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The East Side Home of a Muse to Andy Warhol Comes on the Market Barbara Allen de Kwiatkowski, a former model who was part of Warhol's inner circle, is asking 11.5 million for her Beekman Place duplex. None The living room of this Beekman Place duplex features oversized windows that look out onto the river and bring in an abundance of light. The longtime city home of Barbara Allen de Kwiatkowski, socialite, former model and one time muse of Andy Warhol, is entering the market for the first time in more than five decades. The asking price for the apartment a sprawling duplex perched above the East River at 1 Beekman Place is 11.5 million, according to Michael Sarg of Compass, who is listing the property with his colleagues Josh Doyle and Nick Gavin. Monthly maintenance is 14,370. Ms. de Kwiatkowski says she's sad to be leaving. She always enjoyed the panoramic water views extending from the Queensboro Bridge to beyond the red curlicue letters of the landmark Pepsi Cola sign. And she appreciated the privacy of her prewar co op building, ensconced in a two block enclave within Manhattan's Turtle Bay neighborhood. Then, of course, there were the parties. She hosted plenty of them during her three plus decades there (her husband had owned the place first), with an array of celebrity and artist guests, among them Warhol, her close friend and confidante. The home is entered through a spacious central gallery that leads to the living room, formal dining room and library. But now she's looking to downsize into a smaller East Side residence. "This apartment is way too big for me," said Ms. de Kwiatkowski, who worked at Warhol's Interview magazine and was dubbed its "Girl of the Year" in 1977. Her well documented days of clubbing and of socializing with the likes of Mick Jagger, Roman Polanski and countless other boldface names have long given way to a simpler, more subdued lifestyle. The nearly 5,300 square foot unit was purchased in 1965 by Henryk de Kwiatkowski, a wealthy horse breeder whom she married in 1986. The couple used it mainly as a pied a terre, having also owned homes in Greenwich, Conn., Lexington, Ky., and the Bahamas. After his death in 2003, it became a primary residence, which she now shares with a handful of staff and her two Scottie dogs, Chloe and Duffy, while her son, Nicholas de Kwiatkowski, visits occasionally. She also owns a home in Locust Valley, N.Y. The Manhattan apartment sits on the fifth and sixth floors of the 16 story brick building, between Mitchell Place and East 50th Street. It has five main bedrooms, all but one with an en suite bath, as well as a staff bedroom and bath, a laundry room, and a half bath near the main entrance. Included in the sale is a separate ground floor unit with around 380 square feet that could also be used as additional staff quarters or as an office. (It now serves as storage for Ms. de Kwiatkowski.) The duplex is entered on the lower level through a spacious central gallery, which contains a baby grand piano and a grand sweeping staircase. The gallery leads to a 30 by 21 foot living room, with a library and formal dining room on each side. The living room is anchored by a wood burning fireplace (one of three in the home) with an ornately carved marble mantle and has several oversize windows that look out onto the river. "The bulk of the living space has river views," Mr. Sarg said, "and it has great light." Tucked away in the western wing of the lower level, near the service entrance, is an enormous eat in, windowed kitchen with banquette seating and a butler's pantry. Upstairs are the bedrooms. Two of them open to a 65 square foot, river facing terrace, including the master suite, which features another marble fireplace and a large, walk in closet. Parish Hadley Associates designed the apartment's interior in the 1980s. Most of the decor remains, including the hand painted Chinese floral wallpaper in the dining room. To design the apartment's interior, Ms. de Kwiatkowski hired the celebrated Parish Hadley Associates, which also decorated the Kennedy White House. Most of Parish's touches are still in the apartment today, including the hand painted Chinese floral wallpaper in the dining room and the blood red painted library with built ins and a fireplace , Ms. de Kwiatkowski's favorite room. (And, yes, Warhol's artwork is displayed, including a rare signed sketch of Ms. de Kwiatkowski hanging prominently in the living room, as well as images of Bob Marley in one of the bedrooms.) Many of the apartment's original architectural features also remain, like the wide plank dark oak floors, wood moldings and high ceilings (some rising 14 feet). The 1 Beekman Place apartment house was built around 1930 by a syndicate headed by David M. Milton, the son in law of John D. Rockefeller Jr. Notable residents have included John D. Rockefeller III; Happy Rockefeller, the widow of Nelson A. Rockefeller, the New York governor and vice president; Prince Aly Khan, the son of the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of millions of Ismaili Muslims; and Huntington Hartford, the A. P. heir who was deemed "undesirable" and evicted from the building. The co op offers numerous amenities, among them a fitness center, indoor pool and basketball court. There's also a common space for residents to entertain and a landscaped riverfront garden, where Ms. de Kwiatkowski recalls organizing an impromptu get together after the 2001 funeral of Frederick W. Hughes, Warhol's business manager. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
In 2013, Joanna Kotze won the Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer for her dense and stately evening length "It happened it had happened it is happening it will happen." Now in her follow up, "Find Yourself Here," choppier in tone, she places three dancers and three visual artists in the same space to blur the lines between task and choreography, movement and sound. Two years in the making, "Find Yourself Here" was originally created as three separate trios; each paired two dancers with a visual artist. Performed at the Baryshnikov Arts Center on Thursday, the completed work, backed by an uncluttered, haunting sound design by Ryan Seaton, who mixes it live for each presentation, has a fleeting sense of purpose even though the performers move purposefully. And everyone moves in "Find Yourself Here." In a preshow presentation, the cast arranges colored tiles on the floor like the squares on a crossword, eventually placing them in piles at the back of the stage. All the while, Zachary Fabri, a video and performance artist, breaks up the task based actions with bursts of rapid hopscotch or slow motion steps as he jabs the air. Arresting in his ability to stop or start quickly, Mr. Fabri is alert and penetrating, yet his presence seems to be tacked onto the piece rather than part of its fabric. When he is left alone, the others, hidden from view, whoop and yell, "Come on, Zach!" His feet start to vibrate faster, wider until the others, with their elbows bent at right angles, enter the stage marching on their toes in clipped steps. Mr. Fabri joins in and soon their feet, in different colored sneakers, echo throughout the space like a beating heart. The dancers Ms. Kotze, Stuart Singer and Netta Yerushalmy break free of the pack, and the women, often paired, shift into poses with birdlike gawkiness. Mr. Singer, as if running for his life, swirls around the stage in serpentine patterns as Kathy Kaufmann's lighting transforms the space in a dusky blue.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
When you're designing a bedroom, there's no piece of furniture more important than the bed. "It's everything," said Jake Arnold, a British interior designer based in West Hollywood. "I always focus on what the finish, materials and proportions of the bed are before developing the rest of the space, because it dictates what happens with the night stands, the rug and the rest of the decorative items." So which bed to choose? That depends on the architecture of the room and your personal tastes, Mr. Arnold said. But he's a firm believer that bigger is better, even in small spaces. "If you have a tight space and want things to look a little more minimal and sophisticated, it's nice to just fill most of the bed wall with the headboard," he said. "I've had people use four poster beds in tiny rooms, and it does make the space feel more dramatic." Just watch out for high footboards. "There's nothing worse," he noted, "than jumping on the bed and whacking your leg."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
CINCINNATI "I am known for writing very dark, disturbing music," the composer Christopher Rouse, who died last month at 70, once said. "It just happened that every time I had a piece to write, somebody died whose death had a big effect on me." When the time came to write his Symphony No. 6, which received its posthumous premiere on Friday with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, he again returned to the subject of death though, as he wrote in a program note typed from bed in hospice care, "in this event it is my own." Mr. Rouse one of the great American composers of our time, admired by audiences and fellow artists alike had been suffering from renal cancer, and treated the symphony as his final musical statement. He typically signed off his scores with the Latin phrase "Deo gratias," or "thanks be to God." But under the final bar of the Sixth Symphony, he wrote "Finis": the end. It's a haunting and profound farewell, though not one of maudlin anguish or tearfulness. If you listen closely enough, all of Mr. Rouse contemplative elegy, rowdy playfulness, eclectic homage is in this score, masterfully orchestrated and transparently rendered. Twenty five minutes long, it has the sweep of Mahler but the concision of poetry. The Sixth, like its composer, is also extremely likable: warmly received by the audience at Music Hall here, as I imagine it would be anywhere else. The piece was commissioned for the Cincinnati Symphony's 125th anniversary season. Louis Langree, the orchestra's music director, who led a sensitive and committed performance, said from the stage at a second go on Saturday that you would expect something celebratory and flamboyant for an anniversary. So he admitted to being at first confused by the work's tone. "And now," he told the audience, "we know why." Mr. Rouse, after all, had been private about his illness. His initial program note about the symphony was focused more on technique than emotion. But then he wrote another, of heartfelt candor, from his hospice bed; it was made available after his death and printed as an insert in the program book in Cincinnati. In both notes, he writes about what his Sixth Symphony shares with Mahler's Ninth: mainly, a four movement structure in which two boisterous inner movements are sandwiched between a slow opening and finale. Such an explicit reference is hardly unusual for Mr. Rouse, whose output is like an Easter egg hunt of music history. Among the composers he's tipped his hat to are Bruckner, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Wagner. His Fifth Symphony brazenly courted comparisons with Beethoven's. This often meant an unapologetic embrace of tonality, which Mr. Rouse's critics pointed to as a streak of conservatism. I don't find that fair. His music is diverse tender and spare, cacophonous and atonal and he seems to have followed his intuition to let every piece simply be what it must. (Anyone looking for a Rouse primer should listen to a recent tribute on the conductor Joshua Weilerstein's podcast "Sticky Notes.") It opens quietly, with a haze of high strings and a despairing theme delivered by a flugelhorn Mr. Rouse was a fan of using at least one unusual instrument per work that lands, in Mahlerian fashion, on a note doubled by a harp in lower octaves. The movement continues slowly, building (like Ravel's "Bolero," which opened the program) toward a climax that wields the full forces of the orchestra. But the burst fades as quickly as it arrived, leaving only that same sad flugelhorn tune in its dust. The symphony continues without pause to a playfully macabre second movement, followed by an explosive third in which the percussionists seem to log a mile in steps as they restlessly move among their instruments. But the mood of the opening returns for the fourth movement, whose final passages are ephemeral and varied expressing awe and glistening serenity, but also uncertainty and pain over a low E drone in the basses. Mr. Rouse, in his program remarks, refers to that long sustained note as a lifeline that continues and continues, until it stops. When it does stop, it does so abruptly, cut off by a gong whose resonance lingers, like a dissipating breath. At the premiere, Mr. Langree kept his baton raised ambiguously neither high enough to hold off audience applause, nor low enough to indicate that the piece had ended as if unwilling to let go entirely, and wanting to offer a moment of silence to a composer who had just delivered his own eulogy. Performed on Friday and Saturday at Music Hall, Cincinnati.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
When Harrison Ford went onstage to present best picture at the 1999 Oscars, it seemed obvious that he would be handing the statuette to his old "Raiders of the Lost Ark" pal Steven Spielberg for the World War II drama "Saving Private Ryan." After Ford opened the envelope, the director John Madden recalled, "in my head, he seemed to take an extraordinary amount of time to absorb what he was reading." Then Ford announced Madden's film, "Shakespeare in Love," and "it was completely surreal." Nobody could have predicted that outcome eight months earlier, when "Ryan" opened to rapturous reviews and terrific box office returns. (It ultimately earned more than 485 million worldwide.) "Should we just FedEx the Oscars over to Spielberg's house now and save everybody the trouble of voting?" one academy member was quoted as saying in Variety. Harvey Weinstein had other ideas. The Miramax mogul had established himself as a master Oscar campaigner, having shepherded such disparate films as "My Left Foot," "The English Patient" and "Pulp Fiction" to wins in major categories in previous years. Now, through sheer force of will, it seemed, he wanted to pull off one of the biggest upsets in Academy Awards history. "He's a man of extraordinary passion and determination, whether anybody likes it or not," Madden said of Weinstein, who now faces five charges including rape and two counts of predatory sexual assault. Weinstein has denied the accusations. "He was obviously a force of nature within the industry, and in other ways we hadn't understood and are appalled to look back on." In mid December 1998 the 11th hour in Oscar season Weinstein decided he would throw his then considerable clout behind "Shakespeare" for best picture. The film had a long and troubled path to the screen, with Daniel Day Lewis and Julia Roberts slated nearly a decade earlier to play the titular playwright and his romantic muse, and Edward Zwick ("Glory") set to direct. That plan fell apart, and Kenneth Branagh and Winona Ryder stepped into the main roles. Finally, Madden (who had directed the 1997 Victorian drama "Mrs. Brown" for Miramax) came on board, with Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow as his stars. In the editing room, Madden and Weinstein clashed over the film's tone and ending. The studio executive "wanted it to end like a romantic comedy in other words, the boy gets the girl," Madden said, adding that the prizewinning playwright who co wrote the screenplay, "Tom Stoppard, and I pointed out, 'Well, that didn't happen.'" Madden prevailed, and critics and audiences embraced the film even as the Bard and his beloved Viola went their separate ways. Weinstein's team lobbied journalists and voters to convince them of the merits of "Shakespeare" and the shortcomings of its main competitor. "'Private Ryan' was hit with one of the first whisper campaigns, when a rumor is spread to manipulate viewers into thinking something negative," Sasha Stone, founder and editor of awardsdaily.com, said in a recent email. The spin? That the movie peaks in its opening sequence, a harrowing recreation of the D Day invasion, and goes downhill from there. "Everyone knew that Weinstein played dirty," Stone added. "Subtle but dirty." The voters' hearts were with "Shakespeare" especially since the largest bloc in the academy is actors, and "they love movies about themselves," Stone said. As Madden noted, "the movie is a love letter to the theater and acting." In fact, "Shakespeare" had won the Screen Actors Guild Award for best ensemble. "That should have telegraphed it to Oscar watchers more than it did," the Turner Classic Movies host Dave Karger said in a telephone interview. Miramax and DreamWorks, the studio behind "Private Ryan," both spent millions on "for your consideration" ads, yet the race became seen as a David and Goliath battle, with Spielberg and company as the giant. "It always seemed like a hilarious juxtaposition two movies more unalike are hard to imagine," Madden said. "That's why the Oscars are so fascinating." (Spielberg ended up winning best director; "I never imagined for a second he wouldn't," said Madden, who was also nominated.) When "Shakespeare" was named best picture, Weinstein took the stage along with four other credited producers, including Zwick, who had remained nominally attached to the project. "Their contributions to the film as producers were hard to define," Madden said. "Harvey was not a producer when we were making the film" but gave himself the title later. Through a spokesman, Weinstein took issue with that characterization of his role. He developed the script, cast Paltrow, Fiennes and other performers, and hired Madden, according to his representative, Juda Engelmayer. As for his campaigning tactics, Weinstein refused to apologize at the time. "I believe in supporting films," he said then, adding, "I think you should get in trouble in this town for not supporting films." Rules were soon changed limiting the nature and number of producers eligible to receive Oscars. "It's unbecoming for studio heads to insert themselves into that space, and a rampant ego produced that circumstance," Madden said. "But success has many parents and failure is an orphan, as we know." Not everyone bought his justification. "Your campaigns are obnoxious, and they do create the appearance of influence buying," the critic Jack Mathews wrote in a post Oscars open letter to Weinstein in The New York Daily News. He added, "What should be remembered as a great night for 'Shakespeare' is being remembered as an ugly fight over a gold plated geegaw." Madden, for one, has fonder memories. "Though I've made many films since that I've felt equally proud of, 'Shakespeare' stands out because of the extraordinary arc of its journey," said the director, whose more recent credits include the hit "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" and its sequel. "I'm perfectly happy to go down with that title next to my name."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Few art works sold in the past few years have drawn as much attention as "Comedian" by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, in part because, despite its price and ironic humor, it is at its heart a banana that one tapes to a wall. The sly work's simplicity enticed collectors to pay as much as 150,000 for it at a Miami art fair last fall, an act of connoisseurship that delighted them but astonished the many people who had not imagined that a, um, "sculpture" of fruit on a wall could command such a price. Now the work's aesthetic merit is being reinforced by the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, which is accepting it into its collection as an anonymous donation. In fact, "Comedian," as sold, does not include a banana or tape. What one buys is a "certificate of authenticity," a surprisingly detailed, 14 page list of instructions, with diagrams, on how the banana should be installed and displayed. Lena Stringari, the Guggenheim's chief conservator, said the instructions will be quite easy to follow and are quite complete in addressing questions like how often to change bananas (7 to 10 days) and where to affix them ("175 cm above ground"). "Of all the works I have to confront, this is probably one of the simplest," Ms. Stringari said. "It's duct tape and a banana," she added. The conservation of conceptual art is not always so straightforward for museums increasingly asked to preserve works made from of all kinds of ephemeral substances, like food. How does one care for a scale model of an Algerian city made out of couscous? A sculpture made of interlocking tortillas? Fruit stuck on a coatrack? (All works the Guggenheim has shown.) Given the expectation that museums will preserve works for generations, centuries, maybe even forever, the host of tricky questions that surface around this sort of work go beyond the more typical concerns of how to touch up an oil painting or mend a crack in a sculpture. How do you preserve a balloon that contains the artist's breath (it's called "Artist's Breath") and that inevitably is going to deflate? (Tate Modern.) What about computer based art when the computer or its software is out of date and can't work anymore? Or the many pieces that have been created from fluorescent lights when the fluorescent lights are no longer manufactured? The answer, for some, is as high concept as the art. "Once you think art is an idea and the material is secondary then it does not matter if that material lasts for a long time," said Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian in Washington. The Hirshhorn has its own conservation specialists who tend to art created from "time based" materials that degrade. "A lot of them are really challenging. The museum's role in a way is to preserve the work forever." The focus is so much on the idea that, in some cases, the materials do not outlast the end of the exhibition. Like the works involving bananas or couscous, the art object is thrown away but the art idea lives on, to be recreated in the future according to the artist's instructions. A famous example of art created from organic matter is Yoko Ono's 1966 "Apple," featuring an apple on a plexiglass pedestal. When it was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015, the apple was bought from a store on 53rd Street and replaced a couple of times over the four months of the exhibition, said Christophe Cherix, one of the curators who put on the show. But he never worried about people stealing it. "Once you remove it from its pedestal, then it's just an apple," he said. Earlier this year, the Whitney Museum of American Art went further exhibiting a work of art by Darren Bader using 40 pieces of fruit and vegetables from rambutans to star fruits to daikon radishes sourced and refreshed from a weekly Fresh Direct delivery and regular trips to a nearby Chelsea fruit market. At the Guggenheim, for a 2016 show Ms. Stringari and the museum's staff cooked couscous according to the artist Kader Attia's specific recipe, along with wallpaper paste and salt to keep it together and deter mold. Her staff, with the help of the artist, used stainless steel molds to recreate the model of the desert city of Ghardaia, which Mr. Attia designed as a commentary on colonialism. The city inspired Western architects, but they rarely acknowledged its influence. Over the three months of the exhibition, the museum team monitored the sculpture for pests like bugs. Cracks appeared, but that was one of the points, mirroring the age of the ancient city. Any couscous that fell away was swept up. Another artist whose work is in Ms. Stringari's care, Dan Flavin, used fluorescent tubes in his art. Ms. Stringari said the tubes, once easily bought, now have to be custom made. She worries about how she will conserve Flavin's art when the tubes are no longer available. "Red tubes are very difficult to get," she said. "They contain mercury." Although Flavin did not consider himself a conceptual artist, there are conceptual aspects to his work. Ms. Stringari said conservators have to think carefully about the conceptual underpinnings of all works and whether the repairs are preserving the concept. "We have to constantly make decisions about how they live on in the future," she said. Perrotin, the gallery that sold three editions of the work at the Art Basel fair in Miami, said that "'Comedian,' with its simple composition, ultimately offered a complex reflection of ourselves." One of the buyers, Sarah Andelman, a French fashion consultant and tastemaker, wrote in an email, "It appealed to me for its absurdity and the effect on the public. I observed all the Basel visitors taking their selfie and I thought that was such a reflection of our time." Ms. Andelman said she has not hung her "Comedian" yet. She's still waiting for the instructions but added that she is in no rush. "What I think I bought is an idea, a more than a banana with tape," she said in an email. Another buyer, Billy Cox, however, said that he had displayed it on his wall, and suggested that the process was relatively straightforward. For him, too, the value of the work, and its meaning, was in its self conscious commentary on a society where any banana can be art, and said in an interview in July that he was thinking of donating it to a major institution. "From where we sit, it's a concept strike," he said. "For us it was a game changer. It's very indicative of our society and how crazy it's become." There is no word yet when the Guggenheim will display it. When the museum does, Ms. Stringari says that, aided by the instructions, she has the task fully under control. "I don't think there is anything in there that says where the banana has to come from or the size of it," she said. "The idea is that it's a banana. Go buy a banana." Asked if she had given any thought to where she might get the banana, she said, "I think just from the local bodega."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Major League Soccer pulled F.C. Dallas out of its tournament near Orlando, Fla., after 10 players and a staff member tested positive for the coronavirus, M.L.S. officials announced on Monday. The positive tests appeared after the team arrived on July 1 in Florida, where the tournament starts Wednesday at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at the Walt Disney World Resort. All of the team's players, coaches and staff were quarantining in their rooms since their arrival, F.C. Dallas President Dan Hunt said. The individuals are mostly asymptomatic, with dull headaches and low fevers as the worst conditions, he said. "Given the impact of the number of positive tests on the club's ability to train and play competitive matches, we have made the decision to withdraw F.C. Dallas from the M.L.S. is Back Tournament," M.L.S. Commissioner Don Garber said in a statement. Three players from two other teams also tested positive for the virus, bringing the total to 13 out of 557 players in Florida. The remaining 25 clubs are set to compete in the monthlong tournament, as M.L.S. becomes one of the first professional sports leagues to return to competition in North America. The National Women's Soccer League is underway, and the N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. are set to hold similar tournaments in Florida later in July.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
In summer months, the ferry also stops farther south at Duck Harbor, where the National Park Service maintains a dock and a small campground, a good jumping off point for several hiking trails. But the rest of the year, it's a four mile trek from the landing to Duck Harbor, on a dirt road that's rough in spots. On a late April visit, I biked to Duck Harbor (fat tire mountain bike recommended). The road wound through the interior of the island, and crossed a cedar bog, where skunk cabbage and carnivorous pitcher plants grow among the sphagnum. It was quiet enough to hear the wing beats of a flushed flicker. Then the road passed the shore at Sharks Point Beach, where an osprey was gathering sticks for its nest. Finally, it led to the narrow inlet of Duck Harbor. The harbor earned its name because American Indians, who summered on the island for thousands of years, hunted eider ducks by driving them into the narrow cove. The island's more recent history began when Samuel de Champlain, exploring the area in 1604, named it for its hills. Year round farmers and fishermen arrived in the late 1700s, followed a century later by "rusticators" nature loving vacationers who built summer homes on the north end. In 1943, the heirs of one of those families donated the bulk of the land that comprises the Isle au Haut portion of Acadia National Park, most of which lies on nearby Mount Desert Island. These days, about 40 people live year round on the two by five mile island, and lobstering is the primary occupation; the population swells to over 300 in summer. Just south of Duck Harbor, a disused road leads to several trails. I started off hiking the Western Head Trail. As I meandered through hummocky spruce woodlands, with plank bridges over boggy patches, it felt a lot like northern Maine, until I scampered over a rock ledge. Just as I emerged from the deep woods to see waves crashing on the headland below, a bald eagle soared past, head and tail radiant in the spring sunshine. It was overkill, really, like a poster proclaiming the majesty of America's wildlands. The trail winds along the shore and weaves back among the trees, then crosses cobbled beaches where storms have milled the rough edges from stones and hurled them high above the tideline (they've also tossed flotsam ashore in a few spots, especially lobster gear and plastic bottles). The bare rock ledges along the shore here are a geologist's delight, telling volcanic tales 400 million years old.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The train that is the nation's economic recovery has slowed noticeably, unable to generate enough jobs in the last two months to keep pace with population growth, much less reduce the vast numbers of unemployed Americans. The United States added just 83,000 private sector jobs in June, according to the monthly statistical snapshot released by the Labor Department. The unemployment rate declined to 9.5 percent, from 9.7 percent in May. But that was a largely illusory decline, as 652,000 Americans left the work force. Over all, the nation lost 125,000 jobs in June, but those losses came as temporary federal Census workers headed for the exits. With the economy slowing housing sales plummeted, while earnings and hours worked ticked downward last month the stakes grow larger, economically and politically. The next few monthly unemployment reports will unfold during the run up to the midterm Congressional elections this fall. Incumbents feel particularly precarious, and major economic decisions about financial reform, unemployment benefits, and aid to states still sit on their desks. "We may have seen the best of employment for some time," said Paul Kasriel, chief economist at Northern Trust. "In general the economy is downshifting, maybe to stall speed, or just above stall." Even longtime optimists pulled in their horns a touch. While they pointedly distanced themselves from those economists who worry about a double dip recession, or a stagnant and lost decade, enthusiasm was hard to detect. "Obviously, it was a disappointing report," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group. "And it comes on top of a whole lot of other economic indicators that painted a bleak picture for the country." Mr. Baumohl predicted, as others did, that this jobs report would add fuel to the fiery debate between deficit hawks and pump primers in Washington. He favored government intervention, but he tends toward the view that it no longer makes as much difference. "Government spending prevented the U.S. economy from tipping into a depression," he said. "But beyond that, the government cannot, short of war, get private companies to increase hiring if they don't want to." Just as May's jobs report appeared deceptively robust, swollen by 411,000 workers hired by the federal government to help with the Census, so the June report appears deceptively anemic, as the government shed 225,000 of those workers. Signs of strength could be spotted. The 83,000 private sector jobs created in June more than doubled the count in May. In the first six months of 2009, the nation lost 3.7 million private sector jobs; during the first six months of this year it gained 590,000. Manufacturing continued a modest revival, as plants added 9,000 jobs, bringing the total for such jobs to 136,000 since January (manufacturing shed two million jobs early in this recession). Amusement, gambling and recreation businesses added 28,000. Health care inched up 9,000, for a 12 month gain of 217,000 jobs. And professional firms continued to add temporary workers, 21,000 last month. In past recessions, such hiring often was a precursor of permanent hires. President Obama offered restrained applause for the jobs report even as he acknowledged the economy remained weak. "Make no mistake we are headed in the right direction," Mr. Obama told reporters before boarding Air Force One to fly to West Virginia for the funeral of Senator Robert C. Byrd. "We're not headed there fast enough for a lot of Americans. We're not headed there fast enough for me either." Indeed, the economy needs to add about 130,000 jobs each month just to keep pace with new workers entering the market. The labor pool is packed with 15 million Americans looking for work, and state and local governments cut another 10,000 jobs in June, cuts likely to accelerate this summer. The weeks leading up to Friday's report offered a grim rat a tat tat of statistics pointing to a slowing economy. Auto sales fell, housing sales plunged and unemployment claims rose to a peak higher than is normal for an economic recovery. And Friday's labor data offered many more signs of slippage. The labor force participation rate that is, the number of workers counted as participating in the national economy fell by 0.3 percentage point. And the picture remained unyieldingly grim for the long term unemployed. The median duration of unemployment rose to 25.5 weeks in June, from 23.2 in May. More and more Americans are being left behind. In June, about 2.6 million people were marginally attached to the labor force, a rise of 415,000 from a year earlier. This means they are not counted in the unemployment numbers, but they have looked during the last year and want a job. The overall unemployment rate, incorporating all such Americans, stood at 16.5 percent. "This economic recovery does not have enough momentum to sustain on its own without government help," said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at California State University, Channel Islands, and a former chief economist at Wells Fargo. "Businesses are reluctant to hire for fear of a double dip recession. Without jobs, the economy can't grow, limiting job growth and spending." Christina Romer, chairwoman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, described the economy as a ship on stormy global waters. European nations are slashing budgets, China's economy has cooled and the stock markets are caught between indigestion and serious worries. Yet the United States labor force is larger than a year ago, she said, and the jobless rate is lower. "Two months ago, the world was getting giddy and it was better than anyone expected," she said in an interview. "In the past two weeks, the news is on the other side, worse than expected." This is not, she said, a normal recovery "because it was not a normal recession. There are some strong headwinds." The velocity of those headwinds, particularly around jobs, could imperil Democratic control of the Senate and House. Several weeks ago, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. christened this "Recovery Summer," emphasizing the jobs created by the 787 billion economic stimulus measure passed in February 2009.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Twenty years before Kellyanne Conway seized the news cycle with "alternative facts" about President Trump's inaugural crowd size, Al Franken (now, Senator Al Franken) began a satirical cottage industry to expose the seemingly loose grasp on truth of various right wing pundits in such books as "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Nearly 50 years before that, George Orwell published his dystopian classic, "Nineteen Eighty Four," with its "Ministry of Truth" for falsifying historical events and "double think," the simultaneous acceptance of two contradictory ideas as true. The 1949 novel became a best seller again after the Trump inauguration. Now, "1984," a play by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, based on the novel, is opening on Broadway on Thursday. Earlier productions in London received critical acclaim. But after the election of Mr. Trump, with his frequent complaints about "fake news" and propensity to trade in demonstrable falsehoods, the New York production is swimming in relevance. Before his election as the junior senator from Minnesota by a narrow margin in 2008, Mr. Franken, 66, was a longtime writer and performer on "Saturday Night Live," beginning in its debut season. After leaving "S.N.L.," he became a nationally syndicated radio host and wrote a series of best selling books of political satire. In the Senate, Mr. Franken has stood up for liberal causes and, early in the Trump administration, proved himself an incisive examiner in confirmation hearings, particularly those of Betsy DeVos for education secretary and Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Mr. Franken's best selling memoir, "Al Franken: Giant of the Senate," was published last month. Over a late afternoon meal at the end of May at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Midtown Manhattan (grilled salmon and mixed vegetables for both), Ms. Wilde and Mr. Franken discussed truth and lies both in "1984" and in contemporary politics as well as their first meeting, when Ms. Wilde was a child. Philip Galanes What a pair: explorers of truth in 2017, no less. Al Franken It's adorable to think I made a living by pointing out that people were lying. And people seemed to care about it back then. Now we have a president who calls the news media the enemy of America. PG But four books? Is there a Rosebud moment here? AF No, no, no. My parents always told me to tell the truth. But everyone's parents told them that, right? Politics ought to be based on actual facts and objective truth. That's hard to find sometimes. OW We've been raised to think, "Politics is dirty; politicians are liars." I think it's great that you've worked against that cliche by calling out lying as outrageous behavior which it is. But now we've hit another level of outrageousness because there's no source that is universally trusted to fact check. Some of that went out the window with internet journalism. People may not even question the source. If it's on CNN, a huge part of the country will say: "Fake news!" So, what's the end of that? PG Isn't that what "1984" explores, the chaos and fatigue of nonstop propaganda? OW Yes, and it's not pretty. PG I first saw the play in London two years ago. OW It was all about Edward Snowden then. Big Brother and the N.S.A. OW It came to me after the election. I needed a way to manifest my daily outrage. And I wanted to talk beyond my own choir. The great thing about Broadway is that it's seen by so many different types of people. And the great point of this play is that we have to get beyond "groupthink" and start thinking for ourselves. I don't plan to convert large groups to the left, not if they came in as Republicans. But I want everyone to leave the theater questioning what we've been told and knowing that's our job. AF You can do "groupthink" without anyone lying. Everybody can be wrong on an issue like Vietnam for a long time. That's a danger on Capitol Hill that's neither a right nor a left issue. You worry about yourself. PG Is it unpleasant going into the Senate, knowing you're probably never going to agree with anyone who isn't in your caucus? AF That's not the case. The problem is: Are they truly listening? Right now, we're going through this health care nightmare. The House passed a horrendous bill, and the Congressional Budget Office scored it: 23 million people lose their coverage. It's not a fact, but that's their score. And if the bill became law, it would end the protections of people with pre existing conditions. We lose all the progress we gained. OW I don't think we know. AF There are so many different lies to unpack here. During the campaign, Trump said he would not cut Medicaid, but this has about 1.5 trillion in cuts: more than 800 billion for this health care plan and over 600 billion in other savings. I go all around Minnesota, talking to people at rural hospitals and community round tables. People are literally crying about this. They say: "My mom gets her home health care through Medicaid, and she will lose it if this happens. My husband and I work. We don't know what we'll do with her." PG I know you're not a mind reader, but ... AF I'd be a liar if I said I was a mind reader. PG So, are these guys lying, or have they somehow convinced themselves that raising my annual insurance premium to 2 million is not taking my insurance away? AF I have to believe there are people who know they are lying. PG Because it's one thing if they've convinced themselves that a lie is the truth. It's another if they just don't care about people having health insurance. AF Sometimes, it ain't so cut and dry. But I had a colleague tell me that the easiest person to fool is yourself. AF Yup. He shouldn't have said it. PG Was he selling or lying or just really hoping it would be true. AF I'm not sure why he kept saying that. First of all, no one can definitely keep their insurance because insurance companies make the decision whether to offer the same damn insurance. But it was embarrassing and bad that he said it. And it opens us up to the same charges we're heaping on everyone else. PG But aren't we all "Lying Liars"? I am. When my dad killed himself, I told people he had a heart attack for years. PG And when I'm fighting with people, I say I'm sorry long before I really am. OW But that's for the greater good. PG So, make the distinction between a lie you can live with and one you can't. AF Why tell someone their butt looks big? OW Is it going to help the situation? AF My point is: Take that extra step to check yourself and your life. Taking the basic, important truths seriously is something that a healthy person does. I also think that as a kid, you learn that lying makes you sad. Remember breaking something in the kitchen and lying about it, that overwhelming guilt you felt? PG I still do! So, what lies do you tolerate from your kids? OW I'd be really impressed if my 7 month old lied to me because she'd be talking. OW But I'll ask my son, "Did you brush your teeth?" He'll say, "Yeah." And I'll say: "You did not. I was standing right here." It's funny. Kids lie without any real strategy. That's why Trump seems so much like a toddler sometimes. His tendency to lie, when it's clearly a lie, is something small children do. They also bully and take toys from each other. It's something you're supposed to grow out of by the time you're 70. AF Having some shame is a good thing. PG Let's go back to your constituents who are terrified about Medicaid cuts. AF Some people take sides. You're on a team, and that's that. The first iteration of the G.O.P. health bill, which was better than the one that passed, had 17 percent support from the American people. That's the exact same number as Americans who said they've seen a ghost. PG Go back to the Trump supporters. Is part of them saying PG How does that work? Why be mad at the politicians who are giving your mother the home health care she needs? AF People are mad because in the last 40 years or so, life has become harder for the middle class. There's been a real squeeze. It isn't a birthright that your kids are going to be better off than you anymore, and people are mad about that. I don't want to place complete blame for this on anyone. But we progressives have a different theory than my conservative friends on this. We saw a lot of misunderstanding of race and immigration in this campaign. And to me, that means not understanding that we need immigrants. OW That we are immigrants. AF Except for some. We have 11 tribes in Minnesota. OW Yes, everyone but them. But can you explain why some people seemingly don't act in their own self interest on policies like health care and tax cuts? OW That's an important point. But the question of elitism is so interesting when it comes to this administration. This is a president who ran on opulence and showing off his gilded Saddam Hussein inspired apartment. My frustration doesn't come from needing to think that people were fooled by someone who doesn't have their best interests at heart. I just don't understand it. AF Here's what my Republican colleagues would say: "The government is bloated, and it hasn't helped us. If you cut taxes, you reduce government spending." But if you cut taxes at the top, it doesn't trickle down. That's been our history. We've also seen what happens, like during the Clinton administration, when we raise taxes at the top. All the Republicans said, "This is going to cause a recession." But it didn't. We had growth. PG It turns out that "1984" was prescient on many levels: the constant screens, the disinformation campaigns, the endless wars. But one area it didn't predict was how celebrity would become more important than ideology. Did you benefit from that? AF Sure. Over the years, when I covered Republican conventions for Air America or Comedy Central, everyone would smile and go: "Hi, Al!" AF Then I asked, "Does she have any idea what she wants to do?" Yes, she wants to be an actress. I thought, O.K., now it all makes sense. So, here are these two heavyweight journalists with a daughter who wants to be an actress. And they went with it. Didn't fight it, at all. Did you go to college? AF A lot of politicians say, "I was the first member of my family to go to college." OW And I was the first member of mine not to. Luckily, my siblings made up for it. And the way my parents raised me had a really positive effect. Not to be impressed by anyone or anything shiny. They wouldn't let me take shortcuts. But they trained me to believe that, with hard work, anything is possible. PG Sort of like that Franken kid from Minnesota. PG Let me end with a question about how your new book is being received: "Al used to be funny; then he ran for senator and hid his funny under a bushel. Now he's funny again. So, he must be running for president in 2020." But when you did the deal for this book, Hillary was going to be our next president, right? AF This will throw your theory overboard, but it was even earlier than that. After I was re elected in 2014 , my wife and I were going to have a vacation, six days at a lodge in northern Minnesota. But she got sick and stayed in Washington, so I had six days alone in a cabin. I'd always threatened to write about how I got into politics. But once I started, I was really having fun. PG So "Fun with Franken" in 2020? OW I'm glad you wrote it. Your book made me more optimistic about our future. AF Good. Because I think we have reason to be.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
That is the message the Walt Disney Company sent by banning advertising from Netflix on its entertainment television networks principally ABC and Freeform as it prepares to introduce its own Netflix style streaming service, Disney Plus. Disney will continue to accept Netflix ads on its ESPN channels, largely because Netflix does not compete with Disney in sports. The Netflix ban, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was confirmed by Disney on Friday. In a statement, Disney said it had updated its policy on accepting ads from rival streaming services "to reflect the comprehensive business relationships we have with many of these companies." Put more bluntly, Disney does not need Netflix. Netflix does not sell any advertising on its own platform, so Disney has no opportunity to directly advertise Disney Plus to Netflix customers. And Netflix is not embedded within a larger media conglomerate that Disney relies upon for cable distribution.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The clip opens with the titular thief (Mena Massoud) engaging in some parkour esque stunts as he evades his pursuers. Later, after he falls for Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott), we get glimpses of Bollywood style musical numbers. Looming over it all is Will Smith as the Genie, who puts a Fresh Prince like spin on "Friend Like Me," a showstopper indelibly performed by Robin Williams in the original. Smith is seen for the first time in the Genie's human mode without a blue face and the promo also features Abu the monkey playing a trumpet, a magic carpet shaking maracas, and Scott and Massoud crooning the Oscar winning song "A Whole New World." Plus, camels and tigers and elephants oh, my!	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
WASHINGTON With the Democratic presidential contest down to a two person race, Senator Bernie Sanders has declared that he will wield his signature issue, Medicare for all, as a crucial distinction between his campaign and the surging candidacy of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden. "Joe essentially wants to maintain what I consider to be a dysfunctional and cruel health care system," Mr. Sanders said this week, adding that he hoped they could devote an entire debate to the issue. But an even bigger hurdle than winning the presidency stands between Mr. Sanders and his goal of generous government health insurance for all Americans: Congress. No legislation to advance or achieve universal health care has succeeded over the past 70 years without Democrats not only controlling all three branches of government, but also having a supermajority in the Senate. At this point, Mr. Sanders's plan has nowhere near that support. Just 14 members of the Senate have signed on to his Medicare for All Act, which would require a huge expansion of federal spending, and Democrats would need to pick up four seats in November to gain majority control of the chamber. Even if they succeeded, most of the Democrats seeking to unseat vulnerable Senate Republicans John Hickenlooper in Colorado, for example, and Mark Kelly in Arizona have come out against Medicare for all, raising the curious prospect of Democratic Senate candidates opposing the Democratic presidential nominee's most prized policy plan. In the House, a similar Medicare for all bill has 119 sponsors, all Democrats, out of a total 435 members at least 218 votes are needed to pass legislation and Speaker Nancy Pelosi is not among the supporters. Nor are most of the roughly 40 freshman Democrats known as "front liners," who helped their party win control of the House in 2018 by flipping Republican seats. "I'm not sure that the government is prepared or qualified to take over the health care for every single American," Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who flipped a Republican district in southern Michigan in 2018, told a local newspaper there. Whether because of the cost 34 trillion in new federal spending over 10 years, according to the Urban Institute or opposition to eliminating private insurance in favor of government control, most congressional Democrats instead support improving the Affordable Care Act or pursuing a new government run plan, or "public option," that would compete with private insurance. A public option is at the core of Mr. Biden's health plan, but it too could prove extremely challenging to enact, depending on how threatening it seemed to insurers and hospitals. Industry groups that are already mobilizing against Medicare for all could also doom public option legislation, as they did in 2010, when supporters of the Affordable Care Act had to drop a relatively modest public option provision to get the law passed. It is always possible that sentiments could shift perhaps sooner rather than later if the coronavirus outbreak were to disproportionately harm people who could not afford care, a possibility Mr. Sanders has already raised. He lost no time in making the case for Medicare for all after Health Secretary Alex M. Azar II suggested while testifying before Congress recently that federal officials would not be able to guarantee that all Americans would be able to afford a coronavirus vaccine if it were to become available. But for now, many Democratic lawmakers have expressed trepidation that a legislative showdown over Medicare for all would make it impossible to advance other important initiatives, including on climate change and immigration. And with the Supreme Court's announcement Monday that it would hear a major new challenge to the Affordable Care Act as soon as this fall, even some who support Medicare for all said that for now, Democrats should unify behind the law, which President Trump's administration is seeking to invalidate. Asked in an interview how the House would treat Medicare for all legislation if Mr. Sanders were elected president, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a co sponsor on the House Medicare for all bill, promptly changed the subject to the court case. "There is an unrelenting attack on the health care of everyday Americans, and it seems to me the focus at the moment should be on protecting and strengthening the Affordable Care Act," said Mr. Jeffries, a New York Democrat who is chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. "If Democrats can further advance toward near universal coverage without the life or death struggles of Medicare for All," Mr. McDonough wrote, "they might just achieve meaningful and historic progress even as they preserve the political capital to make progress on other compelling and urgent policy needs." Mr. McDonough also pointed out that the landmark coverage expansions in 1965 (which also created Medicaid, but for a very limited group at the time) and in 2010 with the Affordable Care Act were passed not merely by a Democratic controlled Congress, but also with Democratic supermajorities in the Senate. "There's no prospect of having majorities like that," said Paul Starr, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. "It's not going to happen." Even if the rules were changed to get rid of the filibuster, making it possible to pass major legislation with only 50 Senate votes, "there is not any guarantee that the 51st Democrat would be willing to support Medicare for all or anything close to it," said Mark Peterson, a professor of public policy, political science and law at the University of California, Los Angeles. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, who wrote the House Medicare for all bill, said in an interview that she was not discouraged by the math, noting that since she introduced her bill a year ago, a dozen more members had signed on as co sponsors, House committees had held four hearings on it, and coalitions representing people of color, labor unions and businesses had begun lobbying for the bill. "A lot of the members I speak to that aren't on the bill, I actually believe they would like to be on the bill but think, 'I don't know if it's politically good for me,'" Ms. Jayapal said. "That would fundamentally change if Bernie were to be elected president." Proponents of Medicare for all like to cite some polls that suggest there is strong support for the idea. But Mollyann Brodie, who oversees public opinion research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, says only a minority of Democrats are solely in favor of a sweeping Medicare for all plan, compared to a majority who support offering the option of buying a Medicare like plan or Medicare for all as a way to address high costs and the challenges of getting care. People are wary of the high taxes that could come with Medicare for all, Ms. Brodie said, partly because they do not necessarily trust the federal government to determine how the dollars are spent. What also makes Medicare for all unlikely is massive opposition from the health care industry, particularly insurance companies whose very survival is at risk. Hospitals are also opposed, because the federal government typically pays them much less than private health insurers. Being paid at Medicare rates, industry groups say, would cause many hospitals to close and others to lay off their workers. The industry groups that were largely on board for the Affordable Care Act have already mobilized, through groups like the Partnership for America's Health Care Future, to squelch any thoughts of Medicare for all. They are aggressively lobbying Congress and spending on television ads, one of which aired during the most recent Democratic debate. Short of a public option, which all the Democratic presidential candidates besides Mr. Sanders embraced in one form or other, there are more incremental proposals that have broad public and congressional support. Increasing the generosity of premium subsidies for people who buy coverage through the Obamacare marketplaces, as California has already done, is one such idea. Another is to offer premium subsidies to adults with incomes below the poverty level in states that have not expanded Medicaid, a population that is still largely uninsured. Ms. Jayapal acknowledged that short of a rapid sea change in public attitudes, full Democratic control of Congress would be necessary to even begin moving forward on Medicare for all. She noted, however, that congressional Republicans have fallen in line behind Mr. Trump's agenda to an extent that no one predicted, and said the same could happen with Democrats and Mr. Sanders. "A president can lead his or her party to a different place in a very short period of time," she said. "Sometimes we think the tipping point is much further away than it actually is."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Over video, chat and text though rarely IRL digital dating coaches help you create a more attractive online profile, decipher your date's cryptic text message and boost your confidence after an unsuccessful Tinder fling. These are not substitutes for a licensed therapist, but they're convenient. "We strive for instant gratification," said Liron Shapira, 30, the co founder of a chat based Silicon Valley start up called Relationship Hero. "We give 24 7 service. If you want advice at 4 a.m., you can get it." Online dating coaches have been around practically since online dating began, but their focus has shifted. In 2009, when Laurie Davis Edwards started a company called eFlirt Expert, her most popular offering was a dating "concierge" who would write client profiles, suggest potential matches and even respond to messages for the client, like an online Cyrano de Bergerac. But Ms. Davis Edwards, 36, who now also runs a group video chat session called Abundant Love, said she came to realize "that women didn't want us to do it for them but with them. They wanted to feel empowered in their dating lives. They wanted to learn." She offers the Abundant Love seminars through her new company, the Worthy One, which strives to help single women find confidence and optimism in their dating lives. (Her husband runs a similar program for men called Fearless Dating.) "It's like virtual brunch," said Kelley Joyce, 45, a divorced entrepreneur in Manhattan who tried the eight week program last fall, using it to analyze, for example, a prospect who was reluctant to schedule weekend dates. "I threw out all my crap to the group, and they were really good about helping me sort out the real issue: 'He's not making you a priority.' They helped me pursue a conversation with him that wasn't an emotional summit." Match.com has also entered the confidence boosting game with webinars like "The Art of Speaking Your Mind." Tripp Kramer, 32, whose YouTube channel "Tripp Advice: Dating Advice for Shy Guys," has over half a million subscribers, runs a three month Skype based coaching program, including six one on one calls, weekly webinars and unlimited email questions. Blake Jamieson, 33, author of the book "TinderHacks," offers a Tinder profile "audit" for men who may need help "getting an up at bat." But What Does It Cost? The price and scope of these services vary widely. Mr. Jamieson charges 49 to 99 for his audits. Mr. Kramer charges 3,000 for his three month program. Abundant Love, which recently expanded to three months, is 2,500. Icebrkr, a Boston based start up, charges 25 for the first two weeks of texts and 20 a month thereafter. Relationship Hero, which uses a proprietary chat platform, charges a dollar a minute. Oliver, a 32 year old software engineer, has spent roughly 200 on Relationship Hero, with coaching sessions that have lasted between three and 46 minutes. (He requested his last name be withheld, because he worried women might have an "uncharitable" opinion of a man who was paying a coach to analyze their conversations and texts. "They might think, 'What a loser,'" he said.) Last fall, Oliver contacted Relationship Hero after an especially bad Tinder date. He told his coach that the woman had seemed normal in her texts, but in person she turned out to be obsessed with status. He asked how to avoid meeting women like this in the future, and if he did end up on another bad date, how to leave early without seeming rude. "Oh boy. lol," the coach wrote. "so would you say you are often drawn to women by their looks first? Because you will have to dive a bit deeper ... you know what Im sarying?" At the end of the chat, the coach suggested that Oliver write down his expectations before his next date and then compare them with his postdate notes. "Good advice but also thanks for listening," Oliver wrote. The coach signed off with a smiley face. Oliver doesn't consider his coach's typos or colloquialisms unprofessional. "It's just a conversation," he said. "Not a formal document." He found the coach clear and helpful. "You just want someone to hear you," he said. "It's like a two minute therapy session." Relationship Hero, which has 20 coaches and has raised 620,000 in funding, emphasizes it provides "tactical relationship advice," not therapy. "We won't tell you to search your emotions, but give you advice that we think is most proven to get results in the situation," Mr. Shapira said. Though some coaches are psychologists, the company's co founder Lior Gotesman, who is also a lead coach, says he often rejects candidates with graduate degrees, "because they're not as much in tune with their intuition." But neither intuition nor expertise can solve every problem. Hunt Ethridge, another lead coach, says clients frequently want help winning back their exes. "Should that not work out, we'll help set you up for the next thing," he said. "We can't do magic." Kristen, 50, a divorced mother who works in the real estate industry in Boston, said she doesn't have such lofty expectations of her digital coach. (She also asked that her last name not be used.) "It's an as needed approach when I connect with someone, and I'm not feeling inspired or creative about how to reach out," she said. She works with Kevin Murray, 35, the founder of Icebrkr, who has a master's degree in communication and information studies from Rutgers and wrote his thesis about how people present themselves on internet dating platforms. Recently, when a Bumble match wrote that he loved steamers and white wine, Mr. Murray suggested she ask the man to describe the perfect setting for this meal. Kirsten did so, and said the man replied, "On a sleek jet at 50,000 miles." She was not impressed. "I was like, 'Ew,'" she said. "That sounds like a horrible place to have steamers. And also, he's trying to make me think that he's rich." Mr. Murray persuaded her to give Jet Man a chance. "The air between us wasn't crackling," she told him after a four hour first date, which she gave a grade of B . "But we had a nice time." After a few more exchanges with Mr. Murray, Kristen reached a verdict: She would see Jet Man again. "Kevin is my online dating Sherpa," she said. Up to a point. "He's constantly reminding me that I can reach out to him on a date," she said. "But I can carry on a conversation in person."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Ms. Chacon is a professor of law at the University of California Los Angeles Law School and Mr. Chemerinsky is dean and professor at the University of California Berkeley Law School. A president has broad powers over immigration under the Constitution and federal laws, but they are not unlimited. At the very least, there must be a reasonable basis for restrictions on immigration. None exists for President Trump's threat to temporarily ban all immigrant visa admissions to the United States. As with earlier, problematic immigration policies like the entry ban aimed at several predominantly Muslim countries, this proposal started out with a remarkably broad promise by the president: a ban on all immigration. That sweeping rhetoric has a cost of its own. Among other things, it may discourage international students from enrolling in American universities this fall, and otherwise signal "keep out" to visitors who would actually boost the economy. But beyond the rhetorical overkill, there are other problems with this ban. The actual policy proposal is much less than promised by tweet, but even in its whittled down form, it is still unlawful. A ban on the entry of individuals who have been granted immigrant visas would not affect as many people as you might think. Although there are usually more than 180 million entries into the United States every year, most of that traffic is by people holding temporary visas. This policy would affect only those immigrants who have been authorized for permanent residency. That involves less than a million people a number that has declined in recent years because of other entry bans, new requirements on immigrants and slow visa processing. The answer to the crushing domestic unemployment crisis caused by the coronavirus outbreak is clearly not going to be found in a ban on these immigrants. One would think that such a draconian measure would have a strong justification. If nothing else, under the law, there has to be a legitimate basis for such an order. In upholding President Trump's travel ban in Trump v. Hawaii, the Supreme Court stressed that it was based on a "D.H.S. and other agencies ... conduct ing a comprehensive evaluation" and "extensive findings." The court found it constitutional because it served the legitimate purpose of national security. In other words, even the court's very deferential approach to presidential decisions concerning immigration in Trump v. Hawaii demanded that the actions be reasonable. The proposed ban on immigration cannot meet that test. It cannot be justified on public health grounds; indeed, the president's tweet did not even mention public health as a basis for the ban. This makes sense, because no one has suggested that protecting public health necessitates an end to immigration. Even during the height of the 1918 flu pandemic, the United States safely allowed more than 110,000 immigrants to enter the country. Public health requires no more than a temporary quarantine on arriving immigrants who might be infected something that the Trump administration has already done for certain arriving immigrants. Based on his tweet and the subsequent announcements, though, it seems that economic, not health, concerns are driving the president. His stated reason for ending immigration is to keep immigrants from taking "the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens." But that does not justify keeping a child from getting a green card to be with a parent. Nor is it a reason to keep out trained health care workers or other highly specialized workers who might lend a helping hand in the unfolding crisis. The majority of employment based immigrant visas are designed specifically for highly educated workers with unique, specialized skills. Keeping them out will not create jobs for displaced workers. In fact, immigrants have a long track record of creating jobs for American workers through innovative business creation. Banning immigration is so overbroad as to be clearly unreasonable, and it is far more likely to kill jobs than to create them. In Hawaii v. Trump, President Trump convinced the Supreme Court that his entry restrictions were lawful because Congress granted the president broad power in the immigration law to exclude immigrants "detrimental to the United States." But the portion of the law he relied upon in that case should not apply to this situation. It has been used only in cases where restrictions are tied to the actions of foreign governments. That is not this case here, and the provision likely does not apply to this general ban. To read it this broadly would be to eviscerate many other aspects of Congress's regulation of immigration. A week ago, President Trump declared, "When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total." That is simply not true in a country that is committed to constitutional checks and balances and the separation of powers. Even in an area like immigration, we must reject the idea that the chief executive can do whatever he wants for any reason. This latest order will not improve the depressed employment market, so it is pointless as a job protection measure. But it will have a devastating effect on the families of banned immigrants. There must be a better reason than that the president thinks it will appeal to his political base and help his re election effort. Jennifer M. Chacon is professor of law at the University of California Los Angeles Law School and Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and professor at the University of California Berkeley Law School. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Lots of people do it search through their attics in hopes of finding something valuable. But Barbara Testa found more than she could have imagined. In her grandfather's old steamer trunk, she came across a manuscript. And not just any old manuscript. It turned out to be half of a draft of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," one of the great American novels. Scholars had been trying to find it for decades. Ms. Testa was an anonymous librarian in Hollywood. But her finding, in 1990, catapulted her into the history books as the linchpin in the reunification of the first and second halves of the draft of Mark Twain's classic novel. Ms. Testa died on Dec. 16 at her home in Boulder Creek, Calif., near Santa Cruz. She was 91. Her daughter Laura Testa Reyes said the cause was congestive heart failure. The story began in the 1880s with her grandfather, James Fraser Gluck, a lawyer who was also curator of the library in Buffalo, N.Y., now called the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. He was a collector, and he aggressively solicited autographs and writings from contemporary authors, all of which he donated to the library. Over the years, he had collected manuscripts from some of the biggest names in 19th century letters, among them Walt Whitman, Henry James and Louisa May Alcott. He also had snippets from Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe, Keats, Shelley and Dickens. Mr. Gluck established a pen pal relationship with Samuel L. Clemens better known as Mark Twain and at one point asked him for the manuscript for "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," a novel that had shaken the rafters of the literary world when it was published in 1884. Some years later, H.L. Mencken would say that reading it was "the most stupendous event of my whole life." Hemingway declared that "all modern American literature stems from this one book." Clemens was happy to send his original draft to Mr. Gluck, but he had misplaced the first half all 665 handwritten pages of it. So he sent the second half in 1885. Two years later, he found the first half and sent it along. By the time Mr. Gluck died in 1897, at age 45, he had donated almost 500 literary keepsakes to the library. But the first half of "Huckleberry Finn" was not among them. Librarians in Buffalo speculated to The New York Times in 1991 that Mr. Gluck might have taken it home to read and forgotten he had it. In any case, after Mr. Gluck died, that draft migrated into one of his steamer trunks, which ended up in Ms. Testa's attic. One day in 1990 she was going through the trunks to see if there was anything she might sell to bring in some money, Ms. Testa Reyes said in an interview. When she came across the Twain manuscript, with his signature, she thought she had struck gold. "The minute I found it in the trunk, I just had a feeling," Ms. Testa told The Los Angeles Times at the time. She had no idea that scholars had been searching for it for decades. Nor did she know that the second half was in the Buffalo library, waiting to be rejoined with its first half. Ms. Testa took the manuscript to Sotheby's to authenticate it and auction it off. News of her find caused a sensation. Mark Twain had sent the first half of his draft of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" to Ms. Testa's grandfather in 1887. She discovered it in her attic in 1990. "It would certainly be the greatest literary discovery of the 20th century," one expert told The Los Angeles Times. So revered was the novel that another expert likened its discovery to "the British finding a working manuscript of 'King Lear' or 'Hamlet.'" When it became clear that the manuscript was legitimate and could fetch perhaps as much as 1.5 million, the Buffalo library filed suit to prevent Ms. Testa from selling it, arguing that Twain had given it to the library. "Rather than have a court fight, which would have given money to the lawyers, they settled," Ms. Testa Reyes said. She said the settlement was about 1 million and was split between her mother and her mother's sister, with the manuscript going to the Buffalo library. The original first draft allowed scholars to see the extensive revisions that Twain made in his own hand before the book was published. Many of them showed Twain trying to de emphasize literary aspects of the book, such as his use of alliteration, and make the words more true to Huck's vernacular, Bob Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project, which researches and publishes authoritative editions of Twain's writings, said in an interview. For example, Twain repeatedly replaced the word "forest" with "woods." "His ear is telling him that 'forest' is too fancy a word for Huck to use," Mr. Hirst said. "This was an extremely valuable find, and the Testas deserve credit for bringing it to the attention of people who did the right thing with it," he added. "It could have been sold off page by page and disseminated to the winds." Barbara Ellen Gluck was born on Aug. 15, 1928, in Los Angeles. Her father, Sinclair Gluck, was a mystery writer who had moved to Hollywood from upstate New York to work in the film industry. Her mother, Nancy (Lee) Gluck, painted animation cels, first for Disney Studios then for Warner Bros.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Boseman as T'Challa in "Black Panther," the 2018 smash that made him a household name. Chadwick Boseman, the actor who died Friday at 43, made his mark as a Hollywood leading man in just seven short years. After appearing regularly on series television in one off and recurring roles, his big screen breakthrough as Jackie Robinson in the 2013 biopic "42" started a remarkable run of iconic Black characters real ones like Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and James Brown, and imaginary ones like his best known, Black Panther. Explaining how he humanized these heroes, he told The Times's Reggie Ugwu last year: "You have to hold it all in your mind, scene by scene. You're a strong Black man in a world that conflicts with that strength, that really doesn't want you to be great. So what makes you the one who's going to stand tall?" Here's a look at six of his best big screen performances: Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu. This biopic directed by Brian Helgeland focused on the years before and after Robinson became the first Black baseball player in the Major Leagues. Though the Times co chief critic A.O. Scott found the movie "blunt, simple and sentimental," he also wrote that Boseman imbued the player with "sly charm and a hint of stubborn prickliness." Read the review. Stream on HBO Max; rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu. This biopic, from Tate Taylor ("The Help"), takes a more expansive approach to its subject's life, following James Brown from his hardscrabble childhood in South Carolina to worldwide stardom with setbacks and occasional bitter moments along the way. The musician was "portrayed indelibly" by Boseman in this "viscerally explosive" movie, Stephen Holden wrote in The Times, making it a critic's pick. Read the review. Boseman cemented his status as Hollywood's go to biopic star with this drama about Thurgood Marshall as a civil rights lawyer in the years before he joined the Supreme Court. Focusing the film on the case of a Black chauffeur and butler accused of raping a wealthy white woman, Reginald Hudlin "seamlessly directed," the Times co chief critic Manohla Dargis wrote, while Boseman and his co star Josh Gad proved to be "natural showmen who never step on each other's moment; they're fun to watch." Read the review. Stream on Disney ; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu. The smash hit that made Boseman a household name. He stars as the title superhero, alter ego of the unflappable leader of the futuristic African nation Wakanda. In the director Ryan Coogler's hands, the story is filled with "intense face offs involving questions of ancestry, identity, the African diaspora, the new world and the old," Dargis wrote, while Boseman's "magnetism" underlies a "more physically restrained" performance that has "splashier, freewheeling moments." Read the review. Boseman's New York homicide detective is at the center of this action thriller about a police conspiracy and a hunt for killers that involves blockading all the bridges out of Manhattan. Under Brian Kirk, making his feature directing debut, "it's big, blunt, battering ram of a movie but it's not dumb," wrote the Times critic Jeannette Catsoulis, and the acting is "unimpeachable." Read the review. Though Boseman will appear in the Netflix adaptation of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," this is the last of his performances you can see for the time being. Spike Lee's drama follows Vietnam War veterans on a quest to find, among other things, the remains of their squad leader, Stormin' Norman, played by Boseman in flashbacks. That casting choice, A.O. Scott wrote in making the film a critic's pick, "underlines the heroism of the character, who is stamped with the likeness of Jackie Robinson and T'Challa." Read the review.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The profiles of the victims of the coronavirus in several neighborhoods in Queens turned cold statistics into flesh and blood innocent individuals who were struck down pitilessly by an invisible foe. The writers of the article, Dan Barry and Annie Correal, made tangible the fear, suffering and anguish of loved ones who mourned, of overwhelmed but heroic hospital staff going beyond their endurance as they struggled to rescue patients from a disease they didn't yet understand, and the will of survivors to somehow go on after devastating loss. The story bore witness to the worth and dignity of each of those depicted in this beautiful tribute. Thank you. This letter has been updated to reflect developments. The lawsuit filed by the attorney general of Texas and backed by Republican attorneys general from 17 other states and 106 G.O.P. representatives aiming to overturn President elect Joe Biden's state victories is an affront to the members of Congress, governors, the 33 other states and the rule of law! Just imagine what would happen if the Supreme Court had agreed and declared Donald Trump the winner of the election. Do these Republicans really believe that the more than 80 million of us who voted for his opponent would not flinch? (Late Friday the Supreme Court rejected the Texas suit.) Elections are sacred in our country, and majority rule must not be overwhelmed by a clearly disappointed minority. Other reforms are needed, too. The power of the majority leader has evolved to allow an authoritarian refusal by only one person to stop proposed legislation from moving forward to a vote. The tradition of a lock step seniority system for the selection of committee chairs is also a relic. Senators should reclaim their power to make democracy work again by changing their own rules. Eric W. Orts Philadelphia The writer is a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The U.S. and the Drug War Nicholas Kristof is right about the war on drugs. After decades of struggle, billions of dollars spent and scores of thousands of lives lost, drug consumption in the world is alive and well. The issue deserves a prominent place in the political agenda of the United States. Whatever the next steps turn out to be, they must include a productive and humane approach to the ravaging effects this war has had on Colombia and its population. The poor have suffered the most. Generations of children from disenfranchised families have been recruited by cocaine financed guerrilla groups, paramilitary squads, cartels and other organizations. Few of them expect to live beyond their teens. Interviewed for a book on the matter, one child said they were not "born to be seeds." Little has changed. The least that this tragedy deserves is for people in power in all countries involved to devote time and effort to finding an alternative.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Pity poor Prin. The college where he teaches is failing. His area of study, marine references in Canadian literature (post "English Patient" seahorses), is in the midst of a dry patch. His marriage to Molly feels increasingly unglamorous, and even a trip to the Toronto Zoo ends in the death of one of his daughters' favorite primates, prompting Prin to come clean to his kids about his cancer diagnosis. Then this: Before the year's out, the novel's first line reveals, Prin, a self doubting, bike riding, practicing Roman Catholic, will become a full fledged suicide bomber. "Original Prin," Randy Boyagoda's third novel, is an original animal, a comedy of literary and cultural references, with wordplay involving unfunny matters like cancer, a crisis of faith and Islamic terrorism, as well as easier comedic subjects like juice box fatherhood and academic power plays. Spotted early, Prin's prostate cancer is excised along with his prostate. Mortality postponed, he turns his attention toward the fate of his college the University of the Family Universal, or U.F.U. (the old name, Holy Family College, sounded "too Catholic," Boyagoda writes) and then a problematic attraction to his predatory ex girlfriend, Wende, a consultant hired to save the college by (a) turning it into an elder care assisted living facility and (b) partnering with an academic group in a fictional war torn Middle Eastern country called Dragomans. The story takes us then to Molly's family's home in Milwaukee, where Prin witnesses two near death moments that end up being elaborate pranks: the first staged by one of Prin's nephews to win the attention of a pretty lifeguard, the second the shooting of his nephews' favorite right wing shock jock by what turns out to be a group of antiwar paintball marksmen.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
On Jan. 20, the day Donald J. Trump was being sworn in as president in front of the Capitol, a limousine was set on fire and storefront windows were smashed nearby. Officers in riot gear from the Washington Metropolitan Police moved in and arrested 230 people including nine journalists at the protests, which were organized in part by an activist group called Disrupt J20. Since then, the charges against seven of the nine journalists have been dropped. The two who are still scheduled to stand trial in Superior Court of the District of Columbia are Aaron Cantu, a staff reporter at The Santa Fe Reporter in New Mexico who worked as a freelancer in January, and Alexei Wood, a freelance photojournalist and videographer based in San Antonio. Mr. Cantu, 29, is scheduled to go before a judge in October. The trial for Mr. Wood, 37, is scheduled for Wednesday. Mr. Wood is charged with several felonies, including rioting and destruction of property. He faces up to 61 years in prison if convicted, said his lawyer, Brett E. Cohen. "The government has not informed me as to why Mr. Wood's case involved any greater degree of culpability than of the other journalists who were ultimately not charged," Mr. Cohen said in an email. On his website, Mr. Wood said that "resistance cultures and conflicts" were his beat. He works as a commercial photographer on the side, his lawyer said. An April 3 indictment, which lists eight charges against Mr. Wood and 211 other defendants, "does not single out Mr. Wood for anything arising from the demonstration," Mr. Cohen said. A spokesman for the Justice Department said he would not comment on pending cases. Gregg Leslie, the legal defense director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, suggested that the Justice Department's reason for proceeding with its case against Mr. Wood might lie somewhere in his 42 minute Facebook Live video of the Jan. 20 demonstrations. Mr. Wood's lawyer, however, said the video showed that his client was innocent of the charges against him. The footage shows Mr. Wood taking digital camera photographs, usually from the sidelines, as he live streams the event. Several times he runs to the front of the group of demonstrators to get a different shot. Occasionally Mr. Wood is heard letting out a cry of "Whoo!" as he captures protesters in the act of spray painting buildings and throwing rocks through windows. A few times he turns the camera to himself, showing his reactions as the protest escalates. "I could see someone at the D.O.J. saying this is what a protester does," Mr. Leslie said. According to Reed Brody, a lawyer who represented the reporter Amy Goodman, who faced rioting charges in 2016 after covering the protests of the Dakota Access oil pipeline in North Dakota, a journalist's attitude toward a protest is not germane. "Obviously, journalists are not above the law they can't break windows," Mr. Brody said. "They can be sympathetic to the people that they cover, and they can draw attention to the people that they cover. But you can't arrest and you can't charge journalists for covering events." 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. Toward the end of the video, as the police are about to move in, Mr. Wood is seen identifying himself as a member of the media. Mr. Cohen said Mr. Wood had done nothing illegal. "I believe the government understands the import of charging Mr. Wood but still continues to do so, despite the First Amendment issues," Mr. Cohen said. Alexandra Ellerbeck, the North America program coordinator for Committee to Protect Journalists, said the law must distinguish between those who covered demonstrations and the participants. "Criminal laws should require criminal intent, and so if a journalist is covering the story, that does not constitute criminal intent," Ms. Ellerbeck said. "He wasn't vandalizing property, and the charges against him are incredibly extreme." The Washington Metropolitan Police seemingly ignored journalists who presented their credentials, including Mr. Wood, who is seen flashing a press badge in the video. "The police used the actions of a few window breakers as an excuse of a mass roundup," said Scott Michelman, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. The other journalists arrested at K and 12th Streets on Jan. 20 were Evan Engel, a senior producer at Vocativ; Jack Keller, a producer of the web documentary series "Story of America"; Matthew Hopard, a freelance photojournalist whose work has been published by The New York Times and Fox News; Alexander Stokes, an independent journalist who has a show on a public access news channel in Albany; Cheney Orr, a freelance photographer; Alexander Rubinstein, a reporter with RT America; and Shay Horse, a freelance photojournalist whose work has been published by Rolling Stone, Al Jazeera America and other outlets. This law enforcement tactic of arresting people in large numbers at protests known as kettling was used in Toronto during a Group of 20 protest in 2010 and during more recent demonstrations in North Dakota and St. Louis. In those instances, it seemed that police officers did not distinguish between the alleged lawbreakers and those covering the events. Afterward, Ms. Ellerbeck said, journalists were "forced through a legal process that is expensive and arduous and scary and all the more so if you're a freelance journalist."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
They Heard Kobe Bryant's Helicopter Go Down. Then They Prayed. CALABASAS, Calif. It began as just another Sunday at a little church along Las Virgenes Road, on a quiet edge of suburban Los Angeles. The Church in the Canyon is an unremarkable box of a building, with a flat roof over glass front doors. It was about 9:45 a.m. The Sunday worship service was an hour away. A ceiling of low clouds obscured the tops of the bare, brown hills across the road. You cannot always see the moment that the world is about to change. Elizabeth Howland Forrest had just arrived from Santa Monica, mesmerized along the way by the low flying helicopter that she followed west for several miles on Highway 101. It weaved so masterfully with the bends in the road, she thought, until she lost sight of it ahead of her. She got off at the Las Virgenes exit, hit green lights at the strip center and the apartments, and parked at the church. She checked her makeup in the rearview mirror. Scott Daehlin, who lives in a G.M.C. Safari in the parking lot, had prepared the sanctuary's sound system for choir practice and stepped outside to get something from his van. Jerry Kocharian, a church member and maintenance worker, stood with his coffee on the opposite side of the building. There was no explosion, no Hollywood style fireball. The helicopter struck the earth about a half mile from Church in the Canyon, on high ground scorched by the massive Woolsey fire in November 2018. Fifteen months ago, the mountains burned, all the way to Malibu, but the fire spared the church. The story was everywhere but there. Not this time. By topographical luck, the church had the only real vantage point of the wreckage. The best view was from the church marquee along the street. Neighbors ambled there immediately, mingling with the churchgoers. No one in the growing crowd knew what to make of what they saw. There were flames, but no inferno. Witnesses described something like flares, at least for a while. Pale smoke rose into the low, gray clouds. Daehlin called 911. Within minutes, patrol cars zoomed past, toward Malibu Canyon, then spun around. They pulled into a driveway at the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, a smattering of buildings at the base of the hills, directly across from the church. Fire engines of various shapes and types came next. Television trucks followed. Emergency medical workers scampered up the hills, on trails usually used by dog walkers and mountain bikers, with all the best intentions. Sunday services at the Presbyterian affiliated Church in the Canyon, begin at 10:45. About 75 worshipers came on Sunday, chattering about the commotion outside. They filed into the small sanctuary, with rows of padded chairs under a low ceiling lined with fluorescent lights. The budget is tight, but Pastor Bob hopes to upgrade the lights by Easter. Pastor Bob is 51, with red hair and a red goatee flecked with gray. He is legally blind in one eye and does not drive. He is married with four children three boys and a girl, ages 15 to 20. He has a big laugh. Many call him Coach Bob because he has coached lacrosse for decades, including at a high school. Pictures of past teams fill the walls of his office. No one calls him by his last name, Bjerkaas. He spelled it, with a plea. "Do not spell it a s s," he said. "It's bad enough to have 'jerk' in there." Pastor Bob's planned Sunday sermon was about Job "the suffering of a righteous man, and how we make sense of it," he explained in his office on Wednesday. A strange morning turned surreal. At the start of the Sunday service, Pastor Bob was passed a note from Howland Forrest, the church member who had glimpsed the crash from her car. He glanced at it. Reading is hard for someone who can wave his hands near his face and not see them. The note said that Kobe Bryant was on the helicopter. It was 45 minutes before TMZ first broke the news to the world. Someone in the parking lot, working for a local television station, had passed that rumor to Howland Forrest. Soon she saw a black SUV pull in. The driver got out, wearing a dress shirt with dark pants and dark jacket, she said. Visibly upset, he walked across the street, spoke with the authorities, and came back to the church lot. He had been at Camarillo Airport, Howland Forrest said the man told her, waiting for a helicopter from Orange County. He planned to drive Bryant, his daughter and seven others to Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks. "He said, 'I got a quick call to come here,'" Howland Forrest said. She prayed with him, she said, and he left. Pastor Bob did not dare share such information, unverified and unreported. But he steered his sermon toward the unfolding events outside. "At the end, in my appeal, I said, 'We've had a very powerful reminder that life is uncertain,'" he said. "'Just as Job experienced great tragedy, very suddenly, something really shocking happened here today. It could happen to any one of us.'" The academy, the size of a Costco, squats in an industrial complex in Thousand Oaks. It once housed workers for Amgen, the pharmaceutical giant with a sprawling campus nearby, but was gutted and remade into a mega gym a few years ago. Bryant became a partner in 2018, a couple years after his retirement from the N.B.A. On this foggy morning, the academy was filled with excited boys and girls, their parents and coaches, the din of chatter, the thump of balls, the squeaks of sneakers, the bleats of whistles. One of the five courts was cordoned off Sunday. It was where Bryant would coach the team of his 13 year old daughter, Gianna, just as he had on Saturday. They had games at noon and 2. Everyone knew that. People spent much of the morning watching games while sneaking peeks to see if Bryant had arrived. News of the crash rippled quickly. Games were stopped. Miller got a stream of text messages. This isn't true, right? He's there with you, right? There were sobs and circles of prayers. That is another thing the Mamba Sports Academy had in common with Church in the Canyon. Prayers. At the church, people came. At Mamba Sports Academy, most people left. There was nothing else to do. "It was surreal stepping out of that building and into, maybe, a different world," Miller said. Strange, the string of destruction and attention that has come recently to this normally quiet stretch of suburbia in Conejo Valley, with its landscaped streets and strip malls, manicured yards and swimming pools. The area feels designed to get away from the kinds of things that have plagued it recently. Times like these can test faith. Pastor Bob had eased people through the fright and destruction of the wildfires, 15 months ago, that had driven out his family, too. He prayed with people affected by the mass shooting at the Borderline bar in Thousand Oaks on the eve of those fires, when 12 people died, plus the gunman. This was different as out of nowhere as a meteor, just outside the church doors. Someone stopped him after church. What are you going to do? "I have no idea," Pastor Bob said. There is no action plan for unimaginable events. Images beamed from satellite trucks and photographers parked outside the church's front door had quickly ricocheted around the globe. People raced to the source of those pictures, crowding to see something they just had to see for themselves. "I thought, what's the nicest thing we can do right now?" Pastor Bob said. "We spent Sunday trying to be nice, in the name of Jesus." They let people park. They brought out water and coffee. They opened the restrooms. Television trucks and reporters crowded in. Fans soon flocked, like a pilgrimage. "There was not a single problem," Pastor Bob said. "Not a single piece of litter. A couple of guys were smoking marijuana in front, and I said, 'You wouldn't smoke marijuana in your grandma's front yard, would you?' And they said, 'Oh, we're sorry, Reverend.'" "Life has a little bit of good and bad in it," Pastor Bob said. "And on this side of heaven, we should always cultivate the good." Midway through the afternoon, when the crash's death toll was confirmed at nine, Pastor Bob used his coach's voice to get everyone's attention. There would be a prayer service at 6:30, he said. Eighty people came. Most were faces Pastor Bob had never seen. There was a broad range of ages and ethnicities, crowded into the little sanctuary that night, under the flicker of the fluorescent lights. Most wore Kobe Bryant jerseys. One teenager was named Kobe. Another was named Bryant.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Spanning up to 25 feet from wing to wing, manta rays look like U.F.O.'s from below. If you ever get a chance to dive with them, look up. Lights won't beam down and abduct you, but something about their bellies may surprise you. Most are white, but some are splattered with unique black blotches. This trait, known as melanism, is seen with some frequency on land. For many terrestrial animals, having a black coat seems to offer an evolutionary advantage. It helps some pocket mice hide out, some snakes regulate their body temperature and some insects resist diseases. But underwater, melanism is far less common. Of the hundreds of species of cartilaginous fish in the ocean, only two the two known species of manta rays exhibit this trait, and then only in some populations. The reason for this dark pigmentation has long been unknown. The mystery of the melanistic mantas remains unsolved. But in a study published Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers confirmed that some manta ray populations have more melanistic individuals than others, and at least one possible explanation was definitively eliminated. For the moment, the team hypothesizes that an evolutionary process that is neutral, and not related to predation, might be at play. And their work demonstrates that some scientific questions don't have black or white answers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
When concerts and in person gatherings shut down this spring, livestreamed shows quickly started to feel like a glorified last resort. I found myself avoiding them. But a Facebook video caught my eye one day in June, of the trombonist Craig Harris performing at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Accompanied by the keyboardist Pete Drungle, framed by a flowering grove and a trellis, he played "Breathe," a suite of concise and soothing music that sounds like the sum of Mr. Harris's experiences on the New York scene since the 1970s. He had written "Breathe" after Eric Garner's killing by New York police in 2014; it was his reflection on the notion of breath as a great equalizer, and as the source of Mr. Harris's own powers as a trombonist. But at the start of this video, he turns to those affected by Covid 19. He offers the suite as "a sonic reflection for those who have passed, and those who are born," Mr. Harris says. "We have to think about the lives of the people who are born in this period now. That's a whole thing, the beginning and the end." The performance was taped in May, before George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis and its nightmarish resonance with Garner's death. By the time Mr. Harris's video was released in June, protesters were constantly in the streets, and the suite's original message had become painfully relevant again. But even in this new light, the poise and sensitivity that Mr. Harris had intentionally brought to this performance didn't feel out of place. For any lover of live performances but especially jazz and improvised music 2020 will be remembered, joylessly, as the year of the stream. Musicians have done their best with what they've had, usually by leaning into intimacy; we saw a lot of artists' bedrooms this year. But it was actually in the moments when musicians zoomed out when they made our perspective bigger, and connected this difficult moment with a greater sense of time that improvised music did its most necessary work. With concerts impossible, the vocalist and interdisciplinary artist Gelsey Bell assembled "Cairns," a remarkable audio tour of Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn; it's part philosophy talk and part experimental music composition, built of Ms. Bell's overdubbed vocal improvisations and the sounds of the cemetery as she walks. Green Wood is a majestic place, and there is something robust and alive about it, even though generations of history lie in its soil. "As I started making it, I was really thinking about our relation to the land and the history it holds, and then where we find ourselves now," Ms. Bell said of "Cairns" in an interview. "To be connected to the land you live on is to be connected to both its history and the other people that you're sharing space with." On the hourlong recording, Ms. Bell tells of various little known but significant figures, using their histories to illuminate what she calls "the apocalyptic foundations of this place." And she gives us the histories of the trees, instructing us to listen to the ways they sing to each other, and will continue to after we're gone. Hiking up a hill, Ms. Bell and her collaborator Joseph White turn the sounds of her breathing and walking into a kind of mulchy, rhythmic music. "Because of breath, we'll never forget how stuck in time we are, how mortal we are," she says, making the word "mortal" sound like a good thing. It wasn't impossible to make music via stream that really pulled people together just rare and on this front, couples had an advantage. The week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended all concerts be put on hold, the vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant and the pianist Sullivan Fortner propped up a camera beside the piano in their living room and broadcast a set of music via Facebook to thousands of viewers. The comments section turned into a chattery town square, full of nervous and grateful people unsure of what the coming months would bring. The bassist Dezron Douglas and the harpist Brandee Younger started performing duets from home every week, ultimately collecting them in a disarming album, "Force Majeure," released this month. The saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and the drummer Tom Rainey got in the habit of recording their wide ranging living room improvisations and publishing them on Bandcamp, in a series that continues under the name "Stir Crazy." Working alone, the clarinetist Ben Goldberg also started posting daily solo recordings in March on a Bandcamp page labeled "Plague Diary"; it now has nearly 200 entries. Listen for long enough and the tracks of overdubbed instrumentals and low, repetitive rhythms start to run together, like the hazy interminable feeling of existing at home amid lockdown. The saxophonist Steve Lehman swung in another direction, releasing a less than 10 minute album, "Xenakis and the Valedictorian," featuring snippets of exercises and experiments that he had recorded on his iPhone, practicing in his car each night so that his wife and daughter could have peace in the house. Continuing to perform during the pandemic near impossible as it often was was both a creative and a financial imperative for improvisers, many of whom saw all of their upcoming performances canceled in March. But newly liberated from obligation, inspired by the movement sweeping the country, many also began to organize. Musicians across the world came together via Zoom to organize the We Insist! collective to address these questions, eventually coming up with a list of demands to promote racial equity in major educational institutions and philanthropic groups in the jazz world. A group of artists of historically underrepresented gender identities came together in the Mutual Mentorship for Musicians collective, striking a creative blow against patriarchy in jazz. And as protests overtook streets nationwide, jazz musicians were often there. The bassist Endea Owens showed up on the second day of protests in New York back in May, she said in an interview. She almost immediately felt a need to contribute music, and she helped put together bands that played daily at demonstrations over the next three weeks. "We were out there for two to three weeks, walking from Washington Square Park to the Barclays Center, just playing," she said. "That created a ripple effect of something creative, something positive. You felt like you had to fight for your lives."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Q We live at 27 West 72nd, and would like to know the history of the huge white brick apartment house next door, the Mayfair, at 15 West 72nd Street. How did it come about, right in the Dakota's backyard? ... Harvey Kulawitz, New York and Ridgefield, Conn. A The developer Edward Clark clearly had a comprehensive vision for his properties on the Upper West Side, beginning with the Dakota. What a pity that no one has any evidence of what it was! Born in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1811, Clark entered a partnership with Isaac Singer in 1848, and the Singer sewing machine was very, very good to him. In the mid 1870s he began building in downtown Cooperstown, perhaps to bolster the area, which was losing farmers to the Midwest. In the late 1870s he started buying properties on the Upper West Side of New York, then essentially vacant land. Then he built not only the Dakota, but two rows of houses on West 73rd, from Central Park West to Columbus, and from Columbus to Amsterdam. That he saw all three projects as part of a unified effort is not in doubt: he used the same architect, Henry Hardenbergh, built them all for income rather than sale, linked them to a common artesian well, and supplied the 73rd Street houses with electricity from a central power plant. Clark died in October 1882, two years before the Dakota was completed, and his son Alfred built a 145 horse boarding stable on Broadway, but after that the estate mostly sat on its lands. Views of the rear yard of the Dakota, where the 36 story Mayfair Towers now stands, are fragmentary, showing in the early years just turf behind a simple picket fence. In all the extensive coverage of the Dakota project, the yard is rarely mentioned, although there are occasional references to a "garden" or "park" for the use of residents of the Dakota and the 73rd Street row houses. In the center were openings for the Dakota's underground power plant. But Clark did leave a clue, a big one: he left the wall facing the yard unornamented, as if he envisioned another apartment house going up on the land. By 1950 the property was a parking lot, still owned by the Clark family, and in 1961 they determined to get out of the real estate business. To the dismay of the Dakota's tenants, the developer Louis J. Glickman bought the building and the parking lot. The New York Times said it was likely that the Dakota would be razed, so the city's "largest single apartment house" could go up on the site. Although possible, it would have been difficult to evict so many tenants, especially since a high number were well connected. Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards Jr., Ward Bennett, Eugenia Sheppard and other prominent tenants were surely alarmed to hear of the plans. Instead, Mr. Glickman sold the building to the tenants after parceling off the rear lot to the developer Max Steinberg. Mr. Steinberg's 456 unit apartment house was completed in 1964. "Inside, as well as out, Mayfair Towers provides tenants with distinctive styling," said an ad in The Times, without going into specifics. So, the story goes, the Dakota narrowly missed demolition. Or did it? No plans were filed for a new and larger building. Harold Sussman, who worked for firm of Horace Ginsbern, which designed the Mayfair, told me "there was never any discussion of demolishing the Dakota." Q What's the peculiar Tudor style front on Fulton Street, east of Broadway? ... Lynda Shand, Yorktown, N.Y. A This little Bavarian fantasy was Whyte's restaurant, designed by Clinton Russell and built in 1909. Its half timbered front is fairly intact, a remarkable if partial survival for such a teeny bit of Alpine picturesqueness. Architects' and Builders' Magazine called it "a quaintly attractive little building designed in extremely good taste" in 1910. The second floor, it said, had a "ladies' restaurant." Early photographs seem to indicate the half timbered facade had large painted panels at each side with murals of peacocks and friezes of farm animals. Whyte's was founded by a St. Louis restaurateur, Edward E. White. The spelling discrepancy is sometimes attributed to a typo on the initial stationery; another explanation is that White used the "y" to make his plain vanilla name more distinctive. Over the years, Whyte's second floor dining room hosted many meetings of clubs, associations and alumni, the Seventh Regiment, Princeton and Purdue among them. In her 2000 book "Life So Far: A Memoir," the activist Betty Friedan recalls that she and other marchers in the Women's Strike for Equality parade of 1970 ate lunch at what she described as the male only Whyte's. A year later, Whyte's closed. Today the building is home to a Popeyes restaurant, a Lucille Roberts gym and a dollar store.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Could an online degree earned in six to 12 months bring a revolution to higher education? This week, AT T and Udacity, the online education company founded by the Stanford professor and former Google engineering whiz Sebastian Thrun, announced something meant to be very small: the "NanoDegree." At first blush, it doesn't appear like much. For 200 a month, it is intended to teach anyone with a mastery of high school math the kind of basic programming skills needed to qualify for an entry level position at AT T as a data analyst, iOS applications designer or the like. Yet this most basic of efforts may offer more than simply adding an online twist to vocational training. It may finally offer a reasonable shot at harnessing the web to provide effective schooling to the many young Americans for whom college has become a distant, unaffordable dream. Intriguingly, it suggests that the best route to democratizing higher education may require taking it out of college. "We are trying to widen the pipeline," said Charlene Lake, an AT T spokeswoman. "This is designed by business for the specific skills that are needed in business." Mr. Thrun sounded more ambitious about the ultimate goal: "It is like a university," he told me, "built by industry." American higher education is definitely in need of some disruption. Once the leader in educational attainment, the United States has been overtaken by a growing number of its peers. Education still offers children from disadvantaged families their best chance at climbing the ladder of success. David H. Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reports in a new study that in 2012 a typical family of graduates from a four year college earned about 58,000 more than a family of high school graduates. But this very statistic underscores the depth of the nation's educational deficit. One reason for the enormous payoff from a college degree, which is almost twice as big as it was in 1979, Mr. Autor finds, is that too few young Americans despite a bump in enrollment right after the Great Recession ever earn one. But putting traditional college courses online may do little to close the gap. Instead, the evidence so far suggests that online education may do better in giving low income students a leg up if it is directly tied to work. And companies, rather than colleges, may be best suited to shape the curriculum. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, found that most students lost interest in its MOOCs within two weeks and, in general, fewer than 10 percent completed the course. Moreover, those engaging with online education mostly have not been the young people who might benefit most from the free coursework. "The people who have taken up these opportunities are not the needy of the world," said Fiona M. Hollands of Columbia University's Teachers College. "They are not democratizing education. They are making courses widely available, but the wrong crowd is showing up." A review of MOOCs co written by Professor Hollands concluded that the typical community college student often did not have the literacy or the drive necessary to benefit from courses that require a lot of self motivation and offer little if any face to face interaction. But even if MOOCs have failed to deliver on their original promise to educate the poor, they have proved more effective with another slice of the population: Americans who may already have a higher education and a job, but who feel the need to acquire new skills to progress in their careers. Udacity was the first to move in this direction, focusing on a more humble business model helping companies create MOOCs to train their workers and customers. "We want to fast track the best practices at a large scale," said Peter Lubbers, who is in charge of MOOC developer training for Google. "We want all the techniques we know about to get out to the market." Udacity helped Cloudera, a software company, make a MOOC to teach customers and potential customers how to use its systems to analyze big data. The "NanoDegree" is a step in a similar direction: offering a narrow set of skills that can be clearly applied to a job, providing learners with a bite size chunk of knowledge and an immediate motivation to acquire it. It may not offer all the advantages of a liberal arts education, but it could offer a plausible path to young men and women who may not have the time, money or skill to make it through a four year or even a two year degree. AT T will accept the NanoDegree as a credential for entry level jobs (and is hoping to persuade other companies to accept it, too) and has reserved 100 internship slots for its graduates. Udacity is also creating NanoDegrees with other companies. If all goes according to plan, Mr. Thrun says, Udacity will ultimately create an alternative approach to the "four years and done" model of higher education, splitting it into chunks that students can take throughout their lives.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
On Wednesday, one of the most anticipated television shows of the year, "The Handmaid's Tale," had its premiere on the streaming service Hulu. Reviews for the series have been rapturous, and it could provide Hulu with an elusive signature hit. But none of this would have been possible without Danny and Fran. Until recently, the production company run by Daniel Wilson, 87, and his business partner, Fran Sears, 70, had more or less been dormant. Work had dried up, and Hollywood had stopped getting in touch many years ago. Whenever the phone rang, they assumed that people were "trying to find out if we were, in fact, still alive," Ms. Sears said in a recent interview, laughing. But Mr. Wilson had something special stowed away: He controlled a big chunk of the TV and movie rights to the 1985 Margaret Atwood novel, "The Handmaid's Tale," which he had made into an otherwise forgettable 1990 feature. If Hulu wanted to bring the story to television, it would have to deal with Daniel Wilson Productions. So through a twist of fate, prescient deal making and an intensely competitive television landscape where studios seem to be willing to turn over any stone to find a hit Danny and Fran are back in business. In short order, they had to, among other things, revive a production company that had gone dark and study up on a vastly changed television landscape, in which streaming services were becoming increasingly important. They also had to acquaint themselves with tasks foreign to them like creating an online imprint. "We just looked at each other and said, 'Oh, God, we better do this,'" Ms. Sears said, about creating a website. "We've been terrible about a Wikipedia page or IMDB. It's not part of our sensibility." Mr. Wilson added, "It's not really good," describing their website. On a recent Tuesday in Manhattan, the duo (they are, alas, not a couple) were discussing their unlikely comeback at Mr. Wilson's Upper East Side apartment. Over the course of an afternoon, Ms. Sears excused herself each time the phone rang. "Daniel Wilson Productions," she cooed as she answered. A bookshelf in the living room was filled with awards Mr. Wilson had won in the 1970s and '80s, including several Emmys. It was difficult to identify what some of the Emmys were for; the plaques were too faded. They marveled at just how much the business had changed. Television executives nowadays? "Much less combative," Mr. Wilson said. And they have been transformed from cigar chomping titans to, as Ms. Sears put it, "young hipster types." Then there were the dailies, rough cuts from each day of filming. They used to be an exhaustive process that took hours to produce, with filmmakers packing a room to watch poor quality film reels of scenes shot the day before. Now, Mr. Wilson and Ms. Sears could watch high quality footage from "The Handmaid's Tale" from the comforts of their own homes, at 8 a.m. each day. "I'd get up in the morning, I'd be wandering around, crashing into the wall in my jimjams with a cup of coffee, and I'd watch the dailies and call up Danny and say, 'Did you watch that?'" Ms. Sears recalled. Mr. Wilson and Ms. Sears met in the 1960s when they were working on a children's show for ABC. Soon, Daniel Wilson Productions was up and running, and they were making after school specials with titles like "The Terrible Secret" and "Me and Dad's New Wife." Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. As awards piled up for the specials, they branched out to make successful TV movies and mini series. Daniel Wilson Productions had a staff of a dozen people, with offices in New York and Los Angeles. It was in the late 1980s when, at the suggestion of his wife, Mr. Wilson read "The Handmaid's Tale," the dystopian novel that presents a grim future for women in the United States. Impressed, Mr. Wilson met with Ms. Atwood, secured the film rights to the book and shared them with the independent movie company Cinecom, which helped finance the film. The movie, which starred Robert Duvall and Natasha Richardson and was written by Harold Pinter (Ms. Atwood was not interested in screenwriting), was released in 1990 and was a dud at the box office. ("It wasn't as good as perhaps it should have been," Mr. Wilson said.) Soon, their careers began to wind down. Mr. Wilson learned that his wife had Alzheimer's, and he put aside work to tend to her. Ms. Sears said she would return to the business only if she actually had passion for a project. "I guess I just didn't really think that was going to happen," she said. About five years ago, with scripted TV booming in Hollywood, MGM decided to forge ahead with a plan to make "The Handmaid's Tale" into a series. The studio assumed it controlled the rights. Then it found out otherwise. "We realized, 'Wait a minute, no, no, no, it's not all ours," said Steve Stark, the studio's president for television development and production. "'We have to call a Danny Wilson. Where's he at?' We didn't know. We couldn't find him." It took some time to track him down, and, initially, Mr. Wilson was unmoved. Cinecom had gone bankrupt, and Mr. Wilson was convinced he owned all the rights to "The Handmaid's Tale." In fact, MGM had secured what was once Cinecom's 50 percent. "We decided to make him an executive producer, we gave him a nice fee, and we figured it all out," Mr. Stark said. Mr. Wilson did not disclose financial details, but the deal, if the show reaches a third season (which appears possible, considering the reviews), is expected to be worth 1 million. The show was originally written for Showtime by Ilene Chaiken, a veteran of "The L Word." Mr. Wilson did not like her script, which he said was far too "graphic sexually." But Ms. Chaiken was soon tied up with obligations to the new Fox hit "Empire," and the story was back on the market. Suddenly, FX and Hulu were neck and neck in pursuit of the series. "For me, Hulu is where you can watch old episodes of 'The Andy Griffith Show,' if you're so inclined," Ms. Sears said. Mr. Wilson was not entirely sure to trust the streaming service until Mr. Stark convinced him it was just fine. "I heard about it from Steve, and I said, 'Really?'" Mr. Wilson said. "And he said, 'Danny, they're the new kid on the block; they're going to back this series to the hilt.' Bruce Miller, the new showrunner for "The Handmaid's Tale," wrote scripts that they adored. Elisabeth Moss, a veteran of "Mad Men," seemed ideal to play the main character, Offred. For Hulu, which has failed to match the buzzy original series of rivals like Amazon and Netflix, "The Handmaid's Tale" may have finally delivered a drama that can drive up subscriptions. It also didn't hurt that the Trump administration has made the show's bleak themes feel more relevant to certain viewers. "Its timing is a hell of a lot better than when the feature was released," Ms. Sears said. "Margaret's book was extraordinary, but it was about another time. We didn't see it coming fast and furious at us the way it is now." Mr. Wilson and Ms. Sears are hopeful that "The Handmaid's Tale" is just the beginning of their comeback. And last Friday night, they were able to take their victory lap in earnest. As Mr. Wilson and Ms. Sears circled a room in the Beekman Hotel for the show's premiere party, a remix of Prince's "Raspberry Beret" blasted at full volume. And what did these two reborn producers think of their return to show business, all these years later?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
At Rockefeller Auction, They Came. They Bid. They Mostly Lost. Christopher Gohr had never attended an auction before just "eBay and stuff like that" and the one he walked into at Christie's was a dizzying place to start. The collection of David and Peggy Rockefeller, a vast trove of paintings, furniture, porcelain and other treasures, was on the block over three days, with Wednesday offering some of the relative bargains. Mr. Gohr, a line cook by trade, was hoping to take home to his East Village apartment a George III tea caddy, a wooden box from the late 18th century in which Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller may or may not have stored their tea. It had been estimated to go for up to 500. A split second later, 1,000. At 1,200 Mr. Gohr finally raised his paddle. Someone in the room bid 1,300. 1,500 from an online buyer in Hong Kong. Mr. Gohr's arm went up at 2,000, his self imposed cap. No matter: A telephone bidder pushed the price to 2,400. The bid won the tea caddy, and with the buyer's commission tacking on another 600, it came in at six times the estimate. "I definitely went a little more than I thought I was going to," Mr. Gohr, 48, said afterward, still processing what had happened. "Once I hit my cap, it was like, 'O.K., what the heck?'" The sale of more than 1,500 Rockefeller belongings is attracting some of the biggest collectors of the art and antiques worlds, and could bring in more than 1 billion, all for charity, by the sale's end. On Tuesday night alone, more than 600 million was raised thanks to the sale of 44 first rate artworks the couple gathered. Mrs. Rockefeller died in 1996, and her husband, the last surviving grandson of John D. Rockefeller, died last year at 101. The pieces on sale Wednesday were more accessibly priced at three and four figures. Bidders without multiple estates could sit in the same room where, just the night before, a Picasso sold for 115 million, a Monet for 85 million (an auction high for the artist) and a Matisse for 81 million (ditto). But those like Mr. Gohr who filed into Christie's Rockefeller Center headquarters discovered that they were not the only ones drawn by the Rockefeller mystique. A George III era wooden side table garnered 25,000, more than four times its estimate. A silver ice pail engraved with Mr. Rockefeller's name went for 50,000, more than 40 times its estimated price of 1,200. The piece with the lowest estimate, a circa 1780 mahogany armchair pegged at 200 to 300, went for 8,750. A Mexican silver ice pail engraved with David Rockefeller's name sold for 50,000. One of the most expensive of the 250 plus lots, a porcelain dessert service that once belonged to Napoleon, was anticipated to sell for 250,000. The final price brought applause from around the room: Including fees, the set sold for 1.8 million. Among those who came up short was Diane Wolf, who traveled to Christie's from York, Pa. She and her husband own a company that makes corrugated boxes and live in a restored farmhouse that Ms. Wolf thought would be a great home for some Rockefeller antiques. She bid 4,000 on a John Berridge painting from around the late 1700s. The final hammer price was 4,200. "I probably should've gone one more time," Ms. Wolf, 60, said. Demand was so high because few other sales have matched this scale and level of anticipation. Among aficionados, it is in the league of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis estate auction at Sotheby's in 1996; the Elizabeth Taylor jewelry sale at Christie's in 2011; and the Yves Saint Laurent sale at Christie's in Paris in 2009. "It's one of those magical sales that happens maybe once a decade where everyone is so exuberant, particularly for the decorative arts," said Barbara Deisroth, a veteran decorative arts adviser. "The auctioneers put the estimate out on what they are worth today," Ms. Deisroth said. "And they're unable to factor in what the upside will be with the celebrity part of it. Is it going to be 10 percent? Is it going to be 50 percent? Or is it going to be 500 percent?" About 50 people showed up to bid, while 30 or so Christie's staff members operated phone banks for those calling in. A screen at the back of the room indicated if an online bid, was coming in along with the geographical origin of the bid. Most of the winning bids came from outside the room. The total for Wednesday's decorative arts sale was 12.36 million, against an estimate of 2.5 million to 3.8 million. For those not able or inspired to participate in a live auction, there was also the Christie's website, where hundreds of lots were being auctioned throughout the week. One of the hottest items online, a 14 karat gold money clip depicting Rockefeller Center, was estimated to go for around 1,200. The final price would probably not fit into that clip: 75,000.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
SAN DIEGO The timing was coincidental, but fitting nonetheless. As Yankees reliever Aroldis Chapman was explaining to reporters on a video call how frustrating it was to cough up the decisive home run to Mike Brosseau in Game 5 of the American League division series on Friday, the Tampa Bay Rays were drinking and smoking cigars on the Petco Park field while playing Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" on a portable speaker. The song is a tradition after games at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. And given how the fifth seeded Yankees with a payroll nearly four times bigger had gone 4 11 against their division rival this year, including the three games to two loss in this series, the top seeded Rays had earned the right to troll. "Every player is probably going to look themselves in the mirror and evaluate themselves and try to find something to work on to get better for next season," said Yankees starter Gerrit Cole. "We didn't reach the goal, so across the board we need to improve." Cole did his best to improve the Yankees this season, including when he took the mound on Friday. The Yankees committed a record 324 million to him over the winter, considering him to be the type of elite starting pitcher they had lacked in past postseasons. After recording a 7 3 record and 2.84 earned run average during the 60 game regular season, he led them to two of their four playoff wins, and nearly a third. Starting on short rest for the first time in his career in Game 5 against the Rays, Cole struck out nine over five and one third stout innings. He allowed just one run on a home run his biggest weakness to Rays outfielder Austin Meadows that tied the score at 1 1 in the fifth inning. In all, the Yankees scored more runs than the Rays (24 to 21) in the series, hit better with runners in scoring position (.241 to .190) and had a lower E.R.A. (4.40 to 4.50) but fell short in the wins category. One reason, said right fielder Aaron Judge, who was 3 for 27 this postseason entering Game 5 but accounted for his team's lone run with a solo homer on Friday: The Yankees failed at "timely hitting." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "I can look back through this whole series and the countless opportunities we had to really change the outcome of the series and weren't able to capitalize," he said. "I take full responsibility for that, especially being a leader on this team certain situations where I need to step up." First baseman Luke Voit, who led the major leagues with 22 home runs during the regular season, also said he felt he had let his teammates down by going 2 for 18 against the Rays. "I hate this feeling," he said after the loss. During the regular season, the Yankees led the A.L. in scoring. They plowed through the Cleveland Indians, who had the best pitching staff in the A.L., in the first round of the postseason. But when facing the A.L.'s next best staff the Rays and their "stable of guys that throw 98 miles per hour," as their manager, Kevin Cash, once said the Yankees' offense wilted in key moments. "We have the talent to" win a title, said the slugger Giancarlo Stanton, who carried the Yankees with six home runs this postseason but went 0 for 3 in Game 5. "It's just a matter of getting it done. We haven't gotten it done." On the mound in particular, the Yankees did not get it done, much like last year. While the Yankees' top pitchers were stout in the series, the Rays were simply deeper. The group of Rays who pitched the bulk of first four games Tyler Glasnow, Charlie Morton, Blake Snell and Ryan Yarbrough outperformed the Yankees' contingent of J.A. Happ, Masahiro Tanaka, Jordan Montgomery and Cole. Tampa Bay's extensive bullpen was formidable all series, too. After the Game 5 loss, Boone acknowledged that the Yankees missed starting pitchers Luis Severino, who was out all year with Tommy John surgery; James Paxton, who sustained a forearm injury in September; and Domingo German, who was out all season because of a domestic abuse suspension. The Yankees also were without Tommy Kahnle, a stout reliever who had Tommy John surgery in August. "That said, I think we're that close even with those of competing for a championship," Boone said after the loss. "That's a great team over there. It's razor thin. It's just the nature of sport." Looking back at the series, Boone said he did not second guess the Yankees' opener tactic in a Game 2 loss. The strategy backfired when Boone replaced starter Deivi Garcia after one inning with J.A. Happ who wasn't fond of the strategy and struggled on the mound. Perhaps the Yankees would not have tried such a gambit if they had the same collection of reliable arms as the Rays. "It came down basically to the last inning of the series," Boone said. "I don't think anyone is surprised by that necessarily, and we came up short. I dissect everything, usually, on a nightly basis and certainly will look back and reflect on things. I don't have that many regrets." Chapman seemed to, though. Although he helped the Yankees force a Game 5 with stout pitching the previous day, Chapman said his 100 m.p.h. fastball to Brosseau, once an undrafted free agent who became a key role player for the Rays, caught a little too much of the plate in the eighth inning. "He made good contact and he had a good at bat," Chapman said of Brosseau, who fouled off four offerings before his go ahead blast to left field on the 10th pitch he saw. Chapman insisted that he wasn't thinking about his history with Brosseau on Friday. A month ago, he threw a 101 mile per hour pitch near Brosseau's head during another flare up in the ongoing rivalry between the Rays and Yankees, earning a three game suspension that is under appeal. Chapman said he felt bad that he had once again given up the decisive blow in a season ending playoff game; in the 2019 A.L.C.S., he surrendered the series ending home run to Houston's Jose Altuve in Game 6. "I'm a closer," he said. "I'm the one that finishes the game. And almost always when these things happen, it's going to happen to me, because I'm the one that either wins or loses the game." For now, the Yankees face another off season with some pressing questions. Will they re sign D.J. LeMahieu, their star infielder who will be a free agent? Will they pick up the 2021 option for their longest tenured player, Brett Gardner? Will Gary Sanchez, who was benched during the A.L.D.S., still be the Yankees' primary catcher? How will they improve their pitching? Will Happ, Paxton and Tanaka all free agents be back? How much will the economic losses of the pandemic affect their off season moves? And perhaps most important: Can they end their 11 year title drought with this core of players before Judge becomes a free agent after the 2022 season? "To come up short the last couple years, it's tough," Judge said. "These are just scars. They're just going to continue to make this team stronger and make this team better. It's just going to make that World Series title that much sweeter in the end."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
From the Start, There Were Ground Rules Before Shanee Markovitz agreed to be Nathaniel Kay's girlfriend in 2014, she laid down her ground rules. "When he asked, I gave him two pieces of feedback," said Ms. Markovitz, then 14. "First I told him to stop shaking, because he was nervous. And then I told him, I will say yes, but I want you to know there will be no breaks. I don't want you to have the impression that, just because we're young, this will be an on and off thing." Mr. Kay, who had worked up the nerve to pop the girlfriend boyfriend question at the bar mitzvah of Ms. Markovitz's younger brother, Ziv Markovitz, agreed on the spot. In the six years they have been together since, Ms. Markovitz's tendency to speak her mind has intensified. It was evident last year when the couple had a party to celebrate the signing of their prenuptial agreement. At Katz Yeshiva, a private Modern Orthodox school, such a union wouldn't have been unheard of. "The whole school was involved in our relationship the entire time we were there, that's just the kind of school it was," Ms. Markovitz said. Family members were supportive as well. Ms. Markovitz's mother, Sharon Markovitz, invited Mr. Kay to Ziv's bar mitzvah after Ms. Markovitz mentioned she had a crush on him. And in 2015, when both were deciding on colleges, it was Mr. Kay's mother, Sharona Kay, who reassured Ms. Markovitz that the decision to earn degrees in separate states Ms. Markovitz at Yeshiva University in New York and Mr. Kay at Washington University in St. Louis wouldn't rupture their relationship. "Tani's mom pulled me out of class one day," Ms. Markovitz said; Mrs. Kay is a Holocaust studies teacher and administrator at Katz Yeshiva. "She said, 'If Tani goes to Washington University, there's such a small Jewish community there that we're basically signing your marriage document for you.'" Fewer opportunities to meet other Modern Orthodox girls meant fewer opportunities to find a new girlfriend and potential wife, as intermarriage is a violation of religious law. Ms. Markovitz graduated virtually from Yeshiva University with a political science degree in June and is working as the director of development at H.F. Epstein Hebrew Academy in St. Louis. Mr. Kay expects to graduate from Washington University with a degree in systems engineering and finance in 2021, then enroll in a master's program in systems engineering. The couple hope to leave St. Louis in 2022, when Ms. Markovitz will begin studying for a law degree at Harvard; she was accepted this spring and deferred. The encouragement from their families to find a partner and marry young is typical in Orthodox families, both said. But if the love affair that led them to marriage was wrinkle free throughout a gap year in Israel for both and then four years of college, they were faithful to each other their lives post high school and pre engagement were much less so. In July 2016, when Ms. Markovitz was 17, her mother committed suicide. "It was incredibly difficult," Mr. Kay said. For Ms. Markovitz, the difficulty was compounded by silence. "As you get into tighter religious communities, and not just Jewish communities, we speak about things that are uncomfortable less and less," Ms. Markovitz said. "Things get hush hush." She decided that needed to change. A few months after her mother's death, Ms. Markovitz wrote a Facebook post about her suicide that went viral. Soon after, she was speaking publicly and writing articles on the importance of lifting stigmas surrounding mental health. It was a role she took on less than wholeheartedly. "It's not like I woke up one day and said, 'I'm going to be a public speaker,'" she said. "It's not something I enjoy doing. But I do think it's a necessary thing to talk about." Supporting her emotionally throughout was Mr. Kay. "When my mom passed, Tani helped us through everything," said Noa Markovitz, 19, who lives in Israel and is preparing to enter the Army there. "It was hard on everybody, but he was there for her every second." By then, their roles within the relationship had been cemented. "They complement each other so well," Noa said. "Shanee's the more dominant one. Tani's more the lovey, huggy one." He is also romantic. When Ms. Markovitz and Mr. Kay decided, with their families, that they would announce their engagement at Zevi Kay's bar mitzvah in Boca Raton on May 26, 2019, Mr. Kay wanted a private moment with Ms. Markovitz, too. The night before the bar mitzvah, he arranged a scavenger hunt around the local places that gave their romance liftoff. At the end, he was on one knee. "I had rose petals and champagne and the whole thing," he said. She said yes. The following night, at the end of the bar mitzvah, Mr. Kay told his brothers he wanted to give them something they didn't already have: a sister. When the party caught on that the couple was announcing their engagement, "everyone was in tears," Ms. Markovitz said. Before they could start planning what they hoped would be a May 2020 wedding for more than 400, they decided they needed a prenuptial agreement. In Jewish law, in order to dissolve a marriage, a document called a "get" is delivered by the husband to the wife. Both parties must participate in its delivery and acceptance. Having what's known as a halachic prenup creates incentive, according to its supporters. The recalcitrant party can either cooperate with the divorce proceedings or pay financial support while they're still legally married. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. Ms. Markovitz first started thinking seriously about a religious prenup during her gap year in Israel. "There's an organization that goes around educating people about halachic prenups, and I'm very interested in the law and in social justice, so it hit all the right spots for me," she said. She later become a fellow at that nonprofit Organization for the Resolution of Agunot. Its goal is to eliminate abuse from the Jewish divorce process, mostly of women. In December 2019, Ms. Markovitz and Mr. Kay signed their prenup at the organization's offices in New York and, later that day, had a party that they shared on social media. "We just thought a celebration was a creative way to show that we really support the process and the organization," Ms. Markovitz said. News outlets took notice. So did strangers on the internet. "A lot of people reached out to me with questions," she said. "We heard a lot of words of encouragement." In 2019, the Rabbinical Council of America found that 84 percent of Modern Orthodox rabbis in the United States require couples to sign a religious prenup before they will officiate a wedding. However, in the ultra Orthodox community, according to Mark Dratch, the executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America, many Jewish authorities feel it creates coercion. Some are uncomfortable raising the issue of divorce at the time of marriage. While the prenup celebration gave Ms. Markovitz and Mr. Kay a sense of momentum leading to the wedding they were planning in Pearl River, N.Y., the coronavirus caused them to pump the brakes. In March, they decided on a smaller celebration with social distancing in Palm Beach. They got legally married on March 6 in a Broward County courtroom. "The civil ceremony wasn't the part that mattered to us," Mr. Kay said. That would explain the elaborately planned religious wedding, with 60 guests led by Eli Zians, a rabbi at Boca Raton Synagogue, that took place June 15 at the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach. Livestream video followed Ms. Markovitz, in a cap sleeve lace dress from the Palm Beach boutique the White Magnolia, and Mr. Kay, in a black tuxedo with a white yarmulke, through a ceremony featuring a series of Orthodox prewedding traditions. The tish tradition involved Mr. Kay and witnesses signing the ketubah, or traditional marriage contract. The badekin followed with Mr. Kay placing a veil over Ms. Markovitz's head, a reference to the biblical story of Jacob and Leah. After those rituals, the couple, with their families and Rabbi Zians, met under an outdoor huppah adorned with cascading red, pink and white flowers. Guests, most wearing masks, sat on a sprawling green lawn. Ms. Markovitz first circled Mr. Tay seven times in a traditional show of dedication. Rabbi Zians then blessed them twice, once with wine, before Mr. Kay placed a ring on Ms. Markovitz's finger and said, in Hebrew, "By this ring you are consecrated to me." After those words, they were considered religiously married. But their time under the huppah wasn't finished yet. After several more blessings, Mrs. Kay and Mr. Markovitz took turns at the microphone. "Shanee is the daughter I never had," Mrs. Kay said. Mr. Markovitz, after praising his new son in law's easygoing nature, offered him some advice. "I recommend you should always insist on having the last word in an argument with Shanee," he said. Those words? "Yes, dear." Minutes later, when Mr. Kay stomped on a glass, signaling the end of the ceremony, cheers of "Mazel Tov!" erupted amid the swaying palm trees. Mirror, Mirror For the reception, Mr. Kay changed out of his tuxedo and into a suit from Opposuits, called the Discoballer, which is made of mirror patches. The groomsmen wore similar attire for the reception, wearing disco party shirts bought from Amazon. Alone Together Just after the ceremony, Ms. Markovitz and Mr. Kay were danced out of the huppah by their attendants and ushered into a yichud room, where bride and groom traditionally spend the first few minutes of their marriage. Double Celebration Ms. Markovitz graduated virtually from Yeshiva University the day before her wedding. She and Mr. Kay celebrated both events during a "minimoon" at a South Florida hotel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
ST. PAUL On a fall day in 2015, Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark went for a walk through the extensive skyway that threads through the buildings of downtown St. Paul. They were new colleagues at APM Reports, a division at American Public Media where investigative reporters and radio producers had been "smushed together," as its editor in chief, Chris Worthington, put it. Strolling above the city, Ms. Baran and Ms. Freemark talked about ideas for their first project. Ms. Baran, a reporter who had grown up mainly in Milwaukee, had lived in Minnesota long enough to be familiar with the case of Jacob Wetterling, an 11 year old who had been abducted from the nearby town of St. Joseph in 1989. How, she wondered, had the crime gone unsolved? Ms. Freemark, an audio producer from Durham, N.C., said the story might lend itself more to a podcast than to a radio documentary. The megahit first season of "Serial" had recently completed its run, proving there was an audience for an audio project that unspooled over many episodes. Ms. Baran agreed. About two weeks later, they got official approval, and "In the Dark" was born. Four years later, the podcast has completed two seasons, its episodes downloaded about 50 million times. Along the way, it received a Peabody Award and became the first podcast to win a George Polk Award, one of investigative journalism's most prestigious prizes. Although the show has so far examined criminal cases from decades ago, it has demonstrated a knack for contributing to prominent stories in recent news cycles. Toward the end of the first season's production, the man who had abducted and killed Jacob Wetterling confessed. And facts uncovered by the "In the Dark" team during the second season, which delved into the case of Curtis Flowers, a man convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of four people in Mississippi in 1996, appeared in amicus briefs filed to the Supreme Court. Last month, the court ruled, 7 to 2, that the district attorney in the case had violated the Constitution. "In the Dark" is at once part of a wave of cold case podcasts and a subversion of the genre. Its creators seem to recoil from the classification of "true crime." "However anyone comes to the podcast, we're glad they're there," Ms. Freemark said. "But how we would describe our work is investigative reporting on the criminal justice system." Before becoming a podcast producer, Ms. Freemark worked at the "Radio Diaries" program in New York. That program, with amateurs recording their own stories, was a sandbox for an audiophile like her "non narrated, really sound rich, immersive audio documentaries," she said. While honing a recent episode of "In the Dark" behind soundproof doors, Ms. Freemark, whose title is senior producer, displayed the tendencies of an editorial perfectionist. She paced the control room, punching the air in time with changes in the background music, editing a stray "like" out of a reporter's question and frequently asking the mixer to move a sound clip two tenths of a second forward or back. Ms. Baran, the no nonsense reporter who hosts the show, resisted the podcast convention of introducing herself by name at the start of each episode. (Ms. Freemark had to talk her into it.) After considering a career in social services, she joined Minnesota Public Radio in 2009 as a part time web writer. Within a year, she had a full time job, and later was the lead reporter on "Betrayed by Silence," a Peabody winning audio documentary that exposed a cover up of abusive priests by the Twin Cities' archdiocese. 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. At the conclusion of the first season of "In the Dark," Ms. Baran put out a call to listeners for Season 2 story ideas. Thousands of suggestions came via email and social media. One, sent by a woman in Mississippi, seemed especially promising: a simple message claiming that Mr. Flowers had been tried six times for the same crime. The woman added that she believed he might be innocent. When the "In the Dark" team confirmed that Mr. Flowers had indeed been tried repeatedly for the killing of four people in a furniture store in Winona, Miss. and sentenced to death after the sixth trial they had more questions. How could this happen? And what did it say about the intersection of race Mr. Flowers is black and the American criminal justice system? Ms. Baran, 39, moved to Mississippi to report the story and stayed there almost a year. She was joined by others on the five person "In the Dark" team, as well as some from the wider APM Reports newsroom. Ms. Freemark, 38, who has two young children, spent roughly 10 days a month there as the saga unfolded. For much of the time, the "In the Dark" base was Water Valley, a town about an hour's drive north of the murder site. The reporters and producers attended church services and watched the Winona High School football team advance to the state title game. Little by little, through extensive interviews and the scouring of public records, they gathered enough material to construct a story sturdy enough to last a full season. Doug Evans, the district attorney who prosecuted Mr. Flowers, emerged as a crucial character, although he granted just a single 11 minute interview. On advice of his attorneys, Mr. Flowers did not speak with "In the Dark." The main episodes of Season 2 each around an hour long, in the manner of prestige television were released once a week. The team later recorded postscript episodes to incorporate the Supreme Court decision and other new reporting. "In the Dark" was studded with literary details, including the grace note that Winona was the town where Emmett Till arrived by train on his fatal trip in 1955. The show also included heartbreaking interviews with Mr. Flowers's father and a recording of John Johnson, the main investigator for the district attorney, singing a Merle Haggard number while backed by the husband of one of the murder victims. The podcast poked holes in the forensic evidence and raised questions about an informant who said Mr. Flowers had confessed to him. In the latest episode, released this month, it also shredded the alibi of a second suspect. In a virtuosic feat of reporting, which would prove relevant to the Supreme Court case, "In the Dark" studied 6,700 jurors over 25 years of Mr. Evans's tenure and found that prosecutors in the district, which is 40 percent black, were four times as likely to strike black jurors as white ones. In the six trials for Mr. Flowers, 61 of the 72 jurors were white. The Supreme Court effectively ordered the Mississippi Supreme Court to overturn the conviction, ruling that Mr. Evans's conspicuous striking of black jurors violated the Constitution. The job of writing the majority opinion fell to a newcomer, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. "Equal justice under law requires a criminal trial free of racial discrimination in the jury selection process," he wrote. In a rare monologue delivered at the close of Season 1, Ms. Baran was critical of nonfiction crime narratives that miss the big picture. "All these TV shows, books and movies," she said, "about impossible cases, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, people who vanished without a trace all that has turned our attention away from the actions of law enforcement, away from asking tough questions of the people who are supposed to be solving these crimes." Now Ms. Baran, Ms. Freemark and their colleagues are sifting through story ideas for a third season. But they have also pledged to track whatever happens next to Mr. Flowers, who remains in the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. "I think things are going to get really interesting from this point on," Ms. Freemark said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017) 5:55 p.m. on HBO2. Ben Affleck's Batman, Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman, Henry Cavill's Superman and more muscular DC Comics heroes punch and pow in this extravagant super adventure. The script involves Atlantis and resurrection. The resulting movie "shows a series that's still finding its footing as well as characters who, though perhaps not yet as ostensibly multidimensional as Marvel's, may be more enduring (and golden)," Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. "It has justice, and it has banter. And while it could have used more hanging out, more breeziness, it is a start." DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012) 8 p.m. on Paramount Network. Batman may have battled Superman in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" (to highly questionable effectiveness), but it'll be Batman vs. Batman Thursday night as Ben Affleck's Batman in "Justice League" precedes Christian Bale's portrayal of the same hero in "Dark Knight Rises." The third and final entry in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy pits the wealthy caped crusader against the anarchist villain Bane (Tom Hardy). They're joined by Anne Hathaway (as Selina Kyle, or Catwoman) and the swells of a Hans Zimmer score.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Before we get to "The Mandalorian," let's talk for a minute about Martin Scorsese. Exaggerating to make a point and tweaking the imperial pretensions of the phrase Marvel Cinematic Universe Scorsese recently maintained that Marvel movies were "not cinema." Now I would like to think that Scorsese, like me and most of the sensible people I know, realized that Marvel's "Black Panther" was one of the better movies nominated for the best picture Oscar this year, if not the best. (He may have preferred "Roma"; people who throw around the word "cinema" generally did.) But his point stands, reinforced by the sometimes wounded and humorless response it invoked. It is possible easy, with small enough budgets for movies to answer primarily to the personal, artistic choices of filmmakers, and that is how the very best movies get made. It is not possible for blockbuster aspiring franchise sequels to be made that way they will always be constrained by the need to answer to nervous rights holders and demanding fan bases. Which brings us back to "The Mandalorian." It isn't a film, but it's in the continuum of which Scorsese spoke a series that extends the "Star Wars" franchise overseen by Marvel's corporate cousin Lucasfilm, and is a star attraction of another wing of the Disney empire, the new streaming service Disney Plus. And while two shortish episodes at about 40 and 30 minutes, they're conspicuously pithy by the current standards of streaming drama aren't much to judge by, at this point "The Mandalorian" is, like more than a few franchise films, pretty good. A prototypical space western with a laconic hero in the Clint Eastwood John Wayne mold (John Ford's Wayne and a baby film "3 Godfathers" comes to mind), it's well paced and reasonably clever, with enough style and visual panache to keep your eyes engaged. The dusty landscapes and hulking machinery stand up to their counterparts in the "Star Wars" films, and the strange animated beasts exceed them. (Andrew L. Jones, an art director for films like "Avatar" and "The Adventures of Tintin," gets his first production designer credit.) But is it cinema? Probably not, according to the Scorsese definition. Because as much as it succeeds at being its own thing, it is still recognizably overwhelmingly a "Star Wars" thing, a sector in a centrally controlled economy that extends from theaters to video games to (just to buttress the Scorsese case) a new theme park extension being rolled out at Disneyland. And in a display of true corporate synergy, this "Star Wars" property was entrusted to a veteran of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The series was created, and its first two episodes written, by Jon Favreau, who inaugurated the M.C.U. by directing "Iron Man" and has produced multiple Avengers films. Throughout these early episodes, you can see Favreau and Filoni looking for ways to make "The Mandalorian" stand apart from its heritage. A notable difference is the low key score by Ludwig Goransson, which eschews the emotionally pummeling surges of John Williams's "Star Wars" music. The series is quieter in general, and so far has none of the inspirational speechifying that can deaden the films. Viewers should stick around through the end credits, which feature moody painted scenes evocative of comic books or the covers of pulp novels (rather than the film serials that inspired George Lucas to make the original "Star Wars"). But as the Mandalorian goes through his paces a few battles to establish his talent for violence, the acceptance of an iffy bounty contract, the acquisition of a curmudgeonly sidekick, a surprise twist that humanizes him and sets the season's story in motion it's also clear that we're firmly within the Jediverse. The opening scene, set in a frontier cantina, is pure "Star Wars" fan service. Children scurry about in cloaks playing diminutive alien gangs. The major reveal at the end of the first episode is a big "aww" in the context of "Star Wars" history, but again, it's in that context. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Watching the gruff, lumbering, suddenly protective Mandalorian safeguard his tiny but powerful new charge promises to be a droll and potentially moving process. (It's hard to say about performances we can't see the face of Pedro Pascal, as the helmeted Mandalorian, nor that of Nick Nolte, who provides a nicely acerbic voice for the crusty farmer Kuiil. The casting of Werner Herzog as the Mandalorian's haughty client looks like a stunt, so far.) But around the edges there's a sense, ever so slightly dispiriting, that "The Mandalorian" will carry out the fundamental mission of the "Star Wars" franchise across four decades: to keep faith with the essential corniness and two dimensionality of George Lucas's original conception. Favreau and Filoni slow it down, make it look good, take out some of the sentimentality, give it some sophistication and let you feel smart for enjoying it. That's not cinema, that's peak TV.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
MUMBAI, India As President Obama pays his first visit to India this weekend, he may want to take his lead from Mary Kay. Since Mr. Obama took office two years ago, America's top economic policy makers have visited India numerous times but left with little to show for their long flights. This time, too, officials on both sides have tried to temper expectations, given the geopolitical and trade tensions between the two nations. But, even without a big policy push from Washington, companies from both countries have already been forging deals at a fast and furious pace. As a result of such moves, American exports to India in the first six months of 2010 hit 14.6 billion, up 14 percent from the period a year earlier and nearly five times what it was a decade earlier. Corporate America mainly hopes the visit by the president, with more than 200 American executives in tow, can help better define the common economic interests of the United States and India and build on the trade and investment foundations the business community has already laid. "Business had been leading the way from the very beginning," said Ron Somers, the head of the United States India Business Council, a business advocacy group. Now, Mr. Somers said, "we want to crown that with a genuine strategic partnership." Harold McGraw 3rd, the chairman of McGraw Hill and one of the executives in the Obama entourage, said the visit was "all about economic and job growth for both the U.S. and India." India is America's 14th largest trade partner, he noted, but "should be a lot higher." For many American executives, India seems to have become the "new China" a place where they feel compelled to do business, lest they miss getting a foothold in a nation with low cost labor and a potentially billion person consumer market. A Bharti Wal Mart distribution center. Foreign retailers cannot run their own stores if they sell products from multiple brands. Keith Bedford for The New York Times But American government officials still seem to be struggling to define India's role, beyond saying that "it's not China." India, with its lively democracy and messy infrastructure, is certainly no China, with its forced march development model. In fact, encouraging India as a counterweight to China both economically and militarily is a motive for President Obama's visit, with potential sales of military technology high on the American agenda. Compared with China, trade between India and the United States is relatively balanced. In 2009, America bought only 7.2 billion more in goods and services from India than it sold. Total trade between the countries was 60.2 billion. But that is just a small fraction of the 434 billion annual trade between China and the United States, which is lopsided 262 billion in China's favor. On paper, at least, India and the United States already have many shared interests and common goals. But Mr. Obama and his New Delhi counterpart, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, have few significant bilateral achievements on economic issues. And one promising partnership, involving nuclear energy, may not even get off the ground. In 2005, President George W. Bush and Mr. Singh announced what is considered the most ambitious agreement yet between their countries. The United States would remove restrictions on the export of civil nuclear technology to India and American companies would sell power equipment to India, which hopes to increase its nuclear power generation more than tenfold. This past August, though, the Indian Parliament set that deal back by voting to make contractors and suppliers partly liable for any damages from nuclear accidents that might occur at the new plants. American companies say the new law deviates from international nuclear norms and would keep them from selling power equipment. Many economists and corporate executives say the power plant impasse and other tensions between the countries most notably Washington's continued, if wary, military embrace of Pakistan suggest that Mr. Obama and Mr. Singh may be unable to reach any meaningful economic concord on this trip. Both leaders face difficult economic and political realities at home. High unemployment, concern over the outsourcing of American jobs and the threat of a more confrontational Congress will limit Mr. Obama's ability to strike deals with India. Mr. Singh, meanwhile, is hemmed in by a coalition government that is conflicted about its relationship with the United States and is uncertain about the pace at which India should open its economy to the world. "There is a limited amount that the visit can achieve," said Arvind Panagariya, an economist at Columbia University and an India expert. "As long as they give a good communique and send some positive signals, that's the best we can expect." Analysts say the more concrete results may come from corporate, not government, meetings. The chief executives accompanying Mr. Obama will include Jeffrey R. Immelt of General Electric and Indra K. Nooyi, the Indian born head of PepsiCo. They will meet with the likes of Ratan Tata, chairman of the multinational conglomerate Tata Group, and Mukesh Ambani, head of India's biggest company, Reliance Industries. Various events will also give executives from smaller companies a chance to mingle. "The most immediate benefit of the visit could be that another group of American industry executives become aware of the India opportunity," said one of the scheduled attendees, Gunjan Bagla, the managing director of Amritt Ventures, which advises American companies coming to India. Trade and investment between the countries has grown sharply since the Indian government began easing state control of its economy in 1991. But disagreements between the United States and India have been a big roadblock in negotiations in the Doha round of global trade talks, which have been stalled since 2008. American officials have been pushing for India and other developing nations to open more industries like financial services to foreign competition, while the Indians are seeking reductions in American farm subsidies. American jobs are also a sore point. In Washington, Democratic lawmakers earlier this year pushed through a 2,000 increase in fees for employment visas, writing the law in such a way that it primarily hurt Indian technology companies. Mr. Obama has also advocated changing tax law to make it more expensive for American companies to outsource work to India and other countries. That is why President Obama will probably focus his talks here on securing deals for American companies that can demonstrably create jobs in the United States, according to administration officials. Some of those deals, which might include the sale of Boeing cargo planes to India's military forces, have been in negotiation for some time. American companies like Wal Mart are also hoping that New Delhi will allow them to set up retail stores in India. Right now, foreign companies cannot operate retail stores that sell products from multiple brands. Indian officials have recently signaled that they might soon change those rules. The Indians, for their part, have said they hope Mr. Obama will agree to ease export restrictions on so called dual use technologies, like cryptography, that can be used for both military and civilian purposes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
The Iraqi born artist Hassan Massoudy, who is based in Paris, draws on his classical training in calligraphy to create vibrantly colored oversized letters evocative of traditional Arabic script. Having formerly produced headlines for Arabic magazines as a student, Mr. Massoudy now bases his compositions on texts from Eastern and Western poets, authors and philosophers. And at a time of uncertainty for immigrant artists, he is having his first New York solo exhibition, at Sundaram Tagore Chelsea. The show, "Words, Breath, Gesture," features more than 25 works on paper as well as several paintings on canvas that Mr. Massoudy has created with his own tools and inks. (Through March 25; sundaramtagore.com.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Craft cocktails those artful, mixologist created drinks that are often a lure at chic bars and restaurants are now finding their way into the airline industry, too. As of mid January, for example, Virgin Atlantic Upper Class fliers departing from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey can head to the airline's Clubhouse, the lounge for Upper Class fliers, to imbibe cocktails courtesy of the popular Cuban inspired Lower Manhattan bar BlackTail. There's the Havana Night, a combination of gin, lime juice, cane syrup, mint and bitters; the BlackTail Daiquiri, made of white rum, lime juice and cane syrup; and four others on the menu. The collaboration is part of Virgin Atlantic's new program to showcase craft cocktails from trendsetting local bars in its Clubhouses. Besides the one at Newark, the airline has similar partnerships at four other Clubhouses including the one in San Francisco International Airport where travelers can sip clever combinations from the pirate themed bar Smuggler's Cove in the city. Virgin Atlantic is paying attention to craft cocktails because they are having a moment, said Mark Murphy, the food and beverage manager for the Clubhouses. "We try to be a brand associated with edginess and coolness, and craft cocktails are very cool," he said. United States carriers are also getting into the craft cocktail game. United Airlines recently introduced more than 20 cocktails in its new United Polaris lounges, reserved for United Polaris business and first class fliers as well as international business and first class fliers on Star Alliance partner airlines. Here, passengers can order cocktails designed by notable mixologists like Jason Kosmas, the co founder of the Manhattan cocktail bar Employees Only, and Adam Seger, the head mixologist at the Tuck Room, a bar at Theaters Fulton Market in Manhattan, who has created the Aperol Orange Spritz, which includes Aperol, blood orange and prosecco. United serves a smaller roster of cocktails on its planes. On flights within North America, for example, passengers can order a higher end version of the traditional Moscow Mule made with small batch vodka, ginger beer, lime juice and cane sugar; the drinks are free in business class and 9.99 each for economy passengers. Delta Air Lines offers inflight cocktails, too, and the choices (usually three or four) change depending on the region and season, said Beatriz Sims, the airline's onboard general manager for food and drinks. "We try to connect with our customers at a local level by tailoring our cocktail options to the routes they're flying and also have ones related to specific events," she said. Last fall, for instance, some domestic and international routes featured three Jack Daniel's cocktails in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Jack Daniel's Distillery; and last summer, all North American routes had the Southern Lemonade, made with vodka and lemonade. Ms. Sims said that Delta had invested in training its flight attendants on making the specialty drinks, which are free for all passengers on international routes and 8 for economy passengers on domestic flights. Elsewhere in the skies, passengers can look for specialty cocktails onboard Emirates, where the breakfast martini a recipe with gin, marmalade, Cointreau and orange is one of more than half dozen options in business and first class. On JetBlue, the signature cocktail for Mint, the airline's premium class, is the Mint, a mix of honey infused limeade and mint, with vodka optional; and Air France takes the star barman Colin Field, from Bar Hemingway at the Ritz Paris hotel, onboard select flights where he sets up a cocktail bar for business and first class fliers and serves his famous cocktails. According to Todd Bliwise, the owner of the New York City travel agency An Avenue Apart and an airline specialist, the recent focus on creative cocktails is a shift from the last decade when carriers played up their high end wines and spirits. "These cocktails are a way for airlines to add some spice to their same old drink choices and become a conversation topic because their ingredients are fun to discuss," he said. From the perspective of the trendy bars, teaming with some of these airlines to take their drinks to fliers is an opportunity to make air travel more enjoyable. As Jack McGarry, a managing partner at BlackTail, put it: "We have a good time designing these cocktails, so if we can bring a little bit of that good time to a new set of customers, why not do it?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The move is the latest in a series of actions taken by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to place safeguards on their networks in the days leading up to Election Day. Lawmakers and the public harshly criticized the companies for allowing misinformation to spread ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Facebook, which at three billion users is much larger than Twitter, has announced several changes in the past few months to stem misinformation about the election. It has started to pin facts about voting to the top of users' timelines, added labels to posts that spread false voting information, placed a ban on new political advertising in the seven days before Election Day, and removed paid political ads entirely after the polls close. Twitter has taken several steps, too. Last week, the company turned off some of the features that help tweets go viral faster. That includes adding an extra step to retweeting posts, and prompting users to avoid retweeting a post with a link to a news article if they had not already read the attached article. The new pinned information will appear in the home timeline of every person with a Twitter account located within the United States, and will be available in 42 languages, beginning Monday. The prompts will also appear in Twitter's search bar when people search for related terms or hashtags. Each pinned alert will also link out to a collection of credible information on the subject be it information on how to vote, or election returns curated within a Twitter "moment" compiled from election experts, journalists and other authoritative sources of information.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
After it was learned that Agnew was a target, Nixon and his new chief of staff, Alexander Haig, discussed plans in the Oval Office to obstruct the investigation. Among those enlisted to help was the Republican National Committee chairman, and future president, George Herbert Walker Bush, whose involvement was uncovered by the authors in a "memo to file" found in Beall's papers, at Frostburg State University. After the Marylanders brought what they knew to Attorney General Elliot Richardson their errand, and admiring affection for Richardson, are engagingly described there was no shutting it down. In the summer of Watergate, faced with the possibility of a Nixon impeachment, Richardson made his priority getting Agnew out of the line of succession as quickly as possible. Like the hosts of a reality show, Maddow and Yarvitz step from behind a 47 year old curtain to inform the former prosecutors what they've learned. "Wow! Agnew said my name! Oh, joy," one says. "Makes my whole life worthwhile." But while "Bag Man" the book is considerably more detailed than the podcast, it necessarily lacks a soundtrack for such spontaneous exclamations, and the sordid immediacy of hearing those White House tapes gems like Nixon talking to Agnew about Beall and asking: "Is he a good boy? Why the hell did we appoint him?" Agnew resigned in October 1973, 10 months ahead of Nixon's resignation, but his story didn't end there. He enjoyed his "convicted/emeritus" status, wrote a lousy novel and tried to make a living. In what Maddow and Yarvitz call "perhaps Agnew's most malodorous second act," he asked a Saudi royal to help him resist the "unremitting Zionist efforts to destroy me," by paying 2 million into a Swiss bank. In May 1995, he attended a ceremony at the Capitol, where his marble bust was added to the vice presidential pantheon. I can report, as a witness, that no one murmured a harsh word about the honored attendee. Maddow and Yarvitz, though, don't hold back. To read "Bag Man" is to be reminded how lucky the nation was to be rid of him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In rural Georgia, 100 years ago this spring, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, made what a newspaper called "unwise remarks" about the lynching of her husband. So a mob came for her, too. They tied her by the ankles. They hung her upside down from a tree. They doused her dress with gasoline and lit a match. That wasn't the worst. As a reporter for The Crisis, a magazine published by the NAACP, wrote, while Turner writhed, a man took a hog butchering knife and cut the baby out of her belly. "The infant, prematurely born, gave two feeble cries and then its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel," the article says. I didn't know this particular story before I saw "A Small Oak Tree Runs Red," written by Lekethia Dalcoe and directed by Harry Lennix at the Billie Holiday Theater. And there's a part of me that wishes I still didn't know it. But "A Small Oak Tree," flawed and devastating, won't support that. It argues that in remaining ignorant of our history we risk remaining mired in its violence. The three character play takes place in two times and two places or a time and a non time, a place and a non place if you want to be precise about it. Half of the play is set in Brooks County, Ga., in May 1918; the other half is set in a sepulchral space that might be purgatory, where the characters must wander until they face the trauma of their deaths. Christian and psychoanalytic, it's a "No Exit" with the promise of salvation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
It should be said, first, that "Old Town Road" was novel, clever and direct. And then it should be said, second, that nothing Lil Nas X has made since then has come close to that song's vim, brightness or wit. His is the peculiar conundrum of the viral phenomenon burdened with the expectation of becoming something more, and burdened further by the budget, time and attention that such a goal requires. And so the further he progresses in his career, and the more professionals he works with, the less intuitive his music becomes. "Holiday" is clunky, stilted and dull, almost provocatively unmusical. His sing rapping is labored, and the production by Take A Daytrip and Tay Keith is almost apologetically undemanding. To be fair, though, the song is merely a pretext for the video, which is a hyperfuturist update of the Missy Elliott oeuvre. And the video is merely a pretext for the continued spotlight on Lil Nas X, a funny, inventive and refreshing public figure for whom music is an inconvenience and, over time, almost certainly an albatross. JON CARAMANICA Enjoy the tricky, sinuous Afrobeats groove a loping bass line teased by filtered vocals, elusive guitar lines and dabs of percussion of "Ginger," a bilingual come on Wizkid shares with Burna Boy, on the full track from Wizkid's new album, "Made in Lagos." Then borrow some dance moves, if you can, from the Nigerian American choreographer Izzy Odigie in the "official dance video," which unfortunately shortens the track and squashes it down to mono sound. PARELES "Since the day we first met/I've had not one regret," Valerie June sings in "Stay," but with a caveat: "I don't know how long I'll stay." An orchestra assembles around her, but her ornery, sweet and sour voice defuses any possibility of pomp. That's just part one; "You and I" begins with voices and finger snaps, then gathers different ensembles: rippling folk rock guitars, a bustling big band and swoopy synthesizers, melting into one another as she marvels, "So much to discover for you and I." It's not overstuffed; it's profuse. PARELES "if trump loses I will cover iris by the goo goo dolls," Phoebe Bridgers tweeted on Election Day a tantalizing promise that certainly impacted the future of American democracy. (Proceeds from the track on Bandcamp will go to Stacey Abrams's Fair Fight organization.) The cover may have begun as something of a lark, but Bridgers a dual citizen in the realms of both absurdist meme humor and sincerely felt songwriting brings trembling emotion to her rendition of the '90s radio staple. Maggie Rogers provides impassioned vocals on the second verse, but her voice best fits the song's sparse arrangement when it's braided in harmony with Bridgers, who transforms the song's bombastic refrain into a kind of introvert's anthem: "I don't want the world to see me, 'cause I don't think that they'd understand." LINDSAY ZOLADZ When Kelsea Ballerini performed the rollicking "Hole in the Bottle" at the CMA Awards this week, she ended it with a winking activation of the Shania Twain bat signal: "Let's go girls." A few days later, she's released a new version of the song featuring vocal contributions from Twain herself. The elder star's iconic twang is a welcome addition to the second verse, but the best part of this version is their giggling ad libs over the bridge, which conjure a certain ... authenticity to the song's central theme ("Just look at that ... hole in the bottle," Twain remarks, completely cracking herself up.) What's better than drinking wine alone? Splitting a bottle (or two ...) with Shania Twain, of course! ZOLADZ From Brian Johnson's screechy vocals to the bludgeon and crunch of the guitar riffs, "Realize" is instantly recognizable as AC/DC, a band that has rarely swerved from the sound it established in the 1970s. The group's founder, rhythm guitarist and songwriter Malcolm Young died in 2017, but the songs on the new album, "Power Up," are still, as always, by Malcolm Young and Angus Young, AC/DC's lead guitarist and Malcolm's brother. (Malcolm's nephew, Stevie Young, has taken his place in the band.) While Johnson exhorts, "Feel the chills up and down your spine/I'm gonna make you fly," Brendan O'Brien's production brings subtleties to the band's wall of guitars, embedding trills, quick lead licks and wordless vocals within the all important riffs. PARELES "Haven't seen the sun with the naked eye much, so the neon is my god and it shine on the numb," El P raps on the first verse of "No Save Point," Run the Jewels' contribution to the soundtrack for the hotly anticipated video game Cyberpunk 2077. (An animated El P and Killer Mike make cameos in the game as "the Yankee and the Brave" a nod to the opening track on their latest album, "RTJ4.") El P's vivid verse and bass buzzing, blown boombox production fit the game's dark, "Blade Runner" esque aesthetic. But then, characteristically, Killer Mike swoops in to survey the larger socioeconomic forces at work in this digital dystopia: "I used to pray to God, but I think he took a vacation, 'cause now the state of Cali is run by these corporations." Let's hope it turns out to be science fiction. ZOLADZ As a young pedal steel guitarist in 1970s Houston, Susan Alcorn came up playing in country bands at honky tonks. But she gravitated to uncharted territory, and in recent decades she's been known for ambient solo performances that conjure a sleepy sonic gloaming. Only recently has she composed music with a full ensemble in mind, and assembled a quintet with some of the finest improvisers around: the guitarist Mary Halvorson, the violinist Mark Feldman, the bassist Michael Formanek and the drummer Ryan Sawyer. On "Northeast Rising Sun," which closes the group's debut album, "Pedernal," Alcorn adapts a melodic refrain used in Sufi devotional singing, improvising on the pedal steel guitar in bright and shapely slashes as the band follows the piece's descending harmonies in a joyful downhill tumble. RUSSONELLO Congress was just weeks away from passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when Charles Mingus and his ensemble arrived in Bremen, Germany, during a tour of Europe that hs since gone down in history as one of the bassist and composer's finest hours. They seem to have taken a special pleasure in offering this lengthy, gut opening take on "Fables of Faubus," Mingus's musical rebuke of the segregationist Arkansas governor. Featuring the saxophonist, flutist and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy; the tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan; the trumpeter Johnny Coles; the pianist Jaki Byard; and the drummer Dannie Richmond, the sextet mixes Ellingtonian harmonies and quotes from "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" into a half hour exploration that's heavy on rough, avant garde improvising and passages of pregnant silence, all of which heighten the collective intensity. RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Do vice presidential picks matter? Conventional wisdom argues they have limited electoral impact. But a vice presidential pick does matter in a particular way to elections. It suggests the strategy and tactics a campaign will pursue. The pick might complement the ticket, like Al Gore did for Bill Clinton in 1992, or the pick might balance the ticket, like Mike Pence did for Donald Trump. So Joe Biden's electoral fate may well hinge on this decision. In our polarized era, where turnout determines election victors and each party's coalition has become more locked in, ticket balancing picks for vice president can be helpful in mending primary wounds and generating excitement for the coalition in the general election. That is why Mr. Biden should select for his running mate a ticket balancer. Now, the temptation for Mr. Biden to pick a ticket "complementer" will be high. All the conventional wisdom suggests that ticket complementers "do no harm" because they are, essentially, prototypes of the presidential nominee. By contrast, ticket balancers offer voters something the main nominee lacks and often are meant to motivate a group within the coalition with which the nominee has struggled to gain traction. Balancers are perceived to be riskier, especially since John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin in 2008. Hillary Clinton is often castigated as running a terrible, horrible, no good, doomed campaign. She actually ran a perfectly fine campaign but strategically speaking, it was the wrong kind of campaign. It was based on the flawed assumption that a significant portion of American conservatives would not, simply could not, vote for Donald Trump. 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." But on Election Day, 90 percent of Republicans voted for him; Mrs. Clinton also failed to carry independents, despite a campaign structured mostly on winning them over. Mrs. Clinton's "do no harm" pick Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia ended up doing her considerable harm. The strategy built around the pick ended up leaving the party's progressive flank vulnerable to, among other things, a sophisticated Russian propaganda and disinformation campaign. In addition, so called protest balloting in 2016 was three to five times higher than normal in the swing states. In states like Wisconsin, which was decided by less than a percentage point, nearly 6 percent of the electorate cast protest ballots. For all the attention placed on white, working class voters and their continued realignment away from Democrats, protest balloting affected the outcome of every swing state contest and played a pivotal role in Mr. Trump's destruction of the Democrat's Midwest "blue wall." Yet Mr. Trump still has a plurality problem, and his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, knows it. Even before the pandemic came along to destroy his best argument for re election, the economy, Mr. Trump was unpopular among independents and has hardly ever (aside from a brief moment early in the coronavirus crisis) hit 50 percent approval rating nationally and rarely in swing states. The only way to re elect a plurality president is to make a plurality vote share sufficient enough to win. And the best way to do that is to replicate Russia's playbook of targeting parts of the Democratic coalition like progressives and young black voters to turn them against voting for Mr. Biden. The only person who has as much riding on Mr. Biden's decision is Mr. Trump. As in 2016, he hopes to pick off or discourage disgruntled progressive voters. Much of Mr. Trump's re election hopes are pinned on Mr. Biden making the wrong choice of running mate. So the Biden team must make a pick that can help Democrats match what promises to be an energized Republican base. The best way to do that is a ticket balancing candidate like Stacey Abrams or Kamala Harris. They would bring gender and racial diversity to the ticket and, perhaps even more important, ideological diversity. That might prove to be the single most effective way to head off the Trump campaign's "divide and conquer" plan for progressives in 2020. With 120 million millennials and Generation Z potential voters now powering their coalition, Democrats would be wise to recognize that their electoral fate hinges on getting these voters to the polls. Mr. Biden is positioning himself as a bridge to the party's future and liberals like Ms. Harris and Ms. Abrams would help pave the way. Another ticket balancing approach would be to put a down payment on the Democratic Party's geographic future. This approach would focus resources not as much on the Midwest but on Sunbelt states from California to Georgia through Texas, which could rise as a potential swing state as early as 2024. This would have the Biden team looking at Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Latina governor of New Mexico, or at Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada as potential running mates. Mr. Biden's nomination maxes out the ticket's appeal to the center of the electorate. Among independents, the pandemic, economic collapse and Mr. Trump's antics already provide Mr. Biden a hard edge. A centrist, ticket complementing pick like Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota will likely bring diminishing returns in this regard. As a fellow white moderate, Ms. Klobuchar is a quintessential ticket complementor a 2020 version of Mr. Kaine. If Mr. Biden is going to ignore the fact that today's Democratic Party represents the most racially diverse coalition in America's history, he should at least look to a ticket balancer like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who would bring ideological diversity and guarantee robust turnout and loyal support among progressives, many of whom are independents. The special election last week in California's 25th District shows Democrats are still vulnerable to low turnout; when their coalition fails to turn out, they lose. It also dispelled a dangerous myth suburban Republicans are not casting ballots for Democrats. If Democrats want to hold on to or even expand on their House gains from 2018 and potentially take control of the Senate, they need an excited electorate. Election outcomes in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona all come down to the same thing: the percentage of Democrats and left leaning independents that end up casting ballots compared with the percentage of Republicans and right leaning independents that do so. Republicans understand this campaign math and learned to solve this equation a long time ago. The only question is, have Democrats finally solved it too? Rachel Bitecofer ( RachelBitecofer) is an election forecaster and senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
LOS ANGELES Nothing about the game was normal. Not the tributes. Not the chants. Not the emotion. Not the reflection. But before the Lakers could begin to move forward from the death of Kobe Bryant on Sunday, they needed to look back. Anthony Davis went back to the 2012 Olympic Games in London, when he was the youngest player on the United States men's basketball team and the last guy off the bench. The United States was up big on Nigeria when Davis was finally summoned to shed his warm ups and play. But there was one problem: Davis, in all his exuberance at age 19, had forgotten to put his jersey on. Bryant, the oldest player on the team at the time, was flabbergasted and let Davis know it. The lesson stuck. "Before every game, I check that I have my jersey on to this day," Davis told reporters. "He taught me how to get dressed before a game." It was late Friday night, and the Lakers were minutes removed from playing their first game since Bryant and his 13 year old daughter, Gianna, were among nine people killed in a helicopter crash last Sunday outside Los Angeles. Davis was sitting next to LeBron James on a dais in a large concrete room at Staples Center, and they were offering some of their most expansive comments on Bryant since his death. About their interactions with Bryant. About what he represented and why he mattered so much to them. It was the quiet conversations more than the splashy moments that resonated with James and Davis: the bits of advice he offered, the way he pushed his peers to excel, the work ethic he exhibited. But James said he had been struck most by how Bryant, who had four daughters with his wife, Vanessa, had transitioned into retirement since he played the final game of his 20 year career with the Lakers in 2016. "You know what's crazy?" James asked. "These last three years, out of all the success he had five rings, multiple M.V.P.s, an All Star Game M.V.P., first team everything, all life, all world, all basketball it felt like these last three years were the happiest I've ever seen him. I think we can all say that. Being able to just be with his daughters, be with his family. Because when we're playing this game of basketball, we give so much to it." Even the Trail Blazers' Damian Lillard, who torched the Lakers for 48 points, 10 assists and 9 rebounds as he continued to play the best basketball of his life, said he felt empty afterward. "I don't think anybody walks away from this moment and this situation a winner," he said. Bryant was everywhere at Staples Center. On the T shirts bearing his name and uniform numbers 24 and 8 that thousands of fans wore. On the video clips that appeared on the scoreboard during timeouts. On the new "Mamba 4 Life" tattoo that James brandished on one of his thighs. On the "Kobe" chants that echoed throughout the building. In recent years, Bryant had been a semiregular presence around the organization even as he coached his daughter's basketball team, even as he shifted to his next phase of his life with other interests. Many of the team's current players revered him, and many of the franchise's longest tenured employees remained close to him. Bryant was most recently courtside at Staples Center for a game against the Dallas Mavericks on Dec. 29, when he playfully trash talked Luka Doncic in Slovenian. Afterward, Bryant introduced Doncic to his daughter, Gianna, who had accompanied her father to the game as she often did. She dreamed of playing at the highest level, too. On Friday night, the seats they sat in were left empty. Jerseys for Kobe (No. 24) and Gianna (No. 2) were draped over the backs. A bouquet of roses was placed on each cushion. During a 15 minute ceremony before the game, Usher sang "Amazing Grace" and the cellist Ben Hong from the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed "Hallelujah" as highlights from Bryant's career played on the large video screen. There was a moment of silence for 24.2 seconds (for Bryant's and his daughter's number) in the dark. By the time Boyz II Men sang the national anthem, James was among the players who appeared to be weeping. He stepped into the spotlight and pulled some notecards from his waistband. Then, he tossed them. Who needed notes? Not James. He said he wanted to speak "straight from the heart." "I'm looking at this as a celebration tonight," he said. "This is a celebration of the 20 years, of the blood, the sweat, the tears, the broken down body, the getting up, the sitting down, the countless hours, the determination to be as great as he could be." It was the first time James had spoken publicly since Bryant's death, and he crammed a lot of emotion into four minutes. He honored the nine victims by reciting their names. He touched on Bryant's resilience. He alluded to the communal suffering that so much of the city had experienced. And he pledged to continue Bryant's legacy with the Lakers. "In the words of Kobe Bryant, Mamba out," James said. "But in the words of us, not forgotten. Live on, brother." Lawrence Tanter, the Lakers' longtime public address announcer, soon used the same introduction for all five of the team's starters, repeating it for each player: "No. 24, 6 6, 20th season from Lower Merion High School, Koooobe Bryant." "Outside, with all the tributes, it's just the thousands and thousands of people who have felt his passing," Stotts said. "That, to me, is the most impressive thing." As for the game, Lakers Coach Frank Vogel shuffled every player on the roster into his rotation by halftime. It was by design after a difficult week. "I wanted to give everybody an opportunity to contribute," he said. The Lakers did not play their best basketball, though Lillard had something to do with it. Vogel said he was proud of his team anyway. He knew it would be a tough night. More are sure to come. "It's going to take time," Vogel said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Can the truth of a story be enough to compensate for its telling? "When It Happens to You" opens with a simple statement from its playwright and star, Tawni O'Dell: "I'm not an actress here to perform for you. I'm a writer here to tell a story." That story is a harrowing personal narrative, and it's a feat for O'Dell, a best selling novelist, to recount it, almost daring the audience to consider how common such horrors are. Yet her script is direct to the point of didactic, offering only surface level insight into an event that understandably traumatized her family. The production, presented at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, trudges step by step through the true story: In 2014, O'Dell's daughter, Tirzah (Kelly Swint), was raped by a stranger who broke into her apartment. Her life falls apart; she struggles with alcoholism and pushes her family away. With the uneasy poise of a student delivering a class project, O'Dell narrates her daughter's journey back to wholeness, with some mentions of her son, Connor (Connor Lawrence), who is overwhelmed and unwilling to deal with the burden of his sister's trauma. As a mother who discovers the limits of her ability to protect her children, O'Dell suffers as well: "I walked around in a haze. I never slept. Night held too many terrors for me now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
I've never deluded myself into thinking that he's in what I've always considered that mythological place called heaven, looking down on my sister and me and the smattering of nieces, nephews and other kinfolk who still remember him. His death, 10 days before I turned 13, was so brutally final for me. I have never harbored the Christian promise of eternal life that has comforted so many in my family. I envy them for envisioning some eternal family potluck where we'll all be happy again. But the realm he does exist in for me is in dreams, consistently about every five years or so, where he is alive and has simply been taking time away from us a pause of 15, 30, 40 years, just because he needed to sort things out. It's as if in my dreamland of grief where I always seem to be childlike and confused even though I'm aware of the years and decades that have passed it's simply standard behavior for people to slip away but return in an instant. And sometimes we are going to visit him in his new, faraway home. And it's in those moments that I know everything will be OK and that I will touch him and hear his war stories that I was too young to care about when he was alive. Like my father, I've traveled extensively in my life and career, much of it for work but mostly, admittedly, to run. Perhaps to run as my father did. I'm not fleeing coal mines and Appalachian poverty, though that legacy haunts me. I think I am fleeing what my father must have been: the fear of an unfulfilled life, driven by the urgency that it could all be ripped away from me at any moment. I'll never know what motivated him to re up for the military twice. It was no doubt to escape poverty, even after World War II when he returned to coal mining and a failed first marriage before the Korean War broke out. But he did decide, like millions of others, to settle down and have children as the Eisenhower era boom created a middle class bubble for those scarred by the Great Depression and perhaps their own great depression. My aloneness in my travels and my fear, at this semi ripe age, that it could all go haywire for me too is, I suspect, common among grown children whose parents died young. I've sought and still seek, in the age of 24 hour work cycles, hookup apps and boundless TV and escapism in every corner of the planet emotional refuge in all the places that feel safe and immediate. There is not much comfort in the future when it's ripped away from you at a young age.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
A chef emerged from the kitchen carrying a tin of caviar and dolloped a heaping spoonful onto the back of my hand. "Then the vodka," he said, nodding at a chilled glass on the table, as clouds of smoke billowed from behind the bar. Dinner at Stockholm's Punk Royale Cafe had begun. The energy swirling through the restaurant stood in stark contrast to its location: a forlorn block on the eastern edge of Sodermalm, an island that has been caricatured as alternately sinister (in best selling Swedish crime novels) or trendsetting (see its No. 3 spot on Vogue's "15 Coolest Neighborhoods in the World" list). Quiet and mostly residential, eastern Sodermalm is not noir, nor is it considered cool. At least not in comparison to nearby Nytorget, a square ringed with trendy restaurants and cafes in the heart of SoFo, as the neighborhood south of Folkungagatan is called. Instead, eastern Sodermalm is one of the island's last undeveloped pockets, a Wild West (or, rather, East) where imaginative young locals are now building a drinking and dining scene that diverges from the capital's buttoned up style. All it needs is a nickname: Given its location north of the park Vita Bergen, NoVi seems inevitable. "Living here, I could never go down to SoFo or Nytorget and find a seat to sit," said Anna Axelsson, a longtime resident of eastern Sodermalm. "On maternity leave in Sweden, you're away from work for at least a year, and when I walked out with the stroller, I couldn't find a single place to have a coffee, a sandwich, a salad or some breakfast in my neighborhood." So in 2013, Ms. Axelsson, who had briefly lived in Australia, opened the cafe Pom Flora with her husband, Rasmus, serving Aussie inspired breakfasts that proved Swedes needn't choose between healthful and delicious: lingonberry lassi smoothies, beetroot hummus toasts, chia puddings with rhubarb compote. The Instagram friendly cafe, with sunlight streaming through large windows and menus handwritten on a roll of butcher paper, now attracts Stockholmers (and in the know tourists) from across the city. In contrast, it was a trip to Japan and a newfound obsession with ramen that inspired the creation of the noodle shop Ai Ramen, said Erik Rehnby, a co owner. The casual spot opened in October 2015 with house made noodles in the tonkotsu ramen, pendant lamps illuminating communal tables and a logo designed by the Swedish street artist Disey; three months later, it won the annual "Best Restaurant: Budget" award chosen by Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest newspaper. "It's one of the best prizes that you can win, because of the impact that it has," said Mr. Rehnby, before rattling off a list of other new spots in the neighborhood. Last summer, Stockholm's Modernist Brewery relocated its craft brewery to a nearby garage shared with a new small batch gin distillery called Stockholms Branneri, while in October the restaurant Cafe Nizza opened down the street with a surprise set menu and resident friendly drop in seating. Nearby Nook recently won a Michelin Bib for its creative Scandi Asian cuisine. "For us, being a bit away from the beaten path is very important," said Mr. Sandberg. "You have the hub of Nytorget very close by, but that particular area is completely saturated with restaurants and cafes and shops. In my mind it's already peaked." Or in the words of Yogi Berra: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." Where trailblazers do go, at least on a recent Sunday evening, is Punk Royale Cafe. After a slew of guest stints and pop ups, the chefs Joakim Almqvist and Kalle Nilsson opened their first restaurant, Punk Royale, here in 2015 amid a tornado of praise and provocation. The decadent, playful tasting menus cost a fraction of what you'd expect in pricey Stockholm, and forget elegant Scandinavian decor. "We're going to take all the money that we've got and put it on the plate," Mr. Almqvist said, which means immodest shavings of truffles and tender lobster spoon fed to diners by the chef himself. "Going to a good restaurant should be a party," he added. And here, it is. This August, Punk Royale Cafe opened next door with a bar area and drop in seats so that friends and neighbors could get in the door. During my dinner, the flurry of courses was free of pretension (and for that matter, silverware). There was birthday singing, after service body shots off a cook in a rubber horse mask, cups of traditional punsch liqueur "Careful, this will mess you up," warned a server and warm embraces from familiar faces in the crowd. "Have you found your way here too?" asked Julia Lundstrom, whom I knew from Vina, the adorable wine bar near Nytorget that she opened with her sister. It was nearly midnight, the streets outside deserted, but this party like NoVi itself was just getting started.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Mr. Sher faulted the museum for allowing the demonstrations, which he described as advancing "a transparently political agenda which had no relevance whatsoever to the museum's charitable purpose." In addition to the protests, artists last year organized a boycott against Mr. Kanders that threatened to disrupt the Whitney Biennial. The boycott, in which several artists threatened to pull their work from the exhibition, came after months of protests had already shaken the institution. Two of the artworks included in the show alluded to the reports that Safariland products had been used against civilians. "I believe that the Whitney leadership did not honor its fiduciary responsibility to the museum and those who support it," Mr. Sher said in an interview. "My objective is to ensure that this situation doesn't arise again. What the museum has done is make a mockery of the important public policy principles that lie behind tax exempt statuses." The museum declined to comment on Mr. Sher's complaint, which was first reported by The Financial Times. Mr. Kanders was unavailable for comment. Mr. Sher said he is acting on his own, but that he has spoken with Mr. Kanders and other donors to the museum. He said he and Mr. Kanders are not friends and that they had not spoken before this.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
'RETURNING TO REIMS' at St. Ann's Warehouse (in previews; opens on Feb. 11). Based on a memoir by the French sociologist Didier Eribon, this play stars Nina Hoss ("Homeland") as an actress recording the commentary track for a documentary about a leftist community's rightward turn. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier, the piece becomes an increasingly personal meditation on family and politics. 866 811 4111, stannswarehouse.org 'HE BROUGHT HER HEART BACK IN A BOX' at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (closes on Feb. 11). Adrienne Kennedy's brief, fragmentary play about an interracial romance in the Jim Crow South brings its lovers together and apart for the last time. Ben Brantley called Evan Yionoulis's production "the most ravishing and organic that a Kennedy dreamscape has ever been given." 866 811 4111, tfana.org 'THE HOMECOMING QUEEN' at Atlantic Stage 2 (closes on Feb. 18). In Ngozi Anyanwu's drama, directed by Awoye Timpo, a Pulitzer Prize finalist (Mfoniso Udofia) returns to her native Nigeria. Now her trip at the Atlantic comes to an end. As Jesse Green wrote, this play about separation and reunion "wrings all the pleasure possible out of its familiar tropes even as it revamps their meaning entirely." 866 811 4111, atlantictheater.org 'LATIN HISTORY FOR MORONS' at Studio 54 (closes on Feb. 25). John Leguizamo's solo show, an attempt to educate himself and his son about their shared origins, holds its final classes. Jesse Green noted that while the show is a "long and often hilarious parade of injustice," for the first time in his Broadway career, "Mr. Leguizamo is unable to make a convincing cartoon of himself." 212 239 6200, LatinHistoryBroadway.com	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
In the opening moments of the unsettling animated feature "I Lost My Body," a young man, Naoufel , lies on the ground covered in his own blood. From that traumatic moment on, his consciousness will be split into two perspectives. This surreal French thriller tells dueling stories simultaneously. In flashback, it shows the life of the adult Naoufel (voiced by Hakim Faris ) whose parents died tragically when he was a boy. Rudderless, he scrapes by as a perpetually overdue pizza delivery guy in Paris. But his path is changed when he meets Gabrielle ( Victoire Du Bois ) on one of his shifts her voice over the intercom inspires Naoufel to transform his life. But his present tense story undercuts the constructive changes he pursues in flashback. In the present, Naoufel the able bodied, if hapless, young man is gone. Instead, the hero is his severed hand, which appears suddenly and mysteriously detached from his body. For this part of the story, Naoufel's hand braves Paris to find its way back to wholeness.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
TEETH The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America By Mary Otto 291 pp. The New Press. 26.95. Politicians, journalists and researchers have a long running problem when it comes to talking about class. The definitions we use are myriad and not always overlapping. Is the boundary of the middle class a college degree, a certain level of income? Perhaps a certain type of job: a teacher or a doctor versus a coal miner or factory worker? We might be missing a still more useful and more personal indicator, however. This is the premise, though not so bluntly stated, of Mary Otto's new book, "Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America." The dividing line between the classes might be starkest between those who spend thousands of dollars on a gleaming smile and those who suffer and even die from preventable tooth decay. If the idea of death from tooth decay is shocking, it might be because we so rarely talk about the condition of our teeth as a serious health issue. Instead, we think of our teeth as the ultimate personal responsibility. We fear the dentist because we fear judgment as well as pain; we are used to the implication that if we have a tooth problem, if our teeth are decaying or crooked or yellow, it is because we have failed, and failed at something so intimate that it means we ourselves are failures. Otto's book begins and ends with the story of Deamonte Driver, a 12 year old Maryland boy who died of an infection caused by one decaying tooth, and the system that failed him. In pointing out the flaws in that system, Otto takes us back through the history of dentistry and shows us how the dental profession evolved, separately from the rest of health care, into a mostly private industry that revolves almost entirely around one's ability to pay. In other words, all of the problems with health care in America exist in the dental system, but exponentially more so. 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. On the high end of the 110 billion a year dental industry, there are veneers for 1,000 each, "gum contouring" and more than 1 billion per year spent on tooth whitening products. A dentist tells Otto that members of his profession "once exclusively focused upon fillings and extractions, are nowadays considered providers of beauty." And thanks to decades of deregulation, allowing medical advertising and then medical credit cards, they are doing well at it according to a 2010 study, dentists make more per hour than doctors. But on the other end of the spectrum, which stretches from a free clinic in Appalachia to the Indian Health Service in remote Alaska to a mobile clinic in Prince George's County, Md., dental providers struggle to see all of those who cannot access regular care. One third of white children go without dental care, Otto notes; that number is closer to one half for black and Latino children. Forty nine million people live in "dental professional shortage areas," and even for those who do have benefits under public programs like Medicaid, which ostensibly covered Deamonte Driver and his siblings, it can be difficult to find a provider. The dentist treating Driver's brother DaShawn, Otto writes, "discontinued treatments because DaShawn squirmed too much in the dental chair." Medicare doesn't cover routine dental services. Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps, the charity that operated the temporary clinic in Appalachia, was begun to reach suffering people in developing countries, but wound up seeing Americans. "We have a very serious social problem that we are trying to solve with private means," a researcher tells Otto. Yet in a country where the party in power fights tooth and nail against expanding regular health care benefits, what chance do we have of publicly funded dental care? After Deamonte Driver's death, elected officials battled to add dental benefits to the State Children's Health Insurance Program (Schip), only to see the law vetoed by George W. Bush. Barack Obama signed the Schip expansion in February 2009; newly confirmed Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price voted against it. Donald Trump, who has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act and who nominated Price, makes a cameo in "Teeth," looming over the Miss U.S.A. pageant as the owner of the Miss Universe Organization, a subtle reminder of which side of the American divide on teeth as on everything Trump stands. The focus on pageant competitors underlines another divide in the dental profession, one between men and women. Though more women are dentists these days, the job of hygienist grew from men's expectations of women's appropriate work, and it has always, Otto notes, made dentists nervous when hygienists move to be more independent. Plans to put dental hygienists in public schools, for instance, have been squashed by dentists' associations. Yet Otto rarely brings up the role of sexism, leaving the reader to ask the unanswered questions if the dental industry revolves around beauty, who is consuming most of these beautifying treatments? Those in the service professions, it's reasonable to assume, most of whom are women. In addition to the fear of competition from hygienists, Otto details dentistry's fear of socialized medicine and how that fear kept the profession largely privatized it is likely not an accident that the invention of still rare dental insurance came from a man named Max Schoen, who "earned the distinction of being the first dentist to be called before the House Committee on Un American Activities." Working with the legendary labor leader "Red" Harry Bridges, Schoen helped the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union set up not just a dental plan but a racially integrated prepaid dental practice to provide the care. It could have laid the groundwork for a radically different dental care system from the one we have now. Instead, the decline of union jobs in America has led to a corresponding decline in dental benefits. Like hygienists, Schoen wanted to focus on prevention and earned the ire of conservative dentists. Those conservative dentists used their social clout as medical providers to consolidate their own power over their industry, to control hygienists and rebels like Schoen, yet ultimately they wanted their practices to be treated more like optional services bought on the free market than social goods. Otto does not say such things outright. A veteran journalist, she never strays into polemic even when her material screams for it. She has a knack, though, for an illustrative anecdote that underscores her point about inequality, for example that in the 1800s, poor people would sell their teeth to the rich, whose own had rotted away from the consumption of sweets that the poor could not afford. Other times, she raises a fascinating fact such as the idea that the extraction of wisdom teeth may be unnecessary, but continues to be performed on patients who can pay only to move on, leaving the reader wanting more. The problem of oral health in America is, Otto argues, part of the larger debate about health that is likely to grow larger and nastier in the upcoming months. At the moment, our broader health care system at least tenuously operates on the belief that no one should be denied health care because of ability to pay. But dental care is still associated in our minds with cosmetic practices, with beauty and privilege. It is simultaneously frivolous, a luxury for those who can waste money, and a personal responsibility that one is harshly judged for neglecting. In this context, "Teeth" becomes more than an exploration of a two tiered system it is a call for sweeping, radical change.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Albert Memmi at home in Paris in 2004. He saw himself as an ardent anti imperialist, an unapologetic Zionist and a self described "Jewish Arab." Albert Memmi, a leading mid 20th century French intellectual and writer best known for nonfiction books and novels that unraveled his anomalous identity as an ardent anti imperialist, an unapologetic Zionist and a self described "Jewish Arab," died on May 22 in Neuilly sur Seine, near Paris. He was 99. His death was announced by Olivier Poivre d'Arvor, the French ambassador to Tunisia, where Mr. Memmi was born and raised when it was a French protectorate. Although he was overshadowed by Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre (both of whom wrote introductions to his books), Mr. Memmi was celebrated in Europe and Africa as an author and sociologist. Among his best known books, some of which were later translated into English, were "The Pillar of Salt" (1953) and "Strangers" (1955), both autobiographical novels; "The Scorpion" (1969), the fictionalized account of the disappearance of a writer much like himself; and the nonfiction "The Colonizer and the Colonized" (1957), which he followed a half century later with a somewhat disillusioned verdict on the fruits of national liberation in "Decolonization and the Decolonized" (2006). Mr. Memmi was consumed by alienation, his own especially. He supported Tunisia's independence, but once that was achieved, he left the fledgling Muslim state and spent the next two thirds of his life in France in self imposed exile. Even so, he once said that his homeland was not the French nation, but the French language. "The Pillar of Salt" is a semi autobiographical novel about a boy growing up in French colonized Tunisia. "I am a Tunisian, but of French culture," he wrote in "The Pillar of Salt." "I am Tunisian, but Jewish, which means that I am politically and socially an outcast. I speak the language of the country with a particular accent and emotionally I have nothing in common with Muslims. I am a Jew who has broken with the Jewish religion and the ghetto, is ignorant of Jewish culture and detests the middle class. "I am poor," he went on, "but desperately anxious not to be poor, and at the same time, I refuse to take the necessary steps to avoid poverty, a native in a colonial country, a Jew in an anti Semitic universe, an African in a world dominated by Europe." Reviewing "The Scorpion" for The New York Times, Richard Locke described Mr. Memmi's earlier novels as memoirs "recorded with a cleareyed sensitivity, a modest candor and remarkable strength." He compared Mr. Memmi to "a Tunisian Balzac graced with Hemingway's radical simplicity and sadness." "But ultimately," Mr. Locke wrote, "it is Memmi's heart, not his skill, that moves you: the sights and sounds of Tunis, the childhood memories, the brothers' sympathetic and contrasting voices, their all too human feelings, have a resonance that reawakens for a while the ghost of European humanism." Albert Memmi was born in Tunis on Dec. 15, 1920, one of 13 children of Fraj Memmi, a Tunisian Italian Jewish saddle maker, and Maira Sarfati, who was of Jewish and Berber heritage. After starting Hebrew school when he was 4, he graduated from the prestigious Lycee Carnot de Tunis in 1939. When France's collaborationist Vichy regime imposed anti Semitic laws during World War II, he was expelled from the University of Algiers, where he was studying philosophy, and sent to a labor camp in eastern Tunisia. When the war ended, Mr. Memmi resumed his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and married Marie Germaine Dubach, a French Catholic. They had three children. The family returned to Tunis in 1951, and he taught high school there, but they left after independence was proclaimed in 1956. There was no immediate word on his survivors. Mr. Memmi became a professor at the Sorbonne and received a doctorate there in 1970. In 1975 he was named a director of the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences. Among his other books were the two part "Portrait of a Jew" (published in 1962 and 1966) and "Dominated Man" (1968). On Middle East policy, he described himself as a left wing Zionist, favoring a separate Palestinian homeland while viewing Zionism as a form of anti colonialism, because, he said, the Jew "has to fight for his national liberation and create a nation for himself."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
I applaud the decision of the American Museum of Natural History, agreed to by the City of New York, to take down the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt, riding high over a Native American and an African a colossal monument to racism and colonialism. It has stuck in my craw for years, each time I passed it especially in the last few years, on my way to the New York Historical Society, where I am a docent, and whose portals are graced with statues of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass! I applaud, too, that the museum will continue to honor Roosevelt's contribution as a "pioneering conservationist," which is consonant with its mission as a museum of natural history. Carol S. Gruber New York The writer is professor emerita of history at William Paterson University. The question of where the Roosevelt statue will go might best be addressed closest to home. I suggest moving it to its own permanent exhibition space within the museum, surrounded by an expanded version of last year's "Addressing the Statue" exhibition for lasting contextualization. Reading about the long overdue removal of the statue led me to recall how a fellow Rutgers University student, along with an instructor, had courageously gone to New York to publicly call attention to the racist nature of this statue in 1971 and demand its removal. Their actions included throwing red paint on Roosevelt, for which they were arrested, were jailed briefly and had to pay fines. In 1971, it was seen as a radical act by many, but I think it now looks like a courageous act that was far ahead of its time. After his presidency, Col. Theodore Roosevelt embarked upon expeditions through Africa and across America to garner specimens for exhibit at various natural history museums. This work was memorialized by the sculptor James Earle Fraser with the 1940 unveiling of a statue of Roosevelt on horseback, flanked by a Native American and an African standing. The statue currently resides outside the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Now it is slated to be removed under pressure from self appointed intellectuals and armchair historians who believe that the statue is a monument to white supremacy. Surely the intent of the statue should be left to the man who sculpted it. In Mr. Fraser's own words, "The two figures at Roosevelt's side are guides symbolizing the continents of Africa and America, and if you choose may stand for Roosevelt's friendliness to all races." In the 1970s I went to junior high school at I.S. 44 across the street from the American Museum of Natural History. We went to the museum often and I loved it, and still do. The principal at the time was the highly regarded educator Luther Seabrook. I remember learning that as a black man, he refused to walk past this statue to enter this museum. That principled stance taught a little 11 year old white girl something about seeing the symbols that teach racism. How monuments like this one, which quite literally elevates a white man over others, indoctrinate us and perpetuate the racist lies we're taught about American history. Over the many decades since, I've never walked past that statue without thinking of Mr. Seabrook, and when it's gone, I will think of him still, and celebrate this small, yet meaningful victory. As the author of the recent biography "Theodore Roosevelt: A Manly President's Gendered Personal and Political Transformations," I strongly agree with the museum's decision to remove the statue. While the biography lauds Roosevelt for his domestic policies particularly his drive for food and drug inspections, workplace safety, and forest, bird, animal and natural resource protection it condemns him harshly for his lifelong racism, mitigated somewhat only two years before his death. The statue is an express depiction of Roosevelt's racism. Whether he was writing about history or hunting, as he often did, his writing reflected a racist bias that descendants of Western Europeans were superior to the Indigenous populations of the Americas and Asia. Like the current administration's policies, Roosevelt's support of increased barriers to immigration was race based. And his foreign policies reflected American race superiority. Roosevelt's racism was inconsistent with the Christian morality embraced by his construction of the manliness ideal. But for most of his life, he lived that inconsistency. Neil H. Cogan Whittier, Calif. The writer is a professor of political science at Whittier College. The statue of Theodore Roosevelt at the American Museum of Natural History is racially offensive, but the memory of Theodore Roosevelt is not. While some of Roosevelt's opinions and actions now offend us, his primary legacies are his leadership on progressive policies throughout a long career of public service, his visionary environmentalism, and his extraordinary learning, energy and curiosity. He is a very worthy role model, as shown in the museum's other tributes to him. All people are complex amalgams of different traits. We should not stop reading the Declaration of Independence or rename our capital city because Jefferson and Washington were slave owners. The monuments we should remove are those of figures whose fame and legacy relate primarily to slavery. Different moral views prevail in different times and places; we cannot evaluate historical figures by our current sensitivities. Our moral objection to slavery is one of the few views that can be considered permanent, objective and obligatory. The planned removal of the statue of Theodore Roosevelt from in front of the American Museum of Natural History is just one step in the struggle to confront the racist imagery that underscores the continuing oppression of those who are not descended from the European settler community. Citizens of Indigenous nations, including my own Onondaga, applaud this reckoning with the centuries of racism and dehumanization by the larger society that continue today, and know that removing statues of Christopher Columbus is essential for that cleansing to continue. The larger society needs to confront those oppressions head on, and realize that the symbols of that oppression go far beyond the Confederate flag. Betty Lyons Onondaga Nation, N.Y. The writer is president and executive director of the American Indian Law Alliance. At the same time the Museum of Natural History has decided to remove the bronze statue of Teddy Roosevelt, plans are afoot to place a monument in Central Park honoring one of the great champions of the women's rights movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, notwithstanding her unequivocally racist remarks uttered in opposition to the 15th Amendment giving African American men the right to vote. She questioned whether women should stand aside and allow "Sambos" (her word) the right to vote. Is there a double standard here? Why can't Americans come to terms with our racist past without feeling compelled to demonize those we used to deify? Those American "icons," including both Teddy and Mrs. Stanton, were mortals like the rest of us. We should not whitewash history in an effort to purify our souls. Instead we need to deal with the real problems of systemic racism today without obsessing about the past in a futile attempt to erase the stain on our nation's soul. A mob in Portland, Ore., has taken down a statue of George Washington. Mobs cannot be expected to be discriminating, but the Portland mob was clearly picking on the wrong patriot. Washington owned slaves, but he was among the few founders who (in his will) freed his slaves, and all of us are in his debt for the examples he set as the commander of the Continental Army who was deferential to Congress and a president who gave up power gracefully. Fortunately, in Washington's case, one mob does not a reputation break. As the British historian Marcus Cunliffe pointed out, Washington's name has been securely attached not just to the capital of the United States and a national holiday, but also to "one American state, seven mountains, eight streams, ten lakes, thirty three counties; for nine American colleges; for one hundred and twenty one American towns and villages" to say nothing of having his likeness on currency, postage stamps, Mount Rushmore and statues throughout the world. Some statues should be moved from public squares to museums. That of Washington in Portland should be restored to the public square. Ira D. Gruber Houston The writer is professor emeritus of history at Rice University. We should not attempt to destroy our history. We should learn from it. I fully understand the anger of having to view statues of Confederate leaders that appear in our cities. We should follow Hungary's lead and dedicate a park where these "memorials" can be moved. In 1991 Hungary announced the creation of Szoborpark (Memento Park), where the statues of Lenin, Marx, Engels and many Hungarian Communists hold forth. They date from Hungary's Communist rule from 1949 to 1989. Re "How Statues Are Falling Around the World" (nytimes.com, June 24): While various statues dedicated to racism are being toppled or removed, they remain at Gettysburg National Park in Pennsylvania. Off to the side of the battlefield are an array of statues and monuments dedicated to various regiments from different Southern states. What is most objectionable about these monuments are the words etched on the plaques that these soldiers died for a "just," a "noble" or an "honorable" cause. Slavery is neither just nor noble and certainly not honorable. On the day before Juneteenth, Nancy Pelosi announced that portraits of past House speakers who were part of the Confederacy would be taken down. Instead, plaques should have been added under these portraits to educate viewers about former House members who were on the wrong side of history and why. I think it is harmful to try to rewrite or erase what has happened in the past; that makes us no better than totalitarian regimes. And though I am all in favor of renaming buildings that glorify those who promoted slavery and advocated for the dissolution of the Union, I do not support destroying or removing art. Sculptures, paintings and murals all provide an opportunity for learning about our country's horrific past regarding racism.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
This Doctor Will See You Now (if You're a Star With a Pimple) It was on the flange of a nostril on the right side of his face. Most every ordinary person has, of course, awakened at some time to an angry and embarrassing eruption. But the movie star was no ordinary person. It was the third week of February. The Oscars were just days away. The actor was to present a big award. Easy enough for civilians to conceal or suffer, a pimple takes on major proportions when it happens to someone whose image will be scrutinized by 32.9 million viewers under the pitiless gaze of high definition television. Thus, the actor found himself one winter afternoon on a padded baby blue exam table in the sunny offices of a dermatologist, a syringe filled with lidocaine and cortisone directed toward his nose. The person wielding the syringe, Dr. Peter Kopelson, 54, is a rumpled bear with pierced ears and whiskered jeans who, although he would not make the claim himself, belongs to a small group of medical professionals responsible for keeping the most recognizable faces on the planet looking always young, or at least, "well rested," and also pimple free. In the entertainment industry now, as always who one knows is of substantially greater relevance than what, a truth extending to the agent who selects your scripts and the trainer who tones your thighs and the dentist who bleaches your teeth. "There is a real mafia" of caretakers charged with the maintenance of boldfaced deities, said John Goldwyn, a film and television producer whose industry lineage qualifies him for that rarefied elite known here as Hollywood royalty. If at the pinnacle of this aristocracy are people named Huston, Barrymore or Goldwyn, at a minor step down stands a person like Dr. Kopelson, who was raised in Beverly Hills and on the sets of the 29 movies produced by his father, Arnold Kopelson, and his mother, Anne. Between them, the two have made films that have garnered 17 Oscar nominations (and a win, in 1987, with Oliver Stone's "Platoon"). Even now, at 82, Mr. Kopelson has enough industry heft to command a view table at the Tower Bar that is, provided Jennifer Aniston doesn't get there first. On a cold, drizzly evening, Dimitri Dimitrov, the beloved maitre d'hotel at the Tower Bar, greeted Dr. Kopelson in so fawning and grateful a way that, as the producer Brian Grazer once noted, it is impossible to thank him last. Shown to an alcove table, the physician had a ringside seat on a room full of well toned faces some identifiable to anyone, some recognizable mostly to show business cognoscenti, a certain number familiar to Dr. Kopelson at an intimate and even microscopic level. There was a former cinematic superhero whose recent career comeback owes much to his miraculous state of preservation. There was a bulldog Hollywood divorce lawyer with runway model looks. There was a studio head and a B list actress and an Academy Award winning director and a rubber faced comedian who specializes in angst. What unified these people, beyond their obvious business connections, is how fresh they all appeared, how unlined and dewy, as if each had just awakened from a restorative nap. "I can't ethically tell you who I treat," Dr. Kopelson said as he surveyed the room. Yet his client list is sufficiently stellar that some here refer to him as the next big celebrity dermatologist, the likely successor to the late Dr. Arnold Klein, a publicity loving physician best known for having treated Michael Jackson, or Dr. Fredric Brandt, the Manhattan dermatologist to whom Dr. Kopelson often lent his Beverly Hills office whenever Madonna summoned Dr. Brandt to town. "The world is always always looking for a star dermatologist," said Joan Kron, a journalist and filmmaker who spent decades chronicling the worlds of surgical and dermatologic cosmetic medicine for magazines like New York and Allure. "There's always this tremendous desire to find the best, though, basically, it's hard to know who the best is." "Fred had this tremendous, loyal following and he served them very well," Ms. Kron said. "Part of it was service flying to London for Madonna every time she needed an injection. That was nice." In data compiled by the American Academy of Dermatology, its 11,000 practicing members reported spending no more than 8 percent of their office time on cosmetic procedures, a figure that skews differently in a town like Los Angeles, where, as Sandra Ballentine, the beauty editor at large for W magazine, said, "All the smart people have a regular regimen of a la carte treatments where, instead of going invasive with plastic surgery, they do a little something here, a little something there, every month." While Dr. Kopelson may not be a "big self promoter," as Ms. Ballentine added: "He is one of those Hollywood doctors that people say, 'Oh, you need to see him if you're having work done. He's the one.'" For Kevin Connolly, an actor and director best known for his role in the HBO series "Entourage," visits to Dr. Kopelson are as much part of a regimen "as going to the dentist," self maintenance being part of an actor's job description and aging the enemy of all in a youth obsessed field. "You kind of have to try to get out in front of it," Mr. Connolly said in a phone interview. Still, his visits to Dr. Kopelson are not, he said, for the purpose of being injected with, say, 800 vials of Botox or to have a 475 Genesis laser treatment for pore tightening, or a 1,200 session with a Titan laser to keep his jawline firm. Like every Hollywood person interviewed for this article, Mr. Connolly claimed to see a dermatologist only to keep an eye on suspicious moles. "When you look at people in Hollywood now, it's like you're looking at an athlete at the peak of performance," said Linda Wells, the chief creative officer at Revlon and former editor in chief of Allure. In the entertainment industry, she added: "The bar is set so high now that their skin has to be perfection. Their toes have to be perfect. They are perfect on the bottoms of their feet." In the age of Instagram, when every famous face is potentially subject to an iPhone ambush, extreme vanity is more necessity than sin. "Suddenly you find your image is up on someone else's feed," Ms. Wells said. "And you can't take it down." "Yes, people are much more conscious of every aspect of their appearance," Dr. Kopelson said one sunny morning at the medical suite he shares with Dr. Sheri Feldman, a former professional partner of Dr. Klein. "Take hair removal. Suddenly straight men are really into getting hair removed from around their genitals. I, personally, don't really get it, but I think they're being pushed by their wives." Located a block west of Rodeo Drive, Dr. Kopelson's office is paparazzi proof, connected by an elevator bank to an underground garage. Decorated with the sprightly sterility of a Swiss clinic as imagined by Stanley Kubrick, the suite is filled with art pieces from the physician's collection by Ross Bleckner, Jean Cocteau, Catherine Opie and David Shrigley. "I'm not sure I'd want to be a celebrity physician," said the celebrity physician, an assertion made somewhat more credible in light of the fact that, unlike his competition, he employs no publicist, has a negligible social media presence and has yet to make breakfast appearances at a department store. Burly, bearded, with multiple earrings and an experimental buzz cut, Dr. Kopelson shares a resemblance to Dr. Brandt in at least one way: He tests many of the fillers he employs on himself. Unlike Dr. Brandt, though, whose face was as smooth and unmarked as a baby's behind, Dr. Kopelson is a human coloring book. "The tattoos are all about members of my family," Dr. Kopelson said, pulling off a snug T shirt, the better to display the large ivory pagoda inked down the length of his spine. The pagoda is a souvenir in flesh of an antique willed to him by his maternal grandfather, a onetime pushcart vendor on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Concealed in its latticework are the names of that grandfather, Jack, and his wife, Belle. On Dr. Kopelson's bicep is a rendering of a pendant he wears, which contains the stone from his mother's engagement ring. Scaling his chest is a tiger with its claws sunk into his neck. Opposite it is an image of a crystal deer figurine with a broken antler, a remembrance of a similar one given to him as a child. The Polynesian style decorative sleeve covering one forearm has no sentimental significance. "What about the piano?" Dr. Kopelson asked and then dropped his pants. There, along his right thigh, was a multicolor drawing of a keyboard held in the grip of a stylized dragon, its yellow tongue disappearing into the physician's shorts: "I played as a child." Single and gay, Dr. Kopelson lives in the flats of West Hollywood, Calif., in a Spanish style house from the 1920s that he shares with a rescue mutt and three West Highland terriers. The drug abuse issues that briefly threatened to derail his professional career are 15 years into the past, he said, and these days he is part of an extended recovery network that probably includes a few of the celebrities he sees professionally. In a clubby town, intersections like that are all but inevitable. As Mr. Goldwyn noted, it is common Hollywood practice to pass along the names of your best people, from your manager at Creative Artists Agency to the doctor who can treat your zit. "It's like sharing military secrets with your allies," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The remarkable Noche Flamenca enlists the typical elements of flamenco music and dance pathos and passion, catharsis and tension yet part of what makes this company so absorbing is its intimacy. Formed in 1993 by a husband and wife team, the director Martin Santangelo and the dancer Soledad Barrio, Noche Flamenca returns with a five week season at the West Park Presbyterian Church that features its acclaimed dance drama "Antigona," an adaptation of Sophocles' "Antigone" starring the fiery Ms. Barrio. It's a part she was born to play. The first program is perhaps riskier: With "La Ronde," a work inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's play that takes on a voyeuristic view of desire, the evening includes "Creacion." In it, Mr. Santangelo pairs Ms. Barrio with a hip hop dancer: TweetBoogie the first week, Nubian Nene the second. Using different dance genres, "Creacion" is about female power. It's a collaboration, in other words, among equals. (Dec. 26 Jan. 7, "La Ronde" and "Creacion"; Jan. 10 28, "Antigona"; nocheflamenca.com.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Ballet is an art of synthesis. Academic dance, music and visual design unite, sometimes with sublime alchemy. But are these really the most important ingredients for ballet? A valuable new book, Nadine Meisner's "Marius Petipa: The Emperor's Ballet Master" (Oxford University Press), records how many other elements have often seemed more crucial: notably scenario, casting and politics. Petipa (1818 1910), French born, was the most important shaper of Russian ballet before Serge Diaghilev, who formed his company, the Ballets Russes, in 1909. Today we single out "The Sleeping Beauty" (1890) from Petipa's long career: That glorious, abundant collaboration with Tchaikovsky, made in St. Petersburg, remains one of the definitive peaks of ballet classicism. From the 1920s to the '70s, however, Petipa's classicism was often hailed as a parent of ballet modernism. "Forward to Petipa!" was a war cry in the ballet experimentalism of the early Soviet era. Twentieth century aficionados saw his ballets as enshrining pure dance and elevating aspects of humanity to the sublime. It turns out, however, that Petipa was working along quite different lines. Soon after his arrival in Russia at the age of 29 in 1847, he began making ballets that were peak artistic expressions of the czarist regime: royalist, hierarchical, elitist. Dynastic succession is a recurring theme in their scenarios. Peasants, when they reach the stage at all, are generally happy, except sometimes in affairs of the heart. Russia is almost never the location. The worlds depicted so intensely by Petipa's Russian contemporaries Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mussorgsky, Rimsky Korsakov and Repin might have come from another planet. Ms. Meisner's book, the first full length Petipa biography in English, is by far the most detailed and complete survey of his life and work to date. Not all its fascinations are cheering, however. Ms. Meisner retells, in all seriousness, many of the stories of Petipa's ballets, even though their narratives are all too often dismayingly absurd. And though dance made an important contribution in most Petipa ballets, in several it was far from their raison d'etre. "King Candaules" (1868) ends, after its title character has died, with a scene in which his queen is haunted by his ghost until she drops dead; that, Ms. Meisner writes, is followed by a tableau in which, amid the other gods in the cloud filled heavens, Venus Astarte points "at the corpse of the hubristic queen who had dared to compete with the goddess of beauty." Fatuous, yes and all too characteristic of other Petipa ballets. Such a narrative epitomizes what the Bolsheviks would soon want to sweep away. Petipa's story was also entwined with the careers of dancers and their influential supporters. In no country was balletomania as extreme as in Russia. Over 60 years with the Russian ballet, Petipa did marvels for ballerinas from Western Europe and Russia. We learn in Ms. Meisner's book about the "ballerina war" of 1862 65, when the main excitemen t was caused by Maria Surovshchikova (Petipa's first wife) and Marfa Muraveva, Russians both, and about the visiting Italians notably Virginia Zucchi and Pierina Legnani whose standards transformed Russian ballet at the end of the 19th century. The super ambitious Russian prima ballerina Mathilde Kschesinskaya (1872 1971), however, became Petipa's enemy. Her power was immense: Having been the mistress of Czar Nicholas II in his youth, she became involved with two other grand dukes of the Romanov dynasty. She established a monopoly on a number of the best roles. When a director of the Imperial Theaters fined her for an anachronistic change of costume, she used her influence to have the fine canceled. The director, thus overruled, promptly resigned. Kschesinskaya's shenanigans, notorious even when she was at her prime, are a blatant sign of what was corrupt about the Russian ancien regime. It seems appropriate that when Lenin, on his return to Russia in 1917, addressed the revolutionary crowd in St. Petersburg, he used the balcony of the house that had been hers. Declaring his politics to be Russia's future, he consigned her to its past. Or to the West: She escaped Russia with one of her grand dukes. (The Bolsheviks killed the other one.) The successful 1917 revolution, however, was preceded by a failed one, in 1905. Hundreds of workers were killed or wounded when police fired on their peaceful protest march on what was called Bloody Sunday. Petipa's favorite ballerina, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, danced that night. But although noting in his diary the flowers and gifts she received, he then wrote, "It's too much here they're dancing, and in the streets they're killing." Then 86, he went with his youngest son to look at the broken shop windows on Nevsky Prospect, the city's most eminent street. These are among the many touching details of Petipa's life that Ms. Meisner records. Yet she leaves unmentioned two other signal events of St. Petersburg's 1904 5 winter. Isadora Duncan, dancing rapturously and with radical simplicity to classical music without any male partner, made her local debut, causing a sensation among artistic progressives. And Diaghilev presented an outstanding exhibition of historical Russian portraits that made both aristocrats and the intelligentsia reconsider Russian history. Diaghilev gave a visionary summing up speech as his exhibition closed . "I have become completely convinced that we are living at a terrible time of fracture: We are doomed to die so as to give rise to a new culture that will take from us all that remains of our tired wisdom," he said. And he spoke of "a new and unknown culture that we are creating but which will clear us away." Did Petipa attend Duncan's dance performances? Did he visit Diaghilev's exhibition or read the text of his speech? He must have been aware of them. He certainly must have known of the ambitious young Diaghilev, who had caused crises during his brief time on the staff of the Imperial Theaters. Ms. Meisner writes that "the Ballets Russes grew from the soil that Petipa had tended." Well, yes Diaghilev's lead dancers were drawn from Petipa's company and no. In 1909, Diaghilev and his colleagues constructed a ballet company that was a vital corrective to what Petipa had been doing. They used music by leading Russian composers Petipa had ignored, notably Borodin and Rimsky Korsakov; they absorbed multiple aspects of Duncan's influence. The three main composers of Petipa's ballets were Cesare Pugni, Ludwig Minkus and Riccardo Drigo: all Western, all harmless, all decades behind the main current of classical music in their day. Diaghilev consigned them all to history.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The European museum director asked me my field of study, and I replied, "icons of the Virgin Mary." His silver beard unsuccessfully concealed a snicker. "Men don't typically study Mary," he told me. I suppose I might have shifted the conversation to sports, but, as the respective footballs of our continents are different shapes altogether, the exchange ground to an awkward halt instead, as did any prospects for the fellowship I was seeking. I still found my way to Europe for my doctoral studies, visiting countless Byzantine churches, chasing depictions of Mary. I had grown quite used to a common image of the Virgin with her arms raised in a prayerful gesture of surrender, her womb revealing the omnipotent God within. The type is sometimes called the Virgin of the Sign (a reference to Isaiah 7:14), or "Platytera ton ouranon," a Greek phrase which today might be translated, "womb more spacious than the stars." My preferred nickname for the icon though is Our Lady of the Ultrasound. But as I looked up at one such Mary at the tiny church of St. Nicholas Kasnitzi in the Greek lake town of Kastoria, I was stopped in my tracks. It looked like the classic icon, except Mary was not Mary, but a man. He even looked like that silver bearded museum director, nearly nine months pregnant. Warren Woodfin has explained that the figure is St. Menas, a Roman soldier from Egypt who tradition relates was killed for his Christian faith. Offered a high military post, he replied "our government is in heaven," traded his military belt for the circular standard of Christ, and was martyred. Later depictions of him, such as the twelfth century image at Kastoria, are a reminder that Menas chose Christ over Empire (something Christians are prone to forget). But it is hard to ignore that Menas is the doppelganger of the Queen of Heaven as well. The onetime warrior's maternal turn is a fitting illustration of what happens when men grow up. The Marian male, I have since learned, stems from the mystery Christians celebrate on March 25 (nine months before Christmas), the Feast of the Annunciation when the Almighty became an embryo. The angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would conceive a boy named Jesus (Luke 1:31). After her questions were answered, she consented to the invitation with an enthusiastic "let it be to me according to your word" (Luke 1:38). But all Christians, male and female, are called to be like Mary as well. "There is a profound analogy between the Fiat" "let it be" "which Mary said in reply to the angel, and the Amen which every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord," wrote John Paul II. That men, too, are called to also be like Mary is less a result of transgressive gender theory than of mainstream Christian theology. Jesus, after all, calls anyone his mother who does the will of God (Mark 3:35). "My little children," says a maternal Paul, "for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you." (Galatians 4:19). For Paul, not just women, but all Christians groan in labor along with creation itself (Romans 8:22 23). Later theologians developed the motif: "Each conceives in like manner to Mary within himself the God of all, as she bore him in herself," said Symeon the New Theologian (d. 1022). The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart (d. 1327) took such rhetoric to the extreme: "It is more precious to God to be born spiritually from every such virgin or from every good soul than that he was bodily born of Mary." The impressive league of men named after Mary (Rainer Maria Rilke and Josemaria Escriva, to name a few) will not find any of this a surprise. "Are men really trying to take pregnancy from us as well?" some women reading this might ask. And there's something to the objection. Because of the mechanics of the Annunciation, there is no way around the fact that for Christians, the salvation of the world was procured without male participation. Only the Holy Spirit and Mary were required. "There was no end to the servitude and pain and affliction of women," as one medieval text puts it. "But when the archangel said to the holy Virgin, 'the Lord is with you,' all the debts of affliction were erased." The text later says, "there is no longer the lordship of man over you." The Annunciation, in other words, is the hammer that smashes patriarchy. There is good reason, therefore, that the priest Zechariah is forced into silence in Luke's account of the months before Jesus's birth (Luke 1:20), while Elizabeth and Mary, by contrast, shout to the Lord (Luke 1:42; 46). That having been said, "Mary is for both men and women," as my colleagues Amy Peeler and Jennifer McNutt have asserted, and both sexes can take her as their model. The history of art makes this perfectly clear. While in his twenties, Michelangelo gave us the traditional "Pieta" (1498 99). In his wiser seventies, through his self portrait as a Nicodemus in the "Florentine Pieta" (1547 55), the artist took Mary's place himself. Or consider Rembrandt's Holy Family (c. 1634), where a basket is placed by Joseph as if to imitate a womb. Beautifully enough, even Jesus and God the Father take on Marian roles in the history of Christian art. In Orthodox icons of Mary's Dormition, Jesus cuddles the swaddled soul of his mother, just as his mother once cuddled him. In "Gnadenstuhl" (Throne of Grace) images, God the Father embraces his dead son in the same way that Mary does in the more famous Pieta. The current El Greco show at the Art Institute of Chicago contains perhaps the most famous of such images ("The Trinity," 1577 79), but it cannot be understood apart from El Greco's image of Mary holding her dead son ("Pieta," 1575) that the artist painted first. The Marian male tradition continues in contemporary art as well. Kehinde Wiley ("Mary, Comforter of the Afflicted," 2016) fuses the Pieta and Black Madonna traditions by giving us a black man holding his dying son. Such images offer an antidote to unhinged masculinity far more potent than any shaving cream commercial. Some outside the Christian faith make similar suggestions: "The body is like Mary," wrote the Sufi mystic Rumi (d. 1273). "Every one of us has a Jesus within him, but until the pangs manifest in us our Jesus is not born." This is an exciting convergence. Still, Christianity gives the intuitions of other faiths firm footing. God became human once, for all, in the womb of Mary. Then, through the Eucharist, he enters human bodies over and over for as long as time endures. Should these bodies lack a functional womb, or if they are, like all of us, broken, afraid, weary, sinful this is no impediment. Mary may have been first, but all are invited to follow. The Christian faith, inconceivable without Mary, is a far cry from the portrait of modern man painted so well by E.M. Forster in "Howards End": "I am not a fellow," boasts Henry Wilcox, "who bothers about my own inside." Years ago on the Feast of the Annunciation, I returned from our church communion rail to sit next to my newly pregnant wife, and realized that my male body was not entirely dissimilar to hers. Having consumed Christ's body, I was bearing another within me as well. "O holy and ever blessed Spirit, who didst overshadow the holy Virgin Mother of our Lord," prayed Jeremy Taylor (d. 1667). "Be pleased to overshadow my soul, and enlighten my spirit, that I may conceive the holy Jesus in my heart." The Feast of the Annunciation does not invite us to celebrate what happened to a brave first century Jewish girl from a safe distance. It invites us all, men especially, to imitate her; and as Mary herself could tell us, that has never been safe. Matthew J. Milliner ( millinerd) is an associate professor of art history at Wheaton College. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Already the largest local television operator in the nation, Sinclair agreed last year to buy the rival TV group Tribune Media for 3.5 billion. The deal would have given the combined company control of broadcasters reaching seven in 10 households across the country, including in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. But in light of the Federal Communications Commission's draft order this week questioning whether Sinclair was sufficiently transparent in how it represented the deal to regulators and whether a merger would be in the public interest, Tribune said in a statement Thursday that it was "evaluating its implications and assessing all of our options." The merger agreement allows either side to walk away from the deal if it does not close by Aug. 8. Sinclair declined to comment. This week has brought a stunning shift in momentum for a deal that once seemed almost assured of being completed, thanks in no small part to policy changes proposed or enacted by the F.C.C. and advocated by Sinclair. The commission had also eased a cap on how many stations a broadcaster can own and relaxed a restriction on advertising revenue and other resources shared by television stations. But on Monday, the agency's chairman, Ajit Pai who is the subject of an investigation by the office of the F.C.C.'s inspector general regarding his new policies said he had "serious concerns" about the Sinclair Tribune merger. Mr. Pai asked the agency's four commissioners to hand off its review of the merger to an administrative law judge to determine the legality of Sinclair's proposal. To satisfy rules that forbid a single company to own airwaves on such a dominant scale, Sinclair had proposed selling 23 TV stations after the deal was completed. But several of those stations would still effectively fall within its operational control, which the F.C.C. said raised "significant questions as to whether those proposed divestitures were in fact 'sham' transactions." Sinclair, which has emerged as a significant outlet for conservative viewpoints, tried to placate federal regulators on Wednesday by amending those planned divestitures. The agency was not moved. Sinclair's original divestiture plan came under scrutiny because several of the stations it planned to sell would effectively remain within its control through contractual agreements known as "sidecars." As an example, the broadcast giant planned to sell the Chicago station to a Maryland businessman, Steven Fader, who runs a company controlled by Sinclair's executive chairman, David D. Smith. The F.C.C. said the sale price of 60 million appeared "to be far below market value," citing a Chicago station that Fox bought for 425 million in 2002. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The sidecar agreement would also designate Sinclair as the primary ad seller for the station and allow it to continue to provide programming, giving Sinclair 30 percent of the station's revenue in fees for that service. Sinclair also agreed to sell a Dallas station and a Houston station to Cunningham Broadcasting, a privately held company that is controlled by Mr. Smith's family, according to securities filings. The combined sale price for both stations was 60 million, "far below the expected market price for stations in markets this size," according to the F.C.C.'s draft order. Sinclair, known for amplifying the Trump administration's talking points in commentary segments that air on numerous local newscasts, is seen as a dangerous new competitor among other conservative news outlets. Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of the conservative news network Newsmax, said the Sinclair Tribune merger would concentrate too much power in one company. His company campaigned vigorously against the deal, putting him on the same side as more liberal leaning consumer advocacy groups. "This was a bipartisan effort," he said. "A lot of people are against media concentration. Even the president himself campaigned against media concentration, and this deal was an even bigger concentration of power than the AT T Time Warner deal." As a candidate, Donald J. Trump, who had frequently criticized the Time Warner property CNN as "fake news," vowed to stop the AT T Time Warner merger if elected. The Justice Department recently appealed the ruling that permitted the deal. Mr. Ruddy said he had spoken to President Trump several times about the Sinclair deal. "He always listens to me, but at the end of the day he still likes Sinclair," he said. Mr. Trump also likes Mr. Murdoch, with whom he speaks regularly. After Mr. Murdoch sells off the bulk of his media empire to the Walt Disney Company, he will be left with Fox News and the Fox broadcast network. A combined Sinclair Tribune would challenge both businesses. Sinclair's purchase of Tribune is being confronted on other legal fronts. Government rules forbid one company to reach more than 39 percent of the TV audience, but Sinclair is trying to take advantage of a newly relaxed loophole that allows the company to get under that cap through what is known as the UHF discount. The discount allows some TV stations to deduct half their audience in areas where they broadcast on the UHF standard, which emits a weaker signal. The F.C.C. under the Obama administration closed the loophole, but Mr. Pai reopened it last year. The change is being challenged in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Not quite one year ago, the Scottish designer Jonathan Saunders, who had recently closed his namesake fashion line after 13 years and was thinking about making furniture, was summoned to a meeting with Diane von Furstenberg in her suite at Claridge's in London. Ms. von Furstenberg, it turned out, had decided to hand over the creative reins of her brand in order to concentrate her energy on philanthropy and women's issues as well as her position as chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and she thought he might be the right man for the job. The two had met before, at a Downing Street reception in 2010, and bonded over color and print. Still, Mr. Saunders said: "A lot of people told me I shouldn't do it. That I would not be able to make my mark on it." Introducing the stealth makeover. It's a new, and thus far successful, approach to an old problem. "In this time, when the revolving door of designers at brands seems to spin ever faster, the smartest approach may be to glide into position and find your voice without calling attention to it," said Ken Downing, fashion director of Neiman Marcus. Fashion is notoriously bad at transition. The history of the industry is littered with the stories of attempts by founders to let go gone wrong. Separating a brand from its creator disentangling the DNA of the person from the DNA of the product is a delicate matter. Hubert de Givenchy complained after selling his brand to LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton about its evolution; Pierre Berge, co founder of Yves St. Laurent, did the same after he and Mr. St. Laurent sold their business to PPR and Tom Ford took over. Leonard Lauder, chairman emeritus of Estee Lauder, once said in an interview with The Financial Times: "The hardest thing I have done is given up power. It took me a long time." Though Oscar de la Renta sought to finesse the process by choosing his own heir, Peter Copping, Mr. de la Renta died before the two could work together, and it ended in something of a mess. Mr. Copping left after less than two years, and was replaced by Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia, Mr. de la Renta's former design assistants, who had earlier quit when Mr. Copping arrived. They had gone to start their own brand and consult at Carolina Herrera, where, it later transpired, Francois Kress, then the chief executive, had promised Ms. Kim the design reins, unbeknown to Mrs. Herrera. The latter was none too pleased, and Ms. Kim and Mr. Garcia returned to the Oscar de la Renta house. (There was a court case, too, but we will leave that alone.) Ms. von Furstenberg has edged into the arena twice before: first with Yvan Mispelaere, her creative director from 2010 to 2012, then with Michael Herz, her artistic director from 2014 to 2016. But while she characterized those relationships as partnerships, and promoted the designers publicly, both arrangements ended in divorce. None of this escaped Mr. Saunders. While both he and Ms. von Furstenberg profess enthusiastic love and respect for each other, he came in with his eyes open and with a plan. Some of it was strategic; some of it was practical. For example, he is the company's first chief creative officer, a title difference that may sound picayune, but it sends an internal message about responsibility and lines of reporting (and power) that is not immaterial. He told Ms. von Furstenberg that when she communicated with anyone on the team, she had to copy him in. And he also told her she could not come to his first presentation for the brand. The newly redesigned logo for Diane Von Furstenberg, revealed last month. Not because he wanted to replace her, he said while sitting back in his white walled corner office just under Ms. von Furstenberg's executive floor (she lives over the shop, and her office doubles as her living and dining room), but because "she fills a room, and everyone would look at her when they needed to be looking at the product." "We need the clothes to speak for themselves," he continued. Hence this weekend's show, which is not a show at all, but a restrained presentation with little associated fanfare, as was Mr. Saunders's first collection in September. Look closely, however. Mr. Saunders has not only reinvented the clothing, disinterring it from the depths of the 1970s and giving it a streamlined, cheerful sophistication (words often used to describe the collection are "sophisticated" and "ebullient"), but also the logo, which is no longer a monogram atop a name, but simply an efficient architectural stack, with "Diane" and "von" sitting on equal but opposite sides atop the "Furstenberg." And then there's going to be a new monogram (away with the dramatic DVF scrawl) and new mannequins, which were originally based on Ms. von Furstenberg's body but have been remade in mixed materials (canvas, wood and bronze) to mimic the mixed materials in the collection. Mr. Saunders has brought in Katie Hillier, the buzzy British handbag designer and the former Marc by Marc Jacobs co designer, to consult on the handbags. And he has abolished the lip symbol from shopping bags and boxes (and anywhere else for that matter). Also out is the use of hot pink in any place except the clothing itself. He is about to redo the store decor and the brand's whole approach to narrative and identity. Mr. Saunders is planning to select a group of women that will represent the DVF spirit different ages, positions, shapes and opinions and will roll out its stories each month under the moniker dvfgirl as new deliveries hit the stores, the better to broaden and populate the world attached to the brand. Yet he himself is happy to stay behind the scenes, in part because he is uncomfortable with the spotlight (he is barely on social media) and because he has had visceral experience with the difficulty of detaching yourself from your own brand. As an approach, "it's very clever," said Ruth Chapman, a co founder of Matchesfashion.com, who has known both Ms. von Furstenberg and Mr. Saunders for years (she and her husband, Tom Chapman, opened the first DVF store in London). "It's respectful, but not pandering." It is the kind of strategy the euphemism "refresh" was created to describe. Though last November Ms. von Furstenberg split from her chief executive, Paolo Riva, whom she had introduced to the world in 2015 as another "heir" who could guide the brand "for the next decades," retailers are bullish on the new DVF, even if, as Ms. Chapman said, it is not billed as "the new DVF" (maybe because it is not billed as "the new DVF"). While Mr. Saunders and Ms. von Furstenberg talk every day, Mr. Saunders said she wasn't looking over his shoulder all the time. Indeed, when contacted the week before the presentation about Mr. Saunders, she wrote back: "Is it hard to let go? Not really. Jonathan is very strong and his talent goes beyond creative. I trust him, respect him and want him to succeed." She had to email because she was in Mexico.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Saved from straight to DVD purgatory at the last minute and given a theatrical release, the 2017 sleeper hit "47 Meters Down" was an elegantly directed, well acted, and surprisingly compelling thriller about two sisters stuck in a cage being terrorized by sharks. Its sequel, "47 Meters Down: Uncaged," with its silly scenario, irritating characters, and garbled action, plays like a rebuke of the earlier film. This time, it's another set of sisters (played by Corinne Foxx and Sophie Nelisse) reluctantly joining two other girls from school (Brianne Tju and Sistine Stallone) for an impromptu cave dive in a secret cove in the Yucatan. They don state of the art scuba gear and plunge in, only to get trapped in a long buried city of the dead, where they come across a type of shark that has evolved in the darkness without eyesight but with other, highly attuned senses.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Jillian Prystupa, of Massapequa, N.Y., who is studying to be a history teacher, says she thinks websites should warn visitors if their information is going to be stored or bought and sold. The Information on School Websites Is Not as Safe as You Think The home page of Pinellas County Schools in Florida is brimming with information for families, students, staff members and the public: an easy to use dashboard of news, shortcuts and links to the district's Facebook page, Twitter feed and YouTube channel. But Pinellas's home page has been supplying information to another audience, an unseen one, as well this year. An array of tracking scripts were embedded in the site, designed to install snippets of computer code into the browsers of anyone clicking on it, to report their visits or track their movements as they traveled around the web. The trackers were detected last winter during a study by Douglas Levin, a Washington based expert on educational technology. Asked about them in April, the district expressed surprise and said it would have them removed. But Mr. Levin found 22 trackers when he checked back last month. Their use is an "industry accepted practice," said Lisa Wolf, the public information officer for Pinellas County Schools, echoing comments by school officials elsewhere. Most trackers are used to help websites work better, by counting page visits or catching problems with broken links. Some are used for promotions, as in Pinellas County, where Ms. Wolf said the trackers spotted in April had been left behind after a school choice campaign, and others were later added to boost enrollment at a technical college. But some trackers are also designed to recognize visitors by the I.P. address of their device and to embed cookies in their browsers for the advertising practice known as behavioral targeting. And knowingly or otherwise, many school sites are hosting software from third party companies whose primary business is buying and selling data for the detailed dossiers of personal information on finances, lifestyle and buying habits that advertisers prize. Those third parties may invite still other trackers onto the site, without the school's knowledge or control. "The price of getting information about your child's school should not be losing your privacy to online ad brokers," said Mr. Levin, founder of EdTech Strategies, which conducts research and advises nonprofits and government agencies on using technology to improve schools. School pages accessible to the public are mostly for adults, but ad trackers shouldn't be allowed on the pages students visit to do homework or check grades, said Linnette Attai, founder of PlayWell, who advises companies on compliance issues related to privacy, online safety and marketing aimed at children and teens. But Ms. Attai said even the most sophisticated companies were having trouble keeping up with rapidly changing online ad technology and the laws that governed it. Amelia Vance, director of the education privacy project at the Future of Privacy Forum, called this a problem for schools as well. "Since 2013, we've had 125 new student privacy laws passed by 39 state legislatures and the District of Columbia," Ms. Vance said. "We have almost no funding and almost no training required by most of that legislation." Google and Facebook prohibit collecting or sharing information from children under 13. But Mr. Levin said the integration of free social media into many school websites had still provided a subtle entry point for commercial activity in what parents might assume was a commerce free zone. Google's DoubleClick ad trackers, for instance, are commonly found on school pages that host YouTube videos, like the Community Website Introduction video on a school site in Massapequa, on New York's Long Island. The trackers tee up videos containing advertising on the school page, once its own video finishes playing. This year, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal cast a harsh light on the way Facebook harvests personal information for its advertising sales, the National Education Policy Center in Boulder, Colo., announced it was deleting its own Facebook page, citing what it called Facebook's "invasive data mining and the third party targeting of users inherent in its business model." Allison Prystupa, president of the Massapequa Council of PTAs, sees Facebook as an essential tool, along with Twitter, Instagram, email and the phone apps Group Me and Remind.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
After Lauren Strachan graduated from Rutgers University, where she studied acting, she rented briefly in New York. She waited tables, auditioned and "basically lived the life of a starving artist," she said. Some friends of her parents mentioned a curious job that seemed right for her a kind of "shopping host" on a cruise ship. The topic arose several times. "All these people talked about a job I had never heard of that they thought I would be good at," Ms. Strachan said. "I had never set foot on a ship in my entire life." She landed the job, which entailed promoting retailers in the various ports of call. Once her seasickness passed, she loved it. So, two years ago, she returned to New York, sharing a two bedroom rental in Astoria, Queens, with a good friend. She paid 1,000 a month. She traveled often, dreading the fourth floor climb with heavy luggage. And the location near the elevated Astoria Boulevard station meant inescapable subway noise. Ms. Strachan, now 31, was eager to buy an apartment in Manhattan. Last winter, she attended an open house in a small elevator co op building in Chelsea. The alcove studio was listed for 434,000, with monthly maintenance in the mid 800s. A skylight and an exposed brick wall caught her eye. But "the bed was literally in the foyer," a kind of windowless sleeping area near the door, she said. "It was scary to see what the real estate market was like." At the open house she met Gabriela Vatamanu, an agent at the Corcoran Group. Ms. Strachan enlisted her help in hunting for a one bedroom. As for duplexes, "I couldn't deal with the curly stairs they were the worst," she said. Sometimes an apartment was great, but the building seemed dim or dingy. The first place Ms. Strachan really liked was a one bedroom in a prewar co op building on Park Avenue in the 30s. The price was 499,000, with monthly maintenance in the low 1,500s. She loved the elegant old school feel of the lobby. "I understood what I was looking for after I saw this apartment," she said. It had high beamed ceilings and a fireplace. But the living room was dark, the kitchen tiny and the neighborhood mostly office buildings. She kept looking. As time passed, Ms. Strachan's budget rose. Initially, she thought 400,000 would be adequate. After all, her friends in other cities had enormous houses for less. "All of a sudden, I was at 600,000 and O.K. with it," she said. Her savings were sufficient at sea, she had paid no room and board, so her expenses had been low. "She raised her price to 700,000 and that's where we started to see more of what she liked," said Ms. Vatamanu, who suspected what she wanted was likely to be found on the Upper East Side. Ms. Strachan liked quite a few places there, including one on East 79th Street with a floor plan that included a foyer and even a couple of short hallways. The price was 599,000, with monthly maintenance in the mid 1,300s. Alas, it required more renovating than she was up for. She immediately loved an apartment in a charming prewar co op building nearby.The doorman ran the elevator. "When I saw the old elevator being operated, that was such a nice touch," she said. "I was getting excited just in the hallway." This apartment, with its many built in bookshelves, lived up to its building. Ms. Strachan was especially pleased by the floor plan, which had a large foyer that branched out "like a T or a cross," she said. "You can walk into any room and circle around. You could Hava Nagila in the apartment." Both bathroom and kitchen had windows. "I never thought I would like yellow in a kitchen, but this is the cutest I've ever seen," she said. Though the view, out the back, wasn't especially sunny, "it was quintessentially so New York," with brick walls and fire escapes. However, there were other apartments on her list to check out. A one bedroom on East 86th Street also had built in bookshelves, as well as a washer dryer in the kitchen. The price was 675,000 with monthly maintenance in the mid 1,300s. The subway was just downstairs. But the immediate neighborhood seemed too commercial, with big box retailers on the block. "The hustle and bustle of the Best Buy was way too much for me," she said. "I wanted to walk out of the building and feel peaceful." So it was back to the one bedroom in the 70s, which she bought for 631,000 after splitting the 2 percent flip tax with the seller. She arrived early in summer, thrilled at her landing spot. "I have been struggling to have New York feel like my home," she said. "Finally, I feel like I belong in New York." Next year, the building intends to automate the elevator, a change that is fine with her. She plans to add brighter lighting in the bedroom. When "all the lights are off in the middle of the day, you would never know the sun is shining beautifully," Ms. Strachan said. But she is philosophical: "You take what you take. When you find the one you fall in love with, you also have to accept the things that don't quite make you happy. You accept those little aspects of people and of apartments."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
SEDUCTION A History From the Enlightenment to the Present Seduction is an especially fraught subject because we have long had trouble agreeing on what it is. Does it mean chocolate dipped strawberries and a Quiet Storm playlist? Swiping right? Stretching provocatively at the gym? Sending pictures of your genitalia? Grabbing 'em by the you know what? Demanding a "massage" for a 200 tip or the promise of movie roles? It is a rich field for Clement Knox, our genteel narrator and a puppy eyed 30 year old nonfiction book buyer in London for Waterstones. At first, I assumed the author's youth was the reason his history of the subject was so gargantuan, a near 500 page feat of millennial overcompensation. But I was wrong. Seduction is a grand theme, influencing politics and power, guiding history, shaping literature and forging powerful social movements. Knox takes us through the lives of memorable seducers and their critics, in sometimes academic and sometimes rococo prose dappled with doges, coups de foudre, rakes, bawds, coquettes, coxcombs and procuresses with guest appearances by members of the Frankfurt School sunning themselves in La Jolla. Like an R rated version of "A Christmas Carol," Knox's history whisks us from Casanova's mirrored sex suite to the rake culture of London, where we meet Col. Francis Charteris, a serial predator of such distinguished loathsomeness that he was known by his nom de guerre, "the Rape Master General," and was alleged to have even raped his own grandmother. But by his side we also have Samuel Richardson, whose novel "Pamela" was a blueprint for how chaste women should behave in the face of avid pursuit, encouraging a zeal for housewifery. Then it's on to the St. Pancras churchyard, where the bachelorette Mary Godwin has sex with a married (and short and sickly) Percy Bysshe Shelley, and to the flapper parties of 1920s America, "where bootleg gin was served behind the bar and vomited up in the ladies' room." Later come the Nazis, who deployed propaganda about hypnotists, vampires and sexual monsters to stoke social and sexual panic against Jews. Knox's dialectics follow us throughout: It turns out that we were just as conflicted about seduction centuries ago as we are now. Depending on whom you ask and when, the seducer is either a manipulative villain exploiting innocents or a heroic figure of sexual liberation. Among the Romantics, Mary Shelley (see above) celebrated free love as much as men like Lord Byron did, but struggled to reconcile her physical passions with the misogyny of her era. The African American heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, who was unapologetic about his sexual relations with white women, a few of whom he married, was hounded by America's racist seduction laws. He was found guilty in 1913 of violating the White Slave Traffic Act, illuminating the highly elastic double standards around race and gender of the time. (For more confusing fun: President Trump, of all people, pardoned him posthumously in 2018.) There's always a debate for reason versus passion, for valiance versus depravity, Knox argues. Flapper sexual freedom begot purity laws for women. In the latter half of the 20th century, seducers from Bond to Bardot were celebrated as independent actors who had relieved themselves of the prejudices of religion, taboo and social custom. Yet to some, that sexual equality meant sex and seduction were dead. Knox points to Elizabeth Hardwick, who in 1973 wrote, "You cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value." In a time of unrestrained sexual freedom, the Supreme Court in 1973 expanded the legal basis for suppressing sexually explicit books and movies. Where there's room today for open marriage, polyamory and apps that can yield instant sexual gratification with zero emotional investment, we witness the rise of seduction's antithesis: violent "incel" culture, in which involuntarily celibate young men fueled by the online manosphere kill people. Why? To punish all the people who are having sex, who have succeeded, presumably, at seduction. We've waded into complex sociological territory. An epidemic of hyper consciousness among American universities now asks students to abide by codes of conduct closer in spirit to the seduction legislation that governed the private lives of their great grandparents, vastly different from the permissive sexual culture of their grandparents and parents. University consent guidelines currently consist of point by point how tos and how not tos regarding not just consent for intercourse, but rules around arousal, proposition and seduction. And if we haven't already read enough about the sex drought among young people, there's even sorrier news. The generations weaned on smartphones and tablets show increased levels of depression, loneliness and suicidal tendencies. They "will likely know no other romantic experiences other than those mediated by online and mobile dating platforms financially incentivized against their lasting happiness," Knox writes. Seduction doesn't get much more dystopian than that. Knox goes into great detail about the culture of the pickup artist, known to one another as PUAs. Their thought leader, a man known as Mystery, was the focal point of Neil Strauss's 2005 book "The Game." Mystery teaches his followers how to target women in bars using magic tricks and the art of "negging" criticizing a woman to keep her attention, or encouraging her to struggle for approval. Mystery spawned a slew of online seduction schools, from Attraction Methods, which teaches "canned routines to seduce women into sleeping with you," to Double Your Dating, which offers the helpful advice "Never complain about being a loser and how no woman likes you." In one of his occasional insights from personal experience, Knox recalls watching a young man in a pub do card tricks for a beautiful young woman "Mystery Method in action before me." The woman, summoned back to her table of friends (one of the maxims of Mystery Method is "seldom will you see women of beauty alone"), realizes she has been subjected to a slimeball pickup move. The young man walks out of the pub, defeat stamped all over his face, and slips on a wet step. His first reaction is to check to see if anyone had seen him fall. No one, except for Knox, had. His hands in his jacket pockets, he walks away into the night, just another incel, just another rake.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The first real fight with my fiance since we began wedding planning last November started with a faux tree one adorned with tea lights dangling from its big, leafy green branches. If set in the middle of our cocktail hour room, my florist assured me, it would most certainly bring the "wow factor" as she called it. I had never thought much about a wow factor to dazzle my guests for that one hour span. But afterward, I found myself thinking that you couldn't really have a cocktail hour without one. The faux tree, though, would raise our floral budget by nearly 2,000, which my fiance had objected to. This might have been O.K. had we not also increased our budgets for the band and rehearsal dinner. Still, I wondered, why not splurge? When else would we get to really wow friends and family? Having a wow factor can help a wedding stand out among guests knock their socks off, have them spread the word that your wedding was the best wedding, that the chargrilled filet mignon was just to die for (not to mention, you were the most radiant bride they've ever seen, and your dress was both trailblazing and timeless). Of course, wowing guests isn't what weddings are truly all about. Yet parsimonious planning sometimes gives way to fantasy fulfillment, which may account for the steady rise in wedding costs. Last year, the nationwide cost of a wedding was 33,931, according to the Knot. That was more than half the national median house income of 61,372, according to the most recent census data. The most common sentiment from newlyweds across every budget is that their wedding is the best day of their lives. So are all the extra costs worth it? Are you happier if you splurge for pin lighting in the flowers or hire that 15 piece band? Or will you end up miserable because you could have saved that money for a down payment on a house? My fiance, David Rogg, who works in venture capital, argued that our "tree for an hour" could be a nice couch one day, and several arguments later, our wow factor was scrapped. But others clearly feel differently. Samantha Edelstein Chetrit, 25, an event planner from Lawrence, N.Y., and Abraham Chetrit, 26, who works in real estate, had a 600 person affair in New York City's Cipriani Wall Street in June 2017 that Brides magazine billed as "over the top." She declined to disclose the total cost. For the reception, her florist, Birch Event Design, built two custom made, gold base tables that were covered in moss, candlesticks and hundreds of pink roses in varying shades (the photos went viral). Ms. Edelstein Chetrit had confetti fall onto the dance floor after her first dance with her husband, and hired an artist to capture the whole scene on a canvas. She elevated her ceremony aisle two to three feet so everyone could have a proper view. It was the kind of wedding that Pinterest dreams are made of. Ms. Edelstein Chetrit noted that Pinterest and Instagram had influenced her planning. "For years, even before I was dating my husband, I would always save things, take screenshots, have a folder for all these different inspirational pictures," she said. The prevalence of social media has "huge impact" on a certain wedding "madness," said Brenda Berger, an assistant clinical professor of medical psychology at Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. "People are comparing themselves and their lives and pictures of their lives constantly with other people." Dr. Berger sums up our grandiose thinking: "What's happened is there's now a zeitgeist and the zeitgeist says that you should spend a fortune and have that gorgeous cake, and have those gorgeous flowers. The food that has to have so many courses that nobody can remember two weeks later what they ate." Such extravagance can be detrimental to the couple. "The obsessionality creates a rigidity of thinking," Dr. Berger said. "It's inflexible. It has to be perfect. Perfection is a defense against emotions of some sort. What's going on inside you that you find the perfect anything?" But Ms. Edelstein Chetrit notes that even without the many extras, "I would still be so happy. It was the best day of my life." For couples working with a slimmer budget, wow factors don't necessarily have to be big, over the top gestures. Small, personal touches can stand out just as much, according to Jennifer Taylor, the founder and creative director of A Taylored Affair, an event planning company. "I've done weddings that are 600,000 budgets at the Pierre that have wow factors and tiny budgets at a bookstore," Ms. Taylor said, "And sometimes, those smaller budget weddings are a lot more heartfelt." Leah Pence, the founder of Another Wild Hare event planning company agreed. "In my opinion, the best wow factors are, like, 'Oh, of course that's there, of course that's there because it makes sense.'" Ms. Pence mentions a wedding she planned on a private estate in the Hamptons, where she used ladders from the couple's grandfather and old barn wood as shelves for party favors. They were wow factors that were "really sentimental to the family," she said, "but only the family would know that they were sentimental in that way." Listening to the advice of the planners (an expense I did not budget for), raised a host of other questions and concerns about my own wedding. I thought about what special touches we could add to make ours feel more personal. I searched via Google the price of Venus Et Fleur flowers ( 39 for one Eternity Rose!) and scrolled through Pinterest and Etsy for fun escort card ideas. "Ask yourself, 'What does the bling mean to me?'" Dr. Berger said. Will it make you smile 20 years from now? Or only for that one night? "And if you say it will make you happy and make you smile 20 years from now, or it's enough that it only makes me smile one night, and you can still really go, 'Yeah, I want it,'" then you're barking up the right tree. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
In 'The Piranhas,' the Chronicler of Italy's Mobsters Tries His Hand at Fiction. For a Change? NAPLES Roberto Saviano is only 38, but for nearly a dozen years it has been like this: He is guarded around the clock, moving from house to house and sleeping in the police station when he returns to Naples, because it's the only safe place for him to stay overnight in his home city. Mr. Saviano earned the long line of people who wish him the very worst with his first book, "Gomorrah," which in 2006 peeled back Naples's skin to name the mobsters who he says destroyed his city. Thus began his journey to become Italy's most divisive writer. He returned to Naples recently to show me key places that appear in his new book, "The Piranhas," the only way he can: From the back seat of an armored Nissan, which carried us, sirens screeching, down from Rome. At least two dozen elite officers took positions as the S.U.V. stopped at a square where Mr. Saviano was going to venture a short walk. For good measure, out of nowhere, there appeared a large plainclothes security officer with a submachine gun. "I made the same mistake as soldiers who go to war voluntarily," Mr. Saviano said, reflecting on life since "Gomorrah," as we drove south at high speed along the A1 autostrada. "When a soldier goes to war he thinks, 'Either I get killed or I come back.' That's a mistake. Because when you return, you've lost your legs. You have hepatitis. You don't sleep." "I'm neither alive nor dead," he said. "They didn't kill me. But they haven't let me live." "The Piranhas," which goes on sale in the United States on Sept. 4, marks a literary departure for Mr. Saviano as his first conventional novel. "Gomorrah," which turned into a blockbuster movie and TV series, and a second book in 2013, "ZeroZeroZero," about the cocaine trade, are works of exhaustive investigation told in a novelistic style with some novelistic license. They have both been praised and criticized as "nonfiction novels," "docufiction" and works of "investigative writing." His new book sheds any journalistic pretense, even as it tells the story of a real gang of teenagers who defied the old order and tried to take over criminal life in Naples. Though it is like his other books in that it is based on real events and was deeply researched, he has invented the names, and presents even real episodes and dialogue entirely as fiction. Unlike his other two books, which pointedly named names, "The Piranhas" pointedly does not. "I chose a novel because I wanted to go deeper inside the characters," he said. "I wanted the freedom to imagine what they were thinking." Still, distractions follow him. Mr. Saviano is visiting Naples at a time, as he put it, of "tension." He has placed himself squarely at the center of criticism against Italy's new populist government, and raised the ire of Matteo Salvini, a right wing, anti migrant deputy prime minister. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. In July, Mr. Saviano posted a photo of a dead woman and child floating in the Mediterranean Sea on Twitter, asking "how much pleasure" Mr. Salvini derives from walling off migrants. "The hatred you have sown will overthrow you," he tweeted. The spat has been a public sensation in Italy, combining the particular mix of respect and hatred that Mr. Saviano engenders. Some have cheered his blunt commentary, but recent elections suggest that many Italians agree with Mr. Salvini's hard line on immigration. Mr. Salvini has threatened to sue Mr. Saviano and take away the state sponsored escort. On the page and in life, drama chases Mr. Saviano. "It's my karma," he said. "I go from trouble to trouble." Bearded, his balding head covered with a baseball cap, Mr. Saviano has a soft voice and a sense of humor. (He bowed his head in front of a box of Napoletano pizza. "A sacred moment," he said before digging in.) He doesn't seem much like a threat. But he is. Even asking if he has a significant other seems too much a risk. This Is No 'Baby Gang' The title of "The Piranhas" in Italian "La Paranza Dei Bambini," or "The Fishing Trawler of Children" is arguably more evocative, suggesting the tiny fish who are attracted to a bright light by nighttime nets meant for bigger fish. It is the first of two novels; the second, "Fierce Kiss," is scheduled for translation into English in 2020. Both tell the story of a gang led, in the novel, by a clever but coldhearted high school student, Nicolas Fiorillo. He is charismatic and quotes Machiavelli like a knife. He believes that the old gangsters who controlled drug running in central Naples have become weak and decides to take over the business. This is no "baby gang," but a real enterprise of young criminals who did not come up through the Camorra, Naples's dominant crime group. Instead, they are like hundreds of thousands of young unemployed Italians who see little hope in following their parents' career paths. What sets them apart is their use of social media: While silence was the code for old school mobsters, these younger ones are endlessly texting each other, posting their exploits on Facebook, chronicling their lives and aspirations electronically. Phones are as important as weapons. "The new generation understands that if you aren't on social media you don't exist," Mr. Saviano said. "They are like Camorra 2.0." The true story behind this novel is compelling, and it's not hard to see why Mr. Saviano chose it for his novelistic debut. The Nicholas character is loosely based on Emanuele Sibillo, who was 19 when he was gunned down in 2015. A bit tubby, he wore dorky glasses and sported a beard that strove unsuccessfully to evoke the Islamic State. But he did not look much like a clan leader; more like a Berkeley Futurist. As with his other books, Mr. Saviano conducted extensive research: He interviewed the young survivors, families of the dead, lawyers and judges. He used wiretaps for some of the dialogue. Mr. Saviano said that Mr. Sibillo has transformed into "a myth," with a cult following among many young people and tribute pages and videos viewed widely on the web. "He risked his life for what he wanted." Not So Different From the People He Writes About Mr. Saviano's phone buzzed as we talked. It did often. How much of his shadowed life is spent on that iPhone? "Sixty percent," he said. "It's terrible. This is something else I share with them." Maybe because he spends so much time alone, Mr. Saviano seems remarkably self aware. And he's come to see, as he suggested with his phone use, that he's not so different from the people he writes about. They shared the same narrow streets; Mount Vesuvius, hazy in the distance; one of the world's most beautiful bays. Both Mr. Saviano and his subjects are rich, thanks to their common interest in violence.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Could we interest you in 500 million metric tons of soybeans? How about five Ford class aircraft carriers and 465 F/A 18 fighter jets? Forty trillion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas? Around 2.8 billion barrels of crude oil? Two and a half million Tesla Model X SUVs? We're just trying to make the math work here. Negotiators from Mr. Xi's government have offered the Trump administration a deal to buy 200 billion of American goods, in order to defuse escalating trade threats between the United States and China including Mr. Trump's vow to impose tariffs on as much as 150 billion of Chinese imports. The purchased goods would be an effort to reduce America's trade deficit with the Chinese, which reached 375.2 billion last year, and which irritates Mr. Trump to no end. Administration officials are confident such an agreement could be reached soon. A senior administration official said Friday that the Chinese would commit to reducing tariff and non tariff barriers that hinder American goods from flowing into that country, allowing an additional 200 billion of American sales to China by 2020. Many experts, though, doubt that plan could work as advertised. "I don't see any plausible way that you could reduce the bilateral deficit by 200 billion in two to three years," said Brad W. Setser, a senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. "You work through individual sectors, and it's hard to get close to even 100 billion over that time frame, let alone 200 billion." Here are some potential ways China could increase its purchases by 200 billion and the trouble that emerges in making the numbers add up. Administration officials have high hopes that China could start buying a lot more liquefied natural gas from the United States. It's a boom industry: Those exports quadrupled last year, with China as a major buyer. Again, though, the problem is scale. China bought 2 billion worth of liquefied natural gas last year from the United States, double the amount from 2016. It bought about 7 billion worth of other fossil fuel products, including coal and crude oil. If you optimistically doubled those purchases right away, that would still give you less than 10 billion in additional exports, though the number would grow over time. Such an increase would require a massive ramp up in energy infrastructure, particularly for gas exports. 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. "We don't have the liquefaction facilities constructed yet to automatically turn on the spigot," said Chad P. Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Try For Technology (Even for Defense) China might not need all those soybeans, but it would love to buy more American semiconductors: Mr. Setser notes that the Chinese imported about 200 billion worth of those crucial building blocks for electronic goods last year, but just 6 billion of them from the United States, which exports about 50 billion in semiconductors worldwide. The Chinese have indicated they would be willing to ramp up the share of American semiconductors they buy as part of an agreement with Mr. Trump. That's still not 200 billion, but it's a start, which could continue with other high tech goods that the United States exports a lot of. China could stop buying new jets from Airbus and only source from Boeing, for example (though Boeing appears to be backlogged on filling its orders from around the world). It could buy more cutting edge American made cars, such as Teslas. Mr. Trump is focused heavily on the trade in goods between China and the United States, particularly goods made in industrial Midwestern factories that have shuttered and moved their jobs abroad. But the United States doesn't just trade goods with China. It also trades services and in services, it runs a surplus with the Chinese. One way to approach 200 billion would be to put services on the table, and look for ways to enroll more Chinese students in online American university courses, attract more Chinese tourists to American theme parks or open up China's financial services market to Wall Street banks and other financial firms.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
How Much Silence Is Too Much? I Found Out This is not shaping up as a good year for silence. Wherever you go, the world blares with updates, alerts and urgency. Now comes a temporary reprieve: a dead silent room at the top of the Guggenheim Museum, a work designed by the artist Doug Wheeler and known as "PSAD Synthetic Desert III," which opened in March. Inside the room is enough noise canceling material to make it probably the quietest place you'll ever go, unless you're an astronaut or a sound engineer. Visitors with timed tickets can enter in groups of five, for 10 or 20 minutes. (The exhibition will be closed through April 12.) But too much hush can be unsettling. As Mr. Wheeler told my colleague Randy Kennedy, "In a supersilent anechoic chamber, the most that most people can endure is about 40 minutes before they start going batty." Not to noise brag, but I live near the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn, on a block with a firehouse and a police station, surrounded by high rise construction projects. My children are 6, 4 and 1. Forty minutes? I asked for an hour. Here I should acknowledge that "Synthetic Desert" is not "going batty" quiet. Anechoic chambers are surreal, echoless spaces with noise levels below the threshold of human hearing. Mr. Wheeler estimated that his creation might reach as low as 10 decibels. My (relatively quiet) office cubicle measures about 50 decibels. Walking into "Synthetic Desert" is like entering a vault. There is a series of doors, and the final chamber feels pressurized, the air still and dense. I walked up a ramp into the silence and waited for nothing to happen. Every movement made noise, so I gave up trying to find a comfortable standing position and sat down. I focused on the room, which evokes the light before dawn, with a smear of sky painted across the wall and ceiling. No border is visible between the two, and there is no horizon or distance reference point. Deprived of stimuli, my ears got hungry fast, and quickly recalibrated themselves. I could hear a thin, high roar inside my head. John Cage was once told that this was the sound of the nervous system at work. Staring into the seemingly infinite space for a while had a similar effect on my vision. My eyes discovered, or invented, some entertainment for me: The colors of the room split apart, from purple into blues and pinks. I tried to quiet my breaths, and got to the point where I wasn't sure if I heard them or felt them, or if there were any difference. The nerve signals of an ache in my foot seemed like actual noise, which gradually amplified into an inaudible scream and made me change positions. The sound of my legs shifting came from a distance. I think this was about 20 minutes in. To preserve Mr. Wheeler's lighting design, no cellphones or cameras are allowed, and watching a timer was decidedly not the point. A low sound maybe blood flowing through my vessels, or maybe part of the audio Mr. Wheeler has subtly incorporated into his design became prominent. I found I could tune my hearing away from it, though, and began to hear other things "noises" is not the right word. These were so soft I couldn't be sure they were real: a wind blowing on the far side of a mountain; a jet flying high above another continent. Around the 30 minute mark, the light glowing from beneath the acoustic cones on the floor intruded on my vision, their spiky pattern seeming to climb the wall. The room was unchanged, but my senses were operating independently of my mind. I watched inky patterns scroll across the wall: a hallucination, maybe, or some neural process I usually wouldn't notice, a corporeal software update. In such a deadened room, a body bursts with life, spilling it out through every sense. I felt enraptured and paralyzed, as if I were a disembodied mind seared in the void, listening to a recording of silence played at top volume. Then a door opened, and a man poked his head in, a worker for the museum who'd come in earlier than expected. I couldn't focus on him, and thought he might be unreal. He looked uncertain, then closed the door and locked it. Those sounds came to me as if through a tunnel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
After a stretch of economic expansion so weak that Main Street struggled to detect any improvement, three consecutive months of solid employment growth have begun to lift the mood of consumers and the unemployed. The economy added 227,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday, and though the unemployment rate held steady at 8.3 percent, that was largely because nearly half a million people had joined, or resumed, the search for work in hopes their prospects had improved. "We've seen a lot less Eeyore," said Sherry Leginski, operations director at CareerPlace, a job placement center in the Chicago suburb of Barrington. "Maybe they're turning a little bit more Tigger instead of Eeyore. They're feeling better." Looking over her recent cases, Ms. Leginski cited a new college graduate who found work helping the developmentally disabled, a 60 year old manufacturing specialist whose contract job in Mexico had led to full time work back home, and a financial services worker who had landed a management job in Charlotte, N.C. Such improvement, if it continues, will most likely be a boost for President Obama as he makes a case to voters that his economic policies have been working. Republicans quickly criticized it as too little, too late. Still, the report coincided with other signs of strength, like a surge in consumer confidence and growing strength in manufacturing. "There is no real cloud in the silver lining of this morning's jobs report," wrote Steven Blitz, chief economist of ITG Investment Research. The big question was whether such improvement could be sustained, or even accelerate, as is necessary to significantly drive down the unemployment rate. Most projections call for slower economic growth in the first quarter of this year than the last quarter of 2011, and a second report on Friday further reduced expectations. The report, showing a higher than expected trade deficit, prompted firms like JPMorgan Chase and Macroeconomic Advisers to lower their growth forecasts for this quarter. The focus, though, remained on more encouraging signs. Public sector job losses, which have been steep, have slowed. Job gains for December and January were stronger than previously reported, the Labor Department said, accounting for 61,000 more jobs than the department estimated last month, and the February report could also have understated the improvement. Patrick O'Keefe, director of economic research at J. H. Cohn, an accounting and consulting firm, said the recent run of gains was approaching "escape velocity." There were job gains across a broad swath of industries, including manufacturing, finance, professional services like law and accounting, hotels and restaurants, and mining. The construction industry lost jobs after two months of gains, and the retail sector shrank. For black men, the jobless rate increased, to 14.3 percent from 12.7 percent, while the biggest employment gains went to whites, black women and, overwhelmingly, college graduates. President Obama said that more companies were bringing jobs back to the United States and that manufacturing was adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s. Speaking from the floor of a new manufacturing plant in Virginia, President Obama said, "Day by day, we're restoring this economy from crisis." In a campaign appearance in Jackson, Miss., Mitt Romney, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, pointed out that there were still 24 million Americans who were unemployed or underemployed, working part time when they would like to have full time jobs. 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. Republicans said that President Obama had not done enough to reduce burdens on businesses or to expand domestic energy production, pointing to his blocking of the Keystone pipeline. Virtually all the growth in the trade deficit was linked to higher oil prices, according to an analysis by Capital Economics, a research firm. "This underscores the Federal Reserve's concerns about the economy," said Diane Swonk, the chief economist at Mesirow Financial. "There's still a lot of slack; the spending power's not there." Ms. Swonk estimated that 10 to 20 percent of the job gains were because of an unseasonably warm winter, essentially borrowing from spring's normal uptick in activity. But things are looking up for Martin Okekearu, 58, an engineer in Kansas City, Mo., who has had long dry spells in his eight month search for work. In the last two weeks, he said, he has received two promising leads from manufacturing firms in the area. One found his resume on the local employment center's Web site. It had been posted there for six months. Mr. Okekearu, who has a master's degree in engineering management, was relieved to find that either job would make use of his skills. "My younger son says: 'Daddy, they talk about somebody educated you are one of them. They talk about somebody experienced you are one of them,' " he said. Others said it had become easier to find income, but only via temporary or freelance jobs. "My feelings are mixed about the recovery," said Pam Sexton, 45, also of Kansas City, who was laid off by Sprint in 2009. "So far, I've managed to find work, but a full time, permanent job is somehow elusive to me." Temporary hiring, often a precursor to permanent hiring, increased by 45,000 jobs. "Companies are more and more interested in converting people from temp to full time," said Tig Gilliam, chief executive of the Adecco Group North America, a staffing company. "That's a really good indicator." Competition for highly skilled workers is on the rise, according to Applied Predictive Technologies, a technology company in Virginia that is planning to add 60 workers, mostly recent college graduates, to its staff of 150. "The sense of nervousness and caution that people felt a couple of years ago has really dissipated," said Catherine Baker, senior vice president for marketing and administration. "There's a real war for talent going on." The recovery has been here before, only to falter. Last February, March and April saw net gains of more than 200,000 jobs each month. But then the effects of high gas prices, the earthquake in Japan and the resurgence of the fiscal woes in Europe kicked in, slowing job growth to a crawl. "Everyone got burned last year, from being elated over the better economic data only to have their hopes dashed come spring," said Ellen Zentner, an economist with Nomura Securities International. "If we can get past April and these trends continue, I'll breathe easy." This year, though, the economy appears to be somewhat less vulnerable to shocks. There were 1.4 million more jobs in January than there were last April, and they were spread across more industries and more cities. Consumers have paid down some of their debt and begun to make large purchases, particularly cars. There was also some evidence that job growth might be stronger than the labor report suggests. For one thing, upward revisions are common during a recovery, and have occurred in each of the six preceding months. Another good sign, analysts said, was the strength of job growth reported in the department's household survey. The monthly employment report comes from two surveys one of businesses, from which the net job growth is calculated, and one of households, which generates the unemployment rate. But the household survey also measures job growth, including some types, like new companies, that the business survey does not capture well. Household survey respondents indicated that 879,000 more people were working in February than in January. Though it is not unusual for the two surveys to differ, it is unusual for the growth in the household survey to be so much greater. More people looking for work was also a good sign, said Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist for the Labor Department and now a visiting professor at Princeton University. She noted that among the unemployed, there were fewer people who had recently lost their jobs and more people who had entered or re entered the work force, or who had quit their jobs, presumably to look for something better. "You didn't want to quit your job a year and a half ago," she said. "I take that as not just a sign that the labor market is improving, but that workers out there perceive that the labor market is improving."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Charlie Parker's brief swing through this world kicked off a century ago on Saturday with his birth in Kansas City, Kan. Eleven years later, he would take up the saxophone. A couple of years after that, inspired by the hot bands tearing up K.C. in the '30s, the man who was later known as Bird dedicated himself to his instrument, the alto, woodshedding for 11 to 15 hours a day, he would later say. A decade later, the complexity, beauty and "tommy gun velocity" (as Stanley Crouch once put it) of his improvisations would hasten jazz's departure from the dance hall. With his bebop cohort of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and others, Bird declared "Now's the Time," thrilling audiences and scarifying critics, who mostly took a while to catch up to the advanced harmonics and polyrhythms. His brash modernism jolted New York and then the world. In the decades since, his influence has never waned, even as the modern music he created evolved restlessly in his absence. Recent tribute recordings come from the patron saint of the avant garde, via Anthony Braxton's 11 disc archival treasure "Sextet (Parker) 1993," and the heart of the mainstream, with the Italian guitar phenom Pasquale Grasso's "Solo Bird" EP from Sony Masterworks. Birdland, the club that bears Parker's name and once banned the sometimes unreliable master from its stage remains an institution, updated for the age of streaming, and the annual Charlie Parker Festival, a free summer tradition since 1992, promises to return whenever live music lives again. Jazz thrives most fully in live performance now's the time, after all. But there's plenty of Parker (and Parker inspired) art to thrill us at home, too. (All times listed for live events are Eastern.) "Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker" (University of Minnesota Press) Revised in 2013, Gary Giddins's slim study (first published in 1987) remains the best single volume examination of Parker's life and art, a welcome corrective to sensationalist works like Ross Russell's 1965 biography "Charlie Parker: His Life and Hard Times." As focused as a Bird solo on a Savoy 78, Giddins eschews myth and romance in favor of facts and achievements. He emphasizes Parker's breakthroughs what they meant, how they came about and why they still resonate rather than his addictions. Listening to Parker's 1945 recording of "Ko Ko" after reading Giddins's explication feels like bearing witness to the birth of modern jazz. "Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker" (Harper Collins) Less a biography than an incantation, the first volume of Stanley Crouch's decades in the making Bird portrait ends before bebop's invention. But its seeds are planted in uncommonly rich soil. Drawing on his own interviews with Bird's contemporaries, Mr. Crouch summons up the milieu in which Parker flourished, evoking Harlem's Savoy Ballroom and Kansas City's gangland club scene with novelistic detail and a critic's understanding of the individual artist's relationship to the culture. Mr. Crouch centers the Blackness of Bird, his collaborators, and his audience with singular perceptive power and virtuoso patter. (Here's David Hadju's review for The Times.) Tragically, only two filmed Parker performances have been discovered, and one of those finds the musicians miming along to a prerecorded track rather than actually playing. (Bird looks both amused and bored by the exercise.) This dash through Tadd Dameron's composition "Hot House," then, stands alone. Bird, Gillespie and the pianist Dick Hyman swap fleet, fiery solos. The cameras move more than Parker does bless the operator for the zoom in on Bird's fingers. This occurred on Mr. Hyman's TV show on the New York based DuMont Television Network. In 2010, Mr. Hyman said, "As soon as Parker began a solo, you'd feel as though a current was turned on in your body." Where to start with the tangled discography of a midcentury giant in the age of Spotify? It's rare in jazz for the latest lavish box set to serve as an enticing entry point, but Craft Recordings' recreation of Bird's dazzling first bebop releases for Savoy Records, recorded between 1944 and 1948, boils Parker's breakthroughs to their essence you hear, in smartly upgraded sound, nothing but the performances ("Ko Ko," "Warmin' Up a Riff," "Parker's Mood," "Ah Leu Cha") that changed the world. It's a dip into the headwaters of modern music. Don't let that "complete" throw you. Loving jazz doesn't demand endeavoring to become some kind of archivist. Parker's official recordings from 1944 to 1948 run the length of just three CDs but offer lifetimes of pleasure and revelation. This 2002 edition, available to stream, is uncluttered with the scraps from the apple alternate takes and repetitious bonus tracks that collectors prize. "The Complete Verve Master Takes," surveying Bird's early '50s work including his sessions with strings, is also streamlined but less consistently superior. Based on Gary Giddins's book, this 1989 PBS presentation makes the case for Parker's pre eminence with a welcome lack of bunk. Interviews with Gillespie, Frank Morgan, the Kansas City bandleader Jay McShann and Chan Parker, Bird's final partner, reveal the multifaceted man behind the legends while also serving as a reminder of how quickly the past is receding from us all of these contemporaries of Parker's are now gone. Compared to later filmed treatments of jazz greats, which tend toward the impatient, this "American Masters" special, which Giddens helped write and direct, is refreshingly committed to inviting viewers to listen to actual jazz solos. Jazz at Lincoln Center had planned an ambitious 2020 tribute concert and tour to toast the Parker centennial, with the guest saxophonists Patrick Bartley, Immanuel Wilkins and Zoe Obadia joining the artistic director Wynton Marsalis and the J.A.L.C. orchestra. (That lineup is provisionally planned for next February.) Bird kept playing through hardships, though, and J.A.L.C. does, too, with socially distanced live performances streamed on Dizzy's Club's Facebook page. Friday night at 7 p.m. Dizzy's will stream an archive performance from the saxophonist Tia Fuller followed by a live Zoom conversation with Fuller and the sax stars Justin Robinson, Bruce Williams and Lakecia Benjamin. That's followed up by full live sets at 7:30 p.m. the next two nights from the up and coming sax stars Wilkins (Saturday) and Godwin Louis (Sunday). If you're late, don't worry: Shows remain available to stream after the original broadcast. Parker wasn't just banned, temporarily, from playing at Birdland, a club in which, despite its name, he held no financial stake. Sometimes he was even denied entry as a customer. "'Can you believe this, Sheila? They name a club after me and I can't even get in,'" Sheila Jordan reports in her SummerStage conversation with McBride. Bird's crime: insufficient dapperness. He was wearing a T shirt. Today, of course, no customers can get into Birdland or most any other New York City jazz club at all, no matter what we're wearing. Fortunately, Birdland now hosts Radio Free Birdland, one of the scene's best streaming concert setups, with multiple cameras and excellent sound. Before Covid 19, Birdland had planned a full month of Parker performances. This Tuesday, Birdland hosted Pasquale Grasso's Parker tribute, which remains available to view on demand. Tuesday, Sept. 1, the singer and pianist Champian Fulton and her quartet take flight with "Birdsong," a live set inspired by her buoyant new album of the same name, and Joe Lovano and his Us Five band revisit their 2011 album "Bird Songs" on Sept. 8. 92Y's robust series of "Celebrating Bird at 100" online events includes a free 12 hour Bird a thon listening party hosted by Brian Delp of WBGO's Midday Jazz Show starting at noon on Saturday. That follows a free online screening of Clint Eastwood's "Bird" film, hosted by its star Forest Whitaker, Friday night at 7 p.m. (Both events require registration.) Ticketed events include the 2 p.m. Saturday round table discussion "Celebrating Bird: A Conversation with Music," hosted by Gary Giddins and featuring the saxophonists Joe Lovano, Grace Kelly, Charles McPherson, Antonio Hart and Barry Harris, who played with Parker. The premiere of Hope Boykin's " ... a movement. Journey.," a dance film inspired by Bird's music, follows on Saturday at 7 p.m., with a Q. and A. afterward. The singer Sheila Jordan, a Parker contemporary, regales the bassist and composer Christian McBride with her warm, firsthand Bird tales in this entertaining July discussion hosted by SummerStage. Ms. Jordan reports that Parker treated her like a sister, often crashing on a cot in her loft she called "Bird's bed" and asking "What are you, a damned ventriloquist?" the time Jordan's parakeet alighted on to the saxophonist's leg and spoke the words Jordan had taught it: "Hello, Bird!" SummerStage also offers streaming video of Miguel Atwood Ferguson's 2012 concert celebration of the still divisive 1949 and 1950 Mercury albums titled "Charlie Parker With Strings." Standing proud at the storied Kansas City address of 18th and Vine, the American Jazz Museum's party for its favorite son peaks with a 12 hour live jam session on Saturday from the historic Gem Theater. Much of it will be broadcast live on the museum's Facebook page, starting at 8 a.m. Eastern. And Loren Schoenberg, senior scholar at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, hosts "The Rarest Bird," a N.J.M.H. discussion and listening party at noon on Thursday. Recorded at Smoke last year, for Bird's 99th, this birthday party/cutting contest bubbles over like uncorked champagne. Three top flight altoists harmonize, twine and showboat on tunes from the Parker repertoire and several appealing in the spirit originals. Each also gets a songbook ballad as a solo piece, offering fresh takes on last century material still not ready to be mothballed. Hear Bird speak in this too brief 1954 interview with the saxophonist Paul Desmond, recorded at a Boston radio station. Desmond, famous from Dave Brubeck's quartet, can fairly be said to geek out in the presence of the master, while Parker, for his part, takes pains to dispel the pernicious myth of Black jazzmen as wild, natural talents: "Study is absolutely necessary in all forms," he says, after describing countless hours of practice. "It's just like any talent that's born within somebody. It's just like a good pair of shoes when you put a shine on it, you know?" What a difference five years makes. Desmond's reverant '54 interview stands in sharp contrast to this 1949 encounter with skeptical, even adversarial unnamed representatives from DownBeat, who refer to him as "the chubby little alto man" and insist he "has no roots in traditional jazz." No wonder the writers note that he takes "self effacement to fantastic lengths." Of special interest, though, is the emphasis on Bird's interest in contemporary classical music, his refusal to prognosticate about bop's future development, and the choice of the verb "admits" in this sentence: "He admits the music eventually may be atonal." Charlie Parker in The New York Times "Chasin' the Bird" is more than the title of one of Mr. Parker's signature compositions. It also characterizes something of the critical establishment's relationship with him. Outside of Leonard Feather and few others, music critics found themselves a couple of years behind Parker's art and eventually hustling double time to demonstrate their belated appreciation. That means The Times ran precious little coverage of Bird during his life. There are stray references in "Music Notes" pieces when the bop crowd headlined Town Hall or Carnegie Hall. (From a 1947 review of a Gillespie concert by Carter Harman: "Mr. Gillespie's own technical deficiencies are many, however, and the lack of form in his work pervades the whole impression.")	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Lanternflies Eat Everything in Sight. The U.S. Is Looking Delicious. To most people, the buds and sprouts of April are welcome heralds of spring. But to some farmers and scientists in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania, these signs mark the beginning of a long season of dread. Their worry is Lycorma delicatula, the spotted lanternfly. It is an invasive pest with a voracious appetite and remarkable reproductive talents. Native to Asia, lanternflies first appeared in Pennsylvania in 2014. Despite a quarantine effort, they have also been discovered in small numbers in New York, Delaware and Virginia. In their native range, lanternflies feed primarily on one type of tree Ailanthus, the tree of heaven. The trees are an invasive species, too, common across the continental United States, and so entomologists fear lanternflies one day may spread to far flung corners of the country. A nationwide outbreak would be something of a disaster, some scientists believe. Among the lanternfly's more alarming qualities is an ability to feed on a huge range of plants, including many of commercial value. Lanternflies are believed to use at least forty species of native plants in the United States as hosts. They are particularly fond of grapevines, apple and stone fruit trees as well as a number of hardwood trees, like black walnut and maple. "We've seen it in hops, we've seen it in some of the grain crops that are out there, soybean and what have you," said Fred R. Strathmeyer Jr., Pennsylvania's deputy secretary of agriculture. "It's able to feed on many, many different things." While it is too soon to gauge how much damage lanternflies might cause in the long term, they can easily decimate certain crops in a single season. "They've been appearing in grapes, and we have reports from growers last year of a 90 percent loss," said Julie Urban, a senior research associate at Penn State. Then there is the lanternfly's unusual ability to lay eggs on almost any surface. While other species tend to deposit eggs on a living plant or in soil nearby, lanternflies can place a bundle of eggs nearly anywhere wheel wells, train cars, shipping containers. Agricultural inspectors in Pennsylvania have even started checking beehives for lanternfly eggs. "Most pests deposit their eggs on their host plant, or very close, so they already have food available," said Surendra Dara, an adviser at the University of California Cooperative Extension. "Those that have the advantage of being able to lay eggs on non plant material obviously have a better chance of surviving and spreading," he added. To try to contain lanternflies, regulators have set up a quarantine zone in Pennsylvania that now spans over 3,000 square miles (up from 174 in 2016) and includes 13 counties, as well as Philadelphia. The state prohibits the moving of certain items within the zone, including firewood, outdoor furniture and construction debris. Officials also have launched a permit program for companies shipping goods out of the area. "It's not just an agriculture problem, this is truly an across the board commerce problem, because we are trying not to move it," said Mr. Strathmeyer. "This is everyday people, this is the trucking company, the U.P.S. driver, the delivery guy." In February, the federal Agriculture Department stepped in as well, setting aside 17.5 million in emergency funding to finance research and help the quarantine effort. Many scientists who have studied lanternflies fear that the pace at which populations have grown so far suggests an uphill battle ahead. "It's unbelievably eruptive in terms of its population," said Michael Saunders, a professor emeritus of entomology at Penn State. "The very first year we went out, in 2015, you had to really hunt for egg masses, and then over the next two years it was just spectacularly exponential in its growth." "I've been through a few waves of invasive species, and this is far and away the most incredible thing I've ever seen," he said. South Korea is the only other country in which the spotted lanternfly is an introduced pest. It was first observed in 2004, and its impact on agriculture there has become a cautionary tale. "It spread across the whole country in three years," said Dr. Urban. "It's still a problem there." Like aphids, lanternflies feed on plant sap and excrete most of the carbohydrates they consume in the form of honeydew a sticky, syrupy liquid. The honeydew promotes the growth of mold, which can ruin produce and cover leaves, blocking out sunlight and killing plants. In residential areas, honeydew can coat yards and porches, and its sugary consistency attracts gnats, bees and other unwanted insects. "I've actually seen stalagmites of hardened honeydew on the ground," said Dr. Saunders. "If you're an entomologist, it's spectacular, but if you're a homeowner and you have these in your yard, it's a nightmare." Lanternflies have mostly been contained in Pennsylvania so far, so some experts hope that they may still be eradicated through traditional means. A variety of insecticides are being tested. In March, lawmakers in Maryland even tabled a bill to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide deemed unsafe by the Environmental Protection Agency some years ago, in anticipation of needing it to combat lanternflies in coming months. Researchers have also begun studying the insect's natural predators in Asia, with an eye to possibly releasing them in the United States. Several species of parasitic wasps are under consideration as a method of biological control, though this strategy typically only becomes practical once an invasive species becomes established. "Biocontrol is an option that you would take up after eradication has been ruled out," said Kim Hoelmer, a research entomologist at the Agriculture Department. Scientists are pondering more experimental solutions as well. A team of researchers at the University of Kentucky is exploring using RNA interference, or RNAi, to develop a novel insecticide. The technology works by silencing the expression of genes that are critical for vital functions like movement, but are also unique to a given species of insect. Last year, the E.P.A. approved the first RNAi based insecticides for use against another pest, corn rootworm. "RNAi is one of the ways to control insects in a target specific manner with precision, without harming the environment," said Subba Reddy Palli, a professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky. While RNAi has proved ineffective against other types of insects, notably many species of butterflies and moths, early indications are that the spotted lanternfly may be susceptible. With more sophisticated solutions still years away, however, many of those working to halt the advance of lanternflies in the field are staying focused on the present. If trends continue, this season is expected to be an important predictor of how severe the problem could become. "2018 is going to be a critical year for us to know whether we'll be able to really effectively contain, suppress and ultimately eradicate this pest or not," said Osama El Lissy, a deputy administrator of plant protection and quarantine at the Agriculture Department.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
DARK ARCHIVES A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin By Megan Rosenbloom Full disclosure: I was not eager to read about books bound in human skin. I knew almost nothing about the subject, but I felt pretty confident that nothing was more than enough. I had a vague sense that the practice of binding books in skin technically called anthropodermic bibliopegy was associated with the Nazis; they were long rumored to have made lampshades out of human skin. But I imagined that such disconcerting relics, if real, were part of an isolated history, their existence attributable to a murderous sect. The only reason to consider skin bound books, then, would be to indulge some twisted fascination with the depths of human wretchedness. With "Dark Archives," Megan Rosenbloom, a rare books specialist and librarian at U.C.L.A., quickly disabused me of this notion. Part scholar, part journalist, part wide eyed death enthusiast, Rosenbloom takes readers on her own journey to understand how and why human skin books came to be. She is self aware about the weirdness of her subject matter, but believes that we should lean into what makes us uncomfortable. It is in this vein that Rosenbloom co founded a "death salon" in Los Angeles a place to "open up conversations around death and learn from experts edging us toward a healthier, more empowering relationship with our mortality." In her book, Rosenbloom takes us from library to library, recounting her conversations with other librarians, as well as with historians, collectors and medical students in the act of dissecting cadavers. She includes no shortage of memorable scientific minutiae and clarifications of misunderstood history along the way, including the fact that there's no evidence that Nazis made books from human skin. (This was maybe the one abominable thing they didn't do.) In fact, anthropodermic bibliopegy was not the practice of some singularly heinous regime. Such books were never common Rosenbloom's team has identified only about 50 alleged examples worldwide but she suggests that the total number is plausibly far greater. Human skin leather looks indistinguishable from that of other mammals, and only recent developments in DNA sequencing technology have made it possible to tell a skin bound book from a forgery. The making and selling of such books was pursued at many times and in many places, including late 19th century America. John Stockton Hough, a Philadelphia physician, is known to have bound three textbooks about reproduction in the skin of Mary Lynch, a local woman who died at 28 in 1869 of tuberculosis and a parasitic infection. During an autopsy, Hough removed and preserved skin from her thighs, and then bound his books with it presumably as a form of homage. Struggling to make sense of this sort of bizarre behavior, Rosenbloom observes, "It's easier to believe that objects of human skin are made by monsters like Nazis and serial killers, not the well respected doctors the likes of whom parents want their children to become someday." The central question Rosenbloom pursues here involves the nature of consent. Books bound in human skin have been circulating among private collectors for centuries and often sell for far more than their animal bound counterparts. Some of the experts with whom Rosenbloom speaks believe that such books should be buried or destroyed treated, in short, as human remains would be not collected or publicly displayed. But Rosenbloom argues that these books are well worth examining not despite the visceral disgust they evoke but because of it. "If your mental image of a doctor binding books in human skin is that of a lone mad scientist, toiling away in a creepy basement creating abominations, that would be understandable," she writes. "But the truth about these doctors is much harder to square with our current perceptions of medical ethics, consent and the use of human remains." Of course, much of medicine's history has been shaped by doctors who saw bodies primarily as objects of study, and body parts as items that could be collected, simply because it was within the doctors' ability to do so. There may be no greater emblem of the failure of the medical profession to treat patients as people first than the instinct to possess their bodies and organs. The era of consent in medicine including in organ and cadaver donation is still in its infancy. Rosenbloom's book, and the skin bound books she discusses, compel us to reckon with that arc, and to try to bend it more urgently in an ethical direction. Rosenbloom does not spare us the details of the methods by which skin bound books were made, right down to the techniques of tanning, soaking and scraping the "hides" to preserve them. At times her descriptions seem gratuitously to indulge the same morbid fascination that has long drawn people to these objects. But she finds a way to indulge that fascination without the exploitation inherent in the books' production. Despite their gory history, Rosenbloom suggests, something draws us to behold physical proof of "what happens when immortality is thrust upon us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The Weeknd's new album, "After Hours," debuted at the top of the latest Billboard album chart, with the equivalent of 444,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen the biggest opening of the year so far. "After Hours" had 221 million streams and sold 275,000 copies as a full album. The sales were helped by a variety of bundles that included copies of the album with merchandise and tickets to the Weeknd's tour, set to begin in June. But as with every other tour this year, the Weeknd's plans on the road depend on how quickly the spread of the coronavirus is slowed, and much of the concert industry is bracing for summer shows to be postponed. Also this week, Lil Uzi Vert's "Eternal Atake," the top seller for the last two weeks, fell to No. 2. Lil Baby's "My Turn" is No. 3 and Bad Bunny's "YHLQMDLG" is No. 4. In fifth place is "Kid Crow," the debut LP by the 21 year old songwriter Conan Gray, who has been posting videos on YouTube since he was 9.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
'APOLLO'S MUSE: THE MOON IN THE AGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 22). This exhibition is a journey through an uncommon history, that of representations of the moon across four centuries. An outsize and beautifully installed revelation of persistent astronomical searches, it is a trailblazing marriage of science and art 300 images and objects (a telescope, a photograph used as a fire screen, two moon globes, Hasselblad cameras used by astronauts), plus film excerpts. The images shine a bright light on astronomers' unstoppable pursuit of knowledge as well as on technological advances, artistic responses and fantasy, and also a generous serving of unabashed cuteness. The show amounts to a testament to the human drive to know and explore, and it quietly affirms the growing influence of visual representations of the moon from the invention of the telescope through the Apollo 11 moon landing 50 years ago. (Vicki Goldberg) 212 535 7100, metmuseum.org 'ARTISTIC LICENSE: SIX TAKES ON THE GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Jan. 12). Displays that artists select from a museum's collection are almost inevitably interesting, revealing and valuable. After all, artists can be especially discerning regarding work not their own. Here, six artists Cai Guo Qiang, Paul Chan, Richard Prince, Julie Mehretu, Carrie Mae Weems and Jenny Holzer guided by specific themes, have chosen, which multiplies the impact accordingly. With one per ramp, each selection turns the museum inside out. The combination sustains multiple visits; the concept should be applied regularly. (Roberta Smith) 212 423 3840, guggenheim.org '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 'BRAZILIAN MODERN: THE LIVING ART OF ROBERTO BURLE MARX' at the New York Botanical Garden (through Sept. 29). The garden's largest ever botanical exhibition pays tribute to Brazil's most renowned landscape architect with lush palm trees and vivid plants, along with a display of paintings and tapestries. In the late 1960s and early '70s, Marx (1909 94) planted bright bands of monochrome plants along Rio's Copacabana Beach and the fresh ministries of Brasilia, then the new capital. For this show, the garden and its greenhouses synthesize his achievements into a free form paean rich with Brazilian species, some of which he discovered himself. (Alcantarea burle marxii, one of many thick fronded bromeliads here, has leaves as tall as a 10 year old.) Check the weather, make sure it's sunny, then spend all day breathing in this exuberant gust of tropical modernism. (Jason Farago) 718 817 8700, nybg.org 'CAMP: NOTES ON FASHION' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 8). Inspired by Susan Sontag's 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. (Smith) 212 535 7100, metmuseum.org 'T.C. CANNON: AT THE EDGE OF AMERICA' at the National Museum of the American Indian (through Sept. 16). In 31 years, Cannon made more stunning artworks than some artists make in much longer lifetimes. This retrospective brings together his polychromatic paintings of Native Americans, intimate drawings commenting on the country's violent history, and original poetry, folk songs and letters to emphasize the full breadth of his singularly hybrid vision. That he made so much mature work in so many mediums before dying in a car accident in 1978 is all the more remarkable. In Cannon's most powerful works, he brings Modernist styles most notably Post Impressionism and Fauvism to bear on portraits of Native Americans. There are echoes of Matisse in his ambush of colors and patterns, and shades of van Gogh in his animation of the landscape. But paintings like "Two Guns Arikara" (1974 77) and "Indian With Beaded Headdress" (1978) demonstrate his irrefutable originality. (Jillian Steinhauer) americanindian.si.edu '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 'CULTURE AND THE PEOPLE: EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO, 1969 2019' at El Museo del Barrio (through Sept. 29). This golden anniversary survey of wonderful art from the collection of a treasured East Harlem based institution sounds a political note from the start, with works by figures who were crucial to the museum's earliest years, like the street photographer Hiram Maristany and the great printmaker Rafael Tufino. Throughout the show, whether in abstract paintings or sculptural installations, art and activism blend. And there's joy: A 2006 collage called "Barrio Boogie Movement" by Rodriguez Calero generates the elation of the sidewalk it depicts, and Freddy Rodriguez's homage to the Dominican catcher Tony Pena a gold leaf baseball nestled in a mink lined glove is a rush of pure fan love. (Holland Cotter) 212 831 7272, elmuseo.org 'CYCLING IN THE CITY: A 200 YEAR HISTORY' at the Museum of the City of New York (through Oct. 6). The complex past, present and future roles of the bicycle as a vehicle for both social progress and strife are explored in this exhibition. With more than 150 objects including 14 bicycles and vintage cycling apparel it traces the transformation of cycling's significance from a form of democratized transportation, which gave women and immigrants a sense of freedom, to a political football that continues to pit the city's more than 800,000 cyclists against their detractors today. (Julianne McShane) 212 534 1672, mcny.org 'LEONARDO DA VINCI'S "SAINT JEROME"' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 6). The 500th anniversary of da Vinci's death in 1519 will bring big doings to Paris this fall with a one stop only career survey at the Louvre. New York gets a shot of buzz in advance with the appearance at the Met of a single great painting: "Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness." On loan from the Vatican Museums, it's one of the most rawly expressive images in the da Vinci canon. And it's a mystery. We don't know exactly when it was painted, or for whom, or why. Like much of this artist's work, it's unfinished. Incompleteness is part of its power. And powerful this picture is, a spiritual meltdown unfolding right before your eyes. You won't want to miss it. (Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'DRAWING THE CURTAIN: MAURICE SENDAK'S DESIGNS FOR OPERA AND BALLET' at the Morgan Library Museum (through Oct. 6). Drawn from Sendak's bequest to the Morgan of his theatrical drawings, this succinct yet bountiful exhibition offers an overview of a dense, underappreciated period in this artist's career, undertaken with his most celebrated books well in the past and his life in uneasy transition. "Fifty," Sendak said, "is a good time to either change careers or have a nervous breakdown." The new midlife career he took on in the late 1970s was that of a designer for music theater. His rare ability to convey the light in darkness and the darkness in light brought him to opera. It's the focus of this show, which is aimed at adults but likely delightful for children, too. Five of his productions emerge before our eyes from rough sketches to storyboards, polished designs and a bit of video footage in those unmistakably Sendakian colors, watery and vivid at once. (Zachary Woolfe) 212 685 0008, themorgan.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. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'ILLUSTRATING BATMAN: EIGHTY YEARS OF COMICS AND POP CULTURE' at the Society of Illustrators (through Oct. 12). Batman turned 80 in April, and now the character is being celebrated with this visual feast of covers and interior pages, teeming with vintage and modern original comic art that shows the hero's evolution. The exhibition includes "Bat Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan," a display devoted to a Batman story originally printed in Japan, and "Batman Collected: Chip Kidd's Batman Obsession," featuring memorabilia belonging to the graphic designer Chip Kidd. (George Gene Gustines) 212 838 2560, societyillustrators.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. '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 'SIMONE LEIGH: LOOPHOLE OF RETREAT' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Oct. 27). Leigh's sensuous, majestic sculptures of black female figures fuse the language of African village architecture and African American folk art, and sometimes racial stereotypes, like the "mammy" figurines produced and collected in earlier eras in America. Sculpture is only one part of the practice that earned Leigh the Hugo Boss Prize 2018, but it is the one that inspired this show of three large objects in a gallery off the rotunda. The title comes from the writings of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman who spent seven years hiding in a crawl space to escape her master's advances. In the exhibition, the "loophole" becomes a kind of artistic conceit, too, in which Leigh moves deftly between mediums, styles and messages, addressing multiple audiences but always, as she has stated, black women. For Leigh, loopholes might include representations of women that link back to ancestors or empower women by drawing on the freedom available through art. In that sense, these sculptures are sentinels, and placeholders. (Martha Schwendener) 212 423 3840, guggenheim.org 'NOBODY PROMISED YOU TOMORROW: 50 YEARS AFTER STONEWALL' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Dec. 8). In this large group show, 28 young queer and transgender artists, most born after 1980, carry the buzz of Stonewall resistance into the present. Historical heroes, including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, are honored (in a film by Sasha Wortzel and Tourmaline). Friends in life, Johnson and Rivera are tutelary spirits of an exhibition in which a trans presence, long marginalized by mainstream gay politics, is pronounced in the work of Juliana Huxtable, Hugo Gyrl, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski and Elle Perez (who is also in the current Whitney Biennial). (Cotter) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.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 shark exhibition, 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 'PHENOMENAL NATURE: MRINALINI MUKHERJEE' at the Met Breuer (through Sept. 29). You almost forget that art has the power to startle to make you wonder "How on earth did someone even think to do this, never mind do it?" until you see a show like this survey of sculptures by Mukherjee (1949 2015), an Indian artist. Roughly half are figurelike forms made from hemp rope ropes worked in a knotted macrame technique of finger aching ingenuity and titled with generic names of pre Hindu nature spirits and fertility deities. Smaller, ceramic pieces, flamed shaped and midnight black, suggest Buddhas. Late cast bronze sculptures look both botanical and bestial. The result isn't folk art or design or fiber art or religious art or feminist art. It's modern art of deep originality. And it's an astonishment. (Cotter) 212 731 1635, metmuseum.org '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 'CHARLOTTE POSENENSKE: WORK IN PROGRESS' at Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, N.Y. (through Sept. 9). This Hudson Valley institution continues its satisfying enlargement of its roll call of Miminalists and Conceptualists with a major showcase of this German artist, who showed her modular, industrially inspired sculptures alongside Donald Judd and Frank Stella in the late 1960s, but then abandoned art for sociology. Posenenske's most important works were free standing pipes, made of sheet steel or cardboard, that look almost exactly like commercial air ducts. Unlike some of the control freaks whose art is also on view here, Posenenske made her art in infinite editions, out of parts that can be arranged in any shape you like: a generous distribution of authorship from the artist to her fabricators and collectors. (Farago) diaart.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 'STONEWALL 50 AT THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY' (through Sept. 22). For its Stonewall summer, the society offers a bouquet of three micro shows. One is devoted to relics of L.G.B.T.Q. night life, from the 1950s lesbian bar called the Sea Colony to gay male sex clubs like the Anvil and the Ramrod that sizzled in the 1970s. Another documents the founding in 1974 by Joan Nestle, Deborah Edel, Sahli Cavallero, Pamela Olin and Julia Stanley of a compendious and still growing register of lesbian culture called the Herstory Archives. And a third turns a solo spotlight on charismatic individuals: Storme DeLarverie (1920 2014), Mother Flawless Sabrina/Jack Doroshow (1939 2017), Keith Haring (1958 90) and Rollerena Fairy Godmother. (Cotter) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.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 packed a punch that has never been matched by any other creature; 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 'WALT WHITMAN: AMERICA'S POET' at the New York Public Library (through Aug. 30) and 'WALT WHITMAN: BARD OF DEMOCRACY' at the Morgan Library Museum (through Sept. 15). "I am large, I contain multitudes," Whitman wrote in "Song of Myself." And this summer, New York has been hosting an unusually large and varied selection of artifacts of its most celebrated literary son in honor of his bicentennial birthday, which was on May 31. The public library's exhibition surveys the landmarks of the poet's public career, drawing in large part from its rich holdings. The one at the Morgan features objects from its collection, too, alongside loans from the Library of Congress, including an errant 19th century butterfly with a back story as colorful as its wings. (Jennifer Schuessler) nypl.org/waltwhitman 212 685 0008, themorgan.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 'VIOLET HOLDINGS: LGBTQ HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE N.Y.U. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS' at Bobst Library (through Dec. 31). With the Stonewall Inn now a National Historic Landmark (and a bar again; it was a bagel shop in the 1980s), nearby New York University has produced a homegrown archival exhibition at Bobst Library, across the park from Grey Art Gallery. Organized by Hugh Ryan, it takes the local history of queer identity back to the 19th century with documents on Elizabeth Robins (1862 1952), an American actor, suffragist and friend of Virginia Woolf, and forward with ephemera related to the musician and drag king Johnny Science (1955 2007) and the African American D.J. Larry Levan (1954 92), who, in the 1980s, presided, godlike, at a gay disco called the Paradise Garage, which was a short walk from the campus. (Cotter) 212 998 2500, library.nyu.edu '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. (Cotter) 202 663 7970, americanart.si.edu 'LIZ JOHNSON ARTUR: DUSHA' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Aug. 18). Trying to guess the identity of a photographer by her images is a dubious game, as Johnson Artur proves in this exhibition. Born in Bulgaria to a Russian mother and a Ghanaian father, she trains her camera on neighborhoods in London, Brooklyn and Russia. Some of the best works are the ones of Brooklyn, with dancers in ecstatic poses and audiences urging them on. As a photographer for fashion and music magazines like i D, The Face and Vibe, Johnson Artur has specialized in people for whom self fashioning is a way of life. She has forged her own path within the realm of identity politics and has something to teach New Yorkers, who often pride themselves on their diversity. Forget labels, she's saying. You can be many things. (Schwendener) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'MUNDOS ALTERNOS: ART AND SCIENCE FICTION IN THE AMERICAS' at the Queens Museum (through Aug. 18). For this exhibition, the museum remixed a show that originally appeared on the West Coast as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. From Alex Rivera's 2008 feature film "Sleep Dealer" to Glexis Novoa's tiny, dreamy cities doodled directly on the museum walls, it's an impressively broad sample of styles and sensibilities from every corner of the New World. Throughout, its focus on science fiction amplifies and exemplifies the way art illuminates reality by imagining the unreal. (Heinrich) 718 592 9700, queensmuseum.org 'ONE: EGUNGUN' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Aug. 18). This compact exhibition built around a single work documents an impressive sleuthing exercise concerning an egungun, a ceremonial costume from the Yoruba culture. An elaborate multilayered assemblage of fabrics, it arrived at the museum as a gift in 1998, with little information about its provenance. Last year, Kristen Windmuller Luna, the museum's new curator of African art, traveled to Nigeria to investigate. Through videos, wall text in English and Yoruba and other displays that address the fabrics that the egungun contains, the show contributes to the crucial debate on African art repatriation and offers an example of the ethos of "re circulation" of works, in dynamic context, under African guidance. (Siddhartha Mitter) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'ALEXANDRIA SMITH: MONUMENTS TO AN EFFIGY' at the Queens Museum (through Aug. 18). Outside the entrance to this exhibition, a Plexiglas panel has been painted to look like stained glass. The theme of worship continues inside the gallery with two antique wooden pews that hover off the floor, two found African masks perched atop imitation Tuscan Doric columns, and a triptych of drawings and paintings that suggests an ascent from the underworld to heaven. Layered over all this is an original aria with gospel tonality sung by Liz Gre. The starting point for this work was the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground; a few miles from the museum, it had been a cemetery for African American and Native American residents in the 19th century, turned into a park then a playground during the 20th, and recently recognized again as a burial ground. Smith juxtaposes evocations of absence, such as the empty pews, with objects that assert their presence, like a sculpture of oversize, tentacle like pigtails. In the balance, she's found a way to honor a past that has been only partly exhumed. (Steinhauer) 718 592 9700, queensmuseum.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	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
"Clara" cloaks its cliches in astronomy jargon and mood lighting, but in the final analysis this Canadian feature from Akash Sherman is yet another movie about a dying dream woman whose cosmic role is to teach a ruthless empiricist to go with the flow. Dr. Isaac Bruno (Patrick J. Adams) is such a stick in the mud that, in the opening scene, he proves mathematically to his students that searching for life beyond Earth is a safer bet than looking for love. His boss insists that he take a break. It is suggested that Isaac is getting over a tragedy in his past.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Dance is a social art form that happens in crowded rooms full of people. Partnering and dance instruction are all about touching. Movement requires large spaces. So what happens in a period of enforced separation and reduced square footage? American dancers are just beginning to deal with these challenges. In addition to the stress of not being able to take part in their daily routine of rehearsals and dance classes, many face worries about when, or if, the next paycheck will come. In Italy, dancers have been experiencing these disruptions for weeks. The first lockdowns began in northern Italy in late February. On March 8, much of northern Italy was shut down, and the rest of the country followed two days later. Italians are not supposed to leave their homes except to buy food, go to work if they can't work from home or receive medical treatment. The slogan "Io resto a casa," or "I stay home," has become a national manifesto. Gatherings have been suspended; relatives who live in different cities, or even just across town, are no longer visiting one another, except virtually. Social media and video calls have become a source of solace. Mr. Messina, who lives in Gerenzano, near Milan, with his husband Salvo Perdichizzi, a former Teatro alla Scala dancer, and two Rhodesian Ridgeback dogs, said creating the video was a way to lighten the mood. He and his fellow dancers have been keeping in touch using WhatsApp, and when he requested videos, "they just flooded in," he said. In a video call, also on WhatsApp, Mr. Messina, 39, said his period of social separation began on Feb. 25, after a singer at the opera company at La Scala, with whom the ballet shares the theater, was found to have the Coronavirus. (Later, there was another case. Both men are fine.) But, Mr. Messina said, he considers himself lucky: As a full time employee of a major opera house with state funding, he is still receiving a salary. Seventy of the 90 La Scala dancers are full time employees, a spokesman for the theater, Paolo Besana, said in email. The remaining 20 are on short term contracts. But even they are being paid, at least for now. (Smaller theaters can't afford to do the same.) La Scala too will suffer: Mr. Besana said the theater's losses from ticket receipts amount to about a million euros a week. For Mr. Messina, the days have taken on a certain routine. Dog walking is a highlight. "I take the dogs out, and then I do an hour on the treadmill, then some stretching and core exercises," he said. "It's hard to do a barre in a small space, but I do my best. Then after lunch a short nap, and then I take out the dogs again." Ms. Daskalova, 24, a Bulgarian performer who has been in Italy for two years, studies dance, singing and acting at the Musical Academy Milano, a school affiliated with the Teatro Nazionale in Milan. When the theater closed, she was dancing in the ensemble of a production of "Singing in the Rain." Suddenly she found herself confined to her tiny apartment in central Milan with no job, no income and no classes to attend. She considered going home to Sofia, where her family lives, but was afraid of bringing the virus with her. So she stayed. She has enough savings to keep her going for about a month. After two weeks, the school began to hold online classes. Nadia Scherani, a former dancer and actress who teaches there, uses the platform Zoom, which allows her to see all of her students onscreen at the same time. In her small home studio outside of Milan, equipped with a barre and mirrors, Ms. Scherani demonstrates the exercises, and then watches her students as they execute them in whatever small space they have devised in their own apartments. (She has also added yoga to her daily teaching routine to help with her students' and her own mental health.) Online teaching has kept Piera Nicoletti Altimari, 13, a promising young ballet student, going as well. Last year, she and her mother moved from Naples to Schio, a small town in the Veneto region, near Lake Garda, so she could be trained by the well regarded teacher Enrica Marcucci at her studio, called Domus Danza. Before the virus interrupted her training, Piera was taking four to five hours of ballet classes each day. Now, most of her life happens online. She does all her academic lessons via Google Classroom. And Ms. Marcucci gives her daily lessons with three other students through WhatsApp. "I put my phone on the table in the living room and use a clothes rack as a barre," Piera said in an interview on WhatsApp. "But I can't use my point shoes, because the floor is made of stone, and it's slippery. We can't do many jumps either." She had been planning to audition for the Royal Ballet School in London at the end of February, but her audition was canceled. She'll try again next year, her mother says, though in a budding dancer's life, a year is a long time. The Naples ballet company, which rehearses and performs at the Teatro di San Carlo, one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world, closed on March 10, the day the national shutdown was proclaimed. The troupe had just concluded performances of the ballet "Don Quixote" a few days earlier. "We weren't in the red zone at the time," Giuseppe Picone, the artistic director of the San Carlo ballet troupe, said in another WhatsApp video call. "So I didn't expect we would have to close so soon." At the beginning of his seclusion, Mr. Picone, a former star who used to partner the Georgian dynamo Nina Ananiashvili at American Ballet Theater, said he was in too much shock to do much besides watch the news and talk to friends and colleagues on WhatsApp. "And eat!" he said. "All we do here is eat!" By the fourth day he was feeling an itch to move, so he started working out, stretching and doing barre exercises by holding onto the windowsill. Mr. Picone, who was born in Naples, has family nearby. His 90 year old father lives in a town about 15 miles north. "He's philosophical," Mr. Picone said. "He says: 'You know, we lived through the war. We hid in caverns and basements. And we survived. But at least you could see the enemy.'" In addition to his parents, Mr. Picone worries about his dancers. About half are full time employees of the theater. But just under half have five month contracts. Right now, they're not being paid. "The government has promised to compensate them," he said, "but who knows when that will happen." Still, amid the fear and uncertainty, there have been bright spots. As in other parts of Italy, Mr. Picone's neighbors joined together to sing last week, their voices rising from the balconies in his central Naples neighborhood. Their song? "O surdato 'nnammurato" (or "The Lovesick Soldier"), a tune known to almost every Neapolitan.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
It's a question loaded with pain, but Emmett speaks it quietly, like a person so soul weary that he's partially numb. "Do you know how many come after me?" he asks. Emmett is Emmett Till, the Black boy barbarically murdered by a pair of white Southern thugs the summer he was 14, down from Chicago to visit family in small town Mississippi. "Do you know how many come after me?" he asks again. In Nataki Garrett and Andrea LeBlanc's wound lancing theater piece "The Carolyn Bryant Project," repetition is a means of outlining an ugly pattern unfounded white aggression, needless Black death, the public tarnishing of the victim. And often, as in Emmett's case, no punishment whatsoever for the killers. These many murders are what he means when he asks that question of his own accuser. Trapped in a corner of our collective psychic landscape, he has her for eternal company: Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who was 21 in August 1955, when Emmett walked into the store that she and her husband owned, and proceeded to buy some bubble gum. Did the handsome kid flirt with her during their very brief encounter? Possibly. Did he lay his hands on her in the store and utter sexual vulgarities? No, though it was more than 50 years before she recanted that smear from her testimony. Claiming a foggy recollection about what exactly did transpire before her husband and brother in law kidnapped, tortured and killed Emmett Till, the real Carolyn Bryant eventually conceded to a historian: "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him." That line echoes through "The Carolyn Bryant Project," directed by Garrett and filmed in 2018 during its premiere at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in Los Angeles. Streaming for free on the CalArts Center for New Performance website, this is a meditation on memory, silence and the potent, poisonous myth of fragile white womanhood in particular, the Southern belle as damsel in distress. Stuck in a narrative loop, bound to each other, Emmett (Jacob Romero Gibson) and Carolyn (LeBlanc) re enact the events of their meeting as alleged in her testimony. She always calls Emmett a man, to make him sound more frightening, and modifies that word with a racial slur. Emmett himself, actually, thinks he's very grown up; who doesn't at 14? But the people he talks about most are his mother and grandmother. "My granny said, 'Stay away from white girls! They'll get you killed,'" he says, and laughs. This is a powerful show, and the video makes you want to see it live not only to get closer to it but also to appreciate more fully its handsome design, especially the video projections by Edgar Arceneaux. One caution: The performance does include a brutally explicit description of what Emmett's murderers did to him. Garrett and LeBlanc are more concerned with the fatal toxins coursing through our culture than with the real Carolyn Bryant's immediate motive for lying. This is not a piece about understanding her, and it's certainly not an absolution. What she said incited the murder of a child in the Jim Crow south. But the ritual we watch Emmett and Carolyn repeat is emblematic of an American cycle that shows no sign of stopping. "I was just scared to death," she claims, brandishing a gun as she recalls the night they met.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
WHEN ultrarich Americans go house hunting outside the United States, they've got a Caribbean soul they can barely control, to paraphrase Jimmy Buffett. Those were the findings of the Candy GPS Report, which focused on the home buying habits of high net worth individuals around the world those with more than 30 million in assets ranking the top 20 places where they buy additional luxury homes for leisure use. The roster, not surprisingly, included Lake Como in Italy, the Cote d'Azur in France and Aspen and Vail in the United States, as well as a few places that might not readily come to mind, like the Seychelles, the Maldives and Emirates Hills in Dubai. But for American buyers looking for property abroad, the roughly eight square mile island of St. Barts in the French West Indies, where the typical five bedroom property changes hands for 14 million, topped the chart. In general, American buyers casting outside the United States favor homes in the Caribbean, the report found. (Although "the majority of ultra high net worth Americans hold their property in the U.S.A., in excess of 80 percent," according to Yolande Barnes, director of Savills World Research, part of the global real estate firm Savills.) One example of a luxury property on St. Barts that is drawing American interest is Villa Au Soleil, a four bedroom hillside villa that the actor Steve Martin put on the market last year for 7.95 million euros, or 10.75 million. Mr. Martin bought the home, which perches on the hillside in Lurin, above St. Jean Bay, as a private retreat in 2008. It had been listed for 9 million before he bought it. Last year, St. Barts experienced a significant rise in sales volumes, according to the Caribbean Prime Residential Insight 2014 report by the real estate consulting firm Knight Frank. Market activity remained strongest below EUR10 million, or 13.6 million, but 2013 also saw an uptick in the number of transactions above that threshold. Buyers from the United States were the top nationality picking up properties, followed by purchasers from Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe, Knight Frank found. For property buyers looking to stay on American soil, Virgin Islands destinations like St. Thomas and St. John, as well as Puerto Rico, remain popular. But Americans are also drawn to non American Caribbean places like Barbados, the British Virgin Islands, Mustique, Jumby Bay and the up and coming Canouan, part of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where properties average 6 million for a five bedroom villa. Major improvements to Canouan's airport have brought more of the global wealthy within its reach, according to a report by Savills. Meantime, the Bahamas are far from passe. Proximity to the United States makes property there high on the shopping lists of wealthy American buyers, according to Savills. A favorite is Harbour Island a chic hangout famed for its pink sandy beaches. And the cachet of owning a private island is picking up. Some of those most sought by American buyers are the islands in the Exuma Cays, a cluster of over 360 islands in the Bahamas, according to Chris Krolow, chief executive of Private Islands, which operates online island sales sites. In the last several years, properties have been sold to the producer/director Tyler Perry and the country singers Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. They join earlier trailblazers like the magician David Copperfield and John C. Malone, the billionaire chairman of the cable and telecommunications giant Liberty Global. Properties in the Exumas market include 554 acre Darby Island, listed at 40 million, and Saddleback Cay, a private 47 acre island that includes a 3,000 foot airstrip and seven white sand beaches. Its price is 15.6 million. And there is also the seven acre Goat Cay, priced at 4.8 million. "Island sales have picked up, and it's a buyer's market right now," said Mr. Krolow, who fields close to 200 inquiries a day. "Not all translate into clients who actually visit the properties, though." Anyone shopping for an island needs to understand that it's not always smooth sailing. Some clients buy an island, and then put the "for sale" sign back up a year later because it is found to be difficult to maintain, or just too isolated, Mr. Krolow said. Also, landing development permission for an undeveloped island can take far longer than expected. For many people, though, buying an island is not about the cost. "They want to be steward of their own little piece of the world," Mr. Krolow explained. "They become so emotionally attached to the idea of owning an island. It's not simply a luxury purchase. It's a very passionate one." Other warm climes where affluent buyers are dipping their toes include the emerging areas of the Southern Zone in Costa Rica and the Pacific Riviera, along Nicaragua's southern Pacific coast. "In Costa Rica's Southern Zone, you can buy an ocean view lot for 90,000 100,000 and build a custom home for 100 per square foot," said Margaret Summerfield, a global real estate expert who reports on real estate trends for InternationalLiving.com and The Pathfinder Alert. "In Nicaragua, you can buy a large ocean view lot in a private community for 90,000 100,000 and build a custom home." Ambergris Caye, the largest island in Belize, is another undervalued market that is drawing prosperous Americans, according to Kathleen Peddicord, publisher of Live and Invest Overseas and author of "How to Buy Real Estate Overseas." "Belize is easy to get to from the U.S., has the Caribbean soft white sands and azure water, and is less developed than other Caribbean markets," she said. "Plus, there's a friendly community of expats." Elsewhere, a yearning for the old sod has been luring deep pocketed buyers to Ireland and Scotland. An increasing number of Americans with Irish roots are buying castles and manor houses at rock bottom prices with cash. "We've had a surge of Americans looking to buy historic homes in Ireland in the last year," said Roseanne De Vere Hunt, head of residential and country properties at Ganly Walters in Dublin. In Ireland, many of the homes are changing hands for roughly a third of 2007 levels because of fire sales by developers, many of which failed when the market crumpled. And a growing number of Americans are shopping for Parisian townhouses and centuries old chateaus in the French countryside. "It's the first time in years that prices have come down, and sellers are truly willing to negotiate directly with buyers," Ms. Peddicord said. "You don't buy a French chateau, however, because you're sensible," said Elizabeth Bonner, 57, a resident of Gulf Stream, Fla., who owns the 18th century Chateau de Courtomer, initially purchased for about 2.6 million in 2005. The chateau is in Courtomer, a village in the Normandy countryside about 100 miles northwest of Paris. Mrs. Bonner has spent the last eight years renovating it slowly, making the 38 rooms and about 17,500 square feet livable. Chateaus currently on the market generally range from EUR1.5 million, or around 2 million, to more than EUR3.7 million, or roughly 5 million, according to Patricia Hawkes, a Paris based real estate agent and co owner of the Philip Hawkes Agency, which specializes in historical French high end properties. Mrs. Hawkes and her husband have operated an agency for nearly 40 years and sold hundreds of chateaus along the way, she estimated. They even own one themselves, the 14th and 18th century Chateau de Missery in Burgundy. "In the last year, we've seen a definite increase in interest from American buyers," Mrs. Hawkes said. "Of course, Americans have always had a love affair with France, but right now the French are in a real muddle, mostly with the tax situation, and many owners are eager to sell." As a result, prices have slipped, sometimes strikingly, from the pie in the sky levels of years past. "Many of these chateaus have been on the market for quite some time," Mrs. Hawkes said. "It's not unusual to be able to negotiate for at least 20 percent off the original asking price, and some are down by half." The appeal isn't surprising, she said. "A chateau is a work of art," Mrs. Hawkes said. "The only thing is, you can't move it." There are some financial considerations, of course. In addition to property tax, nonresidents pay an annual wealth tax on a property, unless they are exempt under a tax treaty. Rates are progressive, from 0.5 percent to 1.5 percent, according to Deloitte. While buyers are picking up prestige properties for sentimental reasons, many certainly see the business side of renting them out when they are not in residence.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Ten state attorneys general on Wednesday accused Google of illegally abusing its monopoly over the technology that delivers ads online, adding to the company's legal troubles with a case that strikes at the heart of its business. The state prosecutors said that Google overcharged publishers for the ads it showed across the web and edged out rivals who tried to challenge the company's dominance. They also said that Google had reached an agreement with Facebook to limit the social network's own efforts to compete with Google for ad dollars. Google said the suit was "baseless" and that it would fight the case. "If the free market were a baseball game, Google positioned itself as the pitcher, the batter and the umpire," Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said in a video on Twitter announcing plans for the suit. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, adds to the fierce bipartisan backlash against one of the country's biggest tech companies. Regulators in the United States and Europe have focused on the outsize role Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google play in the modern economy, shaping everything from how we shop to what information and entertainment we see. In October, the Justice Department and 11 states said Google had illegally maintained a monopoly over online search engines and the ads that appear in users' results. An additional case against Google, brought by a separate set of states, is expected soon. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission and more than 40 states accused Facebook of illegally crushing competition by acquiring younger rivals, and argued that the company should be broken up. Apple and Amazon are both under federal antitrust investigations, too. The lawsuit filed on Wednesday is the first by regulators in the United States to focus on the tools that connect buyers of advertising space with publishers who sell it. Advertisements generate a vast majority of the company's profits. The Justice Department has its own antitrust inquiry into advertising technology, said a person with knowledge of the investigation. The prosecutors asked for monetary penalties and structural changes at the company, but they did not add specifics. The prosecutors who signed the suit are all Republicans, and it is not expected to be part of the Justice Department case against the company. The other states' suit against Google, which could come as soon as Thursday, is expected to be signed by Republicans and Democrats and could combine with the federal agency's case. Google's own system for selling ads across the web has been built over more than a decade. In 2007, Google bought DoubleClick, which offered advertising technology and acted as a marketplace, in a deal that has since been criticized as central to Google's dominance. Google now controls software at every step of the ad sales process. The company says that it competes with a vast array of rivals when it comes to offering advertising technology and that its services work with those offered by competitors. In recent years, companies like AT T and Amazon have made attempts to capture more of the market for online ad sales. "Attorney General Paxton's ad tech claims are meritless, yet he's gone ahead in spite of all the facts," said a Google spokeswoman, Julie McAlister. "We will strongly defend ourselves from his baseless claims in court." Publishers like Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation have long contended that Google's dominance lets the company exact a higher cut of each sale without contributing to the costs of creating content. Google's success stands in sharp contrast to shrinking newsrooms and the shuttering of many local newspapers. This year, Google said it would pay news publishers more than 1 billion over the next three years through a new licensing program. After achieving a monopoly, Google has been able to squeeze publishers for a high cut of each ad sold on its platforms, prosecutors said. "The monopoly tax Google imposes on American businesses advertisers like clothing brands, restaurants and realtors is a tax that is ultimately borne by American consumers through higher prices and lower quality on the goods, services and information those businesses provide," they said in the lawsuit. The lawsuit argues that Google used a variety of tactics to become the dominant player in online advertising, hurting publishers, competitors and consumers in the process. They said that Google then tried to destroy a process designed by publishers to introduce more competition into the market for online ads. Under that system, publishers were able to sell ad space in more online marketplaces at once, reducing their reliance on Google's ad tech. The states said that Google had maintained its dominance in part by reaching an agreement with Facebook to limit the social network's involvement in that process. In return, Google gave Facebook an advantage in other ad auctions it runs, the prosecutors said. "The companies' efforts to avoid competition were successful," they said in the lawsuit. Facebook, which did not immediately offer a comment, is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. Ms. McAlister, the Google spokeswoman, said the allegations involving Facebook were inaccurate. A representative for Facebook declined to comment. With the data behind many of the most popular services on the internet, the two companies together sit on a treasure trove of data about what people are interested in, where they go and who they interact with. That information helps advertisers reach the right audience for marketing. Both companies also sell ads for their own sites. The two companies accounted for about 54 percent of U.S. digital advertising in 2019, according to the research firm eMarketer, with Google's share at about 31 percent and Facebook's at 23 percent. The publicly posted version of the complaint is heavily redacted, obscuring key evidence prosecutors are citing to make their case. But the document refers to internal documents from both Google and Facebook. At multiple points, it says that Google gave projects code names inspired by the Star Wars series, but the names themselves are blacked out on the page. The complaint widens the focus of suits over Google's business, said Charlotte Slaiman, the competition policy director at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that has pushed for more regulations for Google. "The powerful market position that Google holds in search also had helped them to develop this powerful market position in advertising technology, and that's part of this complaint," Ms. Slaiman said. "It's also an indication of how broad the competitive challenges are in Big Tech. Mr. Paxton led the investigation into Google even as he faced allegations that he abused the power of his office. Seven of Mr. Paxton's lawyers said this year that he had done favors for a friend and donor and committed bribery. The employees have since left Mr. Paxton's office, or been put on leave or fired outright. Mr. Paxton was also charged with securities fraud in 2015. He has denied those charges as well as the recent allegations made by his own employees. He is also a prominent ally of President Trump, leading some critics to see his investigation of Google as part of a larger conservative campaign against the tech giants. But Ms. Slaiman said that she believed there ultimately would be bipartisan support for the concerns expressed in the lawsuit. She said she hoped that lawmakers in Washington could act on the concerns by passing legislation to rein in the companies, instead of leaving the task entirely to prosecutors. "It's really important to have antitrust enforcement," she said, "but so much more is needed. Maurice Stucke, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and co author of "Competition Overdose," said that the online ad industry stands out as a place where regulators should look, and noted that it has also caught the attention of regulators in Australia, France and Britain. "In no other market do you have one entity that represents most of the buyers, most of the sellers and controls the leading exchange," he said. "You can create a system that on the surface looks robustly competitive but it really isn't." The allegations of collusion with Facebook stood out, Mr. Stucke said, since such examples of anticompetitive behavior are usually seen as the linchpin of a strong antitrust case the type of evidence that should interest more states and even the Justice Department.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
According to the excerpt, aides hurried to cobble together primate documentaries to create a "makeshift gorilla channel." When Mr. Trump bemoaned the lack of gorilla on gorilla fighting, they edited the documentaries to include only footage of the animals hitting one another. The president, the passage said, could watch for up to 17 hours a day. "Wow, this extract from Wolff's book is a shocking insight into Trump's mind," Mr. Ward wrote in his tweet. The post exploded. As of Saturday morning, it had been shared more than 24,000 times and liked more than 80,000 times. More than a few prominent Twitter personalities reposted it and appeared to believe it was real. To be clear: It wasn't. Mr. Ward, who also spawned the Milkshake Duck meme, changed his Twitter display name to "the gorilla channel thing is a joke," and Snopes, the fact checking website, debunked the post. By the weekend, various news outlets, including Esquire and Vice News, had created their own versions of the gorilla channel. Animal Planet, Netflix and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, a conservation group, jumped in on the joke. But because social media jokes and political discourse are sometimes indistinguishable, in a time when Twitter and the White House have become inextricably linked, the satirical post also became fodder for political and societal commentary. 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. Fox News pounced on the viral tweet as evidence of how easily "Trump trashers" could be fooled into believing anything negative about the president. Farhad Manjoo, a New York Times columnist, admonished people for sharing fake screenshots, saying "the jokes just don't work in a partisan echo chamber feed world." Jennifer Stromer Galley, the former president of the Association of Internet Researchers and a professor at Syracuse University, said the gorilla channel meme had spread thanks to people's willingness to suspend disbelief and their susceptibility to confirmation bias the same reasons that fake news accounts are able to take hold, she said. "This is a bit more harmless, but it's part of a larger challenge," she said in an interview on Saturday. "It does raise questions for how we try to empower the public to better sort out what's true from fiction." In an email, Mr. Ward wrote that he has been doing fake screenshots on Twitter for a long time, and he always tried "to make them ridiculous enough that it's clear they're jokes." "But there's always at least a few people who think the joke is real," he continued. "I'm not sure this says anything about the state of society. I think it's just that people assess what they're reading in the context it's presented in, so some people won't realize they're looking at a joke unless you explicitly say 'this is a joke.'" In defense of those who fell for the gorilla channel gag, art or in this case, Twitter jokes might imitate life. A 1997 New Yorker profile of Mr. Trump described a scene aboard his jet as he flew to Mar a Lago, with Mr. Trump watching the 1988 martial arts film "Bloodsport" and tasking his son Eric with fast forwarding to the fight scenes. The gorilla channel tweet is certainly not the first joke post about Mr. Trump to generate partisan debate. A 2015 tweet purporting to show Mr. Trump attacking the rock band Pavement, for example, sent some potential voters into crisis about whether they could support a candidate who didn't appreciate '90s era indie rock. As for whether the viral reach of Mr. Ward's tweet is a harbinger of the death of critical thought and democracy, experts offered some solace. "I think this is just yet another signal that we live in a social media society now," said Jennifer Grygiel, a professor at Syracuse University's school of communications. "If there's a decline in society, there's probably better examples."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
LONDON When James Hyman was a scriptwriter at MTV Europe, in the 1990s, before the rise of the internet, there was a practical as well as compulsive reason he amassed an enormous collection of magazines. "If you're interviewing David Bowie, you don't want to be like, 'O.K., mate, what's your favorite color?'," he said. "You want to go through all the magazines and be able to say, 'Talk about when you did the Nazi salute at Paddington Station in 1976.' You want to be like a lawyer when he preps his case." Whenever possible, Mr. Hyman tried to keep two copies of each magazine he acquired. One pristine copy was for his nascent magazine collection and another was for general circulation among his colleagues, marked with his name to ensure it found its way back to him. The magazines he used to research features on musicians and bands formed the early core of what became the Hyman Archive, which now contains approximately 160,000 magazines, most of which are not digitally archived or anywhere on the internet. It was frigid inside the archive during a recent visit a good 10 degrees colder than the chilly air outside and the staff were bundled up. Space heaters illuminated a nest that Tory Turk (the creative lead), Alexia Marmara (the editorial lead) and Mr. Hyman had made for themselves amid boxes of donations to the collection. It lines more than 3,000 feet of shelving in a former cannon foundry in the 18th century Royal Arsenal complex in Woolwich, a suburban neighborhood abutting the Thames in southeast London. At a moment when the old titans like Conde Nast and Time Inc. are contracting, shape shifting and anxiously hashtagging, herein lies a museum of real magazine making, testament to the old glossy solidity. The price of admission, however, is stiff: visitors can do research with a staffer's aid for 75 pounds per hour (about 100), with negotiable day rates (and a student discount of 20 percent), or gingerly borrow a magazine for three working days for PS50. "I always knew it was a cultural resource and that there was value in it," Mr. Hyman said of the archive. But having the collection verified by Guinness was about validation, he said, "because then people might take it more seriously than just thinking: 'Some lunatic's got a warehouse full of magazines.'" Ms. Turk has a knack for repackaging Mr. Hyman's animated monologues into what in the trade are called sound bites. "I maintain that James always had the foresight that this was going to be something else, more than just a sort of collector's dream," she said. "The archive is all about preserving and documenting the history of print." Mr. Hyman has kept magazines in various storage spaces since the late '80s, and had many, many magazines at home, in his spare room. But in 2010 his wife was expecting a baby. "I wasn't given any ultimatums," he said, "but it was like, 'You're going to have to sort this out.'" (At that time, Ms. Turk also helped Mr. Hyman pare down his collection of about 40,000 compact discs, like a scene out of the Nick Hornby novel "High Fidelity.") The archive is still peppered with periodicals from the MTV days, marked "James." To illustrate the point, Mr. Hyman, 47, pulled from the shelves a 1995 issue of the defunct FactSheet5 "The definitive guide to the zine revolution" with his name scrawled on the cover in black marker. After all these years, Mr. Hyman is still intimately familiar with its contents. "This is a phenomenal publication. It listed zines, just a quirky catalog that reviewed fringe zines. It was sick," he said, before seeking out and indicating a surprisingly positive review of a zine dedicated entirely to its founder's genitals. Each member of the team has a particular familiarity with the archive's contents and has an institutional knowledge of certain titles and their whereabouts. Mr. Hyman is great on music, with a particular fondness for New Musical Express. Ms. Turk is strong on fashion, and Ms. Marmara is especially good at unearthing what Mr. Hyman calls "visual gold" weird or unsung design elements, photo shoots or ads. "If we all died tomorrow, it would be over," Ms. Turk said. No donation is turned down, and Mr. Hyman described the archive as a final resting place for printed matter. "We're heaven for magazines," he said. The archive, for example, recently accepted a "loan" of around 2,680 British, Italian, French and American fashion magazines dating back to the 1930s from the British writer Colin McDowell, the author of 25 books on fashion. Mr. McDowell said his magazines were becoming "unmanageable in my Soho pied a terre and overwhelming in my house in the country." Mr. McDowell said he saved the magazines because they are "the quickest and most memorable source of information," and that he is "more interested in how clothes are featured in magazines than in their catwalk life," as well as in fashion photography and illustration trends. Mr. Hyman accepted the magazines on the condition that Mr. McDowell can recover them from the archive should he need them and that his collection remain intact. Jeremy Leslie, the owner of MagCulture, a magazine shop in London that serves as the locus of a boom in independent magazine publishing in England, said that because magazines by their very nature are rushed to press, they reflect the particular quirks of society during short intervals of time. "In order to understand the value of the Hyman Archive, you have to understand the value of magazines above and beyond their contemporary purpose," he said. "There is a canon of great magazines that is forming, but actually when you look through even magazines that are central to that canon, you see the pages you don't get shown. There are so many subplots to this bigger picture that don't get spotted unless you have the whole thing." This is especially true of niche magazines or ones that aren't widely thought of as classics, Mr. Leslie said. "When you come to look at something from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, there are obvious kinds of historical archive worthy elements, but they are also a great record of design trends, typefaces, photography, writing and technology, so they are fantastic records of time gone." During a recent visit, Mr. Hyman showed a reporter some of the titles and design elements he considers particularly important, including fake ads from Mad magazine trolling the cigarette industry; Kate Moss's first cover (The Face, July 1990); The Notorious B.I.G.'s first appearance in The Source (March 1992); Rihanna on the cover of the first free issue of New Musical Express (September 2015) and a hacking magazine from 1984 called 2600, which, Mr. Hyman said, "is the frequency you used to use to get free calls if you blow your Cap'n Crunch whistle down the phone line," and lists all of the direct phone extensions in the Reagan White House. There is also a copy of the British trade magazine Television from 1980, the cover of which features a bikini clad model holding what appear to be the innards of television set. "This is an early example of a sexy model selling technology," Ms. Marmara said. "It's just so weird. The one after that they went back to showing just the technology." Mr. Hyman isn't a completist, at least not anymore. "I used to be," he said, "but it will never end." Instead, he is seeking funding to finish meta tagging and digitizing the entire archive for use by academics, curators and researchers. He still tries to get two copies of each magazine, but now it's because one needs to be unbound for faster scanning. An archivist has examined the setup at Cannon House and determined it will be safe for another five years or so before needing to be housed properly, ideally as the permanent collection in a proper museum of magazines. "The style of exhibition is changing, it's becoming more populist, more based around contemporary culture, so therefore magazines are becoming important objects," Ms. Turk said. "They show the period, they're great objects." Still, there are titles Mr. Hyman covets. He recently attended a lecture on Japanese magazines, and his mind was somewhat blown by the Tokyo based Popeye, the nearly unclassifiable "magazine for city boys." "My jaw just hit the ground. It was ridiculous. I was like, 'I can't wait for the crate to arrive with every issue of Popeye,'" he said. The speaker "had another magazine that was just about businessmen who'd gotten too drunk and went to sleep in the middle of the night in weird places. And he had two different magazines just about pigeons. I was like, 'whoa.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
I've been thinking about you a lot over the last month of ready to wear shows, because even though only a few brands "officially" combined their men's and women's collections this season Burberry, Bottega Veneta in fact, in Milan at least, it seemed as if the majority of brands were testing out the idea. Antonio Marras, Giorgio Armani and Gucci (to name a few) all had men on the runway, and in Paris, Anthony Vaccarello sneaked a guy into his Saint Laurent debut. Given that Gucci is going to go full on integration next season, and all this suggests they might not be the only ones, I was wondering what you thought about the development? I understand the rationale it is the same designer, telling the same story, whether for men or women; it is cheaper for brands and those who have to see them and though I thought when I first heard about it that it was a logical idea. But after experiencing it, much to my surprise, I am not so sure. Fashion, as usual, follows culture. Designers are doing on runways what consumers have been doing for years: ignoring the creakier traditional restraints of sexual identity (Alice hair bands, anyone? Boyfriend jeans?) to shop across the aisle. Particularly for brands like Burberry and Gucci, whose bottom lines are substantially driven by accessories, fragrance and things other than apparel, it makes a lot of sense to demonstrate an ostentatious easiness about gender. And it's certainly a welcome corrective to the mentality of "locker room talk" and other remnants of an unlamented dinosaur cultural past. Fabrice Gili, creative director of the high end hairdressing salon Frederic Fekkai, recently pointed out to me that the fastest growing and most profitable segment of his business is men. And Fekkai, let's remember, was where Upper East Side ladies went for their highlights. Now it's guys getting a 125 trim. I think of the blend as conceptually good for everyone, a natural way of underscoring the pleasures and advantages of migrating at will along the Kinsey scale. Still, let's not forget that a bellwether like Hedi Slimane at Saint Laurent showed men's and women's together almost from the start and that when the business blew up, almost the first thing he did was build a glossy new guys only store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif. But this isn't necessarily about gender neutral clothes, or men's clothes worn by women and women's clothes by men, although that is what was going on at Saint Laurent. At Bottega and Armani, certainly, it was classic men's wear mixed in with classic women's wear two shows in one, if you will. At Marras, it was men's wear done in the same fabrics as women's wear, but not the same cuts or silhouettes. Ditto at Fenty x Puma, where the guys were not the slim, haunted figures Hedi Slimane and Alessandro Michele favor, but big, hunky dudes. They couldn't fit into a woman's sample size, a la Jaden Smith in his Louis Vuitton ads, where the clothes apparently came straight from the runway. What we had, rather, was the traditional men's looks mixed in with the traditional, or not so traditional, women's looks. And therein lay the problem, at least for me. Because men's wear moves along so incrementally, it's hard to pick up on the evolution when you are being boggled by, say, the abundance of bubble dresses and bubble bloomers at Charmani (his title, by the way, not mine). Which makes me wonder if mixing the two lines won't mean that men's wear starts to get overlooked. I think it's a risk. For me, it's not so much about pussy bows for guys or so called gender neutral styles as it is about gender agnostic consumption. The designers are just reflecting back to us their version of an Amazon search. People don't color within the lines on the web, and fashion is bound to reflect that. I've said before that I'm not so worried about men's wear being swallowed up amid the leg o' mutton sleeves and froufrou. Though you're right that men's wear is glacial in pace, it's still experiencing faster growth across the board than ever. And what global brands like Armani, in particular, are addressing is this shift in shopping habits. Historically, women bought for men, with the exception of suits. The suit, for the moment, is effectively kaput. So it's perfectly sensible to mix up the elevated sportswear Tomas Maier designs without regard for gender and to expect consumers of either (or neither) sex to tune in. (Anyway, Mr. Maier and Giorgio Armani have been softening feminizing, if you like men's wear all along.) As for men's wear getting lost, I'd say check out a big trade fair like Pitti Uomo in Florence, which continues to break records for attendance and exhibitor numbers every season. It's like attending a car or a boat show. Guys geek out on fashion the way they traditionally have obsessed about hot rods or fantasy baseball. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic, but I don't foresee that trend slackening anytime soon. Take off those rose colored glasses! Pitti is a men's wear event, which kind of proves my point: It's huge in part because it's a pure play; as you say, it allows guys to geek out. It highlights what is special or desirable about men's wear, as opposed to hiding it under a much showier women's wear bushel. But maybe, as you say, that's critic's myopia, and consumers are fully capable of taking what they want from where they want, categories be damned, and we should just all be happy about the more efficient use of our time. Though when I went through a lot of the coverage of Burberry, Bottega, et al., to test my theory, it seemed as if readers could be forgiven for not realizing there was men's wear on those runways at all, so little mention did it get (and yes, mea culpa). But maybe that's what designers want? Just to make the clothes and have content for a marketing platform and forget the reviews? Could it be?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
FOR many, deciding to retire can be as straightforward as reaching Social Security eligibility age or amassing a solid nest egg. But for others mulling over when to stop work, there are other powerful, if less measurable, considerations like life expectancy, changing technological demands of the workplace and fear that age bias will limit continued employment. When Mike C. Miller, a personal injury lawyer, was deliberating his retirement decision, the question of how long he might live was a recurring theme. At 55, he recently resolved to step away from his two person practice in Marshall, Tex. "What's on the top of my mind," he said, "is that my dad retired when he was 61, after 40 years as a school administrator, then he died the following May, about eight or nine months later." His father was a smoker and had had prostate cancer, but Mr. Miller has some health problems of his own. "As I get older, I see some echoes of his experience," he said, "and that helped me make up my mind to retire." With his two daughters nearing the end of their educations, Mr. Miller said, "I can afford it now, as long as I don't spend whole hog." Mr. Miller can expect, on average, to live about 30 more years, according to government statistics. Estimates differ, but for individual calculations, the Social Security Administration has an online life expectancy calculator to help people figure out their longevity. A 65 year old man, for example, can expect to live, on average, until 84.5 years old, and a woman of the same age until 86.8 years old, according to Social Security. (The calculator does not factor in a person's current health, family history and other matters.) Merely because people can continue to work into their 70s and beyond, though, "does not mean that longer work lives are a reasonable option for all," said Sara E. Rix, who analyzes retirement issues for the AARP Public Policy Institute. "We may think we have a pretty good idea of how long we will live judging from the age of death of a parent or grandparent of the same sex," she said, "but we can't rule out dying well before then and before we eventually retire." Individuals who expect to live until they are 75 or older often delay their retirement target date, according to a 2014 study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, typically to add to their retirement savings. "There is so much push to work longer it's practically a mantra but sometimes if you have a health history or a family health history, you need to take that into account in making the decision to retire," said Alicia H. Munnell, the center's director. Seeing friends die early helped prompt Patrick Hale and his wife, Gina, both 58 years old, of Jacksonville, Fla., to come up with a plan to retire at 62, despite having fine health, "good genes," plenty of stamina and solid jobs as public schoolteachers. "It's an eye opener when you see someone pass away from a brain aneurysm," said Mr. Hale, a science teacher and avid bicyclist. Like his wife, who teaches music appreciation and music history and who plays tennis regularly he comes from a long lived family. "Sure, there are challenges in the workplace," he said, "but we have a plan to work another three years, until mid 2018, and then start the next chapter of our lives." Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' While optimism or pessimism about expected longevity can influence the timing of retirement, other challenges like technology can precipitate a permanent departure from working. Many reaching retirement age today have not had routine exposure to the media tools that are becoming regular features of current offices. Sally Shelburne, 73, of Washington, said technology changes hastened her retirement two years ago from the National Gallery of Art, where she was a staff lecturer. "There was no mandatory age requirement for retiring," said Ms. Shelburne, who raised four children, then returned to college to earn two advanced degrees, including a doctorate in modern and contemporary art. She later joined the National Gallery's education division, and gave lectures on Picasso and other major artists. But technology began to upend how art and other museums were providing information to visitors, and the scheduled gallery talk began to seem more old fashioned. Multimedia devices opened up ways to package visual, audio and video information for museum goers to use on their own timetable. "As audio guides and smartphones became more prevalent," Ms. Shelburne said, "I began to feel we were a bit of a declining breed. You could see the handwriting on the wall." Like Ms. Shelburne, Leslye Evans Lane, 60, a board certified academic coach in Portland, Ore., was in a situation where retirement might be the graceful choice. She worked in higher education for years, including four years as an academic adviser at a community college in Albuquerque. She moved with her husband to Portland two years ago so he could pursue his career in the utilities industry. Then she started looking for a new job, but, after repeated efforts, she could not find an opening that made use of her experience and credentials. "In one job I applied for, they told me they didn't think I could register students in the computer system," she said. "Of course, I had done that before." Another potential employer told her that she "couldn't relate to 18 year olds," she recalled. That, too, she rejects as a reason not to hire her and says, "It's been shock, denial and depression. I never dreamed that higher education here would be this way." Ms. Evans Lane is one of many older workers who face impediments to finding a job, said Michael D. Hurd, director of the Rand Center for the Study of Aging, who has examined how the labor market treats aging workers. "A better educated, higher skilled, older worker competes for a new job with a young, less educated, lower skilled worker," he said. Not only is it harder to find a job, he said, but "it's highly likely that a new job will be low paying." That is what Ms. Evans Lane experienced. She finally took a part time, on call job at an animal shelter, where she cleans kennels and helps out. And she has shifted her retirement age downward, to 62. "I want to work, but I'm going to be involuntarily retired," she said. "That means I will get fewer benefits than if I had worked until 65." For those who can do it, having a fallback plan for unforeseen difficulties is ideal. For example, Mr. Miller in Texas has given himself some leeway to make sure he is making the right decision to leave his job. He is taking a three to six month sabbatical from his law firm, leaving himself the option of returning to work part time if money is tight or if he is bored as a retiree. Of course, "I own the practice," he said with a chuckle. Even so, he's not eager to return, noting "there's nothing healthy about my job. It's a lot of stress."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The N.B.A. on Friday furnished teams with an expected timeline for the rest of the season but also notified them that it has not yet completed negotiations with the players' union on the health and safety protocols that would govern the planned resumption of play at Walt Disney World Resort next month, according to a private memorandum obtained by The New York Times. The delay in the release of the guidelines, which were widely expected on Friday, comes amid growing concerns among N.B.A. players about various aspects of the 22 team return to play plan. A summary of regulations for the campus at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex near Orlando, Fla., might still come within the next few days, according to a league spokesman. But a number of players have voiced worries over the plan in recent days. A primary concern is the restrictions on daily life that would be imposed on players in the so called bubble environment conceived by the league to stave off the coronavirus. Perhaps an even more significant issue is the suggestion from some players that returning to work could divert the spotlight from, or even hamper, efforts made by numerous N.B.A. players to take an active role in the surging Black Lives Matter movement worldwide. "I think guys are gathering to really talk about and dive deep into the idea of not playing," Malcolm Brogdon of the Indiana Pacers told the New Orleans Pelicans' JJ Redick on a podcast from The Ringer. The Pelicans and Pacers are included in the 22 team field. In an interview with GQ, Damian Lillard of the Portland Trail Blazers, another team included in the format, said his teammates were "about split" on whether they were comfortable with the rules the N.B.A. was expected to impose to limit player movement within the bubble. The restrictions have been negotiated through weeks of talks between top league officials and a player group headed by Oklahoma City's Chris Paul, the president of the National Basketball Players Association, but have not yet been disseminated to all players. "A lot of my teammates are like: 'Whatever, let's play. Let's hoop. If that's what we're gonna do and they're saying it's safe, then let's do it,'" Lillard told GQ. Others, Lillard said, are asking, "'Are we just doing this because we don't want to miss out on this money?' People just don't know." It is not clear yet whether the surfacing player trepidation is merely 11th hour concern as a summons to Florida draws near or a movement that could legitimately imperil the N.B.A.'s planned comeback. The league and union's plans are at such an advanced stage that teams received a detailed outline of dates for the next four months in Friday's memo. Roughly 80 players, including some from the W.N.B.A., met on a conference call Friday night organized by the Nets' Kyrie Irving. They discussed their reservations about playing amid the unrest over racial issues in the country, on top of coronavirus concerns, the challenges posed by the bubble environment the virus has necessitated and coming back after a layoff that reached the three month mark Thursday. Although he's a member of the union's executive council, Irving has been one of the main figures behind this week's player pushback about resuming the season, according to Bleacher Report. The Nets' Garrett Temple, who is also a member of the N.B.P.A.'s executive council, has countered Irving's perspective in multiple interviews, insisting that the N.B.A.'s return would provide black players with a considerable stage to help fuel their push for social justice while also protecting their financial interests. Temple and Paul also participated in Friday's conference call and Jared Dudley of the Los Angeles Lakers took to Twitter to warn his peers of the potentially dire financial consequences that players leaguewide could face if this season does not go ahead, since the N.B.A. would then have the ability to terminate its collective bargaining agreement with the union. The current expectation is that players will be required to register two negative tests for the coronavirus upon arrival at Disney World and then must quarantine in their hotel rooms for up to 48 hours. Training camps would run from July 9 through July 29 with up to three intrasquad scrimmages per team from July 21 to 29 before regular season and playoff games take place from July 30 through Oct. 13. Players' families and friends, according to Friday's memo, would not be allowed into the bubble before Aug. 30 at which point 14 of the 22 teams will have been eliminated. It is also expected that any N.B.A. player found leaving the bubble without authorization would be required to quarantine for 10 days before being allowed to play. Yahoo reported that there was "a significant number" of players disappointed that the union's vote last Friday to approve the 22 team format and playoff structure was conducted solely among 28 of the 30 teams' player representatives, not the union's full membership. In addition to their concerns about resuming a full contact indoor sport during a continuing pandemic, some players believe it would be "bad optics" for a league in which an estimated 80 percent of players are African American to play games amid the vast protests against systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd's death in police custody in Minneapolis, Yahoo reported. "Look at the lengths that we're going to play a basketball game when there's something so much greater going on something so much more meaningful going on that really needs us," Lillard told GQ. "So I mean it's a battle every day for me, man." "I've talked to a few guys that are super interested in sitting out possibly," Brogdon said on Redick's podcast. "Some guys are going to say, 'For health reasons, like Covid and the long term effects that we don't understand about Covid, I want to sit out.' Other guys are going to say: 'The black community and my people are going through too much for me to basically be distracted with basketball. I'm not going to prioritize this over the black community, I'm going to sit out.'" ESPN reported this week that players who chose not to play would forfeit their salaries for games missed but would not otherwise be sanctioned by their teams or the league. Also on Friday, Florida recorded the state's biggest daily increase to date with 1,902 new coronavirus cases 95 of them in Orange County where Disney World is.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
A 6,000 year old tomb in Northern Spain provides valuable information about an ancient Neolithic community, according to a new study in the journal PLOS One. The tomb holds the remains of 47 individuals, laid to rest in several layers. Individuals in the bottom tomb were closely related, and family members were buried side by side, DNA analysis suggests. In layers above, however, the bodies appear to be missing skeletal parts, including skulls. The bones were manipulated, possibly for ritualistic purposes. . The analysis also showed that the community relied on cereals and other plant based food for sustenance.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The Wirecutter, The New York Times site for product evaluations, has lots of advice on the best gadgets, but also has ideas on how to buy them in a smarter way. I talked to Andrew Cunningham, lead editor there, about how he thinks we should "buy" a cellphone: by leasing it. Have I been procuring my phone the wrong way? At the beginning of the smartphone era, you pretty much had to buy. You could either buy it outright for 600 to 700 or you could get it for 200 ish with a two year contract and then own the phone at the end. Carriers do that to reduce sticker shock, and then they charge you as much or more in your actual bill over the course of your two year contract. In return, AT T or Verizon, or whoever, basically owned you. When you reached the end of the contract and you had paid for the phone, it was two years old and trashed, and so you'd go back and get a new phone and start all over again. The barriers to leaving were super high with big cancellation fees. So what is the idea to cut loose? Leasing. It's similar to the old system, as you're still paying for the phone over the course of your contract. But it's not so much a hidden fee now. They specify the monthly price upfront and it's usually a separate line item on your bill, so you always know what you're being charged for.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Over six seasons, "BoJack Horseman," which released its final episodes Friday on Netflix, evolved from a scathing Hollywood satire into a more expansive and often disquieting exploration of depression, addiction and human morality. But on the fringes of all that, it was also a show about animals doing funny things. As BoJack, the self destructive celebrity horse voiced by Will Arnett, negotiated the dark corners of Hollywoo and his own psyche, a steady stream of peripheral visual gags puns, pop culture references, the occasional cocaine addled lemur made his various descents more palatable. "The fact that we get so stupid lets us earn when we get so serious," said Mike Hollingsworth, a co executive producer and supervising director. "Without the silly animal things, it would get too maudlin." After Raphael Bob Waksberg, the show's creator, and the writers finish the script for an episode, the visual jokes are added during the storyboard phase "when we can feel the pacing," Hollingsworth said. "They all have to take a back seat to the story." Hollingsworth was a stand up comic who also drew cartoons for publications like L.A. Weekly before he moved into animation. He has been with "BoJack" from the beginning, directing the pilot among other episodes, and serving as a primary architect for "the deep cut animal things." "I'm basically a gag man, a reincarnation of Mike Maltese," he said, referring to the cartoon artist and writer best known for his work with the Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. In a recent interview, Hollingsworth discussed some of his favorite deep cut animal things from throughout the run of "BoJack Horseman." Puns of all kinds are core to the "BoJack" experience, and one of the series's most groaningly brilliant came during a Season 2 scene in a '50s themed restaurant. The bartender? A snugly T shirted trophy fish named Marlin Brando, of course, but the twist came as he delivered the three beers on his tray: "Raphael told me everyone complimented him on that one after Season 2 came out," Hollingsworth said. "And he had to say, 'Thanks, but that wasn't my joke.'" "It's You," an episode in the third season, found BoJack throwing a rager at his house to celebrate what he thought was an Oscar nomination. The party was a visual smorgasbord of dissipated animal behavior, and offered Hollingsworth the chance to finally bring in an aye aye, a bizarre looking nocturnal lemur he'd been wanting to get into the show, for a quick foreground joke. Aye ayes have incredibly long, thin middle fingers, which they use in the wild to find bugs but that at a Hollywoo bash might also work for ... well, you can probably see where this is going. One of the show's most acclaimed episodes was a Season 3 underwater fantasia that included very little dialogue. The installment found BoJack attending the Pacific Ocean Film Fest, which led to him getting mocked by a walrus chauffeur, fleeing an angry bodega owning shark (Tim Jaws) and delivering a litter of baby sea horses, among other animal gags. "But the one I remember was this celebrity octopus who had all of these autograph seekers surrounding him," Hollingsworth said. "He signed them all at the same time by blowing out a big cloud of ink." "BoJack" aimed to avoid obvious animal gags. "I was always telling the writers, 'We've got to get past the tall giraffes and fat hippos,'" Hollingsworth said. But that didn't mean he was above the occasional piece of low hanging fruit. One such example came in a Season 2 scene of workers building a set, which included a brief shot of a hammerhead shark pounding nails with its face. Easy? Sure, but it's also one of the jokes "BoJack" fans most frequently bring up, Hollingsworth said. "It's like, I'm glad you like it but it's not my finest work." But sometimes an obvious joke can be elevated by its execution. In Season 1, "BoJack" mined gold from a broad premise cheetahs are fast, sloths are slow by putting them on treadmills on either side of Princess Caroline (Amy Sedaris) at the gym. Hollingsworth added that he enjoyed Disney's DMV sloth bit in "Zootopia," which came out a couple of years later, though he noted that a sequence that by definition brings the action to a standstill would never work on television. "In film you can stretch things out a bit longer," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
New Orleans Saints Coach Sean Payton is the first known member of the N.F.L. community to test positive for the coronavirus. Payton told ESPN on Thursday that his symptoms started on Sunday the day after he attended the Rebel Stakes, a thoroughbred horse race at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark. He said he was tested on Monday and received the results on Thursday. "I'm feeling better and fortunate to not have any of the respiratory symptoms," Payton said in a Twitter post, adding that he expected to stay home for four more days. "This is not just about social distancing," Payton, 56, said. "It's shutting down here for a week to two weeks. If people understand the curve, and understand the bump, we can easily work together as a country to reduce it. Take a minute to understand what the experts are saying. It's not complicated to do what they're asking of us. Just that type of small investment by every one of us will have a dramatic impact." The Saints declined a request for comment clarifying the length of Payton's planned seclusion. The N.F.L.'s new league year began Wednesday, and teams are signing free agents and trading players despite travel restrictions. Players are barred from meeting with teams in person, and they must take physical exams which are generally required to complete a deal where they live instead of at teams' headquarters, as they normally would. The headquarters are closed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Travel is supposed to be about the journey. The goal isn't to get there first. Yet a variety of new services are aiming to speed things along, be it automatically checking you in for your flight, accompanying you through security, reserving a car or hotel with voice commands, or whisking you to the French countryside on new high speed trains. Here's a look at half a dozen of the latest innovations. CHECKING IN FOR YOUR FLIGHT AirlineCheckins.com, an automatic check in tool that was in beta last year, is officially up and running. AirlineCheckins.com is free and does just what the name suggests it does for flights on more than 100 airlines worldwide with automated check in. It's handy for those who don't want to bother looking up their reservation number and going through the usual steps the day before a flight. When you register on the site which includes filling out a profile with seating preferences, travel companions, frequent flier program information and identification documents you receive an AirlineCheckins.com personal email address. Thereafter, whenever you book a flight, you use that personal email address. This allows the site's agents to check you in as soon as the airline's online check in window opens. If applicable, the site will also choose seats for you based on the preferences you selected. After that, your boarding pass is automatically sent to you via email or SMS message. The tool was created by the Lufthansa Innovation Hub, a subsidiary of the Lufthansa Group in Berlin, but can be used by any traveler on any airline that has online check in capability. GLOBAL ENTRY ENROLLMENT ON ARRIVAL You've probably heard of Global Entry, the expedited security program from United States Customs and Border Protection. If so, you've probably also heard that wait times can be tedious at its enrollment centers. Customs and Border Protection is endeavoring to change that with "Enrollment on Arrival," introduced this month at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, William P. Hobby Airport and Austin Bergstrom International Airport, all in Texas; San Francisco International Airport; and Vancouver International Airport in British Columbia. With "Enrollment on Arrival," if you've been conditionally approved for Global Entry, but still need to complete the in person interview, you can do so during Customs primary inspection at the participating airport instead of at a Global Entry enrollment center. The program will be rolled out to more airports in the coming months. (The Global Entry application fee is 100 for a five year membership; you must begin the enrollment process online.) AN ESCORT THROUGH THE AIRPORT A new tool, Solve, describes itself as an airport concierge service. Its goal is to save travelers time and alleviate confusion by providing someone to meet them at their arrival gate, expedite the immigration and Customs process, and then escort them to whatever car or shuttle is to take them to their hotel or home rental. The company sees itself as particularly useful for business travelers and young and elderly travelers. Solve is available in more than 480 airports globally, and the company says most of its employees speak both English and the local language. The cost starts around 225 a leg for two people. BOOK A HOTEL OR A CAR WITH YOUR VOICE If you've always wanted to be able to say "Book me a hotel room in Las Vegas" and suddenly find yourself with a reservation, you're in luck. Kayak just announced that users can now book hotel rooms with voice commands through Amazon's Alexa smart home devices. (Previously, you could search for hotels, flights and rental cars by speaking, but you couldn't book them that way.) Kayak performs the search for rooms while the booking is done through its sister brands, Booking.com and Priceline.com. This, as one might imagine, is not necessarily for obsessives who want to look at and compare dozens of hotel reviews, photos and lists of amenities. Early reviews suggest voice booking is best for the traveler who is looking to reserve a room at a familiar hotel, such as one he or she regularly stays in for business. Kayak is not the only travel company wading into voice only booking. Next month, Avis will introduce voice powered car reservation capability with Alexa, allowing users to issue commands such as "I need a car at La Guardia Airport at 9 a.m. this Friday." Customers will be able to make car rental reservations, review current or past reservations, and request electronic receipts of their last rental. As for booking your next flight, you still have to do that the old fashioned way: online. UNLOCK YOUR HOTEL ROOM WITH A SMARTPHONE A few years ago, digital room keys were a novelty. Today, brands like Marriott and Hilton have made them available through their mobile apps at hundreds of hotels and are planning to make them even more widely available. Hilton, which offers digital keys at hotels throughout the United States and Canada, is now introducing them in Britain. This year Marriott is rolling out its mobile key to more than 500 hotels globally. The company has also expanded the capabilities of its mobile check in/checkout feature. For the first time, users can request room upgrades and find out if they have been approved before they arrive. Additionally, they can skip the line at the front desk and request late checkout, which is guaranteed for Gold and Platinum Elite loyalty program members. WHIZ THROUGH THE FRENCH COUNTRYSIDE This summer, France began operating two new high speed trains. Now you can get from Paris to Bordeaux in about two hours, and from Paris to Rennes in less than an hour and a half. Every day, some 35,000 high speed seats will be offered between Paris and Bordeaux and 30,000 high speed seats between Paris and Rennes. Look for interiors by the French designer Christian Lacroix on the Rennes route. For those who care about staying connected, some trains to Brittany will begin offering Wi Fi later this year. The Bordeaux route trains will offer internet access.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
A newly described horned dinosaur with peculiar ornamentation was a close relative of Triceratops, paleontologists have found. The dinosaur had a longer nose horn than Triceratops, and two small horns above its eyes. But its most distinctive feature was a radiating frill, a set of large, pentagonal plates like a crown atop its head. Researchers at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Canada named their find Regaliceratops peterhewsi. They first stumbled on the bones sticking out of a cliff along the Oldman River, in southeastern Alberta, about a decade ago. Like other horned dinosaurs, Regaliceratops probably evolved during the late Cretaceous, 65 million to 100 million years ago. Its nearly complete skull is described in the journal Current Biology.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In the biography of nearly every white rock performer of a certain vintage, there's a pivotal moment more pivotal than signing the ill advised first contract that leads to decades of litigation, and more pivotal than the first social disease. The moment is when the subject watched Elvis Presley's appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" on Sept. 9, 1956. For Black audiences and many future musicians, the crucial moment came three years later. On Dec. 10, 1959, CBS, in partnership with Revlon, broadcast a prime time special called "Tonight With Belafonte," produced and hosted by Harry Belafonte, the debonair and rawboned Jamaican American singer. These weren't easy years for Black families to gather around the television. As Margo Jefferson wrote in her memoir "Negroland," they turned on the set "waiting to be entertained and hoping not to be denigrated." Belafonte was given artistic control over his program. He told executives he wanted a largely unknown folk singer named Odetta to perform prominently. One executive asked, "Excuse me, Harry, but what is an Odetta?" Revlon was bemused to learn she did not wear makeup. The hourlong show was commercial free except for a Revlon spot at the beginning and end. At the start, Belafonte sang two songs. In what is, amazingly, the first in depth biography of this performer, "Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest," the music writer Ian Zack picks up the story. "Next a lone spotlight shone on Odetta wearing a dark loose fitting dress, and she began singing 'Water Boy,' or, rather, she unleashed it. Accompanying herself with her large National acoustic guitar, eyes closed, brows knitted in concentration, she brought the full tragedy and anger of chain gang life to bear." 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. It was a mesmerizing performance. Odetta was drawing on spiritual patrons that included not just Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey and Lead Belly; with her classically trained voice, she put listeners in mind of the contralto Marian Anderson. There was a second mesmerizing aspect to Odetta's performance: her natural hair. This was years before the "Black is beautiful" movement, and unstraightened hair was a real rarity so much so that, for a time, the cut was called "an Odetta." Zack's biography, a solid work of reportage and writing, is one of two new books that assess Odetta's life and legacy. "One Grain of Sand," by Matthew Frye Jacobson, is an essayistic exploration of the songs on Odetta's 1963 album of the same title. Jacobson's book is part of the estimable 33 1/3 series of short books about individual albums. He teaches American Studies and African American Studies at Yale, and his book expands the context of Odetta's songs, setting her alongside figures like Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois and many others. It would not be correct to say that Odetta has been forgotten. In Ava DuVernay's 2014 movie "Selma," for example, the singer's ill boding cover of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" plays during the climactic scene, as marchers are beaten while trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But she's closer to being erased from mainstream cultural memory than she should be. Odetta Holmes (1930 2008) was born in Birmingham, Ala. She never knew her biological father. She was given the surname Felious after her stepfather, a steelworker. When he developed black lung disease, the family moved to Los Angeles to find cleaner air. Out there, both parents worked as janitors. Odetta was a large person from birth, and she was acutely aware of that fact. (Early in her career, Zack notes, "writers would wear out thesauri describing her hair and weight.") She was the kind of girl who tended not to come to school on photo day. She was recognized early for her voice, and took lessons with good instructors, often singing German lieder. She traveled to San Francisco in 1951 with a theater group and discovered the folk scene there. The songs she heard and later went in search of convict songs, spirituals, slave songs provided a political awakening. Of this awakening, she would say: "It straightened my back and it kinked my hair." She realized early that "society's foot is on your throat" and "every which way you turn you can't get from under that foot." About singing these old songs, she said: "I could get my rocks off, being furious." Odetta began playing clubs in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, where she ultimately moved. Her early manager was Albert Grossman (she was his first client), who helped put together the first Newport Folk Festival largely as a platform for her. She hollered and clapped her way through her songs, and hammered on the side of her guitar. She was self deprecating about her guitar style. She once called it mere "self defense." Before long, to her dismay, Grossman's better known white clients like Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary vastly eclipsed her in popularity. Her albums did not spin off hit singles. There are many excellent details in Zack's biography. He charts Odetta's friendship with Maya Angelou, who in the mid 1950s had what the author calls a "sexy calypso queen act." Angelou said of the two of them: "We were both tall Black ladies, with attitudes. And most people were really scared of us. We were young and Black and female and crazy as road lizards." One of Odetta's longtime band members was the bassist Bill Lee, Spike Lee's father. Odetta was an outsize influence on Dylan. He said that the first time he heard her, "I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat top Gibson." He bought her 1957 album "Ballads and Blues." "I learned almost every song off the record, right then and there, even borrowing the hammering on style," Dylan said. When he later visited Odetta in the studio while she was recording an album of his songs, she said, "Get your white ass out of here!" She didn't want him in her head.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
We All Have a Stake in the Stock Market, Right? Guess Again The riotous market swings that have whipped up frothy peaks of anxiety over the last week bringing the major indexes down more than 10 percent from their high have virtually no impact on the income or wealth of most families. The reason: They own little or no stock. A whopping 84 percent of all stocks owned by Americans belong to the wealthiest 10 percent of households. And that includes everyone's stakes in pension plans, 401(k)'s and individual retirement accounts, as well as trust funds, mutual funds and college savings programs like 529 plans. "For the vast majority of Americans, fluctuations in the stock market have relatively little effect on their wealth, or well being, for that matter," said Edward N. Wolff, an economist at New York University who recently published new research on the topic. Both Republicans and Democrats have promoted the idea that a rising stock market broadly lifts Americans' fortunes. When there was a parade of market rallies, President Trump asked, "How's your 401(k) doing?" There was a move toward democratizing stock ownership in the 1980s and 1990s, with the advent of individual retirement accounts, but the busts of 2001 and 2007 scared off some middle class investors. Of course, any financial loss can be scary and painful. Indeed, the less you have, the more each dollar counts. And market gyrations could foreshadow deeper problems that signal the end of a nine year boom and short circuit the economic recovery. But the day to day impact on most people's overall wealth is minimal. "It's far from where you think that it would be, given the rhetoric," said Ray Boshara, director of the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. A look at some fundamentals may provide a clearer perspective. Roughly half of all households don't have a cent invested in stocks, whether through a 401(k) account or shares in General Electric. That leaves half the population with some exposure to financial market whims, but as Mr. Boshara said, "some exposure can be 100 bucks." "If you look at where the money is really held, it's among the top 10 percent," he said. "And if you break it down by age, race and education and parental education, you'll see the disparities are even larger." Parents who lack a four year degree and, later on, their children are much less likely to have a direct stake in the stock market than college graduates; blacks and Hispanics are much less likely than whites.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Credit...Cole Wilson for The New York Times Jonah Peretti, the chief executive, says his company could eventually merge with other online publishers in order to negotiate better terms with t ech platforms like Facebook. BuzzFeed has long positioned itself as the future of publishing it practices the mysterious arts of digital media better than anyone. From the beginning, its ability to know, before anyone else, what sort of content would go viral delivered it a large audience and helped the company attract half a billion dollars in venture money and a steady stream of mostly positive media attention. Then came 2017, when the company fell far short of its revenue goal of 350 million. Sales instead came in flat at about 260 million , according to three people with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the company's finances. One hundred people were laid off. Considerations for a public offering in late 2018 were shelved. But efforts to re establish its fortunes have already begun. The company expects to surpass 300 million in revenue this year, the three people said. To get there, BuzzFeed now sells cookware at Walmart and accepts banner ads on its web pages. It runs a morning show on Twitter, a weekly one on Facebook and another on Netflix, all of which are paid for by the platforms. Its newsroom and its entertainment studio churn out thousands of videos and articles each week, to an audience of 690 million people every month. The company also gets a commission when a reader buys a product on Amazon or other commerce sites after clicking through from one of BuzzFeed's recommended product links, known as affiliate marketing. Still, these are largely stopgaps. The better solution according to Jonah Peretti, a founder of the company and its chief executive, would require a much more audacious effort : a series of mergers with five or six top internet publishers. "You have Vice and Vox Media and Group Nine and Refinery," Mr. Peretti said in an interview. "There's tons of them that are doing interesting work." He extolled the logic of combining forces: A larger entity could lobby for a higher percentage of the ad dollars Facebook and Google share with publishers whenever their content, videos in particular, runs on the platforms. In turn, publishers can supply them with content that is safe for users and friendlier for advertisers. He pointed to how Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have had to answer for the latest content crisis plaguing social media . In addition to Russia's misinformation campaign to try to sway the 2016 presidential election in the United States, hate speech and conspiracy theories regularly show up on their platforms. "Having some bigger companies that actually care about the quality of the content feels like something that's very valuable," he said. Though initial discussions involving a few companies have taken place, they were all very preliminary, according to five people with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. BuzzFeed has spoken to at least one other company, while other publishers have had separate discussions, these people said. Mr. Peretti declined to name which companies he has talked to regarding any potential mergers. Any deal would be difficult to pull off given the number of investors involved and the compounding losses that would result from combining several money losing start ups. Staff cuts would be inevitable. Still, publishers have been getting squeezed by the tech platforms as online advertising rates continue to level off. "If BuzzFeed and five of the other biggest companies were combined into a bigger digital media company, you would probably be able to get paid more money," he said. Content companies everywhere are hurting, especially after Facebook introduced a sweeping change in 2016 that significantly reduced the visibility of articles and videos from publishers in News Feed, its main artery of content. Vice Media will be profitable by the "next fiscal year," the chief executive Nancy Dubuc said, but staff cuts would be needed to meet that goal. Vox Media, publisher of The Verge and Eater, has struggled to hit its more ambitious revenue targets. Group Nine, owner of popular sites such as The Dodo and Now This, has sought ways to get better ad terms from Facebook and Google. Refinery29, a publisher focused on videos aimed at young women, recently had to lay off nearly 10 percent of its staff. A natural camaraderie exists among the digital publishers, which could make a potential partnership more palatable, said Benjamin Lerer, the chief executive of Group Nine. 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. "I don't believe my competition is BuzzFeed or Vox or Vice," he said. "We compete on a day to day basis for business, but the ultimate competition here is us against traditional TV and also protecting ourselves against the big platforms." Mr. Lerer and Mr. Peretti have been friends for over a decade, and Mr. Lerer's father, the venture capitalist Kenneth Lerer, is the chairman of BuzzFeed. He also sits on the board of Group Nine. But the younger Mr. Lerer stressed that any business deal between the two would not include his father to avoid conflicts of interest. "Consolidation in digital media is something that is going to happen," he added. Money for a merger wouldn't be an issue, according to Mr. Peretti. The sticking points would center on who would run a combined entity as well as how each business would be valued in a merger. The combined valuation of the companies Mr. Peretti mentioned exceeds 7 billion. Other publishing executives acknowledged the seeming inevitability of consolidation. "We'll always consider ways to better serve our audiences and strategically grow our business through building, partnering and acquisition," said Jim Bankoff, the chief executive of Vox Media. Philippe von Borries, a co chief executive of Refinery29, said that in the next year or so there might be "an opportunity for the leading media and entertainment companies that emerged over the past decade to come together," provided all parties could settle on a shared culture and vision. Mr. Peretti, 44, started BuzzFeed in 2006 as a kind of experimental project while working at The Huffington Post, an early giant of web publishing that he founded with Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer. BuzzFeed then was little more than a bot running out of a small office in Chinatown. The program would scour thousands of links across popular blogs to sort out which ones were trending. It became incredibly accurate. Mr. Peretti was able to find which stories people wanted before they did. (He left The Huffington Post now called HuffPost in 2011 after it was sold to AOL for 315 million.) In many ways it was a return to his first media obsession: what makes something go viral. In 2001, while a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, Mr. Peretti got in a heated email exchange with customer service representatives at Nike. The company allowed buyers to customize their shoes with a word or phrase. Mr. Peretti chose "sweatshop." The request was denied. Mr. Peretti insisted "sweatshop" had not violated Nike's criteria, but the company wouldn't fulfill his order. He forwarded the email thread to several friends who sent it on to several others. It eventually reached millions of people. Mr. Peretti ended up appearing on the "Today" show debating labor issues with a Nike executive. The story has become the stuff of internet lore, but it also represents the heart of BuzzFeed. The early chat bot became a website, which led to original content and then the formation of a newsroom, which now boasts a huge monthly audience. As BuzzFeed's audience has grown, so has the diversity of its content. Hard hitting investigative journalism lives alongside listicles, quizzes and cooking videos. When BuzzFeed started, Mr. Peretti didn't want banner ads because they significantly slowed down the site, so he pushed for native ads posts that look like editorial content but are designed for marketers. "BuzzFeed has always been very experimental," he said. The ethos that led to its viral content and mining of memes to explain the day's news is now being applied on the business side, he said, "to consider commerce and advertising and even donations." The company is positioning its membership model as a way of supporting its journalism, despite being a for profit company. BuzzFeed had experimented this year by soliciting donations from readers for its news division. The high level of interest spurred the creation of memberships, which sound similar to fund raising drives by nonprofits like PBS. Last year, native advertising slowed down considerably, so BuzzFeed started accepting banner ads. After President Trump was elected, a lot of brands didn't know what they wanted to say, Mr. Peretti said. "Some of them got scared to say anything because everything seemed polarized," he said. That prompted the move to accept traditional ad formats. This year, BuzzFeed started selling cookware based on the popularity of its Tasty cooking videos. The company licensed the name to a manufacturer that sells the branded pots and pans at Walmart, a deal worth more than 20 million to BuzzFeed, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Making sure the business can thrive is important to Mr. Peretti, even if it comes in the form of bakeware and banner ads. At a staff meeting in Los Angeles a few years ago, someone asked Mr. Peretti what he would do if he won the lottery. He responded: "I already won the lottery when we sold HuffPost to AOL. After that, I went out and bought a Honda Odyssey." Mr. Peretti acknowledges the anecdote but said it shouldn't be characterized to mean he doesn't care about money, or its importance to BuzzFeed. "A company that doesn't generate money isn't a company that gets to do very much," he said. "From a business standpoint, money is a means to an end."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Magda Szabo's novel "Abigail" begins with an ending. When we first encounter 14 year old Gina Vitay, "the change that came about in her life robbed her of so much it was as if a bomb had destroyed her home." The change in question the sudden dismissal of Gina's beloved governess is just one of many upheavals soon to launch a cosseted teenager into an abrupt adulthood. Originally published in 1970, "Abigail" is Szabo's most popular book in her native Hungary, where it has been adapted into both a TV series and a musical and where it is even more widely read than "The Door," the 1987 novel that may be her best known work outside her country. The English edition of "Abigail" is as welcome as it is overdue. Len Rix's translation is deft, but Szabo's frank, conversational prose takes a back seat to her sinuous plotting: The novel unspools its secrets over many pages, and the resulting tour de force is taut with suspense. It is 1943 when Gina's father, a general in the Hungarian Army, ships his daughter off to an oppressively pious boarding school in the remote village of Arkod (now the Serbian town of Jarkovac). Despite Gina's protests, the general offers no explanations. Instead, he warns her to keep her whereabouts a secret from her friends back in Budapest. Gina quickly discovers that Bishop Matula Academy is a bastion of strictly enforced uniformity. As soon as she arrives, her personal effects are confiscated, and her hair is trimmed so that it is indistinguishable from that of her peers. The students look so similar in their identical outfits that Gina struggles to differentiate them; they are even required to use regulation soap. To add insult to injury, the Matula girls are barred from voicing their dissatisfaction. Gina plans to apprise her father of her misery in her first missive home, but a teacher warns her, "We do not forward letters that mention complaints." "They have swallowed me whole," Gina thinks in despair. Initially, she has no more patience for her classmates' defiant antics than she has for her teachers' chastisements. Most juvenile of all is the myth that Abigail, a sculpture in the school garden, comes to the aid of students who drop handwritten entreaties into her urn. Gina is so unimpressed by this childish superstition and so dismayed by her austere environment that she contemplates running away. But Abigail soon proves more substantial than she seemed at first. It's not long before Gina has cause to wonder, "Why was I so slow to understand that in this forest of rules and instructions and prohibitions there might be someone, not a mere stone statue but a real person hiding behind it, ready to help anyone with a genuine need?" Her classmates, too, win her over, and she comes to understand their pranks and traditions as survival tactics ingenious means of cultivating individuality in an institution designed to root it out. Once Gina befriends her peers, she starts to relish their flair for subversion. "Like hungry little foxes," her co conspirators are "always on the qui vive, looking to squeeze out every bit of fun they could in the thicket of rules and regulations." Even as the students are fostering a culture of quiet dissent within the academy, an anonymous political insurgent is papering Arkod with anti Nazi signage. When Abigail stages increasingly daring interventions to protect Matula's Jewish students, Gina begins to suspect that the town revolutionary and the power behind the statue may be one and the same. "Abigail" is at once harrowing and mesmerizing, all the more so because we glimpse its dramas through the uncomprehending lens of Gina's youthful simplicity. Nothing could ruin a book so humane but to resolve the novel's central mysteries, especially the enigma of Abigail's identity, would be to diminish some of its breathless urgency. To learn the truth, you must consult Abigail herself.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
"Slay the Dragon" begins with a subject that might seem counterintuitive for a documentary on gerrymandering: the Flint, Mich., water crisis. The movie lays out a timeline of state legislative actions that led to the decision that contaminated the city's water supply. It persuasively argues that the crisis never would have happened without gerrymandering, which had allowed legislators to shield themselves from voters' wrath. Connecting the dots between Flint and gerrymandering isn't new; that case has been made elsewhere by the journalist David Daley, a consultant on the documentary and the author of "Ratf ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count." For anyone who has read a book on gerrymandering or followed the legal fights over the matter, "Slay the Dragon" won't necessarily offer much that is new. (The Supreme Court ruled last June that federal courts had no power to rectify partisan gerrymanders, a process in which state legislative majorities redraw voting maps to help their political side ensure control.) But the film, directed by Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance, does a skillful job of distilling a complicated history. It recounts a Republican campaign to flip statehouses in the all important election of 2010, a census year after which legislators could redraw boundaries. It tags along with Katie Fahey, a grass roots activist, as she pushes for a ballot measure in Michigan that, in 2018, gave redistricting authority to an independent commission. And it dissects the extreme nature of partisan gerrymandering in Wisconsin graphics show how sophisticated, data driven mapmaking guaranteed that, even in the event of a Democratic landslide, Republicans would maintain power in the State Assembly and its policy consequences.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
PARIS Mercedes Benz brought a smorgasbord of new vehicles to the 2014 Paris Motor Show and spent a lot of time explaining how its polarizing new range of small A , B , CLA And GLA Class vehicles have become sales successes. But all the visual sizzle was supplied by its biggest, most powerful and costliest models. It was the auto show debut for the new S 500 plug in hybrid, which features a gasoline electric powertrain that offers up to 333 horsepower and has an electric only range of about 20 miles. The company promised that by 2017 it would introduce nine more Mercedes models that use the technology. Though some of the models "unveiled" here have been seen previously at non auto show events, this was the first showing of the new Mercedes AMG C63, the range topper of the C Class lineup. "With the new Mercedes AMG C63, our performance experts demonstrate once again that characteristics like 'family friendly' and 'racetrack ready' need not be contradictory," Dieter Zetsche, chief executive of Mercedes's parent company, Daimler, said in introducing the car on Thursday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The Cornish coast with its high cliffs and inlets, lining the peninsula that juts out from England's southwest corner has a long association with pirates. Its rocky coves, secret anchorages and long winding creeks have historically been a haunting ground for seafaring scoundrels and salty sea dogs. Today, it is the home of an entirely different breed of renegade. Since 2017, Steve Green and Monika Hertlova have been setting sail in their 112 year old boat to remove plastic pollution from the coastline's worst affected areas. In the three years since they began operating under the banner of Clean Ocean Sailing and alongside a team of dedicated volunteers they have removed over 44,000 pounds of plastic waste from areas of land that are inaccessible by foot. I met Steve and Monika in the galley of their boat, which is also their home, and which they share with their one year old son, Simon, and their labrador, Rosie. They pored over maps and weather reports as 90 bananas swung from the ceiling above them. The fruit, along with other supplies, had been donated to the team by local businesses eager to support what is meant to be a 60 mile round trip voyage to the remote Isles of Scilly, an archipelago some 30 miles southwest of Cornwall. For skipper Steve, the Scillys are where Clean Ocean Sailing began. "I was caught by a freak wind and washed up on Annet," he said, referring to the one of the archipelago's many small islands. "It's only a mile across, but I ended up having to spend a few days there. On the southwest of the island, it is six foot deep of all sorts of plastic flotsam and jetsam full of dead or dying seabirds and dolphins." Since then, Steve and Monica have returned regularly to Annet with a crew of citizen activists to help tackle the island's pollution problem. They planned to return again in February, and offered me a spot on the boat. But because of recent storms Britain had just been battered by the deadly storm Ciara, and the Coast Guard warned of further "danger to life" posed by the rapidly approaching Storm Dennis they decided not to risk the open waters of a long crossing, and opted instead to stick closer to home. We were armed with a plan to clean 10 of Cornwall's most polluted beaches over a 10 day period, and, in true piratical nature, to hide from the worst of the storms in the natural harbors and caves of the coast, where we'd spend each night. We settled into what we hoped would become a familiar rhythm: We'd drop anchor on the 60 foot schooner, then disembark in a flotilla of smaller canoes and rowing boats to land and edge our way along the rocky shore, gathering plastic along the way. Volunteers and marine conservation authorities arrived moments too late. We later read that she was a fin whale, the second largest creature on earth. This was a juvenile, and chronically malnourished. Over 60 feet long, the poor creature was doomed as soon as she left the water, her organs unable to support her weight. We returned back to the boat, clutching our plastic. Weighed down by the traumas of the first day, our tempo on the water was slow. Winds howled and rattled across the deck of the boat. At night, we listened to the sound of straining ropes and chains. Perhaps most surprising was the condition of the items: an empty packet of chips from 15 years ago seemed as structurally sound as one you might pick up from a grocery shelf. All of the waste was hoisted back on deck and securely strapped down. Simon Myers, a volunteer who joined the expedition with his 17 year old son, Milo, said that the experience gave him a new perspective on climate change, overconsumption and plastic pollution. Before the voyage, he said, it seemed that many such problems were happening elsewhere "somewhere low lying, somewhere where they don't know how to process litter." "But now we know the problem is everywhere," he said. "It's happening on our doorstep. It's coming home to roost."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The adventure itself is almost an afterthought. It concerns Ian and his hopelessly uncool older brother, Barley (Chris Pratt), a connoisseur of the old lore. Ian, for his birthday, is given a staff and a spell that the brothers' dead father left for them. The spell is supposed to bring their dad back to life for one day, but it only partly comes off, leaving him as just a pair of sentient pants and shoes. The boys, intermittently disguising the body with "Weekend at Bernie's" style puppetry and clothes that might have suited the original invisible man, embark on a mission to conjure the rest of him. While the story of "Onward" is personal for Scanlon, whose father died when he was young, Ian and Barley's journey plays as disappointingly routine, a checklist of mechanically foreshadowed heart to hearts and lessons learned, leavened by the occasional offbeat sight gag. (The movie will teach viewers the perils of gelatinous cubes, and the design of the final dragon is a hoot.) What is missing are the unexpected flights of fancy on which Pixar forged its reputation breathtaking, tempo altering sequences like the fire extinguisher ballet of "WALL E," or the refreshingly adult perspective of "Up." Given the movie's nostalgia for bygone eras and analog game playing, "Onward" might have shown more nerve if it had been a rare foray from Pixar into hand drawn animation. As it is, the film is a brightly rendered, sentimental ode to adolescence that hits all the right emotional buttons, even as it risks being forgotten itself.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Here are some tips compiled from experts for writing that all important application essay, which can often mean the difference between getting accepted or rejected by the school of your choice. The essay is your megaphone your view of the world and your ambitions. It's not just a resume or a regurgitation of everything you've done. It needs to tell a story with passion, using personal, entertaining anecdotes that showcase your character, your interests, your values, your life experiences, your views of the world, your ambitions and even your sense of humor. Emphasize volunteer work or other ways you've helped people or made your community a better place. It helps if the activity is related to the subject you want to study. For example, Christopher Rim of Command Education Group, which coaches students, remembers that one student who wanted to become a dentist set up a nonprofit and held fund raisers to distribute toothbrushes, toothpaste and other dental products to homeless shelters. Admissions staff members want to know how your presence will make the college a better place.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Flavonols, a large class of compounds found in most fruits and vegetables, may be associated with a reduced risk for Alzheimer's disease. Flavonols are known to have antioxidant and anti inflammatory effects, and animal studies have suggested they may improve memory and learning. A study in Neurology involved 921 men and women, average age 81 and free of dementia, who reported their diet using well validated food questionnaires. During an average follow up of six years, 220 developed Alzheimer's disease. People with the highest levels of flavonol intake tended to have higher levels of education and were more physically active. But after controlling for these factors plus age, sex, the Apo E4 gene (which increases the risk for dementia) and late life cognitive activity, the scientists found that compared with those in the lowest one fifth for flavonol intake, those in the highest one fifth had a 48 percent reduced risk for Alzheimer's disease. The study covered four types of flavonols: kaempferol, quercetin, isorhamnetin and myricetin. All except quercetin showed a strong association with Alzheimer's risk reduction.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
You would think that it's every budding ballerina's dream to dance "Swan Lake." But it wasn't Megan Fairchild's. "Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever," she said, her brown eyes growing big. "I play human beings in peasant dresses and tutus. You know?" She's also a natural at comic parts. "Swan Lake," with its double role of Odette Odile the tragic Swan Queen and her evil doppelganger is more of an emotional roller coaster. So when Peter Martins, City Ballet's master in chief, proposed that she dance in his full length production of the ballet, she was perplexed. "I was like, "What part of 'Swan Lake'?" she recalled in an interview at Lincoln Center. "Which 'Swan Lake'? And he was like, 'The whole thing.' " With her sparkling footwork, musicality and lustrous phrasing, Ms. Fairchild, 33, who makes her Odette Odile debut on Sept. 26, is used to commanding the stage in effortless displays of virtuosity, especially in ballets by the company's founding choreographer, George Balanchine, like "Donizetti Variations," "Rubies" and "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux." But her roles in full length ballets have veered more toward "Sleeping Beauty" and "Coppelia" parts, traditionally, for smaller dancers. (Ms. Fairchild is 5 feet 4 inches.) "One tends to typecast people," Mr. Martins said in an interview. "You have your soubrettes, your tall dancers and so forth you wouldn't put her in 'Diamonds,' you would put her in 'Rubies.' That's sort of historic here. Balanchine set the pace in that regard. On the other hand, every once in a while there are people who defy any category, and I think she's one of those." Ms. Fairchild took a leave of absence from City Ballet in 2014 to perform as Ivy Smith in "On the Town" and returned to the company with her crisp technique intact impressive and rare while dancing with more exhilaration and daring than ever before. She's even grown a half inch. (She credits it to Pilates and Gyrotonics.) That growth in body and spirit was apparent in the studio. At a recent "Swan Lake" rehearsal, Gonzalo Garcia, her Prince Siegfried, watched in fascination as she followed the suggestion of the ballet master Susan Hendl to think of her releve rising on her toes as coming from her hip in arabesque. But her groans, which gave way to bursts of dismayed laughter, also revealed what a challenge "Swan Lake" is. At one point, she announced, "I have to say this is my most unfavorite start to a variation." Watching and listening to Ms. Fairchild, 33, who strings sentences together as rapidly as an actress in a screwball comedy, was a window into her dancing as much as into her agile mind. (After 15 years, she earned a degree in mathematics and economics from Fordham University in May.) She remained silent for a rare moment as she looked at the wall in disbelief. "Did that clock move at all?" It had been a long rehearsal. Yet as she progressed through it, she increasingly let go of her inhibitions and began to discover the dangerous sparkle of Odile, and you could sense that Ms. Fairchild was coming around to "Swan Lake." "There is a sense of freedom about it," she said later. "Instead of feeling like I have to be what other people look like, I'm going to be my own little swan." Born in Salt Lake City, Ms. Fairchild started dancing at 4. (Her brother, Robert Fairchild, is also a principal with the company, but will leave it next month to pursue musical theater projects.) For much of her career, despite her seeming confidence onstage, Ms. Fairchild said she felt out of her depth at City Ballet. Part of it was because of her brisk rise through the ranks: She joined the corps de ballet in 2002 and by 2005 she was a principal and dancing with the more mature Joaquin De Luz. He was short; he needed a partner. "I felt like, well if he's gone am I really crucial?" she said. "I started feeling like I was serving someone else's career." She and Mr. De Luz, she said, are good friends. But she's not sure if he realized how difficult it was for her. "He was already an established artist," she said. "I didn't know what I was doing." "On the Town," for which she received a Tony nomination, transformed her. "It ended up informing my ballet career, which is so cool," she said. "I don't think that Peter would ever think that would be great for one of his dancers and thank God he let me go. It's made me a better dancer for him, and I think that's why I'm doing 'Swan Lake.' " "She will make something of it," he said. "I can guarantee you that." Before "On the Town," Ms. Fairchild said, she had been "an anxiety stress ball" and plagued by fainting spells. They haven't returned since she started practicing Transcendental Meditation, which turned out to be an even more necessary coping mechanism when she and her then husband, Andrew Veyette, a principal with City Ballet, separated two years ago. Now divorced, they were a couple from the time Ms. Fairchild was 18 until she was 31. After they danced together during the winter season, she announced their split on Instagram. They still don't speak. Ms. Fairchild now lives with her French boyfriend, whom she met online, in an apartment in Union City, N.J. it's spectacular as her Instagram account attests with floor to ceiling windows. "A really great friend of mine on Broadway was on OkCupid, and I would swipe for her throughout the year," Ms. Fairchild said. "Then when I was single, I was like, I am going to go find my own." And while her divorce was incredibly painful, she said, it was also "the best thing that ever happened to me." She continued: "Going into 'On the Town' was this wonderful moment for me of breaking out of this bubble of the company, but I would say the grind of all of those shows broke up my marriage. And it needed to be broken up." It's been two years and she has clearly moved on. But there's one problem: proximity. She faces her ex husband at work every day. "It's the worst thing ever," she said. "I highly recommend no one ever dating at work. And we all do it in the company. I get why we do it! We have weird hours, we have weird breaks. Now I'm with someone who has a totally regular job. Hallelujah! I'm happier than ever."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Dennis Reynolds, left, and Jack Lowe in Atlanta in May. The men sued their employer after they were asked to take a DNA test. Seven years ago, Congress prohibited employers and insurers from discriminating against people with genes that increase their risks for costly diseases, but the case that experts believe is the first to go to trial under the law involves something completely different: an effort by an employer to detect employee wrongdoing with genetic sleuthing. Amy Totenberg, the federal district judge in Atlanta who is hearing the case, called it the mystery of the devious defecator. Frustrated supervisors at a warehouse outside Atlanta were trying to figure out who was leaving piles of feces around the facility. They pulled aside two laborers whom they suspected. The men, fearing for their jobs, agreed to have the inside of their mouths swabbed for a genetic analysis that would compare their DNA with that of the feces. Jack Lowe, a forklift operator, said word quickly spread and they became the objects of humiliating jokes. "They were laughing at us," he said. The two men were cleared their DNA was not a match. They kept their jobs but sued the company. On May 5, Judge Totenberg ruled in favor of the laborers and set a jury trial for June 17 to decide on damages. She determined that even though the DNA test did not reveal any medical information, it nonetheless fell under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA. Atlas Logistics Group Retail Services,which operates the warehouse, has not decided whether to appeal, its lawyer, Dion Kohler, said. The company had contended that the test provided no medical information about the employees and that both kept their jobs and suffered no discrimination. The decision in this case means the scope of the law goes far beyond what Congress seems to have envisioned, legal experts said. Even if an employer, as in this case, did not seek an employee's DNA to look for medical conditions, it was getting a trove of data that it arguably should not have, said Jessica L. Roberts , director of the Health Law and Policy Institute at the University of Houston Law Center. The judge, she said, ruled that "a genetic test is a genetic test is a genetic test." "It's really a bizarre case," said Lawrence O. Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University. "But beyond the comical, it touches on some quite serious issues." "Anyone in the future thinking about using a genetic test in ways that can embarrass or harm an individual will have to confront the fact that it violates federal law," he added. Benign intentions are not enough. The concern is that allowing an employer to obtain an employee's DNA would open a Pandora's box. "While the employer here was taking the DNA for identification purposes, once it gained access it could have theoretically tested for all kinds of other things, including issues related to health, and used that information to discriminate," Ms. Roberts said. The law was enacted in part to alleviate people's fears that their genetic information could be used against them. There were concerns that people who feared discrimination if they got a genetic test would refuse to participate in clinical trials needed for the advance of medical science, or avoid getting tests that might be useful for their health. There have been very few cases under the law, and legal experts said they did not know of any others that had gone to trial. The cases so far have mostly involved workers suing employers who had asked for their medical histories. A Connecticut woman claimed she was fired after she disclosed that she had a gene that predisposed her to breast cancer. Her claim was settled out of court with a nondisclosure agreement. Sharon Terry, chief executive of the Genetic Alliance, an advocacy group for people with genetic disorders that lobbied for the law, said she and other advocates were pleased by the outcome of the case in the Atlanta court, but surprised by both its substance and the dearth of other cases. "Is the law so effective that employers are well informed and not going there, or is this less of an issue than we thought it would be?" Ms. Terry said, adding that she thought there was some truth in both. The case of the warehouse workers began more than two years ago when Atlas asked its loss prevention manager, Don Hill, to find out who was defecating in one of its warehouses where grocery store goods were stored. After looking at employee work schedules, Mr. Hill identified workers who he thought were present when the deeds were done. He asked a forensics lab to compare the DNA of men the company suspected with the DNA of the feces to see if there was a match. Everyone knew about the problem, Mr. Lowe said. The workers were abuzz, wondering what sort of person could be doing it. Then, one day after his break, Mr. Lowe was ushered into a room by his supervisor. His union steward, a human resources manager and Mr. Hill were waiting for him. "They sat me down and asked me did I know why I was asked to come upstairs," Mr. Lowe said. "They asked if I knew about the feces. I said I had heard about it and thought it was gross. They asked me to take a DNA test because they had reason to believe it was me." He agreed to take the test, saying he feared for his job, and a forensics expert from the testing lab swabbed the inside of his cheek. The lab results exonerated Mr. Lowe and another worker, Dennis Reynolds, who delivered food from the warehouse to grocery stores. But by then, Mr. Lowe had found a law firm, Barrett Farahany, where three lawyers agreed to take the case. Mr. Reynolds joined Mr. Lowe in the lawsuit. The lawyers thought the men had a case because the genetics law had made it illegal "for an employer to request, require, or purchase genetic information with respect to an employee." The question before the judge was whether the DNA samples Atlas requested constituted genetic information, even though they did not reveal disease genes or risk factors for disease. Atlas's lawyer, Mr. Kohler, said the DNA results from the test the company sought were not genetic information, and involved normal minute variations in DNA sequences that did not reveal anything about disease genes. The intent of the law, he added, was to prevent discrimination based on a genetic propensity to disease, and there was none in this case. Both men kept their jobs. (Mr. Reynolds has since left Atlas, and now works as a used car salesman. Atlas never figured out who was responsible.) But Judge Totenberg said the law defined genetic information as data arising from a genetic test. The DNA test used in this case, she ruled, qualified as a genetic test that revealed genetic information. In June, the case will go to trial to determine damages. Ms. Roberts said the judge and jury would have little precedent to go by. The genetics law is different from other antidiscrimination laws that say employers cannot hire, fire or fail to promote a worker based on such things as race, sex or a disability. GINA says an employer cannot even ask for or buy genetic information. "We have a lot of existing case law on how judges should award remedies for employment discrimination," Ms. Roberts said. "But what happens when an employer obtains genetic information and does not act on it? Judges currently have little guidance."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
TAMPA, Fla. Injuries paved the way for unexpected players to make the Yankees' season opening roster, which was decided on Sunday. Although most of the decisions were not surprising, Manager Aaron Boone at the very least provided some clarity as to how the team will look in the early going. FIRST BASE Once locked in a battle for the starting job, Luke Voit and Greg Bird will both be on the team because of a lingering back injury to center fielder Aaron Hicks, who has not played in more than three weeks. On any given day that Voit or Bird plays first base, the other could be the designated hitter. INFIELD/OUTFIELD Brett Gardner will be in center field, with Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton on each side. Aside from first base, the infield will be second baseman Gleyber Torres, shortstop Troy Tulowitzki and third baseman Miguel Andujar with Gary Sanchez at catcher.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
WASHINGTON The governor of Pennsylvania wants to hire unemployed workers to help the state track the spread of the coronavirus in the fall. City Council members in Austin, Texas, voted to pay people to help with projects like preparing land for fire season. And Green Bay, Wis., hopes to pay the out of work to fix a decades old rotted boardwalk in a major recreation area. Across the country, state and local officials are considering ways to directly hire their out of work constituents, hoping that they can pay them to clean up parks, assist in conservation efforts and form the backbone of the public health response to the virus. The programs so far are likely to allow for only a small number of jobs, in some cases just a handful. But local officials say they are hopeful the idea can persuade other areas to try similar efforts and, more important, elicit additional funding from Congress to support local job creation. The effort is aimed at helping communities deal with an unemployment crisis more severe than what the nation faced at the worst moment of the Great Depression. Tens of million of workers have lost their jobs since mid March, when the pandemic forced consumers into their homes and shut down most businesses. New unemployment claims have topped one million for 13 straight weeks. So far, lawmakers and governors have mostly pushed for policies that will ensure Americans can go back to the jobs they held before the pandemic. The federal government allocated 660 billion for forgivable loans to businesses that agreed to keep workers on the payroll. Republican lawmakers have said they are interested in providing bonuses to people who return to work in lieu of extending expanded unemployment benefits, which are set to expire on July 31. And states have pushed to quickly reopen workplaces so that employees can regain a paycheck. But overall unemployment remains high, and experts estimate that a large percentage of layoffs caused by the virus related lockdowns could become permanent the longer the pandemic persists, as businesses fail to attract the number of consumers they did before or shut down entirely. In some states and cities, one emerging answer to the growing jobless problem is simple: Hire those workers directly, sometimes using federal funds. When the City of Green Bay received almost 600,000 in funding from the 2 trillion federal stimulus package passed this year, it decided to spend 136,000 on a jobs program to address projects in the 2,500 acres of land managed by its parks department. "We worked very closely with our parks department director to designate some of the things that we could put people to work on immediately," said Eric Genrich, the city's mayor. The program will be able to employ roughly 20 people full time and more in the event that the jobs are part time. A wildlife sanctuary in Green Bay has a wooden boardwalk built 20 years ago with boards that are rotting out. Mountain bike trails need to be groomed. The city's wildlife sanctuary is struggling with an infestation of garlic mustard, an invasive plant. Last month, the Austin City Council approved a resolution to create a program that will pay unemployed residents to work on conservation projects. "What I love about the way that we're approaching this is that it's not only about the immediate but it's a program that can evolve over time," said Alison Alter, the Council member who proposed the idea. "We already have interest from our county in potentially engaging with us." Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania has said he will create a Civilian Coronavirus Corps to employ some of the state's unemployed people doing contact tracing, the intensive process of mapping out the virus's spread in order to contain it. Mr. Wolf has provided few details about the program, but he has said he hopes the federal government will pay for it. His office declined to comment further. The efforts come as state and local governments are confronting their own potential unemployment crisis. With higher health costs and lower tax revenue, some cities and states have furloughed or laid off workers. The National League of Cities has estimated that up to a million public sector jobs may be at risk. In April, Pennsylvania stopped paying thousands of employees who could not telecommute, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Austin has a hiring freeze, an aide to Ms. Alter said. In early June, Mr. Genrich said Green Bay had so far avoided laying off or furloughing any city workers. But with the pandemic continuing longer than many had expected, local leaders have asked Congress to step in and fill the gap in revenue left by falling tax receipts. A group of Democrats in the New York Legislature, for example, have proposed a work program for roles in public health, conservation and clean energy. The administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo would consider only proposals that did not take funding away "from other critical" needs, a spokesman for the state's budget agency said in a statement. The proposals call to mind and in some cases are directly inspired by the jobs programs that defined the New Deal response to the Great Depression. The Works Projects Administration, for example, employed roughly 8.5 million Americans over eight years, according to one 1946 estimate. Another program that employed young men in wilderness jobs, the Civilian Conservation Corps, has inspired many of the local officials creating jobs programs to respond to the pandemic. In Green Bay, the program shares a name: the Green Bay Conservation Corps. There are more modern parallels to the current proposals. In the recession after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Hawaii authorized a program that paid unemployed workers to help eliminate an invasive plant, miconia; some program participants went on to full time jobs in conservation. "They loved it," said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, who was then in the State Legislature. He added that some workers had declined to participate, staying on unemployment benefits instead. But the idea of broad funding for a jobs program has yet to gain traction at the federal level. Instead, lawmakers have focused on efforts to encourage businesses to retain employees or bonuses that would be given to employees going back to work. Mr. Genrich acknowledged that his program, which can employ 20 people full time, was "obviously very modest" compared with "the scale of the crisis we're facing." "But we think this is an important response to take to enable a few folks to be productively employed, to participate in something larger than themselves, connect with other people and improve the city of Green Bay," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy

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