routinely defrauded and misled federal and state regulators "and the betting public." At a news conference announcing the charges, Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said that the case was the most far reaching prosecution of racehorse doping in the history of the Department of Justice and that the investigation was continuing. The defendants, he said, had acted "not for the love of the sport and certainly not out of care for the horses, but for money." The horses were "injected and force fed all manner of illegal and experimental drugs, drugs that allowed the horses to run unnaturally fast and to mask pain," which can lead to injuries and death, he said. William F. Sweeney Jr., head of the F.B.I.'s New York office, added, "What actually happened to the horses amounted to nothing less than abuse." Horse racing has a long history of trainers' repurposing drugs in pursuit of a performance edge. Frog and cobra venom, Viagra, cocaine, heart medicines and steroids have all been detected in drug tests. This reliance on performance enhancing drugs combined with lax state regulations has made American racetracks among the deadliest in the world. Nearly 10 horses a week on average died at U.S. racetracks in 2018, according to the Jockey Club's Equine Injury Database. That figure is anywhere from two and a half to five times greater than the fatality rate in Europe and Asia, where rules against performance enhancing drugs are enforced more stringently. Servis and Jorge Navarro, whose horses have earned more than 37 million since 2008, were the most prominent trainers named in the indictment. Both are based in the Mid Atlantic and at times conspired to keep their cheating from being detected, according to the indictment. On Feb. 18, 2019, Servis alerted Navarro via text message that a racing official was in the barn area near where they kept the prohibited joint blockers and blood builders that they referred to as "red acid" and "monkey," the indictment said. On the same day, Navarro was overheard on a call with another defendant, saying that he would otherwise have been caught "pumping and pumping and fuming" every horse that ran that day. Servis and Maximum Security, who has won eight of his 10 starts and nearly 12 million in purses, have become favorites of horse racing enthusiasts largely because of what many thought was an unjust disqualification in America's most famous race. The indictment says Maximum Security was given performance enhancing drugs. On June 5, 2019, Maximum Security was drug tested at his Monmouth Park barn on the Jersey Shore as Servis was preparing him to run in the Pegasus Stakes. In a phone call intercepted by the authorities with one of his veterinarians, Kristian Rhein, Servis indicated that Maximum Security had received a shot of SGF 1000, a compounded drug aimed to enhance performance, the indictment said. According to the indictment, Rhein told him not to worry: "They don't even have a test for it. There's no test for it in America." He also suggested that, if anything, it might trigger a positive for another medication that is allowed. That same day, Servis had another veterinarian falsify the records of Maximum Security to say the colt had received the allowed medication, the indictment charged. It also accused Navarro and alleged co conspirators of trying to conceal the existence of the doping program by using false names to ship and receive the drugs. The authorities said Navarro and another defendant worked together to surreptitiously dispose of the bodies of horses that had died, rather than report those deaths to the relevant authorities. The indictment, citing an intercepted phone call last year, quoted Nicholas Surick, a harness trainer charged in the case, as he discussed horses Navarro had "killed and broke down" that Surick said he had made "disappear." "You know how much trouble he could get in?" Surick says, according to the indictment. Lawyers for Navarro and Servis each said their clients would plead not guilty. Lawyers for other defendants named in this article declined comment. Among the defendants charged in the case were seven veterinarians, Berman said at the news conference. One, Louis Grasso, who was licensed in New York and New Jersey, created and sold customized performance enhancing drugs and advised others on how to administer them, according to one indictment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
When he took the stage Saturday night in Tulsa, Okla., it had been more than three months since President Trump had held one of his treasured campaign rallies. But they say giving a rally speech is like walking down a gently inclined ramp: It's incredibly treacherous and harrowing, but after what seems like an endless amount of time, you eventually reach bottom. The rally capped a week that began with a shaky appearance at West Point and also included a Father's Day themed interview with the president's oldest son, intended to tell the trouble beset president's base that daddy was coming home. But the welcome wagon was underpopulated. The sea of red hats in the lower reaches of the arena was crested by a blue wave of empty seats in the upper deck. Outside, workers dutifully cleared an empty stage for an "overflow rally" that had no overflow to rally. The president aimed to fill the empty space, and spur a sometimes listless crowd, with provocations and racist imagery. He pushed blame for the coronavirus's ravages on China, using the nickname "Kung Flu." He called police brutality protesters "thugs" and painted a picture of a "tough hombre" climbing through a young woman's window. He said that he told his staff, "Slow the testing down, please!" in response to the number of Covid 19 cases reported. (A White House official contended that the president was joking, about a pandemic that had killed almost 120,000 Americans.) The bizarre crescendo of the speech was a nearly 15 minute stand up monologue, complete with re enactments, of the much dissected incident at a West Point commencement ceremony when the president had difficulty walking down a modest ramp and needed two hands to drink a glass of water. In Mr. Trump's epic retelling, walking at a slight downward angle became an ordeal to rival the D Day invasion scene in "Saving Private Ryan." The ramp was like a medieval death trap solid steel, without a handrail, "like an ice skating rink!" The sun (remember, it is a molten ball of flame ignited by nuclear fusion!) beat down on him mercilessly. The commencement dragged on for hours. He saluted hundreds of cadets, in defiance of the natural limitations on the human arm. Then he valorously shuffled down the incline (Mr. Trump mimed the walk for the Tulsa crowd), staying upright and denying a fall, and thus a victory, to the true enemy, the fake news media. At the end of the bit, Mr. Trump raised a glass of water a substance so dense and heavy that human bodies can float on it unsupported and lifted it to his lip using a single hand, as the crowd chanted, "Four more years!" You take your wins where you can get them. Fox News, which carried the president's speech in full, offered an assist with chyrons like "Trump Debunks West Point Ramp Fake News." (The conservative One America News Network, Fox's rival for the president's affections, carried the vice president's speech as well.) But there were undeniable stretches of, as someone might put it, low energy. Despite Mr. Trump's prodding, the crowd couldn't work up the bloodlust for his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., that his throngs reliably did (and still do) for Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump gave his speech a merely "average" grade midway through. And even Fox couldn't keep the empty seats entirely out of frame, though its host Jesse Watters described the arena as "packed." Mr. Trump's defenders might say that focusing on the empty seats is one more example of the fake news doing anything to tear the president down. But the campaign had touted its attendance expectations, possibly inflated by online protesters flooding the campaign with spoof registrations. And the video junkie and former "Apprentice" star is nothing if not a televisual thinker. (At one point in the speech he marveled at the number of TVs on Air Force One.) Those rafters were supposed to be jammed, and it was supposed to be on TV, and that was supposed to say something. It would say his people were back; that he was back. That neither a protest movement nor a virus could stop the MAGA. That Mr. Trump had said that it was safe to get together again amid the pandemic (despite the liability waiver his campaign had attendees sign), and Team Trump listened. Instead the conspicuous absences sent the visual message that some portion of his base, when it came time to actually trust walk across the hot coals, was not entirely buying the panacea he was selling. For a president who has rarely tried to expand beyond that aggrieved fan base the "our" in his line "they're trying to take down our statues" the sale must go on. Mr. Trump extended his video outreach Thursday by pivoting toward his original base his family and appearing on his son Donald Trump Jr.'s YouTube show, "Triggered." That extends especially to "Triggered," right down to its title, shared with a book by the younger Mr. Trump: a catchphrase of the extremely online right, celebrating the idea that honesty and righteousness can be measured by how much you make people unhappy. "Triggered," whose credits normally include images of a melting snowflake and cheering MAGA fans, shifted to black and white stills, a "West Wing" like musical theme and the show title blazing across the image of president and son, along with what I suppose qualifies, by "Triggered" standards, as a tasteful fireball. It was the Trump aesthetic in perfect miniature: part luxury hotel ad, part '80s action movie explosion. The interview was light on policy, fitting Trump Jr.'s interest in cultural proxy wars. He asked the president about the New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees' "cowering to the mob" by apologizing for calling police brutality protests before N.F.L. games "disrespectful." ("I think he hurt himself very badly," said the president, who inflamed the argument when he cursed out kneeling football players at a rally in 2017.) There's a theme, in Trump campaign content, of presenting the presidency to superfans as a kind of reality TV family business a White House "Duck Dynasty," with favorite supporting characters to choose from. (The president's daughter in law, Lara Trump, also hosts a show on the campaign's online platform; his son Eric appeared at the Tulsa rally, where he referred to protesters as "animals literally taking over our cities.") | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
THE MAN IN THE GLASS HOUSE Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century By Mark Lamster Illustrated. 508 pp. Little, Brown Company. 35. You want to begin a review of "The Man in the Glass House," Mark Lamster's stimulating and lively new biography of Philip Johnson, by saying something about architecture. But the reality of Johnson one of the most compelling architects who has ever lived, which is not the same as being one of the best architects is that the most interesting thing about him was not the buildings he designed. The qualities that make him, and this book, fascinating are his nimble intelligence, his restlessness, his energy, his anxieties, his ambitions and his passions, all of which were channeled into the making of a few pieces of architecture that will stand the test of time, and many others thatwill not. Johnson, who began his architectural career as the Museum of Modern Art's first curator of architecture and only later decided to practice what he had been preaching, probably had a greater effect on the architectural culture than anyone else in the second half of the 20th century. He certainly did more than anyone except Frank Lloyd Wright to put architecture into the public discourse. He had a critic's mind, not an artist's: He was fascinated by everything, and he wanted to get it out there, put it before the public, stir up the pot. He nurtured the careers of architects he admired, and he undermined, or tried to undermine, the careers of those he thought less of. Through sheer force of personality, he made himself the godfather of American architecture in the second half of the 20th century. Not a bad accomplishment for someone who was not, in the end, a truly great architect. He knew that he was too smart not to even though he had trouble admitting it, and while he would sometimes make self deprecating remarks like his oft quoted line about how all architects are whores, he knew that neither his profession nor he himself could be quite that simply explained. Architects sell themselves to their clients, but only toward a greater end, the making of architecture that has the power to stir the emotions, something that Johnson honestly believed was noble. For most of his life he was one of our most ardent proponents of the notion that good buildings make life better. To give him his due, he made several such buildings himself: Pennzoil Place in Houston, the original Four Seasons restaurant and the AT T Building in New York belong on that list. His combination of enthusiastic advocacy and deep insecurity also led him to be exceptionally generous to gifted younger architects who, even if they were more talented than he was, would respect his position as their dean. So when he received the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1978, he managed to get Charles Moore, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, Robert Stern, Charles Gwathmey, Cesar Pelli and Stanley Tigerman to join him in Dallas to serve as a kind of honor guard around him, his young architectural groomsmen. 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. That is the good side. So is the Glass House, the extraordinary country house he created for himself beginning in 1948 in New Canaan, Conn., now a museum owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In addition to Johnson's original residence of glass, the grounds are also home to a dozen other remarkable structures that he built over many decades, including a painting gallery, a sculpture gallery and a library study, continuing until just a few years before his death at 98 in 2005. The estate as a whole demonstrates his mercurial design intelligence as it evolved over half a century; it is as close to a true autobiography in architecture as anything that has ever been built in the United States, and it is like no place else. Randy Harris for The New York Times But there is another side to Philip Johnson, and it is less benign. Lamster deals extensively with Johnson's horrendous infatuation with the Nazis in the 1930s, a ghastly chapter that was well documented in Franz Schulze's 1994 biography and that Lamster fleshes out with a few more details, which do not redound to his subject's benefit. Johnson spent a lot of time in Germany, ostensibly researching the flowering of European modern architecture, which would lead to the celebrated exhibition and book, "The International Style," that he produced, along with the architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock, for the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. But he took more than a little time off from studying buildings as he fell under the thrall of both German politics and the attractiveness of Aryan youth. After all of this became known some years ago, it was sometimes excused as simply an offshoot of Johnson's homosexuality. But Lamster helps us understand the weakness of that explanation as he shows how Johnson returned to the United States and supported many other characters whose politics were almost as despicable, among them Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. In reality, Johnson was a bundle of contradictions. He was a brilliant aesthete, a connoisseur, an intellectual who devoured ideas and as stimulating a conversationalist as you could ever encounter. If as a young man he possessed what Lamster calls an "extravagant hauteur," he was too full of enthusiasm to be merely a cynic. He was saved, you could say, by a genuine curiosity that never left him, even in old age. "Boredom was the one thing Philip Johnson would not suffer," Lamster tells us. He was also a man who spent much of his life searching for something to believe in, worshiping one architectural deity after another: He was Mies van der Rohe's greatest acolyte, until he was not; he took possession of postmodernism from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and then he abandoned that for what others named Deconstructivism, which he made his own by curating an exhibition by that name at the Museum of Modern Art. Then, toward the end of his life, he decided that Frank Gehry was the greatest architect of the age, and his work began to take on a clear, if not terribly convincing, Gehry esque tone. What was at the core of Johnson? Lamster says his architecture is really all about the idea of the void, which seems a bit too easy, a bit too close to saying he was trying to fill an internal emptiness, which on some level is the case for everyone. He was not incapable of love; he had a relationship with David Whitney, an imaginative curator with a razor sharp intelligence (who doesn't quite get the respect he deserves in these pages), that lasted for more than four decades. He was enough of a reader and a thinker to have built for himself an entire building at the Glass House estate where he would retreat, surrounded by books. But he was also a shameless publicity hound, which is why it is telling that toward the end of his career, when his longstanding professional partnership with John Burgee had ended and he was continuing to practice on his own, he took on as a client a certain developer by the name of Donald Trump. He and Trump needed each other: Trump wanted a famous name, and Johnson was desperate to stay in the game. Johnson produced a few lousy buildings for Trump, who probably didn't know the difference; all he cared about was being able to claim that they were designed by Philip Johnson. And Johnson got to stay in the public eye. The Trump chapter of Johnson's long career seemed just a bizarre footnote when it happened in the 1990s. Now, it is a little harder to dismiss. Outwardly, the two men could not have been more different: Johnson could talk circles around anyone, and Trump is verbally inept. Johnson had contempt for Trump's vulgarity and lack of intellectual curiosity, and Trump had no understanding of Johnson's cultivation. The beautiful little study at the Glass House would have been a prison to Trump. But now that we know Trump as more than a real estate developer, it is hard not to think back to Johnson's infatuation with dictators, his snobbery, his obsession with being noticed, and wonder if they did not have a little more in common than it seemed back then. Lamster's timing is excellent: He has written the story of Philip Johnson for the age of Donald Trump, and it makes us see a side of Johnson that is, at the very least, sobering. Johnson, like Trump, made himself impossible to ignore. Lamster's most important contribution may be to show us that, however electrifying the ability to command the spotlight may be, it does not confer the lasting qualities of greatness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Pilobolus knows how to pack a lot into two hours. On Tuesday at the Joyce Theater, opening night of that company's annual monthlong run there, the bang for your buck variety included magic tricks, gymnastic stunts, large scale shadow puppetry, stripteases and, just when you thought things couldn't get more explosive, a short film of stuff blowing up (household items mostly, in slow motion, courtesy of the Danish TV show "Dumt Farligt"). To ensure our sustained overstimulation lest we feel bored (not allowed) video interludes like that one filled the transitions between the five works on Program A. It was all entertaining, but bluntly, numbingly so. Pilobolus, named after a peripatetic fungus and founded in 1971 by a group of Dartmouth College students, long ago evolved from an exploratory modern dance ensemble into a commercially successful juggernaut. The house was packed on Tuesday; the audience went wild before, during and after the show. But beneath spectacular displays of gladiatorial strength and a patina of high production values, it's hard to locate the spirit of real risk taking that must have galvanized the troupe in the first place. Which isn't to say that the work is not physically risky. In "On the Nature of Things," a New York premiere created by company leaders in collaboration with the dancers, three performers share a circular pedestal just over three feet in diameter. Clad in nothing but flesh toned G strings a Pilobolus uniform designed for maximum exposure of rippling muscles and allusion to a "natural" state Nile Russell, Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern and Eriko Jimbo leverage one another's weight in ways that flirt with the edges of the minuscule stage. The big question: Are they going to fall? They never do, of course, though Ms. Jimbo, after passing between the hands of the two men, gracefully dismounts and assumes a strenuous, sensuous position on the floor, spine arching back, head reaching toward her feet. The men are left to battle it out for her, presumably to ominous, operatic Vivaldi. Mr. Russell tries to strangle Mr. Ahern with the crook of his knee; Mr. Ahern retaliates, flattening Mr. Russell with the sole of his foot, though in the end, Mr. Russell seems to triumph. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to three scientists who developed lithium ion batteries, which have revolutionized portable electronics and are very likely powering a device you're using now to read this article. Larger examples of the batteries have given rise to electric cars that can be driven on long trips, while the miniaturized versions are used in lifesaving medical devices like cardiac defibrillators. John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino will share the prize, which is worth about 900,000. "Lithium ion batteries are a great example of how chemistry can transform people's lives," said Bonnie Charpentier, president of the American Chemical Society. "It's wonderful to see this work recognized by the Nobel Prize." The three researchers' work in the 1970s and '80s led to the creation of powerful, lightweight and rechargeable batteries used in nearly every smartphone or laptop computer, and in billions of cameras and power tools. Astronauts on the International Space Station rely on them, and engineers working on renewable energy grids often turn to them. By storing electricity generated when sunlight and wind are at their peak, lithium ion batteries can reduce dependence on fossil fuel energy sources and help lessen the impact of climate change. M. Stanley Whittingham, 77, a professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York, and one of the three winners, said that he always hoped lithium ion technology would grow, "but we never envisaged it growing this far. We never imagined it being ubiquitous in things like iPhones." John B. Goodenough, 97, is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. With the award he becomes the oldest Nobel Prize winner, but is still active in research. And Akira Yoshino, 71, is an honorary fellow for the Asahi Kasei Corporation in Tokyo and a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan. He said after the announcement that he was pleased that the technology could also help fight climate change, calling lithium ion batteries "suitable for a sustainable society." Ever since Alessandro Volta invented the first true battery in 1800, scientists have tried to find ways to get electrons to flow from a negative electrode called an anode to a positive electrode called a cathode. Volta did this by stacking discs of copper and zinc, and linking them with a cloth soaked in salty water. When wires were connected to the discs to complete a circuit, the battery produced a stable current. In subsequent decades, versions of these batteries powered telegraphs and other devices. For many years, there were no major advancements in battery technology. But the Arab oil embargo of 1973 made many scientists realize the extent of society's dependence on fossil fuels. Dr. Whittingham, who was working for Exxon at the time, began searching for improved ways to store energy from renewable sources and power electric cars. He knew that lithium would make a good anode because it released electrons easily. It also had the advantage of being the lightest metal. So Dr. Whittingham started looking for materials that had a high energy density and captured lithium ions in the cathode the side of your battery with the plus sign. Dr. Whittingham discovered that titanium disulfide, which had never been used in batteries before, had a molecular structure that let lithium ions into small pockets. This resulted in the first functional lithium battery. "The big advantage of this technology was that lithium ion stored about 10 times as much energy as lead acid or 5 times as much as nickel cadmium," Dr. Whittingham said. Lithium ion batteries were also extremely lightweight and required little maintenance. "So there was a huge incentive to move to lithium ion." Dr. Goodenough, then at Oxford, predicted that lithium ion batteries would have greater potential if the cathode were made with a different material. He noticed that cobalt oxide was similar in structure to titanium disulfide. It could tolerate lithium being pushed into it and pulled out over and over. It also made the lithium ion battery almost twice as powerful as Dr. Whittingham's. The battery now generated four volts. Building from Dr. Goodenough's work, Dr. Yoshino, who was at the Asahi Kasei Corporation in Japan, then showed that more complicated carbon based electrodes could house lithium ions in between their layers too. This eliminated pure lithium from the battery entirely. Instead, the system used only lithium ions, which are safer. These developments ultimately led to commercialization of the lithium ion battery in 1991 by another Japanese electronics giant, Sony Corporation. The compact nature and reliability of lithium ion batteries made the technology a staple in electronics that had once been powered primarily by disposable batteries that consumers always seemed to run out of at the wrong time. That included radios, hand held gaming devices, laptop computers and eventually smartphones and wearable computers. Technologists often point to lithium ion as an innovation roadblock: While computer chips have doubled in speed every few years and digital displays have become significantly brighter and sharper, tech companies have made only incremental improvements on batteries; there's not much that engineers can do beyond making the batteries bigger and implementing software algorithms to make hardware more power efficient. Despite the hiccups, companies continue to rely on the batteries because they can be cheaply and reliably reproduced. They have also been scaled up for use in larger settings. Energy storage, most often using lithium ion battery technology, is widely seen as necessary for transforming the electric grid to a carbon free system and combating the effects of climate change. Most electricity in the United States and in many other parts of the world comes from fossil fuel sources, predominantly natural gas but also coal. Battery technology helps replace those carbon emitting sources because it allows power companies to store excess solar and wind power when the sun does not shine nor the wind blow the weakness of those carbon free sources. The most critical area for the electric grid has been providing power when people return home from work during the summer and turn on their air conditioners, cook dinner and wash clothes, when utilities often rely on natural gas plants designed to meet those periods of high demand, known as peaking plants, which typically are more expensive. "What's exciting about lithium ion technology is it has the power to unlock the sun 24 7 to really help renewable energy power our future in a way that we haven't been able to capture until now," said Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association, an industry group. The potential of battery technology is highlighted in Northern California, where Pacific Gas Electric is shutting off power to hundreds of thousands of customers on Wednesday because of the risk of wildfires. More than half of lithium is gathered using brine extraction from deep inside the earth, especially in South America, and the rest is still mined traditionally from rock. Both methods have caused environmental damage to areas around lithium processing operations. And as the demand for lithium increases, companies may resort to using energy intensive heating to speed up brine evaporation. Some lithium sources could also be overextracted. Once lithium ion batteries are used up in electronics, they are often disposed of improperly by consumers. Less than 5 percent of lithium ion batteries are collected and recycled in the United States, according to the Department of Energy. "If you think about the batteries in cellphones, most of them are thrown away and end up in landfills," said Alexej Jerschow, a chemist at New York University. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
After a career in standup, sketch comedy, movies, and television, Janeane Garofalo will make her Broadway debut in the Roundabout Theater Company's "Marvin's Room" this summer. The play was written by Scott W. McPherson and follows the uneasy reunion between two estranged sisters, one of whom has leukemia. It originally ran Off Broadway in 1991; in a Times review, Frank Rich called it "one of the funniest plays of this year as well as one of the wisest and most moving." A 1997 film adaptation starred Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton. Ms. Garofalo starred in "Russian Transport" Off Broadway in 2012, but has appeared sparingly onstage over her career especially compared with her roles in movies and television, including "Wet Hot American Summer," "24" and "The Truth About Cats and Dogs." In "Marvin's Room," she will portray Lee, the role played by Ms. Streep in the film. Lili Taylor will play Lee's ailing sister Bessie, and Celia Weston will be their aunt Ruth. Anne Kauffman will direct in her Broadway debut. Previews begin June 8, with the official opening on June 29, at the American Airlines Theater. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The renovation of Geoff and Liz Caan's house in Newton, Mass., has been a 16 year work in progress. Since the couple bought the 1920s Georgian style brick house in the Chestnut Hill historic district in 2003, Ms. Caan, an interior designer who favors rooms bursting with statement making color and pattern, has rarely rested. Renovating and redecorating the rooms one by one, she has overhauled some spaces more than once to suit her changing tastes and the shifting dynamics of her family of five. "It's like a little laboratory" for design ideas, said Ms. Caan, 51. "I think your home should evolve with you." A few years later, she replaced the venetian blinds with black shutters, swapped the nickel pulls and plumbing fixtures for brass ones, and repainted the floor with a pattern of interlocking hexagons in two shades of blue. Last year, she repainted the floor again, in Farrow Ball's electric Yellowcake. "I loved it at first it's very bright," she said, noting that her goal with the floor has always been to divert attention from the inexpensive cabinets that came with the house. "It's funny, because people always love the kitchen, but it's really kind of junky." The family room has undergone such extensive changes that repeat visitors could be forgiven for thinking they were in the wrong house. "When we first did it, it was light yellow, pink and green," Ms. Caan said. "It was winter when I did it, and I was in this kind of Palm Beach y mode like, 'Get me out of here' so I made it look very tropical, light and summery." That lasted five years. Then she "threw everything out and started over," coating the walls in a deep emerald green and banishing the pink accents. Then, two years ago, "I just felt like I was more in a blue phase," she said, so she repainted the walls a high gloss aqua and added cloud patterned Fornasetti wallpaper to the ceiling. And don't get her started on the living room. "It's had 500 different furniture arrangements I just keep playing with it," she said, to accommodate the furniture and accessories she acquires. Recent additions include a 19th century English secretary that belonged to Mr. Caan's mother (now used as a bar) and a taxidermy zebra mount from SafariWorks Decor. Stuck indoors during a snowstorm last winter, she suddenly felt inspired to give the room a salon style gallery wall. "I decided to gather all the art that was lying around," she said. "I just started to hang stuff and added little charms and things to fill in the spaces." For Mr. Caan, the redesigns sometimes double as workouts. "I do help with some of the heavier lifting," he said, "literally, in terms of moving things around." But he welcomes the changes. "Prior to this house, we lived in different cities, in different apartments and houses," he said. "With this, you get a whole change without moving, so it's refreshing." Of course, there were less glamorous improvements along the way. The Caans replaced the heating system, going from oil to natural gas. They finished the basement. They fixed drainage issues outside, and added a bluestone patio and fence. They replaced the gutters and built a new driveway. Between the flurries of renovation, there have been a few moments of relative calm. "I take breaks," Ms. Caan said, recalling the time in 2016 when she finished renovating the three bedrooms and two bathrooms the master suite and rooms for the couple's daughter, Lilly, now 19, and younger son, Leo, 12 on the second floor of the three story house. "I did the whole second floor at one time and then took a couple of years off," she said. But like a dormant virus, the renovation bug always comes back. "I wake up one day and I'm like, 'Oh, that fireplace surround is awful, and I can't live with it for another day,'" she said. "Then I make some phone calls, and it's gone." When their older son, Henry, 24, left for college, she wrapped the walls and ceiling of his third floor room in black and white, gingham patterned wallcovering to make it a more welcoming retreat for guests. And where there are now kitchen banquettes, she plans to add a powder room. She also intends to open up the back wall with big windows and doors. Then it might be time to give the house another break. "We've been chipping away at it over the years," she said. "It's getting there." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
There was one night (at least) this season Dec. 14, to be exact when everything came together for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Movement melted off shoulders and fingertips without effort. Power emanated from the inside and then flowed out with searing swiftness, the rare sort that isn't ostentatious. The men found strength in suppleness; the women were softer still, plush yet never weak. The Ailey season wasn't all like this. Plenty of evenings were a chore to get through. Programming and not just the new works was more at fault than the dancers. But that special evening dedicated to showcasing the works of the choreographer Ronald K. Brown proved that he was the real star of the season even though he didn't, sadly, unveil a new dance. The air at City Center, where the Ailey company is in residence until Saturday, felt different that night. Radiating a sense of occasion that went beyond themselves, the dancers emanated pride both for Mr. Brown's connection with the company and for the way his presence has changed them as movers. Our critic Brian Seibert on the Ailey season's premieres Their persistence in getting it right even when the movement is robust, Mr. Brown's blend of African and modern dance must roll off the body was palpable. Before Mr. Brown came around, the tendency at Ailey was to punch out movement. He is their Jerome Robbins. That master choreographer would instruct dancers to calm down, to, as he might say, "take it easy, baby." And like Robbins, Mr. Brown creates dances that expose intimacy within groups. It's subtle, painstaking work. Mr. Brown first began choreographing for the Ailey organization 20 years ago when Sylvia Waters, then the director of Ailey II, commissioned a dance. Since then, he has created five works for the main company, including "Grace" (1999) his response to Ailey's 1960 masterwork "Revelations" and "Four Corners" (2013), a jewel of a dance in which seekers of enlightenment share the stage with four angels. Mr. Brown's dances usually have a spiritual element, but it's rarely heavy handed; he imparts more of a sensation than a story. With a diaphanous quality that places it somewhere between heaven and earth, the piece is addictive in its slipperiness; it grows more appealing each season. Angels haunt "Grace," too. While Mr. Brown's dances are explorations of spirituality, they're also full of spirit with a pulse that sends bodies across the stage like brush strokes. Matthew Rushing was a quicksilver phenomenon in an excerpt from "Ife/My Heart" (2005) has there ever been such a natural, silky dancer? And Linda Celeste Sims, front and center in three of the four pieces (actually, everything but "Ife"), brought her hypnotic phrasing to the choreography. Throughout the night, she displayed her mysterious way of splintering her body in two as if the upper half has floated away from the lower half, until, in a split second, they merge back together. But all of the women in Mr. Brown's dances inhabit a world in which they can be feminine and wholly independent. Along with Ms. Sims, Belen Pereyra, captivating all season, showed delicate fluidity in Mr. Brown's "Open Doors" (2015), while Fana Tesfagiorgis was especially ethereal in "Four Corners." And in "Grace," which tells the story of lost souls finding the divine, it was as if all three were carried by the music. The other find of the season was a new production of Ailey's "Masekela Langage," a simmering piece of dance theater from 1969 that draws parallels between apartheid and the race violence in 1960s Chicago. Though it was of its time, "Masekela" managed to resonate in ways that the season's new works Kyle Abraham's "Untitled America," about the affect of the prison system on families, and Hope Boykin's "r Evolution, Dream.," inspired by the speeches and sermons of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not. Those premieres, for one thing, were heavy on voice overs that made each, to varying degrees, pedantic and already stale. "Masekela," set to music by the trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela, was the opposite: With quiet, measured brutality, it was something of a tableau vivant coming to life as it told, through spurts of agitated movement and biting stillness, how violence and prejudice can make a place crumble and how despair and defiance go hand in hand. Other programs had little momentum. A new production of Billy Wilson's "The Winter in Lisbon," a 1992 tribute to Dizzy Gillespie, was full of vamping and common in the worst Broadway sense. Christopher Wheeldon's "After the Rain Pas de Deux" came off as insipid without the rest of the ballet, it loses whatever poignancy it might have; "Vespers," by Ulysses Dove, and "The Hunt," by the company's artistic director, Robert Battle, were calculated in their shallow presentation of force. Apart from Ailey's work, it was troubling how much of the choreography was indistinct: pasted onto the dancers instead of embedded in them. That's part of why Mr. Brown's evening was so essential. In a pre curtain chat for that program, Mr. Battle recalled that Mr. Brown had once told him: "You have two choices to be motivated by: love or fear," and that Mr. Brown said, "I choose love." Not to be corny, but that thing in the air? It was love. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
President Trump is not generally known as a student of history. But on Tuesday, during a combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in New York, he unwittingly waded into a complex debate about history and memory that has roiled college campuses and numerous cities over the past several years. Asked about the white nationalist rally that ended in violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Trump defended some who had gathered to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee, and criticized the "alt left" counterprotesters who had confronted them. "Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee," Mr. Trump said. "So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down." George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the president noted, were also slave owners. "I wonder, is it George Washington next week?" Mr. Trump said. "And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?" "You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?" he added, comparing the removal of statues to "changing history." Mr. Trump's comments drew strongly negative reactions on Twitter from many historians, who condemned his "false equivalence" between the white nationalists and the counterprotesters. But "where does it stop?" and what counts as erasing history is a question scholars and others have asked, in much more nuanced ways, as calls have come to remove monuments not just to the Confederacy, but to erstwhile liberal heroes and pillars of the Democratic Party like Andrew Jackson (a slave owner who, as president, carried out Native American removal) and Woodrow Wilson (who as president oversaw the segregation of the federal bureaucracy). "The debates that started two or three years ago have saturated the culture so much that even the president is now talking about them," said John Fabian Witt, a professor of history at Yale, which earlier this year announced that it would remove John C. Calhoun's name from a residential college. Mr. Witt called Mr. Trump's warning of a slippery slope a "red herring." There have been, after all, no calls to tear down the Washington Monument. Annette Gordon Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard who is credited with breaking down the wall of resistance among historians to the idea that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, said that the answer to Mr. Trump's hypothetical question about whether getting rid of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson also meant junking Washington and Jefferson was a simple "no." There is a crucial difference between leaders like Washington and Jefferson, imperfect men who helped create the United States, Ms. Gordon Reed said, and Confederate generals like Jackson and Lee, whose main historical significance is that they took up arms against it. The comparison, she added, also "misapprehends the moral problem with the Confederacy." As for the idea of erasing history, it's a possibility most scholars do not take lightly. But James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, said that Mr. Trump's comments failed to recognize the difference between history and memory, which is always shifting. When you alter monuments, "you're not changing history," he said. "You're changing how we remember history." Some critics of Confederate monuments have called for them to be moved to museums, rather than destroyed, or even left in place and reinterpreted, to explain the context in which they were created. Mr. Grossman noted that most Confederate monuments were constructed in two periods: the 1890s, as Jim Crow was being established, and in the 1950s, during a period of mass Southern resistance to the civil rights movement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Are fairy godmothers obsolete? Ask anyone: Princes on steeds rarely come around anymore, and all our ball gowns just sit in the closet. But in "Godmothered," an anodyne new comedy, even the most modern and jaded women find use for a fairy's magic touch. Now streaming on Disney , the film recalls the studio's once upon a time hit, "Enchanted," although here, the conceit loses much of its charm. The story follows an eager fairy godmother in training, Eleanor (Jillian Bell), who shirks her studies in the fantasy world of Motherland to pursue an assignment on Earth. Transporting herself into a wintry Boston, Eleanor locates her Cinderella: the wearied single mother Mackenzie (Isla Fisher) who works at a local news station. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It's official: Alexander Hamilton now out earns his boss. That, at least, was the verdict of one expert who was bidding at Sotheby's on Wednesday, when a trove of Hamiltonia fetched 2.6 million. "Hamilton has exceeded the value of George Washington with this auction," John Reznikoff, a dealer from Stamford, Conn., said after the hammer dropped on the last of 77 lots of letters and documents, which had been held by Hamilton descendants for more than 200 years. "If you compare letters with comparable content, Hamilton's now cost more." The auction was notable not just for the prices but also for the first time bidders (and gawkers) it drew, including 11 year old Zack Pelosky of Manhattan, who was wearing a navy blazer over a Hamilton T shirt. "It's from the New York Historical Society, not the show," Zack told a reporter afterward, though he noted that he had seen the musical three times. He had been going for a low ticket item a lot containing manuscript copies of letters by George Washington and George Cabot but was edged out by a telephone bid of 1,500. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
TIRED of your vehicle and its aging, limited features? Don't trade it in just yet. Download new software instead. In some cases, that is already possible. And over the next few years, as the already extensive software on modern cars becomes even more feature rich and upgradeable, manufacturers mean to step up the effort. They plan to offer many types of improvements or repairs through downloads that are beamed directly to the car via satellite, Wi Fi or cellular signal, without the vehicle's having to be brought into the shop. Eventually, your car will be serviceable like a giant smartphone, with new features added periodically while you sleep. But Tesla is by no means alone in the download department. General Motors has been offering services and upgrades via the cellular delivered OnStar entertainment and roadside assistance system since 2009. G.M.'s Acadia sport utility vehicle can now receive new apps for its entertainment system over the air. Other manufacturers, including BMW, Mercedes Benz and Volvo, send wireless uploads to update various in vehicle apps, including maps and entertainment offerings like Spotify and Pandora. The number of vehicles on United States roads that can accept infotainment software upgrades will increase to 34 million in 2022 from one million now, the consulting firm IHS Markit predicts. "The advantages for automakers of doing over the air updates are too great to ignore," said Egil Juliussen, automotive analyst for IHS Markit. "They can keep their functionality up to date and get rid of bugs." Tesla's upgrades have included an updated digital instrument panel, a revised touch screen, faster acceleration, activation of Autopilot and the ability for the vehicle to enter and exit a garage without anyone being in the car. "Software updates to my Tesla are like Christmas," said Ankur Pansari of San Francisco. "When I get them, I have a new toy to play with." And the automaker can save money. With cars and trucks increasingly reliant on complex computer code to operate, manufacturers can cut costs if they can correct or improve a vehicle's functions without having to get the car into a dealership. In November 2013, Tesla issued a software update to electronically raise the ground clearance of the Model S after a vehicle's battery pack caught fire when it ran over an object. A subsequent update gave the driver the ability to change the clearance at will. "Software updates are extremely important to me," said another Tesla owner, Scott Wolf, a software engineer in Naples, Fla. "Knowing there are new features and they can fix the car without having to bring it in that's very impressive for an owner." Ford, which previously provided software updates to its Sync infotainment system using a USB memory stick, will soon send software uploads to deliver Apple CarPlay and Android Auto functionality to its 2016 models equipped with its Sync 3 infotainment system. CarPlay and Auto replicate certain iPhone and Android smartphone features on the vehicle's display. Ford delivers the updated software via Wi Fi, installing it when the vehicle is restarted. The company will eventually switch to making updates via satellite. A download alert on the Tesla owned by Jason Hughes. Sending uploads will enable Ford to reduce the number of versions of its software. Instead of creating baked in variants for each country, for example, Ford will be able to upload interfaces in different languages. "We absolutely believe in the promise of software updates," said Don Butler, Ford's executive director of connected vehicles. Manufacturers are also looking at software downloads as a new source of revenue, turning on features remotely if the owner pays a fee. It would be similar to the way most new cars come with the hardware for SiriusXM satellite radio but require owners to pay a subscription fee. Tesla has already incorporated fees for features into its business model. While late model Tesla vehicles are equipped with cameras and sensors to enable semiautonomous driving, this feature Autopilot requires a 3,000 to 3,500 software download to make it work. Owners of the Tesla S60 are also able to increase their vehicle's range by about 40 miles if they pay Tesla 9,000 to activate the feature through a software download. Other automakers see similar opportunities. "There are potential situations where one could buy a Ford with a base configuration, and then we could deliver an update for an a la carte fee, or on a subscription basis," said Mr. Butler of Ford. The trend does pose challenges. Security is important to prevent unauthorized software, including Trojan horses or other malicious malware, from being inadvertently downloaded. And once software is downloaded, the potential exists to hack it, as two security researchers demonstrated last year with a Jeep. Jason Hughes, a Tesla Model S owner and computer programmer in Hickory, N.C., did not like the speed restrictions and the need to keep his hands on the wheel that Tesla requires when Autopilot is used on the streets. Hacking into the software, Mr. Hughes removed those safeguards. Tesla declined to comment on whether such activity would void an owner's warranty. But Mr. Hughes runs the risk of having the restrictions restored when the next update is beamed down. A direct communications link between an automaker and its vehicles means the company has the capability not only to upgrade software but to monitor vehicle systems as well. Location, driving style and serviceability can all be tracked. Since May, G.M. has offered its optional Smart Driver technology to the three million customers who own vehicles with 4G wireless capability. The system tracks and analyzes driving characteristics, suggesting ways to improve fuel economy and reduce wear and tear. The company will also suggest that drivers with strong scores seek insurance discounts. Remote software updates will become particularly crucial as vehicles become more capable of driving themselves. "Software upgrades will be almost mandatory once we move up to higher forms of autonomous driving," said Richard Wallace, a director at the Center for Automotive Research. "The artificial intelligence underpinning self driving will require constant upgrading to deal with novel situations." In the future, vehicle manufacturers might even refuse to assume liability for an autonomous vehicle that causes a crash but whose owner did not bother to accept an upgrade, said Lars Reger, the chief technology officer at NXP Semiconductors, a supplier to the automotive industry. For all the issues and opportunities posed by the upgradeable car, one business consideration might seem crucial for automakers: Will the ability to continually improve features and performance make the idea of buying a new car less enticing? Here, too, the smartphone analogy could prove apt, carmakers say. "Ultimately, satisfied customers will want an ongoing relationship with us," said Mr. Butler of Ford. "As with an iPhone, at some point the hardware will no longer be upgradeable. It's part of the world we live in." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
WASHINGTON A record low share of Americans were living in poverty, incomes were climbing, and health insurance coverage was little changed in 2019, a government report released on Tuesday showed though the circumstances of many have deteriorated as pandemic lockdowns and industry disruptions have thrown millions out of work. The share of Americans living in poverty fell to 10.5 percent in 2019, the Census Bureau reported, down 1.3 percentage points from 2018. That rate is the lowest since estimates were first published in 1959. Household incomes increased to their highest level on record dating to 1967, at 68,700 in inflation adjusted terms. That change came as individual workers saw their earnings climb and as the total number of people working increased. Methodology changes made after 2013 make comparing data across time tricky. But even adjusting for those differences, the 2019 income figures appeared to be the highest on record, based on Census Bureau estimates. The data may also have been somewhat skewed by the pandemic. Interviews for this year's income and poverty report were disrupted by the virus, the Census Bureau said. Some economists warned that the disruptions could have made the data look too rosy: The people who responded to surveys were more likely to have high education and income levels. Analysts at the Census Bureau estimated that poverty would have been slightly higher, at 11.1 percent, without the resulting data quirks. "It doesn't change the overall picture we had a tight labor market that was pulling people in and reducing poverty," said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. But it underscores that "there was still a lot of room for improvement." Despite the record long expansion, about 26 million Americans 8 percent of the population still lacked health coverage for all of 2019. That was a slight decrease from the 27.5 million who were not covered in 2018. While that change is small, it is notable because 2019 was the first year in which the Affordable Care Act's mandate to purchase coverage was no longer in effect. A second health insurance survey, which asks Americans if they had coverage at the moment they were interviewed, did show a slight increase in the uninsured rate, from 8.9 percent in 2018 to 9.2 percent in 2019. The data suggests that the individual mandate, which the law's drafters saw as crucial to increasing insurance sign ups among healthy Americans, may not have been that effective. The mandate regularly polled as the health law's least popular feature before congressional Republicans repealed the fines in late 2017. "The initial consensus when the law passed was the mandate was a critical feature," said Benjamin Sommers, an assistant professor of health policy and economics at Harvard. "Over the years of implementation, the studies that have come out have been less convincing in terms of its importance." The census figures showed a slight increase in Americans receiving health coverage at work and a decrease in those buying their own policies, suggesting that a stronger labor market could be driving the better coverage numbers. Enrollment in Medicaid, the program that covers low income Americans, declined slightly. That could reflect more Americans gaining coverage at work and many states tightening their eligibility rules. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The report highlights how strong the job market and economy were ahead of the pandemic, following a record long expansion that began in 2009. Yet it underscores how, despite those gains, many families remained vulnerable to such a major shock. Unemployment was hovering at around 3.5 percent before the crisis took hold, the lowest in 50 years, and wages were steadily rising. Yet at the end of 2019, three in 10 adults said they could not cover three months' worth of expenses with savings or borrowing in the case of a job loss, according to a Federal Reserve survey. Minority groups experienced bigger declines in poverty in 2019, the census report showed, but also have much higher poverty rates. The poverty rate for whites dropped 1 percentage point to 9.1 percent; for Asians it was down 2.8 percentage points to 7.3 percent. Black poverty dropped 2 points to 18.8 percent, and Hispanic poverty decreased by 1.8 percentage points to 15.7 percent. "The very groups who need a stronger economy to pull them back are the ones getting disproportionately hit by the downturn we're in now," Ms. Shierholz said. The figures suggest that many families were still on edge as state and local lockdowns prompted the sharpest job losses on record, pushing the unemployment rate up to 14.7 percent in April. While unemployment has declined to 8.4 percent as employers call back their temporarily furloughed workers, that left about 10 million fewer people employed in August than in February. Members of minority groups have been hard hit by those job losses, as have workers with lower education levels. Economists warn that many layoffs in the service sector could turn permanent as casinos, concert venues and hotels struggle to fully reopen as the coronavirus continues to spread. President Trump, who has been highlighting the bright spots in the 2019 economy, is likely to embrace the positive news in the income and poverty report. Mr. Trump's campaign pitch focuses on the idea that his administration "built the strongest economy in the history of the world." Some figures argue against that statement: growth rates below historical records and high inequality prevailed before the crisis, and fewer people participated in the labor market than in the late 1990s. But it is true that a record long expansion and strong labor market were helping workers to make meaningful gains before the pandemic. Median incomes for white, Black, Asian and Hispanic households all increased in 2019, adjusting for inflation, the census report released Tuesday showed. Even as incomes rose, census officials said that the measure of income inequality was statistically unchanged last year. That suggests that despite higher levels of employment and pay, different policy measures would need to be used to narrow the gap between the rich and poor. The 2020 recession is most likely worsening such gaps between rich and poor, between racial groups, and in terms of both economic and health outcomes. "The populations who are hit the hardest by the coronavirus are also those with the least stable access" to insurance coverage, said Katherine Baicker, the dean of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Despite hopes that New York's real estate market would spring back to life over the summer after the coronavirus lockdown was lifted in June, the number of closed sales in Manhattan was down by 46 percent in the third quarter compared to the same period in 2019, according to new sales data. Inventory was up by 27 percent the highest gain since 2009, according to a new report from the brokerage Douglas Elliman and demand remains soft. The median sales price for apartments, 1.1 million, was 7 percent higher than at the same time last year. "The Manhattan market is crawling out of lockdown and has clearly been the outlier in the region in terms of coming back," said Jonathan Miller, a New York appraiser and the author of the report. Sales at the lower end of the market, below 2 million, fell in the third quarter by 50.7 percent, compared to the same period last year. Despite a weak market, Mr. Miller reported an increase in bidding wars for properties priced under 2 million toward the end of the second quarter and the beginning of the third quarter, with 3.6 percent selling above the last asking price. UrbanDigs, a data reporting site, noted that 52 percent of contracts signed since Mar. 23 were for properties under 1 million, while 26.3 percent were in the 1 million to 2 million range. Sales of higher end properties, especially those in the resale market, remained flat between the second and third quarters, suggesting that sellers in the luxury sector aren't as flexible about negotiating prices and don't have the same sense of urgency about selling quickly. The number of condo and co op sales in this sector dropped 47 percent this quarter compared to this time last year. One category of the market that saw a relative boost was new development. Sales of new apartments in Manhattan represented 15.6 percent of all sales this quarter, and median prices jumped by 18 percent, to 2,886,098, from 2,449,020 in the third quarter of last year. But these prices aren't reflective of the overall market, as prices of larger properties tend to skew the numbers on all new developments sold. For example, 16 units closed this quarter at 220 Central Park South, Robert A.M. Stern's luxury condominium complex, including one for 99.9 million, and all of those sales went into contract before the pandemic. The month of September was the most active, by far, since the real estate market picked up again. Shaun Osher, the founder and chief executive of CORE Real Estate, said two factors led to this shift: the end of summer and the beginning of the school year. As people returned to the city, the number of in person showings skyrocketed. "If I had to guess, the number of showings are up 10 times what it was in August," Mr. Osher said. But the increased interest hasn't translated to sales yet. According to the Elliman report, the number of new signed contracts on co ops in Manhattan was still down 33 percent in September, compared to this time last year, and condo sales were down by 51 percent. Brooklyn is a different story, as the number of new signed contracts in September slightly exceeded 2019 levels there. Still, "by no way, shape or form are we seeing the strength that previous markets have shown," said Frederick Warburg Peters, the chief executive of Warburg Realty. "But the city is showing signs of recovery, and I'm cautiously optimistic that next spring will show robust numbers." Sales in the suburbs are also plateauing, indicating that the outbound migration from the city may be waning. The number of new contracts signed for single family homes and condos on Long Island, for example, was higher than 2019 levels, but the spike in sales seems to have topped out in mid July and has been declining sharply since then. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
However, it was their mother's camera ready hair and makeup and cherry red dress, donned a few hours after giving birth, that got everyone talking. Personally, I hope that is not an influence on anyone: the idea that one should look blow dried to perfection immediately after having a baby is entirely unrealistic; another example of the "beauty standard denialism" my colleague Amanda Hess wrote about this week in reference to Amy Schumer's new movie, "I Feel Pretty." Still, we are definitely on the verge of another major royal influencer as Meghan Markle makes the transition from "Suits" (yes, I watched the final episode) to Kensington Palace. The way her fashion choices push purchasing buttons in the rest of us amazed me when I started collecting the data, and then got me thinking about why. You can read my hypothesis below (and send me some of your own). Or check out the deeply moving story of some of the survivors of the Rana Plaza factory disaster, and the inside scoop on LeBron James's strategic rationale for convincing his Cleveland Cavalier teammates that they all needed to suit up pregame in Thom Browne. And if anyone is going to be in New York between now and October 8, l suggest you stop by the New York Historical Society and take in the exhibit "Walk this Way: Footwear from the Stuart Weitzman Collection of Historic Shoes." You'll never think about footwear in quite the same way again. Now excuse me while I go reserve my multiplex tickets. Q: All the things in the stores that are supposed to be cooler, aren't. Seersucker needs to come back. Can it be made from hemp and bamboo and cotton? I've had to scour Goodwill and Amazon, with delightful but very rare results at Goodwill and depressing results on Amazon. Please, find some artist to find a way to do updated seersucker, preferably before the next 110 degree heat wave with 80 percent humidity? Jan, California | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
This article was updated on Sept. 20 to reflect actions taken by other countries. The heartburn drug Zantac has been on the market for decades, and was considered safe enough to be sold over the counter and regularly given to infants. But on Sept. 13, the Food and Drug Administration said that it had detected low levels of a cancer causing chemical in samples of the drug, which is also known as ranitidine. The agency advised patients who were taking over the counter versions of Zantac to consider switching to other medications. On Sept. 18, the drug maker Novartis said that its generic drug division, Sandoz, had stopped distributing a prescription form of ranitidine worldwide as it investigates the issue. Another major generic manufacturer, Dr. Reddy's Laboratories, also said it was halting distribution. The companies, including Sanofi, which manufactures the brand name version, have stopped short of recalling their products in the United States. What is the problem? The F.D.A. said that it had detected a type of nitrosamine called N nitrosodimethylamine, or NDMA, in all of the samples that it tested. NDMA is the same chemical that was found in some versions of valsartan, a blood pressure drug carrying the brand name Diovan. The discovery of NDMA in valsartan led to several recalls of that commonly prescribed drug, which in turn led to supply shortages. Nitrosamines can cause tumors in the liver and other organs in lab animals, and are believed to be carcinogenic in humans. NDMA, which is also found in foods like grilled meat, can form during manufacturing if the chemical reactions used to make the drug are not carefully controlled and monitored, the F.D.A. has said. The agency said the levels it detected in early tests "barely exceed amounts you might expect to find in common foods." But Valisure, an online pharmacy company that tests the drugs it sells, said its own investigation detected far higher levels of the contaminant, especially when the drug is subjected to conditions similar to digestion in the stomach. That company has argued that the drug may be reacting with itself to create NDMA. What action has the government taken? The F.D.A. has said it is still investigating the source of the NDMA contamination as well as the risk to patients. It has not identified any specific products or manufacturers. But other governments have gone a step further. The Italian government said it was recalling all versions of ranitidine where the active ingredient was made by Saraca Laboratories, an Indian manufacturer, and that it was halting the use of some other versions of ranitidine while it studied the issue. The Canadian government requested that manufacturers stop distributing ranitidine in Canada "until evidence is provided to demonstrate that they do not contain NDMA above acceptable levels." It also said that current evidence suggests that the NDMA may be present in ranitidine regardless of the manufacturer, indicating it could be a problem inherent to the drug. The agency, Health Canada, said Sandoz had agreed to recall its ranitidine products in that country. Other versions of ranitidine have not been recalled and they can continue to be sold. A spokeswoman for Sanofi said that while the company is not planning a recall, "we are working closely with the F.D.A. and are conducting our own robust investigations to ensure we continue to meet the highest quality safety and quality standards." I take Zantac, or someone in my family does. What should we do? The F.D.A. has said it is not telling people to stop taking Zantac, but recommended that patients who take prescription forms of the drug and want to switch should talk to their doctor about alternatives. People who are taking over the counter ranitidine should consider taking one of several other heartburn drugs that are available. "You always want to err on the side of caution," said Dr. Gary LeRoy, a family practitioner in Dayton, Ohio and the president elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians. He said there are several alternative heartburn medicines that people can consider, such as proton pump inhibitors like Prilosec. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
"His name is No No, so I didn't think I needed an explanation of his character." Claire, who asked that her last name not be used, is discussing a contrarian goat that's the protagonist of a children's story she has written. Like the dozen other women gathered in a back corner of the public library in Brooklyn Heights, she is part of a fairy tale writing workshop for nannies, creating stories for the youngsters in their charge. The workshop is the brainchild of Jakab Orsos, the library's vice president of arts and culture, who previously established a similar creative writing program for domestic workers and cabdrivers at PEN America, the nonprofit literary and advocacy group. "When I was hired by the library, I noticed all these nannies coming through," he said, "and I thought it would be interesting to start working with them in this way." The workshops are conducted in both Spanish and English. The latter is led by Fadwa Abbas, a writer and teacher who immigrated to the United States at age 14 from Sudan, where her father was a political prisoner. Bringing what she calls "radical thinking" to the classroom drives her curriculum for the nannies. "The idea is for them to go off and write something that sounds deceptively light but is actually deeper," she said, "something that addresses what we're trying to raise children to be. One woman wrote about a mermaid who was on a quest to clean up the trash in the ocean." Claire, 54, is from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), and writing in English is a challenge. But she carries a notebook with her even while she's on duty for two boys, aged 5 and 10. "Sometimes while they're playing, I'm writing," she said. "Inspiration comes at any time." Occasionally some resentment or frustration about raising other women's children is evident in the nannies' stories. "We talk about moving the writing from the stage of therapy to the stage of craft," said Ms. Abbas, "rather than something that comes out of you because it has to come out. The women may use the workshop as an opportunity to let go of complicated feelings they have about their position." 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. Some of the nannies do not reveal their participation to their employers. "You want to keep your private life private," said Carol Ottley, a 57 year old nanny from Trinidad and Tobago. "When you try to educate yourself, your employers might think you're going to leave, rather than take care of their children all your life." But it was actually the mother of the three children in Ruta Miniotas's care who suggested that she take the workshop. Originally from Lithuania, she grew up in a small town in upstate New York and felt like "kind of a freak." Her fairy tale was about two mother birds who adopt an odd looking egg. "It was a bit of commentary on how people gossip and judge other people's choices," said Ms. Miniotas, 30, who has purple hair, partly shaved. "I identify as a queer person and have friends in nontraditional family structures. A lot of my friends would be gossiped about." Ms. Abbas encourages a gentle criticism of each story in development engendering lively conversations that are enthusiastically welcomed. "It doesn't make you feel like you're doing a horrible job, as opposed to having an employer saying that you didn't zip the Ziploc bag of snacks tightly enough," said Stacey Ann Douglas, 40, originally from Trinidad and Tobago, who has worked as a nanny for 15 years. "In high school, my literature teacher would encourage me to write, but I didn't become a legal resident in this country until a few years ago, so I couldn't further my education. This workshop brings out a part of me, like critical thinking, that I didn't know I had." There are some interlopers women not currently employed as nannies but caring for children in their own families, like Erica Razook, 38, who until two years ago was a lawyer for a large nonprofit, doing anticorruption litigation. "I'd been in that field for over ten years, fighting bad guys," she said, "and yearned to do something positive. Around the same time, both of my sisters had a bunch of kids, and it was a moment to take some time off with my family. I spent most of that year off in the library and saw the flyer about the nanny workshop. I wasn't the target audience, but it's a profound opportunity to explain the world to the next generation." Ms. Razook wrote a poem about two dots and a spot. "The spot keeps trying to fit in, in these tortuous ways," she said. "Really I was writing about power and greed, about trying to keep up with the bigger forces in life." For Ms. Abbas, the camaraderie that develops is the most important aspect of the workshop. "It's one of those beautiful experiences showing that groups of people are not a monolith," she said. "We had one woman who spoke no English and a twentysomething white woman from Texas. Norma wrote her stories in Spanish, and Riley translated them." Riley Rennhack is from a conservative small Texas town. "I was never allowed to watch TV, but I could read anything," she said. "Only the really scary people are scared of books. And the library was a space that was not centered on religion or moralizing." When she moved to Brooklyn and discovered the workshop while looking after a 3 year old, she wrote a story about the concept of home, about trying to live in a different place where everything is new and confusing. "It's hard for a nanny to have a community," said Ms. Rennhack. "You work in somebody else's house, you don't have co workers, and you feel like part of the family but you're really not. The workshop works because there's a lot of patience and wisdom and empathy in that room. I'm only 25, one of the really young girls in the class, and those women are what one writer I like calls the many gendered mothers of my heart. I'm a white girl from Texas, and I got invited to Kwanzaa." At the end of the "semester," many of the nannies invited the children in their care plus extended families to a celebration at the Brooklyn Central Library in Grand Army Plaza, where they read the stories they'd written. "What they do is not a small undertaking," said Mr. Orsos. "They're often writing about the nadirs and zeniths of their lives, camouflaging their experiences with metaphors some of them are so cheeky and funny. It makes me hugely emotional because they get out of their own reality, and it's quite liberating. When they start, they're shy, but even their posture changes as they continue." Support and appreciation from the library is highly valued, but something else is even more important. "We're sitting around and respecting each other as writers," said Ms. Rennhack. "What an audacious thing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
WASHINGTON Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross predicted Thursday morning that a deadly virus originating in China would cause companies to reconsider their global supply chains and ultimately "help to accelerate" the return of jobs to the United States. In an interview on Fox Business, Mr. Ross said diseases like the Wuhan coronavirus, which has killed more than a hundred people and sickened thousands, were "another risk factor that people need to take into account" when considering where to locate operations. "Every American's heart has to go out to the victims of the coronavirus, so I don't want to talk about a victory lap over a very unfortunate, very malignant disease," Mr. Ross said. "But the fact is, it does give businesses yet another thing to consider when they go through their review of their supply chain." He cited the deadly SARS outbreak that paralyzed China 17 years ago, as well as the African swine fever that has decimated China's pig farms. "So I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America," Mr. Ross said of the coronavirus. "Some to U.S., probably some to Mexico as well." The Trump administration has been waging a global trade war in an attempt to bring jobs back to the United States. That has included steep tariffs on imported goods, which President Trump has wielded as a cudgel to force companies to relocate manufacturing to the United States. Officials have said that the first phase trade deal Mr. Trump signed with China this month would improve ties between the countries. But they also say that their tariffs which remain in place on more than 360 billion of Chinese products will cause American companies with Chinese operations to think about moving their supply chains back home. Some companies that can move operations out of China have been doing so, in part to avoid the tariffs and in part because of longer run economic factors, like China's rising wages. But economists say that few of these factories are moving back to the United States. Instead, competition for factory space in low wage countries like Vietnam, Mexico and India to make clothes, toys and shoes has been fierce. And many companies say they are unable to move their supply chains, often because it is too expensive to shift or because China is the primary manufacturer of their materials. For instance, China remains the global hub of electronics manufacturing, and a huge consumer market in its own right. The Chinese government has placed entire cities under lockdown to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and encouraged companies to let their workers stay home. The moves are expected to result in a major dent in the Chinese economy and are likely spill over to slow global growth. Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said on Wednesday that "there is likely to be some disruption to activity in China and perhaps globally." The virus has already caused companies including Apple, Ford and Toyota to reroute supply chains and idle factories in China, while Ikea, Starbucks and other businesses have temporarily closed some Chinese stores. British Airways and Air Canada have suspended all flights to mainland China, while other major airlines have reduced the number of flights. Mr. Ross, a wealthy investor, has been criticized for making controversial or seemingly out of touch statements in televised interviews before. In May 2018, he held up a can of Campbell's soup while arguing that the administration's metal tariffs would have a minimal effect on consumers. In early 2019, he suggested that workers who had been sent home without pay during the government shutdown should take out personal loans. The Commerce Department, in an emailed statement, said Mr. Ross had made clear that the first step was to bring the virus under control and help victims of the disease. "It is also important to consider the ramifications of doing business with a country that has a long history of covering up real risks to its own people and the rest of the world," the statement said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
South Korea's leaders were mostly happy to accommodate Samsung's ambitions, and by the 1960s the company was already a symbol for how political connections could lead to great riches. Samsung's coziness with the government grew as the company did, helping its chairman, Lee Kun hee, twice be granted presidential pardons for white collar crimes. Today, across the Republic of Samsung, as South Korean cynics call their country, it can feel impossible to escape the company's influence, which stretches from gadgets to hospitals to art. (A Samsung heiress, Miky Lee, was the executive producer of "Parasite.") Cain lived in South Korea on and off for years between 2009 and 2016. His is a brisk, balanced telling of the Samsung story, though there is much more here about American smartphone marketing strategy than most readers could ever want. Samsung did not cooperate, which is not surprising for a big tech company. But, then, Samsung seems more interested than most in hiding aspects of itself from the public eye. It keeps a tight lid, for instance, on almost anything to do with the ruling Lee dynasty. Cain interviewed one member of the clan, but they remain a frustratingly distant presence in his book's pages. This is a shame, because the Lees are a truly HBO worthy bunch. The ailing patriarch, Kun hee, is a mercurial loner who breeds dogs and spends his free time speeding around in sports cars on Samsung's private racetrack. His son and heir, Jae yong, is widely regarded, Cain writes, as "more entitled than he was competent." The family's unending feuds, tragedies and intrigues are the stuff of fascination among South Koreans. The Lees' maneuverings have gotten Samsung into trouble in recent years. In 2017, South Korean courts ruled that the company had bribed the country's president to win support for a corporate takeover that solidified the family's control over the empire. Lee Jae yong served barely a year in jail before his five year sentence was commuted. Samsung did just fine financially during that time. As Cain puts it: "If the empire was posting record profits while its king in waiting sat in jail, then what was the point in having a king in waiting?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SpaceX, the ambitious rocket company headed by Elon Musk, wants to send a couple of tourists around the moon and back to Earth before the end of next year. If they manage that feat, the passengers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years. Mr. Musk made the announcement on Monday in a telephone news conference. He said two private individuals approached the company to see if SpaceX would be willing to send them on a weeklong cruise, which would fly past the surface of the moon but not land and continue outward before gravity turned the spacecraft around and brought it back to Earth for a landing. "This would do a long loop around the moon," Mr. Musk said. The company is aiming to launch this moon mission in late 2018. The two people would spend about a week inside one of SpaceX's Dragon 2 capsules, launched on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The spacecraft would be automated, but the travelers would undergo training for emergencies. Mr. Musk did not say how much the travelers would pay for the ride. "A little bit more than the cost of a crewed mission to the space station would be," he said. The Falcon Heavy itself has a list price of 90 million. While the trip appears to be within the technical capabilities of SpaceX, industry experts wondered whether the company could pull it off as quickly as Mr. Musk indicated. "Dates are not SpaceX's strong suit," said Mary Lynne Dittmar, executive director of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, a space advocacy group consisting of aerospace companies. The Dragon 2 and Falcon Heavy are years behind schedule and have yet to fly. "It strikes me as risky," Dr. Dittmar said, adding that autonomous systems are not infallible. "I find it extraordinary that these sorts of announcements are being made when SpaceX has yet to get crew from the ground to low Earth orbit." Last week, a crewless Dragon capsule taking cargo to the International Space Station aborted its rendezvous because of a glitch. It successfully arrived a day later. Mr. Musk said the two would be private space travelers wished to remain anonymous for now. He declined to describe them, except to say they knew each other. Seven space tourists have paid tens of millions of dollars to fly on Russian Soyuz rockets to visit the International Space Station, which is about 200 miles above the Earth's surface. This would be a much more distant trip. The moon is about a quarter million miles away, and the trajectory would take the capsule 300,000 to 400,000 miles from Earth. No astronauts have ventured beyond low Earth orbit since the last of NASA's Apollo moon landings in 1972. NASA is working on a rocket, the Space Launch System, and a capsule, Orion, that would be capable of taking astronauts to deep space once again. But that first launch, without anyone on board, is scheduled for late next year, taking a path similar to what Mr. Musk has proposed for his space tourists. This month, NASA announced it is looking at the possibility of putting astronauts on the first flight, but officials say that would probably delay the launch to 2019. The rocket that SpaceX would use for the voyage is more powerful than its current Falcon 9 workhorse, but not as large as NASA's. When Mr. Musk announced the Falcon Heavy in 2011, he said it would fly in 2013. The maiden flight is now scheduled for this summer. SpaceX has a contract to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station using the Dragon 2 capsule launched on the Falcon 9 rocket. That program has also encountered delays. SpaceX is scheduled to launch a crewless test flight this year and take its few NASA passengers next spring, although a report by the Government Accountability Office has cast doubt that SpaceX would be able to do it that quickly. NASA has financed much of SpaceX's spacecraft development, and Mr. Musk said the agency has priority. If NASA wants to put its astronauts on the Falcon Heavy's first moon flight, he said, SpaceX will comply. But the Falcon Heavy has not been through NASA's rigorous reviews to be judged safe for astronauts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The fast talking, obnoxiously brazen Hollywood agent played by Jeremy Piven on "Entourage" dogs him wherever he goes. "l have an Apple Store appearance coming up," the compact 49 year old Mr. Piven said last month, "and the invitation says, 'Please join the actor Ari Gold.' " Mr. Piven related the incident moments before striding onstage at the 92nd Street Y to submit to a series of politely invasive questions from Matt Lauer, the "Today" show host, and Rebecca Eaton, the executive producer of "Masterpiece" on PBS. He was there, as it happened, to call attention to a very different character: Harry Gordon Selfridge, the genially expansive, merchant slash showman and title character of "Mr. Selfridge," a British period drama now in its third season on PBS. A man with a vision, Mr. Selfridge likes issuing blustery edicts: "I want Treasure Island in here; I want Aladdin's cave!" But the year is 1909, and when his patrician sponsor informs him: "People like us aren't used to shopping. It's not considered smart," he retorts, "We are going to have to change the fashion." The role is a departure, and a welcome one at that. In his dressing room earlier that evening, Mr. Piven stoically ignored the gnatlike handlers mopping his brow and plucking at his pocket square, intent on describing the change. Ari "leads through intimidation," he said. "He's an equal opportunity offender." Selfridge, on the other hand, "operates from the heart." Mr. Piven himself seems to operate from a disarming mixture of naked self interest and an unalloyed passion for his metier. Before "Entourage," he said: "I was never progressing. I was still the schlumpy best friend No. 6." During lunch the next day at Bubby's, a favorite haunt in TriBeCa, he picked up the thread. "I've been the underdog my entire life 1,000 percent," he said. But Mr. Piven is nothing if not tenacious. "Beyond sharp elbows, you've got to create your own work," he said, "to make a meal out of the scraps that you're given." Early in the taping of "Entourage," which ran for eight seasons on HBO starting in 2004, he hogged the camera and filled dead air with a barrage of hastily improvised banter. "It was awkward at first," he acknowledged. "People were asking, 'Who is this guy and what does he think he is doing?' "But I just kept talking and they didn't yell, 'Cut.' And suddenly one scene turns to three." Too busy hammering home his points and hawking his latest venture ("Entourage," the movie, is scheduled for a June release), Mr. Piven sampled not a bite of the savory burgers or the matzo balls. His reputation precedes him, he knows. In 2008, fans rolled their eyes when he left a Broadway production of "Speed the Plow," pleading a debilitating case of mercury poisoning from eating a surfeit of fish. Never mind that the role, as he'd been assured, might have garnered him a Tony. Coulda, woulda, shoulda, Mr. Piven shrugged. "They're still chelating mercury out of my system," he said. "What good is a Tony if you're dead." As he spoke, a pair of diners passed and flashed him a brolike thumbs up. He grinned, more pleased than irked by the distraction. He likes to keep a low profile, he said. "But you can't put images out there and then be angry if people connect with you," he said. "That would be delusional." Mr. Piven reserves his ire for those who would conflate the actor with the ever volatile Ari, who somehow sticks like flypaper. Mr. Piven recalled a long ago and, in his telling, uneventful dinner at Nobu Malibu with his mother, the actress Joyce Piven. But the tabloids saw it differently. "Two days later, The Post said I was screaming at my mother so badly that we were asked to leave," he said. "She called me the next day and asked, 'Did I miss something?' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Perhaps you remember the late Sy Syms, founder of his namesake discount clothing chain, intoning "An educated consumer is our best customer" in commercials. Maybe you even shopped at a Syms before the company declared bankruptcy in 2011 and shuttered its stores. But now, two years after the squat Syms flagship on Trinity Place in Lower Manhattan was demolished, a 42 story tower is rising in its place. The clothing company has reinvented itself as a real estate concern named Trinity Place Holdings, and 77 Greenwich, consisting of a 90 unit condominium atop a new public elementary school, is its first foray in construction. The sales office opens this month. Mr. Syms himself cobbled together the site which includes the footprint of the old store as well as the Robert and Anne Dickey House, an 1810 landmark rowhouse that sits next to it as well as enough air rights from neighboring buildings for the new tower to reach 500 feet. Trinity Place Holdings, for its part, brought together a team of local architects: FXCollaborative, whose Statue of Liberty Museum opens this month, designed the building; Deborah Berke Partners took charge of the residential interiors; and Future Green Studio will landscape outdoor spaces. The building has yet to top out, but its two part form already reflects the main uses to be contained within. The eight story cast stone base will house the school, which will also spread into the Dickey House, whose interior is now gutted. That Federal style building has Flemish bond brickwork and a rare bowed facade and was originally built as a mansion for a merchant's family. The School Construction Authority will turn the shell of the building into a school fronting on Trinity Place. If the lower portion of the building feels solidly rooted in the neighborhood's masonry architecture and history, the slender faceted glass tower shooting up from the ninth floor aspires to be a part of the sky. The entrance to the residential portion of the building will be on Greenwich Street, opposite the unlovely Battery Parking Garage. The lobby, with ribbed oak walls and ceiling, has been designed to whisk residents from street noise to "serenity," said Ms. Berke, the eponymous founder of her firm and dean of the Yale School of Architecture. Upstairs in the apartments, which range from one to four bedroom units, with two and three bedrooms predominating, things open up dramatically. Many new residential buildings on Manhattan's west side afford views of the Hudson River, as this one does. But it's rare to be able to also look south, to the Battery and, beyond it, the bay. Dan Kaplan, senior partner at FXCollaborative, ensured that every apartment would glimpse that view with angled glass on the southern and western facades of the building. The interior finishes, which include pale colored marble and oak and sycamore millwork, are intended to enhance the feeling of light and air. All apartments will have powder rooms. Building wide amenities include a dog run on the 9th floor with a view of Trinity Church, and a large lounge, children's playroom and gym on the top floors of the building, along with a 3,600 square foot landscaped roof. Of course, the school is the amenity that may be of greatest interest to families in the building, not to mention the neighborhood, which is increasingly residential. It is expected to open in 2022 and offer 450 seats from pre K through fifth grade. Matthew Messinger, chief executive of Trinity Place, expects the residential portion of the building to be completed next year. Apartment prices start at 1.7 million, which gives renewed meaning to this stretch of Greenwich Street, which was once known as Millionaire's Row. Mr. Messinger, who like the rest of Trinity's current leadership, has expertise in the real estate, not clothing, industry, said there are no members of the Syms family left at the company. But Trinity holds the intellectual property assets of the Syms business, including the rights to Filene's Basement, a chain that Syms acquired in 2009. Although the Filene's stores, too, closed after the parent company folded, Trinity has recently revived the business as an online entity. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Credit...Nathan Bajar for The New York Times When Jean Kaneko started volunteering at her son's kindergarten class in Santa Monica, Calif., she was surprised by how hesitant the children were to play with toys they didn't recognize, to make a mess and, well, to be kids. "'I can't do that. I'm not good at that,'" she remembered them saying. Even at 4 or 5 years old, there was already a 'be perfect, don't fail' attitude, she said. So she started bringing in blocks, strange clay creations, crafts, and handing them to the students with no instructions. They warmed to it. The craft supply grew, the activities changed and soon teachers were asking her to go into classrooms and even host after school programs and camps. Ms. Kaneko describes herself as a maker, and she brings maker spaces to schools all over her area. Now, those include 3 D printers and virtual reality technology. Making should be practical and relevant to some problem a student sees, Dale Dougherty, who is considered by some to be the founder of the maker movement, said in a phone interview. "It's this sort of creative process of taking an idea, developing it, using tools and techniques to make it real," he added. Maker Faire, a gathering of makers and educators held each year in cities around the globe, was co founded by Mr. Dougherty in 2006 in San Mateo, Calif. This year, the focus of the flagship Maker Faires, which draw some 200,000 people annually, has changed. "A lot of the previous years, we've been organized around how do you engage kids and making and the idea of maker spaces," Mr. Dougherty said. This year it's "on the future of work." Some who attend are educators who want to learn about it; some are students showing off their maker projects in a supersize show and tell; some work for education nonprofits and want to keep up with trends. Some are not so sure about it. "I'm a little unclear about what being a maker is about," said James Bacchi, a biology teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School who was at the event in Queens in September. He grew up working in his dad's garage, fixing fuel pumps, modifying his bicycle. He was a hands on learner. "I guess that's missing from today's kid culture," he said. He was interrupted by one of his former students, James DeLaura, who was there with his physics professor at Kingsborough Community College. He reminded Mr. Bacchi that he had been one of his environmental sciences students a few years ago. "I have a 3.8 now," Mr. DeLaura said with a smile. "I'm not a terrible high school student anymore." And he has become a maker himself, teaching 3 D printing in middle school classes. Like Mr. DeLaura, a growing group of students who haven't responded to traditional textbook and work sheet learning are excited and inspired about making, teachers say. There are more than 400 active spaces for hacking and making in North America. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Late last week, as she was leading the charge to push the Democrats' 3 trillion pandemic relief package through the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi strode the floor of the Capitol in a fuchsia pantsuit, red pumps, white shell and a coordinated red, white and green cherry print face mask. This was the day after Ms. Pelosi had stood at a podium for a news conference in a black dress with a complementary dark green and white foliage print face mask which was itself not long after she had appeared in a shell pink pantsuit with a matching shell pink mask. Hillary Clinton took note, posting a photo on Instagram with the caption: "Leader of the House majority, and of mask to pantsuit color coordination." The post has been liked more than 250,000 times. Since late April, when she began wearing silk scarves that were color coordinated with her suits and shells orange and orange, blue and blue and cream and brown and that she had worn bandanna style around her face, Ms. Pelosi has also modeled a purple suit with a purple/blue, black and white geometric face mask and a white suit and blue shirt with the same. And though it would be easy to categorize Ms. Pelosi's masks as fun! and all about self expression! and yes fashion!(as many style watchers have done), her track record and the way her approach contrasts with those around her suggest something more nuanced though the stratagem is covered, natch, by the accessibility of patterned cloth, the kind we all have to wear and to which we can all relate. After all, why simply don a face mask when you can also use it to make a political point? Indeed, the sheer variety of her masks stands out like a beacon amid her sea of aides in generic white or blue medical masks and her dark masked protective detail. It suggests a commitment to consciously choosing a mask every single day that, more than simply demonstrating good mask habits, civic awareness and solicitude for those around her, or even support for small businesses, demands attention. (Many of her masks come from Donna Lewis, a small store in Alexandria, Va., where she also buys some of her suits; for each mask sold, one is donated to Johns Hopkins hospitals.) As the president continues to eschew the mask in his public appearances over the weekend he went without one when meeting in the Rose Garden with Girl Scouts and small business leaders Ms. Pelosi is making her mask wearing, and the contrast with those around her, impossible to ignore. Doing so is a constant reminder of the difference between the heads of the executive and legislative branches. Official Washington may have come relatively late to this particularly emotive symbol of the contemporary culture wars, but it has now fully arrived. Ms. Pelosi is not the first government official to match her masks to her outfit. That honor goes to the Slovakian president, Zuzana Caputova, whose image went viral in late March at the swearing in of her new coalition government when she wore a burgundy face mask that coordinated perfectly with her burgundy sheath dress. And, apparently, she instructed her new cabinet to wear identical masks (blue) and gloves (white) for the group photo, hence both distinguishing herself from the group and creating a perfectly harmonious picture of civic care. Likewise, Emmanuel Macron donned a navy mask with a discreet red, white and blue grosgrain ribbon at the side to match his navy suit and little red, white and blue lapel pin on a visit to a school earlier this month. Melania Trump, too, matched her basic white face mask to her basic white shirt when she appeared in her PSA for mask wearing in early April. As did Ivanka Trump, who wore a black mask with a black jumpsuit to tour a Maryland produce distributor last week (though that mask had the effect of making her look unsettlingly like a movie bank robber, despite the little American flag pin on the side). And though most of Congress has now been converted to mask wearing, as the recent Senate hearings on Covid 19 revealed, with Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina modeling a University of North Carolina booster mask and Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, a red and black tie dye bandanna. Still, they mostly seem to have resorted to the gimmick mask, the current equivalent of the gimmick tie (see also Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and his Washington Nationals mask), the patriot mask (Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina in a stars and stripes and eagles number) or the OK I'll wear it if I have to face mask that Vice President Mike Pence wore when he visited the General Motors and Ventec ventilator production plant in Indiana last month. But no other elected official has embraced the mask with as much relentless and considered eye catching range as Ms. Pelosi. In this her resolve is fully in line with the Speaker's approach to image making, which has always involved every tool at her disposal, be it a clapback at the State of the Union or her Speaker's mace pin. She understands that there are ways to make herself and her positions heard even when she isn't saying anything at all. That at a time when almost all communication is taking place within the confines of a small box, these kinds of details matter. And thus, Nancy Pelosi, master of the statement coat, canny strategist of the suffragist pantsuit, has also become the leader of the masked opposition. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The federal government acknowledged on Friday that your last few cellphones were more valuable than it thought. That disclosure came tucked in a package of revisions the government made to the economic growth statistics it published from 2012 to 2017. From time to time, data wizards at the Commerce Department take a new look at their past estimates of how large the economy was in a given quarter, and how fast it was growing, and re evaluate those estimates using new information that has come to light. This year, that new information includes a better way to measure the quality of cellphones, which, you may have noticed, usually improve with each new iteration. The economy grew at a 4.1 percent annual rate in the last quarter, the government said Friday. The statisticians concluded America's imported cellphones were improving more rapidly than previously calculated that consumers had actually gotten more for their money than we thought. That change had a ripple effect, all the way up to annual economic growth figures, which emerged from the revisions ever so slightly changed from previous estimates. Here are four takeaways from the total package of revisions: The economy under President Obama was better than advertised Revisions added 82.7 billion to the size of the United States economy at the end of 2016, which means it grew a tenth of a percentage point faster in President Barack Obama's second term than previously thought. Growth in President Trump's first year in office, 2017, was actually smaller by the same amount. That's not an economic earthquake, but the headline change does mask some bigger swings in individual components of gross domestic product. For example, companies appear to have invested 110 billion more in 2012 than previously thought, largely because the statisticians more or less missed some huge corporate spending on cloud computing technology. The revisions employed improved measures of I.T. investments, and voila. Winter's not as cold as it seemed For a while now, experts at the Bureau of Economic Analysis have struggled with something called seasonal adjustment, which is their way to rebalance raw economic data to allow for an apples to apples comparison of growth at different times of the year. Even after two rounds of fixes , growth in the first quarter, which includes most of the winter, has consistently run lower than subsequent quarters. This revision brought what the bureau said were the final batch of fixes, and it has changed past winter numbers to look much better and made some quarters from later in the year look worse. Growth in the first quarter of 2016 has been revised up to 1.5 percent, from 0.6 percent. Growth in the fourth quarter of 2017 was revised down to 2.3 percent, from 2.9 percent. (That revision complicates Republican claims that growth was surging with companies' expectation that President Trump would sign a big tax cut package into law, by the way, but the revision for the first quarter of 2018 that is announced Friday could help their case that the enactment of the law sped up growth.) Over all, growth averaged 2.1 percent in the first quarter from 2012 to 2017, up from 1.6 percent. For the third quarter, it averaged 2.4 percent, down from 2.7 percent. That may not perfectly smooth out the seasonal bumps , but it's close. 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. Americans are saving more than we knew Possibly the most dramatic shift in the revisions came in the bureau's measure of the personal savings rate, which is how much Americans set aside as a share of their income each year. Last year, that rate looked really low: 3.4 percent, a level that economists warned could mean consumer spending could fall off, dampening growth. Well, surprise! It was a mistake, apparently. The bureau made use of a new Internal Revenue Service analysis and concluded that the government had been overestimating the amount of national income held by corporations and underestimating how much of it was held by proprietors of businesses. That meant people as opposed to corporations had been sitting on more money than the government previously thought. And that meant the savings rate was higher. The revised rate for 2017 nearly doubled, to 6.7 percent. So Americans aren't spending as unwisely as previously thought, although other statistics provide a sobering reminder of how unprepared many people are for an economic shock: In 2016, 44 percent of American households said they would not be able to easily handle a hypothetical emergency expense of 400, according to the Federal Reserve. Your cellphone made the trade deficit worse than we thought Americans buy a lot of phones that are made in other countries. And those phones keep getting better a phone you can buy for 100 today is capable of much more (for good or ill) than the phone you bought for the same price in 2013. That means it's more valuable. Using a new tool from the Fed, the government is now better able to estimate the value of that improvement and see how much it underestimated it in the past. And it turns out they underestimated by a lot. The revisions make clear that the phones Americans were importing were more valuable phones, in inflation adjusted terms, that previously thought. Because that pushes up the real value of imports, it adds to the trade deficit, which has been in the news a bit lately. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Davide Bizzi consulted with many of his real estate colleagues in New York before deciding to buy a parcel on the western edge of SoHo, at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, for a condominium development. "In the beginning, I was afraid of the tunnel," said Mr. Bizzi, a global developer. But many friends, including Howard M. Lorber, the chairman of Douglas Elliman Real Estate, talked to him about the changing downtown landscape. Neighborhoods that were once considered outer fringes of Manhattan, like Hudson Square to the west, were now bleeding into SoHo and TriBeCa, they agreed, and formerly distinct neighborhood borders were being blurred. Even the Pritzker Prize winning architect Renzo Piano, a friend who at the time was working on the new Whitney Museum of American Art, thought the location was good, Mr. Bizzi said. Although the building would overlook tunnel traffic that is often quite heavy, units that were high enough would have a clear view of the Hudson River, because it is unlikely that the low level tunnel entrance would ever be built over. "Renzo's philosophy is all about light, openness and transparency," Mr. Bizzi said. "And that works well for this location because of the great views of the Hudson River." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Contemporary dance has a reputation for being adult entertainment. Not so much because of heavy themes or graphic images which are rare but because we don't trust children to get abstraction (which may just be our own internalized bafflement). "The Nutcracker" feels safer. Thankfully, the New Victory Theater rejects that assumption. The theater has been around since 1995, bringing "kids to the arts, and arts to kids." Its new summer series, Victory Dance, introduces top contemporary dance artists to young audiences in family friendly, bite size pieces and roughly hourlong performances. The last of three programs gets a showing on Thursday night, featuring an excerpt from Gallim Dance's wacky romp "Pupil Suite," a solo by the tap virtuoso Michelle Dorrance, an excerpt from Doug Elkins's "Scott, Queen of Marys," which successfully blends Scottish folk dance, hip hop and vogueing, and an appearance by Ballet Tech Kids Dance in a work by Eliot Feld. (7 p.m., 209 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, 646 223 3000, newvictory.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
My cultural pilgrimage to the Rocky Mountains began more than 20 years ago, a few steps from my door in the East Village of Manhattan. The poet Allen Ginsberg was staging one of the regular readings at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, featuring his Buddhist inspired verse. As he fielded queries after the reading, he mentioned that he was decamping to teach at something called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in, of all places, Boulder, Colo. Poetry in Boulder? Until then, I had envisioned the town as a high altitude boot camp, where every resident dressed in colorful spandex and went hiking, biking and climbing with grim determination. When it came to culture, it was hard to imagine anything more profound than the "Mork and Mindy" house, whose exterior is featured in the TV series. But Ginsberg insisted that Boulder was actually brimming with progressive artists, writers and musicians. It used to be called "the Athens of the West," he enthused. So as an Amazonian heat wave descended on New York a year ago, I decided to finally make the expedition to the Rockies to answer a question: How does culture thrive in a world of free climbers and triathletes, who one might think are more concerned with perfectly formed abs than deeper questions of the soul? Or has Boulder's very intimacy with the great outdoors created a cultural scene all its own? Arriving on a hot but blissfully dry July night was a disorienting experience, and not just because of the thin alpine air. At first glance, Boulder seemed dreamily pleasant, as clean and orderly as a Swiss resort, but not exactly in bohemian ferment. On the tidy Pearl Street Mall, crowds were gathered by burbling fountains to watch buskers, jugglers and flame swallowers. Uplifting mountain views framed every corner. The bike lanes were so perfectly drawn they qualified as site specific sculptures. In fact, everyone was so cheerful, healthy and fresh faced that I had to fight the urge to flee back to Manhattan. Instead, I checked in to the Colorado Chautauqua, an enclave of cottages that opened in 1898 at the base of the Flatirons, the dramatic foothills of the Rocky Mountains. This was the Western outpost of a national adult education movement specifically created to combine culture and the great outdoors: Gilded Age travelers flocked here to meet visiting artists, listen to lectures by mutton chopped philosophers or hear opera sung by visiting European divas, then go hiking in the idyllic natural setting. (One fan, Teddy Roosevelt, called the Chautauqua movement "the most American thing in America.") The Chautauqua's once austere teetotaling regimen has clearly loosened up. When I arrived, the historic concert hall had been taken over by Ziggy Marley and his band. The air vents had been opened for the warm summer night, so the strains of reggae wafted from the auditorium across the landscaped grounds, accompanied by a sweet miasma of legalized marijuana from hundreds of Boulderites picnicking and sipping wine beneath the stars. In the spirit of improving both mind and body, I went hiking the next morning with Carol Taylor, a local historian, newspaper columnist and program manager for the Chautauqua. We followed a trail into the Flatirons, soaring triangular crags that were named for their resemblance to Victorian era clothing irons. As sweat soaked fitness devotees jogged past lugging backpacks filled with rocks, Ms. Taylor engaged me in a mobile history lecture, explaining that Boulder's current status as a perpetual contender for "America's most livable town" was the result of a century and a half's worth of efforts to imbue its idyllic setting with intellectual cachet. Boulderites gave land and cash in the 1870s to establish the University of Colorado, then donated Chautauqua's choice site to lure creative celebrities. In 1908, they even hired the renowned landscaper Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the designer of Central Park in New York, for aesthetic advice. He recommended they plant more trees the mountains were barren then and clean the refuse strewn Boulder Creek. Soon after, a boosterish collection of poems by William O. Wise, "Boulder the Beautiful," complete with promotional photos of the area, anointed Boulder the "Athens of the West," a cultural beacon for the Rockies. (The lofty title has also been claimed by several other cities, including Cleveland and Louisville, Ky.). Ms. Taylor led me to Enchanted Mesa, a pine clad expanse that is a sacred site for the conservation movement, which was inseparable from the vibrant intellectual and scientific community. In 1962, forward thinking citizens banded together to stop a luxury hotel from being built here, purchasing the area's 55 acres at risk instead. They had already voted in 1959 to enact the famous Blue Line, which prohibits city water services from being built at higher elevations, effectively limiting development and protecting the pristine views of the lower Rocky Mountains. For good measure, Boulder in 1967 became America's first town to tax itself to provide money to buy chunks of wilderness an "open space" program that continues today. Caine Delacy for The New York Times "Can you imagine if this place was concreted over?" Ms. Taylor mused as we took in the fairy tale beauty of the valley, carpeted with colored wildflowers and exploding with clouds of butterflies. I decided to settle into a regimen. Like genteel Edwardian travelers of a century ago, I cleared my city lungs every morning with a wilderness jaunt one day mountain biking the Switzerland Trail, a 20 mile former railroad track through gold mining ghost towns; the next day inner tubing down Boulder Creek. Then, in the heat of the afternoon, I sought out the cultural attractions, following the advice of writers who congregate here, creating their own literary enclave in the West. Steps from the Farmers' Market, I paid my respects to the Dushanbe Teahouse, a psychedelic edifice transported from Tajikistan it looks like a jewel box from "Arabian Nights" then dropped by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art next door. The entire museum was being transformed by a local celebrity chef, Michael Neff, for one of their regular "art dinners," with culinary treats delivered to guests via a model electric train. For avant garde architecture, I headed to NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which looms like a western Stonehenge over the town. I. M. Pei's masterpiece, completed in 1968, gained additional cultural cachet by being featured in Woody Allen's 1973 sci fi classic "Sleeper" as a futuristic "laboratory" (Mr. Allen infiltrates the building in a mock athletic moment by awkwardly rappelling down a tower with computer tape). It's hard to remember that until the late 1960s, Boulder was still a sober, conservative and pious place. (It remained "dry" until 1967.) Its image changed almost overnight when university students became radicalized, hippies and antinuclear demonstrators arrived from around the country, and a progressive City Council voted in the town's first (and last) African American mayor. Suddenly, Boulder was a countercultural mecca. To get a sense of how Boulder went from sober "Athens" to raucous "People's Republic," I headed to Naropa University, a pioneering Buddhist university in the Western Hemisphere, founded in 1974 by a wealthy Tibetan exile named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. It was Open Day when I visited, and a graduate was escorting three students around the leafy campus. We paused to admire Eastern shrines, a geodesic dome used as a greenhouse and the Consciousness Lab, where "the neuroscience of meditation" is researched, and poked our head in at a poetry conference, which was in full swing. Allen Ginsberg was first invited to teach here in 1974, along with luminaries like John Cage and William Burroughs. He already knew Colorado well from his beat days with the Denver denizen Neal Cassady. By the '70s, the creative ambience and radical politics in Boulder were so convivial that Ginsberg agreed to found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with another New York poet, Anne Waldman. "It was supposed to be a 'hundred year project' at least," Ms. Waldman recalled in an email. "That was the hook, to help found a school in this part of the country that had a spiritual context, that would go beyond our lifetimes. It was inspiring." Today, Naropa's Allen Ginsberg Library remains as a modest homage, preserving many of the poet's papers and films of his lectures on literature; a small black and white portrait hangs over the door. But the most intimate shrine turned out to be Ginsberg's long term residence, which I tracked down in the quiet back blocks of the town. Stone steps led up from a sleepy lane to a quaint cottage with a "Bernie for President" sign in the window. The current owners, Steve and Jennifer Hendricks, welcomed me in for iced tea. They admitted that they had known nothing of Ginsberg's life here before moving in five years ago. "We do get a few poetry fans every year," Mr. Hendricks said. "Not many." The interior of the house had been renovated, they said, but its exterior has barely changed since the glory days. As proof, Mr. Hendricks pulled up on his laptop a snapshot of Ginsberg with friends gathered on the porch, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Orlovsky and Burroughs. "What worries us is that property prices are so high now in Boulder, the new arrivals are going to be more mainstream," Ms. Hendricks mused. "It changes the atmosphere." "They won't have 'Bernie for President' signs in their windows," Mr. Hendricks added. I.T. specialists, professionals and retirees are descending on the town, squeezing out the more chilled out and impecunious population. Last year, Google broke ground on an office with room for 1,500 employees, which threatens to force even more locals out. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Alice Merton closes her debut album, "Mint," with "Why So Serious," a song full of questions like "When did we get like this?" It's a wish for a more carefree, less calculating spirit, sung by her overdubbed, call and response posse of female voices over a bouncing bass line. And it's the counterbalance, in some small part, to an album that takes everything extremely seriously, from career ambitions and lovers' quarrels to the placement of every hook. Merton has a hearty, natural voice that stays plush while echoing the power of singers like Adele and Florence Welch. It's a voice made for larger than life declarations; the first lines she sings on "Mint," in "Learn to Live," are "They've got fire/Well, I've got lightning bolts." In more than one song, she sings about her fears and inhibitions, even as her voice leaves no question that she will conquer them. Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder. Merton, 25, was born in Germany, grew up mostly in Canada and moved back to Germany in her teens, and she has also lived in England and the United States. Now based in Berlin, she has had a dozen addresses in 24 years. She propelled her pop career in Germany with a single released in 2016, the partly autobiographical "No Roots," a song about constant relocation that speaks, perhaps, to listeners whose connections are digital, not terrestrial. "I've got memories and travel like Gypsies in the night," she exults over a 4/4 thump, a stop start bass line and clanky rhythm guitar chops hinting at 1980s hits by INXS. "I've got no roo ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh oots," Merton sings, with the kind of nonsense syllable hook she also brings to other choruses on the album. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A decade after leading a platoon through the battle of Falluja in 2004, when Iraq gave American troops their most intense urban combat since Vietnam, Elliot Ackerman found himself knocking around the edges of another war. "What I see is Syria," he writes in his spare, beautiful memoir, "Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning." "What doggedly looks back is the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan." Ackerman, a Marine veteran turned novelist, falls in with others drawn to Syria's war and its borderless churn: Syrian fighters and democracy activists, foreign humanitarian workers and journalists and a striking number of American veterans. Why are they there? The most honest answer comes from a fellow ex Marine as they stroll past a raucous demonstration in Istanbul: "To be close to it." "It's the same it many of us need to be close to," Ackerman admits. Not necessarily a cause, or a specific battle, but "an experience so large that you shrink to insignificance in its presence. And that's how you get lost in it." "Places and Names" is a classic meditation on war, how it compels and resists our efforts to order it with meaning. In simple, evocative sentences, with sparing but effective glances at poetry and art, he weaves memories of his deployments with his observations in and near Syria. He pulls off a literary account of war that is accessible to those who wonder "what it's like" while ringing true to those who each in his or her own way already know. 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. I read the book as a fellow it seeker, by chance and choice a denizen of the forever wars. Like Ackerman, I lived in Iraq during the first two years of American occupation and spent time in Afghanistan. I too rode into that battle of Falluja, reporting for The Boston Globe; like him I went back for more, mainly to Syria, after the Arab revolts. I'm a bit older than Ackerman, but my heart seizes when one of his wandering comrades calls war the place where "we grew up," and in some ways, still live. But in Syria, as Ackerman puts it, "we watch in a different context this isn't our war." I most wanted to know how he would unpack the complexity of this statement since Syria's war is different yet entwined with "ours" and it leads to his only real false note. "We are veterans of the same war," Ackerman writes of his Syrian friend Abed, "the same disillusionment, one where high minded democratic ideals left a wake of destruction." This equivalence doesn't work. Abed is an idealistic Syrian civilian who protested for political freedoms. He sometimes regrets "his revolution" for the destructive forces it unleashed: not just the Syrian government's scorched earth brutality, but also Islamist extremist militias that claimed Abed's banner only to sideline and repress activists like him. Does Ackerman really think Abed's grass roots Syrian movement parallels the United States' ocean crossing, false pretext invasion of Iraq? I doubt it, based on the other things he writes. And whose "democratic ideals" were at work in Iraq American grunts'? Decision makers'? Ackerman doesn't clarify. Mostly, though, he deftly evokes resonances and contrasts. As Syrians process their war, he processes his. He seeks out old comforts to recapture a sense of safety (in his case, skateboarding). He metabolizes death differently when he first witnesses it as a parent, "with the same eyes that looked at my daughter." He recalls shaving his beard after combat to reveal a self both new and old, like a rebel fighter I once saw leaving Syria with a tanned face and a pale, newly exposed chin. He meets a self described jihadi, Abu Hassar, who fought Americans like him in Iraq. Across the language barrier, they pore over a map of Iraq, tracing "places and names" they both know: Haditha, Hit, Falluja. They share, as does Abed, the irreplaceably intense feeling through the ups and downs of what began as a greater enterprise that you would do anything for your comrades. Like a trail of bread crumbs pointing to a destination it doesn't quite reach, Ackerman's account offers clues to the complex relation between his wars and Syria's. It's not just that his Iraq mission was ill conceived and, unlike Abed's homegrown revolution, a foreign adventure. The Iraq war was precisely the reason the United States had such a poor hand to play in Syria, and the American "wake of destruction" set the stage for the Islamic State's takeover of swaths of Iraq and Syria. But Ackerman's business is "show, don't tell"; rather than declare these points, he reveals some in snatches of conversation. He tells the jihadi the Iraq war was "a bad idea," though he felt compelled to join. As President Obama weighed striking Syrian government forces after a 2013 chemical attack, a veteran tells Ackerman that if Marines were sent to Syria, he'd protest the way John Kerry did over Vietnam, but "on the other hand, someone's got to stop what's going on over there." Ackerman touches on Iraq hangover as a factor holding Obama back. A year later, when the Islamic State takes over Falluja and veterans ask, "Was it all a waste?," Ackerman can't engage his emotions. "Instead," he writes, "a memory": gearing up for Falluja, the stillness inside the armored vehicle, and then, "the back ramp drops." He is in combat, as if it were today. This episode, the defining horror and high point of his life, is detailed again in the last chapter, a recognition that it can't really be integrated into narrative or analysis. He interrupts the orderly official praise of his Silver Star citation with his chaotic impressions at each moment: memories of comrades who died, he believes, in his place; the strangeness of enemy fighters up close; the admission, startling from a Marine, that "when we killed them it felt like murder." We are left with the puzzle of how he and others Americans, Syrians, Iraqis can function, sometimes heroically, amid such terror. So there is an honesty in keeping conclusions at arm's length. This is a Marine's eye view. Marines aren't supposed to talk politics. Their wars have not ended. And some things stay buried. Like the hill in Berlin, built of war rubble, that he and a mentor jog past as they avoid discussing their fight over Ackerman's decision to leave the military. Ackerman can't decide what to do with his bloodstained Falluja uniform wash? discard? so it stays in his drawer, "an old, bloody and tattered rag." (I recently managed to give my relatively intact Falluja sweater to Syrian refugees.) He leaves his counterparts, too, without neat endings. We last see Abu Hassar, the ex jihadi, as a laborer in Turkey, paying a smuggler who ferried his siblings to Europe. And then there is Abed, the unmoored activist. After his wedding in Switzerland, we see him trying to free some balloons tangled in a tree. He is carefully fixing this one, small, fixable thing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Great wealth in America primarily comes from two sources: entrepreneurship and inheritance. In any age, how people work and create great wealth and how others put to use money they inherited, sometimes many generations removed, speak to the complicated feelings people have around wealth. Entrepreneurs range across every industry, from the esoteric to the fascinating. For a time, tech entrepreneurs who took industry changing ideas hatched in their dorm rooms and rode them to vast and quick wealth were lionized. Now many in that group are seen as selfishly fixated on the wealth itself. Society's view of inheritors has always been complicated. Some have been president, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, George and George W. Bush, and now Donald J. Trump. Other inheritors have used their great wealth to endow museums, universities or charities, like the Whitneys, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. Some, of course, have just had tremendous fun with their inheritance, not always to society's approval. To better understand how the sources of wealth might change one's view of it and life I reached out to the multimillionaires Blaine Vess, 36, an entrepreneur, and Mitzi Perdue, 76, an inheritor, who bring equally complicated views to their wealth. In August, Mr. Vess sold the online study aid company he founded, Student Brands, in his college dorm to Barnes Noble for 58.5 million in cash. His dorm was at San Jose State University, not Stanford or Harvard. It took him 17 years to build the company. And during that time it was always profitable, growing from 60,000 in revenue when he graduated in 2004 to over 20 million in 2016. He also owned an estimated 80 percent of the company. Last year, he started a second company, Solve, an airport concierge service, and this fall sold it to Blacklane, a global chauffeur service. At age 26, Mrs. Perdue and her siblings inherited Ernest Henderson's controlling stake in Sheraton hotels, which he had founded during the Great Depression. In 1968, the family sold the company to the conglomerate ITT. She had already lived a privileged life, growing up in Boston, traveling widely and attending Radcliffe College, formerly the all women's college at Harvard University. She has had a career as a science writer and public speaker. While her first marriage ended in divorce, her second to Frank Perdue, the chicken king, lasted until his death in 2005. It also gave her great insight into another publicly known but private family dynasty. The result is a recently published book on family business, "How To Make Your Family Business Last." Here are edited and condensed excerpts from my interviews with them. What did you want do when you were young? I grew up in Darien, Ill. I graduated from Naperville North High School. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to create something. I wanted to work with my friends. I wanted to have fun. All of this was leading toward, I wanted freedom, freedom to live the way I wanted to live, do what I wanted to do. I made more money than I expected. I wasn't shooting for that. I knew it would be something in technology. I was always gravitating toward internet businesses. Having this outlet, this career path was fortunate. How and why did you sell your first company? I'd been in the business almost 18 years. The key for a lot of older businesses like Student Brands is it's not the hottest company around, but we'd created a lot of value, and we happened to find a partner who could take that value to a higher level. We thought we'd eventually sell the business. It worked out: right place, right team, right buyer. How was the sale of your second company different? I felt I could apply some of the things I'd learned to airport concierge, which is an old school business. For me, it was I stumbled upon another problem I had experienced in my life that I wanted to solve. I didn't intend to go the venture capital route, but when my co founder and I teamed up a year ago, we felt that the venture route could be an option for us. We applied to Y Combinator a tech incubator . That began the very fast paced journey of building that company. It accelerated the business to a point where it needed more help, or more help than we could supply. We had been working with Blacklane as partners. They were interested in bringing Solve into Blacklane. We felt like it has a good home. What was it like to have money from a liquidity event? I didn't really know what to make of it. That morning, that was a weird day in general. The deal closed in the afternoon. I think it was Aug. 3. I knew it really happened when the money hit my bank account. I wasn't going to leave my apartment until it happened. The deal closed, and I went alone to one of my favorite restaurants, Absinthe. I kind of just had a big meal and four drinks. This is 1 p.m. I didn't know what to do from there. We had a lot of work to do at Solve. I had to get right back to work. It was an intense business. How did the sale of your first company affect you? It didn't change my lifestyle that much. Partly that's because I ran a bootstrap business for a long time. I was able to make a good amount of money over a long period of time. Years ago I had bought a Maserati, and then I had a McLaren. I got those things out of my system. There are no more fancy cars coming. I guess for me the way that I think about it is I like building businesses, I like creating something that solves a problem for me and probably solves problems for other people. I didn't come from a really wealthy family. I'm happy where things are. Do you ever worry about losing the money? I used to. A lot of entrepreneurs like myself, there is still that vision of somehow ending up on the street. It's an unrealistic thought in the first place. One thing that helped me is I got the advice from a wealth manager who asked what if the business goes to zero? He laid it out. Once you understand if something bad happens this is the plan, that's very helpful. In what ways has money made life easier and harder? Easier in all the basic ways not worrying about a mortgage payment or a car payment and stuff like that. I like to travel but I travel in a frugal way. Being able to travel and not think about every expense along the way, I love that. It all boils down to not having to worry. As for making it harder, I've purposely kept things simple. A lot of people hire an assistant who then ends up complicating things. I didn't do that. I can't think of any way it's made things harder. How do you think these experiences and this money are going to make life different for any family that you have? The good thing for me and my girlfriend is we're both very grounded. I think it was great that my parents didn't buy me a car. My parents just always instilled working hard in me. I worked at Wendy's when I was 16 years old. I worked at the grocery store. Some parents would argue that you could have been focused on your education. That's fine. But for me work was always instilled early on. When I graduated from college, I felt I'd better figure this out because there isn't going to be this natural support system. I want my kids to work for things on their own. That's how I got here. Not being comfortable led to comfort. What did you want to do when you were young? Mother always said that her greatest aspiration for us was that we'd be good strong contributors to society. One thing she did was we went to private as well as public schools. My father, he was very strong in the notion that we not be entitled. If we wanted something, he'd say in a low strong voice, earn it. We always had loads of tasks. We were brought up to be frugal. It was the same in the Perdue family. Frank to the end of his days almost always flew economy. We'd use public transportation, particularly in Manhattan. He knew the subway system inside and out. It was an attempt to get out of the bubble. How did your parents teach you financial responsibility? When I was 15 years old I was given a job working for my father's company, the Sheraton hotels. My job at age 15 along with probably 15 other people was to file credit cards. I found it so boring and miserable that I made up my mind that I'd try to get good grades so I'd have a more exciting job in life. I became a much better student after that and got into Radcliffe. What did you do after college? My first job was as a management intern in the Treasury Department, in the commissioner's office of the I.R.S. It was 20 guys and me. I remember telling my father about my job and being so moved when he said I'm proud of you. It meant so much that I had a job and that I had gotten it not on my name. It's something I see very much in the Perdue family. You need a job outside of the family for several years before you get a job in the company. What was the sale of Sheraton like for your family? My father died in 1967, and we sold it shortly after that. When it came time to sell Sheraton, there was the issue of whether we sell the company or not. There were strong economic reasons to do it. But on the other side this was our identity. Who would ever love it as much as we did? It was a public company, but we owned the controlling share. I was one who really didn't want to sell. I thought of my father's legacy and our identity. Half wanted to sell and half were thinking, don't do this horrible thing. But by the time of the sale we were united. The reward is 50 years later we still have these family reunions where people come together. Do you ever think of wealth in terms of what is enough? I don't think about wealth in that parameter. Wealth is power. Do you want to use it for good or do you trust that other people are going to use it for more good than you? You'd be surprised how simply I live. I don't need wealth for status. The apartment I live in, one neighbor is a librarian, one is a technician at the local hospital, one is working at the sheriff's department. It's firmly middle class. I don't need an apartment on millionaire's row. I don't need the money for lavishness. I love that I can support the charities that I support. If you give me a choice between a first class ticket to Beijing and an economy class ticket to Beijing, and I can give the 9,000 difference to charity, it's a no brainer. Do you ever worry about losing your wealth? No. Let me tell you why I don't worry about it. It came from my late father. In Dublin, N.H., I watched him chopping wood. He was doing it rhythmically. I said, "Daddy, you're the head of a major hotel company, you employ 20,000 people, you could pay someone to do this." He said: "I like this. I like the physical nature of this. But if I lost all my money, it wouldn't change my mental furniture because I've learned on my feet." Now, do I want to lose my money? I'd prefer it not happen because I like how I live now. In what ways has money made life easier and harder? There's a whole world of worry, about not paying your bills or having your choices restricted that courtesy of my dear father and my dear husband, I don't have to worry about, and I'm grateful for it. As for harder, is there any world in which I wished I had been born into a different family and had a different economic background? No. But my sentiment comes from a whole childhood of being prepared. Were there big adjustments going from the Henderson family to the Perdue family? I have often thought that the Hendersons and the Perdues are in parallel universes because we have similar values. Both put tremendous effort into being a strong family. Neither family left it to accident. One difference is the Perdues have been a family business since 1920, the Hendersons have been a family enterprise since 1890. Some of our traditions are a lot older and therefore a lot stronger. I admire both families equally. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Founded a decade ago by a small group of private dealers, New York City's Asia Week now includes dozens of shows mounted by local and international galleries as well as auctions at all the major houses. It's a rare opportunity to see antiquities and esoterica that are otherwise hidden away in private collections. Read more about what to see in New York art galleries this weekend. In all, 16 museums and cultural institutions are participating in Asia Week New York, which is running through March 23. Here we explore Manhattan's most notable exhibitions, along with a sprinkling of interesting gallery shows. And if looking at art from the other side of the world inspires you to travel, consider heading to the Charles B. Wang Center at Stony Brook University for a show of Islamic poster art, or to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which just finished renovating its Chinese galleries. Suh Seung Won, a pioneer of the process based Korean painting movement known as Dansaekhwa, or monochrome, started out with hard edge, translucent rhombuses that evoke unreal architectural spaces. In the large scale recent canvases comprising most of "Suh Seung Won: Simultaneity" at the Korea Society, those rhombuses have become overlapping bursts of diaphanous yellow and pink. They're too square to read as clouds, despite the unmistakable glints of blue peeking through, so the mood remains otherworldly. Through April 19 at 350 Madison Avenue, 24th floor, Manhattan; 212 759 7525, koreasociety.org. "Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism" is an expeditious survey of how Tibetan, Tangut, Chinese, Mongol and Manchu emperors all bolstered their legitimacy by claiming to be reincarnations of Buddhas, gods or previous emperors. A good way to find your footing in a profusion of complex imagery is to keep your eye on Mahakala, a wrathful deity who reappears throughout the show, most notably in a 19th century Bhutanese painting that pictures him with a raven's head and a blood red consort. But look out, too, for an exquisite 18th century depiction of the Fifth Dalai Lama descending to earth on a delicate rainbow bridge. Through July 15 at 150 West 17th Street, Manhattan; 212 620 5000, rubinmuseum.org. A uniquely rich permanent collection means that every week is Asia Week at the Met. But this week in particular boasts an abundance of must see works. Written in the 11th century by Murasaki Shikibu, a minor figure in the Heian imperial court, "The Tale of Genji," a divine parade of assignations, poetic melancholy and intricately cataloged haute couture, has dominated Japan's imagination for a thousand years. "The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated" (through June 16) gives a tantalizing sense of just how much decorative and fine art the novel has inspired by including a little of everything, from the heart stopping calligraphy of a 17th century copy by Isome Tsuna, with its unusually subtle modulation of thin and thick lines, to a gaudy 19th century bridal palanquin ornamented with scenes of Prince Genji's love affairs. A 1631 painted screen by Tawaraya Sotatsu, which sets delicate trees and an ox cart against an intensely stylized green hill, will demolish any convictions you might have had about the difference between abstraction and figuration. And a gilded wooden icon from Ishiyamadera, where Murasaki is supposed to have started her book, might inspire new novels of its own. The fourth rotation of the encyclopedic "Streams and Mountains without End: Landscape Traditions of China" (through Aug. 4) is an unmissable demonstration of how formal conventions, like the treatment of landscape in traditional Chinese ink painting, can be tools for an almost infinite range of self reflection and self expression. Highlights include Huang Xiangjian's epic 17th century scroll "Searching for My Parents," inspired by the disorders of the Manchu conquest, and Gao Cen's contemporaneous album "Landscapes in the Style of old masters," in which delicate twigs and leaves seem poised to disappear into misty expanses of faded golden silk. And while you're in the building, don't forget the staggering colors and hallucinatory visions of the Himalayan miniatures in "Seeing the Divine: Pahari Painting of North India" (through July 21). 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org. SCHOLTEN JAPANESE ART While interned in Arizona during World War II, the Japanese American art dealer Kakunen Tsuruoka made a series of lush, haunting watercolors of desert scenery. His works are the focus of the exhibition "Captive Artist: Watercolors by Kakunen Tsuruoka" at this gallery, running through March 23. 145 West 58th Street, No. 6D; 212 585 0474, scholten japanese art.com. ERIK THOMSEN In "Taisho Era Screens and Scrolls," extraordinary Japanese screens from the early 20th century combine Western approaches to color and anatomy with traditional perspective and design. Through March 23 at 23 East 67th Street, fourth floor, and 9 East 63rd Street, second floor; 212 288 2588, erikthomsen.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Tuesday Could Be the Beginning of the End of Philadelphia's Soda Tax PHILADELPHIA Jeff Foster, 58, a retired security guard with an abiding sweet tooth and a generous paunch, scowled as he considered the cornucopia of refrigerated soft drinks at his local convenience store. "It's just not right," he said, complaining that prices on his favorite brands had nearly doubled since a tax on sweetened beverages went into effect here two years ago. Then he did something that might make public health experts beam. He headed to the cash register, leaving behind the two liter bottle of Day's Champagne Cola he coveted. "I'm on a fixed income, so I have to watch my spending," said Mr. Foster, who has high blood pressure. "Plus, my doctor says I've got to lose weight." Three years ago, Philadelphia became the first major American city to enact a tax on sugary beverages, products that contribute mightily to the nation's epidemic of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. When Philadelphians go to the polls on Tuesday in primary elections for mayor and City Council, they will be indirectly voting on its survival. Though not on the ballot, the soda tax has become a heated issue in the city's local elections this year, with emotions fanned in part by anti soda tax television commercials and online ads paid for by the beverage industry. The two Democrats challenging Mayor Jim Kenney oppose the tax, as do a score of City Council hopefuls who decry the 1.5 cent per ounce tax as an unfair burden on the city's poorest residents. The levy, which is applied to distributors, on average adds about 30 percent to the price of sweetened drinks. Some people say beverage companies could chose to absorb the expense, but in most cases they pass it on to retailers, and consumers end up paying it. "In my district, 95 percent of the residents hate it," said Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez, who has introduced legislation that would study the tax and come up with possible alternatives. "The people who buy 7 lattes say the poor should be drinking water, but no one is considering the fact that my constituents live in food deserts with no access to fresh fruit and vegetables." In the months before its approval in July 2016, the beverage industry, allied with grocery store owners and the Teamsters union, poured 10.6 million into the fight against the measure; supporters spent 2 million, much of it from Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who has been a generous backer of soda tax initiatives across the country. In a cash strapped city where a quarter of all residents live in poverty, Mr. Kenney sold the tax as a revenue generator, not a nanny state gambit to change unhealthy habits. The City Council approved the measure, 13 to 4. Opponents immediately took their case to the courts, but last July the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania rejected their argument that the tax is illegal. The decision freed up millions of dollars in soda tax revenue that had been held in escrow and directed it toward creating 4,000 prekindergarten slots, 12 new community schools and an ambitious program to rebuild the city's crumbling libraries and recreation centers. Next year, the city plans to add another 1,000 pre K seats. "It's been an absolute success," the mayor said on Friday after visiting a museum that was hosting dozens of children from the city's expanded pre K program. He said he was not especially worried about the future of the tax, and he had harsh words for the beverage industry, which last month spent more than 600,000 in its campaign to turn public opinion against the measure. "This is all about rich white men who want to become even wealthier and who want to deny many kids of color an opportunity for an education," he said. Industry executives say the tax is a failure and that it goes against the will of the people. "Beverage taxes hurt working families, small local business and their employees," said William Dermody, a spokesman from the American Beverage Association, which news reports indicate has spent more than 1 million on the city elections from April 2 through May 6. "And polls show a majority of Philadelphians want it repealed." A study published last week in the medical journal JAMA found that the law dampened supermarket sales of sweetened beverages by 38 percent; a study by Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, published last January, put that number at 22 percent. Other studies have found less significant effect. Experts say it could be years to determine whether the policy has improved the overall health of the city's residents. Christina A. Roberto, the lead author of the JAMA study, said Philadelphia's results far outpaced those in other places that have adopted beverage taxes in recent years, among them Berkeley, Calif., and Mexico, which have since experienced a roughly 10 percent reduction in soda sales. "We are losing the war against chronic diseases, so it's rare to see something that has this kind of impact," said Professor Roberto, a health policy expert at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school. "It's not surprising that if you raise the price of something, people will buy less of it." More than 40 countries have adopted soda taxes, and since 2014, seven municipalities in the United States and the Navajo nation have embraced such measures. The industry has been pushing back aggressively, most notably at the state level, where it has convinced legislatures in Arizona, Michigan and California to pass laws that bar municipalities from adopting soda taxes. It has also backed statewide ballot measures to ban such taxes, with mixed success. But Dr. Jim Krieger, executive director of the advocacy group Healthy Food America, said the dynamic could change next year, when California and a number of New England states are expected to take up statewide soda tax legislation. "The momentum is building," he said. "If a state like California were to adopt a tax, that would be a game changer." Even supporters say that Philadelphia's measure has flaws. For starters, it covers any beverage with added sweeteners, including diet sodas and fruit juices that have modest amounts of artificial sweeteners. Critics say that sends out a muddled message about the importance of avoiding sugar. And because the tax only applies to liquids, it does not cover powdered drink mixes, which have seen a spike in sales as price sensitive shoppers find ways to avoid the tax. The other problem was on display last week at the Acme supermarket in Bala Cynwyd, a town just across the city line that was buzzing with shoppers, their carts laden with 12 packs of Sprite, jugs of Sunny Delight and a kaleidescopic array of Gatorades. Russ Bompartito, the store director, said employees could barely keep up with the demand from customers who drive in from the city to stock up on beverages. Mayor Kenney says he has a solution to that problem: a statewide beverage tax, though the prospects of such a measure appear dim given Republican control of the legislature. In the meantime, residents like Mr. Foster, the security guard, are bearing the brunt of the tax. Without access to a car, he does much of his shopping at the 10 Brothers Food Mart, a corner store that stocks mostly packaged food and sells no fresh produce. Despite his disdain for the measure, Mr. Foster acknowledged the tax was having the desired effect. He helps take care of his five grandchildren, who clamor for the fluorescent blue bottles of Little Hug, a sugary drink that now costs 50 cents, double its previous price. "They just drink this stuff like it's water," he said. "Now if I could only get them to drink water." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Telemedicine is having its moment. Over the last few months, millions of people have relied on video or telephone calls to talk to their doctors. But as the pandemic moves across the United States, and eventually recedes in some places, how long will the moment last? While patients used virtual visits to avoid overcrowded and potentially infectious doctor's offices or emergency rooms, many are returning to face to face appointments in cities where the threat has subsided. And insurance payments for telehealth services, especially at full cost, may only be temporary. Medicare's coverage of a broad range of services is slated to end when the coronavirus no longer poses a public health emergency. Private insurers, which followed the federal government's lead, could revert to paying doctors for virtual visits at a fraction of the cost for traditional visits, if anything at all. Some of the nation's biggest insurers, like UnitedHealthcare and Anthem, say they haven't decided beyond September or October on whether to extend the policies they adopted that allowed for coverage in lieu of doctors' visits during the coronavirus crisis. "The concern everyone in the industry has is that reimbursement is in jeopardy," said Dr. Mia Levy, the director of the cancer center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, which treated patients virtually during the height of the pandemic. "Because of telehealth, we were able to stay actively engaged with our patients," she said. While there is broad bipartisan support for telehealth coverage, Congress would have to pass specific legislation to make some of Medicare's changes permanent. "Reversing course would be a mistake," said Seema Verma, the administrator for the federal program, which reimbursed doctors the same for virtual visits, including those over the telephone, as for in person ones and relaxed rules about who can use telemedicine. About nine million people under traditional Medicare used telemedicine services during the early months of the crisis. Early data does not show wide variations in use by race or ethnicity. "It was really a no brainer for us," Ms. Verma said. And spending on telemedicine services during the first peak of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States underscores the demand. In addition to federal spending through Medicare, nearly 4 billion was billed nationally for telehealth visits during March and April, compared to less than 60 million for the same two months of 2019, according to FAIR Health, a nonprofit group that analyzes private health insurance claims. But to convince insurers they should continue paying for virtual care, doctors must demonstrate they can move beyond treating simple respiratory infections to caring for patients with chronic conditions like depression or diabetes. "From the perspective of managing the cost and quality, there's a lot we don't know about telemedicine," said Dr. Rahul Rajkumar, the chief medical officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee says it is the first major insurer to make coverage of telehealth services permanent, but it has not yet determined how much it will eventually pay for the care. A few insurers, including Cigna and the Blue Cross plan in North Carolina, said they will continue to cover telehealth services at pandemic levels through the end of the year. "We need to give providers time to get more comfortable," said Dr. Scott Josephs, the chief medical officer for Cigna. To make remote medicine successful and worthwhile, doctors and medical groups need to invest in technology and train staff. "If they don't have the time, they won't make the investments," he said. The biggest hurdle to widespread adoption by both the government and insurers is the potential cost. Lawmakers are reluctant to pass any bill that would significantly add to Medicare's budget, with the government already spending a total of some 750 billion a year. And private insurers see telemedicine as a way to save them money, said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University, who helped author a recent report on how the companies responded to the pandemic. "Unless they are required to by the states or federal government, a lot of carriers will try to reimburse less for telehealth than an in person visit," she said. For those at risk, telemedicine is particularly valuable. When a fever sent Susan Varak, 45, who has breast cancer, to the emergency room during the height of Chicago's outbreak in April, she felt as if she were "walking into this war zone," she said, because she was so terrified of catching the virus. She appreciates she still can see her oncologist remotely. "I don't think it's absolutely necessary to be face to face every couple of weeks," she said. Other patients like the convenience. David Collins, 67, didn't have a choice when he had a 20 minute video visit in March to rule out a diagnosis of coronavirus. Like many practices during the pandemic, the Kelsey Seybold Clinic, a large physician group in Houston, was not allowing most patients to come in. "I loved it because it saved me a lot of time." he said, adding "I'd much rather do that than drive across town and look for parking." But, a few months later, he didn't hesitate to go to the clinic for his checkup. "There's a little more hands on required," he explained, like getting a physical exam and having his blood pressure taken. Not everything can be done virtually, he said. "If you break your arm, an e visit isn't going to help you at all," he said. After seeing about 90 percent of its patients virtually, Kelsey Seybold has "almost flip flopped back," said Dr. Donnie Aga, an internist who oversees telehealth for the group. Most patients seem to prefer an in person appointment. "You could really see that people missed coming in," he said. With coronavirus cases now at epidemic levels in Texas, the clinic wants to shift to dividing visits to half virtual, half in person. "You've got to have a balance, for sure," Dr. Aga said. Doctors have to be more discriminating about which patients to see remotely, said Rita Numerof, a health care consultant. Telemedicine "was a solution to an immediate problem," she said, and doctors did not have clear criteria about who should be seen, under what circumstances and for which conditions. Many in Congress are already convinced that Medicare should continue the current coverage. "The Covid 19 pandemic has been a trial by fire, but the experience to date has made clear that the health care system is ready for broader access to telehealth on a permanent basis," said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat who introduced legislation earlier this month. On Thursday, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a Republican and chair of the Senate health committee, introduced the Telehealth Modernization Act, which would also make some changes permanent. The experience of the previous four months "will likely mean that hundreds of millions of physician patient visits will be remote or online that were in person before," he said. Since May, nearly 20 telemedicine bills have been brought to the House floor and about the same number in the Senate, said Miranda Franco, a senior policy adviser for the law firm Holland Knight. She thinks legislation will be passed by the end of the year. While some lawmakers favor permanently expanding Medicare payment for a broad range of telemedicine services, others are concerned about the technology's cost and potential for fraud. "Now you're talking about reimbursing services we haven't reimbursed before," Ms. Franco said. Some patients say telemedicine is not a substitute for in person care. Jorge Cueto, who is in his mid 20s, said a virtual visit is often an additional step before going to the doctor's office for, say, a sore throat. "It's another fee, it's another gating mechanism," he said. His parents, who are not fluent in English, prefer going to the doctor's office because they find it easier to communicate in person, he said, and they have difficulty setting up video calls. "I don't think they would be willing opt for telehealth if they weren't required to do it," Mr. Cueto said. Others may not have access to a computer or smartphone to connect for video visits, and insurers are particularly wary of doctors charging for phone calls to follow up on lab results or tell someone to come to the office. Even patients who have cellphones may not be able to afford a lengthy consultation, Dr. Levy said. She and her colleagues discovered some people stopped answering their phones at the end of the month because they had run out of minutes. "That was very eye opening to us," she said. Some proponents argue the goal of telemedicine should not be to lower health care costs over all. One of its main benefits is improving patients' access to care, said Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, adding that it would be foolish to expect savings if more people also get treatment. "Those don't reconcile," he said. Insurers should evaluate whether telemedicine is more effective for treating conditions like depression than it is for, say, cancer. They could then make those distinctions in reimbursing for virtual visits, he said, just as they do for different prescription drugs. "There should be no single telemedicine policy," Dr. Mehrotra said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
PARIS On the penultimate day of fashion month, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, fresh from defending her city during L'Affaire Kardashian, held a small breakfast in the gilded rooms of the Hotel de Ville with assorted media figures and the titans of the Federation Francaise de la Couture, French fashion's governing body, to celebrate the industry. "This is an essential sector," she told guests as they sipped coffee and ignored the croissants. "Paris is not a capital of crime, but a capital of fashion." Then she talked about diversity, and asked for advice in getting the word out. Less than an hour later, Karl Lagerfeld built a supercomputer in the glass environs of the Grand Palais, complete with snaking multicolored cables and blinking little green lights, the better to send images and ideas from his Chanel show into the ethosphere. Big data was on the case! In what turned out to be a relatively low tech show of classic Chanel suits in electric circuit board tweeds and sporty shapes the blouson jacket, the tennis skirt all mixed and matched with lacy peach toned lingerie and light up handbags, Mr. Lagerfeld dangled the promise of delving into the dueling realities of modern life but didn't entirely deliver. Instead he served up delicate dresses and digitized sound and light prints, all worn with sideways baseball caps. Even though two masked robotic stormtroopers opened the show, the tone was more breezy than Big Brother. In this, it was entirely linked in (and wired up) with much of the week. Over all, and with one more day to go, it has been an unambitious finale to what had been shaping up as a strikingly political season. In New York, designers practically held election rallies on the runway (one brand actually did). In London, "Brexit" was the subtext to almost every collection as creatives struggled with the idea of Britain's departure from the European Union. Even Milan seemed to be having something of a collective Berlusconi flashback, and engaged in a coordinated effort to empower the alternative i.e., women. But Ms. Hidalgo's efforts aside, Paris Fashion Week has been marked by its lack of activism. Despite a presidential election looming next year, and a "Frexit" that's on the table, designers have by and large shied away from any overt campaigning, content to offer vague lip service to the need for "optimism" and "joy." You can understand it it's the safe way out; the inoffensive middle ground but it has left a lingering sense of emptiness. If they don't care enough to commit, why should we, to them? Such was feeling, anyway, when faced with Nadege Vanhee Cybulski's collection for Hermes, an absolutely appropriate procession of workwear inspired separates, jumpsuits and what looked like nurse's outfits in pastel cotton drill, silk and lambskin. Aside from a fringed leather skirt suit and some very pretty layered bias tank dresses at the end, it was so discreet it practically disappeared. It's fine to want every individual to be the star, but there's a difference between providing a platform for personal expression and being entirely passive. At least at Sonia Rykiel, a house that could be forgiven if its thoughts were elsewhere, given that its founder and namesake passed away in August, the designer Julie de Libran fully pledged herself and her atelier to one idea: liberating the body. Which in practice meant: supersize. There were giant clown pants in denim and khaki, and tent like empire waisted tunics in jacquard; pillowy leather handbags and suede platforms and silk sleeves on maxi dresses stretching to the ground. It was hard to imagine many women wanting to embrace the look (that kind of volume is hard for most bodies to pull off), but it was also hard not to admire Ms. de Libran's dedication to the line. She went there, whether anyone else wanted to follow or not. It was at Alexander McQueen, however, that a big idea finally became bigger than itself. On a runway lined with approximately 220 Shetland wedding blankets, traditionally woven in two halves one by the groom's family, one by the bride's and then knit together with all the best intentions and imperfections left intact, Sarah Burton sent out a beautifully argued case for the allure of unity. "I was thinking about our team," she said before the show, "and how we come together, and then also our larger community, and then it seemed applicable much further beyond." This took the form of thinking about the Shetland Islands (we all have to start somewhere, and she chose those rocky, windswept lands). And given that Scotland, where the Shetland Islands are and where, not coincidentally, McQueen has some roots; remember Mr. McQueen's 1995 "Highland Rape" collection? is rumbling again about leaving Britain as Britain prepares to leave the European Union, you can see what she means. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
World class criminals, like world class writers, are natural obsessives. Alone in their rooms, they both spin endless plots, picking at the details of their projects. Near the start of "The Mastermind," Evan Ratliff's possessed true crime investigation, there is a stop and gawk image of the obsessive outlaw with whom he becomes obsessed: Paul Le Roux, the South African kingpin who gives the work its title. The scene takes place in a thriller worthy setting a penthouse condo in Manila, where Le Roux has based his illegal organization. But when one of Ratliff's sources enters the apartment, he finds the potbellied crime lord in the most unlikely guise: dressed in shorts and flip flops and perched behind a desk in a room filled with digital servers. The 300 fever heated pages that ensue are, in a sense, the author's agitated and sometimes self imperiling attempt to understand that bizarre tableau and to figure out how Paul Le Roux transformed himself, in the course of 30 years, from a teenage tech geek with a talent for encryption to an international villain with a cadre of mercenaries protecting his interests in everything from Congolese gold to North Korean meth. Ratliff's journey is not just one of miles logged on the ground, but of incomparable oddness. In his hunt for those who knew Le Roux, he goes to Minnesota, the Philippines, Israel, Brazil and Vietnam, encountering a cast of characters out of a Coen brothers film: a grizzled Canadian security operative, an elderly pharmacist, a target shooting Filipino cop, a South African hit man and the pseudonymous informant who ran Le Roux's business in Somalia and later helped the American authorities to capture him. The narrator fixed on an elusive prey has been a well worn device at least since "Moby Dick," but if there were ever a subject worthy of investigative mania, it is Paul Le Roux. The man was into anything and everything: high speed yachts, precious metals, plastic explosives, tuna fishing, piracy, Predator drones, Peruvian cocaine and hallucinogens. "He wanted to be the king of his country," according to the informant who ultimately brought him down. "The big man. Sitting on his fat ass behind a giant desk in his palace." In the midst of his pursuit, Ratliff like a serial killer fan boy tapes multicolored Post it notes to his bedroom wall in an effort to understand his protagonist's sprawling empire. "I'd like to claim that this was some kind of linear process, a journalist turned detective expertly following a trail of bread crumbs down the path to a secret lair," he writes. "But, in truth, people and stories came to me scattershot, and I found myself constantly circling back to re evaluate some fact that I'd been told before." 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. One of the pleasures of "The Mastermind" is the way in which the story effortlessly toggles between the mundane and the macabre. Le Roux's chief business and the source of his great wealth was, for several years, an online pharmacy network. Unsuspecting customers would place their orders for painkillers like Tramadol to call centers run by a company known as RX Limited. Licensed doctors, most in the United States, would evaluate the requests and unaware of where the payments were going authorize prescriptions to be handed out by pharmacists from Brooklyn to Wisconsin. While some of the money was siphoned off along the way to keep the pill mill (and its largely unwitting participants) in motion, the bulk of it was hoarded by Le Roux to fund the rest of his illicit operations. This trick of funneling quasi legal profits into wholly illegal business ventures eventually led to the crime lord's downfall as investigators dug into the innards of his scheme. It also provided Ratliff with the philosophical ballast of his story. Violent crime, he notes, often exists in vertiginous proximity to ordinary life. "Call center managers in Tel Aviv could wake up and find themselves arms dealers," he writes. "Family doctors could turn into conspirators in an international drug cartel at the click of a button." This "adjacent reality," as Ratliff calls it, is Le Roux's reality, and in "The Mastermind" it "lurks just outside of our everyday perception, in the dark corners of the internet we never visit, the quiet ports where ships slip by in the night, the back room of the clinic down the street." There is an inference and perhaps even a lesson here: Bad things happen when the edges of those two worlds start to touch. Ratliff's book emerged from several articles he wrote for the online magazine The Atavist. Three weeks after "The Mastermind" was published, a second book, Elaine Shannon's HUNTING LEROUX (Morrow, 27.99), came out. Shannon, a journalist, has worked closely in the past with the Drug Enforcement Administration and she clearly had access to the two elite agents who helped take down Le Roux. But her book is less broadly sourced than Ratliff's and not as haunting. A quick disclaimer: I, too, became obsessed with Le Roux after chasing him and his spectral story for The New York Times years ago. (In "The Mastermind," the author briefly mentions the articles I wrote.) Much like Ratliff, I recall the bleary nights on Google thinking I'd struck gold when I stumbled across Le Roux's name in incorporation papers for a mysterious firm in Hong Kong or a United Nations dossier on the Somalian arms trade. I also recall the nausea that gripped me when Le Roux slipped back into the shadows, and the gold I thought I'd found turned into mist. All of which is to say that, aside from the other triumphs of "The Mastermind," Ratliff clearly deserves this year's Award for Dogged Journalism for staying on his target until the very end. Without spoiling his story, the end arrives with yet another twist when, after years of living out of sight, Le Roux shows up, in the flesh, in two separate federal courtrooms. Read this account of the drug lord's testimony in one of his trials: "In a spellbinding two day turn as a prosecution witness, Mr. Le Roux confessed to an astonishing array of crimes." Ratliff's efforts fail only when he tries to lash his story to sweeping themes (Le Roux as the first great outlaw of the digital age) or to root it in current events (Le Roux's supposed role in heightening the opioid crisis). While both of these ideas are likely true, they struck me as the sort of unnecessary stretches that a publishing executive might suggest. The fact is, Ratliff's tale is unique, so strange and so compelling, it is almost better left to float alone in its cloud of "adjacent reality." That, of course, is where it already exists close to, but just beyond, the world we recognize: out there, on its own, in a state of shimmering drift. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Lisa Immordino Vreeland at home in her art filled apartment in Manhattan. Above her, from left: Etienne Drian's sketch for a mural of the decorator Elsie de Wolfe jumping across the Atlantic; a Cindy Sherman photo from her "Untitled (Towelhead)" series; and a Diana Vreeland gouache by Cecil Beaton. A famous last name is handy for getting restaurant reservations, but it's even better if you can use it to create art. In 2011, Lisa Immordino Vreeland made a documentary, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel," and wrote a book of the same name about the renowned Vogue editor who was the grandmother of her husband, Alexander Vreeland, a fashion executive. Family ties gave her unusual access to archival material. Next up for Ms. Immordino Vreeland was the documentary of an heiress, "Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict" (2015). Now she chronicles another demanding aesthete in the coffee table book "Love, Cecil: A Journey With Cecil Beaton" (Abrams), published this month. She made a movie version, too (the Hollywood Reporter called it "one of the most engaging documentaries shown at this year's Telluride Film Festival"), but it doesn't have a United States distributor yet. Sir Cecil Beaton (1904 1980) was a Harrow and Cambridge sort of Englishman who became a notable fashion and portrait photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. A prolific costume and set maker, he's perhaps best known for his two Academy Awards, for set and costume design for "My Fair Lady." He won another for the costumes in "Gigi." "He was way, way out there," Ms. Immordino Vreeland, 53, said of his anxious drive and high style. "He never stopped creating, and I love that." Beaton entertained society at his succession of country houses and frequently photographed the royal family. Considerably more pared down is the way Ms. Immordino Vreeland lives, on two floors of a Manhattan townhouse, with her husband and their 15 year old daughter. Mr. Vreeland established the fragrance company Diana Vreeland Parfums in 2014. "It's fun to live in a house," she said. "My husband's a frustrated architect, so he really designed this. We completely gutted it and added the dark wood floors and huge closets." The biggest room in the place is a sitting room that also serves as Ms. Immordino Vreeland's office. She has hung the longest wall in that space salon style, displaying a John Baldessari print; a Richard Avedon portrait of her husband as a child, playing with his brother and father; and Etienne Drian's sketch for a mural of the decorator Elsie de Wolfe jumping across the Atlantic. That floor of the townhouse includes two close up Herb Ritts portraits and a single image by Bernd and Hilla Becher depicting a water tank against a brick background; Ms. Immordino Vreeland purchased it from Sonnabend Gallery. "I don't like the grouping to be too thematic," she said. "Mixing things gives much more impact. I just want a surface that has a lot of motion on it." Ms. Immordino Vreeland talked between deadlines about art and creativity. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. The aesthetic of your collection is very spare: black and white photos and drawings. I suppose I could use more color. I've collected photography over the years, but the Cindy Sherman photo here is from her "Untitled (Towelhead)" series, and it was a gift from the dealer David Maupin. The Diana Vreeland gouache by Cecil Beaton was something my husband inherited. She met Beaton in the '30s when she went to London, and they became fast friends. In these days of screenplays on every laptop, what's interesting about Beaton's creativity? In his lifetime, he published 38 books. He took 7,000 photographs just of World War II, showing the spirit of the people in it. In our time, when we are all doing things so fast and going from one thing to the next, nobody can create what he's done. He was really a recorder of the 20th century in many different ways. That kind of productivity is always impressive, but probably taxing. He had drive, he had ambition, and he had ego all combined. He sacrificed everything at the altar of creativity. What ties him to your previous subjects? All three are people who really redefined themselves, and they really strove to have a purpose of life. With him and Peggy, there are these unhappy childhoods. They have these mothers that tell them that they are ugly little monsters, or they're not pretty, so there's this sense of insecurity. But the weak points fuel the achievements somehow? I do like these flaws. I like seeing flaws that people can overcome. This romantic notion of the great ending, of being inspired: "I can go do this." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
CBS has called off the search for a new chief executive and extended the contract of its interim chief, Joseph Ianniello, through the end of the year, the company announced on Tuesday. CBS had been on the hunt for a permanent chief executive since September, when Leslie Moonves was ousted from the job after more than a dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct. He has denied the allegations. Mr. Ianniello, formerly the chief operating officer at CBS, became the acting chief executive upon Mr. Moonves's departure. The company hired a search firm, Korn Ferry, to find other candidates, but after six months it hadn't turned up a permanent successor. A provision in Mr. Ianniello's contract would have allowed him to leave the company by June 30 if CBS did not intend to give him the top job. Rather than risk losing its acting chief, the CBS Corporation's board of directors extended his deal, citing his strong record. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Now Lives In a one bedroom loft in the West Village with her French bulldog, Bleecker (more than 25,500 Instagram followers). Claim to Fame Ms. Bernstein is the founder of We Wore What, a popular fashion blog started four years ago while a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The blog, which mostly chronicles Ms. Bernstein's daily outfits, has grown from a hobby into a full time business. "Staying true to my style has been a big part of what my brand is built on," said Ms. Bernstein, who recently teamed with Estee Lauder to promote its Modern Muse fragrance. In addition to the blog, she is active on social media, with 1.4 million Instagram followers and a growing presence on Snapchat, where she gives fans a peek into her daily life. "I think that makes me more relatable," she said. "I like to think of my blog as the perfect mix of relatable and inspirational." Big Break In 2012, Refinery29 named her a Next Big Style Blogger, which she said "put her on the map" and led to her first brand partnership with Macy's to promote one of its in house labels. In 2013, she signed with Next Model Management to handle her deals. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
IF there was one word that applied to investing this year, it was uncertainty. But there were different kinds of uncertainty. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, this year there were uncertain uncertainties and certain uncertainties. Some of the uncertain uncertainties were the European debt crisis, China's handling of its stalled growth and leadership transition, and the presidential election in the United States. The fiscal cliff negotiations were a certain uncertainty. No one I spoke to throughout the year thought the talks would be concluded in a tidy fashion with weeks to spare, and they were certainly right. "There has been a lot to worry about this year," said Gregg Fisher, president and chief investment officer of Gerstein Fisher, a wealth management firm in New York. "The other problem with uncertainty is we're worried about what other people are worried about. This creates a huge amount of uncertainty without a path." Despite the worry, stocks in the United States had a good year, with the Standard Poor's 500 up 11.5 percent even with the declines of the last week. More than that, Neeti Bhalla, head of tactical asset allocation at Goldman Sachs private wealth management, pointed out that this was the first year since 2009 in which the S. P. did not drop below its starting point for the year, 1,258. "That was important because at no point this year did people feel a negative return in their equity portfolio," Ms. Bhalla said. "You had pullbacks this year, but you never got to a negative experience." So what did investors do in a year that was full of uncertainty yet actually quite strong in terms of returns? The opposite of what they should have done: measurements of cash flows showed that investors took money out of equity funds while continuing to put money into fixed income, even though financial advisers were concerned that a slight drop in the price of bonds like Treasuries could quickly result in investors losing money. "They were looking for stability in the fixed income markets," said Barbara Reinhard, chief investment strategist for Credit Suisse Private Bank. "The big thing is investors held onto the recent past and couldn't get out of their own way." Of course, even the professionals would not fault the average investor for being scared by so much uncertainty. Chris Blum, global head of equities at J. P. Morgan Private Bank, said he liked to show clients a series of charts of stock returns over many decades. The trend is up despite periods of declines. But he knows that's not enough to persuade them. "I can show this kind of data in front of an individual 10 times until Sunday, but the reality is you're not getting in touch with people who are scared," he said. "You need to acknowledge how they feel. You can't say markets are panicking, go buy." So how should investors have looked at this year? Much of the advice came down to two themes: the world won't end, and politicians will eventually come up with a fiscal agreement. Still, advisers acknowledged that was deeply unsatisfying to clients. (I'd wager it may not have been worth the management fees that investors pay.) Karen Wimbish, director of retail retirement at Wells Fargo, said she talked to investors about having three sources of income guaranteed, stable and a pot of money that can grow over time. But she said the simplest solution for contentment in uncertain times was having a set plan. "You don't need 1 million to sit down and make a plan," Ms. Wimbish said. "Retirement is a long term proposition. If I'm in it for the long term and I'm saving, some years it is going to be up, some years it is going to be down. But over time, I'm going to be fine." Mr. Blum said he used data to try to get clients to the same place: while the year may have been bumpy, it was just one year among many. "I comb the data on a chart to take them through what they're feeling," he said. "I ask them what concerns you about the fiscal cliff or what keeps you from deploying capital. I related those issues to what happens in risk assets and how those concerns get factored into the prices. But it's not a slam dunk." Mr. Fisher said he tried to show clients that markets generally do a good job of factoring in risk. "The return we expect to earn on stocks is higher when the risk we perceive is higher and lower when the risk we perceive is lower," he said. "This is simple, but investors always seem to do the wrong thing." As examples, he said, Europe's economic problems seemed unsolvable in the first and second quarters, and there was speculation that Greece would leave the euro. Large companies in Europe were paying significantly more to borrow money than their counterparts in the United States. Mr. Fisher said this was a great investing opportunity that many people missed because of their concern over political and macroeconomic matters. "The cost of capital for two similar businesses in developed countries shouldn't be too different over time," he said. "There are going to be periods of time when one country is different from another, but over time they converge. Returns on big company stocks have been almost identical over the past 40 years." Ms. Bhalla said that one of the big problems was just how strong the pull of the recent past is on investors. And since the past five years have not been great, investors may be caught in a feedback loop of fear. "We think the last five years should not be extrapolated into the next five years," she said. "You want to think where is change happening and is that risk asset accurately priced." She said investors needed to move away from worrying about whether they will get their money back and start thinking about whether they will make money. "This year has been one of the most critical in shaking up beliefs about asset pricing," she said. "The most important difference from 2012 to 2010 and 2011 is that expectations have been set lower. People have been surprised by the upside." She added, "What we find is people are a little more open now to discussing the balance of risk." This may seem difficult to believe given the stalled negotiations on the fiscal cliff. But while the lack of an agreement may be bad for markets in the short term, the only certainty for next year is something will happen that no one planned for. "This illusion that everything is O.K. is always an illusion," Mr. Fisher said. "Life is full of uncertainty." Shlomo Benartzi, a business professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the chief behavioral economist at Allianz Global Investors' Center for Behavioral Finance, said that investors' confidence had been shaken by volatility in the markets and so much uncertainty around policy decisions. "I don't think we've had so many times when markets are so volatile and everything is going up," he said. "It would be interesting to ask people what percentage think the market went up this year versus down. I think a lot of people would think the market went down because they confuse the volatility and the bad news." John Verfurth, a partner at VWG Wealth Management, a division of HighTower Advisers, said investors had spent the past year "completely frozen because of the uncertainty." But he has been trying to talk to his clients about the positive effects of uncertainty. If the country goes over the fiscal cliff and the equity markets go down, the firm will buy more stocks for clients at lower prices. Still, getting his clients to let go of their fears is more difficult. "No one believes we're at the beginning of the next 10 to 15 year cycle," he said. "We're trying to be balanced. We're trying to take steps." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
DETROIT The driver of the first Corvette, in 1953, was welcomed by a lovely fan of numbers a sweeping, eye catching speedometer denominated in 10 mile per hour intervals up to 160. The display offered a stark representation of speed. By contrast, the instrument panel of the next generation Corvette, which made its public debut here last week at the North American International Auto Show, offers a tachometer formed of seven big numerals surrounding a translucent, ghostly image of the car suggesting the 3 D cyberspace world of "Tron." This tachometer emphasizes the 450 horsepower pumped out by a new V 8 engine. But that's just one way of looking at what the car is doing. The dashboard is "completely configurable," said Ryan Vaughan, who designed the new Corvette's interior. Dials have been banished; an eight inch screen has taken their place. A car's instruments summarize its personality. Every car has two faces, and each expresses character. One is outside, visible to all the world: the grille and headlights that are the car's public face. The other is more intimate, the instrument panel through which the driver interacts with the machine. The speedos and tachs, the knobs and dials, tell a story, and they convey emotion as well as information. The amount of information is increasing rapidly as digital technology pervades the car. The automobiles displayed this year at the auto show suggest a quiet revolution: digital is chasing the last vestiges of analog from the dashboard. Mechanical instruments are rare. The dial is dying. Gorden Wagener, design chief for Mercedes Benz, is among those predicting a complete shift to virtual instruments. "Honestly, I see hardware dials disappearing and I like that," he said, standing next to the new small CLA sedan hidden behind curtains near the Mercedes display. "It's a question of how you do it." For years, most cars have offered analog speedometers and tachometers even with the fanciest digital displays. Aside from their nod to tradition, analog gauges offer reassurance, like a windup clock or a mechanical wristwatch that keeps running even if a superstorm knocks out power and blocks access to the Internet. But this year, digital readouts of speed and engine performance are trumping analog needles and numbers. Many of the dials that survive are digital replicas of analog instruments. The tach is especially endangered. Purists may blanch, but as fewer and fewer cars offer manual transmissions, the more redundant the tach seems. In the battle for prime real estate on the dashboard, it may be doomed. The most basic traditional layout sets an equal size speedometer and tachometer side by side. But gauges reflect character: in sports cars, the tach looms larger, sometimes literally overshadowing the speedo. The gauge clusters of the new Porsche Cayman and Boxster are dominated by huge circular tachs larger than the speedometers. These speak of a sports car for the autobahn with no speed limit, who needs a speedo? The graphics of the new Corvette's dash are much more sophisticated than the Spark's. Choosing one of various modes including Tour, Sport and Track produce very different looks. The big Cadillac XTS sedan also offers a configurable display, from a traditional layout to one that emphasizes the technological. Analog dials have also vanished. At the other extreme, the retro look of the Fiat 500 is expressed in instruments with numbers like those on a 1950s table radio. The Mini Cooper's podlike gauges are puffy and cartoonish, like something from the "Futurama" cartoon series. The green credentials of electrics or hybrids are evident in instruments that offer driving guides. Ford's SmartGauge with EcoGuide coaches drivers in the Fusion Hybrid, famously rewarding those who are most efficient with a display of growing leaves and vines. Such nudges, aimed at keeping engine speeds down, suggest that the speedo and tach are not siblings, but rivals. Speed and efficiency battle in our cars, as in our hearts and minds. To meet fuel efficiency targets, we need to push mileage up and revs down. If the tach is a relic, what of the volt meter and the oil pressure gauge? Other information is crowding into view: where dials used to be, the driver gets directions to a destination, news alerts or the album cover art of the music that's playing. The new Corvette offers multiple ways to display information. In Track mode, for instance, a sweeping graphic literally shows the torque band. The Corvette was one of the first cars with LCDs, in 1984, and with a heads up display, which projects information onto the windshield. But as time passes, novel interior features can seem dated, like the complex graphic equalizers that rocked audiophiles in cars of the 1970s. Today's dashboard experiments are likely to quickly grow dated as well. Aaron Betsky, the director of the Cincinnati Art Museum, has been shopping for a car. He is dismayed by the state of instrument design, likening much of it to "a teenage boy's idea of high tech heaven." "In general, it is amazing how clutter has increased just when we thought everything would become simpler," he said, adding that he wished Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief designer, would try his hand at an instrument panel. Mr. Wagener of Mercedes also insists on a higher standard of design for digital dashboards. He notes that dials have long served as jewelry in car interiors. "The new S Class will offer a world where you don't need the real dials," he said. "You will have virtual dials. But they must have the same qualities as real jewelry." Today's analog dials, like watches, exist more for decoration than function. Mr. Wagener says he thinks the role of "eye candy" will be assumed by air vents. The polished round vents on the CLA, for instance, echo those of the Mercedes 300SL of the mid 1950s and are one of the key themes of the brand's current interior design language. The flow of air into a grille, over a fender, through a side vent is inherently sexy, in the view of Mr. Wagener. "Any time you have air handling, it is emotional," he said. Another example was found at the Lincoln display, where the vents inside the MKC evoke the crossover's winged grille a clear example of a car's inner face corresponding to its outward face. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
It's been almost 22 years since "Saturday Night Live" last found itself satirizing a presidential impeachment proceeding, but as the show turned its attention to President Trump's trial in the Senate, it quickly reverted to its tried and true formula: a smidgen of factual detail, a dollop of celebrity cameos and a whole bunch of cultural references that may or may not be germane to the topic. This weekend's broadcast, hosted by Adam Driver and featuring the musical guest Halsey, began with a sketch set on Capitol Hill, where Susan Collins (played by Cecily Strong) and Mitch McConnell (Beck Bennett) reflected on the trial to date. "We all know this impeachment proceeding is a sham and a hoax," Bennett said. "Republicans are simply requesting a fair trial no witnesses, no evidence. That way we can acquit President Trump and focus on the real criminals in this country: teenagers who try marijuana." Strong said, "The evidence against Trump is pretty damning so I'm still on the fence," then made an exaggerated wink. The Republican senators welcomed the lawyer they said would be their star defense attorney in the coming days: Alan Dershowitz, played here by Jon Lovitz, the "S.N.L." alumnus. "It's wonderful to be here," Lovitz said, " 'cause I'm not welcome anywhere else." He was repeatedly admonished for mentioning past clients he has represented, including Jeffrey Epstein, O.J. Simpson and Claus von Bulow. Then, abruptly, Lovitz acted out an apparent heart attack and the screen filled with smoke. When it cleared, he found himself in hell, where he was welcomed by Kate McKinnon, playing the devil. "I used to let nobodies into hell but now it's all influencers," McKinnon said. Among the notorious guests she introduced to Lovitz were Epstein, who was played by Driver. "Great to see you," Lovitz exclaimed. "What are you doing here?" Driver seemed ever so slightly mortified as he replied, "Eh, just hangin'." Other visitors to Hades included Bowen Yang as the composer of "Baby Shark"; Heidi Gardner as Flo, the Progressive Insurance mascot; and someone playing Mr. Peanut, the recently deceased brand icon. (As Mr. Peanut explained, "I took out a lot of first graders with peanut allergies. Plus, I never wore pants.") Finally, Alex Moffat appeared in his recurring role as Mark Zuckerberg, identified here as hell's I.T. guy. "I just want everyone to know that I don't endorse evil," Moffat said. "I just help millions of people share it. If "Star Wars" has taught us anything, it's that if something is successful once, keep doing it. Back when Driver hosted "S.N.L." in 2016, he appeared in a parody of the CBS reality show "Undercover Boss," playing Kylo Ren, his villainous character from the "Star Wars" series, attempting to go incognito among the bad guys he employs. That sketch was a hit, so why not give it a sequel? In this installment, Driver as Ren adopts the guise of an entry level First Order intern named Randy, who uses the Force to obliterate a malfunctioning printer (as well as an admiral who berates him for botching his drink order). Over at the "Weekend Update" desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on the impeachment trial of President Trump. The impeachment trial started this week, and am I crazy or was Adam Schiff on my TV for 100 hours straight? Even when I turned the TV off, there was still an outline of him burned into the screen. What happened was, Democrats spent three days laying out in great detail how they believe President Trump has been the most egregious abuser of power in American history. And then Republicans laid out their defense, the shrug emoji. Mitch McConnell, seen here calmly watching an orphanage burn, defended his plan for the trial, saying, "The country is waiting to see if we can rise to the occasion." I would maybe say you're not rising to the occasion, considering one senator fell asleep, Rand Paul was doing a crossword puzzle and some Republican senators even brought fidget spinners to play with. I assume this symbolized how the Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves. You're better than me, Colin. I didn't watch one minute of that trial. It was like a four day long PowerPoint. This is supposed to be Trump's punishment, not mine. This whole impeachment is like a bad episode of "Maury." There's all this evidence that Trump clearly cheated and Republicans are still like, "But Maury, he loves me." Trump is so confident he's going to win, he's using Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer to represent him. Talk about credibility who's his character witness, R. Kelly? Melissa Villasenor appeared as herself in a segment where she sang a series of songs about this year's crop of Academy Award nominees. Each tune was set to the same bouncy bossa nova beat, like this catchy ditty about "The Irishman": This movie has a lot to offer If you listen to Villasenor's other songs, which also address "Joker," "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," "1917" and Greta Gerwig's snub for directing "Little Women," we think you'll see a pattern emerge! (Hint: It's white male rage.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Ten years ago, Susannah Cahalan was hospitalized with mysterious and terrifying symptoms. She believed an army of bedbugs had invaded her apartment. She believed her father had tried to abduct her and kill his wife, her stepmother. She believed she could age people using just her mind. She couldn't eat or sleep. She spoke in gibberish and slipped into a catatonic state. Had it not been for an ingenious doctor brought in to consult on her case, Cahalan might well have ended up in a psychiatric ward. Instead, as she recounted in "Brain on Fire," her best selling 2012 memoir about her ordeal, she was eventually found to have a rare or at least newly discovered neurological disease: anti NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis. In plain English, Cahalan's body was attacking her brain. She was only the 217th person in the world to be diagnosed with the disorder and among the first to receive the concoction of steroids, immunoglobulin infusions and plasmapheresis she credits for her recovery. Cahalan's condition is what in medicine is called a "great pretender": a disorder that mimics the symptoms of various disorders, confounding doctors and leading them astray. "The Great Pretender" also happens to be the title of Cahalan's new book . It, too, is a medical detective story, only this time at the heart of the mystery is not a patient or a disease but a member of the profession: David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist and the author of "On Being Sane in Insane Places," a landmark 1973 study that, by questioning psychiatrists' ability to diagnose mental illness, plunged the field into a crisis from which it has still not fully recovered. Cahalan, 34 , learned about Rosenhan six years ago, while on tour for the paperback edition of "Brain on Fire." She was inundated with letters, hundreds a week, from desperate patients and their families, convinced that they too might have a neurological condition masquerading as mental illness. She was haunted by the idea that sheer luck had allowed her to escape a similar fate. At a mental hospital in North Carolina where she presented her case, a doctor approached ashen faced to say he had a patient who sounded just like her. "I remember thinking we had just toured the place Was it that person? Or that person?" Cahalan recalled. She later learned that the patient, a young woman, had tested positive for autoimmune encephalitis Cahalan's disease. But the diagnosis came too late: The woman's brain had been irrevocably damaged. "The doctor said, 'She will operate as a permanent child,'" Cahalan remembered. Shaken by the story, she began to think of the woman as her "mirror image." In an interview at her home in Brooklyn, Cahalan talked fast, her vivaciousness proof, should any be needed, that she had suffered no such brain loss. Doctors had told her parents that she might "get back as much as 90 percent of her former self." "I'm 100 percent!" she said. "Ten percent of my intellect would have been a devastating loss." "I realized that this was a larger issue," she said. "It wasn't just about autoimmune encephalitis, but about medicine in general its limitations." 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. Soon after her trip to North Carolina, she had dinner with a psychologist who mentioned Rosenhan's study. Cahalan immediately looked it up. Published in Science, a leading academic journal, "On Being Sane in Insane Places" described a daring experiment: Eight "sane" volunteers presented themselves at mental hospitals under fake names, complaining that they heard voices a classic symptom of mental illness. The goal was to test the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. "If sanity and insanity exist," Rosenhan wrote, "how shall we know them?" His answer was damning. All eight "pseudopatients" were admitted to hospitals, where they remained for at least a week and as long as 52 days. All but one received a diagnosis of schizophrenia. And although other patients in the hospitals suspected the pseudopatients were fakers "you're a journalist, or a professor" was a typical remark the staff never caught on. The study made Rosenhan an academic celebrity. Nearly 50 years later, it remains one of the most cited papers in social science. "It was a bombshell," said Andrew Scull, a historian of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego. "Not just newspapers but radio and television stations picked up this story about silly shrinks who couldn't distinguish actors from real patients." Cahalan was fascinated. "I had an almost spidey sense," she said. "I just wanted to find those pseudopatients." After all, having a "great pretender" illness was a little like being a pseudopatient. And then there was her "mirror image." How many other patients were out there, in psych wards where they didn't belong? A former investigative reporter at The New York Post, she knew how to chase down sources, and her efforts to identify Rosenhan's volunteers form the backbone of "The Great Pretender." Rosenhan died in 2012, but Cahalan contacted his son, friends, students, colleagues and secretaries. At one point, she hired a private detective. She got access to Rosenhan's notes and to a 200 page manuscript of a book he was supposed to write for Doubleday but never delivered. Rosenhan had revealed that he was one of the pseudopatients. But the identity of the others was a mystery. According to his notes, one was a famous woman abstract painter; Cahalan looked into every well known female artist from the period, only to hit a dead end. At the same time , troubling discrepancies between Rosenhan's papers and his study began to emerge. The study was stocked with alarming statistics drawn from the pseudopatients' accounts of their hospital stays contact with doctors averaged just 6.8 minutes a day; 71 percent of doctors moved on, "head averted," when a pseudopatient addressed them. But Rosenhan's notes didn't back up the numbers. Some of the discrepancies looked like sloppiness. Others seemed deliberate. According to the study, the pseudopatients all presented with a single, identical symptom: They heard voices that said "empty," "hollow" and "thud." (This being the early '70s, existentialism was in vogue; Rosenhan said he chose words to suggest a concern with the "meaninglessness of one's life.") Yet Rosenhan's own medical file contradicted this claim. The psychiatrist who admitted him noted that Rosenhan had been having symptoms for months; that he found the voices so upsetting that he put "copper pots" over his ears to tune them out; and that he could "hear what people are thinking." He also reported feeling suicidal. All told, his admission note conveyed a much more detailed and disturbing picture of mental illness than Rosenhan said the pseudopatients had presented. Science had published letters from psychiatrists complaining about the study's "methodological inadequacies." One published a lengthy rebuttal. But Cahalan's investigation was far more thorough. "It was becoming alarmingly clear that the facts were distorted intentionally by Rosenhan himself," she writes in "The Great Pretender." Only the other pseudopatients could tell her what really happened. In the end, she found just two, both former psychology graduate students at Stanford. One, Bill Underwood, now a retired software engineer in Austin, struck Rosenhan as so balanced that he doubted he could pass for a mental patient. (In fact, Underwood was admitted for nine days with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.) "When you spoke to David, he had a way of giving you the impression that you were the most important person in the world at that time," Underwood said in an interview. Until Cahalan contacted him, he added, it had never occurred to him that there might be problems with the study. Through Underwood, Cahalan found her second pseudopatient, Harry Lando. In Rosenhan's study, Lando was reduced to a footnote, his data "excluded" on a technicality, allegedly because he'd "falsified aspects of his personal history" when he was admitted to the hospital. In fact, Cahalan discovered, Lando, who would have been pseudopatient No. 9, was cut from the study because his experience had been positive. Lando spent 19 days at an institution in San Francisco where patients passed their days as they pleased, and the staff didn't wear uniforms. He attended group therapy sessions and went on a day trip to the beach. "The hospital seemed to have a calming effect," Lando told Cahalan. Rosenhan's comment on Lando's notes was withering: "HE LIKES IT." "Maybe we could have emerged from this with an idea that there were institutions that were doing something right," Cahalan said. Instead, Rosenhan's study gave the imprimatur of science to a growing antipsychiatry movement. Within a decade, dozens of institutions had closed and the number of patients in mental hospitals had dropped by 50 percent. The American Psychiatric Association rewrote its diagnostic manual from scratch, throwing out Freudian terminology and replacing it with rigid checklists meant to standardize diagnoses. The problem was that most of these diagnoses had been created by doctors arguing in a conference room; there was no blood test for schizophrenia or manic depression. Despite decades of searching for genetic and environmental factors, we still don't know what causes these disorders or even whether they are distinct diseases. As one psychiatrist puts it in Cahalan's book, today, "Symptoms and signs are all we fundamentally have." Rosenhan isn't the only social scientist whose work at the time has come under ethical scrutiny. His Stanford colleague Philip Zimbardo, the author of the famous "prison experiment," in which a simulation involving students posing as "guards" and "inmates" spun violently out of control, was recently found to have coached the "guards" to behave more aggressively tainting the study's conclusions about prison's inherent evil. But "The Great Pretender" leaves open the possibility that Rosenhan did more than distort and omit facts that undermined his thesis. Could he have invented the other pseudopatients out of whole cloth? "This was one of the handful of the most influential social science papers produced since World War II and ironically it's a fraud," Scull said. "It's possible, now that the book is coming out, that someone will emerge from the weeds and say, 'Actually, my aunt was one of those pseudopatients.' But even were pseudopatients to surface this point, the other evidence Susannah lays out is so damning that it wouldn't transform things." Cahalan is more circumspect. "I believe that he exposed something real," she writes toward the end of her book. "Rosenhan's paper, as exaggerated, and even dishonest as it was, touched on truth as it danced around it." His message about psychiatry's limitations helped her understand how her own ordeal could have turned out so differently from that of her mirror image. "I was a medical marvel," she said. "The more access I got to psychiatry, the more I realized that I was a marvel and that the average person isn't and won't necessarily get the outcome that I did. This was a recalibration for me, to put my experience in the proper context: that it was extraordinary." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Skip the Upkeep and Rent the Jet, or Island, Instead Owning an island is the quintessential "I've arrived" declaration, but many among the well heeled are arriving through an alternate route: They're renting. Farhad Vladi, president of Vladi Private Islands, a brokerage firm, has rented Fregate Island in Seychelles to Bill Gates, the co founder of Microsoft, for 150,000 a week, he said. And Paul McCartney rented Cousine Island, also in Seychelles, for around 5,500 euros or 6,000 a night from Mr. Vladi. Ownership does not have the cachet it once commanded, and renting is shedding its declasse image. Even among the very wealthy who could easily afford to buy an island, renting simply makes more sense. And not just renting property. In other luxury categories, including exotic automobiles, designer frocks, private jets, flashy diamond jewelry, spacious villas and sleek yachts, the well to do are taking a cue from the broader shift to a sharing economy, epitomized by the ride hailing service Uber, city bike programs and the peer to peer sharing of many goods and services. Consumers are finding more satisfaction and status in experiences, rather than material possessions, according to a 2015 survey on the sharing economy by PricewaterhouseCoopers. "In recent years, we've seen a shift to a sharing versus owning mentality," said Cathy Ross, chief executive of Exclusive Resorts, a collection of 300 privately managed luxury properties around the world that is open to members. "Affluent individuals are now recognizing the benefits of renting, as opposed to owning," she said, "and are more open than ever to renting luxury vacation homes when they travel." Mr. Vladi suggested another motivation: "If you own a property, you have to pay taxes, insurance, and manage the property. We can see it. There is a change in the market. They rent and have fun for two weeks, and then they go." Besides a budding enthusiasm for a more uncluttered lifestyle, patrons say these sharing based services offer more convenience and choices. Many of the world's better off choose to rent their vacation homes instead of buying for a range of reasons, including a desire to avoid burdens like maintenance and homeowner association, or HOA, fees. That is why Geoff Tracy, a Washington restaurateur, bought into Exclusive Resorts with his wife, Norah O'Donnell, anchor of "CBS This Morning." It is "like owning exquisite vacation homes all over the world without having the responsibility or the headaches that come with homeownership," he said. The starter plan costs 45,000 for 20 days over two years. "Wealthy folks are willing to pay a premium to rent places they want for only the time they want them," said Kathleen Peddicord, the founder of the Live and Invest Overseas publishing group. "I have a friend who owned a place in the Cayman Islands for years, but he got worn down with HOA fees, hurricane insurance, maintenance upkeep, etc.," Ms. Peddicord said. "Now he goes to the Caymans for the month of February every year. He pays ridiculous rent for a penthouse at a Ritz Carlton community. But when the month is over, he simply leaves and has no worries the rest of the year and no carrying costs." Then too, there are tax considerations. "Another reason not to own property can have to do with residency and taxes," Ms. Peddicord said. For "someone who has citizenship in a country where the tax system is based on residency" as it is in most European countries "it can make sense to rent to avoid becoming a tax resident." For those afraid of commitment, renting adds flexibility. You can enjoy one place, then move on. "Although the St. Barth real estate market is hot right now, we see many of the uber wealthy, including celebrities, continuing to rent on the island," said Peg Walsh, founder of St. Barth Properties. "Renting vacation homes in St. Barth," she said, "fits with their globe trotting lifestyle and provides them with the flexibility needed for their superbusy schedules." Villas in St. Barth that would catch these renters' eyes include the six bedroom Villa Oasis de Salines, which includes two one bedroom guest pavilions in the garden and rents for around 100,000 a week during peak season. The seven bedroom glass enclosed Villa Athena goes for 49,000 a week for 14 occupants, and the five bedroom Villa Fleur de Sel is 50,000 a week for 10 people. Rates for renting Musha Cay in the Bahamas, the 700 acre private island of the magician David Copperfield, start at 39,000 a night for a four night minimum for up to 12 people (it can accommodate 24). Wealthy travelers also are buying fractional shares of jets and use in hourly increments from Bloom Business Jets, and others like NetJets, Flexjet, Sentient Jet and Wheels Up. A 25 hour jet card from Bloom Business Jets, for instance, allows purchase of individual flights on demand and permits selection of the specific jet type for each flight. Jet card rates range from 128,100 to 249,750, depending on the size of the jet. "A lot of people don't want to own their own plane because it's a big undertaking," said Steven W. Bloom, chief executive of Bloom Business Jets, whose charter business grew around 10 percent in the last year. "The transaction process alone is complicated," Mr. Bloom said. "If you don't have more than 200 hours a year usage, a lot of people choose to charter. It is all about usage. Once you get to a certain level you might as well just own your plane because it is cheaper." But for most people, chartering's benefits are clear, he said. "The convenience and time savings, you don't have a big capital outlay, you don't have to manage the plane and the crew, and you just make one call and someone shows up with an airplane." The disadvantages of chartering are that the plane is usually different every time, and its condition may vary. Many wealthy people "don't want the hassles of owning a yacht," said Ms. Tidmarsh of Luxury Charter Group. "They've done the figures and realize they can charter the latest and greatest superyacht for a completely unique vacation, personalized for them, with none of the ongoing expenses of ownership," she said. "It's walk on, walk off convenience. There are no maintenance logistics or crew to manage, no cleaning, no paperwork and no ongoing invoices and expenses for berthing and upgrades." Luxury Charter Group offers vacation charters on board yachts like the 103 foot Diamond Girl, available for charter out of St. Thomas in the United States Virgin Islands in the winter and Florida or the Bahamas this summer. The cost is 47,000 to 52,000 a week, and taxes and expenses like food, fuel and gratuities for the crew, which can add 20 to 30 percent or more to the bill depending on the destination. The 157 foot Cocktails, with five staterooms, can be rented starting at the 2016 special offer rate of 150,000 per week in the low season to 225,000 per week during Christmas and New Year, and taxes and expenses. The 286 foot Nero has six cabins, which accommodate up to 12 charter guests, and 20 crew members for a weekly rate of 420,000 to around 460,000 per week, depending on the location. In the British Virgin Islands, Virgin Traders rents an eight guest 73 foot motor yacht for around 29,500 a week. The Moorings rents a 57 foot crewed catamaran yacht with six cabins in Tortola starting at 20,230 to 53,200, yacht only. An upside to chartering is that experts estimate it might easily cost 1 million annually to keep a 10 million mega yacht running. Even for well to do yacht owners, fixed costs for fuel and paying a captain and crew, on top of docking fees and maintenance, can be formidable. David Spencer, 38, splits his time between New York and Los Angeles for his business, Talent Resources. Although he owns a 2015 BMW 750, when he is in California he prefers to rent a black Cadillac Escalade for up to three months at a time, at around 2,500 to 3,200 a month. He does that through the Exotic Car Collection of Enterprise, the rental car company. "They know my preferences," Mr. Spencer said. "When I get off the five hour plane in L.A., I like it to be streamlined. I don't have to deal with insuring, storing and maintaining the car." Rates for Enterprise's luxury vehicles vary depending on make, model and market. For example, in Los Angeles, a Mercedes S Class is available for 350 a day. In San Francisco, a Porsche Panamera is available for 400 a day and a Maserati Ghibli for 700 a day. In San Francisco, a Lamborghini Huracan is 2,400 a day. Hertz also offers luxury rentals, via Hertz Dream Cars. A Porsche Boxster at Hertz is available for 300 daily rented at Palm Beach International Airport. Luxury car rentals are growing rapidly. Enterprise has expanded its Exotic Car Collection to 31 locations in the United States and Canada, recently adding two locations in Houston and one in Washington. "This rapid growth is evidence of the strong demand we continue to see for luxury rentals," said Brice Adamson, the senior vice president at Enterprise who oversees the Exotic Car Collection. Affluent customers who own similar luxury vehicles that are in the shop for repairs are behind some of the demand, Mr. Adamson said. Other renters include those who are shopping for new high end autos and want to rent for a few days to get a feel for the ride. Four day rentals are 30 to 800 for apparel in sizes 0 to 22. Accessory rentals run 5 to 400. Many customers are professional women making six figures, who use the "delivered to your door" service. The concept is unpretentious: Customers select a dress, rent it for four days and then return it to the company in a prepaid carrying case. Want to wear a Naeem Khan dress that retails for 5,180? It rents for 800 for four days. A Jason Wu leather handbag that retails for 1,965 rents for 300. "It's about being a smart shopper," said the chief executive and co founder, Jennifer Hyman. "Many clothing items have very low utility. Over 50 percent of a woman's closet women have worn three times or less." "And there is the emotional depreciation of your clothes," she continued. "It's not as exciting to wear something the third time. And with all the social media, everyone sees what you have worn." Also, owning a dress adds work to your life, Ms. Hyman said: "You have to care for it. You have to store it and dry clean it." "There is a feeling of euphoria," she said, "to only surrounding yourself with things that you need." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Dana Carvey impersonated John R. Bolton, President Trump's incoming national security adviser, in an interview with Stephen Colbert on "The Late Show" Wednesday night. It was a bit reminiscent of Carvey's famous impression of the first President George Bush but a few notches more ludicrous. Colbert asked "Bolton," who is known for his far right views and is said to act abusively toward co workers, for reassurance that he was not gunning for pre emptive war with North Korea or Iran. The interview began with Carvey's character pleading innocence, but it didn't take long to fly off the rails. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Prague's Veverkova Street, once a humdrum side street, has evolved into a go to area for design savvy locals and visitors alike. Located in the city's happening Letna district, just east of Prague Castle, this now impossibly hip street is a prime spot for people watching and whiling away hours at cool cafes, shops and showrooms. This one room, corner bookshop and publishing house has been a bright spot among the surrounding gray facades since 2014. Specializing in art and design titles and original posters, it regularly hosts book launch parties, which spill into the street and contribute to Veverkova's lively scene. Award winning furniture designer Helena Darbujanova brought her playful wares to Veverkova with the opening of her first showroom in 2014. One bed has a cute little heart carved out in the headboard. With names like Sweet Tweet, Macaroons and My Dear Fox in Flowers, her pieces are all produced in the Czech Republic by local artisans who share Ms. Darbujanova's zest for life. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Hamilton, a gritty former steel town, roughly 40 miles southwest of Toronto, is making a comeback. The city is getting a big boost from creatives fleeing Toronto's skyrocketing real estate costs. Much of the buzz is centered on once rundown James Street North, which is percolating with a vibrant art scene, inventive farm to table restaurants, edgy start ups and cool shops. Visitors, once a rarity, are descending on the city, too. Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican director and actor, was in the city last year filming "The Shape of Water," (to open in December). He praised the city, calling it "full of promise and surprises." This spot, open since last October, pays tribute to Canada's ethnic mosaic. Its menu leaps from sushi nachos to braised beef cheek. Playfully named cocktails include the bourbon infused Thai Cat, a homage to the Hamilton Tiger Cats of the Canadian Football League. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Each Friday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Farhad: Good morning, Mike! Are you having a good time in our nation's capital? I saw on Instagram that you got to ride the Senate subway. That sounds fun, but it really makes me doubt the wisdom of the Capitol Police. Mike: I picked the perfect time of year to come here. Leaves are changing colors, the air is brisk but not cold, and the smell of pumpkin spice abounds. I think I love D.C. Also, you jest, but I was stopped by Capitol Police multiple times trying to get into the Senate Press gallery. I don't look that suspicious, do I? Farhad: Hmm, no comment. O.K., let's get to tech. Farhad: The big news happened there in D.C. Executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter appeared before lawmakers looking into claims that the Russian government used their platforms to influence the 2016 election. Among other things, the lawmakers released details on the scores of ads purchased by Russian operatives. The ads are wild. The Russians' primary political goal seems to have been to create discord in American society; they took just about every side of every issue, promoting protests over religion, politics and other issues. Beyond the ads, though, did we learn anything new from the hearings? Mike: First, let me say attending House and Senate hearings is surreal. Members of Congress love to have aides blow up tweets and Facebook posts 1,000 percent, plaster them on big pieces of poster board, and then use them as visual aids in the hearing. I spent an hour looking at an advertisement of Satan fighting Jesus in a hearing this week. Anyway, my takeaway: The whole ordeal was mostly orchestrated pageantry a way for lawmakers to give tech execs a very public, rather embarrassing dressing down with a few new facts and insights scattered throughout. For one, all three companies said the reach of Russia backed ads stretched much further than they had originally known. Facebook estimated some 150 million people were served the ads across Facebook and Instagram. That's a lot! But more than that, I found it fruitful that some members of Congress seemed to recognize the more pervasive issue of so called organic content. That is, the posts that you and I and anyone else can create and post to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Those are much more difficult to track, and we still don't know the extent to which Russia linked organic content spread across all of these platforms. I wonder if this contrition will be enough to head off any strong regulation. I suspect it will. Mike: Probably. And note that in the hearings this week, none of the tech companies said they would back the Honest Ads Act, the bill senators are proposing that could impose stricter regulations on digital advertising. So we'll see how far the bill goes after this week. The iPhone X Is Here, and Tech Writers Are Mad Farhad: Mike, how excited are you for the new iPhone? Did you stay up late to order one? Mike: The only things I stay up late for are Radiohead concert ticket sales and New Year's Eve. So, my answer is no. Farhad: I didn't either, so mine is likely to ship in a month's time long after the first ones hit the shelves this weekend. It's a strange feeling to be so left out. In previous years, Apple has given tech journalists a week to look over its latest iPhone. But it completely changed the plan with the coveted X, causing a lot of heartache for us whiny writers. Apple gave some outlets including TechCrunch, Buzzfeed and Backchannel, which is part of Wired a week with the device. But many others, including The Times, were given just a day with the new phones. Meanwhile, Apple also offered review devices to several YouTube stars and some out of left field choices, like the political journalist Mike Allen. Mike: Don't tell the others, but Mike Allen's review was my favorite. He gave the phone to his nephew, who is more tech savvy than him, and relayed what the kid loved about it. I'm totally asking a cousin to write my next Facebook story. Farhad: Ordinarily the question of who gets to review the iPhone would be too inside baseball for us. But as Jake Swearingen at New York points out, Apple's shifting review policies are a good way to document how much the media business has changed since the original iPhone came out in 2007. That year, Apple provided early review units to big print outlets the Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Newsweek. In 2017, Apple has the pick of any outlet it wants; it knows that a review will get a lot of traffic on virtually any site, so it doesn't really matter whether it chooses an established media brand or some YouTuber with a fan base. Mike: I loved Jake's piece! Aside from chuckling at the angry posts from reviewers who felt slighted, it was a clear insight into how Apple believes people buy things these days, and how the older model of going to a select few reviewers perhaps isn't the only way to drive purchasing decisions. Frankly, I agree! I don't really read traditional consumer reviews anymore, and I suspect the crowd for deep tech and gadgety reviews is growing smaller over time. Farhad: I guess we should talk about the actual substance of these reviews. They were mostly positive. After two days of using it, our colleague Brian X. Chen found that the phone was "incredibly fast and took exceptional photos," and that the face detection unlock system mostly worked very well. But like several other reviewers, Brian said the X is not a must for most people. You'll probably get by just fine with a cheaper phone. Mike: I'm not going to buy one because my phone is only a year old. Also, I think if I try to unlock a device with my face I'll break the entire phone. Farhad: O.K., have fun in D.C. Say hi to the president for me! Farhad Manjoo writes a weekly technology column called State of the Art. Mike Isaac covers Facebook, Uber and Twitter. You can follow them on Twitter here: fmanjoo and MikeIsaac | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
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