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In the gray light of a summer dawn, the invaders threw their great American force into action here, quickly taking the beach with their blue flags, white beach chairs and wood slat cabanas, a sturdy if sumptuous operating base from which to storm this seaside resort conference room by conference room, rooftop bar by rooftop bar. The frightened townsfolk top executives from the biggest media companies and advertising agencies in the world debated in whispers their grim choice between bloody resistance or total surrender. A correspondent broadcasting from the Hotel Barriere Le Majestic here reported the words from the blue shirts' communique in a quivering voice: "As we connect the world, we believe very deeply in the importance of helping creators build businesses on Facebook STOP ... We are only here to help STOP ... Why don't you believe us? STOP " The preceding paragraphs were based on The New York Times's report on the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 loosely, very loosely. They capture the sense of siege that was palpable here last week during the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where Facebook has one of the most visible pop up headquarters along the beach, with a pier festooned with its logo and a club on the sand. But in this case, no one was prepared to view the seaside regiment as a liberating force. On the surface, this festival is a great bacchanalia the advertising industry holds with its clients and business partners in Big Consumer Goods, Big Entertainment and Big Journalism. Over six days they celebrate the year's best advertising, while massaging relationships and cutting deals over Michelin star meals and at over the top soirees that have acts like Chris Martin and Wyclef Jean. But in a week in which Britain was preparing to make its exit from the European Union sending the Continent toward an uncertain realignment it was fitting that the real action here involved a war for territory in a media world heading for its own painful realignment, its old borders withering away at the speed of Moore's Law (which holds that computing power increases twofold every two years or so). Google and Facebook have upended the old order by taking ownership of the new one, claiming nearly two thirds of the 60 billion online advertising market last year and on course to take more this year. Therefore, the word of the week in Cannes was "duopoly." You could understand why the gathered Mad Men and Women were so mad. For decades, they have enjoyed mutually beneficial relationships with their big clients Coca Cola, Procter Gamble, Unilever reaping great riches by catering to Americans' wants and tastes, having divined them through focus groups and surveys. Then along came Google and Facebook, using their world changing technologies to insert themselves into those advertising relationships, but with a huge advantage they weren't just divining their users' tastes and preferences, they knew them. They controlled the data. And as advertising goes more digital, he or she who controls the data controls the market. If I'm you, the reader, I'm wondering why I should care; isn't it like the old mob complaining about the new mob being unschooled in the honor code of omerta? Well, there are much larger questions at play. When one or two companies gain control over a market, it creates dangerous asymmetries that skew competitive balance. And the market we're talking about isn't making widgets. It delivers what we read and watch every day, and increasingly every minute: the news and information our democracy needs. Think about it this way: The shift in advertising revenue to Google and Facebook contributed last year to the worst year for newspaper revenues since the economic crash in 2009, a recent Pew Research Center study found. Dwindling advertising revenue equals dwindling foreign bureaus equals "Surprise: Brexit!" 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. While Google has usually been the chief villain here, Facebook seemed to have assumed the role of Frenemy No. 1. Two hours didn't go by here without some top executive telling me about how Facebook's "walled garden" makes it a new intermediary between brands and their customers, and between newspapers and their readers. That gives Facebook the potential to steal them all away if it ever chose to do so. (It says it won't.) Facebook, which maintained a fortresslike presence here within the Hotel Majestic as well on the beach, had a simple message: We Come in Peace, and we need the ad world. "Our point of view on this is that the whole industry has to collaborate more than ever," Carolyn Everson, Facebook's vice president for global marketing solutions, told me. "There is a massive shift in the industry." That shift is to mobile phones, where more and more digital advertising is going. But the industry hasn't quite figured out how to make us regularly watch more than three seconds of a telephone based video ad, or to click on a mobile display ad on purpose. "We desperately need the agency ecosystem to support and drive this shift to mobile marketing," Ms. Everson said. Figuring it out is in everybody's interest. Advertising executives here voiced respect for Ms. Everson, who came to Facebook from Viacom via Microsoft a few years ago, when relations were at a low. And they credited Facebook for giving them and their clients access to some 1.6 billion users. Yet, in a dozen or so lengthy conversations I had with high level agency and marketing executives, suspicion of Facebook abounded. Sure, some of it could have been because while the executives were talking about existential threats to their business, Facebook was here introducing cool new advertising opportunities on Instagram and Messenger. But a lot of it stemmed from the view that Facebook's Silicon Valley happy talk about "collaboration" and "connectivity" rings hollow in light of its seemingly aggressive push to grab more media and advertising territory away from them. You can point to a clash between New York cynicism and West Coast idealism, but there is a history. Several years ago, Facebook invited advertisers to set up fan pages at no cost. As more advertisers jumped in, their messages became overwhelming. Facebook scaled them back. But then it offered the brands a chance to increase visibility by paying for it that is, to reach the customer fan base that Facebook had initially invited them to create free. You can imagine how that went over. Facebook has been doing a better job of avoiding such surprises, Ben Winkler, the chief investment officer at OMD, told me at his company's beachside tent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The Upper East Side apartment of Lella and Massimo Vignelli, the influential design team whose understated work endures in their adoptive home of New York, will list for 6.5 million. The roughly 3,900 square foot duplex co op, on the sixth and seventh floors of a 1907 Italian Renaissance style mid rise, has three bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms and a nearly 20 foot tall living room with a towering leaded glass window. The maintenance fee is 6,787 a month. Bought in 1978 for around 250,000, it was the Italian born couple's first and primary home in New York, said their son, Luca Vignelli, 55, a photographer who lived there during high school and college. The couple, who were prolific in a range of disciplines, including architecture and graphic and industrial design, had moved to New York in 1965 to pursue those interests. Mr. Vignelli, who died in 2014 at the age of 83, was a founder of the design firm Unimark International, one of the first to emphasize corporate identity. He is credited with iconic branding for companies like Bloomingdale's (the big brown bag and logo), Ford and American Airlines. But perhaps his best known mark on New York is the 1972 "diagram" of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority subway system, which earned praise from aesthetes and bemusement from some straphangers. (Central Park was rendered gray, not green, and the style was angular and clean, like an engineer's schematic.) It was replaced with a more conventional design in 1979, but the M.T.A. still uses a version of the map on its Weekender app. The couple frequently collaborated, and together founded Vignelli Associates, which focused on graphics, interior design and corporate identity. They also designed the interior of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Manhattan and created signature designs for modernist brands like Poltrona Frau. But it was Mrs. Vignelli, a licensed architect who died in 2016 at the age of 82, who specialized in three dimensional design, her son said. She led Vignelli Designs, creating products like furniture and tableware. On a recent visit, their home which the younger Mr. Vignelli and his sister, Valentina, are selling because they live elsewhere was much as the couple left it. His work space was set up to overlook Mrs. Vignelli's office in the next room, so the couple could collaborate more easily. "They designed new things every day of their lives," their son said. The apartment has more than 600 linear feet of bookshelves, many of them filled with books and magazines the couple designed, including several featuring the works of the modernist architect Richard Meier. They designed almost all of the furniture and decorative elements in the apartment, for clients like Venini Glass and the luxury furniture brand Casigliani, Mr. Vignelli said, and the purchase of some of those furnishings may be negotiated by the buyer. "It was very much a cultural hub for artists and designers," he said of the home, recounting long conversations in the dining room and over the butcher block kitchen counter with guests like the philosopher Umberto Eco and the sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro. Upstairs, there are two bedrooms with en suite bathrooms and dressing rooms that could be converted into additional sleeping quarters. Several walls have a textured, sandy finish, sparsely adorned with framed artwork, including a 2008 update to the New York City subway diagram. "They wanted things that had longevity and quality and lasting value,'" said Jan Conradi, a professor of graphic design at Rowan University, in Glassboro, N.J., and the author of "Lella and Massimo Vignelli: Two Lives, One Vision." Other than the conversion of the dining room into a library and a den into office space in 2000, the apartment has remained largely unchanged since the 1970s. Downstairs, a third bedroom has an en suite bathroom with a cylindrical, 1970s era shower, while a powder room has mirrored paneling. "Some people might see this as dated," Mr. Vignelli said. But much of the apartment feels timeless, as his parents intended, he added: "I would love to see somebody who appreciates the space and their presence in the space" as a buyer. Gabriele Devlin and Lee Summers of Sotheby's International Realty have the listing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Bumblebees can remember the patterns, colors and scents of different flowers, researchers have discovered. But memory can fail in the bumblebee, just as it does in humans. In a laboratory, Lars Chittka, a behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary University of London, and his colleagues trained bumblebees to expect a reward when they visited a solid yellow artificial flower and one with black and white rings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Any buyer knows that a dream home can become a nightmare. But most people don't expect it to happen to them. Steven and Michelle Hicks found what looked like the perfect home: a two story, mid 1920s Dutch colonial on three quarters of an acre in Millburn, N.J. But months after moving into the 1,856 square foot house, they realized just how elusive a dream home can be. When the Hickses started their search in the suburbs a few years ago, they had been looking to leave the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where they had been living in a 1,000 square foot rental apartment above a Japanese restaurant. It was large, but so dark that they called it "the Batcave." They wanted a home with a big yard for their growing family; they have a 2 year old son, Jackson. Mr. Hicks, who grew up in Freehold, N.J., works for a company that does web marketing; Ms. Hicks works in television commercial production. When a broker urged them to look at 264 Glen Avenue in Millburn in 2012, their long search ended. "It was gorgeous," Mr. Hicks said. Bay windows let in glorious light, and French doors graced the living room. The front yard had a stream running through it with a footbridge, and the house looked out into the thick woods of the South Mountain Reservation, whose southern tip began just across the street. They offered the seller's asking price of 650,000, and "she just took it," Mr. Hicks recalled. In retrospect, he said, "That should have told us something." Once they moved in, problems quickly mounted. New windows had been installed in some rooms, but haphazardly, without insulation. A contractor told them that the previous owner had removed a load bearing wall without putting a hefty beam across the ceiling to make up for the missing wall. "Nothing was shoring up the second floor," Ms. Hicks said. An electrician told them the wiring was not grounded, and that a fire could break out at any time. The basement had a tankless water heater, a selling point for the Hickses. But shortly after they moved in, it stopped working. It was supplying water to a Rube Goldberg series of pipes that traveled all the way to the attic and then into the rooms for the radiators, looping throughout the house and covering so much distance that the water cooled by the time it got to where it was needed. During last year's often bitter winter, the radiators couldn't get the second floor warmer than 48 degrees. Ms. Hicks said she was working from home, "but with a hat on" and a space heater glowing. Ms. Hicks's favorite feature of the house had been the hand laid tile on the floor of the master bath, which gave the impression of a riverbed. But by the end of their first summer, the tiles were cracking. The plywood subfloor was inadequate and incomplete; the floor was sinking. That winter, they lost access to one of the showers when the pipes froze; the pipes ran along an outside wall over the covered porch and had not been insulated. Some things simply seemed slipshod. When Mr. Hicks leaned against the granite countertop on the kitchen island, it slid. It had never been attached. The Hickses had paid for an inspection, but many of the problems were hidden behind the redone walls. Mr. Hicks said he wished that he had picked up on subtle signals the inspector may have been sending. "He was a little bit more apologetic than he should have been," he said. In the basement, the inspector noticed that the beams supporting the kitchen had been notched to run wiring and pipes, reducing the load bearing capacity. "You are not supposed to do that," he told them, "but are you going to have 40 people in the kitchen?" They had fallen in love with the house, and the broker's account of how the previous owner had rescued it. "We got kind of fed this story about how this woman was a hero," Mr. Hicks said. They had not known the level of deep disrepair that the previous owner, Ms. Royal, had encountered when she bought the house. They had not seen an article that ran in The New York Times in 2010, detailing her efforts to bring it back with a crew of handymen. The charming bridge over the stream had to be replaced; the wood was untreated, and began disintegrating within a year. By last June, nearly three years after moving into the house, the Hickses moved out and contractors moved in; the family realized that they needed to tackle all of the necessary repairs at once. They were told that the repairs would take six or seven months, but it is likelier to be 11. They have stripped the walls to the bare boards to rework the electrical and plumbing systems. They have torn out siding, removed the mold and rotted wood that was found within, and laid a massive beam to support the second floor atop columns that extend through the basement. They are also adding 1,000 square feet of new space, including a large upstairs bedroom that looks out over the footbridge. They are living in a rental townhouse nearby and hope to move back in by May. They estimate the total cost of repairs and the expansion at about half the purchase price. Ms. Royal, who now owns the organic Strawberry Fields Farm in Sherman, Conn., with family berry picking, said in a telephone interview, "I'm really horrified that they're having all these problems." In the three years she lived in Millburn, she insisted, she did not put in new plumbing, aside from the water heater. Her winters had been relatively mild, and when it did freeze, she kept her faucets dripping and never had a problem. The electrical work she had done was by a licensed electrician, she said, and added that she had indeed put in a beam to provide support in the absence of the removed wall. (The Hickses say that whatever Ms. Royal put in to them and their contractor, it appeared to be simple framing was insufficient to support the second floor.) In an email following up the telephone call, Ms. Royal added, "I am troubled by the angst directed toward me as the seller. They bought an old house!" Were the Hickses to offer advice to home buyers, Mr. Hicks said, "you should forge and manage your own relationship with your inspector," and make clear you want to hear the bad news. In houses that have undergone extensive renovation, he urges that buyers ensure all the necessary permits were obtained. "I don't know how I'll ever buy a house again," Ms. Hicks said. "I can't imagine trusting anyone." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
ST. LOUIS "They can't hear me," the ghost of Pvt. Danny Chen sings desperately during the first scene of the new opera "An American Soldier." "No one's listening." In real life, Private Chen, after months of vicious hazing and racist taunts, killed himself in 2011 at an army outpost in Afghanistan. He was 19. The opera opens in the military court where a sergeant is being tried for negligent homicide in the death. The dead man's ghost appears, trying to speak to those assembled there including Private Chen's suffering mother, who has come seeking justice who can't see or hear him. But thanks to the composer Huang Ruo and the playwright David Henry Hwang, the creators of this powerful work, we're listening to him now. Basing an opera on a recent historical event, especially a story fraught with racism, is risky. But "An American Soldier," having its premiere in an expanded two act version here at Opera Theater of St. Louis and seen on Saturday, is convincing, driven by Mr. Hwang's rueful libretto and Mr. Huang's arresting music. Turning what was a 60 minute chamber opera seen in Washington, D.C., in 2014 into a richly orchestrated two hour work, the creators explore the complexities of Private Chen's life and death, the tragic tale of a young Chinese American man who just wanted to prove he was, as he sings, a "real American, an American soldier." The libretto situates the story at the trial but explains how we got there through a series of flashbacks rendered vividly in Matthew Ozawa's strikingly spare production, with sets that slide on and off a shadowy stage. We see the teenage Danny (sung with raw emotion and poignant boyishness by the remarkable tenor Andrew Stenson) at home in New York's Chinatown, making dinner with his beloved mother (the affecting mezzo soprano Mika Shigematsu, in a remarkable performance), who is distressed to find out her son has enlisted. There are increasingly awful incidents at boot camp and in Afghanistan, where he endures vulgar hazing from his fellow soldiers and sadistic humiliations from the racist sergeant (the bass baritone Wayne Tigges, who is chilling). Elements of modernist atonality, Asian inflected styles, jazz and eerie atmospheric noise course through the taut score. Yet you sense Mr. Huang in control of every detail. Whole stretches crackle with sputtering rhythms and skittish riffs. Strange, fractured fanfares, like would be military marches, keep recurring. But during reflective passages, searching vocal lines are backed by tremulous harmonies and delicate instrumental flecks. Both the subtle colorings and pummeling intensity came through in the compelling performance the conductor Michael Christie drew from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Huang acutely charts emotional undercurrents in his music. During the first flashback, set on a fire escape, Danny chats with his cheerful, college bound friend Josephine (the soprano Kathleen Kim). Her music is chirpy and kinetic, but weird chords and nervous bits rustling in the orchestra suggest that Josephine fears that his plan to enlist is dangerous. Similarly, the opera depicts a boot camp ritual called "Racial Thursdays," when the soldiers were all but encouraged to hurl racist taunts at each another, the idea being that such venting would let off steam and boost morale. But in the opera, as these soldiers mask their barbs with comradely banter, Mr. Huang's roiling music reveals the deep hatreds at play. One late scene struck me as a miscalculation. At the trial, after the sergeant is cleared of the most serious charges, the judge (the earthy bass Nathan Stark) and a chorus of male and female soldiers sing "E pluribus unum; from the many, one." With music that hints of Copland, Mr. Huang tries to rescue the trope of the affirming American anthem from triteness. But especially given the political climate of today, with anti immigrant hostility being stoked by a divisive administration in Washington, it was hard to know what to make of this attempt at redemption. I wanted more bitterness and irony. After a harrowing scene showing Private Chen's final humiliation (he is forced by the sergeant to crawl over sharp rocks while soldiers hurl stones at him) and the bleak depiction of his death the shooting, which his family never accepted was a suicide, takes place offstage "An American Soldier" ends magnificently with a sorrowful scene for his mother. She tells us of her American dream: simply to work, be happy and raise a family. The day her son was born, she thought: "This is enough." Then she sings an elegiac lullaby to her dead son, though she can't help slipping into bursts of anger. On Friday, Opera Theater presented a new production of Mark Blitzstein's "Regina." It's based on Lillian Hellman's play "The Little Foxes," best known from the 1941 film starring Bette Davis as Regina Giddins, a Southern woman with aristocratic airs who struggles for wealth and independence in a deeply patriarchal culture. "Regina" had its premiere in a Broadway theater in 1949, but closed quickly; critics and audiences were baffled by Blitzstein's hybrid of opera and musical theater. But "Regina" may be a piece whose time has come, especially as presented here in James Robinson's production, suggestive of the Southern locale and early 20th century period, and performed by an exceptional cast led by the mezzo soprano Susan Graham in the title role. Though the score evokes spirituals, jazz, folk songs, ragtime and Dixieland, the elements of musical theater came through most strongly in this performance, led with brio by Stephen Lord. The score keeps breaking into set piece arias that are basically Broadway songs. Leonard Bernstein admired Bliztstein tremendously, and the influence of "Regina" upon Bernstein's stage works is unmistakable. The plot turns on Regina's attempt to secure 75,000 so that she can join her two wealthy brothers in a plan to build a cotton mill on their plantation. She schemes to get the money from her ailing husband and, as we discover, stops at nothing to do so. The baritone Ron Raines, who has worked extensively in musical theater, and the veteran Wagnerian bass baritone James Morris were excellent as the two brothers, Oscar and Benjamin. The soprano Susanna Phillips brought touching vulnerability to the role of Birdie, Oscar's flighty wife, who frets and drinks too much. The youthful bloom of the soprano Monica Dewey's voice was perfect for Alexandra, Regina's daughter, who comes to understand her mother's ruthlessness. And Ms. Graham, who has sung a lot of bubbly roles in her day, seized on Regina to show her flair for fiercely dramatic singing. At one point, Regina says that when she was young, she "loathed and despised" anyone who "obeyed so easy." This includes women, it's clear, who simply heed their parents and husbands. Ms. Graham delivered the phrases with sneering contempt and steely tone. You believed this proto feminist Regina. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
There was a time when the term "instant" brought to mind not an iPhone snap but the simple bliss of seeing a film pop through a Polaroid camera, fixing a giddy moment onto a memory that would last a lifetime (provided the photograph didn't fade). Not so since Feb. 29, when Fujifilm announced that it would stop producing its FP 100C film, a final blow to photographers who had squirreled away the peel apart prints after Polaroid discontinued its stock in 2008. The fashion world, of course, loves nothing more than something it can't get its hands on. Cue the recent books that elevate the Polaroid to art object, with celebrities as their subject. "I do think the speeding up of our culture makes people like the old format of that instant satisfaction," Mr. Leeds said about the affection for Polaroid film. If readers want their lust for Polaroid books gratified before the spring, 1,500 copies of the flesh pink book "Madonna 66" will ship at the end of this week (NJG Publishing, 60 pounds for a signed and numbered copy, 164 pp.). It contains shots of Madonna from June 1983, over a month before her first album was released, taken by the photographer Richard Corman in her brother's East Village apartment. The sitting was encouraged by Mr. Corman's mother, an apparently prescient casting director. "I think the Polaroid is this little jewel that, in some ways, is just untouched," Mr. Corman said. "They're not manipulated, they're raw, as the subject matter was." There is nothing scandalous about the 66 previously unreleased Polaroids, which feature the singer wearing demure acid wash denim and a pleasant expression. Nonetheless, Mr. Corman sought and received her blessing before releasing them. "Look, when I photograph somebody, whether it's you, or Madonna, or Mandela, I have so much respect, and I feel so responsible for those pictures. I would never publish anything without them knowing," Mr. Corman said. "I just feel that they're important. I feel that this is a piece of pop culture history." The book's elaborate packaging is reminiscent in concept, if not execution, of another piece of pop culture history: Madonna's own 1992 tome, the Mylar wrapped "Sex." Mr. Corman said Nick Groarke, the creative director of NJG Studio, wanted "Madonna 66" to be "a tactile book that you touched it and you felt something." Even if that something is just a nostalgia for a pre Instagram era. "I think the Polaroids are really, in some ways, a reflection of that period," Mr. Corman said. "Not so much the technology, but the fact that people just seemed less guarded. And more open to being exposed." But not everyone is so nonchalant about being exposed in old Polaroids. Through his limited liability company, Imperial Publishing, the photographer Jonathan Leder is set to ship a limited run of signed copies within the next few weeks of "Leder/Ratajkowski 'Collector's Edition,'" featuring nude shots of the model Emily Ratajkowski taken in 2012 ( 80, 84 pp.). Ms. Ratajkowski, however, has used Twitter to denounce Mr. Leder's coming publication of 71 Polaroids, most of which feature her nude, a year before she burst on the scene in the Robin Thicke video "Blurred Lines." "I've been resisting speaking publicly on the recently released photos by Jonathan Leder to avoid giving him publicity. But I've had enough," she wrote on Nov. 30 to 918,000 on Twitter. "This book and the images within them are a violation." She wrote, furthermore: "These photos being used w/out my permission is an example of exactly the opposite of what I stand for: women choosing when and how they want to share their sexuality and bodies." Regarding the ability to publish the images themselves, Mr. Leder disagreed. He provided a release signed by Ms. Ratajkowski's agent at Ford at the time, Natalie Smith, granting among other rights use in "a future book of Polaroids." Mr. Leder said: "It's almost like, if you find treasure in the desert, or a dinosaur bone, you're not going to keep it secret for yourself. It's something that you want to share and exhibit with the world. I think that's not only the right of the artist, but also that's the position of the artist to do that. And the responsibility, I suppose." Regardless of the message, he will miss this particular medium. "Over the last five years, I've only shot Polaroids," he said. "I would have kept going, except Fuji pulled the plug." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
During the last several months, between the scourge of Covid 19 and the spate of Black deaths resulting from police brutality, Blackness has become a concept loaded with fresh injuries. In "The Baptism," a short, abstract video tribute to Representative John Lewis and the civil rights leader C.T. Vivian, Blackness isn't divorced from the tragedies but carefully picked apart and examined through an existential lens. The result is a work that is freeing and radical in a way that Black art so often doesn't get to be. Commissioned by Lincoln Center, "The Baptism" features a three part poem written and performed by the poet Carl Hancock Rux, and is directed by the acclaimed visual artist Carrie Mae Weems. Though it is a memorial to two towering Black civil rights leaders, both of whom died on the same day this year July 17 "The Baptism" isn't interested in particulars. Its style of eulogy is experimental and philosophical. As Mr. Rux reads his poem in the background, the video begins in black and white, with the sight of murmurations myriad starlings pulsing and transforming into shapes in the sky then visions of flowers and plants. And yet "The Baptism" never feels grim, because in the text and video, Mr. Rux and Ms. Weems subvert these expectations of death and tropes of the dying Black body. When we speak of the Black citizen in America, we're so often in conversations about the body, and usually a body that is injured or dead or dying: with bullets or with a police officer's knee on a neck, or, during the civil rights era, with a torrent of water from a "baptism" by fire hoses aimed at protesters, as Ms. Weems herself has captured in her works. The Black body becomes a symbol of racial inequality and injustice. But not here. "We do not die. We are always becoming," Mr. Rux says in the voice over, speaking of blood, membranes, enzymes and bacteria, breaking down the Black body to its elemental parts and considering them individually, as pieces of a larger marvel of nature, while Ms. Weems guides us through images of outdoor scenes. The video then brings us to Mr. Rux himself, sitting at a table (subtly evoking Ms. Weems's famous "Kitchen Table Series"), reciting the work, intercut with black and white archival footage, then more recent color footage, of people simply walking down the street. "The Baptism" recreates the Black body as the flower, as the field, as the seminal building blocks of life, even as architecture, as when Mr. Rux says, "Every being is a building with music grace upon grace upon grace." Conceptually the piece feels like a cousin to Beyonce's recent visual poem, "Black Is King," which also relished abstraction, drawing from sound and imagery and metaphor to define Blackness positively and holistically. Though plenty of Black movements have touted an essential theme of self determination in their works the Black Arts movement, Afrofuturism it is still novel to have visible artwork that aims to dissect Blackness on an existential level, with lyrical ruminations. Of course, this has long been a hallmark of Ms. Weems's photo installations, which are contemplative and stunningly poetic in their depictions of Black life. And it's something white filmmakers have been so comfortable with in movies like "The Tree of Life" or even "Being John Malkovich," philosophically interrogating humanity and human identity when whiteness is the default. In an accompanying interview with Ms. Weems, Mr. Rux said he was inspired by figures like Lewis who "found a tongue, a language, a means of articulation, a way of speaking to the universe and through time." Blackness is also universal more than the tragedies, more than the images of bodies in the streets. That is part of our unfortunate reality in America, but Blackness also exists outside of that, in realms of abstraction like in the earth, in space, in the sea. Walt Whitman was famously a poet of transcendental reach, writing himself as part of a universal sense of humanity and nature, fluid in all of its possibilities. "The Baptism" imagines something similar, but grants it to Black people; the most poignant part of the tribute is how it dares to think of Blackness as something transformative and eternal. In one of the final shots of the film, we look at a young Black man sitting still in the middle of a Black Lives Matter protest, mask over his mouth, while Mr. Rux's voice says, with an emphasis that sounds like gospel, "They are over and over and never die." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Chris Doleman, the Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive end whose 150 1/2 career sacks in 15 seasons, mostly with the Minnesota Vikings, placed him No. 5 on the N.F.L. career list, died on Tuesday in Atlanta. He was 58. The cause was brain cancer, for which he had undergone surgery in January 2018, the Vikings said. The Vikings selected Doleman as the fourth pick in the 1985 N.F.L. draft out of the University of Pittsburgh and put him at outside linebacker, a position that he liked. But the Vikings switched him to right defensive end late in his second year, when it went to a 4 3 defense. "I wouldn't say it was love at first sight," Doleman told The Boston Globe in January 1988. "It was like someone asking you to go cover a wedding. It's a job, but you don't fall in love with writing about weddings." He soon found, however, that being a fearsome pass rusher could be glamorous. As he put it: "If I made two tackles at linebacker, you'd say where was I all day? If I made two sacks at defensive end, you'd say I had a great day. Defensive end is where you can just tee off and get the quarterback." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
NASHVILLE Charlie Daniels, the singer, songwriter and bandleader who was a force in both country and rock for decades, bringing a brash, down home persona and blazing fiddle work to hits like "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," died on Monday in Nashville. He was 83. His publicist announced the death, at Summit Medical Center in the Hermitage section of the city, saying the cause was a hemorrhagic stroke. Mr. Daniels made his first mark as a session musician in the late 1960s and early '70s, playing guitar, bass, fiddle and banjo on Nashville recordings by Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and Leonard Cohen. He also produced albums for the Youngbloods, including the group's 1969 folk rock touchstone, "Elephant Mountain." But his greatest acclaim came as the leader of the Charlie Daniels Band, a country rock ensemble that hosted the Volunteer Jam, the freewheeling Southern music festival, established in 1974, that featured Roy Acuff, Stevie Ray Vaughan, James Brown and the Marshall Tucker Band. Modeled after the Allman Brothers, another regular act at the Jam, Mr. Daniels's band used dual lead guitarists and dual drummers in the service of an expansive improvisational sound that included elements of country, blues, bluegrass, rock and Western swing. Formed in 1971, the Charlie Daniels Band earned a reputation early on for recording material of an outspoken countercultural bent, much of it written by Mr. Daniels. "I ain't askin' nobody for nothin'/If I can't get it on my own," Mr. Daniels asserted in a gruff drawl on the chorus of "Long Haired Country Boy" (1975), which unabashedly extolled the virtues of free speech and marijuana. "If you don't like the way I'm livin'/You just leave this long haired country boy alone." His plucky attitude reached new heights in "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," a No. 1 country single and Top 10 pop hit from 1979 in which Mr. Daniels's protagonist goes head to head with Satan in a fiddle contest, and prevails. The recording appeared on the multiplatinum selling album "Million Mile Reflections" and won a Grammy Award for best country vocal. His championing the underdog, coupled with his band's constant touring, won Mr. Daniels a following, which included President Jimmy Carter, who invited the Charlie Daniels Band to perform at his 1977 inaugural ball. But as the 1970s gave way to the '80s, Mr. Daniels's politics became increasingly right wing and his songs more strident, beginning with "In America," a Top 20 pop hit written in response to the Iran hostage crisis of 1980. "Simple Man," a No. 2 country single in 1990, called for the lynching of drug dealers and sex offenders, while "(What the World Needs Is) A Few More Rednecks," also from 1990, ran counter to the hippie nonconformity of his early hits. "If I come across an issue, or something I feel strongly about, and I happen to think of a song that would go in that direction, then I do it," Mr. Daniels said, discussing how he came to write "Simple Man," in an online interview. "But that's not what I start out, necessarily, to do." Such disavowals notwithstanding, Mr. Daniels proved to be anything but reluctant to share his increasingly right wing views, especially on the Soap Box section of the Charlie Daniels Band website, where he would pontificate on the Second Amendment, patriotism and other issues, and in his 1993 book, "Ain't No Rag: Freedom, Family and the Flag." In 2003 he published "An Open Letter to the Hollywood Bunch" in defense of President George W. Bush's Iraq policy. "You people need to get out of Hollywood once in a while and get out into the real world," he wrote. "You'd be surprised at the hostility you would find out here. Stop in at a truck stop and tell an overworked, long distance truck driver that you don't think Saddam Hussein is doing anything wrong." Charles Edward Daniels was born on Oct. 28, 1936, in Wilmington, N.C. His mother, LaRue (Hammonds) Daniels, was a homemaker, and his father, William Carlton Daniels, was a lumberjack who played fiddle and guitar. Mr. Daniels followed suit, learning to play both instruments while in school before forming his own group, the Jaguars, in the late 1950s. He had begun writing songs by this point, including "It Hurts Me," a collaboration with Joy Byers that was the B side of Elvis Presley's Top 40 hit "Kissin' Cousins" in 1964. Mr. Daniels disbanded the Jaguars and moved to Nashville in 1967 at the urging of the producer Bob Johnston, with whom he immediately established a successful career as a session musician. Among the albums on which he appeared were Mr. Dylan's "Nashville Skyline" and Mr. Cohen's "Songs of Love and Hate," both produced by Mr. Johnston. Mr. Daniels made his first record under his own name in 1970, a solo album, titled simply "Charlie Daniels," for Capitol Records; it went nowhere. He and his band later signed with the Kama Sutra label, for which they recorded "Uneasy Rider" before finding a long term home with Epic Records in 1975. Over the next two decades they recorded more than two dozen singles that hit the country chart, four of which, including "The Devil" and "In America," crossed over to the pop Top 40. In 1997, after a brief stint with Warner Bros. Nashville, Mr. Daniels founded Blue Hat Records, an independent label with an exclusive distribution arrangement with Walmart. His numerous honors included the Pioneer Award by the Academy of Country Music in 1998 and the BMI Icon Award at the 53rd annual Country Music Awards in 2005. He joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in 2008, the same year he celebrated his 50th anniversary in the music business. In 2016, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Survivors include his wife of more than 50 years, Hazel Juanita Alexander Daniels; their son, Charles William Daniels; and two grandchildren. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. A few years into his career, Shawn Mendes is becoming a bard of the forlorn. As on the best songs from his 2018 self titled album, new single "If I Can't Have You" is about failing to grab what you wish was yours: I'm in Toronto and I got this view But I might as well be in a hotel room It doesn't matter 'cause I'm so consumed Spending all my nights reading texts from you Written by Mendes with Scott Harris, Teddy Geiger and Nate Mercreau (and produced by Mendes and Geiger), this is an exuberant expression of desolation, with melodies and hooks as ecstatic as Abba. JON CARAMANICA Is there anything Rhiannon Giddens can't sing? Her new album, "There is No Other," is a duo project with Francesco Turrisi, a pianist who also plays a global assortment of string and percussion instruments. "Gonna Write Me a Letter," written by the Appalachian folk singer Ola Belle Reed, is a lament for a sailor away at sea. Giddens and Turrisi move it to the Middle East, with an unchanging modal vamp and an ancient North African drum called the bendir, and especially in the final please to "Come home, come home" Giddens sings it with inflections that bridge mountains and deserts. PARELES The vibraphonist Joel Ross is only in his mid 20s, and looks even younger, but he's already widely known as contemporary jazz's top prospect. "Kingmaker," his major label debut, out now on Blue Note, shows that he has what it takes to build something vital on the over farmed terrain of mainstream jazz, largely by reckoning with conflicting histories. His compositions seem to pick up on the streetwise, slithering approach that Roy Hargrove put down in the 1990s, while adding ideas from the music's past 20 years: Lush, balladic harmonies give way to snappy post bop swing, then fluttering, busted hip hop beats. And in his solos, you'll hear the proud clarity of Milt Jackson and the counterintuition of Bobby Hutcherson, but as on the bounding "Is It Love That Inspires You?" which features Ross with only the bassist Benjamin Tiberio and the drummer Jeremy Dutton he's liable to spin off into a multidirectional hail of notes, at once centrifugal and forthright, in a style like no one else's. RUSSONELLO Girl falls for boy. Takes boy home to meet her family. Family embraces him. Relationship sours. Girl and boy split. Everyone's disappointed: "If I bring you home to mama/I guess I better warn you/She feels every heartache I go through." Ingrid Andress's piano ballad is an elegantly written song about a love that lets you down that sounds like a tragedy even at the beginning, when there's still hope. CARAMANICA This week, Dallas shout rapper 10k.Caash released "Kerwin Frost Scratch That" (a collaboration with the feral young rapper Matt Ox), basically a hardcore song of a hip hop track that's reminiscent of the earliest Beastie Boys mosh anthems. He also put out a video for the recent single "Aloha," which smushes together early Odd Future pastel absurdity, Dallas rap viscosity, SoundCloud rap distortion (remember that?) and the hilarious confidence of someone who still can't quite believe rapping is his job. CARAMANICA | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The drug is better at stopping hair loss than at bringing back what's already gone. "I set expectations from the beginning, realistic expectations" about the drug, said Dr. Andrew Alexis, the chairman of the dermatology department at Mount Sinai St. Luke's and Mount Sinai West in New York. "The thing I emphasize the most is stopping progression and preserving the hair you have. I think it's very successful at doing that. " Dr. Alexis is not involved with Mr. Trump's care. Most men with this type of hair loss start treatment with a different drug, minoxidil, also sold as Rogaine, which is rubbed into the scalp, Dr. Alexis said. If they do not see enough of an effect, they can add finasteride. Many of his patients wind up using both drugs, Dr. Alexis said. The treatment works best on the top of the head, and not as well at the temples and the receding hairline. For both drugs, the effects on hair loss were discovered by accident, when patients were taking them for other reasons. Minoxidil, in pill form, was used to treat high blood pressure, and finasteride was prescribed for prostate enlargement. But balding patients noticed that some hair grew back. Finasteride can have side effects, including decreased sex drive, erectile problems and a decreased volume of ejaculate. But those reactions are not common, affecting less than 2 percent of the men in studies. Dr. Alexis said he warns patients about the potential problems, and that some men decline the drug as a result. But many decide to try it, and they generally stick with it, he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The sun flecked ocean glittered to the west as I wound my way down Victoria Road in Cape Town toward The Twelve Apostles Hotel and Spa. The origin of its name would quickly become apparent from my position on the coastal road it was easy to see the distinct craggy peaks called the Twelve Apostles jutting up one after another, forming a long spine down the Atlantic side of Table Mountain National Park toward Hout Bay. I passed the hotel's friendly resident cat on my way up to the hotel's Leopard Bar, where I shook hands with Nardus Buys, the head concierge. We took a table with a pristine view of the Atlantic and I explained that I needed help: I was having difficulty spending money. Low prices and a strong dollar meant that I struggled to find pricier experiences that would interest a more profligate spender than myself. Mr. Buys generously offered his assistance. "If I can plan an itinerary for someone and make their stay in South Africa memorable, there's nothing more satisfying than that," he said. He drew up a daylong itinerary for a fictitious traveler on a budget of 1,000, or about 14,000 South African rand. I would then take that itinerary and, keeping its general spirit, remake it on a much more modest budget of 100. One of the most luxe dining experiences a Cape Towner can have before noon is Sunday brunch at The Pot Luck Club. Patrons sit in the repurposed old biscuit mill that was taken over by the chef Luke Dale Roberts and, for 450 rand (plus 200 rand for unlimited Champagne), tuck into one of the city's most indulgent brunches. Diners can sample any or all of about a dozen items, including beef tataki, burrata with braaied (grilled, South African style) pumpkin, and fresh fish crudo with granadilla tiger's milk. Finish off the meal, if you have room, with burnt vanilla churros served with dulce de leche. Cape Town is, across the board, a dream for any traveler on a budget, and that begins at breakfast. One morning, just before 9 a.m., I wandered into Wild Sprout, a two month old cafe on Long Street in the city center. I ordered their early morning breakfast special eggs and grilled toast with a small side salad and a good, strong cup of Truth coffee for just 40 rand, less than 3. In addition to the shockingly cheap price, the food was satisfying and the service friendly. Mr. Buys would book our theoretical big spender on a private helicopter tour of Cape Town and some of the city's grandest neighborhoods and seemingly endless coastline. A mere 6,450 rand will get you on the Three Bays Tour, a helicopter ride with unhindered panoramas of the city, some of its vineyards and imposing Table Mountain. The tour starts by curving around Green Point, home to Cape Town Stadium, and then following the west side of the Atlantic seaboard to Camps Bay. Passing the Twelve Apostles (the mountains, as well as the hotel), our guest would swing up into Hout Bay before cutting over to Muizenberg, a beach community on False Bay, and pass Constantia, a suburb known for its wine production and wealthy residents (including, at one point, Charles Spencer, Princess Diana's brother), on their way home. I also wanted a survey of Cape Town's natural wonders. Instead of booking a chopper, I tackled two of the city's most recognizable natural monuments: Lion's Head and Table Mountain. The first spot, so named because of its head shaped outcropping, which gazes out majestically over the city, isn't nearly as tough to conquer as its name might imply. The hike, which takes around two hours round trip, is easy for the first two thirds and moderate near the end, when the climb becomes distinctly more vertical. All the same, it is a good warm up for the day for those who are in moderately decent shape I saw people of all ages and sizes making their way up and down the 2,195 foot mountain. Table Mountain is a different story. It is a longer and tougher hike, but you can still conquer it and Lion's Head and be back in the city before lunchtime provided you cheat a little and take the cable car. After descending Lion's Head, it was just a five minute Uber ride over to the Table Mountain cable car station. A round trip ticket on the aerial tram, is just 290 rand and a fun ride that gives a great vantage point on the city. Once at the top, I particularly appreciated the beautiful view of Lion's Head the top of which I had just come from. Outside of the week or two the tram closes in the (austral) winter for maintenance, the back to back ascent of Lion's Head and Table Mountain can be accomplished any time of day, morning or afternoon. They like to keep you guessing at Chefs Warehouse, the Liam Tomlin restaurant that constantly revamps its menu you could go multiple days in a row and not have the same meal twice. The diversity has made the restaurant a favorite in the Mother City, and even nabbed it a mention in the Discovery Series category on the World's 50 Best Restaurants website. Influences on the 8 dish tapas menu will vary wildly, from China to the Middle East to India and back again. Diners might be served lamb kofta with marinated eggplant and yogurt alongside fried squid with caramelized pineapple and sriracha dressing one night, charred cauliflower risotto and duck pot stickers the next. Dinner for two runs 700 rand, not including drinks. After (sort of) climbing two mountains I had worked up a considerable appetite. Having already explored the popular, Saturdays only Neighbourgoods Market in Woodstock, I made my way to the newer Mojo Market, a food and clothing focused indoor hall in Sea Point with dozens of stalls offering everything from burgers and beer to denim and jewelry. Roughly six months old, the market had plenty of cheap lunch offerings. I ultimately opted for a soup and sandwich at Raclette, a stall that lured me over with the tempting smell of grilled cheese. The sandwich, Klein River Gruberg and Schardinger cheeses between two slices of sourdough rye, was outstanding, and came with a decent cup of minestrone like vegetable soup (75 rand for both). While I waited, I picked up a local Alpha dry cider from Jo's Bar (35 rand) and listened to a couple songs from Paige Mac, a woman with an impressive, emotive voice and equally good guitar skills. I had my own feast at Thali, a small plates Indian restaurant off popular Kloof Street. For 325 rand, the kitchen sends you a seemingly endless assortment of food, most of which is excellent: Chicken and lamb kebabs, tandoori cauliflower with coconut and cashew, fried fish tacos in papadum, seafood curry with panch phoron (Indian five spice blend with cumin and fennel). The parade seemed to never end not that I was in any hurry for the meal to be over. An evening out on the waterfront and in downtown Cape Town may very well end at Bascule Bar, where a high roller can truly indulge his or her inner Gatsby with whiskey and cigars alongside high priced yachts bobbing in the marina. Located in the Cape Grace hotel, Bascule has an impressive variety of whiskies to choose from, as well as a number of choice cigars. A pour of single malt whisky distilled at St. Magdalene (shuttered in 1983) from independent bottler Dun Bheagan will run you 925 rand. Fire up a Montecristo No. 2 Cuban cigar for an additional 435 rand and relax in an extravagant, malted barley and tobacco induced haze. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
A Tufts University project seeks to make "history more visible" from slavery to Black Lives Matter with a map of historic African American sites in Boston and beyond. MEDFORD, Mass. During Black History Month, Massachusetts likes to point out its reputation as the enlightened 19th century hub of the abolition movement. The state was one of the first to end slavery, long before the 13th Amendment formally banned it nationwide in 1865. Less well known is that Massachusetts was the first to legalize slavery, in 1641. Even before then, merchants in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had enslaved Native Americans, and by 1638 were bartering them for Africans in the West Indies. The slave trade grew from there and soon became a pillar of the colonial economy. Two professors at Tufts University, Kendra Field and Kerri Greenidge, are among the many scholars who have been tracing the history of Massachusetts's African American residents, from slavery to Black Lives Matter. Their research, a collaboration with students and nonprofit organizations, has evolved into what they call the African American Trail Project, a website that maps out more than 200 historic sites across the state. "We wanted to make the history more visible and the facts accessible," Dr. Field said. The professors sought to link these disparate people and places together so that a visitor a tourist, student or local resident might see them not in isolation but in historical context. Dr. Greenidge said that people often think of Boston as either "where fugitive slaves came and were 'rescued' by the abolitionists, or as the place where people were throwing bricks at black children" during busing protests in the 1970s. (The site of protests against the Boston School Committee, at 15 Beacon Street, is one of the sites.) Their goal, the professors said, is to "complicate the narrative," to fill in gaps, show African American people in all their dimensions and place present day struggles for racial justice in a continuum. Local "trails" of African American significance have long existed. These trails, which can be walked in a few hours, include the Black Heritage Trail on Beacon Hill in Boston; a self guided tour of antislavery sites in Concord, Mass.; and the African American Heritage Trail at Mount Auburn Cemetery. By contrast, the Tufts Trail Project is not a self contained walking tour but more of a planning tool for the do it yourselfer, especially beyond Beacon Hill, where so much of the popular narrative has been focused. The website features a map with a bird's eye view of most of the known sites in Massachusetts as well as further information. It allows readers to suggest new locations. Some of the locations, like the 1806 African Meeting House on Beacon Hill, the oldest extant black church in the country, are open year round and offer tours; others consist of a statue, plaque or historic home; some are not open to the public, and some are not marked at all. Here are four notable sites to see. Only 35 feet separate the slave quarters from the Royall family's manor house at this one time 500 acre farm north of Boston. A tour of the quarters and home, with their artifacts of bondage and bounty, shows how the enslaved Africans toiled to keep the manor house functioning for the wealthy Royalls. "Where this country is in terms of racial conflict isn't by accident," Penny Outlaw, co president of the site's board of directors, said on a recent informal tour. "There were so many antecedents in the 18th century." After the enslaved people on the farm were freed, many had to stay on as sharecroppers to earn clothes and food. "Black people weren't starting out owning anything," she said. "What they got was ownership of themselves." Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813 in North Carolina, where her mistress broke the law and taught her to read and write. Ms. Jacobs was later transferred to a brutal plantation owner "who began to whisper foul words in my ear," she wrote. "I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master." She described the experience (and her shame over her involvement with a married white man) in her stunning memoir, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself." It appeared under a pseudonym (Linda Brent) in 1861, and was forgotten until it was authenticated in 1981. After hiding from her master for seven years in crawlspaces, Ms. Jacobs eventually escaped and ended up in Boston, where her book, now regarded as a significant feminist slave narrative, was printed. After the Civil War, the Pullman Car Company was one of the few employers hiring former slaves. The pay was terrible and conditions demeaning. All porters were called "George," after the company owner George Pullman, a vestige of when enslaved people were addressed by their owner's name. In 1925 the porters asked A. Phillip Randolph, a Harlem labor leader, to help them form a union. A decade later, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became the first black union to sign a labor agreement with a major corporation. A larger than life statue of Randolph, the union's first president, sits inside the Back Bay Station in Boston, often ignored by commuters and homeless people alike as they sprawl around it. Among Randolph's achievements, said Larry Tye, author of "Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class " (2004), was getting nameplates for the porters' uniforms, so they were no longer called George. Mike Womble, the street artist responsible for 20 wall murals in Boston, painted this expansive piece of public art in 1995 in Roxbury's Dudley Square. Mr. Womble said in an interview that he wanted to pay homage to the sense of community in this largely black neighborhood, where Martin Luther King Jr. marched in 1965. All people depicted were based on actual residents. Famous neighbors in the painting include Melnea Cass, the suffragist and civil rights activist. Another was Malcolm X, who lived as a teenager in Roxbury in the 1940s and appears three times in the mural "as a pimp in a zoot suit, as a hustler and as the man he became," Mr. Womble, 45, said. "I wanted to show kids they could rise to be something bigger." The African American Trail Project map is available at africanamericantrailproject.tufts.edu. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
STEVE JOBS (2015) Stream on HBO platforms; Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The announcement by Apple last week that iTunes will be retired may have been the somewhat expected, inevitable product of a culture that has turned to subscription streaming music services. But it also offered a chance to revisit the idea that, with iTunes, Steve Jobs and Apple transformed the way people consumed music. The role Jobs had in changing the way people live with technology (and making tech sexy) through innovations like iTunes has made him a popular subject for films. This movie may be the most wired of them all; it combines Danny Boyle's kinetic directing with a characteristically sharp and fast script by Aaron Sorkin. Michael Fassbender plays Jobs around the launches of three products: the first Macintosh personal computer, the non Apple NeXT computer and the iMac. The result is "a rich and potent document of the times, an expression of both the awe that attends sophisticated new consumer goods and the unease that trails in the wake of their arrival," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. WONDERS OF THE SEA (2019) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. If you want an undersea adventure that's narrated by a person who might also be able to bench press an anchor, look no further than this nature documentary, which has voice overs from Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Sorry, David Attenborough.) It follows the famed ocean explorer Jean Michel Cousteau and Cousteau's children as they go on dives and discuss environmental issues that threaten the ocean. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In the 1980s, Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta had the nouvelle society ladies. They were the celebrities within that world. I remember at one show, I realized that I was sitting next to Marla Trump. Eventually that front row broadened to ladies like Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer. Actors came a little later to the game. That Uma Thurman moment in 1995, when she wore that lilac Prada dress to the Oscars, was a sort of milestone, a sign that it was groovy for a designer to dress a celebrity. Freebies came into play, and actors became a significant marketing tool for the designers who dressed them. But when they started coming to fashion shows, it took a while for me to get my head around it. I thought, "I know that these people love shopping, but I wonder what other trade shows they go to." I started coming to fashion shows in the mid 2000s, a time when actresses didn't often go to shows. Photographers were everywhere. It was like a walking freak show. As I took my seat, I wondered: "Oh, my God, do I cross my legs? Do I not cross my legs? Am I going to trip a model?" The seats were so tiny. The tents were so hot. Then the show started, and it was over before I even realized. I grew up in the world of opera, in the world of New York, so everything is intimidating, and that makes nothing intimidating. The only thing actually frightening is when the photographers descend on you, taking your picture in the front row. Even now, that first flashbulb kind of stops your breath. I was at the Richie Rich show in 2008. It was one of those marginal shows, but I adored him. Britney Spears was expected. She was late, and they were holding the show for her. People were restless, squirming and chattering. I was seated three or four seats away from her chair, when all of a sudden Britney came barreling through with her security. They bulldozed people out of the way. She was wearing very high stilettos, and she stepped, not so gracefully, on my foot. She's no Misty Copeland. I can still recall the pain. The first time I went to fashion week, in 2009, I was 13. I sat in the front row at Rodarte and Marc Jacobs. Back home, I would have been at the school library at lunch looking at the shows that had gone up on the web that morning. I was just so excited to see the shows in real life. Some people resented me. To this day, I encounter editors or people in New York who wrote really unpleasant things about me under some guise of concern. They wrote, "What is all this bad press going to do to her when she grows up?" They were giving me all that bad press. At first, I don't think I really understood the significance of fashion show seating. Sitting in the front row didn't mean much to me until people started looking at me differently. A lot of our friends come to the show from Los Angeles, usually sitting in the back row cheering us on. But before that, they're out front taking pictures. And for all of us, the prize photograph is the picture of Anna Wintour's chair with her name on the seat card. Every year, we have a new set of photos: sometimes of that chair, sometimes of Anna in her seat. She is usually the first person to show up. That's when the clock starts ticking. You feel once she's arrived, the show has to start. When we spot her, it's a sign that we've got to get our act together. Anna Wintour came to one of my earliest shows. She was the first person to arrive. The only other person in that space was my mother. Being the lovely, kind woman that she is, my mom took one look at Anna, and thought: "Who is this poor woman here all by herself? I'll just go sit and talk to her." I was backstage, or I would have had a complete heart attack. But I did see it all on the monitor. My single thought at the time was: "What's happening? What's happening?" We always reserve a seat for Anna Wintour. I actually pick the seat I want her to sit in. I fight with my P.R. over it. I have a strong feeling about the way I want her to see the show, from which particular vantage. For a designer, it's a rite of passage to have her at the show. It's a rite I haven't been through yet. Anna was always invited. She never came. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
It is a mistake to say that diversity and free expression cannot coexist. And yet, this academic year, on campus after campus, that has been the choice served up: You are either for diversity, equity and inclusion in our communities, or you are for free expression. The strength of our communities depends upon a commitment to upholding both, perhaps especially when that is hardest to do so. The American experiment is, at its highest form, about diversity and free expression coexisting. That coexistence has not been easy, nor has it been all that successful, especially for those who have less power. And free expression has been interpreted in ways that have tended to support those in authority, rather than all people equitably. These critiques of the American experiment are all grounded in historical truth. That the American experiment has not yet been entirely successful, nor fairly carried out (think Indian removal, slavery, Jim Crow, internment, unequal rates of incarceration into the 21st century and more), does not mean that the principles are wrong. . One purpose of education is to bring young people into contact with those of different backgrounds so they might learn from one another. It is an essential skill for today's young people to be able to spend time with those who think and act differently than they do. It is an affirmative goal of education to make access available to all young people, not just the children of those who are already on top. For reasons that are both functional and moral, it is right to pursue diversity and, in turn, to commit to making our campuses equitable and inclusive | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Ahmed H. Zewail, an Egyptian American who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999 for developing a revolutionary technique to observe the dance of molecules as they break apart and come together in chemical reactions, died on Tuesday. He was 70. Dr. Zewail, a naturalized American citizen, was the first Arab to win a Nobel in any of the sciences, and he used that stature to champion science education and research in Egypt and the Middle East. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., where Dr. Zewail was a professor of chemistry for four decades, announced his death, but did not say where he died. Mostafa A. el Sayed, director of the Laser Dynamics Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a friend of Dr. Zewail's, said Dr. Zewail's body was being flown to Egypt for a military funeral on Sunday. Neither Dr. Sayed nor Caltech had information about the cause of death. The death elicited a statement from Egypt's president, Abdel Fattah el Sisi, who said, "Egypt lost one of its loyal citizens and a genius scientist who spared no effort to serve his country in the various arenas." Dr. Zewail was a recipient of the Order of the Grand Collar of the Nile, Egypt's highest honor. Chemists have long studied chemical reactions by looking at the ingredients they started with, the final products they produced and, sometimes, transitory molecules along the way. But they could not watch the actual dynamics of the process because the breaking and shifting of chemical bonds occurred too quickly. A vibration of an atom in a molecule typically takes 10 to 100 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second. To capture the molecules in so infinitesimal a moment, Dr. Zewail took advantage of advances in lasers that could fire ultrashort pulses, using them as strobe lights. One laser pulse would set off the chemical reaction, then a second pulse would record the state of the molecule through the colors of light the molecule absorbed and emitted. By repeating the same experiment many times, varying the time between the pulses, Dr. Zewail and his colleagues could, in essence, piece together a movie of the reaction. A new field, femtochemistry, was created and flourished. "He wanted to go somewhere science hadn't gotten before," said Peter B. Dervan, a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. After receiving the Nobel, Dr. Zewail devoted time to improving scientific research in Egypt. "His idea is, 'We've got to teach them that research is very important,' " Dr. Sayed said. Instead of Egyptians' going abroad for doctoral studies, as he had, he wanted to create an independent, cutting edge research institution in Egypt. And with others he did, in Cairo: the Zewail City of Science and Technology, which Dr. Dervan described as "a Caltech in Egypt." The cornerstone was laid in 2000, but the project languished until the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Dr. Zewail, who led the board of trustees, spearheaded fund raising, mostly from individuals. Zewail City opened its classrooms to students in 2013, and there are now 535 students enrolled. Part of Dr. Zewail's vision was to restore the Arab world to its historical place as a center of learning. In an op ed article published in The International New York Times in 2013, Dr. Zewail wrote: "Westerners often forget Egypt's long history of educational accomplishment. Al Azhar University, a center of Islamic learning, predates Oxford and Cambridge by centuries. Cairo University, founded in 1908, has been a center of enlightenment for the whole Arab world." Dr. Zewail acknowledged that the Middle East had fallen far behind. "A part of the world that pioneered science and mathematics during Europe's Dark Ages is now lost in a dark age of illiteracy and knowledge deficiency," he wrote. "With the exception of Israel, the region's scientific output is modest at best." But he remained optimistic. "I call on Egypt's leaders, of whatever religious or political persuasion, to insulate education and science from their feuds," he wrote. Ahmed Zewail was born in Damanhur, Egypt, on Feb. 26, 1946. After he completed bachelor's and master's degrees at Alexandria University, his advisers encouraged him to go abroad for a doctorate. In the Egypt of 1967, with its ties to Moscow, that usually meant going to Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. But when the University of Pennsylvania offered him a fellowship, he accepted. "So, by luck, he came to America, which would not have been the usual route when young Egyptian men of talent were going abroad to get educated in science," Dr. Dervan said. After completing his doctorate in 1974, Dr. Zewail worked at the University of California, Berkeley, before becoming a professor at California Institute of Technology in 1976. He earned his citizenship a few years later. Dr. Zewail was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of academies in other countries, including Britain, Russia, France and China. He was an author or co author of 600 scientific papers. He served on President Obama's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology from 2009 to early 2013. He also served as the United States science envoy to the Middle East. Dr. Zewail is survived by his wife, Dema Faham, and four children, Maha, Amani, Nabeel and Hani. After winning the Nobel, Dr. Zewail switched gears to invent a new form of microscopy using ultrafast pulses of electrons instead of light. The electrons can track, for instance, how layers of graphite vibrate like a drum. In February, Caltech held a symposium titled "Science and Society" to celebrate Dr. Zewail's 70th birthday. Before a packed auditorium, he spoke of his efforts to expand research in his native country and the importance of holding to a vision. "What do you do after you get the Nobel Prize?" Dr. Zewail said. "It's my choice, but hopefully it's a choice that will make an impact. At Caltech, you dream, and you dream big, and the sky is the limit." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Hoping to cut medical costs, employers are experimenting with a new way to pay for health care, telling workers that their company health plan will pay only a fixed amount for a given test or procedure, like a CT scan or knee replacement. Employees who choose a doctor or hospital that charges more are responsible for paying the additional amount themselves. Although it is in the early stages, the strategy is gaining in popularity and there is some evidence that it has persuaded expensive hospitals to lower their prices. In California, a large plan for public employees has been especially aggressive in using the tactic, and the results are being watched closely by employers and hospital systems elsewhere. Under the program, some employees are being given the choice of going to one of 54 hospitals, including well known medical centers like Cedars Sinai and Stanford University Hospital, that have agreed to charge no more than 30,000 for a hip or knee replacement. Prices for the operation normally vary widely in the state, with hospitals billing from 15,000 to 110,000 for the same operation, a spread that is typical for much of the nation. "It's a symptom of the completely irrational pricing structure hospitals have," said Ann Boynton, a benefits executive for the California Public Employees' Retirement System, known as Calpers, which worked with the insurer Anthem Blue Cross, a unit of WellPoint, to introduce the program. Overall costs for operations under the program fell 19 percent in 2011, the program's first year, with the average amount it paid hospitals for a joint replacement falling to 28,695, from 35,408, according to an analysis by WellPoint's researchers that was released Sunday at a health policy conference. The study found no impact on quality of care. "It's a race to value," said Dr. Samuel R. Nussbaum, the chief medical officer for WellPoint. One of the nation's largest health insurers, WellPoint operates Blue Cross plans in 14 states. The California plan, which is one of the nation's largest buyers of health care benefits, is "viewed as a bellwether of what other large employers will do," Mr. Robinson said. He and colleagues calculated the savings from the program for the first two years at 5.5 million. While relatively few companies fully embrace the strategy now, more employers are experimenting with it. Using a technique called "reference pricing," the employer sets a cap, based on what can be an average price for the service or a price that allows employees to select from a wide group of hospitals or doctors but still excludes the very high priced providers. The idea is to exert pressure on prices for certain procedures without limiting the individual's choice of hospital or doctor for all kinds of care. "There will be acute interest and focus on prices and price variation," said Ron Fontanetta, a benefits consultant at Towers Watson, who said that programs like this represented one approach. About 15 percent of large employers say they expect to try the technique next year, compared with just 5 percent this year, according to a 2013 survey by the firm. "This seems something that's a no brainer," said Steve Wojcik, a vice president for public policy at the National Business Group on Health, which represents employers offering health benefits to their workers. "Why pay more if you can get it for less?" Last year, WellPoint worked with the Kroger Company, a large grocery chain, to start a similar program in which payments for certain M.R.I.'s and CT scans were capped at around 800, and employees were given a list of places that would charge that amount or less. Kroger picked services that had a significant variation in price but did not vary in quality from provider to provider, according to Theresa Monti, a benefits executive at Kroger. The company also chose to set the price the plan would pay at a point where employees would still have a wide range of choices, she said. Historically, information about how much a doctor or hospital will charge before a patient gets a test and treatment has been difficult if not impossible to obtain, and the federal government's recent decision to publish Medicare data on hospital charges has focused attention on the wide variation that exists throughout the country. One of the goals is to determine when the price of a medical service bears no resemblance to the quality care. Paying more money without getting better care in return has been a longstanding source of frustration for employers. Under the federal health care law, many employers are looking for ways to reduce their own costs without shifting them onto their workers, said Darren Rodgers, a senior executive at the Health Care Service Corporation, which operates nonprofit Blue Cross plans in four states. "We're having a dialogue about it right now," Mr. Rodgers said. Two employers it works with have programs that cap payments for tests, like colonoscopies or CT scans, and a handful of other companies will introduce a similar program next year. Benefits experts say these programs are only appropriate for medical services with little urgency and where the quality of care does not vary significantly. But it is not always clear that even a seemingly mundane procedure like an M.R.I. may not vary in quality from facility to facility, depending on the skill of the physician to interpret the images, said Dr. Robert Berenson, a health policy expert at the Urban Institute. "Is an M.R.I. just an M.R.I. and just a commodity?" he asked. While Dr. Berenson described these programs as promising in forcing a more explicit discussion about the value of their care from hospitals and doctors, he said the current ways of determining quality were inadequate. "There are huge domains in quality that we don't measure at all," he said. In the California program, the hospitals were not selected simply on price but on other measures, like how many surgeries they performed and their outcomes, Ms. Boynton said. "It's not just about reducing cost at the expense of health and clinical outcomes of members," she said. About 350,000 people are covered by the California program. While more members chose to get operations from facilities participating in the program, members who went outside were able to get the procedures done for less. On average, members had about the same out of pocket costs as they did before the program. At the least, the California experiment may suggest that the irrationality of pricing may be coming to an end. "Price is the leading driver of health care cost growth," said Suzanne Delbanco, the executive director for Catalyst for Payment Reform, a group that aims to encourage employers and health plans to change the way they pay for care. The California plan has made it clear to the hospitals that it was both aware of the unexplained variation in prices and that it would no longer simply pay whatever a hospital charged the insurer, she said. "That's a very powerful signal," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
352 East 55th Street (between First and Second Avenues) An investor has bought this mixed use 1950s five story building and is to occupy part of it. The 5,422 square foot building sits on a 20 by 100 foot lot in the Sutton Place area and features a vacant duplex commercial space, formerly occupied by a rug dealer. The building also offers six alcove studio apartments. 218 East 89th Street (between Second and Third Avenues) A pet groomer has signed a 10 year lease for a 630 square foot ground floor space, to feature a retail area in the front and grooming area in the back, in this five story walk up on the Upper East Side. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Hundreds of thousands of people want to know two things about Elsa Majimbo. Where did she get her "Matrix" esque sunglasses? And what kind of chips is she eating? For the past four months, the 19 year old Kenyan comedian has been wearing black shades and crunching on snacks while filming herself express pretend contempt about all those who feel sad about quarantine. "Ever since corona started we've all been in isolation and I miss no one," she says in one of her most popular Instagram videos, laughing before switching to Swahili then back to English. "Why am I missing you? There is no reason for me to miss you." A pause. "People keep on telling me you haven't participated in corona challenges, you haven't joined Houseparty, you haven't joined TikTok it's not by mistake. It's not," she says with a smirk, popping a chip in her mouth. When she posted that video on March 30, Ms. Majimbo had 10,000 followers, most of whom were in Kenya. Glowing write ups in The Guardian and CNN followed (as did several hundred thousand more followers). Her jokes about not wanting to work, but wanting to be rich; not wanting to spend time with people, but wanting a boyfriend; not wanting to Zoom every day, but wanting to still be connected, are relatable to anyone stuck in the emotional push and pull of quarantine, no matter what country the viewer is living in. Ms. Majimbo was born and raised in Nairobi, where she is a journalism student. Her father, an interior designer, doesn't quite understand his daughter's sudden internet fame, especially because he told her to stop posting earlier this year, after seeing a video in which she suggested that someone post nude photographs of her to Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, so she could follow Kim Kardashian's steps to wealth. (It was a joke.) "My dad said, 'This is not how a Christian girl in a Christian home behaves,' and I tried to explain that it's meant to be funny," Ms. Majimbo said. "He said, 'I don't see anything funny here, stop making videos of this nature immediately.'" She blocked everyone her father knew on social media and kept posting. When her father found out in May that his daughter was a viral sensation, he still said he doesn't understand the comedy, but is happy for her. In a recent phone interview from her family's home, Ms. Majimbo reflected on the strangest part of newfound internet fame: "People are obsessed with the chips." She said she gladly shared that she bought her sunglasses from a street vendor outside her school in Nairobi for 2, but now, with so much interest in the chips she eats during her videos, she has no intention of telling anyone what flavor or brand they are. "It'll be a big reveal and I'll say something like, 'Tonight at 7 p.m. I'm revealing what chips I eat,'" she joked. "But I won't do it anytime soon." There are many challenges of trying to grow an audience internationally as a young African woman, Ms. Majimbo said. But these past few months have slowed some of her early detractors. "I'm young, I'm African, I'm a woman, and on top of all that I'm dark skinned, so things are way harder than they are for others, especially men," she said. "Then there are men it's always men, I don't know why online who say, 'You're in Africa, so you can't do comedy there,' which isn't true at all." Her rose gold iPhone 6 is her most prized possession, an essential tool for her comedy career. "I worked hard and saved up for six months," she said, of getting the phone three years ago. "My hard work? For six months I sold my lunch and when I had enough money, I upgraded." (Also a joke.) Now, Ms. Majimbo is in talks with the cosmetics company MAC Cosmetics Africa. She has worked on two projects with Comedy Central. And as her audience has grown, she is making some adjustments. Most of her Instagram videos used to be in both English and Swahili, but now they are primarily in English. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
SAN FRANCISCO If you were hoping to hear less about Facebook this year, you're out of luck. The social platform announced on Thursday after months of hemming and hawing that it would not change its basic rules for political advertising ahead of the 2020 election. Unlike Google, which restricted the targeting of political ads last year, or Twitter, which barred political ads entirely, Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, decided to preserve the status quo. Politicians will still be exempt from Facebook's fact checking program, and will still be allowed to break many of the rules that apply to other users. Campaigns will still be allowed to spend millions of dollars on ads targeted to narrow slices of the electorate, upload their voter files to build custom audiences and use all the other tools of Facebook tradecraft. The social network has spent much of the past three years apologizing for its inaction during the 2016 election, when its platform was overrun with hyperpartisan misinformation, some of it Russian, that was amplified by its own algorithms. And ahead of 2020, some people wondered if Mr. Zuckerberg who is, by his own admission, uncomfortable with Facebook's power would do everything he could to step out of the political crossfire. Instead, Mr. Zuckerberg has embraced Facebook's central role in elections not only by giving politicians a pass on truth, but by preserving the elements of its advertising platforms that proved to be a decisive force in 2016. "It was a mistake," Alex Stamos, Facebook's former chief security officer, said about Facebook's decision. Mr. Stamos, who left the company after the 2016 election, said political considerations had most likely factored into the decision to leave its existing ad targeting options in place. "They're clearly afraid of political pushback," he said. Mr. Stamos, like some Facebook employees and outside agitators, had advocated for small but meaningful changes to Facebook's policies, such as raising the minimum size of an audience that a political advertiser is allowed to target and disallowing easily disprovable claims made about a political candidate by his or her rivals. These proposed changes were intended to discourage bad behavior by campaigns, while still letting them use Facebook's powerful ad tools to raise money and turn out supporters. But in the end, those arguments lost out to the case made by Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook executive, in an internal memo, as well as President Trump's campaign and several Democratic groups that changing the platform's rules, even in an ostensibly neutral way, would amount to tipping the scales. Mr. Bosworth, who oversaw Facebook's ad platform in 2016, argued that the reason Mr. Trump was elected was simply that "he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser." In other words, the system worked as designed. Don't get me wrong: Facebook has made strides since 2016 to deter certain kinds of election interference. It has spent billions of dollars beefing up its security teams to prevent another Russian troll debacle, and it has added more transparent tools to shine more light on the dark arts of digital campaigning, such as a political ad library and a verification process that requires political advertisers to register with an American address. These moves have forced would be election meddlers to be stealthier in their tactics, and have made a 2016 style foreign influence operation much less likely this time around. But despite these changes, the basic architecture of Facebook is largely the same as it was in 2016, and vulnerable in many of the same ways. The platform still operates on the principle that what is popular is good. It still takes a truth agnostic view of political speech telling politicians that, as long as their posts don't contain certain types of misinformation (like telling voters the wrong voting day, or misleading them about the census), they can say whatever they want. And it is still reluctant to take any actions that could be construed as partisan even if those actions would lead to a healthier political debate or a fairer election. Facebook has argued that it shouldn't be an arbiter of truth, and that it has a responsibility to remain politically neutral. But the company's existing policies are anything but neutral. They give an advantage to candidates whose campaigns are good at cranking out emotionally charged, hyperpartisan content, regardless of its factual accuracy. Today, that describes Mr. Trump's strategy, as well as those used successfully by other conservative populists, including President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. But it could just as well describe the strategy of a successful Democratic challenger to Mr. Trump. Facebook's most glaring bias is not a partisan one it is a bias toward candidates whose strategies most closely resemble that of a meme page. On one level, Mr. Zuckerberg's decision on ads, which came after months of passionate lobbying by both Republican and Democratic campaigns, as well as civil rights groups and an angry cohort of Facebook employees, is a bipartisan compromise. Both sides, after all, rely on these tools, and there is an argument to be made that Democrats need them in order to close the gap with Mr. Trump's sophisticated digital operation. Ultimately, though, Mr. Zuckerberg's decision to leave Facebook's platform architecture intact amounts to a powerful endorsement not of any 2020 candidate, but of Facebook's role in global democracy. It's a vote for the idea that Facebook is a fairly designed playing field that is conducive to healthy political debate, and that whatever problems it has simply reflect the problems that exist in society as a whole. Ellen L. Weintraub, a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission who has been an outspoken opponent of Facebook's existing policies, told me on Thursday that she, too, was disappointed in the company's choice. "They have a real responsibility here, and they're just shirking it," Ms. Weintraub said. "They don't want to acknowledge that something they've created is contributing to the decline of our democracy, but it is." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
"Sometimes you meet people and there is instant ease," said Gabriella Winter, an associate broker at the Corcoran Group, with her husband, Doug Stone, a former client. Gabriella Winter was the listing broker for a two bedroom apartment on Bedford Street when it came on the market in 1996. Eager, of course, to spread the word about the property, she sent out a promotional mailing, and soon got a call from one Doug Stone. A few days later, Mr. Stone came by, although he did seem a good bit more interested in checking out the broker than in checking out the condo. "He said it wasn't quite what he wanted, but then he asked if he could keep looking with me for a place," Ms. Winter recalled. Over the next few months, the two went out once a week to view the inventory. "The meetings were very pleasant. It was easy chatting," said Ms. Winter, 58, an associate broker with the Corcoran Group. "There was chemistry, but it didn't concern me. I was single. He was single." She did, however, become just a little bit concerned when Mr. Stone invited her out for dinner. She didn't go out with clients, she told him. She didn't believe in mixing business with pleasure. "And he said, 'I tell you what, if you have dinner with me, I promise I will never buy an apartment from you.'" Mr. Stone, the owner of an online marketing company, proved to be nothing if not a man of his word. He and his former broker will celebrate their 22nd wedding anniversary this year (he proposed in front of the building where they met), and he has yet to buy an apartment from her. Ms. Winter is hardly the first in the business to meet her mate in such a rom com ready way. And there is a certain logic to relationships that move from real estate to romance, however prosaic the opening topics: square footage, common charges, comparables and mortgages. "If you're a good broker, you don't just talk real estate to clients. You get deep into who they are and what makes them tick," said Kathy Braddock, a managing director of William Raveis New York City. "You're having conversations that get you very intimate very quickly." A few minutes after "how do you do," house hunters are laying bare their finances, and in many instances their domestic situation ("My wife and I just separated, and I need three bedrooms because I have the kids every weekend"), their emotional state (see: "My wife and I just separated"), their quirks ("I could never live on the 13th floor") and their very specific needs ("I play golf on the weekend, so I can't be more than a block from my garage"). "It becomes an interesting dynamic for two people who are available," Ms. Braddock said. Not to mention an effective screening tool. "You may think, 'That client is cute, all right, but wait a minute, he's got 18 years of alimony payments ahead.'" While psychotherapists are ethically bound to forswear romantic entanglements with clients, real estate brokers must rely on their own moral compass. In fact, Douglas Elliman, Corcoran, Warburg Realty and Halstead Property, among other real estate agencies, have no rules governing the dating habits of their agents (who, in any case, aren't employees, but rather independent contractors). Still, there is general agreement that it's not smart to get involved with a client until the business part of the relationship is done. "To be a good real estate broker, you have to have very good judgment, and if you have good judgment, this is something you don't do," said Barbara Fox, the president of Fox Residential Group. "I met a lot of lovely clients when I was single," Ms. Fox continued. "Sometimes a guy I was showing an apartment to in the late afternoon would say, 'Let's go have a drink,' and I would always decline. Or a guy I was dating would say, 'If you ever see an apartment that has X, Y and Z, keep a lookout for me.' And I would always say, 'Sure, I will.' But I didn't, because I didn't want to mix things." In many cases, Mr. Malin added, clients might be coming to New York for the first time and might not have a social network. Then the real estate agent who is their first contact in the city could easily become more than the person who found them a place to hang their hat. "I like to say that being in the real estate business is like being in the hospitality business," Mr. Malin continued. An agent might introduce a client to a neighborhood, suggest restaurants and become a resource, he said. The next step might involve inviting the client out to dinner as a gift after the deal has been completed, or inviting the client to a party the agent is having. "You've spent a lot of time together," he said. "You've shared a lot of information. And all of a sudden you realize you have a lot of things in common, and one thing leads to another." Sometimes, the thing it leads to is a breakup. It had been a late night for Joanna Mayfield Marks, an associate broker at Halstead Property. At 11 p.m. or so, she accepted her boyfriend's marriage proposal. That's why she was half an hour late for an appointment the next day to show several Manhattan apartments to an artist who was relocating from Buffalo. "I could tell pretty soon that he wasn't going to want to rent from me, because he kept talking about wanting to live in Brooklyn, where all the artists lived," said Ms. Marks, who is now 43. Despite the fact that the morning had been a bust, she was suddenly feeling butterflies (but she had just gotten engaged), and all because of this cute guy (did we mention that she had just gotten engaged?). Ms. Marks, the sort who reflexively puts it all out there, put it all out there within 20 minutes of meeting this new client, the artist. "I think I made a terrible mistake," she announced to him. "I got engaged last night." He listened without comment. "When we did first get involved, I don't think Rory wanted people to know he was dating a client, so we kept it quiet until we got more established," said Ms. Readlinger, who switched careers to join Mr. Bolger in the real estate business. Caution makes sense, for sure. After all, who's to say your real estate agent isn't a serial client dater? (Mr. Bolger pleads previous guilt on this charge.) But consider the agent who is falsely accused. Jamie Stoner, 23, a broker at Spaces, a residential and commercial brokerage in Chicago, met her former boyfriend last Valentine's Day, when she was showing him several one bedroom rentals. "We had a really good conversation, like about traveling, and we had a lot in common," Ms. Stoner said. "We were texting throughout the process, and right after he signed the lease he asked me out." For a while, things went well. "But then I realized he wasn't very supportive of my career," she said. "I take out a lot of clients my age to show them apartments, and I think my boyfriend was jealous because that's how he met me. There were other issues, but I always had to be reassuring him that these other clients weren't romantic interests." Clearly, when romance is part of the equation, things can get sticky. Four years ago, when Ryan Garson met his future wife, Carola Fernandez, an emergency room doctor, he was a fledgling real estate agent unsure of the rules. Was it O.K. to be smitten? He was. Was it O.K. to flirt a little? They did. But despite all that bantering, or maybe because of it, the scene was awkward when it came time for Dr. Fernandez to sign a lease on the apartment Mr. Garson had found for her. It was the desire to avoid such complications that, for years, kept Lisa P. Rollins from getting involved with a client. That and the fact that she had a fiance. Even after the relationship ended, Ms. Rollins, a real estate sales agent with Page Taft Christie's International Real Estate, in Madison, Conn., saw no reason to operate differently. In the spring of 2015, she was asked to do a comparative cost analysis on an antique house that was about to come on the market. Accordingly, Ms. Rollins, now 52, showed up with a colleague and did the walk around with the owner, Jeffrey Johnson, the mid sixtyish co founder of the home care service Visiting Angels, who gave the pair the listing. "As we were leaving, my co worker said, 'Oh, he's into you. Did you see the way he looked at you?' Ms. Rollins recalled. "I said, 'Stop it. He's too old for me.'" Mr. Johnson thought otherwise. He asked her to dinner. She didn't go out with clients, she told him, but perhaps they could revisit the matter after the closing. They did, dating for two months before realizing the time wasn't right for either of them. Four months later, Mr. Johnson sent Ms. Rollins a text asking if she was married yet. No, she answered, but now she was game. They tied the knot in March of 2017, and now live in a house on the water in Westbrook, Conn. Guess who was the agent in the transaction. "My mother always told me that the only way I would meet someone was if it was a client, because, she told me, 'The only thing you do is work,'" Ms. Rollins said. "I would laugh, but as you can see Mom is always right." 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 |
The dynamics of the Who were uniquely molten. The singer, as noted, was a species of turbo ventriloquist; the guitarist, the brainiac, drove the thing forward with massive, slashing chords; and the rhythm section was composed of two uncontrollable soloists: the prolific John Entwistle, whose bass offered arch intra musical commentary at heavy metal volume, endlessly raising its eyebrows and doodling in the margins, and on drums the feast of acceleration, the rampage of allegro agitato, that was Keith Moon, stampeding ahead of his tics like a character in a fairy tale. Daltrey and Entwistle connected first, in the summer of 1961. A few months later they auditioned a kid they had seen around school, a tall boy with an "impressive sneezer": Townshend. ("He knew all these clever chords that were diminished, missing thirds here, adding sevenths there, all strange shapes. ... They were flash chords and he knew it.") And then, during a show at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, "ginger topped after a failed attempt to go Beach Boy blond," Keith Moon arrives. He joins the band for a version of Bo Diddley's "Road Runner": "Halfway through, he started to do his syncopations. It's all mathematics, isn't it, drumming, but his mathematics were from another planet. ... It just took things up to the next level. The final gear." Moon lived and played in a state of exuberant torment. He could be very funny, "but that," Daltrey comments ruefully, "was only about 20 percent of the time. The rest of it, the pranks, the explosions, the general devastation, there was usually someone at the other end of it having a pretty miserable time." Entwistle was a dark rock 'n' roll character "John had a very spiteful streak" and he liked to wind Daltrey up. But the largest presence in "Thanks a Lot" because it is almost an absence is that of Pete Townshend. "The thing was," writes the long suffering Daltrey, "I recognized his talent." In 1966, as part of a projected rock opera about gender reassignment called "Quads," Townshend writes "I'm a Boy": "I'm a boy, I'm a boy, but my ma won't admit it." "Bloody hell," confesses Daltrey. "I found this very, very difficult." In 1969, Townshend introduces "Tommy" to a preview audience as "a story about a boy who witnesses a murder and becomes deaf, dumb and blind. He is later raped by his uncle and gets turned on to LSD." Incredibly, "Tommy" becomes a great success and not incidentally another vehicle for the artistic emancipation of Roger Daltrey. "Everything I learned to do with my voice came from 'Tommy.' ... I just changed." However, 1971's "Lifehouse" project, which features people in "experience suits" all linked up on a great "Grid" of leisure (hello?) this is too much. Too soon. Too intuitively futuristic. Everyone is bewildered. "I've said it before, and I mean it in the nicest possible way, but talking to Pete could be like walking through a minefield wearing a pair of clown shoes. And a blindfold." Daltrey's favorite Who album, revealingly, is "The Who by Numbers" (1975): the most sozzled, vulnerable and desperately libidinous set in their catalog. "I saw the lyrics and I thought, this has to be sung." And that's what he does, singing on "How Many Friends" about the "handsome boy" who buys him (Townshend) a brandy and compliments him (Townshend) on his (Townshend's) clothes, provoking sexual confusion and tristesse. "He's being so kind / What's the reason?" The tender emphatic lapse, the little downward drunken swoop or sigh, that Daltrey achieves on that word "kind" it's one of the Who's greatest, quietest moments. Moon dies; Entwistle dies. Daltrey and Townshend endure. "Years passed." It takes a robust lack of vanity to include that sentence in your own autobiography. But Daltrey's peculiar swaggering selflessness is the key to this book, and a key (one of four) to the Who. "Most of those songs were written from a place of pain, as well as spirit. I struggled at first to find that place and you can hear the struggle. But then I inhabited it." Cripes, as Daltrey might say. Cor blimey. How many rock memoirs actually have a meaning? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Manual Cinema, a Chicago arts collective, is highlighting four of its productions vivacious hybrids of film and theater in a virtual retrospective. A Manual Cinema show can often feel like two performances at once. Look up during any of its productions, and you'll find a screen where a polished projection of the story unfolds: figures dancing across the frame in silhouette, usually in the absence of any words, spinning a clear narrative into view. But down below is where the real action happens. The ensemble which usually includes the founders and artistic directors of the Chicago based cinema, Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller and Kyle Vegter are pulling the strings (often literally) in full view of the audience. There's an organized chaos of actors, musicians, several overhead projectors, cameras, maybe a green screen and roughly several hundred puppets, all on display in real time. "It's kind of like watching an animated film," Kauffman said, "but all of the elements are performed live." After a decade of molding and expanding their art form a puppetry infused hybrid of film and theater the members of Manual Cinema are looking back with a virtual 10th anniversary retrospective (or a "retrospectacular," as the group is calling it). We explored the four shows Manual Cinema is featuring on its website, in chronological order, starting Monday and running through Aug. 23, and how the artistry used to create each has evolved. (Dates are subject to change.) The retrospective's first show, which premiered in 2012 and was filmed in North Branch, N.J., in 2016, tells an inventive, dreamlike coming of age story set in the 1950s American Southwest. As one of Manual Cinema's earliest productions, "Lula Del Ray" helped to establish some of the ensemble's signature techniques: hundreds of shadow puppets on display through multiple projectors, actors performing in silhouette onscreen, and an ethereal (in this case, Roy Orbison inspired) live score. The company has since added other technical elements to its productions: In "The End of TV," for example, actors come in front of the camera, and "No Blue Memories" has a more verbose script. But even in those earlier days, with fewer bells and whistles to juggle, the performers wore multiple hats. Miller, who conceived "Lula Del Ray" and designed the masks for actors in silhouette, performed as both a puppeteer and Lula's mother in the original cast. "It attracts a very specific type of performer who really enjoys multitasking," Miller said. "Once the show starts, you just go. There's no offstage time. You're a technician; you're a camera operator; you're a cinematographer; you might even be doing lighting; and then you're also acting and doing puppetry as well. It's a lot of patting your head and rubbing your stomach." Between the flashy commercials and QVC like broadcasts that appear on a screen above the stage is a deeper story, written by Vegter and Kauffman, that chronicles the parallel lives of two former autoworkers in a Midwestern town. "The End of TV" premiered in 2017 in New Haven, Conn., and was filmed at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago the next year. "We started working on the piece right before the 2016 election and finished it after," Vegter said. "I think we were kind of searching for how we got here how did the country get to this place of rampant consumerism, and a place where a reality TV star can be elected president?" The show, like all Manual Cinema productions, has gone through several iterations since its premiere. By nature of the medium which is usually faceless, and almost always wordless it often takes getting the story in front of an audience for the company to figure out what clicks and what points people may be missing. "To tell really nuanced, powerful stories that don't involve language or characters speaking to each other is a really difficult task," Vegter said. For "The End of TV," Vegter said, the company collected audience surveys after the performance and adjusted the production according to feedback. Manual Cinema's shows end with an invitation for audiences to join the ensemble onstage; it's an opportunity for viewers to see the puppets up close and ask questions, and for the company to hear their thoughts and figure out what works. Manual Cinema is a company with deep Midwestern roots a fitting group to explore the story of one of the region's and Chicago's most iconic writers, the poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks. The work premiered in 2017, when it was commissioned by the Poetry Foundation, and was filmed that year at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. The script, written by Eve L. Ewing and Nate Marshall, was a sharp departure from the company's typically wordless material but in a story that hinges on a writer and her words, Vegter said, that departure was essential. The shadow puppets for "No Blue Memories" and other Manual Cinema shows are crafted from card stock, with joints linked together through a thin piece of wire. In the beginning, puppets were hand cut. The group later started using a silhouette cutter that was similar to a printer. They now use both, depending on whether they want the puppets to appear more rough around the edges or cut with more computerized precision. "It's really wild for us to see the puppets that we made in 2010 versus what we're capable of now, because we just have so much more control over the style and the aesthetic and the detail," Miller said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
BRUSSELS European officials scrambled on Tuesday for a way to entice banks to accept much deeper losses on their Greek bonds as debt crisis talks went down to the wire before a crucial gathering of European leaders on Wednesday. With less than 24 hours before the meeting of government leaders in Brussels, banking representatives and European officials were negotiating over what losses banks should accept. The banks have taken a hard line and warned that the write off of debts they are being asked to agree to about 55 percent could result in a default or similar shock to the financial system, something European officials are desperate to avert. That has prompted a search for so called complementary measures that might help to sweeten the deal for the bankers. Stock markets in Europe and the United States fell as investors feared that the meeting would not deliver a plan ambitious enough to solve Europe's financial crisis. The Standard Poor's 500 stock index closed down 2 percent. After reaching a bottom on Oct. 3, the index has risen 14 percent on signs that the American economy might be pulling out of recession. But analysts said the markets were still vulnerable to turmoil in Europe, where the long political uncertainty was already unsettling credit markets and damping growth even in core economies like France. Interest rates on bonds of countries like Italy and Spain have risen sharply. A failure to resolve the crisis definitively at the meeting on Wednesday, particularly by maximizing the firepower of a proposed 600 billion bailout fund, risks upsetting markets, analysts said. "Europe still has the possibility of dragging the U.S. back into recession," said Sam Stovall, a strategist at S. P. Equity Research in New York. "What is going to be needed to keep markets happy will be funding" for the bailout fund "that goes well beyond 1 trillion to ring fence the debt problems and allow the other economies to move forward," he said. Italy, meanwhile, has come increasingly under the spotlight as investors doubt the government's commitment to reduce its 1.9 trillion euro, or 2.6 trillion, debt. European Union leaders want Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy to present firm plans on growth and debt reduction in time for the meeting. Italian news agencies reported late Tuesday that Mr. Berlusconi had reached an accord with the Northern League, his principal coalition partner. The league's leader, Umberto Bossi, said earlier Tuesday that Mr. Berlusconi's government could fall over the issue of raising the standard retirement age to 67 from 65, a move Mr. Bossi opposed. With the clock ticking, a senior German official, Jorg Asmussen, and a French counterpart, Ramon Fernandez, joined intensive discussions with the banks in Brussels. Under one of about five plans being debated, Greek bonds might be swapped for those of much lower face value issued by the euro zone's bailout fund, according to two officials briefed on talks, who added that the idea might make a write down more attractive for the banks. The Institute of International Finance, which represents the banks involved, intends to send its own proposal to European leaders on Wednesday, according to a person with direct knowledge of the negotiations. That would involve banks taking more than the 21 percent loss they agreed to in July, in exchange for sweeteners that would help mitigate some of the additional loss, such as allowing banks to buy bonds from the bailout fund. "It's clear that circumstances have changed too much for the July 21 agreement to work at this point," said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were continuing. "We are prepared to adjust to new circumstances within limits. The question is, are the governments prepared to meet us halfway?" Though that was a recognition that the deal with the banks would not be ready by Wednesday morning, it did not mean that agreement was impossible later in the day, when the leaders meet, diplomats and officials said. The summit meeting will still take place and "work on the comprehensive package of measures to curb the sovereign debt crisis" will continue there, a statement by the Polish presidency announcing the cancellation said. Those measures include a recapitalization of European banks and augmenting the 440 billion euro bailout fund, probably to more than 1 trillion euros. That would likely be achieved through two methods that probably would run together. The rescue fund, known as the European Financial Stability Facility, is expected to offer insurance against part of the losses on bond purchases. A separate mechanism is expected to be set up to buy bonds, drawing in funds from the International Monetary Fund and other investors from the emerging world. Though France is reluctant to bring other powers, like China, into the heart of the euro zone, it will probably have to overcome its reservations because of the gravity of the situation. Though officials expect the European Central Bank to play a role in bond buying, at least in the short term until a new system is established, Germany is resisting any firm reference by leaders to this as part of the deal. "It is important to have clarity on private sector involvement," Amadeu Altafaj Tardio, a European Commission spokesman on economic and monetary affairs, told reporters in Brussels. "All the issues are interlinked." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
CHICAGO In a conference room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on a recent evening, a group of men sat down for a class on pregnancy and childbirth led by Dr. Craig Garfield, a pediatrician who specializes in studying new fathers. The class is one of many that Northwestern offers to new parents, including some that are designed for moms, for grandparents and in the case of one class called "Bowser the Baby" for dog owners. Dr. Garfield's parenting class is for expectant fathers, most of whom are here after their pregnant partners signed them up for it. As the class got underway, the soon to be dads seemed uneasy. But with some prodding from Dr. Garfield, they began to open up, sharing some of their hopes and fears about becoming first time fathers. One man said he hoped to raise a strong and confident daughter. Another said he was fearful about holding his baby for the first time because babies are fragile and he had never held one before. Others said they worried about their finances, losing sleep, the health of their babies and their partners, and not having enough time to spend with their children. While today's generation of fathers is not the first to change diapers or be actively involved in child care, they are more likely to participate than their own fathers, and much more so than their grandfathers. But Dr. Garfield and his colleagues have found that many dads who are eager to be engaged are often uncertain about where to begin. "This class serves as a 'How to' or 'Fatherhood 101' to try and meet this disconnect between wanting to be involved and not being sure exactly what to do," Dr. Garfield said. "Many new fathers really are scared of breaking their babies." The class is part of a broader effort he is leading to shed scientific light on the role that fathers play in child and family well being. Dr. Garfield, an associate professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, has found that helping fathers benefits the children they raise. "My message is to get in early and get in often," said Dr. Garfield, who is also an attending physician at the Ann Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago. "When the baby is born, be there, get your hands on the baby, change the diaper, talk to the baby, hold the baby, feel the baby. Get involved and don't be shy about it because it's all about building your confidence and getting comfortable with your baby." Dr. Garfield explains to expectant dads how they can help if their partners breast feed, whether it is positioning the baby at the right level or helping their partners stay hydrated. He shows them how to cradle their infants on their chests with skin to skin contact, a calming technique. And he encourages them to read and talk to their newborns often so their developing brains will benefit from hearing their voices. These steps and others can get fathers more engaged and comfortable with their newborns, Dr. Garfield has found, and they may also be crucial to their long term development. Studies suggest that children who grow up with more involved fathers acquire better language skills. They have higher self esteem and better grades in school, and they suffer less depression and anxiety. They have lower rates of truancy and are less likely to become teenage parents. "The data is pretty robust," said Dr. Michael Yogman, an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. "The more involved fathers are early on, the better the child does academically and the less likely they're going to have behavioral issues later on." In 2016, Dr. Garfield and Dr. Yogman published a report in the journal Pediatrics outlining ways that pediatricians and health care providers could engage new fathers in prenatal and postpartum care. They argue that this is particularly important given the evolving nature of family dynamics, with many mothers and fathers no longer exclusively playing the roles of primary caregiver or provider. Dr. Garfield's interest in studying fatherhood stemmed from his own experiences. When his first child was born in 1997, he was the first medical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital to ask for a month of family leave. A year and a half later, when his son was a toddler, he took time off to be a stay at home dad so his wife, who also became a pediatrician, could focus on her residency. Dr. Garfield noticed that he was the only dad on the playground, at playgroups and in "Mom and Tot" classes. He and his wife found that their pediatrician ignored him during visits with their toddler, focusing on his wife. It dawned on him that he too had excluded fathers as a doctor, a revelation he wrote about in JAMA. "With remorse, I realize that during residency I established more eye contact and directed most of my advice toward mothers, even if both parents were present," he wrote. Looking at the medical literature, he found that much of the research on child health and development was focused, appropriately, on maternal interventions. But he also felt that many populations of fathers were understudied: married and unmarried dads, single parent fathers and gay fathers, adolescent dads, and even incarcerated fathers, who account for roughly 750,000 of the 7 2 million fathers in America. "I was frustrated that my discipline of pediatrics was slow to recognize the role that fathers play in child health, and that plays out in the research that we do," he said. "Fathers are a key player in families for positive and negative." In shaken baby cases, in most domestic violence cases, he noted, the perpetrator is often the dad. In his research, Dr. Garfield found that some of the health issues new moms face also affect new dads. He discovered that new fathers gain significant weight and that many experience a major increase in depressive symptoms, which could lead to them being neglectful of their children. And he found that fathers of premature babies experience higher levels of stress than their partners during the transition home. Dr. Garfield is now developing an app to help parents of premature babies care for their infants, and he has called for wider health screening in new and expectant fathers, many of whom do not have primary care physicians. To better understand their well being, Dr. Garfield is working on a pilot study to track health behaviors in new fathers. It is expected to start in August. In the meantime, he is trying to help individual dads through his expectant fathers' class, which meets roughly once a month. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Toward the back half of this week's episode, "Watchmen" finally offers a glimpse of its show within a show, "American Hero Story: Minutemen," which doubles as a backdoor adaptation of the graphic novel that creator Damon Lindelof is writing around (or "remixing," as he has put it). What stands out first is the hyper reality of the sequence, a notch or two more comic book like than the "Watchmen" series itself an effect that Lindelof, his co writer Nick Cuse and the director Nicole Kassell imply is what happens when history gets transformed into art. Everything is more vivid and intense . Readers of the original comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons will recognize the supermarket stickup as part of the origin story of Hooded Justice, the first masked vigilante, who sheathed a wrestler's physique in dark, tight clothing, a thick noose, a black cape and a hood. He looks like an executioner, although the hood and the noose, in the context of an episode about a lynching, has other disturbing associations. The sequence is part of the drip drip drip of information about the legacy of the Minutemen and the generations of costumed adventurers that followed, but its placement in this episode helps to grasp the slippery theme of identity that runs through the hour. In an episode where we paradoxically learn more and understand less about Angela Abar and Judd Crawford, the answer Hooded Justice gives to the question "Who are you?" ends in a big fat question mark. When he looked in the mirror, he explains, he was a stranger to himself, angry and uncomfortable in his own skin, yet "thirsting for justice." Delivering that justice in a hero's disguise scratches that itch and the shocking, gratuitous brutality of his crime fighting methods gives his anger a place to go, too. But there are two other important details to consider: When Hooded Justice smashes the ringleader's face into the counter repeatedly, to the horror of even the citizens he is saving, it recalls a moment earlier in the episode when Abar relentlessly pummels an attacker in Nixonville. And when Hooded Justice is answering the clerk's "Who are you?" question, part of his monologue is juxtaposed with images of Abar, driving a car as Sister Night. What does it all mean? "Watchmen" isn't about to give the game away on that, but it does help rebut suspicions that Sister Night wouldn't be as morally ambiguous as the vigilantes in Moore and Gibbons's book. She's our hero for certain, but she has already violated police protocol so often in throwing a Nixonville suspect in the back of her car, in holding Louis Gossett Jr.'s mystery man away from the authorities that the badge is merely a license for freelance mischief. She's angry, and she will beat adversaries within an inch of their lives. She, too, has a thirst for justice, just like the Minuteman on television, but her story is incomplete to herself as much as it is to us. Her instincts tell her that a 105 year old man in a wheelchair has some of the answers. He insists multiple times that he was the one who strung up Crawford, despite his seemingly diminished state, and she can't quite dismiss a claim that is so ridiculous on its face. He planted a seed earlier when he asked her if she thought he could lift 200 pounds, and then there he was, sitting beneath the dangling body of a 200 pound man, waiting for her specifically to turn up. So she gives herself the extrajudicial space to find out who he is. And she also allows him to show her what he wants her to see. And with that, the show turns on a dime. We know now that he was a man with "skeletons in his closet," namely a Ku Klux Klan robe with a police badge pinned on it. Yet we also have to grapple with Crawford's close relationship with Abar and wonder why he seemed to be her greatest ally and mentor on the force. Was Crawford the second Seventh Kavalry member in the Rorschach mask hovering above her during the White Night, when she was shot in the chest and seemingly on death's door? A cut from that scene to another in which Crawford hovers over her in the hospital certainly suggests as much. So much of "Watchmen" is about upending our assumptions, though, that it's worth acknowledging what we've actually learned, just to have one foot planted on terra firma. We know that Gossett's character, called Will here, is the child who escaped the Tulsa massacre of 1921, and that the note he was carrying was written on the back of a German propaganda flyer from World War I. We know that the DNA sample processed at the Greenwood Center for Cultural Heritage courtesy of Treasury Secretary Henry Louis Gates Jr.! revealed that Abar is Will's granddaughter. When Will is whisked away dramatically in the final scene, Abar is left with the note from her great grandfather, which beckons her to find her place on a century long continuum of black resistance within her family. That it took the lynching of a white man to make it happen is the type of counterintuitive twist the show savors. None One of the liberating aspects of Lindelof and company's departure from the text is they can color outside the lines all they like. No one could have guessed that the show would whisk us back to a German military secretarial pool during World War I, but it has the freedom to do it. None The episode title, "Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship," is a reference to "Comanche Feats of Horsemanship," the George Catlin painting that hangs in the Crawford manse. Catlin was known for his authentic depictions of Native Americans like this one, from 1834, when he followed the United States Dragoons into Native territory. What's notable about the painting is the Comanche technique of riding in a horizontal position on the side of the horse, screening your body from exposure. A good spot, in the show's logic, for a surprise attack. None The show's score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, has been a superb mood setter, but there are times when its indebtedness to John Carpenter's simple, synth based ambience borders on shameless. Listen to the music when Abar pulls up to discover Crawford's body and you'll swear that you've heard it somewhere before. None Abar should consider investing a few more bucks in her front. A bakery without sugar is awfully conspicuous. None Robust business at a newsstand? No wonder journalists love "Watchmen"! None "Topher, we don't go lollipops and rainbows, because we know those are pretty colors that hide what the world really is black and white." This how Rorschach sees the world, remember, hence the black and white on his mask. For Abar to express this sentiment is one of the many examples of how the show challenges and scrambles the book's mythos. None Jeremy Irons's identity has not been revealed, but those who have read the book can probably guess who he is based on his wealth and his genetic experimentation. His grisly staging of the Dr. Manhattan origin story is immensely disturbing, but in character. None Beastie Boys fans will surely delight to hear "Eggman," from the band's classic "Paul's Boutique" album, play over the closing credits. How apropos for a "remix" show to use a song that samples from a famous work, Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly," to achieve its own ends. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In the world of "I May Destroy You," the critically hailed HBO/BBC series written, co directed by and starring Michaela Coel, few things are ever static. The show, like its central characters young, exuberantly liberated but inherently vulnerable Black Britons navigating sex, power and friendship in a very recent London is held together by the cumulative force of its apparent contradictions. Those extend to the series's inspired and frequently arresting soundtrack. As in many stylish, music heavy coming of age dramas, from "The O.C." to "Euphoria," the music of "I May Destroy You" a vibrant, mostly modern mix of hip hop, electronic music, R B and jazz, much of it made by members of the African diaspora provides an appealing and useful foothold into the characters' social and psychological universe. But if most soundtracks create a closed experience for the viewer, driving home a set of emotions that the writer or director has prescribed, the most memorable music of "I May Destroy You" does precisely the opposite, opening up room for ambiguity and uncertainty. Ciara Elwis, 27, a music supervisor based in London, was Coel's partner in creating those moments among more than 150 music cues across 12 25 minute episodes. Elwis, who works for the music supervision company Air Edel, previously worked on "The End of the World," "Sex Education" and Joanna Hogg's "The Souvenir." For "I May Destroy You," she and a colleague, Matt Biffa, were tapped to expand and execute Coel's unique musical vision. I spoke to Elwis last week about how the music reflects the characters, why she doesn't want to tell the audience what to think and which were the songs that almost got away. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. How did you come to work on "I May Destroy You"? We were contacted by the producer and line producer to work on it I think they'd seen stuff we'd worked on in the past and thought it might be a good fit. We went for a meeting with Michaela near the set in East London and, luckily, she seemed to like us. They were about halfway through the shoot. Did she describe what she was looking for? One of the main things she spoke about was this podcast Soulection, which she listens to. I think a lot of the music that she had in mind for the series came from that. She had also written a few songs into the script, like "Truffle Butter" by Nicki Minaj, with Lil Wayne and Drake for Arabella's karaoke scene in the first episode. "Something About Us" by Daft Punk, "It's Gonna Rain" by Rev. Milton Brunson and the Thompson Community Singers and "Flowers" by Sweet Female Action, the Sunship Radio edit , which is the song they all dance to in the bar, were also in there. There's no score in the show it's all commercial tracks so we needed a lot of music. What was your process once the work began? After our meeting, I read all of the scripts and we went out to all of our various sources for music publishers and labels and things like that. They help us find a ton of music, and we listen to everything and put what we think might work into a massive playlist. Then we send that over to production, where the editors take different songs and try them out. Before the lockdowns, we'd all get together for what we call music spots, where we'd sit down with Michaela, the producers, and the editors and go over each episode cue by cue. Later, we did it all by Google Hangout, which was a bit weird but we made it work. If we came across a cue that needed music, or where the music wasn't working, I would pull five or six options for Michaela to make a final decision. A lot of the conversation would be about what the character might be thinking in the scene, or what they might be listening to. With Arabella, she's really upbeat and bubbly and full of life regardless of these horrible things that seem to happen to her so Michaela wanted a lot of female hip hop and gospel and things like that for her character. With Kwame Arabella's friend, a gay aerobics instructor played by Paapa Essiedu we used some L.G.B.T. artists that he might have an affinity for. It's not meant to be reductive, but it was really important for all the characters to have songs representing them, including in the lyrics, and for that add to your understanding of who they are. The show addresses sexual assault, trauma and other sensitive subjects with a lot of nuance. Things that we don't fully understand in one moment, like what happens to Arabella at the end of the first episode, take on different meanings over time. How did you approach that ambiguity with the soundtrack? I think it's the main reason that early on they decided that they didn't want to have a score. They were really keen that people be able to make up their own minds about how they felt about something, rather than having the music tell you, "This is sad, and you must feel sad now." Because a lot of what happens is quite complicated. Characters that we're supposed to feel sorry for in one episode go on to do horrible things to other characters in another. So with the music, we didn't want it to be leading you too much in one direction. A good example of that is at the end of Episode 2, where Terry's crying and they just put Arabella to bed after coming back from the police station. Instead of having a sort of classic sad song there, you have "Nightmares" by Easy Life , which has trumpets and a kind of upbeat groove to it. It takes you out of a place of being like, "Oh my God, I can't believe what happened to her, this is awful," and just creates some distance there for a different kind of release, which I think is really powerful. What was the hardest song to get the rights to? "It's Gonna Rain," which Michaela had chosen for a pivotal scene in the first episode. Arabella stumbles out of a bar and blacks out. Later, we realize a drug had been slipped into her drink . It was quite tricky, because it's a gospel song and not only is the show not Christian, but the scenes where the song is used are quite intense. We wrote a letter to the rights holders explaining what the show was trying to do, and they ended up being wonderful about it. Daft Punk was another one that was really exciting, because they don't say yes to much. And we almost couldn't use "Pynk" by Janelle Monae, not because of her, but because the song has an Aerosmith sample in it, and their approval didn't come in until the last minute. Do you have a favorite music moment from the show? I would say "It's Gonna Rain" is up there. It's really one of the key tracks of the series. We hear it in the first episode and then again in a later episode in a completely different context, and what's great about that is you feel the progression, the journey. There are about four or five different songs that are reprised at different times over the series, almost the way you would use a theme in a score. Each time you hear a reprisal, it's like connecting the dots along with the characters. Another one of my favorite moments is with the song "Cola" by Arlo Parks in Episode 7. We found the perfect moment for her in a Kwame scene toward the end of the episode. She writes really beautifully about depression and other difficult subjects, but she has this serene voice that kind of washes over you. I think it's the perfect fit for the experience of the show, which can be beautiful and true and horrible all at the same time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein's weekly N.B.A. newsletter here. LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. A knock on the heavy brown door of my first floor hotel room at Walt Disney World finally came Sunday night just before 10 p.m. This was the all business knock I was waiting for. Three technicians from BioReference Laboratories wearing white coats and face shields, and accompanied by an N.B.A. representative, had arrived to administer my first ever coronavirus test. According to the rules in the N.B.A.'s corner of Disney World, no one is allowed inside the 314 square foot room I am restricted to through Sunday. So I slid a chair up to the doorway to receive a shallow swab of each nostril and my throat. The sticks were snapped and placed in a tube, then stored in a crate to take back to the lab. The swabs, roughly five hours after I checked in, took less than a minute. I took my second coronavirus test Monday night, nearly 24 hours later, even before I had a result confirmed from the first. But the end goal remains unchanged: I need a week's worth of negative results from daily tests to gain full entry into what everyone refers to as the N.B.A. bubble even though league officials, as Commissioner Adam Silver put it last week, acknowledge that it is better described as a campus because it is by no means "hermetically sealed." Only two reporters are fully inside so far. Once the rest of us are allowed to look around, access restrictions for reporters will be the most onerous in league history. The N.B.A. believes that's the appropriate approach for what is surely its most complex undertaking in league history, but the strictness makes it difficult to say how much of the bubble we'll really be able to see. Reporters can only go three places after quarantining game venues, practice sites and the hotel designated for the news media. The three hotels that house the 22 teams are off limits. Yet this first of its kind event, even after accounting for all those deterrents, was simply unmissable. Regular readers of this newsletter know that for weeks I have been voicing concerns about the dangers of the N.B.A. restart, stemming from the virus as well as soft tissue injury risks. That apprehension hasn't gone away; how could it when Florida racked up a national record 15,300 new coronavirus cases on Sunday as I arrived? But this is the league I've been fortunate to cover for nearly 30 years. The moment is just too big, too historic and too different to stay away. "This is going to be a very unique opportunity to observe the human condition," said Tommy Sheppard, the general manager of the Washington Wizards. Closer to 20 journalists, compared to the anticipated 10, have been approved to enter, reflecting the considerable curiosity generated by 22 teams that must live and play at a single site without fans. That includes journalists from The Associated Press, The Athletic, The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Los Angeles Times, Southern California News Group, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, The Washington Post and The New York Times. A like number of journalists from the league's official media partners, ESPN and Turner, is also expected, including one reporter from each outlet who was allowed to arrive early to complete their quarantines before teams started arriving on July 7: Malika Andrews (ESPN) and Chris Haynes (Turner/Yahoo). Those outlets will have enjoyed a 12 or 13 day jump on the rest of us by the time we can exit our rooms and attend a practice. Yet I learned long ago, from several mentors at The Orange County Register in the 1980s when I was just starting out, that sportswriters shouldn't bemoan work conditions to readers because they simply don't want to hear it. So I will shut up and report from behind that brown door until lockdown ends and report even more on the other side. A few more highlights and observations to share from the first 48 hours: None The next time you fly, expect to feel disoriented. Being back in the Dallas Fort Worth airport Sunday for the first time since March 13, even as much as I typically travel, was ... tense. Any time a line had to be formed, just figuring out where to stand and how to social distance was awkward. And that was before I even got on the plane. None On top of the well chronicled three daily food drop offs made to everyone in quarantine, room service is available from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. I've tested it twice, but I have not yet tried either the New York strip steak or the braised beef short ribs that had the Los Angeles Lakers' newly signed J.R. Smith excited, amid his various complaints, when he read the menu aloud last week on Instagram Live. None I am a coffee snob who has zero dexterity to make my own coffee decently, no matter how hard I try. I stuffed one suitcase and two large duffel bags to capacity but that left no room to bring my own fancy coffee maker. So I purchased some space efficient Keurig pods that looked interesting online, packed them to use with the machine in my room and hoped for the best. After it was too late, I shared this plan with Utah Jazz forward Joe Ingles. "Keurig ain't it," Ingles said with a laugh. Utah's coffee connoisseur was right. None I can handle the isolation I think. The only daunting development so far was finding out, after fully unpacking, that we must move to a new room after completing the seven day quarantine. I couldn't function until two months' worth of clothes were all on the extra hangers I brought, or until I found places for the considerable work supplies, toiletries, hats, snacks (peanuts mostly) and maybe even a small stash of a glass bottle soft drink you may have heard colleagues rib me about in the past. None I can't leave the room until Sunday night, but I haven't seen any security presence outside my window. I nonetheless intend to obey the rules and stay put, no matter how badly I would like to walk to the ice machine steps from my room. Even that is not permitted. None The thick, gray, rubber MagicBand bracelet that functions as a room key is adorned with two iconic silhouettes: Mickey Mouse and Jerry West, the inspiration for the N.B.A. logo. It may prove to be the best Disney souvenir we take home when this is all over if we indeed get to keep it. I am scheduled to be here until early September, before a handoff to my colleague Scott Cacciola. Of course, as we all know by now, planning in 2020 tends to be futile. So especially in these early stages, for me as much as anyone, bubble life is probably best approached day to day. Stephen Jackson helped the San Antonio Spurs win a championship in his third N.B.A. season. He moved past his role in the ugliest brawl in league annals to earn a lasting place in Golden State Warriors folklore. When his playing career ended, Jackson stayed in the game by transitioning to the media industry. Then he eclipsed all of those achievements by fighting so passionately for justice on behalf of George Floyd, his longtime friend from the Houston area whom he affectionately referred to as "Twin." The leadership and energy Jackson has poured into the Black Lives Matter movement over the past six weeks, at one of the most meaningful junctures for race relations in this nation's history, has been the finest work of his 20 years in the public eye. Yet it has suddenly become difficult to focus on any of that. Last week, Jackson made anti Semitic remarks and defended a social media post from DeSean Jackson of the Philadelphia Eagles that used a quote widely misattributed to Adolf Hitler and also cited Louis Farrakhan, a minister with a history of anti Semitic comments. I have covered Stephen Jackson extensively through his highs and lows. I briefly worked alongside him at ESPN. I profiled him for The New York Times as recently as June 11, covering his emergence as an activist after Floyd's death under the headline: "Stephen Jackson Was Known in the N.B.A. as an Agitator. Now He's Leading a Movement." In the article, Jackson spoke of his determination to be "a voice for the voiceless" as his voice unexpectedly became so prominent. It is against the backdrop of Stephen Jackson's widely lauded activism, beyond my status as Jewish journalist who covers the N.B.A., that Jackson's comments were so disturbing. It was disappointing to watch and not only for the pain it caused when Stephen Jackson was slow to apologize for his initial backing of DeSean Jackson and then repeated a centuries old trope about how Jews "control all the banks." It was also hard to watch because of the damage Stephen Jackson did to himself. Having taken on such a momentous role in the battle against systemic racism and police brutality that means so much to so many in the N.B.A., Jackson swiftly undermined those efforts. As Michael Wilbon, another former ESPN colleague of mine, so aptly put it on "Pardon The Interruption," Jackson hurt his own credibility as a voice for equality. In a CNN interview with Don Lemon, Jackson ultimately conceded that he used the "wrong words" from the beginning. Jackson insisted that his much criticized support for DeSean Jackson was misconstrued and that he failed to clarify that when he spoke of DeSean Jackson being "right," he was referring to a private conversation the two had about DeSean Jackson's treatment by the Eagles. But DeSean Jackson's initial post purported to quote Hitler, the personification of hate after orchestrating the genocide of six million Jews during the Holocaust. It also invoked Farrakhan, who has a well chronicled history of anti Semitic comments, including describing Hitler as "a very great man." The perception thus lingers for Stephen Jackson that he endorsed the most offensive possible hate speech to Jews and then showed less contrition than DeSean Jackson, who is not related. I have my own personal connection to the Holocaust, as I have written, after my late father and his parents were seized by the Nazis in Romania when he was 9 1/2 months old and ultimately taken to a concentration camp called Transnistria. But I am trying to separate that as much as I can and cover this, first and foremost, as an N.B.A. issue, just as I am trying to understand and cover issues that affect people of color every day in this league better than I have before. In virtually every social media message Jackson has posted since Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody on May 25, Jackson has included what has become his signature phrase: Love For All Who Have Love For All. At a great cost last week, Jackson seemed to completely forget his own mantra. With such significant topics commandeering the first two sections of this newsletter, we have placed Corner Three on a one week hiatus. It will return next Tuesday. The Detroit Pistons are one of three N.B.A. franchises to win a title in the inaugural season at their home building. The Pistons won it all in 1988 89 to cap their first season at The Palace of Auburn Hills, with the Los Angeles Lakers (Staples Center in 1999 2000) and San Antonio (AT T Center in 2002 03) later duplicating the feat. The Pistons moved back to downtown Detroit for the 2017 18 season after spending nearly 30 years in the suburb of Auburn Hills, Mich., and the previous 10 seasons in Pontiac, Mich. The remains of The Palace, whose demolition began in February, were imploded Saturday. Washington's Bradley Beal, who elected not to participate in the N.B.A. restart because of a right shoulder injury, finished the season with a scoring average of 30.5 points per game. He's the first player in league history to crack the 30 points per game barrier for a season without earning All Star status. Even after electing to skip the Wizards' eight seeding games at Walt Disney World, Beal will have appeared in 79.1 percent of Washington's games this season. As my pal Justin Kubatko ( jkubatko), a creator of Basketball Reference, recently reminded us via Twitter, Beal had to play in at least 70 percent of Washington's games to qualify among the league's scoring leaders. Beal realistically wasn't going to catch James Harden's 34.4 points per game, even if he had played in Florida, but his absence means Harden needs only 12 points in the Houston Rockets' eight forthcoming games in Florida to win his third consecutive N.B.A. scoring title. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The Helsinki Airport hopes to help jet lagged travelers catch up on their sleep with the introduction of new sleeping pods at two of its international gates. The Finnish made GoSleep Sleeping Pods feature a recliner set within a hard shell outer casing. Travelers can place their carry ons in a compartment under the seat, plug in their portable devices for charging from electrical outlets in the pod, and then use a credit card to rent the chair (EUR9 per hour). Once the chair reclines flat, users can pull down a porous felt cover that screens light and reduces noise, while enclosing sleepers inside the pod until an automated alarm wakes them up. With 19 sleeping pods installed in February, Helsinki claims to be the first European airport to offer the chairs, though they are also available in Abu Dhabi International Airport. An optional pillow costs EUR6, and a blanket EUR9. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
For longtime Williamsburg denizens, the area's North Side now feels like a grim "Mad Max" wasteland patrolled by clean cut conquistadors in hipster Halloween costumes. Seeking cooler climes, the neighborhood's holdouts now huddle in a South Side oasis along Broadway, just south of the Williamsburg Bridge, where new spots like Loosie Rouge have cropped up around the stately century old street. With its windows cast open to the street on a toasty Saturday night, Loosie Rouge lured night crawlers coming from dinner at Diner or gassing up for a show at Baby's All Right. Talk was of the Governor's Ball and Bushwick Open Studios earlier that day, with the words "amazing" and "nightmare" being used almost interchangeably. Just south of the Williamsburg Bridge, where passing J trains, cast iron lofts and sooty brick stack buildings provide unimpeachable old New York atmospherics. The apartment size bar's magic hour glow and midcentury Scandinavian decor will make you curse your own digs, and add up to an inviting je ne sais quoi. "I really like it," Uma Madan, a Brooklyn based beauty writer said on a recent night. "It feels so Euro," she added, before conceding that she'd never actually visited the continent. Nearly all the guests are chugging into their 30s and look dressed for an al fresco dinner party in Tulum, with men in botanical print Hawaiian shirts and women in witchy blacks and geometric jewelry. Early evenings are serene, as fledgling couples flirt and wingmates scheme. After 11 p.m., a thirstier set rolls in, clamoring for cocktails at the bar and perhaps a reason to pocket one of the sleepover toothbrushes Loosie Rouge provides in its loo. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Fans of the director John Tiffany know that "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is only his latest bit of sorcery. Since he marched onto the scene a decade or so ago with the dazzling "Black Watch," he has also given us a decadent "Bacchae," a swoony "Once," a robustly lyrical "The Glass Menagerie" and a coolly feverish "Let the Right One In." There are some differences this time: He's working on an enormous scale ("Cursed Child" is capitalized for Broadway at a Gringotts busting 35.5 million) and he's not only the play's director. In collaboration with J.K. Rowling, the author of the novels, and Jack Thorne, who wrote the script, he dreamed up the story, which imagines a Harry aged from boy wizard to dad wizard. The show was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, one of them recognizing Mr. Tiffany's emotive, cape swirling direction. On a break from rehearsing a new London cast for the show, Mr. Tiffany, 46, spoke about his influences. First and foremost: "People, really, because at the end of the day, who are you if not the people that surrounded you, influenced you, challenged you, angered you, made you furious with pleasure and joy and lust?" Many of his "Cursed Child" colleagues are friends he has known and worked with for decades. Steven Hoggett the "Cursed Child" choreographer and I, we met when we were 14 and one of the things we bonded over was our absolute adoration of Kate Bush's album "Hounds of Love." It starts with a young woman going to sleep. She falls into a nightmare that she's come back as a ghost. Then there's a bit where she ends up in space looking at the earth. "The Morning Fog" is the last song. She comes back and realizes how joyful life is. I didn't think music could do that. I thought albums were just a collection of songs. I never get star struck. I never fanboy. Ever ever ever. But she feels part of my DNA. I had the absolute good fortune of meeting her when we were at the Evening Standard Theater Awards. I said, "I promise you I'm not a freak, I promise you I'm not a weirdo. I just have to say something: As I was growing up and listening to your music, it taught me something about storytelling and challenging form and really really pushing boundaries, and that's probably one of the massive, massive reasons I'm a theater director." It's set in Yorkshire and I grew up in Huddersfield, which is a town in Yorkshire. Very rural, very kind of beautiful and bleak. There's something about the landscape manifest in those two characters, Cathy and Heathcliff, that just makes me kind of ache for home whenever I think about it. That book has buried itself inside of me. I know it's not perfect in the way that something like "Pride and Prejudice" is, but it gnaws at me even more because of that. Weirdly, the thing that made me read the book was Kate Bush's song "Wuthering Heights." I was 15 going on 16 and wildly romantic when I read it, and I think because of "Wuthering Heights," I still am. When I sold my flat in Glasgow, I bought a little cottage on the North Yorkshire coast. Whenever we go up from London to stay there, I'm just like, "I'm home! I'm home in Bronte land!" I was pre med at Glasgow University. I was from a family who were of the mind that if you were clever enough to be a doctor or a lawyer, why wouldn't you be? A friend of mine was studying theater, and he said to me one day, "I've got a spare ticket." It turned out to be "Tectonic Plates," directed by and starring Robert Lepage. It was the most radical and extremely entertaining piece of performance I had ever seen. It had a beautiful, accessible story that would just jump from city to city, from continent to continent. There was one scene in a library in Venice; two characters were there. It ended with them saying, "We need to go to New York." The light that had been shining on the books from the front moved so that it was shining from behind. And the books became the Manhattan skyline reflected in the Hudson River. I was born again. I remember gasping. There was no sci fi, there was no CGI, there was no huge automation. My work's always searching for that moment. As a result of seeing "Tectonic Plates," the next day I swapped from doing pre med to doing theater and classics. My tutor at the time, somebody who's been massively influential, a man called Alasdair Cameron he very excitedly said to me, "Have you read Tennessee Williams? Have you read 'The Glass Menagerie?'" I read that opening monologue: "I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician." And I was like, "You can't do that! Theater has to pretend it's real!" Because that was my experience of it. And then I went on to read the most beautiful story of the tragedy of this family. I was just forever changed. I just thought, "Well this is it." It's the most inspiring, illuminating, heartbreaking. It has never, ever let me down. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
MUMBAI, India This summer, Jaguar Land Rover cranked up production to 24 hours at its plant near Liverpool, England, adding 1,000 jobs to help meet demand for its hot selling and acclaimed Range Rover Evoque. Now, the company is readying the release of its much anticipated Jaguar F Type roadster. Four years after being bought by an Indian company, the well known but somewhat faded British brands are regaining some of their lost luster, racking up big sales from Shanghai to London. The success has stunned analysts and investors, many of whom had said that Tata Motors, the Indian auto company, was making an expensive mistake when it acquired Jaguar Land Rover from Ford Motor for 2.3 billion in June 2008. At the time, Ford was raising money to ensure its own survival, and it sold the brands for several billion dollars less than it had paid to acquire them years earlier. Analysts say Tata has done what few companies from emerging markets have been able to do turn around and successfully run a troubled Western company. Many others, including Tata Motor's sister company Tata Steel, which paid 11.3 billion for Corus Steel in 2007, have struggled with acquisitions made in Europe and the United States in the era of cheap money before the financial crisis. Tata Motors appears to have succeeded in large part because it did not seek to run Jaguar Land Rover from Tata headquarters here. Instead, it has left day to day management in the hands of executives in England. It also benefited from projects started under Ford ownership, including the Evoque, which has won fans, including the exacting hosts of the BBC show "Top Gear" and the Chinese nouveau riche. In its last fiscal year, which ended in March, Jaguar Land Rover posted a 27 percent jump in retail sales, to 306,000 vehicles, and became the primary driver of growth and profit for Tata Motors. The Indian car and truck business of Tata has stagnated in the same time because of a slowing domestic economy and a weak product lineup that includes about a dozen passenger cars. Sales of Tata cars were up an anemic 4 percent in the previous fiscal year. Analysts said that barring a global economic recession, they expected Jaguar Land Rover to continue to do well because it was about to release several new models, including a redesigned version of its flagship Range Rover and the F Type. "I think people were a bit skeptical and snobbish and maybe had some old colonial hangover," Tim Urquhart, a senior analyst at IHS Automotive in London, said about the initial doubts about the acquisition. But he added, "If you look at Land Rover and Jaguar now, they probably have the strongest product line in their recent history if not ever." Tata's takeover of Jaguar Land Rover did not always look promising. The financial crisis hit soon after the deal closed, and demand for luxury cars tumbled in Europe and North America its two biggest markets. Struggling with a 3 billion debt it took on to pay for the deal, Tata Motors was forced to put more money into the company after it failed to secure financial aid from Britain. Many analysts questioned whether the company paid too much and extended itself too far, speculating that its chairman, Ratan Tata, a car buff and scion of the family that built the Tata group of companies, had become too enamored of buying global brands. Over the years, the group has acquired Tetley Tea, the Pierre Hotel in New York and Daewoo Commercial Vehicles in South Korea. "The acquisition has worked because the investment has been carefully targeted and effective," Phil Popham, global operations director for Jaguar Land Rover, said in a written response to questions. "Our growth is supported by a disciplined financial plan involving tight cost controls and targeted investments." Analysts and competitors credit the turnaround to Tata's financial reserves, which helped it weather tough times, and its wisdom in granting autonomy to managers in England. "What has helped is that Tata had staying power," said an executive at another auto company who asked not to be named because he did not want to speak publicly about a rival. "And Tata adopted a hands off policy." Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. The Ford effect extends beyond its past investments in the brands and the design and engineering for the Evoque. Most engines in Jaguar Land Rover cars still come from Ford, though the company is building its own engine factory in England. Led by a former BMW executive, Ralf Speth, who took over as chief executive in early 2010, Jaguar Land Rover makes all of its cars, which range from 36,000 for an entry level S.U.V. to 140,000 for a convertible, in factories in England, though it is now starting assembly operations in other countries. The company reported this month that its latest quarterly profit was up 7.5 percent from a year ago to PS235.9 million, or 372 million. In North America, the company's sales were up 15 percent, to 58,003 cars, in the fiscal year that ended in March. J. D. Power recently rated Jaguar as the "most improved" car brand in its quality rankings. Much of the success has come in China, a country that provided just 1 percent of Jaguar Land Rover's sales as recently as 2005 and is projected to generate sales in the double digits this year. The company made a big effort to expand dealerships in the country, where luxury car sales have been much stronger than in Western markets. Executives expect China to become the company's largest market soon, and last year they announced that Jaguar Land Rover would begin building and assembling cars there. High end car buyers in China appear to be drawn to Jaguars and Land Rovers in part because they are considered a novelty. Liu Gang, a 33 year old finance executive in Shanghai who confessed to not knowing much about cars, recently bought a Jaguar XF sports sedan, for which he paid 700,000 yuan, or 110,000. He considered and dismissed comparable models from BMW and Mercedes Benz as passe. "Let me be honest, it's just a symbol of status," he said. "Anybody in China can have a Mercedes Benz." But analysts say the Jaguar Land Rover's growing reliance on China suggests that a sharp slowdown there and another euro related shock in Europe could derail its growth. Another concern is whether the company has enough models beside the Evoque to power future sales. The Evoque accounted for 85 percent of sales growth in the last fiscal year even though it was only on sale for the last seven months of the year. By contrast, sales of Jaguars have been relatively muted, increasing just 5 percent in the last fiscal year. More recently, Jaguar posted a 16.3 percent increase in global sales in the first seven months of this year compared with the same period last year. Mr. Popham said the company expected sales of Jaguars to pick up with the introduction of the F Type, a long awaited sequel to its well known E Type roadster, which was introduced in 1961 and is considered by many car aficionados as one of the most beautiful sports cars ever made. A production version of the F Type will make its debut at the Paris Motor Show on Sept. 27. "A lot is riding on the F Type roadster," said Hormazd Sorabjee, editor of AutoCar India, a Mumbai based car magazine, adding that Jaguar has made big strides but still has a "fair amount to do." Still, analysts say that for Tata Motors, which recently hired a senior executive from General Motors to help revive its flagging Indian auto business, Jaguar Land Rover is likely to remain a driving force for the near future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
TWO thousand miles into the trip, with another 1,000 yet to go, it was a 30 cent fuse that finally stopped us. But maybe that's the sort of trouble you have to anticipate when trying to cross the continent in an old car. Accompanied by my co driver and longtime photographer friend, Terry Moore, I started out last fall with a simple goal: drive a classic convertible coast to coast, mostly following U.S. Route 50 because it is one of the most intact, Interstate skirting east west roads still on the maps. Just two middle age guys, wives and worries left behind, the open sun struck road ahead. And not in just any old car, but a 1958 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, a long neglected castoff that I bought in South Jersey three years ago and had hauled to Vermont for a rebuild of its engine, transmission and brakes. Otherwise, it remained original the black paint worn, its red leather tuck and roll seat covers splitting at various seams, and whatever mysteries and ailments haunting the wiring, the cooling system and the drivetrain waiting to reveal themselves. We knew that the car would also attract attention it is not small or subtle and create opportunities to meet people with stories to tell. It did not take long for the adventures to unfold. "That's a rare car," said Jim Fuccello, manager of Fuccello's Custom Exhaust in Trenton, N.J., after his shop corrected mistakes made by the installer of the dual muffler system. "A very rare car," he added for emphasis. It sounded like a warning that setting off for California in such an unusual car might not be the wisest plan. Only 815 Biarritz convertibles were made in 1958, the year of a deep recession. Quad headlights were a recent innovation, and tailfins were reaching new heights. Still, compared with the egregious fins of the 1959 models, tacked on over the objections of Cadillac stylists as G.M.'s panicked response to the 1957 Chrysler line, our car seemed quite subdued. Mr. Fuccello's comment was well founded: as romantic as it may sound to drive off into the sunset in a 1958 Eldorado, it would be an unusual use of the car. For starters, insurers of collector cars limit how many miles the cars may be driven typically a few thousand a year and restrict the use to club meets, "parades, cultural and educational events," to quote a typical policy, and Sunday drives with the family. Additionally, the rarity of the Eldorado meant that it was more than just another valuable car; in the case of an unrestored original like mine, it would be essentially irreplaceable. Little wonder, then, that when I wrote 6,000 miles on the insurance application as my intended driving distance, the company called to ask why it was so high. I replied that I wanted to take a cross country trip, starting in Ocean City, Md., the eastern terminus of U.S.Route 50. The highway ends 3,000 miles west, in Sacramento. Lars Kneller, a family doctor in LaPorte, Ind., who is also president of the Cadillac LaSalle Club, agreed that owners typically used their cars for collector gatherings . He added: "We don't drive them much, and we're pretty careful when we do." Our plan, by contrast, called for lots of driving in a car that had not made a long trip since its mechanical overhaul. Sure enough, on our first day the quirky magic of the old Cadillac asserted itself: it breaks down, but when it does, people are really nice to you. The first repair adventure began as an intermittent but tortured rattle and bang, coming from under the floor, that made the big car buck and stumble. With visions of the trip ending even before reaching our starting point, we limped into what was reputedly the best garage in Berlin, Md. But we were turned away an old car could be nothing but problems, we guessed, and the shop had a full datebook. Desperate, we drove to a local Goodyear tire outlet. The service manager heard my pleading and said, sure, Frank could look at it in a few minutes. Frank Digiacomo, a motorist's friend, put the Caddy on a lift and immediately spotted the problem: the driveshaft's center support it is a two piece design had come loose, and the shaft was flopping around, slapping the crossbraces of the frame. Mr. Digiacomo secured the support with strong bolts, corrected a loose universal joint, checked the tires and said we were good to go. I said I'd go settle the bill. Mr. Digiacomo smiled. "That's O.K.," he said. "We got you." "We got you," he repeated, meaning there would be no charge. We were obviously crazy, he said, and he approved. This would happen again. However much it might fly in the face of discretion to take an unproven old car on the open road, it certainly struck a chord in the hearts of car loving Americans we met along the way. We had climbed out of corn country and into the dry wheat fields of the High Plains west of Dodge City, Kan., when we noticed that the fuel and temperature gauges had stopped working, and that the generator light was glowing. The service manager at Lewis Cadillac in Garden City had a mechanic wheel out diagnostic equipment and polarize the voltage regulator; he assured us that whatever the problem was, the battery was being charged as it should. The dealership did not charge, however. But by then the Rockies and the deserts of the Great Basin lay before us, and our planned 10 days on the road had already stretched to two weeks. Counting caution as the better part of valor, we drove the Cadillac to Fort Collins, Colo., and finished the U.S. 50 trek in my sister's utterly reliable, predictable, practical and fin free Subaru. Five days later, I was back in Fort Collins, seeking a diagnosis for the generator lights. It took Gilsdorf Garage half an hour to find the blown fuse causing the problem. The tab: 30 cents for parts, 30 for labor. Alone now, I turned east and powered over the western Interstates at 80 miles an hour, hour after hour, for a 2,000 mile homeward run. A side trip to see friends in Detroit included a stop on Clark Street, where the multistory assembly plant that built my car once stood. The Cadillac ran flawlessly, the bugs of the westbound trip finally exorcised. At last, my Eldorado was ready for a long road trip. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
When "Everything Sucks!" joins "The End of the ing World" on the Netflix Originals roster on Friday, the streaming service will have two new coming of age comedies with more in common than their confrontational titles. On paper, at least. Each show centers on a pair of high school outsiders, a boy and a girl, each of whom has one absent parent. (In the 10 episode American series "Everything," the boy's father and the girl's mother are gone; in the eight episode British "End," it's the other way around.) The missing moms are dead, the missing dads are deadbeats. Each show plays teasing games of will they or won't they, finding endless last minute ways to forestall kisses or worse. Each boy gallantly takes full responsibility for a crime the corresponding girl was complicit in. But no matter how many standard features of the teenage comedy the two series share, they're as different as night and day, and there's no question which one's the dark one. Here's a hint: In "Everything," the boy takes the rap for pulling a fire alarm in the school gym. In "End," the boy takes the rap for an extremely bloody killing committed with a hunting knife. It's worth noting here that "End," which is jarring, aggressively morbid and by far the better of the two shows, was originally made for good old broadcast television it was shown on Britain's Channel 4 last year before arriving on Netflix in January. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, a surgeon and researcher who performed the first successful liver transplant on a human patient in the 1960s and later helped advance the breakthrough drugs that made organ transplants markedly more survivable, died on Saturday at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 90. His death was announced by the University of Pittsburgh, with which he had been affiliated since 1981. In 1967, Dr. Starzl led a surgical team at the University of Colorado in a procedure that many in the medical community had dismissed as impractical, if not impossible. Although kidneys had been transplanted successfully since the 1950s, all previous attempts to replace a liver had resulted in the death of the patient. Indeed, Dr. Starzl's first four attempts at liver transplantation, in 1963, had failed when the patients experienced complications from the use of blood clotting agents, which in some cases caused lethal clots to form in the lungs. After a self imposed moratorium that lasted three years, Dr. Starzl and his colleagues tried again. They first considered inserting a second liver, to function beneath the impaired one, as a possible route to avoiding the heavy bleeding caused by organ removal. But promising results obtained from liver surgeries on dogs could not be replicated in human patients, and that avenue was abandoned. The team then operated on a 19 month old girl and replaced her cancerous liver. The transplanted liver functioned without ill effects for more than a year, before the infant died of other causes. In the next year, as surgical techniques were improved, this pathbreaking success was repeated in six children and, ultimately, in adults. Dr. Starzl later described those early liver transplants as both a "test of endurance" and "a curious exercise in brutality." It involved, he explained, "brutality as you're taking the liver out, then sophistication as you put it back in and hook up all of these little bile ducts and other structures." "Each one," he said, "is a thread on which the whole enterprise hangs." While the early liver recipients survived for months and sometimes for years, organ researchers soon realized that survival rates would largely hinge on the patient's long term immunological response to foreign tissue. In the late 1970s, Dr. Starzl helped investigate the efficacy of cyclosporine, a drug that laboratory tests indicated could inhibit the body's immune response. In drug trials held at Colorado and at Brigham Young University in Utah, cyclosporine was subsequently used to prevent rejection by the patient receiving a donated organ. Dr. Starzl applied the drug in combination with steroids to avoid a toxic effect on the kidneys. After further trials conducted at the University of Minnesota and the University of Texas, cyclosporine was approved in 1983 by the Food and Drug Administration. In 1981, when he moved to the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Starzl expanded his success with liver transplants by working on the transplantation of multiple organs. He provided Stormie Jones, a 6 year old suffering from a hereditary condition that produces dangerously high cholesterol levels, with a new liver and heart in a novel combined operation in 1984. Dr. Starzl later helped transplant her liver a second time, after damage to the organ from hepatitis. In that operation, Dr. Andreas Tzakis and Dr. Starzl used FK 506, an experimental anti rejection drug, which went on to become widely used in transplant surgeries. Dr. John Lake, a professor of medicine and surgery at the University of Minnesota and an expert on transplants, said the drug turned out to be "easier to use than cyclosporine, particularly in liver transplants, and was rapidly proven to be a more effective, and more potent, immunosuppressant." He added: "It was Thomas Starzl who lobbied hard and generated the enthusiasm for using FK 506. In the process, he drove the early program that thoroughly tested the drug." With Dr. John Fung, a surgeon and immunologist, and others, Dr. Starzl evaluated FK 506, also known as tacrolimus. They published their findings in the British medical journal The Lancet in 1989. Their investigation was not without risk; other scientists showed that tacrolimus had proved toxic when tested in dogs, and they doubted that it could be safe for humans. But the unexpected result was a medical breakthrough for patients and lavish headlines for the University of Pittsburgh, which Dr. Starzl helped fashion into an international center for training transplant specialists. The university appointed Dr. Starzl director of its transplant unit in 1990, in what six years later was officially renamed the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute. A former colleague from Pittsburgh, Dr. Byers Shaw Jr., praised Dr. Starzl's "indomitable spirit" and said that FK 506, eventually approved in 1994 by the F.D.A., was a shining example of tenacity in a career spent "challenging the conventional thinking." Dr. Shaw, who is now the chairman of the department of surgery at the University of Nebraska, observed Dr. Starzl in the operating room in the 1980s, when a patient appeared to be dying during surgery. Dr. Starzl, he recalled, showed "persistence when everything else looked hopeless." "It affected everybody in the room," Dr. Shaw said, "as if a fear of failure was driving all of those around him." After the death of Stormie Jones at age 13 in 1990, Dr. Starzl announced that he was weary of surgery and emotionally exhausted from "an uncompromisingly difficult life." He decided to stop performing surgery, although he continued to consult on difficult procedures. He also experimented with transplanting baboon livers into human patients animal transplants have long been suggested as a potential solution in dealing with periodic shortages of human organs but the results were disappointing. And he advanced a theory that involved the weaning of patients from the very drugs that had made their transplant possible. In the years since the advent of cyclosporine, researchers had become aware of cancers, diabetes and other serious health problems that could in some instances be tied to long term use of immunosuppressants. Dr. Starzl's theory was based on his studies of patients from the 1960s who had survived even after stopping their medications in effect, weaning themselves off anti rejection drugs. Working with a Nobel Prize winning Swiss immunologist, Dr. Rolf M. Zinkernagel, and others, Dr. Starzl explored the phenomenon and found that some patients' immune systems ultimately seemed to tolerate foreign tissue, without need for continued suppression. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Marta Wohrle and her husband, Pascal Volle, were relocating to New York from London in 2001 and mostly looking in Chelsea when they came upon a two level, "very affordable" apartment that was just what they needed. However, she said, "It was in a strange location," tucked away on an almost entirely industrial side street two blocks from Pennsylvania Station. It turned out to be in Midtown South, a neighborhood that, besides encompassing bustling Penn Station and the attached Madison Square Garden, also envelops Herald Square, Greeley Square Park, Bryant Park, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library and the Empire State Building. In recent years, it has become more residential and more pleasant over all. "We wanted a loft, a fairly raw space, and some outdoor space," said Ms. Wohrle, 59, the founder of Truth in Aging, where women test beauty products for the website, which also sells the most highly regarded. Ms. Wohrle and Mr. Pascal, 58, who works in mergers and acquisitions in the media field, paid 1.3 million, she said, for what is now, after extensive renovations, a three bedroom, three bath co op apartment with a large rooftop terrace in a former button factory. It feels quiet and secluded on weekends, she said. Theirs is still the only residential building on the block, which otherwise is filled with remnants of the garment industry that once thrived in the area. "One of my hobbies is dressmaking, so this a perfect area for me," said Ms. Wohrle, formerly the senior vice president digital for Hachette Filipacchi Media. "If I need a zipper or some fabric, I can just pop down to one of the stores." She also likes the many small food shops nearby "It feels like being in Europe" and, more recently, the addition of the High Line and Hudson Yards to the west. "I'm always kind of surprised that it has a community feel," she said. "People know me. They recognize me at the butcher's, and I chat with the postman." On the eastern end of the neighborhood, Judith Kaufer, a clinical psychologist, and her husband, both in their 60s, live in a prewar three bedroom, three bath co op on Madison Avenue that was intended as a residential building. But still, she said, "We feel we are on the edge of what is mostly a business district." That is changing a bit, she said, as a few new condominiums are being added on Madison and Fifth Avenues. "Our building has a roof deck, and when we sit there, we are aware of how the buildings are just sprouting like weeds all around us," Ms. Kaufer said. The couple moved from a Chelsea loft in 2005, she said, after her mother died and she invited her father, then 86 and living alone, to join them. "We needed a place that worked better for three adults, with occasional visits from our sons," now 36 and 39, she said. "My father had his own little area and his own bath." He died in 2017, but Ms. Kaufer said she has grown too attached to the neighborhood to want to move. She can walk to her office on Third Avenue, shop at Macy's (now that Lord Taylor's Fifth Avenue store closed earlier this year, she said) and easily reach public transportation on the east and west sides of Manhattan, to get to Lincoln Center or visit friends. She uses nearby branch libraries to pick up books, she said, but takes her grandchildren to the main building's "wonderful children's room" and to Bryant Park behind it. Though Ann Miller, an investment banker, lives closer to Penn Station, she passes through Bryant Park when she walks to her office at Lexington and 53rd Street. "It's nice to sit there, though I never have time to watch the movies they show in the summer," she said. Ms. Miller, 50, had been renting a small duplex in Hell's Kitchen, and the one bedroom co op apartment with big windows and tall ceilings that she found in 2002 in a former industrial building "spoke to me," she said. She bought it for 485,000 and later, for 500,000, added the other unit on her floor, spending "twice as much" for renovations. "It was a labor of love," Ms. Miller said. "It was my own little oasis." Her husband, Francois Merazga, 51, whom she married in 2005, had encouraged her to buy the second apartment, she said. He manages co ops and condos. Her block had three co ops when she moved in, including one inhabited by artists, some of them well known, she said. Recently, a condo was built, and, on nearby streets, small hotels have popped up. She endured three years of construction, she said, "but that's over. We're already back to quiet." In general, she said, "I like gentrification. It was a wasteland before, not a good use of space." She used to joke that she lived "in the dirty 30s, between Penn Station and Port Authority. It's very different now." "It has changed dramatically if you go back 10 years," Ms. Blair said. "It was really stagnant for a long time," as garment manufacturing moved elsewhere in the world and zoning restricted some uses of the buildings. Now the area is diverse and dynamic, she said, with an increase to 139,000 jobs in 2018 from 89,000 jobs in 2000, and 43 new hotels since 2005 in the whole district. That has brought in more coffee shops and restaurants, which in turn make the area more attractive for residential use. In addition, she said, her alliance has added planters, seating and wider pedestrian areas along Seventh Avenue and Broadway. This kind of beautification is happening elsewhere, too, said Daniel A. Biederman, the president of the 34th Street Partnership and the executive director of the Bryant Park Corporation. "We've come a long way since the '70s, when murders, rapes, assaults and everything terrible was happening in Bryant Park," he said. "We've made it clean, safe and pleasant." 11 EAST 36TH STREET, NO. 606 A one bedroom, two bath condo with a home office in Morgan Lofts, a conversion of a 1909 loft building with a rooftop gym and in unit washer dryer, listed for 1.47 million. 541 961 1485 Of the 53 apartments for sale on Dec. 18 on StreetEasy, the most expensive was a five floor, 11 bedroom, 14 bath new condo penthouse at 172 Madison Avenue, offered at 98 million. The least expensive was a sixth floor studio co op with Empire State Building views and a 24 hour doormen at 159 Madison Avenue, asking 419,000. The median asking price for a studio was 460,000, while for a one bedroom it was 942,000, and for a two bedroom 2,437,500. Prices generally aren't as high as in more established surrounding neighborhoods like Murray Hill, Chelsea or NoMad, said Michael J. Franco, a broker with Compass. "But I think the neighborhood will become more desirable as there is more residential development," he said. The trendy Chelsea Hudson Yards designation "will clearly push east," he said, bringing more people with it. "The rental market is pretty strong right now," he added. There were 113 apartments for rent, ranging from a three bedroom, two bathroom penthouse at 42 West 33rd St. for 14,000 a month, to a third floor studio at 18 West 37th St. for 2,195. The median asking monthly rent for a one bedroom was 4,184. 7 EAST 35TH STREET, NO. 10F A one bedroom, one and a half bath three level co op in the Antoinette with hardwood floors, floor to ceiling sliding glass windows, a wood burning fireplace, a balcony upstairs and a Juliet balcony downstairs, listed for 999,999. 717 314 2170 Though they may be jostled by tourists and office workers, local residents have an edge in some ways. They find it easy to take advantage of events at Madison Square Garden, said Talia McKinney, an agent with Nest Seekers International. "If you want tickets to a basketball game, you can just walk over and get them," she said. Young fashion designers, many of whom are still clustered in the area, find it handy to be near the supply shops that still exist and to the Dover Street Market, an eight story showcase for hip and high end fashion on Lexington Avenue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Q. Do scammers send unsolicited text messages about credit card fraud? How do I know what is real? A. Scammers will try just about anything to steal your money or your identity, so bogus credit card fraud alerts are certainly possible. Many credit card companies have a warning system in place to automatically notify you of suspicious activity on your account, and will contact you by the method specified in your account settings usually by text message, telephone call or email. If you get a text message or email alert about fraud out of the blue and want to confirm its authenticity, call the customer service number on the back of your card and ask to speak to a representative. If you prefer an online approach, log into your account on the company's website (or mobile app) over a secure network connection and check for notifications about suspicious account activity. To be on the safe side, do not call the number or open any links that may have been included with the message, even though some can be legitimate. Many financial institutions have sophisticated and automated fraud detection algorithms that can quickly detect signs of unusual activity on your account often before you are aware of it. Your purchasing history, geographic location of the charge, merchant choice and spending amounts are some factors typically used in fraud detection systems. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Renate, Hans Maria Hofmann Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Christopher Gregory for The New York Times The Renate, Hans Maria Hofmann Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Christopher Gregory for The New York Times Credit... The Renate, Hans Maria Hofmann Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Christopher Gregory for The New York Times Frank Stella will be selling some pieces from his personal collection at Christie's. The Surprising Tale of One of Frank Stella's Black Paintings At 82, the artist Frank Stella has done it all and isn't terribly concerned what anyone thinks. He is matter of fact and unguarded, secure on his perch in the pantheon after two solo retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art. He can and did wear white house slippers to an interview and photo shoot. Deal with it. Mr. Stella became art famous not long after graduating from Princeton in 1958, and he has been lauded for achievements like his early Black Paintings, with their dazzling geometric rigor and their power to inspire statements like his "What you see is what you see." His work evolved over the decades the brightly colored Protractor series became a landmark of contemporary art, too, and eventually his work got sculptural and very big. His studio is now in the Hudson Valley, where he goes often to make pieces that require a lot of space, like "adjoeman" (2004), a stainless steel and carbon fiber sculpture weighing some 3,000 pounds that was once featured on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But he and his wife, Harriet McGurk, a pediatrician, live in the same three story house in Greenwich Village that he acquired in the late 1960s. Mr. Stella has decidedly catholic taste in art, further evidenced by the works he is selling at Christie's, including an untitled 1927 Miro oil being auctioned in London on Feb. 27 and David Hockney's "A Realistic Still Life" (1965), up for auction on March 6. In New York in May he is selling a double portrait of a couple by the Dutch painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen (1532); two of his own works, "WWRL" (1967) and "Lettre sur les Aveugles I" (1974); and Helen Frankenthaler's "The Beach Horse" (1959). Estimates for those works range from 1.5 million to 7.5 million. Why sell? "It's nice to have some liquidity," Mr. Stella said. "You don't want to save everything for the end. I won't be around forever." Explaining the works he has amassed, Mr. Stella said, "Artists collect differently from other people," an idea he elaborated on in a chat. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. There's nothing by you in this main space. It's nice to come home and look at paintings. I don't have to look at my own paintings. To me, it's a relief. I like seeing them and not worrying. I don't have to adjust anything. You're the only artist I've ever met who displays fakes of their own work. I only own four fakes. Some people are naive enough to say, "Will you authenticate this work?" laughs And then we don't send them back when they're fake. They're serious, these guys making them; they know what they're doing. There's a painterly quality to everything on display here. Take the Jack Youngerman for example "Aztec III" (1959) . Artists see each other's work, and they recognize the touch. The way your hand moves, you can see Jack in the brush there, and you can see the same thing in the Olitski "Hot Ticket" (1964) . You know how the paint goes into the canvas. You can see how it builds the work. One piece you're selling is by Helen Frankenthaler. She was only a bit older than you, but she was already famous when you arrived on the scene. I always loved Helen's work and everything about her. And the most interesting part of our tiny "relationship" was she once offered to exchange art, for one of her smaller '58 paintings. And you said yes, of course? It was so off putting, with Helen and with Bob Robert Motherwell, her husband then in their apartment, I couldn't bear to exchange because it didn't feel to me that there was anything I could offer that would be equal. I was just intimidated. And then I bought this painting from a dealer because it was a '59 painting, from that period. I think a lot of people would be surprised that you have collected old masters. The van Hemessen, I just saw it in a catalog in the '80s. The part I couldn't resist is that it's from 1532. The idea of having a Northern Renaissance painting in your house! So I say, "O.K., maybe I'll go to 400,000," and believe me, I didn't have the money. And I kept bidding. And I was up to 680,000 for this painting. And the guy is saying, " 690,000." And I'm saying, "What am I doing?" laughs "Who am I?" What was appealing about the Miro? It's a beautiful little picture. If you think about things, basically it's Picasso, Matisse and Miro that's one side of the coin; and the other side is Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Is it safe to say that you have a lot of your work tucked away? There is a large collection, but it's in my studio. People fantasize about that sometimes, but you have to remember that it consists of work that I wasn't able to sell. laughs I think people fantasize that there's an extra Black Painting tucked away. Once, when I was moving from my studio on West Broadway and I had to carry things down to Walker Street, I had a painting in a cart that I was pushing, and the painting kept falling off a Black Painting, rolled up. I just bent it in half and stuck it in the trash basket on the corner of West Broadway and Canal. Wait, are you serious? Somebody could've just found a Black Painting one day? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
When it comes to pollinators, plants are not usually picky. But one tropical plant seems able to choose its suitors, a new study found. When Heliconia tortuosa resisted researchers' attempts to pollinate it by hand, they tried introducing the plant to six species of hummingbirds and a butterfly. Only two types of the hummingbirds those with the longest bills and that travel most extensively were consistently successful in getting pollen from the plant. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Oregon State University and the Smithsonian suggest this coyness may be a way for the plants to ensure genetic diversity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
THE ILIZA SHLESINGER SKETCH SHOW Stream on Netflix. After five stand up specials for Netflix, the comedian Iliza Shlesinger turns to sketch comedy in this new streaming series. The first episode includes parodies of "Jackass" and "A Star Is Born," plus a sketch in which a roomful of suited executives trade business gobbledygook while messily (and inexplicably) scarfing down nectarines. SEVEN SAMURAI (1956) 8 p.m. on TCM. Wednesday would have been the 100th birthday of Toshiro Mifune, the Japanese actor perhaps best known for his work with the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. (Mifune died in 1997.) TCM is airing a handful of Mifune and Kurosawa's collaborations over the course of the day. In addition to "Seven Samurai," Kurosawa's venerated drama with Mifune as a samurai of questionable legitimacy, consider Kurosawa's film noir HIGH AND LOW (1963), airing at 5:30 p.m., in which Mifune plays a business executive drawn into a kidnapping scandal. For a late night masterpiece, see RASHOMON (1951), airing at 11:45 p.m., with Mifune as a bandit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Sometimes his optimism proved badly naive. He supported the United States's invasion of Iraq. The New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright notes that when Khashoggi interviewed a young Osama bin Laden, Khashoggi "looked at bin Laden with stars in his eyes," and that he became disillusioned later on. The actor Nasser Faris reads Khashoggi's writings as narration throughout, and Khashoggi's assessment of bin Laden after bin Laden's death in 2011 "You were beautiful and brave in those beautiful days in Afghanistan, before you surrendered to hatred" is misleadingly overlaid on footage of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, as if the remarks were written years earlier. Rowley's impressive access, and the film's brisk contextualization of relationships and political alliances, can make it difficult to assess how much weight to accord each statement, or to decide what to think of Khashoggi which may be part of the point. Shortly after the movie has walked us through Khashoggi's grisly killing, it is jaw dropping to hear David Rundell, a former American diplomat who served in Saudi Arabia, say that "Saudi Arabia is a strategic ally, and I do think that outweighs the death of one person." But the film's primary virtue is in presenting many friends and colleagues of Khashoggi who illuminate his ideals, ventures and personal relationships which is useful, because, as the human rights activist Mohamed Soltan puts it, "Jamal chose what information he shared with each person." Khashoggi's international life, often lived warily, means that no one documentary could capture the full picture. Kingdom of Silence Not rated. In English and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Showtime. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate run by Warren E. Buffett, announced on Wednesday that it had agreed to sell its 31 newspapers for 140 million in cash. The buyer is Lee Enterprises, the publisher that has been managing the newspaper group's operations for the past 18 months. Among the organizations being sold are The Buffalo News and a collection of local papers that include The Richmond Times Dispatch in Virginia. The deal ends Mr. Buffett's dalliance with being a news mogul. Berkshire had owned The Buffalo News since 1977 and within the past decade rapidly bought up other papers, consolidating them in a division called BH Media Group. In a letter to his newspaper publishers in 2012, Mr. Buffett described himself as a newspaper "addict" with designs on buying more papers. But he grew pessimistic about the business more recently because of drops in advertising revenue. In an interview last year, he said most newspapers were "toast." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The Chocolate Factory's white walled performance space looks as if a bunch of drunken carpenters had competed in building eccentric structures with scrap lumber, wires and light bulbs. This setting reinforces the ideas that drive Karen Sherman's "One With Others," a dance theater piece that opened Wednesday night about missed connections, inappropriate strategies, shaky relationships and the need for community among artists. A waiver projected on one white brick wall asks the spectators not to hold the company responsible for ailments or feelings that may be induced by the performance (including, for example, an onset of pinkeye). It is one of several texts, seen, spoken by taped voices or said by the performers (Joanna Furnans, Don Mabley Allen and Ms. Sherman). (Claudia La Rocco, who writes about theater and books for The New York Times, was among those credited for the written material.) Whether apologetic, advisory or self flagellating, these texts focus on missteps taken or anticipated. Seated behind a low, irregular wooden structure that could (almost) be a coffin but turns out to be a keyboard, Mr. Mabley Allen plays some awkward chords, saying "sorry!" every few seconds. The performers' vigorous, rough edged dancing is most effective when it most resembles work, and their gestures smack or carve the space around them. Near the beginning of "One With Others," Ms. Sherman jumps over and over, her body slanted in the air, in order to hit a plywood panel that looks like a door with a working light bulb for a handle. Whatever this small, wiry woman is attempting, it's hopeless, yet the here and now fact of it is compelling. The way the three dance is as important as the steps. They eye the space and one another as if seeking confirmation that they are in accord. They use the equipment with serious concentration, no matter how wacky the task. After they don wooden appurtenances that suggest makeshift armor, Ms. Furnans makes the long stick attached to her chest plate connect the hook on one of the two wooden skirt flaps that Mr. Mabley Allen is wearing to the eye on the other. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Elon Musk, the chief executive of the carmaker Tesla, is something different to everyone. For having mass produced cool all electric vehicles, he has been a hero to coastal environmentalist liberals. Small government conservatives have lionized him for thumbing his nose at regulators. He has been likened to the superhero Iron Man, and sci fi aficionados love the billionaire for his dreams of colonizing Mars. Online, his exhortations can cause markets to shudder or soar and prompt lawsuits and investigations. His cryptic tweet over the weekend to "Take the red pill" aroused speculation he was signaling a rightward turn Ivanka Trump seemed to agree or that he is simply a fan of "The Matrix." And politically, he's a man of contradictions. His companies Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity have received billions of dollars in public subsidies to build factories and lower the cost of car ownership through rebates. On the other hand, he has railed against big government and has also publicly rebuked President Trump for backing out of the Paris climate accord. Now he's inserting himself into the broader debate over how and when the economy should start opening. And his latest gambit forcing some 10,000 Bay Area workers back on the job in defiance of the law may permanently align him with President Trump in the eyes of the public. Late last month, Mr. Musk made clear his disdain for government enforcement of shelter in place orders, describing them as "fascist" and "forcibly imprisoning people," amid an expletive laden earnings call with investors. "This is not freedom. Give people back their ... freedom," he said. Then last Tuesday he opened the factory and dared county officials to arrest him, while insulting Alameda County's public health chief as "ignorant." Never mind that county officials were going to allow him to reopen this week, according to what County Supervisor Scott Haggerty told me. And never mind that demand for large purchases like cars have slumped as record numbers have filed for unemployment. For one, Mr. Musk is winning new high profile admirers. Last week, he earned the support of President Trump, the President's son Eric Trump, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and a host of venture capitalists for his reopening crusade. The Washington Post reported he praised the president on a private call with other chief executives and voiced his desire to reopen the factory by May 1. Mr. Musk thanked the president for his support in a tweet, of course. Any association with President Trump threatens to damage Mr. Musk's reputation with those on the left, like Robert Knight of Los Angeles, a Tesla Model 3 owner. "It's just starting to look like he's a Trump guy and that's not great," he told me. "Like the president, it seems like it's 'all about me.'" David Dawson of Lancaster, Calif., vowed never to buy a Tesla, even though he supports the company's environmental image. "Using people's lives as a bargaining chip that's playing the same game as Trump," he said. As a businessman, Mr. Musk would be wise to appease customers like Mr. Knight. Nearly 40 percent of Tesla owners identified as left leaning as of 2019, up from 23 percent in 2015, according to data that the research firm Strategic Vision supplied me. That compares with just 29 percent last year, up from 22 percent in 2015, who identify as right leaning. Independents or centrists made up about 26 percent, down from 44 percent previously, the firm said. Neither Mr. Musk nor Tesla responded to a request for comment, so I'll have to guess at his intentions. He may, for instance, see an opportunity to grow his buyer market in the middle of the country. Analysts told me the Tesla Cybertruck, with its jagged edges and aggressive styling, looks to appeal more to the Schwarzenegger set than the Prius one. Mark Bidewell of Bucks County, Pa., said Mr. Musk demonstrated rare fearlessness in standing up to Alameda County authorities. "It takes some guts to do that and he's a big fish for them to go after if they wanted to make a statement," he said. A University of California, Los Angeles student, Kurt Burrows, agreed. "I thought it was cool to see a billionaire stand up to the whole left leaning Bay Area and say we want to get this economy going," said Mr. Burrows, who said he identifies as conservative. Liberal and less business friendly than Texas, the Bay Area is perhaps an ideal test case for large scale manufacturing amid the coronavirus pandemic. It had one of the earliest documented cases in the United States and was first to issue large scale shelter in place orders. And it has largely held the virus at arm's length, limiting deaths and the number of positive cases relative to other large cities. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
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. Round two of the first Democratic debate became a moment of reckoning for Joe Biden. All of the late night hosts who were on the air this week went live for the second night in a row to recap it. "Tonight was the second Democratic debate, or as nine candidates called it, Operation Destroy Joe Biden." JIMMY FALLON "I hope they took dental photographs of Biden before this debate, because they're going to need a reference to put his teeth back in." STEPHEN COLBERT | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Louis Johnson and Cassandra Phifer Moore rehearsing "Forces of Rhythm" at Dance Theater of Harlem. The piece premiered in 1972. Louis Johnson, an acclaimed choreographer, dancer and director whose career spanned Broadway, ballet and modern dance, died on March 31 in Manhattan. He was 90. The cause was pneumonia and renal failure, said Glory Van Scott, a dancer, actress and director and his friend and health care proxy. He recently tested positive for the coronavirus, she said. As a dancer and choreographer, Mr. Johnson was known for his extensive range. He performed in Broadway shows like "House of Flowers" and "Hallelujah Baby!" and in the screen and stage versions of Bob Fosse's "Damn Yankees." An African American who was influenced by black mentors, he created works for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Dance Theater of Harlem. He was the choreographer of the 1978 film adaptation of "The Wiz." And he was nominated for a Tony Award in 1970 for his choreography for the musical "Purlie." "Very few blacks have had all the experiences I've had," Mr. Johnson said in an interview with The New York Times in 1975. "There haven't been that many opportunities. I've performed and choreographed all kinds of dance, so that's how I can go from 'Treemonisha'" an opera by the ragtime composer Scott Joplin "to the Metropolitan Opera." At the time, he was choreographing the dances for "Aida" and "La Gioconda," which featured Allegra Kent, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. "He was at one with the music," Ms. Kent said in a phone interview. "The adagio section just poured out of him in a gentle dramatic way. It was very individual." As a dancer, movement flowed out of him, too. The dancer and actress Carmen de Lavallade, who appeared with him in the 1954 musical "House of Flowers," always loved watching him. "You know those hard rubber balls that bounce?" Ms. de Lavallade said, also in an interview. "He reminded me of that because he had such elevation, and he was quick and tough. He was low to the ground, but he could get off the floor, and he could jump high." "My goodness, he was strong," she added. "And there was always a sense of humor in his movement the jauntiness that he had." Louis Johnson was born on March 19, 1930, in Statesville, N.C., and grew up in Washington. He started out as an acrobat before being discovered by Doris Jones and Claire Haywood; they gave him a scholarship to their dance school in Washington. "His body worked in such a way," Ms. Van Scott said. "He did gymnastics. He also was at the point where they wanted him to be an Olympic swimmer. He swam like a fish. So he came with these gifts already part of his body." At the Jones Haywood School of Ballet, one fellow student was Chita Rivera; both earned spots at the School of American Ballet and moved to New York City in 1950. Black students were a rarity at the school, which is affiliated with the City Ballet. Although Mr. Johnson never joined City Ballet, the choreographer Jerome Robbins featured him in 1952 as a guest artist with five City Ballet dancers in "Ballade." Mr. Johnson was an inspiration for Robbins's 1953 work "Afternoon of a Faun." But his training extended beyond ballet. Mr. Johnson studied with Katherine Dunham, a pioneering black choreographer and anthropologist who influenced his work. "I am a dancer who loves dance, any kind of dance," he told The Times in the 1975 interview. "In choreographing, I don't think of dance as ballet, modern or anything, just dance." The work "is a choreographic approximation of a quick turn of the radio dial," Jennifer Dunning of The Times wrote in a review of a Dance Theater performance of it in 1988. "But its staging is ingenious and its message heartfelt. One's roots must be acknowledged and honored." Virginia Johnson, who is the artistic director of Dance Theater (and not related to Mr. Johnson), said: "The story that he tells in 'Forces' was exactly what Dance Theater of Harlem was all about. He could bring together all those different languages in that one work to say, 'Yes, it belongs to us.'" When he was choreographing the work, Mr. Johnson was demanding and exacting, Ms. Johnson said. "He was not like, 'You have to do this the way I told you to do it, exactly the way I told you to do it,'" she said. She added, "He didn't want you to parrot what he was doing. He wanted you to be painting inside the lines in the most beautiful colors that you could imagine." Mr. Johnson was also a dance educator. He started the formal dance department at Howard University in Washington and was the director of the dance division of the Henry Street Settlement in Manhattan. Ms. Van Scott, who played Rolls Royce Lady in "The Wiz," as part of a cast that included Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, recalled a moment during filming when Mr. Johnson asked the male dancers to cartwheel over several high wooden tables. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Last year, Coach, the handbag and accessories company, hired Lite Brite Neon Studio to create a six foot tall pink Tyrannosaurus Rex for its store in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. But when Matt Dilling, Lite Brite's founder, saw the sketches for "Rexy," as the dinosaur is known, he was shocked. "It was like a drug induced hallucination," he said. "And I mean that with the utmost respect." Mr. Dilling, 38, has run Lite Brite for almost 20 years. In the past, he said, clients merely wanted to light up their logos. To him, this wasn't just boring; it lacked appreciation for the medium's creative potential. Mr. Dilling believes that even a few years ago, a design like "Rexy" would have been unthinkable for a legacy brand like Coach. But recently Tiffany Company, Bergdorf Goodman and Fendi, among others, have hired Lite Brite to help them liven up their images. "If you're Coach, how do you remarket yourself?" Mr. Dilling said. (Besides picking a strangely hippie sounding name, Tapestry, for your parent company.) "I mean, you make leather handbags. That's tough. You have to think of something that cuts through the visual clutter, and neon definitely cuts through." But even as fashion brands are using neon to showcase their modernity, they're also hoping to invoke our nostalgia. While installing a cascading neon rainbow in Stella McCartney's store in the meatpacking district, Mr. Dilling overheard multiple shoppers mention its "retro" quality. (Never mind that they each thought it evoked a different decade.) Tiffany, too, has taken up neon to try and reclaim some of its midcentury irreverence. In the 1970s, for instance, the company's celebrated window designer Gene Moore created a neon lit Chinese food container spilling diamond encrusted pendants instead of noodles. Richard Moore, the vice president of creative visual merchandising at Tiffany (no relation to Gene Moore), said that type of creativity "has not necessarily translated to consumer perception of the brand, and that's why neon feels particularly relevant right now." This fall, Tiffany's Fifth Avenue windows display a neon orange "Don't Walk" hand wearing an engagement ring. The (perhaps obvious) symbolism: A Tiffany ring will stop traffic. Like the Chinese takeout container, said Mr. Moore, "it's very urban, very New York, very iconic." He said that today's young people are especially attracted to things that are handcrafted, as most neon is. Signs are created by artisan "tube benders" who heat the glass in 2,000 degree flames, shape it and then fill it with gas. Argon with a dash of mercury naturally shines blue, while neon is naturally "motel sign" red. These are the classic colors that first arrived in the United States from Paris in the early 1920s and replaced the pointillist incandescent "spectaculars" that dominated city center marquees. "Whatever you could do with light bulbs, you could do in bigger, better, clearer ways with neon tubes," said Eric Lynxwiler, 44, a preservationist and historian at the Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, Calif. "Every business in the nation that wanted to be perceived as modern in that Art Deco era had to have neon." Neon dimmed briefly during World War II, as chemicals and glass grew scarce, and then proliferated across the American highway afterward, as businesses competed for a car bound public. But by the late 1960s, spurred in part by Lady Bird Johnson's national "beautification" campaign, townships began passing anti neon laws. That, along with the introduction of cheap, backlit plastic signs, ended the medium's glorious run. Neon returned briefly in the 1980s, its comeback linked to 1950s nostalgia. Today's resurgence, though, which Mr. Lynxwiler says we're riding "in a big, big way," seems more about hope for the future. "We want the promise that everything is going to be O.K.," Mr. Lynxwiler said. "We want the joy back. We've moved away from the dark Edison bulb toward something bright." At DeKalb Market Hall, a new food hall in Downtown Brooklyn, all vendors were instructed to hang a neon sign. "We're bringing the city back pre hipster," said Anna Castellani, 46, DeKalb's managing partner. "I'm definitely not complaining about missing the '70s or '80s in New York. But I love the chaotic nature of a street full of different lights. You feel like you're in the city." Neon has also become central to a handful of urban renewal projects in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Oklahoma City, whose downtown, from the 1920s to the 1950s, was home to 52 car dealerships, many of them neon lit. After decades of urban decline and the devastation of the 1995 bombing, civic and business leaders sought to develop that old stretch of "Automobile Alley." This included grants for new businesses to hang neon. To date, 29 businesses have hung neon on the six block stretch of Broadway, including a massive 24 by 23 foot reproduction of the original Buick sign, which was installed in 2014. "Each sign is very distinctive," Mr. Elliott said. "It's like art hanging on these buildings." And yet even as these new signs go up and restoration efforts increase, many of the historic signs have shut off. In New York City, the red, green and yellow P G Cafe facade at 73rd and Amsterdam has vanished; so too the luminous purple sign with an excitedly leaping girl in Times Square and the multistory signs for Eagle Clothes and Kentile Floors in Brooklyn. "There were so many signs here, that nobody thought we should preserve them," said Mr. Dilling, who works just a few blocks from where Eagle Clothes once towered above the Gowanus Canal. "And now with the development, they're gone." The same developers who are taking over these spaces sometimes hire Mr. Dilling. He is currently making a five foot tall record for Henry Hall, an upscale residential complex on the West Side of Manhattan, where Legacy Recording Studios once stood. There will be a trendy restaurant named after the studios, once the East Coast center of film and Broadway recording, and a "Jam" room with Fender Stratocaster guitars and the neon record. Mr. Dilling is mostly tranquil about these changes. "For years reporters would call and be like, 'Neon's a dying industry. How does it feel to be one of the last guys?'" he said. "But it just dies to be reborn." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"Liquid Sunshine/I am a Pluviophile," a commission for the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, is the best known work of Rui Sasaki. It is made of more than 200 raindrop shape pieces of phosphorescent glass.Credit...Yasushi Ichikawa/Corning Museum of Glass "Liquid Sunshine/I am a Pluviophile," a commission for the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, is the best known work of Rui Sasaki. It is made of more than 200 raindrop shape pieces of phosphorescent glass. This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about crossing the borders of space, time and media. Artists and designers who work with ceramics and glass might be thought of as delicate types. After all, they specialize in works that can easily break. But the converse tends to be true. It requires steady handed bravery to blow glass or fire up a kiln, given the melting, explosions and shattering that are a normal part of the process. Rui Sasaki fits this counterintuitive mold. She is soft spoken but extremely dogged in her exploration of a tricky medium on a large scale, as with what is perhaps her best known work, "Liquid Sunshine/I am a Pluviophile," a commission for the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y., which was on long term view until January and is now part of the museum's collection. It is made of more than 200 raindrop shape pieces of phosphorescent glass, and Ms. Sasaki spent about a year making it. She is now working on a new version of the piece for the Toyama Glass Art Museum. "Fragility and breaking glass is an inspiration for me," Ms. Sasaki, 36, said from her home in Kanazawa, Japan. "Because glass is very fragile, but it's really strong much stronger than iron in some ways." Ms. Sasaki's great subject is the weather, which, in the wrong hands, could be a banal topic. She infuses it with mystery. "It's an important inspiration for me," Ms. Sasaki said. "We never really get great sunshine in my area, and it's the most rainy city in Japan. It's always cloudy." She was raised in a suburb of Tokyo, where it was much sunnier, she said. The bits of phosphorescent material, which were being constantly charged, would glow, but then fade over time as people lingered in the space, "the way the memory of sunshine fades during the dark days of winter," Ms. Sasaki wrote in her artist's statement for the piece. She used phosphorescent glass similarly in the 2015 work "Weather Chandelier," which was attached to a solar panel. She has to special order the phosphorescent material from China. Susie Silbert, the Corning Museum curator who worked on "Liquid Sunshine," said Ms. Sasaki's preparations impressed her. "Rui met with scientists to see how clear glass could work with phosphorescence," Ms. Silbert said. "She really had to troubleshoot that. It was a lot of research. Not all glass shapes can hold it." Though Ms. Sasaki creates aesthetically pleasing objects, her work can have an edge of menace, too. Her 2010 installation "Walking on Glass" had visitors do just that, pulverizing glass panes into dust. For "Self Container No. 2," exhibited in 2015, she created a box of clear glass blocks, open on top, just barely large enough to fit her own body in a folded up position. Growing up, "I wanted to be an archaeologist or a surgeon," Ms. Sasaki said. But in high school, she traveled with her father to Okinawa, a hub of craft activity in Japan, where she saw glass blown for the first time. "I was like, 'Oh, my God, this is glass,'" she said. "I was fascinated with it, so I switched my career goals." Ms. Sasaki rarely works with colored glass, preferring the clear version for her projects. She said that as a child, "I was really obsessed with swimming in the ocean and the pool. I always want to be in the water all the time, and I'm really interested in transparent material." After the Okinawa visit, she made a connection in her mind: "Water is glass. Glass is water." She went to her parents with the bad news. Ms. Sasaki recalled, "I told them, 'I want to be an artist,' and they were, like, 'Oh, my God, you're going to choose an unstable life?' They were so surprised." Ms. Sasaki, who is a full time faculty member at a local art school, Kanazawa Utatsuyama Kogei Kobo, got her Bachelor of Arts degree from Musashino Art University outside Tokyo in 2006. She then went to the Rhode Island School of Design for a Master of Fine Arts degree, perfecting her English along the way. "R.I.S.D. was a culture shock for her," said Jocelyne Prince, the head of the school's glass department and one of Ms. Sasaki's professors. "I almost failed her that first semester. But her tenacity eventually worked in her favor." Ms. Prince said that it took time for Ms. Sasaki to get used to an experimental approach "working in a way that was more about the question than the finished result" but that her struggles were common for many graduate students. "She found her groove, and then she was unstoppable," Ms. Prince said. "Her work hasn't lost its experimental nature. It's become better while remaining fresh." Ms. Sasaki's tenacity was useful when it was time to present "Liquid Sunshine" at the Corning Museum of Glass. Though she spent months planning it, she was at the museum for only three days at the very end of the installation process. "She wanted to use a glossy paint on the floor, so the pieces could be reflective," Ms. Silbert recalled. "But at that point we weren't able to de install the whole piece to do that. So we came up with an alternative: We covered the floor in reflective Mylar." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Has the great fashion experiment at J. Crew come to an end? On Monday, the downward spiral of the company that catapulted to trendsetting prominence on the back of Michelle Obama claimed its highest profile head with the news that Jenna Lyons, officially president and executive creative director of the brand, and unofficially its public face, would be leaving. The parting was a mutual decision by Ms. Lyons and Millard S. Drexler, the J. Crew chairman and chief executive. She will continue as a creative adviser to the company until her contract runs out in December, but will not be officially replaced. Instead, Somsack Sikhounmuong, head of women's design, will become chief design officer, with responsibility for women's wear, men's wear and children's wear (Crewcuts). Unlike Ms. Lyons, however, he will not oversee brand image, store design or marketing. He and other creative teams will report directly to Mr. Drexler. In other words, there isn't going to be one primary design vision in charge of all the aesthetic aspects of the brand. Mr. Drexler has talked about a return to core principles at J. Crew, which may include a return to a more anonymous design team as Mr. Sikhounmuong has so far remained resolutely in the background. That doesn't really sound like a big deal, until you start thinking about its implications especially when it comes to the accessible, mass market end of the spectrum. After all, many would say it's about time that Ms. Lyons left. J. Crew has been battling a two year sales slump and is carrying a debt load of 2 billion, some of which will become current in 2018, prompting heightened speculation from investment analysts and news outlets of a possible bankruptcy filing. Same store sales (purchases in stores that have been open more than a year, a gauge that eliminates the effect of new store openings on sales tallies) have fallen in 11 of the past 12 quarters. Last year, J. Crew shut its bridal business. And last month, the company, which is backed by the private equity firms TPG Capital and Leonard Green Partners, reported that revenue fell 2 percent, to 695 million, during the three months to Jan. 28. Something isn't working. Whispers about the need for design change at the brand began in 2015, when Tom Mora, head of women's design, was fired and Mr. Sikhounmuong was moved up from his design role at Madewell, the hipper, younger (and growing) brand under the J. Crew umbrella. Yet for most consumer brands, of which J. Crew is one, the designer is almost beside the point; a leader whose name most consumers never know. (Does the Gap have a creative face? L.L. Bean? Target? Ann Taylor? Theory?) Rather, it's the merchant who matters. But J. Crew was different. The company achieved its initial turnaround in part by taking the tools of high fashion and applying them to the mass market. Including especially making the designer the embodiment of the brand as a shortcut to authenticity and attitude. Ms. Lyons tall, gangly, with a broad grin and thick framed nerd glasses put the human factor into generally faceless, accessible fashion. Her geek chic quirkiness, which mixed camouflage and sequins for day, and denim and taffeta for evening, all of it layered with big costume jewelry, was a model not just for those she worked with, but also for her customers: "Jenna's picks" were publicized in the catalog and on the website; she was photographed at home in Park Slope, Brooklyn (and later, post divorce, at home in SoHo); she once appeared in a catalog shoot painting her young son's toenails pink. She went where no similar brand had gone before: not just to the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was widely photographed on the red carpet mixing feathered ball gowns and crew neck sweaters (and, last year, with Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner of "Girls" both channeling Ms. Lyons's look), but also into the pages of Vogue, and finally to New York Fashion Week itself, as J. Crew held presentations in the official collection venues. She was an accessible personality whose lifestyle J. Crew customers could, and did, aspire to buy into. It all culminated in the White House, after Mrs. Obama's callout to J. Crew on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" during the 2008 presidential campaign, a moment orchestrated by Ikram Goldman, proprietor of the high fashion Chicago boutique Ikram, who at that time was working with Mrs. Obama on her wardrobe. After that election, Malia and Sasha Obama also wore custom made J. Crew to their father's swearing in, while the first lady added J. Crew gloves to her Isabel Toledo coat and dress. Mrs. Obama wore J. Crew on her first state visit, to Britain (an embellished cardigan and mint green gingham pencil skirt), as well as to the second inauguration (gloves and belt with a Thom Browne coat). Among other appearances. J. Crew's woes can to a certain extent be attributed to the same malaise that has hit many of its peers, including Gap Inc., which is also suffering because of growing competition from even cheaper fast fashion competitors and an excess of brick and mortar stores. But those problems can also be traced to the great fashion experiment. The trendsetting style element, exciting as it could be, created added confusion: How fashion forward could a mass market retailer be? How quirky was too quirky? What happened when people had enough sequins and needed to get serious? Could they look beyond the buzz? Was it expensive or affordable? Where did J. Crew belong? In the end, consumers couldn't be bothered with the answers. They just went elsewhere. And the face of the brand became the symbol of its fall. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In a program note accompanying his new work, "The Oracle," Daniel Gwirtzman assures his audience that "there are so many ways into a dance." Listen to the score, he suggests, or trace the geometries of the movement. Imagine what might happen next, or consider the metaphors embedded in the choreography. Whatever you do, "Create your own frame," he urges. Another tactic, when those patterns or metaphors just aren't doing it for you, is to focus on the individual performers. Who speaks to you? Alas, on Sunday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fishman Space, even the shining performances of Jonathan Alsberry and Anna Schon, the most capable members of the Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company there were 14 in all couldn't capture the viewer for long, lost as they were inside the overcrowded, overbearing world of "The Oracle." For this 15th anniversary engagement, Mr. Gwirtzman opted for seating in the round, with four gaps in the circle facilitating entrances and exits. His tall, slender figure was the first to appear in one of those portals, as he leaned forward with outstretched arms, riding that incline into the center of the space. Building into a duet with the radiant Mr. Alsberry and a trio with Ms. Schon that soared dangerously close to the audience, this opening sequence turned out to be the most finely honed part of the evening. It established the muscular, emotive mode of communication that would persist for the next hour, alongside Jeff Story's bombastic score. New dancers continued to arrive, each clad in a gem toned combination of velour tank top and shorts. Justin Keats and Amanda Blauer faced off in a combative duet; a cluster of bodies scuffled around the ring in a kind of unwieldy folk dance; the whole group convened (more than once) in feverish unison. Too much happened, some of it messily. Mr. Gwirtzman loves tangled partnering and tricky lifts, but these are effective only when seamless. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
I worry about Joe Biden debating Donald Trump. He should do it only under two conditions. Otherwise, he's giving Trump unfair advantages. First, Biden should declare that he will take part in a debate only if Trump releases his tax returns for 2016 through 2018. Biden has already done so, and they are on his website. Trump must, too. No more gifting Trump something he can attack while hiding his own questionable finances. And second, Biden should insist that a real time fact checking team approved by both candidates be hired by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates and that 10 minutes before the scheduled conclusion of the debate this team report on any misleading statements, phony numbers or outright lies either candidate had uttered. That way no one in that massive television audience can go away easily misled. Debates always have ground rules. Why can't telling the truth and equal transparency on taxes be conditions for this one? Yes, the fact that we have to make truth telling an explicit condition is an incredibly sad statement about our time; normally such things are unspoken and understood. But if the past teaches us anything, Trump might very well lie and mislead for the entire debate, forcing Biden to have to spend a majority of his time correcting Trump before making his own points. That is not a good way for Biden to reintroduce himself to the American people. And, let's not kid ourselves, these debates will be his reintroduction to most Americans, who have neither seen nor heard from him for months if not years. Because of Covid 19, Biden has been sticking close to home, wearing a mask and social distancing. And with the coronavirus now spreading further, and Biden being a responsible individual and role model, it's likely that he won't be able to engage with any large groups of voters before Election Day. Therefore, the three scheduled televised debates, which will garner huge audiences, will carry more weight for him than ever. He should not go into such a high stakes moment ceding any advantages to Trump. Trump is badly trailing in the polls, and he needs these debates much more than Biden does to win over undecided voters. So Biden needs to make Trump pay for them in the currency of transparency and fact checking universal principles that will level the playing field for him and illuminate and enrich the debates for all citizens. Of course, Trump will stomp and protest and say, "No way." Fine. Let Trump cancel. Let Trump look American voters in the eye and say: "There will be no debate, because I should be able to continue hiding my tax returns from you all, even though I promised that I wouldn't and even though Biden has shown you his. And there will be no debate, because I should be able to make any statement I want without any independent fact checking." If Trump says that, Biden can retort: "Well, that's not a debate then, that's a circus. If that's what you want, why don't we just arm wrestle or flip a coin to see who wins?" I get why Republican senators and Fox News don't press Trump on his taxes or call out his lies. They're afraid of him and his base and unconcerned about the truth. But why should Biden, or the rest of us, play along? After all, these issues around taxes and truth are more vital than ever for voters to make an informed choice. Trump, you will recall, never sold his Trump Organization holdings or put them into a blind trust as past presidents did with their investments to avoid any conflicts of interest. Rather, his assets are in a revocable trust, whose trustees are his eldest son, Donald Jr., and Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's chief financial officer. Which is a joke. Trump promised during the last campaign to release his tax returns after an I.R.S. "audit" was finished. Which turned out to have been another joke. Once elected, Trump claimed that the American people were not interested in seeing his tax returns. Actually, we are now more interested than ever and not just because it's utterly unfair that Biden go into the debate with all his income exposed (he and his wife, Jill, earned more than 15 million in the two years after they left the Obama administration, largely from speaking engagements and books) while Trump doesn't have to do the same. There must be something in those tax returns that Trump really does not want the American public to see. It may be just silly that he's actually not all that rich. It may have to do with the fact that foreign delegations and domestic lobbyists, who want to curry favor with him, stay in his hotel in Washington or use it for corporate entertaining. Or, more ominously, it may be related to Trump's incomprehensible willingness to give Russian President Vladimir Putin the benefit of every doubt for the last three plus years. Virtually every time there has been a major public dispute between Putin and U.S. intelligence agencies alleging Russian misdeeds including, of late, that the Kremlin offered bounties for the killing of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan Trump has sided with Putin. The notion that Putin may have leverage over him is not crazy, given little previous hints by his sons. As Michael Hirsh recalled in a 2018 article in Foreign Policy about how Russian money helped to save the Trump empire from bankruptcy: "In September 2008, at the 'Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate' conference in New York, the president's eldest son, Donald Jr., said: 'In terms of high end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets. Say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo, and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.'" The American people need to know if Trump is in debt in any way to Russian banks and financiers who might be close to Putin. Because if Trump is re elected, and unconstrained from needing to run again, he will most likely act even more slavishly toward Putin, and that is a national security threat. At the same time, debating Trump is unlike debating any other human being. Trump literally lies as he breathes, and because he has absolutely no shame, there are no guardrails. According to the Fact Checker team at The Washington Post, between Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, and May 29, 2020, he made 19,127 false or misleading claims. Biden has been dogged by bone headed issues of plagiarism in his career, but nothing compared to Trump's daily fire hose of dishonesty, which has no rival in U.S. presidential history. That's why it's so important to insist that the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates hire independent fact checkers who, after the two candidates give their closing arguments but before the debate goes off the air would present a rundown of any statements that were false or only partly true. Only if leading into the debate, American voters have a clear picture of Trump's tax returns alongside Biden's, and only if, coming out of the debate, they have a clear picture of who was telling the truth and who was not, will they be able to make a fair judgment between the two candidates. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Above, Cynthia Oliver's "Virago Man Dem" with, from left, Duane Cyrus, Niall Noel Jones, Jonathan Gonzalez and Ni'Ja Whitson. From far left, Jeremy Smith, Rachel Furst and Tegan Schwab of ODC/Dance. At the beginning of Cynthia Oliver's "Virago Man Dem" on Wednesday, as audience members settled into the BAM Fisher theater, four performers entered, one by one, and stood still. "Go," said a voice from offstage. But the dancers remained motionless, the only visible movement a flicker of light on a purple blue backdrop. This was Ms. Oliver's first gesture of defiance, a subtle one, in an evening that was all about defying cultural pressures and expectations, or slyly slipping out from underneath them. In "Virago Man Dem," which had its world premiere as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, this Bronx born, Caribbean raised choreographer set out to uproot stereotypes related to black male identity and conjure more nuanced, expansive alternatives. Ms. Oliver and her four deeply invested dancers tackle that challenge with humor and agility of many kinds, aided by the visual art team Black Kirby (John Jennings and Stacey Robinson) and the media designer John Boesche. Protean illustrations and animations offer vibrant visual analogies to the dancers' fluid, shifting states. In towering portraits of four faces, masculine and feminine mingle, just as they do when Ni'Ja Whitson bounces to a house beat, devouring space, or when Jonathan Gonzalez, in a silver sequined jacket, brandishes a slip of gold fabric above his head. The movement is occasionally representational at one point the dancers mime playing sports but more often it escapes such easy readings. In one striking passage, the four recline on the ground and merge into one amorphous being, crawling over one another, caught up in sticky entanglements. The work's many elements busily war for attention at times, though fracturing our focus may be a deliberate move. Jason Finkelman's eclectic soundscape and Susan Becker's costumes, which morph in the final scene from pants into gauzy skirts, heighten the sense of an environment in continuous flux. Words, spoken and projected, evoke the difficulty of having to explain oneself or justify one's actions. Phrases like "see, wait" and "it's complicated" and "don't misunderstand me" recur in various guises. "If I use a little force, it doesn't mean I'm angry," Duane Cyrus says, discussing his fluency in "many different languages, all of them English." The frequently loping and strutting Niall Noel Jones, who often peels off from the others and lingers onstage after their final exit, is the only performer who doesn't speak, as if freed from the weight of explanation, or perhaps troubled by a different burden. Nearby at the BAM Harvey Theater on Thursday, ODC/Dance, the 46 year old modern dance company from San Francisco, was upending gender conventions in a different way through the full throttle partnering for which the group is known. The sleekly produced "boulders and bones," choreographed by the artistic directors Brenda Way and KT Nelson in 2014, was inspired by the construction of "Culvert Cairn," a stone installation by the British land artist Andy Goldsworthy in the woods of Marin County, Calif. The hourlong work, for 10 superbly strong and resilient dancers, opens with a wordless version of RJ Muna's time lapse video documenting the creation of the elegant structure, a sort of stone tunnel housing a large, egg shaped stone mass, over which rainwater can flow. At its most compelling, "boulders and bones" captures the textures and energies of crumbling rock or cascading water, and not through high definition projections (of which there are plenty) or the white dust that the dancers fling onto the stage, but through the dancing itself. Propelled by a lush, layered cello score composed and played live by Zoe Keating, who sits prominently atop a portable platform, the dancers slide deftly through swooping phrases on the floor or fly ardently into one another's arms. More than once, Natasha Adorlee Johnson plows into a row of her peers, corralling them with her torso. In work so dependent on partnering and ballet technique, it's heartening that the women show just as much brute strength and daring as the men. The alert Josie G. Sadan, a kind of exalted figure, dances with a more ethereal remove, until an exacting solo in silence at the end, where she gathers energy like a brewing storm. Yet "boulders," with its outpouring of highly technical movement, sometimes loses its grasp on a larger sense of purpose, detached from the essence of the landscape it seems intent on embodying. Nature is more spontaneous and more unruly. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In "Waiting for Superman," the new education documentary, the union leader Randi Weingarten is portrayed, in the words of Variety, as "a foaming satanic beast." At a two day education summit hosted by NBC News recently, the lopsided panels often featured Ms. Weingarten on one side, facing a murderer's row of charter school founders and urban superintendents. Even Tom Brokaw piled on. It's nothing personal, really. Ms. Weingarten happens to be the most visible, powerful leader of unionized teachers, and in that role she personifies what many reformers see as the chief obstacle to lifting dismal schools: unions that protect incompetent teachers. A combative labor leader who does not shrink from the spotlight, Ms. Weingarten has been fighting back. She issued a written rebuttal to "Waiting for Superman," and she has publicly debated the film's director, Davis Guggenheim, arguing that teachers have been made scapegoats. More to the point, the portrait of Ms. Weingarten as a demonic opponent of change albeit one more likely to appear in a business suit and cashmere V neck sweater, with a Cartier Tank watch and a red kabbalah string around her wrist is out of date, according to many education experts. In the past year, for example, she has led her members sometimes against internal resistance to embrace innovations that were once unthinkable. She has acted out of a fear that teachers' unions could end up on the wrong side of a historic and inevitable wave of change. "She has shrewdly recognized that teachers' unions need to be part of the reform," said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, an education research group. Christopher Cerf, a former deputy schools chancellor in New York City who has sparred with Ms. Weingarten, offered a similar, if more skeptical interpretation. "The earth moved in a really dramatic way," he said, "to the point that a very successful strategist like Randi has to know that teacher unionism itself is in jeopardy, perhaps even in mortal jeopardy." Both friends and foes describe Ms. Weingarten, 52, who became president of the 1.5 million member American Federation of Teachers in 2008 after a decade leading the New York City local, as a superb tactician who cares deeply about being seen as a reformer. "We have spent a lot of time in the last two years looking at ourselves in a mirror, trying to figure out what we've done right and what we've done wrong, and we're trying to reform," Ms. Weingarten said in an interview. Early this year, she delivered a major policy speech that embraced tying teachers' evaluations in part to students' scores on standardized tests, a formula that teachers and Ms. Weingarten herself once resisted. In the District of Columbia, Ms. Weingarten stepped into a stalemated contract negotiation and agreed to give up certain seniority protections and to enable schools to more easily fire poorly rated teachers. And in May, she threw her support behind a Colorado law that went further than any in the nation to strip tenure protections from ineffective teachers. "You have to look at that collection of steps and say they deserve applause," said Timothy Daly, president of the nonprofit New Teacher Project, who has been a frequent critic of teachers' unions. Lest anyone think the union is rolling over, it threw money and manpower into defeating the mayoral patron of Michelle A. Rhee, the Washington schools chancellor and a heroine of "Waiting for Superman" who resigned this week. Ms. Weingarten must navigate tricky waters between reformers who demand sweeping changes and rank and file union members for whom job security is a major issue. She has met with some opposition within her ranks. And in May, Ms. Weingarten was heckled at her union's state convention in Michigan by a handful of Detroit teachers, who were angry, in part, that a new contract introduced an evaluation system in which they are rated by their peers. Hard liners argued that peer review makes teachers complicit in the firing of colleagues. Ms. Weingarten had played a major role in reaching compromises on seniority and evaluations during the contract's negotiation. It passed in December but with 36 percent of teachers voting no. Some called the leader of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, Keith Johnson and by extension, Ms. Weingarten a sellout. At the Michigan convention, when Ms. Weingarten was booed, David Hecker, the state union leader, shushed the dissenters. Ms. Weingarten, according to participants, said she wanted to hear them out. "She was masterful," Mr. Johnson said. "One by one, she said, 'That is not true.' She had the facts to contravene anything they brought forward." Ms. Weingarten, Mr. Johnson said, is telling teachers "things that were taboo." "We now have our backs up against the wall," he added. "If we don't embrace education reform, we will get knocked through the wall." In many ways, Ms. Weingarten is fighting to keep her footing in a tilted political landscape. For the first time, a Democratic president, Barack Obama, is espousing ideas that have been anathema to teachers' unions chiefly, encouraging school choice through charter schools and holding teachers accountable for student learning. A 4.3 billion federal grant competition, Race to the Top, enticed many states this year to climb aboard the administration bandwagon, and pulled some unions along, too. For some reformers an unusual alliance of moderate Republicans and Democrats there is still skepticism about the depth of Ms. Weingarten's commitment. "The problem is the messages have been very mixed," Mr. Daly of the New Teacher Project said. "While wonderful steps have been taken, the exact same policies that seem to be supported in one context are opposed in another." For example, critics said, even though Ms. Weingarten helped negotiate a breakthrough contract with Ms. Rhee in Washington, the union contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to unseat Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who lost the Democratic primary last month to Vincent Gray, setting up Ms. Rhee's departure. Some analysts have said that teachers' support of Mr. Gray was a shot across the bow of elected Democrats elsewhere who might try to push unions too far. Ms. Weingarten resisted any suggestion that her union was bending with the political winds. "There's a much more important purpose here, which is the love of children," she said in the interview, held at Green Dot New York Charter School in the South Bronx, an unusual example of a charter with unionized teachers. As she did often in the interview, she spoke slowly, tapping her hand on the table for emphasis, and offered perorations, as if speaking to a hall full of listeners. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
GERALD HARDAGE and his wife, Edie, were driving around in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado during a family visit when something clicked inside them. One granddaughter was crawling, and the other was 3 years old. Mr. Hardage said, "'We should just move here,' and I said, 'O.K.,' " Mrs. Hardage, now 64, recalled. Within months, the couple, who were retired, left St. Augustine, Fla., and rented a furnished two bedroom condominium in Steamboat Springs, Colo. Leaving almost all their possessions in Florida they took only clothes and other necessities they rented out their Florida house. That was in 2008. The move required major adjustments some of which were unexpected. And not everything turned out quite the way they had hoped. But they are grateful for the closeness they were able to develop with their grandchildren. Not all grandparents have the wherewithal or the desire to be closer to their grandchildren. But with families increasingly far flung, those who want to establish or maintain a bond may have to go where their grandchildren are. The big decision is whether that move is relatively permanent or clearly temporary, as the Hardages' move turned out to be. As of the 2010 census, 34 percent of grandparents were age 55 through 64, while 26 percent were 65 through 74. Twenty percent were 75 and older, and 20 percent were 45 through 54, according to The MetLife Report on American Grandparents: New Insights for a New Generation of Grandparents, July 2011. Much of what grandparents decide to do depends on whether they have the relative freedom retirement conveys, what kinds of relationships they have with their grown children, whether they are married or living independently and their degree of real or perceived financial freedom. "All grandparents in the nation are alike only in that they have one or more grandchildren," the Met Life Report said. "Within that set of 65 million Americans, there are wide variations in socio economic status and diversity, as there would be in any population that large." Based on United States Census Bureau surveys from March 2010, the mean annual income of grandparent age households was 68,500, about 500 above the mean income for all households in the United States. Yet the same survey said the mean household income of the roughly half of grandparents who were ages 45 to 64 was 81,000 a year, much higher than the 46,400 mean income of households age 65 or older. In addition, the surveys found that about one in four grandparent age households had an annual income of 90,000 or more, while another one in four had an income of less than 25,000 a year. Beyond finances is the strength of family ties. Some grandparents are not inclined to move because they believe they live close enough at a 40 minute to two hour drive. Others live across the country or on another continent. Some move; others visit. One of the risks in moving, many grandparents have learned, is that their children might have to relocate for work, leaving the grandparents behind. So deciding whether to be a nearby grandparent or one from afar takes some soul searching and analysis. For the Hardages, moving was the right thing to do. But living in a region where winter sports, ranching and snow are the norm was tougher than they had imagined. The subzero temperatures were enough to drive them back to Florida five or six years later. The weather was particularly hard on Mr. Hardage, now 77. They ultimately moved to Lake Mary, Fla., near Orlando, but Mrs. Hardage continues to spend three to four months a year in Steamboat Springs. Her husband does not travel much anymore, she said. She goes back and forth, and her daughter and grandchildren visit Florida, too. Often, the desire to live near adult children changes over time. Parents who might not have considered moving closer to their children change their minds when a grandchild comes along. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' It is the birth of the next generation, the "continuity of family," said Christine Crosby, 69, editorial director of Grand magazine and a grandmother. "It changes your view of life," she said. "Even before my daughter became pregnant, I started thinking about coming down here," said Ann Meehan, who relocated to Chevy Chase, Md., from Pennington, N.J., in 2013. "I had been here since July, so it was great to be here for all the anticipation." Ms. Meehan's daughter and son in law live in Arlington, Va., so she is near enough to be able to take care of her granddaughter when needed. "I have my life here and I can go be with them," said Ms. Meehan, who lived with her daughter's family in Arlington from July to October while getting settled. "It kind of gives me the best of both worlds." After divorcing, Ms. Meehan was interested in starting a new life, and she found the Washington area appealing. She had driven down from New Jersey every six weeks to visit since 2008, and she had explored the area carefully. Whether family members move sometimes "depends on the economic status of everybody," Ms. Crosby said. "What can they afford?" Some grandparents, she said, move nearby "to be part of the economic solution for the parents." Another way some families adapt to the birth of grandchildren is to spend part of the year where the new generation lives. Some grandparents who live in colder climates than their grandchildren spend a month in the winter, allowing them to escape harsh weather at the same time. Others go back and forth on visits, while still others plan vacations with adult children and grandchildren. Some, like Ms. Crosby and her husband, Jonathan Micocci, decide to invest in a motor home a "very modest" one, she said, that costs 25,000 so they can live near their grandchildren temporarily. If the adult children have enough space for grandparents to stay with them for short or longer visits, it can make the difference between more and less time together. Here is what grandparents suggest before moving to be near grandchildren: Consider the relationship you have with your adult child. No matter how good it is, figure out your boundaries and how you would develop your own life if you moved. Decide how you are going to spend your time in the new location. Mrs. Hardage, for example, found a part time job and joined the local Chamber of Commerce so she was not always dependent on her family to use up her time and energy. Realize you may be leaving longtime friends and the support of a community. Think about how to establish new relationships. "You have to find your own community," said Judith Botvin, 74, who lives in Denver. Analyze the financial impact of moving. If you have more than one child and more than one grandchild, and want to relocate, compare the cost of living in each area with the cost where you are. If finances are not a big factor, you can move anywhere. If they are, make sure you figure out a budget before you put your home on the market. "If you're working, it's much harder," said Ms. Botvin, who has grandchildren in the Denver area and in Jakarta, Indonesia. "If you are older and retired, it's much easier." She and her husband, who is 80, traveled to Indonesia two years ago and spent a lot of time with their daughter and her family. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Tolstoy had intended to set "War and Peace" in his own era, but realized that in order to understand the aftermath of the Crimean War he had to go back to the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Then he realized that in order to understand those events, he had to go back to Napoleon's invasion of Russia, a generation earlier. Nino Haratischvili, born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1983, wanted to write about growing up in the 1990s, a post Soviet decade of ethnic wars, a flatline economy and electricity blackouts, and she too came to the conclusion that she had to rewind history much further to make sense of her own. Almost 1,000 pages, over 100 years. At first sight, Haratischvili's novel "The Eighth Life" looks like a big old fashioned airport blockbuster, complete with book jacket superlatives: Sweeping! Epic! Saga! The novel tells the story of a Georgian family across the 20th century "the red century," as the narrator, Niza, describes it, "a century that cheated and deceived everyone, all those who hoped." "The Eighth Life," Haratischvili's third novel, won several literary awards in Germany, where the author has lived since 2003, and has been a best seller in translation in several countries. Haratischvili, who writes in German, has said her book is personal rather than autobiographical. Niza writes, like her author, from the vantage of an expatriate in Germany. "I had so many questions," she admits, as she confronts the past in an epistolary account addressed to her niece, an effort that is part explanation, part expiation. Georgia lies on the southern flank of the Caucasus Mountains, east of the Black Sea. It is the farthest edge of Europe, a land of myth and mythmaking whose inhabitants have managed to co opt successive occupying empires Byzantine, Ottoman, Persian and, most recently, Russian with their "sacred virtue of hospitality," copious quantities of wine and polyphonic song. I lived in Georgia for two years at the end of the 1990s and, like all visitors, fell in love with its charms. Unfamiliar readers, fear not; Haratischvili writes deceptively easy prose and inserts historical and cultural references, as clear as an almanac, along the way. We begin in the Eden of the before: Young Stasia, Niza's great grandmother, dreams of ballet dancing, rides her Kabardin horses with abandon, is wooed by a dashing lieutenant. Her father is a well to do chocolate maker who tells her his secret recipe, warning of a curse. The early chapters are full of portents as we await the arrival of the events we know will shatter the idyll. 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. "Time hurried by," as fast as you can turn the pages. 1917: Stasia rushes to Petrograd in the midst of revolution to search for her husband. New Year's Eve, 1927: The sinister "Little Big Man," favorite of the "Generalissimus," appears at a party with a menacing interest in Stasia's sister, the beautiful Christine. 1937: a terrible suicide, terror and arrests. Under collectivism, the chocolate maker is reduced to being a worker in his former shop; when World War II breaks out, it is turned into a canteen serving meatballs and mashed potatoes. The big hands of history scoop up futures and throw them away. Events are woven through the lives of the family, in keeping with a recurring knotted carpet metaphor. I sketched a family tree to keep track of all the characters: pious aunts and mean stepmothers, wives and mistresses, lost lovers, poets and filmmakers and pianists and singers, secret agents and loyal soldiers, bandits, torturers, bastard children and favorite children, love triangles and ghosts. Throughout the book, the family hot chocolate is mixed at moments of crisis, an analgesic to soothe or to summon strength, an opiate of sorts that seems to symbolize the delusion of solace and perhaps the delusion of the great Communist experiment itself. "We can't save anyone," admits Stasia at one point. Love and loss revolve and are recast through generations. But just as I was jotting the familiar tropes "ripping yarn," "fairy tale" and "soap opera" in my critic's notebook, something rather extraordinary happened. The world fell away and I fell, wholly, happily, into the book. It happened during the siege of Leningrad, when hope had slipped to nothing and "the skeletons beneath the earth beat time." Two lovers were separated by the blockade. I won't post spoilers, but what I expected to happen didn't. Instead there were two moments, one after another, of delicately wrought sacrifice. My breath caught in my throat, tears nestled in my lashes. The fulcrum tipped, the cliches I had ascribed were now overwritten with new ones: poignant, heart stopping, sublime. The 1940s are terrible years of war, rape, gulag, execution. An orphan dreamer who once carved legions of wooden angels returns from the camps in Siberia to end his days chiseling busts of Marx and Engels and Lenin. Dreams are "hung, drawn and quartered." The '60s herald teenagers and rebellion, but for this generation it is a false dawn; Stasia's daughter sings to the demonstrators in the middle of the Prague Spring as the tanks roll in. By the '70s, Niza's childhood, life has lapsed into a comfortable complacency, "a golden age" corrupted by "alcoholism, theft and absenteeism." In the '90s, things fall apart. Civil war, ethnic wars, banditry on the street, heroin. The state ceases to function at all; the heat goes off and the electricity goes down (I remember this well) to four hours a day in winter. Lenin Square is renamed Freedom Square, "though no one really seemed to know," the author comments wryly, "what 'freedom' meant." Haratischvili is acute on the push me, pull you complex of Georgia's relationship with Russia. "We enjoyed being the giant's favorite child," one character admits. The author does not comply with the nationalism that came with Georgian independence and allows no reveling in "glorifications and perpetual conspiracy theories." Instead, her novel chronicles more needless deaths, more wasted lives. Haratischvili writes compellingly from inside her characters' heads, but from time to time she pulls back, admitting to her reader that she dare not trespass too far into interior hinterlands. Her misgivings subtly afford her characters privacy for the most intimate of deliberations, the fine lines between betrayal and hypocrisy. Here lie the powerful silences of unspeakable traumas and of culpability too, the "blanks" of "all those who have been forgotten." The novel is patched together from the memories of those who somehow survived, a testament to those who didn't. Even as Niza tries to make a life in a new land, she is compelled to recognize that all the stories she grew up with "formed the very ingredients of my life." Compiling them, confronting them is her gift to her niece, "the girl who had set out, undaunted, to look for a new, better story for herself and her ghosts," the girl who didn't drink the cursed chocolate but poured the remains down the sink, the girl who might just have a chance. The book concludes with a devastatingly brilliant announcement of hope, a new chapter, titled with her niece's name, yet unwritten. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Liu Fengfeng had more than a decade under his belt at one of the world's most prominent technology companies before he realized where the real gold rush in China was taking place. Computer chips are the brains and souls of all the electronics the country's factories crank out. Yet they are mostly designed and produced overseas. China's government is lavishing money upon anyone who can help change that. So last year Mr. Liu, 40, left his corporate job at Foxconn, the Taiwanese giant that assembles iPhones in China for Apple. He found a niche high end films and adhesives for chip products and quickly raised 5 million. Today his start up has 36 employees, most of them in the tech hub of Shenzhen, and is aiming to start mass production next year. "Before, you might have had to beg Grandpa and call on Grandma for money," Mr. Liu said. "Now, you just have a few conversations and everyone is hoping projects get started as soon as possible." China is in the midst of a mass mobilization for chip mastery, a quest whose aims can seem just as harebrained and impossible at least until they are achieved as sending rovers to the moon or dominating Olympic gold medals. In every corner of the country, investors, entrepreneurs and local officials are in a frenzy to build up semiconductor abilities, responding to a call from the country's leader, Xi Jinping, to rely less on the outside world in key technologies. Their efforts are starting to pay off. China remains far from hosting real rivals to American chip giants like Intel and Nvidia, and its semiconductor manufacturers are at least four years behind the leading edge in Taiwan. Still, local companies are expanding their ability to meet the country's needs, particularly for products, such as smart appliances and electric vehicles, that have more modest requirements than supercomputers and high end smartphones. The turbocharged chip push could prove one of the most enduring legacies of President Trump's pugilistic trade policies toward China. By turning the country's dependence on foreign chips into a cudgel for attacking companies like Huawei, the administration made Chinese business and political leaders resolve never to be caught out that way again. In a way, China is hoping to achieve the same kind of liftoff that helped it progress from making plastic toys to crafting solar panels. With semiconductors, though, "the model starts to break down a little bit," said Jay Goldberg, a tech industry consultant and former Qualcomm executive. The technology is eye wateringly expensive to develop, and established players have spent decades accumulating know how. Europe, Mr. Goldberg noted, once had many "incredible" chip companies. Japan's chip makers are leaders in certain specialized products, but few would call them bold innovators. "My point is, there is a ladder China's moving up it," Mr. Goldberg said. But it's "unclear which outcome they go to." Beijing's recent love of chips began with the creation of a giant, chip focused investment fund in 2014. The government set a lofty goal: China would produce 40 percent of the chips it consumed by 2020. That didn't happen. Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that Chinese brands bought 103 billion in semiconductors last year, of which 17 percent was from local vendors. They predict the share will rise to 40 percent in 2025, far short of the government's target of 70 percent. China has charged ahead with renewed urgency because of the U.S. assault on Huawei, the Chinese tech champion, which has been choked off from buying American chips or even chips made using American software and tools. The U.S. Commerce Department imposed similar curbs this month on exports to China's most advanced chip manufacturer, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, citing concerns over military ties. SMIC has denied its products have any military use. And so, China this year has rolled out new tax breaks for chips, including a 10 year exemption from corporate tax and duty free imports of materials. State backed funds have invested in both start ups and publicly traded companies, including when SMIC listed shares in Shanghai in July. At a top level meeting on the economy last week, the Communist Party's leaders enshrined technological self reliance as one of the country's "Five Fundamentals" for economic development. According to an analysis by China Economic Weekly, a magazine affiliated with the Communist Party's official newspaper, People's Daily, the number of chip related companies in China climbed by 58,000 between January and October this year, or roughly 200 a day. Some of these, the magazine noted, were in Tibet not a place traditionally associated with cutting edge tech. "Up until very recently this year the goal had been: With state backing, move up the value chain, specialize where China has a comparative advantage, but don't really try and fall down the rabbit hole of trying to build everything yourself," said Jimmy Goodrich, the vice president for global policy at the Semiconductor Industry Association, a group that represents American chip companies. Now, "it's very clear that Xi Jinping is calling for a redundant domestic supply chain," Mr. Goodrich said. "And so the rules of economics, comparative advantage and the supply chain efficiencies have basically been thrown out the door." The government is conscious of the dangers. State run news outlets have amply covered the recent semiconductor flameouts. The message to other upstarts: Don't mess it up. "There have been some stunning absurdities that defy logic and common sense," China Economic Weekly said. Yet there has also been progress. Two companies, Yangtze Memory Technologies and ChangXin Memory Technologies, are gearing up to put China on the map in memory chips, which store data. Local manufacturers of logic chips, which perform computations, are expanding production, largely for Chinese customers. Those manufacturers might not have much choice but to serve domestic clients. Some multinational chip makers are starting to think twice about working with Chinese suppliers and partners out of concerns about intellectual property theft, said Randy Abrams, a tech analyst with Credit Suisse. "International companies are becoming more wary about the I.P. leakage in China," he said. Mr. Liu, the start up founder in Shenzhen, does not deny being motivated by a certain patriotic purpose. Emblazoned atop the website for his company, Tsinghon, is a proud reference to the Mao era project that produced China's first atomic bomb, ballistic missile and satellite: Inherit the Spirit of "Two Bombs, One Satellite" Be Self Reliant and Bold in Forging Ahead Mr. Liu says the sense of national mission does not conflict with his work serving customers and putting out competitive products. He does acknowledge, when he looks at the sky high valuations for some chip start ups, that irrationality has crept into the market. "There is definitely a bubble in China," he said. "But you can't overgeneralize." The government, he said, is trying to hold local authorities more accountable for bad investments. And the torrent of money might at least persuade more skilled engineers in China to work on chips instead of video games and food delivery apps. "Something is bound to accumulate, whether it's equipment, talent or factories, right?" Mr. Liu said. "If not you or the other guy, then it will be someone else who ends up using it. I think this might be the government's logic." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Amid the low thatch of five and six story apartment houses on Riverside Drive is a tall stand of buildings between West 155th and 158th Streets, eight to 13 story apartment houses that stick out like a cottonwood grove on the prairie. The Riviera, the Vaux Hall, the Sutherland and others were meant to appeal to the professional class that would otherwise take up residence lower down on Riverside or West End Avenue. Today, they remain out of character with their low rise environment, forming a memorable enclave. The land here originally plunged down to the Hudson River. When John James Audubon built a frame house in 1840 on land now between 155th and 156th Streets, he was moving to the country; the woodlands were rich with birds, elk and muskrat. Suburban development followed in the 1880s, and the area became known as Audubon Park. The buildings came about a few years after 1900, when Riverside Drive was extended north of West 155th Street, destroying many houses in its path as it curved inland along its present line, atop an elevated landfill held back by a giant retaining wall. In 1908, Reginald Pelham Bolton, writing in The Record and Guide, complained the new street was "undesirable and even dangerous." But he observed that the newly created land would form a good site for "the highest class of institutional buildings." Yet it was apartment house developers who saw possibilities here, and from 1910 to 1915 five large residential buildings went up on this winding three block stretch: the Vaux Hall (often spelled Vauxhall), 780 Riverside Drive, at 155th Street; the Rhinecliff (occasionally the Rhinecleff), 788 Riverside Drive, at the south corner of 156th; the Riviera, 790 Riverside Drive, between 156th and 157th; the Grinnell, 800 Riverside Drive, between 157th and 158th; and the Sutherland, at the head of the drive at 611 West 158th Street. They were designed by four of the big gun architects of speculative apartment houses: George and Edward Blum did the Vaux Hall; Schwartz Gross did the Rhinecliff and the Grinnell; Rouse Goldstone did the Riviera; and Emery Roth did the Sutherland. They present an encyclopedia of styles. On the Vaux Hall the Blums used their characteristic brick and inset tile for the Arts and Crafts style for which they are well known. Schwartz Gross gave the Rhinecliff a standard stocky West End Avenue style facade, but with two ebullient round topped shields at the top. Rouse Goldstone put up the huge Renaissance style Riviera in three sections, reducing its apparent mass. Schwartz Gross gave the Grinnell a Mediterranean style facade with a central drive in courtyard. And Emery Roth put a fanciful, even funny mansard and copper dome on his Beaux Arts Sutherland. Tenants were willing to trade the more central location of the West End Avenue area for the new subway going up Broadway and the spectacular views across the Hudson the western exposure was completely open until the 1920s. These were big but not fabulous apartments, from five to nine rooms, although according to Matthew Spady, who lives in the Grinnell and has done extensive research on Audubon Park, that building had three duplexes. The apartments attracted people like "Miss M. E. Berry, Pianist," who made her home in the Riviera. She advertised in The New York Tribune in 1915 that she could be engaged for parties: "My Dance Music Is an Inspiration to the Poetry of Motion." Did she ever play for Harry Sohmer, the president of the piano company that his father founded in 1872? In 1920 he was living at the Vaux Hall. Servants were rare, although Rafael Brache, a diplomat from the Dominican Republic and a resident of the Riviera in the 1940s, engaged a Dominican born housekeeper to help tend his family of 11. After World War I a sudden burst of co oping took place, and in 1920 tenants bought the Vaux Hall for 750,000 from an investor who had paid 700,000 for it the previous year. The West Side lost caste in comparison with the East Side after that time, and in the 1930s many of the large apartments were subdivided. By the 1960s drugs and crime were a fact of life in the neighborhood, and the once elegant buildings fell into disrepair. Things turned around in the 1980s, and a group of friends dedicated themselves to clearing out the vines from the mall that is a distinctive feature of this stretch of Riverside Drive. In 1925 it was named Charles and Murray Gordon Memorial Park, after two men killed in World War I, but in recent years has been known as Riverside Oval. The vines were winning again by about 2000, and in 2004 Vivian Ducat, who lives in the Riviera appalled to discover the little oval not only ensnared but buried in vodka bottles, parts of a broken fence and other detritus called a meeting to revive it. Today Christina Ham Read is the head gardener; she says that in addition to pruning shrubs, this fall volunteers planted grasses and, for a bit of winter greenery, two holly trees. "To me," Ms. Ducat says, reflecting on the effort, "it's what makes the neighborhood different. I grew up on the West Side, and I never really thought I could make a difference. But here I have." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Has Hillary Clinton found her dresser in chief? It would appear that way. While the Twitterverse was busy parsing the possible subtexts of Melania Trump's decision to wear a hot pink Gucci pussy bow blouse to watch her husband, Donald J. Trump, during the second presidential debate Sunday evening (given his recently revealed lewd comments about women from 2005), it was actually what Mrs. Clinton wore that seemed meaningful to me. Specifically, her use of a Ralph Lauren navy wool double faced pantsuit with a cream shawl collar and cream wool top to better frame the jovial serenity atop policy wonk approach with which she has chosen to contrast herself with Mr. Trump. See, she also wore Ralph Lauren to the first presidential debate (a red trouser suit), to her speech accepting her party's nomination at the Democratic National Convention (an ivory suit), and to her opening campaign rally on Roosevelt Island (a periwinkle blue suit). In other words, she has worn Ralph Lauren for most of her recent major televised public appearances. This matters both because of what it means now and what it suggests about how Mrs. Clinton is using clothing to bolster her own narrative, and because of what it means for the future. After all, if she wins the election, it will be up to someone to help craft the image of the first female president of the United States. And thus far, despite the fact that a spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the relationship, evidence is beginning to build that that someone would be Mr. Lauren. After all, during the 2008 campaign, Mrs. Clinton had no clear allegiance to any one designer. And though she has worn other designers over the many months of this campaign (including Giorgio Armani), and though during her time as secretary of state Mrs. Clinton often wore jackets from the designer Nina McLemore, the increasing choice of Mr. Lauren as the current go to name and the ability of the clothes to flatter the candidate without calling attention to themselves make it very likely that the pattern will continue. Certainly it would make sense, from both a historical and a professional point of view. First ladies from Jacqueline Kennedy (with Oleg Cassini) to Nancy Reagan (with Adolfo) often allied themselves with a single designer, both as a collaborator in shaping the style of the administration, and for simplicity's sake. President Obama said in an interview with Vanity Fair during his first term in office that the fewer decisions he had to make every day, the more he could concentrate on political priorities. And one of the easiest places for anyone to reduce options is in the wardrobe. Put simply, the president has more important things to worry about than clothes. Which doesn't mean they don't matter. Ralph Lauren is an interesting choice for Mrs. Clinton, both aesthetically and strategically. Mr. Lauren is, perhaps, the most ur American of American designers: a man who built an empire on the mythology of the untrammeled West, where cowboys roamed free among herds of bison, along with a kind of "Brideshead Revisited" Anglo past. He is a man who takes his bow at the end of his show in cowboy boots and jeans, who owns a ranch with tepees so luxurious they made Oprah Winfrey green with envy when she visited. A man who dresses the United States Olympic team for the opening and closing ceremonies, and who (because he got in trouble, admittedly) is now doing so in Made in America stuff. A man who gave 13 million in 1998 for the restoration of the original Star Spangled Banner. Born in the Bronx, a man who started his career as a tie salesman, he is the stereotypical American success story. He is also Mrs. Clinton's peer: He is in his mid 70s and will have experienced many of the same social and political upheavals that she has. What he is not, however, is young, a hyphenate (such as Cuban American or Asian American), in need of the publicity, or even a very adventurous designer all hallmarks of the choices made by the current political style setter in the White House, Michelle Obama. Mrs. Obama has used her public profile to support new American names, to further disseminate the idea of the United States as a melting pot, and to otherwise expand the definition of a first lady. And though it seems Mr. Lauren is the establishment choice, given both his dominant position in the fashion world and the noncontroversial politesse of his clothes which could be construed as a bad choice for Mrs. Clinton, given the clear desire on the part of so much of the electorate to upend the Washington establishment he has, in fact, never been much of a White House presence (a black dress worn by Mrs. Obama to a British state dinner aside). That honor often went to Oscar de la Renta, who died in 2014 but who had dressed first ladies from Mrs. Kennedy to Laura Bush during his career. A Clinton Lauren collaboration would have, indubitably, elegant results. She would look, if she does become president, always appropriate. Odds are that the pantsuits would continue but that they would be slightly more tailored than they have been, a bit less like coat dresses, a little softer. Together, they would not foment sartorial revolution, or shatter the Angela Merkel mold of dressing, or change the parameters of what it means to look like a president. That's probably no bad thing, since the next holder of the executive office will have other eggs to break, and there's no reason to waste political capital on clothes. As a woman, though, I can't help but wish that something a little more radical may happen so that the feminization of power could be clear for all to see, whether they are listening to a speech or just looking at Instagram. And maybe, if Mrs. Clinton is elected, she will decide to cast her sartorial net widely, and experiment. You never know. But either way, if Mrs. Clinton does become president, whoever dresses her will be designing the look of history. That, at least, we know for sure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
American Airlines said on Tuesday that it will offer coronavirus tests to passengers, joining United Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and JetBlue Airways in rolling out preflight testing. Tampa International Airport also said it will offer tests. The tests, which range from rapid tests at the airport that return results in minutes to tests that take a few days, allow travelers whose results are negative to skip or minimize quarantine restrictions in various destinations. The new tests come as the number of people flying both domestically and internationally continues to be at record lows (the Transportation Security Administration screened 568,688 people on Tuesday compared to 1,998,980 on the same date a year ago). Testing at airports, it is hoped, will assuage people who are worried about the safety of flying amid the ongoing pandemic. "Our plan for this initial phase of preflight testing reflects the ingenuity and care our team is putting into rebuilding confidence in air travel and we view this as an important step in our work to accelerate an eventual recovery of demand," Robert Isom, American's president, said in a statement on Tuesday. American initially will test people traveling to international destinations, starting with people traveling from Miami International Airport to Jamaica. Testing for travel to Jamaica will be for residents flying to their home country; if a passenger tests negative for the virus, the 14 day quarantine currently in place for returning residents would be waived. The airline is also working to start testing for visitors and residents going to the Bahamas and other countries in the Caribbean. Beginning in mid October, the airline will offer at home testing that can be done via video call with a medical professional; in person testing at a CareNow urgent care location; and rapid on site testing, administered by CareNow at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport for flights to Hawaii. Tampa International Airport is the first airport in the United States to offer the tests and they will be available to passengers flying on any airline. Tests will be administered by BayCare nurses and medical professionals, and travelers have the option of taking a PCR test that returns results in 48 hours or a rapid antigen test that returns results in 15 minutes. Before the pandemic, Tampa's airport was one of the busiest in the country, with more than 22 million travelers in 2019. Ticketed passengers who are flying or have flown within three days and can show proof of travel can take a nasal swab test for 125 or an antigen test for 57. The tests are not mandatory, and range in price from about 50 to 250. Airlines and airports are desperate to have passengers flying again. The aviation sector faces about 40,000 job losses this week, when the financial relief that was part of the CARES stimulus package ends Oct. 1. "More rapid, efficient testing allows for a broader reopening of the travel economy, and will enable organizations to more quickly restore lost jobs and rehire workers," said Tori Emerson Barnes, the U.S. Travel Association's executive vice president of public affairs and policy, earlier this month. "Importantly, a robust testing program would allow America to welcome back international visitors, a segment of travel that has effectively disappeared since the start of the pandemic." Announced last week, United's pilot program for testing passengers and people traveling from San Francisco International Airport to Hawaii on the airline will begin mid October, when Hawaii allows out of state visitors to skip quarantine if they have a negative test result within 72 hours of traveling. "Our new Covid testing program is another way we are helping customers meet their destinations' entry requirements, safely and conveniently," said Toby Enqvist, the chief customer officer at United, in a statement, adding that the airline is looking to expand testing to other destinations and airports in the United States. JetBlue is offering an at home saliva test that is administered through an online video chat with a Vault Health test supervisor who ensures customers are providing their samples correctly. The airline's test is for people traveling to countries that allow people to enter if they have a negative test result. Travelers receive results within 72 hours. Airports and airlines have been touting increased cleaning procedures and many have mandated social distancing and mask wearing rules, all in an attempt to keep travelers safe and make them feel confident about flying. "Offering tests is consistent with other things major airlines have been doing to make people feel more comfortable around travel experiences," said Stephen Beck, the founder and managing partner of cg42, a management consultancy that has advised aerospace companies. The tests come a few months after airlines and travel trade groups asked the government to create a federal testing program and guidance mandating that people wear masks, but that has not happened and airlines have created their own policies and systems. Airlines also asked European Union and American officials to create a testing program to encourage travel. Carlos Ozores, the aviation and Americas consulting lead at ICF, an airline and aviation consultant, said that the move to offer testing won't lead to a full recovery in air travel, but will likely gain traction in the coming months, especially for international travel. "This is really meant for international markets where you have country restrictions that require a quarantine or a negative test result," Mr. Ozores said. "I imagine this will be rolled out more broadly when catering to international travel." Mr. Ozores added that in order for testing by airlines and airports to work, governments would have to agree to accept the validity of each other's tests, and consistent standards would have to be applied, regardless of where the tests were being done. Among other developments in airline virus testing, Hawaiian Airlines will have drive through testing sites for its passengers in San Francisco and Los Angeles in partnership with Worksite Labs; the tests will cost 90 for results within 36 hours, or 150 for day of travel express service beginning in mid October. In Europe, the Italian airline Alitalia is offering tests on flights between Rome and Milan through October. The airline is also hoping to test on flights and at airports for passengers traveling between New York and Italy. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Dr. W. Dudley Johnson, who pioneered and popularized lifesaving cardiac bypass surgery and was considered a healer of last resort for heart patients around the world, died on Oct. 24 in Milwaukee. He was 86. The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter Susan Comen said. Dr. Johnson was a reluctant surgeon early on, he once recalled, "I disliked surgeons and their pompous attitudes" but he applied the crocheting skills he had learned from his mother, who was a home economics teacher, and the needlecraft he was taught in a seventh grade sewing class (he got an A), to perform more than 8,500 heart bypass operations over four decades. "He received patients who had three alternatives from other doctors who wouldn't tackle their condition," Dr. Gordon Lang, his friend and colleague, said in an interview. "One was, 'Go home and get your affairs in order.' The other was, 'Put your name on a cardiac transplant list.' And the third was, 'Go to Milwaukee and see Dr. Dudley Johnson.'" In an interview with WMVS TV in Milwaukee in 2014, Dr. Johnson said, "I find it very difficult to tell someone to go home and I can't do anything for you." Doctors had experimented with coronary artery surgery since the 1950s, the goal being to remove accumulated plaque caused by cholesterol deposits, which can block blood flow and cause the stabbing pain of angina. One method was to remove the clogged portion of an artery and graft on a replacement patch of cardiac membrane or a segment of vein from a leg. In 1968, Dr. Johnson and his team took another path, sewing segments of veins from multiple arteries end to end and stitching them directly into the aorta, the body's main artery, bypassing cardiac ducts where the flow of blood was impeded. His breakthrough, reported the next year, defied skepticism within the medical profession and heralded a new era of successful double, triple and quadruple bypass surgeries. "It was perhaps the presentation of Johnson in the spring of 1969 that had the greatest impact on the widespread use" of coronary artery bypass grafting, Dr. Eugene A. Hessel II wrote in "Cardiac Anesthesia: Principles and Clinical Practice," published in 2001. Wenner Dudley Johnson was born on April 3, 1930, in Madison, Wis., the son of Royce Johnson, an electrical engineering professor, and the former Olga Wellberg, who was from a family of Swedish immigrants. He went by Dudley. He decided to become a doctor when he was in the eighth grade, he said, in part because he was fond of a physician who was a close family friend. He earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of Illinois in 1951 and, after graduating from the university's medical school, interned at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, where an admired senior resident changed his dim view of surgeons. His first marriage, to Kathryn Ann Dicks in 1958, ended in divorce. Besides his daughter Susan, he is survived by another daughter, Sharon Bock, and a son, Stephen, all from his first marriage; a brother, Stephen; and four grandsons. Dr. Johnson was married twice more, to the former Sharon Clark and the former Lois Reid, who died in 2012. Two stepchildren from his third marriage, Nancy Anthony and Jeff Swegler, also survive. Dr. Johnson was drafted into the Navy, but because he was prone to seasickness, he said, he signed up for the Public Health Service. He had planned to be a general practitioner, but after leaving the health service he moved to Milwaukee and began studying bypass procedures with Dr. Derward Lepley Jr. In 1968, they collaborated on a heart transplant operation on a woman who went on to survive nearly nine more years, longer than any other transplant patient until then. Dr. Johnson's multiple bypass surgeries, which could take as long as nine hours and were often accompanied by classical music in the operating room, were credited with saving an untold number of lives. But in an interview with Dr. William S. Stoney for "Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery" (2008), Dr. Johnson said "the single biggest thing I ever did to lower mortality" was to prescribe the drug allopurinol, which is ordinarily used to inhibit the production of uric acid (high levels of it can cause gout), but which has also been found to improve survival in cardiac patients by improving their capacity for exercise. Dr. Johnson never shied from controversy. In the mid 1980s, he was criticized for refusing to operate on AIDS patients out of fear that his surgical team might become contaminated by blood. Despite Cold War tensions, he performed heart surgery in Communist Cuba (becoming, by his account, the first American heart surgeon to do so). And he persevered in his defiance of skeptics to prove that multiple bypasses were practical. Dr. Johnson liked to say that "the best way to prevent coronary disease is to pick your parents," but he also said that people could take action to prevent it. He himself was eating less meat and more fish, and swimming four times a week, he said in 2014, though he acknowledged that he was a little overweight. (He had also never smoked.) Most of all he emphasized that surgery was not a cure for heart disease. "The coronary artery bypass graft operation does nothing for the basic cause of the disease," Dr. Johnson said, adding, "Prevention is, of course, the ultimate answer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
VENICE What if David, the biblical hero who defeats Goliath, were a gay teenager with a taste for vogueing? The Italian director Giovanni Ortoleva makes the case for reinvention in "Saul," a new play presented at the Venice Theater Biennale but the character is also a metaphor for the entire festival, which concludes on Sunday. While Venice has had a Theater Biennale since 1934, it still feels like a David to the Art Biennale's Goliath. Misleadingly, the juggernaut contemporary art exhibition is regularly referred to as "the Venice Biennale," but this city is actually awash with Biennales. Theater is a yearly fixture along with dance and music, while the art and architecture events happen every other year. Yet the performing arts' presence remains more discreet. It may be a blessing in disguise. This year's lineup was blissfully free of the same old star directors who headline many international theater festivals. Antonio Latella, who has been at the event's helm since 2017, appears more interested in theater makers who fly below the radar. His first edition featured only female directors, and, in keeping with this year's theme, "Dramaturgies," the Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement went to a dramaturge, Jens Hillje, the co director of Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theater. At the two week Biennale, a sample of Mr. Latella's finds proved invigorating. Not only does he go for unpredictable, diverse, boldly structured projects, but he takes the time to introduce artists, frequently programming two productions by the same director or company. This proved particularly beneficial for the Rotterdam based collective Club Gewalt, whose nutty brand of musical theater swings wildly between opera, punk and pop references from one project to the next. "Yuri A Workout Opera," the company's opening act, was inspired by the troubled career of Yuri van Gelder, an artistic gymnast from the Netherlands. Club Gewalt's tribute is staged as a 39 minute floor exercise, timed by a countdown clock. The seven cast members , who are clad in leotards and leggings and salute like gymnasts before their entrances and exits, sing and perform repetitive choreography reminiscent of both 1980s workout videos and the minimalist patterns of the American dance maker Lucinda Childs. A series of songs composed by the collective charts Mr. van Gelder's path to a world title in 2005 on the rings, his favorite apparatus and subsequent struggles with drugs and alcohol. (In 2016, he was pulled from the Olympic rings final in Rio de Janeiro by the Dutch team after a night of drinking.) While well realized, "Yuri A Workout Opera" would be easy to dismiss as an unclassifiable oddity, but "Club Club Gewalt 5.0 Punk" gave the Biennale's audience a sense of Club Gewalt's range the next night. Described by the millennial collective as a "performance club night," it started as a punk concert with the audience standing and a bar at the ready and morphed into immersive theater, delivered in a mix of Dutch and English. One minute, a performer personifying "Kapitalismus," or capitalism, delivered a spot on imitation of Matthew McConaughey; the next, the audience was divided into teams to play "hard rock bingo," where the prize was a chance to knock down a balloon marked "Eurocentrism" with a bat. By the time the "Game of Thrones" characters Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow appeared to debate business issues and Donald Trump, the giddy inventiveness of Club Gewalt's political cabaret had grown irresistible. Their work looks like nothing else on the European stage, and with any luck, an international career beckons. Alongside the youthful experiments of Club Gewalt, the Venice Theater Biennale also gave a platform to an Australian duo with three decades' experience. The director Susie Dee and the playwright Patricia Cornelius have crafted award winning productions focusing on Australia's underclass. Still, m ainstream companies in their country shy from putting on their work because of its "more challenging" nature, Ms. Cornelius told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2017. That's a mistake because the two pieces of theirs at the Biennale, a 2015 work with an unprintable title that rhymes with "grit," and "Love," new this year, suggest Ms. Dee and Ms. Cornelius are producing exactly the kind of work that socially conscious theaters and audiences around the world are currently looking for. In "Love," a teenager, Annie, works as a prostitute to support her girlfriend Tanya and Lorenzo, a drug addict. In the 2015 work, the easy banter of three women who have been ground down by abuse and poverty takes a dark turn when they commit a crime. Ms. Cornelius's excellent writing mostly steers clear of misery porn. Profanities and slang have no secrets for her and Ms. Dee, who lend them a rapid fire musical rhythm: The swearing sequences in the 2015 work are especially virtuosic, and earned shocked laughter in Venice. The characters, served by superb casts, are alternately vile and vulnerable. The Theater Biennale also serves as a training ground for young Italian artists. Over two to three years, a group of young directors and playwrights known as the Biennale College receive mentorship and opportunities to present works in progress. Both the winning director of the 2018 19 College, and Mr. Ortoleva, the recipient of a special mention, were invited to show complete productions at this year's festival. The production, which also draws on a 1903 play of the same name by the French author Andre Gide, is at once faithful to Saul's story and utterly idiosyncratic. The breakneck pace of the Italian dialogue made the English subtitles hard to follow, but it brought out the text's Beckettian quality, especially in the early back and forth between the king, played with a kind of blase charisma by Marco Cacciola, and his concerned son Jonathan. Their routine is disrupted by the young David (Alessandro Bandini), who defeated Goliath at Saul's command and became his successor. "Saul e David," a 1964 sword and sandals film directed by Marcello Baldi, plays on a screen above the characters' heads throughout. Mr. Ortoleva builds on the homoerotic tension between David and both Saul and Jonathan. While "Saul" meanders toward the end, a number of tightly directed scenes made up for it. In one of them, at a dinner party, Saul found himself throwing spears at David on a loop, with increasingly fragmented, sped up text. Here, and elsewhere at the Biennale, you could see theater makers flexing their creative muscles with absurd, captivating insouciance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Shopping isn't usually the first thought travelers have when they visit Verona, a picturesque city in Italy's Veneto region that is about an hour's drive from Venice. Most come here in the summer to catch an outdoor opera in the Roman amphitheater, Arena di Verona, and year round, the city attracts tourists who want to learn more about the real life love story said to have inspired William Shakespeare to write "Romeo and Juliet." But some of the boutiques in the pretty town center, an area lined with cobblestone streets, are also worthy of attention. Though the goods they sell ranges from clothes to wine and chocolate, these shops stand out for their loyalty to Italian brands. Don't come hungry to this chocolate boutique, which carries truffles, pralines and bars from several renowned Italian chocolatiers such as Amedei, Venchi, Domori and Manjani: the temptation to not buy and immediately consume something from the enticing display will be that much harder to resist. Look for seasonal flavors such as strawberry truffles in the summer and pumpkin pralines in the fall. The shop also has a cafe that serves coffee and cocktails. Prices from 1 euro. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
On the volatile Billboard album chart these days, one week you can be No. 1, and the next you drop to No. 169. Case in point: Bon Jovi's "This House Is Not for Sale." The album, which came out almost a year and a half ago, returned from oblivion last week to reach No. 1, thanks to a deal that bundled the CD with the cost of concert tickets for Bon Jovi's latest tour. Such deals have become the music industry's favorite new sales gimmick, used by everyone from Metallica and Arcade Fire to Pink. And since chart positions are now computed by looking at both sales and streams with sales of full albums given the most weight by far a well timed ticket bundle can be a quick path to No. 1. This practice has raised concerns, but Nielsen denies any chart manipulation. Bon Jovi's 168 spot plunge, however, is the biggest drop for a No. 1 album in the six decade history of the chart, according to Billboard. (The previous record holder was the emo band Brand New, whose album "Science Fiction" fell 96 spots last September.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
ORLANDO, Fla. In this most visited city in the country, tens of millions of tourists spend their dollars every year in a swarm of theme parks that have made this area famous around the world. Now, Orlando is trying to show itself as a place far different than a land of fantasy. An important part of Orlando's emerging presence as a mature and innovative city is the 14 square mile Lake Nona project, which is being built on land that only a decade ago was mostly pasture. Once finished, the development, being built by Tavistock Development Company, will resemble a city in everything but name, with hospitals, hotels, office buildings, schools and colleges, recreational and sports training facilities, retail centers, entertainment spots and, ultimately, about 11,000 homes and more than 25,000 residents. More than 10 million square feet of construction has been completed at a cost of more than 3 billion. "We didn't want to pave over this project with a bunch of production housing we wanted to do something greater," James Zboril, president of the company, said over the summer in the project's Laureate Park Village Center. Nearby, children splashed in a large pool and adults worked out in a state of the art gym, facilities built for the residents. The Lake Nona property was bought in 1996 by the British businessman Joseph C. Lewis, the founder of the Tavistock Group, the developer's parent company. He later doubled the site's size by buying adjacent parcels. If the entire 9,000 acre property 40 percent of which will be left undeveloped were laid over Manhattan, it would stretch from the financial district north to 66th Street and, in parts, as far west as Jersey City. Two of Lake Nona's top goals, the developer says, were to entice institutions and commercial entities to build on the site and to encourage their employees to live there, sparing them from commutes and providing daily conveniences within easy reach. Tavistock using enticements like grants and free plots of land, and aided by state and local government incentives set about persuading major medical and research institutions to move to the site as part of a life sciences cluster. Now known as Medical City, its 650 acres are host to Nemours Children's Hospital; the University of Central Florida Medical Center; the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute; the University of Florida Research and Academic Center; the GuideWell Innovation Center, a research, education and incubation hub; and a Veterans Affairs hospital, the first for the 400,000 veterans who live in the Orlando area. About 13 percent of Lake Nona's home buyers work at a Medical City institution, and 11 percent work elsewhere in the area. An additional 13 percent are employed at Orlando International Airport, which is northwest of the project and within sight of much of it, and 27 percent work from home. At home workers benefit from a high bandwidth infrastructure that delivers internet service at one gigabyte per second. Mr. Zboril said that, in an effort to build a place that inspires and helps create good health, Tavistock invited Lake Nona residents about 11,000 people so far to consider themselves a "living laboratory" and participate in formal health studies run by on site institutions over many years. In the shorter term, residents are offered free activities like bike races, tai chi and yoga. Trails in the area will eventually total 44 miles. To encourage what they describe as "environmentally conscious" lifestyles, the developer is limiting the community's use of nonrenewable resources like gasoline by installing electric vehicle chargers. The developer is also minimizing the project's impact on the environment by applying "green" construction practices, reducing energy and water use and reducing waste. "There's not anything like this in all of North America," said Mayor John Dyer of Orlando, who said the city had spent more than 80 million to build roads and other infrastructure in and around the development. "Lake Nona is a great expression of what Orlando is all about," said Mr. Dyer, who is known as Buddy. "It wasn't just a place where someone was going to build tract housing. It was a place that was going to be an economic engine for the area." He said the development was part of an effort to "rebrand" Orlando, including a marketing campaign with the slogan "You Don't Know the Half of It," aimed primarily at companies and entrepreneurs who may want to relocate to Florida because of tax incentives. The mayor and the city's Economic Development Commission are promoting several projects they say will elevate Orlando's standing as a world class city. Downtown, about 15 miles north of Lake Nona, a public private partnership plans to build a 68 acre, mixed use development called Creative Village, with office buildings, schools, shops, apartments, a hotel and a new campus of the University of Central Florida for more than 7,000 students. Other plans downtown include a 155 million soccer stadium with at least 25,000 seats, while the Camping World Stadium, built in 1936 and used for professional football games and other events, is being renovated at a cost of 200 million. An auditorium called Steinmetz Hall is to be added to the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, a 488 million structure that opened in 2014 and houses the Walt Disney Theater and the Alexis and Jim Pugh Theater. Beyond Lake Nona and downtown, other developments abound. Near Kissimmee, about 12 miles southwest of Lake Nona, builders are at work on a 70 million campus called the Florida Advanced Manufacturing Research Center. The aim is to attract technology jobs. "If we could end up with a jobs factory, everything else would take care of itself," Rasesh Thakkar, the senior managing director of Tavistock Group, the developer's parent company, said of Lake Nona. As the prestige of the Lake Nona project has grown, more institutions are coming aboard. The United States Tennis Association, which has 700,000 members, is scheduled to open its national training center in the development's Sports and Performance District in January. The 63 acre site will have more than 100 tennis courts of various surfaces, including red clay imported from Cremona, Italy. Another tennis organization, the 15,000 member United States Professional Tennis Association, which certifies instructors, plans to move its headquarters to Lake Nona next year, after 25 years in Houston. The sports district will also house a 23 acre training facility for the Orlando City Soccer Club, which competes in Major League Soccer's eastern conference. The University of Central Florida was a major partner as Lake Nona began to take shape. In 2005, Mr. Thakkar contacted John C. Hitt, president of the university, who was looking for a place to build a medical school. The developer's gift to the university of 50 acres and 12.5 million was persuasive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
BEACON, N.Y. Before it was converted into one of the country's largest museums of modern and contemporary art, the building that houses the Dia Art Foundation here was a box factory, built in 1929. The front galleries upstairs were once printing sheds, and still signal their lapsed function through their saw toothed windows and unstained wood floors. But it's downstairs, in the old loading bays, that you really sense this minimal monastery's industrial life. An array of concrete columns, each topped with a mushroom shaped capital, holds up the printing plant. Clerestory windows cast shadows on a huge concrete floor. Down here, where Dia has previously presented work by Bruce Nauman, Dan Flavin, Tacita Dean and Francois Morellet, the museum fully foregrounds the awkward alliance of modern art and modern industry. The basement is almost entirely empty right now, and in this dark vacuum lies one of the smartest and saddest exhibitions I've seen in a while staged not by an artist, but a musician. For the new work "Party/After Party," the D.J. Carl Craig, a leading figure of Detroit techno, has converted Dia's lower level into a phantasmal nightclub, illuminated only by a few strip lights and spots, and equipped with heavy duty speakers that blast a precisely engineered score. For more than 20 minutes, Mr. Craig builds and layers four on the floor explosions, deep toned echoes and euphoric drops. You may want to dance, but no one is there to dance with you. More than just a migration of the nightclub into the museum, "Party/After Party" delves into the intertwined legacies of functionalist architecture, postwar art, and techno music: how industry shaped culture from the Bauhaus to Motown, and what happens to art and music when the factories close down. It's an immensely cunning meld of factory, nightclub and art gallery. It's a triumph for Dia, which has been quietly broadening its roster of participants without dissolving its commitment to a cool, narrow strain of minimal, conceptual and environmental art. And it represents one of the sharpest efforts I've seen to introduce a musician into the supposedly all media terrain of contemporary art, which took experimental music more seriously in the late 1960s and 1970s than it does today. (MoMA's "Bjork" calamity is a cursed memory.) Yet when Mr. Craig and the Dia curator Kelly Kivland began planning this exhibition five years ago, they could not have foreseen how devastatingly gloomy "Party/After Party" would appear, now that you cannot dance in almost any city on earth. (Turn your browser to Mr. Craig's touring schedule, and gasp at the litany of canceled gigs and livestreamed stopgap efforts.) Its integration of gallery and club, its conversion of sound into space, might have felt like a Brechtian defamiliarization of techno before March. Now it feels like an antiseptic memory palace before the "after party" of Covid life. Museums are slowly reopening, but clubs are not coming back for a while. You may never taste a stranger's sweat on the dance floor again. Dia reopened to the public earlier this month, with timed ticketing and, naturally, a mask requirement. The galleries are even more serene than usual given the limited capacity, and upstairs John Chamberlain, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and Gerhard Richter are now joined by the post minimal sculptor Barry Le Va, whose circa 1970 scatterings of chalk, glass, felt and ball bearings cover the length of one gallery's floor. You have to keep your distance, but you were already doing that. Minimal sculpture, like techno music, conditions the body to behave in certain ways circling it, sizing yourself up to it, getting close without touching it. This theatrical aspect, as if sculpture and viewer were two bodies on a stage, was precisely what the art historian Michael Fried, in an influential 1967 essay, despised about minimalism and it got worse with the arrival of the camera phone, which turned minimal art into a familiar Instagram backdrop. Yet I found that Covid has revalued and reformatted my experience of minimal sculpture, which gives off new tensions amid the heightened body awareness we've all picked up from social distancing. Richard Serra's "Torqued Ellipses," whose tight passages of contorted steel have loomed these past two decades in the factory's old train shed, require the same careful negotiations we execute in pharmacy aisles. Donald Judd's wooden boxes occupy space with as much exactitude as a quarantine venue: they keep their distance from each other, and silently dictate where you should stand. No such objects are to be found downstairs in Mr. Craig's exhibition, though its orchestration is just as careful and its impact on your body is just as profound. The D.J. and his sound engineers equipped the basement with equalizers and black fabric baffles to modulate reverb, so that his rippling percussion and expansive rhythms leave your heart beating and your ears ringing. His crescendoing blocks of sound have affinities with Sol LeWitt's exhaustive systems of lines, with the identical rods of Walter De Maria's "Broken Kilometer," or with Flavin's barrier of green fluorescent lights in the next room. Just as important is the architecture of Dia's stark basement, whose concrete colonnade echoes the garages that Craig and other African American musicians in Detroit repurposed for parties in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the minimal and conceptual artists that Dia sanctifies upstairs worked in converted lofts in the 1960s and 1970s, of course. And techno, too, was shaped by industrial architecture. (Consider Kraftwerk, the German electronic music group whose Bauhaus type sound was decisive for the development of Detroit techno, and whose name literally means "power plant.") Those vacated factories and workshops inspired art and music with a stricter, depersonalized edge and "Party/After Party," with stunning confidence, establishes that Black electronic music fully belongs in the lineage of American and European art and industry that Dia guards. By century's end, the artists themselves got priced out of their SoHo lofts and museums themselves began to move into the old warehouses, factories and electric plants of deindustrializing cities. The trend dates at least to the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, which became an art space in 1977. But it really took off in the late 1990s, with the opening of Mass MoCA in the Berkshires (a former textile printer), the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (an old train shed), and the granddaddy of museum conversions: Tate Modern in London, which opened in 2000 in a repurposed power station. These museums, and Dia too, have turned the streamlined spaces of industry into the most rarefied and expensive of climes, and that gives a melancholy tint to the evolution of art, music, money and urbanism that "Party/After Party" so cannily traces. In exporting techno music from one converted factory to another, Mr. Craig is increasing its historical worth but also depopulating it, objectifying it, giving it the same cool power as Judd's specific objects. There is no party in "Party/After Party," especially now, in the reduced occupancy museum. I could imagine it, as my breath under my mask got hot, as an exhibition of club culture in an ethnographic museum, an embalmed display of some vanished civilization. At the end of the 20th century, both high art and popular revelry could infill our cities' deindustrialized expanses. At this low moment in the 21st, only art is left. And maybe, in the era of Covid, this is what art is supposed to be: a time capsule of when our lives still had human fullness, an amulet of past joys we will not experience for a while longer. I may never feel the joy of dancing again, I felt, as Mr. Craig's drop washed over me and my feet stayed planted to the floor. I have reached the edge of tears in nightclubs before, but this was the first time I've done so sober. Maybe, before Dia brings down Mr. Craig's installation in the summer of 2021, it will be safe enough for a few hundred bodies to pack the museum's basement and dance. I hate to bet against it. But shortly after leaving Beacon I saw an item from Germany: Berghain, the immense Berlin nightclub (another power plant conversion) where Mr. Craig regularly D.J.s, will not host parties for the foreseeable future and will instead turn its dance floor over to ... contemporary art. For pity's sake, we should just say it: Art is the luxury asset that moves in when the party's over. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
To loosely paraphrase Tennessee Williams's Blanche Dubois: When you travel with a family, that's when you really depend on the kindness of strangers. The thought occurred to me, any number of times, during a three day weekend late in April, I spent in Montreal with my husband, Howie, our son and daughter in law, and three young grandchildren. I was struck not only by how much planning and work it requires just to get from place to place to deal with jackets, the stroller, seating arrangements, food preferences, the occasional meltdown but also how your whole day (indeed your whole trip) can be made or ruined by the way others react: the eye roll of impatience versus the generosity and thoughtfulness that signify a genuine desire to help. The good news is that in Montreal we experienced nothing but kindness. Everyone we met at our hotel, in restaurants, in museums and on the street seemed so eager to make our lives easier that at moments I was shocked. Why were these people so nice? The kids picked up on the considerate responses and (as kids do) responded accordingly they were on their best behavior. Meanwhile the older ones were thrilled to discover that we could drive four hours from our home in the Hudson Valley and wind up in another country a country where people spoke French! Not only because French is so widely spoken though everyone we met spoke English but because of how the city looks, Montreal feels more Old World than other Canadian cities, such as Toronto and Vancouver. Walking around this supremely walkable city (which is, however, large enough to require a car or public transportation there is a good metro system as you get farther from the center) you feel as if you are moving through centuries of history. Near the Port of Montreal, Old Montreal with its cobblestone streets, old stone buildings, its majestic basilica and its small, leafy squares and parks you almost feel as if you could be in France. (In fact, films have been shot here, using the neighborhood as a stand in for French cities.) The downtown is more modern, bustling, vibrant, offering excellent museums, great shopping, and sleek modern architecture. Each of the many disparate neighborhoods has its own particular character, at least partly reflecting the immigrant populations who first settled there. You can still find cafes serving espresso and cannoli in Little Italy, and Portuguese restaurants and bakeries in the city's Little Portugal. And while it's true that the weather can be daunting in the winter the city gets a lot of snow, and the stones in the Old City seem to exhale cold and damp the spring is lovely, and the summer, according to everyone I spoke to, is glorious. Montreal is one of those cities in which, whenever the weather warms up even moderately, everyone takes to the streets in shorts and T shirts, and that was the case when we were there. Here's an example of what I mean about the good will that went beyond anything I'd expected or experienced. Let me be honest: I'd kind of forgotten to tell the restaurant, Le Club Chasse et Peche, in Old Montreal about my 18 month old grandson, Pablo. I'm not proud of it, but I'd committed my little lie of omission because I'd wanted, for so long, to try the well known and justly celebrated Chef Claude Pelletier's elegant and original take on what one might find at a Quebecois hunting and fishing lodge; because there were seven of us and the website said the restaurant could only accommodate six at a table; and because I thought we'd deal with the baby one way or another, rotating laps, if need be. I was prepared to be gracious when the restaurant refused to seat us it wouldn't be their fault. I braced myself for the punitive reproof masquerading as an apology that usually begins, "We're sorry but ..." That was not what happened. The receptionist hid his consternation beautifully, conferred with a few co workers, then returned, smiling, to say: "My colleague is smarter than I am, and has figured out how we can make this work." They showed us to a table against a long banquette at which we could sit Pablo between his sisters, Emilia, 11, and Malena, 7, comfortably and with enough room so that he wouldn't feel hemmed in. Before we'd even ordered, they offered to bring out plates of pasta with butter and cheese for the kids. Later, when the younger kids did get restless, a host brought over a toy animal she'd improvised, using a few wine corks and some sticks, a creature with which Pablo and Malena played happily while their parents and grandparents dined on exquisite braised piglet risotto with foie gras shavings, perfect seared scallops with fennel puree and lemon confit, halibut with chorizo and almonds, and, for dessert, maple syrup parfait with red berry sauce. The staff was similarly resourceful and accommodating at the legendary and marvelous restaurant Joe Beef in the Little Burgundy neighborhood, widely known for its dedication to excellent, lavish portions and gourmet excess, and at Au Pied de Cochon, one of my Montreal favorites and a 10 minute drive from the old port, where, though we were by then slightly woozy from two days of feasting, I insisted that at least one of us try one of the restaurant's specialties: duck in a can. It's an ultrarich dish that as a waiter with a can opener releases it from the can arrives with an especially dramatic presentation, as the food and sauce and delicious aroma spill out. All three of these restaurants are admittedly high end (unless one orders carefully, there can be a bit of sticker shock at the conclusion of the meal) but we were treated just as nicely in simpler establishments for example, the popular breakfast spot, Olive et Gourmando, a few blocks from our hotel in Old Montreal, where the tempting pastries vie with the menu items made with fresh fruit and eggs. In Montreal's small but engaging Chinatown, a short walk from the Old Harbor, at the noodle shop, Nouilles de Lan Zhou, we waited to be seated, as the kids watched, with enraptured fascination, the young man twirling, stretching, spinning and cutting hand pulled noodles in the restaurant window. They also enjoyed eating on the fly as we walked through the huge Jean Talon market, a covered market in what is officially the Little Italy neighborhood, but whose main streets are now lined with Vietnamese restaurants, and where one gets a powerful sense of the city's ethnic diversity. One can lunch on tacos, samosas, enchiladas and baklava, on oysters and poutine (the Montreal signature dish of French fries, gravy and cheese curd). And the displays of artisanal cheeses and freshly caught fish are so enticing that the market is the sort of place that makes the visitor think: Really, I could live here. Eating not only well but wonderfully is one good reason to go to Montreal, but it was only one of the reasons and not even the principal one why we went. That was, at least in the planning stages, all about the butterflies. Several years ago, in Montreal for a few days, in the dead of winter, I asked a woman working in the gift shop at Montreal's excellent Museum of Fine Arts: What would she do if she had extra time to kill in Montreal in the winter? She replied without hesitation: I'd go see the butterflies. And she couldn't have been more right. Every winter, from late February through April, which can still be fairly cold, though it was temperate and pleasant when we were there, Montreal's Botanical Garden turns one of its greenhouses into a butterfly jungle. The result, entitled Butterflies Go Free, is awe inspiring. At any one time, 2,000 butterflies iridescent, brilliantly colored, elaborately patterned, are flying through the air, alighting on the lush vegetation and occasionally on a visitor. It feels a bit like walking into a scene from the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," when one of the characters, Mauricio Babliona, is followed constantly by swarms of yellow butterflies. A winding path leads visitors past thickly planted borders and through open areas where knowledgeable docents stand ready to talk about butterflies and their habits. Ever since that first time I'd gone, I'd been planning to go back again with the kids. The children (and their parents and grandparents) were appropriately mind blown as we called each other over to see some particularly outrageous specimen. A bright blue butterfly landed on baby Pablo, who made his noise of wild enthusiasm, somewhere between a bird's caw and an adolescent wow. His sisters borrowed our phones to photograph the insects that seem to pose obligingly on banana leaves, fluttering their wings only slightly. In fact, the kids liked all the half dozen or so greenhouses in the Botanical Garden's extensive complex. One of them has an Asian theme, with extraordinary bonsai, while another is planted with the cactuses and spiny plants of the American Southwestern desert. A walk of a few minutes from the greenhouses through one of Montreal's many pleasant parks is the Insectarium, also part of the garden complex. Unlike the butterfly house, the insect museum operates year round. A large vitrine filled with rows of improbably shiny, garishly colored beetles provoked almost the same awe struck response as the butterflies had. And the impressive array of imposing creatures a tarantula, a scorpion behind glass but obviously quite alive, inspired squeals of horror and excitement. There was a lot that the kids enjoyed: walking through the Old City of Montreal, especially in the early mornings and on a Friday evening, when the streets were less crowded than they were on weekend afternoons, and when you could imagine that you were in a different country in an earlier era; strolling through two of the most interesting neighborhoods, Westmount and the Plateau; stopping in clothing and toy and gift shops that seemed so much more various, quirky and individual less corporate than stores in American cities. We'd planned on spending an hour or so there, but we wound up passing a good part of the day, as Emilia and Malena ran from exhibit to exhibit, calling each over to see the latest wonder they'd discovered, and Pablo ran behind, eager to see what had gotten his sisters so enthusiastic. The science center occupies a vast space enlivened by bright colors and inventive graphics explaining what each of the dozens of displays means and what it has to teach them. A grouping of large, bright red foam building blocks demonstrates the way in which the arch is a surprisingly strong and stable architectural form; the text accompanying a ball and a net (almost like something one might find in a carnival midway) describes the enormous amount of coordination and judgment required for a child whose nervous system is not yet fully developed to catch a ball. "So let's be patient on the playing field" was the helpful conclusion offered. A permanent exhibition, entitled "Human," invites kids to appreciate the wonders of the body the eyes, the ears, the mysteries of the brain. Emilia and Malena were amazed even shocked to learn that humans share certain genetic similarities to the banana! A robot with pincers that can be manipulated to pick up blocks teaches kids about the ingeniousness (and the challenges) of prosthetic limbs. Other exhibits, equipped with screens rather like video games challenge players to stop a fictive epidemic threatening Quebec, or to catch an antelope (like the cave people did) to feed their families. An animal skeleton half buried in sand that visitors can remove with brushes allows pretend archaeologists to unearth thrilling discoveries. The feature that most excited all three of the grandchildren so much so that we could hardly persuade them to leave was a pad on which they could stand in the midst of a kind of moat of soapy water. By raising a circular bar immersed in the water, they could encase themselves, head to toe, in a bubble; the children's excitement was such that everyone lost sight of what scientific principle this was intended to illustrate. What extended our stay for another hour was a free workshop in which kids and their parents were given a wide assortment of wheels, pulleys, rods and decorative feathers material from which they could construct imaginative vehicles capable of sliding down a long piece of string. Everyone in the family becomes involved, even in the required cleanup following the construction a brilliant aspect of the workshop, in their parents' and grandparents' opinion. Partly because we'd spent so much time in the science museum, there was a lot we didn't have time to do in one weekend. The kids wanted to ride the Ferris wheel, formally known as the Montreal Observation Wheel, in the Old Port of Montreal, from which you can, apparently, see the entire city; they wanted to ride the boats that tour the Old Port harbor on the St. Lawrence River; they wanted to climb the trails in Mount Royal Park in central Montreal. Meanwhile the grown ups were thinking, with regret, of all the excellent restaurants we hadn't had time to try. And when the desk clerk at our wonderfully comfortable hotel, Le Saint Sulpice, who had proven marvelously accommodating and thoughtful during our stay, suggested we return at the height of summer, when the streets are full of performers and music, when he said the city becomes a perpetual open air (and free!) party, all of us, children and adults agreed: We'd be back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Brett Howell, a program manager at Coca Cola in Atlanta, has found a way to use his small family foundation to take on environmental issues that have a big impact. He was one of the leaders of a 2019 project to clean up Henderson Island, an atoll in the South Pacific that has the highest concentration of plastic pollution in the world. The island, a U.N. world historical site, is uninhabited but sits in the middle of a current that carries ocean debris. Mr. Howell also started a process of working with other organizations to figure out how to keep the plastic from filling up the beach again. "I came at this from the approach of I know a ton about this, and I've seen what works and what doesn't work," he said. The issue of climate change may seem too overwhelming for individuals to have much influence. Sure, people can recycle, maybe dial back the thermostat to save heat. But even governments with unlimited resources struggle to take meaningful steps. Yet some smaller foundations, like the Howell Conservation Fund, are trying to challenge this narrative and focus their energy and resources on one small area of the environment in the hope that it will have a major impact. "Philanthropy is so much more than money," said Henry Berman, the chief executive of Exponent Philanthropy, which works with small foundations. "Relationships, expertise, pulling people together these are all parts of the puzzle to make things work. You don't have to be Bill Gates or Mike Bloomberg to make it work." Mr. Howell contributed just 10 percent of the 2019 operation's 300,000 cost the return trip this year was canceled. But he brought people together with more money and different expertise. "If you're hyper focused, you can punch above your weight," he said. Several principles unite these small foundations in their efforts to slow climate change or make a difference in a local ecosystem. Believing in and talking about the science behind climate change is, not surprising, the starting point. But these smaller foundations have often found that they have to take a role in bringing together other interested groups of all sizes. The Campbell Foundation, which is based in Baltimore, has focused on the poor health of the Chesapeake Bay for over 20 years. Last year, it made 18 million in grants to some 200 organizations, but it also regularly brings together the various interests around the waterway, including farmers, fishermen and conservationists. One big issue has been the runoff into the water from chicken waste. "It's me going around and meeting people," said Samantha Campbell, the president of the foundation, which her father started. "That kind of effort to hear all sides really counts. "I say it's not just conservation for conservation's sake," she added. "It's about the benefits to people of a healthy environment." As the only American on the expedition to Henderson Island, Mr. Howell had to do something similar. "You have to bring together very disparate groups," he said. Other members of the expedition team focused on research to understand where the plastic was coming from and how to recycle some of it. And some focused on getting out the word on how a pristine island was overwhelmed by plastic. Some smaller environmental organizations also try to educate people outside environmental circles. Ms. Campbell acknowledges that her group's efforts have not necessarily improved areas of the Chesapeake Bay, but she shows that without education efforts, it could have been much worse. And foundations that are deeply knowledgeable, and care, about a specific issue can raise it to local and state government officials. The Virginia Environmental Endowment was created out of a legal settlement over a pollutant that was illegally discharged into the James River in the 1970s. That pollutant shut down fishing on the river for over a decade. Joseph H. Maroon, the endowment's executive director, said it used its grants to highlight what other nonprofit groups were doing. It also uses its resources to lobby on environmental issues in the state, particularly involving its waterways. "We haven't been afraid to be engaged in public policy issues," Mr. Maroon said. Foundations can also push for change at large, publicly traded companies by investing assets and then filing motions as a shareholder in a company. "Small foundations are often the named shareholders in shareholder advocacy proposals," said Sada Geuss, an investment manager at Trillium Asset Management, which has a shareholder advocacy division that works with clients to create these motions. Ms. Geuss said typical areas included filings to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to update the type of chemicals a company uses. Trillium's foundation clients were named on motions a few years ago to push Home Depot to sell more sustainable lumber and to stop using on plants it sold a chemical that has been linked to the decline of bee colonies, she said. "For some of these smaller organizations, they can talk to their donors about this engagement," Ms. Geuss said. "It's something they can hang their hat on. We've seen them talk about how they're amplifying their impact in fund raising pitches." The shareholder actions, when successful, can have a significant impact consider how much lumber and how many plants Home Depot sells. The money used in such campaigns might otherwise have sat in an endowment. Even foundations that don't want to become part of a shareholder motion can take steps to ensure that their investments align with their values. Those steps can be as direct as investing in clean energy companies or more indirect, like investing in companies that make products that will help other companies become more efficient. Foundations can become selective in the type of fixed income investments they buy, paying particular attention to what the proceeds from the sale of these bonds are used for. "Our analyst who covers fossil fuels always reminds us that the transition is going to be financed through debt," Ms. Geuss said. "More and more, we can focus in on green bonds and sustainable bonds to amplify impact." Beth Renner, head of philanthropic services for Wells Fargo Private Bank, said her group was reaching out to clients to discuss these options before the clients asked about them. One thing a foundation of any size can do is make the most of "5 and 95," Ms. Renner said. Foundations are required to make grants of at least 5 percent of their assets each year, but they can think just as strategically about the 95 percent of their assets that are invested. "How do the assets that sit in investments help further the mission and the area of focus?" she said. "It's a higher level of awareness in philanthropy right now." The Edwards Mother Earth Foundation in Seattle has been using that strategy for years. With 35 million in assets, it makes grants of about 2 million a year. But the foundation, which focuses on slowing climate change, has its portfolio of public and private investments in areas like clean tech and sustainable agriculture. "There are 150 family members, and they made a commitment to doing impact investing," said Bruce Reed, the foundation's operations director. "We've made bets on some early stage clean tech companies that we won't know for another decade or 15 years if they're going to work." Mr. Howell said he was able to work within Coca Cola to push for the use of a trash trap that collects plastic waste before it ends up in the ocean. Last fall, one was installed in a river in Atlanta. "I went to my boss at Coca Cola, and they let me run with it," he said. The lesson, he said, from that was: "Don't be afraid to start something new." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
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. As 2018 winds down, here's a look back at the big running stories we talked about. (And here's a roundup of New York Times coverage of the year in fitness.) In a Bloomberg story, Jim Weber, the chief executive of Brooks, said that someone like me, who doesn't run professionally, isn't really a runner, a comment that made a lot of devoted Brooks fans wonder who was paying his salary (and got me accused of secretly being a shill for a Brooks competitor when I wrote about it). Weber walked the comment back, and Brooks is still a major force in the American running shoe market (and that dude who accused me of being a nefarious reporter apologized). Whoopsie the fitness tracking app Strava gave off enough information that an Australian college student could figure out where United States military bases were. In August, the Pentagon implemented a new policy that prohibited the use of GPS software in combat zones. In July, Mollie Tibbetts, an Iowa college student, was killed while running. An undocumented immigrant was charged, and her death became fodder for political rage. But it also restarted a conversation about men who attack women while we do something that's supposed to be good for us. "Just as our bodies learned how to sprint around the curve of a track, our muscles learned to tense up when men honked their horns as they passed us. And just as we learned to use that nervous feeling in our gut before a race to propel us across the finish line, we also recognized the gut feeling that told us a trail wasn't safe to run on alone," Talya Minsberg wrote. I've been asked to comment on "women in peril!" stories about runners being attacked since, and I won't because the focus is almost always in the wrong place. As I wrote then, "If your response is to suggest ways women can be safe while running, realize that puts that onus on us, and blames us for it happening. The only ones to blame are the people attacking women for doing something so ordinary, and a society where it has become so common that, unless a tragedy is thrown into the chum of anti immigration commentary, it barely registers anymore." Is There One Right Runner Body Shape? Right before the New York City Marathon, Lindsay Crouse wrote about the pro runner Allie Kieffer, who had been told she was too big to run marathons professionally (and has since proved those people wrong). It opened up a conversation about whether an ideal body shape for an athlete exists at all. When I started getting texts and messages about a brewing controversy at Rowan University, I thought "Rowan? Really?" Rowan is not that far from where I live, and not the biggest school around, but was suddenly in the news: The cross country teams had been booted from the track that rings the football field, and one runner said it was because the women were running in sports bras. Turns out there had been an informal policy that athletes must wear shirts during practice though a clarification of the rule has changed this to allow women to run in sports bras only. What do you think we'll be talking about in 2019? Let me know! I'm on Twitter byjenamiller. Run Well, and Happy New Year! Jen A. Miller is the author of "Running: A Love Story." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
For young people, moving to New York City hasn't made much mathematical sense for decades. The jobs don't pay enough, the internships don't pay at all, and the rents are prohibitive by any sane standard. But now add a new economic fact of life to that list: soaring student loan debt. More students are taking out bigger loans than ever before, and in the last 10 years alone, education debt tripled, reaching over 1 trillion. A record number of college students are graduating knee deep in a financial hole before they begin their adult lives. Still, new research suggests that college is working, economically. Four years on campus nets the average graduate almost twice as much in wages as someone without a degree. Those odds may be comforting in the long run, but not when you're young, deeply in debt and trying to nest in New York City. For many people in college and recently out of it, the pressure of debt seems to be colliding in new ways with the problem of finding a place to live in the city, adding a layer of complication to something that was already plenty complicated. When Tierney Cooke arrived in New York City in 2010, she faced a daunting choice: pay rent or pay off her student debt. She had taken out loans to put herself through four years at the University of Washington in Seattle, and her first job as a nanny barely paid the bills. The total loan payment "was coming in close to 1,000 per month," Ms. Cooke said. "There was no way that I wasn't going to pay rent. I didn't think of it as a choice." Ms. Cooke, 26, a California native, eventually landed a job in digital advertising, but still couldn't find the money to pay the rent and the debt collectors at the same time. Several missed payments dashed her credit score and that of her father, since he had co signed the loans. Ms. Cooke stifled her dream of living alone. "I take my responsibility for my part and not being on top of it," Ms. Cooke said, but added that she signed on the dotted line as a clueless teenager. "At 18 or 19, agreeing to take on thousands and thousands of dollars of debt, I had no idea what it meant." Data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that the relationship between student loan debt and the housing market has turned ugly fast. People with student debt used to buy homes at higher rates than peers who had not taken out loans, partly because going to college meant earning more money, according to the report. But in 2012, the New York Fed reported that for the first time in at least a decade, 30 year old student borrowers were less likely to take out home mortgages than other young people. Among people around 30 years old, homeownership was plunging fastest for student debtors. Economists are worried. Last month, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said that student loan debt was taking the life out of the housing recovery, and the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz called the rising debt "an educational crisis" that is "affecting our potential future growth." But if it is a crisis, then it begins long before twentysomethings turn 30 and start to think about white picket fences. From the moment they leave the classroom and enter the real world, young people are often on a delayed schedule, unable to take even baby steps toward real estate maturity. Eventually, Ms. Cooke moved into a two bedroom in Manhattan that housed four women, one boyfriend and two dogs, including Ms. Cooke's cockapoo, Oliver. "I couldn't take it," she said. "They were all in college." But she couldn't move into her own place without saving up some money first, and she couldn't do that without cutting out one of her two biggest expenses: rent and her recently resumed loan payments. This time, she chose to keep up the loan payments. She moved out, and for two months, slept on friends' couches and air mattresses in divided bedrooms and spare nooks. Oliver, the dog, was not always welcome where Ms. Cooke was, so he had his own itinerary of abrupt relocations. She shed any remnants of an REM cycle at her sixth pit stop. "I was basically sharing a living room with a guy who snored and talked in his sleep," she said. For some young people, a home in New York is an ever more distant prospect. Brittaney Barbosa, 24, has been living in a motel on Long Island for the last two months while she scours New York City for an apartment. The numbers are not on her side. She has a 2 year old son, a full time job and a student loan bill of 30,000. Ms. Barbosa defaulted on her loan payment, joining 600,000 students across the country, or 15 percent of recent borrowers who have defaulted on their loans within three years. "It's affected my credit, it's affected my apartment hunting process," she said. She has seen more than two dozen apartments in eight weeks. "You have to make 40 times the rent, and I don't. They don't want me." In the meantime, most of what she earns goes toward the 100 a night she spends on the motel room. Ms. Barbosa said she took out a loan to study fashion merchandising at Bay State College in Boston, but left the program after a year. Her debt followed her back to her hometown on Long Island, where she gave birth to her son. She eventually began taking classes again at Queensborough Community College. She is in school until 2 p.m. most days, and works in customer service at an oil company from around 4 to 11 p.m. Her mother and her child's father take turns watching the toddler during the day. Life in the motel, which shares a spread with the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, can be dreary. "It's seedy and weird," said Ms. Barbosa, recalling a recent tattoo convention during which the motel acquired both visitors and a pungent smell of marijuana. "I'm at the end of my rope here," she said. She's been staring down the numbers for months and is starting to believe that there is no place for her in New York. She has already begun seeking a rental in New Jersey. Some young people are opting to leave town rather than trying to tackle New York rents and debt all at once. Joseph Trout, a Philadelphia born chemist with about 19,000 in loans coming due and a long history of barely getting by, has decided to back away from the city altogether. A soon to be former doctoral student, Mr. Trout, 22, has never counted on outside funding. He went into the foster system at age 14, emerging two years later to become the valedictorian of his high school. He earned a spot at Temple University, he said, which he financed with a hefty student loan. He was obsessed with his studies. "I realized that if I didn't graduate I was going to fall back to where I came from," he said. "I'm not letting this become my destiny," he told himself. "I want something better." He came to New York about a year ago as a graduate student on a full scholarship to study chemistry at New York University. His apartment, a shared two bedroom in Stuyvesant Town, is partly subsidized by the university, but Mr. Trout isn't impressed with the 1,100 a month in rent that comes out of his own pocket. "The fact that people think it's a good deal makes me think people here are brainwashed," he said. There's a lot about New York City that loses its shine when Mr. Trout is doing the looking. He sees Manhattan as "just a place," doesn't know why he should subsist on noodles "just so I can live in an area with a few parks nearby" and is troubled by the New York tax on a simple sub. "Knowing there are people on this planet who think their sandwiches are worth 10 apiece bothers me immensely." He has decided to leave the graduate program, partly because he feels overwhelmed by the work and partly because he does not feel he has much in common with the other students. That means finding a new apartment and a job, and in about six months, starting to pay off his loans. The impending payments and the pressure of shouldering rent and utilities alone has forced Mr. Trout to look far beyond the city limits. He has contemplated moving back to a rough area of Philadelphia; he says rents decline with the increased likelihood of being mugged. "There's utility in having jerk neighbors," he said, "because it makes sure you have enough money in your own pocket when it comes time to pay the rent." He is also considering moving to Rockland County to be near his fiancee. He has found some rooms in the area for around 500 per month, which is far lower than the average rent in New York City. No stranger to struggle, Mr. Trout said that, if things get bad, he will invest in keeping himself afloat before trying to keep the collectors at bay. "If I don't get all the income, then my survival comes first, because what are they going to do, milk a rock? They can't take money from me that I don't have," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The HBO series "Succession" is a story about dominant people the fictional Roy family, whose company, Waystar Royco, has tentacles that extend into the media and multiple other industries and the sometimes comical, sometimes deadly serious behind the scenes family feud for control of this business. "Succession," whose second season was broadcast last fall, had a dominant day on Tuesday, picking up 18 Emmy nominations, including one for outstanding drama series and one for Brian Cox, who plays the show's wily and temperamental patriarch, Logan Roy. (Cox was nominated as an outstanding lead actor in a drama, as was his co star Jeremy Strong, who plays his son and sometime rival Kendall Roy.) Cox spoke by phone on Tuesday about the ineluctable appeal of Logan Roy, whom he described as his "evil twin," and how he thinks his alter ego would handle quarantine. Your nomination was one of 18 that "Succession" received today. How is everyone feeling about this bounty? We're all thrilled because everybody that's in the show, practically Nick Nicholas Braun and Kieran Culkin and Matthew Macfadyen , they've all been nominated, which is thrilling. And of course Jeremy Strong , in the same category as me, which is delightful. And Sarah Snook as well. Can't complain. It's a bit of a cleanup, I think. The Roys wouldn't have it any other way, I suppose. No, unfortunately, they wouldn't laughs . How have you been spending your quarantine? I'm in upstate New York, in seclusion here. I've been here since March, watching the seasons come and go. I've done a little bit of building work on my house, which is overdue. I went back to the city once for my son's graduation. He had a Zoom ceremony and a drive around, because he's at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School, in Astoria, Queens . So we drove around Kaufman Astoria Studios. I went for the drive around but I couldn't wait to get back up here. I recommend anyone come and live in Columbia County. What do you think is the appeal of the Logan Roy character? He's obviously monstrous in many ways, but viewers still find him fascinating. Ostensibly he is monstrous. But the appeal of the character is his mystery, and it's something that I don't want to play around with too much. You don't quite know where he's coming from. The great revelation to me was in the first season. I said to the "Succession" creator Jesse Armstrong, does he love his children? He said, "Oh, yes, he really does love his children." And once you've got that as a given, you realize how he's operating. He's coming from the School of Hard Knocks, which of course none of the kids have got. He's not a Donald Trump. He doesn't come from an existing money situation. He is self made. And he comes from Dundee, which was a shock to me. They didn't tell me until the ninth episode of the first season the character was now born in Dundee, Scotland, which is of course where I come from! And that makes for a very complicated situation. He's become my evil twin. Just as Logan and Kendall Roy are competitors on the series, you and Jeremy Strong are Emmy nominees in the same category. How do you feel about that? I'm very pleased for Jeremy. That character, Kendall, is the linchpin figure of the show. He has the angst of the show on his shoulders. Logan is the motivating, motoring force. But I don't see these things as a competition. It's horses for courses. I've been too long in this game to take it too seriously. Have you been able to do any work on Season 3? We haven't done any filming but we are hoping to get back ASAP. I don't know when that is. But HBO is being fantastic and looking at every protocol under the sun. I think we'll get back. I know it's all written, it's all there. Oh yeah. There's certainly a story line. We don't know how many episodes we're doing. It could be eight, it could be nine. We're in that ballpark. But of course we have to see how the current crisis affects the writing and what we take on board. But that's the writers' problem. I just learn the lines and don't bump into the furniture. How do you think Logan Roy would handle quarantine? Oh, I think Logan would be fine. He lives a life of quarantine anyway. He might get a bit bored but he's got enough money to survive. It might be an opportunity for him to get a sense of the world not that I think he would. Because he's such an ornery cuss. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
With the assassination presumably by Israel of Iran's top nuclear warhead designer, the Middle East is promising to complicate Joe Biden's job from Day 1. President elect Biden knows the region well, but if I had one piece of advice for him, it would be this: This is not the Middle East you left four years ago. The best way for Biden to appreciate the new Middle East is to study what happened in the early hours of Sept. 14, 2019 when the Iranian Air Force launched 20 drones and precision guided cruise missiles at Abqaiq, one of Saudi Arabia's most important oil fields and processing centers, causing huge damage. It was a seminal event. The Iranian drones and cruise missiles flew so low and with such stealth that neither their takeoff nor their impending attack was detected in time by Saudi or U.S. radar. Israeli military analysts, who were stunned by the capabilities the Iranians displayed, argued that this surprise attack was the Middle East's "Pearl Harbor." They were right. The Middle East was reshaped by this Iranian precision missile strike, by President Trump's response and by the response of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to Trump's response. A lot of people missed it, so let's go to the videotape. First, how did Trump react? He did nothing. He did not launch a retaliatory strike on behalf of Saudi Arabia even though Iran, unprovoked, had attacked the heart of Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure. A few weeks later Trump did send 3,000 U.S. troops and some antimissile batteries to Saudi Arabia to bolster its defense but with this message on Oct. 11, 2019: "We are sending troops and other things to the Middle East to help Saudi Arabia. But are you ready? Saudi Arabia, at my request, has agreed to pay us for everything we're doing. That's a first." It sure was a first. I'm not here to criticize Trump, though. He was reflecting a deep change in the American public. His message: Dear Saudis, America is now the world's biggest oil producer; we're getting out of the Middle East; happy to sell you as many weapons as you can pay cash for; but don't count on us to fight your battles. You want U.S. troops? Show me the money. That clear shift in American posture gave birth to the first new element that Biden will confront in this new Middle East the peace agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and between Israel and Bahrain and a whole new level of secret security cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which will likely flower into more formal relations soon. (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel reportedly visited Saudi Arabia last week.) In effect, Trump forced Israel and the key Sunni Arab states to become less reliant on the United States and to think about how they must cooperate among themselves over new threats like Iran rather than fighting over old causes like Palestine. This may enable America to secure its interests in the region with much less blood and treasure of its own. It could be Trump's most significant foreign policy achievement. But an important result is that as Biden considers reopening negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal which Trump abandoned in 2018 he can expect to find Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates operating as a loose anti Iran coalition. This will almost certainly complicate things for Biden, owing to the second huge fallout from the Iranian attack on Abqaiq: the impact it had on Israel. After Trump scrapped the nuclear deal, Iran abandoned its commitments to restrict its enrichment of uranium that could be used for a nuclear bomb. But since Biden's election, Iran has said it will "automatically" return to its nuclear commitments if Biden lifts the crippling sanctions imposed by Trump. Only after those sanctions are lifted, said Iran, might it discuss regional issues, like curbs on its precision missile exports and capabilities. This is where the problems will start for Biden. Yes, Israel and the Sunni Arab states want to make sure that Iran can never develop a nuclear weapon. But some Israeli military experts will tell you today that the prospect of Iran having a nuke is not what keeps them up at night because they don't see Tehran using it. That would be suicide, and Iran's clerical leaders are not suicidal. They are, though, homicidal. And Iran's new preferred weapons for homicide are the precision guided missiles that it used on Saudi Arabia and that it keeps trying to export to its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, which pose an immediate homicidal threat to Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and U.S. forces in the region. (Iran has a network of factories manufacturing its own precision guided missiles.) If Biden tries to just resume the Iran nuclear deal as it was and gives up the leverage of extreme economic sanctions on Iran, before reaching some understanding on its exporting of precision guided missiles I suspect that he'll meet a lot of resistance from Israel, the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia. Why? It's all in the word "precision." In the 2006 war in Lebanon, Iran's proxy militia, Hezbollah, had to fire some 20 dumb, unguided, surface to surface rockets of limited range in the hope of damaging a single Israeli target. With precision guided missiles manufactured in Iran, Hezbollah in theory needs to fire just one rocket each at 20 different targets in Israel with a high probability of damaging them all. We're talking about Israel's nuclear plant, airport, ports, power plants, high tech factories and military bases. That is why Israel has been fighting a shadow war with Iran for the past five years to prevent Tehran from reaching its goal of virtually encircling Israel with proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Gaza, all armed with precision guided missiles. The Saudis have been trying to do the same versus Iran's proxies in Yemen, who have fired on its airports. These missiles are so much more lethal. "Think of the difference in versatility between dumb phones and smartphones," observed Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment. "For the past two decades we have been consumed by preventing Iran's big weapon, but it is the thousands of small smart weapons Iran has been proliferating that have become the real and immediate threat to its neighbors." That is why Israel and its Gulf Arab allies are not going to want to see the United States give up its leverage on Iran to curb its nuclear program before it also uses that leverage all those oil sanctions to secure some commitment by Iran to end its exporting of these missiles. And that is going to be very, very difficult to negotiate. So, if you were planning a party to celebrate the restoration of the Iran U.S. nuclear deal soon after Biden's inauguration, keep the champagne in the fridge. It's complicated. 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 |
Shaunie Begley and Christine Bottross stood Tuesday on the steps outside the Vessel, the sprawling, ovalish 150 foot high steel structure connected to the recently opened Hudson Yards on Manhattan's West Side. Ms. Begley posed for a picture as Ms. Bottross snapped away on her camera. She posed again. Another picture. And again, with a slightly different hand gesture this time. On and on this went for several minutes. Both called themselves "Instagrammers," and their carefully curated photos were destined to be consumed by the nearly 90,000 followers they have between them. And, possibly, by one very big real estate development. Questions over who controls a person's social media content soaked the Vessel in an internet rainstorm this week after the website Gothamist reported on a curious and, some legal experts said, aggressive assertion of copyright by Hudson Yards, the Vessel's owner. In its terms of service, which are not posted on the property but are available online, Hudson Yards said that it had the right to use any picture taken in the vicinity of the art installation for commercial purposes, with no royalty fees and no restrictions, forever. Or, in legal speak, by posting your Vessel selfie on Twitter you were giving the company "the irrevocable, unrestricted, worldwide, perpetual, royalty free, sublicensable, and transferable right and license to use, display, reproduce, perform, modify, transmit, publish and distribute such photographs, audio recordings or video footage for any purpose whatsoever in any and all media (in either case, now known or developed later)." You also "further authorize Company to store such images on a database and transfer such images to third parties in conjunction with security and marketing procedures undertaken by the Vessel." It is not unusual for a privately owned attraction to use visitors' photos in its own promotions. But Domenic Romano, a New York lawyer specializing in entertainment law, said that Hudson Yards wasn't "just asking for the right to use the photos or reshare them on their own social media channels." "They were basically claiming ownership over the underlying materials," he said. After much social media derision that was not likely to become part of any Hudson Yards marketing, the development said on Monday it would be "refining the language to be more clear." And it did. Now visitors "retain ownership of any photographs, text, audio recordings or video footage depicting or relating to the Vessel" that they create. But if you want to send that photo out to your Instagram fans, you still "hereby grant to Company and its affiliates the right to repost, share, publish, promote and distribute the Vessel Media via such social media channel and via websites associated with the Vessel or Hudson Yards (including my name, voice and likeness and any other aspects of my persona as depicted in the Vessel Media), in perpetuity." It was a slight tweak but one that was more similar to what most museums and other public venues currently have, according to Mr. Romano. "It's the difference between use and owning the underlying right exclusively," Mr. Romano said. In a statement on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Hudson Yards said: "As we are a new destination, we wanted to over communicate, be transparent and disclose to all users that we may reshare select social posts on our social channels and website that visitors have already shared publicly on their social channels. This is a process undertaken at major attractions around the city and country." Ms. Bottross, taking a quick break from instructing Ms. Begley on how to pose, said she was not aware of the hubbub over what control Hudson Yards had or did not have over photos they would share online. "But sure, they can use it," Ms. Bottross said of her photos. Ms. Begley said she had no problem, either and hoped the developer would direct people to where the photos came from. "Can they me?" she said, laughing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Kansas Jayhawks entered the postseason with their wings clipped. Having lost two stars midseason one to an N.C.A.A. suspension, one to unspecified "personal matters" they could well sustain double digit losses for only the second time in 19 seasons. Yet according to the Rating Percentage Index statistic, which typically saturates bracketological prognostications ahead of the N.C.A.A. tournament's Selection Sunday reveal, Kansas was, as of Friday morning, the top ranked men's basketball team in the country higher than Kentucky, which beat Kansas handily in January; higher than Virginia, which had zero losses to teams not named Duke; higher even than Duke and its basketball messiah, Zion Williamson. So should you start penciling Kansas in as one of the four No. 1 seeds before the bracket is released on Sunday night? Not so fast. While you can still find websites that calculate R.P.I., the statistic is officially no more in the men's game. The N.C.A.A., which created it nearly four decades ago, disowned it in the statistic's most prominent sport last year. "We as a committee have decided the R.P.I. is kind of yesterday's news," this season's selection committee chairman, Bernard Muir, the athletic director at Stanford, said last month. The R.P.I.'s replacement as the first among equals rating, the N.C.A.A. Evaluation Tool, put Kansas all the way down at No. 19 through Friday's games. It is a shockingly large divergence that much more closely matches the No. 4 seed Kansas is generally expected to receive after the committee considers not only NET but other advanced stats, winning percentages, individual game results and even the eyeball test. As Kansas shows, we are not in R.P.I. land anymore. And it is difficult to find close observers of college basketball who do not think this is a good thing. "By and large, eyeballing it, it has been better than the R.P.I. at measuring good versus bad teams," the ESPN tournament analyst Joe Lunardi said of the NET. More subtle but at least as important, moving from R.P.I. to NET even the acronym seems an improvement! may have heralded a shift in the selection committee's philosophical underpinnings. (The selection committee for the Division I women's tournament will still use the R.P.I.) Every year, there is a long, loud debate when it comes to selecting the at large bids the teams that do not receive automatic tournament slots by virtue of winning their conference tournament championships. The fundamental question is: In sifting the candidates, should the committee pick on the basis of who is "most deserving," which is to say the teams that had the better seasons to that point, or simply pick the "best," which is to say the teams that gave other indications of overall quality? R.P.I., which essentially measured only won lost record and strength of schedule, was a tool for "most deserving." NET, which combines those R.P.I. like inputs with efficiency ratings and margins of victory, is an argument for "best." Joel Sokol, a Georgia Tech professor of engineering who compiles a college basketball rating known as L.R.M.C., noted that NET has more closely tracked other advanced ratings, including his own and KenPom's main rating, which measures offensive and defensive efficiency per possession, adjusted for opponent strength. "It's a lot better than the R.P.I., a lot more reflective of how good the teams are," Sokol said. Stanford's Muir, who has served for several years on the selection committee that picks and then seeds the final N.C.A.A. men's field of 68 teams, this week called NET "contemporary." "We're quite pleased with how the new metric is working," he said last month, adding: "There's a thousand possessions that occur over the course of a year. Coming down to one possession is not going to adjust your NET that significantly." By contrast, the R.P.I. really could be affected by a single possession. It was a good faith attempt to do two things: situate teams' records in the context of their strength of schedule, and discourage teams from running up the score. But this meant that a single bad (if close) loss or good (if close) victory could disproportionately sway a team's rating. And the R.P.I.'s myopic focus encouraged teams simply to schedule good opponents, or have the good fortune, shared only by major conference teams, of facing many good opponents in league play. Worse, by not accounting for home court advantage in a sport in which the home team wins nearly two in three games R.P.I. boosted teams that could afford to schedule more nonconference home games, which, again, tended to be major conference teams. "Depending upon the amount of money and support you have and your arena, you can basically isolate yourself from the rest of the world or at least control who you play and when you play them and where you play them," said Doug Fullerton, who served on the selection committee when he was Big Sky Conference commissioner. "It's a have and have not situation. Meanwhile, discouraging blowouts meant ignoring margin of victory, which sports analysts for decades have generally said is a better predictor of future winning percentage. "When you played a good team, you didn't get a bonus for winning by 40 than winning by 1," Sokol said. He noted that Kansas has an unlikely 6 1 record in one possession and overtime games this season, further explaining its aberrantly high R.P.I. By contrast, NET factors game location into its Team Value Index, and the N.C.A.A. also sorts wins into quadrants based on whether they came at home, on the road or at a neutral court. And NET accounts for margin of victory, although in a nod to sportsmanship, the stat is capped at 10 points. "I think that's an honest attempt to try to capture what a point spread would tell you without creating an incentive for someone to run the score up," Fullerton said. To see the kinds of teams NET favors over R.P.I., and vice versa, consider two bubble squads: North Carolina State and Arizona State. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
According to our e commerce and big box retail overlords, the hottest toy this holiday season was the L.O.L. Surprise! Bigger Surprise. It didn't reach fist fighting in store aisles levels of frenzy; it's no Tickle Me Elmo, and it's not 1996. But, according to NPD Group, a market research firm, L.O.L. Surprise! was the best selling toy brand of the year (excepting December, for which sales numbers haven't been released), and L.O.L. Surprise! Bigger Surprise was the top selling toy in November. So, what is the L.O.L. Surprise! Bigger Surprise? It is a glittering, baby pink plastic suitcase that one buys without knowing what's inside. It is filled with doe eyed plastic dolls and many sparkly accessories (including wigs, handbags and green tennis rackets) and each item is individually wrapped in enough plastic packaging to occupy a doll size landfill. It is also bigger than the L.O.L. Surprise! Big Surprise, which was the hot toy of last season, and with a promised 60 plus surprises, it contains the most trinkets of any toy in the L.O.L. Surprise! canon. The whole thing weighs 3.3 pounds and costs 89.99. It is made for children ages three and up a population, I figured, that includes me. In November, L.O.L. Surprise! hosted a fashion show in Los Angeles. Celebrity child models including North West, the daughter of Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West, making her "runway debut" dressed up like the dolls, which have names like "Thrilla," "Oops Baby," and "Shapes," and their famous parents shared every detail of the spectacle on Instagram. I carefully examined footage posted by Ms. West and Busy Phillips but still could not determine what, exactly, made L.O.L. Surprise! such a big deal. Certainly, the dolls and their pets and accessories are clad in the mesmerizing jewel tone color scheme that must be kryptonite to little girls everywhere (see: Lisa Frank, Limited Too in the '90s). But the real fun of L.O.L. Surprise!, according to the brand, is the drawn out experience of unwrapping the gift. MGA Entertainment, the toy company behind Bratz dolls, launched the L.O.L. Surprise! franchise two years ago in a bid to capitalize on YouTube's unboxing trend, and there are now many videos of children (and more adults than one might expect) employing L.O.L. Surprise! toys for that very purpose. It's brilliant marketing. The package that I ordered arrived in a box bigger than my head. I feverishly ripped into it, and encountered dolls (one, wearing a shiny pink diaper and swaddled in layers of wrapping; others, encased in baby blue orbs and carrying sunglasses and miniature to go cups), along with tons of tiny wrapped boxes, many with Lewis Carroll esque tags like, "PICK ME!", "UNBOX ME!", "ME FIRST!", and the more unsettling "LET ME OUT OF HERE!" The items crying out for freedom included a shimmering Britney Spears style newsboy cap and a hot pink crop top that read "MEOW." Were these good collectibles? I wasn't sure. According to the L.O.L. Surprise! website, all of the items surprises sit somewhere on a Pokemon style rarity spectrum, from "ULTRA RARE" to "FABULOUS," which may as well be "BASIC." The doll "Baby Next Door," for example, is ULTRA RARE. The "Thrilla" doll, meanwhile, is FANCY, which is just one step up from FABULOUS. There was little in the way of discernible narrative. (Are the dolls friends? Sisters? Aliens? Hard to say. They are only grouped in terms of rarity.) But from three "secret clues" in the package, I learned that the dolls (and I, by extension) were on a mission to find a missing pet. The dolls are identified as "secret agents" so I guess it's all part of their job. One of the tiny items a plastic pizza box, stamped with "PizzaBFF.com" led me to a website that shed a bit more light on the story: The dolls were diverted from a "top secret mission" when their cat went missing, and the search to get it back took them through both a pizza place and a wig shop called "Unbeweavable." Some time into the third layer of the suitcase, I unwrapped a spotted cat with its own disc shaped litter box, sand included. This, I gathered, was how I solved the mission. Allegedly, the many dolls and tiny unboxable trinkets in my L.O.L. Surprise! weren't meant to make me, or anyone else, L.O.L. in the traditional, internet sense of the term. L.O.L. stands for Little Outrageous Littles, though that detail is not listed anywhere on the L.O.L. Surprise! site. The items are little, yes, but outrageous little, in a descriptive sense, feels like a stretch. If there is outrage, it should be directed at the amount of plastic wrap; after unwrapping 60 plus items, I had filled a small kitchen trash bag with packaging. The L.O.L. Surprise! took me exactly 59 minutes to fully unbox. It was an experience both interminable but also not nearly long enough to quench my newfound need to unwrap even more. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's bill to lower drug prices has the backing of many of the nation's biggest labor groups, including the United Auto Workers, the A.F.L. C.I.O., and unions representing teachers and other government workers. But a wave of Facebook ads that ran this fall appeared to suggest otherwise. The ads, featuring a dejected looking man in a hard hat, warned that the bill "threatens thousands of good paying jobs and restricts access to lifesaving medication." The ads were paid for by a little known group, the Pharmaceutical Industry Labor Management Association, that is trying to defeat drug pricing proposals around the country, from statehouses in Nevada, Maryland and Oregon to Congress. The Facebook ads targeted 15 recently elected Democrats in Congress, including Harley Rouda of California and Andy Kim of New Jersey. The group, a coalition that includes major drugmakers like Pfizer and Johnson Johnson as well as large construction industry unions whose members help build pharmaceutical plants and research labs, has been buying print advertisements in local newspapers, mailing fliers to voters in vulnerable Democratic districts, and hiring former labor officials and well known union lobbyists to deliver their message. It aligns closely with the talking points of drug companies, which claim that Ms. Pelosi's bill would stifle innovation and damage a vital American industry. Even in the nation's capital, where coalitions and dark money groups are routinely used to repackage corporate interests in a more sympathetic light, the pairing of the drug industry and unions is an unusual one. Many unions, including some who are members of Pilma, help oversee their workers' health plans and have an interest in lowering drug costs. And out of pocket costs for prescription drugs are a financial strain on many Americans, including union members. "It's really odd," said Representative Rob Nosse, a Democratic Oregon lawmaker who helped pass a drug pricing transparency bill in 2018. Pilma, which opposes transparency bills, contending they expose proprietary information, hired the former political director of the regional chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to lobby for the group. Mr. Nosse said that he was surprised the unions' health care experts didn't "tell them, you know what's killing our health insurance? The cost of medications." The drug companies who are members either did not respond, or declined to comment . Tim Dickson, the executive director of Pilma, said the group's position was aimed at creating jobs for union workers. "We place a premium on the partnership that yields jobs," he said. "And we have a longstanding position that we've held for quite some time that certain policies, such as price controls, will have a negative effect on union construction jobs." Ms. Pelosi's bill would require the federal government to negotiate the prices of insulin and as many as 250 other high priced drugs on behalf of Medicare, and impose financial penalties if companies failed to comply. Although the bill is seen as unlikely to become law in its current form Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has come out against it, as has the Trump administration the drug industry has fought hard against it. Its main lobbying group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, has called the bill "devastating," and said it would lead to fewer new drugs coming to market. Some of the bill's biggest backers are labor groups, including the national A.F.L. C.I.O., some of whose members are part of Pilma. A spokesman for the federation declined to comment beyond pointing a reporter to its position supporting Ms. Pelosi's bill. Other unions that support efforts to lower drug costs avoided criticizing labor groups, either declining to comment or choosing their words carefully. "National Nurses United is really focused on the real culprits behind these outrageous drug prices, which is the pharmaceutical industry specifically," said Amirah Sequeira, the lead legislative advocate for the nurses union, which has not yet supported Ms. Pelosi's bill because it believes it does not go far enough in lowering costs. In addition to Facebook ads, Pilma also mailed fliers to voters in swing districts like Mr. Kim's in New Jersey, a state where the pharmaceutical industry plays a major role in the economy. The mailing warned that Ms. Pelosi's bill would jeopardize 54,000 jobs in the state and would "risk access to critical medicines." Among Pilma's members are unions that represent a range of building trades involved in manufacturing plants for pharmaceuticals, like sheet metal and iron workers, electrical workers, and plumbers and pipe fitters. The International Union of Police Associations and the International Association of Fire Fighters are also members. According to Pilma, the pharmaceutical industry is responsible for 4.7 million jobs in the United States , including many highly skilled union jobs. A spokesman for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, whose president, Joseph Sellers, Jr., is chair of Pilma, said that while the union supported expanding access to prescription drugs, it also relied on companies like drug makers to provide good paying jobs. "Without jobs to fund them, there are no health care plans in the first place," said the spokesman, Paul Pimentel. One of Pilma's members, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, has been outspoken about its struggle to contain high drug prices one family covered by its health plan requires a drug that costs about 1.5 million a year per person. John T. Fultz, the international vice president for the Northeast States Section of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, declined to comment on the union's membership in Pilma but said that drug prices were a major concern. He is also the secretary of the boilermakers' health and welfare fund, which oversees benefits along with the workers' employers. "Our concern is drug pricing, so we can afford the medications that our members need," Mr. Fultz said. If the cost of high priced specialty drugs is not reined in, "it will eventually break many plans." Alexander Hertel Fernandez, an assistant professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, said unions that form corporate alliances can wield considerable influence. Others said groups like Pilma can contribute to a broader sense that taking sides on a thorny issue like drug prices carries political risks. "Union management coalitions have been successful in the past in pressuring Democrats to moderate their policy agenda, especially on climate and environmental legislation," Mr. Hertel Fernandez said in an email. "When Democrats are hearing from powerful corporate interests and labor interests, it's harder for them to resist." Pilma has had federal tax exempt status since 2004 as a business association and is run out of the offices of a public relations firm, Groundswell Communications. Its executive director, Mr. Dickson, is the owner of Groundswell and a longtime grass roots organizer for Democrats. Pilma had revenues of about 2.3 million in 2018, according to federal tax documents. Mr. Dickson said the pharmaceutical industry supplied the group's revenues, which he said was standard practice for coalitions between industry and unions. Union activists are the group's public face. Pilma has spent 465,000 on federal lobbying in the first three quarters of this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and most of its lobbyists are former labor officials or have clients that include other unions. "I was very surprised," said Yvanna D. Cancela, a state senator. Ms. Cancela, who is the former political director of the state's largest union, the Culinary Workers Union, said her insulin bill had the support of most of the state's biggest unions and ultimately became law. Still, she said, "it was an unexpected alliance." Mr. Thompson did not return calls for comment. In Maryland, Pilma neutralized some of the union support for a bill which has since become law that created a board that can limit payments for drugs on behalf of public sector employees. The state's A.F.L. C.I.O. did not take a position on the bill because Pilma and some individual unions opposed it, said Donna S. Edwards, the federation's state president. "If we have one union that is not on board with a decision, then we're neutral," she said. "We had hopes that A.F.L. C.I.O. would endorse this right away," as other unions did, said Vincent DeMarco, the president of the Maryland Citizen's Health Initiative. "And then we saw that they were getting pushback from this Pilma group." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Sunday afternoon brought a burst of orchestral activity to New York. At 2 p.m., Gianandrea Noseda gave the downbeat at Carnegie Hall for the National Symphony Orchestra, which he took over last season. A few blocks uptown and an hour later, a veteran pairing, Manfred Honeck and his Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, played at David Geffen Hall . Our critics were at both concerts. Mr. Noseda led exhilarating performances of two seldom heard works: Liszt's "Dante Symphony" and Rossini's "Stabat Mater." Since 2017, Mr. Noseda had also been thriving as music director of the National Symphony. So he arranged with Carnegie to bring his Washington band to New York instead. The members of the audience on Sunday were the winners. Liszt, who revered Dante, struggled to compose an epic symphony based on "The Divine Comedy." The episodic, 52 minute work that resulted can come across as meandering and long winded. Not here. For all the intensity of the playing, the performance revealed the work's surefire structure. The symphony opens with a stern proclamation in the low strings and brass that evokes infernal depths and soon turns frenzied. A calmer episode depicts the grieving voice of the lustful Francesca da Rimini trapped in an eternal whirlwind. Satanic fury returns and crests into a shattering climax that Mr. Noseda drove to a pitch of blazing, demonic fervor. Whole stretches of the ruminative "Purgatorio" movement are diaphanous and mystical, interspersed with chorale like passages and an grimly industrious fugue. The symphony ends celestially with a tender setting of lines from the Magnificat, beautifully sung here by the soprano Erika Grimaldi and the women of the University of Maryland Concert Choir. A few years after suddenly retiring, at 37, from a sensational career in opera, Rossini was persuaded to accept a private commission to set the "Stabat Mater" text, a meditation on Mary as a mother grappling with the death of her son. Rossini the opera composer comes through often in this sacred score: The "Cujus animam" movement could be a stirring heroic tenor aria. Neither of the works Mr. Honeck played with his Pittsburgh ensemble at Geffen Hall was similarly rare. As my colleague David Allen wrote in a recent essay, this conductor and orchestra have made their impact, both on record and in performance, largely in the standards. From the glittering burst of strings at the start of Beethoven's "Emperor" Piano Concerto to the sleek heat of the finale of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, this was immaculate yet impassioned playing with a certain patrician, distinguished quality that never fell into stuffiness or rigidity. The performance was aristocratic, in the best sense. Till Fellner was a perfectly suited partner for this group in the Beethoven: courtly and elegant, with a bit of reserve but also welcome flexibility. Orchestra and soloist responded as one to Mr. Honeck's generous malleability of pulse. The second movement started more swiftly than the usual, giving Mr. Fellner's entrance at a slightly slower tempo a subtle charge of drama. That slow movement was an eloquent pastoral, not casual but relaxed and sunny, breaking into a grand, dancey Rondo finale that, as it progressed, seemed more and more fascinating its variations forming and dissolving in a mood of confident experimentation. The icy hot sweep of the strings is a particular glory of this ensemble Alexi Kenney, a young star violinist, played as a guest in the orchestra's currently empty concertmaster chair but the Mahler symphony showcased superb work from every section: the incantatory trumpet solo of the opening; sculpted and tender horn solos later on; warm winds; alert and subtle percussion. Throughout there was a sense of transparency a perception of all the layers even at full tilt of speed and volume. The first movement was a chilling funeral march cut with almost inaudible, but hair raising, knife swipes of violin. The Scherzo was a dance that began with a neurotic edge and passed into a kind of dream, the music heard as if through frosted glass: slowed, candied, distant. Mr. Honeck keeps his Mahler wonderfully strange, pacing the final two movements with a kind of studied tentativeness, a gradual and not unbroken progress to an uneasy triumph. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The straightforward, elemental documentary "The Cage Fighter" suggests that many of the cliches of boxing and wrestling movies about not being able to resist a last fight, about the ring's lure being a force more powerful than love aren't cliches at all, but simply true to life. With a bare bones, direct cinema style and only scant context, the movie the first directorial feature from Jeff Unay, who has worked in visual effects plunges viewers into the world of Joe Carman, a mixed martial arts fighter in Washington State. In the first scene, Mr. Carman is 39, hardly a prime age for grappling. The question that emerges is whether he knows it's time to call it quits. Mr. Unay often shoots Mr. Carman in wide screen at close range, emphasizing the physical strain of his routines, whether he's running, training or doing mechanical work for a ferry system. Part of the secret of the movie's interest is that Mr. Carman is not invincible or a former superstar. We're told that he doesn't even make money off cage matches. Yet the damage they do to his home life is real. "It's the only time in my life when I feel proud of myself," he tells dismayed family members who have just learned that he is fighting again, despite having promised his ill wife never to get back in the ring. Fighting, he says, allows him to feel that he likes himself. Mr. Carman is shown throughout the film as a loving parent (we see him dancing with his daughters and making them pancakes), but he can't check his pride. Fighting means being in a cage in more than one sense. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
For decades, it was a nagging mystery how long does a day last on Saturn? Earth pirouettes around its axis once every 24 hours or so, while Jupiter spins comparatively briskly, once in roughly 9.8 Earth hours. And then there is Venus, a perplexingly sluggish spinner that takes 243 Earth days to complete a full rotation. With Saturn, it turns out the answer rippled in plain view, in the planet's lustrous rings. After reading small, spiraling waves in those bands, sculpted by oscillations from Saturn's gravity, scientists reported this month in the Astrophysical Journal that one Saturnian day is a mere 10 hours, 33 minutes and 38 seconds long, measured in Earth time. "The rings are not only beautiful, they're very diagnostic of what's going on inside the planet," said Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA's Cassini mission, which studied Saturn for more than a decade. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Saturn has been stubbornly secretive about its days. Its buttery c louds don't bear helpful markings that scientists might use to track the planet's rotation, and they can't easily use its nearly vertical magnetic axis as they have for Jupiter's more off kilter alignment to gather clues about the planet's interior. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
WE STAND DIVIDED The Rift Between American Jews and Israel By Daniel Gordis In August, the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow devoted 13 minutes, a TV eternity, to attacking Steven Menashi, a federal appeals court nominee. She could have gone after him a dozen ways. Menashi works in the Trump White House, including with the one man immigration policy wrecking ball Stephen Miller. Menashi has published a book's worth of articles espousing illiberal opinions on race, women and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. But Maddow chose to read aloud, at length, from an obscure article by Menashi published in 2010 in The Journal of International Law. And she homed in on an obscure word in its title, "Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy." You can guess which word she kept repeating: ethnonationalism. Maddow interpreted it as code for white supremacism. Ethnonationalism certainly raises red flags in Trump's America. But in 2010, Menashi clearly meant to refer to a concept that goes by a much less provocative name in academic circles: "ethnic democracy." That phrase is supercharged with complication, and it's the object of serious debate by scholars who don't fit neatly into categories of right and left. The question is this: Can a nation state favor one ethnic group over others and remain a democracy? Certain countries come up a lot in this discussion former Soviet states and satellites such as Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia, for instance. And, yes, Israel. O.K., mostly Israel, perhaps because it has been the most public about its status as a political oxymoron, a Jewish democracy. The American born Daniel Gordis is a prolific defender of Israel, as well as a vice president of Shalem College, a stoutly Zionist liberal arts college in Jerusalem. He wrote "We Stand Divided" to address a question that has preoccupied the American Jewish press lately: Why are American Jews falling out of love with the Jewish state? The broad outlines of the story have become almost mythical. Once upon a time, American Jews supported Israel almost unanimously. Now they're disaffected, the non Orthodox ones anyway, mostly because of its bellicose leaders (or leader, since there has been only one for the past decade) and West Bank settlements. The millennial generation is recoiling from the Israel right or wrong line usually taken by mainstream Jewish organizations. Even rabbis (the non Orthodox ones) ask tougher questions than the rabbis of my childhood. Is the Jewish state a liberal democracy or an occupying force? Why does the Israeli rabbinate treat liberal American forms of Judaism (Reform, Conservative) with such scorn? Gordis's answer to the American Jewish critique of Israel is that the Americans don't understand the nature of the state. The problem isn't what Israel does but what it is. "For decades, American Jews have assumed that the more Israel emulates the United States the more admirable it will be," he writes. But Israel can't emulate America because it's not a liberal democracy. It's an ethnic democracy, founded as a refuge for people hounded on account of their ethnic identity, as well as to restore to them "the cultural richness that a people have when they live in their ancestral homeland, speak their own language, and chart the course of their own future." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. In a classic liberal democracy, the state treats all citizens alike and forges the many into one. By contrast, ethnic democracies don't assimilate, homogenize or try to enforce the neutrality of the public domain. They're particularist rather than universalist. They may be multicultural (Israel is) but they fully embrace the mores and values of a specific culture. Ethnic democracies grant rights to all citizens, but only insofar as those rights don't interfere with the goal of self determination for the dominant group a goal usually given a high priority after self determination has been withheld from that group for a long time, as it was for Jews and the ethnic groups populating former Soviet states. It's hard to imagine how the Zionist project could exist without ethnic majoritarianism. Moreover, favored cultural status shouldn't be controversial. Yes, in Israel, everything shuts down on the Sabbath and Yom Kippur, not on Arab holidays. But in the United States, everything shuts down on Christmas too. Meanwhile, across the ocean, American Jews were pledging allegiance to a nation that was welcoming them with less bigotry than most. They championed a democracy meant to be, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "applicable to all men and all times." Zionism didn't appeal to all American Jewish leaders. Some worried that its sectarianism would threaten their status as loyal citizens and elevated peoplehood over religion. Why not make America the Jewish homeland? It already was, in a way. In a slippery move, Gordis turns a former leader of the American Council for Judaism, Rabbi Elmer Berger, into the spokesman for these views: "Jewish nationalism tends to confuse our fellowmen about our place and function in society," Berger said before his death in 1996. But the council doesn't deserve the prominence. Infamous for its anti Zionism, it represented the minority of American Jewish opinion. Gordis does quote more moderate voices, such as that of Justice Louis Brandeis, who wrote, "Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism." And it's true that even after the Holocaust a portion of the American Jewish community wavered in its support of Israel. Living thousands of miles away, Gordis says, Americans couldn't and still can't grasp the dangers facing Israel nor "the inevitability of protracted conflict." Nor did they appreciate the prescience of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the brilliant, charismatic founder of Revisionist Zionism, whom Gordis calls Zionism's "guiding spirit." And here is where the author's partisanship comes to the fore. Revisionism is Zionism in its maximally militaristic form. The sad truth is that Israel owes its existence in part to the violent expulsion of Arabs during its War of Independence. The Israeli journalist Ari Shavit acknowledges as much in his magisterial book length essay on Israel and its troubled history, "My Promised Land." He mourns the tragic contradictions that pervade the creation of the state; he knows that they could yet prove its undoing. Gordis gestures toward an awareness of Israel's excesses, but his "to be sure"s feel empty. To him, the opposite of Revisionism remains a suicidal passivity. Jabotinsky was not Zionism's guiding spirit, because Zionism never had one. It had many. And Zionism was never one thing or its opposite. It was a vibrant, contentious stew of ideologies and their representatives: 19th century romantic nationalists, communitarian kibbutzniks, social democratic Labor Zionists, among others. (Gordis alludes to Zionist plurality but downplays it.) Did these groups live up to their ideals? On the whole, no. And that is one reason they withered away. As Israel's left flounders, Jabotinskian survivalism has re emerged as the credo of the right. Gordis has undertaken to explain European and Israeli Zionism to supposedly uncomprehending Diaspora Jews; if he will teach, he must teach the whole, not the part. But Gordis's biases are nothing compared with the louder silence that echoes through this book. He never tests his premise against the really hard questions: the Palestinians, the West Bank settlements and Israel's recent embrace of so called illiberal democracies like Hungary and Poland, as well as dictators. Astonishingly, Gordis reduces the Palestinian question to a footnote in which he grants that the arguments he makes about particularism also justify Palestinian nationalism, then declares such a discussion outside his purview. Gordis's failure to grapple seriously with Israel's occupation of the West Bank also undercuts his argument. The settlements go further than Israel's hybrid democracy in explaining the alienation of its Diaspora brethren. And while a new Israeli government may reverse the previous one's extremely right wing foreign policies, Gordis ought to acknowledge that Israel under Bibi Netanyahu eschewed not only liberalism but the whole liberal world order, as Robert Kagan argued earlier this month in a powerful essay in The Washington Post. In the concept of the ethnic democracy, Gordis lays out a bracing idea that ought to make us reassess knee jerk impositions of American values on Israel. But if he won't face up to its abuses, potential and real, he won't change many minds. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
ELLEN'S GREATEST NIGHT OF GIVEAWAYS 8 p.m. on NBC. Tuning into Ellen DeGeneres's talk show on any day of the year is almost guaranteed to be a feel good exercise. But this week, the host is dialing up the positivity with a special holiday series that focuses on giving back to families in need (as well as showering her live audience with goodies, a la Oprah Winfrey). Jennifer Aniston joins the comedian on the first of her three night gifting spree, which will also welcome other celebrity guests like Chrissy Teigen, Justin Timberlake and Michelle Obama throughout the week. Get the tissues ready! BELICHICK SABAN: THE ART OF COACHING 9 p.m. on HBO. Bill Belichick and Nick Saban lead two of the most successful teams in football: Belichick with the New England Patriots and Saban with the University of Alabama Crimson Tide. But the two met in 1982, and worked together on the Cleveland Browns coaching staff in the '90s; over the decades they've maintained a friendly relationship, meeting up once a year to talk about their coaching philosophies. This 90 minute special takes sports fans into that annual meeting of the minds, where the coaches will talk about their work together as well as their professional triumphs. The show also incorporates interviews with family members, assistant coaches and peers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
8 Artists at the Paris Photo Fair Who Show Where Photography Is Going PARIS Is it possible to create meaningful photographs in a world awash with images? Or should photographers instead work with the flood of images already out there? Could photographs from the past help us understand who we are today? Does photography necessarily require a camera? Those were some of the questions posed by the displays of 166 galleries exhibiting at Paris Photo, held again this year at the Grand Palais, the 19th century iron and glass masterpiece by the Seine River, running through Nov. 11. The international fair showcases works spanning the history of photography. While many of the artists on show seemed happy with photography's traditional flat prints, others departed to find new forms of expression, incorporating techniques such as weaving, cutting, painting and sculpture. Here are edited extracts in which some of the artists explained their work. "These are portraits of inhabitants of the Faroe Islands. As a nondocumentary photographer, I was slightly terrified to leave my studio, but the landscapes were so photogenic that it didn't matter that I had no control over the backdrop. "I set up the subjects in absurd situations, letting them choose objects from their daily life to pose with. They were incredibly welcoming and participative. "I learned to weave in Swazi factories. Back in my Catskills studio, I wove that fabric through their printed faces, bringing their DNA, their sweat, their hair, into the portraits. Metaphorically, they are shrouded, peering from behind the bars imposed by their culture and government. "Weaving is a methodical process, very meditative. Each of these pieces takes from 20 to 60 hours to produce and is unique. "These people have very little choice. As an artist, I wanted to do something to give them a voice." "This work is about the essence of photography. I used to shoot traditional photos, then three or four years ago, I hit a wall. There are so many images out there, we no longer see them, or know which are good or bad. I considered giving up photography, then asked myself: What, in fact, is photography? "Now I work without a camera, just with light and essential photographic tools. For this series, I played with filters, using glossy chromogenic paper. "To me, the length of an exposure is magical. It is all about time, and the images are actually in movement because if I expose the paper to light just five seconds longer, the crimson red will turn to dark burgundy. "I am not nostalgic for analog, I shoot digital images like everyone else, but they are two entirely separate mediums. These images are not photographs, they are created in my lab with no representation of reality. I feel like I am inside my camera." "I am originally a sculptor and a performer, and I believe that photography can also be about movement and experience in space and in time. "I wonder about the place of photography in contemporary societies: Does it still have any impact? We are exposed to so many images today, and they are so infinitely replicable, that they seemed to have turned abstract and transient. Even images of conflict feel it's horrible to say like decorative wallpaper. "I juggle two sets of memories: those of Morocco, my birthplace, formerly under French control; and those of France, where I grew up and went to school. I used to feel there was a civil war inside me because neither country has properly addressed the issue of decolonization. "My work is about healing memories. To do this, it is necessary to address facts of the past and accept them as part of our history. Only then can we make peace with our identities and move forward. "In this work, I have used colonial era postcards showing young Moroccan prostitutes in Bouzbir, a French military district in Casablanca. These women's bodies were the obscene battleground of French domination. On the pictures, I have digitally overlaid a grid of tiny images of female genitals and uteruses. "Today, I feel my French and my Moroccan heritages are at peace within me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Despite his extensive theater background, Todd is known for horror movies, but he doesn't mind: The genre is "passionately adored so I don't see it as a secondhand citizenship." Tony Todd, the veteran horror star, has found himself in an unusual state: He's scared. But not of what comes after you say "Candyman" five times in the mirror or of the frights in his myriad other films, like "Final Destination," that keep his fans up at night. He's afraid for the fate of live performance amid the pandemic. "Opera, dance, ballet, museums, everything," Todd said on a phone call from his Los Angeles home, where he's been quarantined. "I worry about a world without culture at some point." It's a pressing concern for Todd, 65, who earned a master's degree from the Trinity Repertory Company, studied at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and started in political theater. He still has friends who perform live, many of them blues musicians now living, as he described it, "hand to mouth." And before the world went sideways, the actor could return to theater, "which is my first love," between making movies. But despite the dismal circumstances, Todd feels inspired: "From the ashes, if 'Candyman' can resurrect after 30 years, anything is possible." Next year, he'll be seen reprising his title role from the 1992 classic "Candyman" for the director Nia DaCosta's remake (its release date was delayed because of Covid 19). He is also back haunting audiences in "Tales From the Hood 3," an anthology horror film that premiered on Syfy this month and is available on major streaming platforms as well. Todd discussed creating horror in the age of social consciousness, fighting for inclusion in and out of the arts world, and how he feels about being known as the king of Black horror. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation. "Tales From the Hood 3" covers gentrification, racism and the dangerous costs of fame. Do you consider horror a space where ills against Black people can be avenged? Absolutely. Horror always opens the question of what frightens us truly, right? The better films always present that in a scathing way that people come out of with new understanding. I don't want to use the word "fun," but "Tales From the Hood 3" is also cloaked in a comic book style that allows people to maybe get in. It's interesting that you mention its accessibility, because many people who are not fans of horror seem more drawn to the genre these days because it mirrors real world fears. With what we've gone through this year with the pandemic, a lot of writers are holed up. I think in two years we're going to have some extraordinary work come out of this. Bernard Rose the 1992 "Candyman" writer director and I had been working on a project at the start of the pandemic. We ended shooting on the first weekend of the George Floyd protests. So we opened with the emptiness of L.A., in kind of a film noir style. Have you gone to any of the protests? Yeah. My daughter did, too. Not heavily because I can't afford to get arrested. But I've always been very socially conscious. The first job I got was with a political theater group called Modern Times Theater. It was my first time traveling the world doing theater. How do you feel about the recent calls for inclusion in the theater community? Well, as much as I love theater, every time I'm called to do an August Wilson play, I say, "What is our donor base?" And invariably it's less representative than the world we live in. It always bothered me. If there's 800 seats, I'd maybe count 10 Black people. I always tried to push back. Particularly if the plays are about the people that are excluded, you need to figure a way to make it more profitable and less expensive. If it's not there on a corporate level, writers have to figure out a way to find the space and let people know that they're telling stories about ourselves. What keeps you coming back to horror? Well, I didn't get my master's saying, "I want to be a horror film star." I just wanted to be a good actor. If you look at my resume, horror's been 30 percent of it. My friend Stan Shaw says, "In Hollywood, if you play a certain color vividly" laughs "they're not interested in you straying away from the rainbow." So, I keep going back to theater because whenever it gets too boring or repetitive, I tell my people to seek out some theater. Unfortunately, this year so many artists in New York City are without that platform. I worry because they don't have the normal fallback positions of bartending and waitering anymore. But we will get stronger and come back more vibrantly than ever. Since you have such a variety of experience, how do you feel about being known as the king of Black horror? I don't mind. You can label me however you want. I know who I am. As long as they pay the bills and for my daughter's grad school education, I'm fine. Horror fans are the most ferocious fan base there is. That allows for a lot of personal appearances and celebrating a genre that's sort of kicked to the side but also passionately adored so I don't see it as a secondhand citizenship. I have outside interests; I'm not worried about being pigeonholed. What was it like returning to "Candyman"? It was a joy. I'm proud of "Candyman." If I had never done another horror film, I could live with that, and I'd carry this character. I thought he would disappear. After 30 years, we're back with a fascinating, powerful new chapter. Nia DaCosta will bring that femininity to a darkness, which is great. And we're back in Cabrini Green, which was no longer Cabrini Green. Gentrification. The towers of the Chicago housing project where the original movie had been set were razed. DaCosta is one of very few Black female horror filmmakers right now. Coming up at a time when that was almost inconceivable No, it was almost nonexistent. When I started in this business, I would show up on set and not only would I be the only Black actor, I would be the only Black person in jobs that anybody should have the opportunity to do if it wasn't for nepotism. Now it's changed. I would go on set and the entire transportation department and hair and makeup were people that looked like me and knew how to apply makeup to me. Laughs And light me, OK? Just the joy that occurred, finally being allowed to the dance. So, do you feel invigorated by the fact that more Black women are taking up space in horror? Absolutely. We're a cosmopolitan society with many different shades and nationalities. Sometimes we lose sight of that in the quest to make America great again, whatever that means. So maybe things will calm down politically by this time next year and we'll find a vaccine, get back on a plane without a possible horror situation. Because if I see somebody without a mask and he starts to cough, that's it. After 9/11, we used to watch everybody that was different from us. Now the enemy may be ourselves. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
On Sunday night, Spike Lee won his first competitive Oscar, then made an acceptance speech that gained a standing ovation. But the events did not please at least one person apparently watching: President Trump. On Monday, he called Lee's speech a "racist hit on your President." Lee opened his speech, after winning best adapted screenplay for "BlacKkKlansman," by discussing slavery and his family's experiences of it. "I give praise to our ancestors, who have built this country into what it is today along with the genocide of the native people," he said. "The 2020 presidential election is around the corner," Lee said. "Let's all mobilize. Let's all be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love versus hate." Read our analysis of the ceremony. Lee did not mention the president in his speech, but that call to action seems to have angered him. "Be nice if Spike Lee could read his notes, or better yet not have to use notes at all, when doing his racist hit on your President," Trump said in a tweet in the early hours of Monday morning. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Yo Yo Ma, left, and Wu Man are the soloists in Zhao Lin's double concerto "A Happy Excursion," which has its American premiere with the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday. "A Happy Excursion," a double concerto that has its American premiere on Wednesday with the New York Philharmonic, takes its title from an ancient Taoist text. But it could just as easily describe the joyous performance of its soloists, Yo Yo Ma and Wu Man. They were at the top of their fields when they met in the 1990s: Mr. Ma, a superstar cellist; Ms. Wu, the world's leading pipa player and a tireless ambassador for that lutelike Chinese instrument. Living in the same small Boston suburb, they became quick friends and colleagues; they've played together at the White House and with Mr. Ma's Silkroad Ensemble. How Yo Yo Ma wants Bach to save the world. Among their collaborators has been Zhao Lin, who wrote "A Happy Excursion" and, in the spirit of Silkroad, has already blended traditionally Eastern and Western instruments in another double concerto: "Duo" (2013), for cello and sheng, a Chinese reed instrument. His latest concerto a lush and cinematic work in three movements pairs the cello and the pipa, which dates back more than 2,000 years. (Compare that with the relatively young cello, created around the 16th century.) In an interview this week, Mr. Ma and Ms. Wu discussed the piece's meaning, and what their instruments sound like together. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. How would you describe the character of this concerto? YO YO MA Zhao Lin comes from a very literary and artistic family. He has a sense of old and new, and really knows poetic traditions. In the second movement, Wu Man plays this theme it's a melody that goes back to around the year 700 A.D. But he picked that and said, "I'm going to actually do something with this movement that shows something from that era," the Tang dynasty. WU MAN In the Tang dynasty, music is very different from modern Chinese music. MA Zhao Lin also comes from Xi'an, which around the Tang dynasty had easily a population of over a million people. They had mosques, Buddhist temples and Christian churches. It was really open; they called it one of the golden ages. It was such a rich and open and multicultural society. So there is a kind of beauty to that movement, going back to this golden period. MA You can go everywhere. And he takes us through time travel. The first movement is all about the beginning of things, different forces that come together and become China. We have that second movement, the golden period. And then we have the last movement, the present. It's in seven it's a very contemporary rhythmic sound but it has elements of the golden period in it. So the question is, how are we, in our present moment, going to evolve ourselves? Plan ahead with The New York Times's Culture Calendar. The timbres of your two instruments are so different. Does that pose a challenge? WU I still remember the first time we played together. In the first rehearsal, I felt really bad and awkward because I didn't know how I could play with the cello. They do sound different. We changed how we produce sound on the instrument. Speaking to Mr. Ma You changed your bowing. But over 20 years we kind of got used to it, so the combination of pipa and cello is not strange to us anymore. The pipa has a history as a court and solo instrument. But they can be produced for a bigger hall now, with steel strings instead of silk. We also use amplification. Today, the pipa and Wu Man are kind of synonymous, and the instrument is normal. But it's because in 29 years she's gone from something that's exotic to absolutely accepted. She plays in cafes, stadiums, concert halls, museums. She's commissioned everybody: Lou Harrison, Philip Glass, Zhao Lin. The repertory was very small, but she has expanded it by several hundred thousand percent. What does it mean that this piece and this instrument is represented onstage with the New York Philharmonic? MA What I love about New York is that it's a world city. Depending on whom you ask, either that's a terrible thing or it's the most normal thing. You look at the New York Phil, and look at the number of Asians what we need, actually, is much more African American and Latin American representation, because those are our two largest minorities. I don't think either Wu Man or I feel odd being what we are. It feels normal to us. I'm not proud; I'm just glad. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
In his previous novels Benedict Wells said that he had tended to wield "irony and sarcasm" to deal with loss. But that this time he deliberately "wanted to confront death again and again."Credit...Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times In his previous novels Benedict Wells said that he had tended to wield "irony and sarcasm" to deal with loss. But that this time he deliberately "wanted to confront death again and again." The German Swiss novelist Benedict Wells developed an intimate understanding of Bavarian boarding schools. He spent 13 years from the age of 6 to 19 in three different ones. What he most remembers is the hunger, both literal and figurative, that these rudimentary state run schools induced in him. "It actually helped me a lot with my writing," Wells, said in a recent interview. "But now at the age of 34, I think I should get rid of that hunger." A Bavarian boarding school features prominently in Wells's fourth novel "The End of Loneliness," which is also his first to be translated into English. It spent more than a year and a half on Germany's Spiegel best seller list and was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2016. The English language version, translated by Charlotte Collins, is being released in the United States by Penguin Books on Jan. 29. Wells said he sometimes broke into tears as he was writing "The End of Loneliness," which took him seven years to complete. At the heart of the novel are three disparate siblings who are packed off to boarding school after their parents die in a car crash. The story is narrated in the first person by the youngest, Jules, who is 11 when the accident happens. Jules falls in love with Alva, a young girl whose own family history has also been marked by loss. Their relationship unfurls over the next 30 years, before a fatal illness strikes. Over the telephone, Wells, who divides his time between Berlin and the Bavarian countryside, described how composing "The End of Loneliness" changed his outlook both as a writer and a human being. In his previous novels he said that he had tended to wield "irony and sarcasm and to look away like most people from loss and loneliness and death." But that this time he deliberately "wanted to confront death again and again," to explore how people find the courage to cope with it. When Collins, who is based in Cambridge, England, began translating "The End of Loneliness" she said she assumed Wells had been through some kind of experience with someone close to him dying. "I have; and I recognized the emotions and the responses to it, which I felt he portrayed absolutely beautifully," said Collins, whose translation of Robert Seethaler's "A Whole Life" was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. "It turned out that he hadn't had that experience and it was him empathizing with the situation and trying to imagine what it would be like." At boarding school, Wells was keen on the storytelling of the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren, best known for her saga about a headstrong young girl, Pippi Longstocking. Recently Wells enjoyed seeing "Becoming Astrid," the director Pernille Fischer Christensen's movie biopic about the writer. "Later I talked to old school friends who also liked the movie," he said. "But while all of them talked about the lighter novels that Lindgren wrote, I only remembered the dark ones where she wrote about heroes who didn't have any parents." 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. After leaving school at the age of 19, Wells went to the registry office and had his surname officially changed from von Schirach to Wells. He chose his new name on account of Homer Wells, the orphan hero of "The Cider House Rules," whose author, John Irving, remains one of his favorites. "Of course boarding school is something very different from an orphanage because I always had loving parents in the background," Wells said. "But nevertheless I always felt connected to stories about orphans." Originally Wells managed to keep his private life out of the public eye but that changed in 2011 with the success of his third novel "Fast Genial," which led to a German newspaper uncovering the story of his family's Nazi past. "At least I had the chance to be an independent writer for three books," Wells said. "My fear now that I have my first book published in America is that everything will arrive at the same time: Me, my book, my family and my family's past." That is why in October 2017, he published an English language statement on his website entitled "A Personal Matter." In it, he explained his decision to revoke his family name and create a new one. Wells's grandfather Baldur von Schirach, who died 10 years before he was born, was sentenced to 20 years in prison at the Nuremberg trials for crimes against humanity, first as the Nazi Party national youth leader and later as Hitler's personal representative in Vienna. In his statement, Wells wrote: "I did not want to bear the name of a person who committed such crimes and showed no remorse." Writing runs in Wells's family. His cousin Ferdinand von Schirach is one of Germany's most successful authors, selling millions of copies of his novels drawn from his experiences as a criminal lawyer. Meanwhile his grandmother Henriette von Schirach, who divorced Baldur in 1950, wrote several memoirs pertaining to the Nazis. As the eldest daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann, one of Hitler's closest friends and his official photographer, she and her husband were part of an inner circle. But Wells, who was 7 when his grandmother died, professed to having read none of her books. "For me it was very important to make a strong cut," he said. When I asked him if his deep rooted sense of empathy stemmed from a repudiation of his late grandfather's values, he demurred. "I can promise you that the conscious part of my writing has nothing to do with my family's past," he said. "One thing I know for sure is that when I was at boarding school and felt this special loneliness even though I was surrounded by other people, I always thought that one day I would try to find a language for all of that. I think this is definitely one of the reasons why I write now." After leaving boarding school, Wells rejected the opportunity to go to university; instead he decided to teach himself how to write fiction. He moved to Berlin where he took on a succession of odd jobs during the day and wrote mostly at night. "When I was at high school there were so many people who were more talented than me," he said. "I never considered myself a big talent as a writer. But I promised myself that I would not give up." Wells completed his first novel "Spinner," about a group of young friends roaming Berlin, at the age of 19, and began sending it out to publishers. He received over 60 rejections before the novel was eventually published in 2009. By that time he had already scored a hit after the Swiss house Diogenes Verlag introduced him as an author by publishing his second novel "Beck's Last Summer," which was made into a German film in 2015. Penguin recently bought the United States rights to "Spinner," for which Collins is keeping her "fingers crossed" in the hope of translating it. Wells also published a debut collection of short stories in Germany last year and is now writing another novel. He has plans to work on it for another year or two. Trial and error has become an integral part of his process. "I never studied writing because I always liked to find my own way," he said. "I've always thought that will, determination and endurance are the fields where I can make my mark." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Credit...Molly Matalon for The New York Times The goats didn't want to go out in the morning, Amanda Seyfried said. There was one in particular that was giving her trouble, the one Seyfried described as the "God knows how big she is goat." This one was spoiling for a fight. This one could not be moved. So what did Seyfried do? She got in that goat shed, planted her feet and pushed. The goat pushed back, of course. That's the thing about goats: They're stubborn. They also have horns, and Amanda Seyfried, a 34 year old actress, does not. It was frustrating. It was exhausting. It was also, Seyfried hastened to add, completely awesome. And that's one of the primary reasons Seyfried lives on a farm in the Catskills instead of in some overpriced condo on the Sunset Strip: A morning tussle with your goats has the ability to put just about everything else into perspective. "It's insane how much I can feel so accomplished and successful here without having to be in a successful movie," she said. Seyfried has just a handful of scenes in "Mank," but she still walks away with the movie, playing Davies as gratifyingly sly and self aware, a brassy, no airs girl from Brooklyn who has been plopped into a castle by Hearst and is determined to make the most of it. Davies throws parties, drinks too much and often says the wrong thing, but when you say the wrong thing in upper crust circles, it just means you've told some wealthy men the truth, and the girl can't help it. When Marion's not onscreen, you wish she was, but Seyfried is not used to being deemed the standout: When reading the rave reviews for "First Reformed" (2018), in which she played a pregnant widow beseeching Ethan Hawke's conflicted pastor, Seyfried was happy just to get an honorable mention. She has found that most of the time when critics name her, it's in a parenthetical telling you who played the daughter or the girlfriend. "Skating through like that has been my experience, mostly," she said. Despite her fair share of hits, Seyfried was still shocked when she ran into Quentin Tarantino at the airport recently and he knew who she was. "Keep your expectations low," she told me, "and you'll be pleasantly surprised." Last fall, when her agent relayed that Fincher had her in mind for "Mank," Seyfried's eyes filled with tears. "It's really nice to be respected by somebody that you think is just a one of a kind master of his domain," she said. In a phone interview, Fincher compared Seyfried to Cameron Diaz a mainstream comedienne who was always capable of giving more, even if she was rarely asked for it. "We all knew that Amanda was luminescent, we all knew that she was effervescent, we all knew that she was funny," he said. "We all knew that she understood how to parse or set up a joke, and we all knew that she could be moving. I think the thing that was ultimately surprising was the mercurial nature of how quickly she could scramble through those things, because it gives Marion this whole other dimension." Fincher is famous for shooting dozens upon dozens of takes, a process that can frustrate movie stars who are used to nailing their lines and moving on. Seyfried found his method to be a dream. She wasn't rushed, she wasn't discounted. Finally, she had the space to see what she was made of. "It was my turn," she said. "It was me." WHAT MADE SEYFRIED pursue acting in the first place? "I'm still sorting this out with my therapist," she said. But she sees a lot of herself in her 3 year old daughter, Nina, who is creative, quick to express herself and eager for affirmation. Becoming a mother has often prodded Seyfried to look back on the arc of her own life, and from her vantage point in the Catskills, things play a little differently now. After a pleasant childhood in Allentown, Pa., where her film buff father got Seyfried hooked on Laurel and Hardy comedies and classics like "Nosferatu," she spent her teenage years commuting to New York City to film episodes of the soap operas "As the World Turns" and "All My Children." Some actresses take forever to land their first breakthrough credit. Seyfried's first movie was "Mean Girls." That's a pretty heady beginning for someone who's still trying to figure herself out. All Seyfried knew back then is that she loved the attention, loved earning a laugh, and loved making people feel something. And when she was young, she was eager to use all of herself in every role. Maybe that's why she was successful so early. Blessed with those big eyes and an intimate, immediate connection with the camera, it wasn't hard for Seyfried to convince you she was feeling something: She really, really was. "I don't think I've ever unpacked what that did to me emotionally," she said. Her tendency to burn brightly and her lifelong eagerness to please has sometimes made her an easy mark, she knows now. "If you don't have boundaries, then you're screwed in this industry," she said. "That is a scary place for a young person, somebody who doesn't have a backbone which was me. And I paid for it." She recalled a job she booked when she was still a teenager, where the director asked her to appear nearly nude onscreen. Without anyone else on set to advocate for her, she reluctantly agreed to take her clothes off. "I have been put in very insane positions," she said. "I was walking around with no underpants on and a T shirt, and I didn't want to be, yet I didn't feel like I had any power to say, 'No, this makes me uncomfortable.'" (She wouldn't name the project.) That's part of why at 22, Seyfried began looking at houses outside Hollywood. As her career kept heating up, she needed to her draw her own boundaries, to remind herself that a set is not home, that home is home. Seven years ago, coming off roles in "Les Miserables" and "Lovelace," she finally happened across the farm in the Catskills and knew it was what she had long been searching for. Her business manager demurred, but Seyfried put her foot down: "I was like, 'No, Mark! I'm telling you, this is where I'm going to die.'" Safety is a priority for Seyfried, and she wants it to be a priority for Hollywood, too. She was reminded of this over the summer during a contentious vote to ratify the new Screen Actors Guild contract. "There was a lot of infighting, and it was really hard to know where I stood," she said. Ultimately, Seyfried voted no, because she felt the contract didn't do enough to protect actors who are shooting intimate scenes: "I just feel like really, this industry is not as safe as it wants to be." Ten years ago, Seyfried might have been too afraid to go against the grain, especially because her fellow actors still voted overwhelmingly to ratify the contract. But it can be a good thing to take a righteous stand: It means you know yourself and your own priorities, and finally, Seyfried thinks she does. No matter how her "Mank" performance fares this awards season, all the time she has spent on her farm this year has given Seyfried the ability to see these things much more clearly. "This movie is definitely the best opportunity I've had in my career, and it is absolutely shifting my career for the better," she said. "But without it, I was just as happy, because I've made space for myself to feel accomplished in my own world." Later, Seyfried would text me a photo from the shed where she'd had her morning clash. I could see most of her goats milling around in the distance, but one had gotten right up in the lens, defiantly staring the camera down with wide set eyes. It looked stubborn as hell. It looked like it wouldn't be easily led. And I knew why Amanda Seyfried had loved the fight. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A solar eclipse and a torrential downpour descended on the stage of the Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Friday night. Those were among the natural phenomena digitally conjured in "Beyond Time," a production by the Taiwanese dance and drumming company U Theater that was having its American debut. The company's 15 disciplined members are consummate multitaskers: dancers who drum and drummers who dance, creating music as they move. In their synchronized action, much of it rooted in Chinese martial arts, and their resounding percussion, with instruments ranging from delicate cymbals to thunderous taiko drums, their focus and precision run deep. According to the troupe's website, the pronunciation of "U" echoes the Chinese word for excellence, and in clarity and uniformity, they undeniably excel. Yet "Beyond Time," created by the group's artistic director and founder Liu Ruo yu and the music director Huang Chih chun, suffers from that same uniformity, anodyne even at its most roiling, both choreographically and technologically. The seven sections, meant to explore "the relationship between 'man' and 'universe,'" as a lofty program note explains, feature sleek video projections of the elements: hovering mist, aquatic ripples, a blinding white sun. Recorded chants and naturalistic sounds, like lapping waves, mingle with the tones and timbres of the live percussion. The directors seem intent on putting the audience in a meditative state, something not so easily induced. We can, however, observe the performers in what must be meditative for them, like the rapid spinning that opens and closes the show. At the beginning, a lone performer turns in place against a backdrop of pelting rain, ushering in the first of several rhythmic spectacles. In the final scene, after heavy golden gongs have lowered from the ceiling, the dancers escalate from slowly, deliberately striking them into a collective whirl, fueled by drummers along one side of the stage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
LONDON This summer will see no fewer than five productions of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in and around London. But I intend no disrespect to the others when I bet that Nicholas Hytner's immersive production at the Bridge Theater is unlikely to be equaled. The play runs through Aug. 31 and will be broadcast in movie theaters around the world via NT Live on Oct. 17. Mr. Hytner, a two time Tony winner, has taken on a canonical favorite that sometimes feels as if it's being done out of duty but not here . Like the "Julius Caesar" that last year was the first runaway success of the new playhouse that Mr. Hytner runs, this "Dream" has been staged with no seats in the stalls, or orchestra level, so that audience members can follow the action on foot . The theater's usual tiered seating remains in place. However you choose to experience it, the production brings out both the darkness and the wonder in this multifaceted play. Mr. Hytner and a large cast led by the "Game of Thrones" star Gwendoline Christie conjure afresh a narrative that threatens death from the very start. That is the fate that may befall the feisty young lover Hermia (Isis Hainsworth) if she will not marry Demetrius (Paul Adeyafa), as her father wishes, when she would rather be with Lysander (Kit Young). Bleating "let me go, you're pathetic," Tessa Bonham Jones's emotionally wayward Helena completes an anxious quartet of suitors in hormonal overdrive. The show uses the full height of the theater, with trapezes allowing the play's fairies to cavort like Cirque du Soleil acrobats and also showcasing the skills of an especially astonishing Puck, played by the fast rising actor David Moorst: This quicksilver sprite is here seen as a reckless figure of anarchy and of compassion, too , when he extends a misshapen hand toward the audience at the end in a gesture of connection. The sound design folds Beyonce and rap into the mix, while honoring Shakespeare's verse at every turn. The result is a rare "Dream" capable of delighting purists and newbies alike. No Shakespeare is complete these days, or so it seems, without a gender swap of some sort, and I'm reluctant to reveal the specifics here. Suffice it to say that Gwendoline Christie, who is first seen suspended in a cage, in a forbidding image of entrapment, cuts an imposing figure as two queens Hippolyta and Titania making their way carefully through a polyamorous landscape. (The rival male lovers steal a clinch with each other.) Oliver Chris is both stern and cheeky as required of his own dual royal roles: the ramrod stiff duke Theseus and a notably libidinous fairy king, Oberon . The "Pyramus and Thisbe" play within the play is beautifully led by Hammed Animashaun as a sweet faced Bottom: His troupe of working class actors discover that they quite like this newfound thing called art. In that way, these burgeoning thespians are in sync with a version of the play that Mr. Hytner and his team have refashioned very specifically from the ground up. Peaceful coexistence is more difficult in "Europe," the transfixing 1994 play by the Scottish playwright David Greig that has been chosen by the director Michael Longhurst to begin his first season as the artistic director at the Donmar Warehouse. (The play runs through Aug. 10.) While this may sound like a play for the Brexit age, it is actually set during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And yet the writing speaks to the here and now in its depiction of, among other things, refugees who come up against an emboldened far right movement. "Europe" may be the name on the poster, but this story is being told the world over. You could imagine a well intentioned treatise on this topic, but Mr. Longhurst finds a theatricality that animates the collision of cultures. Don't be put off by the subpar Brecht of the dreary location setting chorus that is sung at the start; the play picks up momentum as its finely drawn array of characters come into focus. It is heartening to witness the same sex relationship that develops between the young refugee Katia (Natalia Tena) and Adele (Faye Marsay, excellent), a married employee at the forgotten railway station of a ground down border town somewhere in Europe. Katia's father, Sava (Kevork Malikyan, in an immensely touching performance), finds an unanticipated ally in an underemployed stationmaster, Fret (Ron Cook), who concedes that the place he inhabits is little more than "a blur from the train." Neither of these older men can contain the ramped up volatility of various thugs , with little time for outsiders, who include Faye's increasingly desperate husband, Berlin (Billy Howle), a malcontent filled with rage at his loveless and jobless life. The climax comes with a scenic coup from the accomplished designer Chloe Lamford that sends the world of the play crashing down. How do we emerge from the wreckage and move on? There's a question guaranteed to haunt playgoers as they make their way to wherever they call home. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Aug. 31; National Theater Live broadcast on Oct. 17. Europe. Directed by Michael Longhurst. Donmar Warehouse, through Aug. 10. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Two biographical compendiums, Vashti Harrison's LITTLE LEADERS: Bold Women in Black History (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 16.99; ages 8 to 12) and Jamia Wilson and Andrea Pippins's YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK (Wide Eyed Editions/Quarto, 22.99; ages 7 to 10) are, by contrast, not bedtime reading but texts that belong in any home library, to be revisited again and again. Wilson's book celebrates a variety of black achievement; there are biographical sketches of Kofi Annan and Stevie Wonder, Solange Knowles and Naomi Campbell, accompanied by Andrea Pippins's illustrations, full of verve but also quite dignified. The candy colored pages and straightforward stories are hard to resist, and will doubtless forever shape the way many readers think about Wangari Maathai and Langston Hughes. Harrison's book focuses on great black women, and it's lovely to see Lorna Simpson and Gwen Ifill ascend to the ranks of Marian Anderson and Bessie Coleman. Harrison wants readers to imagine themselves in such august company; her adorable illustrations depict all of these figures as a little black girl, an everygirl, in a variety of costumes and backdrops. Harrison and Wilson have similar projects. But which book is better? I'd like to point out that my sons own around 40 volumes on the subject of trucks. Young readers deserve both these books. The person most qualified to tell the tale of Kareem Abdul Jabbar is the man himself, as gifted an intellect as he is an athlete. Written with Raymond Obstfeld, his autobiography, BECOMING KAREEM: Growing Up On and Off the Court (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 17.99; ages 10 and up) is aimed at middle grade readers but could and should be read aloud to younger kids. It's a tale by a wise elder about basketball, sure, but also about cultural, political, social and religious awakenings, big stuff narrated in a very accessible way. MARTIN RISING: Requiem for a King (Scholastic, 19.99; ages 9 to 12) is a collaboration by two of children's literature's most well known names, Andrea Davis Pinkney and Brian Pinkney (who happen to be married). It's a work of verse, with some prose end matter to help elucidate the poems, and it will reward a reader sophisticated enough to grapple with language and metaphor. Andrea Davis Pinkney frames her poem cycle about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last months with the figure of Henny Penny, the bird who either worried or prophesied, and she makes King's death feel as significant as the falling of the sky above. It is, of course, a terrible and sad story, but one in which Brian Pinkney's illustrations manage to find beauty. King is an evergreen subject, so significant and complex that the story of his life and death can withstand repeated tellings. James L. Swanson's CHASING KING'S KILLER: The Hunt for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Assassin (Scholastic, 19.99; ages 12 and up) is a departure, less classroom text than airport thriller. It's a bit like sneaking kale into brownies: Swanson offers plenty of context on King's activism and his turbulent times, but frames the book as a manhunt for James Earl Ray. This approach makes education feel more like entertainment, and will prove seductive to even a reluctant older reader. My children are too young, yet, for Swanson's thriller and the Pinkneys' elegiac tribute, or maybe I simply want to believe that they are. They have a lifetime of reading ahead, particularly if they are to meet Dr. King's expectations for them. For now, my boys can suspend disbelief and accept that Pippi Longstocking can lift a horse and plays with pistols. But they won't be able to believe what happened to Dr. King in Memphis. Who among us can? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Abiola Abike Animashaun and Dr. Chimaobi Obilo Amutah are to be married Oct. 8 at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Danvers, Mass. Gene Corbin, a friend of the couple, who was previously ordained a Baptist minister, is to officiate. On Oct. 7, the couple and their families participated in a ceremony involving Nigerian wedding traditions. Ms. Animashaun, 30, is known as Abby. She was, until last week, a policy analyst at Commonwealth Medicine's Center for Health Law and Economics in Shrewsbury, Mass. Later this month, she will begin work as a program officer at the Center for Health Care Strategies in Hamilton, N.J., a health care policy nonprofit organization. She graduated from Wellesley and received a Master of Public Health from Emory. She is a daughter of Adetoun Biodun Staveley Animashaun and Tajudeen Babatunde Animashaun of Malden, Mass. The bride's father is a property manager at Jones Lang LaSalle in Cambridge, Mass. Her mother is a geriatric case manager for Central Boston Elderly Services. Mr. Amutah, 32, is the statewide data manager for the Office of Comprehensive Support at the New Jersey Department of Education in Trenton, N.J., where he also serves as the program director for school improvement grants. He graduated from Harvard and received a master's degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Mississippi and a Doctor of Education from Rutgers, with a concentration in education, culture and society. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization. Dr. Jose Baselga, the chief medical officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, resigned on Thursday amid reports that he had failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from health care companies in dozens of research articles. The revelations about Dr. Baselga's disclosure lapses, reported by The New York Times and ProPublica last weekend, have rocked Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the nation's leading cancer centers, in recent days. Its top executives scrambled to contain the fallout, including urgent meetings of physician leaders and the executive committee of its board of directors. In his resignation letter released Thursday, Dr. Baselga, who also served as the physician in chief, said he feared that the matter would be a distraction from his role overseeing clinical care and that he had been "extremely proud" to work at Memorial Sloan Kettering. "It is my hope that this situation will inspire a doubling down on transparency in our field," he said, adding that he hoped the medical community would work together to develop a more standardized system for reporting industry ties. In an email sent to the staff Thursday evening, Dr. Craig B. Thompson, the hospital's chief executive, said that Dr. Baselga had made "numerous" contributions to Memorial Sloan Kettering, patients and cancer treatment. Dr. Lisa DeAngelis, the chairwoman of the neurology department, will take over as acting physician in chief until Dr. Baselga's successor is hired. The resignation was effective immediately, and he will have no continuing role at the cancer center, although he will stay for two weeks to ease the transition, said Christine Hickey, a spokeswoman for the cancer center. Dr. Thompson echoed comments he made to the hospital staff on Sunday, saying that the cancer center had "robust programs" in place to manage employees' relationships to outside companies, but that "we will remain diligent." He added, "There will be continued discussion and review of these matters in the coming weeks." Dr. Baselga, a prominent figure in the world of cancer research, omitted his financial ties to companies like the Swiss drugmaker Roche and several small biotech start ups in prestigious medical publications like The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. He also failed to disclose any company affiliations in articles he published in the journal Cancer Discovery, for which he serves as one of two editors in chief. All told, ProPublica and The Times found that Dr. Baselga had failed to report any industry ties in 60 percent of the nearly 180 papers he had published since 2013. That figure increased each year he did not disclose any relationships in 87 percent of the journal articles that he co wrote last year. In an interview and later statement, Dr. Baselga said he planned to correct his conflict of interest disclosures in 17 journal articles, including in The New England Journal and The Lancet. But he contended that in dozens of other cases, no disclosure was required because the topics of the articles had little financial implication. He also said his failed disclosures were unintentional and should not reflect on the value of the research he conducted. Dr. Baselga and Memorial Sloan Kettering said that he had disclosed his industry relationships to the cancer center. Those journals, as well as professional societies like the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Association for Cancer Research, said they were conducting reviews of Dr. Baselga's disclosure practices after inquiries from The Times and ProPublica. Dr. Baselga was president of the A.A.C.R. in 2015 and 2016 and appears to have violated disclosure rules for reporting conflicts of interest during that period. In his statement Thursday, Dr. Baselga said that he took full responsibility for his disclosures and that he had already submitted updates to medical journals "and will continue to do so until the record is complete." A spokeswoman for The New England Journal, Jennifer Zeis, said in an email Thursday that Dr. Baselga had submitted changes to his disclosures but that editors had questions for him before the articles could be corrected. A spokeswoman for the A.A.C.R. said that organization was continuing to review Dr. Baselga's disclosures. Dr. Baselga, 59, is an expert in breast cancer research and played a key role in the development of Herceptin, which was developed by Genentech, a subsidiary of Roche. He came to Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2013 after serving as chief of hematology and oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Before that he was a leader at the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology in Barcelona, Spain. Medical journals and professional societies have imposed stricter rules about reporting relationships to industry after a series of scandals a decade ago in which prominent physicians failed to disclose payments from drug companies. But medical journals have said they don't routinely fact check authors' disclosures, and much is left to the honor system. Ethicists say that outside relationships with companies can shape the way studies are designed and medications are prescribed to patients, allowing bias to influence medical practice. Reporting those ties allows the public, other scientists and doctors to evaluate the research and weigh potential conflicts. Jeffrey S. Flier, who was dean of the Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016, said medical leaders should be held to a higher standard. "The higher you are in the organizational structure, the more important it is that you fulfill those obligations," he said. "You're not just another faculty, you're also a faculty to whom other people look up and your reputation is tied to the institution's reputation." That said, he added, relationships between academic faculty members and the health care industry are essential to developing new drugs. Dr. Baselga has extensive ties to a range of companies, including sitting on the board of the large pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb and serving as a director of Varian Medical Systems, which sells radiation equipment and for whom Memorial Sloan Kettering is a client. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
What are the most popular albums in any given week? For Billboard, the 125 year old music trade publication, that was once a simple question. Its charts were based on the number of CDs, vinyl LPs or tapes that fans bought at stores. But compiling its weekly charts has only gotten more complicated with the rise of streaming formats some free, some paid and as record companies have found ways to game the system by including free downloads of new albums with the sale of merchandise or concert tickets. Now, in the latest change to its chart rules, Billboard has tackled one of the industry's most contentious questions: the role of YouTube, which dominates music consumption online but has frequently been vilified by record companies and even many of the artists who post videos there for low royalty payments. Starting Jan. 3, Billboard will count the popularity of official music videos on YouTube, as well as those on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and Vevo, in the magazine's flagship album chart, the Billboard 200. (YouTube plays have been part of Billboard's singles ranking, the Hot 100, since 2013.) User generated content like memes or cover versions will not count. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Within certain circles, there's been much talk about the growing trend of programming dance in museums. The Whitney Museum of American Art has included dance in its recent biennials, and the Museum of Modern Art has also commissioned work from choreographers. Artists both welcome this development and question how it changes the perception and reception of the form. The Children's Museum of Manhattan offers another way to include dance in that space: as an interactive tool to complement and further explore a broader topic. For its exhibition "Jazzed! The Changing Beat of 125th Street" which celebrates the music's history, rhythms and personalities the museum has recruited tap specialists to demonstrate and discuss dance's relationship to music, further bringing their theme to life. A series of tap stars have already participated this summer. The last of them, on Wednesday, is Jason Samuels Smith, one of the form's most exciting ambassadors. (212 West 83rd Street, 212 721 1223, cmom.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Around this time in July when our ever shortening spring weather takes a sharp right into the damp, hot depths of summer coffee drinkers are confronted with a morning altering decision: switch to iced coffee to combat the oppressive weather, or commit to hot coffee as a kind of bold, unnecessarily masochistic act? Those who prefer their summer over ice have also grown accustomed to another question: regular or cold brew? If you're unfamiliar with the difference, think of cold brew as traditional iced coffee's unhurried fraternal twin. Cold brew can't go a day without a long, luxurious bath, while iced coffee can barely swing a quick shower; cold brew has read "The Goldfinch" (and is planning on a reread before the movie is released later this summer), but iced coffee unfortunately never had the time what with work and the kids though it has seen the trailer on mute. Once found primarily in the trendiest coffee shops and kitchens of adventurous home baristas, cold brew iced coffee has become a year round staple. Chains like Starbucks and Dunkin' have added the drink to their permanent menus. Cold brew makers like Rise, High Brew, La Colombe stock cans in major grocery stores. And at home brewing kit companies have helped popularize D.I.Y. methods. Rich Nieto, owner of Sweetleaf Coffee Roasters in Greenpoint, said that cold brew has become so popular in recent years that it now outsells iced coffee in all but one of the company's four locations. Still, even the most passionate cold coffee drinkers have questions about their chosen beverage: Is there really less acid in cold brew? Will drinking it in the afternoon keep me up at night? Should I just make it at home? The good news is, we have answers. What's the difference between cold brew and iced coffee? Both drinks are made from the same pair of magical, everyday ingredients they're just combined at different temperatures. Water heated to around 200 degrees Fahrenheit (about 93 degrees Celsius) and poured over the grounds will extract all of coffee's most pleasurable essences in a matter of minutes. When cooled and poured over ice, you have a standard iced coffee. If the brewing water is room temperature, it must canoodle with the coffee grounds for much longer, anywhere from 12 to 24 hours, to produce a cup of joe worth sipping, but the resulting beverage contains coffee's most sought after qualities flavor and caffeine without the bitterness found in one brewed hot. Does cold brew coffee really have less acid? My husband recently had an endoscopy that revealed an anomalous patch of stomach tissue on the wall of his esophagus which had been exacerbating his acid reflux. His doctor informed us both that he should try to cut down on spicy food, alcohol and coffee. The first category would be easy, he assured me. The second? Achievable. But the third? Utterly impossible. Dr. Rabia A. De Latour, a gastroenterologist and assistant professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health, said that it was a common sentiment, and that people who are "exquisitely sensitive" to caffeinated or acidic foods, and those suffering from gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD, would benefit from switching to cold brew if they cannot eliminate caffeine from their morning routine. "We recommend they cut out coffee completely," said Dr. De Latour. But for everyone else, the difference between cold brew and iced coffee is negligible. Does cold brewed coffee have more caffeine? Wading through the world of cold brew coffee can be a brutal game of trial and error. Thanks to the wide range of brewing methods, the difference in caffeine content among cold brews is considerably harder to predict than the amount of acid. After brewing for 20 hours, 16 ounces of cold brew at Starbucks contains 200 milligrams of caffeine (12 milligrams per ounce). While that's about 20 percent higher than their iced coffee, which clocks in at 165 milligrams (10 milligrams per ounce), it's considerably lower than the same amount of hot coffee, which has 310 milligrams (20 milligrams per ounce). Coffee from Dunkin' reports similar numbers, with 10.8 milligrams in every ounce of cold brew. But when you wade into more specialty waters, especially among prepackaged brands, the caffeine content is far from predictable. Canned cold brew brands Rise and High Brew have nearly identical packaging, but grabbing the wrong one could cost you. Rise's original flavor contains 180 milligrams in its 7 ounce can (25 milligrams per ounce), which is anywhere from 30 50 milligrams more caffeine than what's found in High Brew's 8 ounce can. Stumptown, a roaster based in Portland, Ore., sells cold brew in 10.5 ounce bottles that contain a whopping 29.4 milligrams of caffeine per ounce. To a caffeine addict like myself, that number sounds lovely. But to the uninitiated looking to give cold brew a shot, it's a recipe for disaster. "A lot of people will not tolerate that amount of caffeine," Dr. De Latour said. "Some people's GERD is worsened by coffee because of the caffeine content and its impact on the sphincter muscles," adding that high amounts found in some cold brews can make people feel quite sick, with symptoms like jitters, peristalsis of the bowels, diarrhea or even increased anxiety and stress. She then reminded me that it is, after all, a stimulant. So that leaves us with cold brew prepared at home, a great option for those looking for more control when it comes to caffeine and acidity. The New York Times's own recipe calls for just 12 hours of brewing. Similar recipes can be found across the internet, and all are easy to adjust in order to find the balance that works for your own stomach and pocketbook. A happy medium can be found in store bought cold brew concentrates. These brews are meant to be diluted, so if you find it too strong, just add water or milk. Not strong enough? You get the idea. In January, I approached the counter of Starbucks at an airport after waiting alongside an amorphous line of fellow uncaffeinated travelers for half an hour and, relieved to have made it there without collapsing, ordered a large cold brew iced coffee. I even used "venti" the Italian word for 20, as in the number of ounces it contains when requesting the large size, even though Italians use the metric system. But my commitment to the chain's conceptually unsound ordering language did not bear fruit, as I was told by the barista that they had just run out of cold brew. All they had left was standard iced coffee, meaning hot brew served over ice. Out of other options and surrounded by more long lines, I grudgingly accepted. It wasn't cold brew, but it was coffee. And that's usually enough. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
When our son learned to walk, he nearly destroyed our home. Using a tabletop to pull himself to his feet, he might snag on a lamp wire and send it smashing to the ground. Once on his feet, he'd trot across the living room, wobbly as a foal, then slam into the far wall and cause a painting to buckle and fall. On one of those occasions I imagined a book based on a child like ours. The story would be about a boy whose greatest joy came from demolishing his surroundings. He had the power to remove his own head and throw it at things. Even better, the head exploded like a bomb. Then he'd grow a new head and have the same fun all over again. I'd call it "The Adventures of Kenny Kaboom." A few weeks later, I visited my mother in law. She'd been a grade school teacher for decades and seemed like exactly the person to tell me if my book would appeal to kids. She laughed along as I told her about the story, and agreed there would be lots of children who might enjoy Kenny Kaboom's adventures. But then she paused and told me who my biggest hurdle would be: the parents. In her experience, grown ups weren't too eager to read out loud books about kids with exploding heads. The kids would get it, but the parents might feel scared. And if the parents are frightened you'll never reach the child. I thought about that exchange recently when I saw the trailer for the film adaptation of "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark." Directed by Andre Ovredal ("Trollhunter") and produced by, among others, the Oscar winning horrormeister Guillermo del Toro, it's based on a series of short story collections that I'd read when I was young, about 8 or 9. The stories were billed as "collected from folklore," retold by Alvin Schwartz, the images drawn by Stephen Gammell. I can't say any one book turned me into a horror writer, but I count these among my essential influences. The stories acted as a divining rod, signaling the morbid well within me. There was the one where a woman returns from the grave to retrieve her missing big toe and the one where baby spiders spill out of a bite on a young girl's face. And I can't forget the one with the killer hiding in the back seat of a car. These tales creeped me out. The images beguiled me. I slept with that book under my pillow more times than I can remember and sometimes woke with nightmares as a result. But I returned to them so often the book finally fell apart. (That wouldn't have been a problem except I'd borrowed it from the library.) This adoration baffled my mom. Why did I keep coming back to this horrifying book? At that age I didn't know how to articulate the effect it had on me. In response to her confusion, I'd open to a page, any one would do, and tap on Gammell's drawings. That's why. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Covid 19 has had a devastating effect on workers. The economy has plunged so quickly that official statistics can't keep up, but the available data suggest that tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, with more job losses to come and full recovery probably years away. But Republicans adamantly oppose extending enhanced unemployment benefits such an extension, says Senator Lindsey Graham, will take place "over our dead bodies." (Actually, over other people's dead bodies.) They apparently want to return to a situation in which most unemployed workers get no benefits at all, and even those collecting unemployment insurance get only a small fraction of their previous income. Because most working age Americans receive health insurance through their employers, job losses will cause a huge rise in the number of uninsured. The only mitigating factor is the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which will allow many though by no means all of the newly uninsured to find alternative coverage. But the Trump administration is still trying to have the Affordable Care Act ruled unconstitutional; "We want to terminate health care under Obamacare," declared Donald Trump, even though the administration has never offered a serious alternative. Bear in mind that ending Obamacare would end protection for Americans with pre existing conditions and that insurers would probably refuse to cover anyone who had Covid 19. Finally, the devastation caused by the coronavirus has left many in the world's wealthiest major nation unable to put sufficient food on the table. Families with children under 12 are especially hard hit: According to one recent survey, 41 percent of these families are already unable to afford enough to eat. Food banks are overwhelmed, with lines sometimes a mile long. But Republicans are still trying to make food stamps harder to get, and fiercely oppose proposals to temporarily make food aid more generous. By now everyone who follows the news has a sense of how badly the Trump administration and its allies botched and continue to botch the medical side of the Covid 19 pandemic. Weeks of denial and the failure to implement remotely adequate testing allowed the virus to spread almost unchecked. Attempts to restart the economy even though the pandemic is far from controlled will lead to many more deaths, and will probably backfire even in purely economic terms as states are forced to lock down again. But we're only now starting to get a sense of the Republican Party's cruelty toward the economic victims of the coronavirus. In the face of what amounts to a vast natural disaster, you might have expected conservatives to break, at least temporarily, with their traditional opposition to helping fellow citizens in need. But no; they're as determined as ever to punish the poor and unlucky. What's remarkable about this determination is that the usual arguments against helping the needy, which were weak even in normal times, have become completely unsustainable in the face of the pandemic. Yet those arguments, zombielike, just keep shambling on. For example, you still hear complaints that spending on food stamps and unemployment benefits increases the deficit. Now, Republicans never really cared about budget deficits; they demonstrated their hypocrisy by cheerfully passing a huge tax cut in 2017, and saying nothing as deficits surged. But it's just absurd to complain about the cost of food stamps even as we offer corporations hundreds of billions in loans and loan guarantees. But what's even worse, if you ask me, is hearing Republicans complain that food stamps and unemployment benefits reduce the incentive to seek work. There was never serious evidence for this claim, but right now at a time when workers can't work, because doing their normal jobs would kill lots of people I find it hard to understand how anyone can make this argument without gagging. So what explains the G.O.P.'s extraordinary indifference to the plight of Americans impoverished by this national disaster? One answer may be that much of America's right has effectively decided that we should simply go back to business as usual and accept the resulting death toll. Those who want to take that route may view anything that reduces hardship, and therefore makes social distancing more tolerable, as an obstacle to their plans. Also, conservatives may worry that if we help those in distress, even temporarily, many Americans might decide that a stronger social safety net is a good thing in general. If your political strategy depends on convincing people that government is always the problem, never the solution, you don't want voters to see the government actually doing good, even in times of dire need. Whatever the reasons, it's becoming increasingly clear that Americans suffering from the economic consequences of Covid 19 will get far less help than they should. Having already condemned tens of thousands to unnecessary death, Trump and his allies are in the process of condemning tens of millions to unnecessary hardship. 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 |
Amada's decision to represent a scene from a pillar of the Western canon in a classical Japanese style seems not unconnected with Murakami's own commitments as a reader and translator of Carver, Fitzgerald and other American writers. Murakami's low key cool owes much to his love of American jazz, and his playfulness and absurdism often bring to mind Vonnegut and Brautigan, who were popular among his generation of countercultural Japanese. Japanese audiences have bought millions of his books, despite critics grumbling about his Western touchstones, an attitude exemplified by Kenzaburo Oe's sniffy remark that Murakami's writing "isn't really Japanese. ... It could be read very naturally in New York." This is true only up to a point. The 18th century ghost stories of Ueda Akinari (most familiar outside Japan through Mizoguchi's 1953 film "Ugetsu") and the demonological compendiums of Toriyama Sekien hover in the background of "Killing Commendatore," as they do in so much contemporary Japanese horror and fantasy, notably the anime of Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away," "My Neighbor Totoro"). Though "Killing Commendatore" does not address authenticity in specifically national cultural terms, the novel is preoccupied with the possibility of making art infused with depth or spirit. The mechanical painter of commissioned portraits comes under the influence of the man whose house he's living in, and is moved to make works with real expressive power. "What I'd created was, at heart, a painting I'd done for my own sake." Read an interview with about "Killing Commendatore" Read our 2011 profile of Murakami in The Times Magazine The novel offers some promising mysteries. The catalyst for the narrator's artistic renaissance is a reclusive businessman who is hiding out in the mountains to be near a 13 year old girl he believes to be his daughter. A persistent ringing sound is coming from beneath a cairn of stones in the woods behind the house, and may be connected to an ancient Buddhist practice in which meditating monks had themselves entombed alive. The narrator and his neighbor remove the stones and open up a pit, which becomes a familiar Murakamiesque location, a liminal space between worlds. Amada's painting and Mozart's opera become part of a tangled net of references and symbols. As historical secrets and hauntings begin to pile on top of one another, one has the sense of a writer throwing a lot of ideas against a wall in the hope that something will stick. The plot is full of melodramatic bustle, but its wheels spin without gaining much traction. This is partly a result of Murakami's customary detachment. Faced with the supernatural, Murakami man experiences no Lovecraftian challenge to the foundations of his sanity, no creeping sense of dread. Instead he reacts with mild concern and head scratching curiosity. When the Commendatore from Amada's painting comes to life and begins speaking to the narrator, he is at first "frozen" but is soon chatting away happily, before lapsing into tiredness and concluding that "it felt like it had taken place in a dream." A state of dreamlike indeterminacy is perhaps the most consistent atmosphere in Murakami's fiction. In his best work, such as "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle," an examination of Japanese war crimes in Manchuria, the feeling of tumbling from bardo to bardo masks trauma and becomes a way to approach the willful forgetting of the postwar period. The low key tone of Murakami's narrators, which in earlier books like "Norwegian Wood" scanned as hipster cool, has in recent years come to feel more like depersonalization and isolation, a malaise not unlike that associated with hikikomori, the young shut ins who have become a symbol of contemporary spiritual crisis. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Bad news, bears. Hibernation is no longer the coolest thing animals do to survive the winter. As cold weather approaches, tiny mole like creatures known as red toothed shrews will shrink their own heads, reducing their skull and brain mass by as much as 20 percent, according to new research published Monday in Current Biology. When warm weather returns, they will regrow the region nearly to its original size, giving new meaning to the phrase "spring ahead." Though it is not yet clear why the shrews go down a few sizes for the winter, the authors of the study speculate that the reduced head and brain size helps them conserve energy when resources are scarce. "These tiny mammals cannot migrate long distances to avoid winter, nor can they enter any kind of energy saving state" like hibernation, said Javier Lazaro, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany and an author of the study. They also have high metabolic rates and very little fat stored in their bodies. "Therefore, they starve within a few hours if they do not hunt constantly." The researchers say the shrinkage is a survival strategy. "Brain tissue is energetically very expensive, so reducing overall brain size might decrease energy demands and thus food requirements," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
MADRID Soccer, beaches, bullfights and discos. Spain's priorities for reopening its economy after months of confinement read like a declaration of the government's vision for the country. Just days before the school year begins, our politicians have finally decided to tackle what they seem to consider least urgent: the education of millions of students. The lack of foresight that has generated confusion about the reopening of schools is part of a process burdened by opacity, a lack of reliable data, inconsistency and slow reactions on the part of the central and regional governments. Behind us are wasted months of unheeded warnings and failed planning. And so, after suffering one of the worst first waves of coronavirus infections, Spain now faces the worst resurgence in Europe. The start of the school year, scheduled in some parts of the country for Sept. 4, will take place amid the chaos of a student strike, different strategies in each region and improvised plans to hastily reduce the student to teacher ratio, reorganize schedules, hire teachers and put measures in place that should have been planned months in advance, as they were in other countries. What would have been surprising is if those same authorities who left the educational system to flounder decades ago had done their homework on time. The understandable decision to try to reopen the country as soon as possible to salvage the peak tourism season "We came out stronger," read the government slogan has been handled with carelessness and irresponsibility. Nightclubs and bars remained open for weeks after they were identified as a source of contagion, crowds were authorized for celebrations of all kinds, and the message was conveyed that the battle had been won, complete with applause for Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. While the national government became complacent, the autonomous regions that form Spain were tasked with organizing the kinds of systems for tracking and monitoring infections that have slowed the spread elsewhere. Most of them failed. The result is a reflection of Spain's recent history: political parties and citizens fighting over whether the right or the left is to blame for a collective failure led by the least prepared politicians since the transition to democracy in the 1970s. Accordingly, Spain has failed to comply with the requirements set forth by the World Health Organization and experts at the Harvard Global Health Institute for a safe opening of schools, including maintaining an infection rate of fewer than 25 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. (The incidence rate is up to 30 times higher in some of the most affected districts of Madrid.) The danger is that students will receive a second year of mediocre and incomplete education. The political parties have been unable to agree on education legislation in over four decades. Parents, teachers and students justifiably despair at the changes each new administration brings, none of them confronting the real problems. For years, more energy has been wasted discussing whether religion classes should count toward grades they should just let the parents choose than in getting students to master English, understand a literary text or acquire basic scientific knowledge. Spain has the worst youth dropout rate in the European Union, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's PISA report on academic excellence in the sciences shows Spanish students scoring below the average. Those who go on to higher education enroll in universities that with few exceptions are disconnected from the job market and mired in bureaucratic paralysis with little regard for innovation. No Spanish university ranks among the world's top 150, according to Shanghai Ranking. The generations that will have to pull the country out of a new crisis are entering the work force without the tools to compete in a globalized world. Our future is jeopardized: Economic hardship is now heaped on top of our health care woes, placing Spain among the worst prospects for economic recovery among developed countries. Our dependence on tourism and services has meant that for several months a year, half of all available jobs came from the hospitality industry. The closure of bars, restaurants and hotels has exposed the fragility of this model and condemns another generation to precariousness and a lack of opportunities. Our economy and education system need a coordinated revamp to help brake the perverse cycle that makes crises in Spain longer and more painful. The Great Recession in 2008 could have been parlayed into a profound education reform focused on innovation, entrepreneurship and training. Instead, Spain chose to cut back on education spending and avoid any major reforms, keeping teachers in precarious employment. If history is any indication, we're on track to repeat the same mistake. The transformative power of education has been a driving force in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore in recent decades. But we don't need to look to Asian countries alone: Portugal, our Iberian neighbor, began major education reforms in 2000 that have turned its education scores around and brought its students up to par with the best in Europe, thanks to quality public schools. Spain needs a Portuguese style education revolution, starting with the training, assessment and fair remuneration of the people we entrust with the task of teaching our children. Beyond resources, the modernization of schools and universities will require a complete curriculum overhaul and reformulation of teaching and learning methods. We must urgently prioritize critical thinking, creativity, rational debate, civility and the humanities. But it's not the politicians, nor this journalist, who should design the schools of the future it's the experts who for years have put forth proposals and cautioned against a deterioration that will be reversed only when our society changes its priorities. The philosopher Jose Antonio Marina, who has been clamoring for change for decades, rightly laments, "Education is of no interest to anyone except parents with school aged children." Until those priorities change on a societal level, they won't change for our politicians either. Although the coronavirus pandemic has exposed one of our worst weaknesses as a nation, we will continue to be the country where education will never get a leg up on good fun. David Jimenez ( DavidJimenezTW) is a writer and journalist. His most recent book is "El director." 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 |
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