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Harry Hadden Paton, who will star in "My Fair Lady" on Broadway, shopped for groceries at Myers of Keswick in the West Village. "It feels just like home," said the actor Harry Hadden Paton. On a crisp Sunday morning, Mr. Hadden Paton was standing in Myers of Keswick, a West Village grocery store on Hudson Street that caters to British expats and local gourmands. With a checkerboard floor and flapping Union Jacks, it's an Anglicized Aladdin's cave, crammed with jars, bottles, boxes, bars and vegetarian haggis in a can. "What is a vegetarian haggis?" said Mr. Hadden Paton, who was appropriately tweedy in a nubbled overcoat. He didn't seem to want to find out. "I'm not going to be reaching for that." Best known for playing Bertie Pelham on "Downton Abbey," the marquess who finally gives poor Lady Edith her happy ending, and Martin Charteris, an affable private secretary on "The Crown," Mr. Hadden Paton specializes in buttoned up men who "come in and cry for a little bit," he said. A week earlier, he had flown in from London, accompanied by his wife, the actress Rebecca Night, and their two young daughters, to begin rehearsals for Lerner and Loewe's musical "My Fair Lady," which begins previews at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on March 15. He will play another Englishman, Henry Higgins, the no filter phonetician who teaches Eliza Doolittle all about the rain in Spain. Higgins isn't a crier. Neither is Mr. Hadden Paton, 36, though he had reason enough. The girls had caught colds on the flight over and were still waking up on London time, which meant 3:30 a.m. screams. He described the last several days as "a haze of jet lag and rushing around" assembling cribs, bingeing on pizza, placing desperate Amazon orders. "All the joys," he said. Some home comforts were in order. His face, dashing and slightly rabbity, lit up when he found a display Marmite, the love it or hate it sticky yeast paste. Mr. Hadden Paton is firmly in the love column. "I need to get some," he said. He was surprised to find packages of Percy Pigs, the English, porcine version of gummy bears. "Now these really are niche," he said. Gentleman's relish also caught his eye. "It's an anchovy paste," he said. "It doesn't sound nice. You have it on a crumpet with melted butter. Sparingly." "This is going to get expensive," he said. After admiring the preening shop cat, he pulled out his phone, its screen cracked just that morning, and pulled up a list from his wife: Marmite, Colman's English Mustard, oatcakes, Lee Perrins Worcestershire sauce, Twinings Earl Grey Tea, Twinings English Breakfast Tea. He added a bottle of elderflower cordial and some bars of Cadbury's Dairy Milk. "If I don't come back with some chocolate, I'll be in trouble," he said. He also threw in a bottle of HP Sauce. "My initials," he said. "For years that was my Hotmail account, HPSaucy." Which is the just the sort of charming remark that would probably send a language purist like Higgins into a furious solo. As Mr. Hadden Paton had predicted, it did get expensive. A small basket ran to more than 100. But one item on the list, a box of smoky Lapsang souchong tea, eluded him, so he set off through the warren of West Village streets, getting turned around only a few times. "I'm going to start following the sun," he said jokingly. He arrived at the Tea Sympathy annex, a small shop on Greenwich Avenue stocked with teapots, chocolate boxes and kitsch accessories. He found the Lapsang souchong there and went next door to treat himself to a cup of tea. "I'm right underneath the queen," he said, settling into the cozy tea shop. Then he looked at the photo above his chair more closely. "A look alike." After two seasons on "The Crown," he knows the difference. He marveled at the menu: bangers and mash, sardines on toast, steak and Guinness pie. "This is more English than the English," he said. He ordered the Earl Grey tea, served in a pot adorned with poppies, and a plate of scones with jam and cream. "My Fair Lady" will be his Broadway debut, and he is still surprised he booked it. When he came out for an audition in October, he received a text from the director, Bartlett Sher, asking him to arrive in something Henryish. In a panic he phoned his one friend in New York who is a similar size. That friend, Charlie Cox of "Daredevil," kitted him out in a shirt, jacket and sweater vest "the full Henry Higgins." It worked. Mr. Hadden Paton said that he feels very sympathetic to Higgins, but isn't sure how some of his lines will land in 2018, lines like "Why can't a woman be more like a man." "How am I going to do that?" he said. "I don't know." "I'm going to get booed," he said, neatly deploying a tea strainer. For now he has fans. The waitress recognized him from "Downton Abbey" and asked to take a selfie. He obliged, even stooping slightly to bring both their heads into the frame. "Where are you from? I like your accent," he said, perhaps channeling Higgins, a dialect expert. ("I paid her," he later deadpanned.) With one jammy scone eaten, he hurried to bring his bounty to his wife and daughters. Would Higgins have headed home with a similar haul? "Maybe Marmite," Mr. Hadden Paton said. "He's a Marmite lover." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Connecticut and New York residents who don't live along the coast are likely feeling the heat more than usual this summer, as one town after another has closed off its beaches to everyone except locals. Citing the need to prevent the spread of Covid 19, officials have instituted varying degrees of "residents only" policies on beaches in every coastal Fairfield County town except Greenwich, with Darien and Stamford the latest to shut off access. Some towns farther up the shoreline, including Milford, Madison and Groton, have enacted similar measures. Many Long Island municipalities are also restricting access to town beaches, including Long Beach, Hempstead, Huntington and Southampton. Jennings Beach in Fairfield, Conn., is open only to residents on weekends, a policy adopted in mid July after the first selectwoman, Brenda Kupchick, received a rash of complaints that there were too many people trying to stake out a spot on the sand. "We had people parking all over the beach area, parking a mile or two away, or taking an Uber and walking on," she said. "We have multiple ways to get onto our beaches, right in the middle of residential areas. People were emailing me like crazy saying it was unsafe." Fairfield has since fenced off various entry points to Jennings and other beaches, posted police officers, and raised parking fines from 80 to 200. Up to 150 nonresident vehicles are allowed to park in the Jennings lot on weekdays for a 50 fee. On the first Saturday the policy took effect, many residents were caught off guard when a parks and recreation worker stood on the main pathway to the beach asked them to show I.D. Most, though, expressed relief at the new requirement. "Our virus numbers in Fairfield are low right now we'd all like it to stay that way," said Sara Tieke, who was biking past the beach with her husband, Brad. "You have to draw the line somewhere." David McGuire, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, which filed a friend of the court brief in the 2001 case, said the ACLU is concerned that the virus is being used as a justification for exclusionary beach policies that in decades past were used as a tool for racial injustice. "I'm not saying that's happening now, but we can't allow the pandemic to be an excuse for unfair treatment of people," Mr. McGuire said. "Capacity limits are important, but a resident only scheme doesn't address the issue of social distancing. What they really ought to do is put a cap on how many people can be on the beach, and allow people in on a first come first serve basis. That is a policy grounded in science." Further, he said, policies that reserve the beach for residents on weekends while opening it up to nonresidents on weekdays "are clearly designed to give preferential or exclusive access to residents during certain periods, which is unfair and unconstitutional." But municipal officials do not want to have to turn away their own residents on busy weekends. "Our taxpayers pay for lifeguards, Department of Public Works employees for maintenance of the beaches, law enforcement it's a lot of money," Ms. Kupchick said. "To say to your residents who pay that, you can't go it doesn't seem right." Mr. McGuire said his office will scrutinize all residents only ordinances and their enforcement to determine if they comply with the 2001 Supreme Court decision. In Nassau County, on Long Island, the city of Long Beach stopped selling nonresident daily beach passes on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays as of July 23. The beach was getting too crowded, due in large part to overflow from Jones Beach and Robert Moses, which were reaching capacity early in the day on weekends, said Joe Brand, the city's interim parks and recreation commissioner. "We were overrun with nonresident sales on the weekends in addition to our resident clientele," Mr. Brand said. Gate attendants and security are now posted at each beach entrance. If the beach is too crowded at any one entrance, attendants will close it and urge residents to enter at a different location. "That's easier than telling people they can't access at all," Mr. Brand said. At the county run Nickerson Beach, county officials closed parking to nonresidents back in May in response to Mayor Bill de Blasio's decision to keep New York City beaches closed. That policy ended once New York City opened its beaches in July. "Because city beaches hadn't been opened, we wanted to avoid people coming from the city and overcrowding," said Jordan Carmon, a spokesman for the county executive, Laura Curran. "The entire point was the health and safety of residents and ensuring that county residents had access to the single county beach that they pay to maintain and operate." Restricting public access along that shoreline could potentially violate federal policies that require communities that accept federal funds for beach restoration to maintain public access. Last year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed a 130 million storm risk reduction project in Long Beach, Lido Beach and Point Lookout. Stuart Malec, a spokesman for Representative Kathleen M. Rice, said the congresswoman's district office on Long Island had inquired with the Army Corps about the restrictions. He said they received this response from the Army Corps' public affairs office: "Any decisions made by local health official and authorities to temporarily close or limit access to beaches due to the Covid pandemic is not expected to affect any funding decisions regarding future long term repair assistance or renourishment actions for those projects." Back in Connecticut, Brenden Leydon, the Stamford lawyer who brought the lawsuit challenging Greenwich's exclusionary policy 19 years ago, said the pandemic makes the issue of access more "murky," but that town officials should try to approach it with flexibility. "They should perhaps take it on a day by day basis, let's see how it's going, rather than just say the beach is closed to nonresidents until October," Mr. Leydon said. Such "blanket declarations," he noted, are hard to justify when the towns are, at the same time, welcoming nonresidents to come to their restaurants for indoor dining. Greenwich, for its part, is trying to strike a balance, making available up to 350 nonresident beach passes a day, said Fred Camillo, the first selectman. The passes are 8, and there is a 40 parking fee at Greenwich Point and Byram Park beaches. "You want to be as welcoming as you can, while being fair to the residents who are footing the bill too," Mr. Camillo said. 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 |
Alberto Savinio's "Family of Lions," from 1927, one of 22 of his paintings on display at the Center for Italian Modern Art. The Greek born Italian artist Alberto Savinio spent most of his life in the shadow of his older brother, Giorgio de Chirico, famed as the pioneer of Surrealist painting. It remains to be seen if he will spend eternity there. The question is not settled by "Alberto Savinio," a rare exhibition of 22 of his paintings at the Center for Italian Modern Art in SoHo, but it is given a tantalizing spin. Savinio (1891 1952) was born in Athens to a family of Italian speaking Greeks and went to Italy as a teenager. He changed his name in 1914, during a sojourn in Paris (1911 1915) with his brother, who was already becoming known for the dreamlike metaphysical paintings that proved foundational to Surrealism. These efforts, as de Chirico admitted, had been formulated with the multitalented Savinio, who worked variously during his life as poet, novelist, critic, composer, pianist and set designer as well as a painter. The brothers frequented avant garde circles and were especially close to Guillaume Apollinaire, contributing essays to a journal he published. But at the time, music was Savinio's chief interest and, not unlike the Italian Futurists, he favored reducing it to raw, physical sound. On May 21, 1914, Savinio gained notoriety with a well attended concert where he played the piano so violently that it had to be replaced more than once. The event would be recalled by Blaise Cendrars in his 1948 book, "Bourlingueur." The war forced the brothers back to Italy but 1926 found them both in Paris again, with Savinio very much in painting mode. All but one of the canvases here date from the second Paris sojourn, which ended in early 1934. They reveal an artist juggling several styles, all buoyed by easy, robust paint handling, all connected more or less to Surrealism. The best of them seem startlingly ahead of their time. Their restlessness, juxtapositions of disparate styles and use of photography especially anticipate important postwar developments. The most surprising combine traditional landscape painting with colorful abstract patterning or still life arrays of cheerful toylike forms. In "The Enchanted Island," a pile of these forms transparent and festively decorated with dots and spirals suggests a trash heap of neon signs set against stormy cliffs and presage the piled compositions of late Guston. The toys become solid and more playful in "The Wise Men," where they hover above a desert like a spacecraft, and in two works where they occupy a jutting offshore rock. The naturalistic backgrounds of these works evince a generic romantic realism. In one of the show's standouts an untitled work from 1929 a stand of dark trees fills the foreground beneath a sky of bright, jaunty abstract patterns. By now, you may wonder as I did, if the artist was applying ironic modern motifs to thrift shop finds as the Situationist painter Asger Jorn would in the late 1950s. But no, he painted everything, one foot in the past, one in the future. Savinio, who was especially close to his mother, also painted from family photographs. "Portrait of a Child," based on an image of the artist as a toddler, is rendered in sepia tones with buttery brushwork. He wears a dress (as was the custom) and stands among dolmens and ruined columns. In another painting an image of the artist's parents is outlined on white (evoking Picasso's drawn portraits of the early 1920s) and joined by a fat Baroque Cupid. The parents migrate separately or together among other canvases, sometimes mutating into stone statues, as in "Family of Lions," from 1927. In slightly stomach churning scenes like "The Widow" and "The Parents," both from 1931, Savinio's mother acquires the scrawny head and fleshy wattles of a turkey. The vitality and prescience of the best paintings here make you wonder what would have happened had Savinio devoted more time to painting, while making it clear that his interests remained peripatetic and polymorphous, even within one medium. Nonetheless his unsettled, unsettling work may feel more alive and useful to our moment than his brother's. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
HONG KONG An interest rate cut in Australia and lowered economic growth estimates by the Asian Development Bank on Tuesday highlighted the extent to which the economic woes of Europe and the United States are spilling into the Asia Pacific region. Economic growth in much of Asia remains robust, the Asian Development Bank said. But trade and financial activity have already started to be eroded by the turmoil in Europe, and they risk being undermined further if the European debt crisis evolves into a full blown financial and economic crisis like the one spurred by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. "Things are changing very rapidly not just weekly and daily, but hourly," Iwan J. Azis, head of the development bank's office of regional economic integration, said at a news conference in Hong Kong, as he presented the bank's latest update on emerging East Asian nations. The bank lowered its 2012 growth forecast for the emerging East Asia region which includes China and much of Southeast Asia, but not India and Japan to 7.2 percent, from a previous estimate of 7.5 percent. It also cautioned that growth could be as low as 5.4 percent if the West's troubles escalated and tipped the United States and Europe back into recession. Hopes of at least a modest upturn in the United States have risen after some better than expected manufacturing and job data in recent weeks, though unemployment remains stubbornly high. The outlook for Europe, however, is grim, as austerity budgets and tighter lending by beleaguered banks constrain growth. Analysts at Nomura, for instance, said they expected the euro zone to contract 1 percent next year. Top European policy makers are to assemble in Brussels on Thursday and Friday to fashion a solution to the region's sovereign debt woes. Over the last weeks, the crisis has spilled beyond small peripheral euro zone nations and begun to undermine investors' confidence in larger economies like Italy and even France. The rapid deterioration has prompted a succession of support measures from international financial institutions in recent weeks. The European Central Bank lowered interest rates last month and is widely expected to do so again on Thursday. In another bid to restore confidence, the two main leaders of the euro zone Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said on Monday that they would work together to remake the European Union into a more integrated political and economic federation, with tight legal restraints on how much debt national parliaments could issue. The changes would effectively subordinate economic sovereignty to collective discipline enforced by European technocrats in Brussels. The Asia Pacific region is for the most part not burdened with the high government and household debt levels that are weighing on Europe and the United States. Asian banks also have little exposure to European debt, meaning that any defaults would not cause huge write downs. Still, much of the region depends on the West as a market for its products, and slowing demand in the United States and Europe has caused export growth from Asia to ease in recent months. Economic growth in China has also slowed as Beijing's efforts to cool down excessively rapid growth earlier this year have borne fruit. The Australian central bank highlighted those concerns with its decision to lower interest rates on Tuesday. The cut, the second in two months, took the main cash rate to 4.25 percent, from 4.5 percent. Trade in Asia is now "seeing some effects of a significant slowing in economic activity in Europe," Glenn Stevens, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, said in a statement. "The sovereign credit and banking problems in Europe, to which European governments are still seeking to craft a full response, are likely to weigh on economic activity there over the period ahead." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
TEL AVIV In early October, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York ordered schools to close in some areas with large populations of ultra Orthodox Jews because of coronavirus outbreaks. Some of the schools refused, and the governor threatened as a consequence to withhold state funding. At about the same time in Israel, a rabbi commanded his followers to open ultra Orthodox schools, in defiance of government shutdown orders. Israel's health minister warned these schools that they could face "heavy fines." Two countries, two different systems of government and a similar challenge: how to deal with ultra Orthodox Jewish communities that while having high infection rates also refuse to take the necessary precautions. Jews and gentiles must be careful not to single out the ultra Orthodox, who look different and act different from most of us. I will try my best to be cautious. I will also state that I see much to admire in the ultra Orthodox way of life: the sense of community and mutual responsibility, the emphasis on study, the devotion to tradition. And yet, I also feel an urgent need to advise ultra Orthodox Jews to adapt to a new reality, one in which ultra Orthodoxy's great success its ability to thrive in a modern world has become its great challenge. Ultra Orthodox Judaism today is based on strict adherence to Jewish law, a highly conservative worldview and a rejection of many components of the modern world (from evolutionary science to television), with the aim of erecting a shield against secularization and assimilation. In shorthand, the ultra Orthodox are called Haredi based on the Hebrew word for "trembling," because these Jews tremble before God. On its own terms, ultra Orthodoxy in Israel and the United States has been highly successful in achieving its goals. What were those goals? To establish an undisturbed and vibrant community of mitzvot (commandments) and Torah study. Seventy years ago, with the destruction of most ultra Orthodox communities in Europe in the Holocaust, some assumed that the end of this branch of Judaism was near. However, with stubbornness and sophistication, high birthrates and social cohesion, ultra Orthodox communities are growing and thriving. This success hasn't come without many challenges. The first is economic: Ultra Orthodox Jews tend to be poor by design. They prioritize study over work, and thus rely heavily on philanthropy and public support. The second is civil. Especially in Israel, where Haredi Jews both rely on public funds and still enjoy exemption from military service, there is a general feeling that this community does not pull its weight. The third challenge is the relationship Haredi communities have with their surroundings. A demographic rise of the Haredi world makes the population both more noticeable and more influential. In a democracy, numbers have meaning, and in Israel and New York, the Haredi are a highly effective voting bloc. Socially, Haredi neighborhoods and towns tend to be less than hospitable to outsiders, and as the neighborhoods expand, clashes with neighbors are common. So these communities are gradually becoming harder to ignore. And the pandemic might be the ultimate demonstration of the emerging problem. In Jerusalem and New York, where these Jews live in great and fast growing numbers, a puzzled public begins to feel these communities have become too independent. Haredi Jews have large families and live in densely populated areas. This enhances their model of togetherness and separateness. It also makes them more vulnerable to the coronavirus. By and large, like many closed communities, Haredi Jews are suspicious of outside institutions. (Some of this is born of a long history of persecution.) When outsiders demanded they shut down schools or cancel weddings or stop attending their synagogues, many of the leaders were thinking that such a decree could come only from people who do not understand the importance of these practices. They refused to comply. To these characteristics we must add Haredis' suspicion of science (a feature of modernity) and their general stiff necked mentality the essence of resisting the temptations of a changing outer world. So it is not surprising that a sudden demand to change their community's behavior was met by many Haredi Jews and, notably, by many important Haredi leaders with suspicion and open revolt. Some of them refuse to wear masks; some evade testing. Others send their children to school even when it is prohibited or attend mass funerals, where they clash with the police in New York and Jerusalem. Many attend crowded synagogues. No wonder that the rate of infections in ultra Orthodox communities has skyrocketed. Haredi Jews are well practiced in defying the larger society in which they live, and defiance is the tool they pulled out when new pandemic rules were dictated. They did it by using political clout and harsh rhetoric, arguing that the authorities were being discriminatory. Of course, they have every right to use political clout to make their case. It is also reasonable to assume that in some cases Haredi Jews are being singled out. (The fact that they are easily identifiable because of their distinctive clothing makes it almost inevitable.) And yet it is time for Haredi leaders to realize that their model of isolation from the larger public is becoming archaic. Not because it failed, but because it succeeded. The Haredi model in Israel and the West over the past century was meant to keep a threatened enclave from being wiped out by a cultural tsunami. It was tolerated as such by a generally indifferent public in relatively tolerant countries, and in Israel, where Jewish sentimentality added another layer of commitment of the state to the survival of the Haredi world. In short, it was designed for a weak group attempting to prevent decline. But as a model for a strong and thriving community it is flawed and dangerous. The thriving of the Haredi world in recent decades was made possible by an ability to be different, without being threatening; to reject the influence of the outside world, without being disruptive. Indeed, the disobedience of a weak minority can be tolerated. But the disobedience of a strong community particularly one that could affect the health of the larger public is more difficult to defend. Few things prompt hatred, fear and vengefulness like a pandemic. What we have witnessed in recent months is dangerous, first and foremost for the future of the ultra Orthodox world. If Israelis completely lose patience with the Haredi lifestyle, the consequences for the community could be drastic. If Americans become hostile to the community, the consequences could be even graver. Anti Semitism, already on the rise, feeds on fear and suspicion. So Haredi Jews are playing with fire. That is because they are not truly that powerful. Not if the world turns against them. No wonder that those of us who see value and beauty in the Haredi world those of us who watch with admiration their prioritization of compassion over personal success, who identify with their prioritization of study over wealth and who respect their resistance to assimilation look at recent events with a growing sense of apprehension. Shmuel Rosner ( rosnersdomain) is a contributing opinion writer, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and the author, most recently, of " IsraeliJudaism: Portrait of a Cultural Revolution." 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 |
Washington Dressed in a crisp purple T shirt and slip on canvas sneakers, Eric Hilton, half of the 1990s electronic music collective Thievery Corporation, stood on Ninth Street in the city's Shaw neighborhood, offering a glimpse behind what was once the area's boarded up warehouses and parking lots. He pointed to No. 2016, a graffiti covered brick rowhouse with a fluorescent yellow "vacant property" sign plastered outside. Mr. Hilton calls this Montserrat House, and it is where Moby once played an acoustic concert and where, on a Thursday afternoon last summer, a singer named Tamara Wellons was laying down vocals for his group's next album. Next, he gestured to No. 2014 next door, a shuttered rowhouse where Mr. Hilton plans to open a Korean barbecue restaurant with Erik Bruner Yang, known for his ramen shop Toki Underground on H Street. It is one of four restaurant projects Mr. Hilton has underway. It's a lot for a man celebrating more than 20 years of making music in the nation's capital, and about half as much time backing a string of restaurants and bars that have been credited with helping transform pockets of the city's night life. Four of those establishments the Brixton (a British style pub), Satellite Room (an "L.A. style dive diner bar"), American Ice Company (rustic Americana) and El Rey (a taqueria) are within a three block radius of Montserrat house. Two were abandoned properties, one was a warehouse, the last a vacant lot. "I like going to an area that will be hot," Mr. Hilton said. "I'm just baffled no one saw those abandoned buildings and open land surrounding the 9:30 club," he added, referring to Washington's venerable music hall down the block. Born 50 years ago in Rockville, Md., Mr. Hilton fled to downtown Washington at 18 and picked up cash as a D.J. at clubs around the city and the host of parties in empty warehouses. "We'd have a makeshift bar and Kinko's fliers and we'd get 5,000 people," he said. "But it was very hand to mouth." In 1995 he gambled his savings on the 18th Street Lounge, a moody saloon with antique velvet Victorian couches south of Dupont Circle, in an unlikely space above a mattress shop. (It is still open.) That year Mr. Hilton met Rob Garza, and the two began Thievery, an influential electronica act that melded jazzy electronic grooves with bossa nova, hip hop, Indian rock, reggae and other international beats. Their sound defined a new genre of ambient electronic music, a kind of global soundtrack for the pre iPod, late '90s melange of boutique hotels, cosmopolitan cocktails and colored mood lighting. "They have managed to stay successful in electronic music, which can be very fickle," says Michaelangelo Matos, author of "The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America." "They haven't been tied to one sound, they can be a little fungible." While Thievery never stopped recording (they still use a recording studio at the Montserrat House), the partnership was sidelined as Mr. Garza focused on his own music, and Mr. Hilton turned his attention to his growing night life empire. In 2007 Mr. Hilton opened Marvin, a Belgian style diner at the intersection of 14th and U Streets in a space that was once a Subway franchise. The area, known in the early to mid 20th century as Black Broadway for its theaters and restaurants, had just begun to rebound from the riots of the 1960s. Marvin became a favorite of young White House staff members from the first Obama administration. "He gave cred to an area that wasn't going to get cred unless a local came in and understood it, and understood what would work there," said Kate Glassman Bennett, a White House correspondent for the Independent Journal and a native Washingtonian. "I don't think any of the stuff around 14th and U would have happened without him." Along with his brother, Ian, Mr. Hilton began to scout properties along the U Street corridor, from Ninth to 14th Streets, and opened a half dozen other bars, including a now closed reggae dance hall. These days, the area teems with mid and high end restaurants and bars. "Everyone said, 'Why would you open eight bars that almost directly compete with each other?' " said Svetlana Legetic, founder of Brightest Young Things, a web magazine and event production agency. "People thought they would cannibalize themselves, but the genius of it was that it created a destination." Mr. Hilton's brand of gentrification was not universally celebrated. In 2012, Stephen A. Crockett Jr. wrote an essay in the blog The Root calling Mr. Hilton's establishments, whose names reference the city's African American history, a form of "swagger jacking." The debate raged for weeks. "I completely appreciate that perspective," Mr. Hilton said. "When we named the restaurant Marvin, it was to remind people that Marvin Gaye was from D.C." One bar was called Blackbyrd, for the 1970s era jazz funk group led by Donald Byrd, a musician and professor at Howard. (Its name and decor have since changed twice.) The controversy did little to deter crowds. Today, Mr. Hilton has 10 bars and restaurants, and they seem to be thriving. He has also moved into other neighborhoods, including Petworth, City Center and Georgetown, where he is opening a wine bar next to Chez Billy Sud, a French restaurant he also operates. Despite the see and be seen air that some of his establishments cultivate, Mr. Hilton is rarely spotted there during evening hours, expect for one spot. "My favorite bar is the Gibson," he said, referring to a quiet, unmarked speakeasy that he opened two doors over from Marvin in 2008. It is known for its reservation only policy and Prohibition era cocktails. "There is no really one type of person there," he said. "You don't really notice if people are hip or cool or professional exec types or fixed gear bicycle types. Everyone seems to fit in." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
When They Met, She Was a Wreck. So Was He. Sometimes in life's worst moments, we realize how strong and resilient we truly are. And, in those moments, our vulnerability might allow magic to happen. It was after 10 p.m. on Dec. 7, 2013 a beautiful winter night in New Jersey. I was driving home from an office holiday potluck dinner, from Parsippany, N.J., to River Vale, N.J., a familiar stretch of road I had been driving for two years now. As I listened to "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry (lyrics like "make me your Aphrodite" a bit of Greek irony comes later), my steering wheel felt funny and started to shake. The road was shiny, and in the time it took me to register what the temperature gauge was showing 31 degrees I realized that wasn't water on the road. Panic set in. Suddenly, I was straddling the two highway lanes, surrounded by two Jersey barriers, no shoulder in sight. I had no control. A rush of terror and fear overcame me as I helplessly slid across the road. I started screaming. I turned to look out my passenger window. Lights were coming. All I could do was scream please no, please no! But the headlights only got closer and before I knew it BOOM. My car started spinning. BOOM. Hit again. Finally, I stopped spinning and found myself facing a wall of oncoming headlights. The smell of smoke filled my car and I panicked, thinking my car was on fire. But I couldn't get out. Both of my doors were pushed in and stuck. Fear overwhelmed me. Suddenly my door was yanked open. "Are you OK?! Are you hurt?!" I jumped out of my car. The rush of fear and emotion was too much. I broke down in the middle of the highway. The man who opened the door tried to calm me down as I cried. I turned and looked at the vehicles facing me, a tractor trailer two cars back. So close was I and whoever was in the other car to a very different ending. Instead, there we were, two cars, one black, one white, like yin and yang, perfectly parked next to each other, both facing the wrong way and staring at headlights for as far as I could see. Soon, several state troopers were there. They closed the on ramp from Interstate 287 onto Route 80. The road was closed for an hour. Once the scene was secure and I was feeling safer, the troopers thought I might like a piece of my totaled car to keep as a remembrance of just how lucky I was. And so we scoured the road and I picked up the Ford Taurus logo off the ground. Then, they told me to thank the driver of the other car. Wait, I should thank the guy who had hit me? Well, the state trooper told me, if it weren't for him you wouldn't be standing there right now. And I wouldn't be writing this today. That stranger, who I later learned was Nicholas Angelus, was then a volunteer firefighter in Hopewell, N.J. He had pulled his emergency brake to gain more control of his car, and instead of T boning me, he managed to sideswipe me. He also had immediately hit his hazards and horn to notify the other cars and tractor trailers behind him. He then leapt from his car and ran to mine to help. We were already sore from the collision, but we both walked away. Both cars were totaled. My family soon arrived to the accident scene. We offered to drive Nicholas home. I wrecked his car and he saved my life. It was the least we could do. Nicholas, I learned later, told the friend he stayed with that night that he was going to date me. The next day Nicholas called my cellphone to see if I was O.K. I hung up on him after 30 seconds. I was so nervous, worried he was going to sue me. But he kept calling, because he cared. We wound up talking for hours and because of those constant calls, we got to know each other. We had our first date Dec. 30, about three weeks later. (Because neither of us had a car yet, we met in Manhattan. I took a bus in, he took a train.) I wish I could reach out to each of the many frustrated drivers and passengers who were stuck in the four mile backup that night. If only they knew the magic that came of that treacherous accident, they might have renewed faith in the power of love. You never know who is ready to open the door for you, and change your life forever. Jennifer Lind Angelus, 27, is an associate trade marketing manager at DanoneWave, working on the Oikos and Danimals yogurt brands. Nicholas Angelus, 26, is the assistant manager at Banchetto Feast, a restaurant in Nanuet, N.Y. He is now a volunteer firefighter in Spring Valley, N.Y. The couple married Oct. 14, 2017 (wedding hashtag: accidentallyangelus) and honeymooned in Greece, where he shared his family heritage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Like many other media executives, Pamela Wasserstein was wary of tech giants and their attempts to go into business with content creators. "There was great optimism around partnerships, and I think that optimism has largely cooled, and people are now more cautious," said Ms. Wasserstein, the chief executive of New York Media, the publisher of New York magazine and web titles like The Cut and Vulture. But like others in her position at publishers like Conde Nast, Dow Jones and Meredith, she put caution aside and joined Apple's media initiative, the recently unveiled Apple News Plus app, which promises to blast out content across more than a billion devices worldwide. The tech giant based the service on an app it acquired last year called Texture, which gave readers access to some 200 publications with a single subscription. The revamped and renamed version, introduced with much fanfare last week at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., charges subscribers 9.99 a month ( 12.99 in Canada) for content from more than 300 titles, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Time, The Atlantic and People, as well as The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. (Also included: Airbnb Magazine, Birds Blooms, Retro Gamer and Salt Water Sportsman, befitting the app's conceit as an omnibus newsstand.) Weighing the pros and cons, Ms. Wasserstein concluded that Apple News Plus would allow her publications to reach "a new audience in an environment that feels right for us." Going into business with a tech giant was a calculated risk. Like most publishers, New York Media had seen its revenue shrink in an internet environment where Google and Facebook scoop up advertising dollars and have great influence over what people read. (New York Media's online sales have grown more recently.) There's a sense among Manhattan's media ranks that any deal with Silicon Valley amounts to a fool's bargain. Now, by necessity, magazines, newspapers and websites have learned to be promiscuous tradesmen to stop relying on one revenue source. They have embraced new business lines like branded content, conferences and podcasts just to diversify and stay afloat. Apple's plan was something altogether different, Mr. Cook promised. "This is going to take Apple News to a whole new level," he said. Cheers bounced around the room half occupied by Apple employees as glossy magazine covers skated across the giant screen at his back. The marketing event seems to have accomplished its goal. More than 200,000 people subscribed to Apple News Plus in its first 48 hours more than Texture had amassed at its peak, according to two people with knowledge of the figures who asked not to be named to discuss confidential information. (Texture's subscribers have not been counted toward Apple's subscribers.) The New York Times and The Washington Post did not join the effort, despite intense lobbying from Apple. Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The Times, said the problem with the app, from his perspective, was how it "jumbled different news sources into these superficially attractive mixtures," making it difficult for users to know which publication they're consuming. A spokeswoman for The Post said that the paper's "focus is on growing our own subscription base" and that it was not interested in offering its wares through another company. Some executives who said yes to the plan seemed less than sanguine, but they declined to comment publicly for fear of upsetting Apple or violating the ironclad nondisclosure agreements the news companies had signed. The day after the splashy announcement, The New Yorker found itself on the defensive after a Reuters headline blared: "Is it time to dump your New Yorker subscription?" In reply, Michael Luo, the editor of The New Yorker's website, sounded off in a 13 part tweetstorm advising readers not to dump the magazine. Only a portion of its archive would be available on the Apple service, he wrote, and readers could miss out on certain articles by Ronan Farrow, Jane Mayer and Doreen St. Felix, not to mention the weekly crossword. 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 best way to read ALL that we do newyorker every day and every week is to subscribe," Mr. Luo tweeted. Patrick Soon Shiong, the owner and publisher of The Los Angeles Times, seemed unworried about tying the paper's fortunes to Apple, saying in an email that the service would "encourage more people to pay for quality content." The Journal reported that, thanks to the deal with Apple, it would add 50 people to its newsroom. But the union that represents the paper's employees noted the new job listings were open to contract workers. "It would be the first time that we'd see a move toward an unprotected work force," Tim Martell, the union's executive director, said. "We don't like the uncertainty." To abide by the union's contract with The Journal, Mr. Martell added, contract workers in the newsroom would be allowed to work for a maximum of 12 months. That suggests the Journal sees these hires as a temporary assignment a compromise approach as it gauges the benefits and costs of the Apple partnership. The majority of Journal stories will appear on the service, but with only a three day archive. Content for niche groups, such as CFO Journal, which is aimed at the financial community, and CMO Today, geared toward advertising professionals, will not be included. For Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The Journal since 2007, the partnership is a way for him to realize his long held dream of turning the paper into something of interest to readers beyond Wall Street and corporate boardrooms. The mogul was the driving force behind the Apple deal, according to two executives close to Mr. Murdoch. He wants The Journal to include more general interest, sports and lifestyle coverage, and the partnership with Apple gives the paper a concrete reason to move beyond its core readership. Unswayed by sentiment, Mr. Murdoch, 88, recently sold off the bulk of his television and film properties as he refocused on the news business and reshaped his empire into an entity built to survive the final steps of the digital revolution. He was able to extract better terms from Apple than other publishers, the people close to him said, including the ability to exit on a time frame that would be more favorable to The Journal. Mr. Murdoch has worked with Apple in the past. In 2011, when tablets were supposedly going to save journalism, he poured millions into an iPad publication, The Daily, with the help of Apple's chief executive, Steven P. Jobs. The effort failed to make its mark and was shut down after less than two years. Publications that originated at the now defunct Time Inc. like Time, Sports Illustrated and Fortune are also part of Apple News Plus. They were pushed into the arrangement as part of a deal struck by Meredith, the company that purchased them in 2017, according to two news executives familiar with the matter. Although Meredith sold Time and Fortune last year and is looking to move Sports Illustrated, the three publications appear to be locked in to Apple News Plus, at least for the time being. (Meredith and Apple declined to comment.) The economics of Apple's venture will vary from title to title. After the company takes half the subscription price, its partners will split the rest. How much each media company receives is based on the amount of time readers devote to its content. That model mimics Spotify and Apple Music, which pay record labels based on how often their tracks are streamed. The visibility of individual articles will depend on Apple's algorithm, which takes into account a user's preference you can "follow" a particular magazine or topic as well as the judgments of Lauren Kern, the editor in chief of Apple News, and her team. In contrast with Google and Facebook, Apple has promoted the human touch. The presence of Ms. Kern, a former editor at New York magazine, has to some degree assuaged publishers' fears of algorithmic tyranny. "Lauren being there gives me confidence, but it's not that she knows who we are, but that she knows what great content is," said Ms. Wasserstein, of New York Media. Although Ms. Kern provides a link between the news media and Silicon Valley, Apple will also have to get used to the journalists now associated with its team. The New Yorker weighed in on the Cupertino event with a satirical story headlined "Tim Cook's Big Apple Circus." Apple got another taste of what it has signed up for after it hosted a private party last week for its new partners at the company's Lower Manhattan loft. In its coverage of the event, Vanity Fair, one of those partners, included a quote from an unnamed partygoer who summed up the mood of the room and, perhaps, the industry at large. The quote became the story's headline: "Are we at a party, or a wake?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
This article is part of our latest special report on Design, which is about getting personal with customization. How many French factory workers does it take to screw in 220 light bulbs? Just one, according to Jerome de Lavergnolle, chief executive of the crystal company Saint Louis, describing the final step in making a bespoke chandelier for a client in Russia. But it took 25 craftsmen to shape and cut the stupendous metal structure with its 3,000 mouth blown crystal pieces, Mr. de Lavergnolle said. The glittering behemoth, designed for the stairwell of a private home, was 30 feet high with 12 tiers and weighed more than 5,500 pounds. In a world of well oiled factory production, affluent consumers routinely challenge designers and fabricators to break the mold. Made to order or, in Mr. de Lavergnolle's phrase, "made to dream" objects are emblems of singularity that astonish the beholder and almost throb with personal meaning. In France, the seat of savoir faire, tales of custom commissions can take your breath away. Puiforcat, whose silversmithing lineage goes back nearly 200 years, recently produced a gold plated serving set to celebrate the birth of an infant prince (no names, of course). The set, which included a porridge bowl and egg cup, among other gummable things, was based on a 17th century fluted goblet in the Louvre that was said to have belonged to Anne of Austria, the mother of King Louis XIV of France. It took 60 hours just to engrave the floral motif on a cup, said Amelie de Cagny, director of marketing and communications for the French company. Procurers of custom pieces frequently savor them in private. Adam Hunter, a Los Angeles interior designer with a sparkling list of household name clients, recounted commissioning the world's most beautiful door to a panic room for a couple who live on a gated 450 acre property in Nashville. The clients wanted to carry an overall theme of Jules Verne inspired steampunk into the lower level, next to a corner occupied by a replica of the robot from the 1960s sci fi television series "Lost in Space." Working with the metal furniture and fabrication company Amuneal, Mr. Hunter designed a shiny portal in the style of an old fashioned bank vault door, with a steering wheel handle and artfully placed bolts. Inside are a refrigerator and a bar with stools, in case the owners want to use the space for wine tastings. Often designers relish the particularity and peculiarity of bespoke assignments, even those that trigger anxiety. "We assumed we would get a beautifully groomed horsetail," Mr. Hendifar recalled. "It came in a Ziploc bag." The production team set up an impromptu horsehair salon "and conditioned and straightened and conditioned and straightened and got it looking its best," Mr. Hendifar continued. "We made the fixture and sent it to the clients and they were over the moon." Aaron Aujla described a time shortly after he and Benjamin Bloomstein founded their New York design studio Green River Project three years ago that a very big celebrity (so big Mr. Aujla would not disclose his industry) commissioned a metal bench that would run around the perimeter of his apartment like an old radiator. The tricky part was measuring the bench so that it wrapped perfectly around a floor to ceiling circular column. "It was just half an inch off," Mr. Aujla recalled. "So close." The partners dragged the bench out to the client's tiny, windy patio, 30 floors up, and shaved off the offending length. The architect Tom Kundig performed a high wire act less than a decade ago, when he designed a house in the San Juan Islands in Washington that was sunk into a rocky outcropping and partly composed of the excavated stones. Though common in ancient times, "building into rock is hardly ever done anymore," Mr. Kundig said. It takes extra work to make the structure waterproof, temperate and stable. He and his contractor learned on the job and later marveled that they pulled it off, unaware that their client was listening to them gloat. "You mean you guys didn't know what the hell you were doing?" she asked. On the whole, designers who customize must see around corners and help clients do the same. Seth Rolland, a woodworker in Port Townsend, Wash., used hand tools and fancy software and hardware to produce a 34,000 cherry wood desk that met the specific needs of his client, an environmental lawyer. After noting that she elevated her monitor on a stack of books, he sculpted a pedestal on the desktop. And seeing that she liked to tilt her keyboard for improved ergonomics, he built a slanted, retractable tray. Her work surface is routinely littered with paper, so he made the base of the new desk the beauty zone. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
With college campuses closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, free virtual tours have grown in popularity. High school juniors hoping to begin college in the fall of 2021 are not able to visit campuses in person, but they and their families have many ways to explore their options while staying safe at home. Here is a guide to some of the tour sites that aim to help students feel as if they are walking around campuses. They can visit as many colleges as they like, without the cost of a road trip or the aching feet. If you are just getting started on the college admissions process: The National Association for College Admission Counseling provides information from more than 1,000 colleges and universities on changes to admissions processes resulting from the pandemic. The tool lets students get an overview of resources available at each institution, including links to virtual tours offered, said the association's president, Jayne Caflin Fonash. "If someone only wants to know about schools in a certain state, or is only interested in finding out about standardized testing policies for the fall, they can drill down to get that information," Dr. Fonash said. StriveScan is offering the Strive Virtual College Exploration program through May 8 to take the place of in person college fairs. Students get advice on how to write a college essay, apply for financial aid, and the chance to ask questions to officials from more than 450 colleges from 45 states and 13 countries Canada, Britain, Ireland, Italy, France, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Belgium, Australia and Mexico. All sessions are taped, allowing students to download them. StriveScan's president, Dan Saavedra, said more presentations will be held in the coming weeks, including one focusing on STEM schools and another on small, private liberal arts schools. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Olivier Rousteing, the 30 year old creative director of the French luxury house Balmain, commands fashion social media and knows how to make a moment an event. He calls the celebrities in his orbit the Balmain Army, but he's always close by when the close cut dresses are on. For Kanye West's Yeezy Season 3 show in February, Mr. Rousteing dressed the entire Kardashian Jenner West clan (even North) in ripped knit dresses and feathery coats. During the show, Kanye gave him a shout out for dressing the fam, an unprecedented nod for a designer to give at his own show. Mr. Rousteing is now a celebrity in his own right. In March, Vogue.com posted a beauty article entitled "Getting Olivier Rousteing Worthy Cheekbones Is Easier Than You Think." He has admitted that he sucks in cheeks for photos; he concedes that the thread of images he shares (a body, a suite, a face, a party, a party, a face, a suite, a body) are a hyper reality. The Balmain Army knows the drill: full attention to the camera and then, because so many Instagrams from behind the scenes are followed with more candid behind the behind the scenes photos, the fierce looks break into smiles, or at least less suctioned pouts. We see Kendall's fringed arm draped over Mr. Rousteing's shoulder, Kylie in white silk leaning softly into his chest, Kanye's gold embroidered sleeve grazing his hand, Kim in lace up heels steadied by the designer's tuxedoed arm, Kris's face in close, moments after a whisper. Each overstated piece and tender pose is custom made for the occasion. The clothes seem to live only on these famous bodies. Even on the app Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, for which Mr. Rousteing designed dresses and accessories that players can buy with real money or the game's currency, K stars, the clothes come precurved. According to Women's Wear Daily, Balmain's presence on the app drove more than two million visitors to the label's website. The opening of the SoHo store this month was quieter. "We didn't make a big deal out of it," a salesclerk told locals popping in for the first time. "We unlocked the doors, that's it." Balmain will celebrate the opening by hosting an after party for the Met Ball on May 2, but inside, the actual space is without even a suggestion of Balmain's accumulated attention and exposure on social media. The store is beige. If it were my hotel room, I wouldn't Instagram it. But I would definitely put on Kanye West's "Waves." (Let me crash here for the moment/I don't need to own it) and enter the bed via leap. When I walk in, a Byredo candle called Bibliotheque is burning. I was expecting Discotheque. The closest thing to an image of a body in the store is an armless, noseless 19th century replica of a Greek statue, enduring and imperfect, that stands against the back wall between the dressing rooms. There's a clear dichotomy between shopping and following. I'm told the space, designed by Studio KO, is meant to evoke Villa Balmain, Pierre Balmain's vacation home on the island of Elba in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Somewhere remote. A restorative pre Internet place. Its irregular tiles look like a polished stone floor, a velour couch is the color of a freshly sliced blood orange; you almost expect to see juice on one of the marble tabletops. Instead, there are belts with mirrored buckles the size of paperbacks ( 1,980) and iPhone cases (to house digital Balmain wardrobes) embossed with the label's logo. A pair of midcentury chairs have open weave backs, but of course there's no breeze to feel through them. The store is still. Can a brand be anxious? The store feels like a retreat from the churn of itself, the photos, the likes, the currency of proximity. I almost expect inflatable bodies to be floating inside the clothes. Most Balmain followers cannot afford them, even a T shirt that says Join the Army ( 365). I try a ruffled viscose bodysuit ( 2,385), which looks like silky batwings strung across my chest. Once it is on, I prepare to leave the dressing room. To step out. On Instagram, this is how a celebrity photographed on the street is captioned; she "steps out" in a Balmain dress. These clothes are honest. They hold you. My designer friend tells me that the fabric embrace comes from technically advanced four way stretch. There's pull and lift. There's no darting or corseting, it's just extremely special fabric. I try on a floor length black dress with sheer windows at the waist and hips, and though my blue underwear shows through (like a little patch of sky), the sensation and line of the dress is exquisite. It's almost too perfect when I learn that a form of viscose is sometimes used to make sausage and hot dog casing. The salesclerks bring in more pieces "just to see." Like a tiger stripe gold and black sequin minidress ( 5,600) that the model Alessandra Ambrosio stepped out in for her birthday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
When it comes to holiday travel, it is generally true that the earlier you book, the better though there are several factors at play. "One of the problems is that everybody looks for a rule of thumb, and it is different depending on the market you are traveling," said Patrick Surry, the chief data scientist at Hopper, a website and app that advises travelers when to book flights. But timing really can be everything when it comes to locking up the best holiday airfares. Here are five guidelines to follow if you want more money to spend on presents this winter. You Can Wait, but Not Too Long A survey by the travel search company Skyscanner found that 39 percent of holiday travelers say they prefer to book four to six weeks ahead of departure, with the rest choosing to book months, if not one full year, in advance. If you're in that group that has procrastinating in its blood, you still have some time before things really get out of hand. "The prices start off pretty high, because people tend to have limited flexibility when it comes to Thanksgiving," Mr. Surry said. "But they stay flat up until probably three weeks out, when they start to ramp up, and in the last 10 days they really spike." Last year, the lowest ticket prices for Thanksgiving week were available about 60 to 70 days ahead of departure, or late September, according to data analyzed by Hopper. If you book between now and the end of October, you'll likely spend around 325 for an average domestic flight, according to Hopper. Waiting until November will cost about 58 more a ticket, according to analysis by CheapAir.com. Hopper puts it at about 1.50 per day during the first weeks of November; 6 per day 10 days out from Thanksgiving. Sticking with the holiday theme, Mr. Surry said Halloween is a good marker for when you should have your Thanksgiving travel plans sorted out. Thanksgiving week is also a good guidepost for when to have your Christmas travel plans settled, though Hopper said booking in early October will give you the best rates. Skyscanner predicts that, based on its 2015 data, booking Thanksgiving week could offer savings of 6.41 percent compared with rates available after. The Day of the Week Matters Most people would love not to travel on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving just to avoid the crowds, but it's also one of the most expensive days to fly, along with the Saturday before and the Sunday after, Mr. Surry said. According to CheapAir.com, the Friday after Thanksgiving is not just good for retailers. Along with the following Tuesday, it's the cheapest return day. Hopper said flying on any day that week but Wednesday will be about 20 percent cheaper. If you're just looking to get away, the more options you consider, the better rate you may find. "I think people have a lot more flexibility when it comes to when they're going to travel and where they're going to travel," Mr. Surry said of Christmastime travel. "You know you're all not necessarily going home for that holiday." According to Hopper, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Eve are the cheapest days to fly for the winter holidays. Departing on Tuesday, Dec. 20, and returning Thursday, Jan. 5, is the next best bet. Flexibility will also put Cyber Monday into play. Hopper said great deals were spotted last year in the week following Thanksgiving, "if you're willing to travel at sort of strange times," Mr. Surry added. Unless you're really spontaneous, and don't really want to see your family, there's no good reason to gamble on last minute bargains. "Particularly around the holidays, there's such an increase in demand that you're much less likely to find a bargain, unless you have complete flexibility on where you're going to go," Mr. Surry said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Eventually the plunging stock market and the rising infection rate forced even Trump to adapt somewhat to reality. But the next delusion belonged to some of his conservative supporters, who embraced the idea that the economic carnage was just the result of misguided government policy even though many stay at home orders only happened after steep drops in dining and shopping and travel, not before and that if the government simply spoke the right magic words of reopening, something close to normal life would immediately resume. Now finally, amid the wave of protests against police brutality, the baton of words against reality has been passed back to the public health establishment, many of whose leaders are tying themselves in ideological knots arguing that it is not only acceptable but essential, after months circumscribing every sort of basic liberty, to encourage mass gatherings to support one particular just cause. With this last turn, we've reached the end of the progression, because it means the original theory behind a stern public health response that the danger to life and health justified suspending even the most righteous pursuits, including not just normal economic life but the practices and institutions that protect children, comfort the dying, serve the poor has been abandoned or subverted by every faction in our national debate. Yes, there are ongoing liberal attempts (including from the ridiculous, disastrous Bill de Blasio) to prop up a distinction between mass protests and other forms of non distanced human life. But these attempts will fall apart: There is no First Amendment warrant to break up Hasidic funerals while blessing Black Lives Matters protests, and there is no moral warrant to claim that only anti racism, however pressing its goals, deserves a sweeping exception from rules that have forbidden so many morally important activities for the last few months. For the record, I still believe those rules were mostly right. The lockdowns lasted too long and imposed too much in certain places, and the George Floyd protests reflect pent up energies that had to be released. But the rules bought time for warmer weather and social adaptations and hopefully a slower spread, they bought time for hospitals and masks and medical equipment, they brought us at least some distance closer to a vaccine and on the evidence of the stock market and the jobs numbers, they did so without creating the total economic calamity that many on the right were prophesying. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
David Longstreth the songwriter behind Dirty Projectors is a man who's rapturously in love for most of his eighth studio album, "Lamp Lit Prose." Within the Dirty Projectors catalog, this is the joyful rebound from the bitter breakup songs of "Dirty Projectors," the album he released in February 2017. But it also faces a bigger question: How should an artist respond to what America has become? In Mr. Longstreth's 15 years of releasing Dirty Projectors albums, "Lamp Lit Prose" is his shiniest, airiest, even catchiest set of songs. The new record exchanges the jarring, glitchy electronic intrusions and arid trap percussion he used on "Dirty Projectors" for the springy guitar lines of older Dirty Projectors albums, bringing out their warmest tones. The album's palette also features a horn section, summoning R B punch and jazz richness, powered by human breath. Mr. Longstreth is still the classically trained musical oddball he was when he released "The Glad Fact" back in 2003. He still devises songs with melodies that hop around all over the place, meshed with precisely picked guitar counterpoint that also ricochets across the stereo channels. Yet amid the fractures and complexities, Mr. Longstreth also provides nuggets of approachable melody. And in new songs like "Blue Bird," without second thoughts or any glimmer of irony or skepticism, Mr. Longstreth sings, "You and me, me and you/Something deep, something true." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
She is the greatest of all time, so magnificent that these three devotees need not even utter her name as they gather to burn sage in her honor. Serena Williams is their own personal deity, and in Ngozi Anyanwu's snappy and hilarious "G.O.A.T.," they are praying to the goddess Nike and the ghost of Arthur Ashe for Ms. Williams to win a Grand Slam. Helping her to victory is such a delicate task that Bonita (a glamorously funny Monique Robinson), the autocratic leader of this little group, fears that they could jinx her United States Open match just by tuning in. "Are you kidding, we got that black girl magic," her friend Roberta (Juanita Frederick) says. Well, they're definitely working some kind of charm in Queens Theater's "Park Plays," a program of 10 short one acts set in and around the teeming world of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Directed by Mary E. Hodges, "G.O.A.T." comes third in the lineup, bringing a shimmering vitality and sharp discipline that have been missing until then. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
LONDON In late May, the high ceiling textile conservation department of the Victoria and Albert Museum was buzzing with activity. Curators fitted several full enagua skirts and square cut embroidered huipil blouses some bearing traces of paint and ink onto mannequins. Alongside were heavy strings of Aztec beads , richly colored rebozo shawls and a starched lace headdress known as a resplandor all ingredients of what would become the museum's major summer exhibition: "Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up." Scheduled to open on Saturday and run to Nov. 4, the show is the latest manifestation of a vogue for examining an artist's image as a creation in its own right. Last year, the Brooklyn Museum exhibited Georgia O'Keeffe's androgynous, understated attire; and a show of artworks by Gluck at the Brighton Museum in England included examples of the British artist's mannish 1920s tailoring. But "Making Her Self Up," which includes drawings and paintings, as well as choice items from Ms. Kahlo's wardrobe, will bring added edge to this approach thanks to the pop culture embrace of the artist's appearance, and the exhibition's attempt to tell a new story about what, exactly, lay behind her look: a desire to accommodate and distract from her physical disabilities. The Kahlo likeness reduced to a shorthand of flower studded braids, unibrow, rosy lips and bright blouse gazes today from products including socks and yoga pants. Her style informs magazine fashion shoots, retail displays and even a Barbie doll. Yet in none of these representations does Ms. Kahlo appear as anything other than an able bodied woman. At age 6, Ms. Kahlo had polio, which left her right leg shorter than her left. She was teased at school for her withered leg and limp, said Circe Henestrosa, co curator of the exhibition, and her dress became a way to conceal it. "She'd wear three or four socks to level her legs, and started to wear long skirts," Ms. Henestrosa said. Then, when she was 18, a school bus carrying Ms. Kahlo collided with a tram, and her body "was pierced through to the pelvic bone," the curator said. She suffered more than 20 bone fractures, most to the spine. "To recover, she spent about a year in bed," Ms. Henestrosa said. "This is the beginning of the art, and of the deterioration of her body." In her 20s, Ms. Kahlo started wearing her own interpretation of traditional Tehuana dress: full skirts, embroidered blouses and regal coiffure associated with a matriarchal society from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, Mexico. Seen as a proud assertion of her national identity, Ms. Henestrosa and her fellow curator, Claire Wilcox, suggest that the artist's distinctive dress served a double purpose: effectively concealing her body and focusing attention on her head and shoulders. "The last thing you'd be thinking of when you saw her were her disabilities," Ms. Wilcox said. "The flamboyance was distracting." The boxy huipil blouses were made without fastenings, and could drop loosely over a back brace or plaster cast. Their short length was well suited to working while seated, whether in a chair, bed or wheelchair. The long flowing skirts covered her wasted leg, and their motion helped conceal her limp. Ms. Kahlo took great pleasure in her dress, and enjoyed the sensation that she caused when visiting San Francisco in 1930. The show notes include the artist's excited letter to her mother: "The gringas really like me a lot and pay close attention to all the dresses and rebozos that I brought with me, their jaws drop at the sight of my jade necklaces." In San Francisco, she bought Chinese cloth and embroidery panels that were integrated in her wardrobe, alongside Guatemalan sashes and coats. Frilled shirts, heavy necklaces of jade and coral, and pinned flowers all directed attention where she wished it to fall: "The adornment is concentrated from the torso up," Ms. Henestrosa said. "The beautiful headdresses and jewelry distracted you from her legs and her body." The 22 outfits that will be on show are among those discovered in 2004 at the Casa Azul, Ms. Kahlo's home in Coyoacan, Mexico. They had been stored for almost half a century after the death of her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, along with 6,500 photographs (among them works by Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Man Ray and Nickolas Muray, Ms. Kahlo's love r), as well as drawings, letters, documents and personal possessions. In the exhibition are back braces, reinforced with metal bars and covered in leather; three medical plaster casts that had been cut off Ms. Kahlo's torso; a pair of handmade boots, decorated with Chinese embroidery and with a built up sole for the right foot; and a prosthetic leg, sculpted by the artist and dressed with an embroidered red leather boot, bells and ribbons. 4 Other Names to Know in Latin American Art Paving the way. Frida Kahlo is internationally renowned for the emotional intensity of her work. But she is not the only woman from Latin America to leave her mark in the art world. Here are four more to know: 1. Luchita Hurtado. For years, Hurtado worked in the shadow of her husbands and more famous peers. Her paintings, which emphasize the interconnectedness of all living things, didn't get recognition from the art world until late in her life. 2. Belkis Ayon. A Cuban printmaker, Ayon was a master in the art of collagraphy. She worked almost exclusively in black, white and gray. She used her art, focused on a secret religious fraternity, to explore the themes of humanity and spirituality. 3. Ana Mendieta. Mendieta's art was sometimes violent, often unapologetically feminist and usually raw. She incorporated natural materials like blood, dirt, water and fire, and displayed her work through photography, film and live performances. 4. Remedios Varo. Though she was born in Spain, Varo's work is indelibly linked to Mexico, where she immigrated during World War II. Her style is reminiscent of Renaissance art in its exquisite precision, but her dreamlike paintings were otherworldly in tone. Found at the back of a wardrobe was a self portrait in charcoal and crayon, now part of the display, that showed Ms. Kahlo's broken body a shattered Grecian column for a spine, a medical corset strapped tight around her torso, her right leg wasted exposed beneath transparent dress. Along the bottom is written, in Spanish, "Appearances can be Deceiving." "She masked her disability in dress, but not in her art," Ms. Henestrosa said. "There it was very boldly displayed." Clothes for disabled women tend to be promoted in terms of functionality, said Eleanor Lisney, a founding member of the disabled women's collective Sisters of Frida, which is based in Britain. But, she added, "What we wear is part of us: That has to reflect the fashion that's going on around us, we don't want to be left out." Thanks to the work of activists such as Sinead Burke, the 3.5 foot tall Irish woman who describes herself as a "little person" and who has been lobbying for fashion world recognition of diversity, things are starting to shift. Ms. Kahlo "didn't allow her disability to define her, but it was an integral part of her life," Ms. Wilcox said. The gorgeous, jewel bedecked image that the artist constructed for herself wouldn't have been the same without it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
WASHINGTON The Justice Department is suing to stop a Philadelphia group from opening what some public health experts and mayors consider the next front in fighting the opioid epidemic: a place where people who inject fentanyl and other illicit drugs can do so under medical supervision. The nonprofit group, Safehouse, was formed last year to house the country's first so called safe injection site in Philadelphia, which has one of the nation's highest rates of overdose deaths. Safehouse had been planning to open the site as soon as next month, and a law firm has been representing it pro bono in anticipation of a crackdown by the Trump administration. At the site, a nurse practitioner or other medical provider would supervise and be ready to respond should anyone overdose after injecting drugs they brought in. The site would also provide clean needles, wound care and referrals to addiction treatment and legal services. The concept has raised not only legal but philosophical objections from people who say they cannot accept the idea of medical sanctioned use of illegal drugs, even if the aim is to save lives. Their objections are similar to those made against needle exchanges when they first began opening several decades ago, though exchanges now generally have strong support as an evidence backed tool for reducing disease and death. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Major league teams used to draft as many players as they wanted. The first baseball draft, in 1965, lasted 72 rounds, until only the Houston Astros were left picking. Recent drafts have been capped at 40 rounds. Now, in this strangest of years, the draft could be whittled to five rounds. That option was made official on Friday when players and owners reached agreement on a set of ground rules for a season thrown into upheaval by the coronavirus pandemic. With no scheduled starting date for this suspended season and June 1 an optimistic guess the sides were all but blindfolded while considering how to proceed. "The principal challenge of this negotiation, for both sides, was the enormous amount of uncertainty around the 2020 season," said Morgan Sword, Major League Baseball's executive vice president for economics and operations. He added: "It's in everybody's interests to play as many games as possible." At least from the league's perspective, the opposite may be true for the draft. This year's event was supposed to be a cause for celebration: It would be the first held in Omaha, Neb., to coincide with the College World Series there. That plan fizzled with the cancellation of the College World Series, and M.L.B. was hesitant to conduct a draft at all why welcome a new slice of the work force to an industry on hold? Tony Clark, the executive director of the players' association, stressed the importance of keeping at least some of the draft. "The players were committed to preserving entry in some form, which was quite different than what was being represented from the other side," Clark said on a conference call with reporters Friday. "Eventually we reached a compromise. It wasn't perfect, but we were able to keep the flow of amateurs in place for this year." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. In the new agreement, M.L.B. holds the right to shorten the draft which could take place on its original date, June 10, or later in the summer to as few as five rounds this year, and as few as 20 in 2021. Player bonuses will also be largely deferred: Draftees will get a maximum of 100,000 immediately, and the rest in equal installments in 2021 and 2022. Bonuses exceeding 20,000 for undrafted players would count against each team's bonus allotment. Previously, undrafted players could sign for as much as 125,000. "My first thought is that a lot of kids are going to really lose out, and it's sad for them," said an amateur scout, who requested anonymity because his team had not authorized him to speak publicly. "They work their whole lives for the chance to get drafted, and finally when it's their turn, all this happens." The scout continued: "Yes, if they're in the top five rounds, it's not the end of the world, and you'll ultimately get your money. But a sixth round pick is a pretty good draft pick, and you're going to get 20,000? Guys typically get 200,000 to 400,000 in the back half of the top 10 rounds. From a financial standpoint, that becomes a really hard decision for them." The ramifications could be significant, and the deal could ultimately make it easier for the league to implement its proposal to reduce the number of minor league affiliates starting next season. With far fewer players entering the pro ranks, organizations would have to keep players they otherwise would have released in order to keep all their current farm teams fully staffed. With a truncated draft and such little financial incentive for undrafted players, more high school players could opt to play in college. But undrafted college juniors could clog those roster spots by choosing to return for their senior seasons. In other words, there might be a lot more players than available spots next season and even more of an imbalance if the N.C.A.A. grants an extra year of eligibility to current seniors who lost most of this season to cancellations. A five round draft would mean only 150 or so new professional players, leaving hundreds with professional talent not playing in the minors. "When you talk about the 350th or 450th best player in the draft, you're talking about a darn good baseball player," the agent Scott Boras said on Friday. "This guy may not be a big leaguer, but he's a very skilled minor leaguer who can play well and allow a premium major leaguer to develop earlier and to develop competently because they're playing against a higher level of talent." Some prospects, of course, do become major league stars despite being low draft picks, including Paul Goldschmidt (eighth round), Jacob deGrom (ninth round) and Albert Pujols (13th round). With a shorter draft, some potential future stars might leave the game. "Look at those college seniors today," Boras said. "They only got to play like 15 percent of their season, they're probably going to lose their eligibility, and now they come into a structure where, anybody passed over by the draft, the maximum a team can sign him for is 20,000 instead of the 125,000 they had before. If you're in college on a partial scholarship and you've got loans, you're going to get a bonus that is so minimal I'm not sure you can afford to live in the minor leagues." Fewer rounds would also give teams less money to use on even higher draft choices, because the bonus pool allotted for those rounds would disappear. In normal years, teams can strategize the draft by choosing some players who will sign for less than their slot value and then using those savings on elite players seeking above slot bonuses. Friday's agreement also specifies that the overall bonus pool will remain at 2019 levels for the next two drafts, instead of rising roughly 3 percent each year. To Boras, it was a shortsighted decision. "You know how we have D.H.s in the game well, the draft is the owners' D.V. the designated victim," he said. "That's who they are: They're the D.V.'s of baseball. They know that they have no representation, and it hurts the game, because I don't think they see that these great athletes have choices." The great athletes are sidelined now, all across sports. The playing field will be different when they return. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Lois Wille, a Chicago reporter, editorial writer and author who examined, scolded and challenged the city she loved with hard hitting investigations and won two Pulitzer Prizes, died on Tuesday at her home in downtown Chicago. She was 87. The cause was complications of a severe stroke, her nephew Eric Kroeber said. Ms. Wille (pronounced willy) wrote for Chicago's three biggest daily newspapers over four decades, became a journalistic institution as she exposed scoundrels and prodded the city to do better. She championed its neighborhoods, called for sensible city planning and leaned on the horn to call attention to corruption and graft. "Power brokers in Chicago admired and appropriately feared Lois," Ann Marie Lipinski, a former editor of The Chicago Tribune and now curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, said in a phone interview. "If she thought you were on the wrong side of history, it could be a withering experience." Ms. Wille wrote two books that reflected her deep knowledge of how "the city that works," as its longtime mayor, Richard J. Daley, called Chicago, really did work. In "Forever Open, Clear, and Free: The Struggle for Chicago's Lakefront" (1972), she examined the powerful forces that sought to control the valuable stretch of city property along Lake Michigan; and in "At Home in the Loop: How Clout and Community Built Chicago's Dearborn Park" (1997), she documented the rise of a neighborhood in a blighted city tract in the face of political machinations to thwart it. Despite her reputation as a ferocious advocate in print, Ms. Wille in person was quiet, poised, precise and unflappable. "People think of this as a two fisted town, a Rostenkowski steak and gin joint kind of city," Bruce Dold, the current publisher and editor in chief of The Tribune, said, referring to the former Chicago congressman Dan Rostenkowski, famous for his arm twisting methods of persuasion. "But she didn't have to bludgeon anyone. She knew the power of a careful needle." Lois Jean Kroeber was born in Chicago on Sept. 19, 1931, to Walter and Adele (Taege) Kroeber. Her father, who had fled Germany as Hitler rose to power, was an architect and opened his own firm in suburban Arlington Heights, where he raised his family. Her mother was a homemaker. Lois liked writing and adventure, and she idolized Brenda Starr, the glamorous flame haired female comic strip character who reported for a mythic paper, The Flash. (The strip was created in 1940 by Dalia Messick, who changed her name to the androgynous sounding Dale after encountering discrimination in the male dominated comic strip profession.) In her first book, "Forever Open, Clear, and Free" (1972), Ms. Wille examined the powerful forces that sought to control the valuable stretch of city property along Lake Michigan. In real life, Lois knew of only a couple of female reporters, and they covered "silly" things, Ms. Wille said in a 1991 oral history interview for the Washington Press Club Foundation. After high school she gravitated to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1952 and her master's in 1953. The next year, she married Wayne Wille, a classmate, who became an editor for World Book Publishing. Mr. Wille survives her. Besides Mr. Kroeber, she is also survived by another nephew, David Kroeber. Ms. Wille broke into the swaggering male dominated world of Chicago newspapers by becoming the assistant to the fashion editor at The Chicago Daily News. She was soon writing for the "women's pages," as they were called, where she found herself writing the kind of soft news articles she had earlier looked down on. For one story she played pool with Willie Hoppe, a hotshot but aging billiards player; for another, she brushed the teeth of a rhinoceros with a large toothbrush. As one of only a handful of women at the paper, Ms. Wille noticed a gaping double standard in how men and women were allowed to behave. "The men could have tantrums and throw their typewriters and yell and scream if something happened to their copy, or go off on two or three day benders, and it was considered very colorful and part of the great Chicago tradition in journalism," Ms. Wille said in the oral history. But women had to appear "in control and calm," she said, "or we would have been thought, you know, frail and temperamental creatures." Frail she was not. She assertively went after one of the two slots for hard news news reporters that The Daily News reserved for women at the time, at one point breaking away from a fashion assignment to cover a fire that she spotted. She also dreamed up stories on her own, like the one that yielded her first front page byline, in 1956. She had been sending out Christmas cards when she noticed that the stamps weren't sticking. They didn't have enough glue. "So I did the story on the frustration all over the city, of people buying these stamps for their Christmas cards and not enough glue on them," she recalled. "And that ended up as a feature story across the top of the front page, which was thrilling for me." It helped propel her to one of the coveted spots reserved for women on the news side, where she plunged into investigating subjects she cared about, like poverty, health care and the civil rights movement. Ms. Wille often went undercover. For her first big series, she posed as a legal aide in exposing abuses in juvenile court. She later posed as a medical worker at a mental health clinic, wearing a white coat and carrying a clipboard. Still another time she acted like a volunteer at Cook County Hospital and saw a huge roomful of neglected babies whose mothers had abandoned them. That kind of misrepresentation is widely considered a breach of journalistic ethics today, but Ms. Wille defended her ruses, saying that matters of public health and safety had been at stake. In all three cases her reporting led to reforms. While examining the welfare system, Ms. Wille learned from caseworkers that indigent women had no access to free contraception as part of their medical care. Because the Roman Catholic Church opposed birth control and was so entrenched in the body politic, the subject was largely taboo, even in the newspapers. But Ms. Wille wrote a five part series about the issue, leading with a 26 year old mother of seven on welfare who had asked her doctor for information about birth control. The doctor, who was barred from discussing the subject, told her, "Well, you're healthy enough for seven more." After the series ran, in 1962, the state and city changed their policies and provided birth control for low income women. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for public service, the highest honor in journalism. Ms. Wille continued reporting for The Daily News until 1976, when she became editor of the paper's editorial page. She found she liked expressing her strong opinions. Her voice was distinct, "and she thrived having it broadcast through the megaphone of the editorial page," Rick Kogan, a storied reporter and columnist at The Tribune, said. While most editorials were unsigned, he added, "people knew who was writing them, no question." When The Daily News went out of business in 1978, she moved to The Chicago Sun Times and ran the editorial page there. And when The Sun Times was bought by Rupert Murdoch in 1984, she went to The Tribune, where, in 1989, she won her second Pulitzer, this one for editorial writing. "She really suited Chicago," Ms. Lipinski said. "You couldn't imagine her in any other place. She knew it so well and cared about it so deeply. She and the city grew up alongside each other in ways that made both of them stronger." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Q. How do you do picture in picture video with Safari on a Mac? A. In macOS Sierra and later, you can use the Picture in Picture mode to pop out a floating video player window on the screen while you have other pages and programs open on the desktop. The feature works in the Safari browser for videos on sites that use the HTML 5 standard for playback, like Vimeo and YouTube. Videos from Apple's iTunes Store support the Picture in Picture view, as do some other apps. To use the Picture in Picture mode, open a compatible video and, in the tool bar of playback controls, click the icon on the right that looks like two rectangles. The video should pop out in a small, separate window that you can resize by dragging its corner with the cursor. To reposition the video window, drag it to your preferred side of the screen. If you do not want to anchor the window in a screen corner, hold down the Mac's Command key while you drag the window to your preferred position on the desktop. When you hover the cursor over the video window, you get controls to pause or play the clip, or to exit the Picture in Picture mode. (You can also click the X in the upper left corner of the video window to close it.) To fast forward or rewind through the clip, however, you need to use the playback controls on the video's page in the main Safari window. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
HOW NOT TO DIE ALONE By In addition to writing novels, I have a longtime corporate career. Recently, I flew with a colleague to Denver. When we landed, he wanted to visit a marijuana dispensary. "Google 'legal cannabis,'" he said, pointing to my phone. "Google it yourself," I told him. "If H.R. asks why I'm looking for weed using a company device on company time I'll have to say I cancer. Who needs that headache?" That "headache" the consequences of telling your employer a baldfaced lie is the primary complication in "How Not to Die Alone," 's winning debut novel. A showcase for Roper's mordant humour (it's set in the U.K.), the book kicks off with a cold open: Andrew Smith is the sole mourner at a "pauper's funeral" for a man who "had died on the toilet while reading a book about buzzards." Andrew isn't required to attend, but shows up anyway, hoping his presence will dignify the dead man's lonely end. Roper introduces Andrew as a tenderhearted, thoughtful person. This is a smart choice, one that inspires our empathy and helps to assuage any discomfort we may feel when we discover, only a few pages later, that Andrew is also a big, fat liar. For the past five years, Andrew, single, childless and forlorn, has convinced his co workers that he's happily married with two children. This untruth, a miscommunication he failed to correct, was born of wistful, wishful desire rather than malicious intent. So, when Andrew's boss obliges each employee to host dinner at his/her home, we know exactly what's coming. Like many funny novels, "How Not to Die Alone" is influenced by the adage that humor equals tragedy plus time. We root for Andrew to come clean and connect, as much for his benefit as our entertainment. He will, of course the book's title tells us as much. But Roper aspires to more than a yuk yuk sitcom resolution. He wants to show that Andrew can't live authentically until he reaches back and confronts the heartbreak that derailed him in the first place. It's a risky proposition for any novelist, particularly a rookie, but when Roper makes it work, the payoff is tremendous. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"He brought it up eight times on one phone call. Eight times makes it seem like a pretty obvious crime. It's like if you went on trial for stabbing a guy and said, 'It was an accident. He fell on the knife,' and they said, 'Eight times?'" SETH MEYERS "Yeah, Trump asked Ukraine for election help, or as he put it, 'I was just trying to make Putin jealous.'" JIMMY FALLON "Right now Eric and Don Jr. are thinking, 'Damn, he pays more attention to Biden's kid.'" JIMMY FALLON "Today reporters asked Trump if he did anything wrong. He was like, 'Yeah, I probably should have asked for dirt on Elizabeth Warren.'" JIMMY FALLON "We spent years talking about Russia; it might be Ukraine that takes down Trump. Who saw that coming? That's like looking both ways before you cross the street then getting hit by a drone." JIMMY FALLON "Maybe even crazier is the fact that Trump did this on July 25th, the day after the Mueller testimony. So a day after the conclusion of a major investigation into whether he got help in an election from a foreign leader, he gets on the phone and asks for help from another foreign leader. It's like the only thing I can compare it to is when Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield's ear and then bit Evander Holyfield's other ear." JIMMY KIMMEL "The bottom line is it would appear the president used his office to ask a foreign country to dig up dirt on his opponent, and Democrats in Congress are thinking very seriously about threatening to maybe consider almost doing something about it." JIMMY KIMMEL "Today Nancy Pelosi said, 'Another five or 600 violations and we might think about impeachment.'" JIMMY FALLON "While addressing the whistle blower complaint about Ukraine, Nancy Pelosi accused President Trump of endangering national security. Yeah, Nancy, where you been? You're like, my mom's friend who is watching Season 4 of 'Breaking Bad' and says, 'I think this guy might be dealing meth.'" SETH MEYERS "I know they say that history repeats itself, but usually it's after a few generations, not, like, two years later with the exact same person." JAMES CORDEN | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
PARIS William Pfaff, an international affairs columnist and author who was a prominent critic of American foreign policy, finding Washington's intervention in world affairs often misguided, died on Thursday in a hospital here. He was 86. His wife, Carolyn Pfaff, said the cause was a heart attack after a fall. Mr. Pfaff, who moved to Paris in 1971, wrote a syndicated column that appeared for more than 25 years in The International Herald Tribune, now The International New York Times. He was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and other publications, the articles informed by his deep knowledge of history and philosophy. Mr. Pfaff (pronounced FAFF) also wrote eight books, which further examined American statecraft as well as 20th century Europe's penchant for authoritarian utopianism. In "The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia," published in 2004, he examined what drove European intellectuals to embrace communism, fascism and Nazism. In "Barbarian Sentiments: America in the New Century" (1989), he argued that the United States had historically harbored unrealistic assumptions about its benevolence in its foreign policy, often with disastrous results. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award. "In fresh, lucid and arresting prose," the citation said, Mr. Pfaff "articulates America's geopolitical illusions." He revisited the theme in his most recent book, "The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America's Foreign Policy" (2010). "What has occurred since 1945," he wrote in its introduction, "has amounted to an American effort to control the consequences of the 20th century crisis in Europe and the breakdown of imperial order in Asia, the Near and Middle East, and latterly in Africa while maintaining that supervisory role over the Americas first claimed by the United States in 1823" with the Monroe Doctrine. The latest American miscalculation, he wrote, was in the Middle East, where the United States was waging an "unnecessary and unwinnable" war "against radical currents in the Islamic religion." A soft spoken man with the appearance of an Oxford don, Mr. Pfaff never stopped writing, even though his health had been declining well before his fall a week ago. In his last column, dated April 22, written before Britain's parliamentary elections of May 7, he analyzed the implications for the United States and Europe if Britain withdrew from the European Union. Other recent articles dealt with Iran, Ukraine and the Islamic State. Often taking a lonely stance and labeled an iconoclast, Mr. Pfaff was attacked at times as anti American for his unapologetic criticism of American interventions in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. "He rejected the messianic illusions of successive American administrations," said a longtime friend, John Rielly, president emeritus of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "Although many American pundits consider him a liberal, he was in many respects a classic Christian conservative one who was skeptical about liberal notions of inevitable progress and always aware of the limitations of human activity." In response to critics, Mr. Pfaff would say that he regarded himself as an American patriot concerned above all with safeguarding long term American interests and values. His insights into European and American affairs drew many admirers. One was William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, which published about 70 articles by him called Reflections. In a letter from 1987, shortly after he stepped down as editor, Mr. Shawn wrote, "I don't think any other writer has ever done anything quite like your elegant and brief political essays," which, he added, were "written in a literary form of your own invention." "I admired those essays extravagantly," Mr. Shawn wrote. The letter, framed, was on display in Mr. Pfaff's book lined office at his home in Paris. The American Academy of Diplomacy, in presenting him with an award in 2006, called Mr. Pfaff "the 'dean' of American columnists and commentators, not through seniority but through substance," noting "his moral vision of the proper uses of power and limits on its abuse." Mr. Pfaff's columns were syndicated in Japan, South Korea, Australia, India and the Arab press of the Persian Gulf, among others. "But ironically his columns appeared less and less frequently in major newspapers in the United States, the superpower whose policies he analyzed in tart, limpid and critical commentary," said Jonathan Randal, an American author and correspondent. Mr. Pfaff was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in December 1928, a descendant of English, Irish and German immigrants. He grew up in Columbus, Ga., where his father and uncle ran military supplies stores. He studied literature and political science at the University of Notre Dame, from which he graduated. Enlisting in the Army, he served in the infantry and a Special Forces Unit during the Korean War and afterward. He later worked at the lay Catholic magazine Commonweal until 1955, when he left to travel to Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He also helped open the European office of the Hudson Institute, a Washington based conservative research firm. Over time he became more pessimistic, his wife, the former Carolyn Cleary, said. "He lashed out at America because he loved it, but he became sadder and sadder about the nation that was so great, yet was belittling itself. He wanted America to stay home and fix its own country." Besides his wife, Mr. Pfaff is survived by their son, Nicholas; their daughter, Alexandra Pfaff Drouard; and five grandchildren. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
After years of working in creative industries, Karen Baldwin was intent on engaging the artistic community of Charleston, S.C., when she began planning to make a home there. "There's a whole creative side of Charleston that people aren't even aware of," said Ms. Baldwin, 59, who previously lived in New York, where she studied fine arts at Parsons School of Design, was a longtime employee of Michael Kors, worked as an interior designer and was a founder of the New York based fashion accessories brand Fairchild Baldwin. Visitors to the city "go to the plantations, or go downtown and do a garden tour," she continued, "but there's a lot of really young, creative people who have been moving here." In 2015, she began working with Kevan Hoertdoerfer, a Charleston architect with a history of designing provocative contemporary structures, to transform a cinder block house across from Hampton Park into a modernist gem. Then, the following year, she bought a 1950s ranch house on a double lot just down the street for 415,000, with plans to demolish it, subdivide the lot and build a replacement with Mr. Hoertdoerfer's help. The initial idea was that the second house would be a spec home to sell. But as work progressed, Ms. Baldwin turned the plan on its head, deciding to keep the second house and put the first one up for sale. To make her new home as distinctive as possible, she tapped as much burgeoning talent as she could. "What was supposed to be just a construction project ended up turning into this collaborative art installation," she said. There was also the exterior color. "I had just come back from New Zealand and had also been in Scandinavia, where I had noticed a lot of black contemporary houses," Ms. Baldwin said. "So I said to Kevan, 'How do you feel about a black house?'" Mr. Hoertdoerfer thought it was a fine idea and proceeded to design a building that bears little resemblance to its red brick and white porch neighbors. "We just went back to basics, with a quintessential gable roofed form," he said, completely cloaked in black. A standing seam aluminum roof folds down over two sides of the house, creating a simple wrapper, while the two ends are clad in black stained cedar shiplap paneling. Many of the tightly clustered houses in the neighborhood have side windows covered by curtains for privacy, so Mr. Hoertdoerfer decided to do away with those windows altogether, adding floor to ceiling glass at either end of the house instead. That opened up sightlines to the most desirable views: the park across the street and the backyard garden, where Mr. Hoertdoerfer added a cabana. To animate one side of the home, Ms. Baldwin and Mr. Hoertdoerfer recruited McKenzie Eddy Smith and Elliott A. Smith, artists and designers who own the firm MES Creative Services, to create a dot based mural that runs up a wall and onto the roof. For the front yard, Mr. Hoertdoerfer designed a sculpture garden of overlapping artificial turf covered squares, where a piece by Carey Morton, a local sculptor, was given pride of place. Mr. Morton's creations also populate Ms. Baldwin's empty lot next door, which she may eventually use to build an art studio, or a spec house to sell. As the project progressed, Ms. Baldwin and Mr. Hoertdoerfer seized on the design process as a teaching tool for elementary school students. "In a lot of cities, schools are cutting out art programs, which, being an art major, just breaks my heart," Ms. Baldwin said. Working with Charleston's Redux Contemporary Art Center, she and Mr. Hoertdoerfer developed a weeklong summer program to introduce children to contemporary architecture. (Ms. Baldwin also held a fund raiser for Redux at her house). The students received instruction from Mr. Hoertdoerfer, toured Ms. Baldwin's house and designed dream homes of their own. After 13 months of construction, the 2,245 square foot house was completed in May, at a cost of about 700,000, and Ms. Baldwin moved in. Inside the house, the palette is the opposite of the exterior: white and bright, with flashes of vivid color. Even the concrete ground floor is finished in brilliant white epoxy. "I loved feeling like I was walking into a gallery, so I wanted to keep it super clean and very contemporary," she said. "But I also wanted to have a pop of color, since everything is white." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Halfway through "Oh My Sweet Land," the writer director Amir Nizar Zuabi's wrenching and shrewd solo show, you will begin to worry about the onions. You have heard them sizzle in the pan, seen the steam rise up, smelled the sweet savory aroma. And then you should have forgotten those onions, because the unnamed woman frying them (a ferocious and radiant Nadine Malouf) is telling you a terrible story. The story is about a prisoner who knows he must leave Syria when a captain of the secret police brings the man's daughter to the jail. The captain tickles her and plies her with chocolates, an oblique and sickening threat. This story, like most of the narratives in Mr. Zuabi's brief, site specific drama, produced by the Play Company in volunteered kitchens throughout the metro area, is probably true, culled from Mr. Zuabi's interviews with Syrian refugees in a camp in Amman, Jordan. Like the other tales nested in the play, it is written and performed with piercing economy. This man's imprisonment matters so much more than a pan of onions. But you are sitting in a cream colored Brooklyn kitchen and the stove is a lot closer to you than Syria. So it's the onions that really trouble you. Because surely the steam has turned to smoke. Surely they are burning. On its surface, "Oh My Sweet Land," produced in London in 2014, is a forceful and absorbing play about a Syrian American woman who goes searching for her married lover, Ashraf. It is more than that, too, but let's stick with surfaces for a moment. Having fled Bashar al Assad's regime, Ashraf finds shelter for his wife and daughter in Lebanon, then resettles himself in America, where he meets the woman at a cafe in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She invites him home to eat kibbe, Syrian meat croquettes. For three months he entangles himself in her sheets and her life while guilt gnaws away at him. "We make love because it's the only way to comfort each other," she says. "It's the most normal thing we can do." But one morning he is gone. So the woman boards a plan to Lebanon. As she tells her own story, the woman prepares more kibbe. The bottles of oil lined against the backsplash, the dozens of lemons spilling out of baskets, suggest that she has been making this dish often and compulsively. The food is a doughy lifeline between her and her lover, between her and the country of her parents. It closes distance, fills loss. She barely looks at her hands as they knead bulgur, cube meat, but the stories she tells affect the way she holds the knife and pulses the food processor. Cleverly, Mr. Zuabi has structured this cooking demonstration as a love story, an adventure, a mystery. We want to follow this woman as she goes in pursuit of Ashraf. Will she find him? Will she find him alive? What barriers will she face? What dangers? Ms. Malouf ("The Who the What," "Ultimate Beauty Bible") is a rigorous and impassioned actress with liquid eyes and a way of moving from one character to the next with subtle delineation. You would be happy to tag along with her on far less eventful journeys. The embellishments that Mr. Zuabi and his designers add shifting lighting, amplified cooking sounds aren't necessary. Ms. Malouf's face, voice and gestures, coupled with Mr. Zuabi's harrowing script, are involving enough. Besides it's always a thrill to see how other New Yorkers play house, a treat afforded by previous site specific shows like Gideon Irving's "Living Here: A Map of Songs" and Aaron Landsman's "Open House," both produced by the Foundry Theater. I saw "Oh My Sweet Land" in a narrow, charming Carroll Gardens rowhouse, in a tasteful kitchen with glass fronted cabinets and what looked like quartz countertops. (As Ms. Malouf and the crew receive access to the house only an hour before the performance, the set design, by Mariana Sanchez, mostly consists of stashing and scattering ingredients.) You might feel like a bit of a monster (I did!) for noticing those countertops, for fretting about those onions, while Ms. Malouf describes people who have suffered torture and worse. Yet this is what makes Mr. Zuabi's play so devastating. Because yes, it's about kibbe and sex and stressful journeys across borders. But as you sit crammed together in that pleasant little kitchen, the play is also about our incomplete ability to wrap our heads around a war being fought half a world away, about our finite capacity for empathy. Probably most of us read news articles and absorb reports about fighting in Syria or similarly fraught regions. Maybe we have signed petitions or made donations. But I doubt we have let ourselves feel the full extent of these horrors, like the revelation that many children have been killed in chemical weapons attacks. Mr. Zuabi's play implicates its audience for wondering whether this woman, with her American passport and more or less comfortable life, will ever find her lover when women who look just like her are being suffocated. Yet this isn't a scolding play or a holier than thou one. The woman is realizing the limits of her own awareness right alongside us. "Decent people can't look away from what is happening," she tells herself. But people can and people do, like the woman who will soon look away from us as she removes the kibbe from boiling oil. So we go on cooking, cleaning, watching plays and we put slaughter out of our minds. What else can we do? (For those who wish to do more, the program includes a list of refuges assistance programs, many of them local.) As you leave you will be handed a small delicacy from Damascus Bakeries, a shop built by Syrian immigrants more than 80 years ago. It is a gentle and generous reminder that there are good things in the world as well as terrible ones. Still, you might not feel hungry. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
How Disney Wants to Take On Netflix With Its Own Streaming Services LOS ANGELES The Walt Disney Company, under pressure to address threats to its vast television business, unveiled its answer on Tuesday: two Netflix style streaming services. "I would characterize this as an extremely important, very, very significant strategic shift for us," Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, told analysts on a conference call to discuss quarterly earnings. Underscoring the need for Mr. Iger to reposition his company for growth, Disney reported a slight decline in revenue and a 9 percent drop in net income. The two still unnamed streaming services one built around sports programming from ESPN, the other on Disney and Pixar movies and television shows will be powered by BamTech, a technology company that handles direct to consumer video for baseball teams and HBO, among others. Disney paid 1 billion a year ago for a 33 percent stake in BamTech. On Tuesday, Mr. Iger announced that Disney had accelerated an option to spend 1.58 billion for an additional 42 percent share. Disney's move online could put the company in conflict with Netflix, which will lose access to new Disney and Pixar films, and with cable providers, which pay Disney handsomely for the right to distribute ESPN and other channels. Mr. Iger said Disney had not yet talked to cable providers. He added, however, that he had "all the confidence in the world" in Disney's ability to maintain favorable deals with them. The ESPN streaming service will arrive early next year, Mr. Iger said. It will include baseball, hockey, tennis and college sports about 10,000 regional and national events in its first year. Users will be able to access the service through an enhanced version of ESPN's current app, which includes news, highlights and scores. People who pay to receive ESPN the old fashioned way (via a cable or satellite provider) will be able to access standard ESPN programming through the same app. Mr. Iger said Disney had lately noticed "a dramatic increase in app based media consumption," and not just for its own offerings. Disney will also offer a separate entertainment oriented streaming service. (With traditional cable hookups, people are usually forced to pay for sports channels even if they do not watch them.) It will arrive in 2019 and provide exclusive access to new Disney films, including a sequel to "Frozen," a live action version of "The Lion King" and "Toy Story 4." (Netflix currently has rights to new Disney branded films; Disney will take back those rights.) The Disney branded entertainment service will also include a vast amount of library content, including movies and television programming from Disney Channel, Disney Junior and Disney XD. Mr. Iger said that Disney would also make a "significant" investment in original movies and shows for the service, which will not have advertising. Mr. Iger said that Disney had not decided whether to include films from its Marvel and Lucasfilm ("Star Wars") labels, in part because of their different fan bases. "It's possible we will continue to license them to a pay service like Netflix, but it's premature to say," he said. "There has been talk about launching a proprietary Marvel service and 'Star Wars' service." He added, however, that Disney was cautious about stand alone services for those film brands, in part because a large amount of content would be needed to satisfy subscribers. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Disney declined to say how much subscriptions would cost. Mr. Iger said the goal was a price low enough to encourage widespread adoption but not so low that it would cannibalize traditional cable and satellite subscriptions. In the past, Mr. Iger has hinted about a "dynamic" model, with viewers able to pay based on how much they want to watch. In some ways, Disney is late to this party. CBS, for instance, introduced a direct to consumer subscription streaming service in 2014. But Disney is a media superpower, and its decision to aggressively pursue streaming could speed the entertainment industry's adoption of the platform. "No one is better positioned to lead the industry into this dynamic new era," Mr. Iger said, noting his company's trove of popular content and unrivaled connection to its audience particularly children, who are a huge driver for streaming services. Most analysts responded favorably, but Disney's stock price declined 4 percent in after hours trading, to about 102.95. The reaction might have been better had Disney not simultaneously reported lackluster quarterly results. Netflix shares declined more than 3 percent after hours, to 172.53. For the last two years, as the cable business has dealt with a loss of subscribers, Mr. Iger has not been able to convince investors that ESPN, the company's longtime growth engine, will keep chugging away. As Wall Street has continued to fret, Disney has found itself at the center of speculation about ways to keep its programming relevant in the online age. Some suggested it should buy Netflix outright or consider selling itself to Apple. Meantime, cord cutting continues to affect ESPN. Traditional subscriptions declined 3.5 percent in the most recent quarter; in the year ago period, ESPN had a 2 percent decline. For its fiscal third quarter, the company had a profit totaling 2.37 billion, or 1.51 a share, compared with 2.6 billion or 1.59 a share, a year earlier. Disney had revenue of 14.2 billion in the quarter, down slightly from a year earlier. Adjusting for a one time charge related to a legal settlement, Disney had per share earnings of 1.58 in the most recent quarter. Analysts had expected 1.55. Among the biggest challenges for Disney in the quarter were costs at ESPN, which recorded about 400 million in incremental expenses because of a new contract with the National Basketball Association. As a result, operating income at Disney Media Networks, which includes ESPN, fell to 1.84 billion, a 22 percent decline. Expenses also increased at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, which opened an attraction in Florida based on "Avatar" and brought one of the Disney cruise ships in for refurbishment. But the theme park unit nonetheless reported an 18 percent increase in operating income, to 1.17 billion, because of the timing of the Easter holiday and improved results at overseas parks, including Disneyland Paris. Disney's movie studio had a difficult quarter. Its operating income fell 17 percent, to 639 million, because of a lineup of films that could not match last year's highs. In the most recent quarter, Disney released "Cars 3," "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" and "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2." In the year ago quarter, the studio's blockbusters included "Finding Dory," "The Jungle Book" and "Captain America: Civil War." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Pixar's animators have a history of achieving impressive feats, making characters and textures feel more authentic in increasingly complex ways. (That flowing hair! Those landscapes!) But how would they portray jazz? With "Soul" (streaming on Disney ), the challenge was to translate the music's emotional and improvisational qualities through a technical process with little room for improvisation. While plenty of animation over the years has gotten the spirit of jazz, "Soul" sits right next to the piano keys to show, in detail, a musician creating. And Pixar knew many eyes, especially those belonging to jazz musicians, would be examining its work. The film follows Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a school band teacher by day, a talented but unsuccessful jazz pianist by night (and always). He struggles to get gigs, but when he sits at the piano, he is transported, his stress fades and his passion emerges with each note. "We wanted to make sure that if this guy is going to be a jazz musician, he should know the clubs and the back story," the film's director, Pete Docter, said in a video interview. He and his team visited clubs in New York to get a better understanding. "We would just go up and talk to musicians and ask them, where did you study?" he said. "How did you get here? What other jobs do you have? And tried to really flesh out the world of those characters." They also consulted with a number of marquee musicians, including Herbie Hancock, the jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and Questlove (who also did voice work). Pixar also brought on the keyboardist Jon Batiste, the bandleader and musical director on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert." He created the original compositions that Joe performs onscreen. Batiste recorded the music with a band in a New York studio, and Docter captured those sessions with multiple cameras. "We set up, like, 80 GoPros everywhere," Docter said. They then studied the video to get a more accurate picture of how to animate the scene. Docter said that the animators exaggerated certain movements in Joe's playing for visual effect, but "in terms of posture and hitting the right notes, that was crucial for us to make sure that it really felt authentic." Along with video, they were able to digitally save the notes that were being played. That digital stream could be reverse programmed into the animation in a way that worked almost like a player piano signaling to the animators which key was being played with each note. So when you see Joe at the piano, he's playing exactly the notes you're hearing. At the recording sessions, Docter said, his approach to directing Batiste was similar to the way he directs actors: He avoided giving specific line readings or input on the music, and instead tried to paint a picture so Batiste could understand the mood of the scene. "I might just say, 'You know that sense when you're playing and the world just disappears and you wake up and three hours have gone by? That's what we're looking for,'" Docter said. Batiste would make adjustments to his composition during the session to match the film's needs. "It was a joy to watch him work," Docter said. "It was like having a private concert." Batiste said that he felt a connection with Docter in creating these scenes "Pete is a healer and a philosopher," he said by email and that he was glad to see the care with which Black music was being treated. Docter grew up playing music. Two sisters are professional musicians and his parents are music educators. So that made it easier to sync up with the film's musical passions. And on his team, he said, those who were animating a specific instrument often either had experience playing that instrument or a strong appreciation for it. Joe, in all his complexity, is brought to life in three ways: through Foxx's vocal performance; the character's design and movement; and Batiste's compositions and performance. Those close up shots of Joe's hands in motion reflect the pianist's spirited style of play so much so that Batiste was taken aback when he saw those moments onscreen. "My hands are central to my life," he said. "I was in tears when I saw my essence come to life in Joe. To have this as a part of my creative legacy is an honor." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
In 1946, Ann Petry had it all, well before we were wondering if this was even possible for a woman. Born in 1908 (or 1911 biographers do not agree), Petry was trained as a pharmacist, worked as a reporter, married, and would soon be a mother. Hers was not an overnight success. She paid her dues, publishing short stories and essays, sometimes writing under a male pseudonym. Her star began to rise when she was awarded a 2,500 fellowship from Houghton Mifflin to write her first novel, "The Street," which sold a staggering 1.5 million copies. And did I mention that she was a black woman? So why do so few people read her work today? I really don't know. When I first encountered Petry, I was a student at Spelman College, a historically black women's college in my hometown of Atlanta. My copy of the book sported a classroom ready cover of muted grays and the title was announced in a blockish, sober font. One of my classmates brought a vintage edition she had found at her parents' home. This cover spotlighted a woman with long hair, hourglass figure and dramatic makeup. The copy promised a tale of violence and vice. My book indicated that the story in my hands was "a powerful, uncompromising work of social criticism" or something snoozy like that. Could this possibly be the same book? Absolutely. "The Street" is my favorite type of novel, literary with an astonishing plot. The heroine, Lutie Johnson, is a single mother who lives with her 8 year old son in Harlem. Although her marriage fell apart due to financial hardship caused by racism (and also old fashioned incompatibility), Lutie still believes in the American Dream. Despite her attempts to be a respectable woman, Lutie's life intersects with the seedier side of Harlem. The building super becomes obsessed with her and puts her dear little boy in harm's way. Her neighbor, a Madam with a heart of gold plate, saves Lutie from rape, but tries to push her into a relationship with a white man with underworld ties. Add to this bubbling plot an abused wife who seeks the services of a local hoodoo practitioner, a crooked lawyer, a smoky nightclub and murder by candlestick and you've got the kind of novel that makes 400 pages seem like too few. Even with the twisty breathless plot, Petry engages the issues of her day, which sadly are the issues of our day as well. At every turn, Lutie confronts that many headed hydra of racism, sexism and classism. Because of its uncompromising view of injustice and its collateral effects, "The Street" has often been called a women's version of Richard Wright's "Native Son." Both novels hinge upon murders motivated by heat of the moment spontaneity and deep seated resentment born of relentless discrimination. However, it is unfair to Petry to think of her artistry as a pink collared version of Wright. James Baldwin famously criticized Wright's hero in "Native Son" by noting that "Wright imagined Bigger, but Bigger never could have imagined Wright." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
If Wright Morris is among the most innovative (and profound and funny) American writers of the last century, he's also one of the most enigmatic and unpredictable. The mystery of Wright Morris isn't why he's so forgotten, it's that he was ever much known in the first place. Because it's true that Morris was, if never a household literary name, at least mentioned among (need I say it?) the male literary heavyweights of his day. A finalist for the National Book Award numerous times, Morris won it twice, in 1957 for "Field of Vision," and in 1980 for his final novel, "Plains Song." A celebrated photographer as well, Morris's work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art as early as 1941. All told, between 1942 and 1986, Morris published 33 books, including novels, prose fiction and photographs (what he referred to as photo texts), essay and story collections, and memoirs. A Nebraska native, Wright Morris spent much of his life in California remembering, and more important, reimagining, the Midwest. He died in 1998 at the age of 88. When I'm asked about my desert island book (weird question, wouldn't I be preoccupied with foraging or trying to figure out how to send smoke signals?) I always answer: "Plains Song." This is often followed by, "Oh, I love that book!" No, I say, not Kent Haruf's "Plainsong," a perfectly fine if, forgive me, conventional novel. I'm talking about Wright Morris's "Plains Song." Two words and "Plains" with an "S." Forgotten, yes, but still among us. There will be no splashy Wright Morris revivals. No tale of a best selling novelist stumbling across one of his books at a yard sale in Schenectady and raising him from the dead. Morris has remained in print all these years, albeit due to the selfless commitment of the University of Nebraska Press and not the bigger houses that used to publish him: Knopf, Harper and Row, Scribner. Each let Morris go after poor sales. When Viking brought out an edition of the Portable Morris, hoping to do for Morris what a portable did for Faulkner, the editor wrote, "We, who look forward to each book of his as it is announced, and talk about it with excitement when it appears, cannot understand why so many pulses remain calm." This piece is only the latest in a line of attempts to quicken more pulses and bring attention to a writer hidden in plain sight. The list of Morris's appreciators stretches back to the beginning of his career, and includes Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, Maxwell Perkins, Wallace Stegner, Richard Howard, Rosellen Brown and Larry McMurtry. In 1957, Ralph Ellison wrote in a letter to Albert Murray, "We got to London and we found a copy of Wright Morris's 'Field of Vision,' which is quite a good, quiet novel. That Morris is probably the most skilled of the younger novelists, he just won't open up with all he has." More recently, the poet John Hollander introduced a reissue of "The Home Place," and Charles Baxter, long one of Morris's most insistent champions, wrote a radiant and to my mind definitive introduction to a new edition of "Plains Song" in 2000. But, like I say, I'm not shocked. If, as I contend, Morris is among the most innovative (and profound and funny) American writers of the last century, he's also one of the most enigmatic and unpredictable. Even during his brief heyday in the 1950s, many readers might not have known what to make of him. If I told you the premise of "Field of Vision," you might scratch your head. (Two old friends from Nebraska meet up randomly in Mexico and go to a bullfight. One of the friends is traveling with his family, the other has brought along, to Mexico, a psychiatrist who, in turn, has brought along one of his patients. See what I mean?) Morris specializes in what I'd call American oddness. He's drawn not to what makes Midwesterners homogeneous but to what makes us strange. Morris's people, even when they are staunch conformists, aren't quite like anybody you've ever met. Not only this, they aren't like anybody they've ever met, either. Morris, I believe, woke up every day thunderstruck at the variety of human existence in Nebraska alone. Morris knew that people don't come in types no matter where they come from, and yet, at the same time, there isn't any escaping your birthright. So no matter where you go, even if you don't go anywhere, you drag around where you come from. As much as he was interested in people, Morris was equally obsessed, in both his prose and photography, with what he saw as the populated emptiness of abandoned spaces. Rusting farm equipment, old shoes, discarded clothes, yellowed mattresses all were stories left behind. In "The Home Place," a photo text, he wrote, "What is it that stirs you about a vacant house? I supposed it has something to do with the fact that any house that's been lived in, any room that's been slept in, is not vacant anymore." 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 devotees, and there are so few of us sometimes it feels as though we all know each other, consider "The Works of Love" (1952), the apex of Morris. A tribute to his father (Morris's mother died when he was only six days old), "The Works of Love" is about one man's search, not for love itself, but to the secret of holding on to it, if only for a little while. The novelist Michael Parker told me recently, "The book aches, that's all I can say. Even when I'm not reading it, 'The Works of Love' sits on my shelf and aches." And there are others, so many others, not all of which are set in Nebraska. "One Day" (1965) is an account of the reaction of the people of Escondido, Calif., to the assassination of President Kennedy. A veterinarian remarks, "Who could say when this day had begun, or would ever end?" There's "Love Among the Cannibals" (1957) set on the beaches of Los Angeles, an attempt by Morris to write about people who don't live in the past at all. For me, it's his least compelling book, though I might add it's the only book of Morris's that sold decently. There's the wacky "Fork River Space Project" (1977), which asks the essential question: Did Fork River, Kan., disappear in a cyclone, or was the entire town abducted by aliens? I've spent better part of the last year and a half reading Morris, a wild ride. As disorienting as his work can be, it's joyfully immersive. There's nothing tentative about Morris's fiction. You enter his universe whole hog. However, the book I come back to, again and again, is "Plains Song." I believe Morris needed to write 18 novels before he could, at last, return to home ground. It's here that he takes up Ellison's challenge and opens up with all he has. He does so, and this is key, by writing Nebraska from a female perspective. There are men in "Plains Song," but they aren't especially relevant. It is the novel's women centric vision that makes the novel so majestic. "Plains Song," a remarkably distilled novel which nonetheless spans the early years of the century into the 1970s, revolves around the women of the Adkins family. Sharon Rose has no business being born into this family of farmers and farmers' wives. Her mother is dead. Her Aunt Cora and her cousin Madge live next door. One day it dawns on Sharon Rose as it does on so many of us, Wait, I belong to these people? And yet it is Sharon Rose's relationship with Madge that tethers her existence, even after she flees the farm at the earliest opportunity, first to study music in Lincoln, then Chicago, eventually taking a teaching job at Wellesley. It is this contradiction that drives a stake through the heart of the book. As the two girls grow up, Sharon Rose can't help but feel betrayed when Madge becomes interested in boys. After Madge becomes engaged, Sharon Rose shouts, "Is he looking for a wife or a housemaid?" Aunt Cora overhears this and whacks Sharon Rose with a hairbrush. But Madge calls out, in a remarkable act of generosity that catches my throat every time, "She don't mean it the way you hear it." She don't mean it the way you hear it. Maybe only somebody you've known your whole life could muster this sort of understanding? I read "Plains Song" once a year. I don't reread it. I read it to remind myself, again, because I have, again, forgotten, how fleeting it all is. How the things I think I'll be able to hold on to, my family, my young kids, my work, will be outside of my grasp soon enough. Will I ever learn? Time. Few novels that I know of capture the bewilderingly inconsistent nature of time quite like "Plains Song." Years pass in clauses; people die midsentence. Sharon Rose's mother, Belle, lives for roughly 19 pages out of a total of 227. I brace myself every time I reach the lines, "Belle had spells of moodiness and Orion might wake up and find her missing and have to search for her. Walking at night relieved her ..." And I think: Can't she just live this time? I could go on, and on, obviously. But let me say this, by the end of the novel, when Sharon Rose returns to Nebraska after 28 years, you might think it's too late for her to find love. She had a chance at it, once, with Lillian Bauman, her classmate from Chicago. But that was long time ago now. It's in the last pages that Morris pulls off a dumbfounding triumph. I tend to like my books morose or not at all. Yet "Plains Song" ends optimistically, and this ending, impossibly, takes place at a crowded motel in Grand Island where women from around the world have gathered for a convention. "I'm coming," Sharon Rose says. "I've not seen a sunrise since I was a child." Forget the desert island. Call "Plains Song" my deathbed book, and I hope to be holding it, trying to read one more sentence before the light goes out. One way to go with Wright Morris is to start with the last, and, if you listen to me, greatest book. But Morris contains multitudes and there are Morris novels for almost any mood one might imagine, and though he is always funny, some books are more mournful than others. 'MY UNCLE DUDLEY' Morris's first novel is a quirky, often hilarious road trip from California eastward. Uncle Dudley and his nephew Kit sell seats in their car to seven random passengers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Our weekday morning digest that includes consumer news, deals, tips and anything else that travelers may want to know. Now that bike sharing programs have made city transit options greener from New York to San Francisco, an electric car sharing program coming to Indianapolis this summer suggests an eco friendly future for short term car rentals. Now available for test drives and set to be fully operational by summer's end, BlueIndy will offer rental electric cars for quick trips, costing 5 for the first 20 minutes. Drivers will pay 10 per month for membership, gaining access to 500 electric Bluecars made by the France based Bollore Group, which is running the Indianapolis project. As is the case with bike sharing plans, BlueIndy drivers will be able to return their cars to any of the network's 200 parking stations. Pitched to tourists as well as local residents, BlueIndy plans to install self service kiosks in the airport and downtown for instant membership access, according to Herve Muller, president of BlueIndy. "Indianapolis doesn't have much traffic so every time you use it, you can do so for 5, so it's very economical," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
When Chris Godfrey learned in early January that the record for "likes" on an Instagram post was held by the celebrity and businesswoman Kylie Jenner, he took it as a challenge. He remembers thinking: "Could something as universal and simple as an egg be great enough to beat that record?" It could! Just nine days after the thought, that record was cracked. Mr. Godfrey had beaten Ms. Jenner's post about her infant daughter with a simple picture of an egg. The original egg post now has more than 52 million likes her post is shy of 19 million and the egg's account now has more than 10 million followers. Why an egg? Mr. Godfrey explained: "An egg has no gender, race or religion. An egg is an egg, it's universal." Mr. Godfrey, a 29 year old advertising creative who works at the Partnership in London, and the two friends he has enlisted to help him with the account have now delivered their second act. It is a commercial produced with and aired on the streaming service Hulu, timed to take advantage of the annual Super Bowl ad extravaganza. In it, the egg shares a story about how going viral has affected its mental health. "The pressure of social media is getting to me," the egg discloses in the commercial, after introducing itself. "If you're struggling, too, talk to someone." The ad then directs viewers to the website for the nonprofit Mental Health America. The creators say that mental health is the first of several causes that the egg which they and their fans call Eugene will come to stand for. "People have fallen in love with this egg, and Eugene the egg wants to continue to spread positive messages," said Alissa Khan Whelan, 26, one of the friends working with Mr. Godfrey. After the birth of the egg on Jan. 4, Mr. Godfrey stayed anonymous. But he, Ms. Khan Whelan and another friend, C.J. Brown, 29, agreed to speak to The New York Times to tell their story and explain their intentions. "We felt that the time was right to come out," Ms. Khan Whelan said. "We can put any speculation to bed." There has been a lot of puzzlement about how a picture of an egg created an Instagram frenzy. Some speculated that the account's creator had paid influencers to spread the word. Others even took credit for growing the egg's audience. Mr. Godfrey says that such claims are untrue and that the account's growth was "completely organic." No one person helped the egg's rise in popularity and no single account or group of accounts helped it to explode. They did note a demographic that embraced the egg immediately. "I think it was perhaps the younger generation," Mr. Godfrey said. "In the schools and stuff, it started to spread. It sort of spread through playgrounds." He noticed that interactions with young people would peak between 3 and 4 in the afternoon, "when school was out." Ms. Khan Whelan recalled seeing "amazing videos of kids in their class going 'Miss, miss, have you liked the egg?'" Marketers agreed that the youth had been key to the egg's success. (Instagram technically requires users to be 13 to create an account, but that rule is often disregarded.) Margaret Johnson, chief creative officer of the agency Goodby Silverstein Partners, only became aware of the egg account after realizing that her 12 year old son had liked the image. She then sought out more information about it. "What a great thing for them to do and kind of hijack the Super Bowl through social, and hammer home a responsible message," she said. The egg's audience was also amplified by Mr. Godfrey's decision to incorporate user generated content into the account's Instagram stories, where posts expire after 24 hours. The egg's main Instagram feed stayed spare and mysterious, while Mr. Godfrey shouted out followers in its stories, helping to infect his growing audience with a sense of team spirit. (The hashtag EggGang was quickly adapted to describe the account's fans.) "In its infancy, it was one of those ridiculous things, like, 'Oh, we're trying to break this world record by just liking this random image,'" said Sam Shepherd, an executive creative director at the digital agency 360i. That agency won industry praise in 2013 when it worked with Oreo to quickly tweet "You can still dunk in the dark" during an unexpected blackout at the Super Bowl. Mr. Shepherd described the egg's next act as the 2019 version of that stunt. The team behind the egg declined to talk about the money it has been offered or the big names it has come into contact with, preferring to keep the attention focused on Eugene. (Asked about one marketer's claim that partnering with the account would be worth at least 10 million, Ms. Khan Whelan said only that the number was "greatly exaggerated.") It is true, though, that building an entity really, a platform on a platform that reaches millions of people brings financial benefit. The egg team is being paid by Hulu. It said that Nick Tran, Hulu's vice president of brand marketing and culture, pursued the opportunity, and that he was introduced to them though The Times, a new agency in Chicago created by the Instagram enthusiast Jason Peterson. It would not disclose what it was paid. "Dollars always follow eyeballs," said Andrew Essex, chief executive and founder of Plan A, a creative holding company. For the creators, the account's success was "basically a license to print money," he said. Mr. Godfrey, Mr. Brown and Ms. Khan Whelan say they are less interested in money than in promoting positivity. "We've had plenty of amazing offers and opportunities that have come on to the table," Ms. Khan Whelan said. "So many. We've not really been sharing details because we don't think this is about us. This is about Eugene the egg and what the egg can do." Mr. Godfrey would not comment on what the last few weeks had been like, other than to say it had been "crazy" and "a real journey." (He, Mr. Brown and Ms. Khan Whelan have essentially been living together, in South East London, for that time.) "It's not really about me," he insisted. "It's just about the egg and sort of where we can take it and what we can do with it." They would not comment on the causes they will support beyond mental health, saying that they would take each day as it comes. They plan to remain highly responsive to their audience. "The fact that they were able to get a lot of people to look at a picture of the egg it was the ultimate anomaly, just a complete freak event," Mr. Essex said. "A tear in the time space continuum. It doesn't make much sense, but it's not going to continue. Every once in a while something comes out of the blue and breaks the internet for no reason. This is the quintessential fluke. It's not replicable. It's not replicable and it's not sustainable. With all due respect." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
A worker lifts a sturgeon from a pond at a fish farm in Riofrio, Spain. Riofrio raises the Acipenser naccarii species of sturgeon, which is native to the Mediterranean. RIOFRIO, Spain Caviar might be perceived as one of the world's most exclusive products, but its production is expanding far and fast. In countries as divergent as China, Finland, Spain and the United Arab Emirates, new sturgeon farms are starting to fill the void left by the depleted stock of wild beluga and other species of sturgeon from the Caspian Sea, the traditional source of caviar. As the new farms emerge, they hope to change the dynamics of caviar, popularizing the product while at the same time expanding production and sales. First, though, they will have to convince consumers that caviar produced somewhere other than the Caspian is not a luxury knockoff. Unlike Champagne, caviar is not a brand name; in fact, many other types of fish eggs other than sturgeon are also sold as caviar. The luxury cachet has come in large part from Russian and Iranian caviar producers, who have successfully sold the image of black caviar from Caspian sturgeon as the only true product. Despite the worldwide financial crisis, caviar is among a select group of luxury goods that has weathered the downturn in consumer spending, maintaining a wholesale price of about 1,000 euros a kilogram ( 590 a pound) for most varieties. That golden market niche, however, has been shriveling. The sturgeon population in the lower Volga River which empties into the Caspian Sea and used to be the world's chief source of black caviar has plunged 99 percent in the last 15 years, according to the Russian fisheries agency. The drop, which began because of pollution and dam building, has been accelerated by illegal fishing, Andrei Krainy, the head of the agency, told Interfax, the Russian news agency, last August. The Russian government banned black caviar exports in 2002 to comply with international fisheries agreements aimed at protecting endangered species. It reopened the exports earlier this year, although from farm fish that take years to reach maturity. In the meantime, the new sturgeon farms are hoping to fill the gap, and then some. There are no reliable statistics on worldwide production, but Patrick Williot, a French sturgeon researcher, estimated that annual caviar production now stood at about 250 tons almost exclusively from farmed sturgeon compared with 550 tons in the late 1970s. But "in contrast with the former production based on wild sturgeon populations, the present production is continuously increasing," he said. Seppo Kapanen is part of the transformation. Mr. Kapanen, the co founder of Caviar Empirik, a Finnish company, runs two sturgeon farms in Finland and in October acquired a sturgeon farm in the Andalusia region of Spain. "We're now talking about being able to transform the market for one of the world's greatest and most established luxury products," he said. "There are plenty of very interesting investment opportunities." Mr. Kapanen said he decided to diversify into caviar production after making his money in activities like shipping and real estate. His company's two farms in Finland, where caviar production is set to start next year, are backed by Russian investors. While he would not give details on his investments, Mr. Kapanen said he and his associates had already spent "many millions" on their caviar business. The U.S. puts security restrictions on Chinese, Pakistani and other entities. The Fed's preferred measure of inflation surged again in October amid rising food and energy prices. Among other newcomers at the table is Royal Caviar, a company in Abu Dhabi that has been building an indoor caviar farm in the emirate at a cost of 120 million and using German technology. Production there is set to start next summer and reach 35 tons of caviar by 2015. Romania and Bulgaria, which joined the European Union only in 2007, are using their access to the bloc's agricultural subsidies to develop sturgeon farming. The two countries are also home to Europe's only viable populations of wild sturgeon, although wildlife organizations have recently raised concerns about illegal fishing. Looming even larger on the horizon is China, where farms have been starting in different corners of the country, including around the Yangtze River Basin as well as along the Heilongjiang River. "Caviar production worldwide will surely double, if not triple, over the next decade," said Diego Pozas, the director of Caviar de Riofrio, the Spanish company that operates Mr. Kapanen's Andalusian farm. "Even the Chinese now have the potential to overtake everybody." After the Finnish takeover of the Andalusia farm, Mr. Pozas is transferring to another Spanish caviar venture, Caviar Perse, which is planning to start production next year in the northern region of Navarra. This farm, Mr. Pozas expects, will be Europe's biggest after it reaches its full capacity of 25 tons of caviar per year. "We're very well placed for further growth in Spain," Mr. Pozas said, "but it's also getting much more competitive." Mr. Kapanen said that a surge in supply should start lowering prices for caviar in about two years, when more farms will reach full production capacity. He predicted that some brands of farmed caviar would end up costing about 600 euros a kilo, so that caviar would eventually come "close" to the price of smoked salmon, a more affordable delicacy. This should not worry producers, he added, because "if people get used to eating caviar, they will want more of it and will also progressively want to switch from the cheaper versions to the more expensive." One of the enduring difficulties with caviar, which in part explains its high cost, is that it requires a long term investment with no immediate return. It takes about eight years for the sex of a sturgeon to become apparent and then another five for the female to reach ovulation and thereby be considered ready for what staff at Riofrio call "the sacrifice," when the fish is killed and cut open to collect its eggs. As the number of market entrants multiplies, Mr. Pozas said, producers could choose among several farming methods to differentiate themselves from the competition. At its Andalusian farm, which stands next to a natural spring in an otherwise parched landscape better known for its olive trees, Riofrio raises the Acipenser naccarii species of sturgeon. The fish is native to the Mediterranean and used to be fished regularly along the Guadalquivir, which crosses Andalusia, until the fish's migratory route got cut off by dams and other constructions along the river. About 35,000 sturgeon swim in the pools at Riofrio's Andalusian farm, a third of maximum capacity, to let the fish roam. The company also avoids using methods to speed up the fish's development, like injecting additional oxygen or overfeeding. "We're putting strict environmental standards ahead of mass production," Mr. Pozas said. "Obviously that's not a choice that everybody will be making." Retailers of luxury foodstuff, meanwhile, recognize the challenge of persuading consumers that caviar produced elsewhere is still, well, caviar. "The public in general thinks that sturgeons only come from the Caspian Sea and that what is produced in farms isn't good or is somehow fake," said Esperanza Monreal, who owns the Madrid franchise of Caviar House Prunier, which sells caviar farmed in the Gironde region of France. While some regular customers initially had their doubts about the quality of French caviar, she said, "they no longer have them because they have seen that caviar is neither better nor worse if it comes from the Caspian Sea." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
You don't have to be Jewish to inherit one of the BRCA gene mutations. But these mutations, which increase the risk of adult onset breast, ovarian, prostate and other cancers, disproportionately injure Jewish people. One in 400 people in the general population carry a BRCA mutation; one in 40 in the Jewish (mostly Ashkenazi) population. Some of those affected are working to encourage more genetic testing to help prevent these cancers. I landed in the office of a genetic counselor after a 2008 diagnosis of late stage ovarian cancer. Would I fill in the disease history in my ancestry? Since many relatives died in the Holocaust or self destructed afterward, I could offer only scant information. My "positive" test result seemed grotesquely negative to me. What might I have bequeathed to my two biological daughters? Parental guilt irrational but implacable hit hard. Children of people with a mutation have a 50 percent chance of inheriting BRCA and therefore a greatly elevated risk of a cancer diagnosis. I steadied myself with the realization that my two stepdaughters neither Jewish had dealt with a BRCA mutation proactively and were thriving. Then I began following advocacy groups on the internet. FORCE (Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered) seeks to improve the lives of all people confronting hereditary breast, ovarian and related cancers. Sharsheret (Hebrew for chain) specializes in helping young women and families with Jewish backgrounds. Both established an impressive record of information sharing before Angelina Jolie publicized the issue. That these platforms and Ms. Jolie have not solved the problem of raising consciousness about BRCA, however, is apparent from the recent history of Lauren Corduck, whose trajectory proves the need for the work she has undertaken. In December, 2016, a friend convinced Ms. Corduck to see a genetic counselor because of her Ashkenazi parentage. A few weeks later she happened to have an M.R.I. to determine the cause of back pain. She quickly learned that she had a risky mutation and Stage 4 ovarian cancer, prompting rigorous treatment, terror and anger. Despite her ethnic background, as well as incidents of breast cancer on her father's side of the family, none of Ms. Corduck's physicians had mentioned her high risk. If they had, she could have learned of the mutation earlier. There is no reliable detection tool for ovarian cancer, so she would have opted for the surgical removal of her ovaries and fallopian tubes. Instead, at 46 years old she was tackling metastases as far away from her abdomen as a lymph node near her collarbone. Channeling her anger into activism, Ms. Corduck established the nonprofit organization Oneinforty. Through its awareness campaign, symposia, medical professional development sessions and the provision of emotional support, Oneinforty informs the public of the relatively high risk for Jews and encourages people with at least one Ashkenazi grandparent to consider genetic counseling and, when appropriate, testing either through a blood test or a newer saliva home testing kit. "Half of the people with a BRCA mutation have no known family history of the BRCA cancers," Ms. Corduck said. "Physicians who are not offering testing to patients need to be educated and patients should be proactive on their own behalf." Ms. Corduck seeks to raise awareness of the vulnerability of Jewish men as well as women. Fathers like her own often carry one of the BRCA mutations that 50 percent of their male and female offspring will inherit. Men with a mutation may suffer from breast, prostate or pancreatic cancers, or melanoma triggered by it. I suspect that my genetic mutation also came from my paternal lineage. "Your BRCA tumors are stupid," my treasured first oncologist told me, much to my hilarity. "There's a drug in the pipeline, but it may not be ready in time." That sobered me up. After my third recurrence, miraculously, there was a breakthrough in the previously dormant field of ovarian cancer. In 2012, my doctor managed to place me in a clinical trial with one of the new PARP inhibitors three others have since been approved by the Food and Drug Administration that now extend the lives of women with ovarian disease. A number of these drugs are being tested on women with BRCA related metastatic breast cancer, and one has been approved by the F.D.A. Ms. Corduck, with faith in research and "zero parental guilt," feels "relieved" that she and her husband can provide the emotional support that their 10 year old daughter will need when she confronts her risk as a young adult instead of landing in an oncologist's office. Whether we count ourselves one in 40 or one in 400, we are less alone because of Ms. Corduck's intrepid outreach. She proves that this terrible disease paradoxically generates astonishing valor from even the most endangered patient activists. She is following the example of the X ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, who contributed in the early 1950s to the discovery of the DNA double helix. She continued to produce scientific papers while undergoing treatments for ovarian cancer. (In 1962 James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for their work on DNA, but Ms. Franklin did not; she died in 1958 at the age of 37, and the rules of the prize precluded its being given posthumously.) Without the work on DNA, the detection of the first BRCA mutation would never have happened. It was found by the American researcher Dr. Mary Claire King, who believes that all women at the age of 30 should be offered a genetic test "as part of routine medical care" to protect themselves from breast and ovarian cancers. Since I am a beneficiary of BRCA research who has been kept alive for six years by an experimental drug, I feel impelled to say, let us now praise women in science: Long may they continue to advance knowledge and safeguard future lives. Susan Gubar, who has been dealing with ovarian cancer since 2008, is distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Italy's highest court ruled that a 2000 year old bronze statue, known as "Victorious Youth," should be returned to that country by the Getty Villa. ROME Italy's highest court has ordered that a centerpiece of the Getty Villa's art collection, a prized bronze sculpture more than 2,000 years old, should be returned to Italy in a ruling that could lead to a trans Atlantic transfer or a diplomatic standoff. The statue, named "Victorious Youth" but often referred to as the Getty Bronze, is on display at the villa on the outskirts of Los Angeles, which is part of the J. Paul Getty Museum. The bronze was retrieved from Adriatic waters by Italian fishermen in 1964. After a decade long legal battle, Italy's Court of Cassation ruled Monday that the statue should be confiscated and brought back to Italy, rejecting the Getty's appeal. The decision had not been published Tuesday but a message from a court official describing it was provided to The New York Times. "It was a very, very long process, but we now hope that we will be able to have it in Italy as soon as possible," said Lorenzo D'Ascia, a lawyer representing the Italian government. Yet the fate of one of the finest original bronzes from the Classical era, probably fashioned in ancient Greece and lost at sea after being stolen by the Romans, is still unclear. The Getty has long argued that the statue was probably created outside Italy and was discovered in international waters after thousands of years, so it is not an Italian object subject to repatriation. Italian officials, who say the statue was found in Italian territorial waters, had said that if the country's high court decided in their favor that they planned to ask the United States Justice Department to enforce the ruling by seizing the statue. That would be likely to lead to another court battle in the United States. Alberto Bonisoli, Italy's Culture Minister, said "We expect full collaboration from the American institutions as they have always done." "We can discuss how and when," he continued. "But the verdict needs to be respected. In response to news of the ruling, Lisa Lapin, vice president for communications at the Getty Trust, said in a statement on Monday: "We will continue to defend our legal right to the statue. The law and facts in this case do not warrant restitution to the Italian government of a statue that has been on public display in Los Angeles for nearly a half century." She added, "We believe any forfeiture order is contrary to American and international law." The "Victorious Youth," a life size athlete crowned with an olive wreath, was long thought to be by Lysippus, or Lysippos in Italian, a Greek sculptor from the fourth century B.C. More recent scholarship, though, has dated it to the second or third century B.C. The fishermen who dredged it from the sea realized the value of their discovery, brought it to shore and buried it in a cabbage field, awaiting the right buyer. Italian officials have argued that the statue, which was sold several times after its discovery, was subsequently smuggled out of Italy illegally, without a required export license, and hidden at various points in a bathtub and in a convent. The Getty Trust, the museum's foundation, purchased it from an antiques dealer in Germany in 1977 for 3.95 million. "At the very least, the museum should have been more prudent in their purchase," Mr. D'Ascia said in a phone interview. "They bought a statue lacking the export permit," he said. Under a 1939 Italian law, when antiquities and archaeological works are discovered in that country, the authorities must be notified and the artifacts are not allowed to leave Italy without an export license. "We provided enough evidence," said Silvia Cecchi, the prosecutor who has pursued the case for 10 years. "The sculptor was Greek, but the statue was culturally and administratively Italian when it sank." But during its long legal fight, the Getty had prevailed in other lower court rulings. Italian authorities maintained that previous trials lacked crucial evidence on the statue's origin, which prosecutors were recently able to provide. William Pearlstein, a partner at the New York art law firm Pearlstein McCullough Lederman, which has frequently represented antiquities dealers in disputes with governments, said the Getty should file a suit in the United States, asserting its right to the statue. "It would state the Getty's claim for title and challenge the Italians to assert their superior title claim to the satisfaction of a U.S. court, which I don't think they can do," he said. "What they've done is basically submitted a bunch of inside baseball claims in Italian court." The view is very different in Fano, the seaside town on Italy's east coast that the fishermen returned to with the statue after they found it more than 50 years ago. Generations there have fought for the statue, and now feel celebratory about its possible return. "It's pure joy for Italy, and for my town; we always felt the Lysippus belonged to us," said Tristano Tonnini, a lawyer for the regional cultural association. The town has a reproduction of the bronze at its port entrance, and a restaurant and newspaper named after its once presumed creator. "It was found near here, was kept here and we hope it will come back here," he said. "It was finally recognized that the Lysippus is like the other 40 masterpieces that the museum already returned to Italy." Mr. Tonnini was referring to accords between the Italian government and foreign museums that have allowed Italy to welcome back many dozens of objects. The Getty, under one of the agreements, has already returned 40 artifacts to Italy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Dancing about real estate is not uncommon in New York. Take Susan Rethorst's "208 East Broadway," a series inspired by her Lower East Side apartment (and her process of moving out); or Ellen Cornfield's "Small Stages," in which three dancers shared a platform the size of a walk in closet. The choreographer Juliette Mapp, who has been presenting work in New York since 2001, now turns to the subject of space with "Luxury Rentals," which has its premiere on Thursday, May 12, at Danspace Project. The title calls to mind development in the surrounding East Village blocks while alluding to the greatest expense for many dancers: rehearsal space. But "Luxury Rentals" looks beyond the quantifiable (rent, square footage). With the eloquent dancers Levi Gonzalez, Jimena Paz and Kayvon Pourazar, Ms. Mapp explores how performers' lives evolve with the city's physical and financial terrain, suggesting that dancing, at whatever cost, may be the greatest luxury of all. (Through May 21, danspaceproject.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization. One of the world's top breast cancer doctors failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in recent years, omitting his financial ties from dozens of research articles in prestigious publications like The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. The researcher, Dr. Jose Baselga, a towering figure in the cancer world, is the chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He has held board memberships or advisory roles with Roche and Bristol Myers Squibb, among other corporations, has had a stake in start ups testing cancer therapies, and played a key role in the development of breakthrough drugs that have revolutionized treatments for breast cancer. According to an analysis by The New York Times and ProPublica, Dr. Baselga did not follow financial disclosure rules set by the American Association for Cancer Research when he was president of the group. He also left out payments he received from companies connected to cancer research in his articles published in the group's journal, Cancer Discovery. At the same time, he has been one of the journal's two editors in chief. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. At a conference this year and before analysts in 2017, he put a positive spin on the results of two Roche sponsored clinical trials that many others considered disappointments, without disclosing his relationship to the company. Since 2014, he has received more than 3 million from Roche in consulting fees and for his stake in a company it acquired. Dr. Baselga did not dispute his relationships with at least a dozen companies. In an interview, he said the disclosure lapses were unintentional. He stressed that much of his industry work was publicly known although he declined to provide payment figures from his involvement with some biotech startups. "I acknowledge that there have been inconsistencies, but that's what it is," he said. "It's not that I do not appreciate the importance." Update: Read the response of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to The Times and ProPublica's reporting. Dr. Baselga's extensive corporate relationships and his frequent failure to disclose them illustrate how permeable the boundaries remain between academic research and industry, and how weakly reporting requirements are enforced by the medical journals and professional societies charged with policing them. A decade ago, a series of scandals involving the secret influence of the pharmaceutical industry on drug research prompted the medical community to beef up its conflict of interest disclosure requirements. Ethicists worry that outside entanglements can shape the way studies are designed and medications are prescribed to patients, allowing bias to influence medical practice. Disclosing those connections allows the public, other scientists and doctors to evaluate the research and weigh potential conflicts. "If leaders don't follow the rules, then we don't really have rules," said Dr. Walid Gellad, director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh. "It says that the rules don't matter." The penalties for such ethical lapses are not severe. The cancer research group, the A.A.C.R., warns authors who fill out disclosure forms for its journals that they face a three year ban on publishing if they are found to have financial relationships that they did not disclose. But the ban is not included in the conflict of interest policy posted on its website, and the group said no author had ever been barred. Many journals and professional societies do not check conflicts and simply require authors to correct the record. Officials at the A.A.C.R., the American Society of Clinical Oncology and The New England Journal of Medicine said they were looking into Dr. Baselga's omissions after inquiries from The New York Times and ProPublica. The Lancet declined to say whether it would look into the matter. Christine Hickey, a spokeswoman for Memorial Sloan Kettering, said that Dr. Baselga had properly informed the hospital of his outside industry work and that it was Dr. Baselga's responsibility to disclose such relationships to entities like medical journals. The cancer center, she said, "has a rigorous and comprehensive compliance program in place to promote honesty and objectivity in scientific research." "I have spent my career caring for cancer patients and bringing new therapies to the clinic with the goal of extending and saving lives," Dr. Baselga said in the statement. "While I have been inconsistent with disclosures and acknowledge that fact, that is a far cry from compromising my responsibilities as a physician, as a scientist and as a clinical leader." Dr. Baselga, 59, supervises clinical operations at Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the nation's top cancer centers, and wields influence over the lives of patients and companies wishing to conduct trials there. He was paid more than 1.5 million in compensation by the cancer center in 2016, according to the hospital's latest available tax disclosures, but that does not include his consulting or board fees from outside companies. Many top medical researchers have ties to the for profit health care industry, and some overlap is seen as a good thing after all, these are the companies charged with developing the drugs, medical devices and diagnostic tests of the future. Dr. Baselga's relationship to industry is extensive. In addition to sitting on the board of Bristol Myers Squibb, he is a director of Varian Medical Systems, which sells radiation equipment and for whom Memorial Sloan Kettering is a client. In all, Dr. Baselga has served on the boards of at least six companies since 2013, positions that have required him to assume a fiduciary responsibility to protect the interests of those companies, even as he oversees the cancer center's medical operations. The hospital and Dr. Baselga said steps had been taken to prevent him from having a say in any business between the cancer center and the companies on whose boards he sits. The chief executive of Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dr. Craig B. Thompson, settled lawsuits several years ago that were filed by the University of Pennsylvania and an affiliated research center. They contended that he hid research conducted while he was at Penn to start a new company, Agios Pharmaceuticals, and did not share the earnings. Dr. Thompson disputed the allegations. He now sits on the board of Merck, which manufactures Keytruda, a blockbuster cancer therapy. Ms. Hickey said the cancer center cannot fulfill its charitable mission without working with industry. "We encourage collaboration and are proud that our work has led to the approval of novel, lifesaving cancer treatments for patients around the world," she said. Some disclosures are required; others aren't After the scandals a decade ago over lack of disclosure, the federal government began requiring drug and device manufacturers to publicly disclose payments to doctors in 2013. From August 2013 through 2017, Dr. Baselga received nearly 3.5 million from nine companies, according to the federal Open Payments database, which compiles disclosures filed by drug and device companies. Dr. Baselga has disclosed in other forums investments and advisory roles in biotech start ups, but he declined to provide a tally of financial interests in those firms. Companies that have not received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for their products projects still in the testing phases do not have to report payments they make to doctors. Serving on boards can be lucrative. In 2017, he received 260,000 in cash and stock awards to sit on Varian's board of directors, according to the company's corporate filings. ProPublica and The Times analyzed Dr. Baselga's publications in medical journals since 2013, the year he joined Memorial Sloan Kettering. He failed to disclose any industry relationships in more than 100, or about 60 percent of the time, a figure that has increased with each passing year. Last year, he did not list any potential conflicts in 87 percent of the articles that he wrote or co wrote. Dr. Baselga compiled a color coded list of his articles and offered a different interpretation. Sixty two of the papers for which he did not disclose any potential conflict represented "conceptual, basic laboratory or translational work," and did not require one, he said. Questions could be raised about others, he said, but he added that most "had no clinical nor financial implications." That left the 17 papers he plans to correct. Early stage research often carries financial weight because it helps companies decide whether to move ahead with a product. In about two thirds of Dr. Balsega's articles that lacked details of his industry ties, one or more of his co authors listed theirs. In 2015, Dr. Baselga published an article in the New England Journal about a Roche sponsored trial of one of the company's drugs, Zelboraf. Despite his financial ties to Roche, he declared that he had "nothing to disclose." Fourteen of his co authors reported ties to Roche. Dr. Baselga defended the articles, saying that "these are high quality manuscripts reporting on important clinical trials that led to a better understanding of cancer treatments." "We don't routinely check because we don't have those kind of resources," said Dr. Rita F. Redberg, the editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, who has been critical of the influence of industry on medical practice. "We rely on trust and integrity. It's kind of an assumed part of the professional relationship." Jennifer Zeis, a spokeswoman for The New England Journal of Medicine, said in an email that it had now asked Dr. Baselga to amend his disclosures. She said the journal planned to overhaul its tracking of industry relationships. The American Association for Cancer Research said it had begun an "extensive review" of the disclosure forms submitted by Dr. Baselga. It said that it had never barred an author from publishing, and that "such an action would be necessary only in cases of egregious, consistent violations of the rules." Among the most prominent relationships that Dr. Baselga has often failed to disclose is with the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche and its United States subsidiary Genentech. In June 2017, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, Dr. Baselga spoke at a Roche sponsored investor event about study results that the company had been counting on to persuade oncologists to move patients from Herceptin which was facing competition from cheaper alternatives to a combination treatment involving Herceptin and a newer, more expensive drug, Perjeta. The results were so underwhelming that Roche's stock fell 5 percent on the news. One analyst described the results as a "lead balloon," and an editorial in The New England Journal called it a "disappointment." Dr. Baselga, however, told analysts that critiques were "weird" and "strange." This June, at the same cancer conference, Dr. Baselga struck an upbeat note about the results of a Roche trial of the drug taselisib, saying in a blog post published on the cancer center website that the results were "incredibly exciting" while conceding the side effects from the drug were high. That same day, Roche announced it was scrapping plans to develop the drug. The news was another disappointment involving the class of drugs called PI3K inhibitors, which is a major focus of Dr. Baselga's current research. In neither case did Dr. Baselga reveal that his ties to Roche and Genentech went beyond serving as a trial investigator. In 2014, Roche acquired Seragon, a cancer research company in which Dr. Baselga had an ownership stake, for 725 million. Dr. Baselga received more than 3 million in 2014 and 2015 for his stake in the company, according to the federal Open Payments database. From 2013 to 2017, Roche also paid Dr. Baselga more than 50,000 in consulting fees, according to the database. These details were not included in the conflict of interest statements that are required of all presenters at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference, although he did disclose ownership interests and consulting relationships with several other companies in the prior two years. ASCO said it would conduct an internal review of Dr. Baselga's disclosures and would refer the findings to a panel. Dr. Baselga said that he played no role in the Seragon acquisition, and that he had cut ties with Roche since joining the board of a competitor, Bristol Myers, in March. As for his presentations at the ASCO meetings in the last two years, he said he had also noted shortcomings in the studies. The combination of Perjeta with Herceptin was later approved by the F.D.A. for certain high risk patients. As for taselisib, Dr. Baselga stands by his belief that the PI3K class of drugs will be an important target for fighting cancer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
CW has 15 scripted shows for the 2017 18 season. Eight are based on comic books; two more are based on existing properties; one is the long running stalwart "Supernatural" and another is a likely to be canceled military drama. Then there are the two quirky, critical beloved genre benders: "Crazy Ex Girlfriend," a dark comedy musical, and "Jane the Virgin," a sudsy but deeply sincere telenovela. Which brings us to "Life Sentence," starting Wednesday, neither superhero nor supernatural nor super bold. Instead, it feels like the straightforward family drama of CW's and WB's past: light, young, heartfelt. It's also unmoored, though, without a clear anchor or companion, putting the show in the unenviable position of having to stand on its own right from the start. It's enough to crush a mightier, meatier show. But then, "Life Sentence" is all about surprise survival. Lucy Hale, who starred as Aria on the teen thriller "Pretty Little Liars," plays Stella, a manic pixie cancer girl who was miraculously cured, thanks to a trial medication. So the good news is that she's cancer free. The bad news is that her family has been lying to her constantly, in the hopes of not adding to her suffering. No one is as stable as she thought: Her parents (Gillian Vigman and Dylan Walsh) instantly separate, her lovable older brother (Jayson Blair) reveals himself to be a lowlife and her type A older sister (Brooke Lyons) admits to feeling trapped by their family's put on a happy face dysfunction. Stella herself had impulsively married a hunky Brit (Elliot Knight) she met in Paris because, well, if you're only going to live a few more months you might as well marry hunky Brits you meet in Paris. But now she's married married and perhaps shouldn't be. If you've ever seen a bohemian aspirational character before, it'll come as no surprise that Stella rides a cute little motor scooter and gets a job at a coffee shop, or that "Life Sentence" is set in Oregon. Stella's largely unnecessary voice over drives home the show's coming of age vibe and its naked earnestness. "Life" might be a little too light for its cancer story, but it certainly isn't glib or ironic. Maybe everyone really did learn a valuable lesson that day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
How Did They Know? (The Signs Showed the Way) In the spring of 2017, Elisabeth Walley had come to wonder if she was meant to live her life as a single woman. "If it's just you and me, Lord, I'm O.K. with that," Ms. Walley, 32, recalled praying. Just a couple of months earlier, on Good Friday, she was seated in a front seat at Hillsong Church during a service in Manhattan when a young man approached her. Ms. Walley, who is a community outreach manager at the church, said she thought he looked familiar. How did she know him? The young man, Delvon Worthy, had been sitting farther back in the church when he noticed a light shining on a pretty woman in the front row. ("It was a stage light," Mr. Worthy said, "but it was still a light.") The moment he met Ms. Walley, he was bowled over by her beauty, her sweetness and the warmth of her smile. He summoned the power of all his beliefs to gain her attention. As with most good love stories, he wasn't looking for romance when it struck. But perhaps it was the right time for him. Perhaps it was the right time for her, too. That spring, she had been walking past the Hudson River and made a wish: that someone special would walk with her there. She passed the restaurant P.J. Clarke's, and wished for a date to dine there. She prayed that someone special would bring her some of her favorite flowers. She prayed that someone special would walk with her in Central Park. And she prayed that someone special would come along who believed what she believed: that being a blessing to others is more important than just about anything else in life. Mr. Worthy, a former staff member of the Clinton Global Initiative who works in philanthropy in Bentonville, Ark., had spent his career helping others. As a child in Syracuse he attended church every Sunday, sometimes twice on Sunday, always dressed in a three piece suit. He volunteered at hospitals, nursing homes and after school programs throughout grade school and high school. Yet when Mr. Worthy showed up, Ms. Walley couldn't see past her own fears. "I had never been in a relationship before," she said. "I was afraid of being hurt, afraid of being rejected, afraid of someone loving me." She did know him, though. The two had been students together at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, N.C. They had both traveled around 700 miles to attend the school; Mr. Worthy from Syracuse, Ms. Walley from Chicago. They had not been friends, although their circles had intersected in numerous ways. Mr. Worthy thought perhaps they had sung in choir together, but couldn't remember; Ms. Walley thinks she recalls passing him on campus. On a campus of 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students that included only a small percentage of students of color, they did not meet. He asked if she would like to get together. Ms. Walley, noncommittal, said sure. But her time was taken up with work, friends and commitments. She gave him her phone number. "I wasn't intrigued," she said. "He was just a guy I knew who went to Wake Forest." He began texting and calling; he was relentless. Such behavior was uncharacteristic. "He is a classic Southern gentleman, even if he is from Syracuse," said a friend, Joseph Tillman. (Mr. Tillman's wedding was featured in Vows on Feb. 12, 2016.) "He'll go to soup kitchens and help people. He's a good guy. And when he met her, he just knew." After two months of prodding, she finally agreed to have lunch with him. Then she thought about it. "I said, Whoa! Was that him asking me out on a date?" Ms. Walley recalled. She considered backing out, but didn't know how. She said, "I can't say I'm not available now after I already said I was. I can't change my phone number because that would be rude." They went to Cafe Luxembourg, a French bistro on West 70th Street. Mr. Worthy was encouraged. Two weeks later, he mentioned to Ms. Walley that he was making reservations for Flame, an Upper West Side hibachi restaurant, on Monday, her only night off. (He had remembered.) Caught off guard, she agreed to accompany him. To her surprise, they talked for hours. After dinner, he suggested a walk through Central Park. Ms. Walley is a Central Park devotee, so she couldn't say no. As they passed the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she mentioned that the museum was also one of her favorite places. Mr. Worthy told her he had never visited the Met; could she give him a tour? She quickly agreed, but not just to spend time with him. "Any excuse to go to the Met," she said. For her, there was no star in her sky leading her to love. Not yet. Ms. Walley pays attention to life in the moment, even if she isn't quite sure where it is taking her. "She is adventurous, with a wanderlust; she sees the glass as half full," said a friend, Trayonna Floyd. After graduating Wake Forest, Ms. Walley attended Hillsong, a Bible college in Australia, for three years. She loves theme parks and Marvel superheroes, has traveled to South Africa for church trips, and is "a very strong personality, very independent," said her sister, Naomi Walley, a Broadway actress who is now appearing as Liz in "Chicago." After the success of the hibachi evening, Mr. Worthy and Ms. Walley made a date for the Met. Once the day arrived, after they had walked the Met, Mr. Worthy said they needed to hurry to get downtown. He wouldn't say why. But when they arrived at One World Trade Center, a.k.a. the Freedom Tower, Ms. Walley felt a twinge. "I had never visited the Freedom Tower but had always wanted to," she said. He took her for a walk by the Hudson. He took her to P.J. Clarke's. Ms. Walley was dumbfounded. "How did he know to do these things?" she recalled asking herself. She orchestrated a fried chicken dinner, her specialty, so Mr. Worthy could meet her sister. "I said, 'Whoa! She's running him by me," Naomi Walley said. "This might be more serious than I thought." Naomi Walley watched as her sister, inexperienced in the rituals of romance, flirted with Mr. Worthy. "She did not have any experience with the opposite sex whatsoever," Naomi Walley said. "But here she was, and I didn't have to coach her. During the course of that picnic, I knew they were going to be together." For the next several months, Mr. Worthy and Ms. Walley strolled in Central Park, watched movies, and attended Hillsong services. This past August, in front of thousands of attendees at a Hillsong conference at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Mr. Worthy proposed to Ms. Walley. She said yes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
When Sue Yeoh bought her prewar one bedroom in Forest Hills Gardens, a private enclave in central Queens, more than a decade ago, she had every intention of renovating the tiny, dark kitchen. But after investing in new appliances, gray cabinets and backsplash tile, she hit a roadblock. "I never got a good feeling about the contractor, so I put a halt on the project," she said. That was five years ago. Stacked in boxes, tile and cabinets sat in a corner of her living room until about a year ago, when she realized she couldn't put off the project any longer. "The last renovation was done somewhere in the late '80s, early '90s, and was poorly designed and cheaply executed," said Ms. Yeoh, 52, who works in corporate communications in the biopharmaceuticals industry. "There was a lot of laminate. Everything was brown." By the time she got around to shopping for another contractor, it looked even worse: The roughly 60 square foot kitchen "was now shopworn and beyond repair," Ms. Yeoh said. "Cabinet doors were actually falling off the hinges." Besides that, she added, "I had enough of living in my home with boxes in the living room." Working with Halina Hofmann, the founder of Aspiro Renovations and Design in Manhattan, Ms. Yeoh started fresh, letting her new contractor take the lead. One of Ms. Hofmann's challenges was the shape of the kitchen, which "had a lot of weird angles, no storage space," she said, and worse still, "outdated electrics" that couldn't handle the demands of modern appliances. Also, "there was a steam pipe exposed in the corner by the window it was a suffocating, enclosed mess." To make some breathing room, Ms. Hofmann removed a wall, creating an L shaped design. She moved the sink closer to the kitchen window and chose compact appliances to maximize space. The slender Bosch refrigerator is counter depth, but "you can still fit a lot of wine, because it goes all the way up," Ms. Hofmann joked. By shaving a few inches off each appliance, the kitchen gained about a foot of counter space. (Counter depth appliances can be more expensive than standard depth ones.) Recessed lights and under cabinet LED strips added light without diminishing headroom. Cabinets were stacked to the ceiling, tiered cutlery drawers cut down on wasted space and an awkward corner was fitted with a custom built trash bin. "We really struggled with giving Sue storage," Ms. Hofmann said, because the basic appliances took up most of the kitchen's under cabinet space. To take advantage of what was left, "we gave her a drawer under the oven," she said, "and gave her double drawers under the cooktop." To reduce waste and cut costs, Ms. Hofmann sifted through the boxes that had been sitting in the living room all those years, to see what could be salvaged. The cabinet interiors were put to good use some of them to cover the exposed steam pipe with new glossy white doors covering them. The backsplash tiles, however, were so old that they were falling apart, and after an unsuccessful attempt to save them, she substituted subway tile. Ms. Hofmann, who said she doesn't ever "throw away anything that can be reused or repurposed," was also able to make a contribution of her own: A white oak door left over from another job was transformed into open shelving. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The visionary landscapist Joseph Elmer Yoakum (1888 1972) has been categorized as an outsider, self taught or folk artist. Whichever: His place in the expanding canon of 20th century American art is assured, both for his achievement and influence. The latest evidence of Yoakum's originality is this enthralling exhibition, among the largest ever devoted to his work. It features nearly 70 of the artist's delirious vistas of undulant hills, mountains and rock formations, variously striated, patterned and creviced, rendered in pale browns and pastels of colored pencil burnished to resemble watercolor. Defined by double outlines, Yoakum's geological elements have a curious autonomy: They heave, lean and push against one another, but they also evoke soft creased flesh, voluptuous but slightly abstracted. Sudden breaks in the terrain offer views of tiny trees, distorting space and scale and intensifying the sexual undercurrent. A magnetic ambiguity prevails. In "Mt Horseback on Rockey Knob Range Near Chillicothe, Ohio" (1969), tan flowing forms divide the scene like irregular columns. They could be landslides, or an alternate universe alive with writhing snakes and worms. Yoakum concocted his fantastical topographies in a storefront on the South Side of Chicago during the last decade of his life, after years spent traveling the world as an itinerant worker. Once discovered, his art exerted an essential influence on Chicago Imagists like Jim Nutt, Roger Brown and Christina Ramberg. Beginning in 1968, he had several exhibitions in Chicago; one at the Whitney Museum in New York opened in late 1972, just weeks before he died on Christmas Day. ROBERTA SMITH | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
So much for that old saw that money can't buy happiness. A new survey of people who have built significant wealth on their own found that money has actually bought them a lot of happiness. The majority of those surveyed 300 people with assets of 1 million to 20 million said they equated wealth first and foremost with peace of mind. Happiness came in second, with more than half of the respondents citing it. But life with money is not all Champagne and caviar. The respondents said that their wealth made them feel satisfied and grateful, but it also gave them a greater sense of responsibility. Many cherished the way their wealth had allowed them to spend time with their families, but some regretted losing the family time they had sacrificed in the pursuit of financial freedom. Such inherent tension between freedom and obligation ran, to varying degrees, through all age groups in the survey, which was conducted by CoreData Research in February and March. Affluent Americans ages 25 to 65 were asked a series of questions about their attitudes toward wealth. Respondents were categorized by age, wealth level and whether they were business owners or employees. The more the responses were parsed by category, the more complications arose. About half of all respondents said the sacrifices they had made to accumulate such wealth meant they had spent less time with friends and family. That regret rose to nearly two thirds for people at the higher end of the wealth range in the study. More than half of business owners felt it, too, outpacing people who had accumulated their wealth by working for someone else. "It's the guilt over the time it took away from the family," said David Murphy, head of wealth advisory at Boston Private, a wealth management firm that commissioned the study. "There's a lot of emotion built into growing the business and the time it takes to do that. The employees also become part of the extended family." The results of the survey, titled "The Why of Wealth," hint at what the more sophisticated advisers already know: The days of focusing solely on investment returns are on the wane. I talked to some people who fit in this wealth cohort. What I found is something that won't surprise anyone who struggles to pay their bills: More money is better than less. But that financial comfort does not make the feelings around wealth any less difficult. Jane Daly, who was passionate about public transportation during her days growing up in Providence, R.I., turned a public sector transit career into a lucrative private sector venture when she and two partners started Alternate Concepts, which operates and maintains transportation systems. "Wealth wasn't my goal," said Ms. Daly, 62. "I wanted the company to be successful because we had a lot of families depending on us. But I'm grateful my career ended in such a way that the wealth gave me the freedom I wouldn't have had otherwise." That freedom allows her to support and run an educational nonprofit called the Rising Stars Foundation in Puerto Rico. Others I talked to also said they felt an obligation be a force for change. "For me, at an early age, wealth was about being able to create the change you wish to see in the world," said Elizabeth Galbut Perelman, 29, a co founder of SoGal Ventures, which has invested in more than 50 companies in the past two years. Ms. Galbut Perelman said her mother had to give up her career as a doctor when she temporarily lost her sight while performing surgery. It was a complication of multiple sclerosis. That motivated her to focus on how wealth can be harnessed to fund women owned companies that are looking to create change. She has invested in companies like EverlyWell, which provides affordable at home lab testing, and Winky Lux, a cosmetics purveyor in New York. "Being an employee of a big company wasn't going to generate the wealth and flexibility that I desired," she said of her time at Deloitte, where she worked after college. "I wanted to figure out how to solve some problems and do it to the best of my ability." For some younger millionaires, wealth does not equate to yachts and homes. "Independence is the first word that comes to mind, and freedom goes hand in hand with it," said Marc Hustvedt, 38, chief executive of Above Average, a digital entertainment company, who has also created and sold companies. "In my childhood, it might have meant the trappings of wealth houses, cars, status. Now as I'm older, with more business experience, I understand it as income stream." As boring as income stream sounds, it's what allows independence. "The whole guiding principle was, I liked to be independent," said Tom Aley, an entrepreneur who had three young children when he quit a high paying job at Reed Elsevier Ventures to start a company called Generate. "I could do more things. I didn't have to be beholden to anyone." He even managed to persuade one of his brothers to join him at Generate in 2004. Four years later, they sold the company to Dow Jones. This is where wealth can bring freedom. Mr. Hustvedt said his flexible schedule allowed him to spend time with two children and still run a company. He said there were other social issues he would like to tackle, like the growing wealth gap, but he felt he had little time to address them. Time is a similar lament for Ms. Galbut Perelman. "You're sacrificing time with your friends, time with your loved ones, time with your own health," she said. "If I'm working at my business 16 hours a day, how do I have a sense of wellness and also take care of my employees? Business owners aren't getting that support in their community." For Mr. Aley, though, having more freedom now, at age 52, is worth any sacrifices he made earlier in his career. He now has better control of his time and how he spends it. "Sometimes, it doesn't always work out, but for me, but it's invaluable," he said. "It also means I can go to lunch with my wife and it doesn't have to be confined to a Saturday, and I can see my kids' games." The Boston Private survey found that business owners in particular felt the burdens of wealth more intensely than people who grew wealthy working at companies. These entrepreneurs said they felt pressure from other people's expectations as well as judgments about their wealth. But some people I talked to also mentioned the gratification they felt, even if it was tinged with regret. Ms. Daly said she was pleased with how her wealth had allowed her to give back to a group of children in Puerto Rico, where her company managed a rail system. But how she thought about wealth and financial independence earlier in her career left her with one regret: She had neglected her personal life. "I turned down a couple of proposals," she said. "I didn't have a family." Still, she remains fulfilled by nonprofit work with children that would not be possible without the money she made in business. "I have more children than anyone I know," she said. "There is so much joy in what I'm doing now." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
For the 13th year, the Travel section presents its annual 52 Places to Go issue. You will likely have some questions: How did the No. 1 spot get there? What's the deal with those looped videos in the online version? And why is my favorite spot not on the list? Here are some frequently asked questions about how we chose our 52 Places to Go in 2018. What made New Orleans the top choice? In a year that seemed particularly traumatic for many around the world, we look to a place where centuries of trauma have yielded something magical. New Orleans is unlike any other city in the world, largely thanks to its ability to synthesize that history and the myriad populations that participated in it into a place full of joy and wonder. New Orleans is also turning 300 this year, so there's no better time to celebrate that history, whether it be through anniversary events, food, music, art or simply wandering this amazing city. What is special about the list online? Last year's list featured about a dozen 360 videos. This year, you'll find a series of short, looped videos shot by photographers in places as disparate as Cambodia, Germany and Japan. We also had our staff photographer Josh Haner head to New Orleans to capture video shot with a camera attached to what is called a gimbal, which steadies the image, as well as a drone camera, which he flew over the city. "There's a certain elation that overtakes you when walking with a second line " a traditional type of brass band parade "in New Orleans," Mr. Haner said. "I found myself dancing while filming and was grateful for the gimbal so my bouncing wasn't too noticeable." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
SEOUL, South Korea The most important thing about this country's legislative elections this week is the fact that they happened at all. They were the world's first nationwide vote of the coronavirus era, and more than 29 million people 66 percent of the electorate, the highest turnout in nearly three decades cast ballots to choose 300 new members for the National Assembly. Each polling station was equipped with hand sanitizer and disposable gloves; voters, wearing masks and standing far apart, had their temperatures checked at the entrances. No one seemed to feel they had to choose between exercising their democratic rights and protecting their health. As with widespread testing, so, too, with record voter turnout: South Korea is again a beacon in dark times, a model for how an open society can weather the storm of a pandemic. Who would have predicted this six weeks ago? At the end of February, South Korea held the dubious distinction of having the highest number of Covid 19 cases outside China. Along with Italy and Iran, it was one of the first new hot spot countries, and a harbinger that the epidemic that started in Wuhan was on its way to becoming a global pandemic. I returned to Seoul with my family from an extended stay in Vietnam just as the number of daily infections was starting to spike: The airline we flew canceled all its flights to and from South Korea not long after. For a harrowing spell in late February and early March, South Korea felt like ground zero. Before the outbreak, President Moon Jae in and his liberal coalition, the Democratic Party, were in the doldrums. Mr. Moon had to let go of a controversial new justice minister and pull back on unpopular structural reforms, like a pledge to substantially increase the minimum wage. Economic growth was sluggish. Mr. Moon's signature foreign policy of "peace and denuclearization" diplomacy with North Korea was stuck in gear, paralyzed by the lack of progress in negotiations between Kim Jong un, the North's leader, and President Trump. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Hollywood's biggest awards show just happened and, wow. What a night. But first, the fashion. See what Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Ruth Negga and more wore as they walked the red carpet. And then read Matthew Schneier's review. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
After an N.H.L. season in which players challenged deep seated issues of racism and the lack of diversity within the sport, the league made history this week when Quinton Byfield became the highest drafted Black player. Clad in a stylish white blazer and black bow tie at home in Newmarket, Ontario, for the remote draft, Byfield, 18, acknowledged the gravitas of the moment when he was selected second overall by the Los Angeles Kings. Previously, the highest drafted Black players had been Evander Kane (2009, Atlanta Thrashers) and Seth Jones (2013, Nashville Predators), each taken fourth over all. "It definitely means a lot to me and is something special," Byfield said in a news conference on draft night Tuesday. "My dad and mom didn't play hockey or didn't have too much knowledge about that, so just going to the game together, it just shows that there's a lot of opportunity for everyone in the world." "Quinton is an exceptional young man and talented player with a very bright future," Kings General Manager Rob Blake, a Hall of Fame defenseman, said in a statement after the first round. "We're proud to be adding him to our organization and look forward to the next stages of his development and a promising career in L.A." Byfield was drafted off the strength of an 82 point season with the Sudbury Wolves of the Ontario Hockey League. He was also a part of Canada's gold medal winning team at the World Junior Hockey Championship, contributing one assist in seven games. At 6 feet 4 inches and 214 pounds, Byfield could be a high end playmaking center in the mold of Kings star Anze Kopitar, a two time Stanley Cup winner with 950 career points in 1,073 games. "The big center man, the effects they have on the play, all those things come into play," Blake said in a news conference after the first round, adding that he thought Byfield could immediately play in the N.H.L. Byfield will join a Kings organization that includes Akil Thomas, his friend and a 2020 Canadian World Junior standout. Thomas, who is of Barbadian heritage and was drafted in the second round in 2018, is currently playing professionally in Germany. Thomas's father and uncle were also professional hockey players. Thomas is active off the ice as well. He owns a clothing company, co hosts the "Soul on Ice" podcast, and has been actively helping younger hockey players of color who reach out to him on social media navigate a sport that is still mostly white. "I don't mind getting my feet wet in a couple of different things that aren't typical for a hockey player," he said. "Definitely I want to impact as many lives and initiatives as I can." Yet just one day after Byfield's landmark selection, the Hockey Diversity Alliance, a group co founded by Kane and the former N.H.L. player Akim Aliu in June to make the sport more socioeconomically inclusive and fight racism both within hockey and society, said it would work independently of the league. There had been months of negotiations over funding and anti racism initiatives, and the Minnesota Wild's Matt Dumba, one of the most visible 20 something players of color, had delivered a pregame speech this summer about the need for hockey to play a more active role in the fight against racism. "The H.D.A. and everything we're doing, it's not about us," Dumba, a member of the alliance, said in a telephone interview before the announcement. "We're doing it for that next generation that are going home after games, facing tears, and having those hard conversations with their parents on why they don't feel that they belong in hockey or what they've heard from opposing players or how they're being treated by their own teammates solely because of the color of their skin." Still, Byfield and Thomas are on track to play in a league that suddenly has several and talented players of color in their 20s. Mathieu Joseph, 23, just won a Stanley Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning. Ethan Bear, also 23, played 71 games for the Edmonton Oilers in the 2019 20 season, while Anthony Duclair, 25, scored 23 goals for the Ottawa Senators. In 2018, the New York Rangers drafted K'Andre Miller, a defenseman with the United States National Development Program, in the first round. During an exhibition game following the league's return to play this summer, Bear, who is Indigenous, wore a jersey with his Cree characters on the name plate. "It will be an honor to wear this jersey tonight," Bear told the Edmonton Oilers website before the game. "I feel like I will be wearing it for all those Indigenous players who came before me and those Indigenous kids dreaming of playing in the NHL." Since the N.H.L. began tracking data on the racial makeup of the league in the 1989 90 season, the number of players from minority groups has hovered around 5 percent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
A major part of the homestretch for "Time's Arrow," the new name for Trinity Wall Street's post New Year's festival, is new work. On Sunday, Jan. 8, a showcase of commissions being made through Trinity's ongoing Mass Reimaginings project will be presented at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, in partnership with VisionIntoArt's FERUS Festival. "Spire and Shadow" by Zachary Wadsworth, commissioned for the 250th anniversary of St. Paul's Chapel, the oldest church building in Manhattan, is a 17 movement work based on poems about New York that span five centuries. For the premiere, on Jan. 11, Trinity's new semiprofessional chorus, Downtown Voices, will be joined by the church's contemporary music orchestra, NOVUS NY. The festival's final concert, on Jan. 12, includes works by Hildegard von Bingen, Machaut and Dufay alongside the premiere of Paola Prestini's "A Mass: The Imaginary World of Wild Order," the latest installment in the Mass Reimaginings series, with a text by the poet Brenda Shaughnessy that features a different language for each section. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
No one ever really dies in "Star Trek: Discovery," apparently. Even the characters who do die. After toying with our emotions last week with the potential demise of Saru, we have the return of Dr. Hugh Culber, whom we all thought was murdered last season by Tyler. How is he still alive? I got lost in Stamets's technobabble explanation but it had something to do with thermodynamics, and how "energy cannot be created or destroyed." It can only change states. The other big story line this week is the collision course of Section 31 and the Discovery crew. To properly understand this plotline, let's take a step back and remember where Section 31 was introduced. It was one of the best story lines in "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine": A rogue Starfleet black ops group, with advanced technology, whose existence wouldn't even be confirmed by the official Federation hierarchy. The operatives, like Sloan, came and went on ships as they liked, whenever they wanted. They committed assassinations, framed high ranking politicians and abducted Starfleet officers. Section 31 was essentially a futuristic version of the KGB and made clear that Starfleet wasn't solely the moral force for good that we saw in "The Next Generation." It's not that Section 31 bends the rules. In "Deep Space Nine," it didn't seem to have any. The group was so secret that in one scene, Admiral Ross wouldn't even discuss it with Dr. Bashir "on the record." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Most people who live through a home renovation vow never to do it again, because the process is inherently messy and disruptive. But Kevin and Hanh Livingston had the opposite reaction. After completing one apartment combination on the Upper West Side in 2010, "the bug bit him," Ms. Livingston said, referring to her husband. Mr. Livingston, 46, a co founder and partner of a New York investment firm, was disappointed when their first renovation ended not because of the end result, which he liked, but because there were no more design decisions to be made. "I spend so much time thinking about floor plans," he said, "that Hanh bought me trace paper for Christmas." Their rosy view of renovating grew out of the positive experience they had working with their architect, Matthew Miller, of the New York firm StudioLAB, on the unusual combination. After the apartment next door to their former two bedroom condo became available, they struck a deal with the neighbors on the other side of the vacant unit to split it: The Livingstons got an extra bedroom, the neighbors got the remainder, and StudioLAB did both renovations. But even with the expansion, the Livingstons began to feel cramped, as their family grew to include three children: Tanner, now 7, Holden, 5, and Wyatt, 3. It didn't help that they also had two dogs, Echo and Tiger. Ready for a new renovation project by 2015, they needed only to find the right space. At a children's birthday party early that year, Mr. Livingston learned from a father who lived across from the American Museum of Natural History that his rental building, The Orleans, was on the verge of converting to condominium. The Livingstons contacted the building's sales team before the units were officially on the market and eventually snapped up a 2,500 square foot sunny corner unit with a view of the museum's grounds for 5.6 million. After being reconfigured many times over the years, the apartment was a hodgepodge of awkward spaces, mismatched flooring and multiple electrical panels which was exactly what they wanted. "It was a positive for us to come into a space that needed to be fixed," Ms. Livingston said. "We didn't want a place that somebody had already renovated." Mr. Livingston sharpened his pencils and engaged StudioLAB to lead the project once again, but with plenty of collaborative effort. "I was looking to be part of designing every square foot," he said. Together, Mr. Miller and the Livingstons pulled together a plan for a complete gut renovation that would create a four bedroom, three and a half bathroom apartment with an open living, dining and kitchen area, and extensive custom millwork, including folding and sliding doors that would conceal a television and bar in the living room. One of the bedrooms would also serve as a combination playroom and guest room, with a wall of built in storage to conceal toys and a Murphy bed. Mr. Miller suggested buying a small portion of the shared hallway from the building to create a more gracious foyer. Mr. Livingston suggested taking some space from a large bathroom to create a "garage" for sports equipment with its own door from the shared hallway. The Livingstons also spent days researching materials. "It was such an education, which I didn't realize would be so fun," Ms. Livingston said. "Matt explained wood flooring to us, and the difference between rift sawn versus quarter sawn, and character versus no character. We learned about veneer. We went to look at stone and pick out slabs." But it wasn't all smiles and smooth sailing. One of the biggest points of contention between the Livingstons was the custom floor to ceiling, steel and glass wine storage wall that Mr. Miller proposed building between the foyer and the kitchen. "That wasn't on the list of things we had asked for," said Mr. Livingston, who nevertheless thought it would be a novel way to allow sunlight from the exterior windows to reach the foyer. "I had strong feelings about that," said Ms. Livingston, who lobbied for a larger kitchen pantry instead. The wine wall stuck (though an aquarium might have been a better idea, a helpful doorman suggested to this reporter on a recent visit). When construction began in November 2015, "Kevin came here once in the morning and once in the evening" nearly every day "to see what was going on," Mr. Miller said. And by the time the project was wrapping up in the summer of 2016, at a total cost of about 1.6 million, the homeowners had grown so fond of their architect that he was the first person they called with important family news: Ms. Livingston was pregnant with their fourth child, Keaton, who is now 1. "Matt knew before any of our family," Mr. Livingston said. "We wanted to make sure there wasn't anything he would do to change the design." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
When you're working from home, the goal should be to "create an environment that's positive and upbeat," said Kelly Hoppen, a London based interior designer. That isn't easy, especially during a pandemic. But a good desk organizer can help. "It's important for your mind to have a really nice desk to work from, so when you come and sit down, it doesn't just feel like a mess," Ms. Hoppen said. That's where a desk organizer comes in soothing frayed nerves by establishing a sense of order, with everything you need right where you need it. Desk organizers also deliver grab and go functionality for people who like to work in different rooms, and they make it easier to do a quick cleanup at the end of the day which is essential if you've commandeered the end of the dining table as your work space. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
No! No! No! Every generation of modernist artists has applied a firm negative to points championed by the previous generation. In the 1960s, when large parts of the world were still taken aback by the dance negations implied or stated by Martha Graham (no to frivolity or merely surface psychology), George Balanchine (no to most decor or costume excess), and Merce Cunningham (no to conventional musicality), the young rebels around the Judson Memorial Church in New York went further. In a now famous manifesto, the dancer choreographer Yvonne Rainer wrote "No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make believe ... " and 10 further "noes." She, Trisha Brown, David Gordon and other dance experimentalists became associated with paring dance down to new essentials. Their influence has grown, both in New York and internationally; there are young and youngish choreographers today who seem inhibited by the Judson legacy, eager to keep earning their Judson qualifications. Now the Museum of Modern Art presents "Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done" (Sept. 16 Feb. 3). By means of live performance, film, photography, sculpture, musical scores, poetry and archival materials, it will chart Judson Dance Theater's history. The filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Charles Atlas will be a central link. The exhibition is to feature several core Judson figures in successive waves: Yvonne Rainer (Sept. 16 23), Deborah Hay (Sept. 24 Oct. 7), David Gordon (Oct. 8 21), Lucinda Childs (Oct. 22 Nov. 4), Steve Paxton (Nov. 19 Dec. 16) and Trisha Brown (Dec. 17 Jan. 16). For those who missed the original Judson moment and who have experienced these artists in separate contexts, the MoMA show will be an opportunity to reassess and rethink history and to watch works, long unperformed, that once seemed to redefine dance: Do they still seem challenging and important? Performances, sometimes two or three a day, will be accompanied by historical film footage. In recent years, Ms. Rainer whose "Trio A" has become the seminal work of postmodern dance has been wildly inconsistent; but at her best she's been witty, mischievous, inventive. Were those virtues present 57 years ago? Most of this exhibition's Rainer choreography derives from 1961 69; the earliest, "Three Satie Spoons" (1961), has a title I can't resist. And I'm keen to improve my scant acquaintance with the work of Ms. Hay, who has been a singularly inspiring figure for many connoisseurs of dance postmodernism. Ms Childs's best work, in my view, was all pre 1980, but we seldom see it; four of her 1963 78 creations will be performed here. Ms. Brown, often the most sensuous, as well as among the most cerebral, of the group and eventually its most celebrated artist died in 2017; several of her 1968 85 dances will be revived Oct. 10 13 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, while for this Judson exhibition Mr. Atlas is preparing an installation of films of her work. Among the living, I have highest hopes for the work of David Gordon and Steve Paxton. Mr. Gordon's "Live Archiveography" was a 2017 highlight for me; he has often specialized in constructing Pirandellian or Stoppardian mazes from the meetings of art and life. Whereas others are being represented by anthologies of shorter works, he is taking just one, "The Matter" (1971, originally for 40 dancers, some trained, some not) and reworking it. In terms of sheer scale, this is likely to be the most substantial single piece of this Judson retrospective. Mr. Paxton was an exceptional performer (apart from the ballerina Lynn Seymour, the only dancer I've known to share a program with Mikhail Baryshnikov and make a yet more remarkable impression); and in 2017 he passed on much of his electrifying intensity and vivifying detail to the Stephen Petronio Company, when it revived his "Goldberg Variations" (1986 92). Now Petronio and Company will perform Paxton in this Judson show. ALASTAIR MACAULAY William Forsythe would like the world to understand a thing or two about choreography not from the distance of a proscenium stage, but from the inside out. In "William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects," which opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, on Oct. 31, Mr. Forsythe expands the notion of choreography with a selection of interactive sculptures, participatory objects and video installations that span the past two decades. The first comprehensive show of Mr. Forsythe's installation pieces in the United States, "Choreographic Objects" involves viewer participation. Don't be put off: It's an adventure waiting to be experienced. In "Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, No. 3" (2015), Mr. Forsythe has created a maze of 80 hanging pendulums giving the spectator the playful (and humbling) task of navigating through them. "The Fact of the Matter" (2009) features gymnastic rings, hanging by the ceiling at various lengths. The aim is to move through space using only the rings. And in "Towards the Diagnostic Gaze" (2013), the trick is to hold a feather duster absolutely still. It's impossible you find that you're suddenly a bundle of micro movements. In all of his experiments, Mr. Forsythe gives you a rare gift: a chance to rediscover your body. As the director of the Frankfurt Ballet from 1984 to 2004, and the more experimental Forsythe Company from 2005 to 2015, Mr. Forsythe stretched dance to daring extremes. Recently, his interest in ballet has been renewed. In October at Sadler's Wells in London, he will present "A Quiet Evening of Dance," described as a "distillation of the geometric origins of classical ballet." In March, he will unveil a premiere at Boston Ballet. And for something closer to home, New York City Ballet's winter season features the return of Mr. Forsythe's "Herman Schmerman." Here, his choreographic objects are the dancers. GIA KOURLAS When Balanchine began in New York The company moved in 1964 to the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch), much larger and designed to Balanchine's specifications, in then new Lincoln Center, where it still performs. But it's those early years that will be celebrated this fall (Oct. 31 Nov. 4) at City Center as part of the theater's 75th anniversary events. Joining the festivities are dancers from many of the world's greatest companies: Mariinsky Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Miami City Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theater and, of course, New York City Ballet. All 13 works are by Balanchine big and small, widely performed ("The Four Temperaments") and somewhat rare (the "Glinka Pas de Trois"). Just over half had their debuts at City Center, and history buffs will pine for omissions from a fertile period ("La Valse," "Orpheus," "Episodes," the list of the left out is long). Yet the festival is likely to be less about how the City Center years were distinct than about distinctions among the participating troupes. As with the three company performances of Balanchine's "Jewels" last year, dancers from different traditions will bring out different facets of Balanchine style all illuminating but not all equal. Even at City Center, New York City Ballet will again have the home advantage, and not only because its orchestra will be accompanying everyone. Wherever City Ballet performs, Balanchine style is its home. BRIAN SEIBERT When it comes to making art, a specific prompt can be both inspiring and limiting. For last year's "We're Watching" series at Bard College, the prompt was to create a work on the theme of surveillance to explore the question, as the curator Gideon Lester put it, "What is the effect of the surveillance state on the experience of being human?" The choreographer Will Rawls, the poet Claudia Rankine and the filmmaker John Lucas collaborating for the first time responded with "What Remains," in which they considered the relationship between being watched and being black in America. Ms. Rankine's "Citizen" and "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" served as jumping off points for a haunting work of poetry remixed with movement, song and video. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Jean Edward Smith in an undated photo. George F. Will called him "today's foremost biographer of formidable figures in American history." Jean Edward Smith, a political scientist and renowned biographer whose works helped restore luster to the tarnished reputations of underrated presidents, died on Sept. 1 at his home in Huntington, W.Va. He was 86. The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his wife, Christine Smith, said. In a long academic career, Dr. Smith had taught at Marshall University in Huntington for 12 years. Dr. Smith was, in the words of the commentator George F. Will, "today's foremost biographer of formidable figures in American history." His subjects ranged from the relatively obscure, like Lucius D. Clay, the American Army officer who oversaw occupied Germany after World War II, to the most historically consequential, like Franklin D. Roosevelt. Dr. Smith won the Francis Parkman Prize for his book "FDR" (2008), a door stopper that ran 858 pages. ("Altogether, an exemplary and highly readable work that ably explains why F.D.R. merits continued honor," Kirkus Reviews said). He was perhaps best known for biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower, presidents who at times received low approval ratings from historians, and of Chief Justice John Marshall, whose legacy had seemed to have been lost in the flood of attention paid to the nation's founders. Dr. Smith's biography "Grant" (2001) was among those that helped rehabilitate the 18th president's reputation as an effective chief executive, despite overseeing an administration rife with corruption. Dr. Smith showed that Grant's poor reputation as president had been fostered in part by biased graduate students at Columbia University who wrote the first studies of Reconstruction. The book was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in biography, which went to David McCullough for "John Adams." Similarly, in "Eisenhower in War and Peace" (2012), Dr. Smith refuted the common perception of Eisenhower as a dullard. "From the very beginning of his military career, Smith argues persuasively, Eisenhower was a shrewd political operator who concealed his acumen and ambition behind an affable facade," Wendy Smith wrote in The Los Angeles Times. The book touched on Eisenhower's blunders during the war. But, Ms. Smith wrote, "What made him a great leader, in Smith's assessment, was his willingness to take responsibility for his mistakes, learn from them and move on." Dr. Smith was not enamored of all his subjects. His "Bush" (2016) was a scathing indictment, starting with this blunt opening sentence: "Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill served as during the presidency of George W. Bush." His book on Marshall "John Marshall: Definer of a Nation" (1996) renewed interest in the longtime chief justice after decades of neglect. "Before Smith wrote his biography, there was a dearth of material interpreting his life and his legacy in the modern day," Patricia Proctor, director of the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy at Marshall University, said in an phone interview. "If you read books by other historians on the founding period, you see they all cite Smith when talking about Marshall." President Bill Clinton once said that "Jean Edward Smith's biography of John Marshall showed me how as chief justice in Marbury v. Madison he built the case for the American nation, and that's one of the most important things in American history." Jean Edward Smith was born on Oct. 13, 1932, in Washington. His father, Jean M. Smith, was a barber at the Capitol on the House side. His mother, Eddyth (Carter) Smith, was a secretary in the Justice Department. He attended McKinley Technology High School, graduating in 1950 and going on to Princeton, where he majored in political science and English. He was in R.O.T.C. at Princeton, and after graduating in 1954 he served in the Army for seven years. Stationed in Germany, he met his future wife there, Christine Zinsel. She was in law school and he was a young lieutenant on his way to becoming a captain. They were married in 1959. In addition to his wife, Dr. Smith is survived by a daughter, Sonja Bauer; a son, Charles; and four grandchildren. Returning from Germany in 1961, he went on to receive his doctorate in public law and government from Columbia, in 1964. His first book, "The Defense of Berlin" (1963), which recounted the events leading to the building of the Berlin Wall, was published before he began his doctoral studies. In an unusual move, Columbia accepted it as his dissertation. Johns Hopkins University Press plans to republish it later this year. Dr. Smith began his teaching career at Dartmouth, leaving in 1965 for the University of Toronto, which offered him tenure. He taught there for 35 years and became a Canadian citizen, holding dual citizenship. Over the years he had been a visiting professor at Columbia, Princeton and Georgetown. He joined the Marshall faculty after retiring from Toronto in 1999 and wrote many of his more notable books in West Virginia. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. The Belmont Stakes champion Tiz the Law added the Travers Stakes to his winning resume on Saturday, making him the favorite to win the postponed Kentucky Derby next month and then possibly to claim the sport's 14th Triple Crown with a Preakness victory in October. A New York bred son of Constitution, Tiz the Law ran away from Caracaro down the stretch of what is known as the Mid Summer Derby, winning by five and a half lengths at Saratoga Race Course. Tiz the Law, ridden by Manny Franco, covered the mile and a quarter distance in two minutes and 95 hundredths of a second, paying his backers 3 on a 2 bet. It was the sixth victory in seven starts for Tiz the Law, and the 535,000 first place check pushed his career earnings past 2 million. The "Graveyard of Champions," as Saratoga is called, truly felt like a cemetery on Saturday as spectators were barred from the grounds. Instead, people tailgated in makeshift party lots near the track or watched the Travers from the porches of nearby bars. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
GROWN ISH 8 p.m. on Freeform. When this spinoff of Kenya Barris's "black ish" debuted at the beginning of last year, James Poniewozik wrote in his review for The New York Times that the series which follows Yara Shahidi's character, Zoey, as she goes off to college "just needs a semester or two away from home." The spinoff, like its lead character, was still finding its own voice, a coarser one than its parent program thanks to being on cable and about college students. Zoey returns to school for her sophomore year in the show's second season, which debuts with two new episodes Wednesday night. In the new season, Zoey moves into an off campus apartment, rekindles a romance and navigates a social sphere defined by hashtags and status updates. MYTHBUSTERS JR. 9 p.m. on Science Channel. Adam Savage's rise to fame was marked by explosions. As the bubblier half of the hosting team behind "Mythbusters," Savage has been seen testing such questions as whether a bullet fired through a plane window can cause explosive decompression and whether using a cellphone at a gas station can cause a caller to go up in flames. He returns in this spinoff series, which features Savage alongside a panel of children working to test the veracity of yet more myths. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Gathering at the Washington Monument before March for Science on Saturday. WASHINGTON Thousands of scientists and their supporters, feeling increasingly threatened by the policies of President Trump, gathered Saturday in Washington under rainy skies for what they called the March for Science, abandoning a tradition of keeping the sciences out of politics and calling on the public to stand up for scientific enterprise. As the marchers trekked shoulder to shoulder toward the Capitol, the street echoed with their calls: "Save the E.P.A." and "Save the N.I.H." as well as their chants celebrating science, "Who run the world? Nerds," and "If you like beer, thank yeast and scientists!" Some carried signs that showed rising oceans and polar bears in peril and faces of famous scientists like Mae Jemison, Rosalind Franklin and Marie Curie, and others touted a checklist of the diseases Americans no longer get thanks to vaccines. Although drizzle may have washed away the words on some signs, they aimed to deliver the message that science needs the public's support. "Science is a very human thing," said Ashlea Morgan, a doctoral student in neurobiology at Columbia University. "The march is allowing the public to know that this is what science is, and it's letting our legislators know that science is vitally important." The demonstration in Washington which started with teach ins and a rally that packed the National Mall was echoed by protests in hundreds of cities across the United States and around the world, including marches in Europe and Asia. The March for Science evolved from a social media campaign into an effort to get people onto the streets. Its organizers were motivated by Mr. Trump, who as a presidential candidate disparaged climate change as a hoax and cast suspicions on the safety of vaccines. Their resolve deepened, they said, when the president appointed cabinet members who seemed hostile to the sciences. He also proposed a budget with severe cuts for agencies like the National Institutes of Health which would lose 18 percent of their funding in his blueprint and the Environmental Protection Agency, which faces a 31 percent budget cut and the elimination of a quarter of the agency's 15,000 employees. While traveling by motorcade to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Saturday, Mr. Trump passed dozens of demonstrators from the march holding signs, including one that said, "Stop denying the earth is dying," according to a pool report. Later, the White House released a statement from Mr. Trump for Earth Day that did not mention the March for Science by name, but appeared directed at its participants. Calling science critical to economic growth and environmental protection, he said, "My administration is committed to advancing scientific research that leads to a better understanding of our environment and of environmental risks." Organizers said they hoped the day's demonstrations result in sustained, coordinated action aimed at persuading elected officials to adopt policies consistent with the scientific consensus on climate change, vaccines and other issues. "This has been a living laboratory as scientists and science institutions are willing to take a step outside their comfort zone, outside of the labs and into the public spheres," said Beka Economopoulos, a founder of the pop up Natural History Museum and an organizer of the march. Mona Hanna Attisha, a pediatrician who helped expose lead poisoning in Flint, Mich., and who spoke in Washington, called the protest the beginning of a movement to ensure that governments do not dismiss or deny science. "If we want to prevent future Flints, we need to embrace what we've learned and how far we've come in terms of science and technology," Dr. Hanna Attisha said in an interview. What began as a movement by scientists for scientists has drawn in many science enthusiasts, young and old. William Harrison, 9, from Washington, held up a waterlogged cardboard sign he drew with markers of a shark pleading with humanity to save him from global warming. He said science is important because without it, "we basically will not exist." On the West Coast, Penelope DeVries, 69, carried a sign at the march in San Francisco that said, "Love your mother," with a blue and green Earth, the paint still wet from when she made it on her kitchen floor. "I have three grandchildren, and I want them to have a beautiful life like I have," she said. She was one of thousands of upbeat demonstrators who marched through the city's downtown under mild weather. A volunteer at that march, Bryan Dunyak, 28, was motivated to help improve science outreach and improve public understanding of science. "The vast majority of people will never have the chance to ask a scientist, 'Why do you do what you do?'" said Dr. Dunyak, who is a postdoctoral researcher in neurodegenerative disease at the University of California, San Francisco. Fearing that Mr. Trump may undermine public support for the sciences, many scientists at the marches said they believed now was the appropriate moment to express themselves politically. Dr. Oreskes said the closest parallel to Saturday's protests were the demonstrations for nuclear disarmament in the 1950s and '60s. But scientists were then marching against the use of science to build weapons of mass destruction. Thousands converged on the Boston Common in a cold rain, and children danced to a brass band. Students from Harvard and M.I.T. marched over the bridge from Cambridge, and a contingent from Boston University chanted, "What do we want? Science! When do we want it? After peer review!" In a city and state where many work in hospitals and biomedical firms, Mr. Trump's proposals to cut the National Institutes of Health's budget were on the minds of many marchers there. Dr. George Q. Daley, the dean of Harvard Medical School, said in a speech that the proposed cuts would have a "cataclysmic effect" on the economy in Massachusetts. "This is a shortsighted decision that will set the biomedical enterprise on a path toward devastation," Dr. Daley said. "I feel that science funding should not be up to the whims of a frugal government," he said. In New York, demonstrators stretched for 10 blocks along Central Park West, wedged between the park and a line of buildings on a gray and dreary day. Underlining the connection in the minds of many marchers between the science march, Earth Day and global warming, one participant, Christine Negra, 49, a chemist who works as a consultant on climate change issues, said she would attend next week's People's Climate March, too. "In the U.S., we're lagging in our recognition about how important climate change is," she said. "These public events are meant to shake people out of their daily lives so that people see how urgent the problem really is." Many messages at the New York rally took on a political hue. One demonstrator carried a sign with a diagram. "Before you dismiss science, Mr. President," it said, "here is the molecular formula for hair spray." Another said, "Fund science, not walls." And along the marching route, some were heard chanting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Donald Trump has got to go," as they passed the Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle. Back in Washington, Denis Hayes, who was the principal organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970, said concerns like Mr. Roy's were an important source of motivation for the science march, which was coordinated with the Earth Day Network. "You have a clear enemy," he said. "You've got a president who along with his vice president, his cabinet and his party leadership in both houses of Congress have a strong anti environmental agenda. He's basically trying to roll back everything that we've tried to do in the last half century." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
A structure that just missed the New York City landmarks preservation law of 1965 was the 1905 Times Tower at 42nd Street at Broadway. Reminiscent of the Florentine campanile by Giotto, it was an expansive gesture by The New York Times, then moving uptown from Park Row. The newspaper left the building around 10 years later, but the tower survived for 60 years before being stripped to its skin. By the time the landmarks law was passed, even the skeleton had disappeared from view. At one time most of the newspaper industry was clustered along Park Row, where The Times built its own skyscraper at No. 41 Park Row in 1889. But when the Ochs family bought the paper in the 1890s, they were open to new ideas, especially in 1900, when construction began on New York's first subway, its route turning at what was then called Longacre Square. In 1903 The Times's architects, Eidlitz McKenzie, filed plans for a 24 story tower on the trapezoidal plot at the south end of the square, bounded by 42nd and 43rd Streets, Broadway and Seventh Avenue. While construction was underway, The Times asked the city to rename the location Times Square, a proposal to which there were objections. One came from The New York Tribune, which in 1904 praised "our excellent neighbor" but also said that "the established names of streets and places ought seldom to be changed." The American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society chimed in, calling Longacre "dignified, reputable and euphonious" and denouncing the "pernicious" practice of replacing long established names with those of commercial endeavors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Akim Aliu, a former National Hockey League player, gave a harrowing account this week in The Players' Tribune about his experiences with racism in the sport. Aliu's unusually frank post in which he challenged the culture of the sport and named his tormentor intensified a debate within the hockey community about efforts to diversify. In the article, Aliu discussed a high profile hazing incident that took place when he was 16 and playing with the Windsor Spitfires of the Ontario Hockey League. Aliu, 31, said that after he refused to strip naked for a rookie hazing ritual, a teammate retaliated by attacking him with a hockey stick in their next practice, knocking out seven of his teeth. Aliu wrote that the player was Steve Downie, a top prospect who went on to play 434 games in the N.H.L. In the article, Aliu referred to Downie as a "racist sociopath." Downie could not be reached for comment after multiple attempts by email and on social media to contact him through former teams and associates. "He was two years older than me and a rising star, and he wielded his power over me like I was nothing like I was subhuman," Aliu wrote. He added: "If you've heard of me, you've heard of the hazing incident that took place that season. Thanks to this guy, that was the way I was introduced to the entire hockey world. I was the kid who wouldn't go along with it. The kid who didn't 'get' the culture." Aliu's comments resurfaced an examination of the sport's culture that became especially urgent in November when Aliu, who was born in Nigeria and reared in Ukraine and Canada, accused Coach Bill Peters, who is white, of referring to him with a racial slur when the two were with the American Hockey League's Rockford IceHogs during the 2009 10 season. Peters, who by 2019 was coaching the Calgary Flames, resigned shortly after the accusations but has since been hired to coach a team in Russia's Kontinental Hockey League. The N.H.L. began an investigation into that accusation and said in a statement that "the behavior that has been alleged is repugnant and unacceptable." The result of the investigation has not been made public, and a league spokesman declined to comment on Aliu's article, referring to the N.H.L.'s initial response. But Aliu's latest comments have ignited strong responses from the rest of the hockey community, as players, fans, and other stakeholders reckon with an issue they say cannot be resolved from the top down. Aliu also discussed more recent racial incidents, including an April videoconference chat with fans in which the Rangers prospect K'Andre Miller was subjected to repeated racist slurs from a hacker. Aliu's article, titled "Hockey Is Not For Everyone," a reference to the N.H.L.'s "Hockey Is For Everyone" diversity campaign, pointed to advancements the league has made but also noted that racism is a pervasive problem beyond the professional level. "There was a lot of discussion, of course, around the league about how to move forward from such an incident. To be fair, I think the league has made positive steps regarding what happened," he wrote. "The N.H.L., though, is not hockey. It's a hockey league, but hockey is its own thing." Since his article was published, N.H.L. players have expressed support for Aliu on social media. "We must all do better and help bring change," Vegas Golden Knights goalie Robin Lehner wrote in a Twitter post. "Thank you Dreamer Aliu78 for sharing these truly disturbing accounts of racism and ignorance," Anaheim Ducks goalie Ryan Miller said in another post. "I hope that we can all listen and be active participants in the change that is needed." The discussion comes as hockey is in the midst of a reckoning on its culture. The television commentator Don Cherry was fired in November for making xenophobic comments during "Hockey Night in Canada," one of the sport's marquee showcases. Toronto Maple Leafs Coach Mike Babcock was fired nine days later, ahead of accusations about hazing and abuse of his power. Five days after Babcock's dismissal, Aliu's accusations against Peters became public. In early May, the N.H.L. issued a statement denouncing "inexcusable conduct" by Washington Capitals forward Brendan Leipsic and the Florida Panthers prospect Jack Rodewald, who made misogynistic comments in a group chat that was hacked. Still, some caution against describing hockey culture as intrinsically problematic. "For me, I have so many teammates and players that I've played with who have been so supportive of me in my career, and coaches and GMs that don't look like me but paved the way for me to get to the National Hockey League," P.K. Subban, the New Jersey Devils defenseman, said in a podcast interview on Friday. "Our job is to make the game better," added Subban, an 11 year N.H.L. veteran who is black, "but it's also our job to protect the people in the game that have done a great job trying to help these issues go away, and I think we can't forget to talk about those people, as well." Subban, who acknowledged that he had not yet read The Players' Tribune article, commended Aliu's outspokenness, but cautioned that the responsibility for change should not fall on any one group's shoulders. "It's not just the responsibility of the black players or players from different backgrounds in the league," Subban said on the podcast. "It's of everyone." In a telephone interview on Thursday, Aliu said that the coronavirus pandemic had given him an opportunity to reflect on his journey through life and hockey. He said he had reached out to The Players' Tribune three weeks earlier about describing his experience. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The roster of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, inevitably keeps changing as the boys who fill it enter adolescence and move on. But for 37 years, the organist and conductor Stephen Cleobury has provided stability as its director of music, leading the ensemble that perhaps best represents the great English choral tradition. On Monday Mr. Cleobury, who will retire from his post this summer, led the choir in a magnificent concert at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, his last performance in America at the head of a storied ensemble that dates to 1441. Over the years he has brought the group regularly to St. Thomas, and the church was packed for this farewell. The boys of King's College arrived, though, as the choir's traditions have been questioned. Last December, Lesley Garrett, a British soprano, wrote an article calling the boys only lineup an anachronism that was unfair to girls. The idea that boy treble voices have special purity is "just nonsense," Ms. Garrett wrote. Read more about the debate over boy choirs. Her broadside sparked an international debate over the singing opportunities presented to girls and the aesthetics of the choral tradition. Do boys sing with a distinctively ethereal sound? It was hard not to conclude so listening to the remarkable King's College Choir on Monday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Since 2010, when American Ballet Theater debuted its current production of "The Nutcracker" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I have seen it a half dozen times. Every time, I've noticed new felicities and connections. This is choreography, by Alexei Ratmansky, that rewards repeated viewings though since the company will be taking it to Southern California next year, there aren't many chances left for New Yorkers to see it again, or to catch it for the first time. By new felicities, I don't mean the liberties sometimes taken by performers, like the mouse on Friday night who interpolated into the battle a crane kick from "The Karate Kid"; I mean newly detected aspects of Mr. Ratmansky's composition, so wonderfully attuned to Tchaikovsky's score. Were you not having such a good time, you could devote full attention to the development of one two footed jump: It starts petulant with the children at the party and threads all the way through the ballet to the flowers and bees and the grand pas de deux. This weekend, I realized that Drosselmeyer plows through those children in the same way he later plows through the thrilling and terrifying snowflakes a connection, perhaps, in the mind of the young heroine, Clara. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Five years ago this month, a push to unionize college football players ended in defeat. But with the coronavirus pandemic raging so widely that fall sports seasons had become imperiled, college football's stars on Monday mounted a ferocious public campaign to salvage their games and to assert power in a multibillion dollar industry. The organization, speed and reach of the pressure campaign suggested that student athletes, many of them already engaged in an off season of activism around racial and systemic injustices, were mastering and embracing bold public strategies that could eventually remake the relationship between universities and the people who play sports for them for little more than scholarships. University administrators and coaches have spent the years since the unionization effort failed in 2015 watching the relative powerlessness of college athletes come under greater scrutiny on Capitol Hill and in America's statehouses. And while it is not yet clear what the merged WeWantToPlay and WeAreUnited campaigns will accomplish, college sports leaders feel they have little choice but to notice and, in some cases, stand alongside the players. "Players just want to be heard, and I think that schools and people who are leading schools are more likely than ever to listen," said Greg McElroy, an ESPN analyst who was Alabama's starting quarterback in 2009 and 2010. The five most influential conferences in college sports the Atlantic Coast, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac 12 and the Southeastern have modified their plans for football, changing start dates, season lengths and formats, but have not canceled the sport outright for this year. Leaders of Big Ten schools, like Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio State and Penn State, spent the weekend considering the fate of their season, scheduled to start on Sept. 3, but a conference official said Monday afternoon that the presidents and chancellors had not voted on a new plan. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks. The sudden push from players, though, some of whom drew the public support of their coaches and universities as Monday went on, threatened to complicate the Big Ten's deliberations. In the statement they shared on Monday, players from across the country, including quarterback Trevor Lawrence of Clemson who is the front runner to be the No. 1 selection in the next N.F.L. draft as well as Justin Fields of Ohio State and Najee Harris of Alabama, called for universal medical protocols and for players to be allowed to opt out of the season without surrendering a year of their eligibility to play college sports. They also said they wanted to use their "voices to establish open communication and trust between players and officials." President Trump, who has pushed for the resumption of sports as a part of his quest to reboot the economy and to depict the pandemic as controlled, retweeted Lawrence's post and added, "The student athletes have been working too hard for their season to be cancelled." In a sport of largely decentralized governance, the movement for stronger, uniform health protections began just more than a week ago when a group of Pac 12 players threatened to opt out of the season if safety demands, as well as others in a lengthy list, were not met. But by Sunday, after Lawrence posted an impassioned plea for a season on Twitter, leaders of the Pac 12 group realized they had a problem. They, too, wanted to play but they sensed that the issue was being used to hijack the debate and divide the players. Darien Rencher, one of Lawrence's Clemson teammates, sent a Twitter message to Dylan Boles, a senior defensive end at Stanford who is a member of the Pac 12 unity drive. They convened a call with Lawrence, whose team reported dozens of positive tests yet pressed on with workouts on its South Carolina campus. The players soon came to a conclusion: They wanted to play and wanted all players to have a voice in how it could be done as safely as possible. They hustled up a group call with players from other conferences, who were in agreement and began crafting a statement with a handful of ideas. Boles said at the core of the conversation was that it was the duty of players who were confident in their programs' virus protocols to stand up for athletes in programs where such trust did not exist. "Some fans were trying to create a divide and pit two movements against each other," Boles said, adding: "It created a division that wasn't supposed to be there." The players initially planned to release their statement later Monday morning, but sensed the importance of doing so as soon as possible. As the dozen or so players hashed out the details, Dallas Hobbs, a defensive end at Washington State who dabbles in graphic design, assembled it to be posted on social media. "I found out I only had 20 minutes to save the world," Hobbs said. "I had to get everything together and grind it out." Lawrence posted the proposal a minute after midnight, after hours of social media speculation that the season was teetering toward collapse. By sunrise, the internet was awash in rising support for the students. Players have described an array of motives for their varied approaches to a possible season. Some believe that tightly regulated football programs can manage the virus and its dangers, or do not want to see years of hard work sacrificed. Others fear that a canceled season might jeopardize the prospects of older players who might have used a final year of college football to show improved skills before the N.F.L. draft. "I hope their voices are heard by the decision makers," Joe Burrow, who won last season's Heisman Trophy as the Louisiana State quarterback and was the top pick of this year's N.F.L. draft, wrote on Twitter. Nodding to his career before his breakout season in 2019, he added, "If this happened a year ago, I may be looking for a job right now." Lawrence, who played opposite Burrow in last season's national championship game, argued over the weekend that players were "more likely to get the virus in everyday life than playing football." "Having a season also incentivizes players being safe and taking all of the right precautions to try to avoid contracting covid because the season/ teammates safety is on the line," he wrote. "Without the season, as we've seen already, people will not social distance or wear masks and take the proper precautions." Some health experts and sports executives are deeply skeptical of those arguments, and some players have been, too. Last week, Connecticut, an independent in football, canceled its season, and its players said in a statement then that they had "many health concerns and not enough is known about the potential long term effects of contracting Covid 19." On Monday, the Mountain West Conference announced "the indefinite postponement" of fall sports. And some schools have struggled to keep their athletes in compliance with public health guidelines. Last week, Louisville paused workouts for four of its teams after 29 players tested positive for the virus, with many of the cases linked to an off campus party. Regardless of the outcome of the debate about the football season, Monday's burst of activism was certain to intensify the protracted debate over the rights of players, an issue that has been the subject of lawsuits, legislation and congressional hearings. The players did not immediately detail how they might try to organize, beyond saying that they ultimately favored a "college football players' association." Unionization could face substantial hurdles. In the absence of a recognized union with the power to seek a collective bargaining agreement, players could turn to, or create, an advocacy group with the aim of shaping public opinion and policy. "Ultimately, college athletes don't need a union to effect change," said Gabe Feldman, the director of the Tulane Sports Law Program. "It may be more effective in a union, but a union is not necessary for college athletes to exercise leverage over schools, conferences and the N.C.A.A." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Ford Motor Company announced Thursday that it would build its redesigned Edge crossover utility vehicle at the Ford assembly plant near Toronto. Ford said it would export the Edge to 60 countries from the Canadian factory, which would also build the Ford Flex, the Lincoln MKX and the Lincoln MKT. (Reuters) Audi is planning to get into the hot hatch game in Europe at any rate with its new S1, a nameplate the automaker brought to fame on rally circuits during the 1980s. Powered by a 231 horsepower 2 liter 4 cylinder engine that can take it from zero to 60 miles per hour in 5.8 seconds, the S1 will come in 2 and 4 door hatchback configurations. (Digital Trends) Workers at the BMW factory in Spartanburg, S.C., and the Kia plant in West Point, Ga., are on alert until Thursday evening as severe winter weather moves across the Southeast. The companies canceled shifts to ensure the safety of employees with long commutes. (Automotive News, subscription required) Honda announced this week that it would unveil its Civic Type R Concept at the Geneva auto show in March. Although Honda has released one rendering of the car, details about its technical specifications have been scant. (Autoblog) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
No mammal may be more perplexing than the platypus. Attached to its furry, otter like body are four webbed feet, several sharp claws, a beaver tail and, of course, that iconic duckbill. The females lay eggs and males sport venom secreting spurs on their hind legs. One could only imagine how dumbfounded the first people to stumble upon these creatures were. But if you were to wager a guess, they probably had a similar expression to that of Ryosuke Motani when he initially encountered the fossilized remains of the extinct marine reptile called Eretmorhipis carrolldongi. Like the platypus, this recently discovered prehistoric creature had a duckbill. But then nature made it even weirder, adding plates on its back like a stegosaurus, a long tail like a crocodile, large paddle like limbs and a tiny head with teeny eyes. "It's a pretty strange chimera of features," said Dr. Motani, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Davis. "When I first saw it, I just said 'What?!' and didn't speak for a while." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Rebecca Minkoff has cute fall styles, among them a cross body bag ( 195) with a guitar strap with a jewel studded strap ( 125). At 96 Greene Street. Baja East teamed up with Melissa Shoes, a sustainable footwear label, on four python embossed styles, including chunky high heeled mules ( 150), as well as a drawstring bucket bag ( 170) in Melissa's signature plastic. At Galeria Melissa, 500 Broadway. Olivia Palermo's partnership with Banana Republic includes tweaked classics like leather kick flares ( 598) and an asymmetrical trench ( 228). At 105 Fifth Avenue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The H.M.S. Terror Sank in the 1840s. See What It Looks Like Now. None About 170 years ago, a pair of English naval ships and their crew vanished while exploring in the Canadian arctic. That disappearance, the basis for the first season of the AMC series "The Terror," captivated England. Dozens of search missions were mounted in the years that followed, but the precise whereabouts of the ships remained a mystery until only a few years ago. Now, new footage captured this month in the ice cold waters of Canada's Terror Bay reveals the strikingly well preserved wreckage of one of those ships, the H.M.S. Terror, raising the tantalizing possibility that it may hold clues to what happened to the ill fated expedition. Among the questions it could answer is whether some of the 129 crew members returned to the abandoned ships to try to sail one to safety, said Paul Watson, a former journalist and the author of the 2017 book "Ice Ghosts," which documents the history of the expedition. "Did these ships just drift or did brave men go back to them and try to sail out, as sailors would?" he said. "Now, if that turns out to be true, I think it's going to be an extraordinary and captivating story for the world." The new footage, released on Wednesday, was captured by Canadian government researchers this month during the first systematic scientific exploration of the sunken H.M.S. Terror since its wreckage was discovered in 2016. Its sister ship, the H.M.S. Erebus, was discovered just two years prior. A seven minute video shared by Parks Canada, the national parks service, shows the Terror's ship wheel still upright, bottles and ornately decorated plates still sitting on shelves, and beds and furniture still in place. In the captain's cabin, researchers found a work desk with sealed drawers that most likely hold documents containing crucial information about the expedition, including what went wrong. The ships set sail from England on a Monday morning in May 1845 with a sizable crew, a cat, a Newfoundland dog named Neptune, and a monkey named Jacko, according to Mr. Watson's book. Their aim, under the command of the explorer Sir John Franklin, was to chart a northwest passage to India and China. The expedition had made its way into Canada's Arctic Archipelago before being trapped in sea ice just off King William Island on Sept. 12, 1846. Franklin died the next year and, in 1850, the British Royal Navy commenced a full scale search for the ships and crew, Mr. Watson wrote. Plates and other artifacts sit on shelves on the H.M.S. Terror near a mess table where a group of lower ranking crew members would have dined. Sparse, but intriguing clues had surfaced over the years, but the search for information reached a turning point in 1859 with the discovery of the Victory Point Note. On it were two handwritten messages, according to the Canadian Museum of History. One, signed by Franklin in May 1847, provided a brief update on the expedition's whereabouts, concluding with the words "all well." The other, written in April 1848, reported that two dozen people, including Franklin, had died and that the ships had been trapped in ice for 19 months. Other clues, including reports of sightings and encounters with native Inuit, emerged over the years, but countless questions remained, Mr. Watson said. What happened? Did the expedition ever discover the northwest passage? What caused the ships to sink? What did the crew do to survive? "It sets up an extraordinary mystery. How can 129 sailors of the Royal Navy all perish?" he said. The discovery of the ships in recent years, though, represented a significant breakthrough in that search for answers. Bottles and other artifacts on a shelf in a cabin on the lower deck of the ship. On Aug. 7, Parks Canada in partnership with local Inuit dispatched an underwater archaeology team to the site of the Terror to research and create a 3D map of the wreckage. Over the course of a week, the team explored inside the ship with a remotely operated vehicle, obtaining clear images of more than 90 percent of the lower deck, including the captain's quarters, much of it well preserved by the cold water, lack of light and layers of silt. As a result, the agency predicted in a statement that there is a "high probability" of finding written documents preserved within. "Not only are the furniture and cabinets in place, drawers are closed and many are buried in silt, encapsulating objects and documents in the best possible conditions for their survival," Marc Andre Bernier, manager of underwater archaeology for Parks Canada, said in a statement. "Each drawer and other enclosed space will be a treasure trove of unprecedented information on the fate of the Franklin Expedition." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
A 1954 Mercedes Benz W196 grand prix car raced by the five time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio of Argentina will go on the block Friday at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in Britain. The rarity and historical significance of the car make it a contender to set a record for an automobile sold at auction. Driven by Fangio to wins at the grands prix of Germany and Switzerland in its debut year, it is the only one of the 14 built for the Mercedes racing team in 1954 and 1955 that found its way to a private owner. The current high water mark for a car sold at public auction is 16.4 million, brought by a 1957 Ferrari Testa Rossa racing sports car of unimpressive provenance at a sale in Pebble Beach, Calif., in August 2011. The Mercedes auction, to be conducted by Bonhams, has attracted considerable attention because of the car's breakthrough engineering and its dominance in both seasons of its competitive career, taking Fangio to consecutive world drivers championships. The W196 the factory's internal designation for the cars was built in two versions, open wheel and with a streamlined body, and with three different wheelbases. The car was powered by an in line 8 cylinder engine that had its power takeoff in the middle, making it the equivalent of two 4 cylinder engines, a measure intended to minimize crankshaft whip. The engine's valvetrain used a desmodromic system for positive mechanical opening and closing, and it was equipped with fuel injection, an innovation at the time. Ten of the original 14 cars still exist: six remain with Mercedes and three are in museums, in Indianapolis, Vienna and Turin, Italy. The continuing surge in the prices paid for classic cars has given rise to speculation of a sale price of around 20 million. Other factors the car can't be driven without a support staff of mechanics, it can't be licensed for the road may keep it out of record territory, though. A veteran collector and car dealer, Don Williams, head of the Blackhawk Collection, has maintained for years that the "heavy hitters" with millions to spend don't go to auctions. But, he said in a telephone interview, "If you don't buy this one, you won't be able to find another." The top prices in recent private sales generally accepted as correct by experts close to the transactions but not confirmed by the parties involved are on another scale: 40 million in 2010 for a 1936 Bugatti Atlantic by Peter Mullin, who specializes in French cars, and 35 million for a 1964 Ferrari 250 GTO coupe by the collector Craig McCaw last year. The W196 for sale at Goodwood was presented by Daimler Benz to the Beaulieu National Motor Museum in Britain in 1973 with the understanding that it would be kept in the museum. But there was no binding agreement. The museum eventually sold it to the British heavy equipment manufacturer Sir Anthony Bamford. It later went to a French collector, then to a German, and about 10 years ago was bought by a member of the ruling family of Qatar. Whatever the sale price, the value escalation in the vintage and classic car market has been little short of staggering. When Henry Manney, a Road Track editor, brought his Ferrari GTO to California from Europe in the 1960s, he had no takers at 8,000 and had to lower the price to 6,000. By these standards, the Bugatti collector Dr. Peter Williamson paid what must have been considered an exorbitant price when, in 1971, he gave 59,000 for the car now owned by Mr. Mullin. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The European Fine Art Fair, known as TEFAF and held every March in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht, had a reputation for stability: the same dealers year after year, bringing their choicest paintings, furniture, and diamond brooches to a well heeled collector base. But a roiling art market, and increasingly eclectic tastes, led the Dutch fair to set out for New York and to establish a pair of satellite events, spring and fall, that brought the gentility of Maastricht to a new American crowd. The autumn fair, whose second edition opens this weekend at the Park Avenue Armory, stretches from the dawn of time to around World War I. Even if you're not in the market for Flemish tapestries, Chinese porcelain or a mourning angel by Antonio Canova, the 95 exhibitors here offer a bounty of surprises for connoisseurs and amateurs alike. And a mini show of pinhole photography by Vera Lutter, displayed by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, brings this showcase of the past right up to the present day. Here are a few prizes that caught my eye during a preview. TEFAF includes a hefty sampling of Greek and Roman art, but this London dealer has brought something older and from further afield: a Persian rhyton, or ceremonial drinking vessel, that dates to around 1000 BC. The terra cotta vessel takes the shape of a zebu bull, and though it would have served a ritual purpose, its simplified forms curve with the easy elegance that Picasso would lavish on bovines nearly 3,000 years later. Hundreds of decorative scratches run from his horns to his hindquarters, and two metal earrings, on either side of the vessel's spout, make this an uncommonly punk antiquity. Within a diverse and sumptuous display of Chinese porcelain and statuary, this Dutch specialist gallery has brought an alluring pair of Tang dynasty stone lokapalas, or tomb guardians. These sentries between this world and the next wear ornate body armor frond shaped helmet crests and flaming epaulets and raise their legs to stomp on ill fated evil ghouls. Now they appear the color of coral, but look closely at their breastplates and spaulders, and you can still see traces of green and red paint that would have made these sentinels appear even more fearsome. In the late 18th century, about a thousand years after an anonymous Chinese sculptor carved those tomb guardians, the mapmaker Huang Qianren completed a stunning map of the world for the Qianlong Emperor. The edition here, more than seven feet long and printed in a brilliant blue, depicts the Middle Kingdom as a dynamic network of cities and town hooked up by waterways, and cradled by bumpy seas. China takes up nearly all the surface of this "world" map, and the Qing dynasty's trading partners of Britain and the Netherlands are nearly forgotten in a corner; for this mapmaker, as for his imperial patron, anything beyond China barely counted as civilization at all. Though he's far less famous than his Florentine buddy Andrea Del Sarto, the early 16th century painter Domenico Puligo figures prominently in "The Lives of the Artists," the foundational book of Renaissance art history. A three quarter length portrait is a biographical mystery: out of a coal black background, an anonymous gentleman in a soft hat and gray mantle looks suspiciously off to the side. Subtle, and bracingly beautiful, it must have been done just before 1527, when Puligo died of the plague at age 35. Like so many painters in Rome in the early 17th century, the Spanish artist Jusepe de Ribera was besotted with Caravaggio's lifelike modeling and dramatic chiaroscuro. A painting of King David, attributed recently to Ribera and on the stand of this Paris gallery, is a choice example of Caravaggesque religious painting: the biblical hero, his eyes locked beatifically on the sky, appears in a shaft of light. The wet on wet brush strokes in David's fur trim, and the buttery flesh of his hand, give this painting all the naturalistic drama Met visitors recently saw in the art of his fellow Roman bad boy, Valentin de Boulogne. Furniture, porcelain, and other decorative arts have a prominent place at TEFAF, and among the most extraordinary objects here is a 17th century table whose intricate floral surface is formed from dozens of colored stones, painstakingly cut and inlaid like marquetry. In this pietra dura table, in the booth of a Paris dealership, strips of yellow chalcedony frame flowers, fruit, and songbirds crafted out of agate and lapis lazuli. (A twin to this table lives at the Schloss Schonbrunn, the Hapsburg palace in Vienna.) Check out the pomegranate in the center; the red stones that represent its seeds lie beneath the surface, visible through a translucent overlay. Tapestry isn't often thought of as a transgressive art form, but the naughtiest and most hilarious work at TEFAF this year is a woven wall hanging, completed in Bruges around 1600 and offered by this London gallery, that depicts shepherds and maidens getting very frisky in a verdant garden. One couple kisses under a bush, another flirts while playing a ballgame, and a third indulges in a little light sadomasochism amid frolicking sheep. Wildly blunt captions in Middle French up the ante. "It's not good manners," says the woman in the grass, "to spank a girl you won't marry." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
WASHINGTON Jerome H. Powell, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in his public debut on Tuesday that his expectations for domestic economic growth have increased since the beginning of the year, citing the passage of the 1.5 trillion tax cut and stronger global growth. In testimony before Congress, Mr. Powell said that the Fed planned to continue increasing its benchmark interest rate only gradually, as it did under his predecessor, Janet L. Yellen. But investors responded to his optimism as an indication the Fed may be compelled to move more quickly. As Mr. Powell testified, stocks fell, the dollar strengthened and bond yields rose. Mr. Powell told the House Financial Services Committee that headwinds once holding back the American economy had now turned into tailwinds. "My personal outlook for the economy has strengthened since December," Mr. Powell said. Yet he struck a careful tone. Inflation has remained sluggish for nearly a decade, and Mr. Powell said the Fed "will continue to strike a balance between avoiding an overheated economy" and allowing inflation to tick up toward the Fed's target of a 2 percent annual pace. Most Fed officials forecast in December that the Fed would raise rates at least three times in 2018, as it did last year. Mr. Powell said he "wouldn't want to prejudge" the new set of projections that officials will issue in March, but said they would take a recent run of strong economic data, including continued job growth and increased business investment, into account. Investors widely expect the Fed to raise its benchmark interest rate in March, into a range of 1.5 percent to 1.75 percent, and most expect another quarter point increase in June. Some Wall Street analysts said that Mr. Powell's testimony increased the chances that the Fed would continue with quarterly rate hikes in the second half of the year. "We are naturally more confident in our standing call for four hikes this year and another four next year," said Michael Feroli, the chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase. But the Fed has emphasized that stronger growth is necessary to justify three rate hikes this year. Fed officials have also said growth will not prompt the central bank to raise its benchmark interest rate more quickly unless it increases inflationary pressures. Randal K. Quarles, the Fed's vice chairman for supervision, said Monday that the tax cuts could increase the country's economic capacity, allowing faster growth without faster inflation. His remarks suggested the Fed is willing to wait and see what happens. "I will be carefully watching indicators of economic activity and inflation and assessing the degree to which activity appears to be pushing up against the constraints of the economy, as opposed to being a reflection of the expansion of those constraints and the growth of the potential output of the economy," Mr. Quarles said. Lawmakers grilled Mr. Powell on Tuesday on many subjects. House Republicans, who pressed for Mr. Trump to put a Republican in charge of the central bank, asked Mr. Powell how he would respond to changes made after the 2008 financial crisis, including stronger financial regulations and a new approach to managing interest rates. Democrats, nervous about the new leadership, pressed Mr. Powell for assurances that the Fed would remain committed to supporting job growth and that it would enforce laws aimed at reducing discrimination by financial institutions. Both sides sought Mr. Powell's affirmation for their views about the economic effect of the 1.5 trillion tax cut that took effect in January. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Mr. Powell began his remarks by commending Ms. Yellen on her tenure and calling for continuity with her policies. But the differences between Mr. Powell, a former investment banker, and his predecessor, a labor economist, showed through. Unlike Ms. Yellen, Mr. Powell shied away from questions about economic inequality, and he spoke more freely about financial regulation. Mr. Powell reaffirmed to House members that the Fed intends to loosen some limits on banks. One change could reduce capital requirements for some large banks, allowing them to rely more heavily on borrowed money. The goal of the changes is to reduce the burden of regulation "without losing any safety and soundness," Mr. Powell said. He also said the Fed plans to reduce regulation of smaller banks. He added the Fed must be alert to both the buildup of financial imbalances and inflation, but that neither risk appeared high at the moment. "There's always a risk of a recession at any point in time, but I don't see it as at all high at the moment," Mr. Powell added. "I would expect the next two years on the current path to be good years for the economy." Stocks took a tumble this month as investors began to chew on the possibility of faster rate hikes. Mr. Powell dismissed the turbulence, saying the Fed saw no evidence that it was "weighing heavily on the outlook for economic activity, the labor market and inflation." The losses on Tuesday were more modest. The Standard Poor's 500 lost 1.27 percent, closing at 2,744.28. Mr. Powell has taken the helm of the central bank as the economy is nearing the end of its ninth year of expansion. The Fed has been steadily raising its benchmark rate back to a more normal level after cutting it nearly to zero to stimulate lending in response to the financial crisis. Those rate hikes are intended to keep the economy from running too hot, while also giving the Fed the capacity to fight a future recession by once again cutting interest rates. Although a strong economy and low unemployment typically drive up inflation, it has remained puzzlingly low in recent years. Mr. Powell acknowledged the trend, but said that he believed sluggish price increases were due in part to temporary factors and that inflation would gradually rise this year. He noted, however, that some indicators suggest the labor market still has room for improvement, including the modest pace of wage growth. The share of working age adults who are not working also remains significantly higher than before the recession; most of those people are not counted in the unemployment rate because they are not actively seeking work. Investors are watching carefully for any indication that inflation could lift off faster than they expected a sign that the Fed might have to raise rates more quickly than it planned and risk choking off economic growth. On Monday, Mr. Quarles was cautiously optimistic that faster economic growth is likely. "There are indications that we have a sustainably stronger economy," Mr. Quarles said. "It's a little too early to call that as happening, but there are clear indications that it could be happening." Mr. Powell, a member of the Fed's board of governors who was sworn in as chairman this month, will testify again on Thursday before the Senate Banking Committee. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
A show for those who have wondered if they are in the wrong life or maybe just the wrong auditorium, "What if They Went to Moscow?" a theater film hybrid by the Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy, presents Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters" in close up. Twice. Performed for two audiences as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, this adaptation encompasses the first act, plus a few bits cribbed from the last. It's presented as a play at BAM Fisher and then, after a half hour break, as a movie, edited in real time, at BAM Rose Cinemas, a block away. Or the other way around. During the intermission, the two groups sidle past each other on Ashland Place. Bleak and funny, grotesque and beautiful, clever if not exactly consequential, the piece meditates, lightly, on the differences between a play and a movie, on presence and the past, on the real and the ideal. It's possible to admire the experiment of "What i f They Went to Moscow?" and much of the craftsmanship that makes it possible, without believing that it delivers on these grand themes. The concept writes big checks; the execution has smaller funds available. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive announced on Thursday that Julie Rodrigues Widholm will succeed Lawrence Rinder as the institution's director and chief curator. Her appointment comes at a time when museums across the country are trying to chart a path forward amid an ongoing global health crisis and simmering social unrest. "I'm really trying to see this moment and all of the challenges we're facing as an opportunity to make the changes that we should have been making and thinking about all along," Ms. Widholm, the current director and chief curator of the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, said in an interview this week. Prioritizing equity, inclusivity and accessibility has long been her goal. Under Ms. Widholm's direction, the programming at DePaul has consistently highlighted work by women, people who are L.G.B.T.Q. and artists of color. She has also helped to grow the museum's collection and expanded its scope by acquiring pieces by artists from historically marginalized groups. More than 500 new works have been added during her tenure. Most recently, Ms. Widholm started an initiative at DePaul that seeks to help rectify the underrepresentation of Latino artists who live and work in the United States. These efforts, she said, were informed by the professional outlook that she plans to bring with her to Berkeley, one of the country's leading university museums, specializing in visual arts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Tango, with the dramatic proximity it gives two dancers from brow to instep and its dramatically weighted walk, can be the most sexually charged of dance forms. It's romantic, smoldering and very often tragic as if destiny were steering the couple. But Gabriel Misse, who has been coming regularly to New York since 2008, is all laughter and song. On Saturday night, he was chuckling boyishly around the Dardo Galleto Studios as he prepared the recordings to which he was to dance. When Guillermina Quiroga (a queen of tango since the last century), wearing a long sleeved, calf length dress of emerald green, arrived to join him for their first number, her eyes sparkled with the same laughter as she looked at him from across the floor. For all the audience enthusiasm, no joy in the room could match the delight these two found in each other. They danced four duets one more than tango couples usually deliver (the fourth was a sweeping, rapid valse tango) all improvised, yet with feats that looked like formal choreography. In their first number, they suddenly knelt at the same moment (a wonderful touch that passed in an instant), and she ended another dance by arriving, in a flash, to sit on his hip. These exemplary dancers are both Argentine, but their partnership, arranged by Karina Romero, of the Dardo Galletto Studios, is so far exclusive to New York, where they first appeared together in November. They're ideally matched in physique, temperament and style. Within the opening moments of their first dance, they both showed how many shades of footwork they have: the soft, slow semicircles she traced on the floor with an extended toe (he soon echoed them); the needle turn (one foot pointed into the floor) in which she revolved him; the whiplash strokes of his leg in the air at calf height. At one moment, she released him while he did a single pirouette, within inches of her, before quickly returning to the tango embrace. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
FRANKFURT Answering critics who said they were running out of ways to promote growth and lending, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England on Thursday did something neither had done before, committing themselves to keeping interest rates low indefinitely. The bid to reassure investors brought the two central banks into closer alignment with the Federal Reserve, which, under Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, has become more open about its intentions. At the same time, they appeared eager to signal that they would not follow the Fed in preparing for a gradual withdrawal of economic stimulus. Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, based in Frankurt, said at a news conference that crucial interest rates would "remain at present or lower levels for an extended period of time." Until Thursday, the bank had steadfastly refused to pin itself down on future policy. "It's not six months," Mr. Draghi said. "It's not 12 months. It's an extended period of time." Mr. Draghi also said that the central bank was signaling a "downward bias" in interest rate policy, meaning further cuts were possible or even likely. Only hours earlier, Mark J. Carney, who became governor of the Bank of England on Monday, made a similar break with tradition. The British central bank said in a statement that any expectations that interest rates would rise soon from their current record low level were misguided. With their promises of easy money stretching toward the horizon, the central bankers offered more certainty to investors at a time when tensions in Europe are rising again. So called forward guidance is considered one of the tools available to central banks, but it was one the European Central Bank and the Bank of England had not used before. European markets reacted positively to the announcements, with the FTSE 100 in London closing 3.1 percent higher and the Euro Stoxx 50, a benchmark of euro zone blue chips, climbing 3 percent. (Markets in the United States were closed for the Fourth of July holiday.) The euro fell sharply, a development that was probably not unwelcome at the European Central Bank, since a cheaper euro makes European products less expensive in foreign markets, feeding exports. The British pound also fell. "Mr. Draghi did what he does best today: intervene verbally to great effect," Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy in London, said in a note. Mr. Draghi's statement on Thursday came almost a year after he defused the euro zone debt crisis with a promise to do "whatever it takes" to preserve the currency union. But after months of relative calm, Europe has been rattled in recent days by a political crisis in Portugal, which has raised questions about whether the region's governments will be able to withstand popular discontent with their policies of cutting budgets to bring public debt under control. Investors have responded by pushing up the risk premium they demand on bonds issued by Italy, Spain and other troubled euro zone countries. Market rates on Italian and Spanish bonds retreated on Thursday after Mr. Draghi's comments. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. The commitment to keep rates low helps amplify the effect of rates that are already nearly rock bottom, by reassuring investors that they can count on easy money for the foreseeable future. But some analysts saw Mr. Draghi's statement as a bluff a tacit admission that the central bank has run out of other ways to stimulate the euro zone economy. "A change of a few words in the way he phrases the E.C.B.'s policy stance is an insufficient policy response to alter the very troubled course of the euroland economy," Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y., said in an e mail. Though the central bank remains unwilling to stimulate the economy as aggressively as the Fed, it promised last year to buy government bonds in unlimited amounts to bring down the issuing governments' rates and counteract fears of a euro zone breakup. By the central bank's standards, that was a bold promise, even if the bank has not been forced to deliver on it yet. The shift to forward guidance on Thursday could be seen as another expansion of the central bank's arsenal. In a further, more tentative break with precedent, Mr. Draghi said that monetary policy would be guided by changes in the rate of inflation, the state of the euro zone economy and indicators of the money supply. Previously, the central bank emphasized inflation above all else. But Mr. Draghi would not elaborate on what economic benchmarks the bank might use to guide policy. Mr. Draghi suggested that, with inflation well below the central bank's official target of about 2 percent, the bank has room to focus on other factors. "We do believe that we have an outlook for inflation in the medium term that would justify this new way of communicating," he said. The bank's governing council, which met on Thursday, unanimously endorsed the shift in verbal strategy, he said. The Bank of England has been less restrained than the European Central Bank since the financial crisis began in 2008, buying bonds on a vast scale as a way to push down market interest rates, a strategy very similar to that used by the Fed. The Fed has amassed more than 3 trillion in Treasury securities and mortgage backed securities, and since December it has been expanding those holdings at the rate of 85 billion a month. It has also said it intends to hold short term interest rates near zero for as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6.5 percent. At the same time, recent comments by Mr. Bernanke looking ahead to a time when the Fed will begin tightening its monetary policy have caused turmoil in global financial markets and probably put pressure on the European Central Bank and the Bank of England to clarify their own intentions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The separation of Britain from Europe, set in motion by Prime Minister Theresa May last week, began a historic process but one not as abrupt as the first Brexit. That was the catastrophic destruction of the land bridge that for 10 million years had joined Britain physically to the Continent. The bridge was a rock formation, about 20 miles wide, that ran from Dover to Calais and protruded several hundred miles into France and Britain. It was made of chalk, as can be seen in the cross section where it has been ripped away at the white cliffs of Dover. After many years of work, starting with the underwater surveys made in preparation for digging the Channel Tunnel, geologists have at last assembled a picture of the mighty forces that tore the bridge away and gave Britain its identity as an island, rather than a mere peninsula of Europe like Denmark and Scandinavia. Their account appears in Wednesday's issue of Nature Communications. In the last ice age, sea levels rose and fell as water was locked up in ice sheets during cold periods and released to the oceans in warm ones. At high sea levels, water would nearly encircle Britain but never surmounted the land bridge, which stood 100 to 300 feet above the waves. That was until a cold period that began 450,000 years ago. A vast glacier that covered all but the southern parts of Britain edged out across the North Sea and joined up with the glacier covering Norway. With the North Sea dammed, the rivers that then drained into it, including the Rhine and the Thames, started to form a large lake, also swollen with meltwaters from the glacier. As the level of the glacial lake rose, its waters started to cascade over the Dover Calais land bridge that formed its southwestern wall. Laden with abrasive pieces of flint dissolved from the chalk, the waterfalls scoured out vast holes in the bedrock beneath, some 450 feet deep and several miles in length. The western side of the land bridge retreated as the waterfalls eroded it, and finally a section gave way. In a cataclysmic flood, up to a million cubic feet of water per second roared through the breach, scouring deep valleys as the vast glacial lake emptied itself into the English Channel. This event took place 430,000 years ago, to judge by a thick layer of sediment this old that has been found on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean next to the English Channel mouth. The first breach in the land bridge may have been relatively small. The sediment record on the ocean floor indicates that a second megaflood occurred 160,000 years ago. It seems a second lake built up in the North Sea, its southern boundary being a wall of sediment left after the sudden exit of the first lake. When this wall collapsed, perhaps because of an earthquake, the lake rushed out, sweeping away the rest of the bridge and ensuring that at high sea levels, as at present, England would be an island. Several aspects of this series of events have been proposed before but not proved. In 2007, a team led by Sanjeev Gupta and Jenny S. Collier of Imperial College London obtained previously unavailable records of the detailed underwater topography of the English Channel. These showed that west of the Strait of Dover, a network of deep valleys had been cut through the channel's bedrock. The streamlined nature of the walls and submarine islands suggested they had been shaped by a flood of enormous force. This evidence, the researchers said, supported the idea that a catastrophic breach of the Dover Calais land bridge had unleashed a megaflood into the English Channel. Dr. Gupta and Dr. Collier have now teamed up with Belgian and French seismologists to analyze the channel's bedrock more closely. In particular they have looked at a series of deep pits in the bedrock between Dover and Calais. The sediment filled pits were discovered in preparing the route for the Channel Tunnel and named the Fosses Dangeard (fosse is French for pit) after a French geologist. The tunnel had to be rerouted to avoid the dangerous pits, which were assumed to have been gouged out by glaciers. But it's now known that the ice never reached that far south. Dr. Gupta and Dr. Collier interpret the pits as giant plunge pools created by cataracts cascading down from the land bridge. The depth of the pits suggests the cataracts must have fallen from a considerable height. The new seismic data show that some of the pits are elongated as if the land bridge was progressively shrinking until a breach unleashed the glacial lake behind it. "Our paper shows for the first time that a lake existed and that there were waterfalls coming over the land bridge," Dr. Gupta said. A deep bedrock valley that passes through the Strait of Dover from the east, the Lobourg Channel, would have been carved by the megaflood from the second lake, in his view. Philip Gibbard, a geologist at the University of Cambridge, said Dr. Gupta and Dr. Collier's reconstruction of events was "exciting and deeply plausible." Victor Baker, an expert on very large floods at the University of Arizona, said the new data definitely showed that an ancient megaflood had occurred in the English Channel, and that everything so far known was consistent with the idea that the Dover Calais land bridge had been destroyed by two catastrophic floods. Dr. Gupta said he hoped to add more detail by drilling into the sediments that now fill the Fosses Dangeard. But the channel is the world's busiest shipping route, and studying the Fosses requires crossing two shipping lanes. "It's quite hard to persuade ships' captains to do it," he said. "I'd say we know more about Mars than the submarine geology of these continental shelves around the world." Geologists may now understand how England became an island, but in their time scale few things are forever. "Brexit" or no, England will again become part of Europe when the oceans' waters are locked back into the glaciers of the next ice age. "If and when sea level goes down again, which it probably will, we'll again be able to walk from here to the Netherlands," Dr. Gibbard said from his home in Cambridge, England. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Marisa Tomei as a seamstress who falls for Emun Elliott, a man who reminds her of her late husband, in "The Rose Tattoo." You thought tropical storms were disruptive? The Italian Americans living along the Gulf Coast in the Roundabout Theater Company's untethered revival of Tennessee Williams's "The Rose Tattoo" are really up against the elements, and so are the actors playing them. But it's nothing as palpable as a hurricane that keeps knocking them off balance and making them flail like sandpipers in a heavy wind. To understand what's sweeping through this production, which opened at the American Airlines Theater on Tuesday with a cast led by a valiant Marisa Tomei, listen to the words of Assunta, a wise old Sicilian signora. "There is something wild in the air," says Assunta (Carolyn Mignini), in the play's opening moments, to Serafina (Tomei), the ecstatically married wife of a virile truck driver. "No wind but everything is moving." She adds that she can hear the noises of the stars. A skeptical Serafina, who says she sees "nothing moving," ascribes the noise to termites. But Trip Cullman, the imaginative but erratic director here, appears to have taken Assunta's emotional weather report to heart. The flamingos, which are artificial, remain immobile. But all the human performers do indeed seem to have been destabilized by a shelter free environment in which the usual demarcations between inside and outside do not exist. This approach makes a certain poetic sense in a play about the serendipitous and cataclysmic force of carnal love. First produced in 1951, when it (astonishingly) became the winner of Williams's only Tony Award for Best Play, "The Rose Tattoo" is perhaps the most hopeful and lighthearted work in its author's suffering packed canon. Dedicated to Williams's longtime partner, Frank Merlo, a former sailor of Sicilian ancestry, "Tattoo" is a paean to the anarchic but restorative power of sexual attraction. It makes good on Blanche DuBois's assertion in "A Streetcar Named Desire" that "sometimes there's God, so quickly," especially if that god is Eros. The fable like plot is built around the unlikely destruction and resurrection of Serafina the seamstress, a proper, corset wearing wife and mother whose life is unhinged when the husband whom she worships body and soul, but particularly body dies in a truck crash. When she later learns that he had been unfaithful to her, she begins to question her very faith. But fate has a wonderful surprise for Serafina: Alvaro Mangiacavallo (the Scottish born actor Emun Elliott, in a likable Broadway debut), a lovely buffoon of man, who has her husband's body and the head of a clown. Williams wrote "Tattoo" with the great Italian actress Anna Magnani in mind, though he had to wait for the 1955 film version for her to play it. She was a volcanic presence, whose Vesuvian eruptions in the part had the transcendent conviction of Italian opera . Tomei knows from Italian flavored portraiture. (She won an Oscar playing a character named Mona Lisa Vito in "My Cousin Vinny.") If, in the closefitting 1950s slips and dresses the costume designer Clint Ramos has provided, her affect is more cuddly pixie than temperamental colossus, she is nonetheless a bold and inventive comic performer. Unfortunately, she is in hard fought competition with her environment. It's not that she's operating in a vacuum, which might be easier. Cullman has populated the stage with an ever present chorus of singing Italian women and frantic children. These are not, to be fair, interpolations. Neither is the use of the mood setting Italian ballads, though they have been omitted from other productions I've seen. ( Fitz Patton and Jason Michael Webb did the original music .) Cullman is acting on suggestions from Williams's original script. I'm also assuming that the intention has been to conjure a small town in which nobody's business is their own, and the lines between private and public are hazy. Still, the lack of defined interiors can lead to unwarranted confusion. From the beginning of this production, which originated at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2016, Tomei must pitch her performance at an exaggerated level to be seen. Fluttery and anxious from the get go, she doesn't establish a whole lot of difference between Serafina before and after her husband's death, which is mostly signaled by a change in hair style. Worse, once the studly but hapless Mangiacavallo (the name means "eat a horse") makes his entrance, he and Serafina seem to be communicating across an abyss on that big, borderless stage. They are both given to frantic, pantomime style gesticulation and shticky molto Italiano accents. When, at one point, she responds to him as if they were playing charades, it feels uneasily like a commentary on the acting. Both Tomei and Elliott have some genuinely funny moments. But it's a vaudevillian notion of sex they're presenting, and the poignancy and poetry within their characters' coming together are mostly absent. The large cast also includes the formidable Tina Benko as a husband stealing casino worker and Paige Gilbert and Portia as man crazy, gossipy clients of Serafina. Ella Rubin is Serafina's defiant (and stridently Southern) daughter, and Burke Swanson is the young, wooden sailor she loves. Though the original film version was advertised with words like "frank" and "violent," "Tattoo" can indeed be interpreted as a romantic comedy. But as in all of this dramatist's works, there are delicate feelings at its center, and they need to be handled with care. Feeling betrayed by her beloved Virgin, Serafina exclaims to the effigy in her living room (or I think that's where it is), "You hold in the cup of your hand this little house and you smash it." Allowing for Serafina's tendency to hyperbole, she might be talking about the production in which she appears. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday denied claims by the hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that she had complained extensively about President Trump in private conversations with them before he was elected. Her response came a day after the hosts, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, used their show to claim that Ms. Conway had complained off camera about having to act as Mr. Trump's campaign manager and had taken the job only "for the money," in Mr. Scarborough's words. Ms. Conway, who is now a counselor in the White House, said the two hosts "have become virulent critics of the president and those close to them" and that she had to respond to "insults and insinuations," calling them "absurd" and not true. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Motley Crue's first gig, as dramatized in Jeff Tremaine's Netflix adaptation of the band's memoir, "The Dirt," does not go well. The drummer, Tommy Lee, knocks over a cymbal before anyone plays a note; the crowd's heckling turns into a full on brawl. But when that fight is over, a guy in the back punctures the silence to scream, " Expletive yeah, Motley Crue!" And that sentiment is an apt summation of the approach and complexity of this tepid, incompetent biopic. The book version, attributed to all four members and the writer Neil Strauss, was a notorious tell all, reveling in the group's bad behavior and self mythologizing. But Tremaine and the screenwriters Rich Wilkes and Amanda Adelson have sanded it down to a junior varsity "Bohemian Rhapsody," complete with many of the same crude devices: embarrassingly bad wigs, hilariously on the nose needle drops (the band plays "Take Me to the Top" as they go ... to the top) and declamatory, subtext free dialogue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
When Greg Marsh moved to New York three years ago, he discovered that his girlfriend often lost her keys and he had to spend hundreds of dollars changing the locks on their apartment. So Mr. Marsh founded KeyMe, a service that lets customers store digital copies of their keys, order them from a computer or iPhone and have them sent to their home or office. Or the keys can be made instantly at retail kiosks in the New York City area. In just a year, KeyMe has stored hundreds of thousands of keys on its cloud servers, saving customers an expensive call to a locksmith or hours waiting for a roommate or spouse to return home with a spare key. Now KeyMe is applying its technology to produce car keys, which are far more expensive and often require a trip to an auto dealer. In the coming weeks, 100 second generation kiosks, which can scan auto keys, will be installed in 7 Elevens and other retail stores across the country. KeyMe will produce only mechanical keys or those with transponder chips not electronic fobs for remote locking or keyless ignition switches. The car keys must be delivered by mail, not produced on the spot at a kiosk. "As soon as we launched the first generation machine a year ago, there were lots of people putting car keys into the machine, but we didn't support it," Mr. Marsh said as he demonstrated a new kiosk at a 7 Eleven in Manhattan. "Car keys are really hard to get. You have to go to dealers, and they're expensive." To thwart thieves, automakers have been making increasingly sophisticated keys. Most are two sided and many have no saw tooth edges. Keys to newer cars also have an encrypted transponder that sends an electronic signal permitting the car to be started. But the more complex keys are more expensive. KeyMe charges 20 for a copy of a mechanical key and 65 for a key with a transponder, which Mr. Marsh said was less than half the price at an auto dealer or locksmith. Customers who store keys on KeyMe's servers avoid having to tow their car to a dealer. "It sounds like it has potential for some people, and certainly the cost is competitive as well as the convenience of knowing you can get one in a few days," Jim Travers, the associate editor for automobiles at Consumer Reports, said of KeyMe. But Mr. Travers and other experts expressed concern about the security of KeyMe's servers. Mr. Marsh said KeyMe erased all billing and financial data immediately after keys were shipped. Customers who use KeyMe's mobile app must scan both sides of their keys laid on white paper to prevent thieves from secretly taking a picture of a key with a cellphone. Customers who use KeyMe's kiosks log in with their email addresses or use a biometric fingerprint reader. "We want as little information as possible about you," Mr. Marsh said. "In a worst case, if someone hacked our encrypted servers, they'll see geometric numbers that represent the shapes of keys, not credit card information or addresses." The service is simple to use. At a kiosk, customers insert their car key into a universal keyhole. On a touch screen, they choose the car's make, model and year. Their key is then scanned and stored without charge. Copies can be ordered on the spot using a credit card or cash. An email is sent to the customer, who provides a shipping address. KeyMe is not the only alternative to a car dealer. Pop a Lock, a chain of franchised locksmiths, will send a locksmith to your car and make a copy. Pop a Lock's locksmiths can also reproduce fobs for keyless ignitions. "If it's not time sensitive and not a high security key, there are some usages for KeyMe," said Don Marks, Pop a Lock's chief executive. "We're in the business of urgent need and high security keys." Dealers, too, say they can better ensure that keys are copied and programmed properly. "If you're talking about a straight mechanical tooth key, that's fine, but when you have a chip embedded in a key, it gets kind of tricky," said Mark Schienberg of the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association. Still, for drivers who want a spare in case they lose a key, or need one in days and not hours, KeyMe may provide a cheaper alternative to driving to a dealer. "If you're thoughtful enough to have stored your key, all you have to do is to go to 7 Eleven and get a copy," said Raja Doddala, senior director for new ventures at 7 Eleven, which has a minority stake in KeyMe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The Chinese government, angered by the latest threat to stability in a chronically troublesome region, barricaded the monastery, brought in paramilitary troops, made hundreds of arrests and cut off Ngaba's internet. Nonetheless, the deaths of many self immolators found their way to YouTube. "In the videos from Ngaba," Demick writes, "one streaks down a dimly lit gray street like a fireball. Another twitches and crumples like a piece of paper thrown into a fireplace. Those whose bodies are completely consumed shrivel as small as children, blackened and twisting." The chapters on the self immolations are the heart of "Eat the Buddha" the terrible climax for which Demick has prepared us through her recounting of more than 60 years of religious repression and human rights abuses. There's a good deal of exposition, all of it essential, but whenever possible, she presents Ngaba's brutal history through the stories of individual characters, the technique pioneered by John Hersey in "Hiroshima." (Hersey took the idea from the Thornton Wilder novel "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," which he read on his ship en route to Japan.) I occasionally felt I needed an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all the players, some of whom vanish for long stretches in one case, for more than 100 pages before re entering the narrative. But Demick, who used the same technique to excellent effect in her previous books ("Logavina Street," about Sarajevo, and "Nothing to Envy," about North Korea), knows what she's doing. As "Eat the Buddha" unfolds, we come to understand why she has introduced this particular cast in sufficient detail to make us care about them. They aren't just a representative sampling of Ngaba residents; they are people who have intersected with history. For instance, the woman who sold counterfeit Nike sneakers turns out to be a witness to Ngaba's first, failed self immolation; after the would be martyr's robes burned and his face turned black, she saw Chinese soldiers toss him into the back of a truck, "like an animal." The young monk who was given his first bath at age 7 after his mother brought him to the Kirti Monastery turns out to be a close friend of the second self immolator and the half brother of the 21st. We are heartbroken by that last death, as we couldn't be if we read about it in a newspaper headline, because we've heard about the summer the brothers spent herding yaks in the hills, sharing a black felt tent and, when September came, making snow angels together. I realized early on though probably later than some more alert readers that the end of the story for all the major characters would be Dharamsala, India, the community of 100,000 Tibetans that is the home of their government in exile. Of course it would be. They couldn't still live in Ngaba, since they would not have been safe from retribution if Demick had interviewed them there. (She visited Ngaba three times, but almost all her local sources are unnamed.) Because they couldn't obtain passports, most of them made their way to Dharamsala via various illegal trajectories, some of them extortionately expensive, some hair raising, some both. They are now able to discuss politics, to worship without restrictions, to display portraits of their spiritual leader. (And to see him in person. The Dalai Lama has lived there since 1960.) But India is no paradise; more exiles are returning to Tibet than leaving it. Demick writes of Dharamsala, "I met many Tibetans spinning with indecision. Their families send them photos on WeChat of new cars and motorcycles, remodeled houses and appliances" the perks of China's economic boom. On the other side of the balance there is the businessman in Ngaba, the owner of an SUV, an iPhone and an iPad, who tells Demick in the final chapter of this harrowing but necessary book, "I have everything I might possibly want in life, but my freedom." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
On Thursday, Fivestory will open a Clean Beauty Clubhouse offering makeup consultations ( 60) with products from the natural makeup and skin care line Follain. At 18 East 69th Street, fourth floor. That same day, the eyewear label Moscot will open a Chelsea Market shop featuring a Tint a Majig, a quirky, arcade style contraption that lets you try out custom lens tinting options for its round ( 260) and square ( 280) frames. At 75 Ninth Avenue. On Friday, the lingerie label Wacoal will be host at a Fit for the Cure event at Macy's. For every woman who comes in for a complimentary fitting, Wacoal will donate 2 to the Susan G. Komen Foundation to benefit breast cancer research, care and community health programs. Wacoal will donate an extra 2 if you decide to buy a piece like the Awareness Underwire Bra ( 65), which has an embroidered ribbon on the back to remind women of the importance of getting checked. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Jada Yuan, The New York Times's 52 Places Traveler, using her DJI Osmo Mobile gimbal to get a steady shot with her iPhone camera during a hike in northern Peru. How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Jada Yuan, who is crisscrossing the globe as The Times's 52 Places Traveler, discussed the tech she's using. You are endlessly traveling, and you must have to pack light. What are the most crucial tech tools that you pack? Funny thing is, I'd be traveling much lighter if I weren't dragging around so much tech! Because I'm carting all my own stuff and moving every four or five days, I have to think a lot about size and weight. My MacBook Pro and iPhone X are essentials, as are a Bluetooth keyboard (which I hook up to my phone to write articles when I don't have my computer), a 2TB hard drive, and a USB C dongle with multiple USB ports and an SD card reader. I adore my Sony RX100 V point and shoot camera, which Todd Heisler, one of The Times's Pulitzer Prize winning staff photographers, chose for me. It's tiny, drop proof (so far!) and especially good in low light conditions. For video, I don't go anywhere without a Rode Lavalier (an external microphone for noisy environments) and my DJI Osmo Mobile gimbal, a stabilizer that helps me take really smooth shots on my phone while walking (or riding a horse). Staying charged is paramount. I can't risk hiking five hours up a volcano to have my camera die, which happened in Patagonia. I have two or three portable battery chargers on me at all times, plus the appropriate micro USB and iPhone cables, wall plugs, a portable charger for my camera's terrible batteries and an Allocacoc Power Cube, which lets me plug in four American plug devices and two USB cords, plus has interchangeable adapters for any wall outlet I might encounter. You shoot lots of photo and videos to document your travels. What do you do to stay organized or do quick edits on the road? I'm new to iPhones I had a Samsung phone I loved before this trip and the magic of Airdrop has been a revelation to me. It lets me send photos to my computer and ruthlessly delete them from my phone. For shooting, I toggle between the iPhone camera app and Pro Camera, a paid app with a ton of clutch features, like sound levels when you're shooting video. The best editing app I've found for both photo and video is InShot, which lets you adjust videos to be square or 9:16 (the ratio for Instagram stories). What apps have been most useful to you for planning trips or finding things to do? I like to book directly through hotels and airlines, and TripIt has saved me from endlessly searching through my email to find confirmations. You forward emails to the app, and it organizes the information into legs of travel. The app even helps you check into your flights. As for planning, I work with a researcher at The Times, and we communicate over Google Docs. But I've found there isn't a single tech substitute out there for reading articles or random blogs, or doing a web search on "where to eat in X," or asking locals where they like to go. Before I get to a city, I like to take all the recommendations I have and enter them into Google Maps. That way I can strategize my must sees, but also know where to eat once I finish with that museum. It's a tossup between Maps and Evernote for which app I use most. Paper clutter is my constant enemy. To avoid taking brochures, I photograph each one I might want to refer to later and put it into Evernote. And a VPN, or a virtual private internet network, is a huge help in countries where I don't know the language. It makes my phone believe I'm still in the States so my web searches come up in English. Which country has struck you as the most fascinating in terms of how it uses tech? What stood out about it? So far, I've been through only the Americas and a little bit of Europe. What's been most fascinating is how few people I've met seem to care about social media. In New Orleans, my first stop, almost no one I met had an Instagram, and those who did could rarely remember their handles. And that has been repeated in most places I've been. I was impressed by some 20 somethings from Mexico City who had planned their entire Baja Peninsula vacation through YouTube video searches. And I loved that in Oslo all the buses had USB chargers built into the wall. Not all of them worked, but it was the thoughtfulness that counted. Are there any common tech problems that people seem to experience everywhere? I expected to have bad cell reception in remote northern Iceland, but in Buffalo I couldn't call a ride share from outside my hotel and I have Verizon! In New York State! Hotel Wi Fi is notoriously awful worldwide. It's really important as a traveler to anticipate a lack of connectivity. Print out or take a screen shot of important tickets. Save your maps offline in Google or use Maps.me, a worldwide network of offline maps for your phone. Outside of the tech for work, what tech product are you currently obsessed with? The only tech in my life that isn't for work right now are the Hulu and Netflix apps, which I use to unwind in hotel rooms. Improvement I want: Make 85 more episodes of "Queer Eye" and turn "Set It Up" into a 15 part series, and deliver them to me tomorrow. Is there an app or a piece of tech that you used at home that you would never use on the road? This was a surprise to me, but I had to cancel my Amazon Prime on the road. When I'd fret about losing something, people would always say, "You can order it off Amazon!" And you can if you time it to ship three destinations down the road. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity talk show host who has advised President Trump, said Thursday that he "misspoke" in remarks made on Fox News about opening schools despite the risk of losing lives to the pandemic. "I've realized my comments on risks around schools have confused and upset people, which was never my intention," Dr. Oz said in a video released on Twitter Thursday afternoon. "I misspoke." During an interview on Fox News on Tuesday, Dr. Oz, a frequent guest on the network, said the idea of reopening schools was "an appetizing opportunity" in light of an article in a medical journal "arguing that the opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality." "We need our mojo back," he told the Fox News host Sean Hannity. "Let's start with things that are really critical to the nation where we think we might be able to open without getting into a lot of trouble. I tell you, schools are a very appetizing opportunity." He continued: "I just saw a nice piece in The Lancet arguing that the opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality. You know, that's any life is a life lost, but to get every child back into a school where they're safely being educated, being fed, and making the most out of their lives, with the theoretical risk on the backside, it might be a trade off some folks would consider." The article he cited appeared to be an April 6 review in The Lancet, a medical journal, that said studies had shown school closures alone would prevent only 2 to 4 percent of deaths from the coronavirus. The comments provoked a backlash and reignited criticism of Dr. Oz, who has been accused by other doctors of promoting questionable treatments and cures for financial gain. In 2014, a Senate panel questioned him about his promotion of green coffee bean extract as a weight loss product, and Senator Claire McCaskill said she was concerned that he was "melding medical advice, news and entertainment in a way that harms consumers." In December 2014, BMJ, a British medical journal, released a report that said "no evidence could be found" for about a third of the recommendations Dr. Oz had made on his show, "The Dr. Oz Show." Dr. Oz added, "We know that for many kids school is a place of security, nutrition and learning that is missing right now." He said he would continue looking for solutions to "beat this virus." Phillip C. McGraw, the psychologist known as Dr. Phil, similarly gained celebrity on Ms. Winfrey's show, and went on to start his own program and to court controversy. Dr. McGraw appeared on the show "The Ingraham Angle" on Thursday and questioned whether social distancing measures were worth sustaining amid a worldwide economic crisis. He compared the death toll of the coronavirus to deaths that are not caused by contagious illness, such as automobile accidents, cigarettes and drownings. He said that those causes, collectively, killed hundreds of thousands of people a year. "We don't shut the country down for that but yet we're doing it for this?" he said. "The fallout is going to last for years because people's lives are being destroyed." On his YouTube show on Friday, Dr. McGraw responded to the criticism he had faced over his comments. "If you didn't like my choice of words, I apologize for that," he said, adding that he wants people to "100 percent follow the guidelines." Dr. Fauci and other public health officials have urged caution with easing social distancing, which they call one of the most effective ways to combat the spread of the virus. They warn that, if the measures are relaxed too soon, it could risk another wave of illness and death. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Once again, Taylor Swift's music catalog has been sold. And once again, she is deeply unhappy about it. For the second time in a year and a half, the recording rights to Swift's first six albums LPs that include megahits like "Love Story," "Shake It Off" and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" have traded hands, and in response Swift has dragged private equity investors into the rough and tumble public conflict of celebrity social media. Last summer, the music manager Scooter Braun made a deal, estimated at 300 million to 350 million, to buy the Big Machine Label Group, the Nashville label that signed Swift when she was a teenager. That led to a dramatic public clash, when Swift called the deal her "worst case scenario." (Braun had managed her longtime rival Kanye West.) She called on her legions of fans to tell Braun and the Carlyle Group, the large private equity firm that is a major backer of Braun's company, Ithaca Holdings, how they felt about it. Swift also indicated that she planned to rerecord new versions of her old music, thus potentially devaluing the original assets. In some ways, Braun's deal for Big Machine was a routine transaction in the music industry, where hit catalogs change hands regularly. But Swift highlighted the fact that, like most artists, she did not control the rights to her own recordings, music videos and album art. In a heated exchange, Swift accused Big Machine and Braun of blocking her from performing her own work at an upcoming awards show. The pandemic has been a time of renewal and reinvention for Taylor Swift. After releasing two quarantine albums, the singer is in the process of releasing the rerecordings of her first six albums. None A Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift's rerecordings: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun. Pandemic Records: In 2020, Ms. Swift released two new albums, "Folklore" and "Evermore." In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music. Fearless: For the release of "Fearless (Taylor's Version)," the first of the rerecordings, Times critics and reporters dissected its sound and purpose. Reshifting the Power: The new 10 minute version of a bitter breakup song from 2012 can be seen as a woman's attempt to fix an unbalanced relationship by weaponizing memories. Her protestations and the news media coverage of it led to months of talks involving Ithaca and Carlyle, which is better known for its past advisory arrangements with former heads of state like George Bush and John Major than for its involvement in entertainment industry tussles. On Monday, after news of a deal for Swift's back catalog was reported by Variety, Swift identified the buyer as Shamrock Capital, a Los Angeles based investment firm that was founded by Roy E. Disney, a nephew of Walt Disney. According to a note posted on social media by Swift, she was given an opportunity to be a "partner" with Shamrock. According to a person with knowledge of the offer, Swift would have been able to invest money in the purchase and become an equity partner. But Swift said she turned it down because, according to her note, Braun's deal allowed him to continue to profit from her work. "As soon as we started communication with Shamrock, I learned that under their terms Scooter Braun will continue to profit off my old musical catalog for many years," Swift wrote. "I was hopeful and open to the possibility of a partnership with Shamrock, but Scooter's participation is a non starter for me." One of the deal's features, in fact, is that Ithaca will receive future payouts if Swift's catalog hits certain financial targets, according to two people familiar with the matter. Swift also said that she had attempted to negotiate with Braun to purchase her work outright, but was presented with what she called an unacceptable nondisclosure agreement as a condition of inspecting Big Machine's books, which she said she declined. Although exact terms of Ithaca's sale of the deal to Shamrock were private, two people familiar with the transaction said that the sellers had insisted that Swift be given the opportunity to invest in her catalog alongside Shamrock once it closed. Swift's letter essentially puts Shamrock in the same position as Carlyle: a moneyed investor, usually accustomed to passive involvement, being thrust into a negative spotlight by one of the most famous people in the world. Swift's stance also raises questions about Shamrock's ability to fully exploit its new asset. Since she is a writer of her own songs, Swift has the ability to block licensing deals for movies or television which she has said she did to thwart Ithaca's plans for her Big Machine catalog. Shamrock paid more than 300 million for Swift's catalog, according to a person briefed on the deal. That would mean that Braun and his backers, including Carlyle, would keep the remainder of Big Machine whose artists include Sheryl Crow, Florida Georgia Line, Lady A and Tim McGraw for a fraction of its original investment. In a statement, Shamrock confirmed the deal, and suggested that it knew what might be coming. "We made this investment because we believe in the immense value and opportunity that comes with her work," Shamrock said in its statement. "We fully respect and support her decision and, while we hoped to formally partner, we also knew this was a possible outcome that we considered." Shamrock has invested in some music assets in the past, including the music publishing rights of the star production team Stargate, and in July announced that it had raised a 400 million fund for entertainment assets. Representatives for Braun and Big Machine did not respond to requests for comment. Carlyle owns about one third of Ithaca Holdings, and was believed to have contributed a significant sum to the deal for Big Machine, which was announced in June 2019. In her statement on Monday, Swift said that she was moving forward with her plans to rerecord her earlier music, adding that "it has already proven to be both exciting and creatively fulfilling." Swift's complaints at the time of Braun's initial acquisition of her songs shone a spotlight on the issue of ownership of master recordings the rights to exploit any record, for sales, streaming or licensing. These rights have traditionally been owned by record companies in exchange for the risk they take in signing new artists; relatively few major label acts have managed to own rights to their recordings, among them Jay Z, Metallica and Janet Jackson. When Swift signed with the Universal Music Group two years ago, she made ownership of her recording rights a prerequisite of the deal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
ALTERNATE ENDING From Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" to Monica Ali's "Untold Story," veteran novelists have long tinkered with real life events. (Roth imagines Charles Lindbergh as president; Ali imagines an alternate life for Princess Diana ... in the American suburbs.) Curtis Sittenfeld is the latest to practice Jenga storytelling in her sixth novel, "Rodham," which considers how the pieces of Hillary Rodham Clinton's life might have fallen differently if she hadn't married Bill. Like its namesake, the book wins the popular vote, landing at No. 8 on the hardcover fiction list. Alka Joshi's debut novel, "The Henna Artist," grew out of a question that was closer to home: How would her mother's life have been different if she hadn't had an arranged marriage at 18? Joshi explains, "My mother was studying psychology at college in Agra. Her father called her back home to Rajasthan and said, 'It's time for you to get married. You're getting really spinsterish.' My mother comes into this room, she is introduced to my father, who is also young and didn't want to get married either. They both had hopes, things they wanted to accomplish in their lives, but their families had decreed, This is the time." Within four years, Joshi's parents had three children; and five years later, the family moved from India to the United States so her father could pursue a doctorate. "My mother never had the decision making powers, but she gave me so much latitude, so much freedom. I wanted to give her that gift back," Joshi says. "I can't change her life, but I can change it in fiction. I can create a character who leaves her marriage and goes off and finds herself and finds her destiny, and her financial and emotional independence. That's where 'The Henna Artist' came from." Joshi worked on the book for 10 years. She says, "We lost my mother about two or three years after I started, but during that period I was going back and forth with her to Jaipur, which is where the novel takes place. It was a wonderful time for me to share with my mom. I was able to read portions to her. I'd say, 'Does this feel real? Does this feel like something that a woman in your time would have done?' She said, 'Absolutely! Honey, this is good, keep going!' I just wish she were here now, so she could see the fruits of her labors and mine." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
An expanse of blue solar panels stretches across part of the Yamakura Dam reservoir in Japan's Chiba Prefecture. In two years, if construction goes as planned, 50,904 panels will float atop the reservoir, generating an estimated 16,170 megawatt hours annually, enough electricity to power almost 5,000 homes, according to Kyocera, the company building the solar plant. The project, once completed, will be the largest installation of its kind in the world. But floating solar arrays are becoming more popular, with installations already operating in Australia and the United States, and more planned or under construction. The growing interest is driven in part by huge growth in the solar market in recent years as the cost of the technology has dropped quickly. Floating solar arrays they are often referred to as "floatovoltaics," a term trademarked by one company also have advantages over solar plants on land, their proponents say. Renting or buying land is more expensive, and there are fewer regulations for structures built on reservoirs, water treatment ponds and other bodies of water not used for recreation. Unlike most land based solar plants, floating arrays can also be hidden from public view, a factor in the nonprofit Sonoma Clean Power Company's decision to pursue the technology. "Sonoma County boasts some of the most beautiful rolling hills, and people don't want to see them covered by solar panels," said Rebecca Simonson, a senior power analyst for the renewable energy developer, which has signed purchasing agreements for floating solar arrays to be built on six treated water ponds in the county. The solar panels, she said, would not be visible from the road. The floating arrays have other assets. They help keep water from evaporating, making the technology attractive in drought plagued areas, and restrict algae blooms. And they are more efficient than land based panels, because water cools the panels. "The efficiencies are what motivated us to look at this," said Rajesh Nellore, the chief executive of Infratech Industries, which has completed the first section of a floating solar plant in Jamestown, Australia, that will eventually cover five water treatment basins. The installation, which went into operation last year, is constructed so that it generates up to 57 percent more energy than a rooftop solar plant. (The finished plant is expected to generate up to 20 percent more energy than a land based array.) The panels are specially coated to prevent corrosion, and set on a tracking system that moves them to maximize sunlight during the course of a day. The company is working on a similar project in Holtville, a small city in Southern California, which has suffered from years of drought. Mr. Nellore notes that each floating solar project comes with its own engineering challenges. Floating panels, for example, can face stiffer wind than land based arrays. But he said the biggest obstacle he faced was convincing government water agencies that the floating technology served their interests. "It's limited by what incentives there are and what the government wants," Mr. Nellore said. He noted that in Los Angeles, the Water Department covered a reservoir with 34.5 million worth of black plastic balls to slow evaporation; floating solar panels might have served the same purpose and also generated energy. Kyocera, for its part, turned to floating panels because solar power has become so popular in Japan that big tracts of land for typical panel setups are hard to come by, said a spokeswoman, Natsuki Doi. She added that construction time and labor for a floating array was far less than for a land based installation. The Far Niente winery in Oakville, Calif., was an early adopter of floating solar panels, placing 994 on pontoons over an irrigation pond in 2008. Greg Allen, a winemaker at Far Niente who is a mechanical engineer by training, said the company was interested in solar power and wanted to eliminate 100 percent of their energy costs. Utility rebates and tax credits helped defray some of the 4.2 million cost for the floating array, which took two and a half years to design and build, and another 1,302 solar panels installed on land. The system is expected to pay for itself by 2020 or sooner, Mr. Allen said. The 3 foot by 5 foot solar panels on the pond are mounted on 130 foam filled plastic pontoons made from drainpipes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
GALLOWAY, N.J. After Donna Cushlanis's son kept bursting into tears midway through his second grade math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to do all of his homework. "How many times do you have to add seven plus two?" Ms. Cushlanis, 46, said. "I have no problem with doing homework, but that put us both over the edge. I got to the point that this is enough." Ms. Cushlanis, a secretary for the Galloway school district, complained to her boss, Annette C. Giaquinto, the superintendent. It turned out that the district, which serves 3,500 kindergarten through eighth grade students, was already re evaluating its homework practices. The school board will vote this summer on a proposal to limit weeknight homework to 10 minutes for each year of school 20 minutes for second graders, and so forth and ban assignments on weekends, holidays and school vacations. Galloway, a mostly middle class community northwest of Atlantic City, is part of a wave of districts across the nation trying to remake homework amid concerns that high stakes testing and competition for college have fueled a nightly grind that is stressing out children and depriving them of play and rest, yet doing little to raise achievement, particularly in elementary grades. Such efforts have drawn criticism from some teachers and some parents who counter that students must study more, not less, if they are to succeed. Even so, the anti homework movement has been reignited in recent months by the documentary "Race to Nowhere," about burned out students caught in a pressure cooker educational system. "There is simply no proof that most homework as we know it improves school performance," said Vicki Abeles, the filmmaker and a mother of three from California. "And by expecting kids to work a 'second shift' in what should be their downtime, the presence of schoolwork at home is negatively affecting the health of our young people and the quality of family time." So teachers at Mango Elementary School in Fontana, Calif., are replacing homework with "goal work" that is specific to individual student's needs and that can be completed in class or at home at his or her own pace. The Pleasanton School District, north of San Jose, Calif., is proposing this month to cut homework times by nearly half and prohibit weekend assignments in elementary grades because, as one administrator said, "parents want their kids back." Ridgewood High School in New Jersey introduced a homework free winter break in December. Schools in Bleckley County, Ga., have instituted "no homework nights" throughout the year. The Brooklyn School of Inquiry, a gifted and talented program, has made homework optional. "I think people confuse homework with rigor," said Donna Taylor, the Brooklyn School's principal, who views homework for children under 11 as primarily benefiting parents by helping them feel connected to the classroom. Research has long suggested that homework in small doses can reinforce basic skills and help young children develop study habits, but that there are diminishing returns, said Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. The 10 minute guideline has generally been shown to be effective, Dr. Cooper said, adding that over all, "there is a minimal relationship between how much homework young kids do and how well they test." Still, efforts to roll back homework have been opposed by those who counter that there is not enough time in the school day to cover required topics and that homework reinforces classroom learning. In Coronado, Calif., the school board rejected a proposal by the superintendent to eliminate homework on weekends and holidays after some parents said that was when they had time to help their children and others worried it would result in more homework on weeknights. "Most of our kids can't spell without spell check or add unless it comes up on the computer," said Karol Ball, 51, who has two teenage sons in the Atlantic City district. "If we coddle them when they're younger, what happens when they get into the real world? No one's going to say to them, 'You don't have to work extra hard to get that project done; just turn in what you got.' " Homework wars have divided communities for over a century. In the 1950s, the Sputnik launching ushered in heavier workloads for American students in the race to keep up with the Soviet Union. The 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" and, more recently, the testing pressures of the No Child Left Behind law, also resulted in more homework for children at younger ages. A few public and private schools have renounced homework in recent years, but most have sought a middle ground. In Galloway, the policy would stipulate that homework cover only topics already addressed in class. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
The Hotel Lilla Roberts, a stylish 130 room property, has brought new energy to a landmark building whose previous tenants include a power station and the Helsinki Police Department. Built in the early 20th century in classic Finnish Art Nouveau style, the building has been renovated by the designer Jaakko Puro, who drew on influences spanning a century of Nordic design. Opened in August 2015, the hotel has a welcoming entrance with its distinctive Art Deco typeface. The lobby dazzles with its gleaming checkerboard floor and midcentury style armchairs. And beside the reception desk stands a sculptural, look at me lamp a giant black horse with a lampshade on its head by the cutting edge Swedish design firm Front. Inspiration for the hotel's name came from the street address, which in Swedish (the other official language in Finland) is Lilla Robertsgatan. In the central Design District, the hotel is a 10 minute walk from the main train station. Several tram lines stop in the immediate vicinity, but most sights are within walking distance. My fifth floor "Comfort" room, the lowest of five room categories, lived up to its name with its plush furnishings. Large windows along one wall were dressed with gauzy black curtains and thick beige blackout drapes. Dark hardwood floors were covered with a soft sand colored rug, and a large TV hung on one wall above a long, slim desk. The king size bed so high I had to literally hop into bed was topped with fluffy duvets and a furry black throw. The bed was flanked by bedside tables, and above the headboard hung a pair of abstract art prints. There was also a brown leather bench at the foot of the bed and a cozy, tufted armchair clad in beige fabric with a traditional Finnish equestrian print. Luxuriously large, the bathroom had glossy white tile walls and, on the floor, a geometric mosaic of small black and white hexagonal tiles. A spacious shower stall with regular and rainfall showerheads was separated by a glass partition. There were also two large mirrors framed in black tile, one above the toilet and another above the vanity where bath amenities were arrayed beside a fragrance diffuser. A top of the line ghd hair dryer was also provided. There is a minibar in the room and free Wi Fi throughout the hotel. In the basement, a bright, well equipped gym with weights, kettlebells and multiple cardio machines is open 24 hours a day. The kitchen is open all day at the hotel's Nordic restaurant, Krog Roba, where the design curvy pendant lamps, deep velour sofas, mosaic tiled floors has been considered as carefully as the menu. An abundant breakfast buffet (included in the rate) featured Finnish specialties such as juniper smoked salmon, crusty rye sourdough and tangy yogurt with raspberry or gooseberry jam. The rest of the day, the restaurant serves pan Nordic plates such as smoked whitefish smorrebrod and malt cake with cloudberries. Select menu items are available for room service all day, including breakfast (20 euro delivery fee). Creative cocktails are also served in the lobby bar, called Lilla E. Exemplary Finnish hospitality at this stylish hotel translates into regional cuisine and glossy design, all overseen by a professional, on the ball staff. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine released a plume of radiation that eventually blanketed an estimated 77,000 square miles of Europe and Eurasia. While the worst of the contamination occurred near the plant an area still closed to human habitation, now referred to as the exclusion zone the effects are still seen further afield as well. Radioactive wild boars roam German forests, and radioactive mushrooms grow in Bulgaria. Now, an international team of experts warns that Europe could receive fresh doses of Chernobyl radiation from forest fires. Radioactive isotopes of cesium, strontium and plutonium take decades to millenniums to decay. The contaminants remain in soil and in plants that, once on fire, can release them into the air. Climate models predict that rising temperatures combined with stable or declining precipitation will increase the risk of wildfires in the already fire prone Chernobyl landscape. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Who knocks off the knockers off? Who bootlegs the bootleggers? It is not quite as Juvenal, the great Roman satirist, once put it ("who watches the watchmen?"), but then, it was not quite Rome, either. It was in Florence, Italy, earlier this week, at a Gucci fashion show, that the question arose. Alessandro Michele, Gucci's magpie creative director, whose taste for mixing and mingling wildly disparate elements is his signature, was staging his cruise collection show, a hodgepodge of Renaissance, 1980s and street wear references, half gilded, half granny, half gamine. (That's three halves, but more is more in Mr. Michele's saturated world.) Among the show's 115 looks, one stood out to many observers: a fur paneled bomber jacket with enormous balloon sleeves in the Gucci double G logo. It looked, as online pundits quickly pointed out, just like one designed by Daniel Day, better known as the imitation artist Dapper Dan, whose Harlem boutique was, in the 1980s and early '90s, the go to for rappers, gangsters, boxers and anyone else looking for even more Gucci, Fendi and Louis Vuitton than could be found at Gucci, Fendi or Louis Vuitton. His 125th Street shop and atelier was, at times, open 24 hours a day. (The original Dapper Dan jacket, made for the Olympic gold medalist Diane Dixon, in 1989, had LV logo sleeves.) With his jacket, Mr. Michele is effectively reappropriating the appropriation, with all the tangled politics and ethics that that would imply. Critics on social media voiced their displeasure; Ms. Dixon herself posted photographs of the two jackets side by side and asked that credit be given to Mr. Day. Gucci does not dispute that the jacket, Look No. 33, is a homage. In a statement, the company said, "Gucci's 'new Renaissance' cruise 2018 fashion show included references to periods of revitalization spanning many different eras, in particular the European Renaissance, the '70s and the '80s. The collection also saw a continuation of Alessandro Michele's exploration of faux real culture with a series of pieces playing on the Gucci logo and monogram, including a puff sleeved bomber jacket from the 1980s in an homage to the work of the renowned Harlem tailor Daniel 'Dapper Dan' Day and in celebration of the culture of that era in Harlem." A Gucci spokesman said that the brand has tried to contact Mr. Day, so far without success, and that Mr. Michele was interested in a collaboration with him that would celebrate the influence he had on fashion and hip hop culture in the 1980s. Mr. Day, and his son and brand manager, Jelani Day, declined to comment for this article. In his career, Mr. Day, who magnified luxury brands' logomania to larger than life proportions, essentially elevated the knockoff to an art unto itself: fashion as sampling. He began by repurposing existing branded items, including garment bags, but eventually moved on to screen printing brand logos himself, Gucci among them (see, for example, the cover of Eric B. and Rakim's album "Paid in Full"). Some labels, unsurprisingly, objected; Mr. Day was sued, and the store was occasionally raided. The Dapper Dan boutique closed in 1992. It may, in fact, be a case of fashion catching up to him. "I never designed anything" that the luxury houses would think of, he told New York magazine in 2015. "I was too cutting edge for that." While counterfeiting remains a thorn in the side of luxury brands, there has also increasingly been a more playful approach taken (in certain cases) by the industry. In January, Louis Vuitton unveiled a collaboration with the skate brand Supreme. Both sides had seemingly agreed to forget that, years earlier, Louis Vuitton had ordered Supreme to cease and desist from using a pattern similar to its monogram. At Gucci, Mr. Michele has toggled between the real and the fake with aplomb. It is enough to scramble the minds of copyright lawyers and epistemologists alike. Several pieces in the cruise collection bore the label "GUCCY," playing on the law dodging misspellings sometimes used by knockoff artists: a faux real, for real. And when Mr. Michele discovered Trevor Andrew, a New York artist, making and selling his own fake Gucci items as "GucciGhost," he did not sue. He brought him into the fold. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
At the beginning of "American Weather" Chris Green's lovely, but irritatingly oblique puppet theater piece at Here a performer brings a metal ring to the center of the stage and sets it spinning. The arcs it traces is gripping, splendid, a geometer's dream. Entropy being what it is, the hoop settles eventually. There's not much that follows that has the impact of that circle. This circus might need more rings. There are seemingly two main characters in "American Weather": a silent, isolated woman in a wooden chair and a puppet who appears projected on the curtain behind her. They never interact directly, though they are both accompanied by folk ballads delivered by Mr. Green and three musicians who double as stagehands and triple as bunraku style puppeteers. There are also some hand drawn animations and a microscopic examination of what is likely corrugated cardboard. It's unclear what all this beauty is actually doing onstage. (When a show spends this much time focused on cardboard, one possible answer is: not much.) In an artist's statement, Mr. Green identifies an initial interest in "the idea that we as Americans are each editing and contributing to this messy epic called America." After the election, that preoccupation shifted into a more particular concern with Trump voters swayed by the prevailing political winds. A couple of lyrics nod toward this. As the woman sits in her chair, the chorus sings: "You change your mind / like the weather / It's like you'll do anything / for a change." But otherwise, few of these ideas emerge in the piece, which I read as a meditation on loneliness and a need for community without ever really being convinced of that. If this is a work of political theater, it is abstract and unemotional in a time that seems anything but. The weather never really gets heavy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
TRUMP AND HIS GENERALS The Cost of Chaos By Peter Bergen Luckily, no one makes us read a book that covers all of our bad moments in the dental chair the tut tutting about a cracked tooth, the anesthetic charged needle sliding into soft tissue, the high pitched whine of the drill, the grating sound of enamel being ground away, the bleeding gum, the anodyne assurance that there are only four more visits left before the restoration is complete. Unfortunately, Peter Bergen has decided to have his readers relive the Trump foreign and national security policy equivalent in this account of the first three years of the current administration. There it all is the spectacular flameouts, from semitragic former generals ending up in court to harlequins flitting through White House corridors; the kooky theories of "The Fourth Turning," which informed Stephen Bannon's understanding of American history; the impulsive hires of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the national security adviser H. R. McMaster, and their humiliating tweet singed send offs; the jumped up mediocrities incapable of writing a memo and the multimillionaires on the make with schemes to outsource the Afghan war; the birther conspiracy theories about Barack Obama; Kellyanne Conway's invocation of the Bowling Green massacre and alternative facts; the constant expletive laden discourse in which major American foreign policy decisions were conceptualized by the president as variations on the Anglo Saxon monosyllable for sexual intercourse; the contempt for human rights, loyalty to allies and fidelity to covenants. And all this before the Ukrainian quid pro quo. One should be grateful to Bergen, a vice president at New America and the author of several books on national security, even though none of the stories are fundamentally new. The anti Trump Republican foreign and national security officials who denounced him in two letters in March and August of 2016 (both of which I had a hand in) foresaw all of this. It took a level headed observer of no particular insight or special knowledge to understand that Donald Trump's deficiencies of character, outlook and experience made him unfit for office. But "Trump and His Generals" raises, even if it does not address deeply, some important questions about the outlandish and sordid tale. One of these has to do with Trump's relationship with the military. Bergen focuses on the generals (Michael Flynn, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, McMaster and others) but he occasionally goes a bit beyond that, for instance describing Trump's visit to Dover Air Force Base to witness the return of the body of a member of the SEALs killed in a raid gone bad. Typically, Trump immediately shifted the blame to his generals: "This is something they wanted to do." The notion of accepting responsibility is as central to the military's ethic as it is alien to Trump's. His relationship with pretty much every general in his orbit failed because he seems to associate soldiering not only with violence, but also with uncaged brutality. Hence his initial approving description of Mattis as "Mad Dog" and his disgust at discovering that the Marine is a soft spoken, well read and judicious combat commander. Hence too his tensions with the leadership of the Department of Defense over the handling of military personnel accused of war crimes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
WASHINGTON It's called the Doomsday Book though by now, officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York probably regret they ever came up with that catchy nickname. It's a collection of legal opinions that describe and delineate the Federal Reserve's ability to fight financial crises, along with a variety of related documents. And the Fed would really prefer to tell the public nothing more than that. The Doomsday Book has popped into public view because a group of investors suing the government over the terms of its bailout of the American International Group say some of the memos inside show the Fed broke its own rules. Last week, in a courtroom overlooking the White House, government lawyers took a break from defending the government against the 40 billion lawsuit, and instead pressed a judge to keep the contents under seal and to limit references to its contents by lawyers and witnesses participating in the weekslong trial. "Of the tens of thousands of documents that we have produced in this case, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has sought to retain confidentiality because of the internal sensitivity of only this one," a lawyer for the New York Fed, John S. Kiernan of Debevoise Plimpton, told the United States Court of Federal Claims. Even the plaintiffs have managed only photocopies of the indexes from the 2006, 2012 and 2014 versions each a stack of papers more than an inch high. Nevertheless, a portrait of the book has emerged from the back and forth, as detailed in transcripts of the trial that were first highlighted by The Wall Street Journal. The Doomsday Book, as it happens, is not a book. It is a collection of documents maintained by the New York Fed's legal department. The contents include "an extensive legal history of Federal Reserve lending activities," and memos on subjects that deal with the Fed's authority to make loans to municipalities and restructure debts. There is no comparable collection in Washington. The New York Fed is the central bank's firefighting department. The New York Fed keeps three full sets, plus an electronic version, and it circulates an index. These facts are on the first page of the index, which the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, David Boies, read aloud in the courtroom last week. Timothy F. Geithner, who led the New York Fed during the early stages of the financial crisis before becoming Treasury secretary, testified that he kept in his office an abridged version, in a binder about two inches thick, containing the index and a selection of memos. He said he had never seen the full work. Mr. Geithner in his testimony also played down the importance of the Doomsday Book, saying that he had consulted it infrequently during the crisis because the Fed was quickly forced to take measures beyond anything it had done before. "We were operating really outside the boundaries of established precedent," he said. At times, the Fed may have even decided to throw out the book. The 2006 version contained "an informal opinion by the board's general counsel that Federal Reserve Banks do not have the power to make non recourse loans." Such loans do not allow the Fed to recoup losses beyond the value of the collateral. Mr. Geithner acknowledged in his testimony that during the recent crisis, notwithstanding, the Fed made non recourse loans. But Mr. Geithner, in a memoir published this year, wrote that the Doomsday Book did help the New York Fed deal with the collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns. The Fed kept the company on life support for a few crucial days by lending money to JPMorgan Chase, which in turn lent money to Bear Stearns. Mr. Geithner wrote that the idea came from "Tom Baxter, our general counsel, taking a page from the Doomsday Book, the binder full of information about the New York Fed's emergency powers that he had helped write years earlier." The lawsuit argues that the Fed ignored the legal opinions in the Doomsday Book again in taking a 79.9 percent equity stake in A.I.G. in the fall of 2008. It argues that the Fed lacked the authority to take an equity stake in the company. Mr. Geithner and other officials have testified that the bailout was meant to keep the financial crisis from deepening, and they have defended its legality. The New York Fed has offered a limited explanation of its desire for secrecy. Mr. Kiernan told the judge at a hearing last week that the collection is "confidential, proprietary and important." The Fed's lawyers also have argued the book deserves privacy because it contains the confidential advice of the Fed's lawyers. More broadly, the Fed has long regarded secrecy as a strategic advantage. Highlighting the full extent of its power to rescue financial companies might, for example, encourage companies to behave more recklessly. It might reduce the Fed's bargaining power during a crisis. And it might ignite prematurely the kind of political outrage at the measures at the Fed's disposal that frequently attend actual bailouts. The newest version is particularly sensitive. The 2010 Dodd Frank Act limited the Fed's ability to make emergency loans to troubled financial companies like A.I.G. A bipartisan group of senators is pressing the Fed to accept a relatively strict interpretation of those limitations. The Fed's conclusions will no doubt be reflected in future versions of the Doomsday Book, if they are not already. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
A new report has found that in 2018, more women and people of color starred in top movies than in any other year since 2007, when researchers began their study. The report, released Tuesday by the University of Southern California's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, found that 40 of the 100 top films from last year had a woman in the starring or co starring role, up from 32 the year before. In 2007, that number was just 20. And people of color played a starring or co starring role in 28 of the top 100 films in 2018, compared with 21 in 2017 and just 13 in 2007. Gains were also made by women of color and women 45 or older. Eleven of last year's 100 top movies starred a woman from an underrepresented ethnicity, compared with four in 2017. Similarly, 11 top films starred or co starred a woman 45 or older, up from five a year earlier. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"The Rape of Tamar," circa 1640, attributed to Eustache Le Sueur. The Met bought it from a trio of dealers in 1984. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has altered the provenance of a major painting in one of its galleries to reflect new information about the artwork's troubled history in Germany before and after World War II. The museum now acknowledges that the 17th century painting, titled "The Rape of Tamar," and attributed to the French artist Eustache Le Sueur, was owned by a Jewish art dealer, Siegfried Aram, who fled Germany in 1933 as Hitler took power. Mr. Aram fought for decades, unsuccessfully, to reclaim the painting, which he argued had been illegally taken by a businessman, Oskar Sommer, to whom he sold his home in Germany. The dispute over the work was brought to light by Joachim Peter, a German researcher, photographer and art instructor, who has spent years studying the history of Heilbronn, the city where Mr. Aram once lived. The discovery by Mr. Peter, who has a diploma in film studies and an art degree, became the subject of a New York Times article earlier this month. The Met bought the painting, which now hangs in Gallery 634, from a consortium of dealers in 1984. The dealers had purchased it months earlier at auction in London where Christie's had identified it as the "Property of a Gentleman" without additional provenance. It had been brought to market by one of Mr. Sommer's daughters, who inherited the painting after his death in 1966. Experts later traced the painting back to the 18th century where they identified two prior French owners. But the painting was mistakenly thought to have been in a private collection for more than 100 years until the 1983 sale at Christie's. Actually, as referenced in the Met's new provenance for the work, it was held in a private collection in Britain in the mid 1920s when Mr. Aram bought it. The painting then passed "to Sommer as a contested part of his purchase of Aram's villa in Schapbach, Germany," the Met said on its website. "We updated the online provenance information, with the confirmation that the painting in dispute between Aram and Sommers was the same as the Met's," the museum said in a statement. Mr. Peter relied on documents from archives in Baden Wurttemberg to track the dealer's long and unsuccessful fight for his painting. For his part, Mr. Sommer defended keeping the painting, asserting, among other things, that the property he bought was smaller than had been described. It is unclear if Mr. Aram, who died in 1978 in the United States, has heirs. The Met declined to say whether anyone has come forward to make a claim on the painting. Mr. Aram considered the subject of his painting to be a depiction of the "Tarquin and Lucretia" legend and he believed it had been created by the court painter for King Louis XIII of France, Simon Vouet, in whose studio Le Sueur had his early training. It had been sold at Christie's as "Tarquin and Lucretia" by the "Circle of Simon Vouet." But the Met and other experts later came to believe that its subject is instead the Old Testament story of Tamar, by Le Sueur. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Heidelberg's only Mark Twain impersonator takes his work seriously. His eyebrows and mustache are unruly, and his long gray hair overlaps his ears. He wears a white suit that is too warm in summer and not warm enough in winter. The only obvious problem with Klaus Mombrei's performance, as he leads tour groups through the city, is something Twain himself would have found amusing: He speaks not Missouri twanged English but his native German. "Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless and so slippery and elusive to the grasp," Twain fumed in his 1880 European travelogue "A Tramp Abroad." And yet, despite his problems with German, Twain was smitten with the country. "Germany, in the summer, is the perfection of the beautiful," he gushed. He was especially fond of Heidelberg, where he lived with his family in the summer of 1878. The city was "the last possibility of the beautiful," he wrote, straining to surpass the superlative he had lavished on the country. Heidelberg curls up against the Neckar River in a narrow pass between a pair of mountains, like a flower preserved between two books. As Mr. Mombrei leads tours of visitors (mostly Germans) over the cobblestone streets, he likes to share a popular local legend. "I tell my groups Twain got the idea for the 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' from the Neckar," he said. "A Tramp Abroad" includes the story of a raft journey down the river and was published several years before "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Many people in Heidelberg believe, therefore, that the Neckar was the creative headwater to Twain's Mississippi. In fact, the fictional river trip was already racing through his mind. Twain had started the novel before he went to Germany, but the draft was stalled shortly after Huck and Jim destroyed their raft in a collision with a steamship. No wonder, then, that Twain watched timber rafts rushing down the Neckar, "hoping to see one of them hit the bridge pier and wreck itself." He was in a creative crisis. This crucial chapter in Twain's career is often overlooked. So I set out to understand it better by retracing his footsteps in the region. Heidelberg survived World War II with only minor damage, so visitors today can still experience the romantic charm Twain found. Church towers crane above the red roofs, while the medieval main street, Hauptstrasse, meanders through the center of the city. The famous castle ruins loom high on the mountainside, a centuries old mosaic caulked with moss and tiny plants. In the afternoon, Twain and his family would gather in the castle park for beer and music. When I visited, a theater troupe was rehearsing "Kiss Me, Kate." Twain stayed at the Schloss hotel, the finest lodging in Heidelberg at the time. The building was on a bluff even higher than the castle, so that Twain could stand on his balcony and drink in the entire city. "I have never enjoyed a view which had such a serene and satisfying charm," he wrote in "A Tramp Abroad." In the evening, Heidelberg became "a fallen Milky Way ... its intricate cobweb of streets jeweled with twinkling lights." Today, the Schloss hotel has been rebuilt as private residences, a boring beige box floating like a Mario Block on its perch above the city. I stayed across the river at the Hirschgasse, a former student pub that Twain could see from his hotel window. In Twain's time, the Hirschgasse was the battleground for Heidelberg University's fencing fraternities, whose members were identifiable by their caps and facial scars. Today the Hirschgasse features two of Heidelberg's best restaurants: the upscale French restaurant Le Gourmet and the German Mensurstube, where the tables are scratched with the signatures of former students and the walls decorated with fencing caps, sabers and old photographs. Other fraternity watering holes from Twain's time are still in business. On the Hauptstrasse, Zum Seppl and Zum Roten Ochsen both serve German comfort food: bratwurst, cheese spaetzle and white asparagus a springtime specialty whose nutritional value Germans like to obliterate with Hollandaise sauce and ham. The fencing duels fascinated Twain. At the Hirschgasse, he saw "the heads and faces of ten youths gashed in every direction." You might have expected him to foil such pointless violence with common sense and wit, but he thought the ritual deserved "a considerable degree of respect." When Twain arrived in Germany, his writer's block had hamstrung not only "Huckleberry Finn" but also several other books, including "Life on the Mississippi" and "The Prince and the Pauper." And he had humiliated himself in December 1877 with an irreverent speech in Boston before some of America's greatest literary figures: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes. "I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country," he wrote to a friend. He told his mother that he needed to "fly to some little corner of Europe." I arrived in Heidelberg in June with some sense of Twain's restlessness. When I told a friend that I was having trouble concentrating, he said I should stay present: open my senses to whatever was happening at the moment, and exist in the world instead of in my head. As I reread "A Tramp Abroad," knowing that Twain had arrived in Germany under a cloud of shame and failure, it seemed to me that he had faced a similar challenge. His goal was not so much to penetrate Heidelberg and the Neckar Valley but to soak his senses in those places, to dissolve his insecurity in the scenery and to rediscover his pride and purpose. This comes through clearest in Twain's Neckar narrative, so I followed him upriver. From Heidelberg, I took a boat to Neckarsteinach, an old town with a quartet of castle ruins. The river winds between hills like a lazy cursive signature. Time has worked slowly on its banks: The terrain is still mainly field and forest; the mountains robed in thick green foliage. Every few miles our boat passed a village with bored looking teenagers and rows of simple white homes. After sundown, the buildings glowed like votive candles in the dark. The inns where Twain stayed along the Neckar have closed, but some of his favorite castle ruins are now connected with hotels. Burg Hornberg is a mountaintop fortress surrounded by terraced vineyards, with a tower so high that surely, at some point, someone must have locked a princess in it. The hotel's impressive view of the Neckar is marred only slightly by an industrial plant. Farther downstream, you can stay at the Schlosshotel Hirschhorn, whose ruins were one of Twain's favorite Neckar sights. "The clustered brown towers perched on the green hilltop, and the old battlemented stone wall, stretching up and over the grassy ridge and disappearing in the leafy sea beyond, make a picture whose grace and beauty entirely satisfy the eye," he wrote in "A Tramp Abroad." Twain's Neckar story is filled with these moments of sensory immersion. He luxuriates in the "green and fragrant banks," the vineyards, the poppy fields. In these sensual descriptions, Twain's language often turns therapeutic. The raft, he wrote, "soothes to sleep all nervous hurry and impatience; under its restful influence all the troubles and vexations and sorrows that harass the mind vanish away." In Germany, Twain was finding the equilibrium that had deserted him at home. Writing "A Tramp Abroad" would frustrate Twain immensely: His writer's block had not yet lifted. But in the Neckar journey, one can detect the shoots of creative rejuvenation. He spins the legend of a German knight named Sir Wissenschaft, who slays a dragon not with a sword but with a fire extinguisher a precursor to the common sense hero of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." The greatest sign of Twain's revival is the Neckar raft itself. Twain never rafted down the river: He traveled the region by boat, foot and train and invented the raft only later as a narrative device. It had emerged from his subconscious and back into his active imagination. And when he picked up the draft of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in 1879, the raft was still afloat: He found a way forward by repairing Huck and Jim's raft after the steamship accident and continuing their journey down the Mississippi. As my boat pushed upstream, I tried to absorb the greenery, the late spring breeze, the sound of water breaking on the hull. By tuning his senses to this place, Twain started to clear his mind, and his inspiration began to flow more freely. After "A Tramp Abroad," he would have the greatest decade of his career, publishing "The Prince and the Pauper," "Life on the Mississippi," "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." And when he got stuck or frustrated with the writing process, perhaps he remembered the quiet music of the Neckar, that narrow river whose sound "bears up the thread of one's imaginings as an accompaniment bears up a song." IF YOU GO The Hirschgasse The former dueling ground of Heidelberg University's fencing fraternities, it is now a small luxury hotel with two of the city's best restaurants. (Hirschgasse 3, Heidelberg; hirschgasse.de/). Double rooms start at 155 euros, or about 170. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
After last year's election, Facebook came in for a drubbing for its role in propagating misinformation or "fake news," as we called it back then, before the term became a catchall designation for any news you don't like. The criticism was well placed: Facebook is the world's most popular social network, and millions of people look to it daily for news. But the focus on Facebook let another social network off the hook. I speak of my daily addiction, Twitter. Though the 140 character network favored by President Trump is far smaller than Facebook, it is used heavily by people in media and thus exerts perhaps an even greater sway on the news business. That's an issue because Twitter is making the news dumber. The service is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by "covfefe," which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo. But the biggest problem with Twitter's place in the news is its role in the production and dissemination of propaganda and misinformation. It keeps pushing conspiracy theories and because lots of people in the media, not to mention many news consumers, don't quite understand how it works, the precise mechanism is worth digging into. We recently saw the mechanism in action when another baseless conspiracy theory rose to the top of the news: The idea that the murder last year of Seth Rich, a staff member at the Democratic National Committee, was linked, somehow, to the leaking of Clinton campaign emails. The Fox News host Sean Hannity pushed the theory the loudest, but it was groups on Twitter or, more specifically, bots on Twitter that were first to the story and helped make it huge. The guts of the news business. One way to think of today's disinformation ecosystem is to picture it as a kind of gastrointestinal tract. At the top end the mouth, let's call it enter the raw materials of propaganda: the memes cooked up by anyone who wants to manipulate what the media covers, whether political campaigns, terrorist groups, state sponsored trolls or the homegrown provocateurs who hang out at extremist online communities. Then, way down at what we will politely call the "other end," emerge the packaged narratives primed for widespread dissemination to you and everyone you know. These are the hot takes that dominate talk radio and prime time cable news, as well as the viral Facebook posts warning you about this or that latest outrage committed by Hillary Clinton. How do the raw materials become the culturewide narratives and conspiracy theories? The path is variegated and flexible and often stretches across multiple media platforms. Yet in many of the biggest misinformation campaigns of the past year, Twitter played a key role. Specifically, Twitter often acts as the small bowel of digital news. It's where political messaging and disinformation get digested, packaged and widely picked up for mass distribution to cable, Facebook and the rest of the world. This role for Twitter has seemed to grow more intense during (and since) the 2016 campaign. Twitter now functions as a clubhouse for much of the news. It's where journalists pick up stories, meet sources, promote their work, criticize competitors' work and workshop takes. In a more subtle way, Twitter has become a place where many journalists unconsciously build and gut check a worldview where they develop a sense of what's important and merits coverage, and what doesn't. This makes Twitter a prime target for manipulators: If you can get something big on Twitter, you're almost guaranteed coverage everywhere. "When journalists see a story getting big on Twitter, they consider it a kind of responsibility to cover it, even if the story may be an alternate frame or a conspiracy theory," said Alice Marwick, who was co author of a recent report on the mechanics of media manipulation for the Data Society Research Institute. "That's because if they don't, they may get accused of bias." As a result, numerous cheap and easy to use online tools let people quickly create thousands of Twitter bots accounts that look real, but that are controlled by a puppet master. Twitter's design also promotes a slavish devotion to metrics: Every tweet comes with a counter of Likes and Retweets, and users come to internalize these metrics as proxies for real world popularity. Yet these metrics can be gamed. Because a single Twitter user can create lots of accounts and run them all in a coordinated way, Twitter lets relatively small groups masquerade as far larger ones. If Facebook's primary danger is its dissemination of fake stories, then Twitter's is a ginning up of fake people. "Bots allow groups to speak much more loudly than they would be able to on any other social media platforms it lets them use Twitter as a megaphone," said Samuel Woolley, the director for research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project. "It's doing something that I call 'manufacturing consensus,' or building the illusion of popularity for a candidate or a particular idea." How this works for conspiracy theories is relatively straightforward. Outside of Twitter in message boards or Facebook groups a group will decide on a particular message to push. Then the deluge begins. Bots flood the network, tweeting and retweeting thousands or hundreds of thousands of messages in support of the story, often accompanied by a branding hashtag pizzagate, or, a few weeks ago, sethrich. The initial aim isn't to convince or persuade, but simply to overwhelm to so completely saturate the network that it seems as if people are talking about a particular story. The biggest prize is to get on Twitter's Trending Topics list, which is often used as an assignment sheet for the rest of the internet. I witnessed this in mid May, just after the Fox affiliate in Washington reported that a private investigator for Mr. Rich's family had bombshell evidence in the case. The story later fell apart, but that night, Twitter bots went with it. Hundreds of accounts with few or no followers began tweeting links to the story. By the next morning, SethRich was trending nationally on Twitter and the conspiracy theory was getting wide coverage across the right, including, in time, Mr. Hannity. A Twitter spokesman said the company took bots seriously; it has a dedicated spam detection team that looks out for bot based manipulation, and it is constantly improving its tools to spot and shut down bots. What's more, because the media is large and chaotic, it is often unclear what role, exactly, bots play in ginning up interest in a story. Conspiracy theories went big long before Twitter was around. If you removed Twitter from the equation, wouldn't Sean Hannity have picked up the Seth Rich rumor anyway? Yet the more I spoke to experts, the more convinced I became that propaganda bots on Twitter might be a growing and terrifying scourge on democracy. Research suggests that bots are ubiquitous on Twitter. Emilio Ferrara and Alessandro Bessi, researchers at the University of Southern California, found that about a fifth of the election related conversation on Twitter last year was generated by bots. Most users were blind to them; they treated the bots the same way they treated other users. "Human users didn't do a good job of separating bots from other humans," Mr. Ferrara said. Because they operate unseen, bots catalyze the news: They speed up the process of discovery and dissemination of particular stories, turning an unknown hashtag into the next big thing. A trending hashtag creates a trap for journalists who cover the internet: Even if they cover a conspiracy theory only to debunk it, they're most likely playing into what the propagandists' want. Finally, in a more pernicious way, bots give us an easy way to doubt everything we see online. In the same way that the rise of "fake news" gives the president cover to label everything "fake news," the rise of bots might soon allow us to dismiss any online enthusiasm as driven by automation. Anyone you don't like could be a bot; any highly retweeted post could be puffed up by bots. "If you can make something trend, you can almost make it come true," said Renee DiResta, a technologist who studies bots. And if that's the case, why believe anything? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A roundup of motoring news from around the Web: In September, Japanese automakers posted big production gains in China over the same time last year, when a territorial dispute between Japan and China caused international tension and anti Japan protests in China. Automakers said revised marketing campaigns and a greater selection of affordable Japanese vehicles seemed to have spurred Chinese interest in Japanese cars. (Wall Street Journal, subscription required) According to Ford and the Environmental Protection Agency, the 1 liter 3 cylinder EcoBoost equipped 2014 Fiesta will be both economical and fuel efficient. The E.P.A. estimates that the EcoBoost optioned Fiesta will get 32 miles per gallon in the city and 45 on the highway, while Ford's online configurator pegs the economy car's price at 17,240 for the sedan and 17,840 for the hatchback, including a delivery fee of 795. (Autoblog) The new owner of the abandoned Packard plant in Detroit, which has sat derelict for decades, says she will build modular homes and offices on the 35 acre site. Jill Van Horn, a family practice doctor from Ennis, Tex., won the property after bidding more than 6 million for it at a foreclosure auction last week. (Detroit Free Press) Andy Palmer, Nissan's executive vice president, told Motor Trend that Nissan had something in the works to battle Toyota and Subaru's joint venture sports car offering, the Subaru BRZ and Scion FR S. Mr. Palmer called the BRZ/FR S a "midlife crisis" car, and said the new Nissan, which may be introduced next month at the Tokyo auto show, would be aimed at young male car enthusiasts. (Motor Trend) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
For the first time in its history, the band's sales total also includes download and streaming numbers. Last month, Tool perhaps as well known for its music as its stop motion music videos finally put its entire catalog online. "There's a brand new thing we think you're really going to dig," Maynard James Keenan, Tool's lead singer, said when announcing the move. "It's called digital downloads and streaming. Get ready for the future, folks!" Tool's numbers for "Fear Inoculum" included 160,000 downloads of the album as well as 27.6 million song streams a low streaming sum by pop or hip hop standards, but better than recent rock releases by Slipknot (19 million), Vampire Weekend (23 million) and the Raconteurs (four million). Swift's "Lover," which opened at No. 1 last week with 867,000 sales, fell to No. 2 with 178,000, a 79 percent drop. It was the first time a Taylor Swift album failed to hold the No. 1 spot for its first two weeks since "Fearless" in 2008. Also this week, Lana Del Rey's "Norman Rockwell!" opened at No. 3, with the equivalent of 104,000 albums. "We Love You Tecca," a new mixtape by Lil Tecca, the 17 year old New York rapper who has dominated streaming services recently with his song "Ransom," opened at No. 4 with 68,000. Young Thug's "So Much Fun" fell three spots to No. 5. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
MOSCOW Of all the surviving 19th century ballets, "Giselle," with its narrative nexus of love and dance and death, is the one that can most be relied upon not to disappoint. Unlike other ballet classics from that era, it seldom loses narrative tension; its technical and acting challenges keep stimulating individual casts. And yet the Bolshoi Ballet performance I saw on Wednesday was the dullest account in my entire experience of this war horse (nearly 40 years). While the one on Thursday was considerably better, both were drearily routine affairs. Yet this was the Bolshoi, which has danced "Giselle" continuously since 1843 (Thursday's rendition was listed as the company's 1,220th) and which has presented several of the most memorable "Giselle" interpreters of recent decades. What has gone wrong? It seems likely that the tedium of these performances had nothing to do with the Bolshoi's recent troubles (notably the 2013 acid throwing that severely injured Sergei Filin, the company's artistic director); the roots go back to the last century. The Bolshoi a vast institution has two main theaters in Moscow, and two different productions of "Giselle." These April "Giselles" were in the Bolshoi's New Stage, in a building adjacent to the historic one. Though it looks 19th century, the New Stage was first opened in 2002, seats around 970 (with three rings above orchestra level) and proves a useful second house. (In late March, I watched the company in the celebrated Bolshoi Theater, known as the Historic Stage, in three performances of Pierre Lacotte's "Marco Spada.") When the Bolshoi dances "Giselle" next month at the Kennedy Center in Washington, it will be in Yuri Grigorovich's 1986 staging. It will also be led by casts different from those I saw here, which occurred in the framework of Vladimir Vasiliev's 1997 production. Both of these "Giselle" productions, quite unlike each other, diverge drastically from the old Bolshoi tradition of Stanislavskian realism and narrative coherence. Mr. Vasiliev, after a long career onstage as perhaps the greatest of the company's many superb male dancers, that year became general director of the Bolshoi Theater, remaining in the job until 2000. His "Giselle" features costumes by the Paris couturier Hubert de Givenchy, an odd choice for a ballet set in a peasant village. Giselle, customarily dressed in blue for Act I, here wears red and yellow. The necklace that she is given by the aristocrat Bathilde descends below her hips; it's ludicrous to think that it has been worn while hunting. The decors, by Sergey Barkhin, are deliberately artificial in the way they emphasize their own two dimensionality. But these designs do not wreck the ballet. What does so is how Mr. Vasiliev ignores core features of the "Giselle" story. Giselle is loved by the peasant Hilarion; Albrecht is engaged to Bathilde. An important reason that Giselle and Albrecht are drawn to each other in Act I is that they both love dancing. But in this production, Hilarion is a dance enthusiast who keeps leading the Act I village hops. A yet more central plot point is that in Act II the punitive and spectral wilis make any man they find dance to his death. In traditional stagings, Hilarion can scarcely do more than a few steps before he's shattered; here, however, he keenly shows off his bravura and, still jumping and pirouetting, shows little sign of fatigue until finally the wili lieutenants hurl him into the lake. And Albrecht, though he falls to the floor at the conventional points for showing exhaustion, then ends the ballet by demonstrating plenty of energy. Once he has forever lost Giselle, he expresses his emotion by an ardent circuit of heroic jumps around the stage. Dawn may have arrived, and he may have lost his girl forever, but for this hero, the night is still young. In Act I, the staging takes two ideas from Peter Wright's irksome 1985 production for the Royal Ballet. Mr. Vasiliev democratizes the traditional peasant pas de deux so that it becomes a larger ensemble for eight (and gives us the odd impression that this village abounds in virtuoso ballet stylists). And he breaks up the continuity of Giselle's gestural conversation with Bathilde the most touchingly communicative mime dialogue in 19th century ballet by placing Giselle's big solo in the middle of it, where it certainly doesn't belong. The Wednesday performance, led by two principals Anna Antonicheva (Giselle) and Mikhail Lobukhin (Albrecht) was astonishingly unconvincing. The central relationship looked like a blind date between two people who knew at once they were ill suited but decided politely to go through the motions for the two acts. Ms. Antonicheva joined the Bolshoi in 1991. Though she has strikingly arched insteps, she almost never stretched her toes in Act II, so the curves of her points had the look of question marks. She kept her eyes lowered much of the time, and seemed truly eager for her final exit into the wings. Mr. Lobukhin, a St. Petersburg dancer who left that city's Mariinsky Ballet in 2010 to join the Bolshoi, was beautifully made up; he often turned wide eyes beseechingly on both Giselle and the audience. His dancing was immaculate but entirely uninteresting until his final jubilant outburst after her final disappearance. Thursday's couple were Ekaterina Krysanova and Andrey Merkuriev. Ms. Krysanova, a principal, is a Muscovite who joined the Bolshoi in 2003; Mr. Merkuriev, a leading soloist, danced with other Russian companies (including the Mariinsky) before becoming a Bolshoi artist in 2006. In Act I, they hung on each other's eyes just enough to give some point to the story; but in Act II, their performances kept turning into exhibitions, as if "Giselle" were a competition and we the judges. Why is the Bolshoi so uninterested in narrative suspense or dramatic logic in the central classics? Some answers derive from the dark confusions of Soviet aesthetics. Yet probably the main motive is just the intention to satisfy Russian balletomanes, who often applaud individual dancers loudly after a mere diagonal of jumps or turns. As these stale "Giselle" performances were occurring, there was no sign that anyone in the audience found them moving or original. And yet the claqueurs behaved otherwise, especially in the last ovations. The final impression was one of deeply entrenched decadence. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. Just a few years ago, school districts around the country were slashing summer classes as the economic downturn eviscerated their budgets. Now, despite continuing budgetary challenges, districts are re envisioning summer school as something more than a compulsory exercise where students who need to make up lost credits fight to stay awake inside humid classrooms. According to the National Summer Learning Association, a nonprofit group, 25 of the country's largest school districts including Charlotte, N.C.; Cincinnati; Oakland, Calif.; Pittsburgh; and Providence, R.I. have developed summer school programs that move beyond the traditional remedial model. The New York City public schools offer several summer programs that mingle enrichment with academics, including an intensive arts institute and a vocational program combining course work and paid internships. Here in Jacksonville, the academic year ended three weeks ago, but Roshelle Campbell drove into the parking lot of Sallye B. Mathis Elementary School on a recent scorching morning to drop off her son, Gregory Carodine, for a full day of classes. Gregory is one of more than 300 students spending six weeks of his summer vacation at Mathis not because he failed an exam or a class, but because educators in the Duval County Public Schools fret that too many children are at risk of falling behind during the summer. "He has always been so smart," Ms. Campbell, a security guard, said of Gregory, 6, who will start first grade in the fall. "I felt like education is really important, and I really don't want him to lose that during the summer time." Even in districts with severe fiscal woes, like Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and San Francisco, education officials have enlisted the support of philanthropic organizations that believe keeping children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, in school during the summer may help level the playing field for poor and more affluent students. "I know that there are students that attend public schools who are in Europe right now, and there are kids who are participating in a soccer camp," said Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of the Duval County Public Schools, which has quadrupled the number of voluntary summer slots it offers in the past five years. "I think that's healthy. But I think what we should be talking about as a country is, do all of our children have access and opportunities to do that so they are not sitting at home, waking up at 11 in the morning, eating doughnuts and watching cartoons? That's a reality for some of our kids." Research has shown that students regress during the summer, losing an average of about one month of instruction per year, with the so called summer slide disproportionately affecting low income children. The lack of high quality summer programs can also hurt working families whose children have few options during the long months off. Enhanced summer school "should be part of public education until we recognize that the traditional school calendar doesn't fit the way Americans live anymore," said Harris M. Cooper, a professor of education at Duke University who has studied summer learning loss. "Adding 20 days to the school year and having multiple short breaks rather than the one long break actually fits better with the way families live and the way kids learn." In an effort to evaluate what kinds of programs produce better academic results, the Wallace Foundation, a private charitable organization, has committed 50 million to study summer schooling in Jacksonville and several other urban districts, including in Boston, Dallas, Pittsburgh and Rochester, N.Y. Beginning this summer, researchers from the RAND Corporation are following about 5,700 students in those cities who will enter fourth grade this fall. The study will track their standardized test performance for at least two years, as well as behavioral factors like a student's ability to work in teams or persist on tasks. Students were chosen by lottery, and the study will compare the summer school students with those who applied but did not get spots. "We're not assuming there will be massive inflows of new public dollars into education," said Ann Stone, senior research and evaluation officer at the Wallace Foundation. "In a time of constrained resources, getting the rigorous evidence about what works is really important." In Jacksonville, the district began what it calls its Superintendent's Summer Academy in 2009, using federal stimulus dollars. That first summer, the district enrolled about 700 students in five elementary schools. This year, close to 3,000 students from 52 schools are attending summer sessions at 10 campuses around the county. The programs, which are financed with a mix of federal and local dollars as well as the Wallace Foundation grant, run for six weeks for eight hours a day. Partners from nonprofit groups help to run enrichment activities and take the students on field trips to local museums, the bowling alley, the movies and a wildlife reserve. Some of the academic instruction looks similar to more traditional school year classes, with read aloud circles and science quizzes, but others have a more creative bent. On a recent morning at Sallye B. Mathis Elementary, seven fourth graders teamed up at computers in the library to write scripts for short films they would later produce. "This is a lot more fun than school," said Asi'yon Brinson, 9, as she and Danajha Camel, 9, tapped out lines of dialogue on a keyboard for their screenplay, "A Trip to Outer Space." Kerri Alexander, who teaches fourth grade reading and writing during the regular school year, moved between the students, making gentle editing suggestions about pacing and punctuation. Unlike a pedestrian English class exercise that assigns students five paragraph essays, the script writing conveyed academic skills in a more entertaining way. "They don't even realize that they are learning to write and present themselves while they are writing these scripts," said Angela Maxey, the principal of Mathis. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Hugh Southern held some high profile jobs. He was acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts during the culture wars of the 1980s and, briefly, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. But perhaps his most lasting legacy stems from an earlier stint as executive director of the Theater Development Fund, a nonprofit organization in New York that supports the performing arts. While there, Mr. Southern helped establish the TKTS booth in Times Square, where over the years millions of theatergoers have bought discounted same day tickets to some of the most heralded shows both on and off Broadway. Mr. Southern died on July 15 in a hospital in Leesburg, Va. He was 87. His wife, Kathy Dwyer Southern, said the cause was pneumonia and congestive heart failure. The British born Mr. Southern was dragged into the culture wars in 1989 over exhibitions, financed by the National Endowment for the Arts, that some deemed obscene and anti Christian. It was his finesse with Congress over this issue that impressed a Metropolitan Opera search committee, which was looking for a general manager. But before working at those renowned institutions, Mr. Southern was, from 1968 to 1982, the first executive director of the Theater Development Fund, an organization whose goal was to increase audiences for the performing arts in New York. At the time, the Broadway theater was in the doldrums and Times Square was to be avoided. Mr. Southern was among those who believed that some revenue from a discounted seat was better than no revenue from an empty seat. This was initially a hard sell to Broadway producers, who worried that cut rate tickets would drain away patrons who would otherwise pay full price. A team that included Mr. Southern, Mayor John V. Lindsay, the Shubert Organization and Anna Crouse, wife of the playwright Russel Crouse and a member of the fund's board, helped convince them otherwise. Only by paying full price, they pointed out, could patrons be assured of seeing the show they wanted to see, when they wanted to see it, in seats they chose, without having to stand in line in bad weather. At the same time, they argued, discounted tickets could make up for some lost revenue and open up the theater to people who might not otherwise go. The producers gave it a try. The first TKTS booth, which was actually a trailer donated by the city Parks Department, opened in June 1973 in Duffy Square, the northern part of Times Square, between 46th and 47th Streets and between Broadway and Seventh Avenue. It has been upgraded over the years and today is a modern glass affair tucked under a set of ruby red glass steps, where ticket buyers congregate amid the panoply of humanity that swarms through the Crossroads of the World. TKTS now also has two satellite booths in Manhattan, one at Lincoln Center and the other at the South Street Seaport. And business is booming. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, in which a record 14.7 million people saw Broadway shows, the TKTS booth at all three locations sold more than 1.1 million same day discounted tickets, about 8 percent of all tickets sold. Hugh Southern was born on March 20, 1932, in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north of England, to Norman and Phyllis Margaret (Hiller) Southern. His father was a lawyer, his mother a homemaker. So eager was he to seek opportunities in America that he and his first wife, Jane Rosemary (Llewellyn) Southern, moved to New York in 1955 before he graduated. He returned to Cambridge for several months to finish his degree before moving to New York permanently. He and his first wife divorced, and in 1988 he married Kathy (Ayers) Dwyer. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his children from his first marriage, William and Hillary Llewellyn Southern; a son, Jaime, from his second; and three grandchildren. After spending 14 years at the Theater Development Fund, Mr. Southern was deputy chairman of programs for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1982 to 1989. In 1989 he was named acting chairman while President George H. W. Bush sought a permanent chairman. At the time, critics were complaining about taxpayer funding of the arts. Their outrage exploded in 1989 when an N.E.A. grant of 15,000 supported an exhibition of the work of Andres Serrano, which included a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. Many on the religious right, most prominently the North Carolina Republican senator Jesse Helms, railed against the N.E.A. and called for it to be abolished. "I most certainly can understand that the work in question has offended many people," he wrote to Congress. "I personally found it offensive." But, he added, the N.E.A. "is expressly forbidden in its authorizing legislation from interfering with the artistic choices made by its grantees." He added that the agency had provoked very few controversies with the 85,000 grants it had awarded in its nearly 25 year history. Shortly thereafter, President Bush named a permanent head of the agency, John Frohnmayer, and Mr. Southern left. In the end, Congress tightened the rules by which such grants were made, but slightly increased the agency's appropriation. "He stayed cool under fire and had a lovely sense of humor," his wife said in a phone interview. "And the British accent didn't hurt." The Metropolitan Opera noticed Mr. Southern's finesse and hired him as its general manager, even though he had had little experience with opera. That lack of experience "did concern us," Louise Humphrey, president of the Met's board and head of the search committee, told The New York Times in 1989. But, she said, Mr. Southern got along with people and could help with fund raising, and she singled out his "diplomacy" in responding to Senator Helms. But after just eight months on the job, Mr. Southern shocked the opera world by stepping down. He said he had "not found fulfillment." Others said his authority had been limited, given that the previous general manager had remained as a powerful member of the Met board. At the same time, James Levine, the company's longtime conductor and artistic director, retained control over artistic matters, leaving Mr. Southern little room to spread his wings. After he left the Met, he worked with various artistic institutions, including the Virginia Festival of American Film (now the Virginia Film Festival) in Charlottesville, the New York State Council on the Arts and Film Forum in Manhattan. Although he loved living in the United States, he also loved being British, his wife said. But he finally became an American citizen in 2015 moved to do so, she said, because for the first time he felt compelled to vote. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"Are you talking to me?" President Trump asked, his brow creased in disgust. He was staring at Jeff Mason, a Reuters reporter whom Mr. Trump had called on moments earlier during an East Room news conference with the president of Finland. Such events, with the American president joined by a fellow head of state, are usually formal affairs. But Mr. Trump seemed to be in a stormy mood on Wednesday, lashing out on Twitter and in person at his enemies, real and perceived, as House Democrats pursue a formal impeachment inquiry against him. One regular Trump boogeyman the American news media has come in for particular ire of late. Mr. Trump has tweaked his usual "fake news" sobriquet, now preferring the term "corrupt news." Earlier on Wednesday, in the Oval Office, he attacked the credibility of The Washington Post over an article that outlined his interest in constructing an alligator and snake filled moat along the southern border. Mr. Trump appeared unaware that the article had been published by The New York Times. Then came the exchange with Mr. Mason, which was emblematic of the president's escalating attacks on the press. Mr. Mason, a veteran White House correspondent, had posed a straightforward question: What did the president hope to achieve when he asked the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, about the Biden family's dealings in his country? Mr. Trump's discursive reply ranged from his gripes about financial support for Europe to a shout out to Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and included a comparison of Ukraine to "a wall between Russia and Europe a big, wide, beautiful wall." The substance of Mr. Mason's question went unanswered, so the Reuters reporter tried again. "The question, sir," Mr. Mason said, "was what did you want President Zelensky to do about Vice President Biden and his son Hunter?" Polite but persistent follow ups are a White House correspondent's stock in trade. But Mr. Trump expressed deep offense, interrupting Mr. Mason and instructing him to ask the Finnish president a question instead. "Did you hear me? Did you hear me?" Mr. Trump said from his lectern. "Ask him a question. I've given you a long answer. Ask this gentleman a question. Don't be rude." "I don't want to be rude," Mr. Mason replied. "I just wanted you to have a chance to answer the question that I asked you." 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. Again, Mr. Trump deflected this time with a verbal fusillade against journalists. "I've answered everything," the president said. (He hadn't.) "It's a whole hoax, and you know who's playing into the hoax? People like you and the fake news media that we have in this country and, I say in many cases, the corrupt media, because you're corrupt. Much of the media in this country is not just fake, it's corrupt." Mr. Mason seems to have a knack for standing out at Finland related events: Last year, he drew attention for a series of tough questions to Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during their summit in Helsinki. His calm on Wednesday won praise from fellow journalists. "Jeff Mason is a total pro," a Washington Post reporter, Michael Scherer, wrote on Twitter. "That was textbook. Play the tape in journalism schools." Even after he moved on from Mr. Mason, Mr. Trump returned to his acid commentary on the press. "If the press were straight and honest and forthright and tough, we would be a far greater nation," he said in closing. Mr. Trump's slashing criticism of the media has been denounced by news outlets and press advocates, in particular for the ways that autocrats around the world have invoked his remarks to justify cracking down on independent journalists. Almost uniformly before Mr. Trump, American presidents publicly promoted the role of journalism in a democracy, even if they groused over tough coverage. In his recent fury, Mr. Trump has also pressed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable discourse in journalism. On Wednesday, the president fired off a tweet that included a profane word for manure, rendered in all capital letters. Soon after, Richard Davis, CNN's head of standards, circulated a memo at the network noting that its journalists should feel free to use the word "in graphics, banners and headlines." "It is newsworthy that he wrote it and tweeted it out, and we should show and say it because the president sent it out just that way," Mr. Davis wrote, according to a copy of the memo reviewed by The Times. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Michelle Yeoh was an established martial arts star in Asia by the time Western audiences came to know her, first as a Bond girl and then a balletic warrior in the 2000 hit "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." During Yeoh's action hero days, she performed her own stunts like launching herself and the motorcycle she was riding onto a moving train and was at one point, she said, uninsurable. Little wonder, then, that Yeoh's portrayal of the imperious mother, Eleanor Young, in the summer smash "Crazy Rich Asians" was so ferocious. Now she and her co stars are nominated for the top prize, outstanding performance by a cast, at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Jan. 27. (The film is also up for a Golden Globe for best musical or comedy at Sunday's ceremony.) During a recent trip to New York, Yeoh who is 56, and cut an edgy figure wearing head to toe black and a supple motorbike jacket met me at the Four Seasons for black coffee and a conversation about the film, the racism she encountered in her earlier years, and her heartbreak over Myanmar's repressive government under Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Yeoh played in the 2012 biopic "The Lady." Asian communities are so hungry, they never see themselves on the big screen. Honestly when I first came out here, suddenly to be told I'm a minority was a big shock. I came from China how did I suddenly switch to being a minority? We want to be represented, we don't want to be invisible, we don't want to be told that we're not good enough to be on the silver screens. You don't have to treat us special. Just treat us as equals. Was your mom like Eleanor? Oh no. My mom is not Eleanor at all. She's not a hippie, but she's very carefree, very outgoing. Eleanor would be truly my homage to the mothers that I know in Asia. A lot of my friends or my friends' mothers. Ha ha. Yes. And their mothers in law. Or their mothers. Because I drew a lot of inspiration from them. Eleanor was up to the last moment trying to please her mother in law. She wanted her son to look good because she wasn't good enough. That was the one thing we really, really worked on. We needed Eleanor to be vulnerable to make her more human. In the book Eleanor was black and white movies mean. I didn't want her to be a villain. I wanted her to have very high standards, to be very elegant. But the most important thing, what we really worked on, is the love between the mother and son. The mah jongg scene was great. I take it you know how to play. Yes, it's my sort of specialty, I had no problem in that scene at all. It was the showdown, right? And the movie could've ended there. At the end of the day it wasn't a prince Cinderella movie. If you look at all of the women, they all were stronger. They weren't waiting to be rescued. Eleanor was very composed. She didn't talk with her hands. She was very contained. For a character like that, she has to command a lot of attention, with the stillness. That I worked on. "The Lady" is. But "The Lady" is also very emotional on other levels. How are you reacting to news about the atrocities against Rohingya Muslims under Aung San Suu Kyi's leadership? I feel very against of course what is happening to the Rohingyas. We do have a foundation inside Burma. We felt when the country opened up, it's not the top layer of society that needed help. It's the rest. But they adore her. Because they really believe that she's trying to do whatever she can for the lower people. They still feel like that. But the thing is, it's so complicated. I don't believe she has the power. Maybe she'll hate me for saying this. She has no power. The power is still with the military. Are you in touch with her? We are in touch with her. But recently it has been very difficult because of all the things that have been going on. But she knows that I have been a little bit outspoken about the fact that I've been so disappointed. It's tragic. It must be very strange for you, having played her. Do you think she should lose her Nobel? I think we should really take a step back and try and understand. What they are condemning her for is for not speaking out. For not turning around and saying, "You are wrong, you shouldn't have." Yes, maybe she can do that and be thrown out of the country again. I feel that she's trying to keep the door open so that there's still dialogue within her country and she still can have some kind of say. What I fear is without the support of the international people, it's easy for the military to just disregard her. So I think she's in a really, really rough place. Let me ask you about another controversial thing. Why stop now while we're at it? Don't get me into trouble. It's been over a year since news about Harvey Weinstein broke. You have said you never had any trouble with sexual harassment, and if you had, you would have deployed your martial arts skills. What do you think about men hoping to come back? It was an adjustment. Something that we needed to clean up. We needed skeletons to come out from the closet. The most important thing is that the person has changed and understands that all that is bad. With "Crazy Rich Asians," were there reactions to the film that surprised you? Asians are quite reserved, but after the movie they've come up to me on the streets to say "Can I give you a hug? I just want to say thank you." The first opening weekend, I was on my knees, because God forbid, if it didn't work, it could've set us back 20 years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
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