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Before Sunday, Kendall Hinton hadn't taken a snap for the Denver Broncos at quarterback not in a game, not in a practice, not in the recesses of his imagination for a pretty logical reason: He is not a quarterback. Once, back at Wake Forest, he was. But as a junior he moved to wide receiver, a role he held until Saturday, when four Denver quarterbacks were ruled ineligible to play because they'd been exposed to coronavirus, causing Hinton to start cramming for the first N.F.L. game of his career, at a position he hadn't played in more than two years. A tumultuous weekend across the league, rife with outbreaks, schedule adjustments and new regulations intended to slow the scourge, continued Sunday with a poor imitation of a professional football game in Denver, though Hinton won't remember it that way. Thrust into an absurd situation, he didn't complete a pass until after halftime of the Broncos' 31 3 loss to the New Orleans Saints that served as a distillation of the N.F.L. experience amid the pandemic. On one sideline at Empower Field: the Saints (9 2), a repeat violator of league protocols. New Orleans had incurred 250,000 in fines, and Coach Sean Payton 100,000, for his failure to regularly wear a mask in Week 2, and it was reported Sunday that they were docked another 500,000, plus a seventh round draft pick, for celebrating in their locker room without masks following a Nov. 8 victory at Tampa Bay. Payton, who contracted the virus in March, had danced along with them. On the other sideline: The Broncos (4 7), who were thrust into quarterback by committee disarray because three quarterbacks Blake Bortles, Drew Lock and Brett Rypien gathered at team headquarters Tuesday, an off day, to watch film for two hours with a fourth quarterback, Jeff Driskel, who two days later tested positive for the coronavirus. The quarterbacks failed to immediately disclose to contact tracers that they didn't wear masks or tracking devices and did not distance sufficiently for the meeting. "We count on them to be the leaders of the team and leaders of the offense," Broncos Coach Vic Fangio said after Sunday's game, "and those guys made a mistake and that is disappointing." The Broncos had requested to move the game to Tuesday, ESPN reported, since that would have conceivably allowed a quarterback enough time to get cleared to return. But the league has said multiple times that games will not be postponed for one player or a position group, and it was not going to consider Denver's situation a special circumstance. "Maybe it could have been moved," Broncos safety Kareem Jackson said. "But at the same time, maybe the league's just making an example of us." Long before the season began, the league insisted that it was aiming to play a full 256 game slate without interruption a challenge, without a so called bubble environment and with Super Bowl LV contested, as scheduled, on Feb. 7 in Tampa, Fla. Whether that would happen, whether it will still happen, hinged always on the discipline of players and staffers, but also the vagaries of a virus that has ravaged the nation. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. As transmission rates have surged across the nation, they have also done so in the N.F.L., and the events that transpired over the long Thanksgiving weekend might very well have signaled a preview for the remainder of the season. In Santa Clara County, Calif., officials imposed a three week ban on contact sports that will force the San Francisco 49ers to play their two scheduled home games in that period elsewhere, while the Baltimore Ravens continued to grapple with an outbreak that has sidelined more than two dozen players and staff members and has postponed their game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, originally scheduled for the prime time slot on Thanksgiving, twice. As such, it's also possible that the virus will again wipe out an entire position group for a game, resulting in even more of the competitive inequities that are viewed as an inevitable consequence of playing football during a pandemic. The Broncos learned Saturday that all four quarterbacks would be unavailable, and since league rules prohibit new acquisitions from playing without having quarantined in advance, they faced a conundrum: Who could play the position? Regrouping, they pared the playbook to a tenth of its size, Hinton estimated about 20 to 30 plays. Denver opted for a committee at quarterback three running backs took snaps Sunday and prepped Hinton for having extended playing time. He said it was difficult to tell what kept him up late Saturday: nerves or studying. Emergency situations surface in other sports, but there's no real equivalent to what unfolded for the Broncos. Even in the N.H.L., where in the most dire conditions a civilian is called on to play goalie, the athlete has generally has done so, at some level, recently. On the eve of the season, Denver waived Hinton, who worked in sales until joining the practice squad in early November. On Sunday, Hinton, playing the most difficult position in professional team sports on 24 hours' notice, was asked to maneuver a tractor trailer the day after earning his drivers' license. Warren Ruggiero, Hinton's offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Wake Forest, said it was wild to imagine that Hinton would play quarterback in the N.F.L. before the man who replaced him John Wolford, now the No. 2 quarterback for the Rams. "A lot of times, he'd just make a Kendall Hinton play, you know?" Ruggiero said. "He'd figure it out and run around and make a couple guys miss. He always had that in him." Hinton still does have that in him, but the speed of the Saints' defense stunned him Sunday. He ran twice for seven yards and connected on one of nine passes, to Noah Fant, for 13 yards. Denver finished with 112 total yards, six first downs and more turnovers (three) than completions. "In the final analysis," Fangio said, "it was just too big of an ask." With two or three days of practice, Hinton said, he would have played better he just knew it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
That was the overriding sentiment online on Wednesday when a start up suggested its internet connected vending machines would upend traditional big city corner stores, and not so gracefully borrowed a name for these stores. The company, Bodega, created by two former Google employees, claims its product is as "easy as opening your own pantry." In order to take items from the machines there are over 30 throughout the San Francisco Bay Area users must use an app that is linked to their credit card. "Eventually, centralized shopping locations won't be necessary, because there will be 100,000 Bodegas spread out, with one always 100 feet away from you," Paul McDonald, one of Bodega's creators, told Fast Company. The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development in New York addressed the matter in a statement. "The awful irony of naming the company 'Bodega' after the very brick and mortar institutions they aim to displace, to say nothing about the cat their logo is based on that will similarly be displaced, is offensive, utterly misguided, and frankly disrespectful to New Yorkers," it said. Frank Garcia, chairman of the New York State Coalition of Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, told Fast Company that "to compete with bodegas and also use the 'bodega' name is unbelievably disrespectful." "Despite our best intentions and our admiration for traditional bodegas, we clearly hit a nerve this morning, we apologize," he wrote. "Like NYC's bodegas, we want to build a shopping experience that stands for convenience and ubiquity for people who don't have easy access to a corner store." The company declined to comment further. Could these machines that hold about 100 nonperishable items each realistically replace bodegas? After all, technology like Uber has disrupted New York's taxi business, and Airbnb has rattled the hotel industry. Saiful Islam, who has been working at the Corner News Grocery Store in Midtown Manhattan for about 14 years, doesn't think so. "Machines can't be the brain," he said. In most corner stores, customers are not necessarily looking for home goods or groceries. Bodegas are a place, often featuring a friendly neighborhood cat, to order breakfast sandwiches and coffee. A place to buy lottery tickets, cigarettes and foreign language newspapers. Day by day, tech creates a world in which fewer people are needed to do jobs, Mr. Islam said. But at the store where he works, where many lottery tickets are sold, "you need a person to handle things." But Michael L. Kasavana, a former professor at Michigan State University and a researcher on automated merchandising systems, thinks vending machines could replace stores in the future. "There's definitely a market for the replacement of the corner store with those kinds of machines," he said on Wednesday. "It's a quick stop. You don't have to talk to anybody. It's anonymous, and it's cashless." "Americans have shown that they're not afraid to do self service, whether it be at the gas pump, replacing banking or online purchases," he said. The idea behind the start up is not new. Automat vending machines, introduced in New York in 1912, served sandwiches, hot dishes and desserts, among other things. People were able to drop a nickel in a coin slot, open a compartment door and pull out a ready to eat dish. The new Bodega machines cannot offer hot or cool items. Bodega is also not breaking ground in the realm of internet connected vending machines, which are on the rise, according to Berg Insight, a market research firm in Sweden. It predicted in a December 2016 report that the number of internet connected vending machines worldwide would grow from 1.5 million units in 2015 to 3.6 million by 2020. There are almost 17 million vending machines worldwide, the report said. Shop24, for example, has numerous locations in Europe and a handful in the United States. They are massive by vending machine standards and provide refrigerated goods.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Michael B. Jordan (left) and Denzel Washington chat at the Lambs Club in Manhattan. When Mr. Jordan made his breakthrough in the movie "Fruitvale Station," he was compared to a young Denzel Washington.Credit...Andrew White for The New York Times Michael B. Jordan (left) and Denzel Washington chat at the Lambs Club in Manhattan. When Mr. Jordan made his breakthrough in the movie "Fruitvale Station," he was compared to a young Denzel Washington. "It was a big highlight," Michael B. Jordan said, then looked down shyly into his lap. The actor was explaining what it meant to him when film critics wrote that his breakthrough performance in "Fruitvale Station," five years ago, reminded them of a young Denzel Washington. Possibly complicating matters was the fact that Denzel Washington was sitting next to him at the table. "When someone says you're like your idol," Mr. Jordan said, "It's like: 'Really? You see that in me?' I'd only done that one movie. But then I started using it as motivation," he said. "I wanted to pop up on Denzel's radar. He's the O.G. If I could get recognition from him, I know I'm going down the right path, you know?" Finally, Mr. Washington broke in with a booming laugh: "And here we are, Mike! Looks like it's working out already," he said. In the past decade, Mr. Washington has ruled the stage, too. He won a Tony Award for best actor in the revival of August Wilson's "Fences" in 2010, later directing and starring in an Oscar nominated film version. He led the acclaimed revival of "A Raisin in the Sun" in 2014. And on April 26, he will open again on Broadway in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's play "The Iceman Cometh," a searing and (at four hours long) monumental drama about the lies we tell ourselves to get through life. Like Mr. Washington, Mr. Jordan, 31, got his big break on television: on HBO's "The Wire," when he was just 15. After his heartbreaking performance in "Fruitvale Station," about the last day in the life of a transit police shooting victim, he starred in the popular "Rocky" reboot "Creed." And earlier this year, he played the villain, Erik Killmonger, in the Marvel juggernaut "Black Panther," winning perhaps the best reviews of anyone in the extremely well reviewed cast. Next month, he stars in "Fahrenheit 451" on HBO, a dystopian film based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. Mr. Jordan plays a "fireman," part of a state sanctioned brigade that hunts down readers and burns books. His company, Outlier Society Productions, is one of the film's producers and also among the first to adopt inclusion riders, requiring diversity among cast and crew, as called for by Frances McDormand from the stage of this year's Academy Awards. Over a cocktail hour at the Lambs Club in Manhattan (a Diet Coke for Mr. Washington, a sauvignon blanc for Mr. Jordan), the actors traded notes about creating characters and the socially minded work that really matters to them. These are excerpts from the conversation. GALANES But all those things you did law, journalism, acting they're all about getting to the bottom of a story, right? WASHINGTON I like that part: building a character. You start with the material that gives you clues. If you're playing a boxer, you want to throw out punches. If you're playing a conductor, you want to get on a train. WASHINGTON Sure, but you don't know who the character is just by reading the script. I don't read a script and go, "Now, I get it!" That's just the beginning. The first thread you pull. MICHAEL B. JORDAN The script tells you what's going up on screen. But the biggest part, the fun part, is figuring out what happened to that character before Page 1 of the script. What kind of food does he like? Did he get into fights going to school? That back story determines the choices you make within the confines of the script. And going through that process with the director is a big part of the collaboration. Now I've got notebooks and notebooks of back stories. Some directors may want you to add something or change your version. That's when you try to find common ground. GALANES Is that why you've both worked with directors repeatedly? Mike with Ryan Coogler; Denzel with Spike Lee and Antoine Fuqua. Your common ground? WASHINGTON laughing Maybe they're the ones who called. What you're saying is part of it, but I don't think it's just one way. JORDAN Those are the roles I was lucky enough to get. Ryan and I have worked together three times, and I have a really close relationship with him. But I said no to lots of other things with other people in between. They weren't right. Personally, I think you're defined by what you say no to. WASHINGTON I say yes to everything! GALANES Why do I doubt that? Managing a career as big as yours must take a lot of work. WASHINGTON Not now. Maybe early on. Now, I just do what I want to do. And you don't want to walk down the same road twice. I'm sure after doing "Iceman Cometh," I won't be looking to do another play. WASHINGTON Yeah, not for a while. GALANES You're too young to remember this, Mike. But early in his career, Denzel was so beloved for playing good guys in "Glory" and "Cry Freedom" that we all freaked out when he started playing villains: in "Training Day," "American Gangster." And he was even better at bad guys! Was that about walking down different roads? WASHINGTON I grew up right here in New York. Trust me, "Training Day" was a lot closer to who I was than a lot of the others. It wasn't a stretch for me. And the original script was more like "Lethal Weapon." But when Antoine Fuqua came on board, he brought this whole L.A. gangster thing to it. That wasn't even in the script. But I went with it. JORDAN So much trickles down from the director. That's why I try to choose the ones who make the best environments to work in, so we can maybe make something as good as "Training Day." You don't want to go into a project with somebody who won't be helpful to your process or vice versa. GALANES I read this funny thing about you, Mike: You started choosing projects where you wouldn't die in the end? JORDAN It started with my mom, who's superemotional. When I shot my death scene in "The Wire," she was on set. And the P.A.'s kept coming to me and saying: "You may want to check on your mom." I go see her, and she's sitting there bawling. I'm just a kid. I'm going, "Come on, Ma. You're embarrassing me." And after "Fruitvale Station," I was like, "Man, this is really affecting her." But there was another thing, too. Look at Denzel's career. I want people to see me win. I want audiences to see me ending up on top not dying. I want to be the leading man. WASHINGTON How old are you? WASHINGTON Man, I got underwear older than that. JORDAN That was the real thought process: How do I become a leading man? I know phenomenal actors who can't open movies overseas. How do you become the guy who can carry a film? WASHINGTON When I was a teenager, "Shaft" and "Super Fly," those were our superheroes. I remember watching "Super Fly" with my boy Carl, and when we got back to the projects, he carved the character's name Priest on the elevator door. And Richard Roundtree in those long leather coats in "Shaft." GALANES Both of your new projects are dark. "Iceman Cometh" is brutal. And in "Fahrenheit 451," competing ideas are so scary that people decide to burn all the books and kill the readers. Why choose them now? JORDAN I was shooting "Black Panther," down in Atlanta, when I first saw the script for "Fahrenheit." I didn't want to do it at all. I didn't want to play an authority figure especially with what's going on with the police in my community. I didn't want to play an officer who was oppressing people. But then I had lunch with the director Ramin Bahrani , and he talked me through his vision, what the movie would be about. And slowly, I changed my mind. GALANES It's powerful to watch a black man in your role. JORDAN But it wasn't all there on the page. I needed to make sure that he was willing to collaborate, to change some things to help me, as a black man, feel more comfortable in that role. And my company's co producing it alongside HBO was important to me too. This is my first time working with the director and the network, giving my opinion and hoping that it's taken seriously. WASHINGTON Listen, this is what I love: acting on stage. And I don't have to do anything else. Just be in this play. So, don't feel sorry for me compared to most workers in America. GALANES Is theater on your radar, Mike? JORDAN Down the line. But right now, I want to take care of my family financially and grow my production company. That's the big thing I want to do: set my family up. JORDAN As a kid, you don't see your circumstances. I didn't. It's not until you look back and think, "Man, we were poor!" My parents really hid that from me. They kept me safe. GALANES You had a tough situation, too, Denzel. WASHINGTON It wasn't that tough. I was having a good time. A lot of my boys went to prison. JORDAN That's why I want to take care of my family now. Then let me go and work on my craft, do something to fulfill me on the inside. That's what I think theater is going to be for me when I'm older. What do you love about it, Denzel? WASHINGTON The energy from the audience is immediate. And you get to develop a full life. See, in film, you might shoot the end first, then the middle. But on stage, it's the full score of the character's life. And you always get another night. GALANES Hang on, I'm asking something different: Based on your years as a powerful figure, why do you think some guys turn to ugly behavior, and others don't? WASHINGTON Nobody's perfect, man. Don't put me on a pedestal, if that's what you're trying to do. I'm just a human being. I made mistakes; I'll make some more. Hopefully, you learn from them. My mother always said, "Keep it simple." The older I get, the more I understand her: Cut away the fat. When you're younger, you want to see, taste, touch. WASHINGTON (laughing) There you have it. But when you get to be my age, you learn you don't have to. I have a beautiful wife, beautiful children, a great job. What more do I need? JORDAN And people like us, actors of color, we don't get a lot of second chances. It's a different type of scrutiny. Knowing it's not all fair and equal, you've got to make smart decisions in the moment. WASHINGTON I remember going home one time and saying to my mother, "Hey, Ma, did you ever think that I ..." And she said: "Stop right there! Do you know all the people who've been praying for your raggedy butt?" You don't get there by yourself. JORDAN That's crazy! I was just thinking: I'm going to church in the morning because I know the people there have always prayed for me. Their blessings have protected me from terrible situations. That's how I think about keeping it simple: remembering where it started that village, that tribe that kept you safe. WASHINGTON The way I see it, I'm in the service business now. I'm here to serve God, my family and young people of color in our business. I talked to Ava DuVernay, whose "Wrinkle in Time" had just opened this morning. Now, Mike knows more about what it's like for younger folks today. There were no black superheroes when I was growing up. GALANES And it was 38 years between Sidney Poitier's Oscar for best actor and yours. WASHINGTON And then something like five Oscars to black actors in the last 10 years. GALANES How about opportunities for people of color? WASHINGTON That's why I'm here! That's why I'm still in the race. And I'm passing the baton. What a lot of people don't know is: When you pass the baton, you keep running behind the other runner, you don't just stop. I'm like, "Make the turn, bring it home!" I like helping people. I want to see them do well. JORDAN That's why I want to produce so much. I like creating opportunities for people. GALANES You were right out of the gate on inclusion riders, Mike. The first to say, My company guarantees that casts and crews will be diverse. JORDAN That's superimportant to me. No matter what community we're talking about. Everybody should be in a position where they can win. WASHINGTON I'm just wired that way. JORDAN My path is my path. I can't take nothing away from nobody, and nobody can take nothing away from me. I'm running my race. But we can still encourage each other. WASHINGTON What's the harm in that? You'll never see a U Haul behind a hearse.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
A month and a half after the initial phase of the N.H.L. draft lottery was held, the Rangers won No. 1 selection and the opportunity to select the consensus top prospect Alexis Lafreniere, a dazzling 18 year old wing from Quebec. "It really is exciting, for sure," Lafreniere said moments after the lottery winner was announced. He cited potentially playing alongside the 2020 Hart Trophy finalist Artemi Panarin and the Rangers' leading goal scorer Mika Zibanejad as reasons for his optimism. "I think they're going to have a lot of success in the next couple years." After being swept by the Carolina Hurricanes in the play in round, the team won the second part of the draft lottery held on Monday. The Rangers have not selected first over all since the universal draft was adopted, but took Andre Veilleux with the top pick in 1965's amateur draft. Veilleux never played in an N.H.L. game. The team has had six first round picks in the past three years, including the No. 2 overall pick in 2019 that they used to select wing Kaapo Kakko. "We're trying to do things the right way," Jeff Gorton, the Rangers' general manager, said, referring to the team's recent draft history. "Don't want to get ahead of ourselves but I think it's a good night for Ranger fans to be excited." The second phase of the draft lottery was needed because none of the seven teams left out of the Edmonton and Toronto bubbles won the pick in the first phase held on June 26. Monday's draw consisted of the eight teams eliminated in the postseason qualifying round, with each having a 12.5 percent chance of landing the top pick. "If you look through some of the best players in this league, it's not a huge secret where the teams are getting them," Gorton said. "It's lottery picks at the very high end of the draft." In a year when little has been conventional, the N.H.L.'s draft lottery was decided in two phases with more moving parts than a Swiss watch. The first draw revealed the teams that would select in the second through eighth spots. Eight so called "placeholder" selections represented the losing teams in the postseason's qualifying round, and one of them won the top pick. "It was a pretty long process. I've been waiting for this day for a couple weeks now," said Lafreniere, who will have his big day virtually instead of at the Bell Centre in Montreal as originally planned. "It was a big day and, for sure, it's a relief just to know who's going to pick first." Lafreniere cemented his standing as the top prospect over the course of the past two seasons, dominating Canadian junior hockey and at international events like the Gretzky Hlinka Cup and Under 20 World Junior Championships. Where Lafreniere skated, hardware followed in the form of nearly every "Player of the Year" trophy for which he was eligible. Lafreniere has eschewed comparisons to Sidney Crosby, the Pittsburgh Penguins star who was drafted first overall from the same junior team, Rimouski Oceanic. But Scotty Bowman the nine time Stanley Cup winning coach said he had little doubt as to Lafreniere's place among the 2020 draft class. "He's much better than anybody else. There's nobody close to him," Bowman said earlier this year. While Lafreniere may be a slightly less certain superstar than Crosby or the Edmonton Oilers' Connor McDavid when they were prospects, he is widely regarded as a surefire first liner with pro level poise. He is also a rare wing who can drive play in a manner usually reserved for centers, much like the American wings Patrick Kane and Johnny Gaudreau. But at 6 foot 1 and 192 pounds, Lafreniere has more formidable size than either of those players. For the teams that lost out Monday, consolation prizes abound in a draft replete with talent, albeit without quite the same bankability as Lafreniere. The Los Angeles Kings will pick second. The Ottawa Senators own both the third and fifth selections. The New Jersey Devils will be up seventh. As for the Rangers, they also own the first round selection of the team that eliminated them, the Carolina Hurricanes, who will fall to the bottom third of the round. Center Quinton Byfield and forward Tim Stutzle head up the rest of a talented group of forwards eligible to be drafted this year, while defensemen Jamie Drysdale and Jake Sanderson are generally considered the top rear guard prospects. The Russian goalie Yaroslav Askarov seems a mortal lock to be the first taken at his position. If Stutzle is selected second, he would become the highest selected German trained player in league history, a distinction currently held by Edmonton center Leon Draisaitl. Byfield could surpass Columbus Blue Jackets defenseman Seth Jones as the highest selected Black player in the N.H.L. draft by going in the top three. Another highly rated forward prospect, Cole Perfetti, said that while this year's draftees have faced distinct challenges and an extended wait to reach the N.H.L., he embraced the singular circumstances. "It's kind of cool to be part of such a unique group," Perfetti said. "People will look back on the 2020 draft class and think about how different we had it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
You might be watching a community of nuns or worker bees. These women, dressed in calf length culottes with chemises and jackets in dark pastel colors, remain gently purposeful throughout. The movement is entirely flat footed, often pedestrian, with impulses now rigorous, now mild. Dancers bend from the knee or waist; arms and spines ripple and stretch. Often they employ four wooden rods or sticks. Sometimes they arrange them to make various mini or maxi geometries on the floor. Or they wield them like implements punt poles, divining rods, balancing poles, spears used as if to catch fish. One striking effect comes when we watch one dancer walking, with long rod, outstretched along a central line of shadow; because the zones on either side of her are lighted from different sources, her straight rod casts the shadow of a broken line. The mood stays soft, hushed. On three or four occasions, the dancers murmur to one another; you can't hear words. The only other sounds are from the sticks (some loud percussive clacks) or breathing. (Ms. Demyanenko's series of sighs at the end of one solo is distracting, contrived.) Yet nothing is monotonous. Although the dynamics are mainly muted, they contain gradations, contrasts. The three at times move like a single team, at others like three independent people engaged in unrelated tasks. The sustained peacefulness is remarkable: "Latitude" is as satisfying as listening to wind chimes or watching birds on a lawn.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
When does a rehearsal become a performance? In one of the last events on Danspace Project's two month Platform 2015 at St. Mark's Church, the choreographer Pam Tanowitz created "a dance in a day (a dance adrift in the cosmos)." Spectators could come and go between 1 and 7:30 p.m. to watch Ms. Tanowitz, the composer musician Dan Siegler and six dancers make a piece. Claudia La Rocco, a freelance critic for The New York Times, organized Platform 2015 partly as a dialogue between ballet and the postmodern dance that ignited in the 1960s. Accordingly, on Monday, Ms. Tanowitz engaged with four dancers she hadn't worked with before. Devin Alberda, Jenelle Manzi, Russell Janzen and Gretchen Smith are members of New York City Ballet. Two others, Dylan Crossman and Melissa Toogood spent years in Merce Cunningham's company and have worked with Ms. Tanowitz for eight years. The dissimilarities are not immense. Ms. Tanowitz, a ballet lover who was trained in Cunningham technique, choreographs clean lined, foot active dancing that twists classicism while respecting it. But her approach to form argues strenuously with convention. Around 2 p.m., onlookers lounging on the church's carpeted platforms could note differences among the dancers. Initially, Ms. Manzi and Ms. Smith planted their feet in ballet's fourth position a foot's length apart; Ms. Toogood created a veritable gulf between her feet. Mr. Crossman, between the City Ballet women, said he was not adept at the limp wristed gestures that accompany what could be a spiky allusion to Balanchine. (Ms. Tanowitz told him that was O.K.) Ms. Tanowitz, equipped with a portable microphone, had asked each performer to contribute a short sequence. Ms. Toogood, Mr. Alberda and Mr. Janzen taught one another what they had come up with, and strung them together. Ms. Tanowitz, meanwhile, worked on a solo with Ms. Smith that had her flashing her long legs around. Mr. Crossman taught material to Ms. Manzi. Mr. Siegler, with his laptop and other equipment, tried out sounds.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
On the unadorned stage of a black box theater two flights below Bleecker Street, the actor Ken Jennings had only a single prop: a compact Bible, worn with use. He was there, on a Sunday evening in late June, to perform his version of the Gospel of John not as a sendup or radical rethink, but as an act of testament, the religious text edited down to 90 minutes. "I memorized this first as a prayer, not as a play," he told the audience. Then Mr. Jennings, whose Broadway credits include "Urinetown" and "Side Show," made the sign of the cross, folded his hands for a flickering instant and began his energetic recitation. It was an embodiment of the idea, much beloved among theater people, that attending the theater is a lot like going to church perhaps especially if, as one of the drama loving faithful, you're seeking some kind of succor from the experience. "The Gospel of John," at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, was the finale of the four day Sheen Center Theater Festival of Catholic Playwrights, a showcase founded to expand the notion of what Catholic playwriting can be. In two Off Broadway musicals right now, too, worship plays a significant role: Michael R. Jackson's "A Strange Loop," at Playwrights Horizons, in which homophobia cloaked in Christian righteousness wounds a young gay man raised in the faith; and the Lynn Nottage Duncan Sheik Susan Birkenhead adaptation "The Secret Life of Bees," at the Atlantic Theater Company, in which a carved wooden statue of a black Virgin Mary is both object of veneration and source of comfort for a group of black women in 1960s South Carolina. "Mary ain't magical," one of them tells a quizzical visitor, "but she's more than just a piece of driftwood. She's something inside of us." When I was little, my brothers and I would pile each night onto our parents' bed, where our mom would read to us. In the same way that "James and the Giant Peach" is etched faintly into my memory in her voice, the biblical stories I heard at our Roman Catholic church on the weekends and the rest of the week at parochial school are inscribed indelibly in the earliest layers of me. That goes for the Catholic morals and ethics that shaped me, too. I was a teenager when I left the church, but it still has a hold on the way I look at the world. I know it's one of the reasons I'm so drawn to the piercing and profane, wildly funny and very Catholic plays of Stephen Adly Guirgis, with their bare knuckle brawls between good and evil. Likewise my fascination with medieval mystery plays, which dramatized the Old and New Testaments, the production of each biblical tale sponsored by a different guild: the guys who made nails, say, taking charge of staging Jesus's crucifixion. My upbringing is also part of my affinity for the Sheen Center, which is a project of the Archdiocese of New York. Much of the center's theater programming like "Little Rock," which was about the fight for racial integration; "Hold These Truths," about the disgrace of American internment camps during World War II; or Tectonic Theater Project's "Uncommon Sense," about people on the autism spectrum, and by extension about the sanctity of life examines questions of morality and social justice. So did the staged readings in its playwrights festival, raising issues like the squeezing of the working class (Caridad Svich's "Red Bike") and the ugly history of eugenics in the United States (William Baer's "Three Generations of Imbeciles"). In another play, Erik Ehn's scripturally inspired "The Weak and the Strong," an aging rodeo rider deteriorates in body and mind. But religion is not the top note to any of these. Faith is more prominent in Nathan Yungerberg's "Thea," a comic surrealist meditation that glides on wings of gospel music. Performed at the festival by an A plus cast (Brenda Braxton, Tina Fabrique, Monroe Kent III, Zonya Love, Matthew Sims Jr. and Mirirai Sithole), it straddles earthly existence and the afterlife in the waning days of Sister Thea Bowman, a Catholic nun and historical figure whose grandparents were enslaved. As she lies ravaged by cancer, a gaggle of ancestors awaits her arrival. There's no benevolence to the religion, though, in "A Strange Loop." It's ferocious and toxic: a weapon wielded unquestioningly by the faithful to shame and shun, in conflict with the Christian edict to love one another. That show's heartbreakingly potent church scene finds a flip side in "The Secret Life of Bees," with the Atlantic's building, a former church parish house, amplifying the sense of worship. The characters' devotion to the Virgin Mary whom they call Our Lady of Chains, for the consolation she's given to generations since the days of slavery is ecstatic, kinetic, even transcendent. The mingling of worship and drama, of course, is older than Christianity; in ancient Greece, the Athenians paid tribute to the dissolute god Dionysus by holding theater festivals. These days, we often think of drama as providing a kind of secular communion. "Hadestown," on Broadway, takes that idea literally, building it movingly into the action of the show. But the secular can also be spiritual, the habit of worship transformed into the habit of theatergoing. A couple of months ago, returning from a visit to my mom as she was dying, I found myself viscerally needing to see a show immediately. Going to plays is what I do for a living, but this had nothing to do with work; it was about assuaging my own pain. I bought a ticket to Dave Malloy's "Octet" at Signature Theater Company, conscious that what I wanted was the solace that church might provide, if I were still religious. That's not a fair thing to ask of any work of art, I realize. Yet the moment the music started, rich and choral and enveloping, I could feel it soothing my soul. The ritual of theater, too, was a comfort: a group of strangers, sitting together in what I think of as a sacred space, breathing the same air as the actors, listening as they told us a story. It had nothing to do with religion, or faith. But that was church to me.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
LOS ANGELES Oprah Winfrey pushing hard on the promotional circuit. Pent up demand for a PG rated Disney film. The first movie in four years from a filmmaker heralded as a visionary. A production and marketing budget of at least 150 million. "A Wrinkle in Time" (Disney), directed by Ava DuVernay, the first African American woman at the helm of a big budget studio film, and starring a diverse ensemble cast led by Ms. Winfrey, Mindy Kaling and Reese Witherspoon, had everything going for it. But, as often happens in Hollywood, the sum added up to less than its parts. "A Wrinkle in Time" arrived to a lackluster 33.3 million in ticket sales at 3,980 theaters in North America over the weekend. That turnout placed it well behind Ryan Coogler's "Black Panther" (Disney), which collected about 41.1 million in its fourth weekend, for a new domestic total of 562 million, according to comScore, which compiles box office data. After a sturdy debut in China over the weekend, "Black Panther" crossed the 1 billion mark worldwide, shattering a myth about the overseas viability of movies rooted in black culture. To avoid going down as a misfire, "A Wrinkle in Time" primarily aimed at children ages 8 to 14 must attract large numbers of families in the coming weeks, when schools begin spring breaks. However, Ms. DuVernay's movie, adapted from Madeleine L'Engle's novel, received mostly weak reviews from critics and a B grade from ticket buyers in CinemaScore exit polls results that typically do not translate to strong word of mouth.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The manuscript of "Media vita" has not survived, only a copy made in the 1570s. "Media vita" starts low, rising as if from catacombs. The tenors begin, sounding the slow, steady chant that will occupy them for more than 20 minutes. Countertenors come in above them, also rising step by step. Then the highest line enters, then another, another, still another, until all six parts take flight rich yet somehow fragile, even lonely, and full of fear. "Media vita in morte sumus," they sing: "In the midst of life we are in death." We also know how Sheppard died: likely of the "new ague," a strain of pandemic influenza that swept England in 1557, then returned the following year in a murderous second wave. Perhaps one in 10 Londoners died in 1558, a carnage that claimed Sheppard just after it took Reginald Pole, the archbishop of Canterbury, and probably the queen as well. So if "Media vita" was written near the end of Sheppard's life as it may well have been this profound meditation in the face of death might be the pandemic piece par excellence. "Media vita" has become a touchstone for me this year, a piece I have played over and over as a beacon of certainty at a time when certainty has been impossible. But the more you try to find out about it as I did in interviews with artists who created most of the nine recordings of a work that has become a cult favorite the more uncertain this inventive, dissonant piece becomes. It sounds, to our ears, almost like a slow movement from Mahler or Bruckner, but we have no idea how Sheppard would have heard it. We don't have its manuscript, only a copy made in the 1570s. We have five of the six vocal parts, but the tenor part is lost, requiring reconstruction before the piece can be performed. And we don't know how accurate the copy is. Are some of the dissonances "piquant," said Robert Quinney of the Choir of New College, Oxford that make it sound so modern actually errors? Or are they a faithful account of what Owen Rees, director of the vocal ensemble Contrapunctus, calls Sheppard's "extraordinary harmonic imagination?" Liturgically, this antiphon (a piece that frames a psalm or canticle) was intended for Compline, at the end of Lent. But the text, which recurs in some funeral rites and Good Friday services, might mean that it was written for a specific occasion. Perhaps, Mr. Quinney suggested, this occasion was the funeral of Nicholas Ludford, a composer who perished in the flu's first wave and was buried, like Sheppard after him, at St. Margaret's, the parish church in the shadow of Westminster Abbey. "Frailty and weakness, pain, repentance, passion, desperation, but faith, acceptance, hope," said Rebecca Hickey, a soprano in the ensemble Stile Antico, summing up the work. "It does encapsulate almost the whole scope of human emotion and the Christian faith, in a nutshell, is all there." At the peaceful heart of "Media vita," after the polyphony has sucked you in, comes the solemn, unadorned "Nunc dimittis." "Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace," the interlude begins. Sheppard is still little known, at least compared to contemporaries like Thomas Tallis. The standard date given for his birth is 1515, though that is guesswork based on an application Sheppard made for a doctorate in 1554. Except for his time at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he led the chapel choir on and off in the 1540s, evidence of his life is thin. At some point he moved to London, joining the Chapel Royal in 1552. For a long time he remained obscure. Omitted from "Tudor Church Music," a 1920s compendium that started a revival for figures of Sheppard's era, it took until the 1970s for scholars like David Wulstan, another Magdalen man, to start to edit his works. Wulstan recorded some of Sheppard's scores, and he had among his students Peter Phillips, founder of the Tallis Scholars, a crucial ensemble in the resurgence of Renaissance polyphony. "We did a lot of Sheppard very early on," said Mr. Phillips, who released the first commercial recording of "Media vita" in 1989. "The success of it took me completely by surprise. I realized it was a terrific piece, but it wasn't normal." Others started to explore Sheppard, including another Wulstan disciple, Harry Christophers, who had recorded many of the composer's scores by the early 1990s. But with Wulstan unsure about his edition of "Media vita," with debates ongoing about the appropriate pitch for music like this, and with the work itself "crucifying to sing," as Mr. Christophers remembers from his own performances and recording, "Media vita" languished. Three verses follow the "Nunc dimittis," each a test of faith. The first spotlights the lower voices, the elder singers in a male choir: "Cast us not away in our old age when our strength fails, neither forsake us, O Lord." The second repeats the idea: "Shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer." The third splits the top two lines in half and leaves a chasm to the basses below, opening up the texture as if to let us hear single members of the choir: "Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; forgive our sins." Between the verses come those colossal "Sancte" pleas again: all of them after the first verse, but then with the "Sancte Deus" dropped after the second and the "Sancte fortis" after the third, so the last, magisterial entreaty for mercy is left to sound alone. Prompted in part by Mr. Skinner's suspicions, last year the scholar Jason Smart published a new edition of the score that has strong claims to archival accuracy, but excises most of what made the piece so alluring. Partly audible on Alamire's release from earlier this year, Mr. Smart's adjustments include replacing the opening edifice with a six note chant, moving the "Nunc dimittis" to the front, and curtailing those enthralling repetitions of the "Sancte" sections. The 17 minutes that remain still make for a fine work, but one less spectacular and certainly less unique than the 25 minutes we thought we knew. "If you strip it down and go back to what the form should be," Mr. Skinner said, "it's about the size of a large scale votive antiphon, the staple compositional endeavor of most composers." Others who have recorded "Media vita" share Mr. Skinner's desire for fidelity to the sources, but suggest that it might nevertheless survive in its traditional form. Mr. Quinney said that 16th century musicians "had a very much looser concept than we do of what constitutes a musical work," so it "would be bogus to say there is now one way that this music must be performed." Martin Baker, until recently the master of music at Westminster Cathedral and the director of a "Media vita" that even he calls "daringly slow," argues that tradition offers its own form of authenticity. "We were authentic singers of the liturgy in this modern age," he said of his choir, which sings daily services much as Sheppard's did. "And we were singing this music as though it were of relevance to liturgy and people today."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
In March 2017, Karl Lagerfeld, perhaps the greatest master of the viral social media moment a fashion show had ever seen, docked a rocket ship under the glass dome of the Grand Palais in Paris for his Chanel show and then made sure, as the models strutted around it in astronaut print frocks, that it had actual blastoff. That was a few weeks after Nick Graham, the former chief underpants officer of Joe Boxer, held a show at New York Fashion Week: Men's, for his namesake line. The show was entitled "Mission to Mars," and it featured Buzz Aldrin, the lunar module pilot on the Apollo 11 mission, as its closing model. And that was just over a year before Heron Preston teamed up with NASA to create a line of streetwear splashed with the space agency's logo, which was itself around the time Virgil Abloh closed his first Louis Vuitton men's wear collection with a model in a silver space poncho. In honor of the event Mr. Graham also made a limited edition NASA bomber jacket in silver or black satin with a lining featuring the Saturn 5 rocket. Just over half a century ago, the space age caught the imagination of the fashion world and changed how we all dress, ushering in an era of liquid mercury frocks and go go boots; of synthetic fabrics and plastic fantastic technological innovation. The influence of the intergalactic has waxed and waned over the years, but when it comes to wardrobes, the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing not to mention President Trump's plans for a new Space Force; the imminent release of "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," the finale of the space saga; the news that NASA plans to open the International Space Center to tourists next year; and the Elon Musk Jeff Bezos Richard Branson race to privatize exploration of the cosmos is bound to set off trends once again. This time, however, is not quite like the last time. "Space travel is glamorous, it's modern, and it's exclusive," said Mia Fineman, a curator in the department of photography of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the exhibition curator of "Apollo's Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography" all words with great appeal to designers. Julien Dossena, the creative director of Paco Rabanne, said: "It carries values of excitement and belief in human kind and progress. And that never really goes out of fashion." It does, however, change. Originally, after all, the space set Andre Courreges, Pierre Cardin and Paco Rabanne (whose penchant for unnatural materials like plastic and metal, and the links therein, inspired Jane Fonda's futuristic sex bomb costumes in "Barbarella") were united by a sense of optimism and belief in the new frontier, as represented by their clothing. "For French designers especially, the space age became a metaphor for youth and progress," said Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. But what happens when you look forward? As our own attitudes toward space exploration have evolved have stretched toward Mars; toward the galaxy as a necessary escape, rather than pioneer jaunt; toward the idea of mining other planets in an effort to repair the damage done this one so, too, have the designs of those whose job it is to interpret what the promise of space means today. After all, to simply look back is to engage in an exercise in kitsch nostalgia, the exact opposite of what the original space age designers were doing. There's a reason the new motto of Courreges is "the future is behind you." And a reason Yolanda Zobel, the artistic director of the brand, has made it her mission to replace the house's signature vinyl, which once upon a time represented a breakthrough, with natural materials. "The question of the future is the central question," Ms. Zobel said. "You still think about a new world, but today that means something different. It's maybe how we do the same thing, but without plastic this time." According to Lucie Greene, a trend forecaster , advances in material science as much as any silhouette, is actually what represents fashion's new frontier, with designers orbiting around the ideas of growing leather from mushrooms, extruding fabric from a 3 D printer, and regulating body temperature in a time of climate change through sensors in fabric.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
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. 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. Lana Del Rey's misery business continues to thrive. "Mariners Apartment Complex" is the first song she's released in advance of her forthcoming sixth album, and it doesn't vary much from the woozy grandeur she typically luxuriates in. But there's a moment late in the song when a new feeling crystallizes: "Who I am is a big time believer/That people can change, but you don't have to leave her." A lesson? A warning? A plea? JON CARAMANICA Two chord folk rock hypnosis and, of course, guitars running backward are the raison d'etre for Kurt Vile's "Bassackwards." It's yet another of his midtempo, semi spoken meditations on a drifting mind and how the mundane becomes mystical. And it's an exercise in how a collection of guitar licks can keep revealing new intersections for nearly 10 minutes. JON PARELES Richard Thompson has never made a bad album in a career dating back to the 1960s, when he was a prime mover in British trad rock with Fairport Convention. But "13 Rivers," his new one, is filled with the spark of his peak moments: a grim urgency, an unflinching gaze, a lean intensity to the music. Maybe it's because so many of the songs are in minor modes; maybe it's because his lyrics probe psychological states instead of concocting character studies; maybe it's because he keeps his guitar playing upfront; maybe it's because his hardheaded stoicism suits a dire era. In "The Storm Won't Come" he longs for a cleansing apocalypse over a Bo Diddley beat, and his two minute lead guitar finale summons elemental forces. PARELES Al Green's first solo recording in a decade is a reminder of past glories, particularly "Love and Happiness." It's a remake of Freddy Fender's country hit with familiar landmarks: the kind of 1970s Memphis soul beat that Willie Mitchell used to provide, a churchy organ, discreet strings and emphatic horn interjections. Most important, Mr. Green is his old self: arriving anywhere he wants around the beat, gliding or leaping, importunate and reassuring. The performance, like the song, promises steadfastness, not surprise. PARELES Gucci Mane featuring Bruno Mars and Kodak Black, 'Wake Up in the Sky' Tremendously tender and seductively smooth, this patient, sparkling collaboration is an unexpected turn for all of its participants. For Gucci Mane, it's an elevated version of the plain spoken raps he's been leaning on since his release from prison. For Kodak Black, it's a more concisely structured take on his roundabout tongue twisters. And for Bruno Mars, it's an opportunity to showcase his silky singing, but with a naughty twist. CARAMANICA Handclaps are all that accompany Jacob Banks's deep, husky baritone as "Be Good to Me" begins, making it sound as if it could be an old traditional dirge. Then the synthesizers appear, throbbing and lurching, dropping out and plunging back in with dubstep impact, pushing distortion into the mix. In one of the silences, Seinabo Sey suddenly arrives: "My stupid heart is always a casualty," she announces. "If you hit and run, do it gracefully." The song heaves between overloaded, of the moment electronics and soulful voices; it's definitely remix bait. PARELES Mariah Carey becomes an angry ghost on "GTFO," which does not abbreviate the four letter word in the title when she sings it. "I ain't the type to play the martyr," she tells the guy who's done her wrong. "How 'bout you get the" etc. She uses only a little of her broad vocal range or her power; instead, she sings most of the song in a small, breathy voice, multitracked over a squashed, mechanical sounding track, opening up only a little more when she reaches the title and refrain. He's so unworthy that she can dispatch him at a fraction of her strength. PARELES Now Vs Now, 'Silkworm Society' "Silkworm Society" comes from "The Buffering Cocoon," out Friday, the third album from Now Vs Now. This trio features Panagiotis Andreou on bass, Justin Tyson on drums and Jason Lindner, its de facto bandleader, playing keyboards and effects as if he's navigating an intergalactic pod. The entire album will make you remember the 1990s for a second when tech still made us feel optimistic, and space seemed like the place then it'll make you ponder the future. For fans of: Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, early Dr. Dre, late J Dilla, the cinema of Fernand Leger, etc. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO A squeaky melodist in the vein of A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, the young Bronx rapper Lil Tjay only has a handful of songs under his belt but has already honed the sound of exuberance. Sometimes, like on his new single "Leaked," his sinuous vocals hit peaks while he talks about his newfound success: "I remember last year expletive went to Coney/Never thought that this year I'd have a deal with Sony." And sometimes, like on his rising hit, the stellar "Brothers," his sweet, twisty vocals mask something far starker: Bodies drop all the time I don't feel nothing Swear to God y'all gon' make me go kill something Told my shooters no mercy or chill button I done been through so much I don't feel nothing Here's a match that was waiting to happen: the eclectic improvising trio Medeski, Martin Wood and Alarm Will Sound, a 20 piece chamber ensemble with a spirit of incursion at its core. On Friday they released "Omnisphere," a collaborative album featuring original compositions from members of both groups. "Northern Lights," a modal piece written by the Alarm Will Sound bassist Miles Brown, centers on a wavering, seven beat cycle. A marsh of brass and woodwinds set the stage, then John Medeski's swirling drawbar solo carries everything off into the ether. RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Uber and Lyft argue that their drivers are contractors because the drivers decide when, where and how long they work. Lyft says forcing it to classify them as employees "may require us to significantly alter our existing business model." Is Gig Work a Job? Uber and Others Are Maneuvering to Shape the Answer It was a potentially sweeping proposal from a Texas regulator: Companies that use a "digital network" to dispatch workers the way Uber does could label them contractors rather than employees. The proposal, made in December, was a turning point in a campaign that has played out in legislatures and courts in numerous states, and even in Washington, as Uber and other gig economy companies have risen to prominence in recent years. Lobbyists involved in this state by state effort have worked behind the scenes to provide rule makers with a template. Hanging in the balance could be billions of dollars in costs, and even fundamental business models, as more gig companies move toward public stock offerings. When such companies are able to classify workers as contractors, they don't have to contribute to unemployment insurance or workers' compensation, or heed minimum wage and overtime laws. Industry officials estimate that a work force of employees costs companies 20 to 30 percent more than a work force of contractors a sum worth many hundreds of millions of dollars per year to Uber. Worker advocacy groups say the goal is to chip away at classification rules in enough places to create pressure for a broad exemption nationally. What is notable about the Texas initiative, which would apply only to unemployment insurance, is that it emerged not from a democratically elected body but from an opaque bureaucracy. There were no hearings where outsiders were questioned, no meaningful floor debates just a few perfunctory statements at public meetings and a 30 day comment period before the agency could issue a final proposal. "This whole thing caught us by surprise," said Jose Garza, executive director of the Workers Defense Project, a nonprofit group in Texas that helps workers fight wage theft and misclassification. For weeks, the impetus for the rule was unclear. A spokeswoman for the agency, the Texas Workforce Commission, publicly denied that it relied on "outside sources" when drafting proposals. But that narrative abruptly changed in early March when Mr. Garza's group obtained a set of emails from the commission through a public records request. The documents, which The Texas Observer has also reported on, suggest an ambitious new phase of the campaign by gig economy companies to solve their worker classification problem. Emails involving one commissioner and her staff show extensive communications with lobbyists working with Tusk Ventures, a venture capital and political strategy firm. Tusk, in turn, was retained by Handy, a company that dispatches workers, Uber style, to perform household chores like cleaning and repairs. The strategy firm's founder, Bradley Tusk, was once a top political consultant for Uber and remains a large shareholder who could cash out millions in equity when Uber goes public this year. Tusk Ventures appears to have been the primary author of the Texas proposal. Large portions of the draft released by the Workforce Commission mirrored a proposal that the lobbyist forwarded to the agency one year earlier. Lisa Givens, the agency spokeswoman, said she had been unaware of the correspondence when she previously commented. And Texas is not the only place where Tusk has appealed to regulatory agencies rather than legislatures to cement gig workers' status as contractors. According to the emails, the firm has pursued similar efforts in other states, like Illinois. Asked in an interview about the strategy of working through regulators, Mr. Tusk said, "If we believe this is the right policy, our job is to get it through, and that can be the most efficient venue." He foreshadowed the plan in a book he published in September. "We're working multiple angles to get this done federally," he wrote. "And we're working on legislation and rules in 13 more states, too." Different state and federal laws define employment somewhat differently, but most focus on factors like whether managers exert significant control over workers, and whether the work is central to a company's business. Uber, Lyft and Handy argue that their workers should be considered contractors because the workers decide when, where and how long they work. The companies say they are experimenting with ideas, like benefits, to improve workers' economic security. But skeptics argue that the companies exert control through ratings that elicit certain behavior, like treating passengers courteously, and by barring drivers who cancel too many rides. Uber and Lyft also determine pay rates for drivers, something independent contractors typically decide. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In recent years, courts and state and federal agencies have disagreed on this question. But there's little debate that if courts and regulators classified large numbers of gig workers as employees, the move would be highly disruptive to companies that depend on them. Lyft, in its recent filing for an initial public offering, told prospective investors that being forced to classify drivers as employees "may require us to significantly alter our existing business model" and warned of potential "monetary exposure." About five years ago, the gig companies began to head off this prospect. In the legislation that Uber and Lyft backed to legalize their business, they often sought provisions indicating that ride hailing drivers are contractors. About 25 states have enacted such provisions, known as carve outs. In other states, Uber and Lyft worked with a broader group of companies to have most gig workers who are dispatched through digital platforms, not just drivers, classified as contractors. Some legislatures are easier targets than others One consequence of these industrywide measures is that they could affect far more than current gig workers. According to Maya Pinto of the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit worker advocacy group that has just published a report on the topic, the broader measures encourage companies to reclassify employees as contractors. Any business that dispatches employees such as plumbers or electricians or nannies could deem them contractors by using a digital interface to coordinate the work and meeting a few other criteria, Ms. Pinto said. Marla Kanemitsu of Tusk Ventures, who has helped to write such measures, said the motivation for the bills wasn't just to preserve the contractor status of Handy's workers, but also to allow companies to provide benefits, like health care and retirement savings vehicles, that might otherwise suggest an employment relationship. "Providing benefits was always the driving force for this," Ms. Kanemitsu said. In the first six months of 2018, six states passed bills broadly carving out gig workers from employment laws and effectively classifying them as contractors. Mr. Tusk's book referred to these states as the "low hanging fruit of Kentucky, Iowa, Tennessee, Indiana and Utah (and medium hanging fruit like Florida)." But in other states, the fruit stood at a considerably higher altitude: The efforts came up short in Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina and California. Colorado, with a large technology sector, was perhaps the most instructive example. The state was the first to pass legislation legalizing ride hailing companies like Uber, and a local lobbying firm involved in that effort helped spearhead this one, too. It received more than 80,000 in 2018 from Uber and Handy, according to lobbying disclosures compiled by the National Employment Law Project. The carve out bill glided through the Republican led Senate on a bipartisan vote last March, but it ran into resistance in the Democratic controlled House. Around the same time, however, Mr. Tusk's firm was field testing an alternative approach. In December 2017, Jerry Valdez, an Austin lobbyist working for Handy, contacted an assistant to one of the three commissioners on the Texas Workforce Commission. Like most lobbyists, Mr. Valdez and his colleagues assumed a posture of extreme solicitousness. They provided detailed responses to questions from the commissioner, Ruth Hughs, and her staff like how such proposals might comport with federal law. "I am sure it will be informative regarding the matters discussed," Ms. Hughs's senior legal counsel replied in one email. Rarely were the lobbyists more helpful than in devising the rule itself, which would effectively expand to all gig workers an exemption that the state had already passed for ride hailing drivers. Mr. Valdez forwarded Ms. Hughs's assistant a draft, with the subject line "Handy proposal," one year before the commission released its own proposal. Of the nine criteria that the Handy draft laid out for classifying gig workers as contractors, the commission adopted seven almost verbatim, then added two. The commission also hewed closely to Handy's definition of a "marketplace platform" and "marketplace contractor," terms of art for "company" and "worker." Mr. Tusk, whose firm stopped working for Handy after Handy was acquired last year, said there were many advantages to lobbying state agencies for a rule change: "You're not tied to the legislative calendar. If the head of a committee in the State Assembly doesn't like it because they have some business owner in their district, you don't have as much of a problem anymore." A Handy spokesman said: "Our work in all states including Texas has always been conducted through appropriate channels and motivated by a desire for constructive solutions." The process behind the Texas regulation, the final version of which will be discussed at a public meeting before the commission can approve it, appeared to stand in marked contrast to the very public debate in Colorado. Advocates on all sides there continued discussing ways to address the employment status of gig workers long after the legislation failed last spring. Labor officials, policy experts and even a representative from Uber attended a meeting hosted by a Denver think tank on how to protect gig workers from being exploited. "There's been a commitment to figure out a true stakeholder process," said Dennis Dougherty, executive director of the state's labor federation. But not everybody appeared interested in an open debate. In June, when an aide to Commissioner Hughs asked the Tusk lobbyists if there were other states where regulators, rather than elected legislators, were addressing the contractor issue, one state they listed was particularly intriguing. "We are also in discussions," a Tusk official wrote, "with Colorado."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that calls on Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to take steps to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, a set of rules regulating energy plants powered by fossil fuels. What was happening with the Clean Power Plan until now? The plan, which would have regulated carbon dioxide emissions from existing fossil fuel powered electricity plants, has been tied up in courts for more than a year, after more two dozen states, industry representatives and others sued the E.P.A. They claimed that the plan was unconstitutional, and it hadn't yet taken effect because the Supreme Court had said the plan could not be carried out while it was being argued before a lower federal court. Mr. Trump criticized the Clean Power Plan during the campaign and promised to bring back coal mining jobs and create new jobs in the fossil fuel industry; the rules would have made that more difficult. Mr. Pruitt, as Oklahoma's attorney general, sued the E.P.A. 14 times over environmental regulations, including the Clean Power Plan. What happens next? The problem for Mr. Trump and Mr. Pruitt is that, if they get rid of this plan, they are legally required to come up with another one.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Whether or not you believe in a literal Garden of Eden, the biblical story in which it appears has fed opinions about the nature of gender relationships, human sin and the consequences of disobedience. "The Odyssey" has lessons about life's journey, weathering storms, heeding warnings and returning home. Odin, the one eyed Norse god of war and death, is a symbol of self sacrifice for wisdom. Many of the world's most recognizable and influential stories come from Western culture classical mythology, Norse mythology, Judeo Christian narratives and the majority of them illuminate the heroic efforts of men or the cultural experiences of white Western figures. Of course, women and people of color appear in folklore, myths and legends across cultures, but they are less often depicted as heroic protagonists in the prominent, globally renown tales. (Black women, especially, are rarely portrayed as offering anything redemptive, or as spiritually or intellectually conscious enough to positively influence others.) When they are present, their ethnicity is questioned or diminished, as with Andromeda in Greek mythology. It's argued she was a Black character before being whitewashed over the years. The intersections of myth, cultural narratives and identity have long inspired artists. Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu, for example, challenge "traditional" narratives by asking why a certain type of person is the central figure and why the world is said to work in a particular way. There are also newer artists exploring these intersections. By investigating classical myths, Calida Rawles, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Harmonia Rosales are seeking more nuanced ways of depicting the interior lives of Black women. "Artists are storytellers, and as Black women, we're at the bottom of the pile in society," Ms. Rawles said in a recent interview. "But that gives us this unique vantage point to look up and see things in our society and culture from multiple angles. We have so much insight, such varied experiences and many stories to tell beyond these stereotyped identities." I spoke with these three artists about how their work reflects on the power of myths in shaping and reimagining identities for Black women in essence offering new universal stories. Literature has always inspired the Los Angeles based painter Calida Rawles, 44, who created the cover art for Ta Nehisi Coates's debut novel, "The Water Dancer." In her art, water is a way to examine power, race and identity politics, and Black people are depicted submerged or partly submerged in a variety of positions and degrees of light. The idea for the imagery of her recent work came to her after reading the ancient Hebrew story of Lilith. As the story goes, Adam's first wife, Lilith, was demonized for refusing to lay beneath him. She had assumed they would be equals. When given an ultimatum, Lilith chooses her freedom instead of a life of inequality, and endures God's punishment of being cast in the waters for her self assertion. Ms. Rawles's resulting art speaks to the triple consciousness of being Black, female and American, and how this identity is affected by microaggressions, violence, generational trauma and colorism, the judgment of Black people based on their skin tones. The artworks were included in her first solo exhibition, "A Dream for My Lilith," at the Various Small Fires gallery in Los Angeles. The show, which ran just before the coronavirus pandemic shut down most of the country, included the six studies Rawles created for "The Water Dancer" cover and six of her hyper realistic paintings from the Lilith series. The painting also references the poet Claudia Rankine's "Citizen," especially her line about how our bodies have memory. "I was thinking about the adultification of young Black girls and all the racially motivated violence that's committed against them," Ms. Rawles said. "I wanted to speak to that, but I also wanted a layered narrative that spoke of their radiance and beauty despite the things that might happen to them." On close inspection, the girl's body reveals topographical notations of the geographical places where Black girls suffered racially motivated attacks. But for Ms. Rawles, who has three young daughters, Black girls and women are more than their traumas. "I want my daughters to be prepared for the painful realities of this world," she said, "but I also want to remind them that the negative experiences we have as Black women is not the full identity of Blackness and Black womanhood." She added: "Lilith made me think of my daughters growing up in a world where their independent minds and desire to be treated fairly would face resistance especially as Black women. I know how we're labeled and how the world wants to put Black women in their place, especially when we are adamant about equality." "Often, we do what Lilith did," she continued. "We choose our freedom even at the cost of being stereotyped, misunderstood and vilified. We've been leaders at the forefront of injustice in so many fights, and unapologetic about our determination." Yet the gracefulness, softness and fluidity of her paintings project an almost tangible sense of strength, power and resilience. Water has spiritual connotations for Ms. Rawles, as a place of death, transformation and rebirth. "But historically it's also a place of trauma and racial exclusion for Black bodies," she said, referring to violent racial conflicts like the one that erupted in Chicago in 1919 after a Black teenager was killed when he crossed the color line at a segregated beach. "I wanted to reclaim water as much as reclaim aspects of Black female identity." To create her artworks, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, 40, uses pencil and oil paint on wood panels to show figures, landscapes and aspects of scientific formulas. The result: pieces exploring identity as an evolving construct among the self, community and environment. "Overall my work is telling a story of love and longing, how we all want to belong somewhere, within narratives that honor our full humanity," Ms. Sunstrum said. In her art, images often overlap, and you might see part of a human form through a landscape, or multiple images of a specific body part. She gives her subjects a spectrum of skin colors, from golds to pinks, maroons and blues, in an attempt to let the figures stand on their own without having viewers project their pre existing biases onto them. "Whoever was creating these master narratives left out so many other voices," she said. "It was personal for me." Born in Botswana to a Botswanan mother and a Canadian father, Ms. Sunstrum was raised around the world and is now based in Ottawa. Inspiration comes from across disciplines, including quantum physics, ethnography and mythology. She prefers telling stories through multiple mediums and is most interested in developing her own narratives, showing Black female identity to be fluid and ever changing, a multiplicity of stories across time. In her latest solo show, "Battlecry," a collection of seven large scale paintings on wood panel at Goodman Gallery in London through Sept. 26, Ms. Sunstrum explores a cast of characters she calls the Seven. These women, who represent mythological archetypes in the form of seven alter egos, negotiate what it means to be both the hero and the villain of the same story. In a 2017 work, "The Mathematician," Ms. Sunstrum references a 1960 portrait of Madame Ogiugo, a Nigerian woman who sat for Chief Solomon Osagie Alonge, a photographer to the royal court of Benin. She's a colossal figure in Ms. Sunstrum's painting, towering over a chalkboard at which men are working on an equation that floats into the folds of her luminous dress and head wrap. The chalkboard dwarfs the men, symbolizing the power and magnificence of a scientific moment presumably in a European or Western context. "I wanted to suggest that vernacular knowledge, which is known in a nonquantifiable way in our bodies and our traditions, should not be regulated lower on the hierarchy of knowledge," Ms. Sunstrum said. "So I made the mythical mathematician loom even larger than quantifiable knowledge, hinting that these traditional and cultural ways of knowing often manifested through the practices and teachings of women is in fact a massive and valuable body of knowledge." Ms. Sunstrum also references the post independence work of the Ghanaian photographer James Barnor as well as the stories of the South African mythologist Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, whose paintings and teachings emphasize the significance of African belief systems and cultures. "Our history is important, too. Identity is as much ancestral as it is futuristic, in this constant state of becoming," she said. "That was the identity I was trying to give shape to in my work." The painter Harmonia Rosales, 36, based in Los Angeles, creates rich visual stories honoring her Afro Cuban religious heritage and the larger African diaspora. She portrays deities and royalty figures in various scenarios working to raise Black communal consciousness and empower Black women. "It's an attempt," she said, "to expand the limited cultural imagination around the agency of Black people and the nature of Black female identity." Her narratives are set in classical Greece and the Greco Roman world of the early first century C.E., and during the age of European colonialism and the trans Atlantic slave trade. Her visual reference, Classicism, helps her to reimagine how Black bodies take up space in hegemonic narratives and myths. That influence is evident in works like "Our Lady of Regla," which was briefly on view as part of her solo exhibition, "Miss Education: Reclaiming Our Identity," at MoCADA in Brooklyn. The show opened on March 11, right as the city was preparing to shut down because of the Covid 19 outbreak. "Our Lady of Regla" depicts a serene Black Madonna clad in a brilliant cerulean blue shawl thickly trimmed with gold and patterned with gold fleur de lis (itself a complex symbol of religion, politics and colonial slavery). A wide gold headband rimmed in pearls holds her translucent oat colored veil in place. Her downcast eyes are hidden from the viewer, but her ebony face bears evidence of the scarification rite practiced across Africa. She exudes a mix of contentment, pride and resolution. The holy infant Eve, in this rendering is wrapped in a vibrant, patterned crimson blanket reminiscent of Ankara fabric used widely in West Africa. White chrysanthemums and red roses symbols of life, love and death rim the canvas. It's a reconfiguration of the myth that women are the root of humanity's sins, suggesting instead that a Black female body, mind and spirit can be a universal place for powerful beginnings or salvific transformations. Growing up, Ms. Rosales would get lost in the world of Greek gods and goddesses. But combining her love of art with mythology didn't happen until decades later, after her daughter came home from kindergarten requesting to have her hair straightened, calling her mother "practically white" and wondering why her own skin was darker than her brother's. The incident led Ms. Rosales to recall her own childhood, and how she had felt as a light skinned girl growing up in Chicago. "I was always trying to fit in somewhere. Even though I'm Black, it took me a while before I felt like I was enough in my own Black identity. My dad is Black Latino, but to the Latinx community, I wasn't Latina enough; to the Black community, I wasn't Black enough; and to everyone else, I was definitely not white," Ms. Rosales said. Her daughter "didn't want anything to do with stories where no one looked like her," Ms. Rosales said. "And that just changed everything for me." In 2015, she decided to fully pursue art, telling stories that centered Black identity, reimagining stories of classical mythology and Catholicism, and infusing her work with the origin myths of Santeria. Prominent in many of Ms. Rosales' paintings is the blue clothed Our Lady of Regla, a figure honoring both Yemaya, an Orisha goddess of oceans and seas considered to be the mother of all living things, and the Virgin Mary figure of Catholic tradition. Her use of an Eve character also nods to the scientific findings of the Mitochondrial Eve, which is the name given to the single common female African ancestor believed, based on mitochondrial DNA sequences, to be the genetic beginnings of all present day humans. "The identity of the Black woman," Ms. Rosales said, "tells a bigger story of creation and human evolution."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
From space, Earth appears as a blue marble. But some researchers have been studying the planet through a different colored lens: green. They have tried to determine which regions are particularly susceptible to some variations in climate, and which are more resilient. And after studying 14 years' worth of NASA satellite images and tracking changes in the color of vegetation, they have developed what they're calling the Vegetation Sensitivity Index . A new study, published and reviewed in Nature magazine, shows the changes in shades of green (a proxy for plant health) in response to certain environmental factors in this case, temperature, water availability and cloud cover.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first antigen test that can rapidly detect whether a person has been infected by the coronavirus, a significant advancement that promises to greatly expand the nation's testing capacity. The test, by the Quidel Corporation of San Diego, was given emergency use authorization late Friday by the F.D.A., according to a notice on the agency's website. Unlike commonly available coronavirus tests that use polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, antigen diagnostics work by quickly detecting fragments of virus in a sample. The newly approved Quidel test will rely on specimens collected from nasal swabs, according to the F.D.A., and they can only be processed by the company's lab instruments. "Diagnostic testing is one of the pillars of our nation's response to Covid 19, and the F.D.A. continues to take actions to help make these critical products available," the agency said in a statement on Saturday. "One of the main advantages of an antigen test is the speed of the test, which can provide results in minutes." The F.D.A. said it expects to grant emergency clearance for other antigen tests in the near future.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Washington's N.F.L. team will retire Redskins branding and adopt a placeholder team name until it can decide on a permanent name, the organization said Thursday, weeks after announcing it would yield to pressure from sponsors and activists and drop the name it has used for nearly 90 years. "For updated brand clarity and consistency purposes, we will call ourselves the 'Washington Football Team' pending adoption of our new name," the team said in a news release, adding that the logo would be retired by the start of the 2020 season in September. The team also said it would roll out an aesthetic that would reflect the direction of the new franchise as it changes. The team's Twitter account and official site on Thursday took on the temporary name and logo, a large W, though images of the original logo remained in some places and its web address using the old name remained unchanged. The team advertised forthcoming "Washington Football Team" merchandise, and on its website shared prototypes of the temporary logo, uniform concepts and field designs that included an N.F.L. logo at midfield. The end zones in its mock field design read "Washington Football Team, Est. 1932." Team officials did not answer messages seeking comment on Thursday. It was not immediately clear whether fans if spectators are allowed at all during the coronavirus pandemic would be allowed to wear merchandise with the old logo to games. It was also not clear whether the team would eventually change its distinctive burgundy and gold colors, a move sought by Native American groups and nearly 150 federally recognized tribes in a letter sent to N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell this month. The team is scheduled to open its season Sept. 13 against the Philadelphia Eagles. On July 13, 10 days after announcing it would review the 87 year old team name and under mounting pressure from corporate sponsors, fans and Native American activists, the team said it would drop its logo and the name "Redskins," a term many had long considered a racial slur. The team's owner, Daniel Snyder, had previously been uncooperative in changing the team's name, but said the new name would "take into account not only the proud tradition and history of the franchise but also input from our alumni, the organization, sponsors, the National Football League and the local community it is proud to represent on and off the field." The name change came after weeks of national unrest following the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis in late May, and as much of the country quickly moved to change historical representations that use racist symbols. Last month, the Washington franchise spent several days removing a monument and remembrances honoring its former owner, George Preston Marshall, from team facilities and its website. The change came amid pressure on the team to acknowledge Marshall's resistance to signing and drafting African American players and his decision in 1933 to name the team the "Redskins." A memorial of Marshall, which had stood in front of R.F.K. Stadium, the team's former arena, was removed by a city agency after being defaced. Last week, the team was once again in the spotlight as 15 women said they were sexually harassed while employed by the team.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
"When that last moment came, we just fell into each other's arms and didn't let go," Mandy Patinkin said of his and Claire Danes's final "Homeland" shoot together. On a chilly January afternoon, Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin arrived safely at the Library at the NoMad Hotel, a book lined coffee and cocktail space in Midtown Manhattan. No one had been kidnapped on the way. Or forcibly institutionalized. "But it's still early," Patinkin said. For nearly a decade, the Emmy winning Showtime espionage drama "Homeland," which begins its final season on Feb. 9, has subjected its characters to most imaginable horrors and privations. Danes plays Carrie Mathison, a brilliant C.I.A. officer with bipolar disorder, alongside Patinkin as her recruiter and mentor, Saul Berenson. The show itself, developed from an Israeli series by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, has survived its own vicissitudes, including the departures of two leading men, Damian Lewis and Rupert Friend. It has persisted through new administrations and shifting attitudes toward the intelligence community and American interventions abroad. At the start of each season, cast members and writers attended what they call "spy camp," a week of interviews and discussions with experts and intelligence workers a "massive, terribly unnerving download," Danes said, "about what's really happening and what is likely to happen" while the season is on the air. The download helped "Homeland" to mirror and seemingly anticipate real events even as the series wrestled with criticism that its depictions of mental illness were simplistic, its portrayals of Muslims Islamophobic. (During production for Season 5, graffiti artists hired to decorate a refugee camp set sprayed "'Homeland' is racist" in Arabic, which made it on camera.) On that afternoon, Danes and Patinkin still had some additional dialogue to record and neither knew how the final episodes would be edited. But they had shot their last scene together "When that last moment came, we just fell into each other's arms and didn't let go," Patinkin said and had begun to explore what their lives would look like without "Homeland." As the show has progressed, the relationship between Carrie and Saul has become its center. Why? MANDY PATINKIN These are two patriots, these two people. They would give their lives for this country. When we met people through spy camp, that was the enduring quality a love of this country with all its complexity. CLAIRE DANES I didn't quite appreciate how real that was I grew up in New York in a community of artists, and people who question often resent authority. It was very humbling. What makes them such a good team? DANES Well, he is more measured, a lot more sane. He is grounded. And she is flying. They're both wildly intelligent, but they're kind of at different frequencies and those frequencies complement each other. Carrie, if she lost Saul, she would be really, really disoriented. He is her ultimate ballast. She was really grounded and emboldened by the strength of that relationship. PATINKIN All I can tell you is at every point, I had only one desire, which was I wanted Claire to know she could do anything she wanted. That she was that safe. DANES And I did. I thoroughly did. Each year that passed, our relationship became that much more established and the trust continued to grow, and it would be just such a relief to get to play with my partner and I could really relax into it even though they tended to be very stressful scenes. That is one of the things I will miss the most, because when will I have that again? When will I be able to work with somebody consistently over eight years? DANES It's the time. You can't cheat that. And we've done this work in how many countries in how many circumstances? PATINKIN This 30 something kid taught me the meaning of grace, which took expletive forever to learn, that you just be kind and graceful in the worst moments. She showed it to me. DANES The emphasis has always been on the intelligence community, which is a sort of neutral entity, actually. It's a place in government where those two cultures really coexist. There are as many Republicans as Democrats working within that field, and it felt kind of amazing to be in a space where that was the case. PATINKIN The question was, at times, Who is the terrorist? Is it a person in the State Department? In a mosque? Is it a white man? An Islamic man? And that responsibility is so interesting. We took a lot of heat and I'm not defending anything, because people were othered. As politicians use terror and fear to get elected all over the world, they love a show like ours to some degree, because it can help generate fear. That is what sells tickets. But our show is a novel of 12 chapters over eight years. In fairness, you can't read just this chapter when the politician is the bad guy or the religious person in the mosque is the bad guy. You have to take it as a whole. There were critiques of the show as anti Muslim. PATINKIN Colbert did a big critique. And when the graffiti was on the walls and nobody saw it, those guys were right to do it. It was a great wake up call for everyone. Do you think the show was successful in addressing it? DANES I think we could have been more sensitive. I also think that the whole premise of the show, even from the very beginning, was that there were protagonists who were unreliable. Brody played by Lewis was this American hero, and maybe he was the opposite of that. Carrie at the end is completely parallel to Brody. We're not sure if she's been compromised or not. We are subverting typical ideas about what it is to be the good guy. So I think that's always been baked into it. PATINKIN I do think that we have tried to do the work. I think our writers have done the best they could. Mandy, you said in an earlier interview that you wanted the show to end with a sense of optimistic possibility. Did the final season achieve it? PATINKIN I prayed for that. I fought for it. And I hope that my prayers will be answered. I know how things can change in the editing room. But I'm hoping that that wish of an optimistic, positive possibility, void of terror for five expletive seconds, will be a part of our narrative. DANES I think the characters are taken to their ultimate edge, which they always are. I mean, how many times have we both been kidnapped? PATINKIN Sometimes I just wish I was in another trunk. DANES We joke that Carrie, instead of a lingerie drawer, just has a drawer full of hoods. We've been pummeled in a profound way and an almost comical way. I mean you have to be a little detached from it, because it's often so extreme. But I think that we managed it without being too maudlin or saccharine or reductive or simplistic. That was always the trick, to honor the show's sense of daring, which is defining and exciting and rare, and also really honor where we've taken our beloved characters and our beloved audience. Does this feel like the right time to end? DANES Alex just couldn't stand the weight of it anymore. I think it ended for him. The way this show is structured, it can be reimagined over and over again. It's flexible in that way. Every year it was a reboot. Would you have done more if more had been offered? DANES I've been claimed by it. I had two kids over the course of the show, too. So I really didn't have many hiatuses. I think it's important for me as an actor to stretch myself in different ways. So in that sense, it's good for it to end, and this is as good a point as any. But I don't think that it needed to end now. How were the last days on set? DANES We had a final scene together and I lost it at the end. After that, I didn't have scenes that were all that complex or critical. I was in a mild fugue state, strangely calm, a little dissociated. But when I had my final scene with Mandy, that's when I was able to feel the loss and the pride and gratitude for everything that we have shared. When we wrapped, for two consecutive weeks, I dreamed that we were filming. I'm still kind of struggling with this idea of it being truly concluded. But I'm cooking again. I'm de Mathisoning by baking chickens and stuff. PATINKIN I didn't have the balls to not have something to do so immediately after, so I set up a concert tour of which I'm halfway through. Patinkin, a musical theater veteran, sings selections from his recent "Diaries" albums. Over the Christmas vacation, I started walking around with my wife going, "What am I going to do?" I want to be free. But it's like, what am I good at? And who am I, and what am I going to be? I have never had an experience like this. I don't have a reference point. DANES No, me neither. Who does? I mean, I've never done anything as long. I've barely been married as long. I'm not going to find that again. PATINKIN Wait a minute, young lady: You don't know what you're going to find. I've been through a lot of things, and I never imagined that I'd have this opportunity. The blessed grace of our existence is we don't know what happens one second from now. But you'll be in each other's lives?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
No ladies swoon in "The Beguiled," Sofia Coppola's toxic thriller set in the South during the waning months of the Civil War. The movie's mostly female cast members led by Nicole Kidman as Miss Martha, headmistress of a girls' boarding school, and Kirsten Dunst as the maidenly Edwina teaching French to her overheated charges are far too busy vying for the affections of the lone man in their midst. He is Cpl. John McBurney (Colin Farrell), a Union soldier rescued by the women and left to convalesce from gunshot wounds as the household dances attendance on him. Not much changes outwardly after his arrival: The women's slow dawning sexuality is suggested by little more than a fresh wash of color in their cheeks and some subtle alterations in their formidably buttoned up style. Trussed in corsets, jawbone high collars and calicos that had seen better days, they have little enough to work with, their attempts at coquetry further constrained by their rigid mores of the day.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Three blindfolded dancers grope in near darkness as two others lead them in different directions to the sound of hand bells. Moments later, four performers execute a squiggly gestural sequence knitted together with shoulder shrugs, flowing arms and slow plies punctuated by quick swipes of the ankle. At the back of the stage, another dancer, wearing a wolf's head, saunters by. "Dusk Ahead," an evening length work full of such eclectic moments and performed by Junk Ensemble on Saturday afternoon at the Ellen Stewart Theater, embraces the surreal side of twilight, which the French describe as, "L'heure entre chien et loup," or the hour between dog and wolf. That in between time, in which what once seemed safe suddenly wafts of danger, inspired Jessica and Megan Kennedy, the artistic directors behind this award winning contemporary Irish dance company. It makes its United States debut as part of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. It's helpful to know that the choreographers are identical twin sisters. Along with exploring the eerie side of dusk in relation to blindness and vulnerability, the Kennedy sisters frequently stage scenes in which dancers mirror or are attached to one another. A duet for Justine Cooper and Ramona Nagabczynski has the pair moving with their hair braided together; similarly, Ms. Nagabczynski and Miguel do Vale lock their lips in an extended kiss, even as they twist and curl around each other. In one acrobatic feat, she hops onto his thighs and rotates until she's in a backbend. Their lips stay pressed. But in this production, such vignettes have difficulty developing beyond the actions themselves, and too often "Dusk Ahead" feels more like a series of movement experiments culled together under a theme rather than a fully realized world. Sabine Dargent's set, a sculptural installation of coppery strings, is the most arresting sight in "Dusk Ahead"; it glows mistily under Sarah Jane Shiels's lighting.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
This morning, Kumail Nanjiani and Tracee Ellis Ross announced the nominees for the 91st Academy Awards, many of which are already streaming online. Need to get caught up? Some of the biggest contenders are still in theaters, but many are already streaming. Here's a rundown of where to find those nominees that are streaming in the biggest categories, with links to our original reviews. How to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube. In telling the fact based story of a black Colorado Springs cop named Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) who infiltrated a Ku Klux Klan chapter in the early 1970s, the director Spike Lee takes a tonally audacious approach part stranger than fiction irreverence, part political statement about the legacy of white supremacy. The balance pays off in surprisingly accessible entertainment that bridges the horrors of past and present. How to watch: Stream it on Netflix; rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube. The first superhero movie to be nominated for best picture for all its acclaim, even "The Dark Knight" missed the list "Black Panther" goes further than any previous Marvel production in bringing thematic weight to escapist spectacle. Michael B. Jordan makes a particularly vivid contribution as Killmonger, a villain whose threat to T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the newly crowned king of the techno utopian nation of Wakanda, is rooted in competing notions of black identity. How to watch: Buy it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu and Google Play. As music history, "Bohemian Rhapsody" takes a "print the legend" approach to Queen and its electrifying frontman, Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek). The film plays fast and loose with the facts, adhering to the formula of traditional biopics like "Walk the Line" and "Ray," but it was a box office sensation for a reason, tapping into the creative breakthroughs that led to hits like the title track and into the passion that infused the band's career capping Live Aid performance. How to watch: Stream it on Netflix. Returning to the Mexico City of his youth, the director Alfonso Cuaron vividly imagines his upper middle class upbringing through the experiences of a live in housekeeper (Yalitza Aparicio) whose hardships may not have been clear to him at the time. In the neighborhood of Colonia Roma in 1970, the maid tends to the needs of a bustling family during a turbulent period for them, for her and for a country roiled by political unrest. What were the snubs? What were the surprises? Read our roundup here. How to watch: Buy it on iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube. For this fourth iteration of "A Star Is Born," the actor director Bradley Cooper, making his debut behind the camera, works to deconstruct the glam pop image of his lead actress, Lady Gaga, and discover the more unvarnished and accessible version underneath. Resembling a countrified Eddie Vedder or Kurt Cobain type, Cooper stars as a stadium rock star who gives Gaga's drag bar singer a career boost before drowning himself in the bottle. Here's what to read about "Green Book," "Black Panther" and the other best picture nominees.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Dr. Seema Khosla, medical director at the North Dakota Center for Sleep, said clinicians have scrambled to keep up with the many non medical apps and devices on the market. Are you sabotaging your sleep in your quest to improve it? Many new tools are becoming available to monitor your sleep or help you achieve better sleep: wearable watches and bands; "nearable" devices that you can place on your bed or nightstand; and apps that work by monitoring biometric data, noise and movement. They can remind you to start winding down, or generate a report on your night's slumber. But some sleep specialists caution that these apps and devices may provide inaccurate data and can even exacerbate symptoms of insomnia. Fiddling with your phone in bed, after all, is bad sleep hygiene. And for some, worrying about sleep goals can make bedtime anxiety even worse. There's a name for an unhealthy obsession with achieving perfect sleep: orthosomnia. It was coined by researchers from Rush University Medical School and Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in a 2017 case study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. Dr. Kelly Baron, one of the paper's authors and the director of the University of Utah's behavioral sleep medicine program, said that sleep trackers can be helpful in identifying patterns. She herself tracks her bedtime with a Fitbit. But she said she had noticed a trend of patients complaining based on unverified scores, even for things like the amount of deep sleep, which varies by individual. "People were putting a lot of stock in what it was telling them," she said. "Like, 'I'm afraid I'm not getting enough deep sleep. There's something wrong with me.'" As gadgets proliferate, so do concerns The flood of data and buzzwords can easily become confusing: sleep debt percentages, heart rate dips, sleep rhythms, graphs of sleep disruption and comparisons to other users. Wirecutter tried four popular sleep tracking apps. Read the findings here. Dr. Seema Khosla, medical director of the North Dakota Center for Sleep and chairwoman of the technology committee of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, said she and other clinicians had scrambled to stay abreast of all the devices and apps on the market. She appreciates the greater awareness the new sleep tech promotes, but is wary of the pitfalls of inaccurate data and increased worrying. "We want to partner with our patients to improve their sleep," she said. "This means that we need to understand sleep technology including its limitations without dismissing this potentially valuable resource." In the case study on orthosomnia, researchers found that patients had been spending excessive time in bed to try to increase their sleep numbers, which may have made their insomnia worse. And they found it difficult to persuade patients to stop relying on their sleep trackers, even if the numbers had been flawed. Researchers say that trackers can overestimate the amount of sleep that you get, particularly if they focus on tracking movement. If you are lying awake in bed, the tracker might think that you're asleep. While devices that track heart rate or breathing give a more complete picture, they are still only generating estimates. One cautionary tale from the case study: A woman came in reporting that she had an average sleep efficiency of only 60 percent, according to her tracker. She was given medication for restless leg syndrome, tested negative for disordered breathing and underwent a formal sleep study. But after being told that she had slept deeply in the lab, she was not reassured. "Then why does my Fitbit say I am sleeping poorly?" she asked. Fitbit and other companies say the threat of anxiety is overblown The makers of tracking devices and apps defend their use and accuracy. Dr. Conor Heneghan, a research director for Fitbit, said that few people experience extreme sleep anxiety. He said tracking sleep can drive home the importance of a consistent bedtime and wake time. It also can underscore the effects that factors like alcohol and exercise can have on sleep patterns. "What we're trying to do is give people a tool to understand their own sleep health," he said. He said that the bands can provide reliable estimates based on algorithms that the company had developed using machine learning in sleep laboratories. The trackers can also recognize the heart rate and movement patterns associated with various stages of sleep, he said. Users of devices like Apple's smart watch have noticed something similar, with different apps giving different scores on the same night. Apple says that its watch tracks heart rate and motion data. The app makers are responsible for the algorithms that interpret them. "Each experience is unique to that app," the company said. Tired of tossing and turning? There are some strategies you could try to improve your hours in bed. None Four out of five people say that they suffer from sleep problems at least once a week and wake up feeling exhausted. Here's a guide to becoming a more successful sleeper. Stretching and meditative movement like yoga before bed can improve the quality of your sleep and the amount you sleep. Try this short and calming routine of 11 stretches and exercises. Nearly 40 percent of people surveyed in a recent study reported having more or much more trouble than usual during the pandemic. Follow these seven simple steps for improving your shut eye. When it comes to gadgets that claim to solve your sleep problems, newer doesn't always mean better. Here are nine tools for better, longer sleep. Dr. Eugene Spiritus, chief executive of SleepWatch, an app that pairs with the Apple Watch, said that his company's focus was on getting users to pay attention to their behavior and change it. If you sleep poorly, the app will send a prompt asking what might have gone wrong. A late meal? Too much coffee? Too much to drink? Skipped the gym? "Can some people become obsessed with this and have anxiety?" he said. "Sure. But there are many, many people telling us it helps them." Dr. Roy Raymann, vice president of sleep science and scientific affairs at SleepScore Labs, said the company had focused on its apps and a "nearable" device because some people had found it uncomfortable to sleep with a gadget on their wrists. The products monitor breathing and movement using radio and sonar waves, and offer a "smart alarm" feature that avoids waking the user from deep sleep, which can feel more jarring. He noted that there had been some discussion within the industry about the need to standardize accuracy ratings. But no matter how accurate a sleep tracker is, he said, it is only a tracker. It cannot by itself improve sleep. He made an analogy to a bathroom scale: "If you stand on it every day, it will not make you lose weight." The Food and Drug Administration does not regulate sleep trackers because they are low risk devices that only make general claims about improving health and well being rather than diagnosing or treating particular conditions. Health experts say that getting enough sleep on a regular basis is crucial: It can help you think clearly, avoid colds and other illnesses, and maintain a healthy weight, among other benefits. Chronic insomnia has been linked to an increased risk of dying prematurely, having heart attacks, and developing hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, depression and anxiety. While sleep needs vary by individual, the National Sleep Foundation recommends that adults up to age 64 get seven to nine hours a night; younger people need much more. Dr. Khosla said that she had seen patients with trackers neglect the basics of sleep hygiene, like following a regular schedule and avoiding screens before bedtime. "People will shell out 200 bucks for some sleep device, but we're not willing to just shut off our phones and go to bed," she said. Sleep trackers have a low tech predecessor: sleep diaries. Both can be helpful to reduce anxiety by reducing "catastrophic thinking," such as the notion that the day will definitely be ruined if you're only running on, say, six hours of sleep. Dr. Khosla said she counseled patients to let go of the unrealistic notion that they must strive for "perfect" sleep. Dr. Hawley Montgomery Downs, a professor of psychology at West Virginia University who has researched the limitations of sleep tracking devices, believes the best way to assess your sleep quantity and quality is based on how your body feels. She recommended avoiding sleep trackers altogether. Her advice? Find a week when you don't have to get up at a certain time on vacation, perhaps and turn off your alarm. You'll sleep a lot at first, but within a few days, she said, your body will adjust and let you know when to go to bed and wake, and how much nightly sleep you truly need. "Trust that," she said, "instead of the device."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Gunnar Birkerts, a Latvian born architect who extended the vocabulary of Modernism using unexpected angular forms, folding planes and ingenious, light suffused interiors, died on Tuesday at his home in Needham, Mass. He was 92. His son, the literary critic Sven Birkerts, confirmed the death. Mr. Birkerts absorbed the lessons of the Bauhaus while studying in Germany immediately after World War II, finding inspiration in the Scandinavian architects Eliel and Eero Saarinen and Alvar Aalto. He had encountered their work while reading architectural journals in the library of the United States Information Agency. After emigrating to the United States in 1949, he worked with Mr. Saarinen at his offices in Birmingham, Mich., near Detroit, and later with Minoru Yamasaki, a leading practitioner of the style known as New Formalism. He started his own firm, Gunnar Birkerts Associates, in Birmingham in 1963. Projects like the austere corrugated metal Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1972), which the architect Bill Stern called "as honest a building as I've ever seen," and the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis (1973), hung from curving cables like a suspension bridge, established him as an innovative interpreter of the high Modernist style. For the University of Michigan's law library, Mr. Birkerts created an underground addition, completed in 1981, that used elaborately refracted light for illumination. A V shaped glass moat reflected the original building, whose Gothic tower could be seen from 56 feet below ground level. A year earlier, he had completed a building to house the collections of the Corning Museum of Glass. His "linear periscope," as he called it, used textured glass panels backed by stainless steel in a graceful serpentine structure. Wolf Von Eckardt, in The Washington Post, called the design "simple and eminently to the point." The new museum, he added, "has the sensible beauty of a hand cut crystal tumbler." In 2006, the Institute of American Architects gave Mr. Birkerts its Twenty five Year Award to honor the museum's enduring significance. His final building, the Latvian National Library in Riga, also known as the Castle of Light, may have been his greatest triumph. Commissioned in the late 1980s and completed in 2014, it was a labor of love and a cultural focal point for a country finding its feet after decades of Soviet domination. Its mountainlike mass, topped with a glass pyramid, was inspired by a Latvian folk tale about the Castle of Light, representing wisdom, and the Glass Mountain, on which a sleeping princess, symbol of freedom, slept. The American Institute of Architects, awarding Mr. Birkerts its Library Building Award in 2017, called the library "a contemporary Modernist masterpiece." The architect Will Bruder, chairman of the prize jury, said: "He plays with metaphor, poetry and an understanding of his native Riga. It's heroic, allegorical, and contains a power and conviction about its space." Gunnar Gunivaldis Birkerts was born on Jan. 17, 1925, in Riga, the capital of what was then independent Latvia. His parents, Peteris Birkerts and the former Merija Shop, were folklorists who separated before he was born. At 13, Gunnar saw an older classmate's architectural rendering of a gas station and decided then and there on his vocation. Fleeing Latvia ahead of the advancing Soviet Army at the end of World War II, he made his way to Germany and enrolled in Stuttgart's technical university, where he earned diplomas in engineering and architecture. Sponsored by Sylvia Zvirbulis, a fellow Latvian he had met in Germany, Mr. Birkerts moved to the United States and immediately sought out Mr. Saarinen at his offices in Birmingham, Mich., hoping for a job. Unfortunately, Mr. Saarinen's biggest project, the General Motors Technical Center, had been delayed, but he sent Mr. Birkerts with a letter of recommendation to the Chicago firm Perkins Will, which specialized in school architecture. (It is now known as Perkins Will, with offices throughout the United States and in several countries.) In 1950 Mr. Birkerts married Ms. Zvirbulis, who survives him. In addition to his son Sven, he is also survived by another son, Erik; a daughter, Andra Birkerts Footer; and seven grandchildren. After two years with Perkins Will, Mr. Birkerts joined Mr. Saarinen's firm, where his colleagues included such future stars as Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche, Robert Venturi and Charles Bassett. He worked on the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich., and Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Ind., and was the project architect for the Milwaukee County War Memorial. He also won several awards for his furniture design.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Viacom isn't out of the woods yet. Viacom, the media group that includes the MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon cable television networks and the Paramount Pictures film and television studio, reported a 3 percent drop in revenue during the latest fiscal quarter, dragged down by continued declines in both its television and film businesses. Adjusted profit declined 35 percent to 303 million for the three months that ended on March 31, the company's second fiscal quarter, compared with the same period last year, Viacom reported on Thursday. The results were adjusted to account for a 784 million charge the company took during the same period last year for underperforming programming and job cuts. Most concerning, analysts said, was the company's slowdown in domestic advertising sales during the quarter despite past promises from executives for improvement in that area. The deceleration was particularly stark given that there was an improved advertising market across the rest of the TV industry. "There are a lot of moving pieces in that company right now," said Michael Nathanson, a media analyst with MoffettNathanson Research. "Everyone is just waiting to get to a place where we can start looking at things on a more normalized basis, if there is ever a time."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
LOS ANGELES Dan Pfeiffer, the Obama adviser turned author and podcast host, was on his third Sharpie, scribbling his signature on copy after copy of his new book, "Un Trumping America." "I've got to sign 800 of these in the next few minutes," he said. It was the day after Super Tuesday, before coronavirus fears had derailed countless book tours and public events, and 900 people were gathered at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre to listen to Pfeiffer, along with the other hosts of "Pod Save America," riff on Joseph R. Biden Jr., Bernie Sanders, the road to the White House and how to unseat the man holding sway there. The evening, organized by Writers Bloc, felt like a political rally, complete with attendees wearing "Warren" hats. But when you looked closer, you saw a Bartleby type in the third row leafing through Sigrid Nunez's "The Friend," and three women arguing over "American Dirt" while their daughters posted memes. This is what a modern literary salon looks like. As the "Pod Save America" gang spent 90 minutes Monday morning quarterbacking, the crowd cheered, clapped and laughed, while Andrea Grossman, who founded Writers Bloc, watched quietly from a seat in the back. "Considering coronavirus and traffic, it's a pretty good turnout," she said. (Things have changed, of course, and all Writers Bloc events have been postponed indefinitely. "We hope they're going to be rescheduled," Grossman said in a follow up interview on Tuesday. "We just don't know when. We don't have any immediate plans right now because everything is unknown.") For the past 24 years, Grossman, 64, has operated Writers Bloc, a Los Angeles literary and reading series that has become an important stop for politics writers. Authors typically go onstage with a journalist or artist who interviews them, then invites audience members to ask questions. Over the past few years, Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid and Ronan Farrow have appeared to sold out crowds, and Democratic presidential candidates such as Sanders, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris have stopped by. (Back in 2014, Senator Elizabeth Warren was here, too.) "In times like these, which can feel really dark, open, honest conversations are crucial," Reid said in an email. The speakers aren't just Democrats and progressives. In 2016, the former Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott was a guest, sparring with Tom Daschle, another former senator, about why the two parties can't get along. "I remember Trent Lott discussing who he'd support for president. I believe he said Trump, not a huge surprise in the audience, but they talked about how years ago, Democrats and Republicans used to knock back beers together and play golf. And that stopped," Grossman said. 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. Unlike the five figure a plate venues where citizens might otherwise be able to have a conversation with these lawmakers, Writers Bloc events typically cost 20 to 40, and they usually include a signed book. The only rule, Grossman said: "I will not host people who are divisive or sow hate." Fiction writers have long been part of the Writers Bloc lineup guests have included Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro and Amy Tan but they aren't booked as much now, a change Grossman attributed to our 24 hour news culture. "Novelists have taken a hit," she said. "They can't compete with an author or journalist writing about the White House or Washington. If you don't have a Trump book, forget it. Political leaders are our new cultural avatars. They're the new entertainers." "Obviously Andrea has to go where the crowd goes," said the crime novelist Michael Connelly, who has been a guest multiple times. "I'm no different from everyone else: I'm consumed by the politics of our time and I can see why that's become the bread and butter of the people she has." The series started in 1996 when Grossman managed to get Joan Didion's publicist on the phone. Grossman started "rambling," she said, about what a serious reader she was of Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne; she had first editions and knew their works by heart. "The publicist said I'm really sorry, she can't come, and hung up. Then 20 minutes later, they called back 'Joan will do Writers Bloc,'" Grossman recalled. "I really needed a great name, and I got it." The conversation series operated by the 92nd Street Y in New York and City Arts Lectures in San Francisco were among the templates. As word of mouth boosted Writers Bloc's profile, writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Christopher Hitchens agreed to appearances. Grossman, who maintains relationships with many publicists, described her programming sensibility as "people I would fight traffic for." Writers Bloc is a nonprofit organization, and there is a board, but it is exhausting work, and it can cost up to 8,000 to market, promote and put on each event, she said. Sometimes the venues are free. "There is no support system, it's just me," she admitted over croissants and coffee in a Beverly Hills patisserie around the corner from a home filled with books and guarded by Elsie, a German shepherd mix, and Carson, a Great Dane/Labrador mix. Grossman, who has worked in political fund raising, TV programming and cosmetics marketing, knows she's not done. Not yet. Even if she's been forced to pause for the time being. "We're not stopping. It is a hiatus," Grossman said on Tuesday. "The minute that this is lifted, I'm full steam ahead. There's an election that's supposed to happen in November, there are voices that need to be heard and we need to be there on the front lines." Correction: March 16, 2020 An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of one of Andrea Grossman's dogs. It is Elsie, not Else. Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
No one should be surprised to hear that Ivo van Hove has blown up "West Side Story." This industrious, experimental director is celebrated, after all, for taking an artistic detonator to sacred classics by authors like Shakespeare, Moliere, Miller and O'Neill and letting the pieces fly. But the blowing up I'm talking about in this curiously unaffecting reimagining of a watershed musical, which opened on Thursday night at the Broadway Theater, is the kind associated with photography, the process by which a picture is enlarged to outsize proportions. This means that most of the performers onstage here have video doppelgangers, projected on the wall behind them, who are many, many times their natural size. As such, those fatally rivalrous street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, have probably never loomed larger. Inside gossip has been steady about this "West Side Story" even before it went into previews. That irrepressible iconoclast van Hove, it was said, would be taking a grittier, rawer approach to a show that rattled Broadway when it opened in 1957 but has since become a sentimental standard. This would involve a certain amount of subtracting from the elements that have made "West Side Story" an evergreen. Jerome Robbins's landmark choreography, which turned ballet into martial art, would be jettisoned altogether, to be replaced with new work by the Belgian avant gardist Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Most of the original score by Leonard Bernstein, with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, would be left intact, though a few squeaks of outrage emerged when it was learned that van Hove was deep sixing the frolicsome "I Feel Pretty." This was all in the name of a more general de prettifying of "West Side Story." His version, van Hove said in an interview in The Guardian, would reflect the "much rougher world" that had come into being with the election of Donald Trump. He would emphasize how much the show was about an environment "where people don't listen to each other's arguments, but just react to each other." I was hopeful when, in the production's opening moments, the gang members filed onto the front of the vast, empty stage and looked dead eyed into the audience. You could imagine any of these able bodied young brawlers being a deadly weapon all by himself. Then those big, projected close ups begin. (Luke Halls did the video design.) And as the camera caresses each photogenic face, the men's tattoos start to look less like don't mess with me emblems of tribal membership and more like fashion choices. We might have stumbled into a casting call for a Calvin Klein fragrance ad ("Rough for the man who likes it that way"). Soon, they all start to sing and dance and occasionally exchange dialogue that in this context sounds terminally quaint. And the impression is no longer of angry young things on the brink of catastrophic explosion. They all read young, for sure, but with the self conscious, just say the words neutrality that stems from being insecure. Their choreography has aggressive accents of taekwondo and boxing, along with an air slicing assortment of somersaults. Yet generally, these dancers seem less like kamikaze street warriors than scampering puppies, who like nothing more than to run around in circles and wriggle on their backs. Even with overhead shots of the dancers in writhing formation, they tend to blur into one indiscriminate mass, which is a problem if you're trying to establish two mutually loathing, racially segregated sides. The Jets led by Riff (Dharon E. Jones) are "homeborn" Americans, while the Sharks whose captain is Bernardo (Amar Ramasar, whose casting has drawn fire because of allegations of past sexual misconduct) are Puerto Ricans. Yet in this version, both gangs appear to be multiracial melting pots. Could this be van Hove's point, that prejudice exists only in the mind's eye? Maybe, but once these boys and girls start to rumble, you'll wish they were wearing team uniforms. (An d'Huys did the tightfitting, street tough costumes.) As a consequence, the fabled dance at the gym sequence feels kind of like a loosely organized line dancing competition. Only the "America" number, in which the Puerto Rican men and women sing and dance out opposing views of their homeland, has that pulsing clarity you long for elsewhere. (The number is appealingly led by a spiky Yesenia Ayala, as Bernardo's girlfriend, Anita.) And an unexpected, rain soaked postscript for the anthemic "Somewhere," in which the characters are sorted into the idealized pairings of their dreams, is an oasis of quiet beauty. No, I haven't forgotten that there's a Romeo and Juliet style love story at this show's center, the source of some of the most beautiful ballads ever written for Broadway. Here, Tony, the peace loving former Jet is played by Isaac Powell, while Maria, the innocent young Shark girl he falls for, is portrayed by Shereen Pimentel. Both performers sing pleasantly. (The music, supervised by Alexander Gemignani, is as ravishing as ever, when you let yourself focus on it.) And they share a loose, endearingly goofy quality that makes this Tony and Maria seem especially young and vulnerable. You fear for their safety. You are less likely to feel they are capable of obsessive, transformative passion. Some of their fraught courtship is conducted behind the main stage, in custom built alcoves representing a sweatshop; a drugstore; an apartment. (The set is by van Hove's constant collaborator, Jan Versweyveld.) Since the audience's eye can't always follow the characters, we have no choice but to watch their interactions onscreen. Punctuative video has been deployed many times before by van Hove, often brilliantly to take us into the corridors of power (in the Shakespeare anthology "Kings of War"), the labyrinths of Id (in his adaptation of the Visconti film "The Damned") and the camera ruled universe of television (in last season's "Network"). But I fail to detect a natural rhyme or reason for the way video is used here, aside from the location street shots that often provide backdrops for outdoor scenes and a "black lives matter" style montage about police violence for the jaunty "Office Krupke" number. There are a lot of split screens and a lot of frankly cliched, commercial style images of characters running and brooding. Since this "West Side Story" is not period specific, I don't think van Hove is commenting on our fragmented 21st century attention spans. But the fact that our focus is repeatedly splintered obviates much chance for emotional concentration and, consequently, the possibilities for being truly moved. A couple of images haunt me from this "West Side Story," and both do come from video. One is of an anonymous, lissome figure, barely detectable as he or she dances at the end of a long, dark street. The other is of a television playing while Maria and Anita are arguing about a recent gang slaying. Since what they have to say here is crucial to the outcome of the story, I really should have been giving Anita and Maria my full attention. It says much about this internally divided production that instead, I found myself trying to make out the grainy heads on the small TV and wondering what they had to say.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Trying too hard to be helpful, Mabel gives the less seasoned Rosenthal a quick acting lesson, during which Schimberg cuts between close ups of his stars' faces. Part of the sweetness of the film is that Rosenthal quickly emerges as the most good humored person on set, and Pearson as an actor of great charm. (The name Rosenthal may mark him as an outsider in a different sense that is, as a Jew.) "Chained for Life" aims to complicate ideas about what constitutes beauty and sincerity onscreen. It even hints at a loose parallel between plastic surgery, which can be seen as helping people look the way they feel inside, and filmmaking; both are mechanisms for creating illusions, but also have the potential for revealing hidden truths. Schimberg's film is odd, darkly funny and when it means to be a little frightening.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Lena Herzog in a preserved cedar grove in Los Angeles. She calls her work "Last Whispers" "an oratorio for vanishing voices, collapsing universes and a falling tree." MONTCLAIR, N.J. The earth spins onscreen amid an eerie, uncomfortable sound, like a building rush of air. It's an ominous, galactic vision that swiftly condenses into an intimate one: A dot of flickering light in the middle of darkness; a woman's voice singing, her fragile intakes of breath audible; an electric guitar strumming with spare, melancholy sweetness. Her words are unfamiliar, a little guttural, the consonants chewy. A title tells us that the woman is singing in Ingrian, a nearly extinct Finnic language spoken now by just a handful of people in western Russia. It is one of over three dozen endangered languages heard in "Last Whispers," a film and surround sound experience that will be screened Oct. 16 20 at Peak Performances at Montclair State University. Its creator, the artist Lena Herzog, calls it "an oratorio for vanishing voices, collapsing universes and a falling tree" as good a classification as any for an unclassifiable work. So reverberant chant in Bathari, a language spoken by perhaps a few dozen people in Oman, sounds alongside enigmatic footage of rock formations. A blurry figure walks in the distance, eventually covered by pages and pages of scrolling script, as we listen to the evocative Ahom language of India. A child speaks Light Warlpiri, which has a few hundred native speakers in northern Australia. That we don't see the speakers and can't know what's being said is the point of this austere and poignant Babel. The musical landscape is sometimes gentle, sometimes aggressive, but it always keeps our attention on the rich, incomprehensible, often overlapping chorus of words. The camera slowly approaches ghostly forests, bodies of water and, through space, our planet imagery that suggests the language crisis interacts with, and is in part caused by, even graver threats to earth's sustainability. Ms. Herzog dates the origins of "Last Whispers" to more than 15 years ago, and her interest in languages even further back to when, as a young girl growing up in Russia, she struggled to learn English to understand a Sherlock Holmes story that turned on the deciphering of a code presented as dancing stick figures. "The more you learn about languages," she said in a telephone interview, "the more you learn they're all vanishing. What was confounding to me was how little we know about that extinction. And we are losing languages at a more rapid pace." A photographer, she years ago found herself in the habit of listening to archival language recordings while printing in her darkroom. At first, she envisioned creating a gallery full of portraits of last speakers of these languages, with recordings emanating from behind the prints. "But we separate ourselves from them because they're in portrait, they're the other," she said. "I wanted us to feel enmeshed in them: They're us." The more literal, visual aspect of the portraits began to disappear, but the notion of immersive sound remained. (The artist and anthropologist Susan Hiller has also made work about vanishing tongues that focuses on sound.) Poring through endless audio files of endangered languages being spoken, Ms. Herzog began a largely intuitive selection process. "I would mark the ones to which I responded," she said. "I couldn't articulate it in words. I knew how I wanted it to feel. I wanted it to be haunting, to be able to get into your cerebellum. I would go through hours listening to these voices talking, chanting, whispering, confessing." Since she lacked a background in music or sound engineering, Ms. Herzog cast around for a composer designer who could help her organize this sprawling archive of voices. Eventually she settled on a pair: Marco Capalbo, a composer and director, and Mark Mangini, an Academy Award winning sound designer ("Mad Max: Fury Road"), who each contributed sections of the finished piece. Their styles ended up being complementary: Mr. Mangini treats the voices with a lyrical, Romantic touch a "21st century version of Rachmaninoff," as Ms. Herzog put it while Mr. Capalbo's landscape is tougher and more aggressive, laced with the sound, translated into audible frequencies, of collapsing stars. Some early ideas were a bit outlandish: At one point, Ms. Herzog intended to pump the sound mix through the root systems of trees, for an effect that would be audible by listening closely to the trunks. ("No park would let us," Mr. Mangini said dryly.) Then there was a notion of mounting speakers high up in a forest grove.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The Food and Drug Administration was dragged into the online world of medical misinformation this week, telling consumers not to drink bleach solutions that are being marketed as cures for autism, cancer, H.I.V./AIDS and other medical conditions. It was the latest example of how health authorities must sometimes pit science against the viral power of the internet, which regularly serves as a platform for inaccurate medical advice and unproven claims of breakthroughs. The F.D.A. has previously taken a stand against the "cruel deception" of supposed cures for cancer, the "dangerous scam" of bee pollen products for weight loss and claims that a dietary supplement can treat a concussion ("No!"). In a statement on Monday, the F.D.A. said it first told consumers not to drink the bleach products in 2010. But its hand was forced again after the products continued to be promoted on social media and sold online by independent distributors, and the agency recently received new reports of people being sickened. "Ingesting these products is the same as drinking bleach," said the F.D.A.'s acting commissioner, Dr. Ned Sharpless. "Consumers should not use these products, and parents should not give these products to their children for any reason." The F.D.A.'s statement referred to products that use the names Miracle or Master Mineral Solution; Master Mineral Supplement; Water Purification Solution; Chlorine Dioxide Protocol; and MMS. Generally, they are composed of a solution of sodium chlorite and distilled water, with instructions for consumers to add citric acid, which turns them into a powerful bleaching agent. The distributors, who were not named in the statement, claim the result is an "antimicrobial, antiviral and antibacterial" remedy for autism, cancer, H.I.V./AIDS, hepatitis, the flu and other conditions, the F.D.A. said. But such claims are "false" and "dangerous," the agency added. The American Association of Poison Control Centers said in its annual reports that 226 cases of exposure to non household bleach were reported to national poison control centers in 2017, the most recent year for which data was available, compared with 276 in 2016. The data did not include whether the exposure was accidental or intentional, or whether it resulted in fatalities. The F.D.A. received reports of at least 20 people affected by exposure to MMS, with at least seven deaths of people who had ingested Miracle Mineral Solution two in 2018 and one each in 2017, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2009. But the problem could be wider: Experts say that not everyone who is exposed to the solution will report it, because the labels on such products say that vomiting and diarrhea are common side effects. "This is a pretty rare exposure, and that might be that people are afraid of being judged," Dr. Kelly Johnson Arbor, a medical toxicologist and a medical director at the National Capital Poison Center in Washington, D.C., said in an interview. "All this data is underreported, because somebody has to decide to call the poison center or make the report to the F.D.A." Dr. Sharpless said his agency would track the companies selling the products and "take appropriate enforcement actions." In 2015, a federal jury in Washington State found a Spokane man, Louis Daniel Smith, 45, guilty of selling industrial bleach as a "miracle cure," the Justice Department said. The F.D.A. has warned and taken action against companies promoting other products purported to be used as a treatment for autism, including cleanses, detoxifying clay baths and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. "Unfortunately, there are a large number of online groups that spread general misinformation about autism," said Thomas W. Frazier, the chief science officer at Autism Speaks, an advocacy organization that sponsors research and carries out awareness and outreach efforts. "These range from fairly benign observations about diet that lack evidence to 'miracle cures' that could carry significant risk."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Jez Butterworth was inspired to write "The Ferryman" after learning about the family history of his partner, the Irish actress Laura Donnelly. Police checkpoints in the street. Helicopters overhead around the clock. The necessity, in certain parts of town, to give a fake last name if anyone asked, because her real last name would tip them off that she was Roman Catholic. To the actress Laura Donnelly, growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the Troubles, these were simply facts of life. So was the absence of her uncle Eugene Simons, who vanished on New Year's Day 1981 murdered by the Irish Republican Army, his body hidden in a bog. "He had three children and another one on the way," she said over coffee recently in Hell's Kitchen. "He was 26. My mum was pregnant with me." Look very closely and you might glimpse a childhood photo of Mr. Simons on the Broadway set of "The Ferryman," a play that Ms. Donnelly's partner, Jez Butterworth, wrote for her. Broadway is rich with drama this season. Here's why. Five years ago, they watched a documentary called "The Disappeared," about the victims of a particularly cruel campaign by the I.R.A.: secret murders of supposed traitors, whose families kept hoping that they were still alive somewhere. When her uncle's face flashed on the screen, Ms. Donnelly who knew that his body had been discovered in 1984, and that her mother had worked with families of the disappeared, yet hadn't quite put two and two together realized for the first time that he had been one of them. "Anyone, I think, from the north of Ireland would understand what I mean when I say that I knew and didn't know," she said. "It wasn't a secret, but it wasn't discussed. There's a saying that Seamus Heaney quotes in one of his poems, which is 'Whatever you say, say nothing.'" Over the course of a snowy, wine fueled night, Mr. Butterworth whose first Broadway play, the verbally pyrotechnic "Jerusalem," won a 2011 Tony Award for its star, Mark Rylance asked Ms. Donnelly's permission to include her family's material in the story he had in mind. Together they sketched out the idea. Then commenced a long period of a playwright resisting his own creative impulses. "I really didn't want to write a play set in Northern Ireland," Mr. Butterworth said early this month, back in New York from a quick trip home to London for his eldest daughter's 12th birthday. "Because I'm English, and for no other reason. It's just not the smartest thing to do." Maybe so, but it's worked out remarkably well despite some criticism (notably in a Guardian piece by a Northern Irish author) that the play traffics in cultural stereotypes. A London hit that this year won three Olivier Awards, including best play and best director, for Sam Mendes, "The Ferryman" is a blackly comic tragedy set in rural Northern Ireland the very week that Ms. Donnelly was born a time when republican prisoners were capturing global headlines with a fatal hunger strike. Perhaps best known for playing Jenny Fraser on the television drama "Outlander," Ms. Donnelly stars as Caitlin Carney, whose husband, Seamus, has been missing for nearly a decade. Caitlin and her son, Oisin, have spent those years in the home of Seamus's brother, Quinn, a married father of seven played by Paddy Considine. The discovery of Seamus's body is the event that sets the plot in motion, putting an end to the family's tormented uncertainty while placing them in fresh danger from the I.R.A., which is prepared to enforce their silence. Another shift: Caitlin's official transition from wife to widow, which places new pressure on the intense, unspoken attraction between her and Quinn, whose wife, Mary, has retreated from the family's day to day life. As steeped in politics as "The Ferryman" is, those emotional dynamics were what most compelled Mr. Butterworth, a big, bearded man with dark eyes and an almost Beckettian head of hair. "I was at that point in my life struggling with the idea of disappearance within relationships of people going absent without leave in relationships," he added. "But I couldn't ever write about that, because it's like trying to catch your own eye in the mirror. When I discovered that there had been this physical vanishing within Laura's own family, and what the damage that 10 years of absence and not having completion does, the whole thing just started to snowball." "The Ferryman" is a play about love and family and the intimacy of war the way men seduce boys into killing with tales of glamorous brutality, and the immense effort it takes to wrench free of that cycle of violence, as Quinn attempts to do for his children. When Ms. Donnelly was growing up, her parents and many of their peers were also trying to end that legacy. She remembers her childhood as peaceful and depoliticized despite the everydayness of the conflict. "Friends of mine had much more extreme experiences. Friends of mine were dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night by the army," she said. Her father, a physician, crisscrossed both Protestant and Catholic communities as he tended to patients, and that lent him a level of protection. "If they stopped my dad's car and said, 'All right, get out of your car, we need your car,' he'd say, 'No, you don't, I'm a doctor, I'm on call,' and they'd take the next car instead." It is a strange disconnect: Ms. Donnelly's sense that she was always safe in a place where even now not all of the bodies of the disappeared have been found. When they are, her mother attends the funerals. In 2015, she asked Ms. Donnelly to go along to a pair of them for emotional support. Mr. Butterworth went with them and was particularly shaken by the service for Kevin McKee, a teenager when he vanished in 1972. "I was sitting in this church, in this cathedral in Belfast," Mr. Butterworth said, "and all of his friends were in the cathedral, and they were of course all in their early 60s, with children and grandchildren running around, as they bring in this casket with this 16 year old boy in it. And one of the things that the priest said was, 'The family have been asking me, where has his soul been? And I can't say.'" That thought led to the play's title: a reference to Charon, who in the underworld of Greek mythology ferries the souls of the dead across the River Styx. Yet even then Mr. Butterworth couldn't push himself past his resistance to writing the play a standard part of his process that grew extreme in this case. And then came the news that finally moved him to write: Ms. Donnelly was pregnant with their first child. "The day she told me she was pregnant she's an actor, she's in her mid 30s she was like, 'This is going to take me out of the game,'" he said. "And I said, 'I'll write that play.'" He did it to assure her that she would have a role waiting for her, that her career would be O.K. Which it has been: Playing Caitlin in London last year, pregnant with their second child, she won an Olivier Award, too. Though the most obvious parallel in "The Ferryman" is with her family's history, Mr. Butterworth layered in some from his own: a fierce republican whose anti Thatcher rant is "a verbatim regular aria that my father would go into every time he saw her on the television," a gaggle of boys who are essentially his brothers, a group of girls who have the names of his mother's sisters, an old woman with a wandering mind who's a stand in for his grandmother. Mr. Butterworth has always known he's not only English; he has a good deal of Irish on both sides. But his family comes from where exactly, if you trace it back? "Funny enough, yesterday my little brother just sent us a note," Mr. Butterworth said. "He's just had his DNA tested, because we always wondered where we were actually from 'cause we all look like me, and we all were hoping that there was some kind of massively exotic story there." No such luck. The test came back "88 percent Ulster," he said. So Ms. Donnelly, it turns out, isn't the only one from the north.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
NAME THAT TUNE After his radio host duties at WQXR, Terrance McKnight goes home to Harlem, where he plays more music, either live or on his record player. When Terrance McKnight gets a piano that's his goal for this year, a piano and some bookshelves his apartment in Harlem will be perfection. The weekday evening host at the classical radio station WQXR, Mr. McKnight, 49, has a sun drenched living room, a kitchen of respectable size with good counter space and plenty of cupboards (he likes to cook on weekends), and a trio of closets. "I need them to hide my skeletons," he said waggishly. Well, in any case, his futon. But he'd happily swap a closet or two or, at the very least, reposition the pewter sectional in the living room, to accommodate the piano in question, his 7 foot 6 grand, a Yamaha C7. Piano has always been key to Mr. McKnight's identity. It was the first instrument he learned to play as a kid. He majored in piano performance at Morehouse College and then did a stint on the faculty. And piano is what helped set him on his subsequent career path: broadcasting. For the moment, the piano, which he saved up for during his five year tenure as the host of a classical music program at Georgia Public Broadcasting, is being watched over by his brother in Ohio. Mr. McKnight speaks of the piano longingly, exactly as he might the girl who got away. "I'm not over it yet," he said. "So I haven't bought an upright or anything." After he arrived here from Atlanta in 2008 to join the lineup at WNYC he later moved up the dial to its sister public radio station WQXR Mr. McKnight spent a year in Fort Greene. "I had a pianist friend who lived in Brooklyn and I thought he would help me get acclimated," he said. "Then I met a lady who lived in Harlem, so I started going up there to visit her." He liked the neighborhood feel and the sense of community, "people talking to you in the morning on the street. Having lived in Georgia, that seemed very familiar to me," Mr. McKnight said. "I decided to live in Harlem." That resolve hardened after a close brush with dead air. One of Mr. McKnight's first live New York broadcasts was a performance by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. "It was a Saturday and I had a hard time getting uptown from Brooklyn," he recalled. "The subway got rerouted and I was confused about how to navigate, and I said: 'Man, as soon as my lease is up, I'm moving to Manhattan. I can't be late to Carnegie.' " While Mr. McKnight knew he wasn't going to get everything he had savored in his Atlanta house hardwood floors throughout, three bedrooms, a fireplace, a large deck off the living room and a backyard he was hoping, at least, for a garden apartment with a fireplace. "But that was difficult to find in Harlem," he said. He happily settled for the top floor of a three story walk up that didn't have a fireplace but did have a compact deck. It also had those hardwood floors he so loved (he owns a timber farm in Mississippi) and a simpatico landlord, who it turned out was a big Terrance McKnight fan. Four years ago, he moved to a charming block between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm X Boulevards, thoroughfares that would intersect with his professional life. Powell's second wife, the pianist/singer Hazel Scott was, coincidentally, the subject of the first "musical biography" that Mr. McKnight produced at WQXR. "As an undergraduate I started reading about Powell," he said. "I found out he'd been married to Scott, but he didn't talk about her a lot in his autobiography and I was just really curious about her. I was thinking: 'Wow, I'm living near Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, I'm doing this piece about his wife. I'm where I need to be!' " He has since done specials about other locals, including Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington. "I look at the music they listened to and loved and how music affected their work and life," he said. As for how music has shaped Mr. McKnight, well, just look around his sparely furnished living room. The trumpet he played in elementary school hangs on the wall between the two windows. "It's the closest thing I have to my early musical past," he said. "I was playing piano when I was 9 years old. But in school there was no piano in the little orchestra and I wanted to be involved with other people. I convinced my mother to buy me a trumpet, so she bought me this used one." In a corner on a floor is a djembe, an African drum that Mr. McKnight bought in 1996 on a trip to Ivory Coast soon after he had injured the tendons of his left hand with a lemon slicer. "I couldn't play the piano for a year, so I was at my wits' end," he said. "The drum was therapy." There's a stack of CDs on the windowsill, evidence of the homework Mr. McKnight does for his show. On the desk is a figurine playing the balafon, a keepsake from the culture minister of Ivory Coast, and a Liszt figurine playing the piano, an object that for years Mr. McKnight kept on the top of his piano. Sigh. The retro style Crosley record player lately, Mr. McKnight has been listening to vinyl releases from Andre Watts and the Modern Jazz Quartet was a birthday gift from a girlfriend. When he gets home from the station his weekday show generally airs from 7 to 10 p.m.; his Saturday show, "All Ears With Terrance McKnight," from 10 p.m. to midnight he eases himself through the window onto the snug deck, which is outfitted with a chair and a chaise longue from Target, tomato plants and a pot of rosemary, a tribute from a fan. "I fall asleep out there," he said. "It's completely still at night. I go to work and people say, 'Have you been on vacation?' "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Even as Anthem, one of the nation's largest insurers, reported an improved financial picture for the last year, the company warned on Wednesday that it would consider leaving some federal health care marketplaces or raising its rates sharply if the government does not continue subsidies to help low income people. Joseph R. Swedish, the company's chief executive, set a deadline of early June for a decision on the subsidies, saying Anthem would weigh increasing rates by at least 20 percent next year. These subsidies, called cost sharing reductions because they reduce the amount people must pay out of pocket when they go to the doctor, have become a political football as President Trump and House Republicans try to repeal the federal health care law and negotiate a spending bill with a deadline looming this week. While Republicans successfully sued the Obama administration to discontinue funding the payments, the decision is on appeal, and Mr. Trump has recently indicated that he wants to use the subsidies as a bargaining chip with Democrats. On Wednesday, Republican leaders were seeking to assure Democrats that the subsidies would continued to be funded, although there was no guarantee. If the subsidies ended in 2018, the lack of funding "would cause further market instability," Mr. Swedish said, which would make the company's participation in the federal market "even more challenging." While the Republican controlled Congress and President Trump insist that the markets under the Affordable Care Act have been "imploding," Anthem's earnings report on Wednesday offered another sign that some markets were stabilizing. By adding new customers and raising prices, Anthem said its overall profits reached 1 billion on higher revenue of about 22 billion, beating Wall Street expectations and sending its stock higher on Wednesday. Its shares closed at 179.03, an increase of 3.8 percent. Anthem, which operates for profit Blue Cross plans in 14 states, is the latest insurer to say its performance has improved over the past year in the individual markets created under the Affordable Care Act. The company said it now covered 1.1 million people through the state marketplaces or exchanges, with an additional 500,000 customers buying individual policies under the law. The company is deciding where to sell policies and what to charge for 2018, and it is telling state insurance regulators that it will need to make significant adjustments to its offerings if the government funding remains unclear by early June. While Mr. Swedish praised some of the steps that have been taken to stabilize the markets, he also urged the Trump administration and Congress to eliminate the tax on health insurance as a way of keeping premiums lower and to create a reinsurance program or high risk pool to help insurance companies pay claims for people with very high medical expenses. Another for profit insurer that has a major presence in the market, Centene, announced its results on Tuesday. The company expressed confidence that there was support from both Republicans and Democrats for the subsidies and said it expected to remain in the market. Like many other insurers, Anthem has struggled to make money in the marketplaces, but it said it expected to break even or do better this year. Two independent analyses, from the Kaiser Family Foundation and Standard Poor's, suggested that the markets over all were stabilizing despite the claims from Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans that they were collapsing. But there have been recent exits by high profile insurers like Aetna and Humana, and there is concern that some places could be without an insurer to sell individual policies under the law. Other markets may have only a single insurer offering coverage. Anthem's results seemed to bolster the view that the remaining insurers were turning the corner, although significant uncertainty remained, said Gary Claxton, a Kaiser vice president who was one of the authors of the recent report. Anthem also addressed questions about its pharmacy benefit manager, the company that handles the drug claims for its customers. This week, that company, Express Scripts, said it would most likely lose Anthem, its largest customer, beginning in 2020, a significant blow. Anthem accounted for more than 17 billion of Express Scripts' annual revenue. In the first quarter of this year, Anthem accounted for 18 percent of Express Scripts' business. Last year, the two companies engaged in a bitter legal battle in which Anthem sued Express Scripts for 15 billion and claimed the company had been overcharging it for drugs. In comments this week on CNBC, Express Scripts' chief executive, Timothy C. Wentworth, said he would like to keep Anthem's business, adding, "We've given them terrific service." In its call with investors, Anthem seemed to suggest that it had not decided which company it would pick to handle its drug business. "We've not made a final decision with respect to any vendor," Mr. Swedish said. "We've not ruled anyone in or out." The company said it would evaluate its options and make a decision by the end of the year. Mr. Swedish said he hoped that the two companies would reach an amicable resolution on Anthem's lawsuit. Mr. Swedish also discussed Anthem's proposed 48 billion merger with Cigna, another large health insurer. In February, a federal judge blocked the merger after the Justice Department challenged the combination as being harmful to consumers, one of two mergers of insurance giants that it successfully challenged. Anthem and Cigna have had a fraught relationship, but Anthem is appealing the decision and said it expected a ruling soon on whether the merger could proceed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Jack Davis, an illustrator who poked fun at celebrities and politicians in Mad magazine for decades and whose work appeared on the covers of Time and TV Guide, died on Wednesday in St. Simons Island, Ga. He was 91. The cause was complications of a stroke, his son, Jack Davis III, said. Mr. Davis was a prolific artist, drawing posters for movies like "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and "The Long Goodbye," as well as record album covers. "There wasn't anything Jack couldn't do," Mad's editor, John Ficarra, said in a statement on the magazine's website. "Front covers, caricatures, sports scenes, monsters his comedic range was just incredible." He got his start in 1950 selling drawings to EC Comics, which published horror fiction titles like "Tales From the Crypt." Two years later, amid an outcry over the potentially harmful effects of violent comics on children, the company started what became Mad magazine, edited by Harvey Kurtzman. Mr. Davis was a member of the "Usual Gang of Idiots," the nickname for the crew that put out the magazine. "There is not a humorous illustrator in the past 50 years who hasn't been influenced by him," the magazine's current art director, Sam Viviano, said in its statement. Gary Groth, president of Fantagraphics Books, publisher of "Jack Davis: Drawing American Pop Culture A Career Retrospective," said Mr. Davis was known for his speed. "When he was drawing comics stories for EC Comics,'' Mr. Groth wrote in an email, "he would draw a story in a week that would take other artists two or three weeks." He added that Mr. Davis's drawings "were often samples of controlled chaos multiple, sometimes dozens, of figures, all of which were miraculously distinguished from one another.'' Jack Burton Davis Jr. was born in Atlanta on Dec. 2, 1924, the only child of Callie Davis, a schoolteacher, and Jack Davis, a salesman. After high school, he joined the Navy, serving in Guam, where he drew a comic called Boondocker for The Navy Times. He returned to his home state and enrolled in the University of Georgia, where he drew for the student newspaper. Before long, his teachers were encouraging him to go to New York to pursue his art career. He moved north and enrolled in classes at the Art Students League. His early work was dark, craggy, and high contrast, while most illustrators at the time used more realistic and flattering styles, said Chris Garvin, the director of the University of Georgia's Lamar Dodd School of Art. "He really looks like a painter in the way he uses a marker," Mr. Garvin said. "That is something new for illustration at that time." His work softened later on. He became known for drawing all sorts of characters with oversized heads and feet, and skinny legs between.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
In past years, the Guggenheim Museum's Works Process series has tried the controlled experiment of assigning the same music to two different choreographers. Sunday featured a new variation: two dances to the same music, but only one choreographer. That was the young, skilled Emery LeCrone. The music was Bach's Partita No. 2 in C minor, lucidly played by Vassily Primikov. Ms. LeCrone made one of her ballets classical and the other contemporary. Each piece also had a different cast and different costumes by the fashion designer Yigal Azrouel. The casting for the classical version was deluxe: Tyler Angle and Teresa Reichlen from New York City Ballet; Stella Abrera and Alex Hammoudi from American Ballet Theater. The classical interpretation took the form of duets. Ms. LeCrone made good use of Ms. Reichlen's sunny grandeur and Mr. Angle's aplomb as a partner: His one handed support of Ms. Reichlen in pirouettes made them both look regally secure. A walking motif brought out the stateliness in Bach's sarabande. During a panel discussion, Mr. Angle's brother, Jared, who was serving as moderator, pointed out a possible City Ballet versus Ballet Theater theme. He noted how Ms. Reichlen led with her pelvis, Balanchine style, while Ms. Abrera did not. Ms. LeCrone remarked that she was aiming for a balance between styles, and her work did have that, along with a mature, calm fluency.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The two young women see themselves in Rue, the stumbling, manipulative teenage drug addict that Zendaya plays in "Euphoria," the new HBO show. They see themselves in Rue when she coughs and flushes the toilet so her mom won't hear her rummaging through the medicine cabinet for Xanax. They see themselves when Rue cops clean urine from a high school friend to pass a drug test. They see themselves when Rue convinces a new friend that getting high first thing in the morning is a good idea; when she threatens her mother with a piece of broken glass; when she aspirates her own vomit after overdosing. They see themselves in Rue's pain, her messiness, her unslakable need to obliterate all the bad feelings, no matter the cost. And the women, who agreed to be identified by their first initials, N. and M., to protect their anonymity, also see themselves in Rue's blissed out, druggy glory. If there is one thing that makes M. nervous about "Euphoria," it is this: That it might entice kids to be like she was not so long ago, looking for reflective surfaces that mirrored everything her addiction needed back to her. Shot in luscious saturated colors, the young characters in HBO's "Euphoria" sext, copulate, record themselves copulating, endlessly shame each other and ingest loads of pornography, alcohol and drugs. Sam Levinson, the creator of "Euphoria," based the show on an Israeli mini series set in the 1990s and on his own battles with addiction as a teen. The Upshot: Unlike in 'Euphoria,' most real teenagers are tame Research suggests that in contrast to the vice a minute portrayal on "Euphoria," today's real life teenagers are having sex and using drugs less often than teenagers of the past did. But if teens, on the whole, are far less wild, N. and M., who were both addicted to drugs and alcohol throughout their teen years, said that they still saw a representation of their lives in the show. In fact, they said, their experiences were worse than what Rue goes through. "When I was using," said N., "literally every move I made was to get high." N., who is 23, and M., 24, have been clean about two years after using every drug they could buy, swindle, steal and sell sex for. They are both residents at Dynamic Youth Community, a half century old rehabilitation center for young people deep in Brooklyn. Dynamic also has an upstate center where they each spent around a year and a half learning how to live clean before moving down to Brooklyn. M. is an inpatient resident at the Brooklyn site now, and N. is an outpatient and lives nearby in Sheepshead Bay with her sister and her mother. They had not seen "Euphoria" but were amped to learn that Drake was one of its producers, and agreed to watch a few episodes and share their thoughts after the Dynamic's executive director, William Fusco, watched the pilot and surmised their sobriety was strong enough for them not to get triggered. Drugs and alcohol are promoted in ads, on television, in movies, in music, on Instagram. For N. and M., l iving clean and sober meant learning to not get tripped up by all of that. The two women first met at Dynamic, their lives having followed parallel trajectories. N. and her parents are from Turkey, and M.'s parents are from the former Soviet Union. M. grew up in suburban New Jersey, where she never felt like she fit in. N.'s family lived in Connecticut and was undocumented; her father was deported when she was in the fifth grade. Both girls started smoking and drinking when they were 13, and fell in love with the escape. "I was unstoppable," N. said. For both, alcohol and marijuana gave way to benzodiazepines, prescription opiates and heroin. Then came the consequences. N. got kicked out of her home and two schools for using and fighting, and ended up in the hospital a few times to get her stomach pumped . By the time M. turned 17, she was shooting heroin in her high school bathroom and selling drugs. Both went to rehab and relapsed; both suffered drug induced psychosis N. from crystal methamphetamine, M. from meth and crack cocaine. Both traded sex for drugs, or for money to buy more drugs. "It destroyed my life slowly and casually," M. said. M. kept moving around and disappearing as her frantic parents scoured the state and posted missing ads. They brought her to Dynamic in Brooklyn after she showed up at their doorstep barefoot, skeletal and disoriented. N.'s mother brought her to Dynamic under the guise of a doctor's visit. Neither young woman has left since (Karen Carlini, the associate director of Dynamic, said the staff felt that both young women's accounts of their drug use were accurate). We watched the first two episodes of the show in Dynamic's fourth floor residence. The young women's first reaction was that the show felt real in its depiction of how Rue felt so amazing on drugs but looked like a wreck. We watched as her character kept slipping into the bathroom to steal pills as her sister and mother hovered outside, and then assured them she was clean afterward. "She doesn't want to stop for herself," N. said. We watched as Rue hit up her drug dealer straight after she got out of rehab, and as she had flashbacks to the hell she had put her mother and sister through, a montage M. found so intense that goose bumps appeared on her arm. And we watched a menacing drug dealer with a tattooed face force Rue to lick liquid fentanyl off a knife. As Rue slipped into the drug's coma like high, it looked liked the dealer was going to demand repayment with sex, until a good guy drug dealer offered up the cash. "This is the part that shows it's a TV show," N. said. "That's what people think: 'They will look after me.' I've been sold out for drugs and money so many times" sometimes, she said, after she had passed out. Set against the national opiate epidemic, the amount of drugs used by the show's youngsters is eye popping. M. felt that even though "Euphoria" showed addiction's consequences, it still fed the idea that heavy drug use was normal and exposed it to people who otherwise might not have been exposed. She hated the idea of, say, her younger sister watching it. On the other hand, it was accurately displaying something that, for her at least, rang true. "Maybe having just gone through a lot of that stuff, I don't want other people to," she said. "It's a delicate balance." Levinson, the show's creator, said in an email that the show was "not a cure or solution," and that if someone struggling with addiction might find it triggering, they should not watch. "My ultimate hope is to inspire compassion and empathy for those battling addiction," Levinson wrote. N. said that not everyone would see the show the way she did: as an addict. Growing up, she took drug cues from every show that depicted drug use, be it "Skins" or "Nurse Jackie" or "Degrassi: The Next Generation." Even when the characters lost everything, N. said, the shows still made her want to get high, because she felt invincible, and like there was no tomorrow. And though she sees a drug culture "everywhere" these days, she believes that not everyone who uses drugs is susceptible to getting hooked. She pointed to one of her cousins a 16 year old who worships trap music and all its drug references who smokes marijuana and thinks that Lean, the high inducing cough medicine concoction, is the best thing ever. But, unlike the teenage N., her cousin does not do drugs all the time. Unlike N., N. said, her cousin does not seem to be an addict. "If you're going to get influenced, you're going to get influenced," N. said. "It doesn't matter if it's a show or an ad for beer. It's all about the kind of person you are."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
LONDON The last time Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon had premieres on the same program was in 2006, at the Royal Ballet. The minimalist, sculptural "Chroma," by Mr. McGregor, was a smash hit, and led to his appointment as the Royal's resident choreographer, a title he still holds. "DGV," an exhilarating ensemble work by Mr. Wheeldon, was perhaps less surprising in its impact, but also a resounding success. A two out of two success rate is unusual in ballet, in which a string of forgettable commissions is usually the price to pay for the very occasional exceptional work. So hurrah for Mr. McGregor and Mr. Wheeldon, who have repeated their 2006 feat with a pair of terrific new pieces for the Royal Ballet, this time created for a Leonard Bernstein centenary program that also included Liam Scarlett's 2014 "The Age of Anxiety." Mr. McGregor's "Yugen," set to Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms," and with sets by the artist and writer Edmund de Waal, is his first work for the company since "Multiverse" in 2016. The title is a Japanese word, meaning beauty evoked with an economy of means, and the work mostly lives up to that premise. "Yugen" is far more conventionally balletic than Mr. McGregor's usual style, which offers fractured angles; extreme, almost scary extensions of the legs; and swerving, curving torsos that often seem to propel the rest of the body into motion. "Yugen" opens on a spare stage, dotted with four tall light box towers in which dancers stand, silhouetted against a white glow. Federico Bonelli and Sarah Lamb are at the front of the stage. As the first rousing strains of Bernstein's 1965 choral score sound ("Awake, psaltery and harp! I will rouse the dawn!"), they begin to dance with smooth lyricism, soon joined by nine dancers, whom Mr. McGregor deftly fragments into continually evolving groupings as the psalm continues its exultant path. As the voice of a young boy sings a treble solo, Calvin Richardson begins a slow, swirling solo, often dropping to the floor, then propelling himself back up with curving, undulating momentum. He remains central throughout the piece, later coming between Ms. Lamb and Mr. Bonelli as they perform a floating, ethereal pas de deux. At another moment, he is lifted and carried by five men as the chorus sings in Hebrew, "Lord, Lord, My heart is not haughty." Is he a Christ figure, a seeker, in need of comfort or a giver of comfort? Ms. Lamb too seems to incarnate or represent something, as her body is arched and curved between Mr. Bonelli and Mr. Richardson, who lift and carry her in a particularly lovely passage close to the end. Is she beauty? Love? The unattainable? Mr. McGregor plays with these ideas, as his title suggests. Perhaps they remain too elusive, as do Mr. de Waal's sets, which initially suggest portals or gateways, but acquire little resonance through use or the otherwise skillful lighting by Lucy Carter. Mr. McGregor remains intensely responsive to the slightly strange fusion of sacred text and tone, with jazzy undercurrents in "Chichester Psalms." And Mr. Wheeldon is similarly resourceful in his responses to Bernstein's "Serenade after Plato: Symposium," a violin concerto in five movements that slips between poetic lyricism and driving dynamic rhythm. (Mr. Wheeldon first choreographed to this score in 1999; Alexei Ratmansky also used it in 2016.) With Greek inspired costumes by the fashion designer Erdem Moralioglu, "Corybantic Games" (the title is a reference to the wild dances of the priests of Cybele, the goddess of nature) is a large scale work that shows Mr. Wheeldon's dazzling range of movement invention. The ballet begins with surging ensemble dances for men (first movement) and women (second movement), and is full of erupting jumps, high circling turns and magically dissolving and reforming circles. Greek dance linkages are a constant theme; men and women touch, turn around one other, form interwoven groups (echoes of Balanchine's "Serenade" and "Apollo") and lines. In the lightning fast third movement, Mayara Magri and Marcelino Sambe offer a brilliant, flashing past the eyes duo; in the fourth movement, three pairs (one female, one male, one mixed) dance with tender lyricism. This is perhaps the most interesting section of the work, in which Mr. Wheeldon explores the varying partnering possibilities between the same sex and opposite sex duos while creating a painterly picture, beautifully lighted by Peter Mumford. Mr. Wheeldon incorporates into the mix stylized Egyptian profile gestures, flexed feet at odd moments, shoulder stands and sinuously undulating upper bodies. It's sometimes as odd, life filled and surprising as Bernstein's score, in which different musical styles often feel like they are crashing together. It's not perfect (the fifth movement, a grand finale, feels rather bewilderingly busy), but it's exhilaratingly full of creative force.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Eugene Scalia, whom President Trump intends to nominate as labor secretary, is often hired by companies when they are sued by workers, or when they want to push back against new employment laws and regulations. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce praised him as an "excellent choice," saying he would be a valuable asset to the department as it finalizes several regulations . Senators, especially Democrats, are sure to closely study his long career working on behalf of corporate clients, which was interrupted by a brief tenure as the Labor Department's top lawyer. Mr. Scalia, who is the son of the deceased Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, is perhaps best known for his opposition to a regulation that would have mandated greater protections for workers at risk of repetitive stress injuries. But he played a role in several other prominent cases, representing the financial industry and companies like UPS and SeaWorld. Here are three important issues he worked on. The Obama Labor Department spent six years developing a new rule for how brokers and other financial professionals advised clients on their retirement accounts. Under the old rule, advisers had been required to provide investing advice that was "suitable." The new rule, which the Obama administration finalized in 2016, required brokers to act as fiduciaries, meaning they would have to provide advice that was in the best interest of their clients. The administration estimated that conflicts of interest arising under the old standard cost Americans about 17 billion a year. Mr. Scalia was part of a team at his law firm Gibson, Dunn Crutcher that sued to block the rule on behalf of several industry groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and the Financial Services Roundtable. The groups argued that the regulation would harm less affluent investors because firms would simply stop offering them advice to avoid exposing themselves to liability. Mr. Scalia called the rule a prime example of "regulatory overreach" in an interview with the author of a newsletter. He said investment advice should be overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission and state insurance regulators, not the Labor Department. Mr. Scalia was part of legal teams that defended UPS against claims brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act in two cases during the late 1990s and 2000s. In the first case, UPS employees who could only see with one eye sued the company for refusing to allow them to become drivers, arguing that the company's policy had discriminated against people who were capable of operating vehicles safely. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought the case, but UPS largely prevailed in two separate appeals. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In the second case, some UPS employees claimed that the company had refused to let them return to work after they had suffered on the job injuries because they were unable to perform all the responsibilities of their previous jobs. The workers argued that the company violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by not providing accommodations that would let them resume work. A lower court certified the case as a class action, but Mr. Scalia and his team successfully argued that the court should not have allowed the plaintiffs to bring their claims jointly before first investigating whether each one should be allowed to return to work under the disability law based on their individual circumstances. An appeals court ruled in the company's favor in 2009. Peter Blanck , a professor at Syracuse University who has written extensively about the disabilities law, said that class action suits are often critical to allowing individuals to realize their rights under the law. Absent the class certification, the plaintiffs agreed to a settlement with the company . In these and other lawsuits involving his clients, Mr. Scalia has "consistently sought to narrow A.D.A. protections on a variety of issues, including the definition of disability and class certification" Douglas Kruse and Lisa Schur , two experts on the employment of people with disabilities at Rutgers University, said in an email. In 2010, a killer whale attacked and killed a SeaWorld trainer named Dawn Brancheau . The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a division of the Labor Department, investigated and concluded that SeaWorld either knew or should have known that the whale posed a threat to humans and should have taken steps to protect trainers. The government's argument prevailed before an administrative law judge, and then again in federal court, where Mr. Scalia's firm represented SeaWorld. When the company appealed to a federal court in Washington, Mr. Scalia argued on its behalf. Mr. Scalia and his team maintained that Congress had never intended for the safety administration to regulate an occupation like training and performing with killer whales. They further argued that SeaWorld already had adequate safety measures in place, and that the trainers had accepted the risks inherent in their jobs and that it was their responsibility to manage these risks. David Michaels , the head of the safety administration at the time, said that it was true that the agency did not have much experience on the subject of killer whales, but it had a responsibility to cover the entire American work force. "We researched the question of what's known about killer whales, we researched this particular killer whale," Dr. Michaels said, "and we thought we made the right decision" to bring the case. Except for the question of whether the company had willfully exposed its trainers to danger, the courts largely agreed with the government. The appeals court rejected Mr. Scalia's arguments in a 2 to 1 decision, and the company did not appeal the case further. But should a similar case arise if he is confirmed as labor secretary, the argument Mr. Scalia made might have more currency. The lone dissent in his favor was written by Brett Kavanaugh, who was then a judge on the appeals court and is now on the Supreme Court. Many sports and entertainment activities, from professional football to the circus, pose hazards to those who participate in them, Mr. Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent. But, he continued, "it is simply not plausible to assert that Congress, when passing the Occupational Safety and Health Act, silently intended to authorize the Department of Labor to eliminate familiar sports and entertainment practices, such as punt returns in the N.F.L., speeding in Nascar, or the whale show at SeaWorld."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
In 1911, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. That alone is a considerable achievement, especially for a woman, but Curie was actually doubling down: Seven years earlier, she, her husband, Pierre, and their colleague Henri Becquerel, had been honored by the Nobel committee for their discoveries in physics. Yet in her adoptive France, the Polish born Curie was not deemed a success or a role model, but a Jezebel and a foreign one at that whose affair with a married man became public the year of her second Nobel. Pierre had died a few years earlier, so if Marie could be accused of anything, it was to have fallen for the old "I swear we're going to divorce soon" line. And this is where Lauren Gunderson's new play, "The Half Life of Marie Curie," finds the scientist. Hounded by prurient tabloids, Marie (Francesca Faridany) escapes Paris for the seaside abode of her British friend Hertha Ayrton (Kate Mulgrew), an electromechanical engineer. Besides being widows and mothers, the women share a calling for scientific inquiry at a time when it was considered a male preserve. "We love our lovers and we adore our children, but our life's passion is proof," Marie says. "Knowing what's true and proving it. Peering for just a moment into the heart of the universe and snatching some truth before the curtain closes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The road snakes up and out of Castelldefels, away from the hubbub of the town center, away from the beach, into the hills. The houses grow larger with every turn. Basketball hoops are replaced by full sized courts. Perfectly manicured gardens roll down the slopes. Blooms of bougainvillea pour over walls. Lionel Messi's place is the last one on the left. It is not his only property in Catalonia Messi also owns the house in Gava Mar where his parents live, and he has an apartment in the city's exclusive Pedralbes district, too but Castelldefels has long been home. It is, he has said, the "ideal" place to live: the sea, the beach, the mountains, the peace and quiet of a pretty but unassuming resort town. It is here that he and his wife, Antonella, have raised their three children. Friends live close by: He often carpools to training or to games with his neighbor, Luis Suarez. There are shops selling Argentine groceries. A handful of favored restaurants, down near the shore, know that when a certain friend calls, it means Messi is coming. They know to ask diners not to trouble him while he eats, but that he will be happy to pose for photos on his way out. This is what Messi was giving up on Tuesday when he and his representatives sent Barcelona official confirmation of his intention to leave the club. He is not just ending a relationship with the club that spans two decades, that has seen him transformed from a 13 year old kid signed on a contract written on the back of a napkin into, arguably, the finest player soccer has ever seen. He is not just breaking a bond between player and team that has come to seem symbiotic. Barcelona is not Barcelona without Messi. But would Messi be Messi without Barcelona? He lifted this team to greatness, this club to unmatched prominence, but the converse was also true for a long time: Barcelona was not just his platform, his stage, it was a character in his story. Barcelona is a broken place, and the sympathy is with Messi. No wonder he has had enough. Though it is difficult to imagine him in another jersey, another set of colors, and though there might be sorrow not just felt in Barcelona at the thought of player and club going their separate ways, he owes it to himself to look elsewhere, to find a club where he can have the golden autumn to his career that he deserves. That could be Manchester City, most likely, for a reunion with Pep Guardiola, the player and coach who brought out the best in each other; or Paris St. Germain, maybe, where he could play once again with Neymar; or even Inter Milan, the club that has, more than any other, positioned itself as his first reserve, his break glass in case of emergency option. Those teams might be able to match his ambition, to deliver him the fifth Champions League crown he craves. It is not to delegitimize that orthodoxy to suggest it is not an entirely comprehensive picture. More than one thing can be true at once. For instance: Barcelona has, quite clearly, been appallingly run for some time; its executives merit most, if not all, of the abuse being hurled in their direction. And yet, for all that Messi has with reason demanded the squad around him be strengthened, it is not quite that easy. Barcelona has the most expensive salary bill in soccer. It has boasted of being closer than any team to reaching annual revenue of 1 billion euros, but almost all of that is consumed by the salaries it pays its stars. That is difficult enough, given the lack of peers who might match their salaries, but until the last week or so and the aftermath of a humiliating defeat against Bayern Munich the club felt it was politically impossible, too. That could have been because it had been warned those kinds of changes would not be welcomed by Messi, or because it had intuited they would not be welcomed by Messi. It is impossible to know for sure it is intriguing that Messi's decision came after Suarez and Vidal had been told they would be allowed to leave but regardless, the effect is much the same. Barcelona has been trapped, in other words, in an impossible conundrum: How do you rebuild while keeping all of your highest paid stars? How do you refresh a side and simultaneously retain, and play, many of the same players? To repeat: That does not mean the club's missteps should be overlooked. But the fact that the board played it badly does not mean it did not have a poor hand. Messi cannot, of course, be blamed for Barcelona's demise a take too hot to be taken seriously but it is tempting to wonder if, to some extent, this sort of denouement was inevitable. Such is Messi's greatness that the bill arrived not when he left, but while he remained, as the lines blurred between what was in Messi's interests and what was in the team's, as the club became so fixated on keeping him happy that it lost sight of what needed to be done to make him happy. And so, this week, we came to the end. Messi has determined that he must leave, he must go elsewhere, that he can no longer carry this team, this club, on his shoulders. He may find, too, that there is a personal cost to greatness: that wherever he goes, he will never truly escape what came to be known as Messidependencia. Any club he signs for will shape itself around him. Any team he joins will look to him, first and foremost, to solve problems. He felt Barcelona was no longer the "winning project" he craves. Wherever he goes, he will find that he is expected to do quite a lot of the winning himself. That is the price of being Lionel Messi. What awaits Barcelona is more daunting still. He has made a choice to find out what he can be without Barcelona; had things been different, it is a question he might never have needed to answer. Barcelona, though, knew this day would come. Perhaps not now, perhaps not like this, but eventually. It must face up to the prospect of what it can be without Messi. No player, of course, is bigger than a club, but Messi was close. For more than a decade, he has been the team. For more than a decade, he has been a symbol of what Barcelona is, what it stands for, what it means. It was the ideal place for him. It is not any more. A few days before Messi's announcement, the Manchester City chairman, Khaldoon al Mubarak, granted his annual interview to the club's in house media channel. It is an admirable initiative one that several of his peers would do well to copy but it is not what anyone would call a grilling. One admission stood out: Mubarak said that, this summer, City would be prepared to break with its general policy of signing players to nurture, and would also look to recruit ready made stars. (At the time, it was assumed that he meant Kalidou Koulibaly, the Napoli defender, but now it may well apply to Messi). That is perfectly acceptable, of course; these recruitment policies should only ever be a guideline, a way of ensuring that you closely interrogate those decisions that do not fit the mold. But it is reminiscent of Manchester United's decision to sign Robin van Persie ahead of what would prove to be Alex Ferguson's final season as manager. Manchester City appointed Guardiola to win the Champions League. It was the equivalent of signing Messi: with the finest coach of his generation and an array of (broadly) young, world class players, City could not fail. After four years, Guardiola has not even reached a semifinal. And now neither club nor manager, it would seem, are prepared to take any more chances. That is the thing with projects and philosophies: They apply only for as long as you want them to. There is something compelling about that sort of imperiousness. OL Feminin, as we wrote last year, may well be the most dominant team in any sport on the planet: so dominant it now has an outpost in Tacoma, Wash. It is breathtaking and jaw dropping, and it has probably benefited women's soccer in Europe as a whole. Domestically, Paris St. Germain and more recently, Bordeaux perhaps does not grow quite so quickly without Lyon as a target. Likewise, the major English teams, as well as the likes of Barcelona and Juventus, would not have a marker by which to gauge their progress. Lyon faces Wolfsburg, a smart, experienced side itself, in the Champions League final in San Sebastian on Sunday. It would be foolish to presume anything other than a Lyon win, but there are glimmers of hope for the Germans: the suspension of Nikita Parris, and injuries to Ada Hegerberg and Amandine Henry. It may yet be an occasion for a change of record. Plenty of feedback on the idea that players are not, as previously thought, actually playing for the fans, so much as for their own dreams and aspirations. "I have found myself not watching games, partly to avoid being disappointed," wrote Nick Barbati. "But having played amateur sports my whole life, I've never not given 100 percent based on who or how many are watching. So why can't I put faith in professional athletes' passion when my own has been so real and tangible for so long?" Matt Noel, meanwhile, wishes to contest my "oft repeated supposition" (guilty) that "soccer has no inherent meaning." "The highest number of fans who ever watched me play was maybe 35," Matt wrote. "For me, and I'm sure for so many who are passionate about playing soccer at whatever level they play, the game is rich with meaning and significance that has nothing to do with who happens to be watching." Matt is quite right, of course, and that would certainly have been a valid way of presenting the argument: that anyone who has played a sport knows it means something, even if it is played against a backdrop of complete silence. On one aspect, though, I should correct Matt: He wondered if my view was "the opinion of someone who doesn't play." I would take issue with that: I have played rather more soccer in my life than my knees and ankles would have liked. Now if you'd said "play well," that would be a different matter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
You run the risk of being rained on, and the positioning of seats lower than the stage means that you might not see the dancers' feet, but if you're a dance lover in New York in late July and early August, you can't bypass Lincoln Center Out of Doors. Even if the festival weren't just about the only game in town this time of year, those less than ideal viewing conditions would be offset by the price: It's all free. And this year's initial dance offerings include some thrilling stuff. First up, on Friday night in the Damrosch Park Bandshell, comes "The Blues Project." This delightful production brings together the tap dancers Michelle Dorrance, Derick K. Grant and Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards with Toshi Reagon and her band, BIGLovely. The combination of some of the greatest tap dancers in the world with live music that exploits all sides of the blues, from slow smoked to full out rocking, should make for a fine summer evening. And this performance has a little something extra: songs by Ms. Reagon not included when the show played at the Joyce Theater this spring. On Saturday night, , the best known master of the Memphis street form called jookin, opens for Randy Newman and Wycliffe Gordon and His International All Stars. Joined by the violinist Yoon Kwon, he'll be dancing to music by Olafur Arnalds and Astor Piazzolla, as well as doing his signature piece, "The Swan." This show at Damrosch l could be frustrating, though, since footwork is nearly as important to as it is to tap dancers: The shifting, hovering connection between his sneakers and the floor is central to what makes his dancing so astonishing and poetic. For this reason, a better bet might be his family friendly demonstration in Josie Robertson Plaza on Saturday morning. He's an old hand at school presentations and he acts with children as if he were still one of them. To see him with kids might be to see him at his best.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Alice Guy Blache, center left, on a film set in France in 1906. A new documentary aims to restore her legacy as a pioneer and innovator. When you think about the titans of classic film, who comes to mind? Go ahead, take a few minutes. No matter how long your list, it's a fair bet that the French filmmaker Alice Guy Blache one of cinema's earliest and most influential pioneers didn't make the cut. Until recently, Guy Blache was mostly relegated to the footnotes: credited regularly as the first female filmmaker (when credited at all), but overlooked in terms of her impact as an artist and an innovator. And yet starting in 1896, she made around 1,000 films, constantly pushing visual and thematic boundaries. She experimented with early synchronized sound, color and special effects. She explored gender, race and class. And she inspired future giants like Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock and Agnes Varda. Green said she was astounded when, in 2000, she first learned about Guy Blache in a TV documentary by Susan and Christopher Koch called "Reel Models," about trailblazing women in film. "I was blown away," Green said. "I had a hard time getting over it, honestly. Why wasn't she a household name?" Shelley Stamp, a film historian who curated Kino Lorber's 2018 box set "Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers," which gathers more than a dozen of Guy Blache's films, said she had thought a lot about that question. "I get asked this all the time about early female filmmakers," she said. "And you know, there's ways to dance around the answer. But I think the only explanation is sexism." "There has been a longstanding myth that filmmaking is a man's game," she continued, "and that narrative has had a lot of sway and has obscured the careers of many women, probably most egregiously Guy Blache." Guy Blache was born in 1873, as Alice Guy, to a convent educated French mother who had been set up to marry an older, French Chilean intellectual. Although her life began amid fairly traditional bourgeois circumstances, there were signs early on that Guy Blache might be destined for an unusual path. Her father owned bookstores in Valparaiso and Santiago, and her pregnant mother insisted on traveling by boat from Chile to France, just so her daughter could be born in Paris. Having learned stenography as a young woman, Guy Blache applied in 1894 for a secretarial job with Leon Gaumont, one of several French inventors experimenting with the potential of early cinematography. Men like Gaumont and the Lumiere brothers, who patented and presented an early cinematograph in 1895, were focused then on the mechanics of moving pictures as a way to document real life: workers leaving a factory, crowds gathered for a parade, trains traveling along tracks. But Guy Blache saw a different path. "I thought that one might do better than these demonstration films," she wrote in her witty autobiography, "The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blache." "Gathering my courage, I timidly proposed to Gaumont that I might write one or two little scenes and have a few friends perform in them." Gaumont agreed to her request, but that was only, she wrote, "on the express condition that this would not interfere with my secretarial duties." Soon enough she had dispensed with those duties for an expanding list of others: location scout, casting director, costume designer, cinematographer, editor, writer, director and producer. Her first film, a short called "The Cabbage Fairy," was one of the earliest fiction films ever made, offering a charming twist on the question, Where do babies come from? (The answer, at least in 1896, was that they're born in cabbage patches.) Her 1906 short comedy "The Consequences of Feminism," in which men and women swap roles, still feels remarkably modern in its unsparing assessment of double standards. "A Sticky Woman" and "Madame's Cravings," also made in 1906, brazenly foregrounded female desire with humor and wit. "She was very interested in gender norms," Stamp said. "She was very interested in sexism. And she was very interested in crafting films with active, adventurous female heroines." When her white actors refused to appear onscreen with black actors, she turned "A Fool and His Money" (1912) into what is widely considered the first narrative film with an entirely African American cast. "A Man's a Man" (1912) offered a rare, sympathetic perspective of a Jewish protagonist onscreen. "The Making of an American Citizen" (1913) tackled immigration and marital abuse. After running Gaumont's studio in Paris, Guy Blache came to America and opened the highly successful Solax, in Fort Lee, N.J., one of the earliest production companies in the United States. Her films were distributed around the country and overseas, serving not only as entertainment but also as a bedrock for the way audiences and filmmakers understood cinema. Jodie Foster, who served as the narrator and an executive producer for "Be Natural," was keen to participate after Green told her about Guy Blache's history. Pamela Green, left, directed the new documentary "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy Blache." Jodie Foster, right, served as its narrator and an executive producer. "When I was growing up in the film business, I never saw another woman on set," Foster said in an email. "Occasionally a makeup artist or script supervisor. The lady playing my mom. Directors were always telling my story (the story of a young girl) through their male lenses." Even so, she admitted: "I'd never heard of Alice before Pamela contacted me. How is that possible?" Patty Jenkins, who directed "Wonder Woman" and is currently working on the sequel, was less taken aback. She appears in Green's documentary as one of a wide range of Hollywood's elites, both women and men. "Though one might think that I'd be surprised I hadn't heard of her, I really wasn't," she said in an email. "I feel like everywhere you look there are incredible stories of the achievements of all kinds of people who weren't the ones that got into the history books. It's nothing new." Guy Blache was never a stranger to being pushed aside, even by her husband, Herbert Blache. Although she had founded Solax, her powers there were circumscribed. "I would have embarrassed the men, said Herbert," she wrote, "who wanted to smoke their cigars and to spit at their ease while discussing business." Eventually, Herbert set up a parallel studio he named after himself. He diverted their resources into Blache Features, and Solax wound down. A few years later, he left Guy Blache for an actress in one of his films, and together they moved to Los Angeles. Blache Features folded, and Herbert continued his career there, as a for hire studio director. Left to support their two children, Guy Blache moved to Hollywood as well. But the offers weren't coming, and she was forced to accept a position as her estranged husband's assistant. Devastated, she moved with the children back to France, where she tried to generate film work in Nice and Paris, without success.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Children in the United States are on pace this year to miss nine million vaccine doses for measles, polio and other highly contagious diseases, according to medical claims data a disruption that health care authorities called alarming and attributed to the coronavirus pandemic. The data was made public on Wednesday by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, one of the nation's largest federations of insurance companies, which said that routine childhood vaccinations had declined by as much as 26 percent, compared with 2019. The findings emerged less than two weeks after the World Health Organization and UNICEF warned that progress vaccinating children from polio and measles was being threatened by the pandemic. In an emergency call to action, the two organizations said that the risk of measles and polio outbreaks was on the rise. And just last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the W.H.O. reported that measles deaths worldwide had soared to their highest level in 23 years in 2019 and were 50 percent higher than just three years earlier.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Amid all the new safety protocols and unusual scenes after the delayed opening of Japan's baseball league, a highly unscientific yet intriguing multicultural study is underway: Can a Venezuelan player who became the emotional soul of an American franchise's first championship run deliver similar results in Japan with his beloved Korean produced children's song? Nearly two weeks into Nippon Professional Baseball's coronavirus delayed season, the early results are promising. Gerardo Parra is remembered in Washington for using the children's song "Baby Shark" to inspire a team and its fan base on the way to the Nationals' 2019 World Series championship. But while his walk up song and on base celebrations may have galvanized the team, his on field production was mediocre, and the Nationals declined to re sign him after his one year contract expired. With an increasingly unkind free agent market to veterans in the major leagues, Parra signed with the Yomiuri Giants when they approached him in November. Despite the long layoff and the adjustment to a new country, Parra is off to a fine start. He got a hit on opening night after his manager challenged a close out call at first base on a ball Parra had bounced to shortstop. With no fans in the stands, it would have made for an awkward debut for his "Baby Shark" dance. The moment produced only a silent exchange of gestures: the umpire overturning the call with a sweeping extension of his arms and then Parra pinching his thumb and index finger together privately just as he and his Nationals teammates had done in 2019 to celebrate singles. A bigger moment came in Game No. 2. As the Giants broke open a close contest in the seventh inning against the Hanshin Tigers, Parra blasted a chest high pitch that clunked off an empty seat in the right field stands for a three run home run. He was delighted with both the result and the response from his teammates. "For this one, I do the big 'Baby Shark' dance," Parra said in a postgame phone interview, referring to the chomping gesture made with both arms. "When I turned back and looked at the dugout, everybody do that. Everybody. I be happy for that, because when the team is together, everything is positive." The Giants lead the six team Central League with a 6 2 1 start. Parra is batting .286 with three home runs and has started in right field in eight of their games, but they did not sign him for his home run prowess. He hit just 88 in 11 U.S. major league seasons, including eight for the Nationals last year. The Japanese club liked his solid career batting average of .276 and his versatile defense, which includes two Gold Gloves and more than 200 games at each outfield position. Beyond those skills, it has been obvious since his signing that the Giants also embrace his contagious energy. 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. At his introductory news conference in January, the Giants blared the same tune that filled Nationals Park last year throughout the room. Everyone on the dais received a pair of blue and white Baby Shark hand puppets adorned with a Yomiuri cap in front of the dorsal fin. Even Manager Tatsunori Hara slipped one on each hand and smiled broadly as he joined in the dance that thousands of Nationals fans happily performed last year. With 22 Japan Series titles, the most of any franchise, the Giants are Japan's version of the Yankees, but they could use an extra dose of inspiration. They haven't won a title in seven seasons, their longest drought since another seven season dearth that ended in 1989. In last year's Japan Series, they were swept in four games by the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks without holding a lead for a full inning. Even with no fans in stadiums after a 91 day delay of the season because of the coronavirus, the Giants are playing walk up music in the empty Tokyo Dome at home games. Once again, Parra is stepping to the plate to the tune from Pinkfong, the Korean educational entertainment company. "I can't change the music now because it's emotion for me," Parra said. "It's my life to see all the people and kids happy. Right now, we can't see fans in the stadium, but I know they like it because they send me video and pictures by Instagram and everything. It brings energy, and we need that to help make a championship team here." He was credited with doing exactly that in Washington. Parra was released by San Francisco in May 2019 after a slow start, and signed with a Nationals team that had stumbled to a 19 31 record. He had been stepping to the plate to the reggaeton track "Contra La Pared," by Sean Paul and J. Balvin, but before a doubleheader against Philadelphia on June 19, he changed it on a whim. "In the morning, my kids say, 'Daddy, I want to listen to "Baby Shark,"' so I put it on my phone and we dance in the apartment for like three hours," said Parra, who estimated he had switched his walk up song more than 20 times in his career. "When I go to the stadium, I said, 'Hey, I want to change the walk up song.' I never think I want to put 'Baby Shark,' but it was still on my phone and I kept hearing it. After so many times, I said: 'You know what? That's the song I'm going to use.'" Some on the team were skeptical, but when Parra saw how children and adults reacted, he decided to keep it. "I never seen kids and adults happy together like that before," he recalled. "It's beautiful when you see that." The energy of the tune, coupled with Parra's charisma, eventually seeped into the clubhouse and helped build a camaraderie that became a central story line in the Nationals' title run. "Of course, you have to play strong on the field, but when everyone is together like that in the clubhouse, everything is possible," Parra said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
This map, the first of its kind, shows a billion stars shining in the Milky Way. It's the work of the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope, which has been scanning the cosmos in order to create the largest and most accurate 3 D map of our galaxy. Most of the Milky Way's stars reside in the so called Galactic Plane, shown here as a bright horizontal strip about 100,000 light years across and about 1,000 light years deep. The data used to make this version of the atlas was collected between July 2014 and September 2015. In addition to providing the position and brightness of more than 1.1 billion stars, Gaia also charted the movements of more than two million of those stars. As extensive as these measurements are, Gaia will catalog just 1 percent of the stars found in the Milky Way by the time its mission ends.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Fred Weber, a proud son of Mississippi and one very scary bartender, is said to have astoundingly acute peripheral vision. Watching the immensely enjoyable (and equally disturbing) reading of Beth Henley's "The Jacksonian," which streamed live on Thursday night as part of the New Group Off Stage series, you don't doubt that Fred played by a priceless Bill Pullman can detect whatever's beside him, behind him or above him. It's a gaze that penetrates straight through the screen that separates you from this human reptile. When his eyes narrow, but never quite close, into razor slits, Fred gives the impression that he's also looking through all the kinks and corners of his own twisted interior. Does he like what he sees? Surely not. But he can live with it. And though he lies with cavalier smoothness, he is probably the most honest person you'll meet in the shabby hotel that gives its name to this cockeyed murder mystery, a twisty study of the discontents of living in the racist South in 1964. When I first saw "The Jacksonian" in its New York premiere in 2013, one of the great, spooky treats of Robert Falls's interpretation was watching Pullman an actor I had long admired for his scrupulous portraits of conflicted Edward Albee characters cross over to the dark side. And I am happy to report that seven years later, confined to an isolating box on a split screen, he is, if anything, even more compellingly creepy. As for his starry, first rate fellow cast members Ed Harris, Amy Madigan and Juliet Brett, who all originated their parts, and Carol Kane, who is reading the role created by the wonderful Glenne Headly, who died in 2017 they too are frighteningly vital. Each offers a testament to the notion that being trapped in a certain place at a certain moment in history can cause even the freshest soul to rot. They may have scripts in front of them, but they're not just reading; they're being, in ways that can feel too close for comfort. The streaming of staged readings has become a commonplace during the pandemic lockdown. But this benefit production for the New Group (with 10 percent of its proceeds going to the racial justice organization Race Forward), which can be seen through Sunday, almost matches its staged incarnation in its power to disturb. The only visible props here are tools for the advancement of forgetfulness and, if possible, loss of consciousness. These include what are said to be Scotch on the rocks, a chloroform soaked rag, a bottle of morphine and a mask for the administration of nitrous oxide. It's no coincidence that Harris's character, the gentlemanly Bill Perch, is a "dismantled" dentist and hence an expert in anesthesia, a gift he happily shares with the hotel's maid, Eva White (a loosey goosey Kane). The people of "The Jacksonian" rounded out by a superb Madigan as Bill's estranged, mentally imbalanced wife and a heartbreakingly open faced Brett as their 16 year old daughter sorely need their oblivion. That leitmotif was apparent when "The Jacksonian" was onstage. But it feels even clearer here. So does the poetic structure engineered by Henley, the 1981 Pulitzer Prize winner for "Crimes of the Heart," who had always flirted with Southern gothic but never before plunged as thoroughly into its deepest shadows. This "Jacksonian" comes close to achieving the ideal function of staged readings: It allows you to contemplate it as literature while still drawing you into an emotional embrace that feels almost tactile. And without the period costuming, the performers deliver X ray portraits that let you see the skulls, and the fractured minds, beneath the skin. What's especially apparent now is how much these people have been warped by a poisoned culture in which lynchings of Black people are commonplace, and the Ku Klux Klan still reigns. All the people here are aspiring to be respectable, civilized, "normal" folks.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
For Elliott Smith, the Oregon singer songwriter, everything changed after "Either/Or." Five tracks from that independent 1997 album, Mr. Smith's third as a solo artist, went on to be featured in the hit film "Good Will Hunting," greatly expanding the audience for his intimate and often impossibly sad songs about failure, pain and addiction. ("Miss Misery," an additional song he wrote for the movie, was nominated for an Academy Award; it lost to "My Heart Will Go On," from "Titanic.") Following that exposure, he signed with DreamWorks Records, then a subsidiary of the film company. "That was kind of when we lost him," Larry Crane, a friend and recording engineer who worked with Mr. Smith, said recently and not in reference to his death at 34, apparently of suicide, in 2003. "He wasn't just our little Elliott treasure anymore. We had to share him with the world." Now, as "Either/Or" approaches its 20th anniversary, Mr. Crane, the archivist for Mr. Smith's estate, has joined with the singer's family and the label Kill Rock Stars to offer that still hungry fan base an expanded reissue of what many consider Mr. Smith's best work, in addition to his commercial turning point. The two disc (or two vinyl LP) set, due out March 10, will feature a remastered, cleaner sounding version of the original album, in addition to a bonus collection of remixed and remastered live tracks and rarities. The commemorative project was originally conceived more than a decade ago, around the time of the album's 10th anniversary. But in digging through tapes from the "Either/Or" era, Mr. Crane discovered almost too much good material. "The bonus tracks would have swamped the album," he said. "Elliott was such a workhorse. He put the time in, writing and recording so many songs that didn't make the cut." The estate instead put out the posthumous collection "New Moon" in 2007. "I wished I could just call him and say, 'Come in and listen to this,'" Mr. Crane recalled of his audio responsibilities. "But Elliott would have said, 'Oh, just throw that away let me recut that, let me rerecord that, let me write new words.'" In returning recently to the "Either/Or" expansion, Mr. Crane, who founded Jackpot! studio in Portland with Mr. Smith's help in 1997, hoped to preserve the sanctity of the original music, while also not superseding it. "The regular version of the album will stay completely available and unchanged," he said. "Elliott has some pretty hard core fans." But with the original remaining in print, Mr. Crane and the mastering engineer Adam Gonsalves had more leeway to experiment with the sound of the reissue, which they beefed up, using new technology, while removing excess noise for additional sonic clarity. "It started to feel like we were lifting the veil off," Mr. Crane said. For the bonus material "dessert after dinner," Mr. Crane said he selected five live tracks from the Yo Yo a Go Go festival in Olympia, Wash., in 1997. "They really demonstrate how adept he was live as a guitarist the fingerpicking, flat picking and different techniques," he said. The new collection also includes a previously unheard studio rendition of the song "I Figured You Out"; a new version of "I Don't Think I'm Ever Gonna Figure It Out," the B side to the 1996 "Either/Or" single "Speed Trials"; a short and playful keyboard take on "New Monkey," from "New Moon"; and an alternate recording of "Bottle Up and Explode!," from the 1998 album "XO," with completely different lyrics. Mr. Crane said he hoped that for fans of Mr. Smith, the touched up album and its revealing surrounding artifacts would reward the kind of close listening associated with canonical songwriters like Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake and John Lennon. "You want to keep going deeper: What are they trying to tell me? What are they saying to the world?" Mr. Crane said. "Elliott was that good."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The original credit placard for "The Blank Generation," a film that has been recognized as an important document of the punk music era. His Film Is a Punk Classic, but the Credits Now Roll Without Him The film, raw and grainy and shot in black and white, is 54 minutes long. It opens with Patti Smith in silhouette, haloed by her raggedy hair, and the snarling opening lyrics to her anthemic song "Gloria." Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine. Made by Amos Poe, and his good friend Ivan Kral, a guitarist for Smith, the film compiled footage of Richard Hell, Smith, Blondie, Talking Heads and the Ramones into a feature called "The Blank Generation," named after one of Hell's caterwauling songs. It premiered in 1976 at CBGB, where much of it was filmed, to a built in appreciative crowd, and later secured midnight screenings in cities like Cincinnati, San Francisco and Toronto. Though it never rose to cult status, the movie is nonetheless a classic in the punk pantheon, a signature No Wave film that captured a fleeting time when an eye popping number of future rock stars were lean and hungry unknowns. But as the film rolled, Poe realized that something was wrong. New segments had been added. Others scrapped. The ending of Lenny Kaye, Smith's longtime bandmate, grinning into the camera as the door to CBGB swings shut behind him had been swapped for a mini documentary about his partner, Kral, followed by the words, "directed by Cindy Hudson" Kral's widow. The opening placard displaying Poe and Kral's names were gone. In fact, Poe's name wasn't anywhere on the film. In that moment, Amos Poe realized he had completely lost control of a film that, beyond its role as a chronicle of music history, was very much the pivot point for his entire life. "I'm trying to be grown up about it," said Poe, who is 70. "But they're trying to rewrite history." Hell and Heaven on the Bowery The place stank of vomit and stale beer. Of course it did, it was CBGB, but Amos Poe didn't know what that meant back in 1974, when he made his first visit. It was around that time that he met Kral, a film buff and rock and roller whose family had fled Soviet Czechoslovakia. Poe had immigrated from Israel in 1958 and worshiped Godard and Bresson, and he and Kral hit it off. Poe was no edgy punk, though, and Kral was his entry point into the music scene. Kral had already been filming his musician friends, largely because he feared deportation back to Czechoslovakia and wanted his memories preserved. Poe said the pair gathered footage of Bowie, Queen and Roxy Music into a short picture called "Night Lunch," and as glam music gave way to something more aggressive, they kept shooting, at CBGB and Max's Kansas City, until they had enough footage to rent the editing suite on Broadway where, fueled by amphetamines and hashish, Poe and Kral cut "The Blank Generation" in 24 hours. The music was added separately using the bands' own recordings or demos, and it was out of sync, which Poe said was on purpose a homage to experimental film. Not everyone got the point. At midnight screenings in various cities, half the audience kept walking out and demanding their money back. But the people who did stay loved it, which for Poe meant a ton: Nobody was in the middle. The film was something of a buoy at a time when Poe's personal life was falling apart. Among the issues, he'd lost a job as a building superintendent. But "The Blank Generation" inspired him to keep going. Poe jumped into writing and directing his first movie, "Unmade Beds," a do it yourself picture starring his friends Duncan Hannah, Eric Mitchell and Debbie Harry, and followed it a with "The Foreigner" and later "Subway Riders," all D.I.Y. features shot on the decrepit streets of New York. Along with fellow filmmakers like Mitchell, James Nares, Vivienne Dick, Jim Jarmusch and Abel Ferrara, Poe became a notable in the No Wave scene, and seemed poised to make it big. "Amos was really inspiring to me as a guerrilla style filmmaker," said Jarmusch, one of Poe's longtime friends. "When I first saw 'Unmade Beds' and particularly 'The Foreigner,' it really inspired me that I could make a film too." By then, Kral was already living his own dream, playing guitar with the Patti Smith Group. Kral had been enthralled by Smith from the moment he had caught one of her searing poetry readings, and in 1974 he bested some 50 other guitarists for a spot in her band. Kral told the filmmakers: "At that time, and to this day, there is no woman that could compare to Patti Smith." But in 1979, as the band's popularity grew a year after its breakout hit "Because the Night," Smith abruptly broke up the group on tour in Italy. Kral was heartbroken. He played for a spell with Iggy Pop and in other bands, and later nurtured a solo career in Czechoslovakia, but would never regain the career high he'd had with Smith. The Poe Kral friendship persevered despite some downturns in their own careers. In 1995, when Smith reunited the band, she did not include Kral for reasons that never became publicly clear. The exclusion crushed Kral, and something else niggled him. U2 released their version of "Dancing Barefoot" as a B side in 1989, and Kral suspected that he might be owed money. According to people familiar with the matter, sometime after the band regrouped without him, Kral sued Smith, to her great distress. The case ended up settling. (Smith's representatives did not respond to queries.) "He ruined all chances of ever being invited for a reunion," Lynette Kral said. Yet Kral still wanted to be close to Smith, and in 2006, he enlisted Poe in that effort, asking him to get him on the guest list for the final concert at CBGB. Smith was headlining and Poe, unaware of the lawsuit, asked the favor of Smith. He remembers her furiously saying no. Poe went through his own woes as his career as a filmmaker fizzled. In the late 1980s he had signed on to direct a movie he'd written, "Rocket Gibraltar." It starred Burt Lancaster and was supposed to be his breakout picture, but he was fired from directing because of cost overruns. In the mid 90s he declared bankruptcy. As the years passed, interest in "The Blank Generation" grew in tandem with nostalgia for New York's grittier past. The film was periodically screened. Television productions licensed footage. Rolling Stone anointed it one of the greatest punk rock films. To the chagrin of Kral, Poe was often credited as its sole filmmaker. And then there was the money. Poe said he and Kral each had a print of the film that they licensed out, and that they had agreed to equally split the earnings. But they did not know what the other was earning, and Kral grew angry because Poe wasn't sharing his cut, even after Kral demanded an accounting. Poe says that Kral wasn't sharing his accounting of his earnings either, though he concedes that by around 2011 he might have owed his friend up to 8,000 in all. But Poe says he couldn't pay. He was consistently broke and was also, by his own admission, "hitting bottom on behaviors I wasn't very proud of," namely "the whole sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll ideology." Poe showed up for a deposition in Michigan in 2011, but says that he couldn't afford a lawyer, and that he believed he and Kral could work it all out over the phone. "I had a real bad attitude; I couldn't get over my own attitude," Poe said. "I didn't look at it just like a business thing. I looked at it as a personal betrayal." When the case went to trial, Poe skipped the court date, and the judge found in Kral's favor, ruling that Poe owed Kral 6,500 in profits from "The Blank Generation" plus nearly 43,000 in lawyers' fees and other costs. After Poe didn't pay, the judge ordered that Poe's copyright interest in the "The Blank Generation" be seized and sold to Kral. Early in 2012, the judge ordered that ownership of four of Poe's films also be sold to Kral (the fee was 10 apiece): "Unmade Beds," "The Foreigner," "Subway Riders" and "Empire II." They are now listed on Kral's website, which credits Kral as the director of "The Blank Generation" and Poe as co editor. Poe fears that more changes will be made to "The Blank Generation." Hudson had said in the initial interview that Kral had wanted to remove the segments that weren't performance footage. But she has stayed mum in response to questions about whether more edits might be forthcoming, or whether Poe's name could be restored to the credits, or whether she would consider letting Poe regain a stake in his films. Her lawyer, Susan Kornfield, said in an email that the revamped version was a new, derivative work and that Poe is not named because, under copyright law, he is not an author. It was the revamped version that was screened, and marketed, as "The Blank Generation," the 1976 classic, in New York last fall. As a legal matter, Gordon Platt, Poe's lawyer, agreed that the Kral estate can make the changes it wants to "The Blank Generation," be it the original or the revamped version, since it now holds the copyrights. As a practical matter, of course, it's not quite that simple. Poe still stews inside about skipping that court date all those years ago. "If I hadn't been as emotional at the time, it probably wouldn't have been the same," Poe said. "I would've said, 'OK, let me deal with it,' like people do."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
U.S. 'Must Work Harder' to Prevent Civilian Casualties, Austin Says White House: About 10% of Younger Children Have Received First Shot Blinken Calls for End to Conflict in Ethiopia	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
AUDIS that won't back up and Jeeps that jump out of gear are among the mechanical ailments covered in the latest technical service bulletins. alldatapro.com, offer automakers' insights into some recurring problems with various models. The bulletins, known as T.S.B.'s, are not recalls; they are information provided by manufacturers to dealers' service departments and mechanics. Unless otherwise noted, the carmakers do not offer payment assistance for these repairs beyond normal warranty coverage. Alldata.com sells a more comprehensive version of the bulletins to consumers. Here are a few recent examples: AUDI Owners of the A6 and A7 counting on the car's side assist feature to warn them of cars in their blind spot may feel a little let down. In T.S.B. 961235 issued on May 29, Audi said a failure of the system in some 2012 and 2013 models was caused by a short circuit in the warning lamp in the exterior mirror. Replacing the lamp should restore the function. Also, backing up some A4s and A5 Cabriolets equipped with continuously variable transmissions may be difficult or impossible. In T.S.B. 381208 issued on April 24, Audi said the problem in 2009 11 models was traced to a securing ring inside the transmission that was too thin, preventing reverse from engaging. Replacing the securing ring should restore the operation of reverse gear.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
When scientists first started to figure out how to extract DNA from ancient skeletons, their success was met with astonishment. One minute, scientists were fishing Richard III's genes from his royal bones, and the next they were showing off DNA retrieved from 500 year old Incan mummies. The idea that DNA could survive for thousands of years let alone be reassembled into an entire genome seemed little short of miraculous. Despite the field's rapid advances in recent years, though, ancient DNA is still hard to find and hard to make sense of. Potential errors lurk around every corner. Even little oversights can cause big headaches. Andrea Manica, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, appreciates this fact all too well. A head turning study by his team turned out to have a fundamental flaw that erased some of its most provocative conclusions. In October, Dr. Manica and his colleagues reconstructed the first ancient human genome ever found in Africa, retrieved from the skeleton of a man who lived in Ethiopia 4,500 years ago. Ancient DNA experts were delighted, because the genome may provide clues about African history that other kinds of evidence broken pottery shards, for example, or scraps of ancient manuscripts cannot. "It's an amazing, amazing, unique, special, incredible, first of its kind data set," David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study, said in an interview. Dr. Reich and Dr. Skoglund reanalyzed the findings but did not reach the same conclusions. In the original study, Dr. Manica and his colleagues sought to understand how the ancient Ethiopian man (dubbed Mota, after the cave where his body was buried) was related to other humans. The researchers found many unique mutations that linked Mota to a group of Ethiopians who live near the cave today, known as the Ari. By contrast, the researchers found that Mota was only distantly related to many people elsewhere in Africa. In fact, the analysis suggested that most living Africans shared some DNA with Europeans and Asians that were missing from Mota's genome. To explain these intriguing results, Dr. Manica and his colleagues tested out different historical scenarios. In the best supported one, a group of people migrated from the Near East back to East Africa a so called backflow about 3,000 years ago. In subsequent generations, their DNA spread across Africa. But some of the implications of this theory were surprising. For one thing, this backflow seemed to have raged like a flood, spreading all the way across the continent in relatively little time. Those provocative implications drew wide attention in the media, including The Times. Unfortunately, Dr. Skoglund and Dr. Reich couldn't find any trace of the migration beyond East Africa. Once Dr. Manica learned of the conundrum, he and his colleagues retraced their steps. They discovered that they had neglected to take one small but essential step in their analysis. "It was clear human error," said Dr. Manica in an interview. "It's just something that should have been done that didn't get done." The DNA in a bone thousands of years old has broken into little fragments. After scientists retrieve those fragments, they must fit the pieces back together like a jigsaw puzzle. As it turns out, the data produced by the program used to map Mota's DNA came in a format that had to be tweaked before the scientists used a second program to compare it with other genomes. In the Mota study, no one did the tweaking. That little oversight had a big impact. Dr. Manica and his colleagues unknowingly ignored some spots in the genome where Mota's DNA was identical to that of Eurasians. As a result, Mota appeared not to be as closely related to Eurasians as he really was. The mistake also created the false impression that many Africans outside of East Africa shared a lot of genes with Eurasians, DNA not found in Mota's genome. Dr. Manica and his colleagues last week posted a statement about the error, which was first reported in the journal Nature. They have asked Science, where their study appeared, to publish an erratum, and the journal is considering it. Still, Dr. Reich noted, other parts of the original study, such as the reconstructed sequence of the Mota genome, stood up to scrutiny. The Ari do appear to be close kin to Mota.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
NOW LIVES A global nomad, she moves among Airbnb rentals in New York and Los Angeles, an apartment in Milan (a "storage closet," she said) and her parents' home in Murcia. CLAIM TO FAME Call her a budding triple threat. Ms. Abellan (whose legal name is Maria Abellan) is a runway model signed with Wilhelmina, a fashion designer and an accomplished techno D.J. who has played all over the world, including at the Provocateur, Up Down and Flash Factory clubs in Manhattan. "When I was younger, fashion was my thing," she said. "But then I discovered with music, I could express myself more. One thing complements the other." Her two passions will merge this week: She is scheduled to be a D.J. for Jeremy Scott's after party during New York Fashion Week. "If I'm in the same city, I'm always playing his parties," she said. BIG BREAK Ms. Abellan first made a name for herself on Instagram, where she would post images of herself in provocative positions, wearing eclectic, colorful outfits. One of her posts got the attention of Rihanna, who tapped her to play one of her henchwoman in the revenge fantasy music video for "Bitch Better Have My Money" in 2015. "She found me on the internet and wanted me to be in the next video," Ms. Abellan said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
"All Creatures Here Below" is a Midwestern tragedy that, scene by scene, grows incrementally more horrific. Tearing open the wounds of childhood trauma, the director, Collin Schiffli, and his writer, David Dastmalchian, immerse us in the desperate acts of a young runaway couple, then dare us to condemn them. For Ruby and Gensan (Karen Gillan and Dastmalchian, both incredible), life in downtown Los Angeles is a daily struggle of bottom rung jobs, scratch cards and garbage rifling. After both are fired through no fault of their own, Gensan unwisely bets his severance pay on an illegal cockfight that leaves him fleeing the law with a stolen car and a blood spattered wad of cash. From there, it's all downhill especially when Ruby joins him bearing a box whose contents immeasurably increases their peril.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
In 1969, two married couples took off their clothes and jumped into one accommodatingly wide bed. Thus did Paul Mazursky's satirical film "Bob Carol Ted Alice" claim a little piece of cinematic immortality, while putting a knowing finger on a middle class American pulse that throbbed with both lust and anxiety about the sexual revolution that was said to be sweeping the country. Ah, the clumsiness, the tortured soul searching, the naivete of those heady, experimental times. People today of course are far more at ease with their bodies and their vast potential for erotic self expression. Why, just look at Paul and George and Michael and Jane, the uneasily swinging spouses of Sarah Ruhl's "How to Transcend a Happy Marriage," which opened on Monday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center. That's right, look. And marvel at how little has changed. The evidence of this idea inebriated, unsteady comedy from the adventurous author of "In the Next Room, or the vibrator play" is that when it comes to matters of the heart (and the libido), middle aged married folks are as scared, curious and confused as ever. Perhaps even more so. The dividing lines between genders are more bewilderingly porous than they were four decades ago, as are the terms and concepts by which we define relationships. Ms. Ruhl, whose works include "Eurydice" and "The Clean House," is celebrated for capitalizing on such ambiguity and for blurring boundaries between myth and reality, poetry and prose and even animal and human. At first, "How to Transcend a Happy Marriage," a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Rebecca Taichman and featuring Marisa Tomei, would appear to be in a more conventional mold. Granted, the flayed deer that hangs over David Zinn's contemporary living room set before the show begins does strike a promising note of bizarreness. But the opening scene, which finds two sets of married friends discussing the idea of polyamory over wine and cheese, has the chipper blitheness of those comedies of middle class manners that were once the bread and butter of Broadway. Jane (Robin Weigert), a lawyer, is describing a fascinating new temp in her office to an avid audience of three: Jane's husband, Michael (Brian Hutchinson), and their best friends, George (Ms. Tomei) and Paul (Omar Metwally). The temp is called Pip, and it seems she not only shares her bed with the two men with whom she lives but also personally kills the animals she eats. The idea of such practices brings out both the wit and puerility among these longtime, long married pals, who begin speculating wildly about the polyamorous Pip. They decide that they must meet this exotic creature and her companions. A New Year's Eve gathering is arranged, chez Jane and Michael. "And our lives would change forever," says George (short for Georgia), who intermittently breaks the fourth wall for purposes of narration and lyrical soliloquizing. Pip (a musk trailing Lena Hall, of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch") and her partners, David (Austin Smith) and Freddie (David McElwee), show up bearing hash brownies, sanctimonious life philosophies and a load of multidirectional sex appeal. After some literate but lubricious conversation about Pythagorean triangles and animal sacrifice, Pip performs a double entendre karaoke version of "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain." The song turns out to be the foreplay for a polymorphous orgy in which identities melt and merge. And just before the first act ends, who should burst in on these intertwined, grown up bodies but Jane and Michael's understandably outraged teenage daughter, Jenna (Naian Gonzalez Norvind). So far, so formulaic, right? But what follows does not adhere to the rules of standard issue sex comedies. The walls of Mr. Zinn's set disappear, for one thing. Then there's that plot turn that hinges on an Ovidian metamorphosis (appropriately, as George teaches Latin). Or maybe not, given that the people involved were under the influence of psychedelic mushroom tea as well as hashish. Fanciful mysticism and anchoring reality coexist less comfortably in "How to Transcend a Happy Marriage" than they do in other works by Ms. Ruhl. Though the cast members are uniformly agile and appealing and it's always a pleasure to be reacquainted with Ms. Tomei's expert, casual comic timing they seldom seem entirely at home in their characters' skins. Like George and company, the play itself seems to be groping to reconcile conflicting concepts and means of expression. It is chock full of apercus, on friendship and parenthood and couplehood, on habits sexual and culinary. And I found myself thinking of the delightful fragmented meditations of Ms. Ruhl's book "100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write." But the elements never quite coalesce into a single fluid stream of thought or story. Ms. Ruhl is suspended ambivalently here between satire and empathy. Despite its portrayal of uncommon events, "How to Transcend a Happy Marriage" remains stuck in the conjectural realm of its opening scene, where George and Paul and Jane and Michael are still just trying on daring ideas on for size.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Damian Woetzel, impressively ambitious, has been making dance history for 10 years in Vail, Colo. As artistic director of the two week Vail International Dance Festival, he assembles each August a top class gathering of performers in multiple genres. No single program is performed twice. World premieres by front rank choreographers (notably Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon) occur. So do unexpected partnerships between dancers from different companies and far apart disciplines. Mr. Woetzel was for many years a star dancer with New York City Ballet, the company George Balanchine founded and that still performs far more Balanchine ballets than any other troupe. In Vail, Balanchine history has been part of Mr. Woetzel's agenda, with ballets seldom or never seen since the master's death in 1983. This week Mr. Woetzel has brought "Vail Dance Festival: ReMix NYC" to City Center. Action packed, stylistically eclectic and with deluxe casting, this is a sampler of Vail souvenirs, with some novelties added. Thursday's opening night was quite a cornucopia, though its later sections grew diffuse with too many bits and pieces; at two hours 45 minutes it was overlong. All the music was live, and Yo Yo Ma was just one of the musicians who contributed. The program ranged from three Balanchine rarities (the uncut Stravinsky "Apollo" with prologue and apotheosis; the Glinka Bellini "Divertimento Brillante" pas de deux; and the 1982 Stravinsky "Elegie") to a Michelle Dorrance number, "1 2 3 4 5 6," in which Ms. Dorrance, the breakthrough tap exemplar, joined forces with New York City Ballet (and Broadway) star Robert Fairchild, the modern dancer Melissa Toogood and the Memphis jooker Lil Buck. Four of America's (and the world's) foremost ballerinas took part in the evening: Isabella Boylston, Carla Korbes, Sara Mearns and Tiler Peck.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Hyungi Park, a Los Angeles based artist, began learning how to make incense six years ago. She admits that incense isn't necessarily the most eco friendly option, compared with candles or essential oils, but thinks that it's "definitely more for the mood." The different functions of incense and the history behind it makes it special to her, especially because it is tied to religious ceremonies. "Incense feels more intentional," said Ms. Park. Ms. Park, 25, now sells small batches of handmade incense products through her studio Baboshop. She has seen a 142 percent increase in sales from April through September of this year, based on the same time period last year. The studio's third most popular item is a 45 incense making kit used for the online workshops that she has been leading on how to make your own. Incense, which comes in a variety of forms hand rolled and dipped sticks, cones, matches, paper, coils, rope, sachets, copal, pellets and loose powders has been a household staple in communities across the globe for thousands of years. The sales spikes seen by Ms. Park and across the industry can partially be attributed to a general increase in demand for goods and fragrances during the pandemic, as well as a steady growth in subscribers to the new age of mindfulness that includes practices like meditation and yoga, often accompanied by the smell of burning incense. Isabel Lee, the studio director at Na Nin in Richmond, Va., reported a 130 percent increase in online sales in September, based on the same time period last year. In general, the fragrance department of the store is thriving in all areas with candles and home fragrance sprays leading the charge. Ms. Lee, 26, sees incense as an attractive alternative to candles because it's a "one and done dispersal of fragrance" without the hassle of a constant flame that allows people to improve the quality of their surroundings in a more meaningful way. "It has a different tone." Related: How to Make Your Own Incense Incense sticks and dhoop have long been common in many South Asian homes, temples, and Ayurvedic centers. Shrankhla Holecek, founder of the beauty and wellness label Uma, was first exposed to incense burning in the temples where she was raised in India. "It really touches all aspects of our lives," she said and added, "not a single day passed by without smelling incense burned in my home." Ms. Holecek, 37, said that incense is a tool for heightening spiritual practices and rituals that bring people closer to universal consciousness as "the spirit of the prayer disseminates through the home." Incense is also burned in ceremonies to commemorate the departed and celebrate the journey of their lives. When Ms. Holecek introduced a line of incense after creating Uma in 2017, the product threw off customers because "it's just not part of the cultural experience in the United States." Ms. Holecek thinks that people don't automatically associate the origins of incense with India because of the Western commercialization of the product. This cultural divide caused what she describes as a "slow burn," in her customers buying incense, but from June to December of this year, sales spiked by 1300 percent. She hopes that this embrace of incense will continue to change how people incorporate smells into their homes and engage in rituals. In the realm of spirituality, incense is a tool used for cleansing the energy in a space, according to Lala Lopez, the owner of Mothball Memoirs. Within some cultures, it plays a significant role in ceremonies and traditions. For example, burning incense in tombs to worship the gods was fundamental in ancient Egypt. Greeks and Romans used it to repel demons and evil spirits. Eastern religions often use it as a way of honoring ancestors. Ms. Park points out that incense was "historically used as a measurement of time." "It's about not just the ritual of lighting incense, but it's the whole sensory experience," said Ms. Lopez, who views goods like Teomati and Espiritus del Ande as tools that should be treated with great reverence. Plant based incense, which contains dried woods, herbs, spices, resins, and barks, is a fundamental part of her lifestyle. She said she uses it to "clear the energy" in her home, on new items that she buys online, when she gets back from seeing people and even when she wants to change her own negative feelings. Mothball Memoirs' sales tripled when quarantine started in mid March through the end of June, based on the same time period last year. Ms. Lopez believes this has something to do with the psychology behind the buying and the need for balance, peace, and comfort in her customer's homes. Many of her customers have also requested care packages with handwritten notes, sometimes even to themselves. "You've had the spike of the ideas of spirituality becoming mainstream and sexy, and all of these things becoming commodified into big business," Ms. Lopez said. "When you strip back all of those layers, what's really there is people wanting to take care of themselves and paying more attention to how they're doing all the things." Is incense good for us? Health concerns arise when incense is made out of synthetic ingredients because it pollutes the air when burned and inhaling these toxins is bad for the respiratory system according to Dr. Allen Dozor, a professor of clinical public health and chief of the Pulmonology, Allergy and Sleep Medicine division at New York Medical College. "I don't trust when it says all natural, that doesn't really persuade me," he said. "Statistically there's a long list of medical risks associated with exposure to incense." However, Dr. Dozor is culturally sensitive to the importance of incense in religious services and rituals, and doesn't think that should be disregarded. He recognizes the correlation between how "mental health can really help your physical health" and the use of incense as a coping mechanism for emotional stress. With that in mind, he said that it is critical to use incense in moderation and "making sure air circulates well" by opening the windows. Hellen Yuan, an aromatherapist, usui reiki practitioner, and founder of the clean beauty brand Hellen, advises burning incense from a distance in a spacious room where the inhaler is not directly exposed to the smoke. Anyone with allergies, asthma, or any respiratory issues should consult a doctor before use. Similar to any other type of wellness oriented product, it's important to practice common sense. "People want to binge on this stuff, but it's really like following your intuition and your body, and being cautious about not overusing anything," Ms. Yuan said. Incense quality varies because there's no form of regulation in the U.S. incense market and not enough studies have been conducted. Across the board, very few companies are transparent about their full list of ingredients. Ms. Park warns that incense paper is often soaked in saltpeter also known as potassium nitrate, a chemical compound that is a constituent of gunpowder and can be found in fireworks, rocket propellants, and fertilizers. Even if consumers were to refer to the CDC's Inventory of Select Agents and Toxins, Dr. Dozor said that it's still not fully up to date with every chemical tested for safety. Issues of sustainability and health are being addressed by some companies though. Ms. Lopez of Mothball Memoirs vets every brand that she stocks (the prices vary from 5 to 16) to make sure that they are fair trade suppliers with eco initiatives and Green America certified. She fulfills a small quantity of orders at a time, restocking inventory as needed to maintain a more mindful approach with regards to material waste. For people seeking out alternatives to burning sage and palo santo out of respect for Indigenous rituals, incense might be a more appealing approach. Ms. Lopez believes that treating all of these items with "the utmost intention" shows that someone is coming from a place of love and respect. "It is complicated, but I think the education piece is really important," she said. "Why are you incorporating these sacred tools into your practice? What do they mean to you? Do you have respect for the processes in which these things are made? Do you have respect for the cultures?" Jenna Wortham on the Incenses She Uses for Every Mood	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Maybe it's not so hard to know what people are thinking right now. If you approached random adults in my corner of Brooklyn and hazarded "vaccine" or "the election" or "school reopening," you might startle them. But you probably wouldn't be wrong. Scott Silven has more refined methods. A debonair Scottish mentalist, he has entertained New York audiences with jaw droppers like "Wonders at Dusk" and "At the Illusionist's Table." That one had a trick that delivered its climax on a slice of chocolate cake. It is difficult to serve dessert from rural Scotland, where Silven ostensibly retreated once the pandemic struck. (He has handsome video to back this up, where he strides across various hilltops looking vaguely Byronic. But trust a magician at your own risk.) So he has partnered with the Momentary, a Bentonville, Ark., performance space nestled in a former cheese factory, to bring his telepathy online. In "The Journey," an hourlong show directed by Allie Winton Butler, he remotely reads the minds of 30 delighted audience members. The setting, Silven claims, as he enters a room with elegant moldings, is his childhood home. Did it have blacked out windows even then? Creepy. With a few props and lots of surprises, Silven enlists audience members in experiments in clairvoyance. The participant appears as a blurry square on the lavender gray walls of the room, when those same walls aren't covered with squiggles, crashing waves or topographical maps. The projection designer, Jeff Sugg, has perhaps gone a little overboard. Like the Geffen Playhouse's remote magic show, "The Present," Silven embeds his evening in a somewhat strained framing device. Here it's a folk tale, a Scottish riff on Rip Van Winkle with some portentous observations about loss and time. (I had a quick look into the relevant folklore; the story seems to be largely Silven's invention.) In between snatches of the story, he solicits treasured objects and cherished memories from the audience, then reveals that he knew what we would choose all along. Is it astounding? Absolutely. A graceful pivot to a new medium? Sure. Just when you think you know how Silven might have faked an effect, he complicates the trick, then complicates it again and you are abandoned to wonderment. That said, there are a few infelicities. There's a time delay, for one thing. So your image, reversed on Silven's wall, reacts a beat after you do. Also, you're supposed to post reactions with the beginthejourney hashtag, already in frequent use as the slogan for Chickee's Dance World in Worcester, Mass. But the main irritant is that frame story. After this many months indoors, uncertain my appetite for mysticism has shrunk. I would rather have heard a more realistic tale about Silven himself and what it means to be an entertainer at the height of his powers suddenly removed from any in person audience. Besides, if you really had awesome clairvoyant talents, couldn't you have maybe used them to see this nightmare coming or prophesy how we might escape it? Instead we get some philosophical maundering and nifty, nimble tricks. The finale will seem familiar if you have seen Silven's previous shows or Derren Brown's Broadway outing, for that matter. But like a lot of bumper stickers say, it's the journey, not the destination, and the trip is a quick and fine one. You don't need Silven's powers to predict the furious applause. The Journey Performances streamed live Tuesday through Sunday at themomentary.org through Oct. 18. Additional performances will be streamed live Tuesday through Sunday from Oct. 20 through Nov. 1 at thebroadstage.org.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
ALL THE LIVES WE EVER LIVED Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf By Katharine Smyth It begins with a house by the sea not in the Hebrides, as in Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," or Cornwall, as in Woolf's childhood, but in the small town of Tiverton on the Rhode Island coast, where Katharine Smyth's parents bought a tumbledown weekend house when she was 5. Her parents, both architects, draw up renovation plans, and, as she writes in her memoir, "All the Lives We Ever Lived," she learns early that proximity to the sea has a way of both distilling time into postcard moments and speeding up our perception of its effects: "We learned quickly how bleached things become in a house on the water, how exhaustively salt and light leach color, leaving behind pale blues and yellows. The spines of books, the cork tiled floors, the rugs and prints and bed linens each became a cheerfully bloodless version of itself." This portrayal of entropy gently echoes "Time Passes," the hallmark section of "To the Lighthouse" in which a decade's worth of dramatic plot points involving the Ramsay family are narrated against the backdrop of their Hebrides house's descent through neglect into near ruin. And it gives us a clue as to the terrain of "All the Lives We Ever Lived," that it will range over the foundational memories of childhood, the heightened attachments and grave disappointments of family, the death of a beloved parent and the quest to create out of all those elements a work of art that survives. Smyth opens her memoir with a preface that states her case for "To the Lighthouse" as the through line for her life, the "story of everything," the one among all the stories out there that resonates most deeply with her psyche, even if it does not conform to the literal contours of her family. (She is an only child, compared with the Ramsays' brood of eight, and the hero worship those Ramsay children direct toward their mother she bestows on her father.) Woolf's fictional portrait of parental adoration and loss speaks profoundly to her from the moment she first encounters the novel, and she dives headfirst into the complete oeuvre, with productive results: Smyth has, her Oxford University tutor tells her during a junior year abroad, "an intuitive sense of Woolf." And so, Woolf threads through her memoir as a conduit between scenes or emotions. A reference to "To the Lighthouse" gives way to a brief analysis of the passage, then the link to Woolf's own biography and then Smyth's reading of the novel and the ways it connects to her own life and memories. But it's hard to relegate a writer as formidable as Woolf to connective tissue, nor would it be fair to ask a debut author to measure up to her mature style. The lighthouse casts too large a shadow.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In January of 1939, after three and a half years of devastating civil war, Francisco Franco defeated Spain's Republican army at Barcelona, clinching a dictatorship that would last for nearly a half century and displacing hundreds of thousands of soldiers, activists and Republican supporters. Many fled across the Pyrenees into France thinking they'd escaped the worst, only to find themselves behind barbed wire in concentration camps like Argeles sur Mer, "half dead from cold and hunger." Though the larger world seemed as blind to Spain's displaced population as they'd been to the war itself, the Chilean diplomat and poet Pablo Neruda lobbied to save over 2,000 of the refugees, as many as could fit on a nine ton cargo ship called the Winnipeg, bound for political asylum. Neruda's far reaching humanist act calls to mind Oskar Schindler, and is the little known kernel of history at the heart of Isabel Allende's 17th novel, "A Long Petal of the Sea." Allende, we learn from her author's note, first heard about Neruda's "ship of hope" in her childhood, when it caught in her memory and remained there for 40 years. Now she has deftly woven fact and fiction, history and memory, to create one of the most richly imagined portrayals of the Spanish Civil War to date, and one of the strongest and most affecting works in her long career. Spanning generations and continents, the novel follows an unforgettable pair of exiles granted passage on the Winnipeg: Victor Dalmau, an auxiliary medic in the war, and Roser Bruguera, a young woman carrying the child of Victor's brother Guillem, missing in action. As the special consul for Spanish emigration, Neruda has been ordered to select candidates clinically, rejecting radicals and any candidates who are overly political or intellectual. His compassion becomes the stronger factor, however, an unexpected blessing for Victor and Roser, who manage to impress the poet with their selflessness and commitment to save the child at any cost. Read an excerpt from "A Long Petal of the Sea." Victor and Roser marry, a bond that has nothing to do with romantic love, but something far richer and more reliable. As they begin their lives over again with nothing in Santiago, Chile, their partnership grows into deep friendship and emotional symbiosis. Only together, they realize, can they endure what they've lost and recover a sense of purpose.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Freshman Force comic from Devil's Due has several covers, including this one drawn by Tim Seeley and Josh Blaylock. Is Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York the biggest comic book character of 2019? Her story has all the twists of a comic book origin: She's a former bartender and activist turned congresswoman; she's a confident public speaker and a social media whiz (where she once quoted from the "Watchmen" graphic novel); and she's a champion for progressive issues and the environment. Readers will be able to decide for themselves where she ranks among their comic book favorites on Wednesday when Issue No. 1 of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Freshman Force arrives in stores. The tales in this anthology include the absurdist and the hopeful. In one, written by Nick Accardi and drawn by Travis Hymel, the world of politics is transferred to a wrestling ring where Ocasio Cortez participates in a "Senate Slam" against "diabolical special interest groups." She is visited the night before the match by someone who introduces themselves as "New York's Greatest Senator." When she guesses Hillary Clinton, there is an angry response: " No Dag Nabbit ! It's me Franklin Delano Roosevelt!" Another story, "Dance Party USA" by the cartoonist Peter Rostovsky, delves into the question of whether dancing and Democrats mix in response to the dance video of Ocasio Cortez that surfaced on the internet on the eve of her swearing in . "Obama danced but was too smooth," Rostovsky writes , while Hillary Clinton "seemed kind of awkward." He also says that the key to a social movement is to make it enjoyable. "I suggested we look at AOC's 'infamous' dance video as a promise of things to come," he writes . "Maybe it'll be a party if she really gets her way. " The project, from Devil's Due Comics, received a lot of media attention when it was announced in February. In his foreword, Josh Blaylock, the founder of the company, said he created the comic because he was inspired by Ocasio Cortez and other newly elected members of Congress. The result is a 52 page book, priced at 5.99, which has pinups, games and stories. The common theme is the potential of the new members of Congress and their "finally bringing diversity to the legislative body that reflects us as a whole," Blaylock wrote . The Ocasio Cortez comic is not the first or last foray into politics by Devil's Due. Blaylock published "Barack the Barbarian" in 2009. And on July 3, the company will release an anthology dedicated to Bernie Sanders, "Talk Bernie To Me!" which is being promoted as "another comic anthology for the 99 percen t." Comic books and politics have a colorful past. President Ronald Reagan was the subject of a 2007 graphic novel biography. The next year, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain made an appearance in a Marvel comic, and IDW Publishing presented biographical comics about Senators John McCain and Barack Obama a month before Election Day. TidalWave Productions has a regular "Female Force" series of comics that tell the life stories of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, Condoleezza Rice and others. The company also released "Donald Trump: The Graphic Novel" as part of its "Political Power" series and is publishing a biographical comic on Ocasio Cortez in August. President Trump is a regular subject of the artist Jon McNaughton, who has been painting for about four decades but whose work turned to politics in 2008, when he painted John McCain. But it was "One Nation Under God" (2009), which showed Jesus Christ holding a copy of the Constitution, that brought him a lot of exposure. "This was when the internet was just starting to come on pretty strong, and it went viral because somebody was making fun of it," Naughton said in a telephone interview. Then the tide turned. "I've come to kind of get used to the fact that half the country loves my paintings and the other half hates them." Similarly McNaughton's paintings of the president tend to take a positive view of him. One painting, "National Emergency," about the immigration debate, depicts President Trump on one side opposed by Ocasio Cortez and others. He normally would not paint such a new congresswoman, he said, but "she was an interesting enough character to put in." In February, when a reporter for TMZ asked Ocasio Cortez about her comic book debut, she said she was appreciative that a portion of all sales will go to RaicesTexas.org, which provides free and low cost legal services to immigrant children, families and refugees. The reporter also asked Ocasio Cortez what it felt like to be depicted as a superhero. "I'm just a normal person, doing her best," she said. She added that her comic book character might inspire young girls, showing them that "we all have a superhero inside of us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Armistice Day was first celebrated in 1919, a year after the armistice that ended the long and terrible first World War, taking effect at precisely 11:11 a.m. on Nov. 11. It was renamed Veterans Day in 1954, to honor all those who had served, but also perhaps to acknowledge that the "war to end all wars" had done no such thing. But this week at the centennial of that original armistice, as we think about the millions who died, it's important to remember that many of them died from what are now preventable diseases. We can try to keep today's children a little safer. Back in 1940, Dr. Philip Stimson, who had served in World War I, spoke about his experiences at the 10th meeting of the still relatively new American Academy of Pediatrics. Wars and soldiers were on everyone's mind, because World War II was already underway, and the pediatricians were thinking about what their role might be, though the United States was not yet in the war. Looking back, Dr. Stimson told his colleagues, "It is not widely known that mumps, measles, scarlet fever and diphtheria between them caused a loss of almost six and a half million days of availability of United States soldiers in the last World War." He went on to say, of himself: "In 1918, the speaker was on duty at a British hospital for contagious diseases at Rouen, in France, where at one time he had soldiers from 11 different nations as his patients in a single large ward for mumps." That's about as good an expression of the pediatric nature of war and soldiers as you could want, boys from 11 different countries, all hospitalized with mumps, a classic childhood disease, all sick together in a single ward, watched over by what was then called a pediatrist, in the days before immunizations, which now could prevent the mumps and the measles and the diphtheria, and the days before antibiotics, which could treat the scarlet fever, caused by Strep. And yet, here we are in the middle of a measles outbreak in Brooklyn at this centennial moment. There are 17 confirmed cases of measles among the Orthodox Jewish communities in Williamsburg and Borough Park, said Dr. Jane R. Zucker, assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Immunization of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. All were 4 or younger, and 14 of them were unvaccinated (12 of the 14 were old enough to have been vaccinated, that is, over a year; the other two were infants). Three different unvaccinated children had brought measles back from trips to Israel, which is currently having a large outbreak, Dr. Zucker said. The health department works with medical providers and facilities, confirming diagnoses, trying to prevent infectious children from exposing others in waiting rooms, tracking down and immunizing people who are exposed, and carrying out a lot of community outreach. "Because we know we've had exposures, I am expecting additional cases, the outbreak isn't over," Dr. Zucker said. It isn't only when we think about the great wars of the past that we need to try to learn important lessons, and there is no more important lesson than doing what we can do to protect our children. "We've learned so much from people being crowded together in military barracks," said Dr. Adam Ratner, the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at New York University School of Medicine and Hassenfeld Children's Hospital. "The most important takeaway is that even though it's tempting to look back and say, isn't that quaint, people in hospital wards due to measles and mumps," Dr. Ratner said, "we're seeing this now." Children have been hospitalized with measles over this past month, he said. Any time you crowd children or adolescents, or young adults together, there's an opportunity for some of the more contagious childhood diseases to take advantage of those who are susceptible. That was true in the First World War, where barrack life and troop ship transports contributed to the virulent spread of the 1918 influenza, which unlike most strains of flu, was more deadly to the healthy young than to the elderly. Many colleges require a specific list of immunizations before students move into dormitories, including meningococcal vaccine to prevent bacterial meningitis. But measles mumps rubella vaccine is always at the top of the list. That's because measles is so contagious that if the herd immunity when a high percentage of a population is protected by immunization drops even a few percentage points, the measles virus can take full advantage. "The first things you see, the cracks in your public health system," Dr. Ratner said, will be infections like this, "measles, infectious through the respiratory route and good at moving from susceptible people to susceptible people." When my own daughter went off to college, someone looked carefully at her immunization records, always accepted without question at her school, and discovered that her very first MMR had been given a couple of months before her first birthday, and therefore didn't count; she had to go get one more dose before she took up residency in her dorm room. I had asked for that early MMR, because we were going to take her traveling in a country where there was still, at that time, a danger of measles exposure (no, not Brooklyn). You can give the MMR as early as 6 months if a child is at increased risk of measles exposure, and it provides some protection, but you have to repeat the shot after the child turns 1. I had forgotten to do that, and no one had ever noticed. As the pediatrician mother of the child with the incomplete vaccine record, I was a little embarrassed, but mostly impressed. Dr. Stimson went on to note that those World War I soldiers who had grown up in more isolated, usually rural circumstances, were less likely to be immune to the childhood diseases, and "when thousands of these rural young men are first massed together in army camps, contagious diseases are apt to be very common," he said. This had also been noted in the American Civil War, when measles was a particularly devastating disease, and the recruits coming off the farm were especially vulnerable. The young men of 1918 were going into terrible danger (Dr. Stimson himself was wounded in action in Flanders, serving with the British troops) but they were also in danger because they were exposed to one another's viruses and bacteria. "Measles is a serious disease," Dr. Ratner said. It used to be a disease everyone got, but even then, he said, "not a small number of children ended up hospitalized, ended up dead." Children are still at risk for severe illness, for hospitalization, for pneumonia, for serious complications that can result in brain damage. And we haven't gotten much better at treating measles, Dr. Ratner said. "What we're good at is preventing measles." Herd immunity remains essential because there are some people who cannot be vaccinated, such as babies too young for the vaccine to work, or children who have gotten the first of the two childhood doses, like three of the 17 in Brooklyn, and thus are largely but not completely protected. Those with suppressed or damaged immune systems also cannot safely get the vaccine, which includes an attenuated version of the live measles virus. "Make sure kids are up to date on their vaccines," Dr. Ratner said. "It helps protect them and protect kids and adults who cannot get vaccinated measles vaccine is safe and effective." We can use the centennial of the armistice as a moment to think about how to keep our world and our children from going to war again. But we might also remember those boys from 11 countries, all on the mumps ward, and make sure we immunize our children so that when they do go out into what we hope will be a peaceful great wide world, they are as well protected as possible.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
New York City Ballet has been renewing itself at all levels in its current six week season, which is now in its fourth week. Dancers in the corps have shown exceptional talent in lead roles, notably that zephyr Joseph Gordon in "Symphony in Three Movements" (seen on May 5), the tall powerhouse Emily Kikta as the soloist in "Rubies," the impishly ebullient Indiana Woodward in the pas de trois of "Emeralds" (both May 1). On Tuesday, its senior ballerina, Maria Kowroski, returned to the stage after childbirth, almost a year after her last performance. She's the same tall and slender vision as ever, but with a newly free expansiveness. And City Ballet has been renewing the ballets of its founder choreographer George Balanchine. He made the three ballets I've mentioned; he also made all three ballets in the triple bill that entered repertory last week. The three "Ballo della Regina," "Kammermusik No. 2," and "Vienna Waltzes", utterly unalike comprise the richest fare of the whole season. The program's diversity and mastery astounds. "Ballo" ("Ballet for the Queen"), set to ballet music from Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Don Carlos," is virtuoso classicism, in which outgoing allegro technique is taken to an exceptional peak of exuberance. Verdi's ballet depicts the discovery of the celebrated pear shaped white pearl La Peregrina (which Richard Burton later gave to Elizabeth Taylor). The twist in "Don Carlos" is that, although the dance is intended to honor Queen Elizabeth of Spain, she has absented herself from the celebrations. Instead, the woman who presides over the opera's dance spectacle is her lady in waiting, Princess Eboli (wearing the queen's mask), who sings with excitement of her chance to be queen for a single night. Though Balanchine's plotless blue and white ballet shows you no pearl and no princess, you can feel multiple layers of that drama evoked by the poetry of his steps: pearl fishing through plashing waters, grand royal processions, exultance in the fleeting moment. Feet sparkle, arms stretch wide. We hardly know which element we're in. A cavalier, immediately after promenading his ballerina, beats his legs in the air (a cabriole).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Rodney McMillian's paintings on found blankets, "Recirculating Goods" at Petzel, continues the long conversation about the value of art made with cheap or salvaged materials but also, surprisingly, the history of landscape painting. I saw the show in person before the lockdown but the online edition can give you an idea of this Los Angeles artist's deft merging of the tactile, political and absurd. The titles cement the landscape association. "Untitled (landscape on blue afghan)," from 2018, is made with latex and ink on a worn blue blanket and evokes rolling hills under a staccato patterned sky. "Untitled (clouds)" (2019) turns celestial while "Untitled (setting sun)" (2019) uses a few dashes of paint to cut through concentric squares and suggest a horizon line. Mr. McMillian's paintings, which use a few quick brush strokes or paint pours to create a work, playfully upend the academically created genre of "landscape." They also have obvious precedents in the improvisatory, jazz inspired look of African American quilts, African textiles and David Hammons's sly sculptures made with minimal materials. The politics of Mr. McMillian's objects in relation to their context was amplified when you saw these works on the tony Upper East Side. Online, however, the scale is obscured and the horizontally oriented paintings look almost like face masks, which have exploded in recent weeks as another ad hoc canvas and a repository for politics and creative expression. MARTHA SCHWENDENER	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
ASSISI, Italy For centuries, pilgrims have trekked to Assisi to walk the same steep and narrow lanes on which a rag cloaked radical monk named Francis preached an antimaterialistic message 800 years ago, rocking the medieval Roman Catholic Church. Francis, who with Catherine of Siena is one of Italy's two patron saints, is a global figure for hundreds of millions of Catholics, and the current pope took his name in homage. The saint's hometown, perched on the broad slope of Mount Subasio, attracts four million to five million tourists annually. But lately, those visitors have included a new sort of pilgrim. Besides church groups spilling from tour buses and flocks of brown robed Franciscan brothers, the town has attracted non Catholic tourists, of the sort who hope for rejuvenation in the ashrams of India or in an ayurvedic essential oils massage. They come, drawn by the same mystical essence that more traditional religious pilgrims believe can be felt in the woods around Francis' hometown. Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian guru who introduced yoga to the West, ranked Francis with Buddha and Jesus in his multicreed pantheon of spiritual guides. Yogananda said he had seen a vision of Francis while giving a speech in the 1950s. After that he came to regard him as a spiritual icon and eventually visited Assisi. Francis, who was born in Assisi and died there 44 years later in 1226, was in many ways the original hippie. A nobleman, he gave up all his earthly belongings to follow in Jesus' footsteps. In the centuries since, many pilgrims have followed a path he took up the scraggy woods of Mount Subasio. But until recently, most of them were Catholic. The new breed of tourist has found in Assisi a hive of ecclesiastical commerce. On sunny Sunday mornings, bells toll as nuns in crisp habits and monks in brown robes crisscross the bleached piazzas in their sandals and socks, sending doves soaring above the sunflower and hayfields of the surrounding valley. Trinket shops sell wood carvings of the tau symbol with which Francis signed his letters; ceramic tile refrigerator magnets of angels; and posters of Francis, who was canonized two years after his death. These tourists are looking for inner peace more than they are looking to buy knickknacks. And some are paying for services out of reach of the impoverished masses that the current pope champions. Several spas have opened in the area since a government incentive began covering some construction costs for hotels that add them. The Rev. Enzo Fortunato, a spokesman for the Basilica di San Francesco, a big tourist draw in Assisi, said he had noticed the influx of a newer type of pilgrim and was unsurprised by it. "Francesco's Assisi has always represented the welcoming of diversities," he said. Assisi's New Age retreats are not all spartan refuges for peace seekers packing yoga mats. In a Roman quarter on the northern edge of town, well off travelers can book a luxurious room with a restored fresco on the wall at the Nun Assisi Relais Hotel and Spa Museum, a converted 13th century convent that opened in 2010. The hotel's owner, Massimo Falcinelli, initially planned to transform the shell of the convent, but had to change course when workers unearthed a Roman bath complex. Like so many religious sites in Italy, the convent had been constructed on pagan ruins, in this case a temple and bath. Mr. Falcinelli decided to combine the baths and the theme of healing water into his hotel. The former convent kitchen is now the wine bar, and the chapel is a meeting room. Down a staircase is a restored ancient spa. The Romans called the water from Subasio's springs "magic water," and Assisi is what the Romans called a genius loci, "a place with a special atmosphere for health, a place that raises your soul to a higher level," said the hotel manager, Chiara Mencarelli. Asked about touches of the lavish in a place known for shunning it, the Rev. Stephen Platten, an Anglican bishop from London who often visits Assisi, said, "I just think people shall enjoy themselves. Then I hope the luxury does not anesthetize the people and take them into their own bubble far from St. Francis' message." While these newer spiritual attractions mostly coexist with the traditional community, one retreat, the Ananda Center, has had a more complicated integration. Opened in the 1990s by a group of Yogananda followers on four mountaintop acres, it now includes a yoga school, guesthouses, a real estate agency and a farm. About 150 people live in terra cotta cottages on the grounds. The retreat has a holistic healing center that offers massages and spa treatments, and a meditation temple. Visitors come from all over Europe to study yoga, and their numbers swell into the hundreds during the high season from June to August. Yogananda wrote that Hinduism and Jesus taught similar lessons, but the Ananda Center was accused by the local authorities of being a cult and a criminal enterprise. The police raided the retreat in 2004, arresting and jailing seven of the sect's leaders. They were soon released. Prosecutors charged them with slavery, brainwashing, organized crime and coercive behavior, but a judge threw out the charges. Ananda's relations with the local Catholic establishment remain chilly. "The church sees us as competition," said a Californian in a blue robe, who goes by the name Shivani Lucki. She added that for the moment, the center has been existing in harmony with the authorities. A little closer to Assisi, but several steep miles up a narrow gravel path called the Alle Porte del Paradiso (Paradise Door Lane) is the Simple Peace Hermitage, a more rugged, smaller player in the local retreat business. It has been heralded by travel publications as being one of the top 10 meditation centers in the world, for its views of the Umbrian countryside and its proximity to the spiritual walks of Assisi. The retreat is a spare, stone farmhouse nestled behind rose and lavender bushes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Dolphins Have Hidden Fingers. So Do Seals. These Sea Creatures Did Not. None Like dolphins, ichthyosaurs' ancestors had fingers. But over time, these connected to one another until they were less like a multibranched tree and more like a dense bush. Put a dolphin's front flipper in an X ray machine, and you'll see a surprise: an arc of humanlike finger bones. The same goes for a sea turtle, a seal, a manatee and a whale. All of these animals had four legged ancestors that lived on land. As their various lineages adapted to life in the water, what had been multidigit limbs slowly transformed into flippers. For a paper published Wednesday in Biology Letters, researchers compared the flipper bone structures of 19 marine species with terrestrial ancestors, from species around today, like dolphins and sea turtles, to now extinct creatures, like mosasaurs and ichthyosaurs that swam the oceans in the dinosaur era. A majority, including most of the still living animals, stuck close to the original blueprint, the researchers found. But some now extinct creatures tried more creative strategies to adapt to aquatic life that have since been lost to time. To compare and contrast the flippers of this diverse set of animals, the researchers used a technique called network analysis. The tool has long been popular in the social sciences for tracing the spread of ideas, gossip and even viruses. Anatomists are using it to investigate "one of the oldest and most confounding problems in biology: the evolutionary relationship between structure and function," said Julia Molnar, a researcher at the New York Institute of Technology, who has done similar work but was not involved with the new paper. For this study, the researchers wanted to know how one function swimming had inspired the development of a number of unique limb structures. To do this, they needed "to compare things that are not directly comparable," like a sea turtle flipper and the five fingered limb it came from, said Evangelos Vlachos, a researcher at the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio in Chubut, Argentina, and one of the paper's authors. Network analysis allowed the researchers to convert each animal's skeletal fin structure into an abstract web of nodes and connections. By comparing this network with the similarly broken down limb structure of a landlubbing ancestor, they could see which of the creature's bones had been gained, lost, fused, connected or otherwise rejiggered since its terrestrial days. Researchers used network analysis to quantify how far sea creatures' flippers had come from the original design. They broke the networks into metrics like complexity and modularity, and plotted them over time. Almost all of the animals kept their fingers, the researchers saw. The digits are connected to one another by surrounding skin and tissue, and can't move independently. It's as though they are inside "a baby mitten," Dr. Vlachos said. Other than penguins (whose ancestors evolved wings before they returned to the water), all of the living aquatic animals in the study pursued this strategy, Dr. Vlachos said. Some now extinct creatures, such as plesiosaurs and ancient crocodiles, had fingers in their flippers as well. The exception was ichthyosaurs thick bodied reptiles that ruled the seas through the early Jurassic. Their ancestors also had fingers. But over time, they connected to each other until they were less like a multibranched tree and more like a dense bush. "They 'lost' their digits by reintegrating them," Dr. Vlachos said. The researchers next wanted to quantify how far each creature's flippers had come from the original design. So they broke the networks down further, into metrics like complexity and modularity, and plotted them. Even within the "baby mitten" group, different animals had experienced different levels of transformation. Sea turtle flippers, for example, have remained almost the same for millions of years, while manatees fused some of their bones together and most baleen whales lost a finger. Overall, though, the animals that still share our seas did not change their flippers much. "They experiment," Dr. Vlachos said. But "they never left this comfort zone." In contrast and as expected the ichthyosaurs were outliers, with more homogeneous and well integrated flipper bones than the other study species. But many of those now extinct animals that kept their fingers still changed their flippers substantially. One prehistoric crocodile like reptile, for example, had seven fingers. And ancient whales called basilosaurids experienced enough bone integration that they were inching toward penguin territory. Did any of these creatures' adaptations ultimately set them on a course for extinction? The researchers plan to investigate further. While pinning down a reason is complicated, Dr. Vlachos said, comparing the extremity of different adaptations "might give you some clues."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
IT'S a recipe for a role model: economic anxiety and America's inherent optimism. Enter that paragon of self reliance, the entrepreneur. "You are the president of a very important company You Inc.," said Thomas J. O'Malia, director emeritus of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Southern California. "And that's true regardless of whether you are starting your own business or working inside a large organization." The entrepreneurial ideal has been in ascent for years. But the shaky economy, it seems, is making the mystique of the entrepreneur a meme of the moment as never before. But is the rise of the entrepreneurial role model just the latest self help fad? Or is there real substance to the concept of entrepreneurship? Can it be studied and learned? There seems to be no shortage of effort. Courses in entrepreneurship are now offered by more than 1,200 American universities, and by thousands more organizations including community colleges, small business development centers and chambers of commerce. Many of the courses are continuing education programs for people with job experience. They include one week courses, night classes, online offerings and graduate degree programs. The courses vary widely, but they typically seek to leave students with some blend of two things: an entrepreneurial mind set and a tool kit. In a start up or inside a big company, the entrepreneurial approach emphasizes the pursuit of opportunities with small teams and few dollars, quickly and flexibly. The mentality, experts say, is that of the insurgent "attacker" rather than the established "defender." Look first to customer needs solving some problem and getting paid for it to build a business. "And keep the F word in mind focus," advised William K. Aulet, managing director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Entrepreneurship Center. "The No. 1 reason new businesses fail is lack of focus." One course the M.I.T. center offers is an intensive, one week entrepreneurship development program that costs more than 8,000 (companies and governments often pay some or all of the costs for their managers). "You see that the essence of the entrepreneurial spirit isn't so much about money as it is about passion," said Tetsuya O'Hara, 47, who took the M.I.T. course last December. "It's a perspective that goes beyond business, forcing you to think about what matters most to you." Mr. O'Hara, director of advanced research and development at Patagonia, the outdoor clothing maker, said he had applied the program's thinking in his job, which involves working with outside companies to explore new technologies and business concepts. Before the entrepreneurship program, he had a list of almost 200 projects he might pursue. Today, he has winnowed that list to two priority projects. "I already got a lot of return from the course," he said. Another participant, J. Patrick Bewley, vice president of global marketing strategy at Acxiom, a consumer data marketer, said one insight he took from the program was the importance of assembling strong teams of people with open minds, willing to experiment, learn rapidly and constantly refine ideas to improve them. "You have to build that culture of resilience within your group," said Mr. Bewley, 34. Both opportunity and necessity are motivations for starting new businesses. A report in May, based on data from the Census Bureau, found that new businesses were formed in 2009 at the highest level in 14 years, despite the weak economy. At the least, challenging economic times can prompt people to rethink their options. That is what happened to Saudia Davis, a former movie publicist, who worked promoting independent films like "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." She lost her job in 2007, when her employer cut her department. "I could find a new job or gamble and put everything on the table to start my own business," recalled Ms. Davis, 32. She chose to take the entrepreneurial plunge. Her grandmother had been a house cleaner, and Ms. Davis had long thought that house cleaning could be made more healthy and environmentally friendly for the clients and the cleaners. Her company, Greenhouse Eco Cleaning, in Brooklyn, was founded to pursue that vision of cleaner cleaning. It uses no toxic cleaning agents like ammonia or formaldehyde, and checks the allergies of clients and their pets to avoid using materials that might aggravate those conditions. Ms. Davis had never started a business before, and her work experience in movie promotion and her education, as an English and Africana studies major at Bowdoin College, were scant preparation. She found a business building course called FastTrac, offered by a nonprofit economic development organization in New York, the Industrial and Technology Assistance Corporation. She took the 12 week course of evening sessions in 2008, with a development grant paying for half the 1,000 tuition. The course work, Ms. Davis recalled, covered business functions like accounting, operations and marketing. "But it also gave me an understanding of what it takes and how all the slices of the pie that go into making a business come together," Mr. Davis said. Today, her company employs 12 people and has 600 household and office clients. Initial plans to manufacture green cleaning products have been postponed too capital intensive and distracting, Ms. Davis said. One lesson learned, she adds, is that the entrepreneurial journey is all consuming. "The closest thing I have to vacation is sleep," she said. The FastTrac coursework is developed by the Kauffman Foundation, a philanthropy with 2 billion in assets, dedicated to entrepreneurship research and education. The FastTrac courses are offered in 37 states, by local development organizations, chambers of commerce and other groups. The courses range in cost from 700 to 1,500 depending on the course, teaching venue and the audience, though grants and scholarships are often available. Kaplan, the private education company, announced in July that it would begin offering some FastTrac courses online, for 882 a course. And the Kauffman Foundation earlier this month overhauled its free Web site, with resources for aspiring and practicing entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial mindset, says Bo Fishback, the Kauffman Foundation's vice president of entrepreneurship, is a personal asset that can be applied to any field. "It's a mentality that sees every problem out there not as a setback but as an opportunity to fix," he said. "Some people will start businesses, but others will take that mindset with them into corporations and government." It worked out that way for Carrie Coker Britt. After three years working for an Atlanta law firm as a recruiter and administrator, Ms. Britt decided against going to law school.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Jose Antonio Bowen, the new president of Goucher College in Baltimore, made headlines this fall with the announcement that the college would accept two minute videos from applicants as an alternative to high school transcripts. But Dr. Bowen, a jazz musician who has played with Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck and Bobby McFerrin, has been shaking up college instruction for years, in workshops across the country, preaching the lessons of his book, "Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning." His ideas about higher education in the Internet age are far reaching, and could be threatening to some faculty members. But he makes a strong case that colleges will become obsolete if they cling to old habits, when so much of the learning dispensed on campus is available online. Why is it important to change what happens on campus? Universities were created at a time when knowledge was scarce. Now knowledge is available everywhere. So If what faculty do is profess to students, their relative value has diminished. If we're going to stay in business, we're going to have to offer something of value that people will pay for, something that no one else does. The most important thing is that students are actively learning in your class, that they have a reason to go. If they can get the same experience online for free, we're all going to be out of business. Give students something to do before they come to class, and then when they get to class, make that assignment more complex. Teaching is not just getting the facts across to the students, but sharing the context and the complexity of what we know. I teach jazz, so after students listen to Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, I ask them to articulate the differences between them, using a different context. If they're talking to a carpenter, the analogy might be shag carpet, hardwood and stained concrete, or in terms of alcohol, cabernet, champagne and whiskey. That's how learning works, comparing something new to something you know, and trying to integrate it. Transparency improves learning. If you tell students that what they're doing is critical thinking, they retain it more than if you don't name it. We know a lot about what works. For example, using a highlighter when you read doesn't increase student learning; what does is reading the chapter, then taking out an index card and putting it in your own words. We talk about the three Rs: relationships, resilience and reflection. If you increase those things, students will learn more, and teaching content becomes less important.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Scientists have for the first time improved memory by applying direct electrical stimulation to a key area in the brain as it learns its way around a new environment. The stimulation, delivered through electrodes inserted into the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, sharply improved performance on a virtual driving game that tests spatial memory, the neural mapping ability that allows people to navigate a new city without a GPS. Experts said that the new study, appearing Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, was tantalizing but not yet conclusive, because the number of patients tested six was small, and the biological effects of electrical stimulation are still poorly understood. But it comes at a time of growing excitement in the study of memory and its disorders; only last week, researchers reported strong evidence that damage associated with Alzheimer's disease spreads through the brain beginning in the same area targeted in the new study. "People should run to replicate this study, because the implications are incredibly exciting, both for understanding the mechanism for encoding new memories, and ultimately for the treatment of neurological diseases" like dementias, said Michael J. Kahana, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. Scientists have enhanced learning with electrical stimulation before, many times in rodents and at least once in a human, as a side effect of stimulation for another purpose. In the 1980s, researchers directly stimulated a brain region in humans called the hippocampus, which is critical in memory formation; but the current interfered with new memories. In the new study, a team of doctors at the University of California, Los Angeles, focused on a neighboring area, called the entorhinal cortex. The entorhinal cortex is now the center of intense study. It is where the first signs of damage in Alzheimer's disease usually appear, and it has dense connections to the hippocampus, through which it transmits the streaming data of daily experience, studies suggest presumably for sifting and encoding. The researchers threaded electrodes into the brains of seven people with severe epilepsy, a standard procedure allowing surgeons to pinpoint the squalls of brain activity that cause seizures, before operating. The patients worked to master a taxi driver game, in which the goal is to quickly drop off passengers at various locations in an unfamiliar virtual city. They "drove" to six places, and during three of the trips an electrode in their entorhinal cortex ran a low current enough to stimulate neurons in the area but not enough to interfere with function or tip off the patients. Sure enough, on a test given later, each patient did far better in returning to the three "stimulated" destinations than to the other three, which were equally difficult to find. The improvement ranged from 40 percent to nearly 90 percent, as measured by the length of the path that the patients used. The stimulation also increased so called theta waves in the hippocampus, a low frequency global rhythm that seems to coordinate the firing of neurons and aid memory. "The bottom line is that, you turn this thing on, and later on you remember better what you learned," said Dr. Itzhak Fried, the senior author and a professor of neurosurgery at U.C.L.A. and Tel Aviv University. His co authors were Nanthia Suthana, Dr. Zulfi Haneef, Dr. John Stern, Roy Mukamel, Eric Behnke and Barbara Knowlton, all of U.C.L.A. Previous studies have identified neurons in the entorhinal cortex called grid cells that are involved in spatial navigation, but it is not yet clear how spatial memories are formed or which cells are most critical. The famous amnesic patient known as H.M., who had much of his hippocampi (there are two, one in each hemisphere of the brain) and neighboring entorhinal tissue surgically removed to control seizures, learned to draw a floor plan of the house he moved into after his operation. "Given these anatomical uncertainties, it may be premature to draw firm conclusions about the locus of memory enhancing stimulation," Suzanne Corkin, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of a coming book about H.M., "Permanent Present Tense," said in an e mail. Still, the potential upside to developing a way to juice the memory circuits is enormous. People with severe dementias, in addition to their loss of identity, often cannot navigate their way to the corner store, or even the bathroom a humiliation that even a crude electronic aid might help resolve. Tens of thousands of people with Parkinson's disease and other disorders benefit from implants that stimulate tissue deep in the brain. "The potential application of deep brain stimulation in amnesic disorders is enticing," wrote Sandra E. Black of the University of Toronto, in an editorial accompanying the study. The next step, Dr. Black wrote, is "finding the best structure for stimulation and the best way to evaluate its effects."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A bevy of modern animalic perfumes (clockwise from bottom left): Suedois by Euphorium Brooklyn, Bat by Zoologist, Ma Bete by Eris, Cadavre Exquis by Fazzolari Gardoni, Equus by YeYe Parfums and Beaver by Zoologist.Credit...David Brandon Geeting for The New York Times A bevy of modern animalic perfumes (clockwise from bottom left): Suedois by Euphorium Brooklyn, Bat by Zoologist, Ma Bete by Eris, Cadavre Exquis by Fazzolari Gardoni, Equus by YeYe Parfums and Beaver by Zoologist. In 2012, Victor Wong, a video game designer for a toy company in Toronto, had a tiny midlife crisis in his hotel room while on vacation. He felt burned out on work but was strangely revived by sniffing the hotel toiletries, which came from a niche fragrance line he can no longer recall. What he does remember is that he swooned over the scents, which were spicy, musky and intense. He knew then and there that he wanted to make perfume. Returning home, Mr. Wong began haunting the message boards of the cult perfume sites BaseNotes and Fragrantica, feverishly researching the formulas behind his favorite scents. The same notes kept popping up: castoreum, civet, musk, ambergris. He realized that he was drawn, in an instinctual way, to animal derived scents or rather (because most perfumery materials that come from animals are now banned or heavily regulated) to their lab created chemical equivalents. When Mr. Wong worked up the courage to put out an open call online for a perfumer to help him create his fragrance, he already had a specific, and beastly, concept in his head. He would call his line Zoologist, and he would release a series of scents named for the wild creatures that inspired them. The British perfumer Chris Bartlett was the first to respond, with a bold idea for the maiden fragrance in the Wong menagerie. He wanted to capture the essence of a beaver. Mr. Bartlett proposed a scent that used no real animal ingredients, but smelled strongly of wet fur, dank musk, felled trees and the sour buttery odor of a beaver's castor sac secretions. Mr. Wong said yes immediately. When Beaver hit the market in 2014, it immediately became a polarizing sensation in the niche perfume world. CaFleureBon, which reviews cult perfumes, named it one of the best of the year, and fans flocked to its peppery, sweaty funk. But, as Mr. Wong now admits, "it was ultimately too challenging for a lot of people." "A lot of people thought it was interesting but said that they would never wear it," he said. The smell of damp pelt (and the not so subtle bodily connotations of the name) made some customers feel uncomfortable rather than swaddled in the dense odor. So Mr. Wong asked Mr. Bartlett to revisit his formula, and this fall they released Beaver 2016, a riff on the original idea but with more "fresh air and river top notes to make it more attractive." Mr. Wong has released six other perfumes, including Bat, a pungent reverie on banana, cave dirt, musk and overripe figs from the perfumer Dr. Ellen Covey that won the top prize at the 2016 Art and Olfaction Awards. The venerable fragrance critic Luca Turin gave Bat a rave, writing that "the fragrance seems lit from within by the earth note all the way to drydown." It turns out that Mr. Wong's animal instincts were right along: In 2016, the demand for fauna inspired scents is cresting. "Animalic" is a buzzword floating around the industry, now that the minimalist, clean trend has given way (at least in high fashion niche circles) to more feral fragrance clouds. Maybe it's the desire of millennials to reclaim their beastly odors in an age of technological detachment, but fragrance buyers are newly excited to smell as if they come from an elegant zoo. A new line capitalizing on this trend is Eris Parfums, a collection from Barbara Herman, a writer turned perfumer who runs the cult popular vintage fragrance site Yesterday's Perfume and whose book, "Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume," was published in 2013. When Ms. Herman decided to switch from writing about perfume to making it, she knew that the bestial would serve as her primary inspiration. "I got absolutely obsessed with animalics," she said. "I had these little bottles of old Lanvin and Piguet scents, which rely on notes like civet and castoreum, and I had such a physical reaction to them. They were rounder, deeper. They made me emotional." In her research, Ms. Herman found that many of her favorite vintage perfumes relied on a base accord called Animalis, developed by a French company in the 1920s. Animalis, in its original form, was an unctuous golden liquid comprised civet, castoreum, costus and musk, and smelled a bit like body odor, dirty scalp, perspiration, butter and a horse stable. Though it sounds unappealing on its own, when combined with other materials, consumers couldn't resist it. Animalis found its way into popular scents like Robert Piguet Visa and YSL Kouros. Though the note changed once real animal products were banned in modern perfumery, Ms. Herman still wanted to mimic its singular tang. This summer, she introduced three perfumes, including Ma Bete, which pairs boozy florals like jasmine and neroli with more brutish notes of benzoin, patchouli and a new chemical base blend that mimics the vintage Animalis. "The word 'beast' kept coming up for me," Ms. Herman said. "It's like the tension between Beauty and the Beast. She's afraid but drawn, identified but repelled. It is compelling now, especially with the internet, to remind ourselves that we are animals." A few of the latest crop, like the Papillon Artisan Perfumes Salome (a heady cumin forward bestial) and Bruno Fazzolari and Antonio Gardoni's experimental new scent Cadavre Exquis (which smells a bit like rigor mortis), are aggressively difficult, with the intent to curl and confuse the nose. This can draw consumers who want to confront their darker desires. Stephen Dirkes, a self taught perfumer who runs the fanciful Euphorium Brooklyn from his workshop in Greenpoint says that animalic scents are, in a twisted way, about confronting mortality. "There is a death drive in these smells," he said over coffee, waving a tin of authentic ambergris from the belly of a whale under my nose. It smelled of boiled fat, mollusks and salt, and was impossible to stop sniffing. "I like to think about how fashion is often elevated as an expression of personal style, like art you can wear, but it's also an expression of self loathing," he said. "Grasse, in France, where great perfumery came from, was also a tannery town. The smell of death and the smell of flowers went hand in hand." One of Euphorium's best selling scents is Suedois, a spicy leather concoction that still contains sharp hints of tannery tang. The same earthy leather can be found in the YeYe Parfums signature scent Equus, which the perfumer Ernesto Sanchez Bujanda says was directly inspired by "the life of a horse: stables, wood, hay, sweat, skin and the beauty of the animal."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
"Every day feels like: 'Don't mess this up,'" said Lindsay Peoples Wagner, the editor in chief of Teen Vogue, this past spring. She was in her 25th floor office at One World Trade Center, where the walls were lined with photographs and a publicist hovered. This was not quite two years after she published an article in New York magazine called "What It's Really Like to Be Black and Work in Fashion," in which she interviewed 100 black industry professionals at nearly every level and corner of the fashion business; not quite two years after she had had "some of the most authentic, and often tearful, conversations about the pains of racism," according to the article. And it was not quite two years after Anna Wintour, the artistic director of Conde Nast, who was looking for a new Teen Vogue editor, emailed her with a blank subject line, asking to meet. "I rushed around to buy an outfit and get my hair done," said Ms. Peoples Wagner, who wore a floral Prada dress. "'If you're going to be in this industry,'" Ms. Peoples Wagner recalled her mother telling her, "'you're going to have to be what you needed.'" This month Ms. Peoples Wagner, 29, is celebrating her first anniversary as the youngest editor in chief of a Conde Nast magazine. She is also the company's third black editor at the top of an American title. If the first version of Teen Vogue was largely a shrunken down version of adult Vogue, and a recent version was laced with politics, Ms. Peoples Wagner's is something else: one that is focused on fashion but also on putting "people in the publication that I felt like other publications were too scared to," she said. At least, publications in the mass readership space of a glossy web entity. "Being the only black, female editor in chief in this industry, you carry a lot of responsibility with that," she said in a phone call this week. She was on her way to Los Angeles for the Teen Vogue Summit, the live event she is remaking. "I think I've made a lot of decisions that other people would never take the risk to make." Ms. Peoples Wagner grew up in Brown Deer, Wis., and it was at her private suburban junior high school that she became acutely aware of race. The mainstream media in the 2000s for teenage girls was a fever dream of homogeneity; an era of denim miniskirts and Uggs, "The Hills," "The O.C.," when editors across all major glossies rotated the same young white starlets between covers. There were, of course, other lesser known women on television who shaped Ms. Peoples Wagner's ideas about beauty, success and identity. If you were a young, black woman in the early 2000s, you got a crash course in what it was like to be a career minded African American woman managing life and love, thanks to shows like "Girlfriends," "Half Half" and "Eve." Black millennial female filmmakers like Issa Rae and Lena Waithe have discussed how black sitcoms shaped the work they produce today. But "I knew something was a little off," Ms. Peoples Wagner said of the experience of attending a predominantly white school. It was a jarring contrast to the black church in which she grew up, and it was an experience that continued through college at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa, a city that is "literally surrounded by cornfields" she said. A professor suggested she apply for a role as an intern in Teen Vogue's fashion closet during her winter break, and after graduation she returned to the magazine as an employee, working full time while also waitressing and moonlighting in retail. "When I started at Teen Vogue, it was such a struggle for me," Ms. Peoples Wagner said. "I'd never cried that much in my life. I felt like this industry would never open its doors to people like me." "She was very ambitious right out the gate," said Stella Bugbee, the editor in chief and president of The Cut. "She was really excited about featuring new talent and undiscovered talent. She would come to me on a regular basis with a roster of people and say, 'This person is going to be a really big person.' I trusted her because she was always right." Asked about Ms. Peoples Wagner, Ms. Wintour wrote in an email: "Who better to inspire a whole new generation of Teen Vogue readers to be passionate and proactive about their world than Lindsay?" Exclusivity? This Vogue Is the Opposite "I'm not one of those editors in chief who pretends to have it all together and be perfect. I think that makes it more human and more approachable, and makes people want to read Teen Vogue more," Ms. Peoples Wagner said on the phone. "I think that everything that we've done has really been a lot of things that I wish would've been around when I was younger, and that I think are really helping young people in shaping their worldview in a positive way." She has focused on highlighting new names in the most inclusive sense. She hired Sophia Wilson, a 19 year old photographer she contacted via Instagram direct message, to shoot a Fenty Beauty article for the publication's September issue. "It feels like for so long the fashion industry has been focusing on white photographers," Ms. Wilson said. "Giving jobs to women of color, especially young women of color, is so important." Ms. Peoples Wagner started with a "Young Hollywood" cover featuring seven actors and actresses including Indya Moore and Yalitza Aparicio. Before that, Teen Vogue had never had a trans person of color on the cover, she said earlier this year. Then came Lil Nas X, the face of this year's music issue. "A lot of people were posting about him and writing about him because he had a No. 1 song but weren't giving him the editorials," Ms. Peoples Wagner said. "So for us to give him his first cover as a young, black, queer artist is probably the best thing I could probably do." During New York Fashion Week, Ms. Peoples Wagner created an initiative known as Generation Next that highlighted a diverse set of designers like Anifa Mvuemba of the brand Hanifa and Georgia Fallon of Dyke Sport. Despite conversation about diversity and inclusion, and advances in representation made on the runway, "I still go to events and P.R. people are shocked that I'm black," said Channing Hargrove, a fashion news editor at Refinery29. How fast that changes if it does change and how much of that Ms. Peoples Wagner can effect, is one of the questions facing her next. As she is well aware. Yet the role of editor in chief, particularly at a mainstream beauty and fashion publication, is still a prestigious post. It's just that today for young, ambitious people it often isn't the destination, but maybe a layover on the way to more flexible and more lucrative pastures. Elaine Welteroth, for example one of Ms. Peoples Wagner's predecessors as Teen Vogue editor has spoken openly about how much more money she makes in her post magazine career. "Leaving the magazine business and working for myself has been an exponential leap in terms of earnings," Ms. Welteroth said in a recent interview with The Cut. Eva Chen, formerly of Lucky Magazine (and Teen Vogue), is now a children's book author and head of fashion partnerships at Instagram. Ms. Peoples Wagner, too, recently published a book, "Becoming a Fashion Designer," a project she started before she signed on to Teen Vogue, but she is firmly focused on her day job. "We have one of the most inclusive, diverse staffs" of any Conde Nast magazine, she said. "Most of the people that I've hired have been women of color. And I'm really proud of that." And yet, she had said, back in her office, "If I had a daughter, I don't know if I would want her to be in this industry." "I'd like to think that if I continue to make these changes and continue to implement these things, and show black girls with cornrows and Afros on covers, that maybe she would feel more included than I did," she said. "That, to me, is success."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The sanctuary at St. Mark's Church is a flexible space, configurable in any number of ways. If you frequent Danspace Project, you've probably seen dance from all sides of that room. But until Thursday, at the premiere of Yanira Castro's "Court/Garden," I had never been herded midperformance up onto the altar, a kind of limbo where the audience waited out a set change, a "labor spectacle," the program called it. This was one of several audience upheavals in the elaborate three act evening, procedures that increasingly eroded boundaries between the cast and crew and us. Ms. Castro, who has long investigated those boundaries, turned to the 17th century for inspiration here, specifically to the court of Louis XIV the birthplace of ballet in all its grandeur and stringent hierarchy. The choreographer and her vast team of collaborators, A Canary Torsi, mine that rich material in ways both alluring and overly ambitious. Perhaps in the spirit of imperial abundance, "Court/Garden" is packed to the brim, driven by big concepts that are somehow more intriguing from a remove in anticipation or in retrospect than in the moment of performance. Act I, the most choreographically striking in its twists on Baroque dance, could be a piece in itself. After posing for a camera near the entrance our images broadcast before the court, as it were, in a kind of see and be seen ritual we took our seats facing a maze of mirrored panels. (Kathy Couch was credited with "environment/lighting," a colossal undertaking.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The posthumous debut album by the Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke, who was shot and killed in February, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart this week, arriving as one of the biggest releases of a slow summer in the music business, one of countless industries greatly affected by the coronavirus pandemic. "Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon," Pop Smoke's third career release following two mixtapes, had the largest opening week since Lady Gaga's "Chromatica" in early June, earning the equivalent of 251,000 albums sold, factoring in both streaming and traditional sales. Songs from the album were streamed 268 million times the fourth best streaming week of the year while bundles of the music and merchandise helped lead to 59,000 units in sales, according to Nielsen.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Another big player in the craft beer business, Stone Brewing of Escondido, Calif., plans to begin construction of the Stone Brewing Hotel across the street from its brewery and its Stone Brewing World Bistro Gardens restaurant, retail and beer garden complex. The hotel is expected to add 99 rooms and three bars to the rest of the company's attractions, all located about 30 miles north of San Diego. For fans of craft spirits, the 1927 vintage Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach, Va., reopened in March after a four year, nearly 85 million renovation that included adding a working distillery. Tarnished Truth Distilling Company makes bourbon, rye and vodka at the 85 room grand hotel and supplies its spirits to hotel bars, including the Hunt Room, which was said to serve bootleg drinks during Prohibition. The distillery "became a homage to the history of the Cavalier," said Mike Woodhead, a vice president of marketing for Gold Key PHR, which owns the Cavalier Hotel. "When the hotel first opened in 1927 it was surrounded by places to get illegal whiskey." The historic hotel follows the 2015 opening of the boutique Distillery Inn from Marble Distilling Co. in Carbondale, Colo, about 30 miles from Aspen, where guests can curl up by the fireplaces in its five rooms with house made rye whiskey and toast iconic Mount Sopris.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
" I'm not an athlete by nature," Alison Brie said one afternoon in the Chelsea section of New York, though you wouldn't guess that from her current role. The 35 year old actress has been pushing her body to its limits as the star of "GLOW," the silly smart Netflix comedy about female wrestling, inspired by the schlocky 1980s franchise Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. As Ruth, a struggling actress turned body slammer, Ms. Brie has had to pull off both a Diane Chambers perm and a three quarter flip. "It's like learning how to do a great trust fall where nobody catches you," she said, a few weeks before the June 29 premiere of the second season. The cast prepared for Season 1 with four weeks of training, building up from basic somersaults to headlocks and suplexes. "Suplex is when you put a person basically in a headlock, but then their body is facing you, and then you lift their whole body over your body and you go slam onto the mat on your backs," Ms. Brie said brightly. "It's become my favorite move, and I've done both sides of it." Her Type A roles on "Mad Men" and "Community" scarcely prepared her for the physical feats required on "GLOW." But she did have experience in fearlessness. At the California Institute of the Arts, where she studied acting, she had a penchant for streaking. ("The rules at school were very accommodating to nudists," Ms. Brie said.) At 17, she spent a summer as a birthday clown, which inoculated her from future forms of humiliation. "I think that idea that you can't show any fear in front of these little monsters has translated into the ring as, like, 'Never show fear. Just do it. Run at it,'" she said. Ms. Brie was game, if skeptical. "There are always fad workouts going on, and it just doesn't interest me," she said. "It took me a long time to get into SoulCycle, because people just preached about it too much. And then of course once I tried it I was like, 'Oh, this is really fun!'" At Rumble's West 23rd Street location, she was greeted by a founding trainer named Erika Hammond, who wore a black sports bra and a ponytail. Ms. Brie changed into workout gear and followed her into a private studio tricked out in faux graffiti. She removed her engagement ring (she is married to the actor Dave Franco) and donned fingerless hand wraps, to protect her knuckles. "Are you a lefty or a righty?" Ms. Hammond said, before taking her through Rumble's six basic punches: jab, cross, front hook, back hook, front uppercut and back uppercut. "Breathe on each punch," Ms. Hammond said, as they practiced side by side in the mirror. "You want to start from the ground up, so you get some power from the hip." With the moves down (more or less), Ms. Brie put on puffy white boxing gloves, while Ms. Hammond slipped on a pair of black mitts. They circled each other, and, as Ms. Hammond called out numbered combinations ("One! Two! One! Two! Roll!"), Ms. Brie threw a suite of punches. "Always stay in that same fighter stance," Ms. Hammond said. Her character on "GLOW" is a metaphorical punching bag, but was Ms. Brie ready to try a real one? "I want to you to throw hooks on this," Ms. Hammond said, leading her to a teardrop shaped bag at the back of the room. Next up: defense. Ms. Hammond showed Ms. Brie how to do a slip, where you move your head to the side and shift your knees to evade a jab. The trainer held up two foam noodles and said, "With these, I am going to hit you." Soon Ms. Brie was hunching her shoulders to dodge noodle thwacks, right then left. She caught herself in the mirror and said, "I look like an ogre." As it turned out, Ms. Hammond had been a World Wrestling Entertainment "Diva" before becoming a personal trainer, a career change brought on by a torn meniscus caused by a back breaker move. In her wrestling life she had a full fledged stage persona. "My name was Veronica Lane, and I was a beauty queen," she said. "So, like, the face," Ms. Brie said. In pro wrestling, the "face" is the hero and the "heel" is the villain. On "GLOW," Ruth comes to embrace that she is better at getting boos than cheers and reinvents herself as the ultimate Cold War heel: a Soviet vixen called Zoya the Destroya. "Every face needs a really good heel," she said. Ms. Hammond, recalling her wrestling days, said, "There's one little thing that you pull from your life, and that's how your character evolves."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
If, like me, you've been imbibing rather more than usual this last year, then you won't need much persuading to watch "Our Blood Is Wine," a slightly tipsy, thoroughly charming documentary about winemaking in post Soviet Georgia. By the end, so many glasses have been raised in lip smacking appreciation that the movie's most impressive accomplishment is not its deep dive into grape centered lore, but the ability of its director, Emily Railsback, to hold her iPhone camera steady. Eagerly accompanied by the sommelier Jeremy Quinn, Ms. Railsback scours the country to discover a reinvigorated culture of independent vintners and ancient traditions. The homogenized factory wine produced under the Soviets pronounced "garbage" by one Georgian and necessitating the destruction of hundreds of varieties of grapes is a stain that these dedicated craftsmen are eager to erase. Employing an underground fermenting method many thousands of years old, they bury the grape slurry in handmade clay pots. Nine months later, a delicious drink is born, its initial tasting typically described as a sacred experience. An ecstatic Mr. Quinn concurs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
THE REAL MCCOY The Suydam farm, a bonafide family operation in Somerset, has been around since 1713. Ryck Suydam says that without tax relief it would have been sold years ago. THOSE selling freshly laid eggs, organic herbs, Christmas trees, or any other homegrown products in New Jersey may soon have to redouble their efforts if they want to protect the drastically reduced property taxes they pay by using their land for farming. Last month a State Senate panel approved legislation that would raise the bar for farm operators who sought to qualify for a farmland tax exemption. The new minimum gross income that a farmer would have to earn selling products for the first five acres would be 1,000 a year twice the previous threshold. For each additional acre the amount in sales remains at 5. The bill, now before the Budget and Appropriations Committee, also stipulates more training for tax assessors and recommends the development of guidelines on what constitutes a farm. The new standards come in response to persistent public assertions that the state's Farmland Assessment Program, which began in 1964, has become more of a tax shelter for wealthy individuals and corporations than a means to preserve farmland. "Over time, what's happened is that people recognized what an amazing tax discount the farm assessment provided," said Senator Jennifer Beck, a Republican from Red Bank who is sponsoring the bill. "And they began to use it to skirt having to pay property tax. The abuse started to take over the program, and it became clear there were an awful lot of fake farmers." The farm tax discount, which can run as high as 98 percent, applies to lands being farmed and not to houses, barns, pools or sheds on one's property. Some of New Jersey's best known residents are included among those frequently cited as "fake farmers": Jon Bon Jovi, who raises honeybees on his Middletown property; Bruce Springsteen, who leases part of his Colts Neck land to an organic farmer; the publisher Malcolm Forbes Jr., who raises cattle on 450 acres in Bedminster; and Jon Runyan, the former N.F.L. star and a freshman Republican congressman who raises miniature donkeys and sells firewood off his 23 acre Mount Laurel estate. Worse yet, said Jeff Tittel, the director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club, are the developers and corporations that own large tracts on which some level of agricultural activity makes them eligible for the farmland tax exemption. "The biggest farmers in New Jersey are developers," said Mr. Tittel, who doesn't support the new bill because he doesn't think it goes far enough. "They buy property during a bust for a low price, then they use the Farmland Assessment to land bank it, sitting on it until the next boom, when they can build." New Jersey's Farmland Assessment Act penalizes properties that no longer qualify as farmland, requiring owners to pay the market rate tax for the year a property becomes ineligible, as well as for the two previous years. Some states have stiffer penalties in such cases; in Pennsylvania, for instance, back taxes plus interest must be paid on the previous seven years. Other states require higher revenue thresholds and bigger tracts to qualify for farm tax rates: in New York, qualifying farmers must earn 10,000 per seven acres. Senator Beck said changing the minimum size of a farm and the rollback provisions in New Jersey would require a voter referendum. Brian Schilling, a specialist in agricultural policy at Rutgers Cooperative Extension, is unequivocal in his support of a tax differential system for farmers. "Without farmland assessment," he said, "we wouldn't have any viable agricultural activity in this state." But he acknowledged that "enforcement of the law is not always as rigid as it could be." The state Division of Taxation offers local tax assessors a handbook and seminars on the Farmland Assessment program, but better guidelines would be welcome, said Patricia Wright, who oversees the program. "The Department of Agriculture could give more guidance on what is or is not a farm," said Ms. Wright, a property tax administrator with the tax division, "but it needs to come from them. They are the farmers; we are the tax people." New Jersey has about 982,000 acres of farmland, according to Ms. Wright, who added that 10 years ago it had 1.1 million. In a 2008 study, Mr. Schilling's department looked at the potential impact of raising the revenue threshold on state farmlands and local tax coffers. A 10,000 threshold would remove about 398,000 acres of farmland from eligibility for the farmland assessment, while raising 51 million in new taxes. A 1,000 minimum would make 47,378 acres ineligible, while adding 2 million in taxes. But Mr. Schilling noted that imposing the 1,000 threshold wouldn't mean losing as much farmland as those numbers suggest, because "I fully would expect every landowner to find every way possible to increase productivity to generate 1,000 and meet the new threshold." According to Richard Motyka, a tax assessor in seven towns in Warren and Passaic Counties, doubling the threshold will not present much of a challenge for those currently eligible for the exemption. "Going from 500 to 1,000?" he said. "That's just a stroke of a pen. It's not very hard to buy a book of receipts." Over the years, Mr. Motyka has challenged many who have claimed to be running farm operations, only to lose most of his challenges in court. "I'm a little jaded," he said. "I just sign off on them unless you're outright doing nothing. The bar is so low, it's not worth fighting."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Taylor Swift and Katy Perry Ended Bad Blood With an Olive Branch. Here's How It Started. It was the olive branch 'grammed round the world. On Tuesday, the yearslong feud between the pop stars Katy Perry and Taylor Swift appeared to come to an end when Ms. Perry sent a wreath of actual olive branches to Ms. Swift. Band Aids don't fix bullet holes, but can foliage? Ms. Swift planted a video of the peace offering on her Instagram account with the words "Thank you Katy" and the potent double heart emoji. See Katy Perry and Taylor Swift seal their reconciliation in Swift's "You Need to Calm Down" video. The camera also shows a note written by Ms. Perry, 33. Repeated viewings suggest it reads: "Hey Old Friend I've been doing some reflecting on past miscommunications and hurt feelings between us. I really want to clear the air" and "I'm deeply sorry." So what was Ms. Perry apologizing for? And why was Ms. Swift so grateful? You're a busy person who reads The New York Times. But you're obviously curious. Please allow me to break it down for you. It used to be mad love In September 2008, Ms. Perry and Ms. Swift appeared together in a segment at the MTV Video Music Awards, along with the singer Miley Cyrus. All three were nominated for the show's best new artist award, along with Jordin Sparks, who had won the sixth season of "American Idol," and Tokio Hotel, an all male German rock band that would beat all four women. There appeared to be no bad blood between Ms. Perry and Ms. Swift. "I think if we weren't all, like, crazy about each other," Ms. Swift said, "that would be awkward, but it's not." At one of Ms. Swift's concerts in Los Angeles, in April 2010, she and Ms. Perry performed Ms. Perry's single "Hot n Cold" together. One of the dancers, Lockhart Brownlie, gave an interview to an Australian newspaper in December 2013, in which he explained that all three had previously toured with Ms. Perry in 2011. He said that Ms. Swift's tour "was a great experience and she's a great person to work with, but then Katy contacted us." Speculation about a feud grew after a September 2014 article about Ms. Swift in Rolling Stone, pegged to the release of her album "1989." Ms. Swift explained the subject of her song "Bad Blood," which would become the album's fourth single. She said a former friend "did something so horrible" to her: I was like, 'Oh, we're just straight up enemies.' And it wasn't even about a guy! It had to do with business. She basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me. She later told Rolling Stone that her desire in writing the song "was not to create some gossip fest." That backfired. (See: this rather long article that you're still reading.) Hours later, Ms. Perry sent a cryptic tweet: "Watch out for the Regina George in sheep's clothing ..." At the time, Ms. Swift had received seven Grammys. Ms. Perry had won none. Ms. Swift had a habit of burying hidden messages in her liner notes. (This is how fans claim to know which songs on "Red" were about Jake Gyllenhaal.) One striking element of the "1989" rollout: Ms. Swift did not release the album on Spotify. A week later, her label removed her entire catalog from the streaming service. (This would prove important.) In an interview with Billboard in January 2015, ahead of her Super Bowl halftime show, Ms. Perry was asked about her tweet and her then rumored feud with Ms. Swift. The video depicted Ms. Swift as an action hero leading a squad of musicians, models and actors in a crusade against a frenemy who betrays her. That antagonist was played by the actress Selena Gomez, who appeared in a black wig and dark makeup that some said was quite similar to Ms. Perry's coiffure and look at the time. After nominations for the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards came out, the rapper sent a series of tweets hinting that her video for "Anaconda" would have been nominated for video of the year had she been a different "kind" of artist. She told Mr. Corden that she was ready for the drama to end. You say sorry (just for show?) Unless, of course, you count Ms. Swift's decision to return her entire music catalog back to streaming services on June 8, 2017, the same day that "Witness" came out. Ms. Perry's album release seemed lost in all the buzz. Ms. Swift dominated the streaming charts. 'God bless her on her journey' That weekend, Ms. Perry staged a 96 hour YouTube livestream to promote her album. As part of that, in a conversation with Arianna Huffington, she apologized to Ms. Swift and said she forgave her. "I love her, and I want the best for her," Ms. Perry said, later adding, "God bless her on her journey. God bless her. Honestly." She repeated a similar sentiment in a live performance of "Swish Swish" days later. Ms. Swift did not respond until her Instagram story this week. And you're all caught up for now.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Jill Shapiro was skeptical. She was taking the subway to look at an apartment on West 110th Street in Morningside Heights, which seemed very far north, she said, compared to the West 86th Street address where she was living with her husband and two daughters. "But when I got off the train, on that corner, I instantly knew," said Ms. Shapiro, 51, an office administrator. "If the apartment was O.K., this would be the neighborhood. It felt right." Among the attractions were a 24 hour supermarket on one corner, an adequate number of small shops and restaurants, and a "little less hustle and bustle" on the streets than in her previous neighborhood, she said. And then there was the three bedroom, two and a half bathroom apartment that she and her husband, Evan, a television producer who is also 51, bought 14 years ago, for about 1.2 million. For Ms. Shapiro, another reason was the students at Columbia University and other nearby schools. "The Columbia kids bring a lot of energy to the neighborhood," she said. She even likes the tourists she encounters when she walks her dogs in the gardens around the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, in an 11.3 acre complex called the Close, where peacocks roam the grounds. "The dogs like to look at them," she said. (So do the humans.) Edward Fortier, 56, a lawyer, was also looking for more space at an affordable price earlier this year, when he and his husband bought a three bedroom apartment near West 125th Street, at the northern end of the neighborhood, for less than 1 million a relative bargain, although it required a complete renovation. "It was hard to find that size apartment any other place, especially to the south, except in the several million dollar range," he said. For the previous 21 years, he'd lived at 110th Street and Central Park West, but he always liked the area around Columbia. "It has a nice open feel to it," he said. "And it has a lively vibe." Some residential construction nearby has been spurred in part by Columbia's new 17 acre Manhattanville campus, starting north of West 125th Street and already partly open. And while the additional housing is not welcomed by all residents, Mr. Fortier is optimistic, believing "it will bring more life to the neighborhood." Morningside Heights is both an old neighborhood much of it was given historic landmark status by New York City last year and a changing one, with several buildings recently completed or going up. It stretches from West 110th Street (called Cathedral Parkway in some parts) to West 125th Street (known in parts as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard), and from the Hudson River to Morningside Avenue. It includes the 13 block long Morningside Park, which has playgrounds, walking paths and a duck pond; the smaller Sakura Park, dotted with Japanese cherry trees; and broad areas of Riverside Park, with tennis courts at West 119th Street. Riverside Church, around West 122nd Street, has a soaring Gothic spire that can be seen from many blocks around. Columbia University is the behemoth in the neighborhood. The main campus has an entrance at Broadway and West 116th Street, but satellite buildings are scattered all around, including Barnard College across the street, ancillary academic centers and residential buildings. Bookstores, bars, food trucks and cafes line some sidewalks, while residential side streets tend to be peaceful. "It's like a little village," said Laura Friedman, 65, a retired community organizer who has lived in the neighborhood for 42 years with her husband, Paul Shneyer, 66, an attorney, and raised two daughters there. But she and others believe that the area which she said has already become too upscale for some writers and artists who once rented there is in danger of becoming overdeveloped, mostly on land owned by institutions in need of funds. Ms. Friedman is president of the Morningside Heights Community Coalition and of the Morningside Heights Historic District Committee, both of which "speak to how deeply people care about the neighborhood they live in," she said. Enclave, a 15 story, 428 unit modern rental building completed in 2016, rises next to the ornate Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on West 113th Street. Across the street, four former nurses' residences that are part of the Mount Sinai St. Luke's hospital complex are being converted into rental apartments, with construction scheduled to conclude in 2020. Union Theological Seminary, on Broadway near 121st Street, has sold the rights to build a condominium on its campus, as has the Jewish Theological Seminary, across the street, where a 32 story building called the Vandewater is going up. The historic district committee is working to extend the district's boundaries, and the coalition has promoted affordable housing, Ms. Friedman said, but "we have not yet been successful in stopping anything." "Prices have held pretty firm," said Steven O. Goldschmidt, a senior vice president at Warburg Realty, and in some cases have risen in recent years. Part of the reason for the increase, which has also been seen in luxury rentals, he said, is Columbia's new Manhattanville campus. Renovated buildings and a few new developments have made the neighborhood more desirable, especially for people looking for larger spaces, said Adrian Noriega, a broker with CORE Real Estate. And while the neighborhood has become somewhat pricier, it still offers good value, he said: "It has changed for the better." In mid October, 45 homes were listed for sale on StreetEasy. The least expensive, at 399,000, was a junior one bedroom, one bathroom co op near the northern end of Broadway. The costliest, at 2.95 million, was a three bedroom, two and a half bathroom co op on Riverside Drive with park and river views. Of the 66 apartments for rent in late October, prices ranged from 1,989 for a studio south of the Columbia campus to 9,500 for a four bedroom, three bathroom furnished condo unit with four balconies, available for only seven months. 417 RIVERSIDE DRIVE, No. 4A1 A two bedroom, one bathroom co op (no board approval needed) with views of Riverside Park, in a 1908 building with a full time doorman and a live in super, listed for 1.250 million. 212 906 0532 Chris Shelton, pastor of the Broadway Presbyterian Church on West 114th Street, said there is a lot of "community warmth" in the neighborhood, as well as "a sense of social justice and a passion for doing good." Mr. Shelton's church operates a shelter and a soup kitchen, and he has instituted a series of chamber music concerts that are open to the public, he said. Columbia University offers many arts programs, and the Manhattan School of Music, on Claremont Avenue and 122nd Street, presents student performances, many of them free. On Amsterdam Avenue, across from the Cathedral, one can find the venerable Hungarian Pastry Shop, filled with students and older people reading, writing or chatting, and V T Pizzeria and Restaurant, a popular student hangout, both of which have sidewalk seating. On the west side of Broadway, between West 112th and 113th, a string of restaurants with sidewalk seating includes Community Food Juice and Le Monde, a more sedate French restaurant. On the opposite corner is Tom's Restaurant, where Jerry Seinfeld and pals ate on "Seinfeld" (though only the exterior was used on the show). On the northern end of Broadway, in an area sometimes identified as part of Harlem, Dinosaur Bar B Que and Harlem's Floridita are popular. Morningside Park hosts the Down to Earth farmers' market on Saturdays. And on Broadway along the Columbia campus, from West 114th to West 116th Street, Columbia Greenmarket operates year round on Thursdays (Tuesday on Thanksgiving week) and Sundays. Students north of West 116th Street are zoned for two schools. P.S. 125 Ralph Bunche has about 260 students in prekindergarten through fifth grade. On 2016 2017 state tests, 54 percent of students there met standards in English, versus 40 percent citywide; 54 percent met standards in math, compared with 42 percent citywide. At P.S. 36 Margaret Douglas, which has about 439 students in prekindergarten through fifth grade, 21 percent met standards in English on 2016 2017 state tests and 21 percent met standards in math. The 1 subway train stops on Broadway at West 110th, West 116th and West 125th Streets. A commute to Midtown can take 30 to 45 minutes. Buses include the M4, M5, M11, M104 and M60 SBS to and from La Guardia Airport. A bronze relief sculpture at Columbia University, facing Broadway between West 117th and 118th Streets, commemorates "the Battle of Harlem Heights, won by Washington's troops on this site, September 16, 1776." George Washington later wrote of the skirmish, "This little advantage has inspired our troops prodigiously." A gift of the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York, the plaque was installed in 1897, the year the campus was inaugurated. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The bombardier beetle is famous for producing a hot, lethal toxin expelled forcefully through a channel near its abdomen. Now, using a technique known as synchrotron X ray imaging, researchers have witnessed exactly what happens inside the beetle's body when the explosion occurs. "The beetle has a really complicated explosion system that's all connected together," said Christine Ortiz, a materials scientist at M.I.T. and an author of the new report, which appeared in the journal Science. The beetle has two chambered glands in which the explosive chemicals are produced. When a predator approaches or the beetle becomes alarmed, a valve opens and a single drop of the chemical falls from one chamber into the second, where it combines with a catalyst and sets off an explosion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
BACK TO LIFE 10 p.m. on Showtime. When Miri Matteson ( Daisy Haggard ) re emerges in her isolated seaside hometown after spending 18 years in prison for a violent crime, it's her secretive past , and that of those around her, that come to the fore . Across the new show's six episodes, it becomes clear that "the people she's closest to, including her mother, Caroline (Geraldine James ), her former best friend, Mandy (Christine Bottomley ), and the affable new neighbor, Billy (Adeel Akhtar ), are harboring secrets that start to make her own past transgression look tolerable," Mike Hale writes in his New York Times review. This series, which Haggard created and helped write, has already drawn comparisons to "Fleabag" another female led British show that shares the executive producers Harry and Jack Williams and has a similar focus on dark humor, grief and redemption. DUBLIN MURDERS 8 p.m. on Starz. Like the latest season of "True Detective," this procedural experiments with multiple timelines to examine how a past crime may have influenced a murder in the present. Sarah Greene stars as the Dublin police detective Cassie Maddox , and Killian Scott plays her partner, Detective Rob Reilly, a charismatic investigator who's reinvented himself after a traumatic childhood. But Reilly's shadowy past resurfaces when a young girl is found dead at an archaeological site near Knocknaree the same town from which three children went missing 21 years earlier.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
As any opera lover will tell you, the drama in the wings can be every bit as enthralling as what's taking place onstage. The February 2011 Washington National Opera production of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" was a case in point. It was the first day of rehearsal at the Kennedy Center when Michael Chioldi, performing the role of the American consul Sharpless, and Scott Hill, an apprentice stage manager, spied each other from across the room, in the kind of tremulous moment from which many a libretto has been spun. "Michael walked in, and, of course, was very attractive," Mr. Hill recalled. Mr. Chioldi had a similar view. "There was instant chemistry between us, certainly a very strong physical connection," he said. "I did the evil baritone thing where I said, 'Yeah, we should all go out to dinner sometime' then I didn't invite anyone else," he said with a laugh. When Mr. Hill showed up at the restaurant and asked who else was coming, Mr. Chioldi replied, "'I think it's just us.'" He said he remembered the expression on Mr. Hill's face which suggested he was not the least bit disappointed to be the singular focus of Mr. Chioldi's gaze. "And I was like, 'Yup,'" Mr. Chioldi recalled. That evening, the conversation flowed along with the margaritas hours and hours of it. Mr. Hill had grown up on a ranch in New Braunfels, Tex., near San Antonio, and after he graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University he interned at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Va. Mr. Chioldi was raised in Avonmore, Pa., where his father was a steelworker, and after attending graduate school at Yale, he was a winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 1995, eventually performing with that company as well as the New York City, Houston Grand, San Francisco and Los Angeles Operas. "We weren't good at hiding it," Mr. Hill admitted. "Pretty much everybody knew." Mr. Chioldi found his emotions spilling over into his performances. "I look back on that as one of the most romantic periods in my life," he said. "Very inspirational, let's put it that way." But for all their ardor, their 17 year age difference Mr. Chioldi was then 41, Mr. Hill 23 needed to be addressed. "Scott and I had this very adult conversation where we discussed where the relationship was going to go and what was realistic since I was traveling a lot," Mr. Chioldi said. Agreeing that their romance would be limited to the opera's run, "we did everything we could to really fight it, but we couldn't we just kept coming back together," he continued. "So we decided to try to make it work." With Mr. Hill based in Washington and Mr. Chioldi about to take a gig as Ford in Verdi's "Falstaff" with the Utah Opera in Salt Lake City, the logistics were decidedly complicated. Then a couple of opera fans offered the men their vacation home near Deer Valley, in Park City, Utah, a stunning dwelling overlooking a ski slope. And in a bold move, Mr. Hill, who'd felt increasingly frustrated by the constraints of stage managing, quit to follow Mr. Chioldi west. "I was going through a transition transitioning out of an opera career and having a fresh new start with a hot new man," Mr. Hill said. Their magical month in the Wasatch Mountains solidified their fledgling coupledom. "In a way, had Scott been older and deeply ensconced in a career," said Mr. Chioldi, "it probably wouldn't have taken flight the way it did." Returning to Washington, Mr. Hill sold his few belongings in preparation for a move to New York. But although Mr. Chioldi wanted Mr. Hill to move in with him immediately, Mr. Hill preferred to live alone and try to make his own way. After taking an apartment in East Harlem and a job at a TriBeCa hotel, he eventually joined the Corcoran real estate group as an assistant to two agents before moving on to Compass, a tech based firm, as a real estate salesman. Within a year, Mr. Hill moved into Mr. Chioldi's financial district apartment. "There was no big 'aha!' moment," Mr. Hill said. "It just felt right." And while Mr. Chioldi had ridden the ebb and flow of previous relationships, this time he felt it was Mr. Hill or no one. "I was in love and I've always said that if anything happens, God forbid, that's it," he said. "I'm done." The men's friends also believed that the stars of romance had aligned. "I've been through a few of them, and I knew he was searching and then I knew that Michael had found the right one," said Rubin Casas, a bass baritone who had attended Yale with Mr. Chioldi. "I was kind of shocked when Scott showed up, because the rhetoric changed; his eyeballs stopped wandering, and it became all about Scott all the time so much so that I forged my own friendship with Scott." They discovered what Mr. Chioldi, now 47, and Mr. Hill, 29, had already determined: that the age difference didn't matter, with Mr. Hill's wise steadiness serving as a ballast to Mr. Chioldi's youthful enthusiasm. "Michael is one of those people with boundless energy, a social butterfly," Mr. Casas added. "Everyone wants to hang out with him. He's a blast. And Scott is just all love. He is kind and sweet and calm. If you're in a crisis, you want Scotty on your side because he's going to make it all better." In the nearly six years that the couple have been together, Mr. Hill has missed only two of Mr. Chioldi's operas, traveling with him to London, where he sang Marcello in Puccini's "La Boheme" at Royal Albert Hall; Oman, where he starred in Verdi's "Macbeth," one of his signature roles, at the Royal Opera House Muscat; and Guadalajara, Mexico, where he performed his first Iago in Verdi's "Otello" at Teatro Degollado. On July 11, 2015, after a performance of "Macbeth" with the Chautauqua Opera in western New York, Mr. Chioldi surprised Mr. Hill by proposing before the cast and crew members as well as his own family, which was visiting from Pennsylvania. "I was so nervous that I couldn't stop sweating after the show," Mr. Chioldi said. "My mother kept asking me if I was O.K. and if I wanted to leave the party. No one knew what I had planned." The crowd went wild as he summoned Mr. Hill to his side, who was so stunned that he could only cry, prompting Mr. Chioldi to ask his beloved if he'd actually said yes. Then everyone else wept, the men recalled, as Mr. Chioldi's mother embraced the couple. She and Mr. Hill's mother walked their sons down the aisle when the two were married on Dec. 10 at Trinity Church Wall Street, where the Rev. Dr. Mark Bozzuti Jones, an Episcopalian priest, performed the ceremony and the Rev. Dr. Peter Goodwin Heltzel, an associate professor of theology at New York Theological Seminary, extolled the men to "lean into love" in a rousing homily. Afterward, as the church's bells pealed, guests walked to the Pier A Harbor House, overlooking the Statue of Liberty. "It was a typical wedding the backdrop was stunning, the pastor was incredible and that's what made it so beautiful, considering it was two men," Mr. Casas said afterward. "They live big lives and they've got big hearts," he added of Mr. Chioldi and Mr. Hill, "and I know that their life is going to be big and fabulous."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Five months ago, the estate of Prince announced a major deal with the Universal Music Group for distribution rights for a substantial portion of the music star's vast catalog. The largest of a series of multimillion dollar contracts lined up in the months after Prince died, it was estimated at 31 million. But in a turn of events that has stunned the industry, the deal has now been rescinded by a judge, after Universal accused representatives of the estate of fraud and misrepresentation during negotiations and threatened a lawsuit if the company was not allowed to withdraw from the deal and get its money back. On Thursday, Judge Kevin W. Eide of Carver County District Court in Chaska, Minn., issued an order approving a request to rescind the deal that was filed by Comerica Bank Trust, the bank that took over as administrator of the estate the day after the deal was signed. Prince died on April 21, 2016, at age 57, from an accidental overdose of an opioid painkiller. He left no will, which has led to drawn out and contested proceedings among his six heirs, some of whom did not want the Universal deal voided. "Universal Music Group and the estate of Prince Rogers Nelson welcome the court's approval of our amicable resolution to this matter," the company said in a statement. "We look forward to continuing to work closely together on Prince's music publishing and merchandise to ensure that we deliver the very best experiences to Prince's fans around the world." Once the deal is formally canceled, the estate will have to refund Universal's money, which was paid in full as a distribution advance. Then the estate will need to find a new buyer for the material, which includes Prince's later albums and much of his storied vault of unreleased recordings, as well as a set of disputed rights that were at the heart of the case. But industry lawyers have said that any future deal may be clouded by this dispute, in which Universal argued that it had been duped into paying for rights that were already held by a rival company, Warner Bros. Records. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. For Universal, the value of the deal hinged on when the company would gain rights to release many of Prince's classic earlier albums like "1999," issued in 1982 in the United States after existing deals with Warner Bros. expired. When Universal announced the agreement in February, it said it would start to gain those rights next year. But Warner Bros. disputed that account, saying a contract it signed with Prince in 2014 guaranteed those rights for longer. Universal then demanded that the deal be canceled and accused L. Londell McMillan, a longtime music executive who helped negotiate the deal as an expert adviser to the estate, of deceiving the company over the true rights, which because of a confidentiality clause Universal saw only after it had completed the deal. The judge did not address the accusations of fraud against Mr. McMillan but said instead his decision had been made to avoid further litigation. The estate, he said, should proceed cautiously to preserve its assets. In a statement, Mr. McMillan, a lawyer who once represented Prince, said he respected the court's decision and added: "There was no wrongdoing on our end. We stand by our work." The judge also noted that he was making no determination about the interpretation of Prince's contracts, since under the terms of Universal's and Warner Bros.' deals, those decisions would have to be made by courts in California and New York. For the estate, that may cause complications in its efforts to find a new buyer or may lower the value of the catalog. The order also left undecided whether Mr. McMillan and another adviser to the estate, Charles Koppelman, would have to return their commissions on the deal, which were set at a total of 10 percent, according to court filings.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Waiting in line to enter a theater has something in common with waiting in line at a border. In the first case, if you have a ticket, you can be reasonably certain you're going to get through, but in both cases the waiting is infused with anticipation: excitement and nervousness about what may happen on the other side. At the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival this weekend, the line in front of the Ellen Stewart Theater on Friday led into the premiere of "After the Feast," by the Tiffany Mills Company, and the line in front of the Downstairs Theater on Saturday led into "Supper, People on the Move," by Cardell Dance Theater. Despite their titles, the two works didn't have food in common so much as walls. It was "Supper" that prompted thoughts of borders. The piece is about emigration and requires audience members to pass through a convincingly nervous making simulation of border control. Inside are long folding tables, which soon become the site of a Last Supper, arranged like Leonardo da Vinci's, the kind of farewell dinner that precedes leaving one's homeland. The tables are key. On four legs or tilted, they serve as platforms for the dancers, who scramble up their sides or run along their edges. The tables represent walls, as at borders, and the dancers slip through the gaps between them, gaps that sometimes slam shut.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
After a 4 12 season, the Jets were expected to overhaul their staff. But few expected the team to land perhaps the most controversial figure in the N.F.L. coaching ranks. Enter Gregg Williams, the Jets' new defensive coordinator, whose credentials include a Super Bowl ring with the New Orleans Saints in 2009; a surprisingly positive run as the interim coach of the Cleveland Browns this season; and, not to be forgotten, a role as the face of one of the ugliest scandals to tarnish the image of the N.F.L. in the last decade. For the Jets, mired in one of their trademark periods of borderline irrelevance, he has been brought in to reform an undisciplined defense and counterbalance Adam Gase, the newly hired coach, who at 40 is one of the league's youngest, most innovative offensive minds. Williams's reputation as a firebrand, however, carries significant risks for a franchise frequently plagued by off field distraction. Williams was at the heart of the scandal known as Bountygate, in which the Saints, with Williams as ringleader, offered payouts to players who injured opponents, according to a league investigation. The scandal resulted in plenty of hand wringing over the sport's relationship with brutality when it was trying to convince the public that it was taking seriously the mounting concerns about head injuries. In March 2012, Williams received an indefinite suspension, the harshest of the penalties doled out, which included a one year suspension for Saints Coach Sean Payton. Williams was reinstated in 2013. In the years since, Williams, 60, has worked his way back into the defensive coordinator role seemingly without having lost much of his brashness or bravado. On HBO's "Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Cleveland Browns" this past summer, Williams became something of a celebrity among Browns supporters, who took to his intensity and vulgar tirades. Williams liked to end defensive huddles with the phrase, "Come get some." None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. "He's not here to make you feel comfortable," said the former linebacker Jo Lonn Dunbar, who played for Williams in New Orleans and St. Louis. "He's willing to ruffle your feathers." Williams is indeed a throwback to the era of football coach as force of nature. Gase's introduction to the Jets was judged by some as notably subdued. But Williams thunders into a locker room like a gale. In Cleveland, where he was defensive coordinator for two seasons, he warned parents about bringing young children to training camp because of his propensity to yell obscenities. He admonished reporters for slouching in chairs. He trash talked the matinee idol quarterback Baker Mayfield. Dunbar said practices were intensified by Williams's insistence that any loose ball be treated like a turnover, at all times. "Anytime a ball hits the ground, he wants you to pick it up," Dunbar said. "Anytime a ball is overthrown, he wants you to act like it was an interception and return it." Dunbar added that players eventually became "conditioned to go after the ball." It strikes some as just the sort of Type A personality that can light a fire under the Jets, who struggled under Coach Todd Bowles. "They need a guy that can come and crack the whip teach them football but also be very demanding," said Bart Scott, a former Jets linebacker who is now a co host of "The CMB Show" on WFAN. "He can teach them and give them the tools to be successful in different situations." The Jets have declined to make Williams available for interviews until after Gase's full staff has been assembled. Gase also hired Dowell Loggains from the Miami Dolphins to be offensive coordinator, and kept the special teams coordinator Brant Boyer. In a recent interview on a Pro Football Talk podcast, Gase said he had known Williams for more than a decade. "He did his time," Gase said of Williams and the scandal in New Orleans. "He's gotten a second chance, he's done it right, he's gone and worked extremely hard to do things the right way, and for me or anybody else to hold that over his head, to me, is wrong." Many Jets players expressed enthusiasm after Williams was hired. Safety Jamal Adams, at the Pro Bowl in Orlando, said he had already been watching videos of Williams's teams on YouTube. "He's the best in the business," Adams said. "I've had so many players hit me up to tell me how much I'm going to love Coach Gregg." One former player who may not share such sentiments is Peyton Manning, who recommended Gase, his former offensive coordinator in Denver, to the Jets. Williams once told a Nashville radio station that he wanted his defenders to put "remember me" hits on Manning, then the quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts. Williams will probably bring at least one significant change to the defensive scheme. The Jets have used a 3 4 (three down linemen, four linebackers) base defense since Eric Mangini arrived in 2006. But Williams is known for his 4 3 format, which emphasizes speed rushers on the outside, something the Jets do not exactly have right now. The team does have more than 100 million in cap space, so there should be flexibility to acquire a defensive end or two to fit Williams's vision, which relies on the blitz.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
WASHINGTON Federal Reserve officials are contemplating their next steps after announcing a new approach to interest rate setting last month, one that could lay the groundwork for longer periods of low unemployment and rock bottom borrowing costs. But it may be too soon for Fed officials to make big changes to their policy setting at their September meeting, which concludes on Wednesday, because they might need more time to coalesce around their next steps, economists said. The Fed slashed interest rates to near zero in March, and it is broadly expected to leave them there for years. Officials are now debating whether to concretely communicate their future plans for rates often called forward guidance by promising that they will not lift them until inflation, employment or both cross some preset threshold. They are also discussing when and how to update their bond buying program. Since March, the central bank has been purchasing large amounts of Treasury and mortgage backed securities to keep markets functioning smoothly, but officials have signaled that they will eventually shift that program to focus instead on stimulating economic growth. Either change could add a little more oomph to the central bank's policies, potentially helping to fuel the recovery from the coronavirus induced economic crisis. While some analysts expect changes imminently, most anticipate that the 17 Fed officials, 12 of whom vote on the rate setting Federal Open Market Committee, will take longer to make those major steps. The Fed will provide a post meeting statement and update its economic projections on Wednesday. "It feels like there's going to be a forward lean from them there's a refinement coming," said Julia Coronado, a former Fed economist and founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives. Still, she does not expect either threshold based forward guidance or a big tweak to the bond buying program just yet. "This is a big and diverse committee, these are complicated issues, and it is uncharted territory." The central bank's Summary of Economic Projections, a document in which officials anonymously forecast where interest rates, inflation and unemployment will be in coming years, will get a refresh at this meeting. The so called S.E.P. will extend through 2023 for the first time. Economists said they expected the Fed to indicate that interest rates would remain on hold throughout that period, reinforcing its plans to be very patient in removing the cushion it is now providing the economy. Low interest rates spur growth by making credit cheaper encouraging homeowners to refinance, which frees up spending money, and inspiring businesses to invest. Fed officials will also almost certainly revise down their unemployment rate projections in the document, because the jobless rate declined from 14.7 percent in April to 8.4 percent in August, a faster drop than the central bank had expected. When the Fed released its last set of projections in June, officials expected unemployment to average 9.3 percent in the last three months of 2020. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, announced in August that the central bank was shifting its monetary policy approach, and no longer planned to lift interest rates simply because the unemployment rate had dropped below levels it saw as sustainable. Officials will also adopt an average inflation target, aiming for 2 percent over time rather than as an absolute goal implying that they will sometimes allow price increases to run slightly faster. The point is to keep inflation from dropping ever lower, which would leave the central bank less room to aid the economy in the future by cutting rates, which include price gains. Despite that shift, few economists expected officials to pencil in an inflation rate above 2 percent in 2023, in part because the outlook for price increases is tepid. "We also expect that most participants will be reluctant to show conditions that could be interpreted as consistent with liftoff, even at a 2023 horizon," David Mericle at Goldman Sachs wrote in a research note previewing the meeting. The Fed releases a statement explaining its policies after its meetings, and that document will probably be updated to reflect the new approach. It could change the language that promises to strive for a "symmetric" 2 percent inflation target meaning one that is equally unsatisfied if inflation runs above or below the target to phrasing that pledges to aim for 2 percent over time. The statement might also upgrade its description of the economy, which has performed better than expected as virus cases moderate somewhat, joblessness declines and consumer spending measures more or less hold up, despite the lapse in a 600 weekly unemployment insurance supplement that ended in late July. Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase, predicted in a note that the Fed would "take note of the pickup in economic activity and employment without celebrating it." It is unclear whether the Fed will provide guidance on the future path of interest rates at this meeting. Officials are considering whether they should tie their next steps on interest rates to unemployment and inflation thresholds, which the central bank did after the 2008 financial crisis. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." Some regional Fed presidents have indicated that they would favor waiting and making such changes once they had more information about the economy, especially because investors already thoroughly understand that rates will be low for a long time. "I don't feel like there's a burning pressure that we need to change our forward guidance today to change market expectations," Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said on a Bloomberg podcast in late August. That sentiment has been echoed by several of his colleagues, including the Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic and the Boston Fed's Eric Rosengren. Fed officials might also prefer to wait for more information before they provide an update to their plans for bond buying. The Fed is planning to eventually shift its asset purchases to more explicitly focus them on stimulating the economy, which could include buying bonds with longer time frames. But some economists did think that the central bank could make major moves at this meeting, if only to back up its recent strategy shift. Seth Carpenter, a former Fed economist now at the bank UBS, said he expected the central bank to tie its interest rate outlook to its forecast for inflation. He thinks the Fed needs to do something to follow through on the unveiling of its strategy shift. "They really are in a bind," Mr. Carpenter said. "Not doing anything, and not having hit your goals in the past, seems like a recipe for having your goals disbelieved." In any case, Mr. Powell will answer questions from the news media after the meeting at 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday. He could echo his colleagues and repeat his own occasional admonition in urging Congress and the White House to continue supporting the economy. Key supports for the economy, including the 600 a week expansion to unemployment insurance, expired in late July. While President Trump has enacted partial stopgap measures, those will run out, and they do not provide the holistic help that a congressional package might. And talks over legislation have stalled for more than a month, with deep divisions between Republicans and Democrats. "Partisan politics threatens to endanger additional fiscal relief," Charles Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said in a speech this month. "A lack of action or an inadequate one presents a very significant downside risk to the economy today."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Late one July night in 2009, George Cogan, a financial consultant, and his wife, Fannie Allen, an interior designer, got a nightmarish phone call. Chapin House, their early 1900s gabled summer retreat on Isle au Haut in Maine, had been struck by lightning in a violent thunderstorm. A neighbor who spotted the flames around 3 a.m. roused the town. About 50 islanders and park rangers, forming a bucket brigade, needed five hours to put out the fire. The news was particularly devastating because the homeowners, who lived with their three children in Atherton, Calif., had nearly completed a yearlong restoration of the property. In fact, Mr. Cogan, 60, had visited the island since boyhood. His family vacationed in a house where salt once was stored for a lobster canning factory near the town dock. As a teenager, he mowed lawns for neighbors who were like extended family. When a nearby two story wooden house with a dock of its own came on the market in 2008, he and Ms. Allen, 59, bought it for 650,000, with the plan to use it throughout the year. Mr. Cogan knew a few things about the property including how Lidie Chapin, who lived there decades before and whose family gave the house its name, had once seen lightning flow down an interior pipe and jump across the living room. Neighbors said lightning had struck even before that, and Ms. Chapin predicted a return appearance. But Mr. Cogan brushed aside the childhood memory and focused instead on insulation. Chapin House had none. It also had an addition with vinyl siding that marred the facade. "Everything had rotted underneath," Ms. Allen said. Upstairs, they added dormers and skylights. Downstairs, they ripped out the addition and extended the central foyer by 12 feet for extra living space and a larger kitchen. The back porch was enclosed for a dining area with insulated windows overlooking the water. Nearing the end of her work, Ms. Doermann went to inspect the house. All that remained were final decisions on the interior paint colors and spots to be patched on the siding and roof. Lightning rods lay on the living room floor, ready to be installed. And so they remained the next day, when lightning hit. "If the barn had caught, the fire would have spread to the whole town," Mr. Cogan said. The bucket brigade saved it and the century old one room schoolhouse next door, but not Chapin House. The top floor was incinerated and water ruined the rest. The couple decided the 2,500 square foot replacement home would be a replica of the destroyed one. "Context was important," Ms. Allen said. A modern building would have clashed with the nearby gabled stone town hall and 19th century Congregational church. So a new Chapin House rose on the old stone foundation. To save time, even mainlanders on the construction team lived on Isle au Haut on and off from August 2009 through June 2010."During the winter, it was hard enough to get materials to the island and get waste off it," Ms. Doermann said, never mind the workers. The mail boat that ferried between the mainland and town dock could transport small loads, but large barges were needed for lumber and Dumpsters and were often delayed by tides and weather. She bought metal beds and wood dining chairs originally from Maine that had made their way to vintage stores in California and New York. A replacement for an original square stained glass window came from Portland, Ore. Deer Isle granite counters in two of the bathrooms are from a Stonington quarry. Rebuilt at a cost of about 360 per square foot, Chapin House is a vivid reflection of its old self. But there is also something conspicuously new: lightning rods on the roof, grounded with concealed copper cables connected to steel plates buried far from the house. "Twenty five other houses got lightning rods that year," Mr. Cogan said. That's how the installer's business works "right after a burn."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Nielsen's new Netflix ratings service has its first public results, and they confirm what a lot of people in the TV industry felt but didn't know for sure: "Stranger Things" is a hit. On Thursday, Nielsen released ratings for all nine episodes of the second season of the spooky thriller, which was made available on Netflix on Oct. 27. According to the data, the first episode of "Stranger Things" was watched by 15.8 million people within the first three days. How does that compare to three day ratings for other top shows? Well, 15 million people watched the premiere episode of the most recent season of "The Walking Dead," the biggest hit on cable; the first episode of NBC's "This Is Us" was watched by 17.8 million people; and the premiere episode of the latest season of "The Big Bang Theory" was watched by 22 million people. The season finale of HBO's "Game of Thrones" had 14.8 million viewers within three days of its broadcast; the premium cable network said that more than 30 million people watched each episode this past season once streaming numbers were factored in.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
LOS ANGELES Mena Suvari, the actress known for both "American Woman" and "American Beauty," was in the front row at last week's first Vegan Fashion Week at the California Market Center, wearing a black textured patent something cap with matching jacket and pants by Enda, along with "leather" shoes by a brand that bore the label Cult of Coquette. Ms. Suvari, 39, has been vegan for the past two years, and it quickly dawned on her that this commitment involves not just food, but also clothes. "I remember the moment where I was sitting with my 1,300 leather tote at Little Pine, Moby's restaurant, and I felt like a jerk. I was like, 'I can't do this!'" she recalled. "I went home and got rid of everything in my closet, was left with two pairs of shoes and one handbag, and have worn cruelty free fashion ever since." There were 54 vegan companies represented at the weekend long event, which was organized by Emmanuelle Rienda, 36, a veteran of the fashion industry. "I was promoting fast fashion, the use of animal products, and selling a very large amount of leather goods to department stores." Ms. Rienda said of her past life. She hopes to bring VFW to different cities. Annika Snowden, 19, came from Apple Valley, Calif., an hour and a half away. "It's either you go vegan and you're kind of earthy or you drive yourself crazy reading labels and trying to find options in stores like H M," Ms. Snowden said. She was pleased to have met a new designer, Anastasia Bones, 22. "She's amazing!" Ms. Snowden said. "It's alternative fashion, but it's basic and she's got a really positive vibe." The offerings of a company called Enda included faux shearling made with a multilayered acrylic fleece and a machine washable wool free tweed made in Italy. The brand's founder, Ran Enda, 36, used to work at Ralph Lauren. "We used leather and fur a lot, and I was struggling because it really contradicted with what I believed," she said. Want to get married without cruelty? (To animals, anyway.) Johanna Ohayon Zenou, 27, a founder of JOZ Couture, a bridal and evening wear company in Paris, had a rack of wedding dresses made from recycled organic cotton and dentelle de Calais French lace on display. Ms. Zenou said she has been busy dressing bridal parties for couples doing full vegan weddings. "We give them the chance to have the perfect outfit that they dreamed about," she said. And Ary Ohayon, 38, was promoting a vegan backpack brand, Arsayo. "It's made with cork, an amazing material replacing leather," Mr. Ohayon said. "It's very ethical. The tree is not killed. You just take the skin off the tree." Harley Quinn Smith, 19, an actress who stopped by, agreed. "Veganism has been such an underground thing for so long, something that people have misunderstood or just wanted to ignore," Ms. Smith said. "Now there are so many of us, and we're hard to ignore because we're quite loud and very eager to make a difference in the world." But how do vegan brands show consumers that they are more than just second rate, er, copycats of the animal skin mainstream? "In the past, we were calling it faux leather, but we don't want to be faux or fake anything now," said Silvia Gallo, 41, president of Jeane Jax, a luxury vegan handbag company in Montreal. "When people look at our purses, they can't tell if they are leather or not." After clearing the bar of veganism, which sometime involves synthetic fibers like polyester that take a lot of energy to create and don't decompose easily, many companies are now turning to the concept of being easy on the environment. Mushroom root leather and a lab grown biofabricated collagen cell leather, was also being discussed. Oh, and speaking of Moby! What kind of Vegan Fashion Week would it be if the musician, 53, weren't in the crowd? Before arriving, he was wearing fuzzy socks and sweatpants watching "True Detective," Moby admitted, not in the mood to "put on grown up person clothes" and come downtown. "But if they are going to make the effort to have a Vegan Fashion Week," he said, "I had to come."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
LOVE FALLS ON US A Story of American Ideas and African L.G.B.T. Lives By Robbie Corey Boulet On International Human Rights Day, in December 2011, Hillary Clinton gave a monumental speech at the United Nations in Geneva, declaring that "gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights." Largely directed toward the African countries in which homosexuality was then and, in some places, still is viewed as a crime punishable by death, her words were met with overwhelmingly positive reactions in the West, where a growing popular support for L.G.B.T.Q. issues has emerged after decades of public struggle for equality. Across Africa, however, the speech may have had unintended negative consequences for L.G.B.T.Q. communities that have created spaces for themselves "underground, and out of sight." The journalist Robbie Corey Boulet's timely book, "Love Falls on Us," addresses the complicated relationship between African L.G.B.T.Q. activists and an American foreign policy whose shifts on gay rights have in many cases exacerbated their difficulties by shining a global spotlight on otherwise unnoticed ways of living. Wisely avoiding the temptation to write about queer relationships across the entire continent, Corey Boulet instead focuses on activists and individuals in three countries Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Liberia highlighting the peculiarities of their respective political and cultural contexts. From the outset Corey Boulet makes it clear that his book is a series of snapshots rather than a single, generalized picture of gay life across an often maligned and misunderstood continent. He is painfully aware of the common errors many writers and journalists make when covering Africa "the mistake inherent in conceiving of sexual minorities in one city, or one country, or anywhere, as a kind of monolith" and studiously avoids their hierarchical language and stereotypes. Instead, he humanizes his subjects by revealing the complexities and variations among L.G.B.T.Q. lives, whether closeted or not. A Cameroonian man named Lambert, who'd first experimented with anal sex at 13, later finds himself in a relationship with an older Frenchman who "exposed him to the possibilities of gay life in places where homophobia was less prevalent." Another, Roger, H.I.V. positive and eager to pursue a master's degree, is arrested and abused for sending a homoerotic text message.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Have you ever tried on a Vanson jacket? One of the serious, sirloin thick motorcycle ones? First of all, you could use it to defend against bites from aggrieved dogs. You could probably also use it to insulate your roof, or hit a baseball thrown at medium speed. It is stiff, substantial and somehow also luxurious. And ludicrous, too, when worn out of context, which is to say, not while racing a BMW HP4 down an open highway at 110 miles per hour. Vanson has been on my mind recently, after the Ruff Ryders reunion concert at Barclays Center, which was a reminder of a moment when this sort of lavishly functional clothing was something of a fashion statement. It was one of the most vivid examples more so than Carhartt coveralls, less so than Kevlar vests of clothing designed for a specific, and extreme, purpose achieving a sort of sublime, brute elegance when resituated in an unlikely context. Where the leather might meet the road is not, it turns out, the same place where it should meet your body. Putting it on was like wrestling with a garage door. Having it on was like wearing a wood plank. This is, of course, by design. Jackets of this type are meant for people who dare death and want a modicum of protection in the process. As a carpetbagger a leatherbagger? I was hopeless in it. I took it off and it fell to the floor and broke three of my metatarsals. (Not actually, but it's less far fetched than you may think.) Generally, I have an aversion to this sort of utilitarian chic. Clothes like this, worn casually, tend to confer an authority the wearer does not have. It's the reason I generally don't wear anything military inspired (and try to avoid even that officious shade of military green). Certainly a Vanson, lovingly worn in over years, molded to the contours of your shoulders and biceps, would be among the most meaningful garments you could own. But divided from the labor it would take to get there, it was a burdensome cipher. I felt much the same riffling through the confusing racks at the Schott store in NoLIta, which is filled with enough leather jackets motorcycle, flight, shearling and more to make a novice retreat to a Levi's store. The classic motorcycle jacket here, the black horsehide Perfecto ( 820), is far more accessible than a Vanson, and more wearable too (if, I imagine, less safe in an accident). It also has styles, including the bolero short 118, geared toward more serious riders, or someone who hopes to pass for one. The store didn't seem to carry the whole of Schott's offerings. Online, I loved the P2484 casual flight jacket in steely blue and the P267V shearling leather vest in two tone brown, rust and chocolate. But the store did have plenty of stoic, boxy and firm, like a lovely black on black shearling flight jacket ( 855). And there was one thrilling casual option: the 654, in black cherry ( 695), which was slim and earnestly worn in and felt like a boot by the divine Italian maker Guidi. Luckily, back at Genuine Motorworks, which recently celebrated its eight year anniversary of catering to both motorcycle fanatics and casual tourists, there were more accessible items that still gave off some eau de moto. After the first Vanson defeated me, I downgraded to the Vanson Redemption jacket, made of heavy waxed cotton that would probably protect you on a moped, but nothing speedier ( 379). It had an alluring, tough shape and was just pliable enough to take on and off at will (though it was difficult to button). I liked it as much as any ambitiously priced thing I've bought at Dover Street Market or Opening Ceremony. In particular, there's a slinky but rough Saberi jacket that might get the boot if I go back to buy this.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Jordan Casteel's exhibition "Within Reach" is currently hanging on the second floor of the temporarily shuttered New Museum. The situation is somewhat paradoxical, given that the show's most prominent theme is closeness something that's been severely disrupted by the coronavirus crisis. Yet that also makes it a good time to look at Ms. Casteel's work however we can in a digital walk through and in the catalog and think about the vision of community it offers. This is the artist's first solo museum show in New York and it includes works from her noted series "Visible Man" (2013 14) and "Nights in Harlem" (2017). In large, expressive portraits, Ms. Casteel celebrates the people around her, black and brown folk who have historically been excluded from art institutions. Her subjects present themselves to her, and to us, posing as they want to be seen in a way that brings to mind Malians in the 1950s sitting for the photographer Seydou Keita. They invite us into their worlds, offering the audience a privileged view. Back when you could still see it, the exhibition created a distinct sense of being let in on a casual but celebratory gathering, like a potluck or a block party. It's harder to feel that spirit online, but browsing images on the artist's website and on her gallery page gives the closest sense of it. The New Museum's video walk through is more helpful as an introduction to her practice. The artist honed her approach while getting her M.F.A. at Yale in 2012 14. She enrolled months after George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American high school student, in Florida. He was acquitted of murder the following year after saying he acted in self defense. The episode sparked a national conversation about a longstanding issue in American culture, and one that Ms. Casteel had already been thinking about: a lack of nuanced portrayals of black boys and men, who are haunted by stereotypes of them as menacing or carnal. She wanted to show their humanity. The result was "Visible Man," a series of nude portraits of some of her fellow students at Yale. In these riveting paintings, several of which are in the show, the men lounge in domestic spaces whose ordinariness underscores their vulnerability. They're surrounded by small markers of their identities, from a stack of books to a bottle of Jim Beam. Their genitals are artfully obscured to avoid voyeurism or sexualization. Instead, we must look at their faces and meet their forthright, honest gazes. "Jonathan" (2014), which can be seen in the New Museum video, exemplifies Ms. Casteel's fruitful experiments with color in the series. Lit by a nearby lamp, his body glows with patches of red, green and yellow. In other paintings, the men's skin ranges from salmon pink to ghostly turquoise, complementing their vibrant surroundings. With these choices, she evokes predecessors like the African American painters Beauford Delaney and Bob Thompson. She also challenges the concept of blackness, exploring how identity is shaped beyond the shade of one's skin. Ms. Casteel's project of portraying black men and boys expanded after she left Yale. She devoted a series to portraits of brothers and cousins sitting together in twos or threes. But her big breakthrough came during a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She would walk around and introduce herself to men who hung out on the neighborhood's streets, asking them to pose for her. If they agreed, she would take dozens, sometimes hundreds, of photographs of her subject and then, back in the studio, let the pictures guide the painting, not as one to one representations but as reference material. In time, she would begin to depict women too, often local business owners, and the occasional scene devoid of people. "Nights in Harlem" includes some of Ms. Casteel's best work. Her renderings are incisive but also empathetic and warm. Her compositions demonstrate how a neighborhood and its public spaces can serve as a kind of home. "Stanley" (2016), for instance, cozies up in a nook bounded on one side by what looks like a construction wall, while the three men in "Cowboy E, Sean Cross, and Og Jabar" (2017) command a flight of steps. (I love the way one man's leg is cut off by the frame, as it might be in a snapshot.) Many subjects are not centered, as if to let their surroundings complete the picture, and in pieces like "Yvonne and James" (2017), the glow of electric light creates an almost beatific effect that amplifies the warmth the couple exudes. It's not hard to understand why Ms. Casteel calls this "one of my favorite paintings of all time." Although her models remain still, Ms. Casteel's paintings never feel static. In part that's because she rarely renders a figure or an object in a single shade. Her brush strokes have become more fluid over the years, and her pictorial choices more confident, imbuing her latest portrait series, of her students at Rutgers University Newark, with impressive kinetic energy. For example, the right foot of "Noelle" (2019) melds with the blankets it rests on and becomes an abstract wave of yellow and brown. In "Serwaa and Amoakohene" (2019), a young man and his mother sit proudly and comfortably with their arms resting on each other in a living room awash with color and pattern. You half expect them to spring to life and start talking. This approach links Ms. Casteel to one of her primary inspirations, Alice Neel, who used composition and color to heightened emotional effect. But whereas Ms. Neel's portraits aim for psychological penetration, Ms. Casteel's tend to only hint at what's beneath the surface. Like the photographs they're based on, they appear to capture a moment in time, a social exchange or relationship, more than the essence of a person. At her strongest, Ms. Casteel seems to be painting her way toward intimacy, balancing her artistic vision with her subjects' self presentation. Occasionally that productive tension goes missing, resulting in a work, like "Shirley (Spa Boutique2Go)" (2018), that feels emotionally thin. Still, it's important to note that Ms. Casteel is only 31 young to be having a museum exhibition that caps off a dizzyingly successful period since her graduation. Many of the almost 40 paintings in "Within Reach" are recognizable from the regular gallery shows she's had in New York City since 2014, and nearly every piece comes from a private collection. This casts a slight hyped up, market driven pall over the presentation. Ms. Casteel is at a crucial moment when she needs to experiment and develop, not become boxed in. So it's encouraging to see the inclusion of works from an ongoing series, begun in 2017, in which she paints scenes she's observed on the subway. They're not posed, and they often don't show people's faces, only gestures and quiet moments. The figures' anonymity gives the scenes a heightened emotional power in our age of social distancing. Taken alongside Ms. Casteel's portraits, they offer another way of arriving at what may be her true subject, and a message to carry with us until safer times: Getting close to other people within reach, you might say is a way of choosing to live in the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Ariel Nicholson Murtagh made her fashion week debut Thursday night walking in Raf Simons's Calvin Klein show. She is 6 foot 1, weighs 125 pounds and has a kind of Pre Raphaelite by way of Joni Mitchell hairdo. So she looks every bit the part of a runway model, even if she's a 16 year old high school sophomore who also happens to be transgender. Some may find this a little unseemly. High school sophomores, walking in runway shows, on a school night? Ah, well. If the fashion industry continues to rely upon teenagers to do adult jobs, why not do it with an eye toward diversity? Anyway, having been selected by Calvin Klein's designer, Mr. Simons, two weeks after signing with DNA Model Management the agency that represents Natalia Vodianova, Linda Evangelista and Doutzen Kroes Ms. Murtagh was stoked to be getting recognized by the industry. She watched guidance videos of how to walk on YouTtube, and could only laugh when members of Mr. Simons's team provided suggestions on how to quickly improve. "I did it very Victoria's Secret runway," she said, two hours before the Calvin Klein show. A walking, talking exclamation point who reads George Orwell novels in her spare time and also leans in on words such as "like" and "amazing," she was in a bathrobe on the third floor of the company's Midtown Manhattan headquarters. Their message was clear and correct, she said: "Tone it down." In her hair were bobby pins, which would be removed at the time of the show. "I know how much school means to her," Kerry Murtagh said. "I don't want her to get crazy." Almost from the time the younger Ms. Murtagh could speak, she told Kerry and her father, Bob Murtagh, that a boy was not what she was. (The Murtaghs and are now divorced; Kerry lives in Park, Ridge, N.J., and Bob lives in Westchester, N.Y.) She wanted to wear pink tutus and couldn't stop watching "The Little Mermaid." That is the story of an isolated, deep sea princess named Ariel whose body is out of sync with her desire to be fully human. Kerry got the message quickly, while Bob took a little longer. "I would go by her bed and there were books on her nightstand," Ms. Murtagh said. "Then I'd go to my father's side and there was, like, a drink of water." In fifth grade, Ms. Murtagh switched pronouns and began taking Lupron, a drug that suppresses the effects of puberty. The longer she spent living as a girl, the happier she became. Her grades were excellent, Kerry said. Kids at school also seemed to have an easier time accepting a transgender classmate than they did accepting a feminine boy. In eighth grade, she appeared "Growing Up Trans," a documentary that was broadcast on PBS stations, in which she talked with her therapist Jean Malpas of the Ackerman Institute about the decision to go on estrogen. She no longer has much desire to wear ball gowns and sometimes gets embarrassed telling schoolmates how she selected her name. "So sometimes I say I chose it after Ariel in Shakespeare's 'The Tempest,'" Ms. Murtagh said. The last movie she loved was "Baby Driver." Her favorite pop star is Lorde, the music world's torchbearer for gritty girl power. In August, Ms. Murtagh appeared in a Vogue spread devoted to transgender children, wearing a black and white polka dot Giambattista Valli dress with floral detailing, photographed by Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. "They were so nice," said Ms. Murtagh, who seemed slightly less impressed by the photographers' status at the forefront of fashion photography than their history collaborating with Lady Gaga. "There was a picture of her just, like, on the wall. It was like crazy. I couldn't believe they'd shot people like that!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Politicians rarely give up power voluntarily. They never give it up when they have free rein to lock it in for at least a decade, and exact long overdue revenge against their political opponents. But a group of Virginia Democrats did just that earlier this month, when they voted in favor of an amendment to the State Constitution stripping themselves of the power to redraw legislative district maps in 2021, after the decennial census. Last fall, Democrats won majorities in both houses of the Virginia Legislature; with a Democratic governor already in office, they took full control of the state government for the first time in a generation. They had unlimited power to fashion the new maps in their favor, cementing their own grip on power just as Republicans around the country have done since the last redistricting cycle in 2011. Some Republican maps are so biased that they have given the G.O.P. legislative supermajorities even when the party loses the statewide popular vote, which happened in Wisconsin in 2018. So it's entirely understandable for Democrats who regain power to want payback now. And yet nine Virginia Democrats agreed to put down their partisan swords and join Republicans to support the new amendment, which would require that the state's district maps be drawn by a bipartisan commission made up of lawmakers and regular citizens. Voters must ratify the amendment in November before it will take effect. The Democrats' vote was a display of integrity and selflessness by members of a party with unified control of government. It placed long term interest in the health of representative democracy over the shorter term partisan benefits that both parties have been happy to exploit when they control redistricting. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." The Virginia amendment's passage is all the more important in the present moment, when voters everywhere have been left at the mercy of self serving state lawmakers, thanks to the Supreme Court's refusal to intervene to stop even the most extreme partisan gerrymanders. The ruling last June, by a 5 to 4 vote, asserted that redistricting was a political matter to be resolved by the states, not the federal courts. The justices thus enshrined one of the most corrosive and anti democratic practices in American politics. Virginia's new amendment would establish a 16 member commission, made up of eight lawmakers and eight citizens, divided evenly between the two major parties. A supermajority of both lawmaker and citizen commissioners would have to agree on a proposed map to send it to the Legislature for approval. If they can't, the job shifts to the State Supreme Court. The amendment, which under the State Constitution had to pass the Legislature twice in a row before going to the voters, was first approved in 2019 by overwhelming bipartisan margins. At the time, Republicans controlled the Legislature, but polls pointed strongly toward an impending Democratic takeover in last fall's elections. As soon as that happened, most Democrats withdrew their support from the amendment. Many had previously vowed to keep supporting it even if they won yet another reminder that power is a lot harder to relinquish once you have it in your hands. Some black Democratic lawmakers also opposed the amendment because, they argued, it didn't provide enough protections for black voters, who have long been cheated out of political power by biased maps. In the past five years, federal courts in Virginia have struck down Republican drawn state and congressional districts for intentionally discriminating against black voters. To address various concerns about the amendment, the Legislature should pass laws that would ensure racial and ethnic diversity on the commission and require the State Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, to appoint a special master to draw the maps using the same criteria as the commission. They have already passed a law to eliminate "prison gerrymandering," the practice of counting prisoners where they are incarcerated rather than where they are from. There are good fixes. Still, the commission itself has significant flaws, chief among them that it includes lawmakers, who have demonstrated time and again that they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the redistricting process. Foxes guarding henhouses are still foxes, even if they're being watched closely by the farmer. But the amendment is an important step in the right direction, and in the end it succeeded because nine Democrats joined all Republicans to get the measure over the hump for a second time. And what of those Republicans? Aren't they to be commended for voting in favor of fairer maps? Sure, but it was an easy call once they were out of power, or knew they were about to be. The better question is, Where was their public spirit when they held an unthreatened majority? Republicans continue to find countless ways to block efforts to make voting fairer and more democratic. In Missouri, Utah and Michigan, Republican lawmakers are working to undo citizen led ballot initiatives that were passed, in some cases overwhelmingly, by voters tired of being chosen by their politicians. And when Republicans do lose at the ballot box, they respond not by trying to appeal to more voters, but by stripping power from duly elected Democrats essentially looting the shelves on their way out the door. This is the behavior of a party that neither trusts its own popularity nor accepts its opponents' legitimacy, a fatal combination for a constitutional republic. In light of this, many Democrats have little patience for calls to level the playing field. After all, why play fair when the other side doesn't? The answer is that the alternative is a race to the bottom, where voters of both parties give up because they know whatever box they check at the polls, the politicians have already made their choices for them. In far too many parts of the country, that's the reality today. Partisan gerrymandering is a key reason millions of Americans feel the government is rigged against them. The good news is that this behavior used to happen behind closed doors, and now it's being dragged out into the open. The more the public learns about it, the more they oppose it. Virginia voters support the new redistricting amendment, 70 percent to 15 percent; according to a January 2019 poll commissioned by Campaign Legal Center, which pushes for electoral reform, 65 percent said they favored districts with no partisan bias, even if it meant their own party would win fewer seats.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Q. Is it true that you can charge your phone from the USB port on a television set? Why do TV's even have USB ports? A. Many television models have included USB jacks for years, particularly the flat panel type with plenty of multimedia ports on the back or side of the set. Depending on the TV, the USB jack is there for different purposes. On some sets, it functions as a service port for television technicians. On some TVs, you can also plug in a USB drive full of photos to view on the big screen. In addition to transferring data between devices, the USB standard can supply a small amount of power to gadgets connected with a USB cable. Phone manufacturers recommend that you charge your phone's battery with the cable and electrical adapter that came with the device, and you use other options at your own risk. However, travelers who remembered their phone's USB cables but forgot their wall charger cubes have been tapping power from functioning television USB ports for years. The phone's battery might not charge as quickly as it does with your standard power adapter or wireless mat, and the television may have to be on. But the TV's USB port can do in a pinch if you have no other options and the hotel's front desk does not have a charger to lend you.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The Gurus of Tidiness: If You Like Marie Kondo ... Spring cleaning started early this year, with the January release of the Netflix series "Tidying Up With Marie Kondo" initiating something of a national closet clearing frenzy. Charities have been inundated with donations, and Instagram feeds have overflowed with tidying hash tags like sparkjoy and konmari, nods to the Japanese organizer's method of keeping only items that bring you joy. Ms. Kondo, who leapt into the American consciousness in 2014 with the release of her book "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up," is not alone in her fascination with order. Three new books also grapple with the topic, offering clutter weary readers various perspectives, and strategies, on managing their stuff. There's "Outer Order, Inner Calm: Declutter and Organize to Make More Room for Happiness," by Gretchen Rubin, author of the best selling book "The Happiness Project." And "The Home Edit: A Guide to Organizing and Realizing Your House Goals," by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, a home organizing duo with a million Instagram followers. And also Joshua Becker's "The Minimalist Home: A Room by Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life." Each of the recently released books espouses the need for a more streamlined approach to life, but with slightly different recommendations on how to get there, and different expectations for how much stuff you need in your home. Where "The Minimalist Home" champions a life with as few possessions as possible, offering a room by room guide on how to get there, "The Home Edit" focuses on categorizing possessions in stylish containers, turning drawers and closets into whimsical storage systems, offering various solutions depending on the size and style of your pantry. And Ms. Rubin, in "Outer Order, Inner Calm," sees power in organizing specific places, like the coat closet (or the kitchen or the sock drawer). If you know where to put your hat and gloves when you walk in the door, and where to find them when you're ready to leave, you can focus on bigger life hurdles. "When you feel more in control of yourself, when you feel like you have more self command, it can help you do harder things," she said. "Feeling like your coat closet is under control could help you eat more healthfully or exercise better." Ms. Rubin does not suggest any one way to organize that closet. Instead, she suggested, "Do it in a way that works for you. You may want to do it all in one Saturday." Or perhaps you'd rather spend 10 minutes a day tidying up for a year. The goal, she argues with headings like "Are you a counter filler or a counter clearer?" is to figure out what motivates you and then find a system that works, whatever that may be. Millennials, saddled with student debt and stagnating wages, are slow to buy and fill big homes. Technology has made it easier to pare down, allowing us to store and access our music, books and photos on the cloud. Online clothing rental services like Rent the Runway chip away at our closets, too. The average number of items in the American closet dropped to 136 in 2019, down from 164 in 2017, according to thredUP. In the age of Instagram and Pinterest, a clean closet is one thing, but a color coded one with matching bins is something to marvel at and sure to generate loads of likes. In come Ms. Shearer and Ms. Teplin, whose organizing business, The Home Edit, started in 2015, quickly amassed a client list of boldface names including Gwyneth Paltrow, Khloe Kardashian, Mandy Moore, Laura Dern and Mindy Kaling. "Why can't we make an organizing aesthetic that makes people drool?" said Ms. Shearer, who was raised in celebrity circles in Los Angeles. To start the business, based in Nashville, where Ms. Shearer and Ms. Teplin live, she tapped her connections. "Selma Blair, Christina Applegate and Marla Sokoloff were some of the very first projects we did because of my close relationship to each of them," she said. "They really helped us gain traction early on." "Organizing is only a temporary solution," Mr. Becker said. "Owning less is a permanent solution. Once you get those things out of your house, you never have to organize them again." Ms. Kondo also subscribes to a philosophy of less is more, albeit one rooted in the idea that some possessions bring happiness and should be cherished. Before you store anything, she advises, "first think about what it is that you want to retain in your life." Regardless of the method, the process of decluttering takes work. Here are three homeowners who used different organizing methods to bring order to their homes and are now happily living with less clutter. In New York, 295 an hour for a two person team; online service , 425 for a do it yourself package In 2017, Seri Kertzner, the chief party officer for Little Miss Party in a Box, could not figure out how to organize all the confetti, plates, cups and supplies. She had recently moved the company's office out of her two bedroom Greenwich Village apartment and into a studio in the same building, but still struggled to keep the closets in order. "It was hard for me to know what inventory I had," she said. So she hired The Home Edit, drawn by their stylish look. "I have to say, the handwritten labels on everything hooked me," said Ms. Kertzner, 40, who previously worked in fashion at J. Crew. "I was taken with how they made everything look. It was not just organized; it was style." 89 for a 12 week Uncluttered online course , with unlimited repeats For years, Karen Lynch prepared for visitors to her five bedroom home in Burlingame, Calif., by grabbing plastic bins, filling them with all the clutter she could find and hiding them in closets, the trunk of her car or a bathtub. "It's about appearances; it's about the mask that I wear," said Ms. Lynch, 52, a life coach who lives with her husband, Paul Lynch, 53, an electrician, and their two teenage sons. "I want everybody to see me as having a neat, clean, organized house." But eventually she wanted a permanent solution. She tried the KonMari method, but found that she could always make excuses, claiming almost any item brought her joy. Then, in September, after seeing an ad for Mr. Becker's Uncluttered course, she decided to give minimalism a try. For three months, she removed six to eight bags of stuff from her house a week. In January, she signed up for the course again, following the weekly challenges, chatting with other students on the private Facebook group and making weekly trips to a local thrift store to drop off items. She now shops differently, too, no longer thoughtlessly ordering from catalogs or window shopping in boutiques. "Now every purchase is: Can I buy it used? Do I need it? Can I borrow it from somebody?" she said. But she still sees a long way to go. "I'm a minimalist with training wheels," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
New York has gone to the dogs, but the rabbits and rhinos aren't far behind in their assault. With little fanfare, Gillie and Marc Schattner, married Australian artists, have marshaled their brash bronze menagerie up and down Avenue of the Americas from Greenwich Village to Rockefeller Center, along Astor Place and over to Downtown Brooklyn. Their anthropomorphic statues genteel Weimaraners, ladylike hares and gymnastic wildlife are leaving behind indelible pawprints in the duo's covert conquest of New York sidewalks. And in the process, the Schattners have become the most prolific creators of public art in the city's history, to the dismay of leading art historians. "Nothing we've done has ever really been planned," Mr. Schattner, 57, said during a December Skype call from their studio in Sydney. Improvisation is a running theme for the couple, who first met on a shoot in Hong Kong (Gillie was the model and Marc the creative director) before eloping to the foothills of Mount Everest for a Hindu marriage just seven days later, jilting their respective fiances. Tell us how you feel about public art in your city Still, it's a modest explanation for a pair who have received eight art commissions on the streets since 2016, half of them on public land. It's an unprecedented pace for a city whose cultural programs come wrapped in streams of bureaucratic red tape. (It took Christo and Jeanne Claude, by comparison, 30 years of efforts to win approval for "The Gates" in Central Park.) And in August, Gillie and Marc, as they are known, plan to unveil their most ambitious project yet, at Rockefeller Plaza: 10 "Statues for Equality" will depict powerful women, including Beyonce and Angelina Jolie. The Schattners said that their project intends to highlight the gender gap in the city's public statues, of which only 3 percent are of women. Creating public art as a duo came years after the artists married in 1990. After living in Singapore and New York, the couple settled in Sydney, where they became weekend painters. Mr. Schattner was working in advertising, with long hair and a Porsche. Mrs. Schattner ran her own graphic design agency for 15 years. Their big break came in 2006 when they were finalists for Australia's prestigious Archibald Prize for their portrait of former Australian Olympic swimmer John Konrads and his dog. The Schattners are now full time artists with a thriving studio enterprise employing 10 in the heart of Sydney's Alexandria neighborhood, with revenues of 5 million, they said. Their daughter, Jessie, 26, a photographer, works alongside them; their son, Ben, 23, is a composer and musician. And although the Schattners still paint, they are engrossed in their bronze statuary business. Their most popular subjects are "Dogman" and "Rabbitgirl," autobiographical ciphers that represent the couple's personalities. "I'm the Dogman and she's the Rabbitgirl, and we're riding the Vespa together," Mr. Schattner told The Sydney Morning Herald. "I'm the person who will push to take more risks than Gillie. I'm the one who is always trying to make Dogman's penis as big as possible." Such candor has not endeared everyone to the Schattners' art, even when it's motivated by feel good causes like gender equality and, in the case of the white rhinos, wildlife conservation. Gillie grew up in Africa, "watching an elephant being killed before my eyes," she said by email. "I vowed to do everything in my power to never let that happen again." Marc spent time in Tanzania in his early 20s studying chimps. "If we weren't artists we would be running a conservation reserve in Africa." Critics are frowning, however. One of Australia's most prominent art critics, John McDonald, called the couple's sculptures "impossibly tedious" and "gimmicky." New York magazine's senior art critic, Jerry Saltz, lobbed "bathos infused folly" at "The Last Three," the Schattners' depiction of endangered rhinos, arranged as a topsy turvy column of Cirque du Soleil acrobats in Astor Place. The Schattners responded to his takedown with an open letter on their website defending kitschy art. What has gone almost unnoticed is how the Australian couple conquered New York City by eschewing the traditional gatekeepers of public art, like the nonprofit Creative Time and Public Art Fund, in favor of some unlikely allies. Five of their commissions have come from Business Improvement Districts, or BIDs public private partnerships that oversee quality of life improvements and are funded primarily by assessments on property owners. From humbler beginnings as stewards of street sanitation, BIDs are evolving into cultural programmers, thanks, in part, to the pedestrianization of many New York streets in the late 2000s. While commissions by BIDs require city permits, critics point out that these new art presenters offer too few avenues for community feedback. "This explosion of art, to my mind, is a lot of garbage," said Michele H. Bogart, a professor of art history at Stony Brook University in New York, and the author of "Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890 1930." She considers the Schattners' work "vapid" and "insignificant." But it wasn't their art alone that beguiled William Kelley, the Village Alliance's executive director, when the two offered "Paparazzi Dogs" to Greenwich Village that fall. The Schattners volunteered to self fund the project, as they have with every public art commission they've done in New York. Mr. Kelley said he jumped at the chance. Less than two years later, the BID would also exhibit "The Last Three" (2017), billed on the Schattners' website as "the tallest rhino sculpture in the world." (The 17 foot high stack currently resides at MetroTech Commons, in Downtown Brooklyn.) It's an open secret that very few public art organizations can afford what they commission. Costs are prohibitive because city officials demand work be weatherproof, graffiti proof, damage proof and accident proof. Multiple permits are usually needed, and artworks must be approved by a city engineer. "The Last Three" cost 200,000, the Schattners said, which included fabrication, shipment, installation and de installation. Even for a large BID like the Village Alliance, shouldering the costs of the single sculpture would eat 14 percent of its 1.4 million budget, which must also cover year round expenses for street cleaning, public safety and business development for one of downtown's busiest areas. But art experts said the monetization of public art risks sequestering city space for only the wealthiest artists who can afford to bankroll their work and saves taxpayer dollars at the expense of the field's diversity. "Why is it that one pair of sculptors in a city of thousands of thoughtful artists get chosen over and over again, if not that they have accumulated a reputation that is not necessarily based on the artistic merit of their work?" Dr. Bogart said. She added, "The problem with the BIDs is that they go with what's familiar or think is popular." The boards of the BIDs that commissioned the Schattners are filled with real estate developers and business people. "It's like asking someone who isn't a brain surgeon to operate on a brain tumor," said Anne Pasternak, who led Creative Time, the New York based nonprofit, for almost 25 years before becoming director of the Brooklyn Museum. "Professional advising is critical." Harriet F. Senie, a historian at the City College of New York specializing in public art, said the Schattners "would not be considered serious artists with a capital 'A' and yet they have eight commissions? That's a severe imbalance." By appealing to a BID's bottom line, the Schattners may be setting a precedent for how BIDs work in the future, art experts say. After working with the couple, the Village Alliance created a public art program that requires artists to pay for their work's "fabrication, installation, de installation, and site restoration," according to a policy memo sent to The New York Times. Years of experience prompted the Australians to create their art loan program to woo interested organizations around the world. The artists' website details their sculptures' market value. They cite "Early Morning Coffee," a 10 foot tall sculpture of Dogman and Rabbitgirl at a Melbourne pier, as a case study of their success: one million impressions on social media, an increase in treasured foot traffic, 10,000 Instagram and Facebook posts. RXR Realty, a private developer based in New York, is a happy customer. Michael Aisner, a vice president, says that the pair have been so "absolutely wonderful to work with" that the firm has greenlit five of their art projects over the last year, from the Financial District to Park Avenue. Come August, "Statues for Equality" will appear on its property at 1285 Avenue of the Americas, in full view of Radio City Music Hall. Mr. Aisner plans to wrap the Schattners' female sculptures around the building's colonnade like a gang of celebrity caryatids: a Meryl Streep here, a Michelle Obama there. "I find art kind of off putting and stodgy, but theirs is really friendly and engaging," Mr. Aisner said. "You can sit down and have a coffee with their sculptures. You can't do that with the Mona Lisa." "I haven't seen a groundswell of opposition to what's going on with the BIDs," Mr. Finkelpearl said. "If I began to sense that people are upset, then we would look into it." Such actions might include consulting the city's Department of Small Business Services or commissioning a report. For artists simply trying to bring joy into the streets, the Schattners feel like the art world is disproportionately set against them. "We want to put a lot more heart into public spaces, more soul and humanity," Mr. Schattner said. Why should people be so opposed? "Critics don't speak for everybody and certainly not for the populace," he added. "Even if we get slammed, that wouldn't touch me if I knew that the public enjoyed it,' Mrs. Schattner said. Besides, the two Aussies have much more ambitious plans for New York. Recently the couple flew to Uganda to study the country's endangered mountain gorilla population for their largest conservation sculpture yet. One day, they hope to install a gargantuan King Kong on the city's skyline. Maybe their mega sized ape will tower over Central Park. Maybe he'll splay across Fifth Avenue. Mrs. Schattner, with ambition in her voice, said the sculpture is still in its early stages. "But wouldn't it be amazing for New York to save the gorillas?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
SOMERVILLE, Mass. Most bands introduce a new album with a tour, a radio performance, maybe a fan club party. Mouse on Mars, the brainy, playful, long running, relentlessly inventive electronic music duo from Berlin, had a different kind of rollout for its new album, "Dimensional People." The music went public at an academic conference presented here by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called "Dissolve Music." The event took place in a converted warehouse space off campus. By day, scholars, D.J.s, musicians and promoters offered papers, discussions and five minute "lightning talks," covering topics like "Multiperspectivity in Sound" and how ocean waves resemble radio waves. Then the lecture hall became a dance floor, with disc jockeys from as far away as Tokyo. And on Thursday and Friday nights, Mouse on Mars Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma delivered multiperspectivity in action, blurring playback and performance as they unveiled "Dimensional People." Dozens of speakers were installed overhead and all around, while "percussion robots" drums and percussion instruments triggered by computer, with lights flashing as their sounds suddenly erupted were scattered amid the spectators. Mouse on Mars was introducing its new album the way the duo had made it: in a state of the art studio with sound coming from every direction. Software allowed the duo to pinpoint sounds in three dimensional space, put those sounds in motion and even to separate and spread around overtones. Mr. St. Werner, the more voluble half of Mouse on Mars, was at home in academe. In 2016 and 2017, he was a visiting lecturer at M.I.T.'s program in Art, Culture and Technology, and he is currently a professor for interactive media/dynamic acoustics at the venerable Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. At both, he has worked primarily with visual artists. "We keep sound away from music as long as we can and see what else we can do with it," he said over coffee on Friday. For the premiere Mr. St. Werner was behind a mixing console, where he could send tracks into motion. Mr. Toma, meanwhile, was wandering the dance floor, listening and appraising. Rhythms, both recorded and robotic, ricocheted all over; siren tones spiraled around; recorded voices and instruments could, and did, pop up anywhere in the room. The effect was at once analytical, clarifying every element, and immersive, even disorienting, in the best way. At Thursday's event, Mr. Toma recalled the next day, "Emotionally, I had the feeling of being part of a live concert." Recording the album coalesced all of Mouse on Mars's recent fascinations. The duo wrote orchestral music for the Chicago Symphony and other classical ensembles, drawing on traditional instruments and virtuosity. They also developed mobile apps to generate music. "We thought, maybe we should take the Kraftwerk idea of passing on the torch to become software, to take the idea of what we do in software and give it away to the people," Mr. St. Werner said. "But we had so much fun using the software ourselves that we just kept on working." Mouse on Mars also wanted to generate computer driven physical sound, teaming up with engineers to develop percussion robots that were robust enough to handle the demands of the music on the road. "We broke them all the time," Mr. St. Werner noted. Then came what Mr. St. Werner called, citing a German phrase, "the drop that made the bucket overflow." They were working in their studio in the Funkhaus in eastern Berlin, which used to house East Germany's top government radio station, when the conductor and arranger Andre de Ridder knocked on the door. He was putting together a festival and had some musicians with him, including Mr. Vernon and Aaron and Bryce Dessner of the National. Many collaborations ensued, in Berlin and in an intensive phase at Mr. Vernon's studio in Wisconsin. "We had two rules," Mr. St. Werner said. "We wanted to stick to 145 beats per minute, so basically we had a rhythmic scheme. And we had a specific key. So we could record whatever we wanted, with whomever we wanted, and we could always move things around. It would always make sense. It would always fit." They ended up with "a crazy mess of possibilities," Mr. St. Werner said. "The information we had was so dense that we couldn't really deal with the idea of that becoming a stereo record." Technology to the rescue: A German speaker company, D B Audiotecknik, was developing its "object based mixing" setup of speakers and software to place sounds in space. In Swabia, in southern Germany, D B had installed a demonstration system geared to club and concert producers; Mouse on Mars had other ideas. "Their thinking was, musicians create something, and we help to spatialize it," Mr. St. Werner said. "And we're like: 'You have to start much earlier. You have to give this to musicians as an instrument.'" Mouse on Mars brought its work in progress to D B's setup, closely examining and reconfiguring the three dimensional possibilities of the tracks on the way to the eventual stereo mix. "We came to a point where, 'O.K., it all fits together,'" Mr. St. Werner said. "So the record starts with a woodblock being played by a robot, and it unfolds into this universe. We time stretched the sound of the woodblock and zoomed into the partials and spectra of a single woodblock stroke just a millisecond of sound and opened it up and basically unfolded the whole piece from there." The album free associates its way through kinetic polyrhythms, Minimalist mediations, head spinning auditory effects, a stark fiddle tune, passages of hip hop and pop vocal harmonies, and surreal funk, and Swamp Dogg's career reminiscences, among many other moments. Mouse on Mars is still deciding how to take it on tour. Mr. Toma contemplated a show without a stage, with live musicians and robots "spread among the people" instead. "Music is a strong anarchic force," Mr. St. Werner said. "It's probably our last bastion of anarchic wilderness, that trace of nature that keeps just growing, keeps crossbreeding, keeps immigrating and migrating and cross fertilizing and expanding our perceptual apparatus. It's also a great means for orientation and for bonding with other people. We don't have to think about music, we don't have to talk about the term. Eventually we'll find it, or it will find us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Brian Ross, the chief investigative correspondent for ABC News, is leaving the network seven months after he botched a report involving President Trump and the Russia investigation, a mistake that led to a rebuke from the White House and concern about self inflicted damage by news organizations already facing scrutiny. His exit, announced on Monday, marked an ignominious end to Mr. Ross's 24 year run at ABC News, where he had been the face of the network's on air investigative arm and a regular contributor to coverage of wars, terrorism, politics and scandals du jour like the Bernard Madoff swindle. Mr. Ross, 69, was in the middle of his current contract, according to a person familiar with the matter who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive personnel issue. Also leaving the network is Rhonda Schwartz, Mr. Ross's longtime lead producer. In a decades long career, Mr. Ross has collected dozens of prizes for his reporting, including Emmy and Peabody Awards. But he came under fire in December after ABC News retracted and apologized for his errant report that Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, had been directed by Donald J. Trump to make contact with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
After sitting on a site near the High Line for years, Sherwood Equities last month broke ground on a residential condominium at 500 West 21st Street, a project that will occupy the entire block from 20th to 21st Street. Sherwood bought the site in 2010 for 23.5 million, half what the previous owners the hotelier Andre Balazs and the investor Charles Blaichman had paid in 2008. Mr. Balazs and Mr. Blaichman had planned to build a hotel there, but the project stalled during the recession. Sherwood likes to take its time with developments, and this project was no exception. "We don't fast track anything," said Jeffrey Katz, the chief executive. "Two years ago it was still a pretty abysmal market, and it was confirmed as a juggernaut market less than a year ago." The design for the condo is being handled by Kohn Pedersen Fox, which has worked on the Hudson Yards master plan and the renovation of the Museum of Modern Art. The building will have a more rhythmic spacing of windows and columns than many of the buildings that have sprung up near the High Line, including the eye catching designs by architects like Jean Nouvel. Large casement windows separated by strips of limestone cladding will provide a more classical look. As the area has become more family friendly, the building will be made up primarily of larger apartments, many measuring more than 4,000 square feet. Sales prices have not yet been set and a salesroom will probably not open until late summer or early fall, said James Lansill, a senior managing director with the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, which will manage sales. But Andrew Gerringer, a managing director of the Marketing Directors, a rival brokerage, said that because the building was in one of West Chelsea's prime locations, units could sell for "somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 a square foot," putting the price for a 4,000 square foot three or four bedroom unit around 10 million. That is a significant premium above the average in the neighborhood, according to figures from cityrealty.com, which puts the average sale price in Chelsea for the last 12 months at 1,560 a foot. Only one building in the area 100 11th Avenue, designed by Mr. Nouvel has average sales prices higher than 2,500 a square foot. There are several soaring high rises under construction elsewhere in the city, but zoning aimed at preserving West Chelsea's views and character will limit the building to 80 feet in height. That will help it more easily blend in with the industrial character of the area, while also being respectful of a stately Romanesque church one block north and the gracious Seminary Row, which stretches east along 20th Street. "This building is the antithesis of the giant buildings going up in Midtown," Mr. Katz said. Despite its low scale, many of the 32 units at 500 West 21st Street will still have commanding views of the landmark seminary and the Empire State Building. To the west, residents will be able to watch the bustling High Line. The interior designer, Mark Zeff, is planning to run a "thread" of oil rubbed bronze from an exterior canopy throughout the public spaces and even into some areas within units. He said that Mr. Katz had directed his designers to impart a "luxurious industrial" quality to the property. Indeed, all those involved in the planning of the building say Mr. Katz has been engaged from the start, even sketching out his ideas over weekends and presenting the results at meetings. Mr. Katz chuckles that his efforts are "crude." But Rebecca Atkin, an architect with KPF who worked on the apartment layouts, said, "His sketches were very helpful as a communication tool." Along with three one bedroom apartments, including one for a live in superintendent, there will be 12 two bedrooms, 13 three bedrooms and 4 four bedrooms, among them 2 penthouses and 2 duplex apartments. The larger units are all near or over 4,000 square feet, with generous terraces. Ms. Atkin said that 65 percent of the units will have either terraces or balconies, and almost all of them will have two exposures. Mr. Katz said that the layouts and the design of the building would give it a "contemporary classic" feel, in contrast to most new developments, which focus on the "contemporary." Although the building will also include a gym, a playroom and a meeting room, the amenity Mr. Katz is most proud of is a garden of mature trees that will provide not only a greenscape for residents to look out on, but a screen from those passing on the High Line. The garden will be planted on the second level of the building, which means most residents will only be able to gaze at the honey locusts and white spire birches planted by the landscape designer David Kelly. But a few owners with units on that level will have terraces extending into the greenery. Sherwood appears to be riding the leading edge of a wave of rising prices, driven by land values that may be surging past the highs of 2008. Last December, the developer Ziel Feldman of the HFZ Capital Group paid 46 million for a parcel roughly the same size as Sherwood's that straddles the High Line on West 19th Street. Mr. Feldman plans a condo project and has also hired Corcoran to manage sales.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
There was a time when the great American male novelists took delight in writing about sex. Rebelling against a literary tradition that perhaps underestimated how much space animal urges take up in the male brain, many big hitters of the 20th century, like Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow, dived into the muck with the zeal of Rabelais or Cleland. Sex was freedom, sex was adventure, sex was a good time, sex was pain, sex was life. Masturbation, threesomes, pedophilia, extramarital flings, one night romps: It was all up for grabs, and how they grabbed it. In these more tentative times, male literary novelists tend to shy away from such strong stuff. And when these creatures of the workshop do manage to summon up the courage to test their descriptive powers against the most basic of human drives and activities, it is often to chronicle male sexual hesitation, confusion or inadequacy. Swimming against the current, with a 400 page work of literary devilry called "Undone," is John Colapinto, a 57 year old staff writer for The New Yorker who wrote his graduate school thesis on Nabokov and published his first novel in 2001. When his agent, Lisa Bankoff of ICM Partners, began submitting the manuscript for his second novel in 2013, Mr. Colapinto expected several offers. Perhaps there would even be a bidding war. But according to the author, 41 publishers, including every major house in New York, turned it down. "It was both harrowing and horrible and incredibly exhilarating," he said, sitting in a back booth of a restaurant a few blocks from his home on the Upper East Side. For Mr. Colapinto, there was a perverse sense of pride: He had seemingly written a novel too dirty for American publishers. An editor at Grove Atlantic, writing to the author's agent, called the manuscript "gripping," only to add, "There were worries that it might be a bit challenging to publish." An editor at Simon Schuster said that although the novel was absorbing and perceptive, "It's not a world or a story I want to live in and explore." An editor at Gallery Books put it like this: "The subject matter is too tricky." One of the protagonists of "Undone," Dez, has a fetish for teenage girls. His latest catch, or victim, is a 17 year old high school student named Chloe. Driven by envy and greed, Dez hatches a wicked scheme: Chloe will pose as the long lost daughter of a morally upright best selling author and seduce him, revealing him to be a fraud and hypocrite. In its intricate structure, "Undone," which is being published this month by the independent press Soft Skull (and which came out last year in Mr. Colapinto's native Canada), reads like a porny version of a Hitchcock story. As Booklist said in a starred review, Mr. Colapinto's writing is "over the top in its comic depravity." "Virtually every page is saturated in this theme of male desire," Mr. Colapinto said. Perhaps that aspect, more than the plot elements, is what repelled so many publishers. After all, Chloe is 18 when she succeeds in her attempt to sleep with the man who mistakenly believes she is his daughter. "If we're on trial, no decency laws have yet been broken," said Dan Smetanka, the acquiring editor at Soft Skull. But by exploring heterosexual male lust, Mr. Colapinto has written the kind of novel that has gone way out of fashion. The classics of the genre "Portnoy's Complaint" (Roth), "An American Dream" (Mailer) and "Couples" (Updike), among them are many decades old. Nicholson Baker is one of the few who has kept the lit smut flame aglow. And those who venture into the territory, as Jonathan Franzen did, here and there, in his most recent novel, "Purity," make easy marks for wags in search of laughs and online traffic. Katie Roiphe lamented the inability of male novelists to reckon with lust in a 2009 essay in The New York Times, and not much has changed in the years since. For the crew of writers that includes Dave Eggers, Benjamin Kunkel and Jonathan Safran Foer, she wrote, "Innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex." Publishers of literary fiction, perhaps afraid to alienate their biggest customers women, who read more than men aren't exactly rushing to release the next male written sexually provocative novel. That space would seem to belong to women: novels like "Tampa," by Alissa Nutting, and "Hausfrau," by Jill Alexander Essbaum, have garnered critical acclaim in recent years, while "Fifty Shades of Grey," by E. L. James, has scooped up the sales. Many critics and civilian readers would say and have said good riddance to priapic literature. In a 1997 essay, ostensibly a review of the late period Updike novel "Toward the End of Time," David Foster Wallace slammed the previous generation of "phallocrats" for its sex obsessed narcissism. He mocked the protagonist of the Updike book for giving voice to such pronouncements as "I want women to be dirty" and expressed disgust for the author's description of a 13 year old girl's breasts ("shallow taut cones tipped with honeysuckle berry nipples"). What had once been an act of literary daring had grown stale, Wallace argued, and Updike was misguided in clinging to the "bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants is a cure for ontological despair." Mr. Colapinto said he had read the Wallace essay and largely agrees with it. But on the subject of the sex drenched novels of Updike, Roth and the other bards of the male libido, he said, "I couldn't deny that I had a lot of fun reading those books when I was younger." In his view, there was an overcorrection. "Men at least the men I knew were still driven by all manner of unruly sexual impulse, however guiltily," he said. "So I decided to address that in as confrontational a way as possible." Books and their authors are products of their time. One wonders if any sexually frank novel published today could rattle the culture in the way that "Portnoy's Complaint" did back when books could go further than movies. At the same time, playing the role of a middle aged male sexual provocateur in an era of safe spaces and trigger warnings is a risky proposition.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
On the season finale of "Bachelor in Paradise" Tuesday night, two women professed their love to each other and got engaged on a beach in Mexico no bachelor needed. " There was a lot of things that came between us, mostly myself and my own struggles," Demi Burnett said to Kristian Haggerty, their blond hair blowing in the breeze. "I came here to find myself, but I found myself in you, " she continued before dropping to one knee and slipping a ring onto Haggerty's finger. On the televised after show, Haggerty got on one knee in front of a live audience and gave Burnett a ring of her own. "The hate is drowned out by all the love," Burnett later said. For the last several weeks of the ABC reality dating show, a spinoff of "The Bachelor" that just wrapped up its sixth season, Burnett and Haggerty have turned one of the biggest, straightest reality TV juggernauts into a space where two women could actually fall in love. For some, myself included, hate watching the show on which a rotating cast of singles from so called Bachelor Nation pair up, break up, repeat, while rolling around in the sand and throwing back tequila shots became simply watching. Not just because Burnett and Haggerty are the first same sex couple in the more than 40 seasons of the American franchise since "The Bachelor" debuted in 2002. (Two women paired off in the Vietnamese version of "The Bachelor" last year, causing a global stir online.) But also because their love story was handled with remarkable nuance and authenticity, two words that run counter to the show's reputation. "The Bachelor," the franchise's flagship program, is a feminist nightmare in which a buffet of beautiful women, coifed and poured into shiny materials, are presented to one man, all of them desperate for his rose of approval. On "The Bachelorette," the woman doles out roses to a gaggle of buff guys, but the regressive gender roles persist. Once the field is whittled, a marriage proposal is expected. The franchise also has a problematic history with casting people of color. There have been no black bachelors and only one black bachelorette, Rachel Lindsay in 2017. (In recent years, more contestants of color have been cast.) "Paradise" is different in some ways: Sequins are traded for string bikinis and tuxes for trunks, and as men and women are eliminated, they are replaced. But in the end, the goal is the same: that the last couples standing (there are usually a handful) decide whether to get engaged or not. On Tuesday, three couples put a ring on it. As two slim, white, traditionally beautiful 20 something women, Burnett and Haggerty fit the show's rigid beauty standards to a T. But from the beginning, they were clearly different from the usual "Paradise" contestant s, beyond the obvious. Haggerty, an ordained minister according to her Instagram page, joined the show midseason having never competed on "The Bachelor" or "The Bachelorette," a rare occurrence. Burnett, who was on Season 6 from the start, had dated Haggerty in real life before filming. As the season progressed and Burnett got closer to another contestant, Derek Peth , she found couldn't shake her feelings for Haggerty. So the show brought on Haggerty, seemingly to give Burnett an opportunity to weigh out the relationships side by side. But surely the potential to gin up some classic "Paradise" drama was not lost on them . Whatever the producers' intentions, the result was that Burnett, an unfiltered, quick witted and beloved contestant from Colton Underwood 's "Bachelor" season, came out as sexually fluid not only to the world but also to her family , she said, bursting the bubble that separates reality TV from actual reality. Viewers watched as she navigated the emotional whiplash that many L.G.B.T.Q. people have when coming out: the high of proclaiming your authentic identity, followed by the grind of living that truth day in, day out . As she fretted over the realities of life in a same sex relationship at one point, she wept as she envisioned the stares she and Haggerty would draw in public the show let her speak for herself as she worked through her insecurities and internalized homophobia. Further, the pair was not presented as some sort of sideshow to the straight couples. In fact, their story line quickly blended with the others, normalizing their relationship as much as a reality dating show could. (Neither Burnett nor Haggerty were available to comment on Tuesday ahead of the finale.) As the episodes went on, another theme emerged: that this relationship was as respected as any has been on the show, not only by those behind the camera but also by the other contestants. While viewers surely braced for the straight male gaze to descend upon the two women as they kissed and cuddled, that didn't happen. For example, Blake Horstmann , a contestant who arrived at the beach as a playboy in a love quadrangle and left lovelorn and solo, said that he wished he could find the kind of love Burnett and Haggerty had. The women in the house rallied around the couple, serving as confidantes and champions. And what about that famously gendered rose ceremony? Would the show milk the moment for a last hit of reality TV tension ? In the end, the host, Chris Harrison, simply asked Burnett to give her rose to her chosen person. The week after, he asked Haggerty to do the same. And so on. Nonexistent crisis averted. Any concerns that including a same sex relationship would put off fans were put to rest as the show, which usually aired on Monday and Tuesday every week, continued to dominate its time slot, especially on Mondays, drawing about four million viewers an episode.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television

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