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It goes without saying that Broadway on the Upper West Side is a commercial street, a cacophonic corridor of delis, shoe stores, locksmiths and coffee shops. But what is now a retail strip began with quite different aspirations, as a boulevard of residential refinement, which in the early 1900s certainly meant no stores. Big chain stores and huge garish signage overtook this once domestic idyll after World War I, but in the last two decades the Age of Preservation has brought commerce to heel. Some idea of the Victorian era horror of a commercial presence in the residence of the well to do is apparent in the architect Henry J. Hardenbergh's reaction to an erroneous report of tradesmen's vehicles in the courtyard of his Dakota. In 1891, clearly in a temper, he wrote the American Architect and Building News to say that "a grocer's wagon has never been seen within the quiet precincts of this courtyard, and an ice cart would cause as much consternation to the aristocratic tenants as a streetcar trundled into the space." This was no trivial matter; commerce must not jeopardize the sanctity of the home. Indeed, Hardenbergh gave tradesmen's wagons an underground entrance, directly to the basement. By following the line of tall apartment buildings in the early 20th century north from Lincoln Center, it is today possible to trace the history of the retail takeover of this once residential vision. The 1902 Dorilton at 71st Street seemed well fortified against all intrusion, with pillowy rusticated limestone on the ground floor, and an old fashioned moat between the ground floor and the sidewalk. If the first tenants of the Dorilton were alarmed by the fabulously busy upper stories of this colossal Beaux Arts extravagance, they were reassured by the purely domestic aspect of their new domicile. But as Broadway apartment houses, and the West Side in general, began to falter, the moat was filled in and stores were cut into the facade. When I first knew the building, the ground floor was awash in giant signs; it was only in the 1990s, after the Dorilton became a co op, that the signage was brought under control. Parts of the original limestone base have been reconstructed. The 1904 Ansonia, two blocks up, presents a slightly different paradigm. Also irretrievably French, somewhat more skillful (but less wonderful) than the Dorilton, the Ansonia was planned as a hotel. Thus a few discreet stores a bank, a florist and a pharmacy sneaked into the original design, a jungle of Beaux Arts curlicues, although they were obscured by the effusive carving. Over time the commercial tenants broadened their scope and emblazoned what had been an elegant Belle Epoque ground floor with neon signs, although not as bad as the Dorilton's. The Ansonia's owners gradually cut the storefronts back in the 1990s, even though the building was still a rental. But they didn't recapture the broad, sweeping hotel entrance to the lobby directly from Broadway. Now it is the plague of sidewalk vendors in front of the building that offend delicate sensibilities (my own included). At 77th Street, the 1903 Belleclaire, a rare Secession style apartment hotel, fell the hardest of the big Broadway buildings. The Belleclaire was almost converted to a homeless shelter in the early 1990s, and gaudy signs succeeded what had been the lacy, swirling ornament of the Art Nouveau. It was far from what the owner, Milton Roblee, had in mind in 1906 when he evicted Maxim Gorky for checking in with a woman not his wife. "My hotel is a family hotel," he indignantly told The New York Times. Storefronts in the Belleclaire, which is still a hotel, were spiffed up fairly recently, although the effect is disappointing. The series of standard green awnings are certainly an improvement but hardly equal to the architecture above them. William Waldorf Astor wavered between apartment house and apartment hotel for his 1908 Apthorp, at 79th, its all limestone Italian renaissance facade a study in absolute respectability. A hint of the hotel slipped in, a pharmacy on the 78th Street corner, framed in limestone and with only a bit of signage. Twenty years later the Astor estate followed the trend and installed bronze and marble storefronts all along Broadway, albeit in impeccable taste, for tenants like Brentano's and Maison Charnay Millinery. By the 1960s those, too, were overtaken by plastic store signs. These eyesores were beaten back in the 1990s. Broadway's stint as a residential boulevard did not last long. The 1904 Broadway subway increased the density of the other avenues, whose tenants wanted convenient shopping nobody wants to walk to Riverside Drive for groceries. And the buildings on Broadway, built in the experimental phase of apartment house construction, were soon obsolete, falling out of favor with the well to do. Just as the Apthorp was completed in 1908, its rival, the giant Belnord at 86th Street was going up. But unlike its predecessor, the Belnord had stores from the beginning. The age of innocence was over; the age of commerce had arrived.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Since it was designated a historic district in 2001, the Madison Square North neighborhood, with its row houses and Art Deco style towers, has undergone a striking transformation. Hotels and offices have replaced many of the warehouses and garment showrooms that once populated the 10 blocks around the northern end of Madison Square Park. But although the character of the tenants has shifted, the historic neighborhood, which some call NoMad (for North of Madison Square Park) and which is bounded by 25th and 29th Streets, between Madison Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, has seen very little new construction since the Great Depression. The area is still home to many wholesale shops that specialize in costume jewelry and wigs, but the opening of upscale boutique hotels like the Ace Hotel on 29th Street in 2009 and the NoMad Hotel on 28th in 2011 helped set a new standard of trendiness. Both hotels, along with other developments in recent years, have been conversions of late 19th and early 20th century buildings. The new condominium is a project by the New Jersey developer Victor Homes, a unit of Eclogue Management of Israel; the interior and exterior were designed by the architecture firm ODA. In 2011 Victor Homes paid 20 million for the original structure a four story commercial building known as the Fifth Avenue Bazaar, which had mirrored glass tiles. Ran Korolik, the vice president and a managing partner in the United States of Victor Homes, said the company began construction on the project, now valued in the 100 million range, in November 2011. A lengthy approval process ensued, with the Landmarks Preservation Commission weighing in, because the property sits within a historic district. Although the building is one of the first new condominiums in the district in many years, conversions are also under way. At 242 Fifth Avenue, the developer Pan Brothers Associates is converting a landmark building into rentals and adding a floor, for a total of six. And just outside the historic district, the Witkoff Group is creating condos in the former International Toy Center, better known as the Toy Building, and renaming it 10 Madison Square West. A number of buildings that struggled during the downturn have also been revived. At 39 East 29th Street, east of Madison Avenue outside the historic district, a new condo opened in 2007, but sales soon stalled. The developer Espais Promociones Inmobiliarias of Barcelona, Spain, rented out its unsold sponsor units but has now sold them all, according to Richard J. Steinberg of Warburg Realty, which represents the building. As for 241 Fifth, it will have one , two and three bedroom apartments, and there will also be one alcove studio. The three bedrooms, ranging in size from about 1,360 to 1,700 square feet, will be priced from 2.4 million to just over 3 million. The two bedrooms will range from 990 to more than 1,200 square feet and will be priced from 2 million to about 2.75 million. The one bedrooms, with 560 to 640 square feet, will start at 1.2 million, and the 500 square foot alcove studio will be priced at 950,000. The condo will have two full floor penthouses: one, a 3,000 square foot unit on the 20th floor with panoramic views of One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building, will be priced in the high 7 million range. The other, a 2,700 square foot penthouse on the 15th floor, has a setback for a large terrace and will have indoor and outdoor fireplaces; it will be priced in the high 6 million range. The developer has raised prices about 20 percent since the first units went on the market in April. "We had a wait list of about 350 people when we launched sales," said Doron Zwickel, an executive vice president of CORE, which represents 241 Fifth, adding that more than half of the units are already in contract or have contracts out to buyers. Several units have terraces, and the building will also have an amenities floor, with a gym, a yoga room, a massage room and a lounge, as well as a garden. Apartment finishes include oak floors, teak wall accents and Zucchetti plumbing, as well as Miele appliances and Sub Zero wine storage. The ceilings are mostly 9 and 10 feet high; in some areas, like the kitchens, they drop to 8. And while many of the units, especially those above the 16th floor, offer soaring views, the lower floor units with southern exposures face an interior courtyard. The building also has a 3,500 square foot retail space on the ground floor. "Time is on our side," said Mr. Korolik of Victor Homes, who doesn't expect to market the retail space until this summer. "This is a high end boutique building, so we will be a bit picky about who we want to put in it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Sheku Kanneh Mason practices before playing for a group of schoolchildren in Baltimore in January.Credit...Greg Kahn for The New York Times BALTIMORE On a Friday evening a few months ago, when it was entirely normal to be in a packed concert hall, Sheku Kanneh Mason finished playing Saint Saens's Cello Concerto No. 1 with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The British cellist had torn through the classic piece, which unfolds in a 20 minute whoosh. "It just kind of starts," he had said at lunch that afternoon. There are no gaps between the concerto's sections, so no breaks for awkward throat clearing. No big solo cadenza stops the momentum. Mr. Kanneh Mason's playing is more poised than fiery: levelheaded, though not exactly cool. But the enameled sunniness of his tone milky yet bright took on dashing spirit in the headlong sprint to the end. Mr. Kanneh Mason, who turned 21 on April 4, walked offstage to a loud ovation, then stood with his cello for a few seconds before heading back on for an encore. When he emerged, the audience greeted him with a roar. Marin Alsop, the Baltimore Symphony's longtime conductor, smiled as she watched from backstage. But if Mr. Kanneh Mason continues to rise through first name recognizability it's "SHAY koo" ticket selling power and millions of Spotify streams, he will be more than just another star who can anchor galas and assure capacity crowds. He will be what the classical music world has long lacked: a black headliner. Orchestras have a stunningly low number of black and Latino members, and the numbers are even grimmer when it comes to concerto and recital soloists. "The arena is still devoid of stars of color," said Afa S. Dworkin, the president of the Sphinx Organization, a nonprofit devoted to diversifying classical music. If Mr. Kanneh Mason becomes a figure as well known as Yo Yo Ma, Lang Lang or Joshua Bell, his celebrity will have had its roots in a fairly standard, if impressive, achievement: He won a prestigious competition, the BBC Young Musician of the Year, in 2016. But that victory set the stage for a once in a lifetime launch. After appearing at a charity event attended by Prince Harry, he was selected to play at Harry's 2018 wedding to Meghan Markle. It was watched on television by an audience of nearly 2 billion including many young people of color who have swiftly taken Mr. Kanneh Mason as a model. After one of his rehearsals with the Baltimore Symphony, Mr. Kanneh Mason rode to an elementary school on the west side of the city to meet students in the ensemble's OrchKids program, which provides after school music programs in poor communities. He warmed up with Bach's D minor Suite in an empty classroom as the sun lowered over the neighborhood of rowhouses. A large group of children, almost all of them black or Latino, filed in and peppered him with questions after he played some short, lyrical pieces, including a version of "No Woman, No Cry" that he arranged in the solemnly dancing style of a Bach sarabande. (His recording of it has been streamed almost 12 million times on Spotify.) Then, joined in a ring by a dozen or so beginner cellists, Mr. Kanneh Mason sometimes seemed almost overcome with bashfulness as he led a genial little master class. He took the students seriously as they sawed through "Frere Jacques," and gave earnest, soft spoken advice as he played along. He was so humble and quiet that he sometimes seemed, improbably, to be just another kid in the class. Being part of a circle of musicians rather than the singular attraction wasn't out of character for Mr. Kanneh Mason. He was raised in Nottingham, in the middle of England, with six siblings, all of whom have also turned out to be serious players. His mother, who was born in Sierra Leone, and his father, whose parents are from Antigua, both grew up in Britain and met in college. Neither was a musician, or set out to create a family of virtuosos. "It's a thing they liked," Mr. Kanneh Mason said of his parents, who would play Itzhak Perlman, Jacqueline du Pre and Vladimir Ashkenazy CDs in the car. "It wasn't a big plan." Quarantined together in Nottingham, the siblings have broadcast twice weekly concerts over Facebook Live throughout the coronavirus lockdown. In April, on the day his older sister, Isata, was supposed to have appeared with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra as the soloist in Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, the family performed an arrangement of the piece that has been viewed more than a million times. His taste in performing, valuing the small scale and personal over grandeur, has fit in well with the restrictions of the moment and what is likely to come in the near future. He loves spaces like Wigmore Hall in London and, in New York, the 268 seat Weill Recital Hall, where he made his Carnegie Hall recital debut in December with Isata. Still an undergraduate at the Royal Academy of Music in London, he's been continuing lessons with his teacher over video chat this spring, and working on the improvisations and arrangements he likes to toy with. On a Zoom call in May from his bedroom on the top floor of the house where he grew up, he talked about breaking apart the different voices of a Bach aria and playing them all. A few days later, he posted the results on Instagram, the tiny screen broken into five of himself, and the harmonies of "Komm, susser Tod" almost painfully rich. His coming months are uncertain, as they are for all musicians. The plan had been for him to do some low key performances of Dvorak's Cello Concerto, the next addition to his orchestral repertoire, in the fall, to get some practice before higher profile dates next year. Now it's unclear when he'll be able to play it anywhere. He and Isata will return to the United States in a couple of years for another recital tour. "And the presenters are very confident that they will be able to sell big halls, because of the appeal he has and the audience that came to the last cycle," said Kathryn Enticott, who manages both of them. "And the initial reason for that was the wedding. But then the audiences want to come back." While his biggest successes online have been in a decidedly light mode "No Woman, No Cry," which he sometimes pulls out for encores, and arrangements of songs like "Hallelujah" and "Scarborough Fair" his performing career has stuck almost entirely to the standard repertoire. "He's been asked to do some crossover projects, and he doesn't want to go near them," Ms. Enticott said. "He believes that the music he plays, if people are exposed to it, they will appreciate just how great it is." Mr. Kanneh Mason is of course not the only gifted young classical instrumentalist of color. The Sphinx Organization alone has hundreds of alumni that Ms. Dworkin, who admires him, says are his equal in ability and deserve their chances, too. "At the beginning of my career, a quarter century ago," Ms. Dworkin said, "there was actual resistance, a vocal one: 'We don't think they're ready; the talent isn't out there.' Now I think the issue is these quiet choices not being made." Artist managers, recital presenters, orchestra administrators, record labels, journalists: All have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to take the risks that will broaden music. "We are very much a field of followers," Ms. Dworkin said. "If a couple of presenters do it, others will follow. Like they did with Sheku." During the day of Mr. Kanneh Mason's final performance in Baltimore, he practiced and went for a run around the Inner Harbor. His performance of the Saint Saens concerto that evening, his face clenched and wincing, was the most intense yet; he took a dramatically deliberate tempo for the slow tease just before the final romp. "He's a phenom, I think," Ms. Alsop had said at dinner before the concert. "Right time, right personality, right everything." The long CD signing line at intermission wound its way through the lobby of Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. People were still waiting to meet Mr. Kanneh Mason as the lights flashed for the audience to take its seats for the second half; still waiting as the auditorium dimmed; and still waiting as Ms. Alsop came out and the orchestra began Dvorak's Seventh Symphony. "That doesn't happen," said Tonya McBride Robles, the orchestra's vice president and general manager, as she stood near those choosing to meet the young cellist rather than watch the rest of the concert they'd paid for. For a classical music event, she added, it was a notably diverse group, in age and race. "It looks," Ms. Robles said, "like our town."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
LOS ANGELES A few days after I visited Demi Moore in her home high above Beverly Hills, her daughter Tallulah Willis told me, "My mom was not raised, she was forged." But the woman who greeted me from atop a staircase, in the boxy residence she calls her "peaceful Zen treehouse," and asked if I was chilly or needed a jacket, was not the steely star whose movies, like "St. Elmo's Fire," "Ghost" and "A Few Good Men," helped define the 1980s and '90s. She was not the stylized deity venerated on magazine covers, not the inadvertent pioneer for pay equity in her industry, nor the walled off enigma who, by her own design, resisted most efforts to reveal the authentic person behind the adamantine roles she played. Dressed in a long sleeve T shirt, moccasin boots and a pair of prescription glasses with transition lenses, Moore sat cross legged on the floor of her living room that late August morning and told me the story of her life. As she writes in a typically unsparing self assessment, "if you carry a well of shame and unresolved trauma inside of you, no amount of money, no measure of success or celebrity, can fill it." With the publication of "Inside Out" approaching, Moore told me she was both eager and anxious, at the age of 56, to finally let audiences see her as she sees herself, without any barriers or artifices. "It's exciting, and yet I feel very vulnerable," she said, twisting a finger through her long, dark hair. "There is no cover of a character. It's not somebody else's interpretation of me." If it is surprising to see such self revelation from any prominent Hollywood actress let alone one with Moore's particular accomplishments and setbacks, and who admits to a reputation for reticence she said that writing the memoir was a necessary part of a longer process of rediscovering herself. "I had to figure out why to do this , because my own success didn't drive me," she said. She writes about being raped at 15 and moving out of her mother's home to live with a guitarist a day after her 16th birthday. Two years later, she married the rock musician Freddy Moore, a union that she says she quickly sabotaged with her infidelity. 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. Her acting career, meanwhile, was exploding, as she parlayed a gig on "General Hospital" into lead roles in films like "Blame It on Rio" and "About Last Night..." If those earliest characters were often lust objects or required her to appear unclothed, Moore now says her jumbled feelings about desire and sexuality likely drew her to them. "When I was younger, I was obligated to be of service," she told me. "I wouldn't be loved if I wasn't if I didn't give of myself. My value was tied into my body." She abused alcohol and cocaine, binge ate and obsessed over her weight. Following a called off wedding to Emilio Estevez, Moore married Willis, the taciturn action star, and they had three daughters, Rumer, Scout and Tallulah. Moore was starring in the most successful films of her career, including "Ghost" (which took in more than 217 million at the U.S. box office), "A Few Good Men" ( 141 million) and "Indecent Proposal" ( 106 million). But just as quickly, the wheels came off: Moore writes that Willis was ambivalent about her work, which he felt took time away from their family, and he told her he was unsure if he wanted to be married. (A spokeswoman for Willis said he wasn't available for comment.) When Moore started earning multimillion dollar salaries, including a reported 12.5 million for "Striptease," she was portrayed in the news media as greedy and given the derisive nickname "Gimme Moore." Today, Moore sees herself as the scapegoat of an entertainment industry that could not countenance its female stars being paid as much as its male leads (at a time when Willis was earning as much if not more for his films). To have been a trailblazer in this way, she said, "was an honor, and with that came a lot of negativity and a lot of judgment towards me, which I'm happy to have held if it made a difference." Does she think it did? I asked. After a long pause she answered, "I do, actually. I know that it really resonated." But, she added, "It's not about me doing it. I was just the instrument by which it was done. Clearly it didn't do enough because we're still, this many years later, dealing with it." No setback deflated Moore quite like "G.I. Jane," the Ridley Scott action movie for which Moore underwent weeks of training and a grueling shoot to play a fictional character attempting to become the first woman to complete Navy Seal training. That film was criticized by military veterans for inaccuracies and savaged by reviewers, ending up a box office disappointment. "They weren't going to let me win," she said. "That, to the little girl in me that was crushing." Amid her divorce from Willis and her mother's death from cancer, Moore stepped back from her acting work to focus on raising her daughters. Though she continued to produce films like the "Austin Powers" series, she acted only occasionally, in roles like the villain of "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle." She was in her early 40s and wondering if Hollywood had no more use for her. "They'd say they don't really know what to do with you, where to place you," she said. "I was like, oh, well is that supposed to flatter me?" Moore never spoke with bitterness when she discussed these experiences; if anything, she was soft spoken and un self consciously goofy. At the start of our conversation she swigged on Starbucks and switched midway to alternating between sips of Red Bull and drags from a caffeine vape pen. She has surrounded herself in her home with small, affectionate dogs with names like Merple, Diego and Sousci Tunia, and she also collects taxidermy like the baby zebra near her fireplace of animals that she said "have had unfortunate early passings." (She said she also had "a stillborn deer" in her home in Hailey, Idaho.) To a slightly younger generation of film actresses, Moore is regarded as a both a tough as nails renegade and a nurturer. "She became a movie star in this time where women didn't naturally fit into the system," said Gwyneth Paltrow, who has become a friend of Moore's. "She was really the first person who fought for pay e quality and got it, and really suffered a backlash from it. We all certainly benefited from her." But before Moore could see her own self worth she had to withstand another set of trials that eventually led to the creation of "Inside Out." In 2003, she started dating Kutcher, disregarding the rubbernecking that their 15 year age gap invited and feeling, as she writes, that she was enjoying "a do over, like I could just go back in time and experience what it was like to be young, with him much more so than I'd ever been able to experience it when I was actually in my twenties." She became pregnant soon after, with a girl who she intended to name Chaplin Ray, but Moore lost the child about six months into the pregnancy. She had started drinking again and blamed herself for the loss. Moore and Kutcher married in 2005 and pursued fertility treatments in hopes of getting pregnant again. But her drinking worsened, and she started abusing Vicodin, all before learning that Kutcher had cheated on her. (They separated in 2011 and divorced two years later; his spokeswoman didn't respond to requests for comment .) Things somehow got worse still. While partying with Rumer in 2012, Moore suffered a seizure after smoking synthetic cannabis and inhaling nitrous oxide. Her hedonistic behavior had already alienated Scout and Tallulah, and now all three of her daughters were shunning her. At the time, Moore had signed with Harper to write a memoir, one that she intended to be about the mothers and daughters in her family. But those plans would have to wait: "Part of my life was clearly unraveling," she told me. "I had no career," she said. "No relationship." And then her health began to deteriorate, as even basic tasks like reading and watching TV became incapacitating. Moore was experiencing autoimmune and digestive problems and, while she was circumspect about telling me the exact diagnosis she received, she said, "Something was going on, including my organs slowly shutting down," adding that "the root was a major heavy viral load." Recovery, reconciliation, 'it's all been in alignment' Little by little, Moore pieced things back together. She went to a rehab program for trauma, codependency and substance abuse and worked with a doctor specializing in integrative medicine to rectify her health problems. Gradually she began to reconcile with her daughters and, about two years ago, got serious about the writing of "Inside Out," which she accomplished with a co author, Ariel Levy, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a memoirist as well. At the outset of their collaboration, Levy said she encouraged Moore not to censor herself, but found that she did not need much reassurance in this area. "Let's just get it out," Levy said she told Moore, "and in the end, anything that you're like, 'That's actually too private,' we'll take it out. And that step kind of never happened." Paltrow, in particular, credited the memoir with helping to reduce Moore's health problems by unburdening her of the psychic baggage she'd been carrying. As women, Paltrow said, "We think we just have to get through everything and bear the burden for everyone in our family." Moore's book, she said, went hand in hand with "her healing journey physically, mentally, emotionally. It's no accident that it's all been in alignment and all happened at the same time." Moore said she had little concern that anything she wrote would cost her any standing in her industry. "There's nothing I have to protect," she said. "Really." She also felt strongly that she had the right to share stories that involved her famous ex husbands if these episodes were principally about her, and she was confident that her portrayals of them did not make them into villains or her into a victim. "I'm definitely not interested in blaming anyone," Moore said. "It's a waste of energy." She thought further on this. She started to say, "I hope that everyone that's in the book feels like it's " She paused, then added, "I don't know what I hope they feel." With a chuckle, she said, "Good, not bad." For Moore's daughters, "Inside Out" is a more fraught project. Each said they were given the opportunity to review a copy of the manuscript and ask for changes, though none of them requested revisions. Scout Willis told me she was proud of her mother for "doing the internal work that she didn't have the time to do, for a long time, because she was just in survival mode." Writing the memoir, Scout said, "really denotes a certain amount of safety and comfort with herself." At the same time, she said the book resurfaced uncomfortable memories for her and her sisters, who have dealt with substance abuse and body image issues of their own. "It's challenging because she's making this amazing effort to put out the most vulnerable moments of her life," Scout said. "It just happens that it also coincides with some of the most challenging and traumatic times of mine." Rumer Willis said the book was an opportunity to learn her mother's history, some of which Moore had hinted at over the years but never told them in this much detail. "We grow up thinking that our parents are these immovable gods of Olympus," Rumer said. "Obviously, as we grow older, we start to realize how much our parents are just people." Moore said she has maintained her sobriety and that she, Rumer and Scout are seven months into a 10 month course on spiritual psychology, which she said teaches "soul centered living." (Moore is no longer involved with kabbalah studies "not the human organization, which is human, so it's imperfect," though she said its teachings provided her with "a lot of wisdom that I still really value.") She continues to act in ensemble roles that she hopes will take her outside her comfort zones: She is among the cast members of a USA Network adaptation of "Brave New World" and plays an obnoxious executive in the dark comedy "Corporate Animals," a part originally intended for Sharon Stone. And she is still developing material for herself, mentioning that a project about Isabella Goodwin, the first female police detective in New York City, could provide "a pretty spectacular character." Moore's already been asked if she wrote "Inside Out" for the money, and before I could ask her again, she answered herself: "Uh, definitely not," she said with a knowing laugh. "Because there's a lot of easier ways to do that." But the idea that "Inside Out" might be perceived as a work of image management an effort on Moore's part to replace the version of herself that people perceive with the one she wants to be seen as, or provide one where none currently exists is one that she wholeheartedly embraced. "I would say, yeah," she replied. "Great! Why not?" "Did you know me before?" she asked, already expecting that I would answer no. "Well, there you go," she said. "That's what I would say." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
WHEN I first started as a freelance writer, I was eager to sell myself but not eager to have to discuss money. So I more or less took whatever was offered. Then I read somewhere that no matter what price a new client states, you always say in a polite but firm tone, "I expected more." The first time I tried it, I was sweating and I doubt my tone was firm it probably sounded more like pleading but to my great surprise, it worked. With that one sentence, I made an extra few hundred dollars. Negotiating a salary when you have a job can be stressful enough. But as more people are choosing, or being forced, to strike out on their own, they face the issue of deciding what to charge prospective clients. Ask for too little and you feel cheated. Ask for too much and you may be pricing yourself out of the market. So what do you do? At the most basic, you need to know what people in your field charge. This is true whether you are a marketing consultant, graphic designer or, like Mike Stoner, a professional magician. "You have very little information to go on and it's very easy to aim too high or even worse, too low," Mr. Stoner said in an e mail. "You really don't want someone to say, 'Wow, that's a bargain,' which basically translates as 'We would have been happy to pay much more than that!' " But how do you find out? Consult with others in the field. Especially if you are just starting, many professionals will be eager to help. Roy Cohen, a career counselor who has provided outplacement services to Goldman Sachs employees, said that when he first started, his competitors were not threatened. "They didn't consider me competition," he said, "and therefore shared information." Surveying friends or colleagues who have hired consultants in your area is a "very efficient way to determine a fee structure," said Mr. Cohen, who wrote "The Wall Street Professional's Survival Guide" (Financial Times Press, 2010). Professional organizations are another great way to find out information. I belong to the American Society of Journalists and Authors. In one section of the group's Web site, members can anonymously report what they were paid for jobs. Colleen Plimpton, a garden consultant for the last three years, said she joined the Garden Writers Association to learn about prevailing wages. "There is a lot of free information available, but with many sites it's not easy to find, so you have to hone your research skills," said Leanne Hoagland Smith, whose company, Advanced Systems, offers executive coaching focusing on small businesses. She found that the American Society for Training and Development and SherpaCoaching were valuable resources. But money is only one part of the negotiation, and it's crucial to know what all your objectives are before talking to a client. What does the contract say? If you're a writer or graphic artist or logo designer, say, will you own the rights or will someone else? For how long? Will the work appear under your name or someone else's? Is the client well known and possibly helpful to your career? If so, are you willing to take less for the long term benefits that may offer? Sometimes, especially when starting, underpricing yourself is a good strategy. My sister, who was a marketing consultant, then took time off, is just returning to the job market. When bidding on her first job recently, she deliberately lowballed her work. "I wanted to get some practice and get my confidence up," she said. It's also important to realize that you have to constantly revise and change as a business develops. Kate M. Gilbert, a Web developer in Massachusetts, said, for instance, that she started out charging hourly rates when working by herself. But when she teamed up with a friend who is a Web designer and started a business, Wide Open Sites, last year, "we had dozens of different clients and we were constantly asking each other, 'What's the rate for this one?' It made it difficult when dividing up the payments." So they decided to set a flat rate based on an hourly fee, which they do not disclose to customers, because they want clients to focus on the project, not on the time it will take. "Back in 2005, when I started as an independent contractor, I charged about 30 an hour," Ms. Gilbert said. She started hearing from potential clients that her fees were lower than average, "so we kept pushing the envelope." Now they charge 80 to 140 an hour. Asking for more money, especially from customers you've worked with before, isn't easy for most people. One option is to state that your own costs have risen and, therefore, you need to pass them on. You can "take the coward's strategy and say, 'I intend to accept this assignment and I'm very excited, but I wonder if there's any wiggle room with the fee,' " Mr. Cohen said. If money isn't available, there may be other ways to parlay the customer's resources to your advantage. Mr. Stoner, the magician, offered an example. "I might say, 'O.K., instead of 300, how about if I do it for 200 but you give me a link on your Web site and let me take a few pictures for my business blog?' " Most important, don't feel intimidated and underestimate your own worth. You're not asking for a favor but engaging in a business transaction. It can be easy to lose sight of that. "You need to point out what additional value you offer," Ms. Hoagland Smith said. "It's not just price point. If that was the case, we'd all be driving Yugos and eating at McDonald's." And, of course, what you ask for will depend on where you live. "I can't charge in the Midwest what some of my colleagues can charge on the East Coast," she added. While difficult, negotiating the fee is only the beginning. Ms. Gilbert says that as issues arise with clients, she is constantly adding clauses to her contracts. She has put in stipulations, for example, about how much it will cost if a customer decides to make changes after approving the design. Or if a customer delays and forces the project to run longer than the anticipated timeline. Also, charging a certain amount and getting paid can be very different things. "Make sure to invoice early and follow up gently," Mr. Cohen said. Here's one way: "I'm checking my unpaid invoices and noticed that I have not yet received payment from you. Please check your records and let's discuss. I'll take the liberty to follow up with you immediately." At worst, there's always small claims court, but few people want to put out that kind of time and energy. Another option is simply to walk away and, of course, never deal with that client again. Working for yourself can be wonderful and incredibly difficult at the same time, say those who have taken the plunge. "I love what I do, but this has been the most challenging year of my life," Ms. Gilbert said. "I just want people to pay me for the work I do."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The villa portion of the ultra pricey 220 Central Park South has had its first recorded sale. The spacious apartment, villa No. 5, sold for nearly 34.4 million, according to property records, and was New York City's most expensive closing in April. The unit is one of 10 in the 18 story villa building, which directly faces the park, with the main 65 floor tower rising behind it. This wasn't the month's only big sale at the Midtown Manhattan limestone high rise, which set a national record this year for the highest price paid for a single residence. Two half floor units in the tower, on the 42nd and 36th floors, also sold. The three recent purchases were by anonymous buyers. At another new limestone clad luxury condominium this one in Greenwich Village, at 21 East 12th Street Stephen F. Cooper, who heads the Warner Music Group, and his wife, Nancie H. Cooper, acquired a combination apartment. On the Upper East Side, there was high priced co op activity. Benjamin Tisch, a vice president of the Loews Corporation, which is headed by his father and co founded by his grandfather, bought a full floor on East 72nd Street with his wife, Daniela Weber Tisch. About a dozen blocks south, Robert E. Nederlander Sr., who ran his family's theater operation and was a former managing partner of the New York Yankees, sold his Park Avenue unit. And the estate of Christine Beshar, one of the first female partners of a Wall Street law firm, sold her grand, East River facing apartment. Also in the neighborhood, Martin S. Burger, the chief executive of Silverstein Properties, and his wife, Alison Burger, picked up a large condo (and no, it wasn't in a building his firm developed). In Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, Steven Eisenstadt, the chief executive of the Cumberland Packing Corporation, the maker of Sweet'N Low, and his wife, Jennifer Eisenstadt, an interior designer, sold their fully restored townhouse. The villa at 220 Central Park South has around 5,000 square feet of interior space, with five bedrooms and six and a half baths, according to the listing with Deborah Kern of the Corcoran Group. The brokerage firm declined to comment further on the transaction. While the listing contained few details about the apartment, a floor plan showed a sprawling space with a central gallery, combined living and dining areas, an eat in kitchen, and an oversize master suite with two baths, an enormous dressing room and a kitchenette. The recently sold tower units 42A, for 23.7 million, and 36B for 19.9 million each have 3,114 square feet and contain three bedrooms and three baths. They were also listed with Ms. Kern. The buyers of both apartments will join a host of well heeled purchasers who began occupying the luxury complex late last year. They are led by the billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin, who paid almost 240 million for four floors encompassing 24,000 square feet. The condo, near Columbus Circle, was designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects and developed by Vornado Realty Trust. The Coopers bought a combination of two townhouse units in Greenwich Village totaling more than 6,000 square feet, with an almost equal amount of outdoor space. The purchase price was 23.3 million. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. Their 12th Street building is near two parks Union Square and Washington Square and was designed by the architect Annabelle Selldorf and developed by the William Macklowe Company and Goldman Sachs. Mr. Cooper has been the chief executive of Warner Music since 2011, and over the years served in several other high ranking corporate positions, including vice chairman of the media company Metro Goldwyn Mayer. On the Upper East Side, the Tisches paid 16.75 million for the 13th floor of 4 East 72nd Street, a prewar co op building off Fifth Avenue and steps from Central Park. The apartment has about 6,000 square feet that include seven bedrooms and six baths. Mr. Nederlander, the former president of the Nederlander Organization, which operates theaters and music venues worldwide, sold a three bedroom, two bath co op on the 12th floor of 465 Park Avenue, between 58th and 59th Streets. The sale price was 2 million, which was just below the 2.25 million he had sought. The Beshar estate received well below the 8.95 million asking price for its 14 room co op on the 11th floor of 120 East End Avenue, opposite Carl Schurz Park. The sale price was 6 million. The apartment offers park and river vistas, and extends about 5,250 square feet, with five bedrooms and six and a half baths.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Paula Kelly, a tall, lithesome dancer who was one of the first African American women to make a successful transition to movies and television from Broadway, using the musical "Sweet Charity" as the bridge, died on Saturday at a nursing facility in Whittier, Calif. She was 77. Her niece, Dina McCarthy, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Ms. Kelly burst into the movies in 1969 in "Sweet Charity," an adaptation of the stage musical about an ever hopeful taxi dancer a dance partner for hire in a run down Times Square dance hall. Ms. Kelly played the dancer Helene, one of two best friends of the title character, Charity Hope Valentine, played by Shirley MacLaine. Chita Rivera played the other. Although lesser known than the movie's big stars Sammy Davis Jr. also had top billing Ms. Kelly more than held her own, especially in the seductive number "Big Spender" and the energetic "There's Got to Be Something Better Than This," in which the three dance hall girls express their determination to get respectable jobs. Onstage, Ms. Kelly played Helene in the London production of "Sweet Charity" (with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields and a book by Neil Simon). The director, Bob Fosse, who also directed and choreographed the show on Broadway, asked Ms. Kelly to reprise the role for the movie, which was to be his feature film directorial debut.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Renovating or converting a historic building can be difficult and costly, but the city's supercharged condominium market is enabling some developers to go far beyond merely sprucing up interiors. Two developers have bought rows of old buildings one on the Upper East Side, the other on the Upper West and, while restoring their historic facades, will reconfigure and rebuild their interiors from the ground up, creating a brand new series of multimillion dollar condos. In both developments, which went before the Landmarks Preservation Commission and received significant community comment, developers had to modify and scale back parts of their initial plans, particularly with respect to the rooftop additions. Daniel E. Straus, the chief executive of CareOne, a company that operates nursing and assisted living facilities, said the decision to reinvent the interiors of a row of brownstones on Madison Avenue part of a project called 33 East 74thStreet was less about market conditions and more about being able to deliver the type of high end real estate product he envisioned. "This project was conceived in 2010, when market conditions were less than robust," Mr. Straus said. "It's possible that the difficulty of a project like this would dissuade other developers, but that's what excited me the uniqueness of the property." The Whitney Museum was the seller of the six brownstones at 933 943 Madison Avenue, built in 1876 in the Italianate and Greek Revival styles, along with two buildings right around the corner: the brownstone at 31 East 74th Street and the 33 foot wide Grosvenor Atterbury mansion at 33 East 74th, built in 1901. Mr. Straus paid about 95 million in the transaction, which took place in 2010. The museum had used two of the buildings for office space; some had had retail space on their ground floors. All are in the Upper East Side Historic District, so Mr. Straus, working with the architects and preservation specialists Beyer Blinder Belle, sought and received Landmarks Preservation Commission approval last summer to create 10 condo units. This will entail creating a stepped back three story rooftop addition over all the buildings and a connecting structure between buildings on Madison and East 74th, as well as rebuilding the brownstone closest to the Whitney Museum, 943 Madison, a building deemed of no value to the historic district. Demolishing all the brownstone interiors enabled Mr. Straus to create the layouts that he believes will best appeal to his target buyers. The three to five bedroom condo units will have 10 foot ceilings; the smallest will have 3,850 square feet of space, the largest more than 10,000. Each will also feature an entrance gallery over 20 feet long, while each bedroom will have an en suite bath and an entry vestibule. Champalimaud, the interior design company on the project, is employing custom millwork and materials like polished Calacatta and honed Bardiglio marble, and ziricote wood. The four story Atterbury mansion, which has a structural system separate from the brownstones, is being gutted but will retain its floors, its giant second floor arched windows and its 13 foot ceiling heights. There will be two elevators for condo owners, but the mansion and the three story penthouse planned atop its roof will each have private elevators. Prices will range from 14 million to more than 30 million, said Katherine Gauthier, an agent with Douglas Elliman Real Estate, which is bringing 33 East 74th Street to market in mid November. The project should be completed by early 2015, Mr. Straus said. With little competing new construction in the area, the project is seen as attracting Upper East Siders, or even Upper West Siders, seeking something traditional looking but not in need of renovation, said Karen Mansour, a Douglas Elliman executive vice president. "Or because of the location and its proximity to shopping on Madison Avenue and Museum Mile," she added, "it could be a pied a terre for an international buyer as well. And it could also appeal to families who are sending their children to school on the Upper East Side." On the West Side, at 182 West 82nd Street, Miki Naftali, the chief executive of the Naftali Group, is already marketing a similar if less pricey project. Mr. Naftali bought four Romanesque Revival apartment buildings, five stories high and built in the 1900s, for about 17 million in 2012. He has demolished the interiors of the buildings again, with the assent of Landmarks Preservation, as they belong to the Upper West Side/Central Park West Historic District and is rebuilding them as one structure with 11 condo units, called 182 West 82nd Street. Neither Mr. Straus nor Mr. Naftali would reveal the cost of their projects, though Mr. Straus acknowledged that 33 East 74th Street had cost more than anticipated. Mr. Naftali, a veteran New York City developer with an engineering background, says that working with old buildings can often involve unforeseen costs, particularly when rebuilding their interiors from the ground up while bracing their facades. "These types of projects are so unique, so it's very hard to estimate the entire cost," said Mr. Naftali, who is working with the architecture firm ODA. "They're challenging in a way that we like, and frankly, we're not the only one that can do it, but it requires a lot of expertise to deal with these projects dealing with Landmarks and everything." While the team at 33 East 74th Street cut down the number of bedrooms in favor of features like column free grand rooms, galleries and entry vestibules, the team at 182 West 82nd Street worked to design efficient units with lots of flexibility, with bedrooms convertible to libraries, and dens to bedrooms, said Alexa Lambert, an agent with Stribling Associates, which is marketing the project.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Many more stroke victims than previously thought can be saved from disability or death if doctors remove blood clots that are choking off circulation to the brain, a new study has shown. "These striking results will have an immediate impact and save people from lifelong disability or death," Dr. Walter J. Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said in a statement. "I really cannot overstate the size of this effect." The key finding is that there is often more time than doctors realized in which brain cells can still be rescued by a procedure to remove the clot. Traditional guidelines have set a limit of six hours after stroke symptoms begin, and said after that it would be too late to help. The study showed that the time window could be expanded to 16 hours. However, the findings do not apply to every stroke victim. The researchers used a special type of brain imaging to identify the patients who still had live brain tissue that could be saved if the blood supply was restored. Only about half the patients who were screened qualified for treatment, known as thrombectomy, which uses a mechanical device to pull clots out of a blood vessel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Stargazers from around the globe gathered at the Grand Canyon this week to gander upon our galaxy's grandeur. The national park is hosting its annual star party, an eight night event inviting the public to observe the heavens free from blinding city lights and street lamps. "As the sky gets darker after sunset you start to notice something on the eastern horizon that at first you think are storm clouds," said John Barentine, an astronomer and program manager at the International Dark Sky Association, a nonprofit group that raises awareness to light pollution. "Then as it gets darker you realize they aren't clouds in our atmosphere, but they are glowing clouds of stars." What he and thousands of visitors witnessed was a sight hidden to many: The Milky Way. "One third of humanity cannot see the Milky Way," said Fabio Falchi a researcher from the nonprofit organization the Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute in Italy. "It is the first time in human history that we have lost the direct contact with the night sky." Mr. Falchi and a cohort of dark night knights have spent the last year creating an interactive world atlas that shows the global effect of artificial light on how most of us see the sky after the sun sets. They released the map to the public on Friday in the journal Science Advances. The new atlas is an improved version of their original one, which was released in 2001.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Emily Badger, who writes about cities and urban policy for The Upshot in Washington, discussed the tech she's using. Q. As a writer for The Upshot, you do a lot of analysis, including on the effects and consequences of technology. What are the best websites and tech tools that you use regularly for that coverage? A. I write about cities and urban policy, so I spend a lot of time trying to get a feel for communities other than the one where I live. I look at other cities in satellite maps. I walk around their neighborhoods on Google Street View. I particularly like the time lapse feature in Street View that lets you see how neighborhoods have changed as Google's cars have passed over time. In many places, the images go back to 2007, which is enough time to see substantial change for example, along H Street Northeast in Washington or in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco. You can watch the Trump International Hotel and Tower under construction in Chicago and see when, by 2015, Donald J. Trump prominently stuck his name on the building, offending a lot of Chicago architecture buffs. I also like to know how places vote. For the 2016 election, I refer to a pretty incredible interactive precinct level map The Times published this year. I draw information from the Census Bureau on things like demographics, population change and housing stock. The University of Virginia's Racial Dot Map, based on the 2010 census, is a fantastic resource for eyeballing patterns of racial segregation; also, it's just beautiful to look at. And I spend a lot of time lurking on the housing market in other cities through sites like Trulia and Zillow. What have you found are some of the main unintended consequences of technology on how we live? For nearly every form of technology I use for work, or use for myself, I have mixed feelings. (These mixed feelings are also a good source of story ideas.) I love apps, like Redfin, that make public information about the housing market incredibly accessible. But I wonder if they also reinforce the unhealthy American expectation that we should all make money off our homes. Redfin emails me probably once a month with its estimate of what my house is worth. (I assume the company figured out which house is mine based on what I've clicked on in the past.) The subtext is that I can watch my investment grow, just as someone might check on a stock portfolio. And I suspect that for a lot of people, this becomes addictive. But fretting about property values is at the root of a lot of political problems in cities fights over where to open homeless shelters, how to draw school boundaries, whether to build new housing. I'm not sure these fights are helped by this addictive live feed of data about housing values. Tech advances in transportation have major unintended consequences, too. We clearly see this in the fight in New York City over whether Uber and Lyft have made traffic worse. Studies in several cities suggest that they're putting cars on the road for trips people might otherwise have taken by foot or transit, or not at all. And they've certainly made the curb more crowded. Now, all of a sudden, cities have to figure out how to manage that space where people hop in and out of cars as if at a cab stand, but everywhere. My favorite transportation apps help me navigate public transit, telling me when the next bus is coming, for instance. That little piece of information can radically transform your sense of the quality of public transit. But people who don't have smartphones don't benefit from this. And that means that while I can run out of my house just when the bus is coming, someone else may wait on a corner for 20 minutes for the same bus. And now we're having very different experiences of the same public service. Mine is much better, because I have a smartphone. Tech is also transforming transportation with the proliferation of electric scooters and dockless bikes. Do you use those? I use old school docked bike share (which is funny to say, because these systems are less than 10 years old in the United States). But mostly I just use a regular old bike. I do wear a very souped up bike helmet, a Christmas gift from my husband a couple of years ago. It has built in lights controlled by a little panel attached to my handlebar, designed to allow me to signal that I'm turning left or right essentially, it lets me behave like a car, with taillights. I have mixed feelings about this, too. (So many mixed feelings!) I don't think I should have to behave like a car when I'm on a bike, although I appreciate anyone who is trying to make cycling safer. In general, my bias is toward assuming that many problems are solved better by policy than by technology. So if you asked me what would really make me safer on my bike, I'd say more protected bike lanes, not more gadgets on bikes (or on cars to detect them). But my husband sadly doesn't have the power to give me bike lanes for Christmas.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
"Hustlers," a semisweet, half flat cocktail of exposed flesh, fuzzy feminism and high spirited criminality, overflows with of the moment pop cultural signifiers Cardi B makes an appearance, and Lizzo does, too but it also strikes a note of nostalgia for the recent past. Specifically the movie, written and directed by Lorene Scafaria ("The Meddler," "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World"), looks back fondly at 2007. Back then, before the financial crisis interrupted the fun, Wall Street guys were making a lot of money, a decent amount of which found its way into the hands and under the G strings of New York strippers. As the movie tells it, the high point of this era remembered as "the last great night" by one of the participants arrives when the R B idol Usher (playing himself) rolls into the club where the main characters work, sending dollar bills raining down on the delighted dancers. The scene is a slow motion bacchanal, a tableau of pure glamour and delight, a snapshot of carnal capitalist utopia. It softens some of the struggle and sleaze that we've already witnessed, and justifies the entrepreneurial larceny to come. Our guide through the highs and lows of this world is Destiny (Constance Wu), who is telling the story of her career to a journalist. ("Hustlers" is based on a New York Magazine article by Jessica Pressler, whose fictionalized counterpart, called Elizabeth, is played by Julia Stiles.) Raised by her grandmother in Queens, Destiny finds her way to a cavernous Manhattan skin palace with multiple stages, throbbing music and an endless supply of thirsty guys in suits. The job isn't much fun until she meets Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), a larger than life figure who takes Destiny under her wing. More literally, Ramona envelops Destiny in her luxuriant fur coat, a gesture that is maternal and sexual, campy and collegial all at once an indication of Ramona's complicated charisma. Ramona is warm, vain, ruthless and unpredictable, and Lopez gathers her contradictions into an incandescent one woman spectacle. Lopez, a pop culture legend in her own right, doesn't so much peel away the layers of her stardom as repurpose them, channeling her exuberant physicality and her quick witted self assurance into a performance that is finely calibrated in its realism and brazen in its theatrics. You need made up adjectives to convey the fusion of craft, nerve and energy that she pulls off: She's Denzelian, Pacinoesque, downright Anna Magnanimous. "Hustlers" itself, unfortunately, doesn't match the scale or audacity of what she does. Ramona is a big, bold, volatile personality inhabiting a story that is small, tentative and risk averse. A few years after the crash, after an unhappy relationship has left Destiny raising a child on her own, she reunites with Ramona, who also has a daughter and who has found a new way to make money. Instead of working the pole and the V.I.P. rooms, she and Destiny along with their colleagues, Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart) scour the city's bars for men of means who can be lured back to the strip club and parted from their credit cards. Eventually the game shifts from a con to something more felonious, as the women, rather than plying their marks with drinks and winks, slip knockout drugs into their cocktails and empty their wallets and expense accounts. It's not exactly a victimless crime, but "Hustlers" brushes off any serious ethical qualms, partly by making the men, for the most part, interchangeable jerks in an indefensible line of work. Which would be fine if the movie had the courage of its populist convictions. But class struggle isn't really at stake any more than gender equality is. The spirit of "Hustlers" is so insistently affirmative and celebratory that all kinds of interesting matters are left unexplored. Scafaria makes it clear that she is on Destiny and Ramona's side. They are loyal friends, devoted mothers, comfortable with their bodies and their choices. All of which is welcome, given the long tradition of treating strippers as easy objects of titillation and moral hand wringing. But the movie seems to view any examination of its characters' motives, their working conditions or the consequences of their actions as a kind of betrayal. There are feints in the direction of realism and social inquiry, but every time she might dig a little deeper into Destiny's inner life or Ramona's relationships, Scafaria falls back into bubbly girl boss montages and luxury brand consumer fetishism. The problem isn't a refusal of judgment, but rather an absence of perspective, a have it all ways approach to the material that feels evasive. Late in the game when the game is pretty much up Ramona asserts that "this whole city, this whole country, is one big strip club," a metaphor that would be more provocative if the movie had backed it up, had showed any real curiosity about the moral, economic and erotic transactions that keep the hustle running. But maybe that's the lesson: The money keeps flowing, and nobody's ever really satisfied. Rated R. A lot of what a lot of men would pay a lot to see. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
There is nothing unique about major companies' social media accounts getting hacked, but the incident on Wednesday night comes after a single hacker has tormented HBO since the beginning of the month. In emails to the news media in recent weeks, the hacker, who identifies himself as "Mr. Smith," has released propriety information, including emails of one HBO executive and unaired episodes of shows like "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Ballers" and "Insecure." It is unclear how widely those episodes have circulated online. But that's not the end of it. Two unaired episodes of "Game of Thrones" were also leaked online this month, including one set to broadcast on Sunday, though neither leak was related to the wider breach. It also did not appear that Wednesday night's Twitter hacking was related to the Mr. Smith attack. OurMine has been responsible for hacking several major companies, including YouTube, Marvel and Netflix. "We are investigating," a spokesman for the network said. In addition to the hacking, HBO has also recently dealt with a prolonged social media backlash for "Confederate," an alternate history drama about slavery from the creators of "Game of Thrones" that is currently in development.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
AIDS, which killed Mercury, has been an important cause to John for a long time. He founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation in the early 1990s, and the memoir carefully apolitical about anything but L.G.B.T.Q. issues more than once refers to his advocacy to explain away some controversy or other. When he performed at Rush Limbaugh's wedding in 2010, he says, he donated his fee to the foundation; and when he plays in Russia he uses the opportunity to promote gay rights. John describes himself as a sexual voyeur, and speculates that his desire to look rather than touch may have kept him safe from the disease. Aficionados of rock star memoirs, take note: This one also gets into John's bout of prostate cancer, complete with his surgery and use of adult diapers. The latter may be a first in the genre. He is even more frank about addiction. Most of his best known work was behind him when cocaine became part of his life. But he is not someone who does anything in small doses: "Nought to nuclear" is more his style. And he had the money and access to indulge in huge amounts of drugs, to the point where he once spent two weeks in his bedroom coked up and drinking. He also had bulimia, and would become furious when anyone suggested he get help for any of these problems. As an example of how low he could go, he describes being shown a hotel room with the furniture in splinters, asking who did the damage and being told that the rampage had been his. This is no sob story. Even the worst of it can be ghoulishly funny: On another bad morning he wakes up to the news that he spent part of the previous night throwing oranges at Bob Dylan, exasperated by Dylan's poor charades skills. ("He couldn't get the hang of the 'how many syllables?' thing at all.") What finally sobers him up is the combined effect of losing so many friends and watching what happens when somebody he cares about goes to rehab. He is scornful about the process until, suddenly, he isn't. And it works. Among other tidbits from the sober life, John reveals that he is Eminem's A.A. sponsor and reveals the obscenity Eminem uses by way of greeting. A book that sweeps from the world class parental cruelty John experienced to Queen Elizabeth's slapping Viscount Linley in the face to John's fondness for Gianni Versace (an even wilder spendaholic than he is, which is no small feat: John at one point had a squash court full of unopened shipping crates) surely has something for everyone. "Me" was written with the help of the British music critic Alexis Petridis, who met with John frequently, heard his stories and created a facsimile of how John speaks. There's the hand of a pro in the book's polished transitions and foreshadowing. But judging from the glimpses of John's own writing that the book provides at one point in rehab, he writes a letter to cocaine that contains the sentence "I don't want you and I to share the same grave" the voice here sounds just right, even if it has been unfamiliar until now. It's a gift to finally hear from someone who has delivered so many of Taupin's words and so few of his own.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
There is plenty of good news in the music industry's latest sales report released this week. Streaming is up. Vinyl has continued its unlikely renaissance. And did we mention that streaming is up? But a closer look shows that the big sales numbers that have sustained the recorded music business for years are way down, and it is hard to see how they could ever return to where they were even a decade ago. Revenue from music sales in the United States has hovered around 7 billion since 2010, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. For 2015, the number was 7.02 billion, up slightly less than 1 percent from 2014. Within that steady total, however, have been drastic shifts in listener behavior. CDs and downloads have been gradually abandoned as streaming has become the platform of choice. The result is that the music industry finds itself fighting over pennies while waving goodbye to dollars. For instance, the growing but still specialized market for vinyl records is generating more revenue than the music on YouTube, one of the biggest destinations on the Internet, but that's because YouTube pays royalties in the tiniest fractions of cents. Streaming whether through paid subscriptions to Spotify or Rhapsody; Internet radio from Pandora; or even videos on YouTube now makes up 34.3 percent of sales, edging out digital downloads as the industry's biggest source of revenue. In 2015, the year that Apple Music arrived and Tidal was reintroduced by Jay Z, paid subscription services generated 1.2 billion in sales in the United States. After adding in free streaming platforms and Internet radio, the total for streaming is 2.4 billion. Getting people to subscribe en masse to streaming services has been a priority for record labels and the streaming companies alike, who have often claimed that by building robust subscriber ranks, they would eventually return the industry to its former glory. But so far streaming has not saved the music business, and deep worries persist about the model. Many artists are suspicious of the deals that their record companies have cut with technology companies, and they want to know how much money is trickling down to them. In a rough analysis of the recording industry association's numbers, Billboard magazine estimated that the average amount of money generated each time a song is streamed fell last year by about 24 percent, to 0.506 cent. (The fine print: That number, a retail sales figure, covers so called on demand streams, excluding Internet radio.) What gets lost in the battles over fractions of pennies, however, is just how much money has vanished from the music business as consumers have abandoned its most profitable product: the CD. In 2006 years after Napster, and well into the iTunes era record labels still reaped 9.4 billion from CD sales in the United States, more than the total sales revenue of the business today. Last year, CD sales stood at just 1.5 billion, a drop of 84 percent in a decade. And downloads, also once viewed as the industry's savior, have now been falling for three consecutive years with no sign of recovery. In a note accompanying the recording industry's report, Cary Sherman, the group's chief executive, criticized sites like YouTube characterized in the report as "on demand ad supported" for what he described as paltry payouts compared to their enormous popularity online. Last year, YouTube and sites like it generated 385 million in royalties. In comparison, vinyl records a niche if there ever was one brought in 416 million. "Reforms are necessary to level the playing field and ensure that the entire music community derives the full and fair value of our work," Mr. Sherman wrote. (In response, Google, which owns YouTube, objected to its comparison alongside audio only platforms, referring to it as "apples to oranges.") It may be possible for the music industry to wring more money out of YouTube. But it seems doubtful that it will ever earn back what it has lost from the CD.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
In a video posted last week, a mob of monkeys runs around a city plaza in Thailand. Something gets thrown in the macaques' midst and they break into a giant brawl. This horde of animals lives in Lopburi, home of the country's Phra Prang Sam Yot monkey temple. The macaques, which are usually fed by tourists visiting the city, are finding a new scarcity because of the coronavirus. And they're not alone. Large populations of wild animals are sustained almost entirely on treats handed out by tourists in a variety of Asian countries. But over the past few weeks, the flow of tourists has been reduced to a trickle as a result of quarantines, travel restrictions and a general reduction in visitors put in place to stop the spread of the illness. Now, for better or worse, thousands of animals are being forced to fend for themselves. Although fights between the macaques of Lopburi are not uncommon, a brawl of the magnitude shown in that video suggests that resources are scarce, said Asmita Sengupta, an ecologist at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment in Bangalore, India, who studies the effects of humans feeding macaques, which remain wild animals even if they live in close quarters with people. "The fall in tourist numbers because of Covid 19 may have indeed brought about a shortage of food supply for them," she said. That shows that feeding the monkeys "can have detrimental effects. Once they get used to being fed by humans, they become habituated to humans and even display hyper aggression if they are not given food."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
LONDON Depending on where one stands in the debate on the rising cost of housing in Britain, Paul Thomas and Abigail Walker, first time home buyers, are either part of the solution or part of the problem. To buy a PS248,000, or 386,000, two bedroom house in Oxfordshire, west of London, Mr. Thomas, a 38 year old electrician, and his 25 year old partner, Ms. Walker, who works in an accounting office, are making use of a government program called Help to Buy. Through it, they are able to make a down payment of only 5 percent from their own funds, with the government giving them an interest free loan to cover the other 20 percent of the deposit. The government of Prime Minister David Cameron has cast the program as a way to stimulate the country's sluggish economy by helping consumers skeptics might refer to them as voters buy homes they could not otherwise afford. But critics say it could lead to a housing bubble and a spate of problem loans on which the government could be left to make good. Under Help to Buy, rolled out in March, the government either offers interest free credit or guarantees part of the property loan. The resulting higher demand for homes is supposed to fuel construction and aid the economic recovery. "Help to Buy is a dramatic intervention to get our housing market moving," George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, told Parliament in presenting the plan. "That is a good use of this government's fiscal credibility." But over the last month, the program has drawn a growing outcry from some lawmakers and economists, demanding an early end for Help to Buy. They note that the housing market has already been picking up and warn that the plan could create a housing bubble that would be likely to burst when the program expires in 2016, while driving price increases that will make homes even less affordable for many in the meantime. As evidence, they cite a report this month by the government statistical office that indicated that house price inflation had risen in June at annual rate of 3.1 percent, up from 2.9 percent in May, bringing prices to the highest level in five years. Albert Edwards, an outspoken strategist at Societe Generale in London, called the British plan "madness" and "truly moronic," saying that "buyers need cheaper homes, not greater availability of debt to inflate house prices even further." Critics also question the wisdom of enabling people to get a mortgage with a down payment of as little as 5 percent of the home value at a time when lenders are under pressure from regulators to reduce the riskiness of loans. It also means that Britain is increasing support to the housing sector just as the United States is seeking ways to reduce the government's role and risk in the mortgage market. This month, President Barack Obama proposed winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant government backed mortgage finance companies. "We do not want what the U.S. has, which is a government guaranteed mortgage market, and they are desperately trying to find a way out of that position," Mervyn A. King told Sky News in an interview a month before he retired in July as the Bank of England governor. The International Monetary Fund warned in May that Help to Buy would push up house prices if the government does not ensure that more houses are built. Fitch, the debt ratings agency, has raised similar concerns. The plan as announced in March by Mr. Osborne came in two parts. The first piece, in place since April, is limited to the purchase of newly built homes. The government offers a five year interest free loan worth 20 percent of the home value to help pay the deposit. Mr. Thomas and Ms. Walker are getting help through that portion of the program. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The second and more controversial part of the plan, which is due to start in January, allows the buyers of any house to pay only 5 percent of the value of the home as a deposit. The government would then guarantee an additional 20 percent of the bank loan for any property worth as much as PS600,000, effectively passing the risk from the lender to the government. "Using the government's balance sheet to back these higher loan to value mortgages will dramatically increase their availability," Mr. Osborne said when he presented the plan to Parliament in March. Mr. Thomas and Ms. Walker had recently moved in with Ms. Walker's mother in Oxfordshire to save money for a deposit, which they said would have taken them 10 years to come up with on their own. But now they plan to move into their newly built home in the autumn. Instead of a PS62,000 down payment on the PS248,000 purchase price, they had to put down only PS12,400. Help to Buy is coming up with the rest. "It really put a smile on my face," Mr. Thomas said. Some economists said making voters like Mr. Thomas happy was the main motive for Mr. Osborne's plan. About two years before the next general election, and with recent opinion polls showing the opposition Labour Party neck and neck with Mr. Osborne's Conservative Party, Mr. Osborne is betting on the housing market. Not being able to afford a home is "a blow to the most human of aspirations," he told Parliament. The government says the program has been a success so far. More than 10,000 people have reserved newly built homes since April, and the number of first time buyers was at the highest level since 2007, the government said this month. Some property developers are also happy. Barratt Developments, one of Britain's largest house builders, said sales had risen 35 percent in the three months through the end of June, from the comparable period last year, with "a significant amount" of the upturn a result of Help to Buy. Still, those gains are coming at a time when Britain's housing market had already been improving. Helped by record low interest rates and demand from foreign buyers, especially in London, prices of homes nationwide rose 4.6 percent in the three months to July, the highest annual increase since August 2010, according to the mortgage provider Halifax. In London, the increase was 8.1 percent. Compared with the United States or some countries in Southern Europe, Britain's housing market downturn after the financial crisis was relatively mild. House prices in Britain fell faster after their peak in 2007 but less steeply than those in the United States because of a combination of mortgage laws and a shortage of new homes. House prices have increased so much in London that the average first time buyer now has to spend half of his net salary on mortgage payments, according to the Nationwide Building Society. "For a market that is already clearly expensive, the government is throwing petrol on an already inflated situation," said Mr. Edwards, the Societe Generale strategist. Mr. Osborne and the Bank of England's new governor, Mark J. Carney, have rebutted criticisms of the housing program, saying Britain was still far from a housing bubble. But behind the scenes at the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority, which is charge of ensuring the safety of banks, there are concerns that Help to Buy conflicts with the regulator's aim of reducing risk in the banking sector and applying stricter lending rules, according to a senior bank official, who declined to be identified because the concerns were not public. Banks that have signed up for the program include Lloyds Banking Group, in which the government continues to hold a stake after a bailout, along with Nationwide and Santander. Those banks and others are in talks with the government about how much lenders will have to pay to participate in Help to Buy and how much capital the banks will have to hold for those loans. Many economists are asking why, if banks are unwilling to take the extra risk of making such loans without government inducements, the government should be expected to backstop the program. Andrew Brigden, an economist at Fathom Consulting, said the program would make it easier for banks to make riskier loans. Help to Buy is a "reckless scheme" because it "uses public money to incentivize the banks to lend precisely to those individuals who should not be offered credit," Mr. Brigden said. But Mr. Osborne has argued that the program is fixing a mortgage market that has been discriminating against people who can afford the monthly mortgage payments but do not have enough savings for a down payment. Passing part of the lending risk from the banks to the government does not worry him, he said. "Because it's a financial transaction, with the taxpayer making an investment and getting a return," Mr. Osborne said, "it won't hit our deficit."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
When Lonzo Ball strutted onstage at Barclays Center on Thursday night after learning he'd been picked second in the annual N.B.A. draft by his hometown Los Angeles Lakers, he wore a black suit with a shawl collared jacket, a black shirt, a black bow tie and, on his feet, an utterly garish pair of white submarine shape sneakers, trimmed in the Lakers colors, purple and gold. That Mr. Ball was going to be selected by the Lakers was something of a foregone conclusion. Pundits predicted it, and so did his stage dad, LaVar Ball, who in essence told other teams not to consider drafting his son. Still, nothing is guaranteed. "I'm glad that they picked me," Lonzo Ball told Darren Rovell of ESPN of his light showboating, "because I didn't have any other shoes under the table." Those statement sneakers were made by Big Baller Brand, the fledgling company that his father founder and that has become something of a basketball world punch line in recent months. It has a sneaker, the ZO2, that sells for 495 a pair, around three times more than an equivalent from a major manufacturer. (A few hundred pairs have sold, LaVar Ball said, though they won't be delivered until November.) He also suggested that his company, which also makes shrugworthy T shirts and sweatshirts, was worth billions, strictly because of the potential of his children: Lonzo Ball is the eldest of three basketball prodigies. But for now, there are sneakers, and prototype sneakers at that. Advertised on Mr. Ball's feet as he shook the hand of the N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, they looked swollen. They didn't complement his suit. Instead they were both siren and albatross, marking Mr. Ball as simultaneously individual and an agent of someone else's desires. Dressing well has become a condition of N.B.A. superstardom, be it in Russell Westbrook's kaleidoscopic fantasias or LeBron James's steely luxury. The young men in slightly ill fitting suits on draft night are still a couple of years and a few million dollars away from the expectation of peak sartorial flair. Even so, apart from Mr. Ball's gauche self branding, there were few ripples Thursday night. This year's draft broke the record for the most freshmen chosen, but the real record might have been for the most bow ties worn by draftees. When the top prospects took to the stage for a group photo before the draft, De'Aaron Fox, the fifth pick, playfully fixed the bow tie of Markelle Fultz, who was chosen first. Jayson Tatum and Josh Jackson, selected third and fourth, wore droopy ones of the kind favored by Academy Award nominees in the late 1970s. Justin Jackson, picked 15th, recalled Orville Redenbacher in a wide stripe bow tie and conservative gray suit. These Halloween costumes were by and large distractions, though, with a couple of exceptions. Mr. Fox had a lovely clover lapel pin on his dark gray suit. And Frank Ntilikina, whom the Knicks took with the eighth pick, looked genuinely comfortable and suave in his suit, a red checkered affair complemented with a spotted bow tie and a pink pocket square. That Mr. Ntilikina is French certainly helped. But throughout the rest of the night, no amount of custom suiting, right down to personalized linings, could hide the fundamental youth of the night. (Special mention here to Justin Patton, selected 16th, and his riot of mismatched 1970s stripes, topped off with a boutonniere.) And so this will be primarily remembered as the year that Mr. Ball loudly announced his loyalties to his team and to his father, perhaps at his own peril. The major sneaker companies have reportedly declined to work with Mr. Ball, owing to his father's excessive demands. Which means that Big Baller Brand is both first resort and fallback plan. As soon as Mr. Ball's selection was announced, a preorder link went up on the company's website: Those Lakers color sneakers were available for 495. And in the hours that followed, small (and unverifiable) pop up announcements appeared at the bottom of the page indicating that someone, somewhere, had decided to shell out the cash for a taste of the Big Baller lifestyle. The thing about advertising is that it works.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Courtney Everts Mykytyn, a California activist who battled educational segregation by urging white parents like herself to send their children to public schools with largely black and Latino student bodies, died on Dec. 30 when she was struck by a car in Los Angeles. She was 46. Her husband, Roman Mykytyn, said the cause was blunt force trauma. He said she was struck by a car that had inadvertently accelerated while the driver was trying to park. Through her grass roots nonprofit organization, Integrated Schools, which she founded in 2015 and which now has about 20 chapters around the country, Ms. Everts Mykytyn (pronounced mih KIT in) worked to reimagine a different path to the difficult goal of desegregating schools whose student bodies are mostly nonwhite. Rather than trying to change education policy or bus students outside their school districts, she challenged white, often wealthy parents to work toward creating equitable, multiracial student bodies by enrolling their children in schools where they would be in the minority and very likely have fewer resources than their own neighborhood schools could provide. "Attending an integrating school one in which yours may be the only or one of a few white and/or privileged families can (but doesn't necessarily) mean that your child won't have impressive sounding credentials, after school enrichment activities or big parent booster budgets," she wrote last year in a column for The Hollywood Reporter. But, she added, "choosing an integrating school is not so much a sacrifice as it is reprioritizing what matters in building a world we want our children to be adults in." Ms. Everts Mykytyn said that she and her husband had decided against raising their own children "in a bubble" when they enrolled their kindergarten age son in a public school in Highland Park, a gentrifying neighborhood of Los Angeles that was predominantly Latino at the time. Seeing her white neighbors send their children to private or charter schools angered her. "You're not too good to live here but you're too good for the schools?" she said to Patrick Wall, a reporter for Chalkbeat, an educational news website, when he profiled her for Mother Jones magazine in 2017. Her son was among the first students at his school to take part in a dual language program, in which classes were taught in English and Spanish with the goal of making the children bilingual. Ms. Everts Mykytyn had led a campaign for the program. Her daughter followed the same path. "Even as our kids have gone without field trips or art in the classroom, the conversations we have as a family about justice and inequality, about how the world works and our place in it, have been critical in our kids' development," Ms. Everts Mykytyn wrote in The Hollywood Reporter. She made her case for integration by talking to parents at school board meetings and by telephone, and by reaching them through podcasts she co hosted and through social media and video conferences. She also brokered meetings between parents who had made the choice to send their children to schools with more students of color and those who were considering it. Anna Lodder, a board member of Integrated Schools, said that though a precise number is not yet known, at least several hundred white parents had been influenced by the organization to place their children in predominantly black and Hispanic schools. Courtney Virginia Everts was born on May 17, 1973, in Woodbridge, Va., to Craig and J. Paulette (Westphal) Everts. Her father was an engineer, and her mother was a homemaker. After they divorced when she was 6, Courtney lived with her mother before attending high school in Los Angeles, where her father lived. Ms. Everts Mykytyn earned a bachelor's degree in biology at the University of Southern California in 1998 and over the next decade received a master's and a Ph.D. in medical anthropology. By then the dual language programs that she had begun at her son's elementary and middle schools were becoming popular. But she had grown dissatisfied with how some white parents fixated on dual language programs as a benefit for their children, not as a community bonding measure toward desegregation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Season 4, Episodes 1 and 2: 'Welcome to the Alternate Economy' and 'The Land of Taking and Killing' "If America is a nation of immigrants, how does one become American?" Every essay needs a thesis, and in the first episode of the fourth season of "Fargo," Ethelrida Pearl Smutney (Emyri Crutchfield), our guide to the combustible underworld of 1950 Kansas City, provides one. She also provides a definition of "assimilation" from Webster's dictionary, which perhaps takes the school report nature of the voice over narration too far. But Ethelrida's words are helpful as an organizing principle for this series's typically dense thicket of criminal intrigue, because it's too easy to get snagged in the details. This will be a season about the tribalist lumps that float around the great American melting pot. It also appears to be the "Miller's Crossing" season of Noah Hawley's continuing homage to the Coen Brothers, even though it takes place a few decades after that Prohibition era gangster noir. Where "Miller's Crossing" is about the conflict between the Irish and Italian mobs in an unnamed U.S. city, Hawley moves past the point when the Italians have emerged victorious and settles on a threat to their power, which comes in the form of a Black crime syndicate. While these new insurgents, called the Cannon Limited and led by Loy Cannon (Chris Rock), carry specific racial burdens with them, the period sheen of the setting is pure Coens, starting with the hardwood at Joplin's Department Store. Hawley treats this arena like an underworld Ellis Island, a place where immigrants are processed before they're granted the legitimacy of being fully American. In the "alternate economy," a pattern emerges where deals between tribes are struck and inevitably violated, and where, in the words of Winston Churchill also quoted by Ethelrida "History is written by the victors." Hawley doesn't go back as far as the deals struck between Native Americans and settlers, but it's easy to extrapolate from the conflicts he breezes through in the opening section between Hebrews and Irishmen; Irishmen and Italians; and, finally, the Italians and Black migrants at the center of this season. The first two episodes, which aired back to back on Sunday, draw these battle lines starkly, but they also suggest key areas where ethnic and racial barriers are crossed, with all the promise and danger that goes along with it. Ethelrida faces those barriers every day at home, where her parents, Thurman (Andrew Bird) and Dibrell (Anji White), are a mixed race couple running a mortuary. Elsewhere, an exchange of sons between mob bosses is offered like a collateral in a deal more binding, certainly, than a spit shake but it's more like a test of loyalty. Will the boys choose their own kind or respond to the nurturing of another tribe? The identity of a nation is at stake. In 1950, the power sharing arrangement between the Fadda Family and the Cannon Limited threatens to come apart at the seams, especially after the head of the Faddas is struck in the neck by a pellet from a child's air rifle. As in the Coens's "Fargo," one incident of violence spiderwebs out into a much larger and bloodier set of circumstances. A dispute between Loy and the elder Fadda over control of a slaughterhouse cannot be resolved after Fadda's death, which leads the Cannons to challenge Josto Fadda (Jason Schwartzman) and the temperamental Gaetano Fadda (Salvatore Esposito) by making a move on it. New terms will have to be negotiated on the fly and at the barrel of a gun. The wild card in this entire scenario is Nurse Oraetta Mayflower, a pulp villain played by Jessie Buckley, who was terrific as a Glaswegian country singer in "Wild Rose" and as the troubled protagonist of Charlie Kaufman's Netflix movie "I'm Thinking of Ending Things." While the Faddas have invited trouble by executing a drive by shooting at the private hospital that refused service to the big boss, they miss when Nurse Mayflower quietly snuffs him out. Her motives are a question mark, but she's a wonderful agent of chaos, comparable to Billy Bob Thornton's Lorne Malvo on the show's first season but disinclined to live in the shadows. She's also our one connection to "Fargo" country, Minnesota Nice turned lethal. The second episode adds a few more key characters to the ensemble, including an opening in which two women, Swanee Capps (Amber Midthunder) and Zelmare Roulette (Karen Aldridge), escape from the clink like John Goodman and William Forsythe in the Coens's "Raising Arizona." Zelmare is Ethelrida's aunt, and while she's not greeted warmly by her mother, it's never the worst thing to have wily convicts around while leg breaking loan sharks are losing their patience. In a season already teeming with eccentrics, the addition of Odis Weff (Jack Huston), a cop with O.C.D., feels a bit like a hat on a hat, but his compromising relationship to the Italians is also of a piece with "Miller's Crossing," in which the top mob boss always has the police at his disposal. The title of the second episode is spoken by Gaetano, the Faddas's brutal new enforcer from Italy: "In the land of taking and killing, Gaetano is king." What kind of land America is and who controls it and how will be a central question on "Fargo" this season. And a lot of blood will be spilled to answer it. None A few other Coen callbacks: The opening titles of the first episode don't appear until 23 minutes in a nod to "Raising Arizona," which doesn't start its credits until the beginning of Reel 2. The cattle gun that Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) fatally applied to the temples of his victims in "No Country for Old Men" is used here for its intended purpose. Nurse Mayweather's calling out her boss at the hospital for "malfeasance" references Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) in the movie "Fargo," who informs Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) that's she in town "investigating some malfeasance." None The bank executive's rationale for declining Loy's offer to get in the credit card business is low hanging comic fruit, but it's ripe: His customers are "just not going to spend money they don't have." And "charging them high rates of interest and preying on them when times get tough ... that's just not what banking is all about." None Loy's rejection of the notion that it's a dog eat dog world is revealing of his character. "That's how dogs work," he says. "Men are more complicated." Force alone doesn't seem like the only tool in his box. None Hanging dead rats in a slaughterhouse to discourage other rats from infiltrating it is as good a sign as any that the operation could benefit from wiser management.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The comic book author and screenwriter Marc Andreyko felt unfathomable horror when he heard the news of the June 12 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Feeling compelled to help, he posted on Facebook a suggestion to create a comic book that would benefit the victims. The result is "Love Is Love," a 144 page anthology filled with original work by contributors both familiar and unexpected. The book, which will be available Dec. 28, includes pages from the documentarian Morgan Spurlock, the actor Matt Bomer, the comedians Patton Oswalt and Taran Killam, and other entertainers. "I went through my Rolodex to use a word for something that doesn't even exist anymore and looked for people who I'm friends with and had name value," Mr. Andreyko said. "I want this book to be in as many hands as possible." Mr. Andreyko, 46, said the inspiration for the book could be traced to his childhood. He fondly recalled the musical acts that came together for benefit concerts such as Band Aid and Live Aid and the song "We Are the World." He noted that the format of the book no story is over two pages long had been chosen to help lure contributors who had tight schedules. But Mr. Andreyko found the biggest motivator was the act of expression. "It was therapeutic,'' he said. "By doing the art, it was purging for us." The offerings are diverse: There are stories that directly address the victims, some pinups, wistful ruminations and more. Brian Michael Bendis, one of Marvel's most prolific writers, teamed up with his oldest daughter, Olivia, to capture a glimmer of a moment from the shooting at Pulse. They came up with a dialogue free spread of revelrous dancers and a lone person in shadow looking upon them. "The idea that someone could stand in the middle of that club full of joy and fun and be drowning in madness was something we couldn't get past," Mr. Bendis said. Michael Avon Oeming drew the artwork, and Taki Soma colored it. Mr. Spurlock, who is working on a documentary about superheroes for the History Channel, wrote a one page story, with art by Kieron Dwyer, in support of the nation's dedicated police officers. Mr. Spurlock said officers were sometimes tarnished as a group because of the actions of a few. "These guys still have to show up and do their jobs," he said. One of the most unusual contributions comes by way of J. K. Rowling, who allowed the use of a quote from "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." It serves as a caption to an image of Harry and his friends drawn by Jim Lee, a co publisher of DC Comics. The pairing seemed only natural, Mr. Andreyko said. "If we get the biggest selling author on the planet, we need the biggest artist," Mr. Andreyko said. Mark Chiarello, a senior vice president of art and design at DC, added a watercolor rainbow flag to the drawing. The quote is by Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Harry's school, who Ms. Rowling has said is gay, and drives home the point of the anthology: "Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
People tend to like churches and synagogues with intricate detail, like the lacy Gothicism of Grace Church at Broadway and 10th Street. But I am drawn to the austere Church of the Heavenly Rest, at Fifth Avenue and 90th Street. Designed by Mayers, Murray and Phillip and completed in 1929 ...wait, that's not right, it has never been completed. Less than half of the sculptural program, by Lee Lawrie and Malvina Hoffman, was carried out, and the exterior has a bare, streamlined look, like Hoover Dam or some Art Moderne armory. The finished sculptural decoration has an ascetic character, and the raw blocks of stone, the uncarved bosses and ambiguous pilasters require the onlooker to fill in the gaps, a more engaged activity than looking at some sober apostles. Imagination is required, something not often seen in architecture. The skyscraper top I look to at night is that of the 1932 Cities Service Building, at 70 Pine Street. What you see after dark is a ziggurat like blast of white glass, as if sugar cubes had been lighted from the inside, capped by a glass rectangle of blood red. Most skyscraper tops wind up illuminating the building, a floodlighted tower, some wall washers, windows outlined with fluorescent tubes; the top of the Cities Service building is just light, nothing else. The Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle is sometimes likened to Darth Vader, but come over to the dark side and watch how it changes as you circle it. From Hell's Kitchen, from Central Park, from Lincoln Center, from the Plaza, from all directions the varying angles of the curved towers catch and bounce both daylight and moonlight in the most uncanny way, like the eyes of the Mona Lisa following you around the room. For a reductionist building of impassive materials, Time Warner always surprises and rewards me, and disrupts my traditionalist inclinations. It is a pity the topmost lighting, a series of horizontal fluorescent type bulbs, is so uninspired. As far as dwellings, we are a city of noses pressed against the shelter magazine glass, each cute village town house, each co op duplex, each funky railroad flat seemingly residential perfection. Although I think of myself as having humble tastes, I am really no different, and for me perfection is 1 Sutton Place South, a 1926 apartment building overlooking the East River between 56th and 57th Streets. Cross Cross designed it in a sensible shoe Georgian red brick and limestone, with a porte cochere on Sutton Place and a vast garden on the river side. Tenants got a third of a floor, most with three or four exposures light, blessed light, Manhattans's most precious resource, all around. I admit that I don't need 12 or 20 rooms, but there is something so generous and yet patrician in the design as opposed to the haughtiness of buildings like 740 Park Avenue that I have for decades thought it my ideal place to live. Perhaps it's best that I have never been inside. Loft buildings are usually the empty calories of architecture, purely commercial enterprises with no room for inspiration and precious little for thought. But in 1927 an otherwise unremarkable developer, Electus T. Backus, built a most unusual loft at 419 Park Avenue South and 29th Street. Its facade is tight and spare, with great bays of metal casement windows, miraculously mostly intact. But it is the color that is hypnotizing, a mixture of moody plum and shimmering electric blue unlike anything else in New York, and with an animation and intensity suggestive of Islamic design. When I pass it, I always wonder if the floors rented any faster because of the striking design by Walter Haefeli. Was the extra effort worth it? Few if any writers seem to have found the building worthy of comment. One of the most moving pieces of park design in the city is the dreamy view through Prospect Park's Endale Arch to the green carpet of Long Meadow. But I find myself far more often at the Great Lawn, the giant, otherwise uninflected oval of grass in Central Park. It seems to be serving its highest use when open to picnickers, ballplayers and Frisbee tossers. They are generally indignant when it is closed, but to me that's when the Great Lawn is at its best, because instead of being allotted a blanket size plot, Coney Island style, anyone can stand at the edge and possess the entire thing. At those times, I imagine the fence extending up into the sky forever, a holy, shimmering kind of wall, such as the diamond like sheets of water pouring into the 911 memorial downtown. I have been a member of many congregations, but for me, this is my church.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The Voyager 2 spacecraft burst out of the bubble of gases expanding from the sun and into the wild of the Milky Way a year ago. It was the second spacecraft to cross that boundary and directly observe the interstellar medium. Its faster moving twin, Voyager 1, made the crossing six years earlier, in August 2012. Launched 42 years ago, when Jimmy Carter was president, the twin spacecraft have persisted far longer than envisioned, as has their ability to send scientific findings home to Earth. In a series of papers published on Monday in Nature Astronomy, scientists report what Voyager 2 observed at the boundary of the solar wind's bubble and beyond. "We're certainly surprised," Edward C. Stone, the mission's project scientist, said of the probe's longevity during a news conference on Thursday. "We're also wonderfully excited by the fact that they do. When the two Voyagers were launched, the space age was only 20 years old. It was hard to know at that time that anything could last over 40 years." In many ways, the measurements echoed Voyager 1's: a jump in the density of particles accompanied by a sharp decrease in their speed, a shift in the magnetic fields. Voyager 2 also noted some differences, which could give clues about the complicated dynamics in that region of the solar system. The sun spews in all directions a continuous stream of particles called the solar wind traveling at a speed of a million miles per hour. The particles are mostly hydrogen, but, heated to some 3 million degrees Fahrenheit, the atoms are ripped apart into protons and electrons. At a distance of more than 11 billion miles from the sun, the solar wind, thinning out, is increasingly buffeted by the flow of particles in the interstellar wind and a galactic magnetic field generated by the long ago explosions of distant stars. The interstellar wind is much cooler just tens of thousands of degrees and denser. With Voyager 1, the outward velocity of the solar wind dropped to zero long before the boundary; it was pushed sideways. With Voyager 2, the outward velocities fluctuated, sometimes dipping to zero but then rising again. Curiously, the distances from the sun for the two crossings out of the solar system were similar. Scientists had expected that the bubble would be pushed outward during the solar maximum and collapse inward during the solar minimum. "A lot of the models leave a lot to be desired," Stamatios Krimigis, a scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and the principal investigator of one of the Voyager instruments, said in an interview. Voyager 2 also measured what scientists describe as a magnetic barrier, "like the pile up of slowly moving cars on a major highway, a few miles ahead of the scene of an accident," Leonard F. Burlaga, a scientist working with the spacecraft's magnetometer, wrote in an email. When solar wind slows, the density of particles increases and the magnetic field strengthens. "Again, it's like the cars, which turn away from the lanes of the accident and move slowly along the available lanes," Dr. Burlaga said. "The cars are more densely spaced, the drivers are heated, but they eventually move along." The missions were originally designed to last four years to fly by Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 also visited Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2 still has five functioning instruments for measuring the void; Voyager 1 has four. Both Voyagers are expected to last another five years or so until their batteries die out. Both are powered by electricity generated by the heat of radioactive plutonium. As the plutonium diminishes, the spacecraft receive less and less energy. Once the Voyagers shut down, there will be no more data from beyond our solar system for years. Only one other spacecraft, the New Horizons probe that flew by Pluto in 2015 and visited another object in the distant Kuiper belt in January this year, is headed that way. But it is moving more slowly and its plutonium power will run out before it reaches interstellar space. "Right now, when the Voyagers go offline, that's kind of it unless we do something else," said Ralph McNutt, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Dr. McNutt is leading a study to look at what it might take to build an ultrafast spacecraft that could leave the solar system in a hurry. The development of NASA's long delayed giant rocket, the Space Launch System, makes that mission more plausible. The mission could also perform what is known as an Oberth maneuver, named after Hermann Oberth, a German physicist who came up with the idea in 1927. A probe would first head to Jupiter, using the giant planet's gravity to accelerate toward the sun. As it then swings around the sun, the spacecraft would fire a rocket engine, accelerating to a speed where it could cover close to a couple of billion miles a year. That would be more than five times the speed of the Voyagers. That would be tricky to pull off, however. For such a powered flyby to be effective, the probe would have to travel within a million miles or so from the sun. "Well, it's not as easy as it sounds," said Dr. Krimigis, who is taking part in the study which should be completed in a couple of years. "At that distance, every metal we know melts."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
It's not too hard to predict the drift of any given "Succession" episode. Each week unfailingly the Roy family will scheme, bicker and belittle one another. All that changes is the location. Since "Succession" began, we've seen episodes set at sprawling country estates, at Connor's ranch, at the family's "summer palace" and even an at underground kink club. In this week's episode, most of Waystar's "top team" heads to Hungary for what's supposed to be a morale boosting corporate retreat ... but which turns, inevitably, into another round of furious shouting and spiteful betrayals. Why Hungary? Because Logan also wants to do some boar hunting on this trip; and according to Gerri, Hungary is a place where a man as rich as Logan Roy can shoot his gun indiscriminately, without worrying about what he might hit. Gerri is referring to a literal gun; but as the weekend darkens, it turns out her joke functions just as well as an analogy. After two straight weeks in which the "Succession" writers balanced their grim family portrait with moments of lighter farce, this latest episode, titled "Hunting," pushes the show's bleak levels into the red. This was a harsh, harsh hour of television, unrelenting in its psychodrama. The story begins with a rare moment of near unanimity at Waystar. Logan has come up with a bold tactic to halt the potential takeover of the company. He wants to buy Pierce Global Media ostensibly the CNN of the "Succession" universe and become "too big to swallow." His executives all tell him to his face that they're gung ho. Privately, they're panicking. Well, most of them are, anyway. It's hard to get a read on Kendall. He seems to flinch when his dad announces the move; but he's also in a nihilistic place, and it's possible he just wants to watch Waystar burn, with himself trapped inside. Roman, meanwhile, seems genuinely to approve of this plan because it involves stirring up public outrage and potentially firing thousands of Pierce employees. But even Roman shows flashes of fear, perhaps because he knows a 20 billion acquisition involves more moving pieces than a glib underachiever like him could understand. As for Tom who also doesn't seem to grasp the finer points of the deal he just wants to be a team player. But he has Shiv in his ear, ordering him to stand up to his fellow execs and his father in law. ("People would do well to know there's going to be a new sheriff in town," she says. "Rally the resistance, deputy.") Shiv's objections are twofold. First, she thinks integrating all of P.G.M.'s pieces into Waystar will take too long given that she is expecting to be in charge long before the fallout from the deal is over. But also, as Tabitha points out to Roman, P.G.M. is "like, the actual news." Shiv wonders how she'll stay informed if Waystar owns most of the media. She says the only outlets left that cover the basic facts of the world's daily affairs (like "Who went where?" and "Who wore a hat?") are "The Times, The Post, editors at Pierce and a couple hundred angry young women on Twitter." Unfortunately, Logan hasn't invited his daughter to Hungary, so she can't confront him. Instead, she's stuck managing Connor, who is preparing to enter "the ideas primary" stage of his run for president by releasing an Instagram video rant wherein he declares his intention to stop paying taxes. ("Do you think he knows what a jail is?" Tabitha asks. "He literally only knows it from Monopoly," Roman replies.) Logan needs Shiv to stall this Connor situation, telling her to let him know that he shouldn't "go shining about tax." ("We have arrangements," he says, ominously.) So when the hunting party arrives in Hungary, they're all exhausted and nervous a situation exacerbated by their boss's consternation over rumors that somebody close to the family has been speaking to a reporter who is working on a tell all biography of him. Gerri tries to calm him, reminding him that, "We can't actually, in this nation yet, sadly, halt the publication of a book," but he's insistent that the mole be sniffed out. This is all tinder for what turns out to be a dumpster fire of a weekend. Everyone is jumpy about the biographer because she reached out to pretty much all of them. (Cousin Greg actually met with her, though he tries to explain to Tom that he only "pre met her" and that she deviously "tried to turn the pre meet into a meet meet.") And Roman's attempt to get ahead of the Pierce deal backfires when he calls one of Tabitha's ex lovers from the Pierce family, who then leaks the news about the potential acquisition. The final straw comes when Tom warns Logan that much of the inner circle is against the Pierce move. What follows is a horrifying party game that Logan calls "Boar on the Floor," in which he asks people how they really feel about his strategy, judges their level of honesty, and then forces the losers to crawl around on the ground and grovel for sausages. It's not an easy scene to watch. There's a point to all this misery, though, in terms of this season's larger narrative. The humiliation shakes up Roman to the point where he actually begins considering learning how to do his job. It also pushes Tom to confront Shiv, who spent the weekend failing at her Connor sitting assignment and sleeping with a hunky actor instead. Tom says meekly, "Maybe it isn't totally great what you sent me to do, which was the opposite of what I wanted to do." (That should've been in their wedding vows.) The weekend also reveals something about Logan, who at the start of the episode receives a warning from his doctor that his pills may cause "anxiety, paranoia, irritation." The irony of the mayhem in Hungary is that everyone at Waystar scrambles to react to the whims of a man who could just be having a bad reaction to his meds. As always, the grandeur of the backdrop makes Logan Roy more imposing. But it doesn't make him any more balanced. The Rich Are Different From You and Me: None Greg enjoys being allowed into the inner sanctum, which he says is "way nicer than the outer sanctum," because it includes amenities like private jets. "It's like I'm in U2," he marvels. None Roman thinks that by closing the Pierce deal, he can humiliate Kendall and become the new boss. "Just like in 'Hamlet,'" he says. "If that happens in 'Hamlet.' I don't care." None For the record: A gallon of milk costs about 3.50. None Anyone can decant a bottle wine. Leave it to Connor to "hyper decant."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Rates Are Going Up. What Could Go Wrong? When expansions end and the economy tips into recession, one or the other is usually to blame. In the past, the culprit has frequently been fire an overheating economy and rising inflation that prompted the central bank to push up interest rates until they ultimately choked off growth. Ice is more unusual, at least in the United States, but often more painful, as excess capacity, weak demand and falling prices foster a deflationary slump that can prove difficult to escape. As the Federal Reserve embarks on a new chapter in monetary policy, having raised rates on Dec. 16 for the first time in nearly a decade, policy makers are acutely aware of the risks posed by either possibility. "Raising rates the first time may have been the easy part; now comes the challenging part," said Mike Ryan, chief investment strategist for UBS Wealth Management Americas. But being too slow to tighten the reins of monetary policy can prove perilous, too. A series of steady quarter point rate increases by the Fed between 2004 and 2006 seemed prudent at the time, but in hindsight the central bank has been blamed for moving too slowly, failing to head off the economic catastrophe that followed the implosion of the housing bubble in 2007. The biggest problem is that higher interest rates do not bite in predictable ways. Not only do they take time to percolate through the real economy, but there is also a difficult to foresee threshold at which the impact can suddenly shift from mild to severe. "I'm sure there is a tipping point," Mr. Ryan said. "It's just hard to know in advance precisely where that is." At least for now, though, few analysts expect the Fed's initial moves to bring the nation's six and a half year old expansion to an abrupt end. "The rate hike this month and those next year may not really be felt until 2017," said Michael Hanson, senior United States economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "Evidence from past cycles suggests it could take a year, rather than the next quarter or two." The Fed's task this time is even more complicated because other central banks are leaning in the opposite direction. With growth in Europe still sputtering, the European Central Bank has belatedly turned to the tools embraced by the Fed several years ago, buying up securities and pumping money into the financial system. But even with some interest rates there in negative territory, Mario Draghi, president of the E.C.B., is under pressure to loosen monetary policy further. In Asia, the People's Bank of China is also in easing mode, as officials try to cushion what looks like an increasingly hard landing for the economy there, the world's second largest. Similarly, Japan's central bank is keeping interest rates at rock bottom levels to encourage growth. The combination of lower rates abroad and rising ones at home is making the United States dollar surge against other currencies. While that might be good for American tourists heading overseas, it hurts American manufacturers seeking export markets and makes imported goods more competitive, undermining the country's trade balance. "The risk is skewed toward moving too fast," said Michael Gapen, chief United States economist at Barclays. "That's especially true as the strong dollar and lower priced imports keep inflationary pressures at bay in the United States." Although Mr. Gapen, like most seers on Wall Street, is generally upbeat about the economy's prospects next year, some of his colleagues elsewhere are less sanguine. David Levy, a longtime private economist, is warning clients that the Fed may be forced to reverse course as weakness in China and emerging markets redounds to the United States. The Fed's rate increase on Wednesday, Mr. Levy cautioned, "may well mark a high point in economic expectations for 2016." In its statement Wednesday about the decision to raise rates, the Fed itself noted there had been a "shortfall" in terms of actual inflation's not measuring up to the central bank's 2 percent goal, which it considers helpful in supporting a more robust economy. For his part, Mr. Anderson expects the economy to continue to grow at a moderate annual pace of about 2.4 percent in 2016. If that forecast for growth is correct, he predicts the Fed will raise rates three times next year, lifting the benchmark rate to a range of 1 to 1.25 percent by the end of 2016. "Consumers are cautious but they still have the capacity to spend," Mr. Anderson added. "Jobs and incomes are growing, debt levels are low and gas at about 2 a gallon should help. When people realize the sky isn't falling because the Fed is raising rates, they will go back to their usual spending habits and save the day." A growth rate of about 2 percent would be in line with the steady, but disappointing, advance that has characterized the current recovery since it began in mid 2009. By contrast, the economy grew by 3.8 percent in 2004 when the last tightening cycle began, and by 4 percent in 1994 when an earlier round of rate hikes got underway. The comparatively weak recovery, which has left most Americans struggling to maintain their standard of living, is the principal reason the Fed has promised to move more slowly during this tightening cycle than in past ones. In the mid 2000s, the Fed raised rates by 0.25 percentage point at every meeting between June 2004 and June 2006, 17 straight increases that lifted rates by more than four full percentage points over two years. The tightening campaign in the 1990s was even steeper, as rates moved up three points in one year. Although that wreaked havoc on the stock and bond markets in 1994, the move may have helped slow growth to a sustainable pace and set the stage for the 1990s expansion to extend for a full decade.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Anand Giridharadas's review of Michael Lind's "The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite" (Jan. 19) is appropriately critical of the thesis that the white working class voters who support Donald Trump are demonstrating understandable frustration with "elites." The photograph accompanying the review, which shows construction workers waiting for Trump to speak in western Pennsylvania in 2019, appears on the surface to illustrate Lind's view. A more accurate caption, however, would back up Giridharadas's point perfectly, since these workers were told by their employers (as reported in The Pittsburgh Post Gazette) that if they did not attend the rally they would not be paid for the day. That rally, and that photograph, epitomize the phony "populism" of our current president. Jonathan Rauch's review of Christopher Caldwell's "The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties" (Jan. 19) raised objections to the author's central thesis that the Civil Rights Act was anti constitutional. But Rauch's objections were distressingly gentle. The 1788 Constitution, which Caldwell holds up as sacrosanct, legitimized human slavery. Even after ratification of the 14th Amendment, Jim Crow laws kept huge swaths of citizens from enjoying the legal protection the Constitution is meant to provide. To understand our current political and social environment, rather than a tortured speculation that the Civil Rights Act allowed unentitled groups to become entitled, one might postulate that the Supreme Court, whose mission is to protect the letter and spirit of the Constitution, has failed at that critical mission. In his review of Ted Gioia's "Music: A Subversive History" (Jan. 12), David Hajdu reminds us that the works of the great composers often puzzled or even infuriated the listeners of their time. I'd like to recommend a book that illustrates some of this frustration. Nicolas Slonimsky's "A Lexicon of Musical Invective" is a collection of bad (even scathing) reviews of great classical works. Many seem little more than opportunities for the reviewers to show off their witticisms, and we still see that today. But the book, in its illustration of cultural narrow mindedness, remains highly enjoyable reading.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'COAL COUNTRY' at the Public Theater (in previews; opens on March 3). In 2010, a thousand feet underground in West Virginia, coal dust exploded, killing 29 of the 31 miners on site. The documentary playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen interviewed survivors and family members, learning how a community reckons with disaster and loss. Steve Earle supplies original music. Blank directs a cast that includes Mary Bacon and Michael Laurence. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'COMPANY' at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater (previews start on March 2; opens on March 22). Phone rings, door chimes and in comes a gender bent version of the beloved Stephen Sondheim musical, with a book by George Furth. Marianne Elliot's production, which originated in London, arrives with the Tony winner Katrina Lenk as the bachelorette Bobbie, with Patti LuPone as the heavy drinking, heavy singing Joanne. 212 239 6200, companymusical.com 'DIANA: A TRUE MUSICAL STORY' at the Longacre Theater (previews start on March 2; opens on March 31). The people's princess comes to New York. Joe DiPietro and David Bryan's musical, which debuted at La Jolla Playhouse, recreates the not so happily ever after fairytale of Prince Charles (Roe Hartrampf) and Princess Di (Jeanna de Waal). With Judy Kaye as Elizabeth II. Christopher Ashley directs, with choreography by Kelly Devine. 212 239 6200, thedianamusical.com	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
There's no mystery surrounding how "I Am the Night," TNT's new truthy crime mini series, came to be. The director Patty Jenkins met and befriended Fauna Hodel, author of a memoir, "One Day She'll Darken," about her difficult youth. Not quite a decade later Jenkins made "Wonder Woman," which made more than 821 million. Et voila: "I Am the Night," a long gestating project "inspired by the life of Fauna Hodel" with Jenkins as a director and executive producer. It's less clear how the six episode mini series (beginning Monday), which was created and written by Jenkins's husband, Sam Sheridan, and stars her "Wonder Woman" collaborator Chris Pine, turned out to be such a lackluster and derivative affair. But we can speculate. Hodel's book was primarily the story of her childhood and teenage years, when she grew up with African American adoptive parents and thought she was mixed race, although she was white. It had a sensational kicker: When she learned the truth about her biological parents, she also learned that one of her grandfathers was George Hodel, a prime suspect in the infamously gruesome and unsolved Black Dahlia killing in 1947. So the story had two currently hot hooks: struggles with race and identity, on one hand, and a lurid real life murder mystery, on the other. It was out of balance George Hodel and the Black Dahlia case were a minor, if highly promotable, part of the book but screenwriting could fix that. The result is a bland hodgepodge. Fauna Hodel's tale of alienation and self discovery is there in a condensed, movie of the week iteration, with the details softened, perhaps to make her a more congenial heroine. Sharing equal space with it is the material that Sheridan, whose previous credits include two episodes of "SEAL Team," appears to have been more excited by: an entirely invented, entirely synthetic Los Angeles noir mystery plot, hashed together from bits of "L.A. Confidential," "Chinatown" and "The Long Goodbye." To make it work, Sheridan inflates the celebrity gynecologist George Hodel (Jefferson Mays) into a mythic, city straddling figure along the lines of John Huston's character in "Chinatown." When Fauna (India Eisley), 16 but intrepid, comes to Los Angeles in 1965 looking for answers about her past, he's able to pull strings everywhere from the police department to the city's newsrooms to the National Guard to help shut her down. An even bigger invention is Pine's character, a down and out journalist named Jay Singletary whose career was ruined when George Hodel sued him for libel. (Jay was covering the trial when Fauna's biological mother accused George of sexual abuse, a detail drawn from history.) Now obsessed with exposing George, Jay crosses paths with Fauna and they warily join forces. Inventions don't equal inventiveness, though, and everything about the Los Angeles mystery story feels reheated. Connie Nielsen is forced to put on a head scarf and go full Norma Desmond as one of George's former wives, while Dylan Smith twitches and leers in the Peter Lorre role as George's pervy underling. Leland Orser (currently excelling in "Berlin Station" on Epix) plays a newspaper editor who assigns stories from his bar stool, which reads as a cliche here even if it sometimes happens in real life. When the dialogue isn't flat and mechanical, it veers into risible noir speak. (Picking a fight, the hard boiled hipster Jay says: "If you're feeling froggy, we can do this dance. Pick a lily pad.") That should be a tip off that Pine, a wonderful film actor who hasn't done a lot of TV, doesn't have much of a character to play either. Jay's two notes are cocaine fueled post traumatic anger he saw combat at Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War and stoic nobility, alternating until the story doesn't need him anymore and he fades away. Pine brings his relaxed charisma and presence to the role, and he's the one reason to watch. But he can't really make much out of Jay, a cardboard construct whose demons we have to take on faith. Sheridan tries to address this by giving Jay dreams in which fur hatted Chinese soldiers surround him in his apartment or his jail cell, an idea that's as bad as it sounds. (In a similar vein, scenes of naughty parties at George's house and a clothes rending happening only prove how hard it is to depict Hollywood debauchery without inducing giggles.) Eisley probably gets more screen time than Pine, but Fauna feels like a secondary character even as the story is channeled through her. That's partly because of Eisley's performance she shuffles a small deck of expressions and emotions and partly because the scenes involving her embittered but protective mother (Golden Brooks) and her other African American relatives are pretty perfunctory. The mystery plot is no more original, but it's delivered with more conviction. (When the 1965 Watts riots are introduced late in the series, it's just to complicate the characters' movements before the big finish.) There's no reason you can't do a great Los Angeles noir predicated on race Carl Franklin did it in 102 minutes in "Devil in a Blue Dress" (1995). That's about the running time of the last two episodes of "I Am the Night" also, as it happens, directed by Carl Franklin. (Jenkins and Victoria Mahoney split the others.) There's a math lesson in there somewhere.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
These roots on a hillside in Auvers sur Oise are thought to be the inspiration for Van Gogh's final painting.Credit...Elliott Verdier for The New York Times A Clue to van Gogh's Final Days Is Found in His Last Painting These roots on a hillside in Auvers sur Oise are thought to be the inspiration for Van Gogh's final painting. AMSTERDAM One hundred and thirty years ago, Vincent van Gogh awoke in his room at an inn in Auvers sur Oise, France, and went out, as he usually did, with a canvas to paint. That night, he returned to the inn with a fatal gunshot wound. He died two days later, on July 29, 1890. Scholars have long speculated about the sequence of events on the day of the shooting, and now Wouter van der Veen, a researcher in France, says he has discovered a large piece of the puzzle: the precise location where van Gogh created his final painting, "Tree Roots." The finding could help to better understand how the artist spent his final day of work. Researchers at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam have endorsed the finding. On Tuesday, the director of the museum, Emilie Gordenker, attended an unveiling of the spot. Louis van Tilborgh, a senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, said in an interview that the finding was "an interpretation, but it looks like indeed it is true." Mr. van der Veen said that he just happened to have the postcard on his screen at home in Strasbourg, France, during lockdown when something clicked in his mind: The postcard was reminiscent of "Tree Roots." He pulled up a digital version of the painting, and compared them side by side. The postcard is "not a secret hidden document that nobody can find," Mr. van der Veen said. "A lot of people have already seen it, and recognize the subject, the motif of tree roots. It was hidden in plain sight." Because he was unable to travel from Strasbourg himself, Mr. van der Veen called Dominique Charles Janssens, the owner of the Van Gogh Institute who was in Auvers, and asked him to take a look at the area. "I'd say 45 to 50 percent is still there," Mr. Janssens said in a telephone interview, referring to the entanglement of roots. "They cut some of the trees down, and it was covered with ivy, but we took some of that down." Van Gogh would have walked along the Rue Daubigny to get to the town's church, which he painted for "The Church at Auvers" in June 1890, and to make his way to the sprawling wheat fields just outside of town, where he painted "Wheatfield With Crows" in July, Mr. van der Veen said. There has long been debate about which painting was van Gogh's last work, because he tended not to date his paintings. Many people believe it was "Wheatfield With Crows," because Vincente Minnelli's 1956 biopic "Lust for Life" depicts van Gogh, played by Kirk Douglas, painting that work as he goes mad, just before killing himself. Andries Bonger, who wrote down some of the events surrounding Vincent's death and was the brother in law of Theo van Gogh, Vincent's brother, noted in a letter, "The morning before his death, he had painted a forest scene, full of sun and life." In 2012, the Van Gogh Museum published a paper by Mr. van Tilborgh and Bert Maes arguing that the letter referred to "Tree Roots," an unfinished painting in the museum's collection. That claim has now largely been accepted by scholars. Because of the way light is depicted on the roots, Mr. van der Veen says he believes that van Gogh was looking at his subject matter at the end of the afternoon, about 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. He says he thinks this means that van Gogh probably spent the entire day painting. Mr. van der Veen added that the new evidence challenged a theory put forward in 2011 by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith in their biography, "Van Gogh: The Life." They argued that van Gogh did not commit suicide, but may have gotten drunk and argued with two young boys, who then accidentally killed him, not far from the Auberge Ravoux. Mr. van der Veen's research on "Tree Roots" will be published in a book in France on Tuesday, and will also be available in English in digital form. "Now that we know he was painting all day, there was even less time for that to happen," Mr. van der Veen said. Mr. Naifeh responded that it would be impossible to time stamp a painting based on the angle of the light. "It's not a photograph; it's a painting," he said in a telephone interview. "Van Gogh painted somewhat abstractly, and he was always introducing a lot of painterly inventions," he added, so it would be hard to tell if he was painting light he saw with his own eyes or just creating it on the canvas. Mr. van der Veen agreed on one point. "It confirms everything that most witnesses at this time say, that his behavior was perfectly normal in the last days," he said. "There was no sign that he was having a crisis." However, Mr. van der Veen maintains that van Gogh killed himself, which is also the official position of the Van Gogh Museum. Van Gogh had also made a drawing of tree roots when he lived in The Hague in 1882. He described the artwork to his brother Theo in a letter. He wrote that he wanted the tree to "express something of life's struggle," seeing it as "Frantically and fervently rooting itself, as it were, in the earth, and yet being half torn up by the storm." Mr. van der Veen said that "Tree Roots" expressed something similar. "Ending his life with this painting makes so much sense," he said. "The painting illustrates the struggle of life, and a struggle with death. That's what he leaves behind. It is a farewell note in colors."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
UNSOLVED MYSTERIES Stream on Netflix. When the docu series "Unsolved Mysteries" debuted on NBC in the late 1980s, it became a hit through a potent blend of reality and folklore. The show ran for a decade, telling stories of missing persons cases and supernatural events, before moving to other networks. Now, Netflix has rebooted it for the streaming age. This new "Unsolved Mysteries," a collaboration between makers of the original series and the production company behind "Stranger Things," consists of six episodes that each focus on a different crime or mystery U.F.O.'s, unsolved deaths while preserving the show's mix of fact and fiction. "We like the mix," Terry Dunn Meurer, one of the show's creators, said in a recent interview with The New York Times. "We've always thought of ourselves as a mystery show, not as a true crime show." DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID (1982) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The comic performer, writer and director Carl Reiner died this week at 98. Those wishing to revisit some of his work have decades' worth of choices, from Reiner's early collaborations with Mel Brooks and his work on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" to his appearances in "Ocean's Eleven" and its sequels. Somewhere in the middle lies "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid," one of four films Reiner made with Steve Martin. A film noir spoof directed by Reiner, the movie casts Martin as Rigby Reardon, a sleuth who, through filmmaking tricks that involve clips from old movies, interacts with Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Barbara Stanwyck and other stars.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
new video loaded: Up Close With Ailey Dancers in Rehearsal	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The organization estimated that in 2018, total daily newspaper circulation in the United States, which includes both digital and print platforms, was 28.6 million for weekdays and 30.8 million for Sundays. Those figures were down 8 percent and 9 percent from the previous year. The Times's average print circulation in 2018 was about 487,000 on weekdays and 992,000 on Sundays, Mr. Cohen said. The Journal's average circulation is just over one million, Ms. Schwartz said. Coffee and macchiato drinkers at Starbucks shops in Manhattan had mixed reactions to the news. "I think it should still be available," Dustin Fitzharris said on Friday while sitting at the 15th Street and Seventh Avenue location. He suggested that perhaps some Starbucks customers want their news the old fashioned way. "Not everybody is on their computers," Mr. Fitzharris said. "Especially for a certain age demographic. An older demographic may not come in with their iPad or their computer. They will come in with a book or want to read the paper." At the same location, David Perozzi said Starbucks made a good decision. "I think it makes total sense; it's not a surprise," he said. "I don't think there is any upside to keeping the paper. If you look around in this Starbucks, there's no one buying a newspaper. It's just another casualty of change. Another casualty of the internet." At least two customers said they had never seen newspapers at Starbucks. "I'm in Starbucks every day in New Jersey and New York and I don't feel like I see a lot of newspapers on display," said Lisa Kelly, who was waiting for someone at the Eighth Avenue and 39th Street location. She said that she usually goes to Starbucks once a day, sometimes twice, and that she would be inclined to read a newspaper if one were around.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Bronson van Wyck is one of those van Wycks perhaps you've driven on their Expressway. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that Mr. van Wyck, a 44 year old event planner, has a strong sense of history, given that he is descended from one of the New York region's Dutch founding families. For starters, it's pronounced "van WIKE," he said this week, smiling but firm on the topic, seated in his spacious apartment adjacent to Madison Square Park. Then he added: "That's how we say it. But what do we know, at this point?" Mr. van Wyck grew up in Arkansas, went to Yale and did stints handling protocol for the State Department and designing movie sets in Los Angeles. He founded his firm, Van Wyck Van Wyck, with his mother, Mary Lynn. He said its signature events had included Madonna's 57th birthday in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and "eight parties in nine days" for the opening of the new Whitney Museum of American Art, both in 2015. Currently, Mr. van Wyck is working on a book about entertaining, and his Instagram profile reads, in part: "Born to party. Forced to work."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Josh Hutcherson, who has been acting since he was 9, is quite the veteran of sci fi. At 25, he is perhaps best known for playing Peeta Mellark from "The Hunger Games," and this month he will starring as a time traveling janitor in Hulu's "Future Man." Off camera, Mr. Hutcherson prefers a more earthbound existence, hanging out in his Los Angeles home in T shirts, jeans, caps and Adidas Sambas. Shirt There is this company called Kelly Cole. They have one shop here on La Brea. I was just kind of walking around and found my way inside the store. They have these T shirts they make themselves. They have a vintage feeling but they're new, so it's great because they don't wear out as easily. I have them in every color. I get five green, five blue, five gray and so on. I'm that guy that will buy a bunch of the same thing if I find something I like. Jeans Once I find the right jeans, I wear them till they fall apart. The ones I like right now are by Ksubi. They're black; I haven't worn a blue jean in years. Stylewise, I've always felt more New York. I wear dark colors and flannels, and simple, modern styles. But I've never set out and said, "I want this style now." I used to wear flat bills and Air Force Ones for a minute. I was goth when I was 10 for a minute. And then I wore Abercrombie all day every day. Now it's whatever my eye is drawn to. Jacket I have this brown leather jacket by Windward. I found it at American Rag Cie. It's almost a bomber style, and it's old looking and smelling, with a fuzzy collar. It's super warm, so unfortunately I don't get to wear it that often in L.A. Every now and then, I get to bust it out. I also have a black Marc Jacobs leather jacket that is kind of rock 'n' roll, almost '50s, but with softer leather and it doesn't have a bunch of bells and whistles with zippers and such. I got it from one of the "Hunger Games" press tours. Literally, I would say 85 percent of my clothes are from press tours.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
With his wife and artistic partner, Jeanne Claude, the artist Christo has wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin and monuments in Milan even a coast in Australia. Now, for the first time since her death in 2009, he is returning to their signature style. On Wednesday, Christo announced that he had received permission from the French government and the country's Center for National Monuments to wrap the Arc de Triomphe, one of the most famous landmarks in Paris, next year from April 6 through 19. "Jeanne Claude was so close to me all my life," Christo, 83, said in a telephone interview. "Of course there is some irony and sadness that she is not here. But I am eager to go ahead with my life and do my work." The project, "L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (Project for Paris, Place de l'Etoile Charles de Gaulle)," will involve covering the arch with a silvery blue recyclable polypropylene fabric nearly 270,000 square feet of it held together with about 23,000 feet of red rope.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
A decade ago, Charlotte Hale was in search of a clever marketing hook for her new clothing business, Plum Pretty Sugar, which manufactured and sold robes and other leisure wear for women. "You wear a robe to go to bed at night," she thought. "You wear a robe to get ready. Who gets ready in a robe?" Then it hit her: bridal parties, of course. In the last several years, the "bridesmaid robe," now part of the "getting ready" retail category that Ms. Hale helped pioneer, has grown in popularity. On the e commerce website Etsy, there have been more than 424,000 searches for bridesmaid's robes conducted in the last three months alone, according to the site. The garment's profile has also been raised by social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. Bridal parties can often be found posing for photos in short, silky robes pastel or floral, bedazzled or monogrammed usually holding glasses of Champagne. Jenneh Bockari, 33, a Los Angeles nurse who got married last February, says she discovered Plum Pretty Sugar on Instagram. "I actually had my girls' getting ready robes picked out before I had their dresses picked out," she said. Today bridesmaid robes are readily available through many major retailers. Anthropologie's bridal label, BHLDN, began carrying Ms. Hale's brand in 2015. Victoria's Secret was an early seller of bride robes before the category expanded to the wedding party and places like David's Bridal. Shopping sites like Amazon and AliExpress also carry them. For brides, the robes are a gift to give their bridesmaids that likely won't be tossed after the wedding. And they're generally affordable. (Plum Pretty Sugar's robes, for example, start at around 40.) Ms. Bockari was the last person in her group of friends to get married, and so she was a seasoned bridesmaid by the time she walked down the aisle. "When I was planning my wedding, I was going through some of the things that I enjoyed or did not enjoy about being a bridesmaid," she said. She wanted her attendants "to be in something comfortable and that they felt good in for our pictures beforehand." Heather Moore Stolfa, a 24 year old performer at the Silver Dollar City theme park in Branson, Mo., surprised her bridal party with monogrammed robes from Etsy. She hung each on a rack in the Whitehall mansion in Louisville, Ky., where she was married in June 2018. "They got to come in and see them they loved them," she said, adding that they also made for great group photographs. For Ellen Begley Weaver, 28, a strategic account executive from Richmond, Va., the robes were pure function at her June 2017 wedding in Atlanta. She had gifted her bridesmaid hair styling and makeup, she said, "and I was thinking about how logistically that's not really an easy thing to do when you have to have a T shirt that you pull up over your head." The bridesmaid robe doesn't just present a new fashion category and gift option for the grateful bride. It also created a new style of photograph. "In my world, it's the 'robe shot,'" said Austin Gros, a Nashville based photographer. "I've done it just sitting on a couch. I've done all the girls kind of propped on the bed. I've done it standing in front of a window. I get shots of the rings, the dress, the bride in hair and makeup, and if there's matching robes, we get the robe shot." Hannah Yoest, a photographer who works in Washington, Virginia and New York, says that a group robe picture was the only shot that the bride specifically requested at the first wedding she shot back in 2015. "For photographs, they're a nice uniform and lower the risk of candid pictures looking overly casual," she said. "When else are they going to get that photo?" The popularity of wedding robes enabled Rachel and Casey Adams to turn their Etsy side gig into a full time business from their home just outside Atlanta. After ordering an embroidery machine and offering custom monograms, they made so many sales at the beginning of 2018 that they had to shut down the store for a couple of months to fulfill them. Mr. Adams frames the trend with a sports metaphor: "You're going forth as a unit," he said, "When you go to a baseball game, everyone's wearing their team's colors." Lately, the couple said they have been fielding more requests for robes appropriate to bridesmen. The money spent in pursuit of the right props for the perfect social media post can easily add up, but fans of the bridesmaid robe emphasize its heirloom potential, not to mention practicality. Since getting married, Ms. Begley Weaver of Virginia has acquired two bridesmaid robes from other weddings, both of which she now regularly uses. "If one's in the laundry I have another one," she said. "It's a nice thing to wear rather than a towel around an Airbnb." Ms. Bockari said that a member of her wedding party shared that she wore her bridesmaid robe when she was going through in vitro fertilization. "Whenever she was having a bad time with the side effects she would put the robe on and that just made my heart so happy that it meant so much to her," she said. One of the favorite parts of Ms. Hale's job is hearing from customers who say: "I wore your robe to get married in. I wore your robe to give birth in. And you have been with me throughout some of the most important moments in my life."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The fashion tent has grown bigger and more welcoming, if the slate of after parties during New York Fashion Week was a reliable indicator. Venerated luxury brands like Cartier and Prada sought a younger and more diverse crowd, while indie downtown labels cemented their reputations for steamrolling racial and gender boundaries. "This fashion week, more than any other, is more for the people," said Ruth Gruca, the creative director at Cala, a start up trying to disrupt the fashion industry with 3 D body scanning. "The calendar is weak, but the underground culture is thriving."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
LONDON When Effie White says that she's nobody's backup singer, it's obvious she's just speaking the simple truth. Never mind that when she makes this pronouncement, with a certainty that is as natural to her as breathing, it's still early in Casey Nicholaw's supercharged revival of "Dreamgirls," a popular hit at the Savoy Theater here. From the moment she arrives fresh off the bus from Chicago in 1960s Harlem, this young vocalist is forever, undeniably front and center. And that has nothing to do with where she's standing on the stage. Effie is portrayed by Amber Riley, in a performance that has Londoners responding with the frenzied adulation their Broadway equivalents are according Bette Midler (in "Hello, Dolly!") and Glenn Close (in "Sunset Boulevard"). At 31, and several decades younger than those much mythologized actresses, Ms. Riley is demonstrating that with the right chops, even a baby diva can help a war horse gallop like a colt. Yet Ms. Riley exudes the casual, instinctive authority of one to the proscenium born. All she has to do is widen her eyes, purse her lips and then open her mouth to emit a radiant cascade of sound, and theatergoers are all but fainting in the aisles. Backup singer? You might as well call Tom Brady a bench warmer. It takes as much confidence as talent to stand out in this "Dreamgirls," which opened late last year. Mr. Nicholaw's reinterpretation of Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger's 1981 show, a sort of morality musical about the price of success for black singers of the 1960s forced to pander to white audiences, is so high energy that you may feel like taking a nap almost as soon as it starts. But Mr. Nicholaw, the director and choreographer, and his top drawer design team aren't about to let you nod off. The show's look is all high sheen glitter and gloss, as if the set (by Tim Hatley) as well as the costumes (by Gregg Barnes) were made up of sequins and lame, klieg lighted to blind (by Hugh Vanstone). It has also been amplified to deafen. And the choreography, at its pulsing best in the athletic set piece "Steppin' to the Bad Side," has enough furious precision to keep you in a vicarious sweat. The show comes roaring at you like a souped up, chrome plated luxury sedan (perhaps the "Cadillac Car" of the show's savvy hymn to aspirational marketing). Mr. Nicholaw's production practices the gospel of razzle dazzle showbiz that is preached by its leading catalyst (and villain), a double dealing manager named Curtis Taylor Jr. (the snake hipped Joe Aaron Reid). This "Dreamgirls" isn't subtle, and it doesn't have the iconoclastic impact of Michael Bennett's original Broadway staging. But it makes a convincing case for this portrait of a Supremes like singing group as an enduring, crowd rousing entertainment with a terrific pastiche score. The fever of being hungry, talented and thwarted as it's experienced by black R B singers with mainstream dreams in a culturally segregated America glows from every element of this version. Eager ambition is cannily used as the production's revved up motor. Sometimes the show's bright and talented (mostly American) ensemble takes that message too much to heart. Adam J. Bernard is well cast as a wild, James Brown esque singer who's been asked to tone it down for supper club audiences. But he could, in fact, tone down the character's clownishness. And the contemporary pop voice of Liisi LaFontaine, as the Diana Ross figure who becomes Effie's rival onstage and in bed, could be leavened with more period silkiness. Ms. Riley, though, never seems to be trying too hard in a role that inevitably has her competing with memories of Jennifer Holliday (who received a Tony in the original Broadway production) and Jennifer Hudson (an Oscar winner for the 2006 film) in the same part. It could be argued that Ms. Riley is too healthy and secure seeming to embody the self destructive Effie. But she's excellent in showing the connection between a talent that knows its own strength and a demanding temperament. And when she sings, Effie's pain and anger, vulnerability and power, meld into one sparkling, mellifluous river. Her emotionally supple interpretation of the knockout first act curtain number, "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," is as stirring as any I've heard. And you thought the orchestra was loud? It's purely pianissimo compared with the cacophony that erupts from the audience when Ms. Riley completes that ballad.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The water in the cove was "smooth as a pond," Hardy wrote, until Troy "swam between the two projecting spurs of rock which formed the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean," whereupon he was swept out to sea and presumed drowned, only to make a dramatic reappearance. Lulworth Cove, an inlet also known as Lulwind Cove in "Far From the Madding Crowd," where the dastardly Sergeant Troy took an impromptu swim. The landscape now inhabits a new film version of Hardy's 1874 novel "Far From the Madding Crowd." Here, Mapperton Estate, whose Elizabethan manor house was used in the filming. There are countless Hardy sites in Dorset, including Beaminster, pictured here, which the writer called Emminster in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." It was in Lulwind Cove, an inlet on England's south coast, that the dastardly Sergeant Troy took an impromptu swim in "Far From the Madding Crowd," Thomas Hardy's 1874 novel about an uncommonly independent Victorian woman and her suitors. The water in the cove was "smooth as a pond," Hardy wrote, until Troy "swam between the two projecting spurs of rock which formed the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean," whereupon he was swept out to sea and presumed drowned, only to make a dramatic reappearance this being a Hardy novel at a most inconvenient moment. On an evening last summer, the sun still high, my wife and I, our 1 year old daughter strapped to my chest, walked the grassy loam above the cove. The spot is actually called Lulworth Cove and is a fan shaped bay formed by erosion of the cliffs. It and Durdle Door, an impressive limestone arch a little farther along the coast, are hallmarks of the Jurassic Coast, a 95 mile stretch of shoreline where rock formations and fossils record 185 million years of geological history. The water below the cliffs was a cerulean blue from the mineral deposits washed into them from the crumbling stone, while the English Channel beyond retained the "clear oily polish" Hardy described. To the north lay rolling maize fields and dairy pastures, the roads and tidy plots bordered by ancient hedgerows. A few swimmers braved the water, still frigid in June, and, as on the day of Troy's swim, "a frill of milkwhite foam along the nearer angles of the shore ... licked the contiguous stones like tongues." Though we were in the county of Dorset, Hardy called this part of England "Wessex," using the area's Saxon name. He described it as "partly real, partly dream" country. It is a region as inextricable from Hardy as the Mississippi of William Faulkner or V. S. Naipaul's Trinidad. The term "cliffhanger," in fact, is said to have originated with Hardy, after he left one of his characters dangling from a Wessex cliff at the end of a chapter in a serialized novel. Though Hardy country, as it is known here, is dotted with actual landmarks such as churches, markets and villages from the author's novels, I was as interested in the pastoral landscapes that he is famous for describing; the farmland and heath with sandstone cottages, sheep pastures and Roman roads ending abruptly at dramatic seaside cliffs. And since Dorset is relatively unspoiled by modern development, it isn't hard to imagine, with a squint of the eyes, the countryside as Hardy saw it. My wife grew up near Lyme Regis, a pretty harbor town on the western end of Dorset, about 150 miles west of London. She spent her childhood in Hardy country and has been known to extol the virtues of "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," Hardy's most enduring novel. But when I said that I wanted to see the Dorset landscape that the books inhabit and that now inhabits a new film of "Far From the Madding Crowd" she was skeptical, thinking only of a childhood characterized by rural isolation, a lack of fashionable friends and traffic jams caused by slow moving tractors. But in the 20 years since she left, Dorset has had a reversal of fortune, aided in 2001 by the Jurassic Coast earning Unesco World Heritage status for its proliferation of fossils and the geological story told by the cliffs. It is now popular with tourists interested in more than just Victorian tragedies about fallen women and men who can't rise above their station. And though the landscape is certainly recognizable from Hardy's time, the area is increasingly home to stylish little hotels, fashionable shops and pubs and restaurants serving modern British fare. We based ourselves in Bridport called "Port Bredy" by Hardy at the Bull Hotel, in a modishly renovated 17th century coaching house. A fishing and market town, Bridport has been called Notting Hill on Sea by the English press for its tasteful boutiques and restaurants. Its main street is lined with stone and brick Victorian buildings, on our visit connected across the high street by festive bunting. Since we were there on a market day, we pushed the baby around the stalls selling antiques and local produce, before retreating for a creative cocktail in the luxuriant Venner Bar, supposedly the site of a 16th century murder, tucked behind the hotel's ballroom. For help with our Dorset itinerary, I contacted the Thomas Hardy Society, formed in 1968 to promote the author, as well as tourism to Dorset. This year, the society will commemorate the 175th anniversary of Hardy's birth on the weekend of June 6 and 7, with a lecture, a "Hardy Walk" through Hardy country and a wreath laying on Hardy's grave. "There is always another character in all Hardy's novels about Wessex, and that is the countryside," said Mike Nixon, the society's secretary. "In a way, Hardy was the first tourist officer for Dorset. And people do come to see the countryside, the towns and the buildings he wrote about." Mr. Nixon said Hardy pilgrimages began in the author's lifetime, aided by Hermann Lea's "Thomas Hardy's Wessex." Compiled with Hardy's help, the 1913 book is a guide to the settings thinly disguised in his novels. I found a yellowing copy in a vintage bookshop in Bridport and used it as my guide. Hardy was born to a builder of modest means and a former domestic servant in 1840 in the tiny village of Higher Bockhampton, about three miles east of Dorchester, the county seat. In 1885, after a nomadic period that included a stint as an architect in London, Hardy settled in Dorchester at Max Gate, an unremarkable two bedroom brick house he designed himself and named for a nearby tollbooth. With his balding head, gray mustache and penchant for drab waistcoats, he was nothing like the handsome blades that appear in so many of his novels. He married a rather dour woman against the objections of her family, and their marriage eventually soured. They never had children but there was a beloved dog named Wessex, or Wessie, a wire haired terrier known to bite. We started in Dorchester, a town of around 20,000 that lies on the site of a Roman settlement and appears as "Casterbridge" in several of Hardy's novels, most notably "The Mayor of Casterbridge," in which the mayor sells his wife to a sailor after too many helpings of "furmity," an "antiquated slop" of rum spiked porridge. "Casterbridge announced Rome in every street, alley and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed the dead men of Rome," Hardy wrote. Indeed, while excavating for the construction of Max Gate, Hardy's builders discovered three Roman graves. A preponderance of chain stores, though, has robbed Dorchester of its Roman and Victorian charms. The model for the mayor's house is now a branch of Barclays Bank,and it is hard to imagine Dorchester as the town where the by then ex mayor memorably wrestled his romantic rival in a granary with one arm tied to his side to make it a fair fight. I was not disappointed, however, by the Maumbury Rings Hardy's "Ring at Casterbridge" the remains of a first century A.D. Roman amphitheater. "Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for appointments of a furtive kind," Hardy wrote in "The Mayor of Casterbridge." It served as an artillery garrison during the English Civil War and was the site of public executions in the 17th and 18th centuries. The once imposing earthwork sits rather meekly amid a residential neighborhood on Dorchester's outskirts, its neatly trimmed grass now host to Roman re enactments, though a clandestine rendezvous inside its basin could still go unobserved. That it sits amid a modern residential neighborhood is a reminder of the area's long history and how the area's past was always present in Hardy's work. A five minute drive southwest of Dorchester is Maiden Castle, the remains of the 47 acre Iron Age hill fort that Mr. Nixon said was the site where Sergeant Troy, the freeloading opportunist who performed his military sword exercise for the heroine Bathsheba Everdene, whom he was wooing, in a scene he said was "fraught with Victorian symbolism." The fort is in the shape of a kidney bean and its earthen ramparts are covered in wild grass and ferns. The invading Romans moved the settlement's inhabitants to the site of Dorchester. These days the fort is reached by walking trails, its only residents sheep. Next we drove up to Cerne Abbas, a village that sprang up around a Benedictine abbey in the 10th century, a version of which appears in "The Woodlanders" and "Tess." We couldn't miss the Cerne Abbas Giant, a 180 foot high figure of a club wielding, muscle bound hulk cut out of the turf on a hillside and carefully maintained over the years. Its ancient origins are unknown. In Cerne Abbas we met Will Best, who owns an organic dairy farm that hugs the hills above the village. Mr. Best credits the Hardy Society's inaugural conference in 1968 with a revival in Hardy tourism. Since Mr. Best's farm is one of the last to grow and supply wheat for use on the thatched roofs of Dorset's cottages, he was recruited to teach the cast of the new film how to make the large bundles of harvested wheat common in Victorian farming that feature in a pivotal scene. He made such an impression that he was made an extra in the movie. Mr. Best, 67, said he developed an affinity for Hardy when he found a copy of "Tess" while away at boarding school. "I was really brought back home by it," he said. "Hardy's scenes with the country people and the way they speak reminded me of my childhood on the farm." Twenty or 30 years ago, Mr. Best said, the cottages and villages in Dorset were still owned by the big landowners. Many were derelict, having been abandoned by laborers who left for the city when mechanized farming rendered them obsolete. But as transport links improved and Londoners started moving to the country or buying second homes there, he said, "the cottages started to emerge from scaffolding with new thatched roofs and smart porches." Before leaving Dorset I wanted to stop in Bere Regis, about 20 minutes east of Bridport. The village has more new buildings than the prettier Dorset villages, but Bere Regis Church isn't one of them, having been built and rebuilt on the same site since 1050. It is notable for containing the tomb of the extinct Turbervilles, the "ancient and knightly" family on which Hardy modeled the d'Urbervilles in his most famous novel. By the end of "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," the destitute family of Tess Durbeyfield thought to be descendants of the extinct landowning d'Urberville clan take shelter in "Kingsbere" churchyard after losing their home on a tenant farm following their patriarch's death, a common occurrence in Victorian Dorset, known in Hardy's time for its extreme rural poverty. They bed down under a "beautiful traceried window, of many lights, its date being the fifteenth century." When Tess enters the church, she encounters Alec, the "sham d'Urberville" with a "reputation as a reckless gallant and heartbreaker" whose unwanted sexual advances have ruined her. After Alec stamps on the tomb's entrance, Tess wishes for her own death, lamenting, "Why am I on the wrong side of this door!" When we arrived at the church it was empty, but the huge wooden door was unlocked, so we entered. There, in the south aisle, was the tomb, now sealed, a sign saying that the worn out Latin text read that the family of Robert Turberville, who died in 1559, "had been lords of the manor from ancient times." Once inside, our daughter needed no invitation to play with the toys left there for the parishioners' children while my wife and I ate sandwiches bought in Bridport on a pew beneath the famous window with its "heraldic emblems" the Turberville crest. We were, for the duration of lunch, lords of the manor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
This Weekend I Have ... an Hour, and I Want Something Juicy 'Harlots' When to watch: Now, on Hulu. Season 3 of this historical drama started Wednesday, and it's as racy and well plotted as ever, with ample scheming and complicating, complex characters. "Harlots" is set in the late 1700s and follows the conflict among rival brothels, but the show isn't exploitative or misogynistic; instead, it has a strong feminist streak. Elaborate costumes and wigs abound. If you want something between "Outlander" and "Orange Is the New Black," watch this. ... a Few Hours, and What Was That Show Again? 'Tuca Bertie' When to watch: Now, on Netflix. If you lost track of this animated gem back in the spring, now's the time. The show follows Tuca and Bertie (voiced by Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong), two bird besties and former roommates who are segueing into a new phase of friendship after Bertie moves in with her boyfriend. Tuca and Bertie's world has the quirky surrealism of a beloved children's book, but the themes and ideas are quite adult. I needed a few episodes to get into the show's rhythms and structure, but once I did, I fell in love. Finally, a reality contest show about glass blowing. No, really what took so long? The craft itself is dynamic and dramatic, and the finished work is mesmerizing. "Blown Away" takes a "Top Chef" format and strips it way down: Episodes are a half hour, there's only one challenge per episode, and the elimination process is swift and direct. There's a total lack of producer made contrivance here, which feels more dignified than other skill based contest shows. It's oddly low stakes, but all the glass making is extremely rad.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
If the heavily hyped U.F.C. lightweight title fight between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Tony Ferguson takes place on April 18, as scheduled, it will not be fought at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The New York State Athletic Commission said on Wednesday that the coronavirus pandemic would keep the event out of New York. "Out of an abundance of caution and in line with recent guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control and New York State, the New York State Athletic Commission informed the U.F.C. that U.F.C. 249 cannot be held in New York," the commission said in an email message. The pandemic has led many other state commissions to suspend combat sports altogether. Nevada has halted all pro boxing and mixed martial arts events through March, and California has a similar moratorium. The virus's rapid spread also has promoters rearranging longer term plans. The U.F.C. has resisted moving or delaying fights, in hopes of salvaging bouts that have been popular on pay per view, ESPN and the network's streaming service ESPN . Dana White, the president of U.F.C., has been adamant that Nurmagomedov and Ferguson will fight on April 18, even as the promotion postponed a London event set for this weekend and two shows in the United States that were scheduled for early April. "We're hoping that this all clears up by April and this fight's going to happen," White told ESPN on Monday. "No crowd, whatever it takes." "Right now, the No. 1 priority is to take care of yourselves and your family," White wrote. White said fans had thanked him for holding a fight card in an empty arena in Brasilia last week, two days after much of the sports world came to a standstill. The health emergency is the latest in a series of twists that have so far kept Nurmagomedov and Ferguson from meeting in the octagon. The pair have had four previous fights canceled under progressively wackier circumstances. The first was scuttled because Nurmagomedov injured a rib, and the second because Ferguson was ill. A third matchup was called off because Nurmagomedov was hospitalized while trying to cut weight to 155 pounds, and in April 2018, their fourth bout fell apart when Ferguson tripped over some cords before a television interview, injuring a knee and prompting a cascade of replacements that left Nurmagomedov fighting Al Iaquinta. New York has not issued a formal ban on fight events, as Nevada and California have. Brian Dunn, the president of the Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports, said it was not practical to mandate a nationwide suspension of fight events, but he urged each state and provincial commission to follow federal and state guidelines and use common sense. "The decisions are coming from up the ladder," Dunn said. "The governors are making the decisions. We don't really have a say." He added, "When they give us the OK to restart, we restart." The prospect of an indefinite shutdown presents a problem for the U.F.C. that is familiar to many other sports leagues, yet different because of U.F.C.'s lack of a season and its model for staging large, singular events in different cities every few weeks. The U.F.C. started this year set to generate huge revenue with two of its biggest stars back in action. On Jan. 18, the former lightweight champion Conor McGregor returned to the octagon after a tumultuous 15 month hiatus, easily beating the rugged veteran Donald Cerrone in 40 seconds in a bout that generated 11.1 million in ticket sales. That figure was the second best ever for an M.M.A. event in Nevada, trailing only a McGregor Nurmagomedov fight that sold 17.2 million in tickets in October 2018. McGregor and Nurmagomedov were suspended and fined after that bout devolved into a postmatch brawl, with Nurmagomedov leaping into the crowd to fight a member of McGregor's entourage. The melee had some negative consequences, but added sizzle to the prospect of a rematch and to McGregor's return. After McGregor dispatched Cerrone, prompting a series of fighters to call him out in hopes of a payday, White spoke of a big money grudge match against Nurmagomedov later this year. But that plan depended on the undefeated Russian defeating Ferguson at U.F.C. 249. The fighters are preparing as if the bout will happen on schedule; both are posting training camp highlights to their Instagram feeds. "Just lock us in the arena and you will know the champion," Nurmagomedov said in one recent post. To ESPN, which made a deal with U.F.C. to sell and stream its fights through ESPN , White emphasized that he had no long term plans to cancel events, and had even tried to avoid postponing a welterweight fight between Tyron Woodley and Leon Edwards scheduled for this weekend in London. When it became clear the event could not be staged at the O2 Arena, White said he had secured an arena run by the Citizen Potawatomi Nation outside Oklahoma City and was set to stage a full card. He said that current C.D.C. guidelines, which discourage gathering in groups of more than 10 people, forced the postponement of Saturday's event, but he is confident U.F.C. 249 will happen. "Probably not even going to be in the United States, but this fight's going to happen," White said. U.F.C. officials had not announced a new location as of Wednesday afternoon. The search for more permissive regulators amid a global pandemic is itself a twist for the U.F.C. During the organization's mid 2000s rise to mainstream prominence, its leadership targeted states with strict combat sports regulations because staging events in places with stringent standards helped legitimize the sport of mixed martial arts. New York was the last major North American jurisdiction to sanction M.M.A. events, so when U.F.C. 205 came to Madison Square Garden in November 2016, the event was seen as a breakthrough.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
He had no history of heart problems. He walked his dog regularly and worked a physically demanding job as a construction worker, according to his doctors. Then, in January 2019, he collapsed at a McDonald's and died. The likely culprit? Black licorice, according to the doctors who treated him and who this week published their findings about the unusual case in The New England Journal of Medicine. The report said the man, an unidentified 54 year old from Massachusetts, had consumed one to two large bags of black licorice a day for three weeks. That habit caused his potassium levels to drop precipitously, prompting a cardiac arrest, according to the study. He never regained consciousness after his collapse and died about 24 hours after he arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital. "We almost didn't believe it when we figured it out," said Dr. Jacqueline B. Henson, who treated the man while she was a resident at the hospital. "We were all shocked and surprised." Aspiring doctors are taught in medical school that black licorice contains glycyrrhizic acid, a plant extract that is often used as a sweetener in candies and other foods and can lead to dangerously low potassium levels if it is consumed in high enough doses. But it is rare to see a case of someone dying as a result of ingesting too much of the candy, Dr. Henson said. The man in Massachusetts had a poor diet and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, according to his friends and family, his doctors said. But it was a switch from red to black licorice three weeks before his death that doctors said proved fatal. Dr. Henson said she interviewed the man's friends and family members, and doctors ran multiple laboratory tests that confirmed the man's potassium levels were well below normal. They studied his medical history, which included heroin use, though he had not used opiates for three years. There was no family history of cardiac disease or other conditions that would have led to low potassium levels, said Dr. Henson, who is now a fellow at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C. "We had no other clear cause for why his potassium levels were so low," she said. The case "raises a public health issue that consuming large amounts of licorice can be hazardous to your health," said Dr. Neel M. Butala, one of the authors of the study and a fellow at the interventional cardiology unit at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Butala said consumers needed to be informed by candy and other food manufacturers about the levels of glycyrrhizic acid in their products. He also reported the case to the Food and Drug Administration. In a statement, the F.D.A. declined to comment specifically on the report, citing its policy not to discuss individual cases. "The F.D.A. is committed to protecting public health and ensuring the safety of our nation's food supply," the agency said in an email. "We are aware that the naturally occurring compound found in black licorice can have adverse health effects." The F.D.A. warns people who are 40 or older that eating two ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks can cause "heart rhythm or arrhythmia." The agency warns consumers on its website about the dangers of an overdose from black licorice. The compound glycyrrhizin, which is derived from licorice root, can cause potassium levels in the body to fall and lead to abnormal heart rhythms, high blood pressure, edema, lethargy and congestive heart failure, according to the agency's warning. The findings by the doctors were carefully researched and should serve as a public health warning, said Dr. Keith C. Ferdinand, a cardiologist at Tulane University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the case and read the article in The New England Journal of Medicine. While it appeared to be "a very unusual case," it should serve as a warning to the public "to be aware that any substance that's taken into the body, especially taken in excess, can have true physiological effects," said Dr. Ferdinand, who is also the Gerald S. Berenson Endowed Chair in Preventive Cardiology. "It is always hard to find a cause and effect when a person has a sudden catastrophic event," he said. But the factors in the case the low potassium, the patient's heart arrhythmia, the fact that he had been doing well until his collapse signal that the licorice "was probably the source" of his ultimately fatal condition, Dr. Ferdinand said. Other studies have raised the alarm about ingesting too much licorice. In 2012, doctors from Mercy Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago published a study titled "Licorice Abuse: Time to Send a Warning Message." It advised doctors to warn patients about ingesting too much licorice and called on the F.D.A. to regulate the use of it. "The daily consumption of licorice is never justified because its benefits are minor compared to the adverse outcomes of chronic consumption," the study said. It noted the case of a 35 year old Egyptian man with no underlying health problems who temporarily lost control of his motor functions after he drank a liter of licorice flavored water during Ramadan. "There are numerous licorice containing products that are readily available in our everyday use and can be unintentionally consumed by the public in liberal amounts, putting them at risk of complications," it noted. Dr. Henson said people who like to eat the occasional piece of licorice should not be alarmed by the case in Massachusetts. Black licorice is not a poison, she said. "It's fine taken in sort of small amounts, infrequently," Dr. Henson said. "But when taken on a regular basis, it can lead to these issues."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Trippie Redd, a 20 year old rapper singer from Ohio, has reached the top of the Billboard album chart for the first time this week, beating out new releases from Jason Aldean and Coldplay. Redd, part of a wave of young rappers who emerged on SoundCloud in recent years, landed at No. 1 with " A Love Letter to You 4," the latest in his series of mixtapes, this one featuring appearances from DaBaby, Juice WRLD, YoungBoy Never Broke Again and others. It had 126 million streams and sold 14,000 copies as a full unit, adding up to the equivalent of 104,000 sales in the United States in its opening week, according to Nielsen. "A Love Letter" easily topped the latest from Aldean, "9," which had the equivalent of 83,000 sales, including 68,000 copies sold as a full album and 17 million streams. Disney's soundtrack to "Frozen 2" rose 12 spots to No. 3 in its second week out, while Post Malone's "Hollywood's Bleeding" is No. 4 and Billie Eilish's "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" is No. 5. "Everyday Life," the latest from Coldplay, opened at No. 7.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
LOS ANGELES Until now, it has been possible to talk about "the Andrew Norman style" as though that were some settled thing. Several of this young composer's major pieces bearing active titles like "Play," "Try" and "Switch" have hurtled, from their opening minutes, with volleys of intensity that rival the kinetic climaxes of other artists. And then, with that established, he can really go to town. Given this creative profile, the title of Mr. Norman's latest orchestral work, "Sustain," hinted at an intriguing about face. Steadiness and stasis have not been his calling cards. And in a recent interview with Joshua Barone of The New York Times, Mr. Norman described a desire to "relearn my language" when fulfilling this Los Angeles Philharmonic co commission. That was not idle talk. Saturday night's performance by the Philharmonic and its music director, Gustavo Dudamel, here at their Walt Disney Concert Hall home underlined just how willingly Mr. Norman has inverted his established practices. Instead of quickly fostering a riot of competing rhythms and motifs, this composition deals in repetitive material for long stretches over its approximately 45 minute length. Percussive interjections and unpredictable collisions of melody are the exception, rather than the rule. During the opening minutes, the composer asks individual strings to play select tones from attractively mystic modes and then hold each one for a spell. (This "sustain" is one aspect of the title.) The staggered approach made the steady ascents and descents through the pitches seem less like composer directed themes and more like seesawing laws of nature, perfectly in balance. Initially, the effect was sublime, in addition to being a compelling realization of the ecological concerns the composer detailed in his program note. (Ideas regarding environmental sustainability and its all too probable opposite give the title additional weight.) Still, during the first third of "Sustain," the lack of much rhythmic thrust occasionally threatened to make the work seem aimless. At one point, I noticed myself breathing a sigh of relief when an exciting new dance for flute and vibraphone rose up from the well trod ground. (It was the first time I'd ever been anxious for the next change when listening to Mr. Norman's music.) Yet gradually, I came to love the consequences of this pacing. Whereas many of his past works have been all about focusing on each new improbable element as it stomps to the fore, here, Mr. Norman's complexity has a lighter footprint. As the strings are painting with those long tones, a smaller group of wind instruments might divebomb through the frame, without causing a commotion. Minimalist motors can possess the trumpets, for a few moments, without scrambling the overall narrative. Over the final third of "Sustain," this unusual merger between restraint and hyperactivity could hypnotize. When reading that the score calls for two pianos, tuned a quarter tone apart, you might reasonably expect some microtonal fireworks. But the dissonances between the pianos are only ever highlighted gently, at hinge points when both are clearly audible. At other junctures, the pianos seemed content to let their collective resonance slip mysteriously into the background. Even when the dynamic level increases to an undeniable roar, there is a smoothness to the piece. Bringing all this across requires an orchestra of considerable dexterity (and patience). The Los Angeles players seemed to savor the material, even when it did not seem obviously virtuosic in nature. Mr. Dudamel succeeded in channeling the slyness of Mr. Norman's writing, too. Taking the transitions in too showy a manner might prove deadly to its overall designs; wisely, Mr. Dudamel built to the passages of pandemonium with a gratifying steeliness of purpose. Perhaps the musicians felt secure in these choices, thanks to the inclusion of another piece on the program (which was to repeat on Sunday) that allowed them to strut more ecstatically. The 1996 composition "LA Variations," by the former Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Esa Pekka Salonen, was designed as a showcase for this orchestra, and it continues to sound marvelous in its hands. The work's varied instrumental colors are still Technicolor in their projected brilliance. The balance even in thickly orchestrated passages still has a punchy vibrancy worthy of a surround sound theater mix. And its final minutes may have gained some rhythmic buoyancy under Mr. Dudamel's watch. Somewhat less dazzling was the orchestra's trip through Beethoven's Op. 56 (known as the "Triple Concerto"). The piano, violin and cello soloists all drawn from the Philharmonic's regular cast carried a brisk energy throughout the demanding work. Yet they could also sound taxed during some of its toughest slaloms. Mr. Dudamel pushed out some effervescent, courtly pulses, though this sometimes necessitated speeding past the work's most captivating harmonic turns. Though as it happens, this orchestra has not planned or marketed its centennial season around the standard repertory. With more than 50 commissions planned for this year and mini festivals devoted both to the Harlem Renaissance and to the composers associated with the Fluxus movement the Los Angeles Philharmonic is going big on modern and contemporary items. During this first weekend of its season, the orchestra's skill in works written over the past three decades amounted to a thrilling omen for the coming year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Hey, where you from? What do you do? Nice shirt. Are these really the building blocks of an emerging art form? Crowd work, the comic's chatter with the audience in between jokes, has long been derided as the cheapest way to get laughs. But lately it's been receiving more attention and respect from performers who have moved it from a supplementary part of their act to the main event. In the past few years, the stand ups Judah Friedlander, Andrew Schulz and Ian Bagg released specials built around crowd work; Big Jay Oakerson recorded a crowd work album, his second; and last week, Moshe Kasher released his own, "Crowd Surfing." Asked why this subgenre is booming now, Kasher pointed to the broader proliferation of stand up specials that typically erase the spontaneous banter of live performance. "The living in the moment part of stand up, which is integral, has gotten short shrift," he said in a recent interview by Skype, suggesting that these specials are less of a departure from traditional acts than a return to fundamentals. "It's foundational and an essential part of stand up," he said of crowd work. "If you look at vaudeville in theaters vamping between acts, it was always jokes written and banter in the moment." Anyone who regularly sees live comedy knows that the hours on HBO and Netflix never entirely capture the atmosphere inside a small room when a comic is killing. Trying to recreate that ambience on a screen may be doomed to fail, but this cluster of specials gets closer, borrowing some of the feel of unpredictability and sense of danger for their own distinct ends. What stands out in these specials is that while they share elements, like a white male point of view and a taste for insults and sex jokes, they are, like any worthwhile artistic genre, flexible enough to accommodate very different styles. In his very funny Netflix special "America Is the Greatest Country in the United States," Friedlander, playing an outrageously arrogant expert on all things, uses crowd work as a kind of misdirection, a trick to make his finely crafted jokes seem more off the cuff than they are. When he finds out an audience member lives in TriBeCa, he calls the neighborhood a model of diversity in a joke that was clearly part of his repertoire. "Where else can you find hedge fund C.E.O.s living right next door to venture capitalists both upstairs from a CVS inside a Walgreens?" he asks, adding: "Which are both inside a Citibank?" For Friedlander, crowd work is a tool, one he assimilates into a set that feels as polished and writerly as a carefully developed routine. Bagg takes the opposite approach; crowd work is not a means to an end so much as the goal itself. His jokes are far less intricate, and his wiseguy persona is nowhere near as vividly drawn, but his quips feel organic. His freewheeling act is raggedly spontaneous. He's incredibly quick, alert to the fun of things going off the rails. As you can tell from the title of his special, "Conversations," he's the rare comic truly committed to dialogue. If he has prepared material, it's not obvious. Anything too polished would get in the way of what he seems to be aiming for: an act that feels entirely committed to the comedy when two strangers meet. The only comic who seems to really listen to his audience with more focus is Oakerson, who can be found in clubs, often past midnight, chatting with patrons about their filthiest thoughts. He drills down on the few subjects he really cares about (sex, money, penis size) like a wily and shameless investigative journalist desperate for scoops. He asks the usual questions about work and where you're from, but he also tosses out some better ones like "Are you successful?" which is just vague enough to produce a revealing result. Schulz, a rising star who released the free "Crowd Work Special," on YouTube last year, has similar interests but a shorter attention span. Quick on his feet, he pounces on the first joke he sees, making meals out of first impressions and well worn stereotypes. Such a strategy staves off long stretches without laughs, but prevents getting much from the crowd. Kasher's album takes full advantage of the audience, in part because of the meaty questions he asks. He begins with five (including "What's your wildest sexual experience?") intended to produce juicy stories. And he gets them. He is very aware of the quality of the story. If it's just O.K., he interrupts more. If it's terrible, he might follow it up with the burn: "Now let me explain to you what a story is." While he teases, his approach is gentler than most, the insults laced with self mockery. On the spectrum from freewheeling to more structured, he falls in the middle, letting audiences tell their stories, then riffing until he finds the perfect punch line. And yet, he concedes he has a couple of stock comments. If he asks about someone's job and the answer involves the military, he thanks them for defending his freedom before the punch line: "You'd be disappointed to know what I am doing with it." He begins his album by saying that crowd work has long been maligned but adds that there are masters of the craft, singling out Don Rickles, Patrice O'Neal and Paula Poundstone. I would include Todd Barry, who, along with Oakerson, anticipated this trend with his 2014 special "The Crowd Work Tour," a documentary of his only doing shows off the cuff, his sarcasm so pristine that he can tease with the lightest of touches. Barry's mockery always seems like it's about to go for the kill but never does. And that restraint is part of what distinguishes him. In a form known for broad targets and performers chuckling at their own lines, he goes out of his way to avoid anything too easy and maintains a stoic deadpan. When a patron makes a comment filled with sexual innuendo on his special, you can feel the audience await the obvious comeback. Barry looks right at him and says, "I don't want to talk to you anymore," and the crowd roars.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Leading women from politics, the arts and other fields urged President elect Donald Trump on Monday to support a new national women's museum in Washington that would be affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. At a meeting in New York to give momentum to the idea, the group cited the report of a bipartisan Congressional commission in November that urged construction of the museum. "It's tremendously important," said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who first proposed the project in the late 1990s. "How can you empower women if they are not even recognized?" The commission recommended "a national museum dedicated to showcasing the historical experiences and impact of women in this country."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Re "In New York, Making Ends Meet on the 5 Cent Recycling Deposit" (front page, Dec. 26): I have worked for the waste and recycling services industry for nearly 30 years all over the Northeast, including New York City. Your article portrays canners in a noble way, but to my way of thinking it is misleading. Canner (scavenging) activity is really not helpful to the system of managing bottles and containers after their useful life. Many cities and communities have anti scavenging laws to prevent those among us who look for valuable materials placed at the curb in trash bins, recycling containers or commercial dumpsters. These laws help keep scavengers safe, and help prevent litter, vectors, and other public health and safety related problems. Anti scavenging laws also help protect the fiscal health of communities, since scavenging activity diverts revenue from being credited to the community's balance sheet. Life on the street is difficult, and we should be working to get those who scavenge into programs that are available through city, faith and nonprofit communities. We can and should do much better for them!	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
This article contains spoilers for the four part HBO documentary "The Case Against Adnan Syed." Did Adnan Syed kidnap and murder his ex girlfriend and high school classmate Hae Min Lee in 1999? A Baltimore County jury in 2000 decided he did. Millions of listeners to the podcast "Serial" haven't been so sure. Viewers of Sunday night's finale of the four part HBO documentary "The Case Against Adnan Syed" will continue to wonder. But they will do so armed with new facts. Chief among them: A series of new forensic tests found no traces of Syed's DNA on the many samples taken from Lee's body and car during the original investigation. The series's director, Amy Berg, made good on HBO's promise to deliver big revelations on a 20 year old murder case that "Serial" made famous starting in 2014. Like the podcast, the HBO series offered no definitive statements about Syed's guilt, but it did raise numerous questions about the methods and conclusions of the state. What's next? Whatever happens will arrive in a context very different from the one Syed faced less than a month ago, when the highest court in Maryland denied him a retrial, overturning the decisions of two lower courts. Here's a quick look at the finale's major revelations. Many samples were taken from Lee during the original investigation, including fingernail clippings and material from necklaces and clothing. New tests performed at the defense's request revealed that none of the samples tested positive for Syed's DNA. His DNA also was not found among samples taken from Lee's car, where prosecutors have said they believe she was strangled. Read an interview about the series with its director, Amy Berg. No physical evidence against Syed was presented at his trial in 2000, so these findings could add heft to his innocence claim. Still, there is a major caveat: No one else's DNA was found on Lee's body or in her car, either. That means only that the killer, whether it was someone else or Syed, left no detectable trace among the areas sampled. News about the DNA testing was first revealed Thursday by The Baltimore Sun, based on documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request. "These results in no way exonerate him," a spokeswoman for the Maryland Attorney General's Office told The Sun. According to the documents, one female DNA profile not matching Lee was found on a piece of rope found near the place where Lee was buried. But that profile did not match anyone's DNA in law enforcement databases. The DNA of investigating officers, who might accidentally have left some material behind, was eliminated. No Match for the Fingerprints Latent fingerprints pulled from the rearview mirror of Lee's car did not match Syed's. The defense requested that they be compared with prints in the database. They did not match with anyone's prints in the system. Whoever left the prints has never been arrested and booked. Haven't yet seen the HBO series? Here's what to know before watching. More Questions About the Car The state's key witness, Jay Wilds, a former friend of Syed's, told the police that after he helped Syed bury Lee's body, he went with Syed to ditch Lee's car at a grassy lot in a residential area of Baltimore. Wilds led the police to the car about six weeks after Lee was killed. Private investigators hired by Berg asked Erik Ervin, a turf physiologist from the University of Delaware with a Ph.D. in horticulture, to examine the grassy lot, along with photographs of the car from the day police discovered it. Numerous factors including the freshness of the tire tracks, the freshness of the grass blades visible in the treads and the condition of the grass beneath the car led Ervin to believe that the car may have been there for a week or less. The private investigators also spoke with Jan Gorniak, the chief medical examiner of Fulton County, Ga. She examined the autopsy report and photographs and surmised that descriptions of Lee's injuries did not in many ways appear consistent with the theory that she died during a struggle in her car. Because of markings caused by a phenomenon called lividity, which Gorniak described as "the settling of blood after you die," she said that Lee's body must have lain for eight to 12 hours somewhere other than where she was ultimately buried, in Baltimore's Leakin Park. Her assessment contradicts the prosecution's timeline, which has Syed and Wilds burying Lee's body about five hours after the slaying. Wilds gave two police interviews and testified at trial, and the contradictions among those accounts were well documented in "Serial" and in earlier episodes of the HBO series. (Click here for a useful comparison of the various timelines Wilds gave to investigators.) They are significant and many. Berg contacted Wilds, who declined to be interviewed for the series. He did, however, provide statements. In them, he made several new claims. One was that the police had coached him to say in his second taped interview that Syed first showed him Lee's body, in the trunk of her car, at a Best Buy parking lot, not at a meeting point off Edmondson Avenue, as he had originally said. The Best Buy location matches a map drawn by investigators based on cellphone geolocation records. Those records have themselves been called into question a factor cited in the lower courts' decisions to vacate Syed's conviction. In his statement to Berg, Wilds said that Syed showed up to his house in Lee's car with the body in the trunk. This is new.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here. Sterling Magee, who played a furious, thoroughly original style of blues under the name Mr. Satan, first as a solo act on the streets of Harlem and then as part of the duo Satan and Adam, died on Sept. 6 in Pinellas Park, Fla. He was 84. His sister Janet Gammons said Mr. Magee contracted Covid 19 three months ago and died in a hospice from complications of the disease. Half bluesman, half street preacher, Mr. Magee was a fixture on 125th Street throughout the 1980s, parked one block east of the Apollo Theater, where he drew crowds of curious onlookers and fans. He played electric guitar, sang and stomped out a rhythm with a pair of hi hat cymbals simultaneously, a feat of musicianship often overshadowed by his otherworldly charisma, bushy Moses like beard and koan like sayings. In 1986, Adam Gussow chanced upon a performance by Mr. Magee, asked to sit in on harmonica and became his musical partner for many years. "I'd argue he's the greatest one man blues band that America has produced," Mr. Gussow, now a professor of English and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi, said in a phone interview. "Sterling was always trying to push the boundaries. He was a man who was coming into full flower on the street." Mr. Magee had a brief solo career in the 1960s, and as a guitarist he backed King Curtis, James Brown and Etta James, but he found his greatest fame with Mr. Gussow, outside the music industry. They were an unlikely pair: a 50 year old Black man born and raised in Mississippi and a 28 year old white, Ivy League educated writing tutor, jamming before the public at a time when New York was deeply divided along racial lines. When Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teenager, was shot and killed in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, by a white gunman in 1989, Mr. Magee told his young associate that it would be best to stay away from Harlem until tensions cooled. But Mr. Magee never dwelt on their racial differences. "When we get together, I'm Mr. Satan and he's Mr. Gussow," he told The New York Times in 2019, upon the release of the Netflix documentary "Satan and Adam." "I want to put the message out that Mr. Satan is in love with this person, and that I don't give a damn about all that stuff." Satan and Adam honed their act as street musicians for four years. Then, at Mr. Gussow's urging, they embarked on a more professional career. They played a celebrated show at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1991; released a trio of raw sounding albums, beginning with "Harlem Blues" that same year; and toured widely. They appeared briefly in U2's 1988 tour documentary, "Rattle and Hum." And they were the subjects of both the Netflix documentary and a 1998 memoir by Mr. Gussow, "Mister Satan's Apprentice." V. Scott Balcerek, who directed the film, first encountered the duo in 1992 at a club in Pittsburgh. "I was blown away by the sound these two people could make," he said. Parts of Mr. Magee's career and personal life remain a mystery. He joined the Air Force after high school and, upon his discharge, moved to St. Petersburg, Fla., where his family had relocated. He played local clubs billed as Five Fingers Magee, he told Mr. Gussow, because of his virtuosic technique. "He prided himself on having invented a new way of playing," Mr. Gussow said. "He didn't bend strings like B.B. or Albert King. He moved chord forms back and forth really quick, and used drone strings. He could keep the chord thing going and drill high treble stuff for emphasis." Mr. Magee recorded some singles for Tangerine Records in the 1960s but later maintained that they never received any promotion because Ray Charles, the founder of the label, didn't like other artists to outshine him. He became disillusioned by the music industry as a result. Mr. Magee bounced around during the 1970s, variously living in New York, Mississippi and Florida. His wife, Betty, died of cancer, an experience that traumatized him. He re emerged as Mr. Satan in 1979 and over the years gave varying explanations for his identity change. "It wasn't a thing I decided," he told The Chicago Sun Times in 1992. "A transition came over me." In addition to his sister Janet, Mr. Magee is survived by a brother, Guy Jr., and two other sisters, Mary Latortue and Martha Travis. Mr. Magee suffered a nervous breakdown in 1998 and disappeared without telling Mr. Gussow, seemingly ending the duo's career. Mr. Balcerek, who by then had started filming his documentary, eventually found Mr. Magee living in a nursing home in Gulfport, Fla.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The cast of the "Jersey Shore" returns, older but maybe not wiser, to hit up the Miami club scene. And watch two gory Brian De Palma films that recently arrived on streaming services. MOM 9 p.m. on CBS. In days past, an actor might have had to choose between work in television and movies. Yet here's Allison Janney, in award winning roles in films (she just won an Oscar for "I, Tonya") while holding down a day job at one of television's most reliably funny sitcoms, "Mom." Her character, Bonnie, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, struggles to be the stable one in her relationship after her fiance, Adam, experiences a devastating loss. WRESTLEMANIA'S GREATEST MOMENTS 8 p.m. on USA. The 34th WrestleMania arrives on Sunday, with Ronda Rousey making her WWE debut and the Undertaker returning. This special reflects on the event's most surprising, dramatic and bone crushing moments over the years.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"The best way to describe how I'm feeling right now it's somewhere between Christmas Eve and the night before a liver transplant," Jimmy Kimmel said. America Is Going Full 'Mad Max' for Election Day, Late Night Says Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We're all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. Late night hosts expressed concern Monday night over the extensive safety measures ahead of Tuesday's election, including a new fence and added barriers around the White House. "Damn, America's going full 'Mad Max' right now," Trevor Noah said on "The Daily Show." It was a sentiment echoed by Jimmy Fallon, who brought up the Trump fans who surrounded a Biden campaign bus in Texas last Friday, reportedly attempting to run it off the road. "And you know expletive is real when even the White House is putting up extra fences and barriers, although hopefully they aren't letting Trump decide what a good barrier is. Imitating Trump 'We don't need a fence, we should just put a slightly steep ramp no one can get past that, they're so dangerous.'" TREVOR NOAH "Right now, they're erecting a massive protective fence around the White House in the event that things get crazy. It took four years, but Trump finally got his wall built." JIMMY KIMMEL "At this point, I'm not sure if Trump's trying to keep protesters out or keep himself in." JIMMY FALLON "The fact that people are boarding up their businesses for an election should alarm us. If anyone needed any more proof that he did not make America great again, there's plywood in the windows at the Wetzel's Pretzels across the street from us. Our pretzels are under attack, what else do you need to know?" JIMMY KIMMEL "This is the most high stakes election of my lifetime and I include when Ruben Studdard beat Clay Aiken." STEPHEN COLBERT "It's getting crazy out there. The F.B.I. is investigating an incident that happened over the weekend in Austin, Texas. Team Biden had to cancel an event there because their campaign bus was surrounded by a group of Trump supporters in trucks and tried to allegedly run it off the road, even though the words 'no malarkey' were clearly printed on the bus. Still, they insisted on engaging in malarkey." JIMMY KIMMEL "Yep, tomorrow the only places that'll be more crowded than the polls are liquor stores." JIMMY FALLON "We made it to the night before the election. Seriously, I haven't felt this stressed out since literally every day since March." JIMMY FALLON "If 2020 was a week, this would be it." JIMMY FALLON "The best way to describe how I'm feeling right now it's somewhere between Christmas Eve and the night before a liver transplant." JIMMY KIMMEL "That's right, it's election eve, and everyone is nervous. President Trump is going to spend all night waiting for Vladimir Putin to come down the chimney." JIMMY FALLON	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
2020 has become the year of the hair trigger election. The conservative Federalist website put its point of view in vivid terms on Sept. 11: "The Left Is Setting the Stage for a Coup If Trump Wins." the last three months of rioting and looting by Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists have in some ways been a dress rehearsal for what the left is planning in November. According to Davidson, left wing Democrats are primed to adopt a strategy to contest the results and trigger lengthy litigations and ballot recounts, working in the meantime to come up with enough absentee ballots to put Biden over the edge. In that case, while the lawsuits and recounts are underway, the left plans to do what it's been doing for months now: take to the streets. The drumbeat on the other side of the aisle is similar. A headline in the liberal Daily Beast declares: "The Left Secretly Preps for MAGA Violence After Election Day." In the article, Sam Stein, the Daily Beast's political editor, describes a gathering of leaders of liberal organizations preparing "for what they envision as the postelection Day political apocalypse scenario." One of the leaders, Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn, told Stein: "It is very obvious that Trump is laying the groundwork for claiming victory no matter what," before adding: We will fight to protect it from what we truly see as a president who has gone off the rails and taking this country down an authoritarian fascist path. On July 16, J.J. McNab, a fellow at the George Washington University's Program on Extremism, told the members of the U.S. House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism: Between gun control issues, civil unrest, the stresses placed on the country by a deadly pandemic, conspiracy theories, anti press sentiments, and a highly divisive election cycle, the nation is one large event away from violence. McNab described the anti government movement as a loose knit movement of right wing groups including private paramilitary "militias," Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, sovereign citizens, tax protesters, and "constitutional sheriffs." At the same time, she continued, "sovereign citizen schemes have taken root in some left wing groups" with the result that "right wing/left wing labels may not be as clear as they once were." Noting the extent to which the 2020 election has devolved into an exceptionally antagonistic confrontation, Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, argues in an email that Trump "acts like a wartime president, defending his base supporters from the 'liberals' who want to take America away from them." this wartime psychology and rhetoric raises the stakes of the election. When the stakes are this high, any election missteps at the local level will question whether the winner on election night truly won. The Transition Integrity Project, a bipartisan organization critical of Trump, mapped out potential scenarios in an Aug. 3 report, "Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition." Project members, who include John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, and Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, warned that the "two biggest threats" are "lies about 'voter fraud' and escalating violence." Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." In the event of a close election, or an election unresolved on Nov. 4, the project advised that the Trump campaign and local Republicans might well take the following steps, including: Attempting to halt the counting of mail in ballots by filing cases in state court or leaning on Republican leaders to stop vote counting or to certify a result early, without waiting for the certified results from the Secretary of State. Turning out their well organized and committed base to take to the streets in Trump's favor, in part by disseminating disinformation about the danger posed by pro Biden demonstrators (e.g., by suggesting likely Antifa violence, etc.) Ariel Malka, a political scientist at Yeshiva University, wrote by email that he is not sure which is the bigger threat, "violent unrest or the prospect of executive actions and legal efforts successfully thwarting a fair electoral process." Robert Malley, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, wrote me: While I wouldn't want to make too much of a comparison between what we are seeing in the U.S. and what, at Crisis Group, we study in conflict ridden situations, there is no doubt that the similarities are becoming alarming. For that reason, we have just decided, for the first time in our quarter century history, to cover the risks of election related violence in the U.S. In June, three staffers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Seth G. Jones, Catrina Doxsee and Nicholas Harrington, released a report, "The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States." It makes the case that the dominant role of the far right has grown significantly during the past six years. Right wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020. The three authors warn that one of "the most concerning" events "is the 2020 U.S. presidential election, before and after which extremists may resort to violence, depending on the outcome of the election." Seth Jones, director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, emailed me to say "there are several factors that make postelection violence likely." The first, he wrote, is the assumption by extremist groups from all sides white supremacists, militias, boogaloos, anarchists, and anti fascists to name a few that others are prepared for violence if the election does not go their way. All of these groups, he pointed out, have access to firearms, incendiaries, and crude explosives. This situation is a classic "security dilemma." Each side's efforts to increase its own security and acquire weapons inadvertently threaten the other side. Second, according to Jones, All sides are defining the election in apocalyptic terms: the election will decide the success or failure of the United States. For some far left extremists, a victory for Trump would expedite the rise of fascism in the United States, however exaggerated that might be. For some far right extremists, a victory for Biden and Harris (an African American, which is a lightning rod for white supremacists) would accelerate the rise of Communism, Marxism Leninism, and outright anarchy in the United States, however exaggerated that might be. Painting the election in these apocalyptic terms significantly increases (actually inflates) the importance of the election in ways that make violence almost inevitable. The nonprofit, nonpartisan Network Contagion Research Institute, which in the past has focused on right wing activity, issued a report on Sept. 14, "Network Enabled Anarchy: How Militant Anarcho Socialist Networks Use Social Media to Instigate Widespread Violence Against Political Opponents and Law Enforcement," that warns: An online structure supporting anarcho socialist extremism appears to be rapidly growing. The appearance of posts with anti police outrage and/or memes and coded language increased over 1,000 percent on Twitter and 300 percent on Reddit in recent months during social justice protests. Extreme anarcho socialist fringe online forums on Reddit use memes calling for the death of police and memes for stockpiling munitions to promote violent revolution. Extreme anarcho socialist fringe online forums on Reddit underwent growth in membership and participation during the quarantine and recent social justice protests. The authors stress, however, that this analysis does not suggest that violence from anarcho socialist militants has yet become as widespread as ISIS nor does it have the death toll or historical reach that right leaning extremism has in the U.S. What is happening here? Four years ago, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, political scientists at Stanford and Dartmouth, wrote in "Fear and Loathing across Party Lines": Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters' minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. In an email, Iyengar wrote: "I don't think there is any doubt that Trump will allege widespread fraud in the event he loses." Given the degree of polarization, Iyengar continued, a less than decisive Biden victory, coupled with Republicans' willingness to accept Trump's claims, may result in widespread protests and unrest. The election has the potential to be incredibly destabilizing. The Republican Party and Trump have spent years conditioning supporters to mistrust elections and to see fraud where it doesn't exist. For many of Trump's loyalists, Westwood wrote, "the only rational explanation for a Trump loss will be manipulation of the election by 'deep state' Democrats." a scenario where Trump accepts defeat without claims of fraud. This is a man whose narcissism prompted the creation of a presidential commission to investigate fraud in an election that he won. To further demonstrate the strength of partisan bias, Iyengar sent me a June 2020 paper, "Partisan Gaps in Political Information and Information Seeking Behavior: Motivated Reasoning or Cheerleading?" that he wrote with Erik Peterson of Texas A M. Peterson and Iyengar conducted a survey in which half of the participants were offered incentives if they answered highly politicized questions correctly (50 cents per right answer) and half were asked the same questions without incentives. They found that experimental evidence indicated that partisans are genuinely committed to inaccurate beliefs and to congenial sources of information. This is to say the availability of incentives reduced, but by no means eliminated, the partisan divide in information. Approximately two thirds of the initial partisan divide obtained in the un incentivized conditions persisted when we offered respondents the opportunity to earn rewards for correct responses. In their July 2019 paper, "Party Animals? Extreme Partisan Polarization and Dehumanization," James L. Martherus, Andres G. Martinez, Paul K. Pif and Alexander G. Theodoridis link increasing "affective, identity based, and often negative" political polarization to "a willingness to apply dehumanizing metaphors to out partisans." Dehumanization or objectification of the enemy lays the groundwork for extreme hostility and suspicion of the motives of the opposing party, according to the four authors. In a series of survey experiments, they found "consistent evidence that partisans are willing to dehumanize members of the opposing party in both subtle and blatant ways." In addition, their report contends that this tendency to dehumanize is not unique to members of one political party both Democrats and Republicans tend to dehumanize each other at roughly similar rates. The four authors argue that By depriving political opponents, to even a small extent, of the complex thoughts and scruples we often associate with humanity, we make them easier to stereotype and we may more readily ascribe simpler, more base, and even nefarious, motivations to them. Large majorities of both parties objectify dehumanize the opposition, to a greater or lesser degree. In the first Martherus study, Nearly 77 percent of respondents said out party members were less evolved than in party members, and about 65 percent offered at least a 10 point difference. In a long email, Theodoridis addressed some of the challenges of this year's election: Our hyper polarized context virtually guarantees that both the popular vote and the Electoral College tally will be relatively close. Blowouts like 1964, 1972, and 1984 are unimaginable in the current political environment. So, it is very likely the contest will come down to a relatively small number of votes in a few states. It is quite possible that, once again, the popular vote is not reflected in the malapportioned Electoral College. And, because a significant proportion of votes will be mailed in and there is variation in when states count those, it is very possible we won't know the outcome of the election on the evening of Nov. 3 or even the morning of Nov. 4. This could very well create an environment where key state vote tallies switch after Election Day, leading to contestation and skepticism. And, Trump and many of his supporters are certainly setting the stage for a challenge to the legitimacy of the vote total. "This could open the door," Theodoridis continued, "for some troubling scenarios," including situations in which neither candidate reaches 270 electoral votes because one or more state slate of electors is contested. Several key swing states have Republican legislatures. In the current polarized climate, where each side sees the other as an existential threat to America, one can't rule out the possibility that a state legislature might declare their state's popular vote fraudulent or illegitimate in some way and either assign no electors at all or simply appoint their party's slate. Even without such confusing procedural machinations by political elites, a close, contested election in our hyper polarized political climate could very well produce isolated incidents of partisan violence. My research, and work by others, shows that most partisans are willing to metaphorically dehumanize those from the other party, and that this dehumanization predicts greater tolerance for partisan violence. I am hopeful that widespread violence is highly unlikely. Sadly, though, I do not think it is unimaginable. There is today an astonishingly widespread belief among normally cautious observers of politics that there exists the possibility of severe disruption including violence this November. "I, unfortunately, am not optimistic about a peaceful reaction from either side," Yphtach Lelkes, a professor of communications and political science at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote by email. "Survey evidence indicates that a sizable chunk (20 percent) of the population believes violence is justified if the other side wins." if Trump suspects he faces indictment (at the state or federal level) once he leaves office, he will have a strong incentive to remain in office in any way he can. That is an extremely dangerous situation. This election has, more than in the past, heightened fears on both sides that if the opposition wins, it will do real harm. Robert Harrison Wagner, who specializes in international conflict at the University of Texas, wrote: The most worrisome aspect of our current situation is not the reciprocal fear of violence by both left and right, but the spreading belief on both sides that the electoral victory of the other side would have unacceptable and irreversible consequences. This can lead not just to potentially violent protests, but to the abandonment of elections as a way of resolving conflicts. For some analysts, concerns over the 2020 election have been building for years. Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., emailed me: I have been worried for the last three years that there will be some very bad and chaotic events in November 2020. Trump is bound to claim that the election was stolen from him (I'm presuming he will lose) and some of his very well armed supporters will take action. Michael Bang Peterson, a political scientist Aarhus University in Denmark and a close observer of American politics, wrote in an email that "there has been an increase in the use of violence for political purposes in recent history in the United States," adding that the clashes between police forces, left wing activities and radical right groups surrounding the B.L.M. protests seem to have radicalized the extreme groups and, most likely, have motivated them to make themselves better prepared for violent confrontations. Petersen described a list of combustible ingredients present in the United States: The final match that might set this bonfire ablaze is Covid 19. Stress and marginalization is key contextual driver of aggressive responses. If a second wave hits the U.S. hard in November, the lives and jobs lost will create an additional psychological push toward a potentially very dangerous situation. As Election Day approaches, the incentives are already plentiful to protest an adverse outcome in the courts, in Congress, in state capitols and on the streets. The intensity of such protests will increase in proportion to the closeness of the results. One thing is virtually certain: If the outcome is unresolved by the day after the election, or if Biden wins by a slim margin, Trump will do everything in his power to discredit the process and to ignite the anger and resentment of his most ardent supporters. As Trump put it in a March 2019 interview with reporters and editors at Breitbart: You know, the left plays a tougher game, it's very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don't play it tougher. OK? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. The Supreme Court upheld abortion rights on Monday, with Chief Justice John Roberts concurring with the liberals on the court to strike down a Louisiana anti abortion law. That sentence might surprise a lot of people, given that the chief justice is a staunch conservative, and that the court now has a solid right wing majority. President Trump achieved that majority by appointing two justices with the express purpose of pushing a hard right agenda, as determined by legal groups like the Federalist Society. Obliterating abortion access in America is at the top of that priority list. What's more, Chief Justice Roberts dissented in a case just four years ago that struck down what was an effectively identical Texas anti abortion law. So the central question ahead of Monday's decision in June Medical Services v. Russo became: Would the chief justice's disapproval of abortion outweigh his desire for the court to respect its own very recent precedent? It turns out that it didn't. In a concurring opinion that provided the fifth vote for a majority, the chief justice wrote that the court's doctrine requires it to "treat like cases alike." Because the Louisiana law which requires doctors who perform abortions to get admitting privileges at a hospital near their clinic, supposedly in the interests of women's health and safety was more or less a carbon copy of the Texas law the court previously struck down, and because it burdened women in the same way, it "cannot stand," he wrote. That's good as far as it goes, which is not very far. It would be a mistake to interpret this decision as a sign that the chief justice has had a change of heart about protecting the bodily autonomy of American women. Even in his concurring opinion, Chief Justice Roberts said that he still believes that the Texas case was "wrongly decided" and that he voted to strike down the Louisiana law solely out of respect for precedent. He appears to have decided that the circumstances of this case were not ideal for crippling reproductive rights but he left the door open to doing so in the future. Monday's decision, with the plurality opinion written by Justice Stephen Breyer, isn't so much good news for reproductive freedom as it is a temporary reprieve from all the bad. Abortion access in many parts of the country is abysmal five states have only one abortion clinic, for instance. If the Louisiana law had been upheld, clinics in that state (which has only three such facilities) and across the country could have closed, forcing many women to travel longer distances at prohibitive expense to receive reproductive health care. That would violate the constitutional right to have access to an abortion without "undue burden," the standard the Supreme Court has followed since the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. A Federal District Court in Louisiana struck down the state's law because it posed such an undue burden, just as the Texas law had. But the conservative federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed that decision, ruling that the lower court had gotten the facts wrong that it was not clear that the new law would actually burden women's ability to get an abortion. Monday's decision reversed the Fifth Circuit ruling, holding that the district court had gotten it right the first time. The Louisiana law, Justice Breyer wrote, was "almost word for word identical" to Texas' unconstitutional law and imposed identical if not greater burdens on women, and therefore was invalid. Chief Justice Roberts's decision to concur with the four liberal justices may enrage cultural conservatives who thought that with the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ending the right to an abortion was just a matter of time. But the chief justice rarely takes the direct route, preferring incremental rulings that slowly chip away at the court's longstanding precedents. So no one should be fooled this time around: The current court is as hostile to reproductive freedom as it ever was. And Chief Justice Roberts left himself plenty of room to vote differently in any of the many cases now speeding toward the court, involving challenges to other state laws that make it difficult if not impossible for most women to obtain an abortion. Some of those challenges like those to laws in Texas and Arkansas that ban a common second trimester abortion procedure called dilation and evacuation could give the chief justice an opening to make what he might consider a more reasonable argument for further undermining abortion rights. No doubt anti abortion forces behind these cases will continue to push hard; they have a knack for rejiggering their strategy after each big case, and they've been especially aggressive in their efforts recently. Another factor that's nearly certainly at play here is that the lawyer who argued for Louisiana during oral arguments in March, State Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill, is widely believed to have bungled the job, answering questions so ineptly that she gave the chief justice little to work with, even if he had been inclined to side with the court's other conservatives. It's concerning that this case made it to the high court at all, given its similarity to the Texas case. It's even more concerning that the rights of millions of women hinged in part on someone having a bad day in court. But such is the state of reproductive rights in 2020: Members of the pro choice side count their blessings over the narrowest of victories, while anti choice crusaders continue to think big, strategic and long term.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
SHANGHAI The mind reading headsets won't read minds. The fire detecting machine has been declared a safety hazard. The robot waiter can't be trusted with the soup. China is ready for the future, even if the future hasn't quite arrived. China has become a global technological force in just a few years. It is shaping the future of the internet. Its technology ambitions helped prompt the Trump administration to start a trade war. Hundreds of millions of people in China now use smartphones to shop online, pay their bills and invest their money, sometimes in ways more advanced than in the United States. That has led many people in China to embrace technology full tilt, no matter how questionable. Robots wait on restaurant diners. Artificial intelligence marks up schoolwork. Facial recognition technology helps dole out everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken orders to toilet paper. China is in a competition with itself for the world record for dancing robots. Donning black headbands that looked like implements of electroshock therapy, the seven men and two women onstage were told to envision themselves pressing a button. The headbands would transmit their brain activity to the robotic hand sharing the stage, which would then push a button to officially start the conference. A countdown began. A camera put the robotic hand onto a huge screen above the stage. The people onstage seemed to concentrate. And then, nothing happened. The hand remained motionless. The camera panned away. A spokesman for Yiou, the tech consultant that hosted the event, declined to comment except for: . All of this embarrasses some people in the Chinese tech scene. They warn that the excess exuberance is one sign of a venture capital bubble, which may be about to burst. Rather than show China's newfound tech might, they argue, spectacles like dancing robots and ineffective mind readers cover up the country's lack of progress in other areas. Those deficiencies were made clear in April when the United States forbade American companies to sell chips, software and other technology to ZTE, a Chinese telecom company. ZTE was found to have violated American sanctions by selling products to Iran and North Korea. The ban brought the company to a virtual standstill. Chinese people shouldn't lose touch with reality, warned Liu Yadong, chief editor of the state run Science and Technology Daily. In a recent speech, he said that China still lagged the United States in tech, and that those who argued otherwise ran the risk of "tricking leaders, fooling the public and even fooling themselves." China isn't the first country to get ahead of itself in tech. Japan at the height of its economic powers had robots that prepared sushi. More recently, Silicon Valley has gone gaga over more than a few pointless products, like Yo the app that said only "yo" and Juicero, the 700 juicer. Ultimately the exuberance could be a good thing for China, as useful products find their place and bad ones disappear when the boom matures. And China has come a long way. What was an agrarian backwater 40 years ago is home to the world's single largest group of internet users and some of its most valuable internet companies. Now it's pushing ahead into emerging tech. In 2017, Chinese start ups took up nearly half the dollars raised globally for artificial intelligence, according to CB Insights, a research firm that follows venture capital. By 2020, China is expected to account for more than 30 percent of worldwide spending on robotics, according to technology research firm IDC. "Chinese are much more willing to try something new just because it looks cool," said Andy Tian, chief executive of Beijing based Asia Innovations Group, which runs mobile apps. "It sounds superficial. It is superficial. But that's the driver of progress in a lot of cases." The E Patrol Robotic Sheriff could fill that bill. It is among several security robots that have shown up at train stations and airports around China in recent months. The E Patrol Robotic Sheriff which looks like the camera lens from the HAL 9000 computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey" mounted on a white trash tub patrols the high speed rail station in the central Chinese city Zhengzhou, tasked with using facial recognition to find and follow suspicious characters, as well as to measure air quality and detect fires. During a winter visit to the station, the robot was nowhere to be found. First, it had missed a fire, officials said. It also had a tendency to collect so many selfie seeking fans that it became a safety hazard. A spokesman for the train station said it was getting an upgrade and would eventually return. Robots in particular have captured the Chinese imagination. A Beijing television station this year made a robot dominated version of the country's annual Lunar New Year television special. Robots and humans performed tai chi and comedy routines, and sang and danced. Companies and local officials often have good reason to show off their splashiest and silliest wares. China frequently takes a top down approach to technology, with local governments rushing to follow plans that come down from on high. Gizmos with a bit of futuristic verve are often the best symbols of progress. Dancing robots, for example, became something of a fixture of company and government presentations last year. "They were everywhere," said David Li, a co founder of Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, a government supported platform that supports small hardware start ups in Shenzhen. He estimated that he had seen 10 dancing robot shows in a single week. Alibaba, the Chinese online shopping giant, has also gotten into the act, though in a more sophisticated way. At one of its new Hema grocery stores in Shanghai, rolling robots take cooked food out onto a sort of runway that connects the kitchen to seating. A team of waiters standing nearby said a human hand was required for soup and steamed dishes, lest the robots inadvertently splash someone with hot liquid. Waiters said their automated counterparts caused more work than they saved. The robots take trays of food out to customers, but are unable to lower them to the table. Real waiters stand back so photos and videos can be taken before shuffling in and serving food the old fashioned way. The robots also break down. Three times during an hour lunch, a waiter had to lean a robot on its side and take a blowtorch to the undercarriage to burn out food and trash caught in its axles. When asked whether he was worried that the robots would take his job, the waiter laughed. "I've just been to America, and I didn't see many new things at all," said Xie Aijuan, a retiree in her 50s. "I don't think they have anything like robotic restaurants there." "China is surpassing America," agreed her dining companion, Zhuang Jiazheng. "Robots are coming. Tech is advancing. It's all a matter of time."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Credit...Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times I think I was in an iced over bus lot in northeastern Poland, standing in front of a mound of desecrated gravestones, when I first had the feeling that Jewish heritage travel in Europe might be a mistake. I had been walking with a guide and an interpreter, both Polish men in late middle age, through Makow Mazowiecki, a small town about 45 miles north of Warsaw. This was where two of my great grandparents were born in the late 19th century, when Jews made up nearly half the local population. Like the vast majority of American Jews, I descend from Yiddish speaking Europeans who settled along the Rhine River around the first millennium. Known as Ashkenazi Jews (Ashkenazi being an old term for German), they later moved to the edges of the Russian Empire, the so called Pale of Settlement, an area spanning much of present day Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Moldova, where Jews were allowed to reside. All eight of my great grandparents immigrated around the turn of the century from the Pale to the United States. They settled in New Jersey, where my father grew up, and Kansas City, Mo., where my mother, and later my brothers and I, were raised among the mowed lawns and flush supermarkets of Midwestern suburbia. "They lived in shtetls," my parents would say, using the Yiddish diminutive for town. "Backward, mud caked, poverty stricken little villages surrounded by anti Semites." Or something along those lines. In this, I wasn't alone. Jewish heritage tourism has been growing steadily since the fall of the Iron Curtain, when the former Pale of Settlement began to open up to Western tourists. The influx of foreign interest has encouraged a re examination of Jewish history, especially in larger urban centers. New museums, most notably Warsaw's phenomenal Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, but also smaller institutions throughout Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic nations, cater to visitors of Eastern European Jewish descent. "It's a tremendous change," said Tomasz Cebulski, a Polish Holocaust scholar whom I contacted early in my heritage quest. "Within the last 25 years in this country, it's like day and night," said Mr. Cebulski, whose company, Polin Travel, offers Jewish heritage tours and genealogical services. He attributes the change partly to the lifting of taboos around discussion of Judaism and the Holocaust but also to growing interest in ancestral research. In addition to hundreds of booming genealogical resources like Ancestry.com and FamilySearch, there are numerous sites geared to Jews, most notably JewishGen, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the New York based Museum of Jewish Heritage, with more than 20 million records and links to country specific Jewish record archives, like Jewish Records Indexing Poland (JRI Poland.org). At the same time, I started reaching out through the JewishGen databases to people who had searched similar name and place combinations. That's where I found Kathy Herman. I had never heard of her, but she turned out to be my second cousin on the Russak side. Her grandfather, Benny, was the brother of my great grandfather Joe. She was the first to tell me the names of their parents: Moishe Meyer Russak and Mindel Stetin. "Family lore is that she was raped by a Cossack, and my grandfather killed the guy," she wrote in an email. "They hanged my grandfather by his hair (I don't even really know what that means), and then the Russaks had to get Benny out fast." That, Kathy said, is why the Russaks moved to the United States. Not exactly "Fievel Goes West," but I was hooked. She had two addresses in Lodz where the Russaks had lived. Armed with these anecdotal scraps and scant genealogical documents, I was off. Old Country or bust. In Warsaw I met a man who has been working for decades as a fixer for Jewish visitors researching their Polish roots. It's a job that often stirs resentment in Poland, especially since the current right wing government came to power, said the fixer, a retiree with kind eyes and a talkative, disheveled demeanor who asked that his identity be concealed. Widespread anti Semitism persists, he said, and there is fear, especially in remote, provincial areas shtetl country that the descendants of Polish Jews will come back and claim their stolen property. "Keep in mind that Poland before the Second World War was like the United States. We had a huge mixture of minorities, and the Jews made up 10 percent of the prewar Polish population," he said, as we drove past fields of black currants, lindens and the occasional roadside taverns, until we reached Plock. Situated about 60 miles west of Warsaw, Plock is one of the oldest cities in Poland. Its antique grain silos and riverside Romanesque cathedral harken back to a time when the Kingdom of Poland was a bastion of liberalism that became a haven for Jews escaping persecution and exile elsewhere on the continent. A local historian met us at a cafe on the edge of the Old Town Square with photocopies of what he thought were my family's records. My great great grandparents Kasile and Cecile Hipsh seemed to match up with a Kasryel and Tsissa Hipsz in the archive. According to the book of residency, Kasryel was married twice and had at least eight children, including my great grandfather, who went by Harry in Kansas City, where he started a textile business with his sons. But he had apparently grown up as Yakob, in the Jewish quarter of Plock, just a few blocks from where we sat. With its cobbled streets and 19th century rowhouses, Plock's old Jewish district looks like a film set. Nearly all the remnants of its thriving Jewish community, which once made up nearly half the population, are long gone or repurposed beyond recognition. The one small remaining synagogue reopened in 2013, after decades of disuse, as the Museum of Mazovian Jews. The project, funded partially by the European Union, educates visitors on Jewish culture, and aims to tell their 700 year history in Plock and the surrounding region a period in which they contributed greatly to the expansion of trade, crafts and industrialization, up until the Nazi occupation of Poland, when those who hadn't fled poverty and persecution were confined to a ghetto and murdered in the camps. I watched in numb silence as the faces of Holocaust victims from Plock flashed on a light box over a model of a dinner table set for Shabbat. I thought of my grandfather and namesake, Charlie Hipsh, who rose from poverty to become a banker and philanthropist, marrying my elegant grandmother, Dorothy Wengrover, and having four college educated daughters. I thought of my own expensive American education, of my record collection and my comprehensive German health insurance, of how it is such a shifting, fickle fault line that separates the privileged from the damned. Then I signed the guest book, "the great great granddaughter of Kasryel and Tsissa Hipsz of Plock" and headed for the car. The Russaks' former address led us to a bleak, graffiti covered high rise in the middle of what was, under Nazi occupation, the Lodz Ghetto. From there, it was a few minutes to the Radegast train station, from which around 200,000 Jews were transported to the extermination camps at Chelmno and Auschwitz. Today it's the site of a small memorial to those victims. I flipped through the prisoner transport lists to "R" until I found Russak after Russak after Russak. As we drove back to Warsaw, I felt the landscape morph and bend into imagery that haunted my youth: rusted train tracks ribboning through a frozen field; skeleton trees against a white sky; the scream of a train whistle, a particular Polish melancholy. I had always recoiled from the idea of identifying with the victims of the Holocaust. My ancestors left decades before the Nazis arrived, and I grew up as a middle class white person in 1980s and '90s suburban America, one of the greatest bubbles of privilege and prosperity the world has ever seen. And yet the closer I was getting, both geographically and psychologically, to the once great Yiddish European civilization of my forebears, the more I began to experience the dull horror of its annihilation. As the moon rose over the Polish plains, my fixer told me something he said is only known to close friends and family. He, too, is of Jewish descent. His father's parents both died in the camps, and he was raised to hide his heritage. "Doing this," he said, "is my way of reconnecting." That's where I thought we were driving to another genocide spot, another desecrated burial ground when we suddenly stopped at the side of the road by a wooded hill. At the bottom was a gate marked with a Star of David. We climbed up the hill, which was so steep we sometimes had to use our hands. As we neared the top, I began seeing Hebrew lettered gravestones, overgrown and weatherworn, jutting from the grass. The cemetery had been left alone, Tautvydas explained. Because Anysciai is filled with quarries, there was no need to take the stones. "So even in wartime," he said, "it was left peaceful and untouched." We looked out over this unspeakably beautiful site, this ancestral resting place we'd never known existed, and onto the distant rolling Lithuanian landscape. I let my eyes blur and saw only the greens and grays of the earth, felt only the wind and the light. I let my mind drift into a distant future when, like these stones, all the buildings and bridges might erode with the passing time, until only the hill remains.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
After visiting Paris in the late 1920s, the trailblazing Chinese abstract painter Wu Dayu (1903 88) set up an art academy in Hangzhou, where Western and Chinese artistic pedagogies would be intertwined. Following the Communist revolution, his commitment to abstraction led to serious trouble; he was ousted from the academy to make way for Soviet trained Socialist Realists, and during the Cultural Revolution, he painted in secret. Nine of Wu's small, uncommon abstract paintings, all undated, are the principal reason to see this showcase of three Chinese artists, curated by Gao Minglu, the eminent Chinese art historian. Wu's vigorous, expressionistic improvisations often elided passages of figuration, especially of landscape. In one watercolor, believed to be from the 1950s, soft edged triangles of navy and plum jostle with floral motifs in thickly daubed black. The painting recalls Qing era landscape painters, like Wang Hui, as much as it echoes Kandinsky, Klee and Frankenthaler. Some hastily scribbled pastels from the end of Wu's life appear frankly childlike, though a few, in their firmly slashed lines of orange or teal, display an aesthetic freedom that had few parallels in China before the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, who led China after Mao. For Americans encountering these paintings in a New York gallery, it's all too easy to assess them with the same handy tools we apply to modern Western painting to fall back on our assumptions that gestural abstraction was artistically, even politically, progressive in itself. But you can't just graft European and American aesthetics onto Chinese art history. In the context of the early People's Republic, the Socialist Realists, who drowned their individuality in murals of smiling farmers and strutting soldiers, were considered the vanguard. Wu, by contrast, faced denunciation for his commitment to abstraction; many of his paintings were destroyed. Yet Wu's unorthodox liberty eventually offered a model to two living painters, both senior figures of contemporary Chinese abstraction, whose art is in the show. Two recent works by Yu Youhan, who was born in 1943 and was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, feature large circles composed of thousands of short, sharp strokes. And splashy canvases by Zhang Wei, who was born in 1952, have a careless dynamism and personal idiosyncrasy that Wu would have appreciated. JASON FARAGO The title work is an installation that can be seen through the museum's front window. It includes video monitors and clothes on racks and breaks the word "noon" into "no" and "on," or combines it with other words and images of ticking clocks in various locales, prompting you to think about the artificial constructs imposed on time. Inside the museum, a series of videos ruminates further on temporality and sequencing, language and different forms of perception. One of the strongest works is "Best Is Man's Breath Quality" (2017), in which the video's subject is a box jellyfish. This creature is extremely poisonous, and its sting is so toxic that one survivor described the pain as worse than that of natural childbirth or injuries from a car accident. Both spineless ("as if lacking a spine is weak") and translucent ("nothing to hide!"), the talking jellyfish persuasively challenges the human defined hierarchy of species. Other videos hinge on monologues and dialogues spoken by eerily familiar automated voices that ruminate on punctuation and abstract, philosophical ideas of language. Ms. Magenheimer's art often feels like Gertrude Stein's work set to music (in one video, an evocatively pitched down PJ Harvey song) and juiced up with images, like those of deer captured by surveillance cameras, primates looking into a mirror installed in a forest, or a lone piece of luggage on an airport conveyor belt, accompanied by a voice over describing loneliness and heartbreak. Sometimes Ms. Magenheimer reaches too far, and the work is obscure and overly precious. Mostly, however, it is potent and poetic, beautifully, sparingly and surgically hitting the mark. MARTHA SCHWENDENER Through April 14. Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street, Manhattan; 212 206 9100, luhringaugustine.com. Through May. Luhring Augustine, 25 Knickerbocker Avenue, Brooklyn; 718 386 2746, luhringaugustine.com. From Oscar Tuazon's tipped over tripod of pebble streaked concrete pipes to Reinhard Mucha's intricate, wall mounted, picture frame like model of psychological avoidance, most of the Bushwick half of this adroit group show, curated by Julia Speed, isn't so much sculpted as built. Simone Leigh's fantastic "trophallaxis," a hanging bundle of nut shaped, slate gray terra cotta breasts, bristling with fully extended car antennas, may be an exception. But, in that case, the found antennas serve the same function as the unpainted plaster surface of the low white consoles in Rachel Whiteread's "Untitled (Double)" or the chunky base and welded black sutures on Christopher Wool's 11 foot high loops of copper plated steel: They call attention to the vast industrial system from which their components were drawn, making the whole into a kind of networked ready made. In Chelsea, Ms. Speed lets this critical material self awareness blossom into a lighter kind of visual doubleness, seen in the 17 white plastic sawhorses of Cady Noland's wonderful, entirely found "Four in One Sculpture" and in Ms. Whiteread's "Untitled (Amber Floor)," an eight foot long section of waxy orange rubber whose end curls up, like a snub nose or an afterthought, against the wall. The apotheosis of this duality is Roger Hiorns's "Adolescent Torso" (2013), a Rolls Royce Nimbus jet engine suspended vertically in a steel frame. It's impossible to look at it, hanging as heavy and fresh as a glistening fish just pulled out of the ocean, without participating in the artist's own detached amusement. WILL HEINRICH	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
244 and 246 248 10th Avenue (between West 24th and West 25th Streets) These contiguous mixed use five story walk ups, across from Avenues: The World School in West Chelsea and the High Line, may be bought together or separately, with a cap rate of about 4 percent. Together they add up to 25,817 square feet and offer 75 feet of frontage. No. 244, at 12.5 million, has 6,096 square feet and was recently gut renovated. It has eight market rate apartments and Paradise Market Place occupies the retail space. Nos. 246 248, at 28 million, total 19,721 square feet, and offer 15 apartments 13 market rate, one rent stabilized and one rent controlled. Bottino, a Tuscan restaurant, has been a tenant since 1996 and this year signed a new 15 year lease.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Andrew Clements, who mined a brief teaching career in Illinois in writing two dozen books for young readers, most notably "Frindle," which sold more than eight million copies, died on Nov. 28 at his home in West Baldwin, Maine. He was 70. His wife, Rebecca (Pierpont) Clements, said the cause had not been determined. "Frindle" came about almost haphazardly when Mr. Clements, already established as a writer of texts for children's picture books, was talking to a group of first and second graders in Rhode Island in 1990 about where words come from. "People made up all these words," he said. But when the children did not believe him, he pulled a pen from his pocket and said that if they started calling it a "frindle," and persuaded others to use the word, it might take hold. When one boy said it was impossible to make up a new word, Mr. Clements suggested that he go to a nearby convenience store and ask for a frindle. "Let's say it's a lady working there," he told the students. "Well, she's going to look at you like you're crazy, but say the word again 'I need a frindle, you know, a frindle.' Say it two or three more times, and then help her out. Point at the plastic container of pens and say, 'There they are!'" If kids asked for a frindle day after day, he asked, "What's the lady behind the counter going to do?" Mr. Clements's best known book tells the story of a mischievous boy who persuades all his classmates to refer to a pen as a frindle. The moment stayed with him. At first he tried to write a picture book, but after publishers rejected it, he turned it into "Frindle" (1996), his debut novel for 8 to 12 year olds. "Frindle" tells the story of Nicholas, a mischievous boy who bedevils his fifth grade teacher by persuading all his classmates to refer to a pen as a frindle. "By turns amusing and adroit, this first novel is utterly satisfying," Kirkus Reviews wrote. "The chess like sparring between the gifted Nicholas and his crafty teacher is enthralling." "Frindle" was followed by many more books for middle grade students, including "The Landry News" (1998), about a fifth grader who publishes her own newspaper and writes a searing editorial about her teacher, and "The Losers Club" (2017), about a boy who reads so obsessively to the exclusion of paying attention in class that he starts an after school book club to preserve his quiet reading time; he calls it the Losers Club to minimize participation. Mr. Clements's books have been praised for their portrayal of the dynamics between students and teachers, the intricacies of classroom and schoolyard culture, and the breadth of adults' as well as children's emotions. "His kids are cruel, kind, bullying, angry, joyful, delightful, tall, short, impulsive, thoughtful smart, funny," Lisa Von Drasek, a children's librarian, wrote of Mr. Clements's "No Talking" (2007) in The New York Times Book Review. Before his death, Mr. Clements had written a first draft of "The Frindle Files," a sequel to "Frindle," in which Nicholas becomes a teacher. Mr. Clements's agent, Amy Berkower, said it might be completed by a collaborator. Andrew Elborn Clements was born on May 29, 1949, in Camden, N.J., and grew up in nearby Oaklyn and Cherry Hill before moving with his family to Springfield, Ill., when he was in the sixth grade. His father, William, sold insurance; his mother, Doris (Kruse) Clements, was a homemaker. An avid reader from a young age, Mr. Clements earned praise for his writing while attending Northwestern University, where one of his professors asked him to teach creative writing at summer high school workshops. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in literature in 1971, he earned a master's in teaching at National Louis University, in Chicago. He taught for seven years at schools in Northfield, Wilmette and Winnetka, Ill., but his job security was uncertain because of declining enrollments. He remembered those classroom years as essential to a future devoted to writing for young readers. "As a teacher, it was a thrill to read a book aloud, and see a whole class listen so carefully to every word, dying to know what would happen next," he said in an interview in "Something About the Author," a book that examines the lives of children's books authors and illustrators. "And I was amazed at the wonderful discussions a good book can spark." He and his wife moved to Manhattan in 1979 hoping to build a career in music. Both sang he wrote their songs and performed and recorded a demo before, but within a year and a half they decided it wasn't going to be their career. Mr. Clements found work with a publisher of how to books in the early 1980s and with another publisher, Picture Book Studio, soon after. While there, he wrote his first children's book, "Bird Adalbert" (1985), under the name Andrew Elborn. It was illustrated by Susi Bohdal.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Still, this origin story for Batman's archnemesis looks serious, even though it was directed by Todd Phillips, best known for humorous fare like the "Hangover" trilogy. Hauntingly scored with Jimmy Durante's version of "Smile," the trailer shows Fleck dancing with his mother (Frances Conroy), dressing as a clown and getting brutalized by thugs, and being hit by a cab. A "Taxi Driver" vibe permeates the clip, with Phoenix delivering a Travis Bickle style voice over about the decline of Gotham City: "Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?" When Robert De Niro shows up as a Johnny Carson esque talk show host, the scene seems to pay homage to another Martin Scorsese movie, "The King of Comedy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Toby Melville/Reuters; Emon Hassan for The New York Times; Alain Jocard/Agence France Presse Getty Images Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Toby Melville/Reuters; Emon Hassan for The New York Times; Alain Jocard/Agence France Presse Getty Images Credit... Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Toby Melville/Reuters; Emon Hassan for The New York Times; Alain Jocard/Agence France Presse Getty Images Isabel dos Santos's secret to becoming a billionaire in Angola, one of the world's poorest countries, was simple. She got her dad, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Angola's president, to give her money from the nation's treasury. O.K., it wasn't quite that simple. A maze of shell companies, overseas tax havens and complex management and investment schemes funneled millions to and fro before the money ended up in her hands, according to an examination of more than 715,000 leaked emails, contracts and other documents obtained and examined by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with several news outlets, including The New York Times. Yes, this is another tragic tale of a resource rich, underdeveloped country plundered by predatory political leaders and their families. But thanks to the investigation, we also know that Ms. dos Santos had the assistance of Western firms, including the Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey Company and the accountants at PwC, who helped manage some of the 400 companies and subsidiaries in 41 countries controlled by Ms. dos Santos and her husband. In some cases, the couple's advisers oversaw financial transfers that the current Angolan government describes as acts of money laundering. All the while, these Western advisers collected a share of the proceeds. Boston Consulting Group "managed" a Swiss jewelry company that the Angolan government bought with money borrowed at a high rate of interest from a bank controlled by Ms. dos Santos. After she and her husband ran the jewelry company into the ground with lavish spending, the government was left owing 225 million. When Boston Consulting and McKinsey were hired to restructure Angola's state oil business, which Ms. dos Santos eventually ran, the government didn't pay them directly but through a Maltese company owned by Ms. dos Santos and another company owned by her friends, allowing the couple to siphon millions of dollars from the government's payments. Money laundering experts and forensic accountants say PwC, which provided Ms. dos Santos with accounting and tax advice, worked with at least 20 companies she or her husband ran, as Angolan funds went missing, and signs of money laundering were overlooked. Angola offered ideal conditions for such plunder. Rich in oil and diamonds, the country has a history of colonialism, conflict and instability that has left it ripe for the picking. The infant mortality rate is among the highest in the world, about 30 percent of the population subsists on less than 1.90 a day and corruption is endemic Angola ranks close to the bottom of 180 countries in the anticorruption monitor Transparency International's ranking of the world's most corrupt nations. Ms. dos Santos's father, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, was a former revolutionary trained in Soviet Azerbaijan, but as he became Angola's longest ruling president, he shed his Marxism and amassed great wealth. For the record, Ms. dos Santos and her husband, Sindika Dokolo, have insisted they made their fortune, estimated at more than 2 billion, honestly and on their own, and that they are now victims of a political "witch hunt." Friday on Twitter, Ms. dos Santos called the accusations "extremely misleading and untrue" and part of "a very concentrated, orchestrated and well coordinated political attack." The leaked documents show how she obtained stakes in lucrative enterprises diamond exports, mobile phones, banks and a cement maker often through decrees signed by her father. The government of President Joao Lourenco, who succeeded Ms. dos Santos's father when he stepped down in 2017, has frozen Ms. dos Santos's assets and on Thursday announced she would be criminally charged soon. Whether Mr. Lourenco will make headway against the country's corruption, or whether he is simply consolidating power to ensure he gets his share, remains to be seen. On Tuesday, PwC's global chairman, Bob Moritz, told The Guardian newspaper that he was "shocked and disappointed" by disclosures of what his firm did for Ms. dos Santos, and that the company would investigate and take action. Boston Consulting insisted that it had taken steps when hired "to ensure compliance with established policies and avoid corruption and other risks." McKinsey said it wasn't doing any work now with Ms. dos Santos or her companies. The investigative consortium should be commended for exposing the gross misuse of public funds, as it did earlier with the Panama Papers, which exposed the offshore finance industry. But naming and shaming is not enough. The United States requires American banks and other financial firms to report suspicious activity, such as potential money laundering. But the United States does not impose that requirement on law, accounting or consulting firms even though such firms can play a very similar role in helping clients move money to avoid taxation or other legal restrictions. European accounting firms, by contrast, are subject to the same kind of reporting requirements as banks. The European Union requires senior executives at accounting firms to approve relationships with politically connected individuals like Ms. dos Santos, and to take "adequate measures" to ensure that a client's money comes from legitimate sources. Such rules are not a panacea. The European Union has struggled to hold accounting firms to those standards. While PwC did business with Ms. dos Santos, the emails reviewed by the investigative consortium showed that some major banks declined the opportunity. But imposing banklike legal obligations on a broader range of firms that provide financial, tax and legal advice would be an important step forward.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
A robotic unit at Officine Panerai in Neuchatel, Switzerland, simulates six ways someone might wear a watch, to check the timepiece's operation. Sometimes the Little Old Watchmaker Has Circuitry NEUCHATEL, Switzerland After work hours, when the Christophe Claret factory nestled in the heights of the Neuchatel mountains is dark, something still stirs. Inside the 19th century manor, its walls hung with neo Gothic tapestries and old masters style paintings, a low mechanical buzz fills the workshop's ground floor. It comes from the 16 axel robot, armed with a range of 144 tools, that is making the complex watch cases used for Mr. Claret's complicated timepieces. "The 16 axle robot performs all the milling and turning to produce our three dimensional cases," Mr. Claret, the brand's founder, said in an interview in Geneva. "There is nothing like this 16 axle robot anywhere in the watch industry where the standard is just five axles." At a time when the world's human work force is still trying to determine whether artificial intelligence applications and automation will destabilize society or simply bring your room service order more quickly, the Swiss watch industry has a similarly split opinion. Some watchmakers still do everything by hand. Some hesitate to talk about their automated operations: They prefer to perpetuate the narrative of an aged master watchmaker stooped over his workbench. Others, however, are proud of them: "We use state of the art technology to create timepieces in the tradition of Swiss watchmaking," Mr. Claret said. "The two are not incompatible." One such machine, the flashcut laser, which Mr. Claret designed and produced after being inspired by those used in the aerospace industry, can adjust itself to perform what he called "micromanipulation" of minuscule components. It was used, for example, to produce the 11 separate tiny glass pieces, all custom cut, that were needed in the X Trem 1 watch that Mr. Claret introduced in 2012. "Our flashcut laser does in four hours what a standard electrical one does in 72," Mr. Claret said. "This machine can adjust itself to work on elements too small for manual intervention. It allows us to create complications too difficult to accomplish by hand." Mr. Claret, who founded his factory in 1989 and introduced his own watch brand in 2009, employs 65 people. He produces about 100 complicated timepieces per year, considered some of the most complex of the industry. In 2012, he established a separate engineering division, Christophe Claret Engineering, in part to produce the robots he uses in his factory in collaboration with BC Technologies of Le Locle, Switzerland. In Mr. Claret's view, the robots allow his workers to concentrate on the finer points of haute horlogerie. The robots don't mind repetitive tasks and, with proper programming, can perform multiple tasks at once, react to an irregularity or detect defects. And, if there is a malfunction, an engineer can intervene online from home. "Robots are in service of man," Mr. Claret said. "We assemble and finish by hand, but we use these machines for a number of other tasks because, unlike man, they don't make mistakes." Three decades ago, when the Japanese company Seiko Epson first used robots in its quartz watch production lines, it used a prescient slogan: "Someday, all watches will be made this way." It was not until 2013, however, that the first mechanical watch was assembled entirely by robots. The Sistem51 by Swatch, presented at Baselworld that year, was made without human intervention on a 65 foot long assembly line in a clean room environment. As such, it marked a milestone in the history of mechanical watchmaking. Since then, automation has been used in a variety of ways by high end watchmakers. Officine Panerai, the Italian brand founded in 1860, readily admits that robots have helped upgrade its production, especially since 2014 when the Richemont owned business opened a 107,600 square foot state of the art factory in Neuchatel. "In philosophical terms, this modern manufacture has helped achieve two goals, innovation and high quality production," Angelo Bonati, Panerai's chief executive since 2000, said in an interview in February. (Days before, Mr. Bonati had announced his retirement; Jean Marc Pontroue, formerly chief executive of Roger Dubuis, will take the position April 1.) "Today, to show a watchmaker using a metal file is anachronistic," Mr. Bonati said. "We must tell the truth. Some operations remain manual, but principally we use cutting edge machines to achieve the results we need." Panerai, whose annual production is 80,000 watches, develops, assembles and manufactures its own movements. "We have an industrial fleet of about 15 C.N.C. machines, all produced in Switzerland to our specifications, which we regularly update," said Jerome Cavadini, manufacturing director at Panerai. "And we also have intelligent robots." (C.N.C. refers to computer numerical control machines that execute preprogrammed sequences of commands, which, according to Mr. Cavadini, have been used in manufacturing for about 30 years.) "This robot can wind each movement and check its performance in six different positions without interruption for up to the limits of the power reserve, which can be 10 days," Mr. Cavadini said. "It can test precision, detect glitches and record performance in positions that mimic the movement of a human wrist." It even works through the weekends so, when the watchmakers return to the factory on Mondays, the machine has done the chronometric controls necessary for them to start assembly right away. "The robot can also save into a database the performance history of each movement and record information about each of its components," Mr. Cavadini said. Thanks to the performance testing and data registration done by robot, Panerai can look up a watch's complete pre sale history when it is presented for servicing. "Our next objective is to connect that historical data with the 'life experience' of the watch after sale," Mr. Cavadini said. "But we are not there yet." While increased mechanization typically results in reduced manpower, Panerai said it actually had doubled the size of its teams to 250 employees from the 135 it had in 2010. And some employees now perform tasks that did not exist before, like programming and maintaining the machines. Still, Panerai had to take measures to alleviate workers' anxiety, including ensuring that the machine's noise level was not excessive and holding a meeting to answer questions. Also, "we produced a video to explain the functioning of the robots and to show our employees they had nothing to fear," Mr. Cavadini said. "Today, one of our watchmakers is also the programmer of the chronometric robot." Even Richard Mille uses some amount of automation, even though the company makes only 4,600 watches a year small numbers of its 60 models. Mr. Mille's tonneau shaped cases made in high tech materials including grade 5 titanium, N.T.P.T. (north thin ply technology) carbon, carbon nanotubes, ceramic T.Z.P. (tetragonal zirconia polycrystal) require special machining techniques that can be supplied only by machines. Still, for a brand that produces a small number of its many varied designs, Mr. Mille admitted it makes little economic sense to invest heavily in high tech machinery. "Economically, our factory is adapted to our own specific business model," he said. "The machines allow us to achieve both variety and homogeneity in our components across the board." Still, human hands, eyes and experience are necessary where aesthetics come into play. "There is a limit to using high precision machines, and that is in the finishing that requires artistry," Mr. Mille said. "I like to have different types of finishing inside my watches, satin, matte finishes or polishing, and there, we must intervene manually." While not all watchmakers have the means or the desire to invest heavily in modern production methods, Mr. Mille and Mr. Claret are among the few who do and feel that it gives them a competitive edge. "Modern watchmaking is a back and forth between modernity and tradition," Mr. Mille said. "We constantly have one foot in the 21st and the other in the 19th century."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Some 12,000 years ago, the saber toothed cat stalked grasslands across the Americas, pouncing on unsuspecting horses and bison before sinking its ferocious fangs into their throats and bellies. But catching that prey came at a price. The big cats, known as Smilodon fatalis, suffered injuries to their shoulders and lower backs as a result of their hunting, a new study suggests. These battle wounds contrasted with those obtained by another top Pleistocene predator, the dire wolf. The wolves, which chased their prey over long distances and often to exhaustion, instead strained their necks and paws while on the hunt. Paleontologists already thought smilodons ambushed their prey and dire wolves pursued them, but the new study provides further support for the creatures' suspected predatory habits using evidence left behind on their own bones. It also suggests that the smilodon's hunting method might have been riskier than the dire wolf's. The paper was published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. Caitlin Brown, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead author of the study, along with her colleagues analyzed more than 35,000 saber toothed cat and dire wolf bones retrieved from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. During the era in which the saber toothed cats lived, the tar pits were death traps for predators and prey alike. Oftentimes a large herbivore like a mammoth or mastodon would wander into the thick, black pools and become stuck. Carnivores eager for what seemed like an easy meal also waded into the goop, only to fall victim themselves. The tar kept the bones well preserved, albeit stained a dark color. A medical researcher at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where the samples are kept, had previously found signs of trauma on about 2,000 of the bones. The entire collection represented at least 340 smilodons and 370 dire wolves. "Most of the injuries we found were not broken bones or signs of major trauma," Ms. Brown said, "they were signs that the muscles were overworked or arthritis was in the area." Using computer software designed to map concentrations of crime in cities, the team constructed injury hot spot maps for the two predators. The maps highlighted where on their skeletons the animals were damaged most often. They showed that the smilodon was more likely to have hurt its shoulder blades and some of its lower thoracic and lumbar vertebrae than its other bones, and the dire wolf was more likely to have injured its cervical vertebrae, ankles and toe bones than other parts of its body. They found signs of damage on about 4 percent of the saber toothed cat bones and 3 percent of the dire wolf bones. But 56 percent of all injuries on the saber toothed cat occurred on the spine with most occurring in the lower parts and about 65 percent of all dire wolf injuries occurred on the limbs, mostly the paws. "An ambush predator lying in wait was more likely to be injured than something that was running through the terrain," Ms. Brown said. The damaged bones, she said, reflected the predators' different hunting methods. The saber toothed cat most likely suffered damage to its lower back while it twisted and turned trying to wrestle large prey to the ground with its massive forelimbs. The dire wolves may have had their limbs stepped on or kicked as they chased their prey. The wolves also may have suffered more neck injuries than the smilodons because they used their jaws to snap at their prey and shred them apart indiscriminately, which would have opened them up to a retaliatory kick, while the smilodon first used its powerful paws to strike its target before delivering a killing bite. While the bones mostly showed how the saber toothed cats and the dire wolves were different, they also displayed one way the predators were the same: Neither could resist a free lunch stranded in tar.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Sam is 33 years old, unemployed and counting down the days to eviction from his apartment near the Los Angeles reservoir that gives "Under the Silver Lake" its name. He doesn't seem too upset about his situation, though he is kind of a mopey guy. His malaise looks like more of a temperamental or existential condition than the response to a crisis. And he doesn't have it all that bad. There are a few guys who are willing to hang out with him, one woman who is willing to have sex with him and a few more who might be, including a neighbor named Sarah with a fluffy little dog. There's another neighbor who has a lot of birds and walks around topless on her porch, giving Sam an opportunity for a bit of voyeurism and the director, David Robert Mitchell, a chance to nod to "Rear Window." This is one of a great many nods, winks, rib pokes, throat clearings and other gestures in the direction of famous and less famous movies, comic books, video games and songs. At one point, an issue of Spider Man attaches itself to Sam's hand by means of an errant wad of bubble gum, which is a funny coincidence no coincidence at all, in other words because Sam is played by Andrew Garfield, who used to be Spidey. Most of the other allusions in this shaggy dog tale of wild conspiracism and male petulance are not quite so blatantly meta. Sam and the director are both steeped in classic Hollywood, '90s indie rock, and various kinds of vintage memorabilia. The mood borrows from Hitchcock (whose grave figures in one scene), and also from Nicholas Ray, David Lynch, and the Southern California noir tradition more generally. Also Thomas Pynchon, Robert Altman and Raymond Chandler. These aren't esoteric references yielding themselves up to a connoisseur's prying. They are part of the movie's surface, and part of its point. Sam believes that there are clues everywhere, if only he could figure out what they were clues to. He finds hidden messages in comics, song lyrics and antique cereal boxes, and he connects this information with strange happenings around him. Dogs are being killed in the Silver Lake neighborhood. A billionaire dies in a fiery crash. Sarah (Riley Keough) goes missing. Mix and match trios of young women 21st century variations on a meme of Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe in "How to Marry a Millionaire" float through the city. Our man gives chase, gets sprayed by a skunk, and eventually discovers ... Don't worry. It doesn't turn out to matter much. The sweet smarts of Mitchell's first movie, "The Myth of the American Sleepover" (treated to a bit of auto allusion in "Silver Lake") aren't much in evidence here. Nor are the slippery psychosexual scares of "It Follows," his breakthrough horror movie from 2015. The ambitions this time are grander, but also vaguer and duller. Which isn't to say that "Under the Silver Lake" is without some diverting qualities. The light, for one thing. Mitchell and his director of photography, Mike Gioulakis, savor the gorgeousness that has seduced so many previous filmmakers. And there are some moments of humor and surprise embedded in the overwrought intricacies and long slack stretches of the plot. But beyond the coy nostalgia and the timid satire is a feeling of bottomless exhaustion. At a crypt party in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, in the company of a balloon girl (identified as Balloon Girl in the credits and played by Grace Van Patten), Sam jumps to his feet to dance to "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" by R.E.M. It's a song partly about the latent, mysterious meanings embedded in pop ephemera ("I'd studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines"), and as such a plausible anthem for Sam's quest. An equally apt, less pretentious choice might have been ZZ Top's "Tush," since that's mostly what Sam is looking for and the camera is looking at. One of Sam's prized possessions is an issue of Playboy from 1970 (it belonged to his dad), and "Under the Silver Lake" dwells in a hedged, half guilty, self conscious iteration of the magazine's hedonist philosophy. There's plenty of titillation and sexual opportunity, but no real lust, passion or liberatory energy. Even Sam's sense of belatedness feels secondhand. He's a Gen X sensibility trapped in a millennial body, with the tastes and obsessions to match. (Mitchell, it's worth pointing out, is 44 years old). R.E.M. called irony "the shackles of youth," and he drags it around like a Styrofoam ball and chain. Like other guys his age, Sam feels oppressed by an older generation of guys who lay claim to all the credit, the money, the art and the women, while he is left with a literal and spiritual pile of junk that may not mean what he hoped it would. The movie turns his resentment into a cosmic joke. Look, I've been there. But I can't say I sympathize, because there's no basis for sympathy. "Under the Silver Lake" is less a cinematic folly than a category mistake, taking the sterility of its own imaginative conceits for a metaphysical condition. It isn't a critique of aesthetic or romantic ennui, but an example of intellectual timidity. As a Los Angeles movie it lacks the rough, naturalistic edge of "La La Land," and it thinks it's so much cooler than "La La Land."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
MATTHEW ROGERS'S infant daughter was just weeks old when he learned that her grandfather already had plans for her. His father, a college administrator, told him in January that he had started an account for the baby in the Private College 529 Plan, a relatively little known program that lets participants prepay tuition at private colleges and universities, at today's rates. "I'm saying, as a grandparent, that getting an education is a priority," said Fred Rogers, the baby's grandfather. The younger Mr. Rogers, 31, an assistant restaurant manager in Orlando, Fla., was thrilled and grateful. "It's very exciting to have something started so early," he said. Perhaps no financial decision is as laden with emotion as the start of a college savings fund for a child, embodying, as it does, a family's most ardent hopes for the future. And plans like the Private College 529 Plan may tug on family heartstrings more than other types of college savings plans, because they are geared toward a specific group of schools that may have nostalgic appeal for parents. (Some states offer prepaid tuition plans for public universities and at least one, Massachusetts, offers a version that includes public and private colleges in the state). Many parents opening accounts in the Private College 529 plan, for instance, attended one of its 273 member schools, which include such marquee universities as Stanford, Princeton and Duke. Fred Rogers works at and attended a plan participant, Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. The University of Notre Dame, known for its fervently supportive alumni, is the most popular school with students in the plan. Because the emotional draw of the plan is strong, it is important that families carefully consider possible risks. For instance, to benefit from the plan, students must be accepted at a member college, and they do not get extra points in the admissions office for participating. The savings are greatest when families join early, but making such a commitment for a baby is a gamble. A student may later feel financial pressure to choose a college that participates in the plan. "That, I think, is a major problem," said Michael Fitzgerald, chairman of the College Savings Plans Network, a clearinghouse for information about 529 college savings plans. "It's another pressure to put on an 18 year old student." (He also oversees Iowa's state 529 plans as the state's treasurer.) Plan organizers are quick to point out that the program includes a range of colleges, including regional schools like Berry College in Mount Berry, Ga., and Drury University in Springfield, Mo. "There's a school for every student," said Nancy Farmer, president of the consortium that runs the plan. But it is often the elite schools that inspire parents. And the child ultimately may not be capable of competing in the Ivy League or want to do so. "It puts emphasis on the prestige of the school rather than the fit for the child, which is always a mistake," said Madeline Levine, a psychologist and the author of "Teach Your Children Well," a book about the negative impact of parental competitiveness. Yet the program does not include some of the biggest name private colleges, like Harvard and Yale, so a talented student admitted to them cannot use the plan's benefits. Here is how the plan works. Families contribute to a trust and get a certificate representing a share of tuition at current rates, a proportion that remains constant even as tuition rises. So, for instance, if you were to pay in 10,000, and the tuition at a given college were 40,000, the certificate you bought would be worth a quarter of one year's tuition at that college. If, in 10 years, the tuition is 60,000, your certificate would be worth a fourth of that amount, or 15,000. Money must be in the plan for at least three years before it can be used. The plan covers tuition and mandatory fees, but not room and board and other expenses, like books. If your child chooses a college that is not in the plan, you can change the beneficiary of the account, so another family member or relative can use it. Or you can request a refund. But you will earn only 2 percent maximum on your savings in the plan, and you could be subject to a loss of as much as 2 percent, depending on the performance of the trust's investments. (While the value of the tuition certificates are guaranteed, plan documents caution that refunds aren't assured, if the trust lacks funds to pay them. But Ms. Farmer says it's "hard to imagine a scenario" in which that would happen. Refunds have averaged about 1 percent of plan assets for the last five years.) Irene Sang, an optometrist in South Pasadena, Calif., and a graduate of Occidental College, a plan participant, told her two children the plan had a specific menu of colleges, but she also assured them she would find a way to send them to whatever college they wanted. (She also saved in a traditional 529 plan.) Her daughter, Rachel, 17, won early acceptance last fall to Dartmouth College, which is not in the plan, and has an annual tuition of 43,782 a year. Her son, Philip, 19, is a sophomore biology major at Johns Hopkins University, a plan participant. Ms. Sang plans to change the beneficiary on her daughter's plan to her son, because his certificates did not cover all of his tuition. Then she will request a refund of the account balance, to use toward her daughter's tuition. She said the plan had served her well, although the family will probably have to borrow to finance part of her daughter's education. "I have absolutely no regrets," she said. Brenna DeLaine, a doctor and medical director for an insurance company in Columbia, S.C., enrolled in the plan in part because she wanted Spelman College, a participant, to be an option for her daughter, Jai Brenay McQuilla. Ms. DeLaine is a graduate of Spelman, the historically black women's institution in Atlanta. Her daughter visited the campus with her mother as a child and calls her mother's best friends from college her aunts. "I made saving a priority," said Ms. DeLaine, who was alarmed at Spelman's tuition increases. "No matter how tight it got, I paid into it." But when she reached high school, Ms. McQuilla, now 18, thought she might like to go to a big university, perhaps even one on a different coast. She applied to and was accepted at Spelman and also at Pepperdine, which is in the private college plan, and the University of Southern California, which is not. Last spring, fretting that her daughter was taking too long to decide, Ms. DeLaine made a deposit at Spelman. She once overheard her daughter complain of being forced to attend Spelman, but Ms. DeLaine said that was not so. "She knew she wasn't obligated to go to Spelman," Ms. DeLaine said. "I wasn't holding her to it." Ms. McQuilla did eventually choose Spelman, she said, because "Spelman has a reputation for creating successful women." Ms. McQuilla received scholarships to pay for half of her tuition, and the private 529 plan will cover most of the rest, she said. Fred Rogers said he felt no emotional need to have his grandchild attend Carleton, which his wife also attended, or any specific college in the plan. He did, however, talk up Carleton with his three children, and he said Matthew Rogers might have felt pressured about it when he was choosing a college. "He asked me, 'You're not trying to lay this on my daughter, are you?' " he recalled. Matthew Rogers laughs when asked about that. "Carleton was my first college visit," he said. "Go figure!" He graduated from the University of Central Florida with a hospitality degree, he said, and it would be fine with him if his daughter went to a state school. Fred Rogers said he reassured his son, "That has to be her decision." He said he expected his son would let him know if he put too much pressure on her about specific colleges. And if she does not want to attend a participating school, he can always change the beneficiary of the plan.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Gwyneth Paltrow's "living apart together" arrangement with her husband, Brad Falchuk, generated curiosity, but lawyers say the strategy comes with risks. Don't Let the Wrong State Get Between You and Your Assets Gwyneth Paltrow, the actress who created the successful lifestyle brand Goop, said last summer that she and her new husband, Brad Falchuk, were living apart, on purpose. Although recently married, they had opted to maintain separate homes. The practice, known as living apart together, dates at least to the 18th century, both among avant garde artists bucking conformity and working people needing to sacrifice cohabitation for economic necessity. In a recent interview in Harper's Bazaar, Ms. Paltrow said they now live under the same roof. But the curiosity generated by her embrace of the practice gave lawyers and wealth advisers an opportunity to point to its risks. If a couple, wealthy or not, live in different legal jurisdictions, there can be a battle over which municipality's or state's laws prevail if they decide to divorce. "The implications on a couple that is married and wants to dissolve the marriage, that's where you're seeing the ramifications of this," said Michael Stutman, a founding partner of the law firm Stutman Stutman Lichtenstein. He has represented clients in a living apart together arrangement who filed papers in the county or state that would grant them more favorable treatment in a divorce. Divorce is not the only area where choosing one state over another can make a huge financial difference. For certain financial transactions, people can benefit from a state's favorable laws without even living there. It has gotten to the point where some states have begun promoting their ability to offer better protection than their rivals. The competition has also had a leveling effect; "state shopping" is no longer a tactic of the megarich. Merely affluent people looking for a better financial deal for current or future assets now have multiple, cost effective options. But not doing your due diligence can have unintended consequences. "State law makes a difference," said Michael Roberts, president of Arden Trust Company in Atlanta. "If you have not planned, the state has a plan for you." Here are four areas where picking the right state matters as much as choosing the best financial plan. When it comes to divorce, a couple with homes in two states, like California and New York, can face vastly different treatment of marital assets. California is a communal property state, where assets are split in half; New York is what is called an equitable distribution state, meaning there is more latitude in deciding who gets what. Mr. Stutman recently represented a wealthy husband who was living and working in California while his wife lived in New York. When the marriage dissolved, Mr. Stutman said, he acted quickly to file the divorce papers in New York before the wife's lawyer could file in California. "It was a nine figure pot of money, and the difference between the two states was eight figures," he said. "It's a bit of a race to the courthouse." The risk of living apart together exists for people in the same state but different counties. Mr. Stutman said a New York couple could file in any county in the state. Suffolk County, which encompasses the wealthy towns that make up the Hamptons, has traditionally been more favorable to the spouse who earned the money, particularly if the couple owned a home there. Sometimes, the state will make decisions for a couple living apart together. In financial matters, for instance, most states will choose a sibling or a descendant over a partner living in a separate residence, Mr. Roberts said. "If you're living apart together and you want this person to be the beneficiary of your estate, then you need to have a will and spell this out," he said. "If you don't, it may end up with your brother that you can't stand." States also have different views on being private and keeping secrets. Delaware allows for trusts to be set up so beneficiaries don't know they exist until an age determined by the person creating the trust. Other states require that beneficiaries be told of the trust on their 18th or 21st birthday. In Delaware, a person could be kept in the dark until 30 or 40 or later. "Parents don't want to tell someone at 18 that they have this multimillion dollar trust if they can wait until their mid 20s or early 30s," said Joshua S. Miller, senior wealth strategist and managing director at CIBC Private Wealth in Boston. "They want kids to get out of college, get a job, start working a bit, mature." Mr. Miller said he counseled clients not to let a trust be silent for too long. "A silent trust is a tool," he said. "I feel strongly that values, legacy and stewardship are really important. I ask clients, 'Are you able to talk openly about your wealth?'" Long ago, people went to foreign jurisdictions, like Switzerland or the Cayman Islands, to protect their wealth from creditors. But states have long since caught up, with Delaware, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Dakota revamping their trust laws to compete for high net worth individuals who want to shield their assets. No state allows money to be shuffled into a trust in response to a lawsuit, a practice called fraudulent conveyance. But several states allow the transfer of money into a trust that would be protected after a period of, say, 18 months. A legitimate use could be by doctors or contactors who might be sued in the course of their career. The money, though, cannot be commingled with other assets, said Matthew Hochstetler, a trusts and estates lawyer at David J. Simmons Associates who practices in Ohio and Florida. And the process needs to look reasonable. He said he would advise clients to move no more than 50 percent of their wealth into an asset protection trust. Bankruptcy judges do not look kindly on people who have separated assets for protection in a state like Nevada and cannot pay their debts in the state where they live. "Bankruptcy judges love to put you in jail and hold you in contempt," said Jerome M. Hesch, a retired law professor who runs a tax and estate planning institute at the University of Notre Dame. But this is where the courts pit state against state. Generally, exceptions are made in the cases of alimony or child support, but states that allow self settled trusts in which the people setting them up are also the beneficiaries have been challenged for not validating those support exceptions, particularly when the beneficiary lives in a different state. "If you happen to live in a state with special asset protection laws, there is nothing stopping you from taking advantage of your own state's laws," said Justin Miller, national wealth strategist at BNY Mellon (and no relation to Joshua Miller). "The real question, though, is whether individuals can set up a trust for themselves in a state where they don't live and still avoid their own state's law. Will your state respect it?" Moving from a high tax state to a one with low or no income tax is a well known strategy. Of course, it requires the taxpayer to move. But there are other ways to save on income tax and still stay home. Pulling certain assets out of high income tax states like California and putting them into trusts in states with no income tax can save a huge amount of money. The highest rate in California is 13.3 percent; the rate in New York State and New York City combined can go up to 11 percent. Not paying that tax can be an enormous boost to an investor's portfolio gains. "All income reported by a Nevada or Delaware trust pays federal income taxes but no state income tax," Mr. Hesch said. "If the people don't need the money, it accumulates for the future." The only caveat is that the losing state does not always take the loss gracefully.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
had been at her job at a small employment agency for no more than a week, cold calling prospective clients, when, as she tells it, her boss sidled up, demanding, in the argot of the day, that she put out or get out. Ms. Tunney, a retired clinical psychologist in her 70s, was 23 at the time, and panicky. "We were in a recession," she recalled. "Jobs were hard to come by. In those days I had to scramble to buy groceries." No matter. She left. "Stuff like that stays with you," she said. "Even today it scares me to think of it." As for her boss: "I'll never forget him," she said. Then, in a burst of long suppressed rage, she named him. The question remains: What took her so long? "At a certain age psychologically, biogenetically, I don't know you get to the place when a switch flips," Ms. Tunney said. "You tell yourself, 'I'm done.'" Amen to that, her peers would say. She is, after all, but one in a chorus of like minded contemporaries, many of them well educated, outspoken professionals in their 60s, 70s and beyond, who are only now uncorking long bottled up grievances, their ire having reached a tipping point. Some, it would seem, have taken a page from E. Jean Carroll, who was it just a month ago? published "What Do We Need Men For?," a chronicle of abuses she suffered at the hands of predators, including Donald Trump, who, as she writes, assaulted her in the lingerie department of Bergdorf Goodman. (She prefers not to use the word "rape.") Ms. Carroll waited more than two decades to tell the tale. Was there something self serving or opportunistic in her late life disclosure? Well, no. "I am a member of the Silent Generation," she writes. "We do not flap our gums. We laugh it off and get on with life." Many readers will relate, their fuses lit by a catalog of past and current ills: mingy salaries, thwarted ambitions, waning sex lives and gasp! impending mortality. " MeToo has lent some older women permission to speak out in a way that they hadn't before," said Cathi Hanauer , a writer and editor whose anthologies, "The Bitch in the House" and its 2016 sequel, "The Bitch Is Back," examine the sources of women's anger in midlife and beyond. (Her husband, Daniel Jones, edits the Modern Love column for The New York Times.) Some of those women are just now playing catch up with their vociferously outspoken daughters, nieces and granddaughters and with their younger selves. The movement is infectious. "They can release the hurts they've lived with all these years in ways that are vindicating," Ms. Hanauer said. And strikingly in tune with changing times. "Online, younger women feel they are instantly heard," Ms. Hanauer said. "That gives them a feeling of power. Older women didn't have that release. Now they do. They're finally finding a place to vent." Wrath begets wrath. "Outrage is very media friendly," the writer Meghan Daum said, somewhat caustically, in a conversation in the Los Angeles Review of Books. "You get clicks and followers by expressing super indignant versions of the indignant opinions people already have." Still, for a generation brought up to smile in the face of almost any affront or risk being tarred as a harridan, older women's indignation seems ripe for reassessment. Small wonder, then, that with careers, social constraints and family obligations mostly behind them, some have seen fit to go rogue. "What's being loosed," Ms. Tunney said, "is the tendency to let her rip." No need to remind Karla Wright, 76, a retired lawyer living in Greece, "When I was younger, I needed people to like me even though I didn't particularly like them," Ms. Wright recalled in an interview . "Now if they like me or not, who gives a damn?" Early in her career, Ms. Wright learned in the courtroom that women cannot be confrontational in the same way as men. "If you are," she said, "you're going to be seen as shrill." "Over the years, I've evolved a professional style that sort of works for me, which is to be flippant," she said. At home she is often brutally direct: "I argue with my husband more. When we disagree, we will get into it. My feeling is, 'What have I got to lose?'" Marian Rivman, 73, a semiretired public relations consultant, still smarts when she looks back at early impediments to her youthful ambition. As a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines, she instructed local denizens in how to teach science. "I had 20 volunteers working for me," Ms. Rivman said. "But when I returned to the States and went on job interviews, all anyone ever asked me was, 'How fast can you type?' I'm still furious, still dealing with that residual rage." The roots of women's fury can be diffuse. Some rail against being made to feel less desirable than disposable. "There comes a time in life when you look in the mirror and what you want more than anything else in the world is to remember when you were beautiful," said Nancy Weber, a 77 year old writer. Ms. Weber was chilled by Ms. Carroll's tales of sexual assault. But she also sensed a perhaps unintended subtext: The author was saying, "''Look at me, look how they all wanted me,'" Ms. Weber suggested. "If I'm noticing that, it's because I feel it myself." She hasn't entirely cast off the docility that once hobbled her, and she still tends to freeze in the face of a leering taunt. During a trip to the post office earlier this year, a mild seeming clerk locked eyes with her. "Suddenly he was saying to me: 'I know how women like it. They want it hard and thick.'" "You would think I would have raised my fist to punch him in the chin," she said. "Instead I was paralyzed. I couldn't tell my husband about it for two days. I was so distressed, not just by the ugliness of that moment but my inability to do anything useful about it." A sense of shrinking horizons can promote a sense of urgency. "There is less future in which to accomplish our goals, and less tolerance for injustice," said Laura L. Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. "Women are telling themselves: 'Not on my watch is this thing going to happen. This time I'm going to get things right.'" In "The Bitch Is Back," Pam Houston, a writer, confided that she finds herself withdrawing on occasion from friends and loved ones. "That may sound misanthropic," she writes, "but mild misanthropy may simply be a thing intelligent women of a certain age grow into because most intelligent women of a certain age have spent a huge percentage of their lives taking care of other people." As the eldest daughter in an Italian American family, Paula Liscio, an opera singer and former member of the New York City Opera, can relate. Ms. Liscio, 71, was reared with the expectation that, as a single woman, she would stay at home to care for her aging parents and four younger siblings. "Looking back on those years," she said, "I think, 'Oh, we swallowed such a pile of garbage.'" Eventually her parents separated, relieving her of the expectations that had dogged her until then. "I woke up one day and thought, 'I've gone through menopause, I'm not in a relationship, it's time to claim my space,'" she said. Still, it's hard to overlook the lingering rage implicit in her confession that after her encounter with Trump, she never had sex again. "Maybe all this just killed my desire for desire," she said in an interview with The Times. Or maybe she had what Ms. Houston refers to as a hormonal assist. "For so much more of my life than I would care to admit, I thought I might die if some man or another didn't love me," she writes in "The Bitch Is Back." With age, and after years of therapy , those obsessions subsided. Up to then, she said, "not one of those therapists ever told me, 'Just hang in there, Pam, and make it to the other side of 50, and those feelings will turn off like a switch.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Choosing a new armchair isn't just about finding a place to sit it can also change the entire aesthetic of a room. "It offers the opportunity to not only serve a function, but also convey personality," said Will Meyer, a founding partner of the New York based interior design firm Meyer Davis. "That's where the room really starts to take a turn." A big, upholstered armchair, for instance, can ground a seating area and lend a sense of gravitas, Mr. Meyer said, but "a chair with legs conveys a sense of airiness, flexibility and mobility." Selecting the appropriate design also requires understanding how much you will actually sit in the chair. If it's where you plan to flop down for hours every day, comfort should be your primary concern, Mr. Meyer said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
SAN FRANCISCO Since Apple said in January that it would bring back most of the 252 billion it held abroad under the new tax law, investors have wondered what the company would do with the enormous cash pile. On Tuesday, those investors learned that they are in line for a big chunk of the money. Apple said it would buy back an additional 100 billion in stock, by far the largest increase in its already historic record of returning capital to investors. The company didn't provide a timeline for the repurchases. Apple also increased its dividend by 16 percent to 73 cents a share, pushing past Exxon Mobil to become the largest dividend payer, according to S P Dow Jones Indices. Apple's stock buyback fits into a broader trend of companies using the financial windfall from President Trump's tax cut to reward shareholders. Share buybacks, which are reaching record levels, are great for investors, including executives and employees, because they reliably lift stock prices by limiting the supply of shares for sale. But critics say the actions can take money away from potential investments in hiring or research and development, and can increase economic inequality because they typically benefit wealthier people. Investors should want companies to reinvest in themselves and their employees versus repurchasing their own stock to increase the share price, said William Lazonick, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, who studies stock buybacks. "It's nothing but a manipulation of the stock market." Luca Maestri, Apple's chief financial officer, said in an interview that Apple was making significant investments in hiring, research and development, and manufacturing, "but we also have a very, very profitable business." He said that "because we're making all the right investments all around the company, it makes perfect sense for us not to keep the cash on our balance sheet but return it to investors." No company has ever done stock buybacks like Apple. In the most recent quarter, Apple repurchased 23.5 billion in stock the largest single stock buyback ever and more than the market value of 275 of the companies in the Standard Poor's 500 stock index, said Howard Silverblatt, a senior index analyst with S P Dow Jones Indices. In March, Senator Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin Democrat, introduced legislation that would restrict companies' ability to buy back stock, though the bill has little chance of passing. Other academics and investors cheered Apple's continued returns to shareholders. "People like to believe the stories that C.E.O.s do things to boost the short term stock price and line their own pockets," said Alex Edmans, a finance professor at the London Business School. "But if you look at hundreds of examples, you find that stock buybacks do increase long term value." He said that companies typically bought back stock only when they had extra cash that they would not reinvest otherwise, and that investors would spend that money elsewhere. Apple said its profit increased 25 percent to 13.8 billion in the most recent quarter on the back of strong revenue growth for iPhones, the Apple Watch and its services business. Apple earned 2.73 a share, it said, beating Wall Street estimates by 6 cents. Revenue rose 16 percent to 61.1 billion. The three months ending with March were Apple's first full quarter selling its new flagship phone, the iPhone X. Analysts had pointed to signs, including the financial results of Apple's suppliers, that the device and its sister iPhone 8 and 8 Plus had not revitalized Apple's iPhone business as the company had hoped. Many analysts lowered their estimates for Apple in recent weeks as a result. Apple said it sold 52.2 million iPhones in the quarter, or 3 percent more than a year earlier. But an 11 percent increase in their average price driven by the 1,000 iPhone X helped raise iPhone revenue by 14 percent.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The California Sunday Magazine, a sumptuously produced and award winning magazine that got its start as a throwback to the glory days of print, has suspended publication after Emerson Collective, the organization founded by the billionaire investor Laurene Powell Jobs, severed ties with its parent company. It's most likely the end of the magazine, which has won three National Magazine Awards since its founding in 2014. Two years ago, Emerson Collective acquired Pop Up Magazine Productions, the company behind California Sunday and the multimedia outlet Pop Up Magazine. Eleven staff members at the two properties were laid off, Pop Up's union said on Twitter on Wednesday. Douglas McGray, the chief executive of Pop Up Magazine Productions and editor in chief of California Sunday, confirmed the layoffs in an interview on Wednesday, as well as the halt in California Sunday's print and online publication. With a focus on California, Asia, Latin America and the American West, California Sunday was included in some Sunday editions of The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle until May. Under pressure from the economic downturn after the coronavirus's arrival in the United States, it went digital only in June.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
LONDON Two intriguing, elusive people I was never close to before are suddenly feeling like my new best friends. I've known Bobbie and Caroline for ages. Yet it now seems that I really hadn't known them at all. They're so much warmer and cooler, funnier and sadder, more profound and more accessible than I recalled. The leading characters of the musicals "Company" and "Caroline, or Change" have been born again in two gloriously transformative revivals here. And they're singing with their hearts in their throats, with the power to make grown men (well, this one, anyway) cry. Amazing, isn't it, what a decade or so, a trip across the ocean and the perspective afforded by distance can do? And, oh yes, in the case of one of them, a change of gender. You've perhaps heard that Bobby, an angsty bachelor of 35, has been reincarnated as Bobbie, an angsty unmarried woman of the same age, in Marianne Elliott's enthralling revival of "Company," Stephen Sondheim and George S. Furth's 1970 take on the stings and sorrows of being single in swinging Manhattan. And what sounds like a gimmick turns out to be a godsend. Starring Rosalie Craig as Bobbie, in a performance destined to redefine both a character and a career, this "Company," at the Gielgud Theater, has emotional coherence and clout that it never possessed in my previous experiences of the show. The same is true for Michael Longhurst's blazing interpretation of Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's "Caroline, or Change" at the Playhouse Theater. With a magnificent Sharon D. Clarke in the title role of an African American maid in a Jewish household in Louisiana in the early 1960s, a work that might be described as a Marxist chamber opera expands in compelling ways that make it both more epic and more intimate. "Caroline" and "Company" were always smart and imaginative shows. In these productions, their hearts have caught up with their heads. Though a source of some classic Sondheim cabaret standards ("Being Alive," The Ladies Who Lunch"), "Company" has shown its age in recent performances, like a Nehru jacket that its male characters might wear. In particular, its leading man, the unhappily uncommitted Bobby, felt like a cipher and even a bit of a bore, as he assessed the lives of "those good and crazy people," his "married friends." Even etched memorably in smoldering fire and defensive ice by Raul Esparza in John Doyle's 2006 Broadway revival, Bobby was still hard to embrace or fully understand. No wonder his girlfriends said of him in the great, close harmony trio "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" that "you impersonate a person better than a zombie should." Those lyrics are delivered (deliciously) by three men in Ms. Elliott's version of "Company," as a barbed valentine to the character now named Bobbie. Though you know where they're coming from (Bobbie is as quick to send her one night stands packing as the male version was), you're unlikely to agree with them. That's because, as played by Ms. Craig, Bobbie wears her feelings on her face and in her long limbed question mark of a body, and in her tender, yearning voice in a way that the audience can always read, even if her friends and lovers can't. Like the Bobbys of yore, she's amused and frightened by the perilously coupled partners around her. That double edged response, by the way, really makes sense when one of them is played, as she is here, by Patti LuPone (in fine, penetrating voice and glowering form as Joanne, the part immortalized by Elaine Stritch). But Ms. Craig's Bobbie radiates a longing that turns wistfulness into something close to existential anguish. No wonder she drinks so eagerly, and so much. This revival also underscores our awareness that being a woman at 35 is still different from being a man of the same age. Bobbie enjoys her independence and her solitude in a very female way. (She's annoyed when her dates leave the toilet seat up.) She also has alarming fantasies of motherhood, in which she sees an assortment of overstressed alter egos pregnant or tending, exhausted, to needy newborns. And as designed by Bunny Christie who collaborated to dazzling effect with Ms. Elliott on the Tony winning "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" the latter day Manhattan of this "Company" bears a tickling resemblance to Lewis Carroll's Wonderland. Bobbi's feelings of being odd woman out in the land the smugly married is externalized in rooms that keep changing shape and size making her look grotesquely large, crushably small and even invisible. That this "Company" is set, the program says, "in modern day New York" only occasionally begets anachronisms. Would a couple in the second decade of the 21st century really find smoking marijuana a forbidden novelty? On the other hand, there's a new, seriously affecting kinship between Bobbie and the character formerly known as Amy. The reluctant bride who sang the showstopping "Getting Married Today" has here been blissfully reconceived as reluctant gay groom, played to agitated perfection by Jonathan Bailey. My date for "Company," by the way, was a British woman who didn't know the show, but had lived in New York in the 1990s, when she was in her early 30s. She marveled at how true the story felt to her own life then and said she couldn't imagine the musical with a man in the central role. In other words, Ms. Elliott's reconceived "Company" is that convincing. No similarly radical alterations have been made to "Caroline, or Change." The libretto by Mr. Kushner (the author of the epochal "Angels in America") remains the same tight, carefully patterned study of how an early lesson in economics left a young Southern boy with a scarring legacy of guilt. The 8 year old Noah Gelman (a very good Aaron Gelkoff at the performance I saw), mourning the recent loss of his mother, keeps leaving spare change in his pockets. And his stepmother (Lauren Ward) decides that the family's maid, Caroline Thibodeaux (Ms. Clarke), whom Noah idolizes, should be allowed to keep whatever money she finds in his clothes. From this simple plot premise, Mr. Kushner spins ever widening variations on the idea of change personal and historical as Caroline finds herself sandwiched between white liberal condescension and a burgeoning spirit of African American rebellion and resistance, embodied with particular piquancy by her teenage daughter, Emmie (the excellent Abiona Omonua). Then as now, the intelligence of Mr. Kushner's text is matched by the seamless variety of Ms. Tesori's score, which incorporates rhythm and blues, Klezmer, gospel and folk into one shifting but seamless whole. When I first saw "Caroline" more than 15 years ago at the Public Theater in a production directed by George C. Wolfe and starring a very fine Tonya Pinkins I found much to admire but less to love. Its impeccably assembled elements often felt self conscious to me, and I kept a spectator's distance. But Mr. Longhurst's production designed by Fly Davis, with lighting by Jack Knowles elicits a common core of loneliness among the characters, while embracing the centripetal whirl that both keeps them apart and flings them into collision. A similar double vision is focused on Caroline, a struggling single mother of four who knows she's been cheated by life, but is damned if she's going to show it. In Ms. Clarke's rendering, those socially suppressed feelings churn with such intensity that it makes sense they should endow the inanimate with life. When her washer (Me'sha Bryan) and dryer (Ako Mitchell) sing to her, they're internal voices that taunt and console. We hear the radio music she listens to through her ears, as it assumes the form of a Supremes like trio with a Motown beat (Dujonna Gift Simms, Tanisha Spring and Keisha Amponsa Banson). And as the stage revolves beneath a silver spangled moon (Angela Ceasar) crooning about flux and stasis, we sense a forward rushing, cohesive momentum, a sense of time passing and altering and destroying that was absent in the original "Caroline." It's a force that pushes some people forward and leaves others stranded, and so bereft and isolated it breaks your heart. These include, inevitably and tragically, Caroline. And Ms. Clarke gives final, devastating voice to this awareness in a climactic aria that seems to shake the theater's very foundations. Like Ms. Craig in "Company," Ms. Clarke finds the pulsing dynamic in surface passivity. And a show I once described as "too good to be good" grows into the titanic dimensions of greatness.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
A travel tip for the Dolomites: You don't want to be the driver, negotiating steep hairpin turns and bands of Italian cyclists pedaling through dangerously narrow mountain passes. You want to be the passenger, the one hanging her head out the window, mouth agape, transfixed on the mountain peaks and gloriously green valleys. This monumental mountain range in northeastern Italy is one of the world's most beautiful playgrounds for outdoor adventurers, from winter skiers to summer hikers, bikers, mountain climbers and more. But equally fascinating is its cultural heritage. Much of the region was Austrian until annexation by Italy after World War I, and the distinctive local cuisine reflects these roots; expect lots of speck, sauerkraut, knodel and strudel. From valley to valley, village to village, you'll still encounter mostly German, some Italian with a lilting accent, as well as Ladin, an umlaut heavy language native to this remote region. But though road signs are posted in two or three languages, the otherworldly beauty of the Dolomites needs no translation. To understand a place, one must understand its history, so begin a visit to the Dolomites with a lesson on its war torn past. At the hillside Bunker Museum (admission, EUR5, or about 5.80), descend into a chilling Cold War bunker where installations trace the South Tyrol region's history through fascism and the fight for autonomy. Delve further into the past at the Forte Tre Sassi (EUR7), a mountaintop museum in a disused fort that examines the hardships that World War I soldiers faced, and the fierce battles fought around the surrounding mountain passes. (Those with more time can also visit the area's Great War themed open air museums to hike through the trenches and tunnels used in tragic battles between the Italian and Austro Hungarian armies.) Or, if driving into the region from the west, stop at the imposing Forte di Fortezza, a labyrinthine fortification spanning nearly 50 acres that was constructed by Austria out of fear for the French in the 19th century and has now opened as a museum (EUR7). High above the town of Bruneck, dine on traditional Tyrolean cuisine at Oberraut, an alpine chalet with homey wood paneled dining rooms and dirndl clad servers. The menu features dishes made with products grown on the property; for instance, delicious bread dumplings called canederli are made with meadow herbs and served with fresh greens from the garden (EUR12.50). Or book a table at Osteria Garsun, a family run restaurant with a hearty set menu of Ladin specialties (EUR25), which recently included panicia, a vegetable and barley soup, and casunziei, or house made half moon ravioli served with melted butter, ground poppy seeds and Parmigiano cheese. Save room for two rounds of dessert, including warm apple strudel and a bracing shot of grappa. After dinner, join the local crowd gathered beside the river in Bruneck at Brunegg'n, a cocktail bar with live music country, folk, rock and D.J. sets on weekend nights. At a table on the terrace, order the Colonial I.P.A. from the Bolzano brewery Batzen Brau (EUR5.50), or try the Hugo Mango, a fruity twist on the bubbly Tyrolean elderflower cocktail (EUR4.50). One of the most spectacular hikes to tackle in a half day is the six mile circumnavigation of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, three distinctive mountain peaks that loom large along the entirety of the trail. The stony paths are relatively easy and well marked, making this one of the most popular (and crowded) Dolomite hikes. The trail begins at Rifugio Auronzo and loops around the rugged spires, past meadows of wildflowers, small lakes and a few rifugi (mountain huts). There's ample parking at the trailhead, and a EUR30 road tariff per car. When it's time to refuel, head to Pur Sudtirol, a grocery shop and cafe where everything from the yogurt and cheeses to ripe summer peaches comes from the surrounding territory. Gather a selection of picnic supplies, perhaps some speck, graukase (a pungent Tyrolean cheese named after its gray rind), apple cider and a loaf of crusty rye. Or order lunch at the cafe, which offers fresh salads and daily specials, like cheesy knodel on a bed of chopped cabbage. Lunch, about EUR12. After scaling his first summit at the age of 5, Reinhold Messner went on to become a famed mountaineer the first to summit every mountain over 8,000 meters (including Mount Everest, solo). Now in his 70s, Mr. Messner has founded a series of museums in his native Dolomites. The most recent, the Messner Mountain Museum Corones, is a podlike complex designed by Zaha Hadid atop Kronplatz, elevation 7,500 feet. Ride the ropeway to the summit to admire sky high views, then tour the museum's exhibits dedicated to the history of mountaineering and its trailblazing pioneers (admission, EUR10). Afterward, meander to the meadow where a herd of horses graze, or ascend the peak's via ferrata, one of the protected "iron path" climbing routes with steel cables that aid rock climbing throughout the Alps. Though the region is most known for its white wines, skip the sylvaner and riesling in favor of little known Alto Adige reds during a tasting at Abbazia di Novacella, a pastoral monastery of Augustinian canons founded in the 12th century that produces wine from grapes grown in the surrounding terraced vineyards. Prefer the robust Santa Maddalena or the sweet schiava? The aromatic lagrein or the zesty zweigelt? At a table in the Stiftskeller, the monastery's bustling cantina, sip your way through the menu; if you discover a new favorite, the on site wine shop sells bottles to go. Michelin stars hang over the Alta Badia, a beautiful valley dotted with polished resort towns. In the well heeled village of San Cassiano, a fleet of Porsches park outside the Hotel Rosa Alpina and its acclaimed restaurant, St. Hubertus, which last year earned a third Michelin star for Norbert Niederkofler's haute mountain cuisine (tasting menus from EUR200). And down the road at the Ciasa Salares hotel, a rising star chef (and St. Hubertus alumnus) has caught the attention of the culinary world. Not yet 30 years old, Matteo Metullio earned a second Michelin star last year for his game focused cuisine at the hotel's La Siriola restaurant (tasting menus from EUR130). The town of Brixen (Bressanone in Italian) has deep roots as a religious and cultural center of the region. In the cool morning light, visit the cathedral, which dates to 980 and boasts an Austrian Baroque facade, beautiful frescoes and a marble clad altar. Equally impressive is the adjoining cloister, where Gothic frescoes believed to have been painted in the 14th and 15th centuries adorn Romanesque colonnades around a contemplative garden. Launch yourself off a mountaintop with just a few running steps, a harness fastened to your tandem paragliding instructor and perhaps a quick prayer. Then sit back for a euphoric flight among the majestic Dolomite peaks and down into the valley below. One of the most experienced outfits is the Fly2 tandem paragliding team, who have been flying in the Val Gardena for over 20 years (various launch locations and flight durations, from EUR110). After a smooth landing, ride the adrenaline wave back into the mountains aboard a cardinal red gondola that ferries riders from Ortisei to the top of Mont Seuc (EUR19.40 round trip). This summit, with an elevation of over 6,500 feet, offers a sweeping panorama of the Alpe di Siusi, the largest alpine plateau in Europe. Beyond the plateau's meadows rises a spectacular series of mountain peaks, including the rugged pinnacle of Sassolungo and the flat topped Sasso Piatto. From here, you might hike or cycle through the green meadows (mountain bike rentals available at the base). Or simply settle in at Ristorante Mont Seuc, where the weissbiers are cold, and tables on the outdoor terrace offer front row seats to one of the finest Dolomite views. Those seeking low key, family friendly lodgings will find an abundance of chalet style options, such as the welcoming Hotel Tannenhof, a rustic 35 room resort near Bruneck (Via Reipertinger 3, Riscone; hotel tannenhof.it; doubles from EUR92). The family run Hotel Rosa Alpina is the premier luxury property in the region with a three Michelin starred restaurant, exclusive spa and 51 mountain chic rooms and suites (Strada Micura de Ru 20, San Cassiano; rosalpina.it; doubles from about EUR500). In the Alpe di Siusi, the Adler Mountain Lodge boasts a mid piste location with 30 rooms spread between private cabins and a modern lodge (Via Piz 11, Alpe di Siusi; adler lodge.com; from EUR800 per person in September).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
In the '70s, Halston's show at Olympic Tower was the ticket of the week, conceived in a modernist way that hadn't been seen before, against a backdrop of glass walls with a view all the way downtown. He seemed to know that it was glamour people wanted. A cashmere floor length sweater would turn into an evening dress with the addition of an Elsa Peretti snake belt or a beautiful silver harness, a cashmere wrap thrown over one shoulder. The twin sets, the Ultrasuede: It was the language of fashion that permeated the '70s, and it had a lasting effect. His shows were a merging of fashion, art, culture and the society of that time. You would see in one row Andy Warhol with his camera, Martha Graham, Lily Auchincloss, Diana Vreeland and Bianca Jagger. But his stable, his family, it was the models, the Halstonettes. They would go out together to the Met Ball, to the clubs, spilling out into New York dressed in appropriately dazzling evening clothes. They would travel as a posse and merge, along with Liza and Andy, on the banquettes at Studio 54. In the 1970s, we were coming into something new. There were clubs: the Loft, the Circus, the private clubs, all dingy and sexually oriented. One night, Steve Rubell was turned away at one of them. He turned to me and said: "I'm going to get revenge. You'll see, Pat. Everyone will come to my club." Then along came this wonderful Studio 54, where you could dress up and be seen. We wore these see through tulle gold dresses and blinding electric looking shoes. Our hair was fuzzed and teased. Everybody was looking twinkly, like in a fairy tale. In those days, people could go under the bridge and get inspired by the drag queens. And it was all reflected on the streets and in the shows. The most exuberant show I ever went to was the Lane Bryant show. Freddie Leiba had styled it. In the old days, if you were a large size woman, you were propelled in the direction of modest, covered up fashion. But Freddie made the show cheeky and sexy. I was sitting next to Isaac Hayes. He was wearing an amazing embellished caftan. All through the show, he kept up a wonderful rapping commentary in my ear, saying over and over, "My, these ladies are deliciously endowed." In the spring of 1994, I was doing the creative consulting and the production for a Calvin Klein fashion show. We were doing model go sees where you have models try on the collection and Nadja Auermann walked in, this 6 foot 1 Amazon. Calvin put a quintessential nude on nude chiffon tank dress on her. She looked stunning, and her body was totally filling out the dress. Meanwhile, waiting behind a rack in the dressing room was Kate Moss. And Calvin said, "Put the dress on Kate," and we put the dress on Kate, who was 5 foot 7. The dress fell away from her body. Calvin took one look and said, "Put the flat sandals on her." And then I said, "Take out the lining." In that instant, we went from this Amazonian, athletic, full bodied movie star model to this teenage girl with no makeup and stringy hair. And that is how the waif was born. The Proenza Schouler graduate thesis collection at Parsons in the early 2000s was not an extravaganza, but from that first collection you could see the makings of a quintessential New York fashion house. The designers, Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, had this uptown downtown aesthetic. We at Barneys were over budget, but they put on such a good performance during the initial selling appointment that we bought the collection. Unbeknown to us, they had nothing to work with: no material, no production. But they figured it out, delivered the collection on time and we sold it. In 1985, we did a show in New York for Comme des Garcons. They were about to open a store in Manhattan. We did the show in this amazing building, like a garage, in Long Island City. Jean Michel Basquiat walked the runway. Just at the end of the show, as everyone was preparing to leave, it started to snow a glistening, soft snow. And through it we could just make out the skyline of New York. It was like a fairy tale. The first Marc Jacobs show I ever saw was in the early 1980s, at Charivari the fashion boutique, now shuttered , where they were selling Marc's collection. A model came out wearing a sweater with a big smiley face on it. Marc's grandmother, I think, had knitted the sweater. It was such a happy sweater and such a happy collection. You knew you were seeing a young star. When Marc Jacobs introduced his grunge collection that was inspired by Nirvana for Perry Ellis , I didn't get it. I thought, "What is this mess?" Later I understood that it was an important moment. I don't know if it sold in the stores, but the collection turned fashion in the direction of something more youthful. It was anti fashion fashion. I loved Marc's grunge show. I was at Bazaar with Liz Tilberis Bazaar's editor in chief at the time. Anna Sui was showing grunge, too. Because I knew both Marc and Anna, their choice of inspiration didn't strike me as odd. The inspiration was all thrift, but it was done in a luxurious way. The models wore layers and double hats. Supposedly Marc got fired from Perry Ellis after that show because the collection wasn't part of the DNA of the house. But to me it was gorgeous and not so far off from what Perry originally stood for. We photographed it right away. My first show in New York was Marc Jacobs, in February 2009. I had no idea how the fashion system worked, no idea what the press system was. I just thought: "O.K. Marc Jacobs invited me to the show. I have to go." In one of the earliest shows that I did I would imagine it was in 1978 people had to walk through the dressing room and, from there, the entire length of the showroom to find their seats. Niki de Gunzburg, who was an editor at Vogue and my mentor, arrived, and Carrie Donovan and Polly Mellen, who at that time was at Harper's Bazaar. Women's Wear Daily was there and a slew of other editors. There was always this rivalry among them about who gets which piece first to photograph for their publications. Then suddenly, in the middle of the show, the music stopped. In those days, we had reel to reel tapes playing in a different room at the far end of the showroom. That meant I had to pick myself up and walk through the showroom past all the guests to where the tape recorder was. I found the tape all jumbled up. I don't know what I did, but it started to play again. Everyone started applauding. We were showing fall 1991 in the middle of a heat wave at the end of April. I thought I was being a renegade putting on my show in a raw loft space. There was no air conditioning and only one set of elevators. The girls backstage were dripping sweat. I started the show. We were on the fifth outfit, and from backstage I heard an explosion. It sounded like gunfire. Naomi Campbell came running backstage to tell me, "The ceiling just fell." So we swept up the dust, I turned down the volume and the show went on. One of my favorite shows was the Western show I did in the '70s at the St. Regis hotel. Alva Chinn came out on the runway dancing to disco music. She was wearing some little fur thing and a chamois shirt. Beverly Johnson was in a bright red fur coat. In the middle of the show, all of a sudden, the lights went out and stayed out. All I could think at the time was: "Oh, no! This show is fantastic. And now nobody is going to be able to see the clothes." Managing director, Liberty of London; former executive, Henri Bendel and Bergdorf Goodman I was in the front row at Miguel Adrover's fall 2001 show. The space was tentlike, and there was a huge amount of incense, really, really heavy. The lights went down, and out came the first of the looks. That's when they led out the sheep. The runway was raised. A sheep stumbled and landed in the pit between the runway and the spectators. It landed right next to me. We were wrestling it to the ground. All I could think about was that poor crazed sheep. We were working with threeASFOUR. It was the late '90s, and they were then AsFour: Adi, Gabi, Kai and Angela. We were going to be showing at Gotham Hall, a very big venue, but they were fighting all the time. It was: "No, we're not going to do a show. No, we're breaking up." I pulled them together, and I told them: "Here's what's going to happen. People have responded to their invitations. You'll have a full house. If you don't get yourselves together right now, I'm going to stand up at your show with a megaphone and tell everyone how selfish and disturbed you are."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Alison Lurie, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer whose mordant novels punctured pretension, deflated dogma and illuminated the staggering talent of smart people for self deception, died on Thursday at a hospice center in Ithaca, N.Y. She was 94. The death was confirmed by her husband, Edward Hower. Ms. Lurie, who was also a folklorist, a writer and scholar of children's literature and a longtime Cornell University faculty member, was the author of 10 novels, as well as short story and essay collections. As a novelist, Ms. Lurie was an anthropologist of contemporary absurdity. Praised by critics for her crystalline prose, her dry, delicious wit, and her microscopic powers of observation, she dirtied, and then gleefully aired, her protagonists' elegant linen in book after book. In novels that were small morality plays, characters (educated, often self regarding men and women) couple, have buyer's remorse and recouple with new partners, often with disastrous consequences, in a ceaseless recombinant two step. Ms. Lurie's novels were often called comedies of manners, but perhaps it is more apt to call them comedies of mortification "mortification" in the sense of both social embarrassment and the inevitable slouch toward decay. Reviewers often compared her fiction with its eye for the domestic and its concern with the artifice of a certain social set to that of Henry James and, in particular, Jane Austen. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ms. Lurie, American born and bred, by all accounts enjoyed an even larger reputation in Britain than she did in the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, she was best known for two novels of intellectual and corporeal folly: "The War Between the Tates" (1974), a best seller, and "Foreign Affairs" (1984), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1985. Set against the background of the war in Vietnam, "The War Between the Tates" centers on Brian Tate, a professor of political science, and his wife, Erica. Marooned in midlife, Brian, who had expected to become an eminence grise, has begun to fear he will end up merely grise. He embarks on an affair with a psychology graduate student, who, Ms. Lurie writes, looks upon him with none of "the hard glaze of self concealment as a prelude to self advancement the yellow signal 'Caution' which glowed so often in the eyes of his own graduate students." Instead, "Her gaze was pure green light." In "Foreign Affairs," Ms. Lurie follows two academics Vinnie Miner, a dowdy middle aged authority on nursery rhymes, and her younger colleague, the caddish Fred Turner, a scholar of 18th century English literature on a sabbatical leave in London. Against her better judgment, Vinnie begins a passionate liaison with a man she has met on the flight over: Chuck Mumpson, an American boor as lumpish as his name. Fred, meanwhile, engages in a torrid and high toned affair of his own. Both novels, like much of Ms. Lurie's work, are meticulous ethnographic reports on a particular tribe, the set of well read, well heeled intellectuals she knew firsthand. Both are organized around themes pivotal to much of her fiction: campus shenanigans (often of the bedroom kind); matrimonial betrayals; class and intellectual snobberies and the essential solipsism underpinning them; and the failure of utopian communities, however pre emptively constructed, to keep disappointment and anomie at bay. Both novels were made into television movies: "The War Between the Tates" in 1977, with Richard Crenna and Elizabeth Ashley, and "Foreign Affairs" in 1993, with Joanne Woodward, Brian Dennehy and Eric Stoltz. The scholars in these books teach at Corinth University in Corinth, N.Y., an upstate institution to which Ms. Lurie's fiction returned again and again. Corinth was a figment of her imagination, though only just: One can easily call to mind a similar sounding university in upstate New York, likewise in a town with a classical name. Characters, too, recur throughout her novels, disappearing and reappearing like strands of bright thread, and Ms. Lurie maintained dossiers to keep track of them all. She was occupied in particular with the Zimmern family, an artistic, neurotic clan whose members can be glimpsed sometimes fleetingly, sometimes head on throughout her books. Leonard Zimmern, an astringent literary critic, appears in many novels, including "The War Between the Tates"; "Real People" (1969), about goings on in an artists' colony; and "The Last Resort" (1998), about a despondent naturalist in Key West, Fla. In "Foreign Affairs" we meet Leonard's daughter Roo, the estranged wife of the philandering Fred Turner. Leonard's half sister Lolly is seen as a girl in "Only Children" (1979), about unraveling marriages in the 1930s. As an adult, Lolly, who became a distinguished painter known as Lorin Jones, is at the center of "The Truth About Lorin Jones" (1988), in which a biographer tries to make sense of Lorin's enigmatic life. Some critics found Ms. Lurie's characters brittle and unlikable, little more than archetypes. But as Ms. Lurie made clear in interviews, she was quite fond of all her characters, despite the myriad flaws they insisted on displaying. After all, she said, she had known from a very early age that she wanted to spend her life conjuring worlds whole, and peopling them in whatever way she chose. Alison Stewart Lurie was born in Chicago on Sept. 3, 1926, and reared in White Plains, N.Y. Her mother, Bernice (Stewart) Lurie, was a journalist and book critic, her father, Harry, was a sociologist who directed the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, an umbrella organization for Jewish social service agencies. A forceps delivery left Alison "deaf in one badly damaged ear," as she wrote in 1982 in an autobiographical essay for The New York Times Book Review, "and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer." Ms. Lurie earned a bachelor's degree in history and literature from Radcliffe in 1947 and the next year married Jonathan Peale Bishop, a literary scholar, with whom she had three sons. She embarked on the life of a faculty wife, following her husband from Harvard to Amherst College to the University of California, Los Angeles, to Cornell, writing in stolen moments. Her first novel, "Love and Friendship," about affection and disaffection in the lives of faculty couples, was published in 1962. The title is a deliberate homage to that of an early Jane Austen novella. Ms. Lurie's other fiction includes "Women and Ghosts" (1994), a volume of stories whose specters are more psychological than supernatural but no less real for that, and "Imaginary Friends" (1967), a novel about sociologists behaving badly. Her books for children include a collection of retold stories, "Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales" (1980), illustrated by Margot Tomes. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Ms. Lurie was also esteemed as a writer of nonfiction. In "The Language of Clothes" (1981), she examined the semiotics of dress. In two volumes of criticism, "Don't Tell the Grown Ups" (1990) and "Boys and Girls Forever" (2003), she explored the subversive qualities that, she argued, are inherent in the best literature for children. And in the memoir "Familiar Spirits" (2001), she recalled her friendship with the poet James Merrill and his lover, David Jackson. Ms. Lurie's marriage to Mr. Bishop ended in divorce in 1984. Along with Mr. Hower, a novelist, with whom she maintained homes in London, Key West and Ithaca, she is survived by a sister, Jennifer Cooke; her sons from her first marriage, John, Jeremy and Joshua Bishop; two stepchildren; and three grandchildren. Because Ms. Lurie skewered zealotry of every stripe, readers attempting to divine her ideology from her books were sometimes misled. A string of modern "isms" incurred her tart scrutiny, and because an exclusionary brand of 1970s feminism was one of them, she was sometimes taxed as anti feminist. "I consider myself a feminist and not a separatist," Ms. Lurie told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1994, invoking "The Truth About Lorin Jones." "There's a character in the book who tries to stay as far away from men as possible. She regards men as being the enemy. I'm against that." "Even if you think there are things wrong with men," Ms. Lurie added, "you owe it to them to help them improve."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Photos of Gillian Anderson occupied a special place on Gabriela Hearst's spring fashion mood board. "She was my muse," Ms. Hearst said. "So sexy, so strong: the image of intelligent beauty." So when Ms. Anderson turned up in the flesh at the Hearsts' West Village townhouse last week, wearing a breezy striped dress of Ms. Hearst's design, the moment seemed surreal. Conversation, up to then a lively mash up about breeding polo ponies and cloning men, came to a brief but pregnant halt, all eyes fixed on the actress, whose open faced candor seemed at odds with her signature roles. Ms. Anderson, 47, has after all honed her craft portraying weirdly troubled heroines: the special agent Dana Scully in "The X Files," Lily Bart in "The House of Mirth," the police superintendent Stella Gibson in "The Fall," and most recently Blanche DuBois in a revival of "A Streetcar Named Desire" first staged in London and set to open Sunday in Brooklyn at St. Ann's Warehouse. She slipped out of character at the Hearsts, where she encountered a cozy scene: Gabriela dandling her 10 month old, Jack, while friends and family gathered around among them the designer and actor Waris Ahluwalia, Lauren Hutton and Ms. Hearst's husband, the film producer Austin Hearst. "Ooh, can I take you home?" Ms. Anderson said, cooing as she leaned over Jack, who was gingerly toying with Ms. Hutton's straw hat. "Oh, it's fine, let him play," Ms. Hutton said, murmuring to no one in particular, never mind any havoc that the baby might wreak. Recovering their balance over cocktails and canapes, the guests besieged Ms. Anderson. "When is 'The Fall 3' coming out?" Ms. Hearst wanted to know. "We're all obsessed." When would previews of "Streetcar" begin? What makes Blanche such a coveted role? "I don't think I necessarily knew that it was coveted, but I'd wanted to play her for years," Ms. Anderson said. "When I started working on the lines, I realized I already knew one of the monologues by heart. "Blanche is one of the most complex characters I have ever played, so innocent, desperate, grief filled, sad and funny, so many layers there all at once." With that, Ms. Hutton leaned forward. "My mother was Blanche," she said a bit sourly. Minnie Hutton, an aristocratic Southern belle once characterized by her daughter as a lethal beauty, "was deeply, downwardly mobile," Ms. Hutton lamented. Ms. Anderson nodded in empathy. "Blanche lives in fantasy," she said. "That's the only way she can survive." An actress, she knows, has a similarly precarious shelf life. Ms. Anderson, who was brought up in the United States but spent much of her childhood in England, toggles nimbly between crisp Americanese and a plummy British accent. "I consider myself American, but in America I was only one thing," she said of her nine years investigating the paranormal in "The X Files," a role that she recently reprised. By contrast, "In England I was embraced as a holistic actor," she said, and was promptly offered classic Dickens parts, among them the society beauty Lady Dedlock in "Bleak House," and the eerie Miss Havisham in "Great Expectations." If her perceived Englishness has given her an edge among New Yorkers (and a bump in ticket sales), Ms. Anderson claims not to have noticed. Her success, she said, has little to do with an accent. But as guests were being rounded up across the hall for a dinner of risotto and lamb, Mr. Ahluwalia begged to differ. We're a nation of Anglophiles, he noted, grinning broadly, adding that he'd recently come across a T shirt stamped with the image of Queen Elizabeth, the Union Jack and beneath them the legend, "Make America Great ... Britain again." Under the watchful gaze of a rotund Botero nude, Ms. Anderson dismissed that notion, accidents of birth and breeding eclipsed, in her view, by the more formidable challenge of getting down the part. She thoroughly excavates each role, a task she describes as a "forensic investigation," parsing the lines every comma, dash and sentence break. "When you play the punctuation right, everybody finally gets it," she said. "You go, 'Ah. ... '" A self professed perfectionist, she confessed that she suffered occasional bouts of near crippling stage fright: "I've had panic attacks right on stage." Still, she copes. "You just keep going no matter what," Ms. Anderson said, "and somehow your mouth just keeps moving."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A few years ago, I was giving a talk somewhere, and a gentleman in the audience asked, "What is the role of free will in criticism?" I didn't have a good answer, but the question came back to haunt me during a recent screening of "The Sun Is Also a Star," a film much concerned with issues of chance, destiny and choice. What, I wondered, had brought me to that dark room where two nice looking teenagers (Yara Shahidi of "black ish" and Charles Melton of "Riverdale") were canoodling in a karaoke booth, and then on an empty Roosevelt Island tram car hovering above the East River? Was it fate? A series of decisions I had made earlier in my life, or that someone else had made for me? Might I find the answers in the writings of Carl Sagan or the poems of Emily Dickinson? If you are fascinated by this line of inquiry, you might enjoy this super sincere young adult romance, directed by Ry Russo Young from Tracy Oliver's screenplay and based on Nicola Yoon's best selling novel. But philosophical interests aren't a prerequisite and may in fact interfere with the business of watching the two main characters banter, flirt and then, at last, make out. That's not a spoiler: If you didn't know that Shahidi and Melton were destined to make out within 10 minutes of seeing them onscreen, you have no hope of passing whatever class this is. Natasha Kingsley (Shahidi) lives in Brooklyn, Daniel Bae (Melton) in Queens. One radiantly sunlit morning, they both have urgent business in Manhattan. Daniel has an alumni interview that he hopes will get him into Dartmouth, a first step in realizing his parents' dream that he'll become a doctor. His own ambitions are more literary, but as the dutiful first generation son of Korean immigrants, he accepts his destiny.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
South Sudan, the world's youngest nation, appears to have stopped Guinea worm disease within its borders, the country's health minister announced Wednesday. "Having known the suffering it inflicted, one is very happy today," the minister, Dr. Riek Gai Kok, said. "Future generations will just read of Guinea worm in the books as history." Dr. Kok made the announcement in Atlanta at the Carter Center, a philanthropy founded by former President Jimmy Carter that leads the effort to eliminate the parasitic worm. Only 30 worm infestations were detected last year, 15 in Chad and 15 in Ethiopia. When Mr. Carter began the eradication drive in 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases in 21 Asian and African countries. Global health officials are racing to make the worm or polio the second human disease after smallpox to be eradicated worldwide. Rinderpest, a cattle disease that for centuries triggered widespread human famines, was eliminated in 2011. Guinea worm also known as dracunculiasis, or "affliction with little dragons" is a minuscule parasite found in ponds. Inside anyone who drinks the water, it grows to be a yard long and emerges after a year, usually from a leg or foot, by exuding acid under the skin to form a blister. The pain drives the victim to dunk the leg in water, and the worm releases millions of larvae, starting the cycle anew. The Carter Center fights the disease by recruiting a volunteer in each affected village to pour a mild pesticide into ponds, distribute cloth filters that remove copepods containing worm larvae, and treat victims before they walk into ponds. South Sudan, which gained independence from Sudan in 2011, triumphed despite having many worm laden ponds, a long rainy season, poor roads and irregular spasms of warfare, said Dr. Donald R. Hopkins, a former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who for years led the Carter Center campaign. South Sudan has not had a case in 15 months, which is longer than the worm's life cycle. The country will be certified worm free by the World Health Organization only after there have been no cases for three years. Because most worms emerge in July, the middle of the growing season, "you will get a complete village crippled," Dr. Kok said. "And besides the pain, the community will not be productive and will be faced with hunger. To get water or prepare a meal is a nightmare." Dr. Kok thanked the Carter Center both for its help and for training thousands of village volunteers. His ministry will hire 7,200 of them, he said, for its new Boma Health Initiative, which intends to place three health workers in every "Boma" district trained to give vaccines, treat malaria, check pregnant women, record births and deaths, and to identify malnutrition, H.I.V. and tuberculosis. In countries with shortages of doctors and nurses, such as Ethiopia, Pakistan and Peru, villagers working for similar programs sometimes called "lady health workers" or "community health promoters" have dramatically cut death rates among mothers and children.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Bella Alarie has become a must see player for the Princeton women's basketball team. It's something her coach, Courtney Banghart, has known for a while, but the rest of the world is just finding out. Banghart began to sense that more people were becoming aware of her star player during a recent conversation with Chris Young, the former major league pitcher who played basketball and baseball at Princeton. "He goes, 'I'd pay to watch two players in college basketball: Zion Williamson and Bella Alarie,' " Banghart said. Almost every basketball fan knows Williamson, Duke's top player and probably the N.B.A.'s next top draft pick. But Alarie? She is a 6 foot 4 junior who has developed into a player capable of lifting the Tigers to national prominence. On Saturday, against Cornell in the semifinals of the Ivy League tournament, she grabbed eight rebounds and scored a game high 21 points, shooting 9 of 10 from the field, in a 68 47 victory to advance to the final. Observers believe she has a chance to do something no Ivy League player has done since Allison Feaster, who graduated from Harvard in 1998: represent the conference in an extended W.N.B.A. career. This development was less a dedicated plan and more a series of serendipitous choices merged with hard work. Alarie, a multitalented two way player of the kind sought at the professional level, did not tower over her peers when she was growing up. She remembers being only a bit taller than them but says she cannot recall a time when she did not have a basketball in her hands. Her father, Mark, a former Duke and N.B.A. player, set about making sure she could play at any position. Her slight build meant that during her high school career at National Cathedral School in Washington, she drew interest from Ivy League teams, including Harvard and Penn, but did not get so much as a letter of interest from her father's alma mater. Anything beyond playing in college was not on her radar when she arrived at Princeton. "In high school, I never really thought of myself as someone who would achieve the things I have so far in college," Alarie said. "And when I was getting recruited, I did really want to put an emphasis on getting a really well rounded college experience. The Ivy League I was really drawn to from the beginning. Princeton, Penn and Harvard those were definitely the schools it came down to." Things began to change for Alarie after she won Ivy League freshman of the year honors, then was selected to play for U.S.A. Basketball in the under 19 FIBA World Cup. "To make that team, that really proved to me that I could compete with some of the best in the country," Alarie said. "And against the best in the world at my age. So I think that summer really boosted my confidence in myself as a player and also expanded my game, and I learned how to play in another system." Her coach took note of it and has turned Alarie into a true hybrid. She has been used more in the post after adding 20 pounds to her frame without forsaking her guard skills. That makes her an intriguing pro prospect for a league dominated by players like Elena Delle Donne and Breanna Stewart, who have size and the ability to play any position. "I love her," Tony Bozzella, the Seton Hall coach, said. Alarie had 22 points and 12 rebounds last year in a Princeton win at Seton Hall. "Reminds me of Delle Donne. Not as good yet, but similar games. Obviously a great scorer in many ways, awesome rebounder and passer, great vision, supersmart. A definite first round pick." Entering this weekend's Ivy League tournament at Yale, Alarie was averaging 23.0 points and 10.7 rebounds a game, and shooting 51 percent from the field, with range extending beyond the arc. On the defensive end, according to Synergy Sports data, she was allowing opponents 0.564 points per possession, which ranked her 36th in the country among 2,231 Division I players with at least 100 defensive possessions. Accordingly, Princeton was 2 7 without her. Entering the weekend, the Tigers were 20 2 with Alarie. Unfortunately for opponents, after she broke her right arm she spent her recovery time working aggressively on going to her left, making her even harder to stop. While W.N.B.A. teams cannot comment on Alarie publicly, scouts and executives are tracking her. As one put it: "She's on radars." They have let her coach know it, too. "I talk to W.N.B.A. coaches all the time about her," Banghart said. "So certainly, she's no secret to the W.N.B.A." Princeton's program has generated other pro talent. Blake Dietrick, the Ivy League player of the year in 2014 15, went on to play for the Atlanta Dream last season. Leslie Robinson, whose father, Craig, was a two time player of the year at Princeton in the early 1980s, was drafted by the Liberty in the third round of last season's W.N.B.A. draft.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
WASHINGTON The United Kingdom drew closer this week to exiting the European Union with a deal, and trade talks with China have led to a mild de escalation. But those hopeful signs were not enough to soothe Federal Reserve officials' worries about the United States economy. As they head into a quiet period ahead of their next policy meeting on Oct. 29 30, central bankers' commentary suggests that a rate cut this month ranks somewhere between possible and likely. Officials remain wary as business investment pulls back domestically and economies abroad weaken. "Global growth estimates continue to be marked down, and global disinflationary pressures cloud the outlook for U.S. inflation," the Fed's vice chairman, Richard Clarida, said on Friday, speaking from prepared remarks in Boston. The Fed "will proceed on a meeting by meeting basis to assess the economic outlook as well as the risks to the outlook," he said, and "will act as appropriate to sustain growth, a strong labor market and a return of inflation to our symmetric 2 percent objective." Mr. Clarida's comments did little to temper market expectations for a coming reduction in interest rates: Investors have nearly fully priced in a quarter point rate cut at the end of the month. That would lower the federal funds rate to a range between 1.5 percent and 1.75 percent. Officials avoid surprising markets when possible, because doing so can inadvertently tighten financial conditions and slow borrowing and spending. While Mr. Clarida made it clear that the economy is now "in a good place" and that the unemployment rate is at a half century low, threats remain. Despite some softening around the edges, geopolitical tensions are unresolved. President Trump's trade war with China may have reached a temporary detente, but the agreement has yet to be completed and would not roll back the tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of goods that China and America have placed on each other's products. Mr. Trump increased levies on goods from Europe on Friday, and tensions could escalate if he decides to place a tariff on imported automobiles next month. In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has managed to negotiate a Brexit deal, lowering the chances of an economically harmful no deal exit that could have global economic repercussions. But it remains unclear whether Parliament will approve the agreement. Even if those uncertainties clear up, data increasingly suggest that economic damage is already materializing. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. A global slowdown is well underway. The International Monetary Fund lowered its expectations for global growth in 2019 to 3 percent, the lowest rate since the financial crisis, in projections released Tuesday. Manufacturers around the world are slumping, and the American factory sector has pulled back markedly. The United States' economic strength has hinged on everyday consumers, whose spending makes up about two thirds of the economy. But there are early signs that households might be cracking: Retail sales unexpectedly declined in September, data this week showed. Policymakers have seen a strong job market and climbing wages as positives that should keep households feeling good. But employment gains have begun to slow, and both average hourly earnings and a broader measure of wages and benefits have grown more gradually in recent months, suggesting that business caution may be spilling over. Despite mounting warning signs, the housing market is holding up, bolstered by Fed rate cuts in July and September. While overall output growth is slowing, that was expected as stimulus from Mr. Trump's 2017 tax cut faded, and gains remain at or above the economy's longer term trend. "This is a fluid situation you've got a lot of uncertainty," Robert Kaplan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, told reporters on Friday at an event in Washington. Though he does not have a vote on monetary policy, he does sit at the decision making table. He remains "agnostic" about whether a cut is needed this month, he said, and wants to keep the Fed's options open.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
In spring 2005, the television producer Jeff Thacker went to Miami to hold auditions for a new reality dance competition. He contacted schools and dance studios and handed out fliers at nightclubs and discos. Four people showed up. Two years later, he returned to Miami to audition contestants for that same show, which had become an unexpected hit. More than 1,400 people showed up. That show was "So You Think You Can Dance," and in the years since its debut, it has helped move dancers from backup into the spotlight, elevated the status of choreographers in the entertainment industry and led to other dance shows here and abroad, with franchises in dozens of countries, including China, Vietnam, Poland, Armenia and Mozambique. On Monday, "So You Think" begins its 15th season on Fox, to the surprise of pretty much everyone involved. Its run has coincided with something of a dance boom in American popular culture. "Dancing With the Stars," which pairs celebrities with professional ballroom dancers, arrived on ABC the same summer as "So You Think You Can Dance." Other television dance competitions have followed, like "America's Best Dance Crew," and, more recently, Jennifer Lopez's "World of Dance," which began its second season this week on NBC. For the dancers who appear on it, the show has been a clear boost, providing an instant fan base and industry connections. Alex Wong was a principal soloist with Miami City Ballet when he decided on a whim to audition for "So You Think." Mr. Wong, who grew up dancing tap and jazz and had been itching "to go back to my roots," was a standout on Season 7 until an injury sidelined him. Still, he has been able to parlay the experience into a constant string of work on stage and screen, as well as lucrative teaching opportunities. "Without the show, it would have been a difficult transition from ballet company to the commercial world," he said. "It's almost like a quick boot camp." Yet appearing or even winning on "So You Think" is not a golden career ticket. Melanie Moore, the Season 8 winner who has gone on to a successful Broadway career, said the show either holds little value for theater directors or has a negative connotation because of its reality TV roots. "I've found both stigma and a shrug," she said. Ms. Moore is now on Broadway in "Hello, Dolly"; Ricky Ubeda, the Season 11 winner, is performing in "Carousel." Winners have gone many routes: Benji Schwimmer (Season 2) choreographed Adam Rippon's Olympic ice skating routine; Jeanine Mason (Season 5) is on "Grey's Anatomy"; and others created the touring dance show "Shaping Sound." "So You Think" is a natural springboard for dancers, but perhaps a more significant and enduring legacy is the platform it has provided for choreographers. "Unless you were in the dance world, you didn't even know the word 'choreography,'" said Mia Michaels, a three time Emmy winner for her work on the show. "Choreographers became household names, which was incredible for our industry." That visibility has led to increased clout in Hollywood, where the Television Academy recently established a Choreography Peer Group, whose members vote on the Emmy for best choreography. "The show has really put more fighting power in our corner," said Mandy Moore (not to be confused with the actress, and no relation to the contestant), a leader of the peer group, who started as an assistant on "So You Think," began choreographing on Season 3 and is now a producer on the show. "There's an ability to have a more open conversation in negotiations because people are more aware of what we do and what our needs are." Choreographers have just a short window to make a mark on the show each week: Routines last around 90 seconds and are often packed with virtuosic moves to arouse cheers from live audiences. Certain styles in particular have caught on, like the show's characteristic brand of contemporary dance, an expressive fusion of styles from lyrical jazz to hip hop, which is distinct from contemporary concert dance and which has become as recognizable in Vietnam as in Vegas. "It made contemporary dance a commercial art form," Ms. Michaels said of the show. And that stormy, sensual style has come to dominate dance in film, TV and in music videos, as well as on the sizable competition dance circuit, where many "So You Think" alumni teach. It hasn't, however, made much of a dent in the more conceptual concert dance world, where the show is sometimes dismissed as an empty calorie snack for its flashy production and flash in the pan length numbers. "Those bite sized pieces of work, it's a craft in itself," Ms. Michaels said. "Just because it's a commercial dance show doesn't mean that you're not an artist." Others in the concert dance world applaud the show's contribution to the broader dance ecosystem. "Dancing is normalized through these mediums," said Damian Woetzel, the former New York City Ballet star. Mr. Woetzel, the incoming president of Juilliard, is also the director of the Vail International Dance Festival, where he curated a "Dance TV" series for five years that featured stars from TV dance competitions, including Mr. Wong. "So You Think" has facilitated "an active conversation" about dance," Mr. Woetzel said, and "it leads young people into the field." Especially boys, he added. That was clear to Sabetha Mumm, who founded a dance studio in Johnston, Iowa, in 2003. (Her son participated in "So You Think" Season 13, subtitled "The Next Generation," in which competitors were 8 to 13 years old.) The show has driven demand for dance in her region, Ms. Mumm said, providing aspiring professional dancers outside of urban dance hubs "so many more people to look up to." She frequently invites former contestants to teach workshops there. Ms. Mumm's studio is now populated almost entirely by a generation of dancers who grew up on "So You Think." The show has influenced the way they think about the art form perhaps as much as what takes place in their dance classes: In the hallways, they rewatch "So You Think" routines on YouTube, debate their favorite dancers and discuss the choreographers they dream of working with. "It's their version of the water cooler conversation," Ms. Mumm said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
With the subways faltering and Citi Bikes expanding, biking is now an established part of New York City's commuting culture. But there's a conundrum: How do you bike to an office job without looking like a messenger all day? Most offices still expect a modicum of sartorial decorum, even if they're run by millennials with a laid back Silicon Valley ethos. That leaves stylish men searching for ways to arrive looking fresh, despite having already logged a few miles on their morning ride. For the architect Alex Lightman, 30, who bikes nine miles each day from his home in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn to his office in Midtown Manhattan, a full change of clothes is helpful. "I don't commute in what I'm going to be wearing to work," Mr. Lightman said. "I wear a pair of shorts and a T shirt, and I'll change at the office. I have shoes and a couple blazers at work so I can just pack a pair of pants and a shirt in my bag." Additionally Mr. Lightman wears a cycling cap under his helmet, to help with the dreaded helmet hair. He places his backpack in his bike's front basket, as opposed to wearing it on his back, to avoid unseemly sweat. There are downsides. "It takes some forethought to stash some stuff at work," he said. "I just wear one or two pairs of shoes at work, so if you want to wear something different every single day, it'd be kind of difficult." And he once forgot to bring his work clothes, which meant he had to buy an outfit before starting his day. Cesar Villalba, 31, a designer at Coach who bikes six miles to his office in Hudson Yards from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, finds versatility in an unexpectedly quotidian piece of clothing: a button down shirt. "I wear it around my waist in case I have to go to the theater, or if it gets colder," he said. "Or if I get sweaty, I can hide it." Mr. Villalba also advises against a backpack (he has been using a cross body bag lately) and to think about fabrics. He prefers linen in the summer and breathable merino wool for the rest of the year. He also notes that having a reputation as the resident bike fanatic helps. "Many times things have happened like I've gotten a flat before an important meeting and arrived with my hands covered in oil and grease," he said. "Most of the people in the company know that I'm a cyclist. I'm that sweaty person with his hair always wet." While some office workers might not want such a reputation, Nick Rosser, 30, an account manager at the creative agency King and Partners, isn't bothered by it. He bikes two and a half miles from the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn to NoHo, and often arrives drenched. "I'm really sweaty," he said, laughing, "and then I'll stand in front of the air conditioner for like five minutes. Everyone in my office just understands that I have to do that because I ride my bike to work." Sometimes he'll even throw his T shirt over the air conditioner, whether or not his co workers mind. "Everyone's staring at me, but that's the only way to cool down," he said. "You either do that or splash cold water on your face." On the occasions when appearance matters more, Mr. Rosser has a stick of deodorant and pomade in his bag, so he can step into the bathroom and quickly freshen up before starting the day. The best advice may be Mr. Lightman's. "You don't have to ride fast," he said. "I do the nine miles, but I'm cruising, I'm not going for a personal best." After all, part of the pleasure of the morning bike commute is the scenery and the fresh air. "I'm cruising," he said. "I'm enjoying it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
It is one of the more repellent bargains in Shakespeare: a young woman's virginity in exchange for her brother's life. To our modern minds, it seems like such a no brainer. Of course Isabella should sacrifice herself. Who would refuse that deal, ugly though it is? Yet in Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod's vivid and uncommonly moving "Measure for Measure" the Pushkin Theater Moscow/Cheek by Jowl production that's part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival she is not so easy to fault. Simply by begging Angelo, the ruler of Vienna, to spare her brother from execution, Isabella (Anna Vardevanian) has walked into a trap from which there is no safe exit. To be granted what she asks, she must have sex with Angelo (Andrei Kuzichev). Furious, frightened, sure that he's deranged, she vows to tell the world what kind of man he really is. But her threat rolls right off him. He is, after all, famous for his rectitude.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Martin Scorsese was the honoree at the Museum of Modern Art's annual film benefit on Monday evening, but Leon Black was arguably the man of the hour, since the museum announced at the gala that he and his wife Debra had given 40 million to the museum. In recognition of the gift, MoMA will create the Debra and Leon Black Family Film Center, spanning two floors of the museum's Ronald S. and Jo Carole Lauder Building, which includes multimedia exhibition galleries and two theaters. The center will present film exhibitions and premieres with directors, actors, and other cinema experts. Mr. Black, a leading collector, was named chairman of MoMA last spring having shared the title since 2015 with the real estate mogul Jerry Speyer. His gift will support the museum's renovation and expansion project, currently underway, which will add 40,000 square feet of gallery space and enable MoMA to reconceive the presentation of its collection and exhibitions. "As a lifelong lover of film," Mr. Black said in a statement, "my family and I are honored to have our name associated with the Film Center of this great institution."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
LONDON As the 1.4 million artwork began passing through a shredder hidden in its frame, gasps were heard in the auction room. About halfway through, the shredding suddenly stopped, and the top portion of "Girl With Balloon" seemed to have been saved. But that reprieve, according to Banksy, the street artist who created the work and who organized the prank to destroy it wasn't planned. In a clip posted to YouTube on Wednesday, Banksy suggested that he had meant for the painting to be completely destroyed at the auction in London on Oct. 5, but that the plan had been foiled when the shredder unexpectedly jammed. In the clip, called "Shred The Love," a man is shown building the frame, his face hidden by a hoodie. "In rehearsals it worked every time," a caption says. The video then shows a copy of "Girl With Balloon" being completely shredded as it slipped out of the frame. The copy in the clip appears to have been printed on paper, whereas the "Girl With Balloon" sold at auction was spray painted on canvas, a tougher material, which may explain why the shredder failed. Joanna Brooks, the director of JBPR, who answers media enquiries on behalf of Banksy, did not respond to phone calls or to an email asking whether the rehearsals had indeed been conducted on paper copies.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Will travelers want to stay in a castle in Kentucky, a former jail in New Orleans or a lighthouse in Massachusetts? Booking.com, an accommodation booking site with a database of more than 1.5 million properties, is betting on a "yes." The three are part of the site's Book It List, debuting today , which is a collection of not so common places around the United States where guests can hang their hat for a night or more; the list has one option in each state. The company is kicking off this new category by selling one night stays for March 8 in three venues that have never before offered overnight accommodations: a suite on the 80th floor of the Empire State Building, in New York; a suite at the AmericanAirlines Arena, in Miami; and a tour bus in Los Angeles that the musician Nick Jonas helped design. Each stay costs 1,500. While these are one time bookings, the permanent possibilities on the Book It List include a man made cave in New Mexico, a treehouse in Ohio, a base camp in Alaska and a shrimp boat in South Carolina. The list's properties are in diverse locales ranging from major cities and the mountains to the coast and remote countryside, and prices for a night's stay range from affordable to extravagant. It costs 65 a night, for example, to stay at the 12 room Town Hall Inn, in Lead, S.D., in the heart of the Black Hills. Originally constructed in 1912 as Lead's town hall, the building was used for several purposes over the years including the mayor's and treasurer's office, a jail, judge's chambers and even gallows, which were directly behind the building.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
I traveled to Israel last May to search for Herod the Great and I found him, or at least his ghost, at his tomb at Herodium. Halfway up an artificial mountain that the king had conjured from the desert for his final resting place, I stood gazing at what was left of the royal mausoleum: a couple of courses of limestone blocks as exquisitely faceted as jewels. Below, the arcing rows of a Roman theater descended in diminishing semicircles to the disc of the stage. Everything around me, even the contours of the earth itself, had been altered at the decree of this ancient ruler. Time has toppled the columns and blurred the carvings, but the majesty (and hubris) of this place remain intact. Herod's Temple in Jerusalem may be more transcendent and his mesa top retreat at Masada more spectacular, but Herodium (about 10 miles south of Jerusalem on the occupied West Bank) was where I channeled the spirit of the man. I was also channeling the spirit of a monster. From 37 to 4 B.C., Herod the Great (not to be confused with a slew of lesser heirs and successors who shared his name) ruled Judea with a bloody, iron fist. Though the account by the Gospel writer Matthew of an "exceeding wroth" Herod slaughtering the innocents of Bethlehem is probably apocryphal, the king did murder a wife, mother in law and three sons, along with untold numbers of enemies and rivals. Yet he was one of the world's great builders an instinctive architectural genius who planned, sited, sourced and landscaped magnificent structures of classical antiquity. Epic was his preferred scale. No project was too ambitious or daring, whether it was throwing up a city from scratch or replacing Judaism's holiest site from the ground up. Judea rejoiced when Herod died, but I found myself breathless with admiration after a week spent tracking his footsteps. The ruler of Judea controlled with an iron fist, but also was one of the world's great builders. "Herod was a vicious murderer, but he was also very sensuous, very attuned to nature," said David Mevorah, a curator for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. "The desert was where he went for peace and serenity." And to be buried. Josephus Flavius, the Roman Jewish historian who is the prime source on Herod, wrote that upon the king's death in 4 B.C., his body was placed on a gem encrusted solid gold bier and conveyed with due pomp from Jericho to Herodium for interment, but for centuries the location of the tomb remained a mystery. Its discovery in 2007 by the Israeli architect and archaeologist Ehud Netzer after a career long search created an international sensation. The national park that preserves Herodium makes the most of this dramatic story. A path ascends from the visitors' center in Herodium National Park to the ruins of the palace fortress at the top of the mound. From the circular courtyard recessed into the summit, a narrow staircase descends into a maze of tunnels and cisterns. When you re emerge into the glare of daylight, you're standing on a ledge between the theater and the site of the mausoleum. Here, Professor Netzer fell to his death in 2010 while working on the magnificent exhibition devoted to Herod that the Israel Museum mounted in 2013. Though the show closed a couple of months before my trip, some of the prime artifacts are still on display, including Herod's dainty pink limestone sarcophagus and two of the marvelous, hastily executed trompe l'oeil wall paintings that Professor Netzer found at Herodium's theater. Herodium and Jericho were the bookends of Herod's life. Herodium was where the king chose to be buried; the winter palace at Jericho, part desert spa, part seasonal headquarters, was where he lived most pleasurably. When the end came and, according to Josephus, it was a protracted and hideously painful end Jericho was where he went to die. Professor Netzer called the Jericho winter palace, which he excavated from 1973 to 1987, "perhaps the most refined building" in the king's oeuvre. On the warm, hazy afternoon of my visit, I was struck more by the refuse than the refinement. Part of the problem was the anxiety of getting there. Jericho is in Area A the section of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords in 1993 put fully under the control of the Palestinian Authority and closed to Israeli citizens. My guide, Shmuel, a naturalized Israeli, assured me that he had clearance to guide there, but it took some tense dickering to persuade the armed Palestinian soldiers at the checkpoint to wave us through. The archaeological site is situated at that forlorn fringe between impoverished city and desiccated farmland. It could have been the outskirts of Las Vegas or Albuquerque. But I was learning to see the ancient splendor beneath the modern degradation. Walls of beautifully preserved opus reticulatum a Roman building technique in which pyramidal bricks are set like diamonds to form a rippling mosaic like pattern crisscrossed the desert floor. Stone circles traced the outlines of long drained pools and fountains. Wadi Qelt, the streambed that cuts through the site, was bone dry but in winter, when Herod held court here, it would have brought the music of flowing water into the courtyards and sunken gardens. I thought we were alone with the mourning doves and hoopoes, but in a few minutes a local taxi driver showed up, attached himself to us, insisted on airing his version of Jericho history in broken English and asked for money. The unshakable cabby was a reminder of how divided the experiences of Israelis and Palestinians are on the West Bank. Archaeology is not exempt from the conflict. The year before last, the Palestinian Authority criticized the Israel Museum for displaying artifacts from this site in its Herod exhibition. According to Josephus, Caesarea was the site of one of the three temples that Herod dedicated to his friend and boss, the Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar. The second was in the city of Sebaste (north of Jerusalem and just south of the Galilee on the West Bank). The location of the third is still being disputed. Today all that remains of Caesarea's Augustan temple is the podium, a featureless platform that I missed altogether as I strolled from the harbor to the hippodrome. But there was no missing the king's promontory palace. Herod, characteristically, chose the city's most dramatic real estate for his abode. Not content with waterfront, he suspended his palace over the sea on a semi submerged reef. A few of the columns have been partly reconstructed, and to my mind all the luxury and beauty of the classical Mediterranean shimmers around those tawny limestone shafts rising against a perfect turquoise sea. Going to Israel without visiting Masada is like skipping the Statue of Liberty or the Coliseum, but I had made the ascent up to Herod's breathtaking palace perched over the Dead Sea on my last trip, and this time I wanted to see something a little more off the beaten track. I got my wish and then some at Omrit, a possible site for the elusive third Herodian temple to Augustus hidden away in the Golan foothills near the Syrian border (the other leading candidate for the third temple is Banias, a small Roman era ruin about two and a half miles from Omrit inside the popular Hermon Stream Nature Reserve Banias). It took about four hours to drive to Omrit from Jerusalem, and even Shmuel had trouble finding the site on the web of dirt roads that lead into the back country near the Kfar Szold kibbutz. But Omrit was worth the effort. Once Shmuel killed the engine of his well worn Toyota, no filtering out of the modern was required. Omrit reminded me of the rugged, chromatically muted uplands where the Anasazi built their stone cities in the American Southwest. Column, capital, mountain, sky: Omrit was like a haiku distilled from Herod's ancient epic. An archaeological team from a consortium of four American colleges was scheduled to arrive later in the season to continue the excavations, but we had the temple steps, wall painting fragments and carved plinths and pediments completely to ourselves. Omrit, to me, felt like a coded message from the ancient world a place where beings at once so like us and so wildly different hid their secrets in the rock. Archaeology will undoubtedly uncover some of them; but I was grateful that silence and slow time had left so much to the imagination here. On my last morning, I went to the site of the Great Temple in Jerusalem to bid farewell to the "charismatic sociopath" ( the historian Simon Schama's words) I had been trailing for a week. "He who has not seen Herod's building has not seen a handsome building the days of his life," the Talmud intones of the Temple. Tragically, all that remains standing is a single prayer encrusted retaining wall the so called Western or Wailing Wall that holds up one flank of the Temple Mount. I had signed up for the tunnel tour an hourlong guided visit to the excavations beside the wall and as we descended from the glare of contemporary Jerusalem to the twilight of the buried city, all of Herod's contradictions converged in my mind. His Jewish subjects reviled him as a mongrel pseudo Jew (his father was a convert, his mother an Arab) and yet every pebble of the temple he erected is still revered two millenniums after its destruction by Rome. His crimes against humanity were legion, and yet during his 33 year reign, Judea enjoyed an unparalleled stretch of stability, prosperity and Herculean building projects. I shook off my reverie to pay attention as Shlomo, our tour guide, pointed to a block of dressed limestone the size of a tour bus and the weight of nine tanks. "We still don't know how Herod moved these stones here," he told us. "Herod was a very complex individual. He was very mentally ill, but when it came to building, 'Wow' was what he wanted." Herod the man is hard to admire the late Oxford scholar Geza Vermes called him "heroic and horrible" in his recent posthumous book, "The True Herod" but everything the man touched still has the power to inspire awe. He just may be the perfect symbol for a land layered with wonder, and riddled with violence.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
TOKYO The towering tsunami that devastated Japan six years ago also unleashed a very different sort of threat onto the distant coastline of North America: a massive invasion of marine life from across the Pacific Ocean. Hundreds of species from the coastal waters of Japan mostly invertebrates like mussels, sea anemones and crabs were carried across the Pacific on huge amounts of floating debris generated by the disaster, according to a study published Thursday in Science. Less than a year and a half after the enormous earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, left more than 18,000 dead or missing in Japan, the first pieces of wreckage began washing up on the shores of Canada and the United States. To the surprise of scientists, the debris was covered with sea creatures that had survived crossings that in some cases had taken years. The study's authors say it is too early to tell how many of these tiny invaders have gained a foothold in North American waters, where they could challenge or even displace native species. While such "rafting" of animals across oceans happened in the past, the authors say the Japanese tsunami is unprecedented because of the sheer number of organisms that it sent across the world's largest ocean. And this points to one of the main findings of the study: that this mass migration was the result of not just the huge natural disaster, but changes in human behavior. Such large numbers of marine animals were able to cross the Pacific because they rode on debris made of materials like plastic and fiberglass that proved durable enough to drift thousands of miles. These synthetics, the use of which has taken off around the world, can stay afloat for years or even decades. The debris that was dragged out to sea by the 2011 tsunami formed an unsinkable flotilla capable of transporting a large population of organisms across the world's largest ocean. "This was our first heads up, that this was the vanguard of what might be coming from Japan," said one of the report's co authors, James T. Carlton, a professor emeritus of marine sciences at Williams College. "After that, we got a steady stream of reports of boats, buoys and other debris, all with Japanese markings, and all carrying an amazing cross section of Japanese sea life." Dr. Carlton called it remarkable that such a wide range of species which also included barnacles, worms and tiny filter feeders called bryozoans could survive the journey across the northern Pacific. In many cases, these passages took years, longer than the life spans of the individual organisms. The authors concluded that not only did these creatures adapt to an open ocean where food was scarcer than in rich coastal waters, they were also able to reproduce, in some cases for at least three generations, before reaching the North American coast. "We found that hundreds of species could survive for multiple generations at sea," said Dr. Carlton, who is a former director of William's Maritime Studies Program in Mystic Seaport, Conn. "They could do this so long as their rafts did not dissolve or sink." To conduct the study, the authors relied on more than 200 volunteers, including state park rangers and beachcombers, to find and examine some 634 pieces of debris that washed ashore from 2012 to earlier this year. While there was concern in the early days that some debris might have been contaminated from the nuclear accident at Fukushima that was caused by the tsunami, Dr. Carlton said such worries quickly eased after tests showed no traces of radioactive contamination. The washed up objects were found to carry 289 invasive species from the western Pacific. While most were invertebrates, a few vertebrates survived the journey, including a small number of emaciated fish that were trapped inside the water filled hulls of half sunken fishing boats. All told, thousands of pieces of debris from Japan washed up on North American coasts from Sitka, Alaska, to Monterey, Calif., and as far afield as Hawaii. Since the authors and volunteers were only able to inspect a fraction of these objects, Dr. Carlton said he believes hundreds more species likely made the crossing. It is unclear how many of these will actually gain a foothold in North America. It takes years for an invasive species to establish a viable population, and these may be hard to spot on so long a stretch of coastline. Most of the newcomers will simply vanish in a Darwinian process of selection that Dr. Carlton likened to "a game of ecological roulette." Species that do prosper can cause enormous environmental and economic damage, especially if they supplant native species upon which coastal communities depend for livelihoods. The study concluded that such disruptions will become more frequent as the use of plastics and other synthetics proliferates. Nor does it take an event as rare as a giant tsunami to launch the next invasion fleet. Dr. Carlton pointed to Hurricane Irma, which blew large amounts of plastic debris from devastated Caribbean islands onto Florida's beaches. "We have loaded the coastal zones of the world with massive amounts of plastic and materials that are not biodegradable," he said. "All it takes is something to push this into the ocean for the next invasion of species to happen."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
President Trump issued a sweeping set of proposals aimed at improving medical care for the tens of millions of Americans who have kidney disease, a long overlooked condition that kills more people than breast cancer. "This is a first, second and third step. It's more than just a first step," Mr. Trump said in a speech Wednesday, which was attended by patients, advocates and industry executives. Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to educate and treat people with early forms of kidney disease, to make kidney transplants easier to get, and to shift the financial incentives for clinics and doctors away from the existing system that relies heavily on dialysis. "The result will be more and faster transplants for those in need," said Mr. Trump, who also said his administration would work to encourage the development of new treatments like artificial kidneys. "For 50 years, we have had basically a stagnant system of how we treat people with chronic kidney disease," Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, said in a briefing held Wednesday morning. Mr. Azar has made kidney disease one of his priorities because his father needed dialysis for several years and later received a kidney transplant. Mr. Trump did not mention his wife's kidney surgery last year, and at the press briefing, White House officials did not answer a reporter's question about whether Melania Trump was involved in these efforts. The president set an ambitious goal to remake how Americans with kidney disease get treated, by aggressively seeking to lower the costs by encouraging in home dialysis and organ donation. Both options are seen as better treatment for patients than clinic based dialysis. However, transforming the area may prove daunting, and many previous efforts have fallen short. About 37 million adults have chronic kidney disease, or about 15 percent of American adults. Medicare, the federal health insurance program, covers about half a million people with end stage kidney disease and spends disproportionately on their care. Although they are just 1 percent of Medicare beneficiaries, they account for 7 percent of the program's medical claims, some 35 billion. The total cost to Medicare for kidney care each year exceeds 100 billion. Medicare has covered people who need dialysis since 1973, when the federal government took the unheard of step of covering people with a single condition end stage renal disease because they would not otherwise be able to afford care. Patients who need dialysis are hooked up to a machine that filters toxins from their blood three times a week, an onerous process that disrupts people's lives and takes a heavy toll on their health. Half of the people who are on dialysis die within five years, according to federal officials. In sharp contrast to treatments in areas like cancer or H.I.V., the main treatment for people with end stage kidney disease dialysis has not changed much over the years. "Dialysis has been a wonderful technology, but it has suffered from little innovation," said Dr. John Sedor, a kidney specialist at the Cleveland Clinic who works with federal officials in a program to foster new developments. "It's a government run program that has discouraged private investment." Officials said they wanted 80 percent of newly diagnosed people with end stage kidney disease to be moved from clinic based dialysis by the year 2025, and to reduce the number of Americans who develop end stage disease by 25 percent before 2030. Today, only about 12 percent of Americans get dialysis at home, an amount that lags other countries. The Trump administration wants to encourage living donors by adding reimbursements for lost wages and child care, as a way to double the number of kidneys available for transplant by 2030. Organs from living donors are considered the best option for people who need transplants, but they too require recuperative time. "We, in the United States, have too much in center dialysis," Mr. Azar said. "It is mentally and physically draining on you as an individual." If the administration is successful, the initiative could lead to a shake up of the dialysis industry, which is dominated by two companies, DaVita and Fresenius Medical Care. They operate about 70 percent of the country's dialysis clinics. In singling out kidney disease, Mr. Trump has taken on an issue widely seen as overdue for reform, and appears to be adding it to his list of health initiatives, a top priority for voters. At the speech, Mr. Trump emphasized the administration's work to combat the opioid epidemic, the quest to end H.I.V. and said there would soon be more news on efforts to control drug prices. He also said he would protect people with pre existing health conditions, just one day after administration lawyers joined several states and argued before an appellate court that the Affordable Care Act should be overturned. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Some of his efforts to address health care issues have faltered. On Monday, a federal judge threw out a key component of the president's drug pricing plan, one that would have required pharmaceutical companies to disclose the price of their drugs in television advertisements. And Mr. Trump has largely abandoned efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act through Congress. His decision to focus on kidney care was met with a mix of surprise and praise. "We are very optimistic and excited that there is great attention at the presidential level," Tonya Saffer, the vice president for health policy at the National Kidney Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group, said in an interview before the announcement. "It's really been four decades since anybody has paid attention to this space in a very meaningful way." It's unclear how many of the initiatives announced Wednesday were new. Many proposals have been in the works for months, or represent the evolution of programs that were already underway. In March, top Trump health officials, including Mr. Azar, outlined steps the administration was taking to improve kidney treatment, including streamlining the process for organ transplants and improving financial incentives for patients to use in home dialysis. In a twist, a major of aspect of their initiative would rely on an innovation center created under the Affordable Care Act, which President Trump has vehemently opposed. The proposal would create pilot programs to test alternate ways of reimbursing physicians to encourage treatment of kidney disease earlier and potentially avoid the need for dialysis. "It is the needed paradigm shift for the United States," Dr. Brigitte Schiller, the chief medical officer for Satellite Healthcare, a nonprofit chain of dialysis centers, said in an interview before the announcement. The current system "makes it very easy to send a patient to the centers." In the United States, the rates of kidney transplants and in home dialysis has lagged those in other developed countries, a situation that many say can be blamed on a host of financial incentives that discourage better options. Companies that operate clinics, such as DaVita and Fresenius, profit from recurring visits by patients coming to their centers. In addition, many kidney specialists, or nephrologists, have a financial interest in dialysis centers in their communities, either by serving as the clinics' medical directors or owning a stake through a joint venture with a dialysis operator. "One of the fundamental challenges is the fact that physicians don't make their money treating kidney disease; they make money on dialysis," Arvind Rajan, a co founder and chief executive of Cricket Health, a San Francisco start up that is focusing on kidney care, said before the announcement. Changing the incentives "is sorely necessary," added Mr. Rajan, who said private insurers that are paying for kidney care have already begun trying to shift more people to home or to consider transplants. "The landscape has changed really quickly," he said. While policy experts praised the president's efforts, many also cautioned that significant change would not be easy. Many people with end stage kidney disease are coping with other serious health conditions or are facing other problems, such as a lack of resources or support that may make it hard to take advantage of alternative treatments. Although the big chains have also begun selling in home dialysis services, they have invested heavily in their brick and mortar centers, Dr. Graham Abra, a specialist at Stanford University, said before the president's speech. "There's an incentive if you build a center to fill it, and push that," he said. DaVita and Fresenius said in separate statements that they welcomed the president's attention to this area, that they were already investing in alternatives to traditional dialysis, and encouraged patients to pursue the best options for their health.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
"When I dream of afterlife in heaven," Ernest Hemingway once wrote in a letter to his friend and fellow writer A.E. Hotchner, "the action always takes place in the Paris Ritz." It's been awhile, but the Ritz is back in action. After a renovation that kept its doors shut for nearly four years, the Ritz Paris is reopening June 6, a few days and 118 years after its original June 1, 1898, opening and almost three months later than intended because of a fire at the property in January. Historic hotels and stories of their renovations don't always make for original ink, but the Ritz Paris, on the Place Vendome in the city's First Arrondissement, is more storied than most. When the Swiss hotelier Cesar Ritz bought the property, then the Hotel de Lazun but originally a private palace constructed in the early 18th century that was home to several noble families, he did so with visions of opening the most luxurious hotel in the world. It should have, he is said to have declared, "all the refinement that a prince could desire in his own home." But even the best hotels wear with age. Mohamed al Fayed, the Egyptian businessman and the current owner, bought the property from the Ritz family in 1979. In 2012, he decided to shutter it for the first time, to conduct a makeover that would bring it back to its former glory. "Closing down the hotel was not an easy decision to make, but it was necessary to maintain the pre eminent position of the Ritz Paris," he said in an email to The New York Times. Christian Boyens, the hotel's general manager, was more specific. "The hotel had a good run for 114 years nonstop, but you can't deny that technology has changed so much," he said in an interview at the Ritz Paris offices, on Rue St. Honore near the property. "We needed to upgrade everything from the water pressure to our air conditioning system." Much of the task for this upgrade fell to Thierry W. Despont, the New York based French architect and designer, who, in an interview in his TriBeCa offices, said that he had sensed a tiredness about the Ritz in the time he had spent there on visits to Paris. "It needed a redo, but maintaining its essence and strong identity was essential, and my vision was to keep the Ritz exactly as it was but better," he said. Aesthetically, the hotel still has the traditional 18th century French decor that its guests are familiar with, but the difference now, according to both Mr. Boyens and Mr. Despont, is that there is a lighter, fresher feel throughout. The red carpet entrance looks virtually identical to its pre renovation days but is now wider and has windows across the top that make the lobby feel airier. The reception area, once a room with 10 foot high ceilings and a mezzanine level above it, has been transformed into a light flooded space with 18 foot high ceilings because Mr. Despont got rid of the mezzanine and opened the room's sealed high oval window so that it overlooks the Place Vendome. "Many of the changes are subtle," he said. "We don't want to say 'Look at what we did.'" His approach may be understated, but there is plenty that is brand new including the plumbing, heating and cooling systems, high speed Wi Fi and telephones from which guests can control lights and temperature. Also, there are now 142 rooms instead of 159, the old number, and 71 are suites (because of the fire, only 90 rooms are currently available to book). The furniture in all the rooms including two of the most prized before the renovation the Imperial Suite and the Coco Chanel Suite is a mix of restored pieces, newly acquired antiques and replicas. There are also new themed suites, each unique, such as those named after Mozart, Maria Callas and Proust, who is finally getting his due at the hotel he adored so much that on his death bed, the story goes, he wanted cold beer that had to come from the Ritz (the hotel supposedly always kept one on ice for him). In addition to the Proust suite, Mr. Despont has designed the Salon Proust, a space with French oak walls where guests can partake in afternoon tea. Other additions to the property include a tunnel under the Place Vendome linking the hotel with its parking garage to give guests the option to enter in privacy; the world's first Chanel spa, Chanel au Ritz Paris, a seven treatment room area that is part of the two story health club; an underground ballroom that can accommodate 400 guests; a third kitchen in the cooking school, Ecole Ritz Escoffier; a shopping passage linking the Ritz's two buildings; and retractable roofs for the two existing restaurants, the brasserie style Bar Vendome and the gastronomic French restaurant L'Espadon, to make their terraces usable all year. And then there is Mr. Despont's garden. "The hotel had this private open space in the heart of Paris that was like an uncut diamond," he said. His vision of a Versailles style small park came to life with the help of the French landscape architect Jean Mus. The 21,500 square foot cream and green hued oasis is lined with more than two dozen linden trees and is replete with hanging ivy and beds of white roses, when they're in season. The garden may be a surprise, but what looks almost the same is the Bar Hemingway, the author's favorite watering hole that was named after him in 1994. His bronze bust is intact, and the new green carpet resembles the old one, but the space is now awash with freshly sourced Hemingway memorabilia like his fishing rods and original passport photos. And still in place is Colin Field, Bar Hemingway's head barman who is a celebrity in his own right, in part, because of his inventive cocktails.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
MELBOURNE, Australia What were you doing when you were 15? Sofia Kenin thought for a moment, just a moment, before answering. "Oh, my God, I was playing ITF juniors," she said. "I wasn't out there." "Out there" on Sunday was the Melbourne Arena, packed to the rafters for a fourth round match at the Australian Open between Kenin and 15 year old Coco Gauff. It was an all American duel on Australia Day, and to compare the reaction as the two Americans were introduced, it was clear that Gauff had the edge in support and name recognition. But Gauff's precocity skews the tennis timeline. Her age has become not only a talking point, but also a psychological edge as her opponents fight the voice in their heads reminding them that they cannot possibly lose to a 15 year old. Naomi Osaka, 22, no longer the defending champion here, made it clear that she had heard it as she melted into a puddle of unforced errors in her stunning third round loss to Gauff. Kenin, who had practiced with Gauff but never played her on tour, was well aware of the danger. "Of course I understand the interest in Coco," she said after the match. "She's 15, and she's playing at this level, which is great. But I knew I needed somehow to block everything out and just focus on myself, on my game and what I do best." That meant redirecting Gauff's power deep and into the corners. That meant changing the pace with drop shots and crisp slices. That meant placing her serve effectively to limit the powerful Gauff's ability to attack returns. Kenin's coach and father, Alexander Kenin, understood the danger as well, but he also sees potential pitfalls for Gauff as she becomes a celebrity before she becomes a legitimate Grand Slam contender. "People make such a big fuss about it, and I'm not sure it is helping her," he said of Gauff's age as he worked his way back to the players lounge through the crowd exiting Melbourne Arena. "I don't think it's going to help her in the long run," he said. "But anyway, that creates some jitters among other players, and it's not easy to play her. It was the story with Osaka, so basically Sofia was fighting more herself than the opponent." In Alexander Kenin's view, Gauff still "has a lot of holes in her game." "Sonya was exploiting them pretty good," he said, using his daughter's nickname. There are deficiencies, which is perfectly understandable at 15. Gauff's forehand is not a pure stroke and can break down, as it did frequently in the final two sets on Sunday. Because of her extreme forehand grip, she is also vulnerable to low balls, and Kenin gave her plenty of them with her chopped groundstrokes. Gauff's taste for risk on her second serve has a downside: double faults. She had seven against Kenin, and she also needs to improve her backhand slice. But there is also so much to celebrate: court coverage, serving power and a two handed backhand that would all be remarkable for a player of any age. There are also the intangibles: poise, fighting spirit and an ability to embrace the big occasion in the game's biggest stadiums. "The thing I'm most proud of myself is how I handled it on the court," Gauff said. "Even though today I lost a set 6 0, I was still believing I could win it. I don't think I showed any negative emotion too much in the match. I just tried my best. I guess what surprised me is how calm I was going into all these matches." What were you doing at 15? Probably not answering questions in a news conference with this sort of perspective. Gauff is remarkable even if the perils are clear. She and her family have said that she intends to be the greatest, and that they do not want to limit her horizons or ability to dream big. The keys will be to avoid getting ahead of themselves, to take delight in the process instead of fixating on distant goals and to keep drawing lines between family life and professional life even with Gauff's father, Corey, as a coach. It will not be easy, particularly as the money rolls in, but Gauff and her team appear to be off to a fine start, limiting her interviews and putting the accent on the positive. "I'm definitely going to savor this and continue to kind of build and get better to work for moments like this, moments like that last match," she said, referring to her upset of Osaka. "Even today, even though I lost, I still had a lot of fun." Gauff has played in three Grand Slam tournaments in singles, reaching the fourth round of Wimbledon, the third round of the United States Open and the fourth round in Melbourne. She will be ranked just outside the Top 50 next week, but will be allowed to play only one more tour event before turning 16, on March 13. She said that would be at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif. But she is also permitted to play Fed Cup, the women's team event, and could be selected to play for the United States when it faces Latvia in a World Group qualifying match in Everett, Wash., near Seattle on Feb. 7 and 8. Kenin would like to be part of that team as well, and said that making the Olympic team was high on her list of goals for 2020. She is fast approaching the Top 10, and if she can defeat Ons Jabeur, 25, a flashy and unseeded shotmaker from Tunisia, in the quarterfinals, she will become the second ranked American, behind only Serena Williams. It is not easy to make a name for oneself with Williams and Cocomania in the mix. But Kenin, who upset Williams in the third round of last year's French Open, is quite a talent herself and the only American women's singles player left "out there" in the Australian Open. "Now starts your hype," a reporter said to her on Sunday night. Kenin grinned and spread her arms. "Yeah, I guess," she said. "I don't know. Of course I didn't do it for the hype. I did it for myself, because I wanted to prove to myself that I could."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Last July, in the height of Norwegian Arctic summer, our family boarded a seven hour train headed northeast from Oslo to the fjords on the highest elevated railway in northern Europe. Outside the train car, snow spackled mountains and narrow inlets flickered by, like images from a fairy tale film reel ready to serve as backdrop to Norse gods or elves. Rain streamed down the windows as we zipped through verdant valleys cut through with rushing waterfalls, the hillside dotted with charming red barns and tiny wood frame houses the color of lemon custard. My husband, Matt, and I pressed our faces close to the glass, savoring the view. We had chosen this train for its proximity to wildness an enchanted landscape carved by glaciers and largely untouched by people. In this season of 24 hour daylight, darkness came only fleetingly, from the train tunnels inside a mountain, or from behind closed eyelids. And yes, we had asked ourselves, more than once, what we were doing here, in the land of the midnight sun, with two young boys accustomed to lights out at 8 p.m. Inside the adjacent children's car, our 6 and 3 year old sons, Felix and Teddy, had gone feral, bouncing like pinballs between climbing structures in the built in play area. What with the never ending day and the jet lag, we'd had no idea how our children would cope. There were no normal signals for sleep. What ensued wasn't sleep deprivation, exactly. It was more a kind of mania, a transformation of our boys into a special breed of excitable baby werewolf shaped by continuous exposure to the sun. We had spent five days exploring Oslo, its gorgeous architecture and inspired urban design. The train was a way of getting our family out into the most remote parts of Norway, a land and seascape imbued with myth and completely foreign to our own lives back home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Leave it to the Norwegians to solve the problem of stir crazy kids by dreaming up a play car. Add to that the fact that Norway has the highest per capita sausage consumption in the world what kid doesn't love a hot dog? and the prevalence of family friendly parks and outdoor spaces, and we were in pretty good shape heading into this Scandinavian excursion. Now, back to that whole sleep thing. The pervasive feeling I had during our two weeks in Norway was the sense that someone had forgotten to turn off the sky. Some days it felt like a perpetual hangover. We dealt with sleeping arrangements largely by darkening rooms as much as curtains and blinds would allow and letting the boys stay up later than usual, but bedtime often stretched as late as 11 p.m., when twilight hit. Felix and Teddy would bounce awake before 10 a.m., full of vigor. It was during those times that we would momentarily wish for the dark days of winter. But in truth, it was that very otherworldliness that we had sought. School was out, and we were taking the summer off from work to spend with our children. Like many working parents with young children, we often felt a bit guilty that our time together as a family was not enough. The dusk sky between midnight and 2 a.m. cast a surreal light on most everything, and that was the point. What better way to teach our sons to look at the world in a new light than to show them Arctic midsummer and cast away the norms of nighttime? There was the late night family dinner we had at a remote waterside pub upon arriving in the Lofoten Islands, a far northern archipelago situated more than 100 miles above the Arctic Circle. The drive from the airport along winding roads flanked by craggy peaks and water that mirrored the sky was nearly devoid of other cars. On the back deck of the wood planked pub, two friendly and inebriated local men named Terry and Simon greeted us with bone crushing handshakes, handed me a juniper berry to chew on and asked us to join them with our young sons, "to expose them to drinks." There was the feeling of time traveling at the amazing Viking Museum in the blink and you'll miss it village of Borg. Anchored by a striking reconstruction of a Viking chieftain's long house that was excavated nearby, the museum has a series of buildings connected by outdoor walking paths. It even features two replica ships and their boathouses. Inside the meeting house, a woman in a period costume of a long white gown and apron ladled for me a cup of mead, a boozy drink made from fermented honey and water, while Matt donned chain mail and Felix and Teddy wore metal and leather helmets and swung heavy swords around. On a chilly day punctuated by downpours, we dashed from building to building, re enacting the sodden life of misery as it was in the 1200s and learning about Norse mythology and the ships that brought the Vikings to inhospitable shores. And there was something special for each of us to find. For me, there was surfing in the Arctic. (I know: surfing in the Arctic!) Friends in Oslo directed us to Unstad, a minuscule sheep farming town that has several surf breaks on the Norwegian Sea and hosts an international surf competition every fall. One afternoon there, I wriggled into a six millimeter neoprene wet suit much thicker than I was accustomed to wearing in San Francisco, making me feel a bit like the Michelin Man and paddled out, nodding as I passed the several guys in the lineup. All of them were cheerful and none looked terribly cold. Truth be told, in the fierce sunlight, the only time I felt any iciness was on my face upon a wipeout. Waiting for the next set of waves to arrive, I looked at the afternoon sky, dabs of clouds across it like chalk dusted fingerprints. Who could not smile when confronted with this heart expanding, crazy beauty? For Matt, there were the craggy mountains, electric green with velvety moss, and the time to run up and down their lung busting slopes most every afternoon. There was the absence of people, the wildness. For someone used to being on the clock every day, the slowing down of time was nothing short of magic. For the boys, there was the powder white sand beach and the endless views of the fjords, and no one to tell them to hurry up. We stayed in a little wood shingled house on a bluff above a cove where Felix and Teddy spent entire afternoons digging holes and trenches. They would take turns directing the action and bossing each other around. The tide would come in and fill the cracks, and then the next day they would run back to start the process all over again. From that house, with its floor to ceiling windows, we watched the sky move mercurially between moods, sunrise and sunset, shifting from full blast sunshine to muted purple orange clouds that crept up near midnight as the sun dipped below the horizon. For a scant few hours, a cool pastel gloom ruled, until the warm egg yolk crept back up into the sky once more. One night, in the wee hours as I wandered around, I got to catch both the sunset and the sunrise. It occurred to me that our days and nights, always so bookended by darkness, no longer seemed to have boundaries. They were fluid, continuous. Infinite. Vacations are funny. They lull you into a certain way of being that is completely at odds with your daily life. Throw children into the mix and oftentimes parents will forego the adventure entirely, citing routine or convenience or, simply, reality: "It's too hard." I am here to tell you that children should not be the thing to hold you back. You make the decision to go. And then you go. What did we want to be the message of this enterprise? That sometimes it's fine to throw out the rules. Go to sleep at 11 p.m.? No problem. Play with swords? Breakfast for dinner, because I had a heck of a time decoding the Norwegian names of everyday items at the store? Yes, and yes. It doesn't mean that it's going to be easy. But remember how fun it was to break the rules?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Given its geographic isolation and bone chilling temperatures, Antarctica has long held up a "no soliciting" sign when it comes to invasive species. But now the first successful marine invaders have breached the White Continent's door. Scientists found a colony of mussels, most likely transported from Patagonia via ship, near the largest of the South Shetland Islands some 75 miles north of the Antarctic Peninsula. This discovery, published last month in Scientific Reports, is a harbinger of future invasions, the researchers suggest, particularly as climate change afflicts the Southern Ocean and ship traffic in the region increases. Paulina Bruning, a marine biologist at Laval University in Quebec City, never set out to find mussels in Antarctica. When Ms. Bruning dove in the 36 degree water of Fildes Bay on King George Island, she was focused on collecting native coral and sea sponges. But back in the laboratory, Ms. Bruning spotted several dozen juvenile mussels clinging to one of her specimens, an orange sponge. That was unexpected mussels aren't native to Antarctica. In fact, there's never been any evidence of young mussels surviving in such cold water.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
This article is part of a series aimed at helping you navigate life's opportunities and challenges. What else should we write about? Contact us: smarterliving nytimes.com. A few years ago, I was sitting in an Yves Saint Laurent presentation (this was before the Hedi Slimane era, when it was still YSL) when a model appeared in a short black silk tuxedo jumpsuit. It was sleek and elegant and hemmed at the upper thigh. She was wearing it with black tights and heels, and suddenly I thought: "Oh, this could solve a lot of my what to wear to a gala problems on those days when I have to go to a black tie event for work and don't feel like putting on a dress. I should get one!" Still, this thought was followed fairly quickly with another: "Get a grip. You are well into middle age. You should not be wearing a shorts tuxedo jumpsuit." I took a breath, and moved on. But it was not an isolated incident. As dressing rules have relaxed, and exercise has improved, some of the traditional realities that used to define adult dressing (covering up flappy upper arms or saggy knees, for example) no longer apply. And so, what it means to dress like a grown up has become ever more complicated. Just because you can wear something just because your legs are good enough, your stomach flat enough, your imagination wild enough, your self image young enough does not mean you should. But how do you know when you have crossed that line? Old axioms like "Dress for the job you want" cease to have meaning in a world where power dressing can mean a suit and tie or a gray T shirt and Tevas. Once upon a time, an adult wardrobe was built on items of clothing that signaled arrival in the grown up world: a trench coat instead of a raincoat, a leather belt instead of a webbed belt, a suit instead of jeans, a good handbag, etc., etc. This is no longer the case. Now adult clothes have less to do with specific items than certain defining characteristics. This makes selecting them both more difficult and more liberating. Yet because your clothes are the first thing to be judged by those who see you be they friends or clients or employers the choice matters. A lot. So I have come up with the following three golden rules of grown up garb. They may seem as if they apply only to workplace settings, but they are equally useful in private life. If you remember no other rule, or ignore the rest of them, please remember this: Clothes should not be the focus of attention, which is to say, they should not be what colleagues or friends remember after a meeting. This generally means you should not have to fiddle with straps, waistbands, decoration or any other part of a garment. Brevity, for example, may be the soul of wit, but it is less desirable in hemlines. You have better things to do with your time than spend it pulling down a skirt or worrying if too much sock is showing. Similarly, clothes should not be so revealing that what anyone in your vicinity remembers is a body part as opposed to an idea (unless you are a personal trainer, in which case that is exactly what you want them to remember). Generally speaking, transparency is good when it comes to collaborative strategy, and bad when it comes to shirts. The point is: You want people around you to think about what you say, not what your clothes say. They should support performance, but not be a performance. 2. Think of your clothes as costume. Part of dressing like an adult is dressing in a way that distinguishes your grown up self from your adolescent self a way that says to you and all who see you, "I am now at this life stage." To a certain extent, this means playacting at adulthood until your inside catches up with your outside. (I cannot tell you the moment when my husband and I stopped saying "honey" to each other in the kind of sarcastic "can you believe we're married" way and started saying it in the totally straight faced "pass the milk" way, but it happened.) It means that if you see a garment and think "costume," that doesn't mean you should avoid said garment; it may even mean you should buy it. It will start to feel natural soon enough. Sometimes, for example, I will be at a fashion show, see an outfit and think, "If I were a child, that is exactly how I would want my mother to dress." Meaning that whatever I am looking at (usually something elegant, flexible, packable and smart, often involving a pencil skirt and peplum) seems to me like the costume of a chic parent, which is the character I play in my mind. Figure out your own chosen role, and dress for the part. 3. Learn to iron (and sew, and fold and invest in some good hangers). The single biggest signifier of adulthood, at least when it comes to clothing, is not any single style of garment but the condition of them all: whether they are spotted, stained, wrinkled, torn and so on; whether they are missing a button, look as if they have been dropped on the floor, crumpled up in a corner, shoved to the back of the drawer; or any of the other telltale signs that the wearers expect someone else to tidy up for them. Because that, in turn, is a telltale sign that they have not gone out on their own just yet.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A 10 to 15 year lease is available for this free standing single story 7,900 square foot modern commercial building, with 50 feet of frontage that is 25 feet high, and formerly home to the Institute at Erno Laszlo, a skin care spa, in the SoHo Cast Iron Extension historic district. The 1986 building, which features nine to 22 foot high ceilings and three skylights, offers three usable levels 3,450 square feet on the ground floor, a lower level of equal size and a 1,000 square foot mezzanine. Because the building has 17,250 buildable square feet, additional stories could be added. Restaurants are also being considered.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
After an N.F.L. wild card round in which both No. 6 seeds advanced and three teams won on the road, the bar is set awfully high for this weekend's action. Enter Baltimore, San Francisco, Kansas City and Green Bay, which just spent a bye week resting and plotting a course to the conference championship games. Here are our predictions for how the divisional round games will sort out, with all picks made against the spread. Last weekend's record against the spread: 2 1 1. No. 6 Minnesota Vikings at No. 1 San Francisco 49ers, 4:35 p.m., NBC Thanks to an all around effort on both sides of the ball, the Vikings (10 6) pulled off the biggest upset of the wild card round, eliminating the New Orleans Saints, thus establishing themselves as the feel good team of the postseason. But the importance of the 49ers' first round bye cannot be overstated. Thanks to the week off, the 49ers (13 3) should have Dee Ford (hamstring) back at edge rusher, thus sorting out the rotation on their defensive line, and Jaquiski Tartt (rib) back at safety, fortifying their secondary. Those reintroductions were expected, but in one that wasn't, linebacker Kwon Alexander, who tore his pectoral muscle in Week 9, is potentially coming off the injured reserve list for the game. Alexander, like many of his teammates, tends to struggle with run defense, but his coverage skills at linebacker are among the best in the league. His presence alone could force Vikings running back Dalvin Cook into a more one dimensional role than the one he inhabited last weekend, when he rushed for 94 yards and gained 36 through the air. With those key defenders back, San Francisco can do what it does best: Send some combination of Nick Bosa, DeForest Buckner, Arik Armstead and Ford at the quarterback on nearly every play, and let Richard Sherman lead a secondary more than capable of holding its coverage for an extended period. That Vikings wide receivers Adam Thielen (ankle) and Stefon Diggs (illness) will potentially play at less than 100 percent makes life even more difficult for quarterback Kirk Cousins. Minnesota's defense is hardly a group of pushovers, but San Francisco's run heavy approach should be effective, and quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo has shown some creativity in getting the ball to his receivers and to his favorite weapon, tight end George Kittle. This game seems like an obvious win for San Francisco. Of course, the same could have been said of New Orleans. Pick: 49ers 7 No. 6 Tennessee Titans at No. 1 Baltimore Ravens, 8:15 p.m., CBS The aesthetics are not similar, but the strategy for both the Titans (9 7) and the Ravens (14 2) has been well established: Run the ball, run the ball more, run the ball a few more times, then catch the defense sleeping with a big passing play. It may not be Sean McVay or Kliff Kingsbury's idea of a modern and sophisticated approach to offense, but it is hard to argue with the results. Led by quarterback Lamar Jackson who should set a reminder on his phone to pick up his Most Valuable Player Award on Feb. 1 the Ravens were the No. 1 rushing team in the N.F.L. But saying they were No. 1 almost sells them short. Baltimore's 3,296 rushing yards were the most in N.F.L. history, and 1,073 more than Tennessee managed despite the Titans finishing third in the league. Almost as a side note, Jackson, who set a single season record for rushing yards by a quarterback, also led the N.F.L. in passing touchdowns with 36. Tennessee will do its best to counter the Ravens with a power running game led by Derrick Henry and a vertical passing attack led by Ryan Tannehill. Based on how things typically played out for the Titans this season, the expectation should be for Baltimore to build up an early lead and for Tennessee to claw its way back to respectability. The prospect of an upset is remote, and Tennessee's season will almost assuredly end, but it is hard to believe that Titans Coach Mike Vrabel will allow his team to go out quietly in a blowout. Pick: Titans 10 In Week 6, however, things did not look so good for the team. They were beaten at home by the Texans (10 6), with quarterback Deshaun Watson outplaying Patrick Mahomes. It was Kansas City's second consecutive loss at Arrowhead Stadium, and came ahead of a stretch in which the Chiefs played two games without Mahomes thanks to a knee injury, during which they split the results. Since getting Mahomes back and in rhythm, Kansas City has found its groove on both sides of the ball, while Houston underperformed relative to its talent. The Texans very nearly lost an A.F.C. South division title that had seemed like a foregone conclusion over the season's first nine weeks. Watson is terrific, but it required an outrageous comeback, and a play for the ages, for him to get his team past Buffalo in overtime last weekend. That is not a likely scenario against the Chiefs. The Texans are a reasonable bet to cover the spread, but the chances of them winning are remote. Pick: Texans 10	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
What would you do if everyone was talking about a movie you hadn't seen? Let's say that movie was "The Farewell," an indie smash from this summer about the members of a Chinese family who try to keep their beloved grandma from learning about her terminal cancer diagnosis. And now, let's say you're the actress who played the grandma. Yes, Zhao Shuzhen may be earning Oscar buzz for her work as the matriarch Nai Nai in "The Farewell," but that doesn't mean she's actually been able to watch the movie she stars in. "I didn't know it was such a phenomenon!" the 76 year old Chinese actress told me one night in early November, after she had reunited with her director, Lulu Wang, and co star Awkwafina to introduce the film at an awards season screening in Beverly Hills. It was Shuzhen's first ever trip to the United States, and she'd been caught off guard when people at the screening recognized her. Many were on their second viewing of "The Farewell," which is two more times than Shuzhen herself had been able to see it. "The attention, the praise, it's inconceivable to me," she said through a translator. But at least Shuzhen had a good excuse for being late to the party: "It hasn't come out in China yet," she told me, "and I've been so busy filming ." Though "The Farewell" was Shuzhen's American debut, she is well known and oft booked in China, where she appears in several television dramas a year. "Some dramas require the grandma to have a bigger part, and other dramas don't use the grandma as much," she said. But in her 70s, she was happy to be so prolific. "To have started at 16 and now be at an old age and still be acting, I'm just grateful for it." That night in Beverly Hills was the first time Awkwafina had seen Shuzhen since they finished filming last year. As the older woman spoke, Awkwafina gazed at her reverently. "I'm getting a little emotional just sitting with her right now," Awkwafina said. "After what's happened with this movie, I want her to know that she's loved here." It was a dynamic not unlike the one shared by their characters in "The Farewell," where Awkwafina plays Billi, a New Yorker who returns to Changchun upon learning of her grandmother's diagnosis. Billi's parents ask her to keep Nai Nai in the dark about the state of her cancer they believe that if she's told she has mere months to live, she will lose all hope and succumb but Billi struggles to deceive the matriarch she so adores. Regal in an aubergine coat and pearl necklace, Shuzhen beamed as Awkwafina and Wang caught her up on the film's success: Since its July release in the United States, "The Farewell" had become one of the year's highest grossing indies. "Having her here is a reminder that the film became so much bigger than we thought," Wang said. "I've been all over the world talking about it and it's been released in multiple languages," she added, saying she was tickled by Shuzhen's surprise. "She's like, 'I haven't seen the film yet. I hope it's good!" The women all laughed, but Wang was sincere. "It's all really validating," she said. "We know what it took to make this movie. It might look effortless and natural, but when I watch the film, I see every single battle that went into it." When Wang first tried to mount "The Farewell," financiers balked at the all Asian cast, tricky mix of tones and potential language barrier 80 percent of the dialogue would be Mandarin and recommended that Wang add more romance and English. Still, Wang had based the film on her own family's true story, and she was determined to hold fast to what had really happened. "It was something else that was driving me, something intangible," she said. "But it can be really hard to listen to that voice and trust yourself." Many of those same conflicts will come up again now that "The Farewell" is being positioned for an award season run. Should the movie be categorized as a comedy or drama? And with its mixture of Mandarin and English, should it be defined as a foreign language film or an American indie? For the Golden Globes, "The Farewell" has been ruled a contender for the foreign language film award, and the arcane rules of that competition restrict such movies from vying for the top comedy and drama trophies. The Oscars have no such stipulation, but the academy doesn't classify Wang's film as an international feature contender, since it was produced in the United States. These rules can feel arbitrary and out of step with the realities of an increasingly global film landscape, and Wang noted that the academy had recently come under fire for rejecting Nigeria's submission for the international film Oscar because it contained too much English. Pointing these things out sometimes made Wang feel self conscious: "You go, 'Oh no, I don't fit in!'" Still, she was happy to be part of the complicated conversation about what constitutes a foreign film, and through whose eyes. A WEEK LATER, I caught up with Wang and Shuzhen at another award season event, this one held at a trendy West Hollywood hotel. As people rushed Shuzhen for hugs and selfies, Wang gave me an important update: "Zhao," she said, "has seen the movie." Across the room, Shuzhen confirmed the news. The distributor A24 had set an intimate screening of "The Farewell" for her and her daughter, and "I was very moved," Shuzhen said. Her translator , Eugene Suen, leaned over to me. "She didn't say this, but I can tell you, because I sat very close to them: They were all wiping away tears," he said. "When I saw that, I was like, 'O.K., I think she likes it.'" Over the last several days, Shuzhen had taken to the awards circuit with gusto, doing countless interviews and turning up at several important soirees: At an event held by the group that votes for the Golden Globes, she had even met Robert Pattinson. Her first American trip was about to end, but now that she had fully come to understand what "The Farewell" meant to audiences, she wasn't quite ready to say goodbye.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The choreographer Ronald K. Brown's new dance, "The Call," pays tribute to Alvin Ailey seen here in a portrait the man who brought Mr. Brown to dance. The choreographer Ronald K. Brown stepped into a big studio at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and greeted the dancers with warm hugs. Then, almost without a word, he began to move, his feet and shoulders swaying to the beat, his upper body undulating slightly. "The Love," a Malian song with a slow, hypnotizing groove, was playing on the sound system. The dancers gathered in a semicircle around him, moving to the rhythm. Just like that, they were drawn into the spirit of the dance. Mr. Brown was putting the finishing touches on "The Call," which is to have its premiere on Dec. 4 as part of the Ailey company's 60th anniversary season. The dance, which he describes as "a love letter to Ailey," is his seventh for the troupe in 20 years. So it's no wonder the vibe in the studio is a bit like a conversation picked up midstream. "His movement just feels good," the Ailey dancer Jacqueline Green said of Mr. Brown's choreographic style, which combines the flow and rhythm of West African movement with an urban drive that suggests club dance. (Mr. Brown also has his own ensemble, Evidence.) "It feels like I could do it at home," Ms. Green continued. "I could do it when I'm out dancing. It's almost like social dance. It's like breathing, a little." The work Mr. Brown saw was "Revelations," Ailey's 1960 masterpiece. It made him realize that he "could choreograph and tell stories," he said. "I started making up dances using my cousins and putting on shows." "The Call" is both intimate and spare; for just five dancers, it's set to a surprisingly harmonious mix of Bach, jazz (by Mary Lou Williams) and Malian music, as performed by the Brooklyn based Asase Yaa Entertainment Group. Despite the contrast in musical idioms, each section flows naturally into the next. It opens with a canon in which one dancer enters after another, each executing the same stately sequence: a jump from the wings; a series of sideways steps with arms extended (as if measuring the space); and, finally, a rising up on tiptoe and turning to gesture to the next dancer, until all five share the stage, their movements echoing across it. Both the music the slow section of Bach's Trio Sonata in G and the movement have a formal, almost classical quality. This, too is a reference to Ailey, Mr. Brown said: "His sensibility could be very formal. And there was something about that clarity of vision and simplicity that I wanted to evoke here." The call and response among the dancers eventually leads to an extended duet for a man and a woman, unusual for Mr. Brown. The two dance together again in the second section, set to Mary Lou Williams's upbeat "Blues for Timme." Jamar Roberts, who dances with Ms. Green in one of the casts, explained that during the creation process the choreographer had brought in photographs of Ailey dancing with Carmen de Lavallade, one of his earliest collaborators. (Ms. de Lavallade, now nearly 90, is still performing.) Ailey and Ms. de Lavallade met in high school in Los Angeles. She convinced him to attend classes led by the modern dance choreographer Lester Horton, whose company they eventually joined together. A few years later, in 1954, they traveled to New York to perform on Broadway in the Truman Capote musical "House of Flowers." "She brought him too us, in a way," Mr. Brown said. Some of the moves captured in those photographs made it into "The Call," including a pose from Horton's 1953 dance "Dedication to Jose Clemente Orozco" in which the two lock elbows. So did a famous pose from a photograph of Ailey by Normand Maxon from the early '60s lunging while reaching up toward the heavens that hangs in the Ailey studios. These are like talismanic elements woven into the fiber of the piece, much like the gestures that recur from one section to the next: pointing, placing a hand on the heart, lifting the forearms toward the body as if splashing water. "It's like you're baptizing yourself with the love for Mr. Ailey and the ancestors," Mr. Brown explained, "with the intention of really asking Mr. Ailey to join us." The meaning is what gives shape to the gesture, not the way it looks like or where it falls in the music. "There's a physical narrative to what they do, which is important, and which they have to be invested in. Because of my long relationship with the dancers, they know that." Sincerity of meaning and formal mastery particularly in the way he moves dancers in and out of sync, on and off the stage are two constants of Mr. Brown's choreography. The grounded style challenges the Ailey dancers to tone down their usual onstage magnetism. "We get so used to projecting," Ms. Green said, "but with him, it's more personal. We really see each other when we dance his work."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
PARIS How does it feel to be an American in Paris when celebrating the Fourth of July? Lazaro Hernandez, one half of the New York design duo Proenza Schouler, admitted it felt a little bittersweet Monday night as he stood in the leafy backyard of an elegant 18th century mansion on the city's Left Bank. "This year is actually the first time I've ever spent the day away from the U.S.," he said, adding that he had been posting images of the "Flags" paintings by the American artist Jasper Johns on Instagram. "I've been dreaming of margaritas," said Mr. Hernandez's co creative director, Jack McCollough. "It has been a fabulous few days and Paris is always an incredible place to be. But it is kind of surreal to be in a city where for most people, today is a day like any other." Earlier this year, MAC, the American cosmetics company, introduced an annual initiative giving designers an opportunity to show their precollections in Paris during Couture Week. Proenza Schouler was the first brand to participate, with the two men coming to town to give salon presentations of their 2017 Cruise designs. Honoring their trans Atlantic trip and to commemorate Independence Day (or, "Amerixit," as some guests jokingly called it in light of recent events across the English Channel) their close friend Lauren Santo Domingo gave a party for friends and family, many of whom arrived in red, white and blue. "After the French team won against Iceland in the Euro 2016 soccer tournament last night, the streets of Paris went nuts," Ms. Santo Domingo said, one eye on her small children, who were using the CNN Style host Derek Blasberg as a human climbing frame nearby. "It is pretty hard to match that level of patriotic enthusiasm." "This might be more low key than anything we would do at home, but we also have plenty of the key ingredients to have a good time," added Ms. Santo Domingo, who grew up in Greenwich, Conn. "Burgers, beers, short ribs and apple pie. This is the real deal, and given there are so many of us here together, we can't be too sad. We're doing things the good old American way." Although there were no fireworks, there were sparklers galore, much to the delight of a host of familiar and glamorous faces including the designer Tory Burch; Naomi Campbell; Hamish Bowles, the European editor at large for American Vogue; Danielle Steel; and the model Caroline de Maigret. "The truth is that being far away from America, and among fellow Americans celebrating an American holiday, makes you feel about the most American you can possibly feel," said John Demsey, executive group president of Estee Lauder, having attended a series of shows, including the Proenza Schouler presentation, over the course of the day. "But at the same time, supporting fashion wherever fashion takes place on whatever schedule it takes place on is part of the new realities of the world right now. And the truly global and collaborative backbone of our industry is what makes it so unbelievably special."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
LONDON Facebook used the mountains of data it collected on users to favor certain partners and punish rivals, giving companies such as Airbnb and Netflix special access to its platform while cutting off others that it perceived as threats. The tactics came to light on Wednesday from internal Facebook emails and other company documents released by a British parliamentary committee that is investigating online misinformation. The documents spotlight Facebook's behavior from roughly 2012 to 2015, a period of explosive growth as the company navigated how to manage the information it was gathering on users and debated how best to profit from what it was building. The documents show how Facebook executives treated data as the company's most valuable resource and often wielded it to gain a strategic advantage. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, were intimately involved in decisions aimed at benefiting the social network above all else and keeping users as engaged as possible on the site, according to emails that were part of the document trove. In one exchange from 2012 when Mr. Zuckerberg discussed charging developers for access to user data and persuading them to share their data with the social network, he wrote: "It's not good for us unless people also share back to Facebook and that content increases the value of our network. So ultimately, I think the purpose of platform even the read side is to increase sharing back into Facebook." The Facebook emails showed the company's real mission: making money and crushing rivals, Kevin Roose writes. The release of the internal documents adds to Facebook's challenges as it wrestles with issues as varied as how it enabled the spread of misinformation and whether it properly safeguarded the data of its users. Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg are under scrutiny for their handling of the matters; the executives have publicly said they were slow to respond to some of the problems. Facebook had tried to keep Parliament from releasing the documents. The materials had been under seal in the United States as part of a lawsuit in California with an app developer. Damian Collins, the chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which is investigating Facebook, used Parliament's sergeant at arms to obtain the documents last month. Mr. Collins said he had the jurisdiction to procure and publish the documents as part of his panel's investigation. In a statement, Facebook said the documents had been selectively chosen to be embarrassing and misleading as part of a "baseless" lawsuit. "Like any business, we had many internal conversations about the various ways we could build a sustainable business model for our platform," the company said. "But the facts are clear: We've never sold people's data." Mr. Zuckerberg posted his own response on Facebook after the publication of the documents, saying the company had limited its access to certain apps and made other changes to prevent abuse of its platform. "I understand there is a lot of scrutiny on how we run our systems," he wrote, adding that context was needed. "This was an important change to protect our community, and it achieved its goal." In the United States, lawmakers said some of the documents raised questions about whether Mr. Zuckerberg had told them the truth when he testified in April and said Facebook did not sell people's data. "Americans' data belongs to them, not Facebook," said Senator Edward J. Markey, a Democrat of Massachusetts. "Any evidence of a pay for data model would fly in the face of the statements Facebook has made to Congress and the public." Much of what was disclosed in the documents was not new, but the emails provide insight into the calculations of top executives as they worked to cement Facebook's position as the world's dominant social network. The documents' publication coincides with a more hawkish shift in public opinion toward online collection of user data, prompted partly by revelations this year of how the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica misused Facebook users' information. The 250 pages of documents cover a period when Facebook was shifting its business from a focus on desktop computers to mobile devices. After years of being largely open in sharing data with partners, Facebook was beginning to debate how to be compensated for the data it was sharing. For companies it liked, including Airbnb, Lyft and Netflix, Facebook made special "white list" agreements. The deals gave the partners preferred access to data that other companies had been restricted from receiving after a Facebook policy change. But for other companies that Facebook perceived as a threat, the company was less accommodating. In 2013, after Twitter released the video app Vine, Facebook shut off the access to its Facebook friends data. "Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today," Justin Osofsky, a Facebook executive, said in an email at the time. Emails also show that Facebook was hungry for more data and that user privacy, at least at the time, was an impediment to its goals of growth and engagement. In one email exchange, employees discussed avoiding a potential public backlash about an update to its Android app that would log calls made by people on their phones. "This is a pretty high risk thing to do from a PR perspective but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it," Michael LeBeau, an employee, said in a 2015 email. The documents also demonstrate the web of companies and services that plugged into Facebook's platform to receive information on users. The Royal Bank of Canada requested access in one note, as did the dating apps Badoo and Hot or Not. At the time, Facebook was also transitioning to what it called Platform 3.0, which would give it more control over the data of its users. Facebook emphasized the privacy benefits of the change, but the documents also show it trying to create more of a walled garden that it could leverage for its business. "Without limiting distribution or access to friends who use this app, I don't think we have any way to get developers to pay us at all besides offering payments and ad networks," Mr. Zuckerberg said in a 2012 email. The emails also lay out how Facebook debated whether to restrict app developers' access to some data unless those developers bought advertising on the social network, a policy the company now says it never enacted.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
When it comes to Beyonce releases, there is usually an element of surprise. The singer who perfected the secret album drop in 2013, and has since toyed with the tactic for releases like "Lemonade" and "Everything Is Love," with her husband Jay Z did it again in the early morning hours Wednesday, one upping the arrival of her own Netflix documentary, "Homecoming," with a previously unannounced live album version of the same concert. Read our review of the Beyonce documentary "Homecoming." Both the film and the album, also titled "Homecoming," capture Beyonce's performance at last year's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, in which the singer the first black woman to headline the event was backed by dozens of dancers and an elaborate marching band for a set that nodded to the musical legacy of historically black colleges. "There's not likely to be a more meaningful, absorbing, forceful and radical performance by an American musician this year, or any year soon," the critic Jon Caramanica wrote of the show in The New York Times. "It was rich with history, potently political and visually grand. By turns uproarious, rowdy, and lush. A gobsmacking marvel of choreography and musical direction." Now, the concert which was live streamed at the time and recreated for Coachella's second weekend, but has existed only in bootleg form since has been preserved for history in multiple mediums. The documentary, a Netflix exclusive billed as "a film by Beyonce," features footage from rehearsals and quieter backstage moments "the emotional road from creative concept to cultural movement," Netflix said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
THE NEWCOMERS Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom By Helen Thorpe 396 pp. Scribner. 28. Steve Bannon, we hear you. Too many white middle class Americans, victimized by globalization, are struggling. Resources are scarce enough for people who were born right here. But maybe Americans are not as flinty a race as we appear to be when we're chanting at rallies. While President Trump was campaigning on the wall, Helen Thorpe spent a year inside a "newcomer class" for teenage refugees from Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Central America. Her resulting book, "The Newcomers," is a delicate and heartbreaking mystery story, as Thorpe slowly uncovers the secret catastrophes in the lives of young immigrants at South High School in Denver. They arrive mute, and they gradually gain the words and confidence to describe the journeys that led to the classroom. Thorpe's parents emigrated from Ireland in 1965, when Thorpe was a year old, and she has written about young Mexican immigrants in America. A discerning chronicler of cultural misunderstanding, she started the book just as nativist resentment became a political movement. South High School is Denver's designated school for non English speaking students whose educations have been disrupted. Here, teenagers uprooted by war, violence and deprivation meet the most generous of Americans. Nice people from churches, synagogues and Goodwill all appear in their lives, brought together by a generously funded public school system and a dedicated English Language Acquisition teacher, Eddie Williams. A Mexican American whose own mother hid her roots out of shame and fear, Williams presides over a miniature United Nations of survivors of conflicts across the planet. There's Hsar Htoo, born in a refugee camp in Thailand to a Karen family from Myanmar. For him, everything in Denver is new: "running water, appliances, grocery stores, snow." Williams worries about Iraqi sisters Jakleen and Mariam, daughters of a Christian father and Muslim mother; their father worked for the Americans, and then disappeared in Baghdad as sectarian violence erupted during the American troop drawdown. With their mother and a third sister, the girls spent six years in a Damascus suburb, missed a year of school because of car bombs and are now barely able to get to school on time. Methusella and Solomon, teenage boys from the Democratic Republic of Congo, were driven out of Goma with their family. The brothers show up at South High School on time every day, "always nicely dressed," bending over their work with laser focus. Thorpe gets to know some of the parents, like Methusella and Solomon's father, a dignified man wearing a collared shirt and navy trousers, working as a dishwasher and studying English out of a creased pocket dictionary he bought at Goodwill for a dollar. He speaks four languages including French, and when he sees dents in American houses, he must remind himself they are not caused by bullet holes, like the dents in houses back home. Thorpe went deep, hiring 14 translators to conduct repeated interviews. Jakleen shares a letter she wrote to her father. Thorpe runs her hands over the Arabic letters on the page, and it's "like reading Braille inversely," because the girl pressed so hard with her pen. Still, some of their sad secrets stay buried. Hsar Htoo asks Thorpe before she interviews him not to ask him about his father's death. She also never really unravels how the unaccompanied Salvadoran children, fleeing one of the hemisphere's most violent nations, survived harrowing cross border trips and made their way from federal detention facilities to Denver. A year is a long time in teenage years, and frustration mounts. Some of the students are multilingual, and feel smarter than their lack of English allows. The Iraqi girls are so depressed they barely show up for school in the winter, racking up absences. The school encourages them with success stories. Thorpe's Arabic translator tells the girls that she raised her three children in America, and that they too hated it when they first arrived. Today, one is an engineer, another is a pediatric dentist, and the third is studying medicine. Thorpe makes fascinating linguistic discoveries. At first, the newcomers can't even communicate with one another. As the weeks pass, they resort to Google Translate, sometimes bypassing English altogether. Watching them translate Swahili to Arabic and Portuguese, Thorpe notices cognates between Arabic and the African languages, remnants of ancient connections between two regions that to many Americans are as unfamiliar as the dark side of the moon. "As the kids discovered these commonalities, I began to feel as though I were watching something like the living embodiment of a linguistic tree," Thorpe writes. "The classroom and the relationships forming inside of it were an almost perfect map of language proximity around the globe." Thorpe has an epiphany of sorts when she learns that the word for "book" is "virtually identical" in the African languages and in Arabic. "That was the moment when I first grasped my own arrogance as an English speaker," Thorpe writes. "I mean, the arrogance harbored by someone who knew only European languages, which rendered the well laced interconnectedness of the rest of the world invisible." In class, the teenagers are like teenagers everywhere. They are dramatic, they preen, they get depressed, they fall in love. One day, the students teach Thorpe a word qalb meaning "heart" in Farsi and Arabic. When Thorpe puts qalb into Google Translate, Arabic to English, something surprising happens. She is given a flood of meanings. "I got heart, center, middle, transformation, conscience, core, marrow, pith, pulp, gist, essence, quintessence, topple, alter, flip, tip, overturn, reversal, overthrow, capsize, whimsical, capricious, convert, change, counterfeit. ... My own concept of heart did not include flip, capsize or reverse." She concludes: "Our two cultures did not have the same idea of what was happening at the core of our beings. ... The idea of heart that these kids possessed appeared to have a lighter, more nimble quality." But no matter how nimble and light their hearts might be, the students can't help noticing the rising resentment aimed their way. "Xenophobia was not something that was listed formally as a factor that inhibited learning among E.L.A. students," she writes, "but as the weeks slipped by and the cacophony of the presidential election ratcheted up, elevating all kind of sentiments in the voting populace, including a virulent dislike of people from other countries, I came to think of the fear some people in my own country felt toward foreigners as an issue that itself inhibited the newcomers' learning. They were acutely sensitive and could detect when they were misunderstood." Right after Trump's election, the long commutes to and from school on Denver's public transit system become an obstacle course of shame and fear. People call the students "dirty" and tell them to "go home." A passenger on a bus tells one girl, "We are going to kick your ass out of this country." The faculty at South High School struggles to help the students grapple with the new social climate, treating it like an emergency akin to a shooting or an outbreak of flu. The principal brings on nine temporary counselors to help, because the number of children seeking counseling "reached levels that nobody had ever seen before." Two students had attempted suicide. Nevertheless, Thorpe's book is a reminder that in an era of nativism, some Americans are still breaking down walls and nurturing newcomers, the seeds of the great American experiment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books

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