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The actor Danny Trejo, with more than 300 movies under his belt, doesn't mind being what some people call "typecast." In this engaging documentary about his should be legendary life, directed by Brett Harvey, he acts out a typical exchange with an interviewer: "Danny, aren't you afraid of being typecast?" "You're always the mean Chicano guy with the tattoos." "Well, I AM the mean Chicano guy with the tattoos. They finally got it right!" But the real life Trejo is an erstwhile mean guy. He spent much of the 1960s in San Quentin prison, for armed robbery. During his misspent youth, his sister recalls, a juiced up Trejo accidentally walked into an A.A. meeting. Someone who knew better than he made a prediction: "You will die, go insane, or go to jail."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Edward Humes, 59, is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist whose latest book, "Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation," is a wide ranging look at the planes, trains and cars that Americans have chosen to rely on. We spoke recently in Manhattan and later by phone. Here is an edited and condensed version of those conversations. How did the book get started? It grew out of my last book, which was about garbage. As I worked on it, I saw how the average American, myself included, is the most wasteful person on the planet. We are conditioned to waste and to see it as a plus. If we're throwing things away, we think we are prosperous. Now, if you look beyond the landfill, how we get ourselves and the stuff we consume around is one of the most wasteful things we do. We drive these vehicles that weigh 4,000 pounds and are built to carry five people and eight suitcases, and most of the time, it's just one person and this giant machine going to work. We've got transportation overkill. I thought there might be a book in that. From the beginning, my task was to avoid doing something encyclopedic, because transportation is such a huge part of our daily existence. What's the first gift one gets at a baby shower? It's an infant car seat. What's the last ride you ever take? It's in a hearse. What's the meaning of the book's title, "Door to Door"? In the transportation world, there's something called the "first mile/last mile problem." It's a euphemism for forms of mass transportation, like the bus or the train, that require riders to go to stations or bus stops. Americans prefer to move door to door. They want to close one door and find themselves in front of another. This is one of the reasons why we, as a society, are so car dependent. Only a system built on trucks and automobiles can do this. In the book, you write about the car as if it were a social problem. And a health problem. And an economic problem. Next to our home, the car is our single largest household expense. We're paying for it round the clock. Yet, it sits idle for 22 hours a day. Plus, it's horribly inefficient in how it uses energy. The average car wastes about 80 percent of the gasoline put into it. By comparison, an electric vehicle uses about 90 percent to actually move the car. In terms of public health, the National Safety Council's data on car crashes showed that in 2015, 38,300 people died and 4.4 million were seriously injured. Why are the numbers so high? Because everything we do is designed to produce them. We have fictitious speed limits, because the roads are designed to allow vehicles to travel much faster than stated. We have vehicles capable of achieving far higher speeds than the posted limits. Given this, people go too fast. And speeding, we know, is one of the major causes of fatal crashes. A pedestrian struck by a vehicle going 40 miles an hour has a 10 percent chance of surviving, and one struck by a car at 20 m.p.h. has a 90 percent chance. So when we post a 40 mile maximum speed limit on a boulevard where pedestrians walk, we're saying that in the event of a crash, a 90 percent mortality rate is acceptable. These decisions matter. Each of us, over a lifetime, has a one in 113 chance of dying in a car. That's crazy, isn't it? So we bolt extra safety devices onto our vehicles, seatbelts and airbags. Those are all great, but they don't get to the fundamental problem: We drive way too fast to survive collisions. The bottom line is that speeding is one of the major causes of fatal crashes. In your book, you never use the word "accident" to describe a crash. Why? They aren't. Most occur because of choices drivers made. If you're chatting on your iPhone while driving, that's a choice. If you get behind the wheel after a few drinks, that's an "on purpose." We probably neuter the language because who, at some point, hasn't been speeding or run a red light? In the 1920s, The New York Times referred to what we now erroneously call "accidents" as "motor killings." There was more outrage then. At the time, there was a nationwide push to have speed governors placed on cars. These were mechanical devices that kept them from going at high speeds. That effort was pushed back by the car industry. It was never deployed in any substantial way.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Bryony Brind, who at 22 startled audiences when Rudolf Nureyev plucked her from the ranks of junior Royal Ballet dancers to be his partner in a Covent Garden production in London, putting her on a path to become a principal dancer for the company, died on Dec. 2. She was 55. Her death, apparently of heart failure, was confirmed by Ashley Woodfield, a spokesman for the Royal Ballet. He said he did not know where she died. Ms. Brind performed with the company for more than a decade. Nureyev spotted her in 1982, after the Royal Ballet had invited him to stage "La Bayadere: Kingdom of the Shades." He had hoped to direct the Royal Ballet and was disappointed when he was not chosen, and had made disparaging comments about the troupe's dancers. Ms. Brind, who was half his age, was "the best bet" to dance the role of Nikiya to his Solor, he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
One of the many discoveries I made on my first night in Japan nearly 30 years ago were the vending machines that sold beer. As I walked to my new apartment just hours after landing in Tokyo, I found a machine stocked with different sizes of cans and brands. It was a eureka moment. Then I saw something more bewildering: a small bottle of whiskey. I was impressed that it was sold in a vending machine but skeptical that it was any good. In a fit of caution, I opted for a few beers. Over the next dozen years that I lived in Tokyo, when I saw Japanese whiskey, it was almost always in pubs where businessmen diluted it with water or ice to make it easier to drink. Back then, domestic whiskey was considered inferior to the Scottish original. One Japanese friend was so smitten with the Glenlivet I gave him he kept the bottle long after he emptied it. It was only after moving back to the United States in 2004 that I realized that I had missed the emergence of Japan's whiskey boom. My first hint should have been the 2003 movie "Lost in Translation," in which Bill Murray cradles a glass of Suntory while filming a commercial. Taketsuru was the scion of an old sake brewing family who traveled to Scotland in 1918 to learn how to make whiskey and returned in 1920 with a Scottish bride. Taketsuru went to work for Shinjiro Torii, the founder of what would become Suntory. With Taketsuru's technical know how and Torii's business savvy, they opened a distillery in 1924 in Mishima gun, about halfway between Osaka and Kyoto. After some early hiccups, they introduced whiskey to the masses. But Taketsuru wanted to make whiskey in a place that approximated Scotland. So in 1934, he and three investors opened a rival distillery that became Nikka, in Yoichi, on the northern island of Hokkaido. Taketsuru's central role in the birth of Japanese whiskey made Yoichi a logical place to start our tour. We found a package plan that included round trip tickets on ANA and a night in a Western style hotel in Sapporo for less than 300 per person. After the 90 minute flight to Sapporo, we caught the Airport Express train to the city center and walked a few minutes to our hotel. The rooms were small, tidy and included breakfast. Nikka seemed to be about the only reason tourists stopped there. Thanks to "Massan," about 900,000 people visited the distillery last year, remarkable for a town of 20,000. Outside the station, we saw the gray brick walls of the distillery a few blocks away on Rita Road, named in honor of Taketsuru's wife, Rita Cowan Taketsuru. Bagpipe music blared over the loud speakers in town. At the gate, two receptionists in red and black tartan outfits greeted us. The free guided tours were only in Japanese, but plenty of tourists wandered around, English pamphlets in hand. Busloads of schoolchildren, Chinese tourists and groups of Japanese senior citizens paraded past the buildings and raided the gift shop. We were lucky to be taken around by Naoki Tomoyoshi, an award winning bartender who is now the chief of international sales and marketing. Mr. Tomoyoshi explained that there is roughly a 10 year lag between production and demand for good whiskey, and during Japan's go go years in the 1980s, Nikka cranked up production to meet demand. As the economy slowed, Nikka drew down its inventory. Now that demand has rebounded, Nikka is playing catch up. "The impact of 'Massan' has been very positive, which can sometimes be a negative in the whiskey business," Mr. Tomoyoshi said. "Whiskey doesn't happen in two weeks like beer." The urgency was not apparent at the stately distillery, where you could almost imagine old man Taketsuru wandering around mulling his next creation. The S shaped trail that bisected the grounds, my wife thought, was a metaphor for the long and winding journey that it takes to make whiskey. The highlight was the distillation room, where the pot stills were heated with coal, rarely used elsewhere because of environmental restrictions. Like a scene out of the Industrial Age, workers in factory smocks shoveled piles of coal into the furnace beneath the pot stills every few minutes. Mr. Tomoyoshi said that using coal to maintain a temperature of between 1,472 and 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit was less precise than more easily controlled sources of heat, but the uneven temperatures created more unpredictable flavors as a result. Nearby was the Taketsurus's modest wooden home. We peeked at the kitchen and the living room, which looked as if little had changed since the 1950s, when the couple lived there. (Rita died in 1961, Taketsuru in 1979.) Taketsuru drank only in a room with the traditional tatami mats, and his flask was still there. Given how instrumental Taketsuru was to Nikka and Suntory, it was disappointing that there was no mention in the Nikka museum that he worked elsewhere. The corporate dispute seemed trivial when a few days later we visited Ichiro Akuto, the founder of the Chichibu distillery in Chichibu, a city about two hours by train and taxi from Tokyo. The distillery is everything Nikka and Suntory are not: Less than a decade old, it is tiny by comparison. Without the expectations of an established brand, Mr. Akuto is freer to experiment, and in a short time he has created some of the most sought after Japanese whiskey. Born into a 350 year old sake brewing family, Mr. Akuto worked for Suntory before joining the whiskey distillery that his grandfather started in 1946. After sales faltered, his father sold the company. Mr. Akuto, though, acquired the 400 casks in inventory and started his own company, Venture Whisky. (Many Japanese distillers use the Scottish spelling of whiskey, without the e.) To buy time, he bottled his father's whiskey and went bar to bar in the Tokyo area to win over bartenders. It took Mr. Akuto two years to sell his first 600 bottles. But after he started winning awards, his whiskeys shot up in price. During our visit, we could see why. He makes everything in small batches with an obsessive attention to detail, and adds some interesting twists, like a fermentation tank called a washback made of mizunara oak, a wood indigenous to Japan that is typically used for casks. One of Mr. Akuto's novel ideas was to blend his father's inventory with his new whiskeys. I fell in love with one named, aptly, Double Distilleries, which was sweet and sharp at once. I had to restrain myself from finishing the samples that were left out for us to taste and was crushed to learn that Mr. Akuto lacked a license to sell retail, so I left empty handed. It wasn't hard to root for Mr. Akuto. In our hourlong talk, he was knowledgeable but modest, and said his goal was not to beat Nikka or Suntory, or even to earn a lot of money. "As for my dream or motivation, I want to drink 30 year old whiskey," he said. "It will take 22 more years. If I can drink it, I think I'll die having lived a good life." The spot is ideal because of the easy access to Kyoto and Osaka, and because the Katsura, Kizu and Uji Rivers meet nearby and provide fresh water. These days, a visit to the distillery is as much as about the company's history as it is the ingredients that go into the whiskeys. As in Yoichi, the cult of the founder was ever present. We saw busts of Torii and his son and successor, Keizo Saji, who pushed the company to develop premium whiskey. The museum made no mention of Taketsuru, but had a fascinating collection of bottles, labels and advertisements. Then Shinji Fukuyo, Suntory's chief blender, took us around the distillery, which dwarfed anything we saw in Yoichi and Chichibu. There were, for instance, five pairs of pot stills in the distillation room and about a million casks of whiskey, including a Cadiz sherry cask dating back to 1924. The inventory is so vast that Mr. Fukuyo's team can only test a fraction of the enormous stock each year. The real fun was talking to Mr. Fukuyo about his job. He sometimes tastes dozens of samples a day, and has to translate his impressions to a team of scientists who adjust batches accordingly. He avoids broiled fish, coffee and other foods that interfere with his taste buds. The son of a police detective, Mr. Fukuyo looked like an engineer in his white factory jacket with maroon trim. But he explained that making whiskey is a guessing game. No one, he said, knows what consumers will want in 10 or 20 years, and even if he or she did, the whiskey now aging will change depending on the weather, the casks and other factors that are difficult to control. Mr. Fukuyo quoted his predecessor, who likened the process to the career of a famous Japanese singer, Harumi Miyako. She still sings the same songs as she always did, sounding slightly different over the years, he said. "But the same person is singing, so it's the same. It's like a Zen question and answer." At the end of the tour, Mr. Fukuyo showed us four whiskeys that would be mixed with others to make new creations. The lightest was aged in American oak and reminded me of bourbon. The second sample was darker and aged in mizunara oak, which gave it a spicy aftertaste. Then we tasted a darker whiskey aged in Spanish oak that gave off a heavy hint of fruit. The last one was the smokiest and tasted a bit medicinal. We poured a splash of water in each glass and marveled at the new fragrances that arose.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
VOORHEES, N.J. There they were, four pairs of goaltender pads propped up in front of a row of stalls in the Philadelphia Flyers' locker room last week, a testament to one of the more intriguing story lines on the team. "The good news is that none of them are mine," said Scott Gordon, the Flyers' interim coach and a goaltender for the Quebec Nordiques for 23 games in the early 1990s. Because of injuries, the Flyers have gone through seven goalies this season, tying an N.H.L. record that is shared by three other teams, Gordon's 1989 90 Nordiques among them. That explains all the pads with two goalies now suiting up for games and two others still rehabilitating and getting closer to a return. The upside of all this upheaval is that the Flyers, for now, are thriving because they had to turn to their top goaltending prospect 20 year old Carter Hart for help. Hart, a second round draft choice in 2016, began this season playing for the Flyers' top farm team, the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, and the plan was to keep him there, with Gordon as his head coach. Plans change. Now both of them are with the Flyers, promoted at the same time when Coach Dave Hakstol was fired in December. Hart won his first two games to extend what had been regarded as a tryout, then later reeled off eight straight victories tying an N.H.L. record for a goalie under 21 before the Flyers lost Monday to Pittsburgh, 4 1, with him in the net. "He's handled all of the situations that have been presented to him in an exceptional manner," said Gordon, who previously coached the Islanders from 2008 to 2010. "We're seeing a lot of maturity that you're not usually seeing in a 20 year old." Because he has two goaltenders Brian Elliott and Michal Neuvirth who are working their way back to full health, Gordon does not want to say if Hart will stay with the team for the remainder of the season. Four healthy goalies are, well, a lot of goalies. But Hart said he was planning to move into the old apartment of his Flyers teammate Jake Voracek. Maybe that's a sign that he's not going anywhere. "The guys have really welcomed me here,'' Hart said recently, while standing in a quiet corner of the dressing room. "They've been really great to me.'' A native of Sherwood Park, Alberta, Hart said he had become quite aware since he was drafted that taking on the role as the Flyers' goaltender of the future meant dealing with the demanding standards of Philadelphia's fans. The Flyers have not won the Stanley Cup since 1975, when goalie Bernie Parent helped lead the team known as the Broad Street Bullies to their second straight title. The Flyers have lost in the Stanley Cup finals six times since then, most recently in 2010. Before they drafted Hart, the Flyers selected five goaltenders in the first or second round since that 1975 Stanley Cup triumph. One of them, Anthony Stolarz, is now a backup. Another, Brian Boucher, the team's No. 1 pick in 1995, did go on to win 21 playoff games for the Flyers. But not the Stanley Cup. "It's difficult. There's pressure," said Boucher, now 42 and a hockey analyst for the Flyers, NBC Sports and the NHL Network. "The bar was set high by Bernie Parent in the '70s, and the fans are longing for those glory days to come back.'' Parent retired early, at the age of 34, after sustaining a career ending eye injury in February 1979. That same year, the Flyers drafted another goalie, Pelle Lindbergh, in the second round and he led the Flyers to the Stanley Cup finals in 1985. But later that year, he was fatally injured in an automobile crash; he had been to a team party and was intoxicated when the accident occurred. Ron Hextall became the next standout Flyers goalie and was part of Philadelphia teams that went to the Cup finals in 1987 and 1997, again without winning a championship. He became the Flyers' general manager in 2014 but was dismissed last November. Now Hart has moved into the crease and quickly distinguished himself. "So far, he's done a nice job of handling it,'' Boucher said. "Still a small window, but he's done a really nice job." The decision to call up Hart and, at the same time, install Gordon as the interim coach, was made by Chuck Fletcher, who took over as the Flyers' general manager when Hextall was let go. He called the pair of moves "a coincidence." Although there was concern that Hart would be joining a floundering team and might struggle at the outset, the decision to promote him now looks like a masterstroke. Hart has been so steady and unflappable even as opponents have taken early leads in games that the Flyers have actually crept into the race for a playoff spot. With a 26 24 7 record, including a 5 4 victory over the Minnesota Wild on Tuesday in Stolarz in goal, the Flyers were just 8 points from a wild card berth entering Thursday's games. "He's going to only continue to get better," Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov, who is all of 22, said of Hart. "It's impressive. He plays with a lot of confidence as a young goaltender. You don't see that often."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
When "Now and Then" was released in 1995, it had the makings of a hit: an A list cast, a coming of age narrative about an unbreakable sisterhood, a nostalgic filter and an underlying mystery. At the time, it was sidelined, panned by critics and largely forgotten. That hasn't stopped it from gaining a cult following in the 25 years since, becoming a touchstone for girls yearning to be seen. Even in the '90s, a movie that focused on the power of female friendships wasn't exactly reinventing the wheel "Thelma and Louise," "The First Wives Club" and "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion" were just a few of the films exploring this theme. But only "Now and Then" examined such friendships while also giving the complexities of girlhood a weight that coming of age films typically neglected. Written by I. Marlene King and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, "Now and Then" followed four preteens in Indiana grappling with friendship, puberty and grief during a life changing summer in 1970. Samantha (Gaby Hoffmann) is a loner fascinated by the supernatural. Teeny (Thora Birch) yearns for stardom. Roberta (Christina Ricci) is a rebellious tomboy. And Crissy (Ashleigh Aston Moore) is a naive prude who abhors cursing. They bond over cemetery seances, games of Red Rover and the mystery of what happened to a boy named Dear Johnny. Released in October 1995, "Now and Then" was a box office success, earning 37.5 million worldwide on a budget of 12 million. But it was largely dismissed by critics. Roger Ebert labeled it a "gimmicky sitcom," and The New York Times called it "a little dull and much too predictable." Reviewers generally considered the star studded cast of adults to be an unnecessary addition. "Now and Then" was also flooded with comparisons to and ultimately overshadowed by "Stand By Me," the 1986 coming of age drama about four boys. Both films were summertime retrospectives about close knit friends during a transitional period in their lives who were faced with the realities of impending adulthood. But the earlier film was nominated for two Golden Globes and an Oscar, while "Now and Then" was snubbed and viewed as derivative. With the exceptions of "The Baby Sitters Club" (also 1995), which glossed over heavier subject matters, and "My Girl" (1991), which wasn't centered on female friendship, few narratives at the time focused on girlhood. It was as if girls were supposed to see themselves through boys' eyes, not their own. But thanks to a variety of factors including its stars, each with their own followings, and repeated airings on cable TV the film became a sleepover staple and won over new audiences through the years. When fans rediscovered it was on Netflix (it's since left but can be seen on Amazon Prime and iTunes), a Twitter frenzy broke out. In the way that "Sex and the City" devotees identified as a Samantha or a Charlotte, viewers saw their personalities echoed in the foursome for instance, the girly Teeny or tomboy Roberta. For these viewers, the flashback sequences make it a quintessential summer film, an era defining time capsule when Nancy Sinatra boots, culottes and breezy bike rides were common, and the Archies' "Sugar Sugar" and Tony Orlando's "Knock Three Times" were hits. More important, "Now and Then" showed tween girls as fully realized characters who weren't written off or secondary. Tackling death and grief, along with budding sexuality gave their stories weight when narratives about female adolescence were often surface level. Take the search for Dear Johnny. It proves to be a powerful force: a distraction for Sam, whose parents are splitting up; a connection for Teeny, who feels abandoned by her absent country club parents; an adventure for a sheltered Chrissy; and a way for Roberta to confront her mother's death. It's this dark journey to uncover the town's hidden mystery about what happened to Dear Johnny that helps the friends save one another and discover themselves. What also made "Now and Then" a singular force is the awkward preteen moments that often remain unspoken between friends and are rarely shown onscreen. These inseparable girls can tell each other about the pudding filled balloons they wear as they eagerly await developing breasts because "Jell O is too jiggly" or that you can't actually get pregnant from a French kiss. In some ways, the movie can be seen as a blueprint for the tender, cringeworthy moments between best friends more than two decades later in "Lady Bird" (bingeing on Communion crackers while comparing notes on masturbating) or the Netflix series "Never Have I Ever" (making awkward TikTok videos). Though in the "now" of "Now and Then," the friends' reconciliation initially reveals cracks in their relationships. After the birth of Chrissy's baby, they find common ground reminiscing about the summer of 1970 in their old treehouse. It's an all too familiar feeling of reuniting with childhood friends and instantly realizing you're clinging to what connected you in the past and struggling to relate in the present. But the once close friends yearn to be reunited with their former preteen selves as well, and opening up to one another is a dose of nostalgia they need. In doing so, for instance, Samantha can finally face that she's spent years alone because she pushes people away. And it extends to reality: Sometimes being with the people you knew during your formative years can help you admit uncomfortable truths that you've avoided. Because even after any time apart, they still know you best. Years later, the film laid the groundwork for "Pretty Little Liars," an ABC Family series that followed four inseparable friends and included murder mysteries and clandestine meetings in cemeteries. King, the showrunner of that series, reunited with Glatter, who directed the pilot and finales for the first two seasons. Together they "really wanted it to be 'Now and Then' meets 'Twin Peaks' for teenage girls," King told Vulture. The success of "Pretty Little Liars" also renewed interest in "Now and Then." During the third season of the show, King was set to work on a TV version of the movie for ABC Family, though it never got off the ground. "They wanted to change it so the 'now' was present day and the 'then' would be the '90s," King told Entertainment Weekly. Moving the timeline from the 1970s "ruins how special the movie is," she said. In 2020, the influence of "Now and Then" can be detected in pop culture in other ways. Without it, it's possible that "Booksmart," "Eighth Grade" and "Lady Bird" might not have seen critical success. Further, coming of age movies for girls now even seem like a popular trope. At its core, "Now and Then" was about the intensity of female friendship and the discomfort of growing up realities that we all know but were finally acknowledged onscreen.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
MINUTES OF GLORY And Other Stories By Ngugi wa Thiong'o Seldom have the raw truths of Africa been exposed so vividly, yet humorously, as in this collection of short stories by the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o. With tales that tease, then bite, he tackles the absurdities, injustices and corruption of a continent and is never intimidated by the "immensity of the darkness" of which he writes. Nor is he cynical or judgmental. Only someone born from this soil could have grown the stories in "Minutes of Glory." Against the harsh rhythms of African drought, when even the insects hum in hunger, the missionaries in one story ("The Village Priest") strive to undermine the traditional holy men. When the rainmaker dances for relief from drought, Joshua, a trainee Roman Catholic priest, pleads to his new god: "Do not bring rain today. ... Let me defeat the rainmaker and your name shall be glorified." When a deluge follows, Joshua creeps to the old spirit tree and makes peace with his former god. "Civilized" nations colonized, imprisoned and enslaved thousands, claiming all the while that their god was somehow kinder than those of the "pagans." In "The Return," young men like Kamau, who were suspected of rebellion against the intruders, are detained in concentration camps with no trial, only to return years later to find their people striving to accept the white man's ways. "Without a Shadow of Doubt" tells the story of two boys who prove in their scientific studies that the shadows of all people are the same color: no black, no white. Everyone is therefore equal. Even the Mau Mau uprising could have been prevented if only someone had listened to these brothers. In the easy, hypnotic section of stories called "Secret Lives," Ngugi delivers a direct hit at the infamous Mubenzi, that insidious and institutionalized faction of officials who took charge after the colonists finally departed and proceeded to embezzle funds meant for village schools, remote hospitals and potholed roads. All this so they could buy the latest model of Mercedes Benz. Schools crumbled, leaving young men like Wahinya, who knew that education is the only road out of poverty, with no hope. His dream to own and die in a Mercedes earned him the name Wahinya Benji as he wandered from job to job and drank himself to death.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
This week, on part two, The New York Times Ashlee Simpson fan club Mr. Caramanica, the pop music editor Caryn Ganz and the pop music reporter Joe Coscarelli returns to continue the Simpson excavation and defense. First comes an in depth look at her MTV reality show, "The Ashlee Simpson Show." That's followed by an extensive listener mailbag, covering a wide range of topics, including Ms. Simpson's relationship to the melodic hardcore of the mid 2000s, a comparison between her "Saturday Night Live" performance nightmare and that of Lana Del Rey a decade later and the Simpson family's appeal to evangelicals. Email your questions, thoughts and ideas about what's happening in pop music to popcast nytimes.com.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
On an ice shelf made of Styrofoam , decorated with snow made of plastic, an eco thriller is being shot in the New Mexico desert. That's both the setup for Bess Wohl's "Continuity" and a sample of the paradoxes it keeps trying to wind into a play. But "Continuity," a Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Tuesday night, never convincingly weds its airy approach to its heavy subject, which is nothing less than the fate of the earth as global warming reaches a tipping point. The approach, on the other hand, is almost whimsical , as if Ms. Wohl were setting a trap whose bait is comedy. Subtitled "A Play in Six Takes," "Continuity" trades mostly in the mild humor of Hollywood cliche. Only some of the cliches are deliberate. The crucial scene we see being shot over and over involves a high stakes confrontation between Eve, the movie's heroine, and George, a buff eco terrorist who happens to be her ex. "The time for science is over," George snarls inanely. "It's time for action." Cut! And of course George is now revealed as a dimwit himbo (Alex Hurt), Eve as a cokehead starlet (Megan Ketch) and the scientist for yes, there is one, though she has no lines as a classical actress (Jasmine Batchelor) mournfully recalling her drama school Ophelia. So they too are cliches, having even less real agency in Ms. Wohl's play than their characters do in the film. Behind the camera, where the triangular scheme is reflected yet again , the story gets more interesting. Now our heroine is Maria (Rosal Colon), an indie director getting her first big break; she is thwarted by her own rogue ex, Caxton (Darren Goldstein), who wrote 17 "polishes" of the script, and by Larry (Max Baker), the climate expert hired to advise the production. At least this scientist has lines. Though Ms. Wohl hints that Larry's dour message will eventually become crucial to the story, she wastes so much time on tepid satire that when she tries to make the big turn it's too late. The themes of the play never cohere except in the title, which refers to two otherwise unrelated problems: keeping a movie consistent from scene to scene and keeping humankind alive from generation to generation. That split might not matter if either the comedy or the drama were successful on its own terms. But with only a few throwaway exceptions, the comedy wilts and the drama, with no stageable crisis, fizzles. You're left with little to do but admire Ms. Wohl's clever connections and end time puns. The movie term "losing the light," for instance, cuts two ways in a play about extinction. Only near the end of its 100 minutes does "Continuity" find a way to weave its main strands together. Caxton turns out to be facing his own existential crisis. And Larry, having helped ameliorate some of the screenplay's worst absurdities, announces that, in the big picture, those improvements don't matter. "You're making a disaster movie, but we're in a disaster right now," he says. "So, really, your movie becomes just another distraction, a way of not seeing the truth of what's happening." The idea pulls Maria (and us) up short, putting her diva management problems and professional concerns in a new light. Unfortunately, that light is fading fast and the play ends without ever having dug into its own depth . I found this shallowness surprising. Ms. Wohl's "Small Mouth Sounds" was a highlight of recent seasons largely because of its burrowing nature: the way it kept unearthing emotion from what could have been an overbearing premise. (It takes place at a silent spiritual retreat.) It was also directed, as "Continuity" is, by Rachel Chavkin, who in musicals like "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812" and "Hadestown" has turned arty ideas into spectacular stage visions. Not here. In the ill suited space at City Center Stage II, the single set that ice shelf, by Adam Rigg is mostly a one note joke. (Everyone keeps sitting on a "rock" and breaking it.) Likewise, Ms. Ketch, Mr. Hurt and Ms. Batchelor, with little to play, are forced to go big, with diminishing returns. And though Ms. Colon, Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Baker at least have characters, the characters have no meaningful relationships until it's too late. The lowly production assistant played in near silence by the one name actor Garcia walks off with most of the scenes, as if this were still "Small Mouth Sounds."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Why would a charismatic young playwright, with a critical hit playing to 800 people a night in Midtown, debut a new work, in which he also stars, at a 72 seat theatrical incubator so far off Broadway it's in Brooklyn? And why would he do so under a pseudonym that sounds like the name of a bot? The answer isn't that GaryXXXFisher as the author and pseudo autobiographical main character of "Black Exhibition" are called is hiding a messy, heartfelt, intensely personal spectacle from too much scrutiny. Or it's not just that. The main reason is that GaryXXXFisher is really Jeremy O. Harris, the author of "Slave Play," and he is savvy enough to understand that his new play isn't for everyone. In the same way, he knew that "Slave Play" was. (Its transfer from New York Theater Workshop to Broadway this season was a great and moving surprise.) Though tightly focused on three interracial couples spending a week at a sex therapy retreat, "Slave Play" encompasses the entire scope of interracial America. From a handful of characters, it implies millions. "Black Exhibition," which opened on Saturday at the invaluable Bushwick Starr, turns the telescope the other way around. I t features five characters who represent different aspects of outlaw sexuality, but narrows down to just one subject: its author. Part notebook, part incantation, part primal therapy, it is so esoteric it sometimes seems as if it were written in a language with just one speaker left. And language is key here. Harris invokes Ntozake Shange's term "choreopoem" to describe a collagelike construction that incorporates free verse, choral speaking, dance, tableaux vivants and (in his case, not hers) text message chains about getting gonorrhea in Berlin . The result is by turns caustic, coy, baffling, impish, embarrassing, insightful and, as the pseudonym suggests, frank. But if Shange's "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf" celebrates the healing power of community, "Black Exhibition" feels neither healing nor communitarian. Harris plays a figure based on the real Gary Fisher: a gay black writer who died of AIDS in 1994, leaving behind a small but potent body of work. In Gary's skin, Harris undergoes a kind of sacrificial flaying as the world he wants to be part of also torments him with its gaze. In truth, that gaze can seem self inflicted; Harris elects to spend most of the 60 minute work, directed by Machel Ros s and beautifully designed by Frank J. Oliva for the tiny Bushwick Starr space, in little more than a jockstrap. (The droll costumes are by Sabrina Bianca Guillaume .) He is just as exposed in his quest for ecstatic spiritual communion. The four other characters, or perhaps they are merely Harris's avatars, advise him on issues of art, submission and self display. The experimental feminist writer Kathy Acker (Ross Days) offers a paean to anal sex as a way to see God (or at least Elaine Stritch). The Japanese poet Yukio Mishima (Miles Greenberg) schools Gary in "necessary fascisms." And the gay Afro Futurist Samuel Delany ( Dhari Noel ) sings the ambivalent praises of Fire Island, where raunch is integrated into the landscape, yet the rich have "gentrified the trees." The three writers make some sense as Gary's spirit guides; he has been reading them while visiting that gay playland. What the fourth is doing in the story is harder to say. Called MandinGO, he is based on Michael L. Johnson, the black athlete sentenced, after a trial later ruled to be "fundamentally unfair," to 30 years in prison for not disclosing his H.I.V. status to sexual partners. Perhaps MandinGO ( AJ Harris ) represents the twinned problems Gary is flirting with: the vulnerability of gay black bodies in white spaces, and the vulnerability of all bodies in the path of disease. If I am uncertain about this, as about so much here, that's fine with me. I don't mind having to ponder the recondite (and wittily worded) questions Harris keeps sparking as Gary travels his "dark gay path." I look to the theater, in part, to show me the lives of my co humans as they live them beyond my ken. What it means to be a gay black man in the world is not, for instance, an experience I can ever have directly. But writer's block is, and that's another of the play's subjects, if not in fact its raison d'etre. Harris draws a sly connection between I'll put this delicately the openness to sex and the openness to inspiration. On the evidence of "Black Exhibition," I'd say he's at least got some good foreplay going. Black Exhibition Tickets Through Dec. 15 at the Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 ho ur.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
"Bohemian Rhapsody" won the Golden Globe for best drama, beating out "A Star Is Born." "Green Book" won three awards at a ceremony full of surprises. See our live updates and analysis from the ceremony. Read about the best and worst moments of the Globes. Here are the movies and TV shows that received awards. Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama: Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama:	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Ever seen someone flip a coin with a forklift? Just place the coin on a hard, smooth surface. Lower the tip of the blade onto it, about halfway across the coin, leaving a bit of pressure, and ever so gently rake it back. The edge of the coin will catch, sending it flying up and over, maybe even onto the fork itself. It takes some practice. So does fabricating a piece of salmon with the edge of your hand, instead of more slowly, with a knife or chopping dozens of perfect slices of cucumber with increasing speed but without looking. Have you ever witnessed the joy of a clean, single pass flat weld? Or of capping a ruptured water line as it sprays mud all over the place? What happens if you pet the sloth you care for at the zoo? Sometimes, it pets you back. Maybe, for no particular reason, you're curious about what goes into a predeparture check for a Boeing 737 Max? It's alarming: A robotic voice recites various notifications as screens light up: pull up, wind shear, wind shear, wind shear, terrain, obstacle, obstacle, pull up. All of this I learned on TikTok, the wildly popular video app that people seem to have a hard time describing. It's an app with lots of teens, and lots of music, and lots of, well, everything. It's ruled by mysterious algorithms, which shuttle users around its sprawling platform however they please, for whatever purposes their creators decide. It's an app that's unapologetic about wasting your time. It's also, apparently, a good way to waste some time at work. Perhaps you're curious to see the kitchens of every restaurant chain you've ever been to, at their best and worst, or to watch a carefully choreographed super speed dishwashing routine, or about how Kind bars get made, or how to run casing down a freshly drilled oil well? Laying down new railroad ties looks satisfying, you might discover on TikTok, while removing old rotten ones looks tedious. The need to remove frozen condensation from things spans professions: In Alaska, it is cleared off roads in the middle of the night, during a blizzard, and in warmer climes, it's scraped off overloaded and malfunctioning air conditioners (to the tune of "Broken," by lovelytheband). TikTok, which encourages users to contribute short videos to hashtags, or to join in on jokes or challenges or to sing along with clips of songs, has, in its manic and frequent demands for content from its users, become an unlikely force for labor visibility. "People were shocked that I don't act or do film but work for an airline," he said. While TikTok does have familiar features, like profiles and followers, it relies more heavily than other platforms on algorithmic recommendations and featured songs, categories and hashtags. This makes it easy to browse an enormous catalog of jobs, as represented, briefly, by the people who do them: scrublife will take you inside hospitals; cheflife, into kitchens; forgelife, into the world of superheated steel; farmlife, to the fields. There are hashtags for most major retailers and restaurant chains, full of employer specific gripes, jokes or observations. There are also more generally relatable sketches. Nobody appreciates the customer who shows up a minute before closing. Many videos are shot on break. Some are shot on the way from one job to another. But plenty more are shot in a whisper, between customers or during a lull, mindful of nearby bosses. There are hashtags that are widely applicable to employed people, like coworkers, working, bluecollar and lovemyjob. People do share their jobs on any large social platform. But on TikTok, which is relatively new, users are frequently shown content from people they don't know. Creation is low stakes and popularity is extremely unpredictable. Feedback is amplified to encourage more creation. Users are incentivized to keep their profiles open to the public if they want to grow. This cuts two ways. Browsing one of the bigger work related hashtags might turn up the satisfying surprise of a video of a man separating a piece of salmon from its skin with a single sweeping motion. (Sample comment: "thats one sharp hand u have.") But its poster Gary Kinsey, 44, of New York, who describes himself as a traveling model chef (as in modeling and cooking) was surprised as well. It was his first video on the platform, and it got more than 6,000 likes, far more than it did on Instagram, where most of his posts are carefully shot finished dishes. It was strange and unexpected, he said but mostly just nice. The video was scored by a musician friend, and he said it helped get her noticed. He's helped others too. "I received a video of a lady in Atlanta who attends culinary school stating she learned the fish skill from the video," he said, "and that meant a lot." The writer and technologist Paul Ford has suggested that the growth of YouTube, through its millions of videos shot on webcams, allowed a narrow but illuminating glimpse into peoples' homes. "The curtains are drawn. Some light comes through, casting a small glow on the top left of the air conditioner. It's daytime. The wall is an undecorated slab of beige," he wrote. "That is the American room," he explained or at least an American room: in some ways generic and literally standardized, in color and dimension and through the catalogs through which it was built, but distinctly recognizable; spacious, suggesting a large home, but barely filled. Later, the video app Vine could be said to have given us a glimpse of life of the American teen, who is extremely diverse, but who posted from another set of conspicuously standardized places outside of the home: the American retail store, the American sidewalk, the American car. TikTok has arrived at a time when mobile devices are far more integrated into our daily lives and in which sharing from one, wherever you are, is a default behavior. It makes sense that for now, at least, it's a portal to the vastness of American jobs. (Or, a few taps away, the Chinese job, the Indian job, or the Russian job. ) In the long run, social platforms have a tendency to professionalize. You can seek out virtually any line of work on Instagram, but you'll have to do some looking and get permission to follow; the most visible form of labor on the platform is influence, which isn't meant to look like labor at all. YouTube is now a workplace unto itself. It pays creators according to the size of their audiences, and so while there are vibrant YouTube subcultures adjacent to various jobs, these jobs tend to be obviously fascinating or exclusive. In the long run, the successful YouTuber's job ends up being YouTube.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
HONG KONG United States officials have torpedoed a Chinese state backed group's plan to buy an American electronics company, signaling the Trump administration's continuing skepticism toward Chinese investment deals, particularly those that involve transferring technological know how. Xcerra, a Massachusetts based provider of equipment for testing computer chips and circuit boards, said this week that it was withdrawing from its 580 million sale to an investment group backed by a Chinese government controlled fund. The reason, according to Dave Tacelli, Xcerra's president and chief executive, was that the deal was not likely to be approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a multiagency Washington panel that operates largely out of the public eye. The committee, known as Cfius, plays an advisory role to the president, but it can effectively block foreign acquisitions of American companies over national security concerns. "Despite our best efforts to secure approval, it has become evident that Cfius will not clear this transaction," Mr. Tacelli said. The deal would ultimately have been financed by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, a 21 billion fund that counts several Chinese state run companies as investors.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Byron Dobell, an editor at Time Life, Esquire and New York magazine who played a pivotal role in the careers of Tom Wolfe, Mario Puzo and other writers, died on Jan. 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 89. The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his daughter, Elizabeth, said. In the early 1960s Mr. Dobell (pronounced dough BELL) was a managing editor at Esquire, under Harold Hayes, when Tom Wolfe approached the magazine offering to write about Southern California's subculture of car customizers. Exhaustive reporting led to a severe case of writer's block. With the deadline fast approaching, Mr. Wolfe called Mr. Dobell to say that he could not produce the article. "O.K., he tells me, just type out my notes and send them over and he will get somebody else to write it," Mr. Wolfe wrote in the preface to his first book, "The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby." Under the salutation "Dear Byron," Mr. Wolfe began typing out his notes overnight, in a mounting frenzy as inspiration grabbed hold. "I wrapped up the memorandum about 6:15 a.m., and by this time it was 49 pages long," he wrote. "I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30 a.m. About 4 p.m. I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were striking out the 'Dear Byron' at the top of the memorandum and running the rest of it in the magazine."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
If you think about escaping as a way to give your mind a rest, you can find respite without going outside even if it's a chair turned just so, a big pillow on a rug in the corner, or a pair of noise canceling headphones. Spending more time with family or roommates is one of the most wonderful things to come out of sheltering during the coronavirus pandemic. It's also one of the most difficult. The truth is, togetherness is terrific until you want to be alone. Before the pandemic, I'd decamp to a coffee shop down the street when I needed a break from all the Lego rummaging, Cheetos crunching and question asking at home. But now that those old hiding places often feel more stressful than sedate, the only option is to carve out your own escape pod. "The value of creating a private oasis is mental refreshment," said Sally Augustin, Ph.D, an environmental psychologist and founder of the design firm Design With Science. "It's an opportunity for reflection." So if you think about escaping as a way to give your mind some time to reset, rather than seeking out a new physical space, you can find respite without going outside even if it's a chair turned just so, a big pillow on a rug in the corner, or a pair of noise cancelling headphones. It's all a matter of personal preference, and only a few principles generally apply. It's also something that can be done affordably. "What's essential is anything that sparks joy and anything that's not distracting," said Nia Lawrence, creative director at Brooklyn based Essence Communications. "All you need is the tiniest corner." "The pandemic has forced us to rethink how we use space," said Malachi Connolly, an architect and owner of Brooklyn based Malachi Connolly Design. Think of restaurants using alleys as dining areas, or schools creating classrooms in courtyards. "Space has become democratized, and interstitial space can become primary space." You may discover these underused spots in your home, too maybe in a foyer or even a laundry room. Leslie Barrett, an architect, interior designer and partner at Studio Sucio in Los Angeles, created a nook in her bedroom by improvising a table with a marble slab and setting it, with a chair, between her window and dresser. "Before that," she said, "it was just floor." Like those side street cafe tables, a home sanctuary can be set up and taken down ad hoc. If you have modular furniture, break from the expected arrangements, said Barry Reidy, country interior design manager at Ikea U.S. A modular sectional sofa can be separated into individual chairs, with the arms in the center instead of at the ends, creating more personal space. A modular dining table can be separated and pushed to the sides of the room after meals to make a one person escape pod, as Mr. Connolly said he has done in his home. Anything Can Be a Boundary Tall, high backed chairs can create a sense of privacy and protection in a shared space. They can also divide a room. Room dividers, bookcases or house plants are some obvious ways to cordon off a private space. But simply sitting in a high backed chair can offer a cocoon like experience for winding down and disconnecting. Humans like having their backs "protected" in order to relax, Dr. Augustin said, noting that it speaks to our innate preference for avoiding surprises from behind, whether it's a hungry predator (in prehistoric days), mischievous felines or sneaky toddlers. Depending on your situation maybe noisy kids, or a videoconferencing partner headphones can be critical for escaping in place. Even regular earbuds will help, but if you want to create a real sense of separation, consider noise cancelling headphones, which have features that actively dampen noise and, in many cases, cup your entire ear. Armed with my noise canceling headset, a weighted blanket and a book at my end of the couch by the window, I can tune out the football game the boys are watching on TV. Most people will pick up cues about when you're not to be bothered. "But humans vary," Dr. Augustin said, so you may need to lay down some rules to avoid misunderstandings. Rather than mumbling one word answers to questions, let your partner, roommates, or kids know that when you have your headphones on, or you're sitting on the white chair, or whatever cue you've set up, that they should let you be for a set period of time. Some parents put up a sign or flag to signal to their children that they need some "do not disturb" time. If your children have a hard time understanding this, you might consider creating a private oasis for them to enjoy when you pop into yours. Ms. Lawrence, the creative director at Essence, propped up a tent for her daughter in the living room. Bring the Outside In If possible, set up your escape area near a window. Greenery, particularly in an urban setting, is known to channel feelings of relaxation and escape. If possible, set up your escape area near a window. "It gives you a visual focus length beyond your small space," Ms. Barrett said. In other words, you can pretend your little oasis is bigger than it really is while relaxing your eyes and your mind. Seeing greenery whether out the window, or a plant on a nearby table can also channel feelings of relaxation and escape, said Paul Harris, Ph.D., a psychologist at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., who also holds a graduate degree in design. Indeed, a recent American Society for Horticultural Science study found that workers made better mental health gains when they intentionally gazed at a desk plant of their own choosing for three minutes whenever they felt stressed. If you don't have a green thumb, try succulents, which are low maintenance but visually appealing. "We don't realize it, but we're constantly surveying our environment," said Dr. Augustin. For our brains to feel refreshed, "we need to manage the visual complexity," and this includes clutter. Even if keeping the rest of the place Marie Kondo neat is futile, commit to making the immediate area of your island and in your line of sight junk free. Keep the books or whatever you want on hand in a nice bin. I find that pushing aside the Legos from my side of the coffee table and couch dissolves considerable anxiety once I finally settle in.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
As the dedicated Bernie Sanders reporter for BuzzFeed News, Ruby Cramer spent months trailing the Vermont senator around the country, flying on his campaign plane, watching him kibitz with voters, and cultivating his political advisers over meals in more than a dozen states. But last week, when Mr. Sanders dropped out of the presidential race, Ms. Cramer got the news while Zooming with her therapist from the Manhattan apartment where, since mid March, she has been quarantining from the coronavirus. She wasn't the only Sanders beat reporter forced to cover the end of his campaign from a distance. TV networks and newspapers had long ago recalled their journalists from Burlington, Vt., where the senator conceded in a speech at his home. With reporters absent, the on the ground details of defeat grimacing aides, tearful supporters were lost. "It was nothing like the end of a campaign I had ever experienced," Ms. Cramer, who also covered the 2016 presidential race, said in an interview. There is no more campaign trail. Instead of a traveling circus of raucous rallies, press bus gossip and drinks with sources at the hotel bar, there is Joseph R. Biden Jr. in his Delaware basement, videoconferencing into cable news. Journalists, barred from flying for safety reasons, still report by phone and text message, but voters go uninterviewed and swing states unexplored. "It feels like it's something that exists only in theory," Ms. Cramer said. "There's no tangible element. It doesn't feel like the living, breathing, changing organism that it has always been." In interviews, nearly a dozen now grounded campaign reporters described feeling unmoored without the usual rhythm of journeying from state to state, jousting with aides and badgering candidates the raw ingredients that, through a subtle alchemy of social media, cable news hits and print deadlines, forge the day to day story line of a presidential race. "That socializing that happens among the beat reporters that travel with the candidate all the time, and have that weird bond and relationship with the campaign and with each other out of that petri dish, campaign narratives form," Ryan Lizza, Politico's chief Washington correspondent, said in an interview (conducted over FaceTime, naturally). "That dynamic isn't there anymore. You don't have that window into the campaign." "We have no one embedded in the basement," Mr. Lizza quipped, referring to Mr. Biden's subterranean roost. News outlets are also grappling with how to cover voters in crucial states like Florida, Michigan, and Nevada, where journalists often gauge the direction of the country's politics. After 2016, when Donald J. Trump's victory caught many prominent journalists by surprise (and led to remonstrations from readers and viewers), senior leaders in the news business pledged not to repeat the same mistakes. In 2020, went the refrain, political writers would focus on the heartland, leaving behind the conventional wisdom factories of newsrooms in Washington and New York. Man plans, and God laughs. Amid the pandemic, much of the country's political press is now marooned in those coastal cities, covering a national race from couches in Georgetown and Brooklyn. David Weigel, a nomadic campaign correspondent for The Washington Post, said in an email that he has been off the trail for a month, his longest stretch at home in Washington since 2017. He's worried about what reporters are missing. "Being able to check in with voters when some story was blowing up on cable is essential," Mr. Weigel said. "It's not just that it's better to talk to voters at random. It's that I'd worry, usually correctly, that online chatter was not reflecting what was happening." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Mr. Weigel belongs to a band of road warrior reporters that Peter Hamby, a former CNN campaign journalist, has deemed the "Avis Preferred" press corps: journalists who hoof it in the heartland, rather than offering analysis from afar. "The value of traveling in political journalism is not to travel to Las Vegas to go to a rally," Mr. Hamby, who hosts a political show on Snapchat, "Good Luck America," said in an interview. "The value is to travel to talk to moms in a Whole Foods parking lot in Henderson, Nev. It's not necessarily to cover a campaign event and just transcribe it." One remedy Mr. Hamby proposed: Cable networks should dump a few highly compensated pundits and hire correspondents who reside beyond the coastal bubbles. "The amount some of these networks are paying their contributors could fund dozens of correspondents around the country," he said. For news executives, there may be one advantage to the lockdown: an unexpected windfall. In a typical campaign year, media outlets budget millions of dollars to cover the presidential race. Reporters who travel on a candidate's jet can run up thousands of dollars in charter flight fees in a single day, not including Marriott stays and meals. Neal Shapiro, NBC News's president from 2001 to 2005, said in an interview that his network's custom built studios for Democratic and Republican conventions where anchors peer down, hawklike, at delegates could cost seven figures. If this year's conventions are canceled or curtailed, he said, news outlets will see "a huge budget relief." But for workaday journalists, the cost of a muted campaign is significant. Every presidential cycle has its standout reporters, who parlay a plum assignment into book deals and other boons. Mr. Shapiro cited Katy Tur, whose coverage of Mr. Trump in 2016 led to a rise in her national profile and an MSNBC anchor slot. "Nobody's on the air, and nobody's covering anything," said Mr. Shapiro, who is now president of the public broadcaster WNET. "It's going to be harder for those stars to emerge." For now, some stranded trail watchers are finding new ways to occupy their time. Mark McKinnon, a co host of the Showtime political series "The Circus," has moved from New York to Colorado, where he is focusing on a different presidential campaign: the fictional one in a screenplay he is writing with his daughter. "That's what we do when there's no real race to cover," Mr. McKinnon said. "We make one up."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
He is Tom Catena, an American who since 2007 has been tending Mother of Mercy Hospital, which he also helped found. This film is more about Dr. Catena and his work than the appalling political situation that keeps Mr. Bashir in power and restricts United Nations humanitarian aid and outside nongovernmental organizations from assisting the people of the Nuba. It's tempting to call Dr. Catena a living saint. Numerous surgeries, which he performs with kindness and patience, are depicted in detail. The doctor works impossible hours, serving a population of one million. When he's not working as a doctor, he is, say, reroofing the facility. In lengthy interviews he speaks of how he found his calling. Dr. Catena rarely loses his cool, but when he gets angry, it's at the larger problem, not the patients or the staff members. In one moment of near despair, he says, "Why do we have to listen to a criminal regime that bombs and kills its own people?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
PHILADELPHIA In April, Dale Mezzacappa attended a panel discussion on cheating sponsored by the Education Writers Association. At the time, she was one of three staff reporters for The Notebook, a community newspaper and Web site that covers the Philadelphia public schools. While few know of The Notebook, many know of Ms. Mezzacappa. For 27 years, until the newspaper industry's near collapse, she was a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. She is also a former president of the Education Writers Association. People trust Ms. Mezzacappa to get it right. After the panel discussion, an executive for a testing security company suggested she ask state officials if they had done a study flagging schools with suspicious numbers of erasures on state tests. In May, the state responded, sending Ms. Mezzacappa a file so large she needed technical assistance to download it. For two months, that 2009 study sat unexamined. (Being one third of the reporting staff, Ms. Mezzacappa doesn't have a ton of free time.) Then last month, The Notebook's editor, Paul Socolar, entered into a partnership with the local public radio station, WHYY, which enabled him to hire a fourth reporter, Benjamin Herold. Mr. Herold's first day was July 6. On July 8 about 9:30 a.m., Ms. Mezzacappa suggested he look at the enormous state file, and by 11:30 that night The Notebook had posted its biggest scoop. A total of 89 schools 28 in Philadelphia had been flagged by the state for, among other things, an improbably high number of erasures, as well as questionable gains on reading and math tests. Mr. Socolar, a data fanatic, calculated that at some of these schools, the odds that the erasures had happened randomly were one in 100 trillion, and Ms. Mezzacappa verified those numbers with Andrew Porter, the dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. And that is how Pennsylvania became the latest in a growing list of states facing a cheating scandal. Never before have so many had so much reason to cheat. Students' scores are now used to determine whether teachers and principals are good or bad, whether teachers should get a bonus or be fired, whether a school is a success or failure. Will Pennsylvania do what it takes to root out cheating? Few school districts have. Most inquiries are led by educators who are not first rate investigators and have little incentive to make their own districts look bad. The Pennsylvania investigation is only a few weeks old, far too early to judge. But the first step is not encouraging: State officials have directed school districts and charter schools with suspicious results to investigate themselves. For places that are serious about exposing cheating, there is a new gold standard: Atlanta. In the bad old days, Atlanta school officials repeatedly investigated themselves and found they had done nothing wrong. Then, last August, the governor decided that, once and for all, he was going to get to the bottom of things, and appointed two former prosecutors to oversee an inquiry. Sixty of Georgia's finest criminal investigators spent 10 months on it, and in the end turned up a major cheating scandal involving 178 teachers and principals 82 of whom confessed at 44 Atlanta schools, nearly half the district. Will Pennsylvania do an Atlanta? It's a big commitment. First, schools with test score gains that seem too good to be true need to be identified. The Philadelphia Inquirer has looked at Roosevelt Middle School, where 63.8 percent of eighth graders were proficient in reading in 2009, compared with 28.9 percent in 2008. Next, to get a sense of the scope of the cheating there are 3,300 schools in Pennsylvania a comprehensive erasure analysis is needed. In Atlanta, investigators calculated erasure rates for every teacher in the district. In Pennsylvania, the 2009 statistical analysis that was unearthed by The Notebook has provided many good leads. Chester Community Charter, one of the state's biggest schools, with 2,700 students, was among those most often flagged for suspicious erasure results. It also was flagged for questionable test scores: in 2009, 65.4 percent of eighth graders were proficient in math, compared with 22 percent the year before. To his credit, the state's secretary of education, Ron Tomalis, has requested two more statistical studies, for 2010 and 2011, to better identify cheating patterns. Once the questionable schools have been pinpointed, the serious work begins. In Atlanta, the investigators chosen to conduct the cheating inquiry were given the necessary legal tools (subpoena power) and generous resources (over 100 people were involved). Then they went out and worked the schools like police detectives, flipping one cheating teacher, who in turn would identify others. This was a far cry from the days when the longtime Atlanta superintendent, Beverly L. Hall, repeatedly dismissed cheating allegations because there was no "direct proof" and no one came forward to confess. The Atlanta report, released last month, contains hundreds of pages of "direct proof," and names all 178 teachers and principals accused of cheating, including the 82 who confessed. The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Notebook have printed accounts of unnamed teachers who said they cheated and saw others cheat. But unnamed won't do it. After Inquirer articles about Roosevelt Middle School, the city investigated. "No one was willing to speak on the record, name individuals, times or locations," said Jamilah Fraser, a district spokeswoman. Of course, teachers aren't likely to confess to their supervisors, who could turn around and fire them. In Atlanta, teachers were promised that they wouldn't be criminally prosecuted if they told the truth. Newspaper investigations can point the way, but that won't nail the cheaters. Reporters at The Atlanta Journal Constitution wrote many articles about suspected cheating, starting in 2001. And for that they were criticized by city leaders for damaging Atlanta's image. If a cheating investigation is to succeed, there must be a top state official with the political will to make it happen, no matter where the investigation leads. In Atlanta that was Sonny Perdue, then the governor, who told investigators there would be no interference and agreed not to read the report until it was finished. Mr. Tomalis, the education secretary, says Gov. Tom Corbett "has been adamant about making sure that we make every effort" to respond "aggressively on these issues." The governor will be tested. Chester Community Charter School, which was heavily flagged in the 2009 study for "aberrant" erasures and test scores, is operated by Vahan Gureghian. Mr. Gureghian was the largest individual contributor to the governor's election campaign last fall, giving more than 300,000. In April the governor visited Mr. Gureghian's charter, praising it as a model "that needs to be reported to all the people of Pennsylvania," which of course is exactly what Mr. Herold did in his July 21 posting for The Notebook.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder. Creevy was 15 when she uploaded home recorded songs to SoundCloud in 2012, under the name Clembutt. They caught the attention of the independent label Burger, which initially released them on the cassette "Papa Cremp" in 2013. The band remade some of those first songs for Cherry Glazerr's official debut album, "Haxel Princess" in 2014, followed by the more professionally produced "Apocalipstick" and now "Stuffed Ready." The band lineup has changed around her with each album; there's no question who's in charge. While Creevy's music has stayed grounded in 1980s and 1990s alternative rock bands like the Breeders, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Cure she has expanded her sounds and dynamics with each album. Live, Cherry Glazerr is a guitar bass drums trio, but in the studio, the band uses layers of guitars and occasional dollops of synthesizer to make each song evolve from within: fragile or eerie at one moment, ironclad the next. Creevy's voice is high and thin but determined, and bolstered by the studio; her melodies take unexpected, angular leaps, while her guitar parts underline her solitude or blast it away. Throughout the album, the songs negotiate intimacy and independence, responsibility and personal needs. In "Daddi," she grapples with her own reflex of deferring to a man. The verses are high, hesitant, whispery lines "Where should I go Daddi/What should I say" but a drum stomp and a blaring guitar take over for the chorus: "Don't hold my hand, don't be my man." She worries about her cultural role in "That's Not My Real Life," a barreling punk rocker: "The suits, they don't want me to go/They just want me to bear it all for all the women." At the album's midpoint, she slows down to ballad speed and guiltily craves time for herself in "Self Explained" and "Isolation." But by the end, she's back in the fray. In "Distressor," she moves from home and seclusion hollow, circular guitar picking patterns to the powerful mask of performing onstage: "I just wanna drown in my own noise," she sings, with a drumbeat looming under her voice and, soon, a titanic, heaving guitar riff. At the end, she's shouting: "So I can just be!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The veteran forward Trevor Ariza was traded three times last week from Portland to Houston to Detroit and ultimately to Oklahoma City. It was perhaps the best illustration that an expected transactional frenzy, after nine mostly dormant months for N.B.A. roster moves, had lived up to billing. One player agent at the heart of the chaos described it to me as three months' worth of business crammed into 10 days leading into next week's scheduled start of training camps. From the many trades and free agent signings that also had the N.B.A. draft wedged in between them, these are the five most important takeaways: We didn't get Lakers vs. Clippers in the Western Conference finals, but their free agent face off was a compelling consolation. If Rob Pelinka finishes anywhere close to seventh in next season's executive of the year balloting, as he did in 2019 20, it would represent peak pettiness from the voters (who, remember, are fellow executives rather than members of the media). Pelinka's Lakers are the early leaders in the race for best off season honors. They: None Proactively traded for Oklahoma City's Dennis Schroder in anticipation of Rajon Rondo's exit; None Signed Wesley Matthews Jr. to replace Danny Green after Green was dealt for Schroder; None Unexpectedly signed Montrezl Harrell away from the Clippers to replace the Philadelphia bound Dwight Howard; None And traded JaVale McGee to Cleveland to create the needed financial flexibility to sign Marc Gasol. The Lakers also beat out their Staples Center co tenants in a head to head showdown for Markieff Morris, preventing the Clippers from signing both Morris, who spent last season with the Lakers, and his twin brother, Marcus. Throw in a re signed Kentavious Caldwell Pope, and it's a lock that the Lakers, with a more dynamic supporting cast to surround LeBron James and Anthony Davis, will start the new season as clear cut title favorites for the first time in James's time in Hollywood. The Clippers, though, haven't folded. They went into the off season determined to make dramatic chemistry changes after a humbling second round playoff exit to Denver. They upgraded from Harrell who team officials quietly decided had to go by luring Serge Ibaka away from Toronto. The additions of Ibaka and Luke Kennard (via trade with Detroit) are just the beginning; many rival teams also expect the Clippers to trade Lou Williams in their quest to create a fresh start environment after they blew a 3 1 series lead to the Nuggets. How Paul George rebounds from a poor postseason and how much influence an all new coaching staff led by Tyronn Lue wields are key factors in the Clippers' ability to stay in the same orbit as a Lakers roster widely deemed stronger than the championship group of 2019 20. Yet just knowing that the Clippers will keep trying ensures that Los Angeles, as it was in the first 72 hours of free agency, will remain one of the league capitals of intrigue. Gordon Hayward knew what he was doing when he walked away from the 34.2 million the Boston Celtics would have owed him. The ceiling on a four year deal for Hayward was widely projected in the 100 million range after his myriad injury woes in Boston, where he had a player option for the coming season. Mark Bartelstein, his agent, extracted 120 million over four years from the Charlotte Hornets, whose 63 million offer sheet to Hayward in 2014 when he was a restricted free agent was matched by the Utah Jazz. Spending nearly twice as much to land Hayward six years later is earning Michael Jordan, Charlotte's owner, no shortage of consternation, but that's not Hayward's concern (or Bartelstein's). We detailed in last week's newsletter that the Hornets would probably be interested in trading for Houston's Russell Westbrook if they missed out on LaMelo Ball in the draft. After the Hornets were able to select Ball at No. 3, they pivoted to overpaying Hayward rather than absorbing the remaining three seasons and nearly 133 million left on Westbrook's contract. So we're about to find out if Jordan comes off worse for spending big compared with last summer, when he decided not to pay to retain the All Star Kemba Walker. Adding to the disconcerting math for Jordan: Hayward will essentially cost 39 million for the first three seasons of his contract, if Charlotte's only way to create sufficient cap room is to eat and pay out the remaining 27 million on Nicolas Batum's contract over the next three seasons. Although it's true that the small market Hornets have never been a free agent destination, they could have used their cap space in trades to try to bring in a marquee name on a shorter deal (like, say, Detroit's Blake Griffin) rather than make such a long commitment to Hayward. The Knicks, for the record, were in the Hayward chase throughout. After the Knicks weighed their own trade for Westbrook, they pursued Hayward much harder, with Coach Tom Thibodeau serving as lead admirer. The Knicks eventually decided to increase their offer to four years from two to compete with sign and trade interest from Indiana and Charlotte, but the Hornets went to a financial level for Hayward that no rival was willing to match. Shooting perhaps the easiest basketball skill to work on alone has never been more valuable. Silly as it sounds to say out loud, teams are looking for shooters (and keen to reward the best). Illustration No. 1: Joe Harris, who was struggling to stay in the league through his first two seasons in Cleveland, has blossomed in Brooklyn beyond all reasonable projections and just landed a four year, 72 million contract (with an additional 3 million in unlikely bonuses) from the Nets. Illustration No. 2: Washington's Davis Bertans elected not to play in the N.B.A. bubble to guard against injury after an offensive breakout in his fourth N.B.A. season, then duly agreed to a five year deal with the Wizards worth up to 80 million on the first day of free agency. Practice your shooting, kids. Obvious as it sounds. The West is still the deeper conference, by far, but the East's top six is a more competitive jumble. Miami made a wholly unexpected trip to the N.B.A. finals and improved its roster through the acquisitions of Avery Bradley and Moe Harkless. Milwaukee will remain a contender for the league's best regular season record, and presumably be a better playoff team after acquiring Jrue Holiday, even after the Bogdan Bogdanovic fiasco. Boston lost Hayward but agreed to add the bruising Tristan Thompson to fill a clear need in the frontcourt on a team friendly contract. Toronto will certainly miss Ibaka and Gasol but has re signed Fred VanVleet and hopes Aron Baynes can step into the center void. Daryl Morey has been decisive upon arrival in Philadelphia by shipping out the ill fitting Al Horford and bringing in two needed shooters: Danny Green and Seth Curry. The Nets are poised to acquire the sharpshooting Landry Shamet from a draft night trade and, beyond re signing Harris, should finally have both Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving in uniform. The jockeying among those six teams is going to be heated and unpredictable. The rest of the West's ability to prevent the Lakers and the Clippers from delivering the conference finals showdown they still owe us, by contrast, is questionable given that Denver, Houston and Utah have nudged their rosters forward only marginally if at all. Golden State's loss of Klay Thompson to a season ending Achilles' tendon tear likewise scuttles the Warriors' expected surge back into contention. Portland and especially Phoenix, through Chris Paul's arrival, have strengthened, but Dallas will have to overcome a late start to the season for Kristaps Porzingis as he recovers from knee surgery. Nothing we've seen matters more than what happens with Giannis Antetokounmpo's contract in the next 26 days. The Milwaukee Bucks have until Dec. 21 to persuade Antetokounmpo to sign a five year, 230 million so called supermax contract extension. If he signs it, Milwaukee's failure to acquire Bogdanovic after it was portrayed as a done deal will become a footnote. If Antetokounmpo elects not to sign it by then, his contract situation will hang over the franchise like an ominous cloud all season, especially if the Bucks incur damaging penalties from the N.B.A.'s investigation into whether the team violated anti tampering rules by engaging with Bogdanovic days before the start of free agency. Milwaukee responded to the Bogdanovic deal collapse by striking deals to bring in a clutch of useful role players the guards D.J. Augustin and Bryn Forbes and the forwards Bobby Portis and Torrey Craig but this triage work can only be assessed with the context of the only reaction that matters: Antetokounmpo's. For two weeks before it appeared that the Bucks had a deal to bring in Bogdanovic alongside Holiday, there had been promising rumblings in league circles that Antetokounmpo was prepared to sign the extension. A belief was building that Antetokounmpo was likely to opt for immediate financial security by signing before the season and quietly reserving the right to try to force a trade later if he was unhappy, as George did one season after re signing in Oklahoma City. Now? Bogdanovic someone Antetokounmpo, by all accounts, was eager to play with has joined the Atlanta Hawks, while Milwaukee is enveloped by eerie silence. The Bucks can only wait for Antetokounmpo's return from an off season trip to Greece and then, they hope, his signature. If Antetokounmpo withholds that signature, Milwaukee is in for the longest and most uncomfortable season with a pending free agent since Durant's final season in Oklahoma City in 2015 16. You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I'll field three questions posed via email at marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. (Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you're writing in from, and make sure "Corner Three" is in the subject line.) Q: The media narrative of "giving up too much" in a trade is so much different when it's not the Lakers. ikeonic from Twitter Stein: The inference here is that the Bucks have been celebrated for swinging a trade for Jrue Holiday whereas the Lakers were roundly criticized for surrendering too much by sending an array of draft picks and young talent to New Orleans for Anthony Davis. I would submit that the truth is firmly in the proverbial middle. The Lakers had to hear it constantly from naysayers until they won the championship. The Bucks are probably in for the same sort of second guessing until Giannis Antetokounmpo signs a contract extension. Milwaukee's package for Holiday: Eric Bledsoe and George Hill combined with three future first round picks and two pick swaps. Maybe the Lakers were subjected to louder negativity, but that's largely because A) they're the Lakers and have the league's highest profile, and B) Davis's very public trade demand had essentially left the Lakers as the only team New Orleans could trade Davis to in July 2019. Davis's narrow trade market, more than anything, is what made people question why the Pelicans' haul was so big. Now people around the league are wondering if the Bucks have gone too far, especially after a proposed sign and trade for Sacramento's Bogdan Bogdanovic collapsed. That deal, before it fell apart, helped fuel a wave of Bucks optimism since it so closely followed the revelation of an agreement for the Holiday trade. The truth is that the Bucks did give up too much for Holiday unless it works. If that was the deal that persuades Antetokounmpo to commit his long term future to Milwaukee, and so long as Holiday doesn't bolt when he enters 2021 free agency, this all in approach will be redeemed no matter how lopsided it may look today. Q: We know Tim Duncan made his living on bank shots (and all time great defense), but do we know how many points he actually scored with bank shots? Also: Is he the bank shot leader or is there someone else more prolific in scoring off the glass? PK (Gdansk, Poland) Stein: As noted in this April piece on Duncan after his selection to the Basketball Hall of Fame's class of 2020, bank shot data has only been tracked in the N.B.A. since the 2003 4 season. So a comprehensive answer to your question, sadly, is practically impossible. What I can tell you, thanks to some typically priceless research from my former ESPN teammate MicahAdams13 is that Duncan converted 945 bank shots (good for 1,890 points) over the final 13 seasons of his career, shooting 59.1 percent on bankers over that span. Stein: Michael's email arrived in response to the item in last week's newsletter about the three former Nets head coaches who now hold jobs as assistant coaches in Los Angeles: Kenny Atkinson with the Clippers and Jason Kidd and Lionel Hollins with the Lakers. Golden State's Klay Thompson last week became the fourth player who was selected to the 2018 All Star Game to tear his Achilles' tendon. The others in an unfortunate run of star players succumbing to the league's most dreaded injury: DeMarcus Cousins, John Wall and Kevin Durant. Marcus Morris of the Los Angeles Clippers landed a four year contract worth 64 million in free agency more than 60 million higher than his twin brother, Markieff, came away with by settling for a one year veteran minimum deal to stay with the Lakers. Early in their careers, in 2014, when Markieff Morris was the more established N.B.A. player, they signed deals with the Phoenix Suns worth a combined 52 million that the brothers were told they could split however they wanted. Markieff Morris took 32 million over four years, with Marcus receiving 20 million over the same span. Last week's draft was the 11th in a row in which a college freshman was selected No. 1 over all: Georgia's Anthony Edwards by the Minnesota Timberwolves. The last non freshman to be drafted with the No. 1 pick was the Oklahoma sophomore Blake Griffin in 2009. Obi Toppin, the Knicks' draft selection at No. 8, led the nation with 107 dunks last season at Dayton.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
If a raggedy sand troll that grants children wishes feels like something out of a classic bedtime story, well, it is. The original conceit, by E. Nesbit, was published in 1902 as "Five Children and It," and the children's author Jacqueline Wilson updated the story in 2012 with "Four Children and It" to be about a blended family. Andy de Emmony's film adapts the latter but has made the household mixed race, added teen angst and wrapped it all into a dull, family friendly package. Matthew Goode and Paula Patton play newly dating divorced parents who ambush their respective kids (Ros and Robbie; Smash and Maudie) with a get to know you beach vacation in Cornwall. While there, the children stumble upon a magical creature called the Psammead, which is distractingly voiced by Michael Caine and looks like a cross between E.T. and the Grinch. A cringey Russell Brand hams it up as a local aristocrat who has his own villainous designs on the wish granter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
"Hightown" is in part a rehab and redemption story, but in an organic way that mostly avoids preaching and solemnity. Stumbling out to the beach one morning to nurse a hangover, Jackie finds the body of a woman who was shot in nearby Truro and dumped in the bay. It shakes her, and when she later stumbles on a piece of evidence connected to the murder, something clicks: She wants to solve the case, for the sake of the victim but also as a way to get back her own self respect. She wants to be a real cop. Raymund, formerly a regular on the NBC bellwether "Chicago Fire" (and the sexy prosecutor Dana Lodge on "The Good Wife"), is all there as Jackie, wholly alive and believable from the moment we meet her. She makes the character's toughness and cynicism tangible, and she communicates her depths of regret and panic hidden until they're not without any maudlin excess. And, crucially, she captures the corresponding wild energy and joy the way that obsessing over the case fits with Jackie's addictive personality, and the unseemly delight she feels whenever her instincts prove right. "Hightown" is full of engaging, unfussy performances in sharply drawn roles the standouts include Riley Voelkel as a stripper connected to the case, Atkins Estimond as a killer with a philosophical cast of mind and Mike Pniewski (the political operative Frank Landau in "The Good Wife" and "The Good Fight") as Jackie's avuncular partner. The most recognizable names in the cast, both fine in more formulaic parts, are James Badge Dale as a state cop who serves as Jackie's foil and Amaury Nolasco as an imprisoned drug dealer. They bounce off one another in a story that has both more piquancy and more common sense than the usual TV mystery, especially in the first few episodes, which were written by the show's creator, Rebecca Cutter ("Gotham"), and directed by the noted cinematographer Rachel Morrison ("Black Panther," "Fruitvale Station"). "Hightown" loses some of its momentum in later episodes the story bogs down a bit and the pieties about addiction and taking control of your life move more into the foreground. But it never entirely loses its flavor. It's good enough that if it were a little better a little quirkier, a little more urgent there'd be nothing to complain about, and that's pretty good.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Caitlin Elfring and Shamisa Zvoma in Bindle and Keep Caitlin Elfring (left) and Shamisa Zvoma both wanted to wear suits on their wedding day, but they also knew how difficult it could be to find something off the rack. Custom was the only option, and Bindle and Keep was the only company they considered. "We knew they would be the ones that would be able to create suits perfectly for us," said Ms. Elfring. "And we knew we would have the nonjudgmental experience we were looking for. It was incredible to work with a small LGBTQ business that's doing great things for the community," Ms. Zvoma said. On their wedding day, both Ms. Elfring and Ms. Zvoma knew they had made the right choice. "Our suits were the best fitting and most well constructed pieces of clothing we've ever worn in our entire lives. We've both never felt so beautiful and stunning," Ms. Elfring said. 3. At Two Boutiques, Still the Same Dress Like any other bride, Lisette Flores visited multiple boutiques while shopping for her wedding dress. Although it took some culling to find the perfect gown, she finally found a dress she loved, but still decided to keep looking. At another boutique, she found a dress that she absolutely knew was the one. "It ended up being the same dress I liked from the other boutique," Ms. Flores said. "I took it as a sign that it was the gown for me." She bought her dream gown designed by Essence of Australia at Diana's Bridal in Skokie, Ill. "It fit my personality perfectly. It had an illusion back, beading and cascading train, perfect for my free spirit personality." Emily Diamond had thought she wanted a dress that was "out there" and "one of a kind." But after trying on more than 30 gowns, she realized that those gowns weren't quite the right fit. "What I really wanted was something classic and timeless, with a bit of surprise and drama," said Mrs. Diamond, who purchased an Oscar de la Renta dress at Saks Fifth Avenue. She added a dramatic tulle skirt with a champagne color bow to give her the edge she was looking for. "I felt like I looked like the best, most beautiful version of myself." Lindsey Weinstein in Pendleton and Leah Rubin Cadrain in Laure de Sagazan Lindsey Weinstein (right) knew that traditional wedding attire wouldn't be a good fit for her. "There's nothing traditional about me, my family, or our relationship," she said. "The thought of wearing a tailored three piece suit in the Ojai, Calif., sun felt too stuffy, uninteresting." Leah Rubin Cadrain also struggled with what to wear on her wedding day after finding out that her mother's 1970s Mexican sundress could not be restored. "Everywhere I looked, I felt sellers pushing their own ideas of what a wedding day should look like," Ms. Rubin Cadrain said. Ultimately both women wanted comfort over pomp and circumstance and went for a "desert casual" look. "We wanted our most loved people to feel fully themselves and be liberated from the usual dress up woes so that the ceremony and its real meaning could take priority," said Ms. Weinstein, who wore a cowl neck cardigan by Pendleton with white pants from Suit Supply and Common Projects sneakers. Ms. Rubin Cadrain wore a bohemian dress by Laure de Sagazan, which she paired with a long Pendleton coat after the ceremony. Unlike most brides, Valerie Rampton didn't spend countless hours scouring bridal shops around the city looking for the dress of her dreams. She simply put pen to paper and designed a gown she knew she would love. She later called on Christina Apolostou, formerly of Blue Bridal, to bring her design to life. "It was so fun to work with a veteran of the N.Y.C. wedding dress world," Mrs. Rampton said. "We had four fittings and it turned out just perfect." Her design featured elements that she loved: a bias cut dress, cape and silk. "I felt peaceful, like I was floating in a cloud of silk dancing in the light." When Grace James started the hunt for the perfect wedding attire, she had two requirements: She wanted to match her vintage, eclectic style and the vibe of her venue, the Bond Chapel at the University of Chicago. Mrs. James found both in a Legends Romona Keveza gown. "I felt fancy, classy, and like there will be no way I'll look back in a year, or 20, and say, 'What was I thinking?'," said Mrs. James who paired her gown with a headpiece by Debbie Carlisle, jewelry by Lulu Frost and a rhinestone belt made of trim she bought at a fabric store. There was only one piece left to complete her vintage look: chic glasses. "Finding the right glasses was actually a bit harder for me than finding the dress," she said. "I've worn glasses since I was 4. It was pretty hard to find examples of brides with glasses." Mrs. James fell in love with a frame from the 1950s on Etsy. Diya Ajit, who works for Vogue magazine, knew there would be a lot of interest in what she chose to wear on her wedding day. She loved dresses, but she also wanted to wear something unexpected. "I wanted to create something I could wear again and wouldn't just end up in an archival box in the back of my closet," said Ms. Ajit, who designed a custom jumpsuit that she had made of Japanese silk crepe by a tailor in Dubai. She completed her look with a cathedral length Swarovski crystal veil and a detachable train for a touch of drama. "I added a pair of glittery degrade Jimmy Choo heels and earrings by Kenneth Jay Lane that had been worn by Audrey Hepburn to elevate the look and add much needed shimmer and sparkle." Annlouise Blanc's wedding day look had to meet three very important requirements. "I knew from the beginning that I wanted my outfit to be elegant, have clean lines, and stand out amid the marble interior of San Francisco City Hall," Ms. Blanc said. After several disappointing trips to local bridal shops whose garments were either too traditional or not flattering to her figure, she moved online. After a quick search, she found the right elements to create her elegant bridal vision. "I purchased the jumpsuit from Net a Porter and the cape from the Tadashi Shoji website," said Ms. Blanc, who also wore a pair of Stuart Weitzman sandals. With two wedding celebrations to plan for, Annie Lee wanted two distinct looks that would celebrate her culture and style. She chose a black and white Jill Stuart dress with an open back for the civil ceremony at San Francisco City Hall. "It was sleek and deceptively simple yet gorgeous," said Ms. Lee who, rented her wedding day look from Rent the Runway. "I felt so chic and elegant in the Jill Stuart dress, which fit perfectly even though I had never tried it on beforehand." For the Chinese banquet, Ms. Lee borrowed a qipao from her cousin. "After trying on at least seven different ones, I loved the qipao I ended up wearing," she said. "I felt like I was living a childhood dream. I could feel the history and tradition in my choice of outfit, and it was such a pleasure to be able to share that with my friends and husband's family." 12. When White Is Not an Option Heidi Nel, who married Thomas Rosser on June 20, in Richmond, Va., knew that wearing white specifically, upholding the tradition of white didn't ring true to who she was. "At age 36, innocence, purity, and virginity don't necessarily represent who I am," Ms. Nel said. "I knew I wanted to wear something bright and bold, like marigold, but had a heck of a time finding anything." Ms. Nel, who had grown frustrated with the lack of colorful options at other bridal salons, bought a custom marigold gown from Elaya Vaughn Bridal in Washington. She worked closely with the designer Kate Pankoke to create a gown that captured her vision. "The gown that I created with Kate Pankoke felt much more like an expression of the promises that my husband and I made to each other on our wedding day: to build a life grounded in honesty, love, purpose, and adventure, and to make each other smile each and every day." Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion, and Vows) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Credit...Allison V. Smith for The New York Times Every Plant Has a Story. You Just Need to Dig. As a matter of habit, Greg Grant leaves his varmint gun at home when he gives a garden tour. But on a late winter Saturday afternoon in Arcadia, Tex., while Mr. Grant was tramping between a stand of native bamboo and a spray of spider lilies, Sonny Boy Desalvo Fontenot caught wind of an armadillo. Sonny Boy, one of Mr. Grant's four critter dogs, started barking and baying, and Acer, the Jack Russell, joined in. Next, the rat terriers got into it. And the botanical lecture came to a temporary halt. "We didn't bring a gun," Mr. Grant said, as he peered through the woods for the dog pack. "They're not happy until you're all involved." The armadillo or maybe a skunk? had worked its way into tree roots above the red clay banks of Grandma's creek. And the furious barking had persuaded the animal to stay put. Mr. Grant, 55, has roamed these acres since he was a boy. He is, in fact, the fifth generation of his family to occupy the little house up the hill. He's the seventh generation to live here in Shelby County, in the piney woods between Dallas and Shreveport, La. And as the area's pre eminent horticulturist and de facto natural historian, Mr. Grant knew how to handle a cornered armadillo: walk away. Rain check on the country hospitality, thanks. The home gardens that Mr. Grant has been restoring here for the past 30 years leave no room for fussiness. He plants and weeds with a tractor disc and a Bush Hog. He manages invasives, woody brush and weeds with a gas can and a drip torch. On one hand, the way he gardens is practical. Mr. Grant has been purchasing empty buildings and property up and down the road: He maintains three houses, the church picnic grounds, the derelict town store and the mail cubbies salvaged from the old Arcadia post office. And you can't manage 50 acres with a hand trowel. All of Mr. Grant's parcels lie along a two lane farm to market road, running south to north. You could walk it in 20 minutes. But this being Texas, we hopped in the truck. Mr. Grant rolled past his second house, white with a pyramidal roof, which previously belonged to Miss Lou, the late shopkeeper. Behind the building lies his next project: 20 acres of longleaf pine savanna. Or the start of it, at least. Two centuries ago, the longleaf Pinus palustris covered 90 million acres of the American Southeast: vast reaches from the Carolinas to East Texas that supported more than 200 bird species. Logging swallowed big swathes of the savanna; cotton and sugar plantations chewed up the leftovers. Today, less than 3 percent of the ecosystem remains. The longleaf pine, with its tufts of needles, some 18 inches long, looks a little like the bearskin hat worn by the Queen's Guard, stuck on a teetering rack. Starting a few years back, Mr. Grant transplanted 12,000 trees ("not all of them survived"). Next, he scattered an understory of grasses: little bluestem, big bluestem, splitbeard bluestem, broomsedge bluestem, et cetera. Controlled burns each spring clear out the oaks and hardwoods that predominate everywhere else. With its boxy geometry and dogtrot porch three rooms on one side of the breezeway and two on the other the folk style house looks like a collaboration between Donald Judd and Annie Oakley. Mr. Grant said: "Anyone can look at a plantation home and say it's important to preserve that. And everybody did. But I think darn few people could look at the most rudimentary, simple, vernacular house and say, 'Those are important and need to be saved.' And nobody did." Back in the truck, Mr. Grant pointed to a tumbledown shack on the west side of the road. (Preservation plan B? Ruins.) This home last belonged to Crazy Larry, he said. "It was my grandmother Ruth's sister who died in a car wreck her husband's second wife's son." Along with being the keeper of the bulbs and buildings no one else wants to claim, Mr. Grant has become the caretaker of half forgotten names. He estimates that of the 500 people who once occupied the community of Arcadia, he could classify half as kin. (The current population stands at 57.) Mr. Grant sometimes applies a country term to his background and pastimes: "redneck." Be that as it may, Mr. Grant has also written six books. His latest, "The Rose Rustlers" (written with William C. Welch and published last fall by Texas A M University Press), describes the hunt for lost Southern roses, and the effort to repopularize them in Texas gardens. For a time, Mr. Grant worked with Dr. Welch at the Antique Rose Emporium, near College Station, Tex. This specialty nursery would grow out cuttings discovered by the Rustlers in cemeteries and unkempt yards, then return these robust and fragrant roses to new gardens. A decade later, Mr. Grant established his own heritage farm to spread the hardy but hard to find bulbs that he had collected from his neighbors. These tales feed the lectures that Mr. Grant gives to garden clubs. Over the years, he has delivered more than 1,500. "Every plant has a story," Mr. Grant will say. "If you don't have a story, I will give it a story. 'You bought a plant at Lowe's, you fell and skinned your knee, and the cat peed on it.' That's the story: It starts there." This old plant stuff also became the germ plasm that Mr. Grant has tapped to breed and select new ornamentals. The goal: plants that will thrive in Texas and beyond. A well adapted narcissus, for instance, will bloom beyond a year or two. Twenty is a reasonable minimum; 200 would be better. "I went to horticulture school to learn to grow things," he said. "And now what I grow is plants that grow without me. I wasted my parents' money." Mr. Grant has introduced more than 50 cultivars: roses, bluebonnets, mums, phloxes, salvias, verbenas. These plants carry the names of friends, colleagues, grandparents, first ladies ("Laura Bush" is a disease resistant petunia) and beloved dogs. Several of his bulletproof best sellers earned the label "Texas Superstars," a crown in commerce. Jerry M. Parsons, a retired professor of horticulture and an early mentor, said Mr. Grant possesses a matchless eye for color and variations in foliage. "It's not a trick," Dr. Parsons said. "It's a gift from God, is what it is." He continued, "I was always married to my job, my career in horticulture." He'd created a homestead tailored perfectly to one (and only one) person. Mr. Grant recalled that people would tell him, "No woman is going to live in that house with you." This assessment proved correct. "She came in and looked at the bedroom and said, 'I'll never spend a night in this house.'" "And I didn't," Mrs. Grant said. "I called it 'The Museum.' It was not livable." "It didn't have central air and heat," Mr. Grant said. Mrs. Grant said, "In the summer! In Texas!" Grandma Emanis's old house includes both heat and air now. Cable TV, too. Mr. Grant has turned his novel domestic arrangement into an opportunity to do something quite familiar: that is, overhaul the garden. He compiled an inventory of Mrs. Grant's favorite plants a cape jasmine gardenia, sweet olive, daisies, blackberries. Within a couple of months, he'd put them all in the ground. "I've got to take the house from horse barn to Pottery Barn," Mr. Grant said. It'll take a generation or two.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Vaping is surging among American adolescents. According to one national survey, 3.6 million middle and high school students used e cigarettes in 2018. Another found that the rise in vaping from 2017 to 2018 was the sharpest for any substance the researchers had investigated in the project's 44 year history. While e cigarettes swept onto the market about a decade ago on the perception that they were largely benign useful tools, in fact, to help smokers quit tobacco concerns are growing over the harm that might be caused by the particles and chemicals users inhale. But the chief worry is over the ingredient commonly found in vaping liquids: nicotine. Nicotine is the addictive chemical that chains both cigarette smokers and vapers, compelling them to repeated use. Its grip is tough to break. Teenagers, whose brains are still developing, are particularly susceptible. Parents and educators are discovering that, unfortunately, there are no established protocols to help teenagers quit vaping. But there are measures parents can take. You just found your child's empty vaping pods. Now what? Before you confront, educate yourself. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a useful website on what the federal government currently knows about vaping and e cigarettes. The Tobacco Prevention Toolkit, by researchers at Stanford, has a major unit on vaping and Juuls. It is not just for educators: Frequently updated, it has photos, charts and points of discussion that may help you engage your teenager. Now that I've got some facts, what's next? Try to see e cigarettes from the perspective of teenagers. They know that on the scale of all things forbidden, lots of substances prescription and street drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, to name a few rank far higher than vapes. While adolescents are canny enough to hide their Juuls from you, they don't really believe that vaping is harmful. So if you unleash an angry outburst, they will likely push back, thinking you are making a big deal over nothing. Also realize that the defensiveness and fibbing you're hearing may not be just a child reacting to being caught the sort of behavior that earns consequences and stern lectures. This is different. Your teenager may be addicted to nicotine. If you take a draconian stance, you are essentially threatening to put an addicted person into abrupt withdrawal. You need another approach. How do I reason with a teenage vaper? "The trick is not to try to scare them, because scare tactics don't work at this point," said Dr. Suchitra Krishnan Sarin, a Yale professor of psychiatry who focuses on adolescent behaviors and tobacco products. "But explaining how these products are making them addicted is the way to go." Involve them in a conversation. Try to get them to recognize the compulsive quality of their behavior. Show them what researchers know about nicotine addiction and the questions they are raising about the possible long term harms of vaping. The goal is to encourage them to want to quit for their own good, not just to give you lip service and continue behind your back. Are all teenagers who try vaping likely to become addicted? Not necessarily. Some people can smoke one cigarette and have a glass of wine at a party and that's it. But nicotine addiction can happen swiftly and is extremely hard to extinguish. One factor is the amount of nicotine the user is exposed to. Some vaping devices, like Juul, provide high levels. If there is a family history of addiction, or if other family members are using addictive substances like alcohol, tobacco or drugs at home, a teenager's vulnerability ratchets up. Teenagers with anxiety or depression can also succumb more quickly. And, doctors note, withdrawing from nicotine can also set off anxiety and depression, at least temporarily. What's the best way to quit? Unfortunately, even the experts aren't sure. "We as researchers are barely keeping up with the increased use and proliferation of these products," Dr. Krishnan Sarin said. "We haven't started to scratch the surface." Addiction medicine experts are beginning to suggest some approaches. Ask your pediatrician about them. Cognitive behavioral therapy can help redirect thoughts when cravings hit. Talk therapy can address underlying anxiety or depression, which may be related to the reason the teen is vaping or have been triggered by quitting. Other activities can calm an agitated mind in withdrawal, especially yoga, meditation and sports. A teenager can renew acquaintance with a passionate interest or hobby that might have fallen away. Nicotine patches and prescription cessation medications might be worth exploring, though most are only approved for adults. Dr. Sharon Levy, an adolescent addiction medicine expert at Boston Children's Hospital, has begun prescribing nicotine replacement patches off label for older teenagers who are motivated to quit. Experts caution that there is no silver bullet. Instead, they suggest that you try a constellation of approaches.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
FRANKLIN LAKES, N.J. By the time they get to kindergarten, children in this well to do suburb already know their numbers, so their teachers worried that a new math program was too easy when it covered just 1 and 2 for a whole week. "Talk about the number 1 for 45 minutes?" said Chris Covello, who teaches 16 students ages 5 and 6. "I was like, I don't know. But then I found you really could. Before, we had a lot of ground to cover, and now it's more open ended and gets kids thinking." The slower pace is a cornerstone of the district's new approach to teaching math, which is based on the national math system of Singapore and aims to emulate that country's success by promoting a deeper understanding of numbers and math concepts. Students in Singapore have repeatedly ranked at or near the top on international math exams since the mid 1990s. Franklin Lakes, about 30 miles northwest of Manhattan, is one of dozens of districts, from Scarsdale, N.Y., to Lexington, Ky., that in recent years have adopted Singapore math, as it is called, amid growing concerns that too many American students lack the higher order math skills called for in a global economy. For decades, efforts to improve math skills have driven schools to embrace one math program after another, abandoning a program when it does not work and moving on to something purportedly better. In the 1960s there was the "new math," whose focus on abstract theories spurred a back to basics movement, emphasizing rote learning and drills. After that came "reform math," whose focus on problem solving and conceptual understanding has been derided by critics as the "new new math." Singapore math may well be a fad, too, but supporters say it seems to address one of the difficulties in teaching math: all children learn differently. In contrast to the most common math programs in the United States, Singapore math devotes more time to fewer topics, to ensure that children master the material through detailed instruction, questions, problem solving, and visual and hands on aids like blocks, cards and bar charts. Ideally, they do not move on until they have thoroughly learned a topic. Principals and teachers say that slowing down the learning process gives students a solid math foundation upon which to build increasingly complex skills, and makes it less likely that they will forget and have to be retaught the same thing in later years. And with Singapore math, the pace can accelerate by fourth and fifth grades, putting children as much as a year ahead of students in other math programs as they grasp complex problems more quickly. "Our old program, Everyday Math, did not do that," said Danielle Santoro, assistant principal of Public School 132 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which introduced Singapore math last year for all 700 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. "One day it could be money, the next day it could be time, and you would not get back to those concepts until a week later." Singapore math's added appeal is that it has largely skirted the math wars of recent decades over whether to teach traditional math or reform math. Indeed, Singapore math has often been described by educators and parents as a more balanced approach between the two, melding old fashioned algorithms with visual representations and critical thinking. In Franklin Lakes, teachers are learning the new math system as they pass the knowledge on to their students. One morning last week, Ms. Covello and six other kindergarten teachers worked with a consultant on how to reinforce the number 8 for students. First came a catchy tune about eight oranges; then they counted off one by one while throwing up their arms in a wave. Singapore math was developed by the country's Ministry of Education nearly 30 years ago, and the textbooks have been imported for more than a decade. The earliest adopters in the United States were home school parents and a small number of schools that had heard about it through word of mouth. Today it can be found in neighborhood schools like P.S. 132, which serves mostly poor students, as well as elite schools, including Hunter College Elementary School, a public school for gifted children in Manhattan, and the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, a private school attended by President Obama's daughters. SingaporeMath.com, a company that has distributed the "Primary Mathematics" books in the United States since 1998, reports that it now has sales to more than 1,500 schools, about twice as many as in 2008. And Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Math in Focus, the United States edition of a popular Singapore math series, is now used in 120 school districts and 60 charter schools and private schools, the publisher says. Some recent research suggests that students who are taught Singapore math score higher on standardized math tests, and in anecdotal reports, teachers say it helps even young children to develop confidence in their math abilities. But school officials caution that Singapore math is not easy or cheap to successfully adopt. In some districts, there has also been skepticism from school board members and parents about importing a foreign math program. The books look different from standard issue textbooks, with fewer pages and brightly colored pictures and diagrams, and early versions contained references to curry puffs and the Asian fruit rambutan. The books and materials initially cost an average of 40 to 52 per student, comparable to other math programs in the United States. As with other math programs, workbooks might be replaced from year to year. But training teachers can be expensive. "All along, people have said it's too hard, too demanding for teachers," said Jeffery Thomas, a history teacher who founded SingaporeMath.com with his wife, Dawn, after using the books to tutor their daughter at home in the suburbs of Portland, Ore. Mr. Thomas said that about a dozen schools had started and dropped Singapore math, in some cases because teachers themselves lacked a strong math background and adequate training in the program. When the Scarsdale district switched to Singapore math at its elementary schools in 2008, it expanded the number of math coaches to three from one to help the 110 classroom teachers learn the material. The district spent 121,000 on the "Primary Mathematics" books and 24,632 for teachers' materials. Bill Jackson, one of Scarsdale's new math coaches, scribbled notes the other day as he watched a fourth grade math class. For nearly an hour, the students pored over a single number: 82,566 (the seats in New Meadowlands Stadium, where the Giants and Jets play football). They built it with chips on a laminated mat, diagramed it on a smart board and, finally, solved written questions. Mr. Jackson said that students moved through a three step learning process: concrete, pictorial, abstract. American math programs, he said, typically skip the middle step and lose students when making the jump from concrete (chips) to abstract (questions).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Not so long ago, philanthropy was an area where politics were left at the door. Conservatives and liberals on a philanthropic board could agree to disagree behind closed doors, but the public paid little attention as hospitals, cultural institutions and universities expanded thanks to gifts from the wealthy. But at a time of heightened tensions over partisan views, charitable organizations can find themselves targets of vocal dissent. Consider Stephen Ross , the billionaire who made his money through Related Companies, the real estate developer behind Hudson Yards and the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. Mr. Ross, the chairman of Related and the owner of the Miami Dolphins, used his wealth to endow the University of Michigan's business school in his name. After it emerged that he was hosting a 250,000 a plate fund raiser at his Hamptons estate for President Trump, calls rang out to boycott Equinox Fitness and SoulCycle, which Related owns. A more direct criticism came from one of the Dolphins players. Kenny Stills , a wide receiver, said on Twitter that Mr. Ross's support for Mr. Trump, whose comments about immigrants and Democratic lawmakers have been labeled racist, was incompatible with his funding of the Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality. That a billionaire real estate developer would host a political fund raiser was once a "dog bites man" story: People shrugged it off. This time, the reaction was much more vocal. Adrienne Arsht, a friend of Mr. Ross's and a fellow philanthropist, said such protests would not affect him at all. "If I'm paying a fee to SoulCycle, maybe half a penny ends up in Stephen Ross's bank account," said Ms. Arsht, a board member of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. "If an individual says, 'I'm going to go to Solidcore instead, because they just gave me something I like,' then my half a cent goes to them. That's my choice." But that is starting to change. Mr. Ross is the biggest donor to the University of Michigan, which scrambled to respond after students and alumni protested his ties to Mr. Trump. Officials released several statements about its commitment to different points of view and Mr. Ross's charitable support of the university. "This fits into the larger question of charitable organizations being judged by their donors and board members," said Ray Madoff, director of the Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good at Boston College Law School. "The problem is exacerbated because charitable giving has become concentrated among the wealthy," Ms. Madoff added. "Twenty years ago, it was a lot of small donors providing the essential support for the institution. Now, charitable organizations have become overly reliant on the big donors." Large philanthropic boards have an array of members from different backgrounds. What the members have in common is enough wealth to meet required annual pledges in the six figures. Politics are avoided. "We don't get involved in any political issues or controversies," said Peter Georgescu , a vice chairman of NewYork Presbyterian Hospital. "We have to be apolitical as an organization that takes care of the community." Mr. Ross also sits on the board of NewYork Presbyterian. A spokeswoman for the hospital declined to comment on how political differences were dealt with on the board. Ms. Arsht, a Democrat, was emphatic that where members stand politically "absolutely does not come into play" on the Lincoln Center board. She said she and David H. Koch , the conservative billionaire, had served together on the board of the American Ballet Theater in the 1980s. "David was passionate about it," she said. "I don't believe there was any political baggage back then." Conservatives like Mr. Ross serve on the Lincoln Center board, but so do prominent liberals like the music mogul David Geffen , whose name is on the building where the New York Philharmonic performs. (Across the center's plaza is the home of the New York City Ballet, a building named for Mr. Koch, who is a director emeritus of Lincoln Center.) Ms. Arsht noted that the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington was politically split by design: Its members are appointed by the president of the United States. Mr. Trump has appointed spouses of several real estate developers he knows, as well as Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and father of Mr. Trump's former spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The world of philanthropy has seen a few protests. After Mr. Koch paid 65 million to renovate the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014, it was named for him. The reopening drew protesters, who were largely focused on Mr. Koch's stance against climate change. For smaller philanthropic institutions, though, a board member's politics might matter more. One donor's money can have outsize influence on an organization, which might not have the heft to stand up to the donor. "Money can really pervert that sense of governance," said Joseph Grasso , an associate dean at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. "These large philanthropists know when they're crossing a line. But at these smaller nonprofits they're prime opportunities for them to press the envelope via their philanthropy." But there is a risk that the current political climate could motivate philanthropists to redirect their charitable giving. Recently, Warren Kanders resigned from the board of the Whitney Museum after artists and patrons protested that a company he owned sold tear gas that was being used along the United States border with Mexico to enforce Mr. Trump's immigration policy. He had donated more than 10 million to the museum. That contradiction, as it manifested itself in his ability to bring together people with vastly different political views, might seem like a lost art today. But Ms. Lorenz said it was part of the core principles of the foundation, which donates money earned from fracking to environmental causes. "He was able to get his peers who didn't think like he did to have conversations they wouldn't normally have," she said. "That's when being political can be helpful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
When Rich Johnston started college in the 1970s, four years at a standard university was out of the question financially. So he worked, knocked off two years of community college credits in 19 months and then worked some more. He ended up graduating in 1981 from the University of Puget Sound, a private college in Tacoma, Wash. "Nobody ever asked where I went the first two years, and I don't think anybody cares," he said. "And I bet I saved myself 30,000." When it came time for his son Bret to start college, Bret decided to take the same path, choosing smaller classes, a more flexible schedule and a price that was a fraction of what he might have paid in Washington's state university system. He is hardly the only one. A few weeks ago, in a "Your Money" special section of the newspaper, I wrote about Mino Caulton, a high school senior in Shutesbury, Mass., who was weighing the virtues of a community college versus a more prestigious private university that would have required him to take out lots of student loans. Advice for Mr. Caulton poured in on our Bucks blog, and it became clear that there were few centralized resources for families who had made a strategic financial decision to attend community college first as a cost saving measure. Merely deciding to attend community college does not guarantee that you will save money. If the goal is to earn a bachelor's degree in four years, anything that goes wrong along the way, like taking the wrong classes or getting a bad grade in a required class, means extra semesters and extra expenses. So what follows are a list of six of the most important things you need to think about if you're trying to save money in this way. Please add your tips to our discussion on Bucks over the weekend. A CULTURE OF TRANSFERRING First, pick the right community college. "The first thing you have to assess is whether or not the community college has a transfer going culture," said Stephen Handel, who is executive director of community college initiatives for the College Board and began his undergraduate education at one himself. Call or visit the advising office of community colleges you're considering and ask what percentage of students who complete an associate's degree transfer to a four year university. Also, which universities do they end up going to and in what numbers? Then, call the admissions staff at your target transfer university and ask them how many transfer students they take each year. Which community colleges send them the most students? What tends to get in the way of them gaining admission and then succeeding? Pretty quickly, you'll start hearing horror stories of students who took the wrong classes at community college and couldn't get into a four year university or ended up having to spend three or more years at the university making up credits. Thankfully, a number of state universities and community colleges have made it easier to figure out all the rules ahead of time. The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers has put together a state by state guide on its Web site, at bit.ly/h8ebPk. Keep two crucial questions in mind here. Which credits will count toward the general education or distribution requirements at your four year college or university? And if you have a target major, which community college classes could you take that would count toward that as well? AN EARLY START Budget cuts are posing enormous challenges for higher education systems just as more people are trying to return to retrain and retool. The resulting enrollment bottleneck has hit many community colleges especially hard. So if you're going to get into the classes you need and get out in two years or less, you need to be first in line come registration time. Don't wait until a few weeks ahead to sign up. But it wasn't easy to pile up the credits he needed. Many of the classes he had hoped to take were closed to online enrollment by the time he logged on. So he scrambled. "During the first two weeks of classes, I was going to different ones all day every day trying to add the ones I needed, taking whatever I could get," he said. "I'd heard that inevitably, even if you don't get in on the first day, the worst case scenario is that you keep showing up and hope that somebody drops the class," he said. "That happens in every class. But I didn't have to do that. I got rejected from a lot of classes, but I also got into enough of the ones that I needed." This approach requires flexibility, which will complicate matters for people who also need to work. Try to find a job ahead of time that has at least a little bit of flexibility. SPECIALIZED ADVICE Most community colleges will have at least one adviser who knows how to work the transfer system. Your task is to hunt down those people before you enroll and pick your classes. "To transfer, you have to complete 60 transferable units, which is quite doable if you are coming to me in April of your senior year in high school," said Dan Nannini, the transfer center faculty leader at Santa Monica College, describing the path that most aspiring transfer students take. "If you do what I tell you, you will transfer. It's not a mystery here in California." And how often should you visit someone like him once you enroll? "My line is that we're like dentists," he said. "You should see us twice a year." THE HONORS ADVANTAGE James Fishbein, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has seen plenty of transfer students come through his office. One thing he wonders is whether they've surrounded themselves with peers who pushed them academically in the two years before he sees them. "At every university, there are at least some people who want to get into law or medical or business school," he said. "They may know a lot of stuff that you don't." These people are at community colleges, too, but you're more likely to find them in greater numbers in an honors program, which many community colleges maintain. Be sure to ask about this when you are applying. A SMOOTH LANDING Mr. Fishbein said that in his experience the vast majority of students who transferred from community colleges stumbled at first. One slip up, such as getting a low grade in a science class that is a prerequisite for other classes in your major, can make a mess of your financial plan. "Depending on the course schedule, there may be workarounds, but every one costs money say, if you need to take another semester or enroll in summer school," he said. Jonathan Chong, 21, who is in his first year at the University of California, Los Angeles after transferring from community college, acknowledges the challenge. "One thing it didn't prepare me for was the speed," he said. "That's where I've had to step up my game." Mr. Chong has formed study groups with some fellow community college alumni to help keep up. THE BENEFITS If community college isn't where you saw yourself beginning your quest for higher education, stop feeling sorry for yourself. "Some of our challenge is demystifying what community college is," said Irma Medina, senior coordinator of a program at Holyoke Community College in Holyoke, Mass., that has sent over 150 graduates to colleges like Mount Holyoke and Smith in recent years. "This isn't 13th grade. We have great faculty here that even taught at Harvard. So you made the right choice by being here." You might even get to meet those faculty, too. Part of the reason Bret Johnston, 21, chose community college was that it offered him more flexibility to take time off each year to pursue rock climbing while he's still young. (His father, Rich, the University of Puget Sound graduate, owns Vertical World, a chain of climbing gyms, and Bret works there to make money.) But when he's in class at Shoreline Community College in Washington, he's been struck by how different his experience has been from those of his peers. "I've had so many friends who have taken a 500 person English 101 lecture, and for a lot of money," he said. "I took that same class in a 25 person room and got a lot out of it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
When Aretha Franklin roared, in several octaves no less listen to the "Ahhhhhh hhhhhh!" refrain from "Rock Steady" I imagined it sprang from a place many black women know all too well. A fire in the belly. A well of pain. A personal altar for communing with a higher power. And, yes, a basic understanding that you don't have to like her, but you will respect her. When Ms. Franklin died at 76 on Thursday, it hit particularly hard. It was, in some ways, worse than David Bowie's passing. Worse than the realization that Muhammad Ali is no more. Because Aretha Franklin was a symbol of black woman magic. Scholars and music critics are spilling barrels of ink to rightfully praise her voice, her civil rights activism, her place in the pantheon of music. She's a groundbreaker, a giant yes, a thousand times, yes. First woman admitted to the Rock Roll Hall of Fame. Winner of 18 Grammys. Songwriter whose tunes became anthems for a people's struggle. But for many women, the pride came in knowing that she looked like our aunts, mothers, sisters and girlfriends. It made her thrilling and untouchable and relatable at the same time. Everyone had an Aretha in the family, right? No, not really. Her image, the manufactured bits and the glimpses of personal life glamour shots on the covers of Jet or Ebony or Time magazine; pictures of her with her husband Glynn Turman; rumblings of trouble in the marriage; headlines declaring "Aretha Franklin tells why weight doesn't worry her anymore" resonated from the Deep South to a yellow house on stilts in South America. There, I first heard her wailing from a newfound 45 in my grandmother's record collection in Guyana. Read Wesley Morris's appraisal here and more on Ms. Franklin as a model of empowerment and pride. I stood mesmerized one Sunday morning in the 1970s by the Gramophone in my nice dress, ribboned hair and shiny Clarks after service at St. Mary's Church. (On Sundays, my grandmother let me flick through her collection of calypso, reggae and American records to blast my own playlist while she cooked and my mother, an exhausted nurse, rested.) I kept picking up the needle to start over again, scratching the record silly. This was different from a genteel Patsy Cline or a Diana Ross rumination about unfaithful lovers or a plea about where did our love go. The lyrics sounded like the invectives my grandmother would spit out at my grandfather on a sunny Sunday morning you've been busted gallivanting around town, so don't even try. Her yowls were a secret language every woman could understand. They meant everything. Rage. Joy. A siren call. An exultation. Then she'd bend a note ... just so. I was hooked. I saw in her the women of the Caribbean who struggled with men and weight and money and still took care of business. Except she was a genius. "I think women have to be strong," she once said, adding that if you aren't, "some people will run right over you." At times she looked ordinary, and so was legion. Then she looked ethereal, worthy of a pedestal. She had a body that spread out naturally over the years, and many could relate: from lithe youthfulness to ka POW curves to chubby to a marvel of folds and hills shrouded in fur coats and decolletage baring gowns that dared you to have a problem with the flesh that housed that soul. In fact, she was the embodiment of the feminist paean "Nice for What," before Drake sang those words in praise of talented, powerful, transcendent women. She was private, sometimes icy, crabby, a preacher's daughter, a wife, a mother of black sons. She had architecturally popping hairstyles that black women create in their kitchens and a wig for all occasions. In her beehives and hair flips I saw the women of my childhood primping and curling and tugging and applying creams in living rooms and salons. I could smell the pressing combs and feel the burn. In her I saw my mother, whose smaller waist atop ample hips was perfect to wrap arms around, and whose bosom was the perfect place to rest my head. Yes, I projected a lot on Aretha Franklin. But mostly her songs were the soundtrack of our lives. Starting in New York at age 16, I bought and "borrowed" my share of Aretha Franklin tapes and CDs. My favorite song was not "Respect," but "Rock Steady." Echoing the name of the slow dance music that originated in Jamaica, it reads like a sly sexual tutorial from a woman who knows what she wants. Before Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj performed "Side by Side," their frank boudoir anthem to women on top, Ms. Franklin confidently laid down a similar groove, setting the pace for "this funky dance all night." Rock steady baby! That's what I feel now Let's call this song exactly what it is Step n' move your hips With a feelin' from side to side Sit yourself down in your car And take a ride And while you're movin' Rock steady Rock steady baby Let's call this song exactly what it is ... On Aug. 31, Detroit, her hometown, will bury one of its most famous daughters. On Monday, MTV's Video Music Awards will throw her a raucous send off at Radio City Music Hall in New York, where divas will probably crowd onstage to honor her legacy, out wailing one another until they're hoarse. And I'll think of music lost.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Q. I recently discovered the keyboard shortcut in Windows 10 that automatically zooms in the whole screen, but it's often a little too close up. Is there a way to adjust this zooming? A. Pressing the Windows and plus ( ) keys together automatically activates the Magnifier, the built in Ease of Access utility for enlarging the screen, and yes, you can adjust the level of magnification. (For those who have found the shortcut by accident, pressing the Windows and Escape keys turns off the Magnifier.) To change the magnification level, press the Windows, Control and M keys to open the Magnifier settings box. (You can also take the long way by going to the Start menu, clicking the gear shaped settings icon on the left side, choosing the Ease of Access icon and then selecting Magnifier.) When the settings box opens, go to the Magnifier options area and under "Zoom level increments," select a smaller percentage than the default 100 percent.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Antoinette Nwandu was at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago last June, about to fly home to New Jersey, when her phone started dinging with notifications. Her play "Pass Over" had just opened at Steppenwolf Theater Company, and Ms. Nwandu was exhausted from constant rewrites. She and the director, Danya Taymor, had agreed that they wouldn't read reviews yet. First, they would take a week or so to bask in what they had achieved. Ms. Nwandu's phone kept going off, though, and by the time her plane landed, she couldn't ignore what was happening: A controversy had erupted around her first major production. A contemporary Exodus story fitted to a "Waiting for Godot" frame, "Pass Over" an LCT3 production that opens on Monday, June 18, at Lincoln Center Theater's Claire Tow Theater is set in a corner of an unnamed city where two African American men live in fear of being shot dead by the police. Inspired partly by the killing of Trayvon Martin, with main characters whose names, Moses and Kitch, Ms. Nwandu borrowed from a South Carolina slavery manifest, it is a Black Lives Matter play layered with the past. But the catalyst for the clamor in Chicago, a city enduring a crisis of gun violence, wasn't what Ms. Nwandu had written. It was a review of "Pass Over" in the Chicago Sun Times, which, among other objections, took vehement exception to the way that Ms. Nwandu, who is black, depicted a white police officer. Many in the local theater scene swiftly condemned the review as racist. Steppenwolf, one of the nation's premier regional theaters, accused the veteran critic who wrote it, Hedy Weiss, who is white, of "deep seated bigotry and a painful lack of understanding of this country's historic racism." A petition went up online, citing a pattern of "racism, homophobia, and body shaming" in Ms. Weiss's writing and calling for theaters to stop inviting her to review their shows. Ms. Nwandu who did some theater criticism herself before she realized that she wanted to make plays, not review them signed it. In American Theater magazine, she wrote about the reaction to her play. But mostly, she said in an interview one afternoon this month, the hubbub felt "like being invited to dinner at somebody's house, and during dinner that person and their family get into a fight about you, while you're just sitting there." Calm, unpretentious and wry, she was sitting just then at a table in the decidedly utilitarian cafeteria of Borough of Manhattan Community College in TriBeCa, where she taught for seven and a half years, after earning an English degree from Harvard and a pair of master's degrees the first in cultural politics, from the University of Edinburgh; the second in dramatic writing, from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Ms. Nwandu, 38, grew up in Los Angeles in a deeply religious family; she was the first to go to college. As an undergraduate at Harvard, writing for the Crimson, she flirted with thoughts of a journalism career until she realized that the most tedious part of reporting was getting quotes when she already knew what she wanted people to say. Recalling that, she laughed at herself, and also at how shocked her Crimson colleagues were that she'd voice such a thought. Making up dialogue: a journalist's scandal, a playwright's skill. But a few months after she graduated from Tisch, in 2008, the economy tanked, and she was glad to take a job at the community college, where she taught introductory theater and public speaking. She felt torn, in that class, between the imperative to teach the kind of decorous speech that would be helpful in a job interview and the desire to hear the authentic voices of her young black and brown students, profanities and all. That's the way Moses and Kitch talk. She was on the verge of burnout two years ago when she abruptly quit. Told that she couldn't take time off to attend rehearsals of "Pass Over" at the Cherry Lane Theater Mentor Project the kind of artistic obligation that conservatory programs regularly accommodate she chose theater over a steady paycheck. "She took an amazing chance on herself," Ms. Taymor said in a separate interview. "You see the power of that commitment in the returns." Such as: Last August, after the Steppenwolf production had closed, Ms. Nwandu was back in Chicago with another play, "Tuvalu," when her agents called. The director Spike Lee whose film "Chi Raq" is a riff on Aristophanes' "Lysistrata," set amid gang warfare in contemporary Chicago had read "Pass Over." He wanted to talk. "As my fiance will tell you, I'm not great at getting good news," Ms. Nwandu said. "I'm always like, 'What's the catch?'" So she was hesitant in her first telephone conversation with Mr. Lee. "I was like, 'A: You didn't see it in the theater. You're just reading it. And, B: I might not be done with it.'" Two hours later, she said, he called again to tell her that he was flying to Chicago so they could talk face to face. Over dinner, he said he wouldn't ask for any of the rights to the stage production, that he didn't care if she changed the play in the future but that he wanted to capture it in its current form on film in Chicago. She was convinced. So at Steppenwolf in September, with the same cast plus one additional actor, in front of a mostly black invited audience, Mr. Lee secretly shot what is largely Ms. Taymor's production, remounted for the film. He used 10 cameras, placing some behind or above the stage. By January, they were at Sundance with the film, also titled "Pass Over," when Mr. Lee asked Ms. Nwandu what she was doing in February his way of dropping a job into her lap. She took it, becoming a staff writer on his Netflix series, "She's Gotta Have It." In March, she got engaged to her boyfriend, Graham Schmidt, a director. In April, "Pass Over" was released on Amazon Video. And this month, as a way of coaxing her younger sisters to New York for the opening of "Pass Over" at LCT3, she's going shopping for a wedding dress. A lot has happened in a year, and not just for Ms. Nwandu. In Chicago, where the Sun Times defended its critic, Ms. Weiss, during the "Pass Over" controversy, it eliminated her job last winter. She is still reviewing, for the local PBS affiliate, and in an interview she said she wouldn't have done anything differently in her "Pass Over" review. Noting that she has covered African American work in Chicago for almost all of the 34 years she has been a theater critic there, she called the accusation of racism against her "ludicrous," and echoed an assertion she made in her review that in focusing on police violence against black men, "Pass Over" unfairly ignores what she called "black on black" gun violence. "You have to face all of it at once and be honest about it," Ms. Weiss said. Altering the play's focus was never on Ms. Nwandu's agenda, though she has used the Lincoln Center run to revisit her text. The New York production has the same director and one of the same actors, Jon Michael Hill (of the CBS drama "Elementary"), but Ms. Nwandu and Ms. Taymor have made some significant changes since Chicago. What's held steady is whose point of view "Pass Over" represents: two young men, unarmed and dreaming desperately of a better life, afraid of being killed for being black.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
It began in 1982, when three kids were so wild about "Raiders of the Lost Ark" that they decided to pool their time, resources and ingenuity to do the impossible: remake Steven Spielberg's blockbuster, scene by scene and shot by shot, with home video recorders and homemade props and costumes. This sweet and funny 2015 documentary explains how that neighborhood project became a lifelong obsession and how its creators accidentally captured (on beautifully ugly VHS) the limitless joy of childhood camaraderie, fandom and play. In New England in the 1630s, a family finds itself expelled from its Puritan community to face the forces of evil alone in this slow boil horror chiller from the writer and director Robert Eggers. A newborn baby disappears, seemingly right under the nose of the daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor Joy, in a bravura breakthrough performance); as her mother mourns and her father fumes, increasingly unnerving events invade their home and their souls. Eggers doesn't go for cheap thrills or jump scares, instead building an atmosphere of slowly accumulating dread that culminates in a furious, harrowing climax. Who's in the mood to escape their troubles with a story of ... quarantines, a deadly infectious virus and "violent riots" in major cities? Uncomfortable parallels aside, this white knuckle zombie apocalypse thriller from the South Korean director Yeon Sang ho, set onboard train hurtling toward possible safety, is a fantastic entry in the "relentless action in a confined space" subgenre (recalling "The Raid," "Dredd" and the granddaddy of them all, "Die Hard"). The set pieces are energetic, the makeup effects are convincing, and the storytelling is ruthless. (Don't get too attached to anyone.) But it's not all blood and bluster; there's a patient, deliberate setup before the orgy of gore and mayhem, leading to a surprising outpouring of emotion at the story's conclusion. Late one night in 1969, the singer Merry Clayton was awakened from her slumber by a summons to a recording studio to record with a band she didn't really know. Curlers in her hair, she went into the booth and recorded the scorching guest track for the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," making music history. But Clayton went home and went back to bed; her name was misspelled in the liner notes. That was par for the course for rock and soul backup singers, who finally get their due in this Oscar winning documentary from Morgan Neville, a celebration of their contributions to popular music and a candid look at the difficulty of stepping from the background into the spotlight. The Hong Kong master Wong Kar wai ("In the Mood for Love," "Chunking Express") writes and directs this thrilling combination of biographical drama and martial arts epic, telling the story of the Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man (Tony Leung), who trained Bruce Lee in the art. Ip Man is a folkloric figure, and his story of dynasty, vengeance, destiny and fate has been told in feature films galore. "The Grandmaster" distinguishes itself with its gorgeous cinematography and astonishing fight sequences, in which Wong proves himself just as adept at crafting thrilling action as intimate drama. Looking back, the only thing surprising about Al Pacino's choosing to play the devil is that he took so long to do it. Old Scratch is here envisioned as John Milton, a high powered New York lawyer (of course) who recruits a gifted young Florida attorney (Keanu Reeves) for his practice and all the evil that entails. The director Taylor Hackford struggles somewhat to find the right tone, but his star knows exactly what movie he's in, and he acts accordingly. This is roaring, scenery chewing Pacino at his absolute hungriest, and the film works best when it meets him at that volume. Greta Gerwig co writes (with the director Noah Baumbach) and stars in this charming chronicle of the struggles of a young woman who is trying to make her way in the big city. It's a tale as old as time, but Gerwig's off center charm juices it with new life while Baumbach's "Manhattan" style, black and white photography gives the picture a lushness uncharacteristic of New York indies. It's an approach that mirrors the film itself, which seems lightweight and offhanded but holds unexpected truths about friendship, maturity and finding a true version of oneself. When would be robbers take over a New York City bank and hold its customers hostage in a Spike Lee movie, you don't have to worry whether the echoes of "Dog Day Afternoon" will be too obvious; he'll put those callbacks into the mouths of his characters. But this 2006 heist thriller has more on its mind than mere homage. What seems at first to be the customary routine of demands, negotiations, threats and pizza deliveries gives way to a pointed commentary on power in the city who holds it, and who abuses it. The result, both giddily entertaining and slyly political, is one of Lee's finest works. If you've made it 27 years without seeing Steven Spielberg's blockbuster adaptation of the dinosaur tastic best seller from Michael Crichton, a few words here probably won't change your mind. (That said, now is as good at time as any!) No, this is a heads up for the many who find it endlessly re watchable, a breathlessly executed thrill ride that serves up charismatic performances, razor sharp set pieces, jolts of dark comedy and groundbreaking dinosaur effects that somehow remain awe inspiring. The twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes made their feature directorial debut with this electrifying crime drama, which follows a young man (Tyrin Turner) on his journey into the underworld of the streets. Along with "Boyz N the Hood" from two years earlier, "Menace" became a prototype for the "hood movies" of the 1990s, but it's more than a shoot 'em up; the Hughes brothers' moody direction and Tyger Williams's bleak screenplay paint a picture of unnerving desperation, and the performances (including early work from Jada Pinkett and Larenz Tate, and brief but memorable turns by Samuel L. Jackson and Bill Duke) are electric. Clint Eastwood picked up his second Academy Award for best director (and his second statue for best picture) for this modestly mounted yet undeniably affecting boxing drama, adapted from a story by the trainer turned writer F.X. Toole. Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman also won Oscars for their low key roles as a stubborn novice fighter and the best pal of the curmudgeonly boxing trainer Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), who reluctantly finds himself in the young woman's corner. Eastwood stages the gymnasium and ringside sequences with lived in ease, but that's to be expected. The film's power lies in its third act, and the sensitivity with which Eastwood presents unguarded vulnerability of these complicated characters. This 2013 coming of age drama from the writer and director Jeff Nichols ("Loving," "Take Shelter") is an evocative throwback, conjuring up the dizzying freedom of a "Huck Finn" style boys' adventure story while fusing it with a contemporary tale of crime and punishment. Matthew McConaughey is the title character, an escaped fugitive hiding out on a remote island who is discovered and then assisted by two young boys (Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland). Nichols is beautifully attuned to the rhythms of these small Southern communities, which makes his work somehow both leisurely and urgent. His films sneak up on you, and this one ambles for two hours before landing with the force of a gut punch. Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" was a publishing sensation in 1999, telling the true story of how an undersized racehorse became an unexpected rallying point for Americans during the Great Depression. The film version, adapted and directed by Gary Ross ("Pleasantville"), hits many of the same emotional pressure points: It's an underdog story through and through, from its title Thoroughbred to its hotheaded jockey (Tobey Maguire) to the challenges faced by America more broadly. Ross convincingly recreates the period while a sterling cast (including Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Banks and William H. Macy) injects its potentially stock characters with quirks and dimension. An astonishing (embarrassing, frankly) number of film critics blew the call entirely on Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of the 1959 novel by Robert A. Heinlein, dismissing it as a dopey sci fi action monster mess while missing its pointed indictments of "patriotic" militarism and government authoritarianism (and mainstream cinema's frequent carrying of those messages). In retrospect, Verhoeven couldn't have made his intentions clearer: From the flag waving propaganda sequences to the purposefully plastic acting, this is political satire with real teeth. The unlikely marriage of the screwball inspired screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and the chilly visual stylist David Fincher birthed one of the finest works of both careers, a highly fictionalized account of the early days of Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg (brought to hard edged, sneering life by Jesse Eisenberg). Sorkin's ingenious, Oscar winning script spins the Facebook origin story as a Silicon Valley "Citizen Kane," dazzlingly hopscotching through flashbacks and framing devices. But the ruthlessness of Fincher's cleareyed direction is what brings the picture together, presciently framing Zuckerberg as the media mogul of the future and hinting at the trouble that entails.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The author Peter Collier in 1984. He was known for the biographies he wrote with David Horowitz, but they were only part of his output, which also included articles, a children's book and a novel. Peter Collier, a prolific writer who midway into his career made a high profile ideological shift from left to right, becoming a leading conservative voice as well as a publisher of others, died on Nov. 1 in a hospital in Sacramento, Calif. He was 80 . His wife, Mary Collier, said the cause was acute myeloid leukemia. Mr. Collier, who often wrote with David Horowitz, was well regarded as a biographer of dynastic families. The two produced books on the Rockefellers (1976), the Kennedys (1984) and the Fords (1987), and in 1994 Mr. Collier wrote on the Roosevelts, with Mr. Horowitz contributing. In reviewing "The Roosevelts: An American Saga," Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, "Mr. Collier once again displays the gamesmanship needed to streamline such family portraits into linear, eminently readable multigenerational dramas. " Such biographies were only part of his output. He also wrote a novel ("Down River," 1979), a children's book ("The King's Giraffe," with his wife, 1996) and books honoring military figures like "Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty" (2003). After working together on the New Left journal Ramparts in the 1960s and '70s, Mr. Collier and Mr. Horowitz made a 180 degree turn and began writing books and articles from the conservative side of the spectrum. T heir ideological shift drew at least as much attention as their biographies did. As The Los Angeles Times once put it , "They go like lumberjacks on a two man saw, enthusiastically cutting through a forest of former beliefs." In February 1985, just after President Ronald Reagan was sworn in for his second term, Mr. Collier and Mr. Horowitz wrote an article for The Washington Post titled "Lefties for Reagan." ("Our title was 'Better Ron Than Red,'" Mr. Horowitz said in a telephone interview.) In it they explained that they had voted for Reagan out of disillusionment with the left, feeling that it had become hollow once its great cause, the Vietnam War, ended, and that it had failed to recognize dangers like the Soviet Union's incursions into Cuba and Central America. "One of the few saving graces of age is a deeper perspective on the passions of youth," they wrote. "Looking back on the left's revolutionary enthusiasms of the last 25 years, we have painfully learned what should have been obvious all along: that we live in an imperfect world that is bettered only with great difficulty and easily made worse much worse. This is a conservative assessment, but on the basis of half a lifetime's experience, it seems about right." "The vision we see when we look into the glass of Sixties narcissism is distorted," they wrote. "It may have been the best of times, but it was the worst of times as well. And by this we do not simply mean to add snapshots of the race riots at home and war in Vietnam to the sentimental collage of people being free. It was a time when innocence quickly became cynical, when American mischief fermented into American mayhem." Mr. Collier and Mr. Horowitz founded Heterodoxy magazine, which, as Mr. Collier described it , sought to "resemble the countercultural underground papers of our wicked youth irreverent and provocative and willing to enter the house of power and rearrange its furniture." Its targets, as its masthead said, were "political correctness and other follies." Mr. Collier and Mr. Horowitz also founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a conservative research group based in Los Angeles and intended as a counterweight to liberal influences in the entertainment industry. It was later renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center. In 1998 Mr. Collier founded Encounter Books, which has published a wide range of authors, many of them conservative. Among Mr. Collier's own books, "Medal of Honor," whose third edition was published in 2016, may have been his most popular, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. It contains biographical sketches of Medal of Honor recipients, accompanied by Nick Del Calzo 's photographs. Ms. Collier said her husband had donated all royalties from the book's sales to the nonprofit Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation. Mr. Horowitz said that the group had asked Mr. Collier if he could suggest a young writer to do the book, and that instead he volunteered to write it himself, for nothing, feeling he needed to make amends for the antiwar screeds Ramparts published during the Vietnam era. "It was his way of paying our debt," Mr. Horowitz said. Peter Anthony Collier was born on June 2, 1939, in Los Angeles to Donovan and Doris (Cox) Collier. His father sold insurance, and his mother was a flight attendant. Mr. Collier grew up in the Los Angeles area, graduating from John Burroughs High School in Burbank. He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961 and a master's in English literature there in 1963. The university is also where he first met Mr. Horowitz, who was a graduate student and teaching assistant. Mr. Collier taught for a time at Berkeley and met his future wife, Mary Josephine Giachino, in 1965, when she was his student. They married in 1967. He became a writer and editor at Ramparts in 1966, joining Mr. Horowitz on the staff. Among those the magazine irritated was the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company; a 1972 issue was pulled from newsstands after the company had threatened criminal prosecution over an article that suggested how to avoid long distance charges. "The richest irony," Mr. Collier said at the time, "is that we make a career of taking on the C.I.A., the Pentagon and other institutions with good sized clout, but the telephone company is the first to be able to suppress an issue, exercising a kind of prior restraint." He and Mr. Horowitz were soon reassessing the 1960s and early '70s, as well as their support for leftist and radical causes. A catalyst in their conversion, Mr. Horowitz said, was when a woman named Betty Van Patter was found dead in San Francisco Bay in January 1975. Six months earlier, Mr. Horowitz had recruited Ms. Van Patter, a Ramparts employee, to be the bookkeeper for a group related to the Black Panther Party. No one was ever charged in the case, but Mr. Horowitz, as he wrote in Salon in 1999, became convinced that she had been killed by the Black Panthers themselves. He has said that she asked too many questions about the Panthers' finances. "The Panther murder was a summary moment for both of us," Mr. Horowitz said by email , adding, "We were affected significantly by the way all our progressive comrades defended the Panthers and claimed 'the white power structure killed Betty' (as one of my close friends said)." Their 1984 book, "The Kennedys: An American Drama ," drew a favorable review from Bob Woodward in The Washington Post. "This remarkable four generation history of the Kennedy family boldly faces some of the major ghosts in American life," he wrote. "It deals not just with individual Kennedys but with power, ambition, the presidency, family, the generational change and obligation, money, religion, narcotics, good luck and bad luck." The "Lefties for Reagan" article came shortly after. "When it appeared, Peter who was the realist between us said, 'Our literary careers are over,'" Mr. Horowitz said. Not quite. Christopher Lehmann Haupt of The Times called "The Fords: An American Epic" "their best book to date." In 1991 Mr. Collier, writing on his own, published "The Fondas: A Hollywood Dynasty." In addition to his wife, Mr. Collier is survived by a daughter, Caitlin Collier; two sons, Andrew and Nicholas; and five grandchildren. Mr. Collier saw a link between his early days on the left, opposing the status quo, and his later career as his own polar opposite, arguing against what he called the "feel good ideology" of political correctness. "We are the counterculture," he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. "We're the people in opposition to what Orwell called the smelly little orthodoxies."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
For years, because of structural changes in the health care delivery system and the deep economic downturn, the health care "cost curve" as economists and policy makers call it had bent. Health spending was growing no faster than spending on other goods or services, an anomaly in 50 years of government accounts. But perhaps no longer. A surge of insurance enrollment related to rising employment and President Obama's health care law has likely meant a surge of spending on health care, leaving policy experts wondering whether the government and private businesses can control spending as the economy gets stronger and millions more Americans gain coverage. "Following several years of decline, 2013 was striking for the increased use by patients of all parts of the U.S. health care system," Murray Aitken, executive director of the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, said in a statement. The news comes as President Obama promotes the success of the Affordable Care Act in covering more Americans at less cost than anticipated. "Under this law, real Medicare costs per person have nearly stopped growing," Mr. Obama said at a news conference on Thursday as he announced that eight million people had signed up for insurance coverage through the law's exchanges. "Those savings add up to more money that families can spend at businesses, more money that businesses can spend hiring new workers," he said, adding that the government's budget scorekeeper "now says that the Affordable Care Act will be cheaper than recently projected." But some health care experts and economists said that an expanded use of the health system might start to have the opposite effect. Americans feeling more economically confident might demand more procedures from doctors and hospitals. Insurers paying more money for those procedures might, in time, increase premiums, cutting into wage gains. The government might end up spending more on the health law than current projections imply. "We knew this was coming," said Douglas Holtz Eakin, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office and a prominent Republican economist, of rising spending because of the coverage expansion and improving economy. "The question now is whether we can hold spending down." Many other analysts said they had long expected health spending to increase. "If we are seeing an uptick, it's the beginning of the uptick," said Drew Altman, the president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. "We've expected to see a lagged effect, both when the economy declines and when it improves." The question is whether health spending might grow moderately, with a one time bump from new Affordable Care Act enrollees, or whether it might surge, with potentially damaging consequences for the fiscal deficit and wages. Economists from both the right and left including in the White House have said that there is no greater threat to the government's budget than soaring health spending. 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. Rising insurance premiums would increase the cost of the health law's expansion. More broadly, experts have warned that the excess growth of health costs could increase the country's debt and crowd out spending on all other priorities, including education, infrastructure, research and development and support for low income families. The pace of health spending growth started falling in the mid 2000s and reached historical lows over the last five years. The recession counts for much or even most of the decline, economists think, as workers lost their jobs and their health coverage, and budget conscious families chose to reduce their out of pocket spending. But at the same time, structural changes to how health care gets delivered and paid for changes made by the government, insurers, doctors and hospitals also helped hold spending down. Many insurers, for example, began charging much higher co pays and deductibles, spurring their enrollees to use less care. Now, health experts said, two big trends are pushing health spending back up again. "Expanded coverage is happening simultaneously with the petering out of the recession's dampening effect," said Charles Roehrig, the director of the Center for Sustainable Health Spending at the Altarum Institute. "It's going to be hard to demonstrate how much is due to expanded coverage, versus just the economy recovering." The data remains preliminary and has not yet provided a clear picture of why health spending is climbing let alone how much it might climb, analysts warned. "We have a handful of data points," said David Cutler, a Harvard professor and former economic adviser to Mr. Obama. "You want a couple hundred, and we just don't have them we can't delve deeper yet." Even so, all early reports point in the same direction: more money for health care. A report from IMS, a health care data and analytics firm, found use of the health care system increasing broadly in 2013. Americans made more visits to doctors' offices, were hospitalized more often and purchased more prescription medication. A separate report from the Altarum Institute, a nonprofit research group, also shows that health spending started to climb last summer. This February, spending growth reached a seven year high. Government data seem to paint a similar picture, with the annual pace of spending growth on health care increasing to 5.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013, from 1.3 percent in the first quarter. That 5.6 percent growth rate is the highest since 2004. Cognizant of the need to keep health spending per enrollee down, Democratic policy makers included a number of provisions in the health care law to encourage insurers to move away from fee for service medicine and to stamp out unnecessary costs. But critics and even many supporters of the law have repeatedly said it might not be enough. "This is a criticism I've had of the A.C.A. going back years this is not revisionist history," Mr. Holtz Eakin said. "I thought it was too heavy on the insurance expansion and too light on delivery system reform. It has tons of projects and demonstrations. But the road to hell is paved with projects and demonstrations." Jason Furman, the chairman of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, cautioned against reading too much into a small number of reports, pointing to a wealth of other data showing that premiums and the price growth of medical goods and services remained low. "Even if only one third of the slowdown is sustained," he said, "we will be spending 1,200 less per person on health care after a decade."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 helped create today's internet giants. It also protects fringe websites from responsibility for material posted by users. When the most consequential law governing speech on the internet was created in 1996, Google.com didn't exist and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old. The federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, has helped Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and countless other internet companies flourish. But Section 230's liability protection also extends to fringe sites known for hosting hate speech, anti Semitic content and racist tropes like 8chan, the internet message board where the suspect in the El Paso shooting massacre posted his manifesto. The First Amendment protects free speech, including hate speech, but Section 230 shields websites from liability for content created by their users. It permits internet companies to moderate their sites without being on the hook legally for everything they host. It does not provide blanket protection from legal responsibility for some criminal acts, like posting child pornography or violations of intellectual property. Now, as scrutiny of big technology companies has intensified in Washington over a wide variety of issues, including how they handle the spread of disinformation or police hate speech, lawmakers are questioning whether Section 230 should be changed. Last month, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said in a hearing about Google and censorship that the law was "a subsidy, a perk" for big tech that may need to be reconsidered. In an April interview, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California called Section 230 a "gift" to tech companies "that could be removed." "There is definitely more attention being paid to Section 230 than at any time in its history," said Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the United States Naval Academy and the author of a book about the law, "The Twenty Six Words That Created the Internet." "There is an inclination to look at Section 230 as one lever to influence the tech companies," he said. Here is an explanation of the law's history, why it has been so consequential and whether it is really in jeopardy. The New York Supreme Court ruled that Prodigy was "a publisher" and therefore liable because it had exercised editorial control by moderating some posts and establishing guidelines for impermissible content. If Prodigy had not done any moderation, it might have been granted free speech protections afforded to some distributors of content, like bookstores and newsstands. The ruling caught the attention of a pair of congressmen, Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, and Christopher Cox, a Republican from California. They were worried the decision would act as a disincentive for websites to take steps to block pornography and other obscene content. The Section 230 amendment was folded into the Communications Decency Act, an attempt to regulate indecent material on the internet, without much opposition or debate. A year after it was passed, the Supreme Court declared that the indecency provisions were a violation of First Amendment rights. But it left Section 230 in place. Since it became law, the courts have repeatedly sided with internet companies, invoking a broad interpretation of immunity. On Wednesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a lower court's ruling that Facebook was not liable for violent attacks coordinated and encouraged by Facebook accounts linked to Hamas, the militant Islamist group. In the majority opinion, the court said Section 230 "should be construed broadly in favor of immunity." Why is the law so consequential? Section 230 has allowed the modern internet to flourish. Sites can moderate content set their own rules for what is and what is not allowed without being liable for everything posted by visitors. Whenever there is discussion of repealing or modifying the statute, its defenders, including many technology companies, argue that any alteration could cripple online discussion. The internet industry has a financial incentive to keep Section 230 intact. The law has helped build companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars with a lucrative business model of placing ads next to largely free content from visitors. That applies to more than social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. Wikipedia and Reddit depend on its visitors to sustain the sites, while Yelp and Amazon count on reviews for businesses and products. More recently, Section 230 has also provided legal cover for the complicated decisions regarding content moderation. Facebook and Twitter have recently cited it to defend themselves in court when users have sued after being barred from the platforms. Many cases are quickly dismissed because companies assert they have the right to make decisions on content moderation as they see fit under the law. Some Republicans have argued that tech companies should no longer enjoy the protections because they have censored conservatives and thereby violated the spirit of the law, which states that the internet should be "a forum for a true diversity of political discourse." Facebook, Twitter and Google, which runs YouTube, which are the main targets for bias claims, have said they are baseless. On the flip side, some Democrats have argued that small and large internet sites aren't serious about taking down problematic content or tackling harassment because they are shielded by Section 230. Mr. Wyden, now a senator, said the law had been written to provide "a sword and a shield" for internet companies. The shield is the liability protection for user content, but the sword was meant to allow companies to keep out "offensive materials." However, he said firms had not done enough to keep "slime" off their sites. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Wyden said he had recently told tech workers at a conference on content moderation that if "you don't use the sword, there are going to be people coming for your shield." There is also a concern that the law's immunity is too sweeping. Websites trading in revenge pornography, hate speech or personal information to harass people online receive the same immunity as sites like Wikipedia. "It gives immunity to people who do not earn it and are not worthy of it," said Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at Boston University who has written extensively about the statute. The first blow came last year with the signing of a law that creates an exception in Section 230 for websites that knowingly assist, facilitate or support sex trafficking. Critics of the new law said it opened the door to create other exceptions and would ultimately render Section 230 meaningless. Ms. Citron, who is also vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit devoted to combating online abuse, said this was "a moment of re examination." After years of pressing for changes, she said there was more political will to modify Section 230. Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri and a frequent critic of technology companies, introduced a bill in June that would eliminate the immunity under the law unless tech companies submitted to an external audit that their content moderation practices were politically neutral. While there is growing political will to do something about Section 230, finding a middle ground on potential changes is a challenge. "When I got here just a few months ago, everybody said 230 was totally off the table, but now there are folks coming forward saying this isn't working the way it was supposed to work," said Mr. Hawley, who took office in January. "The world in 2019 is very different from the world of the 1990s, especially in this space, and we need to keep pace."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
With one day of delayed viewing factored in, the audience for the "Roseanne" premiere is now up to 21.9 million viewers. Among adults under 50, the rating went up 22 percent, to a 6.2 rating. Those numbers will continue to creep upward as more people catch up on their DVRs or through on demand viewing. The current "Roseanne" season, technically the show's 10th, comprises nine episodes, seven of which have yet to air. The next season of "Roseanne," which will be shown as part of ABC's 2018 19 lineup, is currently planned at 13 episodes. "Roseanne," the first run of which was part of the ABC schedule from 1988 to 1997, has thrust itself into the middle of the national conversation. Ms. Barr, in real life and on the show, is a vocal supporter of President Trump, who called to congratulate her on the ratings win and mentioned her success during a rally in Ohio on Thursday. Fox News pundits have praised the show for representing people who they say are not usually major characters on network television shows. Although "Roseanne" has won generally favorable reviews from critics, some on the left have expressed feeling conflicted over supporting the show. Its early success has been a big win for ABC. "Roseanne" is part of a broader strategy hatched by the network's executives soon after Mr. Trump's surprise victory in 2016. The TV industry will keep a close eye on the performance of "Roseanne" as it moves deeper into the season: Will there be a drop in viewership, or will all the recent media attention keep the ratings relatively high? ("Will Grace," for example, lost 30 percent of its live audience between its first and second week but the show helped make up the gap with delayed viewing.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
CHICAGO While Verdi's "Aida" ends with a delicate duet for its lovers, who have been sealed alive together in a tomb, they don't have the opera's final word. That goes to the princess Amneris, who begs softly for peace, and a chorus of priests and priestesses. What are they saying in the somber closing bars? I bet you've never heard the words. At most performances of "Aida," the chorus intones on a vague, barely audible "ah." But with Riccardo Muti, our most scrupulous modern Verdian, leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a concert performance of the opera on Friday evening, the sound was barely a gauze, and yet the rhythm was exact, each phoneme crystal clear and relished: "Immenso Ftha," a prayer. The moment took on new mystery and wonder, and the import of the opera's conclusion a timeless religious sphere quietly swallows up the transient concerns of governments and romances was suddenly fresh. There were passages like this, as if hearing the opera with new ears, throughout Mr. Muti's "Aida": pinprick violin arpeggios evoking the flow of the Nile in the opening of the third act; tiny grace notes that add ineffable spirit to the short second act ballet in Amneris's chambers. At the beginning of this Triumphal Scene, a dotted rhythm, properly crisp, conjured the light step of horses. And as Amneris pledged revenge against the man who won't love her, a passing trill in the trumpets usually buried in the orchestral textures was a memorably angry flare. It's unsurprising that the performance was full of little revelations like these. Mr. Muti made his career in Italian opera, and this is the fourth Verdi work he has done in his decade long tenure in Chicago, after a harrowing "Otello" (2011), a darkly surging "Macbeth" (2013) and a stylishly witty "Falstaff" (2016). "Aida" would have been the most crushing artistic loss had the orchestra musicians' strike not been resolved, after nearly seven weeks, at the end of April. Mr. Muti's position is that Verdi has been abused by modern musicians. His rhythms have been fudged; his operas have become occasions for vulgar high note battles rather than displays of refinement, subtle vocalism and meticulous wedding of text and music. Mozart and Wagner, Mr. Muti argues, would never be subjected to the disrespect the cuts, the smudgings still commonplace in Verdi performance. He's not wrong; Teutonic condescension to southern European culture has long loomed large. For his part, Mr. Muti has responded with Verdi interpretations that are pledges of allegiance to each marking in the music, each 16th rest (never to be confused with an eighth rest, so help him God). The performance on Friday sometimes had the feel of a time capsule being prepared. In a hundred years, this "Aida" could be opened and you could recreate the score, note by note, as if taking dictation from Verdi himself. As an orchestral showcase, it was always impressive the tempos judicious; the sound unfailingly balanced; the winds, in particular, beautifully blended. Mr. Muti has appointed three players in the past few years whose interplay was a model of sensitivity: Stefan Ragnar Hoskuldsson, principal flute of the Met Orchestra before coming to Chicago; Keith Buncke, principal bassoon; and William Welter, new this season as principal oboe, and remarkably full and liquid in tone and line. The playing of this "Aida" was in many ways exemplary. And yet, like Mr. Muti's performance of the opera at the Salzburg Festival two years ago with the Vienna Philharmonic an even more extravagantly virtuosic and sensual partner it was often cool to the touch. It was a practically flawless reading of the score, but it was never moving. The drama barely crackled. Even the most forceful moments felt rounded off, smoothed out, ultimately muted. I found myself, as I never have before, wanting more heft from the brass players, notorious for playing too loud but often superbly elegant on Friday. I wish that at the end of the Judgment Scene, when their howls mark the opera's climax, Mr. Muti had really unleashed them. Controlled wildness isn't the same as vulgarity. That's one lesson about opera that should be remembered. Another is that intelligence and respect for the score are integral, but only get you so far. Without vocal richness and power, "Aida" means little; the work's structure must of course be correct, but great singing fills it with life. So it is no coincidence that this "Aida," the least thrilling of the four Verdi operas Mr. Muti has conducted here, features the spottiest cast of the four. The soprano Krassimira Stoyanova, her voice pale and fragile on Friday, has long collaborated with Mr. Muti. (She was a wrenching Desdemona in his "Otello" here.) But the question of whether she was ill, or the bloom is more permanently out of her voice, is less important than the reminder she offered that vocal glamour and power are not incidental to the details of articulation. Those details were observed fastidiously by everyone onstage, including the bass Ildar Abdrazakov (as the chief priest Ramfis), the bass baritone Eric Owens (the King) and the baritone Kiril Manolov (Amonasro). But there was not real vocal richness or personality among that trio of deep male voices; they struggled to match the orchestra for color and resonance. There was, moreover, a chilled feeling, as if everyone were so intent on executing Mr. Muti's exacting vision to the split second that spontaneity had been banned. It was only in the fourth act duet between the tenor Francesco Meli, an ardent, sweet voiced Radames, and the mezzo soprano Anita Rachvelishvili, a moody Amneris, that attentiveness to detail met tonal security and allure. The result was, finally, the kind of emotion that should be pervasive in "Aida" the reason, after nearly 150 years, we keep on wanting to hear it. The program repeats on Tuesday at Symphony Center, Chicago; cso.org.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The New York townhouse has been through a lot since it began appearing in profusion in the 19th century. These stately buildings started life as single family houses sheltering comfortable middle and upper class families and their servants. By the Great Depression, most had been chopped into single room apartments, the unlucky among them getting the greatest wear, as rooming houses for the down and out. In the '60s, plucky young New Yorkers with more enthusiasm than cash began buying these down at the heels beauties and spiffing them up for their families, usually retaining tenants who provided rental income and in many cases were impossible to dislodge. In the past few years, the historic townhouse has started to come full circle. Thanks to the growing appetite for larger and more luxurious private urban dwellings among people happy to pay upward of 10 million, many townhouses have been returned to the elegant single family homes they once were. To the casual passer by, the changes may be invisible. On the East and West Sides of Manhattan, in Greenwich Village and in large swaths of what is commonly called Brooklyn's brownstone belt, brick, brownstone and limestone facades encrusted with corbels and lintels continue to mirror a distant era. But these ornate fronts conceal profound shifts in occupancy, demographics and financial structure. Townhouses represent only a small fraction of the city's housing stock, but because they define certain beloved neighborhoods, the implications of their transformation are great though whether the shift represents boon or blight depends on who is being asked. "These houses have always been commodities they were built, after all, by real estate developers," said Patrick Ciccone, a preservationist who is preparing a revised edition of "Bricks and Brownstone," Charles Lockwood's landmark 1972 study of the New York townhouse. "So returning a townhouse to single family occupancy might be the most historically appropriate thing to do, given its original use." But, Mr. Ciccone added, in the process of such conversions, what may be sacrificed is the life and activity on the street produced by variety in the size, density and affordability of residences. "So what's good for one house," he said, "can also be bad urbanism for the city as a whole." This time around, a different breed of New Yorker is working the magic on these buildings. As tenants move or die off, many owners are reclaiming entire buildings. Perhaps most important, developers are doing the same, a process that often entails a gut renovation and high end amenities (elevators and wine cellars de rigueur). Notwithstanding the rear glass walls increasingly common in retrofitted townhouses, the better to brighten dark interiors, many 21st century buyers harbor an unexpected taste for Edith Wharton style decor. They wax eloquent about coffered ceilings and mahogany wainscoting. Savoring a 19th century aesthetic, they seek meticulously preserved period facades along with lush interior details like carved moldings and wood burning fireplaces, even if reinterpreted in contemporary materials. And the numbers of these buyers is growing. According to Dexter Guerrieri, the president of Vandenberg, the Townhouse Experts, 15 of the 48 townhouses sold last year on the Upper West Side were multifamily dwellings being returned to single family homes, either by developers or what are called "end users." "That's nearly a third of West Side sales," Mr. Guerrieri said, "a high percentage and one that's been increasing in recent years." He and other townhouse watchers attribute the shift in part to a desire for bigger and more opulent homes that provide a degree of privacy unavailable in condominiums and especially co ops. These homes also often offer other benefits: Residents can have a garden; they can own a dog without asking anyone's permission. Many of these houses are in picturesque neighborhoods with an embracing sense of community. "But money is the driving force," Mr. Guerrieri said. "Values are rising, and developers are seeing the big numbers that these houses sell for." Because supply is limited estimates suggest that fewer than 10,000 pre World War I townhouses survive in Manhattan, with perhaps 50,000 citywide, mostly in Brooklyn operating in this market can be highly profitable. For couples like Doug Derryberry and Serena Mulhern, whose home must double as a work space, the benefits of a spacious and flexible townhouse are considerable. Mr. Derryberry, a musician and record producer, and Dr. Mulhern, a physician, own a two bedroom, 1,000 square foot condominium on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. But as their family grew to include two children, Jane, 5, and Justice, 3, the challenges of combining work and family proved daunting. "I always had work space in the house," Mr. Derryberry said. "But by the time the second one learned to walk, it became clear I needed space outside the house. My wife would say to the children, 'Leave Daddy alone, he's working.' They'd say, 'No, he's not, he's just playing the guitar.' " Yet when Mr. Derryberry maintained a studio elsewhere, the shuttling from place to place, often with quantities of unwieldy equipment, made a hectic schedule even more demanding. "My equipment seemed to metastasize," he said. "Plus, we underestimated the complexity of the hours from 5 to 8, the hours of dinner and the baths." On nearby Prospect Place, a century old three story townhouse with a fig tree in the pocket size front garden offered a solution. The couple bought it for about 1 million in December 2012, shortly after the final tenant departed. The plan is to return the structure to single family use, to create a studio for Mr. Derryberry and to add an elder friendly guest suite in the rear for two pairs of doting grandparents. Many traditional architectural elements will be preserved, among them two fireplaces and the white oak paneling on the parlor and upstairs floors. Thanks to James Wagman, the couple's architect, and Cramer Silkworth, an engineer, this will be a passive house, ensuring maximum energy efficiency and a minimal ecological footprint. Mr. Derryberry and Dr. Mulhern have been deeply involved in the reconstruction of their future home. But veteran developers more typically assume the risks and headaches involved in restoring these down on their luck properties to their former glamour, especially with top of the line townhouses in neighborhoods like the Upper West Side. This is what happened with the Renaissance Revival townhouse at 304 West 90th Street being prepared for sale by Omek Capital, a Long Island real estate investment firm that specializes in townhouse redevelopment. The five story 1891 structure, designed by Clarence True, contains 7,300 square feet of space and has 12 foot ceilings and a south facing garden. Once home to seven apartments "tiny but great," said Keith Strand, the Harlem based architect who is redoing the structure the house is on the market for 12.995 million. "Back in the '70s," Mr. Strand said, "this sort of work was more do it yourself. But now it's luxury finishes, appliances, everything high end." As if to offset a rear wall sheathed with glass, the brownstone facade is being restored in traditional fashion, and Mr. Strand is especially pleased that the stoop, ripped out decades earlier to create an extra downstairs bedroom, is being replaced. Though work will not be completed until February, on a recent weekday David Kornmeier of Brown Harris Stevens showed the house to three potential buyers, who stepped gingerly around exposed floorboards and dodged masked workers to inspect premises stripped to the studs. Mr. Kornmeier expected nine more visitors in the coming days, and he is not surprised that traffic has been brisk. "It's almost impossible to find an 8,000 square foot apartment in Manhattan," he said. "To get just 7,000 square feet of space at 15 Central Park West would cost you 88 million." A similar old school beauty will go on the market in the coming weeks at 38 West 87th Street, where Allerand Capital is putting the finishing touches on an 1891 Gilbert Schellenger townhouse priced at 18 million. The company bought the 6,300 square foot building, which contained 10 apartments, for 5.15 million in 2011. When finished, the house will have six bedrooms, a grand salon, a formal dining room, three fireplaces, two roof decks, a terrace and a full butler's pantry with a dumbwaiter. "The house will be beautiful, mint modern," said Ann Marie Folan, the Douglas Elliman broker who is handling the sale with her colleague Eileen Foy. "But it will capture a traditional look with the staircase, fireplaces and exposed brick." Proponents see the shift to one family occupancy of townhouses as representing a resounding vote of confidence in the city, a sign of robust civic health. "This trend, which we've been seeing in the oughts and the teens, represents an investment and belief in New York City," said John Berson, a partner of Sawyer/Berson, a Manhattan architecture firm that specializes in townhouses. "It represents people saying, in effect, 'They'll have to take me out of here feet first.' It also raises the overall value of a block. There's enormous benefit to preserving these beautiful houses." Critics bemoan the reduced street traffic and less lively street life fewer schools, churches, delis and dry cleaners, and especially fewer children that come with lower density and altered demographics. "There's something nice about the fact that people are restoring these houses to single family living, as they were intended," said Arlene Simon, who grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, moved in 1960 to a 115 a month parlor floor apartment in a West Side townhouse, and currently observes neighborhood change from her perch as president of Landmark West!, a preservation group. "It's nice that the stoops, which were removed in the midcentury, are being restored." But with fewer people per building and with some homes serving as pieds a terre, Ms. Simon fears that street life on townhouse lined blocks will be noticeably quieter. "And of course street life makes all the difference in the world," she said. Brian Sawyer, Mr. Berson's architectural partner, shares these feelings. "When you walk down a block and you see house after house with one buzzer instead of 12," Mr. Sawyer said, "there will be a silent change. In some ways it makes the block less interesting. At night, if you live in a city, there's nothing more delightful than looking into those lighted windows and peeking into someone else's life. When there are fewer people living on a block, something changes. The changes don't kill the entire block, but there's a noticeable difference." Critics of the shift also cite the gradual disappearance of the townhouse rental apartment, leading to a small but palpable depletion of the city's housing stock. The loss is deepened by the fact that these apartments, immortalized in films from "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to "You've Got Mail," were so beloved. Mr. Sawyer remembers moving to his first such place in the late '80s. "I walked into this studio on Morton Street in the Village that was for rent for 400," he said. "The plaster was crumbling. But I was overjoyed. There were huge ceilings and moldings and a fireplace. I put a tent in the middle of the room to sleep in. I lived there for 10 years, and it was one of the best times in my life." But although the final tenants had moved out by the time the couple bought the house, during their first decade at their new address the building remained configured as a multiple dwelling, an inconvenience to them and their sons, Jared, now 11, and Cailan, 13. "We lived for much of that time in compressed quarters, with two small children, all of us smushed into one large bedroom," Ms. Schick Dougall said, "and it was adding lots of stress to our lives. We had no closets. We couldn't have people over. By the time the kids were approaching their teens, it was clear that they needed more privacy and so did their parents. It was now or never." In spring 2012 the couple hired Ben Baxt of Baxt Ingui Architects, a Brooklyn firm, to retrofit the house for one family use. In August, after a year in a rental, the family returned to find the evidence of the building's time as a three family dwelling almost entirely erased. The original oak floor edged with mahogany can be seen in the formal dining room. Period details rescued and brought to glowing life include two original fireplaces and wood molding delicately carved with swirls and fruit. The renovation produced so many closets, Ms. Schick Dougall has lost count. The project satisfied many of the couple's goals, notably providing an abundance of space. And as Ms. Schick Dougall, who grew up on Long Island, added: "We were not apartment people. Plus, to be honest, I'm secretly a suburban girl. I think that sort of thing is in your DNA." These days, the only indication of the house's previous incarnation arrives with the mail. "Once in a while we still get letters addressed to the old tenants," Mr. Dougall said. "We just mark them 'return to sender.' "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
CAMDEN, N.J. Plans for a major mixed use waterfront development represent the latest step in efforts to rehabilitate this city that not long ago was rated as America's most dangerous. The development of offices, apartments and retail space, totaling 1.7 million square feet, would be built along the Delaware River starting in the fall of 2016, according to plans announced by Camden's mayor, Dana L. Redd, and the developer Liberty Property Trust last week. The project, estimated to cost about 1 billion, would be the biggest private sector investment in the city's history, and the latest in a series of corporate developments and relocations that are beginning to create jobs and drive down the city's notoriously high rates of crime and poverty. John Gattuso, a senior vice president at Liberty, said the company is in "very serious conversations" with parties who are interested in investing in the development but that no financial commitments have been made so far. Potential participants would apply for tax credits with the New Jersey Economic Development Authority and, if the credits were approved, would then agree with Liberty to invest in the project, Mr. Gattuso said. The development, scheduled for completion in 2019, will occupy 16 acres directly south of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge to Philadelphia, in an area that is now a parking lot and adjoined by a minor league baseball stadium and a public aquarium. The plans include replacing Camden's current low rise profile from the Philadelphia side of the river with four office towers, 325 residential units, a 120 room hotel, 27,000 square feet of retail space and parking garages for 5,000 cars, city and company officials said. William P. Hankowsky, chief executive of Liberty Property Trust, predicted that investors would be attracted to the development because of recent declines in crime and poverty, the closure of failing public schools and several corporate relocations. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey announced last week that Liberty Property Trust is planning a 1 billion transformation of a 16 acre swath of the waterfront in Camden. The mixed use development is scheduled to be complete by 2019. "We're going to be able to create a sense of place that will allow companies to attract a future work force," Mr. Hankowsky told about 300 guests at the project's announcement. Coming arrivals in Camden include Holtec International, a processor of spent nuclear fuel, and the Philadelphia 76ers basketball franchise's practice facility, both scheduled to open in 2016. City officials say such moves, under the second term Mayor Redd, are beginning to turn around a city that has been a national symbol for economic decline and urban blight. According to official statistics, violent crime is down 7 percent so far this year after double digit declines in the last two years, while the poverty rate, though still high, dropped to 36.5 percent in 2014 from 42.6 percent in 2013. Robert Corrales, the city's business administrator, attributed the lower crime rate to more police officers on the street and an emphasis on community policing under a new county run force. The city's renewal program includes the continuing demolition of about 600 vacant or derelict buildings that have scarred neighborhoods and attracted drug dealers. The demolition has been paid for by 7 million in proceeds from a bond sale that was enabled by the city's first investment grade rating BBB from Standard Poor's for 15 years, Mr. Corrales said. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said the changes were allowing Camden to turn its back on a grim reputation. "Camden is no longer America's most dangerous city," he said at the announcement event. "It's where families can come to live and work and do business." Mitchell Marcus, managing director in the Philadelphia office of Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate investment company, said the new development would help the local economy and would effectively expand Philadelphia's central business district across the river into New Jersey. "It's a boost for the region. It supports new quality inventory coming in. It brings scale," he said. With its offices and accompanying retail and restaurant space, the development will provide the "work" and "play" components of the "live work play" formula commonly sought by developers. But it is less certain that it will meet the "live" requirement because of continuing challenges in Camden's public schools, Mr. Marcus said. Still, the new development can succeed even if the schools don't turn around, he said. "If you get the retail to follow the employment base, I think that would be sufficient to support it. I'm not sure the school system plays into that." The city's turnaround has been spurred by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, a state agency that provides tax incentives for companies to relocate to, or remain in, economically challenged locations. The tax incentives, equivalent to a project's capital cost, are payable over 10 years, and they are dependent on capital investment and job creation. Since its inception in 2013, the program has stimulated investment of about 1 billion and created or retained 7,600 jobs in Camden, the economic development authority said. The incentives are also expected to be available to tenants in the waterfront development, said Timothy J. Lizura, president of the agency.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Re "Some Colleges Plan for More Students in Spring" (news article, Dec. 7): As a faculty member at the University of Florida (my office is in the building pictured in the article), I was happy to see coverage of this topic. Yes, administrators base the success of their back to school initiative on testing, tracing, masking, distancing and student obedience. Unfortunately, as we have learned this fall, all too often this is not happening. Here at the University of Florida, Covid cases have boomed (over 5,500 positive tests since March), testing has been optional, social distancing doesn't always happen, tracing is imperfect and hundreds of students can be found in large groups at bars and restaurants every week. Our students are getting sick. They will bring this into the classroom. Putting faculty in the classroom with students on a regular basis will not end well. Colleges and universities often fail to adequately consider the impact on the surrounding community of their decision to introduce a large student population from hot spots throughout the United States and the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
When May becomes pregnant, she prays for a boy, observing that Xuan, who has given birth to two daughters, holds a lower status than Lao, the mother of sons. She also observes the affair between Xuan and their husband's oldest son, a relationship that brings conflict and tragedy to the clan and some heavy breathing al fresco eroticism to the film. The sensuality that Mayfair and Chananun Chotrungroj, the director of photography, create around May is seductive, and also unnerving. "The Third Wife" presents a tableau of injustice a male dominated hierarchy that directly oppresses women and brings collateral misery to some men as well from a perspective that feels both compassionate and detached. It's too cool for melodrama and too pretty for politics, and the drama of May's experience occupies a middle ground between pity and indignation. The cruelty she encounters is a fact of life, as is the solidarity she occasionally experiences with Lao and especially with the unfailingly kind Xuan. The possibility of freedom occasionally stirs like a faint breeze, and the film's final scenes hint at desperate and defiant acts of resistance. But the movie is also trapped in the same claustrophobia it depicts, unsure of how much it can or wants to get away with.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
For those spending hundreds of dollars to see Dave Chappelle on Broadway, some advice: Don't leave your seats too quickly. On Tuesday, the first night of a 10 show engagement at the Lunt Fontanne Theater, as most of the audience filed out after what was for him a subpar set, Chappelle returned to the stage for another hour, taking suggestions on what to talk about. What followed was looser, more surprising and funnier than what preceded it. When someone shouted "Kanye West!" Chappelle embarked on one of his ornate historical digressions, comparing the rapper to the boxer Jack Johnson, whom he described as a great pioneer for African Americans but one driven by self interest. Asked about the recent news that a black actress, Halle Bailey, had been cast in the lead of "The Little Mermaid," he quipped: "If they draw her as a catfish, I'm going to be furious." And when someone asked why he lived in Ohio, Chappelle described a recent visit to Aziz Ansari's house and marveling at how incredible it would be to live in a New York home like his. Chappelle's extra note of seriousness seemed intended to set up a shift of gears: "Yeah, but he flies commercial." This joke, which he followed with effusive praise for private jets, is not exactly relatable. But it is, I believe, revealing, a reflection of the rarefied world Chappelle has existed in for the last 15 years of his fame, since the days of "Chappelle's Show," the sketch show that made him a superstar. He has been a fixture of the culture for so long that it's easy to miss how eccentric he is. What other comic would dress in a dark jumpsuit (with his name on it) that looks like something Michael Myers would wear in a "Halloween" reboot? Chappelle's peculiarity has long been an asset, giving him an outsider perspective. But he's not an underdog anymore. In the past year, he has appeared in the big screen hit "A Star Is Born" and taken time to mentor Will Smith on stand up. And now he's making his Broadway debut, part of a theatrical lineage of standup explored on a recent episode of the illuminating podcast "The History of Stand up." The theater might provide a rich target for Chappelle, but outside of his opening line ("Welcome to the most heterosexual show on Broadway"), it's not one he trains his sights on. Chappelle doesn't much adjust to the room. He does what he does, with supreme confidence. But his fiercely independent streak has led to a more indulgent performer constantly doubling down, returning to old obsessions, courting controversy and then exploiting it in his shows to play the beleaguered star. After he was criticized for mocking transgender people in two 2017 specials, Chappelle seems to have become fixated on the subject, alternating between lukewarm jokes about this marginalized group and defensive justifications for them and even apologies. "Got to stop with the trans jokes," he tells himself at one point. But the time spent on this subject is overshadowed by his other favorite long running pastime, expressing sympathy for rich and powerful men enmeshed in scandal. Chappelle has become the bizarro Joan Rivers, obsessed with celebrities, but not to skewer them so much as to play their defense attorney. In his new show, he does Louis C.K. few favors by defending him limply. He also speaks up for Kevin Hart who, in his telling, lived a blameless life when his dream of hosting the Oscars was dashed because of a few tweets. And after litigating the case of Michael Jackson on specials in 2004 and 2017, he does so again here, telling his audience not to watch the recent HBO documentary, "Leaving Neverland," in which two men who accused Jackson of sexual abuse speak out. Chappelle says he doesn't believe them, and then adds that he has no evidence, before sputtering that even if the pop star was guilty, "he's Michael Jackson." As he has told audiences many times, Chappelle says he is not in "the being right business." He often adds qualifications to these provocations, but it's hard not to notice that he sympathizes so much with his peers in wealth and fame. Once again returning to what he sees as the excesses of MeToo, which he has soured on even more than in his special in 2017, when he described victims as "weak," he focuses on the plight of the men, those accused, but also the ones who might be. Chappelle refers several times to the dangers of being canceled. He's not worried, he says, because he doesn't rape, but adds: "I have a few Aziz Ansaris in my past." The extensive Playbill bio noted that Chappelle's comedy has "often shocked his audiences into laughter." But there's nothing shocking anymore about his making fun of transgender people. He does it so relentlessly that it has become blandly familiar. And the way he pairs this material with constant justifications, explaining how these marginalized groups, which he calls "the alphabet people," have disproportionate power in Hollywood, is defensive, predictable and ultimately cruel. Chappelle would argue, rightly, that comedy contains cruelty, and no one has demonstrated the comic potential of punching down better than him (see his sketch about beating a kid with cancer in a video game on "Chappelle's Show"). But the bar for such jokes is higher, and he doesn't scale it. Of the dozen or so times I have seen Chappelle headline, this show was the first where I occasionally felt bored. Make no mistake, he remains such a naturally funny performer that he is always worth seeing. And where his greatest gift was once the conspiratorial way he would introduce an idea, teasing an audience by saying he probably shouldn't say something, now his signature is to bring up something ridiculous and flash some side eye. He uses it to particularly sharp effect to mock Jussie Smollett, the rare disgraced celebrity he displays little sympathy for. Imagining the police hearing Smollett's story that he was attacked by men wearing MAGA hats in Chicago, Chappelle flashed that side eye before imitating an officer excusing himself and saying to a colleague: "Find out where Kanye West was last night."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
While restoring the 1887 vintage Old Taylor Distillery in Frankfort, Ky., Will Arvin and Wes Murry, partners in the business, discovered abandoned train tracks on the property and a passenger depot once used by visitors arriving to tour the bourbon works. When it reopens in the fall, after a 40 year hiatus, as Castle Key Distillery, the gin and bourbon brand will use the restored Taylorton Station as a museum, tasting room and the gateway to distillery tours. The 113 acre estate was established by the bourbon legend Col. Edmund Haynes Taylor Jr. "It was a little like Pompeii," said Mr. Arvin. "The magic of the place is that Col. Taylor was the visionary who figured out bourbon tourism was a cool thing." Now, it's not just bourbon, but gin, rye and even limoncello leading a new wave of spirits driven travel. As with food, wine and beer, traveling to the source for booze has exploded alongside the boom in craft distilleries, up 26 percent from 2016 to 2017, according to the American Craft Spirits Association. It currently identifies 1,600 craft distilleries, defined as those producing less than roughly 315,000 cases annually. Small distilleries commonly open tasting rooms and offer tours as a way of marketing on a meager budget. Those start ups are reimagining the ways they engage visitors, offering spirits festivals, mixology classes, concerts and other activities. Meanwhile, major brands are investing heavily in entertaining visitors with destination architecture, blending workshops and interactive exhibits. "All of the infrastructure from equipment and stills to actual building structures is a huge capital expense and we're seeing all these classes and workshops add additional revenue," said Peggy Noe Stevens, a Kentucky based master bourbon taster and marketing consultant who has worked with whiskey brands including Woodford Reserve and Jim Beam. "Any activity that adds entertainment or education is directly correlated to brand loyalty." Though popular now, distilleries have lagged behind wineries and breweries in attracting travelers, in part because of regulations that, in many places, prevented distillers from offering samples of their liquor. Rules vary by state but have been loosening steadily since about 2004, and tourism has followed. The Jack Daniel Distillery in Lynchburg, Tenn., for example, attracts about 300,000 people a year, up from 200,000 10 years ago. "Distilling is the essence of value added agriculture since George Washington's day," said Frank Coleman, the senior vice president of public affairs at the Distilled Spirits Council, a national trade group, noting that the first president of the United States became a whiskey maker once he left office. "Slowly but surely the states have liberalized laws," he added. For travelers, distillery tours bring the eat local trend to the bar. "I see it as an extension of culinary travel," said Kim Jamieson, the public relations director for South Carolina's tourism office, which launched Satisfy Your Thirst, a campaign identifying 134 locales from moonshine distilleries to a tea growing farm, in 2016. "Beyond having a cocktail, people want to know the history behind it." New distilleries dispense samples and stories, including Waterman's Distillery in the Finger Lakes region of New York, housed in a 19th century barn once used by bootleggers during Prohibition. The atmospheric tour of Lost Spirits in Los Angeles includes a boat ride on an indoor river to the book filled tasting room inspired by "The Island of Doctor Moreau" by H.G. Wells. J.J. Pfister Distilling in Sacramento contains a museum devoted to the founding family's earlier business making knitted swimsuits in the early 20th century. Offering patios, yard games and sometimes food, many distilleries are following the pattern set by wineries to encourage visitors not just to tour but to linger. With outdoor, umbrella shaded tables and a bocce ball court set on six acres, the new tasting room at Seersucker Distillery, a gin maker in San Antonio, is one of these. Inspired by the immersive Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, its founder Trey Azar built the tasting room amid the production center with 360 degree views of the stills and bottling lines and pipes running above the bar. "The way to make anything approachable is to plop people right in the middle of it and see the process from production to cocktails," said Mr. Azar, who sends visitors home with cocktail recipe cards. Existing distilleries are adding tourist friendly amenities too. Tuthilltown Distillery in Gardiner, N.Y., recently opened a new restaurant, Char 1788, on site. Copper Kings brandy distillery in Louisville, Ky., now offers cocktail making classes on its third floor, skyline view bar at a complex that includes a butterfly garden and a courtyard where movies like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" are shown. Denver's new Booz Hall resembles a food hall for Colorado made wine and spirits, with tenants that include Wood's High Mountain Distillery, State 38 Distilling and Rising Sun Distillery. The growth of booze travel is by no means limited to micro producers. In June, Macallan whisky opened a design forward distillery built into a hillside in the Scottish Highlands and centered around the visitor experience (15 pounds, or about 19.75), which includes interactive exhibits. The distillery formerly drew 250,000 visitors annually, and Macallan expects to double that this year with the addition of such amenities as a restaurant, Eat TheMacallan. In Puerto Rico, Casa Bacardi, where Bacardi rum is distilled, now offers 90 minute mixology lessons ( 60) and opportunities to fill your own bottle from an aging barrel ( 160). Buffalo Trace Distillery, near Lexington , Ky., where you can make your own bourbon starting at 5,500, added a new boat tour of the Kentucky River ( 14) this summer. In September, the Kentucky Bourbon Trail Welcome Center will open in Louisville with exhibits on bourbon making and directions to its member distilleries. Like wineries before them, some distilleries are adding inns. In Greenport, N.Y., both the Matchbook Distilling Company and the affiliated Lin Beach House, with five rooms, a cocktail bar and tasting room, recently opened. Some hotels are adding distilleries. Copal Tree Lodge in southern Belize opened Copal Tree Distillery, powered by biomass and using resort grown sugar cane, last year. This summer the resort, home to a 3,000 acre organic farm, plans to add rum spicing and cocktail making classes to its culinary lineup. The Distillery in London, housing a working distillery, restaurant and the Ginstitute gin making classes, added three guest rooms in late 2016. In whatever incarnation, distillery visits introduce travelers to the human stories behind the mad scientist vapors, stills and mashes. Their proliferation, according to Jeffery Lindenmuth, the executive editor of Whisky Advocate magazine, "has made distillery tourism accessible to many, many more people. Whether you are in Brooklyn or Bozeman, you are rarely far from a distillery , which means you can tack a visit on to all sorts of recreation."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
MIRANDA SINGS LIVE ... YOUR WELCOME (2019) Stream on Netflix. This new Netflix special doesn't only feature Colleen Ballinger, the comedian, singer, actress and YouTube star. It also presents a hefty dose of her internet persona Miranda Sings, a talentless teenager with a grating, nasal voice and overdrawn lipstick. Ballinger introduced Miranda to the world in 2008 and has since amassed millions of subscribers. Her peculiar sense of humor is the kind that simultaneously draws laughs and cringes and it works. (Miranda has appeared on Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" and "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," and was also the center of a short lived Netflix comedy series, "Haters Back Off!") In this one hour special, Ballinger grumbles about pregnancy, reads from her childhood diaries and transforms into Miranda midsong. THE OSLO KILLING Stream on Sundance Now. This six part true crime series digs up a cold case that has haunted Maria Nielsen Iranzo all her life. When she was 4, Iranzo was the sole witness to the fatal beating and strangulation of her pregnant mother, Anni, in her Oslo home. Investigators concluded that the culprit must have been Minna Treadwell Thompson, an American woman who was having an affair with Anni's husband. The Norwegian police tried and failed to extradite Thompson from the United States, and the story has remained in the past. Now, more than 40 years later, this show follows Iranzo as she crisscrosses the world to uncover the truth and find some sort of justice.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The runways of this season from Dior Men to Heron Preston certainly don't look like the all white lineups of the past. PARIS "Fashion week is like the playoffs, like a championship,'' the musician Quavo said as he made the rounds here this week. "There are some designers that don't do well,'' added the rapper, flashing a grill made from emerald cut diamonds covering top and bottom teeth. Others, however, come out on top. Asked to name some, the Migos member (who was born Quavious Marshall) handily reeled off his list: "Prada, Off White, Rick Owens, Undercover,'' he said. "They all had good pieces, great pieces you want to own.'' Like advance scouts, Quavo and his fellow musician, Takeoff (Kirshnik Khari Ball), had been enjoying their status as favored guests as they tracked a men's wear circuit that has lately changed almost beyond recognition. As recently as five years ago, men's wear was fashion's sleepy minor leagues. You barely had to wait in line to get into most shows, let alone battle your way past mobs of fans screaming for rappers, ballers or Robert Pattinson. Now the scenes outside shows like those in Paris for Louis Vuitton or Dior Men, held in temporary structures set up inside the Tuileries Garden or on the Place de la Concorde could have been lifted straight from "The Day of the Locust.'' What was notable was not merely the spectacle of screaming bystanders at V.I.P. drop offs mobbing the limos depositing K pop sensations or musicians like the Colombian reggaeton star J. Balvin but that the composition of the crowds tracked broader demographic shifts the industry has shown itself eager to exploit. The days of fashionsowhite, in other words, are numbered. You can see it the streets outside the shows but just as notably on the runways, where often the clothes themselves are less memorable than the fact that they are being displayed on models who in the past, if they were cast at all, were stereotyped as "exotics.'' In 1964, when the designer Emilio Pucci cast two black models for a fashion show in a gilded salon of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Italy, journalists questioned whether the gesture had been an act of courage, a scandal or a novelty. Contrast dated observations like those with the clear and decisive statement that the designer Kim Jones made with his authoritative Dior Men show on Friday. An opening look is considered in the industry a designer's concept statement. Here it was a billowing swing coat of pearl gray moire taffeta with a rumpled rosette at the collar, worn over a turtleneck and pinstripe trousers and accessorized by a white velvet opera glove and a single pearl earring. The person wearing it was the elegant young Angolan model Guibu Bunga. Consider that a writer for the Business of Fashion site declared last week on Instagram that the breakout runway star of the season was the Senegalese model Malick Bodian. Add to that the fact that when Nicholas Daley, an award winning young British designer of mixed race, mounted a fashion week presentation early this month at a cavernous club in north London, he cast the show exclusively with people from what he called "his community.'' Not one appeared to be Caucasian. The designer Olivier Rousteing told a group of journalists before the Balmain show on Friday, "I think I can deliver messages that are beyond business or beyond fashion.'' Balmain's desert themed "Sheikh of Araby'' theatrics appeared to be as much Vegas spectacle as anything seen before on the runways of Paris. Recently Mr. Rousteing, who was adopted in childhood by a white couple from Bordeaux, France, discovered the origins of his birth parents, and now describes himself as "Half Ethiopian, half Somalian and 100 percent French. Add to that the multicultural global citizenship conferred on him by an Instagram following of 5.8 million and you can see the power he has to upend the definition of inclusivity. The once yearly appearance of a black face on a fashion magazine cover (usually in February, a graveyard month for print publications) won't pass muster now that the people whom fashion historically excluded are increasingly calling the shots. "That script has already been flipped,'' the designer Telfar Clemens said before the show he staged earlier this month as part of the Pitti Uomo men's wear fair in Florence. Mr. Clemens meant the breakdown of hegemonies that pigeonholed people by sexuality, race or gender. At shows like the opulent one Mr. Clemens staged inside a palazzo on the banks of the Arno a posse of his New York friends had been flown in at Pitti's expense for a night of eating and dancing and celebrating, at the conclusion of which models stomped across a littered banquet table the point seemed to be the erosion of arbitrary boundaries of all kinds. An emailed statement from Rei Kawakubo, the Comme des Garcons Homme Plus designer, described her antic rush of a show on Friday as "color resistance fighting back with color.'' She meant the vibrant strident clashing animal prints, tartans, stripes and checks worn by models who were sent caroming around the space, mosh pit style. It was a joyful thought from a most serious designer and, like many of her gnomic statements, open to personal interpretation. Fighting back with color can also be read as an endorsement of embracing the whole human dispersion, the best imaginable thing that could happen within fashion and outside it. That the process is underway can be gauged by the fact that the creative director of a powerhouse multinational like Dior Men can now pay overt homage to figures once judged marginal or even less. The Dior show, in homage to the jewelry designer and gender provocateur Judy Blame, felt like an augury of a broader liberation as welcome as it was overdue. When the American designer Heron Preston filled his front row on Thursday with friends from across the social/sexual/racial spectrum and talked about things coming apart and being reassembled in better ways, you could tell he meant more than camouflage patterned jacquards or the cleverly reworked polyamide Gore Tex workwear that has brought him success.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The prose at the improvised, liquor fueled wake is lean, clean and fine. And though it is spoken in the style of the recently departed a big man (call him Papa) who cast a shadow over everyone around him it is not he, for once, who is the subject. "When I think of her, I think of the truth," says a character in Jaclyn Backhaus's "Wives," the feverish feminist comedy that opened on Monday night at Playwrights Horizons, "and the quest for what was true and how she always had it there at her side and it made me want to eat the worms." Thus does Hadley Richardson , the first wife of Ernest Hemingway, imagine how her former husband might have described her. Two other Mrs. Hemingways his widow, Mary Welsh, and the journalist Martha Gellhorn are there to provide their own self eulogies in the voice of the author of "The Sun Also Rises." They're having a helluva time. And just wait till that giant swordfish that was mounted on Papa's wall is brought out to join in the drinking games. She (for surely this piscine trophy is also female) is doused in rum and set on fire, suggesting that revenge is a dish best served hot and soused.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
FOREIGN VISITOR A 1955 Citroen Traction Avant is all French, as is the family who owns it. The name in French means front wheel drive. An Immigrant's Welcome to New York TWO smartly dressed couples, on their way into the River Cafe on the Brooklyn waterfront on a late spring Sunday, were momentarily diverted by an entirely alien sedan. "What kind of car is it?" one of the men inquired. "What year is it?" asked the other. They soon learned that the black car, parked in a prime spot in front of the Michelin starred restaurant, was a 1955 Citroen Traction Avant. They responded with arched eyebrows and uncertain smiles before moving on. Inside the busy restaurant, the car's owner, Alain Daumas, sat with his wife, Magali, and the couple's daughters, Lea, 5, and Julia, 2. "It was a luxury car," said Mr. Daumas, a jovial man with an outsize personality (think a French version of the actor Roberto Benigni). He wore an orange stripe polo shirt and pale beige chinos. When his job at a nonprofit education service brought about a move to Princeton, N.J., from Paris, last year, Mr. Daumas squeezed the Traction Avant (and a vintage trailer that he tows on longer trips) into a 40 foot shipping container with most of the family's belongings. "We had to leave some furniture behind," Ms. Daumas said. Mr. Daumas, 40, laughed broadly. "No bed, one car," he said. The Traction Avant the name is French for front wheel drive has the look of an old time mobster's car. Made from 1934 to 1957, it was quite innovative by prewar standards. While it wasn't the first car with front drive, it popularized the layout in Europe, and its unibody structure was considered advanced. Like other Citroens of the era, the styling of the Traction Avant changed little over its lifespan. The car has a long hood with generous fenders. The roof is high and the floor is low, affording more interior space than the car's smallish size would suggest (perhaps a reason that Charles de Gaulle, listed at 6 foot 5, favored it). Mr. Daumas acquired his Traction Avant from a business associate of his father's, who had accumulated more vintage cars than he knew what to do with. The Citroen was in such dire shape when the man obtained it that it had cost him only a chainsaw. The car's condition did not improve under his care. "Gosh, it was in ruins," Mr. Daumas recalled. There was rust everywhere, and the engine had become a pantry for squirrels. But he was smitten. He was living in Paris at the time and traveled to his father's house in Le Mans to work on the car during the summer and on weekends. "He has a lot of space and a big garage," Mr. Daumas said. When he met Magali in 1997 and they fell in love, the project took on a little more urgency. The couple wanted to have the car for their wedding in 2000. With an accelerated schedule, Mr. Daumas resorted to extreme measures. "I was coming back from Le Mans with one or two small pieces in my trunk to rebuild in the tiny basement of my house in Paris," he said. "Good memories," he added. "Every screw has been disassembled and restored. In a Citroen, each bolt has the Citroen logo, and I wanted to keep that intact." "I broke it in at the wedding," he said. Mr. Daumas named the car Madeleine, after its original owner, whom he tracked down in the process of completing the paperwork for ownership. He found the vintage trailer years later, through an online classified ad. He saw the ad late at night and arrived in the morning to make the purchase. After 500 hours of restoration work, the family put it to the test with a drive to Norway. "We wanted to drive across the fjords," Ms. Daumas said. The Daumases have crossed the Scottish Highlands (a trip of 1,864 miles, Mr. Daumas estimated) and traced the path of the Tour de France. Now that they live in the United States, they plan to tour the country by car. At the top of the list? Times Square, which was where they were headed after lunch. "I've always dreamed of driving down Broadway," Mr. Daumas said. Ms. Daumas buckled the girls into their car seats as her husband donned a pair of tan leather driving gloves. "What I love about this car is the smell," he said, lifting up the seat cushion to his nose. "A car is about the atmosphere. Even when I found it destroyed, the smell was mild and nice." There are other noteworthy features. The hinged windshield, for example, opens at the bottom with a push of a lever on the dashboard. Mr. Daumas demonstrated the operation, noting its usefulness on rainy days when the windshield fogs up. But, he said, "You get wet trousers." Under the driver's seat was a custom modification. A small uneven flap cut into the carpet opened to reveal an empty space. "This is where you put the wine," he said, explaining how he smuggled French wine into Norway. At the River Cafe, the compartment was empty. That about ended the tour of the car, and the Daumas family was off to Manhattan, braving the weekend traffic over the Brooklyn Bridge. They were delayed in a backup for about 10 minutes on Canal Street a mistake, Ms. Daumas said but still made it to Times Square in good time, considering the jammed streets. But there was another hitch. In 2009, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg closed stretches of Broadway around Times Square to vehicle traffic. Mr. Daumas took Seventh Avenue instead, hardly fazed by the detour. Amid the bustle, tourists had another sight to point their cameras at. Mr. Daumas soaked in the attention, taking his time down the crowded avenue. "It's like a dream come true," Mr. Daumas said afterward, the car parked on a side street. "I'm very emotional right now." The long day, however, had taken its toll on his daughters, who were actually quite close to a dream state in the back seat. So Mr. Daumas smiled and slipped back into the car. With a honk of the horn and a wave of his gloved hand out the window, he pointed the Traction Avant toward the Lincoln Tunnel and New Jersey.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Sister Alice is out to sea. Literally. In the shot that ends this week's episode of "Perry Mason," the charismatic preacher is shown blissfully adrift in her tiny ship, figuratively kept afloat by her conviction that God has spoken to her. The leaders of her congregation, however, are facing stormier seas. Sister Alice remains involved in the life of Emily Dodson even as District Attorney Maynard Barnes mounts what appears to be an airtight case against her helped by the distraught woman's murmur of "guilty" when asked for her plea at an arraignment hearing. To make matters worse, we can add seizures to auditory hallucinations in the tally of neurological conditions that seem to plague the preacher; when she collapses and convulses in the middle of a theatrical church service, the rich and powerful elders ensure that the show goes on around her. Then, to the horror of her mother and handler, Birdy, Sister Alice whispers loudly enough for a nearby reporter to hear what God has commanded her to do: raise the slain infant Charlie Dodson from the dead. That final, surrealistic shot of Sister Alice floating alone is belied by the tension and turmoil her faith has wrought in those around her. It's a bold choice to end the episode this way. But on this show, bold choices abound. There always seems to be some new weirdness around the corner, something stranger or sharper or gorier or more romantic or more unpleasant than what is strictly called for by the standards of a whodunit. Take the plight of E.B. Jonathan, who is Perry's de facto boss and Emily's lawyer. Over the course of this episode, we see him suddenly struggling with what ought to come naturally to him. He repeatedly loses his train of thought. He bobbles a statement to the press. He seems perpetually one step behind in court. He notices blood in the sink after he brushes his teeth. He stares at a hummingbird outside his window so fixedly that he doesn't hear his assistant, Della Street, calling his name. In the end, E.B. gets dumped by his client Herman Baggerly who is busy planning the construction of a religious community with his son Matthew Dodson, recently cleared in the case and is reduced to begging an old associate for a loan, unsuccessfully. Thanks to a precise performance by John Lithgow, Jonathan's dissolution over the course of an hour feels both sudden and inexorable, as if it were bound to happen sooner or later. It adds a tragic dimension to a character who could have remained a stock figure in lesser hands. The same can be said of the Los Angeles police officer Paul Drake, a reluctant participant in the cover up of key facts in the Dodson case. Followed around by the crooked and murderous Sgt. Ennis who puts the "offensive" in "charm offensive" when he puts his hand on the belly of Drake's pregnant wife, Clara (Diarra Kilpatrick), and pays for the couple's groceries he beats Perry when the private eye approaches him about his bare bones crime scene report. When Perry ironically employs a racial slur to describe Drake's acquiescence, Drake threatens him with the violence that, as a police officer, is his to mete out with impunity, throwing the epithet back in Mason's face. But when his wife instructs him to go along to get along, despite knowing full well what kind of person Ennis is, it's too much for Drake to take. (There's a separate conversation we can have about Clara and other wife characters who, like, just don't get it, but I'm willing to give the show the benefit of the doubt at this point.) Drake approaches Perry under cover of darkness and admits that he doctored the report, changing the facts to fit the bogus theory that Emily's lover George Gannon killed his co conspirators and fled the scene instead of getting killed there as well. As evidence, he proffers a broken set of dentures he recovered in the alley where Gannon fell to his death. So, like grim Prince Charmings searching for their Cinderella, Mason and his wisecracking sidekick, Pete Strickland, race to the morgue to locate Gannon's body before it gets cremated. After fighting their way through the tangle of corpses, they locate their man and discover that the broken dentures match the fractured partial set still in his mouth. It is perhaps the most disgusting investigative breakthrough TV has seen since Will Graham was out there profiling serial killing installation artists in "Hannibal." But for all its darkness, "Perry Mason" still has a lighter side. Sometimes it comes out in the form of humor, like the off color anecdote that the mortician, Virgil (Jefferson Mays), shares with Perry and Pete while they're searching for the personal effects of the two other dead kidnappers. ("Never would've caught him if it weren't for the mayonnaise," goes the punchline. The rest is probably better left unwritten.) Pete's grousing and grumbling and his own penchant for foul mouthed tale telling is another example. At other times, the show's warmth stems from romantic chemistry. Perry combines business with pleasure when he and his girlfriend, Lupe, travel to a desert casino to investigate one of George Gannon's old jobs, from before Gannon found Jesus. Lupe smiles when she realizes she has been dragged along on an assignment in lieu of simply having a nice New Year's Eve date but that doesn't stop her from making Perry take off her high heeled shoes and hop in a fountain with her, finally getting the New Year's kiss she'd been demanding. The easy, sexy rapport between the actors Matthew Rhys and Veronica Falcon is such that you half expect the fountain's water to begin steaming. For all its darkness, "Perry Mason" illuminates its world with flashes of the unexpected and the light of human connection. It could skate by as a grim and gritty revisionist riff on the "Perry Mason" of yore and to an extent, that's exactly what it is but only to an extent. It's too smart, too strange and sometimes too sweet for that critique to stand up in court. None Fans of great character actors take note: That's the former Max Headroom, Matt Frewer, as the judge at Emily's arraignment. Personally, I have a soft spot for his portrayal of the pyromaniac Trashcan Man in the old ABC mini series adaptation of Stephen King's "The Stand." None As Emily Dodson, Gayle Rankin is really put through her paces in this episode, whether she is screaming "Shut up!" at the top of her lungs as her husband chews her out or reeling from the illegal interrogation to which detectives Holcomb and Ennis subject her. None Something to keep an eye on: Perry pays special attention to a photo representing the "Child Adoption" aspect of Sister Alice's ministry. Combine that with her ambiguous declaration to Emily that "You didn't kill your baby any more than I did bad men did that," and I think it might be time to view the good Sister as a suspect.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Another Earth could be circling the star right next door to us. Astronomers announced on Wednesday that they had detected a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest neighbor to our solar system. Intriguingly, the planet is in the star's "Goldilocks zone," where it may be neither too hot nor too cold. That means liquid water could exist at the surface, raising the possibility for life. Although observations in recent years, particularly by NASA's Kepler planet finding mission, have uncovered a bounty of Earth size worlds throughout the galaxy, this one holds particular promise because it might someday, decades from now, be possible to reach. It's 4.2 light years, or 25 trillion miles, away from Earth, which is extremely close in cosmic terms. One astronomer likened it to a flashing neon sign. "I'm the nearest star, and I have a potentially habitable planet!" said R. Paul Butler, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a member of the team that made the discovery. Beyond the planet's size and distance from its parent star, much about it is still mysterious. Scientists are working off computer models that offer mere hints of what's possible: Conditions could be Earthlike, but they could also be hellish like Venus, or cold and dry like Mars. There is no picture of the planet, which has been designated Proxima b. Instead, Dr. Anglada Escude and his colleagues detected it indirectly, studying via telescope the light of the parent star. They zeroed in on clocklike wobbles in the starlight, as the colors shifted slightly to the reddish end of the spectrum, then slightly bluish. The oscillations, caused by the bobbing back and forth motion of the star as it is pulled around by the gravity of the planet, are similar to how the pitch of a police siren rises or falls depending on whether the patrol car is traveling toward or away from the listener. From the size of the wobbles, the astronomers determined that Proxima b is at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth, although it could be several times larger. A year on Proxima b the time to complete one orbit around the star lasts just 11.2 days. Although the planet, lost in the glare of the star, cannot be viewed by current telescopes, astronomers hope to see it when the next generation is built a decade from now. Proxima Centauri, which is in the constellation of Centaurus 4.2 light years from Earth. And the planet's proximity to Earth gives hope that robotic probes could someday be zooming past the planet for a close up look. A privately funded team of scientists and technology titans, led by the Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner and the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, have announced Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, a project to develop and launch a fleet of iPhone size spacecraft within two to three decades. Their proposed destination is the Alpha Centauri star system, which includes two larger, sunlike stars in addition to Proxima Centauri. "We will definitely aim at Proxima," said Avi Loeb, a Harvard astronomer who is the chairman of an advisory committee for Breakthrough Starshot. "This is like finding prime real estate in our neighborhood." This newly discovered planet is much closer to its parent star, about five million miles apart, than Earth is to the sun, 93 million miles. Even Mercury, the innermost planet of our solar system, is 36 million miles from the sun. While Proxima b might be similar to Earth, its parent star, Proxima Centauri, is very different from the sun. It is tiny, belonging to a class of stars known as red dwarfs, with only about 12 percent of the mass of the sun and about 1/600th the luminosity so dim that it cannot be seen from Earth with the naked eye. Thus Proxima b, despite its closeness to the star, receives less warmth than Earth, but enough that water could flow on the surface. Whether the planet has liquid water or an atmosphere is "pure speculation at this point," Dr. Anglada Escude said in a news conference. If the planet formed close to the star, it could be dry and airless, but it might also have formed farther out and migrated inward to its current orbit. It is also possible that the planet formed dry and was later bombarded by comets or ice rich asteroids. "There are viable models and stories that lead to a viable Earthlike planet today," Dr. Anglada Escude said. Even if it is habitable, scientists studying the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe spiritedly debate whether planets around these red dwarfs are a promising place to look. Small stars are more erratic, especially during their youth, and eruptions off the star's surface could strip away the atmosphere from such planets. Levels of X rays and other high energy radiation bombarding the planet would be 100 times that on Earth, the scientists said. The close orbit suggests that the rotation of the planet would probably be gravitationally locked by the star's pull. Just as the same side of the moon always faces Earth, one side of Proxima b is probably eternally bright, always facing the star, while the other is ever dark. Additional visible light observations further convinced the scientists that they were not being fooled by variations in the star itself erroneously mimicking the presence of a planet. The discovery was more than a decade and a half in the making. Michael Endl, an astronomer at the University of Texas and one of the authors of the Nature paper, peered at Proxima Centauri for eight years beginning in 2000, looking for hints of a planet.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Wallace Spearmon, a two time Olympian in track and field, got what he wanted when the International Olympic Committee finally bowed to pressure from athletes and national Olympic organizations and postponed the 2020 Tokyo Games for a year. It made sense given the coronavirus pandemic. But the financial ripple effect might jeopardize his ability and that of thousands of other American athletes to train for the Games. "Hopefully the athletes don't feel this, though we know we probably will," said Spearmon, who is training in Arkansas to compete in the 200 or 400 meters. "A lot of us are already struggling to get by." The anxiety is growing because the postponement has left the United States Olympic Paralympic Committee with a 200 million cash crunch that could leave athletes without the modest living and training stipends they rely on. The deficit comes while the committee simultaneously makes a push for the 2021 Summer Games and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. The organizations that run the individual Olympic sports in the United States, known as national governing bodies, were already trying to figure out how they will manage without income they were set to receive from thousands of events that have been canceled because of the pandemic. In recent days, U.S.A. Cycling laid off or furloughed 40 percent of what had been a 70 person staff. U.S. Rowing cut its staff by a third, also through a mix of furloughs and layoffs, and cut pay for much of the staff that remained. Now, funding from the U.S.O.P.C. is up in the air. "We have a rainy day fund, but it's raining awfully hard, awfully fast," said Rob DeMartini, the chief executive of U.S.A. Cycling. The looming crisis is a result of the U.S.O.P.C.'s unique financial structure, which relies so heavily on nearly 200 million it receives every other year from its share of the U.S. media rights fees that NBCUniversal pays the I.O.C. to televise the Olympics. The problem for the U.S.O.P.C. is that it does not get its share of the NBCUniversal money until after the Games occur. That money represents about 40 percent of the U.S.O.P.C.'s budget and allows it to distribute annually about 100 million, including 13 million in stipends directly to athletes and more than 75 million to the national governing bodies for their sports. For example, in 2016, U.S.A. Cycling received 2 million from the national committee, according to U.S.O.P.C. tax filings. The U.S. Fencing Association received 900,000. U.S.A. Gymnastics received 3 million. And even though the 2018 Winter Olympics were still more than a year away at the time, U.S. Figure Skating received 1 million, U.S.A. Curling got 842,000 and the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation received more than 2 million. Some of the organizations received more the following year. Also, direct payments for the athletes totaled 13 million each year as well, funding that helps roughly 2,000 athletes pay their rent and eat, using stipends that range from a few thousand dollars to as much as 21,000. There is also a discretionary fund of about 1 million to target a team or a group of athletes for whom a little extra support might make the difference between sixth place and a medal. Max Cobb, who leads the U.S. Biathlon Association and is the chairman of the council for the national sports organizations, said all of the projects the U.S.O.P.C. funds for athletes at the elite level and the grass roots now need to be reassessed and possibly put off for a year. In a statement Thursday, Morane Kerek, the U.S.O.P.C.'s, chief financial officer, said the organization is still evaluating the financial impact of the cancellation of the Games. "Given the uncertainty of the virus and its impact on the sports landscape we expect our analysis will continue to evolve over the coming weeks," Kerek said. The U.S.O.P.C. could try to tap the United States Olympic Endowment, created in 1984 after the Los Angeles Games, to finance Olympic sports. The endowment has net assets of 185 million, according to its last financial report, but the U.S.O.P.C. tries to limit how much it asks to withdraw from the endowment, which is run independently, in any one year. What happens to the U.S.O.P.C.'s finances during the next 18 months may hinge on a delicate series of negotiations between the I.O.C. and NBCUniversal. In a conference call Thursday, Timo Lumme, the director of television and marketing services for the I.O.C., said his organization is speaking to broadcasters to try to avoid leaving national Olympic committees and athletes without the funds they need. However, NBCUniversal is not obligated to make the bulk of its payment to the I.O.C. roughly 1.2 billion until shortly before the Olympics start. By that time, the network has finally received a steady stream of funds from advertisers. A spokesman for NBC Sports said Thursday that executives are "in constant communication with our partners at the I.O.C.," but he declined to comment on any specific conversations. While those talks take shape, athletes and the people in charge of getting them the money they need are dealing with life in limbo. DeMartini, the U.S.A. Cycling chief executive, said the organization receives roughly one third of its money from the U.S.O.P.C., one third from fund raising and one third from current racing. U.S.A. Cycling has received its U.S.O.P.C. money for this year but all riding in the country has stopped. Next year, riding will likely return but the Olympic money remains up in the air. "I've got a hole in my boat the size of a third, so I've got to take action," he said. Susan Smith, the interim chief executive of U.S. Rowing, said her organization has applied for a low interest loan through the Small Business Administration and reached out to donors for help covering the shortfalls that the cancellation of rowing's busiest season of events has already produced. "It's an interesting thing how a pandemic can focus an organization," Smith said. Spearmon said athletes are already feeling the financial crunch, and if the U.S.O.P.C. has to dial back its funding that will only to make it worse. He is finally healthy from a calf injury two years ago, but there are no competitions where he can collect prize money or reach the standards that would requalify him for funding from the U.S.O.P.C. or the U.S.A. Track and Field. He doesn't have a sponsor, and social distancing advisories prevent him from coaching. For those athletes who do have sponsorships, many of them have to renegotiate with shoe companies in December. That was supposed to be the end of an Olympic year, not the beginning of one. And it will be a bad time for companies dealing with the fallout from what economists predict will be a deep recession. "They are expressing how much money they have lost in last few months," Spearmon said of the shoe companies. "There is so much unknown right now financially."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
What would happen if the Supreme Court struck down the Affordable Care Act? The fate of the sprawling, decade old health law known as Obamacare was already in question, with the high court expected to hear arguments a week after the presidential election in the latest case seeking to overturn it. But now, the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg increases the possibility that the court could abolish it, even as millions of people are losing job based health coverage during the coronavirus pandemic. A federal judge in Texas invalidated the entire law in 2018. The Trump administration, which had initially supported eliminating only some parts of the law, then changed its position and agreed with the judge's ruling. Earlier this year the Supreme Court agreed to take the case. Mr. Trump has vowed to replace Justice Ginsburg, a stalwart defender of the law, before the election. If he is successful in placing a sixth conservative on the court, its new composition could provide the necessary five votes to uphold the Texas decision. Read about three scenarios for how the Court might act. Many millions more people would be affected by such a ruling than those who rely on the law for health insurance. Its many provisions touch the lives of most Americans, from nursing mothers to people who eat at chain restaurants. Here are some potential consequences, based on estimates by various groups. As many as 133 million Americans roughly half the population under the age of 65 have pre existing medical conditions that could disqualify them from buying a health insurance policy or cause them to pay significantly higher premiums if the health law were overturned, according to a government analysis done in 2017. An existing medical condition includes such common ailments as high blood pressure or asthma, any of which could require those buying insurance on their own to pay much more for a policy, if they could get one at all. The coronavirus, which has infected nearly seven million Americans to date and may have long term health implications for many of those who become ill, could also become one of the many medical histories that would make it challenging for someone to find insurance. Under the A.C.A., no one can be denied coverage under any circumstance, and insurance companies cannot retroactively cancel a policy unless they find evidence of fraud. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that 54 million people have conditions serious enough that insurers would outright deny them coverage if the A.C.A. were not in effect, according to an analysis it did in 2019. Its estimates are based on the guidelines insurers had in place about whom to cover before the law was enacted. Most Americans would still be able to get coverage under a plan provided by an employer or under a federal program, as they did before the law was passed, but protections for pre existing conditions are particularly important during an economic downturn or to those who want to start their own businesses or retire early. Before the A.C.A., employers would sometimes refuse to cover certain conditions. If the law went away, companies would have to decide if they would drop any of the conditions they are now required to cover. The need to protect people with existing medical conditions from discrimination by insurers was a central theme in the 2018 midterm elections, and Democrats attributed much of their success in reclaiming control of the House of Representatives to voters' desire to safeguard those protections. Mr. Trump and many Republicans promise to keep this provision of the law, but have not said how they would do that. Before the law, some individuals were sent to high risk pools operated by states, but even that coverage was often inadequate. People who could lose their health insurance Of the 23 million people who either buy health insurance through the marketplaces set up by the law (roughly 11 million) or receive coverage through the expansion of Medicaid (12 million), about 21 million are at serious risk of becoming uninsured if Obamacare is struck down. That includes more than nine million who receive federal subsidies. On average, the subsidies cover 492 of a 576 monthly premium this year, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services. If the marketplaces and subsidies go away, a comprehensive health plan would become unaffordable for most of those people and many of them would become uninsured. States could not possibly replace the full amount of federal subsidies with state funds. Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor that is jointly funded by the federal government and the states, has been the workhorse of Obamacare. If the health law were struck down, more than 12 million low income adults who have gained Medicaid coverage through the law's expansion of the program could lose it. In all, according to the Urban Institute, enrollment in the program would drop by more than 15 million, including roughly three million children who got Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program when their parents signed up for coverage. The law ensures that states will never have to pay more than 10 percent of costs for their expanded Medicaid population; few if any states would be able to pick up the remaining 90 percent to keep their programs going. Over all, the federal government's tab was 66 billion last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Losing free health insurance would, of course, also mean worse access to care and, quite possibly, worse health for the millions who would be affected. Among other things, studies have found that Medicaid expansion has led to better access to preventive screenings, medications and mental health services. The biggest group able to get access to addiction treatment under the law is adults who have gained Medicaid coverage. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that 40 percent of people from 18 to 65 with opioid addiction roughly 800,000 are on Medicaid, many or most of whom became eligible for it through the health law. Kaiser also found that in 2016, Americans with Medicaid coverage were twice as likely as those with no insurance to receive any treatment for addiction. States with expanded Medicaid are spending much more on medications that treat opioid addiction than they used to. From 2013 through 2017, Medicaid spending on prescriptions for two medications that treat opioid addiction more than doubled: It reached 887 million, up from nearly 358 million in 2013, according to the Urban Institute. The growing insured population in many states has also drawn more treatment providers, including methadone clinics, inpatient programs and primary care doctors who prescribe two other anti craving medications, buprenorphine and naltrexone. These significant expansions of addiction care could shrink if the law were struck down, leaving a handful of federal grant programs as the main sources of funds. Americans who no longer face caps on expensive treatments The law protects many Americans from caps that insurers and employers once used to limit how much they had to pay out in coverage each year or over a lifetime. Among them are those who get coverage through an employer more than 150 million before the pandemic caused widespread job loss as well as roughly 15 million enrolled in Obamacare and other plans in the individual insurance market. Before the A.C.A., people with conditions like cancer or hemophilia that were very expensive to treat often faced enormous out of pocket costs once their medical bills reached these caps. While not all health coverage was capped, most companies had some sort of limit in place in 2009. A 2017 Brookings analysis estimated that 109 million people would face lifetime limits on their coverage without the health law, with some companies saying they would cover no more than 1 million in medical bills per employee. The vast majority of people never hit those limits, but some who did were forced into bankruptcy or went without treatment. Medicare beneficiaries would face changes to medical care and possibly higher premiums About 60 million people are covered under Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people 65 and older and people of all ages with disabilities. Even though the main aim of the A.C.A. was to overhaul the health insurance markets, the law "touches virtually every part of Medicare," said Tricia Neuman, a senior vice president for the Kaiser Family Foundation, which did an analysis of the law's repeal. Overturning the law would be "very disruptive," she said. If the A.C.A. is struck down, Medicare beneficiaries would have to pay more for preventive care, like a wellness visit or diabetes check, which are now free. They would also have to pay more toward their prescription drugs. About five million people faced the so called Medicare doughnut hole, or coverage gap, in 2016, which the A.C.A. sought to eliminate. If the law were overturned, that coverage gap would widen again. The law also made other changes, like cutting the amount the federal government paid hospitals and other providers as well as private Medicare Advantage plans. Undoing the cuts could increase the program's overall costs by hundreds of billions of dollars, according to Ms. Neuman. Premiums under the program could go up as a result. The A.C.A. was also responsible for promoting experiments into new ways of paying hospitals and doctors, creating vehicles like accountable care organizations to help hospitals, doctors and others to better coordinate patients' care. If the groups save Medicare money on the care they provide, they get to keep some of those savings. About 11 million people are now enrolled in these Medicare groups, and it is unclear what would happen to these experiments if the law were deemed unconstitutional. Some of Mr. Trump's initiatives, like the efforts to lower drug prices, would also be hindered without the federal authority established under the A.C.A. Repealing the law would also eliminate a 0.9 percent increase in the payroll tax for high earners, which would mean less money coming into the Medicare trust fund. The fund is already heading toward insolvency partly because other taxes created by the law that had provided revenue for the fund have already been repealed by 2024. Young adults with coverage through their parents' plans The A.C.A. required employers to cover their employees' children under the age of 26, and it is one of the law's most popular provisions. Roughly two million young adults are covered under a parent's insurance plan, according to a 2016 government estimate. If the law were struck down, employers would have to decide if they would continue to offer the coverage. Dorian Smith, a partner at Mercer, a benefits consulting firm, predicted that many companies would most likely continue. Medical care for the uninsured could cost billions more Doctors and hospitals could lose a crucial source of revenue, as more people lose insurance during an economic downturn. The Urban Institute estimated that nationwide, without the A.C.A., the cost of care for people who cannot pay for it could increase as much as 50.2 billion. Hospitals and other medical providers, many of whom are already struggling financially because of the pandemic, would incur losses, as many now have higher revenues and reduced costs for uncompensated care in states that expanded Medicaid. A study in 2017 by the Commonwealth Fund found that for every dollar of uncompensated care costs those states had in 2013, the health law had erased 40 cents by 2015, or a total of 6.2 billion. The health insurance industry would be upended by the elimination of A.C.A. requirements. Insurers in many markets could again deny coverage or charge higher premiums to people with pre existing medical conditions, and they could charge women higher rates. States could still regulate insurance, but consumers would see more variation from state to state. Insurers would also probably see lower revenues and fewer members in the plans they operate in the individual market and for state Medicaid programs at a time when millions of people are losing their job based coverage. Menu labels are among dozens of the law's provisions that are less well known The A.C.A. requires nutrition labeling and calorie counts on menu items at chain restaurants. It requires many employers to provide "reasonable break time" and a private space for nursing mothers to pump breast milk. It created a pathway for federal approval of biosimilars, which are near copies of biologic drugs, made from living cells. These and other measures would have no legal mandate to continue if the A.C.A. is eliminated.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Companies that employ pregnant women, women who are planning to become pregnant, or even men whose wives or girlfriends are contemplating pregnancy should consider letting them work indoors if they are in areas with Zika transmission, federal health and safety officials said Friday. If the virus reaches the American mainland this summer the recommendation could impose a major burden on industries such as construction, agriculture, transportation, amusement parks and cafes, which employ hundreds of thousands of outdoor workers. It was among a general set of guidelines jointly issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect workers from occupational exposure to the Zika virus. The greatest risk of infection is from mosquito bites, although the new guidelines recognize that the virus can also be transmitted sexually. The new guidelines also recommended that pregnant employees not travel to areas where the Zika virus is circulating and that businesses consider allowing workers who are or may become pregnant delay traveling to those areas. That recommendation also applies to the male partners of such women. The other recommendations made on Friday are based on earlier guidelines issued to protect against West Nile virus. They urge employers to give outdoor workers clothing that covers exposed skin, hats with mosquito netting, insect repellents, and to eliminate standing water near work sites where mosquitoes could lay eggs. Other guidelines issued Friday covered mosquito control workers, who face biting insects and hazardous pesticides, and laboratory and health care workers, who could be in danger of acquiring the Zika virus from patients' blood and bodily fluids. Mr. Barab said industries that employ outdoor workers had not been consulted before the guidelines were issued. Jill M. Shugart, an environmental health specialist in the C.D.C.'s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said her organization often consulted with unions and trade groups but in this case had discussed these occupational guidelines primarily with the airline and cruise ship industries. Those industries were initially concerned with the travel guidelines for pregnant women that the C.D.C. issued in January. Asked if there had been any reaction from businesses with outdoor employees, she said: "The guidelines were just posted today, and we have not heard from every single sector." Calls to the United States Chamber of Commerce, which represents employers, were not returned Friday afternoon. It was not clear what constitutes an "area with Zika transmission" for purposes of the workplace guidelines. Mr. Barab said his agency would defer to the C.D.C. on that question. Ms. Shugart suggested that her agency's travel guidelines might be used to define such an area, but she added that those parameters are broad. The agency initially recommended that pregnant women avoid entire countries, then amended that to include only areas below 6,500 feet in elevation because the mosquitoes that carry Zika do not survive at high altitudes. The only American territories with known Zika transmission are Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands and American Samoa. If the virus reaches Florida or the Gulf Coast this summer, as the C.D.C. has said it might, employers across these regions may not know if their specific location is at risk. Defining such areas by county or state may be required; presumably, an outbreak in Key West would not affect a job site in Minnesota. Mr. Barab said he assumed that the C.D.C. would eventually come up with a narrower definition. In the new guidelines, the advice about indoor work is phrased more cautiously than the other guidelines. For example, the new recommendations said that employers should "consider reassigning" employees "if requested by a worker."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The president emphasized a "blue collar" boom in his speech to Congress. But workers in those industries have seen a slowdown or even losses in jobs. WASHINGTON President Trump used his State of the Union address on Tuesday to tick off a laundry list of economic gains, citing record low unemployment for women, higher incomes for households and a "blue collar" boom that he said is underway across America. The speech showcased what will be Mr. Trump's primary message as he heads into a re election campaign that he hopes will be a referendum on the United States economy. But it also overstated the strength of an economic expansion that has slowed or stalled for parts of his base. "Jobs are booming. Incomes are soaring. Poverty is plummeting," Mr. Trump said. "America's fortunes are on the rise." He added, "I am thrilled to report to you tonight that our economy is the best it has ever been." The economic expansion has now reached its 11th year, a record for the modern era of economic statistics in the United States. Unemployment sank to 3.5 percent in December, down from 4.7 percent when Mr. Trump took office. Workers' wages are growing, particularly for those in the jobs that pay the least, like retail clerks and restaurant workers. The stock market, which is one of the president's favorite gauges of economic success, is up about 20 percent from a year ago. Forty percent of Americans say they are better off financially than they were at the same time last year double the number who say they are worse off, according to a survey conducted last month for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey. That is the brightest economic outlook respondents have expressed in the three years the survey has been conducted. Independent voters, a particularly crucial electoral bloc, reported a surge in confidence in the latest survey. And yet the economy grew faster under several of Mr. Trump's predecessors than it has on his watch. When he bragged of the economy's strength on Tuesday, Mr. Trump frequently cited "record" low rates of unemployment and poverty, which are in part attributable to the low and falling rates he inherited from former President Barack Obama. The economy's improvement has also slowed on several fronts since last year, particularly in the president's favored blue collar sectors like mining and manufacturing. Mr. Trump declared in his 2019 State of the Union speech that "an economic miracle is taking place in the United States, and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations." Over the last year, the president's economic policies have not delivered anything close to the miracle he had promised to white working class voters in the industrial Midwest. Combined employment in construction, manufacturing and mining grew more slowly last year than at almost any other point in the current expansion. And while Mr. Trump signed a large tax cut in 2017, it has failed to produce the sustained investment boom that he and Republicans promised. After surging in 2018 following a cut in the corporate income tax rate, business investment shrank for the final three quarters of 2019. Investment has now grown more slowly in the quarters after the tax cut than it did in the eight years, including the end of the Great Recession, under Mr. Obama. Mr. Trump's only mention of business investment was in reference to opportunity zones, a creation of the 2017 tax law that bestowed tax incentives on investors who put money into projects in so called distressed communities. He did not directly mention the corporate rate cuts that were the centerpiece of the 2017 law, nor the investment decline. Mr. Trump did not propose a new round of tax cuts, as his advisers had hinted he might. His most substantial economic policy proposal was to call on Congress to pass a bipartisan family leave law that has been championed by his daughter Ivanka Trump. The president was unequivocal in saying that his policies had fundamentally transformed the economy. "The days of our country being used, taken advantage of and even scorned by other nations are long behind us," he said. "Gone, too, are the broken promises, jobless recoveries, tired platitudes and constant excuses for the depletion of American wealth, power and prestige." Other analysts say Mr. Trump has benefited from a historically anomalous economic stimulus while unemployment is low. The Federal Reserve ended a slow march of interest rate increases last year and slashed rates instead, spurring growth and stock gains. Combined with military and other federal spending increases that bipartisan majorities in Congress passed and Mr. Trump signed into law, the tax cuts have helped to swell the federal budget deficit to 1 trillion a year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
It's a popular question: Where are all the female ballet choreographers? Over the past year, the urgency to right a wrong has been visible at festivals and in programming at top ballet companies. In the fall, Lauren Lovette will present her second work for New York City Ballet, and on Monday, the Vail Dance Festival will host an evening of new works by women. So it's hardly a surprise, then, that women dominated at the 2017 Joyce Ballet Festival, which ended on Saturday. But to what end? It's disheartening to report that out of 21 dances presented by five companies at the Joyce, only one stood out for its freshness and musicality: Gemma Bond's "Then and Again." One. It's a lonely number, but that's a dance festival for you. Included in Ms. Bond's evening of new and reconstructed works, "Then and Again," danced to Alfredo Piatti's "Twelve Caprices" for solo cello, was first seen in 2016, and while promising then, it has found its poetry now. In this veiled love triangle, Devon Teuscher and Stephanie Williams find themselves with, and without, Thomas Forster as five others waft on and offstage, shifting the mood from vitality to mystery and back again. Both delicate and forthright, "Then and Again" is strengthened by Ms. Bond's focus on the women. They form a sort of sisterhood, moving as one and seemingly breathing as one which gives the dance its gossamer sheen. But what's best about this ballet is that it adds up to more than a mere collection of poses: Ms. Bond's vivid use of petit allegro small, brisk jumps and her focus on port de bras, or the carriage of the arms, leave behind lasting afterimages. The women, especially, with bent elbows and hands softly framing their faces, float through this sweeping dance, yet the entire cast performs with an understated voluptuousness. The elegant, soulful Ms. Williams, left alone onstage in the end, most gorgeously encapsulates it. Less convincing were Ms. Bond's other two works, "The Giving," a ponderous duet for Christine Shevchenko and Cory Stearns that explored facets of isolation, and "Impressions," titled after Jennifer Higdon's score. "Impressions" was too long and aesthetically confusing the costumes by the Ballet Theater principal James Whiteside, who also performed in the work, had the shimmer of competition dance and failed to cement just who Ms. Bond is as a choreographer. Yet dances on other programs felt even more generic. Cirio Collective, led by its artistic director, Jeffrey Cirio, another Ballet Theater principal, and its associate artistic director, Lia Cirio (his sister), unveiled an evening brimming with familiar markers of contemporary ballet: vacuous, overwrought partnering; shifts between stillness and ferocious movement; more bare chests than Martha Graham could have dreamed of; and even, in "Minim," a dance set to poetry, beginning with, "I saw the face of God today." Sometimes the stage looked like a haunted house. This program, which featured works by Mr. Cirio, Paulo Arrais and Gregory Dolbashian, was all over the place yet depressingly colorless. Both Emery LeCrone and Claudia Schreier, who presided over their own evenings, had too little momentum in their choreography. The dances just about wilted. Ms. LeCrone, recycling her well worn patterns and phrases, presented one lethargic ballet after the other, while Ms. Schreier, whose bland choreography is overly embellished with Balanchine touches a raised hip, a flexed foot had an oppressive, sanctimonious air. Their works had plenty of star dancers, but no urgency. Why do they choreograph? It was hard to sense their love for the form. The season ended with "Wandering," by Amy Seiwert, who was recently named the artistic director of Sacramento Ballet and leads Amy Seiwert's Imagery, a contemporary ballet company based in San Francisco. She set this dance, her first evening length work, to Franz Schubert's song cycle "Winterreise." In it, dancers take turns portraying a wanderer, with the help of a jacket that they slip on and off. It wasn't long before Ms. Seiwert's repetitive movement became tedious and overly familiar in its details: Hands pressed into the chest; a leg jutting forward, heel first. The dancers stared mournfully into the distance. Here, the choreography places more emphasis on lengthening and stretching the body than on expressive dancing in space, and the unambitious partnering mainly featured women in supported turns. It made for one lugubrious journey. But like many other works in this festival, it crystallized what contemporary ballet really needs: imaginative partnering that doesn't treat women like objects, and a choreographer who understands how to work with a point shoe and musicality. Too many of the dances had no pulse. This year's festival was organized by its director of programming, Martin Wechsler, who has just announced his departure after 32 years with the organization. He had help from John Selya, the festival's curatorial associate, who has a long association with Twyla Tharp. When watching these programs, it was hard not to pine for Ms. Tharp, not because she's a woman who succeeded in the ballet world, but because she had it down: partnering, pointwork and musicality. And, of course, overflowing imagination. Choreography is, after all, mysterious business, a strange and subtle alchemy. But there was something in the program to make you blink twice, a fabricated Q. and A. between John Selya the dancer and John Selya the curatorial associate. Lines like, "They caught up with each other a few weeks ago over green juice (for the dancer) and coffee (for the curator)" were obviously attempts at humor, yet it's hard to take a festival seriously that doesn't seem to take itself seriously. And aren't choreography and curation serious business? In the end, and joking aside, one delightful dance out of 21 is not nothing. It's hope.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
A 5 rapid test for the coronavirus may be nearly as effective as the slower, more complex polymerase chain reaction test for identifying people who may spread the coronavirus, a novel experiment has found. The study, conducted by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, is among the first head to head comparisons of a rapid test and the P.C.R. diagnostic tool under real world conditions. But the number of participants was comparatively small, and the data have not been peer reviewed or published. A rapid test still cannot conclusively determine that an individual is not infected; the tests are intended primarily to detect the presence of high levels of the virus, rather than its absence, and are authorized only to evaluate symptomatic people. At the moment, anyone who has been exposed to the virus should be tested by P.C.R., said Joseph DeRisi, an infectious disease expert at U.C.S.F. and a co leader of the project. The new test, Abbott's BinaxNOW, offers results in 15 minutes, compared with the days or weeks people may have to wait for a P.C.R. result. The Trump administration already has purchased 150 million BinaxNOW tests and plans to ship them to states for use in schools, nursing homes and meatpacking plants. The tests could also be used to screen people in communities where time, trust and resources are in short supply. The study assessed the BinaxNOW in one such community, a largely Latino neighborhood in San Francisco. On three mornings in late September, as commuters emerged from a BART train station in the Mission District, they were offered two nasal swabs: one for a P.C.R. test, the other for the rapid test with a simple readout. The commuters received only the P.C.R. result, by text, but the researchers compared both tests. Of the 878 people who took the tests at the train station, only 26 tested positive on the researchers' P.C.R. BinaxNOW identified only 15 of them. But many experts have argued that the P.C.R. test is too sensitive, picking up fragments of the coronavirus lingering in the body long after people have recovered and are no longer infectious. A study by the company Becton Dickinson recently showed that rapid tests correlated better with live virus than P.C.R. But when they only considered P.C.R. results that corresponded to high viral loads, the researchers found that the BinaxNOW test detected 15 of the 16 people who were most likely to transmit the virus. "This card will do pretty well at detecting the most infectious people, the people who are actually spreading virus," Dr. DeRisi said, referring to the BinaxNOW. "On the whole, I'm pretty encouraged and very optimistic." Dr. Yuka Manabe, an expert in infectious disease diagnostics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, "It's a very nice illustration of how an antigen test could be used in real life and might find those patients who are most likely to transmit disease." A study in April by the same team showed that 11 percent of Latino participants at another train station tested positive for the virus when P.C.R. was used, compared with 2.6 percent in the city over all. About 90 percent of people who tested positive in that study were essential workers, and 88 percent made under 55,000 a year, said Jon Jacobo, chair of the health committee for the Latino Task Force. Undocumented community members may also not have access to sick pay or to state and federal benefits, he said. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. The task force worked with the researchers to design the study and make it financially possible for those who tested positive to isolate. The organization offered two weeks of groceries to those with positive tests, and a community wellness team delivered other necessities. Beginning July 1, the city guaranteed two weeks of minimum wage, or 1,285, to anyone who should isolate but could not afford to do so. "The important thing is to always, truly, have a partnership with community," Mr. Jacobo said. The project benefited from the researchers' experience conducting H.I.V. studies in sub Saharan Africa. "Working in rural areas in Africa is all about talking with the community and asking the question, 'What works for you?'" said Dr. Diane Havlir, an infectious disease expert at U.C.S.F. who led the project. In this case, she said, the community expressed interest in flu vaccination, so the team worked with Walgreens to offer free vaccines at the test site. Dr. Havlir and other experts acknowledged that BinaxNOW had limitations. Simple as the test may be, it should be used only by people who are trained to interpret the results, cautioned Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The tests are "supposed to be administered by a health care professional, but occasionally that gets interpreted as, 'as long as a doctor signs off,'" she said. Nearly half of those with the high levels of virus did not have symptoms, the U.C.S.F. researchers found. The number was similar in the group who tested positive by P.C.R. That result suggests that "whether you have a high viral load or low viral load doesn't really matter you can still equally be asymptomatic" said Dr. K.J. Seung, chief of strategy and policy for Covid 19 response in Massachusetts. Most coronavirus tests, including various P.C.R. versions, have not been independently tested or compared against alternatives. In September, the Food and Drug Administration released results of one effort to assess the tests' sensitivity. The analysis was imperfect, but it offered some insight into the tests' sensitivity, experts said. The F.D.A. panel looked for the tests' ability to detect the virus in a series of dilutions, as a rough proxy for their sensitivity. The P.C.R. test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranked somewhere in the middle. Another rapid test by Abbott, called ID Now, is near the bottom. "What's been difficult as a lab director is that when you look at one package insert compared to the other, the manufacturers weren't consistent about how they assess their limits of detection," said Dr. Susan Butler Wu, director of clinical microbiology at the University of Southern California. "So I find this very helpful." In Guinea, during the Ebola outbreak of 2014, most people who were infected experienced fever, diarrhea and body aches symptoms of any number of pathogens that circulate in Africa. "We could not scale P.C.R. to screen the thousands of people who have those symptoms every single day in West Africa," recalled Dr. Ranu Dhillon, an epidemic response expert at Brigham Women's Hospital in Boston. A rapid test in development was stymied by F.D.A. regulations and by concerns about false positives, he said, and was never deployed. A study in the journal Nature later estimated that rapid screening could have reduced the scale of the Ebola epidemic by one third.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
SAN FRANCISCO There were 218 communities whose proposals did not reach the second round in Amazon's well publicized search for its second headquarters. For those ambitious but unlucky folks, there were no "thanks for entering" gift baskets or any consolation prizes. Tom Hall, town manager of Scarborough, Me., had just returned from a meeting about the clam harvest when he heard the bad news from a reporter. He took it philosophically. The town's proposal to convert a 500 acre harness racing track in the center of Scarborough was, he knew, "the longest of long shots." In Oklahoma, there were more regrets. "I'm certainly disappointed," said Scott Phillips, who ran a development team called Day 1 that promoted a proposal to build an entirely new 50 square mile city for Amazon between Oklahoma City and Tulsa, equidistant from each. For the cities that were not one of Amazon's 20 finalists, that D word kept coming up. Jim Watson, the mayor of Ottawa, said he was "disappointed" twice in a brief interview, adding that the whole process was "great publicity" for Amazon. "This news is certainly disappointing," the team that promoted Buffalo and Rochester said in a statement. "Very disappointed," said the Bay Area Council, which had submitted a bid on behalf of San Francisco and four neighboring cities. Amazon's obsessive desire to please its customers has created a fearsome retail juggernaut and made its founder, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world. This sense of disappointment in the company, however transient it may prove, is something new. Yet it was perhaps inevitable after the way Amazon turned its search for a second headquarters, which it announced in a blaze of publicity in September, into such a beauty contest. Even with unemployment low, the stock market booming and the economy chugging along, the prospect of landing as many as 50,000 high paying jobs from Amazon aroused the excitement of politicians everywhere. "When they rolled this idea out, the narrow description they used really only defined about 30 cities," said Mr. Phillips of Day 1, referring to how Amazon had said it was looking for a metropolitan area in North America with at least a million people, among other criteria. "Maybe they truly thought only 30 cities would apply. The fact that 238 did probably caught them off guard." Scarborough, for instance, was probably not on Amazon's radar. It is on the Northeast coast, just south of Portland, and has a population of about 20,000. The simplicity of the application process, which involved answering nine questions, providing data and touting the city, "encouraged us and several hundred others who did not have a viable chance to make the strongest possible argument why it should be us," said Mr. Hall, the town manager. "There's value in thinking and articulating that." Another factor at play: the sense that Amazon was determined to achieve dominance, so why not join up? Mr. Hall said he had received "no word whatsoever" from Amazon about the fate of his application. An Amazon spokesman said, "All the cities received direct communication from Amazon, including many personal phone calls." (Late Thursday, the Scarborough team finally received an email from the company.) Many of the other also rans did not want to talk. Jason Lary, the mayor of Stonecrest, Ga., who had offered to create a town named Amazon and make Mr. Bezos "the mayor, C.E.O., king, whatever they want to call it," did not return calls. A spokeswoman for Tucson, which had also applied, said, "We are in an all day off site meeting," adding that she could not be interviewed. The letdown followed a rush of antics by cities across North America to entice the retailer with tax breaks and publicity stunts. Business leaders in Tucson had tried to mail Amazon a 21 foot cactus, which the company declined. The mayor of Washington posted a video of herself asking her Amazon Alexa where the headquarters should go. (The answer was of course Washington.) Business school students in Philadelphia had a new homework assignment: Write to Amazon asking it to come. Mayors flew out to Seattle to wander the corporate campus. The biggest winner in all this, of course, was Amazon. The search has led to feel good stories in local papers around the country, a coup for Amazon's public relations machine when many are wary of Mr. Bezos' growing wealth and power. For Art Rolnick, an economist at the University of Minnesota, the selection process which will continue for months is "reality show" theatrics and should not be celebrated, he said. "From a local point of view, it looks like job creation in your community," Mr. Rolnick added. "From a national perspective, it makes no sense." Some elected officials said the reality show spectacle was an improvement on the way business is usually done. "It was like 'The Apprentice,'" the show about hiring and firing that President Trump starred in, said Tulsa's mayor, G. T. Bynum. "I loved the process. Amazon, to their credit, made it a public and transparent one. Nine out of 10 times, when we have corporate relocation interest, we have to sign so many nondisclosure agreements we don't even know what company is interested." Not all the applicants felt the process was transparent. Amazon released the total number of proposals but not where they were from, which caused some latter day confusion. Mr. Phillips of Day 1 said he had gotten a receipt from Federal Express for delivering his proposal in October and never heard from Amazon after that. One possibility: the company did not take some applications particularly seriously. An Amazon spokesman declined to clarify this point. However clumsy the process, Amazon might have unleashed something. Apple, which has been criticized for doing most of its production in China, announced this week that it would open a new domestic campus. (Apple did not mention a location.) Taking advantage of the new Republican tax plan, which allows a one time repatriation of cash, Apple signaled it would bring back most of the 252 billion in cash that it held abroad and add 20,000 new jobs in the United States. "Second headquarters are the thing of the future the companies are getting too big for a single market," said Jeff Cheney, the mayor of Frisco, Tex., a city near Dallas that had a losing bid for Amazon's second headquarters. Beyond any sense of disappointment among the losers, then, was a feeling of expectation. "If Amazon is not willing to swing for the fences in Oklahoma and build a city, maybe Alibaba" the Chinese internet retailer "is willing," said Mr. Phillips. His efforts to build a corporate city, he said, will continue. There is, however, the problem of the name. "Day 1" is a pet expression of Mr. Bezos, symbolizing how his company's opportunities are always right in front of it. "We'll probably look for a better brand," Mr. Phillips said, and then reconsidered. "If someone wants to take on Amazon, maybe keeping it 'Day 1' will offer the added ability to mess with Bezos' head a little."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The point of drag, says RuPaul, an expert on the subject, is "to remind culture to not take itself seriously." Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, a sassy all male drag troupe (Trocks, for short), has applied this ethos to the prim world of ballet for more than 40 years. After the company's debut in 1974, critics applauded its smart satire of ballerinas and inherent commentary on the performance of femininity. But hidden in all that jest is great reverence for the art form and its history, and audiences keep coming back when else can you laugh at the ballet? The Trocks will hold court at the Joyce for nearly three weeks, beginning Tuesday, Dec. 13, presenting two programs that celebrate and skewer classics from the ballet canon, including "Swan Lake," "Giselle" and "Paquita." New to New York is the "Pas de Six" variation from "Napoli" by the 19th century Danish dance titan August Bournonville, a choreographer seen too rarely here. Expect sturdy technique (the men dance confidently on pointe) and cheeky wit. It's silly, sophisticated subversion. (Through Dec. 31; joyce.org.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
President Trump on Wednesday repeated a pledge to make it easier for people to sue news organizations and publishers for defamation, denouncing the country's libel laws as a "sham" a day after his personal lawyer filed a lawsuit against a major media outlet, BuzzFeed News. The salvo from Mr. Trump, who has long expressed hostility toward traditional press freedoms, followed a days long effort by him and his team to undercut the unflattering portrayal of the White House in a new book by the writer Michael Wolff. "We are going to take a strong look at our country's libel laws, so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts," Mr. Trump said during a public portion of a cabinet meeting in the White House. The president added, "Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace and do not represent American values or American fairness." First Amendment lawyers were quick to point out that Mr. Trump has little power to modify those laws, barring a Supreme Court appeal or constitutional amendment. Other libel laws are determined at the state level, where Mr. Trump, as president, has no direct influence. "President Trump's threat to revise our country's libel laws is, frankly, not credible," the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement on Wednesday. Mr. Trump's remarks reflected a broader frustration in his inner circle over critical coverage in recent days that has cast him as an erratic and ill prepared commander in chief. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, filed a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed News for publishing, last January, a salacious and mostly unsubstantiated intelligence dossier that purported to describe how Russia had aided the Trump campaign. The dossier characterized Mr. Cohen as a central figure in what it described as a globe spanning conspiracy. Mr. Cohen also filed a separate suit in federal court against Fusion GPS, the research firm that prepared the dossier. Fusion GPS and BuzzFeed both said they would aggressively defend themselves against the suits. Last week, a lawyer working on Mr. Trump's behalf, Charles J. Harder of Harder Mirell Abrams in Beverly Hills, Calif., sent an 11 page cease and desist letter to the publisher of Mr. Wolff's book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Mr. Harder's letter demanded that the publisher, Henry Holt and Company, withdraw the book from stores and apologize; the publisher responded by moving up the book's release date and increasing its first print run to one million copies, from 150,000. Mr. Trump's remarks on Wednesday about libel law seemed, at times, to refer obliquely to the book, which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times nonfiction best seller list, and has provided fodder for dozens of news articles, opinion pieces and cable news segments. "We want fairness," the president said. "Can't say things that are false, knowingly false, and be able to smile as money pours into your bank account. We are going to take a very, very strong look at that, and I think what the American people want to see is fairness." As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump made sport of the reporters who stood in fenced off areas during his speeches, often whipping up the crowd against them. He also said on the campaign trail that he would "open up" the country's libel laws although he later backed off that pledge in an interview with editors and writers at The Times, joking that he personally might be in trouble if the laws were loosened. "Somebody said to me on that, they said, 'You know, it's a great idea softening up those laws, but you may get sued a lot more,'" Mr. Trump, who propagated false rumors that Barack Obama was born in Africa and that the father of Senator Ted Cruz had aided the assassination of John F. Kennedy, said at the time. Mr. Trump is no stranger to defamation claims, having filed several of them himself, without success. In 2009, a New Jersey judge dismissed a 5 billion suit brought by Mr. Trump against a biographer, Timothy L. O'Brien; Mr. Trump had claimed that Mr. O'Brien understated his personal wealth. The president's comments about the news media on Wednesday also extended to one of his favorite punching bags: network news. He taunted the television reporters in the room, saying they were dependent on his activities for ratings. "If Trump doesn't win in three years, they're all out of business," the president said. "You're all out of business." He also claimed that network anchors had sent him "letters of congratulations" on Tuesday about a meeting with lawmakers that was broadcast on television that day. "A lot of those anchors sent us letters saying that was one of the greatest meetings they've ever witnessed," Mr. Trump said, adding that he had received "about two hours" of positive coverage from news networks, "and then they went a little bit south on us." (White House aides said later that the "letters" in question referred to complimentary tweets from journalists.) "They probably wish they didn't send us those letter of congratulations, but it was good," Mr. Trump added. "I'm sure their ratings were fantastic."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The Grammy Awards will expand the number of nominees in its top categories from five to eight, a move that may help increase gender diversity after the awards were sharply criticized this year for their lack of recognition for women artists. The change, announced Tuesday, will affect the four most prestigious categories: album, record and song of the year, and best new artist. (Record of the year recognizes a single recording, while the song prize is for songwriters.) The new rule will go into effect immediately, with members voting on nominations this fall for the 61st annual show next year. "This change will better reflect the large number of entries in these categories and allow voters greater flexibility when selecting this year's best recordings," the Recording Academy, the organization behind the awards, said in a note to its members. The revision comes after a rough season for the Grammys, when both the show and the management of the academy came under fire. At this year's ceremony, in January, the sole woman nominated for album of the year Lorde did not have a solo performance spot, and just one woman was given a solo award in one of the handful of televised categories (Alessia Cara, for best new artist).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Pilgrims at the mountaintop basilica that holds the shrine of Our Lady of the Cabeza in the Spanish province of Jaen. Held in April, it is considered the oldest romeria or religious pilgrimage in Spain. For someone who is not remotely religious, the moment was almost surreal. Standing by a hillside stream in the Sierra Morena mountains of southern Spain, I was face to face with the wife of the mayor of a nearby town, and she was baptizing me. She scooped water into her hand, asked me to lean over and dribbled it into my hair. "With this water we baptize you in the Stream of the Rooster, witness to your first journey," the woman, Cabe Tebar Gil, said with a smile. Then, draping a small medallion on a ribbon around my neck, she declared me a pilgrim. With that, she kissed me on both cheeks and sent me on my way, with applause from the gathered crowd. Although raised as a Roman Catholic, in Spain's Basque Country, I had long since abandoned any connection to the church. And yet I did not need much persuading when a friend suggested that I join him for a trek alongside thousands of other people to the mountaintop basilica that holds the shrine of Our Lady of the Cabeza. Some 20 miles north of Andujar in the province of Jaen, the site was where, in 1227, the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a shepherd and healed his afflictions. Peregrinations to the site began shortly thereafter and have been an annual event since the beginning of the 16th century, interrupted only by the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Always held on the last weekend in April, it is considered the oldest romeria or religious pilgrimage in Spain, a country that takes its holy holidays seriously even as the influence of the Catholic Church wanes. That same evening, my friend Francisco Senra everyone calls him Fran and I walked for blocks in Andujar through an enormous street fair, an event that always precedes the romeria. People had set up elaborate picnics on tables, rows and rows of them, and offered friends and strangers whatever they had. Toasts rang through the air, and, at the slightest provocation, regal, beautifully attired flamenco dancers broke out in the middle of the street into Sevillanas and other dance steps emblematic of Andalusia, the region of southern Spain that encompasses Jaen and seven other provinces. Mixed with the sounds of strumming guitars and palmas the rhythmic clapping of flamenco was the clopping of hooves. The horses were in festive finery and obedient to every subtle command from perfect posture riders whose stiff brimmed Cordobes hats complemented their high waisted paseo trousers, short jackets chaquetillas camperas and tall leather boots. During the street fair, Fran introduced me to everyone he knew, and to some he didn't, and we were plied with refreshments, including wine, beer, and gin and tonics, and tapas. This went on for hours. "You don't sleep during the romeria," said Jose Parrado, the owner of Los Naranjos, a bar and restaurant on Calle Guadalupe, who has done the pilgrimage for almost all of his 60 years. "Maybe you can rest your brain a little. Maybe." Despite my bilingualism, an American like me was a bit of an oddity in the streets of Andujar, since most visitors to the region the ones with no interest in religious pilgrimages tend to flock to more glamorous places like Granada, Seville and the Costa del Sol. But I soon learned that Andujar and its surrounding area are studded with enticements for the curious. There are medieval Moorish castles, Neolithic cave paintings in red hues, deep gorges with cascading rivers, wild orchids and ancient oak trees. Vast stretches of mountainous forest include Spain's largest protected wilderness named after the town of Cazorla, which traces its history back 2,000 years as well as the Sierra de Andujar Natural Park, where the basilica of Our Lady of the Cabeza sits atop a commanding peak. The area is home to wildlife like the endangered Iberian lynx, wolves and Spanish Imperial eagles. The province is said to produce more olive oil than all of Greece and has been in the business of fine ceramics since Roman times, when the delicate wares were exported throughout the empire. Two of Jaen's most imposing cities, Baeza and Ubeda, filled with Renaissance palaces and churches, were declared World Heritage sites by Unesco in 2003. In the 19th century, I was told, the densely wooded Sierra Morena range, more than 300 miles in length from east to west, was known for the bandits who trawled for spoils among mail and gold wagons en route to the southern cities from Madrid, sharing their plunder, like Robin Hood, with the poor. The range has areas so remote that a 7 year old boy, Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja, was said to have been lost there in the early 1950s after the death of his caretaker and was not found until 12 years later, living with wolves, dressed in animal skins and communicating in howls. Antonio F. Agenjo Fernandez, one of Andujar's historians, insists on the truth of the story, which has been told in two documentaries, a play by the British playwright Kevin Lewis and in newspaper articles and television news programs that have featured Mr. Rodriguez's halting accounts of his early life in the hills. But the war did not spare the ancient effigy of Our Lady of the Cabeza, whose 16th century mountaintop sanctuary was reduced to rubble in 1936 when Republican forces lay siege to Franco loyalists who had taken refuge there. It was subsequently rebuilt, and a new effigy was created in 1944. The small wooden figure, wearing a crown, clad in resplendent vestments and holding a representation of the baby Jesus, is venerated as a saint she was canonized by Pope Pius X in 1909 and is considered by many pilgrims to be capable of healing the sick and performing other miracles. "For those who venerate this Virgin, she's the only one there is; she's the mother of God," said Manuel Andres Jimenez Crespo, an architect who lives in Andujar. "The others don't count. For the devout, they have to believe that." Like several other devotees of the Virgin, Antonio Baron Martin, a 71 year old retired agricultural fieldworker, imbued the statue with anthropomorphic qualities. "She's got to have something that calls us to go to her," he said after having just walked almost 30 miles to Andujar from Canete de las Torres, a town in the adjoining province of Cordoba. Accompanied by 55 of his fellow townspeople, he also planned to walk the remaining 20 miles to the sanctuary, 2,250 feet above sea level. "The Virgin helps us so that we can climb the mountain," he said, noting that he had made the trek for 18 consecutive years "because of the passion I have for her." As we headed into the hills, Araceli Gonzalez Rubia, a former leader of the Cofradia Matriz de la Virgen de la Cabeza, the organizing entity of the pilgrimage, struck a similar note. "We pray for those who don't know how to, and when we get to the top, we thank her," she said. "And when we have to go, we become sad because we have to leave her behind. I even see her as sad." As Ms. Gonzalez Rubia spoke, thousands of people around us I met travelers from Brazil, Panama and all over Spain were making their way along winding, forested roads and dirt paths on foot, on horseback, in cars and aboard long wagons pulled by tractors and filled with noisy, merry pilgrims. Hundreds of horsewomen, in full festive regalia, rode sidesaddle in specially constructed wooden armchairs known as jamugas, a tradition since the 16th century. Having reached my assigned wagon, I joined a party in progress, with a dance floor in the middle, flamenco music blaring from speakers and drinks on ice. There were at least 15 people aboard, most of them in their 20s and dancing with abandon as the wagon rattled up the mountain path. "Anyone who tells you they're here only to express their devotion, they're not being truthful," said Miguel Cano Villar, the owner of the wagon and of a restaurant in Andujar called El Puchero. "Yes, there are some, but look at these kids. They're here to have a good time. Although there are people who go up the mountain on their knees because, perhaps, they have a sick child and they believe he'll be cured." Once we got to the top of the mountain, it became clear how vast the crowd was, as many as half a million, according to the local police department. A huge tent city housed most of the pilgrims, near a village in which many of the houses, bedecked with flags and banners, were built expressly by fraternal organizations connected to the romeria. My friends and I spent the night in one of those houses, eight to a room, in bunks. The following morning, an open air Mass next to the sanctuary preceded what I had been told would be the most dramatic moment of the weekend: a procession through the village by the effigy of Our Lady of the Cabeza, carried aloft on an elaborate platform by dozens of heaving men. As the cortege slowly wound its way through the streets amid the milling throngs, pilgrims passed their babies to a pair of priests riding on the platform to have the infants blessed by the Virgin. Disabled people in wheelchairs were lifted too, their hands reaching out to the passing holy figure proximity as palliative. At one point, I noticed a woman watching the procession with tears running down her face. She was praying. "I asked the Virgin to give me faith so that I can have hope, so that I can start again," said Victoria Borde, a 38 year old hairdresser from La Guardia de Jaen, about 50 miles southeast of Andujar. "Sometimes bad things happen and you lose faith, even though I know that strength and belief is something we have inside."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Dr. William Frankland, one of the top allergists of the 20th century and an indomitable researcher who helped legions of hay fever sneezers by distributing daily pollen counts to the British public, died on Thursday in London at 108. His son, Andrew, said the cause was the coronavirus. He lived in a care home at the historic Charterhouse complex, a former monastery in London. Dr. Frankland, who was among the world's oldest active scientists, remained remarkably vigorous to the end, despite having come close to death several times in his long life. He was born prematurely, weighing just over three pounds, and he contracted bovine tuberculosis as a child. Later, while serving in the British Army, he spent years as a malnourished prisoner of war in Japanese camps. He had another brush with death when he used himself as an experiment on a biting insect and had an anaphylaxis reaction. Dr. Frankland was best known in professional circles for a number of groundbreaking clinical studies. In 1954, he proved that pollen proteins were the parts of plants most useful in preseason allergy inoculations, and in 1955 he debunked the efficacy of treating asthma with bacterial vaccines. He was an early proponent of using allergen injections to desensitize patients with severe allergies, and developed immunotherapy serums for hay fever sufferers with pollen from one of the world's largest pollen farms, which he operated outside London until the late 1960s. It was while investigating desensitization to insect bites that Dr. Frankland allowed the South American insect Rhodnius prolixus to bite his arm at weekly intervals. The eighth bite sent him into life threatening anaphylaxis, from which a nurse revived him with repeated shots of adrenaline. Among the tens of thousands of patients that Dr. Frankland treated was the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who summoned the doctor to Baghdad in 1979. Dr. Frankland found that Mr. Hussein had no allergies but was suffering from the effects of excessive smoking, consuming as many as 40 cigarettes a day. "I advised him to stop smoking," Dr. Frankland told the medical journal The BMJ. "Three and a half months later he was dramatically better, and because he was so grateful, I was invited back to Baghdad with my family to have lunch with him." Dr. Frankland's research included rare cases. One involved a patient who suspected that she was allergic to her partner's semen. She reported, however, that she had no allergic reaction from sexual encounters with other men, in effect providing Dr. Frankland with data from a control group, as is often done in scientific experiments. But she advised him, "Those controls were not done for your benefit, only mine." Alfred William Frankland was born in Sussex, England, on March 19, 1912, one of twin boys of Henry and Alice Rose (West) Frankland. His mother was a musician. His father, a vicar in the Church of England, moved the family to Britain's Lake District, where the boys grew up surrounded by farms. It was there that William discovered that he suffered from hay fever. He attended St. Bees School in West Cumberland before studying medicine at Queen's College, Oxford, and St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, now part of Imperial College London. After finishing his studies, he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps three days before the outbreak of World War II, anticipating that doctors would be needed. He was later sent to Singapore, where he arrived just days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By chance Dr. Frankland was sent to work in Tanglin Military Hospital in Singapore rather than the newly opened Alexandra Military Hospital there thus eluding almost certain death. The Alexandra hospital was soon overrun by Japanese troops, who massacred the doctors, nurses and patients there. It was one of several times that luck kept him alive. Dr. Frankland was taken prisoner on Feb. 15, 1942, and spent the remainder of the war in Japanese prison camps, underfed and overworked, treating the other men. On his return to Britain, he took a post at St. Mary's, where he worked with Alexander Fleming, who won the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of penicillin. The mold that had contaminated Dr. Fleming's Petri dishes decades earlier and led to the development of modern antibiotics had come, in fact, from the allergy department, which was directly below Dr. Fleming's laboratory. Dr. Frankland correctly predicted that some patients would be allergic to the new wonder drug. Dr. Frankland had a pollen trap installed on the roof of St. Mary's and began distributing daily pollen counts to the British news media in the early 1960s. He was one of the first allergists to do so. Pollen counts are now a staple of weather reports around the world. Dr. Frankland published more than a hundred articles and academic papers on allergies, including four that he wrote after turning 100. Among his many honors, he was named a member of the Order of the British Empire in 2015. In addition to his son, he is survived by his three daughters, Penelope Culverhouse, Jenifer Woodhouse and Hilary Crew; 10 grandchildren and six great grandchildren. Before entering Charterhouse, Dr. Frankland had lived alone in a Central London apartment that he had shared with his wife, Pauline (Jackson) Frankland, until her death in 2002. He cooked his own meals and, though he used a walking stick, followed a routine of daily exercises into his 100s. Given his brushes with death, he was frequently asked what the secret of his longevity was. He would reply simply, "Luck."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
"THIS tradition is finita," says Luciano Barbera, as he opens the door to an underground warehouse. Dozens of large wooden boxes are stacked to the ceiling, containing nearly 80 tons of colorful thread, wound in spools and idling like sunbathers at a beach, absorbing moisture in a cavernous room kept naturally cool and humid by a creek that burbles under the floor. "I call it a spa for yarn," explains Mr. Barbera, a lean and regal 72 year old, who is dressed in a style that could be described as aristo casual: white linen button down shirt, brown herringbone pants and brown leather shoes. He is giving a quick tour of the Carlo Barbera mill, named for his 99 year old father, and destined to be run by two or three of Luciano's sons. Mr. Barbera calls wool a living fiber, and he does not mean this metaphorically. After yarn is dyed here, it rests in the spa for as long as six months, recuperating until 20 percent of its weight is water. Then the material undergoes a 15 step process, which Mr. Barbera will not detail, other than to magisterially summarize it as "the nobilization of the fabric." Any shortcuts, he says, would harm the fabric's "performance." "Yes, performance," he says in an accent both purring and professorial. "If your suit is not performing well, it's like being in a car where you can feel every little bump in the road. If a suit is performing well, it's as though you drive right over the bumps and you feel nothing." As insiders of the fashion world will confirm, the bolts of wool and cashmere produced at this mill can indeed be described as high performance, among the finest in the world, sold to dozens of luxury brands like Armani, Zegna and Ralph Lauren. The financial performance of the mill that creates this fabric, on the other hand, is far from stellar. Like much of the Italian economy, the Carlo Barbera factory is struggling and for reasons, according to academics, that say just about everything you need to know about what ails Italy. Since the economic crisis began, this country has regularly turned up on the informal list of Nations That Worry Europe. While its finances are not as precarious as those of Greece, Portugal or Ireland, because it is far larger the Italian economy is the seventh largest in the world its troubles are more frightening. As a recent report by UniCredit, a European banking group, put it, Italy is "the swing factor" in the crisis, "the largest of the vulnerable countries, and most vulnerable of the large." Study the numbers and you will find symptoms of distress that look a lot like those of Greece. Public sector debt amounts to roughly 118 percent of the gross domestic product, nearly identical to Greece. And like Greece, Italy is trying to ease fears in the euro zone and elsewhere with an austerity package, one intended to cut the deficit in half, to 2.7 percent of G.D.P., by 2012. But dig a little deeper and the similarities end. The Italians, unlike the Greeks, are born savers, and much of the Italian debt is owned by the Italians. That means that unlike Greece, which will be sending a sizable percentage of its G.D.P. to foreign creditors for a generation to come, Italy is basically in hock to its own citizens. "I know that in the States, all Mediterranean countries get lumped together," says Carlo Altomonte, an economist with Bocconi University in Milan. "But Italy's problem isn't that we have a lot of debt. It's that we don't grow." Like Italy, Mr. Barbera has debt woes he owes his creditors roughly 5.8 million and says that if his country's financial system offered the protections of Chapter 11 style bankruptcy, he would have sought it several years ago. But he could also solve his debt problem if more orders were coming in. Instead, orders are drying up. The Barberas have long been small, niche players, the family that high end designers turn to when assembling their most fabulous collections. And since 1971, Luciano Barbera has also sold clothing under his own name, made with his own fabric. Today the line is sold in stores like Barney's and Neiman Marcus, handmade suits that sell for 4,000 and a line of upmarket women's wear, some of which you can see on Angelina Jolie in the recent film "Salt." But sales for Luciano Barbera clothing and Carlo Barbera fabric have drastically slowed in recent years. In the late '90s, the mill enjoyed record annual sales of what amounts to about 15.5 million, Mr. Barbera says. Last year, the figure was half that sum. WHEN describing the ills of his businesses, Mr. Barbera tends to focus on one issue: the "Made in Italy" label. For the last decade, he says, a growing number of clothing designers have been buying cheaper fabric in China, Bulgaria and elsewhere and slapping "Made in Italy" on garments, even if those garments are merely sewn here. Until recently, there weren't any rules about what "Made in Italy" actually meant, but that will change when a new law goes into effect in October. It states that if at least two stages of production there are four stages altogether occur in Italy, a garment is made in Italy. To Mr. Barbera, this is an outrage, though somehow the word "outrage" doesn't quite capture the depth of his feelings. He says the law will wreck the national brand, which has long been built on the skill of its craftspeople. In op ed articles and an assortment of meetings, he has crusaded against the law, clashing with a nemesis with a familiar last name: Santo Versace, the chairman of the Versace house of fashion. Mr. Versace is also a member of Italy's Parliament and a co sponsor of what is officially called the Reguzzoni Versace Law. "It's a truffa," says Mr. Barbera one recent afternoon, using the Italian word for scam. "And I am fighting with all my strength to make people understand that this country is destroying itself in order to advance the interests of just a few people who are unfortunately members of the most powerful caste of this country." But labeling is just one of many obstacles standing between Mr. Barbera and profitability. To understand why his factory, and so much of Italy, is stagnant or worse, requires a bit of geopolitical history and a look at the highly idiosyncratic business culture here. It is defined, to a large degree, by deep seated mistrust not just of the government, but of anyone who isn't part of the immediate family as well as a widespread aversion to risk and to growth that to American eyes looks almost quaint. He brought home know how in textile engineering as well as admiration for British finery, to which he added a flair for color and pattern and which he has turned into a personal trademark. A fashion director at Neiman Marcus once called Mr. Barbera "the most elegant man in the world." It is not uncommon for strangers to introduce themselves and ask, "How can I look like you?" "I don't want to generate people who all look the same," he says, sitting in his office one recent afternoon. "I am a soloist. You can be a soloist and play in an orchestra." His career as a designer began, he says, almost by accident. In 1962, a photographer from Vogue snapped a photo of him in a suit made of fabric he had designed. (In the image, he is leaning against a fence, a cigar in hand, gazing at his horse, Edwan.) Several years later, a man named Murray Pearlstein, who owned LouisBoston, a menswear store, knocked at the Carlo Barbera factory, introduced himself to Luciano and told him that he wanted to sell his line of clothing to the American market. "I said: 'Mr. Pearlstein, I have no collection. I have only my own suits.' He said: 'You have talent. You should design your own collection.' " At roughly 41 euros a meter ( 48.75 a yard), the average price of the fabric that the Carlo Barbera factory produces today is almost double that of competitors in Biella, a town in the foothills of the Alps that has been renowned for centuries as a textiles hub. The problem is that fewer designers have been willing to pay this premium, and factories in other countries have been copying the Barberas' methods, with results that may not be as good but that cost a small fraction of the price. There's a demand side problem, too: the number of men buying bespoke suits has plunged in recent years, as the workplace becomes more casual. LouisBoston doesn't carry Luciano Barbera any longer. "At a certain point, he could have gone to China and opened factories there," says Mr. Pearlstein, who is now retired. "But mentally, I don't think there was any way he could do that because he has always been so committed to his hands on methods." Mr. Barbera says he has no qualms about globalization. In his opinion, Italy can't compete when it comes to low skill labor and shouldn't try. "But I say that Italy, with its 20 million workers, can be the boutique of the world," he says. That will never happen, he adds, if designers can buy fabric outside Italy and tag it "Made in Italy." While his vehemence on this subject is easy to understand, economists here say that Mr. Barbera's small empire would be teetering even if he could rewrite the "Made in Italy" law tomorrow. In a list of what is crushing Mr. Barbera's balance sheet, they say, the provenance of labels is not at the top. FIVE years ago, Francesco Giavazzi needed a taxi. Cabs are relatively scarce in Milan, especially at 5 a.m., when he wanted to head to the airport, so he called a company at 4:30 to schedule a pickup. But when he climbed into the cab half an hour later, he discovered that the meter had been running for more than 20 minutes, because the taxi driver had arrived soon after the call and started charging for his time. Allowed by the rules, but to Mr. Giavazzi, utterly unfair. "So it was 20 euros before we started the trip to the airport," recalls Mr. Giavazzi, who is an economics professor at Bocconi University. "I said, 'This is impossible.' " Professor Giavazzi later wrote an op ed article denouncing this episode as another example of the toll exacted by Italy's innumerable guilds, known by several names here, including "associazioni di categoria." (These are different from unions, another force here, in that guilds are made up of independent players in a trade or profession who have joined to keep outsiders out and maintain standards, as opposed to representing employees in negotiations with management, as a union might.) Even baby sitters have associations in Italy. The op ed did not endear Professor Giavazzi to the city's cab drivers. They pinned leaflets with his name and address at taxi stands around Milan and for the next five nights, cabs drove around his home, honking their horns. "This is a country with a lot of rents," says Professor Giavazzi, sitting in his office one recent afternoon, using the economists' term for excess profits that flow to a business because of a lack of competition. "You need a notary public, it's like 1,000 euros before you even open your mouth. If you're a notary public in this country, you live like a king." For Mr. Barbera, as is true with every entrepreneur here, the prevalence and power of Italy's guilds explains much of what is driving up costs. He says he must overspend for accountants, lawyers, truckers and other members of guilds on a list that goes on and on: "Everything has a tariff, and you have to pay." THE protectionist impulses of the guilds are mimicked throughout the Italian labor market. The rules are different for small companies, but in effect, people with a full time job in a company with more than 18 workers have what amounts to tenure, even if they don't belong to a union. This makes managers reluctant to hire, especially in a downturn. You are stuck with new employees in perpetuity, whether they're good or not. A sclerotic job market is a major reason that the Italian economy has been all but dormant for the past decade, growing far more slowly than its European peers. And this is a country that never had a housing bust or a major bank crisis. One answer is the black economy, say economists. Roughly one quarter of Italy's G.D.P. is off the books. When you inquire about the cause and persistence of this longstanding fact of life, people here say that most Italians have little sense of national identity, an obstacle to a system of national taxation. The country didn't really begin to transcend its clannish roots and regional dialects until after World War II; even today, displays of national pride are reserved for World Cup victories and little else. Italians, notes Professor Altomonte, are among the world's heaviest consumers of bottled water. "Do you know why? Because the water in the tap comes from the government." The suspicion of Italians when it comes to extra familial institutions explains why many here care more about protecting what they have than enhancing their wealth. Most Italians live less than a mile or two from their parents and stay there, often for financial benefits like cash and in kind services like day care. It's an insularity that runs all the way up to the corporate suites. The first goal of many entrepreneurs here isn't growth, so much as keeping the business in the family. For a company to really expand, it needs capital, but that means giving up at least some control. So thousands of companies here remain stubbornly small all of which means Italy is a haven for artisans but is in a lousy position to play the global domination game. "The prevailing management style in this country is built around loyalty, not performance," says Tito Boeri, scientific director at Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti, who has written about Italy's dynastic capitalism. In the eternal contest between the meticulously honed and the nationally franchised, Italy knows where it stands. As a matter of profit and loss, it doesn't make sense to store wool in a spa and let it convalesce for six months, but the methods of Luciano Barbera were never destined for a get rich quick guide to manufacturing. His business will make sense only to customers, and for them, quality has a logic of its own. And of course, the worship of growth has its limitations. The American economy is vastly more robust, but instead of family owned bakeries, which seem to dot every hectare of Italy, we've got Quiznos. And for all the efficiency and horsepower in Germany, no character in a movie has ever welled up and sighed, "We'll always have Stuttgart." Despite his cash flow woes, Mr. Barbera is sticking to his plan, even the plan to hand his business to his sons, which according to a national maxim is likely to end in tears. "We say in this country that the first generation builds, the second generation maintains and the third generation destroys," Mr. Barbera says. "But my father and I worked together, so I think we were the first generation. My sons are the second generation. So at least they will maintain." MR. Barbera can discuss all the quirks and pathologies of the Italian economy, but there is rarely more than five minutes between his monologues about "Made in Italy." He is reluctant to name the fashion houses he thinks are snookering consumers, in part because they are his customers, and in part because they are acting legally. "I'm criticizing the law," he says. "I am not criticizing the people who buy my fabric." One name he is happy to mention is Santo Versace, whose purchases his brand buys a "very small" amount of fabric, says Mr. Barbera are eclipsed by his role in pushing the new law. In a phone interview, Mr. Versace noted that there was no "Made in Italy" rule before the law he co wrote, which means his rule is a huge improvement on the free for all that had existed. Yes, his company makes less expensive products, like jeans, in countries like Croatia and Turkey, but he said every luxury brand does the same. "Never our top stuff," he said, through an interpreter. "All of that is made in Italy." He sounded skeptical about one of Mr. Barbera's ideas: a label that simply lays out the origins of a garment, stating where its fabric was made, where it was constructed, and so on. "You can't make a label too complicated," said Mr. Versace. "You need a simplified label. Otherwise you can't sell things." For now, Mr. Barbera is hoping that the European Commission will overturn the law, which it can do. Meanwhile, garments in the collection that bears his name are labeled "Entirely manufactured in Italy." Economists said that Mr. Barbera had a point, but they also said that worrying about this issue was like fretting about the head cold of a patient with Stage 3 cancer. They see a country with a service sector dominated by guilds, which don't just overcharge but also raise the barriers to entry for the millions in ill fated manufacturing jobs who might otherwise find work as, for instance, taxi drivers. They see a timid entrepreneur class. They see a political system in the thrall of the older voters who want to keep what they have, even if it dooms the nation to years of stasis. They see a society whose best and brightest are leaving and not being replaced by immigrants, because Italy has so little upward mobility to offer. To Professor Giavazzi, the future here doesn't look like Greece. It looks like Argentina. "Before World War II, Argentina was rich," he says. "Even in 1960, the country was twice as rich as Italy." Today, he says, you can compare the per capita income of Argentina to that of Romania. "Because it didn't grow. A country could get rich in 1900 just by producing corn and meat, but that is not true today. But it took them 100 years to realize they were becoming poor. And that is what worries me about Italy. We're not going to starve next week. We are just going to decline, slowly, slowly, and I'm not sure what will turn that around." Mr. Barbera is optimistic. He is working with a bank to allow him to pay off creditors. After lengthy negotiations with the government and workers' representatives, he has reduced his payroll to 90 employees from 120. Best of all, he says he thinks he has found a large group of new customers in an improbable place: China, where he has been talking to a number of distributors. Given that he has been undersold by the Chinese for years, it would be a surprising twist if Chinese consumers became fans of Mr. Barbera's fabric and his painstaking methods. "Water from the creek," he says, as we leave the yarn spa. "Listen. It is the sound of music." The sentiment seems so sincere and romantic that it sounds as if he could be kidding. But when the line elicits a laugh, Mr. Barbera's gentle rebuke makes it plain that he is not. "You know," he says, with a resilient smile, "it is a hard world for poets."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
For the choreographer Stephen Petronio, Bloodlines developed out of a reverence for what had come before him. The initiative, now in its fifth season, was a way to both preserve American postmodern dance and pay homage to his influences. It's accomplished more than that: It has breathed new life into his company. Bloodlines began in 2015 with Merce Cunningham's "RainForest." Now the Petronio dancers are at even greater ease with Cunningham repertory as seen in the company premiere of "Tread" (1970), its third Cunningham work, presented at N.Y.U. Skirball on Thursday. A playful dance, "Tread" has a set by Bruce Nauman: 10 tall industrial fans placed in a row across the front of the stage. They blow air out at the audience and at times obscure the dancers. It's funny. But another Bloodlines addition, also from 1970, was even more precious: Rudy Perez's "Coverage Revisited." At Judson Dance Theater, the 1960s experimental collective, Mr. Perez was a rarity: an artist of color. In "Coverage," Mr. Perez focuses on fluctuating states of conformity and nonconformity with a dancer the lithe Ernesto Breton dressed as a construction worker in a white jumpsuit and a blue hard hat. Read about Rudy Perez and the revival of "Coverage" He tapes a square on the floor and removes his jumpsuit; now in shorts, he has the freedom to jump and run within the space. But it's a tiny space to pledge allegiance to; in the end, he rips the tape off the floor systematically and without emotion while the song "God Bless America" plays. Finally, he removes his hat, brings it down across his chest and pauses slightly over his heart; he isn't finished until it firmly rests over his crotch. The affecting "Coverage" is quiet and defiant at once. Mr. Petronio capped the program with a new work of his own, "American Landscapes," in which he questions what it means to be an American in 2019. It begins with a prelude: The movement therapist and dance educator Martha Eddy (in a blue jumpsuit) walks onto the stage with Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" (it's white); Mr. Petronio (in a red jumpsuit) soon follows. To the Chris Isaak song "Wicked Game," they lean on each other, an image of mutual give and take that returns later in the work. At another point, Ms. Eddy, alone, rushes toward the audience while extending her arms and curling them back with increasing speed. What starts out as a simple action shapes into an imploring one. When the dancers enter the space, the music switches to a spare, almost soothing composition by Jozef Van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch it's a combination of lute, acoustic guitar and electric guitar. "Landscapes" also features an arresting backdrop of changing images by the artist Robert Longo. In the foreground, dancers, sleekly costumed by H. Petal, etch geometric patterns onto the stage in front of numerous scenes: a barren forest, an exploding bomb, a soldier walking down a street, a torn flag. "Landscapes" seems to be in conversation with "Glacial Decoy," a luminous 1979 collaboration between Robert Rauschenberg and Trisha Brown that featured a slide show of photographs. (Mr. Petronio danced in Ms. Brown's company.) But "Landscapes" is also a work of Mr. Petronio's own design, full of his recognizable swoops and twists that both fight and fuel a body's momentum. Within this surging scene are fleeting moments in which the dancers quote aspects of American life and culture. There is Rosie the Riveter; after we see an image of a football player, two dancers take a knee. At times, it can feel obvious, but the meditative nature of the dance saves it from becoming too didactic. It also ends well. In the bristling conclusion, the dancers rush to the front of the stage echoing Ms. Eddy's swimming arms and then, just as suddenly, pivot while raising an arm in the air with a slightly wilted wrist. It could be the Statue of Liberty. She's hanging on, but just barely.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Wait, What's That Noise? Cicadas, the New Batch, to Sound Siren Song in 5 States After a 17 year wait to mate, expect a lot of noise from the next brood of cicadas, which will start to emerge next month in parts of five states. Western Maryland, eastern Ohio, southwestern Pennsylvania, northwestern Virginia and most of West Virginia are expected to see the ascension of the so called Brood V. There are six species of periodical cicada, three with a 17 year cycle and three with a 13 year cycle. Periodical cicada populations called broods are identified by Roman numerals. "We think of them as the Methuselah of the insect world," said Gregory Hoover, an ornamental entomologist at Pennsylvania State University. This particular generation of insects last emerged in 1999 (a year filled with anxiety about a different kind of bug, the computer based Y2K). The periodical cicada is native to North America and exists nowhere else in the world, Mr. Hoover said. Researchers have been tracking the broods for more than 100 years. In the late 1800s, American entomologists created the first good maps of the insects' ranges. Relying on a form of crowdsourcing, they sent circulars to postmasters in the Eastern United States each year and recorded their responses. The insects are about one and a half inches long, with red eyes and orange veins in their wings. They are smaller than the dog day cicadas, which are usually heard in late summer. How do they make that buzz? The periodical cicadas the males in particular will be the noisiest. Individually, a cicada's song sounds like a tiny maraca shaken at high speed that then fades into a noise resembling an electric buzz. In a swarm, the cicada's high pitch hum can reach 85 decibels, or slightly louder than a passing diesel train. Males begin their singing shortly after they emerge, while the females are mostly silent, Mr. Hoover said. The sound comes from their tymbals, the corrugated exoskeleton on their torso that they contract and release. The insects cover their own hearing organs to avoid doing damage. As the website Cicada Mania noted: "A cicada applied directly to the ear (do not do that) gets in the range of a loud rock concert and ambulance siren, which will cause hearing damage. Again, do not put cicadas in or around your ears, and avoid seeing Metallica live in concert." How does this brood compare with others? There are many broods of periodical cicadas, with different geographic ranges and life cycles. In 2013, the arrival of Brood II was most evident in places like Staten Island and parts of the Hudson Valley. Brood V's population will number in the billions, but the distinction of "Big Brood" goes to Brood X, which saw cicadas in more than a dozen states in 2004, Mr. Hoover said. In general, development in forested areas that remove trees, which are the habitat for periodical cicadas, has drastically reduced their populations, he said. Although adult cicadas are harmless to people, they can cause some damage to shade and fruit trees, Mr. Hoover said. They can also cause a mess and discomfort for humans. In addition to the eerie noise cicadas emit, they leave behind casings that can coat decks and patios, prompting some homeowners in the past to get power washers to remove them. If you have a phobia about insects, this will be a time of high anxiety. Dog owners have discovered the undigested remnants of the insects from the upset stomachs of their pets. But for some other animals, such as birds and fish, the emergence of the periodical cicada means a bumper crop of food. Trout, bass and carp "will literally gorge themselves" on the adult insects, Mr. Hoover said. How do they know when to emerge? The lead up to cicadas' emergence is a prolonged, low key process. Cicada nymphs spend 17 years underground, where they "await an undetermined signal for emergence," Mr. Hoover said. A combination of soil temperatures reaching 64 degrees and light rain seems to trigger their ascension, he said. The nymphs climb trees and within an hour, they shed their skins and become adults. Ten days later, the mating begins. Each female lays up to 400 eggs in the twigs of more than 75 species of trees. Nymphs hatch in six to eight weeks and then drop to the soil for a period longer than four presidential administrations before they re emerge and the cycle continues.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Jimmy Kimmel tried to convince President Trump to end the partial government shutdown so that he can get back to golfing. Jimmy Kimmel Says the Shutdown Is Hurting Trump, Too: He Can't Golf 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. On Day 26 of the partial government shutdown, Jimmy Kimmel said he might have figured out a way to convince President Trump to abandon his course. He noticed that Trump hadn't played golf since before the shutdown began. (He last played on Nov. 25, the longest spell without a golf game in his presidency.) Kimmel presumes that Trump knows it would look bad for him to be out on the course instead of negotiating with Democrats to reopen the government. "I know it doesn't mean much to Donald Trump that a bunch of Americans are being forced to work without paychecks," Kimmel said. "But I know what does matter to you. I know what you care about down to the bottom of your Kentucky fried little heart. And that is golf." Kimmel suggested to the president that he give up on funding a border wall and simply reopen the government so he can hit the links again. "With one crazy zigzag stroke of your executive Sharpie, you could be back on the greens at Mar a Lago, faster than you can say 'Pocahontas.' You'll be right back out there eating club sandwiches and bossing caddies around with the boys. It's a win win, for us and for you. The federal employees can go back to work, you can get back to doing what you do best: cheating at golf. It's good for you, and it's good for America. We need you out on the golf course as much as possible to keep from you doing things! So think about it. Let's play our way out of the rough together." JIMMY KIMMEL Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, asked Trump on Wednesday to either delay or cancel his State of the Union address amid the shutdown. She suggested that he could submit his remarks in writing, rather than delivering them to Congress. Both Stephen Colbert and James Corden saw a problem with that idea. "Now, pointing out that until Woodrow Wilson was president, presidents didn't give the State of the Union in person, Pelosi gave Trump the option to deliver it in writing. Really? In writing? Have you seen how this guy spells? He's just going to tweet, 'The Stat of our Uniom is ... STRANG!'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Pelosi did say Trump can submit a written version of his speech, which is pretty strategic on her part. She's going right for his biggest handicap: spelling." JAMES CORDEN Chris Christie announced that he would release a memoir about his experiences in Trump's inner circle. The title is "Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey and the Power of In Your Face Politics." Colbert and Seth Meyers both had some fun with that. "Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is releasing a memoir later this month titled 'Let Me Finish.' Oh, you haven't seen your approval ratings lately? You're finished." SETH MEYERS "His book chronicles his time in Trump's inner circle, and it's called 'Let Me Finish.' And how dare you suggest that the original title was 'Are You Gonna Finish That?' Shame on you! Shame on you for thinking that!'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Netflix just announced they will be raising subscription prices by up to 2 a month. Yeah, I know, this is awful news for the person whose account you use." JAMES CORDEN "The federal government has been closed for 26 days, and experts say the shutdown could cause the economy to shrink. Then the president said, 'No, it's only shrinking cause it's cold outside.'" JIMMY FALLON "The C.E.O. of Delta said the shutdown has already cost the airline 25 million. He's not that worried, because they'll make it all back if two people pay to check their bags." JIMMY FALLON Baker Mayfield of the Cleveland Browns is a sensational young quarterback. But surely you've been wondering whether he's also good at identifying objects by nuzzling them. Fear not, here's your chance to find out.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
You can guess who that choreographer might have been. Mr. Thomson was in the company of Trisha Brown from 1979 to 1993, and in "mythical beast" he quotes (with attribution in the program notes) from her 1975 work "Locus." But identifying that source isn't the point, really. The particular history of Mr. Thomson as a minority in the largely white field of postmodern dance is allowed to resonate with larger questions of identity. When the fourth cast member, Jodi Bender, first speaks, her face is covered by a veil. Elsewhere in "mythical beast," the whiteness of her skin is sometimes impossible to ignore, as in a sequence when she repeatedly shoves Mr. Hamilton to the floor, puts him in a chokehold and drags him around, once by the ear. Yet even in this most on the nose part, it's equally important (and complicating) that Ms. Bender is much smaller than Mr. Hamilton, and female. Often, the dancers are divided by gender, with the two women speaking while the two men move, or vice versa. Formally, the most fascinating aspect of "mythical beast" is this interplay between dance and speech, two modes of communication that Mr. Thomson frequently presents as modes of conversation. Viewers seated on three sides of a long rectangle in one of Performance Space's two new theaters are confronted simultaneously with action in the foreground and the background or to the side. Dance and speech can coexist, the work demonstrates, but four people speaking at once is a muddle.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
PITTSBURGH In 2015, Monocle magazine, a favorite read of the global hipsterati, published an enthusiastic report on Lawrenceville, the former blue collar neighborhood here filled with cafes, hyped restaurants and brick rowhouses being renovated by flippers. Last year, in a much publicized development, Uber began testing self driving cars on the streets, putting this city at the forefront of the autonomous vehicle revolution. Also last year, in a less publicized development, Jean Yang, 30, returned to this city after more than a decade of living in Boston, finding a Pittsburgh she hardly recognized from her 1990s childhood. And four months ago, Caesar Wirth, a 28 year old software engineer, moved from Tokyo to work for a local tech start up, Duolingo. These seemingly unrelated events have one thing in common: Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. Much has been made of the "food boom" in Pittsburgh, and the city has long had a thriving arts scene. But perhaps the secret, underlying driver for both the economy and the cool factor the reason Pittsburgh now gets mentioned alongside Brooklyn and Portland, Ore., as an urban hot spot for millennials isn't chefs or artists but geeks. In a 2014 article in The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Mayor Bill Peduto compared Carnegie Mellon, along with the University of Pittsburgh, to the iron ore factories that made this city an industrial power in the 19th century. The schools are the local resource "churning out that talent" from which the city is fueled. The big tech firms, along with their highly skilled, highly paid workers, have made Pittsburgh younger and more international and helped to transform once derelict neighborhoods like Lawrenceville and East Liberty. Indeed, East Liberty has become something of a tech hub, said Luis von Ahn, the co founder and chief executive of Duolingo, a language learning platform company with its headquarters in that neighborhood. Google Pittsburgh, with its more than 500 employees, also has part of its offices in East Liberty, as does AlphaLab, a start up accelerator. Within easy walking distance from them is the Ace, a branch of the hip hotel chain that opened in 2015 in a former Y.M.C.A. building. The hotel's in house Whitfield restaurant and lobby bar have become hangouts for local techies and out of towners alike. With so many of his 90 employees residing in Walnut on Highland, one of the newer housing and retail complexes in East Liberty, Mr. von Ahn joked, "We call them the Duolingo dorms." Mr. von Ahn, 38, is a superstar in the tech world. He has sold two companies to Google, received a MacArthur grant and helped develop the type the squiggly word thing we use online to prove we're not bots (it's called reCaptcha). He earned a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in 2005 and could have made a beeline for New York, Boston or Silicon Valley, but he decided to stay. There were also business advantages to remaining: Duolingo is close to the engineering talent ("C.M.U. is pumping out some of the best, at a rate of about 500 a year," Mr. von Ahn said), and for millennial job seekers, Pittsburgh's quality of life metric is looking better these days than ever costlier, ever more crowded New York or San Francisco. For Mr. Wirth, the software engineer who started at Duolingo in February, Silicon Valley is a fun place to visit, but living and working in the Bay Area would be a grind. "I was just there last week for a conference," Mr. Wirth said. "I was talking to someone who told me, 'My commute is two hours on the bus.' I just can't do that." Kamal Nigam, a Carnegie Mellon graduate who is the head of Google Pittsburgh, said that a decade ago, workers hired by the company had family or personal connections to the city. That is no longer the case. "We're getting people who are moving to Pittsburgh for the very first time, from all over the country and the world," Mr. Nigam said. He added, "With the growing number of start ups and the big companies in the area, people realize they can have not just one job at a good tech company, but a tech career here." For many years, Pittsburgh was a place 20 somethings fled or avoided. In the 1990s, Allegheny County, which includes the city, was the second oldest large county in the United States, behind only a geriatric zone in Florida. It was a notoriously difficult place to be young and single, and an earlier generation of computer science students put in their four years at Carnegie Mellon, grabbed their diplomas and left. This is the sleepy city Jean Yang knew while growing up near the campus, where her father was a research scientist in the School of Computer Science. "I didn't realize no one wanted to stay in Pittsburgh," Ms. Yang said. "I was just leaving because I thought everyone wants to leave where they grew up. I really didn't think I'd come back as an adult." But Ms. Yang's field of research is in computer programming languages, and, as she put it, "C.M.U. is the best place for the kind of work I want to do." When she was offered an assistant professor position in the School of Computer Science and discovered a changed Pittsburgh on her visits back, Ms. Yang accepted the job and returned last August. "There's definitely an excitement about being here," she said. "I go out to eat and drink in East Liberty. Lawrenceville I go to a lot. Everywhere I go didn't exist when I was growing up." While young, cool Pittsburgh may be a recent development, the research at Carnegie Mellon in the field of artificial intelligence has a long history. The university was the first in the world to establish a machine learning department, and its Robotics Institute, a division of the School of Computer Science, tested an autonomous vehicle, the Terregator, back in 1984. It's no surprise that Uber came to Pittsburgh to research self driving cars (and poached 40 Robotics Institute employees). Or that Amazon recently joined them here, opening an office whose engineer heavy work force will focus on perfecting Alexa, the company's intelligent personal assistant that aims to turn us all into the Joaquin Phoenix character from "Her." Put simply, where the tech world is going self driving cars; personal A.I. concierges; robot workers is where Carnegie Mellon's faculty and students have been for decades. In some ways, the School of Computer Science feels like any college campus environment, with its hodgepodge of new and classical architecture and hushed study zones. But there is also a "Roboceptionist" named Tank LeFleur and eager grad students in a basement lab testing drones and all manner of research projects going on that might change the world in 10 years, or just delight someone's colleagues. "It's like being in Hogwarts," said Andrew W. Moore, the dean of the School of Computer Science. "It's really cool and exciting to have these glimpses of the future, and to see all these people running around and having these crazy ideas." The video is part of a project that Yaser Sheikh, an assistant research professor, is working on to capture and analyze through a camera and computer software the limb movements and hand gestures of every person in a crowd, Mr. Moore said. "I get to see these cool things all the time and I'm just stopping to say, 'Well, what does this even mean for the world?'" he said. "You start thinking, 'Someone can use this in dance class.' Then you think: 'Wait. Can we use this to judge gymnastics competitions?' Then you say, 'Wait, couldn't we use this in securing Penn Station in New York?'" Frequently, campus research projects spill into the larger city, like when a professor develops a start up company (the school encourages entrepreneurship), or the local government allows Pittsburgh to be used as a lab (a number of traffic lights in East Liberty are controlled by a Carnegie Mellon professor and his colleagues, who have developed smart signal technology). Lee Gutkind, an author who published a 2006 book about the Robotics Institute, "Almost Human: Making Robots Think," has seen self driving cars go from clunky circuit boards on wheels to cruising the streets of his hometown. "It's a terrific thing to have in Pittsburgh," Mr. Gutkind said. "It's uplifting to see." Speaking of Red Whittaker, the professor who led Carnegie Mellon in winning the 2 million Darpa Urban Challenge self driving car competition in 2007, Mr. Gutkind said, "Red was into self driving vehicles before anyone," using Carnegie Mellon's resources and reaching out to local investors for money and technical support. A legend in the robotics field, Professor Whittaker turns out also to be a gentrification pioneer: He was instrumental in locating the school's National Robotics Engineering Center in an abandoned foundry in Lawrenceville, in 1996. "Lawrenceville was in the lost and found, it was really rough," he said, adding that the introduction of a state of the art research facility and its educated work force was, among other developments in the area, a "catalyst and galvanizing influence" for the neighborhood. "The real estate and the culture of the neighborhood was a very big thing for robotics," he said. "And robotics was a very big thing for the neighborhood." Which means even a Monocle reporter being dispatched to check out the Espresso a Mano cafe with its rotating exhibitions by local artists can be traced back to the geeks, in a six degrees of Carnegie Mellon sort of way.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Credit...Michel Ginfray/Sygma, via Getty Images A man, a country and an era came together in Leonard Bernstein, the musician of the American century. After 150 years of insecurity as this country gazed across the sea at the edifices of European culture, here was the New World finally in command. Composer, conductor, arranger, pianist, television personality, star, Bernstein a Jew, crucially, just a few years after the Holocaust marched Mahler back into Vienna, a second wave of liberation, a musical Marshall Plan. Bold, maybe a little brash; tender, maybe a little sentimental; difficult to work with yet desperate to please: Bernstein's qualities were America's, too. He was born 100 years ago on Aug. 25, and his centenary is being celebrated as his achievement and the smilingly confident place and time he symbolized seems ever more unrepeatable. Who today could write both "West Side Story" and three thorny, searching symphonies? Who could bring together Brahms and the Beatles on national television, and have millions watch? To what maestro's left wing political dalliances would New York magazine devote a cover story in 2018? Yet if there will never be another Bernstein, and if the high culture for which he tirelessly evangelized keeps drifting farther from the mainstream, his legacy is still clear, and secure. When he died, in 1990, he left us a charge to listen to music, of all kinds, with endless enthusiasm; to devote ourselves to both the creation of new work and the revival of old; to make every facet of culture accessible to all. To mark the anniversary of Bernstein's birth, writers of The New York Times have come together to focus on key moments in his career, to interview musicians he led from the podium, to praise his feverishly physical conducting style, and to offer suggestions for further listening. We hope to capture just a bit of the energy and influence of one of the most indelible figures in the history of the arts. ZACHARY WOOLFE It's more than just "New York, New York." "On the Town," Bernstein's 1944 foray into Broadway, may be famous for that number, which transcended musical theater to become a city's anthem. But the rest of his score for this show is so much more important: Its omnivorous musical style embodies the Bernstein ethos at its most daring and youthful, while also laying the groundwork for his later masterpiece, "West Side Story." When he wrote "On the Town," Bernstein was in his mid 20s but rapidly on the rise. He had already made his unexpected debut conducting the New York Philharmonic, filling in for an ailing Bruno Walter, and in January 1944 he had arrived as a composer with the premiere of his First Symphony. "Fancy Free," Bernstein's first ballet a collaboration with the great Jerome Robbins, who would choreograph "On the Town" and "West Side Story" came just several months later and couldn't be more different. Where the symphony was moody and dissonant, and clearly under the influence of Aaron Copland, the ballet score unabashedly embraced popular music and jazz. (It opened with a radio ready song, "Big Stuff," which was recorded by Billie Holiday.) The democratic style of "On the Town" proliferated in Broadway's golden age and continues today, even in the works of Bernstein's eventual collaborator Stephen Sondheim. It's also in their "West Side Story," an indisputable masterpiece, though ultimately more refined and controlled than "On the Town," which has the youthful elan of its creators: brash energy that sometimes verges on unwieldy recklessness. That spirit may make it a risk for producers today, but it's also what makes every opportunity to see the musical so electrifying. JOSHUA BARONE Puncturing the Snobbery of the Concert Hall There were conductors as great as Bernstein and pianists, and composers, and political activists, and theater artists. But there had never been a communicator about music with anywhere near his brilliance, humor, energy, reach and importance. From 1958 until 1972, Bernstein turned a series of educational concerts for children into a televised international classroom of unlikely glamour. The roots of the New York Philharmonic's Young People's Concerts went back to the 1885 86 season, when Theodore Thomas conducted 24 matinees focused on learning about music. In Bernstein, the practice was revived by post World War II mass culture. After becoming the Philharmonic's music director, he reshaped the concerts, following the model of the Omnibus programs he'd done on CBS, starting in 1954. That was the series that began unforgettably with Bernstein analyzing the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony while he and the musicians strolled over a giant reproduction of the first page of the score. "A more perfect unconscious metaphor for his American cockiness," the critic and historian Joseph Horowitz writes of the moment, "could hardly be invented." Bernstein hosted the televised concerts for 15 consecutive seasons, during which time they were dubbed into 12 languages and syndicated in 40 countries. They were referenced in "Peanuts" and, in Hungary, beat "Bonanza" in the ratings. For a few years, they even made it from weekend afternoons to prime time. He clearly loved doing them, and is said to have written every word of every script. In the 1964 65 season, when he took a composing sabbatical, Bernstein conducted just a single concert (of his own music) along with four Young People's Concerts. They were, he said, "among the favorite, most highly prized activities of my life." When he gave up the Philharmonic's directorship in the late 1960s, he said he would be happy to continue leading them, and did. Bernstein's is the best kind of teaching: even more empowering than informative. Music, in his telling, is about open ended, never ending pleasure, about gaining confidence in your own choices and judgments. "No matter what stories people tell you about what music means," he said of Rossini's "William Tell" Overture on the first televised program, "forget them. Stories are not what music means. Music just is." ZACHARY WOOLFE Of course, Bernstein was working with some of the best lyrics yet written for a Broadway show, by Stephen Sondheim, then in his late 20s. Together they were cannibalizing one of the best scripts, by Arthur Laurents. Compared with other musicals, not much dialogue remained after Bernstein and Sondheim's raid. To make up for it, the score had to be dense, providing in music the depth of portraiture Shakespeare achieved in verse. That's part of why the rhythm of "West Side Story" is so intensely layered. Naturally, Bernstein used Latin dance forms to depict the Puerto Rican characters: an explosive mambo, a delicate cha cha and, in "America," a joyful huapango, with its stresses constantly regrouping, two then three, back and forth. More than 30 percussion instruments, including maracas and police whistle, help create and clarify the effects; though many productions make do with one player, Bernstein calls for four or five in his symphonic arrangement of the score's dances and they are not underworked. But the manipulation of stress in "West Side Story" cuts the other way as well. Whenever the pure love of Tony and Maria is set to music, the rhythms, as if they were street noise, disperse. "One Hand, One Heart" barely has any notes; Sondheim had to beg Bernstein to toss in a few more so he could fit some proper English onto the melody. And the hymnlike, dreamlike "Somewhere" is entirely square, at least until it wakes up to the rat a tat nightmare that is the lovers' reality. Then it sounds like gunfire. We think of Bernstein as a melodist, and it's true that the vocal lines of "West Side Story" are gorgeous, even when they're spiky. But no one writing a musical has ever used rhythm as effectively as he did, to let us hear the human heart just as it's leaping forward, just as it's about to burst. JESSE GREEN One January evening in 1970, Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, had about 90 people over for a soiree. The express purpose, according to the invitation, was to "meet and hear from leaders of the Black Panther party and lawyers for the New York Panther 21." So: a cocktail fund raiser for the Panthers 21 Legal Defense Fund, which would pay for the defense of the men and women accused of a rash of attempted coordinated bombings and armed attacks on government facilities (they were all eventually acquitted). Anyway, these fund raisers were a thing at the time. And that evening in January, it was the Bernsteins' turn. The press hadn't been invited. But the press was there. The Times's society writer, Charlotte Curtis, whipped up a detailed article that ran a few days after. Six months later, in New York magazine, Tom Wolfe dropped his bomb. "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's" lasted 25,000 words of withering absurdism that mocked white liberal haute bourgeois virtue. The guests included the likes of Barbara Walters, who at the time hosted "The Today Show," the filmmaker Otto Preminger, the socialite Jean vanden Heuvel and "the former 'boy president' of Sarah Lawrence" (Harold Taylor). Wolfe, less cuttingly, looks askance at the Panthers for, among other things, being the sort of outfit that would need the attention of such people. But Wolfe keeps making a target of Bernstein, who had just cut back his duties at the New York Philharmonic. He becomes an emblem of do gooding wishy washy, optics obsessed paternalism and these Panther parties were possibly beside the point of most engaged interracial civil rights struggles. Bernstein seems, in Wolfe's caricature, grand, withdrawn, contradictory, exasperated, squeezed. "Lenny couldn't get over the whole affair," Wolfe writes. "Earlier in the evening he had talked to a reporter and told him it was 'nauseating.' The so called 'party' for the Panthers had not been a party at all. It had been a meeting. There was nothing social about it. As to whether he thought because parties were held in the homes of socially prominent people simply because the living rooms were large and the acoustics were good, he didn't say. In any case, he and Felicia didn't give parties, and they didn't go to parties, and they were certainly not in anybody's 'jet set.' And they were not 'masochists,' either. "So four nights later Lenny, in a tuxedo, and Felicia, in a black dress, walked into a party in the triplex of one of New York's great hostesses, overlooking the East River, on the street of social dreams, East 52nd, and right off the bat some woman walks right up to him and says, 'Lenny, I just think you're a masochist.' It was unbelievable." It was also an impossible position for Bernstein. Obviously, he meant well. But he'd lost control over the interpretation of what he meant. In Wolfe, he was up against someone as superb at his job as Bernstein was at his one maestro trapped under the thumb of another. WESLEY MORRIS My father took me to see Bernstein conduct a Young People's Concert when I was nine years old. I don't remember what he conducted, but I do remember that he was dressed in a very hip way, he looked really cool, and he talked to me, to us, the audience, and I absolutely loved that. When Bernstein conducted, he was having so much fun. I had been getting the feeling that classical music was not going to be a lot of fun. And then I saw him, and I said to my dad, "Ah, that's it! I want to be the conductor." So Bernstein became my idol from that moment on. I had a poster of him, and a poster of the Beatles on my bedroom wall the Bernstein poster was bigger! As I got to know him, and study with him, I discovered many other connecting points: the idea of eliminating boundaries between popular and serious music, the idea that music is fun, that the rules about how people must behave are just dumb constraints that we've imposed on classical music and, most importantly, that music speaks to every one of us. And, as I witnessed the kind of a citizen of the world he was, my admiration for him grew exponentially. I really admire people who stand up for what they believe in. As an American music director, I think my commitment to new music, to living composers, my interest in speaking to audiences, my interest in creating access points for all different segments of our population, all different types of people, throwing the doors of the concert hall open I think that all of these things were deeply influenced by Leonard Bernstein. These approaches are much more part of the fabric of orchestras as institutions today because of Bernstein. Bernstein gave a credibility to American musicianship that hadn't existed before, easing our sense of inferiority. He came along and did what seemed impossible: bringing Mahler back to Vienna! He talked a lot about the narrative of the piece. He was an amazing storyteller. I remember watching him, I think it was with the New York Phil once, when he said, "Ugh, do I have to tell you the story of this Haydn symphony?" And all these grown ups were like, "Yes! Please tell us the story!" He loved storytelling, and music for him was just a vehicle for telling stories. Often his stories had important morals as well: There was always a lesson to be learned. For me that was a big takeaway. In terms of conducting technique, he would offer tips. He used to say, "Don't imitate me but do it like this." It was very funny. But it was much more about bigger concepts. He was extremely supportive of me personally. He'd say "Come on, show me what you're feeling!" and then saying "Yes! That's it!" Giving students the courage and permission to be themselves this is a beautiful gift. I think in many ways he was at a unique moment but he was a uniquely gifted human being. Really the epitome of an American entrepreneur. He was so many things: a great conductor, great composer, great pianist. But he was also a TV star, he was a thinker, he was a philosopher, he was a political activist. How many people could wear all of those hats at once? It's a rare thing. MARIN ALSOP, MUSIC DIRECTOR OF THE BALTIMORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, AS TOLD TO MICHAEL COOPER	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
WASHINGTON The legal fight against the Federal Communications Commission's recent repeal of so called net neutrality regulations began on Tuesday, with a flurry of lawsuits filed to block the agency's action. One suit, filed by 21 state attorneys general, said the agency's actions broke federal law. The commission's rollback of net neutrality rules were "arbitrary and capricious," the attorneys general said, and a reversal of the agency's longstanding policy to prevent internet service providers from blocking or charging websites for faster delivery of content to consumers. Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox web browser, said the new F.C.C. rules would harm internet entrepreneurs who could be forced to pay fees for faster delivery of their content and services to consumers. A similar argument was made by another group that filed a suit, the Open Technology Institute, a part of a liberal think tank, the New America Foundation. Suits were also filed on Tuesday by Free Press and Public Knowledge, two public interest groups. Four of the suits were filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Free Press suit was filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. "The repeal of net neutrality would turn internet service providers into gatekeepers allowing them to put profits over consumers while controlling what we see, what we do, and what we say online," said Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, who led the suit by the state officials. The lawsuits have long been expected. The filings on Tuesday, petitions to begin the suits, kick off what is expected to be an extended legal and political debate about the future of internet policy. Democrats have rallied to fight the F.C.C.'s repeal of net neutrality, which was passed in a 3 to 2 party line vote in December. The agency is led by Ajit Pai, a Republican nominated by President Trump. All of the attorneys general involved in the suit filed on Tuesday are Democrats. The lawsuits have the support of the Internet Association, a trade group representing big tech firms including Google and Netflix, giving the various legal challenges financial support and the clout of companies. The companies say internet service providers have the incentive to block and throttle their sites in order to garner extra fees. The F.C.C. declined to comment on the suits. But it did point to a part of its order that prohibits legal challenges until the new rules are submitted into the federal registry. The F.C.C. is expected to enter the new rules into the federal registry in the coming days or weeks. The states said they could file a petition to the United States Court of Appeals, starting the process to determine which court would hear the case. That is the action the attorneys general, as well as Mozilla and the Open Technology Institute, took on Tuesday. The states that signed onto the lawsuit include California, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts and Oregon, as well as the District of Columbia. Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general, said the decision to roll back the agency's declaration of broadband as a utility like service will harm consumers. "Internet access is a utility just like water and electricity," Mr. Becerra said in a statement. "And every consumer has a right to access online content without interference or manipulation by their internet service provider." In a release, Mr. Schneiderman said the agency's roll back disregarded a record of evidence that internet service providers' could harm consumers without rules. A similar argument was made by Mozilla. "Ending net neutrality could end the internet as we know it," said Denelle Dixon, Mozilla's chief business and legal officer in a blog post. "That's why we are committed to fighting the order. In particular, we filed our petition today because we believe the recent F.C.C. decision violates both federal law as well as harms internet users and innovators." The issue of net neutrality has been fought in court challenges twice before in the past decade. The rules adopted in 2015, which set rules that sites could not be blocked or throttled, were upheld by the United States Court of Appeals in 2016 after legal challenges by telecom companies. The F.C.C. vote in December was to roll back those 2015 rules. The new lawsuits are among several efforts to restore net neutrality rules. On Tuesday, Senate Democrats announced they were one supporter away from winning a vote to restore net neutrality rules. All 49 members of their caucus, as well as one Republican, have signed on to a resolution to overturn the rules. A similar effort initiated in the House has the support of 80 members. Success by members of Congress is unlikely, particularly in the House, where Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, would have to agree to bring the resolution to a vote. The president will also have to agree to the resolutions, if they were passed, but the White House has expressed its support of the rollback of net neutrality rules.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
She zigzags through gnarled seascape that eventually snags the camera from her fin and then the footage stops. We're used to the idea of sharks as predators in the open ocean, not creatures that stalk seals through tangles of sea grass. "People would anecdotally say the sharks won't swim into the kelp, not the great whites," said Oliver Jewell, a doctoral student at Murdoch University in Australia. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Great white sharks typically hunt at dusk or dawn, near the ocean's surface, and will jump out of the water to snag cape fur seals just like on T.V. But in the middle of the day, cage divers and researchers near Dyer Island Marine Reserve, off South Africa's west coast, had noticed sharks lurking in areas close to the island's cape fur seal colonies, which are surrounded by kelp forests. They assumed the sharks, too big to maneuver through the dense vegetation, avoided the kelp forests where seals hide. But this footage reveals there's more to a sharks' predatory strategy than previously known. "We kind of thought they would wait for the seals to come out of the kelp but no, they're not that patient," said Mr. Jewell, who led the research that captured this footage, which was published Wednesday in Biology Letters. "They want to go in and find them." In other well studied white shark populations in South African waters, sharks aren't found near kelp, because there isn't much kelp. But here, mixing oceans stir up nutrients so kelp and the animals it feeds thrive. When Mr. Jewell worked in this area in the past, he could only see sharks at the surface or track their movements by following the ping of an acoustic tag. Near kelp forests, he almost always lost the signal. So to find out what the sharks truly were doing during lunchtime, he and his team attached sensors and cameras to their dorsal fins. Clamping a camera onto a shark fin is about as easy as suctioning one to a whale's back and bloodier, with more teeth. In a small boat, one person stirred up chum in the water to lure in the shark. Mr. Jewell stood at the boat's side, dangling a fish head from a rope. If they were lucky, this brought a shark close enough to a third person who was lying on his belly, holding a long pole with the tag on a spring clamp that he attached to the shark. After that, the team hoped for a tag that stayed on, as well as some visibility and an interesting shark. Then they hoped to retrieve the tag. After three years they finally captured this footage and more from a total of eight sharks. "It was just relief," said Mr. Jewell. Researchers can now better understand how sharks use these environments for hunting and find new ways to conserve this rare and vulnerable apex predator. And Mr. Jewell hopes this footage will change people's Hollywood perception of the Great White. "People think sharks are mindless killing machines," but that's not how they behave in the wild, he said. "They're very calm and they're also curious animals, and they're just there doing their own thing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The first "Wonder Woman" movie, directed by Patty Jenkins, was a cinematic game changer that proved female superheroes were every bit as mighty as men. The new sequel, "Wonder Woman 1984" (due Dec. 25), promises to be a very different kind of game changer: Once positioned for a billion dollar box office gross, it will now debut on the same day both in theaters and on the streaming service HBO Max, a corporate priority for Warner Bros. and its parent company AT T. "It would have been a news story about women making so much money in the box office this year," said Jenkins, who watched release plans for would be blockbusters like her film and Niki Caro's "Mulan" (for Disney) shift after the pandemic forced many theaters to close. "However, the more important thing is the movie finding its right audience, who is hungry for that experience." Tentpole starved fans will find much to dig into with "Wonder Woman 1984," which takes place decades after the first "Wonder Woman." It's now the 1980s, and Gal Gadot's superheroine must tangle with Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), a grasping tycoon who encourages the world's avarice, and Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), a nerdy nobody who eventually becomes Cheetah, Wonder Woman's comic book rival. These are edited excerpts from our conversation. A sequel wasn't guaranteed in your contract for the first film. When did you start negotiating for it, and was it a battle to get what you wanted? As soon as "Wonder Woman" came out and it was successful, we started to talk about it, and then the contract negotiations were very rough and they took a long time. But if not me after making "Wonder Woman," who should be getting equal pay? I wanted to get paid at least as much as people who have done less well with their first superhero movies. It's been reported that you made around 8 million or 9 million for this movie, which would be a record for a female filmmaker. It feels great. It really does. The weirdest part about it is that you can't even quite wrap your head around the money, as somebody who's never made huge amounts of money before. Really, I was so distracted with why it had to be that way that I wasn't even able to absorb it. What made you decide to set this film in the 1980s? I wanted to do a full blown "Wonder Woman" movie, but what I really wanted to talk about was what I was feeling is happening in the world. Not to get too heavy about it I don't want people to even know it's about climate change but we're about to lose this world. What are we, when we're at our most excessive, when we can't stop wanting more? We all have a hard time changing our lives, but if we don't, we're going to lose everything. So what better time than the '80s, before we knew any of the costs of these things? It's interesting, then, to see Pedro Pascal playing this blond businessman adversary who at first resembles Donald Trump. But he's given a much more sympathetic back story than you might expect. I love the bigness of those '80s villains, so I was into it. But also in this case, we wanted to really do something slightly different. You're not just doing a campy '80s businessman. You're doing somebody who wants to be that, an immigrant who's seen those guys in The Wall Street Journal, and so he's frosting his hair and trying to look like he's white. I did a couple of things in this movie that everybody said we couldn't do: Nobody dies, and she wins in the end with a conversation. To me, this was a Trojan horse: I wanted to tick off every box of what you're looking for in a superhero movie, but actually what I'm hopefully pulling off is a subversion where instead you're saying to this younger generation that sees these movies, "You have to find the hero within." It's rare to see a superhero movie where triumph is based on more than just the ability to physically defeat someone. And don't we know better than that now in this world? We could go bomb any country in the world, and it's not going to stop the clock that's coming at us in about 40 years. That's exactly the point. Have you had to fight for those moments of sincerity? I don't have to fight for it now, but I have had to fight for it in my career and I always will. There's definitely an attachment to irony and pessimism in our world, which I get, but I don't believe it's very courageous. I think if you really have ever experienced tragedy or ever experienced love, they're neither of those things. And so, since the beginning of my career, I made a promise to myself because I was with the cool kids who were at the inception of some of that stuff, and I was like, "I'm not going to do it. You may be embarrassed along the way to learn how to do emotion and sincerity, but I'm not going to stop doing it until I figure out how to." Was it easy to smuggle all of that into the first "Wonder Woman"? There were plenty of people at the studio who didn't quite understand or were not very confident in the film: "It's too funny." "Is she too soft?" But then on the night of the premiere, everything changed on a dime, and watching people freak out and react to the things I wanted them to react to was amazing. I'm so sad I'm not getting that this time. It's such a bummer. "Wonder Woman 1984" was originally supposed to come out in theaters at the end of 2019. Do you wish it had held that release date? I never wanted it to come out in the winter. I was fighting the studio because we were supposed to come out summer of 2020, and then they didn't have a big movie for 2019. I was in the middle of making a limited series, and all of a sudden they announced that they had moved up the release date by seven months, which was going to give me way less time to make the movie than I had for "Wonder Woman." I was saying, "You guys, why would you guarantee I can't make as good of a film by making it too quick?" So we argued about that all year, and I had to drop out of doing a whole limited series and only do the first two episodes, and just race to write an 80 page treatment at the same time as I'm trying to direct the show. We finally got lucky that it got moved back. It would have been a much worse movie if it had come out then. After the pandemic began to heat up and movie theaters started closing, "Wonder Woman 1984" slipped from its initial June 2020 release date to August, October and then Christmas Day. What was your experience on those decisions to keep delaying the film? It was a fascinating thing, because it wasn't like any of those calls were confident. It was a group of us sitting around going, "I don't know, I guess we could say, 'Three months from now,' and then we'll see what happens." That was a trip, to be talking about a major movie like that with the heads of the studio and the heads of marketing, and everybody's like, "I guess let's just say October?" When did you finally get the call about the release on HBO Max? Two or three weeks before we announced it. It was weird, because the whole year I was afraid of that, and everybody at the studio kept saying, "No way, we'll never do that," because you have to make so much money with this thing. So when they suggested it, I was shocked. We did not agree right away it was a very, very long process, and I don't know that they would have let us disagree based on what they've been doing now. But I was conveniently into it for this movie. Warner Bros. has said this is a one year plan to send all its releases to HBO Max, but not everyone is convinced. Can the genie be put back in the bottle? I would like to believe that it is temporary, but I'm not sure I do. But I'll tell you, some studio's going to go back to the traditional model and cause tremendous upheaval in the industry, because every great filmmaker is going to go work there. And the studios that make this radical change of moving their theatrical releases to a streaming service , particularly without consulting the artists, will end up with a very empty slate of quality filmmakers working there.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
A frantic fall schedule may be just around the corner, but hotels in Kansas City, Mo., Mexico City, Miami Beach and Key West, Fla., are offering attractive deals for one last getaway before the end of summer. Whether you want to take the family, or are looking for a getaway once the kids are back in class, these four vacation packages are worth a look. At Galeria Plaza Reforma in Mexico City, rooms are available for under 100 a night. Book a two night trip from Friday through Sunday and receive a discount of 25 percent off the regular room rate of 101 per night. That means that for about 76 per night, you can relax at the hotel's rooftop pool or use the property as a launching pad for exploring the Mexican capital. In Key West, a two night package at the Perry Hotel is available for 225 per night, 30 percent off the regular starting rate. Rooms have waterfront views and a breezy pool area with hammocks offers direct marina access for excursions including snorkeling, sailing and fishing. The Experience the Perry package also includes a 100 excursion credit and a bottle of wine. Shuttle service to downtown Key West is complimentary. Stay two nights at the Fontaine in Kansas City before the end of September and pay 203 with the Summer Spirited Escape package, 30 percent off the regular starting rate of 289. The recently renovated hotel can be a gateway to Kansas City attractions including craft breweries, the National World War I Museum and Memorial and the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
So Tim Robbins and Donald Trump walk into a bar. They just happened to be in the same Greenwich Village club one night in the mid 1990s. But given the fact that fame is an irresistible magnet for Mr. Trump, the two men naturally ended up in a picture. "I was throwing a private party for a friend, and he tried to crash it and I wouldn't let him," Mr. Robbins recalls. But Mr. Trump is not that easily put off, even when his quarry has disdain for him. "We were in a little roped off section of the club that I had rented out and I was leaving to go to the bathroom and all of the sudden, there he is. And before I know it, I turn around and there's photo flashes, and it was weird. He wanted a photo with me because I was famous. He used to do that a lot, by the way. He wanted to be photographed with famous people all the time." It is strange that this onetime cardboard cutout celebrity popping up at Gotham parties has turned into a psychic dentist drill, boring into Americans' deepest, most painful schisms on race, gender and inequality. "Think about this," Mr. Robbins says, over scallops, fries and espresso in the bar at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo. "You pursue celebrities your entire life when you're a real estate developer, and then you become the most powerful person in the country and no one wants to be photographed with you. This is the time when most celebrities will go to your side, and no one is going to his." The Washington traditions that you'd think President Trump would have enjoyed, given his old party surfing, glitterati fawning ways like the White House Correspondents Dinner and the Kennedy Center Honors he has shunned. "He doesn't want to be in a situation where anyone has any kind of power over him," Mr. Robbins theorizes. "And celebrities ultimately have the power to say, 'No, I don't want to be photographed with him.'" Like Tom Hanks saying he wouldn't go to the White House to screen "The Post," even if he were asked, or Tom Brady deflating President Trump and refusing to go to the Super Bowl ceremony at White House, no doubt because he feared the wrath of Gisele. "'Bob Roberts' came true," Mr. Robbins says, referring to the 1992 mockumentary he wrote and starred in. He prefigured the Trump phenomenon in the film, which is about a charismatic television entertainer and rich businessman who runs for office on the Republican ticket, sugarcoating his corrupt ways with an appeal to family values. He is hailed as a savior by his fans and as a crypto fascist by his critics. When a young woman sends an admiring note to Bob Roberts, he writes back warning her to stay away from crack because "It's a ghetto drug." As Vincent Canby said in his New York Times review, "Bob understands the appeal of an ultraconservative political and economic policy even to those who have nothing: anticipating the day when they do have it all, they want to make sure they will be able to keep it." Bob urges his followers to "take, make and win by any means" and asks them: "Why has your American dream been relegated to the trash heap of history?" When the movie was a big hit in Cannes, Miramax signed on as a co distributor and Harvey Weinstein began hectoring Mr. Robbins to recut and re edit the film. "He must have called me 20 times and I just told him, 'No, I'm not doing it,"' Mr. Robbins says. "He was so powerful because he had a company that was making movies that the studios weren't making." Aside from his monstrous behavior with women, Mr. Weinstein ravaged Hollywood in other ways, Mr. Robbins posits, adding that, though the producer was hailed for his good taste, "you could make the argument that Harvey's overall impact on cinema was negative. "What happened is, when Miramax became as successful as it became, every studio all of a sudden wanted to have an independent arm," he says. "So they all set up their little boutique companies that would do 'independent' films, quote unquote. And it wasn't that they were independent or edgy or that the content was risky or provocative. It was more that it was independent of paying people what the studios had to pay them. And so it became this way of making films on the cheap and not committing full studio resources into those kinds of films." When Mr. Weinstein asked Mr. Robbins to star in an indie called "Smoke," shortly after the producer had sold Miramax to Disney for some 60 million in 1993, the actor remembers confronting him, saying: "'Harvey, the talent made your company and you've been paying them scale for years. And you just put a fortune in your pocket. When are we going to see some of that?'" "'You don't get what I was saying,'" Mr. Robbins recalls telling him. "This wasn't a shakedown for me to get money. This was about, What are you going to do overall for talented people now that you've been monetized in this way?" Mr. Robbins deadpans: "Needless to say, I never worked for him again after that conversation. Also, he was personally transforming the Oscars into an advertising campaign that was about a relentless pursuit of gold." Mr. Robbins, who loves old Hollywood, is rueful about the dearth of great movies: a decay in Hollywood standards that gave Mr. Weinstein power, and cover, for a long time. "Since I won the Oscar for 'Mystic River' in 2004, I think I've worked in one studio film as a lead actor, which was 'Catch a Fire' at Universal," Mr. Robbins says. "But I don't know why that is. The way I look at it is, every movie I have done, I am proud of, other than one I did for money, 'Green Lantern.' Is it 'Green Lantern' or 'Green Arrow'? I forget. I do have to pay the bills occasionally. But I'm not broke. I have been wise with my money. I don't need to be an uber rich person. I'm happy where I am." He agrees with the philosophy of the San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who explained recently why charitable contributions matter: "Because we're rich as hell, and we don't need it all, and other people need it." And you're a jerk if you don't give it. Asked about the tectonic shift for women in Hollywood, Mr. Robbins says he is happy that "the incredibly libidinous atmosphere in Hollywood is changing" so that men will be more afraid "to intimidate women into compliance in horrible, rapey ways." "Everybody knew," he says in a disgusted whisper about Harvey Weinstein. "Everybody knew." He thinks there might actually be a fundamental shift, "not just on the man woman thing but the male male thing, too. That's been happening for a long time." He knows this is a supercharged moment, given the opprobrium that has descended on stars such as Matt Damon, who said people should acknowledge "a spectrum" of bad behavior among men. "It's really, really important that women have the floor now to talk about this because it has been so pervasive throughout every industry as long as I've been alive," Mr. Robbins says. But, he adds, "I don't trust mobs of any kind, even when they're advocating for things I support. People losing their careers based on innuendo or accusation is troubling for me. There is a process for this: a legal system. Convicting someone on an accusation is really dangerous territory to be living in." He worries about overreach. "Is it possible for me to do a feminist film or a film about race and speak with any authority, or am I limited to telling stories about white men?" Mr. Robbins is passionate about politics but protests that he is not a radical. He does cop to driving in Santa Monica many years ago with his older son, Jack, when he was about 12, and when Mr. Robbins saw Henry Kissinger coming out of the posh Ivy at the Shore restaurant, he leaned out and yelled, "War criminal!" "And my son was like, 'What? What? Why are you doing that?'" He does not regret speaking out against our misguided wars, even though, during the Iraq fiasco, he got denounced by conservatives as a "terrorist supporter" and a "Saddam lover." "My children were young when 9/11 happened, and that was a traumatic experience," he says. "And they saw how a traumatic experience was turned into using manipulated information to produce another catastrophe, which was the war. So it's kind of a double trauma. And I don't think they trust the institutions of power and so they're looking to create their own. Many of our leaders are no longer on moral high ground. The millennials are living in a society where if you fail you succeed, from the bankers who almost brought down the economy and then got bonuses to Trump and his bankruptcies. It started with Nixon. The degradation of it all. Wouldn't we be living in a different country right now if Richard Nixon went to jail?" He laughs, noting wryly that "the millennial midlife crisis will be one for the ages." He avidly supported Bernie Sanders in the primary before switching to Hillary Clinton in the general. (His ex Susan Sarandon, also an independent spirit, got heckled by Hillary supporters for refusing to support Mrs. Clinton; she said, "I don't vote with my vagina," and then switched to Jill Stein after Mr. Sanders was out.) "I think the Democratic Party is making a huge mistake right now, trying to caustically marginalize those people that voted for Bernie, because they're not going to be shamed," Mr. Robbins says. When he started his career, Mr. Robbins got offered a lot of roles as psycho killers. Then came "The Player." Now, at 59, he says that "most of the parts I get offered are middle aged dudes having existential crises." Mr. Robbins has been producing short films for his oldest son, Jack, who got into Sundance last year and this year. And his younger son, Miles, is going on tour with his band and has roles in the upcoming "X Files" and "Halloween" movies. Perhaps because he got used to wearing the garter belt of Ms. Sarandon's character in "Bull Durham," Mr. Robbins was not bothered by Miles's op ed in HuffPost talking about how, even though he is "mostly heterosexual" he has kissed a few men he likes to wear dresses on stage sometimes or to parties. "He's a showman," said his father, adding that he himself wouldn't do it because "You've got to have nice legs for that." He is still very private about his two decade romance with Ms. Sarandon, noting that accounts of stars' personal lives are inevitably "artificial or manufactured because when you're promoting a movie, you're trying to tell people what they want to hear. And they're operating in stereotypes from the past younger man, older woman, whatever it is different perceptions that have nothing to do with reality." After dating for years, he says, "I'm with someone right now that I've been with for a while. I like my life right now." He lives in Venice, Calif., in a charming house, where he has fun art parties and writes poetry and music and plays and screenplays. (His latest, "The Heretic," is about a trio of Jesuses, one of whom gets waterboarded because his message of love is too radical for Christian consumption.) He is still busy with the Actors' Gang, which he founded in 1981. Through the Actors' Gang Prison Project, Mr. Robbins, who starred in "The Shawshank Redemption," has had some success over the last decade in renewing interest and funding for arts programs in California prisons, which he believes can help change the behavior of criminals and teach social skills. Former Attorney General Eric Holder was a strong supporter, given the soaring incarceration rates, and Mr. Robbins says his prison plays, mingling black gang members and white supremacists, should be a bipartisan project. He says he would meet with Jeff Sessions, if Mr. Sessions were willing. He's doing a documentary on the project. The latest production of the Actors' Gang, "The New Colossus," opens on Feb. 8, with 12 actors from 12 different parts of the world reminiscing about or playing their ancestors in their journeys from oppression to freedom. "All of our ancestors are related in a common desire," Mr. Robbins says. "The tribalism, dividing us by race, is not who we are. It's being manipulated for an economic cause. One night we had people from all over the world in our little hundred seat theater and I was like, 'This is America right here in this room.' And it was so powerful. The division that's happening now is all an illusion." MORE: Tim Robbins names his celebrity doppelganger in a round of Confirm or Deny.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The Lasker Awards, which are among the nation's most prestigious prizes in medicine, were awarded on Tuesday to a Scottish veterinarian who developed the drug propofol, two scientists who discovered the hidden influence of genetic packing material called histones and a researcher who in addition to doing groundbreaking work in RNA biology, paved the way for a new generation of female scientists. The awards are given by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and carry a prize of 250,000 for each of three categories. They are sometimes called the "American Nobels" because 87 of the Lasker recipients have gone on to win the Nobel Prize. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Dr. Glen, the recipient of the Lasker DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, is only the second veterinarian to win a Lasker in 73 years, according to the foundation. A pharmaceutical career was an unlikely path for Dr. Glen, but the fact that he was interested in anesthesia was no surprise: for years, he had taught the subject to students at Glasgow University's veterinary school. "I was anesthetizing dogs, cats, horses whatever animals came around," Dr. Glen said in an interview. Once he used anesthesia on a pelican to fix its beak. When he arrived in the 1970s at ICI Pharmaceuticals, later acquired by AstraZeneca, Dr. Glen had turned his attention to humans and was on the hunt for a replacement for thiopentone, a widely used anesthetic that quickly put patients to sleep but often made them groggy afterward. In lab tests on mice, he and his colleagues discovered that one of the company's existing compounds, propofol, seemed to work as well as thiopentone but wore off quickly, without the hangover effect of the earlier drug. Propofol was approved in 1986 in the United Kingdom and in the United States three years later. In 2009, propofol's reputation took a hit after Michael Jackson's personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, administered a lethal dose of the drug to the singer. Dr. Murray was convicted in 2011 on charges of involuntary manslaughter, and Dr. Glen said he followed the trial closely. "It was never intended to be used in that way," Dr. Glen said. But of the drug's broader success, he said, "I'm delighted that it has become so widely used." She became a champion of women in her field and trained nearly 200 future scientists. Dr. Steitz, the recipient of the Lasker Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science, said winning the award is particularly significant because it signals how far she has come since her days as an undergraduate lab technician in the early 1960s. "When I started out being excited by science but seeing that there weren't any women scientists I thought I had no prospects whatsoever," she said in an interview. "The one thing that I really wanted was to have the respect of my peers for the scientific contributions I made, and for my participation in the scientific community." More than four decades later, Dr. Steitz has her own lab at Yale University and her work has led to several breakthroughs in the understanding of RNA, a type of molecule that carries out many tasks in the cell, such as helping to read the information in our genes. One of her biggest discoveries was particles made up of RNA molecules and proteins, known as small nuclear ribonucleoproteins, or snRNPs for short. They're scattered throughout cells and among other things, they help cut messenger RNA into pieces, some of which get pasted back together. This process, called splicing, is essential to the process of making proteins from genes. This discovery led to an entire new field of research in cell biology. She was an author of a 2007 National Academy of Sciences report that recommended specific steps for maximizing the potential of women in academic science and engineering. Since then, she gives talks about how to encourage more women in science and is also being recognized for her work as a mentor. She has trained almost 200 students and postdoctoral fellows, according to the Lasker foundation. Of the 360 papers that have come from her laboratory, 60 do not include her name, "a gesture of generosity that reflects her belief that students and postdoctoral fellows who work completely independently should be allowed to publish on their own," according to the Lasker foundation's citation. In an interview, Dr. Steitz downplayed this detail. She said in her early days running her own lab, she frequently left her name off papers because she was following in the scientific tradition she had learned as a young researcher. As for her role as an activist, "I sort of feel a little embarrassed by that, because there are so many women that have done so much more," she said. What she has done, she said is to be "a good citizen and try to help women and other underrepresented people to fulfill their potential." They took a new look at a protein once considered the "packing material" of DNA. From opposite ends of the country, Dr. Allis, whose lab is at The Rockefeller University in New York, and Dr. Grunstein, at the University of California, Los Angeles, pioneered work that elevated the importance of histones, proteins in the chromosomes that previously had gone overlooked. They are the recipients of the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. DNA molecules are so long that, if they were stretched from end to end, one strand would reach six feet. Histones are the proteins that coil and cram these strands into a microscopic cell and they were long seen as little more than DNA spools, part of the basic machinery of the cell. "I went into the field thinking, everyone's working on gene activity, I want to work on packing material," Dr. Grunstein said in a video produced by the Lasker foundation. "I didn't want to go the direction everyone else was going in." What Dr. Grunstein and Dr. Allis discovered is that, in fact, histones play a crucial role in turning genes on and off, which allows each cell to do its assigned task. The two worked separately, Dr. Grunstein focusing on genetics, and Dr. Allis on biochemical processes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
It seems President Trump is ready to start rolling back globalization. Let's hope he doesn't blow up the postwar economic order. While Mexican negotiators waited for the United States to make its first move in its proposed renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the president last week turned on the invective against another trade deal he called unfair that negotiated by the Obama administration with South Korea. Largely in place with the confirmation of Robert Lighthizer as the nation's top trade diplomat in May, the president's trade team seems itching to deploy a wall of trade protection around the United States. This would include new tariffs on imports of steel and maybe also aluminum based on the novel argument that the imports somehow endanger national security. The administration is also mulling anti dumping duties on Canadian aircraft and countervailing duties on imported solar panels. A lot of this may look tame when set alongside Mr. Trump's fiery campaign speeches portraying trade as the bane of the American worker. He no longer calls for a 45 percent tariff on imports from China, nor does he threaten to walk away from Nafta. Despite his campaign promises to voters in industrial states eager for protectionism, some analysts suggested that Mr. Trump might ultimately be hemmed in by the standard pro trade orthodoxy of the Republican Party. But the relative moderation of the administration's recent trade initiatives is hardly reassuring. It's not just that many of his proposals will invite retaliation from the nation's trading partners inviting the prospect of a protracted tit for tat trade war. The most frightening aspect of Mr. Trump's approach is the seeming contempt for the rules and institutions that have underpinned global trade since World War II. Might Mr. Trump hew to the rules overseen by the World Trade Organization even as he retreats from prior American commitments to global trade? Or will he eschew the multilateral framework in pursuit of a set of bilateral deals, turning his back on a long history of trade diplomacy? These days, quite a few economists show sympathy for the argument that some trade protection may be warranted to help workers in industries threatened by imports. Protectionism will not add to American jobs or raise wages, on the whole. At best it will shuffle jobs around adding some in protected companies like steel makers and cutting some in industries that buy steel, like auto manufacturers. By making the economy less efficient, protectionism will also make the nation poorer as a whole. But maximizing economic output is not the nation's only objective. The case for trade liberalization also relies on the proposition that winners in the process will compensate the losers whose jobs are displaced. If American politics impedes any redistribution of trade's spoils, perhaps there is a case for restoring equity by throwing sand in the cogs of trade. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. "It would be decreasing the size of the pie to increase the size of some slices," as David Autor, a top labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put it to me once. "We have always done the opposite thing without making people whole." What's more, unanticipated shocks over the last quarter century when information technology swept through every industry and China emerged from nowhere to become the world's biggest exporter might justify reconsidering market access commitments made earlier. "Maybe at the end of the day some trade responses are reasonable," said Robert W. Staiger, a trade economist from Dartmouth College. And yet even accepting that the United States may find it reasonable to retreat from trade somewhat, it is critical to figure out what this retreat might look like. The many rounds of trade liberalization after World War II were anchored in two core principles that, in fact, had been adopted by the United States in 1934: reciprocity and nondiscrimination. Countries could expect to receive concessions as valuable as those they offered. Most critically, a concession made to one country would automatically be extended to all, under what was called the most favored nation rule. The cocktail worked. Notably, the principle of nondiscrimination ensured that a given trading partner could not negotiate a tariff cut with the United States and then offer a more favorable deal to another country undercutting the American competitive position. This broke through a logjam that had stymied previous attempts to liberalize international trade by encouraging countries to make only miserly offers. The problem is that these principles make for an ill fit with Mr. Trump's worldview, honed in the zero sum sphere of real estate deal making where one party's win is the other's loss. In trade diplomacy, the objective is to arrive at an agreement that everybody can call a win. "The best way to have a trade commitment enforced is to make it mutually beneficial," Professor Staiger told me. "If we push to get the very best deal for the United States, we will push other countries to the point that they are indifferent." Mr. Trump has railed against the fact that Germany's tariffs on imported cars from the United States are higher than American tariffs on German cars. "Reciprocal is, if you've got a 30 percent tariff, you know what, we should have a 30 percent tariff," he told Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders of the Group of 7 most advanced nations in May, according to Gary D. Cohn, his chief economic adviser. This misunderstands the multiple trading of concessions that has guided trade liberalization over more than a half century under the most favored nation rule, opening deals in which India offers something of value to Europe, in exchange for which Europe offers something of value to the United States and the United States offers something India likes. As Chad P. Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics pointed out, the Germans could equally complain that the American tariff on German shirts is twice as high as Germany's tariff on American shirts. And this presents the risk to global trade: that Mr. Trump follows through on his talk of eliminating the nation's bilateral trade deficits through a series of one to one deals, abandoning the multilateral framework. This is not only pointless; in a market economy it is not possible. Trade agreements set the rules, but not the trade balance. Bilateral trade deficits are not losses. Bilateral surpluses are not gains. They say little about the overall strength or weakness of the economy. "I have a deficit with my grocer and a surplus with my firm," said Carla A. Hills, the nation's trade representative during the Nafta negotiations under the administration of the first President George Bush. "As long as I run my economy properly, I stay above water."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Last week I was called for jury duty. Twice. New York City has yet to resume in person jury trials, but from a perch on my sofa, I could hear and assess one case involving the murder of an elderly woman and another concerning arson in a commercial building. These trials weren't precisely real or even vaguely legal and as both were Britain based I doubt that I and my U.S. passport would have made it past voir dire. But I count each as an extrajudicial highlight in a week spent sampling new experiments in immersive theater and gaming. Verdicts follow. When theaters shut down in March, many companies scrambled to make archived work available, organized Zoom hosted readings or adapted productions to an online format. In those first bewildering weeks, proximity to any form of theater felt like a gift, if often the kind of gift fancy hand soap, say that you unwrap and then promptly throw into the back of some closet. As lockdown weeks became lockdown months, the question of whether live theater could be made and shown remotely became moot. It could, with more content available than any sane person should stream. But could online drama ever substitute for the in person form? Here, doubt has seemed more reasonable. And yet theatermakers have spent these same months testing the varieties of interaction these platforms allow and which genres and narratives best suit an online setup. A few companies make strong cases for theater in its digital form. I began with "The Evidence Chamber," a coproduction from Fast Familiar, an interdisciplinary studio, and the Leverhulme Research Center for Forensic Science at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Empaneled as an online jury, participants in any given performance sift through evidence and weigh recorded witness testimony as they consider guilt or acquittal in a murder case. The jury setup is a brilliant one, not only because some places, like Alaska, are piloting grand jury proceedings via videoconference, but also because many of us already feel sequestered, dependent on online evidence and the occasional expert witness to understand the world around us. In "The Evidence Chamber," an actor playing a clerk of the court is present, but participants mostly create the drama themselves as they debate the case. (Think "Twelve Not So Angry Men and Women.") The piece works both as theater and as an exploration of how laypeople understand and evaluate forensic evidence here, DNA analysis and gait analysis, a systematic evaluation of an individual's walk. The case itself wasn't complicated. My group mostly white, mostly women, mostly English began to vote unanimously about half an hour in. (We were gait skeptics.) Everyone involved seemed to take the task seriously, even as some of us clearly relied on information gleaned from cop show marathons. Toward the end, someone asked if any of us had actually served on a real murder jury. "I don't think it's this exciting," a woman said. A few days later, I again found myself murder adjacent, during "Mystery at Boddy Mansion," a friendly, schlocky dinner theater experience loosely based on the board game Clue. This being a pandemic, dinner was strictly D.I.Y. Assigned characters in advance, a costumed dozen of us met up in a Zoom room to reveal clues, ask leading questions and (in my case) take occasional bites of a lukewarm veggie burger. Actually most people drank their dinners. Wise. Assigned "Madame Rouge," a sanitation expert and Gypsy princess ("We prefer Romany," I said as soon as I could), I wore a kerchief and avoided an accent. My cohort lacked such reservations. One of them, a preteen playing a flighty heiress, accessorized with a live chicken. That's commitment to character. Few of us were skilled improvisers, which made the conversation awkward, though maybe less awkward than it might have been in person. The solution was perhaps too easy, at least for anyone who played Clue as a kid, though the friend I virtually brought along nearly (and wrongly) confessed. Her dinner was all daiquiris. Drifting flaneur like, I saw a naked man sing "Puttin' on the Ritz," a contortion act set to "Peter and the Wolf," an obscene standup routine, a nifty magic trick. There's a mystery at the heart of "Eschaton" something to do with a vanished performer. But here the puzzles are so abstruse that I couldn't get started and after less than an hour, just as I began to feel dimly oriented, the show ended. Given enough time and M.C. pointers, you could probably crack "Eschaton," but the problem at the center of "The House Never Wins," from Kill the Cat, part of Electric Dreams Online, an interdisciplinary arts festival, might be insoluble. In a Zoom room, a group of us gathered to play online blackjack. As we played, rules shifted and a flurry of WhatsApp messages relating to the climate emergency pinged, the suggestion being that while we try to acquire wealth (or in my case, barely stay afloat) the world burns.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Mel Stottlemyre, the Yankees' pitching ace in their lean years of the late 1960s and early '70s and later the longtime pitching coach for Mets and Yankees teams that won the World Series, died on Sunday in a Seattle hospital. He was 77. His wife, Jean Stottlemyre, said the cause was complications of multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer for which he had been treated for many years. At his death he also had the flu and pneumonia, she said. Stottlemyre, who grew up in Washington State, lived in the Seattle area. Stottlemyre made his last visit to Yankee Stadium in June 2015, when the Yankees surprised him by dedicating a Monument Park plaque in his honor when he attended their annual Old Timers' Day gathering. The tribute came after their former second baseman Willie Randolph received a plaque as scheduled. Stottlemyre, walking with the aid of a cane, told the crowd, "It's been a thrill over the years for me to wear this uniform." He said that if it was to be his last Old Timers' Day, he would "start another baseball club, coaching up there, whenever they need me." Stottlemyre coached the Mets' pitchers for 10 seasons, including their 1986 World Series championship year, and the Yankees' pitchers for another 10, during which he won four World Series championship rings. He was being treated for multiple myeloma, which affects plasma cells, for much of his time as the Yankees pitching coach. Stottlemyre was the quiet type, but even as a rookie pitcher he possessed uncommon poise. "Here's a 21 year old kid nobody knew coming out of nowhere with this great arm and super control who has all the confidence not a big head, mind you, but a quiet self assurance of a Whitey Ford," his teammate Tom Tresh was quoted as saying in the oral history "Bombers" (2002), by Richard Lally. Years later, Stottlemyre was admired by the pitchers he coached for his optimism and his ability to relate to them. The Yankees' David Cone once said that Stottlemyre anticipated how pitchers liked to be treated. Stottlemyre, in turn, said he had benefited from talking with his sons Todd and Mel Jr., both of whom pitched in the major leagues. "It's like he never got older," Cone said of Stottlemyre. "When you're struggling, he's always there for you," the relief pitcher Mariano Rivera told the New Jersey newspaper The Record in October 1998, after the Yankees defeated the San Diego Padres to begin their string of three straight World Series titles. Dwight Gooden remembered how Stottlemyre came to the mound and steadied him when he was two outs away from a no hitter against the Seattle Mariners at Yankee Stadium in May 1996. Gooden had walked two batters and thrown a wild pitch to Jay Buhner, putting runners on second and third with the Yankees leading by 2 0. "There's something about his demeanor so trusting, so trustworthy that makes you want to tell him the truth," Gooden said in his memoir, "Heat" (1999), written with Bob Klapisch. Gooden recalled Stottlemyre using his nickname while telling him: "I'm not taking you out, Doc. I'm just here to give you a breather. This game is yours, Doc. Yours unless you tell me you can't go anymore." Stottlemyre's fellow coach Don Zimmer recalled that after Stottlemyre revealed he had multiple myeloma in April 2000, he remained strong and steady while coaching the Yankees' pitchers for most of the regular season, even as he received chemotherapy. "He was a rock," Zimmer said in "Zim: A Baseball Life" (2001), written with Bill Madden. After a stem cell transplant in September 2000, Stottlemyre could not return to the Yankees that season, since he risked contracting an infection. When the Yankees beat the Mets in the World Series, Zimmer called Stottlemyre at his home. "When Mel answered the phone, he sounded ecstatic," Zimmer remembered. "Later on that night, I found out that Mel's brother had died earlier in the day of a brain tumor. He never said a word about it on the phone because he didn't want to ruin the night for the rest of us. That's what kind of a person he is." Melvin Leon Stottlemyre was born on Nov. 13, 1941, in Hazleton, Mo., and grew up in Mabton, Wash., the son of a construction worker. He was signed by the Yankee organization in 1961 out of what was then Yakima Valley Junior College (now Yakima Valley College) in Washington State. When Stottlemyre joined the Yankees, Ford, the Hall of Fame left hander, became his mentor. When Ford hurt his shoulder pitching in the 1964 World Series opener, the Yankees rested much of their hopes on Stottlemyre. He beat Gibson in Game 2, pitched to a no decision in Game 5 and was the loser in Game 7. The Yankees never returned to the World Series during Stottlemyre's playing career, but he became one of the American League's leading pitchers. He had a 20 9 record in 1965, when he led the A.L. in complete games, with 18, and innings pitched, with 291. The Yankees were beginning to fade by then, finishing sixth in what was then a 10 team league. Stottlemyre won 12 games and lost 20 in 1966 when they finished last for the first time since 1912. But he rebounded to go 21 12 in 1968 and 20 14 in 1969. In June 1974, while pitching against the California Angels, Stottlemyre tore his rotator cuff. Over the winter, he was advised by the Yankees to rest until at least May 1. When they released him at the end of spring training, he was stunned. The move was made by the team's general manager, Gabe Paul, but Stottlemyre was convinced that the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner had been behind it, and it left him embittered. Stottlemyre retired with a record of 164 139 and an earned run average of 2.97 before turning to a second career as a pitching coach. But a family tragedy took him away from baseball for a time and ultimately colored his already bittersweet feelings toward Yankees management. In March 1981, Stottlemyre's son Jason died of leukemia a few days after his 11th birthday. Stottlemyre left his post as a roving pitching instructor for the Mariners the next year to be with his family. Two decades later, reflecting on the possibility of a connection between his multiple myeloma and his son's leukemia, Stottlemyre thought back to radiation treatments he had received on his shoulder from the Yankees' team doctor in the late 1960s as a means of reducing calcification. A radiologist had advised him to stop the treatments because of potential health consequences, and he eventually did so despite what he said were reassurances from the Yankees' medical staff that the radiation would not harm him. "I've become convinced it played a role in both of the diseases," Stottlemyre said of the radiation in his memoir, "Pride and Pinstripes" (2007), written with John Harper. "The medical care the Yankees provided was not up to the standards you'd expect in professional sports, and certainly not from one of the most successful sports franchises in history." After a break from baseball, Stottlemyre became the Mets' pitching coach in 1984, Gooden's rookie season. He did not tinker with the mechanics of the immensely gifted Gooden, but counseled him on how to handle the spotlight and saw himself as something of a father figure. When the Mets defeated the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 World Series, Stottlemyre oversaw an outstanding pitching staff featuring Gooden, Bob Ojeda, Sid Fernandez, Ron Darling, Roger McDowell and Jesse Orosco. Stottlemyre was fired at the end of the 1993 season and was the Houston Astros' pitching coach for two seasons before being asked by Steinbrenner to return to the Yankees. Stottlemyre had torn up invitations to the Yankees' Old Timers' Days for two decades in anger over what he considered the bad faith the team showed by releasing him in 1975. But he decided to accept the offer, joining the staff of the new Yankees manager, Joe Torre, when he came to believe that Paul, the general manager, not Steinbrenner, had been responsible for letting him go. The Yankees won the World Series in 1996, then captured consecutive championships from 1998 to 2000, the year Stottlemyre began treatments for multiple myeloma. Stottlemyre guided pitching staffs that included Cone, Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, Mike Mussina, David Wells and Gooden, who was coming back from battles with drug abuse. Stottlemyre left the Yankees after the 2005 season and was replaced by Ron Guidry, their former star left hander. Stottlemyre was the Mariners' pitching coach in 2008, but he was not retained when Don Wakamatsu replaced Jim Riggleman as manager the next season. In addition to his wife, the former Jean Mitchell, he is survived by a brother, Jeff; a sister, Joyce Lawerence; his sons, Mel Jr. and Todd; and eight grandchildren. Todd Stottlemyre pitched for 14 seasons in the major leagues. Mel Jr., who pitched for one season, became the Miami Marlins' pitching coach in December 2018 and had formerly been in that post for the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Mariners. By his last few seasons with the Yankees, Stottlemyre had cemented his reputation as an outstanding pitching coach. But his resentment of Steinbrenner resurfaced in the face of criticism from him when the team was unable to make it back to the World Series. Stottlemyre was also irked by what he saw as undue interference from Billy Connors, the Yankees pitching adviser who worked out of the team's facilities in Tampa, Fla., and was close to Steinbrenner. (Connors died last June at 76.) In an interview with USA Today in May 2005, Steinbrenner complained that Stottlemyre had not been improving the Yankees' pitching staff. But Torre was quick to defend Stottlemyre, who had been alongside him on four championship teams. On Monday, Torre, in a statement, called Stottlemyre "a role model to us all and the toughest man I have ever met."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
LOS ANGELES To borrow one of his favorite phrases, Gavin Newsom has met his moment. He heads the largest state in the country during a crisis where governors have emerged as trusted, popular leaders, carving out a new brand of federalism. He was the first governor to issue a mandatory stay at home order, which has helped keep illness and death in California well below projections. His youthful face and bold pronouncements have become a familiar feature on national television. "We decided enough's enough," Mr. Newsom said on "The Rachel Maddow Show" on April 7 as he announced that California had signed contracts to obtain 200 million protective masks a month. His "nation state," the governor declared, had stopped with "the small ball." The next morning, PresidentNewsom trended on Twitter. Now the California governor must demonstrate he can not only deliver fanfare but also follow through. Otherwise Mr. Newsom's national stature may be as fleeting as the Twitter hashtag. The pandemic and the looming recession will define his governorship and shape his political future. And the verdict on Mr. Newsom's leadership will depend not on sound bites but on the myriad deals and details that unfold as the state confronts wrenching choices and rebuilds what was the world's fifth largest economy. The pandemic has enhanced Mr. Newsom's standing, just months into his second year in office. Californians have embraced his calls to "meet the moment," a phrase (or variation of it) he used close to 20 times in his March 19 announcement that the state would shut down. While Mr. Newsom has emulated his New York counterpart with daily Newsomatnoon briefings, in many ways he is the mirror image of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose father, Mario, said he had a face made for radio. Mr. Newsom is telegenic and always impeccably coifed; a novice governor, Mr. Newsom lacks both the baggage and the expertise accumulated over years in office; he is engaging and personable, but has yet to achieve the authenticity and gravitas that has earned Mr. Cuomo a cultlike following. Mr. Newsom has proved adept at garnering headlines and, even before the pandemic, favored governing by executive order. In the flurry of recent news releases, details have been fuzzy and substance often fallen short of hype. An order proclaimed as a moratorium on evictions for those who could not pay rent did not really block evictions so much as delay them. A heralded agreement with unions and school districts that are negotiating over online teaching did not resolve outstanding disputes. Though he has praised them as partners, Mr. Newsom has kept even legislative leaders in the dark on key decisions. Before California lawmakers adjourned for an unusual six week recess, they granted the governor extraordinary authority: to unilaterally spend 1 billion on Covid related expenses. He committed much of the money to the mask deal, which has raised more questions than answers. Lawmakers, informed only minutes before Mr. Newsom's announcement on national TV, were told emergency approval was essential because a 495 million check had to be cut within 48 hours. They were not given copies of contracts, details about costs and quality controls or plans to distribute and allocate the protective gear. A four hour Senate hearing called to answer such questions yielded only generalities and evasive responses from Newsom administration officials. Releasing more details, the governor said Saturday, could imperil delivery of the masks: "I care about producing a big result. Others again are going to consume themselves around process. We're going to consume ourselves around saving lives." "The definition of an executive order is the governor flying solo we empowered him to do it," State Senator Holly Mitchell, chairwoman of the Budget and Fiscal Review Committee, told a reporter when the mask deal was announced. But as chairwoman of the new subcommittee to oversee Covid 19 spending, now projected to total 7 billion by July, she made clear that lawmakers would demand more information. Trust and communication between the governor and the Legislature, frayed last year amid a booming economy, will be tested during painful budget deliberations. The gaping income inequality that plagued the state in times of surplus has been laid bare by a pandemic in which your ZIP code determines whether you experience disruption or disaster. The gulfs will only widen. Children without access to computers and the internet cannot do distance learning. A recent food pantry pop up in Los Angeles drew a mile long line of cars and hundreds who stood in the rain. In the last month, over three million Californians filed for unemployment; forecasts predict unemployment may peak at more than 16 percent, well above the worst of the Great Recession, and take two years to rebound. That hardship, too, will fall unequally. The state will need billions to cover escalating costs for social services programs. There are calls to extend benefits to stave off ruin for those not currently eligible, like undocumented workers. Increasing unemployment benefits to a barely livable level would cost another billion dollars a month. At the same time, revenues will collapse. More than half of the state's personal income tax the largest chunk of revenue comes from the top 1.5 percent of earners. Capital gains alone was budgeted to bring in 30 billion this fiscal year and next. The Great Recession drove home the extreme volatility of California's finances. Former Gov. Jerry Brown, who inherited a 26 billion deficit when he took office in 2011, used his political capital to preach fiscal austerity, squirrel away money in reserve funds and champion a 2014 proposition that created a rainy day fund, which had 16.5 billion as of February. Each year of his final term, Mr. Brown warned that the state's robust economy could not last. At his final budget presentation in January 2018, when it seemed clear he would escape Sacramento ahead of any downturn, he nonetheless pointed to the familiar chart that showed plunging revenues in a recession and said with a mixture of gloom and glee: "The next governor is going to be on the cliff. What's out there is darkness, uncertainty, decline and recession. So good luck, baby!" The options are limited, and unpalatable: cut spending, raise taxes, borrow, resort to financial gimmicks. Achieving consensus will require trust and leadership. With little warning, Gavin Newsom has found himself on the edge of the cliff. 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Last summer, members of eBay's private security team sent live roaches and a bloody pig mask to the home of a suburban Boston couple who published a niche e commerce newsletter. The harassment campaign, which also included physical surveillance, sending pornographic videos to the couple's neighbors, posting ads inviting sexual partners to the couple's home and an attempt to attach a tracking device to their car, was detailed earlier this month in a federal indictment against six former eBay employees. The lurid, 51 page indictment, describing how the employees of a multibillion dollar company were loosed in what authorities described as an unhinged and illegal effort to intimidate critics, drew national attention to the stunning lengths some tech companies will go when responding to their critics. Silicon Valley companies have stacked what they often call their "trust and safety" teams with former police officers and national intelligence analysts. More often than not, their work is well within the law: protecting executives and intellectual property, fending off blackmail attempts and spotting theft. They conduct background checks on companies that could be acquisition targets and they ensure employees aren't doing anything illegal. But the industry's intense focus on reputation can lead their security units astray. Those perils were laid bare when federal authorities revealed the charges against the eBay employees. "Most companies, especially established high tech companies, have units within them that do this kind of work, respond in as close to real time as they can to online criticism of the company, to take steps to protect the brand," Andrew Lelling, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said. But, he added, "I can tell you that at least internally, we have never seen a company that did something like this before." Prosecutors charged the six eBay employees with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and witness tampering, but noted that eBay's campaign against the husband and wife publishing duo was ordered up by senior executives. "I want her DONE," Steven Wymer, eBay's former communications chief, told James Baugh, the company's former senior director of safety and security. "She is a biased troll who needs to get BURNED DOWN." In case there was any confusion, Mr. Wymer added, "I want to see ashes." Contacted this past week, Mr. Wymer, who was not one of the employees charged in the indictment, said, "I would never condone or participate in any such activity." He added that he was constrained in what he could say beyond that. EBay said in a statement that "neither the company nor any current eBay employee was indicted." Private security teams have long been part of corporate America, among them insurers' fraud investigators and the "seed police," as farmers call investigators for the agricultural giant Monsanto who secretly videotape farmers, infiltrate community meetings and recruit informants in their hunt for patent infringement. These private detective teams, which typically operate under fraud divisions, are projected to grow into a 23.3 billion global industry this year from a 17.3 billion industry in 2018, according to Grand View Research. Few industries have embraced the notion of private security as much as tech. One Silicon Valley investigator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of nondisclosure agreements, said a start up executive had paid his firm 50,000 over one weekend to root out employees he believed were plotting his ouster. (They were.) The total tab for the work was as much as half a million dollars. According to police reports and whistle blower complaints filed by two Tesla security operators with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla was accused of hacking into Mr. Tripp's phone, having him followed by private investigators and passing along an anonymous, false tip to the local authorities that Mr. Tripp planned to shoot up Tesla's factory. "Tesla's investigators were tailing him, showing up at weird places, and completely spooked him," Robert Mitchell, Mr. Tripp's lawyer, said in an interview. Mr. Tripp has since moved to Hungary out of fears for his family's safety. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment, but the company has sued Mr. Tripp for 167 million for what it has said was data theft. Mr. Tripp has filed a countersuit for defamation and unspecified damages. Both suits are ongoing. When working for tech companies, private investigators have advantages over traditional law enforcement: They have access to more data, deal with far less red tape, and they have the ability to quickly cross jurisdictions and borders. Justin Zeefe, the president of Nisos, a security firm in Virginia that has worked for tech companies on a wide range of cases. Emma Howells for The New York Times Justin Zeefe, a former intelligence officer who is now the president of Nisos, a security firm in Virginia, said his company has worked for tech companies on a wide range of cases. On one occasion, they learned that a company's overseas suppliers had ties to foreign intelligence agencies. Another client asked his firm to determine whether an acquisition target had been infiltrated by foreign hackers. Yet another hired Nisos to determine the source of multiple cyberattacks. It turned out to be the work of a competitor that had intercepted the company's Wi Fi from an apartment rented across the street. Joe Sullivan, the chief information security officer at the internet company Cloudflare, still remembers the frantic call he received from a colleague while working as a security executive at Facebook several years ago. She had met a man on Match.com who claimed to work in construction in San Jose, Calif., and he had convinced her to send him a topless photo. He was threatening to email the photo to the entire company if she did not pay him 10,000. With her permission, Mr. Sullivan's team took over her account and redirected her extortionist to a payment scheme that they knew would reveal his identity. They determined he was a former Google intern living in Nigeria. Mr. Sullivan's team hired Nigerian contractors to confront him. He confessed and surrendered access to his computer and online accounts, which showed he was extorting female executives across Silicon Valley. Investigators were able to destroy the nude photos and warned his victims not to pay. It could have taken years, Mr. Sullivan said, for law enforcement to identify the extortionist and even longer for Nigerian authorities to do something about it. Mr. Sullivan learned that lesson as a security executive at eBay in 2006. Romanian fraudsters were running rampant on eBay, and Romanian authorities refused to address the problem. It was only after Mr. Sullivan's team shut off eBay access to all of Romania with a message blaming eBay's shuttering on Romanian law enforcement's refusal to pursue online criminals that Romanian police took action. But Mr. Sullivan's experience shows how easily tech's aggressive security tactics can run into trouble. In 2016, two hackers approached Uber with security flaws that allowed them to obtain login credentials for more than 57 million riders and drivers, and the pair demanded a 100,000 payout in return. Mr. Sullivan, who had recently joined Uber from Facebook, ran the same playbook he used in the Nigerian extortion case, pushing the hackers into a payment scheme to deduce their identities. Uber's security team eventually confronted the men at their homes with nondisclosure agreements and asked them to destroy the data. The plan, which was approved by Uber's chief executive at the time, Travis Kalanick, was initially celebrated. But after Uber hired a new chief executive, Mr. Sullivan was fired and accused of covering up a data breach. Uber later settled an investigation of the breach and the company's behavior surrounding the incident for 148 million. The two hackers pleaded guilty last October to charges of computer hacking and extortion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
EVEN people who have known Axel A. Weber for years are not quite sure why he has breached European Central Bank etiquette and dimmed his chances of becoming Europe's top central banker by discussing policy spats outside the clubhouse. As the default favorite to succeed Jean Claude Trichet as president of the bank a year from now, the safe path for Mr. Weber would simply be to keep a low profile. Instead, Mr. Weber has stridently voiced his dissent on decisions that most on the bank council have made since May to combat the European sovereign debt crisis. Normally, little inside information escapes the conference room high in the European Central Bank headquarters, where members of the governing council meet twice a month around a large doughnut shaped conference table. Does Mr. Weber, now the president of the Bundesbank, not want Mr. Trichet's job? Is he simply not able to keep his views to himself? Or is he simply making sure that European heads of government know exactly what they are getting if they put him in charge of monetary policy for the countries that use the euro? "My own judgment is that he is certainly not making it easier to select him for the job," said Jan Pieter Krahnen, a professor of finance at Goethe University Frankfurt and director of the Center for Financial Studies. "He clearly states that 'I will not be an easy person to deal with. With me you will not get a dependent central bank,' " said Mr. Krahnen, who was co director with Mr. Weber of the center from 1998 to 2002. Mr. Weber surprised analysts and investors when, in May, he made it clear he did not support the E.C.B.'s unprecedented decision to buy government bonds to slow a sell off of Greek government debt and other troubled sovereign paper. Mr. Weber surprised them again when despite the furor his first round of comments provoked he repeated his criticism last month during a speech in New York, where he called on the E.C.B. to end the so called Securities Markets Program. "As the risks associated with the S.M.P. outweigh its benefits, these securities purchases should now be phased out permanently," Mr. Weber argued. In fact, the E.C.B. has not bought any bonds in the last three weeks, though it has not formally ended the program. Just last week, during a speech to an audience of business executives in Frankfurt, Mr. Weber split from Mr. Trichet again. Siding with Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, he argued that in future debt crises, bond investors should have to share the costs when a government gets in financial trouble, rather than leaving taxpayers with the bill. That same day in Brussels, Mr. Trichet had argued that talk of making investors pay would only unsettle bond markets and complicate efforts to deal with the current crisis. "I wish that in the future, the E.C.B. would speak with one voice," Jean Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg and head of the so called euro group, complained to the German newspaper Die Welt in an interview published Monday. Mr. Weber also seems to have annoyed Mr. Trichet, who almost never publicly criticizes his colleagues. Since taking office in 2003, Mr. Trichet has toiled for consensus among the members of the council. That was no mean task, given that most are themselves presidents of their countries' central banks, with their own administrations to command and constituencies to serve. Asked about Mr. Weber's comments by the Italian newspaper La Stampa last month, Mr. Trichet said, "There is only one single currency; there is one governing council, only one monetary policy decision, and one president, who is also the porte parole of the governing council," using the French word for spokesman. There are signs that other countries are seizing on Mr. Weber's behavior to try to block his appointment. French newspapers reported last month that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France now considered Mr. Weber unacceptable. But there are few other obvious candidates who would pass political muster and also possess the stature and intellect to do a job that could be the most powerful in Europe. Mario Draghi, governor of the Bank of Italy, has raised his profile recently as chairman of the Financial Stability Board, a panel based in Basel, Switzerland, that has a mandate from the Group of 20 countries to make proposals for a more resilient financial system. Mr. Draghi has stuck to the E.C.B. hymn sheet in his public comments but could suffer from having worked as vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International from 2002 to 2005. The investment bank helped Greece mask the true extent of its financial problems. Other candidates, like Nout Wellink, president of the Bank of the Netherlands and chairman of a prominent panel that is rewriting global banking regulations, are dark horses. Germany, as the largest financial contributor to the euro zone, inherently has a strong claim to supply the next E.C.B. president. Mr. Trichet is French and his predecessor, Wim Duisenberg, was Dutch. The decision on who succeeds Mr. Trichet will have wide significance for the European economy. If leaders choose Mr. Weber, a militant on price stability issues, there would be an effect on bond prices, bank lending and other investment decisions tied to the inflation rate. If investors expect inflation to be low, bond yields could fall and banks could become more willing to lend. But investors might also expect interest rates to rise, which would raise borrowing costs and make it more difficult for countries like Greece to solve their debt problems. "If you get a president like Weber, that is a clear signal that there is absolutely no way we will be giving up on the inflation front," said Silvio Peruzzo, a euro area economist at Royal Bank of Scotland. "The market reaction will be quite quick." Among people who know Mr. Weber, the most likely explanation for his vocal dissent is simply that he feels too strongly about some issues to keep quiet. "He is a man who honestly speaks his opinion," said Jurgen von Hagen, a professor of economics at the University of Bonn, where Mr. Weber taught from 1994 to 1998. "I think he is truly worried about the independence of the E.C.B." A stocky 53 year old and father of two who wears his dark hair slicked back, Mr. Weber spent most of his career as a university professor, teaching in Bonn, Frankfurt and Cologne. He became president of the Bundesbank in 2004 after serving on the German government's council of economic experts, an influential advisory body. As co director of the Center of Financial Studies, Mr. Weber pushed for more interchange between the academic community and banks, which had avoided each other. He was crucial in organizing an annual conference that brings E.C.B. policy makers together with professors and analysts who focus on monetary issues, requiring the camps to confront one another in person. "Some professors sit critically on the sidelines," Mr. Krahnen said. "This was not Axel's position. He was more into dialogue, research with practical applications." Though he enjoys a vigorous debate, Mr. Weber is not dogmatic, Mr. Krahnen said. "He listens, he argues," Mr. Krahnen said. "He is not like other people I have seen in senior positions who basically don't question their own views." "He has always been, as far as I can remember, a very outspoken person and not the diplomat you see in these positions," he added. While Mr. Weber enjoys wide respect for his intellect, some question whether that lack of diplomacy could be a liability. Certainly Mr. Weber would be a very different E.C.B. president compared with Mr. Trichet, a lifelong civil servant known for decorum. "It is a good thing to have an internal debate," said Marie Diron, a former E.C.B. economist who now provides advice on economic issues to Ernst Young, the consulting firm. "But once the decision is taken, debate is harmful. It increases volatility in the markets, which is not helpful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
A pet portrait party is among the many activities that have been planned for residents of 88 90 Lexington Avenue.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times A pet portrait party is among the many activities that have been planned for residents of 88 90 Lexington Avenue. Monday was pet portraits in a velvety lounge at 88 90 Lexington Avenue, a condominium development on 26th Stree t in New York City . Thursday was mixology in the chef's kitchen at 121 East 22nd Street, the OMA designed, prism edged tower built by Toll Brothers. Down at 56 Leonard, otherwise known as the Jenga building in TriBeCa, there were classes in bouquet making by Uprooted, the mobile florist; a mommy and me tea party; and a tacos and tequila fiesta for Cinco de Mayo. Color therapy, involving an installation of light and sound, designed to treat stress, is scheduled for June. In shiny new developments all over Manhattan, the fulsome amenity spaces lounges and screening rooms and chef's kitchens are being "activated," as developers and artists like to say, with talks and classes, tastings, parties and panels, as if home is now an extension of the 92nd Street Y. While the buildings of the last few booms adopted the embellishments and services of luxury hotels, this wave has been imprinted by the community building behaviors of idealistic millennials bees, horticulture, self care! and the tastes of the podcast class. It was Mr. Fazio who invited Noah Wilson Rich, a behavioral ecologist, chief scientific officer at Best Bees (a company that installs and manages beehives across the country) and veteran of the TED X circuit, to give a talk on urban beekeeping for the would be residents of Waterline Square, a condominium complex near Lincoln Center expected to open later this year. Also on the roster: a panel on the science of scent; a talk on decoding dreams by a sleep doctor; an evening with an aura photographer; and a class in dancing while blindfolded. "We think brain fitness is on trend, and it's something we're going to push out in the fall," said Mr. Fazio, the co author of "Concierge Confidential: The Secrets of Serving Champagne Bitches and Caviar Queens," a 2011 memoir (with tips) of his years taking care of uppity guests at the InterContinental hotel. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Fazio and his colleague Rachel Woodbridge, 29, a Parsons School of Design graduate who once worked at the fashion website Net a Porter and helped found a concierge start up, were on a conference call with Game U, a company that teaches children how to build video games. They were planning an event at 56 Leonard and hashing out the details: Would the kids be able to code in one session? Would it be enough of an experience? What would it cost? (About 100 per child, which Mr. Fazio thought could fit the building's budget without charging extra. The cost of most events is built into a property's running costs, he said, which are paid for in maintenance fees or by the developer.) The next call was to Tom Leonardis, the president of Whoopi Goldberg's company Whoop. Mr. Fazio wanted to create an event for Gay Pride Day around marriage equality: perhaps screen a few documentaries and organize a panel. "If you were painting this picture, what would be discussed?" Mr. Leonardis said. "Would you want Whoopi to be a part of it? She's doing a clothing line and opening Gay Pride at the Barclays Center." Mr. Leonardis went on to describe an engagement ring he and others have designed for the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and also straight men. "It hasn't launched," he said. "You could have it first." Mr. Fazio gasped and said, "Oh my God! O.K.! Let me bake this a little bit more and get back to you." Then he turned to Ms. Woodbridge. "Do we do serious, or light and breezy, a trunk show: destination weddings and the engagement rings?" Ideas may come from serendipitous street sightings or scouring Instagram. They court new businesses, and are courted back. Du's Donuts and Coffee, the chef Wylie Dufresne's exotic doughnut emporium in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, sent samples for LIV to test, after which LIV organized a few doughnut pop ups in its buildings. In return for their time and products, the businesses or individuals LIV approaches get exposure to a captive audience of time starved affluent people who may not otherwise partake of their wares and expertise. "We've probably exhausted hundreds of relationships," Mr. Fazio said. "But it's part of the life these people have bought into. It becomes part of a building's story. Everyone has the same Bosch appliances, the same views, the same marble slab open kitchens. But you can say, 'Move over Soho House and Core Club.' You don't have to belong to those, it's in your building. So it's just another asset. Just add water. Just add 6 million and you have friends and stuff to do and you're in the know about, say, Wylie Dufresne's doughnut shop in Brooklyn." Unless you win the affordable housing lottery, you'll need 6 million for three bedrooms and water views at Waterline Square: three glass towers with 263 condo units on five acres, more than half of them park, on the edge of the West Side Highway, stretching from 59th Street to 61st Street. The exterior architecture is standard high luxury fare, by Richard Meier, Kohn Pedersen Fox and Rafael Vinoly. (Each firm got its own building; the Vinoly one looks sort of like an iceberg.) Underneath will be a private underground mall called the Waterline Club, 100,000 square feet rendered into swoopy fabulousness by the Rockwell Group and outfitted like a college campus with a soccer field; a skate park; multiple gyms, pools and fitness studios; a tennis court; a gardening center; a recording studio; an art studio; a two lane bowling alley; a dog run; and a 4,600 square foot children's playroom that looks like the Gryffindor common room by way of Disney. Five years ago in Manhattan, according to the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, there were 54 developments that were considered "luxury"; at the time, that meant units selling, on average, for 2,200 per square foot and up. Now there are 90, and the benchmark for "luxury" is 2,400 per square foot. (In 2012, there were just 31 such properties.) Many of these buildings, rising in all sorts of commercial or less populated areas "transitional neighborhoods," as James Lansill, a managing director at Corcoran Sunshine, called them may lack organic opportunities for socialization. Enter LIV and its competitors, which include a company called Luxury Attache and also in house lifestyle managers. Mr. Lansill was on the phone from the sales center of 130 William, a cast concrete tower at the southern tip of Manhattan that has just topped out at 800 feet and will be finished next year. Its architect is David Adjaye, one of the designers of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. It is quite beautiful with arched windows that are a little bit Gaudi, a little bit Romanesque, a respite from all the glass towers but its size and vast amenity spaces will create yet another enormous gated community, another urban suburb. "The most precious commodity people have is time, and they value the efficiency of having robust resources in their vertical community," Mr. Lansill said. "If you don't have to leave your home to host a party, or your kid's party, or go to the gym or see a movie, that's truly valuable." And then there's that major commitment of many Manhattan women: hair. Lauren Witkoff, executive vice president of Witkoff, one of the developers of 111 Murray Street (another Kohn Pedersen Fox tower on the edge of TriBeCa), has invited the blowout chain Drybar into the amenity spaces there. "It's the only private Drybar in the city," Ms. Witkoff said, adding that she was working with Creative Art Partners, an "art concierge service" in Los Angeles, to help residents build their own art collections. "We're always trying to do something a little different. It's not just, 'What amenities are we going to put in the building?' But 'how are we going to activate them in a way that's meaningful?'" In "The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of Community," which was published in 19 89, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about the importance of the "third place": that which is not home and not work, a ballast in a society where home life is increasingly isolated. If there is no informal public life, he wrote, if the "means and facilities for relaxation and leisure are not publicly shared, they become the objects of private ownership and consumption." That's not good for cities. So many buildings have devoted so much interior space to what used to be public places hair salons and gyms and theaters and food courts it may begin to feel like the city is turning inside out, ri nged by walls of glass as smooth and blank as Kim Kardashian's skin. Not everyone is wringing their hands. Richard Florida, a professor at the School of Cities at the University of Toronto and the author of "The New Urban Crisis," cautions against reflexively dismissing these fastidious private developments, and romanticizing New York City's grittier past, even if it was chockablock with authentic "third places" like seedy bars and diners. "Every time people say New York is over, it transforms," he said. "New York was never held back by its past. Everyone is complaining about Hudson Yards, but they don't get it. Hudson Yards is not for New Yorkers. It's made for a lot of people who lived in a suburb and want to be in a city that's not gritty or dirty." Yes, he conceded, "some of these neighborhoods are becoming the equivalent of vertical suburbs. Now combine that with everyone on their cellphones and social media, instead of talking to people at the bar. And you have the modern, tech induced version of David Riesman's lonely crowd." The binding element, he suggested , may be the community and connection found in blindfold dancing with your neighbors, or at a panel of CBD entrepreneurs and wellness experts, like the one convened by Mr. Fazio on April 20 ("Lit in Luxury," he called it). Or hey, pet p ortraits. "I never lived in a building before where I talked to my neighbors," said Colleen Tanjeloff, who is on the board of 88 90 Lexington and had brought her two year old son and Lou, a 13 year old Yorkiepoo, to the pet portraits party in her lounge. There, Roxy, a gassy yet beguiling Boston terrier, had her mug sketched by Laura Supnik, an illustrator in Brooklyn, without straying from the lap of her owner, Jodi Balkan, the principal of a public relations firm. ("She doesn't like people or other dogs," Ms. Balkan said.) Ms. Balkan and Ms. Tanjeloff noted that new developments aren't like traditional co ops or rental buildings. "Everyone is new and everyone arrives at about the same time," Ms. Tanjeloff said. Their building is rife with amenities, including a plush screening room that Ms. Tanjeloff and other residents with small children use as a playground in the colder months no programming required. "We call it the kids' track," she said. "We lie back in those reclining seats with our coffee and let them run around us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
With an agenda that Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, has described as a "quiet revolution," the Obama administration has pushed rigorous new standards for a majority of the nation's public schools as well as requirements that states and districts evaluate not just schools but individual teachers, in part by assessing their ability to improve student scores on standardized tests. But some critics suggest that at the same time the administration has gotten tough on teachers and set higher standards, it could be allowing states to set new, unambitious goals for how quickly students must reach those standards, particularly poor and minority students. "We repeatedly look for ways to game the system and fuzz up the fact that our kids aren't being educated to the standards that they need," said Amy Wilkins, vice president for government affairs at the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that works to close achievement gaps. One particularly controversial example emerged over the summer, when Virginia initially released new targets showing that the state would require 57 percent of black students to become proficient in math by 2017, compared with 78 percent of white students. Virginia's education department has since revised its goals, with a goal of making 73 percent of all students proficient in math within five years. The administration has pushed its agenda through two programs: its Race to the Top grants, which it has awarded to 19 states, and the waivers to 33 states from central provisions of the Bush administration's signature No Child Left Behind education law. States that have qualified for the waivers are relieved from meeting the law's most controversial target: making all students proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014. Although both President Obama and Mitt Romney addressed education during their debate on Wednesday, neither talked specifically about the changes to No Child Left Behind. But Mr. Duncan, in a telephone interview, addressed critics of the waiver policies. He said the administration had deliberately flipped the theory behind No Child Left Behind, which has been up for reauthorization since 2007. That law prescribed consequences for schools that failed to meet annual goals, while allowing individual states to set goals that Mr. Duncan described as "dummied down standards." He said that with its waivers, which the administration used to sidestep Congress after lawmakers failed repeatedly to reauthorize the No Child law, the policy was "tight on goals, loose on means." So while the administration is requiring states that want waivers to set rigorous "college and career ready" standards, it is allowing them to design their own proposals for how and how quickly to get schools to meet those standards. "Going forward, we should be in the business of supporting states and holding them accountable," Mr. Duncan said, "and not treating every state and district the same." Some advocacy groups worry that the waivers require few consequences if schools fail to meet their new targets, even as No Child Left Behind was criticized for requiring rigid interventions for low performing schools, like forcing states to lay off a large portion of a school's staff or to close a school altogether. The waivers allow states to design new interventions, and some critics worry that education officials now have too much leeway. "All of these states continue to significantly weaken the power and impact of goals by not using them to hold schools accountable," Jeremy Ayers, associate director of federal education programs at the left leaning Center for American Progress, wrote in an e mail. With the waivers directing states to focus on the bottom 15 percent of schools, Mr. Ayers said, he was concerned that the remaining schools would do little more than report test results. "Describing the problem is not the same as fixing it," he said. Teachers' unions and other education advocates have chafed at other conditions in the waivers and Race to the Top, which require new teacher evaluation systems that rely increasingly on students' standardized test performance. Such objections became a significant sticking point in the Chicago teachers' union strike last month. According to the Education Commission of the States, 30 states have passed laws requiring districts to evaluate teachers using standardized test scores. Michael Griffith, senior policy analyst at the commission, said states had acted despite the fact that the 4.35 billion disbursed through the Race to the Top program is to be spread over five years and amounts to less than 1 percent of total education spending at the federal, state and local level in 2011 2012. Federal education financing is typically about 10 percent of total spending on public K 12 education. It is not clear what could happen to the waivers if Mr. Romney is elected president. Congressional Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly failed to reauthorize the elementary and secondary education law as they have clashed on the proper role for the federal government in public schools. In the debate, Mr. Romney reiterated his support for a plan to distribute federal money so students can choose where they go to school, and surprised some educators and analysts when he said: "I'm not going to cut education funding. I don't have any plan to cut education funding." Supporters of the Obama administration's approach say it is allowing states to accommodate differences between students, rather than entrapping schools with unattainable goals. "A statement by a state that 'we're going to give low income schools more time to reach proficiency than we're going to give high income schools' is reasonable in the real world," said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative leaning education policy group in Washington. The adoption of the new college and career standards, he said, "is still ambitious, and says in the long run, it's the same standard we'd like them all to attain."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Does a bear poop in the woods? Of course it does, and so, apparently, do a whole lot of humans. Discarded toilet paper is just one of the problems that Rocky Mountain National Park has been dealing with as it leapfrogged ahead of Yellowstone and Yosemite in popularity last year. Its 4.16 million visitors in 2015, an increase of 21 percent from the year before, is behind only Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with 10.71 million guests, and Grand Canyon National Park, with 5.52 million. "With that increase, we started to see a different behavior in our visitors," said Kyle Patterson, a Rocky Mountain National Park spokeswoman. While most people behave properly, the number engaging in illegal activity increased so much that the park this summer issued a plea for assistance in trying to educate visitors about park etiquette. The "Please Help Your Friends to Behave Better to Protect Rocky Mountain National Park" statement covered a variety of topics, including avoiding the park between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. during the summer and fall, restrictions on campfires, keeping a distance from wildlife, not taking items from the wild, the prohibition on pets in most places, parking and, yes, bathroom habits. "If your friend is a frequent pooper, suggest taking care of that before hiking. If nature calls, plan ahead bring a waste bag, or research tips on how to poop in the woods," it said. "Friends don't let friends go to the bathroom near water sources. Just think, you might be drinking from that water source the next day!" Etiquette issues in the parks aren't new, nor are they unique to Colorado. Last year, Glacier National Park posted a blog on its website about "the not so rare wildflower called the 'toilet paper bloom' " that gave instructions on how to properly pee and poop in the woods. In fact, nearly every park website offers some sort of guidance about etiquette, whether it's a reminder to turn off cellphones for night sky viewing at Joshua Tree National Park or advice on how to behave with the villagers at the National Park of American Samoa. With three straight years of record visitation, "we've heard anecdotally, especially from the major parks, that citations for minor crimes and misdemeanors are up," said Jeffrey G. Olson, a spokesman for the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. Even though Rocky Mountain has half the staff of Yellowstone and a third of the staff of Yosemite, the call for help that was shared on Twitter and with the park's 500,000 Facebook followers, posted on its website and sent to various news outlets, wasn't intended to encourage vigilantism, Ms. Patterson said. "We certainly have a lot of visitors reaching out to other visitors," she said. "Sometimes that goes well, sometime it doesn't. We have had altercations about parking spaces, arguing about who got the parking space first. People trying to save parking spaces and other people yelling that they can't." A few years ago, a man was punched in the face after politely telling another visitor that he needed to stay off the tundra to protect the fragile ecosystem, Ms. Patterson said. Rather than encouraging people to engage with strangers, the lighthearted primer "was truly meant to connect with park visitors to be able to share with their friends what the rules and regulations are and why," she said. It's easy to understand the challenges that many of the park's 400 summer employees (including 175 year round staff), are experiencing. A trip to one of the most popular parts of the 415 square mile park on a Saturday in late summer put a spotlight on a variety of visitors who either didn't know or didn't care about park rules. Choice parking lots like Bear Lake were filled before 8 a.m. Drivers arriving after that were sent back down the hill to a Park and Ride lot. Once the Park and Ride lot fills, usually around 9:30 a.m., access to Bear Lake Road is restricted. Drivers are stopped lower down and directed to the parking lots at the visitor centers, where free shuttles take passengers to trailheads. "This guy might be a problem," Billy Webb, a park volunteer, radioed ahead after he sent a white S.U.V. to the Park and Ride lot. Mr. Webb was worried the driver would pull forward and stop, insisting on waiting for a spot to open. When drivers do that, it snarls traffic, incites road rage and blocks the way for the shuttles and emergency vehicles. As the lots filled, some drivers parked on the wild grass by the side of the road, risking damage to the native species, and the chance that they would be towed. Friends are advised to discourage this behavior by reminding the driver that they wouldn't allow someone to park on their prized rose bushes. On the Saturday of my visit, about 10,000 vehicles entered the park. While there are more than 350 miles of hiking trails in the park, there was a steady flow of people on the 5.6 mile trail to Mills Lake, including some who broadcast music from their phones as they walked along. Nonetheless, all seemed polite, nodding hello and stepping to the side to let others pass, or in the case of one fellow, to take a hit of his Boost Oxygen supplement as he approached 9,500 feet and the spectacular vista as the lake comes into view amid a stunning mountain backdrop. But I was only an hour into my hike when I noticed a woman squatting behind some limber pines near the trail. Soon after, the confetti of toilet paper became increasingly noticeable along the side of the trail. Already, the park provides free bags to pack out waste at the Backcountry Office and also from a dispenser near the 13 mile Lumpy Ridge Trailhead, a popular site for climbers. "What we will be doing within the next couple of years is looking at long term solutions, engaging the public on what that looks like," Ms. Patterson said. Until then, the staff will continue to walk a fine line between host and enforcer, all while trying to educate the public. As I rode back to my car in the shuttle, I noticed there were advertisements on the inside of the bus, not unlike a New York subway. The subject matter, however, was decidedly different. "Go Before You Go," read one. "Use restrooms at trailheads. Although bears do it in the woods, we'd rather YOU don't."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
BUDAPEST Zoltan Zsoter, an 80 year old retiree, would seem to be about as far from the world of currency speculation as a person can get. Yet he is an example of how the workings of the global financial system, amplified by the policies of a single political leader, can have a devastating effect on ordinary people. Mr. Zsoter is one of hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who took out home loans that must be repaid in Swiss francs or other foreign currencies like the euro. Such loans offered seductively low interest rates when times were good. But then the Hungarian currency plunged, causing Mr. Zsoter's monthly payment to almost double. "I live day to day," Mr. Zsoter said. After defaulting on his loan, he pays 40,000 forints, or about 163, out of his monthly pension of 51,000 forints to stay in his modest Budapest apartment as a renter. "Sometimes I have to choose between buying either food or medicine," he said. Hungary serves as a cautionary tale for those who argue that Greece could regain competitiveness by reintroducing its currency. The drachma would plunge against the euro, the theory goes, and allow Greek products to compete on price with countries like Turkey. "Whatever you win today, it shoots you back tomorrow," said Radovan Jelasity, chief of the Hungarian unit of Erste Bank, an Austrian institution. Viktor Orban, the embattled Hungarian prime minister, did not create the problem with foreign currency loans, which is also an issue in other East European countries like Poland. But many critics regard Mr. Orban as a would be strongman whose erratic, heavy handed policies have made Hungary's economic problems far worse by scaring off foreign investors, prompting credit rating agencies to downgrade government bonds to junk and leading to an even further drop in the forint. In theory, the plunge of the currency should help the economy by making Hungarian products less expensive abroad and cutting the cost of labor relative to neighboring countries. But economists and business people say the advantages of a weak currency are more than canceled out by negative factors, like soaring prices for imported fuel or imported components for Hungarian factories, not to mention higher payments on foreign currency loans. But the near future looks grim, with 10.7 percent unemployment and inflation of 4.3 percent as the economy heads into recession. Hungary is highly susceptible to the economic problems in Western Europe, where most of its exports go. To some critics, the biggest problem with the Hungarian economy is Mr. Orban himself. "The fundamental numbers are good," said Mr. Oszko, who now runs a venture capital fund. "If the government decided to become more credible and predictable, it would help a lot." Backed by a two thirds majority in Parliament, Mr. Orban has passed a flurry of laws that have concentrated power in his hands, weakened competing institutions like the central bank and alienated international lenders as well as an increasing number of Hungarians. One law nationalized private pensions in order to make the budget deficit look better. Such actions last week prompted the European Commission to threaten to take legal action against Hungary, a move many Hungarians regarded as long overdue. Mr. Orban also faces pressure from the International Monetary Fund, which may be Hungary's only hope to avoid defaulting on its national debt, much of which is also denominated in euros. Faced with rising borrowing costs, the country could run out of money by May or sooner if bond investors become more skeptical. Yields on longer term Hungarian bonds rose above 10 percent this month, a rate that bodes ill for the government as it seeks to sell more than 1 billion in debt through April, a large sum for a country of 10 million people. Following a visit to Washington last week by Tamas Fellegi, a Hungarian minister, Christine Lagarde, the I.M.F. managing director, made it clear she wanted to see action and not promises. Before the I.M.F. will begin negotiations on further loans to Hungary, "it will need to see tangible steps that show the authorities' strong commitment to engage on all the policy issues that are relevant to macroeconomic stability," Ms. Lagarde said in a statement. Some Hungarians are hopeful that pressure from so many quarters will force Mr. Orban to modify his behavior. But few expect Mr. Orban to cede power easily, and there is a real risk that Hungary could lose its status as a symbol of the transformation of the former Communist East, and a favored destination for companies like the German carmaker Daimler, which will soon begin producing Mercedes Benz vehicles at a new factory southeast of Budapest. Foreign banks, while insisting they still see Hungary as a growth market, have been cutting jobs in the face of losses. They trace some of the losses to Mr. Orban, whose government decreed that holders of foreign currency loans could redeem them at an artificially low exchange rate. Banks say the move helped only wealthier borrowers with enough capital to pay off loans all at once, not people like Mr. Zsoter. He belongs to the category of borrower hardest hit by the decline of the forint: ordinary citizens whose income is entirely in local currency. About 14 percent of all retail loans in Hungary are considered nonperforming, according to the Hungarian Financial Supervisory Authority, a regulatory body. Erzsebet Dobos, president of the Hungarian Investment and Trade Agency, insisted that plenty of companies were still interested in locating in Hungary because of its well educated workers and good infrastructure. However, she said some potential investors had become more cautious. "They are reading the newspapers," Ms. Dobos said. "They want to have a closer look." Despite the new Daimler factory, foreign investment in Hungary has been declining since the beginning of 2011. The exchange rate "is not really an advantage for us," Ms. Dobos said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
So much for politics. After two years in which the CFDA awards the annual celebrity and model infused "Oscars of the Fashion World" bestowed by the Council of Fashion Designers of America had celebrated and called out the need for diversity, the power of immigrants, the rights of women and questioned the very meaning of what it was to be a designer; on an evening that symbolized the turn of an era as Diane von Furstenberg, the longtime CFDA chairman, passed the torch of leadership (literally) to Tom Ford; at a ceremony where more designers of color were nominated for awards than possibly ever before, the winner was ... the status quo. It started off promisingly enough. On Monday night at the Brooklyn Museum, as the sun set over Prospect Park and guests finally took their seats in the rotunda after two hours of air kissing, Hasan Minhaj of "The Daily Show" appeared on stage to present the Menswear Designer of the Year award. And he began by poking pointed fun at Gucci for "putting white guys in turbans," a reference to a recent cultural appropriation brouhaha that suggested the show would not be without currency. But then Rick Owens, the American designer in Paris who won the Lifetime Achievement Award back in 2017, got the prize beating out Virgil Abloh, the most nominated designer, who went home empty handed (kind of like Jay Z at the 2018 Grammys). And so it went. In presenting Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen with the Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti International Award (on the same night that the Duchess of Cambridge wore a McQueen gown to the state banquet with President Trump in London), Anna Wintour showed a family wedding picture, of the gown that Ms. Burton made last year for Ms. Wintour's daughter, Bee. Barbie, the Mattel doll celebrating its 60th birthday this year, won the Board of Directors' Tribute, a recognition that previously went to Michelle Obama, Gloria Steinem, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood. While accepting on behalf of the doll, Lisa McKnight of Mattel pointed out that Barbie had been an astronaut before a man went to the moon, and president before "a woman won the popular vote," but it was hard to get away from the sense that a plastic toy was not quite the same thing. Especially one that, despite coming in numerous iterations, is still most famous for being Caucasian, blond and the sort of female shape that exists only in virtual reality. They were such familiar names on this particular podium (Bob Mackie won the Lifetime Achievement Award), the announcement that Brandon Maxwell, the maestro of Lady Gaga's four in one Met gala look, won the Womenswear Designer of the Year award, practically qualified as an upset even though he also took home the Emerging Womenswear Designer trophy in 2016. In any case, Mr. Maxwell's name was met with many cheers, as was his emotional speech, in which he announced he had not expected to win and so had been taking full advantage of the free bar, revealed his pants were too tight, and celebrated being "part of an industry like this where we wake up every day charged with the idea that making a woman feel good, that making someone happy, is valid." That was Jennifer Lopez's message also as she accepted her Fashion Icon award in a Ralph Lauren ball gown skirt and cropped top, noting that as a girl who grew up in the Bronx, she had to wear a designer who also grew up in the Bronx. Introducing her, Mr. Ford had hailed her as a pioneer of the body positive movement, though the closest anyone got to really taking a stand on an issue of the day was Eileen Fisher, who was given the Positive Change Award for her work in sustainability. And though she did acknowledge that fashion as an industry was in no way sustainable, instead of excoriating the people in the room, she simply asked them to engage with the problem, and think about what they could do. Maybe that was a clue to the import of the event: In a world that is increasingly angry and divided, this was a time for an industry to just come together and make nice. But while inclusivity and a warm, cuddly embrace is important, is it enough? New York fashion American fashion in general is in the midst of an identity crisis. The old guard is treading water, and a new generation (many of whom, including Telfar Clemens, Mr. Abloh and Kerby Jean Raymond of Pyer Moss were nominated, but none of whom won) is coming to the fore, wrestling with entirely different ideas about what role fashion plays in the world. By avoiding the topics that have the most urgency, whether gender fluidity, the tension between digital and material culture, race or women's rights over their own bodies, and the designers trying to remake those narratives, the CFDAs also avoided controversy. And risk. As a result, after Ms. Lopez finished her speech and the attendees melted into the night and their Ubers, it was hard not to feel that despite all of the winners, something had also been lost: relevance.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The Public Theater, one of the nation's biggest and most influential nonprofit theaters, has abruptly shortened the run of a climate change activist's provocative one man show, saying the creator, Josh Fox, had violated the theater's code of conduct. Fox, a film and theater artist best known for his Oscar nominated anti fracking documentary "Gasland," announced the cancellation on social media, where he levied a series of serious claims against the Public, accusing the institution's staff of "verbal threats, coercion, angry tirades and physical intimidation" as well as "acts of aggression." "They were clearly suppressing the content of the show," he said. In the show, Fox recounts his anti fracking work and what he describes as subsequent incessant harassment by the oil and gas industry; he also links the fossil fuel industry with white supremacy and the architects of big data. He was the show's writer and performer, and was also directing it with Ron Russell. The show had been running since Jan. 11 as one of multiple works featured in the Public's annual Under the Radar Festival. It had been scheduled to run until Jan. 19; instead, its final performance there was Jan. 16, and Fox said he would relocate the remaining performances to a rehearsal space in Brooklyn. Fox said on Saturday that he and his crew had been subjected to a series of intimidating and disruptive behaviors during the run at the Public. He said that he had been berated by festival staff just before a performance, that a sound technician had aggressively rushed the stage during a rehearsal and that written complaints to the Public from his crew, in which they had described not feeling safe, had gone unanswered. He accused the Public's employees of "anti Semitic tropes." When asked to explain, he said he had been told that he was too passionate, too loud and too emotional. "To me that is distinctly cultural," he said. "That's a classic anti Semitic trope." And he has pointed to several major donors to the Public that, he said, have fossil fuel industry links. "The Public Theater takes a lot of oil and gas money, so we suspect that this was a factor," Fox said. The Public denied that its employees had behaved inappropriately or that its decision making had been influenced by any donors. "We have confidence that our staff did their best to treat Josh and his team with dignity and respect," Bhola, the spokeswoman, said. The theater, which is the birthplace of "Hair" and "Hamilton" and has regularly staged politically charged work about contemporary issues, said it had no concerns about the substance of Fox's show. "The Public has a longstanding history of defending innovative and provocative artistry," the theater said. "The content of Josh's show had nothing to do with the cancellation."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Twin sisters are summoned together to a creepily named government bureau called the Federal Registry of Genetics. One of the women has had a mysterious health condition all her life. They hope that the testing they've been asked to undergo will help. What they don't realize, but gradually discover, is that they're clones. In "Assembled Identity," a high tech sci fi drama at Here, the genetics registry is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the sisters (Mariana Newhard and Lipica Shah) have a lot of company women from all over the world, each with long, dark hair, all looking uncannily like them. (They are played, of course, by Ms. Newhard and Ms. Shah.) The show was created by Purva Bedi, Ms. Newhard and Kristin Marting, who directs. It is partly inspired by cultural dynamics that Ms. Bedi and Ms. Newhard, both actresses, regularly navigate. "Although we are from very ethnically different backgrounds," they write in a program note, "we are often mistaken for each other, asked if we are sisters and called in for the same roles, which generally don't reflect either of our ethnicities." Race and ethnic ambiguity are some of what they mean to explore in this show, which is about the nexus of technology and identity, and the danger that science will erode our humanness. But with its intricate projections (by David Bengali), by turns crisp and spectral; its abundant video (also by Mr. Bengali), both live and recorded; and sound design (by Drew Weinstein) that makes us feel the clinical coolness of the research facility where the twins are specimens, "Assembled Identity" tumbles into a trap: It prizes technology over connection and the clear telling of a tale.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
An electric affinity crackles between the man and the woman in line for the movies. They have never met before, but they both stand out in the crowd. The head of each has been subtly illuminated, as if framed by self consciousness. And you may wonder because their faces are both disfigured beyond concealment if such self consciousness ever leaves them. Thus begins the exquisite "Feos" ("The Ugly Ones" in English) from the Chilean troupe Teatro y Su Doble, conceived and directed by Aline Kuppenheim. This quiet, resonant production is a boy meets girl story of a singular stripe. That's partly because our leading, would be lovers are portrayed by mannequin puppets. I initially thought these figures were life size, until I was able to discern in the gloaming of a sustained, velvety night (lighted by Jose Luis Cifuentes) the larger human beings in black who manipulate them. Such a disorienting perspective befits a work that asks us to think about how we see others. So does having its principal characters, in a long scene set in a cafe, seated so we see only their "good" side. We could almost forget here that they have very visible distinguishing traits that set them apart. Or we could if these nameless characters weren't engaged in concentrated talk about what it means to look the way they look. (The show is in Spanish, with supertitles.) They are fatalistically preoccupied, in particular, with how their appearances affect their prospects for an active sex life. The Mario Benedetti story that inspired this production is very short and elliptical. This adaptation, by the uncompromising playwright Guillermo Calderon, fills in the conversational blanks. These characters speak with the hesitations of any couple that has just met. Yet their similarities allow them an unusual frankness, and their discussion implicitly becomes a dialogue on physical appearance as an existentially defining force. Neither of them has been invested with extraordinary charm or pluckiness. But we find ourselves deeply invested in the outcome of this evening. The play concludes with a wordless morning after that glows with aching ambivalence. BEN BRANTLEY "If you get motion sick at any time just raise your hand." That's the unusual advice delivered as an audience consisting of only four people enters a darkened classroom on the Public's third floor to see the virtual reality work "To the Moon." After donning the requisite headset and taking hold of the manual controllers provided, I understood why: During the course of the 15 minute experience, the four of us, seated on far spaced stools and isolated even further in discrete mindscapes, were launched from Earth and incorporated into a series of gravity defying lunar vignettes. There's a lot of gorgeous psychedelia in the vignettes, created by the pioneering electronic avant gardist Laurie Anderson and the new media artist Hsin Chien Huang. A galactic debris storm pelts your spacesuit with rocks and moon mud. Extinct creatures made from DNA skeletons loom and lumber. A donkey takes you for a ride to the rim of a dizzying abyss. If there is no explicit conflict, there is a quieter message about the smallness of human life in the universe and its outsize capacity for mischief. Flags trying to signify ownership pop up on the lunar surface. The earth rises very small in the distance, yet you keep looking around for it in hope or worry. Your shadow gets tinier and tinier. "I love the stars because we cannot hurt them," Anderson whispers through your headset in her best bedtime voice. Her tinkly, thrumming music enhances the feeling that "To the Moon" is more of an illustrated soundtrack or a high tech cartoon than a piece of theater. A display in the hallway outside the classroom says it was inspired by the tale of a Chinese painter who, upon finishing an enormous vertical landscape of unprecedented detail, walked into it and disappeared. "To the Moon" wasn't dramatic enough to make me do the same. Although I kept trying to pet my lovely donkey, I couldn't shake the awareness that, ultimately, I was pawing in the dark at nothing. JESSE GREEN It is a terrible pickup line, but Liu Mei uses it every time. "Do you know why it's impossible to lick the tips of your elbows?" she asks. "They hold the secret to immortality." The guy she has her eye on might edge away before she urges him to try it. But in Wang Chong's cinematically intimate production of "Nick Payne's Constellations," for the Beijing company Theatre du Reve Experimental, that guy is always Du Lei. And in some versions of their lives, they fall in love. As Mei (Wang Xiaohuan), a Beijing physicist, tells Lei (Li Jialong), a beekeeper, "In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you've ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
A still from Pam Tanowitz's "A Dance for Any Body Outside Anywhere," an instructional type video influenced by Judson Dance Theater. You can fight a cultural moment, or you can look at what it's producing and ride that wave. Sasha Okshteyn is going for the wave. Like most things annual, Beach Sessions, Ms. Okshteyn's summer series at Rockaway Beach in Queens, will look different this year. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, live performances would have been difficult, if not out of the question. But instead of canceling, she thought, "Why don't I work it into where we are today?" In our isolated world, social media is more than ever where connection happens. Ms. Okshteyn noted how choreographers from the contemporary dance world had expanded their reach during the pandemic on TikTok and Instagram, as had professional dancers like Marc Crousillat and Erica Lall. The artists she selected had used social media platforms to continue making work, even as the dance world went on pause. "They were expressing themselves through these platforms," she said. "They feel comfortable in this realm." Her assignment to them was simple and open: Design a movement score, roughly 60 seconds in length, that could be learned on a social media platform. The outcome could be private people can learn and perform the dance, simply to experience some form of physical release or public, if participants repost their videos on TikTok. Two intriguing and wholly different works in the series are by Ms. Tanowitz and Ms. Walsh. "What does it look like to build our community that way?" Ms. Okshteyn said. "It would be amazing to have thousands of people doing a Pam Tanowitz sequence." Ms. Tanowitz's choreography is usually technically daunting, but here she has made an instructional film open to individual interpretation: "A Dance for Any Body Outside Anywhere" looks to the inclusive spirit of Judson Dance Theater, the experimental 1960s collective that celebrated, in part, pedestrian movement. Viewers can mimic her dancers or make up their own movement. "The score and the steps are really made up of all of our lives right now," Ms. Tanowitz said. "Some are very specific and some are very open and abstract." It's a framework from which participants can copy the dancers' movement or interpret the steps however they like, from the first "tap, tap, tap" to the final, strangely poignant directive to "think the word love." (Other directions include "arch" and "do something that wasn't your idea.") The instructional text, hand written by Ms. Tanowitz, appears overlaid on the screen, like a page torn one from her choreographic notebooks. Ms. Okshteyn said she had been drawn to Ms. Tanowitz partly because of how she persevered during quarantine continuing to choreograph remotely with dancers even without an immediate goal in sight. Ms. Tanowitz's score for Beach Sessions is an outgrowth of that work. "That's what makes a true artist," Ms. Okshteyn said. "To be able to adjust quickly, but continue your existing practice. Of course, we all have to adjust to this new normal, but it's important not to stop." She also collaborated with an editor, Britt Kubat; together, they paid homage to the look of the colors and credits of Jean Luc Godard films. (One of Ms. Tanowitz's loves is the French New Wave.) But mainly Ms. Tanowitz sees the video as a marker of the time we're in. "There's so much sadness and alienation right now," she said. "I just wanted to make something that felt good for a second." While Ms. Tanowitz's video is meant to work as a balm, Ms. Walsh's, "Loneliness," contemplates sadness and responds to Ms. Okshteyn's prompt in a surprising way. For her piece she chose, arbitrarily, a video of Britney Spears dancing. Ms. Spears, whose career is under the guidance of a conservatorship that restricts her freedom, frequently uploads videos of herself dancing. "Strangely, and maybe embarrassingly," Ms. Walsh said, "a large portion of the choreography we've used in rehearsal in the past eight years has been taken from her Instagram. We've been learning Britney material for a long time." Ms. Walsh, who considers Ms. Spears "one of the most iconic dancers of her generation," is drawn to slow, carefully articulated movement. Her score instructs participants to: "Learn any 10 to 15 seconds of this Britney video slowed down to 1 minute (or more.) Take a moment to slow your breath before you begin. Close your eyes and feel your interior processes as you move slowly." She also provides instructions in case you find yourself at the beach: "Your feet should be in the wet sand or shallow water," Ms. Walsh says in her score. "Feel the largeness of the sky, the largeness of the ocean, the ground beneath you." The main point is to take your time, to dance inside of stillness and to contemplate Ms. Spears's state of mind and others'. "I spend so much time thinking of the loneliness and the journey of a dancer," Ms. Walsh said, "and what that is particularly in this country and in this place, where there's not very much possibility financially or otherwise."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
TO FLOAT IN THE SPACE BETWEEN A Life and Work in Conversation With the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight By Terrance Hayes Illustrated. 207 pp. Wave Books. Paper, 25. "Sometimes you have to conjure an idea of ancestry, an idea of family," Terrance Hayes writes late in "To Float in the Space Between," the seventh book by this celebrated poet. Since his 1999 debut, "Muscular Music," and across five other collections (including "Lighthead," winner of a 2010 National Book Award, and his latest volume, "American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin," a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award), Hayes, now in his mid 40s, has become one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation. Hybrid and slippery as this book is part memoir, part study of the poet's own influences and ancestors, part meditation on poetics and selfhood "To Float in the Space Between" is Hayes's first full length prose work, illustrated by sketches demonstrating the writer's deft graphic skills. As is the case throughout Hayes's work, "To Float in the Space Between" is a meditation on family; from the first, Hayes has fingered the grain of black families, whether linked by blood or duty or sexual tension or aesthetic kinship. "To Float" movingly bridges these concerns. The title invokes the career of Etheridge Knight, who began writing poems in prison in the 1960s and carved out a singular career through the 1970s and '80s. The 19 sections in Hayes's book take their titles and focus from phrases in Knight's most celebrated poem, "The Idea of Ancestry." Thus this collection offers a deep textural (as opposed to textual) encounter between two important and mercurial minds. Since the beginning of Hayes's career, his poems have presented a syncopated and constantly shifting subject, a speaker insisting he's agile, hip, logical, bruised, both guttural and highfalutin and who refuses to be drawn into any box of fixed dimension. Hayes's speakers are always aware they're being watched both by well wishers and enemies. They're also aware it's often unclear which is which. So his poems shift between notions of survival and excellence in performance and again, it's not always clear which is which. This shifting has frequently meant having a stand in or alibi. At times the alibi is formal. Hayes invents forms most famously the so called Golden Shovel, in which one poet honors another by incorporating an existing poem into a new work. Such invention gives Hayes's poetry a lightheaded if not always lighthearted sense of play, immersed as it is in heavy subjects like race, violence, desire and other dangerous mysteries of self and world. Despite the tragic shadows across Hayes's playground, his first five books retained a certain upbeat ebullience. History, however, would change the weather. In 2014, Hayes won a MacArthur fellowship. At the same time, Michael Brown's death and the subsequent non indictment of the police officer who killed him sparked unrest in Ferguson, Mo. (and elsewhere), concentrating national attention on the issue of police violence and corresponding with the rise of the Black Lives Matter era. The stakes intensified with Donald Trump's election, and with protests inaugurating the MeToo movement. 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. Hayes's response was his most brilliant collection to date, "American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin," a consummate volume of 70 poems each titled "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin" followed by a "Sonnet Index" of first lines arranged into five additional sonnets a formidable formal alibi, to be sure. Here Hayes unmasks the brutal and perilous need to shift positions, references and sightlines when targeted by a history that fixes cross hairs and chokeholds on the body. This collection utterly refuses to stand still, to be framed as a single thing, because it recognizes that to stand still to embrace one unified and stable identity is to give one's assassin an easy target: "To be divided is to be multiplied," Hayes writes in Sonnet 21. "Let us / Ponder how it is that you I have remained / Alive." Crucially, not all the dangers come from without; selves have been formed in the American crucible, selves perfectly capable of an intricate self harm. "Assassin, you are a mystery / To me, I say to my reflection sometimes," Hayes writes in Sonnet 55. These poems sketch their shifts as a mixture of self referential necessity and everyday survival: "You appear, you appear to disappear, you disappear." At times Hayes's shifts carry across platforms. In a short film also titled "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin," released late last year, the poet dances. He wears a metallic mask, shaded in silhouette, and often in multiple exposure over Tidus's song "Powers" that repeats its demand: "Can you show us all your power?" "To Float in the Space Between" doesn't show all Hayes's powers, but it does transform the fast twitch shift of his poems into a slower sense of drift. Reading "To Float" after Hayes's poems feels akin to hearing Coltrane switch from "Giant Steps" (where he sometimes changes keys twice in one measure) to something like "Flamenco Sketches" (where he often remains in one scale for bar after bar after bar). If Hayes's poems strobe, "To Float" is more tidal. Hayes eases into the flow by using Etheridge Knight's life and career as his alibi, introducing a book "as speculative, motley and adrift as Knight himself." Reading "To Float" is also like a dream wherein, magically, one finds oneself in a conversation with a person maybe someone you know, maybe not in terms that experience never affords. In the 1980s and '90s, I had a recurring dream where I'd meet Michael Jordan somewhere, like a laundromat, and our conversation would drift slowly along as we folded our clothes. Reading "To Float" felt to me like one of those dreams: The rhythm is as pleasing as the substance itself. Early in the book, Hayes charts his aesthetic family, the genealogy of his poetics. The question of influence becomes one of connection more than resistance, collaboration more than anxiety. Hayes reminds us that the word "influence" is at root fluid: "from medieval Latin influentia ('inflow'), from Old French influence ('a flow of water')." This is a genealogy that emphasizes the paternal side. Women poets do appear, among them Wanda Coleman, Mary Karr, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde and Gwendolyn Brooks. But mostly this is an "inflow" of poetic fathers. A reader's conversation with "To Float" will deepen the more he or she knows about the main figures Hayes claims as poet fathers: Knight, Langston Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Christopher Gilbert. But even if you've never heard of these writers, Hayes's readings function as apt introductions. It's a gift to encounter writers through the precisely calibrated curiosity of a wide open searcher like this. Hayes begs off the assignment of the biographer. This is not a book "about" Etheridge Knight, or anyone else. "I felt I had two choices," Hayes writes: "a rigorously researched biography or a rigorously imagined biography." He opted for the latter. "I sidestepped research for guesswork; I was reading between the lines of photographs, interviews, letters, maps, scraps of details." For part of "To Float," the alibi of "biography" helps Hayes avoid autobiography. But he's as canny as ever. Consider: Early in the book, Eunice Knight Bowens, Etheridge's sister, tells Hayes that Etheridge was the third of seven children. Hayes shares that he "did not ask Eunice why he, and not one of his older brothers, Charles and Floydell, was named after his father." Over a hundred pages later, Hayes confides: "My younger brother, James L. Hayes II, has my father's name because James L. Hayes is, biologically speaking, not my father." Instead of "guesswork," lyrical rigor floats in the space between Knight and Hayes. He concludes: "My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache." O.K. But whose? Ultimately, "To Float" charts an intimate "inflow" of selves and methods. Hayes accepts that the "future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography," then follows with a chapter, "My Genes," in which he steps far from the spotlight of the famed poet's stage and travels to Columbia, S.C., to investigate his paternal ancestry. Hayes meets Earthell "Butch" Tyler Jr., the father he didn't know about until he was 18, along with a series of younger brothers and at least two of their mothers, all for the first time. We come along as Hayes kicks it, almost, with the kinfolk (to steal a line from Knight), and we listen over his shoulder to tales of a quasi heroic grandfather, Earthell Tyler Sr., who made a military career away from his wife even as she added children to the family while her husband was away. We learn that the senior Tyler was killed in Vietnam in 1965, awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. Hayes like the successful college professor and poet he is tries to decide if he's listening to stories of shameful abandonment or heroic valor, deciding again and again that "the truth was more layered" than available terms allow. Seeking more details that might but probably won't pierce the layers in his newfound family's legacy, Hayes embraces the through line that Butch Tyler offers about their legacy, one of openness: "He used to kiss me," Tyler tells Hayes. "You come from a long line of loving men." The legacy Hayes's search unearths is practical as well as ideal, the challenge of men who refused to make their "long line of loving" a synonym for control and ownership, of soldiers who had enough of warfare. Hayes asks was his grandfather funny, or shy, or serious? He's told: "He was serious. But on the other hand, he was like me. He wasn't the kind of guy to kick the door in and shoot you" for messing with his woman. Challenged and moved, and maybe changed, by what he's found, Hayes reports: "Thinking about it on the plane home, I had to put my hand over my eyes." Through such deeply felt and finely wrought eddies of narrative drift, "To Float in the Space Between" confronts the reader with many such moments of angular reflection and renewed recognition. "Vital. Vital," is how the poet Gwendolyn Brooks began her lyrical preface to Etheridge Knight's first pamphlet of poems, "Poems From Prison." Vital meaning living, and meaning necessary. With a similar double edged vitality, "To Float in the Space Between" drifts into a growing chorus of autobiographical writings including such recent books as Yrsa Daley Ward's "The Terrible," Darnell Moore's "No Ashes in the Fire" and Kiese Laymon's "Heavy" that put practical, stress tested flesh on the closing sentence of Brooks's preface: "And there is blackness, inclusive, possessed and given; freed and terrible and beautiful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
First, the atrocity. Then the architecture. At the National September 11 Memorial Museum, walls of water plummet into twin black voids. In choosing this design, called "Reflecting Absence," over thousands of competing proposals, a jury weighed how best to serve the living and revere the dead, how to answer trauma in landscape. The three women in the stirring and mournful "Villa," a drama by the Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderon, face a similarly daunting task. For reasons that remain opaque through most of the play, these women, all called Alejandra, have to choose what to do with a plot of land behind a red brick wall near Santiago, Chile. It once housed the Villa Grimaldi, a site of imprisonment and murder during Augusto Pinochet's regime. Should they use plastic and paint to recreate scenes of torture, theme park style? Should they build an airy, educational museum? Should they preserve the garden survivors have made? Should they try to solve an easier problem, like world hunger, maybe, or grand unified theory? Around a table cluttered with water glasses and a scale model of the Villa Grimaldi, the women sit in mismatched chairs and try to sort it all out. Through speeches and strategy and sabotaged secret ballots, they hack away at the problem until attempted murder or a psychotic break seems likelier than consensus. (And they don't even have to decide whether to include a cafe and a gift shop.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Curses! And Why They Work So Well Onstage (Sometimes) Theater stands or falls on whether or not vocalized language has power. Sung or spoken, the words of a play must move us if it is to succeed. It is no surprise, then, that playwrights frequently use profane language curses, expletives, oaths and epithets in their work. Such words, we think, make an impact. The use of profanity onstage is nothing new, but this past year there seemed to be epic amounts of mouthing off. In the last five months two of the reigning poets of profanity, Stephen Adly Guirgis and Martin McDonagh, have had plays staged in New York. Mr. McDonagh's "Hangmen" is a lesson in how to curse artfully; Jesse Green, a New York Times theater critic, called Mr. Guirgis's "Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train," an "obscenity oratorio." And in "Jerry Springer The Opera," which runs through April 1, God himself sprays a few expletives of his own. What, exactly, does cursing do for a playwright? "All things being equal, the most physiologically affecting language is profanity," Benjamin Bergen, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, said in an interview. "Your heart rate increases, your pupils dilate, you start sweating. We call this a state of emotional arousal. Hearing the most taboo language induces this effect much more strongly than other powerful positive or negative words." But in theater, it is not enough to just include dirty words to get a response from the audience. Obscenities must serve a purpose. Mr. Guirgis, whose "The With the Hat" ran on Broadway in 2011, said he uses curse words to depict reality. "The language is really just mostly a reflection of the characters I tend to create," he said. There are places, however, that playwrights feel they can't go. Mr. Guirgis is reluctant to use racial epithets in his work, so he sometimes opts for an interchangeable profanity instead. Though profanity does sometimes help create a sense of verisimilitude, it can also be employed to punch up everyday speech. A sentence or phrase that might otherwise be flat can become, as if by magic, hilarious, heartbreaking or even beautiful when a curse word is inserted into it. "You get to a place where what things mean literally doesn't serve your expressive purpose," said Michael Adams, the author of "In Praise of Profanity" and a professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. "Metaphors aren't even helping you anymore. You just have to reach beyond that to something that is ultimately expressive non literally, and for us that is often profanity." In Mr. Presson's " Marry Kill," expletives serve to both capture the way real teenagers speak and also to turn a story of adolescent depravity into a "Jacobean Revenge Comedy" (the play's subtitle). Mr. Presson's characters may use the same swear words that many American teenagers do, but the way they use them is entirely different. "We're always really trying to get to the musicality of the language and the rhythms to in some ways invoke the verse of Elizabethan and post Elizabethan texts," he said. "We're referencing the way speech is used in that era, where you have puns and double meaning and repeated things." The musicality of bad language is taken to another level in "Jerry Springer The Opera" at the Pershing Square Signature Center. The profanities may be familiar, but they're rarely sung by trained opera singers. "You've got two languages happening at the same time the language of words and the language of music and it's the contrast that really makes it work," said Richard Thomas, the main creator of the show's music and lyrics. "For a thing that puerile to be afforded such grandiosity makes it land, makes it delicious." While he delights in the disjunction between the beauty of his show's music and the often obscene content of its lyrics, Mr. Thomas encourages performers to ignore it. "I tell the actors to forget the profanity,'' he said. "I tell them to focus on the transcendent nature of what you're singing. That's more important than the scatological or profane text you're articulating." Kevin McCollum, the producer who controls the transfer rights to "Jerry Springer The Opera," said he does not think the show's profanity negatively affects its commercial viability. "What gets a show to Broadway is that people are talking about it," he said. "All good theater and all popular theater must reflect the time in which it is not only created, but also performed." Strong language can backfire, however, with critics and audiences sometimes reacting differently than the playwright intended. David Bar Katz said he felt that some audience members weren't able to recover from the obscenities used in the opening scene of his 2011 Labyrinth Theater Company production, "The Atmosphere of Memory." "A lot of the audience never came back from that scene," he said. "It was supposed to be comedic but it's incredibly profane. They don't know what to do with it." Mr. Katz said he learned something from the experience: "If you're trying to elicit a certain reaction and if profanity is not serving you, then you, as a disciplined artist, have to find another way." Some playwrights contend that they're particularly vulnerable to criticism for their use of profanity. Ms. Feiffer, who has had several prominent Off Broadway productions, said that she thinks female playwrights are more likely to be taken to task for the practice than their male counterparts are. With a curse word in the title, getting the word out about the play itself can be difficult. That may be the situation for Tori Sampson, who is getting a prime Off Broadway slot in the Playwrights Horizons season in 2019. Ms. Sampson said she had been warned by her mentor, the playwright Sarah Ruhl, that the title could cause problems, but she was still somewhat taken aback when several publications omitted all or some of it. She experienced the omission, she said, as a form of censorship, which she felt especially strongly as a female playwright and a person of color. "The theater is a place where people can fully express themselves," she said. "There's really no limit to what you can do, so it shocked me that there are gatekeepers to language in theater." Her new play "If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a " opens in February 2019.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
With his first feature, the director and co writer Tyler Taormina delivers something at first familiar and then increasingly but never ostentatiously strange. "Ham on Rye" can be taken as an allegory for middle class suburban life in America, but it's got added value as a potent mood piece, accomplished with a bare minimum of means. It's late spring in the suburbs, and boys and girls of high school age are dressing up not quite in prom wear, but in sundresses and ties and jackets, headed to some kind of event. As they wend their way through more or less quiet streets, the boys talk, crudely but with awkward innocence, about sex. The girls talk about fashion and popularity. In other parts of town, slightly older kids, a bit disheveled and aimless, drive around in cars, tune guitars and look dissatisfied.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
A LOT of us are self employed these days whether by choice or necessity and eager to attract as many clients as possible. And that sometimes means agreeing to work with people who are, to put it mildly, challenging. It's tough to turn down business, especially when you're trying to build up a reputation and a bank account. But difficult customers can cost more than they're worth in time, stress and even cash if they don't pay their bills or use the precious time that could be devoted to building a larger client base. I've thought about this a lot recently in trying to decide whether to take on a job to help write a book. The offer is from someone I don't really know and who lives in another country, but the pay seems good and the work interesting. This could turn out to be a great gig or a quagmire of time and sanity. So I posed the question of problem clients, and what to do about them, to friends and on various Web sites that cater to the rising number of freelancers. According to the Freelancers Union, a membership organization that provides advocacy, education and services such as insurance, about 42 million Americans are "independent workers." That's one third of the work force. The consensus among those who responded? Don't ignore warning signs, even if you really want the work. "Many years ago when I started my practice I needed clients and I did not have any, so I took anyone with a pulse and money. I totally ignored their bad attitudes," Jay Malik, a tax strategist and wealth manager specializing in doctors, said in an e mail. He soon realized, however, that if he kept doing that he would spend so much time on the demanding clients that he couldn't expand his practice and he would be miserable. "So I stopped signing up the bad ones," he wrote. "The mere fact of knowing that I could say no to problem clients helped me psychologically and boosted my self esteem." Sometimes it is just a niggling sense that something is off and this person may be tough to work with. Sometimes it's more. "I had a call from a client who spent an hour telling me about personal problems and my gut was saying this was going to turn into a fiasco if I took her on," said Amy, a Web designer who asked that her last name not be used as she is still wary of stirring up trouble with this particular former customer. "I am a people pleaser, though, and I tend to want to help, so I took the job on anyway," she said. "Things started out O.K., but slowly started to dissolve until ultimately I had to break up with the client." And at that point, she said, the hours she had put in for this customer far exceeded what had been paid for. All agreed that bad clients were not worth it. So how to spot them? One red flag is if they have unrealistic expectations. For example, Wes McDowell, who owns The Deep End, a graphic design firm, said he probably would not take on a client who told him he had worked with several other designers and wasn't satisfied with any. "I had one client who said he went to five designers," he said. "I made him show me the previous work, which was fine. I took the project, but after Round 1, he pulled the plug." Other signs? Rudeness. Hostility or outrage at your prices (it is all right to negotiate cost, but in a professional manner). Disrespect for your work. Having no idea what they want. "I look for 'warning words' in the discovery interview," Emily Worden, a freelance copywriter, wrote in an e mail. "Whenever someone tells me, 'I dabble in writing myself' or 'This just needs some polishing up' alarm bells start ringing. Why? Someone who 'dabbles in writing' thinks they could do a great job themselves and they'll micromanage you or worse, not pay what you're worth. Also, any time clients downplay the amount of work required for a project, double or triple the estimated time. They don't know how much work 'polishing up' takes and you need to charge accordingly." Of course, what may be right for one person may not be for another. Some people are willing to be available day and night. Others, not so much. "I find anyone who reaches out trying to hire me at 10 o'clock at night or later, or on the weekend I'm automatically going to pass," Carol Tice, a business journalist and author of "The Pocket Small Business Owner's Guide to Starting Your Business on a Shoestring," wrote in an e mail. "These are dysfunctional people who work 24/7 and will want you to be available at all hours. Requests for my I.M. address so they can ding me all the time also makes me pass," she added. "I did have one client like this who I took because she was a contractor for a Fortune 500 in my town that I wanted to work for. But it proved my rule, she was a nightmare!" Kim Laudati, who owns her own skin care salon in Manhattan, said she would not treat clients who expected her to work miracles. "People will come in and request that I take off 10 years immediately," she said. "Even heavy duty laser treatment won't do that." Putting in protective clauses in contracts can help in damage control, such as limiting the number of times a customer can come back to you for additional work without paying more. Mr. McDowell, who also published an e book called "Get Graphic Design Clients," said his contract stipulates that he will do three rounds of revision for a client, and he makes it very clear in his e mails which revision he is on so there are no misunderstandings. "In the subject line, I say, 'Logo concept, Round 2,' " he said. A sound contract is not only good practice, but will also drive away clients you probably would not want. "When I first started my company, our contracts were weak and enabled clients to walk all over us if they were so inclined," wrote Kari DePhillips, co owner of the Content Factory, a digital public relations firm. "Now our contracts are much stronger." She asks for a portion of her fee before she starts the work, for example. "If they won't pay at least 50 percent up front, chances are good that they won't want to pay after the project is completed." A client of Ms. DePhillips once lured away one of her best coordinators, so she also has inserted a "no poaching clause," in all contracts. There is an additional 20,000 fee if a client hires a member of her company within six months of the end of the contract. "You have to trust your own authority know what you want from a client and what you're worth," said Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union. "Do your homework. Know the industry rate. Think about how this gig fits in with your whole portfolio is it a one off or maybe the start of a long relationship? Trust yourself to build a diverse roster of clients that works for you long term, not just today." It's not always easy to "fire" a client or even let a potential one know you don't want to work with her. The best advice is to be kind but direct. "No matter how unrealistic or rude, they are obviously coming from a place of need," Ms. Laudati said. Sometimes she will refer such clients to a competitor who, she said, is more willing than she is to take on such customers. That seems to be a common practice. So is the catchall phrase "This probably isn't a good fit." Shaun Eli, a comedian and executive director of the Ivy League of Comedy, which provides comedians for events, said if it was clear a client would be difficult, "I tack on another 500 to the cost of the show. Because usually their issues show through long before I have enough information to quote them a price. Sometimes it's enough to discourage them. Sometimes not. But then when they're annoying, contradictory or argumentative, I can smile because at least I'm being paid to put up with their issues." I'm still not sure what to do about the prospective book client, but I'm certainly going to carefully consider the potential downsides. No one needs more crazy and demanding people in their lives after all, isn't that what family is for?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
"Meanwhile, back in March of 2018, Bolton almost wasn't hired in the first place. Apparently, 'Mr. Trump hesitated in part because of his negative reaction to Mr. Bolton's walrus style mustache.' Ironically, while Bolton is leaving, his mustache is staying on as Stephen Miller's new hairpiece." STEPHEN COLBERT "He's out, effective immediately. He's gone. But his mustache will stay on for a few more weeks to tie up any loose ends." JAMES CORDEN "And to mark the occasion, his mustache was lowered to half mast." TREVOR NOAH "That's right, President Trump has fired national security adviser John Bolton, and you have to appreciate the irony of John Bolton being taken out by a pre emptive strike." SETH MEYERS "By the way, Bolton was the third national security adviser Trump has pushed out. Honestly, it's amazing that America's unemployment numbers are so low considering Trump has fired half of the country." TREVOR NOAH "Yep, Trump tweeted Bolton's services were no longer needed and that he strongly disagreed with many of his suggestions. Bolton thought we should continue the war in Afghanistan and Trump thought we should continue the war with Chrissy Teigen." JIMMY FALLON "I don't know who to believe: the guy who lies all the time, or the other guy who lies all the time." JAMES CORDEN	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The question hangs over the career of every ambitious soul: Is there still time to make a mark? Charles Darwin was 29 when he came up with his theory of natural selection. Einstein had his annus mirabilis at age 26; Marie Curie made big discoveries about radiation in her late 20s. Mozart's Symphony No. 1 in E flat: 8 years old. For years, scientists who study achievement have noted that in many fields the most electrifying work comes earlier in life rather than later. After all, younger people can devote their life to a project in a way that more senior people cannot, and young stars attract support, mentors and prestigious appointments. Now, a big data analysis of scientific careers appearing in the journal Science finds a host of factors that have nothing to do with age or early stardom. It is, they suggest, a combination of personality, persistence and pure luck, as well as intelligence, that leads to high impact success at any age. "The bottom line is: Brother, never give up. When you give up, that's when your creativity ends," said Albert Laszlo Barabasi, who with Roberta Sinatra led a team of researchers who conducted the analysis. Both were physicists at Northeastern University in Boston. Dr. Sinatra has since moved to Central European University in Budapest. Previous work had found that a similar combination of elements lay behind the success of very top performers in a variety of fields. The new study illustrates that the same forces are at play at all levels of a discipline: the student, the young professional, the midcareer striver and beyond, to those old enough to wonder if their hand is played out. "It's very impressive, what they've done, the size of the sample," said Dean Simonton, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, who did not contribute to the study. "I have looked at the upper end of achievement; they have gone bottom up, and found similar results" applying to an entire profession, he said. The same relationships, Dr. Simonton said, emerge in a broad variety of work, including music composition, film, psychology and technical invention. The research team began by focusing on career physicists. It ransacked the literature going back to 1893, identifying 2,856 physicists with careers of 20 years or more who published at least one paper every five years widely cited findings rated as "impact" papers and the team analyzed when in a career those emerged. Sure enough, the physicists were more likely to produce hits earlier rather than later. But this had nothing to do with their age, the analysis found. It was entirely because of productivity: Young scientists tried more experiments, increasingly the likelihood they would stumble on something good. "It's not the age or order of the papers that matters," said Dr. Barabasi, who wrote the study with Dashun Wang, Pierre Deville and Chaoming Song, as well as Dr. Sinatra. All have appointments at Northeastern. That is to say: keeping productivity equal, the scientists were as likely to score a hit at age 50 as at age 25. The distribution was random; choosing the right project to pursue at the right time was a matter of luck. Yet turning that fortuitous choice into an influential, widely recognized contribution depended on another element, one the researchers called Q. Q could be translated loosely as "skill," and most likely includes a broad variety of factors, such as I.Q., drive, motivation, openness to new ideas and an ability to work well with others. Or, simply, an ability to make the most of the work at hand: to find some relevance in a humdrum experiment, and to make an elegant idea glow. "This Q factor is so interesting because it potentially includes abilities people have but may not recognize as central," said Zach Hambrick, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. "Clear writing, for instance. Take the field of mathematical psychology. You may publish an interesting finding, but if the paper is unreadable, as so many are, you can't have wide impact because no one understands what you're talking about." The startling thing about this Q property, the researchers said, is that it remains constant over time. Contrary to common assumption, experience does not significantly raise a person's ability to make the most out of a given project. "It's shocking to think about," Dr. Barabasi said. "We found that these three factors Q, productivity and luck are independent of each other." The researchers gathered career data from other scientific fields and found that the same relationships held up. Pulling these results together, the study concluded that hit papers were a product of Q, the person's particular strengths, and luck: that is, finding an important project that flares to life in the furnace of precisely those abilities. A match of scientist to experiment or, more broadly, of writer to subject, musician to composition, of the dancer to the dance. So it is that highly productive people may never hit the charts, and high Qs may spend a career feeling thwarted. "The composition of this Q quality, whatever you call it, is likely to vary in different fields," Dr. Simonton said. "That's why you can see people who are highly successful in one field switch careers and not do so well." One important factor often does increase with age, in many endeavors: status, and with it the freedom to take risks, said Frank Sulloway, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Jean Baptiste Lamarck was 57 when he first published on the subject of evolution in 1801, and he was 66 when he finally published his great book 'Philosophie Zoologique' in support of the theory of evolution," Dr. Sulloway said in an email. "This example seems to fit with my argument that one needs to take into account the social context of a given theory as well, as controversial theories tend to be published when scientists are older and have more intellectual ammunition and reputational status to back them up."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
SAN FRANCISCO In the first few months of his presidential campaign, Michael R. Bloomberg has been as aggressive on social media as President Trump was four years ago. But with a lot more money to spend. Mr. Bloomberg has hired popular online personalities to create videos and images promoting his candidacy on social media. He is hiring 500 people at 2,500 a month to spend 20 to 30 hours a week recruiting their friends and family to write supportive posts. And his campaign has posted on Twitter and Instagram a flattering, digitally altered video of his debate performance last week in Las Vegas. Through his money and his willingness to experiment, the billionaire former mayor of New York has poked holes in the already slapdash rules for political campaigns on social media. His digitally savvy campaign for the Democratic nomination has shown that if a candidate is willing to push against the boundaries of what social media companies will and won't allow, the companies won't be quick to push back. "The Bloomberg campaign is destroying norms that we will never get back," said Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which studies disinformation. The campaign, he said, has "revealed the vulnerabilities that still exist in our social media platforms even after major reforms." On Friday, Twitter announced that it was suspending 70 pro Bloomberg accounts for violating its policies on "platform manipulation and spam." The accounts were part of a coordinated effort by people paid by the Bloomberg campaign to post tweets in his favor. Twitter's rules state, in part, "You can't artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts," including "coordinating with or compensating others" to tweet a certain message. In response to Twitter's move, the Bloomberg campaign issued a statement on Friday evening. "We ask that all of our deputy field organizers identify themselves as working on behalf of the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign on their social media accounts," it said. The statement added that the tweets shared by its staff and volunteers with their networks went through Outvote, a voter engagement app, and were "not intended to mislead anyone." Social media companies have been under pressure since the 2016 presidential election. Over the last year or so, they have publicized a stream of new rules aimed at disinformation and manipulation. Facebook, Google and Twitter have created teams that look for and remove disinformation. They have started working with fact checkers to distinguish and label false content. And they have created policies explaining what they will allow in political advertisements. Most social media companies have special rules that place elected officials and political candidates in a protected category of speech. Politicians are allowed much more flexibility to say whatever they want online. But the companies have had a hard time defining what is a political statement and what crosses the line into deception. When Mr. Trump posted an altered video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Facebook and Twitter refused to take the video down. A 30 second video ad on Facebook in October falsely accused former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. of blackmailing Ukrainian officials to stop an investigation of his son. Mr. Bloomberg, a latecomer to the race, has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into it. As the owner of Bloomberg L.P., he has the money and the resources to vastly outspend his rivals. Mr. Bloomberg has reassigned his employees and recruited other workers from Silicon Valley with salaries nearly double what other campaigns have offered their staffs. The roughly 400 million he has spent has made him omnipresent in ads across Facebook and Instagram, as well as on more traditional forms of media such as television and radio. His campaign's sophisticated understanding of how to generate online buzz has shown how uneven social media's new political speech rules can be. Mr. Bloomberg's lackluster performance in the Las Vegas debate three days before Saturday's Democratic caucuses in Nevada was startling even to his supporters. But soon after, his campaign's digital team edited the debate into digestible bites on social media that made Mr. Bloomberg appear as though he had done better. On Thursday morning, a video was posted to his Twitter account. "I'm the only one here, I think, that's ever started a business. Is that fair?" Mr. Bloomberg said in the clip, showing him up on the debate stage. The video then cut to reactions from the other candidates, who appeared speechless. Crickets chirped in the background as the silence stretched on for 20 seconds. In reality, Mr. Bloomberg had paused for about a second before moving on. "It's tongue in cheek," Galia Slayen, a Bloomberg campaign spokeswoman, said of the video, which was viewed nearly two million times within hours. "There were obviously no crickets on the stage." Was the video against the rules? Referring to new guidance on manipulated videos, Twitter said it would most likely label the video as misleading. That is, it would if the rule, which goes into effect in March, were already in effect. The company said it would not label Mr. Bloomberg's video retroactively. Facebook, which owns Instagram, said it would not remove the video. The company has recently altered its policy on manipulated media to state that Facebook will remove videos that have been edited "in ways that aren't apparent to an average person and would likely mislead someone into thinking that a subject of the video said words that they did not actually say." The companies are less certain of how they will handle Mr. Bloomberg's hiring of 500 "deputy digital organizers" to recruit and train their friends. (All 500 haven't been hired yet.) His campaign has said it is paying people to use their own social media accounts to publish content of their choosing to mobilize voters for Mr. Bloomberg. "We are meeting voters everywhere on any platform that they consume their news. One of the most effective ways of reaching voters is by activating their friends and network to encourage them to support Mike for president," said Sabrina Singh, a spokeswoman for the Bloomberg campaign. The Bloomberg team said the people they hired were ordinary Americans, and would not include so called social media influencers, or individuals with large social media followings. The campaign said the digital organizers would not add disclosures to every post, but they would be directed to clearly identify in their social media profiles that they were affiliated with the Bloomberg campaign. "We recommend campaign employees make the relationship clear on their accounts," said Liz Bourgeois, a spokeswoman for Facebook. But if Mr. Bloomberg's employees do not make clear on their accounts that the campaign paid them, Facebook has no easy way to identify them, she said. Facebook has also made it clear that influencers who post content in support of Mr. Bloomberg's campaign must clearly label themselves as being sponsored. The company also is exploring ways in which it can identify and catalog sponsored political content.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Howard Cruse's STUCK RUBBER BABY (First Second, 24.99), a graphic novel about racial violence and gay subculture in the South of the early 1960s, is immediately fascinating and disturbing. The first page offers, on either side of the title, an image of the Kennedys, and a racist Southern protest ("Race Mixers Go Back North"). The narrator protagonist, Toland Polk whose adult face looms large as a backdrop, and whose gaze meets our own then recalls the dead bodies he saw that had "stuck" in his mind as a kid. The second page takes up the 1955 picture, published in Jet, of the murdered Emmett Till in his coffin a "gross" image a friend shows Toland, which "permanently blew a fuse" for him. "Stuck Rubber Baby" calls attention to the scale of systemic, endemic racism from the horror of lynching, a devastating, recurring event in the book, to Jim Crow to the ingrained bigotry of ostensibly well meaning white families like Toland's. From the outset it also interrogates the very act of seeing, and specifically the visibility, and invisibility, of Black death. It is aware of its own ability as a book of images to show and to withhold. It's hard not to feel as though Cruse, who died last fall at the age of 75, was inspired by the horrific deaths and videos of a George Floyd or a Rayshard Brooks. But "Stuck Rubber Baby" first appeared in 1995, and this new, timely hardcover marks its 25th anniversary. If it is a time capsule of 1960s American culture, it shows just how much has changed, and just how much hasn't. The son of a Methodist minister, Cruse grew up in Alabama, and the "Clayfield" featured here is a thinly disguised Birmingham; the story, while fictional, pulls from history and Cruse's own experiences. Its key coordinates spaces in which readers find, together, both Black and white, queer and queer friendly characters include a Black motel, an underground gay bar and an integrated jazz club; they are based on real life establishments. Like Toland, Cruse was a closeted young man who wound up accidentally fathering a baby with a woman. Eventually, he became one of the pioneers of queer comics. The founding editor, in 1980, of the major underground anthology series Gay Comix, and then creator of "Wendel," a witty strip in The Advocate during the Reagan years, Cruse led the way for younger cartoonists to craft textured work about queer lives. Of Cruse's influence, the "Fun Home" creator Alison Bechdel told me: "I loved that he was so good he was so technically good at what he did, but he still did queer stuff. That he would bring that talent into the subculture was very moving to me." "Stuck Rubber Baby" is heavily and precisely crosshatched; all characters' faces take shape and expression through minutely detailed shading in addition to line work. The careful, deliberate effect rhymes with Cruse's attention to somber realities. But his characters, with their big faces and jutting jawlines, can also have a bulky quality that smacks of the rubbery bodies populating underground comics of the 1960s and '70s. Cruse's distinctive visual idiom builds an absorbing world featuring a rich intergenerational ensemble of characters. While Toland, a gas station attendant, dates Ginger Raines, a white civil rights activist, he's dazzled by the handsome and accomplished Les Pepper, the gay Black son of local celebrities a community minister and a famed singer and increasingly aware of his desire and his shortcomings. The Rev. Harland Pepper, who infrequently but sometimes by necessity crosses over into the culturally scandalous haunts of his son, has to respond to crisis after crisis, including the fight over Black citizens' right to use a public park and the murder of children in the bombing of the Melody Hotel, a frequent site for political organizing. "Stuck Rubber Baby" chronicles both the crushing pervasiveness of discrimination and brutality in the Jim Crow, pre Stonewall South, and also myriad forms of mourning and resistance. Bishakh Som's SPELLBOUND: A Graphic Memoir (Street Noise, 18.99), another L.G.B.T.Q. narrative, is more modest in scope, but its structure is experimental. Som, a trans woman, depicts herself as Bishakh Som only briefly at the beginning and end: "Loath to draw myself ... I substituted Anjali, a cisgender Bengali American woman in place of yours truly in these recollections. I realize, in retrospect, that I had resorted to this substitution for another reason." Often quite funny, "Spellbound" is charming when it recounts, in colorful panels with black line art, Anjali's goth obsessed childhood, "old school" Indian family and romance troubles. But it lags in the diaristic present tense too many daily inventories of meals. The layers of identity and story in this memoir, however, and Som's fluid approach to representing the self, feel impressively easy, unbelabored. If "Stuck Rubber Baby," for all its resonance, is located in the past, and "Spellbound" creates a continuously evolving present tense, Cristy C. Road's lavish, bilingual NEXT WORLD TAROT (Silver Sprocket, 50) envisions the future "a world based on radical redefinitions of love and social justice." It's of the moment, keyed to transformative rage and care. Nominally, it is a tarot deck Road has made smaller, portable versions but a beautifully produced art book is the ideal format for her prodigious artistic talent. The Spanish and English text, although often evocative in its details (the nine of swords "smokes capri menthols under a chrome umbrella to blow in the face of despair"), feels beside the point next to Road's sumptuous, full color portraits of mostly Black and brown characters, differently abled, old and young, often gender nonbinary (descriptions alternately refer to "she," "he" or "they"). Road gives bodies that have been historically devalued central space as the movers of forces and fortunes. Her characters are meticulously visually articulated, with detailed hairstyles, outfits, tattoos, and often situated in fantastical landscapes; they pose cross legged on cars and in gardens, create music, read books, gaze out windows, ride horses, clutch purses and torches and knives. The king of cups' throne is her wheelchair, on which is balanced a mug of tea. "Next World Tarot" testifies to the need to imagine the future and the political power that comes from that imagining.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
CEDAR FALLS, Iowa The unemployment rate here is one of the lowest in the country. Wages are rising at nearly twice the rate of inflation. Jobs are so plentiful that manufacturers are paying to train unskilled workers. Yet Iowa is also one of the states most vulnerable to a trade war. And that could be a problem for Representative Rod Blum. "I'm not on the ledge ready to jump out the window concerning trade, but I do have the window open a little bit," said Mr. Blum, a two term Republican incumbent vying for re election in one of the nation's most competitive House races. Iowa has a lot riding on global trade. Its farmers export one of every four rows of soybeans worth around 2 billion to China. One in five Iowans has a job tied to agriculture, and not just on farms. John Deere has several plants in the state, making tractors and combines, and hundreds of metal manufacturers churn out fences and grain bins for family farmers and corporate growers. If the trade dispute between the United States and much of the world isn't resolved soon, economists say, it will almost certainly lead to layoffs and unyielding financial loss across the state. Republican strategists worry that the simmering unease over that possibility may be enough to keep party faithful at home on Election Day in November. "We need some wins," Mr. Blum said in an interview. "We need something to rally around, something good. If we could do a deal with Mexico, that would be great." President Trump has urged farmers to "be a little patient" with trade negotiations, and he recently announced a 12 billion aid package for those hurt by the tariffs. In July, Mr. Trump made a stop in the district to campaign for Mr. Blum, promising the Iowans in the crowd that they wouldn't be "too angry with Trump" once the trade scuffles came to an end. "It bites," he said. "For us, that's huge money." And yet Mr. Harberts is standing by Mr. Trump. He is on track to sell more parts than ever. He can't hire fast enough to fill the geyser of orders coming in. "If Hillary would've won, I don't think we would've been in this mode," he said. "In spite of the hassle and frustration, everyone is doing good." The question is how long those good times can last. Economists are certain that if the tariffs remain in place, they will lead to layoffs, farm foreclosures and bankruptcies but not right away. Iowa may feel only a subtle effect by November, economists said, although any damage will almost certainly be felt in full by the time the state's first in the nation presidential caucuses roll around in early 2020. "It's possible that it might look good right up until the midterms," said David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University. "Even though everything we know about economics says that can't be true in the long run." Already, there are signs that the tariffs are beginning to filter through the regional economy. Chinese buyers have been canceling hundreds of thousands of tons of soybean orders since April, according to Department of Agriculture data, and soybean prices fell close to a 10 year low in July. Soybean producers in Iowa stand to lose 624 million from the trade war, according to Chad Hart, an economist at Iowa State University. In Iowa, trouble in the agriculture sector invariably spreads to the rest of the economy. Recent business surveys have found that farmers are becoming more reluctant to buy equipment and that local bankers are becoming gloomier in their outlook. Mr. Harberts, for example, makes housings for fans that go into massive grain bins made by Sukup Manufacturing, 60 miles northwest of here in Sheffield. Steve Sukup, the chief financial officer, has started grumbling about how metal prices are eating into his profit. Like Mr. Harberts, Mr. Sukup buys his metal from American steel mills. Several months before the tariffs were announced, those mills started to increase prices, he said, in anticipation of the protection they were about to receive. "They raised prices because they could," he said. And he heard from clients in California who said that their Chinese buyers recently froze all orders of almonds. Mr. Sukup said that "the realization has sunk in" among Iowa soybean farmers that the tariffs could push foreign buyers away for good. "Once they go elsewhere, it's hard to get them back," he said. Mr. Sukup, a Trump voter, said Mr. Blum "has got some headwinds" in the midterms, partly because of the tariffs. Mr. Blum is treading delicately. In June, he signed a letter, along with the entire Iowa delegation, urging Mr. Trump to "avoid a trade war." But Mr. Blum thanked the president during his July visit for "having political courage to renegotiate these trade deals." Abby Finkenauer, the 29 year old Democratic challenger in the race, called those comments "heartbreaking." Ms. Finkenauer, a state legislator, has built a bigger campaign treasury than Mr. Blum and recently won the endorsement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." "We deserve a lot better than a congressman who sits there and thanks somebody for throwing livelihoods in flux," Ms. Finkenauer said in an interview. The fate of the contest in November may hinge on whether Kevin Watje changes his mind. Mr. Watje, 60, is a Trump supporter and a reliable Republican voter who lives in Waterloo, in the heart of Mr. Blum's district. He's giving the president the benefit of the doubt on trade. As the chief executive of Curbtender, a garbage truck manufacturer, Mr. Watje sees that American companies can be at a disadvantage in global markets. With the economy still humming, Mr. Watje figures he can absorb the losses for a little while. If the trade aggression keeps ratcheting up, though, he thinks it could end the good times in Iowa and the rest of the country. "We could go into a deep recession again," he said. "Then I would make a connection to Congress that they didn't put a stop to it." For now, he plans to vote for Mr. Blum in November. But he's open to hearing what the Democrats have to offer. And if the pain stretches into the winter, all bets are off. "I would probably change my mind about voting for Trump," Mr. Watje said. "When it gets past six months, we probably are all going to start changing our minds about who we are voting for."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
LOS ANGELES For the first time in its history, the recessed, ground floor gallery at the Marciano Art Foundation looked like the backstage of a women's fashion show. A clothing rack held odd garments and hair extensions, a model sat having her makeup touched up, and others shuffled around in white robes. But when these eight models a mix of cisgender women and trans performers of different races walked out past a large scrim and drifted onto an island of white sand to pose near colorful steel sculptures, they moved extremely slowly, with no hint of a runway swagger. And they wore body paint in place of clothes: a blue bikini like form here, a green chaps like shape there. The only tangible garments were see through vinyl and molded plastic pieces worn for warmth. It's a new twist by the Berlin based artist Donna Huanca on the work of Yves Klein, who drenched nude models in his bright blue paint starting in the late 1950s. And it's a new use for a space that, pre Marciano, was a 2,400 seat theater where male members of the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple staged their own plays to attain higher levels of initiation or "education." She has installed nine of her Cubist looking steel sculptures and a large photo based canvas in the cavernous space, making it seem less imposing with scrims and bright lighting. The air is filled with a soundtrack of natural noises like fire and water and a pungent scent that smells like burned wood. ("To me it smells like a witchcraft market I like in Mexico City burnt feathers and bleach," she said.) The slow moving models will appear, two at a time, in the exhibition every Saturday for the show's run, through Dec. 1. "The previous shows here played with the darkness of the theater," said Ms. Huanca, wearing a paint splattered black jumper and some fierce looking talon shaped red nails. "With the light, the models, the scent and sounds, you're entering a whole new landscape." Cecilia Fajardo Hill, an independent curator not connected to the show, calls it a "ritualistic landscape where she explores the fluidity and complexity of identity, femininity, nature, culture." She relates Ms. Huanca to a previous generation of Latin American artists interested in the female body, including Cecilia Vicuna, Ana Mendieta and Maria Evelia Marmolejo. "She belongs to the tradition of body art, showing how the body, the subject of so much political violence, is a creative space that can be reclaimed by artists," she said. So this isn't the same as Klein's directing women to smash their painted breasts against large sheets of paper to make artworks. But isn't it still at some level exploitative to ask women to pose naked before strangers? "That's such a natural reaction because women have been exposed in art, exploited by artists, for so long," Ms. Huanca said. "But these models have complete agency. They have the right to take breaks or leave whenever they want. I'm paying everyone above an average 'life model' wage. Their voices are included in the catalog we're making. Their names are on the walls. I want them to be collaborators." One model, Iiia Anxelin Eleuia Xochipilli, who identified herself as a performance artist of Apache descent, said: "I think it's really cool that she's working with models of different shapes who are trans, cisgender, nonbinary. There are no men allowed, even among the security guards. She keeps it really safe for us." Ms. Huanca noted that no photography would be allowed at ground level and that security guards had been trained to follow each model. "These performances trigger reactions in people ranging from crying to masturbation, so we want security to understand what to look out for," she said. Olivia Marciano, the institution's artistic director and daughter of the museum co founder Maurice Marciano, added that she found Ms. Huanca's work "meditative," not sexual. After seeing a similar installation by Ms. Huanca at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna last year, she invited her to take over the Marciano project space for her first big museum show in the United States. Ms. Huanca grew up in Chicago with Bolivian immigrant parents: her father worked as a Berlitz language teacher, her mother as a travel agent. She spent summers in Bolivia, until the family decamped to Houston when she was 15. "My older brother was in a gang in Chicago and we had to duck to get him out," she said. Before she painted skin, she liked to paint clothes. In Texas she discovered both an underground music scene, playing the drums in various bands, and contemporary art. She studied painting at the University of Houston, getting her B.F.A. in 2004, but wasn't, to the dismay of her teachers, interested in canvases "too expensive," she said. Instead she bought thrift store garments to cut up and turn into collages or rub with pigment. In 2006 she did the summer program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, starting what she calls "my hobo life of residencies and finding ways to work with nothing" moving between New York and Berlin with a stay in Mexico City as well. There, in 2012, she dipped garments like a velvet dress and leather shorts into paint and hung them on the wall for a show at the Preteen Gallery. A couple of years later, in Brooklyn, she began experimenting with painting directly on the skin of friends. Her biggest attention getter came in 2017 at Art Basel, when her gallery, Peres Projects, presented her work in the Unlimited section, devoted to venturesome artists. For an eight day, eight hours a day performance, she painted the skin of two nude models and set them adrift in her own sculptural installation. Sabine Schaschl, director at Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, was among many who shared images on Instagram, writing, "Lock eyes with a model and the lines between looking and being looked at begin to bend." At the time the artist was painting skin by hand, waking up around 5 a.m. to create a new pair of body paintings every day. For the Marciano show she is using machine sprayers, giving each model a set pattern and palette to be replicated through the show. Some are painted to match the sculptures they stand near more or less camouflaged. Ms. Huanca likes to include natural materials like turmeric and coffee grounds in her canvases, body paintings and sculptures alike. This time, she dusted turmeric on the models' shoulders. For the hair extensions, she initially used horsehair but switched to synthetics a couple of years ago. "I got an extension where some pieces of skin were left on," she said, "and I said: 'I'm done with this.' It felt cruel and abusive." It wasn't the right visual, to say the least, for art that celebrates the flesh. Through Dec. 1, Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, marcianoartfoundation.org. Timed tickets are available online.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design

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