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Players for the Atlanta Dream and other teams across the W.N.B.A. have begun a public show of defiance by wearing T shirts endorsing the Democratic opponent of the Dream's co owner Senator Kelly Loeffler, Republican of Georgia, who is in a tightly contested race for her seat and has spoken disparagingly of the Black Lives Matter movement. Images of players, including the nine time All Star Diana Taurasi, wearing the shirts endorsing Dr. Raphael G. Warnock flooded social media on Tuesday ahead of a nationally televised matchup between Atlanta and the Phoenix Mercury. Across the chest of the black T shirts were two words "Vote Warnock," a reference to the Atlanta pastor who is one of the top Democrats running against Loeffler in a special election in November. It was the latest escalation in a conflict that has roiled the W.N.B.A. in recent weeks. Loeffler, who owns 49 percent of the team, has publicly and frequently derided the league for dedicating its season to the Black Lives Matter movement, provoking sharp criticism from some of the league's most high profile figures. The players' union has called for her ouster, but W.N.B.A. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told CNN in mid July that Loeffler would not be forced to sell the team. Elizabeth Williams, who has played for the Dream since 2016, said in an interview on Monday that the players plan to "vocally support" Warnock in the coming weeks, and that players have had "several" conversations with him. "When we realized what our owner was doing and how she was kind of using us and the Black Lives Matter movement for her political gain, we felt like we didn't want to feel kind of lost as the pawns in this," Williams said. Warnock, in an email, said he was "honored and humbled by the overwhelming support from the W.N.B.A. players." "This movement gives us the opportunity to fight for what we believe in, and I stand by all athletes promoting social justice on and off the court," Warnock said. "Senator Loeffler and those like her who seek to silence and dismiss others when they speak up for justice have planted themselves on the wrong side of history." Williams said the idea to publicly endorse Warnock came from Sue Bird, the 11 time All Star guard for the Seattle Storm. Both Williams and Bird are executives in the players' union. Top players also consulted with Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who lost a close race for the Georgia governor's seat in 2018 to Brian Kemp, a Republican. Abrams joined the players' union board of advocates last summer. In planning the demonstration, the players thought it was important that the T shirts debuted during a game that was nationally televised. Tuesday's game between the Dream and Mercury was scheduled to be broadcast on ESPN 2. Williams said that the Dream players will continue to wear the T shirts in upcoming games, and other teams have agreed to do so, too. "We can't really do anything about her ownership," Williams said, referring to Loeffler. "That's not something we can control. We can control who we vote for." The teams' coaches were made aware of the demonstration, Williams said, but she was unsure whether Mary Brock, the philanthropist who owns the other 51 percent of the Dream, was told ahead of time. Brock thus far has not publicly addressed the conflict between Loeffler and the W.N.B.A. players. This level of public protest players on a team openly campaigning against their own owner is virtually unheard of in professional sports. But it is not out of character for players in the W.N.B.A., a league that has frequently shown a willingness to tackle social justice issues publicly. In 2016, W.N.B.A. players were among the first professional athletes in the United States to demonstrate against police brutality, also with T shirts. The W.N.B.A. initially fined those players before rescinding the fines. Recently, the league has waded deeper into politics, in large part because of its players' willingness to do the same. In 2018, the W.N.B.A. partnered with Planned Parenthood for an initiative called "Take a Seat, Take a Stand," which sent a portion of ticket proceeds to multiple groups including Planned Parenthood. Since then, W.N.B.A. players have often been spotted at the front lines of demonstrations, especially recently after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, who were killed by the police. The initial response to Loeffler, who is not involved in the day to day operations of the team, came after she wrote a letter in early July to Engelbert, saying, "I adamantly oppose the Black Lives Matter political movement, which has advocated for the defunding of police." Loeffler also accused the movement of promoting "violence and destruction across the country." One of the most high profile rebukes came from Dream players, who issued a collective statement on July 10: "It is not extreme to demand change after centuries of inequality. This is not a political statement. This is a statement of humanity." Loeffler has since made a cause celebre of criticizing the W.N.B.A.'s commitment to social justice, frequently conducting interviews painting herself as a victim of so called "cancel culture" as a result of the backlash from players. In her Senate race, Loeffler is fighting to remain in the seat she was appointed to late last year after Johnny Isakson stepped down because of health problems. To win, a candidate must get 50 percent of the vote. If no candidate reaches that mark, the top two candidates will have a runoff, which is widely expected to be the outcome. The other top candidate in the race is Representative Doug Collins, a Republican and ardent supporter of President Trump.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Some ideas are just ahead of their time. The science fiction action film "Snowpiercer" takes its name from its setting: a gargantuan train that has become humanity's last refuge after a failed attempt at reversing climate change renders the earth otherwise unlivable. As it traverses the frozen remains of our planet, this 1,001 car behemoth houses a brutal dystopia where class divisions are rigidly enforced and where resources as well as justice and equality are in short supply. Directed by Bong Joon Ho, who wrote the film with Kelly Masterson, "Snowpiercer" was a critically acclaimed cult hit when it was released (in 2013 in South Korea, and the following year in the United States) a bleakly imaginative parable that seemed safely set in the faraway future. Now "Snowpiercer" is back: On May 17, it makes its debut as a TNT drama series, adapted from the movie and the French graphic novel series that inspired it, "Le Transperceneige." But the world that this "Snowpiercer" arrives in is one that has moved incrementally closer to the catastrophe that the series anticipates. Though the themes of the show may be more resonant now, the people who made "Snowpiercer" cannot be sure whether it will be more compelling or more terrifying to audiences as a result. The power of good science fiction, Diggs said, is a universality that extends beyond the moment in which it was created. "No matter what time we're living in, it allows us to reflect on ourselves through a particular lens," he said. "We certainly did not know that this would be the lens through which we'd be viewing our own show." Graeme Manson, the showrunner of "Snowpiercer," acknowledged that achieving the right balance was tricky, regardless of the surrounding circumstances. He did not want the series to be seen solely as a bleak fiction, but neither did he want it to forsake its moral mission. "I do think it has a duty to warn but also a duty to entertain, too," Manson said. "I'm an optimistic person, but how do you balance optimism and activism?" Manson is one of several people to have grappled with these questions during the show's five year development process. The television rights to "Snowpiercer" were acquired in 2015 by Tomorrow Studios, which signed up Josh Friedman, the creator of Fox's "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" and a screenwriter of the upcoming "Avatar 2," to write the pilot and run the series. TNT picked up the project as a pilot the next year, hoping that "Snowpiercer" would follow the successful trajectory of its other post apocalyptic dramas like "Falling Skies," an alien invasion series that it ran from 2011 to 2015, and "The Last Ship," a pandemic survival thriller that aired from 2014 to 2018. Cast members who signed on included Connelly (an Academy Award winner for "A Beautiful Mind," playing her first series TV role in 20 years) and Diggs (a Tony Award winner for "Hamilton"), as well as Alison Wright ("The Americans") and Mickey Sumner ("Frances Ha"). The filmmaker Scott Derrickson ("Doctor Strange") was hired to direct the pilot episode. But at the start of 2018, with the pilot completed, Friedman was dropped from the project and replaced by Manson, a co creator of "Orphan Black." Derrickson left soon after, writing on Twitter that Friedman's script was "the best I've ever read" and that the pilot he had directed "may be my best work." (Derrickson declined to comment for this article; an agent for Friedman did not respond to a request for comment.) Marty Adelstein, the chief executive of Tomorrow Studios, said that the original "Snowpiercer" pilot "had a lot of beautiful things in it" but "it was too long and didn't portray the story." Brett Weitz, the general manager of TNT, TBS and TruTV, said that "Snowpiercer" should be "premium, populist content" and the earlier pilot "just wasn't that." Manson continued to work with the cast that had been hired for Friedman's incarnation of the show and met with several actors individually to chart a path forward. Diggs, who plays the show's lead an oppressed bottom class passenger named Andre Layton, who is offered the opportunity to investigate a murder in the train's opulent first class section said he had been permitted more input into that revision process than he expected. "When things started to change direction, I was like, well, is this now the same project I signed up for?" Diggs said. "But we were consulted a lot, in a way that's probably pretty uncommon." He said the Layton character retained its fundamental attributes, particularly "his belief in the need for revolution." Connelly, who plays Melanie Cavill, the head of the train's hospitality services, said that with her role, "the bare bones remained the same: her personality, a little bit of her story." But in the reconceived version of the show, Connelly said, "the spin on her was different this is definitely a different iteration of her." As he reworked "Snowpiercer," Manson wanted to place the show in the tradition of what he called "existential sci fi," he said, meaning genre fiction that seeks "to address social realities in what's actually quite an absurd premise." Though some elements of "Snowpiercer" might be blatantly, scientifically unsound, Manson said that the show's commentary on climate change and other solvable environmental crises was pointedly aimed at a present day audience. The inhabitants of Snowpiercer are "so close to the end of the world and riddled with the guilt of losing the planet through their own actions," he said. "It's our current guilt, too, at what we're doing to the earth and what we're doing to each other." James Hawes, a veteran director of genre shows like "Black Mirror," "Penny Dreadful" and "Doctor Who," was brought into direct the new pilot. Hawes (who is also an executive producer of "Snowpiercer" and directed later episodes of the series) said that sets were rebuilt to move and turn like actual train cars, and to provide each section of Snowpiercer with a distinct identity: sumptuous first class cars for its elite passengers near the head of the train; cramped, industrial compartments for its underclass, rear car residents, known as "tailies"; aquariums and greenhouses for the fish and flora it preserves. Hawes said that he, Manson and their art department worked to furnish Snowpiercer with technological innovations that its passengers would have developed during their time on the train. Bong, now a three time Oscar winner for "Parasite," is an executive producer of the "Snowpiercer" series and visited its set in Vancouver, British Columbia. Manson and Hawes said they were admirers of his "Snowpiercer" film and inspired by it, but they also said they were not required to follow it like a blueprint. "We wanted to be aware of it, and harness it, but never be limited by it," Hawes said. "You need much more story to keep 10 episodes, let alone multiple seasons, going." (A representative for Bong said that the director "has been focusing on his family during this time" and was not available for comment.) No one can predict how viewers will respond to a show like "Snowpiercer," with its stark depictions of life or death stakes, during this time. As the debut approaches TNT moved its premiere date ahead by two weeks amid a growing appetite for new content while audiences shelter in place its cast and creators understand that the coronavirus pandemic will be at the forefront of viewers' minds, even if the parallels are not entirely intentional. "Everyone on that train has been separated from their communities, the lives that they lived, the places that they loved," Connelly said. "We didn't imagine that, by time this show came out, we would all be living a version of that." Manson, the "Snowpiercer" showrunner, said it was inevitable that real world events would gradually draw closer to the calamitous forecasts of science fiction. "I'm not surprised," he said. "I've been expecting it." Manson described himself as having grown up in the Cold War "with a sense of fatalism" and as a fan of authors like William Gibson, who wrote speculative fiction in which "there's no wool on the eyes." When your sensibilities are forged by that kind of work, Manson said, "There's something in your gut that tells you, don't be complacent." He was skeptical that his brand of storytelling could prevent the kinds of catastrophes it predicts. "What does a TV series really do?" Manson said. "You hope you open some eyes. I have some doubts and questions about its efficacy to change." But he added that "if reality and fiction can align at the moment that something is broadcast, it can have an impact and make people think." Connelly said that she did not see "Snowpiercer" as "just dark and dystopian." The series, she said, is "asking relevant questions about the use and abuse of resources and the choices made by the people who have the power to distribute them. That can lead to change and to something really positive." "Snowpiercer" is also, Connelly said, "a show that's full of hope" one that reminds audiences that champions can emerge even in the most dire of circumstances. One that finds hopefulness in its characters' efforts to stay alive. "They're struggling to find meaning in their existence," she explained. "The show is saying: 'This is what they are going through how will they respond? How will they go on?' Meanwhile, there is humor, as there is in life. And even in the darkest times, there's joy and there's love, and there's sadness and beauty."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
At a time when germs are growing more resistant to common antibiotics, many companies that are developing new versions of the drugs are hemorrhaging money and going out of business, gravely undermining efforts to contain the spread of deadly, drug resistant bacteria. Antibiotic start ups like Achaogen and Aradigm have gone belly up in recent months, pharmaceutical behemoths like Novartis and Allergan have abandoned the sector and many of the remaining American antibiotic companies are teetering toward insolvency. One of the biggest developers of antibiotics, Melinta Therapeutics, recently warned regulators it was running out of cash. Experts say the grim financial outlook for the few companies still committed to antibiotic research is driving away investors and threatening to strangle the development of new lifesaving drugs at a time when they are urgently needed. "This is a crisis that should alarm everyone," said Dr. Helen Boucher, an infectious disease specialist at Tufts Medical Center and a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria. The problem is straightforward: The companies that have invested billions to develop the drugs have not found a way to make money selling them. Most antibiotics are prescribed for just days or weeks unlike medicines for chronic conditions like diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis that have been blockbusters and many hospitals have been unwilling to pay high prices for the new therapies. Political gridlock in Congress has thwarted legislative efforts to address the problem. The challenges facing antibiotic makers come at time when many of the drugs designed to vanquish infections are becoming ineffective against bacteria and fungi, as overuse of the decades old drugs has spurred them to develop defenses against the medicines. Drug resistant infections now kill 35,000 people in the United States each year and sicken 2.8 million, according a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released last month. Without new therapies, the United Nations says the global death toll could soar to 10 million by 2050. Read our other stories in our series on drug resistance, Deadly Germs, Lost Cures. The newest antibiotics have proved effective at tackling some of the most stubborn and deadly germs, including anthrax, bacterial pneumonia, E. coli and multi drug resistant skin infections. The experience of the biotech company Achaogen is a case in point. It spent 15 years and a billion dollars to win Food and Drug Administration approval for Zemdri, a drug for hard to treat urinary tract infections. In July, the World Health Organization added Zemdri to its list of essential new medicines. By then, however, there was no one left at Achaogen to celebrate. This past spring, with its stock price hovering near zero and executives unable to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to market the drug and do additional clinical studies, the company sold off lab equipment and fired its remaining scientists. In April, the company declared bankruptcy. Public health experts say the crisis calls for government intervention. Among the ideas that have wide backing are increased reimbursements for new antibiotics, federal funding to stockpile drugs effective against resistant germs and financial incentives that would offer much needed aid to start ups and lure back the pharmaceutical giants. Despite bipartisan support, legislation aimed at addressing the problem has languished in Congress. "If this doesn't get fixed in the next six to 12 months, the last of the Mohicans will go broke and investors won't return to the market for another decade or two," said Chen Yu, a health care venture capitalist who has invested in the field. The industry faces another challenge: After years of being bombarded with warnings against profligate use of antibiotics, doctors have become reluctant to prescribe the newest medications, limiting the ability of companies to recoup the investment spent to discover the compounds and win regulatory approval. And in their drive to save money, many hospital pharmacies will dispense cheaper generics even when a newer drug is far superior. "You'd never tell a cancer patient, 'Why don't you try a 1950s drug first and if doesn't work, we'll move on to one from the 1980s,'" said Kevin Outterson, the executive director of CARB X, a government funded nonprofit that provides grants to companies working on antimicrobial resistance. "We do this with antibiotics and it's really having an adverse effect on patients and the marketplace." Many of the new drugs are not cheap, at least when compared to older generics that can cost a few dollars a pill. A typical course of Xerava, a newly approved antibiotic that targets multi drug resistant infections, can cost as much as 2,000. "Unlike expensive new cancer drugs that extend survival by three to six months, antibiotics like ours truly save a patient's life," said Larry Edwards, chief executive of the company that makes Xerava, Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals. "It's frustrating." Tetraphase, based in Watertown, Mass., has struggled to get hospitals to embrace Xerava, which took more than a decade to discover and bring to market, even though the drug can vanquish resistant germs like MRSA and CRE, a group of resistant bacteria that kills 13,000 people a year. Tetraphase's stock price has been hovering around 2, down from nearly 40 a year ago. To trim costs, Mr. Edwards recently shuttered the company's labs, laid off some 40 scientists and scuttled plans to move forward on three other promising antibiotics. For Melinta Therapeutics based in Morristown, N.J., the future is even grimmer. Last month, the company's stock price dropped 45 percent after executives issued a warning about the company's long term prospects. Melinta makes four antibiotics, including Baxdela, which recently received F.D.A. approval to treat the kind of drug resistant pneumonia that often kills hospitalized patients. Jennifer Sanfilippo, Melinta's interim chief executive, said she was hoping a sale or merger would buy the company more time to raise awareness about the antibiotics' value among hospital pharmacists and increase sales. "These drugs are my babies, and they are so urgently needed," she said. Coming up with new compounds is no easy feat. Only two new classes of antibiotics have been introduced in the last 20 years most new drugs are variations on existing ones and the diminishing financial returns have driven most companies from the market. In the 1980s, there were 18 major pharmaceutical companies developing new antibiotics; today there are three. "The science is hard, really hard," said Dr. David Shlaes, a former vice president at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and a board member of the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership, a nonprofit advocacy organization. "And reducing the number of people who work on it by abandoning antibiotic R D is not going to get us anywhere." A new antibiotic can cost 2.6 billion to develop, he said, and the biggest part of that cost is the failures along the way. Some of the sector's biggest players have coalesced around a raft of interventions and incentives that would treat antibiotics as a global good. They include extending the exclusivity for new antibiotics to give companies more time to earn back their investments and creating a program to buy and store critical antibiotics much the way the federal government stockpiles emergency medication for possible pandemics or bioterror threats like anthrax and smallpox. The DISARM Act, a bill introduced in Congress this year, would direct Medicare to reimburse hospitals for new and critically important antibiotics. The bill has bipartisan support but has yet to advance. One of its sponsors, Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said some of the reluctance to push it forward stemmed from the political sensitivity over soaring prescription drug prices. "There is some institutional resistance to any legislation that provides financial incentives to drug companies," he said. Washington has not entirely been sitting on its hands. Over the past decade, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, a federal effort to counter chemical, nuclear and other public health threats, has invested a billion dollars in companies developing promising antimicrobial drugs and diagnostics that can help address antibiotic resistance. "If we don't have drugs to combat these multi drug resistant organisms, then we're not doing our job to keep Americans safe," Rick A. Bright, the director of the agency, said. Dr. Bright has had a firsthand experience with the problem. Two years ago, his thumb became infected after he nicked it while gardening in his backyard. The antibiotic he was prescribed had no effect, nor did six others he was given at the hospital. It turned out he had MRSA. The infection spread, and doctors scheduled surgery to amputate the thumb. His doctor prescribed one last antibiotic but only after complaining about its cost and warning that Dr. Bright's insurance might not cover it. Within hours, the infection began to improve and the amputation was canceled. "If I had gotten the right drug on Day 1, I would have never had to go to the emergency room," he said. Achaogen and its 300 employees had held out hope for government intervention, especially given that the company had received 124 million from BARDA to develop Zemdri. As recently as two years ago, the company had a market capitalization of more than 1 billion and Zemdri was so promising that it became the first antibiotic the F.D.A. designated as a breakthrough therapy, expediting the approval process. Dr. Ryan Cirz, one of Achaogen's founders and the vice president for research, recalled the days when venture capitalists took a shine to the company and investors snapped up its stock. "It wasn't hype," Dr. Cirz, a microbiologist, said. "This was about saving lives." In June, investors at the bankruptcy sale bought out the company's lab equipment and the rights to Zemdri for a pittance: 16 million. (The buyer, the generic drug maker Cipla USA, has continued to manufacture the drug.) Many of Achaogen's scientists have since found research jobs in more lucrative fields like oncology. Dr. Cirz lost his life savings, but he said he had bigger concerns. Without effective antibiotics, many common medical procedures could one day become life threatening. "This is a problem that can be solved, it's not that complicated," he said. "We can deal with the problem now, or we can just sit here and wait until greater numbers of people start dying. That would be a tragedy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
For relaxing in comfort, there's nothing better than a hammock. Just ask the London based designer Ilse Crawford, or her husband and partner in Stuidoilse, Oscar Pena. They not only have their own at home, but also frequently install them in interior design projects for clients. "We love them," Ms. Crawford said. "Hammocks have been part of our lives for a very long time." She added: "We give our friends hammocks as presents. We're responsible, I think, for the hammock infiltration of London." With a hammock, "you can do so many things: swinging, napping, sitting," said Mr. Pena, who hails from the hammock hotbed of Colombia. He and Ms. Crawford own numerous examples, he said, and recently designed one: the Wellbeing hammock, for Nanimarquina. No matter which hammock they have strung up at home, when friends visit, "the kids always jump in," Ms. Crawford said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
When Kendall Williams let her daughter, Bailey, paddle happily in a swimming class on the South Side of Chicago as a preschooler, she noticed the other parents seemed anxious. "I don't think any of them knew how to swim," Ms. Williams said. "And they were afraid of the water and afraid for their kids." Ms. Williams, 45, and her daughter are African American, as were most of the other families at the swimming class. While Bailey, now almost 9, swims competitively, most of the other children dropped out of the program. Ms. Williams's experience reflects one of the more intractable racial divides in American sports and culture. In the United States, a substantial majority of African American young people and adults cannot swim or are weak swimmers, according to the most recent research from USA Swimming, the sport's national governing body. It is a trend that has a complicated history, including segregated swimming pools and beaches, attacks against African Americans at pools as well as socioeconomic forces that divided access to swimming pools along class lines. But now there is Simone Manuel, the charismatic young Olympic swimming champion whose stirring, surprise victory in the 100 meter freestyle in Rio de Janeiro made her the first African American woman to win individual swimming gold. Her overnight popularity has public health experts and swimming advocates hopeful that she may have the star power to close the gap and inspire more minority children to learn to swim. The stakes could not be higher, since not being able to swim can be a matter of life and death. Yet in the United States, it is estimated that about 70 percent of African American children and adolescents cannot swim an entire length of a pool by themselves, a standard measure of swimming proficiency, and about 15 percent of these nonproficient swimmers cannot swim at all. By contrast, only about 6 percent of white children and teenagers cannot swim, according to data from USA Swimming. The consequences are devastating. African American children and teenagers are almost six times as likely as white children to drown in a swimming pool, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Several years ago in Louisiana, six African American boys and girls drowned, some trying to save the others, after one of them slid into deep water in a river. None could swim. A friend of the victims, who also could not swim, helplessly witnessed the tragedy, telling reporters, there "was nothing I could do but watch them drown, one by one." The 2010 report commissioned by USA Swimming and based on surveys and interviews with almost 2,000 parents and children around the country found that many African American families remain profoundly suspicious of and even frightened by swimming as an activity. Some of this anxiety is attributable to old Jim Crow laws, which restricted many pools to "whites only," the study's authors believe. As a result, many African American families avoided swimming pools and, in the years since, did not enroll their own children in learn to swim programs. The 2010 report found, in fact, that if a minority parent had never learned to swim, the chances were less than 1 in 5 that his or her child would be comfortable in the water. Carol Irwin, an associate professor of health studies at the University of Memphis in Tennessee, who was a co author of the report, said that many of the African American parents and the young people who were surveyed for the study told the researchers that their fear of the water and of drowning was the primary reason they did not want to learn to swim. This attitude has deep historical roots, said Jeff Wiltse, the author of "Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America." A surge in the building of public swimming pools across America in the 1920s and 1930s attracted tens of thousands of new swimmers and set off the first recreational swimming boom, but these swimmers were almost exclusively white. Public pools often barred black swimmers, and many pools were situated far from minority neighborhoods. "The few pools open to blacks were small, poorly equipped, and often located in places like the basements of buildings," said Dr. Wiltse, a professor of history at the University of Montana. "You had multiple generations of white families who had a cultural tradition of swimming and passed that interest to the next generation," Dr. Wiltse said. "And you had multiple generations of African American families who had no comparable tradition. Instead, their experience of swimming typically involved exclusion and, more dramatically, drowning. For generations of African American families, swimming has been associated with fear." Ebony Rosemond, who founded the website blackkidsswim.com, said that beyond segregation, there has been a history of violence against blacks who ventured to beaches and pools. "When I was growing up, we all heard about the black kids who got beat up or held underwater if they tried to go to public pools," she said. "People threw stones at black kids who went to the beach. There is this legacy of fear that got to be associated with swimming, and it wasn't just about drowning. It was also about being attacked and driven away." Last year, Ms. Rosemond created her website because when she and other parents of young African American swimmers searched online for "black kids swim," the only sites that came up were about drowning or racial episodes at pools. She wanted to provide resources that were "positive, not just about drowning." One of the most common questions she gets is about hair. Chlorine can react with chemically processed hair and may cause it to become dry and brittle, and concerns are in fact so pervasive among African American girls it was among the top reasons girls cited for not swimming, according to the 2010 report that the website devotes a page to the topic. Its advice includes always wearing a swim cap, going natural, using antichlorine shampoo and conditioner after every swim, and perhaps considering cornrows. A number of swimming programs are working to increase African American participation. USA Swimming sponsors a program called Make a Splash that partners with local swim teams and cities to promote swimming among minorities by offering free or low cost lessons and pool time. Felecia Eaddy, 45, stood in line Monday at the Marcus Garvey pool in Harlem, waiting to sign up her 5 year old daughter, Savannah, for swimming lessons. "My mother did not know how to swim," Ms. Eaddy said. "She is 64 years old and she still doesn't know how to swim, and I want to break the cycle with my daughter." Ms. Eaddy plans on bringing Savannah back as frequently as possible to develop swimming skills for "survival," as well as exercise and confidence. "I encourage my daughter to be strong, and I think it's important especially for girls to know they can do that as well," she said. "Nothing about you can stop you, not your hair, your skin color, nothing." Joel Johnson, the president of the Chicago South Swim Club, where Ms. Williams's daughter trains, fields a competitive team that is made up almost exclusively of young minority swimmers, and has produced several state champions. For these athletes, Mr. Johnson said, the experience of becoming first comfortable and then swift and strong in the water is "very empowering." "After watching our kids race, no one can hold on to the stereotype that African Americans can't be good swimmers," he said. The Annual Black History Invitational Swim Meet in Washington this year hosted the largest contingent of minority swimmers in its 30 year history, according to Gwendolyn Crump, the director of communications for the city's Department of Parks and Recreation. More than 1,100 minority swimmers from 25 teams attended the three day event. The success of Ms. Manuel, along with Ashleigh Johnson, the African American goalie for the United States women's water polo team, and other minority Olympian swimmers reminds young African American swimmers of what is possible, Mr. Johnson said. "I sent out a message to all of our swimmers and their parents to watch Simone and the other African American swimmers and athletes at the Games," he says. "I wanted them to think big about their own futures." Ms. Williams and her daughter dutifully cheered as Ms. Manuel won her 100 meter gold and then, on Saturday, won the silver in the 50 meter freestyle and a second gold anchoring the medley relay.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Eliot and John W. Cross were the perfect patrician designers, brothers born into a family with plenty of money and social standing. They put their Ivy League and Beaux Arts connections into play in 1907, and quickly gained a practice in discreet townhouses, clubs, country houses and jewel like banks, all shown in the luxuriously illustrated monograph on their work, "New York Transformed The Architecture of Cross Cross," by Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker (Monacelli Press, 2014). But the sumptuous illustrations also show an unexpected aspect of their career in the late 1920s, as they developed a specialty of flashy skyscrapers in devoutly modernistic style, a form generally eschewed by the old boy gentility of the architectural profession. To reconcile the restrained historicism of most of their commissions with the Jazz Age modernity of their most memorable work is an architectural problem so far without solution. Their father was an English born banker and writer, their mother a member of the Redmond and Hoyt families, prominent in New York society. Eliot was named after an aunt, the English novelist whose pen name was George Eliot, and the brothers grew up in a family house on Washington Square. After graduating from the Groton School followed by Harvard (Eliot, Porcellian Club) and Yale (John, Skull and Bones), they set up shop as Cross Cross in 1907. In 1916 came the commission for the Links Club at 36 East 62nd Street, with worn looking iron spot brick and classical travertine detailing that has now weathered to apparent antiquity. They also designed townhouses and even apartment houses like the inventive 333 East 68th Street, and the scrumptious 1 Sutton Place South, with light all around and sweeping East River views. These were almost all of traditional neo Georgian character, accomplished and with plenty of taste but not much of the individuality, the spark, of the work of contemporaries like Charles Platt and Grosvenor Atterbury. But in the late 1920s something different began to show up in the brothers' designs, like the neo Classical marble fronted Lee, Higginson bank at 41 Broad Street, with three severe lower stories topped by a heavily modeled three story arcade. The 1929 bank is a puzzling departure from the usual base middle top paradigm, and might be a mason's clubhouse or a massive burial vault. The main floor is now a for hire ballroom with the original long double row of Doric columns all classical enough. But there is a definite Art Deco bent. The fluting on the columns is unlike anything seen in antiquity, its separating ridges in bronze, its concave channels in a luxurious mosaic of vinelike styling almost as if the Parthenon had been reconstructed by an artist in semiprecious materials. The brothers completed the 54 story City Bank Farmers Trust Company at 20 Exchange Place in 1931, and from a distance it appears a straightforward limestone skyscraper. But up close, it is rich with silver nickel moderne style metalwork, and the interiors are a perplexing mix of staid banker and Art Deco classicism. Nearly impossible to perceive from ground level are 14 mysterious, slightly menacing figures ringing the 19th floor. In 1931, Through the Ages, a magazine related to the stone business, described them as showing the "giants of finance" but did not elaborate. Simultaneously, at Lexington and 51st Street, Cross Cross were working on an RCA Victor commission, a skyscraper later known as the General Electric Building. This was, truly, an electric design, buzzing all over with radio energy. Mr. Pennoyer and Ms. Walker quote John Cross's statement that his goal was "to depict in design the very fundamentals of our universe." The photographer for the book, Jonathan Wallen, took spectacular close ups of the spiky, vibrating tower that show things you'd never imagine from the street: incised brickwork, explosive medallions, chevrons and stylized, masklike faces. The RCA Victor building gives the Chrysler Building a run for its money. This Jazz Age experimentation is unexpected from a white shoe firm; was it from the brain of the shyer, artistic John or the ambitious, popular Eliot? Mr. Pennoyer and Ms. Walker tend toward the idea that John was the designer and Eliot worked the business side. That corresponds with what their niece Sarnia Marquand told me in 1980. She added that "they both needed the other, and it was very good." But in the same year the decorator Sister Parish told me without equivocation that Eliot did the townhouses and John did the country houses; John had designed one for her family in Far Hills, N.J., in 1920. Eliot Cross was active in real estate, but also had a sentimental bent. When he was part of a group developing the Westbury Hotel, on Madison Avenue and 69th Street, Eliot hired an architectural photographer specifically to document the pre existing house on the site, a grand Victorian. The book on Cross Cross is the fourth in an admirable series of monographs by Mr. Pennoyer and Ms. Walker Grosvenor Atterbury, Delano Aldrich and Warren Wetmore. Most of these designers' works are richer, simply more interesting, than those of Cross Cross. But none of the three come close to the brothers' most unusual works, in which tradition crossed paths with flash.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
When the Landlord Tries to Break Up With You This winter, Eugenia Forteza and Mimi Klipstine faced a common inconvenience for those living in apartment shares: a departing roommate. "We were like, 'Oh, that's a pain.' We were so comfortable with each other," said Ms. Forteza, a 28 year old opera singer who became close friends with Ms. Klipstine, a 25 year old actress and singer, after moving in two years ago. But while they were dumbfounded that their roommate would want to leave their large and lovely three bedroom in Washington Heights to move farther uptown, the apartment's charms made it easy to find someone new, and Ms. Forteza quickly found a college acquaintance to fill the room. There was just one glitch: They hadn't yet received their renewal lease, usually sent out months in advance. "I just wanted the rent number so I could tell the new girl what her share would be," said Ms. Forteza, who emailed the management company. "And they were like, 'Oh, we have to talk on the phone.'" This, understandably, came as a shock. Not only do many landlords wait to renovate until tenants move out of their own accord, but their housing luck had, up to that point, been so good. First, there was the apartment itself, which Ms. Klipstine and a friend had found after a leaky ceiling necessitated a departure from a cramped three bedroom a few blocks away. And then there was the fact of their meeting. Ms. Forteza had braced herself for a long and possibly unpleasant apartment hunt as she neared the end of a graduate program in New Jersey. But on her first week of looking she came across a video tour that Ms. Klipstine had posted on Gypsy Housing, a Facebook group where people post room and apartment listings. "I thought, 'I like this girl! This girl is so chill,'" said Ms. Forteza, recalling how funny she had found Ms. Klipstine's ravings about the huge closets and radiator covers. "And it was a beautiful apartment in a good location." "We were like, 'This is too easy!'" Ms. Klipstine said. "I think that's why when we had to leave, it was so horrifying. And it was out of the blue." The management company softened the blow by offering them a choice of two other empty apartments in the building: a three bedroom on the ground floor or a two bedroom down the hall. Both had been recently renovated, from a two and one bedroom respectively, and had new kitchens. But the generously sized layouts were gone. "The three bedroom was terrible," Ms. Klipstine said. "It was right on the street, with these tiny bedrooms." "And then we were like, 'If we have the opportunity to live together '" Ms. Forteza said. "That would be nice," Ms. Klipstine said, finishing the sentence. They told the management company they would take the two bedroom, so long as they could keep the same per person rent of 970 each. The company agreed. "When I came to the city, my goal was to find something under 1,000, and I want to maintain that," said Ms. Forteza, who, in addition to her work as an opera singer, runs a blog about the behind the scenes of the opera world, 360deg of Opera. (Ms. Klipstine also has several side gigs, working as a personal assistant and a personal shopper.) They moved into the two bedroom in March, a process that entailed culling quite a few possessions. They got rid of much of their furniture, though Ms. Forteza's keyboard and several paintings by Ms. Klipstine's grandmother made the cut, as did Ms. Forteza's opera gowns and musical scores, a collection she augmented significantly when she worked at the Juilliard bookstore. That they are both in the performing arts, but not the same performing arts Ms. Klipstine performs in plays, musicals and cabarets, but not operas makes them ideal roommates. They understand each another's career challenges, but can offer an outside perspective. "I don't think I'd love to live with another opera singer," Ms. Forteza said. And as Ms. Klipstine pointed out, being able to find support and a soothing atmosphere at home is important when you are in a stressful calling that involves regularly going on auditions. As for the new apartment, Ms. Forteza admitted that "it was stressful at first, but overall it was a pretty good situation." "They could have just said, 'We're not renewing,' and then we would have had a month to find another place," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
When HBO Max announced Tuesday that it was temporarily removing "Gone With the Wind" from its streaming service, it seemed as if another Confederate monument was coming down. "Gone With the Wind" may register with younger people today only as their grandmother's favorite movie (or maybe, the source of a lacerating joke that opens Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman"). And for every prominent conservative accusing HBO Max of censorship, there were plenty on social media calling the movie, well, boring. But the 1939 classic still the highest grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation has enduringly shaped popular understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction perhaps more than any other cultural artifact. "You want to have a Southern antebellum wedding where does that come from?" said Kellie Carter Jackson, a historian at Wellesley College who teaches a course on slavery and film. "People will say they haven't seen the movie. But they have seen it just not in its original form." HBO Max's move came a day after The Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by John Ridley, the screenwriter of "Twelve Years a Slave," criticizing "Gone With the Wind" for its racist stereotypes and whitewashing of the horrors of slavery, and calling for it to be presented only with added historical context. (A few days later, the African American film scholar Jacqueline Stewart announced in an opinion piece for CNN.com that she will be providing the introduction when the movie returns to the streaming service.) But it also represents a belated reckoning with African American criticism that started immediately after the 1936 publication of Margaret Mitchell's novel even if it was barely noted in the mainstream white press. "Gone With the Wind" is one of the mythic lightning strikes of American cultural history. Mitchell, a former journalist who wrote the novel (her first and only) while recovering from an injury, expected it to sell 5,000 copies. Instead, it became a sensation, selling nearly a million copies within six months, and earning her the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The production of the movie version, including the casting of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler, was covered breathlessly in the press. And by opening night, in 1939, seven million copies of the book had been sold. "People just ate it up," said Karen L. Cox, a historian at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the author of "Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture." And the Northern embrace of Mitchell's plantation nostalgia, with its depiction of happy, obedient slaves, wasn't just harmless lifestyle consumerism. "There was nascent civil rights activity in the 1930s, but if everyone is watching this movie or reading this book, they get the idea that that's how things were," Cox said. "It made it easier for white Northerners to look at African American migrants arriving in places like Chicago and say, 'Why can't you act like these Negroes?'" But even as white Americans embraced the moonlight and magnolias, African Americans were registering objections. Soon after the producer David O. Selznick bought the rights, there were complaints that a movie version would incite violence, spread bigotry and even derail a proposed federal anti lynching bill. Margaret Mitchell reacted dismissively to the criticism. "I do not intend to let any trouble making Professional Negros change my feelings towards the race with whom my relations have always been those of affection and mutual respect," she wrote to a friend. Selznick did a more complicated dance. "I for one have no desire to produce any anti Negro film," he wrote in a memo to the screenwriter Sidney Howard. "In our picture I think we have to be awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger." Selznick initially floated the name of one potential African American adviser, but ultimately hired two whites, including a journalist friend of Mitchell's, tasked with keeping the Southern speech authentic (a matter of great concern to some white fans of the novel who wrote to Selznick) and avoiding missteps on details like the appropriateness of Scarlett's headgear at an evening party. The film tried to sanitize some of the novel's racist elements. References to the Ku Klux Klan, which the novel calls "a tragic necessity," were omitted. Reluctantly, Selznick also cut from the script a common but notorious racial slur ("the hate word," as one African American journalist who weighed in put it). The film also finessed a scene from the book where Scarlett, while riding alone through a shantytown, is nearly raped by a black man, which prompts a retaliatory raid by the Klan. Instead, the attacker is a poor white man, and the nature of the posse that rides out to avenge her honor is not specified. "A group of men can go out and 'get' the perpetrators of an attempted rape without having long white sheets over them," Selznick wrote in a memo. But the film put the nostalgic Lost Cause mythology by that point, the dominant national view of the Civil War front and center, starting with the opening title cards paying tribute to "a land of Cavaliers and Cotton fields," a "pretty world where Gallantry took its last bow." Even during production, there were calls for an African American boycott. Afterward, there were protests outside theaters in Chicago, Washington and other cities. While responses to the finished film in the black press were mixed, the criticism was harsh. The Chicago Defender initially published a column calling it inoffensive and the performances of Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) and Butterfly McQueen (Prissy) examples of "Negro artistry." But a week later, it ran a scathing review calling it "a weapon of terror against black America," a sentiment echoed in other black papers like the Pittsburgh Courier, which denounced the depiction of all blacks as "happy house servants and unthinking, helpless clods." Among those who saw it around this time was a teenage Malcolm X. "I was the only Negro in the theater, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug," he wrote in his autobiography. White audiences, meanwhile, were largely swept up in celebration of the nearly four hour Technicolor epic, with its hundreds of extras, lavish costumes and themes of grit and survival that resonated with a country emerging from the Depression. White newspapers, including The New York Times, carried rapturous coverage of the movie's premieres in New York and Atlanta, where the four days of festivities included the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir (including, one film scholar has noted, a 10 year old Martin Luther King Jr.) singing in front of a mock up of Tara, the film's plantation. But few noted the African American protests, or any black criticism at all. Even past the 1960s, the film endured for many white Americans as a beloved cultural touchstone, a symbol of golden age Hollywood and even American identity itself. In 1974, NBC paid a record smashing 5 million dollars (more than 26 million today) for the right to show the film once, as part of its Bicentennial programming. Broadcast over two nights, it was watched by 47 percent of all American households. Some African American artists have made direct challenges to its whitewashed nostalgia. In 2001, the Mitchell estate fought a losing copyright battle against "The Wind Done Gone," the novelist Alice Randall's parody from the point of view of the enslaved. The authorized sequels, meanwhile, have tried, sometimes awkwardly, to update the book's racial politics, while keeping the white centered romance intact. In 2001, the Mitchell estate tried to stop publication of "The Wind Done Gone," a parody from the point of view of the enslaved. In Alexandra Ripley's "Scarlett," from 1991, Scarlett lovingly tends to the dying Mammy, who is ushered offstage (along with most of the black characters) early on. "Rhett Butler's People," by Donald McCaig, from 2007, focused on the post Civil War struggle over the re establishment of white supremacy, but glossed over the issue of the Klan (and Rhett's possible membership). Other institutions have changed their approaches. Since the Atlanta History Center took over the Margaret Mitchell House from a private group in 2006, the focus has shifted from a literary view that downplayed racial controversy to an emphasis on the story's racist tropes and distorted history and the fact that African Americans objected from the beginning.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
In many cities, the threat of the novel coronavirus and the efforts to slow its spread have altered daily life dramatically. Ordinary objects (doorknobs, soap) seem transformed, banal activities biting a nail, buying milk freighted with danger. New vocabulary has emerged, as have new habits and new ways of navigating a narrowed landscape. Still, if you see enough theater and you have, like me, a fascination with onstage dystopias, certain elements may feel familiar restrictions on movement and behavior, distrust of the environment and each other. "King Lear" and "Endgame," "Far Away" and "Blasted" are classics of the genre. But you could fill a shelf with plays of the past several decades that have dreamed bleak outcomes for humanity. And then, in a pinch, you could burn that shelf and those plays for warmth. Recently, I spoke with several playwrights via telephone and email about what it is like to first imagine a cataclysm and then live through one. Because playwriting is a solitary art, many of the men and women described routines that felt both somewhat typical and wholly changed. "Friends have suggested that I must be coming up with so many stories during this time," Robert O'Hara said. "I'm simply hoping we all make it through this alive." These are excerpts from the conversations. Apocalyptic event A young copy editor navigates a despoiled New York City. The moon has disappeared, and food has turned to salt. Your circumstances "I live alone, on the Upper West Side. My routine hasn't changed very much. I get up every morning, and I write for four to six hours a day. Generally, I'm as isolated as I always was." Your play "I lived a lot of those experiences. I was burnt out of my Bronx apartment. I was attacked by a guy with a golf club on the subway. Crack was beginning to explode, as well as AIDS. I didn't set out to write a piece of prophecy. I was responding to my daily existence." How to live now "I resist writing about a crisis when I'm in the middle of the crisis, because I can't see clearly." Your environment "I speak to you from our bedroom in Brooklyn. I'm with my husband, Gordon. The apartment is a sty. So that's very occupying. My goal is usually to spend all my time at home, but since I never get to realize that goal, it's hard to say what this will be like." Your play "I was thinking about a pandemic, a fantastically quick moving, incredibly mortal, sweeping humanity off the face of the earth pandemic. This is not that." How to live now "Dystopias are soothing because the worst has already happened. What's awful about right now is that we're before whatever is next. We can't start to cope because we're all still being slung around by the future. Either this is the worst time, or it's the easiest time and it gets much worse." Apocalyptic event In the wake of an ecological collapse, humans spend most of their waking hours in elaborate online worlds. A detective investigates a potentially dangerous site. Your environment "I'm in Los Angeles, sheltering in my cottage. I'm pretty used to it. I'm naturally a hermit and I have a cat there's actually a whole community of cats around here. I've been talking more regularly to close family and friends." Your play "I was thinking about climate change, working with the idea that nature had become so compromised, it was actually far more pleasant to spend time in virtual realms. I was trying to say that the internet as a piece of technology is not all bad. I'm so grateful that we have the internet right now." Apocalyptic event Returning astronauts seed earth with apian life forms who enslave humanity. A generation later, humanity rebels. Your environment "I'm in my apartment in Long Island City with my wife, Sandy. She just popped in to say that she's saving me from the apocalypse. She went through the various canned stuff and figured out how many meals we have left." Your play "In my plays, collapse is specifically motivated by human actions. A big difference between that and the coronavirus situation is that viruses don't think like a human enemy. They're just doing their thing." How to live now "Jumping into apocalyptic science fiction was a way of getting away from myself. I was like, I want to force my drama into a world that I couldn't possibly survive in. Now I'm actually looking down the barrel of a world where, if there were total societal breakdown, I would be one of the first to go. I can't fight. I can't forage. My wife would outlive me by quite a bit." Apocalyptic event In an ecologically imperiled future, the British government has placed profound limits on childbearing. One woman tries to flout the system. Your environment "We are in London: me, my partner, our toddler and our dog. In some ways, my life isn't so radically different I work from home, we hardly ever went out in the evenings. But our routine has shrunk, and anxiety for the people we love and the world and the vulnerable is huge." Your play "It was inspired by research I did about the climate crisis a year of research followed by five years of living with the anxiety resulting from that research." How to live now "Just over two years ago, our child was born with a serious long term medical condition, and I've learned a lot about being in the moment, not projecting too far into the future and trying to manage overwhelming feelings of anxiety. I have also developed a profound respect and gratitude for people working at every level of the health care profession. We are in their hands now." Your play "I thought about it for like five years. It seemed really important to me that it be ecological, but that it not be an accident, like a meteor or something that had no causality. My friends who are introverted who saw my play, were like, that seems like a very hopeful future where people are safe and spend their days reading and doing science." How to live now "I wouldn't say I feel prepared in any way. But I am like, 'Oh, all of the Oregon Trail skills that I have may come in handy.' " Apocalyptic event In this fierce satire, women have gone extinct, and abortion is illegal. Somehow two men have and lose a baby. Your environment "I'm sheltering with my partner at our home upstate. We are adjusting to being around each other so much. We have to find the time to settle down and quiet our minds. The challenge of sitting inside the unknowable is something I usually manufacture in my art. But this is not a 90 minute one act." Your play "I imagined a world where half the population disappeared. I hope we are not living through that right now." How to live now "The thrill of being an artist is to imagine the unimaginable. There is no thrill in sitting inside of a real pandemic. This is not fiction." Your environment "I'm at home in North West London. My son is having his last day at school. Things are eerie. The shops are empty. My phone is lighting up with people either panicking or sending funny videos." Your play "'Lungs' touches on political unrest, climate change, economic uncertainty. When I wrote it, people seemed to find the characters' global concerns absurd. Now it seems less satirical." How to live now "We're experiencing the sort of disruption that people elsewhere in the world have been experiencing for a long time. I'm choosing to see this as a collective act of compassion that we're choosing to undertake as a way to protect those who are less privileged and more vulnerable than we are."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
LONDON What happens when a director seems not to trust her play, or maybe her audience? The answer can be discovered at the Vaudeville Theater here, where Kathy Burke's production of Oscar Wilde's "Lady Windermere's Fan" barreled into view on Monday night. The play, which follows a much better production of "A Woman of No Importance," is the second in a yearlong lineup of Wilde titles at this playhouse, and runs until April 7. Its dismaying lack of delicacy is ill suited to Wilde, a writer who, if anything, can often seem fey and arch. As if to counter that possibility, Ms. Burke, herself an acclaimed actress from films like "Nil by Mouth," opts for protracted double takes and hammy exaggerations to buoy an abridged version of the 1892 play, which has far more resonance and emotion than are allowed to surface on this occasion. In the secondary role of the Duchess of Berwick, the comedian and TV star Jennifer Saunders ("Absolutely Fabulous") is at once the show's commercial draw and the cause of its imbalance. Making a rare theatrical appearance, she is required mostly to bustle imperiously about, lobbing insults at her hapless daughter, Agatha (a game Ami Metcalf), and narrowing her eyes when about to land an especially withering remark. She returns after the intermission to sing a bawdy ditty during a scene change, just to give her supporting character something to do in the second act. Ms. Saunders gets her laughs but at the cost of any sense of an ensemble. (The male aristos, for their part, converge in a scene whose physical antics devolve into a routine that could have come from the Keystone Kops.) A critique of Victorian era social constraints and a gossipy world's tendency toward snap judgments, "Lady Windermere's Fan" insists that people aren't good or evil; they exist as shades of gray. Good luck extracting that from the bluster and anything for a gag approach taken here. Wilde knew in his bones the difference between high comedy and vulgarity, an essential that Ms. Burke and company have yet to understand. As proof of the happy results when a director and a literary titan align, along comes Ian Rickson's 60th anniversary production of "The Birthday Party" from a writer, Harold Pinter, who relished language just as much as Wilde, but with very different results. The play is running at the Harold Pinter Theater how apt! through April 14. Not that Pinter's disorienting amalgam of mirth and menace was particularly welcomed at its 1958 premiere; the play was greeted with general befuddlement until a celebrated review from Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times of London alerted readers to the playwright's singular capacity to disturb and provoke. No matter: The production nonetheless closed after a week. Its current iteration by contrast looks likely to be London's first theatrical hit of 2018 a testament to a starry cast that anchors the piece in a recognizable time and place while allowing its absurdism to shine through. (You can tick off the various textual nods to "Waiting for Godot," which was first seen in London only several years before "The Birthday Party.") The setting is one of those rundown seaside boardinghouses that Pinter would have known firsthand when he used to tour the regions as an actor under the stage name David Baron. You can practically smell the damp rising from behind the cracked wallpaper of the living room set. The evocatively dreary environs belong to Meg (Zoe Wanamaker) and her husband Petey (Peter Wight), though questions of ownership and control soon come to define the play. The couple have a lodger, Stanley (Toby Jones), who seems to be a surrogate for the son Meg never had. Stanley is a study in unspecified damage, and an unspoken anger courses beneath his blandly bespectacled visage. It's not altogether surprising when he reaches toward Meg in what looks like an embrace, only to put his hands around her throat. Petey, a deckchair attendant, keeps absenting himself, allowing Meg and Stanley to pursue their warped interactions unbothered, until into this peculiar trio comes the troubling double act of Goldberg (Stephen Mangan) and McCann (Tom Vaughan Lawlor). They have arrived to deliver Stanley to an unseen character called Monty, though who Monty is or what he represents is anyone's (fearsome) guess. From this self enclosed landscape we never leave the living room Pinter maps out themes of dominance and usurpation that he would revisit throughout a lifetime of plays that shifted over the years from the domestic to the more overtly political. His gift for ambiguity, too, is everywhere evident: Meg refers more than once to a boardinghouse that is "on the list," by which she presumably doesn't mean the tourist itinerary. (Is it under surveillance? Has it been condemned?) Comedy, of which there is plenty, arises from the characters' capacity for surprise Goldberg for no apparent reason sticks out his tongue and from Pinter's self evident delight in the effect of certain words. Ms. Wanamaker's Meg looks taken aback early on by Petey's use of the adjective "succulent" one that is clearly more suggestive than she is used to. As Simon Baker's sound design ratchets up the tension, the company play with the ensemble ease that is one of the director Mr. Rickson's many gifts. (Nor is he any stranger to Pinter, having directed Pinter as an actor in Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" and overseen productions of his plays "Old Times" and "Betrayal.") Among a uniformly attuned cast, of whom only Ms. Wanamaker is on occasion a tad too studied, it's worth noting Mr. Mangan's dampening down his natural charm and full coiffeur to play a man on a none too cheerful mission: He and the ramrod straight Mr. Vaughan Lawlor revel in vaudevillian banter toward the end as a chastened, newly captive Stanley looks on motionless. And in the pivotal role of the piano playing victim, Mr. Jones, known from such films as "Infamous" and the recent "Happy End," delivers a climactic scream worthy of Edvard Munch. Think of it as the first of Pinter's many theatrical alarm calls: a cry for help from a writer besotted with language who also knew the forbidding terrain that exists beyond words.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Opposition to the Common Core, a set of reading and math standards for elementary, middle and high school students that were originally adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia, has gathered momentum among state lawmakers in recent weeks. The governors of Oklahoma and South Carolina are considering signing bills to repeal the standards and replace them with locally written versions. In Missouri, lawmakers passed a bill that would require a committee of state educators to come up with new standards within the next two years. Although the Common Core, developed by a coalition convened by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, was initially backed by a group of Republican governors, the Obama administration also lent its support. For the past year, conservative Republicans, seizing on the administration's backing, have argued that the standards amount to a federal takeover of public schools. Jason Nelson, a Republican state representative from northwest Oklahoma who sponsored the bill to withdraw the state from the Common Core, said he and his colleagues wanted to "break any kind of nexus where any private organization or the federal government would exert control over our standards." The bill passed the Oklahoma House overwhelmingly last week, and this week it passed the Senate, 31 to 10.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
There aren't many hotel options on the Point Reyes Peninsula, Northern California's national seashore, but in September 2015, West Marin County welcomed back one more: The Olema. Built in 1876, the historic property had operated as an inn (upstairs) and a restaurant (downstairs) for most of its existence, but when its new owners, Margaret Grade and Daniel DeLong, took over in 2013, they painted the fusty bright white Victorian a gloomy shade of gray (to much local controversy) and reopened only the restaurant, named Sir and Star. It was a sequel, in a way, to their celebrated first: Manka's Inverness Lodge, a pioneering local spot secluded in the woods and beloved by food lovers and luminaries alike, before it burned down in an electrical fire a decade ago. Now, the Olema once again operates as a proper inn, with five renovated rooms each done in Ms. Grade's unique style. Just about every backpacker, birder and oyster slurper bound for Point Reyes National Seashore passes through the unincorporated town of Olema, and therefore by its namesake inn at the intersection of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and Highway 1. Spare but sophisticated, the inn's rooms are tucked down a short hall dimly lit by sconces. Each room is decorated differently, some with wrought iron bed frames and footstools, free standing wardrobes and framed etchings of fowl all scavenged by Ms. Grade from Parisian flea markets or her personal coffers. Rustic black, wide planked floors are made from repurposed wood, and long black shutters help keep the otherwise drafty rooms warm. Eye masks and earplugs are set on every pillow, in case you'd rather not fall asleep to owl hoots and the faint jazz coming from the restaurant downstairs or, for that matter, wake to the dairy trucks rumbling by below. It's called the "W.C.," as emblazoned on the door's clouded glass. Clean, with classic white tile, Kiehl's products and a vintage toothbrush holder too small for today's bulbous handles, there is nothing especially noteworthy about this water closet other than the fact that, despite California's drought, the hot water took so long to warm up I worried that my shower, in a basic tub, might have to be cold. (It wasn't.) Years before the notion of "local" took root in the culinary world, Ms. Grade and Mr. DeLong cooked exclusively with ingredients gathered from within miles of their restaurant, Manka's. (All that remains now are a few guest cabins.) Today, Sir and Star is an intimate restaurant adorned with antlers, stuffed cormorants and candelabras. It's a fitting scene for feasting on rustic, memorable dishes like "Leg of a Neighbor's Duck," as worded on the whimsical menu typically written mere minutes before 5 p.m. service begins. No bicycles or hot tubs or even bathrobes, but the Olema does boast a romantic foyer with a seven foot high fireplace and pair of deep chairs, perfect for sharing a bottle of syrah by the local winemaker Sean Thackrey. If my room though comfy and calming and affordable was not a creaky flight of stairs above Sir and Star restaurant, I might wonder: What's the point? (As Point Reyes has many cozy cabins available to rent.) But how wonderful it is, to enjoy such a fine supper in the countryside without having to drive the winding road home.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
In this week's newsletter, Marc Stein analyzes the championship hopes of the top contenders Raptors? Lakers? Clippers? Bucks? and offers a peek inside one of the bubble hotels. Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein's weekly N.B.A. newsletter here. LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. The Los Angeles Lakers will play their first playoff game in seven years Tuesday night at a centralized N.B.A. site in the middle of August. This Newsletter Tuesday, in other words, is a special occasion. It was under these auspices that I decided to break from my recent once a season tradition to convene what is known as the Committee (of One) and assemble an emergency edition of my power rankings to assess the 16 teams that, after spending some 40 days in the N.B.A. bubble, have advanced to the playoffs. The higher seeded team won each of Monday's first four playoff games, but many N.B.A. experts believe the 2020 postseason will be more unpredictable than ever because home court advantage and the usual rigors of travel have been deleted from the equation. Everyone is playing and living at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., with only a few hundred virtual fans admitted to the games. "I hate giving predictions, but especially in this scenario, where literally anybody could get upset," Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors told me last week when I asked him for his N.B.A. finals picks. "I'm prepared for anything as a quote unquote fan." As a reminder: The Committee computes the order by weighing what is happening in the present alongside each team's big picture outlook guided to some degree by subjectivity and whimsy. Teams were ranked ahead of Tuesday's play, before East leading Milwaukee's chastening Game 1 loss to the short handed Orlando Magic. The Raptors did not quite match the unbeaten Phoenix Suns in the seeding games, but they looked more playoff ready, at 7 1, than anyone else in the bubble. The Raptors also recorded more wins this season than the Clippers (53 to 49) even after Kawhi Leonard swapped Canada for Hollywood. Given Toronto's versatility on defense, its towering confidence after last season's title run and Coach Nick Nurse's creativity, it shouldn't surprise anyone if the Raptors win the East again even without Leonard. The Bucks have such a favorable first round matchup against Orlando that it made more sense to laser in on their mental state. Because Milwaukee's No. 1 seeding in the East was all but assured before the team arrived in Florida, its intermittent focus was an understandable problem. Harder to understand was the impression that Giannis Antetokounmpo's patience was already wearing thin, as suggested by a scuffle with the Nets' Donta Hall and a head butt of Washington's Moritz Wagner. The Bucks will have to spend nearly two more months here to win the franchise's first championship since 1970 71. They haven't enjoyed themselves much so far. The Clippers' ceiling may still be the league's highest, but it's rather late and they still haven't found that peak. More than a year after the acquisitions of Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, Coach Doc Rivers still seems to be waiting to have access to his whole roster. Maybe Monday night's Game 1 win over Dallas was the first step, at last, to putting all those inviting pieces together. Even without its best James Harden defender (Luguentz Dort) for Game 1 and possibly longer, Oklahoma City has a real chance to upset Houston in the first round and continue a surge that would see the Thunder at No. 1 if we were ranking this season's overachievers. Chris Paul predictably gets much of the credit in what has been a turn back the clock season for him at age 35 and his team got a classic subjective boost here from the Committee in recognition of Paul's behind the scenes work just to make this restart happen. The Heat are not quite the title contenders that Jimmy Butler has proclaimed them to be not yet but the Committee is higher on them than most. Coach Erik Spoelstra has playmakers (Butler, Goran Dragic, Bam Adebayo), shooters (Duncan Robinson, Tyler Herro) and a variety of defenders to throw at Indiana's T.J. Warren (Butler, Andre Iguodala, Jae Crowder) enough across the board to feel good about Miami's first round series with the Pacers. No one questions Jayson Tatum's franchise player viability, and Jaylen Brown continues to impress with both his on court maturation and his off court activism. But Boston, with its well chronicled lack of dependable size, was already sweating its first round matchup with the Philadelphia 76ers before Gordon Hayward sprained his ankle Monday night, sidelining him for at least four weeks. The Celtics, who are also managing Kemba Walker's longstanding knee problem, should find a way past the Ben Simmons less Sixers, but that's the most we're prepared to promise. There were so many fit questions and so much skepticism when the Rockets acquired Russell Westbrook from Oklahoma City in July 2019. The big mystery now, amazingly, is whether Houston can survive a difficult first round series against the surprising Thunder without Westbrook, who is out indefinitely with a quadriceps injury. With its ultrasmall lineups, Houston was supposed to be the most feared wild card in the West playoffs, but it may take all of Coach Mike D'Antoni's tricks just to steer Houston into the second round amid numerous questions about D'Antoni's future. The Nets lost so many players in the weeks before coming to Florida that they had no shortage of N.B.A. Twitter cynics asking if they should have even bothered showing up to Disney World. Then they went a spunky 5 3 on the way to the playoffs, rallying around the blossoming Caris LeVert and the steady Joe Harris to beat Milwaukee (with Giannis Antetokounmpo in the lineup) and nearly eliminate a desperate Portland. They've been a great story here, even if Toronto sweeps the Nets in the first round especially LeVert and the response Jacque Vaughn is getting from this group as the interim coach. The Magic have been a curiosity for me from the moment they became the first team to arrive on the N.B.A. campus, because they had to travel only about 25 miles. Orlando's staycation, though, is surely coming to an end soon. Milwaukee has too many weapons, and the Magic's only realistic defensive counter to Giannis Antetokounmpo Jonathan Isaac tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in his second game here. Adding to Orlando's problems: Aaron Gordon is still recovering from a hamstring injury. At least a dozen reporters were at AdventHealth Arena to cover the epic Trail Blazers/Nets game that went down to the last shot and sent the Phoenix Suns home despite their 8 0 record in bubble games. One reporter me signed up to cover the last game at the Visa Athletic Center. Orlando beat New Orleans in that meaningless game, which nonetheless meant a ton to me because it was my last chance to sit in the glorious courtside seats I've been raving about. The N.B.A. will not use the arena for any playoff games. Last Wednesday, I was also the only reporter to attend the Washington Wizards' final practice before leaving the bubble. I tweeted a picture of an empty Visa main court, so invitingly peaceful, as the Wizards practiced behind an adjacent curtain. I know, I know: I am a basketball nerd in the extreme. But I miss that gym so much already. I've heard that it's hard to tell the difference between any of the venues on television, but the convenience of the seating and the interview spaces at Visa will stay with me when I leave here. A rule barring the news media from the hotels housing teams was relaxed for one night after five teams left the Yacht Club Resort they shared with the Portland Trail Blazers. The league organized a Saturday evening dinner at the Yacht Club's Ale Compass restaurant, which is widely regarded as the signature attraction of the resort. The Yacht Club, fair or not, got branded as a distinct third choice for teams behind the Gran Destino and the Grand Floridian Resort Spa, largely because hotel assignments were based on the standings in March. But the Blazers have thoroughly embraced the place. When our two buses full of reporters arrived, Portland's coaching staff was in the lobby, decompressing after a taut playoff play in victory over Memphis that secured a first round matchup with the Los Angeles Lakers. "Welcome to the Portland Yacht Club," Blazers Coach Terry Stotts said as he stood to greet me and my pal Chris Haynes from Yahoo and Turner Sports. Stotts looked quite pleased, but I think we were even happier by night's end. It was a real meal in a real restaurant albeit very socially distanced with no more than two or three of us to a table and it was scrumptious. (My main course: New York strip steak with truffle fries and a watercress salad after some nice appetizers.) After Game 1 of its series against the Lakers, Portland will move into the Grand Floridian, Disney World's flagship resort. But who would blame the Blazers for wanting to stay at the Yacht Club after it has treated them so well? Speaking purely for myself, after getting a glimpse of the Yacht Club's lobby and its old world nautical charm, I know I could quite happily stay there. The sample size remains small, but playing without fans has not adversely affected "home" teams in the bubble. They won 49 of the 88 seeding games, for a winning percentage of .556. That falls right in line with the season from October through March, when home teams went 535 436 for a winning percentage of .551. In the bubble, the "home" designation really only gives teams control of uniform choice and the various acoustical touches in the arena my colleague Scott Cacciola just wrote about. Of course, given the very wide spectrum of approaches teams used during seeding games, tracking this statistic now that the playoffs have begun will be a more worthy exercise. Zero current N.B.A. players were active in the league in 1997 98 when the San Antonio Spurs began a playoff streak that lasted 22 seasons and finally ended last week. Alvin Gentry, who was fired Saturday by the New Orleans Pelicans, was coaching the Pistons in 1997 98 and, until his New Orleans dismissal, ranked as this season's only other active coach besides the Spurs' Gregg Popovich who held an N.B.A. head coaching job when the streak started. Portland's Gary Trent Jr. has always been a player of high interest here at Stein Line HQ because I (gulp) covered his father as a Dallas Mavericks beat writer more than 20 years ago. In the bubble, Trent Jr. announced himself to the N.B.A. community at large by more than doubling his pre bubble scoring average (7.7 points per game) to 16.9 points per game during Portland's 6 2 run. There have only been 295 players listed as left handed shooters in N.B.A. history, according to Stathead. This is the league's 74th season. So many of my good southpaw stats over the past few weeks were additionally researched by the Warriors' tireless Darryl Arata. Among them was the following gem: Four of the 50 lefties in the N.B.A. this season were only 19 years old when the season began: New Orleans' Zion Williamson, Oklahoma City's Darius Bazley, Cleveland's Kevin Porter Jr. and the Knicks' RJ Barrett. All four players have turned 20 since May. Hit me up anytime on Twitter ( TheSteinLine) or Facebook ( MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram ( thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein newsletter nytimes.com.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Helen Mirren peers imperiously from inside a high collar that lends her an aura of majesty. Nicole Kidman confronts the camera, her features slightly furrowed, her muscular arms hugging the back of a chair. Charlotte Rampling does each of those A list stars one better, her pale skin and famously hooded eyes devoid of discernible makeup. Ms. Mirren (71), Ms. Kidman (49) and Ms. Rampling (70) are but three in a red carpet worthy lineup showcased in the 2017 Pirelli calendar. Also posing gamely, without apparent artifice, for the German photographer Peter Lindbergh are Kate Winslet, Uma Thurman, Robin Wright and Julianne Moore, among others, each over 40, some much older, and each apparently willing to bare not just parts of her flesh, but shades of her innermost self, too. The calendar, a collector's item that is produced annually and delivered free to a select group of high powered clients and members of the fashion elite, is the second in the company's history to subvert its decades long tradition of displaying scantily clad models in campily suggestive poses. For 2017, the calendar stepped up the game by concentrating more pointedly on age, and in the process flouting fashion's last taboo. Evidently the bias against age, long endemic to Hollywood and the fashion runways, no longer applies to style marketing campaigns. Turned loose on the project, Mr. Lindbergh, renowned for his alternately cinematic and naturalistic portraits of models and screen sirens, aimed to demonstrate that there is beauty in age and, more than that, audacity. "We see all these people today who all want to be perfect and young," he said in a phone interview from his home in Paris. "My thought was, 'Why don't we do a calendar with women ready to go without much makeup, to be as they are?' For me, beauty is someone who can say yes to herself." Mr. Lindbergh, 72, seemed an apt choice for the assignment. The task of shooting his fiercely accomplished subjects with every pore, crease and sag dramatically magnified was, he would have you believe, no more than business as usual. "I wasn't even thinking about their age," he said. "I was thinking that they all have something about them that is vulnerable and truthful at the same time." Mr. Lindbergh approached the job as a spontaneous, largely improvised adventure. "I didn't force anything," he said. "There was no urging them to smile, no promising, 'You're going to look great.' For us, the coolest thing was that they could be themselves." He warms to his subjects in conversation. "Sexy has nothing to do with skin," he said, a touch of mischief in his voice. "Nothing is more erotic than talk." One may detect a hint of vaulting ambition, not that of Mr. Lindbergh's but of Pirelli's: an aim to create, if not precisely an art object, at least, a document of its time. For sure, the calendar aims to court an older female clientele. Those women may or may not be the ones to reach into their wallets, but they are crucial nonetheless. When it comes to spending, Mr. Tronchetti Provera said, "women are the decision makers much more than men." As a marketing gambit, the calendar breaks no molds. At fairly routine intervals, fashion lifts fat people, prepubescent children, sexual outliers and now, with increasing frequency, old people to an exalted chic. Last year the luxury giant Celine raised eyebrows by introducing the octogenarian Joan Didion as the face of the brand; in its fall advertising, Dolce Gabbana prominently featured a pair of wizened nonnas. All that is to say nothing of the ubiquitous Carmen Dell'Orefice and Iris Apfel, each riveting in a multitude of campaigns. For some observers, such efforts seem a bit past their prime. "There is something about the wider trend of casting older women aimed at making middle aged and young women feel good that feels rather cynical," Sandra Howard wrote last year in a column for The Daily Mail. "This is not about gray power, but the power to shock." But to Mr. Tronchetti Provera, the choice to show older models and actresses seemed, if not quite inevitable, at least in tune with shifting times. "In an aging society, we cannot get rid of age," he said. "We have to live with it, in a positive way."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Cella Irvine, a Silicon Alley pioneer who led About.com and other new media companies in New York starting in the early 1990s, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 59. The cause was thyroid cancer, her husband, Hart Hooton, said. Ms. Irvine broke ground in a male dominated field in her corporate roles and as a founding board member and chairwoman of the nonprofit New York New Media Association. The group, which had 8,000 members at its peak, was acquired by the Software and Information Industry Association in 2003. Ms. Irvine began her quarter century career in the digital industry in the mid 1980s at Activision, a video game and educational software company. From 1989 to 1993, she ran customer relations and strategic planning for the Prodigy Services Company before joining the Hearst Corporation in 1994 as vice president and general manager of new media. At Hearst, she guided its first digital ventures, including an interactive newspaper and the marketing of CD ROMs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Jessica Brescher of Dover, N.J., who works for a pharmaceutical company, said that even though a calculator showed she would get a modest tax cut next year from the Republican tax bill, she wasn't sure what to expect. Republican congressional leaders say their tax overhaul would raise wages, accelerate economic growth and give middle class families a badly needed tax cut. They are having a hard time convincing Americans of those claims. Many polls have shown that the tax bill is highly unpopular with voters, and growing more so. And a new survey shows that a large majority expects to see no personal benefit from the legislation. According to the survey of 5,100 adults, conducted this week for The New York Times by the online polling firm SurveyMonkey, only a third of Americans think their taxes will go down in 2018 if the bill passes next week as widely expected. That is at odds not only with the Republican talking points but also with the assessment of most economists who have studied the bill. The Tax Policy Center, a research group, recently found that under the Senate version of the plan, roughly three quarters of American households would pay less in taxes next year. Last minute changes made by a House Senate conference committee could lead to a tax cut for even more Americans. The confusion probably stems in part from the complexity of the bill, which would increase the size of some tax breaks while reducing or eliminating others. And it could also reflect the unpopularity of President Trump. Cindy Kelly, an art director for a television station in Orlando, Fla., is the kind of person who might ordinarily support the tax bill. A political moderate, she said she was optimistic that a corporate tax cut could lead companies to create jobs and increase wages. And as a middle class resident of a low tax state, she would most likely come out ahead. But Ms. Kelly, 54, said she doubted that the bill would cut taxes for her or other middle class Americans. She said her skepticism stemmed from one factor: Mr. Trump. "I just can't be too happy about it over all," Ms. Kelly said. "I have such a strong distrust of the president." The SurveyMonkey poll, taken before the final tax bill was out, found that 58 percent of Americans disapproved of the bill, while only 37 percent supported it. An earlier version of the poll, conducted in November, found 52 percent disapproval. In the latest poll, only 29 percent of respondents said they felt that the plan would lead to substantially higher economic output a decade from now, and only 18 percent believed Republican assertions that the bill would not add to the federal deficit. (Even two thirds of Republicans said either that the bill would increase the deficit over the next decade or that they weren't sure.) The skepticism is shared by economists, who overwhelmingly say the bill would increase the deficit while giving only a modest boost to the economy. Perhaps most striking, however, is the skepticism about how the bill would affect taxpayers personally. Using demographic and other data provided by survey respondents, The Times estimated how likely they were to receive a tax cut. Even among people with more than a 90 percent chance of getting a cut, about half said they did not expect to get one. Jessica Brescher, who works for a pharmaceutical company, has been trying to figure out how the bill would affect her. A resident of high tax New Jersey, Ms. Brescher said she worried that Republicans' plan to repeal or reduce the deduction for state and local taxes could make her home unaffordable and force her to move. On the other hand, as the mother of twin boys, she would benefit from a planned increase in the child tax credit. In the SurveyMonkey poll, Ms. Brescher, 34, said she did not expect a tax cut under the bill. She later plugged her information into an online calculator, which told her that she could expect a modest tax cut next year. But with the bill's details changing seemingly every day, Ms. Brescher now doesn't know what to think. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. "I'm a scientist, I know numbers, but I don't know money numbers," Ms. Brescher, who holds a master's degree in epidemiology, said in a follow up interview. "I don't have the patience or really the skill set to read the tax bill for myself." Ms. Brescher's confusion is hardly surprising. Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans promised a broad based tax cut, particularly for the middle class. The emerging bill, however, is a web of complex provisions that would cut taxes for some people, raise them for others and have different effects in different years. Even families that look similar on paper could be affected differently depending on where they live and how they earn their money. "It comes down to a bunch of idiosyncratic factors," said Mark Mazur, a Treasury Department official in the Obama administration who now directs the Tax Policy Center. "You really have to parse through the details." Sentiment about the bill seems strongly colored by feelings about the president. Backing remains strong among supporters of Mr. Trump: 80 percent of them say they approve of the bill. Among those who don't approve of Mr. Trump, the figure is only 10 percent. Geoffrey Cantley, an Army recruiter in rural Virginia, said he didn't know whether he'd get a tax cut or a tax increase under the bill. But he said Mr. Trump's efforts to simplify the tax code would enable him to file without a tax preparer, saving money. And he said Mr. Trump deserved the benefit of the doubt. "I don't think he's getting a fair shake in the coverage he's getting," Mr. Cantley said. "I think the economy's doing a lot better." Republicans said this week that public doubts would fall away once the bill becomes law and tax cuts begin appearing in paychecks. They cited polls from 1986, showing that most Americans did not feel that year's tax bill would help them, either. "Whatever the polling data is that's out there today doesn't recognize just how powerful this bill is going to be to put more money in the pockets of hard working families," said Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the majority whip. Recent history suggests that view is overly optimistic. In 2004, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that fewer than one in five Americans believed they had been helped by President George W. Bush's tax cuts, which had, in fact, been designed to benefit all workers. Polls after the 2009 stimulus bill, which cut taxes across the board for workers, showed many Americans did not believe they had benefited. "Nothing in my experience suggests that the views people have about the tax cuts whether justified or not will change after they start actually being affected by them," said Jason Furman, a Harvard Kennedy School economist who advised President Obama during and after the 2009 stimulus bill. Samuel Bruce, a financial analyst in Keller, Tex., has followed the tax bill closely but still isn't sure whether he would benefit. A father of two, he would be able to claim the higher child tax credit, but as the owner of his own home and a rental property, he said the limit on property tax deductions could hurt him. Still, Mr. Bruce said he was more concerned with the broader economic impact. He said he doubted that most businesses would pass tax cuts on to workers, and he worried about how the deficit would affect his daughters, now 7 and 8, when they grow up. "Politicians are all about 'take care of today,'" Mr. Bruce said. "I'm more worried about the future, really."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Leadership changes in Hollywood almost always come when profits are scarce, though that is not the case at Warner, which is set to have one of its most profitable years ever, according to financial filings. Warner, which last month released "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" to blockbuster results, is perennially Hollywood's No. 1 or No. 2 studio based on domestic ticket sales. So far this year, Warner, with 18 percent market share, is running second to Walt Disney Studios, which has about 24 percent of the market, according to the database Box Office Mojo. But the operation formerly run by Mr. Silverman, an affable executive with a tendency to give directors a wide berth, has also delivered films of irregular quality something that did not matter so much in the past, when consumers had fewer entertainment options, but a shortcoming that is now considered unacceptable, especially as studios like Warner increasingly rely on sequels. Mr. Silverman had celebrated movies, including "Fantastic Beasts," "Mad Max: Fury Road" and "The Lego Movie." But he also oversaw numerous critical clunkers, including "Pan" and the superhero movies "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" and "Suicide Squad." While Mr. Tsujihara has been patient, in May he reduced Mr. Silverman's role in superhero film production, giving oversight instead to Jon Berg and Geoff Johns. The pipeline that Mr. Silverman leaves behind includes potential hits like "The Lego Batman Movie," "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" and "Ready Player One." His departure has been widely expected, in part because he has told colleagues for several months that he would like to flex his entrepreneurial muscles. Mr. Emmerich has had misses of his own, with this weekend's "Collateral Beauty," a modestly budgeted drama starring Will Smith, likely among them. Over all, however, his New Line has been on a roll, serving up critical and commercial hits like "The Conjuring 2," "Lights Out," "Central Intelligence" and "Creed." Mr. Emmerich was also responsible for running the big budget "Hobbit" series for Warner.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
in "Nanette." She said in an interview after her new show, "I wasn't expecting global stardom," and added, "Now I have everyone watching me." MELBOURNE, Australia In the smash hit show "Nanette" which discussed homophobia, abuse and rape the Australian comic declared she was quitting comedy. Now she's back doing, yes, stand up. In "Douglas," her new show named for her dog, which premiered at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival last week, Gadsby discussed her autism diagnosis, which she received relatively recently, and the clarity it provided. While she found out about her autism before she put together "Nanette," it was not until now that she felt ready to talk about it in front of an audience. Her return she will play more sold out shows here, then begin an American tour April 29 in San Francisco follows the controversial success of "Nanette" last year. Beginning life onstage before going viral worldwide as a Netflix special, that show set off furious arguments about the nature of comedy. "I wasn't expecting global stardom," Gadsby said in an interview on Friday. "I wasn't expecting to finish and end up big in India. Now I have everyone watching me." In Melbourne, "Douglas" drew thousands of fans who agreed to lock away their phones in a special case during the show. "I've never heard such a huge crowd so silent. She's the most courageous person," said Theresa Bonasera, 52, from Melbourne. "We're very proud of her," added another Melbourne local, Lindy Arc Dekker, 59, a retired engineer. "It's brave to make yourself so emotionally vulnerable. But I think the home crowd really took that and held her safe there." After the performance, I caught up with Gadsby, dressed in a cap, glasses and teddy bear sweater, in the Arts Center Melbourne. Humble, self deprecating and shy, she said that stand up is "a really great way for me, as somebody who has lived an incredibly isolated experience, to connect with the world." These are edited excerpts from the conversation. In "Nanette," you said you were quitting comedy. But you're back. Quitting was always a theatrical device, and I'm delighted everyone took it so seriously. It was basically to defuse the obvious criticism: "That's not comedy." But that theatrical device, as I relived trauma night after night, felt really good to say it and mean it. I think I meant it and still mean it in the sense of the strictest definition of what comedy is yeah, I've quit that. What was it like getting back onstage? I thought I was risking a lot with "Nanette." It was a lot more risky to not care about failure now that I'm at this level. That was my main driving principle writing "Douglas": I don't care if this fails. I'm going to take certain risks again. At times in "Douglas," especially in a Power Point presentation where you unpack assumptions around fine art, you looked like you were having lots of fun. The nature of "Nanette" meant I couldn't enjoy that experience. I was exhausted and every night was trauma. "Douglas" is a fun show. And it will only get more fun as I weave the thoughts more tightly. How scary was it to talk about your autism diagnosis? It was a lot of pressure. Everyone understands the coming out story now: It is part of popular culture. But women with autism is a very niche experience. I can't predict how people are going to respond. "Douglas" examines neurodiversity, portraying neurological differences, such as autism, not as "conditions" that need a cure but as human variations. Autism is overwhelming. So people see the distress of it. But often in a lot of those distresses we've been dragged out of our little thought orgies, having a great time in our heads. Nobody sees that, and I don't see that celebrated. It is different and it is not all sad. People think it's a devastating existence. And it doesn't have to be: It's not autism that makes it difficult to live with autism. It's the world we've created that is not geared in our favor. I believe strongly that in live performance you're not passive taking people's access to their phone heightens their experience. It brings them back into the room. We're all aware that there is an addiction going on. It is overwhelming having the world in your hand at all times. During "Douglas" at certain moments it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. In a room full of people, mood can spread like an infection. You can see that in broader culture too. I'm very interested in that because on the spectrum, we're not as prone to be taken by mass mood . Our less intuitive way of experiencing the world stands outside that group thinking a little bit. You live in Los Angeles now. Will you stay? I'm not going to stay in L.A. People say you've got to give it two or three years and then you really love it. I don't know if you really love it or you just become an L.A. person and I'm not sure I want to be that. It's all industry, and that hustle makes me uneasy. Hollywood is making our culture, it is driving our stories, and I don't see anything tackling homelessness and it is so in our face over there. So these people creating all our content are willfully blind to really vulnerable people. And I've been homeless. So I'm both sides in that town. "Ten Steps to Nanette" will be published later this year. How did you find the process of writing a memoir? I'd been struggling, trying to write a book for a long time but could not. I could never reconcile this almost naive part of my world and life with this other part that is quite intelligent. But once I was diagnosed, I could fully understand that they could coexist and I could celebrate two parts of that world. The book has a lot of that: It's tracking my life from extreme invisibility to extreme visibility. You have talked about a revolution in comedy. Tell me about that. There does have to be a revolution of form in order to accommodate different voices. Because stand up in the form it exists stand up punch line that's a form that was set up by men for men. It's a competitive way of communicating, and that suits them. But there is a diversity of experiences that won't fit into the format as it stands. I'm not sad if I kill comedy. I'm not sad.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Writing in Time magazine, the famous Anglican theologian N.T. Wright offered a similar conclusion: Instead of seeking explanations for our present disaster, we should "recover the biblical tradition of lament," an expression of solidarity both with our fellow humans and with God himself, who in the Old Testament grieves for his people's infidelity and in the person of Jesus weeps for Lazarus. The Christian tradition, Wright argues, doesn't require us to "explain what's happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain and to lament instead." To people experiencing the sharpest grief, contemplating the dying body and the open grave, a response of simple solidarity and lamentation is appropriate. But many people suffer more slowly and less sharply; even in this pandemic, much suffering will be doled out in slow doses as its social and economic consequences spread. Meanwhile, even people suffering the sharpest pain will eventually leave the graveside and begin life after tragedy. And in both cases suffering that endures and suffering that belongs to the past there is a need for something more than solidarity as time goes by; there is a need for narrative, for integration, for some story about what the pain and anguish meant. This need is powerful enough that even people who officially believe that the universe is godless and random will find themselves telling stories about how their own suffering played some crucial role in the pattern of their life, how some important good came from some grave evil. And it's a need that religious believers must respect and answer: We can acknowledge the mystery, with Martin and Wright, while also insisting that in their own lives people should be looking for glimpses of a pattern, for signs of what a particular trial might mean. The personal and specific element is crucial here, because the Christian tradition offers not one but many different explanations for how suffering fits into a providential plan. In some cases the miser growing old alone, the dictator consumed by paranoia the wicked may suffer as a kind of fitting, self created punishment for their sins. But then in other cases suffering may be a gift to the righteous, given because their goodness means that they can bear more of its hard medicine, its refining fire. (There is a longstanding Christian tradition that finds it more theologically perplexing when good things happen to good people than when bad things do.) Then in still other cases, suffering is bound to some purpose beyond the self. Before Jesus heals a blind man, the disciples wonder whose sin made him blind, and their master's answer is stark: "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him." There is no retreat to mystery here; the man was born blind just so that the Messiah could heal him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
It was not immediately clear what happened inside the apartment, which is in Douglas County, about 17 miles southeast of Denver, before the authorities arrived. The sheriff's office said it had no additional information as of Saturday afternoon. Mr. Latimer was taken into custody and transported to the Douglas County Detention Facility, where he was booked on charges of second degree assault, menacing, illegal discharge of a firearm, prohibited use of a weapon and reckless endangerment. He was released on a 25,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on Monday, according to Deputy Cocha Heyden, a public information officer for the sheriff's office. The Redskins did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. However, the team told NFL.com that it was "aware" of the situation and had informed the league office. "We will continue to gather more information and have no further comment at this time," the team said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, told lawmakers during a virtual Senate hearing on Tuesday that the economy would recover but that a full rebound would probably not happen quickly. Federal Reserve officials are painting a relatively bleak picture of the United States economy's path forward amid the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting that activity may take time to bounce back even as lockdowns lift and warning that second wave outbreaks could inflict serious damage on businesses and the labor market. While the Trump administration has been suggesting a more positive outlook for the United States economy, the nation's foremost economic authority its central bank has taken a much more cautious view, warning that the bounce back may be halting and that a full recovery cannot take hold until the health threat posed by the deadly virus is under control. Central bank officials met remotely April 28 and 29, and notes from the gathering released Wednesday showed that they discussed ways in which the sharp economic decline already underway could create longer lasting fallout. Among their worries: Lockdowns meant to contain the pandemic are weighing on emerging market economies, leaving United States companies more indebted, spurring consumer caution and heightening financial vulnerabilities. "Participants expressed concern that the possibility of secondary outbreaks of the virus may cause businesses for some time to be reluctant to engage in new projects, rehire workers or make new capital expenditures," according to the minutes. In discussing the outlook for the economy, Fed officials said that "the economic effects of the pandemic created an extraordinary amount of uncertainty and considerable risks." Lifting lockdown orders could allow economic activity to recover, especially if infections faded enough to make consumers comfortable, but that was seen by policymakers as an optimistic scenario. "A number" of Fed officials saw a "substantial likelihood of additional waves of outbreak" that would cause further social distancing and widespread business closures, leading to a "protracted period of severely reduced economic activity." The central bank's influential staff was even more blunt, stating that "a more pessimistic projection" involving a second outbreak "was no less plausible than the baseline forecast." Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, struck a similarly cautious tone at a virtual news conference after the April meeting, warning that the recovery could take time and pledging that monetary policymakers would do what they could to cushion the blow and get the labor market back on track. The minutes make clear that his dim assessment closely reflected his colleagues' views. Fed meeting participants worried that the labor market might suffer longer run damage if the crisis lingered and workers lost skills amid heightened unemployment, a concern that Mr. Powell repeated during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Tuesday. He warned that the economy was not likely to quickly rebound even once states ended lockdowns and that households and businesses might need more support to get through the downturn.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
The myth of Steve Jobs: iconoclastic artistic genius, Nietzschean Ubermensch, progenitor of the digital revolution who reshaped our domestic lives the same way that the titans of the Industrial Revolution reshaped cities and factories. Although dark tales about Jobs have appeared in biographies and movies, they have only burnished the legend: After all, the Ubermensch is not a mensch. But "Small Fry," an entrancing memoir by his first child, , will force readers to grapple with whether Jobs was not merely unmenschlike but a monster. It is not a stretch to say that if you read this book, you will never think of Jobs the same way again. Brennan Jobs herself never addresses the question of his legacy; her book is written from the perspective of a child longing for a father. She grew up in Palo Alto with an impoverished single mother, Jobs's high school girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, and had moved 13 times by the time she was 7 a bohemian existence so chaotic that the Humane Society rejected their application for a kitten. (Lisa had to settle for mice.) Yet all the while, just around the corner, was the increasingly famous, wealthy father who refused to parent her. At a birthday party for her younger half sister Eve, a guest asks Lisa who she is. Eve responds, "She was daddy's mistake." "You shouldn't say that," Lisa whispers in Eve's ear, reeling. It is the terrible motif of her life. For the first three years after her birth, Jobs denies paternity (and later, when she is an adult, he erases her existence again, describing himself to magazines and on his company's website as the father of only her three half siblings). Chrisann also makes her feel like a mistake, repeatedly intimating that being a single mother is too difficult for her. By kindergarten, Lisa had internalized her unwantedness and begun "to feel there was something gross and shameful about me," as if she were "wormy inside, like I'd caught whatever disease or larvae were passed through raw eggs and flour when I snuck raw cookie dough." Brennan Jobs is a deeply gifted writer. Before I read her book, I wondered if it had been ghostwritten, like many such books. But from the striking opening in which Lisa is drifting around her father's house when he is dying of cancer, snubbed by everyone and pinching trifles from different rooms to appease her sense of exclusion it is clear that this is a work of uncanny intimacy. Her inner landscape is depicted in such exquisitely granular detail that it feels as if no one else could possibly have written it. Indeed, it has that defining aspect of a literary work: the stamp of a singular sensibility. In the fallen world of kiss and tell celebrity memoirs, this may be the most beautiful, literary and devastating one ever written. Although Lisa felt loved by her mother, Chrisann was intermittently negligent and abusive. Suffering from depression, she would talk of suicide, spend whole days shut in her room and by middle school draw Lisa into hours of violent argument every night. Under pressure from Lisa's school (which threatened to call social services, Lisa later learns), Steve agrees to take her in. She is overjoyed. As a child, she had pictured herself as a princess in disguise; finally, she imagines, legitimacy will be bestowed on her and she will take her place alongside her stepmother, Laurene, and baby brother, Reed, in their "fairy tale," faux English country cottage mansion adorned by apple trees where fans cluster on the sidewalk. 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. But Lisa's role turns out to be more like Cinderella's, as neighbors who come to play fairy godparents in her life observe. (These neighbors take her in when her father expels her, and pay for her senior year at Harvard when he refuses.) Steve demands absolute fealty: He pressures Lisa to change her last name to his (she adds it with a hyphen) and insists that she not see her mother for six months. Lisa cries herself to sleep out of grief and guilt about abandoning Chrisann. She is made to wash the dishes by hand each night (Steve refuses to repair the broken dishwasher), to sleep in a chilly room (he also refuses to repair the heater) and to serve as an on call babysitter for her brother. When her father and Laurene invite her to join them at a fancy wedding in Napa, she is thrilled. She pictures it as her coming out ball, where she will "be included, in public, part of the family! The daughter, the sister." She'll need to buy nylons and pick out a dress, she thinks, in "an ecstasy of decision making." But when they get to the hotel room and she starts to change, they let her know she needn't bother: She won't be attending the ceremony. They have brought her to babysit for her brother. Her father goes to great lengths to make her feel excluded when he is with Laurene. In one of the book's most grotesque scenes, he grabs Laurene when the three of them are sitting in the garden and starts making out with her, undulating and "moaning theatrically" as he puts his hand up her skirt and Laurene opens her legs to reveal "a scythe of her white cotton underwear." (A startling metaphor: Has underwear ever been figured as a scythe before?) When Lisa gets up to leave, he forces her to stay and watch, telling her, "we're having a family moment" and "it's important that you try to be part of this family." The scene feels to her more like "a performance" than an expression of uncontrolled lust a performance Steve inflicted on her with a previous girlfriend as well. He also likes to joke by simulating sex and frequently engaging her in sexual conversation. One morning, he looks up from his newspaper to ask if she masturbates. Chrisann's own memoir, "The Bite in the Apple" (2013), describes her horror when she arrives at Steve's house to find him joking about sex between his prepubescent daughter and random boys. Lisa's face, Chrisann writes, is "blank with pain and confusion." The reader is left to wonder whether Lisa is fully aware of just how disturbing this dynamic was. In another instance that would have benefited from perspective, she recounts a moment when she is 14 and tries to be close to Steve by sitting, uneasily, on his lap, trembling with fear, excitement and a "quaking electric love," wishing they could relate like normal daughters and fathers. At one point she calls his behavior "inappropriate," but at the end of the book she assures him that he had been "good about sex." Was she trying to appease the aggressor, or does she not understand the scenes she has shown us? Desperate to win over her stepmother, Lisa fawns over Laurene, hoping her "servile quality would ignite compassion, pity or love" and she would become "the long lost daughter they might want." She comes to the painful realization that Laurene whom she perceived as her "last resort" would not "inhabit the role I'd assigned her, that she was not here to fix my father for me." Lisa's memoir stands in marked contrast to previous representations of Steve and the Jobs family. Laurene, Lisa's half siblings and her aunt the novelist Mona Simpson have said in a statement to The Times that the book "differs dramatically from our memories of those times," and "the portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew." Readers will need to decide for themselves how to judge conflicting accounts. The portrait of Laurene as a stepmother certainly diverges from her public reputation as a philanthropist and devoted mother. "Steve Jobs," Walter Isaacson's best selling authorized biography, lionizes Jobs and depicts Laurene and her children in glowing terms, while painting Lisa in a largely unflattering light. Learning Lisa's perspective for the first time, and being confronted with instance after instance of her father's sadism, readers may find themselves reeling, thinking: What is wrong with this man? Read our profile of here As a writer, however, she chooses not to speculate on the nature of her father's pathology, but instead focuses on her childhood experience trying to understand why gestures of nurturing, approval or warmth are inevitably followed by acts of aggression, cruelty and humiliation. At a resort in Hawaii, she watches with horror as Steve taunts a parrot, holding forth a bread crumb only to snatch it away when the bird reaches for it. The bird does not, cannot, learn: Again and again, it reaches. Occasionally, her father tosses her a crumb. Lisa captures her father's mystique, the frisson she felt from seeing his picture in magazines, the effect of dropping his name and the way he created the impression that knowing him was a privilege albeit a dangerous one. She recalls the way he would pull up to her mother's small house in his black Porsche convertible, "thickening the air with excitement," and take her roller skating around the neighborhood. Sometimes he would force her to ride on his shoulders; he would lurch, terrifyingly, and they would both fall an apt metaphor for the relationship. He would tell Chrisann, "You know she's more than half me," and Chrisann would tell Lisa that her father had "fallen in love" with her again. Then he would disappear. Children inhabit the world more sensually than adults, but the memories of how things looked and smelled and sounded fade, and childhood memoirs often suffer from a deficit of such details. Brennan Jobs details scenes as richly as a prose poem, conjuring the way rare moments of connection with her father transformed the landscape. One weekend morning as they took a walk, he expounded on his belief that the two of them were West Coast people. East Coast people, he said, were phonies and lacked "the quality of holy surrender we had because of these fragrant hills that smelled of pepper and eucalyptus, all this watery sunlight." Torn between her parents' worlds, Lisa "bobbed between different ideas of myself," but at such times she felt she was her "father's confidante, the one like him, true like jeans, the Stanford hills, Bob Dylan." It is the longing of every person to see her parents as people, for their parents to step out of their roles and reveal their true, baffling selves, like the couple Woody Allen stops on the street in "Annie Hall" who explain the success of their relationship: "I'm very shallow and empty"; "And I'm exactly the same way!" In one of the climactic scenes in "Small Fry," precisely this kind of moment occurs. When Lisa is in high school, she persuades Steve and Laurene to accompany her to her psychiatrist for a meeting, where she confesses: "I'm feeling terribly alone." Then she bursts into tears, which she hoped "would soften them." Laurene finally breaks the silence. "We're just cold people," she announces. Lisa is stunned. Laurene had said it "dryly, like a clarification." Lisa had imagined that she "could shame them for being cold and absent. Now I was the one who was ashamed, for ignoring the simple truth. How obvious it was they were just cold people!" Yet, on Steve's deathbed, the moment she has been waiting for all her life finally arrives. He asks her to visit on a weekend when her stepmother and siblings are away, and tells her he regretted the father he had been. "I want to say something: You were not to blame," he tells her, sobbing. "I wish I could go back." The apology feels like "cool water on a burn." But when Laurene returns and Lisa tries to tell her about it how momentous it felt Laurene's response is curt: "I don't believe in deathbed revelations." We all have our own myth of Steve Jobs: surges of love, gratitude or awe for the man who gave us the tools we use to express ourselves. At his memorial service, and in the years that followed, strangers would burden Lisa with their Jobs legends people she had never met praising her father, "asserting a claim" that Steve was "like a father" to them. She knows they want her to "confirm him as the ur father. His great greatness." Bearing his last name, yet forced to live under the crushing reality of his emotional deficits, Lisa was, in some sense, uniquely deprived of the myth. But after Steve dies, Chrisann insists that she can sense his spirit, telling Lisa that he's following her around and he's overjoyed to be with her: "He wants to be with you so much he's padding around behind you ... he's delighted just watching you butter a piece of toast." "I didn't believe it," Lisa writes in the book's perfect last line, "but I liked thinking it anyway." The ultimate question for all of us is what image of our father we carry forward: our own ur father, the internalized figure we choose to keep. Having sifted through the complex reality of her experiences, Lisa is finally free to claim her own myth: the fantasy of the father she longed for that allowed her to survive the father she had.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Bride Is Walked Down Aisle by the Man Who Got Her Father's Donated Heart It's a bittersweet wedding story a decade in the making: Nearly 10 years after Jeni Stepien's father was killed, the man who received her father's donated heart traveled from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to walk her down the aisle. "The murder and the wedding happened within a three block radius" in the town of Swissvale, Pa., Ms. Stepien, an elementary schoolteacher, said in an interview on Monday, as she was about to board a plane for her honeymoon. "And I was just thinking, 'My dad is here with us, and this man is here with us because of us.' " This story began in September 2006, when her father, Michael Stepien, was walking home from his job as head chef at a restaurant. Mr. Stepien, 53, was cutting through an alley when he was robbed at gunpoint by a 16 year old, who shot him in the head at close range, she said. Leslie L. Brown was convicted of second degree murder in the killing and is serving 40 years to life in prison, according to news reports. As her father lay dying at a hospital, Ms. Stepien said, her family "decided to accept the inevitable" and donated his organs through an organization called the Center for Organ Recovery and Education. The organization allows donor families and the recipients to keep in touch with one another after the transplant. Mr. Stepien's heart went to Arthur Thomas, a father of four who lives in Lawrenceville, N.J., and who Ms. Stepien said had been within days of dying. Given a diagnosis of ventricular tachycardia about 16 years before receiving the transplant, Mr. Thomas, 72, said in an interview on Monday that he was in congestive heart failure when word arrived that his doctors had found a heart. "In order to get to the top of the transplant list, you have to be really hurting," Mr. Thomas said. "Once I had my transplant, I, of course, decided I would write a thank you to the family." From there, a relationship was forged through monthly phone calls, emails and letters. Ms. Stepien's mother, Bernice, kept in touch with Mr. Thomas, even swapping cards on Christmas and flowers on birthdays. At times, they compared parenting tips. But the families had not thought about meeting in person until Jeni Stepien, 33, became engaged to Paul Maenner, a 34 year old engineer, in October. "One of my first thoughts in that following week was, 'Who will walk me down the aisle?' " Ms. Stepien said. "I was thinking, 'Oh, my gosh, it would be so incredible to have a physical piece of my father there.' " At her fiance's suggestion, Ms. Stepien wrote Mr. Thomas, whom the family calls Tom, asking him to walk her down the aisle. Mr. Thomas said yes, but only after running the proposition by his 30 year old daughter, Jackie, he said. "She said, 'I think it's a wonderful idea,' " Mr. Thomas said of his daughter, who also recommended that he start practicing walking down the aisle. (He said he practiced once before the wedding.) Mr. Thomas, a retired college adviser who formerly worked at a boarding school in Lawrenceville, warned Ms. Stepien that his emotions might get the best of him. Ms. Stepien said she felt the same, and told him, "I'll be right there with you." The wedding took place on Saturday in the church in Swissvale where Ms. Stepien's parents were married. Mr. Thomas and the bride formally met one day earlier, when he suggested she grip his wrist, where his pulse is strongest.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
People with Covid 19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, are most infectious about two days before symptoms begin and for five days afterward, according to a new analysis of previous research. A few patients who are extremely ill or have impaired immune systems may expel or "shed" the virus for as long as 20 days, other studies have suggested. Even in mild cases, some patients may shed live virus for about a week, the new analysis found. The accumulating data presents a quandary: Should public health officials shorten the recommended isolation time if it means more infected people will cooperate? Or should officials opt for longer periods in order to prevent transmission in virtually all cases, even if doing so takes a harsher toll on the economy? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that infected people isolate for a minimum of 10 days from the beginning of their illness. The agency is considering shortening the recommended isolation period and may issue new guidelines as early as next week, according to two federal officials with knowledge of the discussions. In September, France dropped its required period of isolation to seven days from 14 days, and Germany is considering shortening it to five days. (Isolation refers to people who are ill; quarantine refers to people who have been exposed to the virus and may become ill.) Setting the isolation period at five days is likely to be much more palatable and may encourage more infected people to comply, said Dr. Muge Cevik, an infectious disease expert at the University of St Andrews in Scotland who led the new analysis, published in the journal The Lancet Microbe. A recent survey in the United Kingdom showed that only one in five people were able to isolate for 10 days after developing symptoms. "Even if we do more testing, if we can't ensure people self isolate, I don't think we'll be able to control the spread," Dr. Cevik said. In the United States, many people don't get tested for the infection until a day or two after they begin to feel ill. With the current delays, many receive results two or three days later, toward the end of the period during which they are infectious. "Even if you were to get the P.C.R. test right on the very first day that you could, by the time you get the results back, 90 percent of your shedding has been completed," said Dr. Michael Mina, a virologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "This meta analysis shows just how short your transmission window is." Dr. Cevik and her colleagues set out to analyze the so called kinetics of the coronavirus over the course of an infection, and to compare the pathogen to the closely related SARS and MERS viruses. The researchers considered nearly 1,500 studies published from 2003 to June 2020 on the timing of infection in thousands of people, most of whom were sick enough to be hospitalized. The team drew data from 79 studies of the new coronavirus, 11 studies of MERS and eight studies of SARS. People who never develop symptoms seem to carry about the same amount of the new coronavirus as symptomatic patients, Dr. Cevik and her colleagues found. But asymptomatic people seem to clear the virus more quickly from their bodies. People with Covid 19 usually are most infectious a day or two before the onset of symptoms until about five days after, the analysis concluded. Yet patients may carry genetic fragments from the virus in their noses and throats for an average of 17 days, and, in some cases, for up to three months. A few patients may carry infectious virus in their lungs as opposed to the nose and throat for as long as eight days after symptoms begin, noted Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University. For these patients, at least, isolation periods should probably be longer than five days, if only they could be identified. "The trouble is, who has Covid pneumonia versus who doesn't is not always fully apparent just based on physical exam," she said. "They wouldn't know it on their own." Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Older people tend to be infectious for longer than younger people, but no study in the analysis detected live virus beyond nine days of symptom onset. The results suggest that positive tests after that point find only genetic fragments, rather than whole live virus, Dr. Cevik said. Because the infectious period seems to peak relatively quickly in the course of the illness, health care workers at community clinics may be at higher risk of becoming infected than those working in I.C.U. units, where patients tend to be in the later stages, Dr. Cevik added. The analysis underscores data that has accumulated since March. In July, based on similar evidence, the C.D.C. truncated its recommendation for isolation to 10 days from 14 days. But even at 10 days, the isolation period may be too long for many people, experts said. Patients may be financially unable to isolate for so long, or they may not feel sick enough to want to do so. "If you could make that shorter for people, I think that would really help people comply with the public health guidelines," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist affiliated with the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, referring to the recommended isolation period. But the new analysis is limited by the fact that only a few of the included studies looked at live virus, she added. Some people who are older or very sick may be infectious for longer than a week. But if a shorter recommended period encourages more people to isolate, the benefit will more than offset any risk to the community from the small amount of virus that a few patients may still carry after five days, said Dr. Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. But some doctors said that they were not convinced by the analysis that five days of isolation would prevent transmission from a majority of people. "There's a sweet spot there, I would imagine, but I haven't figured out where that is," said Dr. Taison Bell, a critical care and infectious disease physician at the University of Virginia. Dr. Cevik and other experts suggest that people can isolate as soon as they experience even mild symptoms, such as a sore throat or head and body aches without venturing out for a P.C.R. test right when they are most infectious. But Dr. Bell said he was unsure how this would work in practice, because these early symptoms were similar to those from other viral infections, including the common cold. Dr. Cevik said a P.C.R. test could be performed after isolation ended to confirm the diagnosis. Alternately, it may make sense to take a rapid antigen test which can detect high amounts of virus while isolating, so as to confirm an active coronavirus infection. Other experts also endorsed the use of at home rapid tests. "I think that's a lovely solution," Dr. Ranney said. "If you have symptoms, and you have a reliable test that you can do at home, stay home, test at home and isolate for five days." Over all, the new analysis underscores how quickly the coronavirus blooms in the body and the speed with which both patients and doctors must respond to keep it contained, Dr. Baral said. Levels of the MERS virus peak at seven to 10 days from symptom onset, and those of the SARS virus peak at Days 10 to 14. By contrast, the new coronavirus "moves quick," Dr. Baral said. "It's a very difficult virus to control, as compared to SARS." Home isolation is safe for most of those newly infected with the coronavirus, he added essentially the model of care that doctors use for patients suspected of having influenza. Some countries already have adopted policies to make it easier for people to isolate. Vietnam provides income support to people who need to take time off work. Until May, the Japanese government asked patients who were young and had mild symptoms to stay home for four days before seeking testing. Japan's guidelines now ask patients to consult by phone with their doctors and to seek testing only if they seem likely to be infected. Anyone who tests positive is admitted to a hospital or a hotel to isolate. In the United States, New York City and Vermont have made similar accommodations available to infected patients. Even if the rest of the country doesn't implement such policies, having patients isolate at home while wearing a mask, keeping windows open, cleaning high touch surfaces and staying far from other household members is more feasible for five days than for 10, Dr. Baral said. "I do think there's an element of diminishing returns with those last four or five days," he said. "An intense amount of isolation during that first five to seven days would avert a ton of infections a ton."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
When the Republican National Convention begins in Cleveland on Monday, The Washington Post will be there at Quicken Loans Arena. So will Politico, The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. Ditto The Des Moines Register. These news organizations are among the dozen or so that Donald J. Trump has barred in the last year from his rallies and events. Mr. Trump, who has antagonized the news media and restricted access throughout his campaign, does not control the credentialing for the convention. That job is left to the Congressional Press Galleries. As a result, some news organizations will enjoy official entry to a Trump led event for the first time in months. "It's easier we don't have to worry about using guest passes or potentially getting thrown out," said John Stanton, the Washington bureau chief for BuzzFeed News. "This is how it's supposed to be." It could very well be a smooth operation for the news organizations on Mr. Trump's bad side. But the convention, which concludes on Thursday, is also a chance to see how much the rest of the Republican Party embraces Mr. Trump's battle with the media. "Accredited outlets applied and received credentials based on capacity from the gallery," said Audrey Scagnelli, the national press secretary for the convention. "If an accredited outlet applies for credentials through the House and Senate galleries and receives a credential, then they are able to cover the convention with that credential." Other candidates have fought the news media before, and during this campaign Hillary Clinton has also attracted criticism for her treatment of the press. But none have been as openly antagonistic as Mr. Trump. In the year since he declared himself a candidate for president, he has vowed to "open up" the country's libel laws. He has called out and insulted individual reporters on Twitter. During speeches, he has referred to political reporters as "horrible people" and "dishonest slime." His campaign staff has also ejected journalists from events. In March, his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was charged with battery after he was accused of grabbing a reporter for Breitbart News. (The charge was later dropped, and Mr. Lewandowski now works for CNN as an analyst.) The crowds at Mr. Trump's appearances often jeer the media, and some journalists who have written critical articles about Mr. Trump have said that they were harassed online by people who professed to support him. Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Senator John McCain during his presidential campaign in 2008, said all campaigns were adversarial to the news media at some point. "Fighting the press is always an ancillary activity you do it defensively, you do it prophylactically," said Mr. Schmidt, who lashed out at journalists during the 2008 convention for their coverage of Mr. McCain's running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. "What Trump has done that's different is he has made the media part of the campaign." Somewhat paradoxically, Mr. Trump is also remarkably accessible to the media. He grants numerous interviews and calls in to cable news networks. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Many news organizations that Mr. Trump has blackballed said they had no difficulty obtaining credentials for the convention. "We have not encountered any problems with the convention," said Sam Stein, senior politics editor for The Huffington Post. Susan B. Glasser, Politico's editor, said her news outlet easily secured credentials, but noted with a touch of annoyance that it had been assigned lodging about an hour away from Cleveland. "Our hotels are in Akron, Ohio, which is not the same city as Cleveland," she said. "But I have a sense that that's true for a lot of people." Many outlets have worked around Mr. Trump's ban by obtaining tickets for his events and rallies. Mr. Stein, for instance, said he sat at the far back of a Trump rally in New Hampshire shortly before the primary, with only his phone and a few pieces of paper in his back pocket. But attending Trump events as a member of the public has its downsides. Mr. Stanton of BuzzFeed said there were so many people waiting in line for an event in Houston that he did not get in even though he had arrived more than three hours early. News organizations on Mr. Trump's blacklist are planning to cover the convention largely as business as usual. Gawker, which said it had been denied credentials in the past, is sending four people to the convention. Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has waged a personal vendetta against Gawker Media and financially supported legal action against the media company, is scheduled to speak at the convention. The Huffington Post which is sending roughly 40 people, many by bus from Washington plans to live stream parts of the convention. BuzzFeed is holding a party called Red, White Blacklisted at a bar on Tuesday night.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
SAN FRANCISCO Uber has reported record losses and slowing growth over the past few months. Its stock has tanked. Investors have called it a "horror show." On Monday, the ride hailing company responded with financial results that exceeded what Wall Street had anticipated. While Uber is still losing large amounts of money, it did not bleed as much cash as it did in the previous quarter, and its revenue growth rate improved. Uber said third quarter revenue had risen 30 percent from a year earlier, to 3.8 billion, above Wall Street estimates of 3.6 billion. It posted a net loss of 1.2 billion, wider than the 986 million loss a year earlier but less than the 5.2 billion loss in the previous quarter. Yet Uber's stock fell more than 5 percent in after hours trading because the number of new customers coming to the app and overall bookings which are rides and food deliveries before the company pays commissions were weaker than some Wall Street analysts had expected. "Our results this quarter decisively demonstrate the growing profitability of our Rides segment," Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive, said in a statement. In a conference call with reporters on Monday, he added that Uber would reach profitability if it excluded various costs in 2021. Uber continues to face significant challenges as investors become more skeptical of money burning technology companies. WeWork, the office leasing company, recently scuttled its initial public offering after investors questioned the economics of its business. Last week, Lyft, Uber's ride hailing rival in North America, also emphasized profits. The company said that if it excluded different sorts of costs, it would be profitable in late 2021. Since Uber went public in May, Mr. Khosrowshahi has embarked on a belt tightening campaign, laying off more than 1,000 workers and cutting other costs. Uber has also introduced services for temporary hiring and financial products for drivers and has acquired a majority stake in a grocery delivery start up, Cornershop. "We are going to be driving discipline across the company," Mr. Khosrowshahi said on Monday. Dan Ives, a managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, said investors were insisting that Uber demonstrate "a clearer path to profitability, strategic initiatives to gain share in the U.S. and give investors confidence that Dara is the pilot on the plane to steer through a myriad of challenges ahead." Uber said it had 103 million consumers a month in the third quarter, up 26 percent from a year earlier. It provided 1.7 billion rides and food deliveries, up 31 percent from the same period. Growth was affected by the heavy discounts that Uber continues to provide for shared rides, Mr. Khosrowshahi said. The company provided more details on each of its businesses on Monday, breaking out its revenues from rides, food delivery, bike and scooter rentals, freight shipment and autonomous vehicles for the first time. Previously, Uber reported the figures from rides and food delivery as a lump sum. The change is "a step in the right direction from a transparency perspective," Mr. Ives said. Investor skepticism about unprofitable companies could work in Uber's favor, Mr. Khosrowshahi argued, especially as its food delivery competitors, many of which are still private companies, continue to burn cash by subsidizing deliveries. "Many of the start ups in the food delivery category have been trying to use cheap capital to buy their way to growth, but we have seen that capital is getting more expensive and can run dry," Mr. Khosrowshahi said during an earnings call. "Platform leadership is both far cheaper and more permanent." Nelson Chai, Uber's chief financial officer, said the company was willing to leave markets where food delivery competition had grown unsustainable. In September, Uber pulled out of delivering food in South Korea. The pressure on Uber's stock is not likely to end soon. On Wednesday, the so called lockup period on insider sales of its shares will expire. That means Uber's employees and early investors will be able to sell their company stock. If many employees and insiders rush to sell at once, that could cause Uber's share price to decline further.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The biggest Silicon Valley initial public offering in years turned out to be less lofty than expected. Uber priced its public offering on Thursday at 45 a share, near the bottom of its expected price range, valuing the ride hailing company at about 82.4 billion. It raised 8.1 billion from the I.P.O. While the event solidifies Uber's position as the biggest American technology company of its generation to go public, it will be a disappointment to the investors, executives and cheerleaders who had bigger dreams for it. And it raises questions about whether other money losing Silicon Valley start ups poised to list their shares should worry about receiving a cool reception. The ride hailing behemoth which will start trading its shares on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday under the symbol UBER will nonetheless have a market capitalization at its I.P.O. that trails only that of Alibaba, the Chinese e commerce company, which went public in 2014 at 168 billion, and of Facebook, which was at 104 billion when it went public in 2012. Its 82.4 billion valuation, which factors in stock options and restricted stock grants, is above its last private fund raising valuation of 76 billion, from August. But it is below the 100 billion that Uber forecast to some investors this year and well below the 120 billion that some of its bankers floated last year. Its lead underwriters at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America acted cautiously in pricing the I.P.O., said people briefed on the decision who were not authorized to speak publicly. Among their concerns: stock market turmoil driven by worries that the Trump administration's trade war with China will continue, and concern about the financial performance at a rival, Lyft. Lyft went public in March, but its shares quickly fell; this week, the company posted a 1.14 billion loss for its first quarter. There have also been questions from investors about Uber's business model. The company faces significant competition in its ride hailing and food delivery businesses, and price wars with an array of competitors in each market are expected to continue. It lost 1.1 billion in the first three months of this year alone, even as its revenue grows. Uber is also the first hotly anticipated tech offering in years to price near the bottom of its expected price range. Facebook, Twitter and Snap all priced well above expectations. But prospective investors in Uber's I.P.O. showed huge interest near the bottom of the range, the people briefed on the matter said. The underwriters hope that by pricing the stock offering conservatively, shares will enjoy a healthy first day gain known in Wall Street lingo as a "pop." Chief on the bankers' minds was avoiding the fate of Lyft, whose shares at Thursday's close were 23 percent below their I.P.O. price. In its pitch to investors in recent weeks, Uber took pains to set itself apart from Lyft and to talk about how it was expanding beyond ride hailing. Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive, compared his company to Amazon, which evolved from selling books to selling a variety of goods and services. Uber has played up its forays into food delivery, freight shipments, and short term rentals of electronic bikes and scooters to demonstrate that it can transport anything. "Ultimately, Amazon was selling everything. Uber is trying to move everything," said Shawn Carolan, a venture capitalist at Menlo Ventures, which led a 32 million investment in Uber in 2011.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
When I first fell in love with "West Side Story," as a teenager, I tried to find as many cast recordings as I could. The Broadway original was energetic and earnest; the film soundtrack was lush and familiar. But what a shock it was to find that the worst album out there was the one conducted by Leonard Bernstein himself. I'm talking, of course, of the famously miscast 1984 Deutsche Grammophon recording starring the tenor Jose Carreras as Tony with an ironically thick Spanish accent and Kiri Te Kanawa as Maria. This operatic interpretation placed vocal beauty above all else, stripping the musical of its theatrical spirit and leaving me cold. In mid June, I heard the Pops play "West Side Story" in concert at Symphony Hall in Boston. Thankfully, its Tony and Maria were Broadway actors; Ross Lekites was on loan from "Frozen," and Ali Ewoldt is currently playing Christine Daae in "The Phantom of the Opera." But the staging 90 minutes with only occasional dialogue and choreography made for an awkward evening that didn't do justice to the theatricality or musicality of the show. Operas fare well in concert performances because the drama and music are so intertwined. Musical theater is by nature a team effort, and "West Side Story" had one of the ultimate dream teams: music by Bernstein, choreography by Jerome Robbins, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Arthur Laurents. Each component is essential to storytelling, and actors must be nimble enough to perform all of them equally. Not so in the Pops staging. Gone was most of the dialogue and the Robbins choreography which, along with costumes, the Pops didn't have permission to use, even though Robbins's movement has the narrative power of story ballet. ("One Hand, One Heart," stripped of context, looked like a literal wedding.) So the performers, left with only the songs, acted unevenly, often with strain. Mr. Lekites was spot on as a naive and hopeful Tony, and Natalie Cortez brought the same griping energy to her Anita as she did when she sang the role on Broadway. But others seemed lost in their interpretations, like high school students reading a play aloud in English class. They didn't receive much help from the orchestra, which similarly struggled to present a unified front. Solo brass blazed with clarity in Bernstein's big band passages, but to the detriment of the whole ensemble's balance in unwieldy scenes like the dance at the gym. But where the Pops's "West Side Story" went wrong, its "On the Town" succeeded. This musical, performed on July 7 at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass., received an all but full staging directed and choreographed by the Tony Award winner Kathleen Marshall, and conducted by Mr. Lockhart. Where "West Side Story" felt perfunctory, this had all the youthful exuberance and dazzle of Bernstein's early, at times daring collaboration with Robbins and the legendary duo Betty Comden and Adolph Green. "On the Town" features some of Bernstein's best earworms, like "Lonely Town," "Ya Got Me" and, of course, "New York, New York." But the score is rich at every turn, blending the rigor of symphonic music with Broadway idioms and vernacular of Latin American style and jazz. The orchestra handled this deftly, animated and evocative in orchestral passages like the "Lonely Town Pas de Deux" and the second act dream ballet, but humbly in the background as it accompanied the actors. The Pops couldn't ask for better casting, including Brandon Victor Dixon, fresh off his star making turn in "Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert" on NBC, as Gabey; Georgina Pazcoguin of New York City Ballet as Ivy, a role she played on Broadway; and the great Andrea Martin as a host of scene stealing characters. As opposed to the "West Side Story" actors, marooned with no book, these performers were gifted with a complete and coherent concert narration written by Comden and Green. But how many ensembles have the kind of resources the Pops put into this wonderful "On the Town"? It pushed the limits of a concert staging as far as they could go before becoming a full production, more like an Encores! concert than a night at the symphony. Bernstein's centennial has led to re examining his diverse output beyond Broadway. The New York Philharmonic performed a revelatory cycle of his symphonies last fall; his borderline 12 tone score for Robbins's "Dybbuk" was a highlight of City Ballet's spring season; and a new recording of "A Quiet Place," with a reduced orchestration and truncated libretto, makes a compelling case in favor of Bernstein's often disliked final opera. (It comes to Tanglewood in August.) These may not sell tickets like "West Side Story," but they are just as deserving of real estate in concert halls.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
In the new series "The Alienist," Daniel Bruhl (right) plays a prickly psychologist in 1896 New York who, along with the cohorts Luke Evans (left) and Dakota Fanning (center), track a serial killer who preys on boy prostitutes. In "The Alienist," the 1994 best selling historical thriller by Caleb Carr, a group of unlikely sleuths kept a running tally of a serial killer's known traits, the better to get inside his head to stop him. If one were to itemize the distinguishing characteristics of the novel itself, the list might include gruesomely macabre, intellectually ambitious and historically vivid. Not to mention totally unfilmable. A heady thrill ride with rich characters and an atmospheric Gilded Age New York setting, "The Alienist" begged for a Hollywood adaptation, and movie rights were sold for half a million dollars before the book was even published. But the intricate mystery proved too dense to distill into a satisfying film, though that didn't stop producers from trying. "It's been 25 years of battling against really bad interpretations of this book," Mr. Carr said. But on Jan. 22, "The Alienist" finally comes to screens on TNT, because of a fortuitous convergence of factors: a resurrected television studio looking to mine its rights library; a cable channel angling for more prestige; and an emerging program format the limited series that accommodates both ambitious, season long narratives and actors who wouldn't sign on for television's usual multiyear commitments. The 10 episode season will present, from start to finish, the book's story of Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a brilliant, prickly psychiatrist or alienist, in the parlance of the day and his team of cohorts tracking a killer who preys on boy prostitutes in the vice ridden city. The German actor Daniel Bruhl ("Rush") stars as the titular doctor, with Dakota Fanning ("American Pastoral") and Luke Evans ("Beauty and the Beast") rounding out the leads. Mr. Carr said the past film attempts failed because producers like Scott Rudin sought to turn his layered psychological tale into a more conventionally formatted blockbuster, proposing to cut characters, add a love story and otherwise abandon the main focus on the team tracking the murderer. "If you don't get what the central dynamic of a book is, you're not going to be able to make a good movie out of it," Mr. Carr said. ("I wish him well with the show," Mr. Rudin emailed in response.) For all his exasperation, Mr. Carr remained eager for an adaptation "that enough resembled the book that I didn't have to fight that battle anymore," so he could move forward with the next chapter of the saga. He is now working on the third book in the series, "The Alienist at Armageddon," slated to arrive in September. (The second, "The Angel of Darkness," came out in 1997.) That pessimism lifted after the television arm of Paramount, which held the movie rights, was revived in 2013. "The Alienist" was "literally the first book I took off the shelf," said Amy Powell, the studio's president. For TNT, still best known for procedurals and ampersands "Rizzoli Isles," "Franklin Bash," "Law Order" reruns "The Alienist" heralds a new focus on shows "that engage people more, that have a stronger, deeper pull on them," said Sarah Aubrey, TNT's executive vice president for original programming. In the past few years, the network has forged a new path under the president Kevin Reilly, with more provocative series like "Animal Kingdom" and "Claws." But "The Alienist" represents its biggest swing yet. Set mostly in 1896, the series was shot in Budapest on an elaborate ersatz fin de siecle Manhattan set that was designed to allow 360 degree movement of the cameras and actors, where designers obsessed over not just cobblestone streets, costumes and gas lamps but also pocket watches, hairpins and shop windows. "Every detail matters," said Jakob Verbruggen ("The Fall"), a director and executive producer of the series. "We could only sell this world if we made it 100 percent believable." Such historical specificity was a big part of what captivated readers of "The Alienist," which unfolds in a grimy New York teeming with beleaguered immigrants, sordid brothels, crooked cops and uptown oligarchs, and included real world figures like Theodore Roosevelt, then a police commissioner, and the financier J.P. Morgan. The philosophical question at its dark heart is evil born or bred? is debated throughout by the agreeably ragtag group pursuing the killer, which in addition to the alienist includes a crime reporter for The New York Times; a police secretary who was the department's first female employee; and two quirky detective brothers. Their innovative tactics include what we now recognize as criminal profiling, fingerprinting and forensic science. Though the series is faithful to the team dynamic that animates the novel, there are differences. The killer's perspective, absent from the book, is introduced early in the series. The reporter character, played by Mr. Evans, is now an illustrator. Sara Howard, the secretary played by Ms. Fanning, has been broadened into a fuller portrait of a young woman trying to be tough enough to thrive in a man's world without losing her femininity and sexuality, Ms. Fanning said. Ms. Powell said, "When people see it, I think it will be even more relevant than we thought it was when we were working on it." Additional modern resonance can be found in the book's story of forgotten refugees seeking better lives in a new country and in the economic chasm between its impoverished New Yorkers and privileged ones. "You can parallel it almost perfectly to certain societies we know today," Mr. Evans said. "It's very topical, and I think people will talk about it a lot and make the comparisons." But what does the toughest critic of all say about "The Alienist"? Mr. Carr sounded annoyed that his being named a consulting producer meant little in practice. "My contribution was neither sought or when it was volunteered, paid attention to," he said. But he had no complaints that the project's original main creative force, Cary Fukunaga ("Beasts of No Nation," "True Detective"), left "The Alienist" before filming started. His take on the story was too salacious and "nearly completely mistaken," Mr. Carr said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
SACRAMENTO Angered by increases in tuition and cuts in state financing, thousands of students, parents and faculty members protested across California on Thursday at colleges, universities and even elementary schools to plead for help with the state's education crisis. Called a "strike and day of action to defend public education" by organizers, the demonstrations were boisterous and occasionally confrontational campus and building entrances were blocked at several schools but they were largely peaceful for most of the day. Late Thursday afternoon, however, more than 150 people were arrested after they stopped traffic along an interstate in Oakland, according to the California Highway Patrol. There was also one injury. Protesters in Davis, outside Sacramento, also tried to block an interstate but were rebuffed by the authorities using pepper spray. One student protester was arrested. Scattered tuition protests occurred in other states, too, with at least 16 people arrested at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, when protesters tried to force their way into administration offices and threw ice chunks at campus officers, according to a university spokesman. One of the largest demonstrations in California took place here on the north steps of the Capitol, where more than 1,000 people used drums, bullhorns, and scores of young voices to try to get their message across. "How are we going to save the future if we can't even get into our classes?" said Reid E. Milburn, the president of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, referring to tuition increases and reductions in the number of courses. Her comments drew a large cheer from those in the crowd, many them students avoiding classes in a show of protest. California's public education system has been racked by spending cuts because of the state's financial problems, which include a looming 20 billion budget deficit. Layoffs and furloughs have hit many districts and school systems, along with reductions in course offerings and grants. On Wednesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican in his last year of office, said the layoffs and reductions in courses carried out by some schools in the state were "terrible." The bottom line, he said, was that "they need much more money." Where that money might come from is unclear. Alberto Torrico, the Democratic majority leader in the State Assembly, has proposed a 12.5 percent tax on the state's oil producers, which he says could raise 2 billion for higher education. But with any new tax in California requiring a two thirds majority in the Legislature, its prospects are uncertain. Protesters held up a scroll of legislators who graduated from the state university system. Educators said the 23 campus California State University system which has more than 425,000 students and lower fees than the 10 campus University of California system was being hit particularly hard by cutbacks. Julie Chisholm, an assistant professor of writing at one Cal State institution, the California Maritime Academy, in Vallejo, was struggling with 1 year old twins at the Sacramento protest. She said that her 60,000 salary had been cut 10 percent by furloughs, but that she had chosen to take her furloughs on nonteaching days to avoid inconveniencing her students. "Our students are getting hit, too, with higher tuition," she said. In Santa Cruz, the surfing town south of San Francisco, protesters effectively shut down access to the University of California campus there by blocking entrances, according to a message posted on the university's Web site. Protesters also broke at least one windshield and intimidated visitors, the message said. Santa Cruz and several other University of California campuses were the sites of demonstrations last fall when the State Board of Regents approved a 32 percent increase in undergraduate fees, the equivalent of tuition. Several hundred students also protested at Bruin Plaza at the University of California, Los Angeles, where people in one group had painted skulls on their faces. And at the university's Berkeley campus, Rafael Velazquez, 23, a graduate student in the school of education, who plans to be a public high school teacher, was one of hundreds protesting. About 100 protesters blocked Sather Gate, a central pedestrian walkway on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, on Thursday as part of a statewide protest against education budget cuts. "I plan to be a teacher, but it's not my job prospects I'm worried about," said Mr. Velazquez, who has a brother in fifth grade in San Lorenzo. "It's the whole system." The cuts are also being felt in economically depressed areas like Richmond, near San Francisco, where unemployment is 17.6 percent and violent crime and poverty are common. "Kids come to school hungry; some are homeless," said Mary Flanagan, 55, a third grade teacher from Richmond. "How can we deal with problems like that with as many as 38, 40 kids in a class?" Protesters said they would continue to press their case with more demonstrations, including what was expected to be a well attended protest on Thursday evening in central San Francisco. But at San Francisco State, where about 150 students, faculty members and administrators had joined to form an "informational picket line," some were skeptical that anything other than a sudden influx of money would be effective in swaying state leaders. "We've had tons of protests here, and it doesn't do much," said Maura Geiszler, 22, a senior studying music. "All they've got to do is turn off the news."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Steve Golin, an independent producer whose career began with low budget movies like "Hard Rock Zombies" in the 1980s and reached its peak when he and three colleagues won the best picture Oscar in 2016 for "Spotlight," died on Sunday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 64. A spokeswoman for Anonymous Content, his production company, said the cause was Ewing sarcoma. The 2016 Academy Awards ceremony was a capstone for Mr. Golin. Not only was "Spotlight," Tom McCarthy's film about The Boston Globe's investigation of child abuse by Roman Catholic priests, named best picture; a second film that Mr. Golin and Anonymous produced, "The Revenant," about an early 19th century frontiersman fighting for his life after being mauled by a bear, was also nominated in that category that year and won for best actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, and best director, Alejandro G. Inarritu. Those films, though wildly different, represented the type of compelling human stories that Mr. Golin preferred to tell. "I think that if you look at 'The Revenant' versus 'Spotlight,' one is a little bit more procedural and talky, arguably more in a classic sense," he told Variety in an interview before the Academy Awards ceremony. " 'The Revenant' is very different. Almost no dialogue, but it's very bold in terms of the technical aspects." Mr. Golin built Anonymous into a small Hollywood empire that produces films, television series, commercials and music videos, as well as managing talent like the actors Samuel L. Jackson, Emma Stone and Mahershala Ali and the director Alfonso Cuaron, who won Oscars in 2014 for "Gravity" and 2019 for "Roma." The New York Times hired Anonymous Content last year to represent it on film and television projects. Mr. Golin's producing credits also include Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich" (1999), a bizarre film about a puppeteer (John Cusack) who finds a portal into Mr. Malkovich's brain. Not only was it difficult to persuade Mr. Malkovich to participate, he said; it was also nearly impossible to persuade PolyGram, the parent of Propaganda Films, the company he ran at the time, to green light it. "I knew Spike's sensibility," Mr. Golin told The Los Angeles Times in 1999. "He's a really unique thinker. And when he started telling me his vision, I said, 'Now, this makes sense.' " Over the last few years, as television and streaming became increasingly important to Anonymous, Mr. Golin was the producer or executive producer of the HBO series "True Detective"; "The Alienist," a mini series on TNT about a gruesome serial killer in 19th century Manhattan; and "Mr. Robot," the USA series about a computer programmer recruited to join a band of anarchists. He was also an executive producer, with George Clooney among others, of a six episode adaptation of "Catch 22," Joseph Heller's satirical World War II novel, which will stream next month on Hulu. Mr. Golin once said that the only film he produced that he would not change was Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), the quirky story of a couple (Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey) who, after they break up, undergo procedures to erase each other from their memories. "It was probably the most complete movie," he was said in an online profile of him, as well as "the most satisfying." Steven Aaron Golin was born on March 6, 1955, in Geneva, N.Y., and grew up in Yonkers. His mother, Marilyn (Phillips) Golin, was a real estate broker, and his father, Jerry, owned an advertising agency. Propaganda came to dominate the market when MTV was heavily influencing the music business, and profits from making music videos for Madonna, Janet Jackson, David Bowie and others helped finance the company's films, including David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" (1990) and John Dahl's "Red Rock West" (1992). Propaganda also made commercials, including for Obsession perfume and Nike. "The only game plan we had when we started was to establish a business that was a positive cash flow business, that would give us the ability to be more flexible, to finance our own development on our own terms," Mr. Golin said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. "The revenue from shooting videos and commercial business is enough to let us survive and to give us a certain credibility with directors who don't want to take a project to a studio." He stayed at Propaganda until PolyGram was acquired by the Seagram Company and started Anonymous Content in 1999. He is survived by his partner, Violaine Etienne; his daughter, Anna Golin; his son, Ari; his stepdaughter Blue Etienne Gay; his sister, Susan Dickson; and his brother, Larry. His marriage to Vilborg Aradottir ended in divorce. Mr. Golin's desire to expand Anonymous Content's businesses led to a search for a well heeled partner to buy a substantial minority stake. In 2016 he made a deal with Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of Emerson Collective, an organization devoted to social change that had made investments in a variety of businesses, including media properties like The Atlantic magazine and the online news website Axios. In an email to Anonymous's staff on Monday, Ms. Powell Jobs praised Mr. Golin. "In an industry and an era that often reward all the wrong things," she wrote, "he was unsparing in his vision and determination to tell stories he believed in, stories that move us and stay with us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
On a recent trip to London, I attempted to arrange an interview with Caryl Churchill, who alongside Tom Stoppard is considered the greatest living English playwright. I didn't expect to get an answer (Ms. Churchill hasn't granted a real interview since the 1990s) and indeed, I did not get one. Trying to obtain an audience with her is like trying to obtain one with Thomas Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy. She maintains a Sphinx like silence. If you want to absorb a bit of Ms. Churchill's London, however, the place to linger is the venerable Royal Court Theater, where many of her plays had their debuts. The Royal Court is a playwright's arena, a word drunk place, dedicated to new writing. John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" (1956) had its premiere there. So did Ann Jellicoe's "The Knack" (1962), and Ms. Churchill's own "Top Girls" (1982). As I wandered the Royal Court, alone and with a guide, and saw a smart new play there (Thomas Eccleshare's "Instructions for Correct Assembly"), I sensed that, handed a time machine, the play I'd most want to beam myself backward to witness on opening night might well be "Top Girls." These highly verbal women hash out their views on politics and sex and health and the patriarchy and religion ("I knew coming to dinner with a pope we should keep off religion," Isabella cracks.) while ordering avocado vinaigrette and Waldorf salad and many bottles of wine. Lady Nijo gets off this line: "I'm not a cheerful person, Marlene. I just laugh a lot." Lucy Kirkwood, a fellow playwright, singled out Ms. Churchill's commitment to experimentation in a glowing tribute earlier this year. "Simply put," Ms. Kirkwood said, "she is the only person writing today who says something new in both form and content every time she puts pen to paper." The critic Robert Brustein remarked that if moviegoing is a solitary act, theatergoing is a communal one. Few make this more apparent than does Ms. Churchill. For one thing, she has been known to squeeze a lot of human beings into her plays. One of her most intricate, "Love and Information," which opened at the Royal Court in 2012 and ran Off Broadway two years later has 100 characters (!) played by 16 actors. More essentially, she is communal in her working methods. There is no other modern playwright quite like her. Her stage directions are few. She gives directors enormous leeway, but often gives them little to go on. Take, for example, Ms. Churchill's 1976 play "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire," which is now in previews and opens May 7 at New York Theater Workshop. (It's the eighth production of her work presented at the Off Broadway theater, and the first play it has ever done twice.) The director is Rachel Chavkin, who received a 2017 Tony Award nomination for "Natasha, Pierre The Great Comet of 1812." "Buckinghamshire" is a difficult, fervent, political play, set in England in the mid 1600s, and it's about a time when a new kind of governance seemed possible. King Charles I has been imprisoned for corruption; royalists have fled their estates. Factions of Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentarians are trying to draft a new constitution. Into this debate plunge the members of three new radical groups: the Diggers, the Ranters and the Levellers. Ms. Churchill's play picks up from there. It takes its title from a Digger pamphlet titled "More Light Shining in Buckinghamshire," which included this line: "You great Curmudgeons, you hang a man for stealing, when you yourselves have stolen from your brethren all land and creatures." It's a play about bravery and optimism. Ms. Churchill did not compose this play in remote isolation. Instead she ran a three week workshop with the actors during which, she has written, "through talk, reading, games and improvisations, we tried to get closer to the issues and the people. During the next nine weeks I wrote a script, and went on working on it with the company during the six week rehearsal period." This collaborative method is part of what appeals to James C. Nicola, the longtime artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, about Ms. Churchill's writing. He calls "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire" perhaps his favorite play of all time. "Some playwrights are temperamentally suited to sitting alone at a desk, imagining a world, and they find it hard to hand the work over," Mr. Nicola said. "Caryl is a writer but she's also a theatermaker at heart. She says, I am going to put these things on the page, they are a scenario, a provocation, a challenge. I want to see what we come up with." Ms. Chavkin continued: "Although this play is about a revolution that did not quite happen, there was so much profound hope in the moment. All these individuals were saying things are unjust, and they wanted to change that." Ms. Churchill cooked dinner for Ms. Chavkin last summer in London. At 79, the playwright is still vital and working. Her most recent plays, "Here We Go," about faith and mortality, and "Escaped Alone," which envisions a dystopian future, appeared in 2015 and 2016. She was born on the cusp of World War II. Her mother was a fashion model, her father a political cartoonist. After the war ended the family moved to Montreal. She went to college at Lady Margaret Hall, a woman's college at Oxford University, where she began writing plays. After college she wrote radio dramas for the BBC, married a barrister and had three sons. She later told an interviewer: "I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn't like being a barrister's wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle class life. It seemed claustrophobic. Having started out with undefined idealistic assumptions about the kind of life we could lead, we had drifted into something quite conventional and middle class and boring. By the mid 1960s, I had this gloomy feeling that when the Revolution came I would be swept away." "Buckinghamshire" is a waterfall of antique language, and Ms. Chavkin wants to make sure that language is heard. "We're working to make the language chewy rather than floaty," she said. "We want it to sound not like Shakespeare, but like something you could hear in a bar in Bushwick." The production features several actors with disabilities. "This is a play about collective liberation, and features a slew of characters who are fighting for acknowledgment, equality, and liberty," Ms. Chavkin explained. "So the humans in the cast should reflect and embody that as powerfully as possible." Another unusual feature of her production is a captioning board, visible at the back of the stage, for the hearing impaired. Others may also find it useful at times, like supertitles during an opera. The language is indeed chewy, but it is a lot to bite off. At the Royal Court, Ms. Churchill's language lingers in the air. To stand in that theater is to be reminded of something the playwright said about "Buckinghamshire," which is that if the men and women in it are historically remote, "their voices are surprisingly close to us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Q. Why does Windows always want to restart after it downloads updates? Do I have to restart? Why do some software updates not require the whole computer to be restarted? A. Big system software updates for Windows and Mac (as well as for Android, iOS and other devices) typically involve multiple steps. The first is downloading the update from the company's servers, which can take several hours if the software is several gigabytes in size and you have a slow internet connection. Once the update has downloaded, another program takes over to install the new software. When the computer is up and running, its operating system files are in use. If the software update includes security patches and improvements to other parts of the operating system code, Windows needs to shut down everything first by restarting the computer. This action frees up the files it needs to add, remove or replace as part of the update process.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The cable and broadcast networks have received more strong ratings for their coverage of Super Tuesday returns. Fox News broke yet another cable record with its coverage, bringing in 4.9 million viewers in prime time, the biggest viewership ever for a cable news channel for a primary or caucus night. It beat the previous high, which was also set by Fox News, for its coverage of the Iowa caucus last month. In the all important 25 to 54 year old demographic important to advertisers, CNN had the highest viewership on Tuesday night with 1.6 million viewers, compared with 1.4 million for Fox News and 625,000 for MSNBC.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Dr. George Blackburn, a surgeon, clinician, researcher, teacher and author who was considered pre eminent in the study of obesity and nutrition, died on Feb. 20 at his home in Boston. He was 81. The cause was malignant melanoma, said his wife, Susan Kelly. Over his career, largely spent at Harvard Medical School and at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Dr. Blackburn correlated poor nutrition with obesity, advocated lower fat diets and helped develop gastric bypass surgery and nutritional liquid diets. He joined Dr. Bruce Bistrian and other colleagues in providing the foundation for what became the field of nutrition medicine. "What really put him and his colleagues on the world map were publications highlighting the inadequate nutritional management of people in the hospital so called hospital malnutrition," said a former colleague, Dr. Steven Heymsfield.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
When the Biden administration takes office in 2021, it will face a unique, fraught decision: Should Donald Trump be criminally investigated and prosecuted? Any renewed investigative activity or a criminal prosecution would further divide the country and stoke claims that the Justice Department was merely exacting revenge. An investigation and trial would be a spectacle that would surely consume the administration's energy. But as painful and hard as it may be for the country, I believe the next attorney general should investigate Mr. Trump and, if warranted, prosecute him for potential federal crimes. I do not come to this position lightly. Indeed, we have witnessed two U.S. presidential elections in which large crowds have found it acceptable to chant with fervent zeal that the nominee of the opposing party should be jailed. We do not want to turn into an autocratic state, where law enforcement authorities are political weapons of the reigning party. But that is not sufficient reason to let Mr. Trump off the hook. Mr. Trump's criminal exposure is clear. I was a senior member of the investigation led by the former special counsel Robert Mueller to determine whether Russia attempted to subvert our fundamental democratic source of political legitimacy: our electoral system. Among other things, he was tasked with determining whether Mr. Trump interfered with our fact finding into this issue. We amassed ample evidence to support a charge that Mr. Trump obstructed justice. That view is widely shared. Shortly after our report was issued, hundreds of former prosecutors concluded that the evidence supported such a charge. What precedent is set if obstructing such an investigation is allowed to go unpunished and undeterred? It is hard enough for the executive branch to investigate a sitting president, who has the power to fire a special counsel (if needed, through the attorney general) and to thwart cooperation with an investigation by use of the clemency power. We saw Mr. Trump use his clemency power to do just that with, for example, his ally Roger Stone. He commuted Mr. Stone's sentence, who was duly convicted by a jury but never spent a day in jail for crimes that a federal judge found were committed for the president. The same judge found that Paul Manafort, a former Trump campaign chairman, lied to us repeatedly, breaching his cooperation agreement. He, too, was surely holding out hope for a dangled pardon. Mr. Trump can't point to what the special counsel investigation did not find (e.g., "collusion") when he obstructed that very investigation. The evidence against Mr. Trump includes the testimony of Don McGahn, Mr. Trump's former White House counsel, who detailed how the president ordered the firing of the special counsel and how when that effort was reported in the press, Mr. Trump beseeched Mr. McGahn to deny publicly the truth and, for safe measure, memorialize that falsity in a written memorandum. The evidence includes Mr. Trump's efforts to influence the outcome of a deliberating jury in the Manafort trial and his holding out the hope for a pardon to thwart witnesses from cooperating with our investigation. Can anyone even fathom a legitimate reason to dangle a pardon? His potential criminal liability goes further, to actions before taking office. The Manhattan district attorney is by all appearances conducting a classic white collar investigation into tax and bank fraud, and the New York attorney general is engaged in a civil investigation into similar allegations, which could quickly turn into a criminal inquiry. These state matters may well reveal evidence warranting additional federal charges. Such potential financial crimes were not explored by the special counsel investigation and could reveal criminal evidence. Any evidence that was not produced to Congress in its inquiries, like internal State Department and White House communications, is another potential trove to which the new administration should have access. The matters already set out by the special counsel and under investigation are not trivial; they should not raise concerns that Mr. Trump is being singled out for something that would not be investigated or prosecuted if committed by anyone else. Because some of the activities in question predated his presidency, it would be untenable to permit Mr. Trump's winning a federal election to immunize him from consequences for earlier crimes. We would not countenance that result if a former president was found to have committed a serious violent crime. Sweeping under the rug Mr. Trump's federal obstruction would be worse still. The precedent set for not deterring a president's obstruction of a special counsel investigation would be too costly: It would make any future special counsel investigation toothless and set the presidency de facto above the law. For those who point to the pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford as precedent for simply looking forward, that is not analogous: Mr. Nixon paid a very heavy price by resigning from the presidency in disgrace for his conduct. Mr. Trump may very well choose to pardon not just his family and friends before leaving office but also himself in order to avoid federal criminal liability. This historic turn of events would have no effect on his potential criminal exposure at the state level. If Mr. Trump bestows such pardons, states like New York should take up the mantle to see that the rule of law is upheld. And pardons would not preclude the new attorney general challenging a self pardon or the state calling the pardoned friends and family before the grand jury to advance its investigation of Mr. Trump after he leaves office (where, if they lied, they would still risk charges of perjury and obstruction). In short, being president should mean you are more accountable, not less, to the rule of law. Andrew Weissmann, a senior prosecutor in Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation, is a senior fellow at the New York University School of Law and the author of "Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Howardena Pindell at her home studio in Inwood, Manhattan. Her exhibition at the Shed in Hudson Yards, which is opening to visitors, includes a new video, "Rope/Fire/Water," along with five new paintings and 10 older ones.Credit...Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times Howardena Pindell at her home studio in Inwood, Manhattan. Her exhibition at the Shed in Hudson Yards, which is opening to visitors, includes a new video, "Rope/Fire/Water," along with five new paintings and 10 older ones. In more than half a century as an artist, Howardena Pindell has made many hundreds of paintings and drawings and just three videos, yet one of those videos is arguably her best known work. "Free, White and 21" (1980) depicts the artist recounting a litany of racist experiences, from being tied to a cot by a kindergarten teacher to discrimination in applying for jobs. Interspersed among the personal stories, Ms. Pindell appears as a second character in whiteface and a blonde wig. The white woman tells the Black narrator that she must be paranoid. "You won't exist until we validate you," she chides. "Free, White and 21" is as much a commentary on the pervasiveness of racism in America as it is on the whiteness of the second wave feminist movement, which Ms. Pindell knew intimately because she'd been part of it. In 1972, she was the only person of color among 20 cofounding members of A.I.R., the first nonprofit, artist run women's gallery in the United States. In conversations with her colleagues, she brought up the injustices she faced as a Black woman, but they were uninterested, even hostile to her concerns. At A.I.R., Ms. Pindell proposed reproducing the photograph while cooking meat in the gallery: Image and scent would combine to re create the chilling experience. "I was the only nonwhite," she said by way of explanation. "They turned it down." She left the group in 1975. Her childhood memory is now the starting point for "Rope/Fire/Water," her first video in 25 years, commissioned by the Shed, which reopened Oct. 16 with her exhibition of the same name; it also features five new paintings and 10 older ones, including a piece that's never been displayed publicly. The presentation at the Shed is Ms. Pindell's first institutional solo exhibition in New York City, her longtime home, since 1993. (Her work is also currently on view in the gallery at Art Omi, a sculpture and architecture park in Ghent, N.Y., about two hours north of Manhattan.) "This show is kind of a culmination of everything," she reflected. In the Shed's gallery, "Rope/Fire/Water" plays in a semicircular space. To get there, visitors (limited to 25 percent of capacity) walk past Ms. Pindell's paintings, which sample the breadth of her experimentation. Of a piece with the video, two new commissions are all black and covered with words that reference episodes of racist violence; both have objects, including burned toys, laid out before them as if they were altars. Nearby, a pair of shaped works combine text and figurative imagery into collagelike commentaries on slavery. Then there are the abstract pieces. The ones from the 1970s are muted, unstretched canvases dotted with circular chads produced by hole punchers. The recent examples are eruptions of chads, other foam shapes, color and glitter, with mazelike networks of sewn lines. They feel simultaneously detailed and expansive, like maps of discrete universes. "This is an emotionally charged show, but I hope people are able to see the beauty of her practice, because it's such an important part of what she does," Adeze Wilford, an assistant curator at the Shed and the organizer of the exhibition, said. "She is this activist, but she also has this gorgeous, canvas producing side that I felt needed to be shown in the same context." The career of Ms. Pindell, 77, is filled with such dualities. She has used her work to confront pain and embrace pleasure, spent decades committed to both figuration and abstraction, worked in institutions and criticized them. "She's always sat in her truth," said Valerie Cassel Oliver, who co curated the first major survey of Ms. Pindell's work, in 2018. "She has been brave, even when it hasn't been popular. It comes from a space of wanting to make a difference." Ms. Pindell was born in Philadelphia in 1943. Her parents encouraged an early interest in art by taking her to meet artists and visit museums and, when she grew older, supported her as she pursued a B.F.A. from Boston University (1961 65), where the training was strictly figurative, and an M.F.A. from Yale (1965 67), whose more avant garde program helped spur her to transition into abstraction. From the beginning, Ms. Pindell was drawn to the form of the circle, which she had "experienced as a scary thing," she said. As a child, she and her father had gone to a root beer stand, where she noticed red dots affixed to the bottoms of their mugs. The symbol "designated that the glassware could be used by nonwhites," she explained. "Whites would not use the same utensils." She became fixated on the shape, and putting it in her art allowed her to reclaim it. "I get great pleasure out of punching holes," she told me with a laugh. In 1971, Ms. Pindell showed in a major museum for the first time, in a group exhibition at the Whitney. She was then working at the Museum of Modern Art, where she started as an assistant, and rose to associate curator the first Black woman curator at the institution. She also joined the push to unionize MoMA. By this time, she was feeling stuck in what she calls "a lose lose situation." Some Black artists had criticized her for pursuing abstraction, rather than figurative work in the vein of the Black Arts Movement; they were also mad that she hadn't "flung the doors open of the museum," she said. Meanwhile, "the whites were angry that I was there," working at such a prestigious institution as MoMA. "They thought I didn't belong." She decided to quit to focus on making and teaching art. In 1979, she was hired as an associate professor at Stony Brook University, but soon after, she and a colleague were in a car accident that left her with injuries and short term memory loss. It proved to be a watershed moment in her practice. "I remember thinking, if I could have died so quickly, I would never have expressed my opinion," she said. "That started me looking at my life again and thinking about what I felt about the world." Ms. Pindell began using her work as a means of healing. She cut out parts of the canvas and sewed them back in a symbolic suturing of the damage that had been done. She incorporated images of her body and pictures of places she'd visited into her abstract process, creating a hybrid style that mapped the associative nature of memory. She assembled fragmented, fish eye forms by taking postcards, slicing them into strips, and painting in between. Many of these pieces belong to her "Autobiography" series, which began with "Free, White and 21." And as that video prefigures, her art became more expressly political, with personal issues crossing over into societal ones. Ms. Pindell spent a lot of time by herself in those years. "I kind of self isolated," she said. Yet she continued her activism, writing anonymous letters about racism to institutions and individuals and signing them "The Black Hornet." She undertook two major demographic surveys of museum exhibitions and gallery rosters in New York City, finding that white artists dominated. "As a result of the closed nepotistic interlocking network, artists of color face an industrywide 'restraint of trade,'" she wrote in a paper delivered at Hunter College in 1987. She showed regularly across the United States and abroad but struggled to find dealers she could trust. White critics dismissed both her abstract and issue driven work. She recalled one review in which the writer said he wanted to have sex under her paintings. As happens with so many artists of color and women, however, the market and major institutions have increasingly embraced her as she's gotten older. She joined Garth Greenan Gallery in 2012 and then had a solo show there, her first in New York City in almost a decade. Two years ago, her retrospective opened to critical acclaim. "You could get a very big head from the kind of recognition I'm getting," she joked. But Ms. Pindell, who is generous and easygoing, has not. When we had our call, she sat in an office overflowing with files and boxes: She was in the midst of organizing her papers, which are going to be acquired by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. She uses a walker now and has problems with her memory, although for the most part, her stories came easily; she even remembered the names of old co workers at MoMA.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Edith Wharton's corpulent great aunt Mary Mason Jones served as one of the most memorable inspirations in literary New York: the model for Mrs. Manson Mingott in Wharton's novel "The Age of Innocence." Much of the 1920 book is centered on Mary Jones's remarkable row of stone houses on Fifth Avenue, from 57th to 58th Street. But almost absent from Wharton's writings is Mary's sister Rebecca Jones, who built an equally impressive row just two blocks south. The father of Rebecca, born in 1801, and Mary, born the year before, was John Mason, a founder of the New York and Harlem Railroad, which first ran in 1832. Rebecca married Isaac Colford Jones Jr., and Mary his cousin, also named Isaac Jones. Rebecca and Mary early exhibited a taste for domestic proximity, occupying neighboring rowhouses on Chambers Street. No. 122, Mary's place, supposedly had the first bathtub in New York; Rebecca's ablutionary activities are not documented. Later, three Jones families, including Rebecca and Mary's, occupied three adjoining houses from 732 to 736 Broadway, in which the entertaining rooms could be opened to one another. It is not clear where the sisters lived after 1854, when a nasty fight over their father's estate, much of it property in New York City, was resolved. They were awarded two city blocks, each running from Fifth to Park, where streets had just recently been cut through. Rebecca's domain was between 55th and 56th, Mary's between 57th and 58th. These are where their architectural aspirations played out shortly after Wharton's birth in 1862. Mary started first, her architect, Robert Mook, filing plans in 1867 for what became Marble Row, a sparkling white series of houses in the Parisian style facing Fifth from 57th to 58th. These houses take up a great deal of real estate in both the book and movie "Age of Innocence." Rebecca followed in 1869, when she had her architect, Detlef Lienau, design a similar row of eight houses for the 55th to 56th Street block, completed in 1871. These were more chaste than Mary's, in part because of their olive colored Ohio stone, but they, too, had the character of something on a Parisian boulevard. In an 1879 issue of The Real Estate Record and Guide, the architect Henry Hardenbergh called Rebecca Jones's effort "one of the best blocks in the city." He certainly felt qualified to judge; at the time of the Jones commission he was working for Lienau. Although Rebecca's block looks austere in retrospect, the 1881 guidebook New York Illustrated praised the row for "the happy union of lightness with the idea of mass and dignity," which gave the buildings "a genial, homelike aspect." The warm green of Ohio stone can be beautiful, but Wharton recoiled when she saw it. In a posthumous article published in Harper's Weekly in 1938 she derided Rebecca's houses as "a block of palegreenish limestone houses (almost uglier than the brownstone ones)." Although she depicted her Great Aunt Mary as visionary in settling on then desolate upper Fifth Avenue, she gave her Great Aunt Rebecca no such credit. But Rebecca was every bit as busy as her sister holding court uptown. The Daily Graphic described her 1873 invitation to the city's debutantes for a "rose bud party," apparently an innovation, at her house on the 55th Street corner, No. 705. The guests were to meet "a select company of gentlemen," and each young woman was to receive a bouquet of rosebuds. Rebecca was "quite celebrated in social circles for the elegance and novelty of her entertainments," The Evening Telegram said in 1874. Two years later, the paper described Rebecca and Mary as "at the head of the ultra fashionable Saratoga clique." Rebecca kept the corner house but rented out the others, several to her relatives; her row, too, was a Jones family affair. She enjoyed this domestic togetherness for only eight years, dying in 1879. Reflecting on her social significance in 1880, The New York Sun said, with a hint of reproach, that in her house "many luxuries and delicacies, as well as many European forms of entertainment, were introduced which had been unknown to the thrift and simplicity of our grandfathers." At the turn of the century, Rebecca's house was taken by the railroad entrepreneur Edward H. Harriman, and according to The New York Sun, its glory days continued: "Financiers galore walked up the short flight of steps at the side of the dwelling seeking a few minutes conference with 'the Little Giant,' " the newspaper reported in 1910. The Jones sisters' trendsetting rowhouses gradually dwindled to nothing before the advance of development. Rebecca's name was soon eclipsed, but Mary's reputation has waxed in recent years. This is certainly Wharton's doing, as she leads the reader of "The Age of Innocence" past "the one story saloons, the wooden greenhouses in ragged gardens, the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene," to Mrs. Mingott's white marble outpost. But every time Wharton passed the saloons, the ragged gardens and the goats, she must also have passed Rebecca's houses, a row that she barely noted.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Lee Krasner's 1965 painting "Combat" is part of "Lee Krasner: Living Color" at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. The show will next travel to Frankfurt, Germany; Bern, Switzerland; and Bilbao, Spain. LONDON A tangle of drips in all directions; a hazy rectangle in a field of dark pigment; a rigid zip down an empty canvas ... To be an Abstract Expressionist in New York's buoyant first postwar years, it helped to have a signature look. Yet Lee Krasner was suspicious of paintings where telltale marks were like alternative autographs even when the autograph was her own husband's. She was proud not to have a single style. You had to figure out each painting on its own, she said, or you end up with something "rigid rather than being alive." Tough, diligent, and deadly serious about the history of art, Krasner might have been the most intelligent of the painters who convinced the world in the late 1940s that New York had displaced Paris as the epicenter of modern art. That intelligence expressed itself through an art that ricocheted across styles and media, from tightly massed collages to huge abstractions of Matissean richness. But it's still rare that we get an effusion of her art on the scale of "Lee Krasner: Living Color," which is on view for a few more weeks at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. The first proper retrospective in Europe for Krasner since 1965, it is to travel this October to the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, and continue next year to the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. At the Barbican, where the show has been curated by Eleanor Nairne, it appears clean, mannerly, and very safe. Its pat chronological presentation has the feel of an introductory course, and the show displays little engagement with either the theoretical challenges of painting or with feminist critiques of American high abstraction. Lena Krassner , as she was named in 1908, was the daughter of Orthodox Jewish refugees from Odessa, Ukraine, and the first of their children to be born in the United States. At 14 she enrolled at Washington Irving High, the only school in New York that admitted girls to its art curriculum, and took the name Lenore. She began advanced study at the National Academy of Design (a place of "congealed mediocrity," she would later say), but when the Great Depression bit, she dropped out, worked as a cocktail waitress and life study model, and made proficient charcoal studies. In 1937, she won a scholarship to study with Hans Hofmann, the German emigre who was the most progressive art educator in New York. The life drawings she did in his classes are an early revelation of this show: dense, foggy charcoal circuits, swallowing up Picasso's split perspectives and the erotic machinery of the Surrealists. The lines appear nearly graven into the paper. Smudges and clouds of dark gray reveal the mercilessness of her corrections and revisions. Her first abstract paintings display a deep technical proficiency even when they feel overcalculated the work of an "A" student still finding her way. Dense, rhythmic nets of black paint over multicolor backgrounds have a decorous quality, while other paintings incorporate glyphs and symbols similar to those of her New York school colleagues Bradley Walker Tomlin and Mark Tobey, as well as early paintings by Pollock, whom she met in 1941. Weeks after V J Day, the couple moved from New York to Springs, a rural town at the eastern edge of Long Island. Pollock, working in the barn, found his way to the drip. Krasner, stuck in a little upstairs bedroom they sometimes couldn't afford to heat, made smaller paintings and mosaics that also relied on allover, non hierarchical composition. She showed many in 1951 at Betty Parsons Gallery, but the exhibition bombed and Krasner, ever merciless toward her own work, tore the canvases to shreds. When she went back to the studio, she started to layer her torn abstractions with blank burlap, new drawings, and even some of Pollock's discarded drip paintings. The results were strident, seismic collages, brimming with confidence. For all their debts to her hero Matisse, including backgrounds of rich vermilion and Mediterranean blue, there's a freer, jazzier, more athletic relationship between parts that is pure 1950s American. These fantastic collages, completed in 1954 55, go a long way to correcting the misunderstanding that Krasner found her way as a painter only after Pollock's death in the summer of 1956. She was in France when he crashed his car on a Hamptons country lane, and after she got back to America she felt she had to keep working. Later that year, she completed the hinge painting of her career: "Prophecy," a spastic, savage composition that feels set to burst its narrow, vertical frame. The figure returns, in the form of a broken, collapsed nude woman, her pink flesh dripping past gashed black outlines. Three more paintings that year continue the theme, all more disorderly than Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," their obvious source, and even messier than De Kooning's series of slashed and gashed "Women." It's too easy to read these brutal paintings as outpourings of grief. For Krasner, painting had a much higher vocation that personal expressivity, and she was no sentimentalist; by 1957, she had moved into Pollock's barn studio, where she had enough space to work at mural scale. There she executed grand, nearly monochromatic abstractions that are more physical than anything before them. The umber paint, thinner and drippier than the slabs of pigment in "Prophecy," stains the untreated canvas like dirt or blood. I find these first large scale abstractions, christened the "Night Journeys" by the poet Richard Howard, pretty theatrical. More rewards seem to lie in the colorful panoramas of the 1960s such as the 13 foot wide "Combat," completed in 1965 and lent from the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, which channels her love of Matisse's bright hues into a parade of pink bubbles and squiggles. But Ab Ex was always a garish mode of painting, and a little theater has always been part of the American package. What Krasner wanted and proved at her best was that theatrics and braininess were not at odds, and that a life in painting had room for both.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Karen Stuart, the executive director of the Association of Talent Agents, the trade organization that negotiates on behalf of the agencies, said in her own email that both sides were "committed to meeting regularly this week in our continued effort to work toward a resolution that serves the best interests of your businesses and your clients." At a time when there are more scripted shows than ever before, thanks to the rise of streaming, television writers have claimed that their pay is stagnant or going down, while the big agencies are expanding and growing richer. The writers blame the agencies for what they describe as gross conflicts of interest and corrupt business practices. Two specific practices have gnawed at television writers. One is the agents' decades old habit of packaging a roster of talent from their pool of clients for a given project. In return for putting a writer together with, say, an actor and a director, the agencies waive the usual 10 percent commission fee paid to them by individual clients. In place of the commission, they collect large sums from the studios themselves, called packaging fees. These fees, the writers say, amount to money taken out of their pockets. The writers' second complaint is focused on how three major agencies William Morris Endeavor, Creative Artists Agency and the United Talent Agency have ventured into the production business by creating affiliated companies that produce and own content. Under this arrangement, the writers say, agents may end up across the table from executives who are essentially colleagues. Agents had previously rejected both claims as ridiculous, countering that packaging talent and their move into production benefit writers in a business that has changed drastically in recent years with the entry of tech giants into entertainment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
When Capt. Richard Davenport, a lawyer with the Provost Marshal General's office in Washington, arrives at a Louisiana army base to investigate a murder, he is the first black officer most of the men stationed there have ever seen. Their diametrical reactions to him the white officers shocked and hostile, the black grunts busting with pride tell you everything you need to know about race relations in the segregated military in 1944. Well, not quite everything. As Davenport is about to discover in "A Soldier's Play," the Pulitzer Prize winning 1981 drama by Charles Fuller, racism is a disease that infects whatever it touches. Even the murdered man, Sgt. Vernon C. Waters, is not immune, though black himself. He hates his own race so virulently that almost everyone, from the Ku Klux Klan to his own corporal, has a motive for killing him. This provides "A Soldier's Play," which opened on Tuesday at the American Airlines Theater, the solid if programmatic structure of a police procedural: Interrogate, rinse, repeat. It also provides, or at least did for white audiences when it premiered, a pair of novel themes. Now less novel, they still remain news: Colorism has not gone away, nor has the military, long since integrated, stamped out racism among its ranks. But the themes and the structure can sometimes seem at odds. Not, apparently, as originally produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, when Frank Rich, writing for The New York Times, called it "a mature and accomplished work." Nor in the excellent 1984 movie, retitled "A Soldier's Story," which uses plenty of close ups to keep the focus on the characters instead of the plot machinery. Onstage, though, the loud ticktock of the investigation too often drowns out the emotion an effect perhaps enhanced by the flattening of the genre brought on by endless "Law Order" spinoffs and reruns. In any case, whether "A Soldier's Play" is a great stage drama regardless of its flaws is something its bumpy but worthy Broadway debut, directed by Kenny Leon for the Roundabout Theater Company, cannot answer. Despite some powerful acting, it is too distracted to make the case. Davenport (Blair Underwood) does not have that problem; the one trait Fuller endows him with is ferocious attention to mission. (Underwood, in an otherwise unexceptionable performance, adds another trait pandering sex appeal in a gratuitous flash of well toned flesh.) Though he drives the plot, he is almost a bystander to it, allowing the soldiers he questions to spin out their views of Waters (David Alan Grier) in flashbacks that sometimes have more flashbacks within them. The views are not pretty. Waters played in the original and in the film by the hair raising Adolph Caesar is part sadist, part eugenicist, and so determined to avenge his own powerlessness as a black man that he is willing to destroy other black men to do it. Fuller has said he based the character, who commands a barracks of former Negro League baseball players, on the kind of person he encountered while living in the projects: "someone who wanted to be a king in a place that didn't need a king." But Waters, with his fixation on purifying his race of its "lazy, shiftless" "geechy" throwbacks, its "singin', clownin', yas sah bossin'" embarrassments, is no harmless martinet. Instead he is, in a way, magnificent, recalling the great, mysterious evil of military men like Claggart in "Billy Budd" and Iago in "Othello." Grier is unable to achieve that grandeur here. Though he appeared in smaller roles in the original production and in the movie, and clearly understands the character, he is naturally too likable or his years in sketch comedy have made him seem so to convey a threat that is larger than Waters himself. You get a sense of that threat more vividly from the men in his command, who have no way to defend themselves against the machinations of a maniac. As punishment for a minor offense, Waters strips one of them, Wilkie, of the stripes it took him 10 years to earn. Another, Peterson, gets badly beaten in an unfair fight that Waters provokes. A third, Memphis, is framed by Waters (in a separate incident) for a murder everyone knows he didn't commit. The three actors who play these men Billy Eugene Jones, Nnamdi Asomugha and J. Alphonse Nicholson are excellent, but the production doesn't capitalize on their performances to build the show into a riveting ride. Transitions between scenes are especially awkward on Derek McLane's abstract barracks set and are sometimes further saddled with florid dance elements it might have been better to have a choreographer stage. (None is credited.) The deployment of music, mostly traditional songs and blues, is likewise erratic. But if the power of "A Soldier's Play" is sometimes attenuated, it is at other times enhanced. Leon draws smart connections between Fuller's portrait of black men trapped in a system with no viable choices and the prison industrial context of our time. When Wilkie suggests to Davenport that Waters's assailants were probably not Klansmen because his uniform was not defiled "They usually take the stripes and stuff off, before they lynch us" it now comes across as a double barreled insight, both a clue in the case and a tiny poem of fatalistic despair. Fuller could not have been thinking, in 1981, of the daily roll call of dead black youth that horrifies us today, or the estimated one in three black American men likely to be incarcerated during their lifetimes. But he definitely had the fate of his race in mind. Though Davenport (it's no spoiler to say) eventually gets his man, wrapping the investigation up neatly and gaining the respect of at least one white officer (Jerry O'Connell) in the process, he also delivers, in a single tossed off line a line cut from the movie Fuller's frightful kicker. Here, Leon could not be clearer, and as Nipsey Hussle's "Perfect Timing" brings us into the present, that abstract barracks begins to look a lot like a jail, or a morgue.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
You can also disable automatic correction within certain programs without turning it off everywhere. To do that within an open app, go to its Edit menu, to Spelling and Grammar, and select Correct Spelling Automatically; a check next to the item means it is enabled, so selecting it disables the feature. Windows 10 users can shut down Microsoft's built in auto correction function too. Press the Windows and I keys to open the Settings box and click (or tap) on Devices. On the left side of the box, select Typing and turn off the button next to "Autocorrect misspelled words." Android's auto correction tools can also be enabled or disabled within the Language Input settings, but Google recently announced new tools that move beyond basic spelling correction. At its Google I/O conference earlier this month, the company revealed a new, optional Smart Compose function for its Gmail service that uses artificial intelligence to suggest complete and perfectly spelled sentences as you write new messages. Personal Tech invites questions about computer based technology to techtip nytimes.com. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Another week, another round of designer musical chairs in the creative studios of top tier European luxury houses. On Thursday, Emilio Pucci announced the abrupt departure of Massimo Giorgetti, and Friday brought the appointment of the husband and wife team Luke and Lucie Meier as joint creative directors at Jil Sander. Pucci, owned by the luxury giant LVMH, said that after four seasons as creative director, Mr. Giorgetti would be leaving the company, effective immediately. Mr. Giorgetti, a maverick Italian designer and former D.J. who succeeded Peter Dundas at Pucci in March 2015, initially made his name in the industry with the contemporary label MSGM, which specializes in quirky digital graphic prints and bold colorful shapes. His efforts, perhaps too avant garde for the average Pucci consumer, received a lukewarm response from retailers and the media alike. In her review of the fall 2017 collection, Vanessa Friedman of The New York Times called the show "a look at me heave," adding that the clothes were "a queasy making mix of highlighter green and orange, hot pink and brown in a disco/loungewear fiesta that included, inexplicably, hats with fringe completely obscuring the face and hanging down to the waist in the front." Less than six weeks later, Mr. Giorgetti has departed to once again focus his efforts on MSGM. He called his tenure at Pucci "an inspiring journey, which has also contributed to my professional growth" and "a beautiful adventure." In a statement, he thanked LVMH; Laudomia Pucci, the daughter of the founder; and Mauro Grimaldi, the chief executive of the company. "We have decided by mutual agreement to end the partnership," Mr. Grimaldi said in a statement. "I would like to thank Massimo for the great professionalism shown during these last two years of collaboration." On Friday morning, a long circling rumor was confirmed when Luke and Lucie Meier were named creative directors at Jil Sander, replacing Rodolfo Paglialunga, who left the company last month. Ms. Meier, together with Serge Ruffieux (now the creative director of Carven), led the ready to wear and couture studios at Dior under the leadership of Raf Simons, taking over the creative reins after his exit and the arrival of Maria Grazia Chiuri. Previously, Ms. Meier had worked for Marc Jacobs, then the creative director of Louis Vuitton, and Nicolas Ghesquiere, then the creative director of Balenciaga. Mr. Meier is a former creative director at the cult streetwear brand Supreme and a founder, in 2015, of the modern urban men's wear label OAMC. The Meiers' first collection for Jil Sander will be shown in September in Milan. "We feel proud and honored to join this beautiful brand," the couple said in a joint statement after the announcement. "We hope to show the affection we have for this brand through our work, as Jil Sander has had such a profound influence on our paths." Alessandra Bettari, the chief executive of the brand, said that she expected "the creation of very clever collections" and that the Meiers had "a vision which is modern, cohesive, and in touch with what is relevant now." Jil Sander, known for its minimalist codes, has undergone enormous creative flux in recent years, with Ms. Sander leaving and returning to the company three times before finally stepping down for good in 2013, to be followed by Mr. Paglialunga. The Meiers, relative unknowns, are part of a recent trend among high profile fashion houses to opt for lower profile designers instead of starry names. See, for example, Natacha Ramsay Levi at Chloe, whose appointment to creative director was announced last month. Now the question is whether Pucci will take the same tack to fill its new job opening. Presumably we will know soon enough.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A white billionaire playboy spends his evenings fighting bad guys in a cape and mask. A white alien works as a journalist but skips out to take down villains in the city. Traditionally, superheroes fit a predictable mold: white males who stand as bastions of justice despite their vigilante status. In the riveting recent Netflix film "The Old Guard," and the masterly Emmy nominated HBO series "Watchmen," Black women are the new kinds of heroes, not only breaking this mold but also allowing for a radical shift in storytelling. A new guard of superheroism doesn't simply mean diversity. It makes room for the possibility that especially now, as our political systems and institutions are being questioned, there is no absolute moral authority, even for those tasked with saving the day. It presents individuals better equipped to understand the weight of the badge and the mask, and the cost that comes with calling oneself a hero. In "The Old Guard," a foursome of immortals are led by the eldest, Andy (a mesmerizing Charlize Theron), a butt kicking, steely eyed warrior. As they trot around the globe crushing bad guys, they welcome a new member, a Marine named Nile (KiKi Layne). Movies and TV shows love an optimistic rookie, and the young and empathetic Nile is certainly that. But her race also ropes her into another cliche. Black women are often presented as the standard bearers of ethical action. They've seen miscarriages of justice and have silently borne the pain or valiantly fought back; either way, they are resilience and goodness personified. This carries over to superhero narratives as well: think of Misty Knight in "Luke Cage," Storm in the "X Men" films, even the no nonsense Okoye from "Black Panther." Though Black women are rarely the protagonists of these stories, they are so often charged with being the pillars of strength and moral foundations of the team. In "The Old Guard" Nile is both the bright eyed newbie and the strong moral compass, so she can serve as a foil for Andy and the others. Nile is skeptical of the team's supposed acts of righteousness. "So you good guys or bad guys?" she asks them. "Depends on the century," one responds. "We fight for what we think is right," another adds. The group is immortal but not infallible, and the immortals' contention that they're using their abilities to fight for their definition of justice is in line with that of myriad armies, generals and other militant bodies throughout history. Nile herself comes from one such institution the U.S. military which is often described as providing an essential line of national defense but in reality is also used to exert power and influence for less ethical and more political reasons. The film even puts the immortals in parallel to the actual military from which Nile comes: Andy outright declares they are an army. But ultimately "The Old Guard" goes easy on its heroes. Though Nile questions their good guy status and self appointed hero work, she ultimately joins them. After initially critiquing the moral superiority at work in hero movies by positioning Nile as the group's conscience, "The Old Guard" won't let us sit with the possibility that the immortals may not be the guardian angels they hope to be. A final twist reveals that there's a grand design after all, and they unknowingly execute it. Suddenly these heroes are, in fact, infallible, despite the blood on their hands. They Nile included are an army given the agency to act and kill in the name of the greater good. Whatever that means. Last fall "Watchmen" also ended with the initiation of a Black female hero but delivered a more complex examination of her relationship to law enforcement, heroism and vigilantism. In the original comic of the same name, Alan Moore and David Gibbons produced an exquisite story but didn't present any heroes of color and didn't address the issue of race at all. The HBO series, created by Damon Lindelof as a sequel to the original, is refreshingly reactionary, positioning the narrative around race and presenting a Black heroine as the protagonist: a police officer named Angela Abar (Regina King) who gets tangled up in the world of superheroes and a megalomaniacal scheme for ultimate power. Tracking down members of the Seventh Kavalry, a pseudo K.K.K. group calling for a revolution, Angela is forced to hide her identity and makes more progress pummeling racists as a masked vigilante, Sister Night. After all, even her fellow police officers can't be trusted. When she discovers a K.K.K. hood in the closet of her close friend and boss, Angela realizes that things aren't as they seem. The series also drives home this message that the definition and execution of justice isn't a nice, tidy task. Angela discovers that her grandfather, a mysterious hero called Hooded Justice, also donned the costume when he was serving as a police officer. He was the victim of racist treatment by his peers and was unable to stand up against crime in the way he aimed to. Two generations later, Angela faces similar circumstances, but she is undoubtedly the hero of the story. Angela is the new guard, following the legacy of the Watchmen. Quite literally, she inherits superpowers and becomes more than the hero she already is; she becomes a god. And, though we've witnessed a whole season of Angela fighting for what's right, we're still denied a final image of her as a deity. Unlike "The Old Guard," "Watchmen" never falls for its own fantasy of the courageous woman who can do no wrong. At its core, "Watchmen," like the original comic, is a breakdown of the superhero fairy tale. But the series extends this critique to include an often glamorized institution that's meant to represent justice but all too frequently fails: the police. After becoming immortal, facing the rejection of her military peers, Nile is marginalized by one army with a morally ambiguous history of atrocities, foreign interference and political agendas, just to become the newest soldier of another that's equally morally ambiguous but rationalized in the universe of the film. Angela, by contrast, breaks with the police and their track record of racist behavior; by acting independently, in line with her own morals, she is granted godhood. Whether this makes her infallible isn't the point. The point is that she is a Black woman who has found power outside a broken structure. Though this and her identity don't make her irreproachable, her experiences as a Black woman, a police officer and then a vigilante give her a more nuanced understanding of justice. She has the potential to be an even greater hero than the ones we've seen. Both "The Old Guard" and "Watchmen" present enthralling universes with powerful beings who aim to do right. But even in this supposedly protected world, justice isn't a given. The character best suited to bring about change is the one who knows the system inside and out and understands what it means to be crushed beneath it. These Black women aren't perfect, but they are the harbingers of a heroic revolution. Because when a Black woman puts on a mask, she is the closest vision of the kind of hero that the world actually needs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
In the lakeside dances, she never let narrative or psychological tension drop. Each phrase revealed a different aspect of hope, doubt, tenderness, diffidence, resolution. One stylistic misjudgment came in some of the arched "swan" positions she took with Prince Siegfried's support; instead of the swan's heroic lines, Ms. Osipova often employed softer arm contours that belonged to some different ballet. As Odile, she was both minx and tornado. While she played most of the role with impressive seriousness, she showed none of this seductress's grand glamour. She also employed a largely Soviet version of the choreography, large, flashy, but without the small glittering steps that give it dimension. The result is relentless, lacking the contrasts of scale and amplitude of line that characterize Marius Petipa's original choreography. Even so, she's a force of nature; in the fouette turns, as well as in the multiple pirouettes of her solo variation, her sheer velocity, even violence, had something of the demonic. Her Prince Siegfried was Matthew Golding, who joined the Royal Ballet at much the same time she did. He would have Brad Pitt looks but for two things: He has what have been called bedroom eyes (narrow, never remotely showing their whites to the audience) and, when demonstrating nobility, he has a nervous habit of hoisting his jaw upward (as if to look haughty). Even so, he already has far more stage presence than in "The Sleeping Beauty" a year ago; and his dancing now demonstrates real brilliance and prowess. In several crucial respects, this "Swan Lake" (though this is to be its farewell season) is a yardstick for others, and not just in the large degree to which it is faithful to the records of the 1895 St. Petersburg production choreographed by Petipa and Lev Ivanov. The extent of mime in both lakeside scenes and the contributions of child swans in the first one (at two points ringing Odette's feet like supplicants) make "Swan Lake" far more textured; the world of the swan maidens becomes a layered society of mutual supportiveness and complex responsibility. More vital is the way the company makes that choreography suspenseful, musical and dramatically serious. Yolanda Sonnabend's sets and costumes make what many "Swan Lake" purists, myself included, consider a mistake in placing the ballet in late 19th century Russia. The mythic dimension of Arthurian chivalry is lost. Since the staging has had remarkable longevity, they have also encouraged many people to think "Swan Lake" occurs in a relatively recent historical era; a number of lesser productions have followed its lead in this respect.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Edith Shapiro was 36 when she and her husband, Nathan, moved in 1967 to a brand new rental building at 200 East 62nd Street. Back then, 725 per month got them a four bedroom duplex with four and a half baths. "It's a fabulous apartment," said Ms. Shapiro, who has remained there ever since, raising her daughter, developing her fashion design business and watching the rent climb. "It started going up and it kept going up," she said. "Then, after a while, it zoomed up. Now, it's 18,000 a month." There were two constants in the Shapiros' long, happy marriage: her pleas, in the face of that skyrocketing monthly obligation, to purchase a co op or condo already, and his steadfast refusal to do any such thing. "My husband didn't want to buy anything," said Ms. Shapiro, now 84. "He wanted to be liquid." Mr. Shapiro died six years ago. Recently, 200 East 62nd went condo, and Ms. Shapiro is now in contract to buy her duplex for more than 5 million, with her monthly costs "in the same ballpark" as when she was a renter, she said. "My friends ask me why at my age I'm buying," Ms. Shapiro added. "But I'm in good financial shape and I don't want to be the victim of any landlord again." As a senior debutante home buyer, Ms. Shapiro belongs to an exclusive club. The median age of first time buyers in 2015 was 31, according to the National Association of Realtors. Only 7 percent of newbies were in the 55 to 74 age group. Less than 1 percent of first timers were 75 and above. Later in life buyers in New York fall into several categories. Some, like Ms. Shapiro, have grown weary of landlord caprices. Some come into an inheritance and decide to put it into real estate. Still others come to the conclusion that their rent regulated apartment, while a boon in many ways, is also a trap, the real estate version of golden handcuffs. Then there are those who could have bought earlier, perhaps should have bought earlier and who suddenly bump up against that most ugly truth: They're not getting any younger. Better late than never. And better, in many ways, to buy in New York, where real estate values have only increased and where real estate taxes are low relative to many surrounding areas. And buying an apartment, rather than a house in the suburbs or the country, takes a lot of variables off the table a felled oak tree in the yard, a leaky roof, the snow removal costs of a rough winter. "As a shareholder or a condo owner, you know you'll have your real estate taxes and your maintenance or common charges," Ms. Braddock said. "And you know that, historically, maintenance increases by X amount annually. You can budget around those fixed costs." Josephine DeMichele and her husband, Gary Inzana, lived happily in the East Village for 10 years in a one bedroom rented to them by a friend. But in March 2014, "we got the horrible news that we had to vacate in three months," said Ms. DeMichele, 58, a creative director. "Our friend wanted the apartment for his son." In the end, they were given six months to clear out. Even so, the whole thing felt like a bad flashback: A decade earlier they'd been obliged to move out of their West Village rental in a similarly narrow time frame; the apartment had been sold out from under them. "We could have continued to rent, which was our M.O. in the past," said Mr. Inzana, 58, a web designer and developer. "But we were tired of having to leave places. We were tired of things being out of our control." Coincidentally, he and Ms. DeMichele had just started thinking about purchasing a weekend house that would become a full time residence when they retired. "We were already preparing to be in a buyer's mind set, so when we were notified by our landlord in the East Village, it was 'Stop the presses,' " Mr. Inzana said. The new headline: "Couple Begins Search for a Co op." After a fruitless hunt in both the East Village and the West Village, they found what they were looking for in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan: a two bedroom apartment with a gym in the building and access to the roof. The view of the river was a nice bonus. The price was under 700,000. And while Mr. Inzana is upset that "the weekend place isn't happening now," and while the couple are laying out a bit more per month than they did as renters, "we're getting so much more," Ms. DeMichele said. Being homeowners, she added, makes them feel even more connected to the city. "New York is in our blood," Ms. DeMichele said. "We probably could have gotten a bigger place in New Jersey or Connecticut, but we decided to stay here. And yes, we're barely in Manhattan. But I can still say we're in Manhattan. You didn't kick us out." Michelle Beshaw knows all about landlords exercising their prerogatives. She lived happily for 27 years in a two bedroom rent regulated walk up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The neighborhood was great and she could bike to her job as the manager of the gift shop at the Brooklyn Museum. But two years ago, when the landlord reclaimed the apartment for his daughter, Ms. Beshaw, 53, needed to find a new place to live. "Until the situation presented itself, this wasn't something I was dreaming of my entire life," said Ms. Beshaw, who is also a puppeteer. "But I'm very grateful to be an owner. "There's a financial maturity I have now that I didn't have earlier," she added. "Coming to New York from Iowa to be an artist, I think I convinced myself that I didn't need much as long as I was doing what I loved. That's sort of true, but it feels good to have a place I can afford that's really, really lovely." According to many in the real estate business, the "must have" and "no way" checklists of older first timers differ considerably from those of younger buyers making their initial foray into the market. Nicole Beauchamp, a saleswoman at the brokerage Engel Volkers New York City, said her older clients are less likely to consider walk ups, anticipating a time when they won't be able to walk up. And they may put a premium on an apartment with a live in super or a doorman. From a broker's perspective, she added, "there's more 'therapy' involved with older clients. They might find a space that works but they aren't familiar with the neighborhood and it's far from where their friends are. You have to help them decide if they want to reinvent themselves at this point in their lives." When Mr. Inzana and Ms. DeMichele had to clear out of their apartment in the West Village a decade ago, they had briefly checked out Washington Heights, where they're now happily settled. "At the time we thought, 'It's nice up here,' " Mr. Inzana recalled. "But it wasn't for us. We weren't old enough to live in the quiet parts of the city." It's true that many of their new neighbors are either pushing a stroller or a wheelchair, "but we've had the late nights and the lights and the hip scene," Mr. Inzana said. "We were willing to take a step forward and get away from emergency vehicles 24/7." Such was the case with Dr. Allen Wilkins, a physician who specializes in rehabilitative medicine and who, with his wife, Erica Wilkins, closed on a 1.64 million townhouse in Harlem this past August, right after his 50th birthday. "If I were younger I might be thinking, 'So we'll buy this place, raise our kids and then maybe sell and move somewhere else,' " Dr. Wilkins said. "But now I know I want to retire here." They are busy renovating. "We're looking at the big picture of spending the rest of our lives in this place, so we want to get it just right," he added. "We want to make it special, rather than just making it livable." Dr. Wilkins, who had a couple of lucrative careers before deciding to go to medical school, had the resources to buy a place in New York a few decades ago and had briefly considered doing just that. "The thing is," he said, "I hadn't yet met my wife." That situation was redressed when he married Erica, now 35, in 2009. Similar uncertainty in her personal life helps explain why Elena Castaneda held off buying until last year. "When I was in my 20s and 30s, I was thinking about how I shouldn't buy an apartment because I might have a partner, and I also didn't know if I was going to have children," said Ms. Castaneda, 56, the owner of the e commerce company Bling Jewelry. There was also the not so small matter of the one bedroom rent regulated apartment on East 84th Street that Ms. Castaneda had occupied for almost 30 years. "I used to think it was a blessing, but in hindsight I see it as more of a curse," she said. "It kept me from aggressively looking to buy something." Three years ago, frustrated by her tight quarters and buoyed by the success of her business, Ms. Castaneda began looking to buy. "At 50, your life has its direction," she said. "I had different needs at that point and it was much more about me and what my needs were than thinking about how other people were going to fit into the scenario." She insisted on a co op rather than a condo. "I didn't want to be next to an empty apartment that was somebody's investment, and I didn't want to be next door to an apartment that some parents had bought for their college kids to live in," Ms. Castaneda said. "They'd be having parties. While I would have wanted to be in that environment when I was younger, it doesn't interest me now." What she had in mind was an apartment that would make her happy for the long term in an amenity rich building on the Upper East Side. At this juncture, she said, she didn't want to pull up stakes and venture to a new part of town. And she wanted "to have an elevator man, having someone bring up your packages, being able to call someone to come fix something," she said. A three year search ended with the purchase, for more than 1.5 million, of a loft like penthouse with terraces and a skylight in the East 70s. Ms. Castaneda made a substantial down payment, yet another decision driven by the calendar. "When I was younger I would have put the minimal amount down and taken out a 30 year mortgage," she said. "But here it was 'O.K., this is my financial portfolio and I need to put a certain percentage of it into real estate. And I get to enjoy that investment.' " Now, she's busily buying art and light fixtures, expenditures she never would have made for a rental. She's not the only one. As soon as the apartment at 200 East 62nd is officially hers, Ms. Shapiro is going to convert one of the bedrooms into "a fabulous closet," she said, and add a Jacuzzi "and all the bells and whistles" to one of the bathrooms. "I'll make it grand for me." Mind you, Ms. Shapiro isn't thinking just of herself. "My daughter loves the apartment, too," she said. "She's going to want it on my demise. But I'm planning to live forever."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
MELBOURNE, Australia Still struggling with a hip injury that has limited him since June 2016, Andy Murray announced Friday that he would retire after this year's Wimbledon if not sooner. Murray said that his decision to end his playing career this year had come during his off season training in December. "I spoke to my team, and I told them, 'I cannot keep doing this,'" Murray said in an emotional news conference in Melbourne. "I needed to have an end point because I was sort of playing with no idea when the pain was going to stop. I felt like making that decision. Murray, 31, became the first British male singles champion at a Grand Slam tournament in 76 years when he won the United States Open in 2012. He won Wimbledon in 2013 and 2016 and won Olympic gold medals in singles in 2012 and 2016. Murray reached the ATP's No. 1 ranking for the first time at the end of the 2016 season, holding on to it through Wimbledon the next year. A counterpuncher who wears down opponents through his elite physicality and guile, Murray earned a reputation as one of the hardest working players of his generation. He is popular among his peers for an off court affability that provided a striking contrast from his often ornery on court demeanor. Murray was particularly admired by many in women's tennis for his vocal support of their tour and his decision to hire Amelie Mauresmo as his coach in 2014. Andrea Petkovic said that she had been an admirer of Murray "even before he kind of became WTA's darling." "He was always my favorite, and I think it will be a huge loss for tennis in general, but also for the WTA," Petkovic added. "Because even nowadays, when you think everything is equal, you still need men, especially successful men, to speak up for women." Though often in the shadow of the others in the Big Four of men's tennis Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal Murray is considered by many the greatest sportsman in Scottish history. He was knighted at 29. Just two years later, with a ranking of 230 after the injury layoff, Murray accepted his mortality in the sport. The weight of the decision was obvious in his news conference on Friday, when he broke down after the opening question: "How are you feeling, and how is the hip injury?" "Yeah, not great," Murray said, his voice quavering. He then sighed and let his emotions flood in, and left the interview room for about three minutes to compose himself. "Yeah, not feeling good," he said when he returned. "Obviously, I've been struggling for a long time. I have been in a lot of pain. Well, it's been probably about 20 months now. "I have pretty much done everything that I could to try and get my hip feeling better, and it hasn't helped loads. I'm in a better place than I was six months ago but still in a lot of pain. Yeah, it has been tough." Murray said he still planned to play at the Australian Open, where he is a five time runner up. His first match will be Monday against 22nd seeded Roberto Bautista Agut. Murray's outlook in Melbourne looked bleak even before his announcement. In a practice match Thursday, Murray was thrashed by his longtime rival Djokovic, who led 6 1, 4 1, before their time slot on the court ended. "I can still play to a level not a level that I'm happy playing at," Murray said on Friday. "It's not just that: The pain is too much, really. I don't want to continue playing that way. I think I have tried pretty much everything I could to get it right, and that hasn't worked." Murray had hip surgery last January, and he said he had seen his Melbourne based surgeon on Thursday. He said that although the operation had helped, it had not alleviated his pain, which he said had been the "driving factor" in his decision. "I can play with limitations, that's not an issue," Murray said. "It's having the limitations, and also the pain is not allowing me to enjoy competing, training or any of the stuff I love about tennis." Asked if the Australian Open could be his last tournament, Murray paused and wiped away tears again. "There's a chance of that, for sure," he said. "Yeah, like I said, I am not sure I am able to play through the pain for another four or five months." Murray said that his injury had also taken an emotional toll. "I have talked a lot, way too much, about my hip for 18 months," Murray said. "It's a daily thing. It isn't just people I work with that ask me; it's everyone. So everyone I bump into, that is all I talk about it. It's pretty draining."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon in the current Broadway revival of "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune." To make the actors comfortable, the director of "Frankie and Johnny" brought in an expert in staging sex scenes Broadway's first, and certainly not its last. Naked on a Broadway stage, Audra McDonald is on high alert, all of her senses sharpened. She likens it to a fight or flight response, and it happens eight shows a week: her body's reaction to being so exposed, center stage in a 1,200 seat house. "Maybe strippers get real used to it," she said recently in her dressing room at the Broadhurst Theater, "but for me there's nothing normal about that. So there's nowhere in my mind that I can drift off and let this just kind of happen, because everything about it is demanding that you be present." Opposite Michael Shannon as the lonely, damaged Johnny, Ms. McDonald plays the broken Frankie in Terrence McNally's 1987 two hander, "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune," which opens with the graphic sexual ecstasy of the couple nearing climax. Then Frankie tumbles, laughing, from the bed. Surely the scene has always been delicate to stage, but perhaps particularly now, with the post MeToo heightening of sensitivities about the potential for exploitation of actors, especially women. It's partly thanks to that same movement, though, that the nascent field of intimacy direction is taking off. Now, with "Frankie and Johnny," it's come to Broadway. "There's just such a history of actors being forced or pushed or asked to do things that they don't feel good about," said the revival's director, Arin Arbus. She worried that the show's demands on Ms. McDonald and Mr. Shannon "could be problematic. And I knew it could be really scary, for both of them." So she got in touch with the three year old Intimacy Directors International, which pointed her to Claire Warden. A warm, unflappable Guernsey native and veteran fight director, she has no patience for the idea that an actor might manage to hit his mark, stay in the light, angle his face perfectly, yet get so lost in the moment that he whoops! unexpectedly gropes a colleague in a romantic scene. "That's not acting," she said. "That's having an episode." Ms. McDonald who at 48 has six Tony Awards, one of them for Mr. McNally's "Master Class" had never had a nude scene onstage until she played Frankie. The prospect frightened her from the moment she took the role, and when Ms. Arbus floated hiring an intimacy director, Ms. McDonald was all for it. She had done sex scenes before, though, including one with Woody Harrelson for the 2011 movie "Rampart." "It was literally like, 'Hi, nice to meet you, I'm Woody,' 'Hi, nice to meet you, I'm Audra,' and then," she said, clapping her hands together, "we started shooting. Everybody was as professional as they could be about it, but there was something that was a little bit" she paused a long moment to choose the next word "horrifying, that it was just: Who's helping us figure out what to do?" For approximately ever, expecting performers to improvise was a widely accepted practice. It's only in the last couple of years that helping them through it has become the work of intimacy directors. One of the first things Ms. Warden does on a show is talk privately, one on one, with the actors, to learn what they're uncomfortable with or anxious about. ("It's kind of like going to confession," Mr. Shannon said.) If there's a place where they don't want to be touched, or a part of their body that they don't want to be seen, she will defend that boundary for them. As she creates a choreography that achieves what the director needs for the production while ensuring it can be done safely, she includes nothing that fails to get the actors' "enthusiastic consent." Any response short of that she considers a no, and respects as such. "There's a lot of talk about making actors comfortable," said Ms. Warden, who choreographed the intimate moments of the most explicit productions Off Broadway last season, "'Daddy'" and "Slave Play"; has two more Broadway projects lined up; and also works in film and television. The last time Ms. McDonald was on Broadway, in the 2016 musical "Shuffle Along," the production coincided with one of those major moments in life that she and her husband, the actor Will Swenson, jokingly call "plot twists": Unexpectedly, she was pregnant. That October, she gave birth to her second child. "I never in a million years would've thought that, three years later, just: in the buff," she said of her Broadway return. "The crazy thing is, too, I'm still nursing. It's been a very wild sort of experience to be literally teetering on perimenopause, naked onstage and still nursing my child through the night most nights." The nudity is always an attention getter in "Frankie and Johnny," the rare play that puts middle aged physiques on display. Ms. McDonald didn't know as she prepared for the role how she would find the bravery to do it especially after she watched a videotape of Kathy Bates as the original Frankie. She remembers telling herself, "Don't be vain, Audra, because playing Frankie is not about her being beautiful. It's not about her body being perfect." Still, she was cautious, and Ms. Arbus allowed her to ease in. It wasn't until the show had moved into the theater and started technical rehearsals that Ms. McDonald and Mr. Shannon at last removed their clothes a step that Ms. Warden said she doesn't believe in rushing anyway. Natasha Katz, the Tony winning lighting designer, was one of only four other people allowed in the house that first day. She'd promised Ms. McDonald that she would take care of her, and she has, bathing the set in moody light that gives the actors someplace to hide. "What I always say about sex scenes, my dumb joke about them," Mr. Shannon said, "is that they really are like sex. They have all the confusion and loneliness and anxiety and despair, just none of the pleasure." It's a pretty smart joke, actually, and as he talked about the practicalities of performing those scenes, he stripped away the illusion of eroticism that they're meant to create. Such as: Getting his clothes off and scrambling into bed during the blackout at the top of the show, while Ms. McDonald climbs in from the other side, is fraught with logistical challenges. "There's been a couple of times where we've bumped heads," he said. "There was one time where I was convinced I had a bloody lip. Thank God it wasn't. It just hurt." But physical hazards are one thing. As respectfully as Mr. Shannon spoke of his colleagues, and of the process that Ms. Warden has used, he was gruff when it came to the notion of anyone looking out for his emotional well being even on a job that makes him "incredibly vulnerable," as he acknowledged that playing Johnny does. He and Ms. McDonald differ in their enthusiasm, for example, about protocols that intimacy directors teach to protect against "showmances," where actors get romantically involved offstage something that Ms. Warden said happens partly because performing a physical action convinces both the body and the psyche that it's real. So she has actors "tap in" and "tap out" of scenes in rehearsal, to formally separate art from life. "Intimacy directors, I think," Ms. McDonald said, "are going to be able to save many relationships and marriages down the road in theater and in film." Mr. Shannon, though, thinks that kind of safeguard might be more applicable to younger people. "The irony of Audra and I doing this play," he said, "is we're both married with children, domesticated. Our kind of crazy days are behind us." Which doesn't mean he can't see the value of an intimacy director. "I really did appreciate being able to have Claire, just to talk to," he said. "But I'm not going to lie. Most of what I said to Claire was 'I just want Audra to be comfortable.' " Here's the thing, though. Whole generations of actors have been trained to believe that the only acceptable answer to a performance challenge no matter how unsafe it might be, physically or emotionally is yes. Drawing a red line is not an option. Intimacy directors would like, urgently, to make it one. "We are having to, at a fundamental level, subvert the conditioning that all actors are put through right from like, high school acting which is that no is a dangerous word," Ms. Warden said. "We're subliminally told and conditioned that if I say no to anything I'm being the diva. Or I'm not dedicated enough. Or I don't want it enough." Boundaries, she insists, can be beneficial to the work not only because they allow actors to feel secure enough to perform at their best, but also because they can amp a show's artistry.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
PHILADELPHIA Peter Fader, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has long yearned for the city life. For 20 years, though, he and his wife, Mina, have deferred that dream, living in a Philadelphia suburb to raise their two children in a 3,500 square foot home. That will change this month, when the couple with the children grown and gone moves into a new luxury high rise in the heart of Philadelphia. They will have expansive 11th floor views, an easy walk to the shops, restaurants and cultural attractions of downtown and a car free commute to work. The Faders are like many other empty nesters in their 50s and 60s, as well as young professionals, helping fuel a boom in multifamily housing in the country's big cities. The growth has been so strong, for so long, that some leading economists have started warning about overdevelopment, worried that flattening prices could leave builders struggling to pay their debts. But developers do not appear to be pulling back, no matter the warnings, believing that there are many more people like the Faders. In a sign that the supply of housing will continue to swell in coming months, the number of building permits, a forward looking indicator, rose 5.7 percent in April compared with a year earlier, the Census Bureau said. "It's exploding," said Ron Caplan, the president of PMC Property Group, a Philadelphia based developer of rental properties in markets including Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Columbia, S.C., referring to the growth in demand for urban residential rentals. Mr. Caplan said that his company's experience was at odds with the fears about overbuilding. "So far the development that we've done has been embraced by a continuing larger population," he said. "We have found that the buildings continue to fill up." In Baltimore, PMC just finished work on a downtown apartment building that has been leased at the quickest rate Mr. Caplan has seen since starting the company in 1981. He expects the property to be fully leased in six months, about twice as fast as is typical. He attributed the surging demand to the increasing livability of downtown areas that were once rife with crime and poverty but that have become more appealing with the influx of new residents who are educated, professional and often wealthy. "What they have discovered is that it's a lot more fun being social than it is going home at the end of the day, closing the door and watching television," Mr. Caplan said. In Seattle, Lake Union Partners, a local developer, has built seven rental apartment houses since 2012 for a total investment of about 200 million, with a vacancy rate of 4 percent, said Joe Ferguson, the company's principal. Mr. Ferguson said that the market was being driven by vigorous hiring by major employers, including Amazon and Microsoft, and by employees' increasing willingness to move to previously marginal areas like Pioneer Square, Seattle's oldest neighborhood. The employers include Weyerhaeuser, a lumber company, which has responded to the influx of young adults by moving from a suburban location about 40 minutes south of downtown Seattle to a new building in Pioneer Square. "They are doing this because they are having to compete for a lot of the same talent as the tech companies and other major employers who are recruiting at the same time," he said. "They want to offer something that's attractive to their future employees." In the Milwaukee area, some baby boomers are moving into the downtown area from the suburbs, encouraged by suburban housing prices that have finally recovered from the 2008 9 crash, said Barry Mandel, the president of Mandel Group, a developer of multifamily buildings. Some of the boomers are buying condos while others are opting to rent city properties and preserve the capital from the sale of their houses. Other older clients are driving the construction of urban enclaves, or "nodes," within suburban developments, where suburban amenities like shops, restaurants and religious institutions are available within walking distance of people's homes, Mr. Mandel said. The "nodes" are in strong demand from buyers in their 40s and older, Mr. Mandel said, noting that one such development was 100 percent leased before construction ended about 18 months ago, while demand in another community was unexpectedly strong. While suburbanites may welcome the opportunity to sell their lawn mowers or donate clothing to charity when moving to city apartments, there are limits to their zeal for downsizing, said Carl Dranoff, the developer of Philadelphia's One Riverside building, where the Faders are moving. The 82 apartments originally planned for One Riverside, a 22 story building, have been reduced to 68, the result of combining some units for buyers who wanted more space after years in the suburbs, Mr. Dranoff said. By the official opening on May 2, 80 percent of the building the first newly constructed condo tower in central Philadelphia for seven years had been sold. The building, offering marble counters, private balconies, and river views, sells 1,000 to 1,100 square foot apartments for 1.5 million to 2 million, Mr. Dranoff said. A 2,500 square foot unit costs from 2.5 million to 2.8 million. While such prices are beyond the reach of most buyers, they are contributing to a citywide erosion in affordability, and mirror the trend in other big cities, said Rick Sauer, the executive director of the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations, which advocates affordable housing, among other causes. "There is a larger impact on the overall cost of housing in the city," Mr. Sauer said. "While there's new housing stock being created on the high end in particular to respond to the demand, over all what you are seeing is that housing costs in the city are going up very significantly." At One Riverside, the Faders recognized that the building met many of their long term goals for city living and jumped at the chance to buy. "It's the last place we're ever going to buy we're here for keeps," Professor Fader said. "We are all in on the condo because the city has so much to offer."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
A European Russian mission to put a rover on Mars and look for signs of life there has been postponed, to 2022. Most parts of the mission including the rocket and the rover, named Rosalind Franklin, are ready. But not enough time remains before the launch opportunity in July to complete tests of the parachutes, fix issues with an electronics module and finish the spacecraft's software. "We could launch, but that would mean we are not doing all the tests," Jan Woerner, the director general of the European Space Agency, said during a news conference on Thursday morning where the decision was announced. "We cannot really cut corners." Dr. Woerner and Mr. Rogozin discussed the status of the mission by teleconference before deciding on the delay; because of the pandemic, Dr. Woerner canceled plans to meet in person with Mr. Rogozin in Moscow. "This is a very tough decision, but it's, I'm sure, the right one," Dr. Woerner said. The positions of Mars and Earth line up every 26 months, allowing a relatively quick trip. Missing that alignment means that the mission will stay on the ground until the next opportunity between August and October 2022. The ExoMars program has persisted through more than a decade of starts and stops and shifts in plans. Originally, it was a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA, with NASA providing the rockets and the landing system, similar to what was used to put NASA's Curiosity rover on Martian ground in 2012. But in February 2012, the Obama administration pulled out of the plans, partly to pay for delays and cost overruns with the James Webb Space Telescope. The Europeans then turned to Russia. The first half of the ExoMars program, the Trace Gas Orbiter, launched in March 2016 on a Russian Proton rocket. It entered orbit around Mars seven months later and continues to operate. But the accompanying lander, Schiaparelli, crashed after a sensor error caused the spacecraft to jettison its parachute too early because it thought it was already on the ground instead of still two miles in the air. The ExoMars rover, which will use a different landing system, was originally scheduled to launch in 2018, but that launch window was missed because of delays in the completion of the spacecraft and the instruments. Some NASA Mars missions have also missed launch windows. Curiosity was to have launched in 2009 but was pushed back two years because of problems with electrical motors. Problems with a key instrument on Mars InSight delayed its launch to 2018 from 2016. Both eventually landed on Mars successfully. The thin atmosphere of Mars makes landing particularly tricky, requiring careful testing of parachutes and other systems used to reach the surface. There is not enough air to provide much drag on the spacecraft as it speeds to the ground, although what's there still generates friction that heats the exterior of a spacecraft to thousands of degrees. Two earlier European landers the Beagle 2 in 2003 and Schiaparelli in 2016 failed. A number of Soviet landing attempts in the 1970s also failed. Only NASA has been able to successfully operate robotic spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Last year, the parachutes for the ExoMars mission one that is 50 feet wide to deploy at supersonic speeds in the Martian atmosphere, and a second, 120 foot wide one that would billow out at subsonic speeds failed in tests. With NASA's help, the problems with the ExoMars parachutes were diagnosed and additional tests are planned for this month.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
"An artist and an activist are not so far apart." In Her Words is available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. They might depict scenes from decades past, but movie sets featured in films by the director Ava DuVernay are starting to look a lot like the United States today. For "Selma," her 2014 film about the 1965 marches for voting rights and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s part in them, Ms. DuVernay directed hundreds of Black and white actors in a restaging of civil rights protests. "When They See Us," her mini series on the wrongful conviction of teenage boys known as the Central Park Five, released last year, had her grappling with the injustices Black men experience at the hands of the police. And her Netflix documentary "13th," from 2016, traces the legacy of American slavery to the present day criminalization of Black communities. As hundreds of thousands across the United States march for Black Lives Matter, Ms. DuVernay's films about Black histories and experiences have come to feel more essential than ever. But there aren't enough Black directors telling those stories. For decades, few Black women have had access to the resources and platforms to make major motion pictures. In 2018, Hollywood saw a record high number of top films from Black directors and it was only 14 percent. Only one of them was a woman, and she was Ms. DuVernay. The calls to break up Hollywood's entrenched disparities are building. Five years ago, the hashtag OscarsSoWhite put a spotlight on the industry's lack of diversity, and its following has since continued to hold Hollywood to account for its lack of representation. Two years later, the MeToo movement erupted and dozens of women exposed the film titan Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuses. Today, industry leaders are listening to people of color protesting films that romanticize the slavery era. For a brief moment, "Gone With the Wind," the highest grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation, was removed from HBO Max. (It was later restored with additional videos offering historical context.) Filmmakers, like Ms. DuVernay, are working to ensure the momentum does not subside. Last month, Ms. DuVernay's media company ARRAY introduced the Law Enforcement Accountability Project in the wake of George Floyd's killing while in police custody in Minneapolis, with the goal of commissioning, funding and amplifying works from Black and female artists that focus on police violence. One of the goals, she said, is to consider who is writing the history of this moment. Ms. DuVernay spoke with In Her Words about the role she sees for artists in a time of widespread unrest, and whether problematic films like problematic statues should be removed to make space for new voices. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. We're in a moment of upheaval hundreds of thousands marching, a pandemic, an upcoming U.S. presidential election. What's the role of storytelling in this moment? The story has been told from one point of view for too long. And when we say story, I don't just mean film or television. I mean the stories we embrace as part of the criminalization of Black people. Every time an officer writes a police report about an incident, they're telling a story. Look at the case of Breonna Taylor and her police report. They had nothing on it; it said she had no injuries. That is a story of those officers saying, "Nothing to look at here, nothing happened." But that's not the story that happened because if she could speak for herself, she would say, "I was shot in the dark on a no knock warrant in my bed." So when you think of her story and multiply that times hundreds of thousands of people over the years in communities of color, specifically Black communities, a single story line has led the day and we need to change that story line. And to do that, you have to change who the storytellers are. This is a moment of grief and rage for so many. How can those emotions be translated into art? The answer to your question for me personally was the creation of our Law Enforcement Accountability Project LEAP which uses art to hold police accountable. It links to the idea that an artist and an activist are not so far apart. Whether you call yourself an activist or not, artists use their imagination to envision a world that does not exist and make it so. Activists use their imagination to envision a world that does not exist and make it so. Today's movement against police violence was, in large part, prompted by the killing of George Floyd when it was captured on video. When did you first make the connection between film and social action? I began to make the link between art and social action in high school when I went to my first Amnesty International concert. It was the first time that I, a girl from Compton, started to link the things that I was experiencing to the wider world through music, and what was being said in those lyrics. And then as I got to college, I started to watch films like "The Battle of Algiers" and the work of Haile Gerima, an Ethiopian filmmaker, and started to see the link between images, film and social justice, and what's possible in storytelling. You were nominated for an Academy Award for best picture the same year that you helped start the movement OscarsSoWhite. What are the challenges of changing an institution or community that you're deeply a part of? It's a system that I work within. It's not a community as it relates to the problem you're talking about. It's a system like the criminal justice system. It's a system like the health care system, the education system. It is the Hollywood system, the entertainment system, the way we create images. It's a system that is over a hundred years old, and it's built on a foundation of racism, exclusion and patriarchy. So, at this point, I think of it less like "rally the community," or "how do you change people's minds." Changing people's minds doesn't matter if those changed minds are working within a system that's still diseased. It's just a Band Aid. So the way I approach it is, yes, you want to create awareness, you want to educate people, you want to make people be less ignorant to the nuances of living in skin of color and as a woman but, ultimately, the systems that we all work in are harmful to a healthy industry. We need to be thinking more broadly about how we not just reform that system but rebuild the system. You once called Hollywood "a patriarchy, headed by men and built for men." One year after you said that, the MeToo movement was introduced to take down some of Hollywood's worst abusers. Are you optimistic about the industry's future? I'm hopeful about everything in the world because I believe in the power of people. I'm a student of history, and there's too much precedent to be hopeless. I understand there is a way forward, and the way forward is as a united front. You're seeing some of that right now. Whenever you get enough people with enough energy behind it, that's power exerted. Let's talk about "Gone With the Wind." Statues are being torn down. Should films like this be erased from the canon, or are they important in some way? I don't think the film should be erased from the canon, because then you erase past sins those cannot be erased. The damage that was done, the foundational elements of that film that seeped into cinematic culture worldwide, I don't think you want to erase those. But I do think you need to give context to them so that they aren't used as propaganda for ideas that are poison to our culture. They're really a lesson on our dark past and what we need to do to get past it. So I feel like contextualizing these films is important. Now film is different from statues commemorating murderers and traitors to the country who wanted to see human beings enslaved. An artist who decided to promote a certain narrative about the inferiority of certain people is different from a monument to murderers. I think these monuments should come down and the films should have context. Many people in the United States are just beginning the fight for racial and social justice. You've been in this battle a long time. What's your advice for sustaining the fight long term?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
LONDON One of Europe's leading museums has devoted its biggest show of the season to someone who saw the future more clearly than any artist of his century. He was a restless traveler and a keen student of anatomy who danced across the boundaries of art and science. He blended ancient religion with new forms of representation, and sketched strange new machines that would be realized long after his death. You thought I meant that lefty at the Louvre? Forget Leonardo: I'm talking about the Korean American conjurer Nam June Paik (1932 2006), who appears as pioneering as ever in a broad retrospective at Tate Modern in London, and more urgent than ever as a defender of human life in a world dominated by technology. Capsule bios call Paik the "father of video art" and he almost certainly invented the medium in 1965, when he shot footage of a papal procession with the first Sony Portapak to reach the United States. You'll find all of that nifty stuff at the Tate exhibition, which includes more than 200 works and culminates with Paik's imposing 34 projector installation "Sistine Chapel," presented for the first time since its debut at the Venice Biennale of 1993. (The show tours next year to Amsterdam and Chicago, and in 2021 to San Francisco and Singapore.) Even more important than what Paik made, though, is how he thought, spoke and wrote about art and technology. Decades before Snapchat and Instagram, Paik became the first major artist to foresee how mass media would give way to multidirectional communication. Long before Skype and Google Hangouts, he masterminded global satellite transmissions that allowed artists to collaborate across oceans collected in a joyous gallery at Tate Modern, featuring Paik's live television broadcasts with David Bowie, Oingo Boingo and rockers from what were then Leningrad and Peking. And when other artists still used video merely for documentation, and treated mass media as at best a target for criticism, Paik correctly foresaw that the exclusionary mechanisms of high culture were on their last legs. The art gallery would be superseded by a worldwide network of images and voices that he called, two decades before Al Gore took up the phrase, an "electronic superhighway." Paik was born in 1932 in Japanese occupied Seoul; he studied musical composition in Japan and later in West Germany, where he met the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and fell in with the zany experimental artists of the Fluxus movement. The European avant gardes of the mid 1950s were besotted with Zen Buddhism, and Paik, who filled notebooks with gleanings from Asian philosophy, began writing compositions and staging performances that could be meditative, paradoxical or just plain weird. In his 1962 performance "Zen for Head," seen at the Tate in a video reel of a chaotic Fluxus night at the theater, Paik slathered his hair with ink and painted a long black track on a scroll on the ground. The next year, he filled a villa in the German city of Wuppertal with detuned and junk stuffed pianos, a record player with a dildo instead of a tonearm and the head of a freshly slaughtered ox. As Marcel Duchamp had done with a urinal 45 years previously, Paik turned the television on its side, and baptized it "Zen for TV" the first of many artworks in which broadcasts, recordings or transmission glitches transformed the possibilities of sculpture. Magnets affixed to televisions turned President Richard Nixon into a spiral shaped ghoul. A CCTV camera trained on an 18th century statuette of the Buddha found a place for the spiritual amid the vapidities of broadcast. And with his "video synthesizer," a machine that he and the engineer Shuya Abe invented in 1969 (a hulking prototype is in a gallery at the Tate), Paik could interrupt the logic of television itself blending together multiple video sources that he could edit, distort, colorize and interweave in real time. The greatest of his distorted videos was "Global Groove" (1973), a half hour video collage that blends Nixon and Cage, Korean musicians and rhythm and blues dancers, into a cascade of psychedelic imagery that overturned television's commercial objectives. In the mid 1960s, he collaborated with scientists at Bell Labs, where he created a few purely digital works with early computers. Yet Paik quickly figured out that art could not be contained within rigidities of code. The artist's role was not to embrace technology wholesale, he felt, but to maintain a place for the human amid media transmissions and digital flows. In this he and Charlotte Moorman, the intrepid cellist who became Paik's greatest artistic partner, offered perhaps the most important examples of the last century of how to integrate new technologies into art. Novelty isn't everything in art. Time rolls back and forth; styles repeat, echo, remix; some innovations turn out to be dead ends. And for a man so innovative, Paik also made an above average quantity of junk. At the Tate, "Global Groove" and the "TV Cello" share space with cheesy jokes and dreary shamanistic installations. Certainly Paik's collaborations with the German artist Joseph Beuys, such as a straw filled Mongolian yurt meant for glib East meets West rituals, have aged very badly. But if you judge this show on the up and down quality of each gallery, you'll miss the full force of his achievement. What mattered to Paik was not the creation of stand alone masterpieces, but the establishment of better, fresher, more democratic modes of communication. That is present above all in the glorious gallery titled "Transmission," which screens his ambitious live performances from the 1980s, originally broadcast by satellite to stations worldwide. I look to Nam June Paik to remember that it didn't have to be this way, and that smartphones and social media were not predestined to become extractive technologies, turning human experience into data and then into profit. Within the flows and counterflows of digital communication some spark of opportunity endures, and we can still chart a path to human freedom if we reroute them as thoroughly as he did broadcast television. Livestreamers of the world, unite! A global groove is possible!	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
THE GOOD DOCTOR 10 p.m. on ABC. In the second part of the season finale, the doctors at San Jose St. Bonaventure Hospital continue to respond to the major earthquake that rocked their city. The crisis is testing their ingenuity and pushing their personal issues to the surface. Dr. Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore), the protagonist of the series, is still reeling from his latest rejection by Lea (Paige Spara), who cited Shaun's autism as a reason not to pursue a romantic relationship with him. Undeterred, he revealed in the last episode that he hadn't lost hope. Lea, who was trapped after the earthquake hit and eventually rescued, overheard Shaun's comments and responded emotionally. But before they could address them, an aftershock left Shaun stranded with a patient in the flooding basement of a collapsed building. THE SCHOUWENDAM 12 Stream on Acorn TV. The second installment of Lex Passchier and Martin van Steijn's "The 12" anthology series focuses on a Dutch village haunted by the unsolved disappearance of two teenagers in 1995. This mystery is reignited when a man in his 40s who bears a striking resemblance to Olaf, one of the missing teens, shows up in Schouwendam. The new arrival claims to not know his own identity. Prodded by the suspicions of the villagers, he starts to look into his connection to the lost Olaf in a bid to recover his memory. This follow up to "The Oldenheim 12" is linked to its predecessor by its shared focus on dark underbelly of small town life. TIP TOP (2014) Stream on Mubi. Rent on Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. This film by Serge Bozon is two parts deadpan farce, one part conceptual mystery. Adapted from a novel of the same name by Bill James, it blends features of screwball comedy and film noir to reflect on the legacy of French colonialism and contemporary sexual mores. Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain star as Internal Affairs investigators charged with determining whether or not the police were involved in the murder of an Algerian informant. Both sleuths have secrets of their own. Sally (Kiberlain) is a compulsive voyeur who was demoted because of her proclivities, and Esther (Huppert) has a penchant for sadomasochism. THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964) Stream on the Criterion Channel. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and YouTube. In this movie, Jacques Demy manages to synthesize the emotional earnestness of the American musical with the adventurous cinematic spirit that was circulating among younger French filmmakers during the 1950s and '60s. Bursting with color, sung throughout and driven by Michel Legrand's music, it tells the tragic love story of a young couple torn apart by the Algerian War. Before he's drafted to fight, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) and Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) make plans to marry. When their wartime correspondence lags, a pregnant Genevieve accepts a marriage proposal from a kind and wealthy suitor at the urging of her mother. After returning to civilian life and learning of Genevieve's decision, Guy also tries to move on.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
WASHINGTON Federal Reserve officials left interest rates unchanged at their first meeting of 2020 on Wednesday, upholding their patient stance after an active, and often tumultuous, 2019. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, walked a careful line in his post meeting news conference, painting a picture of a solid economy that is fueled by strong job gains and a confident consumer willing to spend. But he noted that global risks remain, including the outbreak of a deadly new Coronavirus and price gains remain surprisingly soft. Fed officials, whose job is to maintain both full employment and stable inflation, think the current economic situation merits a wait and see approach before they adjust rates again. The federal funds rate is currently set in a 1.5 to 1.75 percent range, and the decision to keep it steady was unanimous. That patient approach contrasts sharply with the Fed's experience in the second half of last year. The Fed cut borrowing costs three times from July to October as trade tensions and slowing global growth weighed on the economic outlook. That move itself marked a pivot from 2018, when the Fed was steadily raising rates to fend off higher inflation as unemployment sank steadily lower. Mr. Powell has now signaled that the central bank does not plan move policy in either direction unless something fundamentally shifts. Central bankers do not expect to cut interest rates as long as the economy shapes up as expected, and do not intend to raise them unless inflation moves up and stays there. That is unlikely to sit well with President Trump, who has been pushing the central bank to slash rates further. In a tweet on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said "the Fed should get smart lower the Rate," arguing that comparatively high rates in the United States are putting the country at a disadvantage. The central bank does not answer to the White House, and officials regularly reiterate that they set a policy with an eye toward their twin goals, which are given to them by Congress. But they are facing a complicated backdrop when it comes to achieving those targets. Expectations of a global growth turnaround have been climbing, helped along by an initial trade deal between the United States and China that brings some certainty and forestalls additional tariffs between the world's largest economies. Mr. Trump also signed a revised North American Free Trade Agreement on Wednesday, bringing more than two years of fraught negotiations to a close. But those positive signs could be dampened by the outbreak of the new coronavirus, which is forcing quarantines in China, shuttering multinational operations in the country and causing nervousness around the world. Mr. Powell pointed to the new virus as a potential economic threat at his news conference, though he said it was too early to know what its macroeconomic effect would be. "It's a very serious issue," Mr. Powell said. "There is likely to be some disruption to activity in China and perhaps globally," he said, adding that the Fed was "very carefully monitoring the situation." The chair also noted other persistent weak spots, including soft business investment and exports, which he attributed to "sluggish growth abroad and trade developments." Manufacturing is also continuing to see a falloff, though Mr. Powell suggested that weakness might be bottoming out. "It hasn't gone away," Mr. Powell said of trade uncertainty. "We need to be a little bit patient about the effect on the economy." Mr. Powell struck an optimistic tone about the United States economy overall, pointing out that employers are still hiring and unemployment continues to hover near a half century low. But he sounded cautious about inflation, which continues to fall short of the Fed's 2 percent target. It has not hit that rate of change sustainably since the central bank formally adopted the goal in 2012. The annual price increase, as measured by the Fed's favored index, came in at just 1.5 percent in November. While sluggish price gains might sound positive, the Fed sees steady, gradual increases as better for the economy. Weak inflation leaves officials with less room to cut rates which include price increases in a downturn. And if consumers begin to expect slower increases, that outlook could become self fulfilling, dragging inflation down further. Fed policymakers themselves do not expect it to eclipse 2 percent this year, based on their most recent set of economic projections. 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." Mr. Powell said the Fed was "not comfortable with inflation running persistently below our 2 percent symmetric objective." "In theory, inflation should be moving up," he added, given that the United States economy is in its 11th year of an expansion and unemployment is very low, at 3.5 percent. If inflation expectations slipped and dragged actual increases lower, "we would have less room to reduce interest rates to support the economy in a future downturn, to the detriment of American families and businesses," Mr. Powell said Wednesday. Some analysts interpreted his wary tone as a sign that the Fed was still oriented more toward cutting rates than raising them. In a purely technical tweak, the central bank did nudge up the interest rates it pays on excess reserves bank deposits stashed at the Fed. The move was meant to keep the Fed funds rate trading within its target range. It also affirmed that it will continue purchasing Treasury bills "at least into" the second quarter of 2020. It has been purchasing short term Treasury securities at a pace of 60 billion per month since October in a bid to keep the financial system flush with cash and to prevent money market ruptures, like one that reared its head in the repurchase market or repo market in September. Fed officials, in a note released Wednesday, said the ultimate goal was to "maintain over time ample reserve balances at or above the level that prevailed in early September 2019." The Fed said it would continue to conduct operations in the repo market "through April 2020 to ensure that the supply of reserves remains ample" even in stressful periods. The Fed has repeatedly said its ongoing interventions are not the type of mass bond buying programs the central bank used to prop up the economy during and after the Great Recession. While those programs, known as quantitative easing, were meant to bolster the economy, the new interventions have been structured differently and are simply meant to fix a market plumbing problem. Investors have turned a skeptical eye on that claim, and equity analysts regularly argue that the purchases are pushing up stock prices, as markets take a cue from the Fed to buy. Mr. Powell declined to speculate on whether that was the case in his comments, saying that "it's very hard to say what is affecting financial markets with any precision or confidence at a given time."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
The director Kamilah Forbes and cast during the filming of "Between the World and Me." Back in August, when Covid 19 had loosened its chokehold on New York City, the director Kamilah Forbes and various cast and crew members gathered in Central Park for a location shoot, one of the first the city had allowed. It was the final week of filming for "Between the World and Me," a television special based on Ta Nehisi Coates's memoir, a meditation on the history and lived experience of Black people in America. Near the park's Ramble, an actress dressed as Amy Cooper the white woman who in May called emergency services to complain, fraudulently, that a Black bird watcher had threatened her played with a three legged dog. A Covid coordinator distributed nitrile gloves and squirts from a tub of hand sanitizer. Hairdressers and makeup artists hovered in plastic ponchos and face shields. A production assistant safeguarded a wheeled cart piled with camera equipment. Officials from the Central Park Conservancy, two of whom stood muttering nearby, had approved the shoot with the stipulation that it not block any pathways. So other assistants had to urge passers by not to walk in front of the camera. At least a dozen people, mostly white, refused, disinclined to allow the production team mostly people of color, mostly women to claim the space they needed. Which felt like a metaphor. "Between the World and Me," an amalgam of animation, music, archival video and monologues, will premiere on HBO on Saturday. An 80 minute special with a superlative cast Oprah Winfrey! Mahershala Ali! Angela Davis! it has the grave and unenviable responsibility of illuminating the violence of systemic racism for millions of potential viewers. It asks of them all, even the ones who won't get out of the way, what the book's narrator asks of his son: to become conscious citizens of this beautiful and terrible world. "Between the World and Me," a slim volume framed as a letter from Coates to his teenage son, Samori, arrived on bookshelves five years ago. Coates still wonders if it should have stayed there. After publication, he fielded plenty of requests for stage and film rights. For the most part, he declined them. "You can't put a book onstage," he said, speaking by telephone in late October. (A film of his novel "The Water Dancer" has since been announced, proving him at least a little wrong.) Then Forbes, the executive producer of the Apollo Theater and a friend from their Howard University days, approached him. She wanted to transform the book into a kaleidoscopic performance piece, a choral work that would translate one man's words into a collective Black American experience. "The exciting challenge was always how do we take this singular story to make it every man's story, every woman's story," Forbes said. Coates agreed. "Knowing her integrity as an artist, knowing her integrity as a person, it just seemed right," he said. The stage version debuted in 2018, first at the Apollo, then briefly at the Kennedy Center. "The entire endeavor represented an extraordinary convergence of institutional resources and artistic talent," a critic at DC Metro Theater Arts wrote. And that, with the addition of a one night stand at the Atlanta Symphony last year and a further weekend at the Apollo, would have been that. But this past spring, as Covid 19 continued its spread and the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor galvanized Black Lives Matter protests, the dynamic changed. During lockdown, Coates, Forbes and the actress Susan Kelechi Watson, another Howard graduate, met on Zoom for a weekly game night. In between rounds of the pen and paper game Celebrity, Watson, who had performed the piece at the Apollo, suggested a new, more serious pastime. She proposed reimagining "Between the World and Me" as a Zoom reading. "I was looking for a way to express what I was feeling," she said. "His book was a lot of what I wanted to say." With a tentative yes from Coates, Watson reached out her agent. Her agent contacted other agents. Angela Bassett and Courtney B. Vance signed on. So did Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter, Yara Shahidi, Phylicia Rashad and 20 or so other actors, musicians and activists. "Folks were really eager and anxious to be a part of something that had meaning in this moment," Forbes said. The project piqued the interest of various networks and streamers. "That's when it was like, 'OK, well, this is going to be bigger than a Zoom reading," Forbes said. A film version already existed. While making the Emmy winning documentary, "The Apollo," Roger Ross Williams had recorded the stage version. But Forbes had always envisioned the piece as a vital response to current events, which meant a new version was required, even as the pandemic prevented most conventional filmmaking. "So then it really became, 'OK, if our biggest challenge is Covid, how do we start to structure this in a way that we can be as safe as possible?'" Forbes said. HBO had already experimented with remote shoots for the special "Coastal Elites." With the network's help, and with Coates, Williams and Watson onboard as executive producers, Forbes devised a plan in which she remotely directed skeleton crews (and actors) in New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington. Typically, she observed from a monitor, talking the performers, some of whom she had never met in person, through the speeches. The three week shoot allotted about three hours per monologue. An hour later, with the sky fully dark, Pierce began again. When he trained his liquid eyes on the camera and said, with love and sorrow, "Dear son, I'm telling you this in your 15th year," the distance and the difficulties seemed to fall away. Pierce had worried about the technology. "I never thought I could actually connect to the scene on the Zoom or video chat," he said. "But the humanity is always there." Forbes had worried, too. "You want to be there with your actors," she said. "You want to be able to walk up and have that conversation between takes. Meanwhile, when I can be with actors, I've got P.P.E. on, a mask and a face guard and like a freaking cape." Some intimacy had been lost, she said. But intimacy had been found, too. Michelle Wilson, an actress who had been with the project from its theatrical beginning, filmed her monologue in her Harlem home and felt that those familiar surroundings helped to deepen her performance. "Our homes, and the intimacy of our homes, it felt actually very appropriate for the material," she said. Members of the crew and production staff also felt a personal connection to the work. Williams recalled an early production meeting via Zoom and the sensation, unique in his film career, of seeing so many Black faces looking back at him. "All of us were each used to being the only Black person in the room," he said. "I realized that we had been starved of each other and our shared experience." That experience informs each scene. The actors aren't playing characters, they're not even playing Coates. Instead, each speaks Coates's words while connecting the language to their own memories, addressing themselves to a son, a brother, a cousin. Wilson thought of her daughter, Pierce of his nieces, Watson of the men in her family. While Coates had signed on as an executive producer, he hadn't wanted to appear in the film. "The words are old, you know what I mean?" he said. "They're not what I would write today." But Forbes asked him and trusting her again, he agreed. In August, he took a Covid test, quarantined for a few days after, then presented himself at a studio in Soho and "banged it out," he said. Viewers can hear his voice at the end, saying, "And still I urge you to struggle." He also provided audio from an interview he had conducted with Breonna Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer. Initially, Forbes had thought that the special could run before the presidential election. But the timing of production and postproduction wouldn't allow it, she said in an October telephone interview. Besides, she knew that the piece would remain pertinent no matter who won, that the struggle for Americans of color to be afforded the same privileges and protections as white Americans goes on. "The unfortunateness of our world is that this piece is necessary before November 4, and after, regardless of what happens," Forbes said. "We'll still be urgent and relevant."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The tale of the Tasmanian tiger was tragic. Once numerous across Tasmania, the doglike marsupial was branded a sheep killer by colonists in the 1830s and hunted to extinction. The last of its kind, Benjamin, died in a zoo in 1936, and with it many secrets into the animals' lives were lost. The striped creature, which is also known as the thylacine, was hardly studied when it was alive, depriving scientists of understanding the behavior of an important predator from Australia's recent biological past. Now, for the first time, researchers have performed neural scans on the extinct carnivore's brain, revealing insights that had been lost since the species went extinct. "Part of the myth about them is what exactly did they eat, how did they hunt and were they social?" said Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and lead author on the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. "These are questions nobody really knows the answers to." Dr. Berns's main research pertains to dogs and the inner workings of the canine brain, but after learning more about Tasmanian tigers, he became fascinated by the beasts. With their slender bodies, long snouts and sharp teeth, Tasmanian tigers looked as if they could be related to dogs, wolves or coyotes. But actually they are separated by more than 150 million years of evolution. It is a classic example of convergent evolution, in which two organisms that are not closely related develop similar features because of the environment they adapted to and the ecological role they played. To better understand thylacines, Dr. Berns spent two years tracking down two preserved Tasmanian tiger brains, one at the Smithsonian Institution and the other at the Australian Museum. Their brains, like those of all marsupials, are very different from the brains of placental mammals. The biggest difference is that they lack a corpus callosum, which is the part of the brain that connects the left and right hemispheres. Because of the differences, Dr. Berns said, if he wanted to make any sense out of the Tasmanian tiger brain, he could not compare it with one of his dog brain scans. Instead, he needed to analyze it against something much more similar. "That's where the devil comes into the picture," Dr. Berns said. The Tasmanian devil, a carnivorous marsupial that mostly scavenges for food, is one of the Tasmanian tiger's closest living relatives. Dr. Berns collected two Tasmanian devil brains, scanned them and compared them with the two Tasmanian tiger brains. For the brain scans, he used magnetic resonance imaging to study the gray matter, and diffusion tensor imaging to study the white matter. From the scans Dr. Berns found that Tasmanian tigers had a larger brain, particularly the frontal lobes. The differences suggested that Tasmanian tigers were smarter than Tasmanian devils and used their cortex more for planning and decision making, Dr. Berns said. That, he said, further supported the idea that Tasmanian tigers were avid hunters, rather than scavengers like Tasmanian devils. Leah Krubitzer, a neuroscientist from the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, called the work a "heroic effort" for scanning brains of the extinct animal. "The authors cleverly used the best available techniques to examine brain organization in nonliving brains that were in not very good condition," she said. And Dr. Berns said his research could change our understanding of these extinct Australian predators. "Go back 100 years, people dismissed thylacines as stupid animals because they weren't fast moving," he said. He added that what he could see of the Tasmanian tigers' brains revealed that "they were probably quite intelligent."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In 2003, when the Walmart heiress Nancy Laurie founded Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, it sounded like a whim. Yet, over time, the troupe earned respect by filling a hole in the market, commissioning work by rising European choreographers gaining buzz abroad but little seen here. This is a valuable service, even if the effect so far has been to make New York dance audiences feel that they haven't been missing much. The company has performed in its Chelsea headquarters and at the Joyce Theater, but for its 10th anniversary, it has moved up to the Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Three programs sample five works recently created for the troupe, none awful and yet none worth seeing again. Opening night on Wednesday featured the longest work, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's "Orbo Novo." When Cedar Lake debuted this piece in 2009, it was a coup: this in demand Belgian choreographer's first dance for an American group. Alas, it was a disappointment, and it remained one on Wednesday. Alexander Dodge's mobile set huge lattice structures that the cast of 15 rolls to form walls, cages and jungle gyms looked at home on the big stage. Live music by the Mosaic String Quartet and the pianist Aaron Wunsch was classy. And the dancers showed off high definition technique in committed performances.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
What Travelers Should Know About New Restrictions on Devices SAN FRANCISCO The United States Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday enacted a new flight restriction. Under the rule, passengers traveling on foreign airlines from eight majority Muslim countries to the United States are barred from bringing devices larger than cellphones onto the plane. Instead, they have to stow devices like computers and tablets in checked luggage. Who is affected, why are larger devices banned, and what should you do? Here is what we know so far. The new policy affects people flying to the United States from airports in Amman, Jordan; Cairo; Istanbul; Jidda and Riyadh in Saudi Arabia; Kuwait City; Casablanca, Morocco; Doha, Qatar; and Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The United Kingdom also announced a similar ban on devices larger than smartphones on certain airlines. The policy applies to flights coming into the U.K. from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. For business travelers on those airlines, the ban may disrupt productivity. "This is going to hurt all the serious businesspeople and academics," said Osama Sharshar, an Egyptian lawmaker and journalist who frequently travels to the United States. "They are not going there to play and don't have time to waste." Do these devices pose a greater threat than cellphones? A computer or a tablet is larger than a smartphone, which would theoretically provide more room for terrorists to cram in components like bomb parts or weapons, said Bill Marczak, a senior fellow at the Citizen Lab, a research group that follows technology and policy. Multiple terrorists could then each take a computer on a plane containing an explosive component and, hypothetically, put it together in the cabin, he said. Yet a smartphone may also pose threats. As Samsung demonstrated last year with its Galaxy Note 7, smartphones and anything with a lithium ion battery are capable of exploding and causing safety hazards. So why ban computers and tablets? Other than preventing terrorists from smuggling components onto planes, the device ban may create additional surveillance opportunities. It is common for airport security officials to search checked luggage. In theory, if a computer is checked, airport officials can do more thorough searches, including a data frisk. "Who, if anyone, takes control of your device while it's not in your sight or possession?" Professor Feamster said. "A search of your device is not outside the realm of possibility." What should I do? If you are flying on an affected airline and concerned about your privacy, consider the recommendations outlined in our guide to protecting your data while crossing the border. For one, you could encrypt your files with an app like BitLocker or FileVault. That way, if someone did try to gain access to your data, a passphrase would be needed to decrypt the files, Mr. Marczak of the Citizen Lab said. In addition, travelers could seal laptops in a tamper evident bag, Mr. Marczak said. Once you reach your destination, you can see if anyone tampered with the laptop by inserting a physical surveillance device into it, for example. You could also consider traveling with an inexpensive computer that lacks any of your sensitive data, Professor Feamster added. And you could back up your data to the cloud and purge it from the inexpensive computer before checking it in with your luggage. If he were traveling to those countries now, Mr. Feamster said, "I wouldn't even bother taking my main laptop. I'd take my clean laptop that doesn't have any data on it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Considering Michelle Dorrance's virtuosity as a dancer which in her medium, tap, is really a type of musician perhaps it's not surprising that she also sings and plays the bass. But it's still a delight to see her do it all, switching seamlessly among roles, as she did in her company's brief but stellar season at New York City Center. In some ways, even while multitasking, Ms. Dorrance was taking a step back, making space for voices other than her own. Two programs, on Thursday and Friday, featured a new work by the celebrated clown and comedian Bill Irwin, along with "Jump Monk," from 1997, by the veteran tapper Brenda Bufalino. Next to Ms. Dorrance's dances, which on Friday included the premiere of her typically inventive "Basses Loaded," these opened up a dialogue between generations. Ms. Dorrance and Mr. Irwin poked fun at their age divide she's 39, he's 68 in the New York premiere of their collaborative "Lessons in Tradition" (2016), a charming trio with the 28 year old singer and bassist Kate Davis. Introducing himself and Ms. Davis as "vaudevillians of disparate age and vintage," Mr. Irwin grudgingly invited Ms. Dorrance to the stage grudging because then he had to keep up with her. (Naomi Funaki, as an eager assistant, fulfilled his request for an oxygen tank.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Sherwin, the author of a book on the legacy of Hiroshima, argues that President Eisenhower's threat to use "massive retaliation" in the 1950s also moved no needles, though it did ramp up the arms race. Then when Kennedy began his term with the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, it emboldened Nikita Khrushchev to introduce nuclear missiles into Cuba to protect the lone Communist outpost in the West. Kennedy's effort to get them removed led to what Sherwin calls "the most devastating event in world history ... that somehow didn't happen." He concludes that "the real lesson of the Cuban missile crisis ... is that nuclear armaments create the perils they are deployed to prevent, but are of little use in resolving them." Sherwin's second theme is setting the record straight on the heroes and villains of the missile crisis. Once Kennedy and Khrushchev made their deal, some of the president's advisers conveyed flattering misinformation about themselves for a Saturday Evening Post article. And after John's death, Bobby Kennedy wrote "Thirteen Days," his memoir of the crisis, which falsely portrayed himself as the peacekeeping hero. "Thirteen Days" was generally accepted as accurate until disproved by recordings of the president's meetings with his brain trust during the crisis, which weren't declassified till the mid 1990s. Sherwin relies on the tapes and other credible evidence to establish that the real hero of the crisis was indeed John Kennedy. Others deserving credit for avoiding World War III are Adlai Stevenson (Kennedy's wisest adviser), Khrushchev (who did not want to trigger a nuclear war) and the United Nations mediator U Thant. As for villains, Sherwin makes it clear that if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had had their way, the Cuban confrontation would have escalated into infinity. And fortunately, Kennedy also rejected the hawkish advice of his brother and Robert McNamara. The book's final lesson is the unsettling one that regardless of how many wise decisions get made by prudent leaders, good luck is crucial. Sherwin reveals that on Day 12 of the crisis, a Soviet captain overruled a flawed order to unleash a nuclear missile on American ships blockading Cuba. Similarly, an American Air Force captain refused to fire a nuke into China until he double checked the accuracy of what proved to be a mistaken communication. The little known captains Vasily Arkhipov and William Bassett thereby become elevated onto the pedestal with Kennedy and Khrushchev for helping prevent the world's destruction.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
LONG BEACH, Calif. In recent weeks, Dr. J. Mario Molina has anxiously approached lawmakers on Capitol Hill and governors across the country, warning them that the Republican efforts to overhaul the health care system could be devastating for insurers and patients alike. As head of the California company founded by his father, Dr. Molina has become one of the few insurance executives publicly criticizing the House bill, which he believes could strip away coverage for millions of their clients and cause considerable turmoil for the insurance industry. The major insurers have mostly stayed silent during the debate, supporting some of the Republicans' provisions that promise near term stability for the insurance exchanges and a repeal of a tax on health insurance. But while big insurers like UnitedHealth Group and Aetna have already largely abandoned the individual marketplaces, Molina Healthcare has been a mainstay of the current federal health care law, offering Medicaid plans in 12 states and Puerto Rico. It has signed up about one million customers in the state marketplaces, and more than doubled its revenue in the last three years to nearly 18 billion. But now Dr. Molina, a Democrat who took over Molina Healthcare in 1996 and runs it with his brother and sister, is warily watching the Republicans' bill in the House as it comes to an expected vote on Thursday. Provisions that would cap federal funding for Medicaid to the states or cut subsidies for lower income people threaten to upend some of the markets where Molina and other insurers have been trying to cement a baseline clientele. Insisting that he is not bluffing, Dr. Molina said that his company might also have to abandon the individual market after this year because so much is in flux. The Senate has yet to debate measures that could deeply affect insurers, and Molina Healthcare just reported to investors last month that it lost hundreds of millions of dollars in 2016 because of what Dr. Molina, its chief executive, called flawed federal funding formulas. While the exit of other insurers has been problematic, a withdrawal by Molina "would be hugely damaging," said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University. The reaction from other insurers has been muted, and the companies seem relieved that they are not being vilified in the way they were during the last debate over the Obama administration's health care plan. This time, many seem eager to stay out of the fray. Anthem, a large insurer that also has a sizable presence in the market, went so far as to write a letter this month to Congress praising the Republican efforts. "The American Health Care Act addresses the challenges immediately facing the individual market and will ensure more affordable health plan choices for consumers in the short term," said Joseph R. Swedish, Anthem's chief executive. Other companies are clearly uneasy. Humana has already announced its plans to leave the individual marketplaces in 2018, and few, if any, insurers have committed to staying in the individual marketplaces. Compounding the uncertainty of whether the markets will be steady enough to remain in is the looming deadline that companies face as they weigh whether to raise prices. For some, these next few weeks are crucial; some states require insurers to file notice of potential rate increases as early as April. "They don't have any real clear idea or even see what a real clear path forward is going to look like," said Kevin G. Fitzgerald, a lawyer who specializes in insurance for Foley Lardner. "Their business is months in the planning and sometimes years in the execution. They don't even know if there will be an exchange in 2018." The G.O.P. bill sharply cuts the Medicaid program, which would result in states bearing a much greater share of covering their lower income residents. Republicans say the bill aims to give states more flexibility in how they spend Medicaid money. Dr. Molina dismisses the argument as "a red herring," masking the fact that federal Medicaid funding will drop by nearly 900 billion over the next decade if the House bill goes through. Republicans seem largely focused on the near term politics of getting their legislation through Congress, but they also are gambling that blame won't shift to them if the markets collapse. "The chaos that Obamacare has created, and for which congressional Democrats and you see that are alone and responsible for requires swift action," President Trump said in a meeting with major insurance executives last month. Dr. Molina is having none of it. "If the market is destabilized in 2018, it really falls on the Republicans," he said. "The administration and Congress have the ability to act in ways to stabilize the market." Still, Congress has an important negotiating tool: a key program that helps low income individuals with out of pocket costs, known technically as "cost sharing reductions." House Republicans brought a lawsuit to stop what it claimed was illegal funding of the program, worth 7 billion to the insurers last year. The lawsuit is suspended, and Congress needs to officially appropriate the money for the program if the insurers are to get all of what they are owed this year or any other year. "They've been silent on this," Dr. Molina said. "I interpret this as a veiled threat to the industry." Other groups, including the associations representing the nation's hospitals and doctors, have come out strongly against the Republican proposals. The American Hospital Association is airing 30 second television ads urging Congress to protect people's insurance coverage. A soft spoken individual, Dr. Molina, 58, displays a dry sense of humor, as when he recently joked with investors about showing them vacation photos rather than discussing the company's dismal financial results. The company's stock, which traded near 60 a share earlier this year, has lost about 25 percent of its value since Molina announced its 2016 results last month. But he is the most vocal of his peers about the havoc he says the Republican proposals will mean for customers. "I think many in the industry are afraid," said Dr. Molina, who said he decided to speak out after being urged to by two close friends, one a retired insurance executive and another an AIDS advocate. "You need to say these things," he said he was told. "You can't duck your obligations." But Dr. Molina was not invited to last month's White House meeting with President Trump. Instead, Dr. Molina has made his case with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and insists they seemed receptive. "Our people have very meticulously analyzed this, and we can speak credibly about what all this means," he said. His concerns are shared quietly by much of the industry. In addition to worrying about adequate funding so low income people can afford coverage, insurers are increasingly anxious about how to encourage healthy people to sign up, which balances out the costs of those who have high cost medical conditions and results in lower average premiums. The proposed Medicaid cuts may have more far reaching implications than marketplace instability for a broad range of insurers. Companies that have already largely exited, including heavyweights like UnitedHealth and Aetna, view Medicaid as core to their business as states have increasingly turned to private insurers in recent years to offer plans to low income residents. "Medicaid has been a profit center for many insurers, and those profits could be threatened if Medicaid is capped," said Larry Levitt, a senior executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Molina is particularly vulnerable. About 86 percent of its customers relied on some form of Medicaid last year, and 16 percent were enrolled as a result of the expansion of the program under the federal law. Dr. Molina is warning governors that the House bill could burden their states with much more of the program's costs. "This is something they haven't come to grips with," he said. "This is the old unfunded mandate business." He and other companies are also making the case to the administration that the insurers have already succeeded in lowering costs. Dr. Molina points to states like Ohio, where insurers were able to save the state money under managed care. The company, which operates its own medical clinics in some states, sees patients like Josie Romero, 65, who has been going to doctors in Long Beach, where Molina is headquartered, for the past 15 years. The number of patients with insurance in Molina's clinics has surged through the federal law, but many have become concerned about whether their coverage will continue and whether they will still be able to see specialists. "I listen to the news," Ms. Romero said. "Everybody's kind of worried."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Reptiles have scales. Birds have feathers. Mammals have hair. How did we get them? For a long time scientists thought the spikes, plumage and fur characteristic of these groups originated independently of each other. But a study published Friday suggests that they all evolved from a common ancestor some 320 million years ago. This ancient reptilian creature which gave rise to dinosaurs, birds and mammals is thought to have been covered in scale like structures. What that creature looked like is not exactly known, but the scales on its skin developed from structures called placodes tiny bumps of thick tissue found on the surface of developing embryos. Scientists had previously found placodes on the embryos of birds and mammals, where they develop into feathers and hairs, but had never found the spots on a reptilian embryo before. The apparent lack of placodes in present day reptiles fueled controversy about how these features first formed. "People were fighting about the fact that reptiles either lost it, or birds and mammals independently developed them," said Michel C. Milinkovitch, an evolutionary developmental biologist from the University of Geneva in Switzerland and an author of the new paper. "Now we are lucky enough to put this debate to rest, because we found the placodes in all reptiles: snakes, lizards and crocodiles."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
A new test for the coronavirus is so simple and straightforward, almost anyone could do it: Spit a glob of saliva into a cup, close the lid and hand it over. While not as fast to process as the speediest swab tests, saliva tests could transform the diagnosis of Covid 19. If manufactured in enough numbers and processed by enough labs across the country, they could alleviate the diagnostic shortages that have hampered containment of the pandemic and offer a less onerous way for companies to see if workers are infected. The first saliva based test, already being offered in parts of New Jersey, detects genetic material from the virus, just as the existing tests do, but it avoids a long swab that reaches disturbingly far up a person's nose. For the saliva based, health care workers do not need to wear and discard precious gowns and masks. And early evidence suggests it is just as sensitive, if not more so, than the swabs. Because the saliva test relies on equipment that is widely available, it also offers the hope of a nationwide rollout without encountering the supply problems that have plagued the swabs. Starting about two weeks ago, New Jersey has offered the saliva test at a walk up site in New Brunswick; drive through sites in Somerset and Edison; the state's Department of Corrections; 30 long term care facilities; and even the American Dream mall. Experts not involved with the test praised it as a welcome solution to diagnostic shortages across the country. "If people are going back to work, and they're going to be tested presumably on a regular basis, we really do need to have less invasive sampling methods than the swabs," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. "To have to do nasopharyngeal swabs twice a week? No, thanks." The next step would be an at home saliva test kit that skirts even the need to go to a walk in center, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. Dr. Adalja noted that LabCorp, one of the nation's largest commercial laboratories, now offers an at home test that people can use to swab their own nose. "If we can do nasal swabs unsupervised, there's no reason why we can't do these tests unsupervised as well," he said. On April 13, the Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency use authorization, waiving some usual requirements, to a saliva test made by a Rutgers University lab, RUCDR Infinite Biologics. The Rutgers lab has already processed close to 90,000 tests, according to its chief executive, Andrew Brooks, and expects to ramp up eventually to 30,000 tests per day. Results are available within 72 hours, although they could be sped up to just a few hours with enough infrastructure in place. By contrast, some rapid tests that rely on swabs deliver results in minutes. Other states are expressing interest. Working with Rutgers, Oklahoma has begun validating a version of the test, and the Rutgers researchers have fielded questions from the White House's coronavirus task force, from Indiana, Illinois, California and from several large companies. In New Jersey, the test is available for between 65 and 100. After a disastrously slow start, the United States is starting to see an increase in testing types and capacity. The National Institutes of Health on Wednesday announced a new 1.5 billion "shark tank" style program aimed at encouraging swift innovation in coronavirus testing, with a goal of new tests by the end of summer. Also Wednesday, the testing manufacturer Hologic said that it had a new test that could allow labs to begin running up to 1 million additional tests per week. The U.S. Army secretary to National Guard members who resist the vaccines: Prepare for discipline. Greece, like some other E.U. nations facing case surges, adds restrictions for the unvaccinated. The nasopharyngeal swabs that have mostly been used to test for the coronavirus are invasive and uncomfortable, and may be difficult for severely ill people to tolerate. They also put health care workers at high risk of infection and require them to wear gloves, gowns and masks. The saliva test, by contrast, doesn't require any interaction with a health care worker. And it's easy enough that New Jersey has also started using it at developmental centers with residents who have intellectual and developmental disabilities. The saliva is immersed in a liquid that preserves it until it can be analyzed. This will be particularly important for developing tests that people can use at home and mail or drop off at a lab, or when dealing with large numbers of samples. "When you're testing 10,000 at a drive through a day, when you're at a correctional facility collecting it from 1,500 people per day, the use of a preservation agent is really critical," Dr. Brooks said. He said that the preservative in the Rutgers test is "a secret sauce" made by a Utah based partner, Spectrum Solutions, but that the ingredients are easily available and unlikely to pose supply problems. However, some of the PCR machines, which amplify viral genetic material, require labs to use the manufacturer's own reagents. "That could potentially be a supply issue," Dr. Rasmussen said. The Rutgers test was validated in people who were severely ill, but the saliva test often yielded a stronger signal than the swab, suggesting that it is more sensitive yielding fewer false negatives than the swab. It also generated no false positives in all of the samples tested. False negatives in particular have been a problem with the nasopharyngeal swabs. (A different type of test for antibodies, which can say whether a person was exposed to the virus and has recovered, is riddled with false positives.) In separate research, a Yale University team reported that saliva may be able to detect the virus in people who are only mildly ill, while a nasopharyngeal swab cannot.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
First, the new bill would add language to the state constitution that makes it harder for Missouri citizens to gain legal standing to challenge a gerrymandered map in court. Voters living in districts intentionally "packed" with members of one political party which allows a mapmaker to hand the surrounding seats to their own side would not be eligible to argue that their rights have been harmed by a statewide plan, because they were still able to elect a member of their choosing within their own specific district. Second, under the new plan, if a legal challenge did make it into the courts, the state constitution would limit the remedies available to judges. A judge would not be able to throw out the entire map as unconstitutional but merely to order smaller changes to individual districts essentially retaining most of the advantages embedded into the map by partisans. The Clean Missouri proposal required the state demographer to draw a map that reflected Missouri's overall political balance. The legislature's new plan would have insiders drawing a map that prioritized compactness. In a state like Missouri, where Democratic voters are concentrated in two cities at opposite ends of the state, weighting the criteria in favor of compactness would artificially benefit the party whose voters are spread more efficiently across the state. While the Clean Missouri plan required a map that achieved "partisan fairness" as closely as practical, the Republican plan allows for a much looser calculation of partisan fairness which would allow for a map that is more gerrymandered than some of the nation's most one sided maps in Wisconsin and North Carolina. Perhaps most dramatically, the Republican plan would open the door to drawing state legislative districts in a way that could shift the essence of representation itself. The longtime standard has been to count everyone the total population when drawing up equally populated legislative districts. Republicans, however, have urged states to redistrict based on voting age population instead and so count only American citizens over the age of 18. What impact would this switch have? Before his death in 2018, the Republican redistricting mastermind Thomas Hofeller completed a study to assess the impact of drawing political maps that were based not on a state's total population the current practice virtually everywhere in the nation but on citizens of voting age. Looking at Texas, he concluded that the switch would pull power away from cities and toward older, rural populations. It would also, he said, "be advantageous to Republicans and non Hispanic whites."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
"Stuffed" won't wrest the title of cinema's most famous taxidermist from Norman Bates, but this documentary isn't headed for as ghoulish a destination as the Bates Motel. Rather, the movie, directed by Erin Derham , sets out to explore the creative side of taxidermy, positioning the discipline as combining the eye of an artist with the scientific impulses of a naturalist, to paraphrase Travis C. de Villiers , one of the subjects. We meet taxidermists like Allis Markham , who left a marketing job to start her own studio after a side education at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The idea that taxidermy can be a form of archiving a way of recording the poses of vanishing species resurfaces throughout the film.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Ms. Salas is a United States District Court judge for the District of New Jersey and sits in Newark. "Let's keep talking; I love talking to you, Mom." Those were the last words spoken to me by my only child, Daniel, as we cleaned up the basement from his birthday festivities. He was still glowing from a glorious weekend at home with his parents and friends. Then the doorbell rang. Daniel raced up the stairs. Seconds later, as I stood alone in our basement, my beloved son was shot to death. Mark Anderl, my husband of 25 years, was shot three times and critically injured. This tragedy, every mother's worst nightmare, happened for a reason wholly unrelated to either my husband or my son, but because of my job: I am a United States District Court judge. A lawyer who had appeared before me was angered by the pace of a lawsuit he had filed in my court. He came to my home seeking revenge. My attacker sought to hurt me but his ire, and his focus, were not unique. Federal judges are at risk from other would be attackers. For judges and their families, better security is a matter of life and death. But its importance goes beyond our well being alone. For our nation's sake, judicial security is essential. Federal judges must be free to make their decisions, no matter how unpopular, without fear of harm. The federal government has a responsibility to protect all federal judges because our safety is foundational to our great democracy. Since Daniel's death, I have vowed to do everything I can to make similar tragedies less likely. Last month New Jersey passed what is known as "Daniel's Law," which prohibits the distribution of personal information, including home addresses and phone numbers, for judges, prosecutors and law enforcement personnel. After Daniel's death, I learned from F.B.I. agents that it's easy to find personal information about judges on the internet. Judges' addresses can be purchased online for just a few dollars, including photos of our homes and the license plates on our vehicles. In my case, this deranged gunman was able to create a complete dossier of my life: he stalked my neighborhood, mapped my routes to work and even learned the names of my best friend and the church I attend. All of which was completely legal. This access to such personal information enabled this man to take our only child from my husband, Mark, and me. Now the United States Senate needs to pass the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, which would provide further protections for federal judges. Identical legislation has been introduced in the House. The bipartisan bill would protect judges' personally identifiable information from resale by data brokers. It would also allow federal judges to redact personal information displayed on federal government internet sites and prevent publication of personal information by other businesses and individuals where there is no legitimate news media interest or matter of public concern. It would also encourage states to protect personal information, improve the ability of the United States Marshals Service to identify threats and authorize upgrades to judges' home security systems. The ambush that took my son and gravely wounded my husband is not the first such attack. In 2005, United States District Judge Joan Lefkow of Chicago returned home to find her mother and husband killed by an angry litigant. Since 1979, four federal judges have been murdered. The threat to judges is intensifying. Security incidents targeting judges and other personnel who play integral roles in federal court cases rose to 4,449 threats and inappropriate communications in 2019, from 926 such incidents in 2015, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. On Oct. 31, a federal judge in Houston learned from a former law clerk that his home address had been posted on Twitter. On Nov. 25, an intruder entered a judge's chambers in Southern California, threatening to kill the judge and striking and damaging his desk with a metal cane which was later found to hold a metal blade. The assailant fled after the judge, who was physically unharmed, called 911. In my case, Roy Den Hollander, a New York lawyer who had filed a suit against the male only military draft, harbored deadly grudges. On July 11, 2020, he killed a lawyer in California. Eight days later, he came to our door and killed Daniel. Too late, I learned that he had often described himself as "anti feminist." In a self published memoir, he described me as "a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama." A determined killer will always be difficult to stop, but we make it far too easy to locate judges. Removing our personally identifiable information from the internet is a critical first defense. It is also essential to make judges' homes safer. In 2005, after the attack on Judge Lefkow's family, Congress funded security systems for judges' homes. These measures are badly in need of an update to include external video and other safety features common in commercially available home security systems. In my house, the only way to see who has come to the front door is to peek through a bay window. In mid July, after four months of Covid 19 restrictions, home deliveries occurred almost daily. Daniel's killer took advantage of this familiar routine, coming to our door posing as a Fed Ex delivery courier. Investigators told me they believe Daniel thwarted a planned attack on me by stepping toward the gunman. My husband slowed the attack further by staying on his feet even after he was hit by three gunshots at close range. By the time I reached the main floor, the attacker had fled. If Daniel's death shows our country anything, it is that threats against federal judges are real, that they have dire consequences. Even at the age of 20, my son cared deeply about other people, and he bravely, and selflessly, protected those he loved most. We, too, must be brave and do what is right to ensure that judges can perform their duties without fear that they or their families will be gunned down where they are most vulnerable. Daniel's death is speaking to us, but will we listen? For the sake of my brothers and sisters on the bench, Congress must act now. Every day that goes by without action leaves our federal judges, our justice system and our very democracy in danger. Esther Salas is a United States District Court judge for the District of New Jersey and sits in Newark.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every week for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... 15 Minutes, and I'm Ready for Tokyo 2020 'All Around' When to watch: Now, on olympicchannel.com. Simone Biles is the main attraction going into the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, but she's not the only gymnast competing. This new web series on Olympic Channel follows three other hopefuls: Morgan Hurd of the United States, Angelina Melnikova of Russia and Chen Yile of China. Episodes come out just once a month, so it's a pretty low commitment as a viewer, even as what we're watching is the incredibly high commitment of these athletes. 'The Righteous Gemstones' When to watch: Sunday at 10 p.m., on HBO. There's plenty to skewer in the over the top world of megachurches, and "The Righteous Gemstones," about a family of ministers, spares no one. As he did in "Eastbound Down" and "Vice Principals," the show's star and creator, Danny McBride , revels in a volatile masculinity and gasping desperation here as the compromised son who must walk in the shadow of his powerful father (John Goodman). The show tends toward wild, gleeful vulgarity with occasional flashes of real pathos, but the biggest draws are the performances from Goodman and Walton Goggins, who plays the slimy brother in law. ... Several Hours, and I've Been Busy 'Fosse/Verdon' When to watch: Now, on Hulu. If you missed this biographical mini series about the choreographer director Bob Fosse and the dancer actress Gwen Verdon earlier this year, it is now streaming and worth watching before the Emmys in September. Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams star as, yes, Fosse and Verdon, and while the show starts off a little pat behind every brilliant man is a brilliant woman tired of being cheated on, etc. it picks up substantially in its second half. Sometimes period shows start out feeling more like costume parties than like stories, but that winds up working in this mini series's favor: Everything's a performance until you're forced to drop the act.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
PROGRAMMERS' NOTEBOOK: ON MEMORY at BAM Rose Cinemas (Aug. 28 Sept. 5). Following a Valentine's Day series called "On Love," the programmers at BAM have come up with a selection that demonstrates the varied ways movies have addressed the subject of memory. It opens with Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" (on Wednesday), which depicts childhood in scenes so fragmented and personal that their full meanings could surely only be deciphered by Malick himself, and continues with Sarah Polley's "Stories We Tell" (on Thursday), in which the filmmaker investigates and learns a great deal more about her mother, who died when Polley was 11. 718 636 4100, bam.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. QUO VADIS HAVANA at Anthology Film Archives (Aug. 23 30). Celebrating Havana's 500th anniversary, this retrospective highlights movies in which the Cuban capital serves as the setting or the subject. Carol Reed's acerbic 1959 comedy "Our Man in Havana" (on Saturday and Aug. 30), adapted by Graham Greene from his novel, opens with a title card noting that the story is set before the then recent revolution, although it was filmed on location after Batista's ouster. Alec Guinness stars as a vacuum cleaner salesman tapped as a liaison for British intelligence. He has little real information to give them, but he finds he can rack up expenses by making things up. Other titles include Tomas Gutierrez Alea's classic "Memories of Underdevelopment" (on Sunday, Wednesday and Aug. 30), which was shown in a restoration last year, and Lucy Mulloy's "Una Noche" (on Sunday and Thursday), from 2012, a more recent portrait of Havana life centered on teenagers preparing to leave. 212 505 5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Francoise Gilot jumped to her feet and opened one arm with a sweeping gesture. "I paint with my body!" she exclaimed. "That's why I appreciate dance." The French born Ms. Gilot, an artist who is perhaps most famous for being a longtime lover and muse of Picasso, looks like a dancer herself. She is 93, with a slim frame, ramrod straight posture and dark hair cropped into a chic bob. She is still a prolific painter, working every day in the high ceiling studio in her apartment just off Central Park West. ("Balanchine lived here too.") On Wednesday night, one of her recent paintings will provide the backdrop for "AfterEffect," a new ballet by Marcelo Gomes, the Brazilian born American Ballet Theater principal, who has created his first major piece for his home troupe, set to Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence." It's the first homegrown work for the company since Robert Hill's "Dorian" in 2003. Mr. Gomes, who is widely admired by the dance public (and critics) for his combination of technical prowess, fine acting and beautiful form, said that he had been interested in choreography for years. "I used to grab Misty Copeland in class and start improvising with her, and we would work in the studio and put little pas de deux together," he said. "Now she is in this piece." Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director of Ballet Theater, said he had been aware of Mr. Gomes's interest in choreography and saw him create small works for students and small troupes. "He has had so many pieces created on him, and has been assimilating all the great choreographers he has worked with," Mr. McKenzie said. "I watched him develop and recently I thought, Now he is ready to do his own piece." Mr. Gomes and Ms. Gilot didn't know each other when the idea of a collaboration was first broached by Scott Schlexer, Mr. Gomes's agent, who had met Ms. Gilot through a mutual friend. "When I saw Francoise's work, I really saw motion," Mr. Schlexer said. "So I just asked." Chance favors the prepared mind, Ms. Gilot observed, quoting Louis Pasteur. "I was immediately open to the idea, because I have all my life been interested in dance, although perhaps more in modern dance," she said. "From when I was very young, I wanted to understand how the body functions; things are dynamic even in abstraction for a painter." "Most of the time artists put forms or objects onstage that interfere with the dance," Ms. Gilot said. So she suggested that she show Mr. Gomes a number of designs and he could select and adapt one as a backdrop. "We went to her atelier, and she had put aside a number of paintings that she thought might suit," Mr. Gomes recounted. "It was such a difficult choice, because there were several paintings I loved, with very specific imagery. But then there was the one I finally chose, with the title 'Question and Answer.' It was very abstract, but it really spoke to me, and I made a decision right then not to put the dancers in a specific environment." The costumes have been designed by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung who have, Mr. Gomes said, used Ms. Gilot's painting as a reference. "AfterEffect" draws on a short piece to the first movement of "Souvenir" that Mr. Gomes choreographed in 2013 for Ballet Theater's fall gala, but the work as a whole, now for 26 dancers, has changed. "The ballet deals with post traumatic experience after a tragedy," he said. "I'm amazed by how people manage to carry on after events like 9/11, tsunamis, earthquakes, and how communities help them get through. How do you carry on? Or are you always missing a part of yourself?" Mr. Gomes said Ms. Gilot's painting evoked ideas in him of fragmented feelings and emotions. "My idea was that the painting wouldn't be fully lit initially, and would come fully together by the end of the piece, representing prevailing and being able to carry on." Cassandra Trenary, a soloist who has a leading role in the ballet, said Mr. Gomes had a clear vision in rehearsals. "He is very good at getting the dancers to draw upon and connect with a narrative, even though there is no time period and the costumes and set are abstract," she said, adding that Mr. Gomes had handled the transition from dancing peer to choreographer with skill.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Review: In 'The Skin of Our Teeth,' the End of the World as We Know It The world is coming to an end, and they're all singing "Jingle Bells." That may not be your idea of a great musical selection for Armageddon. But as performed by a ragtag chorus of displaced persons in Theater for a New Audience's spirited revival of Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth," the choice of song feels fitting, resourceful, valiant and for just those reasons very moving. The scene comes near the end of the first act of this wobbly mammoth of a play, which opened on Tuesday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. And as often happens in the director Arin Arbus's heartfelt interpretation of Wilder's 1942 cosmic comedy, the sequence's elements register as both exceedingly whimsical and disturbingly familiar. What's being portrayed, after all, is an earth succumbing to climate change, which means that although it is high summer, a glacier is advancing on Excelsior, N.J., where a home has become a haven for a swarm of refugees, whose admittance was a subject of angry argument among the family that lives there. And what may be the last fire on the planet is about to go out. It is hardly a cause for celebration that the alarm bells being rung here sound as resonant today as they must have in the early 1940s, when the United States was on the brink of world war. Yet a celebratory glow pervades this millennia spanning portrait of a single family's survival against the odds through freeze, famine and war. "The Skin of Our Teeth" can be quaint, creaky and tedious. But it feels as perversely suitable to 2017 as "Jingle Bells" does to the Ice Age. When the play first opened, with a dazzling cast led by Fredric March and Tallulah Bankhead, Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times that it stood "head and shoulders above the monotonous plane of our moribund theater." Atkinson particularly admired Wilder's "mischievous ideas about the informality of good theater." But while he adored the first third of "Skin," he was less enamored of the two other acts. He wasn't wrong. That first act, which places a mid 20th century American family on the edge of extinction in the Ice Age, still feels as fresh as morning and as old as Moses (who happens to appear in it). But as it continues to follow the allegorical Antrobus clan in its 5,000 year struggle for survival (through a biblical style flood on the boardwalks of Atlantic City and a family dividing world war), "Skin" can wear thin. Recent revivals including a misguided whopper in Central Park in 1998, starring John Goodman have suggested that the play had gone the way of its singing dinosaurs. Wilder's starker "Our Town" and robust "The Matchmaker" (the basis for the musical "Hello, Dolly!") seemed far more likely candidates for survival. Ms. Arbus whose fruitful association with Theater for a New Audience has yielded a bright string of cleareyed productions of classics doesn't entirely restore "Skin" to newborn sprightliness. But she makes you appreciate why its first audiences cherished it. Her production does particularly well by Wilder's inspired notion to have the improvisatory spirit of "theater, interrupted" reflect the make do persistence of life itself. From its first moments (and it's all in the script), the production is troubled by falling scenery, electrical blackouts and a temperamental actress who refuses to stay in character. That's the woman who plays Sabina, the Antrobus's mantrap of a maid, embodied with original comic flair by Mary Wiseman, who brings to mind not so much Ms. Bankhead (who created the part) as a young Lucille Ball with an attitude. It is Sabina who guides us irascibly and apologetically through the willful anachronisms of the play. Its central archetypal clan is made up of Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus (David Rasche and Kecia Lewis) and their children Gladys (Kimber Monroe) and Henry (Reynaldo Piniella), who was originally named Cain. Mr. Antrobus is an inventor of genius (his contributions include the wheel, the lever and the alphabet), while his wife is a fierce defender of family. As for Sabina, she's basically Lilith, the eternal temptress, there to lead good men like Mr. Antrobus astray. In its sexual politics (and its Oedipal confrontations), "Skin" can feel agonizingly dated. And despite solid performances by Mr. Rasche and Ms. Lewis, the configuring of this eternal triangle occupies entirely too much stage time.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
With a little planning and dedication, it's possible to turn even the dreariest outdoor space into an urban retreat. Whether you have a big backyard or a tiny balcony, here is how to make your outdoor space work for you. DECIDE HOW YOU WANT TO USE THE SPACE "Ask yourself what you see yourself doing in the space," said Sera Rogue, the owner of Red Fern Brooklyn, a landscape design firm. "Yoga? Reading? Entertaining? Morning coffee?" This will drive most of your decisions, including where to put the plants, what furniture to buy and how to address noise or privacy concerns. SKETCH OUT A PLAN "When you talk to an interior designer, it's about flowing through rooms, transitioning through space and creating focal points," said Todd Haiman, a landscape designer, who pointed out that the same principles apply to creating outdoor rooms. In a small space, he suggested, "design on a grid," using squares and rectangles, rather than circles, to take advantage of every square inch. If you don't have much width, go vertical: A tall hedge, a few small trees or trellised vines in planters can create privacy. "I always try to create a sensory and experiential journey," he said, which can be as simple as placing a pot of lavender near the door "so you brush up against it, every time you step out, and release its scent." BE REALISTIC ABOUT UPKEEP Even the hardiest plants require regular watering and pruning. If you travel frequently, a well furnished terrace with an occasional bouquet from the farmer's market may be more your style. Sedums and ornamental grasses generally do well in full southern sun. "I like to use full sun loving sedums in hanging baskets," Ms. Rogue said, as they require little water and are "colorful, draping and textural." She also suggested using sedums "in low bowls for full sun rooftops and balconies you can put them anywhere, as they do not need to be connected to an irrigation system." For shady spots, her go to plant is a Britt Marie Crawford ligularia dentata, for its "large, round leaves that give height and volume," she said. "In the summer, it sends up an otherworldly wand flower." Whereas hostas, she said, are "overused."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Dylan Hronec has been in a wheelchair since he was 2 years old. "When you're surfing you don't really think about anything else it's the closest thing to an out of body experience," said Mr. Hronec, 27, who has cerebral palsy and uses a special surf board retrofitted with handles to help him grab on. "I'm more in control of my body and my muscles in the water. So I'm not limited in any way." Surfing is one of the newest sports to make it into the 2020 Olympics in Japan, and it's something more and more people with disabilities, both physical and cognitive, are taking part in. More than 30 countries have adaptive surf programs, geared to those with disabilities; the International Surfing Association has petitioned the International Paralympic Committee to add adaptive surfing to the Paris games in 2024. To that end, several nonprofit groups cater to surfers with disabilities, including autism, visual impairments and limb loss. They include the Challenged Athletes Foundation, Life Rolls On and the Association of Amputee Surfers, or AmpSurf, which has chapters in New England, New York and California and holds free surfing clinics all year long. "Surfing is a lot different than a typical activity people might get involved in, like basketball, tennis or volleyball," said John W. Roberts, 71, a retired health and physical educator in Rockaway Beach who has been surfing for 55 years and is the coordinator of the New York chapter of AmpSurf, which has a focus on veterans. About 500 people a year participate in various AmpSurf events; participants, including both veterans and non veterans, are given instruction on land and then teamed up with a mentor to help them in the water. "The environment is always changing," he said. "Surfers are attracted to that. It's very physical and very spiritual." Ryan Fitzpatrick would agree with that. Mr. Fitzpatrick, 14, was born without a right leg above his knee. His mother, Deirdre, heard about The Limb Kind Foundation, founded earlier this year by New York prosthetist Robert Schulman. In July, she brought her son to an event in Long Beach. "My instructor told me to put my knee up to the board and slowly get up and balance," said Mr. Fitzpatrick, a high school freshman from Sherman, Conn. "I was able to get up there for a few seconds. I was really surprised I could do it. It was really cool with the waves coming behind you seeing all the people cheering and clapping." For Jase Wheeler, 47, a Gulf War veteran whose legs were amputated above his knee after a botched military training exercise, surfing is like "playing a song." In July, Mr. Wheeler, of Dallas, visited Rockaway Beach for an AmpSurf event. "You feel the electricity of the water and it speaks to you." His German shepherd, Justice, got up on the board with him. Of course, "getting up on the board" means different things to different people. Some stand, some kneel, some lay on their bellies. How they ride their board is beside the point. "The best two waves I caught, I was lying down," said Dana Cummings, 49, a Marine who lost his leg below the knee in a car accident in 2002. Four months later, he learned to surf. He co founded AmpSurf in Pismo Beach, CA in 2003. "It doesn't matter how you do it. If you're riding a wave, you're surfing." It's also therapeutic. Mr. Cummings, who is a member of the U.S. Surf Team and will compete in the ISA World Adaptive Championships, suffers from post traumatic stress disorder. Surfing calms him down. "You've got to focus on what you're doing," he said. For people with cognitive disabilities, surfing offers sensory pleasures. That was one of the main reasons Marcie Santiago brought her son, Bryce, who has autism, A.D.H.D. and limited language function to a weeklong surfing camp in Long Beach with Surf For All. "Bryce loves water in any capacity baths, pools, sprinklers, swim class," said his mother, a special education teacher. "The fact that it involved water made it easy for him to go with the instructor. He even liked the rocking of the waves and the taste of the salt water. So many pieces of it meet his sensory needs. "He went out with his instructor and he was in heaven," she continued. "He was sitting up on the board, he looked so excited. When he came to the shore he had a big smile on his face. Everyone was cheering and clapping. He said, "I want more yays!" She plans to buy him a wetsuit so he can surf through the fall.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Two years ago, Alexis Wold arrived in New York from her hometown, Albuquerque, and rented a studio in a dog friendly Yorkville walk up. It had two of the things she wanted most a laundry room and an easy walk to the hospital where she works. Her rent was just 1,575 a month, "so I was able to save up," she said. But she yearned to buy a place. "I knew this was a good real estate market, probably the best in the country in terms of it being a good investment, although it is very competitive," she said. Ms. Wold, 31, hunted assiduously on StreetEasy.com, seeing what was available in her price range and learning about the interplay between purchase price and monthly outlay for housing. Ms. Wold wanted a home on the East Side between 48th and 88th Streets, so she could walk to her job as a pediatric pharmacist. This time, along with location and laundry, her wish list included avoiding stairs. Her dog, Benny, a German shepherd husky mix, weighs 70 pounds. At 8 years old, he was having trouble descending the steep steps of the rental, even though it was just one flight up. Ms. Wold knew she would be unable to carry him as he grew older and less agile. She called Citi Habitats, which had an office near her Yorkville place, and was connected with a salesman there, Joshua Thissell. A listing for a condominium in the East 60s sounded just right. It was a studio with a sleeping loft in a building that had once been a commercial laundry. The price had dropped to 465,000 from 495,000. Monthly charges were around 750. The ceiling height in the loft was 5 feet 7 inches. Ms. Wold is 5 foot 2. The low ceiling was "probably not appealing to the majority of people," who would have to crouch or crawl, Mr. Thissell told her, "but it might be to you." As Ms. Wold walked to the open house, she passed her hospital and glanced at her watch. The apartment was five minutes from work. She loved the proximity and also the 500 square foot interior. "It was very unique and I liked that it was a loft, which is not that easy to find," she said. Having the bed up and out of sight "was nicer than having a super cramped one bedroom," she said. The apartment had five closets, and she had been plagued by a lack of closet space. The kitchen included a dishwasher; the building had an elevator; and the laundry room was on the top floor. At the open house, a woman climbed the loft stairs and, attempting unsuccessfully to stand, declared the height unsuitable. But Ms. Wold could easily stand upright. "The apartment fit all my criteria and more," she said, "and I didn't feel compelled to keep looking." But she had two more open houses later in the day. In an East 79th Street elevator condo building, she saw a dark L shape studio, 430 square feet, with a dining area. The price was 425,000, with monthly charges of 800. "It's not that it wasn't livable; it's just that it was not in good shape," Ms. Wold said. (The place later sold for 432,000.) She couldn't help but compare it to the first one, "so it became, do I like it better than this?" Next up was a one bedroom of around 550 square feet in an elevator co op building on East 80th Street. It was listed for 389,000, with monthly maintenance of just over 1,000. The sunny street view included a pretty church, but "I felt like the feng shui was not right," Ms. Wold said. She didn't like the layout, with an entrance that forced either a left or a right turn. The bedroom was tiny. The apartment was "sort of unremarkable, which is O.K.," but not for her, she said. (The co op is now in contract.) Now there was no question that the first apartment was the best. "I just really liked it and it seemed to speak to me," she said. She had no compunction about buying the first place she saw. Having done plenty of reading, Ms. Wold felt she had to move quickly, "because I knew someone else could swoop in and buy this place if I was too slow," she said. "I tried to be as on the ball as possible." Her offer of the asking price was accepted, and she arrived, with Benny, late last summer. Including a temporary assessment, her monthly outlay is just over 3,000. Ms. Wold did some painting and replaced some light fixtures. She also acquired a fan after realizing that the sleeping loft could become unpleasantly hot. With no obvious place for her large TV in the triangular living room, she downsized to a smaller screen. Though her street hosts traffic from the Queensboro Bridge, her apartment faces the back, with a bland but quiet view of an alley. She misses sunlight, "but it's still O.K. with me," she said. "No place is going to be perfect." Her commute is a five minute walk when traffic is light, a few minutes more when she must wait to cross the street. Benny no longer has to struggle with stairs. Ms. Wold rejoices in her closet space. "I feel I hit the closet jackpot," she said. "I don't have to stash things that I would want to put in a closet under the bed. I don't have anything under my bed anymore."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Dancers don't last forever. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater proves that this week as three artists bid farewell. Along with a married couple, Antonio Douthit Boyd and Kirven Douthit Boyd, is Alicia Graf Mack, who returns from her leave of absence for three guest appearances. This transcendent, statuesque dancer sways her hips with the company a final time as the parasol waving woman in the "Wade in the Water" section of "Revelations" on Tuesday and Thursday and next Sunday night. Other highlights include the Douthit Boyds in "Chroma," "Grace" and "Revelations" on Thursday, and in "Night Creature" on Saturday. They will soon take over the Center of Creative Arts in St. Louis, where they'll have some company. Ms. Mack, who recently gave birth to a son, will teach ballet and modern dance at Webster University and Washington University in St. Louis. There's some solace: The next generation of Ailey is in good hands. (7:30 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday; 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m., Saturday; 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. next Sunday; David H. Koch Theater, 212 496 0600, davidkochtheater.com.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Beverly Blossom, a modern dance choreographer and teacher and a daring, vividly imaginative solo performer, died on Saturday in Chicago. She was 88. Her son and only immediate survivor, Michael Blossom, said the cause was cancer. Ms. Blossom, who lived in Chicago, died at Northwestern Memorial Hospital there, he said. Ms. Blossom was best known later in her career, from the 1980s on, as one of the most distinguished and zaniest solo performers in modern dance. She had only to walk quietly onto a stage, statuesque and slightly quizzical, and disparate worlds would be evoked, bursting into the light. Her dances were set to a broad variety of scores, from Bach to 1930s cartoon music to familiar popular songs of the time, including "The Way We Were." Simple props figured in her dances, most memorably a battered black top hat. In a signature solo piece, "Dad's Ties" (1983), she mourned her father's death, with neckties swinging madly under her voluminous black skirt. She was vivid onstage: bright red dyed hair set off by the "shabby black" she favored, a coinage that became the title of one of her dance programs. In her later years, the magnificent ruin of her face mirrored the tragicomic quality of many of her dances, which seemed to ravel and unravel simultaneously.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Months before the Justice Department filed a landmark antitrust suit against Google this week, the internet company's adversaries hustled behind the scenes to lay the groundwork for a case. Nonprofits critical of corporate power warned lawmakers that Google illegally boxed out rivals. With mounds of documents, economists and antitrust scholars detailed to regulators and state investigators how the company throttled competition. And former Silicon Valley insiders steered congressional investigators with firsthand evidence of industry wrongdoing. An unlikely collection of lawyers, activists, economists, academics and former corporate insiders are now fueling the backlash against the world's largest technology companies. Bolstered by millions of dollars from high profile sponsors like the financier George Soros and the Facebook co founder Chris Hughes, they have coalesced to become a new class of professional tech skeptic. To rein in Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the tech opponents have employed a wide set of tactics. They have lobbied regulators and lawmakers about anticompetitive business practices, filed legal complaints about privacy violations, organized boycotts and exposed the risks of disinformation and artificial intelligence. Their potency was cemented on Tuesday when the Justice Department filed its suit accusing Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly over internet search and search advertising. After years of making the same argument, the opponents claimed the action as a victory. "It's a moment of pride," said Cristina Caffarra, a London based economist who advised state attorneys general on their Google investigation and worked on an earlier probe of Google in Europe that the Justice Department's case is similar to. "We did it." Their rise underlines the growing sophistication of opponents to the more than 5 trillion technology industry. Even if the Justice Department's suit against Google becomes mired in legal wrangling, their swelling numbers and activity suggests that the tech behemoths will face years of scrutiny and court battles ahead. That could eventually lead to new regulations and laws that reshape people's digital experiences. "There is a counterweight growing in reaction to Big Tech similar to what we've seen in relation to Big Oil over these past decades," said Martin Tisne, managing director of Luminate, a foundation that has provided 78.3 million since 2014 to civil society groups and law firms focused on tech accountability issues. "I would hope the companies are concerned and watching." Google declined to comment beyond its statements on Tuesday that the Justice Department's lawsuit was flawed and "would do nothing to help consumers." Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have girded themselves for a long battle. Often outspending their critics, they have hired law firms, funded policy think tanks, built out their lobbying operations and started public relations campaigns. They have also argued that they behave responsibly and that consumers love their products. Carl Szabo, the vice president of NetChoice, a trade group that represents Google, Facebook and Amazon, dismissed the tech critics as "an industry for activists" and an opportunity for rivals to "put on the moniker of consumer protection." The anti tech professionals agree on many broad points: that the companies have too much power and have transformed commerce and communication. But they have sometimes found themselves at odds with one another and do not agree on the fixes. Some support using antitrust laws to take on the companies, potentially breaking them up. Others said tougher regulations were better to rein in the firms. Sarah Miller, executive director of American Economic Liberties Project, a group focused on corporate concentration, favors breaking up the companies. She said there was "jockeying" to put forward ideas, but that the movement was a "fairly aligned, functional ecosystem." Many of the groups are increasingly well funded. Billionaires including Mr. Soros and Pierre Omidyar, the eBay co founder who backs Luminate and other groups, have poured tens of millions of dollars into opposing the tech industry. Mr. Hughes, a co founder of Facebook, is funding think tanks and activists who pressure the companies. Institutions like the Ford Foundation are also funding civil society groups and research efforts to study tech's harms. And human rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Anti Defamation League have devoted more resources to tech accountability issues. "If you compare today to five years ago, there is a much different awareness among policymakers and the public," said Vera Franz, deputy director of the Open Society Foundations' Information Program, an organization backed by Mr. Soros that has spent 24 million this year on groups focused on privacy, online discrimination and other tech topics. "The key question is how to translate that awareness to real change and real accountability." The anti tech movement's first signs of success came in the European Union about a decade ago when some of Google's rivals banded together to persuade regulators to investigate the company for antitrust violations. The resulting cases cost Google more than 9 billion in fines. In 2016, the opponents scored another victory when the European Union passed a landmark data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, which many lawyers and activists now use against the tech companies. In the United States, few were alarmed by tech's power until the 2016 presidential election, when Russia used social media to spread disinformation and sow political discord. In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed Facebook's weak privacy safeguards and added to the momentum. Since then, the influence of industry critics has swelled. Antitrust lawyers and economists focused on tech accountability are in demand at law firms and think tanks. Civil society groups eager to investigate the industry are hiring data scientists and researchers. Universities are adding programs looking at tech's harm. Bookstores are also stocking titles like "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," by the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, about how companies like Facebook and Google try to predict and control human behavior. Netflix films like "The Social Dilemma," which is critical of social media, have become surprise hits. Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, said few shared his concerns about tech five years ago. Now he speaks with American and European authorities about regulating the tech giants as public utilities. Mr. Harris, who starred in "The Social Dilemma," said he wanted to mobilize "a global movement of regular people and citizens," akin to what Al Gore did for the environment after releasing "The Inconvenient Truth." "It took a long time to get here," said Mr. Harris, who in 2018 also co founded the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit that raises awareness about tech's dangers. One clear impact of the anti tech community was the 449 page report released on Oct. 6 by the House antitrust subcommittee, in one of Congress's deepest looks at the industry in years. House lawmakers concluded that Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook had abused their power to block competitors. Tech critics played a central role influencing the direction of the report. Lina Khan, an antitrust and competition law scholar, was a counsel for the committee that drafted the report. Fiona Scott Morton, a Yale economist, and Gene Kimmelman, a former Justice Department antitrust official, provided legal and economic background to investigators. Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor who later turned against the social network, also met so regularly with congressional staff members that he thanked several of them in his 2019 book, "Zucked," about the damage Facebook was doing to society. A similar coalition helped build momentum for the Justice Department and state attorneys general investigations of Google. Lawyers at the Justice Department built the case off theories developed by economists including Ms. Caffarra. Google has criticized Ms. Caffarra's involvement in an inquiry led by Texas because she has done work for prominent rivals of the company, including News Corp. There was a "consensus that enforcement has not delivered," said Ms. Caffarra, who works at Charles River Associates, an economic consulting firm. "I'm in favor of really putting on pressure. Too little has happened." But their criticism varies by company. While Ms. Caffarra and Ms. Scott Morton have raised alarms about Google and Facebook, they have also done work on behalf of Amazon. Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer who has battled Microsoft and Google, said the political momentum could evaporate. Two decades ago, he said, the government filed a landmark antitrust case against Microsoft but did not produce the safeguards to prevent misbehavior later. "We should have had a seminal moment 20 years ago," he said. "Something happened that caused the momentum to dissipate, and that's the risk here." For now, the mood is largely celebratory. After this month's House report, Google's critics in Washington passed around a version of a meme that featured dancing pallbearers holding a coffin, essentially jubilant over the misfortune of the coffin's occupant. The pallbearers were Representative David Cicilline, the Rhode Island Democrat who chairs the House antitrust subcommittee, and Representative Ken Buck, a Republican member of the panel who agreed with parts of the report. And the coffin? It bore Google's logo.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Late night hosts went after President Trump on Monday after China announced a retaliatory tariff increase on American goods. China's president, Xi Jinping, rejected Trump's demands that a trade agreement includes changes in Chinese law, among other things. "They also objected to the publication of all the details of the agreement, preferring a summary. Oh, really? The White House is upset because China wants to release a summary? Impersonating Trump 'No way. No way, Xi. I know how summaries work, O.K.? it's gonna be four pages long and a bucket o' lies.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Now, I don't like this. I feel like this trade war is going to end with Trump riding on the back of a dragon, torching the entire economy." JAMES CORDEN "I saw that Chinese officials said that, quote, 'No one should expect China to swallow bitter fruit.' And then Trump fired back with, 'I believe the word is vegetable.'" JIMMY FALLON And while Trump insists that China will foot the bill for the tariffs, his chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, said that both China and the United States would end up paying. " As Trump 'It's paid mostly by China. Largely. Somewhat. Kinda sorta. I mean, that's what I heard. They don't pay anything. We're screwed.'" STEPHEN COLBERT During an appearance on Fox News, Kudlow requested the phrase "trade war" be traded in for "trade negotiation," which Colbert cried foul over. "No, you can't. Nice try, though. I know why you want to change it, because it makes it seem less dangerous. There's a reason no one went to see 'Avengers: Infinity Negotiation.'" STEPHEN COLBERT Trump and Xi are scheduled to meet in June to discuss the potential for renegotiation, of which Trump said, "Maybe something will happen." Seth Meyers found his statement to be, "as usual, sounding incredibly vague." "'Maybe something will happen.' It sounds like a Mafia boss doing a book report on a book he's never even heard of. As Trump '"To Kill a Mockingbird." It's about a mockingbird. He owes some people some money, maybe something bad happens, but maybe the mockingbird had it coming. Let's just say you don't got to worry about anybody mocking anymore.'" SETH MEYERS Last Friday, Trump referred to the 2020 presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg as "Alfred E. Neuman," the mascot of MAD magazine. "I see the similarity in that they are both more qualified to be president than Donald Trump." STEPHEN COLBERT Buttigieg's initial response was that he had to Google the reference, saying, "I guess it's a generational thing." But he later shared a Chinese proverb about walls and windmills he found to be apt. "It's a nice thought, but thanks to Trump's tariffs, saying that proverb now costs 80." STEPHEN COLBERT "That's how you know you've made it," Buttigieg joked of Trump's insult in an appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" on Monday. "You know, we talk a lot about elevating the dialogue, so I guess the fact that I inspired him to make a literary reference possibly for the first time ..." " As Trump, rapping I like big tariffs and I cannot lie, you other leaders can't deny, when Xi walks in with the itty bitty trade and the soybeans in your face you get sprung." STEPHEN COLBERT, to the tune of Sir Mix a lot's "Baby Got Back" "It's unclear how long this trade war may last. Just to be on the safe side, Trump has already gotten a note from his doctor so he can get out of it." JAMES CORDEN "These tariffs could raise the price of a huge range of products including dog collars, apparel made from reptile leather, mattress supports and Christmas tree lights. That's really going to hurt the holiday themed sex dungeon industry." STEPHEN COLBERT Buttigieg joined Jimmy Fallon and the Roots' Tariq Trotter for an edition of "Slow Jam the News," which was dedicated to Buttigieg's campaign.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Can Halloween Be Saved? Yes, Experts Say. Here's How. It had already been a hard year for kids. They lost time with friends and teachers at school, their summer vacations and their everyday routines to the coronavirus. With the arrival of fall, and cases rising fast among children, another scary specter raised its ugly head: Would they also have to give up Halloween? The answer is a resounding "no," according to experts, but parents and children should know that this year will look different than previous ones. You do have to take precautions. First, you should be aware that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in guidelines updated last month that traditional trick or treating would be higher risk than other ways of celebrating the holiday. The guidelines were somewhat unexpected, given that epidemiologists and other scientists generally consider it safe to gather outdoors with face coverings. Dr. David Hirschwerk, an infectious diseases attending physician at Northwell Health system, said there are themes in the C.D.C.'s guidelines that have been constant throughout the pandemic, including avoiding large crowds (particularly if they're from outside your area), avoiding indoor activities as much as possible, and using face coverings. "We still, unfortunately, are far from the end of this pandemic, and I think that the C.D.C. reminders, really more than anything, should have us all pause to think about what our plans are, whether it's for Halloween or for Thanksgiving," he said. Over the years, Halloween has grown from a night of spooky fun for children on Oct. 31 into a billion dollar industry with weeks of celebrations, parties and parades enjoyed by people of all ages. Canceling it altogether might cause major economic disruption in a year that has had more than enough trauma from Covid 19. For weeks, cities, towns, retailers and confectioners across the country have braced for more subdued celebrations if they happen at all. On the list of moderate risks was "trick or treating where individually wrapped goody bags are lined up for families to grab and go while continuing to social distance." Dr. Tista Ghosh, an epidemiologist and senior medical director at Grand Rounds, a digital health care company in San Francisco, said she was not surprised to see the C.D.C. take what she called a "middle of the road" approach for the guidelines, which appear to balance science with personal freedom. Dr. Ghosh, the former chief medical officer for the state of Colorado, said the concern with trick or treating stemmed from its inherent face to face interaction. The risk is highest for adults who are around children and may have underlying medical conditions. But, she said, "there are ways to participate in Halloween that could minimize risks." Dr. Hirschwerk, the Northwell infectious diseases attending, called the guideline's emphasis on avoiding indoor gatherings, large groups, and the use of face coverings (not your costume's mask) helpful because "this is an infection that really is about the air that we breathe and about making sure that we're separated from each other and that we're not spending too much time together indoors." Candy sellers are trying to put the best face on the reduced celebrations. "Beyond doubt, this Halloween will be different than years past," said Christopher Gindlesperger, a spokesman for the National Confectioners Association, a trade group for candy makers. Mr. Gindlesperger said he and his family treat it more like a season than a one night event. This year, they'll be safely celebrating by "decorating the house, working on our coordinated family costumes, streaming 'It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,'" carving pumpkins" and hanging out with neighbors at a safe social distance. According to Dr. Ghosh, some strategies for safer trick or treating include: leaving baskets of candy outside your home; having kids wear gloves and carry hand sanitizer; and keeping parties and other gatherings outdoors and socially distanced. You could set out pool noodles or other markers so children have visual markers for the prescribed six feet of distance, she suggested. And while you don't need to sanitize each and every candy wrapper, you should make sure your hands are clean before eating any sweets, Dr. Ghosh said. What if you don't have a porch, patio or front yard where you can leave treats? Dr. Ghosh recommended using a balcony if you have one, or consider investing in a heat lamp or heat structure "that can help use outdoor space more" if you have visitors. At the very least, she stressed the importance of ventilation opening windows and doors if you do have people visit inside your home. Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said a small group 10 or fewer people could have a costume show or other outdoor gathering with masks and social distancing of at least six feet. "The key is to make it a brief get together, which further reduces risk," he said. "It's the time spent together that increases risk of transmission." Officials looking to prevent a public health disaster are asking that people beware of indoor activities and large groups of people as fall holidays, including Halloween, get underway. Crowded indoor parties and haunted houses "where people may be crowded together and screaming," are on the higher risk end of the spectrum right alongside traditional trick or treating, according to the C.D.C. The agency also lists traveling to rural fall festivals (think harvest festivals) if you're coming from an area with high Covid 19 rates as "higher risk." Dr. Glatter agreed with that advice and took it a step further: He recommended against attending Halloween parties outside your community. "Even though a mask and distancing mitigate risk, such events can generate superspreaders, placing even more people and families with older persons at risk," he said. Both the C.D.C. and Dr. Glatter consider drinking alcohol a higher risk activity as it can cloud your judgment and "increase risky behaviors." Beware of parades, if there are any Several traditional Halloween parades, which invite crowds of spectators to huddle on sidewalks, have already been canceled or moved online, just as cities canceled parades for Saint Patrick's Day in March and for Pride in June. This year would have been the 47th annual Village Halloween Parade in New York City, but organizers scrapped the famed event, saying it was "because we love you all too much to endanger you and we care about your health and well being." Parades were also canceled in many other places, including several towns and cities in Pennsylvania, where the tradition is robust. Bethlehem will be hosting its first virtual parade. A Zoom Halloween party may also be in the works, and for her oldest, a 13 year old, a possible backyard movie night with everyone bringing their own food and chairs for socially distant seating. "Holidays help us maintain our sense of rituals and 'normalcy' during a not so normal time," Dr. Glatter said. "Whatever we can do to keep holiday celebrations and traditions at least partially intact while remaining safe serves as a guidepost or compass during these turbulent times."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Depression and anxiety. The state of the country. Climate change. Mass shootings. Today's students are grappling with a variety of issues beyond the classroom. To that end, lawmakers in two states have recently recognized the importance of the mental health of their students by allowing them to take sick days just for that. The measures "empower" children to take care of their mental health, one expert said. On July 1, a law in Oregon went into effect giving students five mental health days in a three month period. In 2018, Utah changed the definition of a student's "valid excuse" to miss a day to include an illness "which may be mental or physical." According to a recent study, teenagers named depression as a problem among their peers. Others blamed their anxiety on politics or climate change. In Oregon, the bill was supported by several teenagers. One recent graduate, Hailey Hardcastle, told The Associated Press that the bill was inspired by politically active students in Parkland, Fla., and that she and her peers wanted to address mental health issues in schools. Another former student, Derek Evans, voiced his approval. "Dealing with anxiety throughout high school has always left me tired, exhausted up against some weeks, and the difference one day makes is honestly life changing," he told Fox 12 Oregon. Ms. Hardcastle said some parents had opposed the bill, raising concerns that students could take mental health days by pretending to be sick. But other parents cited a real need for the days. The parents of Chloe Wilson, who died by suicide in 2018, told The Associated Press that their daughter, who had faced bullying after coming out as bisexual, had pretended to be sick in order to stay home from school. "Because she lied to get her absences excused, we didn't get to have those mental health conversations that could have saved her life," her mother, Roxanne Wilson, said. The new laws are "a huge win, especially for individuals and families that are affected by mental health conditions," said Jennifer Rothman, senior manager for youth and young adult initiatives for National Alliance on Mental Illness. Suicide rates for children have been rising as well, Ms. Rothman said. "The suicide rates for kids are not going down," she said. "They are actually rising very quickly, which I think is making schools think a little bit more about mental health conditions." According to a 2017 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is the second leading cause of death for 10 to 34 year olds. A 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance report from the centers showed that during the 12 months before the survey, 19 percent of high school students had been bullied on school property and another 7.4 percent had attempted suicide. From 1999 to 2016, suicide rates increased 28.2 percent in Oregon, and rose 46.5 percent in Utah, according to the centers. Ms. Rothman said the days off not only give students a chance to speak up about their needs, but help break the stigma associated with mental health. She said children who are "quietly suffering" from symptoms of mental illness would most benefit from taking the days. "We have a lot of kids that are dealing with this in silence because they're embarrassed or they think people are going to judge them and not believe them," Ms. Rothman said. She said federal mental health education should be available to students, school staff and family members. The lack of such education hinders the ability to recognize and understand the warning signs, Ms. Rothman said. Adults may think that children are overreacting or that their complaining about mental health problems is a phase. "I don't know that it coddles children when they have strep throat that keeps them at home and they have a fever," Debbie Plotnick, vice president of mental health and systems advocacy at Mental Health America, said Monday. "It is not coddling adults when they need a mental health day." Ms. Plotnick said the laws allow children with mental illness to focus on their health instead of attending school only to suffer from "presenteeism," which she described as being physically present but "not fully present" and responsive to what is happening around them. She said that there were few risks to giving children the agency to take mental health days and that the legislation was a step in the right direction for the country. "We think that this will be a model for other states to follow," Ms. Plotnick said. "As a matter of public policy, for decades we have waited until stage four, until crisis, and then treating it only through incarceration or having kids thrown out of school," Ms. Plotnick said. "We think that this kind of legislation will help people reach out when they need to, not be afraid to do so and not be ashamed." While the legislation in Utah and Oregon has made headlines, it's not the first time a state has acted in favor of a child's mental health. Minnesota passed a bill in 2009 that said conditions that "require ongoing treatment for a mental health diagnosis" are sufficient for excused absences, and that a written note from a physician or mental health professional may be required to approve the absence. "I hope this gets out there and schools start to think about it," Ms. Rothman said of the trend. "I hope it continues to spread."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
For seniors graduating from the University of Michigan this month, employers have been lining up since the fall to offer interviews and boast of their companies' benefits. Recruiters would ask when their competitors were coming, said Geni Harclerode, the university's assistant director of employer development, and then they'd say: "Well, we want to come the week before." "This has been one of our largest seasons of hiring," she said. "The job market has been very good." The outlook for many high school graduates is more challenging, as Vynny Brown can attest. Now 20, he graduated two years ago from Waller High School in Texas, and has been working for nearly a year at Pappasito's Cantina in Houston, part of a chain of Tex Mex restaurants. He earns 7.25 an hour filling takeout orders or 2.13 an hour plus tips as a server, which rarely adds up to more than the minimum, he said. He would like to apply to be a manager, but those jobs require some college experience. "That is something I don't have," said Mr. Brown, who says he cannot afford to go to college now. "It's the biggest struggle I've had." Most young workers have the same problem as Mr. Brown. Only 10 percent of 17 to 24 year olds have a college or advanced degree, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute, although many more of them will eventually graduate. And for young high school graduates, the unemployment rate is disturbingly high: 17.8 percent. Add in those who are underemployed, either because they would like a full time job but can only find part time work, or they are so discouraged that they've given up actively searching, and the share jumps to more than 33 percent. Younger workers have always had a tougher time finding a job than their older, more experienced counterparts. Even so, the economic recovery has progressed more slowly for young high school graduates than for those coming out of college. Ms. Gould is part of a growing chorus of economists, employers and educators who argue more effort needs to be put into improving job prospects for people without college degrees. "Without question we have failed to pay attention to and invest in opportunities for young people who are not on a path to go to four years of college," said Chauncy Lennon, the head of work force initiatives at JPMorgan Chase, which has started a 75 million program to design and deliver career focused education in high schools and community colleges. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. For high school students, a four year college education is frequently held out as the only viable option, precisely because job opportunities and wages are so much better upon graduation. But many who sign up never finish. "The most common reason they fail to complete is that they need to start earning a living to support their families," Mr. Lennon said. Vocational, career and technical high schools have often been stigmatized as a last resort for underachievers. At the same time, educators and administrators in some places have been criticized for steering minority students toward them in lieu of academic programs. The initiative sponsored by Chase is aimed at repairing that reputation. Although some traditional middle skills opportunities for construction and clerical workers are shrinking, Mr. Lennon said, others are growing. In health care, for instance, radiology and phlebotomy technicians are needed; in advanced manufacturing and aviation, mechanical maintenance workers are in demand. He added that vocational schools should no longer be thought of as dead ends, since they can serve as steppingstones to associate degrees at community colleges or to enrollment at four year institutions. "I went into vocational school with my heart set on the automotive program, but I fell in love with electrical and saw a bigger future for myself," Mr. Cardoso, 17, said. He is also applying for a coveted spot as an apprentice with the local electrical union, where the starting pay is 18.25 an hour. As an apprentice, he could work while training to become a journeyman, a position with an hourly wage of 28. Most of Mr. Cardoso's classmates also have jobs waiting for them, he said. Stefanie A. DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, is the co author of a study of low income African American millennials in Baltimore titled, "Coming of Age in the Other America." She agrees there is a pressing need for more targeted, streamlined vocational programs in high schools and at community colleges. "They're looking for jobs," Dr. DeLuca said of the youths she interviewed. "They want a quick launch." Still, low wages combined with rising housing costs make it tough to get ahead. "They're juggling a job at Potbelly and a security job and working 60 hours a week and it's still not enough," she said. Despite the improving job market, what particularly troubled Martha Ross, a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington, were the 3.2 million disadvantaged youths between 16 and 24 who were not in school and did not have a job.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
The nation's foremost public health agency is learning that it is not immune to the complex effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told employees that some office space it leases in the Atlanta area would be closed again after property managers of the buildings discovered Legionella, the bacteria that causes Legionnaires' disease, in water sources at the sites. No employees were sickened. The announcement was reported on Friday by CNN. That the C.D.C. is contending with this problem highlights the seriousness of Legionella in the aftermath of coronavirus lockdowns, and how complicated it can be to prevent it. The C.D.C. itself warns that Legionnaires' disease, a respiratory illness, can be fatal in 1 in 10 cases. Since various jurisdictions in the United States have put in effect lockdowns to contain the spread of the new coronavirus, some experts have been warning of the risk of Legionnaires' outbreaks when people return to buildings left unoccupied for months. The bacteria that causes the illness, Legionella pneumophila, can form in warm, stagnant water that is not properly disinfected. When sinks are turned on or toilets flushed, the bacteria can then be sent through the air and inhaled.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Though the return of baseball and basketball might make it feel like professional sports are back, there are still plenty of other leagues and events that have remained idle since pausing because of the coronavirus pandemic. But in 31 days, if the virus allows, the sports world will be running near full steam. Here's a look at the games that will restart in August. The puck drops on the playoffs on Saturday with five games in Toronto and Edmonton, starting with the Rangers against the Carolina Hurricanes. The Rangers are one of the teams to benefit from the expansion of the playoffs to 24 teams from 16; when the regular season was halted they were still fighting for a wild card spot in the postseason. The four top teams in each conference, like the Boston Bruins, who had the best regular season record, and the defending champion St. Louis Blues, won't be idle. Starting Sunday, those teams will play in round robin tournaments to determine their seeding for when they join the playoffs in the next round.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
THE Ninja name has long since grown beyond a mere model designation used by Kawasaki to set apart its most sport focused motorcycles. It's become an entire franchise. First applied to the GPZ900R of 1984, a hard edged machine powered by a groundbreaking 16 valve, liquid cooled 4 cylinder engine, the name soon earned such powerful associations that it became a generic term for racy sportbikes of any make. But the Ninja ethos did not remain pure. Over the ensuing 27 years, Kawasaki applied the Ninja label to a broad assortment of bikes worldwide with engines as small as 150 cc and as big as 1400. The Ninja 1000, a new model in Kawasaki's lineup for 2011, may help to steer the name back to its origins. Its forgiving rider accommodations are intended to give it wide appeal, yet it honors Ninja tradition in being a racetrack styled performance bike powered by a refined 1 liter in line 4 cylinder. Building on a heritage that can be traced to the Z1 model of 1973, a pioneer of the superbike era, the Ninja 1000 is a derivative of last year's well reviewed debutante, the Z1000. While the Z1000 could loosely fall into the class of so called naked sportbikes it has the bare minimum of aerodynamic bodywork the Ninja 1000 wears an attractive set of clothes. And its fairing is effective, too, giving the bike so much of a potential top speed advantage over the Z1000 that Kawasaki felt compelled to electronically limit the Ninja 1000's maximum speed. Yet the Ninja 1000 is more than a fully dressed Z1000. It is loaded with user friendly features like a three position windscreen, higher handlebars and lower footpegs than the Z1000, making the riding experience less fatiguing. Hard luggage cases are an option for those who fancy using the bike for touring. But the Ninja 1000 addresses more of the concerns of sportbike shoppers than just creature comfort. In recent years, riders who wanted ergo friendly bikes that were also suitable for vigorous riding on back roads or even an occasional track day often had to settle for second string chassis technology. The Ninja 1000 addresses those shortcomings with a racing inspired aluminum frame, fully adjustable inverted fork front suspension and a multisetting rear shock. At its 10,999 suggested price, the Ninja 1000 falls well below the pure sport Ninja ZX10R ( 13,799; add 1,000 for antilock brakes) and slightly above the 10,599 Z1000. A shipping charge of 275, and a preparation fee, may be added at the dealer's discretion. Another factor making the Ninja 1000 so attractive is its easily tapped engine performance. The Ninja ZX 10R chomps at a 13,000 r.p.m. red line; by comparison, the Ninja 1000's maximum safe speed is a relatively sedate 11,000 r.p.m. What is sacrificed at the top end is put to better use in improved midrange pulling power. The 1,043 cc motor produces 121 horsepower at the rear wheel and 73 pound feet of torque, according to Cycle World magazine. The Ninja 1000 also weighs in at a reasonable 500 pounds. That compares favorably to touring bikes, even some that are positioned as sport touring models, weighing as much as 700. A skilled rider can still commit quite a lot of mayhem with the horsepower available. Zero to 60 m.p.h. dashes took 2.8 seconds in testing by Cycle World. Triple digit speeds can be attained while still in third gear. And the engine seems to loaf along albeit at about 6,000 r.p.m. in top gear at 75 m.p.h. The riding position is more comfortable at lower speeds; at Interstate velocity and beyond, my head was buffeted in the air currents despite having the windscreen cranked to its highest position. Kawasaki says the seat has been blessed with an additional half inch of padding, but any extra measure of comfort is forgotten after a few minutes. On long rides I found myself looking forward to the respite of gas stops. And despite a five gallon gas tank, on a highway trip I needed to stop for fuel about every two hours. I had concerns with the six bar digital fuel gauge; the bike seems to go through about two thirds of its fuel range on the first three bars; the last three bars disappear with unsettling haste. I learned this on a 60 mile stretch across the Mojave Desert of California. With three bars left as I passed through Barstow, I thought making it to Baker would be a snap; in fact, the reserve fuel indicator started blinking after just 35 miles. And when I refueled, it took only 3.5 gallons, so it seemed that I had at my disposal only four usable gallons. Still, fuel economy was admirable: even at hooligan speeds, the Ninja 1000 squeezed 40 miles from each gallon of premium fuel. One item on my wish list for this bike would be a gear position readout. I had no complaints with the 6 speed transmission the clutch operated easily, needing only a light pull on the lever but it would have been nice to have a dashboard confirmation of which gear I was in.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The United States Open tennis tournament may have been the event that brought names like Serena Williams, Venus Williams, Rafael Nadal and Nick Kyrgios to New York City, but it was badminton that brought them to The 4th annual Palace Invitational, a trio of matches where the tennis stars tried their hand at the sport. Each of the players, along with Mischa Zverev and his brother, Alexander "Sascha" Zverev, also competing in the U.S. Open, spoke at the event about their travel essentials, the destinations they've visited that most surprised them, and even offered a few tips for better sleep on airplanes. Here are their answers, lightly edited. Is there one thing you rely on to get through your hectic travel schedule? It helps a lot of have my family, friends and girlfriend around me. They make me feel less homesick. What's your top piece of advice to anyone who wants to or travels as much as you do? When you're traveling, there are always issues that can happen so you need to be relaxed and understand that sometimes things won't go perfectly. There can be delays, for example. For me, catching flight connections can be a problem, and I can get annoyed, but when I stay calm, I feel less bothered by what's going on. Do you have any tips for how to sleep well on a plane? I don't sleep on planes. Well, not very often. What's the most surprising destination you've ever visited? Or, what's your favorite destination? The Exumas in the Bahamas are my favorite. The colors of the water and the islands are beautiful. I am from a very beautiful island myself Mallorca , but every time I visit the Exumas and I've been a couple of times I'm surprised by their beauty. Is there one thing you rely on to get through your hectic travel schedule? Books. I am an ebook reader because I don't want to travel with any extra weight. I read a lot of fantasy books. I am a big kid. Right now, I am not reading anything. I need suggestions! What advice do you have for anyone who travels as much as you do (or wants to)? Don't think about the travel. Sometimes you know it's going to take you 30 hours to get to where you're going, but don't think about the 30 hours. Just go. My dog, Harold. He is a Havanese and is 11. I take him with me almost everywhere. When he's not there, I forget that he isn't. I think that he's on my bed or following me. He's like my shadow. Do you have any tips for how to sleep well on a plane? Go to sleep when you're sleepy. Or, stay up the night before and have some fun. When you get on the plane, you will sleep. Have any destinations surprised you? Norway. I didn't realize how unbelievable it would be. I went there on an impromptu vacation in July and hadn't heard anything about it. I went to Alesund, which is one of the smaller cities and Geirangerfjord, which is one of the famous fjords. That's all I had time for because I was only there for two days. It was so beautiful. The water was crystal clear, and the air was super fresh. I drove everywhere when I was there. Can you name your No. 1 travel essential? I have a blanket that's soft and keeps me warm. I would also say my computer because I can watch TV shows on it. I'm always watching new programs. Do you have any tips for how to sleep well on a plane? I am actually open to tips. I used to not have a hard time sleeping on planes, but ever since I had Olympia her daughter , that's changed. Is there one thing you rely on to get through your hectic travel schedule? Music is an essential for me. I like hip hop and R B. When I'm so far away from home, like now when I have been on the road for four months straight, my music is a go to. My PlayStation is also essential. What's your top piece of advice to anyone who travels as much as you do (or wants to)? Be ready for anything. You're living out of suitcases and in hotel rooms, and it's important to be flexible. It can be hard being away from your family and friends, but remember that you're also very blessed because you're seeing all these beautiful places and meeting new people. Do you have any tips for how to sleep well on planes? You can take some melatonin. Or try not to sleep too much the night before. That's what I do so when I get on the plane, I just sort of lay back and watch movies and sleep. But I would say not to force sleep. It will come when it will come. What's the most surprising destination you've ever visited? Or, what's your favorite destination? I wouldn't say that anywhere has surprised me, but my most favorite place, apart from Australia, is anywhere in the States. It sort of feels like home to me, especially since I am a massive fan of the NBA. Is there one thing you rely on to get through your hectic travel schedules? Mischa: Our dog, Loevic. He is actually our mom's dog, but since our mom always travels with us, he's ours, too. He's a miniature poodle, and it doesn't matter what mood I'm in or what stress I'm going through when I'm traveling whenever I see him, my spirits are lifted. Sasha: I love having Loevic around, but having all my family with me, including Mischa, always helps when I'm on the road. What's your top piece of advice to anyone who travels as much as you do (or wants to)? Mischa: Travel with fun people. If there are flight delays or any hassles, at least you're surrounded by people who will entertain you. You'll never get too bored or frustrated. Sasha and I travel with a lot of great people our family, our coaches and sometimes, friends. Can you each name your No. 1 travel essential? Mischa: A good phone that has long lasting battery power. Whenever I want to get in touch with friends or call a cab or listen to music, my phone does the job. Sasha: Definitely a phone, but also a PlayStation. Do you have any tips for how to sleep well on a plane? Sasha: You get on it and start sleeping. I have no problem sleeping on planes. I can sleep anywhere. Mischa: Exhaust yourself before getting on board. When you get on, you'll hopefully just crash out. What are your favorite destinations? Mischa: I love the Maldives the most the water, the colors, the scenery. They're amazing. Sasha: The Maldives a favorite for me, too. Mischa and I went together last year, but I've also been on my own.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Mr. Willis, 52, is the chief executive of Keller Williams Realty, a real estate brokerage firm based in Austin, Tex. The company has about 700 franchise offices with more than 95,000 agents worldwide, including Keller Williams New York City, which opened in April 2011. Q. What brought you to New York? A. I'm speaking at a conference, and I'm visiting the Keller Williams Manhattan office. Q. That office is relatively new to this competitive market. A. We were always planning to come to New York; we were ready to tackle this frontier. It started here about two and a half years ago, and it's done extremely well. We started with about 18 brokers, and we're at 250 now. Q. Could you see additional franchise offices in Manhattan? A. We will do two, maybe three ultimately in Manhattan within the next five years. We are already in Queens and the Bronx. Q. Is the Manhattan office profitable yet? A. The New York office has broken into the black this year. Ninety six percent of our offices are profitable. We have 670 offices systemwide. Q. How about Keller Williams over all? A. Last year was a terrific year. We netted 14,000 agents. In 2005, we had 57,146 agents; in 2010, we had 74,500 agents. We actually grew in the downturn. Revenue increased more than 23 percent last year over the previous year. Q. How do you earn revenue? A. We have a percent royalty we don't call it a franchise fee on the first 50,000 of gross commission income that the agent earns on their anniversary year. So after 50,000 of gross commission income they stop paying us. At the most an agent would pay us 3,000 a year. And we have about 95,000 agents. We have the most agents in the Southeast, which is the Atlanta, Nashville, Northern Alabama market. Q. So the more agents, the higher the potential revenue for Keller Williams. What's your agent goal for this year? A. Our goal is 105,000 at the end of this year. I believe we will hit 110,000. A. I shy away from that conversation. I think all commissions are negotiable. Our average systemwide is between 5 and 6 percent. Q. What's your outlook for the spring selling market? A. We're cautiously optimistic. We teach our agents that you wake up every day acting as though you're in the worst market of your life which means you work harder, you give more, and as a result, we don't try to pull out a crystal ball and predict what's going to happen in the marketplace. We're all watching interest rates. Beyond that I don't know what we can predict, and I think we'll see rates go up slightly this year. I think we're going to see appreciation in a lot of markets. I don't think that this year is going to be phenomenally robust compared to last year. Nationally we'll see that we may do a little more volume this year as an industry than we did last year. Q. Do you see another bubble in the making for the New York area? A. Honestly I don't, but we'll get there. Q. You've been at the helm of Keller Williams since 2005. A. I came to the company in 1991. We had eight offices in the system; we had fewer than 300 associates.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
"The dreadful memory torments me," the vengeance crazed Azucena moans in Verdi's "Il Trovatore." "It makes my blood run cold." But be honest, opera lovers. How many times has an Azucena actually convinced you that she's telling the truth here? And I bet it's at even fewer performances that she's made your blood run cold, too. Well, it fairly freezes in your veins while watching and listening to Anita Rachvelishvili, the Georgian mezzo soprano who is running away with the show in "Il Trovatore," which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday and runs through Feb. 15. Just 33, Ms. Rachvelishvili has been a daringly grim Carmen at the Met and had a crucial, sensuous turn here in Borodin's "Prince Igor" in 2014. But this Azucena is her true coming out. She turns this haunted and haunting Gypsy, driven mad by her memories and often mentioned last in rundowns of the "Trovatore" cast's main quartet into the riveting, volatile central figure. Azucena has in recent years often been sung at the Met by Dolora Zajick, an indefatigable, indispensable company fixture whose take on the part has grown blunter, musically and dramatically. (She gets a single performance this season, on Feb. 6.) Ms. Rachvelishvili brings back the role's nuances, its range of colors, its emotional gradations. Above all, she respects the bel canto tradition out of which this opera emerged. Her Azucena is a creation of soaring high notes, fluttering trills, seductive legato, chilling low tones. These never feel like effects; they are the building blocks she uses to form the character. Without stinting the role's brutality, Ms. Rachvelishvili is often delicate and responsive to the generous length of Verdian lines. She makes the words bite. She is sometimes ethereal. She is sometimes, even more than earthy, elemental. Amazingly, given Azucena's unending desperation, she is elegant. She is the revelation in this revival of David McVicar's effective, efficient 2009 production. (This is the fourth McVicar staging at the Met this season and the third this month; surely the company's audience would be well served by a broader range of directorial approaches than his starkish period dress naturalism.) But Ms. Rachvelishvili is not the only highlight in a treat of a "Trovatore." Under Marco Armiliato, the orchestra plays with spirited polish. The baritone Quinn Kelsey, an aristocratic but fierce Count di Luna, has a distinctive tone: rich but smoky even, excitingly, a little hollow, as if you're always hearing him in an empty, echoey church. At full tilt, the tenor Yonghoon Lee (as Manrico, the troubadour of the title, di Luna's nemesis and Azucena's son) sings with clarion robustness; it's only when he tries to go gentler that his voice turns thin and crooning. The soprano Jennifer Rowley took over the full "Trovatore" run from an ill colleague less than two weeks ago. As the noblewoman Leonora, battled over by Manrico and the count, she is finely controlled, her tone clear and clean. Sympathetic, particularly in the opera's last minutes, she never quite galvanizes. "My frightened heart can barely beat," she claims in the final act. You hear Ms. Rowley, but you don't quite believe her; Ms. Rachvelishvili, you always do.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
To hear more audio stories from publishers, like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Joe Biden is very famous, but you wouldn't know it from looking at his YouTube channel. Mr. Biden has just 32,000 subscribers on the influential video platform, a pittance compared with some of his rivals in the Democratic primary race and roughly 300,000 fewer than President Trump. The videos that Mr. Biden posts these days, mostly repurposed campaign ads and TV style interviews filmed from the makeshift studio in his basement rarely crack 10,000 views. And the virtual crickets that greet many of his appearances have become a source of worry for some Democrats, who see his sluggish performance online as a bad omen for his electoral chances in November. "This video is 2 days old and it's sitting at 20,000 views," one commenter wrote under a recent video of Mr. Biden's. "This is a guy that is supposed to beat Trump?" In a normal election year, a former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee would have no trouble filling an arena. But the coronavirus has forced Mr. Biden to abandon in person gatherings and adapt to an all digital campaign strategy a daunting pivot even in the best of times, but one made even harder by the need to compete for attention amid a pandemic and a once in a generation economic collapse. The shift has been clumsy for Mr. Biden, an old school retail politician who relishes face to face interactions. He lacks the social media firepower of Mr. Trump, whose 106 million combined followers on Facebook and Twitter dwarf Mr. Biden's 6.7 million, and whose White House coronavirus briefings have allowed him to commandeer the news cycle. Mr. Biden's first virtual town hall last month was marred by technical problems, and some of his other digital experiments like a soporific campaign podcast, "Here's the Deal," which did not rank among the top 100 podcasts on Apple Podcasts as of this week have not gone as well as hoped. The problem for Mr. Biden is not that he is old or out of touch. After all, other septuagenarians, including Mr. Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders, have amassed intense and loyal online followings despite not being internet natives. And Mr. Biden was once an internet star himself. (Who can forget "Diamond Joe," the beer guzzling, Trans Am driving satirical character created by The Onion, which launched a million memes during the Obama years and became an indelible, if fictional, part of Mr. Biden's legacy?) The Onion's satirical characterization made the vice president an internet star. The problem is also not that Mr. Biden is ignorant of the internet's power. His campaign employs a number of veteran digital strategists who have been busy trying to elevate his online profile with "No Malarkey" coffee mugs and feel good quarantine videos. Mr. Biden's biggest problem is structural. Most of our online political communication takes place on internet platforms that are designed to amplify content that provokes strong emotional reactions, often by reinforcing tribal identities. Mr. Trump's unfiltered, combative style is a natural fit for the hyperpolarized audiences on Facebook and Twitter, whereas Mr. Biden's more conciliatory, healer in chief approach can render him invisible on platforms where conflict equals clicks. Those structural disadvantages hobbled Hillary Clinton's 2016 social media campaign, which struggled for traction despite big budgets and her name recognition. The Trump campaign also paid lower effective rates for Facebook ads than the Clinton campaign because Facebook's automated ad buying system gives more reach to ads that generate lots of engagement. Rob Flaherty, the digital director for the Biden campaign, said in an interview that he considered the 2020 election a "battle for the soul of the internet," which required not just taking shots at Mr. Trump but inspiring people to come together around Mr. Biden. "If you want to succeed on the internet without turning into Donald Trump, the best thing you can do is show empathy and compassion, and build community," Mr. Flaherty said. "Our digital strategy is going to reflect that." YouTube, where progressives have only recently started competing for attention with an extensive network of popular right wing creators, is particularly thorny territory for a centrist pragmatist like Mr. Biden. The platform's left wing commentariat, often referred to as "LeftTube" or "BreadTube," mostly seems to consist of young Sanders supporters who see Mr. Biden as an establishment phony. Video compilations of Mr. Biden's verbal gaffes, with titles like "17 Minutes of Joe's Melting Brain," have gotten millions of views over all. Joe Rogan, a popular talk show host with an enormous YouTube following, endorsed Mr. Sanders this year. After Mr. Sanders withdrew from the race, Mr. Rogan stated that he would prefer to vote for Mr. Trump than Mr. Biden, saying of the former vice president: "The guy can barely remember what he's talking about while he's talking." Facebook and Twitter are friendlier turf for Mr. Biden, but he is still lagging far behind Mr. Trump, whose rapid fire posts routinely make him the most visible figure on each platform. In the last month, Mr. Trump's posts got 42.6 million interactions on Facebook, including likes, comments and shares, according to CrowdTangle, a Facebook owned data tool. Mr. Biden's Facebook posts got just 3.4 million interactions in the same time period. Mark Provost, an administrator of The Other 98%, a left leaning Facebook page with more than six million followers, said Mr. Biden could capitalize on liberals' hostility for Mr. Trump by giving the party's base more red meat, and becoming more combative himself. "You want to tap into that deep id inside the Democratic Party," Mr. Provost said. "At this point, people just want to see a bully get smacked down. They want to see him hammer Trump a lot more." In the coming months, Mr. Biden will benefit from his proximity to Democrats with bigger online followings. This week, two videos containing new endorsements of Mr. Biden, from Mr. Sanders and Mr. Obama, got millions of views apiece and briefly stole the spotlight from Mr. Trump and his coronavirus task force. Mr. Biden will also benefit from the efforts of left wing super PACs like Priorities USA Action, which has raised millions of dollars to rally digital support for the Democratic nominee online. These efforts may still seem small in comparison with Mr. Trump, who has spent years building a vast data operation and a war chest that will allow him to blanket the internet with ads. Brad Parscale, who ran Mr. Trump's digital operation in 2016 and is managing his re election campaign, has said he does not expect Mr. Biden or any other Democrat to catch up to Mr. Trump, with or without social distancing. "President Trump's supporters will run through a brick wall to vote for him," Mr. Parscale said in a recent statement. "Nobody is running through a brick wall for Joe Biden." For now, Mr. Biden's supporters can take solace in his relatively strong polling performance, and the hope that a lull in the coronavirus allows him to return to the campaign trail this summer. And while some Democrats are worried that Mr. Biden's online struggles are a preview of a rough road ahead, others don't see social media success as a prerequisite for winning the White House. "We're not campaigning for YouTuber in chief. We're campaigning for president," said Andrew Bleeker, the president of Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic strategy firm. "He has a message of bringing the country together around the American spirit. He doesn't need to change that to get views."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
James B. Comey's coming book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership," briefly jumped to No. 1 on Amazon's best seller list on Sunday, about a month before its publication date of April 17. The spike in preorders occurred a couple of days after the former F.B.I. deputy director Andrew G. McCabe was fired, prompting a string of tweets by President Trump in which he said Mr. McCabe was a "choirboy" next to Mr. Comey, whom he called "sanctimonious." The early interest in "A Higher Loyalty" is comparable to the advance buzz for "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," Michael Wolff's expose of the current administration, which was published earlier this year. Mr. Wolff's book also hit the top of the Amazon best seller list before its release, and the publishing house and book sellers were unprepared for the demand. There appears to be an enormous appetite for books that give insight into the Trump White House. "Fire and Fury" has sold more than a million copies across all formats, and it remains at the top of The New York Times's hardcover nonfiction best sellers list. It has been on the list for 10 weeks. Similarly, upon its release, "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump" by Michael Isikoff and David Corn sold so quickly that Amazon temporarily shut down the buy button on the book's page, according to Twelve, an imprint of Hachette Book Group and the book's publisher, likely believing bots were manipulating the sales. It has sold 47,000 copies in its first week, and on Monday evening, it was right behind "A Higher Loyalty" on Amazon's politics and social sciences best seller list. Mr. Comey's book dropped to No. 2 over all on Amazon on Monday, it was replaced with "A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo," a parody book commissioned by John Oliver based on a picture book about the Pence family's real life rabbit, which was written by Mr. Pence's daughter. Macmillan, which owns Flatiron Books, declined to comment on preorders but confirmed an initial printing of 450,000.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
ORLANDO, Fla. Hispanic women in the United States, who have generally had the highest fertility rates in the country, are choosing to have fewer children. Both immigrant and native born Latinas had steeper birthrate declines from 2007 to 2010 than other groups, including non Hispanic whites, blacks and Asians, a drop some demographers and sociologists attribute to changes in the views of many Hispanic women about motherhood. As a result, in 2011, the American birthrate hit a record low, with 63 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, led by the decline in births to immigrant women. The national birthrate is now about half what it was during the baby boom years, when it peaked in 1957 at 122.7 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. The decline in birthrates was steepest among Mexican American women and women who immigrated from Mexico, at 25.7 percent. This has reversed a trend in which immigrant mothers accounted for a rising share of births in the United States, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. In 2010, birthrates among all Hispanics reached their lowest level in 20 years, the center found. The sudden drop off, which coincided with the onset of the recession, suggests that attitudes have changed since the days when older generations of Latinos prized large families and more closely followed Roman Catholic teachings, which forbid artificial contraception. Interviews with young Latinas, as well as reproductive health experts, show that the reasons for deciding to have fewer children are many, involving greater access to information about contraceptives and women's health, as well as higher education. When Marucci Guzman decided to marry Tom Beard here seven years ago, the idea of having a large family a Guzman tradition back in Puerto Rico was out of the question. "We thought one, maybe two," said Ms. Guzman Beard, who gave birth to a daughter, Attalai, four years ago. Asked whether Attalai might ever get her wish for a little brother or sister, Ms. Guzman Beard, 29, a vice president at a public service organization, said: "I want to go to law school. I'm married. I work. When do I have time?" Latinos suffered larger percentage declines in household wealth than white, black or Asian households from 2005 to 2009, and, according to the Pew report, their rates of poverty and unemployment also grew more sharply after the recession began. Prolonged recessions do produce dips in the birthrate, but a drop as large as Latinos have experienced is atypical, said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution. "It is surprising," Mr. Frey said. "When you hear about a decrease in the birthrate, you don't expect Latinos to be at the forefront of the trend." D'Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center and an author of the report, said that in past recessions, when overall fertility dipped, "it bounced back over time when the economy got better." "If history repeats itself, that will happen again," she said. But to Mr. Frey, the decrease has signaled much about the aspirations of young Latinos to become full and permanent members of the upwardly mobile middle class, despite the challenges posed by the struggling economy. Jersey Garcia, a 37 year old public health worker in Miami, is in the first generation of her family to live permanently outside of the Dominican Republic, where her maternal and paternal grandmothers had a total of 27 children. "I have two right now," Ms. Garcia said. "It's just a good number that I can handle." "Before, I probably would have been pressured to have more," she added. "I think living in the United States, I don't have family members close by to help me, and it takes a village to raise a child. So the feeling is, keep what you have right now." But that has not been easy. Even with health insurance, Ms. Garcia's preferred method of long term birth control, an IUD, has been unaffordable. Birth control pills, too, with a 50 co payment a month, were too costly for her budget. "I couldn't afford it," she said. "So what I've been doing is condoms." According to research by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the overwhelming majority of Latinas have used contraception at some point in their lives, but they face economic barriers to consistent use. As a consequence, Latinas still experience unintended pregnancy at a rate higher than non Hispanic whites, according to the institute. And while the share of births to teenage mothers has dropped over the past two decades for all women, the highest share of births to teenage mothers is among native born Hispanics. "There are still a lot of barriers to information and access to contraception that exist," said Jessica Gonzales Rojas, 36, the executive director of the institute, who has one son. "We still need to do a lot of work." In Denver, Olga Gonzalez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, teaches a family planning class in Spanish to Mexican immigrants. She tells her students that as a teenager in the 1980s, she decided to take the long view on life: "I chose to do the college route first and establish my career and then think about babies later." Now 40, Ms. Gonzalez has a master's degree in nonprofit management, two children and a solid foothold in the professional middle class. (Her father, one of six children, never finished the fifth grade back in Guanajuato, Mexico, before he had to go to work.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
'If We Do This Right' Maybe H.I.V. Will Be Forgotten If the 50 years since Stonewall has ultimately been about social and legal progress for L.G.B.T.Q. people, it has also been about one of the most devastating and, at first, mysterious medical events of modern times: The AIDS epidemic. While history now tells us that H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, probably made its move to humans from chimpanzees in central Africa in the early 1900s, its arrival in the United States in the 1980s brought to the public consciousness a disease that has killed more than 35 million people worldwide. A panoply of drugs in recent years has allowed some people with H.I.V. to have almost the same life expectancy as the general population. But perhaps even more striking has been the development of a drug known as PrEP, for pre exposure prophylaxis. It enables anyone at risk of contracting H.I.V. through unprotected sex, for example to ward off the virus by taking a daily pill. Still, after so many years of research, only two people have been considered cured of H.I.V. But the method the destruction of their immune systems followed by bone marrow transplants is so dangerous and expensive that it cannot be used on typical H.I.V. patients. Both men were chosen only because they were already dying of leukemia or lymphoma and the life threatening bone marrow transplants were their only hope. PrEP is a potential solution to the AIDS epidemic. But not everyone who needs it has access to it. Although the intense public attention to and panic over AIDS, the late and usually fatal stage of H.I.V. infection, have subsided since those earlier days, the scientific and medical focus remains, along with efforts to reduce the social stigma of the disease. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, deputy commissioner for the Division of Disease Control of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is among those trying to rewrite the AIDS narrative. During his tenure, New York City has succeeded in lowering H.I.V. transmission rates, rolling out PrEP and rebranding the city's STD (for sexually transmitted disease) Clinics as Sexual Health Clinics. Dr. D., as he is known to his social media following, exemplifies the shifting paradigms around sexual and gender minority health. He has advocated a disease prevention strategy that attempts to remove the stigma associated with H.I.V. and AIDS. Numbers show progress. Last year, the Health Department announced that 2,157 New Yorkers had been newly diagnosed with H.I.V. in 2017, down 5.4 percent from 2016 and down 64 percent from 2001 when H.I.V. case reporting began in New York State. The number of young people newly diagnosed with H.I.V. in New York City continues to decline, too; in 2017, 427 13 to 24 year olds were newly diagnosed, down 35 percent from 2001. In 2017, 38,739 people received an H.I.V. diagnosis in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control, down slightly from the diagnoses each year between 2012 and 2016, when the number remained stable around 40,000. In an interview, Dr. Daskalakis shared the philosophy behind his strategy and where today's efforts to end the epidemic are focused. His answers have been edited and condensed. What do you think is the greatest misconception about H.I.V. today? That it's over. It's only over for some people. There are some populations that have really benefited a lot by having a high level of access and education. And there are other populations that live in a deep zone of stigma that we really are working hard against. How do you think the legacy of AIDS as a gay man's disease affects your efforts to destigmatize it? There's good things and bad things. H.I.V. has a history, at least in the United States, of being a gay white man's disease. It's not. And so we have a legacy of shaking that off. Ownership of this disease now goes beyond the initial population that at least in the portrayal of the story was most affected by it. So whose epidemic is H.I.V.? The easy answer is that it's everyone's epidemic. But I think the harder answer is that it's an epidemic of folks who are, unfortunately, already stigmatized in the community. When you look at our numbers, 91 percent of the women who get diagnosed with H.I.V. in New York City are black and Latina and older. They're not young, gay men, or men who have sex with men (known as M.S.M. in medical and scientific jargon). A lot of the M.S.M. who are getting diagnosed are black and Latino too. We're working against a universe of stigma that is an intersection of racism, sexism and homophobia. In the epidemic's early days, public health authorities used harsh and sometimes controversial measures to stop the epidemic, such as closing gay bathhouses. Times have changed, and the science has changed. What do you see as your role in this new historical narrative? I think that's why I'm here. I think that the reason that I was hired, the reason that I was made the assistant commissioner of H.I.V., was because my perspective was a very community perspective. What I promised to do coming here was to shift the narrative from fear and intimidation to support of the community to control its own story. So everything that's happened revolves around this concept: Rrather than scaring people from disease, we were going to ease them into health. What is your response to AIDS activists who said your work with PrEP was undoing their hard work promoting the use of condoms, which not only protect against H.I.V. but also against other sexually transmitted diseases? I had a lot of responses. One of them was that the technology speaks for itself. The guiding principle for launching PrEP is science. Right? I mean that would be like saying, we have an H.I.V. vaccine now, and we're not going to give it because someone may have condom less sex and maybe they'll get syphilis. Well, you don't hold one infection hostage for another infection. If this were 1984, and they told you that there was a pill that could prevent H.I.V., you best believe you would have been first in line. Right? And you'd be advocating for it to be out immediately. What do you think the impact of H.I.V. has been on queer culture? L.G.B.T.Q. health in some ways was born out of H.I.V. There were people who were focused on the health of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people before AIDS. But there wasn't the same support. The stuff that has emerged over years, including some of the trans health stuff, now has, thank goodness, split off completely from H.I.V. and has a life of its own, which is fabulous. Stonewall and the arrival of the H.I.V. epidemic happened over a decade apart, but what do you think the 50th anniversary of Stonewall means for the epidemic? It's so critical that you had an uprising, and it became not just folks being downtrodden by their system but actually then fighting back. I feel that the fighting spirit now is like the Act Up experience in New York. There was a feeling that it was part of L.G.B.T.Q. rights to ask for faster, better support and funding to fight H.I.V. What do you think the legacy of that activism is today? Folks really are using that same "health care is a right" strategy for all of the H.I.V. prevention efforts. When there's something going on in the H.I.V. space, they come to me before I go to them because they are connected, either to the science or the politics or both. So I think that legacy of activism remains powerful decades later. What do you hope your legacy is? If you do it right, the H.I.V. status of someone is less important. What's more important is: How do you provide the service to the person to optimize their health? What I do every day is make sure that people get the right service so they stay engaged in treatment or prevention. And if we do that, then their status matters less, because you're just doing the right service for people. Do you ever worry that the next generation won't know what H.I.V. and AIDS meant to you and your generation?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
At the Golden Globes on Sunday night, the fastidious Amal Clooney made what passed for red carpet history, turning the proceedings at the Beverly Hilton hotel into something resembling an affair of state. For better or worse, depending on which critic one consults, she pulled off that dubious feat by accenting her dramatic one shoulder Dior haute couture dress with a pair of pristine opera gloves. Incandescently white against her regal black gown, and scrunched below her elbow, those gloves her own brought down on her head a storm of controversy. Kathy Griffin, in her Monday morning debut on "Fashion Police," fired off one of the first salvos: "She had on those gloves that remind me of, like, a porn scene, where the guy goes home and there's the naughty dishwasher, and she only has the gloves." Ms. Griffin was just one in a chorus of critics taking potshots at Ms. Clooney for a fashion choice that, however respectfully intended, struck some as uppity, or at the least, unsuitable. "They make this look like her prom, or her debutante ball," sniped Jessica Morgan, a blogger on a celebrity site. "If Amal A. Clooney is anything," she posted, "it is not a blushing teen or fresh young debutante."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
What better way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage than by discussing the way it turned out to be a big flop? The great champions of the 19th Amendment thought that when America's women got the right to vote, they'd immediately start to change the nation. Promote women's issues, like better health care and education. Refocus politics from special interests to the general good. Then in 1920, for the first time, they went to polls across the nation with their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons and elected President Warren Harding. In 1921, Congress, with a wary eye on the newly enfranchised sex, passed the Sheppard Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act. It was a modest effort to improve health care for the poor by training nurses, licensing midwives and establishing clinics for young mothers and their babies. The physicians' associations saw it as government subsidized competition socialized medicine! and hated it. During debate on the bill, one opponent claimed the sponsors were pandering to busybody old maids who were always pushing do gooder causes. But the doctors kept complaining, and as time passed, politicians began to notice that they weren't hearing much from the new female electorate. In 1929, the act was repealed. The Sheppard Towner debacle was one of the best examples of how the effects of women's suffrage turned out to be more complicated than its champions had imagined. Everything worked great when it came to the title cause of giving women the right to vote. But the leaders of the movement had expected to use the ballot to transform the nation. For a very long time, nothing happened. Well, except for Prohibition. Banning the sale of liquor was one cause that really did bring the women together. Most of them didn't drink, but their husbands did. The upper class men retired to the study or a club after dinner to sip some liquor and have fun talking among themselves. Poor men went off to a saloon to get soused, spending the family's much needed cash. Once Congress approved the 19th Amendment, the liquor lobbyists stampeded to the state legislatures to try to stop ratification. They won enough battles to leave suffragists one state short of victory and only Tennessee left to vote. All eyes turned to Nashville. The State Senate voted yes while virtually everybody in the capitol was getting swacked on the lobbyists' free samples. Then it all came down to the House of Representatives, where the "no" group had a one man majority. On Aug. 18, 1920, a 24 year old suffrage opponent named Harry Burn got up and reported to his colleagues that he'd gotten a letter from his mother telling him to "be a good boy" and help the women's cause. "I know that a mother's advice is always the safest for a boy to follow," he told his colleagues. And he switched his vote. Suffrage ruled. That was a great culmination, and much more fun to report than the slog that preceded it. We will refrain from revisiting what suffragists counted as 480 campaigns to get state legislatures to submit the issue to the voters. Some fights had been much, much easier than others. Lawmakers in Wyoming had eagerly voted for the franchise in 1869, hoping it might be a draw for a territory in which men outnumbered women six to one. "We now expect quite an immigration of ladies to Wyoming," said The Cheyenne Leader hopefully after the legislature voted for women's suffrage, as well as women's property rights and equal pay for women schoolteachers. Wherever suffrage arrived, there were lots of women who resisted the idea of getting involved. Election Day was, in many neighborhoods, a rowdy time when political parties tried to encourage voter turnout with yes! free liquor. "Saloons, marching, drinking all day voting was seen as a very masculine act," says Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Theodore Roosevelt told a crowd of suffrage supporters he was the only person in his family who agreed with their agenda, and urged them to "go and convert my wife and daughters." His young niece Eleanor was among the unenthusiastic. I don't have to tell you that things changed. Women went to the polls more and more with every generation. But politicians still presumed that they'd vote with their menfolk unless something very unusual cropped up. When Woodrow Wilson was up for re election in 1916 his handlers did worry about the "women's vote" in the states where they already had the franchise. The president's wife had died during his first term of office and Wilson rather quickly picked up with Edith Galt, the widow of a prominent Washington jeweler. They wanted to marry right away, but Wilson's aides were afraid of how the news might affect the female electorate. In the end, the answer was: not much. Perhaps voters didn't hear the gossip in political circles about what was said to be a hot and heavy premarital affair. (The political columnist Murray Kempton told me he heard a joke when he was a boy in the 1920s, in which when the president proposed, Mrs. Galt was so excited she fell out of bed. "I think my sainted mother told me that one," Kempton recalled.) After the Wilson engagement became official, The Washington Post printed a social note containing one of the most famous typos in American history: "The President gave himself up for the time being to entering his fiancee." You have to wonder, as the years went on, how many husbands were actually reflecting their wives' opinions when they went to the polls. The balance of power within families has shifted dramatically over the last 50 years, mainly because of money. The transformation began when the country's post World War II economic boom hit the killer recession of the 1970s, and everyone began to realize that a whole lot of the families of the future would not be able to afford a middle class lifestyle unless the wives kept working. The women's movement combined with the hard facts of the economy created a world in which almost no one envisioned young women with a distinctly different wage earning future from men. I'll never forget a visit I made to a community college in Connecticut, back around 1980. I was invited for some reason to speak to a class of young men, and I asked them to describe for me their ideal mate. There were a few polite murmurs about a good sense of humor and fine moral character then someone called out, "And a good earner!" I cannot tell you how enthusiastic the room became over the "good earner" qualification. It took professional politicians quite a while to notice there was a change going on. Then in 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated then President Jimmy Carter, it became clear the country had moved on to a whole new political wave. Analysis of the final tallies showed that both sexes favored Reagan, but the women split very narrowly while the men went Republican 55 percent to 36 percent. The gender gap was born, and it really turned into a canyon in 1996, when Bill Clinton won the women's vote by a wide margin, while men narrowly favored Bob Dole. These days, women go to the polls more faithfully than men, and they are more likely to vote Democratic. That doesn't mean they always win. In 2000, women favored Al Gore for president over George W. Bush, 54 44 percent, while the men went for Bush, 54 43. In 2016, the male voters gave us Donald Trump in an election where the gender gap yawned at 11 points. But the power is there. Black women, who've fought dual battles against racism and sexism to exercise their right to vote, knocked the socks off Democratic organizers in Alabama in 2017 when they gave long shot Senate candidate Doug Jones 98 percent of their vote and a victory over Republican former judge and pursuer of teenage girls Roy Moore. Women who tearily discovered in 2016 that they weren't going to be able to introduce their daughters to the first woman president have mostly gotten over it. If everything we think we know about the current presidential race is reasonably true and nothing crazy happens over the rest of the campaign next January the country will have a female vice president, a woman who the voters trusted as second in command to 78 year old Joe Biden. "Women's issues" like guaranteed quality health care for all and reproductive freedom may still not have universal political support. But they're now political goals for a vast swath of the voting public, both male and female. And maybe it won't be too long before someone's little niece in the future innocently asks her mother whether men are allowed to be president, too. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
AMSTERDAM The Dutch postwar photographer Ed van der Elsken lived with, and through, his cameras. They came with him into his bedroom, capturing life with his first, second and third wives; they were slung around his neck and across his chest as he traveled to Paris, Tokyo, Chile, central Africa and back home to his native Amsterdam. They joined him in his deathbed, as he recorded his own slow capitulation to cancer in 1990. He was "a man who would have liked to have transplanted a camera into his head to permanently record the world around him," wrote Beatrix Ruf, the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Marta Gili, the director of the Jeu de Paume in Paris, who have collaborated to present a major retrospective of his work for both museums. That text comes from the preface to the catalog of the exhibition, "Ed van der Elsken Camera in Love," at the Stedelijk until May 21, before it moves to the Jeu de Paume, from June through September, and then to the Fundacion Mapfre in Madrid. Even though his cameras were ever present, van der Elsken's work didn't contain the least tinge of solipsism. It didn't explore his personal identity he was far more concerned with using his camera for documenting the social culture around him, especially the counterculture. His lenses captured the reckless, drug taking bohemians in postwar Paris, the gruesome slaughter of hunted elephants in Africa, the demolition of Amsterdam's looted and destroyed Jewish Quarter, segregation in South Africa under apartheid, jazz musicians onstage, and all forms of love gender bending, interracial and otherwise. He's most famous for pictures shot in grainy, high contrast black and white. A 1993 review in The New York Times compared his photographic style to "aspects of Robert Frank's melancholy romanticism with Weegee's harsh fascination with the underside of city life"; his cinema verite style of documentary filmmaking was most associated with anthropological research. "He was always looking for what he called 'my kind of people,'" said Hripsime Visser, the Stedelijk curator of the exhibition, who has studied van der Elsken's work for 40 years. "And what he meant by that was not the beautiful people and not the famous people but the people who tried to live or to survive." "Almost from the start he was also a filmmaker, a documentary maker," she said, adding that he was often compared to people like William Klein or Jonas Mekas, "people who really didn't film from a distance but filmed their own lives and filmed with cameras that could record in the most direct way." Van der Elsken began shooting photos on the streets of Amsterdam after World War II, then moved to Paris in 1950, where he worked in the darkrooms of the Magnum agency, printing for Henri Cartier Bresson and Robert Capa. In 1953, the American photographer Edward Steichen, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, selected 18 of his works for the exhibition "Postwar European Photography," and one photograph for "The Family of Man" exhibition and book of 1955. Between those two shows van der Elsken married a fellow photographer, Ata Kando. Steichen suggested that van der Elsken turn his Paris photos into a book, which he did in 1956, blending fact and fiction to create a novel in pictures: the tale of an ill fated love affair between a Parisian woman and a Mexican man, "Love on the Left Bank." In 1960, he and his second wife, Gerda van der Veen, sold everything to embark on a 14 month trip around the world. A book he made of the journey, "Sweet Life," is now considered one of his major achievements. In 1971, like many other artists and hippies of his era, he went back to the land: in his case, a farm in Edam, the Netherlands, with his third wife, the photographer Anneke Hilhorst. The exhibition includes about 200 prints and a dozen films, beginning with his postwar work in Amsterdam and Paris, moving chronologically as he traveled the globe and ending with the film "Bye" he made as the last chapter of his life, after he learned in 1988 that he had incurable prostate cancer. They are drawn from the Stedelijk's collection of about 340 works, as well as an extensive archive, now owned by Ms. Hilhorst. The Stedelijk last hosted an exhibition of its highlights a quarter century ago, also curated by Ms. Visser, who said she "always felt that it didn't show enough what kind of spirit, what kind of artistic attitude he had." The goal of this exhibition, she said, is not just to show his best images but to explore how he worked as a multidisciplinary artist. The exhibition also includes marked up contact sheets, sketches of the books he would later make reminiscent of film storyboards and some lesser known color photographs made during the last 30 years of his life. Although he has not been a household name, Ed van der Elsken has influenced a wide range of admirers among artists, including Nan Goldin, Anton Corbijn, Valerie Jouve and Paulien Oltheten, said Annet Gelink, an Amsterdam based gallery owner who represents his works. While visiting friends in Edam after van der Elsken died, Ms. Goldin met Anneke, his widow, and John, her son with van der Elsken. They were so friendly and welcoming, she said, that she moved into their home for a while. Twenty seven years after his death, van der Elsken is still accumulating acolytes. The opening night of "Ed van der Elsken Camera in Love" had a surprisingly enthusiastic reception among those under 30, Ms. Ruf, the Stedelijk's director, said. "Our impression was that his way of making life the center of his work is very appealing to a younger generation," she said. "There's almost a kind of revival of the ethics and values and interests of the '60s generation, the streets, the direct contact and direct activity, and the movement of people into public life." Ms. Gili, in a telephone interview, said that van der Elsken's work has a particular kind of vitality that speaks to the current sociopolitical climate. "He was making pictures in a moment of crisis in Europe, and we are also in crisis now, not only economically but in terms of social values," she said. "He was working with social values values he was espousing and values he was against." He was also using his camera much in the way that young people today snap selfies and navigate their own personal boundaries between the private and the public selves, she said. Van der Elsken, she said, explored the "questions that arise when we begin this elimination of the walls between what we are and how the others look at us. This idea of just being permanently exposed."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Dr. Karla Kerlikowske, a breast cancer researcher, goes over mammogram readouts displaying different stages of breast density, at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in San Francisco. A new study offers help to patients and doctors who are trying to deal with mammogram results that many women consider troubling and confusing: the finding of "dense" breast tissue. Not only is breast density linked to an increased risk of cancer, it also makes cancer harder to detect because dense tissue can hide tumors from X rays. But the new research indicates that not all women with dense breasts are at very high risk. Patient advocates urge women with dense breasts to ask doctors about extra tests like ultrasound or an M.R.I. to check for tumors that mammography might have missed. Studies have found that those exams can improve detection of tumors over mammography alone in dense breasts. Pressed by advocacy groups, 22 states have passed laws requiring that breast density be reported to mammography patients, and similar federal legislation has been introduced in the House and the Senate. The new study, published on Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine, suggests that only about half of women with dense tissue are at such a high risk that they need extra tests. Instead of looking at density alone, women and their doctors should also consider other risk factors when making decisions about additional screening, the researchers concluded. "While mammography is currently the best screening tool we have, there are women for whom mammography is not enough," said Dr. Constance Lehman, an author of the study and the director of breast imaging at the University of Washington in Seattle. "We hope this work can help women be better informed regarding whether or not supplemental screening, such as with ultrasound or with M.R.I., should be considered," she said. The study, by a large team of experts in breast cancer and epidemiology, was done in part because many doctors thought that the laws and advocacy groups had gotten ahead of the science. About 45 percent of all women have dense breasts, but not every woman with that finding has a high risk of cancer. Some experts warned that the new laws would give some women bad news that did not necessarily apply to them and lead to a demand for unnecessary, expensive tests that could swamp the health care system. "I was trying to focus in on who's really at high risk of having their breast cancer not seen on mammography," said Dr. Karla Kerlikowske, the first author of the study and a professor of medicine and epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. "It can't be 45 percent of people." Dense breasts have a relatively high proportion of glandular or connective tissue, which shows up as white on mammograms. Tumors also appear white, so dense tissue can hide them. Non dense breasts have more fat, which looks dark on mammograms, so tumors stand out more easily. Density can be detected only by mammograms and is reported in one of four categories, from "almost entirely fatty" to "extremely dense." The study findings are based on the medical records of 365,426 women ages 40 to 74 who had screening mammograms from 2002 through 2011. The researchers wanted to know if they could detect whether, among all the women with dense breasts, any distinct subgroups had a higher risk than others of developing an "interval" cancer, meaning one that is found less than a year after a normal mammogram. Such tumors, usually found when a patient or her doctors feel a lump, may have been present but not detected by the mammogram. The report uses breast density assessments along with an online calculator that estimates a woman's risk of developing breast cancer in the next five years. The calculator asks five questions: a woman's age, her race, breast density as reported from mammograms, whether she has ever needed a breast biopsy and whether her mother, sisters or daughters have ever had breast cancer. The calculator categorizes each woman's risk as low, average, intermediate, high or very high. A five year risk up to 1.66 percent is considered low to average; more than 4 percent is very high. The study found that women with certain combinations of breast density and five year risk levels had the highest odds of an interval cancer. Two groups had high rates of interval cancer, defined as more than one case per 1,000 mammograms. One group included women with a five year risk of 1.67 percent or higher and extremely dense breasts. The second group had a five year risk of 2.5 percent or higher and "heterogeneously dense" findings on mammography. Women with a five year risk of 2.5 percent or higher and heterogeneously or extremely dense breasts 21 percent of all women with dense breasts were also the most likely to have interval cancers that were advanced, the study found. These women with the highest risk are the most likely to benefit from additional tests after a normal mammogram, the authors said. An accompanying editorial said the study provided "compelling evidence" that density alone should not be the basis for deciding whether to have additional screening. The study authors provided an example of one way the information might be used for a sample of 100,000 women with dense breasts in mammograms. If they all had additional tests, about 89 interval cancers would be found. One cancer would have been discovered for every 1,124 tests administered. But if the extra testing were limited to only the two groups of high risk women singled out in the study, 24,294 women from the sample would have the tests, and about 35 interval cancers would be found. So it would have taken 694 tests to diagnose one cancer.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
This week, we visit three national monuments (more than two dozen are under review by the Trump administration and could be made smaller and opened to logging and mining): Berryessa Snow Mountain in California (below), Gold Butte in Nevada and Bears Ears in Utah. The sideways dawn light as it winks across the vineyards from the east: It was the first thing I noticed as I pulled off a California freeway. As I drove, the vineyards gave way to wheat gold foothills, black cows in fields. The fields gave way to darkly arching oaks, tree tunnels shading a narrow country road outside Winters, Calif. The early hour brightness indicated the nearness of summer. Here, an hour and a half northeast of San Francisco, the dense press of civilization lifts, and the open wilderness weaves itself into the landscape. The light is somehow ventilated, given more space. I watched a cloud bank slowly roll over a cliff, rearranging itself like a gauzy muslin scarf. In the six o'clock glow of the last days of May, I entered the southern boundary of Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, one of our country's newest national monuments. The knobby fullness of the surrounding hills resembles rising bread. Named for the craggy 7,056 foot peak at its northern end, the monument runs along a ridgeline that stretches south through seven counties to Blue Ridge, where I would start my hike. One writer called Berryessa's outline a long, lumpy Christmas stocking. This is the toe, and I'm dipping in. What do we want from our wildlife areas? Something so remote we'll never see it? Or something close enough, braided into our tangle of civilization, to remind us of all that exists alongside us in this world? When Theodore Roosevelt signed the 1906 Antiquities Act into law, he gave presidents the power to protect cultural, historic and natural resources under threat with the national monument designation. More than a century later, millions of acres of public lands have been protected, many across the American West. They include the Pacific Remote Islands, the largest marine reserve in the world, which was proclaimed by George W. Bush and expanded by Barack Obama, and the Grand Staircase Escalante in Utah, an astounding, alien landscape of plateaus and cliff faces created by sedimentary erosion, chock full of fossils. This year, 27 national monuments were made newly vulnerable to oil, gas and other resource extraction, placed under review by President Trump for what he deems as presidential overreach amounting to a "massive federal land grab." But it's important to note that these places were never meant to be walled off or untouchable. They're meant to be explored. Designated by Mr. Obama two years ago, Berryessa Snow Mountain was a complicated puzzle of orphaned lands managed by a host of government agencies. But looking at the pieces together now, you'll see they make up a rich wildlife corridor amounting to a third of a million acres, with densely forested slopes and some of the rarest plants on earth. Because the monument is situated north of Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay, all of it intersects with human activity. Its landscape reveals more than 10,000 years of Native American artifacts and cultural sites, and is flush with places to hike, camp, fish, hunt, bike and go boating. Locals advocated protection for the region for years. On the editorial pages of California newspapers, the outcry against Mr. Trump's order has been fierce; along with Berryessa Snow Mountain, seven other national monuments in the state were covered by the order. In these contentious times, it seems fitting that Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument was birthed in flames. Days after Mr. Obama's July 2015 designation, wildfires raged across Napa and Lake counties, eventually engulfing 100,000 acres by the end of the summer, including much of the landscape earmarked for the monument. The trails in the area reopened to the public just one year ago. I came to Berryessa Snow Mountain to see about the possibility of rebirth indeed, to remind myself how to imagine what that could look like. One thing rebirth looks like is an explosion of wildflowers. As I ascended the Blue Ridge Trail, it was hard to ignore the vibrant, in your face display of fire follower blooms: white Stebbins' morning glory and delicate yellow whispering bell, for instance, whose seeds lie dormant in the soil until heat and smoke trigger germination. At every step, a new floral arrangement seemed to present itself: woolly sunflower, fire red Indian paintbrush and pale pink splendid Mariposa lily, all taking advantage of the extra sunlight and soil moisture freed up by the recent fires. The trail I chose, the Homestead Blue Ridge Loop, is considered the gateway to the national monument. It's a terrific and tough five mile loop that starts and ends along Putah Creek, with a steep elevation gain of 1,300 feet over two and a half miles to the highest point. What you get for the effort, along with sore legs, are those thick blankets of wildflowers, a panorama of the Sacramento Valley and glorious ridgeline views of Lake Berryessa from the very top. The trail crosses into Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve, which the University of California, Davis, maintains as an outdoor classroom, a place for biologists to study vegetation changes after a fire, say, or for geologists to model landslides. Jeffrey Clary, the director of the reserve, spends a lot of time in the field. ''If you were to design a trail that squeezes the maximum into five miles, this is it," he said. "It's really special." The monument has some of the most ecologically diverse lands in the state; when taken together, Mr. Clary said, they act as a valuable corridor for the migration of species, especially in a changing climate. Part of the importance of a national monument designation is the mandate to create a management plan that takes the whole picture into account, not just its pieces. As I climbed higher in elevation above Putah Creek, there was an abundance of B letter wildlife: blue jays, bumblebees, butterflies. At one point, the bushes along the trail rustled, and a brown bunny hopped across my path. (Though I spotted a sign announcing the presence of mountain lions, I didn't see any.) At 800 feet, I stopped for a long moment, moved to do so by the view of mountains and fog seen through a scrim of rustling wheat gold grass. As the switchbacks began piling up, the charred black skeletons of trees below made for a striking overlay on the otherwise blazingly bright native ground vegetation. During warmer months, this is a hike to start in the early morning cool air, since the 2015 fires cleared away much of the tree cover above the valley floor. A handful of mature trees were left standing, a California blue oak here, a manzanita there. "If you're a hiker out there, as you're walking, there are those places you naturally want to stop and rest because it's cooler; there are trees, some shade," Mr. Clary said, describing the many microclimates along the hike. "In the same way, you see species moving, not very far, but to microclimates that are a little cooler than where they came from. With a fire, those kinds of shifts can happen overnight. Most climate change models for California suggest more frequent and more intense fires. And that's happening all over the world." As I rounded the northern part of the loop, sprouts of poison oak extended onto the trail to catch my hair and clothes. Lizards skittered across the trail, throwing up puffs of dust. Just as I reached the exposed ridgeline, short of breath, I was rewarded with my first glimpse of Lake Berryessa. Viewed from this vantage point, the water shone a glorious, thirst quenching blue. Thirst quenching in a psychic way, that is; there is no actual potable water on this hike. I paused to swig some of the liter plus water I'd brought, and to appreciate the breeze, while turkey buzzards the color of char rode the cool updraft over the lake. Though it was quickly getting hot, the astounding blue of the water below was a balm. Even as I focused on carefully bouldering up a narrow cliffside passage, I kept turning to take sips of that view. At one point, I passed a group of hikers going the other way, clockwise on the loop, exclaiming about the lake as they came up upon it. "Kudos to you for doing this alone," one young woman chirped as we scrambled past each other. I smiled weakly, blinking back the sweat as it poured over my brow. In the end, I was happy I'd gone counterclockwise, getting the bulk of elevation gain under my belt early on so that I could circle back on the Homestead Trail section of the loop; it has a more gradual slope, with wooden stairs in sections and some shade. (Still, I admit the descent was murderous on my legs.) But with the ascent behind me, I wasn't in a rush. I could meander along, pushing aside plant tendrils that reached for me every which way. The landscape had changed; some flowers that were closed on my climb were now visible. I was reminded of Linnaeus's flower clock, with every hour indicated by a specific bloom that opened. What else does this landscape have to tell us? "It's easy to see the skeletons of trees," Mr. Clary told me. "But take a closer look: Are those trees resprouting? Or was that fire so intense that you're not getting any of that regeneration? We are the gateway so researchers can understand this landscape and how it works." Back at the creek, I took a short detour to visit the eponymous homestead of this portion of the trail. Here lies the old foundation of a cabin, where its resident raised goats and made cheese circa 1938. On the shady slope from what remains of this homesteader's claim, I stuck my hands into the cool rushing creek. By the time I reached the end of the loop, the sun was high and fierce in the sky. It was only 10 o'clock. That afternoon I drove west and north, tracing the outlines of the monument on switchbacked roads, largely empty of cars and people. The tree cover was dense, the towns small, the ranches sprawling. This lumpy stocking is full of leftover lands, sewn into a monument designation. But the fact of their proximity to big city populations close enough to be a trapdoor, a way to drop out of the present day and into another, grander scale of time is one of the best reasons for their existence. Lying in bed that night, I couldn't shake one gorgeous, defiant image of the trail from my mind: whole fields of morning glory, fully open in the midmorning heat, drinking in the sun. They bloom for several years, then fade away until the next fire comes along. It's a reminder of the next day, and the next, to imagine that bigger picture, and to look forward every once in a while, instead of just at what's at our feet. If You Go Because Berryessa Snow Mountain's designation as a national monument is relatively recent, there is no single trail map for the region. AllTrails is a useful app for sifting through the trails associated with each of the wilderness areas within the monument's borders; it offers trailhead information on the Homestead Blue Ridge Loop, recent reviews, and photographs (also useful is the Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve's new website). The United States Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Managementand the nonprofit Tuleyome also offer information on the monument and its trails.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Rob Gronkowski, the dominant tight end who helped lead the New England Patriots to three Super Bowl titles in nine seasons while cultivating a goofy, frat boy persona off the field, announced his retirement from the N.F.L. on Sunday. In an Instagram post, Gronkowski, 29, widely considered one of the most talented tight ends to ever play, thanked the team and its fans for drafting his "silliness" back in 2010 and acknowledged the uncertainty of what will come next for him. "Thank you for everyone accepting who I am and the dedication I have put into my work to be the best player I could be," he said. "But now its time to move forward and move forward with a big smile knowing that the New England Patriots Organization, Pats Nation, and all my fans will be truly a big part of my heart for rest of my life." Becoming a television or movie personality is not a complete surprise; he seemed to enjoy performing on camera, dancing and hamming it up on things like a Gronk Party Ship in 2016 filled with fans and entertainers on a cruise ship from Miami to the Bahamas. He danced shirtless and appeared to egg on patrons to have sex. There also were a series of injuries that put in question how much longer he could play. He had hinted the past two seasons that he was considering leaving the N.F.L. because of the wear and tear on his body, which led to missed games because of an ankle sprain, a broken forearm, an infection, a herniated disk in his back, a torn A.C.L., a sprained knee, an injured hamstring and a pulmonary contusion, among other injuries. 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. Gronkowski should this truly be the end will finish his career with 521 catches, 7,861 yards and a Patriots record 79 receiving touchdowns. He was named to the Pro Bowl five times and was first team All Pro four times, taking full advantage of his size and speed to find mismatches on any given play. His team made the Super Bowl in five of his nine seasons, winning three times, but he was not on the field for the Patriots' dramatic comeback win over the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI because he was recovering for back surgery. When he was on the field, though, he was nearly always the go to receiver for Tom Brady, with the two combining for thrilling plays in the closing minutes of countless games. "What an honor and privilege to play with you these past nine years gronk!,'' Brady wrote on Instagram. "You accomplished so much and our team was almost unbeatable when you were on the field!" Last season, Gronkowski earned nearly 9 million in salary and bonuses. He was able to finish his career on a high note, helping the Patriots the only team he has played for beat the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl LIII. Drafted in the second round (42nd over all) of the 2010 draft, Gronkowski used his hulking 6 foot 6 frame to excel as a receiver and a blocker. He also used his size to run over defenders and, at times, confront them. He was fined four times, including once for taunting a player, once for unnecessary roughness and once for his role in a brawl at the end of Super Bowl XLIX. Because of his age and his injury history, much of the talk coming into this year's Super Bowl was about whether Gronkowski had fallen off as a player. That idea was brushed aside by Aqib Talib, a cornerback for the Rams and a former teammate of Gronkowski's. "You all haven't put on shoulder pads and helmets and lined up against Gronk in your life. I do," Talib said. "So believe me when I tell you, any day he can explode and go crazy." As dominant as he was on the field, Gronkowski was equally larger than life off it, frequently standing out among the businesslike Patriots, led by Coach Bill Belichick, with his love of partying and his frequent sophomoric humor, delivered with an exaggerated wink. Gronkowski's fun loving personality was candy to his fans. But it came as the N.F.L. was battling the perception in the wake of several high profile players being suspended for domestic violence and sexual abuse that it cared little for how women were treated. Given his size and sense of humor, it was perhaps appropriate that Gronkowski is also a professional wrestling fan and friends with performers including Mojo Rawley. Gronkowski helped him "win" a Battle Royal in 2017. From time to time, speculation has surfaced that WWE was interested in offering Gronkowski a contract. His wrestling cameos might have been a prelude to a new career on screen. Already, he has appeared in the television series "Entourage," "Family Guy" and "MVP." He has also appeared in movies, including "The Lit Party," "You Can't Have It" and "American Violence."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Alessandra Ferri, returning to the role of Juliet at 53, on Thursday, was recognizably the same dancer she was 10, 20, 30 years ago and unmistakably different. The performance was of Kenneth MacMillan's "Romeo and Juliet," at the Metropolitan Opera House; the company was American Ballet Theater, with which Ms. Ferri, for over 20 years (1986 2007), enjoyed her greatest triumphs. Though she is an Italian who began her career in London, it's here in New York that she has been most loved. The plasticity, liquidity and effortless eloquence of her movement seem unchanged. Her stage persona remains vivid, ardent, rapturous, impulsive and compelling. And in the miraculous Herman Cornejo, she finds a Romeo who shares those virtues. Both have charm; neither cultivates it. The youthful intensity they share in this ballet has nothing sweet about it; it does have tremendous pathos. Alessandra Ferri on preparing for her return to "Romeo and Juliet" Alastair Macaulay's primer on the ballet Her vividly particular acting on Thursday, more than in any of the Juliets I have seen her dance from her 1984 debut in the role with the Royal Ballet, to her 2007 Ballet Theater farewell performance keenly brought lines from Shakespeare's play to mind. The dilemma of "My only love born from my only hate," when the Nurse explains to her who Romeo is; the passionate declaration of "My bounty is boundless as the sea/My love as deep" in the balcony love scene; and the anguish of "Then, window, let day in and let life out," as she sends Romeo from her bedroom into exile: Ms. Ferri piercingly evoked those moments. The movement of her thought was evident in every movement of her body. The famous arches of her feet, however, have grown yet more strangely pronounced. Though they were part of her beauty, they are now part of her frailty. She has lost both security and speed. Yet I was reminded of what the opera critic Michael Scott wrote of the great soprano Lotte Lehmann: "And her faults, what of them?" He added, "One may as well complain that the Venus de Milo has no arms." Ms. Ferri today, though physically more vulnerable than before, is so complete an artist that this becomes part of her whole stage persona. When she was young, she was inspiringly reckless; but today she is more touching. Mr. Cornejo now in his prime, an artist yet more versatile, resourceful and bewildering than she devoted himself selflessly to her. Though his technique is exciting, it's all subordinated to expression. His jumps' height and his turns' speed matter less than their windblown, tilting ecstasy and shining, boyish fervor. How can this paragon of adolescent lyricism also be the mature prince or witty imp we see in other ballets? We do and we don't know him; he dissolves his immense energy and skill differently into each role. Ms. Ferri and he interacted brilliantly. Familiar moments the way they, motionless, as if transfixed, gazed at each other across the space at the start of the balcony scene seemed newly potent. Other moments the suggestion of a fleeting disagreement in the bedroom scene seemed their own invention, superbly judged. Ms. Ferri's new quality of pathos is matched by another new gift for expressive stillness. MacMillan's choreography has always been punctuated by moments of immobility, but only now did those all seem to point the way to the final great stasis of death. Earlier in the week, I caught two other Ballet Theater casts. Diana Vishneva's Juliet, ravishing in the past and still superficially exquisite, on Tuesday tipped over into a study in narcissism. Sadder yet is a loss of freshness in her Romeo, Marcelo Gomes. Conscious charm rather than poignancy pervaded all their scenes. The partnership of Isabella Boylston's Juliet and James Whiteside's Romeo (Wednesday afternoon) was entirely dewy, affecting, spontaneous. Few dancers anywhere have the springing ease of Ms. Boylston's feet; they, like everything about her, caught the impetuousness essential to MacMillan's conception of Juliet. Mr. Whiteside sometimes lacks dance polish, but he and she share the same focus and immediacy. MacMillan (1929 92), having made this "Romeo" for the Royal Ballet in 1965, made several adjustments when he staged it for Ballet Theater in 1985 principally, giving the mandolin dance lead role to Mercutio, for whom it becomes here the high, soon before the crash of his death scene. One or two misguided adjustments have arrived in recent years, however: notably, the unnecessary, even coy, moment when Juliet kneels beside Romeo during the balcony pas de deux. Here my memories stretch back. This "Romeo" in the years 1974 76 was part of my own conversion to dance. As for Ms. Ferri, I realize having watched her dance with the Royal Ballet School in 1980 and having seen the world premieres of one act ballets MacMillan made for her in 1983 and 1984 that there is no artist I have watched longer or through so many stages. And yet greedily, I ask for more. May she return as Juliet and in other roles.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The good news is, the human brain is flexible and efficient. This helps us make sense of the world. But the bad news is, the human brain is flexible and efficient. This means the brain can sometimes make mistakes. You can watch this tension play out when the brain tries to connect auditory and visual speech. It's why we may find a poorly dubbed kung fu movie hard to believe, and why we love believing the gibberish in those Bad Lip Reading Videos on YouTube. "By dubbing speech that is reasonably consistent with the available mouth movements, we can utterly change the meaning of what the original talker was saying," said John Magnotti, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. "Sometimes we can detect that something is a little off, but the illusion is usually quite compelling." In a study published Thursday in PLOS Computational Biology, Dr. Magnotti and Michael Beauchamp, also a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, tried to pin down why our brains are susceptible to these kinds of perceptual mistakes by looking at a well known speech illusion called the McGurk effect. By comparing mathematical models for how the brain integrates senses important in detecting speech, they found that the brain uses vision, hearing and experience when making sense of speech. If the mouth and voice are likely to come from the same person, the brain combines them; otherwise, they are kept separate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
On March 13, a dozen people gathered at a Cleveland outpatient clinic for their daily therapy group. They represented a patchwork of addictions: to alcohol, crack cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, heroin. They were freshly out of jail, out of marriages, out of work. The newest member had enrolled just a week earlier. The three hour morning session that Friday, reinforced with continually brewing coffee and snacks everyone brought to share (mini doughnuts, chips, cookies, pretzels) began with lights dimmed and a meditation. Shortly after noon, they locked arms, recited the Serenity Prayer, and said: "Be well, be safe, see you Monday." But the Monday session never came. Instead, early that morning, Rona Huckabee, their therapist at Cleveland MetroHealth, called each one of them with hard news: Because of the coronavirus pandemic, meetings would have to be indefinitely suspended. "They keep saying, 'Please can we come in, we won't touch anyone,'" said Dr. Huckabee, who now phones each patient daily. Treatment providers, support networks and even the federal government have begun to act. Last week, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration issued new regulations and guidelines. They will now allow clinics to dispense extended quantities of the addiction treatment medications methadone and buprenorphine to patients whom providers deem stable, so they will not have to visit clinics daily. Regulations now also permit some medical assessments to be done by phone. Dr. Fiellin said many doctors still needed to loosen office rules. "Some practices vary about whether counseling and providing urine is obligatory in order for patients to receive their buprenorphine," he said. Experts note that drug courts will need to adjust procedures too: Thousands of people are under orders to attend meetings and submit to regular urine screens, or risk incarceration. Organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous, which had online meetings and phone counseling available for years, are urging local chapters to use those tools immediately. New apps are helping people stay sober with meditations, peer support and counseling. But people are frightened. Last week, a Los Angeles woman, scarcely three months sober, dialed into an online Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, then shut off her computer's camera and, as she listened, broke into her husband's wine collection and started knocking back a bottle of red. Her friend Monica, a 46 year old former investment banker who has attended AA meetings on and off for 18 years, said she understood why. "I'm having a hard time staying sober and I've been at this a long time," said Monica, whose boyfriend is now very ill, possibly with Covid 19. "It is incredibly difficult not to pick up a drink right now for anyone who struggles with alcoholism, but especially difficult for those of us who are closer to our last drink." While people worldwide have been upended by social distancing, for many struggling with addiction the order to stay apart has thrown them back into the basements of loneliness where their addictions took root. People in recovery are told not to isolate themselves. But now, said Joe Dinan, 41, an environmental consultant who attended meetings of SMART Recovery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, "We're being told to isolate again." "People are winding up at home with a lot of free time, boredom and social disconnection," he said. The first 90 days of recovery are typically structured with activities to distract from drinking or using drugs, including two daily meetings, plus travel time. That's done for now. He has friends who are live streaming yoga classes and putting together online support groups. But irritability, anxiety and urges are mounting, he said. In those sessions, Mr. Krumroy identified the association of trauma with relief seeking behaviors, like drinking and using drugs, that has scarred so many members, himself included. For him, the trauma that led to his own excess drinking was the AIDS epidemic, when he lived in San Francisco during the height of the crisis. Now he is fighting to quell the reverberations that the coronavirus pandemic is setting off. "These Google groups and individual phone calls are going to be crucial to helping us all acknowledge how traumatic the coronavirus potentially is," Mr. Krumroy said. "We need to tell each other that our reactions are normal and understandable and not something to be ashamed of. And with that mutual support, I'm hopeful that most of us will be able to resist any urge to re engage in our behavior." But Kristen Marshall, who manages the DOPE Project in San Francisco for the national Harm Reduction Coalition, is not nearly as hopeful. To help prevent overdoses, the project distributes clean syringes, addiction medications like naloxone and Narcan, snacks and water bottles to programs working directly with people without housing. She is considered an essential worker who does not have to heed the state's orders to shelter in place, so she is moving about the city with other health workers, to aid people without housing who are suffering from addictions and health crises, ordered to scatter, their belongings confiscated. "Closing or limiting programs designed to support them puts them at even higher risk for overdose and overdose death," Ms. Marshall said. She added: "For so many of our folks, their contact with our programs are some of their only opportunities for socialization and connection. So workers and their organizations are desperately trying to balance keeping themselves healthy and safe while also refusing to close their programs' doors." The business shutdown orders rolling through the country are hitting some in the recovery community in ironic ways. On the Facebook group Harm Reduction Abstinence Moderation Support, which accepts many people who handle substance issues by reducing use instead of abstaining, some worry that with some liquor stores closing, they will have to withdraw cold turkey and plunge into delirium tremens or the "DTs," with hallucinations, vomiting, fever and high blood pressure. And then they fear they won't be admitted into overcrowded emergency departments. Or will be exposed to Covid 19 in those waiting rooms. "Many of our members have laid in a supply of alcohol so they won't crash immediately," said Kenneth Anderson, the founder of the group. Dr. Anna Lembke, who sees patients at Stanford's Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, is new to online platforms and sees silver linings. "We have lots of patients who struggle to get to our clinic in person and could really benefit from remote visits," she said. An added bonus: By seeing patients in their homes, she is getting more information about how they live. "I've told a few of my patients to clean their rooms," she said. In Cleveland, Dr. Huckabee has been checking in by phone with patients four times a week. So far, most are hanging in, but she fears for a woman who had only been in the program a week, after struggling with heroin. "She says she is OK, but I know she's not," Dr. Huckabee said. Dr. Huckabee knows deeply that a half hour telephone call is no substitute for a three hour daily group session. Many of her patients are facing relatives who don't understand what they've been through. They need the solace of the group. She repeatedly tells them, "I'm your No. 1 fan." A week from now, she predicts, a few will simply show up at her office. But what about social distancing?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Whether it's a beach getaway or a camping trip, animal encounters some potentially dangerous can happen on any vacation. San Francisco based writer (and New York Times Travel section contributor) Rachel Levin has plenty of tips to help in her new, lighthearted book "Look Big: And Other Tips for Surviving Animal Encounters of All Kinds." The book offers advice from wildlife biologists and researchers on how to handle interactions with 50 animals, including bears and bison to mountain lions and moose. Here are a few of them. According to the experts Ms. Levin interviewed, the secret to surviving a dangerous animal encounter, like one with a shark, bear or rattlesnake, is to not panic. "Easier said than done, and sounds obvious, but seriously, try and keep your cool," Ms. Levin said. "The bad stuff happens when you don't." The best thing to do during such an encounter is to remove yourself slowly from the scene if you can. Which means: if you see a great white in the water, quietly slip out and don't start splashing. If you see or hear a rattlesnake coiled up, give it a wide berth. If it bites, stay still and call poison control immediately freaking out will only make the situation worse. Stand tall, huddle together, open your coats, and raise your backpack overhead. If it's a mountain lion for example, look it in the eye and show it who's the boss (in theory, at least). Start yelling and screaming, throwing stuff or whatever else you can to scare it off. Don't lie down and play dead (this is also true for bears and other predators): if the animal is hungry and views you as docile prey, you'll be dinner.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel

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