text
stringlengths 1
39.7k
| label
int64 0
0
| original_task
stringclasses 8
values | original_label
stringclasses 35
values |
|---|---|---|---|
LONDON The director Jamie Lloyd was giving me a tour of his tattoos. Not the Pegasus on his chest or the skeleton astronaut floating on his back, though he gamely described those, but the onyx inked adornments that cover his arms and hands, that wreathe his neck, that wrap around his shaved head. When I asked about the dragon at his throat, he told me it had been "one of the ones that hurt the least," then pointed to the flame licked skulls on either side of his neck: his "covert way," he said, of representing drama's traditional emblems for comedy and tragedy. "I thought maybe it'd be a little bit tacky to have theater masks on my neck," he added, a laugh bubbling up, and it's true: His dragon would have eaten them for lunch. When Time Out London ranked the best theater of 2019, it gave the top spot jointly to all three Lloyd productions, saying that he "has had a year that some of his peers might trade their entire careers for." Lloyd, who is 39, did not spring from the same mold as many of those peers. There was for him, he says, no youthful aha moment of watching Derek Jacobi onstage and divining that directing was his path. Epiphanies like that belonged to other kids, the ones who could afford the tickets. If there is a standard background for a London theater director and Lloyd would argue that certainly there used to be that isn't where he came from, growing up working class on the south coast of England, in Margaret Thatcher's Britain. The first time I laid eyes on him, chatting in the Playhouse lobby after a preview of "Cyrano," he was the picture of working class flair the gold pirate hoops, the pink and black T shirt, the belt cinching high waisted pants. He looks nothing like your typical West End director. Which of course is precisely the point. "It's quite often said of him," McAvoy observed by phone, once the reviews were in, "that he strips things away or he tries to take classical works and turn them on their head. I think he's always just trying to tell the story in the clearest and most exhilarating way possible." The "X Men" star, who put the number of times he's worked with Lloyd in the past decade at a "gazillion," calls theirs "probably one of the most defining relationships that I've had in my career." Yet Lloyd himself is on board with the notion that his assertively contemporary stagings pare back stifling layers of performance history to lay bare what's underneath. Lloyd's first "Cyrano de Bergerac," starring Douglas Hodge in 2012, was also his Broadway debut. It was, he said, "absolutely the 'Cyrano' that you would expect," with the fake nose, the hat, the plume, the sword fighting. There is, granted, sword fighting in the new one but the audience has to imagine the swords. Lloyd's productions, including a lauded revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's "Passion" in 2010, long marked him as a hot young director on the rise. But he sees in some of his previous work a noisy tendency toward idea overload. The pivot point came in 2018, with a season that the Jamie Lloyd Company which he formed seven years ago with the commercial producing powerhouse Ambassador Theater Group devoted to the short works of Harold Pinter. The playwright's distillation of language forced Lloyd to match it with his staging. That immersion led to what the director Michael Grandage one of Lloyd's early champions, who tapped him at 27 to be his associate director at the Donmar Warehouse called Lloyd's "absolute masterpiece." Charm is a ready currency in the theater, but Lloyd's is disarming; he seems simply to be being himself, without veneer. Like when I fact checked something I'd read by asking whether he was a vegan. "Lapsed vegan," he confessed immediately, with a tinge of guilt about eating eggs again. Pay no attention to any tough guy vibe in photos of him; do not be alarmed by the sharp toothed cat on the back of his head. In conversation, Lloyd comes across as thoughtful and unassuming, with an animated humor that makes him fun company. If he speaks at the speed of someone with no time to waste, he balances that with focused attentiveness. His father, Ray, was a truck driver. His mother, Joy (whose name is tattooed on his right forearm, near the elbow), cleaned houses, took in ironing and ran a costume rental shop, where young Jamie would sneak in to dress up as the children's cartoon character Rainbow Brite. "It's very embarrassing," he said, squelching a laugh. Seeing professional theater wasn't an option then for Lloyd, whose grown up passion for expanding audience access one of the things he has made himself known for in the West End grew out of that exclusion. His company has set aside 15,000 free and 15,000 PS15 tickets for its current, characteristically starry three show season, which will also include Emilia Clarke in "The Seagull" and Jessica Chastain in "A Doll's House." At the 786 seat Playhouse, that adds up to just over 38 full houses. Lloyd, who was studying acting at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts when he decided he wanted to direct, found his way to theater as a child by acting in school shows and local amateur productions. Twice he was cast as a monkey; in "The Wizard of Oz," thrillingly, he got to fly. The details of his early days have always been colorful like having a clown as his first stepfather, who performed at children's parties under the stage name Uncle Funny. But Lloyd is quick to acknowledge the darkness lurking there. "It sounds a little bit like some dodgy film, because he was actually a really violent man," he said. "And there were times where he was very physically abusive to my mum. There was a sort of atmosphere of violence in that house that was really uneasy. And yet masked with this literal makeup, but also this sense of trying to entertain people whilst enacting terrible brutality behind the scenes." This is where he locates his own connection to Pinter's work. "A lot of that is that the violence is beneath the surface," he said. "And on the top there is this sort of, what I call a kind of topspin, a layer of cover up." Lloyd was still at drama school when he staged a production of Lapine and William Finn's "Falsettoland" that won a prize: assistant directing a show at the Bush Theater in London. Based on that, Trevor Nunn hired him, at 22, to be his assistant director on "Anything Goes" in the West End a job he did so well that Grandage got word of it and hired him to assist on "Guys and Dolls." While Lloyd was doing that, he also began directing in his own right. The costume and set designer Soutra Gilmour, who has been a constant with Lloyd since he cold called her for his first professional production, Pinter's "The Caretaker," said theirs is an easy relationship, with a "symbiotic transference of ideas." Even their creative aesthetics have evolved in sync. "We've actually never fallen out in 13 years," she said over mint tea on a trip to New York last month, just before "Betrayal" closed. "Never! I don't even know how we would fall out." Of course, the one time she tried to decline a Lloyd project five years ago, because its tech rehearsals coincided with the due date for her son's birth, he told her there was no one else he wanted to work with. So she did the show, warning that at some point she would have to leave. Now, she says, he understands that she won't sit through endless evening previews, because she needs to go home to her child. Lloyd and his wife, the actress Suzie Toase (whose name is tattooed on one of his arms), home school their own three boys (whose names are tattooed on the other). Their eldest, 13 year old Lewin, is an actor who recently played one of the principal characters, the heroine's irresistible best friend, on the HBO and BBC One series "His Dark Materials," whose cast boasts McAvoy as well. Lloyd's interpretation of "Betrayal," a 1978 play that recounts a seven year affair, imbued it with a distinctly non '70s awareness of the fragility of family the notion that children are the bystanders harmed when a marriage is tossed away. Its gasp inducing moment came with the entrance of a character Pinter wrote to be mentioned but not seen: the small daughter of the couple whose relationship is imperiled. In putting her onstage, Lloyd didn't touch the text; it was a simple, wordless role. With it, he altered the resonance of the play. To me, it seemed logical that Lloyd's production would have been informed by his experience as a husband and father and maybe also as a child in a splintering family. How old had he been, anyway, when his parents split up? "Five," Lloyd said. "The same age as the character would be." He paused. "Oh God, yeah, fascinating. I'd not thought about that. Exactly the same age." If that fact was of more than intellectual interest to him, he didn't let on. He volunteered a memory, though of being a little one "amongst these kind of big giants, and I guess what we can now see as the mess of their lives." Doing "Betrayal" in New York, Lloyd was struck by how eager Americans were to chat about his tattoos. Still, he told me after I texted him a follow up question about them, he hadn't expected his appearance to be such a talking point in this story. It's not just idle curiosity. It's about what the tattoos signify in a field where, in Britain as in the United States, the top directors tend to have grown up very comfortably. It's about who is welcome in a particular space, and who gets to be themselves there. For a long time after Lloyd started working in the theater, he wore a blazer every day: a conscious attempt to conform in an industry where he felt a nagging sense of difference. "Every other director at the time was from an Oxbridge background," he said, "and looked and sounded a particular way. I spent a long time pretending to be like them." It was a performance of sorts, with a costume he donned for the role. It was only about seven or eight years ago around the time he left the Donmar and started putting together his own company that he stopped worrying about what people might think if he looked the way he wanted. "My dad had tattoos" was the first thing he said when I asked him about his own. "I guess it's partly getting older," he mused, "but it's just sort of going, 'You can't pretend to be someone. You've got to be who you really are, in every way.'" The tattoos that have gradually transformed him are from a different aesthetic universe than his recent work onstage. Yet the impulse, somehow, is the same.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Theater
|
GOOD GIRLS 10 p.m. on NBC. It's three suburban moms against the world in this new comedy drama by Jenna Bans ("Desperate Housewives," "Grey's Anatomy"). Four minutes into this pilot, Beth (Christina Hendricks), Ruby (Retta) and Annie (Mae Whitman) have robbed the grocery store where Annie works. The story then backtracks to explain what drove them into that messy situation the men in their lives share most of the blame and the women quickly find themselves up against a larger threat than they anticipated. "'Good Girls' certainly works as a caper," James Poniewozik wrote in The New York Times. "The problem is that it's also very much a drama, and the needs of the one mode often conflict with those of the other." THE VOICE 8 p.m. on NBC. Adam Levine and Blake Shelton are back for more bickering in Season 14. Alicia Keys returns to the red swivel chairs after her Season 12 win, while Kelly Clarkson makes her debut as a coach.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
THE END OF THE DAY By Bill Clegg In Bill Clegg's magnificent debut novel, "Did You Ever Have a Family?," a diverse group of people, united only by their fleeting connection with the central character, June Reid, stitch together their subjective and incomplete accounts of her life in the wake of an unspeakable trauma. One character in particular, Lydia, admits, "The truth was something she had hidden or bent all her adult life, and she had suffered and caused others to suffer because of it." Clegg's equally remarkable second novel, "The End of the Day," employs a similar notion as a load bearing wall for the interiority of his characters. However, in this case, unspoken truths carry with them a feeling of menace. On the surface, "The End of the Day" replicates features of its predecessor. Once again, the setting is the fictional town of Wells, Conn., and characters alternate points of view to fill in gaps in one another's accounts. But this time they tend to undermine each other, for good reason Clegg's new cast isn't seeking revelation, but pointedly avoiding it. The characters are ignorant of key events that shaped their lives and, while one could argue whether they're better or worse for this, they do come to know devastating secrets. Read an excerpt from "The End of the Day." The first person we meet is the wealthy heiress Dana Goss, the never married, childless end of her family line, on a mission to show up uninvited at the home of a former friend she hasn't seen in almost half a century. That unlikely friend, a weary, working class woman named Jackie, struggles through a rocky marriage to her high school sweetheart. She supported her kids, and later grandkids, with modest resources. The truth Dana seems desperate to reveal is, for Jackie, unnecessary, if not pointlessly destructive, and whether and how Dana will force it upon her anyway is one of the most brilliant tensions in their already heightened dynamic.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
Since launching in the U.S. in 2018, TikTok has cemented itself in viral culture. It has given birth to dance crazes, popular catchphrases and food trends. It also jump started the careers of a generation of young influencers. Now, TikTok is being embraced by a new group of internet wizards: memers. Multi platform meme brands like Daquan, Betch and Memezar have begun investing heavily in TikTok in recent months. They've already amassed millions of followers, surpassing many influencers. Midlevel independent Instagram memers, many who create memes in specific genres such as gaming, are also pivoting toward TikTok. And more teens are using the platform to build meme brands from the ground up. "I can't overstate just how much TikTok has taken hold in the meme space," said Don Caldwell, the editor in chief of Know Your Meme, a website that documents memes. "A lot of people associate TikTok with Charli D'Amelio and these dance trends. It's actually a platform where all kinds of viral content can proliferate and thrive." Memers act as small media companies that reshare trending videos, images, and jokes in order to amass large audiences on social platforms, which they then monetize by selling products or posting ads. Growing fast can involve shady behavior. Meme pages have been notorious for their scrappy nature and dubious growth hacks on Instagram and YouTube, and many have begun replicating that on TikTok. Meme accounts can be found in the comment sections of popular TikTok stars' videos posting things like "follow for follow" or "follow for a big reveal." Many also grow by starting off as joke pages, designed to troll users who ask for the handles of women featured in videos. "Let's say there's a TikTok account that posted a video of a girl dancing, everyone in the comments is like, 'she's so hot, what's her ?'" said Graham Heavenrich, founder of Cowbelly Studios, a meme publishing company. "People will be like, 'oh it's this,' and tag one of those meme pages. Then they click it and it's like it's like, 'psych.'" There is a point in every social media platform's life when it is forced to grapple with the community of memers bending the limits of the platform to go viral. Most platforms have responded by banning them. Twitter deactivated a slew of high profile meme accounts in 2018. YouTube regularly issues copyright strikes to accounts that repost videos they don't own. Instagram, after deactivating several waves of meme accounts, attempted to repair its fraught relationship with the meme community earlier this year by hiring its first partnerships manager to work specifically with memers. TikTok, however, has shown a willingness to work with the community. "I have a rep at TikTok already who helps me with things," said Sal Patel, a meme account administrator. "They helped me get the username Betch, they helped me attach my YouTube channel. The support at Instagram isn't as good." While memers are notorious for failing to give credit, many large meme brands on TikTok say they work with licensing companies or reach out to creators to ensure they have the right to reshare content to the app. They're also using the platform's design to their advantage. While most meme pages simply post viral videos and mash ups, some intersperse YouTube style commentary or feature innovative formats. A current trend in the teenage TikTok meme world is to use the app's profile layout to create a giant image out of several videos. "People are recognizing they can use the layout of how TikTok shows content to make these giant photos and people are getting super creative with it," Mr. Heavenrich said. Some TikTok users are even creating giant memes across their grids. Joey Ruben, 17, ran several Instagram meme accounts, but since quarantine began, he has refocused all of his energy on TikTok. He currently runs Funny, with 1.1 million followers and Gods, with 530,000 followers. "I find videos off YouTube, Insta and Twitter. I usually download the video to my camera roll and repost it with credit," he said. "In the beginning of 2020, that's when I started to see meme content rise on the app. Now, I've noticed everyone is posting memes. Half of my For You page is reposted content as opposed to people making their own content." A viral media brand called PizzaSlime has amassed more than 712,000 followers on TikTok posting the way they feel many users do: sharing a mix of funny videos, images, and sometimes their own creations. "I don't necessarily know if it will or won't work, but it reminds me of the early days of Instagram where everyone is just figuring it out," said Nicholas Santiago, a co founder of PizzaSlime who is known online as Stove. "I don't think in the beginning of Instagram we knew that the influencer was going to be what it's going to be today, and that's what excites us about TikTok. Right now it's just very free and open." Mr. Caldwell of Know Your Meme said that the dancing Ghanaian pallbearers meme that went viral on TikTok in April is a good example of how the platform is evolving. TikTok users began appending clips of the dapper pallbearers to create "fail" videos. For instance, a video of a girl sending a text message and getting no response cuts to the pallbearers. "That meme had much of its early spread on TikTok by smaller meme accounts that dedicate themselves to posting remix and joke videos," said Mr. Caldwell. "This is something the platform has proved to be good at."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Style
|
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. Here near the heart of Hollywood, up a canyon at a compound lined with enough contemporary art for a respectable museum, Tamara Mellon, a founder of Jimmy Choo, is trying her hand at life in Los Angeles. The city represents a new beginning for Ms. Mellon, who has been, in various incarnations, a fashion editor, a fixture of tabloid fascination and a queen of shoes. Late of New York, and before that, of London, Ms. Mellon arrived here after a bankruptcy shuttered her first attempt at a Tamara Mellon label. Now she is giving the label another try. "I'm starting again," she said, undaunted. As for before, she said, she had screwed up though the actual wording she used was more colorful. After years on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Ms. Mellon, 49, moved into the palatial home of her partner, Michael Ovitz, a founder of CAA, the talent and entertainment agency. Coming with her out west, besides her teenage daughter, Minty, and Minty's stable of puffball dogs, is her team: her chief executive, Jill Layfield, who is also a founder of the second label; her chief design officer, Tania Spinelli, the previous creator of her own namesake collection; and a stylist confidant in skintight shredded denim, Keegan Singh. With the Mellon brand, Ms. Mellon aimed to shake up the industry by delivering shoes and, for the first time, clothes closer to the time one may conceivably want to wear them: winter clothes in the winter, spring clothes in spring. It was, in other words, an early version of the "buy now, wear now" model. When she used that phrase in 2013, "People looked at me like I had an alien growing out of the back of my head," she said, and the company foundered. She filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2015. In starting over, Ms. Mellon has kept her boho scandalous aesthetic ("I can't take myself out of it") but reset her methodology. This time around, she is bypassing stores, including Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus, which once stocked her wares, selling directly to consumers via her website. Hers is a model that cuts out the middlemen and, in so doing, lowers prices. (A suede bootee from Ms. Mellon's line costs 525; a similar one from Jimmy Choo was 875.) "The next generation of luxury brands will not be built the way that I built Jimmy Choo," Ms. Mellon said firmly, looking out through pastel tinted sunglasses on her terrace with its views over Los Angeles. "The next generation of luxury brands will be built in a very different way, and in the business model I'm doing now." Los Angeles has been magnetizing designers with a stronger pull lately. Tommy Hilfiger, Rebecca Minkoff and Rachel Comey will each move their usual New York Fashion Week shows here next month. Tom Ford will introduce his next collection here, just as he did in 2015. And Maria Grazia Chiuri, the new artistic director of Dior, will present her cruise collection here in May. But Ms. Mellon envisions her operation less as a fashion brand than as a tech company, albeit one in stiletto heels, just like so many others sprouting up along Los Angeles's growing Silicon Beach. "Basically, every industry will be eaten by technology," Ms. Mellon said. "Right now, it's the fashion industry's turn. We've seen it in movies; Uber has eaten transport. But I always say to people, the best analogy is the music business. We all still love music and we want to listen to music, but we don't go to Tower Records and buy a CD. We download it. The same thing's going to happen to fashion." In her quest to be fashion's premier direct to consumer luxury brand, she has been buoyed by investment from the venture capital firm NEA, which has stakes in such digital forward properties as Goop and Moda Operandi, and by her connection with Mr. Ovitz, who is now a private investor and consults with companies in Silicon Valley. "She's gotten a lot of great advice from all the people I deal with up north," Mr. Ovitz said in an interview. "She goes up with me often." "In the designer world, you're selling more than a product," said Ron Frasch, a partner in Castanea, a private equity firm and the former president and chief merchandising officer of Saks Fifth Avenue, who worked with Ms. Mellon when she was at Jimmy Choo. "You're not really selling anything that anyone truly needs; you're selling wants and dreams and stories about the product. I think it becomes more difficult as a direct to consumer play, particularly if it's an online direct to consumer play. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but it certainly is more difficult." The buy now, wear now model that Ms. Mellon has been championing since her last go round (there will be new styles added to TamaraMellon.com monthly, rather than seasonally) has "a long way to go," he added. Ms. Mellon acknowledges the concept is still in its infancy, but she noted that some powerful industry peers were cautiously beginning to experiment with the same strategies. (Tommy Hilfiger, Burberry and Tom Ford have all shifted the timing of their shows and production to send products from the runways immediately into stores.) The stumbles of the first Tamara Mellon brand have not dissuaded her of the wisdom of her approach. Along with bad timing, Ms. Mellon blamed the interference of her former colleagues at Jimmy Choo for its ultimate failure, saying the company "boycotted her" from using her former factories, even after a noncompete clause had expired. She is now suing Jimmy Choo; the companies have a February court date in New York. ("This suit is groundless and will be vigorously contested," said a spokesman for Jimmy Choo.)
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
One afternoon during the height of coronavirus lockdowns, 16 year old Finn Kolesnik found himself in a cold sweat. He was on the phone with Bob Hamman, 82, one of the greatest bridge players ever. Kolesnik wanted to know if, um, maybe Hamman and his longtime bridge partner, Peter Weichsel, 77, would join his team for this year's North American Online Bridge Championships Premier Knockout, being held from July 23 to Aug. 2? "Who's better to play with than the historically best player of all time?" said Kolesnik, a high school junior in Ventura, Calif., who learned bridge from his parents when he was 13. Though Kolesnik casually knew Hamman through his father, who also plays bridge, he thought the request was a long shot. Both Hamman and Weichsel are Grand Life Masters and in the Bridge Hall of Fame. Kolesnik had only been playing three years, but Hamman responded quickly: He was in, and thrilled that teenagers were even interested in the game. "There's not enough young people playing," he said. The unlikely group, which included Kolesnik's bridge partner, 20 year old Jacob Freeman, recruited Bart Bramley, 72, and Kit Woolsey, 76, to round out the team of six. "It's the greatest game ever invented," said Bramley, who has been playing since he was 5 and is also a Hall of Famer. "I saw my father playing in the living room with three other guys. I didn't know what they were doing, but I knew I wanted to do it." And so, a group that included among the oldest and youngest bridge players were trying to win a national bridge title. It most likely wouldn't have happened without the coronavirus. "Players of the level of Hamman partnering up with young folks in a major event like that is not something I ever recall seeing," said Greg Coles, the director of operations for the American Contract Bridge League, a membership organization. "It's like playing with Kobe or Michael Jordan." Like just about everything else, bridge underwent a major shift when the pandemic began. In person events and tournaments were canceled and this year's world championship was rescheduled for late 2021. The bridge community followed the rest of the globe and pivoted online. Within the space of a few weeks, bridgebase.com, the virtual platform on which most people play, grew from nearly 10,000 players at one time to 50,000. Funbridge, another online provider, reports more than 2 million players regularly, five times the rate before the pandemic. Many professional players, including Hamman and Weichsel, had to shift to playing online for the first time themselves. The average age of the ACBL's 167,000 members hovers around 73, as the league is filled mostly with players who learned in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. As that cohort got older, they continued to fill the halls of bridge clubs around the country. But younger people weren't exactly racing to learn a game associated with their grandparents or great grandparents. Not all of the older players were welcoming either. As one of the youngest players on the circuit he learned at 6 years old Freeman, who grew up in Toronto and is now in his third year of business school, noticed that sometimes the old guard was displeased when he won. "I said to my dad, 'They were so rude!'" Freeman recalled. "My dad was like, 'That means you've made it.'" The ACBL has been trying to change the perception of bridge as a game for older people. There are national and international youth championships, online youth events and new bridge clubs on college campuses like Georgetown and the University of Minnesota. "I'm seeing more younger people reaching out for something intellectually stimulating because they can't go do the things they used to do," said Patty Tucker, an Atlanta based bridge teacher who coaches the Georgia Tech bridge club. "Bridge is a very intricate, strategic, intellectual game. It's fun, but there are lots of levels to it and I think they relish that." Reese Koppel, 21, has been playing at the Louisiana Bridge Association in New Orleans since he was 11 years old. The older players treated him "like Elvis," he said. "They saw me as a savior of the game." "This game taught me so much people skills, compassion, emotional endurance, and an appreciation for the older generation," said Koppel, who founded Yale's 40 member bridge club and works as a product manager at an app called Tricky Bridge. "It's not the cards you have, but it's how you play them. Everyone's going to pick up the same cards as you. It's how you react to that sort of adversity." Adversity was in no short supply on Aug. 2, the last game of the summer tournament. Players were scattered throughout Michigan, California, Texas, Canada, and Norway, where it was 4 a.m. Team Kolesnik was getting pummeled. The score going into the fourth quarter was 85 to 113, the equivalent of being 20 points down in the N.B.A. finals with roughly five minutes remaining. "We were just stuck," Hamman said. The other team "had almost an insurmountable lead, with six hands to go." Somehow, they caught up and by the end of the night, the score had evened at 113 113. But after eight hours of playing, everyone was exhausted. "Although sedentary, bridge is surprisingly grueling because of the mental energy and concentration required," Weichsel said from his home in Southern California. No one wanted to admit defeat. After a lengthy discussion with the tournament directors, the two teams shared the title.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Soon, Cars May Take Away the Keys of a Drunken Driver WASHINGTON IN the near future, cars will communicate with one another on the road, partly or entirely drive themselves and be packed with more entertainment options than most computers. But could technology also offer a solution for a scourge that kills nearly 10,000 Americans each year drunken driving? Regulators and the auto industry hope the answer is yes, and recently the Department of Transportation unveiled the latest steps toward developing anti drunken driving technology that would allow a car to detect drivers impaired by alcohol and stop them from turning on the car. Auto safety officials demonstrated a new test vehicle equipped with special touch pads that can instantly measure whether a driver has been drinking. The technology, which could exist on the steering wheel or the starter button of keyless ignitions, could become a reality for consumers as soon as the end of the decade. A competing system being developed captures drivers' breath and instantly analyzes it for alcohol content. Research into both systems is being financed by auto regulators and a consortium of automakers as part of what is known as the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety program. The goal is for at least one of the two options or both, possibly working together to be ready by 2020 and available as optional equipment on most vehicles sold in the United States. Jeff Michael, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's associate administrator for research and program development, said that to get there, the new technology had to be "highly accurate, very fast and completely passive." That is because it should remain largely invisible to drivers activating only when necessary to prevent a car from operating. And when that decision is made, it has to be right, because sober drivers or those below the legal limit will not have much patience for errors that mistakenly shut down their vehicles. Mr. Michael said early adopters could include parents of teenage drivers and others looking to take special precautions. The goal, though, is to have the technology widely deployed in a range of new cars and trucks. "The potential is huge," he said. Traditional breathalyzer units, used by police officers during traffic stops and installed in the cars of some convicted drunken drivers, are commonly known not to always be accurate. They also require a lot of effort: A deep, sustained breath into the plastic tube is needed to capture a sample, and even then multiple attempts are sometimes required to get a reading. Bud Zaouk, director of transportation solutions at QinetiQ North America, a defense technology company, is running the research lab in Cambridge, Mass., where the N.H.T.S.A.'s project is based. He said the new breath based system in development would avoid those problems. "It doesn't require contact, or even a deep breath," Mr. Zaouk said. "You just breathe normally in its direction." He said the system also avoided another common problem with traditional breathalyzers: the need to constantly calibrate them to get accurate readings. The technology would require calibration only once, before the car was sold. "It would be ready to go for the lifetime of the vehicle," Mr. Zaouk said. The quest to develop next generation technology to prevent drunken driving started in 2008, Mr. Zaouk said, and researchers in government and private laboratories began experimenting to find solutions that would be noninvasive while also being precise and fast. Ultimately, researchers narrowed it down to two main options they felt were most feasible: the new breath analyzing system and the touch based one. "We're working to resolve the challenges with each one," he said. "From the start of the program, we knew as a consumer device we had to be very precise and accurate, and that's what we're moving toward." To make the new systems work, researchers are using a host of technologies like infrared light and sensors. According to the highway safety agency, the touch based technology analyzes alcohol found beneath the skin's surface. It shines an infrared light through the skin to measure the alcohol content in tiny blood vessels in a person's finger or palm, and it can tell the difference between a person and an inanimate object. The sensors could be embedded in the steering wheel, for instance, since the driver is already going to be grasping the wheel. A simpler and more affordable option from an engineering perspective is to have the stop start ignition button double as the alcohol detection touch pad. But that raises another question: What stops someone else from pushing the button instead? To combat that, researchers are exploring the use of a front seat "driver presence detector," which would generate a signal that works with the button to ensure that the person pressing it is the driver rather than a passenger or some other person. The breath based system works by drawing in air from the driver's normal breathing. A small sensor attached to either the steering column or the driver's side door collects the air and measures concentrations of alcohol using infrared light inside the sensor. Special venting aims to ensure that the air being analyzed comes only from the driver's breath rather than that of other passengers. Another approach being studied is to use multiple sensors placed around the driver to ensure the breath is coming from the driver. Mark R. Rosekind, administrator of the safety agency, said in a statement that the N.H.T.S.A. believed the new technology "would provide a powerful new tool in the battle against drunk driving deaths."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Automobiles
|
Harsh measures, including stay at home orders and restaurant closures, are contributing to rapid drops in the numbers of fevers a signal symptom of most coronavirus infections recorded in states across the country, according to intriguing new data produced by a medical technology firm. At least 248 million Americans in at least 29 states have been told to stay at home. It had seemed nearly impossible for public health officials to know how effective this measure and others have been in slowing the coronavirus. But the new data offer evidence, in real time, that tight social distancing restrictions may be working, potentially reducing hospital overcrowding and lowering death rates, experts said. The company, Kinsa Health, which produces internet connected thermometers, first created a national map of fever levels on March 22 and was able to spot the trend within a day. Since then, data from the health departments of New York State and Washington State have buttressed the finding, making it clear that social distancing is saving lives. The trend has become so obvious that on Sunday, President Trump extended until the end of April his recommendation that Americans stay in lockdown. Mr. Trump had hoped to lift restrictions by Easter and send Americans back to work. "That would have been the worst possible Easter surprise," said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who added that he thought the Kinsa predictions were based on "very robust technology." Kinsa's thermometers upload the user's temperature readings to a centralized database; the data enable the company to track fevers across the United States. Owners of Kinsa's thermometers can type other symptoms into a cellphone app after taking their temperature. The app offers basic advice on whether they should seek medical attention. Kinsa has more than one million thermometers in circulation and has been getting up to 162,000 daily temperature readings since Covid 19 began spreading in the country. The company normally uses that data to track the spread of influenza. Since 2018, when it had more than 500,000 thermometers distributed, its predictions have routinely been two to three weeks ahead of those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which gathers flu data on patient symptoms from doctors' offices and hospitals. To identify clusters of coronavirus infections, Kinsa recently adapted its software to detect spikes of "atypical fever" that do not correlate with historical flu patterns and are likely attributable to the coronavirus. As of noon Wednesday, the company's live map showed fevers holding steady or dropping almost universally across the country, with two prominent exceptions. One was in a broad swath of New Mexico, where the governor had issued stay at home orders only the day before, and in adjacent counties in Southern Colorado. The second was in a ring of Louisiana parishes surrounding New Orleans, but 100 to 150 miles away from it. That presumably was caused by the outward local spread of the explosion of infections in New Orleans, which officials believe was set off by crowding during Mardi Gras. By Friday morning, fevers in every county in the country were on a downward trend, depicted in four shades of blue on the map. Fevers were dropping especially rapidly in the West, from Utah to California and from Washington down to Arizona; in many Western counties, the numbers of people reporting high fevers fell by almost 20 percent. The numbers were also declining rapidly in Maine. As of Monday morning, more than three quarters of the country was deep blue. A separate display of the collective national fever trend, which had spiked upward to a peak on March 17, had fallen so far that it was actually below the band showing historical flu fever trends which meant that the lockdown has cut not only Covid 19 transmission but flu transmission, too. "I'm very impressed by this," said Dr. William Schaffner, a preventive medicine expert at Vanderbilt University. "It looks like a way to prove that social distancing works." "But it does shows that it takes the most restrictive measures to make a real difference," he added. For some hard hit cities, Kinsa also sent The New York Times fever data plotted on a timeline of restrictions enacted by mayors or governors. But closing restaurants and bars and asking people to stay in their homes produced dramatic results in all three cities. For example, in Manhattan, reports of fevers steadily rose during early March, despite a declaration of emergency on March 7 and an order on March 12 that public gatherings be restricted to less than 500 people. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. The turning point began on March 16, the day schools were closed. Bars and restaurants were closed the next day, and a stay at home order was announced on March 20. By March 23, new fevers in Manhattan were below their March 1 levels. Last Friday, New York State's own data showed the same trend that Kinsa's fever readings had spotted five days earlier. The state tracks hospitalization rates, not fevers. So many patients were being admitted to New York City hospitals, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said, that until March 20, hospitalization rates were doubling roughly every two days. By Tuesday, the hospitalization rate took four days to double. This is roughly what the fever readings predicted, said Nita Nehru, a company spokeswoman. Hospitalizations occur several days after symptoms like fever appear. "The cases being counted now had fevers five to 10 days ago," she said. The slowing of new hospital admissions "suggests that our density control measures may be working," Mr. Cuomo said on Wednesday. "People say these requirements no restaurants, no nonessential workers are burdensome," he said. "And they are burdensome. But they are effective, and they are necessary. The evidence suggests that they have slowed our hospitalizations, and that is everything." Shown the Kinsa data, Dr. Howard Zucker, New York State's health commissioner, called it "a great example of technology being able to show what we think we're experiencing and it's consistent with our data." On Friday, the University of California, San Francisco, said its hospitals were not facing a huge surge of patients and gave the credit to the strict shelter in place orders imposed by Mayor London Breed on March 16. On Sunday, Washington State also reported a downward trend following the imposition of its restrictions, based on data from deaths, coronavirus tests and information about people's movements from the Facebook apps on their cellphones. "People need to know their sacrifices are helping," said Inder Singh, founder of Kinsa. "I've had friends text or call and say: 'Inder, this seems overblown. I'm sitting at home by myself, I don't know anyone who's sick, why am I doing this?'" Kinsa's tracking of fevers in Miami Dade County in Florida showed an even more pronounced trend, and the company had tried to raise the alarm. In early March, Florida beaches and bars were packed with spring break revelers, despite warnings that crowding was dangerous. On Kinsa maps that normally look for flu trends, fever levels were soaring. Mr. Singh tried to get the word out, but the San Francisco based company is relatively obscure and almost no one paid attention. "It was so frustrating," said Ms. Nehru, the company spokeswoman. "For three days from about March 19 on, Inder was calling local government folks in Florida, The Tampa Bay Times and other papers. The government did absolutely nothing." "Plus, we were getting pushback on social media," she said. "People were saying, 'The testing doesn't show this, you know, is your data wrong?' and 'Could it be that you were just selling more thermometers in Florida?'" On March 12, a state of emergency had been declared, but according to Kinsa's data, fevers were continuing to rise. Closing local schools on March 16 had little effect. But on March 18, Miami's bars and restaurants were closed, and within two days reports of fevers started to drop sharply, according to Kinsa's data. The dropping fever trend does not mean cases or hospitalizations will also drop immediately, Ms. Nehru pointed out. Confirmed cases will keep going up for days, because people do not always go for a Covid 19 test the same day they feel feverish. Besides, many states are doing more tests every day. The C.D.C. has declined to comment whenever it is asked about the company. Mr. Singh said he had approached the C.D.C. about using his data as part of its own flu surveillance, but agency officers had insisted on him giving up the rights to his data if they did, and he refused. Dr. Schaffner, an adviser to the C.D.C. on flu surveillance, said he was disappointed to hear that and would look into it. The refinement Kinsa made on March 22 was to add "trends" a map showing whether all fevers were increasing, decreasing or holding steady.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
THE SCENE was beginning to take shape, a Walter Mitty like fantasy about a schlub taking out the garbage. A small team was imagining how the mundane task might be suddenly transformed. After briefly considering an action sequence, they landed on a number with a lift straight out of "Dirty Dancing." Although it felt more like an improv class at the Upright Citizens Brigade, the setting was a corporate brainstorming session in a Midtown Manhattan loft, and the centerpiece of an unusual approach that one San Francisco agency is hoping will disrupt the industry. Long hours, tight deadlines and a stream of demanding clients can sometimes make advertising seem deadly serious. But the two year old agency Funworks has found a way to inject some humor into the business, joining its clients and copywriters with a team of sketch and improv performers for collaborative workshops that attempt to kick start the creative process. Paul Charney, the founder and chief executive of Funworks, said the method gets at what he thinks is a fundamental problem in the industry: how long it takes to produce a campaign and get the client to sign off on it. "The process hasn't changed, but people's expectations have," said Mr. Charney, who previously was a creative director at Goodby Silverstein Partners, describing an accelerated business environment where there are more platforms than ever for advertising. "People are frustrated because it takes so long." As a longtime sketch comedian he is a founding member and former artistic director of the San Francisco troupe Killing My Lobster he knew there was another way. But Mr. Charney did not think to combine the worlds of comedy and advertising until his friend Craig Mangan, who at the time was executive creative director at BBDO San Francisco and has since joined Funworks, suggested that he tap some of his comedian friends. "It just made so much sense," Mr. Charney, 42, said. "At the sketch group, we came together collaboratively and came up with ideas faster." Initially he did not envision bringing clients into the brainstorming process, long sacrosanct in advertising. But the agency was a start up, and he discovered that inviting them into the sessions to find out what might resonate saved time and money. "What happened was it made it better because they had ideas, too, and it got everyone on the same page," he said. "What we're trying to do is explicitly connect what we're doing in the workshops to what good science is recommending we do," said Ms. Fortescue, who also serves on the faculty of the Center for Childhood Creativity at the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito, Calif. At a recent Funworks session in New York for SodaStream, a manufacturer of home carbonation systems, that meant incorporating stimuli like music and movement at one point, the participants were asked to do the twist to get the ideas going. A graphic artist kept track, using markers to sketch the suggestions on an oversize pad of paper. 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. If it all sounds more like fun than work, well, that's the point. Teresa Amabile, a professor and director of research at Harvard Business School and a co author of "The Progress Principle," researches the role that positive emotions, like those brought about by a good laugh, play in stoking creativity. When people are in a good mood, she said, "cognition kind of loosens up, helping us to make connections between things that are normally not associated" the key to coming up with good ideas. Mr. Mangan, 45, said he had seen firsthand how the comedians, who work for Funworks as freelancers, act as a kind of creative spark, getting clients and copywriters into a "free flow space." Comedians seem to appreciate the experience, too and the extra money. "I left my day job to continue writing, which has been very lucrative," deadpanned Dan Wilbur, a 29 year old writer and stand up comic. There was no downside, he added, to an arrangement that asked him to spitball ideas without any pressure. The workshops are not as freewheeling as they might sound. Kenny White, the head of creative collaboration, works with Ms. Fortescue to lead participants through the tightly structured two hour sessions, exploring each client's marketing strategies in a series of carefully planned exercises. Afterward, the Funworks team, including copywriters working on the project, meets with the clients to select the strongest ideas to develop. The model has helped reveal early on what approaches have the most potential, shaving weeks, if not months, off the process, Funworks said. And because the clients and the creative team come up with ideas together, there's more support for the end product. "We've sold work that we never could have in the traditional format," Mr. Charney said. "But because the clients were there, they were able to take a risk." Still, the approach can be limiting. Despite reassurances that Funworks does not only do funny, the agency said some clients are put off by the comedic element. But Funworks says it has doubled its business in the last year, with clients ranging from Clorox to Pax, which makes sleek portable vaporizers. Emma Froelich Shea, SodaStream's vice president for marketing for the United States, said Funworks's approach was what sold her on the agency, even though she was not looking for a humorous campaign. "This seemed to me to be a fast, creative way to get ideas that would have cultural resonance," she said. "Comedians think quicker than anyone."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
SEATTLE So just how impatient are shoppers? Enough to bolster sales at Amazon. This spring, Amazon announced plans to make one day shipping standard for Amazon Prime customers, a major logistics investment it said would cost 800 million in the second quarter alone. The growth of Amazon's core retail sales had been slowing, so investors hoped that offering millions more items available faster would get customers to spend more on its site. On Thursday, the company said it had 63.4 billion in sales in its latest quarter, up 20 percent from the same period last year. Profit for the quarter was 2.6 billion, up 4 percent. Amazon beat Wall Street's expectations for sales, but it fell short on earnings, as costs rose and Amazon's cloud computing business grew more slowly than in the past. Shares fell as much as 2 percent in after hours trading. Brian Olsavsky, the company's chief financial officer, said the costs for the rapid delivery were higher than he had anticipated. Productivity was "a bit off" in Amazon's vast fulfillment network as the company expanded its ability to ship more products in a day. "Millions more one day packages went out this quarter than last," he said. "Customers are responding, and they like it." Get the Bits newsletter for the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry. People with a Prime membership, which costs 119 a year, are the company's biggest customers. They spend more than twice as much as non Prime shoppers. But with more than 100 million estimated Prime members in the United States, the growth is "reaching its limit," according to a June report by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. And as the rise in Prime memberships has slowed, so has Amazon's sales growth. There are signs that delivery times could help juice sales. About a third of Prime members say they have abandoned purchases in their online shopping carts because an item would not arrive fast enough, according to research from John Blackledge, who covers Amazon for the investment bank Cowen. Mr. Olsavsky said that as one day shipping becomes available on more products, Amazon competes more on things people want quickly. "It strengthens your need to not have to go elsewhere to buy a product," he said. In the quarter that ended in March, the number of units sold on Amazon was up just 10 percent, compared with 22 percent growth during the same period a year earlier. This quarter, unit sales picked back up, growing 18 percent, far more than Wall Street had expected. Mr. Olsavksy said the company was still trying to understand how purchasing behavior was changing, noting that a lot of the new purchase growth came from lower price items. "Changing Prime to one day delivery is an epic move," Mr. Blackledge said. The cloud keeps growing, but at a slower pace. Amazon has several businesses that have begun to provide consistently large profits. The biggest component is Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud provider. It has continued to grow even as sales reached almost 8.4 billion in the most recent quarter, and it is more profitable than the much larger retail business. But the annual growth for the cloud division did dip below 40 percent for the first time, and operating margin was down to 24 percent, versus 84 percent this time last year. Mr. Olsavksy attributed the smaller profit margin to spending heavily on sales and marketing. He said Amazon's tech work force is growing about twice as fast as the company's overall head count, which is up 13 percent. Sales on the website are increasingly from third party merchants, who pay Amazon fees for listing and shipping their items. That business as a fee collector is also more profitable for Amazon than when it sells items directly from its inventory. Finally, Amazon's high margin ad business reaches more than an estimated 10 billion a year in sales, as it has become almost a necessity for people selling on the website. Amazon has also been building out tools to use consumers' shopping behavior to target them for ads across the web. Amazon's "Other" business segment, which it says is largely ads, had 3 billion in sales in the last quarter. Those profit machines let Amazon spend heavily on the infrastructure for fast delivery or other major pushes that don't yet produce major revenue, like the Alexa voice assistant. "They have cover with this ad business scaling and A.W.S. as the incredible business it is," said Mr. Blackledge. Has the scrutiny in Washington hurt the business? The pressure in Washington has been ramping up, as lawmakers and regulators focus on antitrust concerns. Amazon had to testify before Congress last week, where an executive was peppered with questions about whether it misuses customer and seller data for its own benefit, and the Justice Department announced this week that it was opening a sweeping antitrust review into big tech companies. On Wednesday, Facebook disclosed that the Federal Trade Commission had begun a formal antitrust investigation into the social network. The F.T.C. also has taken the lead for antitrust oversight for Amazon.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
John Hill's book "A Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture" is filled with examples of the crazy new forms of the last decade, like Frank Gehry's white wind filled "sail" on the West Side Highway in Chelsea. They are startling, creative, amusing, sometimes even hilarious. And yet, the United States is in the middle of a great revival of traditional architecture Georgian, neo Classical, Arts and Crafts and so forth that is almost absent from Mr. Hill's stimulating and enjoyable work. So, what isn't contemporary about traditional design? "Modern" didn't used to be such a big deal it was just what was lying around at the moment. Indoor plumbing, Queen Anne, mansard roof, Romanesque, Corinthian columns they all had their 15 minutes of modern, and then, without much fuss, they were succeeded by something different. But in the 1930s the definition of "modern" became hardened into antihistory: glass boxes with flat roofs, or at least nothing observably traditional. Modern was morally correct; anything else was trivial, or worse. By the 1950s, modernism as practiced in New York City had pushed traditional styling into a pretty small corner one often occupied by unabashedly conservative patrons. These included clients like New York University and its 1951 Vanderbilt Hall on Washington Square South, a neo Georgian brick miniquadrangle of subtle sophistication, by Eggers Higgins. Another was the Roman Catholic Church, which was willing to march out of step with buildings like Paul Reilly's suave 1959 Romanesque style Church of Our Saviour, at Park Avenue and 38th Street. There were also some die hard traditionalists, including Mott Schmidt, who delivered an ever more diluted Georgian and Federal for upper class residences. These designers were looked at askance by the architectural establishment as a harmless lunatic fringe. Such was the situation around 1980 when a sort of pop art version of traditionalism arose in the form of two single gestures, Philip Johnson's fake mansard roof on the apartment house at 1001 Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, and his broken super pediment at the top of the old AT T building, later occupied by Sony, at Madison Avenue and 55th Street. They seemed like unseemly stunts at the time, but they turned out to be opening wedges in bringing traditional architecture into the glass box discussion. Pediments and mansards had been ruled out of order decades before. Although historic districts should have been the last refuge of the old fogy, the orthodox protocol was for a new building in these areas to be "of its time," almost always meaning sleek or boxy modern; Hugh Hardy's 1980s reconstruction of the bombed out row house at 18 West 11th Street comes to mind. But recently, critics like Steven Semes have begun challenging the premise that "of our time" can't include neo Georgian, Beaux Arts or whatever, and their challenge has yet to find a response. Outside of the historic district, the traditionalist battle with the modern is conducted without such interference, and in New York the neo traditional has crept in on little cat's feet. A very early apartment house in the neo traditional style is that at 145 East 76th Street, built in 1999 and designed in grayish brick by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer and Schuman Lichtenstein Claman Efron. Quoins run up the corners, and the heavy use of horizontal elements gives this a different flavor from its more glitzy colleagues. There are perhaps a dozen neo traditional row houses on the Upper East Side, usually brick and limestone or marble, but only a few stand out, among them Peter Pennoyer's crisp, new London style town house on 80th Street between Park and Lexington. There is also the temple topped Carhart town house extension of 2005 at 5 East 95th Street, by Zivkovic Connolly and John Simpson. The ur neo trad work of architecture in New York is the long anticipated Ralph Lauren store at 888 Madison Avenue, finished in 2010 by the architects Weddle Gilmore. No one would ever confuse it with a traditional New York building, because New York has never had anything like this sumptuously French emporium. Rather it is a direct import from the Champs Elysees, or perhaps Havana or Barcelona. Mr. Hill includes a few neo traditionalist buildings in his 10 year review, including Robert A. M. Stern's 1920s revival apartment house at 15 Central Park West, and George Ranalli's prairie style Saratoga Community Center in Brooklyn. But out of 200 plus projects, that's it. Does he have a bias against the neo traditional movement? He doesn't think so. "I thought about including the Carhart town house," he said, "but just didn't get around to it." As for the Ralph Lauren store, "it was being completed just as I was finishing the book" in late 2010. But he does include other projects scheduled for 2012 and even 2013. This suggests that there is probably space for a guidebook of neo traditional architecture. At the moment, it might not be more than a couple of chapters, but it is sure to grow.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
When Lupita Nyong'o tells a bunch of kindergartners, "One, two, three, eyes on me," viewers of "Little Monsters" jolt to attention, too. The charismatic Nyong'o is easily the best part of this feeble Australian horror comedy, arriving Friday to Hulu, as Miss Caroline, a Taylor Swift crooning, ukulele strumming teacher who turns fierce when her class is attacked by zombies while on a field trip to a petting farm. Unfortunately, the film's nominal lead is Dave ( Alexander England ), a rude, selfish would be rocker whom the writer director Abe Forsythe sets on a collision course with utterly predictable redemption: Crushing on a dedicated educator and battling ravenous corpses will do that to the most terminally irritating man child. When zombies spawned by an experiment gone wrong at a nearby American military outpost descend on the koalas and the sheep and the kids, Dave, who tagged along as a chaperone, initially sputters. Faring even worse is Teddy McGiggle ( Josh Gad ), a superstar children's entertainer who just happened to be shooting his show at Pleasant Valley Farm. While he reveals himself to be a foul mouthed mega jerk, he also lands the film's single best line, so he is almost (almost) forgiven.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
With college admissions significantly altered this year, pay attention to what your child wants and needs. If this were a normal year, the Johnson family would have spent the summer touring colleges in the Upper Midwest. But this is 2020. Thanks to the pandemic, there was no summer road trip. And Emma Johnson, 17, a senior at Forest Hills Eastern High School in Ada, Mich., no longer wants to study far from home. She and her mother, Michelle, have agreed that if school continues to stay online next year, she may start at a community college. As if applying to college weren't stressful enough, this year's crop of seniors and their families has to grapple with existential questions as well, such as what does it even mean to go to college when classes are mostly or completely conducted online? Will you be considered an accomplished candidate for higher education when you spent the pandemic cooped up at home, unable to do much of anything that wasn't on Zoom? From standardized tests that can't be taken, to campuses that can't be toured, to activities that can't be done via Zoom, key elements of the college admissions process are suddenly either irrelevant or significantly altered. Parents of high school students particularly seniors, but also juniors and, to a lesser extent, sophomores may find themselves unsure about how to proceed. That's true for the experts as well. In interviews for this article, some college admissions consultants urged parents to push their teens to find creative ways to engage with activities, even if the usual channels of sports teams or in person gatherings are shut down. Others suggested backing off during this stressful time. Some advised parents to go to great lengths to ensure their seniors sit for an SAT or ACT exam. Others just shrugged and said test scores aren't that important, anyway. They could all, however, agree on one thing: Pay attention to what your child wants and needs in this moment of swirling, shifting demands. "Listen to what your kid is saying really listen before delivering a lecture," said Dr. Cara Natterson, a pediatrician and author of "The Care and Keeping of You," a series of books about the changing adolescent body. "And then, maybe skip the lecture." To test, or not to test Two thirds of colleges in the United States have gone test optional this year, a decision often born of necessity. Of the more than 400,000 students signed up to take the August SAT, for example, nearly half had their tests canceled because of Covid 19 related health and safety issues. But college counselors and other higher education experts said testing seats are available outside of the major coastal cities, and some families are traveling to find spots. Some advisers say a student who submits a good test score has an advantage over a similar candidate who submits no test score at all. "I'm still advising my families and students to prepare for and take the tests," said Poojha Daryanani, a private college consultant in Bellevue, Wash. But this year, nothing is certain. Jeffrey Selingo, author of the new book "Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions," said his contacts at one of the nation's most selective universities told him they expect to receive test scores from half their applicants at most. "They are going to have to select students not using the SAT," he said. "There are just too many kids out there who are not going to have a score." Parents should encourage their children to research schools online, said Julie Kamins, a private college consultant in Los Angeles. And if your child isn't going to do the work on their own, consider sitting with them and going on some virtual college tours or asking a trusted friend or relative to do it, if your teenager isn't in a place to listen to you, she said. "I've even been telling my juniors and sophomores: Do your research now," Ms. Kamins said. "Because of the pandemic, there is more information online than ever." Last year's safety school may not be safe this year There have been some startling reports about gap years, such as this one: more than 20 percent of Harvard University's incoming freshman class chose to defer admission this fall. Numbers like this can trouble the parents of the high school class of 2021. "I think parents are extremely stressed that last year's seniors who deferred admission will be taking spots away from the current seniors," Ms. Kamins said. But this may only apply to competitive, wealthy schools like Harvard, with its deep waiting list and sizable endowment, said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Based on the association's conversations with its more than 1,200 member colleges and universities, admissions calculations at most schools shouldn't change that much this year, she said. That's because most institutions did not grant approval to every deferment request, she said. And sadly many students who deferred this fall may be unable to afford to attend next fall, because of the economic crisis. Still, the combination of the increased size of 2020's gap year cohort, a trend of students wanting to stick closer to home and some financially strapped families looking for less expensive options may alter the usual application patterns. Some fear that state universities will become more competitive. "I'm telling my students, they have to really think about their college list and evaluate it from different perspectives," Ms. Daryanani said. Sports are canceled, or significantly curtailed. Stages are dark. Clubs, meeting virtually, may seem anemic. Even an after school job may feel too risky for some teens and their families. But colleges expect a robust list of extracurricular activities. Don't they? Some counselors, like Carolyn Kost in Palm Beach, Fla., urge parents not to "coddle" their high school students. "I just keep seeing parents throw up their hands and make excuses for their kids," said Ms. Kost, a private consultant as well as a college adviser at Cardinal Newman High School, a private Catholic school in West Palm Beach, Fla. Suggest your child enroll in a college class online, she said, or aid librarians by transcribing historical documents from home. Parents can talk with their children about what interests them, then encourage them to create a project, like a website or a course for their peers, around that topic, Ms. Daryanani said. Other experts caution against pushing too hard on teens already struggling with vast changes in their lives. One way to gauge that is to think about how much you used to have to push your kid before the pandemic, said Regine Galanti, a Long Island psychologist and author of "Anxiety Relief for Teens." "If you are someone who didn't push, and now your teen needs pushing, there may be other dynamics going on here," she said. One silver lining: This moment may be an opportunity for an "equal playing field," said Warren Quirett, an admissions counselor at a Virginia boarding school and co leader of the African American Special Interest Group for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. That's because affluent families cannot give their children an advantage by paying for expensive camps and experiences, since "it's all been canceled," he said. Urge your student instead to pick up a new skill, or increase their involvement in their community anything that will pique their interest and enrich their lives, he said. Mr. Selingo said college admissions officers are going to understand that this is not a normal year. They'll be "really looking for a mind set," he said. "They want students who are creative. They are going to be asking, 'How did students respond to this pandemic?'" But be forewarned: with other markers of achievement in short supply, colleges will focus on what is available. "I've been telling my seniors," Ms. Daryanani said, "to really pay attention to their grades this semester." Hoping to generate some excitement for next year, Michelle Johnson and her husband took Emma to visit Northern Michigan University in late September. To ensure social distancing, the admissions office was limiting in person campus tours to only five students at a time, and the slots for that day were already filled. But they walked themselves around the campus, the town and the Lake Superior shoreline. They saw hardly any students; those they did see wore masks.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Well
|
Michael Kors has made a fortune from perfecting a certain look that is all his own. Camel coats, deep tans and a glossy blowout? So Michael Kors. Tan leather bag and shoes? Very, very Michael Kors. Bare legs in winter because you have a car waiting for you in the snow outside? The definition of Michael Kors. The actress Blake Lively was ticking all those boxes from the front row of his show on Tuesday and had brought her mother along. She spent five minutes before the show talking to Styles. Why did you decide to bring your mom as your plus one? Is she a hugefan of the brand? Well, yes, she is a fan of Michael. But I am a massive fan of hers more than anything else. It's wonderful to do fun things with your mom whatever age you are. She used to make all of our clothes as we were growing up, and was very good at it, too. So I jumped at the chance to bring her along. What is on the agenda for you in the next couple of months? A lot of press junkets. I have three movies coming out. "The Shallows" is a shark attack movie, which was a hoot to shoot, although I had some seriously challenging stunts. Then one called "All I See Is You," which is about a woman losing her eyesight at a young age, so quite a challenging experience for a whole different set of reasons.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
Question: When is a pantsuit not just a pantsuit? Answer: When it is a piece of political performance art. At least that was the message at "Cut Piece for Pant Suits," an event staged by the theater directors JoAnne Akalaitis and Ashley Tata and held in Madison Square Park on Monday afternoon, around the same time that members of the Electoral College cast their votes for president. The performers 10 women of various ages and ethnicities who are professional actors and friends of the organizers wore pantsuits (cream, red, gray, navy), and each held a pair of scissors. The audience male and female, old and young were bundled in layers (it was 29 degrees outside, despite the sunshine) and were invited to cut pieces of the suits off the women's bodies. The set up was inspired by Yoko Ono's 1964 "Cut Piece" performance, in which Ms. Ono had viewers cut off pieces of her dress while she sat motionless and expressionless as more and more of her skin was revealed. "It was an incredibly symbolic piece about women's bodies and about the male animus towards women's bodies," said Ms. Akalaitis, a director of the pantsuit performance. She and her co director, Ms. Tata, created a contemporary version that made use of the pantsuit as a symbol for the failed presidential bid by Hillary Clinton, for progress on women's issues, and for women at work and in the public eye. Ms. Akalaitis noted that the pantsuit, like other items of clothing, has been examined so meticulously and regarded in such a variety of ways that it has morphed into something very different from the power suit of the 1980s. The fact that the woman who brought it into popular consciousness suffered an unexpected and crushing election defeat hasn't helped its image. "The pantsuit has been ridiculed, abused," she said. "There is no armor for a woman any longer. If professional women felt that somehow a pantsuit was going to cover us in a way that's protective and powerful, that symbology is out the door." Ms. Akalaitis compared the pantsuit to the miniskirt or the chador, items of clothing that have been called both empowering and oppressive for women. "I'm wondering if everything a woman puts on has the potential to be used as a weapon, including some sort of Eskimo outfit," she said. For Winter Miller, one of the participants and a playwright, the pantsuit's demise was a long time coming. "This wide shouldered look came along in the '80s, and so did this idea that a pantsuit is power," she said. "I reject that." From Ms. Miller's perspective, wearing pantsuits to signify professionalism or stature has always been a misguided move, one rooted in the belief that power has to be masculine in nature. Kristin Marting, a director and producer, looked at the ruined pantsuits as more strictly symbolic of Mrs. Clinton's White House run. "I certainly think Hillary was very known for her pantsuits," she said, "so to have this idea of it being cut away as the College is voting feels very connected to what is happening in this moment." Monday's vote was, after all, the indisputable end to Mrs. Clinton's 2016 campaign. And the atmosphere certainly had a funereal quality to it, with spectators watching and cutting in silence or speaking in murmured tones. (A brief moment of levity came when a little girl, who had arrived with her father, exclaimed, "That was fun!" after chopping off a corner of a woman's suit.) "It made me so sad," said Elizabeth Marvel, an actress who had her loose cream suit cut. "This group of strong women standing and having our clothes removed, piece by piece. I became overwhelmed." But just as the pantsuit has many connotations, so, too, did the performance. "It was a moment of sadness," Ms. Marvel said, "but it was also a great moment of strength and resilience that we stood there together, in solidarity, in this very cold weather. It was almost spiritual."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
LONDON By Saturday afternoon, after three weeks of impasse, after hearing their morals questioned by politicians and witnessing their clubs start to line up for government bailouts, the players of the Premier League decided to take matters into their own hands. The captains of the league's 20 clubs, as well as many of its managers and several executives, dialed into a videoconference meeting with the aim of establishing a collective position on a subject that has threatened to turn the English public against English soccer at a time of national crisis. Somehow, as the country's death toll from the coronavirus pandemic has started to mount, the issue of whether the stars of the Premier League the richest domestic soccer tournament on the planet and one of Britain's proudest cultural exports should take a pay cut has moved front and center. How soccer which was placed on indefinite hiatus in England on March 13 has found itself cast as one of the villains of the crisis speaks volumes not only about the political reality of the game in England but also of the singular role it plays in the national psyche. Now, clubs accustomed to the unyielding loyalty of fans have managed to alienate even their most ardent followers. Players, more accustomed to being seen as heroes, have been accused not only of failing to help their teams stanch losses, but of the much more serious offense of not offering financial support to Britain's overworked health service. In the space of three weeks, a discussion that started with the question of how the richest domestic soccer league in the world will ride out the economic impact of the shutdown has led to its stars starting their own initiative independent of their clubs to funnel part of their salaries straight to the National Health Service. It did not start out like this. Talks over what role the players might have in alleviating the virus's financial impact on the clubs that pay their salaries began in the middle of March, just a few days after the postponement of the Premier League season. Officials from the Premier League's London headquarters, acting on behalf of the clubs, and representatives from the players' union, the Professional Footballers Association, gathered in a virtual meeting room, joined by executives from the League Managers Association, an umbrella group for coaches, and the English Football League, the governing body for the three lower tier professional leagues. All involved thought those talks had progressed positively enough. The Premier League initially suggested that all of its players take a 15 percent salary cut for the rest of the year; it claimed its clubs needed to save 280 million pounds, or 347 million, in order to make up for lost revenue. The union said it would be able to make a decision only if it saw each team's financial forecast. They cycled through various suggestions a 25 percent cut and a 15 percent deferral, suggested by the league; no cuts, but a series of deferrals, proposed by the union. Then they focused on a combination of cuts and deferrals that amounted to a figure of 30 percent, for a year, that could be reduced depending on how much of their losses the clubs could claw back. That seemed to form the outline of an eventual agreement. But on March 31, Tottenham Hotspur followed Newcastle United's lead and placed most of its non playing staff on furlough, effectively asking the British government, in accordance with public welfare laws, to pay 80 percent of their salaries for the next three months. The remainder would simply go unpaid. A few days later, Liverpool made the same announcement, before being forced to backtrack. Tottenham's move was greeted with derision and anger not just from fans, but from players, too. It was the moment a commercial negotiation suddenly morphed into something far larger and far more damaging to all sides: a conversation, in essence, about soccer's role and responsibilities in public life. But now, through some trick of the light, what they gave back to society became firmly enmeshed with what they were prepared to give back to their clubs. Many of the players felt that Tottenham's decision was an attempt to back them into a corner, forcing them to take a pay cut or risk appearing greedy, aloof and out of touch during the pandemic. To some extent, it worked: Two days later, the country's health secretary, Matt Hancock, urged players to "play their part" by taking a pay cut. Julian Knight, a Conservative Party lawmaker, linked players' pay to health care workers, saying that "the first thing Premier League footballers can do is make a contribution, take a pay cut, and play their part," given the "sacrifices" being made by front line workers in the health service. The players, though, did not see the link between those two things quite so clearly. They wanted to help, but wondered if doing so with a pay cut rather than direct donations might simply save money for their team owners, rather than benefiting the health service. Their salaries are taxed, after all; any cut would lead to a reduction of income for the treasury, and ultimately, the N.H.S. That situation was complicated by the role of the players' union, led by its longstanding chief executive, Gordon Taylor, who is thought to be the highest paid trade union leader in the world. The union works not just for Premier League players; it also represents the interests of the hundreds of professionals farther down soccer's pyramid. Its concern, in negotiations, was that any agreement with the Premier League might later be copied for use in the lower leagues, where salaries are markedly lower. Its priority was to protect members who could not afford to take a pay cut, or who had already received missives from clubs commanding them to accept a reduced salary. By Friday, the battle lines had been drawn. When the parties regrouped for another call, there was little hope of resolution. The Premier League had commanded its clubs not to act unilaterally. A collective solution had to be found to help stem losses that could amount to 1 billion and that had required the league to forward millions in emergency funding to clubs coping with a cash flow crisis. The union by then had doubled down on its position: Any pay cut, it said in a statement after yet another round of talks, would be detrimental to the health system. Yet again, the fate of the health service was portrayed as a central plank in discussions over soccer players' salaries. Unsurprisingly, the two sides failed to find any common ground, and so the players decided to circumvent the formal discussions, arranging a meeting of their own. A few days later, they reached their conclusion: The players on Wednesday revealed an initiative called Players Together, releasing a statement that declared a goal of quickly "granting funds to the front line" of the health service. The players must hope that move will not only help in the way it was intended, but also put an end to the public backlash, and to the easy depiction of them as feckless and greedy. But that cannot, at a stroke, solve the problems caused by three weeks of rancor. The players still feel let down by their clubs and unfairly exposed by their employers. The Premier League, and its constituent clubs, must still find a way to cut costs in the face of a looming financial calamity. The players' union has been made to seem, at least in public, scarcely relevant. Most of all, though, the worry will be that the damage, to some extent, is done. Hancock tweeted on Wednesday night that the players were, in his view, now "playing their part." Whether the rest of the country remembers it that way remains to be seen. After three weeks of war, it is possible everyone has come out losing.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Like many authors, I have a dismal opinion of the novel writing abilities of Hollywood screenwriters, especially screenwriters like David Koepp, who wrote such obscure films as "Jurassic Park," "Spider Man" and "Mission: Impossible." Thus it was with a jaundiced eye that I picked up his first novel, "Cold Storage" a thriller. Like Michael Crichton, Robin Cook and other thriller writers before him, Koepp has paged through the catalog of dark biology and found something truly delicious: a genus of parasitic fungi that makes Ebola look like the sniffles. It is called Cordyceps, nicknamed the "zombie fungus." Here's how it works: An ant, making its happy way along the jungle floor, treads on a spore, which attaches to it and hatches. The fungus grows inside the ant, threads its way to the brain and hijacks it. The zombie ant is seized with the desire to climb up to some high point, where it clamps itself down with its jaws and awaits death. The fungus continues to feed on the ant until it is ready to reproduce. A stalk emerges from the ant's head and sends up a fruiting body, which ripens, swells and bursts, showering the ground beneath with more spores, which infect more ants, and the cycle continues. Back to the novel: In 1979, a tank from the first space station, Skylab, falls into a remote town in the Australian outback. It is found by a resident and kept as a souvenir. But there is something growing inside that tank. Over the next eight years it mutates, until in 1987 it finally escapes. This, we learn, is a strain of Cordyceps fungus that, due to its trip into space, has metamorphosed into something that hungers not for ants, but for warm blooded animals like cats, deer and Homo sapiens. A team of American scientists, dressed in biohazard suits, investigates. They find the little outback town strangely devoid of people until they realize that everyone has climbed up onto the roofs of the buildings. There, it seems, their living bodies became the fruiting organs of the fungus and burst open "parted like a suit coat lying on the floor with nobody in it." The entire area is contaminated with fungal spores. As the team departs the town with a sample (No, no! Don't take that sample!) one of the scientists, recalling a nearby radio tower, is seized by the sudden and bizarre urge to climb it. They realize that, even inside her suit, she's been infected. As the fungus multiplies like mad in her body, she swells and explodes "like a balloon popped by a pin." Her head, "which in one moment was a disfigured, although recognizable, human head," was in the next moment "a wash of green gunk that completely covered the inside of her faceplate."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
Consider all that can go wrong on a football field, all that could have gone wrong for Kansas City late Sunday night, with the Chiefs trying to score the go ahead touchdown and the Las Vegas Raiders seeking to stop them. Penalties, mental lapses, drops, imprecise routes. The ball could sail just high or wide, grazing off a receiver's fingertips. It could be caught a centimeter out of bounds, or intercepted a centimeter in bounds. All sorts of wacky stuff. Until recently the Chiefs, with a grisly history of postseason malfunctions, knew wacky stuff. But when they took possession Sunday with 1 minute 43 seconds remaining and 75 yards to the end zone, running back Clyde Edwards Helaire turned to a teammate and uttered the words that govern today's N.F.L.: "We've got Patrick Mahomes. I'm not worried about anything." Mahomes is the best quarterback in the league in part because he is the most predictable. He eliminates variables, defenses, worries. He knew the Chiefs were going to score. Maybe not on a 22 yard reception by Travis Kelce, and maybe not with 28 seconds left, but he knew. Coach Andy Reid knew, too. "I've got Pat Mahomes," Reid said. "You give me a minute and a half and I'm pretty good right there. We can roll." None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. No poll was taken, so call this a hunch: Everyone on Kansas City's sideline knew it. And in an honest moment, maybe the Raiders would admit they had a sense of dread, too. The Chiefs are 9 1, three games clear in the A.F.C. West of frisky Las Vegas (6 4), which holds the conference's third wild card slot, and in most seasons they would be gliding toward the No. 1 seed. But since Pittsburgh has yet to lose, Kansas City was left to rue the blemish on its record, an Oct. 11 defeat to the Raiders, and avenge it. After that loss, the Raiders' buses circled Arrowhead Stadium in a victory lap of sorts, and though that little event had no tangible impact on the game that unspooled Sunday, professional football players and coaches do have pride, especially those who lifted the Lombardi Trophy only eight months earlier. Nursing a grudge might not be healthy for one's emotional balance, but for Mahomes and the Chiefs it is as nourishing as bone broth. It just so happens that late last week, Reid installed a trick play, which Kelce completed for 4 yards, with a Vegas homage, named Slot Machine Right. The Chiefs do not lose often only once in the last 54 weeks but when they do, they tend to respond: After losing to Tennessee and Houston last season, Kansas City bludgeoned them in the playoffs, with Mahomes throwing for eight touchdowns. In both of those games, Mahomes spun victories from double digit deficits, developing a reputation for comeback wizardry that only intensified at the Super Bowl, when he led three touchdown drives in the final 6:32. But Mahomes does not lead many fourth quarter comebacks six across 46 N.F.L. games, counting the postseason because his team rarely trails that late. The Chiefs trailed late Sunday because Raiders quarterback Derek Carr did not just match Mahomes over the first 58 minutes or so he outshined him. In one sense, the Raiders are the anti Chiefs, an anachronism assembled to win with brute force: with fullbacks and blocking tight ends and by running with Josh Jacobs, who harnesses the power of a transformer, out of two back sets. But they don't have to. The Raiders' offensive personnel promote flexibility in a manner that feels vaguely aspirational, with Darren Waller blossoming into their version of Kelce. Carr didn't surpass 165 passing yards in any of the Raiders' previous three games, all victories, because Las Vegas bullied its opponents on the ground. On Sunday, he topped that number by halftime 183 of his 275 total and in the fourth quarter he whipped touchdowns to Waller and Jason Witten, whose 1 yarder off a Carr scramble put the Raiders up by 31 28 with 1:43 left. Glancing at the clock, Carr thought they left too much time for Mahomes. Later, Carr clarified that he would have said that about any quarterback in that situation. But few quarterbacks in football history have done what Mahomes has done, or can do what Mahomes can do. At his current rate, Mahomes will throw for 4,856 yards this season with 43 touchdowns and only three interceptions; according to Pro Football Reference, no one has passed for that many yards and that many touchdowns and so few interceptions. But Mahomes, the youngest player to win the Most Valuable Player Award and a Super Bowl, demolishes precedent. Never before had he thrown a go ahead touchdown within the final two minutes. On the winning drive, he completed six of seven passes. On the winning play, he escaped the pocket and, surprised to see Kelce so open, zipped him the ball. "I just tried to put it on him as quick as possible," Mahomes said. "I knew that was the game winner."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Enter Laura Wass's Brooklyn studio and you will find brass bunny ears, candy colored bras, gold crowns and other pieces that are a futuristic cross between happy go lucky and streetwise, something a young Joan Jetson might have worn to an intergalactic rave. Out of the ordinary as they may appear, you have probably seen them before: a visor crown covering Beyonce's head as she meditated and spun in her music video for "7/11"; a stellated octahedron propped atop one of Erykah Badu's iconic tall hats as the singer performed in Philadelphia and New York last week; and a bone white halo on the cover for "Awaken, My Love!", the most recent album from Childish Gambino, also known as Donald Glover. Six more of these will be part of his performance for Dave Chappelle's August residency at Radio City Music Hall on Saturday. Though Ms. Wass also sells less ostentatious jewelry necklaces made of miniature pyramids, simple metal cuffs and bracelets with thin, dangling chains she considers the funkier stuff the soul of her company. "These pieces are all about exuberant self expression and becoming almost like a superhero," she said. "They're both sincere and kind of funny, but that for me is really where I see the value of the brand." Ms. Wass creates these items using bungee cords and dozens of plated or powder coated metal tubes and beads. (The headpiece on Childish Gambino's album cover, for example, required 157 tubes and 824 beads.) "When we're weaving, we make it as efficient and streamlined as possible," Ms. Wass said. The goal is to have one knot per item. "There are no redundancies. Ideally the cord ends where it starts. It's kind of like solving a math problem." Ms. Wass's big break came in 2014, when Bergdorf Goodman invited her to design a window as part of an artist series, helping her attract the attention of stores like Colette, 10 Corso Como and Boon the Shop. That success eventually delivered fans like the reality star Kylie Jenner, the Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards and the musicians Phantogram and James Blake. Sometimes, as with "Awaken, My Love!" and Beyonce's crown, Ms. Wass does not know where or how her pieces will end up. In other cases, she has made personal connections that led to collaborations. She met Ms. Badu at a party while wearing one of her own creations: a gold voluminous mask made of pyramids. "Erykah came up to me and was like: 'Hi, my name is Erykah. Can you make these pieces for me?'" Ms. Wass said. "And I was like, 'Absolutely.'" Ms. Wass, 31, majored in Latin American studies at the University of Pennsylvania but had always been interested in art. After graduating in 2008, she took on several jobs in manufacturing and product design, supporting labels like Coach, Swarovski and Diane von Furstenberg with their jewelry collections. In 2012, she founded WXYZ Jewelry. Why the obsession with repeating shapes? "I was into the simplicity of the fundamental structures on which our entire world is built," Ms. Wass said. "The structures of life itself are built on these fundamental shapes." As for what is next, Ms. Wass wants to go bigger. "At first, I wanted to crack the code of creating a brand that's distinctive and recognizable and has a clear voice and breaks through the noise," she said. "In order to do that I had to get really specific. Now I see these things almost as miniatures for building sets and sculptures, and creating immersive worlds."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
Reviewing my book, "False Alarm," in the Aug. 9 issue, Joseph E. Stiglitz misses its main argument: Climate change is a real, man made and substantial problem. For instance, the U.N. Climate Panel estimates that hurricanes might become fewer, but fiercer, resulting in more damages. The total negative climate impact is estimated by climate economics, spearheaded by the only climate economist to win a Nobel, William Nordhaus from Yale University. Studies show that while the cost of stronger hurricanes will rise, resilience from richer societies will counteract this effect. By 2100, one highly quoted Nature article suggests that fiercer hurricanes will cost the world 0.02 percent of G.D.P. Similarly, climate will mostly make agriculture harder, although adaptation will mitigate this impact. The largest empirical study finds the total cost by 2100 at 0.26 percent of G.D.P. Adding up these and many other costs, we can come to a total cost of unmitigated climate change by 2100 of about 3 percent of G.D.P. That makes climate change a problem, but it seems counter to much end of world media coverage. That is because most climate stories are told without realistic, moderating effects. The recent headlines that 187 million people will be flooded by 2100 assumes no adaptation. With realistic adaptation, the actual number is 600 times lower. Climate policies are also costly. Cutting 80 percent of the E.U. emissions by 2050 will cost 5 percent of G.D.P. Going net zero, as proposed by the presidential candidate Joseph Biden, has been independently assessed by only one nation, New Zealand. It found the cost would be at least 16 percent of G.D.P.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
In 1842, a prosperous clothing salesman named Lazarus Morgenthau recorded memories of his impoverished, nomadic childhood in the territories that later became modern day Germany. Mr. Morgenthau, then 27, used a small brown notebook to record begging for food, barely attending school and apprenticing with cruel bosses. He wanted his relatives to understand their humble origins, he wrote, so that "neither pride nor arrogance may gain a foothold in my family." On Wednesday, his great grandson Robert M. Morgenthau, 99, the district attorney in Manhattan from 1975 to 2009, donated the document to the Leo Baeck Institute at the Center for Jewish History in New York after recently unearthing it in his files. In 1866, Lazarus Morgenthau packed the memoir into his luggage when his family moved to New York. In 1933, one of his granddaughters, Louise Heidelberg, published a translated and edited version of the notebook's contents along with a biographical sketch of her forebear. In America, she wrote, he prospered in various businesses and supported charities while gradually growing estranged from his wife, Babette, and other family members, because of "his eccentricities and his violent temper." Robert Morgenthau said he remembers hearing relatives' stories about his ancestor, who "had great trouble adapting to life in the United States."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
Edward Lewis, right, and the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in 1967. Mr. Lewis hired Trumbo, a victim of the Hollywood blacklist, to secretly write "Spartacus" and then demanded that he get credit. Edward Lewis, an award winning producer who hired the banned screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to write the movie "Spartacus" and then demanded that he be publicly credited, heralding the end of Hollywood's anti Communist blacklist, died on July 27 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 99 . His death was confirmed by his daughter Susan. "Spartacus," which was released in 1960, received four of the nine Oscars awarded t o films produced by Mr. Lewis, as well as a Golden Globe. All told, his 33 movies received 21 Academy Award nominations. His producing credits included nine movies directed by John Frankenheimer (among them "Seven Days in May" in 1964) as well as films by John Huston ("The List of Adrian Messenger," 1963) and Louis Malle ("Crackers," 1984). With his wife, Mildred Lewis, who died in April, he shared an Academy Award nomination for best picture for "Missing," the 1982 political thriller directed by Costa Gavras. Mr. Lewis produced five more films written by Trumbo, including "Lonely Are the Brave" in 1962 and "Executive Action" in 1973, but none packed more punch than "Spartacus," which was directed by Stanley Kubrick. Mr. Lewis insisted that the movie, which was based on a novel by Howard Fast, another blacklisted writer, was never intended to be overtly political. It nevertheless climaxes with what amounts to a 2,000 year old prequel to the Red Scare, in which members of Congress demanded in hearings that witnesses identify colleagues or associates suspected of Communist ties. In the film, the Roman authorities demand that Spartacus's fellow slaves identify him; instead, in solidarity, each stands to proclaim, "I am Spartacus!" Trumbo later said that the scene evoked the refusal by many congressional witnesses to name names. But Mr. Lewis maintained that "Spartacus" was simply a story "about slaves who are overthrowing the yoke of oppression." Dissatisfied with a script by Fast, he and Mr. Douglas hired Trumbo, who had not received a screen credit since 1950 after refusing to testify before the House Un American Activities Committee investigating Communist infiltration of the film industry. The script was submitted piecemeal to the studio, Universal International, under Mr. Lewis's name while Trumbo churned out page after page, writing in his bathtub with a wooden tray across the top. The tray "preserved his modesty and gave him a place to put his typewriter, an ashtray, and an ever present glass of bourbon," Mr. Douglas wrote in "I Am 'Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist" (2012). "Every time Eddie Lewis told someone he was writing 'Spartacus,' it embarrassed him," Mr. Douglas wrote, adding. "The revelation of Dalton Trumbo's involvement with 'Spartacus' could shut down the entire picture. So Eddie continued to play the producer turned writer, a charade he hated." Once Universal had invested heavily in the film (more than 70 million in today's money), making it too late to halt production, Mr. Lewis demanded that the studio credit Trumbo and pay him. When "Spartacus" was released in October 1960, Universal International became "the first major movie studio to give screen credit to a blacklisted writer," The New York Times reported. (Otto Preminger had announced in January 1960 that his forthcoming film "Exodus," released by the smaller studio United Artists, would be written by Trumbo.) Edward Lewis was born on Dec. 16, 1919, in Camden, N.J., to Max and Florence (Kline) Lewis. His father worked for his own father's furniture company; his mother was a homemaker. Edward attended Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and enrolled in a dental school program. But before graduating he served as an Army captain in World War II at a military hospital in England. After the war he moved to Los Angeles, where he met and married Mildred Gerchik, the sister of an Army buddy. She was a Brooklyn transplant whose mother had been a garment industry organizer. She had another brother who had fought in the anti fascist Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. "He developed his deep and powerful commitment to social justice under her influence ," Susan Lewis said, referring to her mother. He is survived by another daughter, Joan Lewis, and two grandchildren. Mr. Lewis was enterprising early on, starting ventures to provide housing for returning veterans and health insurance for pets. Both failed, but Hollywood beckoned. Ms. Lewis said of her parents: "At some point I remember them telling me that they went to a social gathering where someone presented a screenplay in progress. My parents went home and said to each other, 'We can do better than that.' " They adapted Honore de Balzac's novel "The Lovable Cheat" into a 1949 movie, though of the two only Mr. Lewis received a screenwriting credit, as well as a producing credit . (In a pan, Variety wrote that it "misses on practically all counts.") Mr. Lewis went on to work for CBS producing two of the first drama anthology series on TV, "The Faye Emerson Show" and "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars." He joined Mr. Douglas's company as a writer and producer in 1956. "I couldn't make a living as a writer, so I became a producer," he told The Los Angeles Times in 1987. As to what he actually did as a producer, Mr. Lewis recalled a few examples . On one occasion he assured animal rights advocates that no potential prey would be injured in a fox hunting scene in "The List of Adrian Messenger." Another time, after the filming of "Spartacus," he quibbled with studio censors over whether a character's preference for both oysters and snails implied that the character was bisexual. In other ventures, he collaborated with David Merrick on the 1963 Broadway adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and was an Emmy winner as executive producer of the television mini series "The Thorn Birds" in 1983. He and his wife also wrote "Brothers" (1977), a fictionalized account of the relationship between the black activist Angela Davis and George Jackson, a prison inmate. After decades of producing, Mr. Lewis returned to writing, in one case the book and lyrics for a musical called "The Good Life ," which was staged briefly in a Hollywood theater. "The main character is a man who's principled, believes in things and, at 70, remains a militant, optimistic person involved in what's going on in the future," he said in 1987, two years before his 70th birthday. "And, you know, that's been the theme of my own life." Sticking to his principles, as he did during the making of "Spartacus, defined much of Mr. Lewis's professional life. "I am most grateful to you," Trumbo wrote him after being recruited to ghostwrite "Spartacus." "By way of recompense, I want the quality of my work to make you grateful to me. And then, nothing but love, gratitude, money, success, increment earned and unearned, glamour, six hundred dollar whores and a torrent of good pictures." In 1959, Trumbo presented Mr. Lewis with an autographed copy of his book, "Johnny Got His Gun." It was inscribed: "To Eddie Lewis who risked his name to help a man who'd lost his name."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
The move toward mixed gender fashion shows is getting a big name boost from Gucci. On Tuesday at The New York Times International Luxury conference in Versailles, France, Marco Bizzarri, chief executive of the brand, called for an end to separation of the sexes, or at least to their collections. From 2017, he said, the anchor brand of the Kering group will no longer hold different shows for men's and women's wear, but will rather combine the two into a single show, to be held each season. "Moving to one show each season will significantly help to simplify many aspects of our business," Mr. Bizzarri said. "Maintaining two separate, disconnected calendars has been a result of tradition rather than practicality." Men's wear shows and sales to wholesalers are now held in January and July, and the women's in September/October and February/March. The move follows similar announcements from Burberry (which will combine its men's and women's shows starting in September), Tom Ford (ditto) and the French brand Vetements (which will have a joint show in January 2017), all geared to close what brands say is a growing, and costly, gap between modern consumer expectations and the traditional fashion system. However, unlike those brands, which have said that they will also immediately sell the clothes they show or, in Vetements's case, close to immediately Gucci does not plan to change its production calendar: It will show clothes that will be available six months later. Call it show everything now/sell later. It's more radical than it sounds, because of Gucci's size (it reported revenue of 3.9 billion euros, or 4.4 billion, in 2015, and has 525 wholly owned stores around the world) and its current position as a trend leader. "It is really being looked to as a trailblazer in the industry," said Julie Gilhart, a consultant and the former fashion director of Barneys New York. "That makes this move potentially the most disruptive change yet." On its face, unifying men's and women's wear makes sense, and not just because most consumers think of men's and women's wear as one category ("clothes"). Combining the collections creates obvious efficiencies, most clearly in the cost of a show, which can reach EUR1 million. In addition, at a time when men's and women's wear are getting ever closer together with Louis Vuitton putting Jaden Smith in its women's wear ad campaign in women's wear, unisex clothing on the rise, and the creative director of Gucci, Alessandro Michele, often including men in his women's show and vice versa combining the two underscores the message of a single brand aesthetic across genders. "It will give me the chance to move towards a different kind of approach to my storytelling," Mr. Michele said in a statement. However, there is an institutional and municipal argument against combining the men's and women's weeks. Every fashion week city profits, literally and significantly, from playing host to the collections. Each season brings floods of buyers, critics and support staff into each city, providing a financial boon for related industries. According to a 2012 analysis by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, women's wear weeks there alone have a "total economic impact per year of 887 million." No wonder why, in July 2015, New York Fashion Week: Men's was introduced, following London Collections Men, which made its debut in 2012. (Previously, men's wear had its own official weeks only in Milan and Paris, along with the Pitti Uomo trade show in Florence.) The first New York men's week brought 3,000 people to the city. It is not yet confirmed exactly when the joint Gucci show would take place, but given that men's wear now accounts for 35 percent of Gucci sales while women's represents 65 percent, odds are the combined show would take place during the women's season. If so, the absence of a brand like Gucci from Milan men's week could leave a gaping hole in the schedule for many buyers, and, along with the Internet's ease of access to shows, may create a convincing argument for some buyers and critics not to attend or at least it may reduce the number who do. Mr. Bizzarri said Gucci was working closely with the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, the governing body of Milan Fashion Week, but nothing had been decided yet. According to Carlo Capasa, president of the Camera della Moda, "Given that the calendar situation is always evolving, it is hard to predict if there will be any negative effects.'' The important thing, he said, is that the Italians "show powerful vitality as a whole" perhaps (it is possible to imagine) by being the first to shift to a new system. One striking thing about Gucci's announcement is how many unresolved questions there are about the logistics. Would the house, for example, invite men's and women's critics to the same show in September? Queried directly, Mr. Bizzarri said he did not know yet. What would it mean for multibrand boutiques and department stores sending men's wear buyers to shows in July? Would they send them again in September? "I don't know," Mr. Bizzarri said with a laugh, though given that 82 percent of Gucci's 2015 sales were in their own stores and that ready to wear accounts for only 11 percent of its sales perhaps it does not matter. Still, despite all the uncertainty, he said the decision was easy to make. "It just seemed obvious," he said. "It's clear something needs to change. Why not start with this?" It remains to be seen whether other Kering brands like Bottega Veneta, Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen, all of which show on both the men's and women's wear schedules, will follow suit. Right now, the group is treating Gucci as a test case, which may only add to the general confusion. "It would be one thing if it all changed at once," Ms. Gilhart said. "But everyone's going off in different directions. It's like the wild, wild West."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
Set in the haute couture world of 1950s London, Paul Thomas Anderson's film "Phantom Thread" brings a renowned fashion designer and a young waitress into a weird codependency. The insinuating and expressive score by Jonny Greenwood with its blend of Minimalist like riffs, eerie harmonies, alluring melodic lines you don't quite trust, and piercing chords that leap about aimlessly conveys both the posh glamour of the designer's world and his inner obsessions. The music has brought Mr. Greenwood, 46, the longtime guitarist of Radiohead, a much deserved Oscar nomination for Best Original Score. When he called recently from his home near Oxford, England, it was revealing, and rather charming, that he referred several times to his "patchy music education." In his youth he played recorder in a local ensemble (he still plays in a little group) and viola in a student orchestra. He had an epiphany at 15, when he heard a recording of Messiaen's ecstatic "Turangalila Symphonie," which inspired him to learn the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument. Here are excerpts from the conversation. You seem to think of a film score as more of a suite of pieces than a more or less continuous track of music. Yeah, I'm usually writing pieces to fit the story, the characters. And, quite a lot, Paul Thomas Anderson cuts the film to fit the music. I find it hard to describe your scores, and I mean this in a positive sense. The influences are varied and ever present, but subtle and elusive. That's a huge compliment. I feel like I'm enthralled to the same three composers all the time: Messiaen, Penderecki and Bach well, Bach and Vivaldi. I love Baroque stuff. I've got such patchy knowledge of so much other music. It's a childish way of looking at things, but I will listen to Penderecki and think about how that kind of thing can be done with modern music, or how Messiaen's modes can work in the structure of Bach chorales. It feels like a really ugly cross pollination. The breadth of what you know comes through in "Phantom Thread." The principal thing was to make sure the emotion was sincere. I was so scared of it being pastiche. In a way it goes back to my first audition for a youth orchestra. I'd never heard the real thing. I'd been in small orchestras that couldn't play. Suddenly here's this room of 17 and 18 year olds, and I'd never heard this noise, and I've never forgotten it. I still feel like, when I'm doing film stuff, I'm chasing that same fix. I know that eventually, after these months of work on paper, I know that eventually there will be a day, or if I'm lucky two days, with an orchestra to record it all. Having said that, the first stuff I sent to Paul he said was all too dark. Like the first two pieces I sent him, on the piano, he said that it sounds like you are telling the story already, that you're giving away what's going to happen. The first piece from the soundtrack album, "Phantom Thread I," begins with these eerie, hazy high strings. Then this alluring theme starts, and a hint of what could be a Bach chorale prelude filters through. Was that Bach like element conscious? That started with trying to work out what music could be used to describe the character of Reynolds the designer . I said to Paul, we should think about what music he would have listened to. I sold Paul the idea of Reynolds being into Glenn Gould, that Reynolds listened intensely to all those recordings. It was a good excuse to work on a slightly neurotic Bach piano style piano music, which seemed to fit him. And then Paul asked for it to be bigger and bigger and bigger. So eventually we did it with a full orchestra. In the piece from the film "Sandalwood I," I heard Steve Reich stuff, and also Debussy. Things leak into my head, I suppose. But I'm constantly stumbling with this stuff. I will spend weeks and weeks on the piano, and things start to be satisfying, and then you realize later where they've been stolen from. The harmonies in "The Tailor of Fitzrovia" suggested to me a composer you haven't mentioned: Britten. Are you a Britten fan at all? Lots of it was coming from Paul as well as from Daniel Day Lewis, who plays Reynolds . We talked about music in Britain in the '50s, and did lots of research, and among all this slightly twee, pastoral, folksy stuff, Britten really stood out for having the darkness to it. So Daniel Day Lewis gave input for the music? He talked about Thomas Tallis a lot. How can music sound English and still be Romantic? One piece, "Alma," for string quartet and piano, is the most English of everything. I'm not sure why. It just has that kind of harmony to it. I feel like it's the closest we got. I'm lucky Paul used it in a very tender, romantic moment in the film, at the New Year's Eve party. The film also includes excerpts from pieces by Debussy and Schubert and more. Were these your choices?
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
As video of the incident spread on social media, criticism mounted. "Why do these news networks feel the need to put these reporters out there?" read one tweet. Another said: "This is not safe. Lead by example." Others pointed out that reporters were standing in conditions that they were advising residents to stay out of. Even Mr. Cuomo acknowledged the criticism: "There is a strong argument to be made that standing in a storm is not a smart thing to do." Mr. Weir was one of many television journalists facing potentially unsafe conditions in covering the hurricane. Hours later, over at MSNBC, the correspondent Mariana Atencio stood on a boulevard in Miami and pointed to a large tree that had fallen across the street, as other trees bowed in the wind alongside her, raising the question of whether her team was in danger. And around noon, Kyung Lah, a reporter for CNN, said on the air from Miami Beach, "If I didn't have this steel railing, I'd be flying." The tradition of television crews standing in the middle of a dangerous storm goes back decades, reflecting the hunger to be on the scene for a nationally significant event. But the news value of dangerous stand ups in which a correspondent is seen in the field talking to the camera is increasingly being questioned, particularly with the rise of social media. Some critics wondered whether they are unnecessary and overly sensational spectacles, especially in cases where correspondents are struggling to deliver information. But those same field reporters insist that the visuals from the storms are essential in persuading people to take hurricane threats seriously and getting them to leave the area. At the same time, veteran reporters say they take every precaution to stay out of life threatening situations. On CNN, John Berman, in Miami, described flying debris nearby and took pains to say that he didn't believe he was in serious danger. "It's blowing in the other direction, just so you know," he said. One MSNBC studio anchor, Ali Velshi, addressed the issue directly, saying before 10 a.m. that he wanted to pause the coverage: "I want to take a quick break. I want to reset. I want to find out that our reporters are safe." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The custom of reporters broadcasting live from hurricanes began with Dan Rather, the former CBS News anchor, in 1961. Working for KHOU in Houston, he broadcast the first live radar image of a hurricane Hurricane Carla on television and took to the streets to show the conditions firsthand. CBS took the broadcast live, giving viewers around the country their first look at the threat posed by such a storm. Pictures of Mr. Rather wading through waist high water propelled his rise to network anchor. Today, this kind of reporting seems routine. And as it has become more common, reporters have become more aware of the criticism and have tried to justify this approach, as Sam Champion, a weather contributor for MSNBC, did on the air on Sunday. "Everyone says, 'Well, look, if you're standing out in the storm, Sam, then how come I can't stand out in the storm?' " Mr. Champion said. "And what I'm going to tell you is we do this so you can see what it's like outside." Reporters, at both the national and local level, echoed that reasoning. "I think it's a fair question: Why would you have reporters standing potentially in harm's way who are telling people to do exactly the opposite?" Mark Strassmann, a CBS News correspondent who has covered hurricanes for 25 years, said in an interview shortly after taking part in a live special from Miami. "Part of that is that television is all about visual proof," he said. "You want to persuade people that what they're seeing is real and matters to them. And if they can see me standing out there getting knocked around, it'll convince them that they should not do the same thing." Local reporters have fewer resources than network correspondents and this could lead them to brave some particularly unsafe conditions. In a Facebook post on Aug. 25, Jacque Masse, a reporter for 12News in Beaumont, Tex., said she covered Hurricane Harvey by herself, acting as an "M.M.J." industry jargon for "multimedia journalist," or a solo television news reporter. She was her own camerawoman, producer and editor. The station came under withering criticism from industry watchers. "Sending a single M.M.J. to cover a hurricane is not only one of the cheapest moves we've ever seen, it was dangerous," said an article on FTV Live, a website that covers television news. In those cases, reporters said, they have to know when to say no to their bosses. "Somewhere it's been ingrained in our minds that there's a million people that would love to have your job, so if you won't do it, someone else will," said Hayley Minogue, a reporter for WKRG, a CBS affiliate in Mobile, Ala., who was covering her first major hurricane from Jacksonville, Fla. "So you get pressured into doing stuff for that, but that's not really my attitude." Ms. Minogue added that her own station had never pressured her in that way. Whitney Burbank, a reporter for WPBF, the ABC affiliate in West Palm Beach, Fla., said that she had not been pressured, either. "I'm looking at a tree that's fallen through a concrete wall that's covering half of a major road," Ms. Burbank said after her 10th live appearance of the day. She described harrowing conditions that at times forced her crew to huddle inside their satellite truck. But, she said, her bosses place a premium on her team's safety. "My employers are pretty careful if something is unsafe," Ms. Burbank said. "They don't want you to do it. They don't want you to do a crazy live shot in the middle of a tornado. If it's too windy to go out, they're going to say, 'Don't do it.'"
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Following Your Bliss, Right Off the Cliff SO you want to be a writer. Or an artist. Or to open a cupcake shop. What you'll hear, often, is that you should pursue your dream. Follow your passion. Quit your job and live the life you want. That advice should come with a bright yellow warning sticker: your dream may end in disaster. Take the fashion editor Michelle Dalton Tyree and her sister, Jacqueline Dalton. They opened a Los Angeles boutique, Iconology, in 2006. The interior was custom made chic white walls, black trim and refurbished hot pink Louis XVI bergeres. And then there were the clothes. "We were the only ones carrying Karl Lagerfeld's collection us and Fred Segal," Ms. Tyree recalled proudly. "We would have studio stylists for TV shows come in and drop 10 grand in 30 minutes." "It was a unique store and there was a lot of love put into it," she added. All that love and some great press didn't stop the store from failing. The sisters closed Iconology two years later. And what came next was what Ms. Tyree described as a "financial blood bath" from which she just emerged in December after four years of struggle. Ms. Tyree acknowledges that she made rookie mistakes. The location wasn't great, and she didn't have enough of a financial cushion to withstand the ups and downs in the market. High end fashion isn't cheap to stock, and a three month Hollywood writers' strike, plus the looming financial crisis of 2008, helped drive away customers. But even when the future looked grim, Ms. Tyree hung on. In fact, she dug in. She bought more inventory for the racks and threw celebrity fueled parties at the store to generate buzz. "Your gut says this could be a problem, but your head overrides it because you have just put in this huge investment," she said. "You are hanging on to not just the dream, but you are hanging on to the sweat equity and what you put into it financially." Human beings, by nature, don't like to turn their backs on what are called "sunk costs," said Craig Fox, who teaches decision making at the University of California, Los Angeles. When a lot of money is put into something the dream of a small business, stocks or even an education and it can't be recovered or is otherwise "sunk," few of us can just walk away. Basically, no one likes to lose face. Michael Dearing can relate. Today, he runs his own venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, Harrison Metal, which makes small seed investments in technology companies. He also teaches product development to aspiring entrepreneurs at Stanford University. But back in the '90s, when he was fresh out of Harvard Business School, he, too, sank a lot of money into his dream of owning his own store. The Industrial Shoe Warehouse had five outlets in Los Angeles that sold work boots (think back to the Dr. Martens craze). "It had a vibe of, like, Urban Outfitters concrete floor, high beam ceilings, all the stock was on the floor," said Mr. Dearing. "We had a really good business for awhile." But, in the end, he said, "It was what you would call a splat against the wall failure." Mr. Dearing said the economics of running a shoe store were tougher than expected. Plus, the business grew too fast. Then Mr. Dearing's business partner wanted out. He struggled to keep the business afloat because, he said, it felt dishonorable to let it go. "I personalized the outcome to a degree that it was unhealthy," he said. "I thought failure was total and permanent and success stamped me as a worthwhile business person." That's a normal reaction, says Dr. Richard Peterson, a psychiatrist and managing director for the New York based financial consultancy MarketPsych. "There is a part of the brain called the anterior insula, and that is where we process losses," he said. "It creates a physical sensation of pain, and it also creates a sensation of disgust." That area of the brain sets off pain if you get shocked with electricity, for example. But, Dr. Peterson noted, "You see the same response in people who are losing money." So to avoid the pain, Dr. Peterson said, we hope. "There's a whole host of what my colleague Shelley Taylor" a psychology professor at U.C.L.A. "calls positive illusions," said Professor Fox. "We overestimate our ability to control outcomes that have some element of chance" and we "tend to overestimate the extent to which good things are going to happen, especially to us." For both Ms. Tyree and Mr. Dearing, hope and money finally ran out. "There was a moment," Ms. Tyree recalled, "when we went to our attorney's office to declare bankruptcy. I looked down and my hands were shaking, tears welling up, and he looked at us he was this fabulous Ari Gold ish character and he said, 'Michelle, some of these companies I work with are on their fifth and sixth bankruptcies. You haven't seen anything yet.' " That advice, she said, "put it into perspective. I thought, O.K., this is not over for me, this was one piece that failed." Mr. Dearing liquidated his business in what he called an "excruciating" time. He turned to eBay to sell shoes, cash registers, delivery trucks and warehouse equipment to repay creditors and pay his employees' severance. "I was dead broke," he said. "This was probably one of the hardest times, deciding whether I was going to buy food for my animals or dinner for me." But he and Ms. Tyree moved on. After selling the contents of his store on eBay, Mr. Dearing landed a job there a few months later. Then he took a post at Stanford's Institute of Design. "I thought I had one shot to be successful," he said. "I had no idea that my career or anybody's career is actually a multiround process and that you had many, many at bats." Ms. Tyree opened a marketing and public relations firm, Blab Communications, building on her talents at getting news coverage for her store. She also started writing again. Her publication, Fashion Trends Daily, is now three years old. This time around, she's not focused on a specific outcome for her project. "It is such a fabulous vehicle for so many different directions," she said. "I am not looking at it as: will it fail or will it succeed?" Mr. Dearing would approve. He tells his students that the "suffering comes from being attached to the outcomes." As paradoxical as it sounds, he said, "If you stop worrying about the outcomes, you will achieve a better outcome." And if you asked either of them if they had any lingering pangs about those earlier, dashed dreams, the answer, even with all that money lost, would be no. So, pursue your life dream, whatever it is, but with caution. Or at least a cushion of savings.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Your Money
|
In nearly 20 years with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rear Adm. Nancy Knight, director of the agency's global health protection division, has led the development, coordination and implementation of public health policies and programs in countries including Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. Before joining the C.D.C., Dr. Knight trained as a family physician and before going to medical school she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho. In 2008, Dr. Knight helped start Nigeria's Field Epidemiology Training Program, training "disease detectives" to identify diseases and how to respond to them. When Ebola came to Lagos, she returned to Nigeria and worked with the government and the "detectives" to deal with the disease. "Those people we trained were instrumental in fighting Ebola because they were leading the effort on the ground, looking at daily cases and running that response within those communities," she said. Dr. Knight talked about the coronavirus, what travelers can do to avoid it and how the C.D.C. works with governments and other groups around the world to help countries stay prepared for the possibility of an outbreak of a contagious disease, and to tackle those diseases when they occur. What does your department do at the C.D.C.? My division and the work that we do focus on working with countries to achieve the goals in the Global Health Security Agenda and keep people safe from outbreaks. How do you do that? We do this through collaborations with partners, particularly governments in countries where we are working. We work together to strengthen core public health systems and find ways to prevent and respond when there are outbreaks. Through the decisions of Global Health Protection and other experts, we work with countries on some critical aspects of their public health systems. The four aspects that we really focus on are: developing strong disease surveillance systems; making sure there are adequate laboratory networks; making sure there are people with expertise in epidemiology we call them disease detectives; and ensuring that there are strong emergency response structures. We have such an interconnected world today, and it's shocking how quickly people and things can move from country to country. In as little as 36 hours an individual can move from a small village on any continent to any country in the world. With that comes a risk of movement of diseases within our borders and across them. It is. There's always going to be fear of diseases, especially when it's a new disease we've never heard of before or one we know about, but it helps to be able to detect them quickly. We want to be equipped to know what it is, stop it, mitigate it and keep it from spreading as quickly as possible. Another thing that can be kind of frightening is not only the health impact and the lives that can be affected or the people who die, but there's also a big economic concern. These diseases can affect human health, animal heath, economies. They can affect relations with neighboring countries, trade and tourism. Are there any examples of that economic fallout? More than 11,000 people died of Ebola that's a huge toll on human life, and the cost on the global economy was more than 53 billion. Severe acute respiratory syndrome SARS costs countries 40 to 45 billion. How many people are involved in containing a disease once we know it's out there? Thousands and thousands. It's a worldwide issue. After the SARS outbreak in 2003, countries around the world recognized that not everyone was prepared to address an outbreak like that when it occurs, so the World Health Organization and countries in it put into place the international health regulations. But a majority of countries were not prepared to respond. They knew what they agreed to, but they were missing the road map. The Global Health Security Agenda was established, so many countries that wanted help figuring out how to know their gaps in an objective way could get that information. People are concerned about the coronavirus. How do decision makers go from one level of seriousness to the next when a virus is spreading? The C.D.C has three levels when a health threat occurs: Watch, alert and warning. Level One is watch. It's when you should practice usual precautions for this destination, as described in the Travel Health Notice and/or on the destination page. This includes being up to date on all recommended vaccines. Level Two is alert, when you should practice enhanced precautions for this destination. Level three is warning, when we say people should avoid nonessential travel to this destination. At Level Three the outbreak is of high risk to travelers and no precautions are available to protect against the identified increased risk. Travelers should remember that there is limited access to adequate medical care in affected areas, and older adults and people with underlying health conditions may be at increased risk for severe disease. Travelers with an immune suppressed system should consult with their health care providers for additional guidance before travel. Currently, there is no vaccine available to protect against COVID 19 infection. There is no specific antiviral treatment recommended for 2019 nCoV infection. People infected should receive supportive care to help relieve symptoms. If you were in Wuhan and feel sick with fever, cough or difficulty breathing within 14 days after you left Wuhan, you should seek medical care right away. Before you go to a doctor's office or emergency room, call ahead and tell them about your recent travel and your symptoms. This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
Under pressure from the federal government, Nevada health officials on Friday rescinded a statewide order directing nursing homes to halt the use of two government issued rapid coronavirus tests that the state had deemed to be inaccurate. The reversal came shortly after the United States Department of Health and Human Services issued a threatening letter, dated Oct. 8, to Nevada officials. The federal document noted that swift punitive actions could be taken if the state did not promptly revoke its ban, which Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, called "unwise, uninformed and unlawful" and a violation of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act. Outside health experts who reviewed the letter, which condemned the state's actions as "based on a lack of knowledge or bias," described its tone as "acid." In a statement released on Friday, Dr. Ihsan Azzam, Nevada's chief medical officer, said that he and his colleagues were "very disappointed by the letter received today." Nevada's priorities, Dr. Azzam said, remained aligned with the federal government's: to protect "those most vulnerable in our communities from Covid 19." About 40 percent of the country's known Covid 19 deaths have come from nursing homes, according to an analysis by The New York Times. The two brands of rapid tests, manufactured by Quidel and Becton, Dickinson and Company, had been shipped en masse to nursing homes around the country in August to address the delays and equipment shortages that for months had stymied laboratory testing. Both tests detect bits of coronavirus protein, or antigens. In submitting applications to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency clearance, BD and Quidel reported no false positives from their products, and advertised these accuracy rates on their packaging. But among a sample of 39 positive antigen test results collected from nursing homes across Nevada, 23 were found to be false positives when confirmed by a more accurate laboratory test. The discovery prompted state officials to issue their directive on Oct. 2, urging nursing homes to promptly pivot from antigen tests to other types of tests that look for viral RNA while the discrepancies were being investigated. Dr. Valerie Fitzhugh, a pathologist at Rutgers University, said the number of false positives the state had reported was "significant" and worthy of scrutiny. "In the meantime, switching to an alternative, accurate method of testing would be the responsible thing to do," Dr. Fitzhugh said. "Nevada was on the right track for trying to fix this issue." A week later, however, Admiral Giroir cracked down on Nevada's "illegal" prohibition on BD's and Quidel's tests, which he said had imperiled the residents and staff of nursing homes across the state. "They cannot supersede the PREP Act," he said. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. The false positives that had emerged, Admiral Giroir said, were not only expected but "actually an outstanding result." No test is perfect, he said. In the Nevada statement, Dr. Azzam reaffirmed his concerns with the number of false positives that had arisen. "If this laboratory data discrepancy had been reported to Dr. Giroir, we would hope he would have taken the same action as Nevada," he said. "We too want more testing with rapid turnaround in Nevada, but the results of those tests must be accurate, as they affect clinical care." The state's nursing facilities can resume use of BD's and Quidel's products, according to a new Nevada directive issued on Oct. 9. But Nevada's department of health also recommended that all antigen test results, positive or negative, be confirmed by a laboratory test that relies on a slow but very accurate and reliable technique called polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R. False negatives, officials noted, risk exposing healthy people in nursing homes to someone who is unknowingly contagious. False positives, on the other hand, could prompt the placement of a person who is well into a unit with sick people, also increasing the chance of infection. "Both of these scenarios could result in causing harm to a population that we have collectively worked so hard to protect," the directive said. State health officials, it said, would also continue to investigate the use of BD's and Quidel's products. "We need to better understand the issue before encouraging mass use of such tools among our most vulnerable citizens," Dr. Azzam said. "We are not saying the tests have no use, we are just saying pause for further review and additional training." In a statement, Admiral Giroir said he and his colleagues were "pleased" about Nevada's reversal. "This serves as a valuable public policy discussion that benefits the public interest by deterring unilateral prohibitions or similar actions in other states or jurisdictions," he said.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
The National Institutes of Health said Saturday that it had stopped two clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug that President Trump promoted to treat and prevent the coronavirus, one because the drug was unlikely to be effective and the other because not enough patients signed up to participate. The agency halted a trial that had aimed to enroll more than 500 patients after an independent oversight board determined that the drug did not appear to benefit hospitalized patients. The same day, the N.I.H. said it had closed another trial of hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin because only about 20 patients had enrolled in the planned study of 2,000 people. The two trials the N.I.H. shut down represent the latest evidence that hydroxychloroquine has not lived up to its early promise of fighting the coronavirus. The N.I.H. said Saturday that an independent oversight board that monitors safety met late Friday to discuss the 500 patient trial and "determined that while there was no harm, the study drug was very unlikely to be beneficial to hospitalized patients with Covid 19," the disease caused by the virus. "In effect, the drug didn't work," said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who was not involved in the research. "I think we can put this drug aside and now devote our attention to other potential treatments." Mr. Trump had called the drug a "game changer" and took it himself in hopes of protecting himself from infection with the coronavirus. Drugmakers donated millions of doses to the federal stockpile, which distributed them to hospitals around the country, where doctors with few other options administered the drug to severely ill patients. On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration revoked the emergency authorization it had granted to hospitals to give hydroxychloroquine and a related drug, chloroquine, to patients. The agency said that the drugs were unlikely to be effective and could carry potential risks. While the N.I.H. said it did not identify safety concerns as part of its review of the 500 patient trial, others have concluded that hydroxychloroquine carries potential risks. This spring, the F.D.A. issued a warning that the drugs could cause dangerous heart arrhythmias in Covid 19 patients. The planned trial, which was being run by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a division of the N.I.H., had enrolled more than 470 patients when the study was stopped. The study sought to learn whether the drug benefited hospitalized patients and those who visited the emergency room, as well as people who were likely to be admitted to the hospital. It was one of several placebo controlled studies that had been organized to test the drug after a series of small, poorly controlled trials showed early signs of a benefit. The other trial that was halted, involving hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, was testing whether the drugs, given together earlier in the disease, could prevent hospitalization and death from Covid 19. That study, led by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an arm of the N.I.H., "sought to fill this knowledge gap by testing it in a randomized, placebo controlled trial considered the gold standard for determining whether an intervention can benefit patients," the agency said in a statement. The agency said it did not find any safety problems, but concluded that the recent decision by the F.D.A. to revoke its emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine "could further dampen enthusiasm for enrollment in studies evaluating these drugs." Several other large trials of hydroxychloroquine have been stopped or have not shown the drug to be effective. "No surprise," said Dr. David R. Boulware, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota, who is studying hydroxychloroquine as a preventive and an early treatment against the coronavirus. He said the evidence is increasingly clear that the drug does not work in hospitalized patients. "Whether there is any benefit for pre exposure prophylaxis or early treatment is as yet unknown, but the role of hydroxychloroquine if any appears increasingly doubtful." On Wednesday, the World Health Organization said it was stopping the hydroxychloroquine arm of a large clinical trial that is testing several treatments against the virus because evidence including results from a large study in the United Kingdom showed it did not reduce mortality rates of hospitalized patients. And on Friday, the Swiss drugmaker Novartis said it was halting its clinical trial because it could not recruit enough patients to sign up. Only a handful enrolled even though the company had planned for a study involving 440 people. Other researchers are still studying whether hydroxychloroquine could be used earlier in the course of the illness, or to prevent people from getting infected from the virus. While some of those studies are still underway, one such trial led by Dr. Boulware concluded earlier this month that hydroxychloroquine was not effective in preventing infections after someone had been exposed.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
No, that's not an excerpt from Bernie Sanders's latest stump speech. Rather, it's spoken by Jennifer Lopez as a New York City stripper who turns the tables on some of her biggest money customers in the flashy, just released trailer for her forthcoming film, "Hustlers." The real life revenge tale it's based on a New York magazine article by Jessica Pressler co stars Constance Wu ("Crazy Rich Asians") as a single mom whom Lopez's character teaches how to pole dance. The impressive ensemble also includes the music divas Cardi B and Lizzo as well as Lili Reinhart, best known as Betty Cooper on CW's Archie Comics adaptation "Riverdale."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
Amazon Wants to Rule the Grocery Aisles, and Not Just at Whole Foods SEATTLE In early 2017, a memo circulated inside Amazon that imagined an ambitious new grocery chain. The document was written like a news release, a common practice for ideas being weighed inside the company, with the title "Grocery Shopping for Everyone." The new stores, the document envisioned, would have robust sections for produce, fresh food and prepared meals. Nonperishable products, like paper towels or canned beans, would be stored on a separate floor, away from customers. Shoppers could order those items with an app, and while they shopped for fresh food, the other products would be brought down in time for check out. There would also be an area to pick up groceries ordered online and to manage packages for delivery drivers. The faux news release, which has not previously been reported, cited a fictional grocery expert named Hal Apenyo, as in the chili pepper, declaring success in just six months. "The conversion from offline grocery shopping to mixed format shopping has been massive," the character was quoted as saying. A few months later, in June 2017, Amazon barged into the grocery business in a different way, by announcing a blockbuster deal to buy Whole Foods for 13.4 billion. The purchase catapulted Amazon near the top of the 700 billion grocery industry, and sank stocks of traditional grocers on fears that they would be outmaneuvered into oblivion. The memo and other big grocery proposals stopped circulating inside Amazon, as Whole Foods demanded everyone's attention. But two years later, instead of Whole Foods being the answer to Amazon's grocery ambitions, it seems to have only whetted executives' appetites. The marriage has made clear the difficulties of selling fresh food inexpensively, either in a physical store or through delivery. Bananas are not the same as books. But the combination has also shown glimmers of success, particularly in delivery. And that has provided some fuel to Amazon executives pushing to add another food selling option one built from the ground up that would change how people buy groceries. The company is now quietly exploring an ambitious new chain, probably separate from Whole Foods, that is not far removed from the one outlined in the old memo. It would be built for in store shopping as well as pickup and delivery. As the discussions heated up this year, employees passed around a slightly updated version of the memo. "People really need to understand Whole Foods is the beginning, it's not the end," said Brittain Ladd, who worked on Amazon's grocery operations until 2017. "It's not everything." An Amazon spokeswoman, Rachel Hass, said the company "doesn't comment on rumors or speculation." Before it bought Whole Foods, Amazon was an afterthought as a grocer, well behind chains like Publix and ShopRite. The food it sold was limited to mostly canned and dry goods, and its decade long effort to sell perishables through a pickup and delivery program called AmazonFresh never caught on. Whole Foods had struggles of its own. The company was fending off activist investors and had stopped expanding. While its base remained loyal, grocers like Kroger and Walmart had started selling many of the products that once set Whole Foods apart, like organic kale or kombucha. "Whole Foods was broken we shouldn't forget that, which is why they could buy it," said Phil Lempert, a food marketing analyst. It was clear from the start that the two companies differed culturally. John Mackey, Whole Foods' co founder and longtime chief executive, had written a best seller about how companies should have a social conscience and consider all stakeholders in their decisions. Amazon corporate principles say good leaders "do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion." But Amazon pushed ahead with some changes that were once held up as points of pride for the grocer. In an effort to shed Whole Foods' "whole paycheck" reputation, Amazon bought more from national food distributors and cut back on the local farms. United Natural Foods, a leading organic distributor, has increased its sales to Whole Foods by 38 percent over the past two years. And inside stores, employees stopped making signs on chalkboards by hand. Now, Whole Foods prints signs with black ink on paper in a font that resembles handwriting but requires less labor. Other price cutting efforts failed. The former head of a major produce company said Amazon told him it wanted to sell marquee fresh items at low prices every day. The executive said he had to explain that certain products, like berries or lettuce, may be available all year thanks to global supply chains, but that they cost more in the off season. Forcing flat, low prices would put too much risk on growers. Amazon executives, the person said, were caught off guard by the response. It didn't seem as if they had fully appreciated how seasonality made predictable pricing far harder than selling cereal or paper towels. The mixed results are reflected in prices at Whole Foods today. A standard basket of goods has fallen about 2.5 percent since the acquisition, according to Gordon Haskett Research Advisors. Amazon has said its Prime members, who get charged 119 for an annual subscription, have saved hundreds of millions of dollars in discounts at Whole Foods. But over all, Whole Foods is still more expensive than other major grocers, particularly for items like meat. Amazon has also run into some trouble integrating Whole Foods into its delivery machine. Amazon never saw delivering cold milk and fragile fruit to doorsteps as something for the masses, according to former employees. Instead, executives thought of it as an option for people who wanted high quality foods and could afford a premium price to have fragile and fresh items arrive at their doorstep. In theory, that was a good fit for Whole Foods and its affluent shoppers. Within six months, Amazon began making two hour deliveries from Whole Foods in four cities for Prime members. Six months later, that had expanded to more than two dozen cities. It's now available in 90. But Whole Foods stores are not like Amazon's delivery warehouses. Because Whole Foods sells so many fresh items, its stores have smaller back of house areas than a standard supermarket. That means employees who pick products for online orders must gather more items from the same shelves as shoppers. They roam aisles with scanners in hand, asking associates on the floor when they can't find something. In addition, items in grocery stores are grouped together. Walk into a Whole Foods, and a picker for an online order might be standing there trying to see if the identical tubs of Parmesan she's grabbed are grated or shaved. In a warehouse, similar items are kept far apart to avoid confusion. Still, deliveries have shown big potential, making up almost all of Whole Foods' growth. The promise of serving customers, but doing so more efficiently, has Amazon thinking again about aggressive investment in groceries. Rather than dramatically substantially expand Whole Foods, several former employees said, Amazon is considering designing stores specifically with pickup and delivery in mind, and with a smaller area dedicated to fresh shopping as the old memo imagined. While it is unclear what hybrid design Amazon has in the works, a recent job posting for a store designer on "an exciting new team" was looking for someone interested in "creating multiple customer experiences under one roof." And Amazon has been looking for spaces close to Whole Foods locations, indicating a hub and spoke approach where one store serves as the warehouse and commissary for others. Experts say it could take more than a decade to build a new chain from the ground up. To be a major grocery player, Amazon would need a little more than 2,000 stores, the old memo estimated. That's far fewer than the 5,000 run by Walmart, the country's top grocery seller, but more than the roughly 1,200 operated by Publix. Whole Foods got Amazon about a quarter of the way there. A store designed with different shopping options, "Mr. Apenyo" predicted in the old memo, would be "highly scalable."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
Plenty of stores and labels offer distressed jeans, which come with a whiff of bohemian chic. Take, for example, a pair of discolored, paint splattered, torn pants from Robin's Jeans that sell for 595 at Neiman Marcus. Or may we interest you in a thoroughly shredded pair from Rag Bone that was originally priced at 325 on shopbop.com? The Prps denim, with its entry into what might be termed manual labor chic, seems to have set the internet ablaze with its attempt to take the look of those who work difficult jobs and sell it at a price affordable to those unlikely to earn their keep by the sweat of their plucked brows. On Monday, Mike Rowe, the former host of Discovery Channel's television show "Dirty Jobs," posted a stinging rebuke of the product to his Facebook page, which has more than 4.7 million followers. "The Barracuda Straight Leg Jeans aren't pants," he wrote. "They're not even fashion. They're a costume for wealthy people who see work as ironic not iconic." Mr. Rowe's post has been shared more than 14,000 times. Twitter users quickly took to their accounts to fire off more taunts. Steve Butts suggested, "For when you need a pair of jeans as fake as you are." "It seems my 5 year old son is a fashion designer. mudjeans," Jonny Rothschild said in a post. "Nordstrom is selling pre soiled/mud stained designer jeans Balenciaga is hawking a 2K IKEA look alike tote. Contractor chic is IN," Erica Russell commented, referring to a blue leather bag that the luxury label debuted in its spring 2017 men's show that looks similar to the furniture retailer's 99 cent tote. (Ikea recently took advantage of the copycat design with a tongue in cheek ad that helps consumers identify an "original Ikea Frakta bag.")
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
SAN FRANCISCO Silicon Valley goes through its own unique shoe crazes. There were Vibrams. There were Crocs. Now comes the Allbird, a knit wool loafer. In uncomfortable times, Silicon Valley has turned to a comfortable shoe. If there's a venture capitalist nearby, there's probably a pair of Allbirds, too. The Google co founder Larry Page wears Allbirds, according to the shoemaker, as do the former Twitter chief Dick Costolo and the venture capitalists Ben Horowitz and Mary Meeker. In true Silicon Valley fashion, Allbirds is a start up. Is it venture funded? Of course it is. The company has raised 9.95 million over the last year to spread its vision. But this being start up land, a shoe is never just a shoe. "We're about the distillation of solutions, the refinement and crafting of forms in a maniacal way," said Tim Brown, the Allbirds co founder from New Zealand. Silicon Valley likes a uniform. Standing out with a personal style in tech is generally shunned, since it implies time spent on aesthetic pleasures, rather than work. Tech leaders often adhere to strict personal dress codes (like Mark Zuckerberg's gray T shirt), and young entrepreneurs study the social media cues of the venture capital class, who tend to select investments in part based on who looks like them. And so, for now, this insular world has settled on Allbirds. At a gathering last month hosted by the venture capital firm August Capital on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., about 1,000 entrepreneurs and investors mingled on a concrete patio over margaritas and deviled eggs to celebrate summer. Guests wore other shoes New Balance, Top Siders, Tevas and a rare dress shoe were spotted but the furry looking Allbird was by far the most common. Serik Kaldykulov, the managing partner for Elefund, which finances early stage start ups, wore a pair as he waited to get into the party. "Everyone's wearing them. Sometimes it is awkward, especially if we're wearing the same color but then it's an icebreaker," said Mr. Kaldykulov, who owns four pairs in different colors. "Anything with laces becomes less efficient," said John Kim, chief executive of SendBird, a start up that helps software engineers build chat features within their apps. He sported a pair of light gray Allbirds. Mr. Kim said he wore Allbirds for "all reasons and purposes" except to a recent barbecue, for fear that sauce could seep in. Allbirds, which are machine washable, are meant to be worn without socks. (Some have complained about how quickly the shoes wear out, though Allbirds has said in a statement that the latest line is more durable than earlier iterations.) Yet today's hot shoe may easily become tomorrow's Google Glass in a drawer. So what to do except strike before the moment slips away? Joey Zwillinger, an Allbirds co founder and former clean tech entrepreneur, said the company planned to raise more money. "We have pretty big aspirations," he said. In 2009, Mr. Brown, then vice captain of the New Zealand soccer team, was trying to figure out his next chapter. He liked design and, before attending business school, made simple leather shoes for his friends. But the shoes were uncomfortable. "Coming from a land of 29 million sheep, wool was obvious," Mr. Brown said. With a research grant from New Zealand's wool industry, Mr. Brown began a Kickstarter campaign to make wool shoes in 2014. Within four days, he had sold 120,000 worth of shoes through the crowdfunding website. He shut down the campaign in a panic. "I didn't understand how it could be made," he said. Mr. Zwillinger, an engineer in biotechnology, was working in Silicon Valley and struggling to sell algae oil as a replacement for petroleum. (It was too expensive to catch on.) Their wives, who are best friends and former Dartmouth roommates, introduced the two men. Mr. Brown traveled to Northern California to meet Mr. Zwillinger and get advice on supply chains. Mr. Zwillinger cooked a lamb stew, and the two decided to form a business. "One of the worst offenders of the environment from a consumer product standpoint is shoes," Mr. Zwillinger said. "It's not the making; it's the materials." Allbirds are made of a very fine merino wool, each strand 17.5 microns wide. "Which is 20 percent of the width of the average human hair," he said. The shoe's name comes from what explorers supposedly first said of New Zealand: "It's all birds." Also, Mr. Zwillinger is an avid birder. For a while, there was little tech interest. Then, in mid 2016, Mr. Zwillinger noticed tech leaders posting about the shoes on Snapchat and Twitter. "All of a sudden, men size 12 and 13 went out of stock," Mr. Zwillinger said. "Our demo went from mostly female to way male. A run started happening." Today, the two men have 50 employees in their San Francisco headquarters, 350 contractors in a factory in South Korea and 40 at a warehouse in Nashville. The Brooklyn based Red Antler consultant firm worked with them on branding and design. The co founders are hoping to appeal to the same consumer who buys basic clothes from Everlane, also based in San Francisco, and eyewear from Warby Parker. (Two Warby Parker founders are Allbirds investors.) Shoes are an 80 billion industry in the United States, where the average American buys eight pairs a year, according to a Euromonitor International Passport report. "If you were going to design one sneaker and only one, what would it look like? We focused on this idea of a singular solution," Mr. Brown said. "The right amount of nothing."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
Apple's ambitions to go head to head with Netflix and create its own lineup of exclusive movies and TV shows has long been the subject of much chatter and speculation. But its first original TV project a nonscripted series about apps might sound more like a marketing campaign than a blockbuster production. Apple announced on Thursday that it was working with the entertainer Will.i.am and two veteran TV executives, Ben Silverman and Howard T. Owens, on a new show that will spotlight the app economy. "One of the things with the app store that was always great about it was the great ideas that people had to build things and create things," Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet software and services, said in an interview.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
After a long struggle, Sri Lanka, the large island nation southeast of India, was declared free of malaria last week by the World Health Organization. It has been more than three years since the last case. "This is a big success story," said Dr. Pedro L. Alonso, the director of the W.H.O.'s global malaria program. "And it's an example for other countries." Sri Lanka almost succeeded in eliminating malaria 50 years ago, but its huge effort fell apart. The country became the example most frequently cited by malariologists to show how defeat could be pried from the jaws of victory. Through the 1940s, Sri Lanka routinely had a million cases of malaria a year. Then officials began an intensive public health campaign, relying on DDT to kill mosquitoes and chloroquine to cure the disease. By 1963, the annual caseload had fallen to a mere 17.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
If NBCUniversal is anxious about how coronavirus may affect its plans for the Olympic Games, it is trying not to show it. "The Olympics are obviously on everybody's mind," Brian Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast, NBCUniversal's parent company, said at a conference on Tuesday. "What I know is, it's full steam ahead. We're getting ready. We're excited." The media giant has been the main broadcaster of the Summer Games since 1988 and the Winter Games since 2002. In 2014, it paid roughly 7.7 billion to retain the U.S. broadcast rights to the Olympics through 2032. NBCUniversal has sold more than 1.25 billion in advertising commitments, or nearly 90 percent of the available ad space, to go with 7,000 hours of broadcast, streaming and social media content, the company said on Tuesday. It plans to deploy more than 2,000 people to Japan for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which start July 24. As the outbreak expands, killing more than 3,200 people and infecting an estimated 92,000 in dozens of countries, Japanese officials and Olympics organizers have said the Games will proceed as planned. But companies that have signed up for ads are increasingly concerned that the most watched sporting event in the world may be canceled, rescheduled or diminished. John Shea, the president of marketing and events for Octagon, a sports agency working with several Fortune 100 companies on Olympics deals, said advertisers were taking the threat seriously. "We have to anticipate that the Games will happen," he added, "but it would also be irresponsible for us not to acknowledge and recognize that a number of scenarios could take place." Sports agents have said they are concerned that endorsement deals with athletes may be affected. Companies like Twitter, which has a deal with NBCUniversal for daily live coverage of the Tokyo Games, have restricted employee travel and backed out of conferences and other events. Mr. Roberts brought up the worst case scenario in his comments on Tuesday. "We try to anticipate, for big events, what might happen so that we're protected there, and we also have insurance for any expenses we make," he said. "So there should be no losses should there not be an Olympics. There wouldn't be a profit this year. But, again, we're optimistic the Olympics are going to happen." Michael Lynch, a marketing consultant who from 1995 until 2012 led Visa's global sponsorship strategy, which included events like the Olympics, noted the importance of sponsors. "There's this enormous brand infrastructure around the world," he said. "The Games don't happen without the corporate support." He added that companies with money in the Olympics were "hoping and praying" that they went on as scheduled. Major companies that have signed on as sponsors ahead of the 2020 Summer Games include Coca Cola, Airbnb, General Electric, Procter Gamble and Visa. "It would be disastrous if it's canceled," said Steven Moy, the chief executive of the ad agency Barbarian. "There could be a very dramatic impact to the whole economy." NBCUniversal also counts on its Olympics programming to promote itself. It plugs its network and cable series, Universal movies and theme parks in between volleyball matches, track and field contests and gymnastics competitions. The "Today" show and Lester Holt's "Nightly News" program were broadcast from the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and the NBC comedy "Superstore" had a ratings lift when it followed Olympics programming. Other NBC shows, including "The Voice" and "The Tonight Show," have scored big ratings when the network scheduled them after the opening and closing ceremonies. And the Universal film "Jason Bourne" grossed more than 400 million at the box office after it received a promotional push during the 2016 Games. The Olympics have faced threats before. The Zika virus sparked alarm before the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and political tensions with North Korea preceded the Pyeongchang Games in 2018. In both cases, the Games went on, and NBC broadcast them to millions of viewers. NBC also found itself in a bind in 1980, when the United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics. Even after its insurance through Lloyd's of London kicked in, NBC took a 34 million loss. If the Tokyo Olympics are canceled, insurance is likely to cover losses related to broadcast rights and production through a claim that the coronavirus was an act of God. But it is not clear if it would protect NBCUniversal if Olympics themed commercials and promotional tie ins were scrapped. In most circumstances, companies pay for Olympics ads after they appear. If the Games are canceled, or continue with fewer nations competing and lower ratings, NBCUniversal may be required to release companies from their ad commitments or otherwise compensate them.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Party Planners Take It From Good to Great, and Free the Host to Make Merry HAVING a party for friends is supposed to be fun. But that may not necessarily be true for the hosts, who do the planning and then often feel that they must make sure everyone is having a good time. David Noto, who owns Altaneve, a producer of prosecco, said he had found himself in that situation all too often. Several years ago, Mr. Noto decided to host two parties that could reasonably be called quirky. In the winter, he invited friends to ice skate in Central Park with everyone dressed in tuxedos and full length ball gowns. Come summer, it was remote controlled sailboat racing at the park's boat pond, with a live jazz band and prosecco liberally poured. Both were such hits with friends, they became annual events. But instead of enjoying his parties, he worried about the little details, from running around to make sure his guests had what they needed to organizing the heats for the sailboat races. "In the three hours of the event, I had fun for two to three minutes," he said. So this year, he hired an event planner to coordinate his mini regatta. The help did not come cheap. It will cost him about 20,000, which was three times what he paid last year. "The cost, although notable, is somewhat more to me if I don't hire someone," he said. If you're going to spend that kind of money and many summer parties on the New York circuit will cost much more than Mr. Noto's you want to make sure your party is great. And many will turn to party planners to pull off what they can't on their own. "A good party is people go, they have great drinks, they get buzzed and they enjoy the company," said Stefanie Cove, managing partner at YOA Productions in Los Angeles and New York. "To get to great, you have to think about all of these details that people just don't think about. You have to create an atmosphere that people are so comfortable in and never want to leave. It's the right lounge, the right temperature, the right music." Harriette Rose Katz, founder of the Chosen Few, a membership organization of elite event planners, said her clients spend widely different sums for a great event. A first rate cocktail party with hors d'oeuvres that are brought to guests by a server could start at about 350 a person, she said. In this circle, weddings begin at 500 a person, and the top social events can cost as much as 1,000 a person. Things can grow much more expensive when outfitting one's home for a party. Steve Kemble, an event planner in Dallas, said he had one client who spent 20,000 for an acrylic cover to turn her pool into a dance floor and another who bought a 120,000 antique rock crystal chandelier and had it shipped from Italy for an event. "It's that show off factor," he said. "We're all guilty of it. There are things you're going to do to your apartment or house that cost you money that you wouldn't have done unless you were having your friends over for dinner." He added, "When I hear people say, 'Oh my God, we could have gone to a restaurant for cheaper,' I say, 'Duh, of course you could have.' But there is nothing more personal than going to someone's home for a party." Still, throwing money at a party doesn't guarantee it will be a success. There are plenty of things either less experienced planners or budget conscious hosts can overlook. The most common mistake is not having someone closely track the R.S.V.P.s. "I have got to have a count to produce an amazing event for you," Mr. Kemble said. "I'm the one who is going to look bad when they say, 'I can't believe there is not enough food.' I say it's because she said 25 people were coming when 125 people showed up." Once people are at your event, the party's flow is crucial. This starts from the moment they arrive. "If you have to wait 15 minutes to valet your car, you'll remember that," Ms. Cove said. And it continues through the night. If people need to go upstairs, it's best that they stay up there until the end, she said. When there is a bar, there should be one bartender and two assistants for every 50 people to keep waiting times short. And if someone has to sit for dinner, the chairs had better be comfortable. When Mrs. Katz gave a party to celebrate the newest renovation of her Upper East Side apartment, she had flow in mind when she held it over three nights, with 60 guests each evening. "Everyone was joyful, but it wasn't so crowded," she said. And with an acknowledgment that event planners understand budgets, she added: "I did the same food, the same flowers and the same wonderful orchestra each night. It was very cost effective when you're bringing in rentals and caterers and a group." How a party progresses is also important. Bentley Meeker, a lighting designer and artist who said he had done 11,000 events in 25 years, said people often call their guests to something, like a cake cutting, and then make them stand around. "People start to lose interest after one or two minutes," he said. "Timing is what makes everything flow, or everything gets stuck or seems staccato. It's the most important thing. Timing is also free." The same goes for anyone who wants to make a speech or screen a video, no matter how moving. Both should be short, preferably less than three minutes. Mr. Meeker said people often cut corners on lighting and sound. The result can be guests, dressed to the nines, looking washed out, not glamorous. Without the right sound, the music can ruin the party. "The band is gauging their performance by how many people are on the dance floor," Mr. Meeker said. "But if you have a party with a bunch of hedge fund dudes, they're never going to dance. The band is going to play louder, but you have all these dudes trying to get rid of Greek bonds, and they can't do it because they can't hear anything. Now, no one is having a good time." For most people, what makes a party memorable is the atmosphere created. Still, the quirks are often the ones that stand out. Mrs. Ledes said the most memorable party she threw was a Sweet 16 party. Her daughter was supposed to go to a concert at Jones Beach with friends, but it was canceled when New York City lost power one weekend in August 2003. Sitting with her daughter and her friends at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, Mrs. Ledes said she saw a group of young girls wandering around in cheerleading outfits. They had been heading into Madison Square Garden for a cheerleading competition but got stuck at the Forest Hills train station when the power went out. Mrs. Ledes invited the girls and their chaperones into the club. "We got some great bottles of wine out of the cellar and gave the kids warm Coca Colas," she said. "We ended up having the cheerleaders perform for us on the grass courts." This year Mr. Noto isn't looking for something so unforgettable. He just wants to enjoy his event. He is leaving every detail but the prosecco to the event planner. "I now get to enjoy the event and be with my friends," he said. And that should be the goal with any party this weekend, regardless of the cost.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Your Money
|
LOS ANGELES Some out of work Hollywood moguls handle the transition from general to civilian with grace. But they can also be one of moviedom's saddest sights. Some are very obviously at loose ends, no matter what kind of face they put on. Others seem terrified about a table downgrade at Mr. Chow. And some are just utterly out of touch, as when one former media titan, struggling to adjust to life without an always idling private jet, arrived at an airport and was baffled by the touch screen check in procedure. What, pray tell, were these newfangled kiosk devices? (I am so not joking.) Hollywood has lately become populated with an unusually large number of free floating moguls; guys (and they are still almost always guys) who find themselves reigning supreme as media kingpins one day and facing down an existential crisis as mere millionaires the next. They include Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former DreamWorks Animation chief; Jim Gianopulos, replaced as the big boss at 20th Century Fox in June; Philippe Dauman, dismissed as Viacom's leader in August; and Rob Friedman, eased aside as co chairman of Lionsgate in September. There are several more examples, including Rob Moore, who recently lost his job as vice chairman of Paramount Pictures. "It's upsetting, no question, when you are suddenly dislodged from your life," Mr. Moore told me. "You're raw, and you're vulnerable. Even though you know this eventually happens to most everyone at a certain level in Hollywood that's just how it works in a hit driven business it's still a surprise. "In these all consuming jobs, your co workers become the next closest thing to your children and parents, and not communicating with them in the same way all of a sudden leaves a big gap. You feel a sense of loss." Jim Gianopulos, formerly the head of 20th Century Fox. Don't feel too bad for Mr. Moore. Under his old contract, Paramount has to pay him for three years, so he has no immediate pressure to find a new gig, even though most people in Hollywood expect him to be courted by a Chinese movie company. Mr. Moore, 54, also has a new fiancee, Betty Zhou, 35, who is the host of a show on Chinese television called "Talking to Hollywood With Betty Zhou." (No, contrary to Hollywood gossip, he did not propose to her on live TV. But they did pose for photos afterward while offering a Vulcan salute.) Mr. Moore, who sounded relaxed during our interview, said that he had recently returned from Europe ("the first real vacation I've had in 15 years") and was now starting to think about his next career move. "Where's the growth?" he asked rhetorically. "Where would be a fun place to work next? At some point, you get through the shock of what happened and start getting excited about new opportunities." So far, put Mr. Moore squarely in the graceful category. How are his jettisoned compatriots doing, emotionally and otherwise? It is hard to know. Whether trying to fly under the radar while putting together a new act, licking wounds, or still miffed about coverage (mine specifically) of their departure, they declined interview requests. But this much is clear: None are ready to leave the stage. Mr. Gianopulos, 64, whose departure from Fox, where he spent 24 years, revealed considerable good will toward him as people rallied to his side, has been courted by financiers for potential partnerships. Mr. Friedman, 65, one of the architects behind Summit Entertainment, which hit pay dirt with the "Twilight" film series and then sold itself to Lionsgate, has been hired as a consultant for Paramount's "Transformers: The Last Knight," set for June release. According to Mr. Friedman's friends, he may decide to start a new studio. None have been more visible than Mr. Katzenberg, 65, whose studio career stretched from Paramount to Walt Disney Studios to DreamWorks Animation, which he sold to Comcast in April for 3.8 billion. But Comcast did not want one asset him and so Mr. Katzenberg left the company, a moment that was marked by a ceremony outside the Chinese Theater, where his footprints were immortalized in cement. Variety gave him a 37 page tribute that played like a retirement party, replete with praise and well wishes from stars. (Elton John: "How did he do such amazing stunts with those little feet?") That was in September. But by then, the hard charging Mr. Katzenberg was already starting a holding company that aims to emulate Barry Diller's IAC/InterActive Corporation, which owns internet businesses like Match.com and Vimeo. Anne Sweeney stepped down as president of the Disney ABC Television Group. Several of Mr. Katzenberg's friends told me that he is working to raise 500 million to 700 million in funding to invest in "mobile content" start ups that his new company will help incubate and operate. For now, Mr. Katzenberg is also still a consultant to AwesomenessTV, a digital media studio that is owned by Comcast and Verizon. All of these bigwigs will be just fine, of course. None certainly have to worry about feeding their families, like a lot of Americans who lose their jobs. Mr. Dauman, 62, who ruled over MTV, Comedy Central and Paramount for a decade as the top Viacom executive, received 72 million in exit compensation. Mr. Katzenberg personally collected more than 400 million from the sale of his "Shrek" studio, money he has said will largely go toward his philanthropic work. ("That money doesn't change anything for me," he told Variety. "I was already blessed. I was already rich.") But perception is another matter. Leaving any high powered, global job requires an altitude adjustment. But leaving one in hierarchy obsessed Hollywood or having the job leave you, as is more often the case can be traumatizing on a whole different scale. Sure, cue the tiny violins if you want. But one week, these people are fielding calls from A listers and making decisions about what millions of people around the world will watch. The next week, they are faced with starring in their own version of "The Incredible Shrinking Man." Calls get returned, but slower. The media spotlight shifts to the next regime, and you start being called an "elder statesman." Show business is a small, incestuous and, in some cases, cruel club. Unlike other industries, almost everyone in Hollywood lives in a bubble (Beverly Hills and Brentwood during the week, Malibu over the weekend), making it nearly impossible to escape the peer pressure. "What are you doing next?" becomes a question that burns like acid. Because status here is openly telegraphed (the platform banquette at the Palm, the early hour invitation to Vanity Fair's Oscar party) everyone notices when you lose it. So what is the best way to navigate this transition? Curious for the perspective of those who have left megawatt Hollywood jobs in the past, I called three people who have done it with aplomb. None were fired, instead leaving on their own terms a big difference. But each had to face the same question as everyone else: Now what? "These jobs are so all consuming that, when you are in the middle of them, it's hard to clear your mind enough to think about what you want to do after it's done," said Barry Meyer, 72, who retired as chairman of Warner Bros. in 2013 after a celebrated run. "So you have to be willing to give yourself some time." Quick moves, he added, are usually the wrong ones. "I don't think there was a start up west of the Mississippi that didn't reach out to me, and that was flattering," he said. "But I quickly realized that a lot of people just want your Rolodex and your name to put on announcements. When you spend 40 plus years building your credibility and your reputation, you have to be careful about how you use that." In the end, among other things, Mr. Meyer decided to join the board of a fast growing entertainment company (Activision) and take on something he never thought he would: He sits on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. "As it turns out, there is life outside Hollywood," he said with a laugh. For another former Hollywood warrior, Anne Sweeney, 59, who stepped down as president of the Disney ABC Television Group last year, her post corporate plans were quickly upended when her mother fell ill. Instead of throwing herself into a directing career, as she intended, Ms. Sweeney cared for her mother through her death in January. Not long after, Ms. Sweeney, already a Netflix board member, became a Mayo Clinic trustee. "I learned that a job is just a piece of you, it isn't all of you," she said. "So many times, especially in Hollywood, that distinction can get lost." Her advice when that happens? "You have to reclaim yourself, and you have to do it without worrying what other people think," she said. "We are more than other people's definitions of us." Nina Tassler, 59, who last year walked away from her job as president of CBS Entertainment, is moving as fast as ever, publishing a book ("What I Told My Daughter") and producing television shows, among other activities. Her advice: "It's not about starting a new business. It's about starting yourself." In other words, savor the joy of being "fully present" with your family, she said, and "do what you want to do, and not what you think you have to do" to cling to status. "I was so grateful for my time at CBS, but, let's be honest, these jobs are insane," she said. "I remember being at my daughter's volleyball tournament and not seeing her play because I was in the bathroom at the convention center the only quiet spot trying to negotiate a new contract with an actress. Insane!" How long did it take, though, for Ms. Tassler not to wake up and immediately check the overnight Nielsen ratings? "I still look," she said, a bit sheepishly. "Old habits die hard."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
The marquee auctions of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art in New York starting Monday are the first crunch moment of the year for the top end of the art market. Owners of big ticket paintings and sculptures regard these biannual sales as the moment to maximize prices . For Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips, this is also the moment to maximize revenues. Headline setting prices can create a wider perception that this opaque and unequal market is booming, even if demand slows for other less publicized businesses in the art world. This time around, the three houses' various evening and day auctions will include more than 2,000 lots estimated to raise at least 1.6 billion. The equivalent series last May grossed more than 2.8 billion, including post sale fees. Though next week's auctions don't contain an obvious 100 million masterpiece, dozens of works by trophy names such as Jeff Koons, Francis Bacon, Paul Cezanne and Jean Michel Basquiat have emerged from American estates. Soaring if volatile stock values have given both executors and collectors the confidence not only to release contemporary pieces for sale but also to take the risk of offering more of them without guaranteed minimum prices which reward the auction houses with a share of the profit if the bidding exceeds the minimum. (If owners turn down the guarantee, they take all the hammer price if it sells but get nothing if it doesn't.) The numbers of big ticket lots with guarantees are down at both Sotheby's and Christie's. President Trump's 2017 tax plan has created expectations that America's 1 percen t is flush with cash to spend on art. And yet earlier this month, Sotheby's, the only publicly traded company among the three major auction houses, reported a loss of 7.1 million for the first quarter, worse than the 6.5 million loss registered for the equivalent period last year. Over all, the company had net income of 108.6 million in 2018. In the accompanying conference call, Mike Goss, the chief financial officer at Sotheby's, described the New York sales as "all important" to the company, which has just opened more than 90,000 square feet of new exhibition space at its Upper East Side headquarters. Sotheby's, like Christie's and Phillips, will be looking to the American street artist and designer Brian Donnelly, known professionally as KAWS, to give their figures a boost. Drawing inspiration from cartoon characters including the Simpsons, the Smurfs and SpongeBob SquarePants, KAWS hasn't been taken particularly seriously by art critics. But his paintings are now popular with wealthy collectors. Last month in Hong Kong, one sold for an extraordinary 14.8 million, almost 20 times the low estimate. For the first time, all three houses will be including works by KAWS in their evening sales. Impressionist and modern art tends to yield few surprises at auction these days, now that most wealthy buyers prefer to purchase contemporary pieces. But spectacular results can still be achieved for works that have crossover appeal to the two collecting camps. Amedeo Modigliani is one of the few modern artists whose auction prices have soared in recent years. In 2015, one of his celebrated paintings of nudes sold for 170.4 million. There has also been a major financial re evaluation of his hauntingly primitive stone sculptures. Back in 2010 in Paris, one of the 25 or so "Tetes" he carved in the 1910s soared to 52.3 million, more than 10 times the presale low estimate. Another from the series sold for 70.7 million in 2014. Christie's will be offering a limestone "Tete," dating from about 1911 12, for at least 30 million. This work is certain to sell, courtesy of a guaranteed minimum price, but will it fly like the others? On Tuesday, Sotheby's will offer a sumptuous 1890 canvas from Monet's "Meules" (Grainstacks) series , the Impressionist painter's first systematic attempt to evoke the same motif in different atmospheric conditions. He produced 25 paintings of the subject, and this is one of just eight left in private hands. Presumably encouraged to sell by the 81.4 million achieved in 2016 for another from the series, the anonymous owner has been guaranteed a minimum price of at least 55 million. The seller bought the painting at auction in 1986 for 2.5 million, according to Sotheby's. The auction market for the work of Mr. Koons is no longer as hot as it was, but this enigmatic sculpture inspired by a child's shiny balloon was first exhibited at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 1986 and is widely regarded as the artist's master work. Made in an edition of three plus one artist's proof, the example at Christie's is the last left in private hands. Unusually for such a high value lot, "Rabbit" is being offered (at least at the time of writing) without a guaranteed minimum but is expected to sell for at least 50 million . The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is the seller of the most highly valued work at Sotheby's auction of contemporary art on Thursday night. SFMoMA has deaccessioned Rothko's 1960 maroon, red, white and gray abstract work to raise acquisition funds to "enhance its contemporary holdings" and "address art historical gaps in order to push boundaries and embrace fresh ideas," according to the museum's director, Neal Benezra. The museum is hoping to raise at least 35 million from the sale. Some critics have suggested that if a museum wants to more broadly diversify its collection say, for artists of color or women it could ask trustees for help. This museum's collection, which contains five other Rothko paintings, has been criticized for a preponderance of white, male, blue chip artists.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
About one fifth of Janet Dupree's monthly Social Security payment was being withheld to repay student loans she took out in the 1970s. JANET LEE DUPREE, 72, was surprised when she received her first Social Security benefits seven years ago. About one fifth of her monthly payment was being withheld and she called the federal government to find out why. The woman, who is from Citra, Fla., discovered that the deduction from her benefits was to repay 3,000 in loans she took out in the early 1970s to pay for her undergraduate degree. "I didn't pay it back, and I'm not saying I shouldn't," she said. "I was an alcoholic, and later diagnosed with H.I.V., but I've turned my life around. I've been paying some of the loan back but that never seems to lower the amount, which is now 15,000 because of interest. "I don't know if I can ever pay it back." She is among an estimated two million Americans age 60 and older who are in debt from unpaid student loans, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Its August "Household Debt and Credit Report" said the number of aging Americans with outstanding student loans had almost tripled from about 700,000 in 2005, whether from long ago loans for their own educations or more recent borrowing to pay for college degrees for family members. The debt among older people is up substantially, to 43 billion from 8 billion in 2005, according to the report, which is based on data from Equifax, the credit reporting agency. As of July 31, money was being deducted from Social Security payments to almost 140,000 individuals to pay down their outstanding student loans, according to Treasury Department data. That is up from just under 38,000 people in 2004. Over the decade, the amounts withheld more than tripled, to nearly 101 million for the first seven months of this year from over 32 million in 2004. While older debtors account for a small fraction of student loan borrowers, who have accumulated nearly 1 trillion in such debt, the effect of owing a constantly ballooning amount of debt but having a fixed income can be onerous, said Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging. "Those in default on their loans can see their Social Security checks garnished, leaving them with retirement income that leaves them well below the poverty line," he said at a committee hearing this week to examine the issue. "Some may think of student loan debt as a young person's problem," he said, "but, as it turns out, that is increasingly not the case." That is the problem that Rosemary Anderson, 57, described to the committee. The woman, who is from Watsonville, Calif., has a home mortgage that is under water, as well as health and other problems, and 64,000 in unpaid student loans. She borrowed the money in her 30s to fund her bachelor's and master's degrees, but fell behind on her student loan payments eight years ago. As a result of compound interest, her debt has risen to 126,000. With her 526 monthly payment, at an 8.25 percent rate, she estimates that she "will be 81" by the time it is paid, and will have laid out 87,487 more than she originally borrowed. Mrs. Dupree, in a telephone interview, said she, too, needed some relief. As a part time substance abuse counselor for a nonprofit based in Ocala, she said she could barely afford the 50 each month that she negotiated with the federal government as payment for her growing debt. She is supporting a measure introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and a committee member, that would allow people who borrowed money for education before July 2013 to refinance at current, lower interest rates. A person who took out an unsubsidized loan before July of last year "is locked into an interest rate of nearly 7 percent and older loans run 8 percent to 9 percent and even higher," Ms. Warren said. The measure would lower the interest rate to 3.86 percent for undergraduate loans and a little higher for graduate and parent loans. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' But the future of the bill is unclear. It was stalled in the Senate in June by Republican senators, like Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, who said college students didn't need a taxpayer subsidy to help pay off a student loan. "They need a good job." The measure would help 25 million people refinance their student loans, but impose a tax increase on people making over 1 million which Senator Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, the majority leader, labeled a "tax increase bill styled as a student loan bill." Adam Brandon, executive vice president of the conservative organization FreedomWorks, which opposed Senator Warren's bill, said such legislation "only makes the current student loan bubble worse by continuing to encourage people to take out more loans than they can afford. "The market needs to work out who can afford these loans. We shouldn't be trying to game the market and have people end up with so much debt they can't afford their car payments." Even though the number of retiree debtors is small, 1,000 deducted from their Social Security payments "can make a real difference for affected senior citizens or disabled adults surviving on Social Security," said Sandy Baum, a professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development, and a researcher at the Urban Institute. For most beneficiaries, she said, "the average monthly payment of 1,200 is the primary source of income." While the government should be holding student borrowers to account for their debt, "and there may be some who just decide not to pay," she said "most are people who are not earning money so it doesn't make sense to ask them to pay." As the ranks of retirees grow, more attention is being focused on the education debt incurred by the next group of people approaching retirement, those 50 to 64 years old. A 2013 AARP study of middle class families found that aging households were carrying increasing amounts of debt. While mortgages account for most of that debt, education debt levels have been rising for the preretiree group, noted Lori A. Trawinski, a director at the AARP Public Policy Institute. "As of 2010, 11 percent of preretiree families had education debt with an average balance of 28,000. Growing debt burdens pose a threat to financial security of Americans approaching retirement, since increasing debt threatens their ability to save for retirement or to accumulate other assets, and may end up leading them to delay retirement," she said. The Government Accountability Office warned this week about the growth of educational debt among seniors. It released a report that relied on different data from that used by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but nonetheless painted an ominous picture of lingering debt burden. "As the baby boomers continue to move into retirement, the number of older Americans with defaulted loans will only continue to increase," Charles A. Jeszeck, the G.A.O. director of education, work force and income security, testified at the hearing. "This creates the potential for an unpleasant surprises for some, as their benefits are offset and they face the possibility of a less secure retirement." More than 80 percent of the outstanding balances are from seniors who financed their own education, the G.A.O. report concluded, and only 18 percent were attributed to loans used to finance the studies of a spouse, child or grandchild. But the default rate for these loans is 31 percent a rate that is double that of the default rate for loans taken out by borrowers between the ages of 25 and 49 years old, according to agency data. "Such debt reduces net worth and income and can erode retirement security," Mr. Jeszeck said. "The effect of rising debt can be more profound for those who have accumulated few or no financial assets." And such student loan debt "can be especially problematic because unlike other types of debt, it generally cannot be discharged in bankruptcy," he added. As a result of unpaid student debt, Social Security payments can be reduced to 750 a month, which is a floor Congress set in 1998. Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, and a member of the committee on aging, said she was planning to introduce a measure to adjust the amount for inflation "to make sure garnishment does not force seniors into poverty." For people like Ms. Anderson, help cannot come too soon. "I incurred this debt to improve my life," she told the committee, "but the debt has become my undoing."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Your Money
|
Rock music is far from the center of the pop music zeitgeist in 2018, but it's possible that the state of pop music or at least, the industry of pop music demands rock stars, and even rock "bands," while not worrying much about whether the music slotted into those categories would be recognizable as rock to fans of one or two generations ago. This theory is borne out by the success of acts like Twenty One Pilots and the 1975, which are, broadly speaking, advertised as rock bands, and whose music appears on the Billboard rock charts, but whose albums are widely diverse, taking in electronic music, R B, hip hop and reggae. And it is supported by the unlikely rise of Greta Van Fleet, the exception that proves the rule: a band that closely traces Led Zeppelin and seemingly exists only as an answer to cries that no true rock bands exist anymore. Is rock a sound, or a mood or a retail category? What will it take for mainstream rock to be something other than the preserve of white men? Why are the Billboard rock charts so erratic, lumping together acts with very little in common?
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
Across the city this summer, works that artists conceived for public spaces are turning up like "Estructuras Monumentales," five large scale sculptures that Carmen Herrera started making in the 1960s that will be on view at City Hall Park from July 11 through Nov. 8. Other artists, like Leonardo Drew, have had to do more fine tuning. Mr. Drew recently crossed over into public art with "City in the Grass," an installation he designed (and redesigned) with Madison Square Park in mind. Sometimes the site of an artist's work really amplifies the work itself . This is especially true of Tanda Francis's "Adorn Me." Fort Greene Park is the socioeconomic and racial dividing line of its neighborhood, with one side reflecting whiteness and affluence far more than the other. Ms. Francis installed her bust featuring three adjoining African faces where it would "speak directly to the African American community, which often goes unrepresented in public art," she wrote on her website. Impossible to miss at the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Washington Park, Ms. Francis's piece is partially covered in African tribal markings, and its three sets of braids rise into a chandelier like headdress. Through July 19. Marketing signs for newly built apartment buildings are everywhere around Court Square Park in Long Island City, along with construction cranes and scaffolding, signaling that more units are on the way. Amid all this is Matt Keegan's "what was what is." An off site installation for the SculptureCenter, it consists of a rectangular glass box with one mirrored side. A horizontal scroll reads, "For a long time this neighborhood was about what will be, and now I think it's about what is." The quotation, from a developer, appeared in a 2017 New York Times article about the area's "skyward" development, and exemplifies how real estate professionals sometimes see the city as being in service to new development . Through Aug. 18. This year, the Dutch sculptor Mark Manders has taken over the Public Art Fund's inaugural outdoor exhibition site, Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the southeast edge of Central Park. Titled "Tilted Head," his piece is just that: a large head resting on its side. Surface cracks and depressions suggest it is made of clay when, in fact, it's cast bronze. "All my works look like somebody worked on it and just left," Mr. Manders said in a video about his process. "Tilted Head" resembles a massive, abandoned model that people could consider a stand in for the real thing. Through Sept. 1 at 60th Street and Fifth Avenue. On the High Line , "En Plein Air" (the French phrase for "in the open air") enlists eight artists to reconsider the tradition of outdoor painting. In "Five Conversations," for example, the recent Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid has painted portraits of fashionable black women on five reclaimed wooden doors the old, paneled kind adding subtle dimensions to each of them. Ms. Himid also integrated the doors' accessories into her "canvases." A round door knocker doubles as a hoop earring, a doorknob as a ring. Ms. Himid not only reimagines the process of "en plein air" painting, but also the subjects typically depicted within them. Through March 2020. To get a look at Simone Leigh's sculptural work, you could visit her exhibition, "Loophole of Retreat," at the Guggenheim, or wander over to the Spur, the newest addition to the High Line. Although, to say that someone must be on the High Line to get a glimpse is a bit misleading. Traveling north on 10th Avenue toward 30th Street, you'd have to be daydreaming not to spot Ms. Leigh's "Brick House," a 16 foot bust of a black woman with cornrow braids and a torso resembling a type of African clay house. Created as the inaugural commission for the High Line Plinth, a focal point of the Spur, the work is distinguished by its imposing height. But if you mosey up to the Spur itself, you'll notice the figure's blotted out eyes, which more effectively position her as someone to be seen, not simply looked at. Through Sept. 2020. For Pride Month, the Public Art Fund has reinstalled a billboard that the conceptual artist Felix Gonzalez Torres first presented at this exact location in 1989, nearly seven years before his death from complications related to AIDS. One of his "date pieces," "Untitled" lists quintessential moments in the fight for gay rights in stark white print against a black background. Torres tried to create "an architectural sign of being, a monument for a community that has been 'historically invisible,'" he once said. Through June 30 at Christopher Street and Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. For a commission organized by the Public Art Initiative of the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance, Jose Carlos Casado references black female subjectivity in "I Don't Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Ah Me ... " The work, situated near Madison Avenue and 123rd Street in Harlem, contextualizes how Mr. Casado felt after reading Maya Angelou's seminal memoir "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." Working with archival printed aluminum pieces, he made an amorphous, multicolored tower (one that becomes interactive with an augmented reality app), and placed it within a 14 foot purple cage that, incidentally, wild birds use as a temporary perch. On the southern end of the park, Kim Dacres and Daniel A. Matthews have installed a black female bust, "Peaceful Perch," near 120th Street and Fifth Avenue. Repurposing motorcycle tires, Ms. Dacres contorted this dark, textured material, contouring the figure from its folds and protrusions. Mr. Matthews helped fabricate the base, and situate it on the curved lawn above the park's main path. Through Sept. 30. Sarah E. Brook wants people to feel a little disoriented when they're looking at "Viewfinding," her sculpture installation in Riverside Park South. Ms. Brook positioned five tall wooden structures in a row, each containing thin, brightly colored panels that reflect the light most dramatically at sunrise and sunset. For the piece, Ms. Brook had an open call for queer identified poets. Her final selections 26 in all are engraved on acrylic plates that have been neatly placed on a bench at the structure's base. The engravings are meant to amplify queer voices and, paired with the vertical installation, explore "how vastness can dismantle limiting narratives of being," she wrote on her website. (On Saturday, June 22, the artist will host a multidisciplinary queer arts festival called Alternative Pride at "Viewfinding.") Through Aug. 22 at 67th Street. The plot at the corner of Intervale Avenue and Kelly Street in the South Bronx has been many things over the years. In 1982, when John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres scaled its adjacent wall to mount "Banana Kelly Double Dutch" molds of four local girls in a tableau of the game it was a small park. Mr. Ahearn and Mr. Torres have restored and reinstalled the work twice in the intervening years, first in 1986 and then in 2017, when Mr. Ahearn and Mr. Torres saw an opportunity to freshen it up after hearing the site was set for redevelopment. Last summer the girls, glistening like new, were returned to their original home which now overlooks the parking lot of a nursing home. Open indefinitely.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
Easter Island is often described as "mysterious" and "mystical." That outsider perspective is reflected in archival TV segments included in "Eating Up Easter," a documentary about the very real, terrestrial, socio economic concerns of the island locally known as Rapa Nui, which sits in the Pacific Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from mainland Chile. While its megalithic moai statues have made Rapa Nui a vacation attraction, this film (now streaming via Music Box) provides a more microcosmic insight from residents, who talk about how tourism and modernization are ruining their ancestral land.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. '17 BORDER CROSSINGS' at New York Theater Workshop (previews start on April 11; opens on April 15). Get your visa approved and your passport stamped as this exploration of migration by the playwright and performer Thaddeus Phillips arrives at New York Theater Workshop. Phillips, who heads Philadelphia's Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, twines memories of his own travels with more fraught journeys. 212 460 5475, nytw.org 'MRS. MURRAY'S MENAGERIE' at Greenwich House Theater (in previews; opens on April 8). The Mad Ones, creators of some of the richest and most carefully observed devised theater, make a show about making a show. This latest play centers on a 1970s children's television program, with Phillip James Brannon, Brad Heberlee, Carmen M. Herlihy and January LaVoy joining Mad Ones regulars. Lila Neugebauer directs. arsnovanyc.com 'NORMA JEANE BAKER OF TROY' at the Shed (previews start on April 6; opens on April 9). The face that launched a thousand ships and the body that broke millions of hearts meet in Anne Carson's new play. A loose adaptation of Euripides's "Helen," which argues that Helen never even went to Troy, it stars Renee Fleming and Ben Whishaw. Directed by Katie Mitchell, it inaugurates the Shed. theshed.org
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Theater
|
In an immediate blow to the N.B.A.'s attempt to stage a season without the protection of a restricted access bubble, league officials were forced to postpone the Houston Rockets' season opener on Wednesday night against the Oklahoma City Thunder when the Rockets were unable to field the required minimum of eight players in uniform. On just the second night of the 2020 21 season, an announcement that the game would be postponed "in accordance with the league's health and safety protocols" came less than three hours before the game's scheduled tipoff in Houston. Three Rockets players, according to the league, had coronavirus tests that were either positive or inconclusive, leading to the placement of four other Rockets players in quarantine after contact tracing. In addition, one other Rocket (Chris Clemons) is injured and the All Star James Harden was prevented from playing because of what the league termed "a violation" of its health and safety guidelines. The league later fined Harden 50,000 for attending "a private indoor party" on Monday; video began to circulate this week showing him at an indoor venue without a mask. The Rockets were one of six teams in the 30 team N.B.A. scheduled to allow reduced capacity crowds into their buildings at the start of the season, which comes as the coronavirus wreaks its worst havoc yet across the United States. Commissioner Adam Silver said in a series of interviews on Monday that the N.B.A. was anticipating "bumps in the road along the way," but being forced to order a postponement so soon illuminated the various complications it faces. Unlike the N.F.L. and college football, which have been besieged by their own coronavirus setbacks, the N.B.A. is trying to operate a contact sport played entirely indoors outside of a bubble with mere 17 player rosters and frequent travel amid an unyielding pandemic. No determination has been made about the Rockets' next game: Saturday night at Portland. As it became apparent in the hours leading to tipoff that Wednesday's game was in jeopardy, Oklahoma City stayed at its Houston hotel rather than taking buses to the Toyota Center, and the team was scheduled to fly home Wednesday night. The Thunder's next game is scheduled for Saturday at Charlotte. The disgruntled Harden, who for weeks has been pushing behind the scenes for a trade out of Houston, had confirmed earlier Wednesday in a since deleted Instagram post that he recently attended an "event" to support a friend. The league's nearly 160 pages of health and safety guidelines prohibit players from going to bars, lounges or clubs this season, as well as from using public transportation and from attending indoor gatherings of more than 15 people. Houston's sudden shortage of players on Wednesday, however, stemmed largely from coronavirus concerns separate from those surrounding Harden. ESPN reported that the veterans John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins and the rookie Kenyon Martin Jr. had gathered at an apartment away from the team's facilities for haircuts. Wall and Cousins tested negative for the coronavirus, ESPN said, but Houston did not have eight players available for what was to be the team's first game with Stephen Silas as its head coach. Harden appeared to be in violation of the league's Covid 19 protocols in early December, when, as The New York Times first reported, he left the Houston area to travel to Atlanta to celebrate the birthday of the rapper Lil Baby. Harden was subsequently photographed with Lil Baby in Las Vegas, but he was not punished in part because he had not yet officially reported to the Rockets. Harden eventually joined the team on Dec. 8, after missing two days of team practices, and was then required to test negative for the coronavirus on six consecutive days before he was cleared to join Houston's practices. "One thing after another," Harden wrote on Instagram before deleting the post. "I went to show love to my homegirl at her event (not a strip club) because she is becoming a boss and putting her people in position of success and now it's a problem. Everyday it's something different. No matter how many times people try to drag my name under you can't. The real always end on top." The Rockets have been engulfed in tumult since their second round playoff exit in the N.B.A. bubble at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla. Coach Mike D'Antoni and General Manager Daryl Morey left their posts soon thereafter, and Harden began pushing for a trade after Houston did not hire Tyronn Lue as its new coach. Lue was hired instead by the Los Angeles Clippers. Houston hired Silas, and both Harden and Russell Westbrook requested trades. Westbrook was traded to Washington for Wall and a first round draft pick on Dec. 2. Harden has urged Houston to trade him to the Nets or to Philadelphia which hired Morey as its new president of basketball operations less than two weeks after he left the Rockets but no deal has materialized despite Houston's talks with numerous teams. "James is a great player in this league, but he's also a player under contract," Silver said in a teleconference on Monday with reporters. "There are responsibilities that come with agreeing to a long term contract. And he's very well aware of that."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Henry Chalfant at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, where his first United States retrospective is being exhibited. When Henry Chalfant arrived in New York City from suburban Pittsburgh in 1973, as an aspiring sculptor, he found a place teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. This was "Ford to City: Drop Dead" New York. But amid the turmoil a new form of art making was taking shape one that took up space where it could, which was mostly everywhere. As a typographical language, graffiti was still raw, a new kind of American expressionism rooted in the volatility of street life, largely done by kids living on the city's margins. The urgent scrawls of names, crowding one another for visual dominance, was a form of branding as self determination. Within a few years, styles became increasingly baroque, entire flanks of subway cars sheathed in florid top down murals, hurtling the city's overlooked periphery into its pulsing center. Mr. Chalfant, now 79, credits one such piece, a Lee Quinones burner from 1977, for permanently shifting his attention. "I came up to the Bronx, and I saw two cars painted by Lee and the Fabulous Five crew," Mr. Chalfant said in a recent interview. "And I thought, Oh my god, I have to get that." And he did, though it took 10 pictures. "From there I knew I was going to see this out," he added. " I found the contrast between what I was doing as a solitary studio artist and what I clearly needed in my life, which was more engagement in the world, and this is how I found it." For the next seven years, Mr. Chalfant photographed the trains. And by the time he stopped shooting, around 1984, he had amassed a body of work considered to be the definitive document of graffiti culture in New York. Now those photographs are the subject of the exhibition "Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977 1987," at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. His train panoramas, some blown up to train car size, have been assembled here alongside his street photography of park jams and wall works, and a collection of archives and black books that recreate his SoHo studio. It's an apt homecoming for Mr. Chalfant's first United States retrospective the site of much of New York graffiti's innovation, where many graffiti artists lived and where the bulk of Mr. Chalfant's imagery was produced. The show's title, "Art vs. Transit," is a reference to the open hostility of the city's officials toward what they deemed to be vandalism as well as the sometimes combative stance graffiti writers took among themselves. Graffiti's parameters developed with serious stakes, a kind of one upmanship expressed through art. It was also the original title, Mr. Chalfant said, of his influential 1984 photography book, "Subway Art," which he published with Martha Cooper, who was also documenting the early stages of hip hop culture from street level. Up to that point, galleries had expressed only a trickling interest in graffiti art even less in the photography of it. "It was hard for us to get the book published," Mr. Chalfant recalled at the museum recently. "We both tried separately and competed, and failed, and tried together and failed. We went to all these publishers and none were interested. They said, 'Well, there's been one,' referring to the one in 1974 "The Faith of Graffiti" that Norman Mailer wrote the introduction to. So we went to Europe and right away Thames Hudson said this is wonderful." As an art form, graffiti was, and in many ways remains, better received in Europe. Mr. Quinones had his first gallery exhibition, in 1979, in Rome. "Subway Art," along with the 1984 PBS documentary "Style Wars," which Mr. Chalfant produced with Tony Silver, is credited with propelling graffiti's global reach. It's not uncommon, in Barcelona or Berlin or Copenhagen, to see trains adorned with freshly painted pieces. The Bronx show was first exhibited in 2018 in Madrid, conceived by the Spanish graffiti artist SUSO33, who has called Mr. Chalfant "the most important ambassador of graffiti culture in the world." During its run, over a thousand people visited it every day. "I think Europe has always been receptive to American popular culture in general, and to American art forms very enthusiastically," Mr. Chalfant said. "African American writers and artists went there and discovered the racial atmosphere was different, and they felt more comfortable. I know a number of Americans who followed in their footsteps: Sharp, Jon One, Core. Europeans in general consider art a profession like any other, where Americans still have a kind of romantic idea about it." To make his pictures, Mr. Chalfant would find a perch on the outdoor subway platforms that afforded him the best light, usually Intervale Avenue and East Tremont on the 2 and 5 lines. He would shoot the painted cars as they shuttled past, taking multiple exposures in rapid succession and later collaging them to create perfect panoramic records. He approached his subject anthropologically, stalking the uptown platforms in the mornings and the downtown side in the afternoons, sometimes waiting hours for a particular train to loop around. Mr. Chalfant's photography froze the trains in place, but not the kinetic energy of the art. By isolating each work, he confirmed its individualism. Graffiti writers appreciated this, and Mr. Chalfant befriended many of them, eventually. He may have felt "alienated from my own privileged, white life in a country club community outside Pittsburgh," Mr. Chalfant said, but he was still viewed as an outsider by the mostly black and Latin graffiti artists in the Bronx. "We didn't really know what to make of him, if he was a police officer or why anyone else would be interested in documenting the work we were doing," said Chris Ellis, the graffiti artist who works as Daze. He was 17 when he met Mr. Chalfant in 1979. "He invited us to his studio and he had these portfolios of photos. It was really incredible for us to see, in 35 millimeter format , our work." Soon, writers began to call Mr. Chalfant the night they finished a piece so he would know where to look come morning.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
Depersonalization is a dissociative disorder characterized by a sense of observing one's self from outside one's body. Those with the condition often report an experience akin to watching yourself in a movie. My 86 year old stepfather, Chuckie O'Brien, does not suffer from depersonalization. But for more than half his life, 44 years, he has watched himself portrayed in news articles, books and motion pictures most recently, in Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman" as someone he is not. The effect on his life has been devastating. Chuckie was the most intimate associate of Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters union leader who famously disappeared from a suburban Detroit parking lot on July 30, 1975. Within two weeks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced its belief, based on circumstantial evidence, that Chuckie had abducted Mr. Hoffa from the parking lot through "force and violence." Ever since, Chuckie's involvement in the crime has been widely repeated and broadly accepted. The charge ruined his life. The government pursued him aggressively and often leaked falsehoods to the press to pressure him into cooperating. He was ostracized in the Teamsters union and lost many friends. And worst of all, at least to Chuckie, the allegation deeply stained his honor. This is all tragic because the conventional wisdom about Chuckie is false. For decades, the F.B.I. has not suspected him of involvement in the disappearance. The circumstantial case against Chuckie fell apart long ago, and his known whereabouts on the fateful day make it practically impossible that he picked up Mr. Hoffa. Unfortunately, the government never made this information public. And so Chuckie's innocence in one of the most notorious crimes of the 20th century remains mostly hidden, his guilt remains publicly presumed, his honor remains soiled. It has been a bizarre experience, and a grim one, for Chuckie to read so many made up things about himself over so many decades and not be able to do anything about it. "Everybody that's written these books, they all surmise what happened," he once explained to me. "They have no facts on them, they have no truth on them. The book gets printed and it goes out and they sell them, and that's it." And now, to top it off, comes "The Irishman," the latest and by far the greatest depiction of the false charge against my stepfather. Chuckie and I recently spoke about the film in Boca Raton, Fla., where he lives with my mother. He is not well physically. But his mind and his spirit are still sharp. And he has opinions about the movie. Chuckie had long dreaded the release of the film. It is based on a book, "I Heard You Paint Houses," that depicts the Teamsters official Frank Sheeran as Mr. Hoffa's murderer and weaves Mr. Sheeran's tale into the publicly known elements of the early F.B.I. theory of the case, including Chuckie's alleged role in picking up Mr. Hoffa. Chuckie worried that Scorsese's film would give his supposed involvement in the Hoffa disappearance a reality in popular culture that the prior books, headlines and movies did not. It turned out to be worse than he feared. In "The Irishman," Chuckie is played by Jesse Plemons. On the surface, the film tracks reality. There really were violent Teamsters union officials named Frank Sheeran (played by Robert De Niro) and Anthony Provenzano (Stephen Graham) and an eastern Pennsylvania crime boss named Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). Mr. Hoffa (Al Pacino) really did act self destructively toward the mob in the mid 1970s as he tried but failed to regain control of his union. And the mob really did organize to knock him off. But beyond these surface truths, and despite the "true crime" feel, the movie is high fiction. "One of the greatest fake movies I ever saw," Chuckie told me. For starters, while no one knows for sure how or by whom Mr. Hoffa was killed, we do know that it was not done in the way it is portrayed in the movie. Chuckie did not pick up Mr. Hoffa on July 30, 1975. And as I have written elsewhere, Frank Sheeran was almost certainly not in Detroit that day, and his implausible tale is belied by many other known facts. And yet, as Chuckie expected, the fiction has become reality for the millions who have watched the film. Almost all of the dozens of people I have spoken to about the movie assume it is true including that Chuckie drove a car with Mr. Sheeran in it to pick up Mr. Hoffa, and then delivered him to a house where Mr. Sheeran shot Mr. Hoffa. Even more humiliating for Chuckie, and unexpectedly so, was the movie's portrayal of Mr. Sheeran's closeness to Mr. Hoffa as his right hand man during trials, as his troubleshooter in the office and as his intimate companion in union halls and in the evenings on the road. Mr. Sheeran, whom Chuckie knew, did none of those things. He ran a Delaware Teamsters local and Mr. Hoffa had business dealings with him over the years, but the two men were not nearly as tight as the movie portrays. "The Irishman was never that close to Hoffa," Chuckie told me. "He was a drunk, he couldn't run a union, he got thrown out finally, and the only thing he would do was set a building on fire now and then." What Mr. Scorsese did, in effect, was to place Mr. Sheeran in Chuckie's role in Mr. Hoffa's life. It was Chuckie, not Mr. Sheeran, who for decades served as Mr. Hoffa's "intimate companion, driver, bodyguard and special troubleshooter," as the labor journalist Victor Riesel noted in the 1960s. Chuckie expected to be "tagged with the disappearance" in the movie, he told me. He did not expect Mr. Scorsese to appropriate his close relationship with Hoffa the precious blood, sweat, tears and joy of a three decade father son relationship, the apex of Chuckie's life and give it to Mr. Sheeran for all the world to see and believe. In the course of writing a book about my stepfather and Jimmy Hoffa, I discovered years of illegal F.B.I. surveillance recordings, through undisclosed microphone bugs, that listened in on Chuckie's relationships with his mother, Sylvia; Hoffa's wife, Josephine; several mob figures; and indirectly, Mr. Hoffa. Many of the recorded conversations were sordid or embarrassing. When the government leaked some of the transcripts in 1976, in an effort to pressure Chuckie and others, it not only violated his privacy; it also deprived him of the power to define and shape these relationships for himself and the world. Mr. Scorsese has done something similar not by listening in illegally and publishing humiliating truths, as the F.B.I. did, but by usurping Chuckie's relationship with Mr. Hoffa, giving it to someone else and then broadcasting the untruth. The effect on Chuckie in both instances is the same. "I had no control," he told me during our recent conversation. His control over his life, and the presentation of his life to the world, was snatched from him in ways he can never reverse. "The Irishman" is not the only film to depict Chuckie's life. The character Tom Hagen in "The Godfather" was a "rough model on a guy called O'Brien in Detroit who was like a son to Jimmy Hoffa," according to Mario Puzo, who wrote the book on which that film was based. In "Absence of Malice," Paul Newman's character, Michael Gallagher, who was based in part on Chuckie, was falsely accused by the feds of involvement in the disappearance of a union official. And in the 1992 film "Hoffa," Danny DeVito played Mr. Hoffa's sidekick, Bobby Ciaro, a composite character based largely on Chuckie. These movies depart in significant ways from Chuckie's life, but none was as painful for him to watch as "The Irishman." Chuckie has grown resigned to the lies about his life over the years. "Mr. Hoffa always taught me, you can't change what they print," he told me. "Put it on the side and keep going forward." This is easier said than done, he also acknowledged. "It hurts, a lot, because you're in the ring and getting the snot kicked out of you and you cannot fight back." But Chuckie's portrayal in "The Irishman" as a "dim jackass" driving Mr. Hoffa to his death made him livid. "To see this happen, it just makes me so mad," he told me. "I'd like to get hold of that Scorsese and choke him like a chicken. And then after I get through with him, I'd grab that other pipsqueak, the guy who played the Irishman." Chuckie is too frail for this to be a threat, and indeed he clearly did not mean it as a threat. It is an end of life cri de coeur by a man whose being has been enveloped, and destroyed, by demeaning public untruths that he lacked power to rectify. "Here's the way I look at movies," Chuckie said, near the end of our conversation, after he had calmed down. "Hollywood could turn a monkey into a peanut. That's their business. They don't care about the truth. It's entertainment. The guy who bought the ticket isn't going to write a letter complaining about the truth if he is fascinated by the movie." Mr. Scorsese basically agrees. "I don't really care about that," he recently said when asked about the truth of his portrayal of Mr. Hoffa's death. "The point is, it's not about the facts." For him, the film is about "the world" his characters inhabit and "the way they behave." Mr. Scorsese and Chuckie are right. Films grounded in history often take license with the facts to serve the larger narrative drama. It is a convention of the genre. But in the case of "The Irishman," the convention serves as the capstone to my stepfather's 44 year humiliation. Jack Goldsmith ( jacklgoldsmith) is a law professor at Harvard and the author of "In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth." 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
|
In the rough, dexterous assemblages of the Los Angeles artist Noah Purifoy (1917 2004), a Duchampian embrace of found objects fused with a political activism that went out of the gallery and extended to a decade in California government. He was the subject of an impassioned posthumous retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2015; his expansive Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum, with more than 100 sculptures made from junk materials, draws pilgrims to the Mojave Desert. Yet there has never been a Purifoy exhibition on the East Coast before this very welcome outing at Tilton, which includes a baker's dozen of his later, mostly wall mounted constructions. Purifoy was born in Alabama and went to Los Angeles in his late 30s, becoming the first African American to enroll at the Chouinard Arts Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts). He turned decisively to assemblage after the Watts rebellion of 1965, making use of debris from the riots; later he stepped back from art for a decade and worked for a California state agency and continued working with found materials in Joshua Tree, where he moved in 1989 and made nearly all the works in this show. Some of the wall mounted works here consist almost wholly of found objects. Two assemblages from 1989 called "Rags and Old Iron (After Nina Simone)," bristling yet carefully balanced, graft together a tennis racket, frayed scraps of fabric, dangling beads and a pitchfork. Their part by part construction takes inspiration as freely from central African sculpture traditions as from Dada, as much from the history of jazz as the Nouveau Realisme of Jean Tinguely and Arman. Other assemblages here have more finely worked wooden pieces. In "Black, Brown and Beige (After Duke Ellington)" (1989), combs and spindles and scraps of wicker nestle in round edge wood cartouches that recall a disassembled piano. Spend some time looking closely at "Access" (1993). It's loaded, nearly overloaded, with a pair of faucets, busted hubcaps, worn sandals and the business end of a spade, that last being one of several elements with a racial overtone. It is so jam packed it seems it could topple. Keeping it together, making it endure, was the effort of a lifetime's work in which art and advocacy were one and history was a junkyard ripe for gleaning. JASON FARAGO "Revolution is in the air," wrote the Danish composer and artist Henning Christiansen (1932 2008) in a 1969 essay addressed to the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, reprinted in a catalog viewable in his show, "Freedom Is Around the Corner," at Blank Forms. "The vibrations of the youth revolution," he wrote, "have spread into debate on art, literature and music, with a massive politicization of attitudes as a result." Mr. Christiansen, who was associated with the '60s Fluxus movement, channeled that sense of revolution into experimental music made with axes and sledgehammers, as well as radical scores, sculptures, collages and films. You can see and hear all of these in this rich and quirky sampling from more than 50 years of his oeuvre. An illuminated green plastic sculpture with a pitched roof stands in the center of the space. The words "Poetical Economy" are painted on its side, proposing Mr. Christiansen's preferred form of exchange. Sock sculptures on the wall resemble ecstatic figures; painted shoes strung with bells repurpose mundane objects. A black and white film featuring shirtless men slathered with mud suggests a return to some primal state. A grid of album covers near the entrance attests to Mr. Christiansen's commitment to altering the landscape of sound and experimental music, shifting performance away from what he called the "usual shut up and listen concert." A poster for a 1985 show at the zoo in Rome exemplifies his expanded approach and audience. After all, the revolution needs to be both inward and outward, he wrote to Stockhausen, with human beings becoming more "accommodating and flexible and less authoritarian, and you must of course also demand that their societies do the same." MARTHA SCHWENDENER After seeing MoMA's Charles White retrospective (which earned a rave from Holland Cotter), you'll want to head to Chelsea for "Truth and Beauty: Charles White and His Circle" at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. Along with more of this midcentury master's paintings, oil washes and gorgeous drawings, "Truth and Beauty" includes a generous selection of work by contemporaries and successors of White (1918 79) who have also explored blackness as an abstract quality or condition through sensitive depictions of distinct individuals. In White's sepia toned, oil and graphite drawing of the singer and activist Paul Robeson, from 1973, the subject's head is placed in the bottom third of a circular panel. Though Robeson looks up into a cloud of dark brush strokes, the way he's lit with highlights on cheeks, nose and forehead suggests that the cloud itself is a source of light. A charged use of monochrome is even more striking in "Let the Light Enter," a tall and narrow 1961 portrait of a young woman that hangs next to a stunning mixed media painting by Kerry James Marshall, who studied with White. White's overall composition is so dark that the unlit side of the woman's body isn't so much shadowed as erased. But his modeling and modulating hues are so subtle that, despite this annihilating weight of color, she remains unmistakable. The flatter and more uniform black of the female nude in Mr. Marshall's "You Must Suffer if You Want to be Beautiful," by contrast, pushes the color's political subtext right to the front. "I Been Rebuked I Been Scorned (Solid as a Rock)," from 1954, shows an older woman with an upward tilted gaze resting two enormous fists in her lap. The density of White's charcoal mark gives the figure an indubitable physical presence, while its softness gives that presence a spiritual quality. The formal similarity of skin, shadow and background means that all three share an implication of unknown depths, which is what gives the portrait its distinctive humanity. WILL HEINRICH In the wake of a recent United Nations report that says the coral reefs may die off as soon as 2040, traveling to Storm King Art Center to see an exhibition about climate change may not sound like fun. Yet "Indicators," which is spread throughout the sculpture park, is more of a prompt than a warning. The 17 artists and collectives in this show favor conceptualism and speculation over the urge to preach. One exception of sorts is Justin Brice Guariglia's "We Are the Asteroid" (2018), a highway message sign that broadcasts pithy sayings like its title. It's a cousin in cleverness to "General Assembly" (2018), an installation by the collective Dear Climate that consists of a circle of banners whose slogans encourage viewers to "fete the fungus" and "let them eat CO2" a branding campaign for the environment. Most works are more meditative. David Brooks has made 30 bronze casts of tree parts, rocks and other natural objects found in Storm King's woods and placed them alongside the originals. Called "Permanent Field Observations" (2018), it prompts you to imagine a future in which only the man made sculptures remain. Discussions of climate change often focus on predictions. Two of the strongest works remind us that the effects are already here. Gabriela Salazar's "Matters in Shelter (and Place, Puerto Rico)" (2018) looks like a cross between an emergency shelter and a temple, while Allison Janae Hamilton's tambourine towers suggest resilience born out of precariousness. Ms. Hamilton's work is titled after a lyric in a 1928 hymn that sounds all too familiar these days: "The peo ple cried mer cy in the storm." JILLIAN STEINHAUER
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
The New York Times said in a statement on Tuesday that Jonathan Weisman, a deputy Washington editor of The Times, had been demoted and would no longer oversee the paper's congressional correspondents because he repeatedly posted messages on social media about race and politics that showed what the paper called "serious lapses in judgment." Mr. Weisman, 53, will lose the title of deputy editor, a designation for Times editors with wide ranging duties and significant input into news coverage, a spokeswoman for the paper said. Mr. Weisman met with Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, on Tuesday and apologized, the Times statement said. He will also no longer be "active on social media," the statement added. In a brief interview after the meeting with Mr. Baquet, Mr. Weisman, who will stay on at the paper as an editor, said: "I accept Dean's judgment. I think he's right to do what he's doing. I embarrassed the newspaper, and he had to act." The reprimand came amid a broader discussion in the Times newsroom of how the paper covers race and the Trump administration in a polarized time. On Monday, Mr. Baquet led a staff meeting at which a recent front page headline that generated heavy public criticism was a main topic. Mr. Weisman, who joined The Times in 2012, was under scrutiny for messages he posted on Twitter on July 31 and Aug. 7. In the July 31 posts, he implied that it was inaccurate to describe certain politicians from urban areas as being representative of the Midwest and the South. He specifically mentioned four Democrats: Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Lloyd Doggett of Texas and John Lewis of Georgia. Three of the four are minorities. "Saying RashidaTlaib (D Detroit) and IlhanMN (D Minneapolis) are from the Midwest is like saying RepLloydDoggett (D Austin) is from Texas or repjohnlewis (D Atlanta) is from the Deep South," Mr. Weisman wrote. "C'mon." Mr. Weisman, who is white, deleted the tweet and a pair of follow ups after they were criticized as racist on Twitter and in the African American focused online publication The Root. The Times's standards editor, Phil Corbett, advised Mr. Weisman to be more careful on social media, Mr. Weisman said. But on Aug. 7, he ventured into similar territory. Replying to a Twitter post by the progressive political organization Justice Democrats that included a photograph of Morgan Harper, a candidate the group was backing for a United States House seat in Ohio, Mr. Weisman noted that she would be challenging Representative Joyce Beatty, an African American Democrat. Ms. Harper quickly replied to Mr. Weisman's message, telling him, "I am also black." To that, Mr. Weisman replied, " justicedems's endorsement included a photo," as if that settled the matter. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Roxane Gay, a contributing opinion writer to The Times since 2015, joined the discussion with a tweet that said, "Any time you think you're unqualified for a job remember that this guy, telling a black woman she isn't black because he looked at a picture and can't see, has one of the most prestigious jobs in America." According to screenshots posted by Ms. Gay, Mr. Weisman sent messages to her saying she owed him "an enormous apology." Ms. Gay made it clear in a subsequent tweet that she strongly disagreed with Mr. Weisman's demand. Erica Green, a national education reporter at The Times, said in an interview that she understood why the tweets by Mr. Weisman, who was her editor, had provoked a backlash. She also defended him as a journalist and colleague, based on her experiences working with him on stories about minorities. "As a black woman, I feel a little bit better that he is in the room," Ms. Green said. Mr. Weisman, the author of the 2018 book "(((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump," stepped away from Twitter for a few months in 2016 after becoming a target of online trolls. Before joining The Times, he worked at newspapers including The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Last week, The Times drew intense criticism from readers, some of whom canceled subscriptions; members of its own staff; and prominent politicians because of a front page headline that Mr. Baquet described as "credulous." The headline, "Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism," was changed for later editions. In the first edition of the Aug. 6 paper, it sat atop an article that quoted President Trump's prepared remarks on the mass killings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, while also noting that Mr. Trump "has himself amplified right wing voices online with histories of racism and bigotry." Editors changed the headline to "Assailing Hate but Not Guns." At the staff meeting on Monday, Mr. Baquet acknowledged "a couple of significant missteps" and likened the current political climate to the turbulent 1960s. He asked those in the packed 15th floor room of The New York Times Building for their help in reporting on a difficult time, an effort that would require the paper's journalists to pay close attention to how they covered race and a divisive administration. "This is hard stuff," he said, reading from prepared remarks. Mr. Baquet, who became the first African American executive editor in the history of The Times in 2014, took responsibility for the much criticized headline, adding that the paper's print hub, which produces the newspaper's print version, was not given enough space to convey the story fairly. The other main topic of discussion was the paper's reluctance to describe certain actions and comments by the president and some of his supporters as "racist." Mr. Baquet said that, in general, it was sufficient to describe racist speech or behavior plainly in news articles without necessarily labeling it as such. "My own view," he said, "is that the best way to capture the kinds of remarks the president makes is to use them, to lay it out in perspective, and that is much more powerful than the use of a word." Some journalists in attendance expressed disagreement with that view, and Mr. Baquet said he was working with other editors to establish a written standard that would try to clarify when the use of "racist" and similar terms was warranted in news coverage. Part of the reason for the gathering on Monday, he said, was the online behavior of Mr. Weisman, which seemed emblematic of larger debates inside and outside the newsroom. "By the way," Mr. Baquet said toward the end of the meeting, "let's catch our breath before tweeting stupid stuff or stuff that hurts the paper."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
A few years ago, a friend went to an academic conference and saw a reading of Anne Carson's adaptation of "Antigone," with the celebrated academic Judith Butler as the Theban king Kreon. "She was hilarious," my friend, a theater professor, wrote to me. "Maybe she has a future onstage." The future is now. Butler, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, currently stars in "Fragments, Lists Lacunae," a performance piece enjoying a brief run at New York Live Arts. Her role: A professor of comparative literature. Over the course of the semester, in a series of punchy, truncated lectures, the professor hips her undergrads to the idea that "absences are more than merely meaningful; rather, they are the material that governs that which is present." Her examples include doughnut holes, the Nixon tapes, Sappho. Pay attention. This is going on the final. Divorced from an academic context, lectures have negative connotations. A lecture functions as a knuckle rap, a don't do it again form of verbal deterrence. But lectures used to qualify as entertainment, with traveling speakers trekking from town to town, obliging a populace eager for diversion and instruction. P.T. Barnum built a lecture hall into his American Museum alongside the trained bears and the mummified mermaid as one more attraction.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Theater
|
Fox News on Tuesday retracted a story linking the murder of a Democratic National Committee staff member with the email hacks that aided President Trump's campaign, effectively quashing a conspiracy theory that had taken hold across the right wing news media. It was a rare acknowledgment of error by the network. But it also underscored a schism between the network's news gathering operation and one of its biggest stars: the conservative commentator Sean Hannity, who has unapologetically promoted the theory and remained defiant on Tuesday. "These are questions that I have a moral obligation to ask," Mr. Hannity said on his radio show, shortly after Fox News announced its mistake. "All you in the liberal media I am not Fox.com or FoxNews.com. I retracted nothing." The story of the murdered aide, Seth Conrad Rich, who was 27 when he was shot in the back near his Washington home in July, has been seized on by Mr. Hannity and other right wing pundits as an alternative narrative to the cascade of damaging revelations about the Trump administration's ties to Russian officials who meddled in the presidential election. On Fox News on Tuesday night, Mr. Hannity said that he had been in touch with Mr. Rich's brother and that, "out of respect for the family's wishes for now I am not discussing this matter at this time." But, he promised his viewers, "I am not going to stop doing my job." He added, "At the proper time, we shall continue, and talk a lot more." Citing unnamed sources, Fox News's website published an article last week suggesting that Mr. Rich's death was in retaliation for his sharing D.N.C. emails with WikiLeaks a theory that, if true, would undercut the notion of Russian political interference and, in turn, offer cover for Mr. Trump. No evidence to support that theory has emerged, and the Washington Metropolitan Police Department is still investigating the death of Mr. Rich. Mr. Rich's family, believing he was murdered during a failed robbery, has called for retractions from news organizations that promoted the story; on Tuesday, Fox News agreed. "The article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting," the network said in a statement. "The article was found not to meet those standards, and has since been removed." The statement did not address Mr. Hannity's coverage of Mr. Rich's death, and Fox News representatives deferred to his comments on air Tuesday night. The speculation about Mr. Rich's death and its implications for an embattled president captivated audiences in the right wing media sphere, from Mr. Hannity's prime time show to more obscure but influential websites like The Gateway Pundit, which rose to prominence last year in part by spreading rumors about Hillary Clinton's health. The theory also surfaced on Fox News beyond Mr. Hannity: Newt Gingrich, a network contributor, discussed the case on "Fox and Friends" on Sunday, and Geraldo Rivera, a correspondent at large, posted on Twitter about it. On the radio Tuesday, Mr. Hannity mocked journalists who questioned his interest in the subject, equating the theory about Mr. Rich's murder to the reports that Mr. Trump's campaign operation colluded with Russian officials during the election. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "For those who accuse me of pushing a conspiracy theory, you are the biggest phony hypocrites in the entire world," said Mr. Hannity, who speaks regularly with Mr. Trump. This was the second high profile break between Mr. Hannity and his employer in two months: In April, he warned publicly of "the total end" of Fox News if the network fired Bill Shine, a top executive and close friend of Mr. Hannity's. Mr. Shine ultimately resigned, but Mr. Hannity stayed put, even as the television news industry speculated about his plans. Mr. Hannity stoked that speculation again on Tuesday, promising an announcement about "my future at Fox." On the air, he made clear that he had no plans to leave. "I serve at the pleasure of the Fox News Channel," he said. "I am here to do my job every night. I am under contract, as long as they seem to want me." Mr. Hannity is the remaining member of Fox News's once invincible prime time lineup, after the departures of Megyn Kelly and Bill O'Reilly. The network's prime time ratings have fallen, especially as Mr. Trump's troubles have grown. Some Fox News employees said this week that they had been angered by Mr. Hannity's continuing broadcasts about the Rich theory, calling it an embarrassment to the network's journalists. Other employees expressed shock that the network was willing to retract the story at all. Under Roger E. Ailes, its pugnacious former chairman, who died last week, Fox News followed a mantra of "never apologize," weathering all manner of controversies over its coverage. But since Mr. Ailes's exit amid a sexual harassment scandal, the network has been more willing to admit error. It apologized in January after inaccurately describing a suspect as Moroccan after a mass shooting at a Canadian mosque. In March, the network briefly sidelined Andrew Napolitano, its senior legal analyst, after he made an unsupported accusation about Britain's top spy agency. Before the retraction, Mr. Hannity had promised to feature an account on his program from Kim Dotcom, an internet entrepreneur who is wanted in the United States on racketeering charges. Mr. Dotcom has said he has evidence that Mr. Rich was a WikiLeaks source, but he has not offered the evidence publicly. Fox News said he was never booked. On Tuesday, Aaron Rich, the brother of Seth Rich, sent a letter to Mr. Hannity's executive producer asking that Mr. Dotcom not be allowed on the air.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
"I think he should be on a roster right now," Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, told ESPN in August. "I think because of his protests he's not." The best counterargument, which has been offered by various anonymous front office employees and coaches, is that Kaepernick's blend of running ability and powerful yet inaccurate passing requires a bespoke offensive scheme, which isn't something a team would orchestrate for a backup quarterback. There is something to this argument, as Kaepernick actually lost his starting job with the 49ers before the protests began and only got it back because his replacement was less effective. But that argument ignores the fact that 72 quarterbacks have appeared in a game this season, dozens of whom cannot match Kaepernick's talent in any system. Did the owners collectively agree not to sign him? Such outright collusion is unlikely. But in a league that has often overlooked domestic violence, animal cruelty, steroid use and vehicular manslaughter all in the name of talent, it is curious that Kaepernick was shown the door for a demonstration that did not violate any rules. BENJAMIN HOFFMAN Did the Russians influence the election? The political scientist Emily Thorson used her 2013 dissertation to investigate whether fact checking was an effective way to combat misinformation. She found that even when readers believed fact checks, they could not banish false information from their minds entirely. The power of fake news, she concluded, incentivized politicians to strategically spread untruths. Not just American politicians. In January, a declassified report informed the public that the C.I.A., F.B.I. and National Security Agency concluded that Russia's leader, President Vladimir V. Putin, had ordered an influence campaign to affect the 2016 election. Facebook's general counsel, Colin Stretch, called posts disseminated by Russians "an insidious attempt to drive people apart." So there is little doubt that Russia meddled in the election (though, for the record, President Trump has said that Mr. Putin denies it). Determining influence is trickier. Did even one person change his or her vote after seeing a mocked up Facebook advertisement? Dr. Thorson coined a term for the residue of untruth left behind by misinformation: "belief echoes." One of her experiments tested whether people became besotted by misinformation only when it confirmed their previously held opinions. She found that was not the case. Humans change their minds. They are subject to influence. And when a state actor summons a sonic boom of nonsense and sends it rattling through the largest communication platform ever invented, there's no telling who might hear the echoes and maybe even follow that actor's lead. JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH This year, particularly dismaying was Ms. Dunham's statement accusing Aurora Perrineau, an actress, of lying when she filed a police report alleging that Murray Miller, a writer on "Girls," raped her when she was 17 and he was 35. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Ms. Dunham and Jenni Konner, her co showrunner, wrote that "this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year." Believing rather than discrediting assault and rape survivors is a tenet of most feminist philosophies and a stance Ms. Dunham has taken in the past, including in a tweet she sent this year: "Things women do lie about: what they ate for lunch. Things women don't lie about: rape." Ms. Dunham, once again, apologized. And since mid November, her Instagram and her Twitter have been silent. VALERIYA SAFRONOVA To put things in perspective, there are hundreds of known and probable carcinogens, many of which you could certainly find at home and not all of which are strictly bad for you. Moreover, just because we have evidence that alcohol consumption is associated with cancer doesn't mean we can conclude that the relationship between them is causal. So, the real question is: Are the effects of wine net positive? Actually, don't answer that. BONNIE WERTHEIM Are there any good men left? Last month in New York magazine, the writer Rebecca Traister noted how, in this moment of post Harvey Weinstein cultural reckoning, her husband had asked, with genuine feeling, "How can you even want to have sex with me at this point?" It's a question many women I know those who sleep with men, anyway have found themselves contemplating, as the list of terrible men doing terrible things seems to metastasize (and not just terrible men we knew were terrible; terrible men we thought were good guys, in some cases feminists, even). But, O.K., let's not get carried away. Statistically speaking, not all men are harassers in fact, most of them aren't and there have been plenty of good men who did good things this year. Like Snackman. Remember him? He broke up a fight on a New York City subway by standing in between two people snacking on a tube of Pringles. Or this guy, Oscar Gonzales, who saved a bunny from raging California wildfires (if you haven't watched the video yet, prepare to sob). There were the men of the El Bolillo bakery, who baked pounds and pounds of bread while trapped inside as Hurricane Harvey pummeled Houston. (They donated it to evacuees.) And, of course, there was salt bae, a Turkish chef by the name of Nusret Gokce, who tickled women and men alike with his flamboyant sprinkling of salt onto a carved steak. Was this the Year of Cardi? Maybe not officially, but we're happy to settle the score. Just recall the video of people in New York starting an impromptu dance party to "Bodak Yellow" earlier this month in the Times Square subway station. See how the woman wearing the National Guard jacket transforms within seconds of hearing the beat. The bravado. The debauchery. The absolute lack of concern. In a year of nonstop bad news, Cardi freed us. Fans who have followed her since she was a stripper in the Bronx named Camilla know that her success didn't come overnight. She's been making money moves for years, from her days on VH1's "Love and Hip Hop" to her mixtapes which, bafflingly, never took off the way "Bodak" did. Since June, it's been nearly impossible to go out or stay in without hearing Cardi's breakout single, which went triple platinum and earned her two Grammy nominations. The song of summer has staying power. Maybe the real question is: Will Cardi still reign supreme in 2018? JOANNA NIKAS But in this case, producers of Rachel's season of "The Bachelorette" had to dodge an inexplicable gravity sinkhole in the middle of their universe. They know why Rachel and Peter aren't together, and they have no way, within their limited palette of reality show hues, to paint us the picture that explains it. No one else involved will or can! They are all too busy doing sponsored content and getting paid. The tabloid universe, which lives by similar rules, can't execute on this narrative either: they tried "Peter Kraus Reveals Why He Turned Down 'The Bachelor': 'I Was Not Ready,'" and it just smells like smoke screen spirit. We will probably never know why Rachel and Peter aren't together. Their relationship is our Roanoke colonists. What's left to believe? Who believes Rachel and Bryan Abosolo, a.k.a. "Plan Bryan," are planning their wedding and next dog and/or baby? (No, seriously.) Who is even ready to trust "The Bachelor" again as Season 378 begins shortly? It's also entirely possible this is 100 percent displaced anxiety about our engagement with the nuclear power of North Korea or maybe even some personal baggage. CHOIRE SICHA Is it nuts to start preparing for the apocalypse? One strange thing about 2017 was that you could talk about preparing for the end of the world and not even have to explain why. The headlines were filled with apocalyptic scenarios hellish wildfires, North Korean nuclear threats, melting glaciers, not to mention a long prophesied economic collapse. As such, the popular image of the survivalist is changing, from wild eyed cave dweller in camouflage fatigues, hoarding canned goods, to the mild mannered executive or lawyer or insurance salesman who lives next door. In a world where the bombproof bunker has replaced the Tesla as the hot status symbol for young Silicon Valley plutocrats, everyone, it seems, is a "prepper." What else is on the list of must have doomsday items? Artfully stocked bug out bags, folding kayaks, jet packs (yes, they exist), even condoms and not just for the expected purpose, although they might come in handy for that, too. ALEX WILLIAMS
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Style
|
The Metropolitan Opera fired its longtime conductor James Levine on Monday after an investigation revealed credible evidence that Mr. Levine had engaged in "sexually abusive and harassing conduct." The news article prompted more than 600 comments from readers. Zachary Woolfe, the classical music editor for The New York Times, followed up with an essay exploring whether Mr. Levine's firing was an opportunity to reconsider the vast power given to maestros , which also brought in strong reader reaction. Many readers wondered how much the Met had known about the allegations against Mr. Levine. Some argued for leniency given Mr. Levine's strong professional record; others said the Met should be ashamed for not having fired him sooner. Most agreed that both Mr. Levine's reputation and that of the Met would suffer in the wake of the situation. On Thursday, Mr. Levine sued the Met for breach of contract and defamation. These are edited excerpts from readers' comments. Many readers suggested that Mr. Levine benefited from a cult of personality at the Met. I adore opera. But James Levine is a conductor, not a god. The Met would do well to focus fund raising efforts on educating the public and donors about the artistry, creativity and glorious musicality of opera and making opera more accessible not creating a deity to be worshiped by New Yorkers. SGL, SETAUKET, N.Y. Maestro worship is an extension of the high self regard held by some who patronize the arts. But as in religion and sports, we learn that the higher the fall, the bigger the splat. TONY, WEST VIRGINIA This article inadvertently highlights another structural problem in the arts: "He made the Met's orchestra into one of the finest in the world ..." No, the players in the Met's orchestra did that. We need to stop putting individuals like Mr. Levine on pedestals and get over the tendency to make and worship superstars, to the point where horrible acts by such individuals get ignored. Mr. Levine was never indispensable. CME, SEATTLE 'It doesn't detract from the beautiful music he created onstage.' Some readers wondered if professional success and allegations of personal misconduct could be separated. Horrible. Just horrible. But it doesn't detract from the beautiful music he and the Met created onstage. LOGAN ANDERSON, VIA FACEBOOK The Met, may I remind everyone, is not a church, although it may be experienced by some, myself included, as a "religion." We go there to hear music. And I for one will not buy into the idea the terrible and strange stuff that went on cancels all that out. Even if someone did terrible things, should we then ignore, condemn or eradicate the good things that same person did or created? Let's put our daggers away, O.K., people? They don't look good on us. ROGER, SAN FRANCISCO The man is probably the greatest opera conductor/interpreter of all time. Although I cannot condone the behavior, he has not fallen from my grace. RICHARD FRAUENGLASS, HUNTINGTON, N.Y. 'To be willfully blind is the same as being complicit.' Readers said that their reactions to the news were affected by what the Met knew and for how long about Mr. Levine's alleged behavior. They asked if the Met's reputation should suffer accordingly. To be willfully blind is the same as being complicit. As long as the orchestra's reputation remained stellar, it was anything goes for Maestro Levine. What price success, Mr. Gelb? TOM Q., SOUTHWICK, MASS. How convenient for the Met to let Mr. Levine go now that he is 74 and in poor health. Why did they not have the courage to do something earlier? Before the MeToo movement? When it was inconvenient? MOCKINGJAY, CALIFORNIA
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
Credit...Rozette Rago for The New York Times On a Thursday evening in October, as the Oscar campaign for "Black Panther" began to unfurl, Kathleen Kennedy took the microphone in a packed room of award voters. The Lucasfilm president had volunteered to host a reception for "Black Panther" at the London hotel in West Hollywood, and her eyes alighted on the 32 year old director Ryan Coogler. "Ryan Coogler's dreams and courage have made 'Black Panther' one of the most significant films to be released in the last decade," said Kennedy, who noted that the critically acclaimed superhero movie has grossed well over a billion dollars, smashing preconceived notions of how a black led blockbuster could be received across the world. "Ryan, you are a good man with a good heart," Kennedy said, quoting from the film. "And it's hard for a good man to be a king." Several feet away, Coogler's wife, Zinzi, and the Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige beamed with pride. Coogler, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to sink through the floor. Other directors might bask in accolades, but Coogler, a high school football star who switched vocations in college to pursue a film career, has never quite shaken the humility drilled into him by sports. "It's so rare to get compliments from your coaches," he said. "You're kind of trained to not hear that, and even on a touchdown, you want to hear your coach say, 'You should have stuck your foot down earlier than you did.'" When it comes to award season, Coogler is of two minds on the subject. "You don't ever want to get too comfortable sitting in rooms and listening to people telling you how great the work is," he said. At the same time, Coogler is aware that if "Black Panther" scores major Oscar nominations, it could open the door for more directors of color. To what extent should he play the game? Coogler's friend, the director Ava DuVernay, said, "Many of us are conflicted about what award season is and what it means, even more so when we tell stories of a certain kind, and when we're filmmakers of a certain kind." Only a handful of black directors have been nominated for an Academy Award, and never more than one in the same year. This season, another prominent contender is the "BlacKkKlansman" director Spike Lee, an idol of Coogler's with whom he could make Oscar history. Still, the fact that Lee has never before been nominated for a best director Oscar says plenty about why Coogler is justifiably wary of award season and why, it's rumored, he turned down the invitation to become an academy member himself. (When asked about it, he wouldn't say.) Just a few years ago, Coogler and Jordan earned Oscar buzz for their "Rocky" revival "Creed," yet the only person nominated from the film was Sylvester Stallone, one of 20 all white acting nominees in 2016, the second consecutive year of OscarsSoWhite. Decision makers at the academy have taken great pains since then to diversify membership, but will they come around on Coogler? Despite the fact that he has made a landmark film, organizations like the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild of America have so far excluded the "Black Panther" director from their final five. True to form, Coogler is less concerned with his own chances and would rather take advantage of this award season to tout the contributions of his crew, many of whom would also make history if they find favor with Oscar. "I'm not a painter or a novelist I work in an art form where I have a lot of help," Coogler said. "I've got hundreds of people helping bring this film to life, and a lot of people on the street don't know that." Coogler, too, likes to surround himself with accomplished women, and the crew of "Black Panther" is unusual among blockbusters for its large number of female department heads. They include the director of photography Rachel Morrison and production designer Hannah Beachler, who both worked on Coogler's first feature, "Fruitvale Station," as well as Ruth E. Carter, the veteran costume designer responsible for Wakanda's striking looks. "We liked to joke that we were his Dora Milaje," said Morrison, referring to T'Challa's female bodyguards. "Me and Hannah would probably both take a bullet for him." The 40 year old Morrison, who became the first woman ever nominated for a cinematography Oscar last year, for "Mudbound," is also the first female director of photography to work on a Marvel Studios film. Beachler, 48, was the first woman to work as a production designer for the superhero studio. "I loved looking around every day at all these women in positions we've worked so hard to get to," Beachler said. "Because of that, we worked extra hard for Ryan and for the opportunity we'd been given, but we can do this. We are professionals alongside our male counterparts." The 58 year old Carter has been working as a costume designer since Spike Lee's 1988 film, "School Daze," yet the many female department heads of "Black Panther" felt to her like the start of something new. "We cut past any of the normal bureaucracy of male dominance, where they may want to overtake the conversation or need to be leader of the idea," Carter said, praising Coogler's willingness to listen to women. "You don't have to be overbearing to get your point to him he's open in that way. With that calmness and humility, the gate opens: 'Hello, I have this to offer.'" Coogler is quick to duck credit for employing so many women in major roles. "In each one of the circumstances where I've worked with these incredible filmmakers that happen to be women, they were the best people for the job," he said. Then why is it so hard for other directors to follow suit? "I don't know that I get it myself," Coogler said. "If you aren't opening up to find people who are truly the best, then that can limit you." While the rest of Hollywood tries to make its film sets look more like the real world by employing inclusion riders, Coogler has simply hired diverse crews and casts all along. With collaborators like Morrison and Beachler, as well as actors like Jordan, Coogler sees what they have to offer and makes the industry see, too. "But if you think that's easy, you don't know anything about Hollywood," DuVernay said. She noted that even before "Black Panther," Coogler was using "Fruitvale Station" and "Creed" to center black men who are not periphery players but heroes, lovers, fathers and sons a rarity in this industry. "He has this effortless thing about him," said DuVernay, "this breezy quality that makes people feel comfortable even though he's pushing the envelope inside a system that does not make it easy to tell those kinds of stories." Carter has another way of describing the director. "He comes from Oakland, he wears his high fade with locs on the top, and he plays football so he has an athletic build, but he is a gentle spirit," she said. "And a gentle soul is not something we're accustomed to celebrating in black men." Coogler goes about things differently. "My experience is that most directors who lead with ego are not so secretly very insecure or self conscious," Morrison said. "Ryan's comfortable in his own skin and confident in who he is, and that allows him to turn to his D.P. and ask what she thinks of the script, or ask the writer what he thinks of the cinematography." "For Ryan, it's important to have a lot of different perspectives around the table, not just his," said Beachler. She recalled a moment on "Black Panther" when a line gave her pause and Coogler suspended shooting the scene to discuss her concerns. "He took the time to make sure I felt good about it, and safe," Beachler said. "And that does not happen on other sets." For Coogler, this approach is common sense. "The more angles you have when you're making something, the more it helps the film cut through, in my opinion," Coogler told me. "I think that's why this is made for the audience, at the end of the day: Film is a collective experience." It's been that way for Coogler ever since he grew up in the Bay Area, when his parents would throw movie marathon house parties for him, his two brothers, and their cousins. "I was watching high quality stuff at an early age," Coogler said, crediting his mother, Joselyn, for helping him become a cinephile. "We used to joke and call her IMDb, because before IMDb even came out, she used to say, 'You see that actress there in the back corner? She played this person in that TV show.'" When Coogler speaks about the crucial people who have helped him develop as a filmmaker, many of them are women, including his wife, Zinzi, who weighs in on casting decisions, and a college teacher, Rosemary Graham, who encouraged Coogler to take up screenwriting and still reads many of his drafts. According to Jordan, his longtime friend and muse, giving female perspectives priority is a throughline that began in Coogler's childhood and extends throughout his work. "The strongest warriors in Wakanda are the women, and the smartest," Jordan noted, likening that lineage to the matriarchies found in many African American communities. "That's how it is in our households and our culture, and that's what our family dynamic is made out of." Even today, Coogler continues to live in the Bay Area near his parents. "I'm thankful to have a big family that's still honest with me," he said, noting that "Black Panther" pivots on the conflict between T'Challa and Jordan's orphaned Killmonger, both of whom he can sympathize with. "The fundamental difference between those two characters," Coogler said, "is that one grew up with a community that loved him and nurtured him, and the other had the opposite." Having been so nurtured, perhaps it's no surprise that Coogler wants to pay it forward. In 2007, Coogler, about to begin film school at the University of Southern California, told the East Bay Times about what he hoped to achieve in Hollywood. Instead of settling down in Los Angeles someday, his goal was to bring the film industry back to the impoverished parts of Richmond and Oakland, where he grew up. "It will be something the people can point to and kids can see it, saying, 'I can do that,'" the young Coogler said then. As my coffee with Coogler concluded, I pulled the article up on my phone and noted that at the end of "Black Panther," this is exactly what T'Challa does. After grappling with the Oakland born Killmonger and coming to understand the crucible he was forged in, the young king flies to his defeated enemy's home city, where he starts a high tech outreach center that will inspire the community. By making "Black Panther," then, Coogler has moved through T'Challa to realize a long held goal. As I told him that, Coogler blinked. "That's a lot," he said, having never considered the connection. "That's a lot." And then he let out a laugh. It was a laugh I'd heard Coogler deploy every time he was paid a compliment, a laugh he uses when he doesn't know how else to react. And then, after letting himself take in the idea for just a moment, Coogler moved on. "Hopefully, there's more to do," he said.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
What books are currently on your nightstand? "Children of Blood and Bone," by Tomi Adeyemi; "Call Me Zebra," by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi; "Mean," by Myriam Gurba; "The Book of Essie," by Meghan MacLean Weir; and "The Talented Ribkins," by Ladee Hubbard. IT'S A BIG NIGHTSTAND, O.K. What was the last truly great book you read? I loved, like beyond all measure, Hanif Abdurraqib's "They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us." It's a collection of essays about music and culture that are written with such insight and tenderness that I read it in a day and immediately read the whole thing again because it cracked my heart all the way open and had me crying over Fall Out Boy and I was like "Hold up, did that really happen?" It's spectacular. Which writers novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets working today do you admire most? This is really a Sophie's choice kind of situation for me and I don't like it, but here is an abbreviated list: Kara Brown, Jia Tolentino, Bunmi Laditan, Michael Arceneaux, Megan Stielstra, Ijeoma Oluo, Kiese Laymon, Ira Madison III, Roxane Gay, Porochista Khakpour, Lindy West, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Fatimah Asghar, Doreen St. Felix and Jessica Hopper. What's your favorite thing to read? And what do you avoid reading? My favorite books, hands down, are thrillers. But only the fancy ones, the 16 paperback ones. I'm the perfect simpleton: I never see the twist coming! The killer pretty much has to climb out of the pages and punch me in the face! I also love a gripping family drama, and I read lots and lots of Y.A. I tend to avoid fantasy because I'm not very good at seeing imaginary worlds in my mind. I get caught up in whether or not I've mentally constructed it correctly and it ruins the book. What do you read when you travel? I always have an ambitiously packed carry on when I travel even though I know that as soon as the announcements are over I'm going to plug in my headphones and watch a movie with John Cena in it. The last book I read on a flight to Los Angeles was "Eat Only When You're Hungry," by Lindsay Hunter, and it messed me right up. I couldn't even look at those tiny bags of airplane chips. 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. W. Kamau Bell. "The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell" was so smart and funny. What are your favorite movies or shows based on books? Is "The Real Housewives of New York City" based on a book? Haha just kidding. I want to say something like "Atonement," by Ian McEwan, so that I can trick you into thinking that I am a serious person, but the truth is I never read the book OR saw the movie. I read "Misery," by Stephen King, and that movie was amazing. I can't wait for some overzealous fan to kidnap me and make me write about diarrhea at gunpoint! And what book would you most like to see turned into a movie or TV show? "I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter," by Erika L. Sanchez, would be such a good movie. It's about a very real girl dealing with real girl problems, craving independence and coping with anger and depression while grappling with boys and her parents and the death of her sister and all that. It's sad and funny and hopeful, and it would be amazing on the big screen. What's the last book that made you cry? I read a lot of Y.A. books, and I just finished this book "Being Fishkill," by Ruth Lehrer, that made me ugly cry in a public place which was incredibly embarrassing! The last book that made you laugh? "Everything Is Awful," by Matt Bellassai. That dude is so bent out of shape about so many things and so am I, because everything is horrible and embarrassing. I'm almost sure we are the same person. It was like reading my diary. The last book that made you furious? "The Girl on the Train." I read it because everybody else read and loved it, plus I'm really into Emily Blunt, and halfway through the book I was like "WHAT." Homegirl was infuriating! Literally why did she keep going back to that house?! Is this the kind of thing where Americans say we like something even though it's terrible because we don't want to look dumb because British people made it? I was rooting for her to die the entire time. What kind of reader were you as a child? Voracious. I had an old mom, who definitely was not a cool mom, who encouraged me to stay indoors and avoid human interaction, so I just read all the time. All of the Sweet Valley High and The Baby Sitters Club books and every single unrequited teenage love story released between 1989 and 1995, when I discovered grunge and focused my sadness there instead. Did you ever get in trouble for reading a book? My mom once threw an R. L. Stine book in the trash because she thought it was demonic. It was a library book! I had to pay a fine! Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? Maybe this is my misandry showing, but boy did I love Amy from "Gone Girl." I didn't even really hate Nick, in fact I could identify with a lot of things going on in his life? But ultimately, when the twist came, I tented my witchy fingers and was like "HAHAHAHAHA YES. FINISH HIM." If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? The President's Daily Brief, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. You're hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited? Listen, isn't it weird when people pretend they want to dig up F. Scott Fitzgerald or whoever and eat catered sandwiches with them? It's not like dude is going to know what good movies are out or who just got kicked off "Survivor," and I'm not enough of a conversationalist to dream up something other than whatever E! News alert popped up on my phone to talk about. "Oh hello, Ernest Hemingway! Help yourself to some grocery store cubed cheese! Would you like to talk about the latest episode of 'Vanderpump Rules'?" Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? Any history book I've ever been assigned. What's the one book you wish someone else would write? I would love to read a book of famous people's lists. Like, what does Drake pack in his overnight bag? What are Forest Whitaker's grocery essentials?! Honestly, I would read anyone's lists of anything. I'm so curious about other people's daily needs. What's in your bathroom cabinet right now? Who would you choose to write your life story? Alissa Nutting! She writes with a disgustingness and urgency that could really make my boring life sound spicy. What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet? Every history book that I've ever been assigned. Also: I rushed out and bought "Pachinko," by Min Jin Lee, in hardcover when I saw it on all the "Best of the Year" lists because in theory I want to be up on the zeitgeist and reading that one thing that everyone else read and loved, and I added it to the stack of things on my desk and promptly started reading something else. Who even knows what. So now it's just sitting there mocking me and making me feel bad but I swear I'm going to get to it soon. What do you plan to read next?
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
The concert's first hour was tight and focused. When playing the concert's opening work, "In Memoriam Muhal Richard Abrams," the violinist Jennifer Curtis and the keyboardist Cory Smythe (heard here on celesta) gave a sense of Mr. Sorey's artistry when working with meditative sparseness. In this mode, the composer's changes can come slowly as with the steady movement from a parched, dry violin tone to something more conventionally lovely yet their culmination often ends up feeling voluptuous. That result is from the variety of effects being presented, as well as the time lavished on each one. Mr. Sorey tends to reward a listener's patience, over the course of a set, thanks to starkly contrasting energies. In "Ornations," the flutist Claire Chase and the clarinetist Joshua Rubin presented the hyperkinetic side of the composer's style. At some points solo riffs were passed back and forth between the players like friendly provocations. Even better were the urgent passages during which both players seemed taxed to their individual limits, while still needing to listen closely to one another to create a well blended sense of chaos. The final opus in this opening set was the New York premiere of "Everything Changes, Nothing Changes," played by the JACK Quartet. Aptly titled, it seemed both static and constantly in motion. In recalling the more delicate textures heard at the concert's opening, this piece for string quartet also brought a sense of closure to the first hour. The music after intermission (and after an onstage Q. and A. between Mr. Sorey and Ms. Chase) was dominated by the world premiere of "Autoschediasms," a work for creative chamber orchestra. Premised on his personal approach to "spontaneous composition," Mr. Sorey described the work as being created by all the musicians onstage and himself. (He conducted the players and provided instructional prompts via a small dry erase board.) The lengthy piece was not without interest. There were too many fascinating artists for that to be the case. But for me, this performance did not consistently channel the purposeful quality of Mr. Sorey's other efforts.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
Despite polls showing overwhelming public support and endorsements from celebrities like Lance Armstrong, efforts to establish a statewide smoking ban in the workplace have fallen flat in recent sessions of the Texas Legislature. But a state agency is finding that the billions of dollars it has at its disposal may allow it to be more effective in getting comprehensive tobacco free policies established most notably, at university campuses. University administrators around the state are considering campuswide tobacco free policies as a result of new rules established by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. In January, the institute's oversight committee adopted a policy that requires grant recipients to have policies prohibiting tobacco use in buildings and structures where financed research is occurring, as well as at the outdoor areas immediately adjacent to those buildings. The grant recipients must also provide smoking cessation services for community members who desire them. For schools that pride themselves on their research function, like the University of Texas at Austin it has received about 30 million in grants from the institute and is hoping for 88 million more there is a clear financial incentive to institute changes. "If folks have to go a little bit farther, if they have to think about having a cigarette a little bit more, we are encouraging them to smoke less which results in positive benefits or to quit altogether," said Bill Gimson, the executive director of the institute. He added that the new rule is not a response to legislative failures but is consistent with the institute's mandate to prevent cancer in Texas. In 2007, the research institute was established with the passage of a constitutional amendment that easily won voter approval. The state was authorized to issue 3 billion in bonds over 10 years to finance cancer research and prevention efforts. Nearly 600 million in grants have been issued, primarily to academic institutions. Institutions currently receiving grants must be in compliance by Aug. 31 or their current financing could be in jeopardy. The policy will apply to all new grant proposals submitted on March 1 or later. Around the state, institutions are scrambling to revisit their tobacco policies. Adrienne Howarth Moore, the director of human resource services at U.T., said that narrowing down the buildings that current and future research might occur in or revisiting the issue each semester as the affected locations change could prove challenging. "We have researchers that do their day to day investigations in a lab, but then they go and do their analysis and review in an office," she said. "And they might have graduate research assistants who are doing their work in the library." The existing policy prohibits smoking in all buildings, as well as within 20 feet of doors and windows. Ms. Howarth Moore said expanding the capacity of the university's current cessation services, as well as producing additional signs and educational materials, would probably have an economic impact, though she said the amount is unknown. In early 2011, U.T.'s student government called for a campuswide tobacco ban. William C. Powers, the university's president, had openly opposed it, claiming that it would infringe on personal freedoms. Mr. Gimson shrugged off the notion of overstepping, saying that campuses still have choices. "We came up with a reasonable policy," he said. "If folks want to expand that, more power to them." Though Mr. Gimson said the rule change is intended to be a carrot and not a stick, it is a large one that many universities cannot afford to ignore. "I don't know what we want to call it," said Taylor Eighmy, the vice president for research at Texas Tech University, which has received nearly 1 million in grants. "It's not legislation, it's not a mandate, it's not a federal or state requirement. "But this suggested language, we intend to comply with it." And with research financing at stake, the president of U.T. is coming around. "President Powers supports revisiting these rules in light of the recent decision" by the cancer research institute, said Gary Susswein, a university spokesman. Although the prospect of having to leave the campus to have a cigarette is certain to create some anger on college campuses, a number of tobacco users welcome the change. "It would definitely be inconvenient, but I am all for a smoke free campus," said Kirk Van Sickle, a junior who started smoking when he was 18. "On a personal note, it would probably help me quit. It would be good for me." A campuswide ban is not a sure thing. As compliance deadlines approach, U.T. administrators say such a policy remains one of many options. At the University of Houston, which has received nearly 7 million in grants from the cancer research institute, the student government recently approved a resolution to extend a prohibition on smoking within 15 feet of facilities to 25 feet. "This is a topic of interest and importance to the university, even before we learned of the new guidelines," said Richard Bonnin, a university spokesman. He indicated that U.H. was also considering a campuswide measure. "We want to make sure everyone's viewpoints are expressed before making a final decision," he said. Jason Cook, a spokesman for Texas A M University in College Station, which has received more than 3.4 million in grants, said the issue would be complicated on A M's 5,000 acre campus, with more than 500 buildings and multiple state agencies. "Given the issue of size and scope and the multiple organizations on our campus, we intend to have a very engaged discussion," he said, adding that the first step would probably be to establish boundaries around buildings where institute financed research is occurring.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
Dr. Mitchell L. Gaynor, a Manhattan oncologist and popular author who taught cancer patients to supplement conventional medicine with soothing music, diet and meditation and practiced what he prescribed was found dead on Tuesday at his country home in Hillsdale, N.Y. He was 59. The cause was suicide, said Kevin Skype, senior investigator for the Columbia County sheriff. Further details were not available. Dr. Gaynor, the son of a West Texas dentist, built both a distinguished medical career and a public following. The founder and president of Gaynor Integrative Oncology in Manhattan, he had been a clinical assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, also in Manhattan, and director of medical oncology at the school's Center for Integrative Medicine. He was also the author of six books, many of them focused on the environment's effect on an individual's health and geared for a general readership. They include "The Healing Power of Sound" (1999), "Dr. Gaynor's Cancer Prevention Program" (1999) and "Nurture Nature, Nurture Health" (2005). In 2013, Jon Regen, a jazz and pop pianist and son of a patient of Dr. Gaynor's, joined with him to produce a record titled "Change Your Mind." After it was featured on "The Dr. Oz Show," the record topped Billboard magazine's New Age charts. They recorded two other albums, "Uplift" and "Peaceful Sleep." Dr. Gaynor, who received a traditional medical education and continued to recommend traditional cancer treatments, was a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in Manhattan in 1987 when he became fascinated by integrative oncology, which encompasses both conventional and alternative treatments a hybrid that its detractors call pseudoscience. At the time, research was being conducted at the university into nutrient gene interactions and the immune system. "I was amazed at the fact that we really 'are what we eat,' and that with the best medical training in the world, nobody had ever taught me this," he said in a 2013 interview. In 1991, Dr. Gaynor was at New York Hospital treating a refugee Tibetan monk named Odsal who was found to have a rare cardiac condition. He concluded that the monk, dislocated from his homeland, "was literally suffering from a broken heart." Dr. Gaynor tutored Odsal in his own style of meditation. The monk reciprocated by bringing a traditional Tibetan metal singing bowl to the doctor's Manhattan apartment. "We removed our shoes and settled ourselves cross legged on the living room floor," Dr. Gaynor wrote in "The Healing Power of Sound." "Odsal took out a small wooden baton and moved it lightly around the rim of the bowl, in much the same way you might trace the lip of a wineglass with your finger." "The sound a rich, deep note with a strong vibrato that resembled nothing I had ever heard before was so exhilarating that tears of joy sprang to my eyes," he continued. "I could feel the vibration physically resonating through my body, touching my core in such a way that I felt in harmony with the universe." "I immediately intuited that playing the bowls would change my life," he wrote, "and the lives of many of my patients." Most of the nutritional supplements and alternative treatments he recommended were aimed at fortifying a patient's immune system and targeted what he determined were the root causes of disease. When people are relaxed as a result of meditation, chanting, listening to music, breathing exercises or other behavioral therapy, Dr. Gaynor said, their heart rates are steady, their breathing is deep and slow and their stress hormones decrease, allowing the immune system to function more efficiently, lowering blood pressure and releasing natural opiates. Dr. Gaynor distinguished between curing a patient fixing a physical symptom and healing, which he described as a complementary union of mind, body and spirit. "If somebody had told me when I was a medical student in Dallas, Texas, that one day I would be teaching my patients to use singing bowls to heal themselves, I would have thought he or she was crazy," Dr. Gaynor wrote.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
After 15 years, Kitson is preparing to shut down by the end of January. WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. On the day after Christmas, a familiar mother daughter spat was playing out at a Kitson boutique on South Robertson Boulevard. "You can walk outside if you want," said the teenage girl, flipping through a stack of jeans. Mom: "I don't really want to go to any stores." Girl: "But it's like, 90 percent off!" She wasn't exaggerating by much. As Kitson, the 16 year old store whose baby blue bags once proliferated on famous forearms, prepares to shut down by the end of January, its 17 locations around the country are clearing house, slashing prices and provoking a queasy nostalgia for the good old days. That is, the early aughts, when paparazzi thronged the chain's outposts to catch Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and their ilk post or even midshopping spree, the resultant photographs evoking the full flush of hedonism before the financial crisis. More than a place to pick up Juicy Couture tracksuits and Ugg boots, Kitson provided a backdrop for celebrity melodrama: Ms. Spears trying on hats at 2 a.m. (the store opened especially for her). Ms. Hilton shopping with girlfriends, oblivious to her dog urinating on a display of studded ballet flats. Kim Kardashian, before she went West, browsing the boutique, fresh faced in an empire waist maxidress. Fond of T shirts emblazoned with silly wordage ("J'adore pizza"), Kitson sometimes chronicled the goings on of Hollywood itself, hawking shirts that read "Team Jolie" and "Team Pitt" when Brangelina became a thing. Some will miss this voice. "I'm so upset," said Jodi Polen, a reiki healer from Chicago who, over the last 10 years, has made a point of shopping at Kitson during trips to Los Angeles to visit her mother. "I just took a picture outside; like, 'Ahh!'" she said, screaming and holding her hands above her head. "They have the best fun stuff and cool clothes, and it's a place to see people and be seen. It's almost like what L.A. means to me is Kitson. How can you come here and not have Kitson?" Despite its association with the region's glitziest set, Kitson ran into trouble. Early last year, it was sued by Hudson Group, the company that operates Kitson's stores at the Los Angeles International Airport. Among its complaints: Kitson's founder, Fraser Ross, allegedly showing up unannounced and berating employees. (The airport stores later closed.) In June, Spencer Spirit Holdings Inc., the owner of Spencer's novelty gift stores (staple items include lava lamps and edible underwear), agreed to acquire Kitson to help the store avoid bankruptcy. Nevertheless, in December Kitson announced that it would go out of business, and while its sell by date is Jan. 31, an employee at the original boutique on Robertson Boulevard predicted that the stores may shut sooner. "I mean, we don't have that much left," she said, motioning to a table of dish towels bearing quips like, "Drunk is when you feel sophisticated but can't pronounce the word!" A public relations representative for the store declined to comment on its closing or to make Mr. Ross available for comment. Merchandise at the Kitson boutiques along Robertson (there are four) had a crumpled up, gently used feel, like a polyester bathrobe, cinched and hanging backward, reading, weakly, "I woke up like this." Shelves once stacked with shoes bore only a few wayward stilettos. There were wan displays of coffee table books and other home curiosities, like a 2016 calendar entitled "Nice Jewish Guys." At the original Robertson store, a woman in yoga pants picked up and quickly put back down a greeting card that read, "I'm the Kylie you're the Kendall." At the end of the first week in January, prices on all apparel had been reduced by 50 to 70 percent, but even with the discount, many items reached well into the triple digits, like a zipper adorned leather pencil skirt by Rachel Zoe (original price: 795). Bright yellow "all sales final" signs stripped away any residue of luxury. (Would Ms. Kardashian deign to dig through the piles of cashmere here?) "It's so sad," Ms. Polen said. "I love to come in here because there's nothing else like it." Even as shoppers expressed puzzlement at the chain's closing, there were signs that its brand awareness was no longer at its peak. "I had never heard of it before," said Charlene Gupit, a student. "I just saw, 'Sale! Sale!' I'm just wondering, why are they actually closing? I really like their stuff now that I've come here for the first time." Tara Radan, also a student, ambled through the original Robertson boutique with her twin sister and an armful of merchandise. "They still have a lot of stock, and I don't know why they're shutting down," she said. "It's really sad. I don't know if they're going bankrupt or what's happening, but I thought they were really popular." Now, though, the atmosphere was more Crazy Eddie than Fred Segal, the rival boutique on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. "I got a lotion in the Newport Beach location for free because it was the last tester that they had," Ms. Radan said. "I was pretty stoked that they gave it to me." Aly Green and Stephanie Ganan, local residents, blamed tourists for driving true Angelenos away. "And tourists, really, how much are they buying?" Ms. Green asked. Ms. Ganan said, "They're coming to, like, try to see celebrities." "... that don't even come here anymore!" Ms. Green added. But Ms. Polen was keeping her eyes on the prize. Among the items she bought: five T shirts, 12 long sleeve shirts, seven pairs of sweatpants, nine sweatshirts, a plaid button down shirt, two pairs of sunglasses, a bracelet and a winter hat.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
TEL AVIV Every year, Jews around the world observe Yom Hashoah, a solemn day set aside to remember the millions of people who lost their lives in the Holocaust. In Israel, which became the first modern Jewish state a few years after World War II, the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day even stops traffic, if only for a moment. The observance began at 10 a.m. local time on Monday. In Tel Aviv, where traffic on weekday mornings usually flows thickly on major highways, all cars and trucks came to a halt. People stepped out of their cars and stood silently as air raid sirens wailed. Farther north, in Yokneam Illit, lighter traffic gradually stopped, and people began to emerge from their cars. Some kept their arms at their sides; others held them over their heart. One or two gave military salutes. The whole thing lasted 60 seconds, but in a country filled with families profoundly affected by the Holocaust, when the entire nation stops moving if only for a minute the silence is profound.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Automobiles
|
Clint Eastwood in "Escape From Alcatraz," where objects like silverware take on great significance, just as in Robert Bresson's world. Writing about the hard edged American filmmaker Don Siegel ("Dirty Harry"), the critic Andrew Sarris once made an offhand observation about Siegel's 1979 "Escape From Alcatraz," starring Clint Eastwood. Siegel, he wrote, seemed "to have been inspired by Robert Bresson's 'A Man Escaped' (1956)." Sarris is hardly the only writer to make that comparison. Reviewing "Escape From Alcatraz" upon its release, Dave Kehr, then the critic for the Chicago Reader, said that movie shared a "gravity and sparseness" with the Bresson picture and that "like Bresson's films, 'Escape' subscribes to the theory that less is more." The connection is perfect, if perhaps counterintuitive. Bresson (1901 99) was the most cerebral, overtly theoretical French filmmaker of his era and one of the most original. He invented a clipped style of filmmaking that is immediately identifiable, and whose influence has reverberated over time. Could Siegel (1912 91), a gifted mainstream director of action and suspense, really share that much with him? And if so, could watching their prison break movies back to back act as a decoder ring for both filmmakers? "Escape From Alcatraz": Stream it on Amazon Prime or Hulu; rent it on FandangoNow, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu. "A Man Escaped": Stream it on the Criterion Channel or Kanopy; rent or buy it on Amazon or iTunes. The common thread in Siegel's films is an anti authority streak and Siegel, a master of efficient storytelling, never wastes a shot. In that, he is similar to Bresson, a filmmaker who showed a little to convey a lot. More interested in "being" than "seeming," he favored nonprofessional actors, whom he called "models." In "Notes on the Cinematograph," Bresson's scattered, collected musings on filmmaking, the director writes of striving to remove any signs of mental activity from his performers; he wanted to capture the "automatism of real life." More than any filmmaker since the Soviet silent directors, he prized the suggestive power of linking two shots together to convey intangible ideas. Although sources vary on his religiosity, Bresson, raised Catholic, made movies that imbued ordinary objects with metaphysical significance. In "L'Argent" (1983), Bresson's final film, a counterfeit bill spreads the sin of its creation as it passes from person to person. The extraordinarily tactile "A Man Escaped," which chronicles the getaway efforts of a French prisoner of war in 1943, makes life or death stakes of every sight and sound. Based on an account by the French resistance fighter Andre Devigny and assuredly informed by Bresson's own World War II experiences as a prisoner of war it begins with a Bresson mainstay: a close up of a man's hands, in this case, those of the captive resistance fighter Fontaine in transit. One hand reaches over to the car's door handle as Fontaine plots to quietly slip from the moving vehicle. We hear the sounds of the gear shift. The slowing of the car offers opportunities; the wheels of a tram provide the cover of noise. We're not even at the prison yet, and already Bresson has attuned viewers to subtleties of space and sound. And when Fontaine (Francois Leterrier) makes his abrupt exit, we hear gunshots directed at him, yet the camera remains fixed in the car, with the shooting barely visible in the background. Bresson rarely illustrates more than is necessary. Soon, Fontaine will be in one prison cell, and then another; in both cases, every possession holds the potential of salvation. The film unfolds as a succession of small triumphs: Fontaine uses a safety pin to slip off handcuffs. He makes a chisel out of a spoon handle to carve through the wooden cell door. He communicates with neighboring prisoners by taps. (We later learn that this simple gesture may have delayed an inmate from killing himself.) The instantly recognizable sound of keys clanking against a railing signals the danger of a guard nearby. There are obvious spiritual dimensions. Fontaine's conversations through barred windows with a fellow prisoner acquire elements of counseling and confession. His escape relies on persistent, careful attention to the carpentry of the door. In his delays and indecision about when to make a break, he experiences lapses of faith. Remaining devoted over time indeed, time itself is everything: As Fontaine makes his way out, it takes him more than 20 minutes to reach the nearby edge of a terrace, because of the dangers of being seen and heard. Maybe none of this sounds forbiddingly austere, but if it does, consider the many points of intersection that "A Man Escaped" has with "Escape From Alcatraz," one of the top grossing movies of 1979. Like Bresson's models, Eastwood makes a natural stoic, and, as an established screen persona, he is effectively an actor more suited for "being" than "seeming." "Escape from Alcatraz," like "A Man Escaped," opens with a period title card and the arrival of a prisoner, and it quickly attunes viewers to the sound of footsteps and shackles. Objects take on outsize importance: Eastwood's Frank Morris pilfers a nail clipper from the warden (Patrick McGoohan) and uses it to chip at corroded concrete in his cell. Like Fontaine, he makes a chisel out of a spoon. (The sound of whittling grows familiar.) A fan becomes a tool. A chrysanthemum turns into a secular article of faith. When the warden cruelly takes away the painting privileges of a prisoner, Doc (Roberts Blossom), Siegel immediately cuts from the pain in Doc's face to a guard engaged in target practice. The edit has a Bressonian precision: With the simple boom of the gunshot and an abrupt zoom, Siegel aurally and visually underscores the agony of the confiscation. "This is the rock, man, they don't want you doing anything here but time," says English (Paul Benjamin), the prison librarian, and as in "A Man Escaped," time is paramount. Waiting a second too long to return to a cell bed or dithering over when to act means the difference between failure and success. When Frank and his accomplices dodge illumination on Alcatraz's roof, the shot choices in the night scene closely parallel those in Fontaine's final rooftop inch to freedom. "Escape From Alcatraz" may be a blockbuster and "A Man Escaped" a canonical art film, but their main difference is in packaging. In suspense, terseness and economy, they belong together.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
Credit...Jillian Freyer for The New York Times Jonathan Groff, now starring as a hapless flower shop clerk in an Off Broadway revival of "Little Shop of Horrors," has a tiny confession to make. "I am really bad with plants," said the 34 year old actor, recalling how rapidly the orchids and other flora occasionally sent his way seem to shrivel up and die. "I kill them." We were seated under an oak tree that had just tried to bean us with a fast moving acorn, somewhere inside the New York Botanical Garden. Visiting had been my idea, and I wasn't quite sure whether it was cheesy or inspired. (Spoiler alert: The musical is about a bloodthirsty plant). But Mr. Groff was game he had never been and although the Bronx gardens were not especially menacing (other than that wayward nut) they did provide an opportunity for some reflection on his unlikely career swerve. So what is he doing in a 270 seat Hell's Kitchen theater performing a show that can easily be seen at many a summer camp or community theater, and that, the producers say, will absolutely positively definitely not be transferring to Broadway? The answer, he says, is mostly that it's fun. He loves the idea ("It made me so giddy and excited"). He loves the music ("I'm just obsessed by it"). And he's as surprised as you are ("I can't believe we're doing this"). "We're just laughing because it feels like we're doing a professional version of the quintessential high school show," he said. " We're all going to back to that initial nerdy impulse of what made us fall in love with musical theater." The other key factor: This revival, of a show that first opened Off Off Broadway in 1982, is a passion project for the director Michael Mayer, who played a formative role in his career. Thirteen years ago, Mr. Mayer took a risk by choosing Mr. Groff over actors with more education and experience to star in an experimental Off Broadway musical called "Spring Awakening." That show transferred to Broadway and won eight Tonys; it brought Mr. Groff his first Tony nomination and changed his life. "It was everything I ever dreamed of, come true at 21," Mr. Groff said. "And, like I told Michael, it's a lifetime of paybacks." In May, Mr. Mayer asked Mr. Groff to join him at the Metropolitan Opera for a performance of his production of "Rigoletto," and during intermission, said to him, "I think I found the next project we're going to work on, because I know something about you that other people don't." A week later, Mr. Mayer called and asked him to play Seymour, a clumsy and nebbishy orphan fascinated by exotic plants and besotted by his co worker Audrey. The show, written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, is now in previews at the Westside Theater, where it is scheduled to run through Jan. 19; the production also stars Tammy Blanchard, as the ill treated and ill fated Audrey, and the two time Tony winner Christian Borle as her sadistic dentist boyfriend. Obsessions? Let's just say that as a child, Mr. Groff would type out, from memory, scripts of "I Love Lucy" episodes (he also read books about Lucille Ball, a memoir by Desi Arnaz and a book about their company). "I am a total nerd, and this role is actually closer to who I am as a person than the other parts that I've played on Broadway," Mr. Groff said. "I have a whole side of me that isn't the projected image," he added. "I get this I totally get it and it feels like a natural fit." His physical transformation from hunky to homely has turned out to be surprisingly persuasive, so much so that this production has interpolated a recurring sight gag about the character's unattractiveness that, by combining absurdity with plausibility, slays the audience (pardon the pun) over and over. Mr. Groff, dressed by costume designer Tom Broecker in ill fitting khakis and a vintage blue shirt, appears to cave in on himself during the first act of the show, as if he doesn't even deserve to stand fully upright. He wears black mad scientist glasses, a beige cap and blue Chuck Taylors, and manages to look boxier and younger than he is in real life. "The only way he's not a Seymour is because he's gorgeous," Ms. Blanchard said. "But even that goes away he just seems to shrink into this dorky thing." But is " Little Shop" more than a lark? "It's about something larger it's Faust," Mr. Groff said. "It's about greed, and how far you'll go to get what you want." But, he added, "the reason it ran for five years Off Broadway, and there's a movie, and every theater in the world has done it, is because it so doesn't take itself seriously." Visiting the botanical garden prompted memories for Mr. Groff, who said it reminded him of childhood trips to Longwood Gardens in his home state of Pennsylvania. "The smell!" he exulted. He grew up in Lancaster County, where his father trains horses. He loved musicals, and dreamed of performing (early fantasy roles: Maria in "The Sound of Music" and Eliza in "My Fair Lady"). As a little boy, he dressed as Mary Poppins and Cinderella and Alice and Dorothy, as well as Peter Pan, before discovering the joys of Robin Hood. He moved to New York instead of going to college, and after waiting tables and an early Broadway debacle (as an understudy in the short lived "In My Life") landed "Spring Awakening." That show, he said, "was my college experience, in a lot of ways," broadening his understanding of musical theater and increasing his appetite for risk. He had known he was gay from an early age, and had been living with a boyfriend since he was 19; he came out to his parents shortly after leaving that show, at 23: "I said, 'I'm gay, but I'm not going to be in a parade or anything.'" By 2014, he was starring in the HBO series "Looking," about a group of gay friends in San Francisco and appeared as a grand marshal of New York City's gay pride march. " I started to just become way more comfortable," he said. "When I came out it was sort of like, 'If I could change it I would, but sorry, this is how I am,' and then it took those years to feel like this is a part of me that I love and I would never want to change." He said coming out has had a generally positive impact on his career he has been landing roles both gay and straight, and "ultimately the payoff has just been that I've been able to be more and more myself." "My ultimate dream is to turn it into a kind of artists' colony for my friends to go make work," he said. Mr. Groff shuns social media he said he doesn't think his life is that interesting and bikes around the city. He has no interest in clothing. He showed up for our photo shoot with three T shirts white, gray and black proud that he had heeded a publicist's advice to bring options. Although he's never quite sure what's next career wise, he likes the work he has. "Mindhunter" was an unexpected pleasure "I'm not naturally drawn to true crime," he said but he wanted to work with the director David Fincher, and has enjoyed the immersion in a new world, as well as the time filming in Pittsburgh, which allowed him weekends with his family. Up next: "Frozen 2." He won't say much about what to expect, other than that Kristoff now gets his own song, and that the character is "ready to take it to the next step" with Princess Anna. As we were wrapping up our conversation, I asked Mr. Groff about an article I had seen in a Pennsylvania paper, noting that he had been spotted in the audience for a community theater production of "Evita." Mr. Groff said he loves seeing theater where he grew up, and had been further inspired by the actor Michael Cerveris, who while filming "Mindhunter" had soaked up shows in Pittsburgh. So yes, he was at "Evita" with his 4 year old niece, and he also made time to see "Mamma Mia!" at a theater where he had performed. As we hopped into a golf cart to find our way out of the garden, he wanted to show me one more thing. He pulled out his phone, loaded with pictures of the cramped backstage at "Little Shop," and swiped to a video in which he was running lines with that niece, who has been learning about the show in preparation for attending opening night. "She's apparently been telling the kids at her day care that she eats blood, and she's obsessed with the plant's eyes," he said. "But I think she sort of gets that we're playing pretend."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Theater
|
Black and Latino pregnant women in Philadelphia are five times as likely as their white counterparts to have been exposed to the coronavirus, according to data collected from nearly 1,300 women between April and June. The findings, which have not been published in a scientific journal, were based on tests for coronavirus antibodies, which reveal a person's past exposure to the virus even if it did not cause any symptoms. The study bolsters other research showing that the coronavirus disproportionately affects Black and Latino people. "The racial disparities are striking, and important to bring out," said Whitney Robinson, a social epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, who was not involved in the study. "This reinforces what we've already seen, and adds more certainty that the racial differences are real." The study's numbers dwarf previous estimates of the virus's skewed impact on racial and ethnic minorities. Across the United States, Black and Latino people have been reported to be about three times as likely to contract the coronavirus as white people a trend roughly mirrored by data collected by the city of Philadelphia. But these patterns have largely been based on tests for active infections, which have struggled to accurately capture where and how the virus has spread. Although there is increasing awareness that many coronavirus infections cause few to no symptoms, many diagnostic testing centers stymied by a lack of equipment and trained personnel have rationed their tests to only people who are noticeably sick. And people who have reliable access to health care and insurance, often white and well off, are more likely to seek out tests than others. Diagnostic testing sites in many cities, including Philadelphia, have also been cordoned off by ZIP code, said Carmen Guerra, a health disparities researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved with the study, but is collaborating with the research team on others. Residents who do not own cars or cannot afford public transportation, she said, must surmount enormous barriers to determining their health status. Tests that look for coronavirus genes also can't find people who were previously infected and are now virus free. To fill that gap, several health centers in the area are now offering antibody tests in addition to those for active infections, said Dr. Karen Puopolo, a neonatologist at Pennsylvania Hospital and an author of the study, which was posted to the website medRxiv on Friday. But many people decide not to get antibody tests, painting an incomplete picture of exposure throughout the city. Keeping tabs on pregnant women, who have continued to seek medical care amid the pandemic, could offer a less biased glimpse into what is going on in the population at large, said Scott Hensley, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania who also was an author of the study. Dr. Hensley, Dr. Puopolo and their colleagues searched for coronavirus antibodies in anonymized blood samples from 1,293 women who gave birth at Pennsylvania Hospital or the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania between April 4 and June 3. These two medical centers see about half of Philadelphia's live births, Dr. Hensley said. Unlike diagnostic tests that search for stretches of genetic material specific to the coronavirus, antibody tests hunt for immune molecules produced in response to the virus and can thus detect infections that have already resolved, even if they did not result in overt symptoms. That potentially gives researchers a window into the past and a chance to catalog infections that diagnostic tests miss. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. The researchers found that just over 6 percent of all the women they tested carried coronavirus antibodies. But once teased apart by race and ethnicity, the numbers revealed striking differences. About 10 percent of the study's Black and Latino participants had been exposed to the coronavirus, compared with 2 percent of the white women and 1 percent of the Asian women, the study found. (The study provided the category "Hispanic/Latino.") "When I saw the data, I almost fell out of my chair," Dr. Hensley said. Some have questioned the accuracy of certain antibody tests, which sometimes mistakenly detect coronavirus antibodies in a person who has never been infected. But Dr. Hensley said the team confirmed that its laboratory test had a false positive rate of just 1 percent, on par with some of the best commercial tests. Mounting evidence shows that the pandemic's outsize effects on Black and Latino people have been driven in large part by a long list of social factors that increase their risk of exposure to the virus, Dr. Guerra said. Black and Latino individuals are more likely to work essential jobs that cannot be done from home. Many live in multigenerational households and rely on public transportation, and have struggled for access to reliable sources of information about Covid 19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Toxic and chronic stress, born out by decades of persistent racism, have also taken a toll on the health and well being of Black and Latino people, Rachel Hardeman, a reproductive health equity researcher at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study, said in an email. As health workers and researchers try to ramp up testing efforts nationwide, pregnant women could play a larger role in helping experts track the spread of disease, Dr. Robinson said. "We also need more targeted research on pregnant populations" in general, she added. Recent analyses have found that pregnant women infected by the coronavirus may be at higher risk of worse outcomes, Dr. Hardeman said. Pregnant women are also thought to be more vulnerable to certain infections because carrying a fetus tamps down the immune system. The study was not designed to assess whether pregnant women are at higher risk of contracting the coronavirus than other groups. But if evidence of that emerges, it would be "concerning," given the other known racial disparities among pregnant women, said Dr. Ibukun Akinboyo, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Duke University. For instance, Black women are three to four times more likely than white women to die during or soon after childbirth. Pregnant women who tend to be young and healthy members of the work force do not represent the population as a whole, Dr. Robinson added. "We still need to have samples like this from kids and older people, and unpartnered people." Still, these patterns "reflect the structural inequities in the United States," and underscore the need to address the factors that underlie them, Dr. Akinboyo said. That is powerful for those trying to curb disease transmission, but it can also help identify and protect those in need. "Highlighting the groups that are more likely to get infected," she said, "means we can get resources to the right groups." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
After more than 30 years writing the Kinsey Millhone "alphabet series" of detective novels, Sue Grafton is almost finished. The second to last, "Y Is for Yesterday," will be published on Aug. 22. Ms. Grafton spends half the year in Santa Barbara, Calif., and the other half in Louisville, Ky. She and her husband travel for pleasure, but she also tours for book signings every other year. "I used to write a book a year and it just got to be too much. I was either writing or on the road or doing interviews and I got really cranky and I thought, this is no way to spend my life. So I cut it back to a book every two years and now I'm cheerful and good natured and enjoy myself. Plus, I only have one to go, baby!" When traveling for work, she doesn't bother packing things she won't use. "I never take workout clothes and I never take a laptop because I don't own one. If I'm on the road I don't worry about exercise and I don't work. I focus on the job at hand, which makes me really boring, but at least I get in there and spend my energy correctly."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
ROME The last time the Oscar winning production designer Dante Ferretti tackled New York City, he created the violent mean streets of a mid 19th century Manhattan slum, a bleak, ramshackle neighborhood where blood and mud caked the ground, for Martin Scorsese's 2002 opus, "Gangs of New York." This time around, Mr. Ferretti has taken a slightly more commercial approach and has lent his design vision to the holiday windows of Tod's, the leather goods emporium on Madison Avenue whose majority owner is the Italian industrialist Diego Della Valle, chairman and chief executive of Tod's S.p.A. Their coproduction will be unveiled to the public this Thursday at a celebratory party. It may seem like an odd move for someone who worked with Federico Fellini for over a decade and with Mr. Scorsese for nearly a quarter century. And it is true that normally store windows don't figure into Mr. Ferretti's job description. But he points out that he and Mr. Della Valle have known each other for many years and have worked together on and off since 2002, so he's happy to give a little help to a friend. The suggestion that he may be selling out provokes some eye rolling. "So how much are you paying me?" he said jokingly to the two Tod's representatives present during a recent interview. "Did you bring the money? Did it fit in the car? It seemed a little small." Both Mr. Ferretti and Mr. Della Valle were born in the Marches, in towns just a few kilometers apart. They often cross paths on vacations, in Capri and in Miami, where they have homes (Mr. Ferretti in South Beach, where he is a resident, and Mr. Della Valle in Miami Beach, where he bought Billy Joel's waterfront villa three years ago). And Mr. Della Valle is one of the main shareholders of the holding company that controls Cinecitta Studios, the film studios created by Mussolini, which reached their apex in the 1950s and 1960s when Rome became known as "Hollywood on the Tiber" and where Mr. Ferretti has had a private office for some 40 years. There, behind a door marked by a large sign that reads "Once Upon a Time," are moody landscapes that the designer said he painted when he wanted a distraction from the moviemaking grind, as well as some of the dozens of awards he has won during a 47 year career: the three Oscars he has won with his wife Francesca Lo Schiavo (making for six statuettes), along with a plethora of British Academy of Film and Television Arts and Los Angeles Film Critic Association awards, and sundry Italian prizes he keeps at home. Little wonder, then, that the inspiration for his holiday spectacle, which follows a V.I.P. showroom he designed for the Tod's store in Beverly Hills, Calif., as well as cinema themed designs for Tod's events was Fellini's idiosyncratic circus scape, a mythical world of street performers and quirky misfits who repeatedly crop up in the legendary Italian director's movies. "I made six films with Fellini, so the circus is very Fellini like," said Mr. Ferretti, who was honored with a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "Dante Ferretti: Designing for the Big Screen," two years ago. Indeed, the Tod's Madison Avenue windows were a homecoming of sort for Mr. Ferretti, who lived for years on Madison Avenue between 61st and 62nd Streets while he worked on a slew of American films, most prominently with Mr. Scorsese. His ninth film with Mr. Scorsese, "Silence," about 17th century Jesuits colonizing Macao and Japan, opens next month. Acrobats, trapeze artists, lion tamers and circus animals preen across the five large display windows beneath a red and white striped big top that calls to mind the American flag. Inside the store, visitors will be able to pose for selfies with circus worker cutouts. Then there are the clowns. Scratch that. No clowns. "We substituted clowns for people who work in the circus but they're not dressed like clowns," Mr. Ferretti said, laughing, in a reference to the recent creepy clown scare. The sets for the New York store were made by Mekane, the Italian company he uses for theater and opera sets, and they were shipped to New York and installed during one exhausting overnight effort. Two dimensional cutouts of circus performers, ringmasters and animals were handmade and hand painted, while a swing was made with special materials, to give it a vintage effect. "Films can be very complicated," said Mr. Ferretti. In comparison, the window displays were a breeze, "if only because it was just one theme." According to Mr. Della Valle, "We wanted to do something that would transmit joy of life." As a child, he said, "the circus coming to town was an important event." "Even those who don't enter the store will be cheered," Mr. Della Valle said. Given the protests currently going on just a few blocks away, that may be some real movie magic, after all.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
Though they remain focused on the naked body, these relatively new magazines are seeking to move sex in print periodicals from under the mattress up onto the coffee table. In stark contrast to online pornography, with much of it free, these niche publications sell for a premium often more than 20 to thousands of people, or tens of thousands, rather than millions. Playboy, which at one time sold almost six million copies a month in the United States, now sells about a million, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Penthouse, which sold nearly five million copies, sells about 100,000. The biggest of the newer magazines, a venerable French publication called Lui, has sold as many as 350,000 in France. Despite their relatively small audience, the magazines are influencing the direction of the pornography industry, according to Theo Sapoutzis, chief executive of the industry magazine and trade organization Adult Video News. "They have an elegant style," Mr. Sapoutzis said. "The difference between porn and erotica is the lighting," said Sarah Nicole Prickett, one of Adult magazine's founders, quoting the former sex actress Gloria Leonard. Ms. Prickett and another co founder, Berkeley Poole, said they sought to create an atmosphere that is very different from online pornography or the sex advice in women's magazines like Cosmopolitan or digital dating apps like Grindr and Tinder, which ask you to swipe images. Adult, for example, recently published an account of a straight man's youthful dalliance with homosexuality. There are photographs by John Edmonds, an employee of a public library in Washington who takes nude portraits of young men, some of whom he knows, and others whom he persuades to be photographed. The magazine's sex columnist, Chelsea G. Summers, is in her 50s rather her 20s. A print magazine "has the power to make you stop and look at an image and consider it," Ms. Prickett said. "It makes you assume that something is beautiful rather than just affirming your unconscious view of what is beautiful, like those swiping things," she said, referring to Grindr and Tinder. Kate Lanphear, the new editor of Maxim a men's magazine rather than a pornographic one, but one that has traditionally featured scantily clad women takes a similar view. Her move last year to Maxim from The New York Times's T magazine, where she was women's style director, surprised many.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Dr. Donald L. Morton, a son of an Appalachian coal miner who gained renown as a surgeon for helping to develop a widely used technique for detecting and treating certain kinds of cancer, died on Jan. 10 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 79. The cause was heart failure, his family said. Even as Dr. Morton did groundbreaking work, he was also known as one of the last physicians to treat the actor John Wayne in 1979, when Wayne was in an advanced stage of stomach cancer. He later had a founding role in what is now the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica. Dr. Morton, who grew up without electricity or running water in West Virginia, made his way to the forefront of global cancer research and treatment with a focus on melanoma, a type of skin cancer. He later had melanoma himself, in the late 1980s, but detected it early enough to have it surgically removed. He helped save countless others from it, too. "Dr. Morton's discoveries have profoundly changed the treatment of human cancer," the American College of Surgeons said in 2008 when it gave him an award for innovation in surgical technique. In the late 1970s, while working as chief of surgical oncology at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Morton helped develop a technique called a sentinel lymph node biopsy. In the past, doctors trying to determine whether cancer had spread to lymph nodes had to remove large numbers of nodes. It was a serious operation with lasting side effects, yet 80 percent of the time it proved unnecessary because no tumor was found. Dr. Morton believed many such operations could be avoided. "Dr. Morton's idea was that a tumor would migrate first to one lymph node, the way water running down a mountain flows into one lake before flowing downstream to others," Andrew Pollack wrote in a 2003 profile of Dr. Morton in The New York Times. "By injecting dye into a patient's tumor, he hypothesized, doctors could trace the spread pattern and find that node, which could then be removed. Only if that node had cancer would others be excised." Dr. Alistair J. Cochran, a U.C.L.A. skin care specialist who worked with Dr. Morton, recalled their discussions about what to call the pertinent node. "We called it the sentinel lymph node because it was the one that guarded the rest of the lymph nodes," he said in an interview. "It stood there as sort of a soldier guarding the gate." The technique proved successful, and it was adapted for breast cancer cases and other cancers. Dr. Morton helped develop the technique while also pursuing his long held dream of creating a vaccine for melanoma. In the 1960s he began experimenting with a vaccine that was intended not to prevent cancer but to harness the body's immune system to attack cancer cells once they had developed. In the following decades he became one of the top grant recipients from the National Institutes of Health, and he helped set up a private company, CancerVax, which raised money to conduct trials of the proposed vaccine, called Canvaxin. Although early studies suggested that Canvaxin could improve the survival rate of some melanoma patients, more complete clinical trials conducted in 2005 determined that it provided no clear benefit, and the testing was stopped. At one point, Dr. Morton gave John Wayne one of his early experimental vaccines. It did not work for him. The two men respected and even resembled each other: Dr. Morton was a large man with a chiseled chin and clear eyes. He later displayed two of Wayne's Winchester rifles in his office. "You can tell a lot about a person in how they respond to adversity and terminal illness," Dr. Morton said of Wayne, "and he was a true hero." Several years after Wayne's death in 1979, Dr. Morton helped start the John Wayne Cancer Clinic at U.C.L.A., which was formed with money donated by the actor's family. In 1991, when Dr. Morton moved to St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, the center moved with him and was renamed the John Wayne Cancer Institute. Donald Lee Morton was born on Sept. 12, 1934, in Richwood, W.Va. His father was a coal miner. He attended Berea College in Kentucky, which offered free tuition for students from Appalachia, before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley. He received his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1958. By 1960, he was working at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., where he began his work on melanoma. Dr. Morton's first wife, the former Wilma Miley, died in a car accident. In 1989 he married Lorraine Euvino (nee Russo). She survives him, as do their daughter, Danielle; his children from his first marriage, Christin Kazmierczak, Laura Morton Rowe, Diana Morton McAlpine and Donald Jr.; eight grandchildren; a brother, Patrick; and a sister, Carolyn Morton Karr.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
The bewitching and sometimes unsettling Japanese romantic drama "Asako I II" begins in the early 2000s. Outside an Osaka art gallery that's hosting an exhibition by the photographer Shigeo Gocho, pretty and shy Asako (Erika Karata) is approached by Baku (Masahiro Higashide), a strikingly handsome and brash guy with goofily floppy hair. He's bad news and even he knows it. He DJs. He starts fights with guys who try to dance with Asako. He goes out for pastries and doesn't come back until the next day. One of his exits seems to contain a phantom whisper of Antonioni's "L'Avventura," but that's not the affair's turning point. His no return disappearance is relayed in the movie's sole use of narration, by Asako herself. A couple of years later, Asako is working in a coffee shop in Tokyo, supplying carafes of the brew to a sake marketing firm next door. Ryohei, an awkward young salaryman there, is Baku's double so exact as to be played by the same actor, in a quietly stunning dual performance. He's Baku's total opposite, personality wise: almost recessively shy and possibly a bit dim. Both parties are resistant to romance, until Ryohei falls hard. This quickly repels the wary Asako, who hasn't told Ryohei about Baku. A galvanic urban event finally brings them together. The couple fall into a domesticity that several years on seems to be splitting the difference between contentment and complacency. At which point Baku makes his presence felt again, when a friend of Asako points out the old boyfriend's portrait on a billboard.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
Not every outdoor space needs the full designer treatment, but many could benefit from a little help. Amber Freda, a New York landscape designer, suggested a few basic elements to consider. "Furniture is probably the most important thing, so you can start using the outdoor space even before you get the plantings figured out," Ms. Freda said. Your choice should depend on the size of the space and how you plan to use it: If it will be for lounging, simple chairs (for less than 100 to about 300 each) and small drinks tables (from about 150 to 300 each) may suffice. But if you plan to eat outdoors, you'll need a dining table (which may cost between 500 and 2,000). Think about custom built in wooden benches with storage underneath (about 3,000 to 7,000). Then Get Some Planters Almost any elevated space will benefit from planters arranged around the perimeter (about 50 to 600 each). Just be sure that whatever you buy is intended for outdoor use. "Machine made terra cottas are prone to cracking in the winter," Ms. Freda said. "Handmade terra cotta is better, and the thicker it is, the longer lasting it will be. Fiberglass will last forever, and you can get it in any color imaginable." Or you could go with metals or frost proof ceramics. "People think they can keep up with the watering, but if you go out of town for one weekend in July or August, your plants are dead when you come back," Ms. Freda said. That's why she thinks automatic irrigation systems "pay for themselves." A landscape professional can install a basic system with a battery operated timer for about 1,000, she said, or you can do it yourself for about 500 "but it takes a lot of trial and error."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
"We do not leave it to market forces to have the final say," Margrethe Vestager said. BRUSSELS Margrethe Vestager spent the past five years developing a well earned reputation as the world's top tech industry watchdog. From her perch overseeing Europe's competition rules, she fined Google more than 9 billion for breaking antitrust laws, and forced Apple to pay about 14.5 billion for dodging taxes. Now she says that work, which made her a hero among tech critics, did not go far enough. The biggest tech companies continue to test the limits of antitrust laws, behave unethically and push back against government intervention, she said. But she said the public's growing skepticism about technology has given her an opportunity for a tougher approach. "In the last five years," Ms. Vestager said in an extended interview, "some of the darker sides of digital technologies have become visible." So Ms. Vestager, a 51 year old former Danish lawmaker, is doubling down. She has signed on for a rare second five year term as the head of the European Commission's antitrust division, and assumed expanded responsibility over digital policy across the 28 nation bloc. With the new power, she has outlined an agenda that squarely targets the tech giants. She's weighing whether to remove some protections that shield large internet platforms from liability for content posted by users. She is also working on policies to make companies pay more taxes in Europe and investigating how the companies use data to box out competitors. Ms. Vestager has pledged to create the world's first regulations around artificial intelligence and called for giving collective bargaining rights to so called gig economy workers like Uber drivers. The push comes on top of an investigation into Amazon's use of data to gain an edge on competitors that had already started, and her look into accusations of unfair business practices by Facebook and Apple. "She has these accomplishments, but she didn't get as much as she wanted," said David Balto, a former lawyer in the Justice Department's antitrust division whose clients now include large tech companies. "Now she can be more aggressive." It will require standing up to relentless resistance from the tech companies, too. "One of the important things is, of course, to prioritize because otherwise you will be in the process of back and forth for a very, very long time," Ms. Vestager said. In person, Ms. Vestager's manner defies her tough enforcer reputation. She is unfailingly polite, meeting guests by offering tea and apologizing for a lingering cold. (She assured everyone that she had just washed her hands.) She is a challenging interview subject, prone to filibuster and rarely veering from oft repeated talking points. A skilled politician, she projects modesty while not exactly turning away from the spotlight. A sign in the hallway outside her office says, in Danish, "Vestager Street." She is also fast to shrug off criticism, including by numerous tech executives and President Trump, that she has been unfair to American tech companies. Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, called the penalty against his company in 2016 for skirting Irish taxes "total political crap." Google is appealing her three decisions against the company. "She hates the United States," President Trump said in a television interview in June, "perhaps worse than any person I've ever met." Ms. Vestager feigns to hardly remember the president's comment. "Since I know the very good relationship I have with the United States, then he must only meet people who really like the States if I am the one who likes you the least," she said. If anything, American authorities are coming around to share her tech skepticism. Federal, state and congressional investigators are scrutinizing the tech industry over unfair business practices. Ms. Vestager said she saw opportunities to collaborate, but was waiting to see how the inquiries unfolded. "Obviously it's very interesting to see what will come of it," she said. As the United States begins to investigate Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, some American officials are trying to learn lessons from Europe's efforts. The investigations of Google and others took years to complete, giving the companies extra time to solidify their dominance. And once the inquiries were completed, critics said, the penalties focused on large fines that the companies could easily afford, rather than enforcing structural changes that would restore competition. Luther Lowe, the head of public policy at Yelp, the reviews website that has been a frequent critic of Google's behavior, praised Ms. Vestager's efforts. But he said companies like Yelp "have to date still not seen a shred of practical relief, despite having prevailed in concept." Ms. Vestager needs to use all powers at her disposal, he said, "or be granted new ones." Ms. Vestager said some of the criticism was valid. She is taking steps to speed up investigations and is applying a rarely used rule known as "interim measures," that acts as a cease and desist order for companies to stop acting a certain way while an investigation can be conducted. She will play a leading role in the E uropean Union's debate over a new Digital Services Act, which could bring sweeping reforms to how the internet operates, including forcing online platforms to remove illegal content or risk fines and other penalties. Facebook, she said, must be quicker to stop the spread of false and mi sleading information, violent material and hate speech. "You have to take it down because it spreads like a virus," she said. "But if it's not fast enough, of course, eventually we will have to regulate this." And she remains focused on whether the largest technology companies squeezed out businesses that rely on them to reach customers. Amazon is under investigation for mistreating third party sellers that offer products similar to what it sells. Apple is being questioned over accusations that it uses the App Store to harm rivals such as Spotify. "Some of these platforms, they have the role both as player and referee, and how can that be fair?" she asked. "You would never accept a football match where the one team was also being the referee." In Europe, a broader debate is underway about a lack of homegrown tech giants. President Emmanuel Macron of France, for instance, has called for more government support of European companies. Ursula von der Leyen, the new head of the European Commission, who appointed Ms. Vestager, has called for Europe to achieve "technological sovereignty." The companies facing Ms. Vestager's scrutiny are warning about taking regulation too far. Christian Borggreen, vice president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association in Brussels, a trade group representing Apple, Google and other companies, warned that new laws could put Europe at a disadvantage. "We hope future E.U. legislation will be evidence based and never become an excuse for protectionism," he said. Ms. Vestager has said that European companies must compete on their merits. "One of the main reasons that U.S. tech companies are popular in Europe is that their products are good," she said. Her job, she added, has been to step in when companies "cut corners." Ms. Vestager said Europe had a different view of technology than the wide open policies of the United States and government control of China . Europe, she said, must forge its own approach. "Market forces are more than welcome, but we do not leave it to market forces to have the final say," she said. "Markets are not perfect."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times A wave, of the development kind, finally seems to be forming along the edge of Queens where Astoria meets the East River. Hoping to turn a long isolated shoreline with panoramic views of Manhattan into a gold coast, developers are at work on a batch of high end rental complexes that will add pools and saunas, schools and supermarkets along a stretch that currently has barbed wire, warehouses and power plants. Locally focused firms, like AKI Development, which opened its 28 unit Graffiti House in the area in December, are planting flags alongside major builders from elsewhere, like the Durst Organization, which is building a 20 story high rise with a supermarket that will loom over the Astoria Houses, the sprawling public housing complex that anchors the neighborhood. At the same time, the city is investing in quality of life upgrades, including ferry service for the subway starved neighborhood, which runs from about 36th Avenue to 20th Avenue, west of 21st Street. Covering an exterior wall of the building, which has 28 one bedroom units and a pergola topped common roof, is a mural with Mondrian like panels of blue, red and black by Tony Sjoman, a.k.a Rubin. Graffiti style murals of birds, mermaids and a man with dreadlocks jazz up the walls around a 14 space parking lot. Painters also let loose inside the building's elevator shaft, which is visible courtesy of a peek a boo window in the elevator cab. Bright designs flash past during a ride. Brett Harris, a founding principal of AKI, said the building's style and name honor the area's legacy of street art. Every summer, with the permission of landlords, artists spray paint garage doors and walls in the neighborhood, as part of an event called the Welling Court Mural Project. Begun in 2009 with about 40 artists, the event expects to attract more than 150 in June, said Garrison Buxton, a founder of Ad Hoc Art, the organizer of the event, which contributed several murals that face Graffiti House from across the street. The company has six other active development sites west of 21st Street, including former ice cream and candle factories. "Everything is cascading this way," Mr. Harris said. If the area, with its artsy vibe and proximity to the East River, does become the next Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as some developers and brokers hope, it might be a feather in the cap of the Alma Realty Corp. of Queens, a family run firm that has invested in the area for decades. Today, Alma is putting the finishing touches on an unnamed 404 unit rental complex on the river at 34 46 Vernon Boulevard, in an area sometimes called Ravenswood. Sitting amid low slung industrial structures, Alma's 18 story rental seems to loom as high as the red and white striped smokestacks of a nearby power plant. Despite demolition activity at the site, Alma, which is part of a team developing the project, can't begin construction without a 421a property tax abatement, said Jason Fink, an Alma spokesman. The 421a program, which exempts developers from some property taxes in exchange for building affordable rental housing and which has been criticized as a giveaway to the real estate industry, expired last winter. A revised version of 421a from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is now before the state's legislature. The end of the 421a program has also hobbled Hallets Point, a mega development on the waterfront from Durst. Wrapping the tip of a peninsula, Hallets Point is planned as a 2.4 million square foot mini city, with 2,200 apartments across seven buildings, as well as stores, parks and a public school. But most of the project is becalmed. Durst does have a 20 story rental under construction there, however, and it will be a game changer when it introduces 324 market rate and 81 affordable units to the area. The brick and glass facades of the two towered building, at 01 02 26th Avenue at First Street, will stand in gleaming contrast to the drab blocks surrounding it. Durst's tower, to open in 2018, will feature a 21,500 square foot supermarket, said Jordan Barowitz, a Durst spokesman. In a neighborhood with a smattering of stores, a large market will be a welcome change, said Claudia Coger, 81, the president of the tenants association at Astoria Houses. Some of her neighbors worry that the Durst project will affect rents in their quiet part of the city, said Ms. Coger, who has lived at Astoria Houses for 62 years. "We were a well kept secret," said Ms. Coger, who fishes for striped bass in the river. "But now, everybody wants a piece of action." The area was rezoned in 2010, covering 238 blocks, including most of the waterfront. The zoning on some side streets was changed to prevent the ungainly high rises of an earlier era. But the rezoning also boosted slightly the allowable size of apartment buildings along the river on Vernon Boulevard. And, to help prevent residents from being uprooted, it created incentives for the creation of affordable housing. The list of influential developers coming ashore in Astoria should also include the Related Companies, which last fall spent 115 million to purchase Marine Terrace, a 444 unit Section 8 housing complex that will be added to its affordable portfolio. Related also will construct two structures, with 53 apartments, for veterans.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
Richard Dudman, a much traveled reporter for The St. Louis Post Dispatch who spent more than a month in captivity in Cambodia after being ambushed by Vietcong fighters and later survived an assassination attempt after meeting the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, died on Thursday in Blue Hill, Me. He was 99. The death was confirmed by his daughter, Iris Dudman. Mr. Dudman's career in journalism lasted more than three quarters of a century. He was in Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and, after oversleeping and missing a flight back to Washington, dropped by the police station where Lee Harvey Oswald was being held and watched as he was gunned down by Jack Ruby. He covered the 1956 Arab Israeli War, filed stories from Havana when Fidel Castro toppled the Batista government and covered wars and revolutions in Guatemala, Argentina, Burma (now Myanmar), Ireland, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Algeria, Laos and China. He made his first reporting trip to South Vietnam in 1962 and, concluding early on that the war was a doomed enterprise, became one of the first American reporters to question the official narrative dispensed by military and government officials. In 1965, while preparing a series of pessimistic reports, he wrote to his colleague Marquis W. Childs, "The war is being lost, and in a hurry." As the Washington bureau chief for The Post Dispatch, Mr. Dudman secured and published excerpts from the government's classified history of the war, known as the Pentagon Papers, after the courts barred The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing any further material. His taste for adventure occasionally led him down dangerous roads. In 1970, he and two colleagues, Elizabeth Pond of The Christian Science Monitor and Michael Morrow of Dispatch News Service International, tried to drive from Saigon to Phnom Penh to report on the developing covert war in Cambodia. At a roadblock halfway between the border and Phnom Penh, three Vietcong fighters, brandishing assault rifles, emerged from the trees along the road and took the reporters captive, convinced that they were C.I.A. spies. Mr. Dudman turned to his colleagues and said, "If we get out of this alive, we'll have a hell of a good story." A coolheaded Vietnamese general, Bay Cao, eventually intervened and ensured better treatment of the three prisoners on Ho Chi Minh's birthday, they enjoyed a feast of roast dog. After six weeks, Mr. Dudman and his colleagues were taken to a road and left to hitchhike back to Saigon. Mr. Dudman described his ordeal in "Forty Days With the Enemy," published in 1971. Cambodia had not finished with him. In 1978, he and Elizabeth Becker of The Washington Post and Malcolm Caldwell, a leftist Scottish economist, secured a meeting with Pol Pot, becoming the first Western writers to travel through Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1974. The hoped for interview never materialized. After a handshake that Mr. Dudman found unnerving Pol Pot had delicate, tapering fingers and soft skin the dictator held court. "He spoke in a quiet monotone as we sweltered in tropical sunshine that flooded the room and brushed away the flies that buzzed around the orange juice," Mr. Dudman wrote in The Post Dispatch in 2015. "He spoke in Cambodian, Foreign Minister Ieng Sary put the Cambodian into French, and another official translated into English. Before getting to our questions, Pol Pot launched into a diatribe against the Vietnamese." He added, "We tried to break in with questions, but he ignored them and rolled right on." Mr. Dudman did manage to take one of the few known photographs of Pol Pot. The following night, Mr. Dudman heard gunshots in the guesthouse where he and his colleagues were staying. Stepping out into the hallway, he faced an attacker, who began shooting at him with a pistol. Mr. Dudman dashed back into his room, dodging bullets, and hid behind his bed. Richard Beebe Dudman was born on May 3, 1918, in Centerville, Iowa, to Virgil Ernest Dudman, a gynecologist and obstetrician, and the former Wilma Beebe. The family moved to Portland, Ore., two years later. Mr. Dudman enrolled in Stanford University with ideas of becoming a doctor, but lost his nerve when it came time to dissect a frog. He began reporting and taking photographs for The Stanford Daily and, on summer vacations in Northern California, worked for The Mercury Register, in Oroville, a newspaper owned by his uncle. After graduating in 1940 with a degree in economics and journalism, he joined the merchant marine, serving on a freighter that transported war materiel across the North Atlantic. In 1942, he enlisted in the Navy Reserves and spent four years on an armed supply ship that led convoys to Europe and North Africa. He was hired as a reporter by The Denver Post and joined The Post Dispatch in 1949. He reported from around the world for the newspaper and in 1954 was assigned to its Washington bureau. He became bureau chief in 1969 and held the position until retiring in 1981. Mr. Dudman, desperate to get a piece of the story, chafed when The Times began printing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers in mid June 1971. A chance meeting with the left wing journalist I. F. Stone, a good friend, led him to Leonard Boudin, a radical lawyer and Mr. Stone's brother in law, with whom Mr. Dudman had an inconclusive conversation. "That same day, an anonymous caller said he understood I wanted a batch of the papers," Mr. Dudman wrote in The Post Dispatch in 1996. "He said I should send someone to Cambridge, Mass., to wait in a certain public phone booth at a certain time the next day for further instructions." Thomas W. Ottenad, the newspaper's political reporter, flew to Cambridge, where, at the appointed phone booth, he was told to go to a second phone booth. There he received instructions to look under a stack of newspapers on a table on the upstairs back porch of a Cambridge rowhouse. There he uncovered a trove of classified material, which he, Mr. Dudman and James Deakin distilled in 38 articles. The newspaper published them the next day.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician who was the only woman ever to win a Fields Medal, the most prestigious honor in mathematics, died on Friday. She was 40. The cause was breast cancer, said Stanford University, where she was a professor. The university did not say where she died. Her death is "a big loss and shock to the mathematical community worldwide," said Peter C. Sarnak, a mathematician at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. The Fields Medal, established in 1936, is often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. But unlike the Nobels, the Fields are bestowed only on people aged 40 or younger, not just to honor their accomplishments but also to predict future mathematical triumphs. The Fields are awarded every four years, with up to four mathematicians chosen at a time. "She was in the midst of doing fantastic work," Dr. Sarnak said. "Not only did she solve many problems; in solving problems, she developed tools that are now the bread and butter of people working in the field." Dr. Mirzakhani was one of four Fields winners in 2014, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in South Korea. Until then, all 52 recipients had been men. She was also the only Iranian ever to win the award. He wrote, "The unparalleled excellence of the creative scientist and humble person that echoed Iran's name in scientific circles around the world was a turning point in introducing Iranian women and youth on their way to conquer the summits of pride and various international stages." Dr. Mirzakhani's mathematics looked at the interplay of dynamics and geometry, in some ways a more complicated version of billiards, with balls bouncing from one side to another of a rectangular billiards table eternally. But if a ball bounced at an angle, its trajectory would be more intricate, often covering the entire table. "You want to see the trajectory of the ball," Dr. Mirzakhani explained in a video produced by the Simons Foundation and the International Mathematical Union to profile the 2014 Fields winners. "Would it cover all your billiard table? Can you find closed billiards paths? And interestingly enough, this is an open question in general." In work with Alex Eskin of the University of Chicago, Dr. Mirzakhani examined billiards tables of more complicated shapes, and in fact considered the dynamics of balls bouncing around all possible tables that fit certain criteria. It was a challenging problem that had been attacked by many prominent mathematicians. That included Curtis T. McMullen, her thesis adviser at Harvard and also a Fields medalist, who had solved a special case. But no one had a good idea of the path toward a more encompassing solution. Amie Wilkinson, a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago, recalled sitting in on a meeting with Dr. Mirzakhani and Dr. Eskin. Whereas Dr. Eskin tended to be pessimistic, seeing all the potential pitfalls that could scuttle a proof, Dr. Mirzakhani was the opposite. "Just pushing and pushing and pushing," Dr. Wilkinson said. "Completely optimistic the whole time.'' After a decade of work, Dr. Mirzakhani and Dr. Eskin proved not the original problem that they had set out to solve but a slightly different one. "When these trajectories unwind,'' Dr. Wilkinson said, "they reveal deep properties about numbers and geometry." Dr. Sarnak said that though Dr. Mirzakhani wrote relatively few papers, she was still a game changer. "I'm sure in the long run, she would have had many more of these decisive papers," he said. In addition to being mathematically talented, "she was a person who thought deeply from the ground up," he said. "That's always the mark of someone who makes a permanent contribution," he added. In an interview in 2014 with Quanta Magazine, published by the Simons Foundation, Dr. Mirzakhani, who described herself as a "slow" mathematician, acknowledged her tendency to take the harder path. "You have to ignore low hanging fruit, which is a little tricky," she said. "I'm not sure if it's the best way of doing things, actually you're torturing yourself along the way." Maryam Mirzakhani was born on May 3, 1977, in Tehran. As a child, she read voraciously and wanted to become a writer. Iran was at war with Iraq at the time, but the war ended as she entered middle school. "I think I was the lucky generation," she said in the Fields video, "because I was a teenager when things became more stable." In high school, she was a member of the Iranian team at the International Mathematical Olympiad. She won a gold medal in the olympiad in 1994, and the next year won another gold medal, with a perfect score. After completing a bachelor's degree at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran in 1999, she attended graduate school at Harvard, completing her doctorate in 2004. She then became a professor at Princeton before moving to Stanford in 2008. Survivors include her husband, Jan Vondrak, who is also a mathematics professor at Stanford, and a daughter, Anahita. Dr. Mirzakhani often dived into her math research by doodling on vast pieces of paper sprawled on the floor, with equations at the edges. Her daughter described it as "painting." "It is like being lost in a jungle," Dr. Mirzakhani said, "and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks and with some luck you might find a way out."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
On New Year's Eve, Helen Branswell, a reporter at the science and medical news website Stat, was finishing an article about the development of an elusive Ebola vaccine when she got an inkling of her next big story. "Hopefully this is nothing out of the ordinary," she wrote on Twitter, adding a link to a report of an "unexplained pneumonia" in central China. Two days later, she tweeted a South China Morning Post article about the outbreak and wrote, "Not liking the look of this." Stat published Ms. Branswell's first article on the "growing cluster of unexplained pneumonia cases" on Jan. 4. There was some indication, she reported, of "a new virus, and perhaps even a new coronavirus." Stat, a digital publication in Boston founded in 2015, was early to a story that would dominate the news. In January, a month before the first confirmed case of unknown origin in the United States, the site published articles on the coronavirus's ability to be spread by asymptomatic carriers; how it could test President Trump's penchant for undermining established science; and the determination by experts that containing it "may not be feasible." "We have realized this was big and have thrown a lot of resources at it, in Stat terms," Ms. Branswell said. The site has attracted nearly 30 million unique visitors this year, which is four to five times its usual traffic, said Rick Berke, the executive editor, who oversees the editorial and business departments. Part of the reason for the surge is that, like many other publications, Stat has placed its pandemic coverage outside its paywall. But with a staff of roughly 30 reporters and editors well versed in health and science, the site was well positioned to cover an epoch defining story. "We're not seeing stories first because we're smarter, faster or more savvy," said Jason Ukman, a managing editor. "It's just because this is the world we've been plugged into the whole time. We were built for this." Stat was started by the financier John W. Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox and the Liverpool Football Club. Before determining that Boston should have a site to cover the industries of its many hospitals, research labs and biotech start ups, Mr. Henry bought The Boston Globe from The New York Times Company for 70 million in 2013. Mr. Berke, formerly a reporter and an editor at The Times, came aboard as a co founder. Another key member of the leadership team is Linda Henry, Mr. Henry's wife, the managing director. "This realization John had was that we need to tell the story of what's happening in life sciences, and that story needs to come from Boston," Ms. Henry said. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Mr. Berke hired a staff that included veterans of the beat like Sharon Begley, once a science columnist and an editor for Newsweek, and Ed Silverman, who had reported on the pharmaceutical industry for The Wall Street Journal in the belief that there was a demand for a news outlet dedicated to health and medicine. Stat is operated separately from The Globe, but the two split some back office functions, occasionally run each other's articles and share a headquarters on Exchange Place. The site's main source of revenue is subscriptions, starting at 35 a month with discounts available. Stat also publishes sponsored content in its newsletters and has started soliciting donations. Before it attracted a wider readership through its pandemic coverage, Stat drew praise for its investigations of the marketing and prescribing of OxyContin; IBM's efforts to harness artificial intelligence to cure cancer, which, Stat found, fell short of the hype; and how groupthink may have stymied an Alzheimer's cure. With articles written in a straightforward style, Stat is meant for a general audience. But it wants to win over specialists, too readers like William Hanage, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, who praised the site's coverage as "accessible" yet "still rigorous." "There is no single place on the internet that I would go to better update myself on the diversity of views that are out and circulating," he said. Dr. Hanage added that Ms. Branswell's reporting on the coronavirus had made her "a godlike figure to people who are infectious disease epidemiologists." Ms. Branswell, who has published about 50 articles on the pandemic, was a health reporter at The Canadian Press before taking on the infectious disease beat at Stat in 2015. In October, she profiled the World Health Organization's head of health emergencies, Mike Ryan. "We're not ready," Dr. Ryan told her. "If we can't stop Ebola, what hope do we have of stopping ... Disease X?" These days, in her time away from work, Ms. Branswell reads mysteries and checks in on friends and family (remotely, of course). She also spends time on Twitter, where she serves up reliable information from experts in the field. "Helen used Twitter the exact same way with Ebola, with Zika, with SARS," Mr. Ukman said. "She's really, really good at communicating information about an infectious disease." Ms. Branswell said the next frontier of testing would be serological to test not if subjects are carrying the virus but if they have already had it. A nervous reporter asked: Are we going to get through this? "It's not going to be over soon," she said. "And it's going to be very painful. But yes. We'll get through this."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Epidural anesthesia lengthens the second stage of labor, the one in which women push. But a study published on Wednesday has found that epidurals are associated with an even longer duration in the second stage than is generally recognized, suggesting that some women may be subject to unnecessary interventions by doctors who wrongly fear labor has become prolonged. The finding indicates that "clinicians might need to wait later before intervening with oxytocin, forceps, vacuum or a cesarean," said Dr. S. Katherine Laughon, an investigator at the National Institutes of Health who was not involved in the study, which was published in Obstetrics and Gynecology. Still, she added, "clinicians and women need to balance benefits of vaginal delivery with potential increases in risk for mom and baby." Current guidelines by the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or ACOG, define an abnormally long second stage as more than three hours for women who received an epidural and are giving birth for the first time, and more than two hours for first births without an epidural. The new study suggests a normal second stage can take as long as 5.6 hours for women who get epidurals during their first births, and as long as 3.3 hours for those who do not get epidurals. For women who have given birth previously, the group's guidelines define an unusually long second stage as two hours with an epidural, one hour without. The new study found that the second stage for these women can be as long as 4.25 hours and 1.35 hours, respectively. "This paper is very important, and ACOG needs to update its 2003 guidelines," said Dr. Robert L. Barbieri, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Brigham and Women's in Boston, who was not involved in the new study. He added, "I will change my practice and feel more comfortable going to five and a half hours with a first birth after an epidural with reassuring fetal monitoring." Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, analyzed the records of 42,268 women who delivered vaginally without problems between 1976 and 2008. Roughly half had epidurals. The investigators compared the average length of the second stage of labor among women who had epidurals with that among women who did not. They also compared the upper limits of duration for both groups. Thirty one percent of first births and 19 percent of subsequent labors would have been classified as abnormally long by the current ACOG definition, the researchers found. "It's time to re examine what normal and abnormal is, and revise our guidelines based on modern obstetric population," said Dr. Yvonne W. Cheng, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco. The research is part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that a normal second stage of labor is now longer than it was decades ago. In 2010, a study of more than 62,000 women found it was as long as 3.6 hours for first time mothers after an epidural, and 2.8 hours for women who did not get one. A 2012 summary of a joint meeting of ACOG and the National Institutes of Health concluded that adequate time for each labor stage "appears to be longer than traditionally estimated." For the second stage, it is closer to four hours for first time mothers who had epidurals, and three hours for those who did not. But this latest study is the first to suggest such an extended second stage may be ordinary. "One of the messages of this study is, sit on your hands a little longer, don't rush into an instrumental vaginal delivery or a cesarean, because really everything could be fine," said Dr. Barbara Leighton, a professor of anesthesiology at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, who has researched the effects of epidurals on labor. But while Dr. Leighton supports revising ACOG recommendations, she believes that the current study did not prove that longer labor is caused by epidural anesthesia. Women who request anesthesia may be predisposed to longer labor for other reasons, she said. Dr. Jeffrey Ecker, the chairman of the committee on obstetrics practice for ACOG, said today's clinicians are "increasingly recognizing there can be healthy outcomes and vaginal deliveries of healthy babies when the second stage extends beyond how it's traditionally been defined." He added, "Often what's best and most appropriate and most difficult during labor is patience." He would not say whether a revision of guidelines is in the works.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
Joan H. Marks, who was a pioneer in genetic counseling, the practice of helping patients understand their risk of an inherited medical condition, and who developed it into a full blown profession, died on Sept. 14 at her home in Manhattan. She was 91. Her son Dr. Andrew Marks said the cause was heart failure. Ms. Marks was the director of the graduate program in genetic counseling at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., for 26 years. When she started, in 1972, the program, the first in the nation to educate genetic counselors, was three years old. During her tenure, she developed it into the largest such program in the country, which it remains, and helped to establish a new health care field. Today there are thousands of certified genetic counselors in the United States professionals trained in both genetics and counseling who help patients and their families confront a variety of inherited conditions. But when Ms. Marks began, doctors were skeptical that anyone without a medical degree could understand the intricacies of genetics. So the role of talking with patients and their families about inherited disorders and potential birth defects was often left to nurses and others.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
Q. What's the point of using a keyboard that's different from the one that came with the smartphone? A. While the virtual keyboard that came with your phone may be fine for typing and may include a few shortcuts to emoji characters, keyboard programs from other developers often include additional features. These can include support for "swipe typing" in which you glide your finger from key to key on the screen to form words, instead of pecking at each key. Better predictive tools for suggesting words, buttons to insert images and animated GIFs, and other timesaving tools are typical features of many third party keyboards. Several developers make their own keyboards for use with Android and iOS devices, so check your app store to see what is available. Google has its own keyboard app, called Gboard, for both Android and iOS. Gboard offers real time translation into other languages as you type, emoji search, voice typing and a shortcut to Google Search among its tools; Google includes a privacy warning about its data collection, however.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
Credit...Coley Brown for The New York Times Bryan Fogel's first documentary, "Icarus," helped uncover the Russian doping scandal that led to the country's expulsion from the 2018 Winter Olympics. It also won an Oscar for him and for Netflix, which released the film. For his second project, he chose another subject with global interest: the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian dissident and Washington Post columnist, and the role that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, played in it. A film by an Oscar winning filmmaker would normally garner plenty of attention from streaming services, which have used documentaries and niche movies to attract subscribers and earn awards. Instead, when Mr. Fogel's film, "The Dissident," was finally able to find a distributor after eight months, it was with an independent company that had no streaming platform and a much narrower reach. "These global media companies are no longer just thinking, 'How is this going to play for U.S. audiences?'" Mr. Fogel said. "They are asking: 'What if I put this film out in Egypt? What happens if I release it in China, Russia, Pakistan, India?' All these factors are coming into play, and it's getting in the way of stories like this." "The Dissident" will now open in 150 to 200 theaters across the country on Christmas Day and then become available for purchase on premium video on demand channels on Jan. 8. (Original plans called for an 800 theater release in October, but those were scaled back because of the pandemic.) Internationally, the film will be released in Britain, Australia, Italy, Turkey and other European nations through a network of distributors. It is a far cry from the potential audience it would have been able to reach through a service like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, and Mr. Fogel said he believed it was also a sign of how these platforms increasingly powerful in the world of documentary film were in the business of expanding their subscriber bases, not necessarily turning a spotlight on the excesses of the powerful. For his film, Mr. Fogel interviewed Mr. Khashoggi's fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, who waited outside the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul in 2018 while the murder took place; The Washington Post's publisher, Fred Ryan; and multiple members of the Turkish police force. He secured a 37 page transcript made from a recording of what happened in the room where Mr. Khashoggi was suffocated and dismembered. He also spent a significant amount of time with Omar Abdulaziz, a young dissident in exile in Montreal who had worked with Mr. Khashoggi to combat the way the Saudi Arabian government used Twitter to try to discredit opposing voices and criticism of the kingdom. "The Dissident" landed a coveted spot at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The Hollywood Reporter called it "vigorous, deep and comprehensive," while Variety said it was "a documentary thriller of staggering relevance." Hillary Clinton, who was at Sundance for a documentary about her, urged people to see the film, saying in an onstage interview that it does "a chillingly effective job of demonstrating the swarm that social media can be." Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, was at the film's Sundance premiere, but the company did not bid on the film. "While disappointed, I wasn't shocked," Mr. Fogel said. Netflix declined to comment, though a spokeswoman, Emily Feingold, pointed to a handful of political documentaries the service recently produced, including 2019's "Edge of Democracy," about the rise of the authoritarian leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Amazon Studios also declined to bid. Footage of Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, who privately owns The Washington Post, is shown in the film. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. Fox Searchlight, now owned by Disney, didn't bid. Neither did the independent distributor Neon, which was behind last year's Oscar winning best picture, "Parasite," and often acquires challenging content. "What I observed was that the desire for corporate profits have left the integrity of America's film culture weakened," said Thor Halvorssen, the founder and chief executive of the nonprofit Human Rights Foundation, who financed the film and served as a producer. Documentaries are not normally big box office draws, so they have traditionally found their audiences in other places. PBS has long been a platform for prominent documentaries, but the rise of streaming has made companies like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu very important to the genre. As those companies have grown, their business needs have changed. "This is unquestionably political," said Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University's film school. "It's disappointing, but these are gigantic companies in a death race for survival." He added: "You think Disney would do anything different with Disney ? Would Apple or any of the megacorporations? They have economic imperatives that are hard to ignore, and they have to balance them with issues of free speech." "The Dissident" is not the only political documentary that has failed to secure a home on a streaming service. This year, Magnolia Pictures, which has a streaming deal with Disney owned Hulu, backed out of a deal with the makers of the documentary "The Assassins," which tells the story of the poisoning of Kim Jong nam, the half brother of the North Korean leader Kim Jong un. The film's director, Ryan White, referred to the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures in an interview with Variety, and chalked up the "bumpy road" of U.S. distribution to corporations feeling they "could be hacked in a way that could be devastating to them or their bottom line." "When 'Icarus' came out, they had 100 million subscribers," he said. (Netflix currently has 195 million subscribers worldwide.) "And they were in the hunt to get David Fincher to do movies with them, to get Martin Scorsese to do movies with them, to get Alfonso Cuaron to do movies with them. That's why it was so important that they had a film they could win an award with." In January 2019, Netflix pulled an episode of the comedian Hasan Minhaj's series, "Patriot Act," when he criticized Prince Mohammed after Mr. Khashoggi's death. Mr. Hastings later defended the move, saying: "We're not trying to do 'truth to power.' We're trying to entertain." In November, Netflix signed an eight picture film deal with the Saudi Arabian studio Telfaz11 to produce movies that it said "will aim for broad appeal across both Arab and global audiences." The outcome for "The Dissident" has not been ideal, but Mr. Fogel is still hoping that people will see the film. "I love Netflix and considered myself part of the Netflix family after our wonderful experience with 'Icarus,'" he said. "Sadly, they are not the same company as a few years ago when they passionately stood up to Russia and Putin."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times This spring, no one has asked more of Pam Tanowitz than Pam Tanowitz. She is making more dances than she ever has in her life. "I'm nervous, and I'm worried, and I stay up at night," she said in a recent interview at New York City Ballet, where she was rehearsing her latest. "I have so many steps in my head." That's fitting. A modern dance choreographer, Ms. Tanowitz, 49, has a flair for inventing sophisticated steps then turning them inside out. While she may appear to be her usual wisecracking self she told her City Ballet dancers to "do it quickly again before I get arrested," referring to the company's tight rehearsal schedule she fully grasps the pressure of her situation. Her approach is to take it one dance at a time. First came a new work for the Martha Graham Dance Company. Next was one for Paul Taylor's troupe that will have its premiere in June, along with her first outdoor site specific piece, conceived with Sara Mearns, the City Ballet principal. Later this month, Ms. Tanowitz will unveil another new work at the Kennedy Center in Washington as part of Ballet Across America, featuring members of both Dance Theater of Harlem and Miami City Ballet. Then there's her company's coming tour to London to present "Four Quartets," her acclaimed work inspired by the T.S. Eliot poems. Having so much opportunity as a choreographer is rare, but it speaks to Ms. Tanowitz's range. It's not just that she's prolific; in the past few years she revealed her own distinct choreographic voice. Her dances are steeped in movement exploration with steps that reverse and invert like interlocking pieces in a puzzle. Through that rigor, drama emerges. "Sometimes I think, am I making the same dance over and over again?" she said. "All of these pieces are coming out and there are going to be recognizable things, steps or movements or ideas that I'm working out. So I could very well be, but what's different is I'm different in relation to each one." Ms. Tanowitz said she never imagined she'd be so sought after as a choreographer, but she has put in her time: She didn't receive her first grant until she was 40. She worked at New York City Center for 12 years, which afforded her free studio space. One of her jobs, early on, was pouring coffee for patrons at City Ballet during intermissions. "She has a very refreshing movement vocabulary that isn't seen very often on the ballet stage," said Justin Peck, City Ballet's resident choreographer and artistic adviser. "One thing that really appealed to me about her is that she has a genuine curiosity toward working with ballet dancers and toward working with the point shoe." In contemporary ballet, having a choreographer who wants to dig into the intricacies of point work is more rare than it sounds. Still, Ms. Tanowitz was rejected five times by the City Ballet affiliated Choreographic Institute, which has led to commissions for many, including Mr. Peck and Alexei Ratmansky. She summed up her present situation: "It really is a miracle." When Jonathan Stafford, the artistic director of City Ballet, called to see if she could bump up her fall commission to the spring after another choreographer withdrew, she figured out a way to say yes. Her new "Bartok Ballet," set to Bartok's String Quartet No. 5, is based on a sketch of a work she created in a workshop at American Ballet Theater two years ago. It will have its premiere at the spring gala on Thursday. As choreographers go, she works fast. But she likes to experiment during the process. During one rehearsal with the City Ballet dancers, an assistant was anxious that she use her remaining time to run the ballet from beginning to end, but she wanted to tinker with a folk dance embedded in the ballet. "Let's just do a quick mazurka experiment: Don't worry about the counts," she told the dancers. "Loosen it up do it like you're remembering a mazurka from another time or from another dance." Judging from the delight on her face it was worth it. "When they don't count, that makes them look at each other," she said later. "I'm realizing that more and more is that's what I care about: people in a room." For ballet dancers, Ms. Tanowitz's vocabulary is both familiar and not. Coordinations are different; she might emphasize a downbeat instead of an up. Gretchen Smith, who has worked with Ms. Tanowitz outside of the company before, relishes the no frills quality of her movement. "You're aware of how clean it is so you want to justify the bareness," she said. "It calls for you to be so present in the movement and to not add any sort of ballet flair. One day she stopped and said: 'You guys are doing this weird neck thing. It's very pretty, but the movement doesn't need it.' I love that she knows exactly who she is and exactly what her work is." And that's what Ms. Tanowitz tries to focus on now. "I'm really trying to not get spooked by being in the house of Balanchine and Jerry Robbins," she said. "I'm trying to just do what I do. I don't think I would have been able to do this even five years ago. I feel comfortable in dance studios now. All the other stuff falls away." Not many midcareer artists find the kind of success that she is enjoying. And not many choreographers would be able to handle so many commissions. But it seems the more dances Ms. Tanowitz has to make, the better they turn out. As for those who think she's taking on too much? "Look, people are calling me now and that's great," she said. "Someday they're going to not call me." Ms. Tanowitz has spent years honing her craft. She began studying modern dance in fourth grade in Westchester County; when she was in eighth grade, her mother signed her up for an intensive workshop where her teachers were the choreographers Blondell Cummings and Ohad Naharin. In high school, she studied with the choreographer Hanna Kahn, in whose company Mark Morris danced. She is now friends with Mr. Morris. "He's so generous," she said. "He schlepped all the way to New Jersey to see my 'Goldberg'" that is, "New Work for Goldberg Variations," her lauded collaboration with the pianist Simone Dinnerstein. He also advised her on her Bartok ballet. "He told me to bring the dance forward in the space," she said. In doing that, the stage immediately becomes more intimate. Ms. Tanowitz was rejected from New York University and reluctantly attended Sarah Lawrence College, which turned out to be the best thing that could have happened: She met Viola Farber, the former Merce Cunningham dancer, who was the director of the dance department. "She taught me how to dance," Ms. Tanowitz said. "She told me thing like 'Ballet barres aren't just for ballet dancers' and my favorite: 'Dance is not a warm bath.'" Ms. Farber also imparted her love for Cunningham technique, whose clean lines and footwork can be found in Ms. Tanowitz's work. But it took time for Ms. Tanowitz to find her voice. A misstep an early attempt at choreographing a ballet turned out to be integral to her development. In 2012, she choreographed "Untitled (the Blue Ballet)," set to music by Morton Feldman; the results were more clinical than visceral. "I was so hyper determined to deconstruct ballet and to use this really hard music," she said. "That's when I realized that dance is not just an intellectual exercise. It has to have heart and head. But I had to go so far out to realize, what's missing? It was air." Right now, she has to remember to breathe herself. During one sleepless night she got to wondering about the dates her ballet was going to be performed. "I opened the calendar on my phone, and it was 'Balanchine Peck Tanowitz.' I had a panic attack. I just couldn't believe it." She also noted something else: She's the only woman. "In 2019, it matters," she said. "It's a big deal that I'm on a list with them. So I'm going to own it and be responsible, and make the best dance I can."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Dance
|
When the N.F.L. schedule is released on Thursday, Jets fans will not be able to buy single game tickets. "We believe this is the prudent thing do to in order to provide the best experience and service for our fans at this time," the team said in a statement Wednesday. The N.F.L. announced its schedule for the upcoming season on Thursday night in a prime time TV event. But a handful of teams have begun tempering expectations that fans will be able to attend some of those games assuming they will be played in front of fans at all. On Wednesday night, the Jets franchise announced that it would not be selling single game tickets after the release of the schedule. "Given the changing conditions surrounding the Covid 19 pandemic, individual game tickets will not go on sale tomorrow," the team announced in a statement posted to Twitter. "We believe this is the prudent thing do to in order to provide the best experience and service for our fans at this time." The Jets' cautionary announcement came just a day after N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell told all 32 teams that they need to have a ticket refund policy in case games are canceled or fans are prohibited from attending games, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press. Fans, Goodell said, will have the choice of getting a full refund or getting a credit for tickets they can buy in the future. The memo was another sign that the league has had to walk back its statements in March, when N.F.L. executives said they were planning for a full slate of games with fans in the stadiums starting as scheduled in September. As the coronavirus has continued to spread, including in cities where N.F.L. teams operate, the league has been forced to adapt. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. While it forged ahead with free agency in March and the N.F.L. draft last month, the selection of college players was done remotely, not before tens of thousands of fans in Las Vegas, as had been planned. Team facilities have been closed since mid March, forcing teams to hold off season workouts and meetings with players entirely online. The N.F.L.'s opening game is not scheduled until Sept. 10, so it has the luxury of time to prepare rather than have its season interrupted as other leagues were. The N.B.A. and N.H.L., for example, were forced to shut down a month before their playoffs were set to begin. But given the persistent spread of the virus, which infects tens of thousands of Americans each week, some infectious disease experts believe leagues like the N.F.L. may have to play games without fans in stadiums to start on time and to limit the risk of exponentially spreading the virus. "I'm not saying this is the way to go, but you want to at least consider to have players, if they're going to play, to play in front of a TV camera without people in the audience," Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the leading public health expert on President Trump's coronavirus task force, told The New York Times last week. "If you can do it with some degree of confidence in the broad general safety of both the players and the fans, if you are going to have fans if you have TV you don't have to worry about it but if you're going to have fans, that has to be the prevailing, dominating theme: the safety of the people involved." According to an N.F.L. spokesman, about three quarters of the league's 32 teams are selling, or expect to sell, single game tickets. The Jets appear to be the first team to publicly state that they will not sell single game tickets. Giants officials, when reached for comment, said that no decision had been made about ticket sales. Other teams, like the Falcons, do not sell single game tickets, only season tickets to fans who hold personal seat licenses. Of course, fans across the country can buy tickets from ticket resellers like Ticketmaster and StubHub. Many of those tickets are posted for re sale by season ticket holders. Other teams are bracing for a season in which social distancing guidelines limit the number of fans in stadiums. On Monday, Tom Garfinkel, the president of the Miami Dolphins, said games at Hard Rock Stadium could include just 15,000 fans this season, about one quarter the building's maximum capacity. "We would have times to come in for security at different gates so people would be separated out in terms of when they enter the stadium," Garfinkel said on "Good Morning America." "We would exit the stadium much like a church environment, where each row exits so people aren't filing out all at the same time in a herd."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Can the market economy still deliver prosperity? That may seem an odd question to ask when the United States is more than eight years into a sustained expansion and the world's major economies are finally following suit. Unemployment is at its lowest since the end of the dot com bubble at the end of the Clinton administration. The stock market's sugar high, fueled by juicy profits and falling taxes, is being tempered only somewhat by fear that the Federal Reserve will take the punch bowl away. And yet a broad sweep of statistics reveals a peculiar weariness spreading through the economy. Belying breathless headlines about the fabulous opportunities that technology is about to bestow on society, it suggests that many rich market democracies have lost much of their dynamism. Their companies are getting old, and their labor markets are getting stuck. Productivity growth has slumped. And many workers in their prime are peeling off from the labor force. The pattern is particularly striking in the United States, where the share of adults with a job remains well below its peak at the end of the 20th century, and productivity growth has trundled along over the last decade at the slowest pace since the end of World War II. But signs of lethargy are showing up elsewhere in the industrialized world. Productivity is at a crawl in most rich economies. Though not as intensely as in the United States, men in their prime, 25 to 54 years old, are leaving the labor force across the nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. While women have picked up some of the slack, the labor supply across the O.E.C.D. as a whole has flattened. Most notably, the economy's ability to generate and support new businesses agents of creative destruction that bring new products and methods into the marketplace appears to be faltering across the world. In the United States, the rate of company formation is half what it was four decades ago. And it is slowing in many industrialized countries. One might blame this on the recession that crippled the world almost a decade ago, in the wake of the global financial crisis set off by the implosion of home values in the United States. But the weariness extends beyond the latest turns of the economic cycle. The stagnation poses a threat to the market economy's main claim to legitimacy: that it delivers prosperity. The income of the typical American household is roughly the same as it was in the 1980s. It is unlikely to be a coincidence. In a study published on Tuesday by the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, Jay Shambaugh, Ryan Nunn and Patrick Liu explore what economists have figured out about the American economy's inertia and the fallout for wages and living standards. The dearth of new businesses is also cutting off one of the main paths to workers' advancement: the outside job offer. Changing jobs allows workers to shift to positions in which they are more productive, and better paid. But labor market fluidity job switching, creation and destruction has been declining since the 1980s. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Clear though the pattern may be, the researchers acknowledge that we haven't yet figured out what is holding the economy's dynamism back. "This is one of those big, economywide trends," Mr. Shambaugh told me. "There is room for a lot of stories." Can the corporate landscape become more dynamic again? "None of the potential policy explanations have been conclusively shown to account for the bulk of the decline in dynamism," Mr. Shambaugh and his colleagues note. The critical question that remains is whether there is a set of policies that might restore the economy's vitality. This isn't just about demographic and social change. Sure, we are aging. Older workers will be less likely to move to a new job across state lines. Families with two earners will have a harder time relocating when one gets a new job offer. Stratospheric rents will make it tough to migrate to some of the most vibrant labor markets, like New York or San Francisco. Policy has certainly played a role: Labor market regulations can gum up the sorting of workers into the best possible jobs, where they will be at their most productive and most highly paid. Specifically, state occupational licensing rules fence off some of the most desirable, well paid jobs. But this alone cannot explain away stagnation. Explaining stagnation requires explaining not only why there are so few well paying jobs but also why there are so few emergent companies ready to employ productive workers. Well into the information age, in a business ecosystem with low barriers to entry, where venture capital stands ready to throw itself at the next good idea, the economy has somehow forgotten how to create companies. My best guess is that this is all about the decline of competition. Mr. Shambaugh and his co authors note how noncompete agreements and other devices used by businesses to stop their employees from seeking jobs elsewhere are preventing many workers from taking the better job that pays more money. I would argue that the failure is bigger: By allowing an ecosystem of gargantuan companies to develop, all but dominating the markets they served, the American economy shut out disruption. And thus it shut out change. This is not the only possible diagnosis, I understand. Many economists will reject my proposition that the nation's economy has been given to oligopolies; that antitrust law has proved no match for the ferocious concentration of market power in the hands of a few businesses that have been allowed to impose their will on the economy as a whole. It fits, however. An economy controlled by big, entrenched companies will have little place for the kind of disruption that could push productivity onto a higher plane. That description looks very much like the economy that many American workers are coping with today.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Economy
|
HONG KONG When the United States Air Force wanted help making military robots more perceptive, it turned to a Boston based artificial intelligence start up called Neurala. But when Neurala needed money, it got little response from the American military. So Neurala turned to China, landing an undisclosed sum from an investment firm backed by a state run Chinese company. Chinese firms have become significant investors in American start ups working on cutting edge technologies with potential military applications. The start ups include companies that make rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors for autonomous navy ships, and printers that make flexible screens that could be used in fighter plane cockpits. Many of the Chinese firms are owned by state owned companies or have connections to Chinese leaders. The deals are ringing alarm bells in Washington. According to a new white paper commissioned by the Department of Defense, Beijing is encouraging Chinese companies with close government ties to invest in American start ups specializing in critical technologies like artificial intelligence and robots to advance China's military capacity as well as its economy. The white paper, which was distributed to the senior levels of the Trump administration this week, concludes that United States government controls that are supposed to protect potentially critical technologies are falling short, according to three people knowledgeable about its contents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "What drives a lot of the concern is that China is a military competitor," said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who is familiar with the report. "How do you deal with a military competitor playing in your most innovative market?" The Chinese deals can pose a number of issues. Investors could push start ups to strike partnerships or make licensing or hiring decisions that could expose intellectual property. They can also get an inside glimpse of how technology is being developed and could have access to a start up's offices or computers. Ashton B. Carter, former secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, had tapped Mike A. Brown, the former chief executive of Symantec, the cybersecurity firm, to lead the inquiry into the Chinese investments, according to two of the people aware of the white paper's contents. A spokesman for the Department of Defense said it "will not discuss the details or components of draft internal working documents." The size and breadth of the deals are not clear because start ups and their backers are not obligated to disclose them. Over all, China has been increasingly active in the American start up world, participating in investment rounds worth 9.9 billion in 2015, according to data from the research firm CB Insights, more than four times the level the year before. Neither the high tech start ups nor their Chinese investors have been accused of wrongdoing, and experts said much of the activity could be innocent. Chinese investors have money and are looking for returns, while the Chinese government has pushed investment in ways to clean up China's skies, upgrade its industrial capacity and unclog its snarled highways. Proponents of the deals said American limits on technology exports would still apply to American start ups with Chinese backers. But the fund flows fit China's pattern of using state guided investment to help its industrial policy and enhance its technology holdings, as it has recently done with semiconductors. China has also carried out efforts to steal military related technology. Still, some start ups especially those making hardware rather than money drawing mobile apps like Snapchat said Chinese money was sometimes the only available funding. But even a company struggling for money can ultimately come up with a big breakthrough. To demonstrate his software's capabilities to the Air Force, Mr. Versace said, Neurala used its software on a ground drone from Best Buy to make it recognize and follow around the service's secretary, then Deborah Lee James, during a meeting. "We were told by the secretary of the Air Force, 'Your tech is awesome, we should put it everywhere,'" he said. "No one followed up." Neurala finally took a minority investment from a Chinese fund called Haiyin Capital as part of a 1.2 million round, Mr. Versace said. He did not disclose the size of Haiyin Capital's commitment. Haiyin Capital is backed by a state run Chinese company, Everbright Group, according to a statement from one of its subsidiaries. American military officials have "figured out a very good way to give 10 billion to Raytheon," he said. "But to give a start up 1 million to develop a proof of concept? That's still very, very hard." Late last year, a research firm called Defense Group Inc. argued in a report prepared for Congress that the Neurala investment could give China access to the company's underlying technologies. It also said the deal could create enough uncertainty that American officials would steer clear of Neurala's technology, effectively wasting any American money that had gone into the firm. Mr. Versace of Neurala said the company took pains to ensure that the Chinese investor had no access to its source code or other important technological information. To address concerns that it was not tapping innovations from start ups, the Pentagon in 2015 set up a group called Defense Innovation Unit Experimental to enable investments into promising new companies. While at first it struggled, in 2016 it helped carry off a barrage of deals. The unit also prepared the white paper. In May 2015, Haiyin Capital also invested an amount it did not disclose in XCOR Aerospace, a Mojave, Calif., commercial space travel company that makes spacecraft and engines and has worked with NASA. XCOR did not respond to requests for comment. Chinese investors have also made a push in another industry, flexible electronics. The technology, which the National Research Council has said is a priority for the American military, can help make electronics lighter and easier to attach to anything from a uniform to an airplane. In 2016, a Silicon Valley start up called Kateeva that makes machines that print flexible screens raised 88 million from a group of Chinese investors. Three took board seats, including Redview Capital, a spinoff of a firm run by the former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao's son, Wen Yunsong. Kateeva's chief executive, Alain Harrus, said that while investors in Silicon Valley had begun looking more at hardware companies, raising big rounds for capital intensive technology can be tough. Kateeva ultimately raised money where its customers were, in China and South Korea. Mr. Harrus said he believed more should be done in America to figure out the best way to nurture and fund core next generation technologies. Ken Wilcox, chairman emeritus of Silicon Valley Bank, said in the past six months he had been approached by three different Chinese state owned enterprises about being their agent in Northern California to buy technology, though he declined. "In all three cases they said they had a mandate from Beijing, and they had no idea what they wanted to buy," he said. "It was just any and all tech."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
The New York Philharmonic canceled the remainder of its season on Monday, bowing to the reality that the coronavirus pandemic will silence large scale performances in the city for months to come. The orchestra said that it was anticipating a loss of roughly 10 million in revenue because of the decision, and that its endowment had declined by about 14 percent since the crisis began. "There's nothing I can compare this to," Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic's president and chief executive, said in an interview. "The human toll and the possible economic ramifications are simply stunning, and they're simply not known yet. We don't have a playbook for this. We're inventing it as we go along." In canceling the season, which was to have run through the second week of June and included a European tour in the beginning of May, the Philharmonic said that its musicians' health benefits would be maintained through the end of their current contract, in September. But pay will be reduced in stages. The musicians will earn their full salaries through March, then receive the orchestra's base pay (roughly 3,000 per week) in April and 75 percent of that amount (about 2,200 per week) in May. They and the Philharmonic will meet as conditions progress to determine compensation for June and beyond. "We don't know what this is going to look like," said the trombonist Colin Williams, the chairman of the musicians' negotiating committee. "Everything changes every 12 hours. So we're going to have to get together and reassess." "We're all coming together in this unprecedented situation to make sure the institution is as insulated as possible," he added. "But we're very grateful for the leadership of Deborah Borda and the board that they're trying to take care of the musicians." Ms. Borda said that the relatively small size of the orchestra made it possible to maintain wages, even if reduced compared with far larger organizations like the Metropolitan Opera, which will not compensate its unionized orchestra, chorus and stagehands after this month, beyond health benefits. "The orchestra is our family," Ms. Borda said. "It's 100 people. It's a different situation than the Met, which has close to 1,000 union employees." She said the orchestra would be working this week on a plan to further reduce operating costs, including potential pay cuts for senior management and administrative staff. Asked about the possibility of administration layoffs, she said: "I have not finalized that plan yet. The Philharmonic will reopen, and we need to have staff to execute that and put up the fall season." She added that the orchestra would encourage patrons not to seek refunds for their tickets to canceled performances, which add up to about 1 million in revenue. The Philharmonic is also turning to the challenge of preserving sales for next season, which it said had been strong before the outbreak. "We'll do all right at fund raising," Ms. Borda said. "Of course we'll take some hits. But I'm more concerned about: Will people buy tickets for next fall?" As part of their agreement with management, the musicians gave broad permission for the dissemination of archival recordings, which will be available through a new portal, NY Phil Plays On (nyphil.org/playson). And every Thursday evening, a past performance will be streamed on Facebook. Ms. Borda was pessimistic about the fate of the Philharmonic's outdoor concerts in city parks, scheduled for June, as well as its planned tour of China in the beginning of July, though neither has been canceled. More plausible, though still uncertain, are the orchestra's performances at the Bravo! Vail Music Festival in Colorado, scheduled for late July.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
Early in this movie, when Ben (Edward Holcroft), tells his mom, Margaret (Fiona Shaw), that he and his girlfriend are planning a move from England to Australia, Shaw makes a face that looks as though a chisel has literally been taken to her jaw. Shaw is more often than not a better than capable performer, but this kind of overplaying seems endemic to "Kindred," a derivative, irritating thriller directed by Joe Marcantonio. (The film has no relation to the Octavia Butler book of the same name, which, depending how you look at it, is fortunate or too bad.) Margaret presides over a crumbling manor whose decor is dominated by portraits of lily white colonialists from centuries past. In a montage, one of those pale faces is contrasted with that of Ben's girlfriend, Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance), who is Black. Once Ben is knocked dead by a horse and Charlotte is discovered to be pregnant, Margaret and her stepson, Thomas (Jack Lowden), contrive to lock Charlotte up at the estate. The dreary picture then turns into a hostage scenario for people who thought "Get Out" was too subtle except race is never explicitly mentioned. This is what the British call "restraint," one supposes.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
DUBLIN, Ohio When Pat Tiberi announced last fall that he was retiring after representing Ohio's 12th Congressional District for almost two decades, there was a long line of fellow Republicans waiting to replace him. The party's primary on Tuesday will feature 10 candidates, including two state senators, a county prosecutor and a local conservative activist. Mr. Kane, 50, has a resume that sounds as if he answered a casting call for a Republican congressional candidate: An Ohio native, he served in the Air Force, then earned a Ph.D. in economics and worked at conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. Along the way, he helped start two companies, wrote four books and became a familiar commentator on economic issues in newspapers and on television. Yet, in part because of that same resume, Mr. Kane can seem almost uniquely out of step with the Republican Party in 2018. At a time when much of the party is hostile to elites and even the very idea of expertise, Mr. Kane is a self described "policy nerd" who peppers his conversations with references to economists with little public profile beyond Washington. In the era of "drain the swamp," Mr. Kane speaks proudly of having testified as an expert on Capitol Hill and highlights endorsements from establishment figures such as former Secretary of State George P. Shultz. And even though President Trump won Ohio in part by tapping into voters' deep skepticism of immigration and free trade, Mr. Kane is a vocal proponent of both. "I'm an old school, free market economist," Mr. Kane told voters during a recent event in this Columbus suburb. On the campaign trail, Mr. Kane adapts a refrain from Howard Dean's 2004 presidential run, saying that he is "from the Republican wing of the Republican Party." Tuesday's primary is, on one level, a test of whether that is true whether a candidate with economic policy positions that are conservative but not populist can win in Ohio in 2018. "Even within the Republican Party, it's a referendum on Trump and whether those traditional conservative Republicans can reclaim control of the party," said Rita Kipp, head of the League of Women Voters of Licking County, one of seven counties in this sprawling district outside Columbus. Indeed, surveys show that Republican voters who were once more supportive than Democrats of free trade agreements have turned sharply against such deals in recent years. Last year the Pew Research Center found that just 36 percent of Republicans thought free trade had been a good thing for the United States, down from 57 percent in 2009. The gulf between economists and the public is particularly vast. In 2016, when a University of Chicago survey asked more than three dozen prominent economists whether workers in Ohio and Michigan would have been better off if the United States had been tougher in trade negotiations, almost none said yes. But when the online polling firm SurveyMonkey asked the same question of the general public last month on behalf of The New York Times, 59 percent of adults and 84 percent of Republicans said the United States should have been tougher. Douglas Holtz Eakin, an economist and president of the American Action Forum, a conservative group, said those results were hardly surprising. Trade has never been an easy sell to the public, he said, because the costs, in shuttered plants and lost jobs, are large and obvious, while the benefits lower consumer prices and greater productivity are diffuse and hard to see. "You have to make the case on a regular basis that the benefits are greater than the costs," Mr. Holtz Eakin said. Mr. Holtz Eakin, who has endorsed Mr. Kane, said the Republican Party needed candidates who would make the case for policies that are more popular with economists than with the general public, among them immigration, fiscal restraint and trade. "Campaigns are teachable moments in the United States," Mr. Holtz Eakin said. If any district in Ohio is likely to be receptive to Mr. Kane's economics lessons, it is the 12th. The district which went for Mr. Trump by about 10 points in 2016 includes rural areas, but the bulk of the population lives in relatively affluent, educated Columbus suburbs that have largely escaped the postindustrial decline that has afflicted Youngstown, Dayton and other cities. Dublin, where Mr. Kane moved late last year, is one of the state's wealthiest cities, with a median household income of more than 125,000. Campaigning on a recent Monday, Mr. Kane did not try to run away from his more contentious positions, or from his wonkish resume. At a meet and greet with voters at a French bakery in Dublin's quaint downtown, Mr. Kane broke the ice with stories about his days at the Air Force Academy, but quickly pivoted to citing articles he had written promoting free trade and entrepreneurship. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Even on friendly turf, however, Mr. Kane faced some skepticism. When one attendee, Caroline Lahrmann, asked about immigration, Mr. Kane noted that he had written 20 articles and was working on a book about the subject. Then he moved into an intricate discussion of immigration policy: why immigration is important for the economy and why he supports work permits, but not a pathway to citizenship, for people in the country illegally. "I haven't heard how he's going to address illegal immigration yet," she said. "How are you going to stop the illegal immigration?" Mr. Kane said he was not necessarily opposed to a border wall, but he doubted it would do much good. Melissa Stack, a local nurse, cut him off. "I disagree with you that the wall doesn't work," she said. Speaking after the event, Ms. Lahrmann said she had liked Mr. Kane, but had not been convinced by his answers on immigration. She also questioned his stand on trade. "It sounds great, free trade," she said, noting that she had studied economics in college. But, she said, "you have to play tough sometimes" something she said Mr. Trump understood. Mr. Trump will not be on the ballot on Tuesday, but he is a constant presence in the race. Most of Mr. Kane's rivals for the Republican nomination have embraced Mr. Trump, promising to support his agenda. Melanie Leneghan, who has the backing of several members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, pledges on her campaign website that she "will stand with our president every step of the way." Mr. Kane is more circumspect. He initially supported Jeb Bush in the 2016 election, and signed a letter opposing Mr. Trump during the primary campaign. But in an interview last week, he praised Mr. Trump's approach to foreign policy and said he believed that the president would ultimately side with the pro trade faction of his administration. "I'm trying to help the president be successful," Mr. Kane said. "I do think the president is a man who listens." Mr. Kane's opponents paint him as a Washington insider and a carpetbagger. Mr. Kane grew up in Columbus but until last year had not lived in the area since high school; he was a resident of Virginia when Mr. Tiberi announced his retirement. "He doesn't live here and never has," Ms. Leneghan said. "He's a Washington insider." In an unusual twist, this primary is actually two elections in one. Voters will get to choose nominees both for a special election to replace Mr. Tiberi, which will be held in August, and for the general election in November. There has been no independent polling, and local political experts say that with turnout expected to be low, Tuesday's outcome is anyone's guess. In the meantime, Mr. Kane is out knocking on doors, making his case to anyone willing to listen. Campaigning in Dublin, Mr. Kane spied a man in a Navy hat walking his dog. After chatting briefly about military service, the man told Mr. Kane that what he really wanted was for Congress to balance the budget. Mr. Kane's campaign manager, standing a few feet away, smiled, knowing what was coming next. As a matter of fact, Mr. Kane said, "I wrote a book on that."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Economy
|
On a recent Friday morning, Simon Hanes, 26, answered the front door of his Bushwick, Brooklyn, house share with a yawn and an apology: He had been up all night finishing a song that he hoped to perform the following night with his 10 piece band, Tredici Bacci. "It's called 'In the 1970s,'" Mr. Hanes said. His band the main of several musical projects that he has going plays what he refers to as Italian soundtrack pop, led by Luxardo, a flamboyant personality he created for himself. "I had to do a lot of work to finish it." The four bedroom house, one half of a brick duplex that he moved into last September and shares with a journalist, a playwright and two other musicians, is by far the nicest place that he has lived in New York. It has an ample kitchen and a large, thoughtfully furnished living room. A couple shares the largest bedroom and everyone else has their own room. Mr. Hanes pays 750 a month for a room that he describes as "cozy," though others might opt for a different word. He had to remove the closet door because it wouldn't be possible to have both the door and a bed. A recent survey of the room revealed a music shelf stuffed with composition and scoring sheets (and a plastic skeleton), a desk, four guitars, a mandolin, two keyboards (propped vertically), a recorder and a large bag of cotton balls. The bag was bought for a cappuccino Halloween costume that failed to come together this year and so is being held in reserve for 2018. A library book was propped open on the foot of the bed: "Shantymen and Shantyboys: Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman." Tredici Bacci has attracted considerable attention Rolling Stone named Mr. Hanes one of the 10 artists to watch last November, praising the group's first full length album, "Amore Per Tutti," as a "horns and string vehicle for sexy, mysterious, mod a go go romps through pop's eccentric European past." The band is also, Mr. Hanes said, "the biggest money suck in the whole world." He pays each of the 10 members a bare minimum of 50 a show, but they often make less than 300 total. "And," he said, "as a band leader, I would be nothing without these musicians, so at rehearsals, there's beer, there's food and I try to rent a bigger rehearsal space so people aren't cramped." His general plan for the band? He laughed. "We'll become extremely lucrative and people will be paying us thousands of dollars to perform," he said, adding that financials aside, "the part of this that is really enjoyable is being with all the musicians and working on it, having fun, all the community elements." To support Tredici and otherwise make ends meet, he tends bar at an experimental music venue, Roulette Intermedium, and occasionally picks up the odd, well paying job. For example, when he last visited his parents in the San Francisco Bay Area, he went to a studio in Napa and helped write and record music for a documentary. "And I'm also starting to sell shirts," he added. "I have a bunch of wiggly shirts." "No, just shirts that I have." He shrugged, referring to some stripy, loud, colorful shirts he happens to own. "It was just an idea to make money." Mr. Hanes moved to New York about four years ago; he had been living in Boston, where he went to the New England Conservatory and formed Tredici Bacci with some fellow graduates. He eventually persuaded almost everyone in the band, whose ranks sometimes swell to 14, to join him in New York over the past few years. A series of terrible apartments followed. There was "a weird, scary basement in Bushwick," then a weirder, scarier basement in Bushwick where he could hear animals scrabbling around in the walls. After that, he ended up in a "glorified Bushwick flophouse," which had a secret entrance in the back of a bookstore. "That was awesome," he concedes, "but the rooms were essentially cells separated by two by fours." Next came a "residency" at a music venue, for which he paid 800 a month for a room even smaller than the one he lives in now. It also lacked heat or hot water, so he had to shower at a friend's place. He decamped to a 540 room in another building, with hot water, but the floors were warped into hills and a hole in the back of the house meant that he shared the space not only with roommates, but also with raccoons. "All that made moving into here all the more amazing," said Mr. Hanes, sitting in his duplex's large, eat in kitchen. Clean pans sat on the stove and the sink was empty, with a pair of dishwashing gloves draped over the faucet. One roommate came in to make tea and toast. Another sat at a desk in the front window, working quietly at a laptop. And, after a cup of coffee, Mr. Hanes was headed back upstairs to his bedroom. Not to sleep, he clarified, but to finish up his latest composition.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Mary T. Barra, who has been chief executive of General Motors since January, has garnered more than her share of the spotlight this year as G.M. has recalled millions of vehicles and she has had to appear before Congress. Ms. Barra is back in the spotlight now, this time on the cover of Time magazine. She also made a speech this week, titled "Valuing What Matters," at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York. (The Detroit News) General Motors and Isuzu announced Friday that they would collaborate on developing a midsize truck for the global market. The automakers have worked together before, building the Chevrolet Colorado, which was also sold as the Isuzu i Series and D Max. G.M. and Isuzu have not given further details about the partnership, such as when the truck would go on sale. (The Daily Mail) Subaru says that among other improvements to its 2015 Impreza, the automaker will offer EyeSight, an active safety system that includes adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning and automated pre collision braking. The Impreza will also be available with the updated infotainment system offered in the higher end Legacy. (Motor Trend) When the union that organizes Hyundai's workers discovered that the automaker was making a move to buy a 10 billion piece of land in Seoul, union officials decided to extend a partial strike affecting production in South Korea. The strike is over wages, and the union was upset that Hyundai had bid more than the property was worth. The land would be used for a new headquarters, hotel accommodations and a car themed park. (Reuters)
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Automobiles
|
In dance as in politics, Israel's visibility and influence are remarkably disproportionate to its size. For years, dance aficionados have celebrated the adventurous physicality coming from that small country, making it one of its most popular and exciting cultural exports. The familiar ambassadors have been big companies like Vertigo, Kibbutz Contemporary Dance and, of course, the Batsheva Dance Company, whose signature gooey movement style, known as Gaga, has swept the dance world. But in the past decade, a noteworthy development in the Israeli scene has been the rise of the independent choreographer artists forgoing company structures in favor of intimate and conceptually daring work that still exudes the anxious, palpable intensity that has become a mark of the Israeli dance sensibility. On Friday, Jan. 15, the 92nd Street Y presents the sixth Out of Israel showcase, in which the curator Dana Katz, a Tel Aviv born New York choreographer, introduces a handful of these vigorous voices to local audiences. (Noon and 8 p.m.; 92y.org.)
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Dance
|
LAS VEGAS In the week leading into his first fight in more than a year, the U.F.C. star Conor McGregor has exuded a confidence familiar to anyone who has followed his transformation from Ultimate Fighting Championship contender to the fight promotion's biggest star. His posture, perfect. His suits, tailored. His chin, held high. But his trademark trash talk has been absent. Instead, McGregor saluted fans and shook hands at a midweek news conference with the rugged veteran Donald Cerrone, his opponent in the main event at U.F.C. 246 on Saturday night. Over the next half hour he complimented Cerrone, who is nicknamed Cowboy, on everything from his fighting acumen to his reptile skin blazer (made of python, Cerrone said). The new sales pitch for McGregor and the U.F.C.: Conor the sportsman, not Conor the heel. The version of McGregor on display ahead of his first bout since a loss to Khabib Nurmagomedov in October 2018 is friendlier but more focused than before, and bent on redemption from high profile losses and image tarnishing arrests. No matter which side he shows, McGregor is undoubtedly a critical part of the U.F.C.'s plans for 2020 as a star who has attracted fight fans and mainstream audiences. McGregor figures to boost the promotion's ticket and pay per view sales by simply entering the octagon to fight Cerrone, a fan favorite known for taking fights across divisions who is also coming off consecutive losses. An impressive win by McGregor, who already owns several U.F.C. sales records, would set him and the promotion up for still more paydays this year. "Fully prepared, fully committed Conor McGregor there's no one that can touch me," the 31 year old fighter said during Wednesday's news conference. "I made this game what it is. I'm going to go in there and remind everyone, and show the world Jan. 18." But McGregor has spent the last 15 months estranged from the sport he claims he built, dealing with a string of legal issues. The brawl that erupted after the loss to Nurmagomedov earned McGregor a six month suspension and a 50,000 fine from Nevada regulators. McGregor also pleaded guilty in two assault cases, one for smashing a tourist's phone in Miami, and another for slugging a 60 year old bar patron in Ireland. McGregor has avoided talking about two cases that are potentially more severe, separate police investigations in Ireland of sexual assault. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that he had not been charged, and the existence of the investigations does not imply that McGregor is guilty of any crime. McGregor was silent when asked about the cases, though he told ESPN in an interview broadcast Monday that things just needed to play out. "Time will reveal all, time will tell all," he said. "And then that's it." The fight card features no title bouts and depends mainly on McGregor to drive sales. According to the Nevada Athletic Commission, McGregor's loss to Nurmagomedov drew 17,835 spectators and 17.2 million in ticket revenue. Both figures are records for M.M.A. events in the state. Of the top six grossing M.M.A. cards in Nevada, McGregor has headlined five. His August 2017 boxing match against Floyd Mayweather earned 55.4 million in ticket revenue, according to the commission. McGregor is the only fighter to appear on the top 10 gate revenue lists for both boxing and M.M.A. events. McGregor's legal issues have not alienated his most dedicated fans. In fact, the U.F.C. incorporated several of McGregor's arrests into prefight promotional videos, casting them as consequences of immature acts that McGregor has outgrown. White and McGregor said this week that they hoped the fighter could compete three times this year, a schedule that depends in part on McGregor's avoiding trouble. They teased a series of possibilities for the rest of 2020, including rematches with Mayweather or Nurmagomedov, a quick turnaround fight in March, or even a boxing match with Manny Pacquiao. "Anything is possible," White said. "Let's see what happens on Saturday." Oddsmakers foresee a McGregor win, with many sports books seeing him as a 3 to 1 favorite over Cerrone. Without McGregor, it is not clear which fighters on U.F.C.'s roster are capable of generating mainstream appeal. Ideally, multiple athletes would fill that role, the way elite quarterbacks like Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson all function as N.F.L. standard bearers. But while McGregor was inactive, the U.F.C. did not always have a single, standout, crossover star. The former bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey played that role in the mid 2010s, but she has not fought since 2016, after back to back losses, and she has not publicly expressed interest in returning. Her predecessor, the longtime welterweight champion Georges St Pierre, took a four year hiatus starting in 2013 and ending with a November 2017 win over Mike Bisping. Last year, St Pierre, a Canadian, retired for good. The light heavyweight champion Jon Jones, who currently tops the U.F.C.'s pound for pound rankings, rode a string of spectacular wins to stardom in the early 2010s. But arrests and three failed tests for performance enhancing drugs have sidelined him for long stretches, limiting his profile. McGregor is unambiguously famous, however, and in a sport where pay is proportional to the size of the audience a fighter draws, a star at the top of the roster has other U.F.C. fighters envisioning their own paydays. Jorge Masvidal, a welterweight contender who beat Nate Diaz in a November fight at Madison Square Garden that was attended by President Trump, is in line for a fight with the champion Kamaru Usman. But Masvidal told reporters on Thursday that he would rather fight McGregor, framing the choice as a business decision. "If me and Conor go in the octagon, what happens? It's one of the biggest fights in history," Masvidal said. "Just by math, proven by what Conor's been doing, the last couple fights that I've had the engagement, the pay per views."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Kenzo Takada in his home in Paris in 2019. "When I opened my shop," he said, "I thought there was no point in me doing what French designers were doing." Kenzo Takada, the designer whose exuberant prints helped bring Japanese fashion to the world, died on Sunday at a hospital in Paris. He was 81. The cause was complications of the novel coronavirus, a spokeswoman for the designer said, adding that he had been sick for a few weeks. Known for his beaming smile and mischievous sense of fun one of his more famous sayings was "fashion is like eating, you shouldn't stick with the same menu" Mr. Takada, who was generally referred to only as Kenzo, shook up the established French fashion world after arriving from Japan in 1964. "Fashion is not for the few it is for all the people," he told The New York Times in 1972. "It should not be too serious." Though he initially planned to stay in Paris only six months, he ended up living there for 56 years, and his work opened doors not only for the highly influential Japanese designers who came after him, such as Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, but also created a new kind of mix and match aesthetic that crossed borders, colors and cultures, embraced diversity, and influenced a generation. "Kenzo Takada was a very special figure in the Parisian fashion world," said Olivier Gabet, director of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, the applied arts arm of the Louvre. "So many people who disliked or hated each other very often did agree on the fact they loved him." Jonathan Bouchet Manheim, Mr. Takada's partner in the lifestyle firm K3, said, "He imagined a new artistic and colorful story, combining East and West his native Japan and his life in Paris." Born in Himeji, Japan, on Feb. 27, 1939, one of seven children of Kenji and Shizu Takada, who ran a hotel, Mr. Takada became interested in design after reading his sisters' fashion magazines. Though he studied literature at Kobe University to please his parents, who did not approve of the idea of a career in fashion, he later dropped out and applied to Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, where he became one of the first male students. In 1960, he won the Soen Prize, an award given by the prestigious Japanese fashion magazine Soen, and began his career designing girls clothing for the Sanai department store. His life changed, however, when, in preparation for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, his apartment block was torn down and he was given 10 months rent in compensation. He used the money to travel to France by boat, passing through Singapore, Bombay and Spain, before ultimately landing in the French capital, where he rented a room near the Place de Clichy for 9 francs a day. He began selling sketches to designers such as Louis Feraud, and by 1970 was able to open his first store, which he renovated himself, in the Galerie Vivienne. Inspired by Henri Rousseau, he painted the walls with wild florals and called the boutique, where he also held his first show, "Jungle Jap." (The name was somewhat controversial, and Mr. Takada later rechristened his company Kenzo.) "When I opened my shop, I thought there was no point in me doing what French designers were doing, because I couldn't do that," Mr. Takada told The South China Morning Post in 2019. "So I did things my own way in order to be different, and I used kimono fabrics and other influences." The joyfully chaotic and oversize designs, made to liberate the body, not restrict it or reshape it, often free from zippers and other closures, landed on the cover of Elle, and inside the pages of American Vogue. "His first fashion shows were memorable," Mr. Gabet said. "Light and playful, with models more dancing and walking than presenting clothes, faraway from the hierarchical vision of French couture." Known for his sense of fun, Mr. Takada who disliked being known as a "Japanese designer" since he considered himself a "fashion designer" first staged shows in a circus tent, and with himself riding an elephant. They were "legendary, and the toughest ticket in town," said Gene Pressman, former co chief executive of Barneys. "He was a cult figure for the young and young hearted." Mr. Takada introduced men's wear in 1983, a jeans line in 1986 and perfume in 1988, but by 1993, struggling after his life partner died and his business partner had a stroke, Mr. Takada decided to sell his company to LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French fashion conglomerate, for approximately 80 million. Though he initially stayed on as the designer, in 1999, he had had enough and decided to step away from fashion, with its increasingly frenetic pace and commercial demands. "Everything has changed, from the way we make clothes to the way information spreads and how many seasons there are now," he said to The South China Morning Post. Though Kenzo, the brand, continued under a series of different designers including the team of Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, who brought back Mr. Takada's signature trendsetting tiger, and the current artistic director, Felipe Oliveira Baptista Kenzo, the man, explored other creative avenues. He designed costumes for the opera, created the Japanese Olympic uniforms in 2004, painted, and created a new homewares collection. He opened his archives for a coffee table tome of his work released in February 2019, "Kenzo Takada," combining sketches, diary excerpts, letters and photographs.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Style
|
"Reese asked me to come to the actors' group, and told me they were going to be wearing black and would I consider creating a pin for the nominees and male presenters," Ms. Phillips told The Hollywood Reporter. "We were up against the holidays, but I said I could do it, and the first person I called was my partner in crime, Michael Schmidt." (Mr. Schmidt is a designer who has worked with Rihanna, Cher and Lady Gaga, among many others). Together, the two of them designed the pin and had 500 versions of it produced within two weeks. Ms. Phillips posted a photo of herself wearing the pin to Instagram, with the caption, "let's all toast post in solidarity with women on the red carpet and everywhere standing up for change." Time's Up includes a legal defense fund, backed by donations from members, that is intended to help less privileged women pursue action against those who violate them; a working group developing ideas for legistlation; and a drive to push studios and talent agencies to have a more even balance of men and women in their employment.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
Mr. Sillerman, who owns about 40 percent of the company's shares according to his most recent filings, said that he would remain the chairman of SFX and that the company would begin searching for a new chief executive immediately. The bankruptcy, which in recent weeks had been the subject of speculation in the music world and on Wall Street, brings to an end a painful stretch for SFX and Mr. Sillerman, who hoped to repeat the success he had two decades ago with an earlier incarnation of SFX Entertainment. In that company, he combined concert promoters around the country and in 2000 sold the enterprise to the broadcaster Clear Channel now known as iHeartMedia for 4.4 billion. That network of promoters and theaters remains the basis of Live Nation Entertainment's concert division. But the new version of SFX has been much more troubled. The company raised 260 million in an initial public offering in late 2013, but investors grew impatient with its efforts to build a profitable business by attracting corporate sponsors. Events like a Las Vegas edition of the Brazilian festival Rock in Rio also had disappointing results. "Nothing ever materialized in the fundamentals with this company," said Steven Azarbad of Maglan Capital, a hedge fund that sold its holdings in SFX last year. "It became a 'show me' story at some point." Last year, Mr. Sillerman offered to take the company private at 5.25 a share, valuing the company at 774 million, including its debt. But investors doubted that Mr. Sillerman had lined up the proper financing, and the company's shares began to plunge. By August, Mr. Sillerman abandoned his bid, and problems continued to mount through the fall. Last month the company disclosed that it was in default because it had failed to make a 3 million payment on a 10.8 million promissory note.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Credit...Mark J. Rebilas/USA Today Sports, via Reuters LeBron James can't say that he wasn't warned. Lots of us were crowing in the summer, and pretty loudly so, about what would greet the unquestioned Lord of the Eastern Conference if he dared to defect. Sign with the Los Angeles Lakers if you wish, for the sunnier Hollywood life and all the perks, but brace yourself for the most trying regular season of your career if you decide to go West. That was the gist of the scouting report which in retrospect could not have been much more prescient. On cue: The most daunting and, yes, disappointing season of James's career is right here, right now, for the biggest name in basketball. And it appears he will soon have to stomach that it's going on his ledger in the most permanent ink that he was unable to bring a halt to the longest postseason drought in Lakers history barring an unforeseen resurrection from a fractured group that sits four and a half games out of a Western Conference playoff berth with 19 games to go. No matter how much culpability you wish to assign James for what is poised to go down as the Lakers' franchise record sixth successive trip to the draft lottery, he's going to have to own this as much as the front office tandem of Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka as well as the under fire coach Luke Walton. The LeBron Way, for years and years, has worked something like this: He inevitably gets most of the credit when his team flourishes; his teammates absorb the bulk of the blame when things unravel. But this is different. This would be the jarring sight of James, fresh off his eighth consecutive finals appearance, actually missing out on the N.B.A. postseason for the first time since his second professional season in 2004 5, when he was just 20. Even though he can rightly point to his recent groin strain as the biggest standings altering disruption these Lakers have endured, James surely understands that his maiden campaign in Los Angeles is bound to be recorded in many precincts as a failure to make the playoffs that belongs to him. After Saturday night's humiliation against a 13 51 Suns team, which dropped the Lakers to 30 33, James's gang only sports a 1.3 percent chance of reaching the postseason, according to Basketball Reference.com. They also have the league's eighth toughest remaining schedule, according to Tankathon.com. We'll never know if the Lakers, who had risen to a heady fourth in the West at 20 14 when James sustained the groin injury in a Christmas Day rout of Golden State, could have kept building upon that promising start with a healthy LeBron. But we most certainly do know that James's mere return to the lineup, at 34, wasn't enough to rescue a roster that has been assailed since conception for its lack of perimeter shooting and its defensive deficiencies. Nor has he been able to galvanize a locker room that was deeply destabilized by the Lakers' trade pursuit of the New Orleans superstar Anthony Davis, which became all consuming in late January, and has never recovered. It obviously doesn't help that James, after missing two key free throws in the final minute Saturday, is also converting a substandard 66.9 percent of his attempts from the line to give his critics more handy fodder. Leaving his home state Cleveland Cavaliers for the Lakers last July without the accompaniment of a second superstar meant that James, in a far deeper conference, would have little margin for error just to reach the playoffs. When you combine James's injury absence with the continuing post Davis malaise and the team's declining ball movement since Lonzo Ball (ankle) was sidelined six weeks ago, it adds up rather quickly to a margin that is long gone. The prevailing assumption in league coaching circles remains that Walton will almost certainly be dismissed after the season, followed by the Lakers resuming their trade quest for Davis. But denying Walton an opportunity to at finish out a season wrought with drama and distraction since James's first dribble in purple and gold would be cruel and needless. Changes are coming, though. It's an open secret that a big off season reset looms in Lakerland. James always knew that his new club would not be in the title mix until his second campaign as a Laker, but his patience predictably faded quickly one more reason desperation has become so palpable around this team. Many of us know it alls in the news media indeed wrote in our preseason forecasts that the playoffs were no certainty for these Lakers, as constructed, but very few of us were actually willing to outright predict that they would miss out. Reason being: It's not very smart to bet against LeBron Raymone James. Yet we've suddenly reached that unprecedented juncture where it would be wholly irresponsible to advise you that James can extricate himself from this jam just because he's LeBron. Whether it's the lingering effects from his groin injury, or his own unmistakably waning spirit in the face of increasingly bleak odds, James has been lacking the zip you associate with his well chronicled playoff mode which he assured us on Feb. 21 had been "activated" earlier than usual. I briefly stood beside James on the floor in Charlotte, N.C., before the All Star Game tipped off and bought into the idea a surge was coming when he insisted he was eager to embrace "the challenge" of hauling the Lakers out of their hole. "And I'm getting healthy, too," James said that night. A mere two weeks later, it's already time to start imagining the N.B.A.'s first spring without King James after watching him for eight straight Junes and wondering how on Earth he's going to cope with not being a part of it.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Get More From Your Letters With Custom Stationery for Print or Pixels None
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
PHOENIX In a sign that his standoff with prosecutors holds little immediate hope of easing, Robert K. Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, on Tuesday waived his arraignment for charges of soliciting prostitution and requested a jury trial, according to a court filing. A hearing in the case was scheduled for Thursday in Florida. Mr. Kraft, who has pleaded not guilty, was not planning to attend. The request for a jury trial, announced in a brief court filing in Palm Beach County, raises the stakes in a case that most defendants settle quickly and quietly. But Mr. Kraft, one of the most powerful owners in sports, is unwilling to simply take the terms offered by prosecutors. Instead, he has insisted that he has done nothing illegal and wants to clear his name to protect his reputation, according to people close to the 77 year old billionaire. The case began a month ago and has generated headlines across the globe for its mix of celebrity, sex and sports. Now it is likely to carry on for weeks and perhaps months. The stalemate between Mr. Kraft's high priced legal team and law enforcement officials in Palm Beach County hinges on two things: The terms of a proposed deal and the status of any video evidence of Mr. Kraft. Last week, prosecutors offered to drop the two misdemeanor charges against Mr. Kraft, but the proposed deal required him to admit that he would have been found guilty at trial on the charges. Many defendants in these types of cases routinely accept such terms to avoid the cost and potential embarrassment of fighting them. But Mr. Kraft is not backing down. His legal team and prosecutors spent much of last week trying to get prosecutors to alter the terms of the deal offered to him and 24 other men who were similarly accused of soliciting prostitution at a massage parlor in Jupiter, Fla., called Orchids of Asia Day Spa. But Mr. Kraft and many of the other men are unwilling to admit guilt because they believe the police mishandled aspects of the case. They contend that a search warrant was improperly obtained to install secret cameras inside the massage parlor. According to the police, the video shows Mr. Kraft and the other men soliciting sex. The pretext for that warrant was predicated on the existence of human trafficking at that massage parlor, something that the police have not yet proven and that Mr. Kraft's lawyers insist did not exist. At the same time, Mr. Kraft and 14 of the other men last week filed a motion asking the court to ensure that all evidence in the case, particularly the surveillance video, be kept private to avoid bias among potential jurors. That request prompted an unusual response from Sheriff William Snyder of Martin County. He said the video evidence would most likely be made public once the case ends. Legal experts in Florida said that Mr. Kraft ran the risk of having the video being made public at a trial, as well. It is possible, though, that the two sides will reach an agreement before a trial begins. Throughout the case, Mr. Kraft has kept a low profile. He appeared at a party before the Oscars, and attended a concert this month by his friend Meek Mill. Usually, he is regularly spotted in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Palm Beach, where he often stays in the winter. He has also been largely out of view at the N.F.L.'s annual meeting, being held in Phoenix through Tuesday. Normally, he speaks freely to reporters in the hotel lobby and other public spaces. Instead, he has used hallways and roped off areas at the Biltmore Hotel to avoid questions. Unlike many other team owners, he did not attend an elaborate cocktail party hosted by the N.F.L. on Monday night. He dined Tuesday with his oldest son, Jonathan, at a restaurant inside the hotel, but he has declined requests to speak. Other than his first statement made the day charges were announced on Feb. 22, Mr. Kraft's only other public comments came Saturday in a statement released by his publicist. "I am truly sorry," Mr. Kraft said. "I know I have hurt and disappointed my family, my close friends, my co workers, our fans and many others who rightfully hold me to a higher standard. I have extraordinary respect for women; my morals and my soul were shaped by the most wonderful woman, the love of my life, who I was blessed to have as my partner for 50 years." Regardless of the outcome of the legal case, Mr. Kraft could still be penalized by N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell, who has broad authority to fine or suspend owners, players, and league and team executives for conduct deemed detrimental to the league. Mr. Goodell said here on Tuesday night that his decision on whether to discipline Mr. Kraft would not be contingent on the outcome of the legal case. "The personal conduct policy applies to everybody," Mr. Goodell said, adding: "And it will be applied to everybody. But it will be done after we get all the facts." Though Mr. Kraft is widely admired in ownership circles, his colleagues have been reluctant to speak publicly about his case. Steve Tisch, the co owner of the Giants, was rare owner to talk on the record about him. "I think what Robert said yesterday very publicly, I think it came from his heart," Mr. Tisch told reporters on Sunday. "I think he was really addressing his family, his team, his players, his friends and Patriots fans. And, I think, in some ways, 31 other team owners. It's probably very, very tough for him to make those statements."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
LOS ANGELES The kidnapping drama "All the Money in the World" has become a new flash point in the debate over gender equality in Hollywood. Ridley Scott, who directed the movie, and Imperative Entertainment, the company that produced and financed it, were lauded in December for purging the disgraced actor Kevin Spacey from the film. After multiple men accused Mr. Spacey of unwanted sexual advances, the "All the Money in the World" team replaced him with Christopher Plummer and hastily reassembled much of the cast and crew in London for reshoots. "We cannot let one person's behavior affect the good work of all of these other people," Mr. Scott said at the time. But the movie, about the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III and his grandfather's refusal to pay a 17 million ransom, now finds itself embroiled in a new scandal. And it involves the reshoots made necessary by the attempt to release the movie with a clear conscience. The film's female star, Michelle Williams, was paid a per diem of 80, a bit above the union minimum, for 10 days of added work. Her male counterpart, Mark Wahlberg, received the same per diem plus 1.5 million. The salary disparities were reported on by USA Today on Monday and the details were confirmed by three people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private contracts. The disclosure prompted instant outrage. "She has been in the industry for 20 yrs," the actress Jessica Chastain wrote on Twitter of Ms. Williams, a four time Oscar nominee. "She deserves more than 1% of her male co star's salary." Adding to the anger, Mr. Scott had previously said that the actors did the reshoots "for nothing" meaning union minimums and Ms. Williams and Mr. Wahlberg are both represented by the William Morris Endeavor agency. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The disclosure of specific salary details also came just after Sunday's Golden Globes, which was a showcase for Time's Up, a new initiative to end sexual harassment and gender inequality in Hollywood and other industries. Ms. Williams, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her role in "All the Money in the World," walked the red carpet with Tarana Burke, senior director of the nonprofit Girls for Gender Equity and the founder of the MeToo movement. Most contracts with actors include a certain number of reshoot days as a routine stipulation. If additional filming is needed, actors will make themselves available as their schedule allows to clean up scenes. But Ms. Williams and Mr. Wahlberg, both of whom had agreed to appear in "All the Money in the World" for less than their standard fee, took different approaches to the reshoots, according to the people briefed on the matter. Because of the circumstances, Ms. Williams quickly agreed to return. The people briefed on the matter said that she did so believing that other participants had made the same decision. She ultimately worked over Thanksgiving, racing to London on an overnight flight after arranging for her 12 year old daughter, Matilda, to spend the holiday without her. "They could have my salary, they could have my holiday, whatever they wanted," she said of the production team at the time. "Because I appreciated so much that they were making this massive effort." Although several actors with small parts, including Timothy Hutton, had agreed to return for reshoots for minimum pay, Mr. Wahlberg was not one of them, according to the people briefed on the negotiations. He asked his primary agent, Doug Lucterhand, to push for more money. (Ms. Williams is represented at William Morris Endeavor by Brent Morley.) Mr. Wahlberg was already not thrilled to have worked for roughly 80 percent less than his standard fee, the people said, especially since overseas distributors were using his box office track record to promote the film. Because Ms. Williams had already committed to return, Mr. Wahlberg had leverage over the production team: He was the only major missing piece, and the clock was ticking. The finished film was set to be released in theaters on Dec. 25. Spokesmen for Imperative, William Morris Endeavor and Sony Pictures, which distributed "All the Money in the World," declined to comment for this article. Publicists for Ms. Williams, Mr. Wahlberg and Mr. Scott either declined to comment or did not respond to queries. Individual client contracts are not always discussed between agents who work at the same agency. It is possible that those representing Ms. Williams did not know about the deal that Mr. Wahlberg was able to secure. When inequitable pay has become an issue in Hollywood in the past as with Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams for "American Hustle" and Taraji P. Henson for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" agents have defended themselves by pointing out that it is in their best interest to negotiate the biggest paychecks possible for their clients, regardless of gender. Agents generally work for a 10 percent cut of the payments they secure. But many advocates and actresses are likely to find those explanations inadequate. Melissa Silverstein, the founder of Women and Hollywood, a nonprofit that pushes for gender equality in entertainment, said Ms. Williams was the latest example of the shortchanging of women in a male dominated industry. "This continuous undervaluing of women has led to an industry where women have fewer jobs, less power and less potential than the men," Ms. Silverstein said. "If Hollywood is to achieve the systemic change brought about by the revelations of the last several months, one thing it must address is the economic disparity between men and women."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
For the analysis, insuranceQuotes.com hired Quadrant Information Services, an insurance data firm, to calculate the price increase of adding a driver aged 16 to 19 to a family's auto insurance policy. The averages are based on a hypothetical couple a man and a woman, both 45 years old, married and employed who each drive 12,000 miles each year and have good credit and driving records. The policy tested included 100,000 for injury liability, 300,000 for all injuries, a 500 deductible on collision and comprehensive coverage, and uninsured motorist coverage. Here are some questions and answers about teenagers and auto insurance: How can I reduce the cost of having a teenage driver on my policy? Kathy Bernstein Harris, senior manager for teenage driving initiatives at the National Safety Council, a nonprofit, said that some insurers offered discounts for students who get good grades (even though it's not necessarily clear that being a good student correlates with safer driving). Discounts are also often available for new drivers who take driver's education classes. Ms. Harris said the best way to reduce claims and hold costs down and keep your child safe was to set rules and spend time driving with teenagers and coaching them along, even after they pass their driver's license tests. "Just getting a piece of plastic doesn't mean they are totally prepared for the open road," she said. "The first year of independent driving is the riskiest." Many state programs set restrictions on teenage drivers, such as curfews for night driving and limiting the number of other people, particularly other teenagers, who can ride in the car with them. Ms. Harris urges parents to follow such rules. "With every teen passenger you put in the car," she said, the risk of a crash increases. The council's DriveitHome website offers resources for parents and teenage drivers, including interactive safety tests. Are some cars safer than others for teenagers to drive? The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety each year publishes a list of safe, affordable cars for teenagers. In general, larger, heavier vehicles are best. Ms. Harris suggests that parents not buy a new car specifically for their new teenage driver or, if they do, that they make it clear that the car is the family's car, rather than the teenage driver's personal vehicle. By making the car a "family" car, she said, parents can better set rules for its use and talk about where their child is headed and who is expected to go along.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Your Money
|
Soon after the sports website SB Nation published an article on Wednesday about Daniel Holtzclaw, a former Oklahoma City police officer convicted of raping multiple women, an editor who worked on the piece sent a laudatory email to a group of writers. The article was "a nuanced portrait that never loses sight of the fact that women were victimized," the editor, Glenn Stout, wrote. "I think people will be talking about this one." He was right, but not in the way he had hoped. The nearly 12,000 word article immediately ignited unfettered outrage, with readers condemning its sympathetic tone toward Mr. Holtzclaw, a former college football player who was convicted on Dec. 10 of 18 counts of sexual assault against 13 black women. In particular, many objected to how much of the article was focused on Mr. Holtzclaw's supporters, including his father and former teammates, with little space given to his victims. In a blistering critique, the sports website Deadspin wrote, "Basically, this is the local news interviewing the shocked neighbors 'He always seemed like such a nice kid' over and over again for 12,000 words." SB Nation, which is owned by Vox Media, removed the article from the web just hours after it was published. In a note that went up in its place, SB Nation's editorial director, Spencer Hall, said the article was "tone deaf, insensitive to the victims of sexual assault and rape and wrongheaded in approach and execution." He added: "There is no qualification: It was a complete failure." The article, which Mr. Stout had described in his email on Wednesday as "tough, insightful and timely," was pitched in December as a story about Mr. Holtzclaw's background as a football player at Eastern Michigan University. "The fact that he was a football player and a pretty good one, who fell just short of the N.F.L. seemed to have escaped all other coverage," Mr. Stout wrote. For two months, the writer, Jeff Arnold, a freelancer with more than 20 years of experience, worked with SB Nation and Mr. Stout to write a story about how Mr. Holtzclaw, once an N.F.L. prospect, had turned into the Oklahoma City police officer convicted of sexual assault. In some ways, the article was a classic attempt to tell an untold story. It was also an example of so called long form journalism narrative driven stories that run many thousands of words and often draw much praise on social media. SB Nation has a long form vertical, for which Mr. Stout is the editor. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. The Holtzclaw article is, of course, not the first story to prompt widespread vitriol. In early 2014, Grantland, the now defunct sports and pop culture site, published a roughly 7,000 word article titled "Dr. V's Magical Putter" about a transgender inventor of a golf club who killed herself that was swiftly pilloried for invading her privacy and possibly playing a role in her suicide. Gawker retracted a story last summer that accused a married male executive at a prominent media company of seeking to pay for sex with a gay escort. Critics of the story had condemned it as having no news value and being an invasion of privacy. Rolling Stone retracted a 9,000 word article, published in November 2014, about a gang rape at the University of Virginia after the veracity of the events described in the story were seriously questioned. The specific editorial process that the Holtzclaw article went through before SB Nation decided to publish and why the article was so quickly removed from the site is still unclear. Reached by phone on Thursday, Mr. Arnold said, "I really have no comment on it." In his note on Wednesday, Mr. Hall, who was on vacation last week, wrote that the article "was not up to our standards as a website. It was not up to our standards as a part of Vox Media. It is not reflective of our ideals, or who we want to be as an organization in the future." He also said there had been "objections by senior editorial staff that went unheeded," but he did not elaborate on what those objections were. Vox Media is planning to conduct an internal review that will be led by Lockhart Steele, the company's editorial director. Until the review is complete, executives and editors are not willing to say much about the editorial process or about what mistakes were made. "A major editorial miscalculation was made, and it's on us that we figure out why and limit the chances of it happening again," said Mr. Steele, who was at a conference on Thursday in Dana Point, Calif. Jim Bankoff, the chief executive of Vox Media, was on a plane and not available to comment, according to a spokeswoman for Vox Media. In a brief phone call, Mr. Hall said: "All the help I can give you right now is our editorial note that we posted yesterday." Reached by phone, Mr. Stout referred questions to Mr. Hall.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Nearly three decades after the LeFrak Organization began transforming a rail yard along the Jersey City waterfront into a planned community of glassy office towers and soaring residences, it has built the neighborhood's first luxury high rise, a blue glass and steel tower that overlooks the Hudson. At 600 acres, the Newport neighborhood dwarfs the 92 acre Battery Park City in Manhattan. But while Battery Park City has ample luxury housing, Newport's developer has not ventured into the luxury market until now. For years Newport was a patchwork of isolated high rises creating an almost corporate atmosphere. Its main attractions were cheaper rents and a short PATH train ride to Manhattan. But Newport has grown up and now has several restaurants, a gourmet supermarket, shops, a private school and a new waterfront park that organizes summer events. When the 19 story Laguna opens this month at 45 Park Lane South, it will be the first in the neighborhood to offer luxuries like a rooftop lounge, a screening room, a fitness center and a children's playroom. "Newport really has evolved," said Matt Brown, a broker with the Hudson Realty Group at Halstead Property. "The addition of the waterfront park was just huge. It's really spectacular. Ten years ago I had a lot of people complaining that the buildings were dated, and you didn't have a park or a grocery store." When LeFrak broke ground on Newport in 1986, this slice of the Hudson River waterfront was an outpost of warehouses and rail yards. For decades, LeFrak developed the site, shying away from luxury residential as the neighborhood lacked key amenities to draw high end tenants. But eventually the Jersey City waterfront transformed, and luxury towers started to rise in other parts of the city. Today Newport has 15,000 residents and 20,000 office workers. Once quiet streets are bustling with office workers and babies in strollers. The Laguna has a modern aesthetic, with interiors designed by the Stephen B. Jacobs Group and Andi Pepper Interior Design, the team that designed the Edge in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the Hotel Gansevoort in Manhattan. Apartments have views of the New York City skyline and kitchens with stainless steel appliances, espresso colored cabinets and quartz countertops. West Elm and BoConcept decorated the model apartments. "This building was, for us, a pretty dramatic step up," said Mario Gaztambide, the vice president for residential asset management of the LeFrak Organization. Interest in the 158 unit building has been strong. Since leasing began in early June, LeFrak has rented 40 percent of the units. Tenants will begin moving in in mid July, although many of the upper floors are still under construction. The rents reflect the Laguna's upscale image: one bedrooms start at 2,790 a month, two bedrooms at 3,790; the remaining three bedroom rents for 6,300. The 2,000 square foot penthouse, a three bedroom apartment with floor to ceiling windows and a 1,000 square foot private terrace, has not been priced yet. The Laguna's offerings might be a bargain by Manhattan standards, where the median rent in the second quarter was 3,500 a month, according to data provided by Trulia.com. But they are high for Jersey City, whose median over the same period was 1,900 a month. "There is a demand and people are paying up for it because there is very little supply," said Ritu Kothari, who signed a lease with her husband, Deep, for a 1,750 square foot three bedroom at the Laguna for 4,620 a month. With a baby due in October, the couple wanted more space than they have in their two bedroom in Midtown Manhattan. "If you want a big space in a location that's nice," she said, "you have to pay up for it." The Laguna is a short walk from the Hoboken and Newport PATH stations, which both offer a 15 minute ride to Midtown or the World Trade Center. The building also overlooks Newport Green, a 4.25 acre waterfront park with a carousel that opened last year. On a scorching recent summer morning, toddlers dashed through playground sprinklers, and sunbathers lounged on an artificial beach overlooking the riverfront esplanade. The Laguna marks the beginning of the end of development for Newport, as it is the first building to be complete in the final phase of the project. LeFrak plans four to six more commercial and residential buildings, which will translate into another 3,000 residential units, Mr. Gaztambide said. "What's going to characterize this next phase of development is, it is all going to happen around this park," he added, referring to Newport Green. "It is something that, we believe, sets this apart."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
Many of the observations in the book are striking. "In most countries, you are generally permitted to do anything you want, unless there is a law forbidding it," a friend says. "In the D.P.R.K., it is the opposite: Everything is forbidden, until you are told that it is allowed." He notices how his overseers exhibit passive aggressive tendencies to create friction between him and a French classmate by criticizing the classmate's progress in Korean and implying that he's not all too bright. Since everyone is traumatized by bullying, "they take every opportunity to terrorize those who are perceived to be in any way beneath them on the social scale. Such a top down structure ... is key to ensuring that no groups are formed." Jeppesen gives us a direct glimpse of North Korea's psychological techniques at work. When he takes a video of his teacher that accidentally cuts off a portion of Kim Jong il's portrait in the background, he is reprimanded, and the video is deleted. Jeppesen lamented afterward that he was an "idiot." "Don't say that," his French companion whispered to him. "You didn't do anything wrong. ... It's them. ... Not us." Structured as part memoir, part travelogue and part history, Jeppesen's artful narrative falls short in the history portion of the book. We are told, for example, that the division of the peninsula at the 38th parallel was "sealed by two antagonistic powers" the Soviet Union and the United States "that knew nearly nothing" about Korea when, in fact, Russia's historical interests in the peninsula ran very deep (Russia fought a war with Japan over control of Korea in 1904 5). "Stalin cared very little" about North Korea, Jeppesen writes, when quite the opposite was true. And there are more specific errors. The Korean War started on June 25, not the 24th. The American led United Nations forces did not "join the war in September 1950," but in July 1950, and the bombing of North Korean dams that resulted in mass flooding occurred much later in the war and played no role in allowing United Nations forces to retake Seoul in March 1951 (not April 1951).
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.