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If the Nets fall in the postseason, but most of the key players aren't there to see it, did the Nets really fall? We kid, sort of. But on Sunday, the Toronto Raptors mercifully ended the team's short postseason run by beating the Nets, 150 122, and completing the first round sweep. It was always going to take something close to divine intervention for the seventh seeded Nets to beat the second seeded Raptors, especially given how many of the Nets' top players didn't make the trip to Walt Disney World for the season restart. The Nets showed bursts of competitiveness early in the series, but in the end, the Raptors were the poised defending champions, and the Nets' mantra for this season might as well have been, "Just wait till next year." For many teams, a first round sweep would be considered a spectacular disappointment hello, Philadelphia 76ers! But the Nets can leave Florida with their heads held high. Next season is coming. Reinforcements are on the way. If everything goes according to plan, the Nets should be ready to compete for the finals. At the very least, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant are expected to be healthy at the start of next season. That alone should emphasis on the "should" elevate the Nets to a top tier Eastern Conference team. Add the blossoming Caris LeVert and the return of Spencer Dinwiddie, Taurean Prince and DeAndre Jordan, and the Nets will have one of the best rosters in the N.B.A. But that's only on paper. There are many questions for the team to answer before that. What's Next for the Nets Sean Marks, the Nets' general manager, has several key decisions to make in the off season. The news of Kenny Atkinson's abrupt departure in March rocked the basketball world. The Nets had gotten better every year of his tenure. That he would leave in his fourth season before having a chance to coach a healthy roster was, at the very least, surprising. It raised speculation that Irving and Durant pushed him out. The speculation wasn't helped by Marks's vagueness at a news conference announcing the move. Jacque Vaughn, all things considered, acquitted himself well as the interim coach. The team played hard in Florida, going 5 3 in the seeding games, and frequently punched above its weight. The Nets beat the Milwaukee Bucks and almost pulled out a win against the Portland Trail Blazers in the regular season finale. Marks has said that Vaughn's assessment won't be based on wins and losses. But he'll have to make a choice about whether Vaughn should be retained or if another, splashier name should be brought in, like Tyronn Lue or Stan Van Gundy. Whomever the coach is going to be, he will have to get buy in from big personalities like Irving and Durant, while developing on court chemistry quickly in an unforgiving media market. The Nets have about 130 million in committed salaries next season, not including Garrett Temple's 5 million player option. The salary cap is projected to be about 115 million and the luxury tax threshold is set to be around 140 million. Those estimates came before the pandemic hit, so there's a good chance they shrink. Basically, the Nets have little room to upgrade the bench. Joe Harris is an unrestricted free agent, and Marks has said bringing him back is "priority No. 1." Harris, a 28 year old swingman, averaged a career high 14.5 points a game while shooting 42 percent from deep. The Nets have the rights to go over the cap to sign him. The team might have a decent trade chip in Dinwiddie, who may have an expiring contract entering next season if he picks up his player option for the 2020 21 season. There have been questions as to whether Dinwiddie and Irving can coexist. The Nets have an opportunity to upgrade from a position of strength. They should also be able to find some cheap help on the veteran's minimum market. Wilson Chandler, a forward who played only 35 games for the Nets, will be a free agent. Chris Chiozza, whom the Nets signed earlier this year to a two way contract, will be a restricted free agent and he had some nice moments as a sparkplug point guard in Florida. Other players who could be interesting: DeMarcus Cousins and Isaiah Thomas, who have battled injuries and are looking for an opportunity to prove they can still play. And let's not forget Jamal Crawford, who played all of six minutes for the Nets at Walt Disney World before injuring his hamstring. The Nets have the Sixers' first round draft pick, which will be at No. 19, and it will give the team a low cost path to add talent. This draft is one of the more fluid ones in recent years, and getting a player ready to help a championship team at that spot will take a lot of luck and savvy. The Nets could probably use more backcourt depth, or the pick could be packaged in a trade. Before we move on, let's pour one out for the Nets season that just ended. Even though it was a transition year as the team waited for Durant to get healthy, it was still frustrating. It was not part of the plan for Irving to miss most of the season with a shoulder injury or for him to publicly criticize his supporting cast. Nor was it part of the plan to have several key players test positive for the coronavirus and miss the trip to Florida. But there were some positives to take into next year.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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WORLD OF THOR There are only two new books on the fiction list this week; one is Riley Sager's "The Last Time I Lied," and the other is "Spymaster," the latest volume in 's series starring the Navy SEAL turned intelligence operative Scot Harvath. "What I do is faction, where you don't know where the facts end and the fiction begins," the author told The Times last summer. Thor has always been clever about marketing his books he once photoshopped one of his book covers onto a picture of the New Jersey governor Chris Christie reading at the beach. So it's not surprising to find that he has a shop on his website, selling mugs, T shirts, challenge coins and the like. ("What are challenge coins?" you ask. They are metal disks that commemorate the publication of his novels, and they cost 25.) SHOP TILL YOU DROP Looking at those challenge coins made us wonder what sort of merchandise other best selling authors are hawking. Turns out we didn't have to look very hard to find all kinds of, um, unusual things. In Nora Roberts's online shop, you can buy lunch totes, bullet necklaces and even a bottle of her 16.99 "signature lotion" ("a blend of jasmine and pomegranate with top notes of citrus, dewberry and cassis, and bottom notes of musk, sandalwood and vanilla").
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Paul Rudd reached a new level of fame as a Marvel superhero, but he still doesn't relate to tough guy roles "in the same way that I relate to a guy who is mildly depressed or put upon," he said. Like many other moviegoers, Paul Rudd emerged from "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" thinking a lot about Brad Pitt. Having spent a couple of hours this summer in a darkened theater, where he watched the effortlessly self assured Pitt spar with Bruce Lee, pal around with Leonardo DiCaprio and strip off his shirt to fix a television antenna, Rudd left feeling slightly bedazzled and slightly intimidated, but also feeling that his own place in the cultural hierarchy had been clarified. "I thought, my God, what a movie star, just so cool," Rudd said a few weeks ago, still sounding awe struck. His voice rose to an ironic timbre "Leo's no slouch either!" before it returned to its usual, gentler register as he described how the Brad gazing experience reminded him that audiences were never going to see him in quite the same way. "I came to terms pretty early on," he said, "that I was not going to be the guy up there that people would watch, going, 'Yes! That's who I want to be!'" Rudd has been a film and TV star in his own right for more than 25 years now, from his earliest appearances in movies like "Clueless" to his first Netflix series, "Living With Yourself," which debuts Oct. 18. Though some of us may feel that we've known him forever, he is, at age 50, just reaching a new peak of fame, thanks in part to mammoth Marvel blockbusters like "Avengers: Endgame," in which he plays the wisecracking superhero Ant Man. He's been filming a lead role in a new "Ghostbusters" movie that is planned to open next summer, and which could elevate him even higher. His wheelhouse, as Rudd understands it, is a certain sort of Everyman who, despite the good looks and charisma, is an avatar of averageness. In his most successful performances, he is besieged by quotidian problems; he is blessed with impeccable comic timing but at his funniest when he's flailing and frustrated. Sometimes he can seem like two people at once. It's a dichotomy Rudd uses to full advantage in "Living With Yourself," a comedy drama with a science fiction twist. In the series, he plays Miles, a dejected brand executive who has lost his passion for his work and his marriage. On a tip from a co worker, he tries a mysterious spa treatment that he hopes will make him a new and better man and which instead results in the creation of a clone (also played by Rudd) who is seemingly superior to Miles in every way. With its dry, deadpan tone, "Living With Yourself" is a show that might not work half as well without Rudd's inherent duality. Of course he can handle the role of New Miles, the guy who seems always to have a spring in his step and a smile on his face. At an August breakfast in Manhattan's West Village, Rudd was as charming as advertised. Clad inconspicuously in a baseball cap, T shirt and shorts, still sporting his summer vacation beard, he was conscious of his celebrity without indulging in it, as when he spoke credibly about taking the subway like a civilian. ("If I talk to somebody, they're like, 'Why are you riding the subway?' Because I need to get somewhere!") But "Living With Yourself" also allows Rudd to find the humor and the humanity in the old, original Miles: a man who was already struggling to fulfill his modest ambitions and must now contend with an unwanted doppelganger, whose very existence creates standards he can't live up to. The truth is, there is a certain amount of the old Miles in Rudd, too: The actor knows how it feels to want the same seemingly fundamental things as everyone else and to be misapprehended in those pursuits. He wants to feel that he is good at what he does and is expressing himself through it, but he also wants to hold on to a sense of commonality and privacy that he sometimes feels is slipping away. When it comes to his work, Rudd said, "I don't have any sort of grand statement to make, to anybody. I don't want people to know that much about me, really. I don't have much of an interest in being an open book." No sooner had he finished saying this than a server came to our table and offered us a complimentary plate of breakfast pastries. In some alternate universe, maybe Rudd could have just continued smirking and slappin' da bass through character comedies like "Knocked Up" and "I Love You, Man." But his trajectory took an unexpected turn about five years ago when he was asked to play Scott Lang, the hero of Marvel's "Ant Man," which was to be directed by Edgar Wright. Rudd was excited about the idea of working with Wright, whose action comedies include "Shaun of the Dead" and "Baby Driver," and Marvel thought Rudd could perfectly embody both the sweet and the unsavory sides of the title character. "Scott Lang was a criminal we meet him coming out of jail," said Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios. "But also, he has a child, and you'd need somebody who could be funny and do action and who you would feel for as the father of this little girl." Rudd's comedic chops were also an asset if Marvel ever hoped to fulfill its long term vision of cramming all its heroes into one film. As Feige put it, "One day, this person might need to do a scene with Robert Downey Jr." When Wright left the film over creative differences and Peyton Reed took over as director, Rudd stayed on as an actor and a behind the scenes contributor of ideas and dialogue, eventually earning writing credits on "Ant Man" and its sequel, "Ant Man and the Wasp." Rudd also reprised his role in the battles royal of "Captain America: Civil War" and "Endgame." But even as his stock soared, Rudd tried to remain down to earth. Feige recalled a trip that he and Rudd took to Hong Kong Disneyland earlier this year to open an attraction based on "Ant Man and the Wasp," during which the actor shared an email he received from his mother. She was reminding him to appreciate how special it was to be featured in a Disney ride. "I thought, oh, that's why Paul Rudd is Paul Rudd," Feige said. "Because his mother is incredibly attentive and nice and emails her movie star son these things in the morning." For all of his previous Ant Man experiences, Rudd said he had never felt so acutely under the microscope as when the widely hyped, widely watched "Endgame" was released in April. As he relayed this memory, Rudd started coughing and he paused to catch his breath. "I just choked on my own spit," he said. "I swallowed wrong, and I wasn't even swallowing. This is my allergic reaction to fame." The differences in his life since then, Rudd said, as his tone turned arch again, have "been noticeable, but you adjust and I adjust by staying in my house and peeing in bottles like Howard Hughes." He didn't seem to find as much humor, however, in the inventory of ostensibly well intended internet posts and memes that comment on his seemingly eternal youth and celebrate him for apparently never aging over the course of his career. Rudd said he was not on any social media, but when I asked if he knew about this strain of online commentary, he dryly answered, "I'm aware." He continued: "It's certainly nicer than hearing, God, that guy looks like expletive . I don't know what to say about any of this there's nothing really to say about it." One might assume that Rudd chose to do "Living With Yourself" as an attempt to get back to his comic roots, to show that he encompasses more than his internet caricature or to stake his claim in the streaming television gold rush. But as it happens, Rudd isn't a rabid consumer of serialized TV "I haven't seen 'Fleabag,'" he said in our conversation, "but I know I love it." (He has since seen two episodes, he said by text.) He just happened to have read and liked the scripts. "Living With Yourself" was created and written by Timothy Greenberg, a former executive producer for "The Daily Show." Greenberg, who wrote all of the show's first season, drew his inspirations from various sources, including a persistent childhood nightmare about meeting his exact double, as well as a frequent argument he had with wife, who wondered why he was sometimes very sociable and other times sullen and solitary. "She would say, 'Why can't you just be the happy you?'" he recalled. "And I was like, 'Who doesn't want to turn on a switch and always be the best version of themselves?' But we can't do that." (He added that he and his wife were "very happily married" and "beyond this now.") Rudd added many of his own ideas to the series. He wanted the protagonist's name changed from George to Miles (he felt he'd played too many Georges in other movies); he had specific jokes written for his characters; and he even had his own strategy for playing Old Miles and New Miles in scenes where they appeared opposite each other. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris ("Little Miss Sunshine"), the husband and wife filmmakers who directed all eight episodes of "Living With Yourself," said that Rudd's input had been welcome and offered in the right spirit. They added that his affability was crucial to helping viewers navigate the opening minutes of "Living With Yourself," which focuses on the pitiable, rundown Old Miles. "That is the luxury of having an actor who has a body of work and who brings so much of themselves to the screen," Dayton said. "You aren't starting at zero. When you see Paul in the first frame, you already know a lot." Faris said that the old Miles character "is kind of unleavened, but he helps you get through the first part of this, because you know it's Paul you know there's going to be more than just this guy who's down in the dumps." A lifetime in show business has made Rudd protective, not only of himself but also of his family: a wife and their two children, whom he discussed only from the standpoint of his angst about raising them in a metropolis like New York. Now his film work also requires a level of secrecy that he is unaccustomed to, and he worried that even my describing the contents of his breakfast would give away whether he was or was not in training for another "Ant Man" movie. "Feel free to not put in the fact that I'm eating bacon," he said. "Eggs would be fine." Rudd had to be cautious, too, when talking about his "Ghostbusters" movie, which is directed by Jason Reitman and will reportedly feature appearances from founding "Ghostbusters" cast members like Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd. "I grew up watching that movie," Rudd said of the original "Ghostbusters," "and this happened to be one where it completely works on its own. You don't want to do it just because it's part of a larger thing, but there is the added bonus of being part of something that has a real place in culture." But he would not say what it was like to strap on a proton pack for the first time, or if he even wields one in the film. "It remains to be seen what I strap on," Rudd said. "I'm not giving you anything." Rudd made "Living With Yourself" partly to show that inadequate people can be redeemed, he said, but any inquiries into his own shortcomings were gently deflected with humor. Could he really be flawed himself? "No, that's the crazy thing!" he said with exaggerated amazement. "That's what makes it really hard to play these parts. I interviewed a lot of people who do have flaws. I have hours of tapes, filled up notebooks." Maybe Rudd wouldn't reveal, in that setting, what exactly made him as imperfect as everyone else. But the point of a show like "Living With Yourself" is that we all have these imperfections even those of us who outwardly appear perfect and there is comfort in this universal truth. "There are some days where we really feel we're on our game," he said. "We're sharp. We feel comfortable and relaxed. We feel good about how we look, or we feel comfortable about the day. And then there are the other six days of the week."
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Television
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It was a fairly typical night at the Village Underground, a comedy club in Greenwich Village. One man after another took over the stage, joking about vasectomies, the inexplicable anger of girlfriends and how men and women see sex differently. "We're trying to figure out health care right now," said Ms. Wolf, curly haired, with bright red sneakers and a mischievous smile. "A lot of the plans they keep suggesting don't include maternity care. I think part of the problem is that women, we're too cute about what happens to our bodies. When we have a baby, we'll be like, 'It's a miracle.'" She continued, with a tone of bewilderment: "It's not a miracle, it's a natural disaster. When Florida gets hit with a hurricane, they send supplies and help because they tell you how bad it is. They don't go, like, 'And then God kissed Florida with wind.'" Vaginas were far from her only topic of the night. Ms. Wolf, 32, whose first one hour special will have its premiere on HBO tonight, also offered her take on Kim Jong un, otters, Instagram, Wonder Woman and her dream superpower: to impregnate men. For her, the wish is not entirely illogical. "I've given up or put on hold a lot of things to do this," she said later, relaxing post show at in a quiet corner of Broome Street Bar, a pub in SoHo. "I don't really date. I don't want to have kids, as of right now. A lot of things women in their late 20s and early 30s are looking to do, I'm not looking to do." But, she said: "I would love to be a dad. There are plenty of comedians who have kids. But they're dads. Being a dad is so different from being a mom." If it sounds like Ms. Wolf is busy, that is because she is. Her workday begins at 9 a.m., when she arrives at the offices of "The Daily Show With Trevor Noah," where she has worked as a writer and on air contributor since 2016. Around 7:30 p.m., she leaves, drops off her bag at home (when she has time), and heads straight to a standup show. She performs standup eight to 16 times over the course of a week. On many weekends, she travels to clubs around the country. "I want to see if my jokes work everywhere," she said, taking a sip of a hot cocktail with brandy. "A good joke can work in New York and Kentucky." With her erratic schedule, the only routine she has mastered is tardiness. "I always almost miss my flight," she said. "My routine is to constantly, no matter how bad or good the traffic is, to almost miss my flight." After leaving the pub, Ms. Wolf wandered through the mostly empty streets of the Village and SoHo, a standard decompression activity for her. Garbage trucks rumbled by as she recalled how even as a child in Scranton, Pa., her days had been filled with activities from morning until night. "School, whatever sport I was doing at the time, dance class," she said. "Then homework and then bed." The scheduling intensity continued after she graduated from the College of William and Mary in Virginia and began working in private client services at Bear Stearns in 2007. "It was fun to wear suits for a minute," she said. "And then quickly I was like, 'Oh, this is not fun and everyone is mean.'" She began taking improv classes in early 2008 and stuck around the finance world for several years. "My bank job was enough money to pay for all these classes and live very comfortably," she said. She gave those jobs partial credit for how comfortable she is in a male dominated profession. "I grew up with two older brothers, I was in banking, so maybe I have a different perspective," she said. "But I don't really feel the boys clubbiness of it. I've always felt welcome." At the corner of Prince Street and Avenue of the Americas, Ms. Wolf stopped at a deli to buy a pack of Hi Chew, and said that she had no groceries in her fridge. Food shopping, beyond candy, is out of the question and waiting for a delivery service would require an hourlong chunk of time that she cannot spare. "When I'm on the road, I eat like I'm on the third day of a hiking trip all the time," she said. "I'm eating beef jerky and trail mix constantly." Ms. Wolf considers herself lucky because she needs only about five to six hours of sleep. "I only drink an entire French press when I wake up in the morning," she said. She has two hobbies: running (eight to 15 miles at a time) and watching television ("Scandal," "The Great British Bake Off" and anything on the Food Network or HGTV). In May, she and her brothers completed the Rim to Rim to Rim trail inside the Grand Canyon, covering about 42 miles in 18 hours. But do not expect jokes about running in her routines. "No one cares," she said. She imitated an audience member: "'I don't want to hear about running. I hate it. I hate you for talking about running. You're making me feel lazy.'" By around 1 a.m., Ms. Wolf was finished with her walk and headed off to her apartment, where she planned to take in an episode or two of "something terrible on TV" so she could fall asleep. No matter how time consuming her standup routines are, Ms. Wolf is adamant that she will continue to perform her own material. "I've always been shy and kind of solitary," she said. "For the longest time I just wanted to be agreeable. Comedy was the first time I really figured out who I was."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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The conductor appeared. The musicians raised their bows. And 20 stringed instruments began to play an orchestral version of "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This." Then the clothing appeared. Subtle, Michael Kors is not. But with his autumn collection, he was onto something. Both the power in a digital world of live performance all those cellos and violins and violas united in song and a desire these days for what can only be termed swaddling chic. Or maybe power comfort dressing. When you never quite know what the news may bring, and the news comes continually, the desire to wrap yourself in soft somethings can be profound. (It's also psychologically transparent, but there you go.) Mr. Kors to the rescue! In a notably covered up show, itself a welcome relief after a week of seemingly endless side cutouts and under boob, he offered voluminous camel and tweed coats, pleated trousers, tulip skirts caught up on one hip, and silver leopard devore shirtdresses. Almost everything came with multiple cashmere sweaters wrapped around the neck and shoulders or tied at the waist, scrunched down elbow length gloves and scrunched down suede boots. Sleeves were mostly long, necklines high, and furs were big and feathered with mink and fox. Fabrics were plush, and the palette soothing (gray, white, camel, olive green with a touch of silver and gold for evening and jewel tones for accent). Even his usual crystal covered jersey dresses and a finale of lavish black fringing had a protective mien. There might have been a minidress under all those silken strands, but the legs were shielded. They had their own safe space.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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HOUSTON Mark Juull, a construction contractor for public and residential housing, has something to be thankful for in this sluggish economy: With global commodity prices falling, he's saving 200 a week on fuel for his three trucks and finding deals on aluminum, lumber and roof shingles, which are typically made from petroleum. But he says he thinks prices for his raw materials could easily shoot right back up, so he is not passing any of his savings on to his customers. "When the economy hit me bad, I actually lost money," he said. "So with prices going down, I am recouping." Businesses big and small are getting a break these days as the European financial crisis and slowing growth in China, India and the United States have pushed down the prices of a wide array of commodities in recent weeks. If the trend continues, businesses and consumers are likely to reap benefits through cheaper prices for goods ranging from cotton shirts to copper wiring and coffee beans. So far, however, businesses seem to be benefiting a lot more than their customers. Over the last month, global oil prices have declined by about 12 percent, while corn, copper, lead, cocoa and coffee have all dropped by 5 percent or more. Prices of corn, cocoa, oats, cotton, rubber, coffee, aluminum, silver, zinc and nickel are all more than 20 percent lower than a year ago. "The world economy is in risk of a recession and on that possibility, commodity prices weaken," said Allen L. Sinai, chief global economist for Decision Economics, a consulting firm. "Lower inflation comes with weakening economies." Oil is among the commodities that have fallen in price the fastest despite continuing tensions in the Middle East and the tightening sanctions on Iran. OPEC production has been soaring in recent months because of mushrooming crude exports from Iraq, an almost total resumption of exports from Libya since the fall of the Qaddafi dictatorship, and a concerted drive by Saudi Arabia to push up production. At a meeting in Vienna on Thursday, OPEC is expected to decide to keep production steady despite weakening prices. In the United States, a glut of natural gas has led to a price drop of about 10 percent over the last month and more than 50 percent over the last year. Since much of the nation's electricity is produced by burning natural gas, that should ease summer air conditioning expenses for consumers. It will also help manufacturers, especially those who make plastics, fertilizers and other products that use natural gas as a feedstock. But while consumers are pleased by lower fuel prices, they say they have yet to see much relief in the prices of other products linked to commodities. "I don't feel food is going down," said Connie Shanley, a homemaker shopping at a Whole Foods store this week in West University Place, Tex. "Paper towels, deodorant, soap, cleaning products seem to be going up. The total bill seems to be more." Libba Letton, a Whole Foods spokeswoman, conceded that there were limited benefits for consumers in the short term. "Typically these market fluctuations do not immediately affect Whole Foods Market because we have long term contracts with our suppliers," she said. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Other businesses also acknowledge that prices for raw materials go up and down far faster than the prices their customers pay for finished goods. Clothing retail executives have said they need to sell off inventory purchased when textile prices were higher before consumers can take full advantage of falling cotton prices, while car parts retailers say they are still paying high shipping costs that have not fallen along with lower fuel costs. Paul J. Chakmak, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Boyd Gaming, a national chain of hotels and casinos, said his company was benefiting from lower jet fuel prices since it operates four weekly charter flights to shuttle tourists from Honolulu to Las Vegas. Lower natural gas prices help reduce the cost of cooking at hotel restaurants and of heating the shower water in 11,500 rooms. But he said the energy savings were marginal compared with labor and marketing costs, so customers would not see lower prices. "It is a little soon," Mr. Chakmak said, to predict any long lasting impact. More than anything else, economists say, the steep drop in prices reflects deepening worries about a global economic slowdown as Greece prepares for elections next weekend that could lead to its withdrawal from the euro currency union, with financial repercussions across Europe and beyond. A sharp drop in European consumer demand, especially in Italy and Spain, has already reduced global trade in many goods. But economists say that while manufacturers and retailers tend to pass higher costs on to their customers, they do not always pass along their savings when wholesale prices go down. "Producers or stores tend to keep prices the same, and take a larger profit," said Michael P. Niemira, chief economist for the International Council of Shopping Centers. Commodity prices are still generally high, and well above levels nearly four years ago, when the global financial panic reversed a seven year bull market. The decline in commodity prices varies widely depending on the raw material. Cotton prices are down nearly 50 percent over the last year, and have actually been recovering a bit in recent weeks. Copper, a metal that is viewed by many economists as a barometer for economic activity, is down by nearly 20 percent for the year. Gold, normally a commodity that soars with economic uncertainty, is higher but only by about 3 percent over the last year. "Gold has behaved in line with risky assets, and the heightened uncertainty globally has not rallied the same support gold garnered on previous occasions," according to a recent research note from Barclays commodities.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Under normal circumstances cast albums are used by musical theater fans to experience shows that are no longer running, playing too far away or prohibitively expensive. But with live theater currently on hiatus, these recordings are now one of the few ways that musicals remain accessible. Recently, The Times's co chief theater critics, Ben Brantley and Jesse Green, each chose the 10 albums they're grateful to have during this time of isolation. Readers reacted with suggestions of their own. Here are but a few lightly edited responses: "Guys and Dolls"! Seriously! And "The Music Man"! I don't know what you would take out, but you have to include these two just for the joy if nothing else. PAULA Neither of you two listed "Candide"? Sure, the book is a mess, but that doesn't play a role in the cast album (or albums as there is no definitive compilation and so several different selections to choose from). My favorite is John Mauceri's with City Opera. A more gorgeous score and wittier lyrics cannot be found in all of theater. And sue me, but I prefer it to "West Side Story." GARY Whatever happened to "The Sound of Music"? If you are to be marooned, why not some of the happiest songs? It's your choice whether it's the Broadway cast album (Mary Martin) or the movie soundtrack (Julie Andrews). JIM
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'BOESMAN AND LENA' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (previews start on Feb. 5; opens on Feb. 25). A man and a woman, tramping from shantytown to shantytown, have arrived back in New York. As part of the Athol Fugard residency, the Signature revives this 1969 play, and though it's set specifically during the apartheid era, it also speaks to a more universal sense of displacement. Yael Farber directs a cast that includes Zainab Jah and Sahr Ngaujah. 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org 'CALL ME MADAM' at New York City Center (performances start on Feb. 6). This 1950 Irving Berlin musical imagines a gentler world in which the worst the State Department has to contend with are finicky matters of protocol and a few inconvenient love affairs. Encores! revives this ambassadorial gem, starring Carmen Cusack, Ben Davis, Jason Gotay and Lauren Worsham. 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org
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Theater
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LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. Duncan Robinson was struggling with his 3 point shot in the N.B.A. finals, and that was a problem because shooting 3 pointers is the one thing he does exceptionally well. Jimmy Butler, his teammate on the Miami Heat, invited him to his hotel room for a late night chat. It was a pep talk with a heavy dose of tough love. "He's hard on me, but it's because he expects a lot," Robinson said. "I welcome that. I love that. This whole team wants me to be aggressive and do my job." Butler has done pretty much everything in this finals series including motivational speaking and he delivered again in the Heat's 111 108 win over the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 5 on Friday night, collecting 35 points, 12 rebounds 11 assists and 5 steals. The Lakers lead the series, three games to two, ahead of Game 6 on Sunday night. And Robinson did his job, too, even though the Lakers had arrived ready to celebrate. They broke out the black uniforms that Kobe Bryant had helped design. Anthony Davis wore gold sneakers. And there was LeBron James, who played like a man who had been living out of a suitcase for three months and desperately wanted to go home. He crammed 40 points, 13 rebounds and 7 assists into 42 minutes. Exhibit A: Robinson, an undrafted, second year forward who was enormous in the win, scoring 26 points while shooting 7 of 13 from 3 point range. His final 3 pointer, late in the fourth quarter, gave the Heat a 2 point lead, helping set the stage for a thrilling duel between Butler and James down the stretch. After Butler made a pair of free throws with 16.8 seconds left, James drove into the paint at the other end and found Danny Green open for a 3 pointer that would have given his team the lead. Green missed, and his teammate Markieff Morris tossed the ball out of bounds after grabbing the rebound. "If you just look at the play," James said, "I was able to draw two defenders below the free throw line and find one of our shooters at the top of the key for a wide open 3 to win a championship. I trusted him, we trusted him, and it just didn't go. You live with that." One game is a small sample, of course, but there is little question that Butler had more reliable help. All five starters for the Heat scored at least 11 points, and Kendrick Nunn had 14 points off the bench. James and Anthony combined to score 68 points for the Lakers. The rest of their teammates shot 30 percent from the field. Erik Spoelstra, the coach of the Heat, never knows when Robinson or Nunn, or Tyler Herro will catch fire. Spoelstra referred to them as "sticks of dynamite." But even as Robinson labored to find his rhythm earlier in the series, he continued making strong cuts. It was going to pay off eventually. "I thought he was just so persistent," Spoelstra said, "and their level of physicality on him, as well, is nothing like the regular season or nothing like the first three rounds. He just dusts himself off and continues to run his routes with great force." Through the first three games of the series, Robinson was shooting just 27.3 percent from the field and 25 percent from the 3 point line. After the Heat won Game 3 last Sunday, Butler reserved a portion of his postgame news conference to broadcast his support for his teammate. "He's going to be a reason that we win one of these games," Butler said at the time. "He's going to hit six, seven 3s, and I'm going to jump up and down, and I'm going to give him a big hug, maybe a slight kiss on the back of his head, because I know how important that guy is to our team." Robinson came through on Friday. His story has become more familiar to fans in recent weeks, but it is still unusual. Lightly recruited out of high school, he played one season at Williams College, where he helped the Ephs to the Division III national championship game. He then transferred to Michigan for his final three seasons, averaging 9.2 points a game as a senior. He did not have the sort of resume that indicated he would be an indispensable scorer for an N.B.A. title contender within two years. But the Heat saw something in him his length, at 6 foot 7, and his ability to shoot from comically long distances. After spending most of last season building his skills in the G League, Robinson moved into Miami's starting lineup this season, averaging 13.5 points while making 44.6 percent of his 3 pointers. "Every time he shoots, we feel like it's going in," Herro said. After Friday's game, Robinson wore a T shirt with a picture of Goran Dragic, the team's starting point guard. Dragic has been out of the lineup since Game 1, when he tore a ligament in his left foot. The Heat are not whole, but they are determined to push the Lakers to the brink. At the same time, Dragic has made his presence felt in other ways. "Goran's just always in my ear to be aggressive, to hunt shots and play to the best of my ability on both sides of the ball," Robinson said. Robinson has been listening to his teammates, and putting their advice to good use.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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This article contains plot details about the second season of "Succession." In the end it was kill or be killed. Viewers heading into Sunday's Season 2 finale of the HBO drama "Succession" knew a "blood sacrifice" was coming. But they had to wait until the final scene to learn who got the ax. For a while the choice seemed clear: After days spent pondering who should take the fall for a sexual misconduct scandal that had been rocking shareholders' confidence, Logan Roy (Brian Cox) finally seemed to decide, coaxing his son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) into being the goat. But in a startling twist ending, Kendall turned the tables on his father, who in making his decision had only just told him: "You're not a killer. You have to be a killer." The morning after the finale, Armstrong spoke with The Times by phone about the finale's knockout ending, and about how his phenomenal cast has helped steer the series's direction. He also revealed what he says to people who complain that his characters aren't "sympathetic." These are edited excerpts from that conversation. At what point in planning out the season did you know you that Kendall was going to flip? Pretty early on. I remember pitching it to the writers' room before we started outlining the other episodes. I always like to know where we're going. It helps to maintain the integrity of the show. When do you think Kendall made his decision to go against Logan? Was it before he kissed his father on the cheek? That's one where I'm really intrigued by what people make of it. I don't think there's a wrong answer. You might even get different replies from me and Jeremy, although I think we're probably on the same page. But I don't want to be sitting up on a cloud making readings on that stuff on behalf of the audience. I like people to make their own decisions. You put Jeremy Strong through the wringer this season with Kendall's arc. Did he at least have the relief of knowing where the character was going to land? You know, me and Jeremy talk a lot, and at a certain point, yeah, he did. Because, you know, his preparation for his performance and his engagement with the character is really extraordinarily deep. It didn't feel like a dereliction of duty not to lay it all out from the very beginning, but at a certain point it did feel like he should know where he was going. So yeah, we discussed that stuff before the episode was written. When did he learn he was going to get to rap? Right before the read through! Laughs. No, I actually can't remember when. But we clearly discussed how it should work, and I think we both had the same feeling, that it might be that other people found it ludicrous, but that Kendall himself shouldn't. Therefore the lyrics, the music, the stuff around it should be as good as someone like him should be able to achieve. Which is pretty decent! Did it surprise you how much the rap took off on social media? Do you pay attention to any of that? A lot of that really isn't useful to have in your head. But there's always a few bits in each season where we think, "Well, tonally, I think we got it right." I remember having the rocket explode in the first season's finale. Initially I wanted to do it on big screens at Shiv's wedding, and then one of our writers, Jon Brown, came into the writers' room having been away for a few days, and was like: "You've all gone completely crazy. It's going to ruin the show." Laughs. We ended up having it on Roman's phone, which was rather a better way. Similarly, I remember suggesting the rap and there being a certain, like, "Yeah, right ... This could be the end of the show that we've all worked on so hard." But if you get those things right, they have that kind of queasy sense we know so well from the world right now. That "Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?" feeling. What inspired the structure of the show, where you're in a different location nearly every episode? Maybe it comes a bit from the fact that most of my career in TV has been in situation comedy. I love the breadth and space you get to explore character in so called serialized TV, the novelistic element of maybe being able to find out who people are. But I also very much like the sitcom discipline of having a self contained episode that you could conceivably, I hope, be able to enjoy in and of itself. My desire is to have a completeness to each episode. Is there much left on the cutting room floor? It would seem like Matthew Macfadyen alone would give you dozens of hilarious outtakes each episode. Oh yeah. Our writers write long, and we write alternative lines. And then there's some improvisation. There's always a lot of warp and weft in the interaction between the writers and the cast. Often I cut the episodes down from an hour and a half or over. We leave some of the comic material out and it's heartbreaking sometimes. But I think the discipline is good in the end. One of the criticisms of "Succession" when the show debuted was that it was hard to root for any of the characters. This season there seemed to be more of an effort to dig into the roots of the Roy siblings' psychological and emotional damage, to make them maybe a little more sympathetic. Was that intentional? Without sounding defensive, I would say that sometimes TV critics assume that after a few episodes the writers "finally understand the characters," and as a writer I often feel that what really has happened is that the viewer has gotten to know the characters. It's a natural process. I would claim that if you went back and watched something from our first season, there were always hints to the inner lives of these characters. Getting into their psychological makeup has always been intrinsic to the show, along with the interest in how the world of media works. We certainly didn't come back after Season 1, saying, "Oh expletive , we've made these people horrible!" Laughs. We've also never said anything like, "Ugh, we've made this person so bad, we need to find a redeeming quality." I think if there is such a balance, that's only because, I would remind you, there's also one in life. We have characteristics we're born with, that are molded by the lives we live. And so to have a psychologically engaged show, our view of human nature is that it doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from somewhere. So we naturally end up portraying that.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Stephen Gould, left, as the title character in Wagner's "Tannhauser," with Elena Zhidkova and Manni Laudenbach in a new production at the Bayreuth Festival. BAYREUTH, Germany The Wartburg castle, so central to Wagner's "Tannhauser" that it's part of the opera's full title, makes an appearance only briefly in Tobias Kratzer's new production, which opened the Bayreuth Festival here on Thursday. At the beginning of the overture, a video projected onstage shows the medieval fortress in sweeping drone footage fit for a tourism commercial. Then it's gone. Instead, the camera's focus turns downward, to a scrappy Citroen van driven by a merry band of anarchists. There's Venus, their leader, at the wheel, looking crazed and sultry in a sparkling black unitard. With her are a raggedy clown, a drum playing dwarf and a drag queen named Le Gateau Chocolat. This is "Tannhauser," I swear. It's just that in Mr. Kratzer's rollicking production intelligent and surprisingly wrenching, though not quite fully formed the Venusberg is not the libretto's mythical pleasure realm so much as a lifestyle of young, brash artistry. That pathetic clown, it turns out, is Tannhauser, joining Venus and company to litter the German countryside with signs saying: "FREELY WILLING. FREELY DOING. FREELY ENJOYING." Those words are Wagner's, from his bad boy days as a revolutionary in Dresden, where "Tannhauser" had its premiere in 1845. He revised the opera in 1861 for a production in Paris, incorporating the groundbreaking musical language he used in "Tristan und Isolde" and patching some of the plot's leaks. It wasn't perfect, but it was better; Wagner had aspirations to continue revising it for the rest of his life. Today, you're likely to come across the Paris version, or some hybrid. But here, Mr. Kratzer has opted for the original Dresden score because, he said in a program book interview, it's truer to Wagner's revolutionary spirit. Regardless of how persuasive that argument may be, there was little case for it in the orchestra pit, where Valery Gergiev was making his Bayreuth debut. Throughout the evening, his interpretation of the music was unreliably thoughtful, and at times lackadaisical. The overture began promisingly, sedate and serene with the Pilgrim's Chorus theme, which returns near the end in the brasses, played over quiet, downward chromatic scales in the strings. But instead of a light, buzzing sound from the violins, he drew something heavier, jabbing and overly present. The baked in filmic qualities of the overture provided a fitting soundtrack for the movie that is the foundation of Mr. Kratzer's production. (Manuel Braun is the video director.) Venus's Citroen arrives at a Burger King, where her gang scams the restaurant out of a free meal. When they leave, they are cut off by a police officer on foot. Out of desperation, Venus runs him over and kills him a sobering end to all the fun, and the beginning of Tannhauser's doubts about her way of life. As the film ends and the curtain rises, we see the Citroen pulled over at a roadside food stand with the Disneyland look of a faded fairy tale cottage. Here, Tannhauser (the mighty tenor Stephen Gould, with ever increasing despair) sings his ode to Venus but eventually begins to beg for escape. She can be awfully persuasive, though, especially as performed by the charismatic Elena Zhidkova. (A late replacement for Ekaterina Gubanova, she showed no signs of insufficient rehearsal time.) So Tannhauser gets back in the van, until he can't take it anymore and throws himself out the door and onto the highway. A cyclist in the role traditionally presented as a shepherd boy but here never clearly defined rouses him and says to listen as pilgrims pass through on their way to Rome. That city, and the pope within it, are treated metaphorically, changing with each act. In this case, "Rome" is the Bayreuth Festival Theater, revealed in miniature atop a hill toward the back of the stage. The "pilgrims" are a mirror image of the audience: making their way to Wagner's theater in tuxedos, gowns and formal lederhosen, fanning themselves with program books. (Outside on Thursday, the temperature was nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit.) The theater, in a somewhat confusing turn, is also a stand in for the Wartburg; its minnesingers Tannhauser's fellow knight troubadours approach him wearing the lanyards you might see off duty singers wearing around the festival grounds. Tannhauser, it turns out, is a cast member of "Tannhauser," returning at last to his colleagues. This sets up a play within a play premise for Act II, a "Tannhauser" by way of "Kiss Me, Kate." The lower half of the stage is a traditional set for the opera's singing contest; the upper half is a screen showing film of life backstage, adding both comedy (a lot of it) and moments of psychological clarity. We see, for example, that Elisabeth Tannhauser's saintly love, sung by the soprano Lise Davidsen in an astonishingly mature Bayreuth debut at just 32 is faithful, but not a simple archetype. She is far more complicated, her devotion to Tannhauser almost pathological and her behavior self destructive. When she returns in Act III years after Tannhauser leaves to seek redemption in "Rome," now meaning jail because he took the fall for the officer's death at Burger King Ms. Davidsen's Elisabeth is in a downward spiral. She finds the dwarf, Oskar (Manni Laudenbach), who is living out of the decrepit Citroen, and joins him in waiting for Tannhauser to return alongside other newly released prisoners. That's because Mr. Kratzer's production begins to muddle in the third act, not always aligning with the libretto as he aspires to illustrate the divergent paths artists' lives can follow. Oskar is homeless; Le Gateau Chocolat, we learn from a luxury billboard, sells out; Venus never changes; and Tannhauser, back from jail, has nothing to return to. He dies maybe holding Elisabeth's body and imagining the road trip they would have share d, smiling and riding into the sunset, if only he hadn't met Venus. Some confusion aside, Mr. Kratzer's reading of the opera is both novel and clever. I left the theater thinking of Wahnfried, Wagner's house in the center of Bayreuth, where an exhibition is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Wagner, the composer's grandson, who is credited with establishing the "Bayreuth Workshop" model of the festival today. The idea is that our interpretations of Wagner are ever evolving; that's why directors are hired for several years, to tweak their productions with each revival. Even for Wagner, "Tannhauser" was always a work in process; for Mr. Kratzer, returning over the next few years, it will be, too, with the potential to keep refining and improving. The festival, for its part, can help by hiring a new conductor. Through Aug. 25 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther festspiele.de.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'CARMEN JONES' at Classic Stage Company (in previews; opens on June 27). Oscar Hammerstein's adaptation of Bizet's opera may be set in a parachute factory, but don't expect too many happy landings. In John Doyle's revival, Anika Noni Rose stars as a femme fatale with David Aron Damane and Clifton Duncan as the other points in this love triangle. 866 811 4111, classicstage.org 'CYPRUS AVENUE' at the Public Theater (in previews; opens on June 25). In David Ireland's play, directed by Vicky Featherstone, Eric, a protestant and lifelong Orangeman, gets a nasty surprise: His baby granddaughter looks like I.R.A. bigwig Gerry Adams. His baby granddaughter might even be Gerry Adams. Stephen Rea returns to the Public Theater in this bleakly comic exploration of prejudice. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'GIRLS BOYS' at the Minetta Lane Theater (in previews; opens on June 27). Every marriage is a double act, but as the actress Carey Mulligan says in this one woman show, "I am, of course, just giving you one side." This monologue, scripted by the "Matilda" book writer Dennis Kelly and produced by Audible, moves from domestic comedy to tragedy, asking if certain forms of violence are innate or learned. 800 982 2787, minettalanenyc.com
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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LONDON London Fashion Week comes to an end on Tuesday, with the biggest buzz surrounding the noon show from Marques'Almeida, the 2015 winner of the LVMH Young Designer's Prize. The Portuguese pair, who are based in East London, have been making waves with their radical reinventions of denim in recent seasons, so all eyes will be on the brand. Early birds will be drawn to the 10:30 a.m. presentation by Christopher Raeburn, who recently unveiled a collaboration with Woolmark, and then to the 11 a.m. show by Amanda Wakeley, the evening wear favorite of Chelsea ladies who lunch. One of the afternoon slots, at 1:30, is taken by Ashley Williams, a much hyped up and comer now stocked in both Selfridges in London and Colette in Paris. And with that, the fashion crowd decamps to Milan for Round 3.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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In the 1980s, Johnson Johnson needed a reliable supply of opium for a popular product, Tylenol with codeine. So the health care conglomerate, better known for baby shampoo and Band Aids, bought a business that grew and processed opium poppies in faraway Tasmania, off the coast of Australia. By 2015, at the height of the nation's opioid epidemic, Johnson Johnson was the leading supplier for the raw ingredients in painkillers in the United States. It even developed a special strain of poppy, called Norman, that produced a core painkilling agent used in OxyContin, which would become Purdue Pharma's blockbuster drug. Purdue, the Sackler family that owns it and the nation's major drug distributors, like McKesson, have gotten most of the blame for much of the opioid crisis. But on Monday, a judge in Oklahoma singled out Johnson Johnson, ordering it to pay the state 572 million and ruling that the company should be held responsible for decades of opioid addiction and the thousands of overdose deaths in the state. The judge cited the company's overly aggressive marketing tactics: Sales representatives were coached to avoid the "addiction ditch" the negatives associated with drug use and dependence when encouraging doctors to prescribe opioids for patients with moderate to severe pain. Some question how long the company can weather what has been a series of damaging setbacks to its brand, including a spate of lawsuits over whether its talcum powder led to ovarian cancer, and high profile cases over other potentially flawed products, like pelvic mesh and the anti stroke drug Xarelto, which has caused excessive bleeding. "Johnson Johnson is a corporation under duress on a number of fronts," said Stephen Hahn Griffiths, an executive at Reputation Institute, which tracks public perception of companies through regular surveys. "It's fair to say that the opioid trial is probably the straw that broke the camel's back for Johnson Johnson's reputation," he said. "We've not in recent years seen Johnson Johnson's reputation dip as low as it's currently tracking." Still, the price of the company's stock rose slightly on Tuesday, by 1.44 percent to 129.64 a share, a sign that investors appeared relieved that the judgment the state had asked for 17 billion wasn't higher. It's also small compared to the 81.6 billion in sales that Johnson Johnson reported in 2018. "As silly as it sounds, a 600 million decision was, relative to expectations, a positive outcome," said Joshua Jennings, an analyst for Cowen. "It was less onerous than many had expected." Many investors weren't as sanguine about other opioid manufacturers, such as Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Mallinckrodt and Endo International, whose stocks dipped significantly on Tuesday. More than 2,000 lawsuits are pending around the country, filed by states and cities pursuing a similar legal strategy to that of Oklahoma. "Johnson Johnson will survive this opioid crisis litigation," Dr. Jennings said. "Other companies may not be in that position." In a statement on Monday, Johnson Johnson described the judge's decision as flawed and said Oklahoma had failed to present evidence that the company's actions constituted a public nuisance, which was a central question of the trial. Purdue and Teva, had previously settled with Oklahoma and agreed to pay the state 270 million and 85 million, respectively. Johnson Johnson also defended its business as an opiate supplier, saying it had followed state and federal regulations and that the subsidiaries, which it sold in 2016, played no role in the marketing or sale of finished products. Beyond its poppy business, Johnson Johnson drugs accounted for less than 1 percent of opioids prescribed in Oklahoma and the United States, the company said. Although the Oklahoma judge ruled that Johnson Johnson's behavior violated the state's public nuisance law, similar attempts to hold companies accountable for their harmful products have fallen short in other cases. Elizabeth Burch, a law professor at the University of Georgia, said that lawsuits using public nuisance laws had failed against gun manufacturers. "You can draw an analogy there, mainly because once you sell a gun, it is no longer in the control of the gun manufacturers," she said. Andrew S. Pollis, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said pharmaceutical manufacturers may not be off the hook. "You can have liability for manufacturing something that you know is being used to an illegal or a harmful end, or if you know the volume of your sales is upside down relative to the population," he said. In Oklahoma, more than 326 million opioid pills were dispensed to state residents in 2015, enough for every adult in the state to receive 110 pills, according to the judge's decision. Some public health experts said companies should be held accountable when they supply ingredients that they should have known were causing harm. "There would have been no OxyContin without J J ramping up in Tasmania," said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the co director of opioid policy research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. He was a paid expert witness for the State of Oklahoma at the trial. Dr. Kolodny, a longtime critic of Purdue, said public scrutiny should shift to other opioid manufacturers as well. "We're getting to a point where I think scapegoating this family and this one company can be counterproductive, because other opioid manufacturers also contributed to the epidemic," he said. During the trial, the state of Oklahoma highlighted how Johnson Johnson's supplier subsidiaries, Noramco and Tasmanian Alkaloids, sought to increase their production of raw ingredients in 1994, the year Purdue sought approval from the Food and Drug Administration to sell OxyContin. At the same time that its supply units were processing opiates, Johnson Johnson's pharmaceutical subsidiary was promoting its own products in what was becoming a hotly competitive market for narcotic painkillers. The company, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, marketed Duragesic, a fentanyl based patch, and Nucynta, a painkiller that it sold off in 2015. Its marketing tactics followed a similar playbook to one Purdue and other opioid manufacturers were employing, and also included so called unbranded promotion, which was not tied to specific products and encouraged doctors to continue to prescribe more opioids. Like its competitors, Johnson Johnson sought to persuade doctors that pain was under treated, training sales representatives to use "emotional selling" to get across the idea that patients were being harmed by undertreatment. Another concept was "pseudoaddiction," or the idea that if patients were asking a doctor for higher doses, they were not necessarily addicted but needed more of the drug to treat their pain. The company has said it acted appropriately and that, ultimately, drugs are prescribed only on the advice of a doctor. Still, researchers have repeatedly found that drug marketing can influence the behavior of doctors. "This sort of marketing can tilt the balance," said Dr. Scott Hadland, an addiction specialist at the Grayken Center for Addiction at Boston Medical Center, who has studied the link between drug industry gifts to doctors and overdose deaths. Doctors "are human just like anybody else and they are affected by marketing." Johnson Johnson has cultivated its reputation through decades of careful messaging and product management, said David Vinjamuri, a marketing consultant and professor who worked at the company in the 1990s. Doctors and hospital administrators were more inclined to trust Johnson Johnson over other pharmaceutical companies, he said. But in recent years, given its setbacks, "my fear now is that the systematic competitive advantage Johnson Johnson got from its reputation has eroded," Mr. Vinjamuri said. "Brand equity is a reservoir that floats you until it's dry."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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A 10 to 15 year triple net lease, for which the tenant is responsible for electricity, taxes and insurance, is available for this entire 7,517 square foot vacant five story commercial loft building, behind Lord Taylor in the Garment District. The 19 foot wide building built around 1930 and renovated in 2013 has picture windows and four skylights offering views of the Empire State Building. It also has an elevator, hardwood floors and a 1,900 square foot storage basement. The former tenant, Bene Rialto, leased the entire building until the end of 2016 as a collaborative work space for up and coming designers in the fashion industry, as well as a retail, showroom and event space.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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"Chasing Portraits" is about a search. Yet the most affecting parts of this documentary come with the realization that some things may never be found. Elizabeth Rynecki, here directing her first feature, grew up surrounded by paintings made by her great grandfather Moshe Rynecki, who died in 1943 in a concentration camp. He produced about 800 pieces in his life, many of them scenes from his Jewish community in Poland. His works were scattered during the war; dozens are now in museums, others are in private collections. Ms. Rynecki has endeavored for years to catalog the art works, and this film follows her to Canada, Poland and Israel as she tracks down several of them and speaks with, or is rebuffed by, their current owners.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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In 1929, an Australian geologist named Paul S. Hossfeld was investigating the northern coast of Papua New Guinea for petroleum. He found bone fragments embedded in a creek bank about seven miles inland and about 170 feet above sea level. At first, Dr. Hossfeld believed that the specimen was from the skull of Homo erectus, an extinct relative of modern humans. Later analysis would show it belonged to a modern human who lived about 6,000 years ago. Now recent research suggests the remains known as the Aitape skull could be something more: the earliest known victim of a tsunami. The findings, published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One, may offer useful historical context for how ancient humans living along the Pacific Ocean's coasts faced fierce natural hazards. "Here we start to see human interaction with some nasty earthquakes and tsunamis," said James Goff, a retired geologist at the University of New South Wales Sydney and author of the study. Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern half of a large, bountiful island just north of Australia (the western side is part of Indonesia). In 1998, after decades of relative geological quiet, a devastating tsunami rocked the country, killing more than 2,000 people. "This huge volume of water struck the coast and swept away everything," said John Terrell, an anthropologist at the Field Museum in Chicago who has completed research in the country and is a co author on the paper. "The villages I knew and loved were sheared off." Following the tsunami, Dr. Goff and some colleagues went to the country to assess the damage. The visit helped spark his interest in investigating whether there was a link between ancient tsunamis and the Aitape skull. After struggling for almost two decades to get funding for the project, he returned to the island in 2014 to explore the rain forests and crystal clear creek where Dr. Hossfeld had discovered the skull 85 years earlier. Dr. Hossfeld had left detailed notes about where he had found the skull, which helped guide Dr. Goff and his team as they collected samples from the same sediment layer at a nearby river cut cliff. Back at the lab, they performed geochemical analysis to determine whether the sediment level had been deposited by a tsunami 6,000 years ago. Because they had previously analyzed geochemical signals from sediment on the island following the 1998 tsunami, the team knew which clues to look for, like grain size and composition. They found that the sediment collected from the skull site contained fossilized deep sea diatoms. These microscopic organisms were a telltale sign that ocean water had drowned the area at some point. The researchers also found geochemical signals that matched the signatures they collected in 1998, offering additional evidence that a tsunami had struck around 6,000 years ago. "Bang! Right where the diatoms were looking very sexy and you're getting excited, you have a signal that says, 'Hi, I'm seawater,'" said Dr. Goff. Sue Dawson, a geographer the University of Dundee in Scotland who studies tsunami sedimentation, said that the team's diatom evidence was similar to what she found examining sediments in Papua New Guinea after the 1998 tsunami and could be suggestive of a tsunami flooding the area. But she added that the findings do not rule out that the skull could have belonged to someone who died before the tsunami occurred and whose grave was disturbed by the event. Ethan Cochrane, an archaeologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and an author of the paper, questioned that alternative scenario. "Tsunamis do not rip up the ground enough to remove already buried bodies and put them into suspension and transport them," he said, pointing to findings from rescue efforts with recent tsunamis. "Overwhelmingly, the dead you find were killed by the tsunami." The geochemistry analysis supported the authors' conclusions, another scientist not involved in the study said, although he added that it didn't contribute much to our understanding of the dangers posed by tsunamis. "It is more of an intriguing geological snapshot of an ancient catastrophic event," said Iain Stewart, a geologist at the University of Plymouth in England.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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ABC reached a settlement on Wednesday with a South Dakota meat producer that accused the network of defamation following its news reports about so called pink slime in 2012. The agreement ends what was expected to be an eight week jury trial, which began on June 5. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Beef Products Inc. said a report by Jim Avila, an ABC News correspondent, misled consumers about the safety of low cost processed beef trimmings, which are officially known as "lean finely textured beef" but are more commonly known as "pink slime" because of the appearance. The company had sought 1.9 billion in damages, but the figure could have grown to as much as 5.7 billion under a South Dakota law. ABC News was among several organizations, including The New York Times, to report on questions about the safety of the product, which was commonly sold in grocery stores and used in schools and fast food restaurants. A public backlash led to a plummet in sales, and the company closed three of its plants and laid off about 700 workers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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After learning she had a high genetic risk for breast cancer, Dane'e McCree, like a growing number of women, decided to have her breasts removed. Her doctor assured her that reconstructive surgery would spare her nipples and leave her with natural looking breasts. It did. But while Ms. McCree's rebuilt chest may resemble natural breasts, it is now completely numb. Her nipples lack any feeling. She cannot sense the slightest touch of her breasts, perceive warmth or cold, feel an itch if she has a rash or pain if she bangs into a door. "I can't even feel it when my kids hug me," said Ms. McCree, 31, a store manager in Grand Junction, Colo., who is raising two daughters on her own. Plastic surgeons performed more than 106,000 breast reconstructions in 2015, up 35 percent from 2000. And they have embraced cutting edge techniques to improve the appearance of reconstructed breasts and give them a more natural "look and feel" using a woman's belly fat to create the new breast, sparing the nipple, minimizing scarring with creative incisions and offering enhancements like larger, firmer lifted breasts. Doctors often promise patients that their reconstructed breasts will look even better than the breasts they had before. But they often describe the potential consequences of the surgery in ambiguous terms. Women say the fact that sensation and sexual arousal will not be restored is not made clear. The main problem is using the word "feel," said Dr. Clara Lee, an associate professor of plastic surgery at Ohio State University who does reconstructive breast surgery. Surgeons who use a woman's own tissue to recreate a breast might tell the patient that it will "feel" like a natural breast, referring to how it feels to someone else, not the woman. "We don't always mean what's important to the patient," Dr. Lee said. "Our focus has been on what women look like," said Dr. Andrea L. Pusic, a plastic surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who specializes in breast reconstruction and studies patients' quality of life after breast surgery. "What it feels like to the woman has been a kind of blind spot in breast surgery. That's the next frontier." The focus on how breasts look and feel to other people, rather than how they feel to the patient, speaks to the fact that women are still largely judged by their appearance, said Victoria Pitts Taylor, a professor and the head of feminist, gender and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University. Adding to the confusion has been the excitement over surgical innovations, particularly "nipple sparing" mastectomies. During a traditional mastectomy, doctors remove the nipple and scoop out breast tissue, causing considerable nerve damage. But now, in certain cases, the nipple can be spared, raising hopes that some feeling will be preserved. The actress Angelina Jolie wrote about her nipple sparing, preventive double mastectomy in a New York Times Op Ed in 2013, inspiring other women at high risk of breast cancer to have their breasts removed. But the nipple sparing surgery has yet to fulfill its promise, and in most cases, sensation is not restored. For many women, the loss of sensation in their breasts can be devastating. "No one said, 'You will not have sexual arousal in your chest again,'" Ms. McCree said. "I thought that because I was able to keep my nipples and the blood supply, I'd keep my feeling." Eve Wallinga, 60, a cancer survivor from St. Cloud, Minn., said many women who choose risk reducing mastectomies believe that reconstructive surgery will make them "whole" again and are not told that the sensation lost during the surgery is unlikely to come back. "They go into it thinking everything will be the same when they come out they'll just have cancer proof stuffing in their breasts," Ms. Wallinga said. "Some are very angry and upset, and say, 'Why wasn't I told?' They feel very betrayed." The lack of sensation is potentially dangerous. Women who have had mastectomies and reconstruction surgery have sustained severe burns on their breasts from heating pads, hair dryers, curling irons, sunbathing and overly hot showers. Several women interviewed recounted times when they had not realized a bra was cutting into their skin until they saw blood. Many described embarrassing "wardrobe malfunctions," when a bathing suit or T shirt shifted to reveal part of their breast without their knowing because they did not feel the air on their exposed skin. A doctor recalled a patient who had burned herself while draining hot pasta for dinner; she did not realize she was hurt until she saw red marks on her skin in the shower several hours later. Some women described losing the sense of the position of their breasts. "It's not just about the sexual arousal, it's the awkwardness," said Cathy Balsamo of Berkeley Heights, N.J. "You can't figure out your space almost like you're bigger than you really are. It's a bizarre feeling." She added, "When I put on a sports bra, I have to look in the mirror and focus on the breasts to make sure they're in the pocket where they belong." Nerve damage during mastectomies can create post mastectomy pain syndrome. Some women experience tingling sensations, and others have debilitating pain. Patients say physicians minimize the condition, even though it is fairly common, affecting anywhere from 25 percent to 60 percent of mastectomy patients, according to published studies. Michelle Lamon Romero, 45, of East Longmeadow, Mass., said she had been incapacitated by pain since having a double mastectomy two years ago. She lost her job and now relies on a cocktail of five drugs to keep the pain at a manageable level. "The surface of the skin is numb if you run a needle over it, I can't feel it," Ms. Romero said. "But I can feel the pain underneath just radiating everywhere." She added that her plastic surgeon had told her that she was an anomaly and that "this isn't real, it's all in your head." Other patients Ms. Romero has met through Facebook have had the same experience. "So many women who join are just relieved to know they're not alone," Ms. Romero said. "They all start out the same way: 'My doctor told me I was crazy.'" Most surgeons agree that the best chance for sensory restoration after a mastectomy is a procedure that uses a woman's own body tissue rather than an implant because nerves have a better chance of regenerating in natural tissue. The procedure has produced modest results. If sensation returns, it is usually limited to the perception of pressure, without improved sensation related to touch, temperature or sexual arousal. "It's a shadow of the degree of sensation that people had before," said Dr. Edwin G. Wilkins, a plastic surgeon at the University of Michigan who is running a large study on reconstruction outcomes and complications with Dr. Pusic. "It's a poor substitute." "I tell patients that if I am able to reconnect nerves in the reconstructed breast, it will improve the sensation. But I never tell them it will be normal," Dr. Spiegel said. She added that many of her patients had shown "very significant improvement." One of her patients, Karen Holt, 65, a retired principal from Houston, had her left breast removed and reconstructed from her own tissue 14 years ago. Ms. Holt knows she's unusual, she said, but claims she has "just about as much erogenous sensation in the left breast as in the right." But doctors say such results are rare. "You don't want to give people false hope," said Dr. Frank J. DellaCroce, a plastic surgeon and a founder of the Center for Restorative Breast Surgery in New Orleans. Restoring sensation is "one of those things that's regarded as the holy grail of breast reconstruction," he said. "But no one has shown in any scientific article to date that we're able to return sensation in any reliable way." Dr. Christine Laronga, a breast oncologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., said she tried to make clear to patients that feeling would not be restored after reconstruction, telling them, "It may look like a breast, but it won't feel like a breast." While doctors agree on the need for a mastectomy procedure that spares nerves, they note that the goal of the surgery is to make sure the cancer is gone. There is also a risk that efforts to restore sensation will trigger a pain syndrome. "It's a very tricky area," said Dr. Ida K. Fox, a plastic surgeon at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in breast and hand surgery. "You don't want to restore sensation and give someone chronic pain." Ms. Balsamo, 50, who had a double mastectomy after testing positive for a genetic mutation that increases breast cancer risk, said she did not regret the surgery, but wished she had been better informed. "I just wish I had known," Ms. Balsamo said. "They said there's going to be a difference in the sensation not that there wouldn't be any. Before you go in, shouldn't you know the facts?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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The Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University has appointed Johanna Burton as its new director. Ms. Burton, who has served as Keith Haring director and curator of education and public engagement at the New Museum in New York since 2013, will be succeeding Sherri Geldin in March. The Wexner Center, which will be celebrating its 30th anniversary next year, includes 13,000 square feet of gallery space; a black box theater that accommodates 150 to 500; a film and video theater that seats about 300; and the Mershon Center stage, which seats 2,500 for dance, music, theater, multimedia productions and lectures. It was conceived from the beginning as a place devoted to the most advanced ideas in contemporary art. It also advocates artist experimentation, by those both well established and newly emerging and that is something Ms. Burton aims to preserve and expand upon. "My hopes are to continue the path of the Wex as groundbreaking and risk taking," she said in an interview. "The Wex has shown again and again that it is unafraid to test the waters." "Continuing to be unafraid and take risks, and allowing artists to take risks, is my hope for the future; continuing to have a place that's both foundational and stable but allows for that kind of experimentation," she added.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Wedding photographers can't possibly capture every moment of your special day, but guests can easily fill in the gaps on social media. Using a designated wedding hashtag, attendees can post photos on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms, serving as a sort of personal paparazzi. Fifty four percent of couples create a wedding hashtag, according to WeddingWire's 2018 Newlywed Report, and one in four views photos on social media immediately after the reception. "Hashtags allow you to be able to see your wedding photos in real time," said Jeffra Trumpower, the creative director at WeddingWire. "We're living in an era of instant gratification." Creating a hashtag has become a core step in the wedding planning process, said Kari Dirksen, the owner and lead planner at Feathered Arrow Events, a Los Angeles based wedding and events planning business. "I'd say 90 percent of my clients incorporate a hashtag into their wedding," she said. With so many hashtags from which to choose, couples may feel pressure to create something clever and distinctive. Some may even hire professional hashtag writers. Marielle Wakim, the founder of HappilyEverHashtagged.com, started her business in 2016. "I went to 14 weddings that year, and almost every couple asked me for help coming up with their wedding hashtag," said Ms. Wakim, who is also an editor at Los Angeles Magazine. "I write puns for a lot of our magazine's headlines, so I had the right experience." Ms. Wakim offers three price packages: one hashtag for 50, three for 95, and 125 for five. "A lot of couples want options," she said. Put Your Skills to the Test "Puns are the lifeblood of hashtag writing," said Christopher Shelley, a hashtag writer at the Wedding Hashers (which charges 20 for three hashtags) and a wedding officiant. A natural starting point is to think about creative ways to incorporate your last name. For instance, Ms. Wakim created this hashtag for Tres Penny and Katie Smith: PennyFoundHisDime. She also created the hashtag HopelessRahmantics for Shabnam Mahmood and Rezwan Rahman. If you're stumped for ideas, Mr. Shelley recommends grabbing a thesaurus and jotting down words that sound like either person's first or last names. For a groom with the last name Hurst, the Wedding Hashers created the hashtag LoveAtHurstSight. Though clever hashtags are the most popular, "not everyone loves puns," Mr. Shelley said. If you're looking for something more straightforward, consider using an alliteration, like ForeverFong or FinallyForman, or combining each person's first or last name, like DebraandAdamAugust2019. Incorporating your wedding's location is another option, like NelsonsInTheBarn or TaylorsTakeNYC. Pro tip: Capitalizing the first letter of each word will make your hashtag more readable at a glance, Mr. Shelley said. If you want a lot of options, ask friends on Facebook, Instagram and other social media for hashtag suggestions. You can also solicit ideas from wedding vendors, such as your photographer, wedding planner or caterer. "I would get as many people involved in the brainstorming process as possible," Ms. Wakim said. A recent poll of WeddingWire's users found that the typical wedding hashtag is 16 characters (not including the ). In Mr. Shelley's opinion, the shorter, the better. "You want a concise hashtag that people can remember easily," he said. "Also, the longer your hashtag is, the more likely people are to make a typo." There are a handful of automated hashtag generators online that will create free hashtags, but they can lead couples to cringe worthy ideas, Mr. Shelley said. (To test one of them out, I plugged in my name, Daniel Bortz, and the name of my fiancee, Alexandra Wald. The generator suggested lame ideas such as AdventuresOfDanielAndAlexandra, BortzPartyOf2, and TheDanielAndAlexandraWedding.) The point of creating a wedding hashtag is to have your guests use it when posting photos from your wedding day, which is why Ms. Trumpower recommends couples create something distinctive. "You don't want to compete with someone else's hashtag, because you don't want to be sifting through a ton of other people's photos," Ms. Trumpower said. Once you've created a hashtag you like, do a search on social media to see if it already exists. If it does, Mr. Shelley said, adding the date of your wedding, like LisaandMikeMay012019, could solve this problem.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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After serving as vehicles for a mass statement on sexual harassment and pay inequity, some of the black dresses and tuxedos of the Golden Globes are ready for their second act. And it is one that may reassure critics who worried that the all black dress code was an empty gesture of protest. Beginning on Friday at noon, and for one week, eBay will host an auction for 39 of the dresses and tuxedos worn by celebrities including Laura Dern, Tracee Ellis Ross, Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, Seth Meyers and Zoe Kravitz to the Golden Globes. Minimum bids will range from 2,500 to 10,000 and are based on prices suggested by the designers who donated the pieces. Why the designers? Most boldface names do not pay for what they wear on the red carpet. Some have contractual relationships with fashion houses that require them to wear designs from those brands. Others receive dresses from designers eager for the exposure, which can be worth significantly more than the cost of the items themselves. All of the proceeds from the auction will go to the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund, which is administered by the National Women's Law Center and connects those who experience sexual misconduct in the workplace with lawyers. In some cases, the fund will help cover the costs associated with pursuing legal action.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Squeeze tightly on a watermelon seed between two of your fingers, and it'll shoot out and fly through the air, as generations of delighted children have discovered. The Chinese witch hazel plant does the same thing. Plants, like some animals, want to send their offspring far out into the wider world. After all, you might not want your baby seedlings crowding your soil or tangling your roots. Dandelions, for instance, cast their seeds floating in the wind to lawns up and down the street. Chinese witch hazel, native to western China, is a favorite of landscapers with its yellow blooms. "By coincidence, we had a twig of this plant in an office, and it started shooting the seeds," said Simon Poppinga , a researcher studying plant biomechanics at the University of Freiburg in Germany and the study's lead author . "This triggered our interest in it, so we started investigating, and it became more interesting and even more interesting and even more interesting." Taking advantage of high speed cameras, botanists have in recent years captured the intricacies of such high flying reproductive mechanisms. As the fruits of a witch hazel plant dried out, the German researchers discovered that the top part of a woody capsule around the seed split open. The middle part of the capsule constricted, as if it were squeezed by fingers, until the seed, about the size of a pumpkin seed, broke free and flew out at about 28 miles per hour. "You hear the crack and then it shoots out," said Thomas Speck , a botany professor at Freiburg. "The fascinating thing is there is no explosive mechanism. There's this squeezing mechanism." Dr. Poppinga, Dr. Speck and their colleagues reported their findings on Wednesday in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. As it flies, the seed is spinning fast, 12,000 to 25,000 revolutions a minute. As with the spiraling of a well thrown football, the spinning enables the seed to travel farther than it would have, landing several yards away. "It's exceptional to launch it with this spiral," said Dwight Whitaker , a physics professor at Pomona College in California who was not involved with the witch hazel research but who has studied how a different plant, the hairyflower wild petunia, catapults its seeds into the wild. "It's just really cool how they've documented how it does it." What the researchers don't quite understand is how seeds from different fruits on the same witch hazel plant can spin in different directions, as if a quarterback sometimes throws right handed half of the time and left handed half of the time. In addition to using high speed cameras, the researchers also put the plants inside magnetic resonance imaging machines so that they could examine the hidden structures within the plant and the fruit without having to cut it apart. "We do not need to use any radiation or sample preparation which could be damaging to the sample," said Linnea Hesse , a postdoctoral researcher who performed the M.R.I. scans. "We can basically perform repetitive imaging on the same plant as it grows over time." The same M.R.I. techniques could be used to study the movements of other plants such as how the Venus fly trap catches and eats bugs. The German researchers want to study in more detail how the witch hazel launches its seeds, in particular how it is applying a torque to make it spin. They imagine that perhaps it could inspire engineers to design a new kind of sensor that detects when the humidity is low and then opens a valve in response.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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So it turns out that trigger warnings can be triggering. We reported last week that, across the country, theaters are posting increasingly specific descriptions of content that might unsettle or offend patrons. It's a polarizing trend some argue that theater should be challenging, while others argue that warnings are a valuable customer service and our readers had a lot of thoughts on the issue. Here's an edited sampling of responses. "This is what happens when power is handed to marketing specialists rather than artists. I prefer to be considered as a theatergoer, a member of the audience, a spectator to be enlightened, sometimes shocked, often amazed at the skill and gusto displayed." ARNAUD TARANTOLA "You're SUPPOSED to be shocked, surprised and confronted by drama. If you prefer milquetoast, stay home and watch cable. Theater is clearly not for you." JOHN GALLAGHER, North Ferrisburgh, Vt. "When I saw 'Equus' many years ago, an elderly gentleman in the theater went into shock when the actors on the stage disrobed completely. His wife, who apparently thought he was having a heart attack, started shaking him and yelling. He was fine he just became breathless at the sight of nudity. If we had trigger warnings in the '70s, I'm guessing that there were theatergoers who would have passed on this excellent production." THERESA KELLY "I think we should stop the ongoing infantilization of adults. If we can't cope with a book or a play, how will we ever cope with other adults or difficult situations?" DVORA LEVINSON "You've got to be kidding! Maybe hand out blankets and pacifiers, too." NORMAN BERKOWITZ "Movies have given trigger warnings for years, in the form of ratings. An artist has a right to shock and surprise for the sake of his art? I don't think so. Let me know generally what I'm in for and I will decide if I see it." A THINKER, NOT A CHANTER "I am not surprised but nonetheless saddened by some of the responses. I feel the majority of us can handle anything a theater could throw at us but this doesn't cancel out the human beings who can't. This idea that we are creating soft people or having to coddle little snowflakes those that hold these thoughts should try to understand the worlds of survivors of rape, torture, abuse, the minds of refugees or of the veterans we routinely send into terrible situations. What a luxury the rest of us have to walk trough daily life without memories of a nightmare lurking just beneath the surface of our daily lives." TODD FREEMAN, Columbus, Ohio "If it wasn't for a review in The New Yorker, I would have thought a real bomb had exploded at the Roundabout production of 'Napoli, Brooklyn' last summer. That could, of course, happen, and anyone in a big crowd of people enjoying the arts certainly has had that thought before. But since I knew it was coming, I was able to thoroughly enjoy all the shaking, noise, and 'smoke.'" MICHAEL CUMMINGS, New York City "Whether to warn or not is the theater's/venue's choice, and appears to be mostly a business decision based on avoiding loss of revenue. However, I trust they won't discount the buying power of patrons like me: If I walked into a venue and was greeted by a placard that gave away a tenth or third or half of what I was about to see, I would be far less likely to attend an event at that venue again." TANYA MILLER, Oswego, N.Y. "I think it's quite funny how 'triggered' people get about trigger warnings. Like, why so upset about something that you can just ignore if it doesn't apply to you? That being said, it deeply irritates me that the original intent of a trigger warning which was to warn those with PTSD about severe violence (physical and sexual), which can genuinely cause a physiological reaction for people who have experienced similar trauma has developed into a message of, 'This contains sensitive material that may upset you.' Being upset or uncomfortable is NOT being triggered and liberals have done a huge disservice to sufferers of PTSD by distorting the meaning." JD, New York City "Readers here have some strange misconceptions about trigger warnings. They're designed to help people engage with difficult material, not avoid it. The people who benefit from trigger warnings aren't weak, delicate, overly sensitive, immature or intellectually incurious; they're people who survived serious trauma, and are dealing with the fallout." ELEANOR, New York "Television is currently full of the most violence, sex and drug use ever seen, and people are going to be upset by a gun going off in 'Oklahoma'?" JIM
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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This colorful four bedroom, three bath home is on the top floor of a four story building in the residential Schoneberg neighborhood of Berlin. The owners created the 4,488 square foot apartment by converting two commercial units in 2016 and 2017, according to Oleksandra Shrestkha, an agent with Engel Volkers Berlin Mitte, which has the listing. The rest of the building is a mix of commercial units and short term rentals. Each room was designed individually, awash in colors and patterns in a bold "masquerade style," Ms. Shrestkha said. High end, custom made fabric wallpapers with varying kaleidoscopic designs cover the walls and ceilings. The floors are tiled, some smooth and glossy, others with tiny metallic mosaics often varying in the same room. Modern hanging light fixtures add to the fantasy effect. The unit is reached by elevator. Inside the entrance, a bright, red tiled hallway with red hanging globe lights leads left toward the main open concept living area, or right to three bedrooms. The living area includes a living room, dining space and kitchen. The living room, decorated in gold metallic finishes, has a wall of windows on one side, a vegetated green wall, hanging geometric light fixtures and an electric fireplace. The dining area, decorated in shades of purple and pink, has an array of 16 lantern style pendant lights hanging above an eight seat dining table, as well as a television built into the wall. Behind the dining table, a large white cooking island with a tiled top has a sink, oven and cooktop. The high gloss cabinetry, by SieMatic, is also white, while the ceiling above has a black and white dotted pattern. Four wine refrigerators are built into the wall of cabinets behind the island. Behind that wall is a pantry, Mr. Jahnsch said. Past the living area is the master suite, with feather patterned wallpaper and a modern sectional sofa facing the built in television. The cavernous spalike bathroom has ornate tiles with reflective geode patterns. A whirlpool soaking tub raised up on two tiers centers the room, and a 10 person sauna is along one wall. There is also a double shower, a glossy black double vanity, and underfloor heating. The apartment has an alarm system, with panic buttons in several rooms, and a video surveillance camera in the hallway. The price includes 10 outdoor parking spaces and one indoor space in the building's underground garage. The Schoneberg district, in the center of Berlin, is known for its night life, diverse mix of residents, and creative spirit. This apartment is within walking distance of Tempelhofer Field, a former 953 acre airport campus that has been converted to a sprawling park, and Kaufhaus des Westens, the famous department store. Nollendorfplatz, long a center for gay and lesbian pride events, is about a 10 minute walk, Mr. Jahnsch said. An underground rail station is just outside the building. Berlin Tegel Airport is about 45 minutes by car. The long awaited Berlin Brandenburg Airport, a new international airport delayed for nearly a decade by cost overruns and mismanagement, is slated to open this fall "if a miracle happens," Mr. Jahnsch said jokingly. Thirty years after its reunification, the city of Berlin, with roughly 3.7 million residents, is experiencing some growing pains. Strong economic gains and population growth are combining to put pressure on an undersupplied housing market. As of the last quarter of 2019, Berlin ranked fourth among global cities with the strongest annual residential price growth, at 6.5 percent, according to Knight Frank's Prime Global Cities Index. Frankfurt, about 350 miles southwest, was first, at 10.3 percent year over year. One of the guest bathrooms, with a suspended sink and a circular light fixture similar to the one in the kitchen. "The trend has been up for the last 10 years," said Claire Locke, an account manager for Germany at Knight Frank's offices in London. "We've seen huge growth." Although there has been substantial new construction of both rental and ownership housing in the city, it hasn't been enough to keep up with demand from a rapidly expanding population, including an influx of refugees, Ms. Locke said. Berlin added about 250,000 new residents from 2012 to 2017, according to government figures. The resulting spike in rents, which has driven out many older and lower income residents, prompted the city government to institute a five year rent freeze in January. The freeze, which only applies to units built before 2014, is scheduled to take effect in March. Ms. Locke estimated that about 85 percent of households in Berlin are renters, making the pool of home buyers a distinct minority. "Culturally, homeownership isn't a big priority in Germany," she said. "Typically, people in Berlin will rent the same apartment for 10 or 15 years." Now, however, the severe shortage of rental apartments is causing more locals to consider buying, said Peter Guthmann, the managing director at the Berlin based Guthmann Real Estate. "The pressure on the rental market is so big that the only chance to get an apartment is to buy one," Mr. Guthmann said, noting that the average asking price for an existing two bedroom apartment in the city is about 320,000 euros (around 345,000). "Otherwise, you will wait for a long time. So now we have more of a mix of buyers, Berliners as well as people from abroad." The up and coming Friedrichshain district, to the east of the city center, is popular with young professionals, thanks to its abundance of clubs, cafes and arts venues, Ms. Locke said. Older Germans looking to come to Berlin to downsize are more likely to buy in prestigious areas on the western side, such as Charlottenburg, she said. Although prices have been rising for some time, Berlin is still a relative bargain compared with other prime cities like London and New York, Ms. Locke said. This is attracting more Asian and Middle Eastern investors looking to diversify their holdings, she said. According to Knight Frank's Berlin Insight report for 2019, Europeans and Americans are the most plentiful foreign buyers, and typically purchase properties in the 300,000 to 700,000 euro range ( 325,000 to 760,000). Mr. Jahnsch said Europeans and Americans often are looking for apartments in historic buildings, while Chinese buyers are often more interested in new construction. "We are lucky we have the entire world coming to invest in Berlin," he said. There are no restrictions on foreign buyers in Germany. A notary handles the transaction and sees that the transfer is recorded in the land registry. Lawyers are not generally part of the process, Mr. Jahnsch said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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When is the final Saturday before Christmas? Don't bother consulting a calendar if you're shopping at Macy's, Sears or J. C. Penney. A sharp drop in shopping since Thanksgiving weekend has prompted worried retailers to slash prices, extend specials, stay open later and rewrite the calendar. Usually one of the most heavily discounted shopping days of the year, the Saturday before Christmas it falls on Dec. 24 this year is too crucial to retailers' holiday sales to be left in the hands of procrastinating Christmas Eve shoppers. Instead, many of the promotions pegged to "Super Saturday," as the day is known in the retail industry, are now scheduled for this Saturday a full eight days before Christmas. "If you wait until the 24th, you have no time to recover," said Michael McNamara, vice president of research and analysis for MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, which tracks consumer spending. But not all stores are making the switch. And that is creating a good amount of confusion in the retail world. "It's chaotic," said Dan Biederman, president of the 34th Street Partnership, an organization in Midtown Manhattan that will help market the Saturday promotions for retailers. "The world seems to be split." Mr. Biederman's organization was set to do its marketing on Dec. 24, including putting up an oversize digital sign that counts the number of shopping bags people in the area carry on the all important Saturday. Then the group learned that about half of the national chains represented on 34th Street, like Macy's, J. C. Penney and Aeropostale, would hold their big sales this Saturday, while the other half, including Skechers, Victoria's Secret and Mango, were leaning toward Dec. 24, said Tricia Lewis, director of digital media for the partnership. Even within companies, there is discord: Gap Inc. said its Old Navy and Gap stores would do their big promotions this weekend, with its Banana Republic division focusing on the 24th. "It obviously confuses a bag count," Mr. Biederman said. The dueling Saturdays might seem like a lot of consternation about nothing to consumers weary of faux shopping events: Black Friday, Sofa Sunday, Cyber Monday, Red Tuesday, Mobile Sunday, Green Monday and Free Shipping Day (Friday this year, for those keeping track). But the worries are real for retailers who are seeing the season slip away from them, and the potential effects on the economy are considerable. After a Thanksgiving weekend that set records in terms of sales, in store shopping has dropped significantly in the two weeks that followed. The cumulative drop from Thanksgiving week sales in those weeks, of 2.4 percent, was the biggest since 2000, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. The Commerce Department said this week that retail sales in November, including online sales, came in lower than analysts had expected, rising just 0.2 percent to 399.3 billion, the smallest increase in five months. "That suggests we may not get quite as much momentum in the holiday sales season as people were expecting," said Peter Buchanan, an economist at CIBC World Markets. Given that consumer spending makes up the majority of the gross domestic product, he said, "the chances of having a really decent recovery are rather limited if consumers continue to hold back."Almost 40 percent of Americans said they were done with their holiday shopping as of last week, according to a survey from America's Research Group and UBS, suggesting there may not be too much spending left to do. Still, the National Retail Federation, the main retail industry group, remains optimistic, and on Thursday raised its holiday forecast to 3.8 percent growth for the season, up from 2.8. "With a stronger emphasis on Black Friday, the more the industry pushes, it works, but the price of that is this lull," said Michael P. Niemira, chief economist for the International Council of Shopping Centers. That lull makes the final days before Christmas especially important this year. Stores including Sears and Target are staying open until midnight in some markets in the run up to Christmas. Toys "R" Us is staying open for 112 consecutive hours in the days leading up to Christmas, and Macy's will keep more than a dozen stores open for 83 hours straight. And all Saturdays are important. "December Saturdays are the highest volume days of the year," Mr. McNamara said. But none more so than the last Saturday before Christmas or, this year, the competing last Saturdays which is sometimes bigger in overall revenue than the Friday after Thanksgiving. Retailers tend to offer deep, cross category discounts on that day, rather than the limited quantity specials they offer after Thanksgiving. J. C. Penney, for instance, plans to offer 60 percent off toys, women's and men's coats and luggage sets, and 65 percent off fine jewelry. Sears will give away diamond earrings with 199 jewelry purchases, along with offering 75 percent off most of its jewelry and 65 percent off sweaters. Adding to the confusion, Wal Mart, which will run a Dec. 17 sale with its lowest prices of the season on items like toys and bikes, says it will not call the day "Super Saturday" it used that term back in November. The goal of the Saturday discounts is to get as much Christmas merchandise as possible out the door. And by moving the promotions back a week, retailers will have more time to sell languishing inventory when there is still some demand for it. "The discounts will be deeper, because as they draw nearer to the end of the season, there is merchandise they have to move," said Kathy Grannis, a spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation. As for the 34th Street Partnership, it will be out in full force this Saturday in addition to the digital sign, it will blog about deals and coordinate security and sanitation crews. Mr. Biederman said his staff would also provide the security and cleaning help on Dec. 24, but it was still puzzling over whether its shopping bag count could be compared to Super Saturday of last year.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Lee Broom doesn't present his work like a typical designer he always puts on a show. For his first installation in New York, Mr. Broom, who is based in London, is creating a monthlong pop up called "Broom off Broome." "I didn't want to create a conventional store or showroom," he said. "The idea is to take people on a bit of a journey. The space reveals itself as you walk through." The 2,000 square foot shop in SoHo is Mr. Broom's take on British Georgian architecture mixed with New York loft style, in his signature gray palette. He'll be showing about 50 pieces of furniture and decorative accessories, including new versions of his Mini Crescent light fixture (a chandelier, table lamp and desk lamp) created for this location, where everything is for sale. Prices range from 110 for a Half Cut crystal glass to 39,850 for the Shadow Cabinet sideboard.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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It was cruel of a senior official to swipe two "reckless" policy directives on trade from President Trump's desk before he could sign them. He should not have left the chief executive to start his working day staring into empty space. Sad. Better to have left the president to contemplate a sheet of paper with a one line sentence from a former secretary of state: Pottery Barn rule you break it, you own it. Colin Powell deployed the Pottery Barn metaphor before the invasion of Iraq. The Bush Cheney administration broke the pottery, and to this day we own the terrible consequences. Trump has in his hands a precious Etruscan vase. What happens now if he drops it if, in a xenophobic "America First" mood, the United States breaks up the alliances with like minded nations in NATO? Or takes an ax to the series of political, trade and financial institutions fashioned fitfully over decades by both parties? We would own the chaos. We wouldn't know where to begin recreating something like today's system of international order because we have a flawed understanding of its history. That is Derek Leebaert's thesis in "Grand Improvisation," a dense reconstruction of events and leaders from 1945 to 1957 that draws impressively on many original sources. 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. One might quarrel with the belligerence in the subtitle, "America Confronts the British Superpower." Leebaert, the author of several books on foreign affairs, suggests more like the reverse, with British world experience over centuries confronting an untutored Washington. He has fun with an incident in the Persian Gulf, long regarded as a British lake. In 1948 the American admiral Richard Conolly and his fleet made a grand port call on Salman bin Hamad al Khalifa, the ruler of the British protectorate of Bahrain. The sheikh's personal adviser for 22 years was the Foreign Office's Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, fluent in the gulf's dialects and customs. He introduced Conolly to Sheikh Salman, who proudly presented his young son standing nearby. The admiral and his retinue didn't understand the introduction or know what to do with their hats. "They assumed the son was a slave, treated him like a cloakroom attendant and quickly buried him under their headgear." It was one of a series of gaffes that Belgrave reported back to London. Maybe the empire would not be taking second place to the Americans after all. Leebaert's emphasis is necessary to demolish the common notion that after 1945 a "bankrupt" Britain and its empire faded from the scene, leaving the United States to become "the world's policeman." The idea that a Washington led world order snapped into place immediately after the war is accepted by any number of renowned historians. Leebaert's thesis should send everyone back to the original sources. His arguments are buttressed by a scholar's scoop, the text of a National Security Council document (NSC 75) he had declassified through the Freedom of Information Act. "Historians," he proclaims, "have never seen this 40 page document." It was nothing less than an audit of the far flung British Empire. Nobody before had estimated what the presumed "liquidation" of the empire would mean for American security. The resounding finding of NSC 75 was that America alone could not take on the "uncountable" expense of Britain's "globe girdling commitments." Britain was not the 97 pound weakling of the Charles Atlas muscle building craze of the time. Leebaert is no jingoist like the flag waving Brexiteers ignorant of history as they lead Britain over a cliff. He recognizes that paying for World War II had drained the United Kingdom of gold and dollar reserves and that devaluation of the pound was inevitable. But he stresses the countervailing points that made Britain an effective international partner, stiffening a "jittery" America in looming collisions with the Soviet Union. He offers some persuasive bullet points: British military and related scientific industries produced higher proportions of wartime output into the 1950s than similar American sectors. Britain was ahead in life sciences, civil nuclear energy and jet aviation. The Gloster Meteor was the first jet warplane to enter the war, and the English Electric Canberra high speed jet bomber was adapted by the American Air Force as the B 57. With the American Army heading home after defeating the fascists, the British Army of the Rhine remained the largest military presence in Western Europe. British intelligence services outshone the Americans. The C.I.A.'s "daring amateurs" were often diverted into futile paramilitary adventures. Leebaert is justified in highlighting Ernest Bevin in all this. Britain's redoubtable but unsung foreign secretary "stood against the sky" when Greece, Turkey and Berlin were in play in a treacherous game of bluff and double bluff. I knew Bevin as a formidable working class trade union leader and Leebaert has him right. Bevin "was visibly a bruiser with a bull neck and loud voice. He was squat at 240 pounds with putty lump features and a goggling stare that gave him an aura of menace." He was the working man's John Bull, the "Labour Churchill." Bevin roasted American legislators for embracing free trade for everyone while they themselves raised tariff barriers. His staff cataloged the raw materials the United States had lacked when it became engaged in the fighting in 1942, and he observed that in any future war America would have to rely on the empire for copper, tin and other vital commodities. A testing point for American resolve came on the rain dank 21st day of February 1947. The British ambassador's office alerted the State Department that in a few weeks Britain would stop assisting Greece and Turkey. In his memoirs Secretary Dean Acheson describes the message as shocking. This was exactly the reaction Bevin wanted. He had no intention of withdrawing the British troops holding off Communist guerrillas, but he wanted to scare the Americans into realizing what was at stake. The shock tactics worked to get the "jittery" Americans to pay up and show up, which they did handsomely. In March, Truman committed 400 million for Greece and Turkey. It was the genesis of the "Truman Doctrine," whose sweeping rhetoric, adopted by all Democratic and Republican presidents, obliged the United States to assist "free peoples" resisting "totalitarian regimes." It was a blank check. The people of Greece were not free of venal corruptions any more than Latin America was free of brutal dictatorships, but it was easier to appeal to America's preference for the moral high ground. Bevin was effective again in 1948, when Stalin attempted to cut off Berlin. President Truman was up for election in four months, faced with a Republican majority in Congress opposed to European "entanglements." But Bevin insisted the West could not let Stalin starve Berlin. The judgment of the historian Jean Smith, endorsed by Leebaert, is that without Bevin, Berlin would have been lost. Instead, hundreds of round the clock airdrops of food and supplies by the British and the Americans triumphantly sustained the city for 10 months. It was a turning point in the history of the 20th century. Leebaert does not spend time imagining a back to the future isolationist America similar to the 1930s and early '40s, though the shadow of those years haunts his narrative. Public opinion, racked by World War I, was seduced by America First rhetoric into enacting the Neutrality Acts of 1935 39. How many remember that it was Hitler who declared war on the "half Judaized ... half negrified" United States he thought had lost its will? Leebaert makes some astute observations on the rise of China, now presenting itself as the champion of free trade and pledging aid to Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe greater than the Marshall Plan. He worries that the United States, meanwhile, has lost all caution by indiscriminately embracing obligations worldwide. He acknowledges that for all the hit and miss nature of the grand improvisations, an economically dominant West did contain Communism and precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. How unfortunate, in Leebaert's view, that America has been tempted into four failed high risk adventures in a row, "from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq and back to Afghanistan." He concludes: "There's no assurance that the United States will remain the world's sole superpower, or even that it will long continue to be one at all."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Some Millennials Are Not Having Sex. But a Vast Majority Are. "Everyone is drinking, peering into their screens and swiping on the faces of strangers they may have sex with later that evening." That portrayal of app abetted, casual sex having millennials in the wild, from a 2015 Vanity Fair article by the journalist Nancy Jo Sales, is far from unusual. Hookup culture and the smartphone apps that make it easy to find partners are commonly portrayed as having fueled a rise in promiscuity among young adults. But a study published this week said this sex charged picture was not a reality for a significant percentage of young millennials. The study, published Tuesday in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that more young people are living sexless existences than their counterparts born in the 1960s did at the same age. To be clear, this does not mean that the vast majority of young millennials are having less sex than young people of previous generations did. It simply means that the portion of people born in the early 1990s who are not having sex is larger than a similar cohort from decades earlier. "People are still getting it on," said the study's lead author, Dr. Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University. She noted that overintepretation by the public and the news media was a common problem with studies like hers. "Just like it's not true that millennials are all promiscuous people who are on Tinder all the time, it's also not true that all millennials are sexless and just watching porn in their moms' basements," she said. Dr. Justin R. Garcia, an evolutionary biologist and sex researcher at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, seconded that point, saying that while the increase in young adults who are sexually inactive was compelling and statistically significant, there was a broader takeaway. "The data also shows that 85 percent of young people in their sample are sexually active in the last 12 months," he said. "The vast majority of American youth are sexually active, and that's the reality we need to take seriously." The paper, part of a series of three reports that Dr. Twenge and her colleagues have published or plan to publish about young people's sexual behavior, relied on the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey of American adults that has been taken regularly since 1972. (The researchers used annual and biennial surveys taken from 1989 to 2014.) It found that about 6 percent of young adults defined as being between the ages of 20 and 24 who were born between 1965 and 1969 reported having no sexual partners after age 18. By contrast, 15 percent of young adults born between 1990 and 1994 reported having no sexual partners after turning 18. The increase in sexual inactivity was far more notable among women than men, and was only significant for those without a college education, the paper said. The phenomenon was not observed among survey participants who had attended college. The trend of more sexless lives was also nonexistent among black Americans, according to the paper, which did not break out information about other racial groups. The trend was "larger and significant" among those who attended religious services; it was present but "not significant" among those who did not. The paper's findings were echoed by the national Youth Risk Behavior Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and released in June, which found that the number of sexually active high schoolers had decreased from 1991 to 2015. Dr. Twenge's study acknowledges several of its own limitations, including that participants might have varied interpretations of the phrase "had sex with." "It is possible that earlier generations counted any sexual activity as sex," the study says, "thus increasing their counts of partners, whereas younger generations, perhaps influenced by abstinence focused education and purity pledges, may see sex as including only vaginal penile penetration, thus leading them to report lower numbers of sexual partners." But it calls that possibility "unlikely," citing a paper about the changing sexual habits of first year university students at a school in Sydney, Australia. The survey data includes homosexual sex, Dr. Twenge said. She said that reports of same sex activity have become more common than in earlier eras. The paper discusses some factors that Dr. Twenge thinks might be responsible for the rise in sexual inactivity, including the slowed development of adolescents, an increase in abstinence only sex education and the unequal outcomes created by new technology such as Tinder. But she acknowledged that "we can't say for sure" that any of those causes were at play in the data revealed by the paper. Dr. Garcia said that it was important to "think critically about the claims we're making and the available data on patterns of sexual behavior over time," citing media headlines that sought to investigate what the paper revealed about hookup behavior or casual sexual behavior. "The methodology of the paper, which was sound, looked at generalized sexual behavior. It doesn't really say anything about whether its relationship sex or casual sex," he said. "Some of those inferences that are being made are hypotheses, and the data doesn't really allow one to clearly answer some of those questions."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Anybody who's had a hard time remembering what store used to be on a certain corner, despite having walked past it every day for years, may understand how ephemeral New York can be, even when it comes to landmarks etched in stone. One place to go to ward off those kinds of memory lapses is the seven block stretch of Fifth Avenue between 14th Street and Washington Square Park in downtown Manhattan. This well kept neighborhood within a neighborhood, whose residents tend to cite the avenue as their address rather than the encompassing Greenwich Village, looks very similar to the way it did in the early 20th century if one squints away modern cars and traffic lights. Some of its terra cotta trimmed high rises, clearly proud of that timelessness, have hung on to the marquees and lobby desks they had in their earliest life as hotels, though apartments are now inside. Stone lined alleyways have remained in place, too. Early this month, the Salmagundi Art Club, at East 12th Street, was hung with monochromatic paintings, just as it has been since 1878, when the annual black and white exhibition was inaugurated. And across the street at the brownstone First Presbyterian Church, organs regularly rumble, as they have for more than a century. Nicknamed the Gold Coast, and perhaps the inspiration for the many others that have followed, the strip has also retained its ambience of exclusivity though that need not put it out of reach, according to Amanda Ryman, a resident. In 2012, a few months after graduating from college, Ms. Ryman, with her parents' help, bought a wood floored 370 square foot studio for 350,000 at 24 Fifth Avenue; after a thorough rent versus buy calculation, the family figured ownership was the smartest move, she said. Nothing in Murray Hill, where many of her friends wound up after college, really comes close, Ms. Ryman added. "It's homey, less concrete jungle and more residential," she said. "It feels like an authentic New York place." The increasing numbers of young people carrying books the New School, nearby, has recently widened its footprint infuse the atmosphere with vitality. Their presence helps keep streets safe, says Marilyn Weigner, who has lived at the Brevoort on lower Fifth since 1979. Named for a once powerful Dutch landowner, the beige brick complex, a rare postwar on the street, has 270 units. Her current two bedroom cost 450,000 in 1982, and she and her late husband, Arthur, spent 300,000 renovating. Today, Ms. Weigner thinks, it could sell for 3.5 million. Another big asset of the area's 20 somethings, said Ms. Weigner, who works as a real estate broker: "People like to go where there is youth, and there is tremendous youth in the area." It begins in the turbulence of 14th Street, but lower Fifth seems much quieter than the avenue as it transects Manhattan farther north; having that effective dead end at Washington Square helps. At the high end was a duplex at Two Fifth, with five bedrooms, four baths and terraces on both levels, but in need of renovation, at 6.5 million, the data show; the most affordable was a studio at 24 Fifth, with parquet floors and beamed ceilings, at 359,000. Brokers say that the area, because it's so well established, is prepared for weathering ups and downs. There is evidence to back up that assertion: Prices were never really in free fall here after the financial crash, though activity has clearly picked up since. In 2009, the neighborhood saw 76 sales, at an average price of 1.45 million, according to Streeteasy; in 2013, there were 140, at an average of 1.84 million. "I think tradition wins out," said Kenneth Barkoff, a broker with Barkoff Residential who is busy in the area. "People still want to pay for traditional. Those kinds of glassy condos are great, but if you are looking for true value, stick with the center of town." Otto, named in Italian for its address on East Eighth Street, is in the base of One Fifth. Hu Kitchen, which was recently advertising wild meatloaf and black mulberry kombucha, is at No. 78. But many residents strike out east or west into denser retail areas; University Place has collegiate flavor restaurants, while the Avenue of the Americas offers gourmet groceries at Lifethyme Natural Market and Citarella. A pair of small theaters, Cinema Village (East 12th) and the Quad Cinema, (West 13th), are close by. The area is zoned for two top ranked public elementary schools: No. 41, on West 11th Street, got an A from the city on its most recent report card. And No. 3, on Hudson Street, received an A. Simon Baruch, a middle school on East 21st Street, received an A. Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School is an option for high school. SAT averages in 2012 were 399 in reading, 418 in math, and 390 in writing, versus 434, 461, and 430 citywide. The area is awash in options. Four bus lines ply the avenue the M1, M2, M3 and M5 and subway stops surround it, offering the following lines: A, C, E, F, M, B, D, L, N, R, 4, 5 and 6. PATH stations are also close by. "Hands down the best reason to live here is that it's a transportation hub," said Arash Najafi, a resident. He arrived here in 2010, from a Hell's Kitchen share. His one bedroom co op at No. 45 cost 423,000. After a major renovation, he thinks it might be worth more than 600,000, based on a listing for a comparable apartment on his floor. Some of the area around the park was owned by Sailors' Snug Harbor, which was planned in the early 1800s as a retirement community for mariners. The organization built One Fifth and other buildings, with the revenue paying for a large complex on Staten Island that exists today as a park.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Adults might find organized city tours interesting and informative, but for children they can be yawn inducing. Fortunately, for hard to please young travelers, companies are creating interactive and entertaining versions for those between the ages of 6 and 12. IC Bellagio in Italy has a six hour tour of Rome with activities like a gelato making class, a scavenger hunt of monuments and fountains and a visit to the Colosseum, where children can dress up as gladiators and take a sword fighting lesson. From 1,800 euros (about 1,970 at 1.08 to the euro) for four people. Paris Muse offers a two hour Discovery Walk for Families in the Marais neighborhood, where children use compasses to trace the footsteps of Victor Hugo to monuments featured in his novels and engage in games like finding masons' marks on a medieval rampart in St. Paul. The price is 270 euros for up to five people. In London there is a four hour excursion from NoteWorthy to Westminster Abbey, Hyde Park and Buckingham Palace, where youngsters learn history through adventure stories and get a behind the scenes look at the famous guard changing ceremony (they visit the barracks to take pictures with the guards as they prepare for the procession). From PS800 ( 1,248 at 1.56 to the pound) for four people.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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The "Maze Runner" series, a.k.a. the teenage dystopian franchise that's not "The Hunger Games" and the sci fi opera that's not "Star Wars," returns with an almost gleefully overstuffed third installment. Oblivious to occupying the pop culture equivalent of the bottom half of a double bill, "Maze Runner: The Death Cure" aspires to be a grand male weepie: the "Shawshank Redemption" of "Maze Runner" movies. The first film like all the entries, adapted from a novel by James Dashner had a pleasing unity of place and action. (Amnesiac boys attempted to escape from a giant maze.) The draggier sequel, "Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" (2015), added scale by sending the characters on the run. While "Maze Runner: The Death Cure" continues the trend toward supersizing, at least it moves. "The Death Cure" opens with a spectacularly staged train rescue indebted to "Mad Max: Fury Road." It continues with a few too many zombies; the return of a character presumed dead; a lot of sneering from an Ahab like security officer (Aidan Gillen); a class revolt that's essentially window dressing; and some of the most homoerotic bromance in a mass release since the "Lord of the Rings" films. But as silly as they sound, these movies are pretty well made, capable of outsize action and teary intimacy. The director, Wes Ball, knows how to move his camera around a futuristic medical compound, and the filmmaking brio especially the sights of Earth's last city, shot in Cape Town mitigates the eye rolls prompted by the plot.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Bernie Sanders Only Had Eyes for One Wing of the Democratic Party Once the mainstream of the Democratic Party's electorate settled on a candidate to support in this year's campaign, however flawed Joe Biden may be, Bernie Sanders's call for a revolution overturning the current American variant of capitalism no longer had a chance. On Wednesday, Sanders finally capitulated to political reality and withdrew from the race. In doing so, he claimed that "Few would deny that over the course of the past five years our movement has won the ideological struggle." The fact is that a decisive majority 60 percent of the Democratic electorate is made up of men and women loyal to the centrist party establishment, such as it is, and to organizations, from unions to party committees, that are aligned with it. Earlier this month, Shom Mazumder, a political scientist at Harvard, published a study, "Why The Progressive Left Fits So Uncomfortably Within The Democratic Party," that analyzed data from a 2019 survey of 2,900 likely Democratic primary voters. "I saw two clear poles emerge within the Democratic Party," he writes: The "establishment" and the "progressive left." A third group also emerged, and while it's not as clearly defined as the other two, it has some overlap with the establishment and tends to be more fond of Wall Street, so I'm calling that "neoliberals." "Establishment" voters, in this scheme, means center left voters who make up just over 60 percent of the total. They stood out as favorably inclined to Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee in other words, to the Democratic establishment. "Progressive left" Democrats, at just under 20 percent, were most favorable to labor unions, Black Lives Matter, the MeToo movement, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America. These Democrats viewed business interests as exemplified by Wall Street negatively, and they weren't happy about Joe Manchin, the centrist senator from West Virginia, either. The third group, "neoliberal" Democrats, at 20 percent, is as large as the progressive wing. These voters like what the progressives don't like Wall Street, Manchin and dislike pretty much everything progressives favor, including Ocasio Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America. Mazumder uses the label "establishment Democrats" idiosyncratically. His data shows that at 44 percent, minorities make up a much larger share of these voters than their share of either progressives, at 28 percent, or neoliberals at 32 percent. His establishment voters are roughly 60 40 female, while the other two categories are majority male. In contrast, Mazumder's progressives stand out as the whitest group 72 percent Anglo of the three categories, the least diverse constituency of an increasingly multicultural and multiracial party. Gilens, Page and their critics basically agree on the same set of facts. Their differences emerge from their conflicting interpretations of those facts. Take the enactment of Obamacare. For Gilens, the final legislation reflects the failure of the Democratic Party to achieve progressive goals: In 2009, with unified Democratic Party control and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, the Democratic Party failed even to include a public option in Obamacare, much less establish a health insurance program that would cover all uninsured Americans. The Affordable Care Act, Gilens continued, is "one illustration of the power of interest groups in constraining Democratic Party policy." Critics of Gilens' argument contend that enactment of Obamacare marks the first major downwardly redistributive federal legislation in generations, a major progressive achievement after decades of conservative success in distributing income and wealth to those in the top brackets. "The A.C.A. was less sweeping than it could have been because of the constraints imposed by a powerful health care lobby, but it was more sweeping than anything that had come before," Rhodes wrote by email. "The fact that significant health care legislation was enacted in spite of substantial resistance was a testament to the strength of progressive mobilization at the time." In other words, for Gilens, the glass is half empty, for Rhodes, half full. The view associated with Bernie Sanders and some scholars, which suggests that both parties have been bought off by rich donors to represent the rich and big business at the expense of the middle class, is inconsistent with the patterns we observe. The Republican Party, they contend, perhaps unnecessarily, does seem consistently responsive to business preferences and its positions are more often associated with those of the affluent. On economic policy in particular, Republican leaders much better represent affluent and business preferences. But the Democratic Party, Grossmann and Isaac argue, "is not aligned with business preferences or affluent preferences in any domain and actually represents middle class views over affluent views on economic policy." Along similar lines, Rhodes and Schaffner found in their 2017 paper that: Individuals with Democratic congressional representatives experience a fundamentally different type of representation than do individuals with Republican representatives. Individuals with Democratic representatives encounter a mode of representation best described as "populist." individuals with Republican representatives experience an "oligarchic" mode of representation, in which wealthy individuals receive much more representation than those lower on the economic ladder. In an email, Rhodes noted that Democrats are on average more responsive to their less affluent constituents than they are to their more affluent constituents, while for Republicans the reverse is true. If the standard in judging the Democratic Party is whether it would support a radical upheaval vastly expanding the federal government, Rhodes continued, then it's fair to say that few elected Democrats at the national level are contemplating major departures from prevailing economic and political arrangements. There's little evidence that most elected Democrats want an economic "revolution." But, Rhodes continued, "the reality is more complicated" than the Sanders claim that "the party is dominated by corporate interests and is unresponsive to the demands of the working and middle classes." Instead, according to Rhodes, there's a decent case to be made that many Democratic elected officials are indeed representing their working and middle class constituents by taking moderately liberal positions on most economic issues. Interestingly, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party faces another challenge from an unexpected source. Eitan Hersh, who is also a political scientist at Tufts, suggests in his new book, "Politics Is for Power," that the Democratic left is threatened by a political side effect of the internet. The web, he writes, has facilitated the growth concentrated especially in the ranks of well educated white progressives of voters seeking "a shortcut to feeling engaged without being engaged," voters for whom "emotion righteous anger is an end rather than a means to an end." Hersh calls these voters "hobbyists." They spend an hour a day or more closely following politics primarily on social media, but they rarely, if ever, actually engage in politics through volunteering or other grass roots activity. Hersh provided data comparing the demographics of hobbyists to non hobbyists. First and foremost, hobbyists are white, 82 percent, compared with 67 percent for non hobbyists. They are majority male, 53 percent, compared with non hobbyists who are 59 percent female. They are better educated, 37 percent with college degrees, compared with 30 percent among non hobbyists. In a further refinement of his analysis, Hersh compared voters who spend an hour or more a day on politics and do no volunteer work with those who spend an hour a day but also perform volunteer work in other words, those who not only follow politics closely but also engage in grass roots activities. There were some striking differences, Hersh wrote by email: The people who spend an hour or more a day on politics but no time in volunteerism are 82 percent white, but those who do volunteering are only 60 percent white. The political hobbyists are 47 percent women but the volunteers are 64 percent women. I asked Hersh why certain Democrats and liberals were drawn to hobbyism. One factor, according to Hersh, is that many hobbyists are not facing hard times: College educated whites do politics as a leisure activity because the status quo is pretty good for them, and they are not motivated either by fears or by a sense of linked fate to those who do have pressing needs to get off their couches. They might say they hate Trump, are worried about polarization, are afraid of climate change, etc., but they aren't really interested in doing anything about it because they don't find the direction of the country sufficiently threatening to them. If political hobbyists go ahead and vote, why worry about what they do or don't do? Political hobbyism isn't just a distinct activity from the pursuit of political power; it hinders the pursuit of political power. Since politics, including the politics of governing, is a competition in the exercise of power and influence, corporations and rich people are going to press for their interests no matter what. Insofar as progressive forces include a disproportionate share of hobbyists as they currently do progressives are going to be weakened in that struggle for power. Interests will always conflict, and the conflicts are often as intense and bitter within a political party as they are between political parties. But political coalitions like the Democratic Party depend on the willingness of competitive forces to come to a compromise or at least a working agreement. Unfortunately, intraparty dissension often brings the whole house down. Strategically, the challenge for progressives in the wake of Sanders's departure from the race is not to defeat the Democratic Party, nor is it to generate a constant drumbeat of hostility from the left. The challenge is to combine forces with the rest of the party and deploy that power to win elections and change lives. This column has been updated to reflect news developments. 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.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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The Grammy Awards are supposed to be music's biggest party. But in recent years the show has also become a pinata for critics, activists and even major artists over a host of issues like race and gender and, oh yes, music. The 61st annual show, to be hosted by Alicia Keys and broadcast live by CBS on Sunday night, should be no different. After a bruising time last year, when the show came under fire after just one woman won a solo award on the air and the chief executive of the Recording Academy, Neil Portnow, commented that women in music should "step up" to advance their careers the Grammys made a series of changes in their membership and nominations process that were meant to address their underlying problems. But in many ways the Grammys still walk a tightrope. And as the show tries to stay culturally relevant, while also balancing the demands of race and gender representation, it may be impossible to please everybody at once. "That moment kind of shed a light on an issue that needed attention, and that is a lack of diversity in the industry," Portnow said in an interview this week. "And if the light that was shed becomes a catalyst for change, then you can feel that it had a reason and a value." To viewers, one of the clearest changes will be that eight, instead of five, acts will now compete in the four major categories: album, record and song of the year, and best new artist. That change satisfied many critics by adding more women to the mix, but it also has made the contests harder to handicap. For album of the year, Drake and Kendrick Lamar, two deities of contemporary hip hop, are up against Post Malone, who has topped the charts with a mellow style between rapping and singing; the boisterous rap of Cardi B; the adventurous R B of Janelle Monae and H.E.R.; and two singer songwriters in the country and folk spheres, Kacey Musgraves and Brandi Carlile. If Carlile prevails, she would be the award's first openly gay winner. But as an artist with minimal sales, would her victory make the Grammys seem out of touch with the masses? Will a rapper win, or will they cancel one another out on the ballot? There is also a chance that the award could go to Drake or Lamar only to have the winner not show up. That has become a growing risk for the Grammys as the show has alienated more and more hip hop and R B stars like Drake, Kanye West, Jay Z and Frank Ocean by failing to give them the most prestigious prizes. "The fact of the matter is, we continue to have a problem in the hip hop world," said Ken Ehrlich, the longtime producer of the show. "When they don't take home the big prize, the regard of the academy, and what the Grammys represent, continues to be less meaningful to the hip hop community, which is sad." Ehrlich said that this year he offered performance slots on the show to Drake, Lamar and Childish Gambino whose song "This Is America" is up for four awards, including record and song of the year but they all declined. Representatives of those three artists declined to comment on whether they would attend the show. More bad news for the Grammys arrived on Thursday afternoon, when Ariana Grande confirmed reports that she had pulled out after clashing with producers apparently Ehrlich himself over which song to perform. "I've kept my mouth shut but now you're lying about me," Grande wrote on Twitter, responding to an Associated Press interview in which Erhlich said that she "felt it was too late for her to pull something together." Last year was another flash point in the troubled history of the Grammys and hip hop, as Jay Z, the most nominated artist, with eight nods including album, record and song of the year went home empty handed, and Lamar, while winning all five awards in the rap field, lost out on album of the year, to Bruno Mars. Three months later, Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for music. "For the Pulitzers to get it right and the Grammys to get it wrong says a lot," said Troy Carter, an artist manager and former Spotify executive. Portnow said he believed the Grammys had made good faith efforts to reach out to artists, but the tensions have shown no signs of letting up. "We would hope that all nominees attend the show and be there as their own achievements are celebrated," Portnow said, "because that's really what it's about." But while race has been a growing problem for years, the Grammys' most urgent issue is over gender. Last year, a report by the University of Southern California, released days before the show, found dismal numbers about the representation of women in the music industry and at the Grammys. Lorde, the only woman nominated for album of the year in 2018, was not offered a solo performance slot. After the show, Portnow's "step up" comment drew an immediate outcry, with some women music executives calling for his resignation. (Portnow said at the time that his words had been taken out of context, and later announced that would leave his position at the expiration of his contract in July.) In response, the Recording Academy appointed a task force, led by Tina Tchen, a former chief of staff to Michelle Obama, to "identify the various barriers and unconscious biases faced by underrepresented communities" at the academy and in the wider industry. Working with the task force, the academy has tried to make its voting pool more diverse, inviting 900 new people, from a variety of backgrounds, to be members; of those, 22 percent accepted in time to vote this year, according to Laura Segura Mueller, the academy's vice president of membership and industry relations. Last week the task force challenged the music industry to hire more women producers and engineers, two jobs that are overwhelmingly male. Even with these steps, this year's nominations show just how much work is left to achieve real gender parity. On the eight songs up for record of the year, a total of 48 producers and engineers were credited, and only two were female. One of them is Lady Gaga, as a producer of "Shallow," her song with Bradley Cooper from "A Star Is Born," which is a strong contender for both record and song of the year. Lady Gaga is scheduled to perform, but that night Cooper will be at the Baftas, the British film awards. (Taylor Swift, who is up for just one award, pop vocal album, is also in London, filming an adaptation of "Cats," and is not expected to attend the show.) And this week U.S.C. released an updated version of its report, showing that the numbers for women working in music have not improved. Looking at Billboard's year end Hot 100 list for the last seven years a total of 633 songs, after removing duplicates the report found that of 1,455 artists credited on those songs, only 17.1 percent were women. In another finding, only three of those 633 songs were credited solely to female songwriters. "This report really solidifies what we saw last year," said Stacy L. Smith, the founder of U.S.C.'s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, and the leader of the study, "and confirms that females are still facing an inclusion crisis in prominent positions in the music space."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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WASHINGTON Federal Reserve officials worry that the uncertainty caused by the trade war between the United States and China could be constraining business spending and may be contributing to a manufacturing slowdown that is dragging on growth. The concerns were outlined in the Fed's semiannual Monetary Policy Report, released on Friday as Jerome H. Powell, the chair, prepared to testify on Capitol Hill next week. The report said that the American financial system was more resilient today than it was before the 2008 financial crisis, that economic activity had increased at a "solid pace" in the early part of this year, and that the job market was performing well. But it also noted risks on the horizon as President Trump's trade spat with China drags on. Manufacturing has slumped in many advanced economies and the flow of goods has slowed, but the report cautioned that identifying specific causes was difficult. In addition to the trade war, the report cited a slowing demand for technology products and one time factors as playing a role.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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The Pro Bowl is different from a typical N.F.L. game in a lot of ways. But one of the most obvious is that nobody kicks off. Since a rule change in 2013, the team that gives up a touchdown or a field goal simply gets the ball at its own 25 yard line. But a team that is trailing late often needs an opportunity to get the ball back. Without kickoffs, there are no onside kicks. So this year, the N.F.C. and A.F.C. teams will have an alternative option. A team that has just scored can opt to run a single play from its own 25 yard line. If the team gains 15 yards, it gets to keep the ball, and the game continues. If it fails, the opposition takes over where the ball is downed. Kickoffs are often considered the most dangerous play in football, as large players running in opposite directions collide at full speed. No one wants an injury at the Pro Bowl, a game that fundamentally is about honoring fine players and having a bit of fun in the sunshine. (That casual attitude is also why tackling can be a bit lax in the game, leading to some high scoring affairs over the years.) Other rule changes that the Pro Bowl has recently taken up for safety's sake include allowing intentional grounding and barring blitzing. In most situations, the clock continues to run after an incomplete pass, giving the impression that just about everyone at the game, and many people watching at home, are happy to keep things moving along swiftly. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. The 15 yard gain requirement of the new "onside kick" rule might seem to be arbitrary, but the numbers on it check out. There has been a significant shift in the success rate of onside kicks recently. Historically, they succeeded at a rate of around 20 percent. But two years ago, the league instituted some safety minded rule changes for kickoffs, most notably not allowing players on the kicking team to take a running start. As a result, the success rate for onside kicks quickly dropped by half, and is now about 10 percent. We don't know for sure how difficult the new play will be, but we can make an educated guess because it is comparable to going for a first down on third or fourth and 15. Last season, teams were 2 for 7 went they went for it on fourth and 15 plays (not a very big sample). But on third and 15 plays essentially the same situation because teams often punt or kick on fourth down offenses converted at a rate of 14 percent last season, according to Pro Football Reference. That is close to the onside kick conversion rate. It seems the N.F.L. put some thought into choosing 15 yards as the benchmark. Based on this year's figures, had they chosen 10 yards, the "kicking" team would succeed 25 percent of the time, probably making it too easy to get the ball back. Had they gone with 20 yards, the rate would be just 10 percent. The lower rate of onside kick success in recent years has prompted a push to include the new Pro Bowl rule, or a version of it, in regular season games. That was proposed last year but did not get enough support from teams to pass. (Under that proposal, the play would have started from a team's 35, not 25 yard line. It also could have been used only once per game and only in the fourth quarter. Traditional onside kicks would have remained an option.) If the rule does become the law of the land in the N.F.L. someday, teams will have to start seriously wrestling with the question of whether to attempt the play. If a team is behind with little time left, it won't have much of a choice no matter the odds just as with the onside kick. But beyond those situations, don't expect to see the play used much, if at all. Teams would be losing the element of surprise and instead simply announcing that they wanted to try the new play. Another clear drawback is that if the play fails, the opponent gets field position in dangerous territory 25 yards from the end zone after an incomplete pass, for example. When a traditional onside kick fails, the recovering team usually has much farther to go than that. If the new rule does get introduced, we may have seen the last of that rare but memorably shocking play, the surprise onside kick at the start or middle of the game.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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More people died on United States roads in 2012 than in 2011, according to a report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Motorcyclist and pedestrian deaths each increased for the third year in a row, and deaths of bicyclists reached the highest level in six years. Over all, however, traffic deaths continue to be at historic lows. Fatalities in 2011 were at their lowest level since 1949. The 2012 increase could not be attributed to Americans driving more, because motorists drove nearly the same number of miles in 2012 as they did in 2011, according to the report. Highway deaths increased to 33,561 in 2012, according to the safety agency's 2012 Fatality Analysis Reporting System, known as FARS. That is 1,082 or 3.3 percent more than the 2011 figure. The majority of the increase occurred in the first quarter of 2012, which the report notes was the warmest in history. The estimated number of people injured rose as well, by 6.5 percent, in what N.H.T.S.A. described in its report as a "statistically significant change" from 2011. There did not seem to be one single issue that explained the increases according to the federal agency, which released the data and some crashes associated with traditional risk factors even fell. For example, the number of young drivers involved in fatal crashes continued to decline. Here are some of the conclusions the agency reached: Of those killed in passenger vehicles in 2012, 52 percent were not wearing seatbelts. Pedestrian deaths were 6.4 percent higher than in 2011, and they increased for the third consecutive year. Most occurred in urban areas, away from intersections, at night, and many involved alcohol.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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John Fairchild, the witty and irascible publisher and editor who transformed his family's fusty trade publication, Women's Wear Daily, into the lively bible of the fashion industry, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87. Women's Wear Daily announced his death without specifying the cause. For more than three decades, from 1960 to 1997, Mr. Fairchild was one of the most powerful, and mercurial, people in the fashion business. From his perch atop Women's Wear Daily and later at W magazine, which he founded he helped make kings out of designers like Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent and Bill Blass and whacked down those who did not meet his exacting standards. And before Gawker and Spy magazine and Page Six in The New York Post became must reads, Mr. Fairchild was already encamped at the intersection of fashion, celebrity and high society, turning socialites like C. Z. Guest, Mercedes Bass and Pat Buckley into personalities, stationing photographers outside fancy restaurants as they came and went. Everyone who crossed his path knew to beware of the newspaper's saucy headlines and withering asides in capital letters. He even gave designer collections letter grades, as if Carolina Herrera and Donna Karan were back in high school. "Everybody got graded," Ms. Herrera said on Friday. Calvin Klein, another loyal subscriber, said, "He made WWD into a paper that the media as well as socials and celebrities and everyone else read to find out what was going on." Not that Mr. Fairchild liked to take credit for mussing the industry's hair and bruising feelings. "On the whole, I think the fashion press's power and WWD's in particular is greatly overrated," he wrote in his 1989 memoir, "Chic Savages." "We don't make or break a designer. Any designer who is good gets ahead. We write what the buyers are saying." John Burr Fairchild was born in Newark on March 6, 1927, and grew up in Glen Ridge, N.J. His paternal grandfather, E. W. Fairchild, the son of a Dutch Reform minister, had begun WWD in 1910 to cover the garment business. Meticulous to a fault, it was also famously dull. From E. W., the family business, which includes other, smaller trade publications, passed on to John's father, Louis. As a teenager in the 1940s, John went to Kent, the Connecticut boarding school, and spent his vacations working in the family's Manhattan offices as an errand boy. He went to Princeton University, married Jill Lipsky, worked briefly in retail and then moved to WWD, taking over the Paris bureau in 1955. There he made enemies by doing things like calling the designers Cristobal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy the "Dullsville Boys" in print and branding their collections "Flop art." At one point he was banned from Balenciaga's shows. Undeterred, he hired a photographer to shoot a show with a Telephoto lens from a rooftop across the street. The view was perfect, until one of Balenciaga's minions closed the blinds. Mr. Fairchild returned to New York in 1960, took over as WWD's publisher and set about making changes. "Fashion is a bunch of blah blah," he liked to say. What interested him were personalities, so he replaced the coverage of hemlines and fabrics with society photos and gossip. "The business he inherited was very dull, and he turned it all around," said Patrick McCarthy, Mr. Fairchild's successor at both WWD and W, which was later sold to Conde Nast. "He realized that printing cotton prices every day and which buyer was coming from Detroit to New York was not the publication he wanted to run. He was interested in the glamour and the fun and the bitchiness." Mr. Fairchild, as he was referred to by everyone in the newsroom "There was no calling him John," the writer William Norwich said on Friday had his favorites: Mr. Saint Laurent, Mr. Blass, Mr. de la Renta, the society hostesses Ms. Buckley and Ms. Guest, and also Jacqueline Kennedy, whom Mr. Fairchild called "Her Elegance." Those who fell off his list really fell off. "He was a very creative journalist and publisher, and he was ruthless," said Bob Colacello, a special correspondent at Vanity Fair who profiled him in the early 1990s in an article titled "Dr. Fair and Mr. Child." Kenneth Jay Lane, the jewelry designer, said, "I always avoided becoming too friendly with him because people who did, he would turn against." So did the designer Valentino and his partner at the time, Giancarlo Giammetti. In the 1970s they came to New York on a trip, where they were trailed by a WWD reporter, Rosemary Kent. When they barred her from following them on a subsequent vacation, Valentino went from being the "sheikh of chic" to persona non grata. "For months, Fairchild would run photos of Valentino and Giancarlo at parties with their faces airbrushed out," Mr. Colacello said. "Their faces would be a gray circle, and beside them would be a caption that said 'Nan Kempner, Pat Buckley, with Italian Designer.' " Geoffrey Beene and Mr. Fairchild got into a feud in the early 1980s. According to Fairchild loyalists, Mr. Beene became incensed when WWD decided to send a young, unseasoned reporter to cover his collection. According to Beene loyalists, Mr. Fairchild was retaliating against Mr. Beene for giving an exclusive on one of his houses to Architectural Digest. Fifteen years later, the bitterness remained. By then, as Mr. Fairchild told The New York Observer, "I don't even know what it is about anymore." As a journalist Mr. Fairchild had a keen eye for talent. Among those who worked for him early in their careers were the photographers Steven Meisel and The New York Times's Bill Cunningham; the Times theater critic Ben Brantley; the Times fashion critic Amy M. Spindler (who died in 2004); and the editors Andre Leon Talley and Bonnie Fuller. By the late 1980s, Mr. Fairchild began to loosen his grip. Mr. McCarthy was reconceiving W as a glossy monthly, and the personalities were changing. "Say whatever you want about women like Gloria Guinness and Babe Paley, but they were interesting," Mr. McCarthy said, referring to two of the most prominent socialites of the postwar years. "And he realized that at a certain point they didn't sell the clothes, and that a TV actress of no import did. He didn't like it." In 1997, Mr. Fairchild announced his retirement, though he continued to hound his editors. "He was full of vim and vigor," and he had been "talkative and had story ideas up until a few weeks ago," Mr. Fallon said. Mr. Fairchild is survived by his wife, Jill; his sons John, James and Stephen; his daughter, who is also named Jill; and eight grandchildren.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Gesine Bullock Prado and Ray Prado at their home in White River Junction, Vt. Both cite the importance of laughter in their marriage. "We've evolved together," she said. "That's been our blessing. We don't have children so our marriage is our whole family." Because marriage is an ever evolving experience, we constantly shift, change and, in some cases, start over. In It's No Secret, couples share thoughts about commitment and tell us what they have learned along the way. Occupations She is a pastry chef and the host of "Baked in Vermont," a television show on the Food Network. She also runs a baking school, Sugar Glider Kitchen, on the couple's five acre farm in Hartford, Vt. Her newest cookbook, "Fantastical Cakes: Incredible Creations for the Baker in Anyone" (Running Press), is to be published this month. He is a storyboard artist for television and films, including "The Hunger Games: Mocking Jay," "X Men: Apocalypse," and the "Stranger Things" series on Netflix. The couple married April 3, 1999, at the Austin, Tex., home of the actress Sandra Bullock, Ms. Bullock Prado's older sister. At the time, the house was undergoing renovations. Several hours before the wedding, Sandra Bullock was stapling fabric to an unfinished balcony, which later held a string quartet. Scaffolding and a tent were placed over the unfinished pool area. About 50 guests sat at two elongated tables, with a lake view as their backdrop. The couple met in January 1997 when both were living in Los Angeles. "I was the development person under my sister's production company," said Ms. Bullock Prado, who was 27 at the time. "We were doing a table reading of "Hope Floats." Ray walked in with a producer friend, and my heart dropped into my stomach. I felt sick. It was one of those lightning bolts, love at first sight moments." Ms. Bullock Prado had been living with a boyfriend at the time, so she didn't think much would come of that first meeting. A week later, however, they found themselves on the same flight, but in different rows, traveling to Austin to scout locations. "We only spoke when we got off the plane," she said. "We tried to find something we could connect on, which was college. I asked where he went. He said, Dartmouth. We knew people in common. Once we started talking we couldn't stop. We had the same quirks and interests. Everything clicked." Ms. Bullock Prado thought Mr. Prado was handsome and "the coolest guy" she'd ever met, and broke off her relationship with the man she had been living with for several months. "It was nice but it wasn't 'it.' I had no way of knowing what 'it' was until 'it' walked in the door, which was Ray." They became a couple immediately, and within a month were living together. Mr. Prado proposed a year later. "We went to one of those old school Italian restaurants that Sinatra would have gone to and told everyone we just got engaged," she said. Because Ms. Bullock Prado's mother was ill, wedding plans moved quickly. Five months after their engagement they were married. Ms. Bullock Prado Ray is the funniest man I know. He's smart and insightful. He's absurd, and absurdly talented. He's an artist, painter and illustrator. He loves collecting action figures. They're all over the house. We also have a life size version of Darth Vader. He's supportive and that's worked in our relationship. We live our own best creative lives with each other, and with each other's support. I wouldn't be a pastry chef or an author, and we wouldn't be living in Vermont if he hadn't shown me I'm capable. I've learned that at Ray's core, he is sensitive and kind. He's become self aware and sensitive to how people are around him. He's expressive and direct, and that can be intimidating, so he's learned to be more nuanced. I can't spend a minute without screaming my head off, but he's shown me patience and understanding that's been eye opening. We are in a mixed marriage. He's Latino, Native American and Asian. He's lived a totally different experience than me. So I've learned to be quiet and listen and watch and learn. I wasn't able to understand in the beginning. Now I can, and seeing some of the things he's had to go through is enlightening. I've also learned to just be there for him, and that we are a team. People evolve in marriages; we've evolved together. That's been our blessing. We don't have children so our marriage is our whole family. We've had tough patches. Twenty years is a long time. If you hold onto resentment you're not having a fulfilling relationship. We decided to say we are going to be rigorously honest about everything, and kind. That has worked tremendously well. When we decided our main focus was to have a happy marriage and make each other happy, everything got fantastic. We got out of these bad spots by saying we have to focus on each other. Mr. Prado I value how much we make each other laugh. It never gets old. I laugh all day thinking about her, so she's always with me. That helps me get through the longing and loneliness when she's not here. She's a true detector of good and evil. She's my moral compass. She reminds me of Wonder Woman. I can always count on her for the correct ethical take on something. I grew up with this idea that men are men, and women are women. That we need our alone time, and we don't have to share everything. That kind of thinking was destroying our marriage. It took a lot of listening and understanding that a true relationship isn't that way. I had to realize we're in this together. Once I became unguarded our life and everything else opened up. Being an artist is an uncertain life. I have a dark perfectionism. She helped me see the happy mistakes that can make this existence more fulfilling and to see the importance of sticking with things. We had a lot of ups and downs. But if it's a chart, we are constantly moving up, even though there are dips along the way. The longer we've been together the better things have gotten. We are lucky because we've grown with each other. We are not the same people we were five or 10 years ago. That feels unique to me. We help each other believe in ourselves, which is sexy. We have a partnership where someone believes in you. That's gotten us through the good and bad times.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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For the last seven days, pretty much every conversation I have had with pretty much anyone fashion friends, book agents, parents at the school gates, my mother has started with the same five word question: "Do you think it's true?" "It" being a report that came out last week in The New York Post that the reign of Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue since 1988 and the artistic director of Conde Nast since 2013, the woman memorialized by Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada" and typically referred to as either the most powerful editor in fashion or the most feared editor in fashion, was ending. The article citing "stunned" anonymous sources said that she was going to move on this summer after finishing her September issue, the largest of the year, and which she made famous when she agreed to let the documentarian R. J. Cutler into the Vogue offices to film its making. The rumors had been swirling around the fashion ether for the last few months, but until The Post article appeared, no one had dared voice them in anything except a whisper. It was just so hard to imagine. Ms. Wintour has been shaping our experience of fashion and dressing and fame for as long as most people can remember. Matters were not helped by the fact that while Jonathan Newhouse, the chairman and chief executive of Conde Nast International, who The Post suggested was coming back to the United States to be chairman of the American arm, denied his part of the story to the Business of Fashion website, the article didn't say anything about Ms. Wintour. The smoke continued to rise until, at the end of last week, Mr. Sauerberg had finally had enough. "I am happy to tell you there is no truth to the rumors of Anna's departure," he wrote in an email to me. He called Ms. Wintour "a great partner as we continue our ongoing efforts to transform the company into the future." So where did the rumors come from, and what do they mean? Perhaps for the first time in a very long time, maybe the first time ever, people are beginning to entertain the possibility of a fashion world after Anna. Think it won't matter to anyone outside the lint picking world of One World Trade Center, the shiny new headquarters of Conde Nast, and Avenue Montaigne? She effectively exerts her own gravitational force field, magnetized by strategically deployed invitations, introductions, magazine features and messages of support. If that disappears, particles previously held together by her atomic network will disperse and collide before renegotiating themselves into some sort of new order, which is one way of saying it would affect not just glossy magazines, but also the broader fashion establishment and the Hollywood sports fashion industrial complex. Ms. Wintour has been, if not formally a headhunter or employment agency, a very active sounding board and adviser for numerous brands in the game of designer musical chairs. She helped get Marc Jacobs his job at Louis Vuitton and Thom Browne his job at Brooks Brothers, though both have since left. She helped engineer John Galliano's return after he was fired from Dior after an anti Semitic rant (fueled, he later said in an interview with Charlie Rose, by a drug and alcohol addiction). She has seeded her proteges around Conde Nast and beyond, including Amy Astley, the editor of Architectural Digest, who began in the Vogue beauty department, and Phillip Picardi, the current boy wonder of the building. The industry is full of Anna alumni (including yours truly, who was a contributing editor at Vogue for a year in the mid 1990s). Still, the award helped spawn a host of similar prizes around the world and created a pathway to market for emerging designers. Ms. Wintour's understanding of the mutually beneficial exploitation that could result from putting the star of a new film on the cover of a magazine, and all the tertiary events involved, was just as formative, changing the Hollywood/fashion calculus, as well as the model/actress cover star ratio, which now heavily favors the celebrity even the nascent celebrity. She also realigned the philanthropic poles of New York via the Met Gala, turning a generic opportunity for cultural beneficence into an "A.T.M. for the Met" that raised so much money that it got her name etched on the Costume Institute door. In the process she made the gala a paparazzi magnet, which gave rise to a special issue of Vogue, thanks to her vetting of guests, dictating which brand got which celebrity, and the Vogue orchestrated dressing of attendees so that much of the red carpet is composed of the people she wants, wearing what she wants, hoping to be in the pages she approves. Then she began to extend that formula, or versions of it, into other arenas (Broadway, with the Tony Awards, for one). What would happen to all of that if Vogue ceased to be her base is unclear. A triangular relationship (Anna brand star) may once again become a two way street. Celebrities and socialites may have to choose their clothes without her guidance. It could be traumatic at first mistakes would be made! but it's kind of an interesting idea. As for us ... well, at the most basic level, we would all have to redefine our ideas of what a fashion magazine editor is. Bob wearers everywhere would lose their most visible icon. The whole dark glasses at the runway trope could disappear. While many of Ms. Wintour's peers have style, it is impossible to think of another who took it to the same calculated, rigorous extreme. She is certainly the only editor since Diana Vreeland who has parlayed her public persona into a pop culture character, but unlike Ms. Vreeland, she now regularly plays herself in not just documentaries but also feature films, as opposed to letting others play her. And, of course, tennis could lose one of its most high profile boosters. It is a singular job description, probably impossible to replicate, in part because fashion has become as splintered as every other industry in the age of digital and identity politics. Her hold, and the idea of a single person or magazine as the ultimate arbiter of style, may be as much a vestige of the former world as print itself. So Why Is This Rumor Trending Now? Certain macro trends and a conjunction of events have given the gossip momentum. Magazines in general are widely acknowledged to be struggling: Conde Nast has closed the print versions of Teen Vogue and Self as part of drive to emphasize digital; cut the number of print issues of W; and reorganized the company so that some staffers work on several different magazines. S. I. Newhouse Jr., the long term chairman of the company and one of Ms. Wintour's champions, died last year (he became chairman emeritus in 2015). Reports of Harvey Weinstein's sexual misconduct broke the same month as Mr. Newhouse's death, and Mr. Weinstein's friendship and working relationship with Ms. Wintour came under scrutiny. Later she had to cut ties with three of Vogue's favored photographers Bruce Weber, Mario Testino and Patrick Demarchelier when allegations of a history of sexual harassment became public. Besides, Ms. Wintour has been here before surrounded by rumors that her end was nigh, and that she was suddenly human, and hence vulnerable. In 1999, New York magazine ran a cover story, "The Summer of Her Discontent," that included the following: "'The general feeling is that people are abandoning Anna,' says one Vogue editor. 'And that her heart isn't in it anymore.'" Eight years later, whispers had it that she was going to be replaced by Carine Roitfeld from Paris Vogue. Ms. Roitfeld ended up announcing her Vogue resignation in 2010. (She is now global fashion director at the Vogue rival Harper's Bazaar, and has her own magazine, CR Fashion Book, which comes out twice a year.) Ms. Wintour is still here. Alexander Liberman, the former Conde Nast editorial director, worked into his early 80s. Ms. Wintour is 68. She has outlasted not just rivals but also designer carping, competition from other magazines, not to mention the internet, criticism about her manner and her model choices, and multiple trends, fashion and social. She has adapted her magazine and herself to changing times and cultures to an unmatched extent, dispassionately (or ruthlessly) jettisoning her catechisms when they cease to work, from magazine sections to Vogue spinoffs. Such longevity is impossible to achieve without a certain amount of casualties and chafing, and it is little wonder there are those who have embraced the recent speculation as a long awaited comeuppance. And yet, as Marco Bizzarri, the much celebrated C.E.O. of Gucci, who previously was the much celebrated C.E.O. of Bottega Veneta and before that the much celebrated C.E.O. of Stella McCartney, regularly jokes in interviews, he doesn't wonder whether he will be fired, but when. The only person in fashion who doesn't own the company he works for and is widely known to have permanent job security is Karl Lagerfeld, who has a lifetime contract with Chanel. Which means that as far as Ms. Wintour goes, no matter the rumors and their particulars, the question is not actually "Will she leave?" Of course she will, at some point. The question for her, as for all of us, is when, and how.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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WASHINGTON The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against Covid 19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published on Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration before a meeting of its vaccine advisory group. The finding is one of several significant new results featured in the briefing materials, which include more than 100 pages of data analyses from the agency and from Pfizer. Last month, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their two dose vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95 percent after two doses administered three weeks apart. The new analyses show that the protection starts kicking in far earlier. What's more, the vaccine worked well regardless of a volunteer's race, weight or age. While the trial did not find any serious adverse events caused by the vaccine, many participants did experience aches, fevers and other side effects. "This is what an A report card looks like for a vaccine," said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. On Thursday, F.D.A.'s vaccine advisory panel will discuss these materials in advance of a vote on whether to recommend authorization of Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine. Pfizer and BioNTech began a large scale clinical trial in July, recruiting 44,000 people in the United States, Brazil and Argentina. Half of the volunteers got the vaccine, and half got the placebo. New coronavirus cases quickly tapered off in the vaccinated group of volunteers about 10 days after the first dose, according to one graph in the briefing materials. In the placebo group, cases kept steadily increasing. The vaccine's swift impact could benefit not just the people who get it but the country's strained hospitals, curbing the flow of new patients into intensive care units. Despite the early protection afforded by the first dose, it's unclear how long that protection would last on its own, underscoring the importance of the second dose. Previous studies have found that the second dose of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine gives the immune system a major, long term boost, an effect seen in many other vaccines. The efficacy of the vaccine after the first dose is about 52 percent, according to Dr. William C. Gruber, senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development. After the second dose, that rises to about 95 percent. "Two doses of vaccine provide maximum protection," he said. A Canadian senator has died after being hospitalized for Covid. Several moves by the U.S. over the last week aim to shift the course of the pandemic. When can the Covid masks finally come off? Many experts have expressed concern that the coronavirus vaccines might protect some people better than others. But the results in the briefing materials indicate no such problem. The vaccine has a high efficacy rate in both men and women, as well as similar rates in white, Black and Latino people. It also worked well in obese people, who carry a greater risk of getting sick with Covid 19. Some vaccines for other diseases set off a weak immune response in older adults. But Pfizer and BioNTech found that people over 65 got about as much protection from the coronavirus vaccine as younger people did. "I found myself trembling reading this," said Dr. Gregory Poland, a vaccine researcher at the Mayo Clinic, referring to the robust response of the vaccines in obese and older people. "This is a grand slam by any measure." Even if the vaccine is authorized by the F.D.A., the trial will continue. In the briefing documents, the companies said that they would encourage people to stay in the trial as long as possible, not knowing whether they got the vaccine or the placebo, so that the researchers could continue to collect information about whether the vaccine was safe and effective. The briefing materials also provide a deeper look at the safety of the vaccine. In any large clinical trial, some people who get vaccines experience health conditions that have nothing to do with the vaccine itself. Comparing their rates of symptoms with those of the placebo group as well as with background rates in a population can point to symptoms that may actually be caused by a vaccine. The F.D.A. concluded that there were no "meaningful imbalances" in serious health complications, known as adverse events, between the two groups. The agency noted that four people in the vaccinated group experienced a form of facial paralysis called Bell's palsy, with no cases in the placebo group. The difference between the two groups wasn't meaningful, and the rate in the vaccinated group was not significantly higher than in the general population. The new Pfizer analysis revealed that many volunteers who received the vaccine felt ill in the hours after the second dose, suggesting that many people might have to request a day off work or be prepared to rest until the symptoms subside. Among those between ages 16 and 55, more than half developed fatigue, and more than half also reported headaches. Just over one third felt chills, and 37 percent felt muscle pain. About half of those over age 55 felt fatigued, one third developed a headache and about one quarter felt chills, while 29 percent experienced muscle pain. "Taking a day off after the second dose is a good thing to anticipate," Dr. Iwasaki said. On Monday, Kristen Choi, a psychiatric nurse and health services researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a first person account of the symptoms she experienced as a participant in the Pfizer BioNTech trial, which included chills, nausea, headache and fever. "Clinicians will need to be prepared to discuss with patients why they should trust the vaccine and that its adverse effects could look a lot like Covid 19," Dr. Choi wrote in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. She advised doctors to tell patients that these unpleasant symptoms were "a sign that the vaccine is working, despite the unfortunate similarities with the disease's symptoms."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Benny Andrews once defined his artistic ambition as a desire to represent "a real person before the eyes." The phrase is the subtitle of a momentous exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Manhattan. "Benny Andrews: Portraits, a Real Person Before the Eyes" brings together 28 of the artist's imposing depictions of friends, family and artists, the most ever shown together. Made over the course of 35 years with a technique he called "rough collage," these riveting, eccentric images combine painted motifs with added pieces of canvas and paper, bits of printed fabric and carefully placed fragments of garments. Andrews (1930 2006) was the son of an impoverished Georgia sharecropper who taught him to draw as a child. The skill became an essential tool that compensated for the school he missed while helping his father. He learned in part by drawing biology and plane geometry projects and whatever else the teachers asked for. After serving in the Korean War, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and felt the pressure to take up an Abstract Expressionist style. He wanted to paint representationally, even though he disliked the constant refinement that realism entailed. One of his instructors, the artist Boris Margo, told him to paint what he knew best and cared about. He took out two birds with one stone, fastening on the school's janitors, mostly African American, and with whom he was friendly. "They were the kind of people I came from," he later said. "They were like my relatives." In "Janitors at Rest," Andrews depicted three men on a break; one reading, the other two perhaps talking. To avoid refinement and introduce a certain rawness, the artist dotted the surface with scraps of paper such as janitors might sweep up. It was his first foray into rough collage. If painting can be said to have a fourth wall an invisible partition separating subject and viewer Andrews broke partly through it. His figures don't quite step off the canvas, but they don't quite stay on it either; they hover in an interim zone between canvas and viewer, which can be electrifying and disorienting. They feel uncannily alive while clearly being deliberately made works of art. Arms and legs might be cutout pieces of canvas. Most important are the pieces of recognizable clothing his figures wear; hats or at least their brims are another regular detail. These fragments have seen a lot of use, denoting a life lived like the often weary faces. By the 1970s, Andrews was laying out the components of his paintings one by one on plain white backgrounds, letting the viewer identify the parts and techniques and put their meanings together. In "Louie" (1977), a man in a wide brimmed hat and a striped shirt both fragments of the real thing occupies nearly half the canvas. He is speaking, holding two little flowers delicately between his thumb and forefinger. In the background is a beautiful tree, its green leaves and brown twisted trunk painted on their own separate piece of canvas. And farther off, a line of what seem to be naked brown men disappears into the distance a stark image of sorrow that symbolizes a cultural memory of oppression for generations of people of color in the United States. Several of Andrews's paintings are not specific individuals, but portray conditions of marginalization, like the emaciated child in "Famine" (1989), holding a beggar's bowl, whose face is split between an abstract mask and a visage so ravaged it seems ancient. In contrast, "Portrait of Oppression (Homage to the Black South Africans)" (1985), startles with its understatement. We see part of a figure wearing a denim vest, his hands behind his back as if bound. A chain hangs down into the picture touching his right shoulder. His face, which is invented, is calm and sensitive. He looks like he could be related to the painter Norman Lewis, the American abstract painter, whose debonair portrait greets us near the entrance. All of Andrews's portraits are notable for their tenderness, especially those of the people to whom he was closest. In "Portrait of George C. Andrews" (1986), his father relaxes in a red easy chair wearing a tobacco colored work shirt and a newsboy cap. The wall beside him is unlike anything else here: It's covered with colorful objects suggesting little paintings, toys, fishing flies an accumulation of artistry and passion. It is also worth noting that the artists he admired and depicted Alice Neel, Howardena Pindell, Ray Johnson, Nene Humphrey (who was also his wife) seem especially at peace. The joy of being both an artist and a subject is palpable in "Portrait of the Portrait Painter" in which an artist (probably Andrews) sits opposite a beautifully dressed woman; an untouched canvas lies between their feet on more bare canvas. The scene is suffused with pleasure and anticipation. In the end, Andrews took on Boris Margo's advice to heart, depicting what he knew and cared about, which not to oversimplify came down to art, politics and people: his loved ones and fellow artists as well as human suffering and social injustice, the issues behind his activism. Eventually he portrayed his world and his values, which may be the most you can ask of any artist.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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After being rebuffed in an attempt to peel back the union protections of federal workers, President Trump took aim elsewhere on Thursday: at their paychecks. Invoking authority that he and other presidents have used previously, Mr. Trump told Congress he was canceling government pay increases scheduled for next year. Congress has the power to override his decision, however, and unions representing government workers called on lawmakers to do so. In a letter to congressional leaders, Mr. Trump said the government would forgo an automatic 2.1 percent pay increase for federal workers scheduled for Jan. 1 and specified that there would be no across the board increase for 2019. The letter did not estimate the overall savings from canceling the raises, though it said a related move canceling raises that are based on the workers' location would save 25 billion. Many legal experts were puzzled because the orders were supposed to apply immediately. But while saying it was still considering further action in the case, the administration acknowledged at least a temporary setback on Wednesday, when the Office of Personnel Management put out updated guidance that rescinded the portions of the instructions that the judge had struck down. Union officials in at least one agency, the Social Security Administration, exulted as they were told that they would be allowed back into offices that managers had evicted them from when the executive orders took effect this summer. Mr. Trump's use of emergency authority to weigh in on pay increases for federal workers is a common occurrence. The president did so last year to scale back a raise, and President Barack Obama took action the year before to rein in location based adjustments. Still, unions and Democrats on Capitol Hill saw the president's call for a pay freeze shortly before Labor Day as an attack on civil servants. "It is unacceptable that after last year signing a Republican tax bill that gave away tens of billions in corporate tax cuts and added more than 1 trillion to the national debt, President Trump cites the need for government belt tightening in his decision to slash a planned pay increase," Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, said in a statement. J. David Cox Sr., national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, issued a statement saying that blocking a raise for federal workers "ignores the fact that they are worse off today financially than they were at the start of the decade."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Whatever you think about Bernie Sanders as a potential president, it is wrong to dismiss his chances of winning the office. Not only does most of the available empirical evidence show Mr. Sanders defeating President Trump in the national popular vote and in the critical Midwestern states that tipped the Electoral College in 2016, but his specific electoral strengths align with changes in the composition of the country's population in ways that could actually make him a formidable foe for the president. Almost all of the current polling data shows Mr. Sanders winning the national popular vote. In the most recent national polls testing Democratic candidates against Mr. Trump, Mr. Sanders beat him in every single one, with margins varying from 2 percent to 6 percent. This has been the case for nearly a year now, with Mr. Sanders outpolling the president in 67 of 72 head to head polls since March. As 2016 proved when Hillary Clinton defeated Mr. Trump in the popular vote by nearly three million votes, however, the Electoral College is what matters most. There, Mr. Sanders also does well, outperforming Mr. Trump in polls of the pivotal battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In the one poll showing significant Trump strength in Wisconsin (Quinnipiac), Mr. Sanders still fares the best of the Democratic contenders. In addition to the polling data about how voters might act in the future, there is now the much more valuable information of actual voter behavior in the first three nominating contests, in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. It is not just the fact that Mr. Sanders won the popular vote in all three states, it is how he won that portends hidden and underappreciated general election strength. Exit polls and precinct analyses show that Mr. Sanders runs strongest with some of the most overlooked and undervalued sectors of the population young people and Latinos in particular. In all three early states, he received twice as much support from voters under 30 than his closest competitor. In Nevada, he received about 70 percent of the vote in the most heavily Latino precincts. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." These particular strengths matter because the composition of the electorate in 2020 will be appreciably different than it was in 2016. Pew Research projects that this will be the most racially diverse electorate ever, with people of color making up fully one third of all eligible voters. The share of eligible voters from Generation Z (18 23 year olds) will be more than twice as large in 2020 as it was in 2016 (10 percent versus 4 percent). Notably, the expanding sectors of the population are much more progressive and pro Democratic than their aging and white counterparts. Mrs. Clinton defeated Mr. Trump by nearly 20 points among voters under 30, and the anti Republican tilt of that demographic was even more pronounced in 2018, when 67 percent of them voted Democratic, 35 points more than the number who voted Republican. As for Latinos, nearly two thirds of that population consistently votes Democratic. The implications of these developments are most significant in the specific states where the election will be most fiercely fought. In Michigan and Wisconsin, which were decided in 2016 by roughly 11,000 and 22,700 votes respectively, close to a million young people have since turned 18. Beyond the Midwestern trio of states, the demographic revolution has even more transformative potential. Mr. Trump won Arizona, for example, by 91,000 votes, and 160,000 Latinos have turned 18 in that state since then. To fully harness the energy from the demographic revolution, Mr. Sanders will need to strengthen his support among African American voters who were more resistant to his candidacy when he faced Mrs. Clinton. His strong support among younger African Americans could help, but he would be best served by choosing as his running mate an African American with strong electoral appeal, such as Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives who received more African American votes in a statewide election than anyone not named Barack Obama. In addition to those particular parts of Mr. Sanders's strength, he is also well positioned to win back those voters who defected in 2016 because Mrs. Clinton was too moderate for their tastes. For all the focus on Obama Trump voters, it was Obama Stein voters who created the critical cracks in the Democratic firewall (the increase in votes for Jill Stein from 2012 to 2016 was greater than Mr. Trump's margin of victory in Michigan and Wisconsin). Of all the remaining candidates, Mr. Sanders is the most likely to reclaim those Democratic voters who defected to the Green Party in search of a more progressive standard bearer. Much of the angst about Mr. Sanders topping the ticket stems from fear about negative fallout in down ballot congressional races. Here, too, the concerns are overblown. In the vast majority of congressional districts where Democrats ousted Republican incumbents in 2018, it was enthusiasm and the high turnout of Democratic voters that made the difference, much more than alienated moderate Republicans switching their party allegiance. In all but five of the 41 seats picked up by Democrats, increased Democratic turnout alone would have been enough to flip the seats without any Republican crossovers. While some small number of down ballot House races could become more competitive, that risk is offset by the opportunity for Democrats to flip even more seats by mobilizing younger and more diverse voters. In 2018, Democrats fell just 1,000 votes short in both the Seventh District of Georgia, for example, where there is a sizable African American population, and San Antonio's 23rd District, which is more than half Latino. There are several other seats where Democrats could make additional gains with Mr. Sanders atop the ticket. The empirical evidence shows that there is no need for alarm about Mr. Sanders being the Democratic nominee, and even some cause for confidence. If you want to engage in theoretical thought experiments, a useful exercise would be to ask how many people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 would switch their votes to back Mr. Trump just because Mr. Sanders was the nominee? Common sense suggests that the answer is infinitesimally small. If that is the case, then Mr. Sanders would win the popular vote. As for the roughly 78,000 votes in three states that flipped the Electoral College, the particular strengths that Mr. Sanders brings to the contest strongly suggest that he could close that gap and make the leap into the Oval Office.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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CASEY STATION, Antarctica Near a nice, big hole in the ice and beneath the stone gray, midday Antarctic summer skies, six Adelie penguins stared at six men toiling with tools. The chasm in the ice might have been an inviting entry to the krill rich waters below. None of the members of the tuxedoed recon party dove into the hole, a square about six feet across. The risk of leopard seals was just too great. But had they leapt in, the penguins would have discovered not a seal, but a robot. In November, scientists and engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory successfully field tested Bruie the "Buoyant Rover for Under Ice Exploration" beneath the ice of eastern Antarctica. The remotely operated rover was built to crawl along the underside of sea ice and ice shelves. These tests on Earth have a long term goal of one day seeking evidence of life beneath the thick frozen shell covering Jupiter's ocean moon of Europa. Beneath that ice is three times more liquid water than can be found in all the oceans on Earth. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. It will be years before a spacecraft from Earth lands on Europa, which was most closely studied by NASA's Galileo mission in the 1990s. The next robotic probe to visit that world will be Europa Clipper, scheduled to launch no sooner than 2025. When it arrives some years later, that spacecraft will orbit Jupiter and encounter Europa dozens of times at different angles to thoroughly scan and map the moon, considered one of the best candidates in our solar system to be inhabited by some form of extraterrestrial life.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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LONDON The cool London "It" girl has become as marketable (and recognizable) a celebrity skewed fashion commodity in the 21st century as the pop singer/designer, athlete with an athleisure line, or reality TV star. Kate Moss paved the way in 2009 with her early collaborations with Topshop. But as the social media era gained pace, so, too, did a fascination with British industry insiders, whose professional influence, impeccable style swagger and wild after hours antics (plus what they were wearing) made their off duty looks as in demand as any they had helped to put on the runway. After Luella Bartley and Katie Hillier (the former creative directors of Marc by Marc Jacobs) introduced their Hillier Bartley ready to wear and bags line last year, and Alexa Chung (the TV presenter and front row starlet who has lent her face to a clutch of brands including Marks Spencer, Mulberry and AG Jeans) announced she was starting her own brand, it seemed almost inevitable that Charlotte Stockdale, the bold name stylist, longtime creative consultant to Karl Lagerfeld at Fendi, and perennial most invited (along with her husband, the industrial designer/Apple consultant Marc Newson) would add her name to the fray. Or not her name, exactly. Rather, Chaos, a London based fashion brand with a focus on technology and lifestyle accessories, was created with Ms. Stockdale's best friend and longtime right hand woman, Katie Lyall, and unveiled this month.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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The Food and Drug Administration never reviewed data from manufacturers regarding the procedures needed to clean the complex medical devices that recently infected seven patients with drug resistant bacteria, an agency official acknowledged on Wednesday. Now the F.D.A. has asked manufacturers to provide evidence that their recommended disinfection methods work, said Dr. Stephen Ostroff, the agency's chief scientist. "Institutions appear to have been doing the recommended procedures, and doing them extremely well," said Dr. Ostroff, who will become acting commissioner when Dr. Margaret Hamburg departs. But the recent infections, at Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, show that additional precautions may be needed, he said. Duodenoscopes have been implicated in similar outbreaks at other hospitals. In 2013, 39 patients at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Ill., were infected with carbapenem resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), also the cause of the infections in Los Angeles. In January, officials at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle acknowledged that 32 patients had been infected with CRE by duodenoscopes from November 2012 to early 2014. Eleven patients died, but it is not clear that the infections were the cause, as they had other serious medical problems. The devices are uniquely difficult to disinfect, and there is no expert consensus on the best way to do so now that standard methods have been called into question. Even when health care providers "appear to be doing everything right, there has been transmission of CRE," said Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, the associate director for health care associated infection prevention programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Makers of the special scopes defended their disinfection recommendations. John Haberstock, a spokesman for Pentax Medical, said its cleaning protocols achieved a "high level disinfection of duodenoscopes." Diane Rainey, a spokeswoman for Fujifilm, said the company's instructions to providers "are appropriate to maintain patient safety." A duodenoscope is a long, flexible tube with a tiny camera at the tip. It is typically inserted down the throat of an anesthetized patient to examine the very small ducts that drain the liver or gallbladder. The inner tubing is intricate and difficult to clean, and can harbor up to 10 billion individual bacteria, said William A. Rutala, an infection control specialist at University of North Carolina Hospitals. By contrast, a surgical forceps may have roughly 100 bacteria on its surface after use in the operating room, he said, and is easily cleaned with heat, detergents and high pressure sprays. "When we clean devices for health care, we do it in such a way that even if we don't clean it perfectly, it's still clean," Dr. Srinivasan said. But with the duodenoscope, cleaning must be "perfect every single time." In the standard procedure, workers use tiny brushes to clean out the crevices, then hook the duodenoscope to a machine that flushes hard to reach inner parts with a disinfecting chemical. The process takes about an hour. Yet a C.D.C. team investigating the cluster of infections in Illinois found that duodenoscopes remained contaminated with CRE even when there were no recognized lapses in this cleaning process. The F.D.A. is investigating numerous additional measures, such as sterilizing the devices with toxic gas or sampling them for microbiological cultures periodically. Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center and Advocate Lutheran General Hospital have begun sterilizing their instruments with a gas called ethylene oxide. Neither has had additional cases of CRE since instituting the procedure. At the moment, however, the F.D.A. is not willing to recommend ethylene oxide sterilization on a routine basis. "This agent itself could potentially be quite toxic, not only if not thoroughly aired afterward but in the longer term to people doing the cleaning," Dr. Ostroff said. Dr. Srinivasan of the C.D.C. said the toxic residue could be mitigated by letting the duodenoscope sit unused for perhaps 12 hours after it is exposed to the gas. But many hospitals would find such a procedure impractical; duodenoscopes are sometimes needed for emergency procedures. The C.D.C. is developing a protocol hospitals can use to screen cultures taken from their scopes. At Virginia Mason Hospital, workers clean scopes according to manufacturers' directions, then test them for potential pathogens and quarantine them for 48 hours until they are confirmed safe. "Just following the manufacturer's guidelines was inadequate," said Dr. Andrew Ross, the hospital's chief of gastroenterology. The hospital bought 20 additional duodenoscopes to implement the quarantine. At the University of North Carolina Hospitals, Dr. Rutala is considering a combination approach: cleaning duodenoscopes with manual brushing, then high level disinfectants, followed by gas sterilization. He said the number of infections was "very concerning" and called for a swift consensus on new cleaning protocols. At the moment, however, experts cannot say which additional measures should be used by hospitals desperate to prevent further infections. "None of them are entirely straightforward or potentially easy to implement on a widespread basis," Dr. Ostroff said. The devices themselves may need to be redesigned, he added. For now, Dr. Srinivasan said, "there is not a consensus answer."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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BRUSSELS The European Parliament passed a resolution on Thursday demanding that the free trade pact now under discussion with the United States exempt "audiovisual" industries so that countries like France could shelter their movie businesses from foreign competition. The resolution, which also called for similar protections to be granted for online media, underlined the sensitivity in parts of Europe to the encroachment of American culture. It also represented a reality check for trade talks that in their early stages had generated enormous optimism but could still bog down in trans Atlantic acrimony. "This vote shows the honeymoon phase is over," said Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament for the free market D66 party. She was referring to the excitement that many trade advocates had felt since February, when President Barack Obama endorsed U.S. efforts to reach a trade deal with the European Union that would create a partnership between the biggest markets in the world. While the resolution is not binding on the Union's governments, which still must agree on a mandate for the European Commission to begin negotiating with Washington, the vote was a signal that the Parliament was prepared to use newly acquired powers to block any eventual agreement with the United States that it disliked. And ultimately, the Parliament's consent would be necessary as part of any final passage. Trade officials from various E.U. member states planned to meet in Brussels on Friday to discuss the mandate, which members of Parliament said Thursday that they expected to be approved by mid June. A similar process is under way in the United States, where Congress is in a 90 day consulting period with the Obama administration. The British government immediately signaled frustration with the European Parliament for demanding so called carve outs, which could make bargaining more difficult for concessions in areas that the Americans consider sensitive. "We want to realize all the potential benefits of this deal for businesses and consumers," a British government spokesman said, on condition that he not be named, as is customary. "That's why we believe that we should put all sectors on the table at the start of negotiations," the spokesman said. The resolution that passed Thursday did broadly welcome the prospect of trade talks with the United States. But the inclusion of the paragraph about cultural industries that passed Thursday "summarizes how challenging it will be to reconcile the goal of raising growth by breaking down barriers with the tensions and political demands that crop up at the more local level," said Ms. Schaake, who advocates a far reaching deal between Europe and the United States. The resolution comes as European filmmakers and governments in countries like France seek the right to preserve state subsidies for filmmakers and maintain requirements that television and radio stations broadcast at least a minimum number of European programs. Karel De Gucht, the Union's trade commissioner, has pledged in the trade talks to preserve the principle of cultural diversity, including allowing member states to set quotas for European movies and other cultural goods, and to subsidize European productions. But he has also repeatedly warned that full scale exclusion of media, including digital media, from the talks could significantly narrow the scope of any eventual deal. "We are already streaming content without borders" and "we should also have the possibility to discuss about the audiovisual sector," Mr. De Gucht said at a business conference in Brussels last week. "We should not carve out the audiovisual sector; it will be a mistake, and it's also not good to start negotiations on the basis of carve outs." The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. The vote, held at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, passed by a wide margin, with 460 votes in favor, 105 against and 28 abstentions. The resolution called for a comprehensive trade agreement and noted the many jobs that it could create, in principle at least. The lawmakers underlined some of their other priorities, including being kept "immediately and fully informed" at all stages of the talks. "Parliament has teeth and can bite," said Vital Moreira, a Socialist member of the European Parliament from Portugal who prepared the resolution and steered it through the chamber. The United States and the Union, between them, already account for about half of global economic output and one third of world trade. Bilateral trade in 2011 amounted to EUR455 billion, or about 588 billion, with a positive balance for the Union of more than EUR72 billion, according to the European Commission. The United States is the bloc's main export market, buying EUR264 billion of goods, or about 17 percent of total E.U. exports, according to figures the commission issued in March. A free trade deal with the United States could expand gross domestic product by 0.5 percent in the Union about a decade after the pact enters in force, the European Commission, the Union's administrative arm, said in March. That would translate into an extra EUR545 a year for each family of four in the Union, the commission said. Mr. De Gucht said the same month that the deal would generate "hundreds of thousands of jobs." Previous attempts to forge a trans Atlantic free trade deal have failed. And any new attempt at a pact faces huge obstacles beyond the question of audiovisual restrictions because some of the biggest gains would come not from the relatively easy goal of dropping tariffs but from removing restrictions like customs procedures that can and do create bureaucratic hurdles. The Union also wants to pry open so called public procurement markets and scrap "Buy American" clauses that restrict the ability of European companies to sell goods and services to U.S. states and cities. The Europeans also have long complained about restrictions on foreign ownership of U.S. airlines. The Americans, in turn, are eager to see a reduction in barriers to exports of agricultural goods, including produce from genetically modified organisms and cloning, which many Europeans oppose.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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The climate that Ballet Memphis brings to the stage is unorthodox, peculiar, fresh and large spirited. That company is visiting the Joyce Theater with six pieces, four of which were on Tuesday's opening program. All four are odd; only one proves a complete work of art Matthew Neenan's "The Darting Eyes" and it's every bit as odd as the others. But the mood blowing through all of these dances is generous, imaginatively breaking rules. Here's a basic rule for making a ballet: Don't mix scores from different sources. In particular, when using taped music, don't use recordings by a variety of composers and performers. Yet all four Memphis pieces cheerfully and effectively smash this rule. They all seem to show that no one composer is enough for what they have to say, and for the hybrid Memphian culture they're representing. In "Darting Eyes," the music ranges from Baptist singing to a Handel chorus and part of a ballet score by John Adams. These are a religious background subtext for a portrait of a secular but Baptist community on the Mississippi River. It's baffling to see how Mr. Neenan switches between musical idioms and situations, and yet his stage world grows and deepens. We can't follow half the stories that seem implicit here, but we hang on these people's vitality. One classy dame (Julie Marie Niekrasz) plays with her pearls until they torture her. The pathos of a climactic male female duet, apparently about the withered hand of a man (Jared Brunson) and its cure by religious faith (the devotion of the woman, Virginia Pilgrim Ramey, seems to heal him) is riveting and imaginative. The opening ballet, Steven McMahon's "Confluence," is remarkably successful in subverting another rule: Don't begin a ballet with dancing in silence. One woman (the authoritative Ms. Ramey), walking and dancing alone, establishes the mood of contemplative lyricism, which part of the Largo from Dvorak's "New World" Symphony then only heightens. Other characters come and go; the mood changes; and soon we're listening to Mahalia Jackson's "In the Upper Room," followed by Mavis Staples's recording of "Don't Knock." There's a sense of memory, of place, of changing community here. Mr. McMahon doesn't have the control to make it all hang together: There's a switch of gears toward the end of the Dvorak where you can see some dancers looking stuck. Along the way, though, there are pleasingly subtle sequences. All the music is irresistible, but the choreography doesn't merely surrender to it; with different phrases happening at contrasting speeds, it often knits its way around it. The titles of the program's other two pieces tell you that they have agendas: "I Am a Woman: Moult," by Gabrielle Lamb, and "Politics," by Rafael Ferreras. But they also have senses of humor. "I Am a Woman" (to numbers from "Pan Tone," "Silfra," "Salon des Amateurs" and Cat Power's "The Covers Record") shows women grouped, assembled and shaped by male costumers, but at no point is it predictable. To some degree these women sometimes like dummies fitted into bodices and other garments have lives and willpower. To some degree these men are more clonelike than the women they handle. It's a nutty piece, but the mind does not wander. The cast of his "Politics" Mr. Ferreras is one of the company's dancers is all female. The politics here are those of the office; black pantsuits are worn by all. The fun is that four of these women wear point shoes and dance smart, gleaming ballet steps, while the other four wear sneakers and do hip hop: Memphis jookin, in fact. The music overlaps Bach orchestral music with live singing of Moses Hogan's "Elijah Rock," performed by vocalists from the Hattiloo Theater in Memphis. The ballet girls rule; at first the jookin girls are so discreet you hardly realize their shoes are different they too go on point, politely, briefly, as if out of deference. When they're left alone, they start to let rip with various break dance moves. (Ptia Reed has a short solo whose effect is especially infectious: Big ripples pass through her.) And what builds up isn't antagonism but pluralism. This would be ponderous as sociology were it not for the dancing. Even the ballet women are differentiated. There's a nice impishness here. "Confluence" and "I Am a Woman" open the program; neither has any pointwork. That's O.K.; several of the most famous works created for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes had no pointwork, either. When we do see women dancing on toe in "Darting Eyes" and "Politics," it's presented with touches of satire, even skepticism. The only dance here I'd like to see a second time in quick succession is "The Darting Eyes." Apart from the mysteries of its multiple narratives, the phrasing has a three dimensional richness, and the vocabulary a variety, that deepen the world onstage. But all four pieces have an energy that's both lively and quizzical.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Two mathematicians who showed how an underappreciated branch of the field could be employed to solve important problems share this year's Abel Prize, the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel. The winners are Hillel Furstenberg, 84, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Gregory Margulis, 74, of Yale University. Both are retired professors. The citation for the prize, awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, lauds the two mathematicians "for pioneering the use of methods from probability and dynamics in group theory, number theory and combinatorics." There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, and for decades, the most prestigious awards in math were the Fields Medals, awarded in small batches every four years to the most accomplished mathematicians who are 40 or younger. The Abel, named after Niels Henrik Abel, a Norwegian mathematician, is set up more like the Nobels. Since 2003 it has been given annually to highlight important advances in mathematics. Previous laureates include Andrew J. Wiles, who proved Fermat's last theorem and is now at the University of Oxford; John F. Nash Jr., whose life was portrayed in the movie "A Beautiful Mind"; and Karen Uhlenbeck, an emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin who last year became the first woman to receive an Abel. This year's Abel winners were trailblazers of new ideas and techniques. Francois Labourie, a mathematician at the University of Cote d'Azur in France who served on the Abel committee, said that most mathematicians in the middle of the 20th century did not think much of probability, which was at the bottom in the hierarchy of mathematics, below number theory, algebra and differential geometry. "Probability was just applied mathematics," Dr. Labourie said. But Dr. Furstenberg and Dr. Margulis found ways to show how methods of probability could solve abstract problems. "It was really a revolution at that time," Dr. Labourie said. "They were some of the first persons to show that probabilistic methods are central to mathematics. Now it is totally obvious." Dr. Furstenberg said he received a telephone call Monday evening informing him of the honor. "I actually have trouble hearing things over the telephone," he said during a telephone interview. "I heard the words 'Norwegian Academy' and I heard 'prize.' and I thought, 'Are they talking about the Abel Prize?' It was hard to believe. I put my wife on the phone. And indeed it was." Dr. Margulis said he also received a phone call on Monday. "Of course, I was very glad and very proud," he said. "It's a great honor." Here is an example of how randomness can be used in theoretical mathematics. Imagine a drunkard stumbling around a room and bouncing off the walls. By noting how often the drunkard passes a given spot, one might be able to infer the shape and size of the room. The general idea of using the trajectory of an object to reveal information about the space it is moving through is called ergodic theory. Dr. Furstenberg took this approach in his doctoral thesis at Princeton University, tackling the question of whether a complete history of some measurements or a sequence of numbers could give useful indicators of what would happen next. "Can you say precisely what is going to happen next or can you at least speak of the probability of what's going to happen next?" he said. Coming up with a dynamical system where snapshots reproduced the sequence of numbers would provide that sort of road map, Dr. Furstenberg showed. Years later, Dr. Furstenberg used a similar approach to provide an alternate proof of a theorem about numbers that had already been proved by another mathematician, Endre Szemeredi. For a sufficiently large subset of integers one that mathematicians describe as having a positive density it is possible to find arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions, which are sequences like 3, 7, 11, 15 where the numbers are equally spaced apart. But Dr. Szemeredi's proof was long and complicated. "Furstenberg gave this beautiful, short proof," said Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2004, Dr. Tao and Ben Green, a mathematician at the University of Oxford, cited Dr. Furstenberg and used ergodic theory arguments to prove a major result that arbitrarily long progressions also exist among the prime numbers, the integers that have exactly two divisors: 1 and themselves. Some notable work of Dr. Margulis, the other Abel Prize winner, addresses problems involving connected networks similar to the internet, where computers continually send messages to each other. To achieve the fastest communications, one would want to make a direct connection between every pair of computers. But that would require an impractically huge number of cables. "These are networks that you are trying to engineer so that are very sparse on the one hand," said Peter Sarnak, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., "yet at the same time they have the property that if you're trying to go from one point to another quickly with a short path, you can still do that." Dr. Margulis was the first to come up with a step by step procedure for how to create such networks, known as expander graphs. Recasting problems, as Dr. Margulis did using ergodic theory, often does not make it easier to solve them. Dr. Sarnak said that if a student had come to him with the initial steps of what Dr. Margulis had done, he would have said: "So what? What did you do? You just reformulated it. It looks harder now."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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'ARTISTS RESPOND: AMERICAN ART AND THE VIETNAM WAR, 1965 1975' (through Aug. 18) and 'TIFFANY CHUNG: VIETNAM, PAST IS PROLOGUE' (through Sept. 2) at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. Everything in "Artists Respond," a big, inspiriting blast of a historical survey, dates from a time when the United States was losing its soul, and its artists some, anyway were trying to save theirs by denouncing a racist war. Figures well known for their politically hard hitting work Judith Bernstein, Leon Golub, Hans Haacke, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero are here in strength. But so are others, like Dan Flavin and Donald Judd and Barnett Newman, seldom associated with visual activism. Concurrent with the survey is a smaller, fine tuned show by a contemporary Vietnamese born artist, Tiffany Chung; it views the war through the eyes of people on the receiving end of aggression. (Holland Cotter) 202 663 7970, americanart.si.edu 'AUSCHWITZ. NOT LONG AGO. NOT FAR AWAY' at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (through Jan. 3). Killing as a communal business, made widely lucrative by the Third Reich, permeates this traveling exhibition about the largest German death camp, Auschwitz, whose yawning gatehouse, with its converging rail tracks, has become emblematic of the Holocaust. Well timed, during a worldwide surge of anti Semitism, the harrowing installation strives, successfully, for fresh relevance. The exhibition illuminates the topography of evil, the deliberate designing of a hell on earth by fanatical racists and compliant architects and provisioners, while also highlighting the strenuous struggle for survival in a place where, as Primo Levi learned, "there is no why." (Ralph Blumenthal) 646 437 4202, mjhnyc.org 'CAMP: NOTES ON FASHION' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 8). Inspired by Susan Sontag's famous 1964 essay, "Notes on 'Camp,'" the latest spectacular from the Met's Costume Institute attempts to define this elastic, constantly evolving concept, which leaves taste, seriousness and heteronormativity in the dust. The show researches camp's emergence in 18th century France and 19th century England, examines "Sontagian Camp" and culminates in an immense gallery of designer confectionaries from the 1980s to now that calls to mind a big, shiny Christmas tree barricaded with presents. (Roberta Smith) 212 535 7100, metmuseum.org 'LEONARD COHEN: A CRACK IN EVERYTHING' at the Jewish Museum (through Sept. 8). The curators of this show, John Zeppetelli of the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal and Victor Shiffman, commissioned artists of various disciplines to develop pieces inspired by Cohen. Some are simple and quiet, like "Ear on a Worm" from the film artist Tacita Dean, a small image playing on a loop high in the space that shows a perched bird, a reference to "Bird on the Wire" from Cohen's 1969 album "Songs From a Room." Some are closer to traditional documentary, like George Fok's "Passing Through," which intercuts performances by Cohen throughout his career with video that surrounds the viewer, suggesting the songs are constant and eternal while the performer's body changes with time. Taken together, the layered work on display has a lot to offer on Cohen, but even more to say about how we respond to music, bring it into our lives, and use it as both a balm and an agent for transformation. (Mark Richardson) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image (ongoing). The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Jason Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'ALICJA KWADE: PARAPIVOT' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 27). This shrewd and scientifically inclined artist, born in Poland and based in Berlin, has delivered the best edition in five years of the Met's hit or miss rooftop sculpture commission. Two tall armatures of interlocking steel rectangles, the taller of them rising more than 18 feet, support heavy orbs of different colored marble; some of the balls perch precariously on the steel frames, while others, head scratchingly, are squinched between them. Walk around these astral abstractions and the frames seem to become quotation marks for the transformed skyline of Midtown; the marbles might be planets, each just as precarious as the one from which they've been quarried. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'MAYBE MAYBE NOT: CHRISTOPHER WOOL AND THE HILL COLLECTION' at the Hill Art Foundation (through June 28). This foundation's inaugural show presents more than a dozen paintings, works on paper and photographs by Wool, the painter who wrenched abstraction into the No Wave era. In a stenciled painting from 1989, the drippy black letters of the word "SPOKESMAN" are arranged three by three, filling the white aluminum background with the same deductive logic as Frank Stella's early stripes. After making layered, silk screened floral patterns in the 1990s, Wool became more gestural; three extraordinary paintings here from the 2000s, with cloudy spray gun loop de loops and merciless erasures, exhibit a simultaneous love and doubt of abstraction that recalls the best of Albert Oehlen. His enthrallingly difficult later silk screens cannibalize his own archive, discordantly remixing earlier works and treating paint as both material and information. (Farago) 212 337 4455, hillartfoundation.org 'OCEAN WONDERS: SHARKS!' at the New York Aquarium (ongoing). For years, the aquarium's 14 acre campus hunkered behind a wall, turning its back to the beach. When aquarium officials last year finally got around to completing the long promised building that houses this new shark exhibit, maybe the biggest move, architecturally speaking, was breaking through that wall. The overall effect makes the aquarium more of a visible, welcoming presence along the boardwalk. Inside, "Ocean Wonders" features 115 species sharing 784,000 gallons of water. It stresses timely eco consciousness, introducing visitors to shark habitats, explaining how critical sharks are to the ocean's food chains and ecologies, debunking myths about the danger sharks pose to people while documenting the threats people pose to sharks via overfishing and pollution. The narrow, snaking layout suggests an underwater landscape carved by water. Past the exit, an outdoor ramp inclines visitors toward the roof of the building where the Atlantic Ocean suddenly spreads out below. You can see Luna Park in one direction, Brighton Beach in the other. The architectural point becomes clear: Sharks aren't just movie stars and aquarium attractions. They're also our neighbors as much a part of Coney Island as the roller coasters and summer dreams. (Michael Kimmelman) 718 265 3474, nyaquarium.com Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'PLAY IT LOUD: INSTRUMENTS OF ROCK ROLL' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 1). Presented in collaboration with the Rock Roll Hall of Fame, this exhibition offers a vision of history in which the rock music that flowered in the 1960s and '70s sits firmly at the center. The format of the rock band provides the structure of the show, with one room given over to the rhythm section and another showcasing "Guitar Gods." Yet another room has a display highlighting the guitar's destruction, with pieces of instruments trashed by Kurt Cobain and Pete Townshend. To the extent that it shifts focus toward the tools of the rock trade, the show is illuminating. Of particular interest is the room set aside for "Creating a Sound," which focuses on the sonic possibility of electronics. The lighting in "Play It Loud" is dim, perhaps reflecting rock music as the sound of the night. Each individual instrument shines like a beacon, as if it's catching the glint of an onstage spotlight. It makes the space between audience member and musician seem vast, but that doesn't diminish the wonder of browsing the tools once used by pop royalty. (Richardson) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'PUNK LUST: RAW PROVOCATION 1971 1985' at the Museum of Sex (through Nov. 30). This show begins with imagery from the Velvet Underground: The 1963 paperback of that title, an exploration of what was then called deviant sexual behavior and gave the band its name, is one of the first objects on display. Working through photos, album art and fliers by artists like Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith and, yes, the Sex Pistols, the exhibition demonstrates how punk offered a space for sexual expression outside the mainstream. In the story told by "Punk Lust," much of it laid out in placards by the writer and musician Vivien Goldman, one of the show's curators, graphic sexual imagery is a tool for shock that frightens away the straight world and offers comfort to those who remain inside. While some of the power dynamic is typical underage groupies cavorting with rock stars images from female, queer and nonbinary artists like Jayne County and the Slits make a strong case for sex as an essential source of punk liberation. (Richardson) 212 689 6337, museumofsex.com 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum (ongoing). After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org STATUE OF LIBERTY MUSEUM on Liberty Island (ongoing). Security concerns stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks led the National Park Service to restrict the number of people who could go inside the Statue of Liberty's massive stone pedestal and up to the crown. So the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation wanted to offer something more for visitors who found the outdoor view less than satisfying: a stand alone museum on the island that would welcome everyone who wanted to hear the story behind Lady Liberty. Going beyond the vague and often dubious ideal of American "liberty," the museum's displays highlight the doubts of black Americans and women who saw their personal liberties compromised on a daily basis in the 1880s, when the statue opened. These exhibits also spotlight a bit of history that is often forgotten: that the French creators intended the statue as a commemoration of the abolition of slavery in the United States. (Julia Jacobs) statueoflibertymuseum.org 'TOO FAST TO LIVE, TOO YOUNG TO DIE: PUNK GRAPHICS, 1976 1986' at the Museum of Arts and Design (through Aug. 18). Many of the objects on display in this exhibition were first hung in record stores or in the bedrooms of teenagers. Posters promoting new albums, tours and shows are mixed in with album art, zines, buttons and other miscellany. Most of the pieces are affixed to the walls with magnets and are not framed, and almost all show signs of wear. The presentation reinforces that this was commercial art meant for wide consumption, and the ragged edges and prominent creases in the works make the history feel alive. (Richardson) 212 299 7777, madmuseum.org 'T. REX: THE ULTIMATE PREDATOR' at the American Museum of Natural History (through Aug. 9, 2020). Everyone's favorite 18,000 pound prehistoric killer gets the star treatment in this eye opening exhibition, which presents the latest scientific research on T. rex and also introduces many other tyrannosaurs, some discovered only this century in China and Mongolia. T. rex evolved mainly during the Cretaceous period to have keen eyes, spindly arms and massive conical teeth, which could bear down on prey with the force of a U Haul truck; the dinosaur could even swallow whole bones, as affirmed here by a kid friendly display of fossilized excrement. The show mixes 66 million year old teeth with the latest 3 D prints of dino bones, and also presents new models of T. rex as a baby, a juvenile and a full grown annihilator. Turns out this most savage beast was covered with believe it! a soft coat of beige or white feathers. (Farago) 212 769 5100, amnh.org '2019 WHITNEY BIENNIAL' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through Sept. 22). Given the political tensions that have sent spasms through the nation over the past two years, you might have expected hoped that this year's biennial would be one big, sharp Occupy style yawp. It isn't. Politics are present but, with a few notable exceptions, murmured, coded, stitched into the weave of fastidiously form conscious, labor intensive work. As a result, the exhibition, organized by two young Whitney curators, Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta, gives the initial impression of being a well groomed group show rather than a statement of resistance. But once you start looking closely, the impression changes artist by artist, piece by piece there's quiet agitation in the air. (Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'JEFF WALL' at Gagosian (through July 26). Rumination and risk taking, in equal measure, mark this conceptual photographer's spellbinding new exhibition. The show, Wall's first at this Chelsea gallery since ending a 25 year run with the rival dealer Marian Goodman, feels decidedly introspective. Figures alone in contemplative trances, or alienated from their partners in scenes of evident tension, define most of the works. The encyclopedic visual literacy that has long characterized Wall's pictures (with their compositional echoes of Old Master paintings) has been pared back, allowing more psychological complexity to emerge. Just as new is an emphasis on narrative and sequence; among the pieces are two diptychs and an enveloping, cinematic triptych. (Karen Rosenberg) 212 741 1717, gagosian.com 'MATTHEW BARNEY: REDOUBT' at Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven (through June 16). The wildly innovative sculptor and filmmaker, Yale class of 1989, heads back to the halls of ivy to present his first major project since the six hour excremental eruption of "River of Fundament." The exhibition shows Barney in a lighter, nimbler mode than he has displayed in years. The new film "Redoubt," shot in his home state of Idaho, riffs on the myth of Diana and Actaeon; the goddess, here, is an NRA approved sharpshooter, while the doomed voyeur is the artist himself, making plein air etchings of Diana and her attendants. Related copper etchings appear in the show, and Barney has electroplated them over varying times, encrusting them with weird metal nodules. "Redoubt" lacks the operatic grandeur some of Barney's fanboys prefer. But it's the most emancipated work of his career, and it should make a star of Eleanor Bauer, the dancer and choreographer whom he has entrusted with the film's most beautiful movement sequences. The film runs about two hours; check the website for screening times. (Farago) 203 432 0600, artgallery.yale.edu 'LINCOLN KIRSTEIN'S MODERN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through June 15). With George Balanchine, the indefatigable Kirstein (1907 96) founded the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. But he was also an impassioned writer, collector, curator and devotee of photography who had much to do with MoMA in its early years. The museum commemorates his complex career with art, letters and ballet ephemera, drawn from its vast holdings. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'JOAN MIRO: BIRTH OF THE WORLD' at the Museum of Modern Art (through June 15). Drawn mostly from MoMA's unrivaled Miro collection, this fabulous exhibition is best when tracing the artist's brilliant early twists on Modernism and their swift ascent to "The Birth of the World," a 1927 masterpiece that presaged the drips and stains of radical painting two decades hence. Unappreciated in its time, it was barely exhibited until 1968. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'THE SELF PORTRAIT, FROM SCHIELE TO BECKMANN' at the Neue Galerie (through June 24). Self portraiture can seem pretty narrow. But the 70 odd works in this exhibition, which run from a handful of delightfully exact Rembrandt etchings to Felix Nussbaum's searing 1940 painting "Self Portrait in the Camp," ably demonstrate the genre's universal scope: It's a consciously constructed illusion of spontaneous self revelation, a sincere put on. And as such it's a peek beneath the hood of art in general. (Will Heinrich) 212 994 9493, neuegalerie.org 'THE WORLD BETWEEN EMPIRES: ART AND IDENTITY IN THE ANCIENT MIDDLE EAST' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through June 23). The Met excels at epic scale archaeological exhibitions, and this is a prime example. It brings together work made between 100 B.C. and A.D. 250 in what we now know as Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. In the ancient world, all were in the sphere of two competing superpowers Rome to the west and Parthia to the east and though imperial influence was strong, it was far from all determining. Each of the subject territories selectively grafted it onto local traditions to create distinctive new grass roots cultural blends. Equally important, the show addresses the fate of art from the past in a politically fraught present. (Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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It's hard to talk about sex and fashion these days, or sex and modeling, or sex and ad campaigns, without a post Weinstein lens on it all. Every discussion, every photo, looks different potentially suspect. Yet sex has been a fundamental tool in the selling of fashion for years. And no one wielded it more effectively than Calvin Klein. In a pre internet world, he built a global brand on the power of astonishingly provocative imagery. Before there was such a thing as going viral, his ad campaigns did it anyway, born on tides of outrage and, well, obsessive looking. Grappling with that is part of understanding of how we got to here. Why is clear in a new coffee table book, a 9 1/2 pound, 463 page 150 tome, the first written and compiled by Mr. Klein. Three years in the making, it was whittled down from 40,000 images created over a career that lasted more than 30 years. It's an eye opening statement from a man who has been relatively mum on both the subject of his own career and the fashion world in general since he retired in 2004. At age 60, he sold his company to PVH, later cutting his ties with the brand that bears his name (now designed by Raf Simons). The book is a series of reminders not just of the clothes Mr. Klein made, and the debt today's fashion minimalists owe him, but also of the disruption he caused and the way it shaped our attitudes and expectations. Most designer coffee table books are, to be honest, really just glossy accessories to egos and living rooms. This one may well be something different: once again a lightning rod for debate, and possibly censure, given the current conversation. Certainly it will raise questions that should be raised. Especially since, at 74, Mr. Klein, who has been busy building houses and designing uniforms for the Harlem Village Academies, is ready to think about many of them if not to completely address the implications. Why did you decide to finally publish a book? People had suggested it for many years. Mrs. Onassis was the first one who asked me. God knows why. Anna Wintour had been pushing me to do it for a long time. But I don't like looking back; I like to be in the moment, and think about the future. Plus I thought it might be emotional, and I didn't want to go there. But I do a lot of speaking to students, and I realized they knew my name, but they certainly had no idea of the imagery we used. And I wanted them to be able to learn from that. Do you think people will be suspicious of that imagery, given the current groundswell of discussion on women being put in uncomfortable situations? I never thought publication would coincide with this conversation, though I also think it's about time we had this conversation. But all of these images came from my life in one way or another, especially my life with Kelly his former wife . It was really a reflection of what was happening. The 1970s were a pretty crazy time in New York. There was Berlin in the 1920s, and Paris in the 1930s, and New York in the 1970s. The orgy campaign started with me thinking about Studio 54. People ask me if it was really like that. Probably, yeah. The culture of the 1970s was one of the justifications Harvey Weinstein used for his behavior. But what is happening in the culture does not give anyone the right to act in an abusive way. In terms of Harvey, not everyone did what he did in the 1970s and after. That's not about culture; it's about character. He used his position to take advantage of women right from the beginning. Did you deliberately set out to be provocative? When I was thinking about our campaign for our first fragrance, I was looking at the competition and they always had these young, pretty girls running through a field of wheat. And I just thought: "Is that why women buy fragrance? Because they want to run through wheat?" No. They buy it because they want to attract men, or they want to be attractive to themselves. So I always put men and women together. Is that being provocative? That is being realistic. In those days I would look at Vogue, and it was thick with hundreds of pages, and I wanted my company to stand out. So I did six , eight page spreads once I did a 27 page outsert. They weren't always about sex, but they often went in that direction because that's me. That's who I am. I did what I did, and I put it out there for students. How did you choose the images? I picked the images the same way I always did: what got my heart racing. No matter which photographer was doing the shoot, we would discuss what we were trying to say, where we would shoot, who the model would be. In the early days, I would be on shoots, styling. Then I would edit the film at night. We always pushed to be more creative and exciting, and sometimes we went over the top. Sometimes we pushed the envelope too far. I understand that. There was a shoot that got referred to as kiddie porn, for example. It was for jeans, photographed in what looked like a basement with knobby pine paneling and shag carpeting. We thought it was funny and provocative, but the Justice Department did not. They investigated us. But it was during a year when everyone was talking about family values, and Bill Clinton, who was president, stood up and said he didn't approve of the Calvin Klein ads. I ended up pulling the campaign and taking out a page advertisement in The New York Times trying to apologize. Steven Meisel shot it, and to this day he can't get over the attacks. For me, it came with the territory. You were used to it by then? My feeling was: If you start to think about what everyone else might think before you design something or put an image out there, you'll never get anything done. I built my company with my childhood friend just like Donna Karan did and Ralph Lauren did and we built it based on creativity, with the assumption that if people wanted what we created, it would be profitable. That's how we ended up working with Kate. I went to Paris to see how other designers did shows I went to Chanel and a few others and I saw all these women whom I had thought were really special, and they were in every show. So then I started to think: That's not really so special. It was a period when lots of models were enhancing their breasts and doing crazy things to their bodies, and I found it pretty offensive. So I came back from Paris and thought: I have to do something different. After a while Patrick Demarchelier called and said he thought he'd found someone like we'd been looking for, and he sent Kate over. She had some personal photographs that Mario Sorrenti, her boyfriend at the time, had taken of her. He wasn't even a professional photographer then. So I asked to meet Mario, and then I gave him a camera and sent them off to an island together.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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WHAT IS IT? Quite simply, the best or, at least, the most impressive hybrid that Toyota makes today. HOW MUCH? 60,345 base; 74,414 as tested. WHAT MAKES IT RUN? A combination of electric motors and a revamped 3.5 liter V 6, which features both port and direct fuel injection, producing a total of 338 horsepower. HOW QUICK IS IT? Car and Driver magazine reported 0 to 60 m.p.h. acceleration in 5.7 seconds. IS IT THIRSTY? The E.P.A. rating is 29 m.p.g. city, 34 highway. The Lexus GS 450h, redesigned for the 2013 model year, demonstrates how far Toyota has come in the two decades it has spent trying to electrify the automobile. The company's goal, which seemed a bit of a stretch in the early 1990s, was to make electrified vehicles that were better than comparable vehicles powered by conventional internal combustion engines. Otherwise, Toyota's leaders believed, no one would have a reason to buy one. This shapely GS 450h suggests that it has met that goal. The hybrid is more powerful than any other Lexus GS. It wafts over the road as effortlessly as, say, a Bentley. Its interior, especially with the optional bamboo trim and buttery leather, is as luxurious as any comparable luxury hybrid, and its fuel economy blows away the competition. But if the GS 450h falls short in any area, it is on price. At a 12,000 premium over the gasoline only GS 350, and a base price some 3,600 above a Mercedes E400 Hybrid, it's hard to make a strong economic case for buying one. Nonetheless, the car's technical prowess is worthy of note. In a recent test covering nearly 1,000 miles, I averaged about 37 m.p.g. well above the E.P.A.'s combined city highway rating of 31. And I seldom used the "eco" mode, which might have yielded even better fuel economy. The GS 450h can even operate at low speeds, for a number of miles, on electric power alone. Toyota says the GS 450h accelerates on par with a GS 350, but Car and Driver found it to be a hair slower (just 0.1 second) than the GS 350. The hybrid's continuously variable transmission is the culprit. A true sport sedan should provide the sensation of, if not actual shifting from one gear to another, at least the feel of a more direct connection between the engine and transmission. Stomping on the hybrid's accelerator feels a bit like taking a deep breath that's never quite exhaled. Passing power is superior, however, thanks to the turbolike thrust that comes when its electric motor kicks in. The GS's hybrid system employs two electric motors; one is integrated into the transmission to help drive the rear wheels; the other is under the hood, dedicated mostly to charging. The previous GS hybrid was positioned as producing power on par with a V 8 with the fuel economy of a V 6. But given that car's combined rating of 23 m.p.g., this wasn't much of a selling point. Besides improvements in the hybrid powertrain, the new GS 450h features a chassis that has been lengthened about two inches, although the wheelbase is unchanged. A revised rear suspension and more compact battery pack leave adequate trunk space something the predecessor model lacked. The standard adaptive variable suspension (an option on the regular GS 350) constantly adapts the suspension settings, steering effort, throttle response and stability control intervention to the road and to driving conditions, optimizing the ride and handling. A driver adjustable controller includes modes for Eco, Normal, Sport and Sport Plus. The old GS was dull inside and out. The new exterior is well proportioned and elegant. And the new interior, which can be ordered in tasteful combinations of smart colors and plush materials, is nothing short of wonderful.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Citing a concern over fires, Porsche is replacing the 475 horsepower 3.8 liter 6 cylinder engines in all 785 of its 2014 911 GT3 models worldwide, the automaker said in a news release late Tuesday. The replacement includes about 400 vehicles in the United States with about half unsold and still at dealerships, Nick Twork, a spokesman for Porsche, said in a telephone interview. Porsche said it decided to fix the vehicles after two fires occurred in GT3 cars in Europe. The automaker attributed the incidents to a connecting rod fastener that came loose, which in turn damaged the crankcase, causing an oil leak that caught fire. Mr. Twork said there were no injuries related to those fires. He couldn't immediately provide an estimate for the repair cost, but a California dealership said an engine would cost about 30,000, and labor, to replace. The starting price of the GT3 is 131,395. Mr. Twork said the vehicles would be repaired as in a safety recall. Porsche says the GT3 can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.3 seconds and has a top speed of 195 miles per hour.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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For the second month in a row, the economy churned out a blockbuster number of jobs, the government reported Friday, an impressive performance in an era of slow and steady employment growth. With the coronavirus outbreak shaking economic confidence, the solid showing in February may not be a harbinger of continued strength. Still, the report from the Department of Labor offered a refreshing breath of positive economic news. Employers expanded payrolls by 273,000 jobs in February, while revisions to data from previous months added 85,000 more jobs to the tally. The jobless rate ticked down to 3.5 percent. Indeed, the report is evidence of just how much momentum the American economy had going into the coronavirus crisis. Monthly payroll gains averaged 231,000 over the past six months. The average for the previous six months March through August 2019 was just 171,000. Every jobs report looks backward, but February's report captures a particularly unusual moment, before the market was gripped with anxiety about the global impact of a widening epidemic. "There is a red line in the calendar," said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. "The value of it is that this report gives us kind of a benchmark of where we were before things began to go wrong." There were scattered reports this week about a potential downturn in employment particularly in the most vulnerable sectors: transportation, hospitality, entertainment and travel. Airlines are clearly feeling the squeeze. This week, United Airlines announced that it was imposing a hiring freeze through June, postponing scheduled merit raises and inviting employees to apply for unpaid leave. The number of canceled or postponed conferences is racking up, which hurts not only hotels and convention centers but also restaurants and stores that cater to those visitors. "Layoffs are here," a respondent in the transportation equipment sector said when surveyed by the Institute for Supply Management for its monthly manufacturing report. The company's suppliers are in Guangdong, a Chinese province that has not been at the center of the outbreak. There have been a few kinks in orders and deliveries, he said, but nothing unusually serious. 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. "Businesses crave certainty, and certainty isn't the word of the day," Mr. Woldenberg said. So he is doing what many business owners always do: managing as best as he can. "I'm just an elf at the workbench," he said, explaining his reaction to the conflicting and confusing economic signals. Amy Glaser, senior vice president at the staffing firm Adecco, said, "We're not seeing an impact yet." The one trend she has noticed in the last few days is that employers are arranging for preliminary interviews to be done remotely instead of in person. Becky Frankiewicz, president for North America at ManpowerGroup, an employment agency, said she, too, had not seen any pullback, even in the hospitality and travel industries. The labor market is tight, she said. "We continue to see a huge demand" for temporary and permanent workers. Jobless claims throughout the United States have remained at rock bottom levels. At Eastman Machine in downtown Buffalo, Robert Stevenson, the president and chief executive, said he wanted to add at least six people to his 137 person payroll. "We had a great year last year, and business is good," said Mr. Stevenson, who also has a factory in Ningbo, China, a coastal city south of Shanghai. In early January, Eastman got a large order from a Chinese wind energy company that was so eager for the machinery, it recently agreed to pay the steep increase in airfreight prices that followed the cancellation of many flights to China. For Mr. Stevenson, the labor shortage is still the most pressing problem. "Our issue is finding qualified people," said Mr. Stevenson, who wants to expand his engineering and software staff. The strong labor market provides a cushion against shocks. The remarkable payroll gains last month were all the more surprising since cooling job creation is to be expected during the 11th year of an economic expansion. There were a few signs of weakness in the report. Wage growth, which was already slowing from last year's peak, was less impressive. Average hourly wages were up 0.2 percent, bringing down the year over year gains to 3 percent. Diane Lim, an economist at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said the first impact from the coronavirus on the labor market was likely to show up in reduced hours for service workers. "Entertainment, hospitality, food and lodging, service jobs they won't lose their jobs but will probably get a cut in hours," she said. At Milwaukee Electronics, a Wisconsin manufacturer of circuit boards, the warnings from Asian suppliers started coming in shortly after the Lunar New Year holiday in February: Prepare for delays. "Our component vendors are telling us to brace for shortages, potentially some substantial ones," said Duane Benson, the company's director of marketing. The company has been saving up inventory, reaching out to suppliers and working with customers to adjust timelines. What it has not had to do, however, is cut jobs or reduce hours. In the short term, the outbreak might even be good for business. The company's Screaming Circuits division in Oregon, which usually handles smaller, shorter deadline orders, has had a surge in inquiries from customers looking to bring production back from China, at least temporarily. "We started getting calls from folks who typically send stuff offshore," Mr. Benson said. Of course, if disruptions persist, Screaming Circuits, too, might struggle to get the parts it needs to fill orders. If it has to give up business, it could be forced to make harder choices. But Mr. Benson said the company would try to avoid cutting jobs. The strength of the labor market early this year at least gives the economy some buffer against the shock of the coronavirus, said Karin Kimbrough, chief economist of the professional networking site LinkedIn.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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"Task: to be where I am. / Even when I'm in this solemn and absurd / role: I am still the place / where creation works on itself." This verse, from the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer's "Guard Duty," provides the epigraph for Tope Folarin's debut novel, "A Particular Kind of Black Man," and echoes of Transtromer's lucidly self instructive poem ring throughout its pages. Folarin's coming of age story centers on Tunde Akinola, a young Nigerian American boy who was born in Utah and speaks English with "a solid middle American accent." He's a first generation kid, as unremarkable as so many unremarkable Americans. Yet Tunde's ordinariness is treated as foreignness, as is the case with so many such Americans sometimes at the hands of their own unpopularly elected president. He soon finds himself alienated both from his town's banal white supremacy the novel's opening passage is a scene of cheerful horror in which an older white woman tells a 5 year old Tunde: "Remember, if you are a good boy here on earth, you can serve me in heaven" and from his own family, whose gradual disintegration is the beating heart of much of the book. Tunde's mother a Beatles and Bob Dylan fan who comes to America from Lagos expecting "a country where love conquered all, where black people and white people lived together in peace and harmony" battles both mental illness and a distinctly diasporic unhappiness that will be familiar to readers who have experienced similar scenes in their own families. "She is just too sick," Tunde's father says. "This country's no good for her." Folarin is attentive to the ways in which mental illness and the particular crises of poverty, immigration and Blackness can dovetail, and how communal silence and shame can magnify one rupture into many. "A Particular Kind of Black Man" was one of our most anticipated titles of August. See the full list. When Tunde's mother eventually leaves the family and returns to Nigeria, Tunde's father tells Tunde and his brother, Tayo, that they will soon have a new mother. Tunde's initial hope soon fades into misery as his stepmother's neglect and abuse become apparent. The fantasy of this patched together family takes its final breath in a passage in which Tunde's bootstrap capitalist father, a determined disciple of the entrepreneurial dream, recruits his family to sell ice cream at the Hartville City Fair, using an old post office truck with a horn shaped speaker jerry built onto it, and a freezer scavenged from the junkyard. The fair and its anticipated effect on their fortunes become the epicenter of the family's dreams and aspirations, and the scene crystallizes the way some moments live in a child's mind forever, becoming not just memory but monument.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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PARIS This should have been Sonia Rykiel's moment. It was, after all, a brand founded by a woman half a century ago. A brand practically synonymous with female liberation and empowerment through clothes. A brand so embedded in the history of French women that a year ago Mayor Anne Hidalgo inaugurated the Allee Sonia Rykiel the city's first street named for any fashion designer . A brand, in other words, practically made for a time when women everywhere are demanding their due and seizing the lead. And yet, this past April, the house of Sonia Rykiel went into receivership and in July, liquidation. "Until the very last month, the C.E.O. and human resources were looking to save the house, and everybody felt it could be saved," said an executive , who asked not to be identified because of the company's nondisclosure agreement. "It's hard to understand that 50 years of history could be flushed down the toilet. It's one thing if it was a mess and nobody cared." But, he said, everyone there had been working tirelessly trying to save it. Mayor Anne Hidalgo, left, and Nathalie Rykiel at the celebration of the naming of Allee Sonia Rykiel in 2018 in Paris. Former Rykiel executives blame, variously: bad artistic decisions; corporate micromanaging; technological myopia; disengaged, faraway investors and a lack of due diligence when Chinese investors bought a majority stake in the company in 2012. The answer is probably a combination of all those reasons as well as bad timing. In 2015 , just as Rykiel's new management team was implementing a major restructuring plan, France was hit by a series of terrorism attacks that leveled its economy, and domestic retail sales collapsed; the Russian financial crisis wiped out the brand's second largest market outside of France the Rykiel distributor in Russia closed all six stores "overnight," a Rykiel executive recalled. And when it became clear in late 2018 that Rykiel needed to bring in a financial partner and relaunch, the Yellow Vests protests decrying economic and social inequities erupted throughout France. But taken together, these facts add up to a tale of just how easy it is to miss the cultural cues that create fashion relevance. There was a time for decades, in fact that the house of Rykiel was a vibrant and quite profitable business. It was founded in May 1968, during the student riots in Paris, when a young, flame haired Parisienne named Sonia Rykiel opened a woman's wear boutique on the Left Bank to sell saucy knitwear as a counterpoint to the era's bourgeois tailoring. She designed a stylish yet comfortable uniform for working women her signature was a striped pullover called the "poor boy" that was a favorite of the actresses Anouk Aimee and Audrey Hepburn and Ms. Rykiel became known as the Queen of Knitwear. She staged shows in her Rue de Grenelle shop, reciting poetry as the models descended the staircase, and opened boutiques in the provinces, so women there could have access to her clothes. By the early 1990s , the Sonia Rykiel company had grown into a 75 million concern, with two women's wear lines, men's wear, children's wear, accessories and perfume, and was sold by 250 retailers in 40 countries. Ms. Rykiel, who had Parkinson's disease, retired in 2009 ; her daughter, Nathalie , who over the years had held various positions, including artistic director and president, stayed on as chairwoman. In 2011, the company reported 83.7 million euros (about 92 million at current exchange rates) in revenue, and EUR 1.4 million in losses, which was considered respectable in fashion business circles. But it was stuck. In an industry in which big groups can negotiate reduced rates for advertising and store rents, independents like Rykiel were at a disadvantage. In February 2012 , the Rykiels sold 80 percent of the business for an undisclosed sum to Fung Brands , an investment group led by the billionaire brothers Victor and William Fung of the Li Fung manufacturing powerhouse based in Hong Kong ; the Rykiel family retained the remaining 20 percent, as well as the company's real estate, which included its flagship Boulevard Saint Germain location. Nathalie Rykiel, who was downgraded to vice chairwoman, said the deal would "ensure the longevity of the brand." But with each season, enthusiasm waned. Tension grew so taut between the Rykiel managing director Eric Langon and Ms. de Libran that executives said they were barely speaking. "It was complicated, because we didn't have the same vision," Ms. de Libran said recently. The environment was so difficult that a Rykiel production manager named as Virginie H. in reports told a French court in 2015 that stress at work as far back as 2013 contributed to a breakdown at that time, during which she murdered her 5 year old daughter and attempted suicide. "Work swallowed me," she testified. Meanwhile, the company missed the China boom. Its mainland China retail network franchises had long operated independently. Mr. Loubier and Mr. Langon shuttered the business, believing the Fungs would help roll out new wholly owned stores there. Only one was opened during Mr. da Conceicao's period but it failed, and was closed. The Rykiel brand had no serious retail presence in China afterward. In 2016 , Nathalie Rykiel sold the family's remaining 20 percent stake to the Fungs and relinquished her board seat (though the family kept the real estate). That August, Sonia Rykiel died at 86 from complications of Parkinson's disease. A couple of months later, the company implemented a major restructuring plan that included closing the Sonia by Sonia Rykiel diffusion line , adding lower price items to the main Sonia Rykiel collection, and laying off workers. Mr. Langon believed the reorganization would lead to profitability by 2019. Ms. de Libran's contract was renewed and she was given 10 percent of the company and a seat on the board; the brand was readying for the 50th anniversary, in 2018 . For that occasion, Mr. Loubier dreamed up a plethora of events and products, including a new rectangular handbag called Le Pave , after the cobblestones that student protesters had hurled at police in 1968; a ready to wear fall 2018 show that included a guest set by Bananarama, and the house's first couture collection , L'Atelier Sonia Rykiel, presented in June at the Ecole des Beaux Arts . It was a blitz, and it was expensive. Rumors flew through Rykiel headquarters that vendors were not being paid, which staff members said made them nervous. And several described how Mr. Loubier began to micromanage . One day, for example, he walked past the Boulevard Saint Germain shop windows and was so displeased with the displays, he demanded they be redone. And then Mr. Loubier's wife, Hedieh Khakbaz Loubier , a jewelry designer with her own brand called Hedieh , added her voice to the mix. In an email seen by The New York Times, Ms. Loubier wrote to her husband after one of the anniversary events: "I just saw the WWD coverage, or lack of I should write, on SR Manifesto soiree." She then laid out, with bullet points, what she felt was wrong, adding, "Please feel free to forward my comments." He did , to company executives. In July 2018, Mr. Loubier fired Mr. Langon and asked the Clergerie chief executive Perry Oosting to run both brands. For 2018, the company reported sales of 35 million euros ( 38.5 million), and a loss of EUR20 million. In January 2019, Compagnie Financiere Edmond de Rothschild was brought in to find an investor or buyer. The plan, as proposed by the board, was to reduce staff to 50 from 130, and drop annual sales targets to a minimum of 25 million , with the ambition to achieve a bit more eventually. The dream of turning Sonia Rykiel into another Celine had been abandoned. In April , Rykiel filed for bankruptcy protection and liquidated its business in the United States. It closed all but the six stores in France and the new Monaco boutique. Mr. Loubier quietly packed up his office and moved into a new office on the Right Bank . Several parties reviewed the dossiers and made bids. By July, three remained: Emmanuel Diemoz , a former Balmain chief executive who planned to concentrate on knitwear and ready to wear and shrink the bricks and mortar network to the Boulevard Saint Germain, Cannes and Monaco; the French real estate entrepreneurs Nicole Levy and Julien Sedbon , who wanted to focus on e retailing; and a Chinese investor, who was conducting due diligence. All three bids depended on the rent negotiations for the Saint Germain property, which the Rykiel family still owns. The building is the identity of the brand like Chanel's headquarters on Rue Cambon , Hermes's on Rue du Faubourg Saint Honore and Dior's on Avenue Montaigne . The Diemoz and Chinese bids were dropped, and on July 25 , the Paris commercial court rejected the Levy bid, forcing the company into liquidation. Other assets, including the name and the archives, will soon be sold . Upon hearing the ruling, several Rykiel employees in the courtroom burst into tears. The French designer Agnes Trouble , founder of the Agnes b. brand , told Agence France Presse, it was as if Ms. Rykiel "has died a second time."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Will van Breda, 30, and Kyla Kohler, 34, watch their children play in their garden; also at the picnic table are their tenants, from left, Justine Lee Mills, Noah Gardenswartz, Gary Hidalgo Rodriguez and an Airbnb guest, Lea Benacerraf. With New York City real estate prices soaring, the only way for some city dwellers to achieve the American dream of owning property is to become landlords. And these days, many landlords are their tenants' contemporaries learning on the fly how to manage property and relying on YouTube for how to tutorials on home repairs. Still others are filling their homes with friends turned tenants. When Frances Largeman Roth, a nutritionist, and her husband, Jon Roth, a director at Alexander Interactive, both 42, found out they were expecting their third child, they decided to sell their two bedroom apartment in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, and buy a home that would fit their growing family. It soon became apparent that this would mean taking on tenants. Their two bedroom apartment sold for 750,000, and in July 2014, they bought a two family home in Windsor Terrace for 1.1 million. "There were places we looked at that were a little bit cheaper that didn't have a rental property attached, but knowing how much work we'd have to put into fixing them up, the math just didn't work," said Mrs. Largeman Roth, the author of "Eating in Color: Delicious, Healthy Recipes for You and Your Family." "This was the only way. And so I really hopped on it. My brain was really working overtime. 'Can we all fit? Yes.' " With a newborn in tow, Mrs. Largeman Roth struggled to get the rental apartment ready for tenants. "I remember so much running up and down it's a big flight of stairs with the baby," she said. "Always trying to find someplace to breast feed where the workers were not. It was really pretty crazy." The setup has worked smoothly. On a recent visit to their upstairs tenants, the Roth children started an impromptu dance party as Mr. Fuell played "Norwegian Wood" on his guitar while Ms. Larson harmonized. "I think we're super lucky that they are who they are," Mrs. Largeman Roth said of her "conscientious" tenants. The 2,000 a month in rent that comes into the family coffers allows the couple's three children Willa, 7, Leo, 4, and Phoebe, who is almost 2 to enjoy having their own backyard. And although there have been plumbing problems to deal with, the couple feel that being landlords has actually given them more freedom. "We never wanted to buy a place where all your life decisions have to get made around a big fat mortgage," Mr. Roth said. "Young people are exploring the idea of becoming landlords as a way to have more control over their own destiny as investors," said Darin Shaw, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. "A sense of security comes when you invest in brick and mortar, as opposed to the uncontrollable ups and downs of the stock market. Any area of the city can suddenly become the next housing hot spot, and young people have always been the pioneers, because often they can't afford anywhere else." In 2011, Sydney Blumstein, an associate broker at Corcoran, helped her friend Kyla Kohler buy a two family house in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn for 569,000. Ms. Kohler, 34, now lives in the downstairs apartment with her husband, Will van Breda, 30, a former travel agent turned stay at home father, and their two young sons. Both parents are from Sydney, Australia. As for tenants, the upstairs part of the house seems like the cast of MTV's "Real World" there's Noah Gardenswartz, 32, a comedian; Gary Hidalgo Rodriguez, 32, a property manager and the resident cook; Justine Lee Mills, 32, a saleswoman for Corcoran; and, for now, Lea Benacerraf, 21, a French Airbnb guest doing a semester abroad at Pace University. Outsiders are initially skeptical about the setup, which involves adults sharing a kitchen and other common areas. "A lot of people call it a youth hostel," Ms. Lee Mills said. "They think it's weird, but they love to come over here." Ms. Blumstein said after the sale to Ms. Kohler she sold a house to "friends who repeated the model." "I think that young people understand how to leverage an asset by doing it in a fun and community building way," she said, describing Bushwick as "a beautiful, park filled neighborhood where you could buy townhouses for 500,000 and young people could basically live for free, offsetting expenses by renting rooms to friends while sharing common areas, backyards and experiences." Mr. van Breda has learned on the job how to fix most things that need repair in the house. "I've learned all about heating systems," he said. "We don't have boilers in Sydney. With a lot of things, it's just about opening it up and seeing how it works, and hoping the problem is obvious." The housemates appreciate Mr. van Breda's handyman rules to live by: "If it moves and it shouldn't, you use duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, you use WD 40." Since becoming the owner of the house, Ms. Kohler has started her own business, Total Package Bushwick Property Management, for which she oversees about 30 homes in the area. Mr. Rodriguez, who came to the United States from Costa Rica, rents the largest room, with an en suite bathroom, for 1,000 a month the smaller bedrooms go for around 800. He said he preferred house sharing with others to having his own apartment. "They are my family," he said. For the landlords, the house offers much more than just financial security. "The setup provides us with a lot of support," Mr. van Breda said. "There's often someone upstairs that can help in an emergency or even just for moral support, like when Justine comes down to take Felix for an hour. If we were somewhere by ourselves, it would be very different." When Matthew Trebek, 25, decided to open Oso, a restaurant serving Mexican street food to debut soon in Harlem, he immediately began searching for a home in the neighborhood. Initially he and his agents, Jason Hernandez, a salesman at Douglas Elliman Real Estate, and Lesley Steiner, an associate broker there, looked for one bedroom apartments. But their explorations took them to townhouses where Mr. Trebek could have more room, as well as steady rental income. He wound up with a five story townhouse with an owner's triplex for 1,915,000 and began a new adventure as a landlord. His father, Alex Trebek, the host of "Jeopardy!," lent a helping hand making updates and repairs. "Oh, yeah, my dad is handy," Matthew Trebek said. "He's 75 now, but he is one of the hardest working people. It's, 'Get out of bed, we're going to Home Depot!' He traveled here from L.A. with power tools." Mr. Trebek's tenants include friends the contractor for the restaurant, Mike Rockhill, 40, a project manager for New World Design Builders, and his wife, Kate Rockhill, 34, a front office manager at Midtown Integrative Health and Wellness, were immediately on board to rent the top floor. Mr. Hernandez placed the 82 year old mother of a neighbor on the floor below. An apartment on the parlor floor went to Oso's chef, Cassandra Rhoades, 26. Mr. Trebek's apartment includes part of the parlor floor, the garden level and the finished basement. The rents on the apartments range from 1,000 to 2,400 a month. With a contractor as a tenant, Mr. Trebek doesn't have to worry about most repairs. Mr. Rockhill said he had no hesitation about moving into the house of a friend. "If you've ever looked for an apartment in Manhattan I've had people asking me for six months' security up front. It worked out well because I didn't have to do that." Mr. Trebek created an intergenerational home that brings together people from the neighborhood with newer transplants. He's also found a new hobby furniture making. He and Mr. Rockhill recently made a coffee table in the backyard. Mr. Rockhill called the project "an excuse for my wife to let me buy a 450 saw." Mr. Kaplan took on the role of troubleshooter and used Angie's List to find a reliable handyman, whom he now has on speed dial. The Kaplans use an application from the website Cozy.co to automatically collect the 2,600 a month rent, which is split by two roommates, Corey de Groot, 26, an art director at Publicis, an advertising agency, and Michael Trapani, 29, a senior grant writer at Win, a nonprofit. Both men like having a person for a landlord rather than a management company. "Every other place I've lived, it's been a company you had to deal with," Mr. de Groot said. Calls placed to faceless numbers often went unanswered or resulted in an early morning unannounced visitor. "At one place, the super came in he didn't even knock and said, 'Oh, you're here.' " Now if there's an issue, a simple text message gets immediate results. "As I type, I see the three dots on the phone as Eric is responding to me," Mr. Trapani said. The rental income the Kaplans receive will cover the mortgage on the three bedroom apartment they recently purchased for 495,000 for themselves back in Manhattan in Morningside Heights. Mrs. Kaplan's Harlem two bedroom turned out to be a great investment the condo is now valued between 550,000 and 600,000. "We qualified for a bigger mortgage because we have this rental income," she said. Now, nine months pregnant, Mrs. Kaplan is glad she was able to give her family a security blanket. "Who knows what's going to happen in life? Owning this place makes me feel secure as a woman," she said. "I'll never have to move back to my parents' house, I'm never going to be homeless."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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An employee at Columbia Sportswear headquarters in Portland, Ore., uses a planimeter, a tool to measure the two dimensional area of each material visible on the external surface area of a shoe. Such measurements are necessary to determine the customs tariff classification and duty rate.Credit...Corey Arnold for The New York Times Columbia Sportswear has worked around tariffs for decades and it says the president's new wave of levies will not bring jobs back to America. An employee at Columbia Sportswear headquarters in Portland, Ore., uses a planimeter, a tool to measure the two dimensional area of each material visible on the external surface area of a shoe. Such measurements are necessary to determine the customs tariff classification and duty rate. PORTLAND, Ore. Columbia Sportswear has spent years designing ski jackets and hiking boots to withstand the elements: wind, rain, snow and, increasingly, tariffs. Located on a sprawling campus adorned with hanging canoes, the 80 year old retailer has long protected its outdoor gear from the whims of Washington by engaging in what the company calls "tariff engineering" adjusting its products to lessen import taxes on materials from outside the United States like rubber soles, zippers and waterproof nylon. But now Columbia worries that its approach is under threat from a president whose trade strategy leaves little room for American companies that make and sell products globally. At Columbia, the response is to lean heavily on the company's long experience in navigating the thicket of trade restrictions it has faced in the United States and abroad. Every fleece vest and waterproof glove stamped with the Columbia logo is manufactured abroad, and the company has come to rely on a system of pairing its designers with its team of trade experts, who recommend work arounds that can help an item of clothing circumvent tariffs. In a conference room filled with samples, Jeffrey W. Tooze, Columbia's vice president for global customs and trade, showed how a small change in design can mean big money for a given product. The addition of a super thin sheath of fabric to the sole of a boot or shoe can help circumvent an existing 37.5 percent tariff on rubber soles imported into America. A fabric sole, by contrast, is taxed at 12.5 percent. (Customers find that the fabric wears off within days, revealing the rubber sole beneath.) A water resistant jacket triggers a 7.1 percent tariff, while a jacket that has not been waterproofed gets hit with a 27.7 percent tariff. A jacket filled at least 10 percent, by weight, with down, brings about a tariff of only 4.4 percent. Those distinctions don't reflect national security or economic concerns they are the result of long past lobbying campaigns intended to protect or exempt certain manufacturers. Recognizing them, and designing around them, has become part of Columbia's corporate culture since Mr. Tooze joined the company in 2001. "It's part of the thought process, part of the creative thinking, part of the D.N.A.," he said. What Columbia is not doing, to any large degree, is bringing production jobs to the United States, as Mr. Trump would like. Tim Boyle, Columbia's chief executive, said in a recent interview that there was nothing the president could do to entice the company to make its products in the United States, where costs would be higher and apparel manufacturing expertise has withered through decades of outsourcing. Mr. Boyle said the firm emulated another Oregon retailer, Nike, adopting the approach that it should "design, market merchandise from a central location America, Portland, whatever and make it where you should make it in the world and sell it everywhere in the world." Today, just under 40 percent of Columbia's business is outside the United States, and all of its products are made abroad. It sells heavily to Asia, Europe and Canada. It has a joint venture in China and is in the process of buying out its Chinese partner. Vietnam is its largest supplier. A quarter of its footwear comes from China. At every turn in the supply chain, it is faced with tariffs. To import the finished products to retail stores across the United States, Columbia must navigate the remnants of a 1930 trade bill, the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act. That 1930 law raised tariffs rates in an effort to protect American businesses, only to end up being blamed by later economists as a key contributor to the Great Depression. Many of its measures have been scrapped, but some remain, particularly those affecting the clothing business. In addition to imposing levies on foreign steel and aluminum, the Trump administration has placed tariffs on 250 billion worth of Chinese goods, while dangling the prospect of taxing all imports from China. Other countries have retaliated, including China, Europe, Canada and Mexico, taxing American made products that flow into their countries, including apparel. So far, Columbia has gone mostly unscathed, in part because Mr. Trump's initial round of Chinese tariffs has largely avoided clothing. But the company has braced itself for the next wave, which would probably hit many of their imports, particularly Chinese made footwear. Columbia is preparing itself for every contingency. Among the questions the company is contemplating: Can it move products out of its factories and into stores quickly enough to beat any new tariffs before they go into effect? Can it change how it manufactures its goods by, say, ramping up production in Vietnam and slowing it down in China? "We've had probably two meetings a day on that, every day, for the last two months," said Emily Vedaa, Columbia's global trade manager. "How can we soften the blow?" Mr. Trump has been unapologetic about his approach, arguing that any short term economic pain will lead to long term growth. He has also called out companies like Apple, telling them to move their production plants if they don't like his plan. "Make your products in the United States instead of China. Start building new plants now. Exciting!" Mr. Trump said in a tweet in September. But companies like Columbia say they cannot adjust the way they do business on the fly to deal with policy changes, particularly when they are not settled. For instance, Mr. Trump has dangled the threat of additional tariffs on China while also saying a compromise could be reached. He plans to meet with President Xi Jinping of China for a high stakes meeting at the G 20 in Buenos Aires later this month. And while the new tariffs are predicated on trade law, they have come about through executive, not congressional, action and could easily be undone by an administration that looks more kindly on global trade. Thomas B. Cusick, Columbia's chief operating officer, said the company has received its entire fall shipment already, as well as the "lion's share" of merchandise for the Christmas season. In addition, it has bought all its products for next spring and reserved factory capacity for its fall 2019 line. Any changes it makes in response to moves out of Washington would not go into effect until 2020 and that would mean large investments that the company would make only if they were certain to pay off in the long run. Nearly every large American retailer is in a similar situation: 98 percent of the footwear bought by Americans is made overseas, and 97 percent of clothing sold in the United States is produced in other countries. "This migration to Asia has been happening since the '60s," Mr. Boyle said. "And so everybody who made investments in machines to make fabric or extreme, you know, plastics to make nylon or any kind of textile products all those investments have been in Asia. All the technology." Along with the factories, the manufacturing expertise has moved overseas. "It's one thing to design a shirt like you're wearing," Mr. Boyle said. "You can sketch that out on a piece of paper. But to make it fit somebody, that's a technical expertise in tailoring that doesn't exist here anymore. You could come up with some stuff that nobody could wear." Mr. Boyle conceded that if Mr. Trump does hit China with more tariffs and Columbia is not immediately able to find a way around them the company will have no choice but to charge more, despite its long expertise in navigating trade winds.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Review: In This Dance, Death Is Out in the Open None Eiko Otake in her brief and cathartic solo "A Body in a Cemetery" at Green Wood Cemetery. Over the past couple of months in New York City, some dance artists have braved the process of presenting live performance outdoors. Like most social rituals these days, going to a show, even in the open air, involves a whole new set of behaviors. As you choose where to sit, you try not to encroach on anyone's six foot radius. You do your best to make small talk through masks, reading facial expressions from the bridge of the nose up. Under these circumstances, it's hard to sit back and immerse yourself in another world. Even to try can feel like a form of forgetting, or denial. We are, after all, taking these precautions against a backdrop of enormous loss, to prevent loss of an even greater scale. Pretending otherwise takes its psychological toll. And so I found myself overcome with relief, on Saturday evening, to be at Green Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, where I wouldn't have to look away from loss. At Eiko Otake's "A Body in a Cemetery," death was out in the open. "A Body in a Cemetery" was the latest in her series "A Body in Places," which has included solos in Fukushima, Japan, and in Lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center. The brief and cathartic solo performance, presented with Pioneer Works, was the latest in Ms. Otake's meditative series "A Body in Places," a collection of site specific solos that have taken this venerable artist from Fukushima to Fulton Street Station in Lower Manhattan, not far from where the World Trade Center's twin towers once stood. Ms. Otake, who was born in Japan and has lived in New York since 1976, often goes where death has been, attuned to the histories, however painful, of her chosen place. In the program for "A Body in a Cemetery," she writes, "with us are the dead from past centuries, including many whose graves were never built, and the land that precedes us all." In much of her work, the fragile force of Ms. Otake's presence seems to alter the passage of time. On Saturday at dusk, as soon as she appeared on the edge of Cedar Dell an expansive circular space ringed with gravestones, some of which date as far back as the 18th century everything seemed to slow down. Watching her measured, staccato steps toward the hillside where the audience sat, I became hyper aware of sounds punctuating the silence: the rustling of leaves, a distant siren, squawking birds. Life, as much as death, was all around us. Ms. Otake's minimal, deliberate actions also pointed toward the continuity of the living and the dead. As she sprawled in her white dress across a white blanket, wrapping it around her, or lowered her spectral frame onto a mound of dirt, she came as close as one could to merging with the earth. As she tended to tombstones, wiping them with tattered cloths or splashing them with water from a metal bucket, she called to mind the care of a gardener and the shudders of a body wracked with grief. Honoring the ghosts in our midst, Ms. Otake also honored those who were physically present. When she began to walk back toward where she had entered, in the light of the setting sun, I thought she would simply disappear over the horizon. But from that faraway place, she paused and bowed, to warm applause. For the first time in a long time, I felt comfort in the return of a familiar ritual.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Racism, homophobia, sexism, police violence, immigration: All of these issues come up in "Awake." It would be a lot for any one play but "Awake" has nine of them, each clocking in at around 10 or 15 minutes. To its credit, the show, written and directed by K. Lorrel Manning at the Barrow Group, moves at a steady clip. After all, the best thing about an anthology is that if an individual play isn't very good, it also won't be very long. Then again, these are not so much plays as vignettes. There is no time to get attached to any of the characters, or to let the situations blossom in a dramatically impactful manner. Setup, red herring, reveal, punch line: over and out. In "Carlos, the Protector," for instance, the protagonist is a cop (Jose Eduardo Ramos) who recounts the fast decision he had to make in a difficult, tense situation. The moral of the story is the moral of every story here: It's complicated. In "The 'N' Connection," an interracial couple (Michael Giese and Madeleine Mfuru) argue over who has the right to say a specific epithet and whether there is such a thing as reverse racism. In "Saving Souls," a teacher (Julia Ryan) summons the mother (Nelly Savinon) of a little boy whose report on Hitler raised hackles among students and parents. The boy is an excellent student at a charter school and the only Latino in his class and it's all ... complicated. Mr. Manning take pains to show the many sides of an issue and can't be accused of hardened didacticism, but his efforts to be evenhanded can err on the side of safety and often sap the show's energy. An exception is "The Date," the only entry flirting with satire and the only one to feature an obvious villain, so caricatural as to be a refreshingly obvious pinata for "woke" theatergoers. Martin (Garen McRoberts), is a cocky corporate bro who can't stand what he perceives as affirmative action. This peach of a guy complains to his dinner date, Susan (Anna Russell), about a certain Jamal being hired over a certain Tommy. When pressed, Martin admits that Jamal is doing just fine at his job "but that's not the point." (You have to wonder why it took the reasonable Susan four dates to realize what a colossal jerk Martin is anybody with functioning ears would have gotten that message in seconds.) The show is essentially an earnest prompter for conversations or school discussions. Audience members are even given cards on which they can write down impressions, thoughts or questions before pinning them on an "experience wall" in the theater's lobby. What may linger most, however, is not a provocative idea (there are none) but some of the performances. In "A J Rule the Universe," for example, Vinny Baierlein and Trey Santiago Hudson portray disaffected teenagers munching on fast food fries and shooting the breeze as they drive around not as aimlessly as you might think at first. Mr. Baierlein and Mr. Santiago Hudson effectively paint outside of the rough outline they've been given. These characters' lives may be in stasis, but those few minutes in their company go fast.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Virginia Commonwealth University, poised to open its new Institute of Contemporary Art in Richmond on April 21, announced on Thursday that its inaugural director, Lisa Freiman, has stepped down, effective immediately. Since 2013, Ms. Freiman has steered the vision for the city's first institution dedicated to contemporary art. She has completed a 37 million capital campaign and overseen construction of its angular glass and zinc clad building, designed by Steven Holl Architects, in a city the former capitol of the confederacy known for its historic red brick architecture and monuments. In a news release by the university, Ms. Freiman said, "I would like to turn my attention to some projects that I had to put on hold," including a monograph on the sculptor Claes Oldenburg. She will remain a tenured faculty member of the V.C.U. School of Arts. The provost and vice president for academic affairs at V.C.U., Gail Hackett, said: "We especially appreciate how Lisa advanced the university's commitment to diversity and inclusion in the arts and worked to integrate the strategic goals of the university into the I.C.A." Both Ms. Freiman and the university declined to comment further. Ms. Freiman came to I.C.A. from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where she had been a senior curator and chair of the contemporary art department. In a 2016 interview, Ms. Freiman said she hoped "the I.C.A. can become a forum for sometimes difficult conversations, using art as a catalyst for broader discussions about the state of our country and about the world."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome; Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome; Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times Credit... Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome; Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times MILAN The Museo del Novecento is usually bustling, but on Wednesday afternoon, it was virtually empty. Giulio Gamberi, 42, an IT manager, had finished working from home, and decided to enjoy the museum without its usual crowds. He was outnumbered by guards, many of whom wore protective face masks and gloves. Italy's first coronavirus cases were reported on Feb. 21, and two days later, the government cordoned off 11 towns and closed schools, universities, libraries, theaters and museums across the north of the country. While some museums were allowed to open, on Tuesday the government announced new nationwide measures. Residents are discouraged from hugging, kissing and shaking hands in public, and must keep one meter about three feet apart from each other at all times, the regulations say. In a further decree on Wednesday, Italy suspended "events and performances of any nature, including cinema and theater," where the one meter rule cannot be enforced. "If the cinema or theater manager can guarantee the meter distance, selling fewer tickets, or arranging people so they don't sit next to each other, they can stay open," said Mattia Morandi, a spokesman for the culture ministry. "But the fact is, people aren't going to the cinema or the theater." In Milan on Wednesday, attendance was down at museums, too. Under the regulations, museums must also limit their capacity to make sure the one meter rule can be enforced. But, at the Novecento, there was no need to turn anyone away. A staff member at the ticket kiosk said that, by just after midday, only 28 people had been admitted to the museum. At the Palazzo Reale museum next door, 160 visitors were admitted by 1 p.m. on Wednesday. According to a staff member at the ticket desk, the usual daily average is 1,000. Daily attendance across Milan's museums was down by 70 percent, Filippo Del Corno, Milan's chief culture official, said in a telephone interview. Italy's culture ministry analyzes attendance at museums and archaeological sites on a monthly basis, so numbers for the whole country were not available on Thursday. But contacted individually, some of Italy's top tourist draws were noting dramatic drops in visitors. The archaeological site at Pompeii has seen an 80 percent reduction, a culture ministry official said. The Uffizi in Florence continues to register between 1,000 to 2,500 visitors a day, "about the same as a normal day in low season, which this year is likely to continue through March and April," said the museum's director Eike Schmidt. In Milan, people were pulling together and trying to follow the rules, he said. "There was a small queue at the Palazzo Reale yesterday, and it was like being in England. People really were patiently standing one meter apart." But how long it would take the country's cultural life to return to normal was unclear. "I don't believe it will be an immediate recovery," Mr. Del Corno said. "It could be more than another week."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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For the last decade as he snared an Oscar nomination for Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave," swaggered through the National Theater production of "Everyman" and wielded magical weapons in Marvel's "Doctor Strange" Chiwetel Ejiofor has had his mind on other things. When he wasn't racking up accolades in front of the camera, Ejiofor was figuring out how to step behind it and make a movie about William Kamkwamba, who at 13 saved his Malawi village from drought and famine by building a windmill. The result, "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" Ejiofor's feature directorial debut, based on Kamkwamba's 2009 best selling memoir arrives on Netflix on March 1 as well as in select theaters for a weeklong run. "I read it when it first came out and immediately wanted to get the rights. I just had a strong instinct," Ejiofor said. "It was talking about things that everybody was dealing with globally" democracy, economics, the environment "but concentrated on these people who were at the thin end at the wedge." "I found a project I loved so deeply that I was prepared to doggedly stick with over many years," he added. Born into a farming family, Kamkwamba (played by Maxwell Simba, with Ejiofor as his father, Trywell) was forced to quit high school after his parents couldn't scrape together the tuition. Undeterred, he sneaked into classes and the library, where an American textbook called "Using Energy" inspired him to use bicycle parts to build a windmill to pump water for crops and in the process keep his village alive as corrupt politicians abandoned it. Kamkwamba was unable to return to school for five years, until his inventions captivated supporters who helped him gain entry into the African Leadership Academy, and then into Dartmouth, where he graduated in 2014. In an interview at a Lower East Side hotel, Ejiofor, 41 who is London based and was on a work layover between the Sundance and Berlin film festivals, where his film captured warm reviews spoke about his passion project. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. Can you pinpoint the moment when you knew you had to make this movie? I was very struck by this idea of a 13 year old sneaking into school, and I considered what my attitude to school was when I was 13 and the idea of how inconceivable it would be that I'd have tried to sneak past teachers in order to get into a double math class. For William to find his way through in that kind of situation just seemed extremely hopeful to me. You first had to write the screenplay before shooting in 2017. Did the ideas behind his story shift during those years? A lot of these ideas became almost more pertinent over time. When I started writing it, there really wasn't a question mark over the nature of democracy in the Western world, so it seemed like a very African issue that this corrupt politician comes along and he's beating people up at rallies. By the time we finished the film, these ideas of whether there are limits to democracy were everywhere, in the States and with Brexit. There was also the financial crash, and the idea of deregulation or unregulated markets was all people were talking about. Years later it's so much more a part of how we think about the potential disastrous consequences of some of the actions like looking at a famine that was really about unregulated grain prices. As an actor, do you see the scenes in your head when you're writing? Yeah, I mean all of it. You hear the scenes, you play out the scenes. I would be seemingly crazy, walking around playing all the parts, just invested in all of the moments of the film. What is William doing now? Now he works in North Carolina and in Malawi, and through his organization Moving Windmills, he's setting up an innovation center in Lilongwe the capital of Malawi to support young people who have ideas innovators, inventors, thinkers and put them in contact with people who could help them actualize their ideas. Let's talk about some of your other upcoming films. There was quite a twist with your character, Baron Mordo, at the end of "Doctor Strange." Have you officially signed on to reprise the role in the sequel? Laughs "I can neither confirm nor deny" type thing. Hmm. You also have two Disney movies coming out. You're playing Scar, the Jeremy Irons role, in the "Lion King" reboot with Beyonce and Donald Glover. Did you feel any pressure reworking such a beloved film? It's just very exciting. Obviously the original was so incredible and so sort of legendary. But like anything else, you have to kind of put that to one side and just try and play the part and see what happens. Could you maybe slip into your Scar voice for a moment? Laughs We'll have to wait and hear it. How about "Maleficent 2"? There's a mysterious blank on IMDb where your character should be named, though rumor has it you're a possible love interest for Angelina Jolie. Putting on a plummy British accent I don't know how much I can say about any of this, really. I actually came to the first "Maleficent" quite late. But I was totally stunned by it and thought it was such an interesting take on the way that we view fairy tales, and how it imprints us with certain thoughts and feelings right from a young age that we carry through subconsciously. I think "Maleficent 2" expands that world in a fascinating way. And I'd worked with Angelina before in "Salt" and had a great time. She's such a remarkable actress and just a force. It was very cool. "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" is no fairy tale. You strove for authenticity by having the cast speak the native Chichewa, which required lots of subtitles. Is it a coincidence that it ended up on Netflix, like Alfonso Cuaron's "Roma," another heavily subtitled film? When I started on the process with this film, there were only a few avenues that one could go, and those questions are really commercial questions because the authenticity would always butt heads with this idea of, "Does that affect the capacity for the film to reach an audience in the West?" In the meantime, Netflix arrives with a whole other way of accessing and engaging people. So being able to put the film into a limited release but at the same time allow it to reach a global audience is a kind of wonderful development for a film like this.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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"This is such an exceptional building, and now that all of the interior amenity spaces are completed, I can see it becoming a destination building in the years to come," said Ms. Candler, referring to the condo's private wine cellars, family club room facing the garden, and residents' lounge with a decorative fireplace. Ms. Candler is the listing agent for the two remaining units in the building, both of them penthouses, and both recently reduced in price: PH17E at 17.75 million and PH19E at 14.95 million. This week's runner up, at 20,161,350, was a duplex penthouse downtown at the Whitman, a luxurious four unit conversion at 21 East 26th Street that faces south on Madison Square Park. The original listing price for the grandly proportioned 6,540 square foot residence, enhanced by outdoor spaces that total 3,106 square feet, was 25 million, reduced in May to 22.25 million. The monthly carrying charges are 22,522. Like the other three apartments in the building, all of which stretch a full block between East 26th and 27th Streets and have soaring arched living room windows that overlook the park, the penthouse has its own private entrance foyer off a keyed elevator. There are four bedrooms, six full baths, two living rooms and two powder rooms. The master suite on the top floor is distinctive for its outdoor options a putting green off the bath and a croquet pitch off the bedroom. Both living rooms have south facing terraces, and the upstairs living room looks onto its own gardens as well as the park. Melanie Lazenby and Dina Lewis of Douglas Elliman Real Estate handled all four Whitman units for the sponsor/developer, Mitchell Holdings, which paid around 13 million for the 1924 Georgian style brick and limestone building in 2011. Fredrik Eklund and John Gomes, also of Elliman, brought the buyer, who used a limited liability company, 21 East 26th Street, with a Santa Monica, Calif., address; online speculation and a report in the New York Daily News have it that the new owner is the singer/actress Jennifer Lopez. The confirmed boldface residents at the Whitman include the Nascar star Jeff Gordon and Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Call it the case of the homing lizards. It's a small mystery. No one of any species is murdered. But the central question is one that has prompted plenty of scientific research: How do animals find their way home? The lizards in this case are anoles abundant, mostly small reptiles that thrive in the Caribbean. The species is Anolis gundlachi. The lead detective is Manuel Leal, a biologist at the University of Missouri. He has been studying the behavior of anoles for more than 20 years. For about three years, Dr. Leal has been trying to understand how the anole finds its way back to its own territory after being carried into the rain forest. And as he told an audience in June at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Anchorage, the case is far from closed. First, a bit of background. Anoles are particularly abundant in the dense vegetation of the rain forests in Puerto Rico, where Dr. Leal studies them. Each species is tied to a very specific environment. For instance, many live on tree trunks, but only a particular part of the trunk. Trunk ground anoles live only in the space from the ground up to six feet or so. Trunk crown anoles live above them, up to the crown of the tree. Twig anoles live way up high.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Neil LaBute, a prominent American playwright and screenwriter known for his portraits of misanthropic and misogynistic men, has been abruptly cut off by one of New York's leading nonprofit theaters. MCC Theater, a prestigious Off Broadway company, announced Thursday that it was canceling an upcoming production of Mr. LaBute's latest play and terminating his tenure as its playwright in residence, effective immediately. The theater's leadership repeatedly declined to explain the reason for its action, but on Friday, Blake West, its executive director, said, "We're committed to creating and maintaining a respectful and professional work environment for everyone we work with." Mr. LaBute did not respond to a request for comment. The action is a startling development in the 15 year relationship between the nonprofit theater and the polarizing playwright: MCC has been a longtime champion of Mr. LaBute's work, which often raises uncomfortable questions about sex and power and leaves viewers debating whether Mr. LaBute was critiquing or reveling in the bad behavior of some of his protagonists.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Natasha Singer, a technology reporter for The New York Times, at the Data Society Research Institute in Manhattan, where she did a fellowship. Encrypted communication services have become crucial tools in her work. Limiting the Influence of Tech When You Report on It How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Natasha Singer, a technology reporter for The Times in New York, discussed the tech she's using. You report on digital privacy, health and education technology. What are your most important tools for doing your job? We're living in a surveillance economy where sites and apps can track and categorize our every online move. In that ecosystem, encrypted communication services have become some of my most important reporting tools. For people who would rather not reach me through my corporate Gmail account at The Times, I use ProtonMail, an encrypted email service. I also use Signal, an encrypted text messaging and calling service. And I do some online research through Tor, a browser that masks your online address so sites can't track your physical location. I also use DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn't store your search history. My wariness of tracking developed when I was a cub reporter in Moscow. On one of my first stories there, I invited a Russian legislator, who was a democracy advocate, to lunch at a restaurant near the Kremlin. She arrived and immediately started combing through a vase of flowers on the table, checking for government listening devices. After that, I often interviewed Russian democracy activists during walks in local parks and forests. It made an impression on me that even the mere idea of being surveilled can chill people's behavior. Now I view privacy not so much as the ability to keep your personal details away from prying government agencies or companies. Privacy is the right to choose which entities access information about you, control how those entities use your data, check the fairness of data based decisions made about you, and correct errors. Since American consumers currently lack those kinds of rights over most of their data, I've grown fond of tools that lift the hood on online tracking and profiling. What could be better about some of these tools? ProtonMail can be cumbersome. The service encrypts your emails before they reach the ProtonMail server. As a result, you can't search the texts of your emails for keywords if you use the free service. You can search only the subject lines. It's a constant reminder that ceding to online surveillance is much more frictionless than trying to limit it. Recently Apple investors raised concerns about smartphone addiction and children. Is this a problem and are there adequate solutions? Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. I've heard from many parents, including a few physicians, concerned about the amount of time their kids are spending online at school and at home. It's so difficult to find the right balance between making sure our children are fluent with online tools and protecting them from getting sucked in by habit forming video platforms and social networks. Many parents feel they are up against a powerful, interlocking ecosystem, designed to hook their kids on constant scrolling, watching, and clicking. Given the vast ecosystem, however, singling out Apple as the culprit seems to me a little bit like blaming only soda can manufacturers for Americans' addiction to sugary beverages. Yes, it would be terrific if Apple introduced new control options for parents. But if shareholders want to fault companies for manipulating or addicting users, they should also be taking a hard look at Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Netflix and many more. Even small user interface changes could make a big difference. Imagine if the default setting for streaming video services wasn't autoplay. On a larger level, we've seen over the past year how some Big Tech companies initially refused to take responsibility for the spread of fake news and other side effects of their innovations. In that context, platforms that nudge children and adults to stay online are merely one symptom of a much bigger problem. You wrote a series last year examining tech industry influence in American public schools. Now you're looking into Silicon Valley's increasing footprint in the health sector. What are the similarities and differences? There's huge hype around the idea that tech can improve education. Same goes for health. So far, however, there's not much rigorous evidence that learning apps on their own improve students' educational results. Likewise, there is little hard evidence that health apps by themselves reduce disease. Still, I'm optimistic about the potential for software in health. That's partly because a few tech companies are participating in rigorous studies, called randomized controlled trials. In these studies, researchers randomly select some volunteers to try a new intervention. By comparing the results in the treated and untreated groups, researchers could identify apps that do make significant health contributions. Beyond your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with in your daily life? Every weekend, I try out a new recipe from NYT Cooking. And while I'm cooking, I listen to podcasts. I'm currently devouring Uncivil, a history podcast on the Civil War. It unfolds like a detective story. And while you're engrossed in the plot twists, it neatly obliterates the standard American narrative of the Civil War. Right now, my family is on a bit of a Brit TV binge. We just watched the second season of "The Crown," the fictional series on Queen Elizabeth II, and "The Coronation," a glowing documentary featuring the real QE2. And we raced through "Prime Suspect: Tennison," the prequel to the classic TV police procedural that starred Helen Mirren. I also just took an audio boot camp course at Columbia University School of Journalism. Now I'm teaching myself to use Hindenburg, a radio editing program. Are you doing anything unusual to limit the spread of your data? It may seem quaint, but I still relish the idea that people in a democratic society have the right to be anonymous in public. I think Americans should be able to attend political protests or drive to the grocery store in our pajamas without being recognized by government agencies or companies. The recent proliferation of face recognition software, however, poses huge risks to public anonymity. In simple terms, face recognition software works by scanning a photo of your face and then converting your facial topography into a unique code, called a face print. The benefit as well as the hazard is that a company that takes a face print from one photo of you could potentially use it to identify you in any other photo or video frame. I may be particularly attuned to the fragility of public anonymity because, like many journalists, I've been doxed. So, as an experiment, I've been limiting photos of myself online to see whether I have any control over how they spread. As a kind of inside joke, my Twitter avatar is an illustration that Minh Uong, the art director in the Times's Business section, created for an article I once wrote about the risks of facial recognition.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Peter H. Hunt, who had a triumphant success with his directorial debut on Broadway, the musical "1776," which ran for almost three years and won the Tony Award for best musical, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81. His wife, Barbette (Tweed) Hunt, said the cause was complications of Parkinson's disease. Mr. Hunt was also well known in theatrical circles in the Northeast for his long involvement with the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, where he was lighting designer on productions as early as the late 1950s and advanced to become artistic director from 1989 to 1995. He also directed for television, including numerous episodes of the family drama "Touched by an Angel," seen on CBS from 1994 through 2003, and several adaptations of Mark Twain stories. "1776," with music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards and a book by Peter Stone about the American colonies' debate over whether to declare independence, won three Tony Awards in 1969, including a best director statuette for Mr. Hunt. Among the shows it beat out for best musical was "Hair." "'1776' is a near miracle, a highly skilled entertainment taken from historic fact," Kevin Kelly wrote in his review in The Boston Globe, "and it is unquestionably one of the most intelligent musicals in the history of the American theater." The musical's characters include towering figures in American history, among them Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Mr. Hunt said the intent was to humanize them to show them, as they debated independence, as people with the traits everyone has, including stubbornness. "It's the same problem we have in Washington every day," he told The Winston Salem Journal in 2002. "How do we get these people to agree on anything? Not a whole lot has changed in 225 years." Mr. Hunt was a well regarded lighting designer early in his career, working not only at Williamstown but also on Broadway. His first four Broadway credits were as lighting designer, including on a 1966 revival of "Annie Get Your Gun" that starred Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley, reprising a role she had first played 20 years earlier. At first Mr. Hunt only dabbled in directing. He directed his own version of "Annie Get Your Gun" at Williamstown in 1966, and a "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" there in 1968 with a cast that included Ken Howard, who would go on to play Jefferson in "1776." According to a 2016 article on Broadway World, the theater website, one of his directorial side projects was his ticket to the "1776" job. He had directed a workshop production of a musical by his friend Austin Pendleton and several others that Jerome Robbins, the noted choreographer and director, had seen. When the producer Stuart Ostrow, who was developing "1776," asked Mr. Robbins for ideas on a director, he suggested Mr. Hunt. The Broadway success of "1776" led to touring productions and, in June 1970, to the somewhat incongruous sight of the show being performed in the Mother Country, at the New Theater in London, by an all British cast. The opening performance there drew five curtain calls. The Broadway cast was asked to perform the show at the White House for President Richard M. Nixon, but with some cuts, including the song "Cool, Cool, Considerate Men," sung by conservative politicians who want to steer the country "forever to the right." The cast and producers declined to censor the show, and the demand was dropped; the full version was performed at the White House in early 1970. But in 1972, when Mr. Hunt directed a film version of the musical, Jack L. Warner, the film's producer and a friend of Nixon (who was then running for re election), cut the song in postproduction. Mr. Hunt, learning of the excision after the fact, was not happy. "I asked him, 'Jack, how could you do this?'" Mr. Hunt told The Los Angeles Times in 2001. "And he said, 'With a pair of scissors.'" The cut material was restored in later DVD releases. The film of "1776" led to directing assignments for television. In the 1970s Mr. Hunt directed episodes of "Adam's Rib," "Ellery Queen" and other shows. In the 1980s his credits included "Life on the Mississippi," a 1980 adaptation of the Twain story for PBS's "Great Performances" series, as well as a very different water related effort, the premiere episode of "Baywatch" in 1989. Mr. Hunt also directed TV adaptations of Twain's Huckleberry Finn saga and "The Innocents Abroad." In 1993 he gave himself a cameo as a parole officer in "Sworn to Vengeance," a TV movie he directed starring Robert Conrad.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Suspended animation: Francis Bacon's "Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus" was shown at Sotheby's in London in March and estimated to sell for upwards of 60 million in the May Contemporary Art auction in New York. Sotheby's has not said if the sale will be canceled or postponed. Francis Bacon's 1981 three part oil painting, "Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus," was supposed to feature in Sotheby's marquee contemporary art evening auction in New York on May 13, where it was estimated to sell for at least 60 million. That live auction clearly won't be happening now, in light of the coronavirus. But Sotheby's has yet to announce what it plans to do with its May sales instead: Hold them online? Postpone them till late June, as its competitors, Christie's and Phillips have assuming it's possible for people to gather by then? Cancel till the world is less upside down? Like companies all over the world, auction houses now find themselves in uncharted territory, trying to find a way to keep their businesses afloat even as the future of buying art looks as if it may be forever changed. With workers being furloughed and headquarters lying empty, some art professionals say the current necessary switch to online sales also underway at galleries could have a lasting impact on the live auction enterprise. "I'm thinking really seriously about what the online experience is for our clients," said Amy Cappellazzo, chairwoman of the Fine Art division of Sotheby's. "In effect, we've been in the live theater business. Now we're segueing into what is more like live streaming. The truth is, that revolution has been underway for some time." Art market veterans agree that the pandemic has accelerated changes that were underway an effort by auction houses to build up private and online sales; to reduce costly and cumbersome catalogs; and to develop younger, nontraditional customers. "People who can change, adapt and innovate will be the ones best able to move forward," said Clare McAndrew, an art economist who puts out the annual Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report. "The online segment could be a big winner here." Auction houses have been trying to adjust quickly, though the uncertain trajectory of the virus makes it difficult to solidify plans. The most immediate question is the spring auctions, which anchor the art market calendar, along with the fall sales in November; last May, the five day series of sales at Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips raised a combined 2 billion. Both Christie's and Phillips have consolidated their New York Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art sales into one week of 20th century auctions scheduled for the end of June that will also absorb the London June sales. The Hong Kong sales have been pushed to July, though that, too, may be wishful thinking. Could the live auction ultimately become a relic of the past? Still unclear is whether people will be able to travel or gather for in person auctions as soon as this summer and, if not, whether auction houses would try to sell those big ticket works of art in an online auction, where the prices are usually lower. "For certain higher priced objects, the jury is still very much out on whether an online only sale without opportunity for proper viewing can truly maximize value," said Edward Dolman, the chairman and chief executive of Phillips. "Once you get to a point where people see online sales maximizing or exceeding value, that would be the tipping point; that's when you'll see our business going broadly online." The pandemic also raises questions for auction houses' costly overhead. If the auction world becomes more virtual, houses will have to re evaluate their need for prime real estate. Phillips' new Park Avenue headquarters, for example, was due to open in May, but construction has now been halted. "This is the stimulus the art market needed to move online," Ms. McAndrew said. "Buying online isn't a collector's No. 1 choice; it won't replace the excitement and sense of community of an auction. But online sales will help relieve the cost pressures of live events." All of the auction houses have added online only sales across several categories for April and May and are already seeing results. Phillips said its March 4 20th century and contemporary art auction had a record number of online participants, with bidders from 47 countries. And nearly half the lots from its April prints sale received bids in the first 24 hours. However, the most expensive item bought by an online bidder in March was a KAWS piece, which topped out at only 350,000. Sotheby's 21 online sales since March 1 have totaled a healthy 40.1 million, which may reflect the fact that the auction house's new owner is the telecommunications mogul Patrick Drahi. Up to 50 percent of the bidders in these sales have been entirely new to Sotheby's, the auction house said, and 50 percent of all bids are being placed on mobile devices. "The art market after resisting for so long has been forced to give digital a chance," said Thierry Ehrmann, chief executive and founder of Artprice, an auction result database in France. Even old school collectors seem to be getting more comfortable bidding online, because right now that is their only option. "I've seen a lot of clients I wouldn't have expected interested in the technology," Ms. Cappellazzo said. "Your palms are sweaty, you're hoping it's your bid it's a bit like a video game." Christie's has increased its online only auctions in April and May from nine to more than 20 events, which are estimated to raise at least 20 million. "This crisis is a moment of truth for online sales," said Guillaume Cerutti, Christie's chief executive. The transition to e commerce is buoyed by an emerging class of wealthy millennials who are spending more than six times the amount of their parents' generation and have few qualms about buying art online, according to the Art Market Report, which also indicated that 92 percent of this demographic have bought works through the web. Others point out that seasoned collectors especially those in distant parts of the world already buy some artworks sight unseen, trusting the reputation of established auction houses, condition reports and their own connoisseurship. Whether those online sales can start including multimillion dollar masterpieces is still unknown. Before the pandemic, the May sales were expected to be strong, given first rate material like the Anderson collection of postwar American art at Sotheby's, valued at 55 million, which includes pieces by Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. The Macklowe Collection has postponed its decision about how that trophy material will be sold. The idea that collectors will feel comfortable bidding tens of millions of dollars on an investment like the Bacon triptych especially if they haven't seen it in person still seems unlikely. "I'm not an online fan," said Adam Lindemann, a prominent collector and dealer. "I want to see the real thing if I can." Mr. Gorvy also emphasized that sellers need auctions to gauge where the market is; sporadic private sales don't provide enough information on whether prices have fallen as a result of the virus. "There is nothing publicly to test the market no fairs or auctions," he said. "It's holding up business. People don't really know at what price to trade." Postponing sales are not just a matter of pushing them back on the calendar. Consignments involve complicated contracts that stipulate not only the date on which an artwork will be sold but how it will be marketed, where it will appear in the catalog and other minutiae. If the sales don't happen as scheduled, sellers could decide to withdraw their consignments. Similarly, auction houses that have promised sellers a certain minimum price could pull out of those guarantees. Auction houses are trying to balance the interests of waiting for the best time to obtain the highest prices and needing to sell soonest to keep the lights on. Even if auction houses can manage live sales by June, experts say, collectors may not be in the mood to conspicuously lay out large sums for art, when many have lost their loved ones and may still be worried about their own physical and financial well being. "This insane thing turned the world inside out everyone is affected at some level," said Mr. Lindemann, the collector. "We have to be careful to temper self interest and think how we can help out. Promoting and chasing sales at this time just feels wrong."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Kim Jong un, Explorer? Did the leader of North Korea actually climb the country's highest peak, at more than 9,000 feet, in leather shoes and a medium weight coat? (BuzzFeed) Travel Watch If you're expecting an Apple Watch later this week (or most likely in the coming months), several nifty travel apps will be available for downloads, with programs created by TripAdvisor and Uber to American Airlines. (CNN) Airplane as a Sardine Can Are things only going to get worse when it comes to airlines cramming passengers into cabins? This look at an Airbus concept with 11 seats across doesn't bode well. (Skift) Open Arms Although travel itineraries can be confirmed at the click of a button, full time travel agents are still able to provide years of expertise to travelers, along with another invaluable benefit: personal attention. (Pittsburgh Post Gazette)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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A few years ago, when the Whitney Museum's airy home in the meatpacking district was brand new, the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner were part of a group exhibition there my favorite part, though had less to do with their art than its arresting display. Huge and colorful, Krasner's canvas got a magnificently conspicuous spot, while a smaller, dimmer work by Pollock, her celebrated husband, hung opposite on a more crowded wall. It felt like a face off between them one that the Great Man was losing to the Little Woman, who at last got to outshine him publicly. Something similar occurs in the French playwright Fabrice Melquiot's "Pollock," a two hander that (its title notwithstanding) is as much about Krasner as it is about Pollock, and above all about their volatile pairing. Directed by Paul Desveaux for Compagnie de la Vallee l'Heliotrope, it's a duet, a double act, a surreal sparring match steeped in alcohol and dripping with paint. As embodied by the experimental theater veteran Jim Fletcher in the modernist Underground Theater at Abrons Arts Center, Jackson Pollock can be fascinating to watch a brooding, dry humored malcontent in the 20th century American genius mold. But Lee Krasner is the riveting one, rare and defiant and glowing with life in a beautifully modulated, remarkably understated performance by Birgit Huppuch. Together these barefoot ghosts are really something.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Substantive and stunning, the documentary "Time" delivers on the title's promise of the monumental as well as the personal. In telling the story of Fox Rich's fight to keep her family intact raising six sons, making a living, doing activist work while her husband, Rob, served a prison sentence of 60 years, the director Garrett Bradley depicts with rattling and tender regard America's thorny gestalt of the individual thrown against the backdrop of systemic inequality. In 1997, young marrieds Fox and Rob G. Rich high school sweethearts opened a hip hop apparel business in Shreveport, La. They were brashly optimistic and then they struggled. "What I remember more than anything was not wanting to fail, and we had become desperate," Fox Rich says in one of the voice overs that carry the film. "Desperate people do desperate things. It's as simple as that." Rob and his younger cousin robbed a credit union. Fox was the getaway driver. They were caught. As ripe for rebuttal as her assessment may be, it doesn't make Fox Rich any less compelling a protagonist. Once the twins Freedom and Justus were born, she went to prison; she served three and a half years. Rob Rich was sentenced to 60 years without the chance of parole or at the time any hope of sentencing mitigation. In the sweep of Bradley's epic vision, Fox Rich is both a Penelope and an Odysseus for America's dark odyssey. Because this is her saga (not her husband's), she is the steadfast mate and the heroic traveler, making her way through the chop and around the shoals of mass incarceration. That phrase, while apt, smudges the names of those lost within the very system it describes. "Time" makes Fox and her sons indelible. "Time" doesn't retry the Riches' crime (although there is a scene between Fox Rich and her pastor that wrestles with the harm the robbery inflicted). Instead it focuses on the consequences of Rob's harsh sentence. What did it take for Fox and her sons to avoid being torn apart by Rob's absence? A worry was that the boys would probably be men perhaps even fathers in their own right long before his return. The daughter of the painters Suzanne McClelland and Peter Bradley, Garrett Bradley has a taut and compassionate grasp of being Black in America that is realized through a deft layering of images and archival footage, sound and music. (She won the best director prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year; this feature was a co production of The New York Times.) In 2009, Fox Rich published her memoir, "The One That Got Away: A True Story of Personal Transformation." She ran her own car dealership in New Orleans, where she moved her sons to be closer to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, and has become a figure in the prison abolition movement. A deft montage of Rich's many appearances in churches, at colleges, in auditoriums over the years gives a sense of her pull, but also her growth. Rich is Bradley's collaborator as much as subject, having provided years of the home video footage that has been interwoven with sumptuous black and white images captured by Bradley and the cinematographers Zac Manuel, Justin Zweifach and Nisa East. Bradley and the editor Gabriel Rhodes make nuanced use of Rich's videos. Time doesn't march on. It curls back. It nudges forward. Some video footage is charming when the twins are asked about little Freedom's student of the month prize, or the kindergartner Remington boasts about being strong enough to carry his mom's load. "Time" also wounds, often in those same moments. Moving between past and present mimics a cycle of hope and rebuff. Rich's faith isn't toothless; it requires tenacity. When she is on the phone with this judge's assistant, that prison official's gatekeeper, her voice is pleasant, information seeking, seldom beseeching or embittered. Above all, the "ma'ams" are tactical. Rich's mother, known as Ms. Peggy, appears from time to time. An educator, she hoped for better and expected more from her daughter. "Right don't come from doing wrong," she says. But it isn't all judgment. Ms. Peggy had more than a hand in helping raise the boys. We watch these sons the twins in particular grow into contemplative young men, who, by the way, seem to really like ironing. In a movie that demands your visual attention, one of the most revealing moments requires listening. It comes when, again in voice over, Remington, Fox Rich and Justus talk about what "time is." If one judges a story of crushing absence by the ache of its homecoming, "Time" doesn't disappoint. Nor does it end with a scene of "closure." (How could it? So much lies ahead for Fox and Rob Rich, and their sons.) Instead the documentary rewinds through the archival footage to a kiss before the time, before the crime. We could see this reversal as merely a gesture of hope. But consider the final moments of "Time" a different kind of restorative justice one signaling a family's reset while acknowledging so much that was lost. Lisa Kennedy writes on popular culture, race and gender. She lives in Denver, Colo. Time Rated PG 13 for some strong language. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters on Oct. 9 and streaming on Amazon on Oct 16. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Striking it rich is the American dream, a magnetic myth that has drawn millions to this nation. And yet, a countervailing message has always percolated through the culture: Money can't buy happiness. From Jay Gatsby and Charles Foster Kane to Tony Soprano and Walter White, the woefully wealthy are among the seminal figures of literature, film and television. A thriving industry of gossipy, star studded magazines and websites combines these two ideas, extolling the lifestyles of the rich and famous while exposing the sadness of celebrity. All of which raises the question: Is the golden road paved with misery? Yes, in a lot of cases, according to a growing body of research exploring the connection between wealth and happiness. Studies in behavioral economics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience are providing new insights into how a changing American economy and the wiring of the human brain can make life on easy street feel like a slog. Researchers have also identified counterintuitive strategies successful people can use to stave off these negative effects. Make no mistake, it is better to be rich than poor psychologically as well as materially. Levels of depression, anxiety and stress diminish as incomes rise. What has puzzled researchers is that the psychological benefits of wealth seem to stop accruing once people reach an income of about 75,000 a year. "The question is, What are the factors that dampen the rewards of income?" said Scott Schieman, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. "Why doesn't earning even more money beyond a certain level make us feel even happier and more satisfied?" The main culprit, he said, is the growing demands of work. For millenniums, leisure was wealth's bedfellow. The rich were different because they worked less. The tables began to turn in America during the 1960s, when inherited privilege gave way to educational credentials and advancement became more closely tied to merit. Today, says Erik Hurst, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, "the more education you have, the less time you have for leisure." In modern America, the tireless Stakhanovites are not the coal miners of Soviet lore but highly compensated professionals, corporate executives and entrepreneurs who brag about eating lunch at their desks and never taking a vacation. Twenty five percent of all salaried workers said they worked at least 60 hours per week, according to a Gallup poll from August. Fifty percent said they worked at least 50 hours a week, compared with 26 percent of hourly workers. These numbers may be lower than reality as the rise of technology, especially cellphones, email and social media, means many people are never really off the clock. This helps explain Dr. Schieman's finding that "excessive job pressure, role blurring, when work spills over into nonwork situations, and work family conflict" have led to a phenomenon he calls the "stress of high status." He said "the feeling of always being rushed for time" coupled with an inability to disengage from work allows stress to "accumulate and compound." Like many overscheduled children, wealthy people tend to fill their leisure time with obligations. "People with greater income tend to devote relatively more of their time to work, compulsory nonworking activities (such as shopping and child care), and active leisure (such as exercise)," Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on the science of decision making, and his co authors observed in a seminal paper in 2006. "Being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed." In addition to external pressures and behaviors, human nature can exacerbate stress. Recent scientific discoveries paradoxically suggest that people can seize more control of their lives and become happier by recognizing that their brains have a mind of their own, leading them to think and act in ways at odds with their interests and goals. Modern executives can gain an edge by seeing their minds as one more thing to manage. An important place to start, according to Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard economist, and Eldar Shafir, a Princeton psychologist, is by understanding how the brain responds to deprivation (whether of time or money). "When we experience scarcity of any kind, we become absorbed by it," they write in their book "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much." "The mind orients automatically, powerfully, toward unfulfilled need. For the hungry, that need is food. For the busy it might be a project that needs to be finished." As Dr. Kahneman and his longtime collaborator, David A. Schkade, observed: "Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it." Looming deadlines tend to focus the mind, often inspiring purpose and creativity. But they also capture much of the brain's finite mental capacity. It presses out other needs, often leading to tunnel vision. A busy executive may want to go out for lunch, take a vacation or see her daughter's softball game. These breaks might even help her be more effective at work. But her mind naturally focuses on the crisis du jour. "Immediate scarcity looms large," they write, "and important things unrelated to it will be neglected." This can generate even more stress. In the modern workplace, where deadlines come like blades on a windmill, one after the other, a singular focus on work can become a way of life. This phenomenon has roots in our evolutionary history, said Daniel J. Levitin, a professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University and author of "The Organized Mind." Our ancestors had many challenges, but the perils of information overload and multitasking were not among them. When it comes to energy expenditure, he explained, the brain has a hard time distinguishing between momentous and banal choices. We may consciously understand that deciding where to expand our company is more important than whether to have eggs or cereal for breakfast, but to the brain, a decision is a decision. "Even small decisions burn through neuro resources at a fast rate," Dr. Levitin said in a phone interview. Because even money can't buy more cerebral bandwidth (yet), Dr. Levitin said making important decisions early in the day was an effective strategy for reducing "decision fatigue." Also helpful is offloading information and responsibility. This can include tried and true techniques such as prioritized to do lists. Instead of micromanaging, "push authority downward," allowing others to make smaller decisions so you can give more attention to bigger ones. Dr. Levitin, whose first job was being a personal assistant to a wealthy person, said this could include having others filter correspondence and email. And by all means, he said, focus on one thing at a time. "Happy, successful people," he said, "are aware of their limitations." While some researchers explore the stress of high status, others are examining how mind management can help the wealthy get more bang for their bucks. Michael I. Norton, a professor at the Harvard Business School and a co author of "Happy Money: The Science of Spending Smarter," noted that many people work long hours because they enjoy their jobs. And the more one earns, the more rational the decision to keep working can seem. But, he said, after people have taken care of their basic needs, money does not buy happiness. "We are working on a paper based on a survey of millionaires that shows that whether you have 1 million or 10 million in net worth, your happiness is the same," he said. "It's not that it's bad to accumulate money; it's that people are focusing on something that doesn't pay off all that much." Dr. Norton does not blame consumer culture for the misguided pursuit of wealth so much as evolutionary biology. Status, he said, is an important psychological marker; people instinctively compare themselves to those around them. Possessions have long been attractive markers of status because they turn measuring into the relatively simple act of counting. But in terms of happiness, the urge to engage in conspicuous consumption is problematic. It often becomes an insidious loop of dissatisfaction, Dr. Norton explained, because we are wired to "constantly compare ourselves upward." "If I used to fly economy and now I fly business class," he said, "I start to compare myself to those in first class." A larger house, faster car and fancier shoes do provide immediate gratification, but the pleasure they bring tends to dissipate quickly. This is rooted in the mind's natural tendency to adapt, to take what it has for granted, and look ahead, said Thomas D. Gilovich, a professor of psychology at Cornell University. This human capacity for adaptation explains much more than why a new boat sparks fresh desires. "Research shows that when truly bad things happen the loss of a child, or a limb it takes most people a surprisingly short amount of time to return to their previous level of happiness," Dr. Gilovich said. "This is also true of good things, which is why winning the Pulitzer Prize only makes you the happiest person in the world for a while." In response, Dr. Gilovich said, we can exploit other habits of the mind to increase happiness. His research shows that people derive more enduring happiness from experiences than material goods. This response is also rooted in our evolutionary history. "In the past, being excluded from the group was often a death sentence," he said. "Nowadays, it is easier to go it alone, but we still value experiences because they connect us with other people in ways that material goods do not." This helps explains findings that people gain more happiness from spending money on others, rather than on themselves. Experiences can also deliver more happiness because the mind often sees the past through rose colored glasses. This is why the hot, crowded trip to Disneyland often becomes a warm memory, or people tend to look back nostalgically on a troubled youth. "We romanticize the past," Dr. Gilovich said. While science can help people manage their minds, happiness still "takes work," said Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, who wrote "The Myths of Happiness." "You have to be intentional," she said. "Find those things that work to make you happy and engaged, and take into account what research shows as main sources of happiness, such as things that help you grow as a person, connect with other people and contribute to society."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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The Democratic Party has long advocated strong government, paired with the power of markets, to achieve broad economic well being. But for the first time in the five decades I've been involved in Democratic policy and politics, the fundamental structure of our market based economic system is being seriously debated. A recent Gallup poll found that a majority of young Americans have a positive view of socialism however amorphously defined while their opinion of capitalism has declined. This concerns me: No country has succeeded economically in the postwar era without a baseline commitment to markets. Even India and China began to see serious growth only when they moved from state control toward markets (though China today is a complicated mix of the two). Capitalism's critics are correct that there are many critical issues climate change, overcoming poverty, health care costs and coverage that markets, by their nature, will not address. Our failure to meet these challenges has led to understandable anxiety and anger in our nation and our party. But the solution is not to abandon market based economics, which is perhaps the only way to achieve long term, inclusive growth. The solution is to pair markets with strong and effective government that meets our challenges. We should fiercely debate the best way to do that. The Democratic Party is not bound by a rigid ideology; at its heart, it is inclusive and pragmatic. Focusing on our shared goals is Democrats' best hope to beat President Trump in November and the only way the next Democratic president could enact his or her agenda. An illustrative example of a policy area where a more cohesive approach is needed is income inequality, a concern virtually all Democrats share. Reading the coverage of the presidential primary, you could be forgiven for thinking my fellow Democrats have to choose between two stark alternatives: a wealth tax on one hand and supporting the status quo on the other. I believe there is more potential for common ground and intellectually honest give and take than the drama of the primary suggests. Finding this common ground, however, will require both sides to make concessions. For the party's more moderate factions, that starts with recognizing that the measures Democratic presidents have been able to achieve to address income inequality have fallen short. The gap between the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans and the other 99.9 percent is greater than ever. To close great and growing wealth and income gaps, and to raise badly needed revenue for public investment, it's not enough to lift the bottom up; we need to ask more of those at the top, too. Moderate members of the Democratic Party must recognize the popular resonance of a wealth tax, even if, like me, they don't support it. Roughly 74 percent of American voters, including a majority of Republicans, support a 2 percent wealth tax on those worth more than 50 million. When I served in government, Americans were wary of taxing the very wealthy, but public opinion and the politics of taxation has changed. A wealth tax is on the table. But it shouldn't be the only option on the table. Just because the wealth tax is good politics doesn't necessarily make it good policy. A plan to bring the top down and reduce inequality must be constitutional and administrable. There are strong reasons to believe a wealth tax is neither. A wealth tax is likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court as a direct tax not apportioned among states, as the Constitution requires. And even if it survives a legal challenge, valuation is likely to prove prohibitively challenging, and taxing illiquid assets presents serious problems. Even those who strongly support a wealth tax must concede that other plans exist and that they ought to be part of the debate. Economists have put forward revenue raising proposals that reduce inequality, such as raising corporate, capital gains and personal income tax rates; broadening the tax base; converting deductions to more limited credits; strengthening the estate tax (including by eliminating stepped up basis, a tax code provision that allows heirs to minimize estate taxes); and imposing a financial transactions tax, as recently proposed by Mike Bloomberg and supported by many leading progressives. Such a tax policy agenda may not have the bumper sticker appeal of a wealth tax, but it would be likely to raise more revenue and do more to unwind concentrated wealth and it's constitutional and doable. Of course, neither wing of the Democratic Party is likely to completely sell the other on its position. What matters is that Democrats unite around shared goals, while recognizing that we may initially disagree on the steps we ought to take. Each side should treat the other as an eventual ally to be reconciled with, rather than an enemy to be demonized. The alternative is to allow those who are determined to do nothing whatsoever to reduce inequality to take advantage of a divided opposition and exacerbate our economic challenges. This is true not just when it comes to income inequality, but with all our pressing issues. The real choice Democrats face is not between the left and the center. It's between vicious debates that yield pyrrhic victories and fail to deliver real change, or a better, more pragmatic approach to intraparty debate that gives America a chance to tackle its most pressing challenges. Let's hope we choose the latter. Robert E. Rubin was the secretary of the Treasury from 1995 to 1999.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Todd Merrill Studio in New York City changed its name from Todd Merrill Antiques. How Low Will Market for Antiques Actually Go? When Todd Merrill opened his self named antiques store on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 2000, it was filled with pieces made before the Titanic: neoclassical French chairs that were contemporaries of Napoleon, an American sideboard from the time of James Madison's administration and a Japanese shrine that could have been owned by Queen Victoria (though it wasn't). Today, at Mr. Merrill's new Lafayette Street location, not a single object predates World War I. The white walled space is dominated by contemporary creations: monstrous bronze LED chandeliers by Niamh Barry, an Irish designer; sinewy wood console tables by Marc Fish of East Sussex, England; and animal inspired stools by Erin Sullivan, a New Yorker. Sharing the room are blue chip examples of 20th century modernism. The name has changed, too. Todd Merrill Antiques is now Todd Merrill Studio. Custom made pieces by living designer artisans have "become 70 to 80 percent of our business," said Mr. Merrill. "It's a big behavioral change for the trade, for collectors, and for dealers. We're not buying things on the secondary market for resale. We're presenting artists and representing them like an agent." He is not alone in turning away from antiques. Since the turn of the 21st century, the value of much 18th and 19th century furniture has plummeted. Shelter magazines, once look books for rooms bursting with lyre back chairs and giltwood credenzas, more often show pared down interiors with just a few older pieces or none at all. Even New York's prestigious Winter Antiques Show has changed its rules. Founded in 1955, the show once required that exhibited pieces be at least 100 years old. In 2009, the organizers and dealer committee changed the cutoff date to 1969 to include midcentury objects. In 2016, they removed the date restriction entirely, paving the way for contemporary design. "By expanding the datelines we were registering changes in the antiques world," said Michael Diaz Griffith, the fair's associate executive director. "We're just allowing it to happen instead of being so rule bound that we create an artificial zone where those market shifts, and shifts in taste, can't be seen." One exhibitor to take advantage of that change is Jason Jacques Gallery, which was once known primarily as a dealer of late 19th and early 20th century European ceramics but is increasingly focused on contemporary design. At the 2018 Winter Antiques Show in January, its presentation included a pair of black plywood benches sprouting moose antlers by the fashion designer Rick Owens (about 5,500) and a new seven foot tall Rococo inspired porcelain wall piece resembling a medallion by Katsuyo Aoki and Shinichiro Kitaura ( 250,000). The medallion "was probably one of the most Instagrammed pieces in the entire fair," said the gallery's director Jason T. Busch, noting that he expects contemporary design to become an even larger part of his business in the coming years. "We're going to always have work from our historic program, but I think it will be integrated within the contemporary." The online antiques marketplace 1stdibs (to whose magazine this reporter occasionally contributes) has also been looking to capitalize on the trend. It began a contemporary category in November 2016. One year later, contemporary design represented 15 percent of the company's furniture sales, and the offering had expanded to include about 30,000 products by more than 500 artisans and small manufacturers. In 2002, Mr. Stair sold a set of eight George III style carved mahogany chairs for 8,000; in 2016, he sold a similar set of eight chairs for 350. In 2003, he dispatched a Regency breakfront bookcase for 9,500; in 2016, the sales price of an equivalent piece had plummeted to 1,300. There are exceptions. Some designers and homeowners still mix antiques with contemporary furniture to create eclectic interiors, and particularly stylish pieces can bring high prices. Dealers of Asian antiques, like Betsy Nathan, the owner of Chicago based Pagoda Red, report strong sales to overseas buyers ("We're shipping back to Asia now," she said. "In a million years, I never would have imagined it.") Some passionate collectors also are willing to pay for pure historical value. Mr. Stair's highlights from the past year include a George I cut gesso and giltwood table that sold for 31,000 and a Louis XVI mahogany desk that sold for 13,000. "It's just as fickle," he said. "Unless it's special, has a name brand or is sexy, it'll die just as hard as a piece of brown Georgian furniture." Dealers, auctioneers and designers point to a number of reasons for the declining interest in antiques and rapid rise of contemporary design. More homes have open concept, casual living spaces rather than formal dining rooms and studies, which reduces the need for stately mahogany dining tables, chairs and cabinets. "In these big rooms, a contemporary piece becomes a piece of sculpture," said Christine Van Deusen, a New York designer who recently commissioned numerous custom creations from Maison Gerard, Cristina Grajales Gallery and Iliad for a client's duplex penthouse on the Upper East Side. "Vintage and antiques are finite, but creativity is infinite, so I can do things that I could not do if I were only looking for things that were in existence." Midpriced retailers like Restoration Hardware, West Elm and CB2 make it easy to buy tasteful furniture on the cheap, with little hunting required. And a new generation of homeowners may be rebelling against the preferences of their elders. "The 40 something crowd isn't looking to put a highboy in their house," said Ethan Merrill, the third generation president of Merrill's auctioneers and appraisers near Burlington, Vt. (and Todd Merrill's brother). "They relate more to pop culture, fashion oriented materials and rock 'n' roll." Contemporary design, he said, "represents something that's a lot more optimistic and positive." Big auction houses like Christie's have adapted to the new market by being choosier about the pieces they accept for sale, and selling less. "There's no denying that there's been, in the last 10 to 15 years, something of a sea change in taste and collecting habits," said William Strafford, a senior international specialist in European furniture and decorative arts at Christie's in New York. "We are wanting to move away from too much volume and to give the pieces we do offer a very strong, stylistic identity, or the breathing space to be seen as collectors' items." Although the overall market for antiques is shrinking, said Mr. Strafford, activity at the very top remains strong, as ultrawealthy buyers acquire the finest museum grade pieces, regardless of category, period or origin. "With the explosion of international wealth, and the reach of the internet, we're able to reach buyers with extraordinary spending capacity," said Mr. Strafford. "We can often sell quite traditional decorative arts to these new emerging markets such as the Middle East and the Far East, most particularly China." To create a rarefied context for high ticket objects, Christie's has developed a new type of sale, which it calls the Exceptional Sale. "It's a very small, really curated sale that tends to be about 30 or 40 lots, and it's the best of the best of the decorative arts," said Mr. Strafford. Last April, one of Christie's Exceptional Sales set the auction record for English walnut furniture when it sold an immaculate circa 1730 George II bureau cabinet for 967,500 (including the buyer's premium) that previously belonged to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Such blockbuster sales seem to do little to prop up antiques that don't come from the Met or weren't owned by celebrity collectors. Will other 18th and 19th century furniture pieces ever return to fashion? Many designers say that antiques will rise again but, after nearly two decades of decline, few are willing to predict when. "The pendulum is going to swing just like it does in politics," said Mr. Hayes. "It always does. But I don't see it coming anytime soon." Jamie Drake, the New York interior designer, also views the current dismissal of antiques as a trend, "just as color trends have moved from neutrals to vibrants, back to neutrals, back to vibrants," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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About six months after leading a pointed public battle against the Mets' owners over their entanglement with the Bernard L. Madoff Ponzi scheme, the lawyer David Sheehan came face to face with one of them, Fred Wilpon, at Carnegie Hall. The two had been at odds in a heated litigation, with Sheehan accusing Wilpon and his brother in law, Saul Katz, of either knowing about Madoff's fraud or neglecting to understand it when they should have. Wilpon and Katz vigorously denied the charges, eventually settling in 2012 to pay roughly 61 million, while never admitting culpability. But when Sheehan noticed Wilpon waving at him at the New York Pops concert, the two shook hands and chatted amicably. Later, the Sheehans purchased tickets for a box at Carnegie Hall, and who should share the box with them? Wilpon and his wife, Judy. Astonishingly, the foursome got along famously, began meeting for preconcert dinners and spending time at the Wilpons' estate in Long Island. Today, Sheehan considers Wilpon a friend, but says they have never discussed the case. "It just shows how incredibly gracious he is," Sheehan said in a telephone interview last week. "That was a really contentious litigation, but it had a delightful outcome." Perhaps decades of withering criticism from fans and news media members over how he ran the Mets some of it fair, some not had inured Wilpon to public attacks. But no booing could have been worse than that bruising litigation and the staggering financial losses suffered in the Madoff scandal, which almost cost Wilpon and Katz ownership of their beloved team. People close to Wilpon say that within days of the revelation of the scheme and the millions of dollars he and the Mets lost, he vowed to do whatever was necessary to salvage his control of the team. He promised, too, that the episode would never destroy his family or become a personal obsession of regret, as his relationship with Sheehan suggests. While they retained control, Wilpon and Katz were eventually forced to sell nearly half the team in small parcels to a crew of separate minority owners. One of them was Steven A. Cohen, the billionaire who recently agreed to buy a majority share of the club for an estimated 2.42 billion. Provided that sale is approved by the other owners, the Mets on Sunday played what will probably be their last game of the Wilpon Katz dynasty and perhaps fittingly, it ended short of the playoffs, for the fourth consecutive year. There is a portentous photograph of Fred and Judy Wilpon at a Mets gala event around 1961, before the team had even played a game, and Judy was pregnant with Jeff. That family would go on to shape the fortunes of the club for decades. Fred Wilpon, 83, first acquired a 5 percent share of the Mets in 1980, and six years later bought half the club from Nelson Doubleday. In the 34 seasons since then, the Mets, playing in the nation's biggest market, reached the postseason only six times and never won another World Series. In 2002, Wilpon, his son Jeff and Katz bought Doubleday's remaining shares (in another contentious proceeding), and governed the team as a ruling triad. Fred Wilpon was the tone setter, Katz was the financial expert and Jeff Wilpon, the bulldog administrator, became a lightning rod for frustrated fans who accused him of meddling too often in baseball affairs. But it was Fred Wilpon, a pitcher in his youth, who was the driving force behind the family's ownership of the Mets. The team was his vision and maybe even his destiny: Judy, his wife, was one of the Mets' first employees, working as an executive assistant when the club was being formed. The Mets could be exciting in the Wilpon years even uplifting, like when they welcomed professional sports back to New York in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, in a game that announced to the world that the city would recover. But in the 19 seasons since the group bought out Doubleday, the Mets made the postseason just three times, and fans grew weary of its reign. Whether it was because they could not, or would not, spend more money on top players, many fans vilified the owners, particularly the Wilpon duo, for the team's failures. "Look, I understand that when teams don't win as much as the fans would want there's always anger directed toward the owner," Selig said. "But no one can doubt how deeply Fred cared about the Mets and wanted them to win." One thing they did win was a huge asset appreciation. The team was valued at 391 million when Wilpon and Katz took over in 2002, and they presided over a sixfold increase in 18 years, thanks in part to the addition of a picturesque ballpark that opened in 2009, a regional sports network (SNY) and the general increase of sports team values over time. Steve Phillips was the general manager of the Mets in 2002, when the Wilpons and Katz gained full control of the club. He had been a member of the front office for several years before that, during the occasionally quarrelsome Wilpon Doubleday partnership. "It wasn't a fair portrayal at all," said Phillips, who served as general manager from 1998 until 2003. A couple of weeks before Phillips was fired, as fan and media pressure mounted for Wilpon to make a change, he entered the owner's box at Shea Stadium during a game and told Wilpon he would understand if he were cut loose. Wilpon thanked Phillips for the gesture, and said he would wait to see what happened. Soon after, Phillips was gone. "He was demanding to work for, and there were times it could be unpleasant watching a game with him because he would get so emotional about every pitch," Phillips said. "But it was because he cared so much. I don't think people get how much he wanted to win." Some felt that little stadium too strongly reflected Fred Wilpon's love of the Brooklyn Dodgers' Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax more than it did the history of the Mets. But the old Dodgers were a genuine passion for Fred Wilpon, and in many ways the Mets grew out of that seed and were often influenced by it. In 1996, Wilpon, with the approval of Doubleday, promoted a manager named Bobby Valentine, a brash, energetic baseball intellect with deep ties to the Dodgers. Valentine was a former Dodgers player, and his father in law, Ralph Branca, pitched for the team when it was in Brooklyn. "Fred's main focus was always to protect the brand of the New York Mets," Valentine said. "When he first hired me, he asked me to work 12 months a year because he wanted everyone to be as committed as he was. And he told me he wanted more back pages than the Yankees. I signed up for both." On the field, though, the dedication never yielded consistent results. In 2006, the Mets appeared to be headed in the right direction after falling a few outs short of the World Series. But a year later, the team suffered a colossal late season collapse in the standings, and one year after that, a far more debilitating financial collapse.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Once the narrator has finally met her tiger and she is safe in her berth on the train to Mumbai, this is what we are told: "Closing my eyes, I see my tigers. The one in my dreams, the ones I have searched for and never found and the one that sprang out before me in the jungle. As I'm drifting off, I imagine her, moving stealthily in the bush, silent, hunting. Her amber eyes fixed on her prey. In my dreams those eyes turn blue. At last she and I are one and the same." Do I believe this to be true? That the tiger and author are one and the same? How so? I'd like to know, I really would. Anyway, the tiger's eyes turning blue as she morphs with the narrator is a startling image. I'll leave those eyes staring at you for a while. Morris has turned up all kinds of fascinating anecdotes in her research, including quotes from Rilke, Borges and Blake. Apparently, Sarah Bernhardt kept a wild tiger as a pet, taking it out with her to cafes in Paris to distract people from knowing she was Jewish. Perhaps Freud should have found himself a tiger when he was chased out of Vienna by the Nazis and had to set off for exile to England. What would he make of Morris's dream analysis? "To see a tiger in your dream," she writes, "represents power and your ability to exert it in various situations. The dream may also indicate that you need to take more of a leadership role. Alternatively, the tiger represents female sexuality, aggression and seduction." The interesting question Morris asks of her own adventurous and courageous life "How do we walk a thin line between sane and savage, between wild and tame?" is the beating heart of this book. It needs to have been ripped out of the beast, still pulsing and warm, rather than gently prodded.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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LONDON Mary Quant was one of the best known designers of the Swinging Sixties, a creative and commercial trailblazer who put London fashion on the world map. Synonymous with some of the defining styles of the era such as the miniskirt and hot pants, she helped spark a quantum shift in fashion, pushing the boundaries of acceptable streetwear and challenging the dominance of male French couturiers. Yet today, the 89 year old plays second fiddle to many of those better known industry greats. Now a new exhibition on her life and work, opening April 6 at the Victoria Albert Museum, aims to rectify that situation. The first international retrospective of her work in almost half a century (the last one was in 1973 at Kensington Palace in London), it focuses on her heyday from 1955 to 1975, with more than 120 garments on display over two floors, along with accessories, cosmetics, sketches and photographs belonging to Ms. Quant, most of which have never been seen before. "Mary Quant grew up at a time when women were meant to dress like their mothers and went straight out of school uniform into pearls and twin sets, particularly in Britain," Jenny Lister, the co curator of the exhibition, said. "With her higher than high hemlines, colorful tights and masculine tailored trousers, she helped wipe out British postwar drabness and create a bold new attitude to dressing.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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If the weather hadn't been so foul, the most dramatic moment of Tiffany Mallory's wedding to Jerrell Moore would never have happened. "It had been pouring, and then it stopped raining but turned cold and windy right as we started the ceremony," said Mrs. Mallory Moore, who was married April 2 before 140 guests on the back lawn of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C. Just as she arrived through the squall to meet her groom at the altar, a gust blew her veil into the sky. "It went flying, right off my head," she said. "But I'm over six feet tall, so people thought it looked very glamorous." During a very wet April and May on the East Coast, many couples learned the hard way that a perfect (or at least nearly perfect) wedding does not require perfect weather. "Did my guests get wet? Yes, kind of," said Minoo Fadaifard Wade, who married John Wade in a drizzle on May 21 at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in front of a crowd of 82. "It was chilly, too. But nobody complained. Everybody made the best of it. We were all lighthearted." Should rain clouds threaten your wedding, here are some tips on how to salvage that perfect day, provided by couples who have managed to do just that. You know what the poet said about the best laid plans of mice, men and wedding planners. So couples should have an easy to execute Plan B. Rain was expected on May 22, the day Jill Jacinto, 30, was to marry Sander van den Bergh, 31, on the outdoor terrace of Battery Gardens, a New York restaurant. But she held out hope that the day would clear by the ceremony's 4:30 p.m. start time. A stormy wedding tests anyone's patience; get upset (just briefly), then collect yourself and take what comes. At Mariana Rodrigues and David Rothschild's May 21 wedding at Cherry Hill in Central Park, rain began falling as guests boarded double decker buses bound for a reception at the NoMad Hotel. "The bus driver was really kind and offered everyone on the upper deck ponchos, but I was pretty upset," said Mrs. Rothschild, 32, a former financial executive. "Then I was upset with myself for being upset, and David reminded me that that was absolutely warranted, that I was allowed to have that moment." She did not let the moment last, though. "I realized it wasn't perfect but it was a great celebration," she said. "You have to remember that the weather is out of your control, and just enjoy yourself." Erin McGrail and Elliot Fleming invited 150 guests to their June 2014 wedding under a stately oak tree at the Destrehan Plantation, just outside New Orleans. Thirty minutes before the ceremony, the sky turned black. "Then it just started pouring torrentially in that typical New Orleans way," Mrs. Fleming, 28, said. Instead of panicking as she watched friends and family run for shelter at a gift shop, she played it cool. "At first I took it badly," Mrs. Fleming said. "Then I saw how upset my mom was. So I said to myself, 'Stay calm, we can figure this out.'" The wedding was moved to the reception site nearby, where guests were seated at decorated tables. "But it didn't matter: At that point I had just accepted it for what it was," said Mrs. Fleming, who works in purchasing at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans. Looking back, she added, she wouldn't change a thing. The bride and groom are the stars of the ceremony; their attitude will set the tone for the entire celebration. "Your state of mind is going to determine your guests' state of mind," said Constantino Khalaf. Mr. Khalaf, 36, married David Khalaf, 38, on May 14 in Cathedral Park in Portland, Ore., the couple's hometown, under drizzly skies with the occasional hard rain. There was no shelter for their 65 guests. "We warned people far in advance to bring their umbrellas and raincoats, because we knew getting married in May in Portland was like playing Russian roulette with the weather," said David Khalaf, who runs the Christian website Modern Kinship with his husband. Then they made the best of it. During the reception, held at the wedding site, "We all huddled together to stay warm, and we danced in the rain," he said. "If you're just like, 'Hey, this is a beautiful occasion, let's dance in the rain,' everybody is going to pick up on that," Read the fine print on the contracts from service providers. "The first advice I would give is: Ask all your vendors what their rain policies are, and read the contracts closely," said Mrs. Mallory Moore, the bride whose veil wouldn't stay put and who is also an assistant United States attorney with the Western District of North Carolina. That includes contracts with musicians. "Some live musicians who play string instruments won't play in dampness," she said. "We had a trio of horn players, so it worked out for us. But it might not have if we had a violinist." Don't forget the basics. Be sure there are plenty of umbrellas on hand, and bring some galoshes too. Rachel Bowie felt personally responsible when the rain started coming down on May 13 at Jane's Carousel in Brooklyn, where 99 guests had gathered to watch her and Matthew Dorville get married. "It was Friday the 13th. We sort of asked for it," she said. But she was glad she remembered a tip from her photographer: buy a lot of clear umbrellas. "They don't cast a shadow on your face," said Mrs. Bowie, 33, an editor who lives in Brooklyn. If she had to do it over again, she would have asked a friend to pack galoshes for her, too. "Right before I walked down the aisle my shoes were so wet I was slipping in them. I had been jumping through those gross, deceptively deep New York City puddles." Maybe it's O.K. if your wedding has a few blemishes. Your marriage will, too. Hurricane Irene was an uninvited guest at the August 2011 wedding of Jacqueline Shea and Matthew Bailey of Eatontown, N.J. When the bride was getting her nails done in preparation for the rehearsal dinner, an evacuation was ordered for an area that included the wedding site on the beach near Asbury Park. "I was in denial, like, this is not happening," said Mrs. Bailey, 35, a teacher of the deaf. The couple married that night at a local restaurant. Flowers were assembled from Trader Joe's, and the bride's mother bought a sheet cake from ShopRite. Then, vendors refused to refund deposits for the wedding. A year later, the couple appeared on Anderson Cooper's short lived talk show, "Anderson," ostensibly to warn other couples about the need to buy wedding insurance. Instead, Mr. Cooper announced that the show was giving them a wedding redo, including a reception at the Wilshire Grand Hotel in West Orange, N.J., and a trip to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, to renew their vows on the beach. The Baileys now have two children, ages 1 and 2 1/2 , and more perspective on wedding day disasters. "I think what happened to us is sort of like a precursor to what everybody finds out once they're married," Mrs. Bailey said. "And that's that there are ups and there are downs in married life, sometimes big ones. What you do is you make the most of it, no matter what."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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This block may look like plastic, but it's actually wood. Using a two step process, researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, stripped away the plank's tan and brown color and made it clear. The see through wood, which the scientists say is stronger and a better insulator than glass, and more biodegradable than plastic, could one day be used in windows, tables and other building supplies. "We were very surprised by how transparent it could go," said Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the university, and an author of a paper that appeared last week in the journal Advanced Materials. "This can really open applications that can potentially replace glass and some optical material." To turn the wood transparent, Dr. Hu and his team first boiled it in a bath of water, sodium hydroxide and other chemicals for about two hours. This removed a molecule called lignin, which gives the wood its color, but left behind its colorless cell structures. The next step was to pour epoxy over the block, which made it four to six times stronger.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Opera Philadelphia has of late prioritized embracing new work and unorthodox programming; last month, New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe wrote that the company "has swiftly become one of the most creative and ambitious in this country." On Tuesday, the company announced its 2018 19 season, which will include a second annual citywide festival and two world premieres. The festival, O18, will race through five operatic performances from Sept. 20 30. ("It may be a risk, but it's one well worth taking," Anthony Tommasini wrote of last year's iteration.) On Sept. 20, the Perelman Theater will host the premiere of "Sky on Swings,"an opera about two women suffering from Alzheimer's disease, by the composer Lembit Beecher and the librettist Hannah Moscovitch. Starting on Sept. 22 at the Barnes Foundation, the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo will perform in "Glass Handel," an art installation that fuses the music of Handel and Philip Glass. The multimedia piece will include live painting, a new dance work by Justin Peck, and videos from James Ivory who just won an Oscar for his "Call Me By Your Name" screenplay. The festival will close with a three night cabaret performance titled "Queens of the Night," with Stephanie Blythe and Dito van Reigersberg. The company's regular programming at its home base, the Academy of Music, features more known quantities. Brenda Rae stars in Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" starting Sept. 21; Britten's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" arrives on Feb. 8 with Tim Mead and Anna Christy as Oberon and Tytania; Puccini's "La Boheme" begins April 26, with Mimi played by Vanessa Vasquez, a Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions winner. Mozart's "Don Giovanni," conducted by Karina Canellakis, plays at the Perelman theater starting March 7.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Read our piece about serial memoirists, including Shapiro, here Shapiro had long known that she was conceived in Philadelphia, at a clinic for couples with fertility problems: "Not a pretty story," in her mother's words. The clinic was run by Edmond Farris, a doctor who had developed a new method for pinpointing when a woman ovulated. When the time was right, Shapiro's mother had told her, her father would rush down from New York, where he worked on the stock exchange, and provide sperm for artificial insemination. Shapiro had heard rumors that such clinics used to "mix sperm" that is, the semen of men with low sperm count would be combined with donor sperm to increase the chances of pregnancy but she didn't give it more thought. Now she learns that in those days, many sperm donors were medical students. A Twitter acquaintance who calls herself a "genealogy geek" needs only a family tree on Ancestry.com showing a first cousin previously unknown to Shapiro and a few web searches to locate the man who turns out to be Shapiro's biological father a decidedly non Jewish doctor in Oregon who went to medical school at Penn. All this takes place within the first third of the book, so I'm not giving much away. At any rate, the true drama of "Inheritance" is not Shapiro's discovery of her father's identity but the meaning she makes of it. In many ways, the knowledge comes as a relief. Her parents' relationship was fraught; her mother suffered from borderline personality disorder, and her father was depressive. She always felt out of place in her birth family, as if on some level she knew she didn't belong. Relatives, friends and strangers commented that she didn't look Jewish; once, when she was a child, a family friend (who will eventually be Jared Kushner's grandmother) ran a hand through her platinum hair and remarked, chillingly: "We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie. You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis." When Shapiro comes upon a YouTube video of her biological father a man with her features and coloring, who even gesticulates the same way she does the resemblance is more than astonishing; it's consoling. "I knew in a place beyond thought that I was seeing the truth the answer to the unanswerable questions I had been exploring all my life," she writes. The discovery that Shapiro carries a stranger's genes has profound implications for every aspect of her life, from the photographs of supposed relatives that line the walls of her house to the need to revise her medical history. ("How could I explain that my father was no longer deceased?" she wonders at the doctor's office.) It also leads her to investigate the early days of artificial insemination, in which she finds more than a tinge of eugenics. Farris is quoted in an interview as saying that he saw "nothing wrong in trying to bring children of fine quality into the world"; his donors were the "best material that Philadelphia medical schools can offer." Couples who used donor sperm were advised to have sex before and after the insemination, to intentionally introduce an element of ambiguity. It was simply assumed that their children would never be told. No one seems to have worried about those children growing up with inaccurate medical histories, much less a pervasive sense of unease in their own skin. Shapiro's account is beautifully written and deeply moving it brought me to tears more than once. I couldn't help feeling unnerved, though, by the strength of her conviction that blood will out, which leads her uncomfortably close to genetic determinism. "Our lifetime of disconnection, finally explained," she writes of her lack of kinship with the woman she believed to be her half sister. Donating sperm, she believes, is "the passing along of an essence that was inseparable from personhood itself"; on a visit to the California Cryobank, the nation's largest donor sperm repository, she wonders about the "millions of souls" within its vials. But by all accounts, many children of sperm (and egg) donors grow up fulfilled and content, nurtured by the love of the parents who raise them and uninterested in seeking out their biological relatives who, when found, often turn out to be a disappointment. And for many children of unhappy families, genetic bonds aren't sufficient to maintain connection to parents who are abusive or neglectful.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. A year ago, antitrust officials from Australia, Brazil, China, Japan and eight other countries enjoyed 110 a plate steak dinners and unlimited pours from 70 bottles of wine at a beachfront hotel surrounded by panoramic views of the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean. The opulent meal was the culmination of a weeklong conference in scenic Huntington Beach, Calif., for 30 foreign government officials who enforce competition laws. The trip was organized and mostly paid for by the Global Antitrust Institute, a part of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Regulators spent the days in classes with the institute's staff, which included a senior federal judge and a former commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. The program was presented as continuing education for antitrust regulators a way to learn more about the economic underpinnings of competition law. But critics and past attendees of similar conferences run by the institute said the sessions were more about delivering a clear message to international officials that benefited the companies paying for the event: The best way to foster competition is to maintain a hands off approach to antitrust law. The Global Antitrust Institute is bankrolled in large part by tech companies corporate donors like Google, Amazon and Qualcomm that are facing antitrust scrutiny from some of the regulators who attended its programs, according to hundreds of pages of emails and documents obtained through open records laws, interviews with four past conference participants, and observation of a conference last year in Huntington Beach. The documents included donation checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars from Google and Amazon, as well as a three year, multimillion dollar donation agreement from Qualcomm. Those checks were a key component of the institute's 2.1 million budget in the year that ended in June 2019. The emails illustrated how the institute's leaders, including Joshua Wright, who has longstanding ties to Google, have worked closely with tech companies to fend off antitrust criticism. And they showed how the institute cultivated and tapped relationships with top competition officials even, in an aggressive courtship, asking Brazil's top antitrust regulator to recruit the country's judges to attend its conferences with offers of business class flights. "This is not a significant expenditure for these companies. And the potential benefits, even making it moderately less likely to be on the losing end of an ambitious antitrust case is worth that price many times over," said Michael Carrier, a professor at Rutgers University's law school. It's difficult to determine the impact of the institute. But in Brazil, a tribunal last year dismissed three separate investigations into Google, which controls 97 percent of the country's search traffic, for a lack of evidence. Regulatory scrutiny is, unquestionably, a global issue for tech companies. Until recently, Europe was the main threat of antitrust action. Google has lost three competition cases there since 2017. Amazon is now the target of an inquiry in Europe for abusing its dominance in online commerce to squeeze smaller rivals. Qualcomm has paid more than 1 billion in fines to Europe for its anticompetitive behavior. Now other countries are also starting to take a more aggressive approach. Australia and Brazil are investigating Google, while Amazon is also facing an antitrust probe in India. The companies are also facing investigations at home. After years of a hands off approach to monopoly enforcement, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are under investigation from federal watchdogs, state attorneys general and Congress. The Justice Department is expected to bring a case against Google in the coming months in what would be one of the biggest antitrust actions in the United States since the 1990s. The chief executives of Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple will appear before lawmakers soon as part of a congressional antitrust investigation into their market powers. Mr. Wright, the institute's executive director, said its mission, curriculum and lectures were available online for the public to assess and that "open minded observers" will see the quality of its instruction from legal academics and economists with experience enforcing antitrust laws and prosecuting cases. "That combination of academic and practical experience is one reason enforcement agencies' officials from around the world consistently choose to send their staff to our programs," Mr. Wright said in a statement. The long era of restraint in antitrust enforcement in the United States can be traced back, in part, to an ideology that tied economic analysis to legal cases. The view was that it's not enough for a company to dominate a market and crush competitors, there must be evidence of so called consumer harm usually in the form of higher prices. That notion permeated through the American judicial system with the aid of economics seminars for federal judges funded by corporate donors. The Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges, which ran from 1976 to 1999, was organized by the Law and Economics Center now housed at George Mason University's law school. By 1990, about 40 percent of all sitting federal judges had attended one of these seminars, according to the program's director. Researchers found that judges who attended the seminars were more likely to approve mergers, rule against environmental protections and organized labor, and use economic language in rulings compared to judges who did not attend, according to an academic study looking at the effects of the program. The Global Antitrust Institute, which was established in 2014 as part of George Mason University's Law and Economics Center, has taken a page from the success of the federal judges program and adapted it for an international audience. It is also starting to offer an economics program for U.S. federal judges, with one scheduled for October in Napa, Calif. Mr. Wright said it had already trained more than 850 foreign judges and regulators. It has hosted a senior judge at Supreme People's Court, China's top judicial body, as well as the current and former superintendent of Brazil's top competition regulator as "visiting scholars." The institute does not disclose the source of its funding, but The New York Times obtained copies of the group's annual budgets and donation checks in document requests. It is funded almost entirely by companies and foundations affiliated with companies. Tech companies have been major backers of the institute for several years. In 2017, Google, for example, donated 200,000 to the group and it contributed an additional 300,000 in 2018. Qualcomm has spent years fighting regulators around the world and incurred billions of dollars of fines over accusations of anti competitive practices. In 2017, after the F.T.C. filed an antitrust lawsuit against Qualcomm, Koren Wong Ervin, a director at the institute at the time, emailed an executive at the company to express that a recent debate about the technology licensing terms at the heart of the case was one sided and not favorable to Qualcomm. "I'm considering a GAI panel on the hill to counter this one," Ms. Wong Ervin wrote. The Qualcomm executive responded that she would appreciate that. Ms. Wong Ervin, a former legal adviser to Mr. Wright at the F.T.C., left her position at the Global Antitrust Institute in September 2017 to become the director of antitrust policy and litigation at Qualcomm. Ms. Wong Ervin, who left her position at Qualcomm this year, declined to comment. Clare Conley, a Qualcomm spokeswoman, also declined to comment. Though it's not clear how much, if any, impact the group's education programs have had on the decisions of international regulators or judges who attended, "nobody would be paying for this stuff if they didn't think it had an effect," said Suresh Naidu, a professor of economics and public and international affairs at Columbia University and one of the authors of the academic study on the economics seminars for federal judges. The theme of the Global Antitrust Institute's teaching is clear, said Marshall Steinbaum, an assistant professor at the University of Utah's economics department. He reviewed a reading list and curriculum of last year's conference in Huntington Beach and characterized the program as "in line with the institute's long term agenda of weakening antitrust laws." Among the reading material is a paper by Hal Varian, who is now Google's chief economist and who argues that the usual economic hallmarks of monopoly power do not apply to tech companies because of the nature of digital products they're expensive to develop initially but can be resold again and again at little additional cost and therefore should not be used by antitrust enforcers to justify aggressive action. CADE has allowed the institute to handpick attendees. After 24 agency candidates applied for the six spots at the 2016 conference in Washington, the institute selected the six candidates it wanted. A year later, for a conference in Dubai, G.A.I. selected from a pool of eight CADE candidates for two attendees and two wait list spots. When the institute was trying to recruit Brazilian judges for a conference in Lisbon last year, Douglas Ginsburg, who is a senior judge with the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington and chairman of the institute's board of advisers, appealed to Mr. Cordeiro. "It would be particularly good if you could recruit judges," Judge Ginsburg wrote in February. He added that a secretary for one judge had asked about whether the institute would pay for business class flights for others. A few days later, Mr. Cordeiro responded by saying he had recruited seven judges. In a written statement, Mr. Cordeiro said he was an academic as well as a public servant so it "is natural to be consulted about possible parties interested to take part in debates of this nature" and that there is nothing wrong with recommending "other public authorities for a renowned international academic conference." He said the institute has paid for his flights and accommodations in the past, but he has never received any other form of financial support. Judge Ginsburg did not respond to emails seeking comment or a phone call. Separately, CADE said it was not aware of the institute's corporate donors and noted that its officials do not participate in training sponsored "directly" by private companies. "CADE has strict rules regarding the performance of its employees and that participation in events of any nature does not influence the work carried out within the scope of the municipality," the agency wrote.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Susan Good was sitting with a group of women in her home in Palm Springs, Calif., when one of them began lamenting the difficulties of aging. But it wasn't the usual script about aches, pains and skyrocketing cholesterol levels. "She said that she felt invisible," recalled Ms. Good, who is in her 70s. The speaker felt generally silenced. Unseen. As if she had nothing to contribute to the world . This shocked Ms. Good. "Invisible" was the last word she would have used to describe this woman. "She was very popular with a great personality," she said. But then the other women in the room echoed the same feelings. "These were all women who had college degrees, were married or had a significant other, were well traveled and led very nice lifestyles, but every one of them felt invisible," she said. "They felt invisible when they saw themselves in the mirror. They didn't feel pretty any longer. Nobody was looking at them." The word continued to haunt her, and she wondered if she could help address this prevalent feeling. So in 2015 Ms. Good, whose nickname is "Honey," created a website for women 50 and over, HoneyGood.com, which offers advice on everything from pedicures to the stock market to grandparenting (she has two children, one stepchild and 26 grandchildren; a book, "Stories for my Grandchild," comes out in February). But rather than keep her initiative strictly online, Ms. Good in September started Moxie!: a free private social network on her website where women could bond. The idea was for them to share their stories, concerns and triumphs not just with people in their same age group, but across generations. IRL. At her monthly Moxie! group in Palm Springs, now in its third year, women in their 60s munch on cookies and sip coffee while mingling with women in their 80s. At a recent gathering in Chicago, where she lives half the year, guests ranged from 29 to 93. "We talk about money issues, blended families, widowhood, invisibility," Ms. Good said. "We talk about problems between mothers and daughters. The only rule I have is that nothing leaves my home." In most other countries, young and old freely mix together, with several generations often living under one roof. But in the United States, that mostly happens in the workplace. Even so, millennials and baby boomers tend to stick with their same aged cohort, rarely associating out of the office. This is a limited way of socializing that cross generational groups seek to expand. "A lot of people think if they're mothers they can only be friends with mothers; if they're single they can only hang out with single people," said Shasta Nelson, 41, the author of "Frientimacy," a book about deepening friendships that was published in 2016. "But research suggests that it doesn't matter what commonality we have, only that we find a couple of commonalities. If I say, 'I'm in my 40s and I only want to meet people in my 40s,' it's as much of a predictor of friendship as saying I can only be friends with people born in September or who like Madonna or who have my name." According to Ms. Nelson, only three things are necessary for a relationship to flourish: positivity (it has to feel good); consistency (you have to be in touch on a regular basis); and vulnerability (you have to feel safe with each other). None of them has to do with age. "A friendship is any relationship where two people both people feel seen in a safe and satisfying way," she said. Ten years ago, Ms. Nelson created GirlFriend Circles, a kind of match.com for women to meet online and take it offline if they choose. She later started Travel Circles, which helps women of all ages take trips to meet other women around the world. Angela Wilkinson, 48, a self described "suburban housewife in Middle America" (in this case, Marion, Iowa), went to Greece, Italy, Rwanda and Peru with Ms. Nelson. With two sons now in their early 20s, one of whom has special needs, Ms. Wilkinson said she always felt isolated at home, and unable to meet new people. On her trips with Ms. Nelson, she became close with two women: one of whom is 13 years older than she is, another who is 14 years younger. They have remained in touch and have even taken other vacations together. "What helped bridge the age gap with friendship is when you're in a new situation or uncomfortable in some way it's just a great equalizer," Ms. Wilkinson said. "We're all in the same boat. On these trips everyone's on these new situations. The age goes out the window." Though Lean In is less spoken of these days, some intergenerational women's gatherings are focused on professional advancements. Erica Keswin, 50, is a workplace strategist who started the Spaghetti Project, a monthly gathering in her Manhattan home of like minded individuals two years ago. (The name came from a study she read Kevin Kniffin, a professor at Cornell who found that firefighters who ate meals together had higher performance levels than those who dined solo.) Some are free; others have a nominal cost. Ms. Keswin models her salons, which do include pasta, after today's average white collar workplace, where multiple generations share one roof and are forced to interact. "Groups of people need to come together in an intentional way," she said. "It's good for us personally and in business. Regardless of where it is and who's there, good things happen when people connect." Spaghetti Project attendees are invited not by age but by a common denominator, usually work related: They're all in the food industry, say, or obsessed with conscious capitalism, or trying to transition out of freelance writing. "When I curate these events I want diversity of thought race, gender, age and not just people from the same schools or background," said Ms. Keswin, the author of "Bring Your Human to Work," about encouraging personal authenticity in the office. "We want people at different stages of their career." That's also the thinking behind Generation Women, a monthly reading series in New York and Sydney, Australia, where women from multiple generations read short stories and essays loosely centered around a theme. The series came about after a conversation its founder, the novelist Georgia Clark, 38, had with her mother about "disappearing" in later life. "She said that as she had gotten older people looked right through her," Ms. Clark said. "If we're walking down the street together they'll just look at me, and if she's alone it's as if she's not there." "I was aware of ageism as an issue, but because it was something my mother said it really made it personal and I got mad," she continued. "I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to create a storytelling event where women of all ages could come together and feel comfortable and heard. We make a lot of space in our society for teens through 30s, for their experiences and journeys and point of views, but we don't make space for women in their 60s, 70s and 80s, who are still going through changes and evolution and whose perspectives are so much greater." Some participants find these sorts of intergenerational gatherings comforting in a divisive political climate. Younger women are seeking solace in the assurance of older women, who have lived through political uncertainty or wartime, that everything will be O.K. Older women appreciate the passion and drive of younger women in case everything isn't. "I'm blown away by their emotional sills and self awareness," said Christine Mulvey, 60, a writer in Nevada City, Calif., who attends annual Honey Root Embodiment Gathering intergenerational retreats (no relation to Honey Good). "Things I came to in my 40s and 50s, young women are coming to so much earlier. I find permission to be themselves and to be creative in them that just thrills me. I'm delighted by it. Their hunger for real connection and depth, their passion for the world." "And then there's a darker side to that," Ms. Mulvey said. "The passion that I see in them can slip into a kind of despair. There's something about being older and having been through a number of cycles from different eras that kind of holds the despair at bay, and also calls it into a sense of how important it is that they show up and engage." At HoneyRoot's Embodiment Gathering (yes, the name is a little woo wooey, but it is California, after all), which lasts four days and costs 495 to 750, depending on financial means, certain women are given "elder" status, which means they're treated as valued members whose experiences are honored and respected. They, in turn, welcome the "youngers" into adulthood. (Each woman determines for herself when she's an "elder" for most woman it's when they are postmenopausal.) "I think our younger members have an understanding that strangely not everyone does, that one day they will be older women and that we're all responsible for creating a society that honors older women," said Devorah Bry, 40, the founder of HoneyRoot, who is a dancer and couple's therapist in Nevada City, Calif. "The dominant culture tells you that when you get to a certain age you can't be included anymore," Ms. Bry said. "It's cool to see certain people who say, 'I don't want you to see my age, I want you to see my age and spirit.' Then other people who are in the same room who want you to acknowledge that 'I'm older and living in a different type of body now, I want to be honored that I have life experience now.' It's really about paying attention. We're all going to get to the end of our life."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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"Transformation: Rhythm's Roots," a collaboration between the veteran jazz musician Owen Brown Jr. and the first rate tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith, advertises itself as a musical response to the recent Oscar winning film "12 Years a Slave." But its subject is actually much broader: the hundreds of years of African American experience from enslavement to the present. And on Friday night, when the City Parks Foundation presented "Transformation" in Herbert Von King Park in Brooklyn, Mr. Smith did often seem like a man trying to find his way in a land not his own. Yet that effect did not always seem intentional. It was a casual looking show, with Mr. Smith dancing in a T shirt and shorts on an amplified platform, surrounded by Mr. Brown and a jazz trio. Though there was a set list, the 75 minute concert was very loose and appeared at times on the verge of falling apart. Besides hints in the lyrics that Mr. Brown periodically sang, his score told its story of diaspora mostly by cycling through styles: rain forest music, reggae, Latin, hoedown, blues, modern jazz and R B. In addition to singing and scatting, he played fiddle, harmonica, keyboard and a variety of percussion. Mr. Smith, improvising, responded to the changing music with passion and ferocious technique. In early sections, the expressive awkwardness of some of his steps one foot crab walking, as the other dragged behind it did summon images of slavery, and when he rapidly hammered a toe tip behind him, it had the force of fierce resistance. But most of his responses were musical rather than visual, in the moment and in his own style, rather than history minded.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, is not the first member of Congress to test positive for the coronavirus. At least 14 lawmakers, hailing from both parties and both chambers, are known to have either tested or been presumed positive for the coronavirus. But something about the diagnosis of Mr. Gohmert, who has belligerently flouted public health recommendations such as mask wearing and social distancing, prompted a convulsion of rage on Capitol Hill. From maintenance workers to legislative aides, employees came forward with anonymous accounts of how the patchwork of precautions each lawmaker's office operates with its own rules and cavalier behavior by some members was endangering the thousands of people who keep the Capitol complex running. In addition to the lawmakers and members of their staff who have been infected, around 90 workers in support roles such as the Capitol Police and the Architect of the Capitol, are known to have contracted the virus. Many lawmakers are approaching the pandemic with appropriate seriousness: running skeleton crews in their offices, encouraging masks and following social distancing guidelines. Others are not. Some are ignoring public health advice for political reasons, while others seem to believe the virus cannot touch them. Representative Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, told CNN that wearing a mask was "part of the dehumanization of the children of God." This sort of denial leads to unnecessary tragedy, as was driven home by the death of Herman Cain. The former pizza magnate and Republican presidential candidate tested positive for the coronavirus nine days after attending President Trump's June 20 campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla. where he was shown in a number of photos sitting close to other attendees without a mask. Elected officials have a particular responsibility both to model responsible behavior during this pandemic and to take extra precautions so they don't become super spreaders. Put another way, when a lawmaker behaves like a "ding dong," as one Republican aide said of Mr. Gohmert, he puts everyone at risk. The danger extends far beyond Capitol Hill. Members of Congress have an essential and unusually public, mobile job. In any given week, hundreds of members jet back and forth across the country, some to coronavirus hot spots. Representative Kay Granger is currently self quarantining after sitting next to a non masked Mr. Gohmert on a flight back to Washington from their home state of Texas on July 26. Representative Raul Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, has been self quarantining as well, after chairing a hearing on July 28 that Mr. Gohmert attended, at times unmasked. On Saturday, Mr. Grijalva announced that he had tested positive for the virus. Who knows how many other people Mr. Gohmert may have potentially exposed? In response to the Gohmert news, congressional leaders reminded members of the safety protocols already in place. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, went further, tightening the rules on mask wearing to require face coverings on the chamber floor and inside the House office buildings. (Mask wearing has been mandatory in committee hearings since mid June.) Those who fail to comply can be denied entry or removed by security. This is a welcome, if belated, step. But that may not be enough. For one thing, Mr. Gohmert's experience has led to renewed calls by members and staff workers to implement a testing regimen on the Hill. That's an important next step. In May, as Congress was figuring out how to safely get back up and running, the idea of testing members was considered as one possible piece of the puzzle. The White House offered to provide 1,000 rapid response tests and machines for processing. Leadership in both chambers rejected the offer. "Our country's testing capacities are continuing to scale up nationwide and Congress wants to keep directing resources to the front line facilities where they can do the most good the most quickly," read a joint statement from Ms. Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. Neither leader has changed their position in the intervening months. Mr. McConnell, who has declined to impose mask requirements for the Senate, continues to maintain that the current protocols are working. Understandably, neither leader wants members to look as though they are affording themselves privileges still not available in most workplaces. But Congress is not an ordinary workplace. As the attending physician for the House noted in June, "The Congress has unique risks in that individuals attending the Congress do not represent a gathering of regional citizens but an intra National assembly of individuals traveling from areas of variable disease activity to assemble in Washington, D.C." Senator Roy Blunt, the Missouri Republican, recently characterized lawmakers, with all their traveling, "the perfect petri dish for how you spread a disease." Testing skeptics also cite the logistical challenges of setting up such a testing program. Who would get tested? Just members? How often would they be tested? Would it be mandatory? How would it be enforced? Working out these details would of course be challenging, and no system would eliminate risk entirely. But one cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. This spring, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, looked into a preliminary testing plan. One suggestion from the experts he consulted was to focus on members and staff members scheduled to participate in hearings or other meetings requiring prolonged contact with others. Likewise, Hill employees who face a higher risk of exposure probably ought to be prioritized. More ambitious plans include testing members every week or two, before they fly back to their home districts. Some lawmakers have been publicly pushing testing for months, including Mr. McCarthy and Senator Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican. Other members are now joining that call. Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader, said in the wake of the Gohmert diagnosis that the question of mandatory testing ought to be revisited. Mr. Blunt said he is pursuing the issue as well. "I've been advocating for a couple months that we test everybody and start with people who are traveling," he told reporters. Congress members are influential figures, and in this time of crisis they ought to be leading by example. By taking steps to protect themselves, their staff members and their constituents, lawmakers can send a signal about the seriousness of this situation to a confused and weary public.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Sexual assault allegations against the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, left, were the subject of a story that the reporter Ronan Farrow pursued at NBC but ultimately took to The New Yorker. The discord between NBC News and Ronan Farrow went public on Monday night. At 7 p.m., Andrew Lack, the chairman of NBC News, sent an email to network staff members arguing that Mr. Farrow's reporting last year on the film mogul Harvey Weinstein was not "fit for broadcast." Hours later, Mr. Farrow fired back at his ex boss with a pointed statement that took issue with Mr. Lack's version of events. Mr. Farrow, while working on contract for NBC, spent eight months reporting on the alleged transgressions of Mr. Weinstein only to end up publishing an award winning series centered on the film executive and his many accusers in The New Yorker magazine. Since then, people in media and entertainment have wondered why the network allowed the reporter to go out the door with the makings of such a big story. Last week, in an interview with The New York Times, Rich McHugh, a former producer at NBC News who worked closely with Mr. Farrow, accused the network's news division of impeding the reporting of the Weinstein story. He called NBC's handling of the matter "a massive breach of journalistic ethics" and said unnamed higher ups had ordered the cancellation of an interview with a Weinstein accuser in August of last year, effectively killing the investigation. Mr. Lack's email was partly an attempt to defend the network against Mr. McHugh's statements. In his message to NBC News employees, the chairman publicly defended the network's handling of the Weinstein story for the first time. "Contrary to recent allegations, at no point did NBC obstruct Farrow's reporting or 'kill' an interview," Mr. Lack wrote in the email. The news executive went on to make the argument that Mr. Farrow's reporting was not broadcast ready last August, when he stopped working the Weinstein story for NBC. The main problem, he said, was the lack of on the record voices in the version of the story Mr. Farrow had prepared. "We spent eight months pursuing the story but at the end of that time, NBC News like many others before us still did not have a single victim or witness willing to go on the record," Mr. Lack wrote. The executive added, "But Farrow did not agree with that standard. That's where we parted ways agreeing to his request to take his reporting to a print outlet that he said was ready to move forward immediately." Attached to Mr. Lack's email was a 4,488 word internal report that included a detailed summary of the reporting process. In addition to arguing that Mr. Farrow had not succeeded in persuading any of Mr. Weinstein's accusers to go on the record, the document detailed what NBC said were all the encounters between its news executives and the film mogul and his representatives, all of which Mr. Lack said had amounted to nothing. The notion that Mr. Weinstein had any effect on the network's decisions, Mr. Lack added in his note, is "baseless speculation." The document also said that Mr. Farrow had asked to move his reporting to a magazine, and that Noah Oppenheim, the president of NBC News, had given him permission to do so. "Immediately after," Mr. Lack wrote, Mr. Farrow asked to use an NBC camera crew to conduct an interview with a potential source a request that the network denied. The next day, Aug. 18, 2017, Mr. Farrow told the head of NBC's investigative unit that he was "pleased with the outcome and considers the arrangement with NBC News to be amicable," the internal document said. "I told them at that point by ordering me to stand down, NBC was killing the Harvey Weinstein story," Mr. McHugh said. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In his memo, Mr. Lack said the interview did not proceed with NBC's cameras because Mr. Farrow had already asked to leave the network. "We were increasingly concerned that repeatedly asking victims to sit for anonymous interviews in front of television cameras on this subject matter was no longer a productive approach," he added. Mr. Farrow took issue with NBC's version, saying it "contains numerous false or misleading statements" in a Twitter statement that represented his first extensive public statements on the network's handling of his work. For one thing, he said, it was not his idea to take the Weinstein story to another news organization. "The suggestion to take the story to another outlet was first raised by NBC, not me," Mr. Farrow said, "and I took them up on it only after it became clear that I was being blocked from further reporting." Mr. Farrow's work ended up earning The New Yorker a Pulitzer Prize in public service, an award the magazine shared with The Times. The existence of NBC's internal report came as a surprise to Mr. McHugh, who said he was not aware of it until last week. "It's hard to imagine how they could have conducted a proper investigation without interviewing me," he said. Mr. Farrow backed Mr. McHugh's view of the report in his statement. "The story was twice cleared and deemed 'reportable' by legal and standards only to be blocked by executives who refused to allow us to seek comment from Harvey Weinstein," he wrote. Mr. Farrow added that NBC's "list of sources is incomplete and omits women who were either identified in the NBC story or offered to be." One of Mr. Weinstein's accusers, Emily Nestor, who went on the record for Mr. Farrow's first New Yorker article, released a statement early Tuesday morning backing Mr. Farrow. She had been willing to go on the record with Mr. Farrow when he was reporting the Weinstein story for NBC, she said, but the network was "not interested." "To attempt to impugn his character or his conduct in his tireless work to publish this story is shameful," Ms. Nestor said. Mr. Farrow is working on a book for Little, Brown Company, titled "Catch and Kill," that is supposed to include his account of his dealings with the network on the Weinstein story. Mr. Lack is in his second go round at NBC. From 1993 to 2001, he oversaw the news division. In 2015, after stints at Sony and Bloomberg Media Group, he rejoined NBC News, a division of the network that has fallen under scrutiny not only for its handling of the Weinstein story but for having employed Matt Lauer, who was fired last year as the star anchor of "Today" after he was accused of workplace sexual misconduct. In his memo, Mr. Lack wrote, "We regret the deterioration of NBC's relationship with Ronan, and genuinely wish we had found a path to move forward together."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We're all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. In an interview published Tuesday, President Trump told The New York Post that he would most likely skip this year's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, reciting his usual complaints about unfair treatment from the press. He singled out the 2011 host, Seth Meyers, calling him "a no talent comic" and "nasty," before saying that both Meyers and , host of "The Late Show," are unfunny. Trump followed with a tweet praising the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld and taking a swipe at Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. A few of the hosts responded to the president in their Tuesday night monologues. "Well, I can't speak for Seth. He's very talented, but I'm an idiot, and the only reason I have a job is because I married the daughter of Donald CBS, and for some reason, he keeps putting me in charge of everything." STEPHEN COLBERT "It's nice to know that Trump is staying laser focused on the ball during a crisis." STEPHEN COLBERT "'Wacko last placer.' I hope he wasn't talking about me. I think maybe this was another typo situation. I think what he meant to tweet was, 'I am completely devastated by the loss of life caused by this insidious virus. My thoughts are with the families of those who have passed. I pledge to spend every waking moment working to make sure our medical workers have the support they need and every American has access to tests. p.s. Congrats to Greg Gutfeld!' That's better, right?" JIMMY KIMMEL "He does seem to be familiar with all the late night shows. I've heard that if you snort enough Adderall, you can watch four of them at once." JIMMY KIMMEL Trump also visited a Honeywell mask factory on Tuesday, where he declined to wear a mask despite signs on the walls asking everyone to do so. "No, he did not. And I love that they didn't turn the volume on the Guns N' Roses down even one notch for the president. I can think of no better metaphor for this presidency than Donald Trump not wearing a face mask to a face mask factory while the song 'Live and Let Die' blares in the background.'" JIMMY KIMMEL "Well, of course you wouldn't want to wear a mask somewhere stupid like a hospital. as Trump I'll only wear a mask if it's a mask facility, same way I only eat cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory, and I only take a bath at Bed Bath Beyond.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Today is also Cinco de Mayo. And if you're trying to celebrate at home, here's your quarantine Cinco de Mayo tip of the day: Any bread can be a tortilla if you use a hammer." TREVOR NOAH "So have fun celebrating Cinco de Mayo today, but don't forget: You may be at home, but guac is still extra." TREVOR NOAH "Happy most boring Cinco de Mayo ever. Tu usted. I don't know about you, but it don't feel like a Cinco de Mayo to me unless I'm in a Tecate tank top getting thrown out of a Senor Frog's." JIMMY KIMMEL "Cinco de Mayo is really handy this year, because it's the first time I've been sure of the date in two months. Thanks to Cinco de Mayo, I know it's the cinco of Mayo." STEPHEN COLBERT "But this tweet I posted last Cinco de Mayo has not aged well: 'Happy Cinco de Mayo 2019! I can't wait to go to a crowded bar and get some Corona in me!'" STEPHEN COLBERT Jimmy Fallon dedicated a new song to educators for Teacher Appreciation Day and Week.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The final event at the Drama Book Shop, the New York haven for theater insiders and fans, was, in the end, quite modest. It wasn't a big party or a series of speeches to remember the beloved store, which on Sunday will permanently close its doors on West 40th Street. Rather, it was a reading: In the small basement theater on Friday evening, two playwrights, Annie Baker and Amy Herzog, read from and discussed their latest published works. There was a scene from Ms. Herzog's "Mary Jane," a mysteriously profound tale of motherhood and child illness, and two monologues from Ms. Baker's "The Antipodes," a surreal piece about storytelling in which characters claim there are seven types of stories in the world or 36, or 19, or 10, depending on whom you ask. One of those types, perhaps, is the quintessential, all too frequent New York story of a beloved small business that, in the face of a drastic rent increase, is forced to close. The century old Drama Book Shop announced last fall that it wouldn't renew its lease at 40th Street, where it has been since 2001, because the monthly rent already pushing 20,000 would go up by 50 percent. But this version of the story has a happy, deus ex machina ending: Earlier in January, Lin Manuel Miranda and a few of his "Hamilton" colleagues bought the store, with plans to reopen at a new location later this year. It was a grand thank you to the place where, in the same basement as Friday's event, Mr. Miranda had sat at a piano writing the music for "In the Heights." Like Mr. Miranda, many artists from the theater world have used the Drama Book Shop as a much more than a store: a place to write, research or just talk with peers and potential colleagues. Monty Renfrow, a 25 year old actor in line for Friday's event, said that he felt "at home" there, and had been coming for years. Andrew Tarzis, 26, who had thought he would have a career in film, said, "I wasn't a theater person before I found this place." Fully aware of the memories people have of the store, the Drama Book Shop has invited visitors to share them on sheets of paper that have been taped to the bookshelves. Many simply wrote thank you for helping them get their first jobs, or into college. One person's favorite memory was "getting to marry the cashier." The papers are helping to hide the increasing emptiness of the Drama Book Shop. Its window displays are still up currently, for "The Prom" and "Kiss Me Kate" on Broadway and its famous dog, a decade old German spitz named Chester, still sits sleepily on a counter by the door. But on Friday there seemed to be more people in the store than books on the shelves. (They remain on sale through Sunday.) In the basement theater, a black box space decorated with white Christmas lights, every seat was filled, with the audience spilling out into the hallway outside. Many of the younger people in the crowd took notes as Ms. Baker and Ms. Herzog, with aw shucks humility and deadpan humor, shared anecdotes about their artistic processes and experiences together. The two playwrights said they had been involved in each other's work for about 12 years; they also have a reading group together, in which they and other artists test drive their latest projects. On Friday, they reprised their roles from the group: Ms. Baker as Mary Jane, Ms. Herzog as Sarah, the assistant from "The Antipodes." After a brief conversation and audience questions, everyone moved upstairs to get their Baker and Herzog plays signed but not before the store's manager stepped out to say, solemnly, "Thank you very much for attending the last event at the Drama Book Shop!"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Nathan C. Ward for The New York Times Nathan C. Ward for The New York Times Credit... Nathan C. Ward for The New York Times MORAINE, Ohio When a giant Chinese glassmaker arrived here in 2014 and began spending what would become more than a half billion dollars to fix up an abandoned General Motors plant, it seemed like a tale from opposite land: The Chinese are supposedly stealing American jobs as no less an authority than President Trump has pointed out. But now the Chinese were suddenly creating them. More than 1,500 jobs, in fact. The Chinese company, Fuyao Glass Industry Group, decided the money was worth spending in this Dayton suburb to be close to its key customers, the big American based automakers that buy millions of windshields each year. From 2000 to the first quarter of this year, the Chinese have invested almost 120 billion in the United States, according to the Rhodium Group, which tracks these flows. Nearly half of that amount has come since early 2016, making China one of this country's largest sources of foreign direct investment during that time. But with the explosion of investment has come unexpected trouble. At Fuyao, a major culture clash is playing out on the factory floor, with some workers questioning the company's commitment to operating under American supervision and American norms. The investment has even prompted hand wringing in China, where comments by the company's chairman, a self made billionaire named Cao Dewang, stirred a debate over the country's competitiveness. "Cao Dewang behaved like a traitor," wrote one person on Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging site. "You set up a factory in the U.S. to solve employment there." Solving employment is, of course, the promise that Mr. Trump rode to office. Since his victory, foreign companies like Bayer, SoftBank and Infosys have moved to align themselves with that goal and avoid an America first backlash by promoting plans for thousands of United States based jobs. But the experience of the Fuyao plant shows the potential pitfalls along the way. The union, which began meeting with workers in 2015, escalated its public efforts in April with a fiery meeting highlighting arbitrarily enforced rules and retaliation against those who speak up. Fred Strahorn, the Democratic minority leader of the Ohio House of Representatives, told the audience that Fuyao's operation felt like "a little bit of a hostage situation" and pledged to "show Fuyao that we do things a little bit different in Dayton, Ohio." In November, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Fuyao more than 225,000 for violations such as insufficient access to locks that shut down power to a machine when workers fix or maintain it. Such lapses are common in the brutally competitive auto parts industry, said David Michaels, a professor at George Washington University who headed OSHA until January, but they can easily lead to amputation or even death. The company reached an agreement in March that reduced the amount to 100,000 and required corrective measures. Eric Vanetti, the vice president for human resources, conceded an element of turmoil at the plant late last year. But he said that the atmosphere had improved significantly in the past few months and that many of the new safety measures were underway before the OSHA settlement. The company also recently gave hourly production employees a 2 an hour raise. One complication at Fuyao is the relative novelty of Chinese "greenfield" investments in the United States, in which foreign companies build new facilities rather than acquire existing ones. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. The approach has advantages for both sides. "If I didn't invest in the Dayton area, it's very unlikely anyone would invest any more in the automotive glass industry in the U.S.," Mr. Cao said. Kristi Tanner, a senior official at JobsOhio, the private economic development corporation for Ohio, which helped lure Fuyao to the state, said in a statement that the company "has transformed a long vacant former G.M. assembly plant and provided an economic lift." But projects can suffer when investors are unfamiliar with the American regulatory and political environment, as is true for many executives in China, where labor standards tend to be less strictly enforced. In 2014, a Chinese copper tube maker called Golden Dragon opened a plant in Wilcox County, Ala., to Fuyao esque fanfare, investing more than 100 million to create an anticipated 300 local jobs. By the end of the year, amid complaints about lax safety and low wages, workers narrowly voted to unionize. Other workers said that despite the company's insistence that it wanted to hand the plant over to American managers, it had increased the proportion of Chinese supervisors in recent months. That contention is consistent with the legal complaint of David Burrows, who was ousted as a vice president for the plant in November, along with the plant's president, John Gauthier. "Since those two have been fired, it has more of a Chinese feel than what it was before," said Duane Young, a worker at the plant. He said the Chinese had little interest in training, sharing responsibility with or even engaging with American employees. In an interview in Beijing, Mr. Cao said he had replaced Mr. Burrows and Mr. Gauthier because "they didn't do their jobs but squandered my money." He lamented that productivity at the plant "is not as high as we have in China," adding that "some of the workers are just idling around." Athena Hou, the chief legal officer for Fuyao Glass America, called Mr. Burrows's suit "legally meritless." Mr. Gauthier and Mr. Burrows did not respond to requests for comment. To some extent, cultural norms may explain the tensions. Mary Gallagher, who directs the Lieberthal Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, said entrepreneurs like Mr. Cao often populate their factories with migrants from rural areas, whom they expect to be relatively submissive, unlike American workers, who expect a more collegial management style. "He hasn't ever had probably this type of pressure from a work force," she said. Mr. Vanetti, the head of human resources, said the company had not sacrificed safety to meet production targets. But he conceded that "the fundamental difference between Chinese and Americans is that the Chinese have a bias toward speed; Americans like to process things, think it through from all angles." Mr. Vanetti said that Fuyao remained committed to its original four to five year timetable for handing the plant to a predominantly American management corps, and that it recently hired two more American vice presidents. But Weiyi Shi, a professor of political economy at the University of California, San Diego, said Chinese overseas investments in Africa and Asia showed a pattern of reluctance to transfer operations to local control. "At the managerial level, you see that the technical staff tends to be from China," she said. "The one local employee they hire at a senior managerial level would be the human resources director."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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At weekly staff meetings, Todd Hembree, the attorney general of the Cherokee Nation, kept hearing about babies in opioid withdrawal and youngsters with addicted parents, all being removed from families. The crush on the foster care system was so great that the unthinkable had become inevitable: 70 percent of the Cherokee foster children in Oklahoma had to be placed in the homes of non Indians. "We have addicted mothers and fathers who don't give a damn about what their children will carry on," said Mr. Hembree, a descendant of a revered 19th century chief. "They can't care for themselves, much less anything else. We are losing a generation of our continuity." Across the country, tens of thousands of people are dying from abuse of prescription opioids. Here in the capital of the Cherokee Nation, the epidemic is exacting an additional, deeply painful price. The tribe's carefully tended heritage, traditions and memories, handed down through generations, are at risk, with so many families now being ruptured by drugs. The Cherokee suit argues that the pharmacy chains Walmart, Walgreens and CVS Health, as well as the giant drug distributors McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen, flouted federal drug monitoring laws and allowed prescription opioids to pour into the Cherokee territory at some of the highest rates in the country. Such neglect, Mr. Hembree claims, amounts to exploitation of a people. The companies have responded by asking a federal judge to deny the tribe's authority to bring the case. They argue that a tribe cannot sue them in tribal court, much less enforce federal drug laws. They have questioned whether a Cherokee reservation even legally exists. "We believe this lawsuit has no merit," a CVS spokesman said. Both sides have mobilized battalions of prominent lawyers. Lindsay G. Robertson, an authority on Native American law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law who is not involved in the lawsuit, believes that the case will indeed go to tribal court. He pointed to a 1985 Supreme Court ruling, which said that, barring extraordinary circumstances, a federal court should not rule on tribal court jurisdictional questions before they have been fully litigated in tribal court. A ruling is expected soon and, regardless of the outcome, will almost certainly be appealed. For the Cherokee, the case is fundamentally about defending their identity and survival as a tribe. "I believe these companies target populations," said Mr. Hembree, whose office displays include a feathered spear and a dish of bundled sage to burn for traditional blessings. "They know Native Americans have higher rates of addiction. So when they direct their product here, they shouldn't be surprised to find themselves in a Cherokee court." On a recent morning, a new mother in the maternity ward at the Cherokee Nation's W.W. Hastings Hospital expected to take her baby home. Instead, in walked Crystal Bogle, a Cherokee Nation investigator. The newborn had tested positive for numerous opiates, Ms. Bogle told the mother. The Cherokee Nation would be taking the baby into custody, she said, until the mother got clear of drugs. Several times a week, Ms. Bogle and her colleagues have similar conversations at hospitals on tribal land. Sometimes, as voices rise, workers must call security guards. Babies addicted to opioids often have a distinctive, inconsolable shrill cry, nurses at the hospital said. The most severely addicted must be evacuated by ambulance or helicopter to a Tulsa hospital with a neonatal intensive care unit, where, on morphine drips, they slowly withdraw, remaining for up to a month. The costs, which can include years of therapy for developmental delays, are astronomical. A few months ago, Oklahoma state child welfare workers woke Nathalene Dixon, a non Indian foster parent, at 1 a.m.: Could she take a Cherokee newborn right away? The 3 day old, who tested positive for opioids, had been allowed to go home. But when workers got there and saw drugs, they took the baby away. For hours they had been trying, unsuccessfully, to locate an acceptable relative. By 4 a.m., the infant was handed to Ms. Dixon, a great grandmother whose mobile home teems with figurines of angels and birds. In two years, she has taken in about a half dozen Cherokee children. "I can't understand how parents can find drugs more important than their kids," she said. Some of the Cherokee Nation's oldest communities crouch along remote switchback roads in the verdant Ozark foothills of Adair County. Families still gather on ceremonial grounds for stomp dancing. Children fling a ball with handmade woven sticks at a wooden fish atop a pole. Many elders speak Cherokee as their first language. But these communities are also among Oklahoma's poorest, most sparsely populated and isolated. "There's not much work in Adair County," said Shawnna Roach, a tribal marshal who patrols here. "People figured out they could make money selling pills. Sometimes they call the marshals, saying their pills were stolen. Were they really stolen? Or did they sell them? They use our reports as proof to get their prescription refilled." "Several of my family members are on the pills," said Daryl Legg, who runs an employment program for Cherokee ex offenders. His disabled mother wears her clothes to bed to keep pain medication on her, secured from other users in the home. "So one night my brother cut her pants pocket open while she was sleeping," Mr. Legg said. Mr. Hembree filed his lawsuit in the Cherokee Nation's district court, a red brick 1869 building with arched windows on Tahlequah's town square. The courtroom looks like any conventional, if modest, state counterpart. Cherokee lawyers and judges are typically members of the Oklahoma state bar, the Cherokee Nation's bar and often the federal bar. The right to bring his case, Mr. Hembree says, was established in 1866. That is when the Cherokee, who had fought with the Confederacy, signed a post Civil War treaty with the United States. It recognized the Cherokees' sovereignty over "the exterior boundaries of the reservation" that included millions of acres spread across what would become 14 counties in northeastern Oklahoma, home now to more than a third of roughly 360,000 Cherokee nationwide. Pharmacies, which sold the medication directly, also bear responsibility, the suit says. CVS, Walgreens and Walmart have stores in the Cherokee Nation that are among the top 10 Oklahoma pharmacies for opioid sales. Pharmacists sidestepped their duties, Mr. Hembree argues, looking the other way when filling prescriptions that were obviously photocopied, written for suspicious quantities or refilled too soon. In response, distributors say they are links in a complex chain that includes companies that make government approved medications and licensed pharmacists. "We intend to vigorously defend ourselves in this litigation while continuing to work collaboratively to combat drug diversion," said a spokeswoman for AmerisourceBergen. The pharmacy chains say their role is to dispense medications prescribed by physicians and that they, too, are making efforts to combat the opioid crisis, such as a recent event at a Walgreens in the Cherokee Nation, touting the company's collection of unused medications. Tribal courts generally do not have jurisdiction over people who are not Native Americans. The Cherokee are relying on a 1981 exception created by the Supreme Court: If a non Indian business has a commercial, consensual relationship with the tribe, the Court said, the tribe may assert authority. Chrissi Ross Nimmo, the Cherokee's deputy attorney general, said in response: "Tribes appear before non Indian courts, judges and juries every day, and we don't automatically claim unfairness. If the Cherokee Nation has these great courts that we set up and this robust civil code, why not use it?" The tribe, the companies argue, does not have the authority to enforce federal drug reporting requirements. As for the Supreme Court's exception? Neither suppliers nor pharmacists, they say, had an agreement with the Cherokee Nation. And they say that the distribution and sale of prescription opioids did not occur on land over which the Cherokee have sovereignty. The suppliers' headquarters are not in Oklahoma. While some pharmacies are within the Nation, others are not. In fact, they contend, there is no "Cherokee reservation." Indeed, much Cherokee land within the 1866 boundaries was sold decades ago. A contemporary map of tribal property would resemble a checkerboard. But Mr. Hembree contends that the 1866 boundaries still have legal weight; that only Congress can undo the status of a "reservation." Congress has not done so for the Cherokee. On Nov. 9, Mr. Hembree's position that the Cherokee are, legally, on a reservation got fresh support. Ruling in a criminal case involving a member of Oklahoma's Muscogee Creek tribe, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit affirmed decisions upholding the treaty boundaries of that tribe's reservation. As the legal battle unfolds, the tribe pushes ahead with enforcement and treatment including drug courts, an overwhelmed Suboxone clinic and youth prevention programs. Such efforts are typical in communities across the country. But here, interventions are often steeped in Cherokee references, in an attempt to anchor tribal identity. "Do you know where your great grandmother's allotment was?" asks Gaye Wheeler, a drug abuse counselor, who tries to engage Suboxone patients about family lore. "Do you know why your family's last name is Nakedhead?" At the Jack Brown Adolescent Treatment Center, a residential facility operated by the Cherokee Nation on 22 acres of a former dairy farm, most teens say opioids had been their drug of choice. "It's important to know who you are and where you come from, to find your resources in your tribe to help you in your recovery," said the director of the center, Darren Dry. This year Nikki Baker Limore, the Nation's executive director of Indian Child Welfare, initiated a tribal cultural program for children in foster care. Accompanied by a golden retriever puppy named Unali (Cherokee for "friend"), children read Cherokee animal fables and learn basket making and weaving from the National Treasures Cherokee elders dedicated to preserving the tribe's traditions. "We have great great grandparents who were products of the Trail of Tears," said Mrs. Baker Limore, her voice shaking as she pointed out the children's artwork. "They were resilient, but we lost a lot of tribal members along the way." "And now," she continued, "you have an opioid epidemic that is wreaking havoc on families, tearing them apart. I am not sure we're going to be resilient enough to overcome this one."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Start your getaway with a MetroNorth train ride along the Hudson River. From Manhattan it's a short ride to Beacon of Cold Spring, where art exhibitions await at institutions like Dia:Beacon.Credit...Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times Start your getaway with a MetroNorth train ride along the Hudson River. From Manhattan it's a short ride to Beacon of Cold Spring, where art exhibitions await at institutions like Dia:Beacon. The day will come this month when you'll feel compelled to flee the city, at least for an afternoon. Luckily the visionaries of the New York art world have built a number of entrancing destinations around which to organize an easy day trip or a relaxing weekend. With the exception of Jack Shainman's the School, in Kinderhook (roughly a two and a half hour drive from Manhattan), all these art institutions are accessible by MetroNorth. (Remember to check opening and closing times.) And if this partial list leaves you wanting more, consider stopping by Art Omi, Bard College's Hessel Museum of Art, the Ice House and River Valley Arts Collective. It's no surprise that the two men overlapped socially but artistically they could hardly have been less alike. The work on display here captures Warhol at his most inventive. Pieces like a 1983 silk screen of a triple exposed Robert Mapplethorpe show the kind of complexity he could put into an image. A series of portraits of New York drag performers, men for whom surface appearances the way they made up their faces carried real personal and political weight, are searing. We even get a few examples of how beautifully he could draw, most notably in a gigantic Last Supper riff that debuted in Milan across the street from Leonardo da Vinci's. But you still don't forget the surface Warhol usually focused on, an opaque and shimmery scrim that to me seems like an inadequate disguise for the bottomless void behind it. And you see it in the wiry, exquisitely placed bones of his white on black screen print series "Anatomy." Marvel at the deadpan humor and philosophical economy of a print showing four parallel views of a single right humerus back, front, left and right. Though the piece asserts, by including them, that each view is different, it also puts the difference in proportion, because they really all do look just about the same. Then slip into the adjoining gallery to see "Side View of an Oxen's Jaw," a bone white, blood pink, finger scrawled painting of unfathomable depth and magical doubleness. Through Sept. 7 at the School, 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, N.Y.; 518 758 1628, jackshainman.com. In Beacon, start at the expansive and gorgeous Dia Art Foundation, where the current exhibitions including Charlotte Posenenske and Lee Ufan, which my colleague Jason Farago recently wrote about, and the pioneering early abstractions of Sam Gilliam (opening there Aug. 10) will keep you busy till lunchtime. Walking up the hill and along the town's frantically gentrifying but still idyllic Main Street, you'll find excellent sandwiches at the Pantry and artisanal Mexican style paletas at Zora Dora. On your way back to the train, stop at two exciting new galleries Parts Labor and Mother sharing a former hotel building on North Avenue (both are open on weekends and by appointment only). Founded last year by the artists Paola Oxoa and Kirsten Deirup, Mother skews grungier, as you can tell from the peeling walls. The star of "Soft Temple," its current group show, is a brace of battered and deep fried motocross bikes by Daniel Giordano: It's an over the top but timely reminder of the beauties of decay, with glints of the bikes' original red paint adding a note of optimism to an already sparkling effect. Among a number of promising small oil paintings is Ryan Browning's "Hair," in which a black bowl cut that looks borrowed from a Nancy and Sluggo comic is halfway abstracted into a faux somber mood study. In Chason Matthams's "Daffy's head on Sylvester's body (beat up)," a purplish cartoon chimera lives at tragic cross purposes with itself, trying to walk in two directions at once. After leaving Beacon, take Metro North one stop down to Cold Spring and reserve a seat on the free shuttle to Magazzino Italian Art, an elegant little private museum opened in 2017 by the collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu. Though the exhibition rotates from time to time, the focus is always on the theatrical postwar Italian movement known as Arte Povera. Luciano Fabro's 1986 sculpture "Efeso II," a 1,500 pound slab of white Carrara marble suspended from the ceiling in two loops of steel cable, offers a great introduction to the movement's approach. Unlike an oil painting, the piece is clearly animated by a singular, somewhat comic idea in this case, a stone that's lighter than air. But the same idea, if you get into the spirit of it, could also be a stab at transcendence, and the work's conceptual impetus doesn't mean the artist was indifferent to the details of its physical form. On the contrary, one constant running through the works of Fabro, Alighiero Boetti, Mario and Marisa Merz, Jannis Kounellis and the others you'll see here is a devotion to lush materials: "Yes, yes, it's art," you can imagine Fabro saying, "but look at the beauty of the marble!" An entire room of works by the Greek born Kounellis, who died just before Magazzino opened, includes a pair of used leather shoes with lead supports sitting on a four and a half foot tall wooden plinth. Like "Efeso II," this untitled piece hides its profound melancholy behind a joke. No artwork could bear as protracted, or as intimate, a portrait of its maker's mortal trajectory through the world as his shoes. But there's something of the mysterious anonymity of human life in the piece, too the way that separate, speechless objects like shoe leather and bones combine for a flashing instant around a living personality and then, just as quickly, fall apart. Still, among the nearly 80 sculptures, paintings and photographs that crowd the museum's 20,000 square feet, the one that lingers with me is the quietest, a mid 1970s work by Giovanni Anselmo. A slide projector sits on the floor, casting some invisible image into the middle of the gallery. Only if you stop and block the light's path with a hand, or your copy of the museum's catalog, or some other personal object, can you see that the silent device is relentlessly projecting its title, "Particolare" (" Particular.")
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Facebook for years gave major tech companies, including Yahoo and Netflix, greater access to people's data than it disclosed, a New York Times investigation found. The partnerships helped Facebook draw new users, ramp up its advertising revenue and embed itself on sites across the web. This is how some of the key deals worked. In 2011 , when Yahoo and Facebook announced their partnership, social networking features were seen as crucial to attracting users to existing websites. In a news release that September, Yahoo announced that it was "putting people's friends front and center to usher in an innovative way of connecting around content socially." Yahoo said people who opted in to its new features would see their Facebook friends and the articles those friends had read, in a "facebar" at the top of the Yahoo News site. As with many social features from that time, the integration did not work as well as the companies had hoped, and it soon ended. Yet Yahoo maintained special data access for more than 80,000 accounts, according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Times. As recently as this summer, Yahoo was able to view a stream of posts from these people's friends, and it is unclear what the company did with that information. A Yahoo spokesman said the company did not use the information for advertising. Netflix and Spotify received access to people's Facebook messages as part of features that allowed people to suggest movies, TV shows and music to friends. On Netflix, for example, after watching a show, a viewer would be prompted to connect to Facebook and recommend it. Netflix promoted the arrangement in 2014 as more privacy sensitive than posting people's viewing habits on their Facebook pages. Using Facebook Messenger allowed people to " easily, and privately, recommend the shows you love to the people you care about," Netflix said in a 2014 blog post. To accomplish such sharing, the Netflix application had to be able to send Facebook messages. But Netflix was given the ability not only to send private messages but also to read, write and delete them, and to see all participants on a thread. A Netflix spokesman said the company was not aware it had been granted such broad powers and had used the access only for messages sent by the recommendation feature. Netflix deactivated the feature about a year after it was introduced, but documents show that the company still had access to users' messages in 2017. Spotify, which continues to offer its own similar recommendation feature, also said it was unaware of the special access. Facebook, in a quest to bind other corners of the web to its social network, shared data with several major websites in a program called "instant personalization." These partners, which included Microsoft's Bing search engine and Rotten Tomatoes, the movie and television review site, got access to users' names, gender, profile photos and any other information they had made public. Beginning in 2010, if people visited one of those partner sites while logged in to Facebook, a blue bar on the screen would let them know the site was receiving their Facebook data to personalize what they saw. For example, people might see what movies their friends liked, or get tailored search results based on preferences gleaned from Facebook. Facebook eventually wound down instant personalization, but it continued to allow some sites, including Bing and Rotten Tomatoes, access to much of the same data they had been getting for the discontinued feature. The internal documents shed light on a Facebook feature called "People You May Know," a friend suggestion tool that has long confused and unsettled users. Gizmodo and other outlets have reported that the tool has recommended connections between patients of the same psychiatrist, estranged family members and people who had simply been in the same location, prompting suspicions that the company was closely tracking users' whereabouts, listening to their conversations and more. In some deals, Facebook shared information with other companies and in turn received people's contact details data Facebook used to develop complex friend network models and suggest more connections, the documents show. The partners that fed information to the tool included Amazon, Yahoo and the Chinese company Huawei. The Times, one of nine media companies named in the documents, developed a social sharing application called TimesPeople in 2008. The tool incorporated Facebook friend lists and allowed people to share articles and make recommendations to other readers. The feature was shut down in 2011, but The Times continued to have access to friend lists until 2017. The Times spokeswoman said they were unaware of the continued access and were not receiving any data for the feature from Facebook.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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New York City Ballet both is and isn't in limbo. Peter Martins resigned as ballet master in chief on Jan. 1. Since early December, the artistic life of the company has been run by a team of four young people, all under 40. Weeks or months are likely to pass before any permanent successor is appointed. Until June, the company dances repertory announced last year by Mr. Martins. No dance company is static. Performances bring change. In the current six week season (through March 4), some careers have made advances; others not. Whoever takes over City Ballet long term must address not just the legacy of Mr. Martins but also the achievements of this interregnum, too. A controversial slap in Mr. Martins's "Romeo Juliet" has been deleted; the ballerina Patricia McBride has coached a role she created. There have been impressive debuts in individual roles. Not least, there's a new name on people's lips: that of the 18 year old Roman Mejia, who was promoted to the corps from apprentice by Mr. Martins in November. This month, Mr. Mejia danced the faun soloist in the Fall section of Jerome Robbins's "The Four Seasons" and Mercutio in Mr. Martins's "Romeo Juliet." He has dash, sunniness, spontaneity, courtesy, speed, precision, sparkle, enthusiasm. He can arrive in the air before you saw the jump coming, beat his legs together or flourish his feet in rings while up there. And he turns, both fast and slow, with the same mixture of impulsiveness and security he brings to everything. There's plenty yet we don't know about Mr. Mejia can he partner? but the rainbow like naturalness of his dancing makes this early stage of his career a joy for the audience. How's the rest of the company dancing? "The Four Seasons" was a good place to check in. Fall, in which the faun character accompanies a lead couple, was exuberantly performed by two casts: Tiler Peck, Joaquin De Luz and Daniel Ulbricht; and Ashley Bouder, Zachary Catazaro and Mr. Mejia. I remember the illustrious first two casts of this ballet in 1979, when Patricia McBride and Mikhail Baryshnikov alternated with Suzanne Farrell and Mr. Martins, but those memories did not stop me from finding Ms. Peck and Mr. De Luz glorious. (And Mr. Ulbricht is another who knows plenty about staying longer in the air than seems possible.) Ms. Bouder, now often so mannered in ballets by George Balanchine, was at her freest and blithest. And Mr. Catazaro, though his powers in bravura technique are limited, showed more blaze and sweep than ever before. But neither Sara Mearns (juicy but harsh) nor Sterling Hyltin (sweet but pallid) gives Robbins's Spring choreography full radiance or elan; nor do their partners, Jared Angle and Chase Finlay. Both the Summer ballerinas, the splendid but usually cool Teresa Reichlen and the lovely but withdrawn Ashley Laracey, are cast against type. Ms. Reichlen, in superb form all season, relished the chance to show a new voluptuousness. The insular Ms. Laracey, however, badly needs awakening: She scarcely connects to anyone else onstage. Most of City Ballet's repertory currently contains comparable unevenness. Who can neatly sum up the overall effect Mr. Martins has left on today's company? The one he inherited in 1983 was superlative. Within 10 years, most of that dance quality had diminished appallingly, with a loss of central energy. Many of the most important classical ballets were looking like pretty little items of confectionery. And too many company alumni who had worked with Balanchine (the company's founder choreographer) and Robbins were banished. Yet the last 10 years have brought a remarkable recovery. How can the same man have presided over such a decline and then such improvement? Two of the most signal features of Balanchine style dancing that takes the dancer out off balance as if over a brink and that arrives with (or ahead of) the beat as if embodying it were so diluted by 2007 08 that you could seldom feel their presence at all. That's far less true these days. Energy isn't always ideally directed, but it is far higher than it was earlier this century. Three ballerinas in particular showed a marvelous command of Balanchine this winter: Maria Kowroski, Tiler Peck and Teresa Reichlen. Sara Mearns, as in the fall, was dancing at peak strength, but often serving her own self dramatizing intensity more than the subtler demands of the roles. Mr. Martins's record with new choreography is similarly baffling. From the first, he made City Ballet the world's foremost showcase for choreographic commissions. (With its treasury of ballets by Balanchine and Robbins, it can lay claim to have been that all along, but the difference was that Mr. Martins brought in more outsiders.) In the last century, however, this policy paid lousy dividends. (Bad new ballets can be found the world over, but they're grimmer when seen in the House of Balanchine.) This century changed that: The company has produced more of the world's best new ballets than any other troupe. So this winter we saw again Alexei Ratmansky's "Russian Seasons" (2006). This remains a wonderfully mysterious and poetic piece that often tugs at the heart. But the season's repertory (scheduled months ago by Mr. Martins) also contained 21st century rubbish. Why on earth were we asked to revisit Angelin Preljocaj's "Spectral Evidence" (2013) and Mr. Martins's "The Red Violin" (2006)? Some bad ballets are at least engrossing; these are bores.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Think Canal Street and the following sights and sounds likely spring to mind: shrink wrapped counterfeit purses displayed on a blanket (ready to be rolled and stowed in a flash); furtive whispers of "Bag?" "Watch?"; and everywhere, tourists. Now, clear some space in that mental image and insert a high end luxury goods store and a hip jewelry boutique. Replace some of the tourists with Brooklyn hipsters (who also wear fanny packs but ironically), and there you have it: If Canal Street's newest neighbors are any indication, this is a picture of its future. "I think people were afraid of Canal Street for so long, and now they're recognizing there are just so many advantages to the area," Beth Bugdaycay said. Ms. Bugdaycay and her husband, Murat, are the founders of the fine jewelry label Foundrae, one of the latest shops to open around Canal. "I think we're just beginning to see the neighborhood come alive," she said. In March, Foundrae unveiled its shop on Lispenard, a two block street that runs into Canal, joining the ranks of retail pioneers including R.W. Guild, a luxury home goods store at the corner of Canal and Mercer Streets, and Canal Street Market, at 265 Canal. Now, in addition to browsing those ubiquitous "I Love New York" T shirts and curious plastic frogs sentenced to swim for eternity in their little tubs, Canal Street shoppers can peruse the 10,000 gold and diamond pendant necklaces at Foundrae, or pop into Canal Street Market for a 17 lobster roll at Luke's and check out various indie wares (a ceramic banana from Rebu, say, or a hand embroidered work wear shirt from Peels). "I had to wonder, was it right to open on Canal because the Guild is sort of a high end place or was it nuts?" said Robin Standefer, who, with Stephen Alesch, founded the design firm Roman and Williams, which opened R.W. Guild in December . "But as a third generation New Yorker, one of the things I love about this city is that it's an incredible place of inspiration and aspiration, the high and low all in one place." Though R.W. Guild's official address is 53 Howard Street, Ms. Standefer and Mr. Alesch didn't want to "cut our face off from Canal," as she put it. "We wanted to be part of a renaissance." Not everyone was sold on the idea, she recalled. "People said: 'You're going to let in all these people just buying a cookie? You're going to keep a door on Canal?' I'm like, 'Yes, absolutely.' The Guild is a high end place, but I am very egalitarian about this: Everybody is welcome. Stephen and I are really devoted to that." As most of these stories go, the neighborhood's refresh can be traced back to the artists and fashion people who set down roots over the last decade. "Around 2010, we suddenly saw this influx of awesome, creative new tenants on the commercial floors," said Philip Chong, the founder of Canal Street Market, who was working in real estate development for HRCE, a company that owns a number of buildings in the area, including the cavernous, six story one that now houses Canal Street Market. Those droves needed to eat. "The idea for Canal Street Market came about because we were thinking about what the neighborhood really needed and what we saw was a huge demand for exciting, new food concepts," said Mr. Chong, who spent a lot of his childhood in the area around Canal. He wanted to do something that would honor the street's past, its connection to the iconic markets in Chinatown, as well as appeal to its newcomers. The idea of a food hall, with a diverse mix of cuisines alongside a rotating roster of retail vendors, emerged. Today, Canal Street Market has 11 food stalls, including an outpost of the famous Chinatown spot Nom Wah Tea Parlor, and around 26 retail vendors, which often change on a monthly basis. The market opened in December 2016. "The streets definitely seem a lot more bustling during the day," said Simon Chung, the market's director of partnership, who formerly served as brand development manager at Opening Ceremony. Of course, the biggest change isn't the size of the crowd but who is in it. "There's a lot more locals coming through," Mr. Chung said. When Exposure America, a communications agency whose clients include Adidas, Sonos and Dr. Martens, moved into an office a block south of Canal Street on Broadway, it also saw an opportunity. The company turned the ground floor of the building into an event space, which has since been taken over by Dotan Negrin, a musician by trade, and rebranded as 393 NYC. The space has been host to a number of pop ups, including for Malin Goetz and Herschel Supply Co. and for an exhibition of work by the artist Jerkface. "I think this area is turning into another arts district," Mr. Negrin said. "There are so many artists in the neighborhood, and a lot of new galleries, and theaters opening up soon. My hope is that it'll become a place where tourists and locals can come and see something cool, whether that's at a gallery or taking in jazz at the Roxy Hotel." Mr. Negrin may get his wish. Later this year, the blue chip Los Angeles art gallery Regen Projects is scheduled to open its first New York outpost in a 5,300 square foot space at 60 Lispenard Street, half a block from 393 Broadway. Jonathan Schley, the vice president of Global High Street Retail at CBRE, a commercial real estate services and investment firm, agreed that for some brands, the edginess of Canal Street may be a lure. But Mr. Schley said that the neighborhood still faces a number of challenges, including a lack of charm not helped by the street's wide girth, unpleasant car traffic and tourist clotted sidewalks. Some stores, like R.W. Guild are circumventing this issue by keeping entrances on Howard Street. Foundrae avoided it by popping up on a tributary street. "That's sort of the best of both worlds because you're accessible to Canal, but also a little bit out of the melee," Mr. Schley said. He singled out Lispenard Street, and the blocks between Mercer and Wooster as the most promising in the area to be developed. "Canal rents are at a minimum 10 percent below the lowest SoHo asking rents," Mr. Schley said, adding that at the very top end of SoHo on Prince Street, say rents can be as much as 75 percent higher than on Canal. Fifty years ago, Canal Street was a mecca of art and industrial supplies. Some 150 years ago, it was a thriving retail center; 200 years ago, it was marshland. Its next iteration could well be the city's cool new shopping destination, but, if that's the case, pioneers like Ms. Standefer hope it won't erase the area's local culture. "I think there's room for some gentrification, but I hope it's never going to be a complete redo," she said. "I think Canal Street has just enough texture and character to always have a foot in both worlds." Perhaps one day a luxury brand will set up shop right next to those hawkers selling its counterfeit. Wouldn't that be the most New York ending to the story?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Mr. Oz's masterpiece is his 2004 memoir, "A Tale of Love and Darkness." It was unlike anything he had ever written, telling the story of his own coming of age in Jerusalem with precision and brutal honesty. He captured the mystical air of the city, how it was transformed with the birth of the state, his own bookish youth and his mother's depression, which led to her suicide when Mr. Oz was 12. In the memoir, he remembers his mother telling him: "I think you will grow up to be a sort of prattling puppy dog like your father, and you'll also be a man who is quiet and full and closed like a well in a village that has been abandoned by all its inhabitants. Like me." It's an extraordinary book that will endure as one of the greatest works in modern Hebrew. In many ways, through this memoir, Mr. Oz perfected what he had tried to do again and again in his fiction to capture the coming together of the personal and the political, with neither of the two elements suffering from the collision. Mr. Oz's politics defined him to the international audience he often dazzled with his metaphors to explain the conflict. ("The only solution is turning the house into two smaller apartments," Mr. Oz said in a 2013 interview with The Times's Roger Cohen. And in the same interview: "I would say that the patient, Israeli and Palestinian, is unhappily ready for surgery, while the doctors are cowards.") He became a critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza following the Six Day War, and was a mainstay of the left who insistently argued, in essays and opinion pieces and speeches, that the only solution to the conflict with the Palestinians was to create two states for two peoples. Given how he envisioned the future of his country, his voice became an increasingly marginalized one in Israel in recent years, even as his stature continued to grow around the world. The native born, kibbutz influenced, adamantly secular, left leaning Israelis of European descent who dominated Israel throughout much of Mr. Oz's life have had to make way for Sephardic and Russian Jews, and the Orthodox, putting Mr. Oz increasingly in the position of an aging lefty, a prophet with fewer people willing to listen to him in his own country. In his last novel, "Judas," shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, he explored, by revisiting the story of the New Testament traitor, what exactly it means to be out of step with your own society. "Anyone willing to change will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don't understand it and loathe change," he told me when I interviewed him in 2016. He felt himself a man possessed of moral clarity but denigrated for it in a country that could not make the difficult decisions he thought were necessary. For all his frustrations with Israeli society and its direction, he was always an optimist, a man who had gone all in on the Zionist experiment and saw no reason to believe that perfection was ever on offer. In his final essay collection, "Dear Zealots," published at the end of last year, he wrote that he was, "afraid of the fanaticism and the violence, which are becoming increasingly prevalent in Israel, and I am also ashamed of them." But this didn't get in the way of his love of Israel. "I like being Israeli. I like being a citizen of a country where there are eight and a half million prime ministers, eight and a half million prophets, eight and a half million messiahs. Each of us has our own personal formula for redemption, or at least for a solution. Everyone shouts, and few listen. It's never boring here."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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DOYENNE OF DYSTOPIA Marie Lu may be the only writer in recent memory who has been inspired by a political convention. In 2016, watching the Democratic National Convention, the young adult author was moved by Khizr Khan's speech about his son, Humayun, who died saving fellow soldiers in Iraq. She says, "I could not stop thinking about how many young people from marginalized walks of life go off to war to fight for us, to protect us, then come back to a country that doesn't give them the respect they deserve. That idea haunted me and it haunts me still." Lu, the mastermind behind the wildly popular Legend series, poured that frustrated energy into her new novel, "Skyhunter," which appeared at No. 8 on last week's young adult hardcover list. Set 5,000 years in the future in what she describes as a "regressed society," the story follows a refugee who defends her country against an evil federation that has taken over the rest of the world. The book is definitely striking a chord with its audience. On Amazon, a reviewer wrote, "'Skyhunter' subtly (and sometimes not quite so) delves into complex themes, including the refugee experience, corruption in government, nationalism and the caste system." On Goodreads, another enthusiast put it like this: "I wish Lu wrote my textbooks because I can't seem to get enough of her books." "Skyhunter" is Lu's second best selling novel in 2020; the first was "The Kingdom of Back," which came out in March, just as the pandemic started to gather steam. Still, in the midst of all the uncertainty, the Los Angeles based author continued to rise before dawn to squeeze in exercise or writing before her toddler woke up. ("I would rather write than exercise. Always.") Lu says the biggest immediate change in her life has been a sense of exhaustion and "trying to find creativity when we're not allowed to partake in each other." She explains, "I'm inspired by places I see and people I talk to friends, family, strangers. It was strange to be physically cut off from people. I feel that difference when I sit down to write." Lu says her fans keep her focused on her work, especially the ones who are "out in the streets marching for these huge issues like climate change and gun control." She says, "Teenagers shouldn't have to take on these things. They should be worrying about prom, grades and crushes. But young people have always been harbingers of change and if we're going to come out of this it's because of them. I'm so grateful."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Nearly four years after breaking away from a large company to run his own digital operation, Bill Simmons is going back into business with a corporate behemoth. The Ringer, the website and podcasting network founded by Mr. Simmons in 2016, will soon become the property of Spotify, the companies said on Wednesday. The terms of the deal, which is expected to close by the end of the first quarter, were not disclosed. Mr. Simmons, a writer, a sports commentator, a podcaster and an internet entrepreneur, started The Ringer after he left ESPN in a bitter dispute. As an employee of the sports media giant, he founded the sports and culture website Grantland. He also had a hand in the creation of the network's "30 for 30" documentary series. ESPN did not renew his contract in 2015 and closed Grantland months later. The Ringer was originally on the digital platform Medium and switched to Vox Media under a partnership announced in 2017.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Back in 2015, students in Maggie Samudio's second grade class at Cumberland Elementary School in West Lafayette, Ind., were contemplating an offbeat science question: If a firefly went to space, would it still be able to light up as it floated in zero gravity? Ms. Samudio said she would ask a friend of hers, Steven Collicott, an aerospace professor at nearby Purdue University, for the answer. "He teaches a class on zero gravity, and he would be the perfect person to answer the question," Ms. Samudio recalled in an email. A day later, Dr. Collicott replied, and Ms. Samudio was surprised by his answer: Instead of guessing, why not actually build the experiment and send it to space?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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