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Even as Lexus lost its lead in luxury sales to BMW and Mercedes Benz, largely because of self inflicted dullness, a philosophical question lingered: Do Lexus devotees even want exciting cars? Toyota's race driving chairman, Akio Toyoda, has vowed to forge ahead regardless, amping up the design and performance of Lexus, the company's premium division. The largely refreshing RC coupe will help to test that proposition, especially in the guise of the 467 horsepower RC F. While many luxury coupes appear restrained, this Tokyo prowler looks unleashed. Its Predator mouth might as well drip green blood. The head trip styling seems inspired by an anime robot factory. To eyes that prefer a demure look, it's a bit much. But the Lexus consistently wowed the public on streets in New York and Michigan. And I'm willing to cut this coupe some slack, because the RC shows that Lexus is taking genuine risks as it seeks a potentially fruitful design language. Say what you want, but the RC is anything but another boring Lexus. And I love that this new model refuses to put on a sedate German suit in an attempt to blend in at the club where Audi, Benz and BMW hang out. The iconoclastic approach extends to the cabin, which blends luxury and technology in an intimate layout that recalls Lexus's rare exotic sports car, the 375,000 LFA, including chronograph style digital gauges with an enormous, configurable central tachometer. Cocooning sport seats display ultrasupportive winged side bolsters and "integrated foaming" construction in which the upholstery and seat foam are molded together in a single process. They look like something Captain Kirk would choose for his bachelor pad. The rear seat is constricting in two plus two fashion, but the front seats slide forward electrically and reposition themselves once passengers are snug in the back. The only real negative is the mouse style touch pad for navigation, audio and vehicle functions. To be honest, it's an industry abomination, a size 16 Achilles' heel. Fussy and beyond distracting, it requires the precise caress of a Casanova to operate while the car is in motion. If the Lexus looks like a video game come to life, the car's engineers focused on a real world in which crashing and burning doesn't earn you a microwave burrito and a second try. Spurred around the Monticello Motor Club in upstate New York, the Lexus was evidently tuned to allow anyone from novice to expert to go fast and have fun. The tire grip is monumental, as are the brakes. Push beyond the limits, and the Lexus segues into safe, predictable understeer. But don't think this Lexus is slow or dumbed down. The ready to rumble 5 liter V8, strengthened from its last appearance in the IS F sedan, pulls like mad to 7,300 r.p.m. and never runs out of breath. The RC F scampers to 60 m.p.h. in a crackling 4.3 seconds, and Lexus claims a top speed of 170 m.p.h. The fuel economy 16 m.p.g. in town, 25 on the highway is par for this class of high performance coupe. The 8 speed paddle shifted transmission is a brilliant wingman, about as fast and frolicsome as a conventional torque convertor automatic can get. Summon the Sport mode on the console's oversize, tactile rotary dial, and the transmission applies artificial intelligence, reading g forces to decide when a shift is necessary. Oh, and the Lexus sounds glorious, a burly, naturally aspirated V8 rumble that's impossible to fake. Driven on another racetrack in western Michigan, the Lexus ran neck and neck laps with the formidable BMW M4 coupe, even though the Lexus is chubbier, with a curb weight of nearly two tons. The RC F also costs decisively less. My test car, wearing a lurid shade of blue, started at 63,325 and reached 73,970 with options. The last M4 that I drove topped 85,000. Over a week in New York and environs, the RC F also proved easy to live with, perfectly willing to ooze through traffic like a traditional Lexus. It's not at all high strung, and the ride on cratered pavement is smoother than the BMW's. On the track, I also drove the surprisingly capable RC 350 models, which share their 3.5 liter V6, rated at 306 horsepower, with the IS 350 sedan. Those more affordable RCs start at 43,715. The price rises to 50,630 for the RC F Sport AWD, which features an adaptive suspension and four wheel steering. As fast, adhesive and athletic as the RC may be, there is something a bit methodical about its performance: This Lexus never seems to sweat. If the worst thing one can say about the RC is that it feels too stable and confident at rocketing speeds on a track, then Lexus must be doing something right.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Kate Chernow and Jake McDonough were married June 6 at the bride's family home outside Philadelphia. The couple enlisted the help of the Clover Event Company, wedding planners that work with a collective of wedding vendors to coordinate "mini ceremonies." Amy Shack Egan, the owner of Modern Rebel, a wedding planning business in Dumbo, Brooklyn, is not exactly a sports fan. But in mid April she watched the Michael Jordan documentary "The Last Dance" with her husband. What was shaping up to be the darkest Brooklyn wedding season in memory suddenly looked brighter. "Somebody said to Michael Jordan when his team was down in the third quarter, 'We'll get 'em next game,'" she said. "And Michael Jordan said, 'Next game? What about the fourth quarter?'" For Ms. Shack Egan, "a light bulb went off. I told my husband, 'I feel like the game's not over. I've just got to be more creative.'" "We did a pivot to virtual and contact free weddings," she said. "So many of our colleagues were willing to pivot with us. And now things are starting to change." Since the end of April, Modern Rebel has been coordinating weddings for couples who are choosing to marry virtually or in scaled down gatherings. Clients more than a dozen so far are sent a menu of virtual add ons to the base price of 399 that includes invitations, a Zoom rehearsal and a day of timeline, and a silent stage manager in the chat box to cue readings by virtual guests. These add ons range from two hour virtual dance parties hosted by popular Brooklyn wedding D.J.'s to custom poems by Ars Poetica emailed to guests as favors, or catered post vows dinners for two from partners like the Pixie and the Scout, a Brooklyn based caterer, delivered contact free. Vendors in other cities are joining forces to salvage a wedding season fourth quarter that may have seemed beyond saving, too. In Philadelphia, for example, "we're relying on each other much more for business advice, like what should we be telling our clients or how should we be updating our policies," said Caitlin Maloney Kuchemba, the owner of the Clover Event Company, a boutique wedding planning business in Norristown, Pa. This camaraderie has been especially helpful for handling clients looking to celebrate twice once on their original wedding date, and again in a bigger way in 2021, when many expect social distancing regulations are expected to be lifted. "People want to know," Ms. Kuchemba said, "Do we consider a smaller celebration part of the original event? Or is it a whole new event that requires new contracts?" Ms. Kuchemba has also formed an alliance called 660 Collective with three other vendors to provide micro weddings for 10 guests or fewer, in a shared Norristown studio (weddings start at 3,500). And with three different vendors, she formed a network called the Gush to put on a free 2021 wedding for a pair of essential workers nominated by the community. "Gush came about after we started speaking as a group about how Covid has affected the industry," Ms. Kuchemba said. "When the virus first came, we were all in reaction mode, figuring out postponements. Now a lot of us in this area have pivoted to 'What can we do right now? What can we do to give couples something to look forward to?'" In Northern New Jersey, Ellen Hockley Harrison, the owner of Greater Good Events in Jersey City, N.J., is tightening her ties to a group of vendors she liked working before the Covid 19 outbreak. "The idea of a collective was something my team had been discussing for quite some time, because we tend to try to work with women or minority owned businesses, and we also try to be on the eco friendly side," Ms. Hockley Harrison said. She is now partnering with about eight businesses that fit those descriptions to put on weddings that conform to Gov. Phil Murphy's guidelines. Currently, up to 10 people can gather for indoor celebrations in New Jersey, and up to 25 outdoors. "In the next six months, we think the wedding industry is going to start opening up but on a much smaller scale," Ms. Hockley Harrison said. "So right now, we're providing resources to clients who come to us saying, 'OK, we're ready to put on a wedding for 25 guests or fewer.'" A small at home wedding package with her collective, including a dress rental, flowers and table arrangements, will cost about 3,500. If restrictions loosen, the group will work together to scale up. "The goal is to help make the process less daunting for couples," she said. "Because right now everything is so confusing." Some wedding vendor alliances are being formed just to clear away this confusion. In Atlanta, Laetitia Towson, the owner of the event planning company House of BASH, is on the phone daily with a loose collective of nearby D.J./s, venue representatives and other wedding professionals. "We're just trying to get a feel for what we can and cannot do," she said. Though Georgia nightclubs have been allowed to reopen, rules for weddings, she said, have not been addressed by the governor or mayor. But keeping up with social distancing and crowd size mandates is not the only reason the wedding community needs to stay in touch. "We're hearing of catering companies going under, smaller shops going under, people selling their businesses," Ms. Towson said. "It's scary for couples, not knowing what services are going to be available to them if they postpone to 2021." It's scarier still for small businesses struggling to survive and unsure when social distancing rules might be eased. The Massachusetts Coalition of Wedding Vendors, already 900 members strong, was formed to get to the bottom of what rules are currently governing Massachusetts weddings and for how long. The group has written letters to state representatives asking for answers, not just about wedding rules but also about financial help for ailing colleagues. "Typically we wouldn't talk about our individual policies for people demanding deposits back and that sort of thing, but now we're working together," Ms. Saraiva said. The shared concern will be especially helpful when Massachusetts gatherings are opened to more than 10 people. "We'll need to know things like, what if I'm hired to take pictures for a wedding and I'm stuck in a tiny hotel room with eight or 10 girls getting ready and there's no social distancing," she said, expressing concerns about who might be liable should clients fail to follow social distancing guidelines or someone becomes ill. "Liability is a huge thing for vendors." As eager as she and her colleagues are to get back to work, Ms. Saraiva admits that if she were a bride, she would postpone her wedding until the pandemic fully passes. "I wouldn't want to worry about whether the girls in the wedding party are going to be willing to have their hair and makeup done and then put a mask on, how many people can sit at a table six feet apart, who's in charge of policing," she said. "Right now, I don't see how we can get to a new normal. But at least we're all working closer together now. That's been a good thing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
My interest was piqued by a promoted tweet and fueled by dietary nihilism. Red Lobster had announced a lobster and waffles special for most of April, and I couldn't get the image of the crispy, buttermilk battered split Maine lobster tail atop a "signature Cheddar Bay waffle" drizzled with maple syrup out of my head. My wife and I decided to try it; it was a meal we were prepared to remember, if not enjoy. On a lazy, almost warm Sunday last month, we drove to the Red Lobster in Woodbridge, N.J., where we were met with a 20 minute wait in a vestibule strewn with spider webs. The two of us took seats between a senior couple dressed to impress for Sunday fellowship and a young couple who smelled like a college dorm on April 20 visions of goals past and future. Red Lobster's take on chicken and waffles may not seem like a big deal, or even worthy of our patience. But, to me, it represented something of a moment. In general, casual dining chains like Red Lobster are in trouble. Major franchises like T.G.I. Fridays and Applebee's have stumbled through a decade of losses, and many chains, including Friendly's and Bennigan's, have filed for bankruptcy. Americans have changed their dining habits: The country's upper class has soured on paying 15 to 20 per meal for bland bar fare, and the chain sustaining middle class can no longer afford it. That, coupled with a widening breadth of delivery options through third party services like Seamless and UberEats, makes the future of casual dining chains unclear. Restaurants have responded to this shift in consumer behavior in uneven, often stomach churning ways. For a while, Applebee's made "a clear pendulum swing toward millennials." The franchise updated its decor and put youthful sounding items, like a "turkey sandwich with sriracha chile lime sauce," on its menu. But in 2017, Applebee's president John Cywinski reversed course. Amid a 21 percent decline in profit and the closure of as many as 135 restaurants, he signaled a return to the restaurant's Middle American roots. Red Lobster hasn't seen the same dramatic plunge in business, but it hasn't grown much either (aside from a Beyonce inspired uptick in sales in 2016). In 2014, five years after a chainwide remodel and an ill conceived pairing with Olive Garden, Red Lobster was sold by Darden Restaurants to Golden Gate Capital for 2.1 billion. Its menu has changed considerably since then. Last December, Red Lobster added snack size tasting plates, retooled its regionally inspired dishes and announced the return of its endless shrimp promotion. Recent menu items have included a lobster truffle mac and cheese and whipped sweet potatoes with honey roasted pecans. But the crispy lobster and waffles which Danielle Connor, the senior vice president of menu strategy and development, said was meant to show Red Lobster's "culinary expertise and menu innovation" is a dish with more than millennial focused overtones. For starters, it was inspired by chicken and waffles, an entree that is part of the trend of soul food items rising from post reconstruction fare for southern black citizens to post gentrification fare offered at slick eateries in post black neighborhoods. And the Cheddar Bay waffle element to the dish was inspired by Red Lobster's famous Cheddar Bay biscuits. In my home state of Massachusetts, where nationwide seafood chains are hard to come by, those biscuits were the stuff of legends. My first taste of a Cheddar Bay biscuit took place in August of 2010, after a five hour drive from Boston to Rutgers University, where I was going to college. After an hour of unpacking, my family was ready for lunch. I suggested we go to the nearby Red Lobster. The meal was a mixed bag: The biscuits were every bit as amazing as advertised, but my shrimp fettuccine Alfredo made up with hazard what it lacked in taste. I spent the night counting the tiles in my new college bathroom, much to the chagrin of my then girlfriend, with whom I had made plans. When the Red Lobster defense failed to hold water, she dropped me like a limited time entree. My first impression of Red Lobster as a killer of relationships and usurper of gastrointestinal equilibrium didn't stop me from frequenting the place during my years at Rutgers. I ordered the same four things: margaritas, lagers, artichoke dip and indefensible amounts of Cheddar Bay bread. One night, I came across a Red Lobster Cheddar Bay biscuit kit at the grocery store. Those first dozen biscuits elevated a college evening of glassy eyed giggling into what felt like a red carpet affair. The next day, I purchased three more boxes of the biscuit mix. After perfecting the recipe, I made them for a crush. Four years later, that same crush, now my wife, was looking at me, across the table, with a leery expression on her face.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Robert Wilson is a slow talking man. But he picked up speed the other day as he described an early encounter with Lady Gaga. As Mr. Wilson told it, some years ago the star cold called him. Not especially cowed by his lofty stature as artist and director, she opened with: "Hi, Bob. Gaga. Can you tell me something about theater?" Mr. Wilson kept his brief to her simple. "'You know the Broadway formula is that you start strong and end big,'" he said. Her response, as he recalled: "'Thank you, Bob. That's all I needed to know.'" After several such talks, Mr. Wilson agreed to oversee her 2013 appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards. "In three minutes and 20 seconds she changed her clothes seven times," he said. "She started with a cowl, like a nun. In the last four or five seconds, she had on nothing but clamshells on her private parts." "When it was over, she asked me, 'Bob, how did I do?'" he said, interrupting himself with a riotous whoop before going on. "'You learn fast,' I told her. 'You started strong and ended big.'" But we had veered off course. We were at the Cedar Lake performance space in the Chelsea section of Manhattan to talk about Mr. Wilson's Noah's Ark installation for Van Cleef Arpels. From Nov. 3 to 19, visitors will be treated to a display of the jeweler's menagerie of exotic animals, designed as brooches and showcased in a series of recessed glass enclosures cresting and dipping rhythmically along the walls. For the project, Mr. Wilson, 76, who will be honored on Nov. 6 at the New York Public Library Lions gala, tapped his enduring fascination with a cast of outsize characters. Over the years that pantheon has included Sigmund Freud, Queen Victoria, Joseph Stalin and Albert Einstein, the ostensible hero of "Einstein on the Beach," the visual and musical spectacle he created with Philip Glass, which shot him to fame in the mid 1970s. To his mind such legends are the lifeblood of the theater. "They are the gods of our time," he said. "People come to the theater sharing a common knowledge about who and what they are. In this instance, we all come with a story in our heads about Noah's Ark." At Cedar Lake that story translates into an alternately soothing and unsettling multisensory experience. On first entering the eerily lighted space, guests are jolted by thunderclaps and flashing lights; inside, they are lulled by projected ocean waves lapping the perimeter, the meditative strains of "Spiegel im Spiegel" (written by Arvo Part), drawing them toward the black jewelry cases. Miniaturized stage sets, they are populated with pairs of lapis and turquoise parrots, intertwining jeweled zebras, diamond and sapphire monkeys and cocooning penguins with black onyx and cabochon gems, all similar in scale. Working with Nicolas Bos, the Van Cleef chief executive, who commissioned the project, Mr. Wilson envisioned the installation as an actual ark. He was quick to discard the idea, though, preferring to use light and space to simulate the experience of a ship at sea. "I've always worked with light first," he said. "Without light there is no space." Suspended from the ceiling is a whalebone ark. Less than a foot long, it is a model of a vessel in Mr. Wilson's private collection of tribal artifacts. Visitors are meant to experience the ship, he said, "as this tiny speck in a vast ocean." An old hand at these collaborations between artists and brands, Mr. Wilson created an installation for a Guggenheim Museum retrospective of Giorgio Armani fashion designs in 2000. Last year, Hermes enlisted him to create an installation to celebrate the debut of its furniture and housewares line. Are such collaborations necessarily compromising? Not if you ask Mr. Wilson. "I don't see so much of a separation, whether you're designing something functional like a car, a piece of jewelry, or a stage set or a building," he said. "To me it's all part of one thing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
They killed his dog. They stole his car. That's pretty much all you need to know about the "John Wick" movies Chapter 3 opened Friday to get them. Keanu Reeves's ridiculously skilled assassin is a man of few words but infinite moves . The first film, which showed that Reeves had plenty of action skills post "Matrix," became a surprise hit and built a legion of fans for action sequences that have grown in technical complexity over three films. In an interview at The Times, the director Chad Stahelski spoke about five scenes from the movies and what it took to pull them off. In the first film, John is resting at the Continental, the hotel meant to be neutral ground for assassins and off limits to business (killing business). That doesn't stop Ms. Perkins (Adrianne Palicki), who is fine with trying to take John out while in his pajamas. The fight, while intense, also shows how the filmmakers are open to humor. "I thought I'd let myself in," Perkins says as she shoots up the hotel room. "Thinking about the scene, we asked, what's the most vulnerable you can make John Wick?" Stahelski said. "So we decided we'll have him in bed." When Stahelski spoke to Reeves about it, he said the actor suggested that John be in his boxers. "I said, no one looks cool in boxers. But he insisted. He thought it would be best for the character." "We reminded Keanu that if he's going to wear boxer shorts and a T shirt in this fight scene, there's no elbow pads, no kneepads. She's going to be in a leather jacket so she can pad up all she wants. We called it the theater of pain. How bad can we beat up the lead character to make you feel empathy for him?" "We were doing our calculations and we were 10 cars short of doing the sequence we wanted," he said. They opted for something smaller, assembling this scene with their stunt coordinator, Darrin Prescott. "Rather than kung fu, we did car fu, keeping Keanu in the car and whatever comes at him, he hits." Reeves does some of his own driving in the scene. He took a stunt driving course with Jeremy Fry, who taught him tricks like executing a sliding drift with one hand while shooting out of the window. "John Wick 2" (2017) takes him to Rome to do a job for an Italian crime lord. That job involves murdering the crime lord's sister, Gianna. But Gianna's bodyguard, Cassian (played by Common), wants to stop that from happening. He tracks down John for this intense fight on city streets and down a few flights of stairs. In casting Cassian, Stahelski said, "we wanted someone who exuded cool without ever having to try, look great in a suit and could not just physically hold up to John Wick, but match him in couth and class." Stahelski continued, "We put Common through firearm training and martial arts training. For three months he just lived the life of a stunt performer." The filmmakers wanted the two to have an epic fight through Rome. "I like close quarters stuff, having it all in one tight frame where it's all messy," Stahelski said of the fight. The spare nature of the clash, on a Rome street amid parked cars, was inspired by John Woo films like "Hard Boiled" and "The Killer." One moment has the two rolling down a staircase to another level of the street. Stahelski said he came across those stairs on a walk through the city to scout locations. He used the stunt doubles Jackson Spidell and Daniel Graham, who were game to take a stair roll. Hoping to avoid shooting the scene multiple times, they completed all the levels of the fall without a break. Stahelski said he left in some of the audio of the men pumping each other up as they complete each part of the stunt. "I love the New York Public Library and wanted to do an action scene in the stacks," he said. "So it's very tight, and Keanu can just get shoulder to shoulder. But the idea was to find the largest individual we could fit within that and have a fight in the phone booth kind of feel." Enter Boban Marjanovic, the 7 foot 3 N.B.A. player who dwarfs Reeves (and just about everyone else). Because they couldn't find a stunt double for someone this size, the filmmakers needed Marjanovic do his own stunts. The team spent two weeks training him for the performance. At one point Marjanovic must kick John Wick in the chest. He performed the scene with Jackson Spidell, but was afraid of kicking even a stunt double with the force of a Size 20 shoe. So a cautious Marjanovic did a mild kick at first. Then the filmmakers assured him it would be fine to kick at full force. "When he does, you can actually see the stunt double go out of frame," Stahelski said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
"That is either an overreach by the Alabama G.O.P. or some pretty intense viral marketing for the new season of 'The Handmaid's Tale.' I don't get it. If a TV show has to become reality, why can't it be 'Star Trek' so they can beam me off of this planet?" STEPHEN COLBERT "They're going to throw them right in the Alabama slammer for 99 years. Let's see, it's 2019, so by the time those doctors get out of jail in Alabama, it will be 1895." STEPHEN COLBERT "The bill also makes no exceptions for victims of rape and incest, because the whole point of this law is to establish that a fetus is a person with rights. Now, that is a bold interpretation of human development. But, on the plus side, apparently, pregnant women get to vote twice now." STEPHEN COLBERT After initially refusing to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee in regards to potential Russian interference in the 2016 election, Donald Trump Jr. has agreed to answer a specific set of questions in a certain amount of time. "The president's eldest son, Don Jr. DJTJ has reached a deal to appear before the Republican led Senate Intelligence Committee next month to try to convince them he doesn't know anything. For him, how hard could that be?" JIMMY KIMMEL "It will be a closed door session, which is a shame but these are some of the questions he is expected to be asked: What happened in the Trump Tower meeting? What was your father's involvement in Trump Tower Moscow? Did you lie to Congress? What the hell is up with that beard? How do you strap a bicycle helmet without a chin?" JIMMY KIMMEL "After weeks of ignoring their subpoena, last night, Junior struck a deal for a limited interview with the Intelligence Committee. To be fair, every meeting with Don Jr. involves limited intelligence." STEPHEN COLBERT "Donald Trump Jr. agreed to testify before a Senate committee, but only for a maximum of four hours. Apparently, that's as long as Don Jr. can leave Eric outside in the car." JIMMY FALLON "I heard that Don Jr.'s testimony will be done in private, so it will not be on TV. The president was like, 'You lost me at Don Jr. and then you lost me again at not on TV.'" JIMMY FALLON "I think it's fair to say that this is the most restrictive law of its kind in America, which is why it barely squeaked by in the Alabama senate 25 6, with all 25 votes cast in favor coming from Republican men, though it may be the last time those Republican men will be coming for a while." STEPHEN COLBERT "To put it in perspective for you male senators, it would be like if cops showed up every time you miracle whipped into your wife's good towels and accused you of genocide except different because you never wanted to bring your shame tadpoles to term." SAMANTHA BEE "Tonight we also have music from Of Monsters and Men. Not only is Of Monsters and Men a great name for a band, but it's also how most women describe the Alabama Senate." JIMMY FALLON "It looks like that world's hardest game of Guess Who, doesn't it? 'Does he have a tie? Is he old? Yep!' They're deciding women's rights and then they'll pick the nominees for this year's B.E.T. awards, so it should be very exciting." JIMMY FALLON	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Here's When Your Favorite Shows Are Returning This Fall If your only question when a new television season rolls around is, "When are my shows coming back?," here are the answers. (If you're more interested in what's next, check out our comprehensive guide to the fall's new shows.) From "American Horror Story" to "Lost in Space," here's a chronological list of notable returning series. "Empire," "The Good Place," "How to Get Away With Murder" and "Modern Family" begin their final runs while "NCIS," "Law Order: SVU," "South Park" and "The Simpsons" chug along into their 17th, 21st, 23rd and 31st seasons. "Grey's Anatomy" (ABC), "How to Get Away With Murder" (ABC), "A Million Little Things" (ABC), "Doc Martin" (AcornTV), "Mom" (CBS), "Young Sheldon" (CBS), "The Good Place" (NBC), "Law Order: SVU" (NBC), "Superstore" (NBC) It's the final go round for "Mr. Robot," "Madam Secretary," "Silicon Valley" and "Supernatural." Will it also be the last march for "The Walking Dead," which enters its 10th season with about a third of the viewership it had at its peak? The flood of premieres slows, but there are still some major attractions, like the newly cast third season of "The Crown."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
It was only after Mariana Cooper, a widow in Seattle, found herself with strained finances that she confessed to her granddaughter that she was afraid she had been bilked out of much of her savings. Over three years, Ms. Cooper, 86, had written at least a dozen checks totaling more than 217,000 to someone she considered a friend and confidante. But the money was never paid back or used on her behalf, according to court documents, and in early November the woman who took advantage of Ms. Cooper, Janet Bauml, was convicted on nine counts of felony theft. (She faces sentencing on Dec. 11.) Ms. Cooper, who lost her home and now lives in a retirement community, is one of an estimated five million older American residents annually who are victimized to some extent by a caregiver, friend, family member, lawyer or financial adviser. With 10,000 people turning 65 every day for the next decade, a growing pool of retirees are susceptible to such exploitation. As many as one in 20 older adults said they were financially mistreated in the recent past, according to a study financed by the Justice Department. Traditionally, such exploitation, whether by family, friends or acquaintances, often has been minimized as a private matter, and either dismissed with little or no penalty or handled in civil court. Even when the sums are large, cases like Ms. Cooper's are often difficult to prosecute because of their legal complexity and because the exploitation goes unnoticed or continues for long periods. Money seeps out of savings and retirement funds so slowly it draws attention only after it is too late. Ms. Cooper, for example, wrote her first check, for 3,000, in early 2008, and later gave Ms. Bauml her power of attorney. In early 2012, after Ms. Cooper realized that Ms. Bauml was not going to repay her in time for her to afford a new roof for her house, she told her granddaughter, Amy A. Lecoq, about the checks. She later called the police. Ms. Bauml maintained that Ms. Cooper gave her money for services she provided as a home organizer or as loans. Later, testing by a geriatric mental health specialist found that Ms. Cooper had moderate dementia, which showed her judgment had been impaired. The diagnosis "helped the jury to understand why she would keep signing all these checks to this woman as loans when she was never being paid back," said Page B. Ulrey, senior deputy prosecutor for King County, Wash., who pressed the case against Ms. Bauml. The case was challenging in part because Washington State does not have an elder abuse statute, said Ms. Ulrey, who is one of a small but growing number of prosecutors around the country with the specific duty of prosecuting those who take financial advantage of elders, whether it is connected to investments, contracts or other fraud. As the number of complaints grows, more municipalities are trying to combat such abuse, which is often intertwined with physical or sexual abuse, and emotional neglect. Some organizations also have set up shelters, modeled on those for victims of domestic abuse. In the Bronx, for example, the Weinberg Center for Elder Abuse Prevention at the Hebrew Home in Riverdale started such a shelter in 2005. Since then, 14 other such shelters have been opened in various long term care operations around the country to deal with urgent cases of financial abuse. One such woman, who agreed to talk only if she was not identified by her last name, stayed at Riverdale after she was threatened with eviction. A neighbor discovered that the woman, a 73 year old widow named Irene, had not paid her rent in six months because relatives living with her had been withdrawing money from her account and leaving her short of funds. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' "I had to leave with one small suitcase," Irene said. "They were abusing me." She was later able to move to federally subsidized housing away from the abusive situation. To help elders in financial and other distress, more municipalities, using federal funds, are training law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and social workers how to spot the sometimes subtle signals that may indicate someone has been swindled. "We see many cases where someone convinces an older person to give them the power of attorney, and then uses that authority to strip their bank accounts, or take the title of their home," said Amy Mix, a lawyer at the AARP Legal Counsel for the Elderly, which works with the Adult Protective Services division in the District of Columbia government as well as the city's police department. In the most recent fiscal year, 934 cases of abuse were reported in Washington. About one quarter of those were financial exploitation, according to Sheila Y. Jones, chief of Adult Protective Services. "And they involve millions of dollars," she said. But many cases are not counted officially because older people are reluctant to pursue legal remedies against relatives and friends. Louise Pearson, 80, a retired government computer analyst, declined to press charges against a security guard in her building who had befriended her and later obtained 30,000 from her savings. "There was something about him you just had to take to," Ms. Pearson said. When she finally asked Malika Moore, a social worker at Iona Senior Services in Washington, for some assistance with her shaky finances, the social worker realized that the situation was serious. One clue, she said, was that, "When I opened her refrigerator, it was empty." Ms. Moore was able to get Ms. Pearson home delivered meals, and after the bank confirmed that she was missing savings, help to find a conservator to handle her money. Ms. Pearson, who now lives in a housing complex for the elderly, said, "I get money whenever I need it, and more than I did before." In Seattle, Ms. Cooper's granddaughter expressed determination to educate others on the warning signs of financial abuse. "I wish we had known some of the red flags," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
It's the circle of pop culture life: Just as one long running TV drama with an obsessive fan base ends, another returns, albeit in a different form. Nearly six months after an initial teaser whetted appetites for the film version of "Downton Abbey," a full length trailer has finally been released. It's 1927 the series ended on New Year's Day 1926 and Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), receives a letter informing him of an impending visit by King George V and Queen Mary for a royal luncheon, parade and dinner. "Here we go," groans Robert's mother, Violet, the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith). The news sends the staff of the titular country estate into a tizzy, making sure every surface is spit shined. No one's spared; even the retired butler Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) is called back to service by Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), who's later seen contemplating an exit from Downton with her maid, Anna (Joanne Froggatt). Nearly the entire cast of the original series, which ended its run in 2015, returns for the movie, with the exception of Lily James (Lady Rose MacClare), who's been busy starring in films like the forthcoming Beatles themed rom com "Yesterday."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The most fitting way to celebrate the life of Tom Seaver, the greatest Met of all, is with a wine glass in one hand and a baseball in the other. Seaver, who died on Monday at 75 years old from complications of Lewy body dementia and Covid 19, spent his retirement running a California vineyard. He was better known as a master pitching craftsman who felt the game in his bones. "Somewhere on that ball there is a spot that feels as though it was born to be, the perfect place for your fingers," Seaver wrote in his manual, "The Art of Pitching," with Lee Lowenfish. "On those days when you are not pitching and are just watching your teammates play, hold a ball in your hand as you watch the game from the bench. Feel every aspect of the baseball." Try different seams and pressure points, Seaver instructed, don't just imitate someone famous. Every hand is different, he said, but every pitcher must abide by two absolutes. "Pitching is not a job for the physically timid or the mentally lazy," he wrote on the very first page. It is a mantra that might as well be inscribed on the Cy Young Award. Seaver won three of those, in the Mets' first World Series seasons 1969 and 1973 and again in 1975. After he was infamously traded to the Cincinnati Reds in 1977, he kept on rolling: a no hitter in '78, another taste of the playoffs in '79, his 3,000th career strikeout in '81. The Mets brought him back for 1983, but left him unprotected on their off season roster. The Chicago White Sox seized on the mistake, choosing Seaver as compensation for losing a free agent. It was a confusing and confounding way to lose the Franchise, as Seaver was known, but he found a way to make more magic in New York when he earned his 300th victory at Yankee Stadium in August 1985. Tony La Russa, then the White Sox manager, had been ejected from that game and watched the late innings from a dugout tunnel, straining to see just a sliver of the field. With Dave Winfield coming up as the potential tying run in the eighth, La Russa's trusted pitching coach, Dave Duncan, spoke at the mound with Seaver and catcher Carlton Fisk. Seaver looked tired, and he was. 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. "One thing about Tom he would always tell you the truth," La Russa said by phone Wednesday night. "So Dunc went out to talk to him and said, 'Tom, I think you've had enough,' and Tom said, 'Yeah, I don't think I have anything left.' "But Fisk went up to him and said something like: 'You've had enough? This is your ballgame! Nobody's coming in from the bullpen to get Dave Winfield. This is you you're Tom Seaver!'" This was one Hall of Famer challenging another Hall of Famer to pitch to a third Hall of Famer and Seaver did not back down. He ran the count full to Winfield, then fanned him on a changeup and went on to complete the game. "He was the most intelligent pitcher we've ever been around," La Russa said. "He was a great competitor and had really good stuff, but as he got older, he was still great because he knew how to pitch. Like Greg Maddux, in a way they would look at a hitter, know what the hitter was thinking and pitch away from it. He was the perfect pro." In those later years, especially, Seaver had an intuitive understanding of how to work around his limitations. Early in the 1985 season, after beating the Tigers in Detroit, Seaver noticed the home plate umpire, Jim Evans, at the hotel bar. He tapped Evans on the shoulder, thanked him for a job well done, but told him he had missed one pitch: a 1 1 fastball to Kirk Gibson in the middle innings. Evans was puzzled; he had called the pitch a strike. "I don't want you to call that pitch a strike," Seaver said, as Evans recalled a few years ago. "That was a mistake. I got it up too high, like a ball or two above the waist, and I don't want any batter to get used to swinging at that pitch. My fastball is still my best pitch, my bread and butter, but if I keep throwing that one up there, they're going to kill me." Seaver would share such insights with teammates, with conditions. ("You had to earn his respect," La Russa said. "He didn't give it up carelessly.") With the Reds, he saw something in Mario Soto, a young pitcher from the Dominican Republic who lacked polish but yearned to be great. Every morning at spring training, Soto would show up at 6 a.m., practicing his changeup alone against a concrete wall in the outfield. "The only guy that discovered me and found out what I was doing was Tom Seaver," Soto said a few years ago. "He was my teacher." Soto would sit beside Seaver during games, and at one point, Seaver asked him a question that seemed elementary: "Do you try to throw a strike with every pitch?" Soto said he did; wasn't that the whole point? "No, no, no," Seaver told him, and then Soto asked why. "'Because you have pretty good control, and you want to take advantage of that,'" Soto recalled him saying. "From then on, I started doing that. From that day I knew I had good control, and then I started moving the ball in and out, up and down." In 1982 his last year as Seaver's teammate Soto had the best strikeout to walk ratio in the majors. Seaver finished his career with Boston in 1986, when a knee injury kept him off the World Series roster. But Seaver was there as the Red Sox fumbled away the title to the Mets, making him the only man to witness both of the Mets' titles as a uniformed player at Shea Stadium. The first championship had come in 1969, when Seaver's 10 inning masterpiece in Game 4 helped the Mets to their famous miracle over the Baltimore Orioles. On Wednesday, when the world learned that Seaver had died, the Mets beat the Orioles again. The stakes and the setting could hardly compare to the World Series. The game was played in Baltimore with empty stands, a grim reminder of the virus partly responsible for taking Seaver's life. But if it was a cosmic wink the Mets and the Orioles, forever linked to vintage Seaver why not go with it? Anything for a reason to think of the man at his best, to raise one last toast to Tom Terrific.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Condomsget a bad rap for being a bad wrap. Men often complain of discomfort, diminished sensation and poor fit. A recent federal study found only a third of American men use them. Now, changes by the Food and Drug Administration and industry standards groups have opened the door to the condom equivalent of bespoke suits. A Boston based company has begun selling custom fit condoms in 60 sizes, in combinations of 10 lengths and nine circumferences. Will the development improve the appeal of condoms, the only birth control method that protects against most sexually transmitted diseases? Public health experts are unsure. Many ideas for improving condoms have fizzled, sometimes stymied by the costs of testing required to satisfy the F.D.A., which considers condoms to be medical devices. A competition sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sought ideas for more pleasurable condoms in 2013 but has not yet brought one to market. While some winners are still pursuing prototypes, others have given up. As the custom fit condom company, Global Protection Corp., pressed the F.D.A. and industry standards associations for changes, a key priority was smaller sizes, said the company's president, Davin Wedel. Until recently, standard condoms had to be at least 6.69 inches long, but studies find the average erect penis is roughly an inch shorter. "The idea was it had to be long enough to fit most men, and excess length could just be rolled," said Debby Herbenick, a sexual health expert at Indiana University. She and her colleagues published a study of 1,661 men living throughout the United States that found that 83 percent had penile lengths shorter than standard condoms. The average length was 5.57 inches. In studies, some men have complained that "condoms tend to slip off," said Ron Frezieres, a vice president for research and evaluation at Essential Access Health, a nonprofit. And sometimes larger condoms actually felt tight because "shorter men had a big roll of latex at the base of the penis." The custom condoms, marketed under the brand name myONE Perfect Fit, come in lengths of 4.9 to 9.4 inches and circumferences of 3.5 to 5 inches. (Standard condoms are typically 6.7 to 8.3 inches long and 3.9 to 4.5 inches in circumference.) The template that men are given to measure themselves does not include inches or centimeters, instead using randomly ordered letters and numbers. One man might be E99, another Z22. One customer, Shawn Reimund, 34, of Austin, Tex., ordered B17. With standard condoms, "the length was frustrating because you would get a lot of sliding," he said, and excess latex would be "cutting off your circulation. I compare it to an anaconda wrapping around you." Also, "sometimes the girth just wasn't enough." Some other condom improvement ideas have been downright perplexing. The Galactic Cap, a polyurethane number that covers only the tip and attaches with medical adhesive, hasn't been tested nearly enough to try for F.D.A. approval. But Charles Powell, its California inventor, nonetheless sells it for 20, "flying under the F.D.A. radar," he said. "If they do come after me, I'm going to move my operation across the border into Mexico," he said. He contends the Galactic Cap allows more sensation because more skin is uncovered, but admits it won't necessarily protect against sexually transmitted diseases and has prompted complaints that its Band Aid like adhesive makes it "painful coming off." Other ideas seemed feasible but stalled for financial reasons. Mark McGlothlin, awarded 100,000 by the Gates Foundation to develop natural feeling collagen condoms from cow tendon or fish skin, said he lacks 2 million for the necessary clinical trials. Origami condoms, pleated to allow movement inside, received fanfare and a Gates grant. But efforts to check its status with the inventor were unsuccessful, and its website appears defunct. One Gates winner, Mahua Choudhury, a medical pharmacologist at Texas A M Health Science Center, said condom companies were considering investing in her stretchy hydrogel condom. Her proposal also claims that embedding an antioxidant in the condom can promote blood flow and muscle relaxation to "stimulate and maintain erection." The custom fit company president, Mr. Wedel, 50, got into the condom game as a Tufts University undergraduate, when he and a classmate sold condoms in packages festooned with the university's mascot, Jumbo the elephant. AIDS was raging, he said, and "we put a fun slogan and a picture on a condom, and presto, we were changing condoms from something taboo." Soon, Mr. Wedel, who considered becoming a professional violinist, informed his mother, a church choir director in Crystal Lake, Ill., that he was going "all in on the condom career." He co created a glow in the dark condom, helped open Manhattan's Condomania store, and won a court battle to sell Pleasure Plus, a condom that balloons near the tip. Still, "condoms have an enormous image problem," acknowledged Mr. Wedel, whose company works closely with public health organizations. The new federal study found "condom non use remained common," and that nearly 7 percent of women using them said condoms "broke or completely fell off." Although custom condoms became available in Europe in 2011, sold by TheyFit, which Global Protection purchased, it took years of pressing the F.D.A. and two standards organizations, ASTM International and ISO, for the devices to reach the United States, Mr. Wedel said. One hurdle: tests like the "hang and squeeze," during which condoms are filled with water and squeezed to see if they leak, and the "airburst" exam, which checks whether condoms break when inflated. Both evaluations were designed for larger condoms. "If you make a condom that's less than half the volume of a standard condom, you're not going to fill it with as much water, or it's not long enough to stretch on the mandrel for airburst testing," he said. Eventually, the F.D.A. granted clearance for expanded sizes, and last year ASTM International devised new testing methods for a wider range of condoms. Yaforgot my password ordered them, too, saying regular condoms were too small. ("I know it doesn't fit this subreddit," he said pointedly, "but I browse here sometimes.") The custom ones are "pretty good so far." Custom condoms cost 66 cents apiece in regular 24 pack shipments ( 1.66 apiece in a single six pack). Early purchasers were also sent the next larger and smaller sizes for free. Michael Davis, 21, a college student in Waverly, Fla., said he preferred the M77, the size above the one he first ordered. Standard condom circumferences were "just basically too big," he said. With custom fit condoms, he has found "no slippage whatsoever." Dr. Herbenick said condom education, along with tips like adding lubricant, are more important than access to 60 sizes. She and colleagues published a study that found custom fit condoms less likely to break but, for some men, more likely to slip. Some men might "prefer a condom that they think fits their penis," she said. "But for the most part, men and their partners are fine with existing condoms." Still, Mr. Frezieres said, even without "true benefit," custom condoms might increase usage, simply by being "confidence boosters."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
"Strrrrrrrrretch!" Irina Kolpakova called out. "Up, up, up, up! More, more, more!" It was mid September, and Ms. Kolpakova, one of the greatest Soviet era ballerinas, was doing what she has been doing for the last 25 years: urging, pushing and inspiring the dancers of American Ballet Theater to do more, more, more. "They are young," she said after the rehearsal. She shrugged expressively and smiled. "Why not?" Ms. Kolpakova is 81, but her shoulder length brown hair, slim frame and constant state of animation makes that age seem a theoretical matter. With Ballet Theater's artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, she is setting "Raymonda Divertissements," a one act version of the 19th century Petipa ballet "Raymonda," for Ballet's Theater's fall season, which opens on Wednesday at the David H. Koch Theater. "Essentially, I sit back, and she pretty much runs the show," Mr. McKenzie said in a telephone interview. "She has so much clarity in demonstrating, it's hard to match." In rehearsal, Ms. Kolpakova moves with the energy, grace and lucidity that characterized her dancing. In an interview at Ballet Theater's headquarters on lower Broadway, she spoke mostly in Russian, through a translator, but even more fluently through dramatic hand gestures and the expressive eyes that she used so effectively onstage. Her story in some ways sums up the changes that have occurred over her lifetime in her native Russia. A young ballerina at the Kirov at the height of Soviet isolationist policy, a revered star and a card carrying member of the Communist Party as glasnost began to break through, she has lived and worked in America since 1989, when Mikhail Baryshnikov invited her to teach at Ballet Theater. There, she has imparted the purity, bravura and spirit of the Russian style that she learned as a child and teenager with the great teacher Agrippina Vaganova, whose syllabus is still the foundation for most ballet teaching in Russia and the cornerstone of the limpid classicism for which the Mariinsky (as the Kirov is now called) dancers are revered. "Those principles cannot be better, absolutely," Ms. Kolpakova said. "The Vaganova school puts everything together from the top of your head to the tips of your fingers and toes." She illustrated her point, stretching one arm forward, her chest and chin lifting toward an imaginary audience. "It's all about coordination between every part of the dancer." Born in Leningrad (now called St. Petersburg), she started to dance when she was 7, prompted by her mother who, she said, would have liked to dance. At the Kirov school, which she joined at 9, she studied not just ballet technique, but piano, music appreciation, history, architecture and painting. "You were taught the history of ballet, about the French ballerinas, how technique evolved," she said. "We would walk around St. Petersburg, and our teachers would explain the styles of architecture, the Renaissance and its painters. We learned French, so that we understood what the ballet terminology meant. All this was in your dancing, not just your physical training." In 1951, Ms. Kolpakova graduated and joined the Kirov. Although she quickly began to get solo roles, she said she never felt certain that she was exceptional. "I doubted myself, doubted my abilities, and that forced me to work, work, work, and to watch and learn from everyone around me," she said. She went on to have an exceptionally long and glorious career she retired from the state company at 57 particularly lauded for her roles in the 19th century classics. When she was in her 40s, Ms. Kolpakova picked a promising young male dancer to partner her in "Giselle" and "Les Sylphides." It was Mr. Baryshnikov. "I was almost puzzled by her interest," he said in a telephone interview. "She was the grande dame of the company, such an important dancer, and really politically active at that time." It was Ms. Kolpakova who took him on the 1974 tour to Canada that provided the opportunity for his defection. "I kind of let her down, and I did feel guilty," he said. "But I am grateful to her for the rest of my life." In his last year as director of Ballet Theater, he invited her to teach at the company. "She is one of the last examples of an ultimate classical ballerina," he said, "a bridge between the great ballerinas of Petipa and later dancers like Ulanova. She didn't have the perfect body or the most beautiful legs or feet, but she had a transparency in her dancing, a quality that was unmatched." Ms. Kolpakova was offered a permanent position at Ballet Theater by Mr. Baryshnikov's successor, Jane Hermann, and she moved with her husband, the Kirov dancer Vladilen Semenov, and their daughter, to New York. Asked why she had decided to move, given her elevated status in Russia, her hands flew into the air once more. "It was interesting," she said. "That was Soviet ballet. This was something else. I wanted to know: How does it work here? How do they live?" She said that while she already knew something of Balanchine, she had loved discovering the work of Agnes de Mille, Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins and Frederick Ashton, and she extolled the talents of Alexei Ratmansky, the Russian born choreographer. But Ms. Kolpakova's essential role at Ballet Theater has been coaching its soloists and ballerinas in signature classical roles. "She is very demanding," said the former Ballet Theater principal Susan Jaffe, who noted that Ms. Kolpakova's teaching had transformed her career. "I think American dancers have a tendency to dance mostly with their legs, and don't understand epaulement, the use of the upper body," Ms. Jaffe said. "Irina brought me to an entirely different level of coordination and understanding." Isabella Boylston, a principal dancer at Ballet Theater, said that among many things Ms. Kolpakova had taught her was that a passionate individuality was important. "She wants it to be technically right, but she never tells you to do it the way she did," Ms. Boylston said. "She is very loving," she added. "You can cry on her shoulder, and she'll say, go home and have a glass of wine with your husband. It's only ballet."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Fred "Curly" Neal, whose dribbling wizardry made him one of the most well known members of the beloved Harlem Globetrotters traveling basketball team, died on Thursday at his home near Houston. He was 77. The team announced the death but gave no other details. Nicknamed "Curly" upon joining the Globetrotters in a humorous nod to his shaved head, Neal played in more than 6,000 exhibition games for the Globetrotters from 1963 to 1985, mostly against the Washington Generals, their hapless foils. In one of the most highly anticipated elements of the Globetrotters' routine, Neal would dribble all over the court, frequently sliding on his knees, never losing control of the ball no matter how close to the hardwood he had lowered himself. Then he would bounce the ball through a flailing defender's legs near the free throw line and dribble in for an uncontested layup to finish off the move. "Oh my gosh, he revolutionized ball handling," Nancy Lieberman, who played for the Generals against the Globetrotters in 1988, said in a phone interview. "Everything you see Kyrie Irving doing and Steph Curry doing now, all of it started with the Trotters. The Trotters made dribbling a show."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
You Know What Else Has Sold Well During the Pandemic? Weed Edibles Ben Emerson had never tried cannabis edibles before his birthday in April. He was raised in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which he left five years ago, and marijuana was "this thing that I had never really even thought that I was allowed to do," he said. "And then I'm like, 'Wait, I can actually make up my own mind about this.'" For his first foray, Mr. Emerson, 38, chose strawberry flavored gummies, which he ordered online and picked up curbside at a dispensary near his home in Portland, Ore. "I'm not super interested in smoking anything," he said. "But as soon as I decided I wanted to try cannabis, I wanted to try something edible." Anxious times (say, a global pandemic) call for palliatives, like meditation, exercise or, in some cases, weed. More than a dozen states declared cannabis stores and medical marijuana dispensaries essential businesses, along with pharmacies and grocery stores, as the coronavirus sent millions of Americans home, with or without jobs. Since March, the cannabis industry has seen an influx of new customers: Eaze, an online cannabis retailer, told The Associated Press that first time purchases of cannabis were up more than 50 percent in early March. And as fear of inhaled products has risen spurred partly by studies of "vaping illness" and exacerbated by respiratory risks associated with the coronavirus many consumers have opted to enjoy cannabis in edible form. When the Apothecarium, an upscale dispensary with locations in California and Nevada, moved from in store retail to curbside pickup in March, Cali Manzello, the general manager of its San Francisco flagship, noticed a change in the size of orders. "One of the first orders that printed out from the pickup machine said 25 packages of this gummy on it," she said. "And we all kind of giggled. We were like, 'Ooh boy, here it goes. It's starting.'" "It did not stop," Ms. Manzello continued. "People were ordering, you know, up to the legal limit, which can be up to 80 edibles in some cases." Ms. Manzello said that the company's edible sales are up 16 percent, while vape sales have fallen by 19 percent. "Edibles every year have been taking up a bigger slice of the pie," said Alex Levine, an owner and joint C.E.O. of Green Dragon, a dispensary that operates 15 locations in Colorado. "Right before corona hit, edibles were basically at 20 percent of our sales. That was a huge increase over the past couple of years." "I think cannabis in general is a pretty recession proof good," Mr. Ning said. "Much like alcohol," whose sales also skyrocketed as people prepared to be holed up at home indefinitely. Chris Beals, the C.E.O. of Weedmaps, an online directory for dispensaries, said that according to company data, overall sales of edibles in March were double those in February. He said it could be a result of increased cannabis consumption among habitual users but also "new consumers coming in, who were working from home, dealing with the stresses of Covid." In the close quarters of quarantine, being stuck with roommates or family for an extended period of time, consumers may not want to smoke or vape. "When people are working at home or they're around children or family, edibles are just more discreet," Mr. Beals said. Lauren Gockley, a classically trained chocolatier, is the director of edibles at Coda Signature, whose product line includes truffles and "fruit notes" (fancy weed gummies). She said consumers may be turning to edibles during the pandemic for other social reasons, including community. "With the pandemic, there's not that same sharing of cannabis the way there used to be," she said. "There's the phrase 'puff, puff, pass,' and now it's 'puff, puff, don't pass.'" "Passing around a tin of gummies is going to be much more acceptable than passing around a joint or a vape pen," she added. In April, Mr. Levine said that Green Dragon saw sales of edibles dip. He chalked that up to customers buying flowers, the smokable part of the plant (commonly called "bud"), which they could use to make their own edibles. "People didn't know how long this was going to last. 'Is cannabis going to be unavailable for months?' So people bought flowers," Mr. Levine said. "Flower is always the best value. It's like buying the raw ingredients, if you will. It's always cheaper to buy the flour and stuff to make cookies than buying the prepared cookies." Tee Franklin, a comic book writer and novelist in New Jersey, makes edibles at home and often uses cannabis oil in her cooking. "Oh, baby, I make everything," she said. "Every single thing you can think of, I have made within reason." That includes "an entire soul food dinner," which she cooked for herself and her 80 year old mother: ribs with homemade cannabis infused barbecue sauce, mac and cheese made with cannabis butter, and baked beans and collard greens cooked with cannabis sugar. Ms. Franklin, who is in her mid 40s, received a medical marijuana card (another item in high demand these days) in December, after seven years of living with a disability caused by a car accident. It took her a month to save up enough money to make a purchase. When she first tried it, she said, "My pain in five minutes went from a 9, 10 to a 6, 7. Those five minutes changed my entire life." Ms. Franklin still uses a walker, but she said she can move better and stand for longer because of the relief cannabis provides her. "I'm not as slow," she said. "I'm not the Flash, but I got a little pep in my step, and that's all from marijuana." "It helps with depression, anxiety, stress," she said. "There is no way on God's green Earth that I would be able to deal with the coronavirus and the protests of George Floyd and just me being a Black woman, period, there's no way." Ms. Franklin said edibles are the most accessible form of marijuana for many people, but not for everyone. Money can be a major barrier, especially since some 20 million Americans are out of work because of the pandemic. Mr. Levine noted that at one of the Green Dragon storefronts where he was recently working, "half of the people coming in had no income. I'm sure it was even worse than that." The price of edibles can vary based on the state and the amount of THC but with a package of 10 gummies with 100 milligrams per bag of THC selling for 20 in Colorado and 18 in California, the cost can be prohibitive for some people. Mr. Emerson, in Portland, acknowledged that his own ability to afford and have access to legal cannabis, for recreation, was a privilege. "That's not something that a lot of people have been able to do," he said. "A lot of damage has been done particularly to Black communities, the communities of color, because of something like cannabis, which is pretty harmless." Ms. Franklin echoed his words, noting the disproportionate incarceration rates of Black people for marijuana possession. "Dispensaries are an essential business," she said. "It's a drug dealing business that is owned majority by white. But the Black people who were doing the same thing are locked up. The brown folks, same thing, they're locked up." "That's the only thing about this whole weed business that I am not of fan of," she continued. "That's the only thing. Everything else, I am for it. I'm for it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
"Everyone's got their own thing," Tom Hardy growls in the newly released teaser trailer for Marvel's "Venom." "Whatever it is, you used to be one thing, now you're something else." 'Nuff said. Mr. Hardy used to be Bane, Batman's heavy breathing foe in the DC Comics based 2012 smash "The Dark Knight Rises." Now he's crossed over to the rival Marvel universe to play Venom in the much anticipated spinoff of the "Spider Man" franchise. The role was previously played by Topher Grace in "Spider Man 3" (2007), but Mr. Hardy looks to bring a much darker take to the character of Eddie Brock, one of the web slinger's adversaries, who attains superpowers after being infected by an alien Symbiote. The trailer is long on action and short on explanation, but we do get a glance at the very busy Michelle Williams, currently on screen in "The Greatest Showman" and "All the Money in the World." She plays Anne Weying, who in comic book lore is Brock's ex wife and, ultimately, the supervillainess She Venom.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
VALLEY GIRL (2020) Rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNOW, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu. The director Rachel Lee Goldenberg revamps Martha Coolidge's 1983 cult classic for this power clashing jukebox musical. This remake stars Jessica Rothe as Julie and Josh Whitehouse as Julie's bad boy love interest, Randy. As we follow the teenagers around Southern California, the movie pulls songs from Madonna, Queen, David Bowie and more, taking a crack at its own version of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," like every movie set in the 1980s must. The classic coming of age story even features a few cameos from the movie's original cast, including Deborah Foreman, who played the original Julie (though, alas, Nicolas Cage is nowhere to be found). JIMMY O. YANG: GOOD DEAL (2020) Stream on Amazon. Best known for his role as Jian Yang on HBO's "Silicon Valley," Jimmy O. Yang makes his stand up debut with this hourlong comedy special. As Yang recounts his experience moving from Hong Kong to California, he jokes about learning English from rap music, dating women who were taller than him and disappointing his father by not becoming a scientist. As he explains via the chapter titles of his 2018 memoir "How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents," Yang is ready to teach audiences anything from "How to Asian" to "How to Strip Club D.J."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Credit...Jody Rogac for The New York Times Greta Gerwig was deep in the American Wing of the Met, searching for signs of modern life. She wound her way instinctively through the halls, bobbed between throngs of tourists, waved an arm and leapt impulsively into a closing elevator: "Maybe we'll go in here! Sorry. Hi!" Finally she came to a Winslow Homer oil painting from 1870, in which three drenched girls were wringing out their heavy swimming costumes on a Massachusetts shore. One was obscured beneath a toss of wet blond hair. Another was planted in the sand, scratchy bare legs splayed out in front of her. Her bathing cap lent her an androgynous edge. She shot the blonde a feral glare. "Those are my girls," Gerwig said. "Don't they just look like girls that you know?" As Gerwig set about writing and directing her adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women , " due Christmas Day, she hunted for evocative images of girls from the Civil War and just after what she calls "girls you know pictures." She studied portraits from the past that hit her with a curious immediacy: a new wife disdainfully preparing her first stew , painted by Lilly Martin Spencer in 1854; a surly Victorian teen captured in sepia by Julia Margaret Cameron. "This is a terrific one of this little munchkin," Gerwig said, conjuring the Cameron photograph from the recesses of her phone. "Look at this girl. She's so arrogant and mad. I love her." Yet as the book goes on, the modern girl's identification with the sisters grows less comfortable : By the end, each of the Marches is either married or dead. These "four really talented weirdo girls who were ambitious and funny and competitive and kind of crazy," as Gerwig describes them, seem trapped by history. They are posed unnaturally in the conventional narratives of their time. Gerwig's film is less an update than it is an excavation a kind of literary investigation of the characters, and their writer, and what they all really wanted. The result is a meta tale that cracks open the world of "Little Women" to make a larger point about the stories we tell about women and girls. Reading the novel again as an adult, Gerwig , who is 36, was struck by how modern its dialogue felt once she brushed away the dusty surrounding material. "Things were jumping out at me that I felt like I'd never heard before," Gerwig said, like Marmee telling her daughter Jo: "I am angry nearly every day of my life." Gerwig said, "That's not something you think of as Marmee saying, except that it's right there in the book . She says it." Gerwig studied the story, and Alcott's life, until she found what she calls "the thing underneath," which is Alcott's depiction of "all of these inappropriate emotions for young women to have." Gerwig's adaptation feels modern. But "I didn't invent it," she said. "It's there." GERWIG DOES NOT RECALL reading "Little Women" for the first time. "I always knew who the Marches were," she said. "It got absorbed into the fabric of who I was." Just a few weeks ago, Gerwig's mother reminded her that she had played Jo in a community theater production of "Little Women" when she was an 11 year old girl growing up in Sacramento. Gerwig had forgotten, but the outline of a memory surfaced: Jo was supposed to flop dramatically onto the floor, and Gerwig recalled thinking, "I'm not really selling this." Opening the book again in her 30s, she told me, revealed a porthole to her younger self. She had idolized Jo as a child, and as she reread the story, she found herself measuring her adult life against the expectations of her girlhood. "I think, as adult women, we're always walking with our younger selves," she said. "I feel like I'm always answering to her, about whether I'm being as brave as I could be, or as big as I could be, or as ambitious as I could be." Her film is the rare adaptation that centers on the March sisters as adults. It opens when they are at the precipice of womanhood, halfway through the book. The project of their creative girlhood has stalled, and life has become about making a living, or marrying into one. Then it blinks back and forth, from childhood to adulthood, investigating where childhood dreams bloom and where they shrivel. As she dug into the world of "Little Women," Gerwig learned how Alcott's life diverged from that of Jo, her literary stand in. Alcott never married. A story line that she lends to the girls' father he goes off to war to serve soldiers and falls ill was ripped from her own experience as a nurse on the front. Gerwig was interested in what Alcott had wanted for Jo, and "what she put in the book because she felt she had to." Alcott's sharply witty letters and diaries were clarifying. "Money is the end aim of my mercenary existence," she once wrote to a friend, a line that Gerwig stole and gave to Jo. The film's Jo, played by the "Lady Bird" star, Saoirse Ronan who is quickly becoming a kind of avatar and muse for Gerwig borrows heavily from Alcott, down to her ambidexterity and her handwriting, which Gerwig hired calligraphers to reproduce. As the film goes on, the line between Jo and Alcott blurs; Ronan becomes both the character and the novelist who created her. To prepare for the role, Gerwig instructed Ronan to start writing, for herself. Alcott had never been interested in writing a book for girls she called the genre "moral pap for the young" but her publisher insisted. When the novel became a sensation, selling out in two weeks, it pulled Alcott's family out of abject poverty. And when Alcott's readers demanded that Jo end up married presumably, to the handsome boy next door, Laurie Alcott complied, with a wry twist. In the back half of the book originally published as a sequel, under the title "Good Wives" Jo does get married, but not to Laurie. "Jo should have remained a literary spinster," Alcott wrote to a friend, but she felt so pressured to satisfy expectations that "I didn't dare refuse out of perversity went made a funny match for her," with an older German professor. The only way Alcott could forge an independent life as a woman was to sell an alternate reality of her life one in which Jo was not so independent. As our tour of the Met wound down, Gerwig led us toward the cafe, where we pushed two chairs onto the end of a crowded table. She bent over a banana and spoke about the ending of her own "Little Women," which rips open the contradictions between life and art and commerce and reveals them plainly onscreen. Jo goes to Mr. Dashwood with a book based on her life and the lives of her sisters. The publisher insists that the Jo character become a wife by the end . They haggle, and finally Jo agrees to marry her off, for a price. And then we do see Jo snag herself a husband, in a way. Gerwig shot the scene like "the end of a studio romance," she said. She wanted it backlit, with rain machines and the camera on a crane . She wanted Jo's odd German suitor played by the French dreamboat Louis Garrel. She wanted a pursuit by carriage and a dramatic kiss. The scene feels triumphant, but the real triumph is Jo's novel, compromised though it may be. At some point, having filmed this meta romcom scene, Gerwig was asked to consider playing it straight. Couldn't this be the real end of the movie, not just the fictional ending of the book inside the movie? "To which I said, I never would have shot it that way," Gerwig said. "Everyone would have been like, What did we just watch?" She added: "That ending's not in me. At all." BY THE TIME SHE WAS DONE SHOOTING last December, Gerwig was six months pregnant, though her cast and crew did not know that at the time. "I didn't really intend for it to be that way," Gerwig said. "It's just that at the beginning, you don't tell anyone. And then at some point, I realized, 'Well, maybe I'll just make it to the end, and no one will know.' And then I did." In the spring, she delivered her rough cut to the studio, and 24 hours later, she went into labor. "The baby was like, 'All right, let's do this,'" Gerwig said. In late October, Gerwig arrived at a New York preview screening of "Little Women" for a crowd of journalists and critics and Alcott scholars. She stood awkwardly in the aisle, and a receiving line formed in front of her, everyone eager to grab her hands and touch her shoulders and pay their respects. "I feel like I'm at my wedding, for my movie," she said, and then she slouched to the front of the room to introduce the film. "As a girl, my heroine was Jo," she said. "As a woman, it's Louisa May Alcott." As she spoke, I noticed she was wearing a ring on the ring finger of her left hand. I watched her film, I cried, and then I went home and scanned her recent press photos for the ring. It had materialized several months ago and hadn't left. Some of the images were attached to tabloid reports of the "secret baby" she'd had with Baumbach, whose own film about art and relationships, "Marriage Story," is due in November . I guess I, too, was eager to know whether my heroine would be married by the end. That night, when Gerwig was out walking her dog, Wizard, she called me, and I asked her questions about directing movies, and then I said: "Oh, no," she said. She laughed. I had noticed she was wearing a ring , I said. "Yeah, that's a that's true, but yes no, but I'm not married," she said. Then she added mischievously: "Yet."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
A roundup of motoring news from the web: In October 1965, Ford promoted the 1966 Mustang convertible by cutting it into pieces, transporting it to the top of the Empire State Building in freight elevators and reassembling the car on the observation deck. Ford has decided to re create the stunt with the new Mustang convertible using the same basic technique, and the car will be on display to the public April 16 17. (Ford Motor) Toyota announced Tuesday that it would begin buying back stock for the first time in half a decade. With a surplus of cash and large profits, the automaker said in a statement that it planned to invest about 3.5 billion in 60 million shares, which works out to be a nearly 2 percent stake. (Bloomberg) The small overlap front crash test conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has proven a tough one for many automaker's vehicles to ace. But the Audi A3 passed that and other institute tests, earning the group's top rated Top Safety Pick designation. (Autoblog) The board of regents at the University of Michigan approved the building plans for a new testing center for automated vehicle systems. The 6.5 million complex, which is scheduled to be completed by the autumn, will be on about 30 acres at the university's North Campus Research Complex and will feature three miles of intersections, traffic signals, roundabouts and other features found on American roads. (The University Record)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The story of a wealthy family who lost everything will resume on May 29, Netflix announced Monday. That's when "Arrested Development," the absurdist saga of the Bluth clan, will return for its fifth season, nearly 15 years after the show debuted on television. Netflix previewed the announcement with a gimmick in which a version of the show's stair car drove around New York emblazoned with the date. (There is another one on display in Los Angeles.) All of the extended Bluth family, which includes Jason Bateman, Jeffrey Tambor, Alia Shawkat, Portia de Rossi, Will Arnett and Michael Cera, is returning for the new season.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"We would never have opened in a million years if our local bookstore hadn't closed," Ms. Straub said. "As a bookseller and a writer, I understand the importance of stores like Barnes Noble. I have no interest in talking smack about the chains. But an independent bookstore is all about understanding your customers and giving them what they need. It needs to be of its place and for its place." Starting an independent bookstore in a borough with few book buying options might seem like a giant leap of faith, but for Ms. Santos of The Lit Bar, it's the culmination of a dream begun three years ago when she learned that the local Barnes Noble would close. "Being an avid reader, that spoke to me on personal level," she said. "While I appreciated Barnes Noble when it was there, you would never know that you were in the Bronx. It didn't offer a lot of opportunities for the community. If you were a local author, good luck in getting your book on the shelf. But with an independent store, you can feel the energy of the neighborhood reflected in the choices. I couldn't think of a better way for people to engage and become real neighbors." There's a difference between surviving and thriving for some indies. "Thriving is a tough word," said Christine Onorati of Word in Greenpoint, Brooklyn (with a branch in Jersey City). "We have people who are unbelievably loyal to us, and we're digging in, trying to make our mark, but it's a tough business." Rent is a challenge for many. Miles Bellamy opened Spoonbill and Sugartown in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood almost 19 years ago, long before there was a Whole Foods and an Apple store, but he recently saw his rent almost double, to 14,500 a month from 8,000 a month. "Just as I go to both the local drugstore and Duane Reade, book lovers can support my store and buy books online," Mr. Bellamy said. "I feel like a better person when I go into the small store. But the pressure is constant. It's a full time hustle." There is an opportunity for certain industries to reinvent themselves after a large shock in their business model or in technology, according to Ryan L. Raffaelli, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, who has been studying independent bookstores for about five years. (He even took a course in how to open one.) "What I've found is that the indies are able to compete on several dimensions," he said. "One is community. They championed the notion of 'shop local' and 'Small Business Saturday.' Another is curation: They're not just offering best sellers but diamonds in the rough. They've taken back a sense of pride in what they can provide: a deeper and ongoing relationship with their customers. In high rent districts, because profit margins are relatively thin, success must come from multiple repeat customers, so that the customer can't imagine not visiting as part of his or her monthly routine. They're also flirting with adapting newer forms of technology." That's what Mr. Neller is banking on. Each of the planned new Shakespeare and Company stores will have an Espresso Book Machine (Mr. Neller is also head of the manufacturer, On Demand Books) that has the potential to print and bind any book not on the shelves while you're having a cappuccino at the store's cafe. (Since Mr. Neller is the former chief executive of Dean DeLuca, the new stores will definitely have baristas and snacks.) "It's really a renaissance," he said, "a new permutation that will have elements of the mom and pop blended with technology, allowing a store to have a practically infinite selection in a small setting. We'll take a digital file and convert it into an analog product, putting the warehouse inside a small footprint. That's transformative." It's almost like a new happy ending to "You've Got Mail."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION 10 p.m. on ABC, CBS and NBC; Stream on demconvention.com. The Democratic National Convention, which was originally planned for Milwaukee, will continue in its virtual format for a second night. "The usual tableau of cheering delegates and supersize balloon drops will be replaced by green screens and about three dozen politicians speaking remotely over satellite feeds that if the event coordinators are lucky don't freeze, drop audio or disintegrate into pixels," Glenn Thrush and Michael M. Grynbaum wrote of the new format for The New York Times. Ahead of Jill Biden's address at the end of the program, the evening's speakers will include former Secretary of State John Kerry, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and former President Bill Clinton. The events will also be broadcast on cable news networks, including CNN and MSNBC, as well as PBS (check local listings). I QUIT 10 p.m. on Discovery. This series is perfect for anyone who's ever fantasized about quitting her 9 to 5 and becoming her own boss. Six sets of entrepreneurs decide to leave their steady jobs and start their own businesses, from developing an outdoor cooler company to making and selling Brazilian truffles. Along the way, they'll be mentored by Harley Finkelstein, the chief operating officer of Shopify; Debbie Sterling, the founder of GoldieBlox; and Tricia Clarke Stone, the chief executive of WP Narrative. By the end of the series, the entrepreneurs with the most promising business venture will receive 100,000.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
LONDON On this wet and windy Monday, deep in the underbelly of Soho House, the British Fashion Council unveiled the nominees for the 2017 Fashion Awards but the grand reveal was something of an anticlimax. You could blame it on the turmoil of Brexit, Britain's decision to leave the European Union. More probable, and pervasive, however, is the modern disorder affecting most awards ceremonies across the creative industries: the affliction known as "not enough new nominees." The breakfast announcement was a more low key event than last year, when much was made of the revitalized and global nature of the awards, with Natalie Massenet, the council's chairwoman, billing it as London's answer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Gala. Yet there were plans for a cocktail celebration that evening and an event for Hollywood insiders this week in Los Angeles. Once again, Jonathan Anderson dominated proceedings with four nominations (he had four in 2016, too). For his J.W. Anderson label, he was nominated in the British Designer of the Year Menswear and British Designer of the Year Womenswear categories. And for Loewe, where he is creative director, he was nominated as Accessories Designer of the Year and Designer of the Year. Once again, Alessandro Michele of Gucci was up for the accessories award (he won it last year), as well as Designer of the Year. And once again, Gigi Hadid, winner of Model of the Year in 2016, was back in the running, joined by her younger sister Bella (on the list last year), Adwoa Aboah (on the list last year, too), and Kaia Gerber, the 16 year old daughter of Cindy Crawford, who appeared on every major fashion week runway last season. And so it went. Guram Gvasalia, the chief executive of Vetements, was back as a nominee for Business Leader. Vetements itself was up for the Urban Luxe Award (which it won last year). Raf Simons for Calvin Klein was a new addition to the Designer of the Year shortlist, but then again, this is not his first appearance at the fashion awards scene rodeo; in June he won both women's wear designer of the year and men's wear designer of the year at the CFDA Awards in New York in June. Then there were the salutes to Christopher Bailey of Burberry (men's wear designer) and Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen (women's wear designer), both stalwarts of the scene who frankly would cause more of a stir at this stage if they weren't up for an award. As the audience rose and prepared to face the rain, one couldn't help but think: for an industry whose raison d'etre is an obsession with newness, the awards event scheduled for Dec. 4 at the Royal Albert Hall, which doubtless will be uplifting and in the right spirit, also is running a high risk of feeling like more of the same. Unsurprisingly, it was among the British Emerging Talent categories, broken into separate awards for men's wear and women's wear this year, that some fresher faces finally were mentioned: Charles Jeffrey for Charles Jeffrey Loverboy was nominated for the men's award, and Natalia Alaverdian for A.W.A.K.E, Michael Halpern and Rejina Pyo were among the women's wear nominees. Interesting, too, was the inclusion of Supreme in the shortlist for Urban Luxe Brand, as the skate wear brand continues its charge closer into the bosom of the fashion establishment. Perhaps the biggest surprise and most controversial choice was the nomination of Maria Grazia Chiuri of Dior as Designer of the Year. Ms. Chiuri has been at the brand's helm for three seasons now, and a subject of critical debate for almost as long. Dior sales may be robust but reviews of her collections have been mixed (to put it mildly). Which raises some interesting questions about the awards criteria, and may make it the most watched choice of the night, which is largely a fund raising vehicle for fashion education grants. May the best man, woman or international conglomerate, win.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A human corpse becomes fertile loam for gentle grasses. Bees do little dances for one another that communicate detailed topographies. The oil from whales formed part of the nitroglycerine explosives used in World War II. The magnetic polarity of the earth totally reverses every once in a while, too, we may as well add. The most basic consequences of the facts of our natural world can read as far more magical than any spirit or bending spoon, save we so rarely see nature in that way for what it is. These four new picture books that focus on nature don't just instill wonder, they renew it. Each one, in telling a relatively straight story of the natural world, reminds us of how much wilder nature is even than our loopiest imaginings. In THE HONEYBEE (Atheneum, 48 pp., 17.99; ages 4 to 8), the author Kirsten Hall ("The Jacket") teams up with the gently magnificent illustrator Isabelle Arsenault ("Cloth Lullaby," "Colette's Lost Pet") to bring readers the story of one year, from spring to spring, with the honeybees of a single hive. Hall's charming text proceeds in lightly cadenced lines that mostly rhyme: "Come now, Rest. Join our nest. Huddle and cuddle, the winter's our test." Arsenault's illustrations capture something of the alien vision of bees bees see a "bee purple" in flowers that is invisible to us through a neon orange that she uses sparingly amid paler gouache, pencil and ink landscapes. Her flowers and grasses are drawn impressionistically, while the bees themselves are made more emotionally legible with cartoonish eyes and even smiles. Children will love tracing the erratic paths of the honeybees, and come away with a not too distorted sense of the little honey factory inside the unprepossessing, and previously terrifying, hive. The hexagons of honeycomb, as drawn by Arsenault, seem so perfect as to be fanciful precisely when they are fact. HAWK RISING (Roaring Brook, 48 pp. 18.99; ages 4 to 9), with words by Maria Gianferrari ("Coyote Moon") and illustrations by the Caldecott medalist Brian Floca ("Locomotive," "Princess Cora and the Crocodile"), has a more naturalistic tone, even as the awesomeness of the central bird of prey makes the book read intensely, in the manner of a ghost story. The reader of "Hawk Rising" is set in alliance with two sisters who are watching a father hawk nested near their home. Over the course of the day, he needs to find food for the three hungry chicks in his nest. The prose is not cute, but instead informative and painterly: "Black talons curving onto wood. Hooked beak, sharp as a knife. Head turning. Eyes searching. Chicks waiting." Gianferrari admirably doesn't shy away from precise language, which a child loves to have at hand perhaps even more than an adult does: The hawk doesn't just fly and attack, he rides the wind "like a wave, twisting and turning, kiting and floating." Children's stories about predators generally either choose to make the predator a villain, or to somehow obscure the predator's way of life. "Hawk Rising" does something more honest and more interesting it simply watches. We see the father hawk failing to get a chipmunk, then harried by crows, then failing to catch sparrows. We see the claws of the hawk up close from the prey's perspective, and we also see the hawk's hungry chicks. Finally the hawk, spotting a squirrel a squirrel lovingly detailed in a full spread Audubon like drawing succeeds in catching its prey. The expression Floca puts on the watching younger sister's face is wonderfully ambivalent as we see her watching the father hawk fly off, the squirrel in his talons silhouetted against "the navy blue sky." The story's final move draws attention to the uneasy unity between the humans and the hawks. "Through the night, safe in your nests, you and the Hawk family sleep." HEARTBEAT (Atheneum, 56 pp., 17.99; ages 4 to 8), written and illustrated by Evan Turk ("Muddy"; "The Storyteller"), also focuses tightly on one species: whales. "Heartbeat," however, finds its through line across time and taxonomy, linking whales and humans through the centuries. The illustrations tell most of this story, while the spare, incantatory prose mostly sets the tone. We see a fetal whale's heart beating near its pregnant mother's. The baby is born, but soon the mother is speared, though this is presented somewhat abstractly, through intrusions of harsh white. The mother's body rises and then becomes a light, then a hundred lights, a million lights, then part of war, eventually even part of mankind's exploration of space. Meanwhile the baby whale longs for its mother. Near the end of the book a young girl at the prow of a ship sees the surviving whale, older now. In sync with the whale's heartbeat and song, she is moved to promise to protect the one ocean, one sea, one song. Turk's intense color palette throughout is mostly inky purples and carmines, interrupted by white cut outs. You leave this book with the sense of having overheard an unsettling but beautiful lullaby. THE FOREST (Enchanted Lion, 72 pp., 25.95; ages 4 and up), with words by Ricardo Bozzi (translated from the Italian by Debbie Bibo) and illustrated by Violeta Lopiz and Valerio Vidali, follows the metaphorical associations of a story of nature even farther. This is an essentially existential children's book, which imagines human life itself as an exploration through that famed and sometimes dark forest in which we have often been said to find ourselves. Like pretty much every title published by the small, independent Enchanted Lion books, it is a gorgeous, singular, unimprovable book. The story starts: "It is an enormous, ancient forest that has not yet been fully explored." Inside, a series of bas reliefs and cut outs on plain paper shows us first a baby, then a young child ... and on through to an old, wrinkled face that eventually yields, becoming lines in a landscape from which new greenery grows. Between the images of a human aging, we see forests, jungles and fields, with animals and humans making their way, sometimes alone, sometimes in a group. Somehow "The Forest" is a work of art that escapes feeling like an "art object" it succeeds in being for children. The ink on its mylar dust jacket makes a distinctively beautiful sound. The eye holes and occasional unfoldings alter a reader's sense of space. "It is said that the forest has a certain limit if you look straight ahead, but the sides are boundless." This book takes on even death: "At the end of the climb there is a ravine into which each explorer will eventually fall, despite the precautions taken and the advancements of science." This fall didn't bother my 4 year old at all. She took interest in the new seedlings, the disappearance of the textured pages, and the return of the pines.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
DRIVING the Mini E in and around New York City highlights both the promises and the pitfalls of electric cars. One promise, backed up on an only mildly nail biting drive through Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Westchester County suburbs, is that the Mini E an electric version of BMW's Mini Cooper can travel more than 100 miles on a charge in favorable conditions. As Mini has said, you may be surprised how far 100 miles is when you are commuting or running local errands. Another is that the Mini, in contrast to plug in hybrids like the Chevrolet Volt that arrives late this year, will never make contact with a gasoline nozzle. The Mini E driver also spends just 3 to 6 for 100 miles' worth of electricity; a car that averages 25 m.p.g. would cost 12 to cover the same distance, assuming a gasoline price of 3 a gallon. The pitfalls may be easy to ignore while you're humming silently in the Mini, but they are lurking. First, you cannot buy or lease one unless you are among the 450 people selected for a yearlong pilot project. Second, battery sapping winter weather can seriously reduce the car's driving range. As with hybrids, the Mini E captures energy from its brakes to recharge the battery. But the Mini's regenerative brakes are arguably too aggressive in their energy scavenging: if you step off the throttle, the Mini drags itself to a stop you need not even touch the brake pedal. With practice, feathering the throttle allowed me to modulate the dragging anchor effect. BMW has considered adding cruise control or a free wheeling mode for smoother cruising. The space hogging battery pack eliminates the Mini's back seat and most of its cargo area, leaving just an oddly shaped parcel shelf. The nearly 600 pound battery also neuters the Mini's signature go kart handling. To imagine what happens when you want to change directions quickly, picture four adults standing on the rear bumper. Yet driven for mileage rather than excitement, the Mini has no trouble keeping pace with traffic, running from a stop to 60 miles per hour in 8.5 seconds and on to a top speed of 95 m.p.h. Even for a committed petro head, it is genuinely satisfying to drive a car that runs on electrons; it feels as though you are getting away with something. Those electrons spring from advanced lithium ion batteries like the ones in laptop computers; the coming Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt will also have lithium ion, which offer roughly double the power with half the size and weight of the nickel metal hydride batteries found in most hybrid cars. Mini doesn't like to publicize the limp home mode, worried that owners might come to rely on it, but the E can crawl roughly 10 miles at up to 25 m.p.h. once its battery indicator is at zero. That helpful feature brings up the "range anxiety" of those considering an E.V. That issue has proponents of plug in hybrids like the Volt which switch seamlessly to gasoline once batteries are depleted on longer trips citing their superior range and marketability. My own teenage years were dotted with hikes to service stations, gas can in hand, after I misjudged how far my nickel and dime fillups would take me. But range anxiety is more acute in an electric car, as I discovered when I briefly thought I had too little juice to make it home. (Going easy on the throttle, I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge with miles to spare). But stray too far afield in the Mini E and not even a gas station can save you. You will also need a tow to the nearest electrical outlet and a few hours to wait for a recharge. That's a chief reason why electrics are being positioned as commuter cars. Until there's a widespread charging network, an electric vehicle is largely tethered within the radius of its travel range 100 miles, or whatever from home. E.V. evangelists tend to play down range limitations, arguing that a charging infrastructure could be quickly developed. But nationwide charging remains more theory than reality. For all the promise of electric cars, the 220 volt question remains this: How many consumers, especially apartment dwellers or anyone who lacks a secure, handy outlet, will buy the E.V. first and hope the plugs will follow?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Taw Richardson, chief executive of the drug's manufacturer, AgroSource, said his company's research found the drug to be effective. He questioned the methodology of the new study, saying that researchers used only one delivery method for the drug and not the range of products that the company recommends for ensuring it penetrates the leaves. But environmentalists and public health advocates said the results suggested that the E.P.A.'s approval of oxytetracycline was based on flawed data, which was provided by Agrosource. "It's pretty frustrating because they are creating a huge environmental risk and risk for people applying the drug," said Steven Roach, the director of food safety programs at Food Animal Concerns Trust, an advocacy group. "This is what happens when you have an agency that responds in a panic mode. It makes me worry about how the E.P.A. is making decisions on antibiotics." Asked to comment on the study, the E.P.A. did not provide a response. Christopher Vincent, a physiologist at the University of Florida who studies citrus greening, said the waxy coating on the leaves of orange trees has been an impediment to delivering oxytetracycline into the plant's phloem, or vascular system. A study he published earlier this year with a group of scientists that included Professor Wang, found the drug does penetrate the leaves, though at relatively low levels. "It's been difficult to know how much of your application is getting into the phloem, but this new paper gets closer to answering that question than anyone has gotten before," he said. The drug is one of two human grade antibiotics that the agency has approved to treat citrus greening, which now threatens commercial groves in California and other citrus growing states. In humans, the drugs, oxytetracycline and streptomycin, are used to treat pneumonia, syphilis and a broad array of infections. In 2016, the compounds were approved for emergency use on citrus trees in Florida, and in December, the agency expanded the use of oxytetracycline for orange groves across the country. A wider rollout for streptomycin is still pending. The approvals were made over objections from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which said expanded use of the drugs could encourage dangerous bacteria to mutate to survive the drugs and infect humans with pathogens that are impervious to existing antibiotics.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Their Day Glo stripes light up blocks. Their cheeky billboards line highways. They are even the subject of shows on cable television. Although self storage facilities have become an inescapable fixture of modern New York, the city still remains underserved with places to stow old futons, tennis rackets and record albums, according to developers, investors and industry analysts. The shortage of storage is most acute in Manhattan, which is a Catch 22, they add, because few need extra space more than those who live on this densely settled island, where apartments are often skimpy on closets. Gotham Mini Storage, which opened this month at 501 10th Avenue, near West 39th Street, hopes to bring relief to those cluttered homes. Currently offering 1,000 units on the fourth floor of the seven story building, with an additional 1,000 units planned on each of the fifth and sixth floors, Gotham is the first self storage facility to open in Manhattan in about a decade and defies a trend of recent closings in areas where new development often replaced the facilities. Gotham, the first in a planned line of outposts from Broadway Storage, a limited liability company, shares the 240,000 square foot building with DHL, the package delivery company, which occupies the second and third floors, and part of the ground floor. DHL is subletting the space to Broadway at 50 million for up to 25 years, says Jack Guttman, a managing partner at Broadway. Like other self storage facilities, Gotham sells cardboard boxes in its ground floor retail area. Clean gray carpet covers upstairs hallways, which seem a far cry from the dingier spaces portrayed on A E's popular reality show "Storage Wars" and its spinoffs. To set itself apart, Gotham will offer free doughnuts to tenants and dog snacks to their four legged friends. Tenants can also work on laptops with free Wi Fi while enjoying music piped through the facility, Mr. Guttman said. The building, which was a parking garage in the 1920s, has two truck size elevators that tenants can use to move things directly from vehicle to storage. Gotham offers free pickups, not in a minivan like other companies, but a Mercedes Benz Sprinter minibus. These flourishes added 20 percent to the development cost of 15 million, Mr. Guttman said. Prices range from 39 a month for a 64 cubic foot locker reached by a stepladder, to 2,000 for a garage size space. In contrast, a similar 64 cubic foot space at Manhattan Mini Storage this week was 57 a month, with a year lease, at most locations. Prices started at 70 a month, for a slightly larger space, at Tuck It Away, which is based in Upper Manhattan. "We know we've built a good product," said Mr. Guttman, who said he has been buying and selling self storage facilities in New York for more than a decade. "It's different, and it's better." He added that the high rise rental buildings that have sprung up around the building in recent years, and others that will come with the Hudson Yards redevelopment, should provide a steady stream of customers. Yet as a start up company, Gotham can seem to be a David opposing an army of Goliaths. There are about 30 self storage facilities in Manhattan, according to the New York Self Storage Association, a trade group, which counts those facilities where tenants can get items as they please, without having to call first. Manhattan Mini Storage, which has been in business since the 1970s, owns 17 of those properties, spread from the East Village to Washington Heights. In look and feel, Manhattan Mini's buildings can resemble Gotham's. At the Manhattan Mini Storage at 401 East 110th Street, the spacious retail area features a low curved counter ringed by stools, evoking the check in area at an airport. For its part, Manhattan Mini, which is known for its politically provocative billboards, plays down the challenge presented by Gotham Mini Storage. "We know our customers have other options, but we're confident that we continue to offer the best service, location choices and reliability in the city," wrote Stacy Stuart, a spokeswoman, in an e mail. The ranks of self storage companies have been thinned because of development pressure. Indeed, as the industrial neighborhoods where self storage facilities were traditionally found became fashionable addresses, like the West Village and TriBeCa, self storage facilities were often sold and razed. A 1,500 unit facility owned by Whitehall Storage at West and Charles Streets, for instance, came down during the last boom and the site is now slated for a 98 unit condo. But analysts say that interest in storage among homes and businesses remains robust, which may explain why CubeSmart, a national storage company, paid 650 million last year for 16 facilities owned by Storage Deluxe, a company that Mr. Guttman helped found a decade ago. The deal involved properties in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, and worked out to about 350 a square foot. In contrast, some city office buildings can sell for 800 a square foot, analysts point out, but Bronx warehouses can trade for as little as 100. "The investment demand for self storage in this marketplace is hot and heavy," said Michael Knott, a managing director of Green Street Advisors, a research firm. For CubeSmart and other companies, existing self storage facilities present golden opportunities, he added. They can attract annual rents of 50 a square foot, on par with Midtown office buildings, but require almost no spending on improvements when tenants turn over, as an office might. "Low capital requirements, in giant bold letters, is a key reason why investors love this business," Mr. Knott said. But as the CubeSmart deal illustrates, the landscape these days is increasingly made up of national companies instead of mom and pop operators, said Christopher Marr, CubeSmart's president. He began his career in the mid 1990s developing two self storage facilities for Storage USA on West 21st Street in Manhattan, facilities which are now owned by Manhattan Mini Storage. CubeSmart also recently changed its name in 2011 from U Store It, in part to convey to tenants that they don't have to do everything themselves, but can enjoy a range of new services, like a courier that can shuttle boxes to tenants' homes, Mr. Marr said. Similarly, its employees can sign for packages, which is important for tenants who run their businesses out of their storage areas and who make up about 30 percent of CubeSmart's tenants, he added. But Mr. Marr said the city appealed to the company primarily because of its high household incomes and because its residents move around a lot: "It has all the characteristics of an outstanding market." And the public markets seem to agree: On Jan. 3, CubeSmart's stock price hit a one year high, at 14.72. Self storage units were believed to have started in California in the 1970s, as places where migrant farm workers could store their belongings during harvest season. The first in New York came soon after, in 1974, when Danny Maloney Jr. opened the first Big Apple Mini Storage at 229 East 120th Street, though it would be two years before tenants could let themselves in to their own units, Mr. Maloney said. Today, he owns four properties, all in Harlem, containing 800 units, as well as Liffey Van Lines, a 60 truck fleet that can move boxes for a fee. Because his self storage units are at 95 percent occupancy, Mr. Maloney is planning a new facility, at a property he owns at 220 East 117th Street, which is leased to Budget, the rental car company. When Budget's lease is up this year, Mr. Maloney will add six new stories atop the 50,000 square foot building, to create a new self storage structure, he explained, adding that the future of his industry has never seemed brighter. As home prices rise, he said, "it's going to be way cheaper to store the stuff than to buy a bigger apartment."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Netflix's "Stranger Things" returns Thursday for another season of the Upside Down, paranormal pyrotechnics and, of course, '80s nostalgia. And as in the first two seasons, the creators Matt and Ross Duffer have given a supporting role to a well known actor from the era. Following in the footsteps of past "Stranger Things" guest stars like Matthew Modine, Sean Astin and Paul Reiser is Cary Elwes, who in Season 3 plays Larry Kline, the fast talking mayor of Hawkins, Ind. Elwes starred in hits like "Saw," "Bram Stoker's Dracula," "Glory" and "Days of Thunder," but he acknowledges that he is still most recognized for one of the most beloved films of the '80s: Rob Reiner's "The Princess Bride." A longtime fan of "Stranger Things," the actor recently discussed what joining the show meant to him, what Netflix is doing to the industry and why "The Princess Bride" is "the gift that keeps on giving." Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. How did you get involved with "Stranger Things"? It was the only show I binge watched with my wife. I wasn't somebody who did a lot of bingeing. But that show was so gripping that we actually canceled a lot of plans that we had because we just couldn't stop watching it. And I don't think I was alone in that experience. So when I got the call from the Duffers that they wanted me to come in and meet on it I was obviously very excited. Have you ever experienced that kind of serendipity in your career before? Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola directed "Bram Stoker's Dracula." Coppola is someone who I dreamed of working with. I had studied his work very carefully. So when we met, I think I talked his ear off for about an hour. He was very sweet about that. I've had a wonderful career really. How secretive is the production of "Stranger Things"? How much did they tell you about how and where you would fit in to the overall story of the season? We discussed the character and explored his past and nuances in great detail. I was allowed to base the character on a number of politicians that I like, and they were agreeable to that. They could only tell me what my character would be doing for this season and not any further than that simply that he was one of those politicians more interested in getting the constituent's votes than in the community as a whole. Laughs. Without spoiling whether it's a possibility for your character, would you come back to the show if the opportunity presented itself? It would obviously be a great honor. I had so much fun doing it. They're terrific folks. I was obviously a little nervous about joining this cast because they've been working together for a long time and I was the "new guy." They all made me feel very, very welcome. It's a very familial atmosphere on the set. The Duffers are very talented at creating that atmosphere. Did they discuss any of the influences on the show with their cast? For example, this season feels very John Carpenter and James Cameron. Sure, sure. They want everybody to know what their influences are per season and sometimes per episode. For this season, it was some Stephen King, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," a couple others. They're very influenced by this period and by the films and pop culture of this period, and their attention to detail is phenomenal. When they create an atmosphere on a set, you feel it. For an actor, that's a great thing. Half your work is done for you when you have filmmakers or showrunners that create a life that's so real that you don't have to use much of your imagination. With "Stranger Things" and "GLOW" this Summer, Netflix is going to be '80s dominated again. Why do you think we're so interested in that era now? It's cyclical, I think. I think we've explored the '70s and now it's time for the '80s, which is not a bad time even if people have issues with it in terms of fashion. Laughs. Myself included. There are some photographs of some jackets I've torn up. On the whole, it was a great time for movies. It was a great time for music. By the way, the Duffers are very talented at picking songs for this show. So it's fun. You've been in film and TV a long time how does the Netflix Era feel different to you? Netflix changed the business altogether. They came along and revolutionized everything. Their talent for picking content and picking talent. They have a great knack for having their finger on the pulse of what's in the zeitgeist, this show being possibly the most important. They're very hands off, and that attracts more talent. A lot of filmmakers who have done television with network have felt like they had their vision stifled a little bit. Who doesn't want to flock to a studio where they leave you alone? Where do we go from here? I think you're going to see the theatergoing experience die out and change altogether. You're going to have event movies that probably last a day or two. You'll be able to buy a ticket and meet the stars. You've seen a lot more movie theaters now catering food to try and get people out of their houses. "A dinner date and a movie" is slowly disappearing. For me, the moviegoing experience sitting in the cinema with strangers and the lights go down and we all have an experience together is a unique phenomenon that you can't recreate in your living room. But the younger generation really doesn't care about that. Is there a way to make them care? Probably IMAX or something that can't be recreated at home. I don't know what it is yet. Somebody's going to invent it. I don't think it will be dead and gone forever, but I think it will be much more limited. We have a movie theater in Pacific Palisades called Cinepolis, and they do retro films. I took a friend to see "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" in a pristine print not one spot or speck or glitch and I saw things I had never seen before! Why do you think "The Princess Bride" remains so resonant, to the point that it feels as if people talk about it more now than 30 years ago? I don't know! Bill Goldman who wrote the novel and film version of "The Princess Bride" wrote a book, "Adventures in the Screen Trade," that says, "In Hollywood, no one knows anything." And what he meant by that was that if they knew what a hit would be, they would make them all the time. It's a crapshoot. What I think "Princess Bride" had was that it was cross generational. It didn't talk down to its audience; whole families could sit and watch it and find something in it; it was fun; and it was about love. Who doesn't like that? It's silly at times. It's adventurous. It has every element you want. It was one of those unique things you can't recreate. It's the gift that keeps on giving.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
AS a girl growing up in Jamaica, Queens, Lucille Gang Shulklapper dreamed of being a writer and "having a househusband like Edna St. Vincent Millay." Life didn't unfold quite that way. Instead of having a literary career, she married, took a teaching job and raised three children. She wrote off and on, mostly for herself. But when she retired in her late 50s, "words came tumbling out of closets and drawers, leaking from rusty faucets and reappearing as character actors," said Ms. Shulklapper, now 80. She began sending out poems and short stories, and published her first book of poetry in 1996, when she was 60. Since then, she has published four chapbooks, which are typically small editions of 40 pages or so, and a fifth is in progress. And in January, Guardian Angel Publishing released Ms. Shulklapper's first children's book, "Stuck in Bed Fred." "I am living beyond my dreams," said Ms. Shulklapper, a widowed grandmother of six who lives in Boca Raton, Fla. "I feel as though it's my baby. A long pregnancy and now its delivery, all 10 toes and fingers." Conventional wisdom holds that if you do not write your "Farewell to Arms," paint your "Starry Night," start the next Twitter or climb Mount Everest by young adulthood, or at least middle age, then chances are you will never do it. But that idea is becoming increasingly outdated as people are not only having successes later in life, but blooming in areas they never expected. Maybe they are not making millions, or wielding a brush like Rembrandt. Still, many people are discovering that the latter part of their lives can be just as (or even more) rewarding creatively, emotionally and spiritually. Examples of later in life triumphs abound. Ernestine Shepherd, for example, began bodybuilding (and running marathons) at age 56. Diana Nyad swam from Cuba to Florida at 64, after several attempts. Harland Sanders started his KFC empire in his 60s. Frank McCourt won a Pulitzer Prize for "Angela's Ashes" when he was 66. Jurgen Schmidt, a retiree in Huntington Beach, Calif., and a Senior Masters swimmer, recently starred in a three minute video for Speedo. "A lot of what it comes down to are you cognitively able to do it?" said James C. Kaufman, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut. "Most software developers don't suddenly start at 60, But being open to new experiences is one of the biggest predictors of creativity." "We absolutely have to revamp this idea of a linear pattern of accomplishment that ends when you're 50 or 60," said Karl A. Pillemer, a professor of gerontology at Cornell University, and author of, most recently, "30 Lessons for Loving." "There are simply too many examples of people who bloom late, and it's the most extraordinary time of their life." Mr. Pillemer, who has interviewed more than 1,500 people age 70 and older for the Legacy Project at Cornell, found that a large number of people said they had achieved a life dream or embarked on a worthwhile endeavor after age 65. "There was this feeling of somehow 'getting it right' at 50 or 60 or older," he said, noting that this sentiment applies to creative efforts, relationships and work. Jan Hively, a retired educator in Yarmouth, Mass., agrees with that. "I'm doing my most meaningful work at 83," Ms. Hively said. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' In 2001, she earned her doctorate in education from the University of Minnesota. Since then, she has helped found three organizations dedicated to empowering older adults to lead productive lives. "My message is: meaningful work, paid or unpaid, through the last breath," Ms. Hively said. "I'm always interested in thinking about what's next." Researchers distinguish between crystallized (general knowledge) and fluid (problem solving) intelligence. Crystallized intelligence tends to grow over a lifetime, whereas fluid intelligence usually declines after a person reaches the late 20s. That's why deciding to become a mathematician or a chess master at age 50 usually does not work. "It is generally very difficult to get a late start in a field that requires lots of fluid intelligence from the get go," said Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis and author of "The Wiley Handbook of Genius." However, Mr. Simonton points out, people differ at the rates and ages in which they acquire expertise. "Often people don't even discover what they really want to do with their lives or even where their talents might lie until well past middle age," he said. "Grandma Moses is the proverbial case." (That's Anna Mary Robertson Moses, better known as Grandma Moses, the renowned American folk artist.) In his book, "Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity," David W. Galenson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, argues that there are two kinds of practitioners in most given fields: conceptual and experimental. Conceptual minds tend to be younger and typically better with abstractions. Experimental minds, on the other hand, take longer to gestate, working by trial and error. This helps explain why, for example, conceptual artist Pablo Picasso produced his greatest work at age 26, whereas Paul Cezanne created his at 67. "To say every discipline has its peak age is wrong," Mr. Galenson said. Of course, everyone has his or her own definition of "peaked." Marjorie Forbes was a 68 year old retired social worker when she began studying the oboe. Although she played the violin as a teenager, she had always wanted to play the oboe. Now 81, Ms. Forbes said she initially was happy "tootling away" in her Manhattan living room. But as her prowess grew, so did her aspirations. After taking a music course at Oberlin College, she joined coached chamber ensembles at the 92nd Street Y and at Lucy Moses, a community arts school in New York. Today, she considers herself a "medium good amateur." "I can't make money doing what I'm doing, but I think I've reinvented myself to do something I've always wanted to do," Ms. Forbes said. "I never dreamed I'd get to be as good as I am." Her colleague, Ari L. Goldman, took up the cello in his 50s, but did not get really serious about it until age 60. Now 65 and a professor of journalism at Columbia University, Mr. Goldman says he has had several musical experiences that have taken him by surprise, including playing a duet with the concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra. "I played a piece from the 3rd Suzuki book and he accompanied me," he said. "That was my peak moment." Mr. Goldman also performs with the New York Late Starters String Orchestra, for amateur musicians, and wrote a book, "The Late Starters Orchestra," about learning an instrument later in life. "The people I met do it for fun, for pleasure," he said. "We try to do our best, and if we get 40 or 50 percent of it we're happy." Music wasn't on Paul Tasner's bucket list, but starting his own company was. For 35 years, Mr. Tasner, 69, worked for other people, but he always had entrepreneurial leanings. In 2009, he was laid off from his job as senior director of operations for a large cleaning products company. Rather than retire, he decided to make the leap. He joined forces with an architect, Elena Olivari, and in August 2011, after many fits and starts, they opened PulpWorks Inc., a designer and manufacturer of sustainable packaging for consumer products. "It's been a struggle, no question this country is not as green as people would like you to believe, and companies are not eager to make changes," said Mr. Tasner, adding that they only recently began paying themselves. Still, they have landed some big accounts (including Groupon and T Mobile), and they are in negotiations for a partnership with Mohawk, a larger paper company in Cohoes, N.Y.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Leonardo Villar, whose star turn as Donkey Jack in "The Given Word" (also known in English as "Keeper of Promises") made him one of Brazil's most revered actors and helped the film clinch the top prize at Cannes in 1962, died on July 3 in Sao Paulo. He was 96. The film producer Anibal Massaini, a longtime friend of Mr. Villar's, said the cause was heart failure. "The Given Word," which tells the story of a man carrying a large wooden cross through Brazil's backlands, became the first, and only, Brazilian film to win the Palme d'Or, making it a classic and Mr. Villar a movie star before it even opened in theaters. It was also the first South American film to be nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film. When the director Anselmo Duarte and the producer Oswaldo Massaini (Anibal Massaini's father) returned from Cannes weeks later, they were paraded through the streets of Sao Paulo atop a fire truck an honor usually reserved for World Cup winners. Mr. Villar, who had discreetly returned to work the day after Cannes, turned out briefly to appear atop the truck and was then, just as quickly, gone.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
THINK of it as an antidote to the electronic era. For 12 continuous hours last spring, 60 students and teachers at Hamilton College in upstate New York read aloud from John Milton's "Paradise Lost," which spans a dozen volumes. "Most of us became interested in reading because of being read to," says Margaret Thickstun, a professor of English at Hamilton, who will orchestrate another "Milton Marathon" in February. She hopes to condense this one to 10 uninterrupted hours. "These readings revive the notion that poetry is not a private, silent thing you do in a room with a piece of paper," she says, "but something you actually speak." The marathon, or long, read is giving new life to a centuries old oral tradition. St. Olaf College and the University of Arizona have similarly hosted readings of epic works, start to finish. In November, the Russian department at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, read aloud all 1,358 pages of "War and Peace" on the 100th year of Tolstoy's death. It took 24 hours. Kathleen Macfie, a professor of Russian who organized the reading, describes it as a lesson in slowing down: "It's not part of their generational experience, to share something in real time, face to face, in a group."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
The Week in Tech: Welcome to the Age of Mandatory Videoconferencing Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Hey there, newsletter subscribers. I'm Sheera Frenkel, cybersecurity reporter for The New York Times, bringing you the week's tech news. I'm writing this from my home office, after every tech source I was scheduled to meet during the week canceled, citing fear of contracting the coronavirus. Instead of meeting in person, I'm speaking to people using a half dozen different messaging services, online conference portals and video chat platforms. That tech is making it possible for thousands of workers across Silicon Valley to go on with their day to day jobs while taking precautions against the virus outbreak. The coronavirus seems to be having an effect on all aspects of the tech industry, from social media policies around health misinformation to the way the big companies do business. Twitter, LinkedIn and Microsoft have asked their employees to work from home, if possible. Together, the three companies employ more than 75,000 people in the United States. Other companies are taking a more piecemeal approach. Google instructed employees at its Dublin office to work from home, after one person there possibly came into contact with the virus. Facebook's employees in China are working from home, and the company has pulled out of several conferences and canceled appearances by its top executives at public events. A number of companies, including Amazon and Apple, have asked employees to cancel nonessential travel to and from China. They have also restricted visitors to their offices, and asked employees who exhibit any sign of illness to stay home until they are screened for the coronavirus. Tech companies in the service industry have scrambled to come up with policies on how to keep their work force and customers safe. Uber and Lyft have seen an uptick in business, as people afraid of using public transportation rely more on hailing rides. It's unclear, however, how much guidance the two companies are offering their armies of contract workers on how to stay safe. Uber has asked drivers to wash their hands, while Lyft pointed drivers to the recommendations made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Airbnb told hosts and guests affected by the coronavirus outbreak that they could cancel reservations without incurring a charge. So did TaskRabbit. Business has boomed for companies that offer services to help people conduct meetings online, such as Zoom and BlueJeans. Google announced that it was giving G Suite customers free access to the suite's advanced features. These include the ability to hold virtual meetings with hundreds of participants, or stream live events to tens of thousands of people. Microsoft also announced that it was offering six month free trials of Teams, a product to help employees video chat with one another. Social media companies began an aggressive response to misinformation related to the coronavirus. Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, outlined what his company was doing in a long post. He said Facebook was working closely with government groups like the World Health Organization. Any search for "coronavirus" on Facebook immediately directs people to the W.H.O. or local health authorities. Facebook has also pledged to give the W.H.O. unlimited free ads to share information about the coronavirus. The Landscape of the Post Pandemic Return to Office None Delta variant delays. A wave of the contagious Delta variant is causing companies to reconsider when they will require employees to return, and what health requirements should be in place when they do. A generation gap. While workers of all ages have become accustomed to dialing in and skipping the wearying commute, younger ones have grown especially attached to the new way of doing business. This is causing some difficult conversations between managers and newer hires. How to keep offices safe. Handwashing is a simple way to reduce the spread of disease, but employers should be thinking about improved ventilation systems, creative scheduling and making sure their building is ready after months of low use. Return to work anxiety. Remote work brought many challenges, particularly for women of color. But going back will also mean a return to microaggressions, pressure to conform to white standards of professionalism, and high rates of stress and burnout. In addition, Facebook is removing misinformation about the coronavirus from its platform and Instagram, which it owns. YouTube is also linking to the W.H.O. on the top of search results for the coronavirus. While videos spreading conspiracy theories on the coronavirus could still be found, they did not appear in the first page of search results for YouTube. Twitter said in a blog post on Thursday that it was working to prevent the spread of misinformation about the virus on its platform. The company also said it was expanding its policies on "dehumanizing speech" to include tweets that disparage those who have contracted the coronavirus. Previously, the policy applied only to tweets that dehumanized people because of their religion. "It just so happens to be that we're having this issue right now with the coronavirus," said Jerrel Peterson, who leads Twitter's global safety policy team. "Whenever something happens in the world, people come to Twitter to talk about it. We are seeing lots of conversations about it." All of the social media companies are sure to be challenged as more cases of the coronavirus are reported across the United States. None The race to be the Democratic nominee for president has come down to two main candidates: Senator Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. My colleagues Nellie Bowles and Erin Griffith took a look at the disparity between Silicon Valley tech leaders, who have been imploring Democrats to reject Mr. Sanders, and their employees. None Can YouTube quiet its conspiracy theorists? That was the provocative question asked by Jack Nicas as he described a new study from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The study, which looked at eight million recommendations over 15 months, "provides one of the clearest pictures yet of that fight," he wrote, "and the mixed findings show how challenging the issue remains for tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter." None Nathaniel Popper looked at a different study, just in case you ever wanted to know if you could hire a hit man on the dark web. According to Nathaniel: "Don't expect someone to get the job done. Experts and law enforcers who have studied these sites almost all of them on the so called dark web or dark net say they are scams. There has not been a known murder attributed to any of them." I guess that's a relief? None And finally, we return to coronavirus. If fear of the virus is keeping you at home, and you want to order food via a delivery app, know that it comes at a price. My colleague Brian Chen found that ordering through an app could be up to 91 percent more expensive. Ordering through an app means paying multiple parties, including the driver, the app and the restaurant itself. That can really add up.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
"How I Got Over," for example, is credited to the gospel artist Clara Ward; her sister Willa says that Clara wrote the song after she was taunted with racial epithets on the way to a performance. Mavis Staples recently said that the Mahalia Jackson version of the song was the first she ever heard sung by a woman. Ms. Staples would later cover the song with the Staples Singers; Aretha Franklin and the Blind Boys of Alabama have also recorded it. "Sitting on Top of the World" was recorded in 1930 by the Mississippi Sheiks. The malleable song would be performed in various styles, from folk to country to bluegrass: Cream, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Jack White all have versions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
As the tennis tours laid out their road maps on Wednesday for a return to play in August, Serena Williams confirmed her desire to be a major part of those comeback plans and to play in this year's United States Open. "Ultimately I really cannot wait to return to New York and play," she said in a video message. "I feel like the U.S.T.A. is going to do a really good job of ensuring everything is amazing and everything is perfect and everyone is safe." Her announcement was welcome news for the Open, a Grand Slam that is unlikely to draw a full strength field this year without spectators on site and with extraordinary health and safety measures because of the coronavirus pandemic. "I'll certainly miss the fans, don't get me wrong," said Williams, still ranked No. 9 in singles at age 38. "Just being out there in the New York crowd, hearing everyone cheer I'll miss that, getting me through some of those tough matches." Williams, of course, has not always heard cheers at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Her relationship with the tournament where she has won six of her 23 major singles titles has been full of soaring high notes but also discordant passages, like the rancorous 2018 singles final in which she lost to the upstart Naomi Osaka after clashing with the chair umpire, Carlos Ramos, and receiving three code violations. Williams's announcement was a part of a United States Tennis Association videoconference on Wednesday to formally announce plans for this year's tournament, which has been confirmed to be held from Aug. 31 to Sept. 13 and is in undeniable need of star power. Roger Federer is out because of knee surgery, and the top two singles players on the men's and women's tours Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Ashleigh Barty and Simona Halep all have expressed initial reluctance to commit. "I would be surprised if it's 100 percent," Steve Simon, head of the WTA Tour, said of the women's field. "I think their positions will evolve based on what's happening in the world. Some will be comfortable with it; some will not. No one is forcing anyone to play." But an aging Williams trying to tie Margaret Court's record 24 Grand Slam singles titles remains an irresistible story line at the U.S. Open. And the U.S.T.A.'s increasingly flexible approach to permitting players to travel to New York with more than one team member and stay in private housing has certainly made it easier to commit for Williams, who typically travels with her family, including her daughter, Olympia, and her staff. John Isner, the top ranked American men's player in singles at No. 21, also is intent on playing. "I think it's important for sport to get back and this is a good opportunity to get tennis back in the mainstream," he said in a text message. Williams has played just two WTA tournaments since losing in last year's U.S. Open final to another youngster, Bianca Andreescu of Canada. But Williams is back in training, and Stacey Allaster, the U.S. Open's new tournament director, confirmed on Wednesday that Williams had even had a court with the Open's new hardcourt surface constructed at her Florida home. A perquisite for a star? Certainly, but it is not unheard of for leading players to train in private on a Grand Slam surface. Martina Hingis, the former No. 1, had a Rebound Ace hardcourt installed at her home in Switzerland during her heyday to prepare for the Australian Open. The men's and women's tours have been on hiatus since mid March because of the pandemic. Though tennis is particularly suited to social distancing with a net separating players, the global nature of the professional tours is a major obstacle. Though no schedule can be definite at this anxious stage, both tours announced their comeback plans on Wednesday. The women's tour is set to resume on Aug. 3 with a clay court event in Palermo, Italy, followed by potential tournaments in Prague and Washington. Then it would continue to the doubleheader in New York with the transplanted Western Southern Open preceding the U.S. Open from Aug. 21 to 28. The men's tour would resume with the Citi Open in Washington on Aug. 14 with the New York doubleheader to follow. After the U.S. Open, both tours would head to Europe for the postponed clay court season with combined events in Madrid and Rome and then the French Open, a Grand Slam tournament that was rescheduled from late May to Sept. 27 to Oct. 11. Unlike the U.S. Open, the Madrid Open and French Open could be played with spectators. Mark Ein, who owns the Citi Open in Washington, has also not ruled out having a restricted number of fans. He said the tournament would undoubtedly operate at a loss this year, but maintained that it was worth the sacrifice. "I have often asked myself, 'Why are we doing this?'" he said. "I just think it's been such a hard year in our world and our community. I think this is something people will look forward to. It's a real honor to have this opportunity, but it's also a big responsibility." Ein said the Citi Open, like the U.S.T.A. in New York, would create a controlled environment for players and staff with frequent testing and limited numbers of people permitted on site to reduce the risk of infection. Ein said players would travel independently from Washington to New York, just as international players are expected to arrive independently in the United States. U.S. Open officials indicated that instead of using tracking or security measures they are counting on players being judicious enough not to venture outside the bubble and jeopardize the health of others involved in the tournament. "If they do become infected, the way the inner bubble is, they will not be in physical contact with any of the other players," Brian Hainline, a U.S.T.A. vice president, said of the planned social distancing measures. "If someone does test positive during the tournament, we're confident that disease won't spread to the other players because of how everything has been worked out and modeled." Both tours have struck deals with tournaments to reduce prize money this season to compensate for the expected loss of revenues from ticket sales and sponsorships. Simon said the reductions on the WTA Tour ranged from 18 percent for low level international events to more than 32 percent for top tier Premier Mandatory events like Madrid. The men's tour will flip that model, with its Masters 1000 events making smaller prize money reductions proportionally than lower tier events. Simon said if the provisional schedule holds true, the WTA Tour will have managed to play about "60 percent" of its original 2020 calendar.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
There is no better or sadder way to explain how Zak Stone's father died in a vacation rental than how he did himself this week, so this is how he began the essay he wrote for the online magazine Matter. "The rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied to broke in half and fell on his head, immediately ending most of his brain activity." The death is devastating, but no one should be shocked by it, either. As with any big hotel operation, Airbnb hosts are putting up so many people each night that fatal accidents are almost inevitable. But the incident and a second death that Mr. Stone disclosed in the essay in Matter, part of the publishing service Medium does raise important insurance and safety questions about Airbnb, its competitor HomeAway and hotels themselves at the same time as Airbnb is offering more protection. Let's start with insurance. A year ago, Airbnb hosts were on their own when it came to liability, and most of them probably assumed that their homeowner's insurance would offer coverage if a guest was hurt or worse. But most homeowner's insurance policies have an explicit exclusion for commercial activity. Airbnb this year began offering free, automatic secondary coverage for liability, in case a host's insurance company denied a claim. Last month, Airbnb made that coverage primary. It's still free, and it covers up to 1 million an incident. It is not yet clear how friction free the claims paying process will be. After the death of Mr. Stone's father, Louis, his family reached a settlement with the insurance company for his host, not Airbnb or its insurer. According to Mr. Stone, that host had an insurance policy that explicitly covered commercial activity. He said in his essay that Airbnb paid a 2 million settlement for the second death he reported, which was from carbon monoxide poisoning in Taiwan. HomeAway, which was acquired by Expedia last week for 3.9 billion, takes a different approach to insurance. Rather than offering free liability coverage, it urges homeowners to buy more comprehensive coverage elsewhere. The policy that it recommends includes property and contents damage and loss of business in addition to liability. HomeAway earns a marketing fee when its customers buy from its recommended provider, CBIZ. So why doesn't HomeAway offer free coverage like Airbnb? Partly because it would be too expensive to offer the comprehensive policy that prudent homeowners probably should have. But HomeAway's business is different, too. It matches homeowners and travelers and likens itself to a classified advertising service. While HomeAway did not say this specifically, it is possible that it believes that its process shields the company from potential liability and removes any need to provide automatic coverage for homeowners who list there. Scott Wolf, the president of CBIZ's property and casualty program division, said in an interview this week that he could not figure out how every Airbnb customer would ultimately be covered. He pointed to Airbnb's stated annual limit of 10 million on its policy, which its hosts could exhaust with 10 1 million claims. He estimated that each policy pays out an average of 100 in liability claims each year (though that average results in large part from a smaller number of claims that are extremely high). If Airbnb has, say, 500,000 listings on average (though there are more occupied properties than that many nights of the year), that is 50 million in claims, which is 40 million more than that annual 10 million cap. One possibility may be that Airbnb, which has many single travelers staying in single rooms for short periods, simply won't need to make as many claims as HomeAway travelers do. After all, people who use HomeAway often travel with their families to large rental homes with slippery pool decks and leg eating trampolines. But Mr. Wolf said that his experience insuring bed and breakfast owners suggested that hosts who were in residence were actually more vulnerable to claims than absentee owners. After all, you can't blame a host for a spill that caused a fall if the host is not there. Airbnb did not want to go into detail about what it pays for its insurance and the precise policy language. But Nick Papas, a spokesman, said that since it started offering liability coverage in January, eight million people had stayed with an Airbnb host in the United States and fewer than 50 hosts had filed claims. "We are extremely confident in the finances underlying our program," he said in an emailed statement. "When we were looking to expand it, we had multiple competitive bids from different insurers. The numbers show how low the risk factors are, and they're eager to work with us." As for the safety questions, this seemed the perfect opportunity to figure out once and for all whether Airbnb and HomeAway rentals are more dangerous than hotels: Just ask everyone for the accidental death rate per 100 million room nights and compare. That only works if companies are willing to answer, though. HomeAway offered its number right away: zero deaths, as far as it knows. Mr. Stone disclosed the two Airbnb deaths, and the company would not comment further on its death rate. The American Hotel Lodging Association does not track industrywide rates. A Hyatt spokeswoman would not disclose its rate or explain why it refused to share it, and an InterContinental Hotels Group spokesman declined to comment. Best Western and Starwood said they did not have the data. Felicia McLemore, a Marriott spokeswoman, and Christine Miller, a Hilton spokeswoman, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on their companies' death rates. Without good data, we're all flailing about looking for anecdotes. So let's start with those nondisclosing hotels. On two separate occasions within weeks of one another in 2013, three people died from carbon monoxide poisoning in the same Best Western hotel in North Carolina. A USA Today investigation that same year turned up eight deaths and 170 other people treated for carbon monoxide poisoning in hotels in the three previous years. Best Western said the company now had an industry leading carbon monoxide detection and alarm system. On the fire front, hotels and motels averaged 3,700 a year from 2006 to 2010, according to the National Fire Protection Association, resulting in an average of 12 deaths, excluding emergency personnel, and 143 injuries a year. We know less about Airbnb and HomeAway, but one thing we know for sure is that their hosts need not follow the myriad regulations about exits and doors and alarms that hotels and motels do. The companies could inspect each property for safety, but they don't. And according to Liz Krueger, a New York state senator who has frequently tangled with the home renting companies, it would be better if somebody else did it. "They'd be self declaring, and it wouldn't be a governmental entity," she said. "Call me a supporter of government, because I am, but I think there is a reason you want a third party doing the evaluation as opposed to an interested party who would have a reason not to document the correct things." Still, who knows if a government inspector would have noticed the dead tree that killed Mr. Stone's father or the water heater reportedly at issue in the Taiwan death. Paying strangers to stay in their homes requires that we assume some risk, and we may simply have to get comfortable that we may never know exactly how much risk. If you're a host renting out a home or a room, tell your homeowner's insurance company, even if you think Airbnb's liability coverage gives you most of the protection you need. After all, your guest's lawyer will probably sue your insurance company, too, if there is an injury on your property. Make sure that your guests know how to get out in an emergency and that your home has many alarms and is free of unnecessary hazards. Paying guests should check batteries on fire and carbon monoxide detectors, be wary of kitchen equipment or outdoor toys they don't normally use and keep a special eye out for things that could harm small children. Still, let's give the new players in lodging some credit where it is due. More insurance coverage is better than less, and urging people to be aware of their risks is a welcome evolution in how these companies operate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
LOUISVILLE, Ky. No one really expected a horse race. The 146th running of the Kentucky Derby was supposed to be either a coronation for a colt named Tiz the Law, who was headed for a credible Triple Crown bid, or overshadowed by protests over racism and police violence in Louisville and beyond, with the sheer anxiety over the coronavirus pandemic ever present. Instead, Tiz the Law, a colt that became sort of a symbol for everyday folks, with his workmanlike performances in winning six of seven races in this upended Triple Crown season, was beaten by a colt named Authentic. With Manny Franco in the saddle, Tiz the Law squared his shoulders and turned for home but came up a length and quarter short of Authentic, who basically led every step of the way. There was no roar of the crowd. Because of the pandemic, the grandstand was devoid of the more than 150,000 people who normally would have attended. But Authentic's victory gave the Hall of Fame jockey John Velazquez his third Kentucky Derby win. He won the 2011 edition with Animal Kingdom and repeated in 2017 with Always Dreaming. The victory gave Velazquez his 200th Grade I victory, making him only the third rider in history to reach that milestone. "I want to cry," he said shortly after crossing the finish line. As he spoke, protests over racial injustice outside the track faded; they were peaceful despite moments of tension. Before the race began, hundreds of people calling for racial justice circled Churchill Downs, and several members of a Black armed militia knelt in front of Louisville police officers stationed inside a fence erected around the track. An airplane flew over the track with a banner that said "Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor," referring to the unarmed Black woman who was shot in her home by the Louisville police in March and who has become a focal point of the Black Lives Matter movement. After the race, the protesters left Churchill Downs and continued to march. Such was the tension and symbolism in an afternoon of racing. The steady roar of law enforcement helicopters was no substitute for the crowds men with pockets squares and women in fancy hats who normally descend on this little patch of horse racing heaven to celebrate some aspects of the Old South. Churchill Downs was docile enough to put its common and most familiar foot forward for America's most famous race. With Authentic, the trainer Bob Baffert won his sixth Derby and tied Ben Jones for the most victories in the race's history. He did so after another of his horses, Thousand Words, acted up before the race and was scratched by racetrack veterinarians. But the fact that Baffert is a Hall of Famer, one who was recently suspended by the Arkansas Racing Commission for 15 days and who vacated the victories of two of his horses after they tested positive for a banned substance, puts the seamier side of horse racing in the spotlight once more. Baffert was emotional in victory, shedding tears in post race interviews not only for Thousand Words's thwarted Derby start but for his longtime assistant Jimmy Barnes, who injured his hand while trying to settle Thousand Words. "I just wish Jimmy was here with me he's one of the greatest assistants of all time, and if there was a Hall of Fame for assistant trainers, he'd be in it," he said. But Baffert has also caught the attention of regulators over the years. The Arkansas violations were his 26th and 27th drug violations, according to public records compiled by the Association of Racetrack Commissioners International and the Thoroughbred Regulatory Rulings database maintained by the Jockey Club. In addition, the Baffert trained Justify failed a drug test after winning the Santa Anita Derby, nearly a month before the 2018 Kentucky Derby. Justify wound up winning the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont that year for the Triple Crown. The rule on the books when Justify failed the test required that the horse be disqualified, forfeiting both his prize money from the Santa Anita Derby and his entry into the Kentucky Derby. California racing officials investigated the failed test for four months, allowing Justify to keep competing long enough to win the Triple Crown. In August, after Justify's breeding rights had been sold for 60 million, the California Horse Racing Board whose chairman at the time, Chuck Winner, had employed Baffert to train his horses disposed of the inquiry in a rare closed door session. The board ruled that Justify's positive test for the banned drug scopolamine had been the result of "environmental contamination," not intentional doping. Baffert has denied any wrongdoing. California regulators, after a lawsuit from Mick Ruis, the owner of the second place horse in the Santa Anita Derby, have agreed to hold a hearing this month on whether his colt, Bolt d'Oro, should be declared the winner and awarded the 600,000 first place check. At 82, the trainer of Tiz the Law, Barclay Tagg, would have become the oldest trainer to win a Derby if his colt could have gotten by Authentic. It wasn't to be. "We didn't win it," he said. "Baffert's hard to beat."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
A century ago Friday, the 18th Amendment came into effect, outlawing the production, importation and sale of alcoholic beverages. Ever since, that day has been celebrated or mourned for formally ushering in the Prohibition Era. Contrary to popular imagination including recent coverage of the amendment's centennial there was no mad dash for hooch on the night of Jan. 16, 1920, no "going out of business" liquor store sales on Prohibition Eve. The United States had already been "dry" for the previous half year thanks to the Wartime Prohibition Act. And even before that, 32 of the 48 states had already enacted their own statewide prohibitions. "With little that differed from normal wartime prohibition drinking habits, New York City entered at 12:01 o'clock this morning into the long dry spell," this newspaper solemnly noted. A few restaurants and hotels held mock funerals for booze, but the city's saloons had long since been shuttered, and "the spontaneous orgies of drink that were predicted failed in large part to occur." What with debates over ratifying the Peace of Versailles and a war scare with Bolshevik Russia, the 18th Amendment was barely front page news. That the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs, rather than the outraged street protests we tend to imagine, says less about prohibition back then and more about our inability to understand it today. The entire idea of prohibition seems so hostile to Americans' contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it. For decades now, popular histories have concocted false stories that the majority of the public had never supported prohibition, or that prohibition was conceived by a "radical fringe" of Bible thumping, rural evangelicals trying to codify their Puritan morality. We use the same language to vilify prohibitionists as we do to describe ISIS or Al Qaeda: calling them "deeply antidemocratic," "extremists" and "zealots." But this portrayal of prohibition as some reactionary, cultural religious movement runs into a bevy of uncomfortable historical questions. How could such an "ultra conservative" prohibition movement win its greatest victory during the middle of the Progressive Era? How could organizations like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union champion progressive issues like the expansion of suffrage and civil and labor rights alongside supposedly reactionary prohibition? If the victory of prohibition was all about Bible thumping morality, why was there no evangelical revivalism at the time? If prohibition never had popular support, how did the 18th Amendment pass with a 68 percent supermajority in the House of Representatives and 76 percent support in the Senate, and then get ratified by 46 of the 48 states, all in record time? None of this adds up. In reality, the temperance movement was anything but pinky raising Victorians forbidding society to drink. Temperance was the longest running, most widely supported social movement in both American and global history. Its foe wasn't the drink in the bottle or the drunk who drank it, but the drink traffic: powerful business interests protected by a government reliant on liquor taxes getting men addicted to booze, and then profiting handsomely by bleeding them and their families dry. In the 19th century, saloonkeepers across the United States and around the world were seen as parasites on the local community. This wasn't Ted Danson, the friendly bartender in "Cheers!" There was no sending home a customer for having too much; that was lost profit. And since the saloonkeeper was often also the town pawnbroker, once you had drunk up your last penny, he might take your shirt, hat and watch too if his hired pickpockets didn't pinch them first. Since fleecing customers was often illegal, the saloonkeeper's profits paid kickbacks to the police, judges and mayor. Pop histories describe the saloon as a "symbol" of masculinity, of drunkenness, of social ills. But the saloon wasn't the symbol of some other problem; it was the problem itself. This is why the powerful prohibitionist organization was called the Anti Saloon League, not the Anti Drinking Society. This is why neither the 18th Amendment nor state level prohibitions ever outlawed drinking alcohol, but instead focused on its sale. It wasn't taking a drink every now and then that got reformers' hackles up; it was the idea of the rich getting richer by making the poor poorer through addiction. One legislator called for prohibition "for the safety and redemption of the people from the social, political and moral curse of the saloon." That zealot was Abraham Lincoln, rising to support Illinois's statewide prohibition in 1855. Similar sentiments were expressed by Frederick Douglass, Theodore Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, William Jennings Bryan, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many other progressive leaders. Our inability to comprehend the past comes from taking current worldviews and projecting them backward. And the fact that Prohibition largely failed at the national level, and was later repealed, doesn't mean that its proponents were crackpots or radicals. For a better understanding of temperance and prohibition, forget Bible thumping "thou shalt nots." Think instead about a major industry making outlandish profits by getting people hooked on an addictive substance that could kill them. Maybe that industry uses some of those profits to buy corrupt political cover by currying favor with government and oversight bodies. Let's call this substance "opioids," and the industry, "Big Pharma." This is the same type of predatory capitalism that the temperance cum prohibition movement fought 100 years ago. Should big businesses be able to use addiction to reap tremendous profits from the poor? If your answer is no, and you were around 100 years ago, you likely would have joined the vast majority of Americans calling for the prohibition of liquor traffic. Mark Lawrence Schrad, an associate professor of political science at Villanova University, is the author of the forthcoming book "Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition." 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
It took over 30 years for Nobuhiko Obayashi's completely bananas experimental horror film to get a proper release in America, but it took little time for cult audiences to rally around it. The plot, such as it goes, involves a teenage girl who decides to visit her aunt with some friends on summer vacation, only to discover her aunt is dead and her country home is a surrealist death trap. Mostly, the setting allows Obayashi to uncork deliriously strange images household objects coming to life, a malevolent white cat that shoots bloody projectiles, bodies disassembling and reassembling and fiddle with in camera effects and a manic editing scheme. It's an exhilarating chaos. Shrewdly engineered to give studio horror the scale of a summer blockbuster, "The Conjuring" combined the haunted house mythos of "The Amityville Horror" with the stylistic bravado of "The Exorcist" to become a commercial juggernaut. It even has the based on a true story authenticity of drawing from the misadventures of Ed and Lorraine Warren, two real life paranormal investigators. Decked out in the fashionable browns of the early '70s, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga star as the Warrens, who are summoned to rural Rhode Island to look into demonic happenings at a family farmhouse. They begin to suspect, however, that it's the family, not the farmhouse, that's really haunted. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. Fresh from a stay in a mental institution, Jessica (Zohra Lampert) seeks refuge at an old Connecticut farmhouse, which happens to be the site where a woman drowned on her wedding day in 1880. As she, her husband, their friend, and a mysterious drifter settle into the place, the bizarre events that follow and the sinister whispers and tension between the conspiratorial townspeople (all wearing bandages) and these hippie interlocutors loosen Jessica's tenuous grip on her sanity. "The Belasco House" was named after an unspeakably perverse, six foot five millionaire who indulged in every vice imaginable, running the gamut from alcoholism and heroin addiction to incest, necrophilia, bestiality and cannibalism. "Bad vibes" don't begin to describe the psychic energy on the premises, but four intrepid paranormal investigators poke around anyway, including a half dazed Roddy McDowall as a man who visited the house before and barely lived to return. The libertine sexuality of early '70s cinema gives "The Legend of Hell House" a sensual charge, but it's equally blessed by the dry British humor that undercuts the horror. Rent it on Amazon, Google Play and YouTube. In J.A. Bayona's gothic Spanish frightfest, a woman and her husband buy the creepy seaside orphanage where she was raised with the intention of turning it into a home for sick children. What follows is a barrage of horror tropes: Children as ghouls in burlap masks, references to fairy tales like "Hansel Gretel," Super 8 home movies, the seance of "Poltergeist." Rooted in the scares is the vulnerability of the young and Bayona's uncanny ability to make his adult audience feel it, too. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. Though adults may find plenty to like about "Monster House," an animated horror comedy with the look of a Halloween pop up book, parents should proceed with caution when introducing it to their kids, especially if they're under school age. But as a colorful primer for the genre, the film is witty and fast paced, built around the clever premise of a house that's a fully integrated evil entity, not merely a space for ghosts to roam. Three teenagers attribute the tricycle destroying property across the street to the mean old man who owns it, but after he's carted away by an ambulance, they have to confront a house with plans to gobble up trick or treaters on Halloween night. Stream it on Peacock. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. Indie director Ti West turned to the haunted house movie with this throwback about an old New England inn on its last night before shutting down. The wage slave banter between Sara Paxton and Pat Healy as the stewards of this nearly empty hotel recalls "Clerks," but West dredges up a dark history that expresses itself one final time before the sun comes up. As he does with his retro '80s horror movie, "The House of the Devil," West delivers a slow as molasses film that builds dread deliberately until its explodes in the final act. 'I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House' (2016) Osgood Perkins's concise chiller marinates in the New England gothic of a creaky old house that its heroine is duty bound to occupy. After her brilliant run as a Hannibal Lecter like evil genius on "Luther," Ruth Wilson downshifts into the role of a brittle hospice nurse assigned to care for a retired horror author (Paula Prentiss) until she dies. She comes to discover that the author's fictional creations have a presence in the real world, too, and that she and her helpless, mysterious patient are like tenants in a house that doesn't really belong to them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
In the Dvorak concerto, the cellist Gautier Capucon battled valiantly to assert himself against an ensemble that seemed intent on belittling him. His tone sounded tight and strained at first, but over the course of the first movement began to glow; his playing became eloquently assured. This is heroic music that builds pathos and excitement from the contrast of solo cello and large orchestra playing, yes, fortissimo. But while that Italian term translates as "loudest," brawn should be matched by character. Dvorak marks these moments "grandioso." They should be an exhilarating amplification of the cello protagonist. Here, the ensemble obliterated him. In the hard driving "Danse Generale" that concludes Ravel's suite, there were more sledgehammer moments in which volume swallowed up color and complexity. (A shame, since the light dappled opening "Daybreak" movement held glimpses of the Philharmonic's playing at its most beguiling.) And in the start of the Rimsky Korsakov on Thursday this movement marked "maestoso," or majestically the huge brass statements burst out with saber rattling strength but little majesty. The most satisfying part of that evening was the Prokofiev concerto with the ebullient pianist Simon Trpceski, who gave a performance that encompassed cartoonish humor and hushed lyricism. Mr. Hrusa is a charismatic conductor with a particular knack, evident in "Scheherazade," for minutely shaping a string melody so that an entire section appears to play with the same effortless freedom as a soloist. Mr. Hrusa also managed to husband the dynamic forces in the Rimsky Korsakov so that the most voluminous louds came near the end. But there, once again, the sound lacked the necessary roundness and texture to support the decibel burn.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. This week, a Bronx team up from Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B, the debut of Diplo and Mark Ronson's project and a 17 minute track from the stoner metal band Sleep. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. George Clinton the leader of Funkadelic, Parliament, the P Funk All Stars and countless other associated projects, and the architect of beats that echo throughout hip hop has been anything but silent since 1980. But that was the last time he released an album under the Parliament name until this week, when "Medical Fraud Dogg" appeared. In an age appropriate setting a hospital the album's first single deploys Parliament trademarks: viscous synthesizer lines, cooing female voices, Mr. Clinton's comic growl and praise for the healing powers of funk. A guest rap by Scarface riffles through the P Funk catalog, while P Funk's Mudbone Cooper croons, "No need to read the label warning." JON PARELES The most striking thing about this Latin crossover pop by committee from Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B isn't that it feels like a kind of post "Despacito" tipping point, or the Lyft product placement in the early 2000s flush video. Rather it's the section in the middle when Ms. Lopez very blatantly sings a few bars in the manner of Beyonce. On a song that already feels laser cut to 2018 specifications, that feels like supplemental insurance. JON CARAMANICA The alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman's playful, singing to the wind sensibility was the inspiration for the Old and New Dreams quartet, a group of Coleman alumni that played together off and on throughout the 1970s and '80s. One member was Dewey Redman, a tenor saxophonist, and his son, the formidable tenor man Joshua Redman, recently decided to put his own spin on the quartet's legacy. The younger Mr. Redman's band uses the same instrumentation as Old and New Dreams; it features Ron Miles on cornet, Scott Colley on bass and Brian Blade on drums. Despite the degrees of separation, Coleman's spirit comes through especially on Mr. Colley's "New Year," which has all the bounce and topsy turvy swing of a late 50s Coleman tune. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Vocals, electronics and ideas gather in a dense swarm in "The Ghost Ship" by Kari Jahnsen, who records as Farao. She's pondering a wrecked relationship and the prospects of new ones: "How this ends is something no one ever knows anything about," she muses. Her overdubbed voice is fully entwined with thick synthesizer harmonies and buzzing, shimmering effects, as the song's multiple sections wander between elaborate, airy introspection and the solidity of a dance beat. J.P. The most instinctual melodist of the SoundCloud generation, Juice WRLD has a sweet yet sinister voice. All over his new album, "Goodbye Good Riddance," he sings about various forms of excess, the women who've let him down, and the anxiety both of those things cause him. "Black White" is one of the album's strongest songs, a carnival chipper production about enjoying yourself to death: "I know that these Perc ies finna hurt me/Sometimes I feel like they doing surgery/Tell me, are they working?" J.C. Just a month ago, the stoner metal band Sleep released "The Sciences," the first album it had recorded since the 1990s, full of towering electric guitar drones and clanging riffs. Now there's a 17 minute postscript, "Leagues Beneath," that both flaunts its duration starting with more than five minutes of slow, tolling, guitar monoliths rising out of tempestuous drums and earns it with an excursion through psychedelic whirlpools, slowly heaving chord changes, an onslaught of trills and a conclusion that dares to be quiet. J.P. Earlier this month Cameron Graves, the pianist in Kamasi Washington's West Coast Get Down, released "Planetary Prince: The Eternal Survival EP," a follow up to his fine debut album, and on Monday he unveiled a video for "The End of Corporatism," featuring the live performance caught on the EP. Mr. Graves's pianism is equal parts classical rigor, metal thrash and hip hop syncopation. Mr. Washington plays in Mr. Graves's band, and occasionally the dissonance between their styles pushes Mr. Washington into fruitful new territory: On "Corporatism," before his solo peaks into its characteristic bluster, Mr. Washington plays some delicate games with his notes, making them into small droplets, nudging at Graves's hard rhythm until it gets the best of him, and he's aloft. G.R.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Let's say you're just a girl or just a boy on a hot summer night in a dark city street with a heart pumping blood and a soul spurting dreams and a profound investment in Meat Loaf's back catalog. Vroom into New York City Center. Jim Steinman's "Bat Out of Hell: The Musical," directed by Jay Scheib, which premiered at the Manchester Opera House in 2017 and then reopened in London's West End, will meet you there with its engine gunned, its wheels mostly spinning, its tailpipe jammed with whatever passes for a plot. Extravagant, absurd, compulsively hummable, "Bat Out of Hell" is, like its score, good bad. Or bad good. Having read the script the morning after, auditory nerves still jangled I now know that the supporting characters have names. And I can fill you in on what we'll graciously call the story. In the City of Obsidian, a post apocalyptic Manhattan wrecked by the climate crisis and economic inequality, the teenage princess Raven (Christina Bennington) lives captive in a tower with her world weary mother, Sloane (Lena Hall), and her tycoon father, Falco (Bradley Dean). ("Rock Me Amadeus" Falco? Maybe?) Raven escapes one night and meets Strat (Andrew Polec), the leader of the Lost, a roving band of mutants, forever frozen at 18. Romeo and Juliet with eyeliner and power chords, these are star crossed, fate diddled lovers. If only they can make it till the morning and the final duet. Mr. Steinman, credited with the book, music and lyrics, has been working on this dystopian gloss on Peter Pan since his undergrad days, 50 years ago. How dystopian is it? Let's just say that in this version, Tink (Avionce Hoyles) dies. Clap all you want, kids. The relevant question here is not whether you believe in fairies, but whether you believe in rock 'n' roll and whether you want to see that rock 'n' roll translated to the stage via shaky video and angular, libidinal choreography, adapted by Xena Gusthart from Emma Portner's original steps. If you're asking me: Yes. And kind of. Like "Moulin Rouge!," a rival jukebox musical playing 10 blocks south, the music, not the narrative, is the lure and the reward. Overblown, with hooks for days, Mr. Steinman's songs have made two generations of teenagers feel nostalgic for a youth they were still experiencing. His imagery stars, hearts, cars, fire, fever, ice is wildly limited, his emotions bruisingly overripe, but if you make it to City Center you will find yourself surrounded by an audience trying not to sing along. Those songs could be slotted in just about anywhere, provided you leave "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" for the finale, which Mr. Steinman does. His writerly motto seems to be: "If you don't go over the top, how are you going to see what's on the other side?" At least that's what he has his characters say. Twice. His book, a banquet laden with cheese, is predictably extravagant. Here is Strat's Meat Loaf scented pickup line: "On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?" It helps if you deliver it shirtless. The staging with an '80s inspired set, costumes by Jon Bausor and video design by Finn Ross that has already lowered my I.Q. is a salacious mess, served lukewarm. A large screen dominates the space, its images supplied by a camera wielding, pigtailed performer, Paulina Jurzec. The leering angles Mr. Scheib prefers and the way he encourages his performers to wriggle before the lens turns the cast into his cam girl.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Jeans I just got to back from doing a movie in Norway. There, I discovered Acne which is the weirdest name for a company and it's something I've been fighting all my life and their jeans fit skinny people really well. Jacket I have a John Varvatos jacket in brown leather. It's nice on a windy day; it's nice for a dress up; it's nice for a dress down. This was given to me as a birthday present. Honestly, I don't shop much. I've stolen a lot from movie sets and I've tried taking pieces from photo shoots, but they watch them closely. Shoes When it comes to shoes, it's pretty much just boots. I have one pair of black Chelsea boots with a zipper by AllSaints that I've had for two years. I was walking in Norway and I had these huge holes in these boots, but I couldn't let the boots go. They're like a family member. I've tried to replace them, but they don't make them anymore. So I feel like I'm doing Tinder for boots. I'm swiping whichever way is bad and not finding love. I'm just sleeping around with different boots. Right now, I'm wearing a pair of boots for Frye, but I feel sorry for them because they're just a weak comparison. Ring I just started wearing a ring. I'm trying to be a ring guy. It's silver, and it can spin around and it has Greek symbols on it. It's cool, because I have a real tendency to fidget, so it's like a fidget spinner but on my finger.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
FLORENCE, Italy Neither the high winds that diverted flights past Florence's airport to nearby regional cities like Bologna or Pisa, nor security jitters that led to undercover patrols and sniffer dogs policing the streets near major monuments deterred the flocks of peacocks who descended on this city this week for the huge men's wear fair Pitti Uomo. "We're really quite surprised, to be honest, how many people came," Raffaello Napoleone, the fair's director, said of an estimated 30,000 visitors. While exhibitor numbers have climbed steeply over the past several years 1,219 labels are now represented here, close to 50 percent of them international geopolitics have a way of wreaking havoc on commercial expectations. In recent years, the ruble collapsed and the Russians stayed home; then the renminbi fell into a ditch, taking with it the free spending Chinese and the global markets. It turns out people have had more important concerns than whether to trade in their jeggings for palazzo pants. Yet the mobs strutting along walkways threaded through a maze of pavilions, tents and pop ups crammed inside the 16th century Fortezza da Basso were so dense that it felt like wandering into a tube sock sale at a street fair rather than a multibillion dollar trade event, among the most important in the business. Because many exhibitors have already gone into production with merchandise displayed here, Pitti Uomo serves as a commercial bellwether. Designers mounting runway presentations in Milan, Paris and New York over the next four weeks are in that sense disadvantaged, as the core of their design messages may, in many cases, have been rolled out already at Pitti in a mainstream commercial form. In terms of trends, all indicators suggest trousers are about to widen and waistlines will migrate north. "My girlfriend asked me if I'd had breakfast this morning," said Scott Schuman, the Sartorialist blogger and a newly minted designer, whose capsule collection for the Italian owned Roy Roger's label opened here on Wednesday. "I said: 'Are you kidding? I have to wear those jeans today,' " Mr. Schuman added, referring to high waisted denims from his new line. Fabrics, if not Mr. Schuman, will be putting on weight in the near future. The hefty woolens that granddad wore are making a comeback. Blue serge may be next. "There is this return to those traditional weaves that disappeared when the superlight woolens came along," said Guido Vergani, a representative of the Italian shirt makers Dudalina and managing director of AD56, a noted Milanese haberdashery. Textile powerhouses like Ermenegildo Zegna have taken note. Under the direction of the unassuming Mr. Napoleone, Pitti Uomo has stolen a march on other fashion capitals as an incubator of style. Street photographers all know it as a place both to spot trends in the making and to mark for death those whose time is up. "There's only one true dandy per country per century," Umberto Angeloni, chief executive officer of Caruso, said, pronouncing doom on the sillies still seen slouching around here dressed up like Oscar Wilde. "There has to be something under your hat besides your hair." It hardly matters that the dandies seen in flocks here (dandies are evidently herd animals) have failed to heed Mr. Angeloni's message. They remain out in force in their snug, taut trousers of Prince of Wales check, cuffed well above the ankle; hourglass jackets in Highland tweeds; pocket squares erupting from breast pockets; monk strap shoes in strenuously distressed finishes; and felt fedoras, sometimes with a pheasant feather tucked into the band. "It all looks a bit heavy," said Nick Sullivan, men's fashion director of Esquire. Sprightly they are not, and one reason is that nostalgia is a burdensome emotion. In its original definition, it means homesickness; for many here, the homesickness they evince is for a period they're too young to have known. "This is a season of the father and son in the wardrobe," said the designer Brunello Cucinelli, whose billion dollar fortune was built on an idiosyncratic knack for mining and modernizing Italy's sartorial past in a way that translates across generations. Others got there before him, of course. Giorgio Armani's early success was predicated on his reinterpretation of traditional soft suiting devised by Anglophile Neapolitan tailors. Those body hugging "American Gigolo" shapes are making a comeback. Mr. Cucinelli was far from the sole exhibitor to show sweaterlike blazers, sweatpants style trousers and over it all, the extravagantly costly outerwear he goes to great lengths to make look generic. There is a reason a pair of basic cotton poplin trousers from Bottega Veneta costs 800 and a deceptively simple shearling coat from Mr. Cucinelli can cost almost as much as a Mini Cooper: "That particular customer wants something special," without standing out, Mr. Cucinelli said. Freshly minted tech billionaires, in other words, don't want to end up looking like Minnie Pearl, price tags dangling from their hats. Simpler is more chic; the more basic the better, in fact. Take the witty collaboration between Seletti, an Italian housewares brand, and Toiletpaper, the art collaborative run by the artist Maurizio Cattelan and the photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari. The melamine trays, enamelware dishes, kettles and plastic framed mirrors ornamented with images of sausages or toilet plungers are a first here. "They've never done home design before" at Pitti Uomo, said Stefano Seletti, whose father, Romano, back in the early 1970s, first imported from China the plastic buckets and enamelware now common in Italian households.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
LAS VEGAS The knowing nods come as soon as the name John Higgins is mentioned to veteran college basketball officials. It could happen to any of us, they say, the way things are going. Higgins is one of the top referees in the sport. But it was during a taut N.C.A.A. tournament matchup in 2017 that he trended on Twitter and quickly became the target of harassment by frustrated Kentucky fans certain that Higgins was the reason that the Wildcats had lost a quarterfinal game against North Carolina. Higgins and his family received death threats, and his roofing and siding business received thousands of harassing phone calls (mostly from Kentucky area codes) and an onslaught of negative reviews, according to a lawsuit that Higgins later filed against a radio station he accused of fanning the discord. "While a basketball game is only played between two teams, there are three major groups of players at each game: the winning team, the losing team, and, increasingly visible with instant replay on every television broadcast, the referees," reads the lawsuit, which was dismissed in United States District Court on Wednesday, nearly 18 months after it was filed. ("Speech on matters of public concern in a public place is entitled to special First Amendment protection," the judge wrote.) In tennis, the 2018 United States Open may be remembered for Serena Williams's reactions to officiating calls in the women's final as much as for the play of the winner, Naomi Osaka. Even umpires at last year's Little League World Series were not immune. Barry Mano, a former college basketball official who founded Referee magazine in 1975 and the National Association of Sports Officials in 1980, sees the magnifying glass as a mirror to society. "Now officiating is public and, in some ways, a petri dish in which the culture of sports and our larger culture gets agitated, stirred together," he wrote in the latest issue of Referee. In few places do officials work in such a high speed pressure cooker like that of a college basketball arena. Unlike their N.B.A. counterparts, highly paid coaches are the faces of the college game and the main mouthpieces to the referees, and allegiant fans follow their lead. Lightning quick decisions are untangled by slow motion replays on screens in the arena and on television for those watching at home. Victories can mean big financial rewards for coaches and colleges. Social media spreads angst in real time. "The speed of information is causing referees to be more visible," said J.D. Collins, the N.C.A.A.'s national coordinator of men's basketball officials. "Our best hope is to have us be invisible, do our job and go home. But I'm afraid we are no longer in that environment." "Sports is simply life with the volume turned up," Mano said in an interview. "Why should we be surprised by this? We're louder, we're brasher. We don't want to be told no. When we don't like a decision, we look for another opinion. That's how we got replay." Yet even as the light on officiating gets harsher, an analysis of all N.C.A.A. tournament games last year found that officials made the right call 94.75 percent of the time when they blew their whistles, Collins said. No calls, where no whistle was blown on close plays, were correct about 90 percent of the time, he added. To watch and listen to the exasperated reactions from coaches and fans, however, the proportion of blown calls feels more like 50 50. "The expectation is that you start out perfect," said Reed, the N.C.A.A. tournament referee, "and you get better from there." At Iowa last month, Coach Fran McCaffery was suspended by his university for two games for berating an official in a hallway after a loss. At the Pac 12 Conference tournament in Las Vegas, Utah's Larry Krystkowiak got a technical on Friday when he swatted a water cup on press row. A few blocks away at the Mountain West Conference tournament, New Mexico Coach Paul Weir received a momentum shifting technical when he rushed down the sideline after a questionable call. Moments later, fans filled the arena with a chant: "You suck, ref!" "I don't know the exact rule on that maybe he's right," Weir said. "I was just voicing my displeasure on a play. I think coaches get that way a lot." The N.C.A.A., which said it had not tracked the number of technicals called this season compared with previous years, tried to set a consistent standard heading into the national tournament. "Part of the responsibility of a coach is to let an official know when we either miss a call or they think we miss a call," Collins said. "But based on the 90 to 95 percent figure, it isn't every call." There are 851 Division I men's basketball officials, each of them an independent contractor working for a handful of regional coalitions. They make roughly 1,350 to 3,800 per game, depending on their experience and the matchup. (Kentucky's John Calipari, the highest paid coach in college basketball, made about 281,000 per game this season, if his nearly 9.3 million annual salary is divided by the 33 games Kentucky has played.) There are no benefits, and officials are generally not reimbursed for travel or other costs. While most referees do it as a part time job from late fall to early spring, a few dozen officiate as their primary income, stringing together several games each week, maybe 80 or more games a season. And just as teams hope to be picked for the 68 team N.C.A.A. tournament, officials hoped to be among the 100 selected to work the games. The best advance to the next round. "All of us want to go to the Final Four," said Tony Padilla, a longtime official who made it there in 2016 and 2017. "It's funny, because then you're under more scrutiny and under the microscope more than any time. It's kind of weird, right?" They will go through more ups and downs than any team. They will draw the ire of nearly everyone watching. But referees will be there at the end, the tournament's only sure bet. "We don't have any home games, and we don't have a student section cheering for us," said Randy McCall, a Division I referee since 1992 who regularly works deep into the tournament. "It can be a grind, especially late in the year. But I chose this. And I wouldn't have it any other way." The next night, McCall officiated a Pac 12 semifinal game between Arizona State and Oregon. Both teams have coaches who pace and bark. When they stand still they merely look perplexed or agitated. The game was a testy one, headed to overtime, between teams desperate to reach the N.C.A.A. tournament. In the second half, McCall called a foul on an Arizona State player who blocked a shot. The Sun Devils' coach, Bobby Hurley, was enraged. Replays on the enormous video board sent Hurley into a frenzy. Fans howled at the officials.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The show, "Taking It to the Streets! The Art Design of Posters and Flyers on the Lower East Side in the '80s '90s," is a project by ABC No Rio, a cultural center that is continuing programming while building a new headquarters on Rivington Street. The exhibition includes works by artists like Sue Coe, Eva Cockcroft and Eric Drooker and will run through June 20 at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space. "We wanted to recreate that street corner where all of these fliers and stencils could be seen," an organizer of the exhibition, Seth Tobocman, said recently at the museum. No Rio's director, Steven Englander, said the show was inspired by questions about how Donald J. Trump's potential effect as president might be compared to Ronald Reagan's. Mr. Tobocman, co editor of a long running political comic book called World War 3 Illustrated, added that one aim of the exhibition was to explore links between contemporary protest movements and past political activism on the Lower East Side that focused on local and national issues. Many fliers in the show are specific to the neighborhood. Some refer to a clash in 1988 between police officers and protesters as the officers tried to enforce a curfew at Tompkins Square Park. A group called Revolt Against Gentrification Erasing Our Neighborhood, or Rage On, advertised a "gentrification tour" with a picture of the Christodora House, a luxury building on Avenue B that was a target of protest and vandalism. A flier titled "Loisaida Intifada," using a nickname for the neighborhood, showed a figure throwing a flaming bottle and declared: "Take our homes, we'll take the streets." There are also fliers addressing issues that resonated beyond the neighborhood even as they were posted there. Three tell the story of Michael Stewart: He was arrested in connection with subway graffiti in 1983 and died after being brought to a hospital by transit police, bruised and hogtied. A poster by Mr. Tobocman described the fatal shooting by the police in 1984 of a Eleanor Bumpurs, from the Bronx. Others referred to campaigns against automobile use, nuclear power and United States covert actions in Latin America.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Paul George has a small freshwater pond behind his house in Oklahoma City that he stocks with bass, crappie and bluegill. Whenever he has a couple of hours to spare from his responsibilities as a do everything forward for the N.B.A.'s Thunder, he heads out back with his fishing rod. He releases what he catches for now, anyway. "Waiting for them to get a little bigger," he said. George has time. Last summer, on the first night of free agency, he agreed to re sign with the Thunder on a four year, 137 million deal. The news emanated from a house party that Russell Westbrook, his superstar teammate, was hosting for George, who did not even entertain meetings with rival teams. He was sticking with the Thunder. In doing so, George made clear that he was banking on his partnership with Westbrook while offering endorsements of the organization and of Oklahoma City's leisurely pace. He can fish. He can raise his two young children in a quiet neighborhood. And he can focus on basketball, knowing that his future is with the Thunder. "You can give your everything to one organization, and you know the direction that you're going," George said in a recent interview. "There's so much that players have to deal with that I don't think people quite recognize. A lot of them are the same issues that everybody else deals with. But this takes a lot of the burden off my shoulders." He is averaging 28.2 points, 8.1 rebounds and 4.2 assists, all career highs, while shooting 44 percent from the field and 39.1 percent from 3 point range. He is at least in the conversation for his first N.B.A. Most Valuable Player Award. "I think the shift I've seen," Coach Billy Donovan said, "is a guy who's a lot more comfortable." George has been limited recently by shoulder soreness, and Oklahoma City has slipped a bit in the standings. But the Thunder are capable of being a force in the playoffs, and they appear to be a close knit group. One reason: Oklahoma City is not exactly flush with "extracurriculars," as George put it, so the players tend to linger at the practice facility. They spend a lot of time together, which has helped build chemistry. "And if one person has to go do something, there's always someone else who's like, 'I'll tag along with you,'" George said. "That's kind of been the culture here." George was traded to the Thunder before the start of last season, after he told the Indiana Pacers that he would not sign a contract extension. Most figured that Oklahoma City would be a pit stop for George, who grew up in Palmdale, Calif., about 50 miles north of Los Angeles. More to the point: He had told the Pacers that he wanted to be shipped to the Lakers. Indiana balked and instead dealt him to Oklahoma City, where George averaged 21.9 points and 5.7 rebounds last season. After Oklahoma City lost in the first round of the playoffs, George was a free agent. He could have gone nearly anywhere, including to the Lakers. "I had so many phone calls and people asking me what he would do when it was all still up in the air," Tom Hegre, his former coach at Knight High School, said in a telephone interview. "But I personally felt that he would stay with the Thunder. I just didn't think he would bail on something before he gave it a legitimate chance." Hegre also said he suspected that Oklahoma City itself had something to do with George's decision. Even now, after six All Star appearances, George is a small town guy and a self described "homebody." Back in his high school days, George and his father would occasionally ask Hegre if the team was planning to practice over the weekend. Hegre knew that meant they were thinking about going fishing. They had their favorite spots: Hughes Lake, Lake Elsinore, Lopez Lake, Little Rock Reservoir. "I always thought that was pretty cool," Hegre said. George has never played in a major market. Not in high school (Palmdale). Not in college (Fresno State). And not in the N.B.A., which may not be a coincidence. When he was with the Pacers, George lived in a suburban community with a large lake, where he kept a boat. He fished there, too.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
A composer who thought in terms of molten guitar melodrama and wailing choral grandeur, Ennio Morricone, who died on Monday at 91, scored movies the way their biggest fans heard them in their heads. He believed in the films no matter how ridiculous, celebrating and amplifying their feelings into something transcendent. (Morricone was often more successful at doing this than their directors or screenwriters.) If we allow ourselves to think about spaghetti westerns as touched by a sense of cosmic fate, or horror slashers as occasionally gorgeous, Morricone is certainly to thank for that. He was a kindred spirit to visionaries like Sergio Leone, Dario Argento, Brian De Palma, John Carpenter and Quentin Tarantino (all five collaborated with him) that is to say, he was a supremely talented addict to the rush of genre filmmaking. To understand Morricone's genius, it's better to explore the deep cuts. The twangy, galloping, ay ay ay ing main title of Leone's action epic is more famous, but revisit the film's wordless climax, set on a cracked stone clearing where the antagonists shoot it out over stolen gold coins, and you'll appreciate how adventurous Morricone's art was. The composer multiplies the unbearable tension of the stare down with each added instrument: a Spanish guitar (gloriously out of tune), a blaring trumpet, skittering castanets, delicate chimes, even what sounds like a reverb drenched amplifier being tipped over. Colored by avant garde liberation, it's a sonic palette that was uniquely his. Mario Bava's kitschy comics based crime film has its superfans (the Beastie Boys once built a whole video around it), but Morricone's groovy, psychedelic tinged additions have more personality than the masked antihero, played by John Phillip Law. Trained at the Santa Cecilia classical conservatory in his native Italy, Morricone was also seasoned in jazz and pop, meaning he could lounge it up with the best of them. "Deep Down," this movie's flirty fuzz guitar laden theme song cooed by the chanteuse Maria Cristina Brancucci, deserves to be more widely known. It's easily better than maybe all but three James Bond tunes. 'Once Upon a Time in the West' Another Leone western moment is merited here, and this violent reveal from the director's mighty 1968 summation work is the most shocking scene of his career. He lets a child's point of view bring us into the scene, rushing down a hallway and almost smacking us into Morricone's savage electric guitar crunch. The boy and his farming family will soon be gone, rubbed out by the menacing men who materialize from the scrub and dark orchestral swells. Their leader? None other than the classic American good guy Henry Fonda, breaking bad in a perverse piece of casting. Morricone makes the betrayal feel like a gut punch. It's impossible to reflect on Italy's tradition of giallo stylish thrillers prone to black gloved killers in close up and not smile at their creepy aural signatures, often supplied by Morricone in a steady side gig. His work on Argento's enormously influential breakthrough film is a nightmare in your ear holes: twinkly lullaby chimes and slightly deranged la la la singing. Talk to disciples of Morricone's weirdest soundtracks and they'll steer you toward titles like "A Lizard in a Woman's Skin" (1971), "What Have You Done to Solange?" (1972) and "Spasmo" (1974). Still, take your time with that journey in the dark; here's the place to start. Elio Petri's Kafkaesque police satire, about a corrupt inspector (Gian Maria Volonte) who kills his mistress and hopes to get caught, would be almost unbearably bleak as a piece of entertainment if played straight. Fortunately, Morricone's score, the product of an especially inspired and fecund period, functions as a mischievous counterbalance. Mincing mandolins, conspiratorial bassoons and the prominent sproing of a mouth harp coalesce into a nudge that helps ground our reaction in black comedy. In his recent reappraisal, J. Hoberman called Morricone's score "cartoonish." It's also a stealth commentary built into the film itself. Golden hour hued and exquisitely pastoral, Terrence Malick's Texas set drama has such a visual fineness to it, you can almost feel the softness of the air. Even in conjunction with knockout cinematography (of such uglies as Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and Sam Shepard), Morricone's contribution stands out, particularly this cue, wavering between natural order and an underlying tension. The composer notoriously butted heads with Malick, who was as demanding as they come. Nonetheless or perhaps because of it Morricone produced some of his most aching passages. Music bridges cultures and connects listeners to a conception of the divine (no matter how arbitrarily imposed) in Roland Joffe's sumptuous religious drama. Tapping into his love of heavenly harmonies and contrapuntal elegance, Morricone composed an oboe melody for Jeremy Irons, playing an 18th century Spanish Jesuit missionary in South America. His priest performs it in the jungle for a tribe of Indigenous Guarani. The solo has to function as an initiation: beguiling, innocent, unthreatening. Morricone expands it into a theme underpinning one of his most beloved scores, better known than the film itself. This may be Morricone's masterpiece (partly composed with his son Andrea), in which his churning, romantic score supplies the final catharsis the belated viewing of a lost reel of kisses from old films in the absence of dialogue. Giuseppe Tornatore's Oscar winner is about a boy enchanted by movies who grows up to be a cynical, faithless director. His memories of youth, first love and a kindly projectionist (Philippe Noiret) are the basis for the story's four alarm nostalgia fire, deeply indebted to Federico Fellini. If you're too cool for it, "Cinema Paradiso" is easy to dismiss, but we Morriconians see you discreetly wiping a tear from the corner of your eye.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The psychology of saving fuel can get complicated, especially when it involves splurging to go from Point A to Point B. "Green" luxury models from the 75,000 Tesla Model S electric sedan to the 845,000 Porsche 918 Spyder plug in hybrid suggest that the wealthy can preen like Marie Antoinette while still waving the banner of energy independence and standing with the peasants in their Priuses. The BMW 535d doesn't require quite that kind of royal ransom, but even a staunch proponent of diesel engines may notice the financial commitment required. Yet that commitment has a payoff. Driven through a howling blizzard this winter in upstate New York, my 535d test car stoically chugged through drifting snow while returning 42 miles per gallon 4 m.p.g. better than the E.P.A. highway estimate. High mileage Euro market diesels arriving in America include models from Audi, Chevrolet, Jeep, Mercedes, Porsche and Volkswagen. All have copious torque that makes up for their relatively modest horsepower. BMW's 3 liter vies with Audi's 3 liter TDI as the most enthusiast oriented of the bunch. With an efficient twin scroll turbocharger, the 6 cylinder engine spins freely to 6,000 r.p.m., an unusually high engine speed for a diesel. And its 255 horsepower tops that of every diesel rival. Combining 413 pound feet of torque and a paddle shifted automatic transmission with 8 efficient speeds, this 4,085 pound sedan races from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in just 5.8 seconds. Adding all wheel drive for 2,300 shaves that time to 5.7 seconds while trimming 1 m.p.g. from the highway rating, to 37. And the diesel Bimmer feels even quicker than the numbers suggest, with peak torque arriving at a low 1,500 r.p.m. for right now acceleration. BMW has mildly updated the entire 5 Series lineup for 2014. Xenon headlamps are standard, with adaptive LED's available. New contour lines wrap the twin kidney grille. The front air intakes are bolder and the taillamps slimmer. An optional feature opens or closes the trunk with the wag of a foot under the rear bumper. The 5 still melts over the road like butter on toast, even if its famously sporty handling has grown more aloof and Lexus like. In the cabin, BMW avoids fixing what isn't broken. For all the deserved acclaim heaped on the Cadillac CTS, BMW's all day supportive seats still whip the Cadillac's standard mush buckets. Old school analog driver's gauges are classic and legible. The huge 10.2 inch display screen, whose iDrive control system adds a touchpad to its oversize rotary knob, is reasonably functional. But BMW needs better contrast for map displays that seem to run 50 shades of gray, to the point that I couldn't pick out the Hudson River on the map. In other areas, the lock step familiarity of BMW cabins can breed contempt, especially in monochrome black versions. As BMW's prices migrate steadily north, it's fair to ask: When are we going to see some new ideas and themes in its interiors? In this 5 Series, the rough textured leather managed to look dull even when brand new. But nothing sullied the BMW's hard won image like the aluminum "hexagon" trim, part of a 3,150 M Sport package. With its dimpled finish and tacked on appearance, the stuff looks like 1970s lawn furniture. Buyers can choose wood that looks better. The 535d had something else in common with BMWs I've tested lately: Even at 66,425 out the door, the test car was notable for things it lacked, including a backup camera, parking sensors and even heated seats. Such features are standard, increasingly, on Chevys, Mazdas and Hyundais. The upside is driving a car that combines Germanic muscle and assurance with small car economy. Mash the gas, and after a half beat of turbo lag, the 535d scoots with a muted rumble. With its 18.5 gallon tank, the 535d can cover 700 highway miles between fill ups. Fuel savings are bolstered by features like BMW's still obtrusive engine stop start function, a coasting mode, brake energy regeneration and an Eco Pro setting that optimizes settings for the throttle, transmission and climate control to maximize efficiency. At 57,525 to start, the 535d costs 7,100 more than the most basic 5 Series, the 528i. But the diesel model handily beats the 23/34 m.p.g. rating of the 528i, which has a 4 cylinder 240 horsepower turbo gas engine. In a more apples to apples performance comparison versus the 6 cylinder gasoline 535i, the diesel sets you back an extra 1,500. According to the Energy Department's fueleconomy.gov site, the typical 535d owner will spend 2,000 a year on diesel fuel. That owner would save 200 a year versus the 4 cylinder 528i, 450 a year over the gasoline 535i and 950 a year compared with the 8 cylinder 550i. Drive the 535d for three and a half years, and fuel savings will essentially make up for the extra 1,500 you spent. Either way, you've saved no real money, but you spent 65,000 on a 5 Series. Which proves that calculators aren't much help when it comes to buying a BMW.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
WASHINGTON Federal agencies are split on how best to handle national security concerns surrounding popular and ubiquitous Chinese made drones, with some policymakers chafing at more protectionist approaches. The Department of the Interior, which uses drones for tasks like wildlife conservation and the monitoring of the state of infrastructure, grounded all those made in China or built with Chinese parts in October. It reaffirmed that decision in January, saying its entire fleet of 810 drones would essentially remain out of commission until it can confirm they pose no security threat. Yet the Department of Agriculture and the Office of Management and Budget raised warnings last year about congressional legislation that would make it impossible for the United States government to buy Chinese drones at all. The Agriculture Department, which uses drones to survey farmland, for example, said it could limit the ability "to carry out our mission crucial work" and "halt" the Forest Service's use of drones altogether. The Trump administration has engaged in a steady campaign to wall off America from Chinese technology, saying the Chinese government could use it to spy on the United States. The administration has been trying to keep Huawei, the telecom equipment giant, out of the next generation of wireless networks both in the United States and abroad and has increased scrutiny of Chinese investment in sectors deemed "critical," like telecom and tech. Federal officials have also investigated whether mobile apps owned by Chinese companies could leak sensitive data. Their efforts have been cheered on by members of Congress from both parties, many of whom have written legislation that would restrict China's ability to operate in the United States. But the debate over drones, which are primarily made either in China or with Chinese parts, shows how attempts to "decouple" America from Chinese industry can crash into the realities of the global tech supply chain. DJI, a drone manufacturer based in Shenzhen, China, is by far the industry leader, with analysts estimating it has a market share of 70 percent or higher. Its drones are used not only by government agencies but by legions of hobbyists. Even some competing products that are made in America include Chinese parts. "Decoupling isn't like a magic wand where you just say, 'We're not going to use these people anymore,'" said James Lewis, the director of the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The prevalence of DJI's products has drawn concern from government officials for years. In 2017, a memo from the Los Angeles office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it had "moderate confidence" that DJI was providing critical United States "infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government." While DJI denied the claims, the concerns have persisted. Last year, Congress approved a measure blocking defense agencies from buying Chinese drones. A bipartisan group of lawmakers has also introduced legislation that would effectively bar federal agencies from buying drones made in China, accusing the companies of intellectual property theft and endangering American security. The proposed law triggered concerns from various corners of the executive branch. In letters obtained by The New York Times, Stephen L. Censky, the deputy secretary of the Department of Agriculture, told the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget that the agency had major concerns with the law. A letter, dated late September, said the law would "severely impact the establishment, development and implementation" of the Agriculture Department's drone program "to carry out our mission crucial work." Mr. Censky also said in the letter that drones could be useful to the agency's efforts in nature conservation, combating wildfires and monitoring the health of forests. By December, the agency had seen a new version of the draft law, according to a second letter, but Mr. Censky said it was still "concerned that none of our previous comments were considered or integrated into this rewrite." The budget office also said it opposed a version of the ban in a memo circulated in September, which was first reported by Politico. It expressed concerns that prohibiting government use of Chinese drones would prompt Chinese officials to do the same to American companies, hindering their growth. And it said that "banning the use of these systems without any viable alternatives would put undue burden on federal agencies." The next month, the Interior Department grounded any drones made in China, or with Chinese parts. Last week, it formalized the move with officials saying that it was "without question" aimed at China while allowing drones to be used in emergencies. The aircraft will not be used again until they can be vetted for security flaws, the agency has said. Nonemergency missions will use other aircraft or helicopters. The Department of the Interior, the Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment. Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican and a sponsor of the legislation that would bar federal agencies from buying Chinese drones, said he was unaware of the letters from the Agriculture Department but noted that defense agencies had raised concerns about the flying devices. "While I would defer to the Department of Agriculture on the Dairy Margin Coverage Program, when it comes to threats to our national security, I am inclined to agree with the security minded experts," he said. Critics of DJI say that it's important for the United States to develop its own drone companies that can compete with Chinese firms. One California company, Skydio, makes its drones stateside but still uses some Chinese parts. Its chief executive, Adam Bry, said that all the core components were American and that the company was moving away from using the Chinese parts altogether. DJI has tried to soothe the Trump administration's fears, moving some of its production to California and introducing a version of its product explicitly for government users.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Four years ago, Jamie Beck was a photographer living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was on a plane and had an anxiety attack and was convinced she would die. "The first thing I thought was, 'I will never know what it's like to live in France,'" she said. "I swore if the plane landed, I will move to France." It did. And she did. Ms. Beck, 37, was following in the footsteps of so many before her into French expatriate life: Ernest Hemingway, Peter Mayle, "Emily in Paris." She moved to Provence, where she documents the sunflowers and vineyards and castles and croissants that she encounters, all the while clad in a seemingly endless series of flouncy white dresses. Her apartment in the town of Apt has previously been rented for honeymoons. It's all very idyllic, and her 317,000 Instagram followers seem to agree. During "le confinement" what the French call their coronavirus lockdown Ms. Beck lost all her commercial work. "The only thing I could control was what I did with my time, so I decided to make a piece of art every single day," she said. She tagged her posts isolationcreation and soon realized she was gaining about 1,000 new followers per day. "I definitely saw a spike in June and July for Instagram and YouTube," said Tiffanie Davis, 30, who moved to Paris in 2017 to get her master's degree in business administration. In 2019 Ms. Davis started to post videos about expat life on YouTube around topics like the cost of living (189,000 views), dating in France (which was explored in a two part series), and Black hair salons. "I have been getting a ton of DMs from people interested in my story and saying, 'I'm living through your experiences and want to make the move abroad.'" Ms. Davis has made a worksheet on moving abroad downloadable from her personal website. "Paris sells. A lot of the cliches are true," said Elaine Sciolino, a frequent contributor to The New York Times and the author of "The Seine: The River that Made Paris." "But there are two different Parises: There is the museum Paris, with the slim, beautifully dressed young woman who walks her dog across the Seine with no dirt anywhere. You can have that seduction, but you're not going to have sex on the Seine because there are rats, it's dirty, there's petty crime, you can get harassed. But who's going to feel sorry for you if you live in Paris? Nobody." Paris and the rest of France is struggling with the pandemic, violence and protests, but so much of what outsiders see is still the beautiful parts. "I get frustrated with the one trick pony approach where the only thing to show is some old looking doors and a rosy view of the Seine for the millionth time and, like, 'Oh sometimes I have to pinch myself that this is my backdrop," said Lindsey Tramuta, 35, who has lived in France for 15 years and is the author of "The New Parisienne: The Women and Ideas Shaping Paris." "I've picked the camp of 'let's not treat it like a postcard.'" Molly Wilkinson, 33, who lives in Versailles ("Thirty minutes from the Eiffel Tower to our apartment by train"), said: "I think my audience is more interested in the pastries, walking down the street, looking at antiques. I like being that little escape for people, and I'm a positive person, too." Ms. Wilkinson moved to France in 2013 to study pastry at the Cordon Bleu; before the pandemic, she taught cooking classes in person. She now leads online workshops about how to make macarons (her most popular class) and tarte Tatin. They were all selling out, she said, so she has increased them to 50 students from 30, for 25 euros each. She posted many photos to Instagram from a trip to the Loire Valley in September. "It was incredible, the engagement," she said. "They wanted to experience everything and daydream where they could go. Whenever something is banned, you want it more." Amid the ripened cheese and warm baguettes, some are trying to show the pros and cons of life abroad. "I don't want it to appear like, 'oh I'm here and you're stuck there,'" said Jane Bertch, 44, whose business, La Cuisine Paris, also offers cooking classes. "I talk about getting kicked out of my apartment, that real life is not the dream," Ms. Davis said of her YouTube videos. "I also wanted to show people that Black people are here, that there is a more diverse population than a lot of people make it out to be." Cynthia Coutu, 54, hosts workshops (now online) called Delectabulles for women about champagne, usually to devoted Francophiles who dream of retiring in their beloved country. "At the beginning of each webinar, I talk about restaurants closing and the trials and tribulations of life in Paris," she said. "I don't idealize life here." David Lebovitz, the author of nine cookbooks and the memoirs "The Sweet Life in Paris" and "L'Appart" (which are being adapted into television shows), has lived in Paris since 2003. During the pandemic, he has started to experiment with Instagram Live from his apartment in the 11th arrondissement, often unpacking what he bought at the local markets or sharing cocktail recipes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Noah Tucker, left and Anthony Joseph, who appear in the TV series "High Cuisine." The two chefs use mind altering ingredients to create gastronomic cuisine. AMSTERDAM Edibles is the word most often used for foods that make marijuana and other hallucinogens go down easy. Think pot brownies and space cakes not exactly famous for pleasing the palate. But for two Amsterdam based chefs, it was high time to go beyond simply edible, and to use mind altering ingredients to create truly gastronomic cuisine. In April, the pair's new television series, "High Cuisine," had its premiere on the Dutch streaming platform Videoland, and they're now creating a series of cookbooks that will ultimately pull together about 100 mind altering dishes. The TV show follows the two chefs around the Netherlands as they learn about regional dishes, and then source Blue Lotus, Mexican tarragon, South African Kanna and other hallucinogens that are legal here, as well as various strains of cannabis recommended by local weed connoisseurs. Tucker and Joseph combine what they find into elegantly presented multicourse meals, with dishes such as wild roe with cabbage, bacon terrine, baby salsify, duck's liver and hash infused mole sauce; and North Sea crab with crispy seaweed, yogurt sauce and a cannabis reduction. The program is driven by Tucker, who describes himself at the beginning of each episode by saying, "I love to cook, and I love to get high." Joseph, in contrast, doesn't ever take drugs. The show's marriage of haute cuisine and hallucinogens might seem possible only because of permissive Dutch drug policies. But Karim Mostafi, a spokesman for the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, which oversees recreational drug policy in the Netherlands, said in an email that he could not comment on the legality of the show. "The Dutch government is aiming at prevention of drug use, in any shape or form," he wrote. "We don't have knowledge/expertise on how recreational drugs can be used in meal preparation." Mostafi sent links to the ministry's drug policy statement, which acknowledges that the status of cannabis is "ambiguous" in the Netherlands under the current policy of toleration. "Selling and using are still criminal offenses under Dutch law, but the authorities choose not to pursue or prosecute lawbreakers," the statement says. David Duclos, chief communications officer at Sensi Seeds, a licensed Dutch distributor of cannabis seeds, said that this policy leaves a lot of room for guessing. As far as selling edible products made from cannabis, he said, "there's no regulation of any aspect of that; there's no authority which can sign off on any of the products which are sold." Iris Freie, chair of the National Association of Smart Shops, stores that sell what she described as "legal and safe alternatives to illegal drugs," said that "High Cuisine" was raising awareness about how psychoactive edibles can be used. "You buy a box of truffles and you can eat them just like that, or you can make tea, or you can also make a really nice dish out of them," she said, referring to so called magic truffles. "They also want to address the fact that these substances are illegal in some places and why is that?" she said. "Since they occur in nature, why can't we consume them? They're trying to focus on a new angle in this discussion, which I think is positive." Tucker and Joseph had both worked in Michelin starred kitchens before they met about a decade ago in Amsterdam. They subsequently opened five restaurants together, before selling four to focus on their latest venture, Yerba, a "plant forward" restaurant in the city's Museum Quarter, which serves seasonal dishes made from ingredients that are wild, local and sustainable but non psychoactive. The cuisine leans heavily toward vegetarian, vegan and gluten free dishes that only use animals from "traceable sources." About eight years ago, the two chefs came up with the "High Cuisine" concept and began to research the range of psychoactive ingredients available in the Netherlands, visiting cannabis cultivation farms and smart shops, interviewing experts, and then bringing the substances back to their kitchen to explore the flavors and the effects when boiled, braised, caramelized and eaten. After testing these out on willing friends and experts "always voluntary and always free of charge," Tucker noted the pair took their show on the road. In each episode of "High Cuisine," Tucker and Joseph explore a region of the Netherlands and, in addition to stopping at a top local restaurant, they visit a local hallucinogens specialist: a truffle farm, a marijuana seed farm, and, in Amsterdam, an importer and distributor of herbs and plants with an enormous warehouse full of rare goods. "We looked at all those alternative ingredients as a chef would," Tucker said. "We looked at their flavor profile, and then paired them with an appropriate flavor combination. "With magic truffles, we pair it with wild mushrooms, so you don't even taste it," he added. "It's already within the flavor profile of the dish but you're getting high." Then Tucker and Joseph head back to their own kitchen, and cook up a regionally inspired feast, to be served to invited guests. "The whole concept is micro dosing, which is very important," said Tucker. "We wanted our participants to leave feeling a slight euphoria, but still in control." Or as Joseph put it, "about the same as if you had a glass of wine per course with a four course meal. To be merry." The two chefs are now developing "High Cuisine" for an international audience. In June, they expect to start shooting the first segment of a new series in locations such as Colombia, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Bali. They plan to learn how ingredients such as chaliponga, peyote and magic mushrooms are used in local rituals, in order to then combine them with culinary specialties from those regions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
THE BIG BANG THEORY 8 p.m. on CBS. The relationship between Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) and Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik) has developed slowly, in awkward fits and tender starts, during this sitcom's 11 year run: They broke up over and over before finally consummating their relationship after five years of dating. In the Season 11 finale, the pair will tie the knot. Guest stars include Laurie Metcalf as Sheldon's mom; Kathy Bates and the magician Teller as Amy's parents; and Mark Hamill playing himself. THE BLUE ANGEL (1930) 8 p.m. on TCM. Marlene Dietrich was a little known German actress when she was cast as the title figure of this tragicomedy directed by Josef von Sternberg. But her alluring turn as a cabaret singer in this movie would catapult her to international fame and a contract with Paramount. Emil Jannings, who had won the first Oscar a year earlier, co stars as a middle aged professor who falls in love with her and descends into madness. While Mr. von Sternberg claimed the film was not a political allegory, in 1933 it was banned in Nazi Germany.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Now that Republicans are in charge, the federal government is poised to roll back regulations limiting access to consumers' online data. States have other ideas. As on climate change, immigration and a host of other issues, some state legislatures may prove to be a counterweight to Washington by enacting new regulations to increase consumers' privacy rights. Illinois legislators are considering a "right to know" bill that would let consumers find out what information about them is collected by companies like Google and Facebook, and what kinds of businesses they share it with. Such a right, which European consumers already have, has been a longtime goal of privacy advocates. Two other proposals face a crucial Illinois House committee vote this week. One would regulate when consumers' locations can be tracked by smartphone applications, and another would limit the use of microphones in internet connected devices like mobile phones, smart TVs and personal assistants like Amazon's Echo. Should they be passed into law, these rules could end up guiding the rights of consumers far beyond Illinois because they would provide a model for other states, and because it would be difficult for technology companies with hundreds of millions of users to create a patchwork of state and country specific features to localize their effects. Congress is pushing to overturn regulations imposed by the Federal Communications Commission under the Obama administration that limit the collection of data by broadband providers like AT T and Comcast. The Senate approved the rollback last week, and the House is expected to follow this week. Congressional Republicans argue that the rules would add an unneeded and confusing layer of regulation and that they fail to distinguish between broadband providers and content companies like Facebook and Google. They also assert, more broadly, that such regulation is onerous and stifles innovation. Illinois is not the only place where state legislators are asserting themselves in the opposite direction. California and Connecticut, for instance, recently updated laws that restrict government access to online communications like email, and New Mexico could follow soon. Last year, Nebraska and West Virginia passed laws that limit how companies can monitor employees' social media accounts, while legislators in Hawaii, Missouri and elsewhere are pushing similar bills for employees, as well as for students and tenants. "More and more, states have taken the position that, if Congress is not willing or able to enact strong privacy laws, their legislatures will no longer sit on their hands," said Chad Marlow, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Online privacy is the rare issue that draws together legislators from the left and the far right. At the state level, anyway, some of the progress has come from a marriage between progressive Democrats and libertarian minded Republicans, who see privacy as a bedrock principle, Mr. Marlow said. States have often been a kind of regulatory laboratory. Be it tax cuts, emission regulations, gay rights or gun laws, advocates on both the left and the right have long worked at the state level to push agendas that Washington is too busy or hostile to handle. In the case of online privacy, consumer groups and civil liberties advocates had a friendly ear in many quarters of the Obama administration. Now they face a White House and a Congress that are looking to roll back regulations, not create them. "What you're seeing is this growing recognition of the intrusiveness of these technologies, and some efforts not to regulate them out of existence, but to regulate them in ways that allow people who care about this to preserve their own privacy," said David Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown Law School, and the former director of the Federal Trade Commission's consumer protection bureau. "So what's going to happen is California is going to supplant Congress, and it's going to be augmented by states like Illinois, Minnesota and even Texas in efforts to protect consumer privacy." In Illinois, the "right to know" legislation recently cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee, paving the way for a full vote sometime in the next few weeks. Technology companies and their trade organizations are lobbying fiercely against it. "I think I created 30 jobs when I filed this bill," said Michael Hastings, a Democratic state senator who sponsored the measure. Mr. Hastings said lobbyists representing companies including Microsoft, Apple, Lyft and Amazon had visited his office to talk about amending the bill. Several technology trade groups, including the Internet Association and NetChoice, have pushed publicly against the legislation. In an interview, Carl Szabo, senior policy counsel at NetChoice, said the law could add a burden of compliance costs and legal fees on essentially any company with a website that collects information, even routine things like creating email lists or giving online support to customers. "Hiring attorneys to write privacy policies, coming up with terms of service that will be a real burden for small businesses," he said. Illinois also has another dimension: class action lawyers. Almost a decade ago the state passed a trailblazing law, the Biometric Information Privacy Act, that regulates the collection of things like facial scans, voice data and thumbprints. This has given rise to a series of potentially expensive lawsuits against Facebook, Google and others. Last year, lobbyists for Facebook failed in a push for an amendment that would have weakened the biometric law by exempting photo tagging technologies that are now commonly used on social media. In the interim, however, lawyers at Edelson PC, a Chicago based class action firm that has become notorious among tech companies for its prolific filing of privacy suits, have gone on offense with a lobbying campaign of their own. Firm lawyers have also helped found a new nonprofit group, the Digital Privacy Alliance, as an advocate for privacy legislation in Illinois and elsewhere. "We were forced to get involved politically because once we started winning a lot of cases in court, they all went on the offensive," said Jay Edelson, founder of Edelson PC. "It's important because the Trump administration is doing so much to roll back privacy rights, so there is going to be a huge shift to state lawmakers and state attorneys general."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
An influential science advisory group formed by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine on Tuesday lent its support to a once unthinkable proposition: the modification of human embryos to create genetic traits that can be passed down to future generations. This type of human gene editing has long been seen as an ethical minefield. Researchers fear that the techniques used to prevent genetic diseases might also be used to enhance intelligence, for example, or to create people physically suited to particular tasks, like serving as soldiers. The advisory group endorsed only alterations designed to prevent babies from acquiring genes known to cause "serious diseases and disability," and only when there is no "reasonable alternative." The report provides an explicit rationale for genetic research that the federal government has avoided supporting until now, although the work is being pursued in countries like Sweden and China. So called germ line engineering might allow people to have biological children without fear that they have passed on the genes for diseases like Huntington's, Tay Sachs and beta thalassemia, and without discarding embryos carrying the disease causing mutations, as is often done now. Though such cases are likely to be rare, the report says they should be taken seriously. The new report heralds a day scientists have long warned is coming. After decades of science fiction movies, cocktail party chatter and college seminars in which people have idly debated the ethics of humanity intervening in its own evolution, advancing technology dictates that the public now make some hard choices. "It is essential for public discussions to precede any decisions about whether or how to pursue clinical trials of such applications," said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin Madison and a leader of the panel that wrote the report. "And we need to have them now." Just over a year ago, an international group of scientists said it would be "irresponsible to proceed" with making heritable changes to the human genome until risks could be better assessed and there was "broad societal consensus about the appropriateness" of any proposed change. No one is pretending that such a consensus now exists. But in the year that the committee was deliberating, Ms. Charo said, the techniques required to perform this sort of gene editing have passed crucial milestones. The advent of a powerful gene editing tool called Crispr Cas9 allows researchers to snip, insert and delete genetic material with increasing precision. It has led to plans for experimental treatments of adult patients with cancer, blindness and other conditions as early as this year. "Now we can see a path whereby we might be able to do it, so we have to think about how to make sure it's used only for the right things and not for the wrong things," he said. A more pragmatic concern driving the committee was the likelihood that the new technology would be adopted in countries like China, where some pioneering research on editing human embryos without the intent to gestate them has already occurred. "If we have an absolute prohibition in the United States with this technology advancing, it's not like it won't happen," Ms. Charo said. But opponents of human germ line editing say that is not a reason to take a big step toward what they fear will be an inevitable push to engineer traits like strength, beauty and intelligence, perhaps eventually creating a dystopian social divide between those who can afford enhancements and those who cannot. "This opens the door to advertisements from fertility clinics of giving your child the best start in life with a gene editing packet," said Marcy Darnovsky, the executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a public interest group in Berkeley, Calif. "And whether these are real advantages or perceived advantages, they would accrue disproportionately to people who are already advantaged." The new guidelines, Ms. Darnovsky noted, also set the United States apart from many European countries that have signed a treaty to refrain from human germ line editing. In addition to social concerns, there are questions of safety and autonomy. While Crispr is generally precise, it can have "off target" effects, cutting DNA at places where it is not meant to. What if a child produced through a gene editing technique were hobbled in some unforeseen way? The new report called for prohibiting any alterations resembling "enhancement", including "off label" applications. Under the guidelines, a genetic technique aimed at strengthening the muscles of patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, for instance, could not be used to make healthy people stronger. But it is not clear who would draw those lines. George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University, saw no clear prohibitions against certain enhancements in the report. "If these fixes for severe diseases are shown to be safe and effective, why would small or large enhancements accompanying the fixes be unacceptable?" he asked. No one should expect to design a baby anytime soon. It will probably be years before gene editing techniques tested in animals can be shown to work in humans. And for the moment, the Food and Drug Administration is prohibited from using federal money to support research that results in genetically modified offspring. In the meantime, said Sharon Terry, the president of the Genetic Alliance, a patient advocacy group, patients who may participate in clinical trials must begin a conversation. "My hope is that there would be serious considerations about what we are balancing here," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Positano. Vail. St. Tropez. Yellowstone. There's one big problem with these vacation hot spots. Everyone knows about them. So don't be shocked when you turn up at your hard won summer holiday, sun screened and ready to de stress, only to encounter fellow vacationers jostling for your place in the sun. Crowds kill my vacation mellow. I go to great lengths to preserve the fantasy that I'm less tourist than fly on the wall, a traveler quietly savoring the charms of a spot versus part of a herd trampling it. Luckily, the world is a big place. And a pivot from popular destinations to others off the beaten track can deliver an equally satisfying experience. Even in the throes of peak season. Here, trendy summer getaways are paired with five less trafficked spots that echo the allure and offer similar recreation. Vail's swank and easy accessibility (Eagle County Regional Airport is 20 minutes from downtown) position it as a primo alpine getaway for well heeled outdoor enthusiasts drawn to pristine hiking trails, river rafting and top notch Colorado cuisine. Though its geography is altogether different, the San Juan Islands in Washington offer naturalist perks with a more attractive price tag. Base camp is Friday Harbor, a town whose timeworn bakeries, bookshops and vistas of the Salish Sea, a network of waterways that runs from Puget Sound in Washington to the Strait of Georgia in Canada, induce a laid back island reverie. Though you won't be summiting 14,000 footers off the coast of Seattle, you will be enveloped in nature. As you bike or hike through craggy shorelines and woodlands, you'll glimpse wild turkeys, red foxes, bald eagles, peregrine falcons, seals, otters and porpoises. The most thrilling sighting, of course, is an orca. From Lime Kiln Point State Park, you can spot killer whales (and hear their "blows") in the Haro Strait as they hunt for king salmon in the deep, nutrient rich kelp forests. For a more intense whale watching experience, a tour with San Juan Outfitters will have you crisscrossing the waters from Washington to Canada with biologists who can identify individual whales as they breach and frolic with their pods. Adventurous types can sea kayak alongside the orcas. Sea Quest Expeditions offers trips from half day outings to three day excursions (you'll camp in state marine parks) led by environmental scientists. On any island, I anticipate first rate seafood. But the ebullient flavors served up at Friday Harbor House were unexpected. The chef, Jason Aldous, forages and then finesses hyper fresh ingredients fiddlehead ferns, ramps, organic duck eggs, local oysters into dishes that highlight the crisp brine of the waters and earthiness of the terroir. Another island expectation: hotels in need of a refresh. Happily, Island Inn at 123 West veers contemporary, with firm mattresses, organic high thread count sheets, flat screen televisions, heated towel bars and radiant bathroom flooring. Positano, the charming, sun soaked vertical Italian town on the Amalfi Coast, is on everyone's bucket list. Which is reason enough, unless you enjoy hearing English spoken at every trattoria (not to mention sitting bumper to bumper at the beach), to avoid it during the high season. It's la dolce vita, Swiss ified. You can swim, water ski or paddle board. There are wildflower filled alpine trails for hiking and mountain biking. And, of course, boating. Take a hop on, hop off style day cruise. Rent a motorboat. Better yet, book a skipper to ferry you to lunch at the glamorous Ristorante Milano in Pallanza and then on for sightseeing in the Borromean Islands. This way, you can relax with a few bottles of the region's acclaimed white merlot. From Ascona, you can day trip to the Cardada Cimetta cable car or the lost in time village of the Valle Verzasca, known for its glacially chilled emerald green river, a star summer attraction. There are many gastronomic restaurants in Ascona. But the best meals are the simple ones, grilled meats and fish served with crisp local wine. At La Cassetta, a historic stone lake house, classic Mediterranean fare is made more delightful by the al fresco setting. The rooftop restaurant at the stylish Art Hotel Riposo serves pastas and proteins whimsically dressed with terrace grown daisies and herbs. Grottos are a Ticinese signature. These rustic outdoor restaurants are all about hearty local flavors: boards of cheese and air dried salami, vitello tonnato, polenta infused with savory mushrooms and pork shank. Bed and breakfast style lodging is plentiful in Ascona. But as a stand in for Positano, an ideal choice is the five star Hotel Eden Roc. You'll have spacious rooms, a serious spa (hydropools, sanarium, Kneipp path, Finnish sauna), a private beach (the hotel has its own Riva Aquarama boat), use of hotel Vespas and sommelier led wine tastings under the vine covered pergola. Through July 1, JazzAscona will have 200 free concerts along the lakefront, a European homage to New Orleans style music. St. Tropez, the jewel of the Cote d'Azur in France, is glamorous, sure. But an equally idyllic coastal getaway is tucked between the Pacific and the Santa Ynez Mountains. For decades, Santa Barbara has wooed jetsetters with its Mediterranean climate, rugged coastline and Moorish architecture. So much so that this pocket of Southern California is often referred to as the "American Riviera." That the Santa Ynez Valley is surrounded by vineyards begs another comparison to Provence. Here, it's a great pleasure to not only drink some of the country's best wine, but also to breathe the region's orange blossom scented air. There is an abundance of outdoor recreation, something you won't find as much of on the French Riviera: beaches (surfing, swimming, snorkeling, kayaking and sailing), just minutes from most lodgings; and mountainous terrain for hiking and biking. Standout activity: a day trip to Channel Islands National Park. Go on your own (take Island Packers Cruises ferry from Ventura, about 40 minutes from Santa Barbara) or with an organized outfitter (Santa Barbara Adventure Company and Truth Aquatics do kayaking, diving and snorkeling day trips) to explore windswept peaks and ocean grottos. Back to the vineyards. On top of being home to 170 tasting rooms, the rolling hills of the Santa Ynez Valley are ideal for bike riding, horseback riding (all available to rent/book) or just kicking back with a farmstand picnic. You can also test drive the local vino without leaving town. The newly established urban wine trail offers two dozen tasting rooms, all within blocks of downtown and the beach. Santa Barbara's microclimate makes eating well effortless. Lucky's, Barbareno, Trattoria Mollie and the Stonehouse at San Ysidro Ranch nail the region's rustic yet elegant cuisine. Two new boutique hotels, the Kimpton Goodland and the Wayfarer (this property also has shared hostel rooms), are well situated and casually chic. But for classic glamour, splurge at the five star San Ysidro Ranch, where you can stay in a private bungalow and stroll along the lavender studded foot paths once trod upon by the newlyweds John and Jackie Kennedy. It's hard to be disappointed in the City of Light. That is, until your outing to Paris's hallowed food hall, La Grande Epicerie de Paris at Le Bon Marche department store, is marred by selfie stick wielding tourists clamoring for a photo with a baguette. On my last summer trip to Paris, these selfie stick obsessed tourists were everywhere; at the farmers' market, clogging the Tuileries, blocking my family's view on a sightseeing Bateaux Mouches boat ride down the Seine. Museums? There are dozens. Contemporary photography, often controversial, is on display at Fotografiska. Moderna Museet exhibits 20th and 21st century artwork; think of Rauschenberg and Warhol mixed with provocative choreographed performances by Marina Abramovic. Of specific interest is the Nobel Museum, which spotlights the more than 900 laureates and tells the story of the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel (1833 1896) who left his fortune to be distributed among fellow pioneers who have had an impact on the world through science, diplomacy and the arts. The Abba Museum, more of an attraction than cultural institution, is a hoot. It is difficult not to enjoy the karaoke stalls and the kitschy 1980s disco room whose flashing dance floor invites moves to the strains of "Dancing Queen." With about 17 hours of sunlight during the summer months, you'll be motivated to be active. You can bike, kayak or go by boat to explore Stockholm's 30,000 islands, uninhabited islets, rocks and coves. Or swim. Sandy beaches like Langholmens and Smedsuddsbadet are smack in the city center. And don't forget the coffee break, fika, as it is known. The Swedes break up the day with this great ritual that always includes pastry. For a room with a view, try the stately harborfront Grand Hotel or sleek Radisson Blu Strand Hotel. Tucked into a residential area of Ostermalm, the 12 room Ett Hem is more townhouse than hotel, high concept Scandi chic design made cozy with plenty of flickering candles and communal spaces. You'll have breakfast on the pelt covered sitting room couch and wind down the day in the basement spa, stretched out upon a massive hot stone slab. Swap One National Park for Another The majesty of Yellowstone is indisputable. Glacier and Acadia, too. But your repose may be fractured when throngs of hikers bulldoze their way toward your perch on a scenic canyon rim. Newsflash: You don't need to visit the most popular national parks for an outstanding experience with nature. The National Park Service manages 417 "units," and many of the less trodden sites are decidedly bare bones, but offer similar recreation and sublime scenery. In Montana (straddling Wyoming), 120,000 acres of high desert punctuated by weathered prehistoric canyons make Big Horn Canyon National Recreation Area an excellent substitute for Yellowstone National Park (4.25 million visitors in 2016). Much of the desolate terrain resembles the uncharted wilderness of the film "The Revenant." Especially the Bad Pass Trail. Once traversed by the Crow people to reach buffalo plains and by trappers, the trail is craggy and arduous with vistas of expansive parkland flecked with bighorn sheep and wild horses. Bighorn Lake is a fisherman's paradise as well as a watery highway that allows you to float through gorges in the shadow of 1,000 foot walls of sedimentary rock. Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota's Badlands is another Yellowstone alternative. Visitors can hike grassy buttes and wind carved gullies or sightsee by canoe, where they may encounter bison, coyotes and elk on the shores of the Little Missouri River as you drift past the site where Theodore Roosevelt built a log cabin in 1884. Glacier National Park? It's stunning; a million acres of some of Montana's most breathtaking scenery. But, for D.I.Y. travelers like me, the setup can be frustrating. The park has limited parking, so guests often travel by shuttle bus to the best known hiking areas. And, once you arrive, you'll have to ascend past the crowds to find any semblance of solitude. In place of Glacier, tackle North Cascades National Park in Washington, which has similar topography, landscape and bodies of water, yet every trail feels off the beaten track. (While Glacier had 2.9 million visitors in 2016, North Cascades had just 28,646.) The setting rugged mountain peaks, dense evergreen forests, alpine lakes, wildflower filled valleys and extensive glacial coverage is ideal for hiking, canoeing and rock climbing. On a switchback filled hike canonized by Jack Kerouac, daredevils can channel their inner beatnik on Desolation Peak Trail. The writer spent the summer of 1956 working for the Forest Service as a fire lookout atop this 6,102 foot peak and recounted the experience in "Desolation Angels" and "The Dharma Bums." On the East Coast, Acadia National Park in Maine attracted over 3 million visitors in 2016. About 130 miles north is a spanking new national monument in Maine's remote North Woods, Katahdin Woods and Waters. This park was donated to the federal government by Roxanne Quimby, a founder of Burt's Bees body care products, and opened by President Barack Obama in August 2016. This 87,500 acre parcel, almost double the size of Acadia with limited primitive campgrounds, dirt roads, pit toilets, no potable water is catnip for travelers in search of the pristine wilderness traversed by Roosevelt in the 1870s. You can hike and bike the rugged terrain (still sprinkled with wooden lean tos) with your solitude interrupted only by the rustle of wildlife. Anglers will delight in the trout filled Wassataquoik Stream and the Penobscot River. After sunset, you'll get the show of a lifetime planets, meteor showers, stars illuminated against northern Maine's inky black skies.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
It was the "Let It Go" of the '90s, the inescapable ear worm that leapt from an animated film to the radio charts to international concert halls and, ultimately, to the stage of the Academy Awards. Now, 20 years later, "Journey to the Past" is back. And this time, the song is on Broadway. On Monday, April 24, "Anastasia," a new musical based on the hit 1997 animated feature about the adventures of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, the youngest Romanov princess, will open at the Broadhurst Theater. The movie one of several retellings of the legend, including a 1956 Ingrid Bergman film of the same name put forth a fanciful, if not historically accurate, premise: What if Anastasia had not been murdered in the Bolshevik Revolution along with her four siblings in 1918, but instead had survived with a touch of amnesia? In the film opening's scene, the princess, who goes by Anya after forgetting her identity, leaves an orphanage outside St. Petersburg in search of her grandmother, who survived the revolution. She has only fuzzy memories, of gilded palaces and a jeweled music box. Trudging through the snow, she sings "Journey to the Past," a number at once twinkling and rousing, about moving forward by diving into history. That and a radio version by the teenage R B star Aaliyah set it on a course to global omnipresence. The song has been dubbed in more than 31 languages for the film's international versions, with various countries' ingenues giving voice to Anya: In Mexico, the pop star Thalia released a cover; in Norway, Anita Skorgan, a Eurovision Song Contest veteran, added her own flair; in Portugal, Lucia Moniz (best known as Colin Firth's romantic interest in "Love Actually") recorded it as "Regresso ao passado," or "Return to the Past." The song's runaway success shocked its composers. "We had another song for that scene," said Mr. Flaherty, sitting with Ms. Ahrens at a cafe near the Broadhurst. "In the other song, Anya was on a bicycle. But, in Hollywood, you always have to write three songs for every scene. 'Journey' was the last one we came up with, late at night." Ms. Ahrens laughed, and added: "My mother, who I call the pinprick in the bubble of joy, said it's an honor just to be nominated. What she meant was, you're going to lose." Still, Aaliyah's performance on the telecast, in a black evening gown, is a lasting cultural moment, especially given her death in a 2001 plane crash. She also appeared in the official music video for the song, frolicking through animated snowscapes in a furry beige jump suit with a matching floor length mink coat. "She was so lovely to work with," Mr. Flaherty said of Aaliyah. "The morning we were nominated, we got a call from her. No one ever thanks the songwriters, but she did. I will always remember that." Though Aaliyah made the song popular on radio, the version that most fans cling to was sung by Ms. Callaway, a Broadway regular who was originally hired to sing only the demo tapes for the film but won the job after studio executives became enchanted with her voice. Ms. Callaway said that she still recalls the moment Mr. Flaherty played it for her. "I thought, 'That's the song,'" Ms. Callaway said. " I wanted to record it that same night. We stayed up until 1 in the morning, and no one left until it was done." The "Anastasia" creative team, which includes the book writer Terrence McNally and the director Darko Tresnjak, is banking on the song's appeal to fill seats. So far it may be working: In a recent week, the show brought in 1.2 million at the box office, a healthy haul before its official opening. Promotional materials, including a teaser trailer that amassed over 12 million views on Facebook, all feature the twinkling opening bars of "Journey to the Past," a kind of instant aural nostalgia trip designed for maximum throwback swooning. (Ms. Ahrens calls it the "shimmer.") "I've imagined this for YEARS!" one fan wrote under the YouTube video. Another: "I'm crying right now, this is my childhood! I wish I could go, but is really hard because I live in Argentina." Svala Bjorgvinsdottir, an Icelandic singer and the daughter of the Reykjavik rock star Bjorgvin Halldorsson, recorded the song when she was 18 and already famous in her home country. Twenty years on, she still performs it "in big arena concerts all over Iceland, including my father's Christmas Stadium Gala," she said by email. "The lyrics are beautiful in Icelandic." Ms. Callaway, too, said she is constantly surprised by the fervor. She included the song on her 2015 album, "The Essential Liz Callaway," and still performs it live dozens of times every year. "I've sung it in China, I've sung it in France, and everyone knows this song," she said. "I have had people burst into tears when they hear me sing it, saying it is their childhood rushing back to them." Caroline Benson, 23, a self described "Anastasia superfan" currently studying musical theater at Auburn University, said that she views "Journey" as a kind of empowerment anthem for women. "My mom bought me the VHS when I was about 6," she said. "I always appreciated Anya as a strong feminist character who knew what she wanted and never took no for an answer. As a person who is in a transition period, this song really speaks to going out into the unknown and taking life by the horns." While the composers are grateful for the "Fanastasias" who express affection for the movie, they worry that the stage version could shock the most devoted among them. Gone on Broadway are Rasputin the villain of the film and Bartok the albino bat, his scheming animal sidekick. The story still centers on Anya and her love interest, Dmitry (Derek Klena), a ruffian from St. Petersburg who persuades her to pretend to be Romanov royalty to escape Russia and find riches in Paris. (Surprise: She was the princess all along!) The main villain is a stern revolutionary named Gleb (Ramin Karimloo), who pursues Anya across Europe out of a sense of patriotism. Mr. Flaherty and Ms. Ahrens made other changes, too, adding many new songs. And gasp they moved "Journey to the Past" from its place at the start of the film to the finale of the musical's first act. "A song like 'Journey,' even though it dealt with indecision, couldn't be the start of a character arc," Mr. Flaherty said. "This is a woman with a past, and we needed to lay the groundwork for this moment." Mr. Flaherty and Ms. Ahrens say they are flattered that new generations continue to find the song. "A British boy group called Collabro just put a cover of it on their latest record," Mr. Flaherty said. "It keeps popping up in the strangest places."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Philip Gips, a graphic artist who created many celebrated movie posters, including those for "Rosemary's Baby" and "Alien," which hinted at the terror audiences would experience but gave away nothing of the films ' plots, died on Oct. 3 in a hospital in White Plains. He was 88. His son Michael said the cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia. Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Gips sometimes in collaboration with Stephen Frankfurt, a friend and his partner in a Manhattan advertising agency created a succession of posters with imagery that captured the essence of the movies they advertised. "He was an equal giant among his peers in the 1960s, '70s and '80s" like Bill Gold and Bob Peak, said Dwight Cleveland, a collector and the author of "Cinema on Paper: The Graphic Genius of Movie Posters" (2019). The poster, drenched in an eerie green, depicts a faraway baby carriage propped on a rocky ridge in shadow and silhouetted against an ethereal image of Ms. Farrow, in profile, staring dazedly into the sky. "It made you wonder, 'Who would leave a baby carriage in unfriendly terrain, and who is this character in the spooky glow ?'" Mr. Cleveland said by phone. For "Alien" (1979), a horror story about members of a spaceship crew who find a chamber with thousands of eggs on a distant planet, Mr. Gips created a single menacing image for the poster: an alien egg, suspended in space, releasing something green and yellow and murky. The portentous tagline "In space no one can hear you scream" was provided by Mr. Gips's wife, Barbara (Solinger) Gips, a copywriter, and is arguably better known than the glowing egg. Philip Sheldon Gips was born on March 28, 1931, in the Bronx to Murray and Rose (Nevins) Gips. His father managed residential properties, and his mother was a homemaker. Philip started drawing as a boy. When he was 13, he filled a book with original comics , some of them inspired by World War II. He earned a bachelor's degree at the Cooper Union in Manhattan and a master's from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. While at Yale, he and Lou Klein became the art directors of Monocle, a political satire magazine edited and published by Victor Navasky, a student at Yale Law School . Mr. Gips and Mr. Klein stayed at Monocle their jobs at the magazine were part time into the early 1960s. Mr. Navasky later became editor of The Nation. After graduating from Yale, Mr. Gips held several jobs, including one at Time Life Books, where he was an art director for two years. He and Mr. Klein then started an advertising firm, the first of several in which he would be involved, including Gips Balkind, founded in 1968. Mr. Frankfurt joined it as a partner 20 years later . As an executive at the Young Rubicam ad agency, Mr. Frankfurt a pioneer in movie marketing campaigns who also designed the title sequence of "To Kill a Mockingbird" asked Mr. Gips to design film posters. Their relationship moved from assignments to collaborations; as a result, determining who did exactly what on each poster can be tricky . Mr. Frankfurt died in 2012. Soon after "Rosemary's Baby," Mr. Gips designed two posters for "Downhill Racer," Michael Ritchie's 1969 film about an arrogant skier, played by Robert Redford. One poster featured an outsize portrait of two lovers about to kiss, juxtaposed with the tiny figure of a skier racing down a slope. The other showed a skier, the image distorted by his speed, racing toward the camera, the background a blaze of blue. In a 2007 survey of the greatest movie posters, Premiere magazine ranked the one for "Downhill Racer" with the two lovers and the one for "Rosemary's Baby" in its top 25. Mr. Gips's poster for the French soft core pornographic film "Emmanuelle" (1974) is a sensual image of a woman, her lips apart. The words "X was never like this" appear to come out of her mouth. That poster is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mr. Gips and his firms also designed corporate logos, including the one that ESPN has used since 1985. Although posters were Mr. Gips's best known work, he and his firms also designed annual reports, album covers, signage and corporate logos, including the one that ESPN has used since 1985.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
I've never thought much about finding the perfect luggage, so I just suffered. But Kit Dillon of The Wirecutter, the New York Times site that evaluates products, told me about ones that might reduce the indignities and hassle of travel and he even has a few high tech solutions. Sometimes it seems as if the one thing we can control when we travel is how well our luggage works. And you folks have looked at a lot of luggage best checked luggage, best carry on, best carry on travel bags. We really can't control how well our luggage works. But if you buy the right piece, it should be the last thing you have to worry about. So how do I find the best one? Even the best designed bag isn't useful if it's broken, so we don't even consider brands that can't stand behind their products. It's unavoidable that luggage (especially checked luggage) will be abused, so you want a good warranty with reliable customer service. After that, we look very closely at the material, construction and design. These things track fairly closely with price. The luggage market is so competitive that you really do get what you pay for, as cliched as that sounds. How did The Wirecutter test the luggage? Once we narrowed the field to something around 10 to 15 bags, we put them through their paces. We did the initial testing on our top picks in an airline training facility, a warehouse of fuselages and mock cabins, where they can train airline staff members for different situations. So with the help of airline employees, we took each bag along a series of obstacle courses and tested for handling and durability in the airplane. Did you try to stuff them full of too much clothing? Yeah, we pack these bags obsessively, just to get a feel for the subjective experience. How well do the bags open and close? How organized do I feel? Was it easy to do? There are little details you start to notice. Like cheap zippers. Or an internal fabric that's likely to tear. Inside pockets that are too small to be that useful. And, on the positive side, bags that seem to hold more than they should without bulging. Or clever systems for keeping a suit or dress well pressed even while folded up. Side handle durability and feel (especially on checked bags) become surprisingly important for hefting the bag off a carousel or into a car. Does it matter what they are made of? The three most common materials are metal, nylon and plastic. The plastic bags are the last ones you want, unless you're worried about price. Metal luggage, like Rimowa's, is a luxury at this point. And we can basically dismiss it unless you want to spend thousands of dollars on your bags, which is insane. So the real choice for most of us is between nylon and plastic. Plastic is lighter, cheaper to make and flexible. However, it also shows wear much more quickly than its nylon counterparts. We have nylon bags that we've been using for years that look cleaner than plastic luggage that's been checked once. The stiffer plastic bodies also transfer more stress to the zippers, which can lead to catastrophic failures. As in, it pops open and your clothes come tumbling out on the conveyor and everyone stares and they thank the good stars that they aren't you. My problem has always been the extended handles on carry on roller bags coming off or jamming. Those handles and wheels are the weak spots. It's sort of unavoidable. That's when a brand's reputation and warranty come into play. That's one reason our favorites were the Travelpro Platinum Magna 2 22 inch Expandable Rollaboard Suiter for carry ons and the Travelpro Platinum Magna 2 25 Inch Expandable Spinner Suiter for checked bags. Something that intrigues me is the so called smart luggage. Is there a smarter, cheaper way to do many of the same things?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The others, especially Joshua Tuason, are rigorous as well; watching them streak across the stage in a repeated pattern of a triplet step followed by a low leap can grab your heart. They're that daring. But once you get past the mechanics of Mr. Petronio's backward movement, the work takes a derivative turn. In both its structure and energetic flow, "Locomotor" echoes the first dance on the program, "Strange Attractors Part I" from 1999, which is inspired by chaos theory. In "Strange Attractors," set to a sentimental score by Michael Nyman and featuring silky pajamalike costumes by Ghost, solos melt into group sections and then duets and trios splinter off. As in "Locomotor," the quick footwork is absorbing, but the blossoming of Mr. Petronio's swirling movement beyond just steps is hampered by his ever predictable structure. Despite the speed, a lugubrious quality seeps in that can't be masked by yet another new collaborator; instead, you get the sense he's been making the same dance for years. Still, in "Locomotor," Narciso Rodriguez's costumes multicolored short unitards with a triangle cut out of the back to reveal the undulation of the spine are marvelously sleek. The costume element in "Stripped," a new solo, is more cartoonish. Mr. Petronio wears, as the program describes, a "costumed intervention" by the artist Janine Antoni. The headpiece, made from ties sewn together, obstructs Mr. Petronio's face like a bulky ski mask; at first, as he performs a series of unconnected gestures, he's more animal than human. Set to Philip Glass's Etude No. 5, "Stripped" shows Mr. Petronio's vulnerability as he drifts from one position to the next. Can he even see anything? Soon enough, the solo veers to a cloying place, and Mr. Petronio, unwinding himself, strings the ties across the stage. Ms. Antoni, sitting in the first row, holds onto a section while he unfurls. The costume becomes the set; he peels back the layers of time. We get it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
In Sarah Einspanier's "Lunch Bunch," the trim, compassionate comedy that opens Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks festival at the Wild Project, a group of public defenders tries to do good, feel good and eat well. Five of them have formed Lunch Bunch, a club in which members take turns cooking and packing "veggie/ healthy, friendly/ forward" meals for one another. No peppers. Jacob (Ugo Chukwu) is allergic. And don't even think of serving pretzels as a side dish. "It's the 21st century," Hannah (Irene Sofia Lucio) explains. "With a few clicks on the internet and a trip to Trader Joe's, you can replicate the feasts of past emperors in under 30 minutes." Between the towering caseloads, the obstructionist judges and the vulnerable clients, these lawyers, who sit in ergonomic chairs facing a persimmon wall (Jean Kim did the set design), don't have it easy. (Neither do we: Ms. Einspanier's clipped lines include a lot of legal jargon ACS, DV, 1028s. Keep up!) The job doesn't allocate for a personal life; weekends are spent mostly alone, with Netflix and maybe a cat.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
HOLLYWOOD has come early to rearrange the furniture. He thinks that the already stylish room in the hottest new private club in town, the San Vicente Bungalows, could be even more captivating. So a team of eight club staffers gets busy under his direction, pulling a potted plant from the terrace for one corner and setting up two dozen glowing amber votive candles. Mr. Ford himself redoes the white flowers, plucking out the roses and leaving in the ranunculus, because he doesn't like mixed blooms. The Murphy bed he can do nothing about. As I enter, the designer is lost in thought, still fantasizing about redoing the room in his own preferred palette, draping chocolate brown velvet on the walls. Everything in life can always be more sensual and beautiful, if you think about it. And Mr. Ford is always thinking about it. Even on vacations in the tropics or river rafting, she said, Mr. Ford looks eerily perfect. He used to tailor white T shirts he bought at La Rinascente in Milan, but now he wears his own brand. "The cut of the sleeve has to be just right if you want your biceps to look right," he said. In 2003, as the creative director of Gucci, he personally shaved a "G" in a model's pubic hair for an ad, adding definition with an eyebrow pencil. Lisa Eisner, who has done jewelry collaborations with Mr. Ford and inspired the Alessia character in his 2016 film, "Nocturnal Animals," said that he doesn't expect everyone to be as persnickety as he is. "At Graydon Carter's wedding, I drank way too much and ran out to go to the bathroom and got sick on his shoes really good shoes," she recalled. "He just laughed and wiped it off." And his friends praise his fierce loyalty. Ms. Wilson recalled that after her breast cancer diagnosis in 2015, when she had to present at the Tonys feeling vulnerable because "you have had part of your body removed," Mr. Ford designed her a beautiful dress to wear that "made my shape look like a normal shape. And he did it with such sensitivity, generosity and love." Mr. Ford did not check his phone during the three hours we spent together. He has perfect posture and lovely Southern manners and stands up when you return to the table from the bathroom. His voice, as one fan wrote in a YouTube comment, sounds like what melted chocolate tastes like. Mr. Ford cloaks himself in black, planted a black garden in London of black tulips and black calla lilies, contemplates death constantly and plans on designing a black sarcophagus. He is 57 but for decades has not seemed to get any older. And he's wearing Beau de Jour (one of 39 fragrances), a scent meant to evoke the allure of Cary Grant's neck. I told him that all this makes him a member of my favorite cult: sexy vampires. His face lit up. "A vampire cape was one of the first things I got when I could tell my mother to make something for me, and it was black satin on the outside and red satin on the inside," he said. "And I had the vampire teeth and I had the LP with the music from 'Dark Shadows.' I was obsessed and I wanted to be a vampire because vampires are sexy. They don't age. Talk about seductive. I'm not talking about Nosferatu, you know. But vampires were usually rich, they lived in a fabulous house or castle. Wore black. Vampires are great." Ms. Eisner demurred: "Tom smells too good to be a vampire." She said that those who know Mr. Ford simply through the famous shots of him with naked models and actresses probably think he's "a sex pervert, someone who thinks about sex 24 7. Nope, he's not that guy at all. He's very loyal to his friends. Very married." Richard Buckley, Mr. Ford's husband since 2013, confirmed that the facade of gleaming black lacquer is deceiving. "The one misconception I think most people have of Tom is that he is some kind of press whore who loves to have his picture taken," said Mr. Buckley, a longtime fashion journalist with whom Mr. Ford had a coup de foudre during an elevator ride 32 years ago. "He is, and always has been, painfully shy," Mr. Buckley said. "He did acting when he was in his early 20s, so he is able to 'turn on' for interviews." Referring to their 6 year old son, he added: "And Jack has never been photographed. In London, we have a court injunction to keep any newspaper or magazine from running pictures of him. In Los Angeles, there is a law." Mr. Buckley, 70, said dryly that their lives are not "all champagne and caviar," opening up about his nightmarish struggle with the aftereffects of radiation for the throat cancer for which he had surgery for in 1989, three years after the men became involved. "Tom has seen me through so much, from throat cancer to my brother and mother dying 48 hours apart, to more bouts of pneumonia than I can count," Mr. Buckley said. Mr. Ford made his husband gray merino wool turtleneck dickeys with keyhole slits for his tracheotomy tube, and, for formal events, a black silk scarf with slits. "Tom is actually quite good at sewing," Mr. Buckley said. (These days, a designer need not be.) Read more about the designer's personal truths here. Recently, it was announced that Mr. Ford will succeed Ms. von Furstenberg as the head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, a job he was persuaded to take by her and Anna Wintour. "He's a cross between a Rolls Royce and the Marlboro Man," Ms. von Furstenberg told me. At a time when Donald Trump's America is turning away from the rest of the world, Mr. Ford, who has spent half his life working and studying in Europe, says he will reach out because "if American fashion is going to flourish, it has got to drop the idea that it's American fashion and become global." "It's a turbulent time in some ways for fashion, which has been rightly criticized for its lack of inclusivity, for not having enough women in C.E.O. positions," Ms. Wintour said. "These are things Tom cares about." Indeed, back in the Gucci days, Mr. Ford was one of the first designers to prominently feature African American and Asian models on the runway and in ad campaigns. Andre Leon Talley said that Mr. Ford stands out because he's "not like most of the cruel snakes in fashion and in cutthroat business. His is an unapologetic universe of sultry, melting pot sexuality, often fusing or blurring the genders." Virgil Abloh, the creator of Off White and the artistic director of men's wear at Louis Vuitton, said that, at the C.F.D.A., Mr. Ford will not be "just a puppet of the industry going with the flow. He has rigor in his work and his personality, and he will bring challenging ideas." Mr. Abloh said that Mr. Ford's provocative Gucci ads inspired him when he was a teenager in Illinois, into skateboarding, hip hop and normcore. "I was an outsider," he said, "and he made me believe in fashion." Women's Wear Daily sleuthed out the news that Mr. Ford was the buyer, for 18 million, of the Paul Rudolph modernist four story townhouse on 63rd Street in Manhattan where Halston once lived, hosting some of the wildest parties of the 1970s (Mr. Ford's favorite decade) for glitterati like Truman Capote, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Liza Minnelli. In Los Angeles, Mr. Ford lives in a 39 million Holmby Hills mansion, formerly owned by Betsy Bloomingdale, that is a study in black and white, complete with a Scottish butler named Angus. He also has property in Santa Fe, where his family moved when he was 11, including a 75 million ranch, which he's selling, that includes a Western movie town used to shoot such movies as "Cowboys and Aliens" and "All the Pretty Horses." When a colleague told him that the Rudolph place had been on sale for eight years, he snapped it up. "I've kind of lived in that house in my mind for many years," Mr. Ford said. "It has dark brown glass, it has a garage, it has a legal curb cut." There are 32 foot high ceilings, skylights galore and a roof garden. New York had long seemed stressful. "It felt like all work, if I walked down the street and somebody saw me, they would get on the phone and call so and so and then so and so would say, 'You need to come to my party,' and 'You need to go to her opening,' and 'So and so needs to see you,' and it just wasn't fun." But then he thought about his son. "I love L.A.," he said, "but I do want Jack to know how to put on a jacket, go to a restaurant, go to a museum, walk on the street, go to a play." Mr. Ford first visited his new house in the heyday of Studio 54, which is where, after years of dating women, he realized he was gay. He was studying art history in his freshman dorm room one night, feeling disoriented about the move to New York. "I just said, 'Oh my God, please, please, please let something happen to me.' Knock, knock, knock. I went to the door and there was Ian Falconer, this guy from art history class, in a little blue blazer, and he said, 'Do you want to go to Studio?' And I said, 'Are you kidding me, Studio 54?' And he said, 'Yeah, I'm going with some friends.'" One of the friends was Andy Warhol, who picked them up in a Cadillac limousine. "The stretch Cadillacs were fabulous. There were two jump seats in the back. And it was literally like a movie, everyone got pushed aside and we walked right in the door. 'Oh my God, here I am, Studio 54 for the very first time' and I drank a lot, did a lot of coke." Even back then, he always visualized the sort of cinematic life he has now, with several Warhols on the wall, including a triptych of vulvas and a "Big Electric Chair." He sold a fright wig self portrait of the artist at Sotheby's for 32.6 million to pay for his stores in China. That night at Studio 54 was the first night he ended up with a man, and it "freaked" him out. "And I said to him, 'This was great but this isn't really what I do or who I am' and I went back to my dorm room. And I tried to sort of deny that, and then I remember friends that were gay saying, 'Why are you dating a girl? You're really gay.' I suppose I struggled with it for maybe six months. Maybe it was coming from my family background in Texas where, you know, guys are guys. I was nervous about telling my parents, but they're liberal Democrats who met at the University of Texas and it was pre AIDS and they were totally cool with it." (His parents were real estate agents.) He had a new film deal fall apart on him last summer, and he has just bought the rights to a 600 page book he won't name but has been wanting to adapt for 12 years. Naturally, he's looking for more control. "In fashion, we would never design something and then hand it off to somebody else to advertise it," he pointed out. "All movie trailers sound the same and look the same. I guess what I've learned is that there's this sort of myth that it's a magic thing that only professionals know how to do and I just don't buy into that anymore because I feel like I know how to do it better." I was surprised to learn he has an aversion to color in his clothes and homes. He tried some, aside from the art, in his Santa Fe home but quickly backtracked because it was too "challenging." He even painted the bright yellow tractors on the ranch black, to go along with his black Angus cattle, black horses and black backhoes. "I don't like color on me because I don't like to scream, I like to recede in a way," he said. "I was always shy and so I would feel silly in a bright color." He said he feels enormous empathy for women who get frightened about their looks fading. "There's nothing more powerful in our culture than a beautiful woman," he said. But "it's an unsustainable thing. One day it stops. And I have lived through it with so many female friends and part of my job is to imagine myself, the female version of myself, would I want to wear that? Where would I go in it? How would I feel in it? Would I feel vulnerable?"(Mr. Ford said if he were a woman, he would be Ali MacGraw.) He confessed that his hair "is a little more salt and pepper than it looks. I mean, Diana Vreeland stayed with black hair all the way until the end. "I've been open about using Botox and fillers, although I can move. You have to be very careful with it. I do it about once every eight months. When I go to the dermatologist, I get a hand mirror, I take a white pencil and I say, 'Right there.' If I could do it myself, I would." Now that he is a parent (and no longer walking naked around the house, as he once did), does he feel the need to tone down the sexuality of his fashion ads? "Oh, yes, absolutely," he said, adding that it may also be because of "the hyper politically correct culture. I mean, you can't say anything anymore. I was shooting an ad campaign last week, and the guy came up behind the girl and was kissing her on the neck and he was holding her wrists from the back and I said, 'No, no, we have to change that. Put his hand in her hand.' I don't know that any of us will survive this scrutiny." His friend and collaborator, the photographer Terry Richardson, was banned from Conde Nast and several fashion houses as part of a wave of MeToo accusations. "Ugh! I love Terry," he said. "And I have to say that I never in my entire life saw any of that with Terry. One of my assistants went out with Terry for two years and he was the kindest, gentlest person in the relationship." I wondered about the fracases over cultural appropriation. "Two shows ago, I showed the girls with scarves on their head, which were not durags and that was not where that idea came from," he said, adding that it came from the '70s, which I know to be true, because I wore them in college. "And a couple of people wrote that it was durags and appropriation. Well, first of all, if you're appropriating something, why isn't that great? You're celebrating it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
When Alexis Fishman arrived in New York around eight years ago, she sublet briefly on the Upper West Side, moving a few times until she settled into a rented studio in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Ms. Fishman is an actor who performs mostly in musicals. About a year ago, the trek to Midtown began to wear her down. She decided to look for a place to buy on the Upper West Side. "My first taste of living in New York was the Upper West Side, so it felt very much like home to me," Ms. Fishman said. In a city of transients, the neighborhood seemed to her to have "a permanence to it." So last year she went on the hunt for a one bedroom on the Upper West Side between 59th and 86th Streets. She had a budget in the mid 600,000s and few requirements: a large kitchen where she could "cook turkey in an oven," and a bathroom that was not en suite. Friends and relatives visit from her native Australia, and she didn't want them traipsing through the bedroom to reach the bathroom. Hunting with a friend turned agent, Ms. Fishman, now 32, found a sunny one bedroom co op on far West 72nd Street. The asking price was 525,000; the monthly maintenance fee was 1,500. The place had a big kitchen and a bathroom that could be entered via both bedroom and kitchen. "I said, 'Ah, this is easy' the second place I walked into was the one I signed a contract on," she said. But the seller did not countersign, instead taking a higher offer. The apartment sold for 542,000. "It all came crashing down," Ms. Fishman said. She realized "this is going to be harder than I thought." A few months later, she visited a ground floor one bedroom in the low West 80s listed for 599,000, with a maintenance fee of just under 1,000. She spent nearly three months dealing with the co op board's scrutiny. "The conditions they were requesting were outrageous," she said. "I had enough. It became so frustrating and so difficult, I didn't feel good about the place anymore." Mr. Elika told her that, as a foreigner without a full time job, she'd be better off looking for a condominium than a co op. "We were going to move away from co ops to get this done," he said. Their search mostly involved midsize apartment buildings. Her price for a condominium rose to the 800,000s. In the low West 80s, they saw a 595,000 one bedroom, with monthly charges in the high 700s. Ms. Fishman thought that with only 500 square feet and a view of brick walls just a few feet away, it was overpriced. She went to see a sponsor unit on West 72nd Street near Columbus Avenue. Around 640 handsomely renovated square feet, it had a "hole in the wall" kitchen and an en suite bathroom. The place, on a low floor, faced a busy corner. Ms. Fishman immediately thought about soundproof windows. The price was 899,000, with monthly charges of almost 1,400. She was willing to compromise on one or two negative features, she said, "because you're never going to get the perfect place. But this one had three negative things." She moved on. Farther north, in the high West 80s, a 750 square foot one bedroom for 750,000, with monthly charges of nearly 1,500, had an attractive sunken living room. But the place overlooked a school and a playground. Again, she worried about noise. She wasn't expecting much at a one bedroom being sold by an estate in the West 70s. "They didn't put any pictures up online," she said. "That's how bad it was." The one bedroom, with just over 600 square feet, was listed at 825,000, with monthly charges in the low 1,200s. It had not been touched in decades. There were "layers of dust and age," Mr. Elika said. "It had furniture for a two bedroom apartment in a one bedroom, and everything was oversized and on the verge of being antique. It was very lived in and had an orange bathroom." Ms. Fishman had trouble seeing the apartment for itself. "I don't have any eye for design," she said. "Thankfully, I had Gea and my boyfriend, who said it was a great apartment." They knew it could be transformed in short order. Ms. Fishman bought the place last winter for 790,000. She replaced the floors, added bookshelves and redid the kitchen with the requisite large oven. She kept the orange bathroom walls.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
President Trump's dispute with China has landed on the doorstep of Verizon, with Huawei demanding that the American wireless giant pay licensing fees on hundreds of patents, according to two people briefed on the matter. Huawei, one of China's largest technology companies and the world's biggest supplier of networking equipment, accused Verizon in a letter this spring of violating 238 of its patents, the people said. They would speak only on the condition of anonymity because the issue was considered a potential legal dispute. The letter, earlier reported in The Wall Street Journal, represents a new wrinkle in the tensions between the Trump administration and China. Mr. Trump has appeared to use Huawei as a bargaining chip in his trade war with China. Last month, he signed an executive order that banned the purchase of equipment from companies posing a national security threat. That includes gear from Huawei, because of its ties to the Chinese government. Huawei officials have denied that it is a security risk and has accused the Trump administration of unfairly targeting the company's products.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Lawyers for the Britain born rapper 21 Savage say he will be released on bond on Wednesday after spending more than a week in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which said it had arrested him for being in the United States illegally. Kuck Baxter Immigration, the law firm representing the rapper, whose legal name is She'yaa Bin Abraham Joseph, posted news of his pending release on its Facebook page on Tuesday afternoon. "In the last 24 hours, in the wake of the Grammy Awards at which he was scheduled to attend and perform, we received notice that She'yaa was granted an expedited hearing," the post said. "Today, 21 Savage was granted a release on bond. He won his freedom." Mr. Abraham Joseph, 26, was arrested in the early hours of Feb. 3 during an operation by federal and local law enforcement authorities in Atlanta, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said at the time. The agency said in a statement at the time that he was a British national who had entered the United States on a nonimmigrant visa in 2005 and was supposed to leave the following year. The agency also said that Mr. Abraham Joseph was convicted of felony drug charges in Fulton County, Ga., in 2014. One of Mr. Abraham Joseph's lawyers, Charles Kuck, said that conviction was vacated and the charges were dismissed by prosecutors in 2018. A member of the rapper's legal team, Dina LaPolt, said in a statement after his arrest that he had been "left without legal status through no fault of his own" because "as a minor, his family overstayed their work visas." Mr. Kuck said his client was 12 when his immigration status expired. Mr. Abraham Joseph was nominated for a Grammy Award for record of the year for "Rockstar," a song with the rapper Post Malone, but did not win at the awards ceremony on Sunday. Known for his flat delivery and subdued rap style, his album "I Am I Was" opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in January. Charles Kuck, another member of Mr. Abraham Joseph's legal team, said Tuesday that the rapper had been granted release but would have to spend one more night in custody. "We actually can't get him out today because ICE stops taking money at 2 o'clock and the judge's decision came down at around 2:15," Mr. Kuck said. "He'll be released in the morning." Mr. Kuck declined to say what bail had been set at or where his client was being detained, but he said Mr. Abraham Joseph had been treated well. "The facility where he has been held has been extraordinarily gracious to him, his legal team and his family," Mr. Kuck said. "They have treated him well and we are grateful for their hospitality, as best as that can be in a jail cell." A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. Mr. Abraham Joseph's next date in immigration court is set for April 11, Mr. Kuck said. The Facebook post from Mr. Abraham Joseph's lawyers on Tuesday said that he wanted to draw attention to immigration detainees who are not as well known as he is. "He will not forget this ordeal or any of the other fathers, sons, family members, and faceless people he was locked up with or that remain unjustly incarcerated across the country," the post said. "And he asks for your hearts and minds to be with them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
After a complicated 20 year effort to save a redbrick mill in North Carolina that was once considered the largest in the world for textiles and that played a significant role in the South's textile history, the plant is finally moving toward a new life as a multiuse complex. The Loray Mill, which for decades produced fabric for car tires, last month began a 40 million conversion project that will create 190 apartments in its six stories, as well as several floors of shops and restaurants. The mill, which was the site of an famous labor strike in the 1920s, is in the city of Gastonia, a former industrial hub outside of Charlotte. To the delight of preservationists, the development team of JBS Ventures, of Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., and Camden Management Partners, of Atlanta, will retain much of the original 600,000 square feet structure of the complex. This first phase of the redevelopment will reinvent about 450,000 square feet of the mill, including the main section, which dates to 1902. Gastonia officials, too, say there's a lot to like about a project that continues decades of effort to remake a longtime industrial center as a bedroom community of Charlotte, which is just 30 minutes away. At the very least, they say that a redeveloped Loray (pronounced LOW ray) could revitalize its immediate neighborhood, whose sidewalk lined blocks once bustled with mill workers but have long since grown quiet. The mill is on the west side of town in a primarily residential area where boarded up buildings dot the main commercial drag. "When you put this many apartments and businesses in an area where there's been so much disinvestment, it's enough to create its own weather," said Jack Kiser, Gastonia's senior executive for special projects. "It will have a catalytic effect." In many ways, the project, which is to be completed in 2014, is lucky even to be under way. Dozens of other mills, which went up in the central part of the state around the turn of the last century, as textile businesses relocated to North Carolina from New England, have fallen into ruin or been razed. Loray Mill has seen several development proposals come and go since 1994, when Firestone, which had owned it since the Great Depression, shut the mill down and left for a more modern plant in a nearby community. Firestone has, however, continued some operations in a smaller building toward the rear of the property. An early condo plan for the mill failed, and in the late 1990s, Firestone was poised to demolish the building, which features a 140 foot tower that is the tallest in Gastonia. But the company ultimately donated it to Preservation North Carolina, a nonprofit group, which paid its power bills and hired security guards while marketing the property, according to Myrick Howard, president of the preservation group. "This was by far the most time consuming project I have ever worked on," added Mr. Howard, who estimated his group had helped save 700 buildings across the state since the 1970s. In 2003, the current developers approached Preservation North Carolina about buying the property, with its arched windows and open floors lined with columns, but the team struggled to line up financing. Then, the recession hit, sapping public financing for the project and derailing efforts once again. Today, Berkadia, a lender, is providing a 22 million loan backed by the Federal Housing Administration. Most of the balance is coming from two investors: Chevron, through federal preservation tax credits, and the health care provider Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which is taking advantage of state tax credits that encourage mill conversions. The developers are also supplying equity, said Billy Hughes, a JBS principal, though he declined to specify the amount. The sale price of the mill was 660,000. While the building's industrial legacy may be part of its draw, it has also stoked some local opposition. In 1929, Loray was the site of a violent labor strike that lasted for months and resulted in two deaths, including that of Orville Aderholt, Gastonia's police chief, and Ella Mae Wiggins, a union organizer and protest singer. The Loray project will take place in two phases. The first and larger phase will target the mill's oldest part, which includes the tower. The 190 apartments will start at 1,000 square feet each and will be spread across the top four floors. The apartments will play up the mill's industrial heritage, with exposed trusses on 16 foot ceilings, although concrete will be poured atop wood floors to muffle tenant footsteps, Mr. Hughes said. Prices haven't been set yet, but the nearby Armstrong Apartments, a recently redeveloped 1921 building with 18 units, rented its one bedrooms for 600 a month and achieved full occupancy after only a few weeks of leasing this spring, according to Dewey Anderson, its developer. The complex will also have 34,000 square feet of amenity space, including a fitness center and outdoor pool. The retail spaces at Loray will occupy 79,000 square feet on the bottom two floors. A market, dry cleaner and coffee shop will probably be among the 15 tenants, though none have signed up yet. Loray will also have a 6,000 square foot public "memorial hall" with mill mementos, including looms, weaving machines and old photos, Mr. Hughes said. A restaurant could be tucked into the tower, though "there really needs to be a synergistic fit for our residents," said Mr. Hughes, who added that asking rents for the commercial spaces were still being determined. Retail rents in Gastonia range from 12 to 20 a square foot, though that is usually for ground level berths in strip malls on busy streets, unlike Loray's setup, said Jerry Roche, owner of Centra Properties, a local commercial brokerage. The mill is on a quiet street of modest homes with open porches, although it does have plenty of parking in lots surrounding the property.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
"Our request to the theatrical community is to stop scapegoating the dramatists at this unprecedented time," the guild said in a statement Wednesday, "and our advice to dramatists confronted by these demands is to just say no, with the full knowledge that it was unfair for you to be put in this position in the first place." An advance is an amount of money paid by a theater to a writer for the right to produce a play. According to Ralph Sevush, the guild's general counsel, advance payments generally range from 500 to 10,000, and are usually contractually guaranteed to a writer, even if the production never happens. "Every contract I've seen says options and advances are nonrefundable," he said. Writers, who are among the few theater industry workers who are not unionized, also then earn some money from a royalty perhaps a percentage of the box office when their show is produced by a nonprofit, and then sometimes earn money from licensing fees for future productions. "Since writers aren't unionized, they don't have collectively bargained compensation, they don't get health insurance, and they don't get unemployment," Sevush said. "A few thousand dollars to a theater is really paper clip money, whereas for a writer it's grocery money, it's rent money it allows them to keep working." Sevush said he would not name the theaters seeking their money back because "we prefer them to accept our advice and not alienate them to the point where we have to expose them to public ridicule."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Enjoying this newsletter every week? Forward it to a friend and tell them to sign up at nytimes.com/rory. Manchester City's fans do not see themselves as victims. They are they feel like the lucky ones, the lottery winners. More than that, in fact. Any fool can win the lottery. Manchester City earned it. For years, their club traipsed in the wilderness, knowing nothing but disappointment and regret and misery, greeting it all with a wry smile. They endured the derision of their rivals and, in particular, the disdain of their neighbors, Manchester United. And then, with a bolt from a bright blue sky, it all changed. Suddenly, Manchester City won titles. Suddenly, Manchester City was the best team in England. Suddenly, Manchester City had the best coach in the world. Suddenly, Manchester City broke records: 100 points in a season, an unprecedented domestic treble. It must have felt, on some level, like a karmic reward for all those years of pain. The fans knew who to thank. A banner has hung from the top tier of the Etihad Stadium for some time now: a decade or so, maybe. It long predates the treble, the centurions, the arrival of Pep Guardiola. Memory is fickle, but it may even have been put in place before Queens Park Rangers and Sergio Aguero and the first title of the new era, back in 2012. It reads, in English and Arabic: "Manchester thanks you, Sheik Mansour." Manchester City's fans do not act like victims, either. Or, rather, a portion of Manchester City's fans do not. Writing about anything other than the wonderful style of Guardiola's team, the sublime majesty of David Silva and the shimmering brilliance of Kevin de Bruyne, certainly, requires something of a thick skin. Suggest that, perhaps, Abu Dhabi's investment in Manchester City is not rooted exclusively in a love of the sport and happy, hazy, 1990s memories of Georgi Kinkladze, but in a desire to burnish the reputation of a Gulf state with a questionable human rights record, and a relatively small but highly concentrated burst of fury is guaranteed. The bile comes, as sure as the sun: accusations that the news media is in league with a mysterious "cartel" of clubs, and also with UEFA, to bring down City. The rhetoric has only intensified in the last week, since UEFA threw City out of the Champions League for two years, not simply for breaking the rules of Financial Fair Play but also for misleading investigators. The club, of course, vehemently asserts its innocence. It will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and perhaps beyond, with what it has called "irrefutable" proof it has done nothing wrong. Its fans believe it, unquestioningly. This is all, they say, a witch hunt. They make that clear to journalists on social media most often in the form of harmless abuse, though it is occasionally more troubling and to UEFA, now seen as City's persecutor, in real life. City's fans have long jeered the Champions League anthem because of the perceived vendetta against the club; during the team's game against West Ham on Wednesday, some brandished signs declaring the organization a mafia. Further demonstrations are planned for the visit of Real Madrid in a few weeks' time. This is not how victims are supposed to behave, this defiance and rage, but that is precisely what City's fans are in all of this. Supporting a sports team is not though it may seem like it, to nonbelievers a straight consumer choice. It is, instead, part of our composite identity. Often, quite a large part. There are parallels, according to some studies, to how we regard our gender, our sexuality, our ethnicity. (Though it is not, we should at this point concede, quite as important.) It may not be integral to who we are, but it is integral to how we see ourselves. A team's success and failure is seen as "self relevant," as Daniel Wann, a professor of psychology at Murray State University, put it. Fans will defend their club against almost anything; the problem is that that word club is a difficult, elusive thing to define. It is not, really, the owner: That is the business. It is not even the players and the coach: That is the team. The club is something else: a shared memory, a badge, a color, a spirit, passed down from parent to child. Those meanings are often conflated and confused, and it leaves fans in the curious position of defending a tycoon or a company or, in this case, a state, because the maintenance of its reputation seems significant to the good name of a social institution. This is the price Manchester City's fans have had to pay for their dreams to come true: to see their club transform from a sports team to some sort of pawn in a geopolitical power game. That is not, really, something they asked for. If the psychological contortions of that are challenging, though, there is another aspect to the Manchester City story one that has come into sharper relief this week that reminds us that the club's fans, the people for whom involvement with Manchester City is not emotionally optional, warrant a little understanding, at least. Everything Abu Dhabi United Group, the investment vehicle that owns the club, has done since it bought City in 2008 suggests it is in it for the long haul. Its establishment of a network of clubs, at the instigation of its chief executive, Ferran Soriano, makes it clear this is not a short term play. But if its appeal to C.A.S. fails, and the Swiss Supreme Court, beyond that, rules against City, what happens then? Does it continue to fight, forcing fans to choose between their team and, to an extent, the structure of the sport itself? Or does Abu Dhabi, convinced the scales are weighted against it, begin its slow withdrawal from soccer? Does it decide that there are better ways to improve its global standing, and sell off further slivers of the club to the Chinese government or to New York hedge funds? This is the problem when clubs are not treated as community institutions but as trophy assets, to be bought and sold, available to those whose use for them is not entirely sporting, but financial or, in this case, political. The club as a whole the part that the fans consider part of themselves is entirely dependent on the whims of the club as a business. That made Manchester City's fans' dreams come true, of course, and they will doubtless forever be grateful for that. But it also has the power to bring those dreams to an end whenever it wants, leaving the fans, once again, to adjust to a new reality, one that they did not ask for and do not necessarily understand. There Is No Such Thing As a Bad Player In the 19 year old Haaland's long shadow, though, came a quietly excellent performance from Emre Can. He moved to Borussia Dortmund in January, one of those late, unexpected transfers that it is surprisingly easy to miss. Can had found himself out of favor at his former club, Juventus, starting only twice in Serie A this season, and deemed so surplus to requirements that he was not even named in the team's Champions League squad. The Italian champion had, it seemed, evolved beyond him, just as another of Can's former employers, Liverpool, had. Since he left England, in 2018, it has won the Champions League, and lost one Premier League game in 64. And yet, against Paris St. Germain, Can was possibly Dortmund's most significant player: intelligent with the ball, disciplined and imposing without it, dovetailing expertly with his new midfield partner, Axel Witsel. It was a reminder that there is at this rarefied level no such thing as a bad player, not really; that we judge talent too harshly, too quickly; that a player who might appear a weak link in one team might flourish in another. No, there is no such thing as a bad player; there are just players, as Can was for a time, in the wrong context. Broadly, I agree with Wenger, though mainly I was struck by the reaction to his suggestion: outright dismissal. This is, sadly, typical of soccer: We have a problem. A change needs to be made. Someone suggests one. Everyone immediately says that, actually, that's even worse. This is not a great recipe for progress. A good point, I think, from Richard Lesser, who asks: What is "the logic (if any) behind scheduling knockout games at the exact same time?" This is not an answer that will please traditionalists, but I suspect we aren't too far away from Champions League spring evenings having two kickoff times: one at 7 p.m. in Europe, and one at 9 p.m. I have a mild objection to that I think it's too hard for fans to get from work to the stadium for an early evening kickoff but somehow I suspect that won't be foremost in UEFA's thinking. Thanks, too, to all of you who wrote in to offer kind words after what can only be described as the defiling of my Instagram account. I can take it, of course you get used to it but those poor Greenlandic dogs didn't deserve all that vitriol from scorned fans of Neymar. Though most of them would probably regard his move to P.S.G. as a bit of an anticlimax, too. That's all for this week. Remember that I am available on Twitter more than is ideal, and that all suggestions, ideas and complaints should be addressed to askrory nytimes.com. There is a podcast for you to enjoy at your leisure, too. This is where you should direct anyone who you want to impress with how sophisticated you are.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The latest and perhaps juiciest Trump tell all to land this year isn't from a disgruntled former White House staffer or a deeply sourced investigative journalist. It's by Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, the pornographic film star and unlikely feminist resistance hero, who has waged a legal battle over a nondisclosure agreement designed to prevent her from talking about a sexual relationship she claims she had with Donald Trump. On Wednesday, St. Martin's Press announced that it will publish Ms. Clifford's memoir, "Full Disclosure," (pun likely intended) this October, just before the midterm elections. In a news release, the publisher said Ms. Clifford will tell "her whole story for the first time," including how she came to be a successful actress and director in the adult film business, her alleged affair with Mr. Trump and "the events that led to the nondisclosure agreement and the behind the scenes attempts to intimidate her." "I own my story and the choices I made," Ms. Clifford writes. "They may not be the ones you would have made, but I stand by them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Paul Watson is a different sort of environmentalist than is typical in documentaries. In "Watson," the director Lesley Chilcott 's profile of the maritime activist, he makes the case for direct confrontation on the high seas. If that meant ramming a boat he believed was engaged in poaching, then by god, that boat was getting rammed. A founding member of Greenpeace who left the organization on contentious terms, Watson started the conservation group Sea Shepherd in 1977. A professed "eco vigilante" group that makes a mission of protecting aquatic wildlife around the globe, Sea Shepherd seeks out illegal fishing and stops ships that engage in it before they can act. The group has had widely publicized skirmishes with, among others, Japanese whaling vessels and with fishermen in Guatemalan waters whom Sea Shepherd has contended were slicing the fins off sharks. ("They claimed that I rammed them and tried to kill them," Watson says of the latter. "I mean, if my decision was to ram them and try to kill them, they would be dead.")	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Duckweeds are humble looking plants whose tiny, brilliant green globules spangle ponds all over the world. Some duckweeds are the smallest flowering plants in nature. Scientists working in Brazil have just discovered that one duckweed, Wolffia columbiana, has a surprising talent. In Biology Letters this Wednesday, the authors report that this duckweed can likely hop entirely intact from wetland to wetland by hitching a ride in the feces of birds. Duckweeds can reproduce by copying themselves, so if one duckweed lands where a duck relieves itself, it's capable of eventually creating a dense mat of duckweeds where there were none before. Understanding how this little plant travels may help scientists develop strategies for containing forms of duckweed that have become invasive species in some environments. To study how ducks and geese might be spreading seeds or pieces of plants between bodies of water, graduate student Giliandro Silva at the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos in southern Brazil had been collecting and freezing their feces to examine later on. However, when he took a look inside, he was shocked to see the globes of whole duckweed plants, intact after having been swallowed and passing through the birds' digestive systems.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
London's Covent Garden district is not short of restaurants. Lots of them are links in British and international chains (anyone for Shake Shack?), but there are plenty of excellent independents too. One of the newest is Cora Pearl, named after a woman whose dates were 1835 86 and whose occupation Wikipedia gives as "courtesan." A sister restaurant, Kitty Fisher, also takes its name from a scandalous woman, albeit one who had her portrait painted by Joshua Reynolds. Evidently, this is meant to evoke the high life of ages past. But apart from some Beardsley esque artwork there's little about the restaurant that's backward looking. The food of head chef George Barson is of the moment, with appealing seasonal dishes that sometimes turn out to be more complex than they sound, but with no fuss or flash. "Pork Turnips," for instance, is presa a cut from the shoulder of Iberico hogs grilled to a precise medium rare; it's dense and tender, smoky and juicy, with a big, meaty flavor we don't always associate with pork. But the turnips are what keep the kitchen busy. Some are pickled, some mashed, some cut into wedges and grilled. Mr. Barson said that the vegetable will change with the seasons; this turnip version, served at an early October dinner, will be hard to top. "Cod Spiced Crab" also sounds straightforward, yet the briefly cured cod is finished with curry butter, topped with crab meat bathed in spicy hollandaise, and accompanied by several preparations of cauliflower.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
I was waiting for a subway last month in Mexico City when I figured out what's wrong with the Queen movie. I mean, I knew what was wrong. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is scared of tapping into the imagination that made the band so innovative and powerfully, addictively strange. But that's not what hit me waiting for the subway. The platform entertainment system was playing a concert video of "Another One Bites the Dust." I don't know what year the clip was from or what city Queen was in. I just know that the lighting is warm, the groove is skintight (you could feel it on the platform), and that Freddie Mercury is wearing is packed into white short shorts and almost nothing else. No shoes, no shirt yet all service. The towel he's whipping around gets an almost immediate, theatrical toss into the crowd. The red wristband and red bandanna tied round his neck bring out the red in his Montreal Canadiens trucker's cap. Mercury does all his Mercurial moves the side gallop, the chug a lug, the duck strut, the steed swipe, the rewind, the vroom vroom, the Wimbledon Final frozen pirouette, the one where he kind of dries his tushy with the microphone stand in a full march. And he does them while belting out this uppercut of a song (with some shockingly forceful assistance from the drummer Roger Taylor). Commuters, tourists, kids: we looked up at this thing, mesmerized, in jeopardy of missing a train. That's right about when I figured out what was wrong with the Queen movie: There's nothing in it remotely like this. "Bohemian Rhapsody" plods, explains, obscures, speculates and flattens. It does not mesmerize. I mean, I wouldn't miss a train for this. We learn how "We Will Rock You" allegedly sprang from a fit of personal protestation. But it's news we can't use. The movie won't stop telling us things about the music business and the songs, about Mercury's tortured sex life. And it fails to show you anything close to what that clip on the subway platforms makes you feel: sweaty. The musical biography has an impossibly high degree of alchemical difficulty. One performer has to become a totally different performer, and not any performer, just this one star the whole world knows, and it has to be done in a way that makes you believe you're seeing either the impersonated star or something quintessential about them. Val Kilmer made you believe you were seeing something vitally true about Jim Morrison. Joaquin Phoenix did the same with Johnny Cash. And Jamie Foxx became Ray Charles. Angela Bassett convinced you that if you were seeing if not Tina Turner, then Turner's indestructibility; and Marion Cotillard, the brittle incandescence of Edith Piaf. For my money, one of the triumphs of this type of acting is Chadwick Boseman's James Brown in "Get On Up." Boseman pumps Brown full of edginess and spite while having to reconstruct Brown as a stage specimen, and part of that reconstruction involves learning to lip sync to Brown. You sense that you're watching an actor who's done more than homework. He's written himself a little dissertation. It's not an impression of Brown. It's an interpolation. Rami Malek has a different challenge in "Bohemian Rhapsody." He's not a superstar playing another superstar. He just has to become the superstar Freddie Mercury was. Just. And yet because the movie is mostly scenes of recording sessions, squabbling and self pity, Mercury's stardom is made beside the point it's assumed so Malek gets to play a charismatic sufferer, quipster and, eventually, proud brown gay man. It's just that this version of Mercury isn't terribly exciting without the reward of seeing him vroom vroom in short shorts. The movie rides the roller coaster of biographical cliche. What's missing are musical numbers that showcase his showmanship and eternal capacity for self delight. This means more time watching Malek struggle with dental effects meant to bring his mouth into more realistic alignment with Mercury's. Maybe Malek has done the best anyone could with the teeth. But they wind up bringing something vampiric out of Mercury that I don't know was ever there. Either way, the alchemy is off. WE'RE IN A HAPPY MOMENT for musical movie excitement. "Mary Poppins" has returned with new songs. And despite that lie of a title, "The Greatest Showman" is the most impressive phenomenon nobody saw coming or took seriously once it came. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is now the musical biopic's biggest hit. We can have the argument later about the difference between a classical movie musical and a movie where people get on stage and do music, but you could also add to the mix this latest incarnation of "A Star Is Born," which was a smash too. It's the story of how a waitress became a Grammy winner. And because the tale is essentially a fantasy of love, fame and ruin; biography as mythology its casting is the inverse of the rock bio. A musician does the acting. In Bradley Cooper's version, the musician is Lady Gaga. She starts off as Ally the restaurant grunt. But when Cooper's beloved alt country pill guzzler sees her belt "La Vie en Rose" in a drag parlor, he hauls her into stardom, which Gaga knows well. But the surprise of her acting comes in the first hour when the movie is closer to earth and requires her to be more like you and me daughter, employee, listener. There's a lovely hesitance to her here, not in the camera shy way singers tend to get when it's time to act. Reluctance is a performance strategy for her in this movie. Again, she's like you and me, she can't believe Bradley Cooper's happening to her, either. Some of what's great about the first hour is how it gets you thinking about the kind of career Gaga could have in movies they haven't made in, like, 30 years. The scenes at home with Ally, her chauffeur father and his fellow drivers are loud, funny and warm in a way that reminded me of "Moonstruck." And some of the pleasure I had watching Gaga in them is how she reminded me of another singer who acts: Cher. A friend points out that she could have Cher's career if the movies were still interested in normal people. I, at least, would love to see Gaga in a "Mask" or a "Suspect." She and Malek are both near the top of the heap for Oscar nominations. And she's got an alchemical advantage over Malek's Freddie Mercury. When Ally's career takes off, Gaga winds up playing a pop star not unlike herself. And you realize she has the opposite problem that Malek does. You're less interested in her as a singer but only because we've seen her do huge, stadium size razzle dazzle before. And yet she's indifferent to playing the fame stuff. It doesn't seem to interest Ally or Gaga. If the movie loses Ally a bit in the second half, Gaga never appears lost. She's giving a serious, considered, committed performance of a person she seems to know. Malek's commitment is to a movie committed in the wrong proportions. It doesn't know who it wants Freddie Mercury to be. "Bohemian Rhapsody" doesn't fixate on the showmanship until the finale, which restages their electric, legendary Live Aid performance at Wembly Stadium and passes for showstopping. Yet you exit hungry for a movie that gets closer to the bottom of a man who renamed himself after both an element and a planet. If someone dares take another crack (and someone really should), I know the perfect Freddie. Her first name is Lady. And her last name comes straight from a Queen song.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
In August, Nadzri Harif, a D.J. at Kristal FM radio station in Brunei, set foot in an airport for the first time in six months. The experience, he said, was exhilarating. Sure, moving through Brunei International Airport was different, with masks, glass dividers and social distancing protocols in place, but nothing could beat the anticipation of getting on a plane again. Mr. Harif is one of thousands of people in Brunei, Taiwan, Japan and Australia who have started booking flights that start and end in the same place. Some airlines call these "scenic flights"; others are more direct, calling them "flights to nowhere." "I didn't realize how much I'd missed traveling missed flying until the moment the captain's voice came on the speaker with the welcome and safety announcement," said Nadzri Harif, a passenger on Royal Brunei's flight to nowhere. "I didn't realize how much I'd missed traveling missed flying until the moment the captain's voice came on the speaker with the welcome and safety announcement," said Mr. Harif of his 85 minute experience on Royal Brunei Airlines. On its flight to nowhere, which the airline calls the "dine and fly" program, Royal Brunei serves local cuisine to passengers while flying over the country. At a time when most people are stuck at home and unable to travel, and the global airline industry has been decimated by the pandemic, flights that take off and return to the airport a few hours later allow airlines to keep staff working. The practice also satisfies that itch to travel even if it's just being on a plane again. Although most people may think of flying as a means to an end, existing solely to get them from one place to the next, some say that it is an exciting part of the travel experience. For those people, flights to nowhere are the salve for a year in which just about all travel has been canceled and people have been fearful of airlines not enforcing social distancing and mask wearing rules. Royal Brunei has run five of these flights since mid August, and since Brunei has had very few cases of the coronavirus, the airline is not requiring passengers to wear masks, but staff members are. Earlier in the month, the Taiwanese airline EVA Air filled all 309 seats on its Hello Kitty themed A330 Dream jet for Father's Day in Taiwan, and Japan's All Nippon Airways had a Hawaiian resort themed, 90 minute flight with 300 people on board. On Thursday, Qantas announced a flight to nowhere over Australia. That flight sold out in 10 minutes. Tickets for that flight ranged in price from 787 to 3,787 Australian dollars, or about 575 to 2,765. It will take travelers around Australia, flying over the Northern Territory, Queensland and New South Wales. The airline also recently brought back its popular sightseeing flights to Antarctica that don't actually land in Antarctica, but allow passengers to walk around and have different views of the continent. The tour company Antarctica Flights charters Qantas to operate the flights. Dozens of Australians took to the airline's Instagram to express a desire for more of these kinds of trips to be added. A handful of travel agents in India, Australia and the United States said that their clients have been asking about flights to nowhere in the past two months as the reality that travel will not return to normal for some time has sunk in. Loveleen Arun, a Bangalore based travel agent who designs luxury trips mostly for Indian travelers, said that she's been hearing from antsy clients who wish there were such flights in India. "One of my clients said just a few days ago, 'all I want is to be in a window seat and see clouds go by. I miss that sight. I just want white fluffy clouds!'" Ms. Arun said. "Some people just want to drag their bags through the airport and go check them in." Most of Ms. Arun's clients are well to do individuals and families who would find a trip to nowhere appealing if it was luxurious something other travelers echoed. "The concept of going on a flight to nowhere isn't appetizing if it's the same rushed cattle being thrown in experience it is when you're going on a trip," Mr. Malby Tynan said. "If it changed and felt like you were going on a spa date or checking into a luxurious hotel, and you were allowed to stretch out, then it would make sense." When Nadiah Hamid's parents forced her to join them on Royal Brunei's flight to nowhere, she thought the idea of flying above her home was "ridiculous," she said, but she had a change of heart just a few minutes into the trip because it allowed her to see her home in a new way. "Normally when you're flying you don't really know where you are, so it was nice to have someone contextualize things in our country and in Malaysia, and the views were really beautiful," Ms. Hamid, 22, said. Katie Chao, a spokeswoman for the Taiwanese airline Starlux, said that the airline has been working to make the flight to nowhere experience a luxurious one by allowing people to buy packages for the flight and a hotel stay. Since August, the airline has run six flights to nowhere and has about a dozen more scheduled through October. Most of the flights have sold out within 10 minutes of being announced, Ms. Chao said, adding that wearing a mask and social distancing are mandatory on all these flights. "We try to provide a different and fun event at the boarding gate," Ms. Chao said. "We also arrange some special decorations in flight. And, of course, a special made giveaway to go with the theme each time is a must."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
BP said on Tuesday that it had set aside 32.2 billion to pay for the biggest offshore oil spill in United States history. But the company acknowledged that its costs might be much higher especially if it was found grossly negligent, criminally liable or was faced with a huge jury award for punitive damages in connection with the April 20 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 people and sent millions of barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. The financial hit will be reduced by a 10 billion tax credit the company is entitled to receive for its spill costs. To improve its future flexibility, BP outlined a program to triple its planned asset sales to raise as much as 30 billion and halve its debt. BP also confirmed that Robert Dudley, the American in charge of its spill response in the gulf, would replace Tony Hayward as chief executive on Oct. 1. Although the new BP will be a leaner company that produces about 12 percent less oil than it does today, the moves do not amount to a radical transformation of the company, which has suffered a series of accidents in the last five years. Instead, they show how BP hopes to ensure it will survive this latest crisis and continue to compete on an equal footing with the world's top producers. The change in leadership did not alter the tone at the top of the company. On Tuesday, Mr. Dudley, just like Mr. Hayward, insisted that BP had not been negligent in its offshore operations. "It's a very complicated industrial accident," Mr. Dudley said during a telephone interview with reporters. It resulted from "a series of individual misjudgments by very experienced people and a multiple series of failures of equipment and processes of using equipment that is going to involve multiple companies here." The new strategy reverses years of rapid growth at BP, which transformed itself in recent years from a midsize European company into a worldwide rival of Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell. BP said the planned asset sales would be focused mainly on its upstream business, which includes oil and gas production platforms, and leave it with a smaller portfolio of higher quality exploration and production assets. BP has already agreed to sell gas fields in Canada, Egypt and Texas to the Apache Corporation for 7 billion, and is negotiating the sale of its operations in Vietnam and Pakistan, Mr. Hayward said. The company is also exploring the sale of its interests in its Alaskan oilfields and Pan American Energy in Argentina, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. Using proceeds from the asset sales and its strong cash flow, BP plans to reduce its debt, now about 23 billion, to 10 billion to 15 billion within 18 months. The big wild card, however, is the company's ultimate financial liability for the oil spill. BP's 32.2 billion provision for spill costs, which includes a 20 billion fund for damages that was established under pressure from the White House, provides a window into the company's view of the spill's impact. BP's damaged well spewed 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil a day until it was capped on July 15, according to government estimates. To help calculate its liability, BP said it took a midrange point from that government estimate, and assumed a fine of 1,100 for each barrel spilled, which is the standard civil penalty under the Clean Water Act. But analysts said the final penalty was likely to be much higher. If the company were found guilty of gross negligence under the Clean Water Act, its penalty would be 4,300 a barrel. In that case, Credit Suisse analysts estimated that BP's fines would increase by 12.6 billion. BP admitted there remained considerable uncertainty surrounding the final costs. The company noted that "it is not possible to measure reliably any obligation in relation to future claims, including natural resource damage." BP's provision for spill costs led to a record loss of 17 billion for the second quarter, in contrast to a 4.4 billion profit in the quarter a year ago. Some analysts said they were not surprised that BP executives were being cautious in their public statements. "If BP admits openly that they are 100 percent responsible for what happened, that opens up the door to unlimited liability," said Kenneth B. Medlock, an energy economist at Rice University. "You are not going to hear them say, 'We were negligent.' " BP also said it expected to recover money from its partners on the well Anadarko Petroleum and Mitsui Offshore Exploration, which together hold 35 percent of the well. BP has billed them 1.4 billion so far, but the partners are withholding payments until the investigations are completed. Mr. Dudley said the company would focus on improving its operations. "We will look at what we have learned from this incident," he said. "We will look at our culture and our safety and operations." Mr. Hayward, who angered American policy makers and gulf residents with his handling of the spill, said his departure would allow BP to repair its reputation. "For it to move on, particularly in the U.S., it needs a new leadership," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
That line, delivered by Darius de Haas's banished duke in "As You Like It," trimly encapsulates the ethos of the Public Works project, whose rollicking, poignant and flat out delightful production of Shakespeare's comedy runs at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park through Tuesday night. This is the fifth annual Public Works show, and like its predecessors, it has recruited more than 200 amateur performers from the likes of the Children's Aid Society and the Military Resilience Project to join a handful of industry ringers. If all the world's a stage, the thinking apparently goes, we all might as well get together and put on a show. Go and see this one. At about 100 minutes, it is a brief and generous respite from floods and nukes and violent demonstrations. You can recommence fretting and resisting when it's over. This musical adaptation, by the composer Shaina Taub ("Old Hats," Public Works' "Twelfth Night") and the director Laurie Woolery, also the director of Public Works, rarely tackles politics head on. But with its varied cast and its lilting confidence in basic human decency, this "As You Like It" offers a utopian vision of a society that favors acceptance over division, honesty over obfuscation, grace over meanness. That is probably why Ms. Taub and Ms. Woolery subtly tweaked Duke Senior's original line "Be truly welcome hither" into a motto that can be read as embracing immigrants and exiles and anyone who wants to play a part in this American experiment. Not that the theater felt so welcoming on Saturday night. The Public Theater, which created Public Works, has a policy of continuing its outdoor performances even in light rain. Half an hour past curtain time, the rain was arguably light in that no actual cats or dogs were falling and the performers began the show, sloshing gamely through the opening number, while the band played behind plastic sheeting. The audience members, many of whom had upcycled garbage bags as impromptu ponchos, were sloshing, too, but they stayed until Oskar Eustis, the Public's artistic director, damply admitted defeat around 9 p.m.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Blues, Elvis and barbecue tend to dominate popular perceptions of Tennessee's second largest city. But there are plenty of other diversions, including new developments in entertainment: the opening of Ballet Memphis theater; adaptive reuse projects with significant public art spaces; and an expansion of the museums devoted to Elvis Presley. A bike share system is set to debut this spring, and there is much to discover in lively art districts like Broad Avenue. On April 2 to 4, the city, and specifically the site of the former Lorraine Motel, will mark the solemn 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. there with a symposium, day of remembrance and evening of storytelling exploring the question, "Where do we go from here?" After a 27.5 million renovation in 2014, the National Civil Rights Museum, which encompasses the original Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, was transformed into an immersive, multimedia experience that begins in a replica slave hold on a ship and covers five centuries of oppression and civil rights struggles (admission 16). Visitors pass through rooms dedicated to the Jim Crow era; a replica of the Montgomery bus where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat; and lunch counters where students held sit ins in the 1960s. Transitioning to King and his civil rights activism, the emotional journey culminates outside room 306, the well preserved hotel room he occupied before he was shot on the balcony. The exit from the museum annex across the street delivers visitors to South Main Street, a historic district undergoing renewal, including the transformation of the former train station into a hotel. On the last Friday of every month, the South Main Historic Art District Trolley Night offers free transit between shops, galleries and restaurants (other times, the fare is 1, or 3.50 for a day pass). The vintage trolleys, temporarily replaced by wheeled versions, are currently being restored and set to resume operations in April. Ride or walk to Stock Belle to browse caps, patches and prints by Rowdy Dept., and geometric patterned Kreep Ceramics, both local lines, then hit the beloved dive bar Earnestine Hazel's to play the reportedly haunted jukebox. The celebrated chef duo of Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman have collaborated on several Italian meets the South restaurants, including the popular Hog Hominy. With downtown's new Gray Canary, they change the pattern, serving up oysters and wood grilled dishes from charred kohlrabi salad ( 11) to romesco sauced pork chop ( 24) in a romantic room overlooking the distant Hernando De Soto Bridge spanning the Mississippi. Start with a rum ginger Wild Rumpus cocktail ( 15) and end with the soft serve ice cream in red wine ( 7) to explore their range. Diners seeking the partners' great Italian ragu actually, David Hudman, Michael's father, still makes the family recipe for "maw maw's gravy" at the restaurants should hit Catherine Mary's two blocks away where the rigatoni with meatballs ( 17) warrants an encore meal. Restoring buildings, as opposed to demolishing them and starting over, is a point of pride among Memphians (see the former pyramid shaped sports arena that now houses a swamp themed Bass Pro Shop). Once a substantial block of blight, a former Sears distribution center has been rebuilt as the vertical village Crosstown Concourse. The new one million square foot mixed used development includes apartments, nonprofits, shops and restaurants. Its public art arm sponsors artists in residence and plans to open a performing arts theater in fall. Grab a cafe au lait ( 3.75) from French Truck Coffee and take a self guided tour of the second floor gallery including murals, videos and installation artwork. One of the nation's largest urban parks, Shelby Farms Park, on the east side of town, encompasses 4,500 rolling acres shared with a herd of buffalo. Show up for Saturday's popular 9:30 a.m. yoga class (free), held on a lake facing lawn outside the visitor center on fair days, or indoors if it's raining. If yoga is not your thing, rent a bike ( 10 an hour) and cruise the paths. The park lies along the 10.65 mile Greenline, a rails to trails conversion that leads back to Midtown Memphis. Having worked up an appetite, sate it with a generous New Orleans style sandwich at the Second Line in Overton Square, where the popular chef Kelly English pays homage to his Louisiana roots. It resides next to his more formal Restaurant Iris and aims to channel the spirit of musical processions in a destination where, the menu notes, "every day is a party." Lodged in an intimate bungalow with exposed brick walls and black and white photos, the convivial quarters draw fans from around the city for his substantial po' boys made with braised chicken thighs and Swiss cheese ( 12) or fried oysters ( 16), including savory sides such as red beans and rice. For music fans, touring Sun Studio (admission 14) is a Memphis pilgrimage. In this modest two story brick building, the sound engineer Sam Phillips or, as tour guides like to tell it, his secretary Marion Keisker discovered a young Elvis Presley. Phillips recorded the future King of Rock 'n' Roll's first single, "That's All Right," in 1954, but he was a blues fan prior and recorded other legends, including Howlin' Wolf and the Prisonaires, whose musical clips are played during the tour. In the actual studio, an unglamorous work room where more recent acts like U2 and Bonnie Raitt have recorded, guides invite tour goers to pose holding the original Shure 55 microphone used by Elvis and other legends. Memphis's growing microbrewery scene positions beer as shopping break conveniences in a couple of emerging neighborhoods. Near Sun Studio in the Edge District, High Cotton Brewing Company adjoins Edge Alley, home to a few intriguing shops, including B. Collective, selling artist made housewares, and Paulette's Closet, a retailer of fine condition vintage clothing. Roughly five miles east on an industrial corner next to some train tracks, Wiseacre Brewing Co. anchors the shop filled Broad Avenue Arts District. Pick up some arty accessories at Falling Into Place then grab a Tiny Bomb pilsner ( 5) and hit Wiseacre's outdoor bocce court and music stage in the shade of a pair of grain silos. New and expanding performing arts venues have concentrated around Overton Square, making the entertainment district a magnet for culture seekers. In August, Ballet Memphis, known for its regionally themed works alongside dance classics, opened a new 38,000 square foot headquarters here. Glass walls invite onlookers to peer into rehearsals, even when no performances are scheduled. A few blocks away, the acclaimed African American repertory company Hattiloo Theater recently cast the award winning playwright Katori Hall as its artistic director. Catch August Wilson's "Jitney," April 20 to May 13. Memphis music resounds from downtown's Beale Street, lined with blues clubs, to venues across town devoted to diverse genres. Begin a progressive listening tour in Overton Square, where Lafayette's Music Room stages shows from bluegrass to soul in a bi level room with a raised stage. The retro furnished Mollie Fontaine Lounge occupies one of the original mansions on Millionaire's Row downtown, now known as Victorian Village, with music ranging from jazz crooners to D.J. spun house. Catch boogie fever on the lighted dance floor of the late night, weekends only club Paula Raiford's Disco downtown. Touring Elvis Presley's estate, Graceland, home to the kitschy Jungle Room with a carpeted ceiling, remains a bucket list trip for music fans the world over. As of last spring, there's much more to see in the new 45 million Elvis Presley's Memphis, a 40 acre complex of museums, shops and restaurants across the street that aims to cement his place in pop culture history and extend his musical appeal to the next generation of rock 'n' roll fans. Tours (from 59) begin at the mansion, where home movies and artifacts like his and her wedding attire focus on Elvis's personal life. Tour buses bring fans back across the street where a series of exhibits survey the King's service in the Army, his influence on entertainers like Elton John and Bruce Springsteen, and his collections of showy cars and spangled jumpsuits. A diner named for his mother Gladys serves the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches ( 4.49) he loved. Head back downtown for a few lazy hours at the sprawling outdoor compound Loflin Yard. Backing up to the train tracks, the 1.5 acre site encompasses a cocktail bar specializing in barrel aged drinks in a former locksmith's shop, a coach house turned bar and a sun dappled yard between them scattered with colorful lawn chairs. Grab a plate of house smoked brisket hash ( 10) and an aged Tennessee whiskey Old Fashioned ( 10), play a round of corn hole and pretend it's your own Sunday backyard barbecue. If You Go The 1902 vintage Winchester office building has recently been repurposed as the Hotel Napoleon Memphis with 58 crisp rooms. In addition to its pedestrian friendly downtown location, the hotel houses a restaurant serving breakfast and dinner, and offers free coffee anytime in the lobby. Rooms from 161; 179 Madison Avenue, hotelnapoleonmemphis.com. The Mississippi riverfront glass pyramid that last served as a basketball arena has been refashioned as an immersive Bass Pro Shop, complete with fish and gator filled ponds. Overlooking them and the indoor cypress swamp diorama is the rustic themed, 103 room Big Cypress Lodge. Rooms from 175; 1 Bass Pro Drive, big cypress.com. The hospitable owners of Memphis Music Mansion rent several private rooms in their spacious home via Airbnb, and host frequent pop up concerts at the site. Rooms from 75; 539 East Parkway South, Airbnb.com. If you do plan a trip to Memphis, check out these suggestions on what to pack from our Wirecutter team.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Where should your appetite take you in 2017? The temptations to travel abound, from festivals honoring crowd pleasing foods to those that celebrate downright quirky ones, not to mention events where it's possible to savor the creations of several famous chefs in a single day. At the St. Barth Gourmet Festival (Nov. 2 to 5), for example, now in its fourth year, eight Michelin star chefs from France will descend on the Caribbean island and dazzle with multicourse dinners by night and cooking demonstrations by day. The lineup is still to be determined, but the roll call of past chefs, such as the three Michelin starred Arnaud Donckele of La Vague d'Or in St. Tropez, hints at the talent in store. There also promises to be pizazz at the 25th annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival (March 31 to April 9), an array of more than 200 events in Melbourne, Australia, coinciding this year with the World's Best 50 Restaurants 2017 gathering (April 1 to 7), being held in the city for the first time. The two events are collaborating with the MasterClass series (April 1 to 2), in which eight chefs whose restaurants have appeared on the prestigious Best Restaurants list, such as Gaston Acurio of La Mar in Lima, Peru, will cook for a hungry crowd and teach a trick or two about replicating their dishes at home. Wine can please the palate as much as food, and the Marlborough Wine Food Festival (Feb. 11) in New Zealand, held in a picturesque vineyard in the wine producing region of Marlborough, started in 1985 and claims to be the country's longest running wine festival. Here, festivalgoers can taste the region's wines in free flowing sessions, take in wine tutorials led by renowned winemakers and sample local cuisine.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
In its 33rd year, the Downtown Dance Festival has a new viewpoint, at least physically. Its free outdoor performances have moved into Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park at the bottom tip of Manhattan. The temporary stage is backed by the harbor, passing ships, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. As the sun sank through the opening show early Sunday evening, it all looked postcard perfect. Alas, the programming for this year's festival comes from the same old point of view: unfocused, as undiscriminating as Lady Liberty is supposed to be. Mixed bills need not have binding themes, but, ideally, the participants should share something other than mediocrity. On Sunday, a theme of Americana, appropriate for the setting, coursed through some selections by the program's four companies. So did a penchant for literalism. But as in previous years, any moments of distinction felt inadvertent. The Vanaver Caravan opened with a tribute to the folk musician and activist Pete Seeger, who died in January. The troupe revived excerpts from "Turn, Turn, Turn," a 1996 collaboration with Seeger, and the ramshackle level of the dancing and the musical accompaniment suggested that the revival could use more rehearsal. But even if polished, the material would still be earnest and bland, mainly illustrations of the lyrics padded with gamboling and some sloppy clog dancing, all smiles and no bite.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Alysson Muotri, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego. His lab grows and studies so called organoids to understand how the human brain functions. Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves? SAN DIEGO Two hundred and fifty miles over Alysson Muotri's head, a thousand tiny spheres of brain cells were sailing through space. The clusters, called brain organoids, had been grown a few weeks earlier in the biologist's lab here at the University of California, San Diego . He and his colleagues altered human skin cells into stem cells, then coaxed them to develop as brain cells do in an embryo. The organoids grew into balls about the size of a pinhead, each containing hundreds of thousands of cells in a variety of types, each type producing the same chemicals and electrical signals as those cells do in our own brains. In July , NASA packed the organoids aboard a rocket and sent them to the International Space Station to see how they develop in zero gravity. Now the organoids were stowed inside a metal box, fed by bags of nutritious broth. "I think they are replicating like crazy at this stage, and so we're going to have bigger organoids," Dr. Muotri said in a recent interview in his office overlooking the Pacific. What, exactly, are they growing into? That's a question that has scientists and philosophers alike scratching their heads. On Thursday, Dr. Muotri and his colleagues reported that they have recorded simple brain waves in these organoids. In mature human brains, such waves are produced by widespread networks of neurons firing in synchrony. Particular wave patterns are linked to particular forms of brain activity, like retrieving memories and dreaming. As the organoids mature, the researchers also found, the waves change in ways that resemble the changes in the developing brains of premature babies. "It's pretty amazing," said Giorgia Quadrato, a neurobiologist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the new study. "No one really knew if that was possible." But Dr. Quadrato stressed it was important not to read too much into the parallels. What she, Dr. Muotri and other brain organoid experts build are clusters of replicating brain cells, not actual brains. "People will say, 'Ah, these are like the brains of preterm infants,'" she said. "No, they are not." It's been only six years since scientists created the first brain organoid from human skin cells. Now they're being grown in laboratories around the world, offering scientists a new window onto the earliest stages of human brain development. Here at U.C.S.D., researchers are using them to recreate, in miniature, inherited brain disorders and brain infections. They are also trying to grow bigger, more complex brain organoids. In one recent experiment, scientists linked a brain organoid and a spider shaped robot, so that the two could exchange signals. With Thursday's report, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the question of what brain organoids might become is gaining more urgency. "There are some of my colleagues who say, 'No, these things will never be conscious,'" said Dr. Muotri. "Now I'm not so sure." Even if scientists someday produce only minimally self aware organoids, that could represent a serious ethical concern, said Christof Koch, the chief scientist and president of the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle. Few things in biology are harder to study than the development of the human brain. Scientists have largely contented themselves with indirect clues from studies of animals, like mice and monkeys. But the human brain is so distinctive that it's hard to make the evolutionary leap from other species. As a result, researchers have a disappointing track record for treating brain based disorders such as autism or schizophrenia. "We are failing miserably," Dr. Muotri said. "We can cure animals of some diseases, but it's not translatable." In 2006 Shinya Yamanaka, a biologist at Kyoto University in Japan, opened a new way to study human brains. He found a cocktail of four proteins that can turn ordinary skin cells into stem cells, which then have the potential to turn into neurons, muscles or blood cells. Building on that advance, other researchers learned to get stem cells to grow like miniature organs in a dish. And in 2013, a team of researchers in Austria succeeded in producing small, short lived brain organoids for the first time. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Until then, Dr. Muotri had studied neurons derived from people with autism. He quickly taught himself how to turn stem cells into brain organoids instead. "The most incredible thing is that they build themselves," he said. Primed with just the right conditions, the organoids take over their own development. Today, Cleber Trujillo, a project scientist, oversees the growth of thousands of organoids in a tissue culture room in Dr. Muotri's lab. "This is where we spend half our day," he said, gesturing to the banks of refrigerators, incubators and microscopes. Brain organoids demand so much labor because growing them is more like making a souffle than running a chemistry experiment. Scientists have to continually replace the broth in which the cells grow and keep a careful eye on the cells themselves. "We need to guide them," said Dr. Trujillo. "Otherwise, they become other stuff." If all goes according to plan, the cells turn into brain organoids. They become blobs, inside of which tunnels form. So called progenitor cells surround the tunnels and sprout cables. Other cells crawl down the cables and form successive rings. They match the cells in our cortex in many respects. Their surface even folds in on itself. Dr. Trujillo pulled out a translucent muffin tray and raised it above his head. The lights overhead illuminated hundreds of tiny pale spheres. At two months, the cells inside each organoid held it together with a network of sticky branches. "They like to stay in touch with each other," Dr. Trujillo said fondly. Dr. David Baud, a Zika expert at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who was not involved in the study, called it a promising discovery one that would be hard to make studying mice or individual neurons. "Organoids offer the best alternative," he said. Fabio Papes, a neuroscientist at University of Campinas in Brazil, feels the same way about organoids when it comes to studying hereditary brain disorders. Dr. Papes is collaborating with Dr. Muotri to study a disease called Pitt Hopkins syndrome. It's a rare condition that leaves children unable to speak and suffering regular seizures. To understand how certain mutations cause the disease, Dr. Papes is growing organoids from skin cells donated from patients. "For this particular disease, mice are no good," he said. "And you obviously cannot open the child's head to know what's going on. We can go this way, or not go at all." In 2016 Priscilla Negraes , then a project scientist in Dr. Muotri's lab, began eavesdropping on organoids. She figured out how to stick them to the bottom of a well that was lined with 64 electrodes. When a neuron in the organoids fired, one of the electrodes would light up. The organoids turned out to be surprisingly noisy and with each passing week, they got noisier. Then she noticed that patterns were emerging. Most of the neurons would suddenly start firing in a synchronized burst a pattern that looked remarkably like brain waves. "In order to say what you should do with it, you first have to say, 'What is it?'" she said. "We're making things that were not known 10 years ago. They were not in the catalog of philosophers." At this stage of research, Dr. Lunshof said, the most important thing is to avoid mistaking today's brain organoids for true human brains let alone people. "They're in a completely different category," she argued. For now, these debates matter to a few scientists: the master chefs who can reliably make enough brain organoids to run experiments. But Dr. Muotri and Dr. Trujillo hope to automate the process, so that other scientists can make lots of cheap, high quality brain organoids. "That's our concept plug and play," said Dr. Muotri. "We want to make farms of these organoids." The organoids sent to space may help make that concept a reality. The box in which they were housed is a rough prototype of a device that someday might produce organoids without human intervention. The astronauts aboard the space station simply installed the box, turned on the power, and let it run on its own. On a recent morning, Dr. Muotri wanted to check on his space organoids. Cameras inside the box snap pictures every half hour, but all the pictures Dr. Muotri had seen were obscured by unexpected air bubbles. Now, to his delight, the bubbles were gone from the latest image. On his computer monitor, he saw a half dozen gray spheres floating on a beige background.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
LONDON When the government forced the BBC to publish the salary ranges of its highest paid entertainers and journalists, executives feared a backlash from the British public, most of whom pay 147 pounds a year for the privilege of watching its television broadcasts. While many Britons criticized the high salaries, the list also showed a significant disparity in the salaries received by women, men and minorities in general at the British broadcaster a pay gap that has angered many, including some of the BBC's most talented female employees. On Sunday, in an open letter signed by 42 of them to the BBC director general, Tony Hall, and published in The Sunday Times of London and other news outlets, they demanded that the corporation "act now" to eliminate the disparity. Among the signers were anchors and media personalities like Clare Balding, Sue Barker and Angela Rippon, and distinguished journalists like Lyse Doucet, Jane Garvey, Emily Maitlis, Mishal Husain, Zeinab Badawi, Katya Adler and Sarah Montague. In the letter, they asked Mr. Hall to meet with them, writing: "You have said that you will 'sort' the gender pay gap by 2020, but the BBC has known about the pay disparity for years. We all want to go on the record to call upon you to act now." They wrote that the report confirmed a long held suspicion that "women at the BBC are being paid less than men for the same work." The BBC on Wednesday revealed for the first time the salaries of stars earning over PS150,000, about 195,000. The figures, published in the corporation's annual report, showed that two thirds of the people who fell into that category were male and white. The Radio 2 D.J. Chris Evans was the top paid star, earning more than PS2.2 million, the report showed. Mr. Hall has promised to work to reduce the disparity, which has historical roots in what was a male dominated corporation. Some prominent male journalists, like John Humphrys, have said that they had already had their salaries cut to loosen up more funds. But the women's letter demanded that Mr. Hall accelerate the reduction. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. The highest salaries are made by those who are entertainers or sports anchors, which the BBC said resulted from a competitive marketplace for star talent. Some of the highest paid, both male and female, make even more money than revealed because they are paid by the production companies that make some of the programs purchased by the BBC. The corporation has been sharply criticized in the past for lavish spending on its top management, and has moved to cut the numbers of top editors and their salaries. For some, the argument had elements of an elite debate among some of the highest paid people in the country. Michael White, who was a Guardian journalist, editor and columnist, said on Twitter that "lazy columnists" were milking a pay dispute "in which highly paid women complain men are paid even more." But when the figures came out, Prime Minister Theresa May called on the BBC to pay men and women equally. "We've seen the way the BBC is paying women less for doing the same job," she told LBC radio. "What's important is that the BBC looks at the question of paying men and women the same for doing the same job." The Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, called the gender pay gap "appalling," according to The Sunday Times of London. A representative for the broadcaster said that progress had been made but that more "needs to be done," the BBC said. While some officials are calling for the release of more details, such as for those who make less than PS150,000, the plan for next year's list is not to include the salaries of 34 actors, comedians, factual and entertainment presenters who work for Studios, the BBC's production arm, or the wages of multigenre employees. That includes Mr. Humphrys's earnings for the TV show "Mastermind," according to reports.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Andrew Barth Feldman has been keeping a list of people he'll need to call when the news comes out: that he, a 16 year old high school junior, will be making his Broadway debut this winter as the title character in "Dear Evan Hansen." "It's been so hard," Mr. Feldman, who won the best actor award at the National High School Musical Theater Awards this year, said in a phone interview last week. "Because people are aware that I have something coming up." But he hasn't been able to let the cat out of the bag. "I have a list of all the people that I've lied to over the past few months," he said. "I have to text or call or email them." On Jan. 30, Mr. Feldman will be taking over the role of Evan Hansen a high school senior with social anxiety in the Broadway musical, which won six Tony Awards in 2017, including the award for best musical and best performance by a leading actor in a musical for Ben Platt. The show currently stars Taylor Trensch. Mr. Feldman will be the first teenager to lead the Broadway cast. His audition for "Dear Evan Hansen" in July was his first for a Broadway show.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Let others tremble at the thought that Donald J. Trump may go too far. Peter Thiel worries that Mr. Trump may not go far enough. "Everyone says Trump is going to change everything way too much," says the famed venture capitalist, contrarian and member of the Trump transition team. "Well, maybe Trump is going to change everything way too little. That seems like the much more plausible risk to me." Mr. Thiel is comfortable being a walking oxymoron: He is driven to save the world from the apocalypse. Yet he helped boost the man regarded by many as a danger to the planet. "The election had an apocalyptic feel to it," says Mr. Thiel, wearing a gray Zegna suit and sipping white wine in a red leather booth at the Monkey Bar in Manhattan. "There was a way in which Trump was funny, so you could be apocalyptic and funny at the same time. It's a strange combination, but it's somehow very powerful psychologically." At the recent meeting of tech executives at Trump Tower orchestrated by Mr. Thiel the president elect caressed Mr. Thiel's hand so affectionately that body language experts went into a frenzy. I note that he looked uneasy being petted in front of his peers. "I was thinking, 'I hope this doesn't look too weird on TV,'" he says. I ask if he had to twist arms to lure some of the anti Trump tech titans, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. "I think, early on, everybody was worried that they would be the only person to show up," Mr. Thiel says. "At the end, everybody was worried they would be the only person not to show up. I think the bigger tech companies all wanted to get a little bit off the ledge that they had gotten on. "Normally, if you're a C.E.O. of a big company, you tend to be somewhat apolitical or politically pretty bland. But this year, it was this competition for who could be more anti Trump. 'If Trump wins, I will eat my sock.' 'I will eat my shoe.' 'I will eat my shoe, and then I will walk barefoot to Mexico to emigrate and leave the country.' "Somehow, I think Silicon Valley got even more spun up than Manhattan. There were hedge fund people I spoke to about a week after the election. They hadn't supported Trump. But all of a sudden, they sort of changed their minds. The stock market went up, and they were like, 'Yes, actually, I don't understand why I was against him all year long.'" Talking about how the Billy Bush tape was not so shocking if you've worked on the Wall Street trading floor, Mr. Thiel says: "On the one hand, the tape was clearly offensive and inappropriate. At the same time, I worry there's a part of Silicon Valley that is hyper politically correct about sex. One of my friends has a theory that the rest of the country tolerates Silicon Valley because people there just don't have that much sex. They're not having that much fun." I note that several Silicon Valley companies have pre emptively said they will not help build a Muslim registry for the Trump administration. Will Palantir, the data mining company of which Mr. Thiel was a founder, and whose clients include the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., be involved in that? (Palantir's C.E.O., Alex Karp, sat in at the Trump tech meeting.) "We would not do that," Mr. Thiel says flatly. When I ask him if he can explain to Mr. Trump that climate change is not a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, he offers a Chinese box of an answer: "Does he really think that? If he really thinks that, how would you influence that? If he really thinks that and you could influence him, what would be the best way to do it?" One could have predicted Mr. Thiel's affinity for Mr. Trump by reading his 2014 book, "Zero to One," in which he offers three prongs of his philosophy: 1) It is better to risk boldness than triviality. 2) A bad plan is better than no plan. 3) Sales matter just as much as product. But he was portrayed as an outcast in Silicon Valley and denounced as a jerk for supporting Mr. Trump and giving him 1.25 million. "I didn't give him any money for a long time because I didn't think it mattered, and then the campaign asked me to," he says. "There are reduced expectations for the younger generation, and this is the first time this has happened in American history," Mr. Thiel says. "Even if there are aspects of Trump that are retro and that seem to be going back to the past, I think a lot of people want to go back to a past that was futuristic 'The Jetsons,' 'Star Trek.' They're dated but futuristic." It is a theme he has struck before, that Silicon Valley has not fulfilled the old dreams for bigger things. "Cellphones distract us from the fact that the subways are 100 years old," he says. An article entitled "Peter Thiel Is Poised to Become a National Villain," in New York magazine, suggested he looked like he is enjoying that role. He says he isn't. Yet the billionaire views the visceral torrent against him with his usual rationality, surveying the scene deliberately, like the chess prodigy he once was. "I was surprised that it generated as much controversy as it did," he says. "There was a push to remove me from the board of Facebook, which is kind of crazy, since I'm the longest serving director there after Zuckerberg." He recalls that he went through a lot of "meta" debates about Mr. Trump in Silicon Valley. "One of my good friends said, 'Peter, do you realize how crazy this is, how everybody thinks this is crazy?' I was like: 'Well, why am I wrong? What's substantively wrong with this?' And it all got referred back to 'Everybody thinks Trump's really crazy.' So it's like there's a shortcut, which is: 'I don't need to explain it. It's good enough that everybody thinks something. If everybody thinks this is crazy, I don't even have to explain to you why it's crazy. You should just change your mind.'" On the Russian hacking, Mr. Thiel says: "There's a strong circumstantial case that Russia did this thing. On the other hand, I was totally convinced that there were W.M.D.s in Iraq in 2002, 2003." The reaction from the gay community has been harsh, with one writer in The Advocate going so far as to suggest that Mr. Thiel was not even a gay man, because he did not "embrace the struggle." "I think Trump is very good on gay rights," Mr. Thiel says. "I don't think he will reverse anything. I would obviously be concerned if I thought otherwise." I ask if he's comfortable with the idea that Vice President elect Mike Pence, regarded in the gay community as an unreconstructed homophobe, is a heartbeat away from the presidency. "You know, maybe I should be worried but I'm not that worried about it," he replies. "I don't know. People know too many gay people. There are just all these ways I think stuff has just shifted. For speaking at the Republican convention, I got attacked way more by liberal gay people than by conservative Christian people. "I don't think these things will particularly change. It's like, even if you appointed a whole series of conservative Supreme Court justices, I'm not sure that Roe v. Wade would get overturned, ever. I don't know if people even care about the Supreme Court. You know, you'd have thought the failure to have a vote on Merrick Garland would be a massive issue. And somehow it mattered to Democrats, but it didn't matter to the public at large." Mr. Thiel is focused on ways to prolong life. He was intrigued by parabiosis, a blood regeneration trial in which people over 35 would receive transfusions from people aged 16 to 25 an experiment that Anne Rice gave a thumbs up to. "Out of all the crazy things in this campaign, the vampire accusations were the craziest," he says, adding that while blood transfusions may be helpful, there may be harmful factors and "we have to be very careful." "I have not done anything of the sort" yet, he says about parabiosis. And because of the publicity, he says, he is now sifting through hundreds of proposals he has received from parabiosis ventures. Mr. Thiel has, however, used human growth hormones and he has signed up for cryogenics. "We have to be more experimental in all our medical procedures," he says. "We should not go gently into that good night." I ask why everyone in Silicon Valley seemed so obsessed with immortality. "Why is everyone else so indifferent about their mortality?" he replies. He has invested in many biotech companies and has been advising the Trump transition team on science. "Science is technology's older brother who has fallen on hard times," he says. "I have some strong opinions on this. At the F.D.A. today, aging is still not an indication for disease. And you're not allowed to develop drugs that could stop aging. We have not even started yet." When I remark that President Obama had eight years without any ethical shadiness, Mr. Thiel flips it, noting: "But there's a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring." When I ask if he is concerned about conflicts of interest, either for himself or the Trump children, who sat in on the tech meeting, he flips that one, too: "I don't want to dismiss ethical concerns here, but I worry that 'conflict of interest' gets overly weaponized in our politics. I think in many cases, when there's a conflict of interest, it's an indication that someone understands something way better than if there's no conflict of interest. If there's no conflict of interest, it's often because you're just not interested." When I ask if Mr. Trump is "casting" cabinet members based on looks, Mr. Thiel challenges me: "You're assuming that Trump thinks they matter too much. And maybe everyone else thinks they matter too little. Do you want America's leading diplomat to look like a diplomat? Do you want the secretary of defense to look like a tough general, so maybe we don't have to go on offense and we can stay on defense? I don't know." When I ask about the incestuous amplification of the Facebook news feed, he muses: "There's nobody you know who knows anybody. There's nobody you know who knows anybody who knows anybody, ad infinitum." Mr. Thiel and Mr. Trump are strange bedfellows, given that much of Mr. Thiel's billions came from being one of the original investors in Facebook and Mr. Trump recently said it's better to send important messages by courier. ("Well," Mr. Thiel notes, "one does have to be very careful with what one says in an email.") The 70 year old president elect rose by wildly lunging with his Twitter rapier in an "unpresidented" way in the first campaign that blended politics, social media and reality. But the 49 year old social media visionary rarely updates his Facebook page and doesn't tweet, "because you always want to get things exactly right" and "if you start doing it, you have to do it a lot." As Silicon Valley has devolved into a place that produces apps like one that sends the word "Yo," Mr. Thiel worries its thinking is "not big enough to take our civilization to the next level." When I ask if it is true that Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, wasn't invited to the Trump tech meeting because the Trump camp was angry that Twitter wouldn't let the Republican nominee create a "Crooked Hillary" emoji, Mr. Thiel replies that "there were people upset about that," but that he set up the meeting according to the market caps of the bigger tech companies. "I think the crazy thing is," he says, "at a place like Twitter, they were all working for Trump this whole year even though they thought they were working for Sanders." Mr. Thiel says he fell into his role in the Trump candidacy. "It was one of my friends who called me up and said, 'Hey, would you like to be a delegate at the Republican convention?"' he recalls. "I said: 'Actually, I kind of would. I think it would be fun to go.' Then, two weeks before the election, they talked to me about speaking at the convention." I note that the audience in his hometown, Cleveland, gave him a great reception when he appeared as only the third openly gay speaker at a Republican convention. "I'm not sure that my speech was that good," he says. "I do think a lot of other speeches were just very bad." Mr. Trump, with his litigious streak and his pugilistic attitude toward the press and his threat to change the libel laws, naturally admired Mr. Thiel's legal smackdown of Gawker. The tech titan was disturbed by the "painful and paralyzing" stories published on the gossipy website and other blogs under the Gawker banner, including a 2007 post that originally appeared on Valleywag blithely headlined "Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People." So he secretly financed the lawsuit filed by Terry Bollea (the real name of the wrestler Hulk Hogan) against Gawker for posting an excerpt from a sex tape showing Mr. Hogan with a friend's wife. A court ruled in Mr. Bollea's favor, in a judgment of 140 million, which drove the site into bankruptcy. (The Gawker founder Nick Denton, who is also gay, described Mr. Thiel to Vanity Fair as "interesting and scary.") "It basically stands for the narrow proposition that you should not publish a sex tape," Mr. Thiel says. "I think that's an insult to journalists to suggest that's journalism now. Transparency is good, but at some point it can go in this very toxic direction." Just as there was "a self fulfilling Hillary bubble" where "everybody was just too scared to say this was a really bad idea" to support this "very weak candidate," Mr. Thiel believes Gawker manufactured "a totally insane bubble full of somewhat sociopathic people in New York." When the case went to court in Florida, he contends, the culture that "you could do whatever you wanted and there were no consequences" was exposed. Savoring his victory, dismissing those who think the way to deal with vile and invasive stories is to grow a thicker skin, Mr. Thiel dressed as Hulk Hogan for the "Villains and Heroes" annual costume party last month, hosted on Long Island by the Mercer family, who were big Trump donors. He shows me a picture on his phone of him posing with Erik Prince, who founded the private military company Blackwater, and Mr. Trump who had no costume but jokes that it was "N.S.F.I." (Not Safe for the Internet.) "There's some resonances between Hogan beating Gawker and Trump beating the establishment in this country," Mr. Thiel says. Hulk Hogan was "this crazy person" who didn't seem like the best plaintiff, but "he didn't give up." Using two wrestling terms he learned, Mr. Thiel says that many people assumed Mr. Trump was "kayfabe" a move that looks real but is fake. But then his campaign turned into a "shoot" the word for an unscripted move that suddenly becomes real. "People thought the whole Trump thing was fake, that it wasn't going to go anywhere, that it was the most ridiculous thing imaginable, and then somehow he won, like Hogan did," Mr. Thiel says. "And what I wonder is, whether maybe pro wrestling is one of the most real things we have in our society and what's really disturbing is that the other stuff is much more fake. And whatever the superficialities of Mr. Trump might be, he was more authentic than the other politicians. He sort of talked in a way like ordinary people talk. It was not sort of this Orwellian newspeak jargon that so many of the candidates use. So he was sort of real. He actually wanted to win." I ask Mr. Thiel about a prescient theory he proffered when I had dinner with him at the convention again, flipping conventional wisdom that Hillary was making a mistake by being too optimistic. "If you're too optimistic, it sounds like you're out of touch," he says. "The Republicans needed a far more pessimistic candidate. Somehow, what was unusual about Trump is, he was very pessimistic but it still had an energizing aspect to it." He says he has no plans to buy a place in Washington. "One of the things that's striking about talking to people who are politically working in D.C. is, it's so hard to tell what any of them actually do," he says. "It's a sort of place where people measure input, not output. You have a 15 minute monologue describing a 15 page resume, starting in seventh grade." While many predict that Mr. Trump will crash and burn, Mr. Thiel does not think he will regret his role.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
LOS ANGELES Add cigarettes to the list of things that the family friendly Walt Disney Company has to figure out as it prepares to integrate the sharper edged 20th Century Fox movie and television studio. Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, announced at a shareholder meeting in 2015 that Walt Disney Studios would "prohibit smoking in movies across the board: Marvel, Lucas, Pixar and Disney films." He said the policy, which put Disney at the forefront of antismoking efforts in Hollywood, "was the right thing for us to do." The decision brought cheers from activists concerned about the power of movies to promote tobacco use. Now antismoking advocates want Mr. Iger to extend that rule to all future youth rated films (G, PG, PG 13) made by Fox and its Fox Searchlight specialty label, which are among the assets that Disney is buying from Rupert Murdoch for 54.2 billion. Among other things, activists want "graphic health warnings" added to youth rated films in the Fox library that depict smoking like "Avatar" and "X Men: Days of Future Past" before selling them on DVD or via video on demand services. The requests were made in a Feb. 20 letter to Mr. Iger that was signed by 46 activists and faith based shareholders. Boiled down, the dispatch, which has not previously been disclosed, raises a broader question shared by some people in Hollywood: How accepting will the Magic Kingdom be of the button pushing content offered by Fox, the home of the R rated "Deadpool" superhero franchise, the violent "Planet of the Apes" movies and "The Simpsons," the show that once produced an episode featuring a nicotine laced variety of tomato called "tomacco." Activists are continuously pressuring studios over one cause or another, but Mr. Murdoch has frequently dismissed such efforts as political correctness run amok. Disney, on the other hand, pays extraordinary attention to its brand perception, which activists often try to use to their advantage. "We ask you now to follow your convictions, common sense and experience in keeping kids safe," the antismoking activists wrote in their letter, a copy of which was given to The New York Times by Jono Polansky, a policy consultant for Smoke Free Movies, an initiative at the University of California at San Francisco. "Amid the myriad details involved in a corporate acquisition of this size and complexity, Disney cannot afford to leave young people's health and lives unprotected." Tom McCaney, associate director of corporate social responsibility for Sisters of St. Francis, an activist order helping to lead the antismoking effort, said that Disney's response to the letter was unsatisfactory. "Disney told us it wasn't appropriate to discuss until the Fox deal goes through," Mr. McCaney said. "We disagree." Government studies have long shown that depictions of smoking in movies and television shows can lead to youth tobacco use. Under pressure, the Motion Picture Association of America said in 2007 that it would for the first time consider portrayals of smoking alongside sex and violence when assessing the suitability of movies for young viewers. Critics have since labeled the move ineffective, in part because the M.P.A.A. does not consider an image related to smoking in and of itself enough to warrant an R rating. Most movie studios responded by putting pressure on filmmakers to kick the habit, which reduced tobacco imagery. But Hollywood, citing the need for artistic license, has resisted calls to give an automatic R rating to any movie that depicts smoking. The Motion Picture Association fought off a smoking related lawsuit last year with a First Amendment defense. It also argued that automatic R ratings for smoking could result in similar demands for anything deemed socially unacceptable, including high speed driving. Concerns about smoking were rekindled last year by a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that depictions or suggestions of tobacco use in top grossing movies were on the rise again. Truth Initiative took aim at Netflix in March with a study showing there was "pervasive" smoking in popular shows like "Stranger Things" and "Fuller House." Studios also face pressure overseas from the World Health Organization, which has called for governments to implement more aggressive regulation of movies that contain tobacco imagery. India, France and Britain are among the countries where action has been taken or is being discussed. Mr. Polansky, the Smoke Free Movies consultant, vowed to continue pressuring studios beyond Disney and Fox. "To quote the Hollywood cliche, 'We can do this the easy way or the hard way,' " he said. "But it will happen."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
FOR decades, hydrogen has been the Dracula of automotive fuels: Just when you think a stake has been driven through its zero emissions heart, the technology rises from the grave. In 2015, even with gasoline cheaper than it has been in years, hydrogen is back to haunt those who insist that battery electric vehicles are the long term solution for reducing fossil fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. This time with hydrogen fuel cell costs falling significantly, and a tiny yet budding network of public fueling stations automakers are placing their latest long odds bet on hydrogen cars. Hyundai has been first in the latest wave of fuel cell models, which are actually electric cars with one important difference: Instead of a plug in battery that draws power from the electrical grid, a fuel cell generates power from an electrochemical reaction between onboard hydrogen and oxygen in the air. Clean water trickles out the tailpipe as the only byproduct. In a technical riposte to most battery electric vehicles, which generally travel less than 100 miles on a charge, and take several hours to recharge, fuel cell cars operate as conveniently as gasoline models. They travel roughly 300 miles on a tank, and their ultrastrong carbon fiber tanks can be pumped full of hydrogen in less than 10 minutes. Count David Uselton and his wife, Suelyn, as true believers. In June, the couple, from Dana Point, became the second California family to lease the hydrogen version of the Hyundai Tucson crossover sport utility vehicle. They are paying 499 a month with 2,999 down, decisively more than they would for the same Tucson with a gasoline engine. But perks include a 5,000 purchase rebate from the state and three years' worth of free hydrogen from Hyundai. Mr. Uselton, a director of a global e commerce company, remembers their teenage son's assembling a toy car model about eight years ago. The toy scooted across the floor, powered by a fuel cell that used sunlight to generate hydrogen from water. "He thought it was really cool, and asked, 'Why can't every car work like this?' " Mr. Uselton said. Like the nearly 70 other people who have leased hydrogen fueled Tucsons, the Useltons were checked out by Hyundai to ensure the car would fit their lifestyle. The criteria included geographic proximity to the nine public hydrogen stations operating around Los Angeles and San Francisco. "I would rather shamelessly drive to dealerships, asking to be part of the program," Mr. Uselton says. His enthusiasm was driven by a belief that automobiles require a reinvention. "One thing we know for sure is that oil will not be here forever," he said. "The combustion engine can't be a long term answer for our grandchildren. There have to be other answers out there." Mr. Uselton appreciates that the Tucson is roomier than the typical small electric car, swallowing gear for his weekend music gigs. Unlike with battery E.V.s, hydrogen technology easily scales up to power larger vehicles. Devin Lindsay, a powertrain analyst at IHS Automotive, says that while E.V.s work well for people who drive set distances and can plan trips around charging, hydrogen could be a better fit for people who have spent a lifetime pumping gasoline. "E.V.s still aren't what consumers are used to," Mr. Lindsay said. "Fuel cells are promising because their range and fill up times match what we've grown up with." On paper, hydrogen cars can indeed appear to be a green dream. So why aren't more people driving them? Proponents note that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. But deriving that element efficiently has been a major catch, along with a dearth of places to refuel. The cars' onboard fuel cells and storage tanks have been exorbitantly expensive. When Honda tested its first FCX fuel cell cars in California in 2002, analysts estimated the cars cost up to 1 million each to produce. Automakers have also talked up hydrogen cars, with skeptics seeing the technology as a pipe dream. Automakers' hands in some ways are being forced: California's powerful regulators have decreed that the six largest automakers build increasing numbers of zero emissions models, toward a goal of having 87 percent of new cars produce zero tailpipe emissions by 2050. Those automakers now receive more than twice the credits from California for each fuel cell car they produce versus battery electrics. California's 5,000 rebate to fuel cell car buyers compares with 2,500 for an E.V. Industry analysts have labeled these relatively costly, slow selling hydrogen and E.V. models "compliance cars," created more to satisfy regulations than consumer demand. In 2007, General Motors introduced a test fleet of 119 Chevrolet Equinox hydrogen S.U.V.s. The company boldly predicted it would sell as many as one million fuel cell vehicles by 2020. But development stalled, and the industry turned its attention to E.V.s and plug in hybrids. Honda and Mercedes have leased small test fleets of hydrogen cars to California customers. How small? Since 2002, Honda has put 43 of its FCX and FCX Clarity models in consumers' hands. Among more than 28 million passenger cars on California's roads, barely 100 carry hydrogen onboard. But still, automakers including Toyota the unmatched king of hybrids remain bullish on hydrogen. Toyota will offer its 58,325 Mirai fuel cell compact this year, exclusively in California for now. The car's name means future in Japanese. Honda will follow in 2016 with a car based on its streamlined FCV concept model. Toyota began developing its hydrogen technology more than 20 years ago, even as it began work on the first Prius hybrid, according to John Hanson, Toyota's spokesman for advanced technology. The company says it has reduced the Mirai's fuel cell cost by 95 percent compared with its previous generation car. Toyota has linked up with BMW to develop fuel cells, with other alliances formed by G.M. and Honda, and by Daimler, Ford and Nissan. To answer a vexing chicken and egg question, automakers are providing seed money to operate fueling stations, reassuring energy providers that if they build them, cars and customers will eventually come. California has committed up to 20 million a year to develop stations, with perhaps 40 expected to be in operation by the end of 2016. Mr. Uselton hopes to see stations open north of Los Angeles, which would extend his Hyundai's range far enough for him to visit his daughter, a college student in Santa Barbara. Today, most hydrogen is derived from natural gas production, diminishing its environmental edge. But backers see promise in producing hydrogen by splitting water using solar, wind or other renewable power. In Fountain Valley, Calif., Mr. Uselton fills his Tucson from a demonstration station, created via an Energy Department grant, that turns municipal waste into enough hydrogen to fuel up to 50 cars a day. Mr. Lindsay at IHS said that with the internal combustion engine continuing to evolve and improve, it will be decades before the majority of Americans switch to alternative fuel cars. But with enough cars and infrastructure, hydrogen could become a valuable part of the energy portfolio. "We may end up having two different zero emissions technologies that will move us away from gasoline," he said. Toyota is confident it could sell perhaps 3,000 Mirais here through 2017. Even that is a relatively small number, but the company envisions a hydrogen nucleus that will spread to the East Coast and eventually the whole nation. "It's taken 25 years to get vehicles to market, and it's going to be a long road to socialize the technology," Mr. Hanson said. "But it's a pretty good place to be right now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
A mural in Bushwick, Brooklyn, proclaims the neighborhood's hipness, while the old style vibe of Ridgewood, Queens, may be on its way out. It was only a matter of time, after Bushwick was given a featured role in the HBO show "Girls," that the young creative types who established this gritty Brooklyn neighborhood as an artists' enclave began to be priced out. Galleries, restaurants and bars have multiplied in Bushwick. Rachel and Kurt of Fox Television's "Glee" moved into a loft there. Last September, the Clintons were spotted at Roberta's, the artisanal pizzeria. More recently, Anne Hathaway was reported to be filming a scene for a movie at a local cafe and music joint. And developers have homed in with plans for doorman buildings, and possibly a mall. Now, with such mainstream endeavors looming and prices on the rise, artists, 20 somethings and young families are taking the L train for the short hop to neighboring and more economical Ridgewood, Queens. The average monthly rent for a studio in Bushwick was 1,675 in July, up 27 percent from July 2011, according to MNS, a residential and investment sales brokerage. The monthly rent for one and two bedroom apartments was also up by double digits, to 1,900 and 2,121 respectively, for the same period. The price increases come as the gap narrows between overall rents in northern Brooklyn and Manhattan. Last month, the average monthly rent in northern Brooklyn rose to 3,035 by 8.2 percent compared with July 2012, according to a report compiled by the appraisal firm Miller Samuel for Douglas Elliman. In Manhattan, the average rent was 3,822 in July, up 1.7 percent. At the same time, developers are looking for a better return on rental buildings as they face rising land prices in Manhattan. "We're getting a lot of these landlords who historically have been in Manhattan saying, 'Tell us about Bushwick; what is this area in Queens?' " said Andrew Barrocas, the chief executive of MNS. He has organized about a dozen informal walking tours of the area for investors and developers who want a better understanding of the buzz. Compared with Manhattan, he said, "the rent multiplier is a lot more appealing," because of lower land costs and the premium that new rentals can command. Ten years ago, a two bedroom priced at 1,100 a month would have been on the high side in Bushwick, said Diana Reyna, who represents the area stretching from Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn into Ridgewood, Queens, on the New York City Council. "Today we're talking about people who are charging 3,000" to roommates who split the rent four ways. She noted that seven rezoning proposals had been submitted in her district, and that she was pushing for developments to set aside 40 percent of apartments as affordable housing. She added that when one of her staff members, who is moving for the third time in two years because of rising Bushwick rents, heard about this article, he lamented, "Now I'm going to have to move again." Real estate prices in Ridgewood, a working class neighborhood of roughly two square miles, are on the upswing. But monthly rents are still cheaper than in East Williamsburg and Bushwick. For example, the rent for a three bedroom in Ridgewood is nearly 20 percent lower than in Bushwick, according to Streeteasy.com. Ridgewood consists mainly of well maintained row houses from the early 20th century, between two and six stories high. The median sales price in the second quarter was 400,000, up 14 percent from the same period last year, according to Streeteasy. Alex Amini, a 24 year old bass player, is paying just 600 a month to share a large three bedroom duplex in a renovated Ridgewood row house with four other people. "It's the biggest apartment I've ever had," he said, "and it's the cheapest." He charts his eastward progression over the past four years, starting in Manhattan, where he paid 1,100 a month for a share in a three bedroom in the East Village. After a brief detour to the Upper West Side, he went through a series of sublets, all with roommates, all costing 700 to 800 a month, near the Morgan Avenue L subway stop a burgeoning area called variously Morgantown, Bushwick and East Willamsburg. "I made some really close friends," Mr. Amini said of his time living with "random people" in Brooklyn. "That's part of the allure." Ridgewood is quiet by comparison. "There are not a lot of restaurants," he said. "It is not as much of a hotbed for artists yet." Even as bright orange umbrellas shade a new pedestrian plaza where Myrtle Avenue, 71st Avenue and Stephen Street converge, a shop like Ridgewood Coins and Stamps remains straight out of another era, advertising an old fashioned telephone exchange beginning with the letters EV. Others have signs that reflect the German, Mexican, Polish and other immigrants who make up the community. But a few are clearly catering to a new demographic. ChocoLatte Cafe, a year old coffee shop a storefront away from Ridgewood Coins and Stamps, has cards at the door promoting a local yoga studio with student specials. A block away, Ridgewood Thai has an oversize chandelier, fake lotus flowers floating in pots and a Mod aesthetic. "Many of the young people who work in Williamsburg bartenders, waitresses if you ask them where do they live, they say Ridgewood," said Gene Keyser, a broker with Halstead Property in Brooklyn. "It's the young folks, east of Fort Greene, the Pratt kids, finding themselves priced out, who are now pushing out there." Families are also being lured to Queens from Brooklyn by the space their money will buy. In March Betsy Hoffman, an agent with Brennan Realty Services, a brokerage that focuses on Brooklyn town houses, began helping a couple who have a year old child and wanted to buy a free standing house in Bedford Stuyvesant. With a 700,000 budget, they were quickly priced out. Next they turned to Bushwick, but that was a washout, too. "The next logical step was to go to Ridgewood," said Ms. Hoffman, who found the couple a three family fixer upper there that met their budget. Unfortunately the deal fell through, but they are continuing to concentrate their search on Ridgewood. New development may have a harder time finding a foothold in Ridgewood than it did in Bushwick. Last month, the community board recommended that a manufacturing area south of Myrtle Avenue be designated an industrial business zone, to help retain jobs and fend off residential construction. Ms. Reyna, the councilwoman, said that in terms of rezoning, "we have to draw the line as to where we go and how far we will go to develop housing, so it's not so much to the point that we lose our work force," by eliminating small businesses and manufacturing. While interest in Ridgewood is growing, Bushwick remains the hub of activity. A proposal by the Read Property Group to develop several rental buildings on a mostly vacant site that used to house the Rheingold Brewery was approved with conditions by the community board; it is making its way through the public approval process, including review by the borough president, the City Planning Commission and the City Council. The project would add 977 apartments, retail space and a park to the area near Woodhull Medical Center and the Flushing Avenue J train. About 24 percent of the one , two and three bedroom units are to be below market rate, according to Mitch Korbey, a partner in the law firm Herrick, Feinstein, which is working with the developer. Nearby at 815 Broadway, Douglas Steiner, a developer and the chairman of Steiner Studios, plans to turn a former Conway store into 40 rental units with a large retail component. And two stops away on the J train, Colony 1209, a 120 apartment rental building going up on DeKalb Avenue, is expected to open this fall with studios and one and two bedrooms. Pricing is being finalized. Colony 1209 will be aimed at "trendsetting" 20 somethings, said David J. Maundrell III, the founder of aptsandlofts.com, a New York brokerage that specializes in the marketing of new developments. Indoor bocce courts and a vintage arcade with games like Donkey Kong are on the long list of planned amenities. If the place is not promoted correctly, he pointed out, the bohemian sensibilities of the target audience could be offended. "I have to be authentic with this," said Mr. Maundrell, who has employed a photographer living in Bushwick to capture the essence of the neighborhood in pictures to be used in advertising. The building's home page will include the Twitter feed of Bushwick Daily, an in the know blog. "They don't like corporate," he said of his prospective tenants. "You can't fool around." Already, questions are being raised about whether Bushwick is losing its edge. Last year, an entire city block at the Morgan Avenue L stop sold for 12.15 million to a developer with plans for a retail complex. The Commercial Observer noted the news with the headline, "A Mall Grows in Bushwick?" It went on to ask if the plans for "Brooklyn's hippest neighborhood mark the death of cool or the beginning of mainstream success in Bushwick?" Although that has yet to be determined, some residents are concerned about the neighborhood's rapid transformation. "There is a lot of anxiety about the pace at which Bushwick is changing," said Deborah Brown, an artist who directs the gallery Storefront Bushwick and serves on the local community board. In May she bought a 7,000 square foot warehouse, which she is using as her studio and has started to use as her gallery. Ms. Brown, who lives in Manhattan, was first struck by Bushwick's then nascent art scene in 2006, when she dropped off her niece at an apartment in the neighborhood. Recognizing the seeds of gentrification, she soon bought a two story vacant factory with her husband, Eric Ploumis, to use as her studio and to be part of the creative community. "I thought, 'I have seen this happen so many times, this time I'm going to be in on it.' " But she didn't anticipate the speed of the neighborhood's change. "It's been faster than I could imagine," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
I was glad to see The Times focus on one group on the front lines who have not received as much recognition as they deserve: teachers, from kindergarten through college. They are working 12 hour days trying to develop lessons so that their students can continue to learn. Creating an online course, if it is done well, is time consuming and tedious, and requires a tremendous amount of thinking through an idea or a skill. Instructions that are normally delivered orally must be extremely detailed. Failing to provide a step or a detail can cause students to fail to do something or not understand an idea. For the remainder of the semester, teachers are working on the front lines. Carolyn Boiarsky Hammond, Ind. The writer is a professor of English at Purdue University Northwest Hammond Campus. Though community college students make up nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States today, they are often left out of media coverage, including how the precipitous move to "distance learning" will affect their educations ("Letter Grades Would Fail Students Whom Crisis Sent Home," news article, March 29).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
American Airlines and LATAM Airlines Group are seeking regulatory approval to enter into a joint business agreement that could potentially add more direct service routes between North and South America and more scheduled flights on existing routes. If the deal is approved, the airlines, already part of the Oneworld alliance and operating with a code share agreement, could work together to schedule, sell and share revenue on flights between the United States and Canada and six South American countries: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. American has joint business arrangements with several partners, including British Airways, between North America and Europe, and Japan Airlines on Pacific routes. If the explosion of new cruise ships and emerging destinations like Cuba have you scratching your head over sailing options, the new website ShermansCruise.com has a matchmaking feature pitched to you. Run by ShermansTravel Media, a publisher specializing in travel deals and advice, the new site's Navigatr tool reveals potential passenger to cruise matches based on the answers to eight questions, covering qualifiers such as budget; style (active, for example, versus low key, sophisticated, academic and others); aesthetics ("Las Vegas flash" or traditional, among choices); and itinerary (educational, party or remote, among others). Once users submit their emails, the results are returned based on several but not all preferences; on a recent test, the site suggested Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas, one of the biggest cruise ships sailing, based on a preference for cocktail lounges and couples, ignoring the preference for low key style. The site also sells cruises, identifies top deals and publishes news stories, videos and social media posts of cruisers. ON AQUA SHIPS, CHIEF EXECUTIVE AND CHEFS ON BOARD The boutique cruise line Aqua Expeditions, which operates two small ships on the Amazon River in Peru and one on the Mekong River in Asia, plans to offer cruises with its chief executive and, separately, its well known consulting chefs over several 2016 departures. Aqua's founder and chief executive Francesco Galli Zugaro will join departures, including going on shore excursions and joining guests for cocktails, on the Mekong from Aug. 26 to Sept. 2, and on the Amazon Nov. 19 to 26. The chef David Thompson, who has earned Michelin recognition for his Thai restaurants in London and Bangkok and is the consulting chef for the Aqua Mekong, will sail on the ship April 22 to 29 and May 13 to 20. Pedro Miguel Schiaffino, who runs the restaurant Malabar in Lima and is consulting chef on the Aqua Amazon, will join the ship March 29 to April 2 and Nov. 26 to Dec. 3. The chefs will offer cooking classes and market visits. Departures range from three to seven nights, and start at 3,165 a person, double occupancy, including excursions. The luxury tour operator Abercrombie Kent has added a new family departure on its 17 day Antarctica, South Georgia the Falkland Islands sailing. Departing Dec. 19 and open to guests as young as age 7, the itinerary includes visits to colonies of Southern elephant seals and gentoo and king penguins, a scientific research station and the grave of the explorer Ernest Shackleton. The trip's Young Explorers program includes hands on workshops in marine mammal identification, squid biology and navigational charting as well as photography competitions organized by the ship's resident photography coach. The trip normally costs 18,995 a person, double occupancy, but is selling for 15,995 until March 31.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Natacha Ramsay Levi, the cool French girl who brought a cool French girl chic to Chloe that proved ... well, perhaps a bit too cool, announced on Thursday that she was stepping down after four years as creative director. No successor was named. Though her departure had been rumored for months since the chief executive who hired her, Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye, left almost exactly a year ago amid talk of falling sales at the brand, owned by Compagnie Financiere Richemont Ms. Ramsay Levi said in a statement that leaving had been her decision. And though Chloe's transition under her leadership from the Provencal windswept romanticism established by the founder Gaby Aghion to a harder edged, more complicated hipness, was often uncomfortable, her departure was framed as a response to the pandemic and the state of the world (rather than a push, though whispers suggest that was also a part of it). "Over the last months of health, social and economic turmoil, I have thought about the changes I want to see in our industry and how to better align them with my own creative, intellectual and emotional values," Ms. Ramsay Levi said in her statement. "It is this reflection that makes me consider my future differently and desire to pursue new opportunities." The news is also an opportunity for Richemont to consider the future of the brand differently, and who may be the best person to realize that future. It is a chance to turn the now familiar "talented designer who lasted only one contract at a big brand because vision and reality didn't mesh" narrative into something altogether more significant and compelling. Fashion has been locked in a paroxysm of change since March. First, the coronavirus closed stores and factories and drove shows online. Then the social justice movement forced a hard reckoning with the industry's legacy of racism, and the still very white nature of its leadership. Yet for all the talk of change and efforts to establish diversity and inclusion departments and executives, for all the scholarships created and listening tours and admissions of fault, giant visible leaps forward, aside from notably more diverse ad campaigns, have yet to occur. And nothing is more visible in fashion than the designer at the top of a great and storied house. The two biggest designer appointments since the twin crises began at Givenchy and Fendi went to white men: Matthew Williams and Kim Jones. When Antoine Arnault, the group head of communications of LVMH, the conglomerate that owns both brands, was asked in September if the group had considered a designer of color for the Fendi job, he said, "frankly, no." He added the caveat that discussions had been underway with Mr. Jones (already well known to the conglomerate thanks to his position as artistic director of Dior Men) for several months, potentially beginning before the world changed. Such an excuse, however, will not work with Chloe. Interesting as Ms. Ramsay Levi's work was, different as it was from the designers who came before her Karl Lagerfeld, Martine Sitbon, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Hannah MacGibbon and Clare Waight Keller and focused as she was on leavening the sweetness with more hardware and a tinge of desert hedonism (she liked an arm band, asymmetry and some complicated bindings along with a nightie), she had one thing in common with most of them. As Riccardo Bellini, the Chloe chief executive said, "She is an important member of that proud tradition of women who have designed at Chloe." Even more than that, she is one in a line of young white women minted in the crucible of the European fashion tradition (Ms. Ramsay Levi spent 15 years working with Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton) and fragrant with a whiff of the bohemian, who designed at Chloe. Her departure has now given the almost 70 year old brand a chance to demonstrate its commitment to moving forward in a new direction: one that, perhaps, speaks to the changing composition of its consumer base, and the changing face of the world. It would be a real statement of intent were Chloe to look beyond the usual parameters of the fashion world toward talent in countries or areas further afield; to engage with designers who bring different backgrounds and experiences to the table. To not revert to the safety of a proven name, or a familiar profile, or someone trained in the rhythms of the old system, but rather to embrace someone willing to question all received orthodoxies and conventions. Not to abandon its foundational virtues of a certain girlish, soft focus whimsy, but to recast them. For the long term, not the next three seasons.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The nascent entomophagy movement barbecue flavored roasted mealworms, cookies baked from cricket flour has gotten some recent (sorry) buzz on campus. Insects, a traditional snack of Asia, Africa and Mexico, are high in calcium, iron and zinc and are a more sustainable protein than livestock (less water, food, land and greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2013 United Nations report). Hamilton College's Club Ento hosted a panel this semester on crickets the gateway bug to entomophagy and on April 16 will hold a beer tasting. "It's a fun way to point out we already have bugs in our diet," says Kyle Burnham, club president, noting that the Food and Drug Administration allows an average 2,500 or so aphids per 10 grams of hops. No one is saying bugs are the new ramen, but a student start up at the University of Texas, Cramen, combines ramen and crickets. The ento chapter at Stockton University in New Jersey has about two dozen active members. The Hamilton club, started last spring, has 92 on its list.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Lakers Coach Frank Vogel could have been concerned. The N.B.A. All Star break was looming and his team still had one more game to go. But Vogel said he could sense from his players, and from LeBron James in particular, that they were focused. "You could just tell that he was really, really locked in," Vogel told reporters after the Lakers' 120 116 overtime victory over the Denver Nuggets on Wednesday, "and that this was not a foot out the door towards the break kind of game, that he was going to have a playoff mind set to it. And he showed that throughout the game." The Lakers had their share of skeptics at the start of the season. How would Vogel, in his first season on the job, handle the team's colorful assemblage of egos? Were the Lakers deep enough to contend for a title? Was James washed up after missing a big chunk of last season because of injuries? And how would he mesh with Anthony Davis? These were all reasonable questions. But with about two months remaining in the regular season now, the Lakers have shown that they are, in fact, for real and lately they have done so while the entire organization mourns Kobe Bryant's death. The Lakers' win against the Nuggets highlighted by James's triple double pushed their record to a Western Conference leading 41 12, four games better than second place Denver. Only the Milwaukee Bucks (46 8), with championship hopes of their own, have a better record. After Wednesday's win, James was asked about the importance of securing the top seed in the West. "We don't talk about it," he said. "We really don't. We just play the game the right way." Here is a closer look at how the Lakers have re established themselves as N.B.A. royalty: Following James's celebrated introduction to the Lakers, last season was a disaster for him. He injured his groin on Christmas Day, missed a big chunk of the season and then watched the playoffs from home for the first time since 2005, his second year with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Was this the beginning of the end for James? His struggles fed into the narrative that he had only relocated to the Lakers because he wanted to live in Los Angeles, where he has his production company and spent last summer filming "Space Jam 2." LeBron, in other words, had gone Hollywood. Was basketball still his priority? "Just very hungry," James said of his approach to the season, "very enthused, very motivated on trying to put this team in position to be as successful as we can be." In addition to averaging 25 points and 7.8 rebounds a game while shooting 48.9 percent from the field, James has never been a better playmaker. He is averaging a career best 10.8 assists per game, which leads the league. His ability, along with his willingness, to act as a pass first distributor has been enhanced by the presence of Davis, who has been dunking a lot of James's lobs. But James, one of just three remaining players from his draft class, is playing like he still has much to prove. Speaking of Davis, remember his 2018 19 season? He asked the New Orleans Pelicans to trade him, a request they rebuffed when they turned down the Lakers' heated overtures. The entire soap opera cast a shadow over both organizations for months. The Lakers' fragile chemistry crumbled. By July, the Lakers finally had the pieces to swing a deal for Davis and sent the Pelicans three first round picks along with several members of their young core, including Lonzo Ball and Brandon Ingram, who earned his first All Star selection this season. The Lakers had essentially decided to mortgage their future for the chance to pair Davis with James and win championships right away. The good news for the Lakers is that Davis has been terrific. Really terrific, averaging 26.6 points, 9.2 rebounds, 2.4 blocks and 1.6 steals a game. Vogel described him as the "defensive player of the year." The Lakers rank among the top five teams in the league in overall defensive rating while limiting opponents to 44.6 percent shooting. None of which is meant to suggest that James and Davis can win games by themselves. The rest of the team has, too, exceeded expectations. To be clear: Few figured that the Lakers would have quite this much depth after they traded about half their rotation to the Pelicans. Alex Caruso, a fan favorite who went undrafted out of Texas A M in 2016, has solidified his role off the bench as a defensive stopper. Kentavious Caldwell Pope has developed into a dependable shooter. Danny Green and Avery Bradley are experienced pros. And Dwight Howard, in his latest reclamation attempt, has emerged as the biggest surprise of all. Signed to a non guaranteed deal by the Lakers in August after DeMarcus Cousins tore a ligament in his left knee, Howard has enthusiastically embraced his job as a backup center. He has also found moments to shine. Consider his performance against Denver on Wednesday: In addition to defending the All Star Nikola Jokic for long stretches, Howard collected 14 points and 11 rebounds in 30 minutes. Caruso was solid, too: In his 22 minutes on the floor, the Lakers outscored the Nuggets by 23 points. James praised both players after the game. "Dwight came in," James said, "and changed the game from an offensive rebounding standpoint, just bullying whoever was on him, being able to get to the free throw, getting us into the bonus, getting us some dunks, giving us some extra possessions. And A.C. defensively was just so in tune, getting steals, getting stops, getting strips." In the aftermath of the helicopter crash last month that killed Bryant and eight others, including his daughter Gianna, Vogel stepped forward as the face of the Lakers. For three straight days at the team's practice facility, Vogel was the sole member of the organization who addressed the news media. He spoke about how his players were grieving, about how James had been a rock for his teammates and about how the Lakers intended to move forward. "We want to represent what Kobe was about more than anything," Vogel said at the time, adding: "It's just strengthened what we've felt all year about our current group, which is that we've become a family in a very short time. And it's something you talk about in the N.B.A. with your teams, but this group in particular has really grown to love each other very rapidly."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
As leaves change and temperatures plummet, some TikTok teens have left behind carefree summer content for autumnal meditations on memory and mortality. Hundreds of users have posted videos about listening to "Everywhere at the End of Time," a harrowing six and a half hour ambient composition by the Caretaker, an alias of the British experimental musician Leyland James Kirby. The album released in six stages between 2016 and 2019 and lauded by tastemakers slowly decays in sound quality with each iteration. The first is a haunting loop of ballroom music; the final stage is barely audible beneath a blanket of static. The project attempts to simulate a fading memory, exploring how musical appreciation is, according to published research on the topic, among the last abilities dementia patients hold onto. Mr. Kirby's conceptual album struck a chord with the TikTok user echoinc, who posted a snippet of the album on Aug. 2 and encouraged followers "looking to hear/read something sad" to listen to the full album on YouTube. To date, more than 720 TikTok users have used the same audio clip in videos. Among them is Owen Amble, 16, from Spokane, Wash. He was drawn to "Everywhere at the End of Time" because his grandfather was recently diagnosed with dementia. "I want him to be OK, and I just wanted to know, like, what was going on," he said in a phone interview. On Sept. 17, Owen posted a TikTok about how the album had reduced him to tears. "Literally the definition of pain," he wrote in the caption. "Never cried listening to something." His video has been viewed more than 340,000 times. "It made me feel like I was so sad, but I was also like, so happy, because it truly made me appreciate this part of my life so much more," he said of the album. "I'm still a kid, I don't have a lot of these responsibilities. And I'm just making all these memories. But to think that one day, everything I've ever done can just disappear, because of my memory. It's so horrifying." He said the album helped him understand his grandfather's illness. "The composer of this music really was onto something in terms of being able to through the medium of music lead a younger generation on a journey through the sounds of what the brain is going through, through a dementing process," said Brian Browne, the president of Dementia Care Education, which trains people who work with dementia patients. "It's a much welcome thing, because it produces the empathy that's needed." Some of the TikTok videos, which have been remarked upon by several digital media outlets, challenged others to sit through the record as a test of endurance, describing physiological symptoms they experienced after doing so. "I really shouldnt have listened to all 6 hours, my body feels numb i wont stop crying," one user wrote. "You feel more and more like you have dementia," Owen said of his listening experience. "By the end, my mind was so fogged." "It doesn't surprise me at all that he felt wiped," said Nina Kraus, a professor at Northwestern University who researches the effects of sound on the brain. "Whether that actually causes brain damage that you can measure, I don't think so." She said only an activity sustained over a long period of time, like learning a musical instrument, could have such dramatic effects. "Our nervous system doesn't change moment to moment in any real fundamental way," she said. The Caretaker challenge sits at the nexus of two viral vectors on TikTok: nostalgia and fear. Young people have often used the app to discover and re contextualize music from the past; recently Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" surfaced on pop music charts after appearing in a skateboarding video. These videos are also an example of creepypasta, in which users post disturbing phenomena in order to spook others. Often, these memes walk a thin line between fantasy and hoax. Several have gone viral on TikTok, including fake stories about the random coordinate generator app Randonautica and tales about the haunting image of Momo. While music is not known to induce dementia symptoms in healthy people, and has even been shown to help animate people dealing with memory loss, Mr. Kirby, 46, wrote in an email that his album often provokes strong emotions. He first released music as the Caretaker (a reference to "The Shining") in 1999 and has used the persona to explore memory and aging across ten albums. "Older listeners have been unable to finish the work as they have the experience of losing loved ones to dementia so it becomes difficult for them," he wrote of "Everywhere at the End of Time." "The reaction from some younger listeners who find the work difficult shows an empathy with what dementia is and how it destroys a person's memories in a devastating way." Some online commentators criticized the TikTok videos. "Seriously please do not turn The Caretaker into some weird online challenge. IT'S NOT A MEME," wrote one Twitter user. "IT IS A REAL DEPICTION OF A DEADLY DISEASE WITH NO CURE."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Joseph Hurley, founder of Savingforcollege.com, says the change is generally a good one. Some potential 529 participants, he said, may have avoided them because they felt they had too little control over their money once they contributed it. Knowing they can change their investment choice more often if they want, in response to changes in the market, may make some families more comfortable. "It relieves the concern that some people have about using 529s," he said. Still, participants shouldn't change investments without a clearly defined reason, investment advisers say. "Just because they can doesn't mean that they should," said Timothy Hayes, a financial planner near Rochester. Many 529 participants choose age based portfolios, with a mix of investments that changes automatically over time as the beneficiary approaches college age. So as long as contributors are comfortable with their plan's fee structure and "glide path" the schedule on which the allocation of funds among various types of investments shifts they shouldn't have to meddle with their choice very much, he said. There are some times, however, when the ability to change investments is welcomed, said Deborah Fox, chief executive of Fox College Funding in San Diego. Each age based portfolio is built a bit differently, and parents may decide that they want an option that is more or less aggressive, she said. Or, a plan may make a new investment choice more available with lower expenses. The key, she said, is to think ahead of a given situation that would warrant a change, so they can act when necessary but to avoid making a mistake out of fear. Meanwhile, other changes for 529 plans are in the works. A measure approved last month by the House, H.R. 529, would include computers and related equipment and services, like Internet access, as an eligible expense for 529 funds. Currently, computers are eligible only if a school requires students to have one. But most students now feel they need a computer, even if the school doesn't mandate it. The legislation also would allow funds to be redeposited into a 529 plan without incurring taxes or penalties if a student receives a refund from the college for instance, if the student had to withdraw because of illness. To avoid being taxed, the funds would have to be redeposited within 60 days.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
GRANTHAM, England Statues of the politically unpalatable have this year been toppled, beheaded and graffitied from the American South to Belgium, and Britain to New Zealand. Not even Winston Churchill was spared. In the English town of Grantham, an hour's train ride north of London, an 11 foot pedestal now stands empty. That's not because the statue atop it has been vandalized though many expect it will be once it is finally installed. Next year, that plinth is to become the base of a stern looking, larger than life bronze monument to Grantham's most famous daughter: Margaret Thatcher. That's true even in her hometown. So while the unveiling of a statue is usually a festive occasion, few in Grantham expect Mrs. Thatcher's homecoming to be celebrated as a hero's return. "If you're a Conservative," said Graham Newton, the news editor of the weekly Grantham Journal, "you want a statue, and you want her recognized. But if you're not, there's a lot of people who not to put a fine point on it hated her." Many in Grantham expect her critics will not wait long to make their mark, Mr. Newton added. "Either way, it'll make a good story for the paper," he said. Culture wars have been roiling around statues since 2017, when officials in Charlottesville, Va., said they would remove a statue memorializing Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy's top general. But voices calling for the removal of statues associated with slavery and colonialism have grown steadily louder this year, particularly since the killing of George Floyd and the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. In England, some have taken matters into their own hands. A monument to Edward Colston, a 17th century slave trader, was toppled in Bristol in June during a Black Lives Matter protest. That same month, a protester in London scrawled "racist" on a statue of Winston Churchill, an ardent imperialist who once said it was right for "a stronger race, a higher grade race" to claim territory from another. (He is also widely regarded as Britain's greatest prime minister for his leadership in World War II.) The statue was boarded up to prevent further damage, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Twitter that it was "absurd and shameful" that Churchill's statue was at risk of attack. As in the United States, where a statue of Abraham Lincoln was considered fair game for protesters in Portland, Ore., a wide range of monuments now seems more vulnerable to attack. And while it is unusual for a statue of a woman a rarity itself to attract such strong emotions, this was always the way with Mrs. Thatcher. Internationally, Mrs. Thatcher, who died in 2013 at age 87, may be seen as a political colossus, the British equivalent of Ronald Reagan. But in Britain, her 11 years in power have a more complicated legacy. Some see her as the leader of a much needed political and economic revolution, privatizing industry, facing down trade unions and winning victory for Britain against Argentina in the Falklands War. To others, she is someone who, coldly, left towns that were dependent on state run industries to rot and turned Britain into a society of uncaring individuals. Perhaps that's why Mrs. Thatcher's presence in Grantham is currently so low key. She grew up above the grocery store her father ran, and there is a small plaque on the building today although the store itself is now a center for "chiropractic natural therapies," beauty and massage treatments. The town's museum features a few exhibits, including her childhood bed and one of her suits, though none of her trademark handbags are on display. "She was never very fond of Grantham, and so Grantham was never very fond of her," said John Campbell, a biographer, pointing out that Mrs. Thacher rarely visited the town as prime minister, and did not mention it in speeches. "She was happy to leave it behind," he said. The new monument, designed by the sculptor Douglas Jennings, won't be Britain's first to Mrs. Thatcher, but it will be the first outdoors, in easy reach of vandals. In 2002, a marble statue was unveiled by the former prime minister herself inside the Guildhall, a regal municipal building in London. (She praised the sculpture for its "good, big handbag.") Within months, a man attacked the statue with a cricket bat, before decapitating it with an iron bar. He was jailed for three months; the statue was repaired, and is still on display. Another statue of Mrs. Thatcher stands in a lobby of the Palace of Westminster, home to the British Parliament. It has also suffered damage since its unveiling in 2007, albeit of a more benign kind: Devoted lawmakers who rubbed the monument's toes to bring good luck on their way into the debating chamber wore off the patina of the brass. The Grantham statue was initially proposed for Parliament Square in London, putting Mrs. Thatcher in the company of Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela and the Churchill statue that was boarded up this summer. But officials rejected it twice for a variety of reasons, including a rule that people honored with statues must have been dead for a decade, "to allow partisan passions to cool and enable sober reflection." The monument is now in storage at a secret location, said Ivan Saxton, the founder of the Public Memorials Appeal, a nonprofit that raised the money to erect it. The plinth was installed in Grantham in February, and the statue was meant to join it in May, Mr. Saxton said, but the coronavirus pandemic scuppered those plans. The unveiling ceremony will now be postponed until social distancing is no longer required, he added, so the event could have a sense of pageantry, complete with local dignitaries and a military band. But last week, the plinth seemed far from a fortress. Two local government employees stood by it, discussing a plan to install flower beds. In interviews with 20 Grantham residents, more were in favor of the statue than against. Joan McDaniel, 82, said she had mixed views on Mrs. Thatcher as a politician, but added that she deserved a monument, even if it could "attract idiots" who might vandalize it. "It looks just like Maggie the fierceness of her," Ms. McDaniel said. Many said it would be good for at least one thing: tourism. "No one talks about Grantham" said Sarah Gibson, 46, a cafe owner. "At least this will get them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
DARK TOWERS Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction By David Enrich Each era seems to have a bank emblematic of its excesses in the 1980s, it was Drexel Burnham Lambert, the junk bond king; in the 2000s, it was Lehman Brothers. The 2010s were different. No towering financial collapse marred the landscape; no Madoff or Enron blighted the business page. Yet never have good times felt so bad. In these early months of the next decade, America is prosperous but malcontent, solvent but anxious. David Enrich, a former reporter with The Wall Street Journal and now the finance editor of The New York Times, has found, perhaps, the perfect vehicle for this murky, un transparent moment. Name a banking scandal and Deutsche Bank was in the thick of it interest rate manipulation, Russian money laundering, currency dealings with rogue states, the collapse of Italy's (and the world's) oldest bank, hidden derivative losses, a high level suicide. It would have been perfect had Deutsche bankrolled a shunned real estate mogul and made him king and of course, they did that too, the one bank that lent to Donald Trump long after he had a reputation for stiffing its peers and for stiffing Deutsche itself. This book was one of our most anticipated titles of February. See the full list. Deutsche is intriguing not only because its leaders chased growth at any cost resulting in mountains of losses, as it always does but because it once was the emblem of European institutional lending, the near opposite of Wall Street short termism. Founded in Berlin in 1870, just before German unification, Deutsche saw its mission as advancing not just profits but German commerce in Europe and America. And over the next century save for a nasty lapse under the Nazis, when it pressured corporate clients to rid themselves of Jewish directors Deutsche did that well. As late as the 1980s, when Wall Street was preaching the glories of debt, Deutsche stood for stability, social as well as financial. It had no C.E.O. excesses because it had no C.E.O. It was run, consensually, by a vorstand (board), an arrangement designed to promote harmony with labor unions and industrial partners. 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. However, as the West deregulated markets, profits from trading soared. Wanting in on the game in 1995, Deutsche recruited Edson Mitchell from Merrill Lynch to expand its markets desk. Mitchell was a gunslinger who would wager 10,000 on a golf putt arguably, not much riskier than the derivatives Merrill peddled to clients. Merrill was so good at peddling these unprotected market bets that one high profile institutional client, Orange County, Calif., purchased enough to wind up in bankruptcy. Seeking just this sort of expertise at Deutsche, Mitchell went on a hiring binge, snagging 2,500 traders and such from his former firm and others, which Enrich calls "one of the greatest migrations in Wall Street history." In no time, Deutsche's center of gravity (and 85 percent of its profits) shifted to investment banking and trading. The bank's formerly prudent style came to seem as dated as the dark oil portraits lining its corridors. The thing about risk is, until it stops working it works rather well. As profits soared, Deutsche wanted more risk. It blithely quadrupled its balance sheet, swallowing Bankers Trust (which Enrich generously labels a third rate firm) and purchasing a dicey mortgage shop at the peak of the bubble. One telling moment in Deutsche's evolution came when an executive bragged that they no longer needed "clients." Why bother writing loans when you can trade derivatives? Another was when Josef Ackermann was anointed C.E.O. The Swiss born Ackermann understood Wall Street all too well. He ran the bank for short term profit and set a target of 25 percent on equity, the banking equivalent of driving 80 miles per hour on an icy road. Troops got the message: Internal controls were scotched or ignored. It was a short step from taking outsize risks to fleecing customers but when whistle blowers reported concerns, they were shoved aside. Enrich recounts numerous examples. A trader named Christian Bittar was in line for a 100 million bonus; when this (unsurprisingly) prompted an internal review, Deutsche staged a whitewash and Bittar got his check. Enrich says the traders were "incentivized to engage in fraud." Later, Bittar pleaded guilty to trying to rig a key interest rate. One of the bank's more troubling activities was laundering billions of Russian rubles (via sham transactions known as "mirror trades") into U.S. dollars. Then there was client Trump. Enrich's portrait isn't new, but it makes for painful reading: the smooth persuasions, the obsequious flatteries, the lying about his net worth to garner loans for office buildings, resorts, casinos. When Deutsche's real estate team cut off Trump, private banking opened the spigot. When a loan came due, Trump had "no intention" of repaying, as if the rules for him were different. Deutsche's brass was so in thrall to Trump's celebrity, and so eager to expand in America, one division lent 48 million to cancel the debt on a Chicago skyscraper a debt Trump had defaulted on with another wing of the same bank. They bought his pitch as voters would. In what could serve as a requiem for the country's lost innocence, the general counsel said, "What the hell are we doing lending money to a guy like this?" Enrich hangs his tale on the story of William Broeksmit, a derivatives trader and Mitchell's pal and would be protector. Broeksmit played the part of "superego" at the increasingly wayward bank, questioning risky trades and asking quaint questions such as "How does that help the client?" But he drank too much and suffered spells of darkness. He got bogged down in the legal and regulatory mire into which the bank was sinking. Eventually, Broeksmit hanged himself. Broeksmit's suicide elevated his usefulness as a narrative prop, perhaps more than his role at Deutsche warranted. Enrich doggedly prowls the psychological shadows for clues about what might have driven him. He trails Broeksmit's son, Val, who wasn't close to his dad but who, after his death, embarks on a quest to find "answers" and to pin culpability on his father's employer. Val gains access to his father's email (and hacks into his mother's credit cards) and shares the goods with journalists and investigators across Europe and America, often demanding money that he then spends on heroin and Oxy. This soap opera says much about the Broeksmits, less about Deutsche. To Enrich, the story shows that Wall Street lures good people "away from their moral and ethical principles." However, he presents no evidence of Broeksmit acting immorally. He was, rather, a decent if imperfect banker who, as Enrich says, internalized his employer's problems. "Dark Towers" suffers some unfortunate tropes of business journalism: Val is "fueled" by Ritalin, traders are "fueled" by testosterone and "crazed" by adrenaline; the bank is "fueled" by greed. Perhaps "fuel" should be reserved for energy writers. Enrich's most tantalizing nugget is that in the summer of 2016, Jared Kushner's real estate company (which received lavish financing from Deutsche) was moving money to various Russians. A bank compliance officer filed a "suspicious activity report," but the report was quashed and she was fired. The suggestion that maybe the money was payback for Russian campaign meddling isn't one that Enrich can prove. Similarly, we will have to wait to see if Deutsche can recover from years of banking malpractice that destroyed its capital and wiped out 95 percent of its stock price. In the meantime, Enrich has given us a thorough, clearly written and generally levelheaded account of a bank that lost its way.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The world that Anna Sperber performer and choreographer inhabits onstage is not yours or mine. It's private: a mystery to outsiders from first to last. Yet she makes it immediately compelling. You watch in hope of understanding her better. Instead, in "Wealth From the Salt Seas," presented this week at the Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens, she remains opaque, an unknown species keen to remain unknowable. The audience sits on four sides of the action: Even when she comes closest to you, she feels remote. Ms. Sperber ranges from being quietly withdrawn to obsessively intense. It's a pleasure to watch her face, her physique, her variety. At the start, in silence, she walks to a corner of the stage stands, turns, looks askance. Then she places the back of her hand to her neck while she looks to one side. Is the gesture one of mild anxiety? Maybe, but her thoughts seem directed elsewhere. Her eyes continue to suggest some other preoccupation while her hands start to trace the top and bottom of her pelvis. Soon she travels across the stage: a few spins this way, a few that. Who is she? What's driving her? But "Wealth From the Salt Seas" tells no story. And, although this hourlong piece changes Ms. Sperber's character, it does not deepen it. After this beginning in silence, the piece becomes a collaboration with the singer musician Gelsey Bell who shares the stage, is similarly dressed (barefoot, leggings and chemise in matching brown) and is evidently a kindred spirit. Some of Ms. Bell's music is taped, but some consists of remarkable vocalism. She emits a number of trills (long lines of rolling Rs with full voice, now inwardly delivered, at high pressure) and single notes sustained with the steadiness of electronic signals.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Katie Mitchell's production of Alice Birch's "Anatomy of a Suicide" played at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2017. 7 More Adventurous Theater Directors to Look Out For Ivo van Hove is a rarity: a stage director who has bridged the divide between experimental European theatermaking and the story driven demands of the commercial American stage. Who might follow in his arresting footsteps? Here, courtesy of critics and writers for The New York Times, are names to watch and where to watch some of their coming productions. This German director's high octane "Richard III" (incorporating a rap by Tyler, the Creator) left me breathless at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mr. Ostermeier, who heads the Schaubuhne theater in Berlin, excels at updating classics to a modern setting his violent "Miss Julie" took place in Putin's amoral new Russia but he also champions fascinating, intellectually inquisitive new works like "Returning to Reims." An announced Broadway debut with "An Enemy of the People" seems to have been indefinitely postponed. Perhaps it's time to give it another chance? ELISABETH VINCENTELLI One of the most imaginative and divisive pace setters of the theater of anachronism, this British born auteur rose to fame with visually startling productions that recontextualized classics, from Euripides' "Iphigenia at Aulis" (reimagined within a stoical, World War II home front) to a ravishing multimedia interpretation of Virginia Woolf's "The Waves." Having focused largely on opera in recent years, Ms. Mitchell returns to London this month to direct Cate Blanchett in Martin Crimp's "When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other: Twelve Variations on Samuel Richardson's Pamela." BEN BRANTLEY The South African Ms. Farber finds new primal energy in theatrical war horses. Her version of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," at the Old Vic in London, was steeped in the sweat, dirt and darkness of colonists finding their way in a harsh new world, while her reimagining of Strindberg's "Miss Julie" as the post apartheid era "Mies Julie" conjured a lethally mixed cocktail of sex and politics. This season, she'll be staging her compatriot Athol Fugard's "Boesman and Lena" for the Signature Theater. BEN BRANTLEY This Australian maverick loves to steer celebrated stars out of their comfort zones in implosive, bare knuckled productions that strip the poetry from lyrical plays. He has worked his rowdy magic on Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert (in an antic take on Genet's "The Maids"); Gillian Anderson (playing a tigerish Blanche DuBois in a Darwinian jungle in Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire"); and Sienna Miller (red in tooth and claw as the title character of Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"). BEN BRANTLEY Mr. Castellucci's cryptic shows exalt rather than frustrate audiences. This Italian director creates masterful living tableaux that often draw from classical and religious themes, and summon tectonic, elemental forces the striking visuals are sometimes accompanied by deafening soundscapes, and sometimes unfurl in a quasi mystical quiet. Mr. Castellucci has become an in demand opera director in Europe, but he shines most with his own company, Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Their "Democracy in America" will be part of Montclair State University's Peak Performances series from May 9 12. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI Last year, this Australian director made a blistering New York debut with "Yerma," a tale of obsession descending into madness. The trademark of Mr. Stone's emerging career seems to be high concept sets: an enclosed transparent box in "Yerma," a three story grid of rooms in "Hotel Strindberg," a revolving abode in "Ibsen House." Just as the characters have nowhere to hide, Mr. Stone's productions turn classics inside out he usually rewrites them the better to reveal their guts. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI The Swiss born director's taboo testing productions led one publication to call him "the world's most controversial director." He broke out in 2009 with "The Last Days of the Ceausescus," about the trial and execution of Romania's Communist leader and his wife, while "La Reprise" in which he re enacts the murder of a gay man in Belgium was the talk of this year's Avignon Festival. His New York debut, in March at N.Y.U. Skirball, will be "Five Easy Pieces," about Marc Dutroux, a notorious pedophile and murderer. Almost all the actors are children. ALEX MARSHALL	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Economics has a foundation in hard numbers employment, inflation, spending that has largely allowed it to sidestep the competing partisan narratives that have afflicted American politics and culture. But not anymore. Since Donald J. Trump's victory in November, consumer sentiment has diverged in an unprecedented way, with Republicans convinced that a boom is at hand, and Democrats foreseeing an imminent recession. "We've never recorded this before," said Richard Curtin, who directs the University of Michigan's monthly survey of consumer sentiment. Although the outlook has occasionally varied by political party since the survey began in 1946, "the partisan divide has never had as large an impact on consumers' economic expectations," he said. At the same time, familiar economic data points have become Rorschach tests. That was evident after the government's monthly jobs report on Friday; Republicans' talking points centered on a 10 year low in the unemployment rate, while Democrats focused on a sharp decline in job creation. "I find it stunning, to be honest. It's unreal," said Michael R. Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "Things that were less politicized in the past, like how you feel about the economy, have become more politicized now." Indeed, the night and day views underscore yet another front on which Americans remain polarized five months after the election, and with President Trump nearing his 100th day in office. There are some tangible reasons for the split. Many Republican states, including the Midwestern swing states that provided Mr. Trump's margin of victory, have experienced a more sluggish recovery over the last eight years and are thus more invested in the change promised by Mr. Trump. Many Democratic states have bounced back more vigorously. Hence their political and economic viewpoints were jolted by November's election result. For example, Vermont, Colorado and Massachusetts all carried by the Democrats are thriving, with an unemployment rate below 4 percent. In Republican strongholds like Alaska, Georgia and Alabama, the rate is well above the national average of 4.5 percent. Rank and file Republicans aren't the only ones who are feeling more upbeat, whether or not it's justified by the data. Sentiment among business leaders who backed Mr. Trump has also surged since the election. David Congdon, chief executive of Old Dominion Freight Line, the trucking giant, never expected Mr. Trump to win when he voted for him in November. "I fell out of bed when I got up in the morning on Nov. 9," he admitted. "I didn't quite know what I was voting for." But despite misfires in Washington like the failed attempt to roll back President Barack Obama's health care policies, Mr. Congdon is definitely feeling more positive. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "Trump's got a hard road ahead of him, but I think he's off to a decent start," said Mr. Congdon, who recently joined other transportation executives for a meeting with Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. Economists, too, find their outlook shifting with the political landscape. Before the election, Heather Boushey, a top adviser to Hillary Clinton during the campaign, thought "the economy was on the right track, with slow and steady growth like we've had over the past few years." Now she is much more pessimistic, especially about the economy's long term prospects. Although she is pleased that the Affordable Care Act survived Republican efforts to repeal it, the gridlock has led her to believe that Mr. Trump will never get a big infrastructure spending package through Congress. "I am losing hope that we will make those much needed investments over the next few years," said Ms. Boushey, executive director of the liberal Center for Equitable Growth. The University of Michigan researchers have their own way of measuring the gulf between the two viewpoints and how quickly it has flipped. Among Republicans, the Michigan consumer expectations index was at 61.1 in October, the kind of reading typically reported in the depths of a recession. Confident that Mrs. Clinton would win, Democrats registered a 95.4 reading, close to the highs reached when her husband was in office in the late 1990s and the economy was soaring. By March, the positions were reversed, with an even more extreme split. Republicans' expectations had soared to 122.5, equivalent to levels registered in boom times. As for Democrats, they were even more pessimistic than Republicans had been in October. As at the voting booth, the split in perceptions could have real world consequences. If behavior tracks the recession era sentiment among Democrats, who account for 32 percent of respondents in the survey, prophecies could quickly become self fulfilling by affecting spending and investing decisions. "If one third of the population cut their consumer spending by 5 percent, you get a recession," said Alan Blinder, a Princeton economist who served in the Clinton administration and advised Al Gore and Hillary Clinton on economic policy during their Democratic presidential campaigns. "I don't think it will happen, but it's not beyond the realm of the possible." To be sure, even if Democratic consumers pulled back, that wouldn't necessarily bring on a recession. A burst of spending by bullish Republicans, who equal 27 percent of those polled by the Michigan researchers, could counteract much of that drag. And independents, who are the largest cohort in the survey, at 41 percent, remain fairly optimistic about future growth. It is rare for "rising optimism to coexist with increasing uncertainty," said Mr. Curtin, the Michigan expert. "The current level of optimism clearly indicates that no economywide spending retrenchment is underway, but the prevailing level of uncertainty will limit growth in discretionary spending." Lawrence H. Summers, who served as Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and was Mr. Obama's chief economic adviser during his first term, said he, too, was struck by the big swing in economic sentiment. "It is a remarkably big switch from October," he said. "If you are a Democrat, you are primed for negativity. It carries through in your view of everything else." A prominent Democrat himself and a strong Hillary Clinton backer, Mr. Summers is nonetheless slightly more optimistic than he was late last year, because the data on housing starts and business investment intentions has been positive, not because of the new administration's policies. Whether the optimists or pessimists prove more prescient about the economy's trajectory, Mr. Summers said, the split in perceptions will persist. "I'd bet there will be some minor convergence," he said, "but there will still be a large divergence on what should be a matter of objective reality."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Six months into the pandemic induced economic crisis, the layoffs keep coming. About 825,000 people filed for state unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. That figure, which does not reflect seasonal adjustments, is far below the more than six million a week who were filing as layoffs peaked in the spring, but higher than in the worst weeks of many past recessions. Millions are relying on unemployment benefits to meet their basic expenses. Worse, progress is slowing: Applications for state jobless benefits rose last week, and have been falling only slowly since midsummer. "Compared to April, they're trending down, but if you're comparing to the pre Covid era they are still so high," said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist for the career site Indeed. The recent loss of momentum is particularly worrisome, Ms. Konkel said, because restaurants and other businesses that had shifted operations outdoors are likely to begin laying off workers again as colder weather hits Northern states in the weeks ahead. "We're losing steam, which is definitely not good heading into the winter," she said. In addition to the filings for state jobless benefits, the Labor Department recorded 630,000 initial filings for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, an emergency federal program that covers freelancers, self employed workers and others left out of the regular unemployment system. That program has been plagued by fraud and double counting, and many economists say the data is unreliable. In recent weeks, California and Arizona in particular have reported a flood of fraudulent claims. On Saturday, California announced it would stop accepting applications for unemployment benefits for two weeks while it took steps to cut down on fraud and address other issues. The data released Thursday suggests that even before that shutdown, California had begun to get its fraud problem under control. The state reported just under 100,000 applications under the program last week, down from more than 200,000 the week before, and more than 400,000 per week in late August and early September. But for Californians like Stephanie Santiful, the shutdown is a source of frustration and uncertainty. Ms. Santiful, 37, lost her job as a university librarian in March. After a few weeks, she began receiving 450 a week in state unemployment benefits, plus a 600 weekly supplement from the federal government while that program lasted. It was a bit less than what she had earned while working, but enough to pay her bills. The supplement expired at the end of July, and last week she reached the end of her regular state benefits. Ms. Santiful should qualify for an additional 13 weeks of benefits under an emergency program created by Congress in March, but she has to apply for them first and with California's application system paused, it isn't clear whether she will be able to do so. She also has yet to receive the 300 a week in extra benefits that President Trump authorized last month, and doesn't know when she will get it. "It's scary," said Ms. Santiful, who lives in Lancaster. "It's scary to not know what to expect. It's scary not knowing if the country decides, 'OK, that's been enough, you're on your own.'" Ms. Santiful, who has two teenage sons, said she had saved enough to cover rent for October. But after that, she isn't sure what she'll do. She said she was considering returning to Virginia, her home state, but doesn't know how she would afford that. 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 can't even move back home because I don't have the money," she said. The report on Thursday marked a grim milestone: 27 weeks since the flood of layoffs began in mid March. In most states, workers qualify for a maximum of 26 weeks of unemployment payments, meaning that workers who lost their jobs early in the crisis have begun to see their benefits expire. An emergency program established by Congress in March offers an additional 13 weeks of benefits for most workers. And a separate federal program will provide extended benefits after that if the unemployment rate remains elevated. But experts on the unemployment system said there was a risk that benefits for some workers would lapse at least temporarily. In the meantime, unemployed workers are trying to make ends meet without the extra assistance that helped them earlier in the crisis, particularly the 600 weekly federal supplement. The 300 a week stopgap replacement that Mr. Trump ordered, Lost Wages Assistance, was drawn from federal disaster funds sufficient for only six weeks of payments. Because the program is retroactive to the week that ended Aug. 1, it lasted through the first week of September in most states. Confusingly, many workers have yet to begin receiving payments or are just starting to get them because many states took weeks to get the program running. So workers in some states will receive a lump sum to cover retroactive benefits, and nothing more. Tyler Lindsay worked as an event sales manager at Hornblower Cruises for four years before he was furloughed on March 17, when the pandemic hit and cruise operations ground to a halt. He was permanently laid off on Aug. 17, after the cruise line decided to suspend New York operations at least through the spring. That money, which includes retroactive payments, will go toward the roughly 1,000 in October rent and 250 in utilities for his apartment in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. But the program's funding has ended, so Mr. Lindsay will have to look for longer term solutions. "Every little bit helps," he said. "But it's still not enough." After he was furloughed, Mr. Lindsay began receiving 504 a week in New York State benefits, plus the 600 weekly federal supplement. But since the supplement ended in late July, he has used 2,000 of his savings since the pandemic hit to pay for rent and buy groceries, while cutting back on expenses. "When the 600 was still here, I still felt comfortable ordering takeout or meeting a friend out to get drinks," he said. "But now I'm a lot more conscious of not being able to do that." Mr. Lindsay said he had lost hope of employment in the event industry in New York and was considering moving somewhere like Florida, where he thinks he would have more opportunity to find work at weddings and parties because virus related restrictions are looser. But the idea makes him nervous. "Do I want to risk my life and throw myself into a situation where there aren't proper Covid practices?" Mr. Lindsay asked. "But at the same time, things don't appear to be getting better here in New York City financially. So it's a predicament."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
"Here were all these people behaving differently. They were doing something differently. They didn't hurt each other. It's such a stunning thing that it's hard to wrap your head around. But it's real. I'll stick up for it. I will embarrass myself and be a hippie and say, yes, there was something completely different going on for a second." "Quite honestly, Woodstock literally changed my life. At the time I was more interested in jazz and classical music. My heroes were Bird and Trane and Miles. I wasn't an actual member of Johnny's band at that time; I was sort of a special guest. And after that performance, just everything shifted for me. I realized that it wasn't my personal world, that music really had the power and the ability to reach out and bring people together. It just caused me to realize and re evaluate everything."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. This clever, clockwork song has Ed Sheeran abetted by the pop pros Max Martin and Shellback. True to Sheeran's catalog, it's a tale of insecurity at a party that somehow turns to romance: "You take my hand, finish my drink, say shall we dance." The crucial clockwork is Afro Caribbean: the syncopated backbeat that links dancehall, reggaeton and dembow, which is stripped down and then decorated differently verse to verse. Along the way arrive high piano chords, backup "oohs," a "hell yeah" out of Beck, floating keyboard notes and Justin Bieber's Auto Tuned vocals joining in for star power in the guise of male bonding. Without that Afro Caribbean beat, the song wouldn't exist. JON PARELES The titans of grime have remained admirably true to form even as their popularity has exploded far beyond what seemed possible even a few years ago. Stormzy, long the genre's most accessible star, will be one of the headliners at the Glastonbury Festival next month, a first for a grime artist. His new single "Vossi Bop" bested Taylor Swift to top the British singles chart. It's fleet, confident, almost joyous hip hop, skipping out on low end almost entirely in favor of some chipper boasts and a flow that oozes from one bar to the next. Meanwhile, Skepta remains a ferocious and tart rapper, and "Bullet From a Gun" continues the bruising, both in the way he jabs his syllables, and also in his sentiments: "See it's too easy to write a sad song about how my dad raised me/'Cause I'm looking in the mirror and my dad made me/A real top boy, I just can't play the victim." JON CARAMANICA Whatever her partner did, it wasn't minor. "You need to stay out of my way," Jhene Aiko warns. "Triggered" circles through a few piano chords as she processes a major betrayal. It's a negotiation with her partner, with herself, with her continued attachment and her roiling anger: "You are my enemy, you are no friend of mine," she decides, but moments later realizes she's still attracted. "All that history, all that's history," she says, but soon realizes, "I'll calm down eventually." Emotionally, this story isn't over. PARELES Zayn and Zhavia Ward, 'A Whole New World (End Title)' "Contra Todo" "Against All" is the battle cry that opens "Almadura," the second solo album by iLe: Ileana Mercedes Cabra Joglar, who sang and rapped for a decade with Calle 13. With a melody that hints at Afro Caribbean chants, an obstinate drumbeat and burly saxophones backing her up, she vows for herself and, it seems, for her hurricane battered home, Puerto Rico to become "the shout of a silenced voice." PARELES Everyone misses Sade during her long silences, and for some songwriters, it's an opportunity to provide mantras of melancholy. As part of a new EP titled "Spirit," Rhye the songwriter Michael Milosh croons "I want to be needed/that's what I need" in a track that's as intricate as it is subdued; a full band and string arrangement infuse themselves behind the echoey piano chords that begin the song. The singer and songwriter Niia collaborates with the producer Robin Hannibal, a founder and ex member of Rhye, in the even slower, preternaturally hazy "If I Cared," which gradually reveals its pitilessness in a sweet whisper: "I don't want to hurt you/again and again," Niia sings, but then again, "you're weak by nature/and I'm sharp like a razor." PARELES Mark Dresser Seven, 'Black Arthur's Bounce (In Memory of Arthur Blythe)' The name of the new album from Mark Dresser, a bassist with unimpeachable avant garde credentials and a waxy, flexible attack, is "Ain't Nothing But a Cyber Coup You." As you might expect, it's a healthy mix of droll irreverence and life or death conviction, played by a septet of masterful improvisers. Who else embodied this kind of musical approach? Nobody better than Arthur Blythe, the underappreciated alto saxophonist known as "Black Arthur," who died in 2017. On "Black Arthur's Bounce," Dresser pays homage as he leads his band through crooked dance grooves, well cropped swing, riotous bursts of improvising and, finally, an almost peaceful fade away. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO The ASAP Mob first arrived in hip hop as a crew of aesthetes, but what's become clear over time is that the mode the members thrive in the most is rowdy rhyming. "Pups," the new ASAP Ferg single, is essentially a remake of DMX's "Get at Me Dog," delivered with the rawness of a freestyle on an old DJ Clue mixtape. While Ferg leans in to his sense of humor, ASAP Rocky doubles down on the clipped, nimble flows that he sometimes abandons on his solo projects, but which mark him as an inventive rapper hiding in plain sight. CARAMANICA The latest project from Davis, an emerging alto saxophonist, is Alula, her most formally innovative group yet. It's a trio, with two established experimentalists laying the foundation under her sax: Matt Mitchell on synthesizers and Gregory Saunier (best known as a member of Deerhoof) on drums. Each of the 11 tunes on her new album has its own identity, but they're all unified by a loose, scrappy energy and a dedication to serious plotting. "Landing" stands out, for its papery synth sound, long sax tones and percussion that sounds like a marching band drummer rehearsing alone in an empty auditorium. It's just the right amount of unsettling like what you'd expect to hear in the background after a confounding, climactic scene in a great Lynch film. RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
A former top executive of Juul is alleging that the e cigarette giant sold at least one million contaminated mint flavored nicotine pods and refused to recall them when told about the problem in March. In a lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday, Siddharth Breja, who was senior vice president for global finance, claims he was fired on March 21 in retaliation for whistle blowing and objecting to the shipment of the contaminated and expired pods and other illegal and unsafe conduct that "has jeopardized and continues to jeopardize public health and safety and the lives of millions of consumers, many of them children and teens." New York and California are the latest states to sue Juul over its marketing of vaping products to young people. Mr. Breja detailed a culture of indifference to safety and quality control issues among top executives at the company and quoted the then chief executive Kevin Burns saying at a meeting in February: "Half our customers are drunk and vaping" and wouldn't "notice the quality of our pod s." Mr. Burns, who left the company in September, issued a statement Wednesday afternoon strongly disputing the quote. "I never said this, or anything remotely close to this, period," the statement said. "As CEO, I had the company make huge investments in product quality, and the facts will show this claim is absolutely false and pure fiction." The lawsuit was first reported by BuzzFeed News. "He was terminated in March 2019 because he failed to demonstrate the leadership qualities needed in his role," Mr. Kwong said. "The allegations concerning safety issues with Juul products are equally meritless, and we already investigated the underlying manufacturing issue and determined the product met all applicable specifications." This lawsuit is only the latest in a growing series of cases against Juul being filed around the country by school districts and individuals. Earlier this month a federal judicial panel gathered together the far flung cases before Judge William H. Orrick in the Northern District of California in San Francisco, who will oversee them. The claims typically focus on personal injury for vaping related illnesses or false marketing. The panel estimated that there are about 50 lawsuits so far. Mr. Breja's lawsuit did not specify what the contaminant in the nicotine pods was. The allegations detail that the shipment of tainted mint flavored pods resulted from a series of decisions by Juul that created a huge demand for that flavor. In November 2018, Juul, under scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration, announced it would no longer sell its teen friendly flavored pods in retail stores, making them available only online. But while Juul moved its dessert flavors off the shelves, it continues to sell menthol and mint in retail stores. Mr. Breja alleged that with popular flavors like mango and creme no longer readily accessible , customers began embracing menthol and mint with fervor, so much so that demand outstripped supply. Mr. Breja said in the legal complaint that Mr. Burns, whom he characterized as behaving like an autocratic "king," pressured suppliers to hurriedly come up with more mint flavored product. Mr. Burns, he said, also exhorted employees, saying, "You need to have an IQ of 5 to know that when customers don't find mango they buy mint." In March, Mr. Breja said he learned that batches of pods flavored with mint flavored liquid and nicotine had been contaminated and that 250,000 "Mint Refill Kits," the equivalent of one million pods, had been shipped and were being sold by retailers. Juul did not recall the pods, Mr. Breja said, yet he was told to charge the supplier, Alternative Liquids Inc., 7 million so that Juul could recover from the contaminated batches. The supplier was not reachable for comment. Mr. Breja said he urged Juul's chief financial officer to issue either a recall or put out product safety warnings. A week later, the complaint says, Mr. Breja was fired. Erika A. Kelton, a lawyer at Phillips and Cohen, a Washington based firm that represents whistle blowers but is not representing Mr. Breja, said that although the allegations are cast as a wrongful termination case, they are likely to get the attention of regulators. "These contamination allegations are headline grabbing, and I'd expect both federal and state regulators will investigate because they are of such grave public concern," she said. Juul is already under investigation by numerous government offices, among them: the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, five state attorneys general and several congressional committees.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health

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