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SAN FRANCISCO The letter was aimed at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, and his top lieutenants. It decried the social network's recent decision to let politicians post any claims they wanted even false ones in ads on the site. It asked Facebook's leaders to rethink the stance. The message was written by Facebook's own employees. Facebook's position on political advertising is "a threat to what FB stands for," the employees wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. "We strongly object to this policy as it stands." For the past two weeks, the text of the letter has been publicly visible on Facebook Workplace, a software program that the Silicon Valley company uses to communicate internally. More than 250 employees have signed the message, according to three people who have seen it and who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation. Many employees have been discussing Mr. Zuckerberg's decision to let politicians post anything they want in Facebook ads because those ads can go viral and spread misinformation widely. The worker dissatisfaction has spilled out across winding, heated threads on Facebook Workplace, the people said. For weeks, Facebook has been under attack by presidential candidates, lawmakers and civil rights groups over its position on political ads. But the employee actions which are a rare moment of internal strife for the company show that even some of its own workers are not convinced the political ads policy is sound. The dissent is adding to Facebook's woes as it heads into the 2020 presidential election season. "Facebook's culture is built on openness, so we appreciate our employees voicing their thoughts on this important topic," Bertie Thomson, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in a statement. "We remain committed to not censoring political speech, and will continue exploring additional steps we can take to bring increased transparency to political ads." Facebook has been struggling to respond to misinformation on its site since the 2016 presidential election, when Russians used the social network to spread inflammatory and divisive messages to influence the American electorate. Mr. Zuckerberg has since appointed tens of thousands of people to work on platform security and to deter coordinated disinformation efforts. But figuring out what is and isn't allowed on the social network is slippery. And last month, Facebook announced that politicians and their campaigns would have nearly free rein over content they post there. Previously, the company had prohibited the use of paid political ads that "include claims debunked by third party fact checkers." This month, President Trump's campaign began circulating an ad on Facebook that made false claims about former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is running for president. When Mr. Biden's campaign asked Facebook to remove the ad, the company refused, saying ads from politicians were newsworthy and important for discourse. Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts who is also running for president, soon took Facebook to task. She bought a political ad on Facebook that falsely claimed Mr. Zuckerberg and his company supported Mr. Trump for president. (Neither Mr. Zuckerberg nor Facebook have endorsed a political candidate.) Ms. Warren said she wanted to see how far she could take it on the site. Mr. Zuckerberg had turned his company into a "disinformation for profit machine," she said. But Mr. Zuckerberg doubled down. In a 5,000 word speech to students at Georgetown University in Washington this month, the chief executive defended his treatment of political ads by citing freedom of expression. He said Facebook's policies would be seen positively in the long run, especially when compared with policies in countries like China, where the government suppresses online speech. "People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society," Mr. Zuckerberg said at the time. Mr. Zuckerberg also said Facebook's policies were largely in line with what other social networks like YouTube and Twitter and most American television broadcasters had decided to run on their networks. Federal law mandates that broadcast networks cannot censor political ads from candidates running for office. Inside Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg's decision to be hands off on political ads has supporters. But dissenters said Facebook was not doing enough to check the lies from spreading across the platform. While internal debate is not uncommon at the social network, it historically has seen less internal turmoil than other tech companies because of a strong sense of mission among its rank and file workers. That has set it apart from Google and Amazon, which for the last few years have grappled with several employee uprisings. Most notably, 20,000 Google workers walked off the job in 2018 to protest the company's massive payouts to executives accused of sexual harassment. Last week, Google employees again challenged management over new software that some staff said was a surveillance tool to keep tabs on workplace dissent. At an employee meeting on Thursday, Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, said he was working on ways to improve trust with employees, while acknowledging it was challenging to maintain transparency as the company grows. A video of Mr. Pichai's comments was leaked to The Washington Post. Amazon has faced employee pressure for nearly a year to do more to address the company's impact on climate change. Some employees worked on a shareholder resolution to push the company on the matter, and more than 7,500 Amazon workers publicly signed a letter to support the proposal. In September, Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, announced the company was accelerating its climate goals, aiming to be carbon neutral by 2040. In the Facebook employee letter to Mr. Zuckerberg and other executives, the workers said the policy change on political advertising "doesn't protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponize our platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by political figures is trustworthy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
THE EQUIVALENTS A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s By Maggie Doherty In the age of fourth wave feminism, intersectionality and MeToo, it's easy to forget how recently acute gender imbalance seemed all but intractable. Milestones of feminism's second wave the publication of seminal books like Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" (1963), Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch" (1970) and Toni Cade Bambara's anthology "The Black Woman" (1970), along with the founding of the National Organization for Women (1966) and Ms. magazine (1971) are less than 60 years behind us. It can be difficult for younger people fully to imagine the world that preceded these advances, a time when women in politics and business were exceedingly rare, and when literary women served chiefly as adornments at male gatherings, or tried to stifle any aspect of their work that might be considered "feminine." As Maggie Doherty writes of "the heyday of the American university" in the postwar era, "one might stumble upon women, in clusters of twos and threes, learning from magnetic men and clinging to the chances they'd been given. They evaluated the competition, they kept tabs on their rivals; occasionally, they found confidantes; rarely, they made friends." Among Boston area poets of the late 1950s, two such women forged an important friendship in the workshop of John Holmes, a Tufts professor: Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin. Both were literarily ambitious, both married with small children. (Sylvia Plath and Sexton met in another workshop, Robert Lowell's master class at Boston University, at around the same time; they became friends and corresponded after Plath returned to Britain with her English husband, the poet Ted Hughes.) Sexton and Kumin's long friendship proved artistically important to them both. For years, Doherty writes, they had "a little mini workshop of their own, using the same method: One of them would call up the other one on her rotary telephone, read out a line or two, then wait for feedback." This literary bond is at the heart of Maggie Doherty's engaging work of cultural biography, "The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s." Her account opens with Kumin and Sexton, and as a scholar of English literature Doherty has a doctorate from Harvard she gives closest attention to these writers, including readings of a number of their poems. But the book is more broadly centered on the establishment, in 1960, of the Radcliffe Institute at the university. The brainchild of Mary Ingraham Bunting, then the president of Radcliffe College, her "messy experiment" quickly became known as the Bunting Institute (it continues today as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study). "In September 1961, the institute offered an inaugural group of 24 remarkable women including Sexton and Kumin the resources they needed to succeed: fellowship money, office space and most important, membership in a professional and creative female community, the likes of which had never been seen before in the country's history." Doherty, who teaches writing at Harvard, provides lively glimpses of the individual trajectories and projects of these artists, both in the years leading up to and after their time at Radcliffe. Olsen's complicated relationship with the academy is well evoked, as are Sexton's volatility (she struggled for many years with depression, and attempted suicide numerous times, successfully in 1974) and Kumin's stable, more introverted temperament. Doherty may be less interested in the visual artists; or perhaps there exists less documentation of their thoughts and experiences. All had already enjoyed some success by the time they received their fellowships; but in the years that followed, they rose to greater prominence the writers in particular. Sexton won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967, Kumin in 1973 (she would accumulate many more accolades, including serving as poet laureate in 1981); and Olsen, whose fictional output was small but influential, became best known as an activist and educator, "a revered feminist scholar and critic at a time when feminist criticism was sweeping through the academy." Doherty's attention to these early Radcliffe fellows is tempered by her awareness of the institute's homogeneity at the time with respect to race and, for the most part, class. Later chapters are devoted to Radcliffe's evolution, following the 1968 protests by black undergraduates: Early African American fellows included the playwright and novelist Alice Childress, the environmental psychologist Florence Ladd (later a director of the Bunting Institute) and the novelist Alice Walker, whose famous essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South" was first delivered as a talk at a Radcliffe symposium on "The Black Woman." Doherty also touches on the wider feminist wave, from Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" and her cofounding of NOW to the radical writings of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, the editors of "This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color." This endeavor simultaneously to offer a broader context for the Radcliffe Institute and to cover a large period of time from 1957 to the mid 1970s ultimately renders "The Equivalents" somewhat diffuse, and in places it can feel skimpy. While Sexton's and Kumin's lives are thoroughly documented (and have been told elsewhere), Swan's and Pineda's in particular are only briefly handled. Doherty isn't notably a stylist, and her descriptions can be perfunctory: One woman at the institute has "dark hair, bright green eyes and a broad smile," while of Bunting herself, we are told that she is "a humanist, a happy wife and a descendant of a Quaker." It's hard to tell whether the book's primary interest lies in portraying the complicated and demanding friendships among Kumin, Sexton and Olsen in the context of what is now the Radcliffe Institute, or in representing, at speed, the diverse strands of feminist activism and scholarship in the late '60s and '70s. Doherty tries to address all of these, in part, one suspects, because the subjects of her title the five "Equivalents" seem, from a contemporary intersectional perspective, potentially problematic: They were white, and, with the exception of Olsen, educated and largely well off. But they are not therefore less important to the unfolding of the women's movement in the United States. Theirs was an uneasy generation, caught between two historical moments: As Doherty wisely observes, they "were women born too early; by the time the women's movement gained full steam, each of them was well established in her life and ways." After 1968, they grew in some ways obsolete even as they came into their prime as artists. But it's important to recognize that for them to become artists at all required uncommon courage, commitment and perhaps even guile: Doherty cites Janet Malcolm saying, "We were an uneasy, shifty eyed generation. We lied to our parents and we lied to each other and we lied to ourselves, so addicted to deception had we become." My mother was of their generation: Born in 1933, she was, by 1968, the mother of two small children, a wife repeatedly uprooted on account of her husband's career. A feminist in her reading and her thought, she found herself trapped in practice by family circumstances, slightly too old, too constrained and perhaps insufficiently courageous to effect radical change. The frank and emotionally intense poetry of Anne Sexton was enormously important to her; she introduced me to Sexton and Plath when I was barely a teenager. The ferocity with which these poets laid claim to their female experiences was formative for me, as for many women I know. Their accomplishments and that they persisted constitute a vital chapter in the narrative of the women's movement. While we may observe, in retrospect, their limitations, Mary Ingraham Bunting and her artistic fellows were groundbreaking and remarkable. Maggie Doherty's account, too, may have its flaws, but "The Equivalents" is nevertheless an illuminating contribution to our history. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Back in January 2018, the Golden Globes' all black fashion moment in support of the Time's Up movement briefly seemed to hold so much promise as a flexion point in red carpet dressing. It seemed possible that the night would stand in history as the moment when celebrities ceased to use their entrance making power to market fashion brands and started to use it to stand up for what they believed. But it was not to be. The pendulum has not thus far swung meaningfully away from the old dress up for advertising's sake mark and maybe it was always too much to ask. Nevertheless the moment does seem to have started a drip drip drip of change that may ultimately work to reshape expectations and erode old conventions. That's how it seems, anyway, judging from the Country Music Awards on Wednesday night. Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland stole the step and repeat parade with a cool white crepe satin tuxedo suit (nipped at the waist, slightly flared at the leg), complete with a hot pink silk faille train etched with a line drawing of a woman's face and the Venus symbol under the words "Equal Play." Scrawled inside was graffiti: "Play our Records" (punctated with an expletive) and "Please Thank You." According to Women of Music Action Network in Nashville, an organization founded to fight gender discrimination in the music business, "in 2018 solo women received approximately 13 percent of the overall airplay on country radio." Ms. Nettles decided to use her paparazzi soapbox to highlight the issue. Her pantsuit was made by Christian Siriano, who also worked with the singer on the Sugarland reunion tour in 2018, and who has developed a reputation as a runway/red carpet activist ever since Leslie Jones spoke out against designers not being willing to dress her because of her size, and he stepped up. The painting was by Alice Mizrachi, an artist known for using female archetypes to address social ills. In other words, there was purpose even behind the people involved in the creation of Ms. Nettles's look. As a statement, it was not exactly subtle, but it was very elegantly made. (Some viewers still managed to confuse the text message with "equal pay.") And it was probably the most memorable style of the night, even though Ms. Nettles, after appearing in pictures that could go around the world, removed the train and simply wore the pantsuit for the rest of the evening and to take the stage. "What better and more womanly way to invite such conversation than with fashion that sends a message?!," she wrote in an Instagram post featuring her look. By Thursday morning it had more than 17,000 likes. According to Mr. Siriano, the look was Ms. Nettles's idea. "She said, 'I want to use this to make a statement that will force people to take notice and listen,'" he said in a phone call. Ms. Nettles's train is another step in getting past the red carpet as usual. It follows in the tradition of the Carolina Herrera rainbow cape worn by Lena Waithe to the Met Gala in 2018, and the pinstripe Pyer Moss message suit she wore in 2019 (on the back it read, "Black Drag Queens Invented Camp"). Add to them the various gowns, some by Mr. Siriano, that Billy Porter has been sporting on the red carpet to "flip the question of what it means to be a man," as he told The New York Times. All of these shrug in the face of the status quo both the status quo of gender prejudice and of the thriving business that is the celebrity/fashion industrial complex. You know, the one in which fashion brands sign up celebrities to wear their designs and talk them up when asked that notorious question, "What are you wearing?" (There are varying degrees of payment involved, from free clothes to multiyear payouts.) Thus far the arrangement has been a very profitable, you scratch my back I'll scratch yours one, not just for the celebs and brands, but for the whole extended system: agents, managers and the like. But judging by the reception of Ms. Nettles's look, a shift may be underway. The impact, after all, is so much stronger when the fashion statement being made is not just about beauty or functionality, but also a belief system, and justice. As Mr. Siriano said, "This is a time when no one really listens to anything anymore, there is so much noise. But if you make your statement visually, no one can get away from it. There's a sense you have to just do it." Or wear it. It doesn't deny the conversation on the red carpet, but rather exploits it, turns the tables so that clothes as a talking point actually make a point. The E! system and our obsessive fascination with what famous people wear may have created a monster, so why shouldn't the celebrities make it their own monster? That way maybe everybody wins. This is especially true in a time when report after report say that consumers the same consumers about to head to the stores to do their holiday shopping want to buy brands that stand for something, that flash their values on their sleeves. Or, in Ms. Nettles's case, back and leg. As we enter awards season yet again, let us hope that she is not an anomaly, but a harbinger. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
THE FLOATING WORLD By 370 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 26.95. Following a grim hurricane season, 's powerful debut novel, "The Floating World," revives our memory of what seemed at the time like the mother of all storms. The novel follows the members of a New Orleans family immediately after Hurricane Katrina, alternating among their perspectives. There is Tess, a white doctor who comes from money, and her husband, Joe, a Creole artist. They have two grown daughters, the distressed Cora and the willful Del. Cora is the only one to stay for the storm; Del is away in New York and the others evacuate. Though Tess will eventually come to her daughter's aid, and Del will return, Cora sees something in the 25 days she's without her family that leaves her even more frazzled than before. Unlike Jesmyn Ward's powerful Katrina novel, the National Book Award winning "Salvage the Bones," most of this story takes place after landfall. And with visions of the storm sneaking into even the most discordant scenes, inescapable loss permeates each page. At one point, the perfection of a Tollhouse cookie in the imperfect city brings tears to Tess's eyes. At another, Del gets a "feeling in her chest like water straining against a door" when her friend turned lover says I love you. Sometimes especially in Tess's, Del's and Joe's sections the sense of loss becomes almost oppressive. In reality the storm's impact was unrelenting, no doubt, but Babst is most effective at conveying the emotional weight of the tragedy when she presents it alongside vibrant characters and story lines. One of the most vibrant is the family patriarch, Vincent, whom Babst brings to life in a portrayal that's impressively unrestrained, even Faulknerian. Because of his memory limitations, we see his whole life stream forward as if in the present tense, outside of the storm's temporal confines. We taste the stuffed crab and pocket pies he ate on a street the city has since replaced with an interstate he doesn't remember. We feel the comfort of his mother's rocking chair, the relief of his dog come back to assure him everything will be O.K. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The N.F.L. on Friday suspended wide receiver Antonio Brown for eight regular season games for his role in a January dispute with a moving company employee, for which he pleaded no contest to burglary and battery charges and received two years probation. Brown was also penalized for sending threatening texts to a woman who accused him of sexual misconduct. The suspension was first reported by The Washington Post and was confirmed in a statement by the league. Brown still faces an investigation into accusations that he sexually assaulted his former trainer in 2017 and 2018. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in South Florida, where Brown has a home, remains open and the receiver could still face additional penalties pending its outcome. He has denied the accusations of sexual assault. Under the terms of the N.F.L.'s suspension, Brown will also have to participate in a counseling and treatment program. Any additional violations of the N.F.L.'s personal conduct policy "will likely result in more significant discipline." Friday night, Brown addressed the suspension on social media. "I look forward to new beginnings," he wrote in an Instagram post. "I appreciate the N.F.L. giving me the opportunity to work on myself and improve." Brown will not appeal his suspension, according to his agent, Ed Wasielewski. A seven time Pro Bowl selection while with the Pittsburgh Steelers, Brown, 32, is an unrestricted free agent and can sign with any team. If he is signed before the start of the regular season, he could take part in his club's preseason activities, would start his suspension on Sept. 5. and could return after the team's eighth game. If he is unsigned, he would be eligible to play after the eighth week of the season. Brown was once considered one of the league's most prolific and popular players known for his penalty inducing touchdown celebrations and a season on the reality TV competition "Dancing With the Stars" but his career has been in a tailspin since he walked out on the Steelers in 2018. Pittsburgh traded him to the Raiders for two draft picks in March 2019, but Oakland released him that September, after a tumultuous training camp. The New England Patriots picked him up, but after Brown lashed out against another woman who, in a Sports Illustrated story, accused him of a separate incident of sexual misconduct, the Patriots let him go. Brown competed in one game with the Patriots, scoring a touchdown. The suspension, which was announced by the N.F.L.'s special counsel for conduct, Todd Jones, comes as the league remains under scrutiny for how it has handled cases involving domestic abuse, sexual assault and harassment. Brown's case is unusual partly because he has tried to defend himself on social media. Since being released in 2019, he has said at least twice that he plans to retire from football. He has also picked fights with his employers, most notably the Raiders, who released him after a series of incidents during the off season and training camp last year, including a dispute over the type of helmet he could wear. In December 2019 and January 2020, Brown used social media to document domestic disputes with the mother of his children, during which police were called to his house. Brown was arrested and charged with burglary, battery and criminal mischief in late January after a dispute with a moving company employee over pay. He pleaded no contest and received two years probation, with no travel restrictions. Despite his troubles off the field, other prominent players have embraced him. Brown worked out with Washington quarterback Dwayne Haskins and Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson in separate practices, and with Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, who played with Brown in 2019. Brown also worked out with Lamar Jackson, the star quarterback of the Baltimore Ravens, who this week publicly lobbied for the team to sign the receiver. Brown's cousin, Marquise Brown, was a standout rookie receiver for the team in the 2019 season. Since 2014, when the N.F.L. was heavily criticized for the uneven way it had handled domestic violence accusations against its players, the league has sought to strengthen its investigation department, adding former prosecutors and specialists in sexual abuse. The league no longer relies exclusively on the findings of law enforcement to determine whether to suspend a player. The league has suspended players after they have been on paid leave. For example, Kareem Hunt, who was caught on video striking a woman in February 2018, was suspended for eight games. Josh Brown, who admitted to the police that he had abused his wife, was initially suspended for one game in 2016. After additional evidence was revealed, he was suspended with pay in 2017 while the league investigated the accusations against him. In other cases, the league suspended players after they were charged with domestic abuse, sexual assault and other violent crimes. In Antonio Brown's case, N.F.L. investigators have examined accusations made in a civil suit by his former trainer. In the suit, the trainer accused Brown of sexually assaulting her twice during training sessions in June 2017. She ended her working relationship with Brown, the lawsuit says, but several months later, when he contacted her to apologize, she relented. She was, according to the lawsuit, "swayed by his assurance that he would cease any sexual advances." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Credit...Cayce Clifford for The New York Times Apple's new AirPods, those tiny wireless earbuds that look like Q Tips dangling from your ears, are some of the coolest audio accessories you can buy today. Just insert the buds into your ears and they work instantly and seamlessly with your iPhone. When you are done using them, pop them into a white case that replenishes their power. They are sleek, innovative and convenient. I could go on, but this is where the gushing stops. That's because AirPods have a finite life. That means you will probably have to buy new ones every few years, as if they were a good pair of shoes. Here's how I know: After I bought Apple's first generation AirPods in late 2016, they became my favorite headset for taking phone calls and listening to podcasts. Their lack of wires made moving around easier, avoiding a mess of tangled cords. I haven't once considered reverting to wired headphones. But about a month ago, my AirPods started dying. Their batteries, which are not replaceable by users, no longer last more than 30 minutes when I am on a phone call; they used to have enough juice for two hours of talk time. Other AirPod owners have recently shared similar complaints. The second generation AirPods, which were released last week, may face a similar fate. That's because their minimalist design involves embedding the batteries, circuit boards, microphones and antennas directly into the tiny earpieces. Then they are sealed up, making it impossible for us to open them to replace the batteries. There are some improvements. The new AirPods have slightly longer battery life and give you the ability to pick songs from an iPhone hands free by speaking the command "Hey, Siri." Yet this is a tough product to recommend for people who are slow to adopt new technology or who are environmentally conscious. While you can spend about 160 (or 200 for a version that includes a special case that can be charged wirelessly) for the new AirPods, you have to be prepared to shell out that amount again when their batteries inevitably wear out. Good wired earphones which can cost less than 50 last indefinitely, so long as you don't rip the cords. So what's right for you? Take a look below to decide. What's new about the AirPods The new AirPods look virtually identical to the previous generation. The charging case resembles a white dental floss container. There are three batteries: one inside each earbud and one inside the case. When the charging case eventually runs out of juice, you can plug in Apple's Lightning cable, the same wire used to charge iPhones. The 200 version of the AirPods includes a new case that can be charged wirelessly. That means you can place the case on a wireless charging pad, which uses an electrical current to generate a magnetic field, creating voltage that powers up the case. This method relieves the Lightning port of eventual wear and tear. The new case worked well with several wireless charging pads I tested. But because you will have to spend about 20 on a charging pad, I recommend buying the AirPods with the special case only if you already own other devices that support wireless charging, like newer iPhones. Like the first generation AirPods, the new ones last about five hours when you listen to music. But for phone calls, they can now go about three hours, up from two hours previously. When you return the earbuds to the case, it has enough juice to recharge them multiple times; as a result, you will get about 24 hours of listening time before having to replenish the case. Over a week of testing, I recharged the case only once. The audio quality of the new earbuds is about the same as the first generation's. Music sounds O.K. through them, good enough for playing podcasts and songs on your commute. But if you want wireless earphones that sound louder and richer with deeper bass, consider earbuds from Jabra or some of the other recommendations from Wirecutter, a product review site owned by The New York Times. The AirPods also include a new chip that lets people use them to interact with Siri, Apple's virtual assistant. To summon the assistant, you say, "Hey, Siri," followed by a command like "Play some music" or "Schedule meeting for 3 p.m. on Thursday." While that's a neat feature for tasks like adding items to your calendar, I couldn't get in the habit of talking to Siri via AirPods especially in public, where I still occasionally get dirty looks from people just for wearing the earbuds. Kyle Wiens, the chief executive of iFixit, a company that sells parts and offers guides for repairing electronics, has tried to pry open the new AirPods to see whether he could replace the batteries. He concluded that removing the batteries was impossible without destroying the gadget, which is a contraption of tiny circuit boards and ribbon cables soldered together. He added that Apple probably wasn't capable of replacing AirPod batteries, either, when consumers take them in for servicing. That means people are most likely getting new AirPods in exchange for their old ones. "There's no way Apple's replacing batteries in these things," Mr. Wiens said. "It can't be done." An Apple spokeswoman didn't comment on whether the company was replacing batteries for AirPods or just giving people new ones. But one thing is certain: Maintaining AirPods isn't easy compared with maintaining an iPhone, which you can take to Apple or a third party repair shop to get a fresh battery or a new screen for relatively little cost. Do things have to be this way? Apple's AirPods create a moral conundrum. Should you buy these earphones knowing that you will probably have to buy new ones every few years? In the process, you would essentially be using up energy, metals, plastics and human labor invested in creating the product. The AirPods reminded me of Tile, the company that offers Bluetooth trackers to help find items like house keys, luggage and wallets. In the past, the trackers were tightly sealed, making the batteries impractical to replace. When a Tile device was nearly a year old, the company would send an email warning that it would soon be time to "reTile," or buy a new Tile. Using Tile thus felt more like a subscription service than ownership. After two years of this routine, I stopped buying Tiles. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, the cerebral Belgian choreographer, will return to New York this fall to open the coming season at New York Live Arts, the performing arts center in Chelsea announced on Friday. The season's programming will be framed around a theme, "Creating in Confusing Time," and is organized by the choreographer Bill T. Jones, the artistic director, and Janet Wong, the associate director. "We create a platform, one founded in empathy, with the goal of providing opportunities for artistic expression and a safe place for the exchange of ideas," Mr. Jones said in a statement. "We hope that by encouraging lively and sometimes difficult conversations and by supporting artists and their varied perspectives and practice, a nuanced and multidimensional view of our world will emerge." Ms. De Keersmaeker's work, "A Love Supreme" (Sept. 27 30), is set to and inspired by John Coltrane's jazz masterpiece. (Her musical choices in recent New York appearances have been diverse: Coltrane was preceded by the spectralist Gerard Grisey and Bach.) The dance, for four performers, is a search for happiness that explores "mysticism and sensuality, as well as meditation and improvisation," according to Live Arts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
THE CARE AND FEEDING OF RAVENOUSLY HUNGRY GIRLS By Anissa Gray No one seems to diet anymore. People may go on a "cleanse" or attempt to "eat clean," but their goal is grander than mere weight loss they're seeking a vague sense of equanimity that's become known as "wellness." The modern woman aspires to be "strong" and "healthy"; she does not care (or not explicitly) about fitting into a smaller dress size. "Self care" is trendy, while self denial is not, even if both require skipping dessert. This new, reverent language around dieting offers innumerable euphemisms for eating disorders. When Anna, the main character of 's debut, "The Girls at 17 Swann Street," arrives at the clinic that gives the novel its title, she informs a concerned therapist that she is vegan. "I also avoid processed foods, refined sugars, high fructose corn syrup and trans fats," she says with pride. The 26 year old Parisian, a former dancer, sees herself as health conscious, when really she is starving. At intake, she is 88 pounds. The first of a series of medical reports, printed throughout the novel to mark Anna's progress, states that she suffers from a dozen different conditions including "malnutrition severe." 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. This early exchange between Anna and her therapist is one of just a few moments in the book that reference contemporary buzzwords, that feel current (another counselor discourages the use of "triggering" language). Eating disorders are often considered a contagion of popular culture, but the residents of 17 Swann Street don't have the energy to watch films or discuss internet memes. Recovery is all encompassing. The clinic is in Missouri, but it could be anywhere. Anna and the others live in their own private time zone. They eat six times a day. If they watch television, it's reruns of the Olympics from years earlier. What distinguishes Anna from the other gauzy young women at the clinic is that she maintains a daily tether to the outside her husband, Matthias, who visits every night, between dinner and evening snack. Though the novel's present tracks Anna's time in treatment, there are frequent flashbacks to her blissful former life with Matthias in Paris, vignettes in which food often plays a central role. On an early date, Anna trades her uneaten olives for his discarded pizza crusts. Later on, they are too settled in their happiness to address her anorexia, even when she becomes so weak that she can't enjoy roller coasters, beach trips or sex. The chapters set in Swann Street are written in the first person, in tight, understated prose that conjures Anna's utter exhaustion. "I do not laugh very often anymore. Very little is funny. When I do, it sounds different," Anna thinks. The passages about her life with Matthias are written in the third person, in lush, descriptive sentences. But the true love story of this novel is not between Anna and Matthias, but between Anna and the other residents. "Anorexia is the same story told every time by a different girl. Her name does not matter," Anna reflects. This shared diagnosis leads to a fierce solidarity among the residents. When one girl strains to finish her meal, the others distract her with horoscopes, word games and quiet kindnesses. "No girl left at the table alone" is their golden rule. They are too ill to find relief in the "body positivity" movement happening outside and online; the only people who can understand their overwhelming fear of fatness are one another. Anna's illness may not be unique, but her story is a singular celebration of the lifesaving power of community and small gestures. Eating disorders are associated with the young, white and privileged the kind of women who tend to be in treatment at Swann Street. But Anissa Gray's debut novel, "The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls," complicates this stereotype. One of the novel's narrators, Viola Butler, is a 40 something black woman with an eating disorder. She is by no means a girl she's a successful therapist who drives a Lexus but, like the residents at Swann Street, she is addicted to a regimen of excessive exercise and calorie counting. Control, or the illusion of it, is her drug of choice. It's a fast paced, intriguing story, but the novel's real achievement is its uncommon perceptiveness on the origins and variations of addiction. The three Butler sisters, who take turns narrating the story, each have their own preferred method of self sabotage. Althea steals, Lillian is unfaithful to her husband, Viola struggles with bulimia. In a particularly excruciating scene, she checks into a highway motel with a load of junk food and proceeds to eat, then purge, it all. Afterward, she feels a blitz of relief: "Xanax couldn't make me feel any mellower." As soon as the calm recedes, she reaches for a fresh pack of Oreos. Gray's novel unfolds like a mystery, with each chapter revealing new information about how the Butler sisters found themselves in this situation. This is not a whodunit: Althea is unambiguously guilty. The mystery is why she did it, or why Lillian cheats, or Viola binges. Details emerge about their traumatic childhoods that help to explain their perennial discontent, what Viola describes as "the thing in you that cries out, endlessly, More, please." By the end of the novel, this ravenous hunger has been satiated, at least somewhat, by the sisters' renewed affection for one another, something they had each been craving for a long time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"Kfulim" is an Israeli conspiracy thriller television series whose Hebrew title translates as "duplicates" or "doubles." Its first season comes to Hulu on Friday, and its new English title "False Flag" is even more of a spoiler than the original. The show plunges into action, with breathless TV reports that five Israeli citizens, presumably undercover Mossad agents, have been caught on video kidnapping an Iranian government minister from his Moscow hotel room. The suspects including a chemist, a preschool teacher and a bride on her wedding day watch the fuzzy footage in disbelief and insist they weren't in Russia and have no idea what's going on. The English title points to the truth that the plot dances with briefly but fairly quickly gives up: The five (or most of them, anyway) are indeed being framed. The show's salient questions, answered over eight fast paced, highly entertaining episodes, are by whom and for what purpose? This setup would have been obvious to Middle Eastern audiences familiar with the real life incident that helped inspire the series: the 2010 assassination of the Hamas official Mahmoud al Mabhouh by a team using fake passports. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The opinion and news site, once a curiosity of the fringe right wing, is now an increasingly powerful voice, and virtual rallying spot, for millions of disaffected conservatives who propelled Donald J. Trump to the Republican nomination for president. Known for gleefully bashing the old Republican establishment, Breitbart now finds itself at the center of the party's presidential campaign. Its longtime chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, was named campaign chief by Mr. Trump, whose nationalist, conspiracy minded message routinely mirrors the Breitbart worldview. On Facebook, it rivals news organizations like The Washington Post and Yahoo, and it has challenged conservative favorites like Fox News in its influence on the campaign, if not in size of audience. On Thursday, the site received its biggest billing yet in the form of a scathing condemnation. In a nationally televised speech, Hillary Clinton identified Breitbart as the Democratic Party's media enemy No. 1, warning about a "de facto merger" between the Trump campaign and a news outlet that she described as racist, radical and offensive. For Mrs. Clinton, it was a strategic attack that linked Mr. Trump to leading avatars of the hard line right. But among Breitbart's ideologically driven journalists, her remarks were taken as validation. "I'll play it cool, but not that cool: It was a big moment," the site's editor in chief, Alexander Marlow, 30, said in an interview on Friday. "A major presidential candidate engaging us like that, and calling us out directly, was quite thrilling." The rise of Breitbart News, founded a decade ago by the provocateur Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012, is an unlikely outcome for a small, decentralized news outlet with a penchant for infighting. But it remains an outsize source of controversy for liberals and even many traditional conservatives over material that has been called misogynist, xenophobic and racist. The site refers to "migrant rape gangs" in Europe, and was among the first news outlets to disseminate unsubstantiated rumors that Mrs. Clinton was in ill health. Its writers often vilify the Black Lives Matter movement, emphasizing what they call a scourge of "black on black crime," and described "young Muslims in the West" as the world's "ticking time bomb." Last month, Milo Yiannopoulos, the site's tech editor, was banned from Twitter after inspiring a sustained online harassment campaign against the "Saturday Night Live" actor Leslie Jones. Reports surfaced this week about domestic violence charges filed against Mr. Bannon stemming from a divorce in 1996. Supporters say it is the site's willingness to embrace viewpoints considered far outside the bounds of respectable political discourse that is the very source of its success in the same way that Mr. Trump's more extreme proposals, like banning Muslims from entering the country, galvanized the Republican primary electorate. And like Mr. Trump, Breitbart excels on social media. Last month, it ranked as the 11th most popular site on Facebook, according to statistics from the social analytics firm NewsWhip. A year ago, its Facebook page had fewer than a million followers; now, it has more than 2.3 million. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. The Breitbart home page drew 18 million visitors last month, roughly the same as Politico, according to data from comScore. It beat conservative competitors like The Daily Caller, though mainstream sites like CNN draw tens of millions more visitors each month. Breitbart, which is privately owned, has declined to release revenue figures. The site appears to be backed by Mr. Breitbart's estate; its chief executive, Larry Solov; and the family of Robert Mercer, a wealthy conservative donor and Trump supporter, according to corporate documents and two people briefed on the company's finances. For Mr. Marlow, the editor in chief, the site's success comes from attracting an underserved segment of conservatives opponents of immigration and free trade who did not see their views reflected in other outlets. In online conservative news media, Mr. Marlow said, "The focus has not been on the traditional left versus right dichotomy. It's become populism and nationalism versus globalism." He said that Fox News, long a favored venue for the Republican establishment, had lost its feel for the grass roots right, saying the network harps on older controversies, like the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and that its owner, Rupert Murdoch, is unwilling to criticize open immigration. "Fox is critical of Trump and a lot of the values that his voters stand for," Mr. Marlow said. "A lot of conservatives feel betrayed." (Fox News has drawn its highest ever ratings amid this year's campaign, and Mr. Trump routinely appears on the network. "We will let our record breaking year speak for itself," the network said in a statement on Friday.) For those who track hate groups, Breitbart's success is particularly alarming. "Breitbart in the last year or so has consistently picked up themes coming from the alt right," said Heidi Beirich, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, using a nickname for a loosely affiliated online movement that includes hard line nationalists and many supporters of Mr. Trump. Ms. Beirich said that Breitbart came to her attention because she found that white supremacist websites, like The Daily Stormer, were increasingly linking to its coverage. "To people in the alt right, who have basically been maligned and haven't been part of the political system at all, this is a big, big deal," she said, adding: "Their views are finally in the mainstream." It was this development that prompted aides to Mrs. Clinton to consider whether she should explicitly call out Breitbart to voters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Welcome to the Running newsletter! Every Saturday morning, we email runners with news, advice and some motivation to help you get up and running. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. Great marathon stories are ones of grit and determination, obstacles overcome the cramp in the leg that threatens to wrench a runner apart, the stomach twisted that makes every step a terror, the legs that just don't want to move anymore. They're stories of hitting the Wall and, after digging deep down into some previously untapped well of strength, smashing through on the road to finisher's glory. My mother's first marathon is not one of these stories. That's because when Mary Miller, 64, ran her first marathon on Sunday in New York City, nothing went wrong. Oh sure, I had a cold, and she whacked her hand on a porta potty's toilet paper roll, which required a quick stop in a medic tent for an alcohol wipe and a Band Aid. But none of this affected her running plan. I had promised to run with her, but I don't think she needed the help. I ended up being her personal running butler. Her pace was a slightly uncomfortable walk for me, so in crowded spots, I walked behind her. I pulled on the back of her shirt when she started running too fast, warned her of inclines up ahead so she knew when to walk. I held her water bottle at bathroom breaks, coordinated with my brothers so we'd know where they'd be on the sidelines, and carried her gloves when she didn't want to wear them anymore. In quiet moments along the course, I'd look at spectators and say, "This is my mom! Cheer for my mom!" to the point that I nearly lost my voice. I'd stockpiled tricks to distract her from pain and help her get through, including terrible knock knock jokes and dumb movie trivia. But she didn't need them. Of my 11 marathons, this was the least dramatic, even the most boring. But it was the most important. My mother, who graduated from high school the month Title IX was enacted and wasn't allowed to run in high school because she was a girl, ran a marathon. She set a goal that, when she started running six years and 60 pounds ago, seemed as far away as the moon, and achieved it. As I ran next to her on Sunday, ticking off one mile after the other, from Staten Island to Manhattan, she looked as if she'd always been meant to do this one thing that had been denied to her, and she did it as if it were no big deal at all. It was a long race, though. We knew it would take her more than seven hours to finish, and streetlights started to blink on as we crossed into Central Park, more than 22 miles into the race. "This reminds me of Disney World," I said. We'd been running for so long that the air felt warm to us, and the soft street lamp light reminding me of walking down Main Street in Walt Disney World when my parents took us there when we were kids. The last time my family went there together was in 2015 with my siblings, their kids, my father and my grandfather, who died in 2017, and my grandmother, who died this September. I thought about my family a lot as I ran through New York. I felt so lucky to have had all of my grandparents into their 80s, and I know that to be 39 years old and running a marathon a marathon with my mother is a dream I never even knew I could want until it came true. After we crossed the finish line and hugged and cried and staggered back to our hotel and showered and sat down to big yellow beers at the TGI Friday's in Times Square, I had a surprise for my mother: We're going back. I'm taking her to Walt Disney World in January to celebrate the achievement of a lifetime. A friend asked if we're going to run the Disney Marathon while there. No, absolutely not. I'm not saying my mom will never run another one, but a gift for finishing a marathon is not to run another marathon. The trip is a time for us to celebrate her achievement, in a place that has meant so much to us both at different stages in our lives together, from a relationship that at times was a tense parent/daughter one and has now shifted more into friend/friend. My mom has thanked me a dozen times for running with her on Sunday, and brought me turkey soup when I couldn't shake my cold, and baked me a Jewish apple cake, which I love. But I should be thanking her for letting me tag along. Congrats, Mary Miller: you are a marathoner. And I am so proud of you. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Welcome to the Running newsletter! Every Saturday morning, we email runners with news, advice and some motivation to help you get up and running. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. Happy Boston Marathon weekend! The 123rd running of this prestigious event, one of the six World Marathon Majors, is happening on Monday. We've got a bounty of coverage for your pre race reading: Matthew Futterman wrote about Sarah Sellers, who finished second in the women's race last year. Futterman, whose book "Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed" comes out in June, is also moderating a chat at the Boston Marathon expo on Sunday at 1 p.m. with two past marathon champions, Greg Meyer and Jack Fultz. And he's running himself on Monday good luck Matt! I wrote about Derek Murphy, a financial analyst who catches people who cheat in races, particularly looking for those who cheat to get into the Boston Marathon. He told me: "When someone cheats to get into Boston, they are keeping out a deserving runner." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
An essential rite of passage for many an otherwise nonviolent child involves cutting an earthworm down the middle and watching as the two halves squirm. One half the one with the brain will typically grow into a full worm. Scientists have now identified the master control gene responsible for that regrowth in one particularly hardy type of worm. How hardy? Chop the three banded panther worm in halves or thirds either crosswise or diagonally and each segment will regenerate just fine, said Mansi Srivastava, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Within eight days, you'll have two or three fully functioning new worms, mouth, brain and all. "It's hard to kill them," she said. Dr. Srivastava and her co authors published a paper Friday outlining their genetic discovery. The process is known as "full body regeneration," and the term has captured the imagination of many individuals ready for a fresh start or second self. "I'll get a new body right now!!" one person wrote in a lively Reddit thread about the finding, adding "I knew it was coming!!" Another posted: "Two of me working together and sharing our stuff? Count me in!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
To call "Grand Horizons" one of the brightest shows to hit Broadway in years is not to tout its intelligence, which flickers. Rather, I mean that it is blindingly lit, no doubt in deference to the theatrical wisdom that defines comedy as what dies in the dark. And, boy, does "Grand Horizons" want to sell itself as comedy. Not witty comedy with its verbal arabesques, nor intellectual comedy with its Paris Review name checks, nor meta comedy with its scrambled plotlines but the vanilla kind that once dominated commercial theater. It's not entirely meant as praise to say that this Second Stage production is a big laugh, blue joke, bourgeois lark of the type Neil Simon mastered until the times mastered him and the genre petered out. There's a reason it did, and perhaps what the playwright Bess Wohl is attempting in "Grand Horizons," which opened on Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater, is a last ditch act of reclamation: a boulevard comedy for a cul de sac age. She has certainly furnished the play with all the original equipment. For starters, there's the zingy premise: Over dinner one night, Nancy, a retired librarian approaching 80, turns to Bill, her husband of 50 years, and calmly announces that she wants a divorce. "All right," he answers, continuing to eat as the audience roars. That Nancy is played by Jane Alexander, and Bill by James Cromwell both actors with heavy resumes suggests something darker may be in store. So does the occasional sound of gunshots seeping through the thin walls of the cookie cutter house in the retirement community that gives the play its sarcastic title. That noise turns out to be coming from a television next door; it is merely misdirection like "Grand Horizons" as a whole, whose lunge at gravitas is too little, too late. At least in part, that's because Wohl and the director, Leigh Silverman, so overplay the sitcom style at the start. Following Nancy's declaration and Bill's acquiescence, their sons, Ben and Brian, descend in a flurry of this isn't happening hysteria. Ben (Ben McKenzie) is the stereotypical firstborn, overburdened and bossy; Brian (Michael Urie) the stereotypical baby, overindulged and whiny. Both insist that people so nearly dead as their parents have no business splitting up. "How much else even is there?" Ben sputters. "Grand Horizons" is filled with thin jokes like that, the kind that do not hesitate to sell character reality up the river in exchange for a chuckle. Ben's wife, Jess (Ashley Park), is a nonstop satire of touchy feely therapists as seen less in life than in other plays; she urges her in laws, who were never physically close, to begin the healing by holding hands. And Brian especially in Urie's by now predictable performance is a tired burlesque of the dithery, narcissistic gay man who turns everything he touches into silly drama. Indeed, he's a drama teacher, currently directing a school production of "The Crucible" that features 200 students. The parents are more complexly written and more compellingly acted but even so, Nancy's insistence that, after a loveless marriage, she deserves a chance at authentic joy is as often as not played for dirty talking old lady laughs. Alexander, with her patrician aplomb, does this beautifully; you haven't lived until you've heard a woman who once played Eleanor Roosevelt sing the praises of cunnilingus. But not everything beautifully done makes sense beyond its immediate context, and often the context seems woefully contrived. Though Bill is a classic sourpuss, Wohl has him enroll in a stand up comedy class at the recreation center largely, it seems, to let him tell a great old joke about St. Peter welcoming four nuns to heaven. Cromwell underplays this, and everything else, as if to avoid setting off believability alarms. Also taking the stand up class is Carla (Priscilla Lopez), whose free spiritedness, meant to show up Nancy's primness, is mostly demonstrated by her wearing a garish scarf. (The costumes are by Linda Cho.) Alas, the scarf is merely a fuchsia herring; Carla is just like everyone else, getting big laughs with cute sex talk. I could go on there's a mortifying scene in which Brian brings home a man for a hookup but I have to remind myself that Wohl is in fact one of our cleverest playwrights, exploring the outer limits of naturalism in search of new ways of expressing new feelings. Both "Small Mouth Sounds" and "Make Believe," which are as suggestive and shadowy as "Grand Horizons" is obvious and glary, were on recent Top 10 lists of mine. Like them, "Grand Horizons" is perfectly structured, mimicking the classic works of stage comedy with a stupendous Act I curtain, a neat Act II surprise and a final beat that would be haunting if the road leading to it were not so littered with extorted laughs. Nor can the production, including that alarming lighting by Jen Schriever, be faulted; Silverman seems to have staged the play exactly as Wohl intended, stopping shy only of a laugh track to get the audience coughing up yuks. But what is it Wohl really intends? She's too serious a playwright to be trying to game the market though "Grand Horizons," with its pace, pedigree and cast of seven, is likely to be performed in regional and amateur theaters for years. Nor do I think it is purely a botch, a mess that got that way by itself. The constraints of its genre are too bizarre not to have been chosen deliberately, just as Wohl deliberately constrained "Small Mouth Sounds" by setting it at a wordless spiritual retreat, and "Make Believe" by using the playacting of children as a medium for dramatizing mistreatment. "Grand Horizons," then, may be doing something similar. The genre that Simon buffed to a high polish in works like "Plaza Suite" a three part marriage farce that returns to Broadway this spring was built on cracks in American confidence that by 1968, when the play had its premiere, were beginning to undermine faith in our fundamental institutions. Those cracks having now become chasms, Wohl can use the falseness of Simonesque stage comedy to dramatize the falseness of her real subject, which is not divorce but marriage. Nancy calls it a stray dog, a boa constrictor, a box you can't claw your way out of: "Don't respect it because God knows it doesn't respect you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Slack, the widely used business communication tool, experienced slowdowns in service on Tuesday, frustrating workers who have become increasingly dependent on it as they work from home. Users complained of slow messages or messages that were not sending starting around 8 a.m. Eastern. At 8:10 a.m., the company apologized and said it was investigating the problem. At round 9:48 a.m., Slack said it appeared that most of the problems had been fixed. "The performance issues we've been seeing should be mostly resolved, and there should no longer be any issues with messaging," the company said in a statement. "However, users may still see some errors as we work to fully fix the issue. We'll let you know when we're confident this is fully resolved." By 11:30 a.m., the company said there were no new reports of problems. "Users should have no issues sending messages or connecting," the company said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
'HILMA AF KLINT: PAINTINGS FOR THE FUTURE' at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through April 23). This rapturous exhibition upends Modernism's holiest genesis tale that the male trinity of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian invented abstract painting starting in 1913. It demonstrates that a female Swedish artist got there first (1906 7), in great style and a radically bold scale with paintings that feel startlingly contemporary. The mother of all revisionist shows regarding Modernism. (Roberta Smith) 212 423 3500, guggenheim.org 'DIANE ARBUS, UNTITLED' at David Zwirner (through Dec. 15). Departing significantly from the work that built Arbus's reputation, the photographs in this series, taken at an all female institution in Vineland, N.J., include some of the most mysterious, haunting pictures of her 15 year artistic career. Arbus arrived at two great insights. The first was that it would be more poignant to show her subjects happy. Her second brilliant stroke was to photograph outdoors, amid trees and fields, scrubbing off the institutional settings and entering the realm of dream and myth. One of Arbus's lifetime quests was to expose what she called the "flaw," a telltale detail that reveals the crack between the way people wish to present themselves and how they actually are seen. In the "Untitled" series, she was dealing with subjects devoid of guile. For an artist who had deployed a battery of strategies to coax sitters into dropping their masks, it was novel to photograph people who revealed their unguarded selves. One of the towering achievements of American art, this series reminds us that nothing can surpass the strange beauty of reality if a photographer knows where to look. And how to look. (Arthur Lubow) 212 727 2070, davidzwirner.com 'ARMENIA!' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 13). The first major museum exhibition ever devoted to the art of Armenia officially its "medieval" era, but in fact spanning nearly 1,500 years bulges with weighty stone crosses, intricate altar frontals and flamboyantly illuminated Bibles and Gospel books unlike any manuscripts you've seen from that time. Armenia, in the Caucasus Mountains, was the first country to convert to Christianity, in the fourth century, and the richly painted religious texts here, lettered in the unique Armenian alphabet, are a testament to the centrality of the church in a nation that would soon be plunged into the world of Islam. By the end of the Middle Ages, Armenian artists were working as far afield as Rome, where an Armenian bishop painted this show's most astounding manuscript: a tale of Alexander the Great that features the Macedonian king's ship swallowed by an enormous brown crab, hooking the sails with its pincers as its mouth gapes. (Jason Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI SCULPTURE: THE FILMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18). This show is built around works by the Romanian modernist (1876 1957) that have been longtime highlights of the museum's own collection. But in 2018, can Brancusi still release our inner poet? The answer may lie in paying less attention to the sculptures themselves and more to Brancusi's little known and quite amazing films, projected at the entrance to the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. MoMA borrowed the series of video clips from the Pompidou Center in Paris. They give the feeling that Brancusi was less interested in making fancy museum objects than in putting new kinds of almost living things into the world, and convey the vital energy his sculptures were meant to capture. (Blake Gopnik) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'CHAGALL, LISSITZKY, MALEVICH: THE RUSSIAN AVANT GARDE IN VITEBSK, 1918 1922' at the Jewish Museum (through Jan. 6). This crisp and enlightening exhibition, slimmed but not diminished from its initial outing at Paris's Centre Pompidou, restages the instruction, debates and utopian dreaming at the most progressive art school in revolutionary Russia. Marc Chagall encouraged stylistic diversity at the short lived People's Art School in his native Vitebsk (today in the republic of Belarus), and while his dreamlike paintings of smiling workers and flying goats had their defenders, the students came to favor the abstract dynamism of two other professors: Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, whose black and red squares offered a radical new vision for a new society. Both the romantics and the iconoclasts would eventually fall out of favor in the Soviet Union, and the People's Art School would close in just a few years but this exhibition captures the glorious conviction, too rare today, that art must serve the people. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'CROWNS OF THE VAJRA MASTERS: RITUAL ART OF NEPAL' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Dec. 16). Up a narrow staircase, above the Met's galleries of South and Southeast Asian art, are three small rooms of art from the Himalayas. The space, a bit like a treehouse, is a capsule of spiritual energy, which is especially potent these days thanks to this exhibition. The crowns of the title look like antique versions of astronaut headgear: gilded copper helmets, studded with gems, encrusted with repousse plaques and topped by five pronged antennas the vajra, or thunderbolt of wisdom. Such crowns were believed to turn their wearers into perfected beings who are willing and able to bestow blessings on the world. This show is the first to focus on these crowns, and it does so with a wealth of compressed historical information, as well as several resplendent related sculptures and paintings from Nepal and Tibet. But it's the crowns themselves, the real ones, the wisdom generators, set in mandala formation in the center of the gallery, that are the fascinators. (Holland Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'DELACROIX' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 6). The first full dress retrospective in North America devoted to the enigmatic giant of French Romanticism is a revelation of nearly 150 paintings, drawings and prints. Their staggering range of often traditional themes from crucifixes to historic battles to rearing, almost kitschy stallions and damsels in distress are belied by a radical use of color and paint that inspires artists still. (Smith) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS: COMMUNITY AND PLACE IN URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY' at El Museo del Barrio (through Jan. 6). This show's title comes from the 1967 autobiography of the New York writer Piri Thomas, a community organizer of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent who grew up in what was then called Spanish Harlem. Five of the show's photographers Frank Espada (1930 2014), Perla de Leon, Hiram Maristany, Winston Vargas and Camilo Jose Vergara took as their beat that neighborhood, or Latino sections of Washington Heights, the South Bronx and Brownsville, Brooklyn. Others were working in Los Angeles. The pictures are a blend of documentary and portraiture. They see what's wrong in the world they record the poverty, the crowding but also the creativity encouraged by having to make do, and the warmth generated by bodies living in affectionate proximity. (Cotter) 212 831 7272, elmuseo.org 'EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED: ART AND CONSPIRACY' at the Met Breuer (through Jan. 6). A dark, fatalistic exhibition of 30 artists, mostly Americans, examines a country that has lost its grip on the truth. The show's hero is the Mike Kelley, who died in 2012. His models and prints here evoke hysterical episodes from the late 1980s and '90s when parents across California accused schools of satanic child abuse; a similar gaze on American unreason animates the art of John Miller, Cady Noland, Jim Shaw and Lutz Bacher. You may be put off by this show's equation of real investigations of wrongdoing in Jenny Holzer's LED displays using declassified Iraq documents with outlandish, often crazed conspiracy theories. What Kelley would say, and what this grimly up to the minute show implies, is that when facts lose their purchase in both art and politics, mental breakdown is the logical outcome. (Farago) 212 731 1675, metmuseum.org 'THE FUTURE' at the Rubin Museum of Art (through Jan. 7). It flies and flows and creeps. You measure it, spend it, waste it. It's on your side, or it's not. We're talking about time, and so is the Rubin. It is devoting its entire 2018 season and all its spaces to time as a theme, with an accent on the future. There's a fine historical show devoted to the Second Buddha, Padmasambhava ("lotus born"), subtitled "Master of Time." Judging by the images and models of him, Padmasambhava was a genial, if mercurial, teacher, alternately baby faced and beaming or stern in a nice dad way. Before he moved on from the mortal realm to a mystical mountain palace, he left karmic extensions of himself called "treasure revealers" also represented here in painting and sculpture who reach from the past into the present to change the future. This era leaping dynamic is operative in all parts of the Rubin's multifloor thematic installation. (Cotter) 212 620 5000, rubinmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'BODYS ISEK KINGELEZ: CITY DREAMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 1). The first comprehensive survey of the Congolese artist is a euphoric exhibition as utopian wonderland, featuring his fantasy architectural models and cities works strong in color, eccentric in shape, loaded with enthralling details and futuristic aura. Kingelez (1948 2015) was convinced that the world had never seen a vision like his, and this beautifully designed show bears him out. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'SARAH LUCAS: AU NATUREL' at the New Museum (through Jan. 20). Lucas emerged in the 1990s with the YBAs (Young British Artists), a group that included Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin and that didn't focus on a particular medium or style. They were postpunk which is to say, more focused on attitude than aptitude with a Generation X nihilism and malaise, as well as the clear message that anything, artistically, could be borrowed, stolen or sampled. Self portraits are among Lucas's weapons. Instead of sexualized, made up or fantastic portraits, hers are plain, androgynous and deadpan. And this exhibition, with its 150 objects many of them sculptures created in plaster or from women's stockings and tights stuffed with fluff is populated with penises and with cigarettes penetrating buttocks, rather than the breasts and vulvas modern artists have used to demonstrate their edginess. At just the right moment the MeToo moment Lucas shows us what it's like to be a strong, self determined woman; to shape and construct your own world; to live beyond other people's constricting terms; to challenge oppression, sexual dominance and abuse. (Martha Schwendener) 212 219 1222, newmuseum.org 'FRANZ MARC AND AUGUST MACKE: 1909 1914' at Neue Galerie (through Jan. 21). Marc and Macke worked at the forefront of German art in the early 1900s, experimenting with audacious simplifications of forms, infusing colors with spiritual meanings and, in Marc's case, specializing in dreamy portraits of otherworldly animals. With the Russian born Wassily Kandinsky, the two friends also helped found a hugely influential circle of Munich painters known as the Blue Rider. But this dizzying, overstuffed exhibit at the Neue Galerie ends abruptly: Both men were killed in combat in World War I, Marc at 36 and Macke at only 27. (Will Heinrich) 212 628 6200, neuegalerie.org 'BRUCE NAUMAN: DISAPPEARING ACTS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18) and MoMA PS1 (through Feb. 25). If art isn't basically about life and death, and the emotions and ethics they inspire, what is it about? Style? Taste? Auction results? The most interesting artists go right for the big, uncool existential stuff, which is what Bruce Nauman does in a transfixing half century retrospective that fills the entire sixth floor of the MoMA and much of MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. The MoMA installation is tightly paced and high decibel; the one at PS1, which includes a trove of works on paper, is comparatively mellow and mournful. Each location offers a rough chronological overview of his career, but catching both parts of the show is imperative. Nauman has changed the way we define what art is and what is art, and made work prescient of the morally wrenching American moment we're in. He deserves to be seen in full. (Cotter) 212 708 9400, moma.org 718 784 2084, momaps1.org 'THE PROGRESSIVE REVOLUTION: MODERN ART FOR A NEW INDIA' at Asia Society (through Jan. 20). The first show in the United States in decades devoted to postwar Indian painting continues a welcome, belated effort in Western museums to globalize art history after 1945. The Progressive Artists' Group, founded in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the afterglow of independence, sought a new painterly language for a new India, making use of hot color and melding folk traditions with high art. These painters were Hindus, Muslims and Catholics, and they drew freely from Picasso and Klee, Rajasthani architecture and Zen ink painting, in their efforts to forge art for a secular, pluralist republic. Looking at them 70 years on, as India joins so many other countries taking a nativist turn, they offer a lovely, regret tinged view of a lost horizon. (Farago) 212 288 6400, asiasociety.org/new york 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Feb. 3). It will be a happy day when racial harmony rules in the land. But that day's not arriving any time soon. Who could have guessed in the 1960s when civil rights became law that a new century would bring white supremacy tiki torching out of the closet and turn the idea that black lives matter, so beyond obvious, into a battle cry? Actually, African Americans were able to see such things coming. No citizens know the national narrative, and its implacable racism, better. And no artists have responded to that history that won't go away more powerfully than black artists have. More than 60 of them appear in this big, beautiful, passionate show of art that functioned as seismic detector, political persuader and defensive weapon. (Cotter) 718 638 8000, brooklynmuseum.org 'THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS: STANLEY KUBRICK PHOTOGRAPHS' at the Museum of the City of New York (through Jan. 6). This exhibition of the great director's photography is essentially Kubrick before he became Kubrick. Starting in 1945, when he was 17 and living in the Bronx, he worked as a photographer for Look magazine, and the topics he explored are chestnuts so old that they smell a little moldy: lovers embracing on a park bench as their neighbors gaze ostentatiously elsewhere, patients anxiously awaiting their doctor's appointments, boxing hopefuls in the ring, celebrities at home, pampered dogs in the city. It probably helped that Kubrick was just a kid, so instead of inducing yawns, these magazine perennials struck him as novelties, and he in turn brought something fresh to them. Photographs that emphasize the mise en scene could be movie stills: a shouting circus executive who takes up the right side of the foreground while aerialists rehearse in the middle distance, a boy climbing to a roof with the city tenements surrounding him, a subway car filled with sleeping passengers. Looking at these pictures, you want to know what comes next. (Arthur Lubow) 212 534 1672, mcny.org 'TOWARD A CONCRETE UTOPIA: ARCHITECTURE IN YUGOSLAVIA, 1948 1980' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 13). This nimble, continuously surprising show tells one of the most underappreciated stories of postwar architecture: the rise of avant garde government buildings, pie in the sky apartment blocks, mod beachfront resorts and even whole new cities in the southeast corner of Europe. Tito's Yugoslavia rejected both Stalinism and liberal democracy, and its neither nor political position was reflected in architecture of stunning individuality, even as it embodied collective ambitions that Yugoslavs called the "social standard." From Slovenia, where elegant office buildings drew on the tradition of Viennese modernism, to Kosovo, whose dome topped national library appears as a Buckminster Fuller fever dream, these impassioned buildings defy all our Cold War vintage stereotypes of Eastern Europe. Sure, in places the show dips too far into Socialist chic. But this is exactly how MoMA should be thinking as it rethinks its old narratives for its new home next year. (Farago) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'ANDY WARHOL FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through March 31) and 'SHADOWS' at Calvin Klein Headquarters, 205 W. 39th Street (through Dec. 15). Although this is the artist's first full American retrospective in 31 years, he's been so much with us in museums, galleries, auctions as to make him, like wallpaper, like the atmosphere, only half noticed. The Whitney show restores him to a full, commanding view, but does so in a carefully shaped and edited way, with an emphasis on very early and late work. Despite the show's monumentalizing size, supplemented by an off site display of the enormous multipanel painting called "Shadows," it's a human scale Warhol we see. Largely absent is the artist entrepreneur who is taken as a prophet of our market addled present. What we have instead is Warhol for whom art, whatever else it was, was an expression of personal hopes and fears. (Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.org diaart.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
For a month's stretch, the Fox News star Laura Ingraham relentlessly promoted the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to her nearly four million nightly viewers. The drug was "a game changer" in the fight against the coronavirus, the conservative anchor declared. She booked recovered patients to describe their "miracle turnaround" "like Lazarus, up from the grave," as Ms. Ingraham put it. Anyone who questioned the drug's efficacy, she said, was "in total denial." "I love everybody, love the medical profession," the host said on April 3, after listing off public health experts who questioned the cure. "But they want a double blind controlled study on whether the sky is blue." But as of last Wednesday, Ms. Ingraham was no longer talking about hydroxychloroquine, and she didn't bring it up on her show for a week. Her fellow Fox News prime time stars Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity also cut back on referring to the drug. In fact, since April 13, hydroxychloroquine has been mentioned about a dozen times on Fox News, compared with more than 100 times in the four previous weeks, according to a review of network transcripts. The shift came as President Trump has dialed back his public zeal for the treatment and as studies and health experts have increasingly cast doubt on the efficacy of the drug in treating coronavirus. On Tuesday, a study of 368 Veterans Affairs patients showed that the use of hydroxychloroquine was associated with an increased risk of death. Mr. Trump's own medical team, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation's leading expert on infectious diseases, has urged caution about hydroxychloroquine, noting the drug's potential adverse effect on patients with heart troubles. Ms. Ingraham declined to be interviewed for this article. On Wednesday, after this article was published online, she opened her Fox News program by dismissing the results of the Veterans Affairs study, calling it "shoddy," "shockingly irresponsible" and "agenda driven." "What's driving this blind obsession to disprove the effectiveness of a drug that is being used right now, tonight, in medical centers across America?" Ms. Ingraham said, above an onscreen graphic that read "The Truth About Hydroxychloroquine." She added: "Is it triggered by pure hatred of Trump? Of Fox? Of me?" (Ms. Ingraham prefaced her remarks by reminding viewers: "I'm not a doctor; I don't play one on TV.") Since mid March, hydroxychloroquine has been a staple of the right wing news media venues that Mr. Trump follows closely, including Rush Limbaugh's radio show and Fox News prime time. Cryptocurrency group loses bid for copy of U.S. Constitution. The company that produced 'Parasite' is in talks to buy Endeavor's scripted content arm. Critic of Teamsters leader claims victory in race to succeed him. Ms. Ingraham was an early and enthusiastic advocate. On April 2, she told her viewers that "nearly all the experts that I've talked to, and the studies I've read, review this information, the evidence, and at this point, it's come across as pretty much of a game changer." The next day, she met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office to personally pitch him on the drug. Doctors around the country have prescribed hydroxychloroquine to patients for weeks despite the lack of rigorous trials. Some physicians say, given the speed and severity of the coronavirus, they are turning to any medicinal tools they can to save lives, even as little evidence has emerged that hydroxychloroquine is a panacea. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has allowed that, "anecdotally," doctors have seen positive results from the treatment, while reminding people that reliable data may take months to collect. On Fox News, though, Ms. Ingraham acknowledged those caveats in passing, leaving an impression that a skeptical bureaucracy was keeping Americans from benefiting from a miracle drug. On April 9, she began her program by mocking the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, for "essentially dismissing, trashing" hydroxychloroquine "despite all of its success stories." She told viewers that the doctors booked on her program that night "my medicine cabinet" would "set the record straight." (Fox News said on Wednesday that Ms. Ingraham's segments about hydroxychloroquine always included a doctor or recovered coronavirus patient.) Later on the show, she interviewed a patient, Billy Saracino, who, by his account, recovered from the coronavirus because his wife was inspired by "The Ingraham Angle" to help arrange a prescription for hydroxychloroquine. "It is amazing that the left and the medical establishment is still in total denial about the potential of these decades old drugs," Ms. Ingraham said. Within a week, she had stopped talking about the drug on air. Mr. Hannity, while not as prominent a hydroxychloroquine cheerleader as Ms. Ingraham was, also highlighted the use of the drug, at one point citing a study that, he told viewers, showed "hydroxychloroquine is rated now the most effective therapy by doctors, over 6,300 of them surveyed, for coronavirus." Mr. Hannity, who likes to remind viewers that he is "not a doctor," routinely asked guests whether they would take hydroxychloroquine for treatment if they were infected with the disease. Fox News, the country's top rated cable network, carries outsize influence among viewers who flock to its popular opinion programs. Hydroxychloroquine was first cited on the network during a late night news show on March 11. The mention jumped to prime time a few days later, when a guest named Gregory Rigano praised the drug to Mr. Carlson and Ms. Ingraham. "Tucker Carlson Tonight" had identified Mr. Rigano as an adviser to the Stanford University School of Medicine, but the school has since said that Mr. Rigano has no affiliation with the institution; he has not been back on Fox News. On Wednesday, Dr. Mehmet Oz, a frequent guest on Fox News, appeared on "Fox Friends" and spoke about the Veterans Affairs study that showed no clear positive benefit of treating the coronavirus with hydroxychloroquine. At first, Dr. Oz offered some caveats, noting the study was not a controlled trial and focused on "older and quite a bit sicker patients." But pressed by the co host Brian Kilmeade, Dr. Oz conceded that "the fact of the matter is, we don't know." "There's so much data coming from so many places," he told viewers, "we are better off waiting for the randomized trials Dr. Fauci's been asking for." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Ralph J. Cicerone, who as a researcher and the president of the National Academy of Sciences issued an early warning about the grave potential risks of climate change, died on Saturday at his home in Short Hills, N.J. He was 73. His death was announced by the academy, which he headed from 2005 until last June. It did not provide the cause. In 2001, while he was the chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, Dr. Cicerone (pronounced SISS er own) headed an academy panel, commissioned by President George W. Bush, which concluded unequivocally that "greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." The 11 leading scientists who composed the panel, including some who had been climate change skeptics, were unanimous in reaffirming the mainstream scientific view on global warming just as Mr. Bush was preparing to join environmental talks with European leaders. They were outraged that he had recently rejected the global warming pact known as the Kyoto Protocol. The panel's conclusion was based in part on research reported in 1974 by Dr. Cicerone and two colleagues from the University of Michigan. They were among the first to warn that the atmosphere's ozone layer, which protects the planet from potentially lethal ultraviolet radiation, was being dissipated by chlorine gases. Their research was credited in the citation for the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, which F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario J. Molina shared with Paul J. Crutzen for their discovery, also in 1974, that supposedly inert fluorocarbons like Freon, a propellant in products like aerosol spray cans and refrigerants, could deplete the ozone layer to dangerous levels. They found that a single chlorine atom could absorb more than 100,000 ozone molecules and linger in the stratosphere for up to a century. "The clarity and startling nature of what Molina and Rowland came up with the notion that something you could hold in your hand could affect the entire global environment, not just the room in which you were standing was extraordinary," Dr. Cicerone told The New York Times in 2012. Such research led in 1987 to the Montreal Protocol, the global treaty banning chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals that had been used as aerosol propellants and coolants. The academy, the nation's leading independent scientific body, had been defending its positions on global climate change, stem cell advances, genetic engineering and evolution when Dr. Cicerone took over. With a reputation for nonpartisan civility, he pursued the activist agenda that he had inherited even more aggressively, gaining the support of President Obama, who visited the academy twice, and working to rally public opinion behind scientific research. Under Dr. Cicerone, the academy issued reports that advocated reducing greenhouse gas emissions while identifying strategies for adapting to a changing climate. It also renovated its historic headquarters on the National Mall in Washington and established a 500 million Gulf Research Program after the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. Rush D. Holt, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, called Dr. Cicerone "a champion of science who helped scientists understand their obligations to society and helped nonscientists understand the importance of science to their lives, especially with respect to human induced changes of Earth's climate." Ralph John Cicerone was born on May 2, 1943, in New Castle, in rural western Pennsylvania, the grandson of Italian immigrants. His father, Salvatore, was an insurance salesman who left math problems for Ralph to solve on the evenings he was making house calls to clients. His mother was the former Louise Palus. The first in his family to attend college, Dr. Cicerone was inspired by the space race with the Soviet Union to pursue an engineering career. He graduated with a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering in 1965 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where he was captain of the baseball team, a sport he later restored to Irvine) and earned a master's degree and a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is survived by his wife, the former Carol Ogata; their daughter, Sara; two grandchildren; and two sisters, Sylvia Ferrare and Sally Golis. Dr. Cicerone was an atmospheric chemist on the faculty of the University of Michigan from 1971 to 1978. After conducting research at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, he was named senior scientist and director of the atmospheric chemistry division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
For a glimpse at the country's divided political reality, look no farther than a pair of television studios on opposite sides of the Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. From her set inside MSNBC headquarters, Rachel Maddow opened her prime time coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings by calling the first day's testimony "a double barreled problem for the president triple barreled, maybe." President Trump, she said, had been "caught doing something illegal" at the "direct expense of the country's national interest." One block south, from a Fox News studio, Sean Hannity welcomed viewers by declaring "a great day for the United States, for the country, for the president and a lousy day for the corrupt, do nothing for three years, radical, extreme, socialist Democrats and their top allies known as the media mob." These distinct visions delivered simultaneously from skyscrapers roughly 1,000 feet apart were beamed at the 9 p.m. hour into millions of American living rooms. It was a striking reflection of today's choose your own news media environment, and a far cry from the era when Americans experienced major events through the same television hearth. Viewers are flocking to opinionated outlets with irreconcilable differences . Although every major TV station broadcast the hearings, Fox News and MSNBC were far and away the most popular networks for Americans to watch the opening round of public testimony this past week, outdrawing CNN and the "Big Three" networks of ABC, CBS and NBC, according to Nielsen. On Wednesday, a pair of veteran foreign service officers testified that Mr. Trump had pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate his domestic political opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. On Mr. Hannity's show, the right wing radio pundit Mark Levin compared the officers to "two homeless guys." A guest on Tucker Carlson's Fox News program said the men "looked like people who sat by themselves at recess." On MSNBC, the host Chris Hayes praised the officers, telling viewers they had revealed "brand new evidence of the president's plot to extort Ukraine." "Today, the American people got a fuller picture of the corrupt abuse of power by the president of the United States," Mr. Hayes said, around the time that Mr. Carlson was telling his audience that the testimony was "pointless and tiresome." Mr. Carlson added, "It made you realize that Democrats really have no master plan for impeachment." Television played a crucial role in framing impressions of the nation's last two impeachment dramas. The Watergate hearings of 1973, now viewed with nostalgia as a moment when Americans could more or less agree on facts, were broadcast in sober tones on PBS . (ABC, CBS and NBC rotated coverage to avoid losing daytime ad revenue.) The MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, who often criticizes Mr. Trump on her program, was a co anchor of her channel's coverage. On Fox News, viewers heard some tough words for Mr. Trump, too. Chris Wallace, the "Fox News Sunday" host, said, "If you are not moved by the testimony of Marie Yovanovitch today, you don't have a pulse." And Ken Starr, the independent counsel who investigated Bill Clinton and a frequent guest on Fox News, criticized Mr. Trump's tweet as showing "extraordinarily poor judgment." By Friday prime time, though, Fox News was back to ardently defending the president . Mr. Carlson opened his show with an onscreen graphic reading, "Media Fawns Over Yovanovitch's 'Poise, Charisma.'" Historians and media scholars say the current moment is in some ways a throwback to an era long before the rise of mass media, when partisan newspapers were the way Americans received their news. Coverage of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, in 1868, was dominated by outlets with strident agendas; some papers were controlled outright by leaders of political parties. "One of the things I find very amusing about the coverage today is when I hear about how divided the electorate is," said Brenda Wineapple, a historian whose chronicle of the Johnson impeachment, "The Impeachers," was published this spring. "It was e qually divided , if not more so, in 1868." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Another day, another Oscar controversy. But this time, will the academy budge? That's the question many in Hollywood are asking after the Oscars announced that in a bid to shorten the length of the Feb. 24 show, the winners in four categories will be rewarded during commercial breaks, then their acceptance speeches will be edited into a montage shown later in the broadcast. The affected categories are cinematography, editing, live action short film, and makeup and hairstyling, and the decision to change the way they are presented has roiled the industry in the days leading up to what is supposed to be Hollywood's most celebratory night. The American Society of Cinematographers issued a stinging critique Wednesday in the form of an open letter signed by dozens of industry figures, including Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, as well as some of the nominees in the affected categories, like the "Never Look Away" cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and "Bohemian Rhapsody" editor John Ottman. "Relegating these essential cinematic crafts to lesser status in this 91st Academy Awards ceremony is nothing less than an insult to those of us who have devoted our lives and passions to our chosen profession," said the letter. "We consider this abbreviation and potential censorship to run contrary to the spirit of the academy's mission." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The day after Donald J. Trump was elected president, nearly a dozen ABC executives meet at the network's headquarters in Burbank, Calif., and discuss a "heartland strategy" their pursuit of an audience the network may have overlooked. "We looked at each other and said, 'There's a lot about this country we need to learn a lot more about, here on the coasts,'" Ben Sherwood, the president of Disney and ABC's television group, says later. The strategy leads ABC which found itself in last place among the four major broadcast networks to reboot "Roseanne," a hit for the network from 1988 to 1997, as well as the former Fox hit "American Idol." Channing Dungey, the president of ABC Entertainment, says of the network's revised strategy: "We had spent a lot of time looking for diverse voices in terms of people of color and people from different religions and even people with a different perspective on gender. But we had not been thinking nearly enough about economic diversity and some of the other cultural divisions within our own country." After weeks of reports about a reboot, ABC trots out the "Roseanne" cast during its annual presentation for advertisers in New York. The response, however, is not exactly what the network is hoping for. In their account of the event, John Koblin and Sapna Maheshwari, who cover media for The Times, describe the audience's reaction to the reassembled cast members as "tepid," noting that "advertisers were relatively silent" when the cast took the stage. Read more: With "Roseanne" and Backstreet Boys, ABC Mines the Past With the premiere months away, the show's cast members and producers appear at an event for television critics in Pasadena, Calif. Roseanne Barr, the show's star, is asked about her vocal support of President Trump and her plan to reflect her political views on the revived sitcom. "I've always had it be a true reflection of the society we live in," Ms. Barr says of "Roseanne." "Half the country voted for him, half of them didn't. It's just realistic." Her use of Twitter also comes up. Ms. Barr has been known to use the platform to spread conspiracy theories and post various insults. In 2013, she made a racist comment about Susan Rice, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, who is black. The tweet, which Ms. Barr deleted, called Ms. Rice "a man" and uses the word "ape" to describe her a word choice that would come back to haunt her again. "Look at Roseanne! Look at her ratings!" President Trump says. He adds: "They were unbelievable! Over 18 million people! And it was about us!" Three days after the premiere, ABC renews "Roseanne" for 13 more episodes. The show is a rare win for the network and a major part of its plan to escape the ratings basement. Read more: "Roseanne" Is Here to Stay: ABC Renews Highly Rated Reboot Jabs at 'Black ish' and 'Fresh Off the Boat' In the April 3 episode, Dan Conner, played by John Goodman, makes a glib remark about two ABC shows: "Black ish" and "Fresh Off the Boat." The remark comes after Dan and Roseanne have fallen asleep while watching "Wheel of Fortune." "We missed all the shows about black and Asian families," Dan says. "They're just like us," Roseanne replies, before grabbing the remote and turning off the TV. "There, now you're all caught up." The episode airs during a week when Kenya Barris, the creator of "Black ish," has begun talks with Netflix while seeking an exit from his deal with ABC. Mr. Barris's dissatisfaction stems, in part, from the network's decision to pull the Feb. 27 episode of "Black ish," which was said to examine American race relations in pointed fashion. "Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show," ABC's entertainment president, Channing Dungey, says in a statement. Bob Iger, the chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Company, ABC's parent company, offers his support for the decision in a tweet of his own, saying, "There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing." Read more: 'Roseanne' Canceled by ABC Hours After Racist Tweet | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Elise went on my Christmas list. Then she went on my birthday list repeatedly, I recall. But, alas, she never arrived as a gift. Why not? My parents aren't around to ask, so I can't say for sure. Perhaps my mother intuited that if I actually had Elise, our F. A. O. outings wouldn't be so special. Maybe she worried that, as the only girl in my family, I was becoming spoiled; she had grown up poor, while I had toys aplenty and numerous doting relatives. (One night, when I was inconsolable after forgetting my baby doll outside, a platoon of aunts and uncles scoured the neighborhood with flashlights to find her.) Most likely, Elise was simply too expensive. A collectors book indicates Elise and her trunk of couture ("Elise Takes a Trip") sold for 65 in 1969. That's more than 400 inflation adjusted dollars today probably beyond the means of my insurance salesman dad and registered nurse mom, especially if they had to spend comparable sums on my two brothers to keep things fair. Still, I recall that crushing feeling of realizing that you are really, truly not getting something that you so desperately desire. So when my girls began poring over American Girl catalogs, I was ready to splurge. I liked that the dolls offered a veneer of history and had back stories. As a journalist, I had a soft spot for Kit Kittredge, Girl Reporter. We had fun picking doll get ups that reflected the girls' interests, like soccer and basketball uniforms. Yes, several dolls per child was excessive. But even I had limits: A holiday sleigh ( 159) and Julie's Volkswagen Super Beetle ( 350), which my girls coveted at one point, seemed over the top. I wasn't as extravagant with other things. I have said no, for instance, to Ugg boots, even if the girls wanted to pay with their own money, because they would quickly be outgrown. And when they were old enough to understand how much the doll attire cost, I had them pay for part of the ensembles with their allowance, if it was a nonbirthday purchase. (I don't recall my parents suggesting that.) That tempered their enthusiasm along with the inevitable process of growing up, and a budding interest in cellphones. My youngest bought her last American Girl outfit when she was 10; she played off and on with the dolls and their horses for about another year. I consider a half dozen years or so of use a good deal for the money. And maybe their own girls will play with them someday. Last fall, when the catalog arrived, the girls, now 13 and 11, ignored it. I gazed wistfully at the Pretty City horse carriage ( 275, jingle bells included) before tossing the glossy volume in the recycling bin. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Edmonton, a city of just under 1 million people, is one of two cities hosting the N.H.L's postseason after a dogged pitch for the honor. "We are oil country and we are a hockey town," Janet Riopel, president of the city's chamber of commerce, said. The N.H.L. chose the small market, hockey mad city as one of two "hub cities" along with Toronto to host its playoffs. EDMONTON, Alberta It is said that hockey is the heartbeat of Alberta's capital city. If that's so then the 2020 N.H.L. playoffs are like a defibrillator that has shocked the city's rhythm back to life. For months it looked like Las Vegas with its massive resorts and status as host to the league's off season awards would be chosen as the primary hub city for the N.H.L.'s summer restart after the regular season was paused in March because of the coronavirus pandemic. But Edmonton, a city of just fewer than a million people, persisted and the dogged effort paid off in early July when the league instead selected it and Toronto as the sites for postseason play. "We've had a great staff doing a ton of work," said Bob Nicholson, the Edmonton Oilers' chairman. Nicholson singled out the team's owner, Daryl Katz, for pestering N.H.L. Commissioner Gary Bettman during deliberations. "But really it was Daryl, starting with the vision. He called Gary a ton." On Saturday, 12 Western Conference teams will begin the qualifying round and round robin seeding tournament at Rogers Place, the four year old arena that sits at the center of the city's Ice District, a 2.5 billion (CAN) mixed use sports and entertainment zone. It will be the site of both conference finals and the Stanley Cup final. The Ice District may not have the same global profile as the Las Vegas Strip, but in Edmonton, which once billed itself the "City of Champions," hockey keeps the community pumping. "We are oil country and we are a hockey town," said Janet Riopel, the president of the city's chamber of commerce. "Our kids start early. They play through most of their lives, male and female. We are a hockey community and we've been very proud of our team. Oil country fans are die hard fans." Kevin Lowe, the six time Stanley Cup winner, Hall of Famer and former Oilers general manager, arrived in the city in 1979, the year the former World Hockey Association franchise joined the N.H.L. Championship hockey quickly became a way of life for the city. Building around the league's career leading scorer, Wayne Gretzky, the Oilers won five Stanley Cups between 1984 and 1990 and made sure they shared their success with the community. "In all likelihood, if you grew up in Edmonton during the '80s, you probably either were in a bar with a couple of us, or you might even have had a sip from the Cup," Lowe said. Sandy Langley, 53, is one of those people. She started working for the Oilers as a 15 year old usher at the old Northlands Coliseum. Since 1993, she has worked in the team's front office in various administrative capacities. "My husband was a bouncer at one of the main bars here," Langley said. "Back then, all of us became really, really good friends. They were just very approachable. They went out quite a bit, so you saw them, you know, at the grocery store. People felt that they could talk to them." Through another schoolmate, Langley said she got to know the former Oiler Esa Tikkanen and his first wife, Lotta. "I think as soon as a player feels comfortable with you, they kind of welcome you into their whole group. So when we became friends with Lotta and Esa, we would go to their house. Grant Fuhr and his wife would be there, and Jari Kurri and his wife. We were almost like a family for them, because they didn't have family here." Langley and her husband got married in June 1988, two months before the blockbuster trade that sent Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings. The Tikkanens were wedding guests. "It wasn't anything, to ask them if they would come to our wedding," Langley said. "Then, for my husband's stag, Esa brought the Stanley Cup. That was unbelievable." When the regular season was paused in March, the Oilers were on track to return to the playoffs for the first time in three years. Forward Leon Draisaitl led the league's scoring race by 13 points, and is the favorite to win the Hart Trophy, awarded to the league's most valuable player. The team also plays behind the 2017 Hart winner, Connor McDavid, and got a spark in December when winger Kailer Yamamoto, 21, was called up from the A.H.L. and scored at a point per game pace. The Oilers start the postseason facing the Chicago Blackhawks in a best of five series but fans won't be able to pierce the league's "bubble." That means some of hockey's most hard core supporters not allowed to cheer from inside Rogers Place or stake out the player entrance to ask for autographs. They'll be on the outside looking in as the local arena hosts up to three games a day in the early rounds, a feat that required packing what should have been months of planning into the span of two weeks. "As soon as we started to get inklings that we were going to be in because we kind of felt that we might not be we really had to time it right, because a lot of our staff were not working," said Stu Ballantyne, the Oilers' senior vice president of operations. Their preparation included bouncing back when a storm ripped away part of the building's roof in mid July, causing flooding that damaged a small portion of the entrance and mezzanine. Ballantyne said the damage did not set the organization's plans back in a significant way. Among the other considerations were sanitizing and facilitating social distancing as teams come and go from the building's six dressing rooms. Arena staff will also have to maintain the ice for more than 12 hours of daily hockey, cooling down the building temperature even more than usual, since there will be no fans in the stands to keep comfortable. In essence, Rogers Place has become a massive soundstage for a made for television event. "At times you think, 'Holy smokes, you won't get there,'" Nicholson said. "Hopefully, we add things and we're going to get better every day from here on out, too. You know, we have to do that for the players." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Later, in critiquing American conservatives who want universities to teach the Western canon, Stanley writes, "it should give fans of such 'Great Books' programs pause that Hitler declares in 'Mein Kampf' that, 'all that we admire on this earth ... is the creative product of only a small number of nations.'" Really? Is there no difference between Hitler's motivations and William Bennett's? But if Stanley's lumping is sometimes a weakness, it also accounts for his book's conceptual power. By placing Trump in transnational and transhistorical perspective, Stanley sees patterns that others miss. He notes the apparent paradox that Trump like many fascist politicians rode to power in part by attacking government "corruption," yet practices it even more brazenly himself. The explanation, Stanley suggests, lies in what fascists actually mean by the term. "Corruption, to the fascist politician," he argues, "is really about the corruption of purity rather than of law. Officially, the fascist politician's denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of traditional order." Stanley's comparative perspective is particularly effective in illustrating how fascists use fears of sexual violence. He notes that fascist politicians, who portray themselves as defenders of a pure, mythic, patriarchal past, frequently play on fears that alien groups pose a sexual threat. Segregationists used the specter of black rape to justify lynchings. After World War I, Germans "promulgated racial fantasies of mass rape of white women" by African soldiers serving among the French occupying forces, fantasies embraced in the United States by the renascent Ku Klux Klan. Nearly half a century later, the wave of Middle Eastern migrants entering Germany has spawned another sexual terror, which has again crossed the Atlantic, and become a staple of pro Trump platforms like Breitbart. Crucially, Stanley also links fascism to economic inequality, and he quotes Hannah Arendt, who argued that fascism flourishes when individuals are "atomized." He explains that Hitler denounced labor unions because he feared they might create solidarity among racially and religiously diverse workers. And he shows that the "right to work" movement that today seeks to cripple unions in the United States has its roots in an effort by Southern business elites to divide black and white workers in the 1940s. Many commentators have linked Trump's victory to the economic dislocation brought by globalization. But by focusing on declining participation in labor unions which can create class solidarity across racial, ethnic and religious lines Stanley illustrates a key mechanism through which economic stress buttresses fascist politics. Even the reader who finds much to admire in Stanley's book may still wonder why he employs the term "fascist" so freely. In his epilogue, Stanley offers an answer. Citing a 2017 study in the journal Cognition, he observes that "judgments of normality are affected both by what people think is statistically normal and what they think is ideally normal." Thus, if American politicians routinely associate Latino immigrants with murder and rape, Americans may grow less outraged by such accusations simply because they occur so often. Stanley supports this scholarly insight with a personal one, from his grandmother, a German Jew who wrote about the way Jews in Berlin psychologically accommodated themselves to Hitler's rule as late as 1937: "We were still able to leave the country; we could still live in our homes; we could still worship in our temples; we were in a Ghetto, but the majority of our people were still alive." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
On July 9, 1776, the Manhattan printer John Holt gently edited the Declaration of Independence text and then published 500 copies. Only four of the Holt Broadsides, as the documents came to be called, were known to survive until a few months ago, when a fifth surfaced in a private collection. The authenticated document and related papers, which belong to a descendant of some of early British settlers in eastern Long Island, will be auctioned on Nov. 11 at Blanchard's Auction Service in Potsdam, N.Y. The copy, which Blanchard's estimates will sell for 500,000 to 1 million, was originally delivered to Colonel David Mulford, a regiment leader in East Hampton. Uriah Rogers, the soldier who brought the Holt page and other documents to the colonel, scrawled a note on the package that he had "made Bold to Open Read them." Mulford, who became known for battlefield heroics, died of smallpox in 1778. Holt had edited Congress's original text by adding a statement from New York politicians and changing some punctuation marks. Printings of his page have also survived at the New York Public Library; the Westchester County Archives in Elmsford, N.Y.; the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif; and the Cincinnati Museum Center (which discovered a copy in its collection in 2015). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
It's a big deal in contemporary dance circles to be anointed a resident commissioned artist at New York Live Arts. On Tuesday the latest recipient of this honor, Kyle Abraham, unveiled "The Watershed," the first half of what he's been working on throughout that two year, generously funded residency. (A second program of three shorter pieces opens on Thursday.) Matching the largess of the opportunity with subject matter of serious heft, Mr. Abraham, whose past work has poignantly addressed race relations and his identity as a black gay man, set out to reflect on the anniversaries of two civil rights milestones: the 150th of the Emancipation Proclamation (in 2013) and 20th of the end of apartheid in South Africa (this year). What to do with the weight of all that history? In "The Watershed," Mr. Abraham can't seem to decide. Reaching both within and beyond his own ingenious body and those of the eight dancers in his company, Abraham.In.Motion he piles film footage on top of projected text on top of dialogue on top of musical montage on top of passage after passage of his typically luscious, synergistic movement. While plunging into charged terrain, he also tiptoes around it, displaying familiar, painful images of racial prejudice without digging into them as deeply, as rebelliously as he might. The results sometimes feel history book generic; you know that Mr. Abraham's voice is in there, but it's hard to hear. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
KANSAS CITY, Mo. The Kansas City Power and Light Building is a widely celebrated Art Deco skyscraper that instantly became a city landmark when it opened 81 years ago. The 30 story building stood as Missouri's tallest for 40 years, and its six story lantern tower, enclosed in sunburst windows and topped by a steel framed glass cupola, still cuts a distinctive profile on the downtown skyline. But the Power and Light Building is at a turning point. Efficiency minded office users no longer are attracted to the building's small floor plates there is only one tenant, which occupies three floors so its viability is tied to reuse as apartments or a hotel. Developers who in the past have proposed just such conversions now are competing for one more shot to fulfill those dreams. The Gailoyd Enterprises Corporation, controlled by the Shulman family of New York, put the 230,000 square foot building up for sale in March for 17.5 million. The Shulman family acquired the property in 1964, and the listing includes roughly two acres of surrounding surface and covered parking. Multiple parties have expressed interest in the Power and Light Building, said Gibson Kerr, a principal with ReMax Commercial in Kansas City, which is marketing the property. Even though some developers have explored the possibility of creating more office space on the lower floors by breaking out the building's west wall, Mr. Kerr said he believed it was time for something different. "The issue we're truly dealing with in this market is that there's not that much demand for office space downtown," he said. "The real demand is for residential or boutique hotel." The building is situated in the central business district, which has benefited from 6 billion in investment over the last decade. The Power and Light District, which is the city's entertainment center, and Sprint Center are a few blocks to the east, while the convention hall and the new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts are to the west and south. Yet whether a new owner can provide the hefty investment needed for a major conversion is far from certain. The Power and Light Building's historic status would allow buyers to use state and federal tax credits to offset about 45 percent of renovation costs, but any project would probably still require subsidies from Kansas City. The city, though, would be hard pressed to commit much. Kansas City recently cut 7.2 million from the fire department, and it is grappling with a federally mandated upgrade of its sewer system that is expected to cost 2.5 billion over the next several years. "It's a wonderful building, and it certainly needs to have a change of use," said a Kansas City developer, Ron Jury, who would like to incorporate the Power and Light Building into a new 1,000 room convention hotel on the site. "But it's a challenging market." Mr. Jury rehabilitated the historic President Hotel, which is next door to the Power and Light Building, in 2005, and he originally proposed his convention hotel plan in 2009. At the time, it was projected to cost roughly 350 million. The city also would like to see a new convention hotel built to help lure more events to town. The city paid 250,000 for an option to buy the Power and Light Building in 2010 to secure the property for hotel development, but that plan died. The Minneapolis based developer Sherman Associates, meanwhile, would like to put 200 apartments in the building and retain some commercial space, said Donovan Mouton, a consultant for the company. The plan is a scaled down version of a proposal that the firm floated earlier this year that included the construction of a boutique hotel adjacent to the apartment conversion. But Gailoyd and Sherman Associates could not agree on a price, Mr. Mouton said. The new plan could cost from 30 million to 50 million, about half the amount for the original proposal, and they would still look for some government subsidies to fill a financing gap, he said. He said, though, that turning the property into apartments made the most sense because downtown needs housing. The number of rental units in the central business district has increased 41 percent, to 5,353, since 2007, according to data supplied by the Downtown Council of Kansas City. But apartment vacancy is widely believed to be less than 5 percent, which is considered full occupancy. The tight residential market has persuaded the Cordish Companies, one of the developers of the Power and Light District, to move forward with a 70 million deal to build 318 apartments a few blocks from the Power and Light Building. In a mid June announcement, Cordish, which is based in Baltimore, said that it would build 250 units in a new 23 story tower and renovate an empty office building for the balance. While there seems to be plenty of interest in creating new housing downtown, office space in the area has seen better days. The average office vacancy rate in Kansas City's central business district was 26.3 percent in the first quarter of 2012, little changed from the fourth quarter of 2011, according to the real estate brokerage, Cassidy Turley. The average lease rate of 18.28 a square foot is also nearly 2 below suburban office rents, said Michael Mayer, managing principal in Cassidy Turley's Kansas City office. A plan by the General Services Administration to move 1,000 workers downtown from a federal complex in south Kansas City in the coming months will sop up some excess space, he said, but the area is suffering from a general lack of corporate expansions by local and out of town companies. Additionally, the State of Kansas has been using tax incentives to lure companies out of Kansas City and into the adjacent suburban Johnson County. The Kansas City based movie theater chain AMC Entertainment, for example, is moving its headquarters next year from downtown to Leawood, Kan., 15 miles away. "The best way to describe it is that it's one step forward and one step back," Mr. Mayer said. "You get some good news, and then you get some not so good news." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Your Data Were 'Anonymized'? These Scientists Can Still Identify You Your medical records might be used for scientific research. But don't worry, you're told personally identifying data were removed . Information about you gathered by the Census Bureau might be made public. But don't worry it, too, has been "anonymized." On Tuesday, scientists showed that all this information may not be as anonymous as promised. The investigators developed a method to re identify individuals from just bits of what were supposed to be anonymous data. In most of the world, anonymous data are not considered personal data the information can be shared and sold without violating privacy laws. M arket researchers are willing to pay brokers for a huge array of data, from dating preferences to political leanings, household purchases to streaming favorites. Even anonymized data sets often include scores of so called attributes characteristics about an individual or household. Anonymized consumer data sold by Experian, the credit bureau, to Alteryx, a marketing firm, included 120 million Americans and 248 attributes per household. Scientists at Imperial College London and Universite Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, reported in the journal Nature Communications that they had devised a computer algorithm that can identify 99.98 percent of Americans from almost any available data set with as few as 15 attributes, such as gender, ZIP code or marital status. Even more surprising, the scientists posted their software code online for anyone to use. That decision was difficult, said Yves Alexandre de Montjoye, a computer scientist at Imperial College London and lead author of the new paper. Ordinarily, when scientists discover a security flaw, they alert the vendor or government agency hosting the data. But there are mountains of anonymized data circulating worldwide, all of it at risk, Dr. de Montjoye said. So the choice was whether to keep mum, he said, or to publish the method so that data vendors can secure future data sets and prevent individuals from being re identified. "This is very hard," Dr. de Montjoye said. "You have to cross your fingers that you did it properly, because once it is out there, you are never going to get it back." Some experts agreed with the tactic. "It's always a dilemma," said Yaniv Erlich, chief scientific officer at MyHeritage, a consumer genealogy service, and a well known data privacy researcher. "Should we publish or not? The consensus so far is to disclose. That is how you advance the field: Publish the code, publish the finding." This not the first time that anonymized data has been shown to be not so anonymous after all. In 2016, individuals were identified from the web browsing histories of three million Germans, data that had been purchased from a vendor. Geneticists have shown that individuals can be identified in supposedly anonymous DNA databases. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. The usual ways of protecting privacy include "de identifying" individuals by removing attributes or substituting fake values, or by releasing only fractions of an anonymized data set . But the gathering evidence shows that all of the methods are inadequate, said Dr. de Montjoye. "We need to move beyond de identification," he said. "Anonymity is not a property of a data set, but is a property of how you use it." The balance is tricky: Information that becomes completely anonymous also becomes less useful, particularly to scientists trying to reproduce the results of other studies. But every small bit that is retained in a database makes identification of individuals more possible. "Very quickly, with a few bits of information, everyone is unique," said Dr. Erlich. One possible solution is to control access. Those who want to use sensitive data medical records, for example would have to access them in a secure room. The data can be used but not copied, and whatever is done with the information must be recorded. Researchers also can get to the information remotely, but "there are very strict requirements for the room where the access point is installed," said Kamel Gadouche, chief executive of a research data center in France, C.A.S.D., which relies on these methods. The center holds information on 66 million individuals, including tax and medical data, provided by governments and universities. "We are not restricting access," Mr. Gadouche said. "We are controlling access." But there is a drawback to restricted access. If a scientist submits a research paper to a journal, for example, others might want to confirm the results by using the data a challenge if the data were not freely available. "It's a cryptographic trick," Dr. Erlich said. "Suppose you want to compute the average salary for both or us. I don't want to tell you my salary and you don't want to tell me yours." So, he said, encrypted information is exchanged that is unscrambled by a computer. "In theory, it works great," said Dr. Erlich. But for scientific research, the method has limits. If the end result seems wrong, "you cannot debug it, because everything is so secure you can't see the raw data." The records gathered on all of us will never be completely private, he added: "You cannot reduce risk to zero." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Let's get one thing straight, so to speak. There's mainstream gay club culture homogeneous house music, international circuit parties, rainbow flags everywhere, which is fine! and there is underground gay club culture, which is more like a spider web of alternative scenes. The underground reflects themes and identities, as well as literal geographies, that are usually marginalized, or are, in a word, "queer." In Los Angeles in early 2016, two queer club denizens put a party together at a strip mall gay bar in deeply Latino eastern Los Angeles and called it Club Scum. Far from the posher dance floors of the gay enclave of West Hollywood, the goal of the organizers was to mix scenes that hadn't often met, even on the widest of webs: drag and punk. They were nervous. "The first Scum, yeah, some people were leaving, and the manager was worried," said one of the co founders, Rudy "Rudy Bleu" Garcia, referring to their venue , Club Chico in Montebello, Calif. More than three years later, this monthly party featuring art and drag performances, D.J.s, go go dancers and sometimes live punk bands, has become a staple of underground East L.A. night life. The mixture has worked, its founders said, because Scum spoke to a cultural current that was hiding right before them. "For us, it's just fun to play X Ray Specs and then Banda Machos, or like, Gloria Trevi to the Germs," said Mr. Garcia, 41, referring to the sounds of Scum playlists, but also to the musical styles that might echo against one another across city streets in East L.A. Dress is central to Scum's subculture. The club's adherents show up reflecting all kinds of alternative styles, often with a gender bending or drag bent. Body positivity is functionally boundless. Extravagant face makeup is a norm. Prosthetics are encouraged. On a recent night in September, the latest Scum night at Chico was going strong. The music and vibe veered seamlessly from New Wave, to techno, to traditional Mexican ranchera to hard core punk. A few people approached me and said they'd never seen me there before, just as a regular said might happen. Inclusivity reigns at Club Scum. I smiled and embraced strangers, informing them that, yes, I was a party virgin. "Scum is that place where you can be your true authentic weird self," said Mr. Sanchez, 30, and I knew exactly what he meant. In a way, I'd been to this party, in some form, many times before. I had a pretty great time living in Los Angeles in my 20s in the mid 2000s. It was in its last few years in the ranks of megacities that were considered underrated, and, for its sheer vastness, Los Angeles felt like a place where wonderlands for any fancy beckoned from behind discreetly marked doors. There was always something going on, always another room to peek into, always another entrance. In that decade, L.A. was the city of secrets. I was convinced that in order to really understand the place, I had to get to know as many distinct night life scenes as possible. After dark, I got in my car and went out. I plunged into the neighborhoods that radiate from downtown, hurtling into backyard ska punk shows in El Sereno, experimental art happenings in Chinatown, and smoky trip hop after hours in warehouses in South Central. Most of all, I was at the underground gay club nights. In L.A.'s central neighborhoods and its Eastside, denizens followed the underground gay calendar from club to club, week to week, where we made bands of friends and notched strings of enthusiastic bed mates. There wasn't a lot of overthinking going on; labels weren't in style. Maybe this was because the period came right after the vibrating trauma of Sept. 11, but also well before dating apps, necessitating analog contact with strangers in order to have a life in a driving heavy metropolis. The corresponding flow was fluid and bent slightly toward the nihilistic in everything from music to sexual practices to street fashion. As a result, it's taken me some years to realize that there were actually two alternative gay underground cultures in Los Angeles at the time, and that many of us had firm footholds in both. There were the more mainstream adjacent scenes that centered in East Hollywood and Silver Lake: leather, bears, rockers, "creative" types, the people who congregated at places like Akbar, MJ's, the Eagle, Cuffs and Faultline. Then there was the immigrant led underground, dominated by working class gays and lesbians, Latin drag queens, trans people . These venues included the old Le Bar on Glendale Boulevard (now the hipster haunt Cha Cha Lounge), the now defunct Circus Disco in Hollywood, the divey New Jalisco on Main Street, and Tempo on Santa Monica Boulevard, a veritable club of worship to gay vaqueros and queens. Farther east, there was the little known lesbian bar Reds in Boyle Heights, and Club Chico, a "cholo bar," as we called it back then, that catered mostly to Mexican or Mexican American guys who shunned the traditional L.G.B.T. identifiers but could definitely be described as "men who have sex with men." Being a gay underground clubgoer in L.A. at the time meant almost by default being some shade of brown. Nearly half of the county's population was already Latino, but it was a time, almost two decades before Latinx entered the dictionary , when the city was weirdly un self aware about it. Everyone was just mixed in. The deeper I got into downtown and the Eastside, the weirder and freer things would get. Which is why, when I first entered a Club Scum night in Los Angeles in 2019, I knew, in club going terms, that I had effectively returned home. Scum also serves as a beacon to the essential identity of the Eastside of Los Angeles County. Montebello, where Chico has kept a low key presence since 1999, is a couple blocks away from the boundary of unincorporated East L.A., which, remember, is a distinct entity; its natives including Mr. Garcia and Mr. Sanchez don't ever let a newcomer forget it. The location keeps the club rooted in the various cultural pillars of the region. East Los Angeles proper is more than 95 percent Latino, according to the U.S. census, and largely some form of Mexican. From here, Scum also becomes the party that arguably fits best for those who feel like they're the strangest in their neighborhoods, anywhere. Maybe they love the Misfits, but also know their Juan Gabriel. Or they skate, but also do some drag. To some adherents, it's all "queerdo," a construction of "weirdo" and "queer" apt, though of uncertain provenance. For the misfits, the outcasts, the night crawlers, it works. "Scum provides a space for people to be themselves, and take risks, and try new things with the way they dress, perform, communicate," Mr. Garcia said. "And to meet other people who are like you, and are not just trying to fetishize you for being brown or for being punk." Mr. Sanchez added: "It's been nice to bring people to our gay bar, in the hood, where we grew up." Daniel Jack Lyons is a photographer who divides his time between New York and Los Angeles. Daniel Hernandez is a Styles West reporter and the author of "Down and Delirious in Mexico City," a nonfiction exploration of youth subcultures in Mexico. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
'HUMA BHABHA: WE COME IN PEACE' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 28). This spare and unsettling sculptural installation for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden Commission includes two figures: one that is somewhat humanoid but with a ferocious mask face and that visually dwarfs the jagged Manhattan skyline behind it, and another bowing in supplication or prayer, with long cartoonish human hands and a scraggly tail emerging from its shiny, black drapery. The title is a variant on the line an alien uttered to an anxious crowd in the 1951 science fiction movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still," but it ripples with other associations: colonization, invasion, imperialism or missionaries and other foreigners whose intentions were not always innocent. The installation also feels like an extension of the complex, cross cultural conversation going on downstairs, inside a museum packed with 5,000 years of art history. (Martha Schwendener) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI SCULPTURE: THE FILMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18). This show is built around works by the Romanian modernist (1876 1957) that have been longtime highlights of the museum's own collection. But in 2018, can Brancusi still release our inner poet? The answer may lie in paying less attention to the sculptures themselves and more to Brancusi's little known and quite amazing films, projected at the entrance to the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. MoMA borrowed the series of video clips from the Pompidou Center in Paris. They give the feeling that Brancusi was less interested in making fancy museum objects than in putting new kinds of almost living things into the world and convey the vital energy his sculptures were meant to capture. (Blake Gopnik) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'CHAGALL, LISSITZKY, MALEVICH: THE RUSSIAN AVANT GARDE IN VITEBSK, 1918 1922' at the Jewish Museum (through Jan. 6). This crisp and enlightening exhibition, slimmed but not diminished from its initial outing at Paris's Centre Pompidou, restages the instruction, debates and utopian dreaming at the most progressive art school in revolutionary Russia. Marc Chagall encouraged stylistic diversity at the short lived People's Art School in his native Vitebsk (today in the republic of Belarus), and while his dreamlike paintings of smiling workers and flying goats had their defenders, the students came to favor the abstract dynamism of two other professors: Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, whose black and red squares offered a radical new vision for a new society. Both the romantics and the iconoclasts would eventually fall out of favor in the Soviet Union, and the People's Art School would close in just a few years but this exhibition captures the glorious conviction, too rare today, that art must serve the people. (Jason Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'CHARTING THE DIVINE PLAN: THE ART OF ORRA WHITE HITCHCOCK' at the American Folk Art Museum (through Oct. 14). Love in the time of science that could serve as the catchphrase for this ravishing exhibition of botanical and geological illustration from the first decades of the United States. Born in progressive Amherst, Mass., a few years after the Revolution, Orra White received a first rate scientific education like few girls of her day; then, with her beloved husband, Edward Hitchcock, she painted the plants, reeds, flowers and mushrooms of New England in exquisite folios. Later, Edward became president of Amherst College, and Orra painted and drew large scale illustrations for his lessons: Paleolithic skeletons, brightly striped cross sections of volcanic earth, a massive octopus munching on a three masted schooner. While the plant and mushroom paintings are delicate and painstakingly exact, the classroom aids are boldly imaginative but both are evidence of an extraordinary life in which carnal love and religious conviction intertwined with scientific discovery. (Farago) 212 595 9533, folkartmuseum.org 'MARY CORSE' at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y., and 'MARY CORSE: A SURVEY IN LIGHT' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through Nov. 25). Light, and specifically the radiant light of Los Angeles, shaped Ms. Corse's career. She became interested not just in representing light, but also in making objects that emitted or reflected it. This duo of shows features her light boxes or "light paintings" made with argon gas and Tesla coils, as well as her paintings on canvas that include glass microspheres, like those used in the lines that divide highway lanes. Both shows are overdue representations for Ms. Corse, who was an early member of the loosely defined Light and Space movement of the 1960s and '70s in California. (Schwendener) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'CROWNS OF THE VAJRA MASTERS: RITUAL ART OF NEPAL' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Dec. 16). Up a narrow staircase, above the Met's galleries of South and Southeast Asian art, are three small rooms of art from the Himalayas. The space, a bit like a treehouse, is a capsule of spiritual energy, which is especially potent these days thanks to this exhibition. The crowns of the title look like antique versions of astronaut headgear: gilded copper helmets, studded with gems, encrusted with repousse plaques and topped by five pronged antennas the vajra, or thunderbolt of wisdom. Such crowns were believed to turn their wearers into perfected beings who are willing and able to bestow blessings on the world. This show is the first to focus on these crowns, and it does so with a wealth of compressed historical information, as well as several resplendent related sculptures and paintings from Nepal and Tibet. But it's the crowns themselves, the real ones, the wisdom generators, set in mandala formation in the center of the gallery, that are the fascinators. (Holland Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'EMPRESSES OF CHINA'S FORBIDDEN CITY' at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. (through Feb. 10). Every emperor of the Qing dynasty had dozens of wives, concubines and serving girls, but only one of them could hold the title of empress. The lives of women at the late imperial court is the subject of this lavish and learned exhibition, which plots the fortunes of these consorts through their bogglingly intricate silk gowns, hairpins detailed with peacock feathers, and killer platform boots. (The Qing elite were Manchus; women did not bind their feet.) Many empresses' lives are lost to history; some, like the Dowager Empress Cixi, became icons in their own right. Most of the 200 odd dresses, jewels, religious artifacts and scroll paintings here are on rare loan from the Palace Museum in Beijing you will not have a chance to see these again without a trip to the People's Republic. (Farago) 978 745 9500, pem.org 'THE FUTURE' at the Rubin Museum of Art (through Jan. 7). It flies and flows and creeps. You measure it, spend it, waste it. It's on your side, or it's not. We're talking about time, and so is the Rubin. It is devoting its entire 2018 season and all its spaces to time as a theme, with an accent on the future. There's a fine historical show devoted to the Second Buddha, Padmasambhava ("lotus born"), subtitled "Master of Time," and another, called "A Lost Future," that centers on a wonderful feature length film by the London based Otolith Group about a still active, utopian minded university founded almost a century ago by the poet philosopher Rabindranath Tagore in West Bengal. And the Brooklyn based artist Chitra Ganesh contributes a suite of bold large scale drawings that weave references to South Asian religions, Indian pop comics and 21st century feminism into a genre sometimes called Indo Futurism. (Cotter) 212 620 5000, rubinmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'ALEJANDRO G. INARRITU: CARNE Y ARENA' at 1611 Benning Road NE, Washington (through Oct. 31, 9 a.m. 9 p.m.). Perhaps the most technically accomplished endeavor yet in virtual reality but closer in form to immersive live theater, created by a two time Oscar winner has arrived at a former church in Washington after outings in Cannes, Milan, Los Angeles and Mexico City. In "Carne y Arena" ("Flesh and Sand"), you explore the exhibition on your own with a motion sensitive headset that transports you to Mexico's border with the United States; brutal encounters with border guards interweave with surreal dream sequences, which you can perceive in three dimensions. The characters are computer renderings of the bodies of actual migrants; the landscapes are photographed by Mr. Inarritu's brilliant longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. It remains too early to say whether virtual reality will reshape art institutions, but this is a rare achievement, and not only for its political urgency. Tickets will be released only on the website at 8 a.m. Eastern Time on the 1st and 15th of each month of the exhibition's duration. (Farago) carneyarenadc.com 'BODYS ISEK KINGELEZ: CITY DREAMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 1). The first comprehensive survey of the Congolese artist is a euphoric exhibition as utopian wonderland, featuring his fantasy architectural models and cities works strong in color, eccentric in shape, loaded with enthralling details and futuristic aura. Mr. Kingelez (1948 2015) was convinced that the world had never seen a vision like his, and this beautifully designed show bears him out. (Roberta Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Nov. 4). The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'GEORGIA O'KEEFFE: VISIONS OF HAWAI'I' at the New York Botanical Garden (through Oct. 28). Finding out O'Keeffe had a Hawaiian period is kind of like finding out Brian Wilson had a desert period. But here it is: 17 eye popping paradisal paintings, produced in a nine week visit in 1939. The paintings, and their almost psychedelic palette, are as fleshlike and physical as O'Keeffe's New Mexican work is stripped and metaphysical. The other star of the show, fittingly, is Hawaii, and the garden has mounted a living display of the subjects depicted in the artwork. As much as they might look like the products of an artist's imagination, the plants and flowers in the Enid Haupt Conservatory are boastfully real. (William L. Hamilton) 718 817 8700, nybg.org 'THE SENSES: DESIGN BEYOND VISION' at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (through Oct. 28). There's a serious, timely big idea at this exhibition: As social media, smartphones and virtual reality make us ever more "ocularcentric," we have taken leave of our nonvisual senses and need to get back in touch, literally. Thus "The Senses" features multisensory adventures such as a portable speaker size contraption that emits odors, with titles like "Surfside" and "Einstein," in timed combinations; hand painted scratch and sniff wallpaper (think Warhol's patterned cows but with cherries cherry scented, naturally); and a device that projects ultrasonic waves to simulate the touch and feel of virtual objects. The show also presents commissions, videos, products and prototypes from more than 65 designers and teams, some of which address sensory disabilities like blindness and deafness, including Vibeat, which can be worn as a bracelet, brooch or necklace and translates music into vibrations. And if you bring the kids, they will likely bliss out stroking a wavy, fur lined installation that makes music as you rub it. (Michael Kimmelman) 212 849 8400, cooperhewitt.org 'SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Feb. 3). It will be a happy day when racial harmony rules in the land. But that day's not arriving any time soon. Who could have guessed in the 1960s when civil rights became law, that a new century would bring white supremacy tiki torching out of the closet and turn the idea that black lives matter, so beyond obvious, into a battle cry? Actually, African Americans were able to see such things coming. No citizens know the national narrative, and its implacable racism, better. And no artists have responded to that history that won't go away more powerfully than black artists have. More than 60 of them appear in this big, beautiful, passionate show of art that functioned as seismic detector, political persuader and defensive weapon. (Cotter) 718 638 8000, brooklynmuseum.org 'THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS: STANLEY KUBRICK PHOTOGRAPHS' at the Museum of the City of New York (through Oct. 28). This exhibition of the great director's photography is essentially Kubrick before he became Kubrick. Starting in 1945, when he was 17 and living in the Bronx, he worked as a photographer for Look magazine, and the topics he explored are chestnuts so old that they smell a little moldy: lovers embracing on a park bench as their neighbors gaze ostentatiously elsewhere, patients anxiously awaiting their doctor's appointments, boxing hopefuls in the ring, celebrities at home, pampered dogs in the city. It probably helped that Kubrick was just a kid, so instead of inducing yawns, these magazine perennials struck him as novelties, and he in turn brought something fresh to them. Photographs that emphasize the mise en scene could be movie stills: a shouting circus executive who takes up the right side of the foreground while aerialists rehearse in the middle distance, a boy climbing to a roof with the city tenements surrounding him, a subway car filled with sleeping passengers. Looking at these pictures, you want to know what comes next. (Arthur Lubow) 212 534 1672, mcny.org 'TOWARD A CONCRETE UTOPIA: ARCHITECTURE IN YUGOSLAVIA, 1948 1980' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 13). This nimble, continuously surprising show tells one of the most underappreciated stories of postwar architecture: the rise of avant garde government buildings, pie in the sky apartment blocks, mod beachfront resorts and even whole new cities in the southeast corner of Europe. Tito's Yugoslavia rejected both Stalinism and liberal democracy, and its neither nor political position was reflected in architecture of stunning individuality, even as it embodied collective ambitions that Yugoslavs called the "social standard." From Slovenia, where elegant office buildings drew on the tradition of Viennese modernism, to Kosovo, whose dome topped national library appears as a Buckminster Fuller fever dream, these impassioned buildings defy all our Cold War vintage stereotypes of Eastern Europe. Sure, in places the show dips too far into Socialist chic. But this show is exactly how MoMA should be thinking as it rethinks its old narratives for its new home next year. (Farago) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'CASANOVA'S EUROPE: ART, PLEASURE, AND POWER IN THE 18TH CENTURY' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (through Oct. 8). Europe in the 18th century: the age of Enlightenment, an age of adultery. This vivacious exhibition uses Casanova, Venice's most famous lover boy and the author of a 3,700 page autobiography, as a contextualizing force for gloriously ornate furniture and costumes, not to mention paintings of amorous aristocrats and pornographic drawings of lovers in laugh out loud configurations. After a year of MeToo revelations, the show might at first seem ill timed, yet Casanova (whose image never appears, except in an introductory wall display) is not really the show's subject. He's more of a conceit to rethink 18th century art too often dismissed as dainty as something more worldly, more swashbuckling, more free. (Farago) 617 267 9300, mfa.org 'HEAVENLY BODIES: FASHION AND THE CATHOLIC IMAGINATION' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters (through Oct. 8). Let us pray. After last year's stark exhibition of Rei Kawakubo's irregular apparel, the Met Costume Institute is back in blockbuster mode with this three part blowout on the influence of Catholicism on haute couture of the past century. The trinity of fashion begins downstairs at the Met with the exceptional loans of vestments from the Vatican; upstairs are gowns fit for angels in heaven (by Lanvin, Thierry Mugler, Rodarte) or angels fallen to earth (such as slinky Versace sheaths garlanded with crosses). The scenography at the Met is willfully operatic spotlights, choir music which militates against serious thinking about fashion and religion, but up at the Cloisters, by far the strongest third of the show, you can commune more peacefully with an immaculate Balenciaga wedding gown or a divine Valentino gown embroidered with Cranach's Adam and Eve. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'OBSESSION: NUDES BY KLIMT, SCHIELE AND PICASSO' at the Met Breuer (through Oct. 7). The highlight of this uneven but jewel studded show of erotically charged nudes from the bequest of an eccentric woolen goods heir is Egon Schiele's incandescent "Seated Woman in Chemise." The 1914 drawing shows a nearly naked model seated on the floor holding apart her folded legs with her hands. From the top of her egg shaped, doll like head, so idealized it's practically inhuman, to the blunt exposure of her sex, rendered as simply and honestly as the medium allows, she's an unresolvable contest of fantasy and reality. (Will Heinrich) 212 731 1675, metmuseum.org 'DAVID WOJNAROWICZ: HISTORY KEEPS ME AWAKE AT NIGHT' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through Sept. 30). This artist was there when we needed him politically 30 plus years ago. Now we need him again, and he's back in this big, rich retrospective. Wojnarowicz (pronounced Voyna ROH vich), who died at 37 in 1992, was one of the most articulate art world voices raised against the corporate greed and government foot dragging that contributed to the early AIDS crisis. But he was far from a one issue artist. From the start, he took outsiderness itself, as defined by ethnicity, gender, economics and sexual preference, as his native turf. And from it he attacked all forms of exclusion through writing, performing and object making. In the show, we find him working at full force in all three disciplines, and the timing couldn't be better. Not long before his AIDS related death, during the culture wars era, he wrote, "I'm convinced I'm from another planet." In 2018 America, he would have felt more than ever like a criminal migrant, an alien combatant. (Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
It is Wall Street bonus season, the time of year when Porsche dealerships are known to polish their inventory and private clubs stock up on Krug Champagne and bouncers. The last several years have been lackluster, as the extravagant compensation lavished on financiers during the boom years failed to materialize following the recession. But this year signs are emerging that bountiful bonuses are back, at least for some, and those who sell high end real estate are seeing buyers return to the marketplace with more confidence and thicker wallets. Cindy Scholz, a real estate agent at Urban Compass, has been working with a couple, both of whom are at hedge funds, for several months as they searched for two bedrooms in the 2 million range. When their bonuses came in at figures almost equal to their pay, they decided to set their sights higher. "They took off for the holidays and came back and said their budget was 4 million to 5 million," Ms. Scholz said. Compensation experts say that bonuses this year will be a mixed bag. Most employers began revealing their plans late last year and into the beginning of 2015, and will be distributing their bonus checks over the next several weeks. This is just in time for spring, when the weather warms and the real estate market emerges from its winter hibernation. Some hedge funds have done relatively well of late, and their owners, in particular, who earn fees for money under management, should be flush with cash. Investment bankers who work in mergers and acquisitions should also do well, but traders and those in fixed income will have less lucrative payouts. "Investment bankers could see an increase in their bonuses of 8 to 10 percent, but bonuses are going to be down for fixed income and traders," said Michael Karp, the chief executive of the Options Group, an executive search firm. Lawyers at the city's white shoe firms, particularly those in mergers and acquisitions, should also do well, Mr. Karp added. Another group receiving a cash infusion are the Wall Street employees who were given deferred compensation during the dark days of the down market. Employers doled out both cash and stock options that did not vest for several years, resulting in much grumbling from the rank and file. Many of these options finally vest this month, and the results are likely to be better than expected, said Alan Johnson, a managing director at Johnson Associates, a compensation consulting firm. "In 2011, 2012 and 2013 they were getting shares that didn't vest for three or four years," Mr. Johnson said. Speaking hypothetically, he added, "But they were paid at 40 a share, and now the stock is worth 80 a share, so they are able to get a large lump sum." Further buoying this buying trend is the news that some banks, like Morgan Stanley, would revert this year to the precrisis practice of relying more on upfront cash bonuses than deferred compensation. And even some Wall Street employees who won't be seeing a big increase in bonuses this year may still be better off financially. Many of them have spent the last several years shoring up their personal balance sheets. "In the years after the crisis, many bankers were in bad shape, but they have spent the past few years digging themselves out of the hole they were in," Mr. Johnson said. "Even though their pay is not up significantly since the recession, their net worth is." Lisa Larson, an associate broker at Warburg Realty, says that several of her more reluctant clients are now ready to jump into the buyers' pool. "A couple of my clients, even just a year ago, were sitting on the sidelines and didn't want to get involved in bidding wars," she said. "But now there has been a perfect storm of conditions that are making them more optimistic and ready to buy." Her clients, and others like them, have a general feeling that they have weathered the recession and are now more confident about holding onto their jobs. Many are also looking to take advantage of low interest rates, amid speculation that rates may rise toward the end of the year. A number of properties have also been sitting on the market unsold and represent a good value. "There are co ops on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue that aren't renovated and aren't selling, so a year or two ago, my clients didn't want to take the risk," Ms. Larson said, "but now that they are more flush with cash, they have the stomach to take on an apartment that needs renovation." As professionals in finance, many bonus rich buyers put a premium on making sound investments. "It is the old saying that cash flows never grow old, and covering your expenses never grows old," said Daniela Sassoun, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. "A lot of my clients are in private banking or private equity, and I think the bonuses create a sense of financial security, like, 'I have more liquidity to spend,' but of course it is very well thought out. These are bankers so they run their numbers." Some of Ms. Sassoun's clients are searching for investment properties in areas like Aspen, Colo., and the Hamptons. "They can buy a huge house in Aspen, use it a few weeks a year, but since they have several houses, they can put it out to rent and it generates income plus appreciation," she said. "After 2007, people are either going to buy premium properties and be very smart about it, or buy second or third homes that produce a cash flow." Mike Schulte, a salesman at Citi Habitats, is working with a group of hedge fund colleagues who would like to invest in a small residential building in the 5 million to 10 million range south of 96th Street. "They are looking in areas where they feel there may be some upside, but they want something fully leased, and the problem is inventory," he said. "There are no deals out there." Real estate developers undoubtedly are also welcoming Wall Street buyers, especially with growing concern that there may be a slowdown at the high end of the market, with a rising number of luxury units saturating a relatively small buyer pool. At the Marquand at 11 East 68th Street, for example, a penthouse has been on the market for 46.5 million since November, but interest has picked up in recentl weeks. The triplex unit, which is priced at 6,588 a square foot and has five bedrooms and six full and two half baths, received one bid that was rejected as too low. It now has three more "serious contenders," including Wall Street types, said Madeline Hult Elghanayan, a Douglas Elliman agent marketing the building. Ziel Feldman, the founder of the HFZ Capital Group, which is developing the Marquand, a century old Beaux Arts Revival building, said, "We have seen a big surge after a lull during the summer months." In the past five weeks, three units have gone into contract at full price likely driven by the bonus bump. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In the era of new Nordic cuisine, diners have experienced everything from fried moss to sheep dung smoked whiskey. But what about old Nordic cuisine? When would fermented mutton make its way to a menu again? Surprisingly, this nearly forgotten gastronomy never left the shores of the semiautonomous Faroe Islands, partly administered by Denmark. In May, the islands saw the opening of what might be the world's first "fermented" restaurant: Raest, entirely dedicated to traditional Faroese fermented foods. "Raest" means fermented in Faroese. Unlike the wet fermenting process for yogurt and pickled herring, the Faroes' salty, brisk air creates ideal conditions for air drying meat and fish, a process done in hjallur, food drying sheds scattered across the islands. During a recent visit, I dipped chewy strips of air dried cod into Faroese butter and tasted mutton sausage that whiffed gloriously of Scottish haggis. A bowl of tangy fermented lamb soup was silky and specked with kelp. There are no waiters; chefs serve the tables, using the opportunity to explain the unusual dishes to guests. "Because we eat these dishes at home, the idea of a restaurant serving Faroese food seems senseless to locals," said Johannes Jensen, the owner, who runs a few restaurants on the islands. "When my mother heard I was opening Raest, she told me it would close within months." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The killing of Jonathan M. Levin, a son of the Time Warner chairman, by one of his former high school students in 1997 transfixed a city that was breaking free of its crime ridden past. Five years later, the New York City Education Department opened Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications in the same South Bronx building where he had taught, declaring it "a living tribute" to the English teacher's "spirit, values, commitment and impassioned belief" that every child has a right to a quality education. But in the past few years, a quality education at Levin High School became harder to come by. Money for a college scholarship in Mr. Levin's name dried up. A ball field that a Mets official helped pay for fell into disrepair. Computers sat untouched, applications to the school fell and the graduation rate sank to 31 percent, the fifth lowest in the city. Now, just a decade after it opened, New York has deemed Levin High School a failure, and is preparing to close it down. The policy has been repeatedly criticized by teachers' unions, and is now also under attack by several Democratic candidates for mayor, who in varying degrees have all pledged to slow or halt the process of closing schools. Civil rights groups have filed complaints with the federal Education Department asserting that the policy has a disproportionate effect on black and Hispanic students. The critics contend that school systems like New York's are more interested in letting schools fail, to accelerate the process of creating new schools, than in helping struggling schools, and the students in them, succeed. "We have a mayor who treats the act of closing a school as the accomplishment," said Bill de Blasio, the city's public advocate and, as one of five Democratic mayoral hopefuls, a supporter of a moratorium on closings. "What should be a last resort is now the go to policy, and kids are suffering the consequences." There may be no better example for weighing these arguments than Levin High School, which, as it happens, is one of seven small schools operating inside the shell of William Howard Taft High School, Jonathan Levin's school, which was closed for poor performance. "It is actually very painful," said Mr. Levin's father, Gerald M. Levin, 73, who retired from Time Warner in 2001. The schools chancellor personally called Mr. Levin in January to prepare him for the heartbreak. "I said that: 'Well, there are some special things taking place at that school and those statistics may belie the efforts that encourage a couple of students to go on. We could have future leaders and future writers somewhere in that group.' " It was always the school's mission to tackle the needs of poor students, the very population Jonathan Levin steered his career toward. Then, as now, poverty and danger were elements of any child's day. In recent years, metal detectors were placed at the main entrance and security guards hovered throughout the ground floor hallways. In a school survey last year, half of all students said they did not always feel safe in the halls, restrooms and locker rooms. The killing of Mr. Levin (pronounced luh VIN) on May 30, 1997, sent his students and colleagues into waves of grief. His body was discovered, bound with duct tape, in his apartment on the Upper West Side. The police said he had been tortured with a knife for his bank card number and shot in the back of his head. At his funeral, some of his students propped a cardboard sign atop his plain wooden coffin with the words: "We are his kids." A former student, Corey Arthur, was convicted of second degree murder, and is serving 25 years to life. Mr. Levin's death, at age 31, prompted waves of cash to pour in. The money grew to around 750,000, and was mostly used for college scholarships. And the school had a "hook," said Nasib Hoxha, 53, the principal at Levin since its inception. It was to have a focus on media, helped by a grant proposal Mr. Levin wrote for media studies that was posthumously awarded. "But the numbers have changed," Mr. Hoxha said. "The system is not set up to address the needs of the community." Over the past five years, he said, the school has taken in increasing numbers of children arriving from the Dominican Republic and speaking no English. One year, he said, 37 of those students were placed in his 11th grade. And many students left midyear, returning to the Dominican Republic and not coming back for months, or ever. In 2011, Mr. Hoxha said, 250 students, more than half the student body, left in the middle of the year. "The problem here is you take this school out, who's going to address these students now?" Mr. Hoxha asked. "Kids are still going to come in from another country." The changes overwhelmed the school. Some who worked with Mr. Hoxha praised his character and devotion to students. "Hoxha is by the books," said Lucia Ramistella, 61, a former assistant principal at Levin. She said Mr. Hoxha would never stand for teachers' altering grades to make the school look good. "There are schools where, I know, teachers have gotten caught and are recycled in the system." But Lesley A. Terry, a former English teacher at the school who had worked with Mr. Levin, said several teachers were frustrated by Mr. Hoxha, finding him dispassionate. In April, state education officials, during a quality review, found that despite the school's promise of a "groundbreaking, media based education," carts of laptop computers often remained out of students' hands. Ms. Terry said the school should have strengthened its theme as a media center, since it had Don Cerrone, a veteran Hollywood grip with credits on "Glory" and "The Shawshank Redemption," on its staff. Mr. Hoxha tried altering the daily structure of the school. Instead of students moving from classroom to classroom between periods, the standard method, he had them stay in the same room, with the teachers moving instead, so the children would not linger in the halls, arrive late for classes or leave at midday. "After a while, that did not work," said Ms. Terry, who retired in July after 30 years of teaching in the Taft building. "Kids were tired of sitting in one room all day long. Some kids, if the teacher didn't have control, would up and walk out of the room." Marc Sternberg, a deputy chancellor in the city's Education Department, acknowledged that Levin had a lot of students with high needs. But he saw its failures in a different way. In 2010, the city began publishing graduation rates in the directory of high schools given to eighth graders, in keeping with the Bloomberg administration's free market approach to education. And it had the intended result. In the next year, applications shot up at schools with high graduation rates; the reverse happened at schools with low rates. Levin's enrollment dipped to 339 this year, from 484 in 2007. The number of non English speaking students with high needs did not so much grow as become a larger part of the school. And because financing is based on enrollment, the school lost money, and amenities like the baseball field could not be kept up. Sure, the city could try a round of interventions to try to resuscitate the Levin High School, Mr. Sternberg said. "But we should not be patient," he said. "There needs to be urgency here." He also said several schools with comparable student makeups, including two at the Taft complex, were "getting dramatically different outcomes," keeping up a 50 percent graduation rate or greater. "What we are doing now is we are starting from scratch after having just started from scratch," said Clara Hemphill, who is project director for the center and the editor of insideschools.org, a guide for parents. "We cannot keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect getting a different result, creating another brand new small school which is just like the other brand new small schools. It is not going to solve the problem." Jonathan Levin's name will not adorn the school that replaces it, known for now as 09X350, though Mr. Sternberg said the city would find a way to honor Mr. Levin. Housing grades 6 through 12, he said, the school's aim will be to catch lagging students early. The school will work in tandem with Claremont International High School, which is already occupying part of the building and is designed to serve recent immigrants. The closing of Levin is expected to be approved by the Panel for Educational Policy, a school oversight board controlled by the mayor, on March 11. Last month, in Levin's auditorium, the Education Department held its required public hearing on the closing, and students, teachers, union leaders and others spent nearly five hours trying to talk Mr. Sternberg and other city officials into changing their minds. Though many agreed it was failing, they said the theme at the center of it the media program Mr. Levin envisioned was so vibrant it meant the entire institution deserved a second chance. Several alumni singled out Mr. Cerrone, the Hollywood veteran, in the audience, crediting him with giving them a lifeline to their futures. He was "like a father to many of us," said Quintasia Stratton, who graduated in 2008. "When I got here, all I had to do was say, 'Hey, what's that?' And he put a 600 camera in my hands and trusted me with it." One of those in attendance was Mr. Levin's mother, Carol N. Levin. His death prompted her to put her own teaching degree to use. By 2005, she had taken a job at the Bronx High School of Business, in the same building where her son had worked, which last year got its third consecutive C grade on a progress report and is seen as being on its last legs. "Jon just had such a feel for poor, disenfranchised students," his mother, 72, said in an interview last week. "He held them to a standard. He expected great things from them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
U.S. health officials on Monday added pregnancy to the list of conditions that put people with Covid 19 at increased risk of developing severe illness, including a heightened risk of death. While most pregnant women infected with the coronavirus have not become severely ill, the new caution is based on a large study that looked at tens of thousands of pregnant women who had Covid 19 symptoms. The study found they were significantly more likely to require intensive care, to be connected to a specialized heart lung bypass machine, and to require mechanical ventilation than nonpregnant women of the same age who had Covid symptoms. Most importantly, the pregnant women faced a 70 percent increased risk of death, when compared to nonpregnant women who were symptomatic. The study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the largest such study so far, examined the outcomes of 409,462 symptomatic women ages 15 to 44 who tested positive for the coronavirus, 23,434 of whom were pregnant. "We are now saying pregnant women are at increased risk for severe illness. Previously we said they 'might be' at increased risk for severe illness," said Sascha Ellington, a health scientist with the C.D.C., and one of the authors of the new study. Still, Dr. Ellington emphasized that the overall risk of both complications and death was low. "The absolute risk of these severe outcomes is low among women 15 to 44, regardless of pregnancy status, but what we do see is an increased risk associated with pregnancy," she said. Dr. Denise Jamieson, chair of gynecology and obstetrics at Emory University School of Medicine, said the new data underscore the importance of pregnant women taking extra precautions to avoid exposure to the virus, including avoiding social gatherings and interactions with people even members of their own households who may have been exposed or become infected. "This is new information that adds to the growing body of evidence, and really underscores the importance of pregnant women protecting themselves from Covid," Dr. Jamieson said. "It's important that they wear a mask, and avoid people who are not wearing a mask." But, she said, women should not skip prenatal care visits and must get the vaccines they need, like flu shots, and noted that the study indicates pregnant women should have access to a safe and effective Covid vaccine, once one is available. An earlier study did not find a higher risk of death among pregnant Covid patients, but the pregnant patients in the new study were 1.7 times more likely to die than nonpregnant patients. That amounted to a death rate of 1.5 per 1,000 cases among the symptomatic pregnant women, compared with 1.2 per 1,000 cases of symptomatic women who were not pregnant. Even after adjustments were made for differences in age, race, ethnicity and underlying health conditions like diabetes and lung disease, the pregnant women were three times more likely than nonpregnant women to be admitted to an intensive care unit and 2.9 times more likely to receive mechanical ventilation. The study also highlighted racial and ethnic disparities. Nearly one third of the pregnant women who had Covid were Hispanic. And while Black women represented 14 percent of the pregnant women included in the analysis, nine of 34 deaths were Black women. Dr. Ellington emphasized the importance of taking precautions to avoid infection, saying pregnant women should limit interactions to avoid people who may have been exposed. "Pregnant women should be counseled about the importance of seeking prompt medical care if they have symptoms," the authors wrote. A smaller study, also released Monday from the C.D.C., reported that women who tested positive for the coronavirus were at increased risk for delivering their babies prematurely, finding that 12.9 percent of live births among a sample of 3,912 women were preterm births, compared with 10.2 percent in the general population. The sample was not nationally representative, but the finding echoes earlier reports that warned of a higher risk for preterm deliveries. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
A game between Cafeteros del Carazo and Leones de Leon in Managua, Nicaragua, on April 7. After Cafeteros del Carazo won, fans participated in a caravan that ended with a rally in Jinotepe, the team's hometown. All over the world, sports have shut down. Yet in one country, an alternate universe exists with a very full sports calendar. Nearly two weeks ago, a national boxing tournament in Nicaragua began as planned. A couple weekends ago, a marathon was run in Managua, the country's capital. Last week, after an important game in the country's popular semiprofessional baseball league, fans participated in a caravan that ended with a rally in the town of Jinotepe's main square. Nary a mask was in sight, nor was social distancing followed. And the five scheduled matches last week in the country's top professional soccer league were played, albeit in stadiums closed to the public. Despite protests by some players and teams, La Liga Primera is the only professional soccer league still in action in the Western Hemisphere. The continued mass gatherings in Nicaragua, one of the few countries, along with Belarus and Tajikistan, that are fully carrying on with professional sports, has worried international health officials and sports figures alike. "It's inconceivable," said Dennis Martinez, a former star pitcher in Major League Baseball and one of the most famous athletes from the Central American country of more than six million people. He added: "As a Nicaraguan, I'm very worried about everything there. I see it from a humanitarian perspective. It hurts me to see that we can't react to reality." Camilo Velasquez, a Nicaraguan soccer journalist who runs FutbolNica, said he felt ashamed that "the world sees Nicaragua as foolish." "There aren't any sports at a worldwide level, but all eyes are now looking at the four corners of the world where there is sufficient authoritarianism to keep exposing their soccer players," he said. Nicaragua has not closed its borders and is the only country in Central America that has not declared a state of emergency. As nations around the world locked down, Nicaragua announced it would not enact a quarantine, and Ortega's wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, called for large public marches across the country under the slogan "Love in the Time of Covid 19." As of Monday, the authorities in Nicaragua, the poorest country in Central America, had reported only one death and just nine confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus all imported from abroad. They have also said that their efforts, like follow up phone calls with recently arrived travelers or campaigns to promote hygiene, have been successful. "We don't have local community transmission, infinite thanks to God," Murillo said during a speech on Thursday. Still, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, which had 137 confirmed cases as of Monday, has publicly questioned the veracity of Nicaragua's low numbers and suggested that the country's insufficient measures could make the outbreak worse in the region. Nicaragua's neighbors, Costa Rica and Honduras, have nearly 1,000 cases and 30 deaths combined, according to the World Health Organization. Dr. Carissa F. Etienne, the director of the Pan American Health Organization, said last week that her institution was concerned about a litany of problems in Nicaragua from mass gatherings to the testing itself and "what we see as inadequate infection prevention and control." Sports are "a bit like giving bread and circuses to the people," Velasquez said. "The government,'' he added, "fears that the Covid 19 situation creates the perfect argument for the opposition to create a sense of a national stoppage or strike." With some exceptions, Nicaraguan sports are largely funded and directed by the national and local governments. Carlos Reyes, the commissioner of the national baseball league, said in a telephone interview that the coronavirus outbreak wasn't yet a problem in the sport, that fans were constantly reminded to wash their hands, and that the already hard hit economy needed to carry on. He noted that the 18 team league was following the lead of the country's health and sports officials. "We can't decide on our own," he said. "If they tell us to stop, we would." Orlando Canales, a spokesman for the soccer league, echoed that sentiment and said the league's leaders had not deemed it necessary to suspend the 18 game season. The league, which broadcasts its games on television and online, did vote on March 20 to close the stands. (League officials have noticed an uptick in viewership and betting on their games.) A 20 team national basketball tournament recently suspended play until after Easter because the parents of youth players guided by "fear and disinformation," the director of sports for the municipality of Managua, Noel Gonzalez, said in a text message didn't allow their children to attend games. Gonzalez expressed confidence in public health officials and said that preventive measures had been shared with all teams. Other parts of society have pushed back. There have been grass roots campaigns to inform the public about the benefits of staying home. Some businesses have shuttered on their own. Traffic has slowed. While attendance at baseball games is down in Managua, fans in more rural areas, at the government's urging, have still filled stadiums. "They should have stopped the games already," said Edgar Tijerino, a longtime Nicaraguan sports journalist and broadcaster. One baseball player paid dearly for his refusal to play. According to local news reports, Robin Zeledon informed his team, the Brumas de Jinotega, on March 25 that he no longer wanted to play because he was worried about becoming infected with the coronavirus and spreading it to his family. The team suspended him for a year and stopped paying his monthly salary of nearly 200 a month. Reyes, the league's commissioner, disputed reports about Zeledon's departure, saying the player had left the team for other reasons and been punished for snapping at a coach. Zeledon didn't respond to a Facebook message seeking comment. Martinez, nicknamed El Presidente because he is beloved in his homeland, called Zeledon courageous and reprimanded those overseeing sports in Nicaragua, in an interview with the country's largest newspaper, La Prensa. Calling from his home in Miami, Martinez added more last week, "One of the problems that exists there is the lack of independence of the institutions." Soon after that game, the 19 year old forward Sebastian Barquero, a Costa Rican, said he had told Diriangen officials that he wanted to return home, which the team allowed. A few other foreign players have done the same. Speaking via WhatsApp from his home in Heredia, Costa Rica, where he was finishing the second week of his government mandated 14 day quarantine, Barquero said he was alarmed by the lax behavior concerning the coronavirus that he saw in Nicaragua. "I don't know why they haven't stopped playing yet," he said. "Across the entire world, soccer has stopped but not in Nicaragua." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"You have these moments where you're like: Are you kidding me? Again?" said Karen Soltero, who faced many hardships before meeting Andres Pena, who is 16 years younger. He brought vitality to her life. When it came to romance, Karen Soltero adhered to two strict guidelines: "Don't get involved with someone whose hair is nicer or longer than yours, and don't date anyone you could have potentially given birth to." So in April 2018, when Ms. Soltero found herself chatting with Andres Pena, whose hair was twisted into a small knot atop his crown, she paused. "I never trust a guy in a man bun," said Ms. Soltero, 45, who works in sales in the Dallas office of Stampede, a global audio visual distributor based in Buffalo. This was even before she learned that he was 16 years, 4 months younger than her. But she had no chance to put her dating rules into action. The minute Mr. Pena, 28, who then worked for QA Systems, an audio visual integrator in Austin, Tex., spotted her he was smitten. After drinks, the group moved to dinner, but Mr. Pena showed up after everyone was already seated. The only available spot was next to Ms. Soltero. He grabbed it. Over seafood and French 75's, a cocktail made from gin, Champagne, lemon juice and sugar, she learned that he had been born in Monterrey, Mexico, but moved to San Antonio, Tex., at 14. He had two brothers and four half brothers, and a dry sense of humor. She was charmed, but wary. "He was cocky and overly self confident," she said. He, in turn, was intrigued by the blue eyed, raven haired woman before him, who he would learn was more than just a pretty face. "She was fun yet shy, intelligent yet goofy, spontaneous yet grounded, sweet yet tough," he said. "There were people I dated at multiple points in my life I could have married and had kids with, but I was never willing to have a starter marriage just to have babies," she said. In 2013, a group A strep infection somehow got into her bloodstream, which morphed into necrotizing fasciitis, a flesh eating bacteria. Doctors almost had to amputate her leg to save her life; she spent three weeks in the hospital and had 13 surgeries. "I remember my mother saying to the doctor, 'I already lost one daughter, you keep her alive,'" said Ms. Soltero, who has a 22 inch scar on her left leg from the ordeal. Four years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a double mastectomy. "You have these moments where you're like: Are you kidding me? Again?" she said. Mr. Pena also understood hardship. When he first moved to the United States with his mother and two brothers, he went through major cultural challenges. At 10 he almost died after his appendix burst. His relationships didn't pan out, either. For years he dated only Mexican women, but secretly he wanted something less traditional. "I always wanted an independent woman, someone who didn't need me," said Mr. Pena, who has a degree in civil engineering from the University of Texas, Austin. "I knew I was going to be with a very liberal Mexican girl or a more progressive American girl." Ms. Soltero may have been the American woman of his dreams, but when he learned her age, he hedged. He wanted children, and he didn't know how she felt about that. Still, they had so much fun and were so comfortable together during the Masters golf events, that he brushed his concerns aside. Before the weekend in Georgia ended, he announced that he was going to take her to dinner when they returned to Dallas. Not a question, a fact. Ms. Soltero told her mother about the slightly arrogant young man she had just met, and how she worried about the age and cultural differences. "I said, go for it!" said Elizabeth Soltero, who works in clinical cardiovascular research. "She just seemed so happy." Ms. Soltero also knew that her sister would have approved of Mr. Pena. In a way, it felt as if she had sent him to her. "I thought, 'This is the universe giving me a positive connotation to the name,'" she said. They went out for Cinco de Mayo, and Ms. Soltero realized that it wasn't ego that was fueling Mr. Pena, but confidence. "This guy was just good with who he is," she said. "That was a surprising and very different thing to experience." What he didn't know was that Ms. Soltero had frozen her eggs at 40. Coincidentally, shortly after going out with Mr. Pena for the first time, she had an appointment with her fertility doctor to discuss whether to move forward on her own. "The doctor said, 'You'll need sperm in its 20s,'" she said with a laugh. "I thought, well, maybe this younger guy is sort of serendipitous. It was uncanny timing to get some tall dark sperm." The couple soon realized that despite their chronological age differences, they were at the same place in their lives. "Age is just a number for how long you've been on the planet," she said. Mr. Pena's mother, Reyna Castano, an artist, agreed. "I see them together and I see how happy and in love they are," she said in Spanish, adding that the age difference "is not important to me." Ms. Soltero sees herself as a young soul. "A lot of my life stopped at 26 when Wendy died," she said. "My growing up got stunted in a way, so I lost some time. A lot of my life now is about capturing youth and energy and vitality." Mr. Pena "just lifts her," said Molly Setnick, Ms. Soltero's closest childhood friend. "Not that she was sinking and she didn't need saving, but it's like the Shel Silverstein story 'The Missing Piece.' The better version of that story is Karen and Andres because she was missing a piece and he was probably missing a piece, too. They fit together." In a break from tradition, and to erase memories of Wendy Soltero's killer, the couple will legally take Mr. Pena's mother's maiden name, Castano, as their new surname. "My mom has always been there with me through thick and thin, showing me how to be compassionate, loving, and resilient," he said. "We want to honor that special relationship I have with my mom, and allow a new generation to carry the Castano name." Ms. Soltero also pointed out that soltero means single in Spanish, which she isn't anymore. "It kind of makes sense to get rid of it," she said. Dinner Redux As is the custom in Mexican weddings, there were two sit down meals, along with a midnight after party at the Soltero family home. Wedding by 7 11: Wendy Soltero often bought gag gifts at 7 Eleven. Ms. Soltero's college friends, Laura Ellett and Siobhan O'Neill, gifted the couple a squeezable, honking, bright green rubber chicken, whose mission was to photo bomb the wedding couple's honeymoon pictures. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'CATCH AS CATCH CAN' at the New Ohio Theater (in previews; opens on Oct. 31). In this Page 73 production, mothers and sons and fathers and daughters are a little closer than usual. Mia Chung's play stars three actors: Jeff Biehl, Michael Esper and Jeanine Serralles (all names that light up a cast list). Each of them portrays two members of working class New England families. Ken Rus Schmoll directs. 866 811 4111, page73.org 'THE CHER SHOW' at the Neil Simon Theater (previews start on Nov. 1; opens on Dec. 3). Gypsies, tramps, thieves and ticket holders will be lining up for this biographical musical. Using Rick Elice's book and 35 (35!) of Cher's songs, three actresses tell the story of one life and many headdresses. Jason Moore directs Stephanie J. Block, Teal Wicks and Micaela Diamond, while the costume designer Bob Mackie directs a lot of sequins. 877 250 2929, thechershowbroadway.com 'DANIEL'S HUSBAND' at Westside Theater Upstairs (in previews; opens on Oct. 28). Michael McKeever's play, perhaps the world's first gay marriage tragedy, which had its New York premiere in 2017, returns for an encore performance. While the drama has some awkward dialogue and some very unlikely plot details, it's still a tear jerker. Matthew Montelongo and Ryan Spahn return to their original roles. 212 239 6200, danielshusband.com 'DAYS OF RAGE' at the Tony Kiser Theater at Second Stage Theater (in previews; opens on Oct. 30). In 1968, in a divided America, five young adults negotiate wars abroad and conflagrations back home. Trip Cullman directs a script by Steven Levenson, the "Dear Evan Hansen" book writer and a master of divided loyalties. Tavi Gevinson ("This Is Our Youth") and Mike Faist ("Dear Evan Hansen") star. 212 246 4422, 2st.com 'GOOD GRIEF' at the Vineyard Theater (in previews; opens on Oct. 30). This play, written by and starring Ngozi Anyanwu ("Homecoming Queen"), centers on a medical school dropout, Nkechi, rocked by the death of a friend. As Nkechi tries to memorialize him, memory and truth wrangle. The director Awoye Timpo's cast also includes Oberon K. A. Adjepong and Hunter Parrish. 212 353 0303, vineyardtheatre.org 'A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM' at the Public Theater (previews start on Oct. 28; opens on Nov. 2). The Public Theater's Mobile Unit has taken its fairy forests to prisons, homeless shelters and senior centers and now returns to Lafayette Street. Jenny Koons directs an imaginative production of this woodland comedy. Nine actors play fairies, mortals and some very rude mechanicals. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'NATURAL SHOCKS' at WP Theater (previews start on Oct. 28; opens on Nov. 8). With a title borrowed from "Hamlet" and a theme wrested from the headlines, Lauren Gunderson's new play, directed by May Adrales, stars Pascale Armand as a woman preparing for a tornado that may not be all it seems. In April, Gunderson made the play available to any group that wanted to host a reading to fund raise for gun control. This is its professional premiere. 866 811 4111, wptheater.org 'TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD' at the Shubert Theater (previews start on Nov. 1; opens on Dec. 13). A small town courthouse drama that weighs a nation in its scales, Harper Lee's novel arrives on Broadway adapted by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Bartlett Sher. (The adaptation was briefly involved in its own courtroom drama.) Jeff Daniels stars as Atticus Finch, with Celia Keenan Bolger as Scout, Will Pullen as Jem and Gideon Glick as Dill. 212 239 6200, tokillamockingbirdbroadway.com 'TORCH SONG' at Second Stage at the Hayes Theater (in previews; opens on Nov. 1). Harvey Fierstein's extravagant, lacerating comedy is back on Broadway. When Moises Kaufman's production ran last winter Off Broadway, Ben Brantley described the final scenes, a confrontation between Michael Urie and Mercedes Ruehl, "too painful, too private and quite possibly too close to your own home for public consumption." 212 239 6200, torchsongbroadway.com 'THUNDERBODIES' at Soho Rep (in previews; opens on Oct. 27). The war is over and everything is weird in America, including the weather. The breathlessly inventive Soho Rep presents the world premiere of Kate Tarker's play. Directed by Lileana Blain Cruz, the drama, which stars Deirdre O'Connell and Juan Carlos Hernandez, coins a new and very relevant portmanteau: "normible," normal and terrible at the same time. 866 811 4111, sohorep.org 'WILD GOOSE DREAMS' at the Public Theater (previews start on Oct. 30; opens on Nov. 14). In Hansol Jung's play, a North Korean defector and a South Korean father separated from his family, try to connect, first online and then, with emotions rather than emojis, in real life. Under Leigh Silverman's direction, the cast, portraying humans and avatars, includes Peter Kim, Michelle Krusiec and Francis Jue. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'ON BECKETT' at the Irish Repertory Theater (closes on Nov. 4). In this almost solo show, Bill Irwin, scholar and clown, interrogates his relationship with the craggy playwright Samuel Beckett. Through Irwin's performance of excerpts from the works he has spent a whole career wrestling with, the show, Ben Brantley writes, "illuminates the notoriously opaque writings of Beckett without ever betraying their ineffable heart." 866 811 4111, irishrep.org 'WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME' at New York Theater Workshop (closes on Nov. 4). In this visceral show, the playwright Heidi Schreck attempts to recreate a speech she delivered in American Legion halls as a teen. The result is both a constitutional law seminar and a memoir of her family's history with domestic violence. Ben Brantley called it "an endlessly open ended conversation." 212 460 5475, nytw.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
We have long counted on our elders to act with a dignity befitting their advanced years and to express their sagacity through philosophically weighty language. Until, that is, the advent of social media. "I wonder how I'd look with a beard ... ItsMy2Cents," Larry King, 83, posted on Twitter in January. "Who Looks At a TUBA, Thinks ... 'DAMN ... IM GONNA SHRED fire emoji ON THAT MO FO,'" tweeted Cher, 70, illustrating the message with a crudely Photoshopped graphic of Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. both playing the nonflammable instrument in question. And Donald J. Trump, also 70, took to Twitter to never mind. While brand boosting celebrities and reality show hosts turned presidents may be too easy a mark, anyone who is friends on Facebook with a person of a certain age has witnessed similar behavior. Seniors used to maintain a wary distance from new technology, perhaps calling in someone younger to help them record an outgoing message on an answering machine or set up an AOL address. But in this era of smartphones and broadband, the shackles are off. The aging hipsters of Gen X have long impersonated millennials online. Now Boomers and their parents, the last adults standing, may also be succumbing to the lures of technology assisted infantilization. According to a Pew Research Center report, almost three fifths of people 65 and over reported going online in 2015, by far the fastest growing demographic since 2000, with 62 percent of that group currently using Facebook (the numbers are much smaller for Twitter and Instagram). Diving into the internet's refreshing fountain of youth, a surprising number of grandparents are acting like their grandchildren in ways rarely seen outside of latter day Jack Nicholson comedies. Reverse role modeling may be the reason for their "Cocoon 2.0" like regression. When those younger than you are engaging in callow activities on the internet selfies, boasting, acronym filled rants, links to ostensibly humorous videos and getting validated for it, peer pressure can alter the conduct of any user, even one eligible for Social Security. "The one way you can tell it's an older person using social media is when they pass on some mass consumption piece titled 'Check this out LOL' that calls attention to itself while telling you it's supposed to be funny," said Jim O'Grady, 57, a reporter for the public radio station WNYC in New York. "That's a guarantee it's not going to be funny." Not helping their cause is that older people are late adopters, Mr. O'Grady said, and thus still unfamiliar with online mores. "We all had to learn together how to absorb the common etiquette that we go by on social media," he said. "They're prone to those tonal mistakes more than younger people for whom it's their native language." Beyond aping youngsters, there is something inherently juvenile about social media. To begin with, it elevates superficiality, speed and the image all youthful preoccupations over depth, deliberation and text, which we associate with mature adults. "We're in a transitional period where older people are trying to figure out how to use social media without losing credibility, in a venue that really wasn't designed for them," said Krystine Batcho, 65, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse with a part time practice. "To some extent, nostalgia can be psychologically healthy. But revisiting your childhood has to be done in moderation. You never want to lose your dignity; you want to retain the image we have of a wise elder." Part of the challenge with presenting this august appearance is that social media is as much about the self as it is about connecting with others. Frequently, of course, it functions as a convenient forum for disseminating news and photos to far flung relatives and friends. Instances of blatant narcissism, however, are at odds with what we expect of older adults, who have supposedly shed the petty, puerile vanities of the developing ego. Old age has the potential "to liberate our mind to the vision of the immensity of the world, of which we form an infinitesimal part," as Carl Jung wrote in a 1960 letter to a fellow octogenarian, the Earl of Sandwich. No one bats an eye when college students brag about how much fun they're having on vacation, but it's jarring to see the same from recent retirees who, one presumes, should be sufficiently content with their private experiences not to publicize them. And yet the senior set is still susceptible to the insecurities sparked by evidence of peers' seemingly happier lives. "Even at my age, it's easy to feel competitive, jealous, left out on social media," said Tracy Pennoyer, 63, a clinical psychologist focusing on diagnostic evaluations of children and adolescents in Westport, Conn. "It stirs up those feelings and juvenile thoughts of 'I'm not cool' that I might have had when I was younger. You think you've outgrown those decades ago, but no, they're right there, waiting to pop out." The desire for online approval, through "likes" and heart symbols, can reduce even a sturdy sexagenarian to a fragile middle schooler. "The concrete venue does bring out past emotions you might have considered to be a time that's gone in your life," Dr. Batcho said. Ms. Pennoyer, an amateur photographer, frequently posts her pictures to Facebook and Instagram and understandably finds herself paying attention to how much engagement they inspire. She recalled seeing Facebook photos of an acquaintance's birthday party to which she was not invited. "I shouldn't have been invited, and if someone had just mentioned it to me, I wouldn't have cared," she said. "But when you actually see a picture of a table with 20 people, it's in your face." As for activities incongruous with seniority, Dr. Batcho theorized that some adults behave childishly, online and off, because of shifting household demographics and unsatisfied nostalgia. "Back when people had larger families, they revisited childhood several times through their kids," she said. "Now, when family size has shrunk, they have unfulfilled needs." Yet an even stronger impulse may be our culture's fixation on denying death, strengthened by the medical progress of our age. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
If Hillary Clinton brushed aside medical advice to rest after getting a diagnosis of mild pneumonia, she was risking developing a more serious case, medical experts said Monday. Pneumonia which leads to infiltration of fluid into the lungs, leaving a patient short of breath and often feverish but still able to function can become serious or even fatal if it is not properly treated, doctors said. The illness can be caused by viruses, bacteria or, less often, fungi or damage from toxic fumes. Without extensive testing, which is not normally needed, it is impossible to know what caused Mrs. Clinton's case. Mrs. Clinton's doctor released a statement saying that the illness was diagnosed on Friday morning and that she was advised to "rest and modify her schedule." Her team has released very little information about her condition: exactly how it was diagnosed; what antibiotics she is taking; the results of any blood work, chest X ray or other diagnostic tests that may have been performed; or whether she has any underlying condition that made her vulnerable to the illness. On Monday, a campaign spokesman said that more medical information would be released this week and that those records would show she had "no other undisclosed condition." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Credit...Janie Osborne for The New York Times It's taken two decades to clean up most of Silver Bow Creek, polluted from a century of mining. Now some Butte residents want the last two miles restored, to babble on through the city. BUTTE, Mont. The first flecks of gold found here in 1864 were along a creek whose meanders, sparkling in the sun, earned it the name Silver Bow. The discovery turned into a full blown gold rush and in the 1860s, swarms of miners tore at the tiny stream for its riches. Butte, though, was birthed from the "copper womb," as one poet wrote, a far richer lode. After thousands of miles of tunnels were dynamited and drilled, a giant open pit copper mine was dug near the headwaters of the creek. Over the years, the stream was polluted beyond recognition. Mine waste was dumped into it from smoke belching factories that concentrated ore, and the creek was rerouted and tapped to satisfy industrial demands. A massive flood in 1908 washed tons of waste along the length of the creek. Raw sewage ran into it until the 1960s. Most life in the stream and along its banks was wiped out. Along the banks of the Silver Bow, cattle bones turned an almost neon blue green from high levels of copper in the water. "Since I can remember, people have always said, 'Don't go near Silver Bow Creek,'" said Ellen Crain, director of the Butte Silver Bow Public Archives, which chronicles the mining history here. For the last two decades, though, most of Silver Bow Creek has been meticulously rebuilt and restored by removing more than a million cubic yards of tainted soil and rock along most of its stretch, at a cost of about 150 million. Now just two miles or so of the battered creek is unreclaimed including a stretch that runs through neighborhoods in this city. In late May, after eight years of court ordered secrecy surrounding the cleanup, some of the veil was lifted and the Environmental Protection Agency released its plan for finishing it. A portion will be rerouted, this time to serve ecological goals. But there are no plans to restore the last mile of Silver Bow, running through some neighborhoods. And that has led to more upset in this town of 34,000. "I want to see a clean, restored and meandering Silver Bow Creek through town," said Fritz Daily, a former state legislator who once worked in the mines and is now head of the Silver Bow Creek Headwaters Coalition. "We not only want and need a clean, meandering creek, we are entitled to it." As mining wound down, Anaconda was purchased by the Atlantic Richfield Company. The company soon shuttered the mine, and became saddled with the largest Superfund complex in the United States: toxic sites sprawled across western Montana. They included the giant copper smelter at Anaconda; contaminated soil around the city of Butte; the yawning Berkeley Pit; the 120 mile long Clark Fork River and Milltown dam which has since been removed and Silver Bow, a tributary to the river. Silver Bow Creek was once 26 or so miles long from its headwaters on the Continental Divide, where a tiny thread of water joined Yankee Doodle and Dixie Creeks, each worked by miners from opposing sides in the Civil War. Some 24 miles of the creek below Butte, all the way to where it flows into the Clark Fork River and on to the Columbia River, have been restored. It's far cleaner, but will never be its old self. There are, in the best stretches, some 200 catchable fish per mile, while comparable streams have a thousand per mile. "If someone had told me 20 years ago I'd be catching trout here, I'd have taken that bet," said Matt Vincent, a former local government executive and now a consultant who has been working on the cleanup for two decades, as he stood on the bank. The recently announced plan calls for the portion of Silver Bow that flows through Slag Canyon whose walls are made of mine waste to be rerouted into a new channel away from the waste's toxic soils. The plan also calls for cleaning up hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of buried mine waste along the creek's route. It's a relief for many who feared that the confidential negotiations among the state, the E.P.A. and officials from Atlantic Richfield would leave vast amounts of mine tailings waste, or ore waste, in the ground where it was dumped by mining companies. Many here simply do not trust the science that found that "waste in place" is a safe alternative. In fact, some buried tailings have been leaching contaminated water the color of blue Gatorade into the reclaimed creek. They are to be dug up and taken away in the coming months, to property owned by a mining company here. But there is still concern that there's no plan to reclaim the last mile of the little creek. In a state famous for pristine trout streams and the film "A River Runs Through It," those who support a flowing, babbling last mile see it as a way to transform Butte from being one of the country's largest Superfund sites, to something more befitting. Upper Silver Bow , in east central Butte, has a long way to go. It's a shadow of its former self, dry and rerouted and looking like little more than a undistinguished ditch. Until two years ago, it was officially called the Metro Storm Drain, until Mr. Daily and others won a four year court battle against the state to have it renamed Silver Bow Creek, so the state would be required to restore it. What is a new creek worth? The price tag for cleanup is now about 8 million per stream mile. A clean creek and the tailings removal would help Butte reduce its toxic stigma, Mr. Daily said, and symbolize a new start. At football and other sporting events, Butte teams are taunted by cries of "dirty water," and it's difficult to recruit health care professionals to the country's largest Superfund complex, he added. "There's still work to do," he said. Jon Sesso, the Butte Silver Bow Superfund coordinator, said that even though there is no plan for a new creek, he's hopeful it will come about in several years, once the nearby tailings are removed. "It's complicated," he said. "There's no headwaters, no water you can count on. It's flat as a pancake east to west through that corridor, and you can't change topography," so a creek may not flow, and there are not headwaters because they are cut off from the creek. But there is a water source if it can be secured: the Berkeley Pit, the mile wide hole on the edge of Butte where copper was once mined. When a new treatment plant is finished, about seven million gallons of clean water a day will be pumped out from the 50 billion gallons in the pit. It's hoped it will become the new "headwaters" for the last mile of Silver Bow Creek. It might work. Because the toxic water in the pit will contaminate the ground water if it continues to fill, water must be pumped out of the pit and treated in perpetuity to keep it from reaching that level. Atlantic Richfield has created a fund to maintain the treatment plant forever. Mr. Daily said that he and others will continue to push for the stream to flow through the heart of Butte. "We're at a crossroads," Mr. Daily said. "If cleaning up the creek and waste and the quality of the water in the pit do not happen, this community is going to fail economically, environmentally and socially." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
If you have been paying any attention to America's paralyzed politics, you are not going to believe this. Even as substantive legislation in Washington remained largely bogged down by bitter partisan mistrust, some of the leading thinkers on opposite sides of the ideological divide experts on the right who have advised Republican policy makers alongside left leaning scholars who have Democrats' ear came together to champion an increase in the minimum wage. They didn't stop there. In a report published in December by the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, they also recommended attaching a job requirement to the food stamp program, to compel poor people to work. They strongly endorsed marriage, as well as birth control. They called for increasing the earned income tax credit for adults without children. They also proposed more federal investment in early childhood education and community colleges. They defended a common core in education. To pay for it all, they recommended culling corporate boondoggles and individual tax expenditures that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, like farm subsidies and the mortgage interest tax deduction. And they urged reducing Social Security benefits for affluent Americans. These folks do not often agree. The group included Robert Doar of the conservative American Enterprise Institute and Lawrence Mead of New York University, who believe that welfare should come with stiff work requirements to discourage dependency. They sat across from Sheldon Danziger of the Russell Sage Foundation and Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University, who believe in a cash safety net of last resort, at least for families with children. "Everybody had to swallow very hard to put their name on that," acknowledged Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, who was part of the 15 member group. It is easy to dismiss the exercise as a futile effort to find a minimum common denominator between disparate opposites. The report is not likely to make its way into legislation any time soon. But, the experts hope, the next administration might turn its attention to poverty and find a set of viable ideas on the shelf. The collection of proposals from promoting strong and stable families to improving the quantity and quality of work actually adds up to a coherent approach to improving an anti poverty strategy that has fallen far short of its goals. This raises a tantalizing prospect. Is it possible that combating America's entrenched poverty the deepest among advanced industrialized nations may have finally become salient enough for the left and right to break through the ideological gridlock? "The report took us longer than we thought," Mr. Danziger told me. "But everybody agreed that even though there were things in it we didn't like, the package together would be better than the status quo." A dose of skepticism is probably wise. Preserving the bipartisan balance drafted over the course of 14 months, with New York University's Jonathan Haidt in the role of ideological mediator required a lot of vagueness that would never survive the rough and tumble of the real political arena. Touchy subjects like race were mostly left off the table. And though bipartisanship may have committed both sides to work from the same facts, it did nothing to alter how each side weighed them. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Consider the call to increase the minimum wage. The scholars made note of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's recent assessment that the Obama administration's proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to 10.10 from 7.25 and index it to inflation would provide higher pay to 16 million to 24 million workers and lift a million people out of poverty at a cost of 500,000 jobs over three years and a slight uptick in consumer prices. This debate was a "clear example of how values can influence the reading of research evidence," the report admitted candidly. Nonetheless, in the service of a deal, those on the right and the left held their noses and agreed to "recommend an increase below what the administration has proposed, but still large enough to substantially improve the rewards associated with work among the less skilled." The two sides will never entirely agree, of course, partly because they view the causes of poverty from such different angles. To the left, deprivation is caused mostly by factors beyond the control of the poor. These include globalization that undercut good jobs previously within the reach of the less educated, an educational system segregated by race and class, lack of parental resources, discrimination, excessive use of prison. Experts on the right, by contrast, put a lot of the weight on personal responsibility, often faulting the bad choices of the poor. And government support, by providing the poor with an income with few strings attached, has made their choices worse. Yet common ground does exist. Understanding the causes of poverty has improved over the last few decades, helping push solutions through the ideological fog. Many liberals are still skeptical that encouraging marriage will do much to help the poor, but most have come to accept that the children of intact families have a better shot in life. Some conservatives have come to acknowledge that though the push to tie work requirements to public assistance may have made sense in the booming 1990s, the approach might require adjustments to fit the present, less dynamic economy. This opens up opportunities for deals. Conservatives want those on government aid to get a job? Liberals will agree, provided there is a guarantee that jobs are available and that there is a safety net for those at the very bottom who simply cannot work. "If we require more work as a condition of receiving public benefits, we should support policies expanding work availability to those who need it," the report states. Progressives, Mr. Danziger told me, placed more weight on the part of the report that calls for "ensuring jobs are available." Conservatives, by contrast, preferred the bit that mentioned "raising work levels among the hard to employ." This is the way deals are made. "This is modest," Mr. Danziger argued. "If we had a system where people were not fearful of the Tea Party or of unions, you could get 60 percent of the House and 60 percent of the Senate to agree." There is another hurdle that may be even harder to overcome: money. The report's "close tax expenditures" approach to financing useful proposals has become the standard Hail Mary pass. But given all the interests with a stake in the present tax system, it never seems to muster much support. As Mr. Strain put it, "it's impossible to deny that conservatives want to spend less money than liberals." Indeed, when House Speaker Paul D. Ryan proposed expanding the earned income tax credit, he favored paying for it by cutting funds for other anti poverty efforts. Still, it is worth seeking a deal. If the Democrats retain the White House while the Republicans maintain their grip on Congress, neither party will be able to dominate Washington policy making. For the poor, a compromise along these lines would be a lot better than doing nothing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Netflix announced on Wednesday that it had acquired the rights to develop Gabriel Garcia Marquez's seminal novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" more than 50 years after it was originally published, in 1967. It will be the first time the novel is adapted for the screen. It was not for lack of interest. In a recent call, the Nobel Prize winning novelist's son Rodrigo Garcia who will be an executive producer on the project along with his brother Gonzalo, said that his father had received many offers over the years to adapt the book to film. But, while some of his shorter books were adapted, his father was concerned that "One Hundred Years of Solitude" would not translate well or fit within a single movie (or even two), he added. Garcia Marquez was also committed to the story being told in Spanish, so many offers were "non starters" to him. "In the last three or four years, the level and prestige and success of series and limited series has grown so much," Garcia said about his family's decision to sell the development rights now. "Netflix was among the first to prove that people are more willing than ever to see series that are produced in foreign languages with subtitles. All that seems to be a problem that is no longer a problem." Francisco Ramos, the vice president for Spanish language originals at Netflix, said the company had tried before to obtain rights to the novel, but had been met with resistance. He noted the success of series like "Narcos" and movies like "Roma," which recently won the Oscar for best foreign language film, that have shown "we can make Spanish language content for the world." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
For a serious architect who has designed public housing in Dallas and a bridge in Slovenia, it may come as a surprise that Oana Stanescu's best known work is a 50 foot high volcano that Kanye West ascended onstage during his grandiose Yeezus tour. But then again, Ms. Stanescu, 32, is not your typical bespectacled architect, reaching for trophy buildings or lucrative commissions. Along with Dong Ping Wong, her partner in the West Village architectural firm Family, Ms. Stanescu is making a name for herself in design circles for her ability to merge pop culture with utilitarian design. Her firm recently completed the Hong Kong flagship store of Off White, a high end streetwear brand started by Virgil Abloh, Mr. West's creative director. Ms. Stanescu is one of the designers behind the Pool project, which is seeking to install a floating swimming pool in the East River. Other clients have included Marina Abramovic and the New Museum in New York. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
An unusual method for producing antibiotics may help solve an urgent global problem: the rise in infections that resist treatment with commonly used drugs, and the lack of new antibiotics to replace ones that no longer work. The method, which extracts drugs from bacteria that live in dirt, has yielded a powerful new antibiotic, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The new drug, teixobactin, was tested in mice and easily cured severe infections, with no side effects. Better still, the researchers said, the drug works in a way that makes it very unlikely that bacteria will become resistant to it. And the method developed to produce the drug has the potential to unlock a trove of natural compounds to fight infections and cancer molecules that were previously beyond scientists' reach because the microbes that produce them could not be grown in the laboratory. Teixobactin has not yet been tested in humans, so its safety and effectiveness are not known. Studies in people will not begin for about two years, according to Kim Lewis, the senior author of the article and director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in Boston. Those studies will take several years, so even if the drug passes all the required tests, it still will not be available for five or six years, he said during a telephone news conference on Tuesday. If it is approved, he said, it will probably have to be injected, not taken by mouth. Experts not involved with the research said the technique for isolating the drug had great potential. They also said teixobactin looked promising, but expressed caution because it has not yet been tested in humans. Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, called the research "ingenious" and said, "We're in desperate need of some good antibiotic news." Regarding teixobactin, he said: "It's at the test tube and the mouse level, and mice are not men or women, and so moving beyond that is a large step, and many compounds have failed." He added, "Toxicity is often the Achilles' heel of drugs." Dr. David A. Relman, a professor of medicine at Stanford, said by email, "It illustrates the amazing wealth and diversity of as yet unrecognized, potent, biologically active compounds made by the microbial world some of which may have real clinical value." He added, "We've been blind to the vast majority of them because of the biased and insensitive methods we use to discover drugs." The methods are flawed, he said, because they miss microbes that will not grow in the lab, and subject others to artificial conditions that may alter the array of potential drugs they produce. Drug resistant bacteria infect at least two million people a year in the United States and kill 23,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization warned last year that such infections were occurring all over the world, and that drug resistant strains of many diseases were emerging faster than new antibiotics could be made to fight them. Compounding the problem is the fact that many drug companies backed away from trying to develop new antibiotics in favor of other, more profitable, types of drugs. The new research is based on the premise that everything on earth plants, soil, people, animals is teeming with microbes that compete fiercely to survive. Trying to keep one another in check, the microbes secrete biological weapons: antibiotics. "The way bacteria multiply, if there weren't natural mechanisms to limit their growth, they would have covered the planet and eaten us all eons ago," Dr. Schaffner said. Scientists and drug companies have for decades exploited the microbes' natural arsenal, often by mining soil samples, and discovered lifesaving antibiotics like penicillin, streptomycin and tetracycline, as well as some powerful chemotherapy drugs for cancer. But disease causing organisms have become resistant to many existing drugs, and there has been a major obstacle to finding replacements, Dr. Lewis said: About 99 percent of the microbial species in the environment are bacteria that do not grow under usual laboratory conditions. Dr. Lewis and his colleagues found a way to grow them. The process involves diluting a soil sample the one that yielded teixobactin came from "a grassy field in Maine" and placing it on specialized equipment. Then, the secret to success is putting the equipment into a box full of the same soil that the sample came from. "Essentially, we're tricking the bacteria," Dr. Lewis said. Back in their native dirt, they divide and grow into colonies. Once the colonies form, Dr. Lewis said, the bacteria are "domesticated," and researchers can scoop them up and start growing them in petri dishes in the laboratory. The research was paid for by the National Institutes of Health and the German government (some co authors work at the University of Bonn). Northeastern University holds a patent on the method of producing drugs and licensed the patent to a private company, NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, in Cambridge, Mass., which owns the rights to any compounds produced. Dr. Lewis is a paid consultant to the company. Teixobactin is the most promising candidate isolated from 10,000 strains of bacteria that the researchers screened. In test tubes, it killed various types of staph and strep, as well as anthrax and tuberculosis. Tested in mice, it cleared strep infections and staph, including a strain that was drug resistant. It works against bacteria in a group known as "Gram positive," but not against microbes that are "Gram negative," which include some that are major causes of drug resistant pneumonia, gonorrhea and infections of the bladder and bloodstream. Dr. Lewis said researchers were trying to modify the drug to make it work against Gram negative infections. Twenty five other drug candidates were also identified, but most had drawbacks like toxicity or insolubility, Dr. Lewis said, adding that one, though toxic, may work against cancer and will be tested further. Teixobactin attacks bacteria by blocking fatty molecules needed to build cell walls, which is different from the way most antibiotics work. Those molecules are unlikely to change and make the microbes resistant, the researchers said. But if resistance does occur, Dr. Lewis predicted, it will take a long time to develop. Dr. Relman said the argument against resistance was reasonable. But he cautioned that "unsuspected mechanisms of resistance" sometimes develop, and that the only way to tell would be to monitor carefully what happens as the drug is used more and more. Dr. Lewis said he hoped the research would point the way to a new approach to searching for novel antibiotics. Until now, he said, scientists have assumed that resistance would inevitably develop, and that the only solution would require scrambling to develop new antibiotics in hopes of keeping up. "This gives us an alternative strategy," he said. "Develop compounds to which resistance will not develop." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
To understand how the current office market for technology companies can resemble a Russian nesting doll, with layer upon layer of increasingly smaller subleases, it might help to consider the upper stories of 568 Broadway in SoHo. In the cast iron former sewing factory, Scholastic, the publisher, is subletting two floors of space to Foursquare, a social media company. In turn, Foursquare is subletting one of those floors to a handful of other tech firms, including Fueled, which designs apps for phones. And Fueled has divided its column lined room as a co working space, where 650 a month gets a renter a seat and unlimited snacks from jars along a wall. One of those seats belongs to David Spiro, a self employed entrepreneur, who sat alone at the corner of a long table on a recent afternoon, a bag of popcorn by his laptop. "I've raised some funding," Mr. Spiro said, "but not nearly enough to afford a typical lease in Manhattan, so this place is great." The sentiment could also apply to the daisy chain of tenants in his building, and more broadly to the surrounding neighborhoods. In the last few months, the area of Manhattan south of Midtown has been awash in deals where early stage tech companies have opted to take over office space belonging to another tenant, rather than enter into a direct lease with a landlord. These sublet deals are often preferred, tenants and brokers say, because the rents are usually slightly cheaper than conventional leases. They can also be for shorter lengths of time than the typical 10 years and require a far smaller security deposit up front. As important, they say, is that the spaces usually come built out, which means essentials like high speed Internet lines, air conditioning and conference rooms are already in place. Getting up and running quickly is critical for companies or self starters that often measure growth in months, not years, analysts explain. "They don't know about the future, so flexibility is key," said Heidi Learner, the chief economist at Studley, the commercial real estate firm, who is the co author of a report on the tech sublet trend. "You don't know about what head count will be, whether you will get any venture capital funding, or whether you will be acquired." In general, subletting is becoming more popular. In the Midtown South area, or from Canal Street to 30th Street, sublets accounted for 19 percent of major leasing activity this year, up from 11 percent in 2010, Studley said. And between January and April of this year, 33 percent of all the leases signed in Manhattan by tech companies a major driver of the current economy were sublets, the report said. Sublet tenants among other industries within the same period were less than half that. The report also states that the average length of tech subleases is about four years. Not just any space will do; tech firms almost exclusively want prewar buildings with lofty ceilings and open floors, said Sean Black, a broker with Jones Lang LaSalle. Since that type of converted industrial space is clustered mainly around the Broadway corridor, supply is limited, he added, and demand is robust. "They like the 'old world meets new world' look," said Mr. Black, whose many tech clients include Foursquare. A lack of walls and cubicles, with eclectic art on the walls, embodies a certain attitude. "The last thing they want to do is conform with corporate America." Technology firms have been subletting a bit more space than they personally need, reflecting awareness of heightened demand from a flourishing industry that allows them to rent out extra room to similar companies. Besides, locking in the space at today's asking rents, which for sublets is about 45 a square foot in Midtown South, according to Studley, is considered wise, because rents are expected to climb, companies say. "It's a great way to hedge the lease," said Derek Stewart, who handled leasing for Foursquare before leaving the company this summer. Foursquare, which has 120 employees in New York, paid about 45 a square foot in 2011 in a seven year deal, Mr. Stewart said. But he estimated that with companies like ZocDoc, a physician app service, and Thrillist, a lifestyle site for men, under the same roof, the building had gained a bit of buzz as a popular tech address. That means the space could command 55 a foot today, he said. But so far there has been little urge to profit off the subtenants, he added, saying that Fueled and the other subtenants also pay about 45 a foot for their space. "We felt kind of badly making money off it," Mr. Stewart said. "We didn't want to have a bad name in this tight community." Mr. Stewart, who now works for David Tisch, a tech investor, also pointed out that subleases were essential for the survival of the tech community. The news site BuzzFeed, for example, has signed a two year sublease for space in the new headquarters of Tiffany Company at 200 Fifth Avenue, across from Madison Square Park. BuzzFeed, which had been based on West 21st Street in a 20,000 square foot space, will take an entire 58,000 square foot floor, which is one of seven floors Tiffany has there. The rent was not disclosed, but Greg B. Taubin, the Studley broker who represented Tiffany, said that comparable sublet space in the area went for 65 a square foot. "Companies like this don't sign long term leases because they don't have a crystal ball," Mr. Taubin said. But for Tiffany, which doesn't need the space immediately, there's an upside in cost reduction, too, he added. Other advantages include having lights on and more people in the elevators, said Bonnie Shapiro, the director of leasing for Allied Partners, an owner of 568 Broadway. "You don't want tenants touring the building and seeing dark, unused spaces," she said. For tenants that may be consolidating or downsizing, the new demand for sublet space may come at a fortunate time. Credit Suisse, the investment bank, which has undergone several rounds of layoffs in recent months, has managed to sublet all its former office space at 315 Park Avenue South, one of three locations it has in Manhattan. Tech subletters in the 20 story Beaux Arts tower, which is at East 23rd Street, include VaynerMedia, X 1 and Responsys, as well as Adap. TV, which this month took the entire seventh floor measuring 16,000 square feet. The new space features a red wall decorated with words like energy, creativity and passion, and executive offices around the perimeter have been turned into shared conference rooms. The space is a far cry from its cramped, plain jane 4,000 square foot space at 915 Broadway, said Gerry Manolatos, the communications director for Adap. TV. Mr. Manolatos would not disclose the terms of his lease, only that it is for less than a decade. But in the merry go round of the tech sublet market, Adap. TV is cashing in itself; its former space on Broadway is also being sublet to a tech firm, he said. "It's like one deal leads to the next," Mr. Manolatos said. "Everybody's thinking, 'Who knows where we will end up next?' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Pueblo Bonito is the largest and grandest of the 12 "great houses" at the Chaco Culture National Historic Park in northwestern New Mexico. On a cool spring day, in the bewitching crystalline light for which New Mexico is famous, I stood in the middle of the Acoma Sky City and looked out into the ocean of desert at an island of pale red and dun colored rock called Enchanted Mesa. My tour guide, Marissa Chino, a young Acoma woman, said it isn't known if her people once lived there. There are tales, though, that say they did. One story holds they descended to the valley to tend their squash and corn and, while they were farming, a violent storm washed away a stone ladder that was their only access. With no way back up the monolith they abandoned their home and moved to the 357 foot tall mesa where the village sits now. This is only one of the great many mysteries about the ancient Puebloan civilization that once flourished across the desert landscape of the American Southwest and, for a long time, was believed to have vanished. Its fate has become clearer in recent years, as researchers have peered more deeply into where this civilization went on its 'final migration' and listened more closely to the descendants of those once called the Anasazi Navajo for Enemy Ancestors who are now known as Ancestral Puebloans. Spanish conquistadores came to this region in the 16th century seeking the fabled Seven Cities of Gold. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado showed up first, in 1540, but others followed and as we stood inside the church our guide related some of the grim history of Acoma. After a small battle with soldiers sent to negotiate, the conquistador Don Juan Onate attacked the mesa and killed hundreds of men, women and children. He took 500 prisoners and sentenced those over 25 to 20 years of servitude. He ordered the right feet and hands of some two dozen captives amputated. The Acoma people returned here after their servitude, and in 1628, the Catholic Church forced them to build this structure, the San Estevan del Rey Mission Church an unusual blend of Spanish colonial and Puebloan architecture. All of the materials, including the logs and dirt for the walls, had to be found elsewhere and carried up from the valley floor. It took 12 years to build. Just as I began to walk back to the visitor center, down the narrow and precipitous stone path that the Acoma used before the road was built in 1929 by a film company, our guide pointed out a small, opaque mica window in one of the homes. The window glints in the sun like gold, she said, and when the Spanish saw it they thought they'd found one of the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. It is the only original mica window that remains here. The Pueblo culture goes back centuries before the time of Christ. Pueblos evolved from pit houses holes in the ground covered with a raised wooden roof to labyrinthine dwellings with hundreds of rooms built with strikingly sophisticated masonry techniques, that peaked in the 10th and 11th century. I drove north from Acoma, seeking out more back story. Two hours on the last half of it on a rutted, severely wash boarded dirt road I spied Fajada Butte, the towering landform at the head of a long, shallow sandstone canyon called Chaco, now the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. First occupied in 800, Chaco was where the Pueblo culture reached its greatest heights until, tree rings tell us, it was abandoned in the mid 13th century. The park contains the largest collection of pre Columbian ruins in the United States and is a Unesco World Heritage site. While most American Indians were hunters and gatherers, the Puebloans were also accomplished tillers of the soil, irrigating the wild desert in this canyon with captured rainwater. Staying in one place for long periods is a large part of what allowed this civilization to evolve to such a magnificent apogee in a harsh desert landscape. I toured Pueblo Bonito with Clif Taylor, a knowledgeable Park Service volunteer who has spent 12 seasons here. Mr. Taylor is a fount of information, yet is only able to scratch the surface on a two hour tour. He too is taken with the mystery of this place. For centuries it was home to thousands of people and "over a few decades it virtually emptied out," he said. The artifacts uncovered here boggle the mind. A few from the long list: hundreds of gorgeous ollas or large round pots, clay ladles, bowls, animal effigy pots and other vessels covered with black geometric designs over a white slip. There are the sumptuous burials of 37 sacred macaws, the gorgeous, red, blue yellow and green parrots, brought here from southern climes, and likely bred for their rainbow of resplendent sacred feathers. A jet frog, black as coal and the size of a child's fist, with inlaid turquoise eyes and a turquoise collar, is one of the most prized artifacts from Chaco, likely a rain fetish. Then there is the mystery of Room 33. That's where two high status individuals "major dudes'," according to one archaeologist were found buried beneath a wooden platform with another dozen remains scattered in the sand above them. No one knows who they were. The room also contained more than 50,000 pieces of turquoise, 6,000 pieces of worked shell, turquoise encrusted conch shell trumpets and a collection of carved wooden flutes. The ability to appreciate the beauty and mystery of a giant buzzing pre Columbian capital in Chaco is enhanced by the isolation and minimal development. It is quietly exhilarating to wander in the sunshine among the glorious remnants of such an elaborate and alien city, with just a scattered handful of other visitors. You can almost hear the barking dogs, the calls of a bevy of children and the gobbling of turkeys that once wandered here. As I walked I noticed a distant storm and a trail in the sky of lace like virga, or shafts of rain that hang from a cloud, never making it to the ground. At night here, with the lights of cities far away, the sky is a midnight fabric stitched with glowing glass beads. Archaeoastronomers those who study how ancient people related to the sky tell us that many of the walls and windows at Chaco are aligned with cardinal points, the sun and other stars, and the buildings functioned as an observatory and calendar. Then there's the famous sun dagger. On the summer solstice a sharp beam of light shines through slabs of fallen rock and pierces the exact center of a spiral petroglyph. Despite what is known here, what exactly this fantastic city was remains unknown, and the mystery endures. "It was built to be impressive," said Mr. Taylor. "A big beautiful city like Manhattan. It may well have been an area of transcendental significance like Mecca. The canyon itself could have been a sipapu," a sacred opening in the Earth that are symbolically represented in kivas around the Southwest. The characters who were entranced by the mystery of these ruins and the vanished people, and who excavated and explored these places, have their own interesting stories. Richard Wetherill is the most well known, the son of a rancher, who, when he first spied treasures in the ground, leapt off his horse and began digging. He never stopped. An accomplished amateur archaeologist, Wetherill led an expedition here in 1896, funded by two wealthy young brothers, Talbot and Frederic Hyde. The first year Wetherill unearthed a boxcar full of artifacts, Mr. Taylor told me. "They shipped them back East and they are housed in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History." My last stop was the Zia Pueblo, a half hour from Albuquerque, to see what Peter Pino, a former war chief and cultural leader, had to say about the Ancestral Puebloans he calls his grandfathers. Mr. Pino graciously invited me into his home, and we sat on the couch to talk. I spied some Zia pottery, which famously features a bird motif. Why did so much of the pottery use it, I asked. "Birds occupy a region that we humans don't the heavens," he said. "The world they see is a lot bigger than ours. To native people that is supernatural." The pueblos at Chaco and elsewhere are not cold and sterile piles of rock, he said, but alive with the spirit of the pueblo people's ancestors. "All those sites are sacred," Mr. Pino said. "They are places of significance to the pueblo people. Our people aren't there anymore, but the spirits of our people are still there." Jim Robbins a frequent contributor to the Times. His most recent book is "The Wonder of Birds: What They Tell Us About Ourselves, The World and a Better Future." 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
BEIJING China's top leaders on Friday made a show of strength to confront defiance in Hong Kong and the economic damage wrought by the coronavirus outbreak, even as they acknowledged that both had dealt a blow to the ruling Communist Party's agenda. On Hong Kong, the leadership struck a hard line at the annual meeting of China's legislature, unveiling a plan to impose sweeping new security laws that would place the territory more firmly under Beijing's thumb and crack down on antigovernment protests. But the move is likely to incite more unrest and outrage in the semiautonomous territory as well as criticism from abroad. On the economy, the premier, addressing the opening of the National People's Congress, declared that the government had achieved a "decisive victory" against the coronavirus outbreak and that the country has shown great resilience. But in a break with tradition, China abandoned setting an annual growth target for 2020, recognizing the difficulties in restarting its economy amid a pandemic. The congress is normally a symbolic annual gathering of the country's political elite. This year, the symbolism matters more than usual. Xi Jinping, China's top leader, has sought to project strength as the government tries to revive the economy, restart schools and businesses and claim credit for largely ending the epidemic that spread from Wuhan in central China. Premier Li Keqiang, who is second ranked in the Communist Party hierarchy behind Mr. Xi, made his speech to nearly 3,000 congress delegates who wore masks as they sat in neat rows in the ornate Great Hall of the People. He pledged to help blunt the impact of the slowdown with goals to limit inflation and unemployment. "At present and for some time to come, China will face challenges like never before," he said. "However, we have unique political and institutional strengths, a strong economic foundation, enormous market potential and hundreds of millions of intelligent and hardworking people." "The horizons for China's development are full of promise," Mr. Li said. The congress also outlined the party's plan, disclosed in a surprise move on Thursday night, for new laws in Hong Kong to prevent and punish secession, subversion and foreign infiltration that it has blamed for fueling unrest in the city. The legislation would also allow the mainland's feared security agencies to set up their operations publicly in Hong Kong for the first time, instead of operating on a limited scale in secrecy. In a speech detailing the plan, Wang Chen, a Politburo member and first vice chairman of the congress, pointed to the protesters in Hong Kong who defaced the national flag and surrounded Beijing's offices in the city as posing a threat to China's sovereignty. He also cited long held suspicions by Beijing that foreign governments had incited the recent protests in Hong Kong, even though evidence to support this is limited. "Law based and forceful measures must be taken to prevent, stop and punish such activities," Mr. Wang declared, as delegates in the hall burst into applause. Beijing's security plans drew immediate alarm, including in the Hong Kong stock market, which slumped more than 5 percent on Friday. The annual congress, which usually convenes in early March for about two weeks, had been delayed and shortened to a week this year because of the coronavirus crisis. By this week, the coronavirus outbreak had infected more than 89,000 people in China, including over 4,600 who died from the virus. Delegates opened the session with exactly 60 seconds of silence for the victims of the outbreak. The unusual arrangements for the congress meeting this year reflect continued worries that China has not totally contained the outbreak. Most journalists have practically no access to the events, and must instead follow proceedings and join news conferences over video links. Delegates have been required to undergo nucleic acid tests for the virus before they are even allowed to travel to Beijing. Premier Li's budget proposal calls for a stimulus program equal to just around 2 percent of the country's economic output last year. Enshrining a leader. China's Communist Party delivered Xi Jinping, the country's top leader, a breakthrough on Nov. 11 that will help secure his political future by enshrining him in its firmament of era defining leaders in a resolution reassessing the party's history. A momentous decision. Senior party leaders approved the resolution at a gathering focused on reviewing the party's 100 year history. A communique from the meeting said that under Mr. Xi's leadership, China had "made historic achievements and undergone a historic transformation." Rewriting history. The resolution is expected to become the focus of an indoctrination campaign. It will dictate how the authorities teach China's modern history and how they censor discussion of the past, including through a law meant to punish people who criticize the party's heroes. Third of its kind. With the resolution, which was issued in full on Nov. 16, Mr. Xi can cement his status as an epoch making leader alongside Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw the only two other resolutions of this kind, in 1945 and in 1981. China's top financial planners have been leery of having the government borrow yet more money now to hand out checks to the public the way governments in the United States, Hong Kong and elsewhere have done. Debt fueled stimulus programs helped the Chinese economy rebound quickly from the global financial crisis a decade ago but left the country burdened with debt and awash in wasteful projects. Mr. Li announced instead a series of small measures that are likely to be popular but will have a modest cost. He said that the government would cut the cost of broadband internet access this year by 15 percent. And he said that the government would increase its subsidies for basic medical insurance for some residents but only by a little over 4 a year per person. Mr. Li emphasized that despite the economic slowdown, there would be no retreat from eradicating rural poverty by the end of this year, a goal that Mr. Xi has made a pillar of his man of the people image. Military spending will also continue to grow, with budget documents released by Mr. Li saying that it would increase by 6.6 percent this year even as overall central government spending is slated to fall 0.2 percent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
G.M., Not Trump, Is the Real Villain to Some Ohio Factory Workers LORDSTOWN, Ohio After an election campaign in which he had pledged a manufacturing renaissance, President Trump came to this once thriving industrial region of northeastern Ohio last year and all but waved a mission accomplished flag. The jobs are "all coming back," he announced. "Don't move, don't sell your house." That vow collided with the shifting dynamics of the auto industry on Monday when General Motors told workers it was idling Lordstown's prized Chevrolet factory. "Some people were crying," said Joyce Olesky, a 23 year employee of the plant. "I looked over and saw people who looked like they had the flu, turning white." Many Lordstown residents recalled that Mr. Trump had promoted steel tariffs and his trade savvy as a way to create jobs. But while critics faulted the president for failing to deliver what he promised, a number of workers were quick to exonerate him. Some portrayed him as well intentioned but simply outgunned by larger economic forces. Others suggested that whatever Mr. Trump's flaws, they paled in comparison to those of General Motors, which they considered the real culprit. "I believe that if there's tariffs or not, G.M. will continue to take our cars out of this country because it's cheaper to do it and ship it back," said Ms. Olesky, a Trump supporter. Beyond the roughly 1,600 jobs that are likely to be lost at the plant, there are a few dozen suppliers employing thousands of workers in the region, along with businesses here in the Mahoning Valley that will be hit hard by the loss of customers. On Monday morning, Earl Ross, the owner of Ross' Eatery Pub, a social hub in Lordstown, was in a tree stand poised to hunt deer when he received a text message about the news. "My reaction was a sick stomach," Mr. Ross said, "and for the whole rest of the day, I just sat in the rain and thought about the future." There is also the likely effect on the housing market, as workers try to offload mortgages amid the prospect of unemployment. Jason Sickler, who has worked at the plant since 2000, said he would prepare his house for a possible sale as he contemplated whether to request a transfer to a General Motors operation in another city. "I was literally nauseous yesterday when I walked out of there," said Mr. Sickler, who enjoys his job in the trim department and is loath to relocate with a son still in high school. "Today I'm trying to get a better game plan, accept it a little more." In some ways the story of Lordstown in recent decades sounds a lot like the story of industrial America writ large. The number of workers at the G.M. plant peaked around 13,000 in the mid 1980s, according to the union there. It had dropped below 5,000 by this decade, as foreign competition and automation took their toll. But in other respects G.M.'s presence allowed the village of about 3,200 to defy the economic realities bearing down on the region. Factory workers have helped generate millions of dollars in village income tax revenue over the years to pay for infrastructure and other expenses. "We've been blessed with the ability to have money to do that," said Arno Hill, who has served as mayor in two stints totaling nearly 20 years since the early 1990s. "Oh, my God, we were so excited," said Marisol Gonzalez Bowers, who has spent more than two decades at the plant. "We had three shifts, were running at full capacity. Twelve hours if you wanted it." Ms. Gonzalez Bowers said that with overtime, she could easily take home 75,000 a year during the early half of this decade. 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. Even with Lordstown's relative durability, Mr. Trump's vision of an industrial comeback resonated in town. Mr. Trump carried the county by about 6 percentage points, a nearly 30 point swing toward Republicans since President Barack Obama won it decisively in 2012. But the day after the election, General Motors announced that it would eliminate a third shift at the Lordstown plant. After years of strong sales, the Cruze was flagging as consumers defected to trucks and sport utility vehicles. Then, in April of this year, as the slump continued, the company said it was eliminating a second shift. The workers' last day coincided with news reports that the company would be building a popular S.U.V. in Mexico. Critics said Mr. Trump seemed oblivious to the plant's struggles despite his promise to workers there. "I had a conversation with him and he did not know about the first two shift layoffs," said Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, who spoke with Mr. Trump by phone over the summer. "It shocked me." Mr. Brown said that he had asked Mr. Trump to intervene personally with G.M.'s chief executive, Mary T. Barra, and that the president had been noncommittal. "He said, 'We'll see,'" Mr. Brown recalled. The White House declined to comment. The notion that Mr. Trump is indifferent or ineffective in the face of factory job losses challenges the essence of his political appeal, and he has moved to counter that idea on Tuesday by threatening to take away G.M.'s government subsidies, and on Wednesday by calling for new tariffs on imported cars. At least some of the workers spurned by General Motors share Mr. Brown's feeling that the president could have done more for them. Tommy Wolikow was laid off from the plant last year and said he became a Trump fan after attending the president's speech hailing the return of manufacturing jobs. "I felt he was speaking to me, and I believed him," said Mr. Wolikow, who didn't vote in 2016 but had planned to vote for Mr. Trump in 2020. "I took the man for his word." But in recent months, Mr. Wolikow has concluded that the president wasn't interested in following through. "I said, 'I heard you're closing your plant,'" Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal, relating their conversation. "'It's not going to be closed for long, I hope, Mary, because if it is, you have a problem.'" Mayor Hill, a tall, barrel chested man who worked for decades for a local automotive supplier, said he thought the odds were fair that the president would eventually save the plant, though he conceded it could take several months. "People say, 'Trump promised us,'" Mr. Hill said. "Yes, he came here, told the people in the valley, 'Don't sell your house, we're going to bring your jobs back.' Well, you know, they made the announcement yesterday. How soon is soon enough?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The national movement galvanized by the killing of George Floyd has created the possibility of transformational change to policing. One reform that has generated broad discussion is eliminating "qualified immunity," the court created doctrine that makes it difficult for people whose civil rights are violated by police officers to obtain money damages in lawsuits. There are good arguments for getting rid of this immunity, or at least seriously restricting it. But abolishing it is unlikely to change police behavior all that much. Qualified immunity shields government officials from personal liability in federal lawsuits unless they violate "clearly established" federal law. That means that even if a police officer violates someone's constitutional rights, the victim can't obtain damages from the officer unless he or she can show that the officer violated a right explicitly recognized by a prior court ruling. In theory, this requirement protects government defendants from unexpected liability when law changes. In practice, courts apply the doctrine aggressively to shield officers from lawsuits unless plaintiffs can point to other cases declaring essentially identical conduct unconstitutional a difficult hurdle, even when police conduct appears clearly wrong. Indeed, even if the former police officer Derek Chauvin is convicted of murdering Mr. Floyd, it's quite plausible that a court could refuse to hold him liable for violating Mr. Floyd's constitutional rights if his lawyers were unable to point to an earlier case making clear that the specific action Mr. Chauvin took kneeling on a restrained person's neck for more than eight minutes was unconstitutional. In recent years, an unlikely coalition seeking to end qualified immunity has emerged. Left liberals and libertarians argue that qualified immunity improperly denies recovery to injured persons and encourages police misconduct. At the same time, some legal conservatives have questioned qualified immunity's doctrinal foundations. These critics argue that the Supreme Court improperly innovated when first recognizing the doctrine, which isn't enumerated in the Constitution or in any federal statute. Calls for reform are picking up. Liberal and conservative members of Congress have introduced legislation to abolish qualified immunity in the wake of the Floyd killing, though Senate Republicans say they will oppose eliminating it. Supreme Court justices at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor have recently questioned the court's qualified immunity jurisprudence, although the court has refused to reconsider the doctrine, as it did again on Monday. There are compelling arguments against qualified immunity. One is compensation: People who are harmed by the police (or those people's families, in cases of police killings) should have a way to obtain money for medical bills and for pain and suffering. Whatever one's approach to legal interpretation, it's hard to justify letting judges make up rules to deny people remedies for serious violations of their constitutional rights. But we should also understand that eliminating qualified immunity is no surefire solution to police misconduct. Courts interpret constitutional rights against police violence quite narrowly, and it is unlikely they will provide redress for a great deal of troubling police conduct even without qualified immunity. Supreme Court doctrine permits police officers to use deadly force when they have "probable cause" to believe someone "poses a threat of serious physical harm." The standard is highly deferential. As the court has said, judges must make "allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split second judgments in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation." In practice, these constitutional rules often prevent courts from second guessing police use of deadly force. Even where smarter tactics could have prevented death, courts will find no violation so long as the officer can plausibly argue that he feared he was under threat at the moment he used deadly force. In these cases, ending qualified immunity won't make a difference. Certainly, eliminating qualified immunity will make some cases easier to win for plaintiffs. And one might think that the threat of civil liability will cause officers to act more cautiously. But in practice, officers almost never personally pay judgments when they are found liable. A large study of lawsuits involving state and local police departments by a U.C.L.A. law professor, Joanna Schwartz, found that over 99 percent of the time, the department indemnified police officer defendants meaning that the officers didn't pay a cent out of their own pockets, even when found to have violated someone's constitutional rights. If police departments are largely footing the bill, perhaps the increased liability risk would encourage them to take more steps to prevent abuses. But governments are not profit maximizing entities, and they do not respond to costs the way private businesses do. Sometimes, politicians may conclude it's easier to just keep paying judgments rather than change police culture in meaningful ways. The City of Chicago, for example, over the past 15 years has spent many hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts and legal fees in civil cases involving police. Yet that high bill doesn't seem to have prompted the city to fundamentally rethink its approach to policing. If Chicago makes real changes, it will be because the voters demand it not because of litigation. Of course, liability may induce some departments to adopt better training and other harm prevention strategies. A recent study by John Rappaport of the University of Chicago Law School found that police insurers encourage departments to improve policies and dismiss offending officers. But these effects are not guaranteed. A more effective strategy could be just to require departments to adopt better training and personnel policies to begin with. In the end, the best argument for eliminating qualified immunity is less about deterrence and more about symbolism. Qualified immunity routinely requires courts to say that there will be no penalty for a police officer who has violated the Constitution. That sends the message to officers and the public that the police are above the law. That is the wrong message. Daniel Epps ( danepps) is an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches criminal law and criminal procedure. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve's huge lending programs, which saved Wall Street in the fall of 2008, also benefited a wide range of other financial companies, including community banks, credit unions and foreign banks, according to documents released by the central bank on Thursday. Hundreds of small banks borrowed modest amounts of cash in 2008 and 2009, ranging from 1,000 to several million dollars, from an emergency loan program known as the discount window. The Fed also used the discount window to make dozens of loans, often exceeding several billion dollars at a time, to the United States Central Federal Credit Union, helping to prevent a collapse that would have harmed hundreds of smaller credit unions. And the Fed helped to save some of the largest banks in Europe by pumping desperately needed dollars into their American subsidiaries. In fact, the biggest borrower from the Fed program was Dexia, a French Belgian bank that frequently held more than 30 billion in outstanding loans from the program from late 2008 to early 2009. The story of the Fed's efforts to rescue giant banks like Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and Washington Mutual from the consequences of reckless lending and investments is already well known. The central bank released detailed information in December about the emergency programs it created to pump billions of dollars into those banks. But the Fed fought long and hard to preserve the secrecy of transactions at the discount window, its oldest and most inclusive lending program. The grudging release of the data Thursday, in a format that impeded analysis, came only after a series of federal courts ruled in favor of lawsuits brought by Bloomberg News and Fox News. The long list of borrowers, provided in the form of a daily loan register, gives a striking impression of a crisis spreading to every last corner of the financial system. By late October 2008, the volume of outstanding loans topped 100 billion, with several dozen banks borrowing each day. Some banks borrowed minimal amounts to test the process in case things got worse. For example, First City Bank in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., borrowed just 1,000 in October 2008 and repaid the money the next day. "Our regulators encouraged us to do it," the bank's president, Robert E. Bennett Jr., said. Other banks were already struggling to survive. Pacific National Bank of San Francisco borrowed 125 times from February 2008 to February 2009. The bank was closed by regulators in October 2009. Borrowing from the discount window, even on a confidential basis, has long been viewed as a sign of weakness, to be avoided if at all possible. From 2003 to 2006, the Fed lent an average of less than 50 million each week. By the summer of 2007, however, the Fed was increasingly concerned that banks were shunning necessary help. In August, officials cut the cost of borrowing from the discount window by half a percentage point. Then they arranged for four of the nation's largest banks Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wachovia to take what were described as symbolic loans of 500 million each. The records released Thursday show that JPMorgan and Wachovia returned most of the money the next day. Bank of America and Citigroup, already showing signs of the problems they still face, kept the money for a month. Perhaps the most surprising revelation in Thursday's documents was that foreign banks quickly became the largest and most frequent borrowers. On Sept. 15, 2008, the day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the Austrian bank Erste Group borrowed 4 billion. By the end of that week banks from Spain, France and Japan had also borrowed billions. An analysis of discount window lending from February 2008 to February 2009 shows that the vast majority of the loan volume went to foreign institutions. Donald L. Kohn, the Fed's vice chairman during the crisis, said that many foreign banks needed dollars to meet their financial obligations. The Fed arranged swaps with central banks in other countries to provide dollars, but the flow was insufficient. "They not only borrowed dollars from their central banks, but they needed to borrow dollars from us as well," said Mr. Kohn, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Dexia was one of the most frequent and prolific borrowers. By October 2008, the company's American subsidiary was regularly visiting the discount window to renew what amounted to a line of credit that eventually reached into the tens of billions. The company continued to borrow from the Fed through November 2009, taking more than 100 short term loans. Dexia, which specialized in lending to municipalities, made the nearly fatal mistake of buying an American company that insured bonds including subprime mortgage bonds. The governments of France, Belgium and Luxembourg invested about 9.2 billion to stabilize the company in 2008. Ulrike Pommee, a spokeswoman for the company, described the information released Thursday as "backward looking," and said the bank had been open about its need for help. "Dexia was one of the banks most dependent on central banks," Ms. Pommee said in an e mail. "The Fed played its role as central banker, providing liquidity to banks that needed it." The Arab Banking Corporation, partly owned by the Central Bank of Libya, was another frequent visitor, taking more than two dozen short term loans of several hundred million dollars each. "It is incomprehensible to me that while credit worthy small businesses in Vermont and throughout the country could not receive affordable loans, the Federal Reserve was providing tens of billions of dollars in credit," Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, wrote in a letter sent Thursday to the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and other government officials. The data also provided new details on the struggles of the largest banks. Goldman Sachs, which has said that it borrowed from the window only as a test, took five loans of 1 million to 50 million between September 2008 and January 2010. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Also one excruciating misstep: Vera Wang , returning to the runway after two years with a moody mishmash of lingerie layers (dangling garter belts, sheer corsets, camisoles, frilled tap pants), men's wear herringbones and wool and misty bordello romance, threw in shoes so acutely angled and vertiginous that her models' knees shook with the effort to remain upright. Two actually fell, and one limped down the runway with one shoe off and one on, one leg about six inches shorter than the other. In 2019, no woman should be tortured by what she wears. At least the quiet environmental chic of Gabriela Hearst , marrying geodes and linen embroidered with insects gone extinct; blanket stitching and urban trenches (the coat kind); dresses made from multiple rolled strips of recycled print fabrics pieced together into cha cha fringe, was crafty, in both senses of the word. But while Ms. Hearst name checked strong women as inspiration backstage, and had Athena, Kurdish freedom fighters and Josephine Baker (in her war days) on her mood board, the effect was one of gentle suggestion; nudge nudge. You had to really get up close to get the point. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
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. Who Let 'Mad Dog' Out? On Wednesday, the former defense secretary Jim Mattis criticized President Trump's handling of the nationwide protests over police violence, saying, "We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership." "Replied Trump, 'I know you are, but what am I?'" Seth Meyers said on Thursday's "Late Night." Mattis resigned in 2018, though Trump claimed this week to have fired him, writing in a tweet: "Probably the only thing Barack Obama I have in common is that we both had the honor of firing Jim Mattis, the world's most overrated General." Trump also claimed to have given Mattis his nickname, "Mad Dog." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
It isn't easy to stand out these days in the ranks of half hour personal dramedies, where shows like "Better Things," "Insecure" and "Atlanta" are among the best and most challenging series on television. "This Close," streaming on Sundance Now beginning Wednesday, isn't at those shows' level it's more conventional, with familiar relationship and family situations, and it doesn't really have a distinct sensibility. But it's funny and poignant in ways we haven't seen before, and more deftly directed and impressively cast than you'd expect for an original series on a small streaming service. It's also, at six episodes totaling about 150 minutes, an easy binge. The deaf actors Josh Feldman and Shoshannah Stern created and wrote "This Close," expanding on an earlier no budget online series called "Fridays." They also star in it as Michael and Kate, best friends living in Los Angeles. Michael is a gay artist in a downward spiral after a breakup, blocked on his graphic novel and often drunk; Kate is a snarkily funny spitfire who works at a public relations firm and is engaged to a hearing man, Danny (Zach Gilford), who hasn't told her that he lost his job. Michael and Kate are also deaf, a fact that is both secondary and central to the show. The questions are universal: Will Kate and Danny find a way to trust each other? Will Michael and his ex, Ryan (Colt Prattes), get back together? Will Michael meet his deadline? But deafness is the inescapable context of each story line, amplifying and complicating the characters' pain. Being shut out and lied to, as Kate is by Danny, is an even greater betrayal when communicating with the world is your daily struggle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Look through the automotive listings on any city's Craigslist page, and you're bound to find a fairly predictable list of vehicles like pickups, S.U.V.'s and late model sedans from Detroit and Japan. But once in awhile you come across something unique. If you stumbled upon, say, a 1970 Subaru 360, that would be unique. After Consumer Reports said in 1969 that the 360 was "unacceptably hazardous" because of safety concerns and inadequate power, sales of the microcars died. Only about 10,000 were sold in the United States. Yet eight of them are for sale in Radcliff, Ky. Thanks, Craigslist. And like the guy he bought them from, John Hicks said that he would only sell them en masse. "I bought a yellow one that came with six others," he said in a telephone interview, adding that he'd picked up a couple of others since and that those ones came with a sizable heap of parts. So how did a bunch of Subaru 360s, called "cheap and ugly" in Subaru ads, end up in Kentucky? Many of them had belonged to Bob Bowersmith, a 77 year old Army and Civil Service veteran who had worked at Fort Knox. He sold them to Mr. Hicks a few months ago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
SINGAPORE When the ruling People's Action Party (P.A.P.) passed a new law against "fake news" last year, it claimed to want to protect both free speech and national security. Falsehoods, the government said, "have been weaponized, to attack the infrastructure of fact, destroy trust and attack societies." Since the law came into force in October, the government has invoked it five times, and there is now reason to fear that the law is, instead, a tool to quiet dissent. Last Thursday, the one target of the law that so far has dared to challenge it in court, the opposition Singapore Democratic Party, argued that an interpretation of data couldn't be considered a "deliberate falsehood." (Or so we, journalists, have been told: The hearings aren't open to the public.) On Friday, the deputy attorney general apparently argued that the S.D.P.'s analysis of unemployment statistics could be considered fake news so long as some people risked misunderstanding it. The government had previously claimed that the party's "false and misleading statements" had a "singular objective": to "stoke fear and anxiety" among local white collar professionals. The Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, better known as Pofma, outlaws "false statements of fact" that, among other things, are "prejudicial" to security, public health and Singapore's external relations or that might "diminish public confidence" in the government's performance. The law grants government ministers the power to issue "correction notices" to the people or groups they claim have published falsehoods. Alternatively, the law allows offending content to be removed or blocked, and for online users or readers to be directed to a government source instead. Noncompliance is punishable by fines (of up to 15,000 for individuals and more than 740,000 for companies) and up to one year in prison. The correction notices must be posted when the government asks for them, even if the recipients object: A Pofma order can only be invalidated by the High Court. Every order so far has been directed at an opposition party or politician, or a government critic. Target of order No. 1: Brad Bowyer, a member of the Progress Singapore Party, a new party, for a Facebook post in which he criticized investment decisions by Singapore's sovereign wealth funds. The prime minister of Singapore is the chairman of the board of one fund; his wife is the C.E.O. of another. Target No. 2: the States Times Review, a website critical of the ruling party, for a Facebook post claiming that the home affairs minister had ordered the arrest of an individual who had disclosed the religious affiliation of a potential P.A.P. candidate. After the website's publisher a resident of Australia refused to post the government's correction notice, the government ordered Facebook to post it instead. (Order No. 3.) Facebook complied. No. 4: an order from the minister of manpower against the S.D.P. for various posts and an online article claiming that unemployment was rising among Singaporean white collar workers. And then, the subject of order No. 5: Lim Tean, the leader of People's Voice, another fledgling political party, for online posts stating that the government had put aside more money for scholarships for foreign students than for local ones. All these statements and analyses touched on sensitive issues questioning the competence of the elites, tapping people's anxieties about immigration and jobs and at a time when many Singaporeans suspect that the government will call general elections well before April 2021, the month by which they must be held. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who has been in power since 2004, has indicated that this race will be his last, and the ruling party seems intent on securing another strong mandate. But never mind politics, the P.A.P. has claimed, or the fact that Pofma has only been invoked against government opponents so far. That's merely a "coincidence." When it proposed the law, the P.A.P. government had argued that it was necessary to ensure a speedy response to online falsehoods, pointing to cases, such as in Sri Lanka, where a failure to correct disinformation had led to violence. Yet none of the cases in Singapore so far have had anything to do with any incitement to harm. Nor has the government treated them as an emergency that required handling in a matter of hours, as it claimed would be necessary. Most of the correction orders came days in one case, as many as 12 days after the supposedly false information was published. There's also the matter of whether the P.A.P. government is challenging only statements of fact or also arguments and opinions. Mr. Lim's Facebook posts one of them a meme were comments on the amount of scholarship money set aside for Singaporean versus foreign students. The education ministry's correction order actually confirmed the sums that Mr. Lim mentioned, arguing instead that he should have made "a more appropriate comparison." On Friday, during a hearing in the S.D.P. case, the attorney general's office argued that Pofma also covered implied statements and matters of interpretation. And to top it all off: Pofma cannot be used to correct any falsehoods published by the government not unless you can convince a minister from the P.A.P. to act against the party. How's that for a measure that might "diminish public confidence" in the government's performance? Kirsten Han ( kixes) is a journalist and editor in chief of New Naratif, a multimedia site promoting free expression and democracy across Southeast Asia. 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 |
Miller, writing once again in the first person ("The Song of Achilles" was narrated by Patroclus), gives voice to Circe as a multifaceted and evolving character. Her unhappy youth is explained, as the eldest and least cherished of Perse's children by Helios, mocked for her unlovely voice (she will learn later, from Hermes, that "you sound like a mortal"). Secretly kind to Prometheus after he is condemned for giving fire to the humans, she is exiled to Aiaia not for this transgression but for her use of witchcraft to turn the mortal Glaucos, with whom she is in love, into a god; and, when Glaucos spurns her for the beautiful but feckless nymph Scylla, for transforming her into the sea monster who will plague sailors for generations. According to Miller's version, Circe is initially chiefly unhappy and immature, given to thoughtless lashing out that she lives to regret. When she cleanses Jason and Medea of their crimes, it is not because she is herself amoral but because she doesn't know what those crimes are: When the pair ask her for "katharsis," "It was forbidden for me to question them." Later, when she transforms sailors into pigs, her apparent malice is revealed in fact to be self defense born of her isolation and mistreatment at the hands of sexual predators. When she deals with good men, like Daedalus, for whom she feels compassion ("he, too, knew what it was to make monsters"), she is filled with benevolent emotion; and even when her arguably evil brother Aeetes comes to Aiaia in search of Medea, she records feeling "a pleasure in me so old and sharp it felt like pain," and recalls innocently that "as a child, he had liked to lean his head upon my shoulder and watch the sea gulls dip to catch their fish. His laugh had been bright as morning sun." Eventually, Circe will bear a child by Odysseus, a boy named Telegonus (although some versions of the myth have her bearing several boys); and Miller grants her, at this juncture, a profoundly human complex of emotions, from despair at the infant's constant screaming to a profound and unconditional maternal ardor: "When he finally slept ... a love so sharp it seemed my flesh lay open. I made a list of all the things I would do for him. Scald off my skin. Tear out my eyes. Walk my feet to bones, if only he would be happy and well." Motherhood, then, is what renders Circe fully recognizable, postpartum depression and all. As this passage makes clear, Miller has determined, in her characterization of this most powerful witch, to bring her as close as possible to the human from the timbre of her voice to her intense maternal instincts. The brutal insouciance of her fellow immortals whether her sharp tongued mother, Perse; or chilly Hermes; or righteous Athena enraged proves increasingly alien to this thoughtful and compassionate woman who learns to love unselfishly. It is an unexpected and jolly, if bittersweet, development, and one rather closer to Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" than to traditional Greek myth. "Circe" is very pleasurable to read, combining lively versions of familiar tales (like the birth of the Minotaur or the arrival of Odysseus and his men on Circe's island) and snippets of other, related standards (a glance at Daedalus and Icarus; a nod to the ultimate fate of Medea after she and Jason leave Aiaia) with a highly psychologized, redemptive and ultimately exculpatory account of the protagonist herself. That said, Daniel Mendelsohn's assessment of Miller's earlier book pertains, perhaps even more so in this instance: It's a hybrid entity, inserting strains of popular romance and specifically human emotion into the lives of the gods. Idiosyncrasies in the prose reflect this uneasy mixture: Circe sometimes speaks with syntactic inversions that recall Victorian translations from Greek ("frail she was, but crafty, with a mind like a spike toothed eel"; "a year of peaceful days he had stayed with me"; "young he was, but not a fool"), and at other moments, in a surprising contemporary vernacular ("Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark") occasionally punctuated by overly familiar phrases (that laugh, above, "bright as morning sun"; or this odd deployment of cliche: "My blood ran cold to see his greenness"). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
BROWNSVILLE, Tex. Becoming an American can be bad for your health. A growing body of mortality research on immigrants has shown that the longer they live in this country, the worse their rates of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. And while their American born children may have more money, they tend to live shorter lives than the parents. The pattern goes against any notion that moving to America improves every aspect of life. It also demonstrates that at least in terms of health, worries about assimilation for the country's 11 million illegal immigrants are mistaken. In fact, it is happening all too quickly. "There's something about life in the United States that is not conducive to good health across generations," said Robert A. Hummer, a social demographer at the University of Texas at Austin. For Hispanics, now the nation's largest immigrant group, the foreign born live about three years longer than their American born counterparts, several studies have found. Why does life in the United States despite its sophisticated health care system and high per capita wages lead to worse health? New research is showing that the immigrant advantage wears off with the adoption of American behaviors smoking, drinking, high calorie diets and sedentary lifestyles. Here in Brownsville, a worn border city studded with fast food restaurants, immigrants say that happens slowly, almost imperceptibly. In America, foods like ham and bread that are not supposed to be sweet are. And children lose their taste for traditional Mexican foods like cactus and beans. For the recently arrived, the quantity and accessibility of food speaks to the boundless promise of the United States. Esther Angeles remembers being amazed at the size of hamburgers as big as dinner plates when she first came to the United States from Mexico 15 years ago. "I thought, this is really a country of opportunity," she said. "Look at the size of the food!" Fast food fare not only tasted good, but was also a sign of success, a family treat that new earnings put in reach. "The crispiness was delicious," said Juan Muniz, 62, recalling his first visit to Church's Chicken with his family in the late 1970s. "I was proud and excited to eat out. I'd tell them: 'Let's go eat. We can afford it now.' " "You work so hard, you want to use your money in a smart way," said Aris Ramirez, a community health worker in Brownsville, explaining the thinking. "So when they hear 'twice the fries for an extra 49 cents,' people think, 'That's economical.' " For Ms. Angeles, the excitement of big food eventually wore off, and the frantic pace of the modern American workplace took over. She found herself eating hamburgers more because they were convenient and she was busy in her 78 hour a week job as a housekeeper. What is more, she lost control over her daughter's diet because, as a single mother, she was rarely with her at mealtimes. Robert O. Valdez, a professor of family and community medicine and economics at the University of New Mexico, said, "All the things we tell people to do from a clinical perspective today a lot of fiber and less meat were exactly the lifestyle habits that immigrants were normally keeping." As early as the 1970s, researchers found that immigrants lived several years longer than American born whites even though they tended to have less education and lower income, factors usually associated with worse health. That gap has grown since 1980. Less clear, however, was what happened to immigrants and their American born offspring after a lifetime in the United States. Evidence is mounting that the second generation does worse. Elizabeth Arias, a demographer at the National Center for Health Statistics, has made exploratory estimates based on data from 2007 to 2009, which show that Hispanic immigrants live 2.9 years longer than American born Hispanics. The finding, which has not yet been published, is similar to those in earlier studies. Still, the data does not break down by generation. Ms. Arias cautioned that subsequent generations for example, grandchildren and great grandchildren may indeed improve as they rise in socioeconomic status, which in the United States is strongly correlated with better health. Other research suggests that some of the difference has to do with variation among American born Hispanics, most of whom still do better than the rest of the American population. Puerto Ricans born in the continental United States, for example, have some of the shortest life spans and even do worse than whites born in the United States, according to research by Professor Hummer, dragging down the numbers for American born Hispanics. But Mexican immigrant men live about two years longer than Mexican American men, according to the estimates by Ms. Arias. Why is a harder question to answer, researchers say. Some point to smoking. Andrew Fenelon, a researcher at Brown University, found in 2011 that half of the three year life expectancy advantage that Hispanic immigrants had over American born Hispanics was because they smoked less. The children of immigrants adopt health behaviors typical of Americans in their socioeconomic group. For second generation Hispanics, the group tends to be lower income, with higher rates of smoking and drinking. Other researchers say culture contributes. Foreign born Hispanics are less likely than American born Hispanics to be raising children alone, and more likely to be part of large kinship networks that insulate them from harsh American economic realities that can lead to poor health. "I'd love to have my wife at home taking care of the kids and making sure they eat right, but I can't afford to," said Camilo Garza, a 34 year old plumber and maintenance worker whose grandfather immigrated from Mexico. "It costs money to live in the land of the free. It means both parents have to work." As a result, his family eats out almost every night, leaving his dining table abandoned. "It's a decoration," said Mr. Garza, who is overweight and a smoker. "It's a place where we set groceries before sticking them in the refrigerator." The lifestyle takes its toll. The county in which Brownsville is situated, Cameron, has some of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the country. The numbers are made worse by a lack of physical activity, including walking. Immigrants said they felt so conspicuous during early attempts to walk along the shoulder of the roads that they feared people would suspect they were here illegally. Ms. Angeles recalled that strolling to a dollar store provoked so many stares that she felt like "a bean in rice." "In Mexico, we ate healthily and didn't even know it," said Ms. Angeles, who has since developed diabetes. "Here, we know the food we eat is bad for us. We feel guilty. But we eat it anyway." Still, immigrants have better health outcomes than the American born. A 2006 analysis by Gopal K. Singh, a researcher at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Robert A. Hiatt, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, found that immigrants had at least a 20 percent lower overall cancer mortality rate than their American born counterparts. Mortality rates from heart disease were about 16 percent lower, for kidney disease 18 percent lower, and for liver cirrhosis 24 percent lower. "When my daughter was born, my doctor told me that if I wanted to see her 15th birthday I needed to lose the weight," said Gerry Ortiz, 37, a first generation Mexican American in Brownsville. He managed to lose 75 pounds, motivated in part by his grandfather, a farmer in rural Mexico who at 93 still rides his bicycle every day. He stares down at the family from a black and white photograph hanging in Mr. Ortiz's living room. Four of the family's six siblings are obese and have diabetes. And health habits in Mexico are starting to look a lot like those in the United States. Researchers are beginning to wonder how long better numbers for the foreign born will last. Up to 40 percent of the diet of rural Mexicans now comes from packaged foods, according to Professor Valdez. "We are seeing a huge shift away from traditional diets," he said. "People are no longer growing what they are eating. They are increasingly going to the market, and that market is changing." Joseph B. McCormick, the regional dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health in Brownsville, said, "The U.S. culture has crept across the border." Perhaps more immediate is the declining state of Hispanic health in the United States. Nearly twice as many Hispanic adults as non Hispanic white adults have diabetes that has been diagnosed, a rate that researchers now say may have a genetic component, particularly in those whose ancestry is Amerindian from Central and South America, Dr. McCormick said. Hispanic adults are also 14 percent more likely to be obese, according to 2010 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate is even higher for Hispanic children, who are 51 percent more likely to be obese than non Hispanic white children. "We have a time bomb that's going to go off," said Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. "Obesity rates are increasing. Diabetes is exploding. The cultural protection Hispanics had is being eroded." But at least for now, the older generation is still enjoying its advantage. In the De Angeles snack bar, a favorite meeting place for elderly Brownsvillians, one regular who is 101 still walks across the bridge to Mexico. Maria De La Cruz, a 73 year old who immigrated to the United States in her 40s, says her secret is raw garlic, cooked cactus and exercise, all habits she acquired from her father, a tailor who died at 98. "He had very pretty legs, like mine," she said, laughing. "You want to see them?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In recent weeks, Gov. Bruce Rauner of Illinois has traveled the state promoting his proposal for more than 2 billion in cuts to pensions for public employees. All public employees, that is, except police officers and firefighters. "Those who put their lives on the line in service to our state deserve to be treated differently," Mr. Rauner said in his February budget address to the state legislature. By announcing the exemption, Mr. Rauner was following the lead of other Republican governors in the Midwest who have imposed unwelcome changes on state and local employees in the name of saving money and improving services. In 2011, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin introduced a bill that would roll back collective bargaining rights for government workers and require them to contribute more toward their own pensions and health coverage. He excluded police officers and firefighters from the legislation, known as Act 10, which he signed the following month. In 2012, Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan signed a right to work bill, eliminating the requirement that private and public sector workers contribute dues to the unions that represent them, whether or not they are members. The bill included a "carve out" for police officers and firefighters, which Mr. Snyder supported. All these exemptions and carve outs have a popular appeal. Who, after all, would deny the heroism of police officers and firefighters? The hitch, labor experts contend, is that the exemptions lack any substantive merit. "When you get into structural differences, you're hard pressed to see why anyone would argue that one group should be left out," said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois. "This has to have more to do with the fact that it's politically dangerous to attack these people." While no one would dismiss the risks that police officers and firefighters face daily, they are not the only public employees whose work is dangerous. Statistically, at least, there are far more dangerous public sector jobs. But even granting that police officers and firefighters have a special claim on the public's conscience, it is not clear why the most effective way to honor that claim is through more generous pensions. It might make far more sense to rein in their pensions while raising their salaries, said David Lewin, a professor of management at the University of California, Los Angeles. For one thing, police officers and firefighters can retire with full pensions at younger ages than other state employees (beginning at age 50 in Illinois, often younger in other states). That means they frequently spend many more years drawing their pension benefits, even while receiving full time salaries in the private sector. This drives up long term costs for municipalities and states. The early retirement policies also deplete police and fire departments of critical employees at precisely the time when they are most valuable. "Why stay with a 130 year old pension arrangement that came in when we thought police and firefighter work was all brawn, no brain?" said Professor Lewin. "That forces folks out just when they're adding value and intellectual capital." Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. But few politicians are challenging these longstanding privileges or asking police officers and firefighters to sacrifice along with other public employees. In Wisconsin, for example, Mr. Walker and other Republicans argued that it was important to insulate police officers and firefighters because the state relies on them during emergencies and cannot afford unrest in their ranks. In Michigan, Mr. Snyder worried that extending right to work provisions to police officers and firefighters would hurt their cohesion. That argument is hard to square, however, with statements by Republican legislators and governors like Mr. Snyder that their proposals would be a boon to employees one that police officers and firefighters should presumably want to share in, not something they should want to avoid. "This is all about taking care of the hard working workers of Michigan, about being pro worker, about giving them the freedom to choose who they associate with," Mr. Snyder said when announcing his support for a right to work law in 2012. Glenn Grothman, a Wisconsin Republican who as a state senator strongly backed Act 10 and now serves in Congress, said that by making it easier for supervisors to lay off state and municipal workers, the law had actually improved worker morale. "I've heard compliments from public employees that are happy they don't have to work with underperforming employees," he said. Similarly, Mr. Grothman said that the real purpose of Act 10 was "to improve the quality of education and other government services." But if policing and firefighting are the most critical services local governments provide, the public would presumably be even more eager to improve them, not less. James Macy, a labor lawyer who has represented dozens of municipalities in Wisconsin, said that smaller towns would be well served by pooling their police departments into larger units. He says he believes municipalities could improve the productivity of their fire departments by rethinking the traditional schedule of 24 hours on, followed by one or more days off. "And firefighters like that, they protect that," he said. Some backers of right to work laws and curbs on collective bargaining for public employees say they should be applied without exception. A spokesman for Daniel Knodl, a Republican state legislator in Wisconsin, said: "Representative Knodl's position on the Act 10 provisions is that all public employees should be subject to the same provisions. This should include police and firefighters." In Michigan, Gary Glenn, a freshman Republican state representative, has drafted legislation that would extend the right to work provisions to these employees as well. But for all its consistency, many Republican leaders are reluctant to go along with that view. For governors like Mr. Walker, Mr. Rauner and Mr. Snyder, political considerations appear to trump everything else. Co opting public safety employees divides and weakens labor unions, according to Harold Schaitberger, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters. "Clearly part of what these governors are doing by treating cops and firefighters differently is driving a wedge in labor," Mr. Schaitberger said. Police officers and firefighters, Professor Bruno pointed out, are also much more likely than other public employees to be white and male precisely the demographics from which Republicans draw their electoral strength. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
It is the news that doctors and families in the heart of Zika territory had feared: Some babies not born with the unusually small heads that are the most severe hallmark of brain damage as a result of the virus have developed the condition, called microcephaly, as they have grown older. The findings were reported in a study of 13 babies in Brazil that was published Tuesday in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. At birth, none of the babies had heads small enough to receive a diagnosis of microcephaly, but months later, 11 of them did. For most of those babies, brain scans soon after birth showed significant abnormalities, and researchers found that as the babies aged, their brains did not grow or develop enough for their age and body size. The new study echoes another published this fall, in which three babies were found to have microcephaly later in their first year. As they closed in on their first birthdays, many of the babies also had some of the other developmental and medical problems caused by Zika infection, a range of disabilities now being called congenital Zika syndrome. The impairments resemble characteristics of cerebral palsy and include epileptic seizures, muscle and joint problems and difficulties swallowing food. "There are some areas of great deficiency in the babies," said Dr. Cynthia Moore, the director of the division of congenital and developmental disorders for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an author of the new study. "They certainly are going to have a lot of impairment." Dr. Deborah Levine, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School who has studied Zika but was not involved in either study, said there would most likely be other waves of children whose brains were affected by the Zika infection, but not severely enough to be noticed in their first year. "A lot of the developmental abnormalities we're not going to see until later," she said. "There's going to be another group seen later in childhood, I'm afraid, and another group probably when they reach school age." In the new study, doctors at two clinics in the northeastern Brazilian states of Pernambuco and Ceara described the cases of 13 infants who had tested positive for the Zika virus. In 11 of the babies, brain scans taken days or weeks after birth showed significant neurological damage, including improperly formed brain areas, excess fluid in some places and abnormal calcium deposits, or calcification, which probably resulted from brain cell death. But the size of their heads, though small, was not small enough to be considered microcephaly. So doctors monitored their progress as they grew. Dr. Vanessa van der Linden, another author of the study and a neuropediatrician at the Association for Assistance of Disabled Children in Recife, Brazil, where most of the babies in the study are patients, said the type of brain damage in the babies who later developed microcephaly "presented the same pattern, but less severe" than those with it at birth. The babies in the study published this fall also appeared to have a pattern of similar, but less severe, brain damage, said Dr. Antonio Augusto Moura da Silva, of the Federal University of Maranhao and an author of that study, which was published in Emerging Infectious Diseases. He and his colleagues studied 48 babies with brain abnormalities in the northeastern state of Maranhao, identified six babies who did not have microcephaly at birth, and found that three of them later developed it. "We were worried, but now that we've started following those cases, we are very sad," Dr. Silva said. "The picture is really terrible. At the least, if they have microcephaly, we expect them to have a very poor quality of life." Experts and the authors of the studies said it was unclear why these infants' brains did not develop enough to match their age and body size. Dr. Ernesto T. A. Marques Jr., an infectious disease specialist at the University of Pittsburgh and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Recife, who was not involved in either study, said it could be that because of the initial fetal brain damage, "the necessary pathways and hormones that organize growth of the neonatal brain are not there anymore and the brain doesn't grow." It could also be the result of the immune system responding to the original Zika virus infection. Dr. Moore said that another possibility might be that there was still some infection that continued to damage the brain. But she said that seemed less likely, given that follow up tests for Zika virus conducted on seven of the babies did not find evidence of active infection. Still, unlike many babies born with microcephaly, most of the 13 in the new study had social interaction skills like smiling and making eye contact. And eight of them had good head control, an important skill for developing the ability to sit or walk. While cautioning that the study involved too few cases to make generalizations, Dr. van der Linden said that it appeared that most of these babies had good eye contact because the damage was less severe in brain areas involving vision than it was in areas involving motor skills. Dr. Marques said that head control, the ability to lift and support the head without help, in babies with microcephaly was "quite rare." Having a social smile and eye contact is less rare, he said, depending on the type of visual damage and on whether they receive enough visual stimulation to strengthen their ability to use their eyes. "At this age, 80 percent of brain stimulus comes from the eyes," he said. "If you don't have that working and you lose this window of opportunity, these babies cannot recover it." One baby, a boy, had no anomalies at birth. His limbs looked normal and his head size was proportional to his body, Dr. Moore said. But brain scans soon after birth showed excess fluid and abnormalities in his cortex and corpus callosum, which separates the two hemispheres. At 11 months old, he had microcephaly, and also epilepsy, difficulty swallowing, involuntary muscle contractions, and muscles that were too stiff and restricted his movement, she said. Another baby had a sloping forehead and slight depressions in the front of his head at birth, as well as similar types of brain damage, apparent on scans, Dr. Moore said. By the time he was 1, he had developed microcephaly that was among the most severe of the babies in the study, and had muscular and swallowing problems. But he also had good eye contact, researchers reported. In six of the cases, the mothers reported having a symptom of Zika infection, a rash, between the second and fifth months of pregnancy. That supports other evidence suggesting that babies born to mothers who were infected late in the first trimester suffer the most serious effects. But since there are no symptoms in 80 percent of cases of Zika infection, it was unclear when most of the women were infected, and researchers are still unable to say whether the virus is more damaging to babies if their mothers experience symptoms. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Q. I have a Netflix account for streaming only. Is there a list of all the movies and shows available with French dubbed audio? A. Netflix supports alternate audio and subtitles in multiple languages for much of its content, but not every show or movie is available in every supported language. One way to see what items are available in French (or another language) in your region is to log into your Netflix account and point your browser to netflix.com/subtitles. On the Audio Subtitles page, use the drop down menus to select Audio or onscreen Subtitles, and then choose a language. In the United States, 18 languages (including French, German, Hindi, Spanish, Tagalog and more) are currently listed. Once you have made your menu selections, Netflix shows you the available content. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
For decades, scientists have debated whether hair dyes frequently used by women might contribute to cancer. The research has been mixed and inconclusive, but now government investigators have turned up a disturbing new possibility. Black women who regularly used permanent dyes to color their hair were 60 percent more likely to develop breast cancer, compared to black women who did not report using dye, according to an analysis published this week in The International Journal of Cancer. White women using hair dye did not see a significantly increased risk. The reasons are unclear: It may be because different products are designed for women of different ethnic and racial backgrounds, or that variations in hair texture alter the amounts of dye that are applied or absorbed through the skin. The study also implicated hair straighteners, finding a 30 percent increase in the risk of breast cancer among women of all races who reported regular use of the products . African American women were much more likely than white women to use hair straighteners, the researchers noted. The analysis does not prove hair treatments cause breast cancer, several experts said, and the overall risk for African American women is difficult to know. Fewer than 10 percent of the study's participants were black women, their use of hair products was assessed only once, and they were tracked for just eight years on average. Generally, scientists become concerned when an environmental exposure doubles or triples cancer risk, meaning the relative risk rises by 100 percent or more. The figures reported in the new study fall short of that threshold. "You cannot, based on these data, make the statement that hair dyes and straighteners cause breast cancer," said Dr. Larry Norton, medical director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. "These effects were small." Still, some scientists said the findings were concerning because of how popular h air products are. In the study, more than half said they had used hair dye, and nearly three quarters of black women reported using hair straighteners. "Our advice is that if you want to take a cautionary approach, limiting the use of these types of products is warranted," said Robin Dodson, a research scientist at the Silent Spring Institute in Newton, Mass., who studies environmental risks to women's health. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. She has identified several chemicals that mimic the hormone estrogen in hair straighteners used by black women, including parabens, commonly used as a preservative, and some banned by the European Union. Estrogen can fuel some types of breast cancer. "Most products put out there on the market today are not adequately tested for safety, and they aren't tested for endocrine disrupting chemicals," Dr. Dodson said, referring to additives that interfere with hormones in the body. "Most people are very surprised to learn that there's nobody really minding the store." The new study, carried out by scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the N.I.H., relied on data from 46,709 women in the so called Sister Study. Participants were between the ages of 35 and 74 and living in the United States from 2003 to 2009. None had breast cancer at the start of the study, but all had at least one sister who had breast cancer meaning that subjects, too, were at elevated risk. The women were asked about their use of hair treatments when they first enrolled in the study. They were followed over an average of eight years, during which 2,794 breast cancers were diagnosed. "The take home message is that these risks are potentially important, but we know that a lot of different factors contribute to a woman's risk of breast cancer," said Alexandra White, head of the environment and cancer epidemiology group at the N.I.E.H.S. and an author of the new report. "We want women to have this information and take it into account in their lifestyle decisions, but to keep in mind that the risks associated with these are small," she added. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The Village Voice, the storied New York alt weekly that shut down in 2018 after a 63 year run, will live again. Brian Calle, the chief executive of Street Media, the owner of LA Weekly, said on Tuesday that he had acquired the publication from its publisher, Peter D. Barbey. "I think a lot of people will be hungry for this and I'm superoptimistic," Mr. Calle said in an interview. He added that he planned to restart The Voice's website in January and would publish a "comeback" print edition early next year, with quarterly print issues to follow. On Tuesday he hired Bob Baker, a former Voice editor, as a senior editor and content coordinator. Mr. Calle said he wanted to bring back more former staff members who know the paper's tone. He has not yet named an editor in chief. The Voice, a mainstay of the independent journalism scene until it wasn't, was founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Edwin Fancher and Norman Mailer. It was home to the dogged investigative reporter Wayne Barrett; the jazz critic and free speech columnist Nat Hentoff; the early rock critic Richard Goldstein; the feminist cultural critic Jill Johnston; the nightlife columnist Michael Musto; and the groundbreaking hip hop writers Nelson George and Greg Tate. Generations of New Yorkers found their first apartments through its seemingly endless classified section. The paper grew thinner over the years, as Craigslist cut into its revenue, and bloggers and early digital sites chipped away at its cultural position. In 2015 it was sold by the Voice Media Group to Mr. Barbey, an heir to an American retail empire whose family owned The Reading Eagle newspaper in Pennsylvania for generations until 2019. He vowed to revitalize the paper, but in August 2017 he took it digital only and shuttered it a year later. Mr. Calle said he had eyed The Voice for several years and got in touch with Mr. Barbey about buying the paper in recent months. "I literally just cold called him and I said, 'Hey, I've been thinking a lot about The Village Voice and a lot about journalism in the context of this year and I feel like we need to figure out a way to bring it back,'" he said. "We had roughly half a dozen calls, just talking about the history of The Voice and getting to know each other, because he views himself as a kind of a steward and was just waiting for someone to come along." Mr. Barbey said he had been approached by a number of prospective owners. "I originally bought The Village Voice to see if we could save it in a different media era," he said. "Brian called and we talked for a while. After thinking about it, I figured he had the best philosophy about how to move forward with The Village Voice." The terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a news release, Street Media said the acquisition did not include the Obie Awards, the Off Broadway honors that will continue to be presented by the American Theater Wing. Mr. Calle has experience running an alt weekly, but his time as publisher and chief executive at LA Weekly has not been without incident. Formerly an opinion editor for The Orange County Register in California and other newspapers, Mr. Calle bought LA Weekly with a group of investors in 2017 from the Voice Media Group. (From 2012 to 2017, the Voice Media Group owned LA Weekly in addition to its flagship paper in New York.) LA Weekly's newsroom was quickly gutted after the sale, and former writers organized a boycott of the paper, pressing advertisers and other journalists to cut ties. Mara Shalhoup, the editor in chief of LA Weekly when Mr. Calle bought it, said that nearly the entire newsroom staff was fired. Ms. Shalhoup, who next week will start as ProPublica's South editor, said she felt LA Weekly was not as focused on serious journalism after the acquisition by Mr. Calle. "I think my opinion is shared by the community of readers in Los Angeles," she said. "It was not the same quality publication after he purchased it as it was before." In 2018, David Welch, one of the investors, sued Mr. Calle and the other LA Weekly backers, alleging that they had mismanaged the paper. The suit was settled in 2019. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Behold, the banana. Who'd have thought it would be one of the most contentious fruits of the 1990s? "It could be a spin doctor's nightmare on either side of the Atlantic if a row about selling bananas sparks a multibillion dollar trade war." "Nobody with any sense wants a tit for tat trade war. That is a blind alley if ever I heard of one." It's a tale of how trade restrictions can trigger geopolitical feuds when countries use things like tariffs to protect their own industries. What became known as the banana wars started like this. European companies were importing fruit tax free from former colonies in places like the Caribbean, Africa and the Pacific to help support their developing economies. Meanwhile, Europe had tariffs and quotas that restricted the fruit that American companies were shipping to Europe from Latin America. And that limited their access to the world's biggest market for bananas. The U.S., together with several Latin American countries, repeatedly turned to the World Trade Organization to mediate the dispute. "This case has been lost four times." But before the W.T.O. ruled that it could strike back, the U.S. announced a plan to put tariffs on European luxury goods. And that got the Europeans mad. "What the Americans have done this last week is clearly unacceptable. It's illegal and it's outside the system." Tensions ran high. Each side accused the others of breaking the rules. "The European Union is the largest member of the W.T.O. And if you allow them to get away with not abiding by the rules, you start to chip away at that system and saying, is the W.T.O. reliable? Can we count on it?" In 2009, Europe agreed to cut back its restrictions on Latin American bananas. But even disputes with a clear cut resolution can seem to be part of a larger story. For example, what could be called the chicken wars is just one of many disputes between the U.S. and China. "The Obama administration will once again take action to hold China accountable." Back in 2010, the Chinese accused the U.S. of dumping underpriced chicken onto its market. So China punished the U.S. with antidumping tariffs. The Americans went to the W.T.O. And they won. Years later, just a month after China lifted the chicken tariffs, President Trump started 2018 with a protectionist bang, widely thought to be aimed at China. He put tariffs on washing machines and solar panels, and made other threats too. "It will be 25 percent for steel. It will be 10 percent for aluminum." Threats of retaliation poured in within days. "We are discussing different U.S. products from which import tariffs can be imposed." Two weeks later, the president stoked growing fears that a trade war with China could be looming. He announced tariffs on consumer goods to punish China for stealing intellectual property from American companies. "This is the first of many." The Chinese immediately responded with threats to retaliate against American products. These unilateral moves could test the strength of the global system for resolving trade disputes. Whether the product is technology, cheap chickens or, yes, even bananas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Interior design projects that don't go well, or don't happen at all, tend to have one thing in common: a failure of vision. You may fail to envision what you want, and do nothing. Or your vision, when completed, fails to match your fantasy. You live surrounded by your regret or spend even more to fix it. But increasingly, technology offers ways to better visualize, say, how a costly couch would look in your living room or how a proposed kitchen renovation would come together. Virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D renderings are the latest tools designers and retailers are using to give clients a clearer vision of projects and purchases before they commit. "A lot of design is trying to explain yourself," said Kevin Hecker of Sea Cliff, N.Y., a software engineer who needed help furnishing the living room of the Victorian style house he shares with his wife and three children. "You have a feeling of what you want, but it's hard to articulate. You just know it when you see it." That's why last fall he chose Decorilla, an online interior design service that offers virtual reality depictions of room redesigns. After sending photographs and dimensions of his living room and discussing his style preferences with a Decorilla designer, Mr. Hecker inserted his smartphone into virtual reality goggles he received in the mail to view the designer's proposal. "It really looked like our living room," Mr. Hecker said. "It's wild. With virtual reality, you can see how multiple pieces go together and from different views, as if you're walking around." He liked what he saw so much, he ended up buying everything (aside from the fur covered ottoman, because he and his wife were morally opposed) and arranging it just as the designer had suggested. Most of the items came from familiar retailers like West Elm and Crate Barrel. Mr. Hecker said the discounts he received by buying through Decorilla more than paid for the 445 design fee. Decorilla's prices range from 400 to 1,300, depending on the size of the room and the designer's experience. Alternatively, the online interior design service Havenly charges a flat 199 per room, which includes emailed 3D visualizations of proposed designs. Three dimensional plans are not as immersive or as cool as virtual reality, but they do give you a pretty good sense of what your space would look like. Havenly's renderings are created from photographs of your room overlaid with suggested furnishings, paint color, window treatments, accessories and other additions. Everything is to scale, giving you a sense of depth and proportion. "We do a lot of testing around here and tried providing the service without the visualization piece," said Lee Mayer, a co founder and the chief executive of Havenly. "But when you get a rendering of your space, it creates a 15 to 20 percent lift in your likelihood to purchase through us the furnishings our designer suggested." It's not surprising, then, that some retailers have started developing visualization apps to help customers be more comfortable buying furnishings online. Because of the expense and level of difficulty, only a few are experimenting with virtual reality. Examples include the Swedish furniture maker Ikea and Doing It Right This Time, or DIRTT, a Canadian company that builds prefab office and residential interiors, including cabinetry, bookshelves and partitions. Others, like FabIndia, an Indian home and lifestyle brand, are testing augmented reality, often described as "virtual reality lite," because rather than wearing special goggles, you hold your phone or tablet as if you were about to take a picture of your room and then dynamically bring into view objects such as sofas, tables and chairs from retail catalogs. "Our products are a significant investment, so we want people to know what to expect before it's shipped and delivered," said Calvin Haggard, the chief executive of United States Stove Company, explaining why the nearly 150 year old manufacturing business began offering an augmented reality app. "The items shown on the app are to scale, so you're not guessing if things will fit. And you can try out enameled or cast iron and various colors, so you can see what matches your decor." There are also free D.I.Y. interior design apps that use augmented reality, including Adornably, Homestyler, Virtual Interior Home Decoration Tool and iStaging. But they are more difficult to use, and offer only a limited (and not that appealing) selection of items. Although virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D renderings have varying degrees of verisimilitude, many design experts and homeowners agree that they are better than leaving things to the imagination, and they are much easier to decipher than a blueprint. "It's definitely the wave of the future, because it allows the general population to make design decisions without feeling hesitant or insecure," said Khoi Vo, a professor and the chair of the department of interior design at Savannah College of Art and Design. "These programs allow us to not only show, 'Here's what a design will look like,' but 'Here's what it will look like at night during a full moon and here's what it will look like during the day.'" But, he said, the expense and expertise required to create virtual reality renderings that are lifelike rather than cartoonish remain high hurdles. For some, a 3D rendering may be just as good. Kathryn Schmahl, a health care marketing consultant in River Forest, Ill., found 3D renderings from Havenly more than adequate for redesigning the circa 1879 wood plank farmhouse she shares with her husband and two young sons. And they were much more helpful, she said, than the collages of proposed items provided by an interior designer with whom she had worked and had paid nearly 10,000. "It was amazing to me that I could send pictures and describe what I wanted and get emailed to me my room redesigned exactly how it would look even down to what's behind the windows, like I'd see a tree if there was a tree," said Ms. Schmahl, who over the last year has used Havenly to redo almost every room in her house. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Wind power can help the world fight climate change, but it's not so great for bats. A new study of wind turbines in Britain found that each turbine killed one to two bats each month on average, with some killing more than 60. The researchers said that the efforts that are required in many countries to assess the environmental effect of planned wind farms have proved faulty and inadequate in measuring the risk to bats. There are more than 300,000 wind turbines around the world. The risks to birds of the blades of wind turbines are becoming well understood, but the risk to bats, while known, has been poorly defined until now, said Fiona Mathews, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of mammalian biology at the University of Exeter in England. Bats, she said, might be attracted to turbines, whether because of the noise the machines make or the bugs that are trapped in the air movement: "It's a ready food supply." Her team found bat casualties in unexpected places like high altitude spots, she said. Finding the bats, which are small and not colorful, presented special challenges. Using specially trained bat sniffing dogs, the researchers found the hard to spot bat corpses at the bases of turbines at 46 wind farms around England. Dr. Mathews said she contacted an expert who trains dogs to sniff out bodies, bombs and the like for bat duty. "He just killed himself laughing," she said, and then he told her, "This is the funniest thing anybody's ever asked me to do." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Over a 45 year career, Elizabeth Bishop published about 100 poems a small body of work. Readers mistook her modesty of scale for modesty of ambition. She won major prizes, and her work was praised, but the praise was subtly, or not so subtly, hedged. She was one of the best women poets America had ever produced (this poet who didn't want to appear in anthologies of women's poetry). She was valued for her "eye," her balance and seeming ordinariness. Vermeer and Vuillard were comparisons. She was "a poet's poet's poet." There was something right in these descriptions, but also something very wrong. They missed the disorienting power of Bishop's poetry to imprint itself on your imagination like a dream, sometimes like a nightmare. Critics were comforted, when they might have been disturbed, that these poems with their sympathy for the hybrid, inverted and grotesque were written by a woman. Praise for her composure rushed to ignore what was strange and therefore arresting in her style. Bishop was a poet with her feet on the ground, not a poet who told you what it felt like to fall through space and slide under big black waves (see her sublime "In the Waiting Room"). Since her death in 1979, the picture has changed. Now there are several collected editions of her poetry. Her unpublished poems and drafts have appeared; also her prose and letters. There is a volume of interviews, and another of her artwork. If you wanted to read a book about Bishop in 1979, you would have found one slim volume. Today there are dozens. She is the subject of a novel, a play, a feature film and documentaries. Her homes in Florida and Nova Scotia are landmarks. There are not one but two Elizabeth Bishop societies. In short, this polite, famously reticent poet, formerly in the background of a poetic era dominated by her close friend Robert Lowell, has shouldered virtually everyone else aside, including, in a remarkable (if only temporary?) adjustment of rankings, Lowell himself. Just as remarkable is the fact that so much of the attention Bishop has received is focused on what she badly wanted to keep out of sight: her life story. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. That story starts with trauma. Bishop's father died when she was 8 months old; five years later, her mother was permanently committed to a hospital for insanity. Bishop's early life was divided uncomfortably between her mother's family in rural Nova Scotia and her father's well to do relations in Massachusetts. She graduated from Vassar in the midst of the Great Depression with the improbable intention of making her way as a poet. She had the advantage of a small inheritance, and she had just made friends with Marianne Moore, who would be a guide and sponsor. But much else was against her. Her health had never been good. She suffered from severe allergies, asthma and eczema. Also, she drank too much, and that problem would get worse. To complicate matters further, Bishop was a lesbian. This central fact determined the nature of her intimacies and her felt difference from the world around her. She had an orphan's knack for finding lovers ready to support and protect her, but she was by no means a simple, passive dependent. She was at times involved with more than one woman at once, and some of the women she was closest to (also some of the men) were notably unstable. The lover at the center of her story is Lota de Macedo Soares (known simply as Lota in books about Bishop), a charismatic Brazilian from a leading family who nursed Bishop back to health when the poet collapsed from an allergic reaction on a visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1951. As Lota's partner, Bishop plunged into a new culture and a new language, greatly enlarged her frame of reference and experience, and became a poet of the whole hemisphere. But the relationship ended in catastrophe, in 1967, when Lota took a fatal overdose of pills. With Lota, Bishop was not only busy discovering Brazil; she was hiding from Cold War America and a society hostile to homosexuals. The strategy was successful enough that her life with Lota remains somewhat mysterious to American readers; and Megan Marshall's new biography of Bishop throws a clarifying light on this crucial relationship. Marshall's is only the second full scale biography of Bishop, and the first to appear in 25 years. A Pulitzer Prize winning biographer, Marshall is a skilled reader who points out telling echoes between Bishop's published and private writing. Her account is enriched by a cache of revelatory, recently discovered documents. These include a sensational series of letters from Bishop to her psychoanalyst in which the poet details her sexual history and describes the specific experiences behind "At the Fishhouses" and "The Moose," two of her most memorable poems. Marshall's narrative is smooth and brisk: an impressive feat, given the mass of evidence she had to deal with. But Bishop's life was hardly smooth, and the story is told too briskly. Key aspects of Bishop's creativity her work as a visual artist, her passion for music, her literary translations Marshall treats swiftly or simply passes over. To keep up the pace (or to satisfy copyright lawyers; she doesn't say), for much of the book Marshall summarizes Bishop's letters, rarely quoting more than a phrase or two, not a whole passage or paragraph, with the result that we get little sense of Bishop's idiosyncratic voice, with its anxious qualifications, dry wit and looping self reference. Similarly, we hear about, but never get a close look at, Bishop's habitual drunkenness and the abject suffering it entailed. Marshall's Bishop, whom she refers to cozily as Elizabeth, is consistently sane, sympathetic and coherent, easy to like and admire; and therefore considerably simplified. Marshall knew her subject personally, having been a student in a poetry writing course Bishop taught at Harvard in 1976. She builds on this encounter by introducing passages of memoir that frame the biography proper and give us glimpses of Marshall's youth and Boston's literary scene in the 1970s. But we don't learn enough about Marshall for her life to take on independent interest, and the memoir ends up being mainly a distraction. One chapter concludes with maximum drama as Bishop tries to save her relationship with Lota by tossing a rival lover's letters into the Sao Francisco River. When memoir returns on the next page, and Marshall tells us Bishop gave her a final grade of B, "the first I'd received since high school chemistry," air rushes out of the story with a whoosh. But Bishop comes back into focus before too long. We follow as she moves from Brazil to Boston in 1972 for what would be the final phase of her career. Her daily life is a stream of accidents, ailments and crises, as if she were bent on proving the precariousness of her mere existence. Still she manages to publish a new collection of poetry, "Geography III," containing just 10 poems, one of them a translation and none of them especially long. Bishop, characteristically, frets over its size. Doesn't she have more to show for all her grief? Yet the collection is as perfect and complete, as fully achieved and starkly original, as any book of poetry in English. There is nothing modest about it. And despite her self doubt and self deprecation, Bishop must have known how good it was which is to say, so good it wouldn't be enough. Her readers would want more. If not more poems, then more of her. We would want to know everything we could about the woman who wrote it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SAN FRANCISCO The Democratic National Committee believes it was targeted in a hacking attempt by a Russian group in the weeks after the midterm elections last year, according to court documents filed late Thursday. On Nov. 14, the documents say, dozens of D.N.C. email addresses were on the receiving end of a so called spearphishing campaign by one of two Russian organizations believed to be responsible for hacking into the committee's computers during the 2016 presidential race. There is no evidence that the most recent attack was successful. The documents, filed in federal court in New York, were part of an amended complaint in a lawsuit filed in April that claimed the committee was the victim of a conspiracy by Russian intelligence agents, President Trump's 2016 campaign and WikiLeaks to damage Hillary Clinton's presidential run. The new court filings say the time stamps and contents of the spearphishing emails received in November were consistent with separate cyberattacks around the same time tied to the Russian hacking group known as Cozy Bear, one of the two Russian groups suspected of breaching D.N.C. computers in 2016. Security researchers believe the hacking attempt against the D.N.C. in November was part of a broader campaign that used decoy emails that appeared to come from the State Department. That campaign had more than a dozen targets, including government agencies, think tanks, law enforcement officials, journalists, military personnel, defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies and transportation officials, according to a report by the cybersecurity firm FireEye. Researchers believe the goal was to ferret out American foreign policy, particularly related to Africa; Democratic policy positions; and the platforms of 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls. FireEye said the attempted hacking of the D.N.C. in November resembled other recent attacks attributed to Cozy Bear, including in its "deliberate reuse" of old phishing tactics and reliance on a similar list of victims. But there were a few new wrinkles, including new decoy email addresses and different obfuscation techniques. The hackers sent some targets of the broader campaign three phishing emails at most. In other instances, they were more aggressive, sending as many as 136 emails to a single organization. In some cases, the malware laced emails were successful. And once they gained access to a computer network, it was only a matter of hours before they were deploying stealthier hacking tools. The attackers in November compromised a hospital email server to launch their phishing emails, a common tactic of the Cozy Bear group, said Nick Carr, a senior manager at FireEye. Cozy Bear hackers are skilled at rummaging through a network without drawing attention, said Matthew Dunwoody, a FireEye security researcher. Once in, they often swap out their phishing tools for malware that can be hard to detect, he said. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. FireEye said that although Cozy Bear was the likeliest culprit, the firm could not firmly establish who was responsible for the 2018 campaign against the D.N.C. and other targets. CrowdStrike, another cybersecurity firm, also noted an uptick in hacking activity in November, but it could not say definitively that Cozy Bear was to blame. Cozy Bear, also known by security firms as APT 29 or the Dukes, was one of two Russian groups involved in the 2016 hacking of the D.N.C. It has not attracted the same scrutiny as the other group, Fancy Bear, or APT 28, which has been linked to a string of cyberattacks against the D.N.C., the International Olympic Committee and other international organizations. Cozy Bear has been active since 2016, security researchers say, and has been linked to a coordinated wave of hacking attacks on Democratic Party officials. The D.N.C. says in the amended complaint that the November campaign was consistent with a continuing push by Russian hackers to target Democratic candidates and party leaders. In 2017, Russian hackers are believed to have attempted a hack of the computer network of former Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri and the networks of at least two other candidates in the midterm elections. Mr. Trump has long denied any collusion with Russia, and in December several defendants named in the D.N.C.'s lawsuit argued that it should be dismissed because the committee was using it to try to "explain away" the Democratic "candidate's defeat in the 2016 presidential campaign." On Friday, Geoffrey A. Graber, a D.N.C. lawyer, said the committee expected defendants named in the case to file another motion for dismissal soon. The Russian government has consistently denied hacking the D.N.C. In a "statement of immunity" from Russia's Ministry of Justice, Russian authorities argued that even if it were responsible for the hacking, such a "sovereign act" would be considered a "military action" protected by a 1976 law that offers some immunity from lawsuits regarding foreign governments' actions in the United States. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The day of a recent school shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., the superintendent of the local school district offered parents guidance on how to talk with their children about the incident, in which a teacher, an 8 year old student and the gunman all died. "Be willing to listen to their story and be willing to listen to their story multiple times," the superintendent said. "Reassure them that the danger that they faced has passed." It was kind and sensible advice, and if I hadn't read it in a news story on my way home from seeing "Church State," an Off Broadway play that takes forceful exception to the pervasive gun violence in the United States, the words might not have struck me the way they did. As it was, I couldn't help thinking that the broader danger had not at all passed, and that there's no assuaging the generalized dread that courses through our culture with every fresh headline grabbing slaughter, and in between. "I for one am tired of being afraid," a Southern senator says in the play, reversing his stance on gun control after a massacre at his children's school. On stage after stage lately, playwrights have been confronting such fears about gun violence, adding their works to a genre that has blossomed like a furious bruise in recent years. No single work encompasses the enormous scope of the issue. Yet together they tell a story that demands our willingness to listen, and to listen again. No Screen to Separate Us Cite the numbers, and the problem instantly becomes too vast to grasp: More than 33,000 people killed and upward of 78,000 wounded by firearms each year in the United States, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Most of those aren't going to make the news, and unless they are especially heinous or close to home, aren't we a little inured to the ones that do? This is where the stealthy power of theater has an advantage, at least theoretically. There are dramas involving shootings in schools ("Punk Rock," "The Faculty Room," "The Library") and workplaces ("Gloria"); attacks spurred by politics ("The Events"), racism ("Mother Emanuel") or mental illness ("Holden"). There are plays focused on bystanders for whom gun killings are an everyday trauma ("Pass Over") or a surreal aberration ("When It's You"). Other shows are some combination of the above ("On the Exhale," "Church State," "The Assignment"). Plays can put us in the room or on the street corner to eavesdrop on unguarded moments, on music and laughter as in Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj, Adam Mace and Christian Lee Branch's "Mother Emanuel," a gospel music celebration of the people gunned down at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. There is intimacy to that, because there is no glowing screen to separate us from the grief and devastation. The experience is visceral and enveloping in a way that the news is not. We may even forget that we are safe. In Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's musical "Assassins" (1990), about murderers and would be murderers of United States presidents, there is a famous moment when Charles Guiteau, the killer of President James A. Garfield, trains his gun on the audience. This is true, and it worked precisely as intended the night I saw "Assassins" this spring at Yale Repertory Theater. The show itself, which gets at the congenital nature of this nation's gun love, has a contemporary resonance that has only grown with the years. But it catapulted me backward, too, in an unexpected way: A scent wafted from the stage that reminded me of the cap guns my childhood best friend and his brothers used to play with. One of them, in young adulthood, would be murdered by a stranger with a gun. I've known three people who have died at the barrel of a gun, two from suicide. That feels like a high number to me, but Antoinette Nwandu's urgent, poetic "Pass Over" which I saw a year ago in a Cherry Lane Theater Mentor Project showcase, and which Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago will stage in June persuades me that this perception is relative. In her play, two young black men in a bullet riddled neighborhood of an unidentified American city are listing the people they've known who've been killed. "Both," says Kitch, who has many more names to add. The play, which transports the audience to the block that Kitch and Moses are eager to leave for a better life, captures in a way I have never encountered elsewhere the paralyzing effect of constant violence. Fearful of being shot by the police ("You heard they picked off Ed, though, right?" Kitch asks), these tough and likable guys repeatedly flinch at the sound or, sometimes, in anticipation of the sound of gunfire. The most haunting such play that I've seen, "Pass Over" requires no prop guns or fake blood. It relies on suggestion, and it is terrifying: both the physical danger and the existential despair. The knot that will need untangling if anything is ever truly to change for Kitch and Moses is viciously snarled. Getting us to look at that and comprehend it, to take us outside our own experience and alter us somehow by the time we leave the theater: That's part of the charge for an artist wrestling with an issue as momentous as this. Yet the genre is still waiting for its great works. Too often there is a sense of preaching, perhaps angrily, to the choir, unspooling dramas whose reliably infuriating outlines we already know from the news. The graphic representation of carnage in plays like Branden Jacobs Jenkins's "Gloria" and Simon Stephens's "Punk Rock," both of which are less about a particular instance of violence than the events surrounding it can be a way of startling us into awareness, making witnesses out of observers. Yet such special effects often threaten to overwhelm a play, becoming its gory centerpiece, the thing that everyone talks about (or, in the case of "Gloria," is asked not to, so as not to ruin the surprise). There is a macabre fascination to seeing blood spilled onstage. But does it take us any further in our understanding than an article in the newspaper, or the bystanders' videos that can show us, online at any moment of any day, some person we've never met being shot to death? Where theater excels is in activating our imaginations and our empathy coaxing us into picturing vivid scenarios inside our own heads. We can't avert our gaze from those. Sensationalism, self righteousness, sentimentality there are plenty of traps lying in wait for playwrights examining gun violence. Jason Odell Williams's "Church State" leads awkwardly with comedy, then begins to preach as its politician protagonist decides that action, not prayer, is the sensible response in the wake of horror. William Electric Black's "The Faculty Room," set in a high school and running through April 30 at Theater for the New City, is indeed didactic, instructing the audience about the nexus of the Second Amendment and urban ills. Camilo Almonacid's "The Assignment," staged by Houses on the Moon Theater Company through May 7 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, struggles to make a mother's long ago loss of her son to gun violence as sympathetic as the bumbling efforts of a sweet ex con (memorably played by Erick Betancourt) to forge a new life nearly 20 years after he pulled the trigger on someone. Among the most harrowing stage moments involving a firearm that I've seen lately, in fact, wasn't in a gun play. It was in Stephan Wolfert's autobiographical military monologue "Cry Havoc!" for the theater company Bedlam, when he re enacted a suicidal impulse, miming the sawed off shotgun he jammed up against his jaw. Clearly he didn't go through with it, but I couldn't get the worry out of my head: Does he still own guns? After the show, because I know him as a reporter, I did the intrusive thing and asked. My whole body relaxed when he said no. Last Sunday night, I saw another Houses on the Moon production called "Gun Country," which continues through May 3 at A.R.T./New York Theaters. Directed by Jenna Worsham, it is a program not of plays but of stories told by people whose lives have been touched by guns, sometimes in positive ways. One of the most potent tales is Ms. Worsham's own, which begins with a warm recollection of her teenage Southern self getting the 12 gauge Beretta semiautomatic she'd longed for. Ms. Worsham is a Manhattanite now, and her views on gun control have evolved. But she understands people who regard regulation as "a dirty word," as she puts it. She looks at the people she's known all her life who hold views that she abhors, and she loves them anyway an extraordinary ability in this riven culture of ours. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
At companies like Square, Apple, Google, Amazon and PayPal, to name just a few, some of the smartest programmers in the world are doing everything they can to virtualize cash registers, credit cards, receipts, coupons and probably even pockets. It is not a great time for the old fashioned wallet. And yet apparently even Square's founder himself is not quite ready to go out into the world completely devoid of some physical money carrying device. "Keep it tight," Jack Dorseytweeted a while back, with a link that led to the Americana 2.0. The Americana 2.0 is a minimalist wallet, 2.25 inches wide by 2.75 inches long. (Typical traditional wallet size: around 4.5 inches wide by 3.5 inches long.) Its primary component, an elastic loop, is designed to engirdle a modest stack of credit cards. Its secondary component, a slim pocket made out of Italian lambskin, can accommodate enough cash to get through an evening out, as long as you start with fairly large denominations. The Brooklyn based company that produces the Americana 2.0 and several similar wallets is called TGT, which is the streamlined, less vowel laden way that minimalists spell "Tight." Inspired by the thick red rubber bands that tether heads of broccoli together, TGT's founder, Jack Sutter, 35, started designing TGT prototypes in 2008. Skinny jeans were just starting to make a mass migration to the men's side of the clothing world, and Mr. Sutter saw the need for a wallet that could fit into aggressively fitted denim without undermining the streamlined silhouette that skinny jeans were intended to produce. In November 2012, after experimenting with prototypes and producing TGT wallets on a limited basis for a number of years, Mr. Sutter created a campaign on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to take it into wider production. The project attracted approximately 7,500 backers who pledged 317,424. And suddenly Mr. Sutter was faced with the challenge of manufacturing and shipping more than 13,000 wallets before Christmas, a process that included foggy late night drives to Rhode Island to train local artisans in the ways of TGT. The Fusion wallet fits cash, cards and more. Mr. Sutter's campaign remains the most financed wallet project on Kickstarter, but it's far from the only one. Since 2011, hundreds of wallet projects have successfully found backing on Kickstarter. They include wallets made out of titanium, carbon fiber, fire hose canvas, recycled bicycle tubes, stone, wood, the same leather used for Lamborghini seats, silk, duct tape and spunbonded olefin. They include wallets that feature protection against card data theft, wallets that incorporate multitools, bottle openers, USB ports and phone chargers. But mostly they are "minimalist" affairs that promise to refine, redefine and reimagine your wallet experience. While the planet's most powerful tech corporations are determined to upgrade us to a cardless, cashless and presumably walletless future, quixotic young men and women are planting themselves in front of sewing machines and breathing life into this 21st century buggy whip. "A wallet is one of the only products that you use every single day," says Mr. Sutter. "It's something to really put thought into." Ryan Crabtree, creator of the Crabby Wallet, second to the Americana 2.0 in Kickstarter funding at 308,838, echoes these sentiments. "Everybody always carries their phone, keys and wallet with them, wherever they go. I was like, 'How can I make those three things come together in the smallest way possible?' " Mr. Crabtree, 28, estimates he went through at least 30 prototypes of his elastic namesake wallet before arriving at a satisfactory answer to that question. All the R D paid off. The Crabby Wallet worked with Kickstarter, too. "Literally within five minutes of launching, we started getting backers," he says. "That wasn't even enough time to read all our content. People were basically watching the video and making a pledge." The Crabby Wallet features a tiny loop to secure your keys and a bright elastic band to secure your phone. Compared to traditional leather billfolds, it's not particularly elegant or luxurious looking. But it does look dynamic and efficient and deeply considered, a wallet that is trying to stay relevant to users instead of just coasting on its legacy accessory bona fides. Along with a minimalist profile, this mandate toward greater functionality is a defining feature of the 21st century wallet. Take the creation of Chris Zumtobel, 23, and Bjorn Talbot, 22, co founders of a Brooklyn based company called BankNote NYC. The left half of their BankNote wallet features card slots. The right half features a tiny paper notebook and a built in pen slot (and pen). The BankNote's leather is vintage Italian and sewn by a veteran leather worker in Queens whom Mr. Zumtobel found via Craigslist. The BankNote's tiny paper notebook, made by a New Jersey woman the men found on the craft site Etsy, features archival paper and hand sewn bindings. It is, in short, an emphatically artisanal and tactile product. "We got this tweet from a customer who said, 'My BankNote smells like the inside of James Bond's briefcase,' " Mr. Talbot said. But for all its handcrafted archaism, the multitasking BankNote is a post iPhone product as well, a wallet with its own analog word processing and image creation app. Mr. Talbot is betting that the BankNote's capacity to enhance personal expression will keep it relevant even as cash and credit cards disappear. "I carry a picture of my sister in my wallet," he says. "I have a lucky 2 bill and a fortune from a fortune cookie. These are items that I always want to have on me, and I need somewhere to put them, whether or not I'm putting cash and cards in the same place. Maybe no one's ever going to steal your wallet again, because there's no financial gain in it. But I still want a place to keep these things." And that's not the only reason to retain a wallet in the coming cashless age. The Ridge Wallet, designed by a son and father team based in Southern California, Daniel and Paul Kane, features a T shaped elastic harness as its core component, and a pair of metal plates as its "exoskeleton." "One of our customers worked in construction," says Daniel Kane. The man, who had ordered the titanium version of the wallet and was carrying it in his pocket, fell at work one day. "He landed on a two inch nail," said Mr. Kane. "Basically, that nail would have gone right into his cheek if he didn't have the wallet. He sent us a picture, and there was a big fat dent right in the middle of the plate." Die hard utilitarians, take note. That's the kind of personal protection no digital wallet is ever going to match, no matter how good its encryption is. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Reviewing Emilie Pine's "Notes to Self" in The Irish Times, Martina Evans wrote: "It's the kind of book you want to give to everyone, especially young women and men, so that we can learn together to take ourselves and each other more seriously." A lot of readers must have taken her advice, because the essay collection became the No. 1 best selling book in Ireland, where Pine is an associate professor of modern drama at University College Dublin. Pine had written academic books before, but the subject matter and the perspective in "Notes to Self" were a radical departure. She writes in these six essays about the effect of her father's alcoholism on her family, her unsuccessful attempts to have a baby, menstruation, body image and sexual violence. Her tone is both frank and measured, confessional and confidently self contained. Below, Pine talks about the "volcanic pressure" she felt to write these things, her surprising connections with readers and more. When did you first get the idea to write this book? My father, who had been an alcoholic all my life, went into liver failure in 2013. He was in intensive care and spent a year in and out of the hospital. In 2014, when it became apparent he was actually going to live, I still had a lot of crazy emotions going around in my head, so I wrote them down, just in a journal to myself. My partner found it and said, "There's something here." It took me two years to get up the courage to send it to a publisher in Ireland, and they commissioned a book out of it. There was this moment when they asked if I could write a book, and I simultaneously thought: Yes and no. But I was being given this incredible permission. And I was being told I had a style and a voice, words I would never have used about myself. On the bus on the way home from that meeting, I wrote down five ideas on the back of my bus ticket that's part of the joke of the title, I write on every scrap of paper available and those five ideas became the five other essays, and I didn't really deviate from that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The goat can be a loaded symbol, according to Mr. Ward, 53, who was born in Jamaica and now lives in Harlem with his wife and two children. He likes to elicit association, memory, history and politics through installations and large scale sculptures laden with commonplace and often discarded objects that he collects from the streets. At his studio and home in a former fire station, he described how the goat can be perceived as a sacrificial animal as well as an image of debauchery, as humble or arrogant, an insult or a boast. Musicians and athletes often use G.O.A.T. as an acronym for Greatest of All Time. After Donald J. Trump won the election, Mr. Ward thought the goat seemed like the suitable form for populating the public park. "Audacity was in the air, with this ego running rampant," said Mr. Ward, a natural storyteller with an easy sense of humor. He had intended to do something "absurdist and ridiculous" with chickens after being offered the Socrates commission last summer but scrapped that plan in November. "I didn't feel playful anymore," he said, emphasizing that the idea is bigger than the new president. "There was something urgent that I needed to talk about. The title 'G.O.A.T., again' is referencing the small minded concept of history that you're the Greatest of All Time." "What's universal," he said, "is the notion of a savior, the notion of a charlatan, the abuse of power and manipulation." Splayed across the center of the park is a 40 foot long hobbyhorse with a colossal faux stone goat's head. Titled "Scapegoat," a term that goes back to the Bible, the sculpture is like a caricature of a political monument or the abandoned plaything of a deity. Mr. Ward imagines the outsize animal as part of a play "where the main character is killed." Whether "Scapegoat" is meant to be worshiped, ostracized or mourned is left ambiguous. "It's up the viewer to figure out their role in that," said Mr. Ward, who likes to keep his imagery open ended enough to invite multiple readings. "The goats become the ambassadors for the conversation," he added. Indeed, Mr. Ward seems to be courting public opinion in the park with a giant glowing sign that spells "Apollo," like the Harlem theater. But in Mr. Ward's version, the first and last letters blink to flip the message to "poll," a word linked to the 2016 election. "It's the linchpin of the show," said Mr. Ward, connecting the theater's Amateur Night, where the crowd cheers contestants or boos them off the stage, with the protests, rallies and social media eruptions across the American landscape. For Mr. Ward, who just had a midcareer traveling museum survey open at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, working outside the white cube of the gallery is a return to how he started. In 1993, during a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem after receiving his master of fine arts degree at Brooklyn College, he began collecting abandoned baby strollers from the streets. They were a poignant symbol to him of disrupted lives. Staging his own exhibition in a rented fire station (where he moved in 1999), he clustered 365 strollers and carved out an ellipse shaped pathway lined with fire hose. The installation suggested both a vulva and a ship's hull. Titled "Amazing Grace" a song that permeated the space in a haunting loop it evoked journeys both painful and transcendent and helped develop Mr. Ward's approach to assembling found objects rich with past lives and stories. Cecilia Alemani, who commissioned Mr. Ward's "Smart Tree" for the High Line last year, called Mr. Ward "a poet of urban transformation." "Nari's able to chronicle the life of the city and the people who live in the cities through the objects that they use and leave behind," she said. He stopped traffic on the High Line with his sculpture of a car propped on cinder blocks and covered with a patchwork of cut tires that became a giant vase for an apple tree. It was based on a childhood memory of his father buying a broken car that he intended to fix but left sitting so long in his yard in Jamaica that it sprouted a tree. "There was quite an element of hope," Ms. Alemani said. This year Mr. Ward won the 100,000 Vilcek Prize, awarded annually to an immigrant artist who has contributed significantly to American culture. He came from Jamaica at 12 with his family, first to Brooklyn and then Parsippany, N.J. There, his mother worked as a housekeeper for Fred Schwartz famous locally for his "Fred the Furrier" TV ads in the 1970s and the family lived with Mr. Schwartz's mentally handicapped brother in law. "It became my job to take care of Howie," Mr. Ward said. "I felt this weird sense of protection for him. It was my tour of duty." The works in Mr. Ward's museum survey, which opened in 2015 at the Perez Art Museum Miami and also traveled to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, explore cliches of Caribbean culture, the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of black men on city streets, and ideas of migration, struggle and ascension. Ruth Erickson, associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, who coordinated the presentation there, said she "could not have imagined how newly timely Nari's survey would be in our current political moment." "Naturalization Drawing Table" from 2004 shows the procrastinatory doodles Mr. Ward made on an Immigration and Naturalization Service form the first time he set out to become a citizen. "The work I was making was questioning what it means to be an American, in response to post 9/11 fervor and distancing ourselves from other people," Mr. Ward said. "I thought I needed to get my citizenship if I wanted to critique this country that I love." He finally completed the process in 2012 after multiple starts and stops. His drawing table will be activated on May 4, when visitors to the show can receive an edition set of Mr. Ward's elaborate doodles in return for filling out the I.N.S. form and having a passport photo taken on site. The notarized applications will then be hung on the wall of the museum and become a permanent part of the piece. Participation is also weaved into a billboard size installation in which thousands of shoelaces spell the first words of the Constitution, "We the People," originally conceived in 2011 using hand dyed laces. Mr. Ward was persuaded by the philanthropist Diana DiMenna to make a new version this year as a permanent acquisition for the New York Historical Society after landing on the idea of collecting used shoelaces from among the 200,000 schoolchildren who visit the society annually. "We wanted people, and especially children, to be able to put themselves literally into the narrative of what it means to be 'we the people'," Ms. DiMenna said. On view in the lobby, "We the People" has been integrated into the society's curriculum on constitutional history and is a pit stop for visiting school groups. This month a frequent visitor to Socrates Sculpture Park watched Mr. Ward installing "Bipartition Bell," a bulbous organic shape made of hammered copper dangling from a steel frame and reminiscent of the Liberty Bell. The man called out to Mr. Ward, asking him if it was testicles "you have hanging up there." The artist pretended not to hear, but then told the man it was an "upside down heart." Finally he sheepishly admitted it was indeed modeled on a goat scrotum. "It's this massive organ that's about virility and potentiality," said Mr. Ward, who will also have a gallery exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in June. While his sculpture seems to promise a resounding gong, viewers who duck their heads inside the bell will find only the tiniest billy goat chime that they can ring. Mr. Ward said he's playing with the idea of "unfulfilled expectations," something he feels many Americans are currently experiencing. For black Americans, he said, it has long been "the norm." "When what you want to happen doesn't happen, how do you then deal with the shortcomings?" he asked. "I think artists are good at shedding light on emotional spaces that are buried because they're painful to revisit." Yet he never wants to leave viewers without a silver lining. In Mr. Ward's goat land, where testicles can be read as a heart, the little bell inside may be a letdown, or a seed of hope. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
David Stern Saw Where the Sports World Was Headed Long Before It Got There David Stern came to power in the N.B.A. in the early 1980s at a pivot point for professional sports in the United States. Wars between the players and management were in full swing. Major League Baseball and the N.F.L. had each embarked on a scorched earth strategy to stifle the mounting power of the players and their unions. Taking all this in was a 40 something New York lawyer who had another idea. Stern had arrived at the N.B.A. in 1978, after serving as the league's outside counsel. He bided his time as general counsel and as executive vice president, overseeing the league's business operations, until 1984, when he became commissioner. And then everything changed. Stern looked at the basketball court and saw the world's greatest athletes, a unique, supersize group of players who could fly through the air on their way to twisting dunks and toss a large ball through a small hoop from 30 feet away. His league had rare talents like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and, beginning in 1984, a guard out of North Carolina named Michael Jordan. Stern, who believed the N.B.A. had failed to leverage the talents and popularity of its past stars, decided that all N.B.A. greats, past and present, would be his tickets to success. Instead of trying to snuff out the rising power of players an approach that had cost baseball and football hundreds of millions of dollars and huge chunks of seasons Stern figured out how to embrace the change and capitalize on it. Television promotions featured N.B.A. players and their on court acrobatics. After deciding the league should have a licensing and sponsorship division, which it somehow lacked before he came aboard, Stern hired a young executive named Rick Welts, who is now the president of the Golden State Warriors. They made a dream list of partners McDonald's, Coke and others and then traveled the country telling the story of what the N.B.A. could be. "He would talk about the athletes, the beauty of the sport, and explain how we were going to create a business structure around this to make it a really good investment," Welts said. "He was mesmerizing when he would get in a room. You couldn't not believe him because of the passion." Stern vastly expanded NBA Entertainment, the league's production arm, which he helped launch in 1982 to create highlights and television shows. He cut a deal with the Players Association and a video game maker that led to the creation of what was then one of the most popular video arcade games ever NBA Jam. When the International Olympic Committee decided to allow professional athletes to compete, Stern took his biggest stars and created the so called Dream Team. Suddenly, N.B.A. players were the biggest celebrities in the world's biggest sporting event, sending the league's brand into every corner of the world. Stern would have his labor battles with the players, but the worst of those arrived after the N.B.A. had become one of the world's most successful sports leagues. By then, even Stern's adversaries admired his work. "He recognized that the game was about the players, and he elevated the marketability of those players in a way that had never happened before," said Jeff Kessler, the labor lawyer who represented the Players Association in numerous battles with the league during Stern's tenure. Stern, who grew up modestly, the son of a deli owner in the Chelsea section of Manhattan long before the area became fashionable, was not an easy person to work for or with, or against. He berated those who questioned his decisions, occasionally in public if they were members of the press. He dressed down employees, sometimes in front of representatives of the league's partners. The style bothered some more than others. "Sometimes the delivery could be challenging, but it got you to the desired outcome," said Peter Land, the N.B.A.'s director of marketing communications from 1993 to 1998. Welts said there were days when he left the office wondering if he could continue working for Stern. Then his home phone would ring at 10 p.m., "and he would be Uncle Dave, and he would talk about what we were accomplishing, how great this was going to be," Welts said. "I'd come in the next day ready to run through a wall for him." Other commissioners simply managed sports leagues. Stern fashioned himself as one of the world's leading chief executives, worthy of hobnobbing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and at the Allen Co. media summits in Sun Valley, Idaho. If players behaved in a way that tarnished the league's image, he did not hide his wrath. A 1997 fight between Latrell Sprewell, a star forward for the Warriors, and P.J. Carlesimo, a coach with a reputation for verbally abusing his players, earned Sprewell a one year suspension and the termination of his contract. An arbitrator later ordered the suspension shortened and allowed Sprewell to recoup the 17.3 million his contract guaranteed him. Stern also took harsh measures toward the players who brawled with abusive fans late in the fourth quarter of a game between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers in 2004. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
During his long, illustrious career, Robert Morris has constructed sculptures that startle, question, challenge and flout expectations. Since the early 1960s, he has made, in a range of materials, spare, geometric forms; Dada like objects; ephemeral works; land art; environments with sound systems that play scripted narratives; proto selfies; dramatic pastel pictures with elaborate sculpted frames; performance art; and, not too long ago, a glass "Labyrinth" on the grounds of the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., that has become a popular gathering place. This body of work reflects Mr. Morris's abilities as a consummate craftsman who possesses a fine tuned intellect with a philosophical bent, the prowess of an agile athlete and the talent to draw like an old master. When Mr. Morris, who's 86 and was born and raised in Kansas City, and his first wife, Simone Forti, a dancer, moved to New York from the West Coast in 1959, the couple became an integral part of a downtown scene made up of avant garde painters, musicians, dancers and performance artists. In this atmosphere, Mr. Morris built the seven large, plywood structures currently on long term view at Dia:Beacon; they were first exhibited in his solo show at the fabled Green Gallery on West 57th Street in December 1964. Resting on the floor, propped against walls, even hanging from the ceiling, these smooth surfaced, gray colored sculptures are early examples of the art movement and aesthetic that became Minimalism. The time was ripe for change, and Mr. Morris and his colleagues Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt obliged. Intriguingly, none of these Minimalists studied sculpture in art school. They never learned how to model in clay, carve marble or weld metal. Mr. Morris set out to be a painter. While building props for his wife's performances, he created a solo for himself with the Living Theater, featuring "Column," his first important object. It was a tall rectangular box with a hollow core; and he stood inside of it for several minutes before toppling over. He almost got a concussion. But he had found his metier. He became a sculptor. Though he has been a trailblazer, he has always been the odd man out. Minimalism was just one of many stops on his six decade journey through the art world. He also published polemical essays about the nature of sculpture in Artforum. To earn a master's degree in art history, he wrote a thesis on the work of Constantin Brancusi, the modern Romanian virtuoso. And, for many years, he was a popular art professor at Hunter College. More than anything else, however, Robert Morris liked to make things. He has worked with lead, aluminum mesh, mirrors, dirt, felt, steam and steel. In November, Mr. Morris recalled that when Donald Judd wrote in a review, "'The trouble with Morris's work is that there is not enough to see,' I knew I was on the right track." Now, decades later, Mr. Morris has been revisiting earlier work. His latest felt pieces, on view at the Castelli Gallery's uptown space, 18 East 77th Street, include provocative words like "paranoid," "blackops" and "assassin" cut into the thick, heavy material. And an installation providing seating has old fashioned radios broadcasting a dialogue he wrote that echoes "Hearing" (1972), his scathing philosophical inquiry related to the Vietnam War. With the multifigure groups on view at Castelli's new quarters at 24 West 40th Street, Mr. Morris's status as a renegade is more pronounced. Though most lack bodies and heads, much less faces, the meticulous way he modeled and cast cloaks, robes and mortuary shrouds while leaving many hollow cores visible suggests they're more like statues than present day structures. And Mr. Morris has conveyed emotional states in a way that emulates what he admires in the art of Francisco Goya: "Deft economy in depicting gesture and expression." His days as a Minimalist, however, are not quite in the distant past. Like the works at Dia:Beacon, these sculptures stand directly on the floor, rest against the wall, lie on the ground, hang from the ceiling. But emotion, not formal language, sets the latest work apart from what Mr. Morris executed earlier in his career. In November, in remarks he delivered at a Dia benefit dinner, Mr. Morris suggested why. "We have only to experience late Donatello or Cezanne or Titian or Goya to see that it is in old age that the most extraordinary art is made by those few survivors who realize how terrifying existence is," he said, "and at the end of life live totally in their art to escape this crushing world." These are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Morris, conducted in person and by email. In November 1964, Richard Bellamy offered me the Green space for December. I said yes, not knowing what I would do. But of course I had been thinking about and making a few large plywood works since "Column" of 1962. They were simple to construct. Deciding which works would go in the space was more critical, and I probably stewed over that awhile. I made all the objects in a month, dismantled them, trucked them to 57th Street, and nailed them back together. Plywood was cheap, plentiful, standard and ubiquitous. It was unstressed as an art material, an "ordinary" material in the industrial world. The tools required to work plywood were common and readily at hand; the skill required to manipulate them was relatively undemanding; carpentry was another "ordinary" everyday skill in the urban late industrial milieu. I doubt whether most of the plywood works of the early '60s were abstract. "Columns," "Slabs," "Portals" these "geometric" objects referenced parts of buildings. Wasn't it daring to place a sculpture in the corner of a room back then? I assumed viewers, anyway some, might walk up to "Untitled (Corner Piece)" and see it had sides. The object sat away from the two walls as well as floated above the floor a few inches. I suppose the question "Why?" might be asked. But I would rather short circuit the question and hide behind Chekhov's remark that art should ask questions rather than give answers. The plywood works got nicknames like "Cloud," etc., and were officially "Untitled." Nevertheless, I always knew they were tainted with the "representational." And not just tainted, but intended to be impure. I was an abstract artist as a painter in the '50s. I've never been an abstract sculptor. Wasn't it a stretch to execute a sculpture from dirt? I have always worked in more than one direction at a time. As the scorpion said after stinging the frog ferrying it across the river, "It is my nature, what can I do?" Of course "Dirt" is more than dirt. It speaks to the ongoing dialogue that we call sculpture, what we take sculpture to be, what we think it can be. Duchamp established the nominalism of art and changed the question from "what is art?" to "is it interesting?" Are your latest "Felt Works" related to earlier pieces? I can imagine you saying, "If anything is abstract, those 'Felt Works' are." And all I can reply is: "I think of the 'Felt Works' as the Mother. Soft, large, enfolding, and yes, unpredictable, too." Well, that is a lame answer, but it is the best I can do. She didn't like me swearing or throwing rocks, but mothers have to make some exceptions for unruly children. In recent years, have you been more inspired by old masters rather than contemporaries? I studied with Ad Reinhardt in the '60s, and he has been a constant inspiration, but I suppose that by now he is in the category of old master, as is Duchamp, whom everyone has drawn on. Some of the '60s drawings quoted Leonardo, but yes, the "Carbon Fiber" figures quote Goya and Rodin and allude to Claus Sluter, sculptor of the medieval "Well of Moses" in Dijon, France . Why, I don't know, but these artists feel closer than ever now. Now that you're in what's considered the late style phase of your career, do you truly see art and, even more, the human condition differently? What constitutes a late style? Is it more than what an artist does in old age? Edward Said thought he saw some old artists letting go and daring to do what they would not have when younger. Who can say? But I don't think I see art differently now than I did years ago. As for insights into the human condition, I think I am the same pessimist I always was. Are there things that can be expressed only with figurative sculpture? Have my "Columns" evolved into figures? When I fell over in the first "Column" in 1962, was I desperate to get out? Or is it only now in old age when the creaking of the body can't be ignored that it insists on full recognition? Now that I can't do a back flip, do I need to make a figure leaping to remember? Are all these dark figures out of the past? Or are they coming to remind me of what is on the way? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Ramy Youssef was home, in a manner of speaking. The Egyptian American stand up comedian had just finished shooting several takes of a scene for his new Hulu show, "Ramy." The set was a mock up of his childhood New Jersey home and the scene took place inside the dining room. Pictures of Youssef and his sister were hanging on the wall. "It was actually kind of emotional when I walked in because I hadn't seen it," Youssef, 28, said last fall as he stood outside his faux home, which was built in a Brooklyn studio. He added: "It doesn't feel exactly like my house but the emotional correctness is totally there. It's the right vibe." The house looks like many middle class suburban homes: A living room, dining room, kitchen, all unremarkable. But what is remarkable about "Ramy" isn't that it significantly differs from other millennial coming of age stories. It's that it doesn't. The comedy, debuting Friday, tells the story of a young American Muslim grappling with his faith along with the usual array of 20 something pressures: romance, career aspirations, drugs, parents. It's a simple formula, but after decades of Muslims being depicted onscreen as terrorists and villains or otherwise pushed to the side, it's practically revolutionary. Our review: "Ramy" is a soulful, funny leap of faith. "On one level, it's very clear that there's nothing out like it," Youssef said. "There's this initial reaction that you have of: 'Oh, man. I have a lot of responsibility. I have this responsibility to speak for my people.' Then you start to make the thing and you're like: 'That's an impossible goal. If I try to do that, it just won't work.'" He continued, "The more that I got into the process, I realized all I can do is really offer my singular point of view, and make sure that it's as much me as possible, and that will speak to who we need to speak to." Portrayals of Muslims in Western pop culture have historically lacked nuance. If they're depicted at all, it is usually as the bad guys see "True Lies," "24," and "Homeland," among many other examples. Jack G. Shaheen, a professor and author who spent much of his life cataloging how Hollywood has stereotyped Muslims and Arabs, said before his death in 2017 that anti Muslim prejudices onscreen were as bad as they've ever been, which he cited as a contributing factor to a low view of Islam among Americans. In 2017, a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center showed a warming view of Muslims in the United States, but still the lowest among other religious groups in the survey, including Jews, Catholics, and evangelical Christians. In 2010, the broadcaster Katie Couric suggested a possible solution to change attitudes about Islam in the United States: "Maybe we need a Muslim version of 'The Cosby Show.'" Aasif Mandvi, the former correspondent for "The Daily Show," gave it a shot with a 2015 Funny or Die spoof called "Halal in the Family." But attempts to seriously address the issue have become more common in recent years. In 2017, in a widely hailed speech in the British House of Commons, the actor Riz Ahmed spoke about the importance of onscreen representation. "If we fail to represent, we are in danger of losing people to extremism," Ahmed said. After Ahmed's speech gained publicity, Sadia Habib and Shaf Choudry, an academic and a tech consultant in Britain, created the Riz Test, the Muslim equivalent of the Bechdel Test, which set criteria for judging Muslim portrayals in film and television. (A representative for Ahmed said he was unavailable for comment.) Among the categories: Are the characters "presented as irrationally angry?" or "talking about, the victim of, or the perpetrator of terrorism?" "The general portrayal is obviously quite negative," Dr. Habib said in an interview. "It almost serves to perpetuate this idea that Muslims are quite backward, culturally deficit, and you get quite a lot of contradictions." Recent projects that failed the test include the BBC hit "Bodyguard," Amazon's "Jack Ryan" and even the smash Marvel movie "Black Panther" where, in an early scene, a terrorist screams, "Wallahi, I will shoot her!" Wallahi, in Arabic, means "I swear to Allah" after the main character T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) goes to rescue Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o). "All those things were driven by the reality that we have no other portrayal outside of the news," he added. In "Ramy" Youssef plays a version of himself embracing Islam. It's not the only authentically Muslim story told in recent years: "The Big Sick," the 2017 movie written by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, was nominated for an Oscar and told the story about Nanjiani and Gordon's real life romance. The difference between "Ramy" and "The Big Sick" is that Nanjiani spent much of that story trying to run away from his faith, whereas Youssef fully welcomes religious aspects of Islam. And in the non scripted realm, the comedian Hasan Minhaj discusses his culture and faith with regularity on his Netflix show, "Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj." If "Ramy" is not exactly a Muslim "Cosby Show" this version is far more vulgar Youssef, who also has a stand up special debuting on HBO on June 29, can claim credit for acing the Riz Test. "If that's how it is, I have hopes for it," Dr. Habib said. "It will change the narrative and it will maybe open the floodgates for more shows like this about Muslims." The Ramy of the show has to reconcile his faith with the demands of being a young adult in New Jersey. He said that while his character on the show wasn't an exact replica of himself, "a lot of the rules that are in the show are kind of the ones that I do have for myself personally." Most of his love interests early in the season are white and do not understand why he doesn't drink or do drugs. He has deep conversations at his mosque about how to properly wash his feet and what his place is in the world. (Youssef doesn't completely avoid caricatures in the show: His uncle, played by Laith Nakli, is cartoonishly homophobic and anti Semitic.) At the same time, "Ramy" explores many of the same issues as other contemporary shows about young adults trying to get by, like HBO's "Girls" and "Insecure." Along with the push and pull of his faith, Ramy contends with meddling relatives, selfish friends, dating woes and career struggles. "I do believe in God," Youssef said. "I realized that there was this void in entertainment of someone talking about that genuine construct. I have a bit about it I do all the time about how there's Friday prayers, and then there's Friday night, where it's like: 'No, I want to do both. I want to pray, and then, I also go out, and I have a girlfriend.'" During one of his first acting jobs, on Nickelodeon's "See Dad Run," the show was "shooting at Paramount Pictures and I remember praying at Paramount," Youssef said. "I had this thought where I was like: 'Who else has done this? Who has prayed on this lot?'" His stand up and acting career started taking off. (I have performed multiple stand up shows with Youssef over the years.) Youssef began dabbling in comedy with a sketch group in high school and then stand up in Los Angeles. He started touring with Jerrod Carmichael. In 2017, he landed his most high profile appearance to date: a set on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert." That same year, he pitched his own show to several outlets, including Hulu. "I think a lot of people look at Muslims and they think every day, the moderate Muslim or the good Muslim it's almost like we all have this choice every morning that's like, ISIS or breakfast," Youssef said. "As if that's like a genuine temptation," he continued. "I don't know anyone who knows anything about anyone who's ever been in ISIS. We've got nothing to do with any of that. Really placing what our actual issues are, and what our actual things are at the forefront is the thing that I think makes us most human. That's what I want people to see." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The South Korean director Hong Sang soo is one of the most prolific directors in world cinema; he had two features at last year's New York Film Festival alone. He's also one of the most repetitive. And for those who know his movies, the experience of watching a new one this month's is "Hotel by the River" is a bit like marking off a checklist. What kind of artist acclaimed by the world but egotistical and perhaps secretly hapless will the protagonist be? Here, Ki Joo bong plays a poet named Younghwan, and one of the character's sons is a filmmaker. How will the artist embarrass himself with women? Younghwan, who is staying at a hotel on the Han River for free, meets two female guests Sanghee (Kim Min hee) and Yeonju (Song Seon mi) on the snowy grounds. Introducing himself as, yes, the poet they've heard of, he keeps awkwardly telling them how beautiful they are. How long before heavy drinking brings out boorish male behavior? More than an hour of screen time, in this case, but the dynamic is set up early: Younghwan has summoned his two sons, Kyungsoo (Kwon Haehyo) and Byungsoo (Yu Junsang), to the hotel. He walked out on their mother and hasn't seen either of them in years. He confesses to having death on his mind. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Yeah, so I've been reporting in and around China for about 12 years. And there's always been a lot of control. I think people are aware of that. They're aware there's censorship. They're aware that people can be followed, and there is a certain amount of surveillance. But in the past five years, things have really changed and taken a much more dramatic and darker turn, really, when it comes to, especially, surveillance. And that coincides with the rise of Xi Jinping. China's president who came into power about five years ago has really doubled down on control. And he has been not shy at all about using technology to exert that control. And there's a lot of things that are invisible in how that works, but one of the very few visible symptoms are the cameras. There were always some cameras in China, but recently, past couple of years, the cameras have just gone in in this dramatic way. Some of them look like these baroque modernist sculptures or something. It's like four cameras stretching off of a different pole, or you have a camera hanging from a tree. There's these almost hidden cameras in the subway cars, these little holes. And if you look closely at them, you say, oh, my God, that's actually a lens. I counted the cameras on my way to work one day, which is a two subway stop ride. And I passed, I think, 250 cameras. Yes. So I went back in October to Kashgar. It's a transformed place. It's one of the most bizarre places I think I've ever been. We're, of course, followed by secret police wherever we go. There are checkpoints every couple hundred yards. And they've created these things called convenience police centers. So think of a convenience store, but it's a police station instead. So these small concrete boxes with constantly flashing lights. And they're every couple hundred yards, and police are in them. And they'll set up checkpoints there. But the idea is to blanket the city with this very suffocating level of police presence and surveillance. This is an old, mud brick city, filled with bazaars. And now what you have is that look with these tremendously powerful facial recognition cameras hanging from a mud brick wall, and there are cameras absolutely everywhere. And so you have this very bizarre contrast of a place that in some ways feels like it could be timeless and 1,000 years old, with these hyper modern technological solutions attempting to understand and track the populations. Right. And they've hung lots of cameras in mosques. So the Id Kah Mosque is this beautiful, mustard yellow mosque that sits in the center of old Kashgar. It's the heart of Uighur Islam. And I think I counted more than 200 cameras inside the mosque, trying to capture worshippers who would come and go. And there aren't many worshippers anymore, of course, because who's going to go walk in front of those cameras and show their faces? And then that very easily can just go into a database, and then they have a data point. They know that Michael was right outside the Id Kah Mosque at this time. And then when he leaves the Id Kah Mosque, he'll have to give his ID again. And then when he goes down to the marketplace, he has to give his ID again. And that way, you can build a comprehensive map of where you're going. If you want to go to the bank, if you want to go to a grocery store, you have to do this. If you want to enter the old city, you have to do it. And so, it effectively just makes it impossible to do anything in this society without constantly giving up your private information to the state and to the police. Right, exactly. In the rest of China, you see something that's a little bit more passive, but you see a constant creep. On the subway, for instance, you start to see more checkpoints. The police just sit out where people are transferring, and they just stop people at random, and they scan their ID card, just like what happened in Xinjiang. And one of the things our reporting showed is that it's not just Uighurs they're looking for in these cities. They're making lists of people's faces depending on what kind of group they are. So they are making lists of the mentally ill. They're making lists of people with a past history of drug use. They're making lists of people who would petition the government or complain about the government. But they also have lists of every single person registered to live in that city. So the idea isn't just to track these small groups. It's to track everyone, with the idea that if somebody were to get out of line, then you know everything about them to begin with. So we don't know everybody that visited. But what we do know is that countries like Ecuador sent delegations places that might be struggling with democracy or even already being led by strongmen, who have come to check this out. And there's screens up with video footage from these thousands and thousands of cameras. And they can see how the Chinese security forces can see everything. They look at it, and they say, well, this is pretty powerful. I wonder if we could get this. And that's where it starts. And so now what we're seeing is those technologies are beginning to flow to the world. And so all of a sudden, on the streets of Quito, you see the same cameras that you would see in Shanghai. And that's not just happening there. That's happening in Venezuela. That's happening in Bolivia. That's happening in Angola. That's happening in Pakistan. It's happening around the world. It tells me that, I think, the Chinese government believes it has created a different model and a new model, and they want to propagate it. They want to spread it. And they want to give other countries the ability to do what they've done and, in that way, influence the world. So this is governance by data, governance by mass surveillance, is, in a way, the Chinese model now, and they want to bring it to the world. And what this encourages is authoritarianism, because it uses technology unapologetically to consolidate power by understanding what everybody's doing and where they are at any given moment. And I think it's an important moment for democracies like the United States, because they need to recognize this is happening, but also say, well, what does the United States stand for in all this? Do they stand for data collection, as well, without telling anybody? Do you stand for something else? Because the United States at this point is so lost in its own debates | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week None The Estate of Joan Brown and George Adams Gallery An orange cat turns its mask like face to the viewer in Joan Brown's 1985 painting "The Golden Age: The Jaguar and the Tapir," one of the stars of "Samaritans," an exceptionally dense and evocative 16 artist show organized by the writer and curator Dan Nadel at Galerie Eva Presenhuber. The jaguar's markings are a fanciful mix of wavy lines and amoeba like shapes, and the animal stares with pale, yellow green eyes, their pupils fine as apple seeds. The contrast between the tapir's impastoed gray black fur and the painting's flat green background is jarring, as are four red rectangles, marked with pre Columbian style figures, that could represent windows, frescoes or tapestries. You don't quite know where you're standing, or what the rules are. But the work is not exactly threatening, either. It's just a reminder that ar t, like the unconscious or the spirit world, has its own nonliteral reality. Two plaster casts by Sarah Peters, sensitive classical white busts with tight crowns of wavy Assyrian hair; a series of heavily worked colored pencil drawings by Steve DiBenedetto; and the three eyed smoker in Jason Fox's large green painting "Jekyll" are all eerie transformations of the human figure. An upholstered wooden monolith by Joe Bradley, like a cross between a coffin and a phone booth for mediums, is a polite but firm reminder of the eerie transformation awaiting us all. Three women in blue scrubs move a gurney through a mod looking hospital in Gary Panter's acrylic "Nurses of Gamma." It's not clear whether they're running from the green monster hailing them with an upraised tentacle or merely looking back in acknowledgment. Painted with swirling strokes of kelly green over olive, the creature may be an imaginary boogie man, the unformed libido or a monstrous self we can't acknowledge but all it's really doing is saying hello. WILL HEINRICH Works by Bonnie Collura in her show "Prince," all from 2018. From left, "Skin of a Dancing Ghost: Jesus"; "Matriarch/Heavy Metal/Jesus"; "Guardian Blue" (one of four Color Codes); Mortality/Evening/Lincoln"; and "Skin of a Dancing Ghost: Lincoln." The word "patriarchy" once seemed like a worn out term bandied about by 1970s feminists, but it's making a comeback as authoritarian leaders around the globe, and their followers, try to overturn any advances made by women. You sense the importance of this word in two terrific shows at Smack Mellon: Bonnie Collura's "Prince" and Rachelle Mozman Solano's "Metamorphosis of Failure." Ms . Collura emerged in the '90s with post Pop sculptures inspired by amusement park doodads , but she's recently gone soft, making human figures with found fabric and other materials. Several of her fiber sculptures are strung from the ceiling, creating an eerie suggestion of just what she'd like to do with some of her subjects. But her titles often refer to Christian martyrs (St. Sebastian, Jesus) and revered leaders (Lin coln), alluding to the complex nature of men cast as "princes." Complicated and antiheroic, Ms. Collura 's work takes patriarchy down a peg (symbolically, at least). "Opaque Mirror," 2017, a single channel color video by Rachelle Mozman Solano in the exhibition "Metamorphosis of Failure." Ms. Mozman Solano focuses on a single man: Paul Gauguin, a towering figure in Post Impressionist art, also known for his ugly colonialist behavior in the South Pacific (that is, having sex with very young women and infecting them with syphilis). Gauguin's exoticizing gaze and behavior are turned back on themselves in a series of canny photographs and collages and a video in which actors recreate Gauguin's paintings as well as grab the camera, turning it back on the artist. Quoting Gauguin's writings and those of Georgia O'Keeffe, who was photographed by her lover Alfred Stieglitz, Ms. Mozman Solano questions the acts of portraiture and representation. Her work also delves into Gauguin's bicultural biography in a way that is just as nuanced as Ms. Collura's thinking about "princes": Gauguin, who was half Peruvian and half French, was still obsessed with ideas of racial purity and the conquered aristocracy of the Pacific Islanders. Where Ms. Collura's sculptures are silent and deadly, Ms. Mozman Solano makes the brown skinned descendants and spiritual sisters of Gauguin's subjects speak, giving a previously marginalized population a voice and, as women around the world are doing now, challenging the men who would abuse or silence them. MARTHA SCHWENDENER For many people, including me, the New Museum's 2017 exhibition of the work of Carol Rama her first museum survey in New York City was a revelation: thrilling, psychically charged work by yet another female artist who had been ignored for most of her life. Fans now have a chance to visit Ms. Rama's work again at Levy Gorvy in the exhibition "Eye of Eyes," which contains some pieces from the New Museum show alongside dozens more. The curator Flavia Frigeri has made two notable choices. She has filled the gallery's stairwell with black and white historical photographs of art exhibitions that took place in Turin, Italy, where Ms. Rama was born and lived until her death in 2015 ; documenting shows whose catalogs Ms. Rama owned, the images suggest that she would have visited or at least been familiar with them . Ms. Frigeri has also placed the artist's best known pieces childlike and strangely sexual watercolors of nude women farthest from the entrance. These decisions force the viewer to spend time with Ms. Rama's more abstract, less immediately shocking work. Many of her canvases from the 1960s feature ominous swirls and splatters of paint in bloody red or oily black, with such unexpected objects as syringes, gun cartridges and doll eyes affixed to them. "Visite Mattutine" ("Morning Visits"), from 1967, looks like a riff on Abstract Expressionism that's possessed, thanks to two beady orange eyes. In the 1970s, Ms. Rama tried out Minimalism with a twist: She took strips of rubber allusions to her father, who committed suicide after the failure of his automobile parts factory and flattened them into suggestive shapes on monochrome canvases. The overall effect is to frame the practice of Ms. Rama, who was self taught, in a refreshingly different way. Rather than positioning her as a loner whose life was tinged with madness, the show emphasizes her engagement with other artistic movements and the world. JILLIAN STEINHAUER | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Dr. Asma Rashid, who runs a members only medical concierge service in the Hamptons, has received some of the most sought after party invitations this summer. "We've gone to these private, private, private events, where they have me sign a 'nothing you see in this house can be leaked' document," she said. "This is still a party town." Dr. Rashid is there to administer rapid or real time tests for coronavirus. She performs the procedure either a finger prick or a nose swab in the car, and then lets guests into the house only if their tests come back negative. The entire procedure takes less than 30 minutes. Consider it a pandemic pregame. Suffolk County still lacks rapid testing infrastructure, and the private service is expensive: up to 500 per test, and not all insurance companies will cover the cost. Most doctors don't even have kits to do the tests; patients willing to pay can wait up to a week for an appointment at the offices that have them in New York City. For that reason many clients book Dr. Rashid in advance when they anticipate hosting guests for a sleepover, a barbecue or a wedding. But some summon her at 2 a.m. for a last minute test or stop by her office in a panic after attending a crowded gathering. "Every time there is an event, a protest or Fourth of July celebration, there is higher demand," she said. A busy day came after a drive in "Safe Sound" concert, where the chief executive of Goldman Sachs performed, at the end of July. Concertgoers, who paid 1,250 per car to attend, were supposed to stay in their cars, but social media showed crowds dancing by the stage. "I can't even tell you how many requests we got after that," Dr. Rashid said. The event is currently under investigation. Dr. Rashid has tripled her staff to keep up with demand for coronavirus testing this summer. The last Saturday in July she even opened a new office in Bridgehampton. "The way I would describe our growth is exponential," she said. Hosts are hiring doctors to screen guests before they attend their gatherings, or children coming in from out of town for sleepovers. Other people are getting tests to provide peace of mind after a particularly wild night. Event companies are offering rapid testing as a service to clients alongside catering and music. Instagram influencers are even touting the service. Still, these rapid tests aren't totally reliable, said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, New York City's deputy commissioner of disease control. "Negatives are not definitive," he said. (And there certainly have been false positives.) Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. "No test is 100 percent," Dr. Rashid said. "A negative test does not preclude one to not be carrying the virus." Indeed, one reason rapid tests aren't in widespread use is that they require additional testing to confirm. "We have to retest all of our negatives, so you're doing two tests for everyone who is negative," said Dr. Daskalakis. "It's a resource issue." He also warned that the virus can take some time to show up in a test result; though some test positive 48 hours after exposure, the two week possible incubation period that has dictated quarantine is generally accepted. So if you were exposed to the virus even 10 days before your test, the outcome is still uncertain. "You can't go to a house party the week before you see Grandma," Dr. Daskalakis said. "That test doesn't matter." Ryan Choura, the founder of Choura, an event and experience production company in Torrance, Calif., that arranges the tenting and furniture for the U.S. Open golf tournament and the BeachLife Festival, believes so strongly that all events should incorporate rapid testing that he created an arm of his company to do it. "There is no question that you now have to have rapid testing as a component to every event no matter what," Mr. Choura said. It's not an easy feat to pull off. "Temperature is a major issue. You have to keep tests under 80 degrees," he said. "You need to put up some kind of tent, like a catering tent." He added, "We have a 100 point checklist for anything we want to build." Still, on July 23, the company staged its first event for 90 attendees (and 30 vendors) using the Rapid Quidel Corporation Sofia SARS Antigen Test. The good news: Not a single vendor or attendee tested positive. The bad news: It was a bit of a buzz kill. Joie Shettler, 51, a singer and co owner of Rebel Music Entertainment who lives in Redondo Beach, Calif., attended the event, which included bottled cocktails and panels on the future of the events industry, after learning about it on Facebook. She ended up having fun, but the beginning felt clinical. "We had to fill out a form beforehand, so that they would be ready for us when we arrived. We also had to book a time frame of when to arrive," Ms. Shettler said. "We had instructions to drive up in our cars, where we would be tested. From there we were instructed to stay in our car, and they would text us our results within 20 minutes." "I was a little worried while waiting for the results," she added. "Both Alysha, my friend, and I were squealing when the results came in. We were both negative! And we were excited to finally enter the event." One of the easier places to get a rapid coronavirus test is the Surf Lodge, a hotel and restaurant in Montauk, N.Y., known for hosting and entertaining celebrities including John Legend and Bon Jovi. Jayma Cardoso, one of the hotel's owners, pays Dr. Seth Gordon, her son's pediatrician, to test all of her employees weekly. "He has his own Sofia 2 machine by Quidel so he can do the test" an antigen test "and get the results very quickly, in 15 minutes," she said. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Once a week, the doctor sets up a testing site on the sand filled deck overlooking Fort Pond. Raya O'Neal, 24, the hotel's director of communications, who lives in East Hampton, says while she hates the test, which takes about 10 seconds, she understands it's an exclusive perk. "I have some friends and family members who think I'm too fancy for them now," she said. Ms. O'Neal feels safer living with her parents knowing she regularly tests negative for the virus. But it also emboldens her socially. "I don't feel as worried as I do about eating or going to public places," she said. "Once I saw my closest friends after not seeing them for months, and I did the humblebrag about being tested weekly and being negative, and I just had to hug them." But as any public health expert will tell you, individual test results are not an all access pass to Life as It Was Before. "There is a false confidence you get when you use a test for social decisions," Dr. Daskalakis said. "This is one of those things I lose sleep over." Nonetheless, receiving rapid testing for the virus has become a mark of status and, ergo, a trending topic on social media. Tasha Todd, 40, is a medical assistant in Dallas. When her former office, a concierge medical group, first received the rapid testing kit, she posted about it on Instagram, where she has nearly 28,000 followers, to hype up the service. "I wanted to try to bring more business into the company," Ms. Todd said. "Not that we could have handled much more volume. We were seeing 30 people a day, 25 of which were in for Covid testing." "I got a lot of feedback," she said. "A lot of people were messaging about the prices, where the office was, what the difference was between that and a regular test, and how quickly the results come in." Her office charges 150 for a test, but she knows of other clinics in Dallas that charge 500 or more. Ms. Todd said she felt frustrated that many of her followers wouldn't be able to afford one. "I would say rapid testing right now is for the rich. It's too expensive," she said. "Who has 150 to 500 dollars just lying around in the middle of the recession?" Reports on social media have also surfaced of colored bracelets or leis to moderate contact at weddings, like the spotlight parties from college where you wore green if you were single, red if you were taken, and yellow if you weren't sure. Now the idea is green if you are OK with hugs and high fives, yellow if you are fine with talking but not touching, and red if you are totally keeping your distance from everybody. ("Scares me to my core," tweeted one bride to be, of the illusory confidence such accessories might impart.) As private citizens improvise at their peril, local governments continue to try and make rapid testing more accessible. New York City's Department of Health, for example, put a pop up site in the Bronx and now Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood, where Mayor Bill de Blasio recently warned of an uptick in coronavirus cases. The idea is to identify as many positives early on so the city can help offer isolation guidance. "There is the ability of the folks who have and the folks who don't," said Dr. Daskalakis. "We are very consciously pushing the rapid test in environments where people aren't resource rich." The city plans to bring the technology to nine clinics that previously focused on sexual health, transforming them into coronavirus testing sites. Even New Yorkers from more affluent neighborhoods are flocking to these free testing sites to get quick results. The first weekend in August Mary Ann Mackey, 31, who lives in Park Slope and works for the Manhattan Borough President's Office, went to Brooklyn on a Sunday afternoon to get a rapid test before visiting her parents for the first time since the pandemic started. Ms. Mackey arrived at 12:30 and was there all afternoon. She was surprised by the line. "By the time I had been through the line it had been three hours, and the whole block was still full of people," she said. "Everyone was remarkably patient and calm. People had books and magazines out. Some people were chatting. I overheard a few people talk about how they had waited in a long time elsewhere and were excited to get it over with and know their results." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
LOS ANGELES "'Get Out' is totally about our family!" Chelsea Peretti, the stand up comic, actress and writer, said as she punched her brother, Jonah Peretti, on the arm. She was talking about the horror movie cum racial commentary written and directed by her husband, Jordan Peele, which follows a biracial couple who visit the home of the girlfriend's white family, where terror ensues. "We have this thing in our family that goes back many years, it's called 'the Coagula,'" Mr. Peretti said, making quotation marks with his fingers. "Wait, I guess you have to see the movie for that to make sense." "Hey, that's a huge spoiler!" Ms. Peretti, 38, said, delivering another arm punch. She said she delighted in the fact that people assumed that the movie, which has earned more than 100 million since opening in February, was based on her, a Caucasian, and Mr. Peele, who is African American. "It's funny to me that we're both in the public eye with this movie, because it's this sinister thing. I love it." Mr. Peretti, 43, a founder and the chief executive of BuzzFeed, said: "It's a massive relief that it's really good. If Jordan had done a terrible movie, it would have been really awkward." It was a sunny Saturday in February and, after spending the morning at the Broad museum downtown, the Peretti siblings headed to the Elite Restaurant, a dim sum hot spot in Monterey Park, a suburb, where the similarities and differences between the siblings were on display. Mr. Peretti prefaced his order by explaining that he is a pescatarian vegan, or "sea gan." Ms. Peretti, who is expecting her first child, joked about indulging her pregnancy induced cravings ("last night a Philly cheesesteak happened, so um ... yeah") and ordered a panoply of shrimp dumplings, sticky rice in lotus leaves and chicken feet, which arrived in a savory sauce she wanted Jonah to try. She is the little sister. She was a writer for the NBC show "Parks and Recreation," is a regular on the Fox comedy "Brooklyn Nine Nine" and is the executive producer of a series based on the Twitter sensation Joanne the Scammer. He is the big brother. As a founder, also, of The Huffington Post, he has shown acumen for building businesses around viral content and memes. (Earlier this week, and many weeks after this brother sister date, rumors spread around the web that BuzzFeed plans to raise money through an initial public offering. Carole Robinson, a spokeswoman for BuzzFeed, declined to comment.) Mr. Peretti, his wife, Andrea Harner, and their twin sons moved to Los Angeles in 2015. The siblings are making the most of the proximity. They share meals regularly, with their spouses and otherwise. They screen movies. They even tried a group game of "Dungeons Dragons," an activity usually exclusive to Ms. Peretti and his sons. And they spent Thanksgiving together Mr. Peretti prepared the meal using only foods available during the Pilgrims' time though not Christmas or Hanukkah. "We did a sort of gift exchange," Ms. Peretti said. "Well, I gave gifts to Jonah. Jonah never gives gifts to me. Go ahead, defend yourself." He began to say, "There are some things that are private that I'd rather not talk about ..." when his sister piped back in. "Actually he did give me a 23andMe genetic test," she continued. "I'm like, are you trying to say we're not related?" Their shared sense of humor should put that idea to rest. Although Ms. Peretti is hipper and droller, and Mr. Peretti is geekier, their wit binds them. They were raised in Oakland, Calif., where they split time between their mother, a schoolteacher who once was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, and their father, a criminal defense lawyer and painter who made museum visits a staple of their childhood. During their visit to the Broad, after passing works by Chuck Close, Richard Diebenkorn and Takashi Murakami, they approached Richard Prince's "Eat, Sleep and Drink," a canvas silk screened with the sentence, "I eat politics and I sleep politics but I never drink politics." Mr. Peretti then pulled up the front of his hoodie to reveal the T shirt he was wearing. It was emblazoned with the BuzzFeed logo and the words "Failing Pile of Garbage" the description Donald J. Trump, then the president elect, applied to BuzzFeed after its news division published a controversial dossier alleging ties between him and Russia. "I wrote an email to Ben Smith," Mr. Peretti said, referring to BuzzFeed's editor in chief. "I was like: 'What's the difference between Ben Smith and Busta Rhymes? One likes to "Pass the Courvoisier" and the other likes to publish a dossier.'" With a wince, his sister replied: "Oh, boo. No you didn't. Can I ask for that to be off the record?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Researchers from Brazil's National Institute of Science and Technology collected sewage samples to test for coronavirus in Belo Horizonte last month. Is It Safe to Come Out of Lockdown? Check the Sewer The world is eager to come out of lockdown. But if countries simply return to business as usual, new outbreaks of Covid 19 will follow. The only solution that public health experts see is to keep careful track of the coronavirus and clamp down on new flare ups. The trouble is that the most obvious way to monitor the virus testing person by person has already proved to be a huge, expensive challenge. Experts say we're nowhere near the scale we need to get a good picture of the pandemic. Now some scientists are looking for the virus not in our noses, blood or spit, but somewhere else: in our sewers. "It's the signature of a whole community," said Krista Wigginton, an environmental engineer at the University of Michigan who has been finding the coronavirus in wastewater around the Bay Area in California. Water authorities and governments are in discussions with scientists and companies about tracking the pandemic through the detection of viruses in the sewer. Wastewater monitoring could provide early warnings of outbreaks. It could potentially give governments some of the data they need about when to end lockdowns and when to ratchet them back up. Measuring viruses in wastewater in effect tests an entire city or region at once. While only some people may get tested for the coronavirus on a given day, everyone uses the toilet. "It's a great leveler," said Christobel Ferguson, chief innovation officer of the Water Research Foundation. This week, the foundation sponsored a virtual research summit, during which Dr. Wigginton and other experts shared their early results and developed a road map for improving their surveillance. For decades, public health workers have looked in sewage for signs of viral outbreaks. The World Health Organization has monitored polio viruses this way, to assess how well its vaccination campaigns have worked. In the early days, researchers had to run painstaking tests to find viruses in wastewater. They had to mix the water with cells so that the viruses could infect them. Then the researchers had to wait for the new viruses to emerge. Later, researchers were able to skip these experiments. They could simply fish out genetic material from the water, read its sequence, and determine what kind of virus they were dealing with. Even newer technology has made it possible to estimate the number of viruses by counting up the viral genes in a water sample. Irene Xagoraraki, an environmental engineer at Michigan State University, uses this method to detect viruses in wastewater in Detroit. In a recent outbreak of hepatitis A, she found that the virus increased in the water about a week ahead of the rise in confirmed cases. "You can predict the outbreak," she said. When the coronavirus began spreading from China, Dr. Xagoraraki and other experts began wondering if they might see it turn up in wastewater. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. The early reports about the coronavirus made the idea seemed plausible. Although the virus infects people's airways first, it can eventually get into the intestines. The coronavirus has been detected in some infected people's feces. Some early studies suggest that the virus becomes inactive by the time it gets to the sewer system. But it still carries genes that researchers can detect. "We started before the virus entered our country," said Gertjan Medema of the KWR Water Research Institute in the Netherlands. He and his colleagues created a test for the coronavirus and began using it in wastewater in early February. They didn't get any positive results, which was reassuring. They could be confident that their test was specific enough not to be fooled by other viruses. After the Netherlands saw its first confirmed case on Feb. 27, Dr. Medema and his colleagues went back out to run more tests. They found the virus in the sewers of cities like Amsterdam and Utrecht. The researchers then went to remote towns without any known cases of Covid 19. They discovered the coronavirus up to six days before the first confirmed cases were found there. Since then, Dr. Medema and his colleagues have continued to track the viruses in the sewer systems. As the confirmed cases of Covid 19 have gone up in Amsterdam and Utrecht, they have found more virus genes in the wastewater. Researchers have reported similar results from countries including Australia, France, Spain and the United States. At the meeting, the consensus of experts was that it's not yet possible to use viruses in wastewater to estimate how many people are infected. For one thing, researchers are still trying to figure out the average number of viruses that infected people shed in their feces. For another, it's not clear how many viral genes survive the journey from a toilet to a wastewater treatment plant. "I don't feel like we're at a point where we can say, 'This is the concentration in the wastewater and this is the number of people with illness,'" Dr. Wigginton said. Nevertheless, the experts who attended the meeting agreed that sewers have a lot to tell us about the pandemic. The studies of Dr. Medema and others suggest that a weekly test of wastewater could serve as an early warning system for outbreaks. When cities or states come out of lockdown, they could check the sewers to follow the virus trend. An increase would tell them that people were infecting each other. "Then you need to go back into quarantine," said Eric Alm, a M.I.T. microbiologist and the scientific director of BioBot, a company that tracks pathogens in wastewater. Previous experience with other viruses has taught researchers to be careful about making sense of these apparent trends. If a huge crowd comes into a city to watch a football game, for example, the wastewater system may see a spike of viruses that has nothing to do with a new outbreak. As their testing becomes more reliable and precise, Dr. Medema and other researchers hope to zoom in on future outbreaks. Instead of looking at a wastewater treatment plant that handles an entire city or county, they may go down into manholes to monitor changes in individual neighborhoods. Conceivably, they might be able to zero in on nursing homes, factories and other places that have seen intense outbreaks. "If we see a hot spot arising," Dr. Xagoraraki said, "we can close down a particular area for a while, so you don't kill the whole economy of a whole state." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
American life expectancy is in decline for the first time since 1993, when H.I.V. related deaths were at their peak. But this time, researchers can't identify a single problem driving the drop, and are instead pointing to a number of factors, from heart disease to suicides, that have caused a greater number of deaths. A study on mortality rates released on Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that Americans could expect to live for 78.8 years in 2015, a decrease of 0.1 from the year before. The overall death rate increased 1.2 percent that's about 86,212 more deaths than those recorded in 2014. Dr. Peter Muennig, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, said in an interview that the decline was a "uniquely American phenomenon" in comparison with other developed countries, like Japan or Sweden. "A 0.1 decrease is huge," Dr. Muennig said. "Life expectancy increases, and that's very consistent and predictable, so to see it decrease, that's very alarming." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
It's the first day of eighth grade and Drew Ellis is already stressed. Curious hands keep reaching for his hair, newly styled in a kinky hi top. A white student who has a crush on him has burdened him with a giant sweet potato pie. Such is life as a Black student at the private Riverdale Academy Day School, or RAD, the setting of Jerry Craft's new graphic novel, "Class Act." You can imagine a lot of New York parents throwing elbows for a spot at RAD. Class sizes are small, and students sit Socratic style at round tables. The library is top notch, and athletic and arts programs are well funded. Plus, RAD has the kind of curated diversity in which a just right sprinkle of children of color enriches the educational experiences of a white majority. It's the perfect setup for a moving and often very funny story about the convergence of an awkward age (13 to 14) with an awkward age (America's racial reckoning). "Class Act" is the sequel to Craft's introspective, Newbery Medal winning book, "New Kid," in which a 12 year old named Jordan Banks arrives at RAD as a wide eyed transplant from Washington Heights. In this follow up, Drew, one of Jordan's closest pals, struggles with both the privileged realm of RAD and his life in the Co op City section of the Bronx, where his childhood buddies call him a "bougie" snob who "ain't really like us no more." Drew feels lost. His teacher Mr. Roche, a walking microaggression in a skinny tie, recruits him and another Black student to make a visiting group of South Bronx eighth graders feel at home. "Shoot, I don't even feel at home here," he says. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Q. Why do you think women need special guidebooks when traveling? A. I think women are often told they shouldn't travel that it's irresponsible, that it's unsafe. So we really try to do our part to make women feel comfortable, to get out there, while also saying, "These are the things you should be aware of." Knowledge is power. Women have special concerns when it comes to traveling regarding their health and safety, for example, so we have a section that has information on women clinics and another one on safety. Have you ever felt unsafe on one of your adventures? When I was in Argentina I had bad experiences with employees on long distance buses. I was spied on by an employee. I had another one push himself on me when I was sleeping. My writers had similar experiences when they went to do the guidebook, so we knew this was one thing we had to put in the book. What about the emotional challenges of traveling? I think loneliness and homesickness are huge emotions you battle as a female traveler, so our guides address community and how to meet people. We talk about using couch surfing as the best way to form a connection and about how to be outgoing and talk to as many people as possible. The more people know of you, the more they feel a need to protect you. Do women want to do different things when traveling than men? I find that women are looking for more connection or purpose when they travel; they have a specific reason to visit a country. So they want to go to Thailand and volunteer with elephants instead of just going to Thailand in general. All our books have a free or low cost volunteer section in the back. How do you select which destinations to feature? We first started choosing cities and countries that are maybe a little difficult for women to go to by themselves. So Thailand is really popular and a wonderful place for solo travel, but it can be a little intimidating. Bangkok is a big city, and the language barrier is a real concern, so that's why we started there. The same is true for Mexico and Argentina, but you are dealing with a macho culture on top of it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Imagine that you're a physician at a hospital overwhelmed by the coronavirus. Three new patients have just arrived in your I.C.U., each gasping for air a 75 year old grandfather who was in perfect health just a week ago, a 30 year old woman who has diabetes and asthma, and a 50 year old I.C.U. nurse who, like you, has been treating coronavirus patients for weeks. Without ventilators, they will likely die, though you can't know that for sure. What you do know is that in your maxed out hospital, there's only one free ventilator. Is it up to you to choose who gets the chance to live, to play god? "That is the worst possible situation that individual doctors would be faced with making this tragic choice on their own, based on their own sense of moral values and own judgment." That's what's happening in parts of Italy, where distressed doctors have been seen weeping in the hallways because of the choices they've had to make. Across the US, states are rushing to make sure that no doctor is left to make these painful moral decisions alone and on the fly. They're writing or revising their existing pandemic triage plans, which are meant to guide health care workers in crises like this. But here's the problem. In the United States, there's no agreement on how to make these potentially life and death judgment calls. Instead, the US takes a patchwork approach with different states offering different ethical formulas and some not offering detailed plans at all. As one doctor recently wrote, 'We've taken an every hospital system for themselves approach.' It may be a political problem as much as a medical one that is keeping us from having a national framework. "I think the politics of that would be sensational. I mean, I can't even begin to tell you what it would feel like to know that the White House issued a model for how to do this, that Americans would then have to point to and say, 'Your model killed my grandmother.' They want it to be state driven." But in the face of coronavirus, isn't this patchwork inadequate? We need unified thinking on this a national triage strategy that we can all see and understand. "You can not have triage decision making that is not transparent. That would be a terrible mistake to have triage decision making taking place and for the public to be unaware or not to have available what the criteria are that are being used." Any federal plan will have to wrestle with some profoundly philosophical questions. How do we do the greatest good? Does that mean saving the greatest number of lives or the most years of life? Does it mean prioritizing people with the best chances of surviving and leaving the sickest behind? Soon, we're in a labyrinth of complex moral trade offs. Let's take a few examples, starting with age. Should young people get priority access to ventilators? Some ethicists have advocated for cutoff ages, often around 80, above which nobody qualifies for one. But how old is too old? Some state plans do consider age as a factor. Others don't. Or they use it as a tie breaker between patients. But isn't that ageist? "It reeks of age discrimination, which is why I said I would make that a second tier consideration. I would say in the first instance, you're going to make this decision based on who has the better likelihood of survival." Now what about doctors and nurses? Should they get preferential treatment? Again, states are divided. On the one hand, health care workers are essential to fight the pandemic. But on the other hand, it's starting to look like the sickest coronavirus patients may need weeks, if not months to get better. Even if they survive, they may not be able to return to work quickly. "There are other arguments. So one is you are asking people to show up to work and take risks not just for themselves, but for their families. So if you really want people to take that risk, you need to let them know you have their back, that you will honor their risk taking. That's always a bitterly disputed topic and should be. I don't want to end up with an intensive care unit that is full of doctors and nurses and the local people are shut out. That is terrible, and that's wrong." What about pre existing conditions, everything from obesity to cancer? Should doctors try to estimate how many years a patient might live after they've survived the virus and what their quality of life might be? Should doctors take social factors into account, like whether a patient has dependent children? Maybe the most excruciating choice is when doctors should remove ventilators from patients who already have them but don't seem to be improving. There's even an argument that the fairest thing to do would be to assign ventilators randomly through a lottery. A lottery, at least, would treat everyone the same. And wherever we choose, will patients and their families have the right to appeal decisions before some kind of ethics jury? Only a few state pandemic plans even mention an appeals process. There is one thing that almost everyone agrees on. These choices should not be left to exhausted doctors in overflowing I.C.U.'s. The results would be inefficient, chaotic, and maybe unfair. The pressure could also traumatize doctors and lead to a kind of moral burnout. To be clear, hospitals do have ethics committees to help doctors with difficult cases. But in a pandemic, they also need fast acting response teams making decisions and communicating with neighboring hospitals. A coronavirus plan could offer guidance on how to do that best. It could also encourage cooperation across state lines, something that's not happening much now. "We live in an age of pandemics, and we are not ready. It is now our worst nightmare. We missed a lot of opportunities along the way to prepare not just the health system for this kind of dialogue that we're having now, but also the public writ large." Many bioethicists have been thinking about this for years and have even proposed specific guidelines for how to deal with a pandemic like this, but no single formula has been formally endorsed at the national level by a government agency like the Department of Health and Human Services or the Centers for Disease Control. Even the American Medical Association, the country's largest association of physicians, offers only the loosest ethical instructions. To be sure, no national plan will be foolproof or binding or can guarantee that doctors won't face tough choices at the bedside. And it would need to be flexible as we learn more about coronavirus. Still, a national strategy would at least encourage a consistent moral approach to this pandemic and prevent the nightmare scenario that worries some experts people moving sick family members from state to state in hopes of qualifying for a ventilator in a state with different rules. Some experts think national guidelines could come together quickly enough to make a difference. "Our group, the groups in New York, the groups from Seattle and elsewhere get us all together for a few hours, and I'm pretty sure we could resolve any differences between our plans. We can come up with a plan we would recommend for the country. There's no technical reason that couldn't happen." A federal agency such as the CDC or the Department of Health and Human Services can bring states together to create a unified national triage strategy for coronavirus one that sets out how America will respond to this crisis not just logistically or economically but morally. We need to know that if the worst comes to pass, our lives are all subject to the same arithmetic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Michael and Melanie Bellanger Boyer, transplanted Parisians who live in a snug one bedroom in the West 90s, are members of what social scientists sometimes call the "forgotten middle." Mr. Boyer, 29, earns 86,000 a year as a financial auditor. His wife, 31, earns 19,000 working at an animal shelter, where a modest salary is offset by generous benefits, a boon since the birth of a daughter, Nora, in January. Last August, the couple moved to a 500 square foot space for which the rent is 2,700. With such attractions as exposed brick, an ornately carved fireplace and a location just steps from Central Park, the apartment was the nicest and most affordable one they could find. But the hefty rent check they write every month takes an increasing toll. "If it weren't for the high rent, I could afford to stay home with the baby," Ms. Bellanger Boyer said, noting that the family's monthly expenses now include 2,000 for child care. "But I needed to keep my job because we need my benefits, and so we had to put Nora in day care." Households like this middle income in terms of earnings but paying at least 30 percent of those earnings for housing perch on the knife edge between hope and anxiety. Even as their housing costs mount, they struggle to hang onto their apartments because they know that their options can only narrow, given the city's challenging housing market. Those lucky enough to be ensconced in rent regulated units, a dwindling commodity, hang onto them for dear life. And in Manhattan, where such households are most prevalent, the situation is especially acute. These residents fear, often correctly, that if they lose their current berth, they will be forced not just out of the borough but out of the city, a move that may result in a longer commute and less family time. This population includes young middle class families like the Boyers, burdened with child care expenses, along with elderly New Yorkers living on fixed incomes, and young singles earning starter salaries and doubling, tripling or quadrupling up in pocket size quarters to acquire a New York lifestyle. And their situation is attracting growing attention. On May 5, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a 41 billion plan to provide additional affordable housing for middle income as well as low income New Yorkers. "We examined the situation because rental housing has become less affordable in the past six years," said Max Weselcouch, the director of the Moelis Institute for Affordable Housing Policy at the Furman Center. "Between 2005 and 2008 things looked pretty good. The median income rose, and new housing construction was at a peak. But between 2009 and 2012, there was little new construction even as preliminary estimates show that up to 200,000 new residents arrived in New York." And a report titled "The State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods in 2013," issued by the Furman Center on May 28, concluded that the percentage of middle income households in the city decreased from 61 percent in 1990 to 56 percent in 2012. The experiences of families like the Boyers put flesh on the numbers. The couple were taken aback by hefty upfront costs that included a broker's fee and a two month deposit (one of the months because of their dog). And space is at a premium. A crib and baby carriage nestle next to the double bed in the bedroom, a playpen dominates the living room, and a car seat atop a dining chair doubles as a highchair. But most stressful is the anxiety about the future. "I can't complain," Mr. Boyer said. "We have a decent life. But we worry that we can't save any money. If we have major health care expenses, we wouldn't have saved enough to cover them. If we were in France, we might be paying the same percent of our salary for rent, but items like health care would be covered. "Our back is against the wall," he added. "Manhattan is nice when you're young, but with a baby it's really hard. We need more space, and we're paying 31 percent of our income for rent." Although the couple yearns to stay in the borough, they suspect that when their lease expires in August they will have to move farther afield, hopefully to a place carrying a more modest price tag. There are compelling reasons middle income families might choose to pay a higher than desirable rent for the benefit of living in a metropolis like New York, which offers so much in the way of jobs, safety, a lively lifestyle and cheap transportation. "It may be a rational choice to pay more to live here because you get so much," said Matthew Gordon Lasner, an assistant professor in the Urban Affairs and Planning Department of Hunter College. But in his opinion, middle income families often pay an unexpectedly steep emotional price for the privilege. "In New York, it's not just the poor in Jacob Riis type conditions who endure housing stress," said Professor Lasner, the author of the book "High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century" (Yale University Press, 2012). "When it comes to housing, middle income families also need help. They earn too much to qualify for apartments earmarked for low income families, but they can't afford market rate housing. So they feel very vulnerable. They get that letter telling them their rent is going up, and they realize they're one pen stroke away from being displaced, from having to pay a lot more for a new apartment, or worse, having to leave the city. "They're truly the forgotten middle, locked out of both luxury and public housing," said Professor Lasner, whose department recently published a report titled "Where Will New Yorkers Live?" that underscored the shrinking number of affordable rentals for middle income households. "They don't experience as much stress as low income families, but they live with a tremendous amount of uncertainty." New York is a city of renters according to the Furman Center, two thirds of the city's three million households rent and this is one reason the center and Capital One focused on this population in their report. Of the city's rental units, 45 percent are stabilized or controlled, 8 percent are in public housing, 8 percent are subsidized, and the rest are market rate. For generations, middle income New Yorkers found it relatively easy to land an affordable place to live. But soaring rents sparked by a tight as a drum real estate market, combined with a dwindling number of rent regulated apartments, stagnant wages, and a burgeoning population fueled by the city's growing allure, have transformed this landscape. In Manhattan, which Ms. Weselcouch of the Furman Center described as "the epicenter of fear," the situation is especially acute. Rents in the borough have climbed more than any others in the city, up by 19 percent between 2005 and 2012. During those years, the rents of one quarter of the previously regulated units in the borough were deregulated. Three 20 somethings from Florida who moved in January to a 900 square foot apartment on East 39th Street can speak firsthand about how difficult it can be to establish a toehold in this landscape. The three are Cecillia Costa, Dana Bakich and Danielle Dormand. All have full time jobs in sales, and Ms. Dormand moonlights as a cocktail waitress several evenings a week. Their combined annual salaries come to just under 150,000. In January, their broker, Dan Falconetti of Citi Habitats, found them a two bedroom with a view of the East River and a balcony Ms. Costa liked so much that she put a picture of it on her Facebook page. A temporary wall allowed them to carve a third bedroom out of the living room. Their total monthly rent is 4,100. Like so many newcomers, the three were drawn by the city's sense of promise and possibility, a chance to reinvent themselves and reinvigorate their lives. "I wanted something new and different," Ms. Bakich said. "I wanted to go bigger. I didn't have a job, but I'd saved, and I figured I'd just make it work no ifs, ands or buts." The roommates put up a temporary wall in the living room to create a third bedroom. Katherine Marks for The New York Times Ms. Costa put it another way: "I moved here to change my life." To save on groceries, they take advantage of perks like free yogurt and cereal available in their offices. "And movies are so expensive," Ms. Bakich said, "I've been only a few times since I arrived in the city a year and a half ago, even though I used to go all the time." For women used to balmy weather year round, big ticket wardrobe items like boots and winter coats are prohibitive. "I haven't bought a single article of clothing since January," Ms. Costa said. "I haven't even gone into a store. You can't." None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. Furnishing the apartment also proved daunting. "We bought one thing per paycheck," Ms. Costa said. "I had no lamp in my bedroom for two weeks." Two weeks ago they bought a toaster. "And nails, eyebrows they've gone out the window," Ms. Dormand said. "I use box hair dye. I eat dollar pizza, and I've learned to like it. Broke in Florida isn't like broke here. Here, 40 gets you nowhere, not even out of the house." Finances are such a constant worry that until recently, when she stopped working on commission, she dreaded opening her paycheck on Fridays. Yet all three are, at least for now, willing to make the sacrifices necessary to buy themselves a Manhattan lifestyle. "At Macedonia Plaza in Flushing, Queens, we got 40,000 applications for 100 plus units," Ms. Bailey said. "At Sugar Hill Apartments in Harlem, we had 48,000 applications for 98 units. There's a certain amount of heartache you can see through the numbers." For rent stressed middle income New Yorkers, the greatest fear may be that they are one rent increase, or one layoff, away from having to depart New York for good. This is what happened to Diane Ordelheide, 63, who moved from St. Louis to New York in 2002 to pursue a lifelong dream, a career as an actress. In that goalshe succeeded, landing roles in "Law and Order," "All My Children" and several movies and commercials. But despite a 30,000 a year pension from her quarter century as a teacher, finding affordable housing proved increasingly elusive. Ms. Ordelheide hopscotched from neighborhood to neighborhood, finally alighting three years ago in a renovated studio on West 102nd Street for which the monthly rent was 1,635. Though she estimates that the space was just about 200 square feet, she was charmed by the Murphy bed and the modern kitchen, accented with granite and stainless steel. At a certain point, however, Ms. Ordelheide realized that she could no longer afford to remain in the city. "I wanted to stay here so bad," she said. "The city changed my life, and I couldn't imagine leaving. But one day I just realized that I couldn't do this anymore. It was too scary. I came to the conclusion that I had to get out of the city. And once I decided, except for the sense of sadness, I felt a great relief." On May 11, Ms. Ordelheide packed up her guitar, banjo and other possessions, and set off for a cottage in Pompano Beach, Fla. monthly rent, 1,345. "I'm trying to be positive because I have no choice," she said as she was getting ready to leave. "I'm hoping that because I'm taking a lot of my things with me, the move will be easier. Still, it's really hard." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Researchers commonly use the term the "Lassie effect" to describe the wide ranging health benefits of walking a dog. The name refers to the television collie that nobly saved Timmy's and so many other people's lives week after week on her popular show. But even though walking the dog can have lifesaving health benefits for owners and pets, a surprisingly large number of dog owners rarely, if ever, walk or otherwise exercise their dogs, research shows. Scientists who had studied the Lassie effect remained puzzled about why someone would forgo an activity that is good for them, potentially imperiling the well being of both owner and pet. But a new study provides clues about why people do or do not walk their dogs. The findings may help researchers promote activities and initiatives that increase dog walking and spread the Lassie effect. For many of us who own dogs, the idea of not walking with them can seem anathema. They are such reliable and insistent training partners. Undeterred by sleet, heat, wind, cold or work deadlines, they wag their tails and drool when we pull out our sneakers and do not mind (indeed prefer) that our shorts come from the dirty laundry pile rather than a drawer. They motivate many of us to exercise when we might otherwise choose to remain still. The health impacts of this exercise can be considerable. Recent studies have found that people who own and walk a dog are much more likely than other people to meet the standard recommendation of 150 minutes of exercise per week. Dog walkers also have lower risks for high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, arthritis and other common medical conditions. Ditto for their dogs, which are less prone to rotundity or illness than dogs that are rarely exercised (although evidence indicates that, as with people, dogs that need to lose weight must cut calories from their diets; exercise alone will not slim most dogs). Dogs and people that walk together also are believed to develop deeper emotional bonds than do owners and pets that do not. But despite these benefits, as many as 40 percent of dog owners in the United States and elsewhere rarely if ever walk their dogs, according to recent estimates. That statistic worried Carri Westgarth, a research fellow in public health at the University of Liverpool in England, who led the new study. She recently began a program in Liverpool to encourage physical activity through dog walking. But such efforts would not be sustainable, she thought, unless scientists understood and responded to the obstacles to dog walking. So for the new study, which was published recently in BMC Public Health, she and her colleagues turned to a large existing database of information about the health and lifestyles of almost 2,000 adults living in Perth, Australia (where one of the study authors resides). The participants had completed multiple questionnaires, including about pets and the household's physical activities. The researchers zeroed in on answers related to dogs and walking and what it was about the dogs, their owners or their neighborhood that contributed to the walking. And what they found was that smaller dogs, those weighing less than about 30 pounds, were much less likely to be walked than larger animals. Older and overweight dogs also rarely were exercised. But even large, healthy dogs were unlikely to be walked if the owners did not believe that walking dogs was healthful or that their dog liked to walk. Dogs were also less likely to be walked if there were few parks nearby. Many people also did not walk their dogs if there was a child in the household who could be handed the task. Interestingly, one of the prime determinants of regular dog walks was affection. People who reported feeling close to their pet generally walked it more often than those who reported a looser bond. In aggregate, Dr. Westgarth said, these replies suggest that some pet owners see little upside to dog walking and are happy to skip or abdicate the task. Many also may underestimate the needs and abilities of their pet. "It's a myth that small dogs don't need walks every day," she said. Her own tiny Chihuahua/pug mix, one of three dogs she owns, has reached the top of the 3,500 foot peak of Mount Snowdon in Wales, she said. Aging and overweight dogs also can and generally should be walked, she said, assuming that you have clearance from your veterinarian. Reintroduce out of shape dogs to physical activity gradually and do not ignore limitations. One of Dr. Westgarth's dogs, a 14 year old spaniel mix, strolls more slowly than her younger, friskier dogs, she said, so she takes it on alternate days. But she still takes it. The rewards can be ineffable. A dog on a walk explores, finding pleasure in moving, sniffing, prancing and sharing your company, Dr. Westgarth said. This is not exercise; it is joy and can be contagious. "People who walk their dogs often say they do it for the dog," she said. "But there is also an element of what we get out of it in terms of enjoyment, which is the big motivator." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Trump seems to believe that it shows strength to flout precautions and weakness to heed them. He seems to think the public wants this "strength" and will flock to him in support of his performance. Yet again, his vaunted political instincts failed him. When, in the wake of the debate, the White House announced that Trump and much of his senior staff had contracted the virus, the public response was something akin to "We told you so." Sixty three percent of Americans said the president had acted "irresponsibly" in "handling the risk of coronavirus infection to the people who have been around him most recently," according to a CNN poll. The most important issue right now for most voters is the pandemic, which has damaged the economy and radically transformed life for hundreds of millions of Americans, while killing more than 210,000 of us. They want solutions and assistance, not ostentatious displays of so called masculine strength. They want the government, and the president, to be honest about the challenge. None of this is particularly difficult. Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic governor of New York, has had as much failure as success in handling the pandemic. His administration's early decision to send thousands of discharged hospital patients back to nursing homes is arguably responsible for a significant portion of the state's death toll. This might have doomed Cuomo with the public. But the power of the rallying effect is such that a serious performance of competence, as well as concrete actions to regain New Yorkers' lost confidence, has been enough to keep him well above water politically. The extent to which leaders across the country and around the world have been able to thrive despite high pandemic death tolls and a vicious economic downturn is a testament to how Trump could have forged a path to re election had he treated the pandemic with any seriousness. Wearing a mask, pressing Congress for more aid, rejecting Covid 19 denialism and refraining from magical thinking this is probably all it would have taken to spin a once in a century crisis into political gold. But Trump refused, and now, if the polls are right and the forecasts are accurate, he's just a few weeks away from what may well prove to be a landslide defeat. Trump was the unexpected winner of the 2016 presidential election. That victory led many, including Trump himself, to believe he had some special sauce, some superpower that helped him defy political gravity. There's no question he has some political skills. A lifelong showman, he's good with a crowd, or at least certain kinds of crowds. He can distill an entire governing agenda into a few simple phrases. And he's been able to build an emotional connection with a significant part of the American electorate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
That many workers in the United States will eventually be replaced by technology seems inevitable. The question is when not if it will happen. For the workers' counterparts in India, the concerns are similar. Over the last decade or so, Indian outsourcing companies have managed to lure a number of jobs out of the United States, leading to a growing tech middle class in their home country. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Here's what it's like to live in a home that is followed by thousands and has to feel lived in but also always ready for a close up. Erin Vogelpohl has tried mixing darker blues and greens into the decor of her five bedroom house in Dallas, but they don't play well with her 447,000 Instagram followers. So she sticks with a soft blush palette, the millennial pink that is ubiquitous on Instagram, and in her living room. For home decor Instagram influencers like Ms. Vogelpohl, the house is the star. And tending to a star can be an all consuming job, particularly when you live in it. Her account, mytexashouse, and others like it have amassed tens of thousands of followers by cycling seemingly endless photographs of private living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens and bedrooms. Some have gained traction chronicling the restoration of an old home or the construction of a new one. A few dabble in areas like fashion, parenting, cooking and makeup, but they primarily peddle the infinite marketability of a home's interior, with all its trappings. Attract enough followers eager to see shots of a dining room centerpiece with fresh cut summer flowers, and brands like Nordstrom, Pottery Barn, Wayfair and the Container Store will pay for access, offering the potential of a six figure salary and plenty of free merchandise. Those who run successful accounts generally describe their rise as accidental, born from a mix of luck (a nod from the Better Homes Gardens Instagram account with its 1.8 million followers helps) and a passion for their homes. Some had successful blogs with loyal readerships that followed them to social media. But there is a price to pay for internet fame derived from your home. The space where you raise your children, kick off your shoes and go to bed lives online, more as a professional showroom than as private living quarters. Consider buying a new sofa or accent chair, and you may pause to wonder how well the piece will photograph. Spill a protein shake on the kitchen runner, and the aftermath becomes an Instagram stories tutorial on how to extricate chocolate from a rug. "The house does feel a little less like my own because so many people know it. So many people have seen inside every space," said Ms. Vogelpohl, 41, who lives there with her husband and three children. "I don't want to entertain because it's my work space literally, the whole thing." It takes work to keep a house looking both novel and spotless. How many pictures of the same family room can you post before a follower moves on to something new? To keep the 104,000 followers of ninawilliamsblog intrigued, Nina Williams, 36, frequently changed the decor of the six bedroom house in West Des Moines, Iowa, where she and her family lived until they sold it in May. Now she is enjoying a temporary reprieve, as the family lives in a rental nearby, while they build a 7,000 square foot house on 40 acres. As that project is the current focus of her Instagram account, she can enjoy a few months of living outside the internet fishbowl, and indulge in decorating sins like covering the refrigerator with magnets and her children's drawings. To operate a successful account can be a full time job of creating content, responding to comments and coordinating with brands. Ms. Saeta, 60, dedicates 60 hours a week to tending her account and blog, which she describes as a "small media company." Mrs. Williams, a stay at home mother with four children, spends two to three hours a day on her account and blog, earning about half as much as she estimates she might if she worked on it full time. There is "labor that goes into keeping a family home in show home condition," said Kim Barbour, a lecturer in media at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who has studied the influence of Instagram on home life. "I imagine there would be times when the pressure to maintain the glossy magazine styling becomes a real burden." It might be summer vacation for Erin Rollins's three children, but the 208,000 followers of erin sunnysideup, the account she runs along with a blog, expect to see regular posts about the five bedroom house that she and her husband, Ken Rollins, 43, a corporate lawyer, built in San Diego. All summer, the children have been hanging out in the room above the garage that Ms. Rollins, 42, spent the last year transforming into a family theater. In mid July, with her design work finally complete, she temporarily evicted them from their lounge space so she could stage and photograph it for the big reveal that she plans to share online in the next few weeks. The children protested, but complied. "I've been blogging and taking pictures of us living in our home for over 10 years, so my kids aren't fazed," she said. Generally, Ms. Rollins stages and photographs the spaces when the children are out of the house, which is easier now that all three are school age. "When they get home, the house is messy," she said. The interiors of other people's homes have long captured the public imagination. In the 1980s, viewers followed Robin Leach around on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" for a glimpse inside the opulent homes of wealthy people who were often not that famous. In the 2000s, a generation of celebrities (and eventual Instagram influencers) was born on shows like "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" and the "Real Housewives" franchise. And home improvement shows on HGTV and other networks now offer viewers uninterrupted access to the unremarkable homes and lives of ordinary people. Free platforms like Instagram make it possible for anyone to show the world her living room, and potentially profit from it by promoting products. Companies like rewardStyle connect popular influencers with brands. When an influencer uploads a photograph of, say, a fabulous lamp tagged with a link, followers who click on the link can buy the merchandise. The influencer then collects a commission on sales that originate from that post. Brands also partner with influencers directly or through marketing companies, paying for sponsored content. (Influencers with smaller followings may receive free merchandise instead.) While earnings vary widely in an industry that is still developing, an influencer can expect to earn roughly one cent for each follower, or 1,000 a post for an account with 100,000 followers, according to Later, an Instagram marketing platform. Influencers with audiences of 50,000 to 500,000 reported earning an average of about 70,000 a year, with more than half of their income from sponsored content, according to a 2019 survey by Collectively, an influencer marketing company. "In the very beginning, people would contact me: 'Can we send you something?' And I was like, 'Oh my gosh, send me all the free stuff!'" Mrs. Williams said. It didn't take long for her to learn that she was worth more than a free duvet cover. "Now, if you want to send me stuff," she said, "there is a price." Deliver impressive enough results, and a brand may roll out signature merchandise, like Ms. Vogelpohl's line of rugs from Orian. Much of an account's success depends on the enthusiasm of its followers. To keep them engaged, an account must feel authentic, and that means sharing more than just your new decorative mirror. Followers will drift off and brands will doubt your marketing potential if few people like or comment on bland photographs with banal captions peppered with rainbow emojis and a string of advertising hashtags and links. To avoid that fate, an account needs to share a certain number of personal anecdotes, complete with photos of the children and the clutter. But not too much clutter, because no one wants to see a real life mess, even if it comes with a deal on a Swiffer. "When you get on Instagram and you're trying to take a break from your real, tough life maybe it's because your kid has been asking for something to eat every 30 seconds you don't want to see your own stuff; you want to see the dream" of an idealized home, said Allison Schaeffer, 44, who lives in San Diego and follows dozens of personal home decor accounts. "It's just relatable enough and just out of reach enough." Of course, there is a risk to sharing your home life with half a million or so strangers. About 18 months ago, Ms. Vogelpohl posted about her family's struggles: Her husband, Dusty Vogelpohl, 41, a lawyer, lost his job around the same time that Ms. Vogelpohl had heart surgery. While many followers expressed sympathy, others questioned her honesty and motives. Some doubted the seriousness of the family's financial problems, given the well appointed, 4,800 square foot house and lavish trips like a cruise in Mexico, or wondered if she was sharing her difficult experiences to attract more followers. In a teary Instagram story, Ms. Vogelpohl challenged the doubters, pointing out that if it weren't for her successful Instagram account, the family would not have been able to weather the financial setback. "If I hadn't done the Instagram thing, we would have had to have sold the house, because we wouldn't have been able to afford it," Ms. Vogelpohl, now the sole breadwinner in the family, said in a telephone interview. "The house has kept me in the house." In 2017, Ashley Harrison, a stay at home mother with four children, turned her Instagram account, ourvictorianitalianate, into a journal to keep in touch with friends and family after she and her husband, Nathan Harrison, who works in insurance, moved into an 1858 house in St. Louis and began restoring it. It never occurred to her that complete strangers would be interested in photos of her house being fixed up. But soon she had 200 followers, most of whom she didn't know. Now, with more than 35,000 followers, she is baffled by the attention. "When it first started happening, I was like, 'O.K., this is strange, who is this lady?' Once I hit 500 followers, I was like, 'This is just bizarre,'" said Ms. Harrison, 36. "It is a little bit unsettling to think that there are nearly 40,000 strangers who could come and knock on my door." Her account has documented the extensive renovation of her Victorian house, which was vacant before she and her husband bought it and expanded it to 6,800 square feet. They added a new kitchen, a mudroom, a three car detached garage and a porte cochere. They also turned an outbuilding into a pool house and added an in ground pool this summer. "I think people like a comeback story," she said of the account's popularity. Followers have asked for floor plans and for video tours of the upstairs bedrooms, which Ms. Harrison declined to share, concerned that strangers would know where her children slept. Like many with popular accounts, she has been asked to give private tours of her property. (She refused.) Others say fans have driven past their homes and greeted them in the supermarket or at restaurants. Marketers have come knocking, too, offering Ms. Harrison opportunities to promote merchandise. While she accepts some opportunities, she has turned down many, reluctant to promote products she wouldn't typically buy. "If this becomes something that's not authentic, then I don't think it's going to be something that brings me joy," she said. "Who can go and redo a room every month?" Ms. Saeta's husband, Dave Saeta, 59, who works in commercial real estate, complains that she spends too much time on the phone, and that he has had to surrender part of the 4,700 square foot house to the business of her Instagram account. The third floor was a game and guest room until it became a storage and staging area for merchandise Ms. Saeta acquires. But Mr. Saeta said he ultimately trusts her to make the most of their stately house, which has long been a favorite of location scouts, appearing on television shows like "Mad Men" and "Judging Amy." In a way, Instagram is a natural next stage in the evolution of a house that was already in the public eye. "It's not like I'm pimping my house," Ms. Saeta said. "It's more that we've created this wonderful place and I want to share it. And I can share it from a distance, but still let people in." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
When the C.I.A. released hundreds of thousands of declassified files online in January, the contents probably seemed far fetched to most people. Included in the cache were documents about U.F.O. sightings, demonstrations of psychic abilities and reports of a Georgian man with magical healing powers. But those subjects would have seemed almost passe to the radio host George Noory and the curious nocturnal listeners who tune in to his radio show, "Coast to Coast AM." Mr. Noory, 66, has been hosting the nationally syndicated program for 14 years from his studios in Los Angeles and St. Louis. With three million weekly listeners, "Coast to Coast," which is broadcast every night from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. Eastern time, is carried by more than 600 radio stations in North America and is by far the most popular overnight radio program in the country, according to information from Nielsen. Given the size of its audience, the show might be expected to cover topics squarely in the mainstream. But Mr. Noory's listeners, whom he refers to as "the night people," tend to focus more on fringier fare, whether it's U.F.O. sightings near Area 51 or the myriad conspiracy theories that Mr. Noory's predecessor, Art Bell, established as signatures of the program. "Most of the folks during the daytime will generally take whatever is handed to them," Mr. Noory said. "Skepticism in my view is very healthy," said Mr. Noory, who considers himself a libertarian. "I think everybody needs to be skeptical about just about everything, until they have either done their own homework, done their own research or accepted information from sources that they trust, like The New York Times, or like The Wall Street Journal, or like Matt Drudge, if they trust him, as well." Mr. Noory worked in television news for 34 years, as a reporter, a producer and an executive at stations in Detroit, Minneapolis and St. Louis. But his interest in unexplained phenomena developed early. He has said many times that he had an out of body experience when he was 11, and described the episode again in a recent interview. "I was bouncing up on the ceiling looking down on my body," he said. "Coast to Coast" began in 1984 as a talk radio program broadcasting from the Las Vegas station KDWN. Mr. Bell, its founder and first host, had originally been a D.J. He switched his focus to talk radio at a time when music listeners began to favor higher fidelity FM stations, forcing many AM channels to switch formats. When "Coast to Coast" went national, in 1992, he started to receive calls from listeners about their paranormal experiences. Those calls soon became the show's trademark. When Mr. Bell left the show, he advised Mr. Noory not to imitate his hosting style, which gave listeners the (accurate) sense that he was broadcasting from a compound in the desert. He was isolated from his audience and occasionally confrontational with callers. On one call from a man claiming to have worked for Area 51, Mr. Bell made his suspicion known right away: "Well, look, let's begin by finding out whether you're using this line properly or not." And on Oct. 13, 1998, Mr. Bell signed off by saying: "This is it, folks. I'm going off the air and will not return." When Mr. Noory took over, after his forerunner returned and vanished from the show a few more times, listeners noticed a shift in tone, from skeptical and sometimes critical to open minded and kind. "Art was a little more, if he thought you were loo la, he would tell you," said Veronica Costin, who started tuning in during the 1990s. It became a ritual for her: drifting off in her San Antonio bedroom to the sounds of faraway voices. "There's a community," she said. "We're all there in that dark. We're all there in that quiet." Mrs. Costin and her husband, who died in December, listened to "Coast to Coast" every night, even as his health was deteriorating. The possibilities that the show raises, like the afterlife, have been a comfort for Mrs. Costin in her grief. "My husband is dead," she said. "I cannot give you anything you can write down on paper and prove, but I know he is not gone." Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Christian MacLeod of Asheville, N.C., has been a nightly listener since 1995. He grew up hearing stories from his grandfather about unexplained phenomena and watching Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of," always wondering, what if? Nolan Higdon, a professor of history and communication at California State University, East Bay, sees programs that propagate unsubstantiated claims as potentially dangerous. "People sit down and think that they watch or listen to or consume media, and that it's just entertainment," he said. "But inside any entertainment are certain values, ideas, concepts, representations. They dictate things to you and the way you see the world, whether you're aware of it or not." Each episode of "Coast to Coast" begins with a news segment, but when asked if he saw himself as a journalist, Mr. Noory responded that he was "a facilitator of the truth, wherever that takes us." His audience seems to see him as an authoritative, unifying force at a time when the country appears more fragmented than ever. Through his radio show, live events and two dating sites Paranormal Date and Conspiracy Date he acts as a connector and a surrogate for his listeners, whom he considers extended family. (Mr. Noory has three children and six grandchildren. He is private about his relationship status.) To uphold the appearance of impartiality, Mr. Noory said, he has abstained from voting since joining "Coast to Coast." "I want to be able to go on the air and say, 'Folks, I don't have a favorite here,'" he said. But that doesn't prevent him from making projections. On July 27, Mr. Noory appeared on Alex Jones's show on the website Infowars and predicted that Donald J. Trump would win the presidential election. Mr. Jones, who is a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump, is also a conspiracy theorist who has drawn intense criticism for, among other things, questioning whether the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut could be a hoax. Mr. Noory said in a recent phone interview that he had noticed a significant change in his audience, and in the general population, over the last 15 years. "I have never seen a time period where more people are upset, concerned, scared, ticked off, about so many things," he said. "That's probably why Donald Trump got elected. There's an uneasiness of something impending." A frequent caller, Jonathan Christian Webster III, who refers to himself as J. C. on the air, illustrates the extreme of the fear that Mr. Noory hears from his audience. The forces J. C. believes are contributing to America's decline include pornography, William Shatner and Canada. (Maybe not coincidentally, Mr. Shatner is a native Canadian.) Mr. Noory is an empathetic listener, even to the views of people like Mr. Webster. But he also says he believes that it is important to question what you hear. For that reason, he occasionally invites guests on his show who challenge some of his listeners' beliefs. Joe Nickell, senior research fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, has dedicated his career to exploring possible explanations for mysterious phenomena. He has appeared on the show occasionally as a voice of skepticism. "What I'm trying to do is actually investigate claims, like Bigfoot or ghosts or any of the other bizarre topics 'Coast to Coast' deals with," Mr. Nickell said. "I'm confident that if I can actually explain some mystery, the debunking will take care of itself." Mr. Noory has no plans to retire and remains open to any topic that a guest would like to introduce to the "Coast to Coast" audience. "I think everything has a possibility," he said. "Even as far fetched as it may sound, there's always some possibility that it's real. Are there other dimensions? I don't know. But it's possible." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The trailer for Jordan Peele's new horror movie, "Us," set the internet on fire in December. The premise a family stalked by its disfigured doppelgangers was chilling, but much of the online reaction focused on the teaser's use of "I Got 5 on It," the 1995 platinum hit by the Oakland rap duo Luniz. As the trailer opens, the song plays over the car radio while the family discusses its meaning, prompting the dad's accidental double entendre: "It's not about drugs, it's a dope song!" Known as the San Francisco Bay Area's premier pot smoking anthem, the track gets a makeover as the trailer turns darker slowed down, then beefed up with orchestral overdubs, becoming a terrifying, atmospheric motif. "You'd never think of it as a scary movie song," said Anthony Gilmour, 52, the Bay Area rap producer known as Tone Capone, who made the original track. "But when they slow it up, it just sounds creepy." Luniz's Garrick Husbands, 43, known as Numskull, said he was ecstatic to learn the song would be included in the film's promotion. "It was the best thing, besides my children being born, I had ever heard," he said in a phone interview. For many younger rap fans, this was their first encounter with Luniz, who originally formed as the LuniTunes in 1992. Linking up with Tone Capone the following year, Luniz helped usher in the Bay Area's "Mob Music" sound slow, brooding, 808 drum machine driven grooves often known as "slumpers." The duo's 1995 debut, "Operation Stackola," went platinum on the strength of "I Got 5 on It." Follow ups in 1997 and 2002 didn't reach the same heights, and the duo split around 2005, reuniting in 2015 for a mixtape called "High Timez." In 2018, it released an EP, "No Pressure," and it's currently working on new singles. "I'll give you a hint: They're definitely around what's going on with the movie," said Luniz's Jerold Ellis, 44, the rapper known as Yukmouth. (On March 8, the day "Us" had its premiere at SXSW, the duo released a revamped version of the track, "I Got 5 on Us," with a video inspired by the film.) "I Got 5 on It" initially appeared in two scenes in "Us," but the horror version known as the "Tethered Mix" was added to the soundtrack "as a result of its success in the trailer," said Stacey Zarro, the vice president for publicity at the movie's distributor, Universal Pictures. The "Tethered Mix" was the brainchild of Joe Wees, the senior vice president for creative marketing at Universal, and the trailer editor John Cantu. (Michael Abels was the composer for "Us.") "We struck it down to where we had just a bit of the lyrics and some tones, added in our own effects, and then hired composition companies to help fill those in," Wees said. (The "Us" team declined to name who finished up the mix.) Tone Capone was more than happy to dissect the revised track, noting some low frequency oscillation on the bells and plucked strings. "They're playing it at a slower tempo, using a turntable or a processor and then a computer to keep the pitch the same," he said. As a producer, Tone Capone's bona fides in Bay Area rap run deep. Working under the name DJ Cool G, he provided turntable scratches on the 1987 album "Surf or Die" by the Surf MC's, a novelty group that nonetheless edged out the scene's acknowledged founder, Too Short, as the first local rap act to sign to a major label. He provided an early influential remix of Eric B. and Rakim's "Casualties of War" in 1992, and was soon directing label scouts to the region, yielding deals for Luniz, Dru Down and the Keak da Sneak launchpad 3X Krazy. Apart from "I Got 5 on It," he is most famous for co producing the Geto Boys' Scarface, including the 1997 smash "Smile," one of the last guest appearances Tupac Shakur recorded before his death. Along the way, he worked with Bay Area luminaries like E 40 and Mac Dre; Dirty Southerners like Devin the Dude; and New Yorkers like Lloyd Banks. His work lately has drifted toward R B, developing vocal talent like the singer London Savoy. In recent years, he's taken on a day job as a supply technician at U.C.S.F. Medical Center, but he estimates about half of his income comes from licensing and publishing from his classic catalog, a fact he ascribes to his old school, major label paperwork and publishing rights. "All I can say is, producers, stop giving your stuff away for free because you devaluing the game," he said. "Even if you just chuck it out on the internet, you still got to have the business part done if you want to eat." Still, even Tone Capone is amazed at the evergreen success of what was already what he called his "top breadwinner." "It's been good to me," he said. "'5 on It' blew up, and it's blowing up again, which is crazy because it's 24 years later." If that's what being a one hit wonder means, he joked, "I'll be a one hit wonder." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The American Institute of Architects said Friday that it had approved new ethics rules prohibiting members from knowingly designing spaces intended for execution or torture, including for prolonged periods of solitary confinement. Such a rule has been championed by architecture professionals for several years, but the organization had resisted making the declaration until now, saying that architects were not responsible for torture policies and procedures that took place in the spaces that they designed. In recent months, as the institute has responded to the calls for equality that followed George Floyd's killing, the group has re evaluated its stance. "We are committed to promoting the design of a more equitable and just built world that dismantles racial injustice and upholds human rights," the group's president, Jane Frederick, said in a news release. Members of the institute are required to "uphold the health, safety and welfare of the public" in their work, Ms. Frederick said, and the board of directors had determined that spaces meant for execution and torture "contradict those values." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Anthony Altamura's family had a running joke: "Oh, Anthony is complaining about the commute again." Mr. Altamura was living with his parents in central New Jersey. The commute to his office near Grand Central Terminal, where he works at an accounting firm, was just shy of two hours each way. For around four years, he arose at 5:30 a.m., rode the train from Princeton Junction to Pennsylvania Station and made his way to his office. Even in summer, he rarely arrived home before twilight. On the train, "I would read and sometimes I would work, but other than that I would be pretty much miserable," said Mr. Altamura, 27, a graduate of the College of New Jersey. "Getting further in my career, I knew the work demands would catch up with me and I wouldn't be able to sustain such a long commute." Mr. Altamura, who had been saving to move to a place of his own, hit his limit this past winter. He considered Hoboken, N.J., where both his parents are from, and the Upper East Side, where some friends live. But a friend at work who lives in Long Island City, Queens, mentioned how nice a place it was. "I had no idea where Long Island City was," Mr. Altamura said. It looked appealing online, with plenty of new high rises and an attractive waterfront setting. Also online, he found Steve Irizarry, then a salesman at Christie Property Group "one of the few brokers who actually got back to me," he said. "It was my first attempt at apartment shopping ever, and I wasn't sure what to expect." Mr. Irizarry is now with NestSeekers International. Mr. Altamura, who wanted to keep his outlay as close as possible to 2,000 a month, scheduled a visit to Long Island City and took his mother, Vicky Altamura, with him. "She has an eye for things that I really don't see," he said. "She would ask certain questions like 'Is the heat included?' and things that I wouldn't know or think to ask." Son and mother rode the 7 train between Grand Central and Long Island City, thrilled that the one stop trip took just a few minutes. Exiting at the Vernon Boulevard Jackson Avenue station, they were disoriented, so they walked in the direction of the waterfront high rises. "This is a really nice area," Mr. Altamura thought. "I can't imagine how much these must cost." They met up with Mr. Irizarry, who took them away from the water to Packard Square, constructed in 2009 on Crescent Street. The one bedrooms there were in the low to mid 2,000s, "the least expensive options in the neighborhood," Mr. Irizarry said. They saw a one bedroom on a high floor, identical to one available on a low floor. Mr. Altamura didn't mind the industrial neighborhood, with the overhead train at the end of the block, but as for the unseen low floor unit, he said, "we envisioned that the view would be blocked by another building, so in my mind, I nixed it right away." They proceeded to 12 15 Broadway, a mid rise building just over a year old in nearby Astoria, also in Queens. Here, an alcove studio was in the low 2,000s. Mr. Altamura's mother pointed out Long Island City High School, and its playing fields, across the street. "Not being street smart at all, I wouldn't think anything of it," Mr. Altamura said, but his mother warned of noise. "When we were going up the elevator and walking down the hallway, I lost my orientation, so I didn't know which way we were going to be facing," Mr. Altamura said. As it turned out, one side of the studio faced the best way, toward Manhattan's postcard skyline. Mr. Altamura headed for the window. "My mom, she is busy looking at the kitchen all the important things that should be looked at while you're apartment shopping and I'm staring out the window," he said. "We were taken aback at how beautiful the views were. Then we stepped back and looked at the practical things, like the kitchen, which I didn't care about because I didn't cook." His income didn't meet the requirement of 45 times the monthly rent, so he had the option of using a guarantor or paying a year's rent upfront. He chose to pay all at once. The broker fee was paid by the building management. When Mr. Altamura arrived in February, the empty apartment seemed somehow bigger than he remembered. He bought furniture from Ikea. He no longer has a commute to complain about. Now that he has time, he is teaching himself to cook, starting with an online recipe for chicken Parmesan. His quality of life has improved dramatically "now that I have three and three quarter hours of my life back on a daily basis," he said. He is able to play pickup soccer, work out at the gym, jog along the waterfront, see friends and "use the time more productively than going back and forth on the train," he said. "I definitely thank my friend every day for tipping me off to Long Island City." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"I'm Not Here" makes reference to Schrodinger's cat, which was simultaneously alive and not alive until observed. Watching "I'm Not Here" doesn't bring it to life as a movie, any more than the screenplay's allusions to quantum entanglement add novelty to its fragmentary structure or its hollow insights about regret. The "I" of the title is Steve, played at age 60 by J.K. Simmons (who is married to the director, Michelle Schumacher). An inveterate alcoholic who lives alone and disheveled, Steve learns that the love of his life, Karen, has died. Steve searches his memories. As a child (Iain Armitage), he watched his parents (Mandy Moore and Max Greenfield) endure a bitter divorce. As a young man (Sebastian Stan), he had a whirlwind romance with Karen (Maika Monroe) that ran into trouble after their marriage. In one of the better scenes, a judge (Tony Cummings), trying to determine custody of young Steve, summons the boy to his chambers and asks him questions, telling him to put jelly beans on a scale, with one side representing his mother and the other his father. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The rising star , 28, is in high demand. You'll find her in one of the buzziest films of this awards season, Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman," which vied for Best Motion Picture, Drama at the Golden Globes last weekend. And she will appear in two movies this year, including the sci fi thriller "Warning" with Annabelle Wallis and Alice Eve. In the near term, there is the Screen Actors Guild awards, where Ms. Harrier and her "BlacKkKlansman" cohort are up for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. Though awards season is exciting, it can also be a grind. See what beauty products Ms. Harrier, a native of Evanston, Ill., is using to survive the back to back red carpets. In the shower, I use a face wash from my aesthetician Shani Darden. And she has this lactic peel that I do when I get out of the shower. I alternate between that and serums by iS Clinical. If I'm breaking out, I'll go for the Active serum, and if my skin is dry, I do the Pro Heal. When I moved to L.A. from New York, almost exactly a year ago, I didn't know anyone. The girl who does my eyebrows, Kim Nguyen, told me about Shani, and she kind of saved my face. I like that she's straight up and tells you exactly what you need to do. For me, it's dealing with breakouts. I didn't struggle with it until late in my 20s. That has been really annoying. It's all the travel, stress and whatever else. For a long time, I was very into superclean, natural skin care. I'll still do a manuka honey mask in the bath, but with all the breakout issues, I've had to amp it up. When my skin was perfect, the natural stuff was cool. But if I'm having issues, they don't do enough. Before I head out, I do an SPF 30 the one by Control Corrective. It's really lightweight and just feels like a moisturizer. At night I use the Bioderma micellar water to remove makeup. I wash again with Shani's cleanser, and then I use her retinol. I'm not using the retinol for wrinkles, but it helps a lot with my acne scarring. And my skin feels smoother. I love to watch the makeup artists at work. Now I can do my makeup for an event if I have to. Day to day, though, I keep it minimal. I do the Nars concealer my color is Caramel. Then it's Glossier Boy Brow every day in Black. I have the Tom Ford Shade and Illuminate palette that comes with the two colors. I throw on the highlighter for everyday and do the contour color if I'm going out. I like the Lash Slick by Glossier for day it's pretty and natural. At night, I switch to the Marc Jacobs mascara. The makeup artist Hung Vanngo told me about it. I've learned the most from him and from Nina Park. Nina has taught me that if I have an early press day and look terrible, do a lip. She'll look at my face and say, "Uhhh, O.K., let's do a lip on you!" With an eye look, you can still look tired and droopy. A bright lip color is lifting, and honestly, it's easy. I have this YSL matte lip stain that I love so much, the bottom label has worn off. Now I don't even know the color. Ruby Woo by M.A.C. is always good. I really like the RMS Lip2Cheek colors. You can layer them so you can choose if you want to go lighter or darker. I also wear foundation if I have an event. I mix the Tom Ford one with the Tom Ford highlighting primer. My hair is so dry, it's like the desert. It's like sand in the desert, it's so rough. I do make an attempt to moisturize, but it's really tough to get ahead of it when I'm working a lot. All the heat styling damages it, and I have really fine hair. I do Olaplex a lot. I throw it on like a hair mask and go to SoulCycle. I feel like it heats up in there! I like the Shu Uemura shampoos and conditioners. I also use Oribe Gold Lust hair oil. I usually get my hair cut by Teddi Cranford in New York, but I'm actually trying to grow it out, so I haven't had it cut in ages. People always tell you that you have to cut your hair in order to grow it, but whatever, I don't want to. And it doesn't even make sense, as your hair is growing from your scalp! I had the best smell ever: this tiny unmarked vial from Morocco that my friend got for me. It smells like orange blossom. I used to get so many compliments. I have saved literally one drop just so I can smell it. Now I do these roll ons from Maison Louis Marie. In the winter I do No. 04, but more recently I've been doing the Antidris Cassis one. I get massages, but I don't have one particular person I go to. It's the same with mani pedis. Kim plucks my brows, but really barely, and she also tints them. I love a brow tint. They make such a big difference on your face. Carrie Lindsey, who used to do my brows in New York, was the first one to tint my brows, but I had to talk her into it. That was maybe two years ago, and now I won't go back. Overall, though, I'm way more of a New York girl in every aspect of my life. People do so much in L.A. I'm not that girl. I'm not getting everything waxed every other week. I'd rather do the bare minimum. I've actually been lazier here in L.A. In New York, I would go to the Dogpound. My friend Kirk Myers founded it. Now, in L.A., I go to SoulCycle and barre class and hot yoga, but I bounce around. Also, I've been traveling so much that it's hard to keep anything together. I downloaded the Nike app to work out while I travel, and I think I did it once. For me, diet is about moderation. I work out, but I love cheese, pasta and wine. As I say that, I'm drinking a green smoothie that was a million dollars at Erewhon. The truth is, the timing of awards season, right after the holidays, is really cruel. I'm not at my peak right now. Honestly, I'm just trying to work out a lot, and I'll go to Shani for a peel before a big awards show. I do the infrared sauna, too. I feel it helps. There's also this infrared sauna where they wrap you like a burrito. I haven't tried that one yet, but it kind of seems like torture. You're paying someone to wrap a hot blanket around you. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: General Motors announced Friday that it would build Buicks destined for the United States and China at the company's Opel factory in Ruesselsheim, Germany. The plant currently builds the Opel Insignia, which shares architecture with the Buick Regal. G.M. will cease exports of Opel vehicles to China in 2015; the automaker sold 810,00 Buicks there in 2013, compared with only 4,365 Opel models. (Reuters) Ford is investing 500 million into its engine plant in Lima, Ohio, the automaker said in a statement Friday, to begin production of the all new 2.7 liter EcoBoost V6 engine scheduled for service in the 2015 F 150. Ford said it expected the move to create 300 new jobs at the plant. (Ford) In other Ford news, Bill Ford, the automaker's executive chairman, said Thursday that the United Auto Workers union played a pivotal role in helping to save Ford from bankruptcy in 2009, when the other two Detroit automakers accepted federal bailouts. He said that Ron Gettelfinger, who was the U.A.W. chief at the time, doesn't get sufficient credit for his role. (Automotive News, subscription required) The Gigafactory the large battery plant Tesla Motors wants to build still hasn't received approval from Panasonic, the main supplier of batteries for Tesla's electric cars. Tesla says the plant will cost about 5 billion to build and will create 6,500 jobs by the end of the decade. Panasonic has expressed concern about investment risk. (Bloomberg) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Michael B. McCaskey, who took over running the Chicago Bears from his grandfather George S. Halas and led the team during its 1980s heyday, when it won its only Super Bowl championship, died on Saturday. He was 76. The cause was cancer, which he battled for years, the team said on its website. It did not specify the type of cancer or say where he died. In recent years he lived in Boston. Mr. McCaskey was a professor of organizational behavior and management when Halas, the team's founder, died in 1983. Mr. McCaskey's mother, Virginia Halas McCaskey, took over as the team's owner, and Michael joined the Bears as president and chief executive. He oversaw a team that reclaimed its old nickname the Monsters of the Midway, led by the running back Walter Payton, the quarterback Jim McMahon and the lineman William "Refrigerator" Perry. When the Bears won the Super Bowl championship in 1986, he was voted N.F.L. Executive of the Year. He called the Super Bowl XX victory, following a dominant regular 1985 season, when the Bears went 15 1, his proudest moment with the team. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The J.C.C. Manhattan on the Upper West Side will be renamed the Marlene Meyerson J.C.C. in honor of a 20 million gift from the Meyerson Family Foundation, which is believed to be one of the largest donations ever made to a Jewish Community Center in the United States. The foundation which made the donation in the name of Marlene Meyerson, a philanthropist who died earlier this year has also commissioned a site specific artwork for the J.C.C. by Jenny Holzer. To create the installation, the J.C.C. will ask its members over the next several months to share their own words or quotes by others that address the question: "What does community mean?" Ms. Holzer will choose a handful of these to chisel onto marble benches and stone plaques throughout the building on Amsterdam Avenue at 76th Street. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Some items may require repairs or parts; warranties may not be available Construction may take longer, with higher labor charges | 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. 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. Vice President Mike Pence took a tour of the Mayo Clinic on Tuesday and ignored the facility's policy for all visitors to wear masks. "Oh my God. You are the head of the coronavirus task force. And you're in the hospital, and you're the only one without a mask." STEPHEN COLBERT "It's not like the vice president didn't know. The hospital has a strict policy requiring all visitors to wear masks and tweeted after Pence's visit, 'Mayo Clinic had informed VP of the masking policy prior to his arrival today.' Wow, that must have been harsh for Mike Pence to get roasted by his idol: mayo." STEPHEN COLBERT "Yes, at the Mayo Clinic, which is totally against the rules. In fact, it seems like they told him to and he said he didn't want to wear a mask. So I guess he was just like, 'It's O.K., everybody. I don't believe in science.'" TREVOR NOAH "Yes, it's being reported that Trump ignored 12 coronavirus warnings in his daily intelligence briefings. And honestly, I'm not surprised. I mean, if they gave him the information in a briefing, of course he's not going to get it, because if you really want the president to pay attention, you had to make it kid friendly and then it sinks in. imitating Trump 'So what you're saying is the sick duck got all the other duckies sick and now that duck has to sit by himself until he's not sick anymore. I get it sad duck." TREVOR NOAH "We're now learning that as far back as January, 'the president's intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited the virus threat.' Well, there's your problem those are three of Trump's least favorite words: 'intelligence,' 'briefing,' and 'book.' If they really wanted him to pay attention, they should have called it his 'daily pornographic hamburger fire truck.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "The president doesn't read books. If you wanted him to take it seriously, you should have him tweeted him like a gif of a dancing cheeseburger." JIMMY KIMMEL "But it's understandable that Donald Trump wasn't paying attention. He was very busy at the time. He had to play golf on January 4, January 5, January 18, 19th, February 1, 2nd, 15th, March 7, March 8 what's he supposed to do, miss his tee times?" JIMMY KIMMEL Joel McHale explained how he came to host Netflix's "Tiger King" aftershow while on "Conan" on Tuesday night. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
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