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What books are on your nightstand? "Something Wonderful," by Todd S. Purdum the story of Rodgers and Hammerstein's working relationship. I've loved Rodgers and Hammerstein since I was 17, when I starred in a college production of "Oklahoma!" as Ado Annie, the girl who "cain't say no." And my obsession with musical theater is growing. "Self Coaching 101," by Brooke Castillo. I've been listening to Brooke's podcast, "The Life Coach School," for a while now. Each week, she tackles a different problem with warmth and insight, and I'm totally addicted to her. She's quite open about being a real, flawed person and not a guru who has attained perfection. "What You Want to See," by Kristen Lepionka. This is the second novel to feature the private investigator Roxane Weary, who's a wonderful character. Lepionka is such an assured writer, with complete narrative authority from the first line. Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how). I have two ideal reading scenarios: a 12 hour business class flight, with no work to do at all and a glass of champagne in my hand, or on a sun lounger next to a beautiful swimming pool/on a beach. My third favorite reading option is: in a lavender scented bubble bath. What's your favorite book of all time? I need three! Can I have three? I'm going to assume I can: "The Black Prince," by Iris Murdoch. The book is so great, I almost feel it has magic powers. It's tragic, comic, mysterious, thought provoking and so much more than the sum of its parts. It manages to be both a great detective story and a great love story at the same time. It's the only book I've ever read that feels as if it encapsulates all of life and the human experience. "Coming From Behind," by Howard Jacobson, a novel about a disappointed academic whose career is an embarrassment to him. It's the funniest book I've ever read. Every sentence is a comic masterpiece in its own right. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. "The Hollow," by Agatha Christie. This book doesn't get nearly as much praise as it deserves. It's a watertight mystery with vivid, memorable characters. There's a surreal scene in which the murder is discovered by Hercule Poirot that is both visually and psychologically brilliant my favorite crime scene in the whole genre. You've now written three books featuring Hercule Poirot, the great Agatha Christie detective. Tell us about your experience as a Christie reader and fan. I've loved Agatha Christie ever since I read "The Body in the Library" when I was 12. I devoured it, and then read all her other books in two years. I loved them all! They were hooky, baffling, funny and full of wisdom and insight. I never asked to write new Hercule Poirot novels I would never have been so presumptuous, and to be honest it wouldn't have occurred to me in a million years. My agent happened to broach the idea with an editor at HarperCollins (without my knowledge!) at exactly the same time as Agatha Christie's grandson told the same editor that the family might be ready for a continuation novel. So we all met up, we got on amazing well, and pretty soon we'd all decided that we wanted to proceed. Writing about my favorite character is still a huge honor, and the Christie family have been so amazingly supportive and great to work with. Who's your favorite fictional detective? And the best villain? Hercule Poirot is the greatest detective, of course, closely followed by Agatha Christie's other "main" sleuth, Miss Marple. My favorite fictional villain would have to be Mr. Brocklehurst or Aunt Reed in Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," or Hindley Earnshaw in Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights." I tend to feel sorry for almost all villains, but not those ones. I loathe them all and still want to give them a hard punch on the nose, decades after I first met them. One essential ingredient is a hook that's irresistible, and considerably more mysterious than "Who killed this dead person?" In my books, I try wherever I can to make the plot hook/mystery something that's very weird and unusual, or even something that's apparently impossible: In my thriller "Keep Her Safe," a woman sees and hears a little girl in a hotel room but that girl is the most famous murder victim in America. So why isn't she dead? I want the reader to wonder, "How on earth can this be possible?" and not be able to think of an explanation. Then my job is to show them how it's not only possible but inevitable, once you know the whole story. Agatha Christie did this brilliantly, all the time. In "Sleeping Murder," a woman moves into a new house in a place she's never visited or been to before, but she knows exactly what she's going to see in that house right down to the pattern of the wallpaper. And then she sees a body that no one else can see. With a mystery as intriguing as that, it's impossible not to read on. Another essential ingredient of a great crime novel is a surprising solution to the mystery. I hate it when I can guess what's going to happen. What kinds of stories are you drawn to? And what do you steer clear of? I'm drawn to confidently written novels with strong narrative authority, plenty of attitude, incredibly gripping plots, and complex, flawed characters. Tana French is one of my all time favorites. She delivers on every level. I also love great memoirs. My two all time favorites are "House Rules," by Rachel Sontag, and "You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know," by Heather Sellers. I steer clear of novels that don't hook me by the end of the first chapter. What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves? My self help/New Age book collection! I am an addict. Write a book and call it something like "The Five Secrets of Badass Kickassery" and I will buy it immediately! I can't help it. So, I have "The Secret," by Rhonda Byrne, "The Essence of Enlightenment," by James Swartz, "The Power of Now," by Eckhart Tolle, "The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a F ck," by Sarah Knight. (Though I'm not keen on the ones that tell you what everyone ought to be able to work out for themselves: "Improve Your Life by Cleaning Your Windows if You Can't See Through the Greasy Panes" surely that is so obvious that no one needs a book giving that advice?) As it turns out, all this self help reading over the years was research I didn't know I would one day need. I ended up writing my own self help book, "How to Hold a Grudge." The book's subtitle is "From Resentment to Contentment the Power of Grudges to Transform Your Life." Scribner is publishing it in 2019. Who is your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer? I'm going to mention a favorite overlooked novel: "Half Broken Things," by Morag Joss. It's a stunning, haunting and provocative psychological suspense novel that anyone who cares about literature should read. It ought to be widely recognized as a classic. What kind of reader were you as a child? I was a voracious reader of mysteries Enid Blyton's "The Secret Seven" and "The Five Finder Outers" series, the McGurk mysteries by E. W. Hildick, Agatha Christie's books and also lots of poetry. Ferris Bueller. He had a profound effect on me, and helped me to hone my skiving skills at a crucial time in my life. What's the last book you recommended to a member of your family? "The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle," by Stuart Turton, a startlingly original debut crime novel. It's set in a country house, where the same murder keeps happening over and over again. The only way to break the cycle is to find the killer. What's the best book you ever received as a gift? What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? There are so many! I don't want to bad mouth any individual author or book, but one kind of book I often give up is the sort that starts with the heroine getting a phone call from someone in her past. She's immediately terrified and goes into panic/concealment mode, afraid that her Terrible Secret From the Past will be revealed. I've seen this device about a thousand times. I'd love it if, just for once, a heroine would react to a call from the Past Person by saying: "Helloooo! Hey, remember that murder we committed together? Wasn't it fun? Shall we get together and reminisce about it?" If you were to write something besides crime fiction, what would you write? Musicals. I know this because I'm already writing them. Last year, my first murder mystery musical was staged for the first time, and it's about to embark on a mini tour of the United Kingdom. I'm also working on a second musical a musical courtroom drama this time! I write the lyrics and the play, and the music is written by my friend Annette Armitage, who is a brilliant composer and all around musical genius. Whom would you choose to write your life story? No one, ideally. My novels and poetry and musicals are my life story just in a more mashed up form. If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know? I'd like to meet Herman Melville so that I could ask him "But why?" over and over again about "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (one of my all time favorite books). What book do you think everybody should read before they die? "So You've Been Publicly Shamed," by Jon Ronson. I spend a lot of time (some might even say too much time) on Twitter, and I'm regularly horrified by how cruel and judgmental people are; quick to condemn and abuse in the face of even minor and quite reasonable disagreement. I hate the eagerness of so many people to find bad guys and draw them to the world's attention for public vilification. Jon Ronson's book makes a brilliant case for never doing that. What do you plan to read next? "Social Creature," by Tara Isabella Burton, a psychological thriller about social media and toxic relationships, set in New York, and "Baby Teeth," by Zoje Stage, a debut suspense novel about a mother trying to find help for her daughter as their relationship becomes more dangerous. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
NEW HAVEN, Conn. Please don't call him a D.J. Really, I mean it, just don't. This is one guy you should never, ever tick off. But you have to say that Deon, the feral young man at the center of Branden Jacobs Jenkins's "Girls" at the University Theater here, sure knows how to play the right music. I'm talking about the kind of music that makes people not just want to, but have to dance. And get down. And go wild, wilder, wildest. And just possibly shed some blood. Deon is short for Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and revelry. And in this lush, bloated party of a production from Yale Repertory Theater, Deon (a feline Nicholas L. Ashe) shows up in fishnets and dreads in a middle American nature preserve to allow women throughout the centuries to get a bit of their own back while letting down their hair. Directed to overwhelm by the talented Lileana Blain Cruz ("Marys Seacole," "Red Speedo") with choreography by the hot dance master of the moment, Raja Feather Kelly "Girls" is a latter day variation on one of the strangest and most disturbing of all Greek tragedies, Euripides' "The Bacchae." Jacobs Jenkins's version turns the tale into a silly but serious revenge fantasy for all women who ever squirmed under the crushing weight of a patriarchy. And maybe I'm over projecting, but doesn't that make this seem, at this moment in time, like an Everywoman kind of play? Jacobs Jenkins, who has one of the most antic imaginations at work in the theater today, loves to riff on classics both venerable and hoary, to turn them inside out and see how they fit our own age. With "Appropriate," he threw the plot of every American dysfunctional (white) family drama into one big pot and let it boil over. His "Everybody" imagined the 15th century Everyman morality plays as a kind of cosmic, 21st century lottery not just for its characters but for the actors playing them. His masterpiece, however, remains "An Octoroon," which took a 19th century melodrama about an interracial love affair and transformed it into a searingly self conscious exploration of the perception and performance of race. Fortunately, "Girls" doesn't give you much time for academic reflection. At its best, it generates the heady disorientation of a big, boozy bash where you feel you've met everybody before (even if you haven't) and all the partygoers seem like a whole lot of fun (until, abruptly, they don't). Like the original "Bacchae," "Girls" uses the eternal plot spring of a stranger who comes to town to right some wrongs. In this case, Deon has returned to the claustrophobic American village where his mother was murdered by the jealous wife of a famous television personality. (That would be Deon's father, who in the original Greek myth is Zeus.) Deon explains his complicated back story directly to the audience, from the sylvan mountainside (a hypergreen festival of foliage in Adam Rigg's steeply raked set) where his mother's ashes circulate in highly visible gusts. There he plans to throw the, uh, mother of all parties for the girls of the area. (For the record, they aren't all strictly female, girlhood being something you choose and own.) And these girls, who have been dressed to kill in club crawling fantasy outfits by Montana Levi Blanco, need some release. They've been suffering too long under the yoke of a hunting driven social order in which they have no power. That especially includes the high strung Gaga (Jeanine Serralles, unraveling hilariously), who comes from a family of gun crazy sheriffs and happens to be the sister of Deon's dead mother. It is for Gaga's son, Theo (Will Seefried), that Deon has reserved his most torturous wrath. Jacobs Jenkins has fun having his characters keep going over the same, ever confusing plot points, in the tradition of choral tragedy. But the repetition becomes wearisome. The recycling feels freshest when the script lets the title characters explain individually why they need to party in the rural open air disco they call the club (pronounced "clurb"). The reasons are often familiar looking for love, for exercise, to induce labor, to escape the information overload of an existence ruled by technology. As a government employed computer coder and hacker, Ayesha Jordan has a virtuoso soliloquy about the ergonomics of her office chair. But it's not only topical grievances that are being aired. Some of these girls have stories about incestuous attachments and murderous parents and witchcraft in politics that bring to mind those doomed heroines of tragedy, Phaedra, Electra and Medea. Yep, they're still with us, and still miserable. Oh, and another glamorous dead girl makes a late evening appearance. That's Meme (pronounced Mimi, and played with relish by Amelia Workman), Deon's mom, who makes her entrance mouthing the opening of Adele's "Hello" (as in "Hello, from the other side"). By that time, "Girls" has gone way over the top and pretty much stays there, as a wild party should. (I haven't mentioned the herd of balloon cows, have I?) Yi Zhao's hallucinatory, audience drenching lighting creates the visual equivalent of the electronic dance music that numbs even as it energizes. (Palmer Hefferan is the sound designer.) Kelly's choreography is artfully and specifically frenetic throughout. It reaches a delirious high point when each of the performers does a solo turn, lip syncing to Adriano Celentano's masterwork of unintelligibility "Prisencoliensinainciusol." We've all lost the plot by then, which is just fine. In fact, when Euripides' original story reasserts itself for its horrific ending, it doesn't have much of an impact. As perhaps befits an era in which rational rules appear to have been suspended, catharsis comes not in a pity and terror conclusion but in the energy burning chaos that precedes it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, is not the only contestant on the new season of "Dancing With the Stars" with a special kind of celebrity wattage. Mary Wilson, a founding member of the Supremes, is also a competitor at age 75. Viewers should get ready for liberal lashings of old school dazzle and a sense of deja vu. There is barely a black female pop act Destiny's Child, Janet Jackson, Janelle Monae, Solange Knowles (let alone a white one) that hasn't taken a page from the Supremes look book. "Millennials love our style," Ms. Wilson said during a recent interview in London. For anyone wondering why this younger generation has joined older fans of the group's look, a new book, "Supreme Glamour," out just in time for the show, makes it all clear. The volume chronicles how the Supremes in their original incarnation (Diana Ross, Ms. Wilson and Florence Ballard) and in their later form as Diana Ross and the Supremes (or DRATS) became agents of cultural change in the 1960s, breaking the race ceiling by weaponizing fashion and defining the way many women black women, white women wanted to look. It has photographs of mannequins in 13 of their designs, plus dozens of concert snaps, promotional portraits and album and magazine covers. It is replete with seed pearls and mushroom pleats. Before the Supremes, as Howard Kramer, the former curatorial director of the Rock Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, notes in the book, no black act "had ever set out to utilize visual signifiers that made them palatable to a white audience." Ms. Wilson agreed. "Our glamour changed things," she said. She was wearing all black leggings and a stretch top with cold shoulder cutouts and one of her many wigs, a dead straight chestnut number with full bangs. "We were role models," she continued. "What we wore mattered." Her claim is that she and her partners knew exactly what they were doing from the beginning. Ms. Wilson said that when she, Ms. Ross and Ms. Ballard were signed to Motown Records in 1961, they already had style. "They had a lot to work with," she said. "As Maxine Powell, who ran the label's famous finishing school, used to say: 'You girls are diamonds in the rough. We are just here to polish you.'" When the Supremes broke in 1964, black singers like Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt performed in deliberately seductive evening dresses, but they were older, solo artists. Ms. Wilson and her colleagues were barely out of their teens and wielded the visual power of three, often in grown up second skin gowns freighted with beads and sequins. DRATS maximized the look with increasingly baroque confections, some with improbable wings and trompe l'oeil jewelry, like paste crystals sewn into the neckline. Anyone who saw them live will recall the frisson produced by such young women in such sophisticated designs. Then, just when you thought you had them figured out, they turned up on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1969 in fantastical, swishing ponchos and pants seemingly made of degrade tinsel. For Whoopi Goldberg, writing in the foreword of Ms. Wilson's book, the Supremes "were three of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. These were brown women as they had never, ever been seen before on national television." Ms. Goldberg said she was encouraged to think that "I too could be well spoken, tall, majestic, an emissary of black folks" who, like the Supremes, "came from the projects." Oprah Winfrey had similar memories, as recounted in "Diana Ross: A Biography" by J. Randy Taraborrelli. "You never saw anything like it in the 1960s three women of color who were totally empowered, creative, imaginative," she is quoted as saying. As a 10 year old black girl "to see the Supremes and know that it was possible to be like them, that black people could do THAT ..." Many of the dresses in the book are owned by Ms. Wilson, though others are held by the Motown Museum in Detroit. Ms. Wilson wants them back. She said she has "proof that the clothes were debited from the Supremes account at Motown," meaning that she and her cohorts paid for them. It is apparent in the book that 1967 was the turning point for the Supremes the year everything changed. The wigs became bigger (and more expensive), the false eyelashes longer, the chandelier earrings heavier. Ms. Ballard was replaced by Cindy Birdsong (cue "Dreamgirls"), and Ms. Ross now had top billing. Indeed, Ms. Wilson might have read Ms. Ross's ascension in the seams (or accessories): In the first Supremes publicity still, Ms. Ballard and Ms. Wilson wear two rows of Pop pearls, Ms. Ross three. The personnel shake up and change from the Supremes to Diana Ross and the Supremes triggered something of a steroidal makeover, with high end off the rack styles and gowns designed expressly for the women, though some of them were slow to retire their bullet bras. Ms. Wilson recalled that there came a point when what they wore was nearly as important as their music. Featured in "Supreme Glamour" are the salmon halter neck gowns Bob Mackie created for "On Broadway," the 1969 television special with the Temptations. Dyed to match turkey feathers circle the hems, and broken lines of silver sequins march up the front and back of the dresses in an inverted "V." Because they were bias cut, as Mr. Mackie explained in an interview, "they open like a Chinese puzzle and cup at the knee, holding you in." "Diana Ross and the Supremes are legendary, when you think of how they've been knocked off and imitated," he added. "They were the best pros I've ever seen because they did nothing but work and learn." Oscar de la Renta has an uncredited cameo as the creator of a paisley minidress shot with gold rivets. But many of the designers and labels in the book are obscure: LaVetta, Michael Travis, Gene Shelley. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
THE GODFATHER PART II (1974) 9:30 p.m. on IFC. There are two big reasons Francis Ford Coppola's revered mob sequel is worth revisiting this month: Roger J. Stone Jr. and Martin Scorsese. Scorsese's new mob movie, "The Irishman," pairs Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, who each had one of the biggest roles of their career in "The Godfather Part II." The films would make a natural (if very long and gruesome) pairing. The second "Godfather" movie also came up this month in the trial of Stone, where a text message Stone once sent asking an associate to "do a Frank Pentangeli" came into play. The message was a reference to a character who gives obtuse answers during a Senate hearing in "The Godfather Part II" and is a good example of the deep cultural impact that the series has had. For memorable lines about "an offer he can't refuse" and a muscleman sleeping with the fishes, see the original movie, THE GODFATHER, which will air at 5:30 p.m. on IFC. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The major networks are unveiling their latest wares to ad buyers in Manhattan this week at a series of events known as the Upfront presentations. It's a longtime tradition made more urgent, these days, by the exodus of advertisers over the last few years from television to Facebook and Google. Two New York Times reporters who cover the media John Koblin (television) and Sapna Maheshwari (advertising) assess what they saw during the ABC presentation at Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall on Tuesday. JOHN That was quite the "Roseanne" show, wasn't it? SAPNA She was clearly the star of the show. JOHN A year ago, Roseanne Barr and the cast of her eponymous sitcom were carted out before the Lincoln Center crowd, and the reaction was dead silence. This year, Ms. Barr opened the proceedings to huge cheers. The revival of her show has been a ratings blockbuster and although she rated nary a mention during a recent Disney earnings call, perhaps because of her inconvenient politics, the ABC TV executive Ben Sherwood played up her contribution to the network's recent turn in fortune before the audience of advertisers and members of the press. "If anyone came to play a drinking game for the number of times we mention Roseanne," he said from the stage, "you're welcome." SAPNA The network also managed to make time for "American Idol," which it stole away from Fox, "Good Morning America" and a few of its shows from Freeform Disney's dedicated cable network for millennials. JOHN Here is one statistic I had never heard at an upfront before: Freeform bragging that the premiere of "Siren" got one million "starts." I'm pretty sure that means a million people clicked on it and may or may not have finished it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
From the relative safety of their cars, moviegoers watched the "The Big Lebowski" at the Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive In in Austin, Texas. Jen Philhower, 48, a part time office manager in Austin, Texas, is one of the many Americans adjusting to almost every group activity being canceled, as people move indoors and into isolation to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus. "My youngest goes to wilderness school, and even that is closed," she said. "When even playing in the woods is closed, things start to feel a little strange." So Ms. Philhower was surprised ecstatic, even to see one group entertainment venue still open for business: the Blue Starlite, a local drive in movie theater currently allowing 35 to park at one time. Located on a hill with the Austin skyline in the background, the theater resembles a "cool junkyard," according to Josh Frank, the owner, who opened it a decade ago. Since the virus hit the United States, the theater has screened movies including "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "The Breakfast Club." Last Tuesday, theatergoers watched short films that were scheduled to premiere at the South by Southwest festival in Austin before it got canceled, and a feature from the festival is scheduled for later this month. When Ms. Philhower's children, who are 20, 16 and 12, were younger, the family would frequent the theater. The kids loved sitting on the roof of the car and chomping on candy under the stars. "We must have seen 'Goonies' three times one year," she said. But they hadn't thought to return until they found themselves going stir crazy at home under the new public health guidelines. "It makes perfect sense," Ms. Philhower said. "We can all sit in our cars, away from each other, and do something fun." But there are still 305 of them in the United States, according to the United Drive In Theatre Owners Association in Stephens City, Va. The U.D.T.O.A. says every state has a drive in movie theater except Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Louisiana and North Dakota. While most drive in theaters open for the summer, some of their owners decided to get an early start this year to provide families an escape insulated by their cars during the pandemic, as malls, concert halls and restaurants shut down. "Who would have thought that drive in movies would one day again become the most attractive option for going out?" Mr. Frank said. Other owners are proceeding with caution, watching a situation that changes every day. "I think we've got a lucky opportunity," said Stephen Sauerbeck, who owns Sauerbeck Family Drive In Theater in La Grange, Ky. "But I also wonder if it's a too good to be true kind of thing." Mr. Sauerbeck was correct. For the past week he has been in discussions with the governor of Kentucky and the commissioner of public health. While the option of showing movies seems to be ruled out, the state is currently allowing him to sell popcorn over the weekend and lend his venue to churches for services (patrons can sit in the car and listen to the service on their radios). Of course, none of that is set in stone, he said. "It seems to change every day." "It's a responsibility on our side to be as safe as possible," Mr. Sauerbeck said. "I don't want this to be, 'We found a loophole in the situation, and we are going to operate an underground business the government is trying to shut down.'" At the end of February Mr. Frank opened a second Blue Starlite, in Round Rock, a town 25 miles north of Austin. Every weekend there up until now have been three to five shows, all of which have sold out days in advance. "It's been really, really, really something," he said. "If I had opened a Round Rock location years ago, I would be maybe three decades closer to retirement." Mr. Sauerbeck opened his drive in theater in August 2018, after the last indoor theater, owned by Regal Cinemas, closed in La Grange. "2019 was such a strong summer," he said. "'Lion King,' 'Toy Story,' 'Spider Man' all performed well for us, and we grew our customers every month as long as the weather cooperated." The theater may look like an old dirt field, but every component of the theater is thought through. "We have no speakers or poles as some of the older ones do," he said. "We also have a gravel parking lot so we can operate if it's raining." Spencer Folmar, a filmmaker, believes so strongly that drive in theaters are not just the past but the future that he is building what he claims will be the world's largest one in Eustis, Fla., with 500 spots, about a 45 minute drive from Orlando. Meant to be an immersive visual experience, it will have a lighthouse in the middle from which you can see screens in every direction. Mr. Folmar's goal is to provide a scene so dazzling that there is no way it could be replicated from anyone's couch. "A cineplex can be a generic experience. You might as well stream at home," he said. "I want to create this world of cinema with a unique design." Bailey Denise Nichols, 20, works at a dog boarding facility in Houston. When her animal clients slowed as people stopped traveling, she wanted to do so something new and different with her free time. So she took her younger cousin to the Showboat Drive In Theater just outside of town. They cuddled in the back seat of her car with pillows and blankets, illuminated by string light they'd brought for fun, and ate McDonald's Chicken McNuggets they picked up on the way. "I was surprised to find out that you use a radio frequency to listen to the movie's audio, so that was an experience for sure," Ms. Nichols said. "I don't know how exactly I expected to be able to hear the movie. It's my fault for being Generation Z, I guess." People were even dancing by their cars at intermission, though there is a rule that they must stay in their car at all times except to use the restroom. "We made the choice to make the most of our time," Mr. Lundquist said. "I do feel that if people did try a drive in they would see the magic of the experience." Drive in theaters have taken extra precautions to ensure social distancing. At the Blue Starlite, you could flash your tickets on your phone from your window to gain admission. Many theaters have started having people order concessions by phone. Servers wearing latex gloves deliver them to the car so crowds don't congregate in concession stands. There are some drive in theaters that would love to open right now but are prevented by restrictions or their worries. After advertising on social media that it would open seven days a week while children are out of school, the Summer Quartet Drive In in Memphis was forced to close Wednesday because it is operated by Malco, and the company closed all its theaters. Brian Francis, who runs the 99W Drive In Theatre in Newberg, Ore., received 30 messages from customers in the past week asking him to open early. "Folks are thinking that the drive in is the original social distance way to see a movie, and this is some kind of golden opportunity for the vanishing drive ins to shine," he wrote in an email. But Mr. Francis is hesitant to do so until he is sure Oregon won't implement a lockdown. He is in touch with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Oregon Health Authority and his state representative, to see, "when, if, and how we can open for the 2020 season," he said. "I want to do my part to flatten the curve." And by Wednesday, March 25, the Blue Starlite too had gone dark. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
These are fearful days in America. Parents fear sending their children back to school during a deadly pandemic. Workers fear losing their jobs in a collapsing economy. Hundreds of thousands without paychecks or unemployment payments fear losing their homes. And millions of Black Americans fear that any confrontation with the police could have fatal consequences. At a time when so many Americans are already living in fear, the last thing we need is a president ready and willing to stoke those fears for his political advantage. Warning that America will collapse into anarchy if he isn't re elected, President Trump seeks to cast himself as a savior who can rescue us from pandemics, protesters and immigrants while warning that those who oppose him will destroy America as we know it. But the nation has faced great challenges many times before. We have survived economic panics, recessions and the Great Depression. We have endured through slavery and Jim Crow, lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan and race riots. Americans have proved to be a strong people, capable of great courage and sacrifice in the face of threats of all kind. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The Alliance of American Football will play a February to April schedule. A league founder, Charlie Ebersol, acknowledged "it would be an act of insanity to try to compete with the N.F.L." There are a multitude of ways to lose money in sports, and historically one of the most dependable ways is to start a professional football league. Charlie Ebersol knows this better than most. He had a front row seat when his father, Dick, the longtime NBC executive, was a partner with the XFL for its only season in 2001. Still, Charlie Ebersol, a co founder of yet another new league, the Alliance of American Football, is bullish on his chances to beat the market. And he argues that timing and technology are on his side this time. The A.A.F.'s 10 week season opens Saturday and ends before the N.F.L. draft. This is by design, Ebersol said. "It would be an act of insanity to try to compete with the N.F.L.," he conceded. Instead, Ebersol intends to fill a post Super Bowl vacuum and feed a viewing audience that he and his partners believe has an insatiable appetite for football. "Two hundred million watch college and pro football compared to the 130 million combined that watch the other major sports," Ebersol said. "We don't need to get all of those football fans to tune back in, but I like our chances of getting a significant chunk of them." None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. 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. To do so, the A.A.F. is working to make its games easy to find. In addition to a deal to place some of its games on the NFL Network, the A.A.F. has agreements with CBS Sports's networks, TNT and Turner's B/R Live streaming service. But the A.A.F. business plan goes beyond football and television; it is hoping to land in a right place right time moment in which sports betting is now legal and expanding in the United States. Eight states already offer gambling on sports contests, and by next year, sports betting could be legal in at least a dozen more. Anticipating and embracing interest from serious and casual gamblers, the A.A.F. has invested heavily in the technology and platforms that can provide data in a blink of an eye, all in the hope of transforming a minor league football broadcast into an interactive experience. Among the A.A.F.'s early investors were venture capital firms like Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, media companies like the Chernin Group and the gambling and entertainment powerhouse MGM Resorts International. MGM executives said they were most taken by the A.A.F.'s app, which can provide a host of data in milliseconds. The information arrives so fast, in fact, that the league and its partners said it could eventually allow in game betting on play outcomes like pass or run and a host of other propositions. "It's a technology play," Scott Butera, MGM's president for interactive gaming, said of the A.A.F. "These specialty leagues will be relevant to sports betting. We think what they are doing is portable to other sports in terms of streaming, watching and making it an entertaining customer experience." Ultimately, however, the A.A.F. will be judged by the quality of its football. To that end, a founder of the league, Bill Polian, a former general manager of the Buffalo Bills and a Pro Football Hall of Famer, has put together a league office of seasoned football people, including the former N.F.L. players Hines Ward and Troy Polamalu. The league owns all eight of the teams and has installed big name veteran coaches Steve Spurrier, Mike Singletary, Dennis Erickson, Mike Martz in cities like Orlando, Memphis, Salt Lake City and San Diego. The league will lean on some gimmicks: There will be no kickoffs (teams will start on their 25 yard line instead) and no point after kicks (only 2 point conversions allowed). And a so called sky judge will keep watch over the action, empowered to correct officiating errors immediately. But some other innovations no TV timeouts; completing games in two and a half hours; tickets priced no higher than 50; three year, 250,000 contracts to hundreds of players have raised questions about the league's long term economic viability. "There's always been a belief that there's room for spring football because of the game's popularity," said John Kosner, a longtime ESPN executive who now runs his own company, Kosner Media. The problem, he noted, is "no one has pulled this off before, so it's not trivial what they are trying to do." Kosner said the A.A.F.'s timing just as sports betting tries to move into the mainstream of American culture is fortuitous, since the amount of energy and venture capital investment available in sports right now is "unparalleled in my career." He also suggested that Ebersol's experience as a television and film producer would come in handy. "Charlie is smart, organized and patient, and best of all, he is a good storyteller," Kosner said. "He can make the fans care about the game." Seventy percent of the players signed so far have played in the N.F.L. in the past 18 months, a group that includes quarterback Aaron Murray (Atlanta Legends) and running back Trent Richardson (Birmingham Iron). All have been signed to a three year base deal that includes not only the 250,000 salary but also what the league calls engagement bonuses. Those are based in part on their contributions to the community. And because the season is so short, all will be free to go to camp and sign with N.F.L. teams. "We are not trying to be sexy," Ebersol said. "We just need to block and tackle on the field as well as off it." For now, he is preaching patience. "This is going to take five to seven years, and there's going to be empty seats at first," Ebersol said. "I caution everyone that this is not going to be an overnight success. But we will succeed." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. This week, a protest song from Willie Nelson, a few unwise words from Chris Brown and a St. Patrick's Day surprise from the Gloaming. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. For about 40 seconds at the beginning of "Can't Deny Me," the first original new Pearl Jam song in five years, the band is downright itchy Eddie Vedder trades the messianic for the agitated, the guitars are a little arrogantly lazy, the drumming is filthy. It's bracing, a nervy and grounded protest from a band that ordinarily prefers to soar. (Pearl Jam dedicated its live performance debut of this song to the students affected by the Parkland, Fla. school shooting.) But then something like a melody arrives, and the song begins to resolve itself into something clean, plaintive, not nervous at all. A shame. JON CARAMANICA Willie Nelson's resilience is one of this country's most powerful natural resources. At 84, he is as puckish as ever a flirt and a scoundrel. The charming, vital "Me and You," a new track from Mr. Nelson's forthcoming album "Last Man Standing," is a protest song masquerading as a serenade. "We are definitely outnumbered/There's more of them than us," he sings. But never fear reassurance is just around the corner: "The world has gone out of its mind except for me and you." J.C. "Ventriloquism," Meshell Ndegeocello's new LP, is a woozy tour through the R B of the 1980s and '90s. It's also a showcase of the manifold territory that is her style: There's acoustic balladry, sighing neo soul, and dance grooves that start in the hips and swirl into the head like an intoxicant. Ms. Ndegeocello practices a coy and unperformative form of seduction her impenetrability is her sensuality. So it's no surprise that she takes well to "Private Dancer," Tina Turner's coldly steaming ballad about sex work and isolation. Moving through the melody like a lone figure through a fog, Ms. Ndegeocello lends a reticent dignity to the song's lament. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Clever enough to be funny and provocative but not smart enough to anticipate the think pieces it'll engender (if people bother to pay attention), the new single from Lil Dicky and Chris Brown delivers a progressive premise in reductive garb. In the song and video, the two performers trade bodies. Mr. Brown sings the first half as Lil Dicky, puerile as they come, and Lil Dicky raps the second half as Mr. Brown, alluding to his criminal history and alleged gang ties. But it's the first half, with Mr. Brown enthusiastically singing wish fulfillment for Lil Dicky, that's most vexing, especially when he thrills at his ability to safely use the one word a white person should not: "Wonder if I can say the N word/Wait, can I really say the N word?" And then he does. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And then, once more. J.C. The improvising saxophonist and avant garde maestro John Zorn is about to release "The Book Beriah," the third and final installment of "Masada," his 613 piece epic based on the Torah's commandments. This book stretches across 92 tunes and 11 CDs, each disc featuring a different ensemble. Mr. Zorn's way of presenting "Masada" a project he first introduced 25 years ago submits the material fully to the yens of its many performers. He is deliberately skipping a step, nudging back against the idea that a major work establishes its identity through some standard setting recording. (These "Beriah" pieces have been in circulation onstage since 2014.) On Disc 3, the Spike Orchestra fuses klezmer with surf rock in an oddly resonant admixture, run through the apparatus of a jazz big band. On Disc 7, the Gnostic Trio (harp, guitar, vibraphone) elevates and aerates Mr. Zorn's cyclical compositions. And in the beginning, on Disc 1, the Argentine vocalist Sofia Rei sings in a declaratory gale over the eight string SazBass of J.C. Maillard. G.R. Kurt Elling has covered Paul Simon's "American Tune" before, as a piano vocal duet on "1619 Broadway: The Brill Building Project," but on his forthcoming album, "The Questions," he sinks into the song more completely. With a full band this time, he sings in a warm ember baritone over wafted horn harmonies, seeking to reconcile Mr. Simon's devotional patriotism with a contemporary drive toward action. In this new music video, clips of recent protests mingle with black and white factory footage. It's broad strokes idealism, soft at the center and deliberately unspecific, but what saves it is Mr. Elling's voice: bright, devout and earnest. G.R. St. Patrick's Day is not popularly associated with introspection, but try it with a song from the new live album by the Gloaming, a group steeped in Irish tradition that carries the music into pensive, even mystical realms, particularly when Thomas Bartlett's piano transmutes the harmonies. "The Sailor's Bonnet," a reel that might have just been a foot stomper, becomes an odyssey of storm, struggle and completion. JON PARELES | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
How do you judge the success of a gala? On Wednesday, Stella Abrera and David Hallberg, principal dancers of American Ballet Theater, announced to the audience that this, the opening night of the company's two week season at the David H. Koch Theater, was the most successful of these grand occasions in the company's history. Yet they made the announcement before the curtain rose. This achievement, implicitly, was financial. Shouldn't a gala's success be judged by the quality of the dancing and choreography? What if billions are raised for stale routine? The good news is that Wednesday's program went on to defy cynicism. Ballet Theater has often seemed the world's most unimaginative company, interested chiefly in repackaging a safe notion of ballet's past. But the gala demonstrated how this troupe has been changing, admirably. It drew attention to two achievements: the 25th anniversary season of its artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, and Project Plie, a diversity initiative. The program demonstrated how Mr. McKenzie has been affecting Ballet Theater in many ways, all good. For one thing, casting showed ethnic diversity: Ms. Abrera, Misty Copeland and Calvin Royal III all took lead roles. For another, all three dances Wednesday were examples of 21st century choreography made for the company. Ballet Theater, which for decades produced so few creations of note, has in recent years been producing important new works. Wednesday brought two world premieres: one by Jessica Lang (women, so pre eminent on the ballet stage, still remain underrepresented among its choreographers); the other by Alexei Ratmansky, the company's game changing artist in residence. Another shift at Ballet Theater has been the absence of foreign guest stars. (The non Americans onstage Wednesday appear with the company all year round.) This policy may well prove controversial among Ballet Theater loyalists, many of whom care far more to see visiting luminaries than evidence of any ensemble style. Just now, doubts only subtle, nothing intense, but central to the company's identity attach chiefly to Mr. Ratmansky. The poetic visions of his dances lack the spectacular impact those old school loyalists crave. The evening's two premieres were Ms. Lang's "The Gift" and Mr. Ratmansky's "Songs of Bukovina"; the evening ended with Christopher Wheeldon's "Thirteen Diversions" (2011). "The Gift" and "Thirteen Diversions" both seem perfect fare for a Ballet Theater gala. They have just enough old style classicism to reassure the conservatives that the home fires still burn bright, just enough modernity to seem of the moment, and just enough brilliance to supply a rush of easy excitement. Ms. Lang's "The Gift" begins (like an advertisement) with taped testimonies from young artists about the rewards of dancing. But it goes on to use its music (excerpts from a Corelli concerto grosso) skilfully, for dozens of dancers (students, studio company, apprentices), with theatrical entrances, sequences, formations and exits. And the smooth ensemble casually includes same sex lifts as well as conventional lifts of women by men. True, "The Gift" felt all preamble and postlude: It built up to, and then away from, a main dance event that never occurred. More, please. "Thirteen Diversions," for four star male female couples and a corps of eight women and eight men, is as polished a work as the skilled Mr. Wheeldon has ever made. It includes lyricism and virtuosity, striking effects of through the body lines and symmetrical ensemble geometry. The music is Britten's "Diversions" for piano (left hand) and orchestra. Bob Crowley's costumes (white for the leads, black with lime trimming for the corps) are super elegant; Brad Fields's lighting (separate zones of light, darkness and purple color) makes the entire theatrical space dramatic. For many, Mr. Wheeldon's choreography exemplifies the kind of impressive classicism they want Ballet Theater to exemplify. But I don't care for what little I find underneath its bright surface. Men and women rush all too eagerly into various kinds of automatic rapture and men seem keener to manipulate women than to converse with them. "Songs of Bukovina," by contrast, wants to look more mild and derivative than it really is. It's an example of the piano ballet, a genre immortalized by Jerome Robbins in "Dances at a Gathering." A pianist beside the stage plays music suffused by (almost invariably) Eastern European folk material, while dancers, in individuated costumes with hints of (almost invariably) Eastern European folk color, suggest atmosphere, emotion, memory, community. This one even has, as in Robbins's "Gathering," five women and five men; only its structure is more orthodox (one lead couple, with four pairs as backing group). In this case, the music is new: excerpts from Leonid Desyatnikov's "Bukovinian Songs (24 Preludes for Piano)." Alexey Goribol played the score, which showed, as did the choreography, that Bukovina, an area now divided between Romania and Ukraine, plainly has colors, rhythms and steps all its own. There are unusual effects of suspense and contrast. Several dances end with people balanced on one leg, as if in midsentence. The ballerina, handsomely dressed by Moritz Junge in red, walks firmly on flat feet in one phrase, as if weighted by her sense of destiny and homeland. But when the pulse changes, she spins brilliantly in finger fouette turns (the famous ballet step, but here sustained by the male dancer's hand guiding the woman's hand raised above her head). This isn't Mr. Ratmansky's most individual ballet, but I want to get to know it better: the only dance of Wednesday's gala of which this can be said. The gala's greatest hit was a short film documentary about Project Plie, which since 2013 has been bringing racially and ethnically diverse children to ballet. Touchingly, attractively, the film showed children discovering both ballet and, by way of dance, themselves. Ms. Copeland never more charming introduced the man who has done most for the project, Valentino D. Carlotti. Another documentary, paying tribute to Mr. McKenzie, was also effective, showing us the artistic qualities he brings to ballet rehearsal while successfully portraying him as an amiably safe pair of hands who wants (and achieves) nothing but to keep Ballet Theater going in the same old way, keeping artistic standards high. The gala and the coming season, however, show that he and Mr. Ratmansky have been revising the company. I applaud, and hope further change and further debate lie ahead. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
When the coronavirus shutdown began in March, Vanessa Antonelli and Jordan Epstein of Manalapan, N. J., rented a house in Orlando for a 10 day break with their 5 year old daughter and 9 year old son. "We quarantined and ended up staying three months," said Ms. Antonelli, 38, an interior designer. "The pandemic made us re evaluate the way we were living. It gave us the time to reflect." In June, despite being reluctant to move away from their close knit New Jersey family, they bought a home in Boca Raton, in a new development that is planned like a country club without the golf. According to a Douglas Elliman August report, new contracts for single family homes and condominiums continued to rise in five south and central west coast Florida counties after having doubled in July. In Palm Beach County, new single family and condo contracts remained significantly above levels from a year ago, with a 268 percent increase in single family contracts over 1 million. In Miami Dade, Pinellas, and Hillsborough counties, much of the annual gain was at higher price points. Brokers say that many of those moving to Florida are coming from northern cities. Sales at Boca Bridges, the development where Ms. Antonelli and Mr. Epstein bought a home, have been brisk. Since May 1, usually the off season for Florida real estate, 102 houses there have sold for an average 1.7 million, said Jill DiDonna, senior vice president of sales and marketing at GL homes, the developer. When the community is completed, it will have 504 homes. "We have seen unprecedented demand from all over the country, but certainly New York, New Jersey and Connecticut," Ms. DiDonna said, with buyers seeking home offices, larger kitchens for increased in home dining, home gyms and private pools. "The shifting product needs of the customer, along with the desire to escape urban areas, combined with the tax advantages, created the perfect storm." Ms. Antonelli said she considered the lack of state income taxes in Florida "a free gift with purchase." Even with an 800 homeowner's association fee to cover lawn and sprinkler service and the clubhouse, "life wasn't going to be any more expensive for us in Florida," she said. She and her husband bought a five bedroom, 5,900 square foot "Veneto" model on a "dream lot" with a lake view for 1.4 million, adding 20 percent for a pool and other upgrades. Ms. Antonelli and her family have temporarily moved back to New Jersey, but plan to move to Florida next June when school lets out, and will rent a home there until their new house is ready in the spring of 2022. "A lot of our final decisions will depend on how everything goes with this school year and Covid in New Jersey," Ms. Antonelli said. Long a destination of choice for northerners weary of taxes and cold weather, Florida's appeal rose when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 limited to 10,000 the amount of total state and local taxes that can be deducted on a federal income tax return. Despite a spike in coronavirus cases in Florida earlier this summer, the pandemic has increased the state's allure. Demand at the wealthier end of the market has swelled "across the major markets of South Florida Tampa and St. Pete are seeing the same amount of activity," said Jay Phillip Parker, chief executive of Douglas Elliman's Florida brokerage, with multimillion dollar sales snowballing in Palm Beach and Miami. Beyond Zoom calls and virtual tours, buyers fleeing urban centers have driven south or even chartered planes to view properties. Some who were wintering in Florida when the pandemic struck stayed. Many rented units "were sold to the tenants," Mr. Parker said, noting that some statistics may be skewed because the activity was at a normally quiet time. "The pandemic is one of the many elements that have contributed toward what we have always known to be a natural migration," Mr. Parker added. "We've been referred to as the 'sixth borough'." In Boca Raton, about 50 miles north of Miami, inventory is low and "demand is outrageous," said Jared Ringel, an agent at Compass Florida. "There are multiple bids on houses now." Neighboring Delray Beach, along with Parkland and Coral Springs, where homes in gated communities sell for 600,000 to 700,000, are also popular among out of state buyers seeking good schools and restaurants, said Chris Franciosa, another Compass agent. Among the roughly 950 people moving to Florida every day, 45 percent head to South Florida, said Craig Studnicky, chief executive of ISG World, publisher of the 2020 Miami Report. During the pandemic, buyers are "moving much more toward permanent living" than to vacation homes. Many buyers from the Northeast were looking in August because they were concerned about whether "Covid could come back during flu season. If they are going to quarantine, they want to be in nice weather." Single family homes are "the soup du jour," Mr. Studnicky said, accounting for 80 percent of residential transactions during the first six months of 2020. "It is easier to social distance in a house." But interest in condos, currently a buyer's market, is inching up with the population swell, with one in three sales occurring near the coast between Coconut Grove and Fort Lauderdale. Deena and Andrew Cromer moved to south Miami about a year ago. Though they loved living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, their 850 square foot, one bedroom co op was cramped. "Our apartment felt like it was shrinking," said Ms. Cromer, 34, with their daughter's crib in a bedroom alcove and a son on the way. "Having a two bedroom wasn't going to solve our problem," she said. "The taxes were eating up our paychecks." Last August, the Cromers sold their co op for 900,000 and headed south. In December, for 1.1 million, they bought a five bedroom, four bath Mediterranean on a quarter acre lot near Coral Gables. Mr. Cromer, a lawyer who grew up nearby, got a job at a local firm. Ms. Cromer switched gears from fashion to real estate. The coronavirus also significantly changed the life plans of Tufan Uzan. In March, when a co worker in Mr. Uzan's software engineering group contracted Covid 19, Mr. Uzan, 35, began working remotely from his home in Medford, N.Y. After his pay was subsequently cut, he sold his three bedroom house for 365,000. In July, based on a FaceTime tour with a leasing agent, Mr. Uzan rented an 800 square foot one bedroom for 3,050 a month at Society Las Olas, a new high rise with a huge amenity deck in Fort Lauderdale. This fall, he plans to look for a new job, and he also plans to buy a house in Boca Raton, Del Ray or Parkland by the time his 12 month lease expires. "Everything is more attractive here," Mr. Uzan said. "I was going to move here when I retired. Covid moved it up 20 years." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, our TV critic Margaret Lyons offers hyper specific viewing recommendations in our Watching newsletter. Read her latest picks below, and sign up for the Watching newsletter here. This weekend I have ... a half hour, and I am very chill Nina Moran, left, and Rachelle Vinberg in a scene from "Betty." 'Betty' When to watch: Friday at 11 p.m., on HBO. This low concept comedy is about a group of young skateboarders hanging out together in New York City, not exactly a sequel to the 2018 movie "Skate Kitchen" but a spiritual successor featuring much of the same cast. The show has a shaggy verite style that can veer toward diffuse, but in its best moments it captures the blissful chill of just hanging out, like a puff of smoke that at any moment can either float away or give you a contact high. ... an hour, and I could eat Vivian Howard in a scene from the "How Do You Cue?" episode of "Somewhere South." 'Somewhere South' When to watch: Friday at 9 p.m., on PBS. (Check local listings.) Vivian Howard turns her attention to barbecue this week on "Somewhere South," part travelogue and part ethnography. Learn about how colonialism shaped food culture, but also learn about how to make a really good bologna sandwich. If you like earnest food programming that's not just straight chef worship, or if you need to alleviate some cabin fever and appreciate the tiny treasures of humanity, watch this. ... a few hours, and I like afterlife shows Robbie Amell on "Upload." The dog is his character's therapist. "Upload" feels like a hybrid of "The Good Place," "Black Mirror" and "Idiocracy," a cheeky, cynical but still lyrical sci fi romantic dramedy. Robbie Amell stars as Nathan, a tech bro in 2033 whose consciousness is uploaded to a chichi but bizarre afterlife. Corporate greed is a defining pillar of modern life, and on "Upload" it's a defining pillar of death, too, where the indignities of being advertised to, of always feeling shaken down, of being little more than a revenue stream, can endure for eternity. But hey, free gum! If you like big, imaginative shows with bite, watch this. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"Synthesizing Gravity" is a delight, if a tart and idiosyncratic one. The book is divided into four sections, more or less keeping to a theme (essays on general subjects, essays and reviews of individual writers, etc.). There is no mystical bombast here whatsoever. Indeed, there is very nearly the opposite, delivered by a writer with a full command of the English sentence and an electric talent for metaphor. As in: "Almost any random poem by a great poet can become your private key to their Enigma machine; although the Enigma machine keeps spitting out different daily codes, you will sense the same deep gizmo behind it." Note the cheeky, unpretentious excellence of "gizmo." Or (in one of the few essays not having to do with poetry): "There is always a feral scent to Annie Dillard's writing, and always a little spatter of blood from birth, the kill, the dissection, the thorn of the rose." Note "spatter" rather than the clumsier "splatter," and the carefully delayed "thorn of the rose." Ryan's touchstone poets are those you'd expect from her own poems Frost, Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith. She's a keen reader of each of them, particularly Smith, whose deliciously loony, merrily hostile writing has bewildered many a Serious Reader of Poetry. Here is Ryan on her unique appeal: "Call her childlike, or childish; say that it is unattractive for a grown woman to steal the good stuff out of the tea sandwiches; but add that her method of getting along was sustainable, that her solitary stand, her combination of fierceness and indecision, her tweaking of demons' beaks, continued to nourish as well as any of the more familiar modes." This seems exactly right (and Smith would have loved "demons' beaks"). Nor is Ryan reluctant to call attention to the clay on the boots of her heroes. On the ostentatiously combative Frost: "The constant black hat can get to be a tiresome pose. It's as though the suspicious part of Frost saw every beautiful thing that he was capable of as a rock to throw." Ryan has all of a critic's skills, but this isn't a critic's book. That's not a put down but an observation. The prose of a true poet critic Randall Jarrell is the classic example engages with a wide variety of writers, styles, problems and pleasures; it provides a window on the art for new readers (perhaps not the widest window, but even so). "Synthesizing Gravity," however, is a poet's book about poetry, and a fairly circumscribed one at that. The same figures recur. The same lines recur. Frost's tiny poem "A Dust of Snow" is discussed not once but twice, yet you will search in vain for any substantial analysis of Auden or Plath, to say nothing of the poems of any living writer whatsoever. This can be frustrating, especially since Ryan is such a strong thinker and writer. Certainly you don't expect her to spend any time on, say, Charles Olson, whom she probably read in embarrassed silence, if she's read him at all. And while it would be interesting to see her thinking on Ashbery, you don't expect it. But there are long essays here on Frost and Marianne Moore, so it seems odd to see nothing on Elizabeth Bishop, who is the most prominent heir to these writers, and whose work is both a complement and a challenge to Ryan's approach. Yet if Ryan gives us a view through a keyhole, it's a view often made richer by its constraints. The essay that many readers will fix on here is "I Go to AWP," which caused a minor ruckus when Ryan first published it back in 2005 in Poetry magazine. A.W.P. is the Association of Writers Writing Programs conference, an annual event in which more than 10,000 creative writing industry folk gather in a vast hotel in some large American city and try to kindle the fire of art while drinking plonky wine in Grand Ballroom E. Ryan is dry and droll as you might expect ("I am given a black tote bag when I register. Very nice with the A.W.P. logo"), and yet the heart of the piece is a quietly severe self interrogation. Ryan has always felt herself to be different, to be striving for a kind of perfection. And yet here she is, surrounded by waves of thoroughly mediocre writers, many of whom probably think of themselves the same way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Archizoom's 1966 Superonda sofa, made of two versatile puzzle pieces, could be configured in many ways. This article is part of our latest special report on Design, which is about getting personal with customization. The tumultuous period remembered as the '60s (although it extended well into the 1970s) was half a century ago, as far removed from 2020 as World War I was from Woodstock. Nonetheless that era's cultural awakening an unwieldy hodgepodge of social, political and aesthetic insurgencies has begun to seem fresh again, relevant (as they used to say) and potentially of practical use for navigating the turmoil of our present moment. So it is entirely apropos that the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has mounted an exhibition called "Radical: Italian Design 1965 1985, the Dennis Freedman Collection." (The show runs until April 26 and will travel to Yale University's School of Architecture in 2021.) The movement, in which young graduates of architecture schools in Florence, Milan and Turin organized themselves into collectives with comic book names like Superstudio, Archizoom and UFO, offered a means for expressing boundless political outrage through aesthetic contrarianism. The passions that famously drove the Bauhaus, a love of mass production and functionalism, were anathema to this generation. Andrea Branzi, a founder of Archizoom, based in Florence, told the exhibition's curator, Cindi Strauss, in an interview for the catalog that his compatriots were "snobs and Stalinists" with a profound desire to undermine Modernist rationalism with a pop sensibility and replace the notion of "good design" with a messy irreverence. Franco Raggi, who had worked in Milan with Alessandro Mendini at Casabella, the leading publication of the Radical moment, recalled that the goal was to "destroy bourgeois culture and thought" and force a re examination of the "capitalistic nature of society." The Radicals worked in every possible medium to advance their ideas. They generated conceptual drawings of ethereal imaginary cities, staged happenings (like one in which Mr. Mendini set fire to his Monumentino da Casa, a chair atop a stepped pedestal) and tried, through an educational effort called Global Tools, to reinvent basic concepts like work and design. However, much of what remains of the Radicals' output is in the form of furniture and light fixtures, which would be bourgeois if it wasn't all so outre. The work of the Radicals is curiously confounding. While the movement rejected the industrial aesthetic associated with the Bauhaus and the very idea of mass production it embraced industrial materials, most notably foam rubber and plastic. And most of its work appears to be in calculated defiance not of capitalism, exactly, but of good taste. Take, for example, a 1964 sideboard called Cielo, Mare, Terra, a claw footed walnut cabinet topped with a metal spike and, instead of the customary glass doors, a pair of pink Fiat doors (equipped with mounds that resemble breasts). It seems to reside in no explicable aesthetic universe but makes a certain amount of sense if you are trying to shake up the world by throwing out the rules. In 1998, Mr. Freedman made his first purchase of Radical design, a big hunk of polyurethane foam shaped like the top of an Ionic column. The Capitello, by Studio 65, a group of art and architecture graduates of Turin's Polytechnic University (who also edited the magazine Working Class) was intended as a lounge chair. While the Capitello has a cartoonish appearance, Mr. Freedman says he believes its political and philosophical message is unmistakable: "Literally your ass is on one of the pillars of classical Greek architecture. It's an act of defiance." What philosophy can be expressed by squishy column fragments, or sideboards with car doors, or gargantuan blades of polyurethane grass meant to be used as a free form lounge chair? It is hard to see this as Stalinism or even something more avant garde, like Dadaism. Instead, it appears to represent a broad, indeterminate approach to making trouble, one object at a time. If there was consensus among the Radicals about the nature of their collective undertaking, it had something to do with mutability. The Radicals seemed to agree that we should all be able to alter our personal environments however we would like. There is a broad swath of the Radical thinking that was dedicated to the power of rearrangement. In the landmark 1972 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape," a precursor of sorts to the Houston show, the Radicals were largely represented as designers of conceptual environments. Ettore Sottsass, for example, the Milan based polymath who later became famous as the progenitor of Memphis design, contributed a residential interior consisting of a set of nearly identical multipurpose "containers" that satisfied all possible household needs and could be endlessly moved around. Such furnishings signaled "a liberated lifestyle, a freedom," suggested Andrew Blauvelt, the director of the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. More than a decade ago, he set out to mount a show for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where he was then a curator, on the Italian Radicals. That exhibition ballooned into a much broader 2015 survey called "Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia," in which he traced countercultural projects across borders. Mr. Blauvelt's own interest in the Radicals was driven by the connections he saw between that movement and today's socially minded designers. The way they worked, the fact that they were "very multidisciplinary and very nonhierarchical" with artists, architects and technicians commingling, is particularly inspiring for creative troublemakers today, he said. There's another aspect of the Radical approach that today's aesthetic insurgents might find rousing. While other 1960s rebels were going back to the land and immersing themselves in nature, the Italian Radicals took the fruits of capitalistic society, the synthetic materials that were everywhere, and repurposed them to furnish their own little cosmos, not a world that was more in harmony with nature, but one that felt more natural to them. A new generation of radical designers might easily do the same, appropriating today's technologies, like those intended to optimize, to make everything smoother and more predictable, and subverting them to craft an aesthetic that accentuates the bumps, surprises and outrages. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. LANZHOU SONG AND DANCE THEATER at the David H. Koch Theater (Jan. 9 11, 8 p.m.; through Jan. 12). The Chinese city of Dunhuang was once a stop on the famous Silk Road. One of its main attractions is the Mogao Caves, which contain ancient Buddhist art. "Tales of the Silk Road," an elaborate production choreographed in 2000 by Chen Weiya and Zhang Jigang, tells its mythical origin story: The artist Mogao falls in love with Yueya but is forbidden to marry her. They flee, only to get caught in a battle that ends tragically. This troupe, formed in 1973, colorfully illustrates the tale through both traditional and contemporary dance and music. 212 496 0600, davidhkochtheater.com GABRIELLE REVLOCK at the Flea (Jan. 8 11, 7 p.m.; through Jan. 12). The inspiration for Revlock's duet "Sex Tape" are conversations and interactions she has had with men. But in translating those experiences to performance, she has replaced the men with a woman so that an erotically charged relationship suddenly becomes a tender, intimate study in friendship. For this program, that work is joined by "Nuptial Blitz," which dissects the ritual of wedding photographs. Revlock invites several audience members to pose beside her as her betrothed, gently satirizing this ritual while also presenting a spectrum of romantic configurations. 212 226 0051, theflea.org AKI SASAMOTO at Danspace Project (Jan. 9 11 and 16 18, 8 p.m.). St. Mark's Church, the home of Danspace, has always been a special place part theater, part chapel. Sasamoto, a visual and performing artist with a dance background, takes inspiration from the space in "Phase Transition," an installation and performance. The title of the work comes from the term used to describe when a substance changes from one form to another (e.g., from solid to liquid). Sasamoto will create a custom air circulation system for the church that during her lecture performances she and others will manipulate, creating a shifting interior climate that speaks to the constantly moving essence of our lives. 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The steady growth of e commerce has been a source of jobs and benefits as employment in traditional stores declines. But at online retailers taken over by Walmart, workers are finding one benefit in retreat: their company sponsored health coverage. In little more than a year, Walmart has spent nearly 4 billion acquiring e commerce companies with thousands of workers. Last month, many learned that their potential out of pocket costs for medical expenses would increase in 2018 at a rate far exceeding the overall rise in health care costs reaching thousands of dollars in many cases. Walmart has periodically struggled against the perception that it skimps on health care benefits. Facing criticism from state legislators and worker advocates that too many of its employees relied on public programs like Medicaid a critique that a 2005 internal memo conceded had a kernel of truth the company began expanding access to coverage and making it more affordable about a decade ago. But with costs rising in recent years, Walmart has reversed course in some ways. In 2011, it raised some premiums by more than 40 percent. Three years ago, it ended coverage for employees working fewer than 30 hours per week on average. Other large retailers, such as Target and Home Depot, made similar changes. Health care benefits tend to be harder to come by in retail than in any other industry, with just over half of all retail employees eligible for company plans, versus more than 90 percent in manufacturing, according to a survey this year by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Retail workers also opt into their company plans at a far lower rate than any other industry's workers, possibly suggesting that the insurance is not very attractive or affordable even when companies do offer it. Walmart says the share of its employees eligible for company sponsored coverage, and of those choosing it, is slightly above the industry norm. But the health benefits it offers in its online operations appear to be inferior to those of many e commerce competitors. At Bonobos, an online men's wear retailer that Walmart agreed to buy in June for 310 million, workers currently pay nothing in premiums for medical coverage in exchange for a deductible that is, the level below which they are responsible for covering their own expenses of 2,000 for individuals and 4,000 for families. A similar policy under Walmart's plan will cost an individual about 750 more per year in premiums and a family nearly 4,000 more, according to documents on Walmart's employee benefits website. Both plans will also feature a deductible that is 50 percent higher than the current one. Some of the biggest changes appear to be occurring at another recent acquisition, ModCloth, an online retailer that made its name selling hip, vintage inspired apparel to millennial women. To keep biweekly premiums for ModCloth's roughly 300 workers relatively close to what they pay now, their deductibles will rise from nothing to several thousand dollars per year. "My concern is they bring their model with them regardless of what was going on before they got there," said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the left leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who served as chief economic adviser to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Blake Jackson, a Walmart spokesman, said: "We've put a lot of thought into creating a total package, including both compensation and benefits, that offers more than what we've had in the past." Mr. Jackson pointed out that as new employees of the retail giant, many of the workers had gained benefits like a 401(k) retirement plan with a company match and a stock purchase plan. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Mr. Jackson said that the company would make sure its benefits largely kept up with those of competitors, and that the benefits that Walmart offered hourly e commerce workers were essentially the same benefits it offered hourly workers in its traditional stores. In addition to its standard health insurance benefits, Walmart covers 100 percent of the cost of certain types of major surgery, like transplants, at a top facility. The group OUR Walmart, which prods the company to improve wages and benefits, alerted The New York Times to the changes in coverage. The group's current campaign seeks to make ModCloth's customers aware of Walmart's policies. Neither Walmart nor any of its recent e commerce acquisitions is unionized. The new Walmart options for hourly workers prominently feature what are known as consumer driven plans, in which workers cover all their medical expenses out of pocket, up to a relatively high deductible. A medical expense account to which the company contributes money helps defray these costs. One coverage option for a worker and a child, including dental and vision, has a biweekly premium of about 67 (assuming no use of tobacco products). Walmart would in turn contribute 600 to a health reimbursement account. Once that 600 is exhausted, however, the worker would have to shoulder the full amount of family medical expenses up to 5,500. At companies with 200 or more workers, only 10 percent of those enrolled in such plans face deductibles of 5,000 or higher for family coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2017 survey. Larry Levitt, a health insurance expert at the foundation, said that such high deductible plans had increasingly become the cost containment strategy of choice among many employers, but that the particulars of Walmart's plan made it especially ungenerous. At Walmart's archrival, Amazon, workers typically pay less for more coverage. A similar type of plan would cost an Amazon worker with a child about 60 in biweekly premiums, with Amazon contributing 1,000 into a reimbursement account, according to the company. (The plan includes dental and vision coverage.) After exhausting that account, the worker would pay all expenses out of pocket up to 3,000. If a ModCloth worker with a child wanted to lower the annual deductible to 3,500 the lowest the company offers for this type of plan and receive a 1,000 company contribution, the biweekly premium would be about 136, or just under 2,000 more per year than the Amazon plan. ModCloth workers were also given the option of sticking with a more conventional insurance plan, but those who do will face premiums that are roughly double their old premiums for family coverage, and their deductible will rise from nothing to 2,000. The average full time hourly wage at ModCloth is 13.64. (Walmart put the average wage for its full time store employees at 13.85 per hour.) But ModCloth employees say Susan Gregg Koger and Eric Koger, who started the company when they arrived in Pittsburgh to attend college in 2002 and later married, saw generous health insurance benefits as central to their feminist values. (Ms. Koger declined to comment.) "The health benefits were really, really good," said Alicia Faust Ogg, who worked in returns and customer service at ModCloth between 2012 and 2014. Ms. Ogg, who had a baby while at the company, said that she had paid nothing out of pocket for her prenatal visits and that her hospital bill for the delivery had been below 1,000. Under ModCloth's current insurance, workers pay biweekly premiums ranging from 6.65 for the employee alone to 144 to cover a spouse and children as well. They pay no deductible within the company's network and a modest co payment for most doctor visits. But in a tough retail environment, online operations were under pressure even before Walmart's buying spree. In 2014, ModCloth imposed the first of several rounds of layoffs and, according to several current and former employees, gradually made its perks less generous. That included cutbacks in health coverage, they said, but it remained comprehensive and affordable before the company was sold. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
NUREMBERG, Germany After the last of the regular artworks, furniture and stamps were sold on a recent Saturday, Kathrin Weidler read a short statement absolving Weidler's auction house of any moral responsibility for what came next. Ms. Weidler, who is a director of the family run business, then began the bidding for "Village on a Mountain Lake," a run of the mill watercolor, at 45,000 euros, or about 51,000. The picture seemed indistinguishable from thousands of watercolors sold at flea markets across Europe every week, except for the signature in the bottom right corner: "A. Hitler." In the last 10 years, the niche market for art by Hitler has grown, experts say, and this has led to an increase in the value of the paintings, drawings and watercolors supposedly created by the future dictator over a century ago. But many, if not most, of these works are likely not by Hitler. After years of letting such public auctions go unchecked, German prosecutors are starting to take notice. Days before the auction in February, the district attorney's office searched Weidler's and confiscated 63 paintings: 26 scheduled for the sale, and another 37 apparently destined for future auctions. Antje Gabriels Gorsolke, one of the prosecutors, said the art works were seized as part of an investigation into forgery and fraud. And weeks before that, police interrupted a sale at the Kloss auction house in Berlin, where three paintings, also supposedly by Hitler, were on the block. At Weidler's in February, no one raised a paddle. Perhaps it was the presence of reporters in the room, the painting's steep valuation, or the questions about authenticity that the raids had brought to the fore. The auctioneer demurely moved on to the next painting: "Mountain Landscape With Mountain Church and Haystacks," also signed "A. Hitler." Hitler did most of his painting before World War I, after he was rejected from art school and before he volunteered for the German Army. Once in power, he ordered the works to be collected, and he may have destroyed some of the more embarrassingly bad ones. Beyond the moral question of buying poor art just because it was painted by a genocidal dictator, there is the problem of verifying whether Hitler actually made the works. So many fakes have been created and certified as real that no one knows what the real Hitler paintings look like. And since they have no artistic value to speak of, there are few professional examiners willing to study them. "It's all part of a grubby gray zone," said Christian Fuhrmeister, an art historian at the Central Insitute for Art History, a state funded research body. "But I will say we get asked about it more frequently than in the past," he said in an interview. Mr. Fuhrmeister said that all he and his colleagues can do is compare works with the few known Hitler paintings in the state archive of Bavaria to rule out the obvious forgeries. The business of faking Hitler's paintings dates back nearly to the first time he picked up a brush, said Bart Droog, a Dutch journalist who specializes in Hitler forgeries. By the time Hitler came into power in 1933, many fakes existed already, and both demand and supply grew over the years until, in 2014, a view of city hall in Munich, said to be painted by the dictator, was sold for 161,000, at Weidler's auction house. Ms. Gabriels Gorsolke from the district attorney's office said that prosecutors would investigate previous owners and sellers to see if fraud was committed. If fake, the pieces would then be permanently confiscated, but for now they sit in the police evidence locker. With 63 works impounded and an estimated 100 already sold, Weidler's has handled an eyebrow raising number of them, especially given how few are likely to exist, said Sven Felix Kellerhoff, a historian and journalist for the newspaper Die Welt. And the other version illustrates how decades of imprecision and swindling have made it very difficult to sort out real Hitler paintings from knockoffs. Marc Oliver Boger, an expert in art forgery and collector of known fakes, said that version was made by Konrad Kujau, a convicted German forger who became famous in the 1980s after he admitted to falsifying diaries by Hitler that were published in the magazine Stern. But the Kujau watercolor fooled people long enough that it made it into a 1983 catalog of Hitler's works created by the American Billy F. Price. As well as faking the diaries, Mr. Kujau, who died in 2000, also faked art works in Hitler's name, many of which made their way into the Price catalog, according to Mr. Boger. To authenticate works in his catalog, Mr. Price had relied on the judgment of August Priesack, an art expert who was later discredited. Mr. Priesack had also authenticated the diaries (and "Village on a Mountain Lake," the painting that went unsold at the Weidler's auction, though that painting had not been confiscated by the authorities). Unreliable as it is, the Price book is still used by many as the definitive catalog of Hitler's art. Most buyers keep a low profile and many come from outside Germany, she added. Tom Schimmeck, the radio program's producer, said that interest in Hitler's art likely has nothing to do with a societal shift to the right, or a rethinking of Hitler's crimes. "My impression is it is people who have too much money and want something crazy from Europe," he said in an interview. Unlike the buyers, who crave privacy, Weidler's and other auction houses need to advertise their wares in advance to attract bidders. This can lead to a bizarre relationship with the press, which can be a way to get the word out, but also brings unwelcome questions. Both Nuremberg and Berlin police were alerted by Mr. Droog and his partner Jaap van den Born, both investigative journalists who have made it their mission to stop auctions of Hitler fakes by scouring auction catalogs and alerting local authorities ahead of the sales. They provide police with detailed reports on the paintings, sometimes giving German authorities the crucial information to begin their own investigations. The comment in the report by Mr. Droog and Mr. van den Born on "Village on a Mountain Lake" reads: "Yet again a stupid forgery; Hitler didn't paint lake or mountainscapes." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Protesters who stormed a vote counting site in Detroit on Wednesday, banging on windows and shouting "Stop the count!" appear to have had one thing in common: They organized themselves online. A New York Times analysis found 32 public and private Facebook groups with a total of 301,000 followers organized an "urgent call to action in Detroit," asking Republican poll challengers to watch the vote counting at the downtown site, TCF Center. The call was also shared on less popular social networks like Parler and the pro Trump website TheDonald.win. The earliest call for additional Republican poll challengers was posted to Facebook at 7:27 a.m., according to The Times's analysis. "Come to TCF Center," read the post in a group called Michigan for Donald Trump. "Help needed to protect our lead. Tell others." By around 3 p.m., there were dozens of calls posted on Facebook, and people responded by showing up; over 100 people were at the vote counting site by then. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
CHICAGO After nearly a decade of silence, the musician Sparkle and her family were finally talking again. Everyone welcomed her at her parents' place after church on Sundays, at birthday parties for nieces and nephews. Then in October, that door snapped shut again: A preview for the documentary "Surviving R. Kelly" had dropped, and Sparkle was in it, telling the world what she thought Robert Kelly had done to her niece. One of her sisters texted her to say that she heard Sparkle was on "some TV show about rob" talking about the family. She told Sparkle to leave them alone. Sparkle, a singer, was once R. Kelly's protegee. He produced her first album in the late 1990s, which went gold. But in 2002, he was arrested on child pornography charges stemming from a video that shows a man having sex with and urinating on a teenager. Sparkle testified at trial in 2008 that the man in the video was Mr. Kelly, and that the girl was her 14 year old niece. Her testimony sliced her family into factions, relegating her to years of exile, and it may have stifled her career. Today, Sparkle is arguably more well known for her public stand against him than she is for her music. And as Mr. Kelly faces new charges of sexual abuse, prosecutors have told her she may be called to testify again. "I hope they don't need me," she said. "But I have to. I have to see this thing through." Read more about the latest charges against R. Kelly. Sparkle, whose real name is Stephanie Edwards, was born on the West Side of Chicago, the youngest of six children. (She described her current age as "somewhere between birth and death.") The family moved to the suburb of Oak Park when Sparkle was 3, and she started singing in church a year later. Encouraged by her father, she and her siblings formed a gospel group growing up. "I don't know if I ever dreamed of being a professional singer, because I wanted to be a model," she said with a laugh. "But dear old dad, he was like, 'No, you get up there and you sing, and you'd better be the loudest!'" She met Mr. Kelly in 1989 and a few years later, she said, she was singing backup on an album he was producing: "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number," by the singer Aaliyah. The album title would soon take on a sinister cast: The year the record was released, a 27 year old Mr. Kelly reportedly married Aaliyah, who was 15. The marriage was annulled. (Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001.) Mr. Kelly's lawyer declined to comment for this article. Sparkle said that at the time, she thought talk of the marriage was a publicity stunt. How could anything like that happen when Aaliyah's parents and her uncle, who was Mr. Kelly's manager, were always around? Still, she continued working with him. Then, in 1996, Mr. Kelly changed Sparkle's life. She was at a big retirement party for her father when Mr. Kelly called and asked her to come down to his studio in the River West neighborhood of Chicago. Down she went in a long black gown and heels, and when she arrived, she started recording what would become her own debut album, "Sparkle." She spent time recording at night and went to work during the day at SportsChannel Chicago as an assistant engineer. Sparkle's album, released in 1998, was a success, selling half a million copies. But even before its release, her professional relationship with Mr. Kelly was so strained that he had threatened not to release it at all, she said. By the time they started working on her second album, it was untenable. "He was trying to now be really controlling, and I saw it now," she said. "You're not going to do that with me." Sparkle said that she asked to be released from her contract, and he let her go. She put out her second album, "Told You So," with Motown records in 2000, but it was far less successful. Sparkle is still a singer, though she has never repeated the success she saw 20 years ago. She sang backup for Toni Braxton for a few years. She released a single in 2012 called "So Bad." She said that private performances have helped her make a living. And just before the documentary about Mr. Kelly came out in January, she released a new song called "We Are Ready," which explores the themes of the MeToo movement. It is impossible to know what effect her schism with Mr. Kelly had on her career, but in a business grounded in relationships, alienating such a powerful figure certainly could have created roadblocks. Today, she lives in downtown Chicago with Bruce Wayne, her manager and boyfriend of nearly 20 years. "I'm fighting to have a street named after her," Mr. Wayne said. "She held a mirror up to society. This is bigger than R. Kelly, and she's been so far ahead of everybody." With long blond hair and an elegant bearing, Sparkle carries herself like a woman who knows how to have her picture taken, and how to stand her ground. But there is a warmth behind the glamorous presentation. Good friends call her Steph, but Mr. Wayne has a lot of people calling her Miss Jenkins. That nickname comes from a skit on the TV show "In Living Color," in which a gossipy character named Benita Butrell would dish into the camera and then proclaim, "but I ain't one to gossip, so you ain't hear that from me." The character was known for freaking out and saying "Don't nobody better say nothing bad about Miss Jenkins!" before trashing Miss Jenkins. Sparkle, he said, hates keeping secrets, even of the most uncomfortable truths. She believes that if someone has done wrong, she is obligated to tell. "Growing up, she was the one who always blew the whistle and told," Mr. Wayne said. "This is, I guess, her call of duty." Before she and Mr. Kelly went their separate ways, Sparkle made a decision that would fundamentally alter her family: She introduced Mr. Kelly to her brother in law, a guitar player, and to her niece. The girl was an aspiring rapper, charismatic and talented, and Sparkle said she hoped Mr. Kelly could do for her niece what he was doing for her. (Her niece is now in her mid 30s, but Sparkle still refuses to say her name during interviews, which she describes as an effort to protect her.) In 2001, a lawyer who said he wanted to represent her sister contacted Sparkle to say he had a tape of her niece having sex with Mr. Kelly. Sparkle decided to testify against Mr. Kelly, along with about a dozen other witnesses who identified Mr. Kelly and her niece in court. But her sister insisted that the girl in the video was not her child. The family split. Only one of Sparkle's brothers Bennie Edwards, who used to braid her hair and make her breakfast every morning as a child stood by her. "Sparkle, she loves her family, they need to know that," Mr. Edwards said. "I love them as well, but the truth the truth is the truth at the end of the day, and that's all it is." Mr. Kelly was acquitted on all charges in 2008. Sparkle's niece never testified, and his lawyers argued successfully that the identities of the people in the video could not be known for certain. Now, prosecutors in Chicago say that another tape has surfaced showing Mr. Kelly having sex with the same girl. Mr. Kelly was arrested in February on charges involving four alleged victims, and while any trial could still be years away, the tape is a crucial piece of evidence in what may be the strongest case against him. Sparkle said she has seen stills of the video and that it's clearly a different recording of the same people. Michael Avenatti, the celebrity lawyer who gave the tape to prosecutors, said the people on the tape talk about the girl's 14 year old body parts. But Mr. Avenatti is now facing legal troubles of his own, with federal prosecutors accusing him of stealing money from clients and lying about his income to the I.R.S. and in bankruptcy court. Mr. Avenatti has denied all the allegations against him and suggested that the case was politically motivated. (He has represented Stormy Daniels in lawsuits against President Trump.) "Any charges I am facing have nothing to do with the R. Kelly case and will have zero impact," Mr. Avenatti said. "Greenberg is desperate," he added, referring to Mr. Kelly's lawyer, Steven Greenberg. Mr. Greenberg has asked the judge for all electronic communications between Mr. Avenatti and the prosecutors. Mr. Greenberg suggested in a filing that the Cook County State's Attorney Kimberly M. Foxx may have been "manipulated" by Mr. Avenatti. Friction between members of the Edwards family began to fade once Mr. Kelly's trial was over, and in 2011, while planning their parents' 50th wedding anniversary, the siblings started speaking again. But inside their new calm, nothing related to Mr. Kelly was discussed, even as her brother in law continued to play guitar with him professionally. When Sparkle tried to speak with her sister about what happened, her sister would only say, "God forgives." In recent years, as Sparkle watched the MeToo movement shake the country, she did not expect it to come for Mr. Kelly. "I didn't think it was for us," she said, "for black people." Then the filmmaker Dream Hampton reached out to Sparkle to ask if she would participate in a documentary about Mr. Kelly that would chronicle his alleged history of abusing girls and women. Sparkle said she agreed to participate when it was made clear to her that her story would be in the documentary, whether she was or not. She said she didn't want someone else to get it wrong. But Sparkle did not tell the family the documentary was coming. Her mother had dementia and her health was failing. "I didn't want this to be my mom's end," she said. In the fall, just days after her mother died, the trailer for "Surviving R. Kelly" was released, and Sparkle was in it. Her sister texted her and told her to leave them alone. Bennie Edwards and their brother, Lee, are the only two of her five siblings who are speaking with her now. She has been criticized for trying to capitalize on the film with her new single, "We Are Ready," she said, but she is a singer, and this is how she processes her life. She plans to release an EP, "Obstacle Course," her first in nearly 20 years, this summer. "You know, I was thinking back to a time, before was a MeToo," she says on her new single, "it was just me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Those who think the gallery scene is all about Manhattan would do well to take the L train to spots like Williamsburg. These noteworthy gallery shows outside Manhattan are heavily tilted toward the L train axis that runs through Brooklyn and Queens, from Williamsburg to Ridgewood, and toward the young and artist run spaces that are those boroughs' specialties. (For two galleries on the southern edge of Williamsburg, Soloway and Black Ball Projects, take the J train.) Luhring Augustine is not on this list because its show "Sculpture," running through May 5, was recently reviewed, but it is definitely worth a visit. Altogether, this guide will give you an extensive foundation from which to experience the city's most dynamic art scene. BLACK BALL PROJECTS through June 3; 374 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, blackballprojects.com. The artist Anthony Graves, an American, and Carla Herrera Prats, who is from Mexico, have been working together under the name Camel Collective since 2010. The centerpiece of their New York solo debut at this gallery is a magical mock documentary video starring Corey Tazmania and with lighting design by Tony Shayne that uses the theater in general and lighting and makeup effects in particular to talk, with beguiling ambiguity, about artifice, reality and "invisible labor." SOLOWAY through April 29; 348 South Fourth Street, Williamsburg, soloway.info. The latest entry in this South Williamsburg gallery's always interesting lineup is "Several Years Have Passed," which its curator, Jenny Nichols, named after a title card in Marcel Carne's World War II era film "Children of Paradise." Its magnetic poles are two enormous unstretched paintings by Annette Wehrhahn, which combine cartoonish figurative outlines with storms of color to convey both grand ambition and intense ambivalence, and two coolly incisive videos by Abbey Williams. In "La Mulatta," Ms. Williams layers an image of her own face, with slowly blinking eyes, over a photograph of a 19th century terra cotta bust of a bound slave. TIGER STRIKES ASTEROID, MICROSCOPE AND TRANSMITTER all at 1329 Willoughby Avenue, Bushwick; tigerstrikesasteroid.com, microscopegallery.com, transmitter.nyc. These three artist run spaces are entered through a loading dock. Transmitter is currently hosting "Living Still," a thought provoking group show of retrofuturist still lifes (through May 6), while Microscope will open an exhibition of Kevin Reuning's etched plexiglass deconstructions of computer animated faces on Friday. (The show will close on June 3.) And for the last few weeks, the Maine based painter Meghan Brady has been using the New York branch of the collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid as a studio, making thrilling, deceptively sophisticated wall size acrylic collages for a show that opens on Friday and runs through May 6. KOENIG CLINTON through June 2; 1329 Willoughby Avenue, Bushwick, koenigandclinton.com. This gallery, next door to the three just mentioned, offers Tyler Coburn's "Remote Viewer," which includes an extensive text piece and a digital animation of doodles taken from "Mental Radio," Upton Sinclair's 1930 study of telepathy. But it didn't really need more than the 12 foot long tablet, produced in collaboration with the design firm Bureau V, that lies on the floor like an Arthur Clarke monolith that's been reimagined in sinister Macintosh white. With burnished corners and a semi gloss finish, it's the perfect surface on which to project your fears and fantasies even before you notice the corner, which is distorted into a ridge of horrifying ripples. INTERSTATE PROJECTS through May 6; 66 Knickerbocker Avenue, Bushwick, interstateprojects.org. At this gallery, the only spot of color in Cindy Ji Hye Kim's punchy mixed media show "Celibate Machine" aside from a glowing red "Exit" sign in the bunkerlike basement space is a small pink silicone brick cast inside a can of Spam. Otherwise, everything, from a wall size graphite reproduction of Pieter Bruegel's "The Parable of the Blind," minus the people, to a short video loop of a kissing couple who have been rotoscoped into pulsing clouds, is in black and white. But by complicating an otherwise chilly investigation of cultural identity and depersonalized violence, that bit of pink makes all the difference. SIGNAL through May 6; 260 Johnson Avenue, Bushwick, ssiiggnnaall.com. Performing together under the name FlucT, Sigrid Lauren and Monica Mirabile choreograph movements and expressions that reside in the intense, confusing and all too relevant space where sex and violence overlap. In the best of the mind bending videos in this show it plays on a screen mounted inside a doghouse they also recite fragments of text that ricochet between existential inquiry and self help style command. (My favorite example was "Drop your shoulder and sacrifice your behavior out the mousehole!") If you survive the passage through these disorienting amplifications of the American psyche, you'll find in the gallery's back room a serene concurrent show of extraordinary red ballpoint pen drawings by Fin Simonetti. "Hearth (7)," in particular, which depicts a sheet of loose leaf paper "watermarked" with a highly detailed cow, is a technical tour de force. MOTEL through May 6; 1078 DeKalb Avenue, Bedford Stuyvesant, bkmotel.org. This space is featuring Harry Gould Harvey IV's intricate and peculiar driftwood dioramas tramp art a la Brancusi. Using foraged clay, medium density fiberboard and driftwood collected on the islands of Narragansett Bay, off Rhode Island, Mr. Harvey builds square towers, miniature biers and complicated arrangements of less identifiable shapes that are studded with thimble size clay heads. One square tower, its base surrounded by red and green moss, is topped with a cross, a head and a tiny cloud of words, lettered in charcoal, about our present political confusion. MARVIN GARDENS through April 29; 1532 Decatur Street, Ridgewood, marvin gardens.org. The Angeleno painter Sebastian Gladstone turned to stripped down, nearly abstract landscapes after the presidential election, hoping to find safety, and even a kind of moral rejuvenation, in a stark simplification of terms. When you're looking at two small yellow canvases, divided into quarters like window panes, you can almost believe it. But two irresistibly creepy close up views of picket fences are proof that you can't really escape your context: One set of wobbly stakes is battleship gray, the other streaky off white, and each looks like an infinite row of demonic fingers. MRS. through June 2; 60 40 56th Drive, Maspeth, mrsgallery.com. Less than two years old and tucked away in a residential corner of Maspeth, just over the Ridgewood line and nearly impossible to get to by subway, this storefront gallery is already mounting ambitious shows and getting major attention. The theme for its group exhibition "Dutch Masters" is delivered, appropriately enough, with an oversize histrionic wink: Caroline Wells Chandler's "Green Goddess," a four foot high, wall mounted fake marijuana leaf. Made of green plastic foam, like a cheap Christmas wreath, and infested with cast resin M Ms, little mushrooms and happy face buttons, this work is a sweetly self conscious declaration that being silly and being serious are not necessarily opposed. Five colorful crocheted heads think of a painting that's also a potholder by the same artist amplify this impression. Be sure to note Courtney Childress's laid back houseplant installation on your way in, and don't miss Chris Martin's van Gogh 2.0 charcoal drawing of a skeleton smoking a giant spliff before you leave. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
"Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man)," from 1973, in the new exhibition "Charles White: A Retrospective" at the Museum of Modern Art. Holland Cotter calls it an "astonishing" work whose "full meaning is elusive." What a beautiful artist Charles White was. Hand of an angel, eye of a sage. Although White, who died in 1979, is often mentioned today as a teacher and mentor of luminaries like David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall, his is no case of reflected glory. In "Charles White: A Retrospective" at the Museum of Modern Art, from beginning to end, he shines. The survey of over 100 paintings, drawings and prints runs on two parallel tracks. It gives the first full scale look at White's career in 30 some years, concluding with his most complex and adventurous work. And, through his politically vigilant art, it traces the broad pattern of African American life through three quarters of the 20th century. White was born in 1918 on Chicago's South Side to a black domestic worker who had migrated from Mississippi, and a Pullman car porter of Native American descent. His mother raised him alone and, in a time before day care, regularly deposited him at the main branch of the Chicago Public Library when she was on a job. There, in the protective care of staff members, he pored over illustrated books and began to draw. And he kept drawing, in elementary school and beyond. At 13, he won a scholarship for Saturday classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he wandered the galleries, soaking in a history of Western figurative painting and noticing that few of the figures looked like him. At 16, he started exhibiting with the Art Crafts Guild , a group that contributed to what would be called the Black Chicago Renaissance. With them he learned what it meant to be a contributing member of a creative community, a role he cherished. He came to the work as a critical looker and thinker. The dominant public images of black people in American culture were, he said, "a plague of distortions," comedic or abject. He rejected them. His 1939 oil on canvas W.P.A. mural called "Five Great American Negroes" is installed just outside the exhibition galleries. And its portraits of Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver and Marian Anderson begin the show on a heroizing note, one that sounds throughout, though not always in the key of uplift. Anger was a motivating force in White's art. In 1940 he said: "Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent." He would find plenty to fight in the history he was living. His 1940 study for a never executed mural called "Struggle for Liberation (Chaotic Stage of the Negro, Past and Present)" includes an image of a lynching. A 1946 drawing, "The Return of the Soldier (Dixie Comes to New York)," illustrates the segregationist violence visited on black veterans of World War II. (White was one, discharged from the Army when he contracted what would become chronic tuberculosis.) His monumental 1964 ink and charcoal drawing "Birmingham Totem" is a response to the bombing, the previous year, of the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Ala., in which four young black girls were killed. Much of this nearly six foot tall piece is an image of ruin, a mountain of splintered boards and shattered glass. But atop the pile sits a young, nude black man, an architect of the future, who is already sorting through the debris and starting to rebuild. Agency, the power to generate action and self definition, was the crucial element White brought to the black figure. It's there in the pumped bodies of his moody postwar work. And it irradiates large scale drawings like "Preacher" (1952), for which Paul Robeson, a leftist ally and personal friend, was the model. A 1951 painting called "Our Land" gives a nod to Grant Wood's "American Gothic" owned by the Art Institute of Chicago and transforms it. White replaces Wood's pale, dour farm couple with the frame filling form of a single black woman, her skin a spectrum of harvest colors, gold and brown. His stay there strengthened his desire to make art that would be available to a wide, nonelite audience. Lithography, basically a form of reproducible drawing, became a primary medium. And back in the United States, his experience of the growing black civil rights movement and a brush with the House Un American Activities Committee reconfirmed the impulse to keep his work political. In 1956, by then married to Frances Barrett, a white social worker, he had a severe recurrence of tuberculosis and moved, on the advice of his doctors, from New York to Los Angeles. There his ideal of keeping the audience for his art broad took a new twist: He started designing graphics for films, and a new friend, Harry Belafonte, used his message driven images in a television special. Maybe more important, White started teaching, in local community art centers and, beginning in 1965, at what is now Otis College of Art and Design. His commitment to an activist art never wavered. In 1970 he was a founding member of the Committee of the Arts to Free Angela Davis, and a poster he designed and contributed on her behalf became one of his best known images, "Love Letter I." (It was the catalog cover for the 2011 exhibition "Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960 1980.") And if, with the advent of the Black Power movement, his work to some eyes looked tame, it did not look that way to observers like Mr. Hammons and Mr. Marshall, who found in him an expansive example of what "black artist" could mean. Teaching seems to have led White to rethink his own art, to experiment with it technically and complicate its content. In the last phase of his career, he devised an oil wash technique that merged painting and drawing in semiabstract layers of images, words and patterns. With it, he produced an extraordinary series of pictures called "Wanted Posters," which placed contemporary African American life in the framework of 19th century slave narratives. And he created an astonishing stand alone work, "Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man)." Inspired by a 1960s photograph of a city street preacher by the photojournalist Leonard Freed, White depicts a black man wearing heavy robes, aviator glasses and cruciform headdress. A placard with the single word "now" hangs from his neck. He holds his left hand out in a gesture that could be a benediction or a peace sign. Behind him, as if imprinted on a vertical banner, is a kind of X ray outline of the lower half of a human skeleton. High above, as a ghostly blur, floats the stenciled word "Chicago." Although you can interpret individual details of the image a reference to White's birth place, to mortality, to a black identity that embraces militancy, spirituality and righteousness its full meaning is elusive, and maybe that's the point. Mystery is the point. The show's organizers Esther Adler, an associate curator at MoMA, and Sarah Kelly Oehler, chair and curator of American art at the Art Institute of Chicago position the piece as an exhibition centerpiece, under spotlights. And it holds a similar place in my own pantheon of great American art images. Grace, passion, coolness, toughness, beauty like its creator, it has them all. Through Jan. 13 at the Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan; 212 708 9400, moma.org. The exhibition will run Feb. 17 June 9 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
FOR solid financial returns, gold seems nearly alone among investments that are legal and fathomable to those of us who are not bankers. Gold's performance over the last five years has been overwhelmingly positive, its price per ounce more than doubling since 2007. But the skyrocketing prices of certain Ferraris built from the 1950s through the 1970s have in some instances made gold's gaudy rate of appreciation look like a passbook savings account at the neighborhood bank branch. "People who have been in the collectible automobile market and originally bought for the love of object are now looking at it as a diversification tool and a strategic part of a well organized investment portfolio," Claiborne Booker, an independent financial consultant based in Virginia, said. Certainly, Ferraris are not the only vintage vehicles whose values have outstripped inflation and conventional investments, but they have been one of the most reliable market indicators among collectible automobiles. And their sales at auctions are closely followed, so there is a reliable track record on which projections can be based. That car was offered with Gooding's presale estimate of 1.75 million to 2 million; it sold for nearly 2.4 million, including buyer's premium. The same car sold nine years ago at a Barrett Jackson auction in Los Angeles for 432,000. That represents a 2 million return in less than 10 years, a period that some investors consider a lost decade. Perhaps those results could be attributed to good luck or great intuition. But the timing of the buyer in 2003 could scarcely have been better: shortly after the red Superamerica was purchased, prices for the model began to rise, indicated by sales of other Superamericas: a 560,000 sale of a similar car in late 2005, followed by a jaw dropping 1.6 million sale in Pebble Beach in 2008 and culminating with a 2 million sale at RM's Monterey auction last year. The year over year difference between this year's sale and the one last year is an impressive 400,000. Condition, ownership history and the circumstances of the sales are all influencing factors in the price, surely, but the trend is still unmistakable. Later, higher production Ferraris like the 365 GTB/4, commonly known as the Daytona, have also seen increases in price exceeding that of gold over the same period. The Daytona was one of the last models whose development was influenced directly by Enzo Ferrari. They're brutish, exceedingly handsome and quite fast even by today's standards; with a top speed of 172 m.p.h., the Daytona was the fastest production car available for much of its time on the market. RM Auctions of Chatham, Ontario, offered two Daytona coupes this year, a black 1973 model and a bright yellow 1972. The yellow car had a relatively active auction history over the last decade. The same car was offered at a Bonhams auction in Massachusetts in 2003 where it failed to sell on a high bid of 97,000. Six years later, Bonhams once again offered the car, this time at its auction in Carmel, Calif., where the seller again declined the high bid which, at 210,000, was more than double that of the last time out. This year, the presale estimate for the same car was 375,000 to 475,000. The third time across the block was clearly the charm, and patience paid off: the yellow Daytona sold for 396,000, while the more staid black car went for about 30,000 less. The impressive returns have not been limited to Ferraris and other rare European exotics. Following Carroll Shelby's recent death, there were an unusually large number of Shelby automobiles offered in Monterey. There were predictions of a Shelby feeding frenzy, but in reality the market seemed to have taken Mr. Shelby's death at age 89 into account quite some time ago. Even so, over the last 10 years, the most collectible Shelbys have done quite well. For instance, RM's auction here included the sale of a 1965 Shelby Mustang GT350 R, a rare competition version of the GT350, for 990,000. Three years ago, in the depths of the recession, Russo Steele sold a similar car in Monterey for just 396,000. In 2003, RM Auctions also sold a GT350 R for 206,700. Just as gold has had its share of peaks and valleys, so have collectible automobiles. Ferraris in particular have had periods of considerable volatility. According to Michael Sheehan, a Ferrari historian and dealer, the market has imploded twice in the last 30 years or so. The first time was in 1979, and then it happened again spectacularly in 1990 after a sharp downturn in the stock market, coupled with the bursting of the Japanese real estate bubble, began a slide in the Ferrari market. By 1995, some models lost 75 percent of their value. "There's no sign of an imminent bubble burst in the current market, but most people don't realize that some Ferraris still haven't regained their 1989 highs," Mr. Sheehan said. Naturally, this raises questions about the wisdom of buying a classic automobile for its investment potential after all, there are storage, maintenance and insurance costs to consider rather than the pleasure that ownership brings. Drew Alcazar, founder of the Russo Steele auction house, said in a telephone interview that he had witnessed three previous boom periods in the collector car market before the current one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
One sun drenched afternoon last month, I took a long solo bike ride through the San Francisco Bay Area. I rode from my home to Mountain View, near the once desolate stretch of marsh that Google has leased from NASA to build a monumental new campus. It looks like a collection of lunar bases made out of origami. Construction has been paused under lockdown, and on the fetid plains surrounding the million square foot project, birds sang and wildflowers painted the horizon, and the trails that run beside the site were packed to socially distant capacity with masked families on foot and wheel. On my way to the Google lunar landing base, I passed by Santiago Villa, one of the area's few remaining mobile home parks. It was built in the 1960s as an affordable retirement community. In January, its residents, who rent the space on which their mobile homes stand, petitioned the City Council to include trailer parks in Mountain View's rent control rules. They're worried that wealthy Googlers looking for a kitschy pied a terre near the new campus will push them out. The anger has been rising. Last year, the same City Council prohibited RVs and trailers many of them used as homes from parking on the street; a petition to overturn the RV ban will be on the ballot in November. But as I rode past Santiago Villa, all that rancor felt like a remnant of the Before Time. Everything was quiet then, from one of the trailers, a jolly trumpet began blowing loud and out of tune. It was then that I first had the ghoulish idea: Could the coronavirus have an upside, at least in this one place? What if the pandemic and its aftermath lead Googlers and trailer park residents to find common cause? What if, after the virus, the Bay Area's wealthy gained a new appreciation for those who live on its edges, and finally made room for them in this digital wonderland? But in this crisis, the Bay Area's response was an unexpected success. And that has given a lot of people, including me, new hope about what's possible. Yes, it sounds hokey, but this might be a time for hokeyness. The first big moment came on March 16, when the six counties around the San Francisco Bay ordered the first shelter in place rules in the United States. Google, Apple, Facebook and other large employers fell right into step; they ordered all of their employees to work from home, setting the pace for most other local businesses to close up shop. And the tech giants set an important example they made a commitment to keep paying their on site service workers, even if they could no longer come on site to work. San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose secured thousands of hotel rooms for homeless people, away from the streets and the risk of the virus in crowded shelters. Cities opened their streets to pedestrians and bicycles and closed them to cars. Perhaps most important, officials in the area were the picture of calm leadership. When I despaired about our national failures, I found myself tuning into hear the plain spoken exhortations of San Francisco's mayor, London Breed. "This is going to take all of us," Breed told the city late in March. "This is going to take all of us coming together and sacrificing so that we get through this." The toll is probably an undercount, and blacks and Latinos are disproportionately represented in it. Still, compared to many American metropolitan areas, this ranks as a near miracle. San Francisco's death rate of four per 100,000 residents is one fourth the rate in Los Angeles, a fraction of the national average, and nowhere near New York's. In the absence of mass death, people around here have had time and psychic space to imagine longer term possibilities. If we could band together so quickly to beat the virus, making so many big changes so seamlessly, what else are we capable of doing? I was not alone in my vague sense of optimism. In an article that went viral among techies last month, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen characterized the pandemic as a call to arms to rebuild American institutions, including our cities. Like many of the Valley's tech princes, Andreessen has often been skeptical of government and its champions, but now here he was, cheering them on: "Demonstrate that the public sector can build better hospitals, better schools, better transportation, better cities, better housing," he wrote. "Stop trying to protect the old, the entrenched, the irrelevant; commit the public sector fully to the future." I heard a similar urgency for grand reform from nearly every Bay Area official, activist and resident I spoke to even those who had clashed with the tech industry or those whose fights earlier seemed unwinnable. Libby Schaaf, the mayor of Oakland, opened up 74 miles of city streets for pedestrians and moved hundreds of homeless people into hotels. She saw the crisis as an opportunity to make permanent improvements. In April, Ro Khanna, who represents parts of Silicon Valley in the House, introduced legislation to provide greater pay, health care and labor protections to workers deemed "essential" during the pandemic. "When we talk about who are the 'essential workers,' very few people are saying it's lawyers or middle or senior management," Khanna said. "They're saying, we want the person who's delivering our groceries, the person who's keeping the internet open, the electricity flowing, or the person who's taking care of our kids." In a similar way, the crisis illustrated the importance of keeping everyone healthy even people who lack a place to live. "Housing is health care," explained Abigail Stewart Kahn, director of the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. "That's something, in my field, that people have been saying for a long time." Now, the connection was inescapable people who lacked housing were also outside of the health care system, and during a pandemic, their presence on the streets created a risk for everyone else in the city. "What this has shown us all is that everyone's health is intertwined," she said. These were all officials and experts people who might be biased toward finding "silver linings" in any crisis. But was anything really changing for homeless people around the Bay Area? I contacted several homeless people who have been placed in hotels during the pandemic. They spoke rapturously about their sudden fortune in an otherwise grim time. "Oh my God I can really breathe and be myself." That was the reaction from a 33 year old woman who had been living in a hotel for weeks with her 12 year son. She asked me not to use her name. Before the virus, they had spent years bouncing from couch to couch around the Bay. Under lockdown, their lives were, in many ways, freer than before. For the first time in years, she no longer felt that crushing dependence on other people. "I can move as the adult I am, and no one dictates what I do or how I move," she told me. The hotel room has two beds and a private bathroom. It was starting to feel like a studio apartment like a kind of home, she told me. "I only wish we could have a deep fryer." It is only guaranteed for three months, but she has begun to see the possibility of a new life in the uncertain distance: "I just know that I am on my way to my place." As the weeks of lockdown dragged on, San Francisco began to break my heart again. While the number of coronavirus cases and deaths remained low, the full gloom of the coming recession began to descend into view, and with it, the same ageless, endless political squabbles. The basic problem is that despite the region's apparently limitless wealth, there were not enough ready resources available to public officials to reach everyone in need. And in the absence of more help from the state and the federal government, or from the region's billionaires, the Bay Area's needs simply outmatched its capacity to meet them. Even after the huge effort to move people into hotels, there are still thousands of homeless people on the Bay Area's streets, and little prospect that many will be housed anytime soon. My hopes for inspiring leadership began to fall apart when a fight broke out recently between San Francisco's Board of Supervisors and the mayor over how many more homeless people the city could house. This fight hinges on the usual things money, willpower, staffing and basic municipal capacity. But it also lays bare how ephemeral our coronavirus inspired unity may be. "To the extent we have restored faith in what is possible, we have also underscored, sadly, our city's limitations," Matt Haney, a member of the Board of Supervisors, told me. When I asked the mayor about her dispute with the supervisors, she was cordial but clearly annoyed. Annoyed that the supervisors hadn't considered the limits on the city's capacity. Annoyed that she agreed with them more homeless people could be taken off the streets if only she had the funds or the people to make it happen. The federal government has promised to reimburse cities for part of the cost of housing the homeless, but Breed says she is not sure whether those funds will come through. "There's a huge difference between what we all want, which is to get every homeless person off the street, and reality," she said. And instead of bringing the region's wealthy and its needy together, she suggested that the pandemic might pit the less needy against the more needy. "I think many people are like, 'Well, wait a minute I lost my job where I was making minimum wage. I can't pay my rent. I can barely eat. Where's my help from the city?'" Breed said. When I asked if the virus had created much political room for bold action to address inequality, she said, "It's going to make it even harder." San Francisco and other Bay Area cities have imposed temporary moratoriums on evictions caused by virus related economic disruptions. But those will expire later in the year, at which time a wave of tenants may be kicked out of their homes unless they can pay months of back rent. At the same time, the virus has given more political ammo to those NIMBYs who have long opposed urban density and blocked the construction of more housing. All is not lost. I do feel a renewed sense of pride and possibility about the Bay Area the way our leaders responded to the virus did strengthen my faith in our local institutions, and we certainly seem better equipped to address long term challenges than I once thought we were. There might still be a window for substantive action: Our local governments can use the new leverage to push for bold ideas among other policies, a plan for rent relief, rather than simply an eviction moratorium, so that more people don't lose their housing. I'm also waiting on the city's billionaires to open up new floodgates of generosity, at least for mitigating the immediate pain of the crisis. Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter and Square, recently pledged 1 billion to coronavirus relief; but of the nearly 100 billionaires reportedly living in the Bay Area, only a handful have donated to the city's coronavirus relief fund. Mary Kate Bacalao, the director of external affairs at Compass Family Services, a nonprofit group that helps homeless families, told me that with a few big checks, the Bay's wealthiest could instantly make a difference. But I wouldn't be surprised if we the people of the Bay Area, our lawmakers, our billionaires and our ordinary, overburdened citizens end up squandering this moment. Rebuilding a fairer, more livable urban environment will take years of difficult work. It will require sacrifices from the wealthy. It will require a renewed federal interest in addressing the problems of cities. It will require abandoning pie in the sky techno optimism. This isn't a problem that will be solved by flying cars; it will be solved by better zoning laws, fairer taxes and, when we can make it safe again, more public transportation. We will have to commit ourselves to these and other boring but permanent civic solutions. I'm hopeful we're up to the task. We cannot go back to the way things were. But as the immediate danger of the pandemic recedes, it will be all too easy for many of us to do exactly that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Though 2020 is nearly over, it keeps turning out sports milestones. On Wednesday night, for the first time, a woman served as head coach in an N.B.A. game. When Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich was ejected after arguing with a referee in the second quarter of a game with the Los Angeles Lakers in San Antonio, he turned to Becky Hammon, one of his assistant coaches, and indicated that she should take over the team. Of course, in typical Popovich fashion, it was a passing of the torch without fanfare. "He officially pointed at me," Hammon said. "That was it. Said, 'You've got them.' Obviously, it's a big deal. It's a substantial moment." Hammon joined Popovich's staff in 2014 and is one of six women who hold an assistant coaching role in the N.B.A. this season after a record 11 last season. She previously served as the head coach of the Spurs' summer league team and had taken over for Popovich in a preseason game in October 2017, but Wednesday marked the first time she moved into the hot seat for a regular season game. "It was business as usual,'' Hammon said. "They're used to hearing my voice in practice. In practice, Pop will put us in two teams and we'll each have a team. So they're kind of used to hearing me out there, seeing me draw a play on the board or whatnot." San Antonio's 121 107 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers will officially go on Popovich's record, because N.B.A. bookkeeping rules dictate that all results belong to the team's listed head coach rather than any replacements. Hammon's milestone nonetheless generated an outpouring of reaction after the game. "It's a beautiful thing just to hear her barking out calls, barking out sets," said LeBron James of the Lakers. "She's very passionate about the game. So congrats to her, congrats to our league." Hammon was promoted to the front of the Spurs' bench entering the 2018 19 season and last season became the senior assistant among the three coaches who sit beside Popovich every game. But in two similar situations last season, after Popovich was ejected from a game against Portland in November 2019 and then missed a game against Charlotte in March entirely, the coach chose his former franchise player, Tim Duncan, to be the stand in. Asked why he didn't choose Hammon over Duncan after getting ejected during the Portland game, Popovich said: "I'm not here to make history." History, however, didn't wait long. Duncan's coaching career lasted only one season after he chose to leave the staff in November to return to family life. Hammon's fellow assistants on the bench are Will Hardy, who also works an assistant under Popovich in his USA Basketball head coaching role, and the newly promoted Mitch Johnson. Hammon, 43, was undrafted out of Colorado State but played for 16 years in the W.N.B.A., where she was a six time All Star. After being passed over for the United States Olympic team, she represented Russia, where she had also played professionally, in the 2008 and 2012 Games. On her flight home from the 2012 London Games, Hammon's seatmate was Popovich. She recalled that he asked her, "So if you were an assistant for me and I asked you something, you'd tell me the truth?" She replied, "I don't know why else you'd ask if you didn't want me to tell the truth." He answered, "Good, I don't want a bunch of yes men." In 2013, Hammon tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee, abruptly ending her W.N.B.A. season. While she was in rehabilitation, she served as a coaching intern with the Spurs. Soon after, Popovich hired her as the first full time female assistant coach in the league. At the time, she said of Popovich: "Honestly, I don't think he gives two cents that I'm a woman. And I don't want to be hired because I'm a woman." She was head coach of the Spurs' Las Vegas Summer League team three times, winning the title in 2015. There were other milestones for women in sports this year. In November, Sarah Fuller of Vanderbilt became the first woman to play and score in a regular season game in one of college football's Power 5 conferences when she kicked for the team. Kim Ng became the first woman hired to run a major league team's baseball operations when she was named general manager of the Miami Marlins. In an exhibition game in July, Alyssa Nakken of the San Francisco Giants became the first woman to coach on the field in the major leagues. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Mr. Wu is the author of "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age." What's getting in the way of a recovery for New York City's small businesses? Continued weak demand is surely the main factor. But the fact that commercial rents remain artificially inflated compounds the problem. More businesses could survive, more commercial spaces repurposed for other uses and more new businesses started if commercial rents actually reflected market conditions. The city and state need to act, imposing a broad set of remedies to lower commercial rents. If they don't, the city faces the prospect of a lingeringly weak economy hamstrung by rents that are, as the saying goes, too damn high. Commercial rents are a key variable in any city economy. If rents are too high, small businesses can't make enough profit to survive, and repurposing (turning retail space into office space, say, or office space into storage space) is too risky for the landlord. This leads to so called high rent blight. But if rents are too low, landlords don't have the incentive to rent or develop properties. Ideally, rents should go up and down in tandem with supply and demand. But that isn't happening in New York City. Commercial rents are "sticky": They stay high even when demand is low. There appear to be several reasons for this phenomenon. First, because commercial leases are typically long, some landlords, especially those with other income streams, wager that it's better to wait for demand to return than to commit to a cheap long term lease. If a landlord has an offer today for 10,000 per month but thinks a 20,000 per month tenant may appear in a year or three, he may decide to wait. Sometimes landlords, who are also getting squeezed by the pandemic, would be willing to rent for less money but are blocked by their mortgages and lenders from doing so. This is another reason commercial rents are so sticky. Mortgages for commercial properties in New York City typically set a minimum rent, which makes price cutting a form of default. The problem is compounded when mortgages have been securitized and the terms can be modified only by investor consensus. A related reason for artificially high rents has to do with how property values are determined. To accept 10,000 a month in rent from a property that once earned 20,000 a month could entail recognizing a multimillion dollar decrease in the official property value a situation many properties owners are eager to avoid, even if it means passing up revenue in the short term. Finally, there is the matter of tax deductions. While a property owner cannot legally deduct losses based on hoped for rental income, losing money while one waits for a renter can be used to offset certain other forms of income. And it's possible that Donald Trump is not the only player in New York real estate who has creative accountants. To be sure, many landlords in New York City have been adjusting rents for existing tenants, on an informal basis. Landlords do fear vacancies, and many are suffering themselves. But they are given too many reasons and sometimes obligations to keep rents high. As a result, storefronts stay empty and the whole city suffers. How can the city and state help unlock these assets? First, the state should pass a law voiding minimum rent terms in existing and future commercial mortgages so that landlords do not risk defaulting if they lower rents. (Yes, such a law would be constitutional.) Second, the city should use property taxes to create a disincentive to leave storefronts empty, as State Senator Brad Hoylman of Manhattan and others have proposed. A storefront unoccupied for, say, more than 90 days could see a property tax increase high enough to cover the revenue lost by the city from not renting the property. That would help get the market moving. Third, the city should modify zoning rules that interfere with repurposing spaces. Finally, the state should create a specialized task force to audit questionable deductions in the commercial real estate market. This plan would help push commercial rents down to market rates. And unlike classic rent control, which puts a limit on price raises, the idea is not to impede the market but to make it work. The city and state would be undoing the restraints that are preventing rents from obeying the law of supply and demand. As the cliche goes, every crisis presents an opportunity. New York City has been hit hard by the pandemic, and economically its small businesses have been hit the hardest. Yet New York, when it needs to be, can be creative: Its recent rapid transformation into a city of great outdoor dining is just one example. Bringing about a reduction in commercial rents could help power the kind of rebirth that has been this resilient city's proudest tradition. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Yet that is just the top 200 songs. Older pop hits have been gaining traction as people look to comfort music, and niches like family music have been swelling during the crisis. As the data comes in, it may take several weeks for these trends to become fully clear. On Billboard's chart, the former One Direction member Niall Horan opened at No. 4 with his second solo album, "Heartbreak Weather." Lil Baby's "My Turn" is No. 2, Bad Bunny's "YHLQMDLG" holds at No. 3 and Jhene Aiko's "Chilombo" fell three spots to No. 5. The "Frozen 2" soundtrack which had opened at No. 1 in December rose eight spots to No. 10 after Disney released the film early to its streaming platform, Disney Plus, "surprising families with some fun and joy during this challenging period," as the company said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Junior suite rates during the low season start online at 179; prices jump considerably for the high season and for larger suites. A resort fee per room per night is 35. The Kartrite is trying very hard to do it right. With four slides, seven water attractions and seemingly countless lifeguards, the 324 room Kartrite Resort Indoor Waterpark, which opened in Monticello, N.Y., in April, touts itself as the state's largest indoor water park. Yet there are many other activities and attractions (distractions?) catering to small children, big children and adults who enjoy behaving like children. Almost eclipsing the water park is an extensive arcade of new and old school games. Jugglers on stilts wander the property, which includes a cupcake shop, and though we missed the reptile show, an albino Burmese python named Twinkie was still draped over the shoulders of my son, Sam, while we were checking out (it didn't leave with us, thankfully). The new resort is down a winding and tree lined boulevard in Sullivan County, about 90 miles northwest of New York City. It is in former Borscht Belt country: this area of the Catskills was once dotted with hotels, resorts and restaurants catering to Jewish vacationers, but decades ago it fell out of fashion and into disuse. The Resorts World Casino is nearby, about a half mile down that landscaped road, but there was little information on how guests could hike or otherwise enjoy the surrounding great outdoors. We were certainly made to think that the main attractions were inside. We arrived a few hours before the 4 p.m. check in (guests are allowed to hit the park early), and we were thrilled to hear that a junior king suite would be available within 30 minutes. While it was ready in less than an hour, we had been shooed to the water park and didn't receive the email notification until later. After a little juggling of wet towels and roller bags, we entered an immaculately clean yet bland hotel room with gray carpeting, gray painted walls and dark wood modern furniture. The pops of color came from bright checkered ottomans and orange and neon green throw pillows, but it didn't seem to be decorated with children in mind. For anyone attempting a B.Y.O.B. after a long day of wrangling children, beware: The room did not have a corkscrew or a bottle opener, and when we called down for the latter, we were told to take our adult beverages to one of the bars for opening. No one wants to do that. The bathroom was clean and spacious, but it lacked a bathtub. That is questionable for a resort aimed at children and families. While Sam happily sang in the larger than standard shower, behind a neon colored curtain with the words "Squeaky Clean" printed at the bottom, smaller children and their parents would not enjoy bath time half as much. One doesn't visit a water park for the food. Kartrite offers tiers of dining options, from fine dining to snack bars. But expect to pay city prices at even at the lower range restaurants, with mixed quality. At the Surfside Grille, the water park's snack bar, tater tots were cold, but the pizza slice was inhaled. A turkey wrap and small hummus cup cost upward of 14 in the Highline coffee shop on the lobby floor. Dinner options include the all you can eat dinner buffet at the aptly named Eat. Eat. Eat., where a meal for three will set you back more than 85. The food was plentiful yet tired. By contrast, the breakfast buffet was worth noting, with everything from lox and bagels to delicious bacon. There's a bar on both the first and main floor, and a third in the water park. Everywhere we ate, the service was quick and courteous. We came for the water park, and we weren't disappointed. The rides were stomach dropping and the excitement contagious. Two of the slides and a heated pool were closed, but Sam would gladly still be at the lazy river, swimming along in the current, if it was up to him. I loved that the piped in music included country and West African highlife tracks, and not simply a loop of recent Disney hits. Sam failed to notice any of the shortcomings of the resort. He played his first games of Pong and Space Invaders, and learned virtual reality game strategy from a very knowledgeable arcade worker. He had what he would describe as four star pizza for lunch, mac and cheese for dinner and a chocolate eclair for breakfast (Don't judge). We climbed on the natural playground with sticky fingers from s'mores fingers still prune like after countless trips down the lazy river and the water slides. Sam's review is more concise: "It has slides, water and it's scary fun." What more would a child and grateful parents want? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Okwui Okpokwasili's "Poor People's TV Room" is as dense and delicate as a centuries old tapestry. It can be oblique, but it's also alive as it drifts through myriad subjects to conjure a surreal, imaginary place where, you get the distinct feeling, women have long been oppressed and ignored, or worse: treated like victims. At least in Ms. Okpokwasili's deconstructed, trippy world, they have a voice: "There was a time way, way back when Oprah was a human being, just a woman, she felt pain and she suffered." Those words, spoken by Thuli Dumakude, the veteran South African singer and actress, are an introduction to Ms. Okpokwasili's dark wit. Created with the visual designer and director Peter Born, "Poor People's TV Room" is blanketed in such gleaming darkness that the stage takes on a painterly quality. Sometimes the distancing works, but in other moments the theatricality feels forced, as if the creators were faithfully adhering to the rules of a deconstructionist playbook. The piece was partly inspired by women's resistance movements in Nigeria, though that isn't necessarily discernible in the final product, which blends dance, music and theater. What is obvious is how Ms. Okpokwasili's virtuosity she can't tame her magnificence overshadows the other performers. She's a force. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
More than 8,500 people have signed a petition asking the health plan of SAG AFTRA, the American union for professional film and television actors, to reverse changes that will result in some members no longer qualifying for health insurance. The health plan said in an email it sent to members on Wednesday night that it would raise the floor for eligibility from those earning 18,040 a year to 25,950, effective Jan. 1. Premiums will also increase. "The Trustees of the SAG AFTRA Health Plan have taken a difficult but necessary action to address financial deficits facing the plan," the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG AFTRA) Health Plan said in a statement. At a time when film jobs are scarce and live theater is almost completely shut down because of the pandemic, many actors have seen their income slow to a trickle or disappear entirely. "Every actor in America is stuck right now," John E. Brady, a film, television, and commercials actor who has been a union member for more than 30 years, said. "Unless you're Tom Hanks and have done a body of work you'll continue to get residual checks from, you're not going to be able to afford insurance." According to the email, the changes are in response to projected deficits of 141 million this year and 83 million in 2021. The health plan estimated that, without the changes, it would run out of reserves by 2024. The SAG AFTRA Health Plan said increased health care costs and the shutdown of the live entertainment industry contributed to its decision to tighten the requirements. Brady said he will not be eligible for insurance when the eligibility cutoff increases. "When I read the email, I went into complete denial," he said. "I just thought, 'There goes my insurance.'" Brady said the changes were "particularly pernicious" because his wife, a breast cancer and brain tumor survivor, has three pre existing conditions. And Brady, 58, had a pulmonary embolism last year. "We're not young spring chickens," he said. The union had previously offered two health care plans. The lower threshold plan had offered coverage to members who made at least 18,040 per year, and the higher threshold plan, which offered better coverage, had been available to those who made at least 35,020. Under the new combined plan, the threshold will be 25,950. The new plan includes several other changes. Spouses who are offered health insurance by their employer will no longer be eligible for coverage under the union plan. Members who are 65 or older who have recently retired will no longer be allowed to use their residuals income to qualify for the new threshold. And the new health plan eliminates the out of pocket maximum for out of network coverage. SAG AFTRA represents approximately 160,000 actors, singers, journalists and other media professionals in film and television. Membership is considered a rite of passage that can lead to more prestigious work. A spokeswoman for the union health plan declined comment on how many members might be affected by the changes. Nick Sullivan, an actor who has been a member of the union since the mid 1990s, said the changes hit especially hard during a year when many actors have little or no work. "We're hearing about this in mid August, during a year that almost all film and TV has been shut down," Sullivan said. "It's jaw dropping." He said the way the union health plan delivered the news was tone deaf. "They thought the best way to tell us would be in a newsletter with stock photos of smiling people," he said. "Anyone looking at those numbers knew what destructive change we were looking at moving into the future. It was enraging." Dave Dillon, a Dallas based insurance actuary who reviewed the changes, said members appeared to be heavy users of out of network providers, and that benefit reductions were likely made to entice them to seek in network providers to reduce costs. But he said that health plan costs are generally not increasing as a result of the pandemic and have gone down in many cases because of eliminated and deferred care. "My educated speculation is that SAG AFTRA has had excess costs that are not related to the pandemic in any way and these changes are to address that," he said. Brady said he thinks there might have been a less drastic course of action available. "I understand that they're strapped," he said. "But I'm more concerned with how I stay eligible for insurance so that my wife doesn't die." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
EVEN though taxpayers have a few extra days this year to file their federal income tax returns, some still won't make the deadline. So with tax day approaching on Monday, it's time to think about filing an extension. The Internal Revenue Service projects that it will receive 13.5 million requests for extensions of time to file this year. An extension grants an extra six months to prepare and file a federal income tax return. Why ask for extra time? Extensions can be a good idea if taxpayers receive necessary forms late, said Melissa M. Labant, director of tax advocacy with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Forms like Schedule K 1, for instance, which shows income from partnerships, are habitually tardy and are becoming more common as more people invest through partnerships. "If you're missing information," she said, "you'll need to file an extension." In addition to late arriving forms, confusion over new documents, like the 1095 C issued to people with health coverage through big employers, is probably delaying the filing of returns as well, said Douglas Stives, a professor of accounting at Monmouth University and a consultant to the Curchin Group, an accounting firm in Red Bank, N.J. Tax preparers are feeling the time crunch, he said, and may suggest that clients file extensions, so returns can be completed at a more measured pace. Filing an extension, he said, can help reduce errors made because of haste and avoid the need to file an amended tax return. Mr. Stives said he considered extensions preferable to amended returns, which must be submitted on paper and so may receive more scrutiny. "You're drawing attention to your return," he said, "and that's the last thing you want to do." Most important, filing an extension will allow you avoid a penalty for filing late, which is typically 5 percent per month of any tax owed, up to a maximum of 25 percent, Ms. Labant said. An important thing to remember, however, is that while filing an extension gives you more time to file your return, it does not provide extra time to pay any tax you may owe. So filers should do their best to calculate any tax due and pay it. If you can't pay what you owe, Ms. Labant said, pay what you can, then contact the I.R.S. to discuss an installment plan for the balance. Don't wait until you hear from the agency, she said. "It's better to contact them first." Here are some questions and answers about tax return extensions: How do I file for an extension? Filing for an extension is simple and is generally automatic. You don't need to give a reason for your request. You can do it on paper by sending Form 4868 in the mail. Or you may submit the form electronically using tax preparation software or the I.R.S.'s Free File program, which provides free tax software online. (The I.R.S. says that while you must meet income criteria to file a tax return using Free File, anyone can use it to submit an extension, regardless of income.) Another way is to make a tax payment, using an option like the I.R.S.'s free Direct Pay service, which pulls the funds directly from your bank account. You don't need to register for Direct Pay, as is the case with some other payment options. According to the I.R.S., filers using Direct Pay should "select Form 4868 to indicate that it is for an extension." Then, "You'll get a confirmation of your payment, and you won't have to separately file Form 4868." The deadline for filing the extension is the same as the deadline for filing a return: midnight Monday, in most states. (The calendar has already provided a slight extension: April 15, the usual cutoff, was observed this year as a District of Columbia holiday.) What is the deadline for submitting my tax return, if I file for an extension? This year, the extended tax filing deadline is Oct. 17. You should file as soon as you can before then, however, to minimize any interest or penalties you may owe on taxes due, Ms. Labant said. Does filing a federal extension also give me more time to file my state tax return? No. States may have different forms and requirements, so you should check with your state tax agency for details. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Chisa Hutchinson's "Surely Goodness and Mercy," at Theater Row, takes its title from Psalms, the section of the Bible that if we're to believe the show's curmudgeonly but kindhearted lunch lady, Bernadette is where all the good book's bangers are. And though this morality play has its collection basket full of tokens of charity, it still feels withholding. Under Jessi D. Hill's direction, the 95 minute Keen Company production moves quickly, in a series of gasp like three or four minute scenes. But the plot is fairly bare bones: Tino (Jay Mazyck), an intelligent 12 year old boy who lives with his abusive aunt, Alneesa (Sarita Covington), in Newark, befriends Bernadette (Brenda Pressley) and a brassy classmate while doing some extracurricular Bible reading. When Tino resolves to help Bernadette with an illness, she ultimately returns the favor. Perhaps that's giving too much away, but the play's spare, homiletic approach is upfront from the beginning. What you see is what you get, with church sermons about giving blessings and being granted blessings in return. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Within a week of its creation, the March for Science campaign had attracted more than 1.3 million supporters across Facebook and Twitter, cementing itself as a voice for people who are concerned about the future of science under President Trump. Now, hoping to transform that viral success into something approaching the significance of the women's march last month, the campaign has scheduled its demonstration in Washington for Earth Day, April 22. "Yes, this is a protest, but it's not a political protest," said Jonathan Berman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and a lead organizer of the march. "The people making decisions are in Washington, and they are the people we are trying to reach with the message: You should listen to evidence." Last week, Dr. Berman found himself in the middle of a social media movement. While browsing a Reddit discussion about how the new administration was handling science, he came across a comment that he interpreted as a call to arms: "There needs to be a Scientists' March on Washington." "I thought someone should do that," Dr. Berman said, "and I realized, I'm someone." He proceeded to buy a web domain, design a logo and create a Twitter account for what was then called "The Scientists' March on Washington." Within three days, the idea had more than 700,000 supporters across its social media platforms. Other collaborators quickly joined Dr. Berman's efforts. Dr. Caroline Weinberg, a public health researcher and science writer in New York, was concerned by news reports about science at the Environmental Protection Agency. Inspired by the women's march and excited by the idea of scientists holding their own, she connected with Dr. Berman. They decided to organize a steering committee and draft a mission statement and diversity statement, but their efforts could hardly keep up with the thousands of volunteer requests and social media responses. "While it was overwhelming, it was incredibly heartwarming that so many people were concerned with what's going on with science and this administration," Dr. Weinberg said. "People were willing to donate their time and energy to this. They were just waiting for someone to set up a Twitter handle." As the organizers address the logistical challenges of enlisting thousands of people to march on the National Mall, what they have proposed has received support from some leaders in the scientific community. "I think it's terrific to have people standing up for science," said Rush D. Holt Jr., the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which has more than 120,000 members. His sentiments were echoed by Christine McEntee, the chief executive of the American Geophysical Union, which has more than 60,000 members. "This is showing that there is a large community of scientists and individuals who are supportive of science and are quite concerned about what they are hearing from this incoming administration and Congress," she said, "and they want to raise their voice." But the organizers of the march also face critical views. "I think the average American will scratch their head and say: 'What are they marching for? What is the threat?'" said William Happer, a physicist from Princeton University who met with Mr. Trump before his inauguration and who has been cited as a potential science adviser to the administration. Dr. Happer added that scientists could risk losing some of their public support with a large scale protest. "It's quite possible that this kind of public exercise could actually be bad for science it's like the toddler banging his spoon in the highchair," he said. "It may not turn out to garner a lot of sympathy." In the months ahead, the organizers of the march will have to contend with these and other views among scientists worrying about politicizing scientific inquiry. But Dr. Weinberg, one of the lead organizers, said she thought the public believed differently based on the response she has seen online. "The overall tone of the current government seems to be trending in an anti science direction," she said. "That is why so many people were motivated to do something like march for science." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
THE BUYERS Mike Lee and Virginia Chiang are still in the unpacking phase. Wedded, but Not to Any Particular Place In his eight years in New York, Mike Lee has moved a great deal sharing rentals throughout Brooklyn and Queens with friends, roommates and siblings. Three years ago, he and Virginia Chiang met through friends, just months after she arrived in New York from her native Los Angeles. She rented a high ceilinged studio in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. The two married in a small ceremony last winter. "We would much rather spend that money on a home or a vacation, anything but a one day party," said Mr. Lee, who grew up mostly in Connecticut but spent time in Korea before and after his years at Syracuse University. The couple lived in Ms. Chiang's studio. She loved her neighborhood, which made up for the noisy upstairs neighbor. "It sounded like he brought home ponies every night," she said. QUEENS A one bedroom in Jackson Heights had a view of a fire escape and a dogleg hall that consumed too much space. Uli Seit for The New York Times After they resolved to buy a studio or a one bedroom, Ms. Chiang had hopes of staying in Carroll Gardens. But among the first places they saw was a ground floor studio condominium in Bushwick, Brooklyn, offered for sale by the owner and listed in the high 200,000s. When negotiations stalled, a friend suggested they contact Sunny Pyun, then an agent at Bond New York and now at the Corcoran Group. "We decided we didn't know what we were doing and would work with Sunny," Mr. Lee said. Meanwhile, Ms. Chiang, who had studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., left her job as an Asian art specialist at an auction house to study jewelry design and metalsmithing. With one income, their budget topped out at 400,000. "Carroll Gardens was pretty dry at that price point," said Mr. Lee, who works as a writer producer for PIX 11. As for the wish list, he said, "I was fixated on proximity to trains, and the commute was for me a weirdly huge factor." BROOKLYN A Fort Greene studio was well located for a Manhattan commute. But a ground floor window made the place a bit too public. Furthermore, he said, "easy access to food was a big factor, but who doesn't want that?" To address both these concerns, he suggested they hunt in Jackson Heights, Queens, near where he had lived for a time. "I had fond memories of the place good times hanging out there, eating." But they lost interest after seeing a one bedroom co op on 74th Street with a view of a fire escape. The price was just 210,000, with maintenance in the mid 600s. (It remains for sale at 199,950.) Back in Brooklyn, every place had some kind of fatal flaw, like a ground floor studio co op on South Oxford Street in Fort Greene, listed for 359,000 with monthly maintenance in the low 400s. The bedroom window faced the sidewalk. "It was like sleeping in a window display, like visual merchandising," Ms. Chiang said. (The place sold for 353,000.) Little was wrong, however, with a one bedroom on Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights, which had a washer dryer in the bathroom. The co op's price was 389,000, with maintenance around 600 a month. A few doors down, a line of waiting diners extended from Tom's Restaurant. BROOKLYN A one bedroom in Prospect Heights would have been ideal. But the prospective buyers bid too low. "At first I didn't want to live that close to a restaurant," Ms. Chiang said. But then she decided such popularity was a good omen for future apartment values. On one visit, music wafted in the bedroom window. "I thought earplugs were my fate in New York," Ms. Chiang said. "It's like an added body part." The couple offered 400,000 and were not surprised to be outbid. (The apartment sold for 405,000, with a 50 percent down payment.) Mr. Lee had become worried about the fierce competition they were encountering. "Sunny told us about all cash buyers," Mr. Lee said. "I didn't know what that meant. I just knew that they were our enemies. Why would anyone have that much cash on them, and if you do, why are you looking to buy a one bedroom?" Intrigued by a feature in Kinfolk magazine about a Jackson Heights co op, the couple decided to revisit Jackson Heights. Some apartments there seemed a bit shabby. But one place was a blank canvas empty, renovated, bright, airy. The 900 square foot corner one bedroom was on a top floor with no neighbors. The listing price was 285,000, with monthly maintenance around 700. At the packed open house, "some guy brought his measuring tape," Ms. Chiang said. "We thought, 'This is serious, it's going to be competitive.' " Sure enough, a bidding war developed. Still, even when the competition is a cash buyer, "you can show you also have the ability to get the deal done," said Paul Hyun, who worked with Ms. Pyun at Bond and moved with her to Corcoran. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Calls for Shipping and Aviation to Do More to Cut Emissions Even though commercial aviation and ocean shipping are significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions, they were excluded from the Paris climate treaty, to be signed by more than 100 countries this week at the United Nations in New York. Now governments and advocacy groups are pressuring these industries to take stronger steps to curb pollution. A coalition of European, North African and South Pacific nations is lobbying the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency that oversees shipping, to start discussing an emissions reduction commitment at a meeting in London that will begin Monday. "We need to do something and go beyond what we already have, and set some very specific targets," said Francois Martel, the secretary general of the Pacific Islands Development Forum. The forum's members include the Marshall Islands and the Solomon Islands, two of six nations that have made a proposal, expected to be taken up at the meeting, that shipping contribute a "fair share" to reducing emissions. Another United Nations agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization, has for years been considering a market based strategy in which airlines could purchase "offsets," or emissions reductions from renewable energy or conservation projects, to cover at least some international flights. Advocacy groups are pressuring the agency to adopt as strict a system as possible when it meets for its triennial assembly in Montreal this fall. "If we're going to have offsets, then they actually have to deliver the tons of reductions they say they will," said Bill Hemmings, the director of aviation and shipping at Transport Environment, an environmental group based in Brussels. Nigel Purvis, the chief executive of Climate Advisers, a consulting group in Washington, said airlines were likely to increase spending significantly on offsets from forest conservation projects. "Airlines know this sector and are ready to play," he said. While some previous forest projects have been criticized for not delivering the reductions that were claimed, "now we have new rules about how to do forests in a way that as we scale up we maintain integrity," Mr. Purvis added. Aviation and shipping each contribute a little more than 2 percent of annual worldwide human produced emissions of carbon dioxide. Together that is more than the emissions from Japan, the world's fifth largest emitter. Both industries are expected to grow over the next few decades, and their percentages of worldwide emissions may increase significantly as emissions are reduced elsewhere. Environmental groups say steps the industries have already taken, including regulations to reduce emissions from new aircraft and ships, will not help much because they are tied to baselines for improvement that are too low. Yet after being included in initial drafts of the climate treaty, a paragraph on limiting or reducing emissions from the two industries was eliminated from the final version, which was agreed upon in Paris in mid December. The treaty commits nations to setting emissions reduction targets, with a goal of keeping global warming "well below" a target of 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. Experts cite several reasons that aviation and shipping were not in the treaty, including a desire to keep the text as concise as possible to improve the chances of reaching an agreement. The issue also would have exacerbated disputes about the responsibilities of developed versus developing nations that could have threatened the overall accord, they said. Industry representatives and environmental groups alike say that despite the lack of any mention in the treaty, there is still momentum for action on emissions by both industries. Simon Bennett, the director of policy and external relations for the International Chamber of Shipping, an industry group, said that there was a "misunderstanding" about the Paris accord and that "somehow that means shipping has escaped." "That isn't the case," Mr. Bennett said. The chamber has filed its own proposal for the International Maritime Organization meeting; it uses language other than "fair share" but still calls for emissions reductions targets. But there are disagreements between the shipping industry and environmental advocates about the best ways to cut emissions. The industry generally favors a global fuel tax over carbon offsets, and notes that most ships have already reduced their emissions and that there is a maritime organization program in place, the Energy Efficiency Design Index, to reduce emissions from new ones. Environmental groups, however, argue that the efficiency index program's improvement standards are too low, and that most ships built in the last several years already meet the standards for 2020. "They need to come up with more stringent targets," Mr. Hemmings of Transport Environment said. The aviation industry also points out that it is not relying solely on so called market based measures like offsets to reduce emissions. "The global offsetting scheme is just one aspect of the sector's climate action, albeit a crucial one," said Michael Gill, the executive director of the Air Transport Action Group, an industry organization. Like shipping, aviation has adopted efficiency standards. The International Civil Aviation Organization approved them in February, and will limit emissions from jets built after 2023 from current designs, and from new models introduced after 2028. Critics say that those standards are weak, and that most advanced jets being built already meet them. That makes adopting tough market based measures more important than ever, they say. "The level of the CO efficiency standard for new aircraft, set in February, was disappointing in its ambition," said Kat Watts, a global climate policy adviser with Carbon Market Watch, in Brussels. With aviation left out of the Paris treaty, she added, the International Civil Aviation Organization "was handed the baton for climate action for international aviation." "Whether they run with, or drop, that baton will be decided in this October's assembly," she added. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has begun what is expected to be a yearslong process to develop emissions rules for aircraft, and has said the rules would be at least as strict as the international organization's standards. But environmental groups have argued that the E.P.A.'s rules must be far more stringent. Last week, several groups, including Friends of the Earth, sued the environmental agency in an effort to compel it to move faster to develop the rules. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
After falling prey to some of the same business difficulties that have plagued newspapers and magazines, the digital media giants BuzzFeed and HuffPost have decided to join forces, the companies announced on Thursday. Under the plan, BuzzFeed will acquire HuffPost from its owner, Verizon Media, as part of a larger stock deal, the companies said. The BuzzFeed and HuffPost websites will remain distinct, each with its own editorial staff. The BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, who helped found HuffPost 15 years ago, will serve as the chief executive. As part of the arrangement, Verizon Media will become a minority shareholder in BuzzFeed, the companies said, but it will not have a seat on BuzzFeed's board. "We're excited about our partnership with Verizon Media, and mutual benefits that will come from syndicating content across each other's properties, collaborating on innovative ad products and the future of commerce, and tapping into the strength and creativity of Verizon Media Immersive," Mr. Peretti said in a statement. BuzzFeed and HuffPost have struggled, with both having gone through rounds of layoffs in recent years. Mr. Peretti believes that getting bigger is the right move for his business. Digital media, a relatively open territory when HuffPost started in 2005, has grown crowded and more competitive. Google and Facebook have grabbed huge chunks of ad revenue from publishers; Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Twitch are taking would be readers' attention; and many legacy media outlets have gotten the hang of the web while also figuring out how to persuade readers to pay for content. The deal between BuzzFeed and HuffPost marks the fourth significant merger among name brand digital publishers, following the combination of Vox Media and New York Magazine, Vice Media's acquisition of Refinery29, and Group Nine's merger with PopSugar. Digital journalism needs size to survive and even these deals may not be enough to sustain their operations. Because BuzzFeed and HuffPost appeal to different readerships, they should complement each other as part of the same company, Mr. Peretti said in an interview on Thursday. "We want HuffPost to be more HuffPosty, and BuzzFeed to be more BuzzFeedy there's not much audience overlap," he said. "These are different audiences they serve. On the editorial side and the consumer side, we want to have a lot of independence and autonomy for HuffPost and for it to determine its own brand." Mr. Peretti, 46, also said HuffPost will have a new editor in chief. The site's previous top editor, from 2016 until March of this year, was Lydia Polgreen, a former New York Times editor. She left HuffPost to become the head of content at the podcasting company Gimlet Media, and a successor has yet to be named. On the business side, operations are likely to be combined. Mr. Peretti approached Verizon on several occasions about a possible HuffPost acquisition, he said in the interview. In 2018, shortly after Hans E. Vestberg was named Verizon's chief executive, Mr. Peretti made an overture, only to be rebuffed. 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. He said he found a willing ear in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the convention that draws digital publishers, tech companies and major advertisers who meet to broker multimillion dollar marketing agreements between games of craps and blackjack. In a suite at the Aria Resort and Casino on the 35th floor overlooking the Vegas Strip, Mr. Peretti met with Guru Gowrappan, the Verizon Media chief executive, who reports to Mr. Vestberg, to discuss ways the two companies could work together. At first, they discussed how Verizon Media could help BuzzFeed with its ad technology, as well as the possibility of entering into a content sharing arrangement. Some months later, the talk turned to an acquisition, Mr. Peretti said. "While considering opportunities to work together, naturally, Jonah and I also discussed the property he co founded, HuffPost," Mr. Gowrappan said in a statement. "We quickly realized BuzzFeed's strategy would complement HuffPost's road map, injecting it with new energy and growing the brand into the future." HuffPost had seen a large drop in revenue because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to two people with knowledge of the company, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In an interview, Mr. Gowrappan said that the company believed in Mr. Peretti's approach, which persuaded him that a merger deal would add value. Once the deal goes through, BuzzFeed will have to find ways to cut costs, the two people said. Mr. Peretti's company was on track to turn a profit this year, but the addition of HuffPost will add more costs starting next year. The deal includes some cash from Verizon that will help BuzzFeed pay for severance for possible layoffs and other costs associated with the merger, the two people said. Both outlets share DNA. Along with the political power player Arianna Huffington and the investor Kenneth Lerer, Mr. Peretti was part of the team that created the original Huffington Post, as it was then known, in 2005. The driving idea was to build a liberal version of Drudge Report an online gathering spot for readers fed up with the George W. Bush administration. The site benefited from Ms. Huffington's Rolodex, back when Rolodexes were still a thing: She was able to charm big name contributors from Hollywood and the Beltway to write for free. Steeped in the Google algorithm, Mr. Peretti, the site's chief technology officer, along with its editors, helped make Huffington Post into an online force, one that featured a new brand of journalism unapologetically web native, complete with slide shows, hot take opinion pieces and curiosity inducing headlines that drew millions of clicks in the years before Twitter and other social media platforms took charge of the internet discourse. In 2006, Mr. Peretti, a scientist of the web with a perennial interest in which pieces of online content proved most engaging to readers, started BuzzFeed while he was still HuffPost's chief technology officer. At first, it was an experimental project that he ran out of a small office in Manhattan's Chinatown. Mr. Peretti left HuffPost in 2011, after it was sold to AOL for 315 million, and with the help of 35 million from corporate investors, he transformed his side gig into a stand alone media company. BuzzFeed caught on as a website filled with features aimed at a largely millennial audience, things like "21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity" and a video of BuzzFeeders trying to make a watermelon explode. As the site matured, it went deep into current events coverage and investigative articles under BuzzFeed News, a division that was led for eight years by its founding editor, Ben Smith, before he joined The Times as its media columnist, and is now run by Mark Schoofs. In 2017, BuzzFeed cut 100 employees after missing revenue targets. Last year, it laid off more than 220 employees, or 15 percent of its work force. Amid the cost cutting measures, BuzzFeed added banner ads, a form of advertising it once eschewed. It even expanded into the retail business, with branded products, including a recent partnership to create sex toys. HuffPost cut 39 employees during a round of layoffs in 2017. In early 2019, Verizon said it would cut 800 positions, or 7 percent of its media divisions. Later that year, HuffPost let 11 video employees go. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
"I want to be facilitating for artists, all the time," says Theresa Buchheister, who is taking over the Brick theater. A wedding dress wearing alien beams onstage. A robot D.J. visits from Planet Nubian. A man tries to sell us a baggie of sour cream. And a pop star strips off his Pierrot outfit a backward suit jacket and a tulle ruff and sings "Heeeey" over and over. Everything is heightened! But also confusing? That's because you're at the scrappy Brooklyn venue the Brick, watching the ? ! New Works Festival also known as Interrobang. Looked at one way, Interrobang is just another installment of the four year old, roving Brooklyn fest of works in progress, now alighting at the Brick though Saturday . You go if you want to see some 30 artists making the avant garde, 20 minutes at a time. This particular Interrobang series, though, is also a peek into the future of the Brick itself. Up in the booth, the festival's presenter curator light op tech director Theresa Buchheister is watching and taking notes. This will be her theater soon, and she needs to know how it works. "At the time," Mr. Gardner said, "Robert and I were seeing spaces like Theatorium, Surf Reality, Todo Con Nada all becoming less viable. But then we saw the Collapsible Hole space" a bare bones converted garage where the gonzo group Radiohole performed "and it was so damn inspirational! We thought, 'Even we can find a garage! Let's make it up as we go!'" The Brick may have once been a garage, but it also seems like it might have been a bricked up gap between two buildings: it's narrow, the bathroom is rudimentary, and when it rains, it sounds like the Rockettes are upstairs. (There is no upstairs.) You can only reach the booth via a ladder, which Ms. Buchheister who exclusively wears caftans mutters about under her breath. For 17 years, though, the cozy Brick has been the rare New York site for experimental work, much of it whimsical: a sampling of the last year of programming turns up "Buffalo Bailey's Ranch for Gay Horses, Troubled Teen Girls and Other" and the New York Clown Theater Festival. Such themed festivals often oriented around video games, comics or, once, the baby Jesus have been an early playground for artists like Annie Baker and Young Jean Lee; the Off Broadway darlings the Mad Ones first performed at the Brick; and the venue's Trans Theatre Festival (another installment comes in August) has been a crucial platform for makers and performers like Becca Blackwell and Jess Barbagallo. For Mr. Gardner, all that lightheartedness was getting heavy. He was shouldering a punishing load as artistic director and primary caretaker of a space that presented 40 to 50 weeks a year. "It hit me that the artist in me had been getting the raw end of the deal," he said. "But I felt very conflicted. I didn't want to close this beautiful thing that had built a community of its own." The Brick had a loving, stable community, but it had also lost a certain sense of danger. Enter Ms. Buchheister, a longtime confidant, who was already a leading figure in the deep fringe scene. Mr. Gardner needed out; she'd just had a revelation about her life's purpose . So while he and Mr. Honeywell will stay on the board of directors, come Jan. 1, the management will change. Ms. Buchheister an actor, writer and director with her company, Title:Point is a throwback to the New York of 20 years ago. Inspired by her early Manhattan days interning for Richard Foreman (she was in his dadaist lumberjack comedy, "The Gods Are Pounding My Head!," in 2005), she has done what few in experimental theater have dared to do in the post 9/11 era. She's gone big. Title:Point was a member of Silent Barn, the late, lamented DIY compound in Bushwick that included a functioning barber shop. At Silent Barn, Ms. Buchheister presented evenings that have proved to be lasting series, including Interrobang . Most visibly, she started the widely flung Exponential Festival in 2016, which stands toe to toe with the big January fests like the Public Theater's Under the Radar. For those interested in the bleeding edge, Exponential was the source, according to David Herskovits of Target Margin, the Obie winning theater now in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. "Theresa is the best outsider curator maker we could hope for," he said. "Theresa doesn't look under the radar; she lives under the radar." After leaving the imploding Silent Barn, Title:Point started a miniature basement venue in Williamsburg called Vital Joint. It was hard to use for anything other than comedy, though. "Last year, I got the last hangout with my Uncle David, who I'd been talking with in the seven months of his terminal cancer diagnosis," Ms. Buchheister said, her voice breaking a little. "He was very specific about how I should be to myself. I was like " and here she makes a noise that's equal parts frustration, grief and anger. "And then," she said, "this January's Exponential happened, and I thought, this is how I want to be. I want to be facilitating for artists, all the time. How can I make that possible?" So, while she loves the Brick, "it'll change a lot," Ms. Buchheister said. First, a renovation that will be both physical (accessibility ramps, flexible seating, stairs to the booth) and curatorial. The theater programming will expand to include her distinctly transgressive sensibility, including even more stand up, dance, and genderqueer and drag works, with specialized collaborator curators helping in each area. There are venues in New York that welcome the weird the Tank, Dixon Place but there are signs that a Buchheister with a permanent space will be a game changer. Given the exhilarating first nights of Interrobang, Ms. Buchheister could be the conduit for a fire hose of thrilling, thoughtful, bonkers work. Go and get a taste before the festival is over. Mr. Gardner just put in some lovely new air conditioners. "I'm proudest of creating a community," he said, but the A/C comes a close second. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Left to right, all by Jean Honore Fragonard: "Roman Interior," 1760; "A Woman with a Dog," 1769; "The Stolen Kiss," 1760, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "A New Look at Old Masters." Goya, Caravaggio, Rubens, Velazquez and more are in skylit splendor in the European galleries. And the museum is acknowledging the shaping force on art of colonialism, slavery, the disenfranchisement of women. "In a dark time, the eye begins to see," the poet wrote. And after the dark, dark time we've been through, this year's winter solstice, marking the start of slow climb back into light, may carry more metaphorical weight than usual. Coincidentally, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has some restorative illumination of its own underway. In recent decades, the skylights that brought natural light into the European paintings galleries had grown timeworn and semi functional, leaving some spaces half dark. In 2018, the museum initiated a four year project to replace all the skylights. The job required that half of the 45 galleries be closed down in two phases and chunks of the collection be temporarily stored or relocated. (The museum's Dutch paintings are on view in the Robert Lehman Wing.) With half of the new skylights now in place, 21 galleries, holding some 500 paintings and a few sculptures, have been reinstalled and reopened. As seen on a recent overcast December afternoon, the new lighting natural with some artificial enhancement looked good, less dramatic than remembered but even and clear, presumably close to the kind of light that artists working in Europe between 1250 and 1800, the dates that roughly frame the collection, might have painted in. In galleries once arranged largely by geography and date, they are mixing things up to spotlight transnational exchanges and border crossings. And they are acknowledging, out loud, in print, the shaping force on art of sociopolitical realities colonialism, slavery, the disenfranchisement of women that this museum has all but ignored in its permanent collection displays. And it's important they do this, not just to advance historical truth telling, but to secure and broaden an audience for art. Over the decades I've noticed a decreasing popular interest in the Met's old master galleries, once considered the museum's chief attraction and crown jewels. Maybe this change can be put down to shifts in school education. Almost certainly it is a byproduct of a digital culture that keeps us inexorably pinned to the present. In fact, though, the sociopolitical themes raised in the reinstallation of art from the past are very much of the present. Making that link is essential to attracting an audience into the future. Changes aren't obvious right away. The high ceilinged galley at the top of the Grand Staircase isn't officially part of the reinstallation. Devoted to the 18th century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, it is a set piece, a fixture in a museum that is, after all, Tiepolo Central. There's more work by him here than anywhere outside of Venice. The distant sight of his supersized paintings of angels and gods couched on cumulus clouds are meant to pull you up the stairs, up to heaven, and they do. Why change a winning thing? Innovations begin just beyond, in a gallery that was once a straightforward sampler of Italian Baroque paintings, but now has a more specific theme: Baroque Rome. In the 17th century, Rome was a magnet for artists from all over Europe hungry for Counter Reformation commissions. Many were Italian; Caravaggio, Guercino and Guido Reni are all here. But so is the youthful Velazquez up from Madrid and, with a charming small picture of the young Virgin Mary, Francisco de Zurbaran, who never left Spain, though the Roman Baroque filtered down to him there. In the next gallery, called "Painting as the Mirror of Nature: 1420 1480," north and south meet in an exquisite lineup of headshot portraits. Some are Italian, some Netherlandish, a difference being this: The Italian portraits present people as they'd probably wanted to be seen, smooth skinned and toned; the northern ones show them as they actually were, stubble, frown lines and all. In Hans Memling's famous dual portraits of Tommaso and Maria Portinari Florentines living in the artist's home city of Bruges the two approaches merge. Every facial crease is accounted for and the sitters are beautiful. The 15th century was a fluid time for culture. Art and influences traveled, fast and wide. During Memling's lifetime, his work made its way to Italy, France, England and Poland. Painting by a Bruges based artist of an older generation, the sublime Jan van Eyck, was a hit in Naples, where it may have inspired the Sicilian born Antonello da Messina to take up and master the Netherlandish medium of oil painting. Antonello's art is beyond category, stylistically and expressively. His bust length panel painting "Christ Crowned With Thorns," from around 1470, is both imaginatively fantastic and portrait specific. Christ's face has the beat up features of a boxer who's lost a fight and the pleading gaze of a doomed man who just fully understood his fate. One of the strangest and most moving images in the Met's early European holdings, it's unlocatable in every way, outside any this leads to this art historical narrative. The Met favors such narratives most big, generalist museums do and adheres to them in sections of the new installation. After the gallery of 15th century portraits comes another centered on religious motifs (the Antonello is here) shared by artists across pre Reformation Europe. And this is followed by a showcase of fancy Florentine homewares: marriage chests, maiolica jars and commemorative platters. (Lorenzo the Magnificent's birth plate, decorated by the younger artist brother of the great Masaccio, is a centerpiece.) Then suddenly there's a break in the timeline. You step from 15th century Italy into 18th century France and the Rococo world of Fragonard and Watteau. It's a world of pinpoint delicacy and in pictures like Fragonard's "Woman with a Dog" self amused wit. And, as distilled here, it feels, for all its urbanity, vacuum packed: all French, all the time. (A gallery of 18th century British art has a similar feel of being a culturally closed system, an island art.) Emerging from it, you make another leap, this one a back flip to a Pan European Baroque. And at this point that the curators spotlight the issue of race in a two paragraph wall text titled "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in Seventeenth Century Europe." This is by no means the only mention. Texts in the Renaissance galleries refer to enslaved Africans in 15th century Antwerp and Florence. Individual labels here and there flag the appearance of Black figures in paintings, cast as Magi in Nativity scenes, or as servants in upscale portraits. In the context of the intense Black Lives Matter consciousness raising of recent years, this all feels like a mild, late coming gesture. But in a museum that has, in its permanent collection displays, been all but mute on the subject of racism, it at least starts a conversation. So does a gallery focused on women artists, or on a handful who established careers in Paris after the French Revolution. Their careers had built in boundaries. Men made "important" art: history painting. Women were confined to lesser genres like still life and portraiture. Yet "lesser" produced two of the Met's most moving 18th century images: Adelaide Labille Guiard's monumental 1785 "Self Portrait with Two Pupils, Marie Capet (1761 1818) and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond (died 1788)," and Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun's intimate portrait of her 7 year old daughter Julie looking at her own reflection in a hand held mirror. Fabulous, both. The Vigee Le Brun painting, a study in dawning self awareness, arrived at the Met, by bequest, just last year. The picture by Labille Guiard, who advocated for the equality of women and passed her conviction on to the next generation, has been in the collection since the 1950s, and I periodically track it down just to get a fix of her radiant optimism. In the end, the deepest pleasure in having the European painting galleries back all 45 will reopen in 2022 is the opportunity to revisit friends, many long familiar, some new. We all have our favorites. Of those now on view in the refurbished spaces, I'll just mention a few of mine. I'm a longtime fan of Johannes Vermeer's late 1660s "Study of a Young Woman," now part of "In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at the Met" in the Lehman Wing. Some portrait sitters come across as stiffs or grouches. (Many of Antonello's look like serious troublemakers.). Vermeer's young woman, with her bare brow and wide set eyes suggests a friendly, ready to party E.T., someone I'd like to know. When the Met bought Duccio di Buoninsegna's "Madonna and Child" (Gallery 624) for 45 million in 2004, some eyebrows went up. Too much money! Wrong. It was worth every cent, and it's priceless now. Dated to around 1300, it's roughly the size of an iPad and painted in tempera and gold. In it, the infant Jesus pushes aside his mother's veil so he can see her sad face. Their eyes meet. They both know the history to come. The picture may or may not have been made for private worship. Its precise origins are obscure but we can see that it was an object of devout attention. Dark scorch marks from altar candles are still visible on its frame. And today at the Met it still radiates all manner of light. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Baseball's Unwritten Rules: Where Does It Say You Can't Do That? Earlier this week, Fernando Tatis Jr. of the San Diego Padres hit a grand slam, a seemingly exciting moment for player, fans and teammates. But because he had done it when his team was leading by seven runs, the blast earned him a postgame rebuke from his manager. Tatis, you see, had broken one of baseball's unwritten rules. Those rules can be mystifying and arbitrary to the casual fan, and sometimes to the hard core one as well. "Violations" of these "rules" cause controversies in the game more often than you would think. Could there really be a bad time to hit a grand slam? "In this game in particular, we had a little bit of a comfortable lead," Tingler said of what eventually became a 14 4 win over the Texas Rangers. "We're not trying to run up the score or anything like that." That all came as a surprise to Tatis. "I know a lot of unwritten rules," he said. "I was kind of lost on this. If you find it baffling that a player should let a good pitch go by rather than, say, hit a grand slam, you are not alone. Even rival players came to Tatis's defense. "Keep swinging 3 0 if you want to, no matter what the game situation is," Reds pitcher Trevor Bauer wrote on Twitter. "The only thing you did wrong was apologize. Stop that." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "If you don't like giving up 3 0 grand slams, pitch better," said Colin Poche, a Tampa Bay Rays pitcher. Even a Hall of Famer weighed in. "Everyone should hit 3 0. Grand slams are a huge stat," Johnny Bench said. It's hard to make a list of baseball's unwritten rules because, well, they're unwritten. But in many cases they revolve around not showing up the opposition and not running up the score, of playing the game "the right way," though that standard is similarly undefined. (There are also superstitions, like not talking about no hitters.) For the uninitiated, here are a few other violations to be wary of. Don't steal bases when your team is way ahead. Rickey Henderson stole a base, something he did more than anyone else in baseball. But because his Padres led the Brewers, 11 5, in that game in 2001, the opposing manager, Davey Lopes, took exception, charging onto the field and threatening to have a pitcher throw at Henderson the next time he was up. (He didn't get the chance. Henderson was prudently pulled from the game.) Henderson may have had a good excuse for breaking the rule, though: It was later reported that he had been asleep in the clubhouse and didn't know the score when he was sent out as a pinch runner. Curt Schilling of the Diamondbacks was five outs from a perfect game. Ben Davis of the Padres broke it up by beating out a bunt. The tactic drew the ire of the Arizona bench. But the Padres were just as mad. "We're all tied for first place and we're trying to win the game and they're up there screaming at him because he dropped a bunt down," the Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn told The San Diego Union Tribune after the 2001 game. "So what? Who cares? We're trying to win the game. They're all hooting like we ain't supposed to try to win a game." Don't flip your bat or otherwise preen after a home run. There's nothing like a flamboyant bat flip to incense an opposing team. There have been many over the years, but the top prize still may go to Jose Bautista for the Toronto Blue Jays in the 2015 division series. After he connected, Bautista froze at the plate watching the ball, then sent his bat deep into foul territory with a muscular hurl. "He's doing stuff kids do in Wiffle ball games," Rangers reliever Sam Dyson groused. Don't watch your homers land, and circle the bases quickly. A first inning home run by Max Muncy of the Dodgers in San Francisco last season left the park and landed in McCovey Cove. What irritated Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner, though, was the few moments Muncy spent watching it leave the park. The two exchanged words even as Muncy finally circled the bases. Muncy related afterward: "He said, 'Don't watch the ball, you run.' I just responded back, 'If you don't want me to watch the ball, you can go get it out of the ocean.'" The only thing a humbled pitcher dislikes more than a slow start out of the batter's box, though, is a slow home run trot. Rhys Hopkins of the Phillies took 34 seconds to get around the bags in a game against the Mets in 2019, the slowest time in five years, according to Statcast. Perhaps he was motivated by two brushback pitches the night before by the same pitcher, Jacob Rhame. Rhame took the high road. "He got me," he said. "If I make a better pitch, he doesn't get to run the bases." Alex Rodriguez during a verbal spat in 2010 over him stepping on the mound. Pitchers are protective of the mound. During a game in 2010, Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees was returning to first from third after a foul ball when he took the direct round over the pitching mound. His bigger unwritten rules violation, though, was letting his feet touch the rubber. It was enough for pitcher Dallas Braden of the A's to yell at him on the field, and then go on a seven minute postgame tirade. "If my grandmother ran across the mound, she would have heard the same thing he heard period," Braden said. "That's the way I handle the game and the way I handle myself on my workday. That's just the way it is. I would never disrespect anybody like that." Braden's complaints were "pretty funny, honestly," said Rodriguez, adding he had no idea what he did wrong. While the unwritten rules can seem foolish sometimes, the former major leaguer Doug Glanville sees some value in them. "Our lives are enveloped in unwritten rules that cover safety, politeness, respect, etiquette, money and so on," he once wrote in The New York Times. "These are ways to acculturate a new generation in tradition, and doing that empowers that generation to take ownership, invest and evolve them." He added: "As a former big leaguer, I roll my eyes in isolated cases and think baseball players' ideas on unwritten rules are silly and uptight, or even culturally insensitive to baseball's evolving diversity. But I also see behind the bravado. "Veterans and rookies, retired players and coaches engage across team loyalties about how they want the culture of the game to move forward. Imperfect, but considerably better than rejecting all lessons of the past or, worse, ignoring them completely." And how has Tatis assimilated the lessons of the past? Despite his contrition after the game in which he hit a late grand slam, he returned the next night and stole third. His team was up by six runs at the time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
One thing we learn in "Captain Marvel" is that it's pronounced MarVELL, like the English poet or at least it used to be, on distant planets and right here on Earth, a windy rock also known as C 53. That was back in 1995, when most of this movie takes place and when the world as we know it had not yet been colonized by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes, of course, Marvel Comics had been around for decades, but when the heroine crashes through the roof of the Blockbuster Video store, landing in between the "Family" and "Drama" sections, there are no Avengers or Iron Man titles on the shelves. Instead, she picks up a VHS box of "The Right Stuff," which earns a mild chuckle, since while we know that she's a space alien named Vers (rhymes with "cheers"), we also have reason to suspect that this young woman is connected with the United States Air Force, and maybe the space program, too, like the guys in that film. Also known as Carol Danvers, and played by Brie Larson, she has some of their bravado, and also since she's on the way to intergalactic superheroism a righteous sense of mission and a burgeoning identity crisis. Captain Marvel has had many, many identities in the comics. The last and least surprising thing we learn about her is that "Captain Marvel will return in 'Avengers: Endgame,'" a scrappy little picture that will be released in seven weeks, if you can stand to wait that long. Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck from a script they wrote with Geneva Robertson Dworet, "Captain Marvel" is an origin story, which is to say a resume check for the newest member of popular culture's biggest, most heavily capitalized corporate team. As such, it's pretty good fun, and could almost be described without sarcasm as a scrappy little picture, like most of Boden and Fleck's other work. (Their resume includes "Half Nelson," "Sugar" and "It's Kind of a Funny Story"). It's not too long, not too self important, and benefits from the craft and talent of a cast that includes Annette Bening, Jude Law and Ben Mendelsohn. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. After a two week hiatus, Stephen Colbert greeted his audience the best way he knew how: with a sidelong jab at President Trump. The president is threatening to continue the government shutdown, which began on Dec. 22, for months to come if he does not receive congressional approval for funding a border wall. "Tonight I am excited to announce that after a 17 day shutdown, I am reopening 'The Late Show.' I held my ground, because I kept my promise and built a wall of mashed potatoes, around my midsection, over the Christmas holidays." STEPHEN COLBERT Colbert made fun of Trump for saying on Twitter that the border wall should now be a "barrier" made out of steel, not concrete in part because it is "less obtrusive." "Oh, thank goodness. Last thing you'd want in a border wall is something obtrusive. That's why they call it the Inconspicuous Wall of China." STEPHEN COLBERT President Trump has taken to using "Game of Thrones" iconography to push for his border wall, and on Saturday he posted an image on Twitter of himself beside the slogan, "The Wall Is Coming." Colbert had a nit to pick with the appropriation. "You can't say, 'The Wall Is Coming.' That's mixing up two different things from the series. There's the wall, and there's 'winter is coming.' That's like quoting 'The Godfather' by saying, 'I'm going to make him an offer he can't cannoli.'" STEPHEN COLBERT Trevor Noah welcomed House Democrats back into power with a not that nostalgic look back at 2011, the last time they held a majority. "As you probably know by now, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years! That's right, eight years. You realize, the last time the Democrats had this much power in Congress, there were only two 'Transformer' movies and Harvey Weinstein only looked like a creep." TREVOR NOAH "I read that an Arizona woman is accused of sending a man more than 159,000 texts after they went on one date. When asked why she did it, the woman was like, 'Why, did he ask about me?'" JIMMY FALLON "According to Reuters, Google moved 22.7 billion to Bermuda in 2017 through a Dutch shell company to avoid taxes. While over at Bing, you're no longer allowed to flush if it's just pee." SETH MEYERS "The N.Y.P.D. is looking for a man who recently broke into an Apple store and stole 75,000 worth of product. That is crazy why would anyone need five iPhone cables?" SETH MEYERS Roy Wood Jr. wants to be angry at R. Kelly, but he can't stop being "seduced by his music." So he came up with a strategy, inspired by the Netflix film "Bird Box." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In a memoir by Zuzana Ruzickova, the Czech harpsichordist who died in 2017, art persists through the Holocaust and Communist rule . It is night. A young girl and her mother have just been transported to Auschwitz. The wind howls, guards scream, dogs bark, people push and shove. The girl is holding something. "In my right hand, numb with cold, I still gripped Bach's beautiful Sarabande from the English Suite," she would recall years later, "and I looked down and read it to myself because it was somehow essential for me at that moment to keep it in my head." Trucks arrive, and the girl is herded into one. Her mother is barred from going with her. Hysterical, the girl lets go of the Bach score, which flies away. But her mother is in motion: "Breaking free from her guards, she rushed forward to rescue my snippet of hope , and shrill voices rang out behind her." "Sprinting like a woman half her age," the girl's memory continues, "she somehow plucked the score from the air and ran to our truck, offering it up to me inches from the tailgate." This story appears in Zuzana Ruzickova's recently published autobiography, "One Hundred Miracles: A Memoir of Music and Survival," based on interview transcripts and written with Wendy Holden. Ruzickova, who died in 2017 at 90, was one of the world's leading harpsichordists and a specialist in Bach; indeed, she was the first musician to record his complete keyboard works. "Bach provides a sense of order in a world of disorder," she said in "Zuzana: Music Is Life," a documentary film released in 2017. The memoir offers more evidence of the significance of her art to her stability in terrifying times, taking her from her earliest memories through the camps to Stalinism, the Velvet Revolution and beyond. Born in 1927 in Plzen, southwest of Prague, Ruzickova had just decided to become a professional musician when the Nuremberg Laws tightened in Czechoslovakia after the Nazi invasion in 1939. When her family received a summons for their deportation to Terezin in January 1942, she went to see her beloved teacher for a final lesson. "She made no suggestion that this might be the last piece we ever played together," Ruzickova writes in the memoir, "but I knew what we were both thinking." They decided to play Bach's E Minor Sarabande, from the Fifth English Suite, as a piano duet. The piece then kept Ruzickova sane on her cattle car journey: "I was terribly ill on that train. I don't know if it was nerves or something I'd eaten, but I was so tired and so sick. Trying to stay calm, I played Bach's Sarabande over and over in my head, singing it to myself quietly and thinking of the last time I'd played with Madame." It was the only piece Ruzickova would take with her from Terezin to Auschwitz , but not the only one she would encounter there. She recognized other music just after she and other girls in her group had been rounded up. "Within minutes we heard the sound of music being played badly on poorly tuned instruments by what I later discovered was the camp orchestra," she wrote. "As the night wore on, the discordant cacophony could no longer drown out the S.S. voices rising in drink and the occasional cries of their victims. I recognized the music as the 'Marinarella.'" This sunny work by Julius Fucik became, she writes, her "most hated piece." It was played on loop for a horrific "Appel," when the prisoners had to stand outside for hours in frigid temperatures while being counted, many dropping dead from hunger, thirst and fatigue. "There was an accordion player named Otto Frohlich and two string players," Ruzickova writes, "and that was almost all they played." From Auschwitz, Ruzickova and her mother were transported to Hamburg for a work detail, and, after more harrowing experiences, to Bergen Belsen, a place, she writes, "where we were meant to die." Starving, she dug under the fence to steal a beet to feed her sick mother: "With my bare hands my once precious piano hands I started to scrape away at the earth." In her memoir she describes her heartbreak when, after the war, a pianist refused to teach her because "my health and my hands were ruined." But through skill and force of will, she eventually earned his respect and friendship, and began a career as a professional musician, first as a pianist and eventually as a harpsichordist. The composer Viktor Kalabis, one of her pupils, became her confidant and then her husband. (A wonderful sampling of their collaboration can be heard in her recording of his "Three Watercolors" for harpsichord.) All this she attained against a backdrop of instability. The family toy store in Plzen, confiscated by the Nazis, was returned to them after the war, only to be taken again by the Communists in 1948. Less harrowing than life in the camps, Communist rule from Stalinism to so called normalization was nonetheless deeply challenging. As an important artist, Ruzickova was allowed to travel because of the foreign currency she generated, but as a non party member she lived a life that was anything but grand. Only after 1989 did she learn how much she had actually been paid for her concerts. Like many of her generation who lived through war, imprisonment, several revolutions and a police state, the last decades of her life were a kind of crescendo, in many ways a genuinely happy ending. Both she and her husband had their academic titles restored; they traveled freely, and she received a parade of awards and honors. She became a beloved teacher. A writer once described the composer Leos Janacek's smile as something that "life awards us like a gold medal for bravery in the face of the enemy." A similar kind of dignity clung to Ruzickova throughout her life and career, and it fills her memoirs. Especially through World War II, sound was at the core of her resilience. "The music in my head was more important to me than ever then," she writes. "It didn't weigh anything and the Nazis didn't even know it was there. They couldn't steal it from me and it was mine, and mine alone." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
An ice like blue brooch, another pin inspired by cold fusion and a pendant meant to look a lot like a mobile phone were the winners of the top award at Schmuck, the contemporary jewelry world's most important event, held in Munich in late February. Schmuck the word is German for jewelry displayed the work of 66 jewelry designers from 21 countries, chosen by the Austrian jewelry designer Peter Skubic from more than 700 applicants. It featured a week of talks and exhibits, as well as the parallel Munich Jewelry Week. Winning the Herbert Hofmann Prize were Jelizaveta Suska, 26, a Latvian who lives in Goteborg, Sweden; Stefano Marchetti, 45, of Padova, Italy; and Moniek Schrijer, 32, of Wellington, New Zealand. "The winners all combine unusual materials to create something entirely new," said Ursula Ilse Neuman, one of the four jury members. Now a consulting jewelry curator in New York, she formerly was the curator of jewelry at the Museum of Arts and Design. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The Lakers' LeBron James hugging Anthony Davis as they celebrated winning the N.B.A. championship on Oct. 11, the end of a season interrupted by the pandemic. The next one is supposed to start Dec. 22. The N.B.A.'s players have tentatively approved the league's plan to start the 2020 21 season on Dec. 22, which would require them to report to their teams for training camps in less than a month barely seven weeks after the end of the pandemic disrupted previous season. The union announced Thursday night that it had tentatively accepted the scheduling elements of the league's proposal to begin a shortened 72 game regular season before Christmas, a plan that only took shape two weeks ago at the strong urging of the N.B.A.'s television partners. The tentative approval came in a vote of the league's 30 player representatives, one from each team. Negotiations to lock the new schedule in, however, are likely to continue into next week on some outstanding salary cap and health and safety matters. "Additional details remain to be negotiated, and the N.B.P.A. is confident that the parties will reach agreement on these remaining issues relevant to the upcoming season," the union the National Basketball Players Association said in a statement. The proposed schedule calls for training camps to begin Dec. 1. The regular season, 10 games shorter than usual, would then run through mid May, with the playoffs lasting into July. The N.B.A.'s goal is to complete the 2020 21 season before the Tokyo Olympics, which are scheduled from July 23 to Aug. 8 in 2021. That would allow the league to avoid direct competition with the Olympics and set up the 2021 22 season to return to the N.B.A.'s usual October through June pattern. The plan is strongly preferred by the league's primary media partners, Disney and Turner, following a summer and fall of dismal N.B.A. ratings in a crowded sports landscape, according to a person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. But there were unresolved talks about a new array of coronavirus protocols that will be needed because teams are planning to play in their home markets rather than in a restricted access bubble, as they did when resuming the interrupted 2019 20 season. The league and the union are also still haggling over how much of the players' salaries in the next two seasons will be placed into escrow. Each season, the N.B.A.'s 30 teams are required to spend roughly half of the league's basketball related income on player salaries. The N.B.A. typically holds 10 percent of each player's salary in escrow until the income has been tallied. The money in escrow is used to make up the difference for the players, in case the total paid out was too low, or the owners, if the total was too high. The sides have been discussing a plan that would place roughly 18 percent of player salaries over the next two seasons in escrow. Amid fears that the escrow amount would be 30 percent or more, the union was pushing to spread the reductions over multiple seasons so players wouldn't feel the salary pinch so acutely. Coming off the longest season in N.B.A. history, league officials have spent the past two weeks insisting that the December plan would reduce projected financial losses related to the coronavirus pandemic by at least 500 million in 2020 21. There is still a faction of players that prefers to start in conjunction with Martin Luther King's Birthday in mid January, but the N.B.A. has prioritized the needs of its television partners in embracing the December start. This partially stems from the league's expectation that the coming season will be played in largely empty arenas because of the ongoing pandemic, which league officials said could reduce revenue by up to 40 percent. The Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat, who contested a six game N.B.A. finals series through Oct. 11, are facing an off season of just seven weeks. In a typical year, finals teams have at least three months off, but the league is expected to make financial concessions to counter the pushback from players on those teams and others who wanted a longer break after the rigors of playing out the 2019 20 season in the bubble at Walt Disney World. Opening on Dec. 22 would enable Turner to broadcast its usual Tuesday night doubleheader to start the season, while also preserving Disney's lucrative five game slate that has become a staple of Christmas Day's television offerings. The league, though, has not yet been able to set a date to start free agency which teams have been expecting to begin shortly after the Nov. 18 draft or to lift a freeze on trades in effect since the Feb. 6 trade deadline. The N.B.A. and the players' association faced a Friday deadline to come to terms or allow the parties presumably the league's owners, in this case to terminate the existing labor agreement and send the league into financial chaos. The deadline had been postponed four times since May. The N.B.A. informed teams and the players in recent days that it fell 1.5 billion short of projected revenue for the 2019 20 season, largely as a result of losses tied to the pandemic. The league maintains that the shortfall would have doubled to about 3 billion without the television money that was recouped during the bubble restart from July 30 to Oct. 11. The cost of arranging that bubble was an estimated 190 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
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. 'ALICE BY HEART' at the Newman Mills Theater at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space (previews start on Jan. 30; opens on Feb. 26). Curiouser and curiouser. For MCC, Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, creators of the beloved rock 'n' roll weepy "Spring Awakening," have teamed with Jessie Nelson of "Waitress" for a riff on "Alice in Wonderland," set during the London Blitz. Molly Gordon stars as the girl gone down the rabbit hole. 212 727 7722, mcctheater.org 'BY THE WAY, MEET VERA STARK' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (previews start on Jan. 29; opens on Feb. 19). The Signature revives Lynn Nottage's incisive, underrated, time skipping comedy of race and fame. Set in golden age Hollywood and in less lustrous decades, too, the play examines stardom and the stories we tell about the icons we love. Kamilah Forbes's production stars Jessica Frances Dukes. 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org 'FREESTYLE LOVE SUPREME' at Greenwich House Theater (previews start on Jan. 30; opens on Feb. 12). It's one thing to say, "Yes and ..." But can you say it to a beat? And make it rhyme? This improvised hip hop show, an early creation of Lin Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail, returns for a month or two of ad libbed rap. Joining the regular crew are occasional guest stars including Miranda, Daveed Diggs and Christopher Jackson. freestylelovesupreme.com 'GOD SAID THIS' at the Cherry Lane Theater (in previews; opens on Jan. 29). A companion play to Leah Nanako Winkler's "Kentucky," this Primary Stages piece finds a New Yorker, Hiro, returning to her old Kentucky home, braving her newly sober father, her born again sister and her ailing mother. Morgan Gould directs, with Satomi Blair, Ako and Jay Patterson revisiting their roles. 866 811 4111, primarystages.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'JOAN' at Here (in previews; opens on Jan. 27). Having worked up a lather in "Sweat," the ferocious Johanna Day has returned to the stage in this new play by Stephen Belber ("Tape," "Match"). For Colt Coeur, Adrienne Campbell Holt directs a story of an American everywoman. Adam Harrington and Marjan Neshat also star. 866 811 4111, coltcoeur.org 'THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN' at the Irish Repertory Theater (previews start on Jan. 30; opens on Feb. 12). Sean O'Casey, a great playwright of the Anglo Irish renaissance, is reborn, courtesy of the Irish Rep. It will present all three of his major plays, beginning with this 1923 tragicomedy, directed by Ciaran O'Reilly. Set in the Dublin slums, it centers on a poet who perilously resembles an I.R.A. soldier. 866 811 4111, irishrep.org 'SUPERHERO' at the Tony Kiser Theater at Second Stage Theater (previews start on Jan. 31; opens on Feb. 28). Why borrow a cup of sugar when you can cadge a pinch of something more extraordinary. In this new musical from the "Next to Normal" composer Tom Kitt, with a book by John Logan, a widow and her teenage son befriend a peculiar neighbor. Kyle McArthur, Kate Baldwin and Bryce Pinkham star, with musical staging by Lorin Latarro and direction by Jason Moore. 212 246 4422, 2st.com 'AMERICAN SON' at the Booth Theater (closes on Jan. 27). Christopher Demos Brown's play, about a mother waiting in a Florida police station for news of her missing son, ends its vigil. Jesse Green described this drama, directed by Kenny Leon and anchored by Kerry Washington's "great performance," as "not a subtle play" and "more like a slice of a nightmare." 212 239 6200, americansonplay.com 'BEHIND THE SHEET' at Ensemble Studio Theater (closes on Feb. 10). Charly Evon Simpson's moving drama, about a controversial gynecologist, has only a few appointments remaining. Colette Robert directs a drama inspired by J. Marion Sims, a physician who made his breakthroughs by experimenting on unanesthetized slave women. Ben Brantley wrote, "'Behind the Sheet' may be a quiet play. But its echoes are thunderous." ensemblestudiotheatre.org THE BIG APPLE CIRCUS at Damrosch Park (closes on Jan. 27). Soon this circus will pull up its stakes, and the aerialists, the acrobats, the clowns, the horses, a chic poodle and an unspeakably adorable pig will take their final bows. If this year's incarnation is a little less highflying than some, it is also good hearted, pleasure minded and a total delight. 212 257 2330, bigapplecircus.com 'THE WAVERLY GALLERY' at the John Golden Theater (closes on Jan. 27). Kenneth Lonergan's wrenching play about a family fractured by memory loss finishes its run. Directed by Lila Neugebauer, it stars Lucas Hedges, Michael Cera and Elaine May, who, Ben Brantley wrote, "turns out to be just the star to nail the rhythms, the comedy and the pathos." Want to see more of May? Film Forum is hosting a tribute to her movies as part of Far Out in the 70s: A New Wave of Comedy. 212 239 6200, thewaverlygalleryonbroadway.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
People who met the British novelist and philosopher (1919 1999) tended to want to describe her. She had big, round blue eyes, strawlike hair and a broad face with high cheekbones. She resembled a lioness or, in one observer's view, the actress Falconetti in the 1928 silent "The Passion of Joan of Arc." The intensity of Murdoch's gaze, boring into you from the dust jackets of her many novels, seemed a promise of the books' contents. For decades this remarkable writer delivered prickly, sophisticated and somewhat unearthly fiction about good and evil and sex and morality. She trailed a large, large muse. She deftly moved her ideas about, positioning them like the slabs used to build Stonehenge. This year is the centennial of Murdoch's birth. It's also been 20 years since her death at age 79. Distressingly, her posthumous reputation is in semi shambles. Many of her novels are out of print. Young people tend not to have read her. She is seldom taught. Well thumbed Penguin paperback editions of Murdoch's novels, foxed and sun damaged, were once staples of Goodwill stores and other secondhand bookshops. These have largely disappeared, in my experience, from circulation. It's hard to argue with the British writer D.J. Taylor's contention, in The Guardian in 2014, that "shares in are in freefall." How did it come to this? In part, it may be that Murdoch was too prolific. Less might have been more. A few of her novels, if not outright duds, are dud like. The intellectuals and artists and eccentrics in her lesser books seem to be moved like lethargic wooden chess pieces, making you feel like you're trapped in the lower intestine of some baroque scholarly superstructure. In part, too, it may be that Murdoch is supremely hard to pin down in nearly every regard. There is her ardent and complicated sexuality, for example. She had many liaisons with both men and women throughout her life, even during her long and happy marriage to the shambling and abstracted English literary critic and writer John Bayley. 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. Murdoch was a staunch feminist, and a pioneer in putting complex and believable gay and lesbian characters into novels. But she also wrote six novels from the point of view of male characters (these are, in fact, some of her very best) and none from a woman's first person perspective. Nothing about her was ever simple. Murdoch's dwindling reputation is painful to behold. To allow her name to fade from the list of the most elite writers in English of the second half of the 20th century is to begin to take our bearings from the wrong landmarks. To borrow a line from Peter J. Conradi, her biographer, "She colonized the century and gave it back to us as myth." She was the rare kind of great, buoyant, confident writer who could drive the whole machine. She was as in touch with animal instincts as intellectual ones. The scope of her vision makes you feel, when you are close to her fiction, that you have glimpsed the sublime that you have swum very near to a whale. "All speech is seduction," Murdoch once wrote, and she seduced on many levels at once. Her novels have a tidal pull. They're so often about extreme love that if I had to choose a paradigmatic sentence from her work, it might be this one from her piquant and often farcical novel "A Severed Head" (1961): "I would come to her even if I had to wade through blood." There is no sense in being a reader (or a critic) if you don't go where your pleasure takes you. So allow me to speak about my favorite Murdoch novel alongside perhaps "A Severed Head," "The Black Prince" and "The Bell": "The Sea, The Sea," from 1978. The novel, which won the Booker Prize, is about a widely known theater director, Charles Arrowby, a kind of aging Mike Nichols character, who retires from London and moves to an isolated house by a rocky sea. He intends to hole up and write his memoirs. Instead his past his sexual past, primarily catches up to him in darkly comic ways. Murdoch wrote "The Sea, The Sea" under the influence of Shakespeare's comedies, and that influence burns brightly. Murdoch once wrote, "Any high theory about Shakespeare is no good, not because he is so divine but because he is so human." One could say the same about her. "The Sea, The Sea" is profound and delicious for many reasons. For one thing, it is a multilayered working out of her feelings about the intensity of romantic experience. "Extreme love must bring terror with it," she writes. Also: "You die at heart from a withdrawal of love." "The Sea, The Sea" also happens to be intelligently and sympathetically concerned with four of my favorite things: swimming, eating, drinking and talking, not necessarily in that order. It is an ideal beach book especially if you enjoy the cooler and pebblier and spookier northern sort of beach. Arrowby is hunger obsessed ("Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too") but in an unusual and somewhat dogmatic way. He likes simple food, homely little picnics, and he often resorts to a can opener. He complains about haute cuisine because it's expensive and pretentious and a bore, and we all drink so much we barely experience it anyway. What's more, it "inhibits hospitality, since those who cannot or will not practice it hesitate to invite its devotees for fear of seeming rude or a failure." Murdoch drops offbeat little maxims as she goes: "Basil is of course the king of herbs"; "Only a fool despises tomato ketchup"; "Meat is really just an excuse for eating vegetables." Not all of Murdoch's novels are food minded. My point is that, whatever human topic she is considering, she has a great deal to say that is funny, pointed, dead on. She fills us to our ears not just with ideas but teeming humanity. "The Sea, The Sea" also contains a lot of commentary about the theater, and about social class. Charles, the insecure and unreliable narrator of "The Sea, The Sea," will make nearly any reader squirm. Were he alive today, he would be a candidate for a bug zapping MeToo cancellation. He has slept with (and lied to) many women under his professional control, and some of his comments are plainly misogynistic. Beautiful women, the morning after, tend to look like prostitutes to him. He also remarks, "There is something strange and awful about the distorted open mouths of singers, especially women, the wet white teeth, the moist red interior." That sentence, with its obvious sexual panic, should probably be sung to "The Vagina Dentata Cantata," a made up ditty in Sigrid Nunez's terrific novel "Naked Sleeper." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
new video loaded: 52 Places to Go: A Bird's Eye View in Laikipia | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The postponement of much of the college football season could disrupt the flow of more than 1 billion from advertisers to the television networks that count on a slate of game broadcasts every fall. The return of the college game a reliable ratings draw might have helped the TV industry salvage a year of declining revenues resulting from pandemic related cancellations and production delays. Now that the Big Ten and the Pacific 12 conferences, two of college football's five powerhouse leagues, have pushed back their seasons amid concerns about the coronavirus, media companies are preparing for more pain. Many players and school administrators, and even President Trump, had lobbied against the postponement, which could have financial ramifications for teams, campuses and local communities. The punting of the season will also affect the networks that have spent billions to secure broadcast rights, as well as the companies that had planned to spend millions to advertise their products. "The implications are huge economically," said Kevin Krim, the chief executive of EDO, a TV ad measurement platform that works with the networks and advertisers. "The cable and broadcast television ecosystem, with advertisers and rights fees and subscriber fees, are heavily anchored to live sports, and the most valuable franchises there are football." Last season, college football brought in nearly 1.7 billion in spending on television advertising, according to the research firm Kantar. Companies like Allstate, Chick fil A and State Farm each spent more than 30 million to advertise during games, while AT T spent more than 70 million, Kantar found. The Walt Disney Company and Fox are among the conglomerates likely to take a hit. More than 27.3 million people watched Louisiana State triumph over Clemson to win the national championship on Jan. 13, a game broadcast by the Disney owned ESPN. It drew an estimated 91 million in advertising, according to EDO. For Fox last year, college football was responsible for nearly 6 percent of ad spending and nearly 10 percent of all TV ad impressions, or viewer exposure to ads, according to the ad measurement company iSpot.TV. ESPN drew 9.5 percent of its impressions from the sport. ABC, also owned by Disney, racked up 7.5 percent of its impressions thanks to college football. The pandemic has left live sports programming "in constant flux, almost on a daily basis," said Jeremy Carey, the managing director of the sports marketing agency Optimum Sports, and companies and their ad agencies are working to adapt their marketing plans. At risk: more than 300 regular season national college football broadcasts that would require more than 50 days to watch, Mr. Carey said. "There's still a lot of dust in the air, and there may be more left to settle," he said. "It's really challenging when you don't have all the puzzle pieces to paint an exact picture." He added that Optimum was having conversations with the leagues, the teams, TV networks and its advertising clients. 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. "There's going to be a domino effect here, because if Advertiser X can't get their dollars into college football, and if they have a specific time frame for messaging, they're going to have to find those audiences elsewhere," Mr. Carey said. Visa, which advertises on pro football broadcasts but not during college games, is monitoring the situation closely, "as it could be an indicator of how the N.F.L. season progresses," said Mary Ann Reilly, who heads the company's marketing in North America. The company is developing contingency plans if pro football is canceled, delayed or cut short, readying itself for the possibility that it will need to shift its spending to other areas, such as digital platforms, Ms. Reilly said. Advertisers have already been trying to work around delays resulting from pandemic related shutdowns of TV shows and the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics this summer, said Rich Greenfield, an analyst with LightShed Partners, a media research firm. "The problems keep piling up," he said. "The catastrophe for the media industry at large is that not only are college sports in jeopardy, but also there's really very limited original entertainment programming. So the TV ecosystem is going to be really starved for content to put ads next to." The Big 12 college conference said on Wednesday that it planned to hold games starting on Sept. 26. And Fox still plans to air major league baseball games and pro wrestling in the fall, in addition to National Football League games. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
ROSEMONT, Ill. A new outlet mall under construction here the first enclosed mall to be built in the Chicago area in over a decade is both a departure for the outlet industry and a major new attraction for this close in Chicago suburb long known as a convention and business hub. The 250 million mall, Fashion Outlets of Chicago, is scheduled to open this summer. The two level, 530,000 square foot center is being co developed by AWE Talisman, a Florida based company that also owns outlet centers in Las Vegas and Santa Fe, N.M., and the Macerich Company of Santa Monica, Calif. "The project is a game changer on several levels," said Arthur Weiner, chairman of AWE Talisman. "We're in a prized area with a higher level of construction and amenities than you would normally see at an outlet center. We also have a pretty good store list." The mall, which is 90 percent leased, is focused on luxury retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue's Off 5th, Last Call by Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale's the Outlet Store and Barneys New York. In addition, there are outlets by top fashion names like Prada, Gucci, Giorgio Armani, Tory Burch and Michael Kors. The developer and the retailers hope to shake up Chicago's retail scene with the new mall. To date, outlet stores have not been very prominent in the Chicago area, with the nearest outlet center Chicago Premium Outlets in Aurora, Ill. about 40 miles from downtown Chicago. But Rosemont is a closer suburb and only 20 minutes from Chicago's Michigan Avenue, where all of the above stores have thriving full price locations. Arnie Orlick, senior vice president of outlets for Bloomingdale's, said that the mall's focus on luxury one of the fastest growing segments of the outlet market bodes well for the project. "When all of these retailers go into a mall," he said, "you know they're going to attract many more customers than a traditional outlet center." Neil Stern, senior partner with McMillanDoolittle, a Chicago based retail consulting firm, said that the mall reflected a shift in the outlet business. "There used to be a clear divide between outlets and regular retail, but that doesn't really exist anymore," he said. "Today we're seeing outlets that are almost the equivalent of full line stores." Specifically, outlets used to be places where retailers and manufacturers disposed of closeout and past season goods. Today, however, they tend to be separate divisions within their companies and tend to have their own supply chains and customer bases. "It's the same brands and labels but they've engineered the process to get the price points more in line with the outlet environment," said Mr. Stern. Robert Wallstrom, president of Saks's Off 5th outlet division, said that Off 5th was merchandised for a different customer than Saks's regular stores. "There's some crossover between the full price and off price customers, but it's only about 10 percent," he said. "What we're trying to create is a luxury value department store." The location is also a departure. In the past, outlet centers were often bare bones affairs located far from major population centers. Fashion Outlets, however, is a quick drive from downtown Chicago. "We're excited about it," said Wayne A. Hussey, senior vice president of properties and store development at Neiman Marcus. "Rosemont is an amazing area in terms of the critical mass of hotels and restaurants and it's very close to the airport as well." That last comment is something of an understatement. Rosemont is not just close to O'Hare International Airport. It's literally next door. This proximity was one of the main drivers of the project, according to Mr. Weiner, of AWE Talisman. "Outlet shopping is fueled by tourism," he said. "Visitors can be 50 percent or more of the business." Mr. Weiner said the mall would offer inducements for travelers. In addition to shuttle service to and from the airport, the center will also provide early check in and baggage handing services for a fee. "Our goal is to have more Fashion Outlet buses than Hertz buses circling O'Hare," he said. A major contributor to the mall is the village of Rosemont, which awarded the project about 50 million in grants and tax breaks. It also split with the State of Illinois's Toll Highway Authority the cost of a new 15 million off ramp to the Tri State Tollway that curves around the back of the mall. Rosemont is one of the more unusual municipalities in the Chicago area. Wedged between the airport and a forest preserve and bisected by a dense web of expressways, it's an island of commerce surrounded by older bedroom communities. In addition to the 840,000 square foot Donald E. Stephens Convention Center and the 18,500 seat Allstate Arena, the two and a half square mile village has 5,501 hotel rooms. Although only 4,200 people actually live in Rosemont, the average daytime population approaches 50,000 people. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
It's shaping up to be a record breaking year for summer travel. Airlines for America, an industry trade group, is expecting about 234 million passengers to travel worldwide on United States airlines between June and the end of August, the highest number ever, and up 4 percent over last summer. Indeed, Dallas Fort Worth International, one of the nation's busiest airports, is predicting that some 18 million people will pass through more than any other summer. At the same time, the vacation rental site Airbnb is projecting that this will be its biggest summer to date by a wide margin. Despite recent world events, more Americans than ever plan to go abroad. The State Department is expecting an unprecedented 20 million passport applications this year. Allianz Global Assistance, an insurance provider, said that while some travelers wanted to cancel visits in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Britain, London and Paris are among Americans' most popular European summer travel destinations. (In May, Allianz predicted that both cities will see a year over year spike in the number of summer travelers, up 37 percent in London and 29 percent in Paris.) With crowded roads and airports, not to mention destinations (international visitors continued to come to the United States in April despite President Trump's executive orders on travel and immigration, according to the most recent report from the U.S. Travel Association), a little preparation can make all the difference. Below, a guide to what you need to know for (relatively) smooth summer travel, including what local laws about car and ride sharing are, if rules about laptops on airplanes have changed, how to get travel and weather alerts, and whether insurance policies cover events such as terrorist attacks. In March, laptops and other large electronic devices were banned from the cabins of flights to the United States originating in airports in 10 Muslim majority countries because of concerns that the Islamic State was developing a bomb that could be hidden in portable devices. Since then there's been talk of the ban being expanded to more airports. In June, John F. Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary, told a House of Representatives panel that he was considering adding 71 more airports in Europe, Africa and the Middle East to the ban if they don't adhere to additional security measures. At the moment, large electronic devices are allowed in the cabins of most flights, but if the ban is extended, passengers must check them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Frank Robinson during the 1960s, when Sports Illustrated wrote that pitchers figured "the only way to deal with Robinson is to hit him before he hits you." So the mighty Frank Robinson is dead at 83. As a young kid, I was struck by the man, tall, strong, so coolly menacing at the plate, and the statistics and awards that underlined all that the eye took in: those 586 pre steroidal home runs and the only man who won the Most Valuable Player Award in both leagues. And there were all those times he was knocked down and dusted himself off and hit a home run on the next pitch. He practically sneered as he trotted around the bases. As Sports Illustrated wrote in the 1960s, pitchers figured "the only way to deal with Robinson is to hit him before he hits you." He was also the first black manager in baseball. He was given a crappy team, of course, an old Buick station wagon of a Cleveland Indians squad. You thought white owners would give the first black manager the keys to a Mercedes? He played designated hitter on that team and at age 39 hit nine home runs with a .508 slugging percentage in 118 at bats. On opening day of that year, 1975, Robinson the player hit a home run for Robinson the manager. And as with all things African American and Major League Baseball, Robinson looms as a figure out of the Mesozoic Age. Less than 8 percent of major league players are African American, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, down from a high of more than 18 percent. More damning still, there is but one manager who could be classified as African American. Dave Roberts of the Los Angeles Dodgers is of African American and Japanese descent (There are four Latino managers). None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. This is a deeply perplexing shortfall, and as it persists year after year after year like the winter and summer solstices, one can safely assume that something more than dumb chance accounts for this problem. We might look to the fact that those doing the hiring, owners and team presidents and general managers, are overwhelmingly white. Baseball men, and the vast majority are male, tend to twin talk of a dearth of minority managers with talk about trends toward analytics, as if that explains something. As Ivy League guys rule many front offices, it is said, they naturally seek managerial candidates fluent in O.B.P., WHIP, FIP, and so on and on, the arcana and language of analytics. Last fall, the Boston Red Sox played the Dodgers in the World Series. The manager of the Red Sox, Alex Cora, was Latino and there was the aforementioned Roberts in the other dugout. They had bested a passel of white managed teams on the way to that affair, not one of whom possessed an advanced mathematics degree from Caltech. I put the questions of baseball analytics to Joey Cora, brother of Alex and baseball coach for decades. He had interviewed several times for manager without making the final cut. "Everyone in baseball understands the importance of statistics and analysis; we're saturated with that," he said. "That's no secret anymore. You also need to know baseball and how to lead men and how to combine all of that. That was a good question last October and a good question still. Robinson managed in the pre analytics era, and few who knew him doubted his necessities when it came to understanding the facets of that game. As the Cincinnati Reds scout George Powles told Sports Illustrated, "I don't know what his I.Q. is, but his B.Q., his baseball quotient, has always been genius." His will was indomitable. In 1965, the Reds traded him to the Baltimore Orioles, his general manager calling him "an old 30." The next year, his first in the American League, he won the Triple Crown, hitting .316 with 49 home runs and 122 R.B.I. That May, he faced Luis Tiant, a brilliant fireball pitcher with the Indians and a man who didn't mind brushing back a hitter. Robinson hit a Tiant pitch 541 feet, making him the first and only man ever to hit a home run entirely out of Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. The Orioles planted a flag labeled "HERE" on the spot where the ball, still in the stratosphere, left the stadium. Baseball men tend to go on and on about their plans to attract great African American athletes back to baseball. They might note that their lamentations coexist with a large number of retired black baseball players who never got a chance to manage baseball teams. Bump your head against a ceiling long enough, and maybe you decide there are better things to do than develop a bruise. Perhaps best to start hiring black managers and planting a flag that says HERE. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
At the Altuzarra show on Saturday night, the style and spirits of the assembled crowd were a little the worse for wear after temperatures had plunged to zero and many had been forced to stand outside at the Moncler show an hour earlier. Emily Ratajkowski, who shot to fame with the "Blurred Lines" music video in 2013, was in a sympathetic mood. "I am beside myself with the cold," she said. "The minute I walk outside, all I can think about is my next place of shelter. It was the same as this in New Hampshire." Earlier this week, the model and actress had been campaigning there for Bernie Sanders. She said she was still reeling from Gloria Steinem's statement suggesting that young women back Mr. Sanders only to connect with the opposite sex. "I said it before and I'll say it again: I was there for Bernie, not for the boys," she said. "It is too bad that feminism hasn't progressed to the extent that women can support other women not based on gender or race, but because of ideas." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
SAN FRANCISCO Some Facebook employees recently told their managers that they were concerned about answering difficult questions about their workplace from friends and family over the holidays. What if Mom or Dad accused the social network of destroying democracy? Or what if they said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, was collecting their online data at the expense of privacy? So just before Thanksgiving, Facebook rolled out something to help its workers: a chatbot that would teach them official company answers for dealing with such thorny questions. If a relative asked how Facebook handled hate speech, for example, the chatbot which is a simple piece of software that uses artificial intelligence to carry on a conversation would instruct the employee to answer with these points: None Facebook consults with experts on the matter. None It has hired more moderators to police its content. None It is working on A.I. to spot hate speech. None Regulation is important for addressing the issue. It would also suggest citing statistics from a Facebook report about how the company enforces its standards. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
"This is a big idea and it's an expensive idea," said Chris Hughes, a co chair of the Economic Security Project, "but I do think that it is in line with the scale of the problem, which is also immense." Chris Hughes was raised by Lutheran parents in Hickory, N.C., and they taught him, by example, to tithe. Every year, they gave 10 percent of their income to the church and other local charities, and Mr. Hughes carried that tradition into adulthood. But in 2008, when he sold 1 million of his Facebook shares on private markets, and the amount of money he needed to give away increased exponentially, he started thinking more seriously about where his contributions might make the most impact. "I grew up looking at the price almost down to the penny on everything from a bottle of juice to a can of soda," he told me in early February, explaining why he wanted to get "the most value" out of philanthropy. We were sitting in the East Village office of the Economic Security Project, an organization Mr. Hughes co founded with two other activists, Dorian Warren and Natalie Foster, to fund the work of technologists, academics, policymakers and others exploring the idea of a guaranteed basic income for low and middle income Americans. Mr. Hughes is one of the co founders of Facebook, for which he did "three years' worth of work for nearly half a billion dollars," as he puts it, emphasizing the extreme nature of his success. He and Mark Zuckerberg were roommates at Harvard, and early on, Mr. Hughes ran the company's communications and marketing department. The social network's colossal success fast tracked Mr. Hughes's career. In 2008, he joined Barack Obama's first presidential campaign to launch and manage My.BarackObama.com, a robust system that organized Obama supporters and was viewed as instrumental to his victory. In 2012, when Facebook went public and The New Republic came up for sale, he bought it, hoping to herald the publication into a digital future and expand its reach. His tumultuous ownership ended in 2016, when he sold the magazine. Later that year, he joined with Mr. Warren and Ms. Foster to form the Economic Security Project. In his new book, "Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn," out this week, Mr. Hughes, 34, traces his ascent to show how the forces that influenced his and Facebook's success technological advancements, globalization and the rise of private equity firms have created a "winner takes all" economy in which only a small group of people succeed. "I think that when people enjoy success of many sorts it is oftentimes easy to forget all of the factors that contribute to making that possible," he said, citing his own upbringing. He grew up in a stable, middle class family, the only child of a paper salesman and a schoolteacher. As a child, he took advantage of government run after school programs and was placed in "gifted" classes. At 14, he searched online for the "best high school in America," turning up Phillips Academy, a prestigious private school in Andover, Mass.; Mr. Hughes applied and talked his way into a scholarship. All these factors, he argues, factored into his success even before he landed in a dorm room with Mr. Zuckerberg. In "Fair Shot," he offers a solution to balance the scale: a guaranteed income of 500 a month for adults earning less than 50,000, including nontraditional workers like parents and students. His proposal is that such a program be paid for through a tax on the country's highest earners, those whose annual income is 250,000 or more. His plan would reach 60 million adults and lift 20 million out of poverty overnight, he writes, while providing those in the middle class with more financial stability. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. "The guaranteed income as an idea is so simple that oftentimes people just sort of skip over the power of cash itself," Mr. Hughes said. "We think, Oh my God, income inequality it's so incredible, all the stats are so insane, but what can we do about it? It's got to be education or it's got to be more job training. It's got to be a higher minimum wage. I say, 'Yes, yes and yes.'" But we need to do more, he insists. The Economic Security Project's office is part university library, part tech start up, with dark leather and wood furniture alongside a white meeting pod near the entrance. It seems to reflect Mr. Hughes's sensibilities his admiration for old, established institutions and his embrace of digital technology. When I arrive for our interview, Mr. Hughes greets me warmly, and we sit in what appears to be the office's only conference room, enclosed by a glass wall. His Southern accent is barely detectable, and in conversation, he is measured and cautious, laying out his argument with his hands, becoming riled only when I bring up the tax bill ("the most perplexing and infuriating move") and the fact that some might view their success as completely self generated ("that's just flat wrong"). Before he started the Economic Security Project, Mr. Hughes had been working on the issue of the guaranteed income internationally through GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that, as the name suggests, operates a cash transfer program that puts money into the hands of those who need it. Mr. Hughes was inspired by the organization's ideals, and he started to wonder whether a similar model could work domestically. "There was no real organization in the United States focused on exploring how a guaranteed income might work," he said. But rather than go in "guns blazing," he explained, "we said: 'This is a promising idea. Let's bring together a network of people to think about this collaboratively and see where it goes.'" The Economic Security Project was originally conceived as a temporary, two year initiative, but has since been extended to 2020. Mr. Hughes's cautiousness is a direct result of his experience at The New Republic. Despite his intention to "make it a publication that millions of people would adore and really value," the result was not so idyllic. He invested 25 million, moved the magazine to a slick new office and hired top talent from other publications. By late 2014, his investment was not paying off, and he brought in Guy Vidra, a former Yahoo executive, to be the C.E.O., hoping he might be able to make The New Republic a digital media company. Mr. Vidra and Mr. Hughes decided to replace Franklin Foer, the editor at the time, but the news reached Mr. Foer first, and he resigned, prompting mass resignations across the publication. What followed was a media maelstrom, and a little over a year later, unable to turn the publication's profits around, Mr. Hughes sold the magazine. "Chris was pretty anxious about where things were headed," Mr. Foer said on a recent call, adding: "There were lots of larger forces remaking journalism, and because of Chris's biography and because of some of the ham fisted ways in which he handled things, he kind of fell into a morality play. It was pretty easy to cast the story as a parable about journalism, and I think that helps explain the heat of the coverage that fell on him." In retrospect, Mr. Hughes said he regretted his approach at The New Republic. "I went in with very big picture kinds of goals and went too far too fast," he said, before I could ask. "Now, I work on this big picture, similarly idealistic kind of idea of a world where everyone has some basic financial security through cash, but I don't think we necessarily need to start off by giving 1,000 to everybody." The plausibility of his idea is a matter of debate. Branko Milanovic, a leading scholar on income inequality, and Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, both believe the plan is unrealistic given the partisan divisions of the current political climate. Mr. Baker also noted that policy changes to restructure the economy, such as weaker patent and copyright laws and public funding for generic medication, were a more urgent need. The Stanford professor and economist Nicholas Bloom brought up the potential for fraud, adding that government enforcement would be difficult. Mr. Hughes is aware that his proposal is far reaching. "This is a big idea and it's an expensive idea, but I do think that it is in line with the scale of the problem, which is also immense," he said. Mr. Hughes said his own windfall gave him the mental space to think about and pursue his goals, and now, he feels a responsibility to pay it forward. When I ask him where this impulse comes from, his face softens. "From my parents." His father wanted him to be successful, he explained, but "there was also a sense that you don't do better at the expense of others." Giving people cash, in Mr. Hughes's view, is not only the most effective way to tackle inequality today, it is also the most humane: "It's truly a belief that people can be trusted and deserve the opportunity to design their lives, to chase their own dreams." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
If you wanted to spend some time contemplating death your own, other people's Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side was a good place to be on Monday night. As part of the American Realness festival, two very different shows Michelle Ellsworth's cheerfully wacky "Preparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome" and a much darker work by Jeremy Wade with an obscenity in its title grappled with disappearance, decline and the thin line between being here and being gone. For Ms. Ellsworth, a jittery performer who expertly folds nervousness into her character, the disappearance in question is both hypothetical and very real. She starts "Preparation," a 50 minute hybrid of PowerPoint presentation and science experiment, by explaining that "in 2003, two things happened." First, she read a column by Maureen Dowd (in The New York Times) titled "Incredible Shrinking Y," about the depletion of the Y chromosome's genetic material over millenniums, and the possibility of its vanishing altogether. (To account for subsequent research suggesting that the Y actually isn't going anywhere, Ms. Ellsworth offers an alternate title, replacing "Obsolescence" with "Evolution.") Second, a friend's father died. And so she set out to prepare for life after men, for the absence of a dad or of half the species. "What will be missed when they go?" Ms. Ellsworth asks. In "Preparation," which can also be enjoyed at PreparationY.com, she takes us through the inventory of male replacement apparatuses she's been developing, homespun contraptions including a toilet seat that lifts and lowers at unpredictable intervals and a "male gazer," a towering eyeball that keeps watch over her every move. "It's not like I love it," she says of the male gaze, "but if it were gone, I might miss it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Kodak Black opened at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart this week with the kind of consumption pattern that became increasingly common in 2018: big streaming numbers, but such a minuscule number of old fashioned sales that it barely seemed to count. "Dying to Live" (Atlantic), the South Florida rapper's latest and his first album since being released from prison in August had the equivalent of 89,000 album sales in the United States last week, according to Nielsen. That included 114 million streams of tracks from the record, yet only about 5,000 purchases of the full album a number that, in those distant, pre streaming Dark Ages of four or five years ago, might not have been enough to qualify even for the Top 100. Also this week, Meek Mill's "Championships" holds at No. 2; Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper's soundtrack for "A Star Is Born" is No. 3; Michael Buble's perennial hit "Christmas" is No. 4; and the new soundtrack to "Spider Man: Into the Spider Verse" (Republic), featuring Post Malone, Nicki Minaj, Juice WRLD and others, opened at No. 5. "Springsteen on Broadway" (Columbia), the official album from Bruce Springsteen's just ended show, opened at No. 11 with 38,000 sales and 1.8 million streams, and XXXTentacion's "Skins," last week's No. 1, dropped to No. 17. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
"Who gets to say 'yes' is massively important," said Alana Mayo, second from right, who will lead Orion Pictures. LOS ANGELES Checks have been written to racial justice organizations. Training programs for Asian, Black and Latino filmmakers have been created. "We must do better" has been tweeted and retweeted by studio executives, most recently after the killing of George Floyd in police custody prompted a national conversation about racism and inequity. But power in Hollywood still belongs almost exclusively to white men. "There are almost no people of color in the film industry who have the power to say, 'This movie is getting made and by this person,'" said Ana Christina Ramon, an author of studies about Hollywood hiring that are published annually by the University of California, Los Angeles. On Thursday, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, the 96 year old home of James Bond, Rocky and RoboCop, took a modest yet meaningful step toward correcting the imbalance, hiring a young producer, Alana Mayo, to remake its Orion Pictures division to focus exclusively on underrepresented filmmakers and stories. Ms. Mayo will lead a greenlight committee made up entirely of women meaning the chairman of MGM's film group, Michael De Luca, will not have a vote in selecting the films that Orion makes or acquires for distribution. "As a person who is a woman and Black and queer, I want to create something that will hopefully make other people like me feel like they are finally a part of the Hollywood system," Ms. Mayo said in a phone interview. "One of the most exciting things about this opportunity is being able to greenlight movies," she added. "Who gets to say 'yes' is massively important. A lot of studio executives still have a fairly myopic view of what and who is film worthy. The human experience is 360 degrees. We have been looking at 20." The overhauled Orion will initially release two or three films a year with budgets of up to 15 million, about the same output and budget level as before. (MGM's signature division works with higher budgets a coming biopic about Aretha Franklin starring Jennifer Hudson cost MGM about 55 million to make and aims to release eight to 10 films annually.) Ms. Mayo, 36, has worked in the film business for more than a decade, climbing rungs at Paramount Pictures and, most recently, producing films and television series with Michael B. Jordan. They were instrumental in pushing WarnerMedia in 2018 to adopt an inclusive hiring policy for productions, and their recent civil rights drama, "Just Mercy," with Mr. Jordan in the lead role, was the first movie to adhere to it. Orion, founded in 1978 as an independent company, sizzled in the 1980s and early '90s, in part because it took risks on challenging stories. Oscar winning hits included "Amadeus" (1984), "Platoon" (1986), "Dances With Wolves" (1990) and "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991). Orion also gave the world "Caddyshack" (1980). But the studio also had misfires, among them Francis Ford Coppola's "The Cotton Club" (1984) and "She Devil" (1989), which paired Meryl Streep with Roseanne Barr. Orion eventually found itself unable to compete with larger studios and declared bankruptcy. MGM bought Orion in 1997, and it remained largely dormant as a film business it also has a TV division, which will not be part of Ms. Mayo's purview until Mr. Hegeman was hired in 2017. Ms. Mayo, who grew up in Chicago (her mother was a paralegal, and her father was a radio executive), graduated from Columbia University with degrees in English and film studies. She got her start in show business as an intern for Lee Daniels ("Precious," "Empire"). She said Spike Lee was as an important influence, in particular his "Bamboozled," a 2000 satire about a modern televised minstrel show. Ms. Mayo was briefly married to Lena Waithe, the Emmy winning writer behind the Showtime series "The Chi." There are other Black women in senior roles at film studios. Nicole Brown is the executive vice president of Tri Star, a Sony division that recently won a bidding war for "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," a Whitney Houston biopic. Vanessa Morrison oversees the development and production of original films for Disney . But they are extremely few and far between, and most do not have the kind of movie picking power that Ms. Mayo has been promised. According to the most recent U.C.L.A. study on diversity in Hollywood, senior management teams at studios are 93 percent white and 80 percent male. Five years ago, they were 92 percent white and 83 percent male. As Ms. Ramon and her fellow researchers noted in the report, "Decisions about what types of films to make, how large a budget to assign to them, how they will be marketed and who will be at the directorial helm are all made by the men and women who occupy Hollywood's executive suites." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Clockwise from left: Jason Henry for The New York Times, Victor J. Blue for The New York Times, Philip Cheung for The New York Times, Jim Wilson/The New York Times Clockwise from left: Jason Henry for The New York Times, Victor J. Blue for The New York Times, Philip Cheung for The New York Times, Jim Wilson/The New York Times Credit... Clockwise from left: Jason Henry for The New York Times, Victor J. Blue for The New York Times, Philip Cheung for The New York Times, Jim Wilson/The New York Times The Economy Is in Record Decline, but Not for the Tech Giants A day after lawmakers grilled the chief executives of the biggest tech companies about their size and power, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Facebook reported surprisingly healthy quarterly financial results, defying one of the worst economic downturns on record. Even though the companies felt some sting from the spending slowdown, they demonstrated, as critics have argued, that they are operating on a different playing field from the rest of the economy. Amazon's sales were up 40 percent from a year ago and its profit doubled. Facebook's profit jumped 98 percent. Even though the pandemic shuttered many of its stores, Apple increased sales of all its products in every part of the world and posted 11.25 billion in profit. Advertising revenue dropped for Alphabet, the laggard of the bunch, but it still did better than Wall Street had expected. "The strong continue to get stronger," said Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities. "As many companies are falling by the wayside, the tech stalwarts continue to gain muscle and power in this environment." The tech companies' financial performance was a remarkable contrast to the overall health of the U.S. economy. The Commerce Department said on Thursday that the country's gross domestic product fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of the year as consumers cut back spending. It was the steepest drop on record. Combined, the companies reported 28.6 billion in quarterly net profit, underscoring how regulatory scrutiny remains more background noise and a distraction for them rather than an imminent threat to their businesses. On Wednesday, a congressional antitrust panel questioned the companies' leaders Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet about their market power and business practices. It was part of a broader inquiry by regulators and lawmakers into the dominance of the tech giants, with open investigations from the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general. The spectacle of the chief executives of the four companies, worth nearly 5 trillion by market capitalization combined, appearing before a House subcommittee was historic. But antitrust investigations often take years, especially if regulators seek more drastic measures like breaking up companies. The pandemic has reinforced the advantages held by the big tech companies. As consumers stay home, demand for Amazon's shopping site surged, while companies are turning to its cloud computing products to keep their services up and running. Apple said the shift to working and learning from home had led more people to splurge on Apple's devices and use its services. "Our products and services are very relevant to our customers' lives, and in some cases, even more during the pandemic than ever before," Luca Maestri, Apple's finance chief, said in an interview. He noted, however, that Apple could have made several billion dollars more if not for the pandemic. Facebook and Google continue to be important to marketers and they are weathering the downturn in advertising better than rivals. Facebook shrugged off a spending slowdown, hailing record levels of engagement with its products. Alphabet said revenue from Google search ads fell 10 percent pushing the company's overall revenue lower for the first time in the company's history but that still was better than rivals. Last week, Microsoft reported an 18 percent slide in search advertising revenue. Since the beginning of March, the companies' stock prices have risen by an average of 35 percent, compared with a 10 percent rise in the S. P. 500. Buoyed by a pandemic induced surge in online shopping, Amazon had 88.9 billion in quarterly sales, up 40 percent from a year earlier. Profit doubled, to 5.2 billion, even though the company invested in expanding warehouses and other ways to increase capacity. "Simply put, Covid 19, in our view, has injected Amazon with a growth hormone," Tom Forte, an analyst at the investment bank D.A. Davidson Company, wrote in a recent note to investors. In April, Mr. Bezos told investors to expect no operating profit, and maybe even a loss, as the company planned to spend about 4 billion on coronavirus related expenses like temporary pay increases, declines in warehouse efficiency because of social distancing, and 300 million for testing its work force for the virus. But even those costs did not compare to the immense surge in demand, with online retail sales up 48 percent. On a call with reporters, Amazon declined to say if it would give its warehouse workers virus related bonuses or raises in the current quarter, but added that pandemic related expenses would fall to 2 billion in the quarter. Sales at Amazon's lucrative cloud computing business, whose customers include major corporations and small start ups, grew 29 percent, to 10.8 billion, falling short of analyst expectations, though it was more profitable than they had expected. Facebook's revenue for the second quarter rose 11 percent from a year earlier to 18.7 billion, while profits jumped 98 percent to 5.2 billion. The results were well above analysts' estimates of 17.3 billion in revenue with a profit of 3.9 billion, according to data provided by FactSet. Despite increasing scrutiny from regulators, questions about its role in subverting elections and how people use the platform to spread misinformation, neither users nor advertisers have shown an inclination to stop using Facebook. More than three billion people now regularly come to Facebook or one of its family of apps, as the services have overtaken much of the developed world. And some 2.47 billion people use one or more of Facebook's apps every day. The company said its number of monthly active users rose 12 percent from a year ago and added that it was seeing record levels of engagement and usage this year because of shelter in place orders around the world. In late June, a grass roots campaign, Stop Hate for Profit, rallied many of the top advertisers on Facebook to reduce their spending because of issues with hate speech on the site. Facebook cautioned investors on Thursday that fallout from the ad boycott was noticeable in July and warned that greater economic turmoil from the pandemic could eventually hurt Facebook's bottom line. Despite the global economic slowdown, people kept buying Apple devices en masse and paid the tech giant billions of dollars more for apps and services on those gadgets. Apple said its sales rose 11 percent to 59.7 billion and its profits increased 12 percent to 11.25 billion. Both figures handily beat analysts' expectations, with Wall Street having forecast declines in both areas. Sales were particularly strong for iPads and Mac computers, as the public was increasingly forced to work and socialize virtually. Revenue also surged in its internet services business, which include Apple's cut of sales from the App Store, the subject of antitrust investigations in the United States and Europe. Even the iPhone, which remains the company's biggest seller, had a slight increase in sales for only the second time in the past seven quarters. Apple also announced a stock split on Thursday that would quadruple its number of shares, allowing people to buy a share in the company for a quarter of the current stock price, which closed at 384.76 on Thursday. Google's parent company, Alphabet, reported its first ever decline in quarterly revenue, hurt by a slowdown in spending by advertisers. The company posted revenue of 38.3 billion and a profit of 6.96 billion significantly higher than what Wall Street analysts had predicted. Ruth Porat, Alphabet's chief financial officer, said advertising revenue "gradually improved" as the quarter went on. The decline came largely from lower sales of advertisements that run alongside Google's search results, but the company's efforts to diversify its business paid off as revenue from YouTube ads and its cloud computing business grew. When asked in a call with financial analysts about the congressional hearing, Mr. Pichai said the company would have to learn to live with the investigations. "The scrutiny is going to be here for a while and we're committed to working through it," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
WASHINGTON "When I meet a woman wearing a ring on a chain around her neck, I know immediately: member of the club," Sheryl Sandberg said. "I never noticed before." That club in question would be the unenviable one for people whose spouses have died. "What I loved about the chain was that I could put both our rings on it," Elizabeth Alexander added. But these two club members, who met recently for breakfast, have more in common than jewelry. Ms. Sandberg, 47, the chief operating officer of Facebook and author of "Lean In," the best selling and highly influential book about overcoming the barriers that women face at work, was widowed young. In 2015, her husband, Dave Goldberg, died at 47, while exercising, leaving Ms. Sandberg with two young children. In 2012, Ms. Alexander's husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, died at 50, also while exercising. The couple also had two young children at the time. Now, both women have written best selling books about those losses and their aftermath. Ms. Alexander's memoir, "The Light of the World," was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. Ms. Sandberg's book, "Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy," written with Adam Grant, was published in April. It weaves the story of Ms. Sandberg's tragedy into those of others, along with social science research, in a practical guide to the inevitable hardships of life. Over a breakfast of English muffins and cappuccinos (with a side of bacon for Ms. Sandberg) at Farmers Fishers Bakers in Georgetown, the women discussed the impulse to write about their struggles, the experience of parenting through grief, and the value in sharing our deepest stories. Philip Galanes You two are like amazing reality show contestants: Handed identical baskets of horrible ingredients, yet you come back ... Elizabeth Alexander I was surprised that so shortly after my husband passed, maybe two weeks later, I started writing things down. It felt unseemly, almost cannibalistic. EA It was the only way I could know what was happening to me. I knew I was alive; I knew I had to take care of my children. But writing was like placing my hand on the earth. It wasn't comfortable. It was more like living with the steady companion of my life: making things out of experience. SS That's exactly how I felt. I always wanted to keep a journal, but never did. I have a box of them from when I was a child. I'd start on January 1st and quit by the 5th or 6th. Then one day I wrote: "I'm going to bury my husband today," and I didn't stop. If I didn't write every day, I felt like I was going to burst. I would walk out of the office, tears pouring down my face, and they would not stop until I wrote everything down: about the flight to Mexico where Mr. Goldberg died , the way we didn't go on the hike that last morning, the way they wouldn't let me into the back of the ambulance with him. EA More like: If you can stay at the bone of what's true, then that's your lifeboat. SS I felt increasingly isolated, just so lonely. I'd drop off my kids at school, and people would stop talking when they saw me. I'd walk into work at Facebook, where everyone talks all day, and there'd be no chitchat. Literally, I could silence any room just by arriving. So, a couple of days before the end of shloshim, the traditional Jewish mourning period for a spouse, I thought, if I was going to write something, this is what I would say: "Stop asking me, 'How are you?' How do you think I am? Say: 'How are you today?' And get out of the way of ambulances. Because when Dave died, no one moved." There was zero chance I was posting this thing. But when I woke up the next morning, it was just so bad. The end of mourning? Are you kidding? I thought: Things can't get worse, maybe they'll get better. So, I posted it on Facebook, but I never thought I was talking to the world. I was shocked when it ran as news. It didn't get rid of the grief, but it changed my life. People started talking to me again. A friend said, "I've been driving by your house every day," but now she stopped and came inside. There are like 70,000 comments on that post. People connected with each other: mothers in NICUs, fathers of suicides. That was probably the beginning of the book, though I didn't know it then. EA My experience was a bit different. I was teaching a lecture class that I loved on contemporary African American art. We talked about coming through the middle passage of being enslaved through Jim Crow and the resilience of making art out of that. What it means for black people to be making art today when our young men are so vulnerable. So the possibility of death was something we were dealing with. After Ficre died and we buried him, there was one class left in the semester. I wanted to go back and give that final lecture. Afterwards, every student all 75 lined up and shook my hand or hugged me. Every single one. And making that occasion to connect got that part out of the way. Of course, there were still many times when I felt: Ah, can I go into that room? I'm neon now; I'm different. SS Same here. I wanted to solve the problem and put a bow on it. But my friend Davis Guggenheim, the documentary filmmaker told me that when he starts a film, he never knows where it's going. He has to let the story unfold. Honestly, I probably still feel like you. I lived through the grief because I had no choice. And as my rabbi told me: "Lean in to the suck." EA There's a poem by Rilke that I quote: "Just keep going. No feeling is final." SS I remember reading that, early on, and thinking: "I hope she's right. But I think she's wrong." Now I know you're right. EA Like after a bad day, your mother would say, "Go to sleep, you'll feel better in the morning." SS But the days just keep coming. Last week would have been our 13th wedding anniversary. Next week would be the second anniversary of his death. Did anyone ever ask, "Did you write your book too soon?" SS I think of my mother in law. Losing her husband, then losing her son. It's too much. And she helped me clean. You know the moments: the wedding ring, cleaning out the closet. EA I thought you were brave to do that with your kids. I did it alone. SS Trust me, I was advised to include them, so I did. PG I love that you kept things. I wore my dad's clothes until they fell apart. PG Because they were his. This ratty sweater is going to power me through the day. SS I have a drawer in my closet for things like that, too. PG You just touched on the other great theme of your books: motherhood. SS Exactly. How do I raise a 7 and 10 year old who just lost their father? I'm a single parent. I don't have the financial challenges that many single parents have. But I'm doing this alone, and they're grieving. SS Not if I could shine a light on the terrible stresses women face: 37 percent of single mothers are living in poverty. With widows, it's 15 percent 25 percent if you're black or Latina. My kids asked me: "Are we going to lose our home?" Do you know how many people for whom the answer is yes? PG You've also taken a strong stand on bereavement leave. SS I changed Facebook's policy. It was great before; now it's better. We're at 20 days for an immediate family member, 10 days for Grandma. I never did this stuff publicly before, but now I want other companies to do better. The best thing that happened after Facebook announced its policy is that our H.R. director got calls from four other companies about it. EA One of the things that came into sharp focus for me is that we need to live in villages. I moved to New York after Ficre died because I had friends who are like sisters. I thought: Who will go and pick up my kids? Who do I trust to do these intimate things? PG I thought it may have been a grief induced move. EA No, Ficre died in April, and my friend Amy sat me down in May and said, "I'm going to tell you something, and it's going to make you cry, and I'm sorry, but you're going to have to move." And I said, "Why are you doing this to me?" But I knew she was right. I go hither and yon for my work not that I could do that immediately. SS I didn't feel like I could do that at all. EA She said, "We will pick up the children." And they did. They've been family to me, and I to them, as well. My parents moved from Washington into our building. SS My best friend, Marne, took the job as C.O.O. of Instagram. But that summer, they moved around the corner from us. And my sister lives around the other corner. Making villages is an important part of surviving this. PG Did being a mother change your grief? SS I didn't want Dave's death to ruin my children's life. And I thought it would. I really did. People ask, "What's the worst moment of your life?" Well, there are lots of contenders. But it might be telling my children their father died. But Adam Grant said to me, "If you don't stop blaming yourself, if you don't learn to laugh, if you don't find joy again, your kids can't recover." And when I did feel a little better, my kids told my sister in law that they were better because Mommy's not crying all the time. EA My kids were paramount for me, too. That didn't mean keeping a stiff upper lip. But it meant carrying on. It was weird, as if a voice said, "We will survive." It didn't sound cheerful about anything on the horizon, but it felt like the truth. And even through the suffering, we had these beautiful men who loved us. What a blessing to have had that. It's indelible. PG There's a flip side, too: being kinder to ourselves. Did you have periods of magical thinking? "If only I'd checked the gym...." EA Oh, yes. If only I'd made him take Lipitor. PG Then he'd still be alive. SS I have to work on that to this day. We put up a video on OptionB.org. This woman is telling a story about getting divorced, finding a guy online, going on her first date. She's all excited. But 10 minutes in, the guy walks out. Her friend tells her: "Well, you're unattractive and boring. Of course he left." But, wait! No friend would ever say that. She said it to herself. And when that dawns on you, it's like: "Oh, yeah, we are really mean to ourselves." SS Self compassion is how we recover. And not just for the things that aren't our fault. But also for the times when I was so angry or when I got it wrong with my kids. We have to work on treating ourselves like we would treat our friends. PG That brings me straight to my final question. It's no secret that we're not communicating very well across political and other divides right now. Is there hope in sharing our deepest stories? SS I've thought about this a lot. I'm giving the commencement speech at Virginia Tech this year, the 10th anniversary of the shootings, and it's about collective resilience. Communities that get through things like that do it together. Because no matter what else we believe, there is birth and love and joy. There is also death by suicide and sudden death and incarceration. We need to create areas to come together, where we can be there for each other. EA One thing that moved me about the response to my book is that readers came in for love and loss, and they came out having loved some black people. I know there are tough challenges ahead for us. I also know the only choice is to connect. But what's fractured in our culture is "those people" what we can do to "those people." It's going to be heavy and hard, but like the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, we have to keep coming back to the idea that other people's children belong to you. SS Yes, other people's children. It's my dream for Option B: to help others help others. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
MUNICH Some of France's most provocative recent fiction has found an enthusiastic audience in Germany, where theatermakers are fond of bringing contemporary international literature, much of it challenging, to the stage. Munich has hosted one of the most formidable of these efforts: A trilogy of novels by Virginie Despentes that paints a riotous portrait of contemporary French life has been adapted into "The Life of Vernon Subutex" at the Kammerspiele, the city's most envelope pushing theater. Ms. Despentes is probably best known for "Baise Moi," a shocking novel about rape and revenge that she wrote in 1993 and adapted into a film in 2000. When she released the first volume of "Vernon Subutex" in 2015, she became a literary sensation in France once again. Published over a two year period, the trilogy was a best seller and earned her some of the best reviews of her career. Canal Plus released a TV mini series adaptation earlier this year. The English translation of the first volume was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize and will be published in America on Tuesday. "Vernon Subutex" has earned its author comparisons to Balzac and George Eliot for its kaleidoscopic portrayal of French society. In a thousand pages, it depicts an array of colorful and frequently unsavory Parisians whom Ms. Despentes both skewers and humanizes: The misfits include musicians, drifters, playboys, bigots, homeless people, drug addicts and porn stars. Their lives all intersect with that of Vernon, a mild mannered former record shop owner who finds himself living on the street after the mysterious death of his rock star friend. Compared with that earlier outing, "Vernon Subutex" feels more stripped down and frontal. The production is heavy on music and projected video and text, and the energetic actors frequently bound across the multiple levels of a mostly bare stage or speak into a microphone. With so much of the script drawn verbatim from the novels, the production can often feel like a staged reading, especially if the books are fresh in your mind. Ultimately, its propulsion has less to do with the soundtrack or the filmed sequences than with the dynamism that the actors bring to the acrobatic and acerbic prose. The adaptation retains the novels' mosaic like structure, with various chapters narrated by the large, rotating cast of characters; the plot emerges gradually through this polyphony of voices. Throughout, Ms. Despentes grants the reader unfettered access to her characters' rudest and crudest thoughts. Bigotry of all shapes and stripes is given vivid and memorable expression. There is no room for social niceties and political correctness in this lurid version of Parisian society. One of the least pleasant characters is Laurent Dopalet (a disarming Jochen Noch), a vain and paranoid film producer who will stop at nothing to recover some incriminating video cassettes rumored to be among Vernon's few remaining possessions. The Kammerspiele's sensational Wiebke Puls is well cast as the producer's henchman, a social media savvy purveyor of career ending rumors known as the Hyena. A more recent ensemble addition, Zeynep Bozbay, does impressive double duty as the porn actress Vodka Satana and her devout Muslim daughter, Aicha. The production abounds with so many lively characterizations that it's surprising that Mr. Pucher's conception of the title role should be so subdued. Jelena Kuljic's performance often seems too slight by comparison. She is at her best when crooning rock and pop songs into a microphone with transfixing coolness. But much of the time, her weary affect is too muted to ground the production. In the novels, Vernon is indeed something of a cipher, but Ms. Despentes gives him charismatic, increasingly shamanistic force. In Mr. Pucher's production, he remains very much a question mark. If the long, involving evening can sometimes seem less than the sum of its parts, it's largely because of this empty center. Another challenging to stage work of prose fiction is "The Possibility of an Island," by France's other great literary enfant terrible, Michel Houellebecq. Against the odds, however, the Berliner Ensemble has served up a robust production of that philosophical, dystopian novel by the young director Robert Borgmann. If Mr. Pucher's production cleaves too closely to its source, Mr. Borgmann's uses Mr. Houellebecq's novel as a thematic springboard for a visually arresting, superbly acted meditation on love, happiness and immortality. The main character is a moody and hedonistic comedian, Daniel 1 (Peter Moltzen in an emotionally bold performance), who navigates the vicissitudes of aging, solitude and heartbreak. The production toggles among episodes from his life, including a doomed love affair with a woman several decades his junior (the magnetic Cynthia Micas, a new member of the ensemble) and, thousands of years in the future, reflections on our moribund planet by Daniel's clones he's been reincarnated 25 times. Daniel 24, nicknamed "the old prophet," is a Zen preaching seer played with both gravity and a smirk by the remarkable Wolfgang Michael. It is less clear which time period Sina Martens and Gerrit Jansen, speaking a mixture of English and German, inhabit as a dynamic artistic duo who appear dressed as clowns in Andy Warhol wigs. Yet even at its most unmoored, the production sustains its focused tone and fluid rhythm through a string of witty, dialogue heavy scenes and stark visual touches. Some, like the omnipresent neon sign proclaiming "L'eternite," are self evident, while others, including the giant flowers that threaten to take over the stage or the large panda bear doll in Daniel 1's apartment, are more cryptic. Mr. Houellebecq's bitter and verbose disquisitions on humanity and its discontents don't transfer easily to a production with an ensemble cast (there's an extraordinary one man adaptation of his 2015 novel, "Submission," in Hamburg, Germany), but Mr. Borgmann succeeds remarkably in translating these anxieties into moods and images of undeniable dramatic power. Like its source, "The Possibility of an Island" holds a mirror up to the contemporary. Despite its science fiction trappings, Mr. Houellebecq's interior vision is no less relevant than Ms. Despentes's broad social canvas. Encountering these daring works on some of Germany's leading stages feels appropriate in our agitated age. The Life of Vernon Subutex. Directed by Stefan Pucher. Munchner Kammerspiele. Through Jan. 7. The Possibility of an Island. Directed by Robert Borgmann. Berliner Ensemble. Through Dec. 27. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times Re "Visa Rules Are Seen as Way to Push Colleges to Revive In Person Classes" (news article, July 8): How brave does a person have to be to move to a new country alone, in pursuit of a college education? Imagine suddenly finding yourself in a place with another language and a completely different culture, and knowing you're putting your family at great financial strain in the process. To have such an opportunity is a blessing and a curse. It's building a new life with the constant fear that a swift stroke of the government's pen could end all your dreams. That's what happened to many international students on Monday, when the Trump administration required that they attend at least one in person class to keep their visas. Millions saw their hopes crumble as they're now forced to leave America or forbidden from returning. We don't just choose America for the classes. We pay atrocious prices for an experience, a taste of a different life, the connections we build and the opportunities we gain. Are we really expected to pay that price to watch classes from our home countries and miss out on all we signed up for? I'm sure I speak for most international students when I say we sincerely hope this heartbreaking decision is reconsidered. Victoria Bremmenkamp Londonderry, N.H. The writer is an international student from Brazil at Temple University. Re "It's Time for Architects to Stand Up for Justice," by Michael Kimmelman (Critic's Notebook, Arts pages, June 13): I was shocked by the brutal efficiency of the cells at San Quentin State Prison when I began representing inmates there who were charged with new in prison offenses more than 17 years ago. One client likened it to "living in a bathroom," with a roommate. Yet the prison, which opened in 1852, is not without some architectural charm or at least honesty. The wrought iron bars and hand operated locks, gates and levers (which "throw the bar" to open or close 25 cells at once) make no pretense about their purpose. In contrast, modern penal facilities have adopted a clinical aesthetic, with featureless passageways and invisible staff operating remote controlled doors and cameras. Each design dehumanizes inmates in its own way. But as the French philosopher Michel Foucault pointed out in his historical study of prison design, "Discipline and Punish," it's the lack of privacy, the sense of always being watched, yet not knowing by whom, that is both prison architecture's most insidious feature, and its most effective means of control. It was very disturbing to read that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has become yet another victim of the censure culture. Keith Christiansen, chairman of European paintings, posted a fair and timely question on his personal Instagram account recently asking, "How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don't approve." And, to illustrate the point, he used an image of Alexandre Lenoir trying to save the royal tombs of Saint Denis during the French Revolution. In light of the current propensity to topple statues and monuments, it seems a fair and timely question. However, it caused such an outcry among a vocal constituency of Met workers that Mr. Christiansen was asked to remove his post and apologize to the entire staff. I was educated in a world where ideas and different points of view could be discussed freely and openly without causing a public outcry. Tragically, these days have vanished. We live in a society where the marketplace of ideas is ruled by censure and the endless desire to protect anyone who is offended by those who offer a different opinion or point of view. At this point, it appears that it's not just individuals who are in "lockdown" but also our thoughts and ideas. V.P. Vetting Is Not Like a Colonoscopy | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
We're now officially trudging through the new year. (And good luck on that healthier living resolution.) This is when we adjust to the fact that nothing has changed. You weren't allowed to toss Donald Trump out with the old. Although it would have been nice if he'd at least have stayed quiet until all of the Christmas trees were down. Instead, he's holding a big, presumably loud, rally Friday in Miami for evangelical supporters. It's supposed to be a response to the editorial in Christianity Today that called him "morally lost and confused." Lost? How can you call the man lost? He's there ... in the place he's at. The site of the rally, the King Jesus International Ministry church, has a large Hispanic congregation, and Pastor Guillermo Maldonado has told his parishioners to come to hear Trump's speech even if they "don't have papers." Explaining his confidence, Maldonado just said "I'm not that dumb." Perhaps he's been following the record of Trump's businesses, which have been rather low energy about checking for undocumented workers. His Virginia winery just got around to firing some longtime employees this week. Of course that had nothing to do with the difficulty getting other people to do the low wage backbreaking labor. It was just ... slow paperwork. But about politics in 2020: For Trump, right now it's pretty much one rally after another. And the Democrats still have 15 presidential candidates. How many can you name? To be fair, I'll give you a passing grade if you can get to 12. Trump might know less. At his rallies, he generally just mentions Elizabeth Warren ("Crazy Pocahontas"), Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, whose last name he enjoys making fun of. He calls Biden "Sleepy Joe," which is sort of dangerous given Biden's proclivity for challenging critics to push up competitions. And Trump will never give up on the story about Biden family corruption in Ukraine, since the only downside to his version is its total inaccuracy. We've still got nearly two weeks to wait before the next Democratic debate, which happens to be the same night as a newly scheduled Trump rally in Wisconsin. Where, I would be willing to place a small bet, the subject will be the wonderfulness of Donald Trump. "You're about to hear the greatest speech you've ever heard," he told the crowd at his most recent rally, in Battle Creek, Mich., right after reminiscing about how he won the state in 2016 and how, a decade or so before, he was named Man of the Year in Michigan. "Can you believe it?" he asked. Well, actually no. FactCheck.org looked into the matter and determined Trump was "referring to a 2013 dinner hosted by a county Republican Party organization, which presented him with token gifts including a statuette of Abraham Lincoln." But apparently Trump did not get any special commendations, let alone a "man of the year" award. I don't think our president should just let this kind of back talk go unchallenged. Let's send Rudy Giuliani to Michigan to investigate. Ah, Rudy. Can't really plunge into 2020 without taking a bet on what he'll do next. He seems to be running many of the government's most critical foreign policy initiatives despite the fact that he is (A) Not a government employee; (B) Doing private business with many of the movers and shakers involved; and (C) At best, borderline nuts. What do you think will happen with Giuliani in the new year? Cabinet appointment? F.B.I. indictment? Relocation to a drying out clinic? Hey, maybe all three. At the same time. Anything's possible in this administration. Safe prediction for 2020 is that Trump will spend most of it bragging about the economy unless something happens to the economy, in which case he will focus on his second biggest achievement, which would be, um, perhaps helping nail down the 2028 Summer Olympics. In Michigan, Trump told his supporters how a man had come up and reported that his wife always thought he was a loser until his 401(k) started climbing: "I'm up 72 percent, sir. She thinks I'm a financial genius. She's so in love with me." Two short comments, one of which is that this doesn't sound like a very secure marriage. The other is that when Trump starts telling stories, virtually everybody he quotes calls him "Sir." Do you think anybody gets a dispensation? Rudy? Jared? Well, probably Melania. There are bound to be a few things that are new for the new year. For instance, he's just started slamming environmentalism by decrying the evils of reduced water consumption. ("You want to wash your hands, you turn on the sink, no water comes out.") On the night he was being impeached that would be during the Michigan rally Trump went on a rant about low flow toilets that he claimed required flushing "10 times." He then pointed to a supporter in the crowd and said: "Not me, of course, not me. But you. Him." Do you think that guy went home and told his family that the president of the United States picked him out as a person who required a lot of water when he went to the bathroom? Would he have been astonished? Embarrassed? Horrified? Whatever it was, sir, we all know how you feel. 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 |
For decades, Gail Zappa, the widow of the iconoclastic rock musician Frank Zappa, was known as a fierce guardian of her husband's business empire. But before she died last year at 70, Mrs. Zappa granted the filmmaker Alex Winter rare access to her husband's "vault," the enormous media archive kept in the basement of the Zappa family home in Los Angeles, as part of Mr. Winter's latest project: a documentary about Zappa's life and music. "We're private people, but we want the story to be told," Ahmet Zappa, one of Frank's four children and a trustee of the Zappa Family Trust, said in a statement about the film. On Tuesday, Mr. Winter, who has made well received documentaries like "Downloaded," about the Napster phenomenon but who may still be best known to a generation of moviegoers as Bill from the 1989 comedy "Bill Ted's Excellent Adventure" will introduce a Kickstarter campaign to help finance the Zappa movie and also preserve the archive. For 9 million, one generous supporter could own the Zappa house (minus its contents, including the vault). Mr. Winter spoke this week about the film and the archive. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation. Q. How did this film and the archive project come about? A. I was coming off my previous doc, "Deep Web," and starting to put the next movie together. One thing that kept coming up was that there had never been a definitive Frank Zappa documentary. I was intent on not making a musical biopic, but making something that's more like a novelistic examination of this man, something that would dig into the cultural aspects of him, the political aspects. That's what we pitched to Gail, and she loved it. Gail granted us, for the first time, access to the Zappa family vault, which is literally a vault it's a giant, floor to ceiling space under their house in the Hollywood Hills that is filled with 40 odd years of unseen and unheard material. It's stuff that he wrote, family stuff, art, music and film. Some of it had been preserved by the family, but it's not been thoroughly archived. How bad a shape is the archive in? My guess is that the bulk of it is probably pretty good. It's also deteriorating, and possibly some of it is gone. Certain types of media are more frail than others the reel to reel audio stuff, that's a very flimsy and fragile material. There is a lot of digital stuff, but some of it is in formats that do not exist anymore. 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. It's the way the whole house is. I was walking around with some of the family members and they were like, "You know, it's not just the vault." They started opening cabinets, and there's media everywhere three quarter inch tape, cassettes, DAT masters. It just goes on and on. That led to the Kickstarter. Frankly, it was just terrifying to see that there and think this is all of Frank's life, and it's going to be gone. How was it dealing with Gail Zappa? In a statement you are very diplomatic in calling her "notoriously discerning." I'm a Gail fan. Does that mean I agree with her on everything? I'm the guy who made the Napster movie. But she was not an unreasonable person at all, and that's what gets misconstrued. You have to remember the times that she grew up through. Specifically, she ran the Zappa business. She was navigating a very complex and treacherous landscape, which is what the music industry is, and she had learned to be fiercely controlling and independent in order to keep the thing alive. Where did the idea of selling the Zappa house for 9 million come from? It's a bargain! In the Zappa family, the kids are all grown up and have their own lives. With Gail no longer here, there's nobody there at the house . So we proposed to them that if this thing is going to get sold anyway, why don't we make it part of our campaign? For the real giant Zappa fans out there, they're going to get the house that has the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, the house that has the vault in it and all this incredible history. They were there from 1968 on. What happens to the 9 million if somebody buys the house? Does it go into the making if the film, or does that money go to the Zappa family? It goes to both. We would give big portion of that to the family for the value of the house, and then do everything we need to do toward making the archive safe and making the movie we want to make. This would allow us to start the movie immediately. What do you want the film to portray? Frank is someone that a large part of the population absolutely adores, and probably a healthy part of the population doesn't like at all. That's really compelling to me. There are so many paradoxical aspects to him that represent the paradoxical nature of that period of history. On the macro side, I love what that allows me to do as a documentarian. But on the micro side, I'm just really fascinated by who he was. How will what's in the vault help you make the movie? Because a lot of it is personal. It's not just outtakes from records. He would record video around the house. If NBC Radio came over to get one sound bite, he would set up a video camera and record the entire interview. No one has ever seen that stuff. It's all down in the basement, and there is tons of it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. will debate with a single moderator at each of their three matchups, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced on Wednesday. The first debate of the general election, on Sept. 29, will be moderated by the "Fox News Sunday" anchor Chris Wallace. Mr. Wallace received high marks for his debut debate in 2016 and is known for his sharp interviewing style. He is also frequently a target of needling tweets by Mr. Trump. The second debate, on Oct. 15, will be moderated by Steve Scully, the political editor at C SPAN, who served as an alternate moderator for the 2016 debates. Kristen Welker, a White House correspondent for NBC News and a co anchor of the weekend "Today" program, will moderate the third debate on Oct. 22. This will be her first time moderating a general election debate. A print journalist, Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief of USA Today, will moderate the vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris on Oct. 7. The debate commission, a nonpartisan group that has overseen all general election debates since 1987, has sole discretion to pick the moderators, and the presidential candidates are not allowed to veto the choices. Some gamesmanship, though, is inevitable. The commission's primary criteria are journalistic skills and the ability to confidently take charge of a nationally televised broadcast. But organizers also prefer that neither campaign vociferously objects to any of its choices. This year, the debate commission may not get its wish. Mr. Trump's communications director, Tim Murtaugh, issued a statement on Wednesday claiming, without evidence, that "some" of the chosen moderators "can be identified as clear opponents of President Trump" and charging that Mr. Biden "will actually have a teammate onstage." Mr. Murtaugh did not say which of the moderators he was accusing of bias, and the Trump campaign did not clarify when asked for additional comment. He also wrote that the choices "are not the moderators we would have recommended if the campaign had been allowed to have any input." In fact, the debate commission never allows campaigns to formally advise on the choices of moderators. The Biden campaign also issued a statement, saying that the Democratic candidate "looks forward to participating in the debates set by the commission, regardless of who the independently chosen moderators are." 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 selection of Mr. Wallace may set off Mr. Trump, who has criticized the Fox News anchor's coverage in the past, although the president also sat for an interview with him at the White House in July. Last week, at a rally in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump taunted Mr. Wallace for "a lack of talent" and compared the anchor unfavorably with his father, the "60 Minutes" legend Mike Wallace, who died in 2012. In August, Mr. Trump's lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, sent a list of 24 journalists "for consideration" by the debate commission. Roughly 40 percent of his suggestions were affiliated with Fox News and Fox Business. Mr. Wallace's name was not among them. No one from Mr. Giuliani's list was ultimately selected. No journalist from CNN the news organization that is arguably the most frequent target of Mr. Trump's attacks on journalists made the cut this year. One of the network's anchors, Anderson Cooper, served as a co moderator in 2016. Mr. Scully, of C SPAN, is a respected broadcaster whose network is known for coverage that prizes nonpartisanship over punditry. (He may be familiar to some viewers from his call in program, "Washington Journal," in which he listens impassively as callers express lengthy political opinions.) Ms. Welker, of NBC News, is the second Black female journalist to serve as solo moderator of a presidential debate, after Carole Simpson of ABC in 1992; she has reported on the White House since 2011. Ms. Page, of USA Today, is a veteran White House journalist who has covered six presidential administrations and wrote a biography of Barbara Bush. Each debate is 90 minutes and is set to air at 9 p.m. Eastern, with no breaks for commercials. An average of 74 million people watched the three matchups between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, by far the candidates' biggest live audience of the campaign. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
When Megan Thee Stallion raps, the words arrive like jabs: confident, precise, disorientingly direct. Especially in an era in which other skill sets have taken priority in hip hop melody, character development, absurdity the mere clarity of the rhymes is jolting, the blue collarness of the craft invigorating. Megan Thee Stallion came to spar. With whom? Anyone who gets in her way. Or anyone who happens to be nearby. "Hottest out but you already knew that/Even if I brought him to you, still couldn't get your boo back," she taunts on "Simon Says," one of the rowdier songs on her very pleasantly rowdy new album "Fever," her first on a major label. Most of this bold record continues in similar fashion: one head turning, gleefully profane bar at a time. Megan Thee Stallion, 24, is from Houston, and learned to rap by observing her mother, who rapped under the name Holly Wood. As a result, she is a technician, as interested in structure as she is in attitude, as focused on unexpected turns of phrase as on how to deliver them. On "Cash ," she opts for a homonym rhyme that arrives like a quick swerve, an unlikely image crash landing into a conventional boast: "I'm a finesser and I'm a fly dresser/Move to the top floor and flew in my dresser." Often, though, it's less the specifics of what she says than her presence, which is authoritative and take no guff. It's an approach that was already clear two years ago, when she released "Stalli Freestyle," a bracing, two minute hurricane of arched eyebrow, seen it all boasting with arrestingly raw subject matter and a casually inverted power dynamic: "He wanna keep it/like, lock it and key it/I tell him to bring me my money then beat it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
It doesn't seem likely that Netflix and DC Universe, competitors in the field of subscription streaming video, get together to plan their schedules. So chalk it up to coincidence that Netflix is releasing "The Umbrella Academy" on the same day (Friday) that DC Universe is releasing "Doom Patrol," while you note that the "Doom Patrol" comic books were a primary model, along with "X Men," for the "Umbrella Academy" comics. Or chalk it up to our apparently bottomless appetite for superhero teams, which television happily feeds: The new series join DC Comics titles like "Legends of Tomorrow," "Titans" and "Black Lightning" and Marvel shows like "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," "Runaways," "The Gifted" and "Legion," to name a few. On the horizon are a couple of heavyweights, HBO's "Watchmen" adaptation and Netflix's "Jupiter's Legacy." So what do these two handsomely produced new shows add to the conversation? Continuing proof that comic books and TV shows have very different vocabularies, and that converting the first into the second requires hard choices. The most enjoyable adaptations commit to traditional TV values ("Black Lightning" on CW) or go all in on replicating the comic book experience ("Legion" on FX). Shows that fall in between often exhibit a particular variety of lifelessness they're action thrillers in which the action feels forced and they're family dramas in which we don't really care about the family. Which brings us to "The Umbrella Academy," based on the comics series created by Gerard Way (the multitalented artist who was also lead vocalist of My Chemical Romance) and Gabriel Ba. Like "Doom Patrol," which Way has generously cited as an influence, it's about a superpowered band of outsiders assembled by a possibly mad, definitely abrasive genius who doubles as father figure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The dancer Misty Copeland has performed with the singer Prince and the pop group TLC. She has appeared in commercials for Diet Dr Pepper and Coach handbags, is national youth of the year ambassador for Boys Girls Clubs of America and has a contract with the Under Armour sports clothing brand. She has her own dance wear line, and next month Simon Schuster will publish her memoir, "Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina." But on a mild January day at American Ballet Theater's studios, she looked as anxious as a novice when she put her toes to the floor and, supported by her partner, Herman Cornejo, tried to rise gracefully from a kneeling position to a straight leg. "Try it again," urged the coach Susan Jaffe, who was rehearsing Ms. Copeland, a soloist at Ballet Theater, for her debut in the principal role of Swanhilda in Nicholas Sergeyev's "Coppelia," which she will perform during the company's spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House. Ms. Copeland and Mr. Cornejo tried it again. And again and again. By the end of the rehearsal, the passage, just a few seconds long, was slightly better. "You have to be so strong to be a professional ballet dancer," Ms. Copeland, 31, said a day later, in an interview at an Upper West Side restaurant close to her apartment. "You have to push yourself and push yourself, and it's never perfect. And to be different means you may even have to be stronger." Ms. Copeland, petite, pretty and polished, is different among ballerinas because she is a black woman in a world that is very largely white. While a number of black men have made prominent names for themselves in ballet Arthur Mitchell, Albert Evans, Carlos Acosta few black women, outside Dance Theater of Harlem, have become principals at major American ballet companies. A mere handful have made it to the rank of soloist, and Ms. Copeland is only the second black woman in Ballet Theater's history to hold that position. New York City Ballet has only had one black female soloist: Debra Austin, in the 1970s. There are complex reasons for this: economics and access to ballet performances and classes, stereotypes about black women and most worryingly for black female dancers stereotypes about what a ballerina should be: white and waiflike. "I think when I joined Ballet Theater, there were people on the staff who did not want to see a brown person in the corps onstage," Ms. Copeland said. In "Life in Motion," written with Charisse Jones, Ms. Copeland recounts her upbringing in San Pedro, Calif., where she and her five siblings were raised by her mother, Sylvia DelaCerna, and a string of her husbands and boyfriends. When Ms. Copeland was 2, she writes, "our family began a pattern that would define my siblings' and my childhood: packing, scrambling, leaving often barely surviving." She was 13 an anxious, perfectionist student who was captain of her school drill team when she happened to glimpse a ballet class at the San Pedro Boys Girls Club of America, where Ms. Copeland and her siblings spent their after school hours. The teacher, Cynthia Bradley, persuaded her to join, and despite beginning ballet many years later than most dancers, Ms. Copeland proved to have extraordinary aptitude. Soon, after Ms. Bradley offered her a scholarship to her own school, she was training there every day. Eventually, she moved in with Ms. Bradley and her family to focus on her ballet training, escaping the motel room where her mother and siblings were living. Two years later, however, her mother demanded that she return home; Ms. Bradley's response was to suggest that Ms. Copeland sue for emancipation. A court battle ensued, placing Ms. Copeland, her family and the Bradleys in a glare of publicity. Ms. Copeland dropped her emancipation request, and a judge eventually found in Ms. DelaCerna's favor. "But the battle in my mind and spirit raged on," Ms. Copeland writes in her book. These experiences, she said, have been fundamental to her development. "I think that I came into this profession with something that most of the dancers didn't have. As hard as it all was, it helped me from a young age to become a character, to feel certain emotions when dancing." After winning a scholarship to Ballet Theater's summer program, she joined the company's junior Studio Company in 2000, then the senior troupe the following year. "When I first saw her, I almost laughed, she was just so coordinated with such amazing facility," said Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director of Ballet Theater. "I have seen her grow up through injury and difficulties. I think, to some degree, the racial issue has got to be a driving force, because there really haven't been that many dancers of color who have reached this level in a classical art form. She has kept her connection to her community and accepts being a symbol and has kept her eye on what it means to excel." Although Ms. Copeland was given solo roles and won critical plaudits "a breakthrough season," Anna Kisselgoff wrote in The New York Times of her 2004 performances in William Forsythe's "workwithinwork" she began to feel that she didn't fit in, she said, adding, "Suddenly I felt aware of being black, that I was never going to get those classical parts." Eventually, she said, the feelings of isolation and exclusion strengthened her resolve. In 2007, she was promoted to soloist; she has subsequently performed principal roles in "La Bayadere," "Le Corsaire" and Alexei Ratmansky's "The Firebird," as well as in more contemporary work. In 2009 came a surprise early morning call asking whether Prince could have her phone number. "I was half asleep," she said. "I was, like, 'Prince who?' " She filmed a music video with him, then performed a number of times during subsequent Prince concerts at Madison Square Garden. The publicity brought her new media opportunities, contracts and appearances. (She has a second book, for children, coming out in the fall, and a documentary about her life is being made: "A Ballerina's Tale," by Nelson George.) Ballet Theater started Project Plie, a diversity program that offers scholarships to promising minority dancers and asked Ms. Copeland to be its face. "Everything I do is about bringing ballet to more people," she said. "It's incredible to get these letters from girls who have seen the Dr Pepper ads and say, she is brown like me. I hear criticism of what I do in the ballet world, but these opportunities show ballet to people who would never see it otherwise." Whether Ms. Copeland will become a principal at Ballet Theater is a question that hangs over her career (although the promotion may not make much difference to her popularity). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In those lingering camera shots, in the silence, Neymar not only illustrated how that felt, but exposed the limitations that had led him, and his team, here. It is always easier to tell an individual story than a collective one. There is no one image not Joshua Kimmich's artful cross, not Kingsley Coman's precise header, not Manuel Neuer's trophy lift that encapsulates the source of Bayern's success. Nor is there a single, pithy explanation. Bayern was, by a shade, the better team in a final that produced a dish quite distinct from any of its ingredients. Two teams front loaded with attacking talent combined in Lisbon to create a game a compelling, absorbing game that was more slow burn drama than quick fire entertainment. Both defended with grit and steel and thought. Neither was quite as assured as normal. Robert Lewandowski was a touch short of his ruthless best leading the Bayern line; Kylian Mbappe was not quite as explosive as he could be for P.S.G. Neymar did not want for work ethic, but his invention was just a little lacking. Both teams were in pursuit of a domestic and European treble league, cup and Champions league silverware and yet neither was quite itself. Bayern won because it came closer than P.S.G., because its self perception is better defined, because it draws its strength and its wonder from its system, not from the lavish talent of its individuals. Hansi Flick, Bayern's coach, had the courage not to change tack out of respect for or fear of P.S.G.'s fearsome front line. Bayern played the high defensive line which, common consensus had it, Mbappe in particular would relish. He trusted his players not to blink. The margins were fine, and P.S.G. hardly played badly, but the reward justified the risk. That will be of scant solace to Neymar and his teammates, of course. The identity of the player that proved their undoing will add a little sting for P.S.G., too. Coman was born and raised in Paris; he joined P.S.G.'s youth academy as a child. He was a teammate of Presnel Kimpembe, the French champion's central defender, until both were 18. Coman made his first appearance for P.S.G.'s senior team at 16, the youngest player ever to do so. Like so many others, he is a product of Paris and its banlieues, the suburbs and satellite towns that are, perhaps, the most fertile breeding ground for soccer players in the world. Only Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and South London even come close to rivaling it. And yet Coman, like Paul Pogba and Ngolo Kante and even Mbappe, until he was brought home at vast cost, got away. Coman left for Juventus in 2014, having grown frustrated at the lack of opportunities he was offered by his hometown team. The scale of investment from P.S.G.'s Qatari backers had by then made the club fallow ground for young prospects. Coman went to Italy, and from there to Munich. Now he has returned to haunt the club that made him, to vanquish it when it was in sight of its goal. Coman is, in other words, the ultimate player for European soccer's superclub era. He is the embodiment of the game's stratification, for how different the world of the elite is from that of those mere mortals who might not win a championship every single season of their career. In these circumstances, it feels almost inevitable that at some point he was going to score the winning goal in a Champions League final. He is proof that, at a certain height, it is almost impossible to fall. For all Neymar's tears, he and the team he represents in more ways than one are precisely the same. Sunday's final had been dressed up as a meeting between two visions of soccer: the old power and the new money, the establishment and the insurgent, the immovable object of European soccer's self appointed aristocracy and the unstoppable force of a sports team co opted as the marketing tool of a nation state. In Bayern Munich's victory, it is possible to draw the conclusion that there is, for now, at least, some sort of winner. Paris St. Germain has obsessed over the Champions League for a decade. It has spent billions in pursuit of it. It has inveigled its way into the corridors of power and it has broken the rules, both in letter and in spirit, and it has done its best to shift the landscape to its own ends. It wants nothing more than that one trophy, that ultimate vindication of its plan. And though it came closer than it ever had before this summer, it has failed again. Chalk up a victory not necessarily for the good guys Bayern Munich, for all its folksy customs, is not what any outsider would call lovable but for the way things have always been. The old certainties hold. The new order has not been established, and Neymar is sitting on the bench in tears. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"The president pardoned two turkeys and I think a Kentucky Fried Chicken while he was at it." JIMMY KIMMEL "It makes sense that Trump would pardon the two whitest turkeys on the planet." JAMES CORDEN "Those turkeys should be pardoning him, by the way, not the other way around." JIMMY KIMMEL "I saw that you could actually go online and vote for which turkey got the official pardon, which is why Butter's lawyer got caught in Ukraine trying to find dirt on Bread." JIMMY FALLON | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
ON BECOMING A GOD IN CENTRAL FLORIDA 10 p.m. on Showtime. Following in the same tradition as shows like "Breaking Bad," "Weeds" and "Ozark," this dark comedy series focuses on the often disastrous lengths that a person will go to achieve their version of the American dream. In this iteration, drug trafficking is swapped for the nefarious trappings of a multilevel marketing scheme, one that leaves Krystal Stubbs (Kirsten Dunst), a Florida water park employee, destitute after her husband (a mulleted Alexander Skarsgard) goes all in. Using her gumption and business savvy, Stubbs cons her way up the cultlike pyramid scheme with help from one of its loyal followers (Theodore Pellerin), only to wreak havoc on those closest to her. The series's oddball Florida setting, ostentatious 1990s fashion and colorful characters creates room for it to join some of the most delightfully weird shows on TV right now, like AMC's "Lodge 49" and HBO's "Los Espookys." POWER 8 p.m. on Starz. This network's most watched franchise picks up for its sixth season. Ghost (Omari Hardwick) attempts to get even with Tommy, tries to make headway on the Queens Child Project and works to cut ties with his criminal past. At the same time, the Feds are growing closer to convicting him. In this season, 50 Cent, who also serves as the show's executive producer, will make his directorial debut. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
There are fish sandwiches, and then there is the fish and chips sandwich at the Boathouse, an all day counter service spot tucked into an actual former boathouse at the Suttle Lodge, a magisterial 1930s era property located in central Oregon's Deschutes National Forest. A brawny trout filet is encrusted in pulverized Kettle brand potato chips, fried golden brown, and crammed into a squishy potato bun like a linebacker into a tutu. Accompanied by tartar sauce, pickles and iceberg lettuce, it's less a sandwich than a piping hot mess of pleasure. Perched on the edge of Suttle Lake, a 20 minute drive from the tiny town of Sisters, the lodge was renovated last year by some of the team behind the Ace Hotel in Portland; the result, which reopened late last summer, emanates a sort of Wes Anderson Goes Glamping vibe. The Boathouse also sports a cool kid pedigree: its menu was designed by Joshua McFadden, the executive chef at and co owner of Ava Gene's and a founding partner at Tusk, two of Portland's buzziest restaurants. "It would be so easy to put a world class restaurant in that location, but for me it would feel like such an injustice," Mr. McFadden said of the Suttle Lodge. Instead, he continued, his guiding principle was "let's do the basics and do them really, really well." That translates to a compendium of expertly executed grown up camp food: burgers, hot dogs, sandwiches, salads and a Left Coast chowder stocked with chunks of trout and salmon. Indeed, the Boathouse is a haven for trout enthusiasts: you can also add it to the aptly named simple leaf salad or, at breakfast, to a pleasingly gooey egg sandwich. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It's now easier than ever to get travel advice from locals, and you don't even have to talk to them in person. Sure, you can still ask a stranger where to find some good sushi, but there is no guarantee they will be interested in, or qualified to, help you. Thankfully, there are several smartphone apps that cut out those potentially awkward moments but still provide valuable recommendations from those in the know. The three I tested out recently while roaming the streets of New York all had something to offer though some were more useful than others. This app costs 3.99 per city (67 major cities are available worldwide), while the others are, for the most part, free. But you get what you pay for: this was the most well rounded of the three I tried. One of its many perks is that it runs entirely offline, so you do not need to stress about data usage. Like all of these apps, provides recommendations submitted by actual local residents on where to eat, shop, be entertained and more. The idea is to keep you away from tourist traps and steer you toward hidden gems. I used it to explore a neighborhood where I used to be a local (Astoria, Queens) to see if it could deliver. The fact that it included a wide assortment of suggestions in a borough not named Manhattan was impressive enough, compared to the other apps I tested, but the recommendations themselves were also spot on. For example, Astoria's popular Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden was rightfully featured, but so was SingleCut Brewery, a lesser known, but worthwhile, beer spot. The advice for each location is the perfect length detailed but not overwhelming, and the "Nearby" tab on the map makes it easy to scope out places wherever you are. This app scored points for originality as well as its practicality, and is perfect for travelers who don't have any cool cousins of their own. Cool Cousin gives you access to contributors in 40 large cities around the world. Each "cousin" has a profile, with name, age, photo, occupation and a lot more information. The idea is to add those to your network who seem to have similar tastes to your own. After each add, the cousin's recommendations are added to your map and broken down into eight different categories, such as food, coffee, night life and outdoors. The app seems geared toward younger travelers it feels like a cross between Facebook, Tinder and Foursquare and most of the cousins themselves have an appropriately hipster look. For New York, this leads to a higher concentration of recommendations below 14th Street in Manhattan and several in Brooklyn (very few in Queens), and heavy in the food and night life areas. But the app itself is easy to figure out, and the map includes the option to download and use offline (for free). No matter where you are, just hit the location arrow to see what's nearby. The recommendations themselves are solid and are written casually think Yelp, minus the negativity. I added 26 of 55 available cousins in New York and was impressed with what was revealed, including free public gardens and lesser known art galleries, as well as a wide variety of intriguing bars and restaurants. Your new cousins will even message you through the app to say hello, and you have the option of writing them back to ask for more tips. You will also get a push notification every time you receive a new message, which you can turn off by adjusting your settings. After asking two of my paired cousins, I received additional restaurant recommendations. Well designed and easy to navigate, Like a Local has fewer contributors than the other apps (28, providing 197 tips for New York at the time of writing) but it is in more cities than the others (over 300) and best functions as a complementary tool. The recommendations are detailed yet concise, giving an excellent general overview and a "special tip" for each location. For example, at the Brazilian restaurant Beco in Brooklyn, Kelly advises: "Come early because the restaurant's seating space is limited. CA H ONLY." You don't have to sign up to use the app, so you can dig right in and explore though if you want to use the app offline, you have to pay 1.99 per city. There's also an option to "ask locals," which works like a message board. I asked for Upper East Side restaurant recommendations (it is a neighborhood not represented well on any of the apps) and after a week had yet to get a response. The recommendations included mainstream spots like St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Central Park more often than the other apps did. These are not underappreciated landmarks, but not necessarily bad places to check out if you've never been. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
NASA's Dawn spacecraft, in orbit around the asteroid Ceres, has died quietly, the space agency announced on Thursday. Dawn missed its appointed check in on Wednesday. Mission managers concluded that the propellant for its thrusters had run dry, and Dawn could no longer control its orientation. Its antenna turned away from Earth, and its radio signal was lost forever. It was an expected end to the mission, although the spacecraft lasted two years longer than originally planned. Launched in 2007, Dawn has been sending home close up views of Ceres and Vesta the largest asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter as well as clues to the building blocks of the solar system's planets. "These are time capsules from the very beginning of the solar system," said Carol Raymond, principal investigator of the mission, during a NASA preview last month of Dawn's demise. Here are some of Dawn's biggest discoveries. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, although it is smaller than most of the solar system's larger moons. Giuseppe Piazzi, an Italian priest and astronomer, discovered it in 1801, and it was declared at first to be a planet. But then other astronomers kept finding more rocks in that region, and eventually they were all classified as asteroids. In the most recent reshuffling of planets, Ceres received a promotion, and it is now classified as a dwarf planet because it is large enough to be round. Among Dawn's findings, the most unexpected were shiny splotches on Ceres some 300 of them. The discovery set off waves of scientific wondering. Was it frozen water? Other ices? How did they get there? What was going on below the surface? "What we saw was completely mind blowing," Dr. Raymond said. But it does show up in a couple of intriguing places, she said: drying lake beds on Earth and in the plumes shooting out from Enceladus, a moon of Saturn known to have an ocean below its outer icy shell. On Ceres, what appears to be happening is that reservoirs of salty brine remnants of a subsurface ocean still occasionally well up to the surface to create the bright spots. That means Ceres, even though it is just 588 miles in diameter, is still geologically active, and spewing ice instead of lava what is known as cryovolcanism. The bright spots almost all lie in or near craters. That suggests meteor impacts created the spots, either by kicking up material below the surface or by cracking the outer crust, allowing subsurface brines to flow upward. At the surface, the water escaped to space, leaving deposits of sodium carbonate as well as ammonium chloride, another type of salt. The biggest, brightest of all The most striking feature on Ceres are the bright regions within a 57 mile wide, 2.5 mile deep crater called Occator. Another eye catching feature is a 13,000 foot high mountain near Ceres's Equator. Named Ahuna Mons, it is indeed the only mountain on Ceres. Scientists described it as a result of an unusual type of volcanism involving salty water and mud: Thick molten material is squeezed up like toothpaste, without an explosive eruption, to create a dome shape. The volcano is not active today. Dr. Raymond said that over time Ahuna Mons, perhaps a few hundred million years old, would likely spread, flatten and eventually disappear, and that there were likely other volcanic mountains in the past. Ceres is too small and its gravity too weak to hold onto a significant atmosphere. Yet back in 2014, the European Space Agency's Herschel space telescope detected water vapor around the asteroid, later confirmed by Dawn. This transient atmosphere is generated by high energy particles from the sun slamming into water molecules at or near Ceres' surface and kicking them up. The same phenomenon happens at Mercury and on Earth's moon. Before Dawn orbited Ceres, it visited Vesta, another asteroid, from 2011 to 2013. Exploring this 330 mile wide rock which looks like a cratered potato and its contrasts with the rounder and wider Ceres offered astronomers additional insights into how objects in the solar system formed. The differences go beyond size. Vesta is dry and heavily cratered, resembling the moon, while Ceres is full of water. "This is almost like night and day," said James L. Green, NASA's chief scientist. Why are they so different? Planetary scientists now think that Ceres formed much farther out in the solar system and then was pushed inward by the jostling of giant planets like Jupiter. Vesta, on the other hand, probably formed close to where it is today, a region in which ice would have been heated away early in the history of the solar system. Spacecraft carry microbial hitchhikers from Earth that can contaminate the worlds where they land. NASA tries to minimize that risk when a mission ends; engineers flew the Cassini probe, for example, into Saturn's atmosphere last year. For the last part of its mission, Dawn was sent on an elliptical orbit that swooped to within 22 miles of the surface, making one orbit every 27 hours. That provided the sharpest images yet of features like Occator crater. Though out of power, the spacecraft will continue in that orbit for at least 20 years, possibly decades longer, at which point it could crash into Ceres. That is not long enough for all of the Earth microbes on Dawn to die, but NASA officials hope that 20 years would be long enough for the space agency to make another visit there to study whether Ceres ever had conditions amenable for life before Dawn crashes and contaminates it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The trap in assessing "My Art" is to assume that it contains more autobiography than it does. That's true despite the possessive adjective in the title, or the fact that the director, an artist, plays an artist, Ellie. Or even the fact that the filmmaker is Laurie Simmons, who, detractors might scoff, belongs to a family of oversharers. (Ms. Simmons's daughter Lena Dunham appears briefly as one of Ellie's former students.) Part of what seems to separate Ms. Simmons from Ellie is that Ellie is alone, with no children or partner except for a dog with bad hind legs. "My Art" can be read as a study of how her solitude helps and hinders her creativity. Ellie travels upstate to spend time by herself at a friend's capacious summer home. Her latest project comes to involve re enacting scenes from famous movies. She is helped by two gardeners (Robert Clohessy and Josh Safdie) who are frustrated actors, as well the father (John Rothman) of a student. They mimic scenes from "Some Like It Hot," "A Clockwork Orange" and "The Misfits," among others, making the point, to paraphrase Ellie, that it is impossible for any one performer to truly be another. Your feelings on "My Art" may vary depending on whether you find that idea compelling. "My Art" invests far too much in the conceit. (The re creations look like unfunny "Airplane!" parodies.) Part of the problem is that Ms. Simmons has surrounded herself with more interesting actors, including a scene stealing Parker Posey. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
WASHINGTON The era of easy money is not ending yet. The Federal Reserve indicated on Wednesday, following a meeting of its policy committee, that it plans to raise interest rates even more slowly than its officials had previously predicted. The Fed still plans to start raising rates before the end of the year. Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's chairwoman, said that growth had rebounded after a difficult winter, and that the Fed was simply waiting to make sure the economy was finally ready for higher rates. But she emphasized that even after rate hikes began, borrowing costs would remain low for years. "It's not an ironclad guarantee, but we anticipate that that's something that will be appropriate later this year," Ms. Yellen said at a news conference on Wednesday, referring to raising rates above zero for the first time since December 2008. For years, Fed officials said they expected to begin the process in June, but they are now delaying at least until September in part because economic growth has once again disappointed. In a retreat that has become a ritual for the overly optimistic central bank, officials said in a new round of economic forecasts published Wednesday that they expected the economy to grow this year by 1.8 percent to 2 percent. In March, they predicted growth of 2.3 percent to 2.7 percent. Almost all the 17 Fed officials on the Federal Open Market Committee expect to raise rates this year, but seven now expect no more than a single increase, compared with three who held that view in March. Officials also predicted they would raise rates more slowly in subsequent years. On average they now expect rates to reach 1.75 percent by the end of 2016. Last June, the average prediction was that rates would reach 2.5 percent by the end of 2016. Ms. Yellen described these reductions in the expected level of interest rates over the next several years as more important than the month the central bank chooses to start raising rates. Investors appeared to accept the argument. Even without any apparent change in the timing of the first increase, the yield on the benchmark 10 year Treasury fell to 2.306 percent after the announcement, from 2.315 percent on Tuesday. The Standard Poor's 500 stock index increased 0.2 percent to close at 2,100.44. "The real question is not when they start but how fast and how high they go," said Kim Schoenholtz, an economist at New York University. "And what we've seen is they keep scaling back the equilibrium rate they intend to reach and the pace they intend to get there." Analysts continued to predict that the Fed would most likely start raising rates when it meets in September, but many investors remain skeptical. The prices of interest rate sensitive assets continue to reflect an expectation that the Fed will wait until December, or possibly until next year, before it increases rates. And that strategy of betting against the Fed's optimism has been consistently profitable in recent years. But Gene Tannuzzo, a senior portfolio manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, said skepticism had run its course. "The market is pricing in some doubt that they will get started," he said. "Looking forward from here, I think Ms. Yellen will do what she has said." The economy shrank at an annual rate of 0.7 percent in the first quarter, and forecasters outside the Fed have also reduced their expectations for the year. Officials predicted that the unemployment rate would decline more slowly in coming months than they had previously anticipated. It sat at 5.5 percent in May, and the Fed now expects that it will end the year at 5.2 to 5.3 percent, compared with an expectation in March that it might go as low as 5 percent. That is a significant change, because it means officials now expect that rate to end the year at or above its estimated long term equilibrium rate of 5.0 to 5.2 percent. But Ms. Yellen said the change actually reflected the increased strength of the economy. She said that participation in the labor force appeared to be stabilizing as people became more optimistic about finding work, and that she saw "tentative signs of stronger wage growth." A small group of Fed officials has already concluded that a rate increase this year would be premature, pointing to the sluggish pace of inflation. The Fed's preferred measure of prices rose by 1.2 percent in the 12 months ended in April, and it has remained below the Fed's 2 percent target for three straight years. The International Monetary Fund has also urged the Fed to wait. But officials who want to start raising rates this year remain optimistic about coming years, at least for now, predicting economic growth of up to 2.7 percent in 2016 and up to 2.5 percent in 2017. They argue that growth will be strong enough to justify their expectation that inflation will rebound. Officials made little change in the inflation forecasts, predicting that prices would rise no more than 0.8 percent this year and 1.9 percent next year. They also continued to predict that inflation might reach the Fed's 2 percent target in 2017. "If you'd gone to sleep a few years ago and someone had said to you unemployment is at 5.5 percent and the economy is growing, yet interest rates are at zero, you'd be a bit surprised," Mr. Schoenholtz said. "There are good reasons why rates are at zero, but the Fed has been very cautious in postponing rate hikes as long as it has." The Fed's stance contrasts with that of major central banks in Europe and Asia, which remain deeply immersed in efforts to revive their economies. For the United States, the weakness of the global economy has weighed on growth, driving up the value of the dollar and limiting demand for American exports. "If foreign growth is weaker than anticipated, the consequences for the U.S. economy could lead the Fed to remove accommodation more slowly than otherwise," Stanley Fischer, the Fed's vice chairman, said last month. Raising interest rates also could disrupt financial markets, although the consequences are hard to predict. There have been only a handful of tightening cycles in the Fed's hundred year history, and the differences outweigh the similarities. "Our experience suggests that it's hard to have great confidence in predicting what the market reaction will be" to Fed decisions, Ms. Yellen said at her news conference. As if to emphasize those differences, Ms. Yellen said that it was possible the Fed should have raised rates more quickly during the last tightening cycle, from 2004 to 2006, even as she underscored the Fed's intention to move more slowly this time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
"The Twentieth Century" also boggles the eyes with, well, 20th century arts. The expressionistic sets evoke wartime poster art and Art Deco, and the 16 millimeter film stock yields both ruddy hues and Northern Lights blues. Is it all a bit much? Sure, but the self consciousness is baked in: Rankin names one public gathering place "Disappointment Square." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Dougie Baldeo, a 13 year old ballet student at Harlem School of the Arts, stood onstage Monday night as Misty Copeland offered him pointers on his port de bras, or carriage of the arms. "Once you start moving, I don't want to see the claw creep back in," she said, referring to his sometimes tense right hand. Dougie was one of 13 students selected to study if only for an hour with Ms. Copeland, one of the most famous ballerinas in the world, who in 2015 became the first female African American principal dancer with American Ballet Theater. And if the students, from Harlem School of the Arts and the Dance Theater of Harlem School, were already feeling nervous because of all that star power, there was added pressure: an audience. The event, "A Misty Copeland Ballet Class," organized by Harlem Stage at its Gatehouse space was open to the students' families and peers, with a few seats available to the public. What started as a technique class focused on turnout of the legs, placement of the arms, straightness of the back became a larger kind of learning experience, when Ms. Copeland, 35, was joined for an after class discussion by a trailblazing African American dancer of another generation, the 86 year old Carmen de Lavallade. The two spoke about breaking down barriers for black ballet dancers and honoring those who had done so before them. For Ms. Copeland, a life changing role model was Raven Wilkinson, who, when she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1955, became the first African American woman to dance with a classical ballet company. For Ms. de Lavallade, it was her cousin Janet Collins, who was accepted into the same troupe two decades earlier on the condition that she lighten her skin. She turned down the job, later becoming the first black ballerina to dance with the Metropolitan Opera. Today, Ms. de Lavallade told the students, "there are no limits." She added: "You have the freedom to be who you want to be, but you have to focus and work for it." If the class was any indication, these young dancers, ranging in age from 8 to 13, are no strangers to focus and hard work. Taking their places at the barre, they followed intently as Ms. Copeland led them through a series of exercises, pausing to offer corrections, to adjust fingers and feet. The barre should be used "as support, not to hold on for dear life," she said. The arms in fifth position should be rounded yet lengthened, as opposed to looking like "a cry for help." While Ms. Copeland attended to details, Ms. de Lavallade an actress and choreographer as well as a multifaceted dancer zoomed out, offering a necessary reminder that technique isn't everything. When the students rested on the floor after the barre exercises she stood up from her front row seat and gently steered the class in an unexpected direction. "There's a light coming out of your head," she said, asking them to envision a vertical beam of energy, and they all seemed to grow a little taller. "You have to start using your imagination for your bodies." Rather than teaching steps, she invited the students to stand and imagine watching something on the horizon, then something crawling on the ground. Suddenly, through those simple prompts, they had all become part of a story and looked the most relaxed they had all evening. After the concerted struggle of technique class, it was comforting to hear Ms. de Lavallade stress the importance of conversing with, rather than arguing with, the body. "You have to talk to your body and be kind to it and not force it," she said. Or as Dougie Baldeo put it after class, reflecting on what he had learned, "You have to make sure that you're having fun and not getting too too too focused, because you don't want to stress yourself out or anything." If one goal of the evening was to encourage the students to dream big, it worked. "I really look up to Misty Copeland," said Ciyanna Rogers Taylor, 11, of the Dance Theater of Harlem School, noting that she owns "all of her books." And Ms. de Lavallade, she added, was just as great an inspiration, "for how long she's been dancing, and how she opened up a pathway for the rest of us." "I hope I can dance with them in the future," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
When Mitt Romney announced on Friday that he would not seek the Republican presidential nomination for a third time, he cited the desire to "give other leaders in the party" a chance to win the White House. He did not mention the public mugging he had received from , the media titan who had called him "a terrible candidate" and whose Wall Street Journal had suggested that his run in 2012 had been "a calamity." There are a lot of reasons that the third time did not prove to be a charm for Mr. Romney's presidential ambitions, but Mr. Murdoch's public rebuke sure didn't help. Having tried and failed to get his hands on Time Warner, Mr. Murdoch is back to king making. As the man who controls both the Fox News Channel and The Journal, he doesn't exactly have to attend a precinct caucus to exercise political influence. Only two people in the world could have this conversation, whether in public or private: Both are New York media owners, both with more money than many sovereign republics and both huge fans of the news and the organizations that trade in it. has a big national newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, and though Michael Bloomberg does not, they are otherwise similarly situated overlords. And so Mr. Murdoch's entreaty to his friend Mr. Bloomberg: C'mon in, the water is fine. I don't think The New York Times is for sale, but it is a telling sentiment, a conversation among kings about what possessions are truly precious to the man, or men, with everything. Even if The Times were for sale, how would it benefit Mr. Murdoch to have a rival paper in the hands of an equally moneyed media baron? It wouldn't, but it is in Mr. Murdoch's nature to stir the pot and create mischief. He's mostly just having his version of fun, all the while tweaking a competitor, which is another hobby. Mr. Bloomberg had his own version of fun running the City of New York for three terms. Now that he is on the other side of that, he did not take long to realize that he was not going to sit in the back seat of the huge data and media company he built while others drove. I don't know Mr. Bloomberg or Mr. Murdoch personally, but I have covered them enough to know that they share a few hobbies. They both enjoy gossip, are inveterate news hounds and love to involve themselves in all aspects of the production of the news. They also like to wield broad influence on how that news unfolds. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. True, Mr. Bloomberg was educated as an engineer and is the ultimate rationalist whereas Mr. Murdoch came up in the bare knuckled world of tabloids and relies on his gut. But neither seems particularly interested in money in the way that only the fabulously rich can be uninterested in money, and they both love winning. Beyond business and politics which are, after all, about winning neither appears animated by much else. As business reporters, we tend to overanalyze the titans among us, because, well, they aren't like us. Watching Mr. Murdoch, who controls and owns big chunks of a movie studio, a cable news channel and newspaper and television properties all over the world, and Mr. Bloomberg, who owns a worldwide terminal and data business, along with various media assets, it's easy to guess that the empire building is all part of one, huge unified plan. But in some respects, they remind me of other newspaper owners in various sized towns that I have covered men with an immense appetite for power who want nothing so much as to be in the middle of things. Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Murdoch just have many more zeros behind their net worth, and global empires to match. To project might, few things are as effective as owning big, throbbing media properties. Since returning to his company, Mr. Bloomberg, 72, has dedicated a large amount of money to remaking his media operations, including a reorganized website unveiled last week. By all reports, he has spent time tinkering with even the most minute aspects of the redesign, despite that being a tiny part of his company. Mr. Murdoch vastly overpaid for The Journal, and continues to support the money losing New York Post. When News Corporation split two years ago, he protected his beloved newspaper assets in a well funded new company. He is, by all accounts, highly involved with his papers and finds no detail too small to merit his interests. These are extremely successful businessmen who spend many hours on noneconomic parts of their businesses. They do so for two reasons: because they can, and because it is fun. Even those of us who aren't billionaires could tell you as much creating media content is a diverting activity that rarely resembles actual work. At 83, Mr. Murdoch has seen a few presidential elections come and go, and, through Fox News and The Journal, has had a hand in influencing most of them. But that won't be true forever, which may explain his antipathy at the prospect of Mr. Romney's taking another shot at the White House. (And it's not just the Republicans: On Sunday, he tweeted: "Guess what! Joe Biden actively preparing to run against Hillary. Maybe others like Kerry.") An Australian by birth who became an American citizen, he recently said in an email to my colleagues Amy Chozick and Michael Barbaro that he made no apologies for his interest in United States politics. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
PARIS Cuba is seeking to overturn Australia's tough tobacco labeling rules at the World Trade Organization, the trade body said Monday, the first time that Havana has used the forum to directly confront another nation over its commercial laws. Cuba, the world's dominant producer of fine cigars, has filed a "request for consultations" with Australia, Keith Rockwell, a spokesman for the W.T.O., said from Geneva, where the organization is based. The two nations now have 60 days to reach an agreement, he said; if they fail to resolve their differences in that time, the next step would be for Cuba to begin a formal challenge with the establishment of a dispute resolution panel. The request was filed on Friday but made public on Monday, Mr. Rockwell said. Cuba is joining Ukraine, Honduras and the Dominican Republic in challenging Australia's tobacco labeling laws at the W.T.O. All four nations argue that provisions of a 2011 Australian law, the Tobacco Plain Packaging Act, have created "technical barriers" to trade and violate intellectual property rights. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
A wildly popular interactive exhibition "Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors" at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington was fully reopened on Tuesday, three days after part of it was shut down when a visitor accidentally damaged a glowing pumpkin. News reports over the weekend made the incident sound like a worst case scenario for modern life: a self absorbed art fan reaching for the perfect selfie shatters a work of art valued at close to 800,000. And that 800,000 in damage to an illuminated pumpkin sculpture, one of dozens that are scattered across the floor in the exhibit? It appeared to be a guess, based on the sale price of a similar piece by Ms. Kusama two years ago. And, the museum said, a replacement pumpkin is on the way. The exhibition reopened on Tuesday morning after the damaged pumpkin was removed and the room was reconfigured to account for one less pumpkin, said Allison Peck, the spokeswoman. The room, called "All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins," is one of six in the exhibition, whose mirrored interiors create countless, ever diminishing reflections of themselves and anything in them. Visitors are invited to step into five of the rooms, and to peer into the sixth, immersing themselves in the dazzling displays. The walls and ceiling are clad in mirrors, so when the door closes you in, "you have a seamless experience," Ms. Peck said. "We have actually never had a show with that kind of visitor demand," she said. Timed tickets control entry to the rooms, and one to four people are recommended to go inside a room at a time, she said. On Saturday afternoon, Ms. Peck said, a visitor stepped into the square room containing the pumpkins. The room is about 13 square feet and holds more than 60 pumpkin sculptures, glowing from within by LEDs, strewn across the floor. The visitor Ms. Peck declined to say whether it was a man or a woman was alone in the room, Ms. Peck said, and "took an accidental misstep" from a small platform, damaging one of the pumpkin sculptures. Security and staff outside the door heard a noise when the incident happened. Conservation and collections experts evaluated the pumpkin and removed it, temporarily closing the room from the rest of the exhibit. The entire installation was then rearranged and reconfigured with the artist's recommendations, Ms. Peck said. "The artist is arranging for a replacement piece to arrive in a couple of weeks," she said. The visitor was questioned by museum staff, and an internal report was written up. There were no arrests. "It was very much an accident," Ms. Peck said. She gave no estimates for the damage of the pumpkin. A report by artnet News said a four foot high sculpture of a polka dot gourd created by Ms. Kusama sold for 784,485 at Sotheby's Hong Kong in October 2015, according to the artnet Price Database. That piece was made of fiberglass reinforced plastic and urethane paint, according to the database. But Ms. Peck said that there was no comparison between that stand alone work of art and the piece at the Hirshhorn, which was also of a replaceable type of plastic, because it formed part of a much larger work. "There is no intrinsic value to the individual piece itself," Ms. Peck said. "It is a manufactured component to a larger piece." A New York Times review of the exhibit called the effect of her work "glorious" and "beguiling." Ms. Kusama, who was born in Japan in 1929, made her first Infinity Mirror room, "Phalli's Field," in New York in 1965, filling the 15 square foot floor of a mirrored space with hundreds of her signature stuffed phalli, or tubers, covered in red on white polka dot fabric. Over the past several decades, "Phalli's Field" and the 19 other mirrored rooms Ms. Kusama has made since have established her as a beloved figure. Crowds line up around the block to enter her rooms, one person at a time; absorb their illusionistic, sometimes meditative effects; and step out, usually after the requisite selfie. The other mirrored rooms at the Hirshhorn include "Love Forever," a floor of tiny lights whose changing patterns and colors are viewed through a peephole, and "Dots Obsession Love Transformed Into Dots," featuring black dotted hot pink beach ball like spheres of several sizes. Art installations at museums have been the victims of accidental damage before. A woman tripped at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010, ripping "The Actor," a work by Picasso dating to 1904 or 1905. The best rule is to keep your distance and your hands to yourself. In 2016, a man walked into the National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, Pa., and, admiring a sculptural wall clock on display, touched and pulled on it to see how it worked. The wooden clock, which was made by the artist James Borden, fell off the wall and collapsed into pieces. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Bill Rodger, 91, often finds himself sitting on a worn flower print couch in his living room in North Hollywood, Calif., facing a wall of accolades that document his long life. There are photos of Mr. Rodger over the decades winning sports tournaments and posing with grandchildren. There are golf medals, plaques and the most recent addition, a monthly bird calendar. "I'd rather be busy, but I haven't been busy in a really long time," Mr. Rodger said in late January from this position, his voice trailing off. "I guess going to the doctor keeps me busy." The admission warranted a warm pat on Mr. Rodger's shoulder from a smiling young man sitting beside him. Ricardo Figueroa, 31, isn't a family member or caretaker or even a neighbor. He's a paid companion who was connected to Mr. Rodger through Papa, a health tech company that provides "grandkids on demand." Before the new coronavirus pandemic, the two spent multiple hours together each week running errands, going to dialysis appointments, or just watching movies. Today, their relationship is restricted to phone calls but they remain close. "The whole situation is so scary," said Mr. Figueroa on the phone, from his home. "So just talking to him is so uplifting." Likewise, Mr. Rodger said, "It's good to hear from him!" The two men are a good match by design. Founded in 2018, Papa pairs older adults with college students and young workers who have common interests and hobbies. Mr. Rodger and Mr. Figueroa are both military veterans who enjoy documentaries, sports and an occasional beer, and they live within a few blocks of each other. But whereas the 5,000 Papa pals once played card games or worked on memoirs with the seniors they have befriended, today they are FaceTiming or calling each other to discuss a world in disarray. Some have shifted to running errands, picking up groceries or prescriptions. For these and other tasks, they make between 11 and 14 an hour, not including tips and covered expenses like gas, on a freelance basis. (Papa is currently available in 20 states; the company typically charges clients 20 to 25 an hour.) Despite the low wage, this is still vital work. According to a 2018 AARP Foundation survey, roughly one third of older adults in the United States are socially isolated, a state that is linked to increased health risks, including heart disease, cancer, depression, diabetes and suicide. Vivek Murthy, the former United States surgeon general, has written that loneliness and social isolation are "associated with a reduction in life span similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day." And the problem has an impact on the health care system. Last year, there were thousands of emergency room visits in Dallas that had nothing to do with physical ailments at all. The patients were just completely socially isolated, without anyone to turn to for help. "Loneliness is now finally being recognized as a disease, not only at a personal level, but also from a health care perspective," said Andrew Parker, 32, who founded Papa in 2018. His company is one of several that aims to be a stopgap, and health insurers who may be looking to cut costs have begun to take notice. Mr. Rodger's family is paying for Papa because of a conundrum: Mr. Rodger's granddaughter Tanya Martin had been his primary caretaker for more than four years. But once Mr. Rodger needed dialysis, it became too much for her to handle with her full time job as an airplane mechanic. He didn't qualify to have further assistance covered by his health insurance, but he also couldn't afford a private caretaker, which can cost about 300 a day in Los Angeles, according to the prices Ms. Martin was quoted. It's a very tough time to be one of the 1.5 million Americans who currently live in nursing homes. About one fifth of U.S. virus deaths are linked to nursing facilities, and employees, who are often poorly paid and have multiple jobs, are overtaxed and afraid for their own families. Visitors have been banned, heightening the atmosphere of fear and isolation. Even before the pandemic, caregivers and aides were often overtaxed, tasked with helping many other residents and with little time to socialize. Emotional support can be hard to come by. "There's no real meaningful conversation," said Liz Barlowe, the president of the Aging Life Care Association, a nonprofit representing senior care professionals. "There is that lack of connectedness, of being present and hyper focused on one person." So Mon Ami, another company that facilitates senior companion services through nursing homes and for individuals, recently set up a volunteer phone bank to support older people isolated by shelter in place orders. It drew 300 hundred volunteers within days. (The company's founders, Madeline Dangerfield Cha, 32, and Joy Zhang, 31, said that Mon Ami's paid companions have also shifted to phone calls or virtual visits, staying in touch with seniors by putting on mini concerts, reading books aloud and instructing gentle movement exercises.) One of those volunteers is Morgan Steele, 25, a clinical research coordinator at Stanford University. She was recently paired with Hugh Ping, 77, with whom she chats several times a week. Mon Ami suggests that companions and clients chat for 15 to 30 minutes at a time, "but we can talk well over half an hour without even realizing it," Ms. Steele said. Mr. Ping's daughter, Deanna Ping, said it has been challenging to strip her sociable father from the small interactions that were "very major to him": He loved venturing out from his home in the Bay Area to go to the drugstore and to restaurants where he knew all the staff. "It brings me a lot of peace to know there are others to talk with him," she said. Often, in conversation with Ms. Steele, Mr. Ping compares the current situation to having lived through the Cuban missile crisis when he was in the Air Force. "He talks about a time where people didn't know if their whole world was ending," Ms. Steele said. It helps keep things in perspective. "We think we have it bad when we're working from home with our significant other or roommates, but then you start to realize there are people who are literally so alone," Ms. Steele said. "A half hour call can really brighten their day." For paid companion positions, both Papa and Mon Ami screen potential candidates through in depth interviews, as well as through background and motor vehicle checks. (The volunteer bank is far less intensively screened, though still requires an application.) While a majority of companions have relevant experience as nurses, social workers or medical school students Ms. Zhang said Mon Ami looks for those who possess social and emotional intelligence skills, those who "can be present and can engage with someone who is very different from you." It's an appealing gig for students with flexible schedules or for those who now find themselves with time on their hands. (Mon Ami companions work an average of four hours per week.) But the benefits go both ways. The start up routinely hears that the work does as much for their emotional well being of many of companions as it may do for the seniors. Ms. Dangerfield Cha is clear that Mon Ami is but one option in an industry suffering from a senior care shortage. About 10,000 people turn 65 each day, and 43 percent envision aging in their primary home. Estimates from the Census Bureau indicate that Americans over the age of 65 will comprise nearly 20 percent of the total population by 2030. "The reality is that as our society is aging more rapidly than at any other time in history, we need all types of support," Ms. Dangerfield Cha said. "We're going to need all of it and then some." To that point, AARP data shows that those who are socially isolated cost an additional 6.7 billion in Medicare spending; Papa already works with 10 health plans, including Humana, Aetna and Florida Blue, and the company is pursuing more partnerships, including offering the service to new parents and other caregivers. It has raised 12.6 million in venture funding to date. As it expands, Papa is also working to safeguard its continuing companionships, like that of Mr. Figueroa and Mr. Rodger. Not that the two need much oversight. They already have big plans once the world reverts to normal. "I want to get into golfing now, thanks to him," Mr. Figueroa said of Mr. Rodger. "As soon as we're clear to go out, we're definitely going to get out there in the field." Mr. Rodger, excited by the prospect of a day on the putting green, couldn't contain his enthusiasm or his grandfatherly tendencies. "I have some pointers," he said. "I could help you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The vibrant performer Marga Gomez pays loving, funny tribute to her father, a comic performer and songwriter named Willy Chevalier (the Chevalier was a bit of invention), in her latest solo show, "Latin Standards," being presented through Sunday as part of the Under the Radar festival. Ms. Gomez, her hair slicked back and wearing a flashy gold jacket her father was a natty dresser, too begins by announcing that this will be her final performance. It manifestly isn't, of course, but as she notes in the short warm up comic set that precedes the meat of the show, "I'm not Mexican but I'm close enough for the sweep." (She also makes a funny crack about Vice President elect Mike Pence's not realizing that "theater is gay.") Her father was a popular entertainer in the nightclubs that catered to New York's large Latino population in the 1950s and '60s, who had come to the city "from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico all of them looking for a better life raping, drug dealing, committing crime," Ms. Gomez quips, adding a wry, "Nyet!" Ms. Gomez had a warm relationship with her father, although he had previously had two other wives, and children by them. Ms. Gomez's mother was an entertainer, too in photos, she's the dictionary picture of a blond bombshell who sometimes worked with her father and at other times fought with him or ignored him. The show's title refers to the songs that Mr. Chevalier wrote, many of which were recorded and made the Latin charts, and most of which were soulful laments about the trials of love. Ms. Gomez confesses that she's no singer, but she recites the lyrics as recordings play in the background. But while his career burned hot for many years, tough times occasionally intervened, and Ms. Gomez weaves into the story of his decline a tale of one of her own professional setbacks. She decided to start a comedy night at a Latino drag club in San Francisco, despite the reservations of her girlfriend then, whom she calls Gwyneth, "because she was into fashion and whiteness, I mean wellness." "What about your brand, Marga?" Gwyneth says scoldingly, noting the club's seediness. But Ms. Gomez persevered, and though she had to buy the chairs herself, she gradually gained a following and the grudging admiration of the club's owner. But the year was 2012, and the forces of gentrification were already swallowing up sections of the largely Latino Mission District. The club closed. The toggling between the stories of her father's career and her own can sometimes be abrupt, but she uses her father's songs as transitional material. Still, under the brisk direction of David Schweizer, the show's momentum never flags, even when Ms. Gomez makes the occasional standup style diversion, as when she talks about attending an Adele concert and only paying attention during the patter because, fundamentally, she doesn't like music. Ms. Gomez's natural instincts as a performer are comic, but here she occasionally allows herself to wade into real feeling, as she recalls with some regret that she withdrew from her father as she concentrated on her career. "I was afraid to see him old and wrecked from booze, cigarettes and cocaine," she says. "I was scared to see him poor. Now I'm the age he was when he died and I can see he was beautiful always, with all his mistakes." And as "Latin Standards" underscores with winning heart and humor, Ms. Gomez clearly owes her own love of performing, and her ability to plow over the speed bumps that are inevitable in show business, to her father, who took it all in stride and kept striving. Sometimes Willy had to take a restaurant job to make money, but even then he was planning for his next comeback. When business at the restaurant was slow, he'd fill the down time writing jokes and songs on the checks. That's a trouper. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Grainy and circular, the sound in the dark could be that of a scratchy old record. But when the lights come up, you see that it is the tap dancer Caleb Teicher, caressing a sanded floor with his leather shoes: not a scratchy old record at all, but a young artist trying new things. In "More Forever," which had its premiere in the Guggenheim Museum's Works Process series on Sunday, Mr. Teicher is joined by his company and at the piano by the composer Conrad Tao. Mr. Teicher and Mr. Tao are former teenage prodigies, now in their mid 20s, garnering much attention and acclaim as they mature in public. At its best, their "More Forever" is both youthful and sophisticated. This is a tap show without tap shoes. Mr. Teicher is reaching back before the invention of metal taps to an earlier tradition of thumping and scraping, but he applies it to his own ends. He starts quietly in a corner of the stage, and as other dancers pass through, trailing what looks like sand (it's cornmeal) from their fists, they leave another soloist in another corner. This happens again and again, until the corners are full. Suddenly, a dancer center stage (the ebullient Macy Sullivan) takes the dance up tempo and onto the balls of her feet. The other dancers follow, locking into diagonals, lines and circles while the rhythms change. One by one, they depart, exiting with a funny little hop. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In the months before she hanged herself in 1999, the English playwright Sarah Kane woke up, nearly every morning, at exactly 4:48 a.m. As she went on and off drugs and in and out of hospitals, she wrote her final play, "4:48 Psychosis," an anguished, mordant, fragmentary work, dissociative in form and content. A throat shredding scream of a play, it has been staged and restaged since its posthumous premiere in 2000. It is now a chamber opera. Composed by Philip Venables and directed by Ted Huffman, the Prototype: Opera/Theater/Now festival's "4:48 Psychosis," which had its premiere in London in 2016 and opens in New York on Jan. 5, makes music of a play with no delineated characters, few clear scene breaks and no stage directions except for occasional, italicized pleas for silence. "It's not a piece that works by who says what on stage, and that is wonderfully liberating for an opera," Mr. Venables said, speaking by telephone from London. Other festivals in January: Read about a play by Gracie Gardner at the Exponential Festival and Under the Radar at the Public Theater. Mr. Venables's interpretation relies on six voices, three sopranos and three mezzo sopranos, who convey together and separately the competing and often contradictory voices inside one woman's head. In scenes where a psychiatrist or some other medical professional seems to be speaking, two percussionists beat out the speech rhythms as the text is projected in a rear wall. The orchestra is visible and sometimes the sound overwhelms the singers, Mr. Venables said, "like a kind of really powerful emotion that you can't overcome." (William Cole will be the conductor, replacing Richard Baker, who had to withdraw because of illness.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The amnesiac title character of "Anastasia," who may or may not be the long lost daughter of the last Russian czar, isn't alone in suffering a serious identity crisis. The postcard scenic show that bears her name, which opened on Monday night at the Broadhurst Theater, has its own troubling case of multiple personality disorder. Come to think of it, Anastasia the person, played by Christy Altomare, has it easy compared with "Anastasia" the musical. She has to worry only about whether she's really a princess. And judging by her instinctive poise, commanding condescension and cut glass accent, she can't be in that much doubt, though she does sometimes go all wobbly when ghosts of the Romanov Empire dance around her. The show in which she appears trembles nonstop with internal conflicts during its drawn out two and a half hours. Part of the source of its malaise may be detected in a conspicuous credit below the title in the program that reads, "Inspired by the 20th Century Fox motion pictures." "Anastasia" the musical, which features a book by the acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally and songs by the Tony winning team of Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (who all collaborated on "Ragtime"), shifts between the worldviews of both inspirations, while pretending there's no disconnect. In the process, it evokes another kind of show altogether. I mean those mid 20th century musicals that must've sounded like a good idea at the time, but tend to be remembered today only by hard core aficionados of the genre. They were frothy but earnest shows, set in distant times and foreign lands, with titles like "Mata Hari" and "Pleasures and Palaces." Such shows had a hard time squeezing their epic size selves into the corsets of book musical conventions, and they usually died young. I don't foresee a similar fate for "Anastasia," which originated at Hartford Stage in Connecticut and is directed by Darko Tresnjak (a Tony winner for his ingenious staging of "A Gentleman's Guide to Love Murder"), with choreography both stately and antic by Peggy Hickey. The cartoon version from 1997 is very fondly remembered by people who saw it as tweens, especially girls. Its Ahrens Flaherty score included the breakout hit "Journey to the Past," which is repurposed here and sung ardently by Ms. Altomare. So "Anastasia" may well tap into the dewy eyed demographic that made "Wicked" such an indestructible favorite of female adolescents. Those without such nostalgic insulation are likely to find this "Anastasia" a chore. It is a reminder, among other things, that bloody periods of history, like the Russian Revolution, do not naturally lend themselves to perky song and dance. (Yes, I know, I know there are the stunning exceptions of "Les Miserables" and "Miss Saigon," but would anyone ever describe these grim behemoths as perky? And "Hamilton" is its own animal.) It's a challenge not to wince, for example, during the unspooling of a plot that segues from the execution of the Russian royal family to plucky comic numbers about hard times in the newborn Soviet Union. No, the death dealing firing squad doesn't sing. But a con man who remembers more glamorous days does, mournfully recalling: "I hobnobbed with the royals/ But then a change of luck./ The czar was dead, the royals fled, and comrade, now we're stuck!" The one reminiscing is the unctuous, middle aged Vlad (John Bolton, looking embarrassed), who comes up with the scheme of passing off a promising impostor as Anastasia, Nicholas II's youngest daughter, who is rumored to have survived the firing squad. Vlad and his good looking young partner in deception, Dmitry (Derek Klena), take up the pretty street sweeper, Anya (Ms. Altomare), who has lost her memory. They train her in aristo ways in a wan "My Fair Lady" style tutoring session. (Never have I so missed "The Rain in Spain.") The three sneak out of Russia, after a sentimental choral farewell to their homeland. (Never have I so missed "Anatevka" from "Fiddler on the Roof.") Their destination: Paris, where the dead czar's mother, the Dowager Empress (the ever elegant Mary Beth Peil, whom it's always nice to see, even in a show like this), lives in gloomy exile. Will the empress accept Anya as Anastasia? If so, what will happen to the budding romance between Dmitry and Anya, who have one of those cutely combative relationships that are so popular in animated films? Fans of the 1997 movie may be disappointed to learn that its archvillain, Rasputin, and his winged assistant, Bartok the bat, have been banished from the show. Their replacement is a humorless but handsome apparatchik, Gleb (Ramin Karimloo, a veteran of grand operas, looking embarrassed), who finds himself strangely drawn to Anya. He follows her to Paris, with designs both romantic and homicidal. Other characters include the wacky Countess Lily (Caroline O'Connor, of Baz Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge," trying hard), the former mistress of Vlad. Reunited, these two make like sexed up variations on the roguish old lovers played by Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold in "Gigi." (Never have I so missed "I Remember It Well.") Alexander Dodge's sets, fleshed out by photographic projections by Aaron Rhyne, have a pop up book prettiness, though they often seem stranded between two and three dimensions. So do the performances, though Ms. Altomare commits herself to her part with melodramatic focus and a soaring pop voice. Once she switches from her street sweeper rags into Parisian haute couture (the costumes are by Linda Cho) you may discern a resemblance to that current fashion plate of American royalty, Ivanka Trump. I did anyway. Such are the little self diverting games a constant theatergoer plays when the mind wanders. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In a move to combat the epidemic of false and unreliable information on the internet, Google is pledging to spend 300 million over the next three years to support authoritative journalism. Google's campaign, which was announced at an event in New York on Tuesday, will be known as the Google News Initiative. Among the initiative's goals are making it easier for Google users to subscribe to news publications, and giving publishers new tools to create fast loading mobile pages. The project is Google's most ambitious attempt yet to improve the quality of information it shows to users at a time when tech companies have come under criticism for letting hoaxes and misinformation bloom on their services. Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, said in a blog post that the initiative was intended to signal the company's "commitment to a news industry facing dramatic shifts in how journalism is created, consumed and paid for." As part of its efforts, Google is helping to create a Disinfo Lab in partnership with the Harvard Kennedy School's First Draft, which will attempt to identify false news during critical breaking news situations. Google and YouTube, the video site owned by Google's parent company, have been criticized for allowing conspiracy theories and unreliable partisan sources to filter to the top of search results for breaking news and for having failed to stop the spread of false news during the 2016 presidential race. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
This season's shortest episode of "The Mandalorian" turned out to be the most consequential so far. In 30 breathless minutes mostly made up of one long action sequence "The Tragedy" offers a sudden and rapid acceleration this year's main story line. By the end of the half hour, Din Djarin has lost almost everything, including his ship and his tiny friend Grogu. In their stead he gains two new allies and a critical assignment. For the sake of the galaxy and to mend his own broken heart, he must get the Child back. So much happens in this episode that it's easy to overlook one of its biggest surprises: the return of Boba Fett. The actor Temuera Morrison appeared briefly as Boba in this season's first episode the one in which Mando earned back what turned out to be the fabled bounty hunter's armor. (He also played Boba's father, Jango, in Episodes 2 and 3 of the "Star Wars" movie prequels.) Apparently the character has been tracking our hero ever since, with the help of Fennec Shand (Ming Na Wen), a mercenary the Mandalorian tussled with in Season 1. Boba and Fennec find Din on the planet Tython, long the spiritual home to the Jedi Order. While Grogu sits in an ancient temple and communes with the Force, the three rogues engage in a quick standoff before coming to an agreement. If Din will give Boba back his armor, Fenec won't hurt Grogu. This isn't an easy bargain for the Mandalorian to strike because he has a code that dictates who does and doesn't deserve to wear the armor. And here's what Din knows about Boba: absolutely nothing. He doesn't know about this stranger's past association with the bounty hunter's guild. He's never heard of Jango Fett, the soldier of fortune the Empire cloned to make an army. When Boba describes himself as "a simple man making his way through the galaxy like my father before me," those words don't resonate with Mando in the same way they should with "Star Wars" fans. I know this kind of ignorance among the characters common to the "Star Wars" universe perplexes and even vexes some viewers of "The Mandalorian." I saw some grumbling online, after last week's episode, about how Ahsoka Tano failed to mention Luke Skywalker as a potential mentor for Grogu. In the timeline of this show, it's been only a few years since Luke helped lead the Rebels to fell the Empire. Isn't he famous? Wouldn't the legends of the Skywalkers and the Fetts and all the other major '"Star Wars" characters be known throughout the galaxy? I've always considered this to be one of the strengths of "Star Wars" though, and not a flaw. Because this galaxy is so huge and so diverse, the heroes and villains often have their own agendas, independent of whatever the powerful have been planning. The characters we meet in these movies and TV series are generally reacting to whatever danger or desire is right in front of them. That's certainly what happens to Boba, Fennec and Din, who get pushed into an alliance when their own face off is interrupted by the arrival of an Imperial transport filled with stormtroopers. Before long, a second shuttle joins the first. The three are facing an overwhelming opposition. What follows is about 15 minutes of outstanding action, masterfully staged and shot by the director Robert Rodriguez, a filmmaker who has been a whiz with screen combat ever since his 1992 debut movie, "El Mariachi." The writer producer Jon Favreau must have given Rodriguez the simple instruction to make this episode look as cool as possible, because there's scarcely a piece of fight choreography here that isn't absolutely awesome, from Fennec's backward leap off a cliff while shooting a rifle, to Din's use of scatter bullets to pick off multiple targets, to Boba's handiwork with a barbed staff, shredding his enemies' armor. (Given the stormtrooper outfit's resemblance to what Jango's clones wore, undoubtedly it gives Boba a special joy to destroy it.) The sequence seems to come to a triumphant end when Boba retrieves his old armor from the Razor Crest and subsequently turns the tide. The troopers try to flee, but Boba knocks down both of the escaping shuttles with one rocket. But before Mando can thank everyone for a job well done, Moff Gideon orbiting above Tython has his Imperial Cruiser fire a laser that demolishes the Razor Crest. Then he sends his robotic, supercharged "Dark Troopers" down to the surface to grab Grogu, who is so tired from his effort to telepathically contact other Jedi that he's easy to kidnap. Boba and Fennec immediately offer to aid in the Mandalorian's rescue effort, arguing that since they promised not to let the Child be harmed, they have a debt of honor to repay. They all zip over to Nevarro, where Din asks Cara Dune to help him find the devious Imperial sniper Migs Mayfield (Bill Burr), who used to work for Gideon. As a newly installed marshal of the Republic, Cara hesitates at first until she finds out that Grogu is in trouble. Anyone who has ever spent any time with Baby Yoda would break any law to keep the little guy safe. Here again, the situational nature of the "Star Wars" saga comes into play. Neither Din nor Cara really know who or what Grogu is. They don't know anything about the adult Yoda, beyond what Mando knows from a few offhand comments by Ahsoka. Most of what they know about the Jedi has come to them secondhand ... and a lot of that talk has been negative. But from the way Din talks to Grogu as they approach Tython chuckling with joy at the kid's very presence while also trying to convince himself that the right thing to do is to turn him over to the Jedi it's clear he knows the Child is one of a kind. If only Gideon felt the same. After watching with delighted wonder as Grogu telekinetically flings stormtroopers around his cell, he then puts the exhausted Child into adorably tiny shackles and orders his subordinate to make a call to Dr. Pershing. "Let him know we have got our donor," he says. We've seen before how Gideon and his people have tried to drain the Force from Grogu, which seems like such a waste of someone so special. But that just goes to show that even the fortunate few who know what's really going on within the "Star Wars" universe can be shortsighted. To them, everything and everybody no matter how small and no matter how mighty is a resource to be exploited. None When Boba sees Gideon's Imperial Cruiser, he ruefully says that the Empire is back. But is it? One of the great unknowns of "The Mandalorian" is whether the Empire's remaining representatives are organized in any systematic way or if Gideon and his minions have moved on from the old order and are now hatching some new kind of evil scheme. None Here's another unknown: Did Grogu in fact contact any Jedi when he was on Tython? We see him collapse with exhaustion from the effort, but he's seized by Dark Troopers before we know whether he had any success. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw another Jedi this season, perhaps swooping in to save the day when all seems hopeless, as Jedi are wont to do. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A powerful family, teeming with dysfunction and spoiling for conflict. An aging patriarch who bred his children for maximum ruthlessness, pitting them in competition for a role he may or may not be ready to yield. Two adult sons, lacking in leadership and riddled with vice, and a grown daughter with more interest in the family business than she lets on; just outside, a horde of malfunctioning relatives and hangers on, waiting to snatch up whatever scraps remain after the combat is over. And the rest of us watching from the cheap seats, as if it's all been staged for our entertainment because it has. In its first season, the HBO series "Succession" was perfectly attuned to this era of the 0.0001 percent, offering a no holds barred look inside the fictional Roy family that bristled with the drama of generational conflict and crackled with comedy that was both erudite and spectacularly vulgar. (Not surprisingly, its creator, Jesse Armstrong, previously wrote for shows like "Veep," "Black Mirror" and "The Thick of It.") "Succession" introduced viewers to characters like the mercurial titan Logan Roy (Brian Cox), founder of the Waystar Royco media empire; his unqualified sons, the brooding Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and the crass Roman (Kieran Culkin); his daughter, the seemingly incorruptible Siobhan (Sarah Snook), or "Shiv"; and his son Connor (Alan Ruck), from a previous marriage, whose idea of a leisurely pursuit is running for the U.S. presidency. Savored by fans for its ability to cut the rich and influential down to size, "Succession" received five Emmy Award nominations last month, including one for outstanding drama series. No longer a dark horse, "Succession" faces new challenges as it seeks to avoid the dreaded sophomore slump that persists in prestige television, and at HBO, where series like "Big Little Lies," "Westworld" and "True Detective" had difficulty measuring up to the expectations set by their first seasons. In its own second season, which starts on Sunday "Succession" has to move forward from its harrowing first season finale in which Kendall was on the verge of a hostile takeover of his father's company, until he went on a drug binge, got a waiter killed in a car accident and had to go crawling back to Logan and continue to strike its balance of discord, farce and tragedy without repeating itself. Viewers also expect the show to continue its eerie streak of anticipating real life revelations from the dominant but secretive dynasties the Murdochs, of course, but also the Mercers and the Redstones, among others whose controversies it mines for inspiration. These are all demands of which Armstrong and his cast members are acutely aware. On a Sunday evening in July, they gathered in a corner suite of a boutique hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to talk about the series. Whether or not they intended it, the actors were often perfectly in character Cox, imposing and impish; Strong, deliberate and enigmatic; Culkin, a wry cutup; Snook, ready to spar; and Ruck, happy to play the fool as they reflected on the show's first season and braced themselves for its second. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. HBO didn't seem to give "Succession" much of a promotional push when it came out, but the show caught the zeitgeist in a way every showrunner must hope for. Jesse, what were you thinking of when you created the series? JESSE ARMSTRONG The network expletive us. Laughter. That was a joke. They've been very supportive, HBO. KIERAN CULKIN Off to a great start, man. Really setting the bar. ARMSTRONG It was a total joke. Not even an undercurrent of truth. So what was I thinking when we came up with this show? CULKIN When you made that joke, what were you thinking? More laughter. BRIAN COX Stop it now, all of you! ARMSTRONG I guess there's two parts of it. There's the ambitious part of you I'd like to write a big American show for HBO, with those resources and the kind of talent that you can attract. And then there was the creative impulse, about wanting to write about these powerful men who control big parts of the media, and how the world ended up in the place it has. I pitched it in the beginning of 2016 and we did the read through on Election Day, so it came together relatively quick. How have you seen people respond to the show since it started airing? ALAN RUCK When the show premiered, I was a little baffled by the people who said there's nobody to root for. Because I've never felt that about anything I've ever watched in my life. If it's a train wreck and they're interesting, who cares? I don't care. They could all die. Laughter. CULKIN I would want to watch that. SARAH SNOOK The comment that I find the most intriguing is when people say, "We grew up poor, but that's totally my family. That's so my dad. He wasn't a billionaire but he was such an expletive ." They empathize with the Roys, despite them being such horrible seeming people. They still forgive them because they recognize a family member or a friend in that. JEREMY STRONG In the time that we're in, that is so saturated with superhero stories, I feel like Jesse and the writers are turning that on its head. This is truer and it exists in a grayer area than that very binary superhero idealization of life. These people are not heroic. But I do think they are at times courageous and trying to be their best selves in these very toxic circumstances. And that's something to care about. The first season of "Succession" ended in a place that felt like a finished story in its own right. Would you have been satisfied if that had been the end of the series? ARMSTRONG No, I would have been personally disappointed. It was intended to carry on. There's a promise in the title that suggests you eventually get to a point of decision. So there's no paucity of ideas. There's like a 300 page document of stuff we couldn't do in the first season. Most of which then didn't fit with what we're now doing. But the family dynamics feel rich to us and not played out. What if anything was different about coming into the second season of the show? ARMSTRONG Sometimes when you write a second season, the first draft can feel like self parody. You're like, I feel like I'm writing fan fiction of our own endeavor. Am I running on the same rail tracks too precisely? STRONG I think you do have to protect yourself from that feeling. For me, it was one of the reasons I wasn't able to watch our first season. Because I didn't want to enter into that space of becoming self aware. I found it really difficult to come back. RUCK Well, last year, you were in hell. STRONG Yeah. And because we start the season maybe 36 hours from that event, and the crisis and the extremity of that, that was difficult. There was a lot of dread in terms of coming back and picking up that weight again. One thing I did before getting ready was to read "Crime and Punishment" again, to understand that idea of the punishment not having anything to do with being caught or with the crime itself, but living with yourself and being isolated because of something that you've done. COX What I viewed as scary was not knowing what was happening next. Now I get a frisson from that. I look forward to that feeling. I've worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater, but I've never I've never been on a show that's so immediate not just the moment, with what we're doing, but in the moment, with life around us. I haven't experienced that, ever. CULKIN I want to echo all of that, except I don't know what "frisson" is. Laughter. COX Don't blame me. I left school when I was 15. Do you think "Succession" is a drama or a comedy? COX An area that I discovered, past my 40s, was ludicrousness. That life is ludicrous and becomes increasingly more ludicrous and you just go, well, I'm part of the ludicrosity. Laughter. SNOOK That's not a word. RUCK But it is now. COX I did "Titus Andronicus" 30 years ago, one of Shakespeare's great plays, and it's exactly like this show. STRONG I feel like I'm in a drama and I approach it like a drama. RUCK That's what you have to do. You have to play it deadly serious. And that's why it's so funny. SNOOK These people have learned to exist with each other, and for them all to be quick witted and funny, they're all in competition with each other, in every single facet of their lives. That's just their natural habit of how they interact with each other. Brian, do you think Logan Roy bears the blame for how his children turned out? COX In real life we see certain people being in certain positions that they shouldn't be in, because of entitlement. The thing about Logan is, he's not entitled he's done it all by his own wits. But his kids have inherited something. They've started from a point which is almost untenable for them. I think he's trying to prepare his children to be what they have to be, which is not very pleasant. But live in it live in not being pleasant. And not have a conscience about it. The saga of Rupert Murdoch and his family, in particular, seems to parallel the story told in "Succession." Are you deliberately using them as a model? Do you have a mole in their household? ARMSTRONG The amazing thing about this stuff is that it's everywhere. Sumner Redstone's family. The Mercers. The Murdochs. Conrad Black. Sometimes people have said, it's really about these people, isn't it? It's based on them. And: No. We read widely and we do take elements of stuff. Hopefully, if you're writing in the right area, you end up hitting reality. But there are no moles. What about the Trumps? ARMSTRONG We talk about that stuff in the room. It's terrifyingly liberating when, occasionally, somebody says, well, that would never happen. And you think of the things which do happen, sadly. But no, I don't think we found it overwhelmingly present in our minds. Because the world of the show feels so real, we trust our characters to do the stuff they would do, and we show up with our notebooks and the stories will come. I don't think we feel oppressed by the real world in that way. Do you now have any insights into politics as a result of playing Connor? RUCK No, I don't. I'm woefully out of touch with what's really going on. I'm an older guy with small children and my wife is a very busy actress. So I watch whatever she's doing and then I watch Pixar or DreamWorks, and then I try to sleep. So I have a vague notion of what's going on, but mostly I just wish the expletive could get it together, and stop bickering and just be like, claps hands "She's it, let's go." Anyway, I'm woefully uneducated. There are sometimes moments where we look to the rich, the powerful and the successful for inspiration. Evidently we are not in one of those moments right now. What happened? COX I think there's a death throe that's going on, which is that white, essentially male, dinosaurs are in a death throe. We really are. We're done. We're out of here. And so there's a sneaking element of that running through the show: You kill the old guy because he represents the old order, and it's awful and his fault. That's what's so interesting about this show, and it's so reflective of the now. We're in the age of diversity by the way, we didn't do it, but we should have announced our preferred pronouns before we started this meeting. My son had to do that the other day, at a read through of play. He had to say, "I am him/his/he." Exhausting. Anyway. That's where we are. Viewers have become especially fond of your co stars Matthew Macfadyen, who plays Shiv's hapless husband, Tom, and Nicholas Braun, who plays gangly Cousin Greg. What can you tell us about them? SNOOK I'm really lucky that I get to work with Matthew. CULKIN I get a little jealous of that sometimes. Matthew is the only one that I sometimes feel guilty about, like when I have to shout at him, " expletive you, Tom," and then it's cut "Sorry, Matthew." He's the most lovely guy in the world. STRONG He's a powerhouse, and Nick Braun is a powerhouse. CULKIN Nick Braun can't help but be funny. I invited him over to a party, years ago, and within about 15 minutes of him being there, everyone was surrounding him. He just has a thing COX It's called the Maypole Principle. laughter CULKIN But I notice everybody flirts with him, of any size, shape, gender, whatever. Who should ultimately get control of Waystar Royco? CULKIN clears throat. Roman. COX The one who should get it is the one who deserves it. SNOOK Ah. RUCK Nicely played. CULKIN Roman. STRONG Given the circumstances, I'm a bit out of the race. This character certainly had wanted that for his whole life. But I think, like in one of those Formula 500 races, the car just flamed out. SNOOK Maybe whoever does worst at Royco deserves it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Here's a rule in today's ever changing TV landscape: Big hits are very hard to come by. On Monday, however, the streaming service said that it was pulling the plug on "Marco Polo," its pricey 13th century drama about the Mongol empire, after only two seasons. Despite devoting billions to original programming, introducing dozens of new TV shows, Netflix has been reluctant to cancel its offerings. It previously pulled "Lilyhammer" and "Hemlock Grove," and announced in September that "Bloodline'' would not be returning. Those shows, however, lasted three seasons; "Marco Polo" will not. Netflix along with the other streaming services like Amazon and Hulu does not disclose ratings, so it's difficult to know just how poorly "Marco Polo" fared. But reviews for the series were unkind, and there has been next to no cultural excitement surrounding it. And the series was costly. Originally developed for the cable channel Starz, it was produced by the Weinstein Company, whose co chairman, Harvey Weinstein, once boasted that it would be "one of the most expensive shows ever done for pay TV." As costs escalated, the series moved over to Netflix, and the production was indeed lavish. With an estimated budget of at least 180 million over two years, the series was filmed in far flung locations like Italy, Kazakhstan and Malaysia, and received an extensive marketing campaign. In a statement, Mr. Weinstein said: "Netflix has been incredible to give us the room to make a series with a cast true to every principle of diversity. It's a bold network that allows you to do that and support us in the way that Netflix did." What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. In the four years that Netflix has been streaming original shows, the service has been in a historic buildup mode that has it outspending every competitor, including HBO and Amazon. Netflix said in October it would spend 6 billion on content in 2017, much of it on original programming. When Netflix landed shows like the Aziz Ansari comedy "Master of None" and the period drama "The Crown," FX's chief executive John Landgraf said that the streaming service overwhelmed them with "shock and awe levels of money and commitment" for both projects. But the "Marco Polo" cancellation may be a sign that Netflix will become more selective about endlessly devoting resources to original series. The streaming service has not committed to a second season for its pricey show "The Get Down" (the second half of its first season will debut next year). And it's unclear how projects like the Chelsea Handler talk show are doing. The streaming service said that it does not disclose ratings because it works on a subscription model, and does not sell advertising to adults under the age of 50, as most TV networks do. Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer, said earlier this year that "if we were spending a lot of money on shows that people weren't watching" then subscribers would drop the service. The service has more than 86 million subscribers worldwide. Netflix did get some good news on Monday: Both "The Crown" and "Stranger Things" were nominated for the best drama Golden Globe, filling two of the five nominee slots. Though Netflix series like "House of Cards" and "Orange Is the New Black" have garnered numerous nominations, the streaming service is still looking for its first Globe or Emmy for best drama or best comedy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Argentina, land of the tango, gauchos and good wine, is also emerging as the land of the good deal. Foreign visitors who pay for their lodging with an international debit or credit card not cash now receive a direct and automatic refund of the country's 21 percent value added tax. The reimbursement applies to all accommodations, from hostels and midrange hotels to luxury resorts and the rural estates known as estancias. "Our goal is to position Argentina among the world's top travel destinations by making it more competitive and affordable. To do so, we have been implementing a range of new policies," said Roberto Palais, the executive chairman of the National Institute of Tourism Promotion. Other measures include removing the 160 visa reciprocity fee that United States citizens were previously required to pay before entering the country, as well as lifting currency restrictions put in place by the former government. After taking office in 2015, President Mauricio Macri allowed the peso to float freely, substantially closing the gap between the official exchange rate and the black market rate. "Before this action was taken, most tourists would change money at illegal back street offices, called cuevas," said Maita Barrenechea, the owner of Mai 10, a Buenos Aires travel company specializing in customized trips to Argentina. "Now they can rely on banks, ATMs and credit cards for a fair exchange rate." Air travel is also improving. The national airline, Aerolineas Argentinas, is growing its fleet and recently added Cordoba as a domestic hub, offering a more strategic location for flight connections because of its central location, while a government investment of 22 billion pesos will go toward renovating and expanding 19 airports. The airline also introduced a streamlined version of its Visit Argentina Pass, which offers discounted domestic airfares to travelers purchasing between three and 12 flights (as long as fliers show proof of an international round trip ticket). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It wasn't that Jennifer Song Kim liked moving so often, but that moving was a small and temporary hardship far outweighed by the chance to live in a new neighborhood. So she and Richard Kim, who were married a little more than four years ago, moved within Manhattan every time their lease was up. "I love change and home searching and finding new places," Mrs. Song Kim said. "A new neighborhood to explore was very exciting to me." Mr. Kim wasn't quite as enthusiastic. "In the grand scheme of things," he said, "I know it made Jennifer happy, which is all that matters." A night owl, Mrs. Song Kim would watch television with a wireless headset while her husband slept; in the morning he would tiptoe around so as not to wake her. They parked nearby for 275 a month. "The car was our big splurge," said Mrs. Song Kim, who like her husband is now 30. They took day trips on weekends and shopped in the suburbs. The Kims decided last summer that they were ready to commit to a place for up to 800,000. They wanted a spacious two bedroom condominiumin with a simple commute to work. And they needed a parking spot for that splurge. "We really like the idea of driving places, parking in a big parking lot and going to a supermarket," Mrs. Song Kim said. Friends suggested Jersey City, which the couple knew only from watching it fly by out the car windows. When they visited, they found it in some ways as lively as Manhattan, but with easy access to suburban shopping. They contacted Margaret Sun of Keller Williams Realty, a friend's mother, to help them with the hunt. At 77 Hudson, a glassy tower in the Paulus Hook neighborhood, they could afford a one bedroom with a home office, but two bedrooms started around 850,000. And the atmosphere didn't seem homey enough. "When I imagine raising our future children," Mrs. Song Kim said, "I imagine something more warm and inviting. It was very much like a hotel, almost kind of sterile." At 389 Washington Street, a high rise condo in the Powerhouse Arts District, the deal breaker was the vacant land right outside, ripe for building. "You could see the construction materials on the ground already," Mr. Kim said. They feared not only having to live through the noise and dust of construction, but also ending up with a blocked view. (A two bedroom there is currently 829,000.) They found too many places with boxy layouts a living area with a bedroom to each side. Mrs. Song Kim feared that activity in the living room would be audible in both bedrooms. Units were selling quickly, Ms. Sun said, and the Kims saw much of what was on the market, including places farther out, in Bergen County. But they realized that a quick commute was too important for them to stray beyond Jersey City. One day the couple happened to park their car near the Liberty Harbor complex, so they checked out some two bedrooms there. One, a low rise town house, had 1,500 square feet of space, with a unique rhomboid layout that placed the master bedroom far from the living room. They decided in its favor, but it had just gone into contract. "We were so bummed," Mrs. Song Kim said. "We weren't going to find anyplace like it." But a few weeks later, a mirror image to the one they had loved and lost came vacant on River Street. The asking price was in the mid 600s, and they went for it. "We didn't want to miss out again," she said. The Kims paid 620,000 and moved in last fall. The common charge is around 380 a month, taxes 11,000 a year. Indoor parking costs 160 a month. Though their street is more congested than they had anticipated, with a rumble once or twice a day from passing trucks, they are getting used to the racket. For trips to work, they both have hops of under 20 minutes on the PATH train; for other excursions, they take the car. "I go to the grocery store and buy whatever I want, because I don't have to worry about carrying it," Mrs. Song Kim said. "If I don't feel like walking, instead of going to Duane Reade, I can just drive to Target and not be bombarded by the crowds in the city. It is not like I always have to plan my every move, my every item." In their years together, the couple have lived in such small spaces that each always knew what the other was doing. Now, living in roomier surroundings, there is some mystery, "which brings back a small joy, a new aspect of our marriage," Mrs. Song Kim said. "I kind of miss him. I wonder what he is up to, what is he watching on TV, and kind of go find him. That was a new experience for us." And with more space, she sleeps better because she is not awakened when he rises early and "does 40 different things before my alarm even goes off," Mrs. Song Kim said. "He can watch the morning news or not be concerned that his typing will wake me up. We are more efficient, and we are not as tired." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Tall, quiet, mature, handsome, self effacing, the dancer Craig Hall, a soloist with New York City Ballet, bade one kind of farewell on Sunday afternoon with grace and warmth. He'll continue as a member of New York City Ballet until July, dancing with it in Paris and Saratoga Springs, N.Y., after which he returns to the company as a ballet master supervising the repertory of the choreographer Justin Peck. He will also accept some dance engagements elsewhere but Sunday was his farewell to life onstage with City Ballet at Lincoln Center. He has long seemed more than a soloist because, as a partner, he has accompanied leading ballerinas for many seasons. In particular, he's remembered beside Wendy Whelan in Christopher Wheeldon's "After the Rain Pas de Deux." She said her own farewell to the company in 2014, dancing that number (among others) with him. On Sunday at the David H. Koch Theater, to showcase Mr. Hall, it was given its only performance this season. His partner was Tiler Peck, who beautifully caught its atmosphere of hushed tranquillity and rapture the atmosphere that Mr. Hall effortlessly conjures. He does this by steady rhythm, seamless phrasing, calmly slow athleticism, complete generosity and a focus that makes us feel that we are in a wide open space when the air is lucid. You had only to look at Instagram to see how Ms. Whelan and other ballerinas were with him in spirit, and how many male City Ballet colleagues paid tribute to the fun they had shared with him. Instagram is where Mr. Hall (as lsweaters) has also shown another talent, as an often superb black and white takethetrain photographer whose pictures of New York subways capture haunting facets of sociology and human spirit. Some of this extratheatrical interest has stayed with him onstage, where his manners, by suggesting a larger life elsewhere, have enriched his presence. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Ford announced pricing Tuesday for the new Mustang, opening up the preordering process for prospective buyers. The base V6 model will start at 24,425, including the destination charge. The EcoBoost model, which will be equipped with a turbocharged 2.3 liter 4 cylinder engine, starts at 25,995 and the V8 powered GT will start at 32,925. The 2015 Mustang GT 50 Year Limited Edition will start at 46,995. (Ford Motor) In Chrysler's muscle car corner, the automaker announced Tuesday that it would offer a version of the 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT equipped with a 600 plus horsepower supercharged 6.2 liter V8 engine and an 8 speed TorqueFlight automatic transmission. Chrysler says the engine, named the Hellcat, is the most powerful V8 it has produced. (Chrysler Group) Nissan says it will resurrect the Pulsar nameplate in Europe and that the small hatchback will be available there this fall. The new Pulsar will be equipped with lane departure warning, blind spot detection and other automated safety features, and will be available with a range of turbocharged 4 cylinder gasoline engines, including a 1.2 liter and a 1.6 liter. (Nissan) Toyota is testing a new type of semiconductor it says can increase the fuel economy on its hybrids by about 10 percent. Made from silicon carbide instead of simple silicon, the new semiconductor wafers are being used in the power control units of test cars. Toyota says the new semiconductors use a tenth of the energy of traditional ones, allowing the automaker to reduce the size of the power control units by 80 percent. (Autoweek) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Jimmy Kimmel encouraged his audience to pitch in to help Stephanie Clifford known as Stormy Daniels in her films get out of a nondisclosure agreement with President Trump. Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Jimmy Kimmel rallied support on Thursday for the legal fund of Stephanie Clifford, the former pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels. Kimmel wants to help Clifford pay her way out of a nondisclosure agreement. "She's trying to raise money to pay for her legal fees, so she launched a fund raising page on a website called CrowdJustice.com, so now you can give money to a porn star just like the president of the United States." JIMMY KIMMEL "I never thought giving money to a porn star would be considered to be an act of patriotism but then again, I also never thought a guy who got in a Twitter war with Cher would become president." JIMMY KIMMEL "And remember, every dollar you donate potentially brings us one step closer to seeing photos that will haunt our dreams forever." JIMMY KIMMEL Robert Mueller, the special counsel, subpoenaed documents from the Trump Organization on Thursday, indicating that his investigation could be narrowing in on the president. Kimmel and Seth Meyers reacted with their own brands of sardonic glee. "Special counsel Robert Mueller subpoenaed the Trump Organization to turn over documents, making it the first time Mueller demanded documents directly from Trump's businesses. You think Trump's businesses keep records? The Trump University textbooks were just Wikipedia pages printed out and stapled together." SETH MEYERS "Robert Mueller has subpoenaed the Trump Organization, the president's company, demanding that they hand over any documents related to business they may have done with Russia. You know, in an investigation like this, it's important to follow the money no matter how many porn stars it leads to." JIMMY KIMMEL "Donald Trump surprisingly hasn't tweeted about the subpoena yet. Probably because he doesn't know how to spell the word 'subpoena.'" JIMMY KIMMEL Meyers welcomed the development, but said that he wanted to see more action. He indicated that he was starting to get impatient with Mueller's pace. "Look, I know you have to be thorough, but at this rate, by the time you're done our only ally will be Luxembourg, Eric will be secretary of state and it'll be illegal for me to make jokes about any of it. When someone is drowning, you throw them a life preserver, you don't throw them a nine part DVD series on the history of swimming." SETH MEYERS, referring to Eric Trump James Corden is pretty excited about the latest news from the stargazing business magnate Elon Musk, whose sights are set on taking human civilization to Mars. "Elon Musk has announced that his company, SpaceX, will be ready to fly an unmanned rocket to Mars and back by 2019, and shortly thereafter, they'll be able to send people there to colonize the planet. You know, just in case you know who is re elected to the you know what." JAMES CORDEN "The name of the rocket is the B.F.R., or the Big Falcon Rocket. And I've got to tell you, it's pretty mother falcon impressive. When I saw it, I was like, 'What the falc? Are you falcon kidding me?'" JAMES CORDEN Here are all the things a couple of foreign tourists don't know about Los Angeles. "Gates and Trump actually have a lot in common, because they've both given away millions of dollars. Gates calls it philanthropy while Trump calls it hush money." JIMMY FALLON, on a meeting Wednesday between President Trump and Bill Gates "I read an interesting poll. It says that 17 percent of March Madness viewers watched a game with their boss last year. Bosses called it 'tons of fun,' while employees called it 'mandatory.'" JIMMY FALLON Also, Check This Out | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Executives and engineers from Facebook's games division submitted their new app, Facebook Gaming, to Apple last month for approval to offer it in the iPhone maker's App Store. Apple considered Facebook's application for a few weeks. This month, it delivered its verdict: denied. The Facebook team was not surprised. It wasn't the first time Apple had said no to the Facebook Gaming app. Or the second. Or even the third. Since February, Apple has rejected at least five versions of Facebook Gaming, according to three people with knowledge of the companies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are confidential. Each time, the people said, Apple cited its rules that prohibit apps with the "main purpose" of distributing casual games. Facebook Gaming may also have been hurt by appearing to compete with Apple's own sales of games, two of the people said. Games are by far the most lucrative category of mobile apps worldwide. Apple's App Store, the only officially approved place for iPhone and iPad users to find new games and other programs, generated about 15 billion in revenue last year. Apple's rejections of the app from Facebook, a fellow Silicon Valley powerhouse, illustrate the control it exerts over the mobile software and entertainment ecosystem clout that regulators are increasingly examining. On Tuesday, the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, said it had opened a formal antitrust investigation into Apple to determine if the terms that the company imposes on app developers violate competition rules. "We need to ensure that Apple's rules do not distort competition in markets where Apple is competing with other app developers," said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president in charge of competition policy. This week, Basecamp publicly complained that its new email app, Hey, had been denied from the App Store because it charged customers outside Apple's payment system, keeping the giant company from collecting its 30 percent cut. "We keep trying to find logic, consistency in Apple's App Store decisions," David Hansson, Basecamp's co founder and chief technology officer, wrote on Twitter. "The answer is much more basic: power. Apple can do what they want, when they want, so they do." Apple, which will hold its annual developer conference next week, said the App Store has many apps that offer casual games and that follow its rules, including the main Facebook app. Facebook said it would release Facebook Gaming when Apple approved it. Apple has long taken a "walled garden" approach to its mobile devices while its main mobile competitor, Google and its Android operating system, has adopted a more laissez faire philosophy. Both companies take 30 percent of most purchases on their app stores, leaving 70 percent to app developers. "Apple and Google Play have always pursued different strategies for their app stores, which align with the closed ecosystem Apple versus open ecosystem Google company attributes," said Candice Mudrick, head of market analysis at Newzoo, a game industry research firm. Apple has said it monitors its App Store ecosystem closely to ensure the highest standards of quality and security. According to its App Store principles: "When you download an app, it should work as promised. We carefully review each app and require developers to follow strict guidelines on privacy, design and business models." But over time, that has increasingly grated on some app developers. The European Union investigation into Apple was spurred by a complaint last year from Spotify, whose music streaming service competes with Apple Music. Spotify and others have criticized Apple for charging a fee of up to 30 percent on digital services sold through its App Store, arguing that it amounts to a tax that violates competition laws. Facebook announced its Gaming app in April as people were sheltering in place from the coronavirus pandemic and playing more video games. For the social network, the new app was a way to more deeply engage its users. The free app has three main components: watching live streams of other people playing games; socially networking with other gamers; and playing simple games like Words With Friends and Thug Life. On both Apple and Android devices, those simple games can be delivered within Facebook Gaming's app using software called HTML5. Google quickly approved Facebook Gaming for its Google Play app store and began offering the app worldwide on April 20. In the Android version of Facebook Gaming, a catalog of simple games is presented by category and with colorful icons. Some of those games allow players to spend real money for in game purchases. Facebook initially submitted its Gaming app to Apple for approval in late February, said the people with knowledge of the situation. Apple rejected that version, they said, citing Section 4.7 of its app rules, which state that HTML5 games are allowed "as long as code distribution isn't the main purpose of the app" and "the code is not offered in a store or store like interface," among other restrictions. But the initial version of the Gaming app that Facebook showed to Apple was similar to the Android version, listing games by category in a manner that could be interpreted as "store like." Trying to get the Gaming app through Apple's review process, Facebook then changed the design of the presentation of games in several ways, the people said. The colorful icons were removed in favor of a bland listing. The different games categories were removed to list all games at once. The ability to sort games was also taken away. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
President Trump proposes to burden revenue strapped states with a requirement to pay money they haven't got to fund the extension of supplemental unemployment benefits. To meet the requirement, states would likely have to divert funding away from essential programs like education, trash removal and infrastructure maintenance. These cuts would no doubt result in you guessed it even more unemployment as state and municipal workers are laid off. I used to think that Mr. Trump worked hard at making bad situations worse. It is now evident that he has a natural gift for it. Gary Mongiovi New York The writer is a professor of economics at the Peter J. Tobin College of Business, St. John's University. Re "Michelle Obama Says She Is Dealing With 'Low Grade Depression'" (nytimes.com, Aug. 6): Michelle Obama has performed a tremendous public service by using the word "depression" to describe her mood state. She validates what so many Americans are feeling as a result of the racial crisis, the pandemic and the resulting quarantine and financial devastation. Her words are especially validating for women, who suffer from depression twice as often as men, and for women of color, who may be struggling with front line jobs and poverty. Mrs. Obama's comments and the strong support she received also highlight yet another change we need to make to American public health policy as soon as possible: greater access to mental health services. It is axiomatic among health care professionals that children's mental health is directly related to the mental health of their parents, especially their mothers. Our families are in crisis in every domain. How long will we have to wait for adequate responses from the federal government? Carol Landau Providence, R.I. The writer is a clinical professor of psychiatry and human behavior and medicine at Brown University and the author of "Mood Prep 101: A Parent's Guide to Preventing Depression and Anxiety in College Bound Teens." While the article is correct about our society's retrograde discomfort with women who seek power, the suggestion that no one told John F. Kennedy that he was too ambitious is untrue. As a young senator of modest accomplishments, J.F.K. was constantly derided as overly ambitious when he sought the vice presidency in 1956 and the presidency in 1960, including by Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman and other Democratic Party leaders. Richard Rovere wrote in The New Yorker in 1960: "Early in his career ... the number of his detractors probably equaled and perhaps even surpassed that of his admirers. His ambition was thought to be untempered by humor or charity." I agree that too many people today are made uneasy by politically hard charging women, and that there is sexism behind many of the complaints. But the historical record shows that John F. Kennedy (and other men) have been subjected to similar criticisms as well. David Greenberg New York The writer is a professor of history at Rutgers University. It appears that Cleveland is to be the venue for the first of the debates between the two likely candidates for president. Some of us here in Cleveland are concerned that the event will increase the city's coronavirus exposure, despite the promised "risk mitigation procedures," and attract protesters, thus providing an excuse for the president to deploy federal enforcers. Since these are exceptional times, why must a debate be held in a large venue? A debate really requires only two debaters; a moderator to ask the questions, keep the time and enforce the rules; and a set of cameras to broadcast it to the nation. The adage to "keep it simple" is appropriate now more than ever. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Josephine Baker, born in St. Louis, spent the latter half of her life at Chateau des Milandes, a Renaissance castle overlooking the Dordogne River in the Perigord region of France.Credit...Andy Haslam for The New York Times The American entertainer had a rich relationship with her adopted country and it with her. Josephine Baker, born in St. Louis, spent the latter half of her life at Chateau des Milandes, a Renaissance castle overlooking the Dordogne River in the Perigord region of France. The first time I saw Josephine Baker up close I was in London. I went to the Alexander Calder exhibition at the Tate Modern and there, at the entrance to the exhibition, was a wire sculpture of Baker. You can see why it was one of the very first wire sculptures that Calder made the subject demanded a new medium. With all due respect to Beyonce, Josephine Baker has the most famous physique in showbiz history a body so often compared to a spring, it's only natural that an artist would try to capture her in that form, complete with spiraling breasts. Four months later, I left for a writer's retreat in the Perigord region of France, no longer thinking about Josephine Baker. This is an area comparatively light on American tourists. It's not that it's lacking in visual splendor the Dordogne River, Marqueyssac gardens, the medieval town of Sarlat la Caneda and Castelnaud Valley, fittingly named considering its collection of castles perched on cliffs but no beaches were stormed, no patron saints burned, no water lilies painted. The region's primary claim to fame is the prehistoric caves of Font de Gaume, Grotte de Rouffignac and Lascaux (Lascaux 4, the latest reproduction of the original, opens in December). The chateau is up a twisting, idyllic road bordered by ivy covered trees and stone walls. When you walk in the front door, you are greeted by the sound of radio interviews with Baker and an exhibition of her stage costumes. There are over a dozen gowns, bustiers and jumpsuits, most involving crystals, all in size remove a rib. I was not prepared for such a display. Because most French chateaus are privately owned (including this one, currently inhabited by the Sarlat native Angelique de Saint Exupery, whose husband is a relative of "The Little Prince" author), most are limited in access. But here visitors may wander through a labyrinth of children's bedrooms furnished with gramophones and trunks, Art Deco bathrooms, a huge kitchen and a vaulted gun room (not the official name of the room, but there's a rifle on a tripod pointed at your head as you enter). There are also cases of military medals and a commendation letter from Charles de Gaulle for Baker's efforts during World War II. Baker was a spy for her adopted country. She hid weapons for the French Resistance and smuggled documents across the border, tucking them beneath gowns like the ones on the first floor. The crown jewel of the tour is Baker's famous banana belt, which she wore along with nothing else in the Danse Sauvage at the Folies Bergere in 1926. Baker did more for the sexualization of bananas than the collective sex ed class demonstrations of the last century. The bananas are gold, not yellow something impossible to tell in the black and white footage. As I admired the belt, a British tourist next to me turned to her husband and said: "She wasn't actually naked all that much, it's just what everybody chooses to remember." A portrait of Josephine Baker around 1930. Born in St. Louis, she died in France. "Everybody" included me. It's exactly what I saw when I looked at the Calder piece and it's probably what Calder saw when he looked at Josephine Baker: an outline. But on the 110th anniversary of her birth, it's worth noting that there is so much more to Baker and to Baker's France than meets the eye. In addition to being a performer and a spy, she was the last speaker before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 march on Washington. Slightly less celebrated is the fact that, in her 40s, she began adopting children from different countries. There were 12 in all and they would come to be known as the Rainbow Tribe. For Baker, they were the living embodiment of a Utopian racial ideal. The easy contemporary parallel would be Angelina Jolie except that when Baker's children became an attraction for tourists, she fully embraced the gawking. Then, after World War II, Baker firmly settled at Milandes. She employed half the town. Her brother married the postwoman. Unlike her hectic nights of performing, her days in the Perigord were peaceful. Or as peaceful as anyone's days can be with 12 small children, multiple monkeys and a pet cheetah. Once I started listening for Josephine Baker, I heard her everywhere. Back in Les Eyzies, I ran into Josette Garrigue, the 69 year old woman who owns the farm down the road. I told her where I had been and she nodded and smiled. "I remember her well," she said, "Back then, this place was only little roads, just a romantic spot where she could drive around in her old cars. It's tragic what happened to her." "Oh, she was so famous. But she was an artist and she didn't know how to manage money. She employed people who billed her for projects she didn't order. I know one waiter who would steal money from the cafe while Josephine was in Paris. Can you imagine someone doing something like that to her in Paris?" I could not. Then again, I imagined Baker's life as a young woman in Paris was light on the dishwashing in general but who knew? So after seeing where she spent the latter half of her life, I decided to head back to the beginning. I contacted Julia Browne, who runs Walk the Spirit Tours: Black Paris and Beyond, which offers specialized tours with themes like "Pioneers of the Left Bank," "Great Black Music Walk" and, of course, "Josephine Baker." Ms. Browne paired me with David Burke, 79, an American author and film producer who is working on a documentary about Baker. Thirty years ago, he and his wife decided to live in Paris for a year and they never left. We met outside the boutique Hotel Josephine, right at the Baker epicenter of Montmartre and Pigalle. "It's funny," Mr. Burke said, "Josephine wasn't really a jazz person and she was a dreadful singer at first, but she was involved with the whole Jazz Age community. She's the most famous person in the whole group, the most famous of any American to ever live in France." I raise my eyebrows. Really? Mr. Burke mostly gives Lost Generation tours: Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald. We begin our walk on the Rue Fontaine, which leads to the Moulin Rouge. Mr. Burke described the area in its heyday as being "like 52nd Street back in the bebop days." The street used to be dotted with jazz clubs, none of which still exist. It took a bit of an imaginative leap to picture the scene; our conversation took place between a nail salon and a pizzeria. The one structure still standing is the former Le Grand Duc, where Langston Hughes was employed as a busboy and where Ada Smith, a.k.a. Bricktop, who later took Baker under her wing, first performed. Six Degrees of Josephine Baker would be too easy a game to play in France. Or in America, for that matter. Baker was a star even before she arrived in Paris (starring in "Shuffle Along," one of the first all black musicals, a revival of which opened on Broadway in April). But Paris made her a megastar. "People just went wild for her," Mr. Burke said. "There was a need for something fresh and Josephine brought this combination of Africa, jazz, humor and America in her presentation. And she was personable. Everyone loved her." Well, not everyone. I broach the subject of "The Hungry Heart," a scathing portrait of Baker I read on the train up to Paris. It's written (with a co writer) by Jean Claude Baker, her unofficial 13th son, who met Josephine when he was already a young man. Mr. Burke said he finds the book "unreliable and worrisome." I can see why. In it, Baker is an oversexed fabulist who, "like a black Chaplin," stepped on anyone "to get where she wanted to get." She answers the door naked for Balanchine and repeatedly refers to Marlene Dietrich as "that German cow." He recommended I read "Josephine Baker in Art and Life" by Bennetta Jules Rosette instead. I eventually did, and it was twice as sophisticated and half as fun. We turned onto the Rue de Clichy. The stained glass arch of the Casino de Paris Baker's third musical hall home, where she performed with feathered wings rose up in the distance. "Josephine almost never played an American," Mr. Burke said. "She was always playing a woman of color from somewhere else. So she would play a Vietnamese girl who was in love with a French planter in occupied Vietnam." "That's quite the colonial fantasy," I said. " 'Thank you for occupying us, how can we serve you?' " Mr. Burke and I attempted entry, but it was the middle of the afternoon and all efforts to talk an usher into opening the doors were thwarted. We were left on the outside, looking in a bit like I felt at the end of the tour. As informative as it was, it was more walk and less spirit. I finished with a greater sense of where Baker led her life, but why she could be considered the most famous American expat remained a mystery. So I did what anyone would do: I contacted a man who has devoted the majority of his professional life to paying homage to Josephine Baker on stage. The cabaret singer and choreographer Brian Scott Bagley, 37, hails from Baltimore; like Mr. Burke, he came to Paris temporarily in 2006 and simply never left. I met him on the bustling Boulevard Beaumarchais in the Marais and we took a stroll through the neighborhood, Mr. Bagley's black and white patent leather shoes clicking along. The Marais is not Josephine Baker's Paris, but it is, objectively, a good place to get lunch. "Honey boo," Mr. Bagley said, taking my arm. "I dream in French now. I have different accents for American people and for French people. I'm kind of like a spy in that way, like our girl." Mr. Bagley believes that Baker's charisma was so stupendous, it still "latches on" to performers like him ("I am the love child of Sammy Davis Jr. and Liza Minnelli adopted by Josephine Baker"). She brings people together from the great beyond. I expressed a healthy degree of skepticism about this right before "J'ai Deux Amours" came dripping out of some cafe speakers and Mr. Bagley and I discovered that we were born the same day of the same year. O.K., maybe. Once seated, we flipped through his collection of vintage Paris Matches with Baker on the cover and he elaborated on what makes her so important. "Everybody imagines something different when they come to Paris, but it's the Harlem of Paris that not everyone knows about but should, because that's where the energy is still so potent. Josephine was the center of it," he said. "She came here and boom she could live in a world without segregation. Boom, she was a major star. She lived that European dream we all want, of liberation and sexual freedom. We all want to come here and meet some amazing French guy, make love in some chambre de bonne and then fall in love with some European aristocrat." Paris had long been "the Bermuda triangle of the muses," as Mr. Bagley put it, one of the world's great magnets for writers, painters and musicians. But like Mr. Burke, he thinks that Baker was much more than an artist. She was a lifestyle. She was "the ultimate connector," inspiring fellow performers, sitting with audience members and chatting long after the curtain closed. And, she "did everything." He, too, has his preferred Baker narratives (he's partial to "Remembering Josephine Baker" by Stephen Papich). "But it doesn't matter what you read," he said. "What matters is embracing Paris the way she embraced it." (Mr. Bagley was recently named assistant artistic director of le Parc de Josephine Baker, an events space and resort, complete with J shaped pool, just down the road from the Chateau des Milandes.) Baker's last show was self titled. She was 69, and she died in her sleep a few days later. But Mr. Bagley is right she's not gone. Not just in the sense that she is remembered or in the sense that there is a square named after her in Montparnasse, but in the sense that she is present. There are still many walls up for black performers around the globe but, as Mr. Bagley noted, "Josephine broke down a ton of them." Like Paris itself, Baker is at once idolized and familiar once you fall in love with her, you both want to share that love and keep it for yourself. This is evidenced by the fact that not a single person with whom I spoke referred to her by her last name, as they did with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein and Porter. Everyone feels as if Josephine was theirs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
To exercise what was supposed to be their most sacred democratic right, Wisconsin voters had to risk catching the deadly coronavirus during the presidential primary election on April 7, 2020. Take It From Me, Voter Fraud Is Part of the G.O.P. Playbook By now most of us have seen the photos from the Wisconsin primary, where voters had to stand for hours in lines that wrapped around city blocks in cold, pouring rain. To exercise what was supposed to be their most sacred democratic right, people had to risk catching the deadly coronavirus and several did. To avoid a repeat of the situation and hold a fair election in November, when America may still be in the middle of a pandemic, elections experts and public health officials say we must ramp up voting by mail. Voters on both sides of the aisle agree, as do Democratic and some Republican lawmakers. But mail in voting has a loud opponent: President Trump. He's calling for Republicans to fight it, saying it's a recipe for fraud. It's part of a playbook that Republicans have deployed for years in battleground states like Wisconsin and my home state of North Carolina. If we don't legislate now to make mail in voting easier in November, the Republican Party might just steal another election. This time, it won't be a congressional race at stake. It will be American democracy itself. The election fraud committed in my race was the largest case in modern American history. My opponent hired a felon, Leslie McCrae Dowless, who promised to deliver unbelievable absentee ballot margins, as he had done in past elections. Mr. Dowless hired workers who went to voters' doorsteps in poor, rural Bladen County, N.C., and "helped" them request, fill out and turn in their ballots. That help included forging signatures and filling in vote choices, and possibly even discarding ballots. The operation targeted African Americans who typically voted for Democrats. It also appeared the county elections board may have also leaked early vote totals to Republicans. At the federal level, Republican politicians were mum. When Mr. Trump was asked about the fraud, he deflected, turning to a baseless conspiracy theory about a million fraudulent Democratic votes in California. When a reporter asked the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, about it, he shifted the blame to Democrats. It turned out that even the local U.S. attorney, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, had failed to act on warnings by the state elections board that Mr. Dowless had stolen votes in a different race two years before. Instead, the attorney's office went on a fishing expedition for fraud committed by immigrants, under the guidance of Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time. As I learned, the Republicans take a conveniently uneven approach to fraud. They claim that voters commit fraud, even though it almost never happens, but when one of their own was caught committing fraud against the voters, they weren't concerned. In fact, it's important to see their talk of "voter fraud" for what it is: one more page from the Republican Party's elections playbook, not all that different from its efforts to selectively restrict voting. Right now, at the state level, administration loyal Republicans are pushing technical changes to election laws that seem small but are big enough to tilt close elections in their favor: for example, purging infrequent voters (who tend to lean Democratic) from the rolls and making it easier to reject absentee ballots (which burdens young people and minorities in the Democratic base). In Wisconsin, it was Republicans who fought against postponing the primary election and extending mail in voting. And look what happened: In Milwaukee, a coronavirus hot spot, only five of 180 polling sites were open; black and Hispanic voters suffered overwhelmingly. Republicans' voter suppression should come as no surprise. It's long been part of the party's playbook in places like North Carolina, where the Republican controlled legislature cut back early in person voting, imposed vicious racial and partisan gerrymandering in districts like mine, and passed a voter ID law that a court found would "target African Americans with almost surgical precision." In my election, had a few brave volunteers and I not fought like hell for justice, the Republican Party would have gotten away with stealing a federal election. And they could steal November's election, too when it won't just be a potentially close presidential race at stake, but also control of the U.S. Senate and state legislatures, which will oversee the next round of redistricting. On top of voter suppression, awaiting us in November are a possible pandemic, a president with emergency powers, a hostile power trying to re elect him, and courts where many races are certain to wind up whose conservative majorities have a history of ruling along party lines against voting rights. The Supreme Courts of both Wisconsin and the United States did so right before Wisconsin's debacle. To keep close elections in November from being decided by voter suppression and conservative court majorities, we need to pass laws that make voting easier, both by mail and in person. My own experience notwithstanding, fraud is extremely rare, even in the five states that conduct elections entirely by mail. But common sense steps to increase mail in voting, such as allowing voters to request ballots online and paying for postage, would also leave less room for illicit ballot tampering. And as my election showed, prosecutors can prevent election fraud by simply enforcing the laws, rather than pursuing Republican claims of "voter fraud" that are largely fictitious. We've already seen that bipartisan progress is possible. At the state level, voters should encourage all Republican lawmakers to join the Republican governors who favor expanding voting by mail. At the federal level, voters should push their Republican representatives to accept congressional Democrats' proposal to add universal voting by mail, along with additional grants for state election administration, to the next coronavirus relief package. This has to happen now: Ramping up absentee voting is an intensive, time consuming challenge; waiting until the fall is too late. I never could have imagined writing this piece when I first ran for office. Let alone when I served as a Marine, where we worried about securing elections not at home in America, but in war torn countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. But I feel compelled to sound the alarm now, because I've seen something that I don't want anyone else to have to see: a stolen American election. Dan McCready, a Marine Corps veteran and solar energy entrepreneur, was a Democratic nominee for U.S. Congress in North Carolina. 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 |
Vladimir Teriokhin was sitting at a long work table in his 3,000 square foot studio on 37th Street in Manhattan the other day, stapling his company ID along the top of sample blocks of a muted green yarn with complex stitches that have names like herringbone, basket weave, double chevron. Like television spec scripts being submitted to a network for development consideration, these were headed to Ralph Lauren for approval. Mr. Teriokhin keeps a library of stitch samples, invented by lead craftswomen such as Nicky Epstein, but has also invented many of his own, available in patterns for Vogue under his own name identified only by number: Vlad 1, Vlad 36. His favorite stitch remains the cable. "Not basic cable!" he said. "Combinations. Traveling." Mr. Teriokhin whose long neck and Allium stalk comportment reflect his background as a ballet dancer in what was the Soviet Union has built a business, Vlad Knit, on giving his ideas away: prototyping and producing sweaters for many of the major fashion houses showing this fashion week. For years, Oscar de la Renta hired him to prototype and produce his knitwear, and he has also collaborated with Vera Wang and Marc Jacobs, whom he's helping to develop an intricate crochet. "Very much technically strong, maybe Francisco Costa competition," he texted after a recent meeting with the latter. (Mr. Costa, at Calvin Klein, is known for his knitwear.) The new guard, including Proenza Schouler, the Row and Rosie Assoulin, have also sought Mr. Teriokhin's expertise. "I don't have knitting knowledge," Ms. Assoulin wrote in an email, explaining that when she decided to add knitwear for fall 2014, "he was our go to guy with his experience and talent." Now he is emerging from behind the scenes. Last autumn, along with a creative partner, Allyson Spencer, he introduced a new line of sweaters, named Spencer Vladimir and retailing from 800 to 2,500 at Barneys New York, Moda Operandi and Just One Eye, a boutique housed in Howard Hughes's old Hollywood headquarters. Perhaps most coveted of these has been the Vlad: an enveloping cloud of chunky cables more elaborate than the trunk lines leading to the main Google servers, knit by Mr. Teriokhin himself. Seventy percent wool and 30 percent cashmere, it evokes Irish fisherman togs of yore, but also, in its intestinal tangle, the work of the Swiss illustrator Giger, who designed the alien in "Alien." Goop, which sells some of the sweaters, tweeted a picture of Gwyneth Paltrow modeling a black Vlad, calling Mr. Teriokhin the "sweater whisperer." A few weeks ago, Miley Cyrus Instagrammed a picture of herself buying flowers, looking unusually fresh faced in another model, the Cocoon, that suggested a particularly delicious bowl of oatmeal (the company had not sent it to her, as is customary with celebrities). In the studio, Mr. Teriokhin jumped up occasionally to help an Eastern European woman about a decade older knitting an elaborate section of a gray sweater. "She must have the stitch right," he said. His employees and he tend to wear mass produced sweaters barely related to the intricate textiles quickly lengthening beneath their needle tips. "I don't care. Only it must be comfortable," he said when asked the label of his plum cashmere V neck. They were surrounded by delivery boxes, oversize skeins of yarn, walls tacked with WWD covers, an old poster for a Miro show, a few abstract paintings of indeterminate age and, in a corner, some large bamboo stalks jutting out of an oversize vase. Mr. Teriokhin's 18 "girls," as he calls them who, along with several European factories help make all the sweaters he produces for other designers hear of him by word of mouth. They include a former violin teacher at a conservatory, two professors and a symphony pianist; they can make 400 to 800 a week working for Mr. Teriokhin, sometimes from home. "We teach each other," he said. The buzzer sounded, and a sleek young man in a black suit, black glasses and knit cap came in. "Did our production arrive?" he asked. "Do you know if our care labels came in?" "From Orley," said Mr. Teriokhin, referring to the groovy young design threesome. A giraffe of a girl came in next with long, straight black hair and a single row of sequins wrapped around her forehead, announcing that she was from Marc Jacobs. "Intern," Mr. Teriokhin said after she left. Beginning at age 9, he trained with the Bolshoi in Moscow, one of 20 students chosen from thousands. As a young dancer he joined the company at the Mikhailovsky Opera Theater in St. Petersburg (then the Maly in Leningrad), knitting backstage as his grandmother had taught him, to pass the time. There he noticed a mysterious woman helping at rehearsals, a former ballerina named Lena Stepanenko, whose career had ended abruptly. She took him under her wing, and he became entranced with her depth of knowledge about the minute requirements of dancing "Giselle" and "Swan Lake." As Mr. Teriokhin talked, he sketched dance scenes from the ballets and recreated the tunes in perfect pitch (with a "dum du du ba bum ba da dum") with such presence that a spotlight seemed to cut through the fluorescent shop lights and illuminated his head, framed by fifth position arms. "We remember still, after all these years, every step, every gesture," he said. The activity of knitting seems for him no less vivid. "When you knit, your mind goes here," Mr. Teriokhin said, his eyes rolling dramatically heavenward. "You are praying, you are meditating." With new labels such as Ryan Roche, a 2015 CFDA award winner, and Gudrun Gudrun, the emotionally and structurally complicated sweater has also become a contender in the race to build new luxury "it" items, as cheap Chinese cashmere gluts the market and the sheer volume and variety of shoes and bags wear away their fetish potential. Championed on Etsy and blogs, at the increasingly popular Vogue Knitting Live conventions, and in little neighborhood wool shops springing up like so many felted mushrooms, elaborate artisanal knits which require loving maintenance to avoid stretches, pulls and holes have become a guilt free status symbol. "There's an attention to detail that's remarkable," said Tomoko Ogura, the senior fashion director at Barneys, speaking of Spencer Vladimir's pieces. "When we touched and examined each piece close up, we were drawn to the couture like quality." Built up layers make collars stand up, ombre effects radiate tones and halftones, and asymmetric shapes hug curves. Most of them also have that ultimate luxury: generous side pockets. Mr. Teriokhin began collaborating with Ms. Spencer, who was working for a bridge line of Mr. de la Renta's, after it closed. She plays the role of art director. "Everything I finish I show to Ally," he said. "She has a very good eye. She knows very well what she thinks, exactly what's inside her." His eyes fill easily with tears when he describes learning that Ms. Stepanenko had been treated harshly by the KGB and afterward could not dance. The two married and moved to Estonia for five years. Then, in 1989, warned by friends in Moscow of further political difficulties, they moved to the United States, where he joined the Los Angeles Classical Ballet. He credits Harold Grimes, who worked for the International Rescue Committee to aid refugees, and Senator Chuck Schumer, a frequent dinner guest of Mr. Grimes's, with encouraging him to make a profession of his hobby. Through them, the owner of the Aviary knit company, now closed, heard about Mr. Teriokhin's skills and asked him to knit seven sweaters in 10 days. "I was dancing 'The Nutcracker' seven days a week, making very little," Mr. Teriokhin said. "So, I perform, I have dinner, I knit. I wake up, I knit, I go to rehearsal. I finish them." One of this first batch made the Ralph Lauren Collection runway, he said. Eventually he was able get an "extraordinary talent" green card with supporting letters from his designer clients, and he and Ms. Stepanenko lived in Park Slope until it became vexing to get into the city quickly with samples. Miraculously, this was the one and only time he encountered the pernicious knitwear villain Tineola bisselliella, a.k.a clothes moth. "Victorian house," he said with a shrug. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'THE CHER SHOW' at the Neil Simon Theater (in previews; opens on Dec. 3). Gypsies, tramps, thieves and ticket holders will be lining up for this biographical musical. Using Rick Elice's book and 35 (35!) of Cher's songs, three actresses tell the story of one life and many headdresses. Jason Moore directs Stephanie J. Block, Teal Wicks and Micaela Diamond, while the costume designer Bob Mackie directs a lot of sequins. 877 250 2929, thechershowbroadway.com 'CIRCUS ABYSSINIA: ETHIOPIAN DREAMS' at the New Victory Theater (performances start on Nov. 30). Created by Bichu and Bibi Tesfamariam, Ethiopian brothers who really did run off and join the circus, this holiday show mixes marvels and memoir. The tumbling, contortion and juggling performed by colleagues from the brothers' Addis Ababa circus school is meant to delight children of all ages. 646 223 3010, newvictory.org 'THE JUNGLE' at St. Ann's Warehouse (previews start on Dec. 4; opens on Dec. 9). In Calais, France, refugees gather in an encampment and share their stories with aid workers and audience. Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin direct a script by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, playwrights who created a theater in the Calais camp. When Ben Brantley saw it in London, he described the feelings it conjured as "oddly inspiring." 718 254 8779, stannswarehouse.org 'NASSIM' at Stage II at City Center (previews start on Dec. 6; opens on Dec. 12). The Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour, last seen with "White Rabbit Red Rabbit," hares after another improvised theatrical experience. At each performance an unrehearsed actor breaks open a sealed envelope and performs Soleimanpour's script, creating a meditation on intimacy, empathy and exile. Omar Elerian directs and Soleimanpour cameos. 212 581 1212, barrowstreettheatre.com 'NETWORK' at the Belasco Theater (in previews; opens on Dec. 6). The suave Belgian director Ivo van Hove has never seemed mad as hell, but he is taking an adaptation of the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film to Broadway. When Ben Brantley saw the production in London last fall, he called it a "a bravura exercise in torturously applied pressure." Bryan Cranston, "in a state of radioactive meltdown," stars as the newscaster Howard Beale. 212 239 6200, networkbroadway.com 'SCHOOL GIRLS; OR, THE AFRICAN MEAN GIRLS PLAY' at the Lucille Lortel Theater (closes on Dec. 9). The girls of Jocelyn Bioh's hilarious and devastating comedy about colorism, directed by Rebecca Taichman, are again about to graduate. When the play, set in Ghana, had its premiere last fall, Jesse Green wrote that the "nasty teen comedy genre emerges wonderfully refreshed and even deepened by its immersion in a world it never considered." 866 811 4111, mcctheater.org 'THOM PAIN (BASED ON NOTHING)' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (closes on Dec. 9). A lonely, logorrheic man finally runs out of words as the Signature's revival of Will Eno's career making early work ends its run. Ben Brantley found that in this word drunk monologue, now starring Michael C. Hall and directed by Oliver Butler, "it's Mr. Eno's love for and grasp of rhythmic language that most impress here." 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org 'WHAT TO SEND UP WHEN IT GOES DOWN' at A.R.T./New York Theaters (closes on Dec. 16). Playwright Aleshea Harris's new work a synthesis of dialogue, monologue and participatory celebration performs its final rituals. Ben Brantley wrote that Ms. Harris ("Is God Is) "has a gift for pushing the familiar to surreally logical extremes" and that her piece is "truly sui generis, truly remarkable." themovementtheatrecompany.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
From "The Value of Good Design," left, shag covered chair by Davis J. Pratt (1948); Alexey Brodovich's rocking "Floor" chair; the Eames's biomorphic La Chaise; and right, the textiles "Triad," by Eszter Haraszty and "Rain," by Alexander Girard. Before MoMA shuts down next week to reboot for its expansion, you can still catch "The Value of Good Design." I joined a crowd the other day, toting up an imaginary shopping list. Covetousness is partly the show's point. Not that most of us can swing the needed cash for, say, Eero Saarinen's vintage womb chair or the cream colored, delicately sculptured Fiat 500, designed in the 1950s by Dante Giacosa and now parked near the entrance to the exhibition. But once upon a time these objects were more affordably priced. "Value" recollects three series of exhibitions that the still young Museum of Modern Art organized across nearly two decades, starting in the late 1930s. These events were among the most influential the museum organized populist counterpoints to surveys of Picasso, Matisse and Surrealism. In their way, they were more pioneering. That's because of how they spread the gospel of modernism. They celebrated everyday items. "Useful Objects" included hairbrushes and highball glasses, brooms and breadbaskets, side tables, sofas, ashtrays and lamps. Some of the objects were beta tests for new materials and industrial techniques. Many came straight from the shelves of five and dimes and department stores. The cheapest cost pennies. More than a few of the things that made it into these various events have since become modernist icons testifying to the early Modern's curatorial judgment but also to its outsize influence in those days among them the German chemist Peter Schlumbohm's X shaped Chemex Coffee Maker, Lina Bo Bardi's Bowl Chair, Noguchi's Arplike coffee table and the Eames's biomorphic La Chaise, introduced at the "International Competition for Low Cost Furniture," which MoMA presented in 1950. Organized by the museum's director of industrial design, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. (Mies van der Rohe was one of the judges), the low cost competition inspired an astonishing number of interesting ideas, among them Donald Knorr's sheet metal side chair and Alexey Brodovich's rocking "Floor" chair, made of simple, almost cartoonish plywood cutouts, an object so practical and clever it ought to be available today. These are in "Value" as well. Its curators, Juliet Kinchin and Andrew Gardner, have leavened the standouts with endearing oddballs like a shag carpeted inner tube chair by Davis J. Pratt. They unearthed wonderful, dusky, timeless looking textiles from the early '40s by Virginia Nepodal, Noemi Raymond, Eszter Haraszty and Vera Neumann. When, during the 1930s, '40s and '50s, MoMA curators of painting, sculpture, prints and drawings were focused almost exclusively on Great White Men, the design department welcomed through these shows and competitions works by gifted women others included Ray Eames and Eva Zeisel and designers of color like Joel Robinson, the first African American to enter the Modern's design collection, whose linen print of abstractly patterned ovals, from the "Good Design" show in 1951, is another eye catcher. The idea back then was that good, inexpensive objects of modern design were social levelers, extending art and beauty into countless working class and middle class homes, improving people's daily lives, encouraging commerce and innovation. Spreading the word was central to the advancement of democracy and to the Modern's core mission. Toward that end, "Useful Objects" did whistle stop tours of the country; and repackaged, retitled versions of "Good Design," among other MoMA design shows, traveled abroad during the Cold War under the aegis of the State Department, advertising the fruits of Western freedom and ingenuity. The museum even developed its own version of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval: a bold, circular "Good Design" tag the Chicago husband and wife graphics firm of Morton and Millie Goldsholl and Associates, designed it which helped manufacturers move stock off the shelves. The effort was in keeping with MoMA's earlier wartime edition of "Useful Objects" which had guided Americans toward well designed household products that would conserve supplies of nickel, tin, copper and steel, critical to the war effort. If all this now seems a curious role for an art institution to play, it was in fact extending a tradition the Modern inherited from London's Victoria and Albert Museum and movements like the Bauhaus. The Modern wasn't alone. At one time, the Brooklyn Museum teamed up with Abraham Straus, the department store, to organize far flung anthropological expeditions and the production of new fabric designs. The early Metropolitan Museum offered plumbing classes and trained designers to make jewelry, lighting fixtures and soap wrappers. The idea was that art museums born during and after the Industrial Revolution, unlike old royal collections, couldn't and shouldn't only collect masterpieces. They existed to marry commerce with spectacle for the explicit purpose of societal engineering, framing consumption in terms of public service, extending culture through the promotion of modern product designs. If most Americans had little patience for Picasso, everybody needed a decent can opener. Like a Trojan horse, that can opener could sneak modernist ideas through the front door. Under the museum's founding director, Alfred Barr, and later, Rene d'Harnoncourt, who became director in 1949, the Modern hyped its design initiatives on radio shows and via the emerging medium of television, with curators appearing on morning programs to demonstrate the benefits of modern lounge chairs and folding lamps. There are scratchy, sweetly awkward, black and white video clips of these early forays in the show. In recent years, MoMA has archived online all the catalogs, publicity materials and installation photographs from these shows, a gold mine for design buffs and historians. I looked up the catalog for "Useful Objects Under 5," from 1938, which included five cent bowls from Woolworth's, a nineteen cent sherry glass from Macy's and a nifty little 4.50 orange juice squeezer from Hammacher Schlemmer. By 1947, when Mies oversaw the show's installation and the Cubist painter Amedee Ozenfant, Le Corbusier's collaborator, designed the cover illustration for the accompanying pamphlet, "Useful Objects" included handmade ceramics from California. There was a 25.75 kitchen cabinet by Raymond Loewy; a nut dish made of porcelain by Zeisel ( 1.50) and an Eames dining table that sold for 75. That Eames table retails now for 1,200. Vitra is selling the Eames chaise for 11,525. The message behind the shows was that cost isn't value . This idea was gradually lost at the increasingly hierarchical museum. Classic furnishings from the Modern's egalitarian exhibitions have inevitably become status symbols for the one percent. That said, the message endures, as "Value" reminds us. Maybe it's time for a new round of "Good Design" exhibitions. Through June 15 (June 16 for members) at the 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; 212 708 9400, moma.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
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