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The pianist Lucas Debargue's recent release is one of the more sprawling helpings on record of Scarlatti's hundreds of sonatas. Over the past couple of weeks, I've filled a swath of the relative quiet at the end of the musical year with a sizable recording: Lucas Debargue's four disc, four hour survey of 52 Scarlatti keyboard sonatas for Sony Classical. It may not have the truly awesome proportions of a Beethoven sonata cycle (10 hours of music in Igor Levit's new rendition, also for Sony). But Mr. Debargue's recent release is one of the more sprawling helpings on record of Scarlatti's hundreds of lucid, elegant sonatas, which generally find themselves on recital programs as shapely amuse bouches rather than the full meal. There were two great Scarlattis of the Baroque era. While Alessandro (1660 1725) made dazzling operas, with a taste for vocal pyrotechnics, his son Domenico (1685 1757) has come down in history for a library of more compact achievements: 555 keyboard sonatas, relative miniatures of generally only a few minutes each. They're in single movements of two parts, but within those deceptively simple bounds, there's immense variety of mood sunshiny and melancholy, dancing and pensive. While the vast majority of these pieces would have originally been played on a harpsichord, Mr. Debargue, 29, recorded this set on a Bosendorfer grand but without any use of the sustaining pedal, resulting in a bright, clean sound with a pearl's soft, coolish smoothness. He makes a cleareyed, straightforward impression in this repertory, with a feeling more modest and self effacing than in his slightly bolder versions of four of the sonatas on his solo debut recording, from 2016. But there's smiling, skipping liveliness in the Sonata in D (K. 214) and assertively rhythmic bumptiousness in the Sonata in G (K. 105). Mr. Debargue brings subtle swooshes of flamenco flair to some of the minor key sonatas, like K. 115, in C Minor. And he's ineffably tender, with the sense of tiptoeing upstairs by candlelight, in the second part of the Sonata in F Minor (K. 462) and brings sublime lilt to the second part of the Sonata in A (K. 343). His touch is not as luscious or seductive as that of Alexandre Tharaud, whose recording of 19 of the sonatas (Erato, 2011) offers more mystery and sensual atmosphere, as in the dark guitarlike strumming of the G Minor sonata (K. 8). (Mr. Tharaud's 2001 Rameau album has a similarly evocative luxuriousness.) And of other recent recordings of the sonatas, David Greilsammer's (Sony, 2014) particularly intrigues. His Scarlatti is as starkly resonant, even lunar, as the John Cage works (like galactic jungles) with which he suggestively juxtaposes them. There are harpsichord versions of Scarlatti: Scott Ross's epochal complete recording from the 1980s and, more recently, a sly set from Jean Rondeau (Erato, 2018) and an ongoing, riotously vivid series by Pierre Hantai, its most recent installment released this year on Mirare. These take their place alongside classic versions of the sonatas on piano by the likes of Vladimir Horowitz, Clara Haskil, Dinu Lipatti and Glenn Gould. If Mr. Debargue's new album is not so ingenious or dazzling as some of these, it is often simply lovely an impressive, satisfying achievement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
This article is part of David Leonhardt's newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday. They keep making the same tactical mistake. The top Democratic candidates, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, continue to imagine that someone other than Sanders is the front runner and then they subject that faux front runner to tough criticism. It happened again at last night's debate, this time with Michael Bloomberg as the target. Sanders came in for some criticism (especially from Pete Buttigieg), but nothing like the attacks on Bloomberg. Bloomberg was criticized for his attitude toward women, his policing policies as mayor of New York, his torrent of campaign spending and more. It was a nastier version of the dynamic at previous debates. Before Bloomberg was the target, Buttigieg had been, in the final debate before the New Hampshire primary. Elizabeth Warren was the main target last fall, and Joe Biden was over the summer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Florida reported 2,610 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, according to a New York Times database, only a slight drop from the state's one day record of 2,783. That was set on Tuesday. Florida was one of the first states to reopen in the midst of the global pandemic. Now, it is one of nearly two dozen states where virus cases are increasing. In the midst of all this, the N.B.A. will attempt to restart its season with a single site competition at Walt Disney World. The season's success, or failure, will affect the league and its players for years to come. It also could influence how several other prominent American sports navigate their own comebacks. The N.B.A. won't be alone in Florida, of course. Major League Soccer will resume its own season at Walt Disney World on July 8, even before the basketball players arrive. Unlike the N.B.A., which plans to complete its regular season and then hold an abbreviated playoffs all on one campus, M.L.S. hopes to return to its own cities in the fall to finish its regular season. Other leagues are attempting a similar feat: The National Women's Soccer League will hold its entire season as a monthlong tournament in Utah beginning June 27, and the W.N.B.A. announced this week that its comeback would begin around the same time as the N.B.A., but at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. The stakes for every league are high: Aside from obvious health concerns for players, coaches and team employees, the leagues all are aware that if they shut down again because of a substantial outbreak, the immediate financial picture might be catastrophic. So it makes sense to ask: Is Florida the best place to stage major sports competitions involving hundreds of participants as the number of cases continues to rise? The contours of all three announced plans involving the state appear to be the same: All league staff, players and other attendees must remain in their respective, so called bubbles and submit to frequent testing. There will be no fans in the stands. "It's not as if the tournament will be open to the public," M.L.S. Commissioner Don Garber said in announcing his league's return. "There won't be any guests in the environment where we are going to be. So it's something that we are confident we'll be able to manage." Broadly, the M.L.S. and N.B.A. have similar health protocols. M.L.S. has posted its guidelines publicly, and they stipulate that all who are traveling to Orlando for the tournament must first test negative twice, 24 hours apart. On Thursday, Atlanta United of M.L.S. announced that an unidentified player on the team had tested positive for Covid 19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The N.B.A.'s protocol, which is not public but was obtained by The New York Times, says that players must register two negative test results once they arrive. The W.N.B.A.'s protocols will be similar with the N.B.A.'s, according to a person familiar with the deliberations who was not authorized to speak publicly about them. A statement from the league on Monday said the guidelines were still being developed. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the N.B.A.'s protocols "quite creative" in an interview with Stadium. The league's plan, which spans 113 pages, is by far the most expansive. It says players should discard decks of cards after using them, avoid doubles Ping Pong and eat outside as often as possible. While some Disney staff members will not reside in the bubble, they also will be wearing face masks and practicing social distancing. "They ran the gamut," Prins said. Beyond basic questions, like what types of tests would be used and how frequently individuals would be tested, she said, the league has "really thorough protocols for travel, thorough protocols for how things will be maintained on the Disney campus from where the players will be, what the contact will be with people and the protocols for cleaning the facilities." The leagues aren't the first to attempt a return, or the first to confront health concerns when they did. In mid May, Germany's top soccer league, the Bundesliga, returned to play in stadiums without fans. Leagues in Spain, Italy and England have followed suit. But when Bundesliga teams returned to training last month, the league's testing of each player yielded more than a dozen positive tests for the coronavirus yet officials went through with the restart anyway. England's Premier League conducted similar rounds of testing as it prepared for its return on Wednesday; in the most recent tests, officials said, the league had one positive test out of 1,541 players and coaches. Germany's top basketball competition also called the Bundesliga returned with a tournament earlier this month. And in the United States, Top Rank, the boxing production company, has begun resuming matches. But no effort in the United States has been as large as what M.L.S. and professional basketball are trying to accomplish in a single location and in a state experiencing a surge of virus cases. An N.B.A. spokesman, Mike Bass, said in a statement that the league was "closely monitoring the data in Florida and Orange County and will continue to work collaboratively with the N.B.P.A, public health officials and medical experts regarding our plans." Prins said that what concerned doctors like her was not protocols or plans but what she referred to as the "human element." Players from both the N.B.A. and M.L.S. are expected not to leave the Walt Disney World area, since doing so would increase exposure of those inside these single site areas in a state that is already a hot spot. In effect, the leagues will have to trust and hope that hundreds of players and staff members will follow the rules. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
FLASH The Making of Weegee the Famous By Christopher Bonanos Illustrated. 379 pp. Henry Holt Company. 32. To write a concise history of the showboating, hard boiled photographer known as Weegee, you'd do well to follow the advice of Christopher Bonanos, the author of "Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous." Keep your eye on the evolution of the photographer's name, for that is the story of Weegee. He was born in the Eastern European town of Zolochev (in what is now Ukraine) in 1899 as Usher Felig. When his family got to Ellis Island, Usher Felig became Arthur Fellig (aged 10). It was under this name that as a teenager he found his beloved profession, when a street photographer made a portrait of him. Fellig was transfixed by the camera, the plate, the processing and the picture of himself. After that, Bonanos writes, "he never wanted to do anything else." At age 14 he quit school and soon began working freelance for various New York newspapers and news agencies (especially Acme) while taking on odd jobs. One involved taking pictures of coffins for a catalog; another involved squeegeeing photographic prints for The New York Times. In fact, some think the name Weegee is a shortening of Squeegee Boy, although the better known story, promoted by Weegee, is that he had a supernatural ability, like a Ouija board, to forecast a decisive photographic moment. Fellig's earliest street photography career was aided by a pony he'd bought and named Hypo, after the chemical solution used to process pictures. Here's how Fellig would get a sale: "We'd find a kid, put him on the pony, take the picture and then try to peddle it to the kid's mother, 5 cents a print." The trick to the game was washing the child's face, and, as Bonanos puts it, getting "a picture that even a poor family couldn't resist." The process, from pony to picture, was jokingly called "kidnapping." 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. Hypo didn't earn his keep, however, and Fellig moved on to news photography. Eventually he managed to break away from the pack of anonymous scrappy news photographers to become Weegee, the man with a knack for getting to murders, fires, suicides and crashes at exactly the right moment. How? His main advantages were living right down the street from Police Headquarters on Centre Street and not having a steady job or family (because he never wanted, as he said, "a hot dinner, a husky kid"), which meant he could stay up all night chasing crime, fires, accidents and women. (Most fires, he noted, would happen at 1 or 2 a.m. "Five o'clock is the jumping time people are out of liquor.") Of course, there was more to it than that. Weegee had a gift for telling a great story, then stretching it into an even better story, often starring himself. At every crucial turn in his career, Bonanos argues, Weegee was working just as hard at his own image as at his craft. Once, in 1936, he photographed a murdered man whose body had been stuffed in a steamer trunk a sight too gruesome for most newspapers. Fellig's shot, made at night with his box camera, flash and shutter release cord, was funny; it showed him peering into the trunk. Here, the subject wasn't the body but the audience's reaction to it. And, in this case, the audience was the photographer. Yes, Weegee wasn't only a showboat but a man with an eye for black humor. Many of Weegee's iconic shots guilty bodies, distraught bodies, naked bodies, curious bodies, sleeping bodies, bodies watching movies, crowds of bodies, mostly from the late 1930s and early 1940s focus on spectators. For instance, in October 1941, a small time gambler was shot at night near a schoolyard. In addition to photographing the body, Weegee shot the crowd of children pushing one another to see the dead man. This photograph is, as Bonanos observes, an amazing catalog of human emotion, from agony to glee. The biggest star is a girl whose face registers insane excitement and curiosity. Weegee titled it "Their First Murder." Did I mention he had a gift for words? In the mid 1940s Weegee added to his repertoire documenting not only low life but bohemian life (at Sammy's Bowery Follies) and high life, too. Many of these pictures involve what Bonanos terms "the New York observer, observed." In 1943, at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera, Weegee photographed two dowagers in white furs and jewels smiling grimly at the camera, while on the darkened sideline a woman in a dirty coat and stole assesses them. Without the frump and without Weegee's brilliant title, "The Critic," this wouldn't be a Weegee. So it's no shock that once he got famous, Weegee was occasionally accused of "stocking the pond," which meant, in this case, bringing his own frump. (By the way, she looks very much like one of Weegee's cross dressing friends.) In 1940 Weegee became one of the founding photographers at PM, a new liberal paper devoted to telling stories with photographs. There the editors weren't interested just in Weegee's photographs but also in his wiseass persona, his bug eyed face, his huge Speed Graphic camera, his car trunk stuffed with equipment, his nocturnal habits, his slovenly ways and his tall tales. He became a champ at producing "tick tocks" first person stories, told with pictures and words. The turning point in Weegee's career and, some say, the tragedy of it was having his work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid 1940s. He began thinking of himself as an artist. He took to calling himself "Weegee the Famous" and stamped his photos thus. He learned how to distort photographs. He got married. He gave up his digs near Police Headquarters. He produced art books, starting with "Naked City." And he was called to Hollywood. Weegee the Famous became a caricature of himself. In the late 1940s and 1950s he often played the part of a hard boiled photographer doing tough guy stuff in Hollywood movies. And by the 1960s, he was acting in schlocky girlie movies in New York and England, portraying his own lust. In a British film called "My Bare Lady," Weegee played the part of a nude popeyed judge in a nudist beauty contest. Weegee did, however, have a last hurrah in the 1960s. Stanley Kubrick knew Weegee (they were both press photographers in the 1940s) and hired him to take stills during the filming of "Dr. Strangelove." In the end, Weegee left two marks on the movie. First, Peter Sellers, who was fascinated with Weegee, borrowed his high pitched voice for the character of Dr. Strangelove. And second, if not for Weegee's stills, we wouldn't know that "'Dr. Strangelove' was meant to end with an enormous slapstick pie fight in the War Room," as Bonanos notes. "Kubrick later decided that it was too glib a finale for a story about nuclear annihilation, and he rewrote and reshot the ending." But Weegee had already caught some unbelievable shots of himself, Kubrick and Sellers covered in custard. Who knew? Because Weegee was inseparable from his work, this biography is mostly a photograph by photograph tour (Bonanos, the city editor at New York magazine, is also the author of "Instant: The Story of Polaroid"); sadly, though, some of the photographs discussed aren't reproduced in the book. What comes through about Weegee is that he was ambitious, original, energetic, inventive, egalitarian (except when it came to women) and witty. Other than that, he's a shell. Weegee's life story is basically "The Picture of Dorian Gray." As Fellig became Weegee, the real man vanished. Eventually Weegee couldn't keep up with his name and wanted to go back: "My real name is Arthur Fellig. ... I created this monster, Weegee, and I can't get rid of it." At age 69 he died of a brain tumor. Tellingly, one of the book's most poignant moments comes after he dies, when the photographer Diane Arbus knocks on the door of Weegee's friend Wilma Wilcox and finds herself ankle deep in 8,000 prints, diving in to save the best. The sight of Arbus wading through these images would have made, I think, a great Weegee picture. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In 2017 the luxury industry will be faced with a precarious balancing act on multiple fronts. Brands will be forced to find an equilibrium between an exponential growth in technology and their traditional emphasis on the human hand; between understanding their customers' behavior and surveilling it; between their global presence and their local consumer groups; and between the poles of a customer spectrum that stretches not just around the world, but over decades, from Generation Z to the silver dollar. If they do not, they risk failure not because of the macro environment of economic and geopolitical uncertainty, though that cannot be ignored, but because of their own inability to change with an ever more rapidly changing world. Risk is no longer defined as "doing something new," but rather "doing what was done before," while the greatest opportunity lies in accessing, and embracing, "the soulful economy." Such were the conclusions of the Global Leaders' Collective, a gathering of chief executives from companies like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Gucci, Carolina Herrera, Oscar de la Renta, Chloe and Jimmy Choo, as well as the Four Seasons and Taj Hotels, among others, hosted by The New York Times this past week. They came together at the Watergate Hotel in Washington for a day of briefings on the world in 2017 from speakers that included Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff; Ray Kurzweil, the futurist; Penny Pritzker, the United States secretary of commerce; Meridith Valiando Rojas, the founder of DigiFest; and Al Gore. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
You don't have to like Twitter or Facebook, or even post to them, but when an emergency strikes, the networking sites can be essential travel tools. As Hurricane Maria neared the Caribbean this week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) used Twitter to disseminate shelter information. And when a powerful earthquake rocked Mexico on Tuesday, the State Department tweeted an emergency message about how to call the United States embassy. After the explosion last week at the Parsons Green subway station in London, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, posted a statement on Facebook, confirming that the "bucket bomb" was being treated as terrorism. Sometimes organizations rely on social media to get out messages when their own websites are slow, as the National Hurricane Center's was when it experienced overwhelming traffic during Hurricane Irma. Other times, ways to help organically bubble up on social media. In 2015, when Islamic State militants attacked Paris, people used the hashtag PorteOuverte ("open door") to offer each other safe shelter. The key to using Twitter and Facebook in travel emergencies is choosing the right people, groups and companies to follow. Misinformation is common. So who to trust? Below, a beginner's guide to finding the most helpful accounts. A word of caution: Sometimes a social media account looks official even though it has nothing to do with the actual organization or individual you're seeking. On Twitter, one way to know you've got the right account is to look for a blue verified badge, which indicates the account is authentic (although getting verified can take quite a while, so not every legitimate account has them). Facebook has gray verification badges. Another way to find what you're looking for is to search for the desired person or organization online, like the Paris Tourist Office, and then connect to that organization's social media account ( ParisJeTaime on Twitter; p.infos on Facebook) from their official website. You can follow your favorite weather outlet, but if you want the latest from the horse's mouth, follow the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service Twitter account, NWS, which provides regular storm updates, including crucial information during this busy hurricane season. You can also follow the service's regional and related accounts, such as the National Weather Service San Juan ( NWSSanJuan) and the National Hurricane Center Atlantic Ops ( NHC Atlantic), though NWS often retweets the most important updates from those accounts. On Sept. 20, the National Weather Service retweeted NWSSanJuan's 7:17 a.m. message that the San Juan metro area would experience 115 mile per hour winds or higher for the next two to three hours. The service's primary National Hurricane Center account is NWSNHC. Some meteorologists use their own accounts to offer perspectives on storms. During Irma, Taylor Trogdon ( TTrogdon), a senior scientist with the Storm Surge Unit at the National Hurricane Center ( NHC Surge), said on Twitter that when he looked at satellite imagery of the hurricane he was "at a complete and utter loss for words." The Centers for Disease Control Prevention ( CDCgov) posts health and safety updates. After Irma, it tweeted a link to its food and water safety guidelines, as well as home cleanup recommendations. FEMA ( fema), provides information about what it's doing before, during and after emergencies, and how you may be able to get help. The State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs posts travel related security messages, be it about planned protests or weather related evacuations, at TravelGov. For instance, this week, in advance of Hurricane Maria, it tweeted that United States citizens should leave Turks and Caicos, if possible. You may also want to follow your local office of emergency management. In New York City, for example, the Emergency Management feed is nycoem. This week it retweeted NotifyNYC, the city's official emergency notification system, about a coastal flood warning in effect for Brooklyn and Queens, and has been posting about the effects of Hurricane Jose on New Yorkers. Local fire and police department feeds are also helpful. After the recent Parsons Green attack in London, the Metropolitan Police Service ( metpoliceuk) tweeted updates on the investigation and threat level changes. In the Florida Keys, the Monroe County Sheriff's Office ( mcsonews) has posted links about hurricane recovery as well as curfew and checkpoint information. Following such accounts may also keep you up to date about areas that may have a heavier police presence or street closures. On a national and international level, there are a variety of accounts to follow, including Amtrak and RailEurope, bus lines (like GreyhoundBus and MegaBus), cruise lines, such as Royal Caribbean ( RoyalCaribbean) and Norwegian Cruise Line ( CruiseNorwegian), car services, such as Uber and Lyft, and, of course, airports and airlines. Even if you fly only one airline, it can be useful to follow a few. For instance, on Monday United tweeted that it was canceling some flights and offering travel waivers to and from San Juan, P.R. Even if you don't fly United, their tweets might alert you to the possibility that your own carrier might take similar actions. When planning a visit to a city, consider following the airports, train stations, bus lines, tourism boards and embassies there. Also consider following your favorite hotels. They can sometimes be sources of emergency information. More often it's a way to stay in the loop about minor events, like renovations or a local marathon or celebration. Booking sites like Expedia and Priceline also post relevant information in emergencies, and if you booked any part of your travel with them, you'll want to stay abreast of changes. The Transportation Security Administration's main Twitter account is TSA, though you won't find much up to the minute travel information. (For that, see the accounts in the categories below.) The Administration's more useful Twitter account is AskTSA, which answers questions, often about what can be packed in a carry on bag. You may also want to follow your local transportation organizations. For example, in New York City, useful accounts include the M.T.A. subway service ( NYCTSubway), the Taxi and Limousine Commission ( nyctaxi) and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey ( PANYNJ). In some cities, like London, there's a general Twitter account for Transport for London ( TfL), as well as for specific Tube lines, including the Central Line ( centralline) and Piccadilly Line ( piccadillyline). Use the Twitter Alerts feature for getting information during emergencies. You choose which individual accounts you want to receive alerts from, and if one of those accounts marks a tweet as an alert, you receive a notification on your mobile phone. (Alerts on your Twitter timeline appear with an orange bell.) In emergencies, Facebook activates its Safety Check tool, which prompts users to let their friends and family know they're safe, and to find or provide help to others. This list is merely a starter guide. There are many more useful places to turn, including travel agencies and bloggers. And of course you can follow news organizations (the Miami Herald and Orlando Sentinel were especially helpful during Irma). Once you're following a few reliable sources, you'll find that in addition to posting their own information, they also post information from sources they trust. For instance, if you follow London Ambulance ( Ldn Ambulance), you're likely to also see tweets originally posted by the London Fire Brigade ( LondonFire) and Terrorism Police UK ( TerrorismPolice). Have your own favorite sources? Tweet me stephronyt. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. The coronavirus continued to dominate the news on Wednesday, and late night was no different: The hosts announced that they would be audience free starting next week, with Samantha Bee getting a head start on this week's "Full Frontal." Jimmy Kimmel recorded his show before the N.B.A. announced it would postpone upcoming games, remarking on the Golden State Warriors' decision to play without a crowd, as the N.C.A.A. said it would for March Madness. "Which is unusual," Kimmel said, "but basketball games in the pros have been played without fans before. The Clippers did it for many years." "These are the five stages of coronavirus. First, you have denial: 'I'm not going to get the coronavirus. Only old people, Chinese people, and people on cruise ships get that.' Second, anger: 'Why isn't there any toilet paper at Target? Is everybody nuts?' Then bargaining: 'All right, there's no Purell. Maybe I'll make my own hand sanitizer with Jergens and vodka.' But next comes depression: 'I can't believe they canceled Coachella. I'm not gonna get to see Carly Rae Jepsen for a year now!' And finally, acceptance, which is 'Hey, you know what? If I die, maybe I'll get to meet Prince.'" JIMMY KIMMEL "Everyone is still talking about the coronavirus and now the airline industry is also in trouble. But I read that some young people are taking advantage of cheap flights and booking trips. In one article, a girl actually said, 'If I die, I die.' Meanwhile, that's also the slogan for Spirit Airlines." JIMMY FALLON "A few months ago was great. It was the holidays, I was drunk on eggnog, I was watching 'Cheer.' I was falling in love with Baby Yoda! I was looking I was looking forward. I was looking forward to impeaching the president. Remember that feeling? We're going to get Trump! Bolton's going to testify, and the Senate's going to do the right thing! It's only March, and 2020 has done the impossible: made me nostalgic for 2019." STEPHEN COLBERT "First, the World Health Organization has officially just declared coronavirus a global pandemic. Which yes, is scary for us humans, but from corona's perspective, it's pretty cool, yeah? Because for a virus this is like going platinum, you know? It is a big day. Started from the Wuhan, now we're here." TREVOR NOAH "Now in some surfaces like cardboard, apparently, corona can only survive for a day if it is cardboard, but on harder surfaces like glass it can survive for much longer. So, like your cellphone, that could be a problem. Yeah, my advice: Clear your browsing history." TREVOR NOAH "Last night was a pivotal moment for Democrats. Who would they choose to return America to stability, steadiness, and calm? The overwhelming answer: the old man who threatened to slap an autoworker." STEPHEN COLBERT "Wow, I can't believe Joe Biden got into a fight with that factory worker, especially considering he was surrounded by all of his boys. I mean, that is risky. At the same time, Biden knows those guys can't touch him not because of Secret Service but because of coronavirus." TREVOR NOAH "Whoa, damn, Joe. Joe! That escalated very quickly. Imitating Joe Biden 'Listen, Jack, you want to see some guns? How about these guns right here? Come on, let's go.'" SETH MEYERS "Wow, it is starting to look like Biden is going to wander away with this thing." SETH MEYERS "Biden is the clear front runner now. You remember when that guy Nik Wallenda walked on a tightrope across that active volcano? That's what it's going to feel like watching Joe Biden open his mouth every day between now and November." JIMMY KIMMEL "Biden did well with voters over 45, and Bernie did well with voters under 45. Basically, if you're a Democrat who's had a colonoscopy, Joe is your guy." JIMMY KIMMEL "The virus is not an excuse to be racist," Bee said on Wednesday's "Full Frontal" segment about anti Chinese sentiments cropping up in conjunction with the coronavirus. "I know racism is America's weighted blanket. When everything is stressful, nothing makes us feel more secure than treating other people like trash." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Hesperios, founded in 2016 by Autumn Hruby, is something other than a concept shop, maybe just a concept, possibly a con. It's not that it doesn't feel legitimate the space is exquisite, its wares are enchanting but that its multitudinous premise sounds too good to be true. Hesperios is a fashion label that puts out seasonal knitwear collections for men and women (made in the United States and Peru), as well as an annual two volume art and literary journal, printed in Sweden. The new Hesperios brick and mortar store is part retail space that sells said knits and literary journal along with gas oil lamps ( 55), tiny asymmetrical ceramics, resin dipped oyster shells ( 35), a leather dog collar ( 35) and vintage poetry books ("Sonnets to Orpheus" by Rainer Maria Rilke, "Words for the Wind" by Theodore Roethke, "The Dream of a Common Language" by Adrienne Rich); and part cafe with a tea list by House of Waris and bread from Meyers Bageri, the bakery in Grand Central Terminal. Fresh loaves are for sale, in case you want to treat the shop like your local boulangerie. There are jams and cordials and cheese boards so carefully carved that they look like smelly Noguchi miniatures. Soon there will be a backyard garden (to be cultivated by the landscape designer Miranda Brooks) that will, come summer, house a writer's shed for rent and a pizza oven. Since the shop doesn't have its food license yet, a saleswoman told me to "Come by before 6, and we will treat you." Free cheese! See what I mean? How can it be? It was after 6 when I walked in with two friends, but if sunlight were for sale, I think I'd shop for it in Hesperios: With so many tiny items on the shelf lined walls, there must be some gorgeous hours with stretched little shadows. There are Hesperios pens, and a set of colorful notebooks with legends like Hesperios Musings and Hesperios Reflections. When you learn that the name Hesperios means "evening star" in Greek, the notebooks seem less like a branding exercise and more like taking a moment to stop and ponder starlight. Broad tables with marble tops invite you to sit, and it almost feels as if Ms. Hruby would rather her customers write than shop. Perhaps the logic is that the longer you're there, the more a 450 Greek wine vessel or an 85 porcelain splatter paint beaker with grooves like a peach pit seems necessary. It's like Vegas for sober, aesthetically obsessed minimalists, lured and kept until they make choices outside their means. "Once you get in there, you never get out," a saleswoman said when my friend sat down in a spare metal framed rocking chair in the corner next to a marble block lamp made to order by the architect Andrew Trotter. On Mr. Trotter's website, it says the marble is hand carved by a stone worker named Jean Briac. My friend asked, "Is that a sweater or a blanket?" when we saw one of many meticulously arranged piles of beautiful knits (it was a sweater, for 325), the colors of which look sourced from a sun faded page of paint samples propped in a window of an old hardware store in the Swedish countryside. The only clothes in the shop besides the knitwear are ornate dresses by Mark Fast, made to order from London. One dress looks like chandelier prisms hooked on a silk fishing net ( 3,000). Before it was Hesperios, the Cleveland Street space was a vape shop. I like imagining disappointed vapers peering inside, shaking their heads and exhaling orange scented nicotine smoke against the windowpanes before skulking away. Inspired by a tiny leaf stalk placed in a glass jar on the shelf (not for sale), I decided to try on two green knit sets, one with a ribbed turtleneck ( 283), the other a crew neck with a more textural weave ( 283), each with a pencil skirt. A lot of Ms. Hruby's designs are monochrome full knit looks. There are even sets of high waist underwear ( 122) and bralettes that remind me a little of Yeezy Season 1 knit separates. What is it about an allover sweater that feels so luxurious? Hesperios contains all the trappings of perfect taste: The store is a banquet set to let you know about a life well read, well traveled, well indulged. In my green set (ribbed pencil skirt, 331), which I was impressed to see had delicate side pockets in the skirt, I looked like I, too, could be a leaf in a glass on someone's windowsill. What would I see from there? Would the person who placed me actually be reading a print magazine on their bed, consulting "The Physiology of Taste" with a piece of toast on a ceramic plate beside them, or composing a handwritten note at their desk? I just don't believe it. But I'll take a cheese plate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
If We Ever Get to Mars, the Beer Might Not Be Bad Here's an interplanetary botany discovery that took college students and not NASA scientists to find: Hops the flowers used to add a pleasant bitterness to beer grow well in Martian soil. "I don't know if it's a practical plant, but it's doing fairly well," said Edward F. Guinan, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Villanova University. Last semester, 25 students took Dr. Guinan's class on astrobiology, about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. For the laboratory part of the course, the students became farmers, experimenting to see which crops might grow in Martian soil and feed future travelers there. Dr. Guinan presented the findings on Friday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. But let's back up: soil from Mars? Of course, no one has yet brought back anything from the red planet, but spacecraft like NASA's Phoenix Mars lander have analyzed Martian soil in great detail. Based on those measurements, scientists have come up with a reasonably good reproduction on Earth crushed basalt from an ancient volcano in the Mojave Desert. It's available for purchase, and Dr. Guinan bought 100 pounds. Martian soil is very dense and dries out quickly perhaps better for making bricks than growing plants, which have trouble pushing their roots through. That includes potatoes, the savior food for the fictional Mark Watney in "The Martian," the book by Andy Weir and later a movie starring Matt Damon about a NASA astronaut stranded on Mars. For the experiments, the students had a small patch of a greenhouse, with a mesh screen reducing the sunlight to mimic Mars' greater distance from the sun. What did "fabulous" in pure Martian soil was mesclun, a mix of small salad greens, even without fertilizer, Dr. Guinan said. When vermiculite, a mineral often mixed in with heavy and sticky Earth soils, was added to the Martian stuff, almost all of the plants thrived. Because astronauts would likely not be hauling vermiculite from Earth but might have cardboard boxes, Dr. Guinan also tried mixing cutup cardboard into the Martian soil. That worked too. One group of students hypothesized that coffee grinds could similarly be used as a filler to loosen up the soil. They figured the astronauts would be drinking coffee anyway, and coffee would also be a natural fertilizer. "Also, it may help acidify Martian soil," said Elizabeth Johnson, a Villanova senior who took the class. Mars soil is alkaline, with a pH of 8 to 9, she said, compared to 6 to 7 on Earth. Dr. Guinan is not the first to try growing plants in Martian soil. Five years ago, Wieger Wamelink, a scientist at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands had the same idea, a way to combine his work ecology research with his interest in science fiction. The first round of experiments grew 14 types of plants including rye, tomatoes and carrots in Martian soil, simulated lunar soil and Earth soil. Almost all of the plants germinated, Dr. Wamelink and his colleagues reported. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The adopted siblings of "The Umbrella Academy," which debuts Friday on Netflix, are not your typical superheroes. They have offbeat superpowers the Rumor can cause things to happen just by saying them aloud and they were raised by an emotionally distant father, an android mother and a kind, talking chimpanzee. Readers of the comic book, written by Gerard Way and drawn by Gabriel Ba, may feel they have a head start, but this is only somewhat true. The Netflix series, the cast of which includes Tom Hopper, Ellen Page and Robert Sheehan as members of the gifted but quarrelsome clan, will include moments not yet covered in the comic, which began in 2007. (It won an Eisner award in 2008 for best finite series.) "I wrote this 20 page document that explains kind of everybody and how their powers work and where the story's heading," said Way, who, like Ba, is an executive producer on the show. (They've weighed in on everything from the story to costumes to set design, Way said.) Despite the success of the Umbrella Academy comic, Way is perhaps most popularly known as the former singer of the theatrical rock band My Chemical Romance he recorded a cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter" for the show. In a recent telephone interview, Way discussed both versions of "The Umbrella Academy," the comic books that have influenced him and, naturally, Liza Minnelli. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. How did the Umbrella Academy comic originally come about? My initial inspiration was a few different things. I had been such a fan of the Marvel Silver Age, and I grew up reading Chris Claremont's X Men. Marvel characters had a lot of issues and problems, but I wanted to give them deeper, more complex problems. I was also reading Hellboy by Mike Mignola, and to me that was a postmodern horror comic. There was nothing like that for superheroes. I usually try to make things that I wish existed that I would want to listen to or read. When did you sense that it was connecting with readers? It connected really early. The first issue came out, and I think a lot of people expected it to be pretty bad. I mean, I came from a rock band. Not a lot of people knew my history of having written a comic at 15, going to the School of Visual Arts for cartooning and illustration, studying comics for many years, then interning at DC Comics. A lot of people just expected some sort of vanity project. I don't fault them for that. Is it weird to have someone else steering the Umbrella Academy now, at least on TV? I never felt like I lost control so much as I relinquished a bit of control. At the beginning, I was asked how closely I wanted to work with a showrunner, if I wanted to be on set every day. I was really focused on the book and creating the mythology that the show would pull from. I also started an imprint with DC Comics, so I had quite a lot of things going on. When I go in on something, I go all in. I would have been sleeping on the set. I didn't think it was the right time for me to dive into TV that way. That may change in the future. But at that stage I kind of relinquished control to Steve Blackman the showrunner and all the people making the show. I never felt like we were not heard. The TV family is much more diverse than in the comic. Did you have an influence on that? I did, and the greatest change is that the casting was so much more inclusive and diverse than the source material. I thought that was a massive improvement. It was something we all talked about really early on. We have this really great opportunity because these kids are adopted from all over the world, and they could really be from anywhere. Why didn't you take that approach in the comic? I wasn't a very good listener. I spent a lot of years just shouting and being on stage and being in control of things. I didn't understand other people's stories, and what I learned to do over the years is kind of shut my mouth and listen to people of different ethnicities and take a look at their struggles. Diversity is something we're addressing in the Umbrella Academy comic. It's something Gabriel and I actively work on. How involved were you with the music choices in the show? I didn't have a lot of say in the soundtrack. Steve has a very distinct vision of the songs he wants in the show. He actually writes the songs in the script. So I didn't get to weigh in much on music, though I am a fan of Queen, obviously, and I really like that Tiffany song. I tend to skew toward things that are maybe a little more underground or things that maybe people haven't heard before. You've shifted from music and performing to writing comics to giving notes on a TV show. Do the different skills inform one another? I've always considered myself a visual thinker. I've always seen Umbrella Academy as a comic, but in my head I saw it play out like a film. But all these jobs feed into each other, and I learn from all of them. It's interesting to, let's say, give notes on screenplays and TV and apply that to the notes you give yourself on the comic, and vice versa. What comic creators have influenced you? Grant Morrison was in one of your videos. He was gracious enough to play the villain in the story of the last My Chemical Romance record, "The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys." I'm dear friends with Grant. I consider him to be not only a friend but a mentor. The biggest thing I borrow from what he does is, when you read a Grant Morrison comic, per page you get more ideas than sometimes in a whole issue or graphic novel. One of the best pieces of advice he ever gave me is "Don't save up your ideas, just use them all because you'll just come up with more." I've kind of always stuck with that. And his wild imagination has inspired me to kind of try and tap into my own imagination. What's the biggest obstacle for your various creative pursuits? It's the time to get there. That's the biggest obstacle. My family is also important to me, and one of the really big positives of getting to write comics is I've been able to spend a lot of time with them and watch Bandit his daughter grow and be there for her as a father. That made me shy away from touring. But I'm really focused on comics because I'm home. Hopefully, I'll have the time to finish the series out properly. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Jake Socha is an expert on flying snakes who uses detailed scientific terminology such as "this big, wiggly, ribbon thing" to describe his soaring quarry. It is an apt description, but don't be fooled. When a snake launches off a tree in its Southeast Asian habitat and lands on another tree dozens of feet away, there is nothing random about those wiggles. A professor of biomedical engineering and mechanics at Virginia Tech, Dr. Socha and his colleagues published a study on Monday in Nature Physics supporting the hypothesis that the midair undulations (the wiggles) are actually carefully coordinated and highly functional processes that enhance the dynamic stability of the snake in flight. "I wouldn't say all the mysteries are solved," Dr. Socha said, "but we have a big piece of the story filled in." Flying is a bit of a misnomer for what the snakes do. The slithering airborne creatures tend to fall strategically or glide, meaning they do not gain altitude like a bird or an insect. Their flights generally last only a couple of seconds, at a speed of around 25 miles per hour, and they land without injury. To the untrained eye, it might look as if the snake just fell out of a tree by accident, wiggling frantically as it plummets to earth. Not so. Once it goes airborne after inching out on a tree limb and pushing off the branch the snake moves its ribs and muscles to extend the width of its underside, transforming its body into a structure that redirects airflow like a parachute or a wing. A cross section of the snake's body midair would show that its normal circular shape becomes triangular and the whole body undulates as it glides toward its target. Once in Singapore, Dr. Socha and a group of researchers witnessed a snake jump from 30 feet up and travel over 60 feet in the air on a windless day. "It was like an athlete hitting its stride," he said. "It was like, 'I know what I'm doing, I'm off and you'll never see me again.'" The researchers, including Isaac Yeaton, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering, took about a half dozen flying snakes to a four story, black box cube on the Virginia Tech campus. The cube, which can be used for student projects and experiments in arts, science and engineering, is equipped with a high speed, motion capture camera system. The researchers attached infrared reflective tape to the snakes, and fashioned a high tower with a launching branch and a lower tower disguised as a tree for a landing spot. Then they let the snakes fly. Mr. Yeaton, who was once surprised when one of the snakes landed in his arms as he stood on the floor, said they observed over 150 flights of Chrysopelea paradisi one of five kinds of flying snakes during a week in 2015. "It's hard to believe a snake can do this," Mr. Yeaton said. "It's kind of scary. But there's a lot of intricate things that are going on." The researchers collected the data and then created three dimensional computer models to show every angle of the snake in flight. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
ONE DAY AT A TIME 9:30 p.m. on Pop TV. Fans of this sitcom a remake of Norman Lear's original were up in arms last year when Netflix canceled the show after three seasons. Now, they can rejoice: The series has found a new home on Pop TV and this premiere will also air on TV Land and Logo meaning the Cuban American Alvarez family will be around to cheer up viewers suffering from the coronavirus blues. The fourth season opens with a census taker (Ray Romano) dropping by the family's Los Angeles home. The trailer suggests there will be plenty of talk about sex and relationships: When the son, Alex (Marcel Ruiz), says the family needs boundaries, the mother, Penelope (Justina Machado), answers with: "Boundaries are for white people. Next thing you know, we're eating Lunchables in separate rooms and grandmama lives in a home!" DARK SIDE OF THE RING 9 p.m. on Vice. This troubling documentary series revisits the heyday of professional wrestling, focusing on the grim realities behind the made for TV entertainment. This Season 2 premiere, told in two parts, looks at the case of Chris Benoit, the Canadian wrestler who killed his wife and son before committing suicide in 2007. Figures from World Wrestling Entertainment attempt to make sense of the tragedy. (The first half of the episode is on YouTube.) Other figures featured in upcoming episodes include Owen Hart, who suffered a fatal fall in 1999 before a World Wrestling Federation match, and New Jack, a wrestler who says he stabbed an opponent nine times in the ring. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
THE BUYERS Sara Grace and Dan Cast with their daughter, Mia, at home in East Flatbush. Five years ago, when Sara Grace Rimensnyder met Dan Cast, she was living in a small one bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of a walk up building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was living in Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn, in a shared two bedroom. He traveled often for work and liked having a roommate. "I didn't have to worry about things back home," he said, such as returning to find a burst pipe. His apartment was also on the fifth floor. "Your legs would shake, like if you had to bring groceries up," Mr. Cast said. In time, he moved into her apartment and the couple were married. He is now 44 and the assistant director on the television show "Impractical Jokers" on truTV. Ms. Cast, 38, is an editor and ghostwriter, mostly of business books. Wanting a monthly rent lower than the 2,150 they were paying, they relocated to Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn. Their new rent, for a two bedroom, was 1,500 a month. They bought a Subaru Outback, primarily for camping. To avoid dealing with alternate side parking regulations, they rented a garage from a neighbor for 250 a month. Once their daughter, Mia, arrived a year and a half ago, buying a home seemed like a good idea. "If I knew how much work it was, I honestly don't know if I would do it again," Ms. Cast said. Last summer, they checked out a few two bedroom co ops. Open houses were mobbed; bidding wars ensued. They felt they couldn't compete. Besides, for a co op, they would need a 20 percent down payment. Financially, "it would put a lot of stress on us, when what we were looking to do was de stress," Ms. Cast said. For help with the hunt, they contacted Reginald Salomon, the broker owner of Lions Share Realty, who had been the listing agent for their two bedroom rental. "I encouraged them to look for a house," Mr. Salomon said, in part because they could purchase a house with 10 percent down, rather than 20 percent. He also suggested they buy a multifamily house, with a unit for rental income. "You can always use a two family as a one family, but it's hard to do it the other way around," he said. For a two or three family house, their budget was up to 750,000; for a single family, it was closer to 600,000. They didn't find many options, but they did find some. A brick barrel front two family rowhouse in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in need of renovation, was listed at 599,000. Their offer of 580,000 was accepted. Then, to everyone's bewilderment, they heard nothing from the sellers. "It was like they dropped off the face of the earth," Ms. Cast said. "That was our first lesson in managing your emotional expectations," Mr. Cast said. "You can really get your hopes up. I had to have Sara promise 'no picking out curtains until we get that signed contract back.' " Another handsome two family on Martense Street in Flatbush, with an asking price of 580,000, also needed renovating. "Maybe some corners were crumbling, but the bones of it were awesome and it had a lot of nice details," Ms. Cast said. "We didn't have a chance." The place sold quickly for the asking price. A short way from their rental, a single family house on Miami Court, one of several short streets in a 1920s development called Coral Gardens, was listed for 499,000. The house was adorable and so small that "we would immediately be bursting at the seams," Ms. Cast said. It sold for 525,000. They declined to pursue a 399,000 two family house in Flatbush on Albemarle Road with a fake stone facade and a "warren of lived in, smoky rooms," Ms. Cast said. At one point, the couple wondered whether they should just stay put. Finding a house to buy seemed too hard. And Ms. Cast could not help but notice that "all of a sudden there were three options for me to get an iced coffee within a three block radius," she said. "Our familiar neighborhood that we loved was now kind of popping." She feared they had been priced out. But Mr. Salomon called one day with a single family house for them to see in East Flatbush. The neighborhood was new to them, but "it felt like a stable, safe, unnoticed bit" of Brooklyn, Ms. Cast said. The two story rowhouse, listed at 459,000, was across from Holy Cross Cemetery. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
A new view of the sun With Solar Orbiter, scientists will for the first time get a good view of the top and bottom of the sun. Until now, almost all of the solar watching spacecraft have orbited in the ecliptic, or the same plane that the planets travel around the sun. That change of view could help solve mysteries about how the sun spews high velocity charged particles that fly outward through the solar system and buffet the planets, including Earth. The magnetic fields that accelerate those particles flow into and out of the sun's poles. The data from Solar Orbiter could help explain the sunspot cycle Why does the cycle last 11 years? Why are some quiet and others roar violently? and help models to predict solar storms that could disrupt Earth's power grids and satellites in orbit. Ulysses, an earlier collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency launched in 1990, also passed over the sun's poles, but at much farther distances, and it did not carry a camera. The launch trajectory will take Solar Orbiter away from Earth into an orbit around the sun. A flyby of Venus on the day after Christmas will sap some of its energy and let it spiral closer toward the sun. Additional flybys one of Earth, two more of Venus will further adjust the orbit, which will still be in the ecliptic, the plane of the orbits. The spacecraft's 10 scientific instruments are a mix. Some measure what is happening directly around the spacecraft, like the magnetic fields and particles of the solar wind. Others take pictures of what is occurring on the sun. Remember the caution that you should not look directly at the sun? Solar Orbiter's cameras have to do just that, and at a distance where the sunlight is 13 times as intense. Three peepholes in the heat shield will open for 10 days at a time to allow the instruments to collect data. The assorted cameras also have heat resistant windows (think of them as scientific sunglasses) as protection. The cameras will look at a range of wavelengths of light, including ultraviolet and X rays. Some of the cameras break the light into separate wavelengths to identify specific molecules. The coronagraph includes a disk to block out most of the light to look at what is going on in the sun's outer atmosphere. Solar scientists do not have reliable ways to predict such an eruption. The largest one known to hit Earth was the Carrington event in 1859, named after one of the people who observed an intensely bright spot on the sun where the eruption occurred. The surge caused some telegraph wires to catch fire. When Nicola J. Fox, director of NASA's heliophysics division, talks about solar science to children at schools she introduces the Carrington event and how it knocked out the telegraph system in the U.S. for four days. "The kids just kind of look at me like, 'So what?'," she said. "And then I say, 'Imagine you didn't have your iPad for four days.' Panic ensues in the classroom." A similar event today could potentially cause not only continentwide blackouts, but also destroy giant transformers on the electric grid damage that might take months or years to repair. A smaller solar storm in March 1989 knocked out power in Quebec for nine hours. Just a few years ago, Earth was lucky. On July 23, 2012, NASA's Stereo A spacecraft was hit by a gigantic coronal mass ejection. Analysis showed that this outburst was bigger than the Carrington eruption. If Earth had been where Stereo A was the spacecraft travels in the same orbit as Earth, but ahead of the planet that would have been a very interesting day. In 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, which is making closer and closer flybys of the sun as it reaches the fastest speeds ever achieved by a human built spacecraft. That probe is flying into the sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona, and eventually coming within four million miles of its surface. By comparison, Earth is 93 million miles from the sun. Mercury, the closest planet, is 29 million miles from the sun. From Aug. 2018: NASA's Parker Solar Probe is flying through the punishing heat of the sun's outer atmosphere. "Set the controls for the heart of the sun." In the summer of 2018, the Parker Solar Probe will lift off from Earth. It will spend the next seven years spiraling inward to the center of the solar system. The Parker probe will be the first spacecraft to touch our star. Or any star. It will brush through the halo of hot gases that form the sun's outer atmosphere: the corona. The surface of the sun looks placid to our eyes, but it is pierced and roiled by strong magnetic fields. The fields trap gas blowing off the Sun and lift it into glowing arcs and streamers. Scientists don't understand how the corona works, or why it's hundreds of times hotter than the surface of the sun. The Parker probe will pass closer to the Sun than any mission before it. To get that close, the spacecraft will make seven flybys of Venus over seven years, gradually tightening its elliptical orbit and shifting it closer and closer to the sun. A high tech heat shield will protect the probe from the punishing radiation and heat of the corona. Within the shield's shadow, the spacecraft instruments will operate at a comfortable room temperature. As the probe passes close to the sun, it will briefly become the fastest machine ever built by humans, zipping along at a brisk 430,000 miles per hour. The Parker probe is the first NASA spacecraft to be named after a living person. Eugene Parker is an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. In 1958, he suggested that the sun radiates a constant and intense stream of charged particles. He called it the solar wind. This wind pushes out comet tails and makes the long streamers seen in solar eclipses. With the Parker Solar Probe, scientists hope to learn more about the sun's turbulent corona. How it accelerates particles, and how it flings huge clouds of fiery gas outward across space. Huge waves of magnetized gas are called coronal mass ejections. If Earth gets in the way of one of these storms, it could be bad news. Our planet is protected by its own magnetic field, but a direct hit from one of these galloping clouds of particles and radiation could disrupt satellites and force astronauts in the space station to take shelter. In 1859, a powerful storm called the Carrington Event produced auroras as far south as Cuba. A solar storm of that size today could cripple satellites and power grids around the world. If successful, the Parker probe's mission to touch the sun may explain how solar storms form. Scientists hope it might teach us how to predict coronal outbursts more accurately and learn how to endure them. We've always depended on the kindness of a star, here on a planet riding the gentle fringe of barely calculable forces. Living with a star is not easy. But we're learning. From Aug. 2018: NASA's Parker Solar Probe is flying through the punishing heat of the sun's outer atmosphere. Solar Orbiter will be passing farther from the sun. At the closest point along its elliptical orbit, it will be just three million miles inside of the orbit of Mercury, and experience much less extreme temperatures. Instead of millions of degrees, temperatures at Solar Orbiter will reach several hundred degrees. That allows Solar Orbiter to carry a wider range of instruments. Coordinated observations between Parker and Solar Orbiter could identify phenomena on the surface with conditions in the corona. "It's really a perfect dream, a marriage in heaven," said Guenther Hasinger, director of science at European Space Agency during a news conference on Friday. In addition to Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe, nine other missions are currently keeping an eye on the sun and the solar wind. Each has been designed to add unique data to our understanding of what our star is doing. Many big space missions are international collaborations. For Solar Orbiter, the European Space Agency was in charge of developing the spacecraft and its instruments. NASA paid for the Atlas 5 rocket for the trip to space. The James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, is the opposite. NASA is building the telescope, and the Europeans are providing the launch vehicle, an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana. The Rosalind Franklin rover that is to launch to Mars this summer was originally another NASA European Space Agency collaboration but NASA backed out in 2012, because of cuts in the NASA budget. The Europeans turned to Russia to provide the rocket and the system to land the rover on the surface. Solar Orbiter was not the only spacecraft scheduled to be launched from the East Coast on Sunday. A crewless Antares cargo ship with supplies, equipment and experiments destined for International Space Station was to lift off at 5:39 p.m. Eastern time from the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia. However, after a short postponement, Sunday's launch was called off. Northrop Grumman, which manages the Antares and Cygnus flights, described a problem with a sensor on the ground. It said it will not be able to attempt a launch again until Thursday because of weather concerns as well as time needed to address the problem that caused the scrubbed launch. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
WHAT IS IT? A Korean muscle sedan. Possibly the first ever Korean muscle sedan. HOW MUCH? 47,350 base; 47,385 as tested with one option, an iPod cable ( 35). WHAT'S UNDER THE HOOD? A 5 liter direct injected V 8 (429 horsepower, 376 pound feet of torque); 8 speed automatic transmission. IS IT THIRSTY? The E.P.A. rating is 16 m.p.g. in town, 25 highway. THE Hyundai Genesis 5.0 R Spec looks good on paper. With 429 horsepower, the R Spec's Tau V 8 outguns even the 420 horsepower twin turbocharged V 8 in the 2013 Audi S6. At 47,385, the R Spec costs less than a V 6 powered Infiniti M37. And with four logos on the trunk, the Hyundai Genesis 5.0 R Spec has 100 percent more trunk badges than a Cadillac CTS. This thing beats Pep Boys at their own game. There are a few subtle changes to augment the increased horsepower. The R Spec wheels, at 19 inches, are one inch larger than the wheels on the Genesis 4.6 model. The rear antiroll bar is one millimeter thicker. The R Spec suspension is treated to a "sport tuned calibration," according to Hyundai, but it still favors comfort over cornering velocity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
AUGUSTA, Ga. For 10 years, Dustin Johnson's chase for career defining, major championship titles was tinged with ruthless angst, misfortune and calamitous setbacks. He grounded a club in an unobserved bunker at the 2010 P.G.A. Championship to earn a heartless penalty that bounced him from a playoff for the victory. Five years later, at the United States Open, a three putt on the final hole cost him another major championship playoff berth. Riding a hot streak that made him the prohibitive favorite at the Masters three years ago, Johnson slipped on the stairs at his rental house on the tournament's eve and withdrew with a back injury. Even as he won the 2016 U.S. Open, he was saddled with the ignominy of a penalty assessed after his celebration on the final hole. Johnson, 36, hopes to find his way there. "It feels good to get past one major, especially when the second one is the Masters, which I always dreamed of winning as a kid," said Johnson, who grew up in Columbia, S.C., about an hour's drive from the Augusta National Golf Club. "I dream of winning a lot of majors. Hopefully, this one will help give me a little spring." Johnson, whose unshakable stoicism on the golf course has become his best known trait, broke down in tears while being interviewed after the final round behind the 18th green. "It still feels like I'm dreaming," he said, wiping his eyes. Johnson's closest pursuers were Sungjae Im of South Korea and Cameron Smith of Australia, who each finished the tournament at 15 under par. They narrowed Johnson's lead after he made consecutive bogeys on the fourth and fifth holes, but Johnson rallied with two birdies in his next three holes and then extended his lead from there. Johnson's final round, four under par 68 gave him a tournament score of 268, or 20 under par, which broke the 72 hole Masters record of 270 previously held by Tiger Woods and Jordan Spieth. Woods, the defending champion, began Sunday 11 strokes behind Johnson, but never mounted a run at the lead. At the par 3 12th hole, he hit three balls into the creek protecting the green and registered a score of 10, his highest score on any hole in his PGA Tour career. Woods then birdied five of his last six holes to finish one under par for the tournament and tied for 38th. Johnson's victory also concluded a bizarrely atypical Masters, which was postponed to November from its customary spot in early April because of the coronavirus pandemic. An event known for its traditions, the 84th Masters was contested for the first time without fans, who are normally an essential part of the visual and auditory experience. Augusta National was so quiet that only the chatter between player and caddie rose above the chirping birds. The final round, a theatric staple of the worldwide sporting calendar, was held four hours earlier than its standard time to account for the diminished amount of sunlight in the fall. Finally, Johnson was presented with the green jacket that goes with his victory less than five months before he will have to defend his title in April 2021. That is a circumstance that did not vex Johnson, the world's top ranked player. "I know 2020 has been a really strange year," said Johnson, who contracted the coronavirus last month and quarantined for roughly two weeks with mild symptoms. "But it's been good to me." Johnson's victory was his first after holding the 54 hole lead in a major championship. He had failed to win in four such instances, including in August when he tied for second at the P.G.A. Championship. Johnson conceded that not being able to close out the lead in a major had begun to weigh on him. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The Yankees are likely to be without two star players, the outfielders Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, for opening day on March 26 against the Orioles in Baltimore, General Manager Brian Cashman told reporters at the team's spring training facility in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday. Both could return as soon as April. Judge, 27, is the latest key Yankee to be vexed by an injury. What began as right shoulder soreness is now being described as discomfort in his right pectoral muscle. When he began ramping up his throwing and hitting last week, he reported feeling something awry near his chest. The team sent him for a new round of examinations which continued into Tuesday. Cashman told reporters that Judge was responding well to recent treatments, but the Yankees were still trying to figure out exactly what was ailing him. Judge's absence is complicated by Stanton's continuing health struggles. During defensive drills last week, Stanton, 30, strained his right calf. According to Manager Aaron Boone, it was the lowest grade of a strain on a scale of three, but that didn't give Stanton much time to be ready for the season's first game. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
You can see the gig economy everywhere but in the statistics. For years, economists, pundits and policymakers have grappled with the rise of Uber, the growth of temporary work and the fissuring of the relationship between companies and their workers. Optimists cheered the flexibility offered by the freelance life. Pessimists fretted about the disappearance of traditional jobs, with the benefits and legal protections they provided. That debate has played out largely in the absence of solid data. But on Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its first in depth look at nontraditional work since 2005, and came to a startling conclusion: The old fashioned job remains king. Roughly 10 percent of American workers in 2017 were employed in some form of what the government calls "alternative work arrangements," a broad category including Uber drivers, freelance writers and people employed through temporary help agencies essentially anyone whose main source of work comes outside a traditional employment relationship. Far from a boom in gig work, that represents a slight decline from 2005, when about 11 percent of workers fell into those categories. "I think everybody's narrative got blown up," said Michael R. Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Strain and other experts cautioned that the data released on Thursday did not signal the American workplace had remained static over the past decade. The government's numbers, by design, do not include people who do gig or freelance work in addition to traditional jobs, and they may not fully capture income generating activities that people might not consider "work," like renting out a home on Airbnb. Separate data released by the Federal Reserve this month found that nearly a third of adults engaged in some form of gig work, either as a primary job or to supplement other sources of income. Private sector surveys have reached similar conclusions. Nor does the bureau's data reflect other changes that have left many American workers with less security and fewer opportunities for advancement. Many companies, for example, now outsource large parts of their business to subcontractors. Employees of those firms will not, for the most part, count as alternative workers under the government's definition. But they generally earn less and receive smaller benefits than equivalent workers employed directly by large companies, and they have far less opportunity to move up the corporate ladder. "In my view, it's this domestic outsourcing that is the big change in why wages don't rise and why workers feel so insecure," said Eileen Appelbaum, co director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank. "And we have only the most indirect data to show it." Rafael Sanchez is one of those who may fall into a gray area in the statistics. He moved to the United States from Mexico 16 years ago, eventually settling in New Brunswick, N.J., and was initially able to find steady work, including a five year stint as a full time employee of a window factory. But Mr. Sanchez was laid off in 2007, and he has since worked for a series of temporary help and staffing agencies, moving from factory to factory and warehouse to warehouse, earning 9 an hour to pack boxes and do other manual labor. The positions can last months or even years without turning into permanent jobs working directly for the factories, which offer better pay and room for advancement. "They're not jobs where you can get ahead," Mr. Sanchez said through an interpreter. Economists have long argued that the most visible kinds of gig work are a relatively small part of the overall labor market, and that nonstandard work arrangements long predated the emergence of app based platforms like Uber and TaskRabbit. (Uber's impact was somewhat visible in the data: The number of independent contractors in the transportation and utilities industry increased by about 200,000 from 2005 to 2017.) The report on Thursday did not break out online workers; a follow up report scheduled for September will do so. But it portrayed an alternative work force far broader than the one typically conjured by the term "gig economy." The largest category of alternative workers, independent contractors, are disproportionately in their mid 40s or older and common in sectors like construction that have not been disrupted by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They earn about as much, on average, as standard employees, and are relatively happy with their arrangements: Nearly eight in 10 say they prefer being an independent contractor to being an employee. The picture looks different for on call and temporary workers, who tend to be younger, earn less and rarely have access to employer provided health or retirement benefits. They are also far more likely to say they would prefer traditional work. 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. Neither category, however, has grown as a share of the work force since 2005. Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a staffing firm in Chicago, said the narrative of the gig economy had long been overblown. "Because of social media and stories out there, I think the perception of the contingent work force has been inflated," he said. Lawrence Mishel, an economist for the left leaning Economic Policy Institute and a long time skeptic of the significance of the gig economy, said it wasn't surprising that the report showed relatively little impact from online marketplaces. "A lot of this hype has been driven by the tech world believing that they are the center of the universe," Mr. Mishel said. But Mr. Mishel said he was surprised by the slower growth in other areas. And he wasn't the only one perplexed by the report. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for budgetary reasons, had not conducted its survey of alternative work since 2005. But in 2015, the economists Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger conducted their own survey that tried to mirror the bureau's methodology. They found that alternative work was more common and growing far more quickly than the data released on Thursday suggests. Economists offered various explanations for the discrepancy. One possibility is that the boom in gig type jobs was real but that as the economy has improved, more people have been able to find traditional work. Part time work, which surged in the recession, has fallen in the recovery, and employment by temporary help services has leveled off. If true of alternative work more broadly, that would suggest that what many commenters interpreted as a structural shift in the economy was instead a temporary result of a weak labor market. It is also possible that the new data understates real changes in the nature of work. The government's standard tools for measuring employment have struggled to capture the shifting employment landscape. For example, the Current Population Survey, the monthly survey used to calculate the unemployment rate and other key measures, shows that self employment is falling, even as tax data from the Internal Revenue Service has shown the opposite. "The questions on our standard surveys don't probe into the nature of these arrangements," said Katharine G. Abraham, a University of Maryland economist who served as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics under President Bill Clinton. "We're not asking the right questions, and they're hard to answer anyway." The bureau's data comes from an add on to the Current Population Survey intended to fill in some of those gaps. But it has shortcomings. The extra questions, for example, were asked only of people considered "employed" in the standard survey. That might leave out people who earn income through activities that they do not see as a job, such as selling products online or working erratically as a freelancer. Professor Abraham said there was evidence that workers struggled to accurately report and classify work that did not fall neatly into traditional buckets. Some Uber drivers, for example, might consider themselves employees of the ride sharing company, even though legally classified as independent contractors. Some Amazon warehouse workers might report being employees of the e commerce giant, even if employed by an outside staffing firm. Professor Abraham and other experts said, however, that if there had been a big rise in alternative work, it should have shown up in the latest survey. The fact that it did not, they said, suggested that any shift had been relatively modest. "Definitely, the vast majority of individuals are still W 2 employees working in traditional jobs," Professor Katz said. He said it was too early to account for the divergence between the government findings and his study with Professor Krueger. Teasing out exactly what has and has not changed will require more data, which may not be coming. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2016 received funding to revive its survey on alternative work, but the Trump administration has not requested funding to run the survey on a regular basis. "The fact that our last data point on this was in 2005 makes it so hard to figure out what's going on," said Martha Gimbel, director of economic research for the job search site Indeed. "Measurement is important, and this is why it's important to fund data analysis." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Kevin Hart is one of the most successful comedians on earth, but his sense of style is no joke. With a new stand up concert movie, "What Now?" out Oct. 14 and a debut album from Motown Records as his hip hop alter ego Chocolate Droppa expected later in the fall, Mr. Hart, 37, will have plenty of opportunities to showcase his largely monochromatic look. He took a moment to discuss his five fashion favorites and the styling tip he picked up from David Beckham. Shirt Nothing beats a comfortable Barneys New York T shirt. There's not a lot to it, but it's well done. I'm a black and white T shirt kind of guy. There's not a whole lot of color in my closet. Suit If I had to pick a suit, I'd say this Valentino suit that I've yet to wear. It's a checkered woven print, and there are two different shades of dark green. I'm waiting for the right event to wear it to. I had it tailored really nicely. I have found brands that cater to what you'd call a petite man the Saint Laurent suits, the Christian Dior suits but I live by a tailor. Clothes that fit are clothes that complement your shape and body. When you understand that, you understand what works on you. Otherwise, a suit will swallow you. Pants I'm pretty much in love with Saint Laurent's basic denim. They've done a good job with the ripped jeans. It's not too much and it's faded well. You know who else is making good jeans? John Elliott. His stuff is really nice. I also love his T shirts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
AS autonomous driving technology advances, perhaps the most notable benefit is the promise of a striking reduction in accidents. But fewer accidents will, according to a recent report, turn the entire auto insurance industry on its head. "We think that over the next 20 to 25 years, the number of accidents will fall by 80 percent," said Jerry Albright, principal of actuarial and insurance risk practice at KPMG, the consulting firm that released the report. "From a consumer perspective, this is a very good thing. You'll see improved safety, fewer deaths." At Progressive's investor relations meeting in 2013, John Curtiss, the company's auto products development chief, said the industry had grown 90 percent over the previous 30 years, mostly because more vehicles were on the road. More recently, Mr. Albright said that most insurance companies had problems turning a profit over the last six years and that the changes autonomous vehicles would bring were sure to make profitability more elusive. At risk is the lifeblood of the industry 200 billion in premiums that the insurers collect every year from policyholders, KPMG says. According to KPMG's report, the insurance industry could contract by as much as 60 percent by 2040 as accident damage payouts and premiums fall. Even Warren E. Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate owns Geico, has said that widespread adoption of autonomous technology poses "a real threat" to the industry. "This technology will be disruptive to the insurance industry," Mr. Albright said. "There will be winners, and there will be losers. There will be fewer companies than there are today. But the question is, Who will survive?" It could even result in fewer cars for companies to insure. A recent report from Barclays Capital said that autonomous technology would lead to a 40 percent decline in sales and a 60 percent drop in the number of cars on the road. Already, the changes are happening. Devices like automatic braking, adaptive cruise control (it adjusts the car's speed to match that of the traffic ahead) and sensors that automatically keep the car from drifting outside a lane are available. And this does not include the fully autonomous cars that companies like Google and automakers have been testing for years. Insurance companies have, accordingly, been examining potential changes to the current business model. KPMG's report envisions a future in which insurers will depend more on commercial accounts for revenue as companies offering ride sharing and mobility on demand become more prevalent. Individual policyholders will decline as households get by with one car, or no car at all. And as the cost of covering losses declines, so will the premiums insurers collect. "Currently, the personal auto sector accounts for almost 125 billion in loss costs," the report said. "By 2040, we believe this sector could cover less than 50 billion in loss costs." State Farm has been working with Ford, the University of Michigan Mobility Transformation Center and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, among others, to figure out how best to adapt to what's coming. "Automated technology has been a major industry issue," Chris Mullen, director of State Farm's technology research program, said in a telephone interview. "It's been what everyone is talking about, so as you can imagine, we have put quite a bit of focus on understanding it." Part of that understanding, she said, had been accepting that the changes had already begun and are happening faster than many experts had predicted several years ago. "A lot of what is disturbing the industry is the pace at which this technology is expected to come," she said. "State Farm has responded to changes in our industry throughout our existence. Changes are coming again, and we're investing the resources to understand how these changes will affect the industry." Ms. Mullen said that the changes to which insurance companies had to respond in the past included the advent of seatbelts, collapsible steering columns and airbags. Those devices changed automotive safety, but not until car insurance had been around for a few decades. "This is not just about technology," she said. "There are issues of behavior that need to be understood how will people react to these new systems? Cybersecurity is another issue that's been at the forefront of this." Mr. Albright said that devising a strategy to face the new world of auto insurance would be as expensive for insurers as it was tricky. "It will take time and cost billions of dollars," he said. "There's enormous skepticism in the insurance industry about the pace that changes will come, but they're going to come sooner than people think." Part of the problem, Joe Schneider of KPMG pointed out, was that insurance companies rely on past behavior to predict the future. What happens when there is little experience to base decisions on? "The insurance industry is historically data driven," he said. "There's been an actual person behind the wheel of every car for 100 years, and all of a sudden saying the rules are going to be different going forward, that's a very difficult situation to wrap your head around." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
It's a question parents have wrestled with since the 2016 presidential election: How do we explain this political moment to our children? I, for one, was hoping the answer would not involve a book aimed at teenagers in which a candidate's obscene reference to female anatomy appears on Page 2, but that is where we are. In UNPRESIDENTED: A Biography of Donald Trump (Feiwel and Friends, 384 pp., 19.99; ages 12 and up), Martha Brockenbrough provides an encyclopedic tale of the rise of Donald J. Trump. Brockenbrough's version is, unapologetically, a liberal's framing of events. Then again, I'm not sure if a nonpartisan book about Trump could grow out of the current climate. For now, there is this thorough, hard hitting volume that seeks to explain Trump, from the time he was born with a silver spoon and "golden hair, pink cheeks and a tiny pucker of a mouth," to his shocker of a presidential campaign ("candidates typically don't insult the parents of soldiers who die in combat"). The tone isn't lighthearted, yet I laughed out loud in Chapter 4. Is there any more telling symbol of our bizarre (and yes, unprecedented) times than Roy Cohn appearing prominently in a young adult book, and not one about the bygone days of McCarthyism? Brockenbrough describes Trump's infamous lawyer and fixer (or "attack dog," as she calls him) in such stark, terrifying terms that he seems almost like a cartoon villain, a closeted Cruella de Vil "with weatherworn skin, dark eyes and a nose that looked like it had encountered many fists in his 46 years." Halfway through "Unpresidented," I found myself craving a different type of children's book, something that would enlighten kids about the current climate, educate them on the historical struggles that got us here, but also offer bipartisan hope. I wanted a respite from the partisan rancor, preferably with appealing illustrations that didn't include a 2016 Electoral College map. I found all of this and more in several immersive picture books about women leaders. The standout books of the bunch tell the stories of two remarkable women of color. In WHAT DO YOU DO WITH A VOICE LIKE THAT? (Beach Lane, 48 pp., 17.99; ages 4 to 8), a biography of Representative Barbara Jordan written by Chris Barton and illustrated by Ekua Holmes, we go from Jordan's modest upbringing in Houston to her civil rights activism to the halls of Congress and back to Texas after a multiple sclerosis diagnosis takes her out of public life. All the way, Jordan's distinct "big, bold, booming, crisp, clear, confident voice" guides us. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Of the painting that became Duchess Goldblatt's Twitter avatar, Frans Hals's "Portrait of an Elderly Lady," the author behind the character writes: "Her mouth is closed, but she's smiling gently. You can see there's a twinkle in her eye, a slight sauciness in her gaze." The painting of a 17th century Dutch aristocrat hangs in the west wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She wears a ruff collar, lace cuffs and a velvet trimmed brocade jacket with puffed sleeves the height of Calvinist chic. Painted by Frans Hals in 1633, the subject's name has been lost to history; the piece is called "Portrait of an Elderly Lady." But on Twitter, this portrait is the avatar that represents Duchess Goldblatt, the fictional author of nonexistent best sellers like "An Axe to Grind," "Feasting on the Carcasses of My Enemies: A Love Story" and "Not If I Kill You First," a tale of motherhood. Her audience of more than 25,000 followers includes many good humored literary types, including the acclaimed authors Elizabeth McCracken, Celeste Ng, Alexander Chee and Laura Lippman. Duchess Goldblatt joined Twitter in 2012, and has since built a rich mythology around herself. When she's not philosophizing about empathy, toast, dogs and Riesling, she's quipping about the mundanities of life in Crooked Path, N.Y., her imaginary duchy, located 10 minutes north of Manhattan and 10 minutes south of the Canadian border. ("The Scrabble Tile Drive continues in Crooked Path all weekend," she recently wrote. "Only clean, like new consonants accepted.") "Becoming Duchess Goldblatt" is one of our most anticipated titles of July. See the full list. There's no recipe for Duchess Goldblatt tweets, but they often amount to one part conventional wisdom and two parts surrealism, with some grandmotherly tenderness or saltiness sprinkled in for good measure. "Night night, loons," she tweeted to her followers earlier this year. "Don't try to snuggle up to me in my sleep. You know I need to stretch out." She often writes about maintaining her sanity: "I'm finding myself some peace and quiet today. I buried it in a coffee can under a weeping willow last fall." Her feed is one of the few places on the internet devoted to spreading unadulterated joy. It's also a successful example of social media literature, due in part to Duchess's voice, which requires readers to confront the ridiculousness of the entire premise alongside the sincerity of her musings. Because so many writers and actors follow Duchess Goldblatt, it has long been suspected that her creator is a public figure. (McCracken, the first writer to champion Duchess online, seemed a likely candidate.) The writer behind the account insists that's not the case, though she is a professional writer. "That's kind of the joke to me, that Duchess is famous as a fictional person, but I'm not. In any way," she said during a phone interview. Still, devoted fans will soon learn a great deal about the person behind the account; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is publishing her memoir, "Becoming Duchess Goldblatt," on Tuesday. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. The people who do know her real identity are a very small number, including a couple of people at Houghton Mifflin and a few select friends made on social media who have gone on to meet her in person. The publisher wouldn't reveal her identity, and other friends said they plan to take the secret to their graves. Tina Jordan, an editor at The Times and a regular Duchess reader, said her efforts to figure out the writer behind the account have so far come up empty. The memoir maps the character's origins as an activity to help the writer distract herself post divorce. The book is written entirely in the author's personal voice, with Duchess tweets interspersed when appropriate. For example, following one scene in which divorce lawyers describe the writer's joint custody options, we see this Duchess tweet: "What kind of feelings taste best raw? I like regrets on the half shell. Serve them on a bed of crushed ice with lemon wedges and Tabasco." "It started on Facebook, just as something fun to do for myself," she said of the fictional persona. Abandoned by friends and relatives in the wake of her divorce, and faced with nights alone when her 6 year old son was with his father, she began to sublimate her pain into joy online. Soon, strangers began to play along. For years, she says, her ex husband told her she wasn't funny. "He was very concerned with appearances, and he wanted to appear to be the smarter and kinder and funnier one, and he resented whenever he thought I upstaged him," she said. After migrating from Facebook to Twitter, Duchess hit a nerve with the literary community, and caught the attention of her creator's favorite singer, Lyle Lovett. "I just came across a tweet where she mentioned me and I thought, what is this?" Lovett said. He clicked on the entire feed and "really enjoyed her writing immediately." At the time, Lovett was on tour, staying in a luxury hotel in Washington, D.C., looking at a portrait not unlike the Frans Hals painting. He sent the writer a direct message, inviting her to a concert of his. "The person behind Duchess is every bit as kind and thoughtful and clever as Duchess is herself," Lovett said. They've become real life friends in the years since, and he contributed his voice to the audiobook of "Becoming Duchess Goldblatt," alongside the actress J. Smith Cameron ("Succession") and the narrator Gabra Zackman. Lovett was the first to suggest to Duchess that she write a book. "I told her from the beginning that I thought she had a book because of the community that she created" online, he said. He's gotten to know some fellow Duchess fans in real life, too, like the Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer, who has visited Lovett's home in Texas. Some Duchess fans have even attended his concerts in groups. "To be able to create that kind of community virtually and anonymously, in this day and time, is really something," Lovett said, especially since the community is bonded by a sensibility more than a specific shared interest. The writer behind the persona insists that Duchess tweets aren't pre written. Instead, Duchess's voice occupies a special place in her brain. "She's always with me," the writer said. "She's with me in the way that ghosts are with us, you know? That the dead are with us. She's just always sort of present at my elbow. Or on my shoulder. And so sometimes, when I'm not really paying attention, I'll just randomly go to my phone and, out of habit, click open Twitter and just be Duchess for a minute." She likens her followers' responses to "an ongoing cocktail party" or "salon experience." But while Lovett suggested she write about her community, "Becoming Duchess Goldblatt" recontextualizes the Twitter account as a therapeutic exercise. The memoir gets dark, covering loss, grief and loneliness. The Duchess created holiday Secular Pie Thursday, for example, was the result of a Thanksgiving spent alone. Smith Cameron said she was "struck by the book as an entity, because the character of Anonymous has such a different voice. Now I kind of read another echo into the tweets." Jon Danziger, a film studies professor at Pace University and a longtime Duchess fan, has twice nominated the imagined writer for an honorary degree at Pace. "Her being fictional shouldn't prevent her from getting a degree," he said. "There was a moment where I thought, 'This is the last thing I'm going to do, they're going to terminate me from the faculty.' But I thought, 'If that's how I'm going out, I'll take it.'" ("Duchess and I are both quite bitter that she hasn't been recognized by academia," her creator said.) Like most internet personalities, Duchess Goldblatt has her superfans, too. Her home office is filled with fan art, mailed to her through various proxies. She's received watercolor portraits, maps of Crooked Path and custom made Duchess M M's. A woman named P.J. in Galveston, Tex., traveled the world taking selfies with a laminated cutout of Duchess's face, and mailed her a sachertorte from Vienna. The novelist Ng crocheted a Duchess doll, which she mailed to Lippman to commemorate Lippman's Goldblatt Prize, an imaginary literary award that Ng had won two years prior. If 2020 had gone as planned, Meg Heriford, owner of the Ladybird Diner in Lawrence, Kan., would be on a plane right now, hand delivering a dozen Duchess pies from her restaurant to the now canceled book party in New York. (Duchess was planning to be represented at the party by some of her notable fans as surrogates.) "There are books to sell," Heriford said over the phone in February. "I am dead serious, I will bring pies." Some publishers were wary of releasing "Becoming Duchess Goldblatt" anonymously, with publicity and marketing departments especially concerned about how they could best promote the book without an author to send out behind it. For Lucy Carson, the writer's agent, the anonymity is part of the magic. "In publishing, in 2020, there's such an emphasis on the writer being part of the narrative, and we're losing something really pure about how to read a text," she said. "For me, part of the book's power comes from Duchess saying, 'You don't have any choice but to use the text alone to form your opinion.'" As for the woman depicted in Frans Hals's painting, the writer behind Duchess hopes she would be pleased that "almost 400 years later, people are still gazing at her portrait with love and affection." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
George Balanchine with a dancer backstage during New York City Ballet's Stravinsky Festival in 1972. Peter Martins inherited the duties teaching, choreographing, casting, commissioning, supervising, coaching that once were Balanchine's. So Peter Martins, after accusations of sexual harassment and physical and verbal abuse of dancers over decades, has retired from New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet. An independent investigation of those allegations continues. But this may be the moment to reform the entire job description, and thus to reform ballet. Mr. Martins inherited a remarkable and wide ranging job model from George Balanchine, who, with Lincoln Kirstein, founded the school in 1934 and City Ballet in 1948. Balanchine began as the company's artistic director but changed his title in the 1950s to "ballet master": Ostensibly he was one of several, but ruled with a generally accepted authority that rendered his word as law. Today there are no Balanchines. Is it time to revise the posts that Balanchine filled? Or might this diminish the art form by reducing the scope for creative vision? Mr. Martins has long been the principal inheritor of the power and the duties teaching, choreographing, casting, commissioning, supervising, coaching that once were Balanchine's. Mr. Martins became one of the company's main ballet masters in 1981; after Balanchine's death in 1983, he began by working in tandem with Jerome Robbins, whose ballets have been part of the company's lifeblood. Soon, however, Mr. Martins took sole command. In 1989, he assumed the title ballet master in chief. (Some Balanchine devotees felt "in chief" was excessive.) It is now almost 35 years since Balanchine died. Nevertheless, City Ballet has remained of singular importance to ballet worldwide. Balanchine has become increasingly recognized as the foremost (and the most influential) choreographer of 20th century ballet. And while the Balanchine enterprise has spawned companies across America and influenced others around the world, City Ballet and the School of American Ballet have remained central to the Balanchine practice. And under Mr. Martins the company has been the global leader in post Balanchine choreography. This policy has paid rich dividends in recent years with City Ballet creations by Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon entering repertories across America and around the world. It's not for me to advocate any heir to Balanchine or Mr. Martins; I strongly dislike the notion of critic as kingmaker or power broker. But when change comes, I must ask: How will the company and the art form itself be changed, too? If the company is to move forward, several important issues must be considered. Most obviously, a system of checks and balances should be introduced to prevent the abuse of dancers. Harassment within ballet has been reported elsewhere. Let City Ballet now set a global example. Elsewhere there have been artistic directors of note who neither teach nor choreograph. City Ballet, however, has been a different organism. Would it be changed beyond recognition by such a director? And, of prime concern to dance goers and dancers alike: Can the company continue in its dual capacity as the world leader in new choreography and the foremost exponent of the Balanchine Robbins repertory? Since Dec. 9, after Mr. Martins took a leave of absence, the day to day artistic direction of City Ballet has been in the hands of an impressively young foursome: Craig Hall and Rebecca Krohn (ballet masters), Mr. Peck and Jonathan Stafford (a former principal now on the school's faculty). The company also has an executive director, Katherine E. Brown, who runs business matters, reporting directly to the board. (The post was created for her in 2009.) How now to move forward? For weeks, people on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have proposed candidates that include men and women, people of various races and sexual orientations. Please note, though, how few of them fulfill the multiple roles of the Balanchine Martins model. The old creative ballet master practice has been largely eroded. (Not entirely: Helgi Tomasson at San Francisco Ballet and Ib Andersen at Ballet Arizona City Ballet alumni are both artistic directors who choreograph, teach and coach.) Balanchine didn't invent the notion of a directing ballet master the teacher who made ballets and controlled policy. It went back to at least the 18th century. (Its 19th century exemplars included August Bournonville and Marius Petipa.) For Balanchine, like masters before him, a company's dancers had to be custom trained by its school. And the choreographer who made the ballets had to keep developing his style by teaching, often daily, in the classroom, which became a kind of laboratory. If City Ballet is run by a person who neither teaches nor choreographs, it will move far in spirit from the Balanchine Kirstein principle. Certainly this may well be the moment for greater artistic separation between the company and the school and yet that's easier said than done, since no company depends more on works, by Balanchine and others, in which students of several ages dance. We live in post Balanchine times. "Ballet is woman," he said but his kind of ballet was always a man's view of woman, and a solely heterosexual one. Though the Balanchine worldview made women empowered and inspiring, it did not include women's equality in the workplace or same sex relationships. Balanchine brought many women to the top, and yet neither he nor Kirstein considered one to be his successor. When alive, Balanchine was controversial, not least in the demands he placed on his female dancers. Seemingly unstoppable, he transformed his art. And today, many of the teachers and choreographers influenced by him including the team now at City Ballet's helm either never met him or were born after his time. It was Kirstein who labored to ensure the school and the company would outlive Balanchine. Conversely, Balanchine expressed no confidence that they would, at least on any scale of consequence. Some of his devotees, lastingly despondent about his legacy, still insist either that the flame died with him or that it passed elsewhere. Of the company after his death, Balanchine remarked, "Apres moi, le board." Now the boards of the company and the school are faced with big decisions about replacing Mr. Martins. Yet these very boards retained him after the first serious complaints were made against him in the last century. Who knew what and for how long? Let nobody the boards, critics, other interested parties rush into promoting their special favorites or pursuing their own agendas. The responsibility of redirecting City Ballet is both considerable and complex. Let the thoughts percolate. History is about to change but how? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
A tentative settlement was announced on Wednesday in a case against Sutter Health, the sprawling hospital system in Northern California accused of anti competitive behavior, just as the trial was to begin. The class action lawsuit, which was brought by the California attorney general, Xavier Becerra, along with scores of employers and unions, accused Sutter of using its dominance in the region to corral insurers so that patients could not go elsewhere for less expensive or higher quality care. The trial had been postponed several times. While both representatives of Sutter and the attorney general's office confirmed they had reached a tentative settlement, neither party would comment further on the details. Hearings on the proposed settlement, which will need court approval, are expected to take place early next year. The lawsuit, which represented a fresh legal attack on health systems accused of using their size to thwart competition, was highly anticipated by both hospitals and health insurers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The Trump administration on Monday said it would begin forcing hospitals to publicly disclose the discounted prices they negotiate with insurance companies, a requirement intended to help patients shop for better deals on a range of medical services, from hip replacements to CT scans. The plan, issued as a proposed federal rule, would take effect in January, but would likely be challenged in court by an industry that has long held such rates secret. "The reality is in every other part of our economy you can get pricing information, but somehow in health care, which is arguably some of the most dollars that we spend, you can't," said Seema Verma , the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announcing the proposed rule. "We're trying to change the paradigm." Administration officials and others have criticized hospitals and insurers for keeping the deals they strike a secret, making it impossible for patients to seek less expensive places to get care. They argue that by making public the actual prices that insurers pay and not just the standard list prices for various services, which the Trump administration started requiring hospitals to post earlier this year hospitals will be under more pressure to compete. Over time, prices will drop, Ms. Verma predicted. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Of all the things that haunt me about my drafty, tired old house, it is the books, sitting boxed up in the basement without sufficient shelving to hold them, that give me the most distress. It's not that I need them, exactly. If asked to name the titles, I could list perhaps half. But within those I've read but not revisited while they've moldered in their cardboard prisons are untold insights. At least, this is my suspicion after reading Vivian Gornick's new book, "Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re Reader." What misconception, or plain old error, calcified when I first encountered the books I've loved enough to tote from home to home? And what kind of revelations would emerge once I had time to reread them? Time to reread! What a farce! And is there value, with dozens upon dozens of new books published every week, in returning to the piles that have already been consumed? Gornick's new book is part memoiristic collage, part literary criticism, yet it is also an urgent argument that rereading offers the opportunity not just to correct and adjust one's recollection of a book but to correct and adjust one's perception of oneself. "The effort required to attain some semblance of an integrated self was going to be the task of a lifetime," Gornick writes, and rereading, as she has it, is an essential part of that task. Bid your therapist goodbye, and dig out your college syllabus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
From left: Bryan Derballa for The New York Times; Peter Prato for The New York Times From left: Bryan Derballa for The New York Times; Peter Prato for The New York Times Credit... From left: Bryan Derballa for The New York Times; Peter Prato for The New York Times Andrew Garfield, a Tony Award nominee for playing the defiant Prior Walter in the Broadway revival of "Angels in America," was 9 years old in 1993, when Stephen Spinella won the first of his two Tonys in the role. As it happens, Mr. Spinella is again tackling the furious, fantastical poetry of Tony Kushner's two part, seven hour play, this time as the bilious lawyer Roy Cohn at Berkeley Repertory Theater. The New York Times asked the actors, who have never met, to correspond by email during a week's worth of shows. They wrote before, after and sometimes in between performances of "Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika." Below are edited excerpts from their exchange, which included insights on how to understand the character of Prior, a man with AIDS who accompanies an angel to heaven, and how to maintain the stamina to play him. Good morning, Andrew, so nice to meet you! Three hours behind you here in Berkeley and just up after a two show day yesterday, legs still covered with alcohol based makeup, feeling like I was hit by a truck. Two more shows today. We've been doing five show weekends for five weeks now. Brutal. Four and a half to five hours for each show, with prep, makes a 25 hour weekend toiling in the theater. Another two shows and it's the French workweek! Berkeley Rep has regimented the times (1 and 7 p.m.) but not the show's schedule, meaning five "Millenniums" and three "Perestroikas" this week. I'm of no mind as to which is more difficult. They're both monsters. And, I think, for the same reasons, Kushner's operatic naturalism and their length. Do you have a preference (or a dread)? Give a sweet hello to Lee Pace and my ancient dear friend Mr. Nathan Lane, who sent me a self satirizing "How dare you!" for doing this out here while he was doing it in NYC. He's right, of course, but for a different though probably just as comical reason: These plays are nuts! And although daunting to walk in the huge footsteps you left behind, it's honestly been more joyful than harrowing. To be swimming around this gorgeous person knowing that you were the first deep sea explorer. I'm stupidly excited to watch your production and your Prior on crappy, hazy, most likely VHS cassette tape. And weep my face off. As soon as our run is over I'm running to the Lincoln Center library. Hold on! Did you say you're doing a five show weekend?! That's criminal! How on earth are you all surviving? Bananas alone can't be enough! (I confess I've been eating a bunch a day simply because you did.) I'm only able to write now as it is our day off. My days off are spent mostly horizontal and as mindless as humanly possible. I've devised a system of temporarily lobotomizing myself each break I get. How is it now playing his antithesis, Roy? What made you think this was a good idea? And how is it watching Randy Harrison make his own Prior before your eyes? I imagine it must be surreal for him. I'll tell you my preference and my dread: My dread is the second act in "Perestroika" : glitter queen into ANTI MIGRATORY EPISTLE (!!!!!!!!!!) into there's no angel!!! I think it's the tether less feeling of losing one's mind. The terrible exhaustion. The hopelessness, the rock bottom sensation. And then the great relief of surrendering to it. The madness. The other world crashing through. The psyche breaking. Oof. It feels strangely cathartic confessing this to someone who will, I pray, understand. Every time that section of "Perestroika" approaches I have an impulse to fake my own death and start a new life growing marijuana in Northern California. I'd love to know what you loved and dreaded as Prior and now as Roy? Andrew! You're fabulous! And the admiration is much appreciated, though it makes me feel a bit like the queen on the Prior float in the "Angels in America" parade. It must be said off the bat that the Prior of the early '90s will never happen again, regardless of my gifts or the gifts of any actor playing him. That gay man with AIDS who wrestled a misguided reactionary Angel of America and won more life the impact of that Prior was as a secular prophet at that moment in history after 10 gruesome years of heartbreaking loss, with still three years to come before the three drug cocktail changed everything. I'm happy to take credit for my performance, but I can't take credit for the full measure of its impact is what I'm trying to say. The times had a lot to do with that. Indeed, a treasure of men and women have approached me over the years with stories of loss the play broke open for them. For their memories, for that grace, I'll ride that Prior float happily till my last day, but for actors playing him, let's just let it move on. Two show Wednesday done! Ethel Rosenberg's son and granddaughter were in today. Remarkable to meet them afterward. Warm and soulful people. I feel they got some good healing from our show, too. My post show nights have become sacred. I'm tempted always to stay up as late as possible so that I can feel myself as Andrew as much as I can. One of the things I love about doing this epic masterpiece is that rest feels earned. I totally hear you about feeling like the Prior on the "Angels" float. And I honestly can't imagine your experience of putting these plays on as they were being written and as the crisis was ongoing. I wonder how it feels in retrospect versus how it felt in real time? Watching that stunning documentary "How to Survive a Plague," I was struck by the contrast these incredible activists must have felt: pre cocktail and post cocktail. The single focused fight with every cell in their beings, and then when they were finally listened to and achieved what they set out to do the release. The victory. Fascinating to think that perhaps the most meaningful, purposeful time of their lives was the exact time when their lives were being threatened the most. Back to the play. Here in the new century, Tony's prophecy has been proven true: "We will all be insane." I was struck in heaven tonight, as I was trying to return this misguided book to these terrified impotent angels, by how hard it is to let go of an old story. How deeply the water of our culture has been poisoned by certain puritanical religious ideas and how imprisoned we are without awareness. How was "Millennium" tonight? I hope it went well. Do you find that every time feels like the first? I find it always feels dangerous and it's impossible to ever be comfortable. The writing demands you to be alive. Never settled. And it makes yesterday's performance irrelevant. It's 2 a.m. here, and I'm just beginning to wind down. I ate a big piece of fried chicken for dinner. The great news about playing Prior of course is that you can eat what you want. The play strips it right off of you. Thank you again for this correspondence. We had two shows yesterday, and for the first time an actor had to take a show off to rest his voice. Vocally this show is murder. Our house here is about 700 and acoustically beautiful but still you have to produce with power. Characters in this play live larger than most. And there are the manifestations of illness, legs that hurt, spasms and convulsions, coughing fits and vomiting. (A weird Prior to Roy aside: I keep feeling like my leg should hurt. I spent so many years doing this play with a leg that hurt, I sometimes now feel like I still have to do that!) I'm having trouble writing about Roy. In a strange way the play protects him, or, more specifically, the play's presentation of his horrific death from AIDS protects him. Those kinds of deaths are rare now in America, so it was important for Tony Taccone, our director, and me to present AIDS in as full a measure as the play can sustain. Taccone and I have also restored Roy's final phone call. It was cut before the Broadway opening in '93 and I've always missed it. Taccone, who co directed the L.A. production with Oskar Eustis, knew it from then. They cut it, I guess, because of the argument that there were too many endings. It's a great speech; it's set up beautifully in the play in two places, and it doesn't allow the play to rest in perfectibility. Roy rises from hell after Harper flies off to San Francisco (Heaven), phone to his ear telling God he'll take his case: The angels are suing God for abandonment! Classic Kushner jokes ensue, but the overall feeling is a kind of terror that Roy will, as he says, "never die." The Rep is giving us four days off for beginning Memorial Day, so David, my husband (the real deal nowadays) and I, with our dog, Teddy, are heading up to the giant redwoods and a drive down the glorious California coast. There is so much in the play about the spectacular beauty of life on this planet, and we're going to get some of that. I cannot tell you how much I've appreciated doing this. In some ways I've gotten a burden off my back.I've been able to look into the heart of a play that I haven't been able to for years. Break a leg for the rest of your glorious run, Andrew. You're a mensch and a wonder. Broadway and Kushner are lucky to have you! Stephen, you have no idea what you have given me here. I love that you feel somewhat unburdened. It makes me think of lines from a favorite Rilke poem: "This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings." That's how I feel about Tony's play: I'm blessed to be crushed by its demands over and again. So funny that your body feels like it should be limping. I remember a performance where I was in the wings, and I wasn't limping, having forgotten to. As soon as I crossed the threshold to the stage the limp came without any thought. My body was saving me from messing up. Miraculous! That's what this play, in part, feels like to me. A grief prayer song celebration. Letting those souls lost in the plague know that we remember them, helping them to continue their crossing over the sea of death and into their rightful place in the infinite. Especially that epilogue. I've truly felt lighter since we started this correspondence, Stephen. I've felt carried through the play each night. Carried on the wings of all you've so generously shared. This will of course make you feel once more like the queen on the Prior float, but please just wave and smile and accept my adulation and gratitude. The image of you and your husband driving Highway 1 has me thinking of Northern California. It's where I go to remember myself. When I, as Prior, describe the real San Francisco as being unspeakably beautiful, I'm actually conjuring that glorious dramatic natural coastline through Big Sur. Sending you and the whole company all my love from the Neil Simon Theater. My hand is at your back as I feel yours on mine. I can't wait to meet in person. Thank you, thank you, thank you. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
GREAT FALLS, Mont. When a study recently found Great Falls the least gay friendly city in Montana, one man wrote on a local news website, "Let's keep it that way." Great Falls, home to 59,000 mostly conservative citizens, can be a soul deadening place. Big box stores and chain restaurants line the weary main drag. The primary employer is Malmstrom Air Force Base, which services nuclear missile silos. The wind chill has been known to hit 40 below. But you can't hold life back. It always breaks through sometimes in unintentionally hilarious ways even in the most unlikely places. I don't know how else to account for the Sip 'n Dip, a kitsch tastic tiki bar hidden inside the O'Haire Motor Inn here. To find this treasure, you walk past the stack of Western Ag Reporter newspapers in the lobby and climb a narrow set of carpeted stairs. There, swimming behind glass six nights a week on a rotating schedule, you will find 12 women dressed very convincingly as mermaids. The cavelike Sip 'n Dip has two large windows that look directly into the O'Haire pool. In the daytime, you can spy on swimming motel guests. The pool closes around happy hour, and women in mermaid outfits, goggles and flowing wigs begin performing in pairs. They do flips, swivel their hips and blow bubbles, rising to the surface (which is out of view) every 20 seconds or so to take a breath. Claudia, one of the mermaids, said the hardest part of the job is staying in character. "Toward the end of a four hour shift, your mind can start to wander," she said. "Stuff like, 'Did I remember to turn the coffeepot off when I left the house?'" (Claudia would not tell me her last name, explaining that she has a conservative day job. "I don't know how corporate would react if they knew I was moonlighting as a mermaid," she said.) Ms. Johnson Thares, whose family owns the O'Haire, recently drew statewide media attention by pushing against the accepted view of masculinity in Montana: She advertised online for a merman Tuesday night at the Sip 'n Dip is ladies' night and the posting went viral, prompting responses from senior Montana politicians. As it happens, the mermaids alone do not make the Sip 'n Dip the campiest cocktail lounge in the history of campy cocktail lounges. (Honorable mentions to the Red Fox Room in San Diego and the velvet wallpapered Bryant's in Milwaukee.) Adding to the atmosphere is an 85 year old singer: "Piano Pat." Pat Spoonheim has been an institution at the Sip 'n Dip since 1963. (The bar opened in 1962 and has the original Naugahyde to prove it.) She still arrives three nights a week with a towering hairdo. She applies a little lipstick, adjusts the Ace bandage on her wrist and sits down at an electric keyboard encircled by Christmas lights. Ms. Spoonheim can be a little cranky she's sick and tired of "Sweet Caroline," she'll have you know. But she will accommodate the occasional request. She describes her style as "jazzy." "We're rockin' and rollin'," she was shout singing when I dropped in over the summer. "It's Great Falls! On good Ole Friday night!" Two macho looking dudes in cowboy hats lifted their drinks (blue concoctions topped with umbrellas) and roared in unison: "We love you Piano Pat." A guy wearing a T shirt reading "Beer, Bacon, Guns Freedom" turned away from the mermaids long enough to clap. A husky lady with the remnants of a home perm fervently tapped her fork on a platter of meatloaf. Despite its landlocked location, the Sip 'n Dip has tiki decor. Blowfish and glass buoys hang from a thatched ceiling. There are velvet paintings, fake ferns and seashell lights. Behind the Formica bar, pink light glows upward through stacks of cocktail glasses. But the food is pure home on the range. There is a full menu. For 15.95, you can enjoy the Hog Heaven (pulled pork, macaroni and cheese, bacon bits). That meatloaf will also set you back 15.95. It comes with potatoes and gravy. "You couldn't make this place up if you tried," said Gayle Nafziger, a teacher from Carlinville, Ill., whom I encountered during my visit. She was on a summer road trip with some friends and the Sip 'n Dip was one of their planned stops. "It's like a bucket list place," Ms. Nafziger said. She paused to fish an orange wedge out of her cocktail. Then Ms. Nafziger burst into wild applause as Piano Pat, having finished a rousing version of "Ring of Fire," made a turn into "Piece of My Heart." Ms. Spoonheim, who recently retired from playing the organ at her church, appeared to be having trouble seeing the sheet music through her bifocals. But the crowd sang along with relish anyway: "Take it!" For reasons that should by now be clear, the Sip 'n Dip has become a must visit for fans of Americana run amok the wacky places where the human spirit gushes to the surface in an unexpected geyser. "These weird, little spots usually have a lot of heart, and I think that's why people seek them out," said Kenneth Smith, a founder of Roadside America, a state by state compilation of offbeat tourist attractions. Along with the Sip 'n Dip, Roadside America lists Montana charms like the Testy Festy, where bikers annually gather to eat fried bull testicles and men participate in a drunken who has the biggest undercarriage contest. (But there is nothing at all gay about this state. Got it?) The mermaids were Ms. Johnson Thares's idea. By the mid 1990s, the Sip 'n Dip was in steep decline. Locals still dropped in to hear Piano Pat. But newer motels had opened near the highway, and the O'Haire pool often sat empty, dispiritingly for Sip 'n Dip patrons. One night in 1996, Ms. Johnson Thares was sitting in one of the circular booths with her mother, and they started to brainstorm. "I joked that we should hire some mermaids," Ms. Johnson Thares said. "The more drinks we had, the funnier it got." The first mermaids made their debut shortly afterward, with tails made from green tablecloths held in place by duct tape. The gimmick was an instant hit, prompting Ms. Johnson Thares to start sewing more elaborate tails by hand, sometimes incorporating lace. "It makes them foofier," she said. To make the pool look more like a lagoon, she added blue lights and faux seaweed, aquarium style adornments inspired by a family vacation to Disneyland in California. (In fact, when she got home, Ms. Johnson Thares wrote a letter to Disney asking for decorations from a submarine ride that had just been closed for refurbishment. "To my shock, the Disney people mailed me a box of their special seaweed," she said.) Ms. Johnson Thares had been telling me all of this as we sat at the bar. As she finished, Piano Pat, perhaps reacting to the light scent of country fried steak in the air, started warbling her version of "I Love This Bar," a country song by Toby Keith. "We got winners, and we got losers," she sang. "Chain smokers and boozers. It ain't too far. Come as you are. Mmm hmm. I love this bar." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"The rivalry of the sexes!" blared a Times headline from 1905. "Is woman crowding out man in the field of fiction?" The paper posed that question to a handful of top publishers, editors and booksellers. "What woman can write as Shakespeare? Can any woman ever write a 'Robinson Crusoe'? Did any woman ever live who could have written 'Huckleberry Finn'? ... And what woman could possibly have written 'Jude'?" harrumphed the bookseller Simon Brentano. The publisher George H. Putnam dismissed the query as "absurd," telling the paper that there were more men and women "doing excellent literary work" than ever before, "and the more both of them do the better." By 1907, things had changed. Women, the paper pointed out, had "been busy with their pens ... scribbling industriously, and, in plenty of cases, doing good work" for years. But with a few exceptions Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte male authors had long ruled book sales, "marching along proudly, without worrying about competitors in the weaker sex." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Come June, expect your local tiki bar to be understaffed. Every Hawaiian shirt wearing, orchid bearing, coconut sipping tiki nut will have packed his ukulele and flown to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to attend the Hukilau, an annual festival that is Christmas, New Year's and Fourth of July combined on the tiki calendar. The Hukilau, which was first staged in Atlanta in 2002, is named after a traditional Hawaiian feast. For many years it has been held at the Mai Kai, a sprawling, 600 seat, Polynesian restaurant bar theater garden compound that has survived largely intact (waterfalls, thatch roofs) since it opened in 1956. Entertainment goes well beyond navy grog and steaks cooked over oak in a Chinese oven, to include a time warp stage show called the Polynesian Islander Revue (fire dancers, headdresses, pulsating drums). Since 1991, it's been run by David Levy, the chief executive, who was born in Tahiti and is the stepson of the founder Bob Thornton. Following are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Levy. Q. I imagine you get a lot of people who travel to Fort Lauderdale just to come here. A. Exactly right. All year round, it would average about 65 percent of our customers. If you go in the bar right now, everybody knows each other. We get phone calls for reservations, saying: "We were here last summer. We're flying in for the weekend and we're coming to the Mai Kai." We have devoted customers. Has it always been that way? Was there ever a fallow period? Only one time, when the nouvelle cuisine came around. People wanted to try something new. After a year or so, people came back. Have you kept the same food over the years? Same cuisine: Sichuan, Hunan, Cantonese, Vietnamese. If you look at the menu 50 years ago, it's exactly the same. We just perfected the dishes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"I love you Harlem," the American painter Alice Neel wrote in her diary around the end of World War II, and really, she loved everything in it. Neel celebrated Harlem specifically its ethnically mixed section known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio for "your poverty and your loves." And what Neel eulogized in her diary, she immortalized in oils: street scenes, interiors and, above all, portraits of the men, women and children in a neighborhood far from the suburban Philadelphia of her youth, which the artist adopted as her own. Little heralded in her lifetime, Neel (1900 1984) has won posthumous acclaim as one of America's most inventive and peculiar portraitists. Her later paintings, especially, made her sitters strange through thick outlining and unelaborated backgrounds. But behind Neel's experiments with form were New York lives of writers and revolutionaries, lovers and petty criminals. Two dozen of her portraits are on view in "Alice Neel, Uptown," an affectionate, rooted, and at times achingly nostalgic exhibition at David Zwirner gallery that concentrates on her relationships with fellow Harlemites, most of them black, Latin American or Asian. The show was organized by the writer Hilton Als, who also has written a series of wistful essays for the catalog. The Zwirner show is one of two important exhibitions of Neel's work this year. Last month I traveled to the Netherlands to see a major touring exhibition of her paintings, which recently closed at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. (It reopens on March 4 at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France.) With more than 70 works, the European retrospective takes in Neel's entire career, beginning with her earliest portraits, done in Havana, and her paintings from the 1930s, when she lived in Greenwich Village and was employed by the Works Progress Administration. The Village was then the epicenter of bohemian life, and would give rise to Abstract Expressionism, beat poetry and gay liberation. A 1933 painting of the eccentric Joe Gould, in the European retrospective, depicts him as a freak with multiple sex organs; in 1935, she painted the poet Kenneth Fearing, framed by the el train and ghoulish commuters. But the young Neel hated Greenwich Village. As Mr. Als points out, she considered the neighborhood "honky tonk" and so with her lover, the musician Jose Santiago Negron, she moved into the first of several railroad apartments in Spanish Harlem, just off Central Park. The Zwirner show begins here, in the 1940s, when her portraits grow tighter and more acute, and her subjects grow more ethnically diverse. Horace R. Cayton, co author of the groundbreaking sociological study "Black Metropolis," sits pensively in a portrait from 1949, his skin lit into fulvous brown by sunlight from a single window. The next year Alice Childress, a playwright, sits by the same window, serene and satisfied, in a blue dress whose ruches Neel renders with fat black lines. Childress lived near Neel, on East 118th Street, and archival materials assembled by Mr. Als position both women's artistic practices in a larger uptown ecosystem in which Neel, who was white, figures as a full participant. A photograph of Puerto Rican community organizers includes Mercedes Arroyo, who sat for Neel in 1952, peering upward through big brown eyes. And long before the social critic Harold Cruse published his broadside "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual," Neel painted him in a baggy gray suit, with long, dainty fingers resting broodingly on his cheek. The painter and the critic probably met through political circles. Neel, though not a Communist Party member, was a lifelong leftist and was under F.B.I. surveillance for a spell. (In that poetic eulogy for Harlem she also wrote, "I love you for electing Marcaronio" a malapropism for Vito Marcantonio, the socialist who served 14 terms in the United States Congress as representative for East Harlem.) The Zwirner show includes Neel's well thumbed biography of Lenin, as well as an autographed book by W. E. B. Du Bois. Yet her gaze roamed past the uptown intelligentsia, onto her neighbors in Spanish Harlem. A boy named Georgie Arce, who used to run errands for Neel, appears here in four drawings and a constricted painting, his ruffled black hair set off by a hot pink background. Decades later, Arce would go to prison for murder absorbed, perhaps, by the violence that Childress described in her books and that Arroyo fought to expunge from El Barrio. But he is preserved here in Neel's hand, and in a sneering snapshot, a trace of a life not yet ground down. Neel spent the bulk of her mature career in two uptown apartments, one in El Barrio and the other in Morningside Heights, and Mr. Als has bisected his show accordingly. When she moved to the west side in 1962, Neel's paintings grew freer and nimbler, thanks partly to the copious light that flooded her new digs. (A good New York moral: Everything in the end comes down to real estate.) Neel in the 1960s began to employ broader strokes and bolder colors in her portraits, whether of the civil rights activist James Farmer or of an unnamed South Asian woman, a bindi on her forehead, her mauve sari covered with periwinkle rhombuses. But her increasingly free form style did not entail an escape from the people she lived among. Her portraits of black, Latino or Asian New Yorkers, quite unlike those of other midcentury leftist painters, were never exercises in social realism. They were something else: efforts to afford the same status and consideration to her neighbors that earlier portraitists reserved for popes and princes. Last Sunday, unseasonably warm, I moseyed through Central Park to see Neel's old neighborhoods. Her railroad apartment on 108th Street in Spanish Harlem is still there, and the bodega around the corner stocks both Goya canned foods and specialty yogurt from Iceland. From there I traveled up Fifth, away from the park and into gentrifying Harlem, up through steep Morningside Park, across the Columbia campus, and down to Neel's final apartment at the top of West End Avenue. Many of the tenements Neel and her sitters inhabited gave way to cruciform housing projects; others, more recently, have been replaced by cookie cutter condos. West Indians gossiping on their cellphones walked past white women in athleisure tights. A car blasting merengue did not disturb the crowds on St. Nicholas Avenue, happily queuing for brunch. Would Neel have made her career here today? She might be in Bushwick or, more likely, Berlin; the artist sold little during her career, and the government funding that sustained her at first will not come again, not when even the National Endowment for the Arts looks set for the chopping block. When I saw Mr. Als's exhibition a second time after touring Neel's Harlem, I found it even more nostalgic than before not only for the thriving culture of a certain New York, but for a time when artists could afford it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
new video loaded: An 'Awesome' View at America's First Offshore Wind Farm | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
LONDON At Bunga Bunga supper club, a sublimely ridiculous ode to Italian kitsch in Covent Garden, there's a speedboat turned table that seats 10, communal cocktails served from four foot high replicas of Michelangelo's David yes, the tap is that part of his anatomy and a Pompeii style fresco featuring cavorting nudes. Look closer at two of the faces in the orgy and they are the club's owners: Charlie Gilkes and Duncan Stirling. The mural's designer did it as a joke, but Mr. Gilkes, 33, and Mr. Stirling, 36, were sufficiently amused to let it stand. It's a fitting tribute to their growing domain, which includes seven boisterously decorated drinking dens frequented by young aristocrats (among them Prince William and Prince Harry) and celebrities (Jennifer Lawrence, Margot Robbie). "A question we ask a lot is, 'Can we do that or is it a bit Disney?'" Mr. Gilkes said. Even after drinking a Colosseum (about 160), a flaming spectacle of a drink that includes vodka, cherry liqueur and a bottle of prosecco, it would be hard to imagine any cartoon princess at Bunga Bunga, which is named for Silvio Berlusconi's infamous sex parties. Ditto at Maggie's, Mr. Gilkes and Mr. Stirling's Thatcher inspired den of 1980s disco, which offers drinks menus in the era's View Master toys, but also a young, glammed up Iron Lady look alike stripping down to her Union Jack sequined underwear. "There's nothing boring and tiring about these places because they don't take themselves terribly seriously," said Ben Elliot, a founder of the luxury concierge service Quintessentially, which recommends the clubs to its clients. Mr. Elliot, a nephew of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall is a fan of Maggie's, in particular, and not because at 16 he interviewed the just ousted prime minister for the Eton College magazine. "It doesn't matter if you're a future king of our country," Mr. Elliot said. "They've got a very equal way of treating people." Brimming with recommendations of places to visit in European cities and self deprecating anecdotes, Mr. Gilkes speaks noticeably slower when asked about his noble connections. He attended Eton with the princes, and he's often misidentified as a former boyfriend of his Edinburgh University classmate Pippa Middleton. ("No," he said flatly. "She is a friend.") "I think one thing as a business we've tried to do is not ever be about the people we know," he said. A publicist emailed to say that Ms. Lawrence has been in, but did not point out the appearance of Ms. Middleton or Princess Eugenie of York. both of whom attended Mr. Gilkes's 2014 wedding. Mr. Gilkes and Mr. Stirling, former rivals, began working together in 2003, after a bar where they both worked in promotion accidentally double booked them during the lucrative run up to Christmas. At the time, Mr. Gilkes was taking a gap year before college and Mr. Stirling was working for an events company. In short order they convinced a stuffy Sloane Square hotel to let them turn its basement into Kitts, the defunct nightclub where Kate Middleton celebrated her 26th birthday and Noel Gallagher, the lead signer of Oasis, his 40th. Instead of fighting the lack of natural light in a former air raid shelter in Soho, they kitted out a bar they named Cahoots like a World War II era London Underground station, complete with a tube carriage and ticket inspectors on the door. In 2014 Mr. Gilkes and Mr. Stirling took over the space of K Bar, the place that had double booked them 11 years before. And in 2015, on St. Martin's Lane in Covent Garden, they opened Mr. Fogg's Tavern, their second imagining of the Victorian pub that Jules Verne's adventurer Phileas Fogg might have returned to after his round the world in 80 days jaunt. (They already had a Mr. Fogg's Residence in Mayfair: a 19th century old boys' club with a hot air balloon in the corner and penny farthings above the bar.) "What's so remarkable and genius and fantastic is that whatever they do, you always want to stay for the whole night because the atmosphere allows you to be playful," said Alessandra Balazs, the daughter of the hotelier Andre Balazs, who went to the opening of Mr. Fogg's Residence her second night living in London. Though Ms. Balazs spoke for over 20 minutes about the partners, the most personal detail she let slip was that she trades texts with Mr. Gilkes about "bathroom porn"; there's a replica of the Trevi fountain in Bunga Bunga's and foreign policy speeches playing at Maggie's. Mr. Gilkes and Mr. Stirling share an exacting attention to detail and chose to sit facing the wall during an interview at Bunga Bunga so as not to be distracted with a to do list. The effort failed: a TV above the stage not angled just so and an unpainted curtain rail made Mr. Gilkes fidget. "It's killing me," he said. Not everything the pair has opened has been a success. There was the Studio 54 ish disco where, at the door, staff dressed like Pan Am stewardesses handed out boarding passes "from: London, UK to: Disco, Manhattan." And a Wyoming theme log cabin that served group pickleback shots on repurposed spinning wagon wheels. A recent foray into fast healthy food with the treehouse inspired Squirrel restaurant is proving trickier than a fad diet. "You don't make the margins on an avocado as you do on a bottle of vodka," Mr. Gilkes said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande have passed No. 1 on the Billboard chart to someone new: Hozier. Andrew Hozier Byrne, the Irish singer songwriter who performs as Hozier, has topped the latest chart with his second album, "Wasteland, Baby!" (Rubyworks/Columbia), which had the equivalent of 89,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen. Of that total, 75,000 were for sales of the full album, helped by a deal that bundled copies of the album with tickets for Hozier's latest tour. "Wasteland, Baby!" is Hozier's first No. 1. His last album, "Hozier," from 2014, reached as high as No. 2, and contained "Take Me to Church," which received a Grammy nomination for song of the year. (It lost out to Sam Smith's "Stay With Me.") Also this week, Grande's "Thank U, Next" holds at No. 2, and Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper's "A Star Is Born" soundtrack fell two spots to No. 3. Next are two new rap albums, with 2 Chainz's "Rap or Go to the League" opening at No. 4 and Lil Skies' "Shelby" starting at No. 5. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" soundtrack is No. 6, and Solange's new "When I Get Home" opened at No. 7. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Thomas Panek dreamed for years of running the way he did before he lost his sight, without fear and without a human or a dog tethered to his wrist as a guide. That dream took Panek, 50, to the north end of Central Park one frigid morning last month, to test drive something that might one day liberate thousands of other people with severely impaired vision. As a camera crew and a team of technologists made some final adjustments, he stood on the downslope of West Drive. He straddled a painted yellow line and waited for the signal to go. A little more than a year had passed since Panek delivered a challenge to a group of engineers at Google's Manhattan offices during a company hackathon. Could they develop a way for him to run by himself, with a clear sense of where he was going and without having to worry about hazards along the way? There had been other attempts to find technological solutions to this problem, but none of them completely untethered runners from their guides. Panek has retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic condition that causes the loss of photoreceptor cells. As a child, he lost the ability to see stars in the night sky. He was legally blind by young adulthood. To run blind, Panek said, is to always fear that you are about to slam your face into a tree. Panek, who lives in Westchester County, just north of New York City, loves to run with his guide dog, Blaze. But Blaze can't run faster than about a nine minute mile. "I'm a little faster than that," said Panek, who completed the 2015 Boston Marathon in 3 hours 42 minutes, with Scott Jurek, an ultramarathoner, guiding him. That translates to about an eight and half minute mile for the marathon, though Panek can go faster at shorter distances. By the end of that one day hackathon last year, the engineers had sketched a basic idea of a solution. They placed a line of masking tape on the floor and had Panek and his dog follow the line. Then the mission became devising an app that worked the same way as the dog, and, in the process, perhaps solving a problem for Panek and a lot of other people. "If you start with one person and their challenges, you can bring a great benefit for him and also people like him," said Ryan Burke, a leader at the Google Creative Lab. The National Federation of the Blind estimates that 7.6 million people in the United States have a visual impairment that requires them to use alternate means to engage in an activity that people with vision can do without assistance. The United States Association of Blind Athletes, which holds camps and regional competitions for people who are blind or visually impaired, has more than 700 members who could benefit from the technology Panek requested. Panek is chief executive of Guiding Eyes for the Blind, which provides guide dogs to people with severe vision loss. Three years ago, the organization began a program to train dogs as running guides, and since then has provided dogs to 75 runners. In a typical year, more than 50 blind runners complete the California International Marathon with guides; 53 runners who identified themselves as having a vision impairment finished the New York City Marathon in 2019. Many others ran shorter races. Dror Ayalon, a creative technologist on the project inspired by Panek's challenge, said a plan became clear fairly quickly. A crew would paint a yellow line for Panek to follow throughout a race. He would strap a phone with a camera and the newly devised app to his midsection, and the camera would track the yellow line on the ground. The app would take information from the camera and convey vibrating signals through a headset. As Panek ran, the signals would tell him how to adjust his steps to stay on the line. Signals in the right ear meant he was wandering too far to his right, and vice versa. Another signal would help him navigate a turn when the camera spotted the line curving. Software programs used for video game design helped the app learn to interpret the images from the camera. The work became more complicated when engineers began to consider all the things that might interfere with tracking a line on pavement that a runner would be trying to follow while carrying a phone. The camera was going to shake constantly. The sunlight would change, making a yellow line look different at noon from the way it did at dawn. And what would happen when leaves blew onto the line, covering a part of it? Would the app interpret that break in the line as a parked car, and signal the runner to stop? "We take examples and feed them into the model, classifying the pixels as one class and everything else as not in the class," Ayalon said, referring to obstacles that might block the view of the line. "The model learns over time." So does the runner. Panek tested the technology for months over short distances, slowly gaining confidence, learning to trust the directional messages in his ears. Then, in November, it was time for a 5 kilometer run. "Liberation is a huge motivation," he said, "the idea of being self reliant." Working with New York Road Runners, the organizer of the New York City Marathon, technologists received permission to paint their yellow line around the north loop of Central Park, a 1.42 mile circle that includes the climb known as Harlem Hill. Despite the cold, Panek wore short sleeves. He has the wiry build of a veteran runner. The only hint of his sight loss is that his eyes sometimes appear to focus in different directions. But he adeptly compensates, following a voice and picking up on people's unique sounds, looking toward them as he talks. As noon approached, he was ready to run. "Let's go," he said when it was time. A starter told him to go, and he was off. He sprinted downhill toward his first turn as though he knew where he was headed. And then, about a minute in, the voice in Panek's headset as well as everyone around him told him to stop. A car from the Parks and Recreation Department was parked on the line. And off he went. Except for a few stutter steps as he rounded the first corners, he pounded the line with confidence, rarely drifting more than a few inches from it on either side. For the first time in decades, Panek was running the way he did as a child. He crossed the finish line. An official from the running organization draped a medal around his neck. "Perfect," Panek said of the run. "It was just perfect." It's unclear where the technology goes from here. Engineers still have some kinks to work out. It would help if the app could navigate around a parked car. But once it can, park officials anywhere might be persuaded to paint yellow lines marking loops for blind runners on routes that are free of cars, allowing them to run freely and safely. Perhaps one day, after the app can learn how to follow a yellow line that is partly covered by discarded paper cups, blind runners may be able to run an official 5K, or even a marathon. "There's that blue line on the New York City Marathon route," Panek said, referring to the race's signature marking of the 26.2 mile route. "Maybe one day we'll be able to get our own yellow line, too." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
EVEN within the rarefied region of brownstone Brooklyn, where landmark protections abound and residents speak of vintage cornices in the same knowing manner they discuss artisanal cheeses, the low rise streetscape of Cobble Hill is distinctive for its consistently intimate 19th century feel. At the neighborhood's heart, the serene green wedge of Cobble Hill Park is flanked on the north by period town houses and on the south by one of the sweetest ensembles in New York, a row of two and a half and three story brick dwellings that seem scarcely larger than dollhouses. On the secluded block of Warren Place, two rows of 11 foot wide brick homes, built in 1879 as affordable housing, face each other across a garden with a splashing iron fountain. On Kane Street, a picturesquely battered pulley is suspended above the hayloft door of a restored carriage house. Like Brooklyn Heights, its more storied neighbor to the north, Cobble Hill is one of the borough's oldest neighborhoods, and most of its blocks lie within a historic district. Yet it has few high rises and little of the workday crush one encounters on commercial blocks north of Atlantic Avenue. "I get calls all the time from people asking me if the old neighborhood still looks the same," said Roy Sloane, the president of the Cobble Hill Association, who has lived on Pacific Street since the 1970s, "and I say: 'It looks more the same. It's getting more intact, not less intact.' " As an example, Mr. Sloane cited three nearby town houses, long ago refaced with simulated masonry, whose original stoops were lopped off. "Now," he said, "two of them have had new owners come in who chipped off the PermaStone and either returned it to brick or did a really nice new brownstone job, and they've returned the stoops." A short subway ride from Wall Street and occupying some 21 blocks, Cobble Hill has in recent years sustained an influx of buyers from Manhattan. The holy grail for these new arrivals, brokers say, is the neighborhood's archetypal structure: the 19th century single family town house, which often costs upward of 3 million. But since few such houses come on the market, buyers have taken to acquiring and reconfiguring multifamily brownstones. "These were built originally as one family houses," said Gigi Zimmerman, the sales director of Brownstone Real Estate, "and after having spent generations as two , three and four family houses, we're now seeing them converted back. We're seeing people buying multifamilies for their own use and converting them, and we're seeing people buying multifamilies to convert back into one families and flipping them." For Julia and John Mack, an interior designer and an architect, transforming a subdivided town house offered the opportunity to push one another creatively. "It's good for our design, and good for our marriage," Ms. Mack said. Last year, after a decade living in a town house on Baltic Street with their two children, the couple paid 1.965 million for a high stooped four family brownstone on Strong Place. "The house was not love at first sight," Ms. Mack said, citing the "pink whirlpool bathtub on the parlor floor." But the place had "good bones," and they had a vision for it. Because the house is only a touch over 17 feet wide, the couple gave it a sense of volume and light by reinforcing the parlor floor ceiling with steel and removing the wall that separated the room from the stair hall. "It gives you a view of both the front and back windows," she said, "and we continued that concept on the two floors above. I feel it's really breathing fresh air into these houses to redo them in a contemporary way; it takes the 'stodgy' out of living in an old house." The Cobble Hill Association, a civic group founded in 1958, defines the neighborhood's borders as essentially identical to those of its historic district: Atlantic Avenue on the north, Degraw Street on the south, Hicks Street on the west, and Court Street on the east. Some argue that Smith Street rather than Court marks the dividing line between Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill. In 2010, 78 percent of the area's 7,162 residents were white, 9 percent Hispanic, 5 percent black and 6 percent Asian, according to data provided by Susan Weber Stoger, a Queens College demographer. From 2000 to 2010, the median value of owner occupied housing units rose by a third, to top 1 million. Although architecturally cohesive, Cobble Hill is far from homogeneous. Interspersed with the brownstones are various beguiling 19th century structures, like Victorian schoolhouses and Gothic Revival churches, some of them condominiums or co ops. One of the more unusual complexes is Cobble Hill Towers, a recently converted condo comprising nine six story red brick buildings along Warren and Baltic Streets and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Built in the 1870s to provide "improved dwellings for the laboring classes," the Dickensian looking walk ups have airy units, exterior bluestone staircases and handsome ironwork. One new resident is Caroline Sinders, a photographer and graduate student, who fell in love with Cobble Hill while strolling its leafy streets during trips to a music theater in nearby Red Hook. "I had no idea this magical land existed," she said, noting how the neighborhood's palpable sense of history reminded her of New Orleans, her hometown. "Years ago I was walking around and I took a picture of the sign at Cobble Hill Towers and said, 'One day I'm going to live there,' " she recalled. In August her prediction came true. With help from her parents, Ms. Sinders paid 462,500 for an 800 square foot two bedroom condo, which she shares with a roommate. Their living room faces a former church, also a condo, while her bedroom overlooks her complex's grassy courtyard and wisteria covered gazebo. "We have these beautiful fire escapes," she said, adding that "the cat and I" have just enough lounging room. "I love sitting out there because there are always children playing." Inventory is low, which brokers say has been pushing up prices. Rod Murray, a senior vice president of Halstead Property in Cobble Hill, said a search of the Real Estate Board of New York database showed only seven town house sales in Cobble Hill this year. Single family homes ranged from 2.6 million, for a 15 foot wide house, to 4.375 million for a 25 foot wide building, he said; the range for multifamily homes was 2.5 million to 2.95 million. Condos typically range from 650 to 850 per square foot, according to Ms. Zimmerman. An exception, she said, is the Landmark at Strong Place, a converted church, where condos have sold for close to 1,000 a square foot. Units in Cobble Hill Towers, 35 percent of them sold, are commanding 500 to 600 per square foot, according to David Kramer, a principal of the Hudson Companies, the condominium's developer. Co ops are selling from 850 to 950 per square foot, Mr. Murray said. A search on Streeteasy.com found 47 places for sale, 6 of them town houses. Mr. Murray estimates that sales this year have taken 30 to 60 days; last year they took 60 to 90. Two bedrooms in wide brownstones rent for 3,500 to 4,000 a month, he said. The area has such a variety of spots to eat, drink, shop and photograph that Ms. Sinders sometimes doesn't venture elsewhere for days. When she needs material for her design and fashion blog, Cellar Paper, she grabs her camera and heads to Cafe Pedlar on Court Street, where "there are a lot of fashionable young ladies wearing really interesting outfits." Although elegant arrivals like the Chocolate Room have invigorated Court Street, the strip retains its small town aura, with family owned stalwarts like Jim and Andy's market, a sliver of a shop where produce is still weighed on hanging Detecto scales. Smith Street's restaurant row, with boutiques like Bird, offers an eclectic nightlife. The Pier 6 playground, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, has filled a need, although broken swings and a damaged surface have become an issue. Public School 29 on Henry Street serves kindergarten through fifth grade and received a C on its most recent city progress report. The Brooklyn Secondary School for Collaborative Studies, in Carroll Gardens, teaches Grades 6 through 12. It earned an A on its reports; SAT averages in 2011 were 371 in reading, 362 in math, and 369 in writing, versus 436, 460 and 431 citywide. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We're all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. Stephen Colbert opened "The Late Show" with a somber, emotional speech on Thursday, accusing President Trump of trying to "poison American democracy" with his lies about the vote count and evidence free claims that the election was being stolen. "By the way, if Donald Trump is right if Joe Biden did pull the strings behind the scenes in Republican states like Arizona and Georgia while coordinating with Democratic states like Pennsylvania and Nevada and Wisconsin and Michigan and throwing in the red herring of letting the Republicans keep the Senate and gain a few seats in the House while just barely removing Donald Trump wow!" Colbert said. "I mean, kudos to that level of interstate coordination. I mean, anyone who could accomplish that many things at once right now really would be the president we need during a global pandemic." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
THE YEARS, MONTHS, DAYS Two Novellas By Translated by Carlos Rojas. 192 pp. Black Cat. Paper, 16. The first Chinese recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize and a frequent target of government censorship, the novelist creates imaginary wounds in real blood. Yan was born in Henan province in 1958, and his childhood coincided with the worst years of the Great Leap Forward, when China's rush toward modernity thrust millions into biblical level famine and privation. (His mother, Yan later recalled, was forced to teach him the most edible forms of bark and clay.) As his translator, Carlos Rojas, explains in his introduction, these experiences profoundly marked Yan's sensibility. Yan has called his style "mythorealism." His books read like the brutal folklore history couldn't bear to remember, and his characters feel stranded, forgotten by time. "The Years, Months, Days," the first of the two novellas collected in this volume, begins with an arresting line: "In the year of the great drought, time was baked to ash." Set after a mass migration, the story has three major characters: a 72 year old man known as the Elder, a sun blinded dog and a cornstalk. The minimal staging recalls a Beckett play. Like Beckett's most memorable characters, the Elder is drawn from a long tradition of absurdist sages, barely lucid but often wise. He talks to his dog, weighs sunlight on a scale and waters the cornstalk with his own urine. The Elder's world is nauseatingly vivid, reminiscent of the too sharp smells and sounds associated with a migraine. When he licks the powder from a flour jug, "the pure white taste of wheat" blossoms in his mouth. When the sun is at its height, he hears his hair burning. Desolation has rarely seemed so sensual, so insistently alive. In chronicling with extraordinary sensitivity the suffering of an ordinary man, Yan forces us to pay attention. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Investors are bracing for a return to volatility when markets in the United States reopen on Tuesday as renewed gloom about the debt crisis in Europe threatens to end the calm that has prevailed on Wall Street in recent weeks. "We've had a lull, but I expect the pressure to start growing again with a renewed round of financial market agitation," said Charles Wyplosz, a professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. "There will be a renewed sense of emergency, which doesn't make for clearer thinking." Late last week, Standard Poor's cut its ratings on shaky borrowers like Italy and Spain and stripped France of its once sterling AAA debt rating. On Monday, it followed up with another downgrade, this time on a bailout fund aimed at shoring up weaker members of the euro zone. The rating on the European Financial Stability Facility was lowered to AA from AAA, and S. P. warned that more cuts could come if Europe failed to address its worsening fiscal situation. Klaus Regling, chief executive of the facility, said the downgrade of the fund by a single agency would not reduce its lending capacity of 440 billion euros ( 556 billion). The fund "has sufficient means to fulfill its commitments" until a permanent fund, the European Stability Mechanism, starts operating in July, he said. Anxiety is also building over the fate of the country hardest hit by the European debt crisis, Greece. Representatives of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund resume negotiations with the Greek government Wednesday over the next step in a planned 130 billion euro bailout, even as they try to force hedge funds and other private holders of Greek bonds to accept large losses to make the country's debt burden more manageable. If Athens cannot secure concessions from the bondholders or the bailout money it needs from the so called troika in the coming weeks, Greece could default by March 20, when 14.5 billion euros in debt comes due and must be repaid. The specter of a disorderly default, rather than the voluntary losses now being negotiated, unnerved stock markets around the world last fall and could prompt renewed selling now. The next several weeks bring what are shaping up to be a series of turning points on both sides of the Atlantic. Even as the negotiations in Greece proceed, several debt sales by other European borrowers this week should provide clues to how seriously investors are taking the recent warnings by S. P. and other ratings agencies. Highlighting the political stakes, European leaders are set to gather for a summit meeting in Brussels on Jan. 30. Investors had hoped for more clarity on Greece's fate before they gathered, but that is looking much less likely, said Julian Callow, chief European economist at Barclays. What is more, Italy has 26 billion euros in debt coming due on Feb. 1, putting additional pressure on European leaders to reassure nervous markets. In the first test of investors' appetite for debt since the broader downgrade, France sold 8.6 billion euros ( 10.9 billion) of short term debt securities on Monday at yields slightly lower than in the previous auction. The yields on the country's 10 year bonds had fallen 0.04 percentage point by late afternoon, to 3.011 percent. The stability facility is set to auction bills Tuesday, while Spain and Portugal have debt sales later in the week, all of which will be closely watched by investors, said Ron Florance, the managing director for investment strategy at Wells Fargo Private Bank. "Everyone is just kind of holding their breath to see how these auctions go," Mr. Florance said. "Investors are just going to have to be able to ride through the volatility; it's going to be bumpy." Since late November, Wall Street has taken a more optimistic turn, with the Dow Jones industrial average rising by more than 1,000 points, to close at 12,422.06 on Friday. Signs of improvement in the job market have led some observers to conclude that what had been a very anemic recovery in the United States might be finally gathering some steam. But if the European banking system seizes up and economies in the region go into a steep recession, the chances that United States can insulate itself are slim, analysts said. "It seems pretty clear to me that once Europe reaches a tipping point, nowhere else in the world can decouple," said Benjamin Bowler, global head of equity derivatives research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. In addition to the news from Europe, American markets will also be affected by earnings news as large companies report their fourth quarter results, including several financial companies over the next few days. Citigroup and Wells Fargo will announce earnings on Tuesday, with Goldman Sachs reporting on Wednesday and Bank of America on Thursday. Slow capital markets activity is expected to weaken profits across the board, but analysts will be looking for clues about the health of consumer spending and corporate borrowing in the latest results. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Bella Thorne, the 21 year old ex Disney star, Instagram provocateur, cat enthusiast, weed entrepreneur, porn director and fanatical crafter, wanted more glitter. She yanked a length of sparkling pink yarn around a wooden shuttle and wove it back and forth across a loom. A videographer she brought along traced the zigzag movement, but Ms. Thorne would never post this to Instagram. Her 21.3 million followers don't go for arts and crafts. They would never appreciate it, she said, switching from pink yarn to purple fluff: "Like, I ain't even giving it to you, like, it's too good for you." Ms. Thorne was at the Weaving Hand, a small weaving studio and "healing arts center" in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. A publicist had insisted that she wanted to learn weaving. "My mind is a little mentally distorted right now," she said in voice as creaky as a haunted house staircase. And she had already cried twice that day, she said: once on Howard Stern's radio show and again in the car after. She wrested a palette from her makeup artist, kicked off her periwinkle stilettos and took a seat. Her affect was half brassy, half fragile, heavy on the id. Red hair flared across her shoulders. Her white tank top rode low. A nipple attempted to free itself. Ms. Thorne, who grew up in Los Angeles and still lives there, had flown to New York City in late July to promote her book, "Life of a Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray," a thin volume of prose poetry and sketches. She had written the acrostics and epigrams ("fall fast not easily") in two weeks, she said, between calls to set on "Paradise City," a television thriller. The poems meditate on her father's death, the sexual molestation she said she endured as a child, her struggles with depression. She said that she was gunning for the best seller list. She also said that her publisher, Rare Bird Books, had left out several key pages and messed up the order of the poems. A model since she was 6 weeks old and a Disney Channel child actress (she starred opposite Zendaya in the tween buddy comedy "Shake It Up"), Ms. Thorne is now a multihyphenate artist and an online sensation. Her polyamorous love life is covered obsessively in the tabloids. So are her feuds with exes and celebrities, like Whoopi Goldberg . She is purposefully uncensored: she tweeted her own nude photos to thwart a hacker (that's what riled Ms. Goldberg), she came out as "pansexual" on "Good Morning America," she directed a pornographic movie for PornHub. Last year, she told a camera crew from Vogue that she can earn as much as 65,000 for a social media post. She bought a 2 million house in Sherman Oaks, Calif., with those earnings, and when break ins and paparazzi made her feel unsafe, she bought another one. "When did I move?" she asked her manager, as she tied off some thread. "Right after Coachella," he said, barely looking up from his phone. Cynthia Alberto, the owner of the weaving studio, introduced her to the tabletop loom, a wooden contraption about the size of a typewriter, and had her select several spools of yarn. Ms. Thorne grabbed some pink yarn and began to weave, yanking the thread tight. "Give yourself some slack," Ms. Alberto said. Ms. Thorne appreciated the metaphor. "I've got a tattoo on my knee, 'Just let go,' and then I've got 'Hang on for dear life' on my shin," she said. "This is going to relax you," Ms. Alberto said. Over the next half hour, as she spoke emphatically and profanely about other craft projects (a "weird human sculpture" made of broken Polaroid cameras) and how much she wanted pizza, a fuzzy tapestry emerged. "This is amazing," she said. It moved Ms. Thorne to think about her own patterns. "I think of Bella Thorne sometimes as just some character that I'm playing," she said. "But then again, I'm so honestly myself, that what is this character?" It's a character people misunderstand. "Why does everybody think I'm such a party girl, literally like what is going on here?" she said. Sure, she'll go to Chili's and have a dirty martini and yes, she'll smoke some weed, and yes, she likes beer. But that's it, she said. "I get it," she said. "I'm an attractive person. But like, I got a lot to offer over here, bro. I am empathetic." She is "deep," she said, and "smart. I am cautious. I can be manipulative if I want to. I've got layers, bro. Like, I'm an onion. Peel me, bro." Her assistant, a waifish young man with bleached hair, sent on a snack run, returned with jalapeno chips and a couple of smoothies. "I told you I wanted pizza," she said, whining. "I'm very hungry. And if I faint or throw up, it's not going to be good." The assistant left again. "My anxiety is really bad," Ms. Thorne said. "Is this relaxing you?" Ms. Alberto said, cooling her with a rattan fan. "Yeah, it does, actually," she said. "I like making pretty things. Can I do little bows?" She ended the call just as her assistant reappeared with pizza, one slice loaded with buffalo chicken, another covered in jalapenos. She took a few bites, washing them down with soda, and belching unapologetically. "This is so good," she said. After pizza, Ms. Alberto displayed her tapestry: a ragged fluff of pink, black, purple and red. Ms. Thorne seemed pleased, a lot less unsettled than when the lesson began. She decided to buy the 160 loom, so she could bring it to the set of her next show. "There's just never enough time to do anything," she said. "I just want so many things done. And there's so many things to do. I want them all." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The emerald hedgerows that are a natural euphemism for Hamptons exclusivity (out here, good hedges, not good fences, make for felicitous neighbors) are hanging tight. Most of the double decker dunes that define the East End's ocean coastline are hanging tight, too. That unfortunately can't be said for patches of Long Island, Fire Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, where the extraordinary weather events of autumn 2012 transformed undulating beaches and waterfront homes to sodden pancakes. On the South Fork of Long Island, where the array of villages and hamlets includes Southampton, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor and Montauk, agents and town officials say only one home, owned by the Lauder family and precariously perched at water's edge in Wainscott, drowned in the maelstrom created by Hurricane Sandy. But erosion is a perennial enemy, and efforts to rebuff it, continual. Otherwise, it's back to business bolstering the bulkheads and merchandising the seductive strata of housing stock (from darling shingled cottages to resorts masquerading as mansions), with brokers forecasting yet another pricey summer season. "Nobody really suffers from Hamptons sticker shock anymore," said Judi Desiderio, the founder of Town and Country Real Estate. Harald Grant, a senior vice president of Sotheby's International Realty, has already rented out an oceanfront house in Southampton for 550,000 for the month of August alone and has a stack of 14 contracts and purchase memos on his desk representing pending sales of 4.5 million to 25 million. Not to worry: the most expensive oceanfront property in the Hamptons, on East Hampton's Lily Pond Lane and co listed by Tim Davis of the Corcoran Group and Diane Saatchi of Saunders Associates, is still available for 40 million. For high rolling renters, Mr. Grant has a trio of oceanfront rentals in Southampton that can be had for the summer for 400,000, 600,000 or 800,000. Why pay 25 million to buy, and more to maintain, a summer getaway when you can rent and run? Or, for a million or so, you can rent year round. "But in general what's different this season," Mr. Grant said, "is that in the mind of most buyers, less is more, and nobody wants to be the king of the hill and flaunt their wealth the way people were doing before the recession. "Folks who spent 20,000 for a month's rental," he continued, "may be looking to spend 15,000. Folks who could be driving a Rolls Royce are settling for a Mercedes. People aren't saying, 'I have to have it; I'll pay anything,' and writing checks on the spot. An owner who says, 'I want 32 million for my oceanfront house' probably isn't going to get it. He'll get somewhere in the mid 20s." But only if the house has a pool, a tennis court and central air conditioning; just being oceanfront isn't enough anymore. "I just sold a wonderful house for 2.9 million in Southampton Village," Mr. Grant said. "Five bedrooms, five bathrooms and a pool on half an acre. My clients would have liked a tennis court, but instead of spending 5 million, they scaled back a bit and they're happy and comfortable with that decision." Mr. Davis, of Corcoran, found a 1.75 million mini estate on 1.7 acres near Little Peconic Bay in Southampton for Barry LePatner, a Manhattan lawyer, and his wife, Marla Tomazin, an image consultant, after they told him they were looking for a private spot with year round proximity to the city and great curb appeal. "We wanted to find a house that made us happy and excited to see it every time we pulled into the driveway," Mr. LePatner said. It wasn't an easy search, until Mr. Davis remembered a house he had listed a few years back at what he thought was an exorbitant price. It hadn't sold, and he no longer had the listing. But when he approached the owners, who were eager to retire to Florida, they were open to an offer. "We loved the house the minute we saw it," Mr. LePatner said. "It had great trees, a great big garden, a pool, and I never imagined I'd be able to buy a second home with a tennis court." (He plays.) "The icing on the cake," he continued, "was that we got a 15 year fixed mortgage at 2.8 percent, and on Jan. 9 we closed. The timing was just right maybe if you bought out here in 2006 you made a big mistake and paid too much, but Tim assured us there was no way we'd lose out buying at this price in a rising market." In a departure from years past, Ms. Desiderio said, 6 of the 10 most expensive Hamptons homes to sell in 2012 were inland. There, the pastoral and pristine prevailed. But for a few extra leaves in the swimming pool, the landlocked housing stock survived the meteorological dramas of last fall mostly unscathed. "Waterfront properties," she continued, "are always sought after, but it's probably safe to say that waterfront with elevation is becoming more important. Maybe that's the new value that's priceless." There is even opportunity for water lovers who aren't billionaires. The oceanfront sales listings at the Corcoran Group start at 249,000 (a co op in Westhampton). "Prices have not gone down in the first two months of this year," said Ernest Cervi, an executive managing director of Corcoran, "and the median price of our rentals actually increased 21 percent over this same time last year." This being the Hamptons, and the clientele being a tad demanding, properties that aren't technically in the supply chain are also in play. "People are always looking to buy things that aren't available," Mr. Cervi said. "I just reviewed the paperwork on the sale of a waterfront home in Water Mill that hadn't even been listed for sale. But when somebody wants to give you 11.5 million in the middle of the winter, sometimes you listen." According to John Gicking, a vice president and brokerage manager of Sotheby's East Hampton office, "The luxury property sales, which to us means 10 million and over, went up 60 percent in the last year, and we're also seeing a lot of private sales, where we're asked to market properties quietly and make discreet inquiries. "Montauk is scorching hot, already 95 percent rented," said James Young, a principal of Rosehip, a brokerage that also operates HamptonsRentals.com, which offers season long rentals ranging from 17,000 to 95,000. Last summer, Rosehip set a company record with a 375,000 oceanfront Montauk rental. Paul Brennan, of Douglas Elliman Real Estate's Bridgehampton office, agreed that Montauk is the cutting edge destination of an increasingly wealthy, and youthful, subset of Hamptons habitues. "We've already done 10 Montauk deals from this office," he said, "because people are coming out, looking around, and migrating out there because they see it as the last bastion of the way it was in the old days before everything was gentrified and Ralph Lauren ed out. Montauk is definitely percolating. Luckily for folks who like it the way it is, the land is 70 percent reserve." So it won't become a second Sagaponack, the no man's land of potato fields that morphed into an elite pumpkin patch of hedge fund managers' McMansions. "I can count 10 spec houses priced at 15 million or more sitting there waiting to be sold," Mr. Brennan said of Sagaponack, which also has the region's most expensive non oceanfront property: a 33 acre estate on Sagg Pond that belongs to Robert Hurst, a former Goldman Sachs executive. It went on the market in June and at last glance was still asking 65 million. "When I started out in this business three decades ago," Ms. Desiderio said, "you couldn't give the dirt away in Sagaponack south. It was flat, barren land, not one green twig. Now it's a lushly landscaped, beautiful area, but it's an area where prices inexcusably doubled between 2005 and 2007, loaded up with Bear Stearns and Lehman dice. Then the bottom fell out." Christopher Peluso, a developer who has built houses on speculation in the 8 million to 12 million bracket in Water Mill, Southampton and Bridgehampton, has carved out his own niche in the marketplace by offering fully furnished properties. "Everything that gets built out here sells eventually," he said, adding that buyers are sophisticated and quick to spot flaws. "These trophy properties are a personal statement for them," he said, "but one thing they all want, even with a traditional shingled exterior, is modern amenities. They don't want to feel like they're at their grandmother's beach house. They want bright, modern and airy. They want the space to flow for entertaining. They want every bedroom to have an en suite bath. Shared bathrooms have gone the way of the dodo bird; no one shares a bathroom in the Hamptons unless they're under the age of 3. Amenities that used to be considered upgrades, now everybody wants them." The record price for a house remains the 60 million paid in 2008 for 108 Gin Lane in Southampton, but not every buyer operates on an elastic budget. Still, median home prices in Amagansett, another spot where 2013 summer rentals are already scarce, rose 22 percent to 1.8 million last year. And East Hampton Village raised the bar in every category. It accounted for 6 of the 10 most expensive sales, had an average sale price of 3 million, and was home to 10 of the 33 sales recorded in the 10 million and over range. It exudes the quintessence of desirability. So snagging a deal in or near the village can be cause for euphoria. Steve Cohen and his partner, who share an Upper West Side apartment with their 2 year old daughter and a dog, had convinced themselves they wanted a charming century old Hamptons fixer upper. But after spending most of last year looking for the right place at the right price 1.5 million or less they wound up buying a 1986 colonial on the fringes of East Hampton Village that they had seen and rejected at the beginning of their search. "When we first saw this home we were in and out in like two minutes," acknowledged Mr. Cohen, a broker with the Corcoran Group in New York City. "It was yellow, it was blah, wasn't an antique, wasn't for us. "But," he continued, "after a year of being educated as to what else was out there, we realized we'd totally misjudged it: here was a house with great bones in a great neighborhood within walking distance of the playground and the village, and almost unbelievably, the price had been reduced. It's like it was waiting for us; it was meant to be." They paid 1.275 million, closed on Dec. 24, and are in the midst of renovations. "We feel like we got in before the market took off again," Mr. Cohen said. They have a good excuse for feeling that way: in early March, they received a call from their home's listing broker, Ms. Saatchi of Saunders Associates. She had received an offer on their house for considerably more than they had paid, and asked if they were interested in selling. Negative. They're busy moving in and making it their own. "For years," Ms. Saatchi said, "time was on the buyers' side. They would look and look and from one visit to the next, prices would go down and inventory up. Now, waiting is starting to mean higher prices and fewer choices. As in the city, we're running out of prime inventory." As for the perpetually picturesque waterfront, buyers with 20 million to spend are showing no post Sandy qualms about securing the totemic Hamptons trophy: a south of the highway oceanfront estate with all the trimmings of a five star resort. But the Montauk Highway is losing its traditional role as the great divider. Alec Baldwin and Paul McCartney could live anywhere in Amagansett, said Arlene Reckson, a broker with Corcoran's Amagansett office, but both settled north of the highway. "The action is brisk right now on both sides of the highway," she said. "People want to buy now and be in for the summer. This quarter is a barometer for the way the rest of the year is going to go." The next time the sales market heats up, she predicted, will be at summer's end: "It will happen in September, when nobody wants to leave." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In a city famous for its architectural landmarks, the Godfrey Hotel is one of Chicago's newest. Opened in February 2014 in a recently constructed 16 story building designed by the local architecture firm Valerio Dewalt Train, the upscale hotel boasts a Cubist inspired facade and a marble clad elliptical lobby. The modern design aesthetic extends to the 221 rooms and suites, many of which have skyline views. A youthful atmosphere pervades the stylish hotel, as evidenced by the high energy music playing in the lobby day and night. North of the Loop in the River North neighborhood, the hotel's central location is a short walk from Michigan Avenue's Magnificent Mile. The area has a high concentration of art galleries, and lots of restaurants, bars and night life. The closest train station is four blocks away. Spacious enough to host a small yoga class, my fifth floor room was an expanse of gray carpet beneath two queen size beds flanked by leather benches, a long desk with a flat screen TV and ample work space, and a fuzzy plum colored chair. A wet bar was stocked with Red Bull, Absolut vodka, Voss water and a sealed plastic cup of red wine. The room overlooked the terrace restaurant and bar, which seemed at odds with my request for a quiet location. Even earplugs were no match for the bass heavy club music that thumped until the early morning hours. Another unwelcome surprise was a soiled rag that appeared on the desk after the room cleaning, a service that took place in the afternoon on the second day only after a call to reception. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In this week's issue, Clyde Haberman reviews Mitchell Zuckoff's "Fall and Rise." Fourteen years ago, David Margolick reviewed Zuckoff's "Ponzi's Scheme," an account of the life of Charles Ponzi, for the Book Review. There is another particular subtlety to the classic Ponzi scheme: Not just anyone can pull one off; doing so requires cleverness, charm and charisma. That all these the original Ponzi had aplenty is clear from "Ponzi's Scheme," Mitchell Zuckoff's entertaining portrait of the dapper rogue who persuaded 30,000 people, Bostonians and others, many of them Italian immigrants like Ponzi himself, to entrust him with their hard earned, pre inflationary dollars. Ponzi's investors, it turned out, were not the only dreamers; so, too, was Ponzi himself. Never did he think he was doing anything wrong. Always, he thought he would find a way out of his fix, a way to make everyone whole: taking over a bank, buying into a macaroni company, turning much of the American freight and passenger fleet from World War I into his very own steamship line. With all of its pejorative connotations, "Ponzi scheme" may actually be a bit unfair to Ponzi, conjuring up someone who was more mendacious and greedy than the real Ponzi actually was. Zuckoff, who teaches journalism at Boston University, tells Ponzi's story amicably and briskly, and keeps the complicated financial intricacies understandable. There are occasional bad puns and tortured metaphors, as well as periodic digressions that seem like padding. More serious is his excessive reliance on Ponzi's autobiography. Since so little else of what Ponzi said can be believed, why trust his own version of events? The answer, of course, is that it's just so colorful. Even from his pauper's grave, it seems, Charles Ponzi is still working his charms. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
On a drizzly Monday afternoon in August, the actress, director and producer Mary Stuart Masterson scrubbed homegrown beets in the kitchen of her home in the Hudson Valley. The beets were enormous, the size of softballs, but she loved the leaves best: sauteed with oil and garlic and finished with ponzu sauce. "My kids don't eat them," she said with a sigh. "But they do eat borscht. They like pureed things. Squeezles!" This, her family's name for those ubiquitous fruit and veggie pouches. It's been 30 years since Ms. Masterson played Watts, a pioneering character of gender nonconformity or what used to be known as a tomboy in "Some Kind of Wonderful" and almost five since she decamped to the countryside from Brooklyn. She moved there with her third husband, Jeremy Davidson, an actor, and their four children, ages 4 to 7, fueled by the now common urban dream of living off the land. They live in a cozy, ramshackle house, just off the roadside in a town that Ms. Masterson would rather not specify, lest overzealous fans hunt her down. There she has learned less about self sufficiency than the importance of community and connection. "I had a lot of attention very young," said Ms. Masterson, who had her first cinematic role at age 8 in "The Stepford Wives." "It just became part of my norm to be unfindable, ungettable and private. I've always been such an individualist, and learning to have roots is something that's coming to me later in life." A kind of pioneer wife among the late John Hughes's many muses a group that includes Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy and others Ms. Masterson now grows a lot of food in her backyard, including grapes and spotted trout lettuce, and plans to raise chickens. She recently installed two beehives on her 14 acre property to keep the family literally in honey. "I've always wanted bees, but ever since 'Fried Green Tomatoes' I've felt like a sham," she said, referring to her role as the "bee charmer" Idgie Threadgoode. She befriended the owners of Sawkill Farm in nearby Red Hook, N.Y., and bought from them a sheep's wool throw. (It cushions a hanging Serena Lily rattan chair "a splurge" which is her favorite seat in the house.) She and Mr. Davidson also started a theater company, which stages multimedia readings based on local stories. And last year, she started a pair of initiatives to turn the area into a television production hub that employs local residents: a would be Hollywood in the Hudson Valley. "Quite honestly, when you talk to most rank and file union members, they'll tell you that they can't afford to raise a family inside the zone," Ms. Masterson said, referring to the 30 mile radius from Columbus Circle over which film and TV trade unions have jurisdiction. "I have four kids. I can't afford it. So it's not like I'm unique. I love the city. I grew up there. But I actually want to raise my kids and be part of their lives." In late 2016 and early 2017 she accepted, with reservations, a few appearances on the CBS crime procedural "NCIS," which shot in Los Angeles, but she turned down a TV show in Vancouver. These days, even the three hour commute to New York City, which Ms. Masterson is currently making for a recurring role on the NBC drama "Blindspot," has begun to feel wearisome. And so she founded Stockade Works, a nonprofit work training program for local residents, and Stockade Studios, a for profit production company. The nonprofit trains residents in "below the line" production work, from lighting to set design. Its locus will be a warehouse in Kingston, N.Y., that Ms. Masterson is renovating into a film and technology hub, complete with dine in movie theater, modest soundstage and postproduction space. She led a letter writing campaign of A list actors and producers who have residences in the Hudson Valley to secure tax breaks and hopes to lure major network shows by building a bigger soundstage: 200,000 square feet. Ms. Masterson led many of the sessions, imparting basic industry knowledge, like the fact that "lunch" on set is exactly six hours from call time even if call is at 3 in the morning. The goal of the project, she said, is to combat the rampant "nepotism" in her industry (she herself is the daughter of the actor and director Peter Masterson) and encourage more women, minorities and the economically disadvantaged, and so she is working with local vocational schools and community colleges. A welder, she said, "might be a key grip and make 85,000 a year." After the boot camp ended, the trainees apprenticed on an independent film called "The Rest of Us," which Ms. Masterson is producing, about minorities on a college campus post 9/11. She is also helping develop a feature film that her husband wrote about a boys' home in Kingston, and a web series about a single mother of twins who moves to the Hudson Valley. "She thinks it will be 'Green Acres' and is like, 'Oh, wow, this is hard,'" said Ms. Masterson, who is the mother of twins and wrote the pilot with a friend, a single mother. Back at the homestead, the beets were scrubbed and Ms. Masterson set to scouring an oatmeal pot from breakfast. She was hurrying to clean up before her children and husband returned from their outing to the local library and grocery store. Then, they were packing up the minivan for their annual family trip: to Brooklyn, where they would spend a week visiting museums, parks and, for the first time, a Broadway show for the children ("The Lion King"). When you leave the city for upstate, you reverse vacation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
From a distance this coupe looks to be a Porsche or Jaguar. It is not. Obviously. The Mercedes Benz AMG GT S is, if you couldn't tell, a rapid transit system built for two. Long of hood and heritage design, it replaces the gull winged SLS that had less tech and cost some 70 grand more. Making the GT S a bargain, I suppose. (ON CAMERA) If you have a spare 131,000 lying around you can buy a base model GT S. As tested, this one is 171,000. You're in that far, might as well finance the rest. Those extras include fade free carbon ceramic brakes, all kinds of carbon fiber trim and structural bits, plus an upgraded interior package that looks for all the world to be from Lord Vader's TIE fighter. I doubt he's a yellow guy though. Skip the Solarbeam paint to save nearly 10 grand. Mercedes is gunning for Porsche 911 and Audi A8 though they have engines in back. This 4 liter 8 cylinder has two turbos nestled in the V. Martin, who hand assembled it, would explain the lack of a traditional oil pan allowed engineers to drop the engine 2 inches for a lower center of gravity (SOUND UP) isn't the sound of 503 horsepower and 479 pound feet of torque lovely? It's variable. (SOUND UP) Drive modes tailor performance, "race" being a bit much for grocery getting. Engine mounts are computer controlled for less vibration. (ON CAMERA) Using the shifter? It's a little bit of a reach back, a bit awkward. The rear mounted 7 speed dual clutch transmission delivers this sturm und drang to the back wheels. The driveshaft is carbon fiber. (SOUND UP HOOD CLOSING) Mercedes claims 0 60 sprints happen in 3.7 seconds (SOUND UP) (ON CAMERA) Seems like the Mercedes folks are being conservative. Oh, look how fast I'm going... Only track time can reveal this cars lofty performance, it cruises without drama at double the speed limit. Don't ask me how I know. Certainly I didn't test the top speed claim of 193 miles an hour. GT S does not use trendy electric power steering. It's hydraulic. (ON CAMERA) One thing you'll notice right away, the steering is incredible direct, without being squirrelly. The faster it goes, the more capable GT S seems to become. Aerodynamics deploy automatically at speeds over 75 miles an hour. (ON CAMERA) I think I'm going to keep that down. (I'm actually keeping it lowered) I don't need to attract any more attention to myself... Gas mileage? Well it's awful of course. But if that's your concern this is clearly not your car. (GFX) On specified premium fuel, the E.P.A. rating is 16 city / 22 hwy Observed fuel economy is 17 m.p.g (ON CAMERA) You can probably tell from the level of my voice, this is not as quiet as an S Class. It's not as cushy of a ride either. That should come as no surprise. Even in comfort mode, I'm not sure I'd want to travel long distance in this car. You'd certainly arrive quickly though. The cabin is snug for a couple, the panoramic glass roof would brighten things up. Seats are infinitely adjustable so there's no issue there. A wonderful Burmester audio system is standard, though the engine sounds even better. Being a Mercedes, the COMAND user interface is here, there's all sorts of ways to enter data, including handwriting. (ON CAMERA) Not just an ultra high performance machine, GT S is also a practical hatchback. Kind of. Sort of. Get the security shade out of the way and there's room enough for just three packs of the two ply. Owners will probably carry suitcases I'm guessing. There's a higher velocity GT R model on the way if this is not powerful enough. For those who just love the way the aluminum panels seem to be poured over the aluminum space frame chassis, a standard GT will start at 113,000. (SOUND UP) And I'll assume it's hardly pokey. Considering its looks and performance, the Mercedes Benz AMG GT S should fast become a classic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The Federal Communications Commission will vote in November on whether to bar cellular providers from using government subsidies to buy equipment from Huawei and ZTE, two Chinese companies, because of security concerns. The vote would affect the money set aside by the federal government to help expand access to communications technology. Under the proposed rules, that money could not be spent on Huawei and ZTE gear. The new rules would also establish a way to identify other suppliers that pose a national security threat. "We need to make sure our networks won't harm our national security, threaten our economic security, or undermine our values," Ajit Pai, the agency's chairman, said in a statement Monday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to allow a single company to own a newspaper and television and radio stations in the same town, reversing a decades old rule aimed at preventing any individual or company from having too much power over local coverage. The Republican led F.C.C. eliminated the restrictions, known as a media cross ownership ban, in a 3 to 2 vote along party lines. As part of the vote, the agency also increased the number of television stations a company could own in a local market. A company will more easily be able to own two of the four largest stations in a market, instead of only one. The vote was the latest action in a deregulatory blitz at the agency cheered on by media, broadband and cable corporations, but opposed by many Democrats and consumer advocates, who say Americans will be hurt from greater consolidation in those industries. In April, the agency relaxed other limits on television ownership. Shortly after, Sinclair Broadcast Group reached a deal with Tribune Media for a 3.9 billion merger that would allow Sinclair to reach 70 percent of American households. Some lawmakers have called for an investigation into the relationship between the agency's chairman, Ajit Pai, and Sinclair. Mr. Pai, who was appointed by President Trump, has said the media ownership rules including the cross ownership ban between newspapers and television and radio stations was outdated. He said most Americans get their news from a variety of sources and, most prominent among them, online platforms like Facebook and Google. Local media organizations, he has argued, would have a greater shot at competing against those internet giants by combining resources in local markets. "It's a simple proposition: The media ownership regulations of 2017 should match the media marketplace of 2017," Mr. Pai said on Thursday. "That's the proposition the F.C.C. vindicates today nothing more, nothing less. And it's about time." Democrats on the commission said that rolling back the rules would hurt people who relied on local stations for news coverage. "During the first 10 months of 2017, the F.C.C. majority has given the green light to more than a dozen actions that are a direct attack on consumers and small businesses," said Mignon Clyburn, a Democratic commissioner, who voted against the orders. "And most Americans are unaware that the agency established to protect the public interest has traded in that role for the chance to grant the wish lists of billion dollar companies." While local news audience numbers have declined in recent years, about 57 percent of Americans get most of their news from television, with local news leading cable outlets and national broadcasts, according to the Pew Research Center. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Public interest groups fear major corporations like Sinclair or CBS would grow more powerful through the relaxation of rules. Private equity investors who have purchased television stations and newspapers to flip them for a profit are also expected to take advantage of the changes. "Our media ownership numbers are already dismally low," said Carmen Scurato, the director for the National Hispanic Media Coalition, a nonprofit that promotes greater diversity in media. "These actions on Thursday shut out our voices." Some academics are skeptical that the relaxation in rules will result in more robust local news coverage, as Mr. Pai envisions. There is little evidence that mergers in local media have resulted in more jobs and stronger journalism, said Victor Pickard, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Instead, the relaxation of rules could result in business models like that of Sinclair, which sends programming created from its station in Washington to be run at stations across the nation, critics of the changes have said. "Media concentration has been a concern since the 1940s, and this is a major reversal," Mr. Pickard said. He added that internet platforms did not create news content on their own so were not real competition to broadcast journalism. "The fact that media content is coming from many sources, including the internet, isn't evidence of real competition because that isn't where actual journalism is coming from," Mr. Pickard said. Mr. Pai's actions have also drawn strong criticism from Democratic lawmakers and some conservative media companies like Newsmax. Representatives Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey and Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland called on the inspector general of the F.C.C. this week to investigate Mr. Pai's relationship with Sinclair to see if he was giving favors to the company he regulates. This week 13 senators called on Mr. Pai to recuse himself from any actions related to media ownership because of concerns of ties to Sinclair. Mr. Pai has rebutted the claims of coordination with Sinclair. It is unclear who would first take advantage of the new rules. But a company like Sinclair could benefit from the elimination of a rule that prevents one entity from owning two top stations in a local market. Through its Tribune deal, Sinclair would have about 10 markets with more than one of the four top stations. And with the new rules, it may not have to divest those stations, some analysts say. The National Association of Broadcasters, the lobbying group for television and radio broadcast station and network owners, said the rules would also help small, independent television owners, who have gone in to lobby Mr. Pai to support the changes. "The F.C.C.'s past decisions retaining the local ownership rules depended upon the agency closing its eyes and covering its ears to avoid recognizing what is clear to any consumer with a TV remote or a smartphone that local broadcast stations and newspapers do not exist in a vacuum and that broadcasters and newspaper owners must compete with myriad other outlets for viewers, listeners, readers and advertisers," the group said in a blog post. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The staging mixes live action with animations in a milieu inspired by the silent film of the 1920s. For all its familiarity, Mozart's "The Magic Flute" has always been a tough opera for directors to crack. It's not just a fairy tale, but also a poignant love story, a farcical comedy, a magic show, and an affecting portrait of a spiritual journey all at once. How do you balance these elements? The director Barrie Kosky's answer is to not even try. Instead, in the production he created with the director and writer Suzanne Andrade and the animator Paul Barritt for the Komische Oper in Berlin in 2012, he embraced the work's myriad styles and contradictions, its messy mix of fantasy, profundity and silliness. This well traveled production had its New York premiere on Wednesday at the David H. Koch Theater, presented by the Mostly Mozart Festival. It features winning singers the five main roles are double cast for the four performance run, through Saturday members of the Komische Oper chorus and the Tolz Boys' Choir of Munich. The conductor Louis Langree draws a lithe, articulate and elegant performance from the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. Though the production celebrates the opera's variety, it does have a unified stylistic milieu: Berlin in the 1920s. Indeed, Ms. Andrade and Mr. Barritt call their production company 1927, in homage to that rich period for cabaret, music hall and silent film. I had reservations about the busy animated images, which sometimes overwhelm the singers. Still, the sheer inventiveness of the staging, its fantastical mix of animation and live action, is hard to resist. What the audience is in for comes through in the opening scene, a tour de force. The set is essentially a rectangular wall, like a film screen, through which characters often pop out when a high or low door opens and a rotating platform swirls around. We see the prince Tamino (the stirring lyric tenor Julien Behr), a handsome young man in a trim black suit and slightly surreal pasty white makeup. He is running frantically, fleeing a monstrous serpent. With his upper body, Mr. Behr pumps his arms and looks breathless. But his impossibly fast moving legs are depicted by an animated film projected on the wall he's standing behind, an image right out of silent movie slapstick. As he runs, we see him passing past animated bushes, trees and hills, all the while encircled by the reddish serpent, its mouth agape. When the Three Ladies come to his rescue, they look like habitues of a Berlin cafe, with fur trimmed coats, stylish hats and cigarette holders. Mozart's opera is a singspiel, with stretches of spoken dialogue not unlike a classic musical. So it's often awkward to present the work as written to non German audiences; the dialogue just doesn't come off as direct and understandable. This production has an inspired solution. As in a silent film, the characters' words go unspoken but are projected as intertitles in English on a black screen, while music from two moody Mozart keyboard pieces (the fantasies in D minor and C minor) is played, by Frank Schulte, on fortepiano. It's touching yet ominous when poor Tamino wakes up looking lost and lonely, and asks or so the intertitle says "Where am I?" as Mozart's mysterious music plays. The production keeps on boldly mixing madcap animated film with a deep dive into the opera's philosophical issues. The bird catcher Papageno (the hearty baritone Rodion Pogossov, in an endearing performance) has the look of Buster Keaton, with a floppy cap and a frumpy forest green suit. Pamina, with whom Tamino falls in love, is here a Louise Brooks lookalike (the radiant soprano Maureen McKay, in a standout performance). Her mother, the Queen of the Night (the brilliant soprano Audrey Luna, renowned for her effortless stratospheric high notes), who sings from a platform high up on the wall, is portrayed as a terrifying spider like creature with tentacles that can ensnare anyone. Why doesn't the lovely Pamina look like her mother? The production invites you to put aside such questions and go with the metaphorical imagery. Besides, you can imagine this Queen actually manipulating a contraption of her own design. Sarastro (the solid bass Dimitry Ivashchenko) is a somewhat stiff, bearded gentleman in a top hat who looks like a member of a Berlin scientific society. Along with truth, work and art, science is at the forefront of the brotherhood he heads. Whenever we are taken inside the Temple of Wisdom, a menagerie of mechanical animals strides by, including lightning bugs with propeller hats, who provide lanterns to guide visitors through their admission trials. The production turns Monostatos (Johannes Dunz) Sarastro's slave, described as a Moor in the libretto into a Nosferatu echo, which softens the tinge of racism toward the character in the libretto. But the directors do not mask the sexism of the story. The Speaker, who greets Tamino when he arrives at the temple, still admonishes him for his romantic folly. "Women do little but talk a lot," he says. On the other hand, Mozart's opera does show Tamino needing Pamina as they undergo the trials of fire and water together. In this production the fire monster is a huge, menacing mechanical creature, easily disarmed by the sounds of the magic flute and the power of young love. Through Saturday at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; 212 721 6500, mostlymozart.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Polish government is threatening to jail Alexander Khochinsky, a New York art dealer of Russian descent, if he does not return "Girl With a Dove," by the French master Antoine Pesne. WARSAW When World War II ended, with Warsaw in rubble, an 18th century rococo oil painting by the French master Antoine Pesne, "Girl With a Dove," was one of hundreds of thousands of artworks in Poland that had gone missing. The painting, which was stolen from a Polish museum in 1943, was hardly the most valuable work of art lost, with an appraised value today of no more than 22,000. But since Polish authorities learned of its whereabouts nine years ago, it has set off an oddly furious battle over its return. The Polish government is threatening to put the man who now has it in jail for 10 years if he does not turn it over. The man, a New York art dealer of Russian descent, Alexander Khochinsky, has refused, arguing he'll only return it if the Polish government compensates him for its appropriation of his family's property in Poland after his mother, a Jew, fled the Nazis. Mr. Khochinsky's land claim is not based on the most detailed of document trails. He has only an address in Przemysl, a city in southeastern Poland, from his mother's birth certificate. But it is, nonetheless, the stance he is taking, even as Poland ramps up its efforts to have him extradited to face criminal charges related to the acquisition of stolen goods. Last month, during a visit to Paris he was detained by the police, and is now currently barred by court order from leaving the European Union. For his part, Mr. Khochinsky has sued Poland in United States federal court, arguing that its efforts to retrieve the painting, which he says he inherited from his father, a former Soviet soldier, have damaged his business. Resolving international disputes over looted art is never easy. But this one has become particularly complicated by the fact that Polish suffering and losses from the war remain a potent issue here. Anything that touches on the nation's unfathomable suffering during the war, which saw six million Poles killed, of which three million were Jewish, sets off a wellspring of emotion. The current right wing government has tapped into those feelings and intensified in recent years its efforts to track plundered treasures and rebuild the nation's historical heritage. The official list of "looted art" still includes some 63,000 objects. Mr. Khochinsky, on the other hand, has raised the specter of anti Semitism in the Polish government's pursuit of him, and in its refusal to negotiate compensation for what he describes as the confiscation of his mother's home. On the site now stands a Catholic Church. "I believe that the criminal case against me was fully fabricated," he said. "It was retaliation for me seeking restitution for my family property." The barter exchange he seeks, though, seems unlikely, according to Sylwia Bartoszuk, a Polish lawyer who often works with Jewish claimants, in part because Mr. Khochinsky does not have the sort of land records that would support such a claim. "Besides, you cannot offer barter deals involving objects that were unlawfully acquired," she said. "That painting, according to the Polish law, is property of the museum." Created by Pesne in 1754, "Girl With a Dove" depicts a partly disrobed young woman cradling a bird in her hand. It was bought by the Wielkopolskie Museum in western Poland, which has been since renamed to the National Museum in Poznan, in 1931. The Germans looted the museum during their occupation, but much of what they stole was taken from them by the advancing Red Army, and sent to the Soviet Union. Mr. Khochinsky said that his father, who died in 1991, told him that the Soviets had found the painting in a house occupied by German soldiers, brought it with them to Moscow, where his father bought it after the war. After his father's death, Mr. Khochinsky, who grew up in Russia, said he exhibited the painting in his gallery, Bogema, in Moscow. It was not until 2010, he said, that he accidentally learned from an organization that searches for missing artwork, that the piece was wanted by Poland. He reached out to Poland's embassy in Russia and offered his trade. Poland sent a curator to Moscow to examine the painting. He decided it was the same one stolen from the museum. "I found the signature and all its other original markings," said Piotr Michalowski, the curator. Polish authorities contend that two acquaintances of the art dealer have told them that Mr. Khochinsky did not inherit the painting but bought it at an auction in the West. When Poland demanded Mr. Khochinsky return the artwork with no conditions, he hid it before the Russian police raided his gallery. It is now stored safely in Russia, he said. In 2013, based on Mr. Michalowski's report, Poland filed an extradition request for Mr. Khochinsky, accusing him of knowing the painting had been stolen at the time he acquired it. By this time, Mr. Khochinsky had moved to the United States, where in 2015, eight F.B.I. agents burst into his apartment in Lower Manhattan one morning and walked him out in handcuffs, still wearing slippers. But a United States judge ruled that, contrary to Poland's motion, there was no proof that Mr. Khochinsky had known "Girl With a Dove" was stolen at the time he acquired it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In 2019, two square blocks in Times Square have been "irradiated," and in response, President Trump has imposed martial law. That is the backdrop of "Building the Wall," a new two character piece by the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Robert Schenkkan ("The Kentucky Cycle") that is one of the first political dramas to imagine explicitly the darkest ramifications of the 2016 election. Mr. Schenkkan's last New York production, "All the Way," took us inside the Oval Office of Lyndon B. Johnson. The heart of the new play is a conversation between a liberal African American history professor (Tamara Tunie) and a white supervisor of a private prison (James Badge Dale), who also happens to be a Trump supporter. "Building the Wall," which is scheduled for a limited run, through July 9, and is directed by Ari Edelson, displays the theater's ability to respond quickly to current events. (Opens on Sunday, May 21, at New World Stages, buildingthewallplay.com.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Now, I wasn't being sarcastic in calling Bloomberg a great businessman. He is. And to his credit, he himself hasn't, as far as I know, engaged in destructive financial wheeling and dealing. Instead, he got rich by selling equipment to destructive wheeler dealers. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, I'm referring to the famous Bloomberg Terminal, a proprietary computer system that gives subscribers real time access to large quantities of financial data. This access is incredibly expensive a subscription costs around 24,000 a year. But it's a must have in the financial industry, because traders with Bloomberg Terminals can react to market events a few minutes faster than those without. It's an extremely profitable business. But is it good for the economy? No. After all, does getting financial information a few minutes earlier do anything significant to improve real world business decisions that affect jobs and productivity? Surely not. Bloomberg has, in effect, made his billions off a financial arms race that costs vast sums but leaves everyone pretty much back where they started. Which brings me to Elizabeth Warren. Warren stumbled badly, making herself a long shot for the nomination, by trying to appease supporters of Bernie Sanders. She endorsed proposals for radical health care reform that have almost no chance of becoming reality, and she was raked over the coals about paying for those proposals even though Sanders himself has offered few clues about his own plans. But before all that, Warren had made a name for herself as a crusader against financial industry fraud and excess. It wasn't just talk. One key piece of the reforms instituted after the 2008 financial crisis, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was Warren's brainchild. Furthermore, by all accounts the bureau was wildly successful, saving ordinary families billions, until the Trump administration set about eviscerating it. And here's the thing: Financial reform, unlike health care, is an area in which it might make a big difference which Democrat becomes president. It's true that other candidates including Bloomberg! have endorsed Warren type reforms. But it is, I think, fair to ask how committed they would be in practice, and also whether they would squander their political capital on unwinnable fights, which is my big concern about Sanders. Again, aside from the clear damage to Bloomberg, I have no idea how or if Wednesday's debate will affect the Democratic race. But it may have helped remind Democrats that corruption, fraud and the excesses of Wall Street in particular can be potent political issues especially against a president who is both personally corrupt and so obviously a friend to fraudsters. 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 |
NEW DELHI In the United States, law enforcement and security agencies have raised privacy concerns with a new proposal for electronic eavesdropping powers to track terrorists and criminals and unscramble their encrypted messages. But here in India, government authorities are well beyond the proposal stage. Prompted by fears of digital era plotters, officials are already demanding that network operators give them the ability to monitor and decrypt digital messages, whenever the Home Ministry deems the eavesdropping to be vital to national security. Critics, though, say India's campaign to monitor data transmission within its borders will hurt other important national goals: attracting global businesses and becoming a hub for technology innovation. The most inflammatory part of the effort has been India's threat to block encrypted BlackBerry services, widely used by corporations, unless phone companies provide access to the data in a readable format. But Indian officials have also said they will seek greater access to encrypted data sent over popular Internet services like Gmail, Skype and virtual private networks that enable users to bypass traditional telephone links or log in remotely to corporate computer systems. Critics say such a threat could make foreigners think twice about doing business here. Especially vulnerable could be outsourcing for Western clients, like processing medical records or handling confidential research projects, information that is typically transmitted as encrypted data. "If there is any risk to that data, those companies will look elsewhere," said Peter Sutherland, a former Canadian ambassador to India who is now a consultant to North American companies doing business there. S. Ramadorai, vice chairman of India's largest outsourcing company, Tata Consultancy Services, echoed that sentiment in a newspaper column on Wednesday. "Bans and calls for bans aren't a solution," he wrote. "They'll disconnect India from the rest of the world." Few doubt that India has valid security concerns. In recent years, attacks against India have included the use of sophisticated communications technology as when the terrorists who stormed Mumbai two years ago communicated with their Pakistani handlers by satellite phone and the Internet. Or when Chinese hackers infiltrated India's military computer networks this year. But critics say that India's security efforts, which they describe as clumsy, may do little to protect the country, even as they intrude on the privacy of companies and citizens alike. "They will do damage by blocking highly visible systems like BlackBerry or Skype," said Ajay Shah, a Mumbai based economist who writes extensively about technology. "This will shift users to less visible and known platforms. Terrorists will make merry doing crypto anyway. A zillion tools for this are freely available." Senior Indian officials, though, argue that they have no choice but to demand the data that could help thwart and investigate terrorist attacks. "All communications which is done by Indians or coming to and fro into India and where we have a concern about national security we should have access to it," said Gopal Krishna Pillai, the secretary of India's Home Ministry, which oversees domestic security. During the Mumbai attacks, he said, officials could not gain access to some of the communications between the terrorists and their handlers. Some legal experts indicate that Indian law which has few explicit protections for personal privacy is on the government's side. But they also say India is trying to enforce the law in unnerving ways. "The concern of corporate users and general users of BlackBerry is that if this is allowed, the government will become the single biggest repository of information," said Pavan Duggal, a technology lawyer who practices before India's Supreme Court. "And we have no idea how this information will be used and misused in the future." The Indian government has also clamped down on the importation of foreign telecommunications equipment, saying it wants to ensure that the technology does not contain malicious software or secret trap doors that could be used by foreign spies. The technology and security debates playing out here are not new or unique to India. During the 1990s, for instance, American security officials tried unsuccessfully to restrict the use of encryption because of worries that law enforcement would not be able to monitor communications. Now, in legislation the Obama administration plans to introduce next year, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications including encrypted e mail systems like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct "peer to peer" messaging like Skype to be technically able to comply if served with a wiretap order. Currently, other countries including the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia are trying to impose various measures similar to India's. The debate here, though, is complicated by the fact that despite private industry's technology prowess in this country, in technologies like cryptography Indian law enforcement agencies still lag significantly behind their counterparts in the United States and other advanced countries. The Indian government says it is intent on improving its code cracking skills. But "in the interim, it has this very blunt instrument," said Rajan S. Mathews, the director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India, a trade group. "It comes to the operators and says: 'I'm going to make you responsible for giving me access,' " he said. Mr. Pillai, the Home Ministry secretary, said the government was not opposed to the use of encryption to protect the privacy of legitimate electronic communications. But he said that as government licensed entities, network operators were obliged to give law enforcement officials a way to decode messages when required or to block communications that they cannot decipher. But network providers say they may not always have the technical ability to do that. In much of the world including for business users in India companies and individuals now often use encryption systems that generate new code keys for each message and lack a convenient master key that could unlock everything for government viewing. Google, for its part, has enhanced the encryption for its Gmail service, making it harder for hackers and the Indian government to read messages. Mr. Pillai said his ministry had begun conversations with Google and Skype, the Internet phone company, which also uses strong encryption, to provide access to decoded data. Representatives for Google and Skype said that they could not comment because they had not yet received formal demands from the Indian government. Meanwhile, government officials have demanded that the maker of BlackBerry, Research In Motion of Canada, set up a server computer in India from which law enforcement agencies can gain access to unencrypted versions of messages when they need to. The government has given R.I.M. until the end of October to comply. The company has said that it is willing to meet "the lawful access needs of law enforcement agencies." But the company says it cannot provide unencrypted copies of messages of corporate users because of how the BlackBerry system is designed, noting that even R.I.M. cannot decode them. "Strong encryption has become a mandatory requirement for all enterprise class wireless e mail services today," R.I.M. said in a statement in late August, "and is also a fundamental commercial requirement for any country to attract and maintain international business." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Consider that Honda's CR V has been America's best selling crossover seven of the past 10 years. Ponder the Swiss Army Knife interior of the Fit. Now, put the two into Seth Brundle's teleportation chamber (without the fly, thanks) and you get HR V. It joins Chevy Trax, Fiat 500X, Jeep Renegade, and Mazda CX 3 in the current automotive "it" segment, the compact crossover. 10 inches shorter than CR V, small isn't what it used to be. HR V is nearly six inches longer than the original compact crossover, the five door Toyota RAV4 launched in the mid 90s. Prices start at 19,995 (with front drive and six speed manual). I'm driving a fully loaded all wheel drive EX L Navi model. HR V is built on Honda Fit bones with a larger 1.8 liter 4 cylinder making 141 horsepower and 127 lb. ft. of torque. In top trims (or with AWD) a continuously variable transmission is mandatory. Starting with EX models, there are paddle shifters for a simulated seven speed manual shift mode. Like Fit, HR Vs seating is more flexible than a five year old gymnast. The back seat bottoms swing upwards to create an open space, perfect for dogs. Front seatbacks recline nearly flush with the back seat cushions, excellent for ducking out of work for a quick nap. Perhaps I've said too much... Most will buy HR V more for driving than snoozing, though with 0 60 runs nearing 9 seconds, this isn't automotive caffeine. The ride quality is a solid blend of comfort and control. The rubbery dynamic common to continuously variable transmissions remains somewhat. Dropping into Sport mode helps. A little. The E.P.A. scores this models fuel economy at 27 city, 32 highway. I'm seeing 25 in urban driving. A glowing ring around the speedometer is green when driving responsibly, too often white with my less than frugal foot. For venturing off road there's 6.7 inches of ground clearance, enough to slog to hiking trailheads with little drama. Go with Jeep Renegade Trailhawk to tackle tough stuff. Cabin materials have a quality look with supple materials. Touch sensitive controls look expensive but could be more responsive. The center console is elevated, providing adjustable cup holders, a nook for phones, and a cocoon like ambience. Honda's touch screen interface is mid pack with a navigation unit that will drive you to Siri for directions. Fortunately, two USB ports will keep smartphones charged. Two average sized adults shouldn't complain about space in the back. A third in the middle position will. HR V does cargo well. In my measure metric, it handles eight packs of warehouse bath tissue behind the back seats. Drop the backs and it gobbles up 18 packs, the same as a Lincoln Navigator with the third row folded. Impressive. Fit is an IIHS Top Safety Pick, so there's a solid chance HR V will test well. Styling? A quick parking lot poll finds folks think HR V is cute. I find the side swage lines lack harmony. Those most excited about it were CR V owners. Brand loyalty and clever packaging should make HR V a big Fit, I mean hit. VIDEO SCRIPT The Honda CR V has been America's best selling crossover in seven of the past 10 years. So its new small sibling is a big deal. I'm Tom Voelk with Driven for The New York Times. HR V joins Chevy Trax, Fiat 500X, Jeep Renegade, and Mazda CX 3 in the current automotive "it" segment, the compact crossover. It might look like a two door... (SOUND UP) It's not. (ON CAMERA) For sense of scale, HR V is 10 inches shorter than CR V. But small isn't exactly what it used to be. This is nearly six inches longer than the original five door Toyota RAV4 launched in the mid 90s. At 26,720 this is a top of the line EX L Navi model. Built on the Honda Fit architecture, HR V can be had with all wheel drive. The larger 1.8 liter 4 cylinder makes 141 horsepower (SOUND UP) and 127 lb ft. of torque (SOUND UP). This is a continuously variable transmission with sport mode and simulated manual shift mode. Like Fit, the seating is more flexible than a five year old gymnast. (ON CAMERA) Excellent for ducking out of work for a quick nap. Most (SOUND UP) will buy it more for driving than snoozing, though with 0 60 runs nearing 9 seconds, this isn't automotive caffeine. The ride quality is a good solid blend of compliance and capability in the corners. It's not a sports car, and not meant to be. Signal right and a mirror mounted camera offers up a view of the blind spot. Both helpful and distracting. (ON CAMERA) There 's some of that rubbery dynamic common to continuously variable transmission. You can eliminate that by going with the six speed manual transmission but it's only available in lower trim levels and with front wheel drive. The E.P.A. gives the AWD HR V a score of 27 city, 32 highway. I'm seeing 25 in urban driving. Keep this ring green and you'll probably do better than me. For venturing off road (SOUND UP) there's 6.7 inches of ground clearance. That's just enough to slog to hiking trailheads with little drama. Go with Jeep Renegade Trailhawk for rough conditions. HR V doesn't look like Fit outside or in. Materials have a quality look. Most often touched materials are soft. Those out of reach (SOUND UP) are not. Touch sensitive controls look expensive, they aren't always responsive. If you're into cup holder tech, things work very nicely, the console storage is quite small. The interface is mid pack, phones have better navigation than this setup. Good thing there's a few USB ports for keeping them powered. (ON CAMERA) Remember, this is not a very big rig and two average sized adults should not complain too much about space back here. Foot room is good. Use the cup holder or the power port, just not both at the same time. I suggest keeping it to a couple, the middle position is not exactly comfy. Storage under the seat is a welcome feature and this is a great space for a dog. It keeps them out of the front seat away from airbags. (ON CAMERA) HR V can swallow 12 packs of this stuff behind the back seat the way big brother CR V does but it's no slouch. Eight bundles is quite good for a small crossover. There's no room for stuff here, a spare is nice far from civilization. I can see the back seat folded quite often. I brought out 16 packs of the two ply which gets gobbled up quite easily, if that's what you're interested in hauling.... Fit is an IIHS Top Safety Pick, so there's a solid chance HR V will score well. I find this swage line lacks harmony with the one flowing from the front. Passerby's think it's cute, many of them are CR V owners. Brand loyalty and clever packaging should make HR V a big Fit, I mean hit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
"America" is over. Or at least it will be on Sept. 15, when the exhibition of that name closes at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum after a one year run. It has been one of the smallest exhibitions in the museum's history, comprising a single work of art: a fully functional 18 karat gold toilet, designed by the puckish Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and installed in a single occupancy museum restroom. But it has been popular with visitors, some of whom waited in line for an hour to test its metal. "More than 100,000 people have waited patiently in line for the opportunity to commune with art and with nature," wrote Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim's artistic director and chief curator, on the museum's website. "America" is based on a common Kohler toilet, and was created by a foundry in Florence. The work's exact cost has not been released, but Ms. Spector described it as "millions of dollars' worth of gold." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
After the explosion in September of one of its rockets, SpaceX is now ready to get back into the business of sending payloads to space, the company announced on Monday, with its next rocket headed to orbit as soon as Sunday. In a statement, SpaceX or more formally, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation said that an investigation had determined the likely cause: an unexpected interplay of supercold helium and oxygen with carbon fibers and aluminum. The statement Monday added technical details about what went wrong, and the company said it had devised workarounds to prevent a recurrence. The cascade of explosions on Sept. 1 that destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida was perplexing and concerning, because it occurred during what is usually regarded as a safer portion of operations the fueling of propellants about eight minutes before the ignition of the engines for a planned test. (The launch had been scheduled for two days later.) The trouble appeared to start near the liquid oxygen tank on the second stage of the two stage rocket, and in less than a tenth of a second, that section was in flames, followed by the destruction of the entire rocket and a 200 million communications satellite whose customers included Facebook, which had planned to use it to expand internet services in Africa. Under current federal laws, investigations into such explosions are led by the company that built the rocket, not by a government agency. The investigation panel included representatives of the Federal Aviation Administration, the United States Air Force, NASA and the National Transportation Safety Board. Falcon 9 rockets are used to carry NASA cargo to the International Space Station and are to provide transportation for astronauts beginning in 2018. SpaceX is also competing to win contracts to launch Department of Defense spy satellites. With few obvious clues to the explosion, the company initially considered hypotheses like sabotage, that a sniper had fired a shot rupturing the oxygen tank from the roof of a competitor's building nearby. "The accident investigation team worked systematically through an extensive fault tree analysis," SpaceX said in its statement. In December 2015, SpaceX began using an upgraded Falcon 9 design that uses supercooled liquid oxygen at minus 340 degrees, 40 degrees colder than what is typically used. The lower temperature makes the oxygen denser, which improves engine thrust. But the helium was even colder. As the carbon and aluminum cool, they shrink at different rates, opening gaps into which liquid oxygen could flow. In addition, the helium may have been below the temperature at which oxygen freezes, and some of the trapped oxygen may have become solid. "Really surprising problem that's never been encountered before in the history of rocketry," Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, said in an interview on CNBC in November. Both carbon and aluminum can burn, and with oxygen sandwiched in between, all of the ingredients for a conflagration were present. Friction or the breaking of fibers could have provided the energy for ignition, the company said. Tests at SpaceX's facilities in Hawthorne, Calif., and McGregor, Tex., supported that conclusion, the company said. The configuration of the helium containers has been shifted, and the fueling procedures will change so that the helium will be warmer, SpaceX said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The core ideas behind Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's much publicized growth strategy are stirring a nagging sense of deja vu. They should. The plan, which is set to be approved later this week, borrows liberally from a string of previous government initiatives that similarly promised to bolster the economy, including his own. And economists and investors are increasingly worried that the latest initiative will have the same effect as the past ones that is to say, little at all. "Every prime minister in recent memory has introduced an economic growth strategy, each not much better than the other," said Akihiko Suzuki, chief economist at Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting, the research arm of the large Japanese bank. "Expectations rise, but are quickly dashed," Mr. Suzuki said. "It's foolish to expect something different this time." The first two arrows of Mr. Abe's economic push a sizable dose of monetary and fiscal stimulus initially impressed investors, sending the stock market soaring as much as 80 percent in six months. But some of that enthusiasm has evaporated, since Mr. Abe outlined the third piece, the core growth strategy. In recent weeks, the Nikkei has been in a steady slide and it fell 5 percent on Thursday morning. Some investors worry that the prime minister's plans are not much different than the largely ineffective attempts made by his predecessors, including Mr. Abe during his previous stint in 2006 and 2007. Take Mr. Abe's idea to help create a cutting edge industry by digitizing Japan's wealth of medical data, ripe for mining by technology companies. A similar policy was featured in Mr. Abe's accelerated growth program, drawn up in mid 2007, during his previous term in office. But after Mr. Abe resigned in September 2007, doctors started to grumble over the burdens of digitization. Many clinics run by older physicians eventually won exemption from the plan, along with others who found it difficult to work with digital technology. It is unclear whether the digital push this time will be more comprehensive or how much new business it may generate. Mr. Abe also wants to create special economic zones that would relax some aspects of nationwide regulation in an effort to woo foreign investors. In part, the prime minister is pushing for more flexible medical services to cater to expatriates and more leeway for companies in emerging fields to hire and fire staff members. Mr. Abe's mentor, the former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, tried much the same tack in the early 2000s. His reforms led to the creation of almost 1,000 special zones for structural reform, which relaxed things like the paperwork required by foreign researchers, standardized school curriculums, and licenses to home brew sake, or Japanese rice wine. The opposition Democratic Party introduced similar zones during its three year stint in power, which ended in late 2012 with the victory of Mr. Abe's Liberal Democratic Party. But the long term impact of such efforts has been limited. Sweeping economic goals and strategies have become an almost annual rite for Japan's successive prime ministers. Before Mr. Abe's growth strategy came three policy initiatives from the Democratic Party: Yukio Hatoyama's New Growth Strategy of 2010; Naoto Kan's Scenario to Bring Back a Lively Japan of 2011; and Yoshihiko Noda's Japan Revival Strategy of 2012. Those initiatives did little to brighten Japan's economic prospects. 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. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Preceding those policies were Yasuo Fukuda's Economic Growth Strategy of 2008 and Taro Aso's Future Pioneering Strategy of 2009, which focused mainly on increasing gross domestic product. But the Japanese economy suffered its most severe recession amid the global financial crisis, ending the Liberal Democratic Party's half century of almost uninterrupted rule. Now, investors are worried that Mr. Abe's growth strategy is merely more of the same, a situation that threatens to undermine confidence in the other facets of his program. "Until now, Mr. Abe had exceeded expectations. But just as we got to the most vital part of his program, he failed to produce anything substantive," said Akio Makabe, a professor of economics at Shinshu University. Japan's near obsessive focus on growth plans traces its roots to the 1960s. At the time, Hayato Ikeda, then the prime minister, promised to double Japan's income in that decade by lowering taxes and investing in infrastructure a feat that would require 7.8 percent of growth a year. Japan's economy exceeded expectations, increasing 10 percent a year. The success of Mr. Ikeda's plan spurred more plans. His successor, Eisaku Sato, introduced three economic growth strategies from 1964 to 1972, but each one brought slower growth than the last. As Japan's economy matured, and growth slowed further, focus shifted from growth to structural reforms that would correct some of the country's economic distortions. The most fervent reformer in recent memory was Mr. Koizumi, who unleashed a platform of initiatives to increase competition in the Japanese economy. Even some of his most prominent policies have fallen by the wayside, highlighting how difficult it can be to make changes stick in Japan. A law that allowed private companies to compete with Japan's sprawling post office to deliver letters, for example, has been effectively neutralized with a provision that requires new competitors to set up at least 100,000 mailboxes across Japan and collect from all of those boxes at least six days a week. In the decade since that law went into effect, not a single company has taken up the challenge. A signature bid by Mr. Koizumi to privatize the post office's vast financial arm, opening up the world's biggest bank by deposits to competition, has also been quietly rolled back. The timetable for privatization is now delayed and the government is set to hold onto a higher proportion of Japan Post stock. Savers now enjoy a higher deposit insurance cap on their savings at the post office, encouraging them to keep more money parked there. Mr. Abe has tried to accentuate the differences between his reform efforts and Japan's previous attempts at change. Mr. Abe has suggested the special economic zones might offer lower corporate tax rates. But he is likely to face difficulty bringing Japan's 38 percent tax rate in line with Singapore or Hong Kong whose corporate taxes are half that rate without grumbling from businesses that do not qualify. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
As the streaming wars begin to heat up, Apple has picked up its third TV show in two months. The latest is a space drama from Ronald D. Moore, the executive producer behind audience favorites like the rebooted "Battlestar Galactica" and "Outlander." Last month, Apple secured the highly sought after rights to a project about a morning TV show starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. For its first acquisition, in October, it ordered up a revival of Steven Spielberg's 1980s anthology series, "Amazing Stories." It will probably be at least a year before any of these shows are available to be viewed, and it is still not clear how they will be distributed to customers. But the eagerness of Apple to add shows to its developing slate is further proof of how intense the competition for content has become. On Thursday, Disney announced that it was acquiring 21st Century Fox in an effort to bolster its own ambitious streaming plan. Netflix, the leader of the streaming pack, has said it plans to spend up to 8 billion on content next year. Apple has roughly 1 billion to spend on original programming. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
WASHINGTON An icy January afternoon was turning into evening, and inside a warmly lit rehearsal room at Arena Stage, the company of a new play called "Sovereignty" had arrived at the final scene. The sweet, 21st century ending unfolds in an unlikely setting: a family cemetery in rural Oklahoma, not far from the spot where, in 1839, a Cherokee Nation leader named John Ridge was stabbed to death in an act of political retribution. His influential father, Major Ridge, was assassinated the same day, and for the same reason. The playwright, Mary Kathryn Nagle, is one of their direct descendants on her father's side, and in "Sovereignty" she is exhuming some family history that is also American history. Both John and Major Ridge were signers of the bitterly divisive treaty vehemently opposed by the Cherokee chief and many others that removed the tribe from its land in the Southeast and sent thousands on the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. The Ridges' killers were fellow Cherokees, wreaking vengeance. What she has made of that story, a time shifting play whose characters include President Andrew Jackson, is in keeping with Arena's penchant for political fare like John Strand's "The Originalist," about the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and Lawrence Wright's "Camp David." Ms. Nagle a lawyer who wrote and, with her fellow students, staged a play each year she was at Tulane Law School, and met her law partner when he came to the Newseum to see a reading of another of her plays fits right in, not only with Arena but with Washington. "She has an ability to quickly move from the personal to the political," Molly Smith, Arena's artistic director, said. "We live here, where we eat, sleep, drink politics, and it's all through our personal lives. She embodies that within the work that she does." Opening on Jan. 24 in a world premiere production directed by Ms. Smith as part of the Women's Voices Theater Festival, "Sovereignty" came out of Arena's Power Plays initiative, which aims to tell a story of the United States in 25 new works over 10 years, with one play pegged to each decade since 1776. Ms. Nagle is the first Native American voice in that mix. "I started writing snidbits of this play in law school," Ms. Nagle said, and in that casual, playful little word "snidbits" is a counterbalance to her cerebral intensity, the ability she has to cite case law and obscure dates mid conversation. (She is also highly entertaining, given to talking with her hands and throwing her arms wide to emphasize a point.) Ms. Nagle radiates the energy that her resume alone suggests: a full time law career, devoted to the issues that also consume her writing (tribal sovereignty, the environment, domestic violence and sexual assault); two plays getting world premieres this year on opposite sides of the country, the other being "Manahatta" at Oregon Shakespeare Festival; a part time gig running the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program in New Haven. She moved to Washington in 2015 after a stint working for a corporate law firm in New York, where she wrote "Manahatta" in the Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group. Last summer, she moved back to Oklahoma, where she grew up. A glow came into her face when she mentioned her new house, on a lake on the Osage Reservation, but her Tulsa based firm has an office and an apartment in Washington, and her travel heavy practice still brings her there. When I told Ms. Nagle that I wondered not about her work life balance but simply how she juggles her legal career with her art, she leapt right into the personal side anyway. "I don't have children, and I would like to have children," she said. With an upbeat, what the hell forthrightness, she added, "Let me just put that advertisement out there for who wants to be the stay at home dad, 'cause I don't think I can handle a third thing right now. It's kind of overwhelming." The daughter of a doctor and a nursing school dean, Ms. Nagle started making up stories as a child, dragooning her two younger sisters into acting them out with her. As a Georgetown University undergraduate, she designed her own major in justice and peace studies, but took classes in theater, won a student one act contest and wrote a play called "Miss Lead," about lead mining on Oklahoma reservations, for her senior thesis. Her freshman year, she performed in a student production of Paula Vogel's domestic violence play "Hot 'n' Throbbing" a formative experience that Ms. Nagle said shattered her impression that there were "certain things we experience as women that are not appropriate for the stage." When Ms. Smith asked her in 2015 what she might like to write about for Arena, Ms. Nagle immediately thought of the Violence Against Women Act, which was strengthened in 2013, giving tribal courts the power to prosecute non Native Americans who victimize Native American women on tribal land. Present at the signing ceremony, watching President Obama make that change into law, Ms. Nagle sobbed. She is convinced, though, that there will eventually be a challenge to that protection "when a non Indian tries to argue to the Supreme Court, which they will, that any exercise of tribal criminal jurisdiction over a non Indian is unconstitutional." As a lawyer, she is preparing for that scenario. As a playwright, she is imagining it in "Sovereignty," a drama about broken treaties and historical rifts that is also about rape. It was Ms. Smith's idea to broaden Ms. Nagle's original concept, interweaving the contemporary strand centered on a Cherokee Nation lawyer who strongly resembles Ms. Nagle and becomes involved in a domestic violence case with one about her Ridge ancestors. Before Major and John Ridge signed the treaty to hand over tribal land, they were instrumental in a rare case where Native Americans prevailed in the Supreme Court: Worcester v. Georgia, in 1832, establishing a crucial precedent about tribal sovereignty. That victory is the proud story Ms. Nagle was raised on, the story her grandmother told her that gave her faith in the Supreme Court and made her want to go to law school. The play follows them through that case and the treaty signing to their deaths. The cemetery, by the way, the one where the Ridges are buried: That's where Ms. Nagle plans to end up, too, one day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Credit...Boom Studios Crowdfunding has long been a tool for aspiring comic book creators trying to break through, but lately some established names have taken to it. Recent arrivals include the publisher Boom Studios, which is working with Keanu Reeves on a Kickstarter project, and Todd McFarlane, the creator of the Spawn comic books. Part of the appeal of crowdfunding, they say, is that it allows them to connect directly with their audience, bypassing the industry's traditional distribution model. Some critics argue, however, that heavyweights with deep pockets are muscling into a marketplace intended to help beginners introduce their creations. But Kickstarter has evolved since it was established in 2009 to become more inclusive, said Greg Pak, a comic book writer and the author of "Kickstarter Secrets," a book of crowdfunding tips. "There was a sense early on if you were an established person, you were stealing someone else's opportunity," he said. "There is an understanding now that Kickstarter is for anybody." The success of these big name campaigns is notable given the disruptions and anxieties caused by the coronavirus pandemic. After a decline in activity in March through May, "we've seen categories, comics one of them, recovering," said Margot Atwell, the head of publishing and comics at Kickstarter. The number of prominent creators using the site has also risen. Mr. McFarlane, who last year celebrated the arrival of the 300th issue of Spawn in comic stores, said crowdfunding was a chance to try a new business strategy. "It was an experiment," he said. "Could this be an add on to our business model or grow into something bigger?" He opted to sell a 25th anniversary edition of the first Spawn action figure in April, the early days of the pandemic. "Things were getting shut down in our industry," he said. Two choices were left to him: Wait until it was over, however long that would be, "or do something a the beginning while people still had a smile on their face." Crowdfunding allows publishers to resolve another challenge: Comic book stories are typically told one issue at a time, leaving readers to wait months for the conclusion. "The problem with the monthly model is that the customer may not return," Mr. Richie said. Supporters of the Kickstarter campaign are buying future collected editions. "They are saying, 'Here's 50. I'm going to order Volume 1 to 3, sight unseen.'," he said. And he has plans to encourage those backers: "We can talk to them. We have the email list," he said. "We want them to get hooked on comics." But the campaign was met with some consternation online. An article on the internet culture site The Daily Dot questioned why a mainstream publisher was using crowdfunding. On Twitter, some users thought supporting Boom might siphon backers from other campaigns. Mr. Richie defended Boom's campaign. "I think we're using Kickstarter in a very innovative way," he said. "This is a tremendous opportunity to reach a different audience." The notion of one project taking away from another is common but unfounded, Ms. Atwell said. "Instead, we see that great projects launching on the platform create more visibility and interest in other projects as well," she said, adding that around 30 percent of its community has backed two or more projects. "We also have a strong core of superbackers who have backed dozens or even hundreds or thousands of projects," she said. Other comic book projects have seen success. Alex de Campi sought funding in May for the science fiction graphic novel "Madi: Once Upon a Time in the Future," with the film director Duncan Jones. They shot past their 50,000 goal, earning 366,000. In August, the writer Scott Snyder and the artist Tony Daniel offered supporters a behind the scenes look at their series Nocterra, which will have its premiere next year with Image Comics. The target for the project, which ends Sept. 17, was 40,000, and it has so far earned 169,000. Mr. Snyder found other opportunities with the campaign. He used it to announce his new imprint, Best Jackett Press, and proceeds will help pay for Mr. Daniel's work as well as for the artist for a second series. The money helps alleviate worries that this project was taking time away from paid opportunities. There were also personal reasons. "Real life circumstance is keeping us away from fans," Mr. Snyder said. "We can't go to conventions. We can't do signings." So the rewards emphasized access to the creators and a sense of community. "It's about meeting us, taking a class with us, getting a sketch." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
BERLIN Less than 10 percent of people surveyed in the European countries hardest hit by the region's debt crisis say that their leaders are doing a good job at fighting corruption, a survey by the anticorruption group Transparency International has found. The results reflect a crisis of faith in government since the debt crisis crippled the economies of much of the euro zone beginning in 2008. The survey, released on Tuesday, revealed a deep chasm between elected leaders and the people they govern. About half of the 114,000 people surveyed around the world said they viewed political parties as the most corrupt institutions, and more than half thought their governments were run by special interest groups. Joao Paulo Batalha, a Portuguese board member at Transparency International, cited the near unraveling of the government of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho in Lisbon last week as an example of how focusing solely on the fiscal aspect of his country's problems had led to the public frustration reflected in the survey. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
FLORENCE, Italy The doors had only just opened at the Stazione Leopolda, the decommissioned train station where Raf Simons held his spring men's wear show, but already there was a throng inside. The music was pounding, and lights flashing, but when your eyes adjusted to the neon and then the dim, there they were: 266 mannequins wearing vintage Raf Simons, paired in groups or hanging over stairways like partygoers at a thumping club. The clothes they wore were drawn from 20 years of his namesake men's wear collection, but Mr. Simons didn't care for the word "retrospective." "I didn't really want to work too much the way it's usually done when you do a retrospective," Mr. Simons said backstage after the show. "It doesn't work for my brand; it's a brand that needs to sit in reality. I don't feel it as an installation." He gestured at the mannequins, who were, he acknowledged with a shrug, all female: "They become kind of a crowd. They're just a part of the audience." Where Mr. Simons goes, crowds follow. He uprooted his show from Paris, where it usually takes place, and moved it for a season to Pitti Uomo, the Florentine trade fair where, in 2005, he showed his 10th anniversary collection. After two decades in the fashion business, Mr. Simons is at a transitional point in his career. In October, he stepped down from Dior, where he had been creative director of its women's collection, and though rumors circulate freely, he has not yet announced where he will go next. (He and his representatives crisply declined to comment.) For the first time in years, without the usual pressure of another brand to carry as well as his own (before Dior, he spent several years designing Jil Sander, which he also brought to Pitti Uomo, in 2010), he has a single focus: Raf Simons. On Thursday night, he staged his new collection for a gathering of men and mannequins, his critics and his own past work. The new collection was made in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which reached out to him to explore a partnership two months ago. "Usually it's the other way around," Mr. Simons said. "I said, 'Can we start tomorrow?' " It is a year of Mapplethorpe, as well as a year of Raf. Twin retrospectives of Mapplethorpe's work are on view, following major Mapplethorpe Foundation gifts, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, one of Mr. Simons's favorite cities; and a new documentary, "Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures," aired on HBO earlier this year. So Mr. Simons shelved some early plans and set about incorporating Mapplethorpe's photography into his collection: the celebrity portraits as well as the self portraits, the erotic photos as well as the flowers. Much of the initial goggling and giggling was over the explicitly erotic pieces, but the show had the scope of a complete catalog. Many of the most famous photos were here: portraits of Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Robert Sherman and Alice Neel; Mapplethorpe's leather gloved hand from the invitation to a major exhibition; the flowers; the classical statuary. It had been an undertaking, Mr. Simons said, to reach out to the sitters to secure permission to use their likenesses. Mr. Sherman, handsome and gleamingly bald, attended the show, as did the family of Ms. Neel, who died in 1984. That palpable sense of connection freed the Mapplethorpe works from the static confines of a gallery retrospective, just as Mr. Simons's own archive, unpedestaled, peopled the crowd. One provocateur and innovator saluted another: Looking at Mr. Simons's work and Mapplethorpe's, it was striking to see once again how influential each has been, and to recognize the debt contemporary men's wear owes to Mr. Simons, and photography to Mapplethorpe. That the work is so well known was the peculiar challenge of using it. "I wasn't interested to choose five photographs and put them on T shirts that's what everyone does," Mr. Simons said. And in fact, as of very recently, you could buy at Uniqlo a T shirt with the same American flag image Mr. Simons used. What was once astonishing is now canonical. That made for a quieter collection than usual for Mr. Simons, even if he called it "probably the most complex collection I ever did, technically speaking," thanks to the challenges of printing the images at high quality on cloth. The clothes were simpler, riffing on Raf shapes of the past: tunics and big coats, threadbare sweaters, abbreviated pullover vests. The models looked like Mapplethorpe (down to the leather man hats on their curly heads) and were dressed like his portraits of Ms. Smith, in her plain black trousers and men's shirt. The looks repeated, with variations; the boys became frames for the images they wore. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Sikolo Brathwaite, wife of the photographer Kwame Brathwaite, in 1968, wearing a headpiece designed by Carolee Prince. The image is in the show "Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite," at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. LOS ANGELES Images of black Americans' deaths and suffering have been a permanent fixture in our cultural history, while those celebrating black personhood and pleasure have been less widely known and shown. Recent years have brought a range of efforts to balance this trend, from the scholar Deborah Willis's book "Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present" to the hashtag BlackGirlMagic. The exhibition "Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite," organized by the Aperture Foundation and accompanied by a publication of the same title, is the latest a tribute to a man who captured the soul of a new movement celebrating African American style and identity (and whose achievements are now inspiring the pop star Rihanna). Offering a small sample of a larger oeuvre, " Black Is Beautiful," at the Skirball Cultural Center here, is the first solo museum show devoted to Mr. Brathwaite. It features 41 mostly black and white pictures he shot largely in the Bronx and Harlem in the 1950s and '60s , as well as contemporaneous clothing, jewelry, posters and album covers. The photographs depict dapper black men in suits, congregating at jazz concerts, and black women with natural hairstyles striking elegant poses in African print clothing. As the exhibition makes clear, though, Mr. Brathwaite's talent for creating images extended far beyond taking pictures. Despite going underrecognized in the years since, he was at the time a social force who helped gather and empower African Americans , rallying them around the slogans "Think black, buy black" and "Black is beautiful." Mr. Brathwaite, born in Brooklyn in 1938 to Barbadian immigrants, was raised in the Bronx. In 1956, around the time of his high school graduation, he teamed up with his brother Elombe Brath and a group of friends to form what became the African Jazz Art Society and Studios. (Both the artist and his brother adopted West African names in place of their given ones, and Elombe shortened his last name.) The organization was part social club, part arts collective, part political statement: Mr. Brathwaite and his cohort were disciples of Marcus Garvey's black nationalist, Pan Africanist teachings. The society also began organizing jazz concerts, first in the Bronx and then in Harlem. As the popularity of the shows grew, so did the profiles of the musicians and Mr. Brathwaite's own status on the scene: A 1958 photograph captures Miles Davis blowing into a trumpet with his eyes closed and beads of sweat dripping down his face. Some of the strongest shots from this period demonstrate the power of music to bring people together, like a 1962 picture of a group of black teenagers awaiting the arrival of James Brown at an airport. Their signs, grins and raised hands convey an irrepressible energy that evokes Brown even without his physical presence. In 1963, a protest against the opening of a white owned wig shop on 125th Street helped catalyze the Black Is Beautiful movement. A photograph by Mr. Brathwaite shows a woman in slim heels pacing in front of the store with a sign. She carries herself with such confidence and poise that she could be walking a runway and, indeed, the protester is Nomsa Brath, the wife of Elombe and one of the Grandassa Models, a group the jazz arts society started the year before. Although it included members of both genders, women, with their natural hairstyles and brightly patterned, often homemade clothes, were the stars; they were also, as Tanisha C. Ford writes in the show's accompanying book, the subjects of the most controversy. In Mr. Brathwaite's photographs, some of which are shot in rich color, the Grandassa Models seem to embody the ideal of empowerment through self presentation. They smile, gaze and cock their hips with hard earned confidence and self possession. In one magnetic image from about 1970, a model looks up through long, carefully articulated lashes. Her semi nudity gives her sex appeal, but her perfectly rounded Afro and the light blue background also make her look angelic. Another striking pair of photographs shot outdoors at a public school in 1966 features groups of female and male Grandassa models, facing off as if they were gangs. No one smiles; the women lean back with an air of suspicion, while the men stand with their hands clasped in front of them, as if they were bodyguards. This is as close to militancy as Mr. Brathwaite's subjects get. Their Afros may hint at the Black Power movement, but theirs was a different kind of activism a politics of body positivity and aesthetic liberation. It's fortunate that "Black Is Beautiful" is on view at the same time that the Underground Museum here was showing Roy DeCarava's intimate photographs of everyday black life , and that the Broad museum is hosting "Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963 1983" (through Sept. 1). Mr. Brathwaite's work helps us see the full picture of African American visual history , which is still coming into focus. Black Is Beautiful: The Photographs of Kwame Brathwaite Through Sept 1 at the Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 North Sepulveda Boulevard, Los Angeles; 310 440 4500, skirball.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In April, as the coronavirus was rampaging through the Northeast, Larry Churchill considered what he would do if the pandemic caused medical shortages. Should he, a 75 year old, direct care to younger people before him if he got sick? He was in a good position to raise the question. A bioethicist retired from Vanderbilt University, he published an essay on the Hastings Center's bioethics forum saying that he intended to avoid hospitals if they became overwhelmed and forgo a ventilator if equipment grew scarce. When a vaccine became available, he would move to the end of the line. Fortunately, Dr. Churchill has not had to face such decisions. He remains healthy, writing and teaching, and hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. And enough ventilators were produced to meet demand. But as new cases surge across the country and the flu season looms, the prospect of rationing has resurfaced. Some policies adopted by states or health care systems to allocate medical resources equipment, drugs, critical care and intensive care beds specifically make age part of the equation. Other guidelines appear more neutral, but incorporate factors that nevertheless disfavor older people, like other health conditions or life expectancy. After much discussion of what younger people owe their elders, who are at greater risk from Covid 19, some older adults are contemplating their obligations to the young. "Part of the moral meaning of aging lies in a sense of reciprocity across generations," Dr. Churchill wrote in his essay. He does not believe that older people are less deserving of care, nor would he want his personal philosophy to become public policy, he said; other older adults will reach different conclusions. But he subscribes to a "life span approach" to ethics, sometimes called the "fair innings" approach: He has had his turns at bat. Younger people have had less time to experience life's opportunities and pleasures. "That's why the death of a 40 year old is tragic we see so much unfulfilled potential," he said in an interview. "My death at 75 would be sad for the people who love me, but not tragic." His is a minority opinion among those considering medical ethics and legal protections in a pandemic. Professional associations like the American Geriatrics Society and advocacy groups like Justice in Aging have focused more on the opposite possibility: They want to prevent older and disabled people from being arbitrarily sent to the rear of the line. "You can have a fairly young individual who is frail and behaves like an 85 year old, and 85 year olds who are running marathons," said Dr. Timothy Farrell, the vice chair of the American Geriatrics Society's ethics committee and a geriatrician at University of Utah Health. "So to say that 85 year olds don't have a claim on resources seems unjust." In June, the society published a position statement aimed at government policymakers and hospital administrators. It warned that age categories, which some states apply to determine access to care in disease outbreaks, natural disasters and other crises, should never be used to exclude patients from treatment. The statement also opposes criteria like "life years saved" and long term life expectancy, which similarly disadvantage the older population. Instead, it recommends treating patients based on the likelihood of being discharged from the hospital and surviving for six months. "Our ability as physicians to prognosticate is generally poor, particularly in the heat of the moment," Dr. Farrell said. Short term predictions are more accurate. The society took no position on whether age should serve as a "tiebreaker," as some ethics guidelines permit in cases where two patients are deemed equally likely to survive. But "that would be bias, in our view," said Regan Bailey, the director of litigation for Justice in Aging. Her organization, along with others representing disabled people and older adults, has filed several complaints with the Office of Civil Rights at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, charging that state policies for allocating health care during a crisis violate federal civil rights laws. In March, the Office of Civil Rights reaffirmed that the Affordable Care Act and other federal statutes prohibit discrimination, in health facilities receiving federal funds, on the basis of age, disability and other characteristics. Nevertheless, the coalition has argued that guidelines in Oregon, Arizona and northern Texas remain discriminatory. For example, Arizona, which activated its crisis guidelines in June, includes long term mortality as a consideration, along with the ability to experience "life stages." While those cases are pending, other civil rights complaints have brought changes in Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Alabama. None of these efforts, however, prevent individuals like Dr. Churchill from voluntarily declining treatment to benefit the young, or for any other reason. Specifying one's choices, using an advance directive, is of greater importance than ever during a pandemic. For those who want to yield their place in the health care line, an organization called Save Other Souls has developed a document that takes effect during a declared state of emergency for Covid 19. Vetted by lawyers, it allows people of any age to cede medical equipment, drugs or hospital care to others. The directive lapses when the emergency ends, or after 18 months. "It's akin to the person who runs into a burning building or gives up the last seat on the lifeboat," said Dr. Andrea Kittrell, an otolaryngologist in Lynchburg, Va., who created the organization in March. "There are those people who are selfless and generous and value other people's lives as much or more than their own." Winnona Merritt, for example, works daily in her vegetable garden in High Point, N.C., sharing cucumbers and squash with her neighbors. Vigorous at 82, Ms. Merritt said she would welcome more good years. But in a pandemic, "I'm afraid I could go to the head of the line, ahead of someone younger, with a family," she said. "I don't need that. I've had a wonderful life." With her family's support, she signed an S.O.S. directive. Research suggests that altruism and generosity increase at older ages. For example, in recruiting volunteers for Experience Corps, which trains seniors to assist in public schools, the most effective recruiting messages appealed to a person's desire to help the next generation. Successful programs like Experience Corps also point to a common criticism of the fair innings philosophy: The last innings of the game can be among the most significant. "We may be missing out on the contributions people make later in life," Dr. Farrell said. Moreover, some individuals, for reasons including race, gender or poverty, never got their fair innings. Of course, forgoing health care isn't the only altruistic response to Covid 19. Jeffrey Balkind, 73, a retired World Bank administrator in Washington, has volunteered for clinical vaccine trials. Mr. Balkind has had two close encounters with death, as a hostage during a 1981 airliner hijacking, then after a 2017 accident with his Vespa scooter. Injured and hospitalized, he resolved that "if I ever had a chance, I would try to do something useful in the medical field." It wasn't simple. For the initial trial of a vaccine candidate developed by the biotech company Moderna and the National Institutes of Health, Mr. Balkind underwent a health screening by phone and a two hour physical exam, then signed a 23 page consent form. He was deeply disappointed to be placed on a standby list. But he was accepted into the much larger Phase 3 trial now underway, and expected to receive his first dose on Monday. "I am thrilled," he said. "I feel I'm on a fascinating adventure." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Public colleges and universities that compete in N.C.A.A. Division I sports spend three to six times as much on each athlete as they do to educate each of their students, according to a new report by the Delta Cost Project at the American Institutes for Research. "Participation in intercollegiate athletics in the United States comes with a hefty price tag, one that is usually paid in part by students and institutions," said Donna Desrochers, the author of the report. "Public institutions with Division I athletic programs have continued to invest significant resources in athletics, even as academic budgets were under strain during the recent recession." Between 2005 and 2010, on a per capita basis, the report found, athletic costs increased at least twice as fast as academic spending at institutions with top tier athletic programs. "The Delta report confirms what a lot of college presidents have long feared: that intercollegiate athletics has become a financial arms race," said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education. "Sooner or later, the increases will be unsustainable. I thought we would reach that point a decade ago, but it shows no sign of slowing down." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Amazon's new campus in Northern Virginia will include the site of this former federal garage in Arlington. Northern Virginia Is Keeping Amazon's 25,000 Jobs, and Wants You to Know It WASHINGTON When Amazon canceled its plans to build an expansive corporate campus in New York City this week, officials more than 200 miles away in Northern Virginia decided to make a statement. Their message: Their region has its act together, they have been far more prepared, and they were free of drama. The comments came from those in the area that has branded itself National Landing, an amalgamation of Arlington and Alexandria neighborhoods that was the other winner in Amazon's sweepstakes last year to award massive new campuses. But after landing Amazon, National Landing faded from the spotlight as attention focused on New York City. In New York, lawmakers, progressive activists and union leaders began contending that Amazon, one of the world's biggest tech companies, did not deserve nearly 3 billion in government incentives to open a campus there. The politicking grew heated. Then came Amazon's very public breakup with New York on Thursday. "A number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward," Amazon said about New York in a statement. In Northern Virginia, officials wasted little time. Within hours, Christian Dorsey, the chairman of the Arlington County Board, held a call with reporters. "I can't speculate what went wrong" in New York, Mr. Dorsey said, "and I don't really care to think about it much." But he discussed how his area had done a better job of planning for Amazon, persuading the company to come and then rolling out an infrastructure and development plan to make its arrival possible. "It highlighted a particular community dynamic in a region that has its act together," Mr. Dorsey said. He added that Amazon hadn't changed its plans to bring 25,000 jobs to National Landing by 2030, with the potential to increase that to 38,000 employees later. Monica Backmon, the executive director of the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, was even more direct. "Oh, yes, we are pleased," she said. "It speaks to certainty that we know what we are doing and put a lot of planning and effort early on into it." From the beginning, Virginia officials said, their preparations differed sharply from those of other cities that applied to Amazon. Residents and others were generally welcoming, in contrast to the steady drumbeat of protests in New York. For years, the region had planned and made improvements to roads, subways, trains and bike lanes to accommodate a major corporation like Amazon, Ms. Backmon said. A bipartisan state board of legislative leaders that reviews major incentive deals had many hours of discussions on Amazon before an agreement was reached for the new campus, said Stephen Moret, who runs the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. "The fact that that group exists and was so heavily engaged periodically throughout the 14 months was a major contributor for how well things have rolled out at the state level," Mr. Moret said in a recent interview. He said Arlington and Alexandria officials had been briefed about Amazon in closed sessions multiple times as well. Late last month, the Virginia legislature overwhelmingly passed a 750 million incentive package for Amazon, which the governor signed into law. It provides Amazon with 550 million in grants for the first 25,000 jobs it creates, and 200 million more for creating 12,850 additional jobs in subsequent years. Officials in Nashville, which landed a smaller development project from Amazon, with about 5,000 jobs, also drew distinctions between their approach and New York's. The city and Tennessee offered a combined 102 million in tax incentives, significantly less per job than New York's multibillion dollar promise. And Nashville's offer didn't come with some of the attention grabbing perks that New York's did. "We don't have a helipad," said Thomas Mulgrew, press secretary for Mayor David Briley, referring to New York's promise to help Amazon secure access to a helicopter landing facility near its planned Queens campus. "I read that and thought, 'Oof, that's going to be a tough one.'" Critics of Amazon and its expansion strategy celebrated the company's withdrawal from New York as a victory and said they were emboldened to turn their sights on Northern Virginia and Nashville. "Do not come to our cities expecting to ignore the democratic process and hoard the resources that our communities desperately need," Local Progress, an organization of local officials, said in a statement. Stand Up Nashville, an activist group that has criticized the Amazon project, and other groups have been working for months to rally opposition to the deal and to push for more community involvement in the process. The news from New York this week injected new energy into the movement and is likely to increase attendance at a public forum the groups were already planning for Friday evening. "Since the announcement yesterday, the event has just exploded," said Anne Barnett, a Stand Up Nashville co chairwoman. "There's more interest now than ever." Northern Virginia officials said they recognized that there could be similar protests in their area. But they said their relationship with Amazon was strong. "They have been a completely honest broker," said Mr. Dorsey of the Arlington County Board. "We feel good about their relations thus far." Amazon did not immediately return a call for comment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
As illnesses and deaths linked to vaping continue to rise, health experts on Friday updated their advice to doctors on how best to recognize symptoms and treat patients, and warned that the start of the flu season would make it harder to arrive at the right diagnosis. "I can't stress enough the seriousness of these lung injuries associated with e cigarettes or vaping products," Dr. Anne Schuchat , principal deputy director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news briefing. "We are not seeing a meaningful drop off in new cases, and unfortunately many more people have been hospitalized with lung injury each week." A new concern has come to light. She said a handful of patients, fewer than five, were hospitalized for vaping illness, recovered and went home, and then wound up back in the hospital again, from five to 55 days later. The reason is not yet known, she said. One possibility is that the patients may have started vaping again. Of the 1,299 cases reported to the C.D.C. since mid August, 70 percent of the patients are male, and 80 percent are under 35 years old. The majority, 76 percent, have vaped THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and many have also used nicotine. Twenty nine deaths have been reported. Only Alaska has no reported cases. The cause of the illnesses is not known, and the C.D.C. says no vaping products can be considered safe. Dr. Schuchat said there might turn out to be more than one cause, and it might take months to find the answer. Health officials have given the illness a formal name, "e cigarette, or vaping, product use associated lung injury," or Evali. The start of the flu season may make it harder to diagnose cases, because some symptoms of lung damage from vaping cough, shortness of breath, fever can mimic those of influenza. The C.D.C. recommends testing patients with those symptoms for flu and other respiratory infections, but it is possible for patients to have both a lung injury from vaping and the flu or some other viral or bacterial ailment affecting their lungs. Many patients with vaping illness also have stomach pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, and it is important to ask people with those symptoms about vaping. Doctors should "strongly consider" admitting patients to the hospital if they have become ill after vaping and are short of breath, have underlying illnesses that could affect their lungs or their blood oxygen level is less than 95 percent, the C.D.C. said. That level, called oxygen saturation, can be measured with a device clipped to the fingertip, the agency said in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published on Friday. The report also said that some patients who initially had mild symptoms then deteriorated rapidly within 48 hours. And many patients who ended up in the hospital had previously been sent home after seeking help at emergency rooms or clinics. Because the vaping illnesses often involve severe inflammation in the lungs, many patients have been treated with corticosteroid drugs. But the report said it was not known whether the drugs really helped or whether the patients might have recovered on their own. And corticosteroids can increase the risk of infection. The report says that "in some circumstances," it might be best to avoid corticosteroids in patients who are being tested for illnesses like fungal pneumonia, which could worsen with the drugs. But the report also says that in patients who are severely ill, it may be necessary to give them corticosteroids along with other drugs to fight infection. Patients who have had high doses of corticosteroids may need to see a specialist in endocrinology to help minimize or manage the side effects. Patients older than 50 who become ill after vaping tend to be sicker than younger ones: more likely to need ventilators and to stay longer in the hospital. These older patients may need special consideration, the report said, adding that a quick diagnosis, treatment with steroids and consultation with specialists in pulmonary and critical care "might be lifesaving in this patient population." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Near the end of his 1933 novel "Romance in Marseille," newly and belatedly published for the first time by Penguin Classics, the Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay moves toward an operatic climax by steering several characters into a bar. While his cast is diverse "girls and men, white and brown and black, mingled colors and odors come together" McKay assigns them a shared pastime: "drinking, gossiping, dancing and perspiring to the sound of international jazz." But then he predicts an imminent end to all that: "The craze of the Charleston and Black Bottom was about dead and buried." This whiplash trajectory from popularity to "dead and buried" wasn't unusual when classical musicians of the time ventured into pop styles. While jazz inspired music by the likes of Stravinsky and Weill has never been forgotten, the similar efforts of dozens of other composers from the same period have fallen into obscurity. Now some of those experiments are enjoying a fresh hearing. The Berlin based pianist Gottlieb Wallisch's revealing and entertaining new recording, "20th Century Foxtrots, Vol. 1: Austria and Czechia," released in February on the Grand Piano label, is mostly made up of world premiere recordings of these dance oriented works, in their piano arrangements. The particular rhythmic patterns vary, but as the musicologist Susan C. Cook writes in her book "Opera for a New Republic," they tend to accelerate beyond the tempo of Europe's vintage waltzes, reflecting the pace of a new century. In a phone interview from his home, Mr. Wallisch described initially falling in love with a fox trot by George Antheil. Subsequent conversations with Mauro Piccinini, a music historian who contributed liner notes for the new album, led him to think about a single disc of piano arrangements of jazz inflected works. But additional trips to multiple archives quickly made it clear that a 70 minute CD would not be sufficient. "The deeper I went, the more astonished I was," he said, "how many so called classical composers really tried to write in these dance forms, like fox trots, Charlestons, tangos, shimmys." By grouping these works geographically, he said, he anticipates creating "an encyclopedia of music from this time." The second volume in the series devoted to pieces by German composers is scheduled for release in the fall. Whether this series will create a wider audience for Jazz Age experimentalism is an open question. Last month, at a New York Philharmonic Nightcap concert organized by the composer Tania Leon, the pianist Jason Moran played a thrilling version of James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout," a Harlem stride classic. A search of the Philharmonic's digital archive for any other programs that included Johnson's music, though, comes up empty. In a more ideal version of the contemporary classical scene, African American composers of the 1920s and '30s, as well as the Europeans they influenced, could easily be presented alongside each other, in ways that were politically impractical during the Jazz Age. Loosed from the official dictates of cultural segregation, performances like Mr. Moran's and Mr. Wallisch's might be able to reopen lines of discourse that writers like McKay saw as only ever being fitfully connected as well as, like all music, pop and otherwise vulnerable to the distortions of the marketplace and the fickle rhythms of fads. Here are a selection of highlights from Mr. Wallisch's new recording: If you've heard of the Czech composer Jaromir Weinberger, it's likely for the Polka from his opera "Schwanda the Bagpiper." (Herbert von Karajan was a devotee of that orchestral excerpt.) But he also composed an entry in the annals of the jazz age dance known as the shimmy, garlanding his miniature with streaks of New World suavity. "It's very charming," Mr. Wallisch said, but it seems to have only been presented rarely, and in the Czech Republic. Works like this were stylistic aberrations in the otherwise strait laced careers of composers like Weinberger, who were pressed by publishers hoping to capitalize on pop music fads. "We know Universal Edition, in Vienna, really encouraged many composers of the time to provide such piano pieces," Mr. Wallisch said. In a 1925 lecture, the Austrian composer Ernst Krenek asked aloud what the listening public wanted. "The answer," he continued, "will perhaps be somewhat frightening: none other than dance music." However frightened he may have been, Krenek leapt into the fray without much trepidation not only including shimmy, tango and blues numbers in his next opera, "Jonny Spielt Auf," but also making an African American musician the hero. Yet Krenek's understanding of race was limited by a lack of access to African American artists, as well as by the racist distortions of the era. In "Blackness in Opera," the musicologist Naomi Andre writes that Krenek's Jonny was reliant on minstrel caricatures. Decades later, he admitted that when writing the opera, he "had only very vague conceptions about real jazz." But the music Krenek wrote for Jonny and his band proved a hit even separate from the context of the plot. Multiple versions of the scene in the score marked "Blues" were recorded as singles. The arrangement on Mr. Wallisch's recording was created by the composer Jeno Takacs as part of a potpourri of selections from the opera. It offers a chance to hear Krenek's affection for American styles as pure music, rather than tied to the opera's sometimes problematic libretto. One composer who actually made the effort to acquaint himself with works by African American artists was Wilhelm Grosz, whose cycle of "Afrika Songs" provided German speaking audiences with translations of poems by Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer. The dance play "Baby in der Bar" included both a shimmy and a tango. In his liner notes for the new recording, Mr. Piccinini spotlights the brief appearance of a third voice in the piano arrangement by Gustav Blasser. This approach to solo piano writing is "something that Liszt developed in the middle of the 19th century," Mr. Wallisch said. "It added so much to pianism: the illusion of playing with more than two hands." Mr. Piccinini sees the arranger's use of that technique as providing a "sort of call and response jazz pattern." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
This week, "Billions" staged a charity boxing match between its fake tough traders. I'm surprised that it took this long for the show to get in the ring. The mano a mano match between Dollar Bill and Mafee on behalf of their overlords, Bobby Axelrod and Taylor Mason, provides the show with a perfect symbol. On the surface the fight is an act of philanthropy, a way to turn competition between rival firms into something productive. And surface is all it is. The perfunctory noblesse oblige of the match's charitable component disguises the venal truth. Two rich men who can barely muster the strength to swing at each other enact an absurd grudge match while their colleagues gamble obscene amounts of money. The winning bet, it turns out, is on both competitors losing. On "Billions," there's always a way to make money off someone else's misfortune. Meanwhile, the real competition takes place before the bout even starts. Wielding every carrot and stick he and Chuck could get their hands on, Bobby has induced the governor to reverse New York's fracking ban. Having bet big on the energy sector, Axe Cap's payoff will be huge. But the windfall headed Taylor Mason's way is even bigger. Through two combative appearances on CNBC's "Halftime Report," Mason goads Axe into spending substantial political and actual capital on reversing the ban. Bobby takes the bait, hoping to hurt both the pocketbook and the public reputation of his hated rival. But by quietly buying up the rights to the water without which no fracking can actually take place for a song, at that Mason Cap has positioned itself to emerge from the fracas an even bigger winner. Bobby, meanwhile, is left to feel like a fool who fell for his former underling's ruse, hook, line and sinker. "I see that taking credit for my success in the midst of defeat is a kind of balm," Taylor sneers when Bobby tries to save face by saying he made Mason's win possible. "So you go on ahead." That's gotta sting. (Helping his billionaire girlfriend, Rebecca Cantu, gain control of the department store chain she dreamed about as a small town kid soothes it a little, I'm sure.) Will Bobby learn anything from this? Certainly not morally. He'll be more wary of tangling with Taylor head on next time, the same way Taylor learned to be both more cautious and more vicious from the Axe induced debacle that destroyed the Mason family last week. But the vendetta will continue, even redouble. It always does. Some characters even wage that war on spec. Consider Sarah (Samantha Mathis), Mason Cap's major domo. Given explicit orders to leave Wendy Rhoades alone, regardless of the role she played in destroying George Mason's dreams, Sarah goes over Taylor's head and sics the medical board on Wendy for ethics violations. Taylor learns of the maneuver directly from Wendy when they meet in the crowd at the boxing match. After a split second's hesitation, Mason rolls with it, claiming responsibility even though it was Sarah who must have pulled the trigger. Sarah, whose admiration for Taylor appears to be more than professional, appreciates the retroactive blessing for the attack. Wendy, of course, is guilty as sin. She knows it full well. Pep talks from both Bobby and Bonnie bounce right off her. As would be clients refuse her services, Wendy admits she's shaken to her core about this more so, even, than by her husband's humiliating public revelation of their sexual kinks. That discrepancy is revealing in its own way. Sex, love and marriage are as important to Wendy as they are to anyone. But being stripped of her license to practice would be a direct hit on her deepest sense of self. Being a doctor matters to Wendy. Despite her shenanigans in service of her boss's and her husband's respective (and collective) schemes, she's still Dr. Wendy Rhoades. Losing that honorific would call her entire life's work into question. Kate Sacker is facing a similar internal struggle. Attorney General Jock Jeffcoat's current bugbear is mobile voting. His reasons are unclear to the other characters, though suppressing the votes of marginalized people is a tried and true tactic for good ol' boy politicians. Sacker has been a good soldier in Jeffcoat and Connerty's war against Chuck. But her skin instinctively crawls in response. For his part, Chuck combines political idealism with his desire to stick it to Jeffcoat and pushes for a mobile voting pilot program among the Cayuga Nation people in upstate New York. This same group controls the casino that helped Charles Sr. rake in big real estate bucks ... and father a secret daughter with one of the locals, as Chuck learns to his chagrin. With the usual carrot stick two step, Chuck works with the tribe to get the pilot program greenlit. In response, Jeffcoat moves against Rhoades's nominal ally, Commissioner Sansone. His threat to pull federal funding for the department's crown jewel antiterror efforts and various other programs is enough to convince the Commish to shut down Charles Sr.'s waterfront construction project. Thrust and parry, jab and dodge, et cetera and ad nauseam. Directed by Colin Bucksey from a story by Lenore Zion and a script by Alice O'Neill, "Fight Night" is "Billions" at its most crisp, brisk and brutal. The twists and turns and pop culture quotes are sumptuous, and every actor seems to appreciate the theatrical vibe of the project part Oscar Wilde, part Bernard Shaw a little more each week. But the toxicity of the politics underneath it all grows stronger with time as well. Voting rights, minority rights, the health of the environment, the sanctity of various and sundry offices everything we're trained, as citizens, to care about are playthings to these people. The message is clear: So are we. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
These Students Are Learning About Fake News and How to Spot It This article is part of our latest Learning special report. We're focusing on Generation Z, which is facing challenges from changing curriculums and new technology to financial aid gaps and homelessness. The students sit at desks in groups of four, watching videos about the recent bush fires in Australia. One shows an apocalyptic landscape in flames, the other a tourist paradise, with assurances that much of the continent is safe. Instead of dismissing both as fake news, the eighth graders know what questions to ask to tease out the nuances: Who put out the videos? What does each source have to gain? How big is Australia? Could both videos be true? It is no wonder these students at Herbert S. Eisenberg Intermediate School 303 in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn approach their task with such sophistication. They have been studying news literacy since sixth grade in one of the only schools in the country to make the subject part of an English language arts curriculum that all students must take for an hour a week for three years. News, or media, literacy how to critically understand, analyze and evaluate online content, images and stories is not new. But it has taken on urgency in the last few years as accusations of fake news and the reality of disinformation permeate the internet and people especially young ones spend hours and hours a day looking at screens. How News Literate Are You? Take the Quiz to Find Out. "Media literacy is the literacy of the 21st century," said a recent report by the nonprofit group Media Literacy Now. Research has shown that an inability to judge content leads to two equally unfortunate outcomes: People believe everything that suits their preconceived notions, or they cynically disbelieve everything. Either way leads to a polarized and disengaged citizenry. Other recent research suggests that while so called digital natives preteens and teenagers are technically savvy, most of them fail when it comes to assessing the veracity of news articles and images. The issue is being attacked by dozens of organizations offering information and curriculums on the subject. According to Media Literacy Now, 14 states require some sort of media literacy education in elementary and secondary schools. One such program, the News Literacy Project which began more than 10 years ago and works with news organizations (including The New York Times) to educate students in grades six through 12 has grown rapidly since the 2016 election and is now offering online courses across the country. "The election was a sea change," said Alan Miller, the program's founder and C.E.O., who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting at The Los Angeles Times. In addition, several universities are working with middle and high schools and providing news literacy curriculums to them at no charge. College is too late to begin the lessons, said Howard Schneider, founding dean of the School of Journalism at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He worked as a reporter and editor at Newsday for 35 years. "Increasingly, students are arriving at college with bad digital citizenship habits," he said. "They are outsourcing their judgment to their peers and to technology." Young people are not alone in their online illiteracy. A study last year found that those 65 and older shared more fake news during the 2016 election than younger adults. The Stanford History Education Group has conducted some of the leading research into young people's digital savvy, finding that a high proportion of students in middle school through college do not have the tools to evaluate the truth of online content. Spurred by the group's 2016 research findings, Google's charitable arm funded a coalition called MediaWise that included the Stanford History Education Group, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and the Local Media Association. As part of the coalition, Stanford developed the curriculum, Civic Online Reasoning for middle and high school students. The goal is broader than just the media, but focused "on how we become informed about the issues of public policy that affect our lives," Professor Wineburg said. The aim of the Civic Online Reasoning curriculum is to get students to ask three basic questions when reading or watching online content: Who is behind that information? What is the evidence? What do other sources say? Researchers focused on two major skills. The first is lateral reading. It encourages readers who come to an unfamiliar website to refrain from exploring the site more deeply until they have opened other tabs and found other websites to help them determine the authenticity or reliability of the newly discovered site. The other skill is click restraint. Ideally, users would resist the impulse to click on the first results that appear in say, a Google search, until they have scanned the full list for credibility and then click selectively. Professor Wineburg said that he learned these skills from professional fact checkers and that "focusing on a very small set of high leverage skills can make a dent in students' abilities to make wise judgments." Robert White, a government and politics teacher at a high school in Lincoln, Neb., was part of a pilot program for the curriculum and has taught it for the last three semesters. He says it works. "Most students believed what they saw on a news site, any news site," Mr. White said. "By the end of the semester, I could see a lot of change they questioned any media source and did fact checking. I now have students fact checking me." In the last 18 months, another university level news literacy program, Stony Brook's Center for News Literacy, has reached out to secondary school staff members and teachers, offering them its summer academy, which runs about four days. The idea of a journalism school now should be "not only teach the journalists of the future, but to prepare the audience of the future," Professor Schneider said. Carmen Amador, the principal of I.S. 303, learned about the Stony Brook news literacy program at a conference and attended the academy when it was still aimed at higher education. Using what she learned there, her school adopted a news literacy curriculum seven years ago. "Before they started talking about fake news, we were talking about it," Ms. Amador said. "But after 2016, the teachers became more excited and passionate about it." The goal, she said, is not only to better understand the news but also to take action through community service and other initiatives. Students are taught to know the "neighborhood" they're reading in: is it journalism, entertainment, promotion, raw information or advertising? And an acronym, IMVAIN, is used widely as a cue: Are sources independent, are there multiple sources, do they verify evidence, and are they authoritative, informed and named sources? Brian Winkel, a high school journalism and English teacher in Cedar Falls, Iowa, uses Checkology in an elective course called 21st Century Literacy. He said he wished every student would be required to learn news literacy. No long term studies have been done on the effectiveness of teaching news literacy. But assessments of students before and after they complete courses and comparisons with students who do not take the classes show that students who learn news literacy are often better able to recognize false content and judge if a source of information is credible, and they are often more engaged in current events and news. Students at I.S. 303, who are fast becoming more proficient than some adults in evaluating online content, now see a need to teach their peers and parents. "My mom doesn't watch the news all that much, but sometimes she'll read something, and she'll automatically believe it and tell me about it," said Nafisa Patwary, a seventh grader. "And I'll help her fact check." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
When It Comes to Weddings, Each Jonas Brother Has a Style None A decade ago, when the Jonas Brothers started pumping out the catchy tunes that launched them into the pop music stratosphere, each famously wore a purity ring. Now all three have traded their purity rings for wedding bands. But while the purity bands were matching, the weddings that led to the wedding rings including the edible Ring Pop that Joe Jonas reportedly accepted last week at his marriage to the actress Sophie Turner have been vastly different. Sophie Turner's Ring Pop wrapper, framed with the wedding picture of her and her husband, Joe Jonas (second from left) and their groomsmen, Nick Jonas and Kevin Jonas. The couple married at A Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. Elvis (otherwise known as Jesse Garon) led the I dos. Joe, 29, the swaggering star Jonas, married Ms. Turner, a "Game of Thrones" star, May 1 in a 15 minute ceremony at the Chapel L'Amour, a room in A Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. Jesse Garon, the pompadour wearing Elvis impersonator, officiated. (In a coincidence, Elvis Presley and Priscilla Beaulieu were also married on May 1, 1967, also in Vegas.) Mr. Garon, who performed more than 600 Vegas weddings last year and was previously unfamiliar with the Jonases, said the wedding differed from what he's accustomed to mostly in size. "They had a really huge group of 40 people," he said. "Most people have five or 10." Also memorable was the end of the ceremony. "They knew how to have fun," Mr. Garon said. "When we started singing 'Viva Las Vegas,' they got into it. Those brothers could sing O.K." Diplo, the D.J. and music producer who had attended the Billboard Music Awards earlier that evening with the couple, captured the ceremony for followers and fans on Instagram Live. Ms. Turner, 23, wore a white low necked jumpsuit with a traditional bridal veil. Joe and his brothers, Kevin, 31, and Nick, 26, who served as groomsmen, wore matching gray suits. The surprise wedding was sensational enough to suit the rock star, recently described as "the indisputable lead Jonas" in W Magazine. But this was no whirlwind secret romance: Fans started posting images of the couple together in 2016. In October 2017, they announced their engagement with corresponding Instagram posts. Each shared an image showing Turner's pear shaped engagement ring. Despite its quirk and camp, the Las Vegas wedding may have been as practical as it was spontaneous. Now that they are legally married in the United States, the couple is free to have the more formal wedding fans were expecting this summer in France. (Joe mentioned plans for the summer wedding during an interview on "The Late Late Show With James Corden" in March. A month later, he told "The Zach Sang Show's" audience he would be marrying in France.) If a second wedding ceremony is in the works for Joe and the newest Mrs. Jonas, they will be following in the footsteps of his younger brother. But possibly with fewer sequins, and dresses, and everything. In December, Nick married Priyanka Chopra, 36, an actress, singer and former Miss World, in a pair of lavish ceremonies, both in India, after a July engagement. The couple said their "I dos" first in a Christian ceremony Dec. 1 at the Umaid Bhavan Palace in Jodhpur; Kevin and Joe, as well as the youngest Jonas, Frankie, were groomsmen. The next day at the palace, they hosted an official Hindu ceremony for 400. Both weddings were preceded by a Mehendi, a traditional Indian celebration during which henna is applied to the bride's hands and feet, and by a Sangeet, another traditional Indian prewedding event. Ms. Chopra's wedding dress for the Christian ceremony was custom made by Ralph Lauren and covered in more than two million mother of pearl sequins. Topping it was a 75 foot veil that could have doubled as the world's largest and fanciest tarp. Nick wore a black double breasted tuxedo, also custom made by Ralph Lauren. For the Hindu ceremony, Ms. Chopra wore a hand embroidered fire engine red lehenga with hand cut organza flowers, French silk knots and crystals, according to the Indian designer Sabyaschi's Instagram post. The groom accessorized his gold hand quilted silk sherwani with a diamond necklace and Christian Louboutin shoes. But back to the stateside wedding reception for Nick and Ms. Chopra, which was at Nellie's Southern Kitchen, a restaurant in Belmont, N.C. That party was inspired by the Jonas brothers' late great grandmother, was held in January, extending the festivities to 2019. This may have been enough celebrating for Nick. During a recent episode of "Carpool Karaoke" Mr. Corden, the host, asked him, "Was there a point during your many weddings that you thought, 'I'm done with these weddings?'" Nick admitted there was, adding, "It was when I looked at the bill." By comparison, Kevin Jonas's 2009 wedding to Danielle Deleasa was a bit more low key, though it took place during a December snowstorm. The couple, now the parents of two daughters, married at Oheka Castle, a French style chateau on a sprawling estate in Huntington, N.Y. Kevin's brothers were by his side. As his bride approached in a Vera Wang lace and tulle gown, Kevin, wearing a black tuxedo, fought back tears. He couldn't have known at the time that his wedding, with its enchanted forest theme, would one day seem tame compared with his brothers'. And neither did his brother Joe during a toast to the newlyweds at the reception. "This is crazy," he said of the elaborate setting. "I can't top this." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
WHAT IS IT? The most hopped up American hatchback in, well, forever. HOW MUCH? 24,495 base; 28,170 as tested HOW QUICK IS IT? Automobile magazine spurred the ST from a standstill to 60 m.p.h. in 6.2 seconds, a half second quicker than the 200 horse Volkswagen GTI. IS IT THIRSTY? The E.P.A. rating is 23 m.p.g. city, 32 highway. About a decade after sparking up its fondly recalled Focus SVT then inexplicably setting it aside Ford has rediscovered the smoky pleasure of a hot hatchback. It was worth the wait. With the fine, largely German engineered Focus as its bedrock, the ST sticks sharp elbows into a perennial benchmark, the Volkswagen GTI. And while the lavishly equipped Focus brings its own form of Euro sophistication, it adds a delightful layer of Yankee aggression. That American edge may be only metaphorical. The Focus ST was developed under a German born engineer, Jost Capito, when he was the head of Global Performance Vehicles at Ford. Mr. Capito, who has since left to manage VW motorsports, formerly led Porsche racing and Red Bull's Formula One team. With minor tweaks, this Focus would be right at home on a track. I tested mine in Florida, where the ST was as loud, fast and sweat inducing as a Miami nightclub a bold counterpoint to the smooth GTI. In contrast to the grinning air inlet of the Mazda 3, Ford turns the smile upside down, giving the Focus a blackened glower that suits its character. Other attention getters include a jutting roof spoiler, snowflake shaped 18 inch wheels and a paint color called Tangerine Scream. The hue seems more taxicab than tropical, but the Focus wore its maize coat proudly, even when it crashed a nighttime gaggle of Bentleys at the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach. The young valet who escorted the ST practically giggled when he handed me back the keys, making it clear whose car he favored. The dashboard black and bulging, all vents and sharp angles is akin to Darth Vader's helmet breathing in your face. Three dashtop gauges display turbo boost, oil pressure and temperature. Recaro sport buckets are a teenage dream, with swollen bolsters, black ribbed inserts, contrasting yellow fabric and red embossed STs on the headrests. But as with every Focus, the footwells are confining. While Ford's troublesome MyFord Touch infotainment unit has drawn deserved complaints, one of its strong points is rarely mentioned: the voice commands are pretty slick. Just recite a street address, hands free, and boom the system has you locked in and on your way. "Locked in" also describes the car's performance. Like the Mazdaspeed 3, the ST holds a power and speed advantage over most pocket rockets. Despite Ford's mechanical and computerized countermeasures, mashing the gas pedal produces roller coaster waves of torque steer, yanking the wheel in your hands. But give Ford credit for not sanitizing the experience; it's up to the pilot to keep a foot to the floor and hang on tight. Steering, tire grip and suspension balance are all remarkable for a front drive car in this class. And the handling assumes skill on the driver's part. The Focus acts more like a rear drive sports car, avoiding the plodding understeer that scrubs the front tires and kills the joy. Lift off the throttle on corners and the rear end pivots into a thrilling yet easily controllable slide. I can't think of another front drive car that's so easy and fun to pivot around its axis. The Focus ST gives up some refinement to the GTI, but that's also true to its nature. The shifter isn't perfect, but it is eager and effective. Full throttle shifts at redline send jarring clunks through the powertrain. Another disadvantage is the trucklike turning circle of 39.4 feet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Lora DiCarlo, the company behind the Ose sex toy shown above, was stripped of an award at CES. Its products were deemed "immoral, obscene, indecent, profane or not in keeping with CTA's image." A personal massager, a sperm counter, virtual reality pornography, something described as "the world's first ebook driven sex toy": All of these products have been exhibited at CES, the country's largest consumer electronics convention. Two of them won awards there. So Lora Haddock was surprised when Ose, a hands free sex toy she designed with a team of engineers from Oregon State University, had its CES Innovation Award revoked after three weeks. In an email explaining the convention's change of heart, which Ms. Haddock shared with The New York Times, a representative cited a clause in the awards' terms and conditions that disqualified products deemed "immoral, obscene, indecent, profane or not in keeping with CTA's image." (CTA refers to the Consumer Technology Association, which runs CES.) "I was shocked," Ms. Haddock, 33, said, "and then I was angry." The award "signified a shift in inclusion," she said. "And then it was actually, no you're obscene and you're indecent and immoral, and you're not innovative at all." John Parmigiani, the director of the Prototype Development Lab at Oregon State University, first met Ms. Haddock in 2017, shortly after she had officially started her company, now called Lora DiCarlo . Over the years, Mr. Parmigiani who has worked with companies like Boeing and Daimler Trucks had become a go to person for entrepreneurs seeking expertise in mechanical engineering. "I went into the meeting with Lora having no idea what her product was," Mr. Parmigiani said in a recent interview. "The third sentence she said was along the lines of, 'I didn't have my first blended orgasm until I was 20 something years old.'" Mr. Parmigiani said he was briefly taken aback but he kept listening. "I thought, it's a little out of my comfort zone," he said, "but there's nothing wrong with it." Ms. Haddock had used a term that describes a sexual climax reached from simultaneous external and internal stimulation. Her first blended orgasm, which Ms. Haddock said occurred at age 28, "knocked me off the bed onto the floor. I laid there wondering, how do I do that again?" That wasn't what sold Mr. Parmigiani on the project. "I gave him a list of 52 functional engineering requirements that would be needed to produce this product," Ms. Haddock said. "And that's when he lit up." Ms. Haddock, who previously worked in health care and served in the Navy, is a self described anatomy nerd. She knew she wanted her product to be customizable, so she started gathering data for where the G spot and the clitoris are located on different bodies. "I tried to have that conversation with every single person with a vagina that I knew," Ms. Haddock said. "I literally asked them to measure it with their hands and a tape measure." Ose, which will be available this fall for 250, expands, according to user preference, once placed on the pelvic girdle. It doesn't vibrate but uses gentle, autonomous motions and air flow to enhance stimulation. Eight patents associated with Ose are pending. The team that built it includes Dr. Ada Rhodes Short, who specializes in robotics and artificial intelligence, and Lola Vars, a current doctoral candidate in design focused mechanical engineering at Oregon State University. In follow up emails, officials from CES and the Consumer Technology Association appeared to step back from the earlier assertion about the product's violations of the morality clause, writing instead that Ose did not fit into the robotics and drones category, nor into any of the other product categories. "It certainly is a robotic device if you look at a definition of a robotic device," Mr. Parmigiani said. "There is no justification. Lora DiCarlo should have won the award." In a statement provided to The Times, Gary Shapiro, the president and chief executive of the Consumer Technology Association, said: "We have apologized to CEO Lora Haddock for our mistake, as the Lori DiCarlo product does not fit into any of our existing product categories and should not have been accepted for the Innovation Awards Program. CES is a professional business show, and porn, adult toys and sex tech products are not part of the event. CES is a large show with over 4,500 exhibitors. We acknowledge there are inconsistencies in exhibiting companies, and these will be addressed." But Ms. Haddock believes that what happened was more than an accidental oversight or a clerical error. So she published an open letter accusing CES of gender bias last Tuesday, Jan. 8, the first day of the convention. It is not the first time the trade show has been accused of gender bias: In 2018, numerous people in the tech industry criticized CES for having no female keynote speakers for the second year in a row, a failing CES attributed to "a limited pool when it comes to women in these positions." This year, of the 89 judges for innovation awards, 20 were women. CES said that it is committed to diversity, and pointed to its announcement this year that it will invest 10 million in venture firms and funds focused on women, people of color and other underrepresented start ups and entrepreneurs. On display at CES was a wide array of female oriented products, including breast pumps, fertility trackers and skin care tools, but critics point out that many of them exist to enable women to support something or someone else. "They're in service of fertility, of society as a whole, of the household," said Ms. Vars, the technical director at Lora DiCarlo. She noted that a sexual health company that has exhibited at CES for years, OhMiBod, won a prize in 2016 for its Kegel exerciser. "It's something construed as good for men's pleasure or fertility," Ms. Vars said. "I hear that as a joke from men: 'I like to sleep with women who do their Kegels.'" "Sexual health wellness is something that can only happen behind closed doors, especially for women," said Polly Rodriguez, the chief executive of Unbound, a company that makes lubes, vibrators and other sexual wellness products. Ms. Rodriguez has never applied to CES because of its reputation for gender based discrimination . (Last year, Unbound was in the news after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority rejected the company's ads on the grounds that they violated rules against obscenity.) But other female driven sexual wellness products have gone the way of Ms. Haddock's. Karen Long, who has been in health care technologies for more than 20 years , was told that her company's libido enhancing device, Fiera, did not qualify for the health and technology category in 2015. A later email from convention organizers added: "As a practice, we don't allow sexual wellness products at CES." "We're a consumer product that's very clinically driven, with studies to support our product, validated surveys, OB GYNs on board and everything," Ms. Long said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Too Pop? Too Weird? A.G. Cook of PC Music Is Stepping Out on His Own In A.G. Cook's music, nothing is stable. Computerized beats bounce along steadily, then suddenly skid rapidly ahead or stretch like virtual taffy. Earnest vocals get giddily pitch shifted and skewed by distortion and effects. Tunes suddenly change key; mixes turn themselves inside out; realistic acoustic instruments begin to wow and flutter. Any semblance of predictability gets upended by human whim, as if, sooner or later, some ghost in the machine can't resist twirling all the knobs. Cook, 30, is the founder of PC Music, a loose collective songwriters, producers, singers, graphic designers, stray pseudonyms that materialized in 2013 with a free online trove of perky, warped electronic tracks: songs that seemed to both compete with and mock the expertise of mainstream pop hitmakers and electronic dance music specialists. Although PC Music includes an assortment of auteurs, most of its prodigious output has been succinct, glossy, packed with melodic and sonic hooks and cheerfully deranged. Initial reactions varied widely; PC Music was greeted as a movement, a travesty, a put on, a subversion and a guilty pleasure. "I talk to pop people and they go, 'Oh, you're that experimental guy,'" Cook said via FaceTime from Montana, where he has been living and recording during the pandemic. "And I talk to the experimental people who are like, 'Oh, you're the pop dude.'" After releasing a few songs under his own name in PC Music's early days, Cook remained largely behind the scenes as a producer and songwriter. But now, after years of collaborations, he is stepping forward for a solo career with a double debut release: two albums in two months. "7G," which came out Aug. 12, is a producer's sketchbook and showcase and a hard drive inventory: seven discs, each with seven tracks and each built around an instrument piano, guitar or an ingredient, like "extreme vocals." It includes new songs with lyrics, shape shifting instrumentals and Cook's remakes of material from, among others, the Strokes, Sia, Blur, Smashing Pumpkins, Beethoven and Tommy James and the Shondells just a glimpse of his eclecticism. Then, while listeners were still sorting through the two and a half hours of "7G," Cook announced that on Sept. 18, he will release "Apple," a one disc album that juxtaposes and infuses more or less introspective songs with vertiginous electronics. For Cook, any distinction between natural and artificial is obsolete. "People in music tend to use opposites," he said. "Either genre opposites, or this sense of authentic or inauthentic, or electronic or acoustic. For me a lot of those opposites actually are really operating on the same level. The 20th century conversation was man versus machine it's this modernist binary. I think it's funny how bits of that still linger in conversations about technology and music. But actually, on a musical level, that binary is completely dissolved." Cook and his PC Music cohorts have frequently played around with the word "pop," but he is still reluctant to define it. "The only definition that is consistent is packaging it to be approachable or consumable," he said. "It's just the idea of limiting something to three minutes or less, or the main idea of the song being at the beginning and then there being one flip of it, or that a noise could be a hook, and then it has to be all hooky. So it's not just music that is popular. Maybe it's music that's trying to be popular. It has that kind of energy to it per se." The pop landscape has shifted around him in recent years, as the jolting, surreal transitions of PC Music tracks have made their way into the home studio productions of hitmakers like Billie Eilish. On Saturday, Cook will be joined on a livestream by some kindred category bending musicians, including the bedroom pop songwriter Clairo and the quick change, genre splicing group 100 gecs. "The pop machine has changed so much," Cook said. "If anything, it's become more similar to what we were naturally doing." While the PC Music stable has continued to pump out its meta pop projects, Cook has also been applying his skills to nominally mainstream pop as the main producer for Charli XCX on her albums and mixtapes since 2016. With Charli XCX, Cook works quickly and spontaneously; she once texted him suggesting they make an album in one day, and they wrote and recorded nine songs. (They didn't release it, but some songs survived for later projects.) "He doesn't think about, like, will somebody like this? Is this pop enough? Is this weird enough? Is this whatever?" she said in a call from Los Angeles. "He just creates. And sometimes he makes really pop decisions, and sometimes he makes really avant garde decisions. But I wouldn't say he's trying deliberately to do either. He's just going with what he feels." Cook took on a different task producing an album for Jonsi, the singer and songwriter who leads Sigur Ros, the cinematic rock band from Iceland. For "Shiver," which is due Oct. 2, Jonsi had a collection of songs that he had been working on for years on his own, with countless overdubs. Cook helped him decide what to keep, what to subtract, and what to completely restructure. Cook's own albums, like the rest of his output, are the result of both impulse and philosophical deliberation. "PC Music I always took the name of it quite literally," Cook said. "I thought that at some point, I can't just keep thinking about personal computer music without doing my own A.G. Cook stuff. I'm bringing my own voice and performance into it, using that awkwardness, playing with the mix between singer songwriter and producer and how those connect." For "7G," he gave himself numerical targets and narrowed down his favorite studio tools; along with guitar, piano and drums, one of the seven discs features "Supersaw," a waveform that creates rough, bassy, buzzing tones often used in electronic dance music. "Apple" might seem to be merely a computer joke from PC Music to Apple but Cook chose the title after considerable deliberation. "At first I was only using 'Apple' as an example of what I thought would be an ideal album name could be," he said. "Something that is super simple and kind of primary school, but then has endless connotations, a ridiculous number. Obviously Apple computing, but also the Beatles' label, New York, the Bible, a million fairy tales. It was just fun to pick an almost random object and see how much depth was in there." Near the end of "Apple," there's a song called "Haunted" that starts out almost folky, with guitar picking and a vocal of random syllables. It sounds like a songwriter with an emerging melody, feeling it out note by tentative note. That's what it was, Cook said an early scratch vocal but that's not where the song stays. Before it ends, it's transformed into a multi tracked, computer tuned chorale, still wordless but thoroughly processed. To Cook's ear, it's all equally natural: human and machine, searching for a song's essence. "It felt kind of inevitable," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Credit...Tag Christof for The New York Times Employers Rush to Adopt Virus Screening. The Tools May Not Help Much. Bob Grewal recently began testing a new health screening setup for workers at a Subway restaurant he owns in Los Angeles near the University of Southern California. When he stepped inside the employee food prep area, a fever detection and facial recognition camera service, PopID, quickly identified him by name and gauged his temperature. Then a small tablet screen underneath the camera posted a message that cleared him to enter. "Thank you Bob, you have a healthy Temp. of 98.06," the screen said. "PopID aims to create a safe environment and stop the spread of Covid 19." Mr. Grewal is one of many business leaders racing to deploy new employee health tracking technologies in an effort to reopen the economy and make it safer for tens of millions of Americans to return to their jobs in factories, offices and stores. Some employers are requiring workers to fill out virus screening questionnaires or asking them to try out social distancing wristbands that vibrate if they get too close to each other. Some even hope to soon issue digital "immunity" badges to employees who have developed coronavirus antibodies, marking them as safe to return to work. But as intensified workplace surveillance becomes the new normal, it comes with a hitch: The technology may not do much to keep people safer. Public health experts and bioethicists said it was important for employers to find ways to protect their workers during the pandemic. But they cautioned there was little evidence to suggest that the new tools could accurately determine employees' health status or contain virus outbreaks, even as they enabled companies to amass private health details on their workers. Clear, a security company that uses biometric technology to verify people's identities at airports and elsewhere, plans this week to start marketing a health screening service that can be used to vet and clear employees to enter workplaces. The service will take employees' temperatures with a thermal camera, as well as verify the results of their medical tests for the virus, sharing the results with employers as color coded scores like green or red. Caryn Seidman Becker, the chief executive of Clear, compared her company's multilevel health screening approach to airport security checks where a person who sets off a metal detector gets a pat down. "Nothing is foolproof," Ms. Seidman Becker said. "It's putting them together that allows you to buy down risk and increase confidence." Companies are adopting new employee tracking technologies partly in response to White House guidelines asking employers to monitor their "work force for indicative symptoms" and prohibit employees with symptoms from returning to workplaces unless a health provider has cleared them. Yet many of the tools including certain infrared thermometers and antibody tests that would be needed for employee "immunity" certificates can be wildly inaccurate. Public health experts said the tools could create a false sense of security, leading workers to spread the virus inadvertently. PwC has developed a contact tracing app to help employers identify workers who may have been exposed to the virus. Fever screening devices, for example, could miss many of the up to one quarter or more people infected with the virus who do not exhibit symptoms. Or they could inadvertently expose employees who are running higher temperatures because they are under stress or have other health conditions, issues the workers may have preferred to keep private. Some law professors and bioethicists also warned that the idea of immunity certificates threatened to create a new class system for employment one that could unfairly prevent certain people from working just because they had never contracted the virus. "Do we really want a world where some people can go to work and others can't based on their immunity status?" said Hank Greely, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies the social implications of new health technologies. "The people who can't will say, 'This is unfair,' and they'll be right." He and other experts said companies would be better off investing in a proven health intervention lab testing for coronavirus for their employees rather than shiny, new surveillance technologies. Gabrielle Rejouis, a workers' rights advocate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, said employers should be "providing free testing for their workers if they're expecting them to come into work, and also making sure that they are paying sick leave and appropriate health benefits to make sure that workers aren't coming to work sick and infecting their co workers." Many of the worker screening tools are being introduced with minimal government oversight and with few details for employees about how companies are using and safeguarding their health data, or how long they plan to keep it. To support emergency responses to the pandemic, the Food and Drug Administration is temporarily allowing companies to market infrared thermal camera systems that have not been vetted by health regulators for temperature checks in places like warehouses and factories. Similarly, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces antidiscrimination rules that generally prohibit employers from requiring employees to undergo medical exams, said in March that, given the coronavirus threat, employers may measure employees' temperatures. The federal law on patient privacy, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA, also puts few restrictions on employers. Although the law protects employee health information collected by an employer for company sponsored group health plans, it generally does not protect employee health data collected for other purposes, legal experts said. As a result, companies are forging their own approaches to health screening accuracy and privacy. Some restaurants and warehouses, for instance, are using hand held infrared devices to assess workers' temperatures. PopID, the restaurant technology company behind the temperature scanning system that Mr. Grewal is trying at his Subway franchises, uses wall mounted thermal imaging cameras that employees stop in front of for temperature checks. The system records the date, time, employee name and temperature, creating a historical log for employers who want to check on worker compliance. Employers can choose to keep or delete that data. "The decision to test temperature at a lot of these places has already been made," said John Miller, the chief executive of the Cali Group, the parent company of PopID. "We're just providing a better way to do it." As part of the pilot test, he has asked employees to scan their temperatures four times a day at the beginning and end of their work shifts, and before and after their break. The employee data is deleted every 30 days. "People are going to adjust," Mr. Grewal said. "They're going to have to understand all the safety precautions that chains have taken." Even so, civil liberties experts said it was important for any virus tracking of employees to be voluntary. Otherwise, by linking identification technologies like facial recognition to employees' health status, employers could usher in an authoritarian, China like system of surveillance and social control at workplaces. "We are accepting encroachments on privacy here that we would not normally accept," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "We need to be vigilant to make sure that they don't outlast this crisis." Four Republican senators recently said they would introduce a Covid 19 privacy bill to hold businesses accountable when they use people's heath information to fight the pandemic. As least for now, increased tracking and screening seem poised to become a fact of daily life not just for workers but also for consumers. Clear, the biometric security company, already operates at sports arenas where fans can use their digital identities and faces to speed through fast lane security checks. Now, said Ms. Seidman Becker, Clear's chief executive, restaurant groups, big box retailers, sports teams, airlines and cruise ships are considering using Clear Health Pass, the company's new identity verification and health screening system, for both employees and customers. "I really do think that this is ubiquitous," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
WASHINGTON Dave Chappelle, in the words of Jon Stewart, a former Comedy Central colleague, is the "black Bourdain." "He's the man that seeks out people and experience and knowledge and wants to touch it and feel it and be with it on the ground," Mr. Stewart said at the Kennedy Center Sunday night, referring to the late chef and television host Anthony Bourdain, "so that he can then channel that for his art and redirect that back to you as something completely different and new." Mr. Chappelle, the longtime stand up comedian and former television host, was celebrated as the 22nd recipient of the Mark Twain Prize, considered the top honor in comedy. Speakers who spanned the comedian's decades long career in comedy testified to how far reaching his influence has been: Bradley Cooper, Tiffany Haddish, Kenan Thompson, and Sarah Silverman were just some of the guests who described Mr. Chappelle as far ahead of his peers. Much of the show was a tribute to the first part of Mr. Chappelle's career, which included the Comedy Central show "Chappelle's Show." Debuting in 2003, it featured bits that are seen as canonical in the comedy world: about a black white supremacist, a black George W. Bush or a mock sports fantasy draft for different races. The show "allowed Dave to be his entire self, to express his intellect, his anger, his morality, his silliness, his hypocrisy, his sadness, his blazing talent," said Neal Brennan, a comedian who was a co creator of the show and who gave a speech Sunday that brought Mr. Chappelle to tears. Mr. Chappelle's largely improvised show was so funny, Mr. Brennan said, that Mr. Chappelle "surprised himself by how funny he was." At the time, Mr. Chappelle was the rare black comedian with his own television platform. Several speakers told of how complicated it was early in Mr. Chappelle's career to find acceptance. Mr. Brennan remembered that when he was pitching "Chappelle's Show" to television networks, one woman asked him why they needed Mr. Chappelle "when we have Chris Rock." "See, back then, there could only be one popular black comedian at a time," Mr. Brennan said. "Unlike today, when there can be three." "Chappelle's Show," which lasted only three seasons, was revered for skits that commented on how black people were stereotyped and characterized by white people, often for white audiences. His discomfort with that dynamic in part led to his disappearance from the network and public life altogether, he admitted. "Chappelle's Show was a rare thing," Mr. Brennan said on Sunday. "It was a fully faceted document of a human being living in the United States of America while having the surreal experience of being born with black skin." The speakers on Sunday briefly alluded to a trip to South Africa that Mr. Chappelle took after quitting. They mentioned the relative anonymity he has since found in rural Ohio, where he owns acres of land and has hosted live music in cow barns. In the years after he left television, Mr. Chappelle's reclusiveness became almost mythological, his few public appearances receiving tabloid attention. Yet on Sunday, it was only when Mr. Stewart spoke that Mr. Chappelle's absence from public life was addressed at any length. Mr. Stewart cited Mr. Chappelle's courage in walking away from a reported 50 million to continue making "Chappelle's Show." The ceremony did little to explain the breaking point in Mr. Chappelle's career and life. In highlight reels of Mr. Chappelle's comedy, there was often at least a decade long gap between jokes or scenes, highlighting his older, more challenging, more thrilling skit based humor against his more recent and uneventful stand up comedy. The more recent comedy, including several Netflix specials, has resulted in a bevy of negative reviews from critics who say Mr. Chappelle lost his smart and progressive take on current events. He has called L.G.B.T.Q. Americans "the alphabet people" and has fixated on the sexual transgressions of famous men, including joking about R. Kelly's alleged misconduct. But as Sunday's program made clear, Mr. Chappelle keeps a towering reputation among peers. Aziz Ansari, another stand up comedian, said that Mr. Chappelle's most creative material has often been found in the most secluded settings. "My favorite Dave sets have got to be the sets that I don't think anyone will ever get to see, small club shows that are super intimate that go late in the morning, 5 6 in the morning," he said. Mr. Ansari said he had heard stories of comedy club employees alerting guests to car towing, but the guests did not move. "That's how compelling this man can be," Mr. Ansari said. The ceremony Sunday, which also featured music performances from Mos Def, Erykah Badu and John Legend, functioned in part as a homecoming. Mr. Chappelle, the son of professors, first got attention as a teenager from Washington on the show "Star Search" and at small comedy clubs, where he was known as a prodigy, as several speakers noted. A marching band from his high school, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, opened the show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The common swift is a bird shaped by and for the air. In flight it looks like a crescent moon, with just a hint of head and a tail that, when spread, echoes the curve of its wings. Scientists have now confirmed that it can spend up to 10 months in the air without landing. Only when it makes a nest does it need to come to Earth. It can even mate during flight. Anders Hedenstrom, a biologist at the University of Lund, and his colleagues determined how much time swifts spend in the air by capturing them in southern Sweden, where they summer and nest, and attaching micro data loggers. They reported their findings in Current Biology. The loggers include an accelerometer, to record movement, and a light sensor. Given the duration of the day and night and the time of year, scientists can determine the north/south position. Noting when the sun is at the midday position gives an east/west location. In 2014 and 2015, they recaptured 19 swifts carrying these data loggers and found that, as expected, the swifts were spending their winters in West Africa. Three birds never rested, Dr. Hedenstrom said. Some did rest occasionally at night for brief periods, but the data loggers showed that all the birds stayed in the air more than 99 percent of the time when they weren't nesting. The data confirmed what had long been predicted, that the birds stayed aloft when they weren't nesting. Roosts had never been found in Africa. And Dr. Hedenstrom said that over the course of the past 100 years, about 50,000 swifts were banded in Sweden. Only one banded bird was ever recovered south of the Sahara. The recordings also showed that long ascents, observed during the summer, happen throughout the year. During these ascents, often at twilight, the birds climb up to one and a half miles. Dr. Hedenstrom thinks the birds may ascend to catch a bit of sleep while safely gliding. How birds that spend extreme amounts of time in the air cope with the need to sleep is an old puzzle. A recent study of frigate birds showed that they can sleep on the wing, although they sleep much less in flight than they do on land. Dr. Hedenstrom and his colleagues are hoping to someday be able to study how swifts sleep on the wing, but the recording devices that observe telltale brain activity weigh too much. All electronic devices get smaller and smaller, however. The data loggers he used are recent developments. "We couldn't have dreamed of this 10 years ago," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Among the endlessly interesting aspects of the performing arts is the matter of physical projection. Why is it that this dancer (or singer or actor) stands and moves in a way that doesn't read beyond a few rows of the auditorium, whereas another seems to effortlessly exude presence and legibility fit for a stadium? In dance, the difference is often more striking among companies. This is likely to become a recurrent issue now that Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance, currently in residence at the David H. Koch Theater, has become a hybrid in which non Taylor modern companies make guest appearances. Much modern dance was never meant for large theaters; although I admired the way in which the Martha Graham Dance Company registered in opera houses in the 1970s, Graham dancers from the 1930s argued that much had been lost and perverted to make this larger scale possible. In truth, the scale of the Koch Theater challenges even the Taylor dancers to their utmost; it's altogether less congenial to some others. On Tuesday, when the Taylor Dance Company (the old name applies to just its dancers) shared its program with Shen Wei Dance Arts, the contrast seemed immense. Mr. Shen's dancers were skilled, committed, well rehearsed; but the capacious space of the Koch dwarves them. You can see the details of their movement from far back in the auditorium but not feel them. By contrast, the Taylor dancers registered as giants. The difference has partly to do with physical style (the Taylor idiom is more striking in muscular force, physical rigor, linear outline), partly to do with contrasts of dynamics and scale. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
BOSTON What is the mission of the Boston Symphony, the most generously endowed orchestra in America? We are six seasons into Andris Nelsons's tenure as music director of this storied ensemble, which appears at Carnegie Hall on Monday, but the answer to that question is still unclear. When he arrived in September 2014, Mr. Nelsons, then just 35, was a young, safe, healthy pair of hands after the drama of James Levine, who had stepped down in 2011 after years of illness and cancellations. Mr. Nelsons has led plenty of good performances some very good and has produced a number of fine recordings, including an ongoing Shostakovich survey that has rightly won him three Grammy Awards. Though his tenure has not been without controversy including some frictions generated by an overhaul of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and persistent issues surrounding the orchestra's commitment to gender parity two years ago I wrote that "there is probably no current music director in the country I would rather hear conduct on a weekly basis than Mr. Nelsons." Part of the problem is that Mr. Nelsons is still trying to pin down his own musical identity. His style is not demonstrative, nor overtly shaped the aim seeming to be to make things appear as uninterpreted as possible. Sometimes that works, as in a memorable pairing of Beethoven's Fourth and Fifth symphonies a year ago; in the Strauss that peppers programs; and, above all, in opera, in which he seems most comfortable. Even there, showing no interest in aping the innovative operatic stagings put on by the Cleveland Orchestra or the New York Philharmonic, he has stuck to concert performances, none of which not even his formidable if noncommittal accounts of Wagner have come close to a sensational "Elektra" at Carnegie Hall four years ago. Mr. Nelsons's reluctance to take a point of view, and his reliance instead on the undoubtable competence of his players, has become wearing. An old school "Christmas Oratorio" of Bach last November could have made a statement, but turned out to have nothing to say. His Mahler has become particularly frustrating, as in a wary "Resurrection" Symphony last October, an unsteady Third in January 2018, and the "most by the book reading possible" of the Fifth, as my colleague Joshua Barone put it, last November. What is especially odd is that there is no doubt this conductor can live up to his glowing reputation in the standard repertoire. Boston proved it by inviting Mr. Nelsons's other orchestra to perform at Symphony Hall. Since 2017, Mr. Nelsons has split his time between Boston and Leipzig, Germany, where he serves as chief conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. Early concerns that the arrangement would detract from his commitment to Massachusetts have proven unfounded, and the two orchestras have made the most of their modest maestro by plotting a partnership that has led to special programs in both cities, co commissions, musician exchanges and educational offerings. The alliance started slowly, but it picked up at the end of October, when the Gewandhaus arrived for two concerts of 19th century repertoire, plus three joint appearances with the Boston players. If the merged appearances were of dubious musical value, the Gewandhaus's own concerts were more revealing. With Mr. Nelsons at the helm of an ensemble offering more Old World heft, any doubts were blown away. Possessing an antique sound colored darkest walnut, and throwing their whole bodies into communicating with one another and with the audience, the Leipzig players enthralled with their innate sense of phrasing, their variety and unity of attack, their use of every inch of hair on their bows, their ability to invest each bar with dramatic meaning. The conductor's avowedly anti didactic, deliberately neutral style came sensationally alive. And I found myself asking where that spirit has been in Boston of late. The orchestra continues to click with many of the guest conductors who take up the podium when Mr. Nelsons is away. Excelling like past guests such as Francois Xavier Roth, Gustavo Dudamel and Sakari Oramo, Susanna Malkki has found remarkable depth this season in Debussy's "La Mer" and other French music, and Dima Slobodeniouk has brought vigor to Sibelius and Nielsen. Their programs also had the benefit of being more carefully put together than Mr. Nelsons's, which have become puzzlingly incohesive. And the composer and conductor Thomas Ades's quirky tenure as the orchestra's "artistic partner" is a reminder that if Mr. Nelsons has stalled in the old, he is also a less than thrilling spokesman for the new. By the end of this season, he will have given 17 world or American premieres at Symphony Hall, all of a more or less conventional kind, as can be heard on a Naxos disc of commissions released this month. His work in this area has been more promising than many expected but still, you sense, dutiful. Only two of those premieres have been by women though guest conductors are doing more this season, and there will be new pieces by Sofia Gubaidulina and Julia Adolphe next season. But that problem is worsened further by Mr. Nelsons's incuriosity about expanding our sense of the past, Shostakovich's clunkers notwithstanding. He has learned his Copland and his Bernstein, but if even Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra feel moved to perform Florence Price these days, what have Mr. Nelsons and the Boston Symphony got to lose by doing right by their city's own, overlooked Amy Beach? Money, apparently. When local musicians met with Symphony Hall authorities in December 2017 to ask them to diversify their programming, The Boston Globe reported that one of the responses they received, beyond a plea for time, was that market research suggested that changes could not be made "without alienating significant portions of our audience and affecting the BSO's well being." Given that the orchestra sits on net assets of well over half a billion dollars and just raised 70 million to open the lovely new Linde Center for Music and Learning at Tanglewood, such timidity ought to worry anyone who cares about what was once among the most progressive orchestras in the world. The question isn't whether the Boston Symphony can afford to recover its pioneering spirit, but whether, with resources other orchestras can only dream of, it can afford not to. Mr. Nelsons, who will probably sign a contract extension beyond 2022, will have to decide what he wants. Will he be the Koussevitzky of today, and take his place among the greatest and most visionary of the Boston Symphony's directors, or will he merely preside over complacency? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
After selling his first technology company, Gururaj Deshpande donated 20 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create a center for technological innovation, which bears his name. Mr. Deshpande is proud of the work the center fostered, but the effort focused on what he refers to as the two billion people in the world with disposable income. He wanted to do more to help the other five billion. "Those people are struggling to get through the day," said Mr. Deshpande, a billionaire who was born in India and has lived in suburban Boston for decades. His idea was to encourage entrepreneurship in overlooked cities and towns by concentrating on start ups, with no more than 10 employees, that would be part of the community but also spur the local economy with jobs and services. His organization, Entrepreneurship for All, offers training and mentoring for aspiring small business owners who have ideas but lack capital and connections. After working in cities in Massachusetts for nearly a decade, the organization, known as EforAll, is looking to transplant its model to other parts of the country. It recently started a program in Longmont, Colo. The concept of using philanthropy to revive struggling communities is attracting the attention of wealthy entrepreneurs. They see it as a way not only to combat income inequality but also to stanch the flow of talent out of these communities. Steve Case, the founder of AOL and chief executive of the investment fund Revolution, started Rise of the Rest, a fund that makes early investments in companies outside Silicon Valley, New York and Boston. Part of its effort is a series of bus trips to cities not typically on the venture capital map. The idea is to find innovators wherever they are. Darla Moore, whom I wrote about two years ago, took a different approach. After a successful career in finance largely in New York, she returned to her hometown, Lake City, S.C., where she has invested more than 100 million over the past decade to revitalize the farm community. That project was rewarding, but the process was deliberate. "I didn't walk in and say, 'I'm back, and I've brought a bunch of money, so let's fix ourselves up,'" she said. Small business owners without connections still struggle to raise capital, said Tim Ferguson, founder and chairman of Next Street, an advisory firm that works with communities to help small businesses. "There's a whole ecosystem of support that exists in tech, biotech, life sciences that doesn't exist for small businesses in underserved communities," he said. And if there are no friends and families to help, getting started can be difficult. Mr. Ferguson said he wished philanthropists would invest parts of their portfolio in loans to small businesses. "The philanthropists are doing really important work, but they could be doing so much more if they thought about their capital in a different way," he said. Mr. Deshpande believes that working with local people has allowed EforAll not only to make strong connections but also to get support in both volunteer time and donations. In some ways, he has shaped EforAll to be the opposite of flashy venture capital backed philanthropy. Many successful entrepreneurs expect that the ideas that made them wealthy can build the economy in underserved communities. Mr. Deshpande thinks that this approach, although well intentioned, will fail. "Entrepreneurs always want to lead with innovation," he said. "They think the best way to revive these communities is to start a biotech incubator. It doesn't work. It's not the talent of those residents." Mr. Deshpande said that approach did not solve basic problems like a need for jobs that give people a sense of purpose. So he focused EforAll on small businesses that are rooted in the community. "They're not going anywhere," he said. "They're going to build an economy." The organization's signature program is a start up incubator that offers participants a year of training to help them make their business idea a reality. EforAll seeks a three year funding commitment to start a program, which costs about 300,000 a year to staff. It looks to raise that part of the money from private sources like wealthy entrepreneurs who can also give their time. In Pittsfield, Mass., whose economy was shattered when General Electric closed its plant there in the 1990s, EforAll has teamed up with community groups and Niraj Shah, the chief executive of Wayfair, the online furniture company. Mr. Shah, who grew up in Pittsfield, recently opened a customer service center in town and has donated 150,000 through his family foundation to the EforAll initiative. "The economy in Pittsfield has not been super strong" since G.E. left, he said. "The economic opportunity that EforAll could spark could help." For a billionaire like Mr. Shah, a six figure gift can be less appealing than a larger one, because donations of any size require due diligence before they're made. But he said he had gotten to know Mr. Deshpande through the Boston tech world and believed in what he was trying to achieve. Gail Goodman, a former chief executive of Constant Contact, an email marketing company, had a similar experience, taking part in EforAll after meeting Mr. Deshpande on another board. Ms. Goodman began by mentoring a young woman who started a skin care company through EforAll's program in Lowell, Mass. She is now on her fifth mentoring team and is the chairwoman of EforAll. She has donated more than 1 million to the organization, her largest philanthropic commitment by far, she said. "We believe if you rebuild the economy, you can rebuild the job base," she said. "These are jobs that can't be outsourced or automated." "My mentors helped me identify who I wanted to help: youth and families in poverty," he said. "They also taught me about following through on decision making and staying consistent, and getting comfortable being uncomfortable." As a result, Mr. Saldana has been able to quit other jobs and focus on his studio. Mr. Deshpande said he realized the limitations of the program. For instance, the model works only in communities with at least 30,000 residents. "If it's a rural area of 500 people, it's not going to do much," he said. It's still early, but the organization is bullish about its expansion plans. As of last year, alumni of the program had created 350 businesses and 680 jobs. Three quarters of those business were owned by women, and more than half are owned by people who were unemployed. But Mr. Deshpande is more interested in the human transformation. "How many people transform from being victimized and feeling nothing can be done," he asked, "to getting up and saying, 'I can do this'?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Restaurants, gyms, cafes and other crowded indoor venues accounted for some 8 in 10 new infections in the early months of the U.S. coronavirus epidemic, according to a new analysis that could help officials around the world now considering curfews, partial lockdowns and other measures in response to renewed outbreaks. The study, which used cellphone mobility data from 10 U.S. cities from March to May, also provides an explanation for why many low income neighborhoods were hardest hit. The public venues in those communities were more crowded than in more affluent ones, and residents were more mobile on average, likely because of work demands, the authors said in the research published in the journal Nature on Tuesday. The data came from the metro areas of Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Infectious disease models had provided similar estimates of the risk posed by crowded indoor spaces, going back to February; all such models are subject to uncertainties, due largely to unforeseen changes in community behavior. The new analysis provides more precise estimates for how much each kind of venue contributed to urban outbreaks, by tracking hourly movements and taking into account the reductions in mobility from lockdown restrictions or other changes that occurred during those first crucial months. It did not model infection in schools or office workplaces. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
"Artists will be looking at who is missing in the picture to bring them forward and amplify their participation," said Avery Willis Hoffman, program director at the Armory. Sade Lythcott, chief executive of National Black Theater, said the project is an incredible opportunity. "This is our present pulse, our day to day mission: knocking down these walls and shining lights in the darkest corners of our own stories," she said. "100 Years 100 Women" builds on the Armory's conversation series, "Interrogations of Form," which brings together artists, scholars, activists and community members. Recent large scale gatherings included "Black Artists Retreat 2019: Sonic Imagination," in which more than 300 black artists and allies convened; a Lenape Pow Wow in 2018, the first gathering of Lenape leaders on Manhattan Island since the 1700s; and "The Shape of Things" a 2017 event focused on the political and social climate in America, curated by the former Armory artist in residence Carrie Mae Weems. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Utkarsh Ambudkar is one of the featured players in the limited engagement of "Freestyle Love Supreme." LOS ANGELES In 2004, Utkarsh Ambudkar completed the acting program at N.Y.U.'s Tisch School of the Arts feeling disillusioned. He'd spent his days in class but his nights at clubs in the East Village, freestyling and battle rapping in his mind, he was much more of a rapper than an actor. A life chasing down parts in an industry where talent mattered less than "the amount of roles for people that look like you" seemed grim, he said recently, over a gargantuan bowl of chili at a restaurant near his Los Angeles home. Fortuitously, he was soon introduced to Freestyle Love Supreme, an improv rap troupe started by Lin Manuel Miranda with Thomas Kail and Anthony Veneziale . "Pups from the same litter," Mr. Ambudkar, 35, said of the group, which presented him with an almost too good to be true opportunity: "I get to rap as good as I can rap? I don't have to dumb it down? And I get to be as funny as I am? And I don't have to dumb that down? Or tough that up?" Since 2005, Mr. Ambudkar has been a part of the FLS performing lineup, which has appeared at Joe's Pub, TEDxBroadway and on the Pivot TV network, among many other places; he has a tattoo of the FLS logo on his ribs. And when the group's key players began working on other projects, including "Hamilton," Mr. Ambudkar was involved: he played Aaron Burr in an early workshop and some readings. But during that early to mid 2010s stretch, Mr. Ambudkar was struggling with alcohol addiction, which made him too erratic and unreliable for the quickly moving train that turned into the biggest Broadway breakout of this decade, cementing rap's place on theater's most prestigious stage. "What we didn't know as friends was that he was struggling in the way he was, " Mr. Kail said. "The stakes were high, and I didn't know why he wasn't responding." Mr. Ambudkar said he wasn't being professional. "It was ego, it was being a daily marijuana user, it was partying at night, it was being preoccupied, growing up as a brown person, feeling unattractive, and seeking validation of the opposite sex to sort of fill a hole, my self worth." "Hamilton" became "Hamilton," and Mr. Ambudkar, in 2014, became sober. His career has taken a different path. He's played memorable parts on television shows including "White Famous," "The Mindy Project" and "Brockmire," starred as the romantic lead in the recent independent film "Brittany Runs a Marathon" and steadily released his own music. And now, finally, he's made it to Broadway as one of the featured players in the limited engagement of "Freestyle Love Supreme," which opens on Oct. 2 at the Booth Theater. That it took this long is bittersweet. "The biggest failure in your life is everywhere, ubiquitous. It's inescapable," he said, explaining the stresses of watching the success of "Hamilton" from afar including Leslie Odom Jr.'s Tony win for portraying Burr as well as the low grade annoyance of friends constantly asking if he could help get them tickets. But he prefers the silver lining: "Dude, what a gift. You almost drank yourself to death, and now here is such a clear, painful, concise, deep wound for you to see the importance in staying sober." "FREESTYLE LOVE SUPREME" is essentially a series of improv comedy games performed via rapping, relying on skills Mr. Ambudkar has been honing since he was a teenager, when he would make up songs as his friend played guitar. "It's probably a little bit 'embarrassing' is the wrong word but it's a little weird to admit that freestyle rap comedy is probably the thing that I'm best at," he said. "He's a new version of the classic entertainer he can rap and dance, he can act great and be funny," said the comic Hari Kondabolu, an old friend. Mr. Ambudkar has been onstage since a wrist injury in high school derailed him from playing basketball. He grew up outside Baltimore, where his parents, both research biochemists at the National Institutes of Health, emigrated from India in the 1980s. He took to hip hop early, soaking up A Tribe Called Quest and Snoop Doggy Dogg . And after white children called him a racist epithet, he was embraced by the black children in his neighborhood: "They're, like, 'Where you from?' I'm, like, 'India.' They're, like, 'We don't know where the expletive that is, but he just called you the N word so you're with us.'" He also struggled with how to express his heritage. "I went through a phase in high school to make people like me, where I would call myself because of the 'Simpsons' stuff I would call myself, like, 'Slurpee Boy,'" he said, referring to the animated series's character Apu, who has been criticized as a mocking caricature. "I stereotyped myself." In college, where his occasional dorm room freestyle partner was the actor and musician Donald Glover, he made his passion for rap part of his studies. "Utkarsh was definitely one of the most experienced and had done the most amount of work already in terms of identifying himself within the performance elements of hip hop culture," recalled his hip hop theater professor, Daniel Banks, who credited Mr. Ambudkar for providing part of the inspiration to create a course in live hip hop performance for the theater studies program. After graduation, however, apart from his work with Freestyle Love Supreme, Mr. Ambudkar was largely coasting. "It just sort of didn't happen for me in the supernova way that I had assumed it would, based on how easily it had come to me," he said. His career had been moving in fits and starts beatboxing and rapping in "Pitch Perfect," playing Mindy Kaling's younger brother on "The Mindy Project," a stint in a pop rap trio called the Beatards. ("It's embarrassing that we chose that name. It does not age well.") But sobriety gave him new purpose, and clarity, and his work blossomed. On the Showtime comedy "White Famous," he was the agent with pinball energy propelling Jay Pharoah's up and coming comic. On the big screen in "Barbershop: The Next Cut," he was a light touch quick wit barber, and in "Brittany Runs a Marathon," he played a slacker turned romantic hero. On IFC's "Brockmire," he was Raj, a hypergenial sportscaster and a gleaming foil to Hank Azaria's sleazy rendering of the title character. Mr. Azaria recalled Mr. Ambudkar as a vivid improvisor, citing one scene where Brockmire tells Raj, "You're a brown Joe Buck" the well known sportscaster and Raj replies, "No, Joe Buck is a white me." "That came from his brain," Mr. Azaria said with a chuckle. Working on "Brockmire" put Mr. Ambudkar's professional and personal political arcs on a collision course. For almost three decades, Mr. Azaria has been the voice of Apu on "The Simpsons," and Mr. Ambudkar had just filmed Mr. Kondabolu's documentary "The Problem With Apu," about the psychic toll that character has left on the Indian American community. (And paradoxically, Mr. Ambudkar voiced Apu's nephew for one episode in 2016.) "What he had to say was completely thoughtful and insightful and kind afterward we discussed it a lot," Mr. Azaria said. He paraphrased something Mr. Ambudkar told him that strongly resonated: "Every time I take a role, I think about how I'm reflecting my people." "As a white actor I'm Jewish for the most part I never think about that," Mr. Azaria said. "It's one of the ways it all came home to me." How South Asian men are represented onscreen and onstage is a central concern for Mr. Ambudkar. Despite being asked, he never considered changing his name to cater to unfamiliar audiences, or executives. "People learned Galifianakis," he said, referring to the actor Zach Galifianakis. In the forthcoming Disney live action remake of "Mulan," Mr. Ambudkar plays Skatch, a new character who's a "swashbuckling con man": "I felt fun and cartoonish and handsome and caddish and dirty." His character also has an Indian accent, which he worried may be "a dead end" in some professional circles: "When, like, Johnny Depp does a British accent, or Angelina Jolie does an accent, it's acting," he said. "But when I do an accent, it's not." In part to avoid such problems, Mr. Ambudkar has been working on writing his own projects, including one roughly based on his story: missing out on your biggest opportunity, and trying to recover from the pain. "I don't think he has a personal ceiling," Mr. Kondabolu said. "It's about how hard everyone else makes it for him, what kind of parts are written for him." RAPPING IS MR. AMBUDKAR'S release and his safe space. (His nom de rap: UTK the INC.) When he's home and has free time, he'll head to a friend's studio to record songs. This year he self released two albums of eclectic pop rap, "Vanity" and "Petty." On the set of "Barbershop: The Next Cut," he spent downtime freestyling with Common, and Ice Cube took him aside to play him unreleased music. For the soundtrack of the movie "Blindspotting" which he also appeared in he recorded a song with Krayzie Bone. ("Unreleased," he said sadly.) Rapping with Freestyle Love Supreme, performing new material for a new audience each night, awakens a different energy. "Actively fighting Alzheimer's with every show," he said. "Decalcifying the brain." At his first Broadway performance, a 10 p.m. preview show on a Sunday night, he hilariously and impetuously played the central character in an audience derived story from a woman who, as a child, was forced by her father to play on the all boys basketball team he coached, and then never touched the ball all season. But his most natural moments came during a segment where each cast member delivered true stories inspired by the same word; on this night, the word was champagne. Initially Mr. Ambudkar looked a touch uneasy as his castmates shouted funny, triumphant tales. But on his feet were sneakers customized with his name and the dictum "Spit Truth." So eventually he relented, delivering a long sermon about how he let his great opportunity slip away, but how sobriety saved and restored him. He ended his verse with a stunner: "I was a champion of pain/But now I toast with Martinelli's instead of champagne." It shushed the room. "It's weird when I'm rapping under the guise of entertainment, but what I'm really doing is just unmasking and being really raw," he said the next day. "I've been doing this 15 years, but in those moments I think, 'I seek out new experiences, and I'm about to have one.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
6LACK at the Hammerstein Ballroom (Nov. 14, 8 p.m.) and Terminal 5 (Nov. 15, 8 p.m.). "Do you just have one soul mate or do you have more?" That's just one of the questions the singer and rapper Ricardo Valdez Valentine, whose stage name 6lack is pronounced "black," asked his fans via postcard when he first announced his most recent album, "East Atlanta Love Letter" an old school promotion for an artist who, aesthetically, is on hip hop's vanguard. But it's fitting for the Atlanta bred artist, whose willingness to show his reflective side has helped set him apart in the city's flooded rap scene; as he put it on his song "Scripture," "Still new, but my attitude veteran." Wednesday's show at Hammerstein Ballroom is sold out, but tickets are available on the resale market. 800 745 3000, mc34.com/upcoming 212 582 6600, terminal5nyc.com THE DOOBIE BROTHERS at the Beacon Theater (Nov. 15 16, 8 p.m.). The soft rock harmonizers will revisit two of their most iconic albums during their first run at the Beacon in 23 years. On both nights, the band will play 1972's "Toulouse Street" and 1973's "The Captain and Me" in their entirety with some deep cuts that they've never performed live. But even casual fans should be pleased with the strict set list: Those albums feature some of the Doobies' most memorable hits, including "Listen to the Music" and "Long Train Runnin'." 212 465 6000, beacontheatre.com BELA FLECK, ZAKIR HUSSAIN AND EDGAR MEYER at the Town Hall (Nov. 15, 8 p.m.). More than anything else, these three musicians are unified by their rejection of conventional genre boundaries. They're well known among classical music aficionados for their 2009 collaboration with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, "The Melody of Rhythm," but that release made it no easier to pin down their style. Meyer, a bassist, and Fleck, a banjoist, have both worked extensively in bluegrass; Hussain, a tabla player, first rose to fame performing Hindustani classical music but often collaborates with jazz musicians. In the end, trying to pin them down is futile: Each is a virtuosic talent, so any tradition they take on jointly winds up transformed. 212 997 6661, thetownhall.org RHIANNON GIDDENS at Symphony Space (Nov. 14, 8 p.m.). The banjoist and singer has earned considerable acclaim and a MacArthur Genius grant through her work as both a dynamic folk performer and deft musical historian, reviving long dormant strains of traditional American music without invoking a trace of golden age syndrome. That mission is reflected in the lineup for her four show residency at Symphony Space, where she's paying tribute to historical and contemporary women of color. Wednesday's performance, titled "Sisters Past," will pay homage to artists and activists like Nina Simone, Ethel Waters and Fannie Lou Hamer. 212 864 5400, symphonyspace.org LALAH HATHAWAY at Sony Hall (Nov. 11, 8 p.m.). You can hear Hathaway's resemblance to her soul singer father, Donny Hathaway, when she sings his songs. But she has long since carved her own path, showcasing her rich, smoky contralto in traditional R B numbers with jazz influences she's worked with Robert Glasper, Snarky Puppy and Esperanza Spalding in the past few years. Through awe inspiring runs and subtly evocative phrasing, Hathaway delivers sophisticated, classic records that still bend toward the arc of contemporary pop. "Honestly," Hathaway's most recent album, includes trap beats and airy synths; the centerpiece, though, remains her one of a kind voice. 212 997 5123, sonyhall.com EMILY KING at the Apollo Theater (Nov. 15, 8 p.m.). The New York native's 2011 EP "Seven" wasn't necessarily ahead of its time; if anything, it harked back to the heyday of neo soul and sometimes even further to R B's golden age. Nevertheless, the clean, acoustic arrangements of the understated songs felt fresh; today, as King prepares to release her long awaited follow up to 2015's "The Switch," they also sound prescient when presented alongside the complex, intimate music of the current R B boom. The singer songwriter's newest single, "Remind Me," incorporates a dash of bouncy '80s sounding synths while maintaining her signature stripped down sound. 212 531 5305, apollotheater.org Y LA BAMBA at Murmrr Ballroom (Nov. 15, 9 p.m.). Indie pop influenced by Mexican folk music might be the simplest way to describe Luz Elena Mendoza's band, which this artist from Portland, Oregon, has fronted since 2007, but it doesn't fully capture the seamlessness of that combination across the group's five albums. Mendoza's voice is the X factor, ranging from forceful and strong to bright, sweet and vibrato filled as she sings in both English and Spanish. The result is music that's global without sounding kitschy or like it's lost its experimental edge. murmrr.com NATALIE WEINER THE BAD PLUS at the Village Vanguard (through Nov. 11, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.). The Vanguard has always meant a lot to this group, which began around the turn of the millennium. It's where a Columbia Records representative first fell in love with the prog jazz power trio, leading to a record deal and helping catapult them into the media spotlight. In December, the group's original lineup played the Vanguard for the last time. This week's run marks the Bad Plus's first appearance at the club with Orrin Evans, their new pianist. Over the past 10 months, his influence on the group's rhythm section the bassist Reid Anderson and the drummer Dave King has been subtly subversive, suggesting a new beginning. 212 255 4037, villagevanguard.com MELANIE CHARLES at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (Nov. 12, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Catch Charles, a vocalist and flutist, performing in a coffeehouse setting and you'll be struck by the easy intimacy in her singing, lightly redolent of Roberta Flack. Hear her fronting a combo at a jazz club, and you'll notice generations of tradition spring from her voice. Then flip on "The Girl With the Green Shoes," an album she released last year, and you'll find something else: a creative, dusty groove blend of neo soul and experimental hip hop, a new kind of music that plays by its own rules. At Dizzy's, Charles presents a program she's calling "Make Jazz Trill Again." The name is a reference to hip hop slang, but the band is stacked with young jazz talent, including the alto saxophonist Godwin Louis, the pianist Luke Carlos O'Reilly, the bassist Jonathan Michel and the drummer Charles Haynes. The alto saxophonist Rogerst Charles will appear as a special guest. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys JAMES FRANCIES BAND at Jazz Standard (through Nov. 9, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). One of the more promising young pianists to emerge recently, Francies last month released "Flight," his debut album, on Blue Note. Produced by the bassist Derrick Hodge, it's got a spacey, glistening ambience, but Francies cuts through that with his bright, forthright touch and dashing improvisations. He will play original tunes from the album at Jazz Standard, with the tenor saxophonist Ben Wendel, the guitarist Gilad Hekselman, the bassist Burniss Travis and the drummer Kendrick Scott. The group will also welcome three guest vocalists Chris Turner, Kate Kelsey Sugg and YEBBA each of whom sings one song on "Flight." 212 576 2232, jazzstandard.com SAM HARRIS TRIO at the Jazz Gallery (Nov. 14, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Best known for his work in Ambrose Akinmusire's groups, Harris, a pianist, will soon be on the jazz radar as a bandleader himself. This concert celebrates the release of "Harmony," an album featuring a five part suite performed by his trio. The record has a distinctive sound, at once unprecedented and nourished by a deep well of history. He plays roughly and beautifully, connoting both seriousness and indifference to decorum. His rich, carefully shaded harmonies draw equally on gospel, R B and the avant garde. He appears here with the trio from "Harmony": the bassist Martin Nevin and the drummer Craig Weinrib. 646 494 3625, jazzgallery.nyc NUBLU JAZZ FESTIVAL at Nublu Classic and Nublu 151 (through Nov. 16 at various times). Nublu is now two separate clubs that are blocks away from each other on the Lower East Side's Avenue C. At both, the programming circles around the fringes of jazz, I.D.M., world music and progressive R B. Over the coming week, that broad programmatic identity will be represented in full force at the ninth annual Nublu Jazz Festival. Highlights include performances on Friday by the drummer Marcus Gilmore and the pianist Brian Jackson (who was Gil Scott Heron's musical partner throughout the 1970s), two sets on Saturday from the Sun Ra Arkestra, and a stacked bill on Tuesday featuring both the keyboardist Brandon Coleman (a member of Kamasi Washington's band) and the tenor saxophonist JD Allen. nublu.net KAMASI WASHINGTON AND BUTCHER BROWN at Brooklyn Steel (Nov. 11, 8 p.m.). Washington, contemporary jazz's reigning mainstream sensation, is touring in support of "Heaven and Earth," his magisterial follow up to "The Epic," the equally grandiose 2015 album that turned this Los Angeles tenor saxophonist into a star. His band performs here on a double bill with Butcher Brown, a quintet that plays funky, frisky music equally influenced by jam bands, hip hop D.J.s and 1970s fusion. (Hear the evidence on "Camden Session," a record the band released last month.) Their star is on the rise, and they're aiming for the same crossover terrain that Washington has claimed. bowerypresents.com GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
When Melissa Marti saw the email that caused her to sit in her driveway sobbing into her steering wheel, she knew she was going marry Seth Visser. She just didn't know when. "We had been talking about it for years we had even started making plans," said Ms. Marti, who is from New Ulm, Minn. But meeting a deadline to present a marriage certificate to the Roman Catholic school where she worked as a dance coach was not something she was willing to do. And so, in June 2018, a few weeks after she got the email that made her sob, she quit. Ms. Marti, 40, had been coaching the Sonics Dance Team at Cathedral High School for nearly 20 years when New Ulm Area Catholic Schools officials wrote to say her contract renewal was on hold because her living arrangement was under investigation. Cohabitating, the email said, ran counter to Roman Catholic teachings about marriage being a moral prerequisite to living together. A subsequent letter offered two options for preserving her job as head coach, a position she had held since 2002: She could change her housing situation or present a marriage certificate before June 15, 2018. By the time she received that ultimatum, though, the grief she felt upon first reading the email had hardened. "I was more angry than anything," said Ms. Marti, who goes by Missy, and who also works full time in a local bank as a marketing officer. Ms. Marti and Mr. Visser, 39, have been a couple since 2011. They met in 2010 through her mother, Pam Mack, at Medallion Cabinetry, the New Ulm cabinet company where Ms. Mack worked in production and Mr. Visser was an engineer. Mr. Visser, divorced and childless, was commuting more than an hour to work each day from Olivia, Minn.; Ms. Marti, divorced and the mother of 12 year old Will Marti, has lived in New Ulm all her life. In 2011, Mr. Visser moved to New Ulm (population about 13,000) to be closer to work. He and Ms. Marti started running into each other at local events like Bock Fest, which lightens the mood of long Minnesota winters with beer drinking by bonfire. "I was recently divorced and just starting to get out of the house again, and whenever we'd bump into each other we just got along really well," Ms. Marti said. "We talked openly and easily. It just felt comfortable." So comfortable that in September 2011, Ms. Marti invited Mr. Visser to meet her buddies at the New Ulm Fire Department, where she has been a volunteer firefighter since 1999, when she became old enough to follow in the footsteps of her uncle, also a volunteer. The occasion was the department's annual fund raiser, the Firefighter's Dance. "That was our first formal date, the first time we made an appearance together," said Mr. Visser, who is now director of operations at Windings Inc., a New Ulm company that makes custom components for motors and generators. He worried about fitting in. "When you're meeting 90 new people you get a little nervous," he said. "But I think I gelled with the firefighters." Ms. Marti thought so, too. After the dance, it was like a drawstring closed around them. Within months, they were ready to commit to each other. "We both enjoy having a stress free life and just being around each other," he said. Early in their relationship they tried ice fishing at a local lake for fun. But through the years, romantic couple time has taken a back seat to Sonics Dance Team events. Before Ms. Marti became a coach in 2001, she was a competitive dancer at New Ulm High School. Dancing "is a huge part of girls' sports in Minnesota," said JoDee Haala, a member of the New Ulm Area Catholic Schools board of directors and Ms. Marti's best friend. High school teams, made up exclusively of girls, practice their high energy routines two to three hours per day, six days a week during their 17 week season, and compete before judges from December through February. Routines can include elements of ballet, jazz, hip hop and other styles; sometimes cheerleading type acrobatics are worked into a team's three minute performance. "I started dancing when I was 10 or 11 and always loved it," Ms. Marti said. She especially loved that it was legitimized by serious competition. "Our team went to the state finals when I was in high school, and that was so exciting I decided I wanted to stay involved." Karlie Gieseke, a senior at Cathedral coached by Ms. Marti since she started high school, was among the dancers stunned by the school's investigation into Ms. Marti's personal life, then heartbroken by its outcome. In May, Ms. Marti gathered the team to tell them her decision quit rather than be rushed into marriage. "At first I was in shock, like no way this is happening," Ms. Gieseke said. "Then I cried for months. She knows more about me than my parents do. The morals she taught us about believing in ourselves and working to achieve our goals are way more important than her living situation." When Mr. Visser and Ms. Marti moved in together in 2013, neither considered it a secret. Ms. Marti wasn't concerned about the community, or New Ulm Area Catholic Schools, finding out. She's not sure what or who prompted the school board's investigation. Karla Cross, the pastoral center staff representative for the Diocese of New Ulm, said it would not be appropriate for the diocese to comment as it is unfamiliar with the specifics of Ms. Marti's case. Calls to the school board were not returned. "The reaction from the community was 95 percent positive," Mr. Visser said. Townspeople, including many strangers, rallied around Ms. Marti. "People would come up to me and say, 'Oh, you're that coach. I'm so sorry about what happened to you,'" she said. Most touching, she added, was a letter from a man at a nursing home whose granddaughter she had coached. "He grew up Catholic and said, in the sweetest way, that he supported me." Ms. Marti's assistant dance coach quit with her, in solidarity. And Ms. Haala submitted a letter of resignation to the school board (she later rescinded it after being persuaded that the decision went beyond the board's reach). "It was so frustrating to watch what she went through," Ms. Haala said. "Regardless of my friendship with Missy, this decision was no good for the school, no good for the kids and no good for the community. The girls were outraged, the parents were outraged." Plus, the school was apparently being selective about the Catholic doctrines it enforced, Ms. Haala said. It didn't make a point of determining which teachers might have been using birth control, for example. "If there were rules and stipulations Missy was supposed to abide by, they should have gone through them with her," Mr. Visser said. "They didn't." The attention the end of her coaching career generated on local news outlets and the internet continues to follow Ms. Marti. "People still stop me to say they're blown away by what happened, that this could happen in 2018," she said. But she and Mr. Visser have gotten on with their lives. Ms. Marti was promoted at the firehouse, where she became New Ulm's first female assistant fire chief in December. They also continued with their intentions to spend the rest of their lives together. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
To some, it is a tax on blue state liberalism. To others, President Trump's plan to end the federal deduction for state and local taxes would eliminate a costly perk for the wealthy. But to many taxpayers, the deduction is a cherished break that can save them thousands of dollars in double taxation. Mr. Trump and House Republicans, riding a wave of conservative and populist sentiment, are pushing to end the provision. Yet they must overcome a long tradition and powerful opponents, including Republican and Democratic officials in wealthy, populous states like California, New Jersey, New York and Texas. "I don't think they're going to seriously restrict it at all," said William G. Gale, a co director of the nonpartisan Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center and a former economic adviser to President George Bush. Congressional Republicans have indicated that they will go it alone on tax legislation, but taking on such an entrenched interest usually requires bipartisan support. "If Republicans do it by themselves, they put a big target on their backs," Mr. Gale said. Members of Congress generally take a "political Hippocratic oath" to "never be seen to do obvious harm," he said, but eliminating the deduction, which would increase taxes and undermine the ability of cities and states to raise revenue, would violate that precept. A raft of organizations that represent state and local governments including the National Governors Association, the United States Conference of Mayors and the National Conference of State Legislatures denounced the measure, saying it would upset the balance between local and federal interests and undermine growth. "We fundamentally believe that Americans' income, property and purchases should not be taxed twice," the organizations said in a statement. Other interest groups have also registered their opposition, like the National Association of Realtors, which said that eliminating the state and local deduction would help "nullify the current tax benefits of owning a home for the vast majority of tax filers." The idea of preventing the federal government from taxing money that citizens must pay to state and local tax collectors goes back to the Civil War, and the deduction was included in the first income tax legislation. One fear, articulated by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, was that the federal government might try to monopolize taxation "to the entire exclusion and destruction of state governments." Striking a blow at the taxing power of cities and states has long appealed to conservative Republicans. They argue that the deduction works like a subsidy and encourages states particularly those dominated by Democrats to set higher rates and spend more taxpayer money. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. The deduction is also one of the code's most costly items. A 2016 report from the Tax Policy Center said ending of the deduction would save the federal government 1.3 trillion over 10 years. That pot of money is particularly tempting because most of the other big ticket items in the tax code including the deduction for mortgage interest and charitable donations have been labeled off limits by the White House and House Republicans. The total cost of the president's tax related wish list is still a mystery, given the scarcity of detail, but deep cuts in corporate and individual taxes certainly would leave a gaping budget deficit that could run into the trillions. Like most other deductions, the state and local tax provision primarily benefits wealthier taxpayers who itemize deductions. The Tax Policy Center's report finds that households with annual incomes exceeding 100,000 would bear roughly 90 percent of the increase; those with incomes over 500,000 would absorb 40 percent. More precise calculations are impossible because other proposals like eliminating the alternative minimum tax would create savings for some of these taxpayers. For example, roughly 30 percent of taxpayers itemize deductions, but that number would certainly fall if the standard deduction were increased, as Mr. Trump proposed, or if various breaks were erased. While the upper middle class would feel the biggest hit, the wealthiest would mostly be unaffected because of limits on the value of deductions, said Edward D. Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at the University of Southern California. "People affected are those with six figure incomes, not seven figure incomes," he said. What is clear is that residents in states that impose the highest combination of property taxes and individual and corporate income taxes would pay the most. Taxpayers in 10 states California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia claim more than half of the total amount deducted, according to the Tax Policy Center. (Even in states without income taxes, including Nevada and Washington, some residents benefit because they can deduct sales taxes instead, the center said.) The Partnership for New York City, a group of large employers, estimated that the value to New York City taxpayers of itemized deductions for state and local taxes was 7.7 billion in 2014, or 6,600 per affected taxpayer. For those earning more than 200,000, the average deduction for state and local taxes exceeded 30,000. Pressure to cut local taxes is likely to mean less spending on programs and services. Conservatives have complained that the deduction causes low tax, often poorer, states to subsidize high tax areas. But as Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the partnership, pointed out, even with those deductions, New York City still sent far more money to the federal government than it received back. City residents paid 96 billion in personal income taxes, and businesses paid 19 billion. In return, the city received about 61 billion from Washington. In any case, she said, ending the state and local deduction would hurt states like New York most. "You can say for sure," Ms. Wylde added, "that high tax states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut will not get as much benefit as states like Florida," where taxes are significantly lower. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
In a highly anticipated decision in the running world, the world governing body for track and field announced Friday that Nike's Vaporfly shoe, the chosen footwear of the world's fastest marathoners but one that has drawn scrutiny for its performance enhancing effects, will be permitted during the Tokyo Olympics. Officials sidestepped making a ruling on whether the design of the shoes extra thick soles and springlike, carbon fiber shanks that spring runners forward gives an unfair advantage to runners who wear them. They chose instead to issue rule modifications that they said were designed "to provide greater clarity to athletes and shoe manufacturers around the world and to protect the integrity of the sport," though only at the elite level. The decision highlights issues that often confront governing bodies for various sports: how to balance technological innovation with the history and integrity of competition, and how to apply those rules to participants who pursue the same activities simply for fun. Just as golf has drivers that might be tolerated in a round among friends but not at the Masters, running now has two classifications of shoes. In this case, the international federation, World Athletics, said that starting on April 30, elite runners cannot run in prototype shoes that had not been available for any competitor to buy on the open market for at least four months, and footwear must meet certain design specifications. The sole cannot be thicker than 40 millimeters and there cannot be more than one springlike shank in the sole. In recent months, Nike sponsored runners have been testing new versions of the company's high tech shoes, which include a steel shank and maybe even more than one that propel a runner forward in the same way that the quarter miler Oscar Pistorius, whose legs are amputated at the knee, ran on blades to propel him forward. With the shoes, Nike was essentially able to place a version of the blades inside the oversized soles. Any race that receives a certification from World Athletics, such as the New York City Marathon and Boston Marathon and other major races, must follow World Athletics rules for elite participants. Susan Hazzard, a spokesman for U.S.A. Track and Field, said the American runners participating in the Olympic Trials Marathon on February 29 will not have to abide by the new rules because they do not go into effect until April 30. Those runners must wear shoes that abide by the current rules. Weekend warriors will have to consult their consciences to determine if wearing a shoe that is illegal for elite runners presents a moral hazard in those major races or in a local turkey trot. "It is not our job to regulate the entire sports shoe market but it is our duty to preserve the integrity of elite competition by ensuring that the shoes worn by elite athletes in competition do not offer any unfair assistance or advantage," said Sebastian Coe, the World Athletics president and Olympic champion. The shoes came under intense scrutiny in October, after two marathon milestones fell in a matter of days by runners wearing the shoes. Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya broke the two hour barrier in an unsanctioned race, and Brigid Kosgei of Kenya shattered the women's world record by 81 seconds. Kosgei appeared to be wearing the standard Vaporfly Next% model when she broke the women's record. That shoe will remain legal, so long as the sole of the shoe does not increase beyond the new maximum allowable thickness of 40 millimeters. Kipchoge, however, was wearing a prototype shoe with an even thicker sole than the one on the Vaporfly Next%. It may also have had more than one spring in its sole. The new regulations limit shoe designs to a single shank. The shank can be broken up but must be in one, continuous plane. The Nike shoe Kipchoge wore has not been released to the public yet for purchase or for testing and Nike has not released its specifications. The Kipchoge shoe looks similar to the shoes that other Nike runners have been testing recently. The shoes have also become popular among sub elite runners, and their bright green and neon pink hues are a common sight on the feet of high performing amateurs. The previous World Athletics rules stated only that shoes must not confer an "unfair advantage" and must be "reasonably available" to all. The rules do not explain how these two values were to be assessed. The federation had been under intense pressure to deliver a ruling on the Vaporfly shoes before the Tokyo Olympics this summer. Regulating shoes, or any piece of equipment in sports that have many casual participants, can be a fraught exercise. "Based on what creative people might do in conjunction with the materials scientists, if the regulations are not done right there is going to be an ongoing cat and mouse game similar to what we see in golf and especially auto racing where the regulations are a starting point for tweaks, workarounds, and gamesmanship of the highest order," said Michael Joyner, a physiologist at the Mayo Clinic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Marin Ireland is a delicate conduit for raw emotions. Watching her deliver the hourlong monologue "On the Exhale," Martin Zimmerman's carefully wrought study of a mother undone by loss, you half expect her to crack and shatter before your eyes. With her pale skin and fine, Pre Raphaelite features, this actress hardly seems built for the depths of anguish she delivers with such regularity and expertise on New York stages. Yet it's the illusion she conveys of transparency as if she were indeed made of spun glass that lets us perceive so clearly a blinding darkness within. Not for nothing was she chosen as a central player in the New York premieres of the British dramatist Sarah Kane's "4:48 Psychosis" and "Blasted." Ms. Kane's almost unbearable chronicles of rock bottom despair require careful handling, and Ms. Ireland was an assured guide to realms of nihilism we would normally shirk from visiting. "On the Exhale," which approaches the subject of American gun violence from a startlingly original perspective, doesn't pack the blistering power of Ms. Kane's work; it's too consciously composed for such impact. (This is probably just as well, since the play, which opened last night as part of the Roundabout Underground season, has been staged in the tiny, low ceilinged Black Box Theater, where the audience is always within scorching distance of the performers.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Alberto Salazar, the famed and disgraced distance running coach, has been placed on the United States Center for SafeSport's temporarily banned list, a disciplinary action that could result in a lifetime ban. The center investigates and rules on accusations of misconduct and abuse, and it maintains a centralized database of disciplinary action. The list includes ongoing investigations into coaches' behavior. Salazar's name appeared on the list Friday, four months after the United States Anti Doping Agency barred him from the sport for four years for doping violations, including tampering with the doping control process and trafficking in testosterone. Salazar was not immediately available for comment. In a statement, a spokesman for SafeSport said the organization "does not comment on specific matters to protect the integrity of the process and the parties involved, especially any potential victims." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
David Hoey, the senior director of visual presentation at , was sitting in his "war room" the other day when his cellphone rang. Mr. Hoey begged a visitor's pardon; the phrase "little crisis" was invoked. "Are you kidding me?" Mr. Hoey said into the phone. "So where you'd go? All right. Let me call you back. Get the 16. How many do they have?" Mr. Hoey pocketed the intrusive device and looked up apologetically. These were the final hours of an undertaking nearly a year in gestation: On Nov. 16, curtains on Fifth Avenue would drop, revealing Bergdorf's holiday windows. For the most important selling season of the year, the venerable department stores of New York have marshaled their resources for elaborate displays of festive cheer. These are a family tradition and a tourist destination, a spare no expense arms race for delighted gasps, bugged eyes and Instagram feeds. "It's a juggernaut right now," Mr. Hoey said. "Here's what we're looking for: We're trying to induce aesthetic delirium." There are the classicists (Macy's, Lord Taylor), the innovators (Barneys New York) and the razzle dazzlers (Bergdorf, Saks Fifth Avenue), but whatever the style, the import is clear. November and December are the biggest months in retail, and the windows help suck customers in, not with product so much as theme. Even for those who can't make it to the windows, those themes radiate outward, setting the tone for the season: in store, online, in mailers and on all important social media, a 360 degree wallop of shoppable holiday spirit. Foot traffic: At this time of year, retailers pull out all the stops to get customers into stores. "The competition is the most intense it is all year," said Jamie Nordstrom, the president of stores for Nordstrom, which is already planning the windows for the seven level, 320,000 square foot women's store the company will open on Broadway and 57th Street next fall. "We're pulling out all the stops." "We wanted it to feel really special for our customers," said Jessica Dennis Capiraso, Bendel's vice president of marketing and e commerce, standing in front of a 20 foot Christmas tree made out of 420 of Bendel's brown and white striped gift boxes and hatboxes. "We've had such an outpouring from our customers since the announcement that we were closing. People have just been coming in and shopping like crazy." Even now, the faint hope of solutions floated in the air. Those striped hatboxes had been eliciting attention on Instagram. Ms. Dennis Capiraso wondered if Bendel should have been selling hatboxes all along. "I'm torn between joy and pain," said Mr. Zenou, who was painting customer portraits for those who spent 400 or more. "It's like getting divorced from someone you don't want to get divorced with." Candy Pratts Price made her mark at Charles Jourdan, then vaulted to Bloomingdale's, where she designed theatrical displays with, some believed, lashings of sadomasochism. "We wanted to be provocative," said Ms. Pratts Price, who would go on to become a fixture at Vogue. "Those days we weren't into Twitter or Instagram where someone could immediately react. My hope and dream was we would've had a mic outside to hear the chatter." Planning for Christmas began months in advance. "There were incredible dilemmas," she said. "I favor holly" which can be flammable "and the fire department comes in. We once had a year where in 12 days we had to change Christmas because the fire department threw everything out." Provocation continued in the 1980s and 1990s with the arrival at Barneys of Simon Doonan, a holiday imp of the perverse, whose displays might feature Sigmund Freud as soon as Santa Claus, or a nativity scene that made references to Madonna the pop star rather than the biblical virgin. It was removed after protests organized by Catholic activists. He and a team of assemblers had worked late in the night to mount a display with gingerbread wolves and an allover patina of cinnamon (real cinnamon, for its particular texture); a Viennese style patisserie window; and the licorice window, with a rearing steed in a dizzying mosaic of licorice twists. Part of the challenge every year is finding the right materials: The layers of Mr. Hoey's napoleon cakes are actually plaster, resin and podiatry foam, and much of the licorice is hand braided polymer clay or caulk. Only three candies are tough enough to withstand the window treatment: jelly beans, a studded gummy called Champagne Bubbles and a heart shaped SweeTart like candy. Going for broke is not necessarily the expected course when fellow stores are going broke. But Darcy Penick, the new president of , who arrived in September from the online retailer Shopbop, said displays like the holiday windows were exactly where she would prefer to invest. "At a time when retail ebbs and flows in all directions, I think there is a natural orientation to pull back on things," Ms. Penick said. "From my perspective, that's not what drives customer love for your brand. You keep investing in the things that your customers love." Mr. Mazzucca said that the need for constant entertainment and refreshment to drive traffic and sales throughout the year has made him reconsider saving all of his fireworks for December. "I don't think holiday needs to be the crux of it," he said. "Every day can be the holiday." And at least one younger retailer expressed respect for tradition but also a willingness to flout it. "I remember my parents bringing me to the big department store windows, where all the toys were animated it was fantastic," said Laure Heriard Dubreuil, the founder and chief executive of the Webster, which has stores in Miami, Houston, New York and Costa Mesa, Calif. "So I like the magic of Christmas and all these beautiful windows." But for her own New York City department store, which opened on Greene Street in 2017, Ms. Dubreuil rejected the standard holiday trimmings. "Usually you think holidays, you think snow, you think green and red," she said. "But we thought glitter and pink. Santa Claus might be a Barbie doll." In lieu of a traditional holiday display, the Webster's New York store chose a theme of luxurious escape. Two full floors will be given over to an enormous installation by Chanel, inspired by the enormous cruise ship the brand erected in the Grand Palais in Paris to show the 2019 cruise collection. As for windows, they are passed over altogether, for one very good reason: The Webster doesn't have any. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Some people say that bringing an animal to your wedding is as inadvisable as inviting an ex lover with a drinking problem trouble, if not injury, seems inevitable. Weddings are zones of perfection, organization, cleanliness and control; many animals prefer rolling in dirt. They howl when they don't get their way and jump on people to show their love, even if those people are wearing long white gowns. Nevertheless, pets especially dogs are becoming more and more commonplace at weddings. Looking through wedding blogs like Style Me Pretty and A Practical Wedding, you can find dogs serving as the best man, ring bearer, flower girl and bridesmaid. They're wearing signs with messages like "I loved her first," floral wreaths, bow ties, tutus, bandannas and pearl collars. "I bet you 50 percent of the weddings I'm going to do this summer are going to have some dog involvement," said Jeff Woodward, a photographer in Vermont. Including a pet in your wedding is a leap of faith, in addition to the one you are already making. "It's a wild card: You don't know what's going to happen," said Alyssa Guilmette, 33. She married Brad Guilmette, 36, in a public park in Lexington, Mass., on Oct. 26, 2014. They said their vows while standing on an rug placed between two trees, with their rescued mutt, Rusty, sitting nearby in a black and white houndstooth bow tie. It did not go smoothly. "My uncle is trying to start the ceremony, and there's Rusty whimpering and whining and howling, a mix of all three really," Ms. Guilmette said. "Then he just plopped down and started chewing the fringe of the Oriental rug. "We understood it was beyond our control and whatever happens, happens. It will add to the untraditional uniqueness of our wedding and our relationship." At Allie Dorsky and John Pollack's wedding last June, their French bulldog, George, also protested loudly. "We were standing five feet away," Ms. Dorsky said. "She cried the whole time, in this very human whine, like 'Why am I here and you are over there?'" Many couples say the presence of a pet takes away the pressure of having a perfect wedding, because that is probably impossible even with a well trained animal around. Emily Layden, 27, and Brian Woods, 30, who live in Menlo Park, Calif., brought their Border collie mix, Canfield, to their wedding in Lake Placid, N.Y. "Having Canfield at the wedding lowered the stakes rather than raised them," she said. "I was saying, 'I'm going to walk my dog around in six inch heels in a floor length wedding dress and hope for the best.'" Dogs were part of Anne Surman and Tom Seidenberg's love story from the beginning. Both live in Exeter, N.H., where he teaches math at Phillips Exeter Academy and she is a member of the town's Board of Selectmen. On their first date a blind one he picked her up in a snowstorm, when almost everyone in town had lost power. "I run out and put my head in the car window, and the first thing I see is this big head of Sydney, his standard poodle," said Ms. Surman, 56. "He was bringing Sydney on the date because he didn't want to leave him alone in the dark house." Since that first date, their crew of creatures has grown to four dogs and two cats. Their wedding invitation was worded as if from their pets. It read: "Sydney Seidenberg, Kady, Clipper, Joey, Bogart and Bacall Surman request the honor of your presence at the marriage of their humans." They were married March 12 in St. Johnsbury, Vt., at the Dog Mountain Chapel. Many churches and synagogues do not welcome animals, but this chapel has stained glass windows and hand carved wooden pews featuring images of dogs. The couple's wedding party included two humans and seven large, beautifully groomed dog "attendants" four belonging to the couple and three to friends. "The moment they walked in, I thought, 'My family is here,'" Ms. Surman said. In comparison to dogs, cats can make finicky, moody, often self centered wedding guests. Allia Zobel Nolan, the author of "Women Who Still Love Cats Too Much," said: "Cats are really more interested in their own comfort. If you had a dog and the dog was going to carry the rings in a basket, you could train the dog to do that. It would take a very long time and a very patient person to train a cat to do that. And you never know. He might be walking up the aisle and he'd see a mouse and he'd be off." Nevertheless, when Allison Moore, 33, and Dakota Smith, 36, married in Austin, Tex., their cat, Meatwad, was in attendance. "We just put a bow tie on him and let him go as he pleased," Ms. Moore said. "He's a very social cat and he loves parties." (Their dogs, Roxy and Sprinkles, are less well behaved so they were left at home.) Tracey Buyce, a wedding photographer and animal lover based in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., has photographed weddings that included cows, horses, sheep, an owl and a chicken. "Our culture has made it more acceptable to truly have an animal be part of your family," she said. "Animals make people smile. Well, most people." The degree to which some people treat animals as family varies widely. Carol Bryant, 47, and her wife, Darlene Bryant, 59, do not view their cocker spaniel, Dexter, as a pet. "He's my son," said Carol, firmly. "I would have been devastated if Dexter wasn't there," said Carol, who is the social media manager for BlogPaws.com, a community of pet bloggers. She has a tattoo that reads, "My Heart Beats Dog." "He's my heartbeat," she said. Linnea Sanderson, 32, thinks of her mellow Terrier, Penny, as a sister. This year, Ms. Sanderson married Robert Davidson, 42, in a pair of wedding ceremonies in Gloucester, Mass. Penny attended both. For the first, she wore a collar of bells and lace snowflakes, and for the second, a magenta leash. "I like to go everywhere with her, on a walk in the morning and on a walk down the aisle," Ms. Sanderson said. Leah Fielding, 30, and Whit Boucher, 29, who live in Aspen, Colo., are almost always with Bromley, a mutt named after the ski area in Vermont where Mr. Boucher grew up skiing. On the save the date cards for their coming wedding, Bromley is front and center and wearing a sign that reads: "My Mom Dad are finally gettin' hitched. 9/16/16." Ms. Fielding said, "We do very little without him by our side, so getting married without him there would be a strange thing for us." Before Leslee Wieseneck, 33, started dating a fellow Google employee, Noah Wieseneck, 34, she lived alone in Manhattan with Cooper, a large German shepherd mix she adopted. "I was single, and he was my best friend and the love of my life," she said. "My friends joked that I was never going to find anyone to date because all I did was hang out with my dog." When they started dating, Mr. Wieseneck was somewhat taken aback by Cooper. "When Noah and I hugged or kissed, Cooper would get upset and cry and jump," she said. "He was doing the screening for me, if you will, like, 'Is this guy going to work for us?'" Last summer, the couple were married in Saratoga Springs, where Mr. Wieseneck walked down the aisle with Cooper, who wore a corsage of white and coral colored flowers. Cooper leapt onto Mrs. Wieseneck at the end of the ceremony, just as the three were about to walk back down the aisle together. "I didn't care," she said. "I was so happy. It was such a special moment, I wouldn't have cared if he ripped my dress." Sometimes, if a pet is not likely to be happy at a wedding full of noise and strangers, brides and grooms will include it in other ways. "There was one couple who knew they couldn't have their cat attend because of the cat's demeanor, so they made all these buttons with their cat's face and passed them out," said Zachary Hunt, a wedding photographer based in Austin. If there is an animal at a wedding, the photographs will probably be more amusing when viewed years later. When Hilary Cooper and Chris Crowley were married 23 years ago in Old Lyme, Conn., Angus, their Weimaraner, stood loyally by their sides. Mr. Crowley said a dog helps relieve the tension in getting married. "They change the ambience," he said. "A dog tells you: 'Hey, look, we're all mammals here. Take it easy. Chill.'" During the reception, however, Angus was bitten on the nose by a wolfhound belonging to a guest. "There's a picture of all the groomsmen with Angus with a bloody nose," Ms. Cooper said. "We called the vet and the vet said, 'Is this a show dog?' We said, 'No.' So, he said, 'Deal with the scar and have a nice wedding.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Photography and the mythos of the American cowboy have been lassoed together almost from birth. Even when they weren't working hand in hand, they were often in close company. The most famous showdown in the Old West, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, took place not at the corral but six doors down in front of the photography studio of Camillus Fly. He was too busy ducking to take a picture but ran out with a Henry rifle as the shots died away and disarmed Billy Clanton, one of the outlaws in a gang called yes the Cowboys. "Richard Prince: Cowboy," a lavish, offbeat new book, just published by Prestel, uses photography to take a long look at the pervasive, at times pernicious, influence of the cowboy on movies, television, books, advertising and politics. The book is nominally devoted to the work of Mr. Prince, who rose to fame in the 1980s through his coy appropriation of the majestic cowboy pictures from Marlboro magazine ads. But as compiled and edited by the collector and curator Robert Rubin, the assemblage of art, ephemera and found imagery ends up feeling more like a ripsnorting syllabus for an American studies class that might have been team taught by Sam Peckinpah and Margaret Mead. "Richard Prince: Cowboy," a new photo book, examines the cowboy as an American symbol. It includes writings by Western luminaries like Larry McMurtry, Louise Erdrich and Kinky Friedman. Mr. Rubin who organized a 2011 exhibition at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris centered on Mr. Prince's rare book holdings has been fixated on the West since growing up in a working class family in suburban New Jersey. At Yale he wrote a research paper about Wyatt Earp's influence on Hollywood. (Years after Earp's famous turn at the O.K. Corral, in Tombstone, Ariz., he rambled around Los Angeles as an unpaid consultant for silent cowboy movies.) The book includes writings by Western luminaries like Larry McMurtry, Louise Erdrich, Kinky Friedman, Charles Portis and Dorothy M. Johnson, author of the short story that became John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962). It also heavily mines connections between the idea of the Wild West and Mr. Prince's well publicized outlaw aesthetic, a shoot first ask questions later approach to borrowing popular imagery that has sometimes landed him in copyright litigation. (He once wrote me an email with the Dylan esque subject line "Deposition Row," apologizing for an unavoidable delay in responding to a message.) Mr. Prince, 70, and Mr. Rubin, 66, sat down in late February in Mr. Prince's studio on the Upper East Side to talk about the book, rare book collecting and their lifelong love of the cowboy ethos. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. How did the two of you meet? ROBERT RUBIN We met playing a sport but Richard doesn't like to talk about which sport. We met in a sportive context, how's that? Let's say we met at a racetrack. Mr. Rubin, a former commodities trader, owns a golf course. You could say you met at a rodeo. Did you ever come across each other in book buying circles, competing for the same kind of rare material? RUBIN No, not really. Though Richard did once buy Milton Berle's entire joke files and at the same auction I bought a copy of a Torah signed to Berle by his mother, for his bar mitzvah. To be honest, until we met, I was only vaguely aware of Richard's art. But then I got into it. RUBIN "Collecting art" is an ambitious term. I'm interested in art. I have some art. I don't have a warehouse full of stuff and an art adviser and a spreadsheet. I have walls and I have some pictures on them. PRINCE Bob pursues multiple influences in the culture. We both like architecture and design. And books and literature. RUBIN And we both absorbed massive doses of popular culture uncritically in our childhoods before we grew up and brought a critical lens to all of that. In less intellectual terms, you could say that we were cowboys before we were hippies. We're of a certain age, and when we were 8 or 10 years old, everything on television was cowboy shows. And then when we grew up, we started smoking Marlboros. It's in our DNA. There were no revisionist westerns when we were kids. PRINCE McMurtry has always been big for me. I first read him very early, when I arrived in New York in the '70s, his novel "Moving On" and then everything else he'd written. I wasn't really able to read until I was approximately 20 or 21. I had really bad dyslexia, couldn't spell, couldn't read. But in my 20s something just clicked and the R's didn't look like fives anymore. McMurtry was some of the first fiction I came to and he led to Jim Harrison and by hook and crook to Joan Didion and to Ken Kesey, who visited McMurtry with the Merry Pranksters, as Tom Wolfe wrote about in "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test." RUBIN Richard and I share the collector's gene, whether it's coins or Cracker Jack prizes or vintage cars, whatever. And one of the reasons I've been interested in Richard's work from a book perspective is that his book collection is very different from most big time collections I've seen. Most of those are best of compilations. They're almost statistical in the way they're organized. But Richard's is very conceptual. And by putting different things together, the collection creates meaning, enhances meaning that's already out there. He may have an association copy of "Ulysses" that knocks your socks off, but he's just as proud of a paperback copy of Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" autographed by Jim Morrison that you could come across on eBay. PRINCE There are two or three schools of thoughts about why people gravitate to collecting books, or at least why I did. One, they're insulation. They keep out the noise. Do you remember being interested in the cowboy as a subject for art before you came to the Marlboro pictures? PRINCE No. That came from working for Time Life Publications in the tear sheet department, where I was for several years as a day job in the '70s and early '80s. The job was to tear up the magazine, to give all the editorial material, which was called hard copies, to the people who wrote the editorial material. And at the end of the day what I was left with was several magazines worth of advertisements. I made files, recognizing certain patterns, certain colors, certain products that I had no feeling for, mostly. It really became, by default, a substitute studio. The art supplies were the magazines. I was collecting Winston ads, Salem and Newport ads, Marlboro. I would look for commonalities in the ads. The more I saw commonalities, the more I could believe in it. With the cowboy ads, I could do something that felt almost like a still from a film. And I really loved the idea of suspension of disbelief when you went to the movies, when you sat through something. For the last 10 minutes, you're no longer there. You're in another place. You're maybe another person. RUBIN Part of the thought in making this book was that it was almost a visual biography of Richard by other means. And of the history of the cowboy in the 20th century. PRINCE The things about those ads was that it wasn't a cowboy you were seeing. It was a model. But the model might be a real cowboy, acting like a cowboy. It was making itself up. RUBIN Those ads came along when traditional westerns were running out of steam. Then the adman Leo Burnett takes the cowboy smoking on the cover of Life magazine in 1949 who looked like he was right out of John Ford and extracts the essence of that cowboy. And instead of using it to entertain and stimulate through popular culture, he's selling nicotine, right? And then Richard comes along, and he has the same love of the cowboy and the myth. So he starts deconstructing it and at the same time giving it new life, probing all the contradictions and the dark underbelly of the thing. If each of you were to name a favorite in your collections that relates to the cowboy what would it be? PRINCE It's always hard to say. Maybe a first edition of "Horseman, Pass By," McMurtry's first book, with a long inscription to the guy who published early drafts of the story in a literary magazine. In other words, it's inscribed to the guy who published McMurtry before he was really published. Which gets you back to the beginning. RUBIN For me, it would have to be two different versions of the script for "The Searchers," John Ford's movie, written by Frank S. Nugent. I have John Wayne's working copy, which is interesting because Wayne had the habit of folding the pages over in two when he finished a shoot. So the screenplay is half the width of a normal screenplay. And then there's the master script draft, with all the production notes. At the very end there's a typed in question: "Ride away?" In other words, Ford hadn't yet settled on what John Wayne was going to do at the end, which is now probably the most famous ending in the history of the western, the doorway scene Wayne walking slowly into the distance as the door closes and the screen goes to black. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The latest round of Danspace Project's Platform series, which explores dance through the lens of a particular idea or theme, is dedicated to the work of the choreographer DD Dorvillier, who helped define contemporary dance beginning in the 1990s. For more than a decade Ms. Dorvillier lived and worked out of the Matzoh Factory, a loft she shared with the dancer and choreographer Jennifer Monson in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But "Platform 2014: 'Diary of an Image' by DD Dorvillier" is not a retrospective. She has created two new performance projects for the event, including the delicate "Diary of an Image," which features music by Zeena Parkins and incorporates Morse code as a way of organizing sound and rhythm. "A catalogue of steps," free to the public, is a chance for Ms. Dorvillier to excavate the dances she created from 1990 to 2004, presenting carefully selected fragments in an installation setting. In other words, she wants to learn from herself. (Wednesday through June 14, 131 East 10th Street, East Village; 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
FRANKFURT Economists may still be debating whether Europe is headed for a sharp slowdown or even a recession, but Steve Knott, who installs home heating systems in Barrow in Furness, a port town in northwest England once known for its iron mills, is convinced he already knows the answer. Mr. Knott, 53, who runs Furness Heating Components, has cut his work force to 18 people from 25 and said business was tougher than he had ever seen it. "There's a lot of competition, and people are just not building that many houses anymore," Mr. Knott said. Data released on Friday leaves little doubt that the European economy is losing momentum before most countries have even recovered to the level of output they had in 2008, when the recession hit. But the larger question is whether an increasingly bitter brew of flagging output and a sovereign debt crisis along with the market downturn will create something more sinister than a mere slowdown, and lead more businesses to cut jobs and investment as Mr. Knott has. In France, the second largest economy in the European Union after Germany, growth came to a standstill in the three months through June, according to official figures. Meanwhile, industrial production in the 17 nation euro area fell 0.7 percent in June compared with May, more than analysts had forecast. On Tuesday, economists expect a report on euro area economic activity to show that gross domestic product slowed to 0.3 percent in the second quarter, from 0.8 percent in the first three months of the year. If there is less economic growth, governments will collect less tax revenue. They will have more trouble paying their debts. That could make investors even more nervous and add to turmoil in the stock and bond markets, which will undercut business and consumer confidence, which will lead to yet slower growth, and so on. Mr. Lueck says he believes the most likely prospect is less dire, but even his more optimistic view calls for a brief slowdown on the way to a "new normal" of weaker growth in Europe and the United States. And he acknowledged that, in 2008, many economists underestimated how quickly and severely the financial crisis would spill into the broader economy. "We learned the hard way," Mr. Lueck said. "The links between the financial world and the world economy are very strong." Another recession is already well under way in Greece and Portugal, while growth in countries like Spain, Italy and Britain has been very slow since last year. But now Germany, which has been remarkably strong, hauling the rest of the Continent along with it, seems to be decelerating. The Ifo Business Climate Index, considered a reliable predictor of German growth, fell in July as executives became less optimistic about exports. "It is more than a soft patch," said Eric Chaney, chief economist at a French insurer, the AXA Group. "The business cycle is really coming to a quasi standstill in Europe." Worse than expected results from companies like Daimler, Deutsche Bank and Siemens in the last month have reinforced the feeling that Germany's extraordinary boom is near an end. E.On, Germany's largest utility, said on Wednesday that it might need to cut as many as 11,000 jobs after experiencing the first loss since it was created a decade ago from a group of state owned utilities. E.On attributed the loss chiefly to the government's decision to force some of the company's nuclear power plants to close early, but sales declines in foreign markets like Britain and Hungary also played a role. A big problem for Europe is that domestic demand is weak and growth has become primarily dependent on sales from abroad, where the signals are flashing yellow. The United States, still the largest foreign market for companies like BMW, is slowing and could slip into recession. The earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan had a greater impact on global trade than economists expected. And demand from China and emerging markets is slackening. "Germany is so leveraged in global trade that if something happens, then Germany slows immediately," Mr. Chaney said. "That makes the recovery more fragile. It depends on the good health of the rest of the world." Some German exporters are still smarting from the severe recession that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, and must now gird for another retrenchment. An association that represents makers of construction machinery said last Wednesday that it expected a sales increase of more than 10 percent this year, but that sales were still one third below their 2008 peak. Many German companies are still not operating at capacity, while they worry about debt problems in the United States and Europe as well as unrest in the crucial Middle East market, said Christof Kemmann, chief executive of BHS Sonthofen, a maker of machinery for processing building materials. "Even when some sectors are reporting good numbers, there is no reason for euphoria," Mr. Kemmann said. And it looks increasingly unlikely that demand from home will recover in time to offset fading exports. Government austerity measures have cut into consumption in countries like Ireland and Italy, and the belt tightening is spreading. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, in attempt to reassure bond investors that the country can service its debt, last week told his budget and finance ministers to come up with new measures to cut the budget deficit to 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2013, from a projected 5.7 percent this year. Britain, where unrest in the streets is only adding to uncertainty among consumers and businesses, provides a prime example. Britain's economy grew 0.2 percent in the second quarter, but disposable income in the 12 month period through March fell 2.7 percent for the average British family as a result of inflation and higher interest rates. As consumers avoid the stores, several retailers, including Jane Norman, a women's fashion retailer; TJ Hughes, a discount department store; and the wine and spirits retailer Oddbins have been forced to seek bankruptcy protection. Despite the risk of another recession, the British government has vowed to stick with its PS80 billion ( 130 billion) austerity program, which is expected to cost 300,000 public sector jobs. "It's pretty harsh times," said Dave Knight, secretary for the Unison trade union, which represents workers for the Waltham Forest Council in the North of London, an area hit by unrest. Of four council offices, three will close, he said. A team of five psychologists who counseled troubled students will lose their jobs. Many economists warn that the austerity measures could be counterproductive by making people fearful of unemployment and afraid to spend. "Austerity has become the problem, not the solution," said Ian Harnett, a managing director at Absolute Strategy Research. "Me saving is great. You saving is great too. But if we all save it's not good." For all the economic angst, many economists say that risk of a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis has been overblown. Banks have more capital in reserve than they did then, the argument goes, and central banks have shown they are ready to step in at the first hint of trouble. This month, signs of stress in the interbank lending market prompted the European Central Bank to expand cheap loans to banks in the euro area, to ensure that none run short of cash. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Wait, is Trump some sort of ignoramus? And on it goes: One knockout revelation after another, ultimately revealing very little. If by now you haven't concluded that Donald Trump is "erratic," "irrational," "foolish," and "stunningly uninformed" among the epithets Bolton applies to the president this book isn't likely to convince you. But the larger question looming over Bolton's book isn't about its subject. It's about its author and everyone else who joined the administration without illusions, participated in it without defiance, and exited it without shame. How do people like Bolton, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson or (when he eventually departs) Pompeo justify their witting, willing service to this witless, wicked president? In a superb essay in The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum draws on the inspiration of Czeslaw Milosz's "The Captive Mind" to address the question. There is the relief, and pleasure, of political conformity. There is the allure of power, or proximity to it. There is a profit motive. There is a kind of savior complex, in which officials like the "Anonymous" New York Times Op Ed writer from 2018 claim to form part of a secret resistance within the upper reaches of government. All true. And all eminently applicable to Bolton. But there's an additional factor at work, described by Hannah Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism." How do demagogues get away with their nonstop lying even with those who at some level understand they are being lied to? Arendt observed "a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member, depending upon his rank and standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement." It took cynicism to work for a president whose character he disdained and whose worldview he opposed. It took gullibility to think he could blunt or influence either. It took cynicism to observe the president commit multiple potentially impeachable offenses and then sit out impeachment on the pathetic excuse that Democrats were going about it the wrong way and that his testimony would have made no meaningful difference. It took gullibility to assume his book would have any effect on Trump's re election prospects now. It took cynicism to reap profits thanks to a president he betrayed and a nation he let down. It took gullibility to imagine he'd be applauded as a courageous truth teller when his motives are so nakedly vindictive and mercenary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
They are classic animated films like "Dumbo" (1941) and "Peter Pan" (1953), but on Disney's streaming service they will now get a little help to stand the test of time. Before viewers watch some of these films that entertained generations of children, they will be warned about scenes that include "negative depictions" and "mistreatment of people or cultures." The 12 second disclaimer, which cannot be skipped, tells viewers, in part: "These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together." In addition to "Peter Pan" and "Dumbo," the warning plays on films including "The Aristocats" (1970) and "Aladdin" (1992), and directs viewers to a website that explains some of the problematic scenes. In "The Aristocats," a cat with slanted eyes and buck teeth is a "racist caricature of East Asian peoples with exaggerated stereotypical traits," the website says. The cat's song about egg foo young and fortune cookies Westernized foods "mock the Chinese language and culture," it says. "Dumbo" includes a group of crows that "pay homage to racist minstrel shows," the site says. The leader of the group of birds is named Jim Crow, a reference to the laws that enforced racial segregation in the United States. "Peter Pan" portrays Indigenous people "in a stereotypical manner" and refers to them repeatedly with a slur, it says. Disney was advised by organizations such as the African American Film Critics Association and the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, according to the site, which says a third party "advisory council" is providing Disney with "ongoing guidance and thought leadership on critical issues and shifting perceptions." The disclaimer follows a similar, yet less extensive, warning from Disney in 2019 that told viewers: "This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions." Hemant Shah, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison who studies portrayals of race and ethnicity in film and media, said that if white children consumed content with racist portrayals that went unchecked, it could "normalize the stereotype" for them and make it "normal for them not to call out stereotypes or racist behaviors they see in their lives." For children of color, it could lead to self esteem issues, Dr. Shah said. "They may have a sense of, 'That's how I am?'" he said. 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. Though he was skeptical that the disclaimer would have a large impact on children, Dr. Shah said that racist scenes offered learning opportunities when children watched them with their parents at home or in the classroom as part of media literacy education. Disney "ought to also have some sort education program" about the stereotypes in conjunction with the disclaimer, he said. The revised language was installed over the past week, a Disney spokeswoman said in an email on Sunday, noting that the original advisory had appeared since Disney kicked off in November last year. Disney said in June that it would remake its Splash Mountain theme park ride, which includes characters and songs from the 1946 musical "Song of the South." Disney has not made the musical available for over three decades because of the racist imagery it includes. The updated warning comes as other companies have reckoned with racist or otherwise insensitive parts of their brands or products. Quaker Oats said in June that it would change the name and packaging of its Aunt Jemima brand, which is based on racist imagery. A formerly enslaved person was hired to portray the character in the late 1800s, and in the 1930s a white actress who had performed in blackface played Aunt Jemima in a radio series. Last month, the company that produces the Cream of Wheat brand of hot cereal said it would discontinue its use of a Black chef as the face of the brand to ensure it did not "inadvertently contribute to systemic racism." Though the branding may be based on an actual chef from Chicago, the company said, the imagery "reminds some consumers of earlier depictions they find offensive." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A throng of lawyers for Sumner M. Redstone and the two longtime confidants who have brought suits against him resumed arguments at a Massachusetts courthouse on Thursday, continuing a heated legal battle that could decide the fate of Mr. Redstone's media empire. Mr. Redstone's side argued that their client had the mental capacity to make decisions regarding his entertainment conglomerate, which includes Viacom and CBS. They said that the lawsuit should be dismissed or, should it proceed, be moved to California, where Mr. Redstone lives. But lawyers for the plaintiffs, Philippe P. Dauman and George S. Abrams, argued that Mr. Redstone, 93 and in failing health, was mentally incapacitated and had been unduly influenced by Shari Redstone, his daughter, who recently reconciled with him after a long estrangement. After hearing arguments from both sides for over five hours, Judge George F. Phelan of Norfolk County Probate Court said he "had a lot of information to digest" before he could make any rulings, including whether to dismiss the case. He requested documents from a California case brought by Manuela Herzer, a former companion and one time romantic partner of Mr. Redstone, that challenged Mr. Redstone's mental competency. A judge dismissed the case in May. (Ms. Herzer has filed an appeal.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
On a cycling tour along the coast of southwest Sardinia, Kathleen Robinson thanked God she was riding an electric bike up the winding heights. But she wished she'd had a class beforehand on the proper etiquette. She didn't realize that the hum of her motor would annoy some of the traditional cyclists on the tour, nor was she certain whether to spin in the back of the pack or move out front. Mrs. Robinson, 60, had enough sense to gloat tactically, like when she sailed past a friend grinding up a hill and "gave him my Queen Elizabeth wave." "There wasn't a problem as long as I didn't stay next to someone who was struggling hard," she said. Over the last two years, bike tour companies large and small have seen a spike in demand for e bikes, and have ramped up their battery powered fleets and the equipment needed to haul the heavier machines. The bikes now are used by 10 to 30 percent of riders on tours, operators said, and that percentage is only increasing. Kathleen Robinson with her husband, Fred. She was in need of a second knee replacement when she joined four other e bikers out of 17 tourists on the weeklong trip in late 2017. "E bikes are revolutionizing bike tours," said Maria Elena Price, co owner of ExperiencePlus! Bicycle Tours, which offers itineraries in 20 countries. Pedaling kick starts an e bike's motors, which cut off at 20 miles per hour in the United States and about 15 mph in Europe. Riding an e bike can feel like having wind at your back or a pair of bionic legs. That has opened tours to noncyclists who are less fit, people once sidelined by injury and older cyclists looking to extend their riding days. Like a marriage counselor, they unite couples who once vacationed separately or joined bike tours reluctantly. But as with many innovations in sports think high tech racing suits for swimmers and sticky gloves for football players e bikes have created their own set of tensions and hand wringing over the artificial advantage. While most on the tours say e bikes make for more harmonious rides with fewer stressed out stragglers, the bikes have also given rise to incessant corny jokes "I didn't think that hill was that hard," said the e biker and no shortage of muttered obscenities from drained riders as e bikers nonchalantly breeze by. Guides now have an orientation script explaining that e bikes are "not mini mopeds," and asking e bikers "to respect your fellow push bike riders as you pass them effortlessly on a climb, and for those of you on push bikes to not look 'down' on the e bikers." Rarely does a guide need to reprimand a rider, said Alain Rimondi, a tour leader for ExperiencePlus! in Italy. But when the sides are evenly mixed, he said, "it turns into an interesting social experiment." At the start, e bikers can feel a bit guilty switching on the motor, he said. In the first days they tend to fly past the others, especially on hills, and some even arrive early for lunch. Later, e bikers usually hang back and the group is more compact. At the end of rides, the e bike riders are happy and refreshed from their workout, he said, and push bike riders often ask if they can try an e bike. Battery powered bikes were invented more than a century ago. But they remained a clunky oddity until this decade, taking hold on riding tours first in Europe, which has an expansive bike culture, then spreading to the United States. Norman Patry, the owner of Summer Feet Cycling in Maine, said he was too far ahead of the curve when he bought a dozen e bikes six years ago. They gathered dust and he stopped promoting them on his website. Now, the sector is full of energy. "Everybody who is in the biking space is talking about it and thinking about it," Mr. Patry said. "We're past the point where they're wondering if they're going to do it; everybody thinks they need to do it now." He's replacing his fleet this year. The costs can be substantial: E bikes typically run at least double the price of a regular hybrid touring bike, with outfitters generally paying 1,500 to 3,000 for one e bike. One of the larger tour operators, Vermont based VBT Bicycling and Walking Vacations, has invested more than 1 million in e bikes, said Ray Hourani, head of global operations. In a five year plan created in 2016, VBT projected 12 percent of bookings would be for e bikes. It's already at 30 percent, he said. That's brought new challenges. Hundreds of new e bikes required dozens of custom made trailers to support them. And guides in Europe needed a special driver's license to transport the heavier loads. The staff at Bicycle Adventures of Redmond, Wash., had seemingly endless debates when it tested e bikes six years ago. According to Todd Starnes, the owner, they argued whether e bikes were cheating, how e bikers would be treated, if the tour makeup would be changed and more. The verdict? "In some ways, I think it makes the trip a little better," Mr. Starnes said. For one, tours begin with less anxious questions about distance and elevation. "The person on the e bike is less concerned at that point about whether they can keep up and more concerned about what the others think about them being on an e bike," Mr. Starnes said. "And they soon learn that nobody cares." E bikes also make it easier for guides; less sheep dogging laggards who delay the rest of the group. "Everybody is at lunch at the same time," Mr. Starnes said. An e bike was the solution for Hope and Richard Wilson last fall. Mrs. Wilson had pinched a nerve in her leg, but her husband had his mind set on a foliage cycling tour in Maine with three other couples. "It made it a lot more fun when you can keep up," Mrs. Wilson, 57, said. "You're going by beautiful estates and beautiful landscape and you get to share it with somebody instead of lagging at the back." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Notorious B.I.G. rapped about Coogi sweaters. But when he needed a suit, he went to Guy Wood. Since 1992, under the name 5001 Flavors, Mr. Wood has supplied custom tailored suits and outerwear to a high profile clientele that includes Jay Z, LeBron James, Fat Joe and Will Smith. "Whatever you thought of, we could make come to life," Mr. Wood said. "No longer did you have to run along and shop for something that didn't exist." In 2012, with family members and a friend, he opened Harlem Haberdashery, at 245 Lenox Avenue (Malcolm X Boulevard). The store offers everything from richly brocaded suits to statement caps that read "Billionaire New York." We'll take a fabric that's not for a motorcycle jacket and convert it. We do this neoprene one with a tartan plaid print. Fabolous has it. I even do one in white wool. I source my leathers all locally, in the fashion district and certain tanneries, but I can't give away all my secrets. Do you make your own line of denim? Yes. It's raw selvage denim. This is our slim fitting jean that you can wear with a dress shoe. What happened is that hip hop has grown up. It's very on trend and fashionable. Now everyone wants to be cleaned up: slimmer trouser, cleaner shirt, not four times the size that fits. That trend has died. It will be back in 25 years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Juan F. Masello never intended to study wild parrots. Twenty years ago, as a graduate student visiting the northernmost province of Patagonia in Argentina, he planned to write his dissertation on colony formation among seabirds. But when he asked around for flocks of, say, cormorants or storm petrels, a park warden told him he was out of luck. "He said, 'This is the only part of Patagonia with no seabird colonies,'" recalled Dr. Masello, a principal investigator in animal ecology and systematics at Justus Liebig University in Germany. Might the young scientist be interested in seeing a large colony of parrots instead? The sight that greeted Dr. Masello was "amazing" and "incredible," he said. "It was almost beyond words." On a 160 foot high sandstone cliff that stretched some seven miles along the Atlantic coast, tens of thousands of pairs of burrowing parrots had used their powerful bills to dig holes their nests deep into the rock face. And when breeding season began not long afterward, the sky around the cliffs erupted into a raucous carnival of parrot: 150,000 crow size, polychromed aeronauts with olive backsides, turquoise wings, white epaulets and bright red belly patches ringed in gold. Dr. Masello was hooked. Today, Dr. Masello's hands are covered with bite scars. He has had four operations to repair a broken knee, a broken nose "the little accidents you get from working with parrots," he said. Still, he has no regrets. Dr. Masello is one of a small but unabashedly enthusiastic circle of researchers who study Psittaciformes, the avian order that includes parrots, parakeets, macaws and cockatoos. For all their visual splash and cartoon familiarity, parrots have long been given scientific short shrift in favor of more amenable subjects like, say, zebra finches or blue tits. But through a mix of rugged and sometimes risky field work, laboratory studies and a willingness to shrug off the frequent loss of expensive tracking equipment, researchers are gaining insights into the lives, minds and startling appetites of parrots. Parrot partisans say the birds easily rival the great apes and dolphins in all around braininess and resourcefulness, and may be the only animals apart from humans capable of dancing to the beat. "We call them feathered primates," said Irene Pepperberg, who studies animal cognition at Harvard and is renowned for her research with Alex and other African grey parrots. "They're very good colleagues," said Alice Auersperg of the University of Vienna, who studies the Goffin's cockatoo of Indonesia. Many of the recent discoveries are described in a new book, "Parrots of the Wild: A Natural History of the World's Most Captivating Birds," by Catherine A. Toft and Timothy F. Wright. Others have been reported in journals or demonstrated through online videos, which have gone viral or deserve to. Dr. Auersperg and her colleagues have found that Goffin's cockatoos are among the most spontaneously inventive toolmakers ever described, and that the birds can learn how to fashion the latest food fetching device after just a single viewing of a master cockatoo at work. Studying the yellow naped Amazon of Costa Rica, Dr. Wright and his colleagues have discovered that different populations of the parrot communicate with one another in distinct dialects that remain stable over decades, like human languages. Just as with people, young parrots can easily master multiple dialects while their elders can't or won't bother to do likewise. A recent DNA analysis showed that parrots were closely related to falcons, a finding that dovetails with field studies of parrots' often merciless dietary habits. While falcons are predators in the conventional sense, hunting and devouring other animals, parrots turn out to be no less bloodthirsty in their approach to feasting on plants. Forget about symbiosis or some happy tit for tat between flora and this particular fauna. Parrots pooh pooh the fruit pulp and home in on the seeds, crushing the casings to extract the plant embryos and the cache of fats and proteins intended to help those embryos germinate. "A parrot is a plant carnivore," Dr. Wright said. "It destroys the seed. It goes right in through the fruit and eats the plant baby." Or the entire herbaceous brood. Researchers have found that when a flock of parrots alights on a fruiting tree, a veritable seed massacre can ensue. In one study of canary winged parakeets foraging on the seeds of shaving brush trees in the Cerrado tropical savanna of central Brazil, scientists determined that the birds destroyed 66 percent to 100 percent of each tree's fruit in a matter of days. Not a single whole seed could be found on the ground. The psittacines are a midsize club of about 360 species, ranging in size from the pygmy parrots of New Guinea, which are smaller than house sparrows, to the bulky, flightless kakapos of New Zealand, which can weigh up to nine pounds. Most parrots live in the tropics or subtropics, where a mix of habitat loss and the depredations of the international pet trade now threaten a third of all species with extinction, Dr. Masello said. "Monk parakeets from South America are doing nicely in New York City," said Leo Joseph, a parrot expert and director of the Australian National Wildlife Collection in Canberra. "Peach faced lovebirds from Africa are well established in Arizona." Residents of Los Angeles County may spot enclaves of more than a dozen different feral parrots, including lilac crowned Amazons, rose ringed parakeets, macaws and cockatiels. Why some parrots thrive in anthropocentric landscapes while others are on the cusp of oblivion has yet to be determined. Researchers propose that many of the parrot's signature traits evolved to meet the challenge of seed predation and exploiting a resource that plants do everything in their power to defend. The parrot's muscular jaw and huge bill specially hinged to allow top and bottom to move independently, up and down and from side to side can crack open even the toughest and woodiest shells. The curved points of the bill act rather like lobster picks, ideal for scooping out seed meat. Parrots can similarly clip apart leg bands, satellite holsters and other animal tracking devices, which is one reason most researchers have avoided them. Another demand of granivory, or seed predation, is the power to withstand the many defensive chemicals that plants pack into their genetic hope chests. Researchers have lately gathered evidence that a drive to detoxify could explain why parrots often converge on clay flats and start nibbling at the ground. In laboratory experiments at the University of California, Davis, scientists fed orange winged parrots small doses of quinidine, a potentially toxic alkaloid, and followed with what they called a "chaser" of Peruvian clay. The researchers found that the clay served a doubly salubrious purpose, first by directly binding to the poison and helping to flush it from the body, and then by stimulating the production of a mucus shield in the gut. Paradoxically, scientists said, the pursuit of toxic prey may be linked to the parrot's exceptional longevity. The difficult diet probably selected for a tough constitution, with top flight immune and DNA repair systems, and tough things tend to last. In addition, the ingested toxins may well have an antimicrobial, anti parasitic effect, helping parrots to fend off disease. However they manage, parrots can live a half century or longer: the record holder among Moluccan cockatoos, for example, is 92, and a very lucky kakapo might make it to 120. Yet seed hunting's greatest evolutionary effect on parrothood may well have been psychosocial, transforming the birds into brainy schmoozers. Fruiting trees are a patchy and unpredictable resource, and parrots often fly many miles a day in quest of food. Under such circumstances, searching in groups turns out to be more efficient than solitary hunting, especially when group members can trade tips on promising leads. "That can mean the development of a social system, as well as the neurological capacity to share information," Dr. Joseph said. The vocal capacity, too: parrots call to one another continually, squawkishly, over long distances and short. "It's extremely rare to find mimicry of other species in wild parrots," he said. He also suggested that the ability of some parrots in captivity to move to a musical beat may be an offshoot of vocal mimicry, a generalized motor pattern geared toward synchrony playing out in body or voice. The most celebrated dancing parrot is Snowball, a sulfur crested cockatoo with a trademarked name whose YouTube dance performances to Queen, Michael Jackson and the Backstreet Boys have been viewed some 15 million times. Always Trying Something New Researchers are still getting a bead on parrot intelligence, and they are repeatedly surprised by each new display of it. Dr. Pepperberg and her collaborators have shown that African grey parrots have exceptional number skills: Alex could deduce the proper order of numbers up to 8, add three small numbers together and even had a zerolike concept "skills equivalent to those of a four and a half year old child," Dr. Pepperberg said. Dr. Auersperg and her co workers have found that Goffin's cockatoos are more geared toward solving technical tasks. Alternately using their bills and feet, the birds can systematically make their way through a lock with five different complex mechanisms on it. Should they discover that one of the steps can be skipped en route to opening a chamber with a nut inside, they skip it the next time around. And in an act of ingenuity that Dr. Auersperg called "sensational" for an animal not known to use tools in the wild, a cockatoo named Figaro one day started carefully chipping at the edge of a larch wood frame until he had formed a long, slender pole, which he then wielded in his bill like a hockey stick to knock out pebbles and nuts hidden under boxes. "It took him 20 minutes to make his first tool," Dr. Auersperg said. "After that, he could do it in less than five minutes." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
THE ROBERT CRAY BAND AND MARC COHN at St. George Theater (June 14, 8 p.m.). More than four decades after initially forming the band that bears his name, Cray, a much lauded guitarist, is still playing the blues. At this Staten Island theater, he will appear with Cohn, the singer songwriter best known for his 1991 hit "Walking in Memphis." Recently, Cohn has been collaborating with the Blind Boys of Alabama, the gospel outfit whose sole surviving original member, Jimmy Carter, helped found the group in the 1940s. The Blind Boys are also on the bill; expect them to sing selections from "Work to Do," the collaborative album they will release with Cohn in August. 718 442 2900, stgeorgetheatre.com DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE at Forest Hills Stadium (June 15, 6 p.m.). Ben Gibbard, the frontman of this group, has one of the most distinctive voices in indie rock though he's quick to point out that, having been signed to a major label for over a decade, the group is hardly "indie" anymore. His wistful tenor matches the earnestness of his lyrics, which, for the more than 20 years that he has led Death Cab, have captured the uncertainty of youth and the agony and ecstasy of love on songs like "Soul Meets Body." At this stadium in Queens, his band will be joined by Jenny Lewis, the former Rilo Kiley singer whose recent album, "On the Line," considers family, illness and addiction. foresthillsstadium.com BILLIE EILISH at Radio City Music Hall (June 19, 7:30 p.m.). This singer from Los Angeles is a truly contemporary pop star. The 17 year old broke out with a single track, "Ocean Eyes," uploaded to SoundCloud in 2015; its success segued into a record deal, a modeling contract and massive internet celebrity. In March, Eilish released her debut album, "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" It's full of dark, off kilter tracks like "Bury a Friend," a song written from the perspective of the monster under her bed. Eilish's performance at Radio City comes the day after a sold out appearance at Pier 17; resale tickets are available for both shows. 212 465 6000, radiocity.com FATHER JOHN MISTY AND JASON ISBELL AND THE 400 UNIT at the Prospect Park Bandshell (June 19, 6:30 p.m.). Performing back to back at this BRIC benefit concert, these co headliners will showcase two notably different songwriting philosophies. Isbell, formerly of the alt country group Drive By Truckers, sings straightforwardly, but insightfully, about addiction, anxiety and the South. Father John Misty, the ex Fleet Fox and full time provocateur whose real name is Josh Tillman, opts for more high concept writing (his most infamous lyric may be the one about Taylor Swift and the Oculus Rift). The British indie folk singer Jade Bird will open the show. 718 683 5600, bricartsmedia.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. SEA WOLF at National Sawdust (June 18 19, 8 p.m.). Alex Brown Church, the creative mind behind this Los Angeles based band, spins stormy romance and natural imagery into graceful indie folk melodies. The group's most recent project, "Song Spells No. 1: Cedarsmoke," was a more experimental release funded through Kickstarter; in press materials, Church called it "not an official record." Though it came out nearly five years ago, its songs have never been performed live by the full band. That will change on Tuesday and Wednesday, when they, accompanied by a string quartet, will take the project to the stage for the first time. 646 779 8455, nationalsawdust.org TANK AND THE BANGAS at the Prospect Park Bandshell (June 20, 7:30 p.m.). In 2017, this band from New Orleans won NPR's Tiny Desk Contest on the strength of "Quick," a maximalist story song that coalesces around the singing, rapping and ineffable charm of the group's frontwoman: Tarriona Ball, a.k.a. Tank. At the victor's podium which is to say, standing behind a desk at NPR headquarters Ball described her group as a roller coaster of "sound and rhythm and love and light, expression, and things that make you feel whole." Their free performance in Prospect Park, presented by BRIC as part of its Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, is sure to be lively. 718 683 5600, bricartsmedia.org OLIVIA HORN MELANIE CHARLES at Dizzy's Club (June 18 22, 11:15 p.m.). Charles, a vocalist, flutist and multi instrumentalist, takes a prismatic view of black music, turning the past into the future and letting the sounds of the Caribbean beam into her versions of classic American jazz standards. At this late night show, she will celebrate the legacy of Abbey Lincoln a landmark vocalist and composer who died in 2010 with help from the thrilling pianist Marc Cary, who played in Lincoln's band for many years; the bassist Jonathan Michel; and the drummer Diego Ramirez. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys GERALD CLEAVER at Nublu 151 (June 16, 9 p.m.). A drummer of marvelous versatility and coolly considered power, Cleaver exhibits a love for thrashing, arrhythmic clatter, but it is matched by his ability to pump quiet energy into a simmering swing beat. He's a first call drummer for musicians across the jazz world, but when he performs as a leader, remarkable things tend to happen. He appears at Nublu 151 in an intriguing, atypical quartet featuring three fellow virtuosos: the cellist Tomeka Reid, the violist Mat Maneri and the electronic musician and multidisciplinary artist Daniel Givens. nublu.net SYLVIE COURVOISIER at Happylucky No. 1 (June 14 15, 8 p.m.). The music that Courvoisier, a pianist, plays with the violinist Mark Feldman seems to articulate its own set of standards and intentions: Play with the utmost clarity, but never compromise depth of tone and feeling. Express yourself with a dead set seriousness, but flee from certainty. Keep a conversation going at all times between the ache of nostalgia and the nervous excitement of anticipation. To hear this private ideology in action, pick up a copy of the duo's newly released disc, "Time Gone Out," then go hear them at Happylucky on Saturday. On Friday, Courvoisier performs with a different duet partner: the restlessly iconoclastic guitarist Mary Halvorson. happyluckyno1.com THEO CROKER at Jazz Standard (June 13 16, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Last month, Croker logged a vital contribution to the growing body of nouveau jazz fusion (think Robert Glasper, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Sarah Elizabeth Charles) when he released "Star People Nation," an album that gallivants from swirling, left field hip hop beats to propellant swing to entrancing passages of African percussion. Through it all, Croker's understated trumpet playing holds his small band together with swagger and poise. Here he celebrates the album's release with Mike King on piano, Eric Wheeler on bass and Michael Ode on drums. 212 576 2232, jazzstandard.com THE MARTIN FAMILY at the Blue Note (June 13 16, 8 and 10:30 p.m.). The alto saxophonist, keyboardist and producer Terrace Martin has been writing and producing for pop and hip hop acts in Los Angeles since the early 2000s; all the while, he has moonlighted as a jazz saxophonist. With the meteoric rise of Kendrick Lamar, one of his closest collaborators, Martin managed to become a household name among music fans without sacrificing either side of his artistry. This weekend he brings a bit of personal history to bear, playing in a trio with his father the R B drummer Ernest Martin, known as Curly and the organist Larry Goldings. 212 475 8592, bluenote.net MELVIS SANTA AND KARLEA LYNNE at the Cell Theater (June 15, 8 p.m.). A Havana born singer with a bright and cloudless articulation, Santa connects Afro Caribbean tradition with an easygoing, contemporary pop sound. Now a New Yorker, she is among the most promising rising talents in her adopted hometown. She will perform at the Cell with a small ensemble, and will be preceded by Lynne, a vocalist with a commitment to jazz's soul inflected tradition. Lynne will appear in a quintet featuring Christopher McBride on saxophone, Jonathan Thomas on piano, Noah Jackson on bass and Darrian Douglas on drums. 646 861 2253, thecelltheatre.org GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
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